This week's highs and lows in PC gaming

THE LOWS

Wes Fenlon: Cryptokillin' me

Graphics cards remain as scarce and fought-over as La Croix in the PC Gamer office, so I'm especially bummed to hear that new cards aren't likely to alleviate the issue anytime soon. We don't know for sure yet, but it sounds like Nvidia isn't announcing its next graphics cards this spring, which means the earliest likely unveiling would come at Computex in June. But who knows, we could be waiting even longer than that. Nvidia's 10-series graphics cards are still plenty powerful, but I'm excited to see what the next generation is capable of. I think this will be the year 4K gaming really becomes viable. Assuming you can find one of the damn cards when they do go on sale, anyway.

Andy Kelly: Disaster artist

Man, I suck at strategy games. I’m loving Into the Breach, the new game from the makers of FTL, but I am legendarily terrible at it. Even in a game that explicitly shows you what the enemy’s next move is going to be, I struggle to plan ahead. Millions of people have died at the hands of the Vek because of my idiotic brain. It’s an affliction that has dampened my enjoyment of a lot of great games, from Total War to Endless Legend. My mind just isn’t wired for these things, and I’ve never once achieved a victory in Civilization. The confusing thing is, I enjoy these games and will play every new one that comes out. I’m just shit at them. Are there strategy training bootcamps? I’d sign up for that in a flash. 

Tom Senior: Trigger-unhappy

What have they done to Chrono Trigger? The classic pixel art of the original has been passed through some sort of hell-filter and now looks splodgy and muddy. The fonts are terrible. Steam reviewers are mentioning stutters, poor framerates, crashes, borked controller support and more. How has the port gone so wrong?

It’s a classic JRPG that deserves better. It’s a sorry state of affairs when the mobile version works better than the PC version, and both are inferior to a ROM running on SNES emulator. At least I can comfort myself with the thought that an imminent port of another massive JRPG may fare better. We’ll find out when Final Fantasy 15 lands next week.

Joe Donnelly: Lost touch

I swear, ten more seconds and Xalavier and I would've linked back up with Samuel and Phil with the car we'd just stolen, we'd have completed the mission, and would've received our money and experience points. Instead, Sam's connection dropped and all of our hard work to that point was for nowt.

Connection issues in GTA Online are something the PCG team has wrestled with in the past—both at home and in the office—but to have the evening's run inexplicably ruined in this way was, not to put too fine a point on it, a right pain in the arse (see, I'm getting excited just thinking about it). Generally speaking, loading times in GTA are bad, but I'm of the view that what it offers is worth it. With mission-breaking disconnects, though, this becomes harder to overlook. Here's hoping we get on better next week.

Tyler Wilde: Give me the wine already

Used to be that if a game were fewer than 10 hours long, people would scream bloody murder. I'm so glad those days are gone, because while I'm down for a 10 hour game, or a 100 hour game, where 10 or 100 hours are warranted, the expectation that a game can't be one hour, or five hours, severely limits what can be made—or the quality of what's made, as so much stretching has to happen. I don't know why Where The Water Tastes Like Wine (which I reviewed today) wound up being over 10 hours long. Maybe that's just how much its creator had to say, and how he wanted to say it: with a long meandering hike, big stretches of nothing.

Whatever the reason, though, I sure wish it had been half as long. There are great stories in it! I wish for people to read them. But it's so slow that I'm much more inclined to recommend, say, Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, which won't ask you to hold down the W key between each page.  

James Davenport: 2 bad

I just finished the first Bayonetta on PC and loved almost everything about it. Modifying attacks by holding down buttons to shoot out of your damn feet makes murdering angels feels like popping pimples, and as nonsensical as the story was, it was absurd enough to hold my attention. I set out to play the second game immediately, but hit a wall. I forgot that Nintendo helped out with the sequel, magnetizing it to their platforms. I'd rather see it on a big screen with the sharpest resolution possible, but Bayonetta 2 has still been one hell of a trip on the Switch. The first game's biggest, most unbelievable set pieces are a starting point in scale for the sequel. Shit goes off the rails and then keeps going and then dissolves into atomized Entertainment™. It's the best character action game I've ever played. A shame we'll never have it on the PC.