What did you play last week?
Here's what we've been up to. What about you?
Joanna Nelius made a goth go to the beach in The Sims 4 expansion Island Living. Somehow she managed to not get burned to a crisp, even while sunbathing nude, and she also seems to have dodged food poisoning as well despite eating a sandwich out of a waterfall. The Sims is weird.
Chris Livingston tested out Fortnite 76, which is the hilarious name we have given to Fallout 76's battle royale made. I wasn't sure I was going to bother with this but then he mentioned that between matches you get to explore a vault and learn about what happened in it. Oh god, I'm going to play this, aren't I?
Most of the team were at E3 last week, which is where Phil Savage had a go at Roller Champions. It's a sci-fi roller derby with a fair amount of Rocket League's DNA in there, which sounds like it could be a good time. Depending on your team-mates, of course, as Phil found when he made an enemy.
Also at E3, Samuel Roberts played a few levels of John Wick Hex, the other Keanu Reeves game that was there. This one's an action game where you can pause to set up your next move, whether that's shooting or melee or throwing an empty gun at someone, and Sam compares it to XCOM via Superhot. It sounds like a much more impactful implementation of a real-time combat system with pausing than the average top-down RPG, that's for sure.
I played Journey, the 2012 PlayStation game about crossing a desert and climbing a mountain that finally came to PC this year. It can be soothing (when a vista sweeps out in front of you), tense (when a strange creature swims through the air overhead), and exhilarating (when you surf down a sand dune). Finally playing it after hearing about it all these years I was a bit underwhelmed by the multiplayer—other players randomly appear, but can't talk and are simply fellow pilgrims sharing your voyage—because I only saw one of them and they were off in the distance. At the end of the game it told me the names of two players who apparently shared the journey with me, so maybe I was just a distant robed figure to somebody else as well. It's still a worthwhile experience, though I think their underwater follow-up Abzu did it better.
Enough about us. What about you? Did you take advantage of Hunt Showdown's free weekend? Is anyone playing Cooking Simulator? Did you grab the Borderlands games while they're on sale, or try the new DLC while it's free? 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.