1. Alien Swarm A super-tense (and free) mod for Unreal Tournament that lets you and three friends invade and then escape from a xeno-infested space colony. That it's a top-down shooter adds to the tension: a single slip of the mouse can see you blowing away your colleagues. Download it from: snipurl.com/cxr07.
2. Fall from Heaven This mod adds dark fantasy to the historic armageddon of Civilization IV, and is easily as good as the base game. The Civ devs agree: the Fall from Heaven creators got to produce a scenario for Civ IV's Beyond the Stars expansion. Try Fall for yourself at snipurl.com/d816q.
3. Garry's Mod A glorious mix of Lego playset and context-free Half-Life 2 insanity. Garry made a mod we didn't realise we needed to play. Then we attached a jet to a bath, and sat Dr Breen inside. And then we couldn't stop. For the best creations, visit: www.garrysmod.com.
4. The headshot noise from counter-strike The sound of melon death and victory.
5. Graphics card naming conventions In which an nVidia 280 is faster than an 8800.
6. Will Wright The world's most powerful developer, producing games for everyone. He's done more to expand gaming audiences than any other developer, and he's all about the PC. Our hero.
7. Desktop Tower Defence Bring on the infinite waves: our heart has been stolen by the free web-version at www.desktoptowerdefence.com. Creepy.
8. Cake Om nom nom.
9. Cocks in Space Thank you, Spore.
10. Physics! The rallying cry of an office entranced by a corpse sliding gently down a staircase.
11. No-CD Cracks Because discs are a 1990s problem.
12. Bookworm Adventures deluxe Defeating a hydra by spelling 'poo'. Still funny.
13. Free games PC gaming doesn't have to cost a thing thanks to the steady stream of free independent games released online. We've compiled a small selection of our favourites on the DVD.
14. Satire as gaming The pace of web game development means that it's a legitimate place for political reaction. Within a few days of Bush dodging a shoe, multiple 'sock and awe' games were playable on Flash sites.
15. Replay editors Making ragdolls funny ever since ragdolls were invented. The best replay editor we've ever seen is in GTA IV - and you'll find the best movies we've created on PC Gamer's YouTube feed.
16. Youtube's Massive cutscene archive Nowadays, we don't need to even complete games to find out what happens at the end: every cutscene ever has been faithfully uploaded to YouTube somewhere.
17. Steam Hundreds of games ready to buy and download at a moment's notice, alongside all your favourite servers and friends list. An endless supply of free demos and game movies, and the best indie game portal on the planet. Amazing. Steam is PC gaming.
18. Dicking around with Deus Ex "Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes!" This brilliant fan edit of the Deus Ex cutscenes will put you in stitches. See why we're laughing at snipurl.com/cxj98.
19. Creepy ragdolls Our inner child still giggles when a goon dies with his hand on his friend's bottom. Sometimes we'll shoot them again and again and again, just so their face edges a little closer to their partner's crotch. Don't mock. We've all done it.
20. Old games on new hardware The first thing you do when you buy a new graphics card? Install your old games to marvel at the frame-rates and resolution. That's why we still keep Far Cry and Crysis nearby.
21. Abandonware Preserving the history of gaming, one ancient DOS strategy game at a time. If you've got an old game you can't get running, try DOSBox, a little gadget that works wonders for classic games, which is available on our DVD.
22. Emulators Want to play Super Mario on your laptop? Well, legally, you can't. But if you download zSnes, and the appropriate ROM packs, you can. In fact, you can play every SNES game ever made.
23. Hello Kitty Torch Mod for Doom 3 A sweet cartoon projected onto Hell's nastiest monsters - why, they'd die of shame if it wasn't for the bullets getting there first.
24. Text Adventures If you want a glimpse of the power of interactive fiction, try Anchorhead, a creepy, Lovecraft-inspired adventure. Try it online at snipurl.com/cxr3t.
25. The Independent Games Festival This competition, run in parallel with the Game Developer Conference, provides a platform for bedroom coders to launch their latest projects. Previous winners include Darwinia (PCG 146, 90%), Gish (PCG 138, 85%) and Aquaria (PCG 198, 80%). We've got demos from this year's nominees on the DVD.
26. Mouse and Keyboard Making possible headshots, /dance and the entire real-time strategy genre.
27. Backwards compatibility Everything was fine until Vista came along. Boo to Bill Gates and technical progress.
28. The sniper dot "You've got red on... oh."
29. Team Fortress 2 content updates Because staying up all night waiting for a patch to download is big, clever and cool. Since launch Valve have added achievements, new weapons and the brilliant Payload game mode.
30. FEAR's Slow-mo What the f-u-u-u-u- whunk.
31. Quickload F9 is our second best friend.
32. Quicksave F5 is our best friend.
33. Richard Burns Rally Want to be a rally driver? Before you pinch the keys to your dad's Focus, try RBR, the most sensuously realistic rally game ever. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's joyless; get your flow on and there's nothing like it. The truth is, RBR felt unfinished on release, with slightly borked tarmac stages and disappointing car models. A talented community has fixed that, allowing players to deluge the base game with gorgeously authentic cars, custom setups and homemade stages - all for free.
34. Audiosurf Musicians are right. Playing music is fun.
35. Gaming photography Because there is no better desktop wallpaper than the sun setting on the majestic savannah of Far Cry 2.
36. Talking to your mates while you play Because IRC chat is almost as interesting as an extended European land war.
37. The '~' key It's called a tilde, and it lets you turn the gravity off. Win.
38. Drawing boxes around tiny men When all else fails, Select All and right click on your problems. If only this worked in real life too.
39. Naked pig slapping MMO mechanics can occasionally lead to the most absurd results: particularly when players have to repeat a single action to level up a certain skill. Take for instance, Ryzom, in which players found a unique way to level their healing skill. High level characters would strip naked and drop their weapons (thus losing any bonuses their armour would give them), and get into a fight with the lowest level monsters in the game: in this case, pigs. Their friends would then heal the tiny amount of damage caused, each slap and resultant heal moving their healing skills one point higher.
40. High definition Gaming We call it 'using a monitor', and we've been doing it since 1992. Catch up, consoles.
41. Dual monitors Because we can watch TV and play games at the same time.
42. Kane Nice face. Nice head. Nice man.
43. 40-man raids We need more dots.
44. No corporate overlords If you want to make a game, Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo aren't going to tell you that you can't. And with 196 million games-capable PCs in the world, if it's good enough, you will find your audience. That's the clear power of the PC as a platform: anything is possible. And everything eventually finds an audience.
45. Dwarf Fortress The most sophisticated, difficult, and absorbing management game we've played in a long, long time. You manage a small population of dwarves living inside a mountain. The awful text-graphics may put you off; don't let them. This is as complicated, and as rewarding, as any major PC game. You'll find the full game on our DVD.
46. 196 Million PC Gamers worldwide We're not a hobby. We're a nation.
47. Laptops We buy them for 'work' but then always end up installing Galactic Civilizations and Civ IV on them. All hail portable PC gaming.
48. DEATHWORM! Play it at snipurl.com/ck3ea.
49. Peggle The world's most hypnotic unicorn, and the one game you can definitely play drunk.
50. Speed runs Did you realise that you can complete Deus Ex in 45 minutes? We never will, but we're happy to watch someone else do it. See the madness at snipurl.com/cxr5u.
50. Speed runs Did you realise that you can complete Deus Ex in 45 minutes? We never will, but we're happy to watch someone else do it. See the madness at snipurl.com/cxr5u.
51. Rigs of Rods This brilliant free simulation lets you drive an astonishing breadth of vehicles, with a radically innovative physics system. It could only exist on the PC. Try it at snipurl.com/d89s3.
52. Voxels, texels, Megatextures, et al The more buzzwords, the better the game. Fact.
53. £1,000 Wheels and Flightsticks Once we've built our PC gaming shed, it will be filled with ridiculous controllers. First choice: the HOTAS Cougar, a £200+ flightstick modelled on the control block of an F-16. Do want.
54. Call of Duty 4's ending Price! Noooo! Clearly, he'll be back. But, Nooooo!
55. Men in hats Tricorns for Empire. Helmets for World War II. Every genre has a headpiece of choice.
56. Screensavers that save the world Do you leave your PC on all night? Don't, you're killing the planet. But if you must, download Folding@Home, a screensaver that uses your PC's idle time to analyse the protein structures that may cause cancer. Hit snipurl.com/d8ae2.
57. Football Manager Because nothing captures the magic of football better than a wall of spreadsheets.
58. Morals defined entirely by killing Because "I was good person. I let Anna Navarre live" is a great way to get funny looks on the train. Also, she was kind of hot.
59. Doom Still brilliant. For a 3D update, download jDoom from www.doomsdayhq.com.
60. "You're a complete jackass" Your brother, Paul Denton, after you kill the man you've been sent to interrogate in Deus Ex.
61. The end of A:/ Now our PCs begin at C. This amuses us.
62. The Supreme Commander trailer Giant robots crawling from the sea. Now that's a PC game. See it again: snipurl.com/cxrh6.
63. The eternal hope of Duke Nukem Forever Duke's perpetual delay means we've always got something to look forward to other than death.
64. Overclocking Voiding your warranty for extra frames per second gets easier every year. It's almost like Intel want us to burn through our processors.
65. Maps Exploration is an under-rated thrill. Getting lost inside a dungeon, navigating your way out, uncovering new areas, wandering off the beaten path: this is the heart of PC adventuring.
66. Grinding Tired? Bored? Have a glass of wine and grind some mobs. Seriously. It's so relaxing. 300 dead tigers later, and all is well with the world.
67. Stalker's broken landscapes Happy? Don't be. Play Stalker - the miserable Chernobyl-based FPS. Wandering alone through countryside full of gruesome mutations and psychic monstrosities is enough to unsettle any mood. We prefer the original, Shadow of Chernobyl, to the later and flawed Clear Sky. Play it with the realism patch (available on our DVD) for a slightly more forgiving game.
68. Tradeskills We never knew that tailoring could be so addictive. Got any spare frostweave?
69. The BFG Because nothing says "f*** you" like a giant bogey to the face.
71. MS Flight Simulation It's testament to both the power and range of PC gaming that Microsoft invested and supported the flight sim community for so long. Even more inspiring was the mini-industry that the game produced - with expansion sets, scenery packs, and all manner of new planes being made available by commercial and amateur modders. We might not be getting a new Microsoft endorsed Flight Sim any time soon, but flight-simmers, and the community they've built, don't need Microsoft. They'll get by.
72. Minesweeper and Solitaire Every PC in the world comes with games installed. Think about that: the most powerful productivity enhancer our culture has produced comes with a built-in way to waste time.
73. Being the last man alive All eyes are on you. You know the spectators are cheering. Will you survive?
74. Building your own PC For under £600, you can buy the bits for a PC that will handle any game available today, or the rest of the year. And putting it all together is stupidly simple. We've put a PDF file with a feature showing you how on Issue 200's DVD.
75. Autoexec.bat Veterans of the old school will alternately scowl or smile at the ridiculous technical process we used to go through, so often, to get our favourite games working. Manually editing text files to free up enough memory to proceed? Emm386.sys? Shudder.
76. Case mods Because every PC needs a blue LED.
77. Minsc "Go for the eyes, Boo!"
78. Games that save the world Foldit (fold.it/portal) lets you solve scientific puzzles that aid scientific understanding.
79. Daikatana It's even worse than we remember. At least it's a joke that all PC gamers can share.
80. Syndicate We still miss the glorious brutality and urban violence of Syndicate: machinegunning civilians because you could... Jacking up your characters' neuroses by controlling their biochemical balance... Genius. Sequel please.
81. Sky-hopping in Battlefield Battlefield 2 might be a frantic and fearsome shooter, but it's also a hysterical sandbox, waiting to be exploited. If you ever tire of shooting, get a few mates together and try some jet-stunts. You can jump from a 'copter to a boat while jumping through a dam, or swap planes in mid-air, fly upside down under a bridge, or reach 150ft using just det-packs and try to hit a passing helicopter.
82. The gravity gun Because a toilet hurled into the face is the new "hello".
83. The portal gun An elaborate solution to an age-old problem: not being able to see your own bottom.
84. Splinter Cell's Booby Trapped Doors Setting the whole scene up takes far longer than just shooting the guy in the face, but it's worth it. But still, attaching a miniature mine to a door-frame, alongside a remote camera (so you can watch the whole dread escapade) and then whistling remains one of the funniest ways to make an entrance. "I AM SAM FISHER. MASTER OF STEALTH." Try it for yourself in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
85. Bejeweled For turning your mum into a PC gamer. Also: fancy playing two great games at once? Try installing the excellent Bejeweled for World of Warcraft - available at snipurl.com/cxriz
86. Throwing chickens at helicopters Crysis wasn't just a high-tech first-person shooter. It was a game about playing a superhero; about dashing up to oblivious soldiers, decloaking, and punching them into orbit. For more of that feeling, try the excellent Predator: Heat of the Jungle mod, available from www.snipurl.com/avp97.
87. Rockstar For pushing a few boundaries. For their gorgeous free-roaming cities that always look best on PC. And for all the f**king swearing.
88. Kazap! Best lasers ever? The dreadnought busters that slice your field of view in Freespace 2. That game is now available from www.gog.com for just a few quid. Try it and its brilliant Battlestar Galactica mod, Beyond the Red Line.
89. In-game gramophones For those long voyages back to base, the latest in the WWII submarine series, Silent Hunter, includes an in-game gramophone. Get packs of period music in mp3 format from snipurl.com/cr1qg. You can copy the files straight into Silent Hunter's gramophone folder.
90. Tim Curry There was a time when Tim Curry ruled PC gaming - appearing in an endless parade of D-list interactive movies and puzzle games with pre-rendered graphics. Practically all of his work is on YouTube. You can even watch him age: Start at Wing Commander 3, check out Toon-Struck, then pay attention to his work in Gabriel Knight. End on the glorious silliness of Red Alert 3.
91. Pinball passions PinMAME turns your PC into a functioning pinball table, right down to the multiball bonuses. PinMAME and its associated table designer enables gamers to recreate ancient favourites and modern classics. Beware: PinMAME might not infringe copyright, but downloading recreations of commercially available tables certainly does.
92. Massively co-op games The fringes of PC gaming are home to truly incredible experiences: consider the Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault communities - clans of which are regularly involved in 40+ player combined arms operations, inserting squads via helicopter, and fighting vast hordes of enemy infantry together. To see what's possible, view the videos at snipurl.com/creuj.
93. Anachronox's planet party-member The insanely original and quirky sci-fi RPG Anachronox is a classic that's been cruelly forgotten. It's a game in which you save a planet. And then, because they had such a good time, that planet's inhabitants shrink their world and it joins your party as a beachball-like character with a face made out of satellites. That's not the best bit. You can still visit this planet, only now all its inhabitants have seen your adventures in the sky.
95. Epic manuals Remember the doorstops that came with elderly simulators such as Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe? Or the amazing training manual-cum-short story that came with TIE Fighter? Today's special editions are about plastic figures and soundtracks. Rubbish. You can't take a pewter Big Daddy to bed.
96. The new There is a thrill in sheer potential - in looking at the first screenshots and movies of a game, of reading previews and impressions, imagining what it's going to feel like to play, to be engrossed in that world. These are breakthrough moments for PC games: remember the first shots of Rome: Total War, Far Cry, or even Quake?
97. One healthkit per crate It seems like you could maybe package healthkits in something smaller. Like a shoebox.
98. The Shire Lord of the Rings Online does one thing absolutely right: it nails the feel of Tolkien's world. Its recreation of the Shire is perfect - from the silly little hobbit houses, to strange men attacking local farms. A ten-day trial for this excellent MMO is available from snipurl.com/cxri8 - we suggest you take a look.
99. Mod stacking One mod is never enough. Try Unreal Tournament: add slow-motion, and big-head mode, and insta-gib, and more, and you'll have a game that looks and plays very differently from when you started.
100. De_Dust We know every nook and cranny of this perfect Counter-Strike map, and find routes to the bombsites with our eyes closed. We love it so much we hired the designer, Dave Johnston, to make a PC Gamer themed version of it.
I loved that Deus Ex was named numerous times. I didn't see any mention of modders overhauling older games to keep them looking current or even recreating them in newer engines such as HDTP, GoldenEye Source, etc.
I think you left out a few, like DRM/online activation, viruses/malware, BSOD, Windows Vista, etc, etc..... where would PC gaming be without 'em. :wink:
Almost as good as the RRoD, the legendary arrogance of Sony, and paying more for games and outdated hardware without the same free independent mod scene nor generally free DLC. :wink:
Just a note on #92 .. wheres the mention of Joint Ops? I remember the days of massive warfare across 2 islands with servers of 200 people in the most frantic ocean crossing I have ever witnessed!
if you still get viruses or malware then thats totally YOUR problem. vista is also not forced onto you so i dont see the problem there and the last and only time i got the BSOD was when i pushed my overclock a little too high. I accept DRM is a major concern for many people but I havent run into any problems concerning it so far (maybe it takes time or just carelessness?).
#40 is so damn true and same thing for online play, its been going on for ages. + maybe i missed tht one but nearly every game allows fully customisable key configs which is always nice.
well its depends on how u look at it. sure its 46" but my 24" monitor is almost half the size but still has more pixels so what do you think is gonna look better? also you're not playing at your screens native resolution with consoles most of the time so again crappier visuals. makes sense?
I think DOSBox got a raw deal,being included under the heading of 'Abandonware'. I wouldn't call my collection of DOS games abandonware, and I am sure many DOS games are bought on ebay because of the knowledge that DOSBox will make it easy to play. DOSBox has never been given much respect as it is a free download.
I also don't get that negatives like the lack of decent manuals nowadays, and the confusing Nvidia card designations that drive casual PC gamers away from the format, and end with many customers feeling ripped off when they get the 'wrong' card should be in a list as to why we love PC gaming.
Also the spending of 'just' £600 to build a PC that could last 'as long as a year'.
Would seem to me, that along with the good points and the silly points, some of the reasons are the cause for PC gaming decline, and I don't why that would be a reason to 'love them' when it comes to PC gaming.
I have to say though, the PC gaming format gets so little attention that even this shallow feature is better than nothing.
I have to end by saying that given the state of PC gaming currently, now's the time to maybe be not so flippant about PC gaming.
Shows how much i really know about these things! yeah does make sense, i stand corrected. Maybe one day i'll have enough time and money to properly get into PC gaming.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
