PC Features

Summer is full of free time, and we know what that means: staying inside, playing games and not letting the sun’s rays touch your skin. But there are also blockbuster films to deal with, which are worth going outside for, at least for the short amount of time needed to get to the theater.

Considering all the attention being directed toward huge, marquee juggernauts like Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, and Beatles: Rock Band, you’d think they were the only games at E3. Not true. Sure, those look fantastic, but we also saw piles and piles of great games that nobody is talking about. Nobody but us, that is.

Need a break from the lurid bursts of awesomeness screaming out of San Diego? Then we suggest having a look at some of this week’s worst trailers in another thrilling edition of Trailer Trash. No packed-to-the-gills special appearances by Hayao Miyazaki or spectacular Green Hornet reveals, just the most futile bits of video game video we could find, rounded out with sardonic commentary. Enjoy!

Contributors: Chris Antista, Charlie Barratt, Brett Elston, Matthew Keast, Shane Patterson, Mikel Reparaz

Hundreds of games are released every year, then played and forgotten by the next. Only a dozen or so will be remembered a decade from now, and only a few of those will have any lasting impact on the medium as a whole.

Which upcoming titles stand the best chance of leaving that meaningful mark?

Deep down, you realize they’re not real. You understand that what you’re seeing on screen is only pixels and polygons, that what you’re talking to is only a voice actor and that what you’re supposedly interacting with is only a fancy collection of programming codes. Sometimes, however, you can’t help but be a little fooled. Especially when you’re a young, dumb, naïve and impressionable kid…

The adventure game is making a comeback. We never dreamed we'd be able to write those words – the genre has been dead or stagnant for over a decade – but the evidence is too convincing to ignore. And now LucasArts, one of the companies that made adventure games popular to begin with back in the '80s and early '90s, is showing the genre real love once more. So what's next? Why stop there? Here are 10 other old-school adventure games that deserve to be seen and solved by new generations.

In this week’s thrilling installment, TalkRadar brings on a special mystery guest to finally settle a question that’s been burning in the minds of our fans for months: What exactly the hell happened between Chris Antista and Tyler Wilde? Once that’s settled, it’s on to our usual dissection of this week’s Top 7, followed by a frank discussion of why we chose what we chose for our Greatest games on every platform

There are two editorial gold mines in the videogame-list business. The first is box art, because laughing at other people’s hard work gone awry is fantastically easy. Right behind those myriad articles about game packaging are lists devoted to poking fun at their very names – and we’re not afraid to go back to the well for another bit of fun.

Mark Hamill unleashes a fiendish cackle that simultaneously sounds like skin ripped from flesh and fingernails dragged across corrugated iron. If the bowels of hell have a soundtrack, this is it.

Okay, this one is going to be a hard sell. At its core, Gas Knight is a one-note joke, and the joke itself isn't all that funny. A knight farting endlessly isn't really the grounds for great contemporary comedy, and yet Gas Knight is still strangely endearing and quite fun to play. Seriously...