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Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer would like to know if video games journalism is OK. He is concerned that the “whole space is gonna go away or be corrupted by things”. He mourns the heyday of magazines, and is bemused by this “SEO” malarkey he keeps hearing about. Much like a Dickensian child holding out a bowl for more gruel, he wants to know if there’s still a “path” for “people with a real honest voice”.
Among the dorkiest aspects of Bethesda’s winningly dorky The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the persuasion wheel minigame – also known as Persuasion Pie, also known as the Wheedlin’ Roundabout, also known as the Dartboard of Indoctrination. (Maybe not so much the last two.) This saw you choosing methods of gaining NPC affection from a disc with quadrants labelled “Admire”, “Joke”, “Coerce” and “Boast”, each of which elicits a different response previewed by the NPC’s gurnishly changing expression.
You have to choose all four options at least once per round, and the underlying “pie” rotates every time you pick one. The underlying segments are partially filled in to show how much they’ll affect the NPC’s opinion, for better or worse. The idea, then is to match responses that have a positive effect to the largest chunks of pie, by picking them in the right order. If you think all that sounds incredibly overwrought and an offence to the character writer’s art, then you are clearly not Don’t Nod Montreal’s Colin McInerney or one of the other hosts of Wheeljam 2025, a game creation jam dedicated to Bethesda’s ole Tart Of Cajolement. Here is a trailer.
Presidents’ Day brings a wave of discounts on gaming laptops, desktops, and more, making it a great time to upgrade or invest in a new machine. Whether you’re after raw performance, high refresh rates, or a balance of power and portability, there are plenty of options available at lower-than-usual prices.
One of video gaming’s great urban fabulists, Half-Life 2 art director and Dishonored visual designer Viktor Antonov, has died at the young age of 52.
Afterlove EP is the new visual novel and/or broken hearts album from Indonesian developers Pikselnesia. It’s the sad, sleepy tale of a musician, Rama, who is trying to put his life back together and reconnect with his old bandmates in Jakarta a year after the death of his girlfriend, Cinta. The complicating factor is that Cinta isn’t entirely gone: she is a voice in Rama’s head, chatting to him throughout the game’s 28-day storyline as though sitting next to the player on the other side of the screen.
In an ultimately failed attempt at cobbling some Elden Ring: Nightreign impressions together, I spent a little over three hours of my Valentine’s Day fruitlessly trying to get a match going in the roguelike spinoff’s doomed PS5 network test. I hope said test provided FromSoft with some helpful data, considering Nightreign releases in May, though it would have been a lot easier for everyone if I could’ve just sent Hidetaka Miyazaki an email saying “Sir, your server infrastructure is made of biscuits.”
In the interests of a more productive outcome, here are some lovely/interesting/terrifying little PC games that I could have started and finished while waiting for the closed beta to sort itself out, and that you might enjoy regardless of whether you’ve just spaffed away a perfectly good afternoon.
There’s something uncanny about dipping “classic” games in a tub of HD paint for the purposes of a remaster. A reboot can completely reinvent an old character, intriguing players in the same way an adaptation of Macbeth might excite a theatre dweeb. But remasters often feel like someone has plainly yet painstakingly rolled over every inch of the original with linoleum. The worst remasters bring to mind the Spanish pensioner who butchered a fresco of Jesus Christ. As acts of restoration go, Aspyr’s work on Tomb Raider (and Soul Reaver) isn’t quite that egregious. Hard work has gone into updating the scenery and textures. Basic vine sprites become handsome twirls of plantlife. Egyptian reliefs are given form. But there’s a limit to this unfurling of digital lino. The results ultimately evoke the look common in mobile games when smartphones were becoming ever more powerful. This is Lara Croft if she were designed by Gameloft in 2011.
Dell is currently offering an excellent 27-inch Alienware gaming monitor for just $200 in its latest round of discounts ready for Presidents Day.
Elden Ring Nightreign will officially arrive on May 30, 2025, across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. But for those eager to get an early taste, Bandai Namco is running a network test this weekend—offering a first look at what’s to come.
If your time with foundational PC strategy 4X game series Sid Meier’s Civilization consists of exactly one save file that ended somewhere in the Middle Ages, don’t beat yourself up, for you have plenty of company. When they got hold of detailed audience data for Civilization 6, Firaxis creative director Ed Beach and executive producer Dennis Shirk were dismayed to discover that fewer than 40% of their players ever finish a single game. Hence, to some degree, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII‘s new Age system, which is designed to counter feelings of exhaustion by smashing the chronology up into more digestible chunks, with something of a Civ power level reset between Ages to stop you feeling like you’re either hopelessly behind or so far ahead that ultimate victory is guaranteed.
