In just a few years, the world of free MMOs has grown from a 2D ghetto of suspicious foreign ZIP files into a full-fledged gaming subgenre of international scale. Yet it’s still a wild, ungoverned field, with far-flung nations like Korea and Malaysia flooding the web with more and more no-fee games every day - many of which are archaic, incomprehensible, or just plain bad. ...

Over the past year, the Strategic Command column has focused mostly on the real-time side of the strategy spectrum, since that’s generally my personal preference (except for X-COM, of course). But, having visited Firaxis this month, I decided the time was right to check in on the state of turn-based strategy games. They don’t get as much attention as they used to, but even excluding Colonization, there are several promising ...

We’re talking about Valve becoming the platform holder and guardian of the PC as a gaming system over the next two years,” says Stephen Gaffney, Business Development Manager of Splash Damage. The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars developer is responding to Valve’s announcement of Steamworks, a suite of publishing apps that will enable developers and publishers to use Steam’s many tools for free. ...

Gaming is an expensive hobby. After all the money you’ve spent on games, consoles and peripherals, isn’t it about time you got something for nothing? Of course it is. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best FREE shoot ‘em ups we could find. ...

In modding, creativity is king, so modders freely rip apart games to fix flaws and add new modes of play - or get crazy and unleash total conversions on the engines.All in all, I like it this way. But some modders go too far and become artistes, putting on airs like they’re creating masterworks solely for hardcore fans. The unspoken message is that the great unwashed can keep the hell out of the clubhouse. As a result, mods can seem ...

To put it bluntly, games with massive, open-ended virtual worlds are better RPGs than those offering more linear, structured experiences. The best RPGs pull you into their worlds by creating the illusion that they are living, breathing places where goals can be achieved in intuitive ways. They create an environment and give you the requisite tools for a personalized experience, which is inherently better for roleplaying than rigidly ...

Barack Obama and John McCain are neck-and-neck in the polls and have less than six months left to convince the American public who ought to be the tax payer and who ought to be the tax collector. To that end, PC Gamer helpfully offers its suggestions for PC games that might help either Obama or McCain on the campaign trail, or that just seem particularly suited to one or the other. ...

There’s a cubic inch of grey mush in our brains which insists that things you don’t pay for, like air, your neighbor’s WiFi and your housemate’s toothpaste, are worthless. Perhaps it’s a healthy bit of self-delusion to believe that something you’ve shelled out money for is better than it actually is, as the alternative is to live every day crushed under an elephant of regret. But throw away the shackles of ...

"I just killed with my mind," Padawan learner Norman Chan uttered, mouth agape. That's the same response I had, word for word, less than five minutes after I slipped the Neural Impulse Actuator on my head, did some basic calibration, and leapt right into Unreal Tournament 3. "Astonishing" isn't the word for it. Astonishing is what you'd call a chicken that can play the violin. This is something else. This is heaven.Comprised of a light, ...