PC Features

 Our first trip to Rapture was a revelation. We didn’t realize first-person shooters could be so daring, so intellectual and so beautifully bizarre while still satisfying our action-hungry trigger fingers. And yet… we weren’t sure we wanted more. We feared a second trip to Rapture would be less a revelation than a familiar retread.

Massively multiplayer online games are big business. Yet not every developer likes the idea of cash regularly pouring in from subscribers, so they created free-to-play MMOs. Today there are hundreds of free-to-play MMOs available, ranging from World of Warcraft clones to side-scrolling platformers. And just about all of them are terrible. This means finding the best ones around is an epic challenge.

Being a Big Daddy has benefits. Instead of a wimpy wrench, you’ve got a murderous drill attached to your arm. Instead of a tiny crossbow, you shoot a harpoon-sized spear gun. Instead of basic pistol ammo, you’re unloading burning metal rivets into Splicers’ bodies.

 Another Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and you know what that means: tons of holiday-themed articles from websites like ours, scrambling to clumsily link videogames with romance and reminding the lovelorn that fictional characters have it better than they do.

A lot of stuff happens in the world of games every week - some of which you might have missed. Here's a quick round-up of what we considered to be the most talked about news stories of the past five days....

The new Ghost Recon replaces its advanced warfighters with future soldiers. It's coming from the same dev team that worked on the two GRAW games and is down for release at the end

There are ways to die in a game and there are ways to die. Being horrendously, but heroically squashed under a size 400 foot as we single-handedly fight a giant robot with nuclear weapons. Now that’s a respectable way to embrace gaming death. Having our hero get done in by birds, spiders or a bad case of the cold (like in the following collection of games)? Yeah, not so much. So join us as we doff our gaming hats and monocles to

PCs ruled the roost in 2009. While console gaming hit the brick wall of its own technical limitations, PC gaming technology just continued to get better, faster and cheaper as the year wore on. And now that 2010 is well underway we know that the coming year is going to be a belter for new PC computing and gaming tech.

Valentine’s Day approaches! What’re you gonna do? Get your special someone a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a card with a puppy on it? How Hallmark™ of you. We have a better way to ignite that sexy spark…by which we mean worse: gaming, plus, sex. It’s so stupid it just might work…or involve more awkward silences and tears than a JRPG.

Real-life shopping. Unless you enjoy shambling about like an extra in a Romero flick, it's a mostly soul-destroying activity that ranks somewhere between 'watching The X Factor' and 'tasting vomit' on our list of Things We'd Rather Not Do If We Can Help It. So it's testament to the subversive qualities of games that they can make shopping not suck. How do games do it - what makes shopping in games so much more enjoyable than shopping in