Last time, you decided that a really big unreal place is better than going undercover. Good. Very good. Great deciding, reader dear. I'm wholly impartial, of course, but I am glad you haven't forced me to come up with some contrived reason to jam a really big unreal place back into the running. We can continue. This week, it's a question of jarring vs. juicy. What's better: physics freakouts or beautiful food?
]]>Square Enix, or Sqix to its close friends, is having a bloody great sale over at the Humble store. The discounts are up to 85% off, and include the likes of Nier, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and more.
]]>Ultrawide gaming monitors can seem excessive compared to regular 16:9 gaming screens, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful and expensive graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there's no going back. I've been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, as their extra screen space not only makes them great for juggling multiple desktop windows, but supported PC games also look uttery fantastic on them - and to prove it, I've put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC.
]]>Final Fantasy 16's future on PC may have been thrown into doubt over the last 48 hours thanks to Square Enix's ongoing exclusivity mess, but man alive, I am EXCITED all the same. Partly because its brand new "Awakening" reveal trailer shown off during Wednesday's latest PS5 Showcase a) looked fantastic, and b) explicitly stated it had been captured on PC, thereby giving me hope that it will come to PC eventually. But mostly because it reminded me a lot of the previous game in the series, the wonderful (but epically flawed) Final Fantasy 15. Allow me to explain.
]]>As the fuzzy denizens of earth pivot to non-existence, we will soon be left with an unclear memory of the animal kingdom's bizarre court. The elephant, for instance, what even is it? I cannot help with that question, I’m not a marine biologist. But what I can offer is a tour of endangered videogame wildlife. Otherworldly creatures you can’t find beneath the rocks of reality or swimming in the ponds of tangibility. It is the least I can do. So, here you go. A safari of the 9 weirdest animals in PC games.
]]>Kick the tires, whistle at the paint job, spin the keys on your finger like a revolver and then shoot the car with the little laser of unlocking. It’s time to get back on the road. What’s that? Entire country in a state of unprecedented lockdown? I see. Well, lucky for you, we concern ourselves here only with pretend cars, the indoor joy of fictional journeys on virtual roads. Here, my housebound friends, are the 9 best road trips in PC games. Seatbelts on, please.
]]>When I think back to the launch of Final Fantasy XV back in 2016, I still can't quite believe that Square Enix managed to get away with it all. Everyone might be kicking off now about separating the Final Fantasy VII Remake into multiple who-knows-how-many parts, but at least we know (hopefully) that they're all going to be actual games. If you wanted to understand what the heck was going on in Final Fantasy XV, you had to watch a 110 minute CG movie called Kingsglaive first, then a five-part anime series called Brotherhood.
There was also an entirely separate (albeit promotional) game detailing the life and fun adventure times of the main character's dad called A King's Tale, and a real-life version of the in-game minigame, Justice Monsters Five. You didn't need to play the last two to understand the story, but man alive, what a mad old set of affairs, eh? And that's before we get to the whole DLC debacle.
]]>Everyone’s a cook now, is that it? A few weeks in lockdown and you’re all suddenly artisan bakers and Bon Appétit Kitchen presenters? Sorry, I don’t buy it. Put the chickpeas down, Jeff. We all know what happens when you let things “simmer”. However, there is a world in which your cooking really does impress. Where it comes out of the pot scrumptious and hot and more flavourful than a generous bite from a big round onion. That world is videogames. Did you think I was going to say something else? I never say anything else. It’s videogames. Here are the 9 most delicious dinners in videogames.
]]>The greasy realm of the videogame is not always the best place to look for good writing. For every Disco Elysium there are roughly 800 Detroit: Beyond Humans. But it is a good place to look for wondrous, over-the-top nonsense. I’m talking about character dialogue so flamboyant and exaggerated, you could insert some line breaks and it would instantly become a verse in a glam rock anthem. Here are the 12 most extravagant, exuberant, and intense lines of dialogue. In games, subtext is just whatever’s written on the side of the nuclear submarine.
]]>Get in the car, punk. Xbox Game Pass for PC is about to pick up three new games, cramming Final Fantasy XV, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Death's Gambit into the back seat of its subscription bandwagon. That's one banger, one bust, and one "huh, seems alright" jumping onto Game Pass' growing catalogue, still available at £1/$1 for three months if you're a first-time subscriber.
But all that's firmly in "coming soon" territory. Before all that, we've got a brief detour to punch-town as Bleeding Edge, Ninja Theory's upcoming multiplayer basher, hops on for a two-day beta on Xbox Games Pass next week.
]]>HDR on PC hasn't improved much in 2019. Despite there being more HDR gaming monitors than ever before, the very best gaming monitors for HDR continue to be quite expensive compared to non-HDR monitors, and the situation around Windows 10 support for it is still a bit of a mess. However, provided you're willing to fight through all that, then the next step on your path to high dynamic range glory is to get an HDR compatible graphics card.
Below, you'll find a complete list of all the Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that have built-in support for HDR, as well as everything you need to know about getting one that also supports Nvidia and AMD's own HDR standards, G-Sync Ultimate and FreeSync 2. I've also put together a list of all the PC games that support HDR as well, so you know exactly which PC games you can start playing in high dynamic range.
]]>Those of you chained to the churning wheel of the internet might have seen this facial recognition algorithm thingo doing the rounds. It's called ImageNet Roulette, and it's basically a website where you feed in a photo of your human face and see what the cybergods of our terrible future make of you. But it's probably not safe to show the neurohive your real face. So we showed it 13 pictures of videogame characters instead, to see if the machine lords of the net realm can tell who they are and what they are all about. The short answer: not really, but sometimes. The neural net, it turns out, is a dangerous idiot.
]]>Want a taste of what 'next-gen' graphics are going to look like? Well, the clever folks over at Square Enix's Luminous Productions studio (the wizards wot made Final Fantasy XV) have just released a brand new tech demo called 'Back Stage' doing just that. Made in collaboration with Nvidia, this real-time ray tracing demo isn't related to any particular game per se (or at least none that we know of), but its depiction of a woman having a chill moment doing her make-up in the mirror sure is a technical feast for the old eyeballs. Here's the demo in full:
]]>Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you'll be playing in the "scary" cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.
To help keep track of them all, here's a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you'll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.
]]>Matt: This is it. The final blog down. Square Enix are about to tell us about what they're up to, and we've both reported to our liveblogging stations for the very last time. Both Cheerer and Jeerer have one more opportunity to don their respective masks of love and loathing, but who will take up each mantle?
Actually, forget I asked. Jetlag has snuck up on us both and filled our hearts with jeer, but I'm the one writing this intro so I get to bagsy it. Plus it's my turn anyway. Nuh-nuh.
]]>After thirteen years of development, the saga of Final Fantasy XV today draws to an abrupt close with the launch of its final story DLC, Episode Ardyrn. Square Enix had planned to release another three episodes after this, each focusing on a different character, but they cut that plan short and here we are at the end, my only friend, the end. Episode Ardyn focuses on the spooky cowboy and his dark past. Here, have some dramatic soliloquising in the launch trailer.
]]>Following the epic boyband road trip of Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix now plan to let us create our own pop trios in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. Today they announced the 3v3 crossover brawler, made with Dead Or Alive developers Team Ninja and released on PlayStation 4 in 2018, is coming to PC as a free-to-play edition. I think my dream pop trio might be Noctis, Kefka, and Sephiroth? Or Yuna, Lightning, and Noctis could be an interesting musical dynamic. Squeenix insist the trios do fight each other, but I assume it's mostly about building and admiring your dream lineup.
]]>Of course the original editions of the Steam Charts focused on those maps used by the early pioneers of steam-based exploration, so this week we take a historical look back at the origins of your favourite game series. For just one week, put aside your modern electricity-based computing, and come on a journey through time.
]]>It's the weekend, or at least after work-hours for most on a Friday, so might as well pick up something to demolish your free time. Square Enix are running a rather nice sale on Steam for the weekend, cutting 50% off the price on most of their bigger games, and slapping deeper discounts on a lot of more obscure stuff, including their old Eidos catalogue. Check out the sale page here, and peruse below for a couple oddball recommendations (and some boringly normal stuff) from me.
]]>The game's director leaving to start his own studio may have sunk most DLC plans for Final Fantasy XV, but there's still one last story to be told. Due on March 26th, Episode Ardyn will put players in the shoes of the game's dapper arch-villain and lead him on a high powered rampage through the streets of the capital city. Still, Ardyn isn't Kefka, who mostly just burnt the world for shits and giggles - Square Enix want you to know his tragic backstory presented in the form of a free anime short. Below, twelve minutes of extreme melodrama followed by a trailer and spoilers.
]]>Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is building up to its next expansion, Shadowbringers, but there's still a few updates and a couple surprises due before its July 2nd launch. Among the goodies is a fun-looking crossover event with Final Fantasy XV. Players will get to hang out with Prince Noctis, battle magitek robots from his world, and even borrow his transforming, flying car - the expansive MMORPG's first four-player mount. The crossover is due out in mid-April. Take a gander at the event trailer below, and a peek at some of the other bits on the way.
]]>For the sake of snappy videogame design, eating is often the first thing that falls by the wayside. After all, food and all the associated processes take time, time that in most games is better spent elsewhere. Just like in real life, having to hunt around for food in the middle of an adventure often tampers with the pacing.
There are exceptions, but food prep tends to either take up a large portion of a game, the way it does in Battle Chef Brigade or VA-11 HALL-A, or none at all. You hunt down weapon parts or shoot animals to turn them into fashion, but food somehow hasn’t become a side activity of equal value. Food intake is often reduced to drinking; downing a quick potion has been established as an acceptable shorthand for eating something to regain health. As an alternative, some games use snack items such as granola bars and assorted sweets. This choice is of course also down to animation speed – if you want to give players a way to heal through food without slowing down the action during a fight, you can’t have them sit down to enjoy a leisurely slow cooked stew. But Final Fantasy XV represents an important peak in videogame design: an actual roast.
]]>Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS tech arrived in Final Fantasy XV last week, allowing all three people who've actually bought themselves one of Nvidia's new Turing RTX cards to finally start making use of what makes the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti so special. I'm still a bit miffed this fancy, AI-driven edge-smoothening magic only works at 4K at the moment, thereby making it even more niche and harder to use than FFVII's Knights of the Round summon (a little joke for you there) but I do realise that this is the resolution that arguably needs it most. And after running some tests on the RTX 2080, the results are pretty encouraging.
]]>Anyone who didn't uninstall Final Fantasy XV in a fit of despair and/or rage last month after the abrupt cancellation of 75% of its upcoming DLC will have noticed a delightful 15GB update waiting for them on Steam today, in which finally arrives support for Nvidia's frame rate rocketing tech, DLSS (or deep learning super sampling, if that makes things any clearer).
It's one of the things I've been most looking forward to testing on the new RTX GPUs, but as with almost everything to do with the launch of Nvidia's RTX family, there's a catch. You can only enable it if you have a 4K display.
]]>The saga of Final Fantasy XV will cut off abruptly, as Square Enix last night announced they've cancelled three of its four upcoming story DLCs. FFXV director Hajime Tabata has left the company too, planning to start his own company for his own project. So... that's about the end of that. The DLC story episode starring antagonist Ardyn is still coming, as are more of the multiplayer Comrades and some FFXIV crossover gubbins, but the DLCs focused on Aranea, Lunafreya, and Noctis are in the bin.
]]>Here ye, hear ye! The most honourable nobles of this treehouse do hereby declare that the RPS Podcast, known in various lands as the Electronic Wireless Show, is now royal majesty of recorded games chat, lord over all, King of the Podcasts, ruler of headphones, holder of hot takes, overseer of opinion. Welcome to this coronation, feeble folk of the videogame fields. Come listen to us chat about the best kings and queens in PC gaming.
]]>“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
It’s a common enough idiom, a plea for empathy and understanding. Taken literally, it’s also a phrase that rings true for gamers. We walk countless miles in the shoes of our favourite characters, learning to love and feel for them along the way. But despite all the miles we travel, we rarely give our well-worn virtual footwear its due. Virtual shoes are just another one of the many small, mundane details that make the worlds in which we play believable, and most players ignore them. Luckily, one photographer has made it his mission to document the art of virtual shoes.
]]>Last week, after much hype and excitement, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card was finally unleashed on the world. Today, it's the turn of its beefed-up big brother, the RTX 2080Ti, whose release was delayed by a week for reasons lost to the bowels of Nvidia's marketing department. As you can see from my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti review, this is hands down the best graphics card for 4K I've ever seen, and that's all down to the monstrous power of Nvidia's new Turing GPU. But how much of a leap does it represent over its immediate predecessor, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080Ti? To the graphs!
]]>Mega-budget as it may be, Final Fantasy 15 has always been content to walk its own road, so it's not that weird that its latest cross-promo update is with a game that doesn't exist yet. In a big patch released today, Prince Noctis can stumble into a new adventure with Sarah, protagonist of upcoming mobile RPG Terra Wars. It's being developed by Mistwalker, a team of ex-Square Enix folks. Those playing FF15's online multiplayer can now also dress up in Lara Croft's iconic tomb-delving gear, and listen to some Tomb Raider tracks on the radio in-game. Nifty.
]]>In my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 review last week, we discovered that Nvidia's super duper new graphics card was about as fast as their GTX 1080Ti when paired with Intel's Core i5-8600K CPU, representing only the teensiest bit of improvement to your overall frames per second output if you were to bung one in your PC today. That may well change once we start seeing more games take advantage of the Nvidia's clever speed-boosting AI-driven Turing tech, but until developers get their act together and start patching in support for all of the best RTX features, the only thing we've got to go on right now is raw performance data.
With this in mind, I thought I'd take a closer look at how the RTX 2080 compares to its direct predecessor, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. The former might not represent much of a leap past the GTX 1080's souped up Ti cousin, but regular 1080 owners should see much better results compared to what they can do now, particularly when it comes to gaming at 4K. Let's take a look.
]]>I imagine in direct response to all my moaning insightful criticism, everyone in the world has upped their game and started buying some more interesting games from Steam. Such that this week's Steam Charts, with an extraordinary four new entries, barely resembles those of the last couple of months! Hurrah! And you clickbait won't believe clickbait where Playerunknown's Battlegrounds falls this week! CLICKBAIT!
Listen up, you’re drumming on my time now. What’s the tune? It’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show of course. This week we are talking about music in games, and what makes a good game soundtrack. The bleeps and bloops of Pac Man? Or the orchestral panache of Oblivion? A lot of people requested this topic, so we’ve also done something special – a music quiz! Can you guess the game based on a few seconds of music? Even if you can, I doubt you’ll score higher than Katharine, who it turns out is, uh, quite interested in videogame music.
]]>We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second.
And what games they are! 2018 has been a great year so far, and our top picks run the whole range, from hand drawn oddities made by one person, to big mega-studio blockbusters that took the work of hundreds. And each of them is special to us in some way. Just like you are too. Click through the arrows to see the full spread of our faves so far. Better luck next year to the games that didn't make the cut this time.
]]>Welcome to my nightmares. As chronicled last week, all human progress is wiped out by a Steam Sale. Where once we were a species that revelled in new, interesting ideas, pursuing our dreams, we are once more wedged neck-deep in the past, doomed to buy the same £40 five-year-old games until we rot and coagulate into a molten horror. Welcome to the Steam Charts!
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>I have reached a conclusion. Everything that's bad is the fault of Steam sales. Two weeks ago these charts had reached a place of being a fertile ground of interesting new games and discounted classics. Today, they're back to being mostly a miserably predictable list of games that even the undiscovered tribes of Papua New Guinea have on their Steam accounts.
]]>Hallo! Me again, filling in (slightly late) while John is handcuffed to a steering wheel for other duties. The Steam Charts were all shook up (mm mm mmh!) last week by the launch of Steam's summer sale, including propelling a lump of hardware into the top ten for the first time in ages. A number of older games have rocketed back too, boosted by sale discounts, and displaced several games from their near-permanent spots in the hit parade. Let's stroll down it and see.
]]>Square Enix have launched the promised official mod tools for Final Fantasy X, letting all and sundry tinker with those good boys. Right now, the tools can replace models, add new weapons, and add new costumes, but Squeenix have said before that they plan to keep expanding their scope to make more types of mod possible. The FFXV Steam Workshop, which previously only hosted mods Squeenix themselves made, is slowly filling up with well, multiple Keyblades so far and one cursed Thomas the Tank Engine. But I'm sure great things are to come.
]]>The boys are low-poly now. As someone with a fairly fancy PC, it's easy to forget sometimes that not everyone has the GPU muscle to run the likes of Final Fantasy XV. An alternative presents itself today (for Windows 10 users, at least - it's OS-exclusive, sorry) in the form of Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition, a low-fi demake of the game designed for mobile devices, but now available for less beefy desktops. There's even a demo.
]]>Gaming laptops are a funny business, aren't they? Nine times out of ten they're nowhere near as powerful as an equivalent desktop PC, yet they usually cost just as much, if not more, than the bulky black rectangles they're so desperately trying to replace. There's also a matter of looks. Most gaming laptops are very much from the shouty GAMING LAPTOP school of design with their edgy angles and flashing LEDs, not to mention the fact that most of them would likely break your back as soon as you tried to remove it from your desk.
Razer's gaming laptops, on the other hand, have always tended to hark back to the nice slim portable laptops many of us, myself included, use for work – and their new, rather lovely 15.6in Razer Blade that I went to see a couple of weeks ago, complete with its 144Hz refresh rate and one of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q chips, could well be one of their best yet. Let's take a look.
]]>Minecraft is a strange phenomenon in gaming. Like a towering skyscraper, the mind stops recognizing it as a place for humans to inhabit, and it just becomes part of the landscape. Every now and then, something recognizable pokes out of a window and you're forced to re-assess your outlook on the world. In this case, it's the boys, girls and monsters of Final Fantasy XV, as they make a cameo appearance in the Windows 10/Cross-platform edition of the game.
]]>With Steam's big VR Spring Sale on, obviously the charts are a bit full of... ha ha ha, no of course not. No one wants VR. Same old same old.
]]>Join us for our weekly skip through the bountiful fields of fresh gaming joy! Hold our hand as we guide you down the top ten selling games on Steam, to discover which heart-lifting original content has caught the attention of the enthused gaming public! Someone please help me!
]]>Final Fantasy XV has already seen some story based DLC this year, but at PAX East there was an announcement from Square Enix regarding four add-on story packs coming to the game in 2019. The Dawn of the Future DLC hopes to set itself apart from other story-based add-ons by creating an entire season of alternate plot branches, building towards (what appears to be) a completely different ending.
]]>Noctis Lucis Caelum is the young monarch of Final Fantasy XV. He has a double-barrelled surname and a lot of invisible swords. He has also made a guest appearance in Tekken 7. These are two ridiculous worlds I like to inhabit in the evenings, so it makes sense to write about this crossover event. But there needs to be an angle. I need a hook. A hook… Of course! A fishing hook. Noctis loves to go angling, it’s his hobby. I’ll fight a bunch of people as Noctis and try to get a K.O. using a large fish. That’s an article.
]]>“I love to shoot the men!” you shout, as you pump 100 bullets into the prostrate torso of a dead soldier in Far Cry 5. “I’m so glad there are no cutscenes to--
THWOCK.
“Oh no.”
And lo, the lord delivered unto ye a sermon of the highest tedium, and the Four Ubisoft Writers of the Apocalypse rode over the earth and reaped the souls of all humanity with pointless exposition and dull characterisation. It was a bad time. But it’s not the only strong game let down by a bad tale. The latest episode of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is unable to discuss all the offenders, but we can take a punt.
]]>It was a good day when the director of Final Fantasy XV told us modding would be supported for the PC version of the regal road trip JRPG. Since then we’ve had some plain costumes, as well as some much-needed graphical aid. But now someone has made a mod that lets you import your own music to the car radio. The Regalia’s radio normally just plays old Final Fantasy soundtracks you find on your travels, but now you can throw anything into the disk tray. Here's how to do it, along with some suggestions for a classic road trip.
]]>John is missing. He flew out to GDC last week stowed inside Brendan's suitcase to save money, I'm sure you'll remember, but on the return journey Brendan's bag has gone missing. Vanished. Didn't flop onto the luggage carousel. The airport have no idea. John took a few cans of pop and bags of gross American chocolate in with him so I'm sure he'll be fine, but where is he? Amsterdam? Boise? Hong Kong? Honolulu? I'm sure he'll turn up. For now, here I am, I am taking over the Steam Charts for another week.
If there's one lesson to learn from last week's 10 top-selling games on Steam, it's that fancy open-world games are quite popular.
]]>PC games usually fall into two camps when it comes to recommended specifications. There's the 'Yes, you'll probably be fine' category, and the 'SWEET LORD CRYSIS 3 IS ABOUT TO MAKE MY PC MELT' bracket. Final Fantasy XV, the anime boyband stag do roadtrip JRPG, almost certainly falls into the latter, so I got together a bunch of graphics cards to see how they fared against the almighty Square Enix behemoth.
Now this is by no means a complete list of all today's available or indeed best graphics cards (yet, anyway), but it should hopefully paint a reasonable picture of what you can expect to get out of it if you're not quite sure whether your PC's up to the task. And who could blame you, when the recommended graphics card is a chuffing 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 480?
]]>A few of the things I have had to do in order to get a workable version of HDR (also known as high dynamic range), the new-ish display technology that significantly ramps up brightness, darkness and vibrancy, on my PC (not including the acquisition of a fancy monitor):
- Try four different display cables - Adjust as many as seven different brightness/contrast/colour etc shaders per game. (I have spent long, unhappy hours doing this to date) - Manually turn on HDR on the monitor, manually turn HDR on in Windows then manually turn on HDR in the game settings. Or sometimes HDR off in Windows but on in the game then alt-tab back to Windows and turn HDR on, and off, and on, and off. Or sometimes alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab until HDR suddenly, randomly kicks in. When I exit the game, I have to manually turn it all back off again or Windows is unusable. - Install an unfinished preview build of Windows 10 whose HDR isn't totally broken on Nvidia cards. - Almost completely lose my sense of whether anything is actually different after all of this.
The egg yolks in Final Fantasy XV were a bit shinier, though.
]]>While resident buttonmasher Brendan is busy in San Francisco, it falls to me to tell you that Final Fantasy XV protagonist Noctis Lucis Caelum today arrived in Tekken 7 as the latest DLC character. "Noctis's occupation is listed as: formally opening swimming pools and shopping centres," Brendan might say, with that air of authority he has when making ludicrous claims about fighting game characters. "Likes: camping and cutting ribbons," he'd add, knowing we'd trust him. God only knows where he gets it from, and I don't intend to ask. "Dislikes: invasions."
]]>John is elsewhere this week, squeezed into Brendan's luggage for a flight to San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference, so I'm here for the regular rundown of last week's top-selling games on Steam. This week, the letters R, A, and S are well-represented with strong showings from both Mars and rats.
]]>Greetings, readers. John, your regular guide to this hollow summary of ceaseless material consumption, is missing. We presume he has angered the company overlords with some sort of ill-judged diatribe against corporate consolidation, and has subsequently been reassigned to another media outlet, possibly The Re-education Supplement, or Gulag's Weekly. Well, you won't find any such insubordination from me. I have only the purest intentions of telling you the top ten best sellers on Steam this week, with a secondary goal of reinforcing the cold emptiness of our predominant mercantile culture. Let's buy some games!
]]>Good news, boy fans. A modder has offered a quick solution to a couple of Final Fantasy XV’s technical problems. The JRPG stag do performs generally well on PCs but that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. Some players using a gamepad (myself included) have found that the game keeps detecting your mouse and keyboard even when you don’t want it to, flipping the on-screen prompts from controller buttons to keyboard keys. This causes jitters and frame drops. It’s v v v v v annoying. But don’t fret, a hero has arisen. And it’s the same guy who fixed Nier: Automata when the developers didn’t.
]]>The story of Final Fantasy XV is a tricky one to unpick. There's the story about how it took ten years to actually come out, transforming from a Final Fantasy XIII spin-off into the boyband roadtrip-stag-do adventure we know today. There's also the story of what happened after it came out, where a large chunk of its third act was almost completely rewritten and streamlined after people started complaining about how linear it had suddenly become after spending hours and hours on the glorious open road.
Then there's the story of the game itself, which, at this point, has been spread across so many different forms of media, including a film, four anime episodes, four bits of DLC, a mobile spin-off and a multiplayer expansion (with even more to come, no less), that only three people in the entire universe actually understand it and would be able to recite it to you from start to finish.
But the story of four lads saving their home from an invading imperial army isn't really what Final Fantasy XV is about. In fact, it's arguably the least memorable thing about it. That might sound blasphemous for a JRPG, where the story is traditionally one of the most important parts of a game, but every conversation I've had about Final Fantasy XV over the last sixteen months always boils down to one of three things: food, photos and friendship. And it's those that make it one of the best and most interesting goddamn JRPGs of the last decade.
]]>Guess who just got back today? Them wild-eyed boys that had been away. Fifteen months after starting their journey on console, the anime boyband road trip stag party of Final Fantasy XV have finally arrived on PC. It's out now. The boys are back in town.
We've only just got the game ourselves so our review will take a while, though I'm sure we'll have plenty of shorter things to say soon.
]]>Some Monday mornings, as I plonk myself down at my desk at 6.50am and load the RSS feed for the Steam Charts, I think to myself: you know what? There are so many other things I'd like to write about today. Anyway, here are the top ten games on Steam from the last week.
]]>We're still waiting for the PC release of Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth while jealously looking over the shoulders of our PS5 brethren. But that doesn't mean we can't ride some other chocobo, so to speak. There are tons of other great Final Fantasy games you can play on PC right now. Below, we've ranked the 10 best Final Fantasy games you can currently play on Steam, putting an end to the debate over which Roman numeral is objectively best.
]]>Boys, boys, boys, I'm looking for a good time. That's why I'm downloading the demo for Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, which just launched. The demo contains the RPG's first chapter so we can meet those boys, boys, boys and see how their road trip starts. And hopefully it'll let us see how the game might actually run on our PCs, given that the benchmarking tool released earlier this month is wonky and Square Enix say it "may not accurately reflect the game's final performance". For now: boys.
]]>I'd apologise for the excessive coverage of Final Fantasy XV lately, but that would be wrong, so instead I'll just admit to being quite excited for the overhauled PC release of Square's quirky and unique mega-budget male-bonding magical realist road trip RPG, and the changes coming to it.
Katharine has been serving as the spirit of FFXV's both present and past, but here I bring you a vision of Final Fantasy XV yet to come: It's a fresh wave of episodic DLC, and it may well be rolling out all the way into 2019, starting with a chance to play as smirking, flamboyant antagonist Ardyn, pictured above.
]]>There's a moment about half way through Final Fantasy XV where you have to say goodbye to your stag-do-cum-road-trip adventure and actually start saving the world. It's the same point that sees you swap your ridiculously large car and the sweeping fields of Lucis for a boat, and then a train, that carries you, quite literally, in a non-stop line toward the game's conclusion, where its open world suddenly becomes much more closed in.
]]>The royal boyband roadtrip adventure that is Final Fantasy XV is almost here. In just under two weeks, Square Enix's ginormous JRPG will finally arrive on PC, a little over a year after it first came out on console. Yes, it gets a little bit bogged down by its wonky story beats, but to dismiss it because of that would be to ignore all the brilliant things it does right, like chronicling your journey with amazing photographs. It also helps that the PC version looks properly brilliant. Yes, you'll need an Iron Giant-sized PC in order to run it, but more thoughts on that are coming separately soon.
Here, I have a talk with the game's technical director and lead programmer Takeshi Aramaki and game design and development manager Kenichi Shida (and their translator) about all things XV on PC. We cover just about everything but if you're after hot mod chat that's over here. There was also a surprise gatecrashing by the game's director, Hajime Tabata, about ten minutes in, so I got to hear what the big boss had to say about the PC version as well. Let the battle music commence.
]]>You’d think we could agree on four simple letters. But nothing is ever straightforward on RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. This week the gang are talking JRPGs, or Japanese role-playing games to use some real words for human people. Does a game have to be made in Japan to be defined as an JRPG? Or does it just need some bright colours and lots of turn-based battles? Maybe it only needs a boss behind a boss (and then another boss behind that one)? Come with us into the petty world of the genre bouncer, as we examine the shoes of dozens of games and decide whether or not they’re allowed into the JRPG nightclub.
]]>A proper playable demo of Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition is coming next week, containing the RPG's first chapter, following the recent benchmark tool. A demo! In this day and age! Bless their hearts. Square Enix have talked a lot about wanting to do the PC version right, mods and all, and they do seem to be going for it. They're even teaming up with iconic PC chap Gordon Freeman, adding the Half-Life hero's HEV suit, glasses, and crowbar to FFXV's Steam version. Well, he's not using them, is he?
]]>Last August, Square Enix finally confirmed that the upcoming PC version of royal roadtrip Final Fantasy XV would indeed come with full mod support when it launches on March 6. At the time, though, the developers kept schtum about exactly what that might entail. Indeed, it was only over the weekend that we got our first glimpse of what a potential Final Fantasy XV mod might look like. Fancy the idea of turning everyone in party town Lestallum into adorable cactuars? Then you're in luck.
Cactuar skins are all well and good, of course, but what else does the team have in store for budding modders? To find out, I sat down with director Hajime Tabata, technical director and lead programmer Takeshi Aramaki and game design and development manager Kenichi Shida and quizzed them (and their translator) about exactly that.
]]>We're just two weeks from the PC release of Final Fantasy XV. Despite a wobbly start on consoles, Square have poured a shocking amount of support into the game, and I admit no small amount of excitement for the re-launch, especially after the benchmark confirmed that my new laptop can more than handle the game on its highest graphics settings at framerates my ageing PS4 can only dream of.
One aspect of it that hasn't really been talked about much is Comrades, a surprisingly beefy online multiplayer expansion which came late to the console version, but will be included as standard with the PC release along with the three character side-story DLC chapters. As part of Square's long-term plans for the game, Comrades is set to receive another chunk of content on the PC version's launch day, March 6th.
]]>Where oh where is #9 this week, you ask, uncertain that it is possible to have a top ten without it. A mystery! Of course there are the usual suspects, the increasingly usual new suspects, and even a couple of new entries, but when it comes to slot nine, there's a gap. The URL for the entry is this, the number seemingly unattached to anything on the store, and not the since deleted entry for the idiotic CS:GO championship sticker collection, as I'd first assumed. Go solve the mystery, mystery solvers!
]]>It's been a long time coming, but the expanded, tuned, moddable and polished-up PC port of magical realist pretty-boy road-trip RPG Final Fantasy XV is nearly here. The only question that remains is "How well will this thing run on my PC?"
Well, hypothetical questioner, I've got some good news for you: Square have been kind enough to release a benchmark tool for the game, allowing you to ogle a bit of it in action on your own PC, and receive advice on whether you'll need to lower your settings or resolution in order to get a consistently smooth result out of the game.
]]>The anime boyband roadtrip of Final Fantasy XV will swing by PC on March 6, developers Square Enix have announced. Noctis, Ignis, and the rest of the boys have been rolling around consoles since November 2016 and I am delighted they are finally coming to our town. Our version will be fancier than the plain old console version too, coming with bits including mod support, a new royal boat to sail and go fishing with the lads, everything from the console DLC season pass, and a new first-person camera view. Splendid!
]]>As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework that exploded in the many midnights of New Year's celebrations was stuffed with games and they were still raining down across the world this morning. We cannot stop them, we cannot contain them, but we can attempt to understand them.
Hundreds of them will be worth our time and attention, but we've selected a few of the ones that excite us most as we prepare for another year of splendid PC gaming. There's something for everyone, from Aunt Maude, the military genius, to merry Ian Rogue, the man who hates permadeath and procedural generation with a passion.
]]>The crossover-verse collapses further upon itself with every passing day. This time it’s magic prince lad Noctis from Final Fantasy XV who falls victim to the fathomless gash in the fabric of our collective realities. In spring next year he will wake up to find himself in Tekken 7, where he must compete in the Iron Fist Tournament. Super.
]]>The royal road trip of Final Fantasy XV [official site] is coming to PC (and with planned mod support too), it was announced this week during Gamescom. That’s good, we like road trips on RPS. So to find out more I sat in a room with the game’s director Hajime Tabata and his translator to quiz him on the origins of Prompto’s camera, the mysterious Final Fantasy committee, sports cars, and the big question: just who is the best boy in the band?
]]>You might have heard that the lads-on-tour simulator Final Fantasy XV [official site] is coming to PC next year. But long before that announcement game director Hajime Tabata dreamt of the idea of including mod support in the then ethereal PC version. Well, that’s now a solid plan.
]]>Prince Noctis and his anime boyband are indeed bringing their Final Fantasy XV [official site] road trip to PC, Square Enix have confirmed. I have been so very keen to scamper about with these rowdy boys who love camping, cooking, friendship, riding chickens, and fighting honking great monsters. Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition will come almost a year after the RPG's initial release, in "early 2018", but it should be the best edition. Improvements and additions that were patched into the console versions should be here from the start, for one. And of course technical improvements and PC prettybits are in too. See them in this new trailer:
]]>Final Fantasy XV is sadly still not announced for PC, but a large lump from it is soon coming here in a roundabout way. Microsoft today announced that Prince Noctis's car, the Regalia, will soon escape the fantasy world and come free to the Australia of Forza Horizon 3 [official site]. Turn 10 Studios have rebuilt the car in Forza so folks can race and roam our world just like their favourite anime boyband. The car's due to arrive on Tuesday, August 1st, and to get it you'll simply need to have played FH3 by then.
]]>Square Enix still haven't announced a PC port for Final Fantasy XV [official site], but I am cheered by game's director saying he would like to bring the anime boyband roadtrip over. Hajime Tabata even says he'd be interesting in special PC features like mod support. This is, unfortunately, not a plan. It's not an announcement. It's not confirmation. It's not even really a hint. But, as a short answer in a short interview, I am digging this. Please, Square Enix, let the rowdy boys come out to play.
]]>If you judged each of E3 2016's conferences by the volcanic applause following each announcement, no matter how minuscule or massive, then you probably think everything the developers said was written by God himself on a stone script. But you're smarter than that. I know you are. So, in continuation of our 'anti-E3' coverage, here are some of the moments when the creators and executives of the show were misleading, vague or "economical with the truth".
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