PC Features

PC Shooters You Should Play Instead of Halo Reach: Part 3

Halo Reach comes out the day after tomorrow, and we can expect a relentless media blitz about the XBox 360 and its new killer app.  But what about us PC gamers who’d rather shoot bad guys with our high-precision mice instead of a clumsy analog stick?  Each day from now until Tuesday morning when Halo Reach launches, we here at Player Affinity’s PC department are going to suggest a PC exclusive shooter that you can play instead of Halo Reach (Or at least help kill the time while you wait).

PC Shooters You Should Play Instead of Halo Reach: Part 4

Halo Reach comes out tomorrow, and all of my friends who own Xboxes are making plans to pick up their pre-orders tonight at midnight.  Gamers who prefer to play shooters on their PCs will be stuck at home with no new AAA game to occupy their time, but that’s just fine, because Player Affinity’s PC department is offering a daily recommendation of PC shooters to help distract you from those raucous midnight launch parties

PC Shooters You Should Play Instead of Halo Reach: Part 2

There are just four days left before Halo Reach comes out, and the internet is ablaze with tantalizing previews and secret accounts of life in the beta test. Your XBox fanboy friends are probably spending the their time trying to unlock every achievement in Halo ODST, but those of us who prefer our shooters on a PC can amuse ourselves with some great titles which never made it to the consoles.   Every day until Halo Reach launches, Player Affinity will feature a different shooter that you can only play on PC. 

PC Shooters You Should Play Instead of Halo Reach

The new Halo game comes out in five days, and those jerks over in Player Affinity’s XBox department won’t shut up about their little space opera.  I’m happy that the console crowd have their new game, but those of us who play games on the PC know that first person shooters were intended to be played with a keyboard, mouse and four gigs of VRAM.  To help my fellow PC gamers shrug off the relentless Halo hype machine, I’m going to remind everyone of a few PC exclusive shooters that you can play, while your XBox pals are waiting in line to get their copy of Halo Reach.  We’ll be detailing one game a day, right up to Halo launch day on Tuesday.

Are Your Children Playing with Killographic Sexboxes?

There’s one good thing about having spent the last four months cleaning up the biggest oil spill in the country’s history; the mainstream media has been too busy with the Gulf to cover frivolous stories like controversial video games.  With an unpopular health care bill, a Hatian earthquake, and The World Cup occupying the headlines, it’s been a good year for us gamers and our killographic sexboxes.

There was a short uproar over the new Medal of Honor game which lets you play as the Taliban, but that died down when the Ground Zero Mosque debate hit the front page. This week I was bracing myself for outrage over the nudity in Mafia II, but the news channels are too busy covering Lindsey Lohan to even notice naked ladies in some game.  In fact, the last time I saw some shrill talking head complain about sex in video games on CNN was last year when Dragon Age had that boy-on-elf gay sex scene.  

Gaming From Across the Pond 08.21.10

Hello fellow gamers and welcome to another week of ranting from the PC Department’s pet Brit. Some of you may have read a feature this week on games that sit on our shelf and never get played, if not check it out. My game chosen was a Settlers game, but it got me thinking about the original and how much fun I had with that game, even though the graphics where appalling by today’s standards. So my question is how important are the graphics?

Though I could never actually say what my ten favourite games are, or put them in order, I do know a few which would definitely be included: The original Command and Conquer: Red Alert,StarCraft (including Broodwar) and Monkey Island 1 and 2 for example. The hours I spent on these games are far larger than the time I have spent on any other game (though maybe notWorld of WarCraft). My point is that even though these games had graphics that can be replicated in flash games now, they were still awesome. The game play was great, the storyline fantastic and the mechanics brilliant.

Will I Ever Play This Old Game?

Every gamer has a shelf of dusty old CD cases, each containing some game we just couldn’t wait to buy, yet never actually played.  Sometimes the hot new game got eclipsed by an even hotter newer game.  Or we bought a classic that we felt we should play, but didn’t.  Maybe we just grabbed a bunch of games at the Big Sale.   Will we ever actually play all these things stuffed away in our drawers and bottom shelves?  We here at Player Affinity chased the raccoons away from that pile of old games behind our office and dug into our backlog.  Here’s what we decided to try:

Gaming From Across the Pond 08.14.10

Hello fellow gamers and welcome to another week of Gaming from Across the Pond. I did something this week which is borderline serious geek zone. As gamers, and especially us PC gamers, we have to accept to some degree we are all a bit geeky. Ever played and MMO? Then you’re a bit of a geek. Ever used hotkeys during a game? Yep still a geek. Get ridiculously excited from trailers that show no ACTUAL footage of the game? Geek. Now this isn’t a bad thing, we all enjoy our hobby and if that makes us geeks then I’ll put my hands up. Yea I drank an inhuman amount of coffee to stay awake to see the announcement of StarCraft II in South Korea, but I loved it so it doesn’t matter. That said being a geek is like any good game, it has levels.

StarCraft 2: Expansion Speculation

Just in case you’ve been away for a while (as in very, very far away, away from any kind of communications device), StarCraft fever has been sweeping the gaming community. StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty was released two weeks ago after over a decade of eager anticipation to critical and commercial success. Wings of Liberty is only part of the story, though: one third to be precise. The StarCraft universe contains three races: the Terrans, Zerg and Protoss, and Wings of Liberty only covers the Terran front, campaign-wise. The StarCraft 2 model is thus: Wings of Liberty, as the first release, contains the Terran campaign and full multiplayer suite, and two expansions will be released to add Zerg and Protoss campaigns. Very little is known at this point about the two expansions, but there are small nuggets of information plus a lot of speculation – so here’s a roundup of some of the most interesting.

Gaming From Across the Pond 08.07.10

Hello fellow gamers and welcome to the next installment of Gaming from Across the Pond. I’m not going to try to lie to you about the fact that one thing has MAJORLY taken over my life at the moment, but before I talk about that I want to talk about a bit of news I posted earlier this week.

Some of you may, or may not, know about the FTC’s settlement with Intel. Personally I love it when a huge company starts throwing their weight around and playing unfair, only to have them taken down a peg or two. One of my pet peeves is people who don’t play fair. Though I’m not the head of a multi-million dollar corporation, I can guess it is a pretty much dog eat dog world. What I don’t agree with is using the power your business has to hinder your competitors. Why not use your resources to develop better products that blow your competition out of the water, instead of using bully tactics to control other companies. So with that rant over, it’s a well done from me to the FTC.