Suhuangkajitu

The historically-flavored 4X Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 is free to play on Steam this weekend, letting anyone try the core experience of the most recent game in the long-running and genre defining strategy series. The core game is free, which includes some eight years of updates and free civilizations to play as—enough to keep you occupied for months, not just a single weekend.

It’s also 90% off, just $6, for another 44 hours at press time. The two major expansions are on sale as well: Gathering Storm is 88% off, and Rise and Fall is 83% off. That also cuts a lot of cost off of the entire-game-collecting Civilization 6 Anthology bundle.

Civilization 6 released in 2016, and got a 93/100 review from PC Gamer at the time.  Reviewer Len Hafer recognized it as the “ultimate digital board game,” saying that “more than ever in the series, the board—the world—is the soul of every opportunity and challenge.” Since then, it has had three major expansions and a boatload of new leaders and civilizations to play as.

Civilization is considered by many to be the progenitor of the 4X genre, the “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate” gameplay that has sp…

The RTX 3070 Ti is a fine graphics card from the last generation, itself not a million miles off the performance of the once-mighty RTX 3080. But it is still a $600+ graphics card and that makes it almost impossible to recommend anyone buys as a standalone upgrade.

But as part of a full gaming PC, well, it actually makes for a great new rig especially with this iBuyPower machine on sale at Best Buy for $1,500. That’s around the price that until recently was the preserve of RTX 3060 machines, and only recently has become the price tag you might expect for an RTX 3070 gaming PC.

The RTX 3070 Ti is comfortably faster than the RTX 3070 because it’s using the complete GA104 GPU. That gives it 6,144 CUDA cores vs. the older card’s 5,888 and uses the same high-speed 19Gbps GDDR6X memory as the RTX 3080/Ti cards.

In fact, that puts it above the AMD RX 6800 (non XT) card in terms of gaming performance, a card which itself was no slouch.

The rest of the spec matches up to GPU, too. The Core i9 11900KF (essentially the same as an i9 11900K but without an integrated GPU) is a couple of generations old now, but the eight-core, 16-thread CPU is still a powerful gaming …

The burgeoning cooperative survival horror genre has a lot of entries, not all of them great—but the great ones, like Phasmophobia and Lethal Company, have really taken off. What’s unexpected, then, is seeing one that did just okay in an Early Access launch become not just promising, but quite good, and then get a surprise full launch just last week.

Forewarned is that exactly. The indie 1-4 player survival horror game has players dive into ancient Egyptian ruins crawling with monsters, traps, and cursed treasure. “Investigate phenomena, collect treasure, discover lore, survive danger, and banish the evil that lurks within,” says developer Dreambyte.

First released about three years ago, Forewarned was good enough to play but didn’t quite pick up the cult following of other games in its genre—maybe because lots of people see “VR Supported” and turn away because they lack the expensive hardware. Either way, Forewarned does great in both modes, and hit its 1.0 release on April 25, 2024.

The Final Reckoning update includes a new big nasty to find, the immortal Ptahmes the Resilient. There’s also two new maps, the deep mountaintop well of the Secret Tem…

Plenty of PC gamers have a pile of boxes filled with fans, HDDs, and old PC parts. I would know, many of you sent me pictures of your hoards. But for us here at PC Gamer, nothing takes up more room in our storage cupboards than PC cases. We don’t even have that many, they’re just a massive pain in the ass.

That’s why I’m particularly impressed with InWin’s latest creations over at Computex: PC cases that come disassembled across a couple of flat cardboard boxes. No polystyrene in sight. 

Now I know assembling a PC case sounds like a worse hellscape than struggling through Ikea furniture, and admittedly I haven’t tried building one of these cases myself. But the two larger ATX PC cases that InWin was showing off over at Computex 2023 didn’t look altogether complicated to put together on the face of it.

The front panel, top panel, side panels, motherboard tray, supports, and feet screw together with the included fittings, all of which are the same size, and once you’re done with the tray of screws that can become an SSD mount for you to use in your machine.

Then you can just fold down the cardboard and recycle it. Job done.

Of the two ATX flat-pa…

The developers of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu entered a surprise settlement with Nintendo on Monday, agreeing to pay the game company $2.4 million in damages and cease development and distribution of the emulator. Now, as a result of that settlement, Citra—a 3DS emulator that shared developers with Yuzu—has also been taken offline.

The Citra Twitter account posted a message that was originally shared in the Yuzu Discord, addressed to “Yuz-ers and Citra fans,” stating that “Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.”

The Github repository holding Citra’s code has been shut down. In Yuzu’s settlement with Nintendo, the emulator developers agreed to “surrender, and permanently cease to use… any other website or system that Defendant or its members own or control, directly or indirectly, that involves Nintendo’s Intellectual Property, to Plaintiff’s control.”

Nintendo’s lawsuit was technically targeting Tropic Haze, LLC, a company that the Yuzu developers presumably formed to facilitate handling Patreon income; since the two emulators share the same founders, it seems likely that Citra is collate…

Gosh, but haven’t passions cooled on Starfield? For years and years, Bethesda’s space sim was the most hotly anticipated game in development by anyone at any studio, and when it came out you couldn’t round a corner without encountering some kind of hot take on it (some of them were even ours). But now it feels like everyone has pretty much come to accept Starfield for what it is: A mostly fine, unspectacular open-world thing. Elite: Dangerous with a dialogue box.

Not a bad foundation to build on, to be honest, which is exactly what Bethesda continues to do. Today, the studio dropped Starfield’s 1.10.30 update in Steam beta ahead of a likely imminent full release, adding new Photo Mode poses, letting you undo a digipicking move without losing a pick, and—I think most important of all—preventing Sam Coe from telling his 12-year-old daughter to try out her stand-up material on a corpse.

“Fixed an issue where Sam Coe could still tell Cora she could try out her joke on a dead character,” reads the patch note, “Tough crowd.” 

A brutal burn for a father to inflict on his precocious daughter, and also probably funnier than whatever Cora’s joke…

In what has come as an unexpected but huge W for those with a chronic hoarding problem, Bungie has today announced that it is undoing the last part of one of its most unpopular design decisions: Weapon sunsetting. Back in 2020, the studio made a huge call to remove huge swathes of content from the game, including entire planetary destinations and raids, and also capped the power of all old weapons, meaning they could no longer be ‘infused’ to the current power cap, rendering them useless in many activities.

The main reasons cited by Bungie at the time included combatting the spiraling file size of the game, the need to make it easier to test for bugs, and to encourage players to use new gear rather than sticking with old favourites. While all that made some sense, players hated it about exactly as much as you would imagine players would feel about having content they’d paid for forcibly removed from a game. 

The entire sunsetting episode remained an open wound ever since, despite Bungie abandoning weapon sunsetting a year later and promising no more expansions would be removed back in 2022. Like many in the community, I eventually accepted my old ‘god roll’ guns…

If you’re the kind of morally loose rum enthusiast who fancies a spot of thieving at sea, you’ve previously had to take to the ocean with a bunch of hearties and put your life at risk for your boozy needs. Thankfully, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew has appeared on the horizon. Its blend of alternate history golden age of piracy with old-school, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines flavored isometric action should satisfy those needs previously only sated by high seas shenanigans. 

The elevator pitch is as simple as it is unusual: pull off a piratical heist and secure a magical artifact that can swing the balance of power away from the tyrannical Inquisition and, naturally, towards you. 

The depth of Shadow Gambit’s lore catches my eye (singular, obviously. The other one’s behind a patch). Developer Mimimi Games, of Desperados III and Shadow Tactics fame, is committed to making Shadow Gambit’s world feel distinctive and immersive. To that end, its Island Spotlight videos delve into a particular locale on the vast world map and explain some local culture, tensions, and plunder. 

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew lets you assembl…

Less than three months before it was due to launch, a Bloomberg report says Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been delayed. An announcement at the 2022 Game Awards had set a release date of May 26, but it has now apparently been pushed back to later in 2023.

It’s been a rough year for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League so far. A February gameplay showcase did not make an overly positive impression with many fans: The YouTube clip embedded above sits at a ratio of 3.2K thumbs up to 10K thumbs downs. Not that it was awful in any particular way, just not really great either—as staff writer and resident shooter pro Morgan Park put it, “it’s a looter shooter alright.”

“My friend group is always hungry for a new co-op shooter, and it’s not every day one with a massive budget comes along,” he wrote. “On the other hand, after 50 hours of looting identical scarves and juggling a pointless gear score in Hogwarts Legacy, I’ve had it up to here (imagine I’m holding my hand very high) with half-baked RPG systems. Finding a new gun/sword/wand with a slightly bigger number has become a shortcut for meaningful progression.”

The Suicide Squad: Kill the Justic…