What did you play last week?
Here's what we've been up to. What about you?
Emma Matthews had been playing Resident Evil 3 Remake, but now she's finished it she's watching streamers tackle the Inferno Mode. I like to watch people who are bad at games blunder through them because I think that's funny, but there are enough people out there who are masters of this kind of thing that there's obviously an audience for more skilful displays.
Dave James tried something I would never have thought to do and took his VR goggles outside to play Half-Life: Alyx in his garden at night. The only thing more frightening than headcrabs is strangers potentially seeing you play a game in VR.
Andy Kelly has been playing Colin McRae: Flat Out Pack, a new DLC for Dirt Rally 2.0 that pays homage to the famous rally driver. It adds challenge tracks based on the events of real races—if McRae suffered from a damaged engine mount, so will you—which makes it a bit like those strategy game levels where you have to shepherd a nation through a specific bit of historical turmoil, or when SimCity gives you the keys to Berlin. It's a neat idea.
Rachel Watts played A Monster's Expedition (Through Human Exhibitions), a new puzzle game from the makers of A Good Snowman is Hard to Build. It's about island-hopping by rolling around logs, which you have to be careful not to accidentally send spinning into the sea. It's a bit like a chill version of Stephen's Sausage Roll if you've played that. If you haven't heard of any of these games you probably think I'm making them up but I promise they are very real.
I knocked another one off the backlog by playing Frederic: Resurrection of Music. It's a rhythm game where the ASDF and WER keys become piano keys, and you have to hit them as notes fly down. Get a combo going and a golden note with a completely random letter from somewhere else on the keyboard will suddenly appear. It's frantic fun, with an absurd storyline about Chopin being resurrected to travel the world competing in musical duels. The translation's terrible and every character an outrageously broad stereotype, but I like the idea—it reminds me of Frets On Fire, the freeware Guitar Hero for keyboards.
Enough about us. What about you? Have you been playing Mount & Blade: Bannerlord 2 or The Complex? Picked up any of the recent freebies? Let us know!
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.