Half-Life 2

GoldenEye: Source is, at the very least, one of our favorite mods, but to state our love more boldly: it may be the best time we've had in a Bond game since the N64 original. In this edition of PC Gamer Plays, we're taking you on a bloody well-dressed romp through its many highlights...

The Facehuggers from the Alien films are the archetypal enemies that scuttle and jump at your face. If these scuttling, jumping-at-your-face enemies had never been invented, video games would probably have 100% less scuttling enemies launching themselves in the general direction of your face area. Thankfully, not all the gaming imitations of these baby xenomorphs insert an embryo-laying proboscis down a protagonist's throat. Which just seems intrusive and not very hygienic. And a bit like unsavoury alien sex.

Here's a list consisting of seven enemies that scuttle and jump at your face. (But deliberately not including Facehuggers because they were made in movie land. Not game land).

Look at games! The sky. The trees. The grass. The water. All of these things look real. And games will continue to get more real-looking as technology throws us ever closer to a promised land of perfect visual fidelity. Just this week, for example, Rockstar's LA Noire will introduce character faces so real - so mind-bendingly authentic - that they may cause some God-fearing types to be sick over themselves.

But here's the actual reality. There are things in games that will never be realistic. Mostly because it would be stupid if they were. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that these are The Top 7... things in games that will never be realistic.

One of the challenges of an action game is creating a villain that you, the player, will want to destroy. Some games, like Killzone 3, end up crafting bad guys so cool and awesome, you're rooting for them instead of the so-called heroes. Then there are games that just get it right, making an entire army of bastards you just want to punch in the face.

Thanks to a mixture of visual design, atmosphere and writing, some games go beyond even that, and are able to craft an entire race of enemies that are simply despicable to behold. They're ugly, they're disgusting, and they garner absolutely zero sympathy. Those are the truly successful baddies in videogames, and now we rightly pay tribute...

Like flying piranha or sentient automobiles with a grudge, an apocalypse is something humanity doesn't want gate-crashing the cosmic party. Famine. Pestilence. War. Death. These are just four types of disaster commonly associated with an apocalypse and each one is guaranteed to kill the mood at any social gathering or LAN party. More catastrophically, they can also kill a significant proportion of the World's people population. Especially Death. Make no mistake - apocalypses are no fun. But would gamers be better prepared to survive one type of apocalypse over another? We find out.

“Is that your profession or pleasure?” Well, when it comes to jobs in games, it’s usually both. Y’see, your average gaming hero’s nine-to-five is a never-ending stream of employed excitement. Acrobatic plumbers who frolic in magical fantasy kingdoms. Archaeologists with pornstar bodies who can dual wield pistols like everyone’s favourite slaphead assassin. And suspiciously buff scientists who routinely save the human race with nothing but a crowbar. They all enjoy incredible careers we mere mortals could only dream of. Of course, if their jobs were a little more true to life, Mario would probably do himself in when he faced his first backed-up toilet… 

In the immortal Arnie-endorsed words of Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer: “Get to the choppa’!” Or, in this case, get to some games with kickass helicopter battles by letting your eyes travel inside. Be it taking out a Russian attack helicopter with a stealthy hero or destroying a whirlybird by damaging its rotor blades with bottles of hooch during a zombie apocalypse; the following fights with airborne a-holes are the definition of badass… eh, if someone’s recently rewritten the dictionary. 

It’s all Valve’s fault. I blame Valve for all of it. 

It was five-thirty. I was just about to leave the office when a friend’s Facebook status reminded me that the Steam sale was on, but was due to end that day. That update was to be the casually-thrown cigarette butt that hit the touchpaper that sent the whole firework factory up.

I was planning on saving money this month, and I hadn’t touched my aging PC for serious gaming since I finished Episode 2 in late 2007. But within a couple of hours, the resulting chain of events had made me an obsessed PC gamer again. It was a messy and frenzied experience, and one which I didn’t come through entirely unscathed, but it was one that desperately needed to happen. Here’s how it all went down.

You've read this sort of feature before. Website X points out that Character Y looks a whole lot like Celebrity Z. Readers agree or disagree. Publish and repeat. The articles are always fun, but eventually, the same obvious choices show up again and again.

So what makes mine any different? I didn't decide these matches – an all-knowing, face-recognizing, database-searching, algorithm-crunching computer did!

The results were… unexpected.

Sometimes, it's just easier to take the half-assed approach in life. Why tidy all of that crap clogging up your room when you can just stuff it under the bed? Why bother putting yourself through six years of baffling questions and migraines on Lost when you can just read a synopsis of the ending on the nets? And why go to the effort of designing an original, inventive game character when you can just borrow ideas from other developers or stick a shiny pair of shades on your protagonist?

Inside, you'll find some of the worst offenders of this noble, half-assed philosophy