What did you play last week?
Here's what we've been up to. What about you?
Wes Fenlon spends Christmas playing retro games that have Christmas themes. I didn't even know there was a Grinch game, but my life is better for having this knowledge in my brain, for sure. Just don't ask me to play it.
Chris Livingston has been playing Red Dead Online, but after experiencing some bugs when he tried moonshining, now he's fallen prey to a cheater, who hacked dynamite into his coat then blew him up repeatedly. It's like Sartre definitely didn't say: Hell is other people on the internet.
Rachel Watts has been playing Telling Lies, the FMV investigation game that lets you spy on people's video calls and recordings. As she points out, its use of real actors means it can suggest when someone might be lying to greater effect than L. A. Noire, where even fancy facial capture technology wasn't quite enough to leap that hurdle.
Joe Donnelly went native in GTA Online's roleplay servers a while back, and his latest adventure has been trying not to have an adventure at all. He's got himself a nine-to-five job as a courier and is trying to live an ordinary life. How long do you reckon that'll last?
Rick Lane has been playing Hitman, and to make it interesting he's randomly determining which weapon to use on each target. It's a way to add variety when you might otherwise rely on familiar, effective tools like the old "emetic poison and drown 'em in a toilet" combo.
I'm still barrelling through Baldur's Gate, determined to finally finish it for once. I've made it to the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, which includes a dungeon that sucks in wizards who use teleportation magic then won't let them leave unless they ditch all their arcane items. It's as if the place feeds on the stuff of magic. Right after that I trekked through Durlag's Tower, the expansion's big puzzle dungeon, and I think I might be done with Infinity Engine dungeon-crawling for a while.
Enough about us. What about you? Did you score any new games for Christmas, or have you been using the break to catch up on something from the backlog? Have you been inspired to go back to The Witcher 3 by Netflix's TV version, or are you trying some of Epic's recent giveaways? 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.