Quake Live

Man, I'll tell ya, Texas is fricken' HOT right now. 107 degrees. Hits you like a wall. Anyway, Texas has more interesting things going on besides the weather - nerd gatherings. You can argue that cosplaying is as nerdy as it gets, but there's something especially geeky about shipping your gigantic desktop PC across the country and flying out to participate in a LAN party. Bonus points if your PC is super tricked-out...

It's that time of week when you're subjected to the fresh ramblings of the GamesRadar UK crew. Doing the honours on this show are Dave H, Cundy and Nathan covering the last seven days of news tid-bits, office goings-on and answering your questions. Amongst the forced Cockney accents, sex voices and innuendos, of course.

Listen now:

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.

We all know that games are the best way to dispel boredom and unwind from the looming existential horrors of modern life. Gaming at work shouldn’t just been seen as idling. You are exercising your mind, taking it to a mental gym. So PC Gamer has compiled a list of the 50 best games you can play at work.

So Metal Gear Solid Director Hideo Kojima has been talking up the idea of a future without consoles. A future free of separate platforms and competing exclusives, where every man and woman is free to play whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, as bees softly buzz and deer frolic in the meadows.

But how likely is it? This kind of thing has been mooted almost since gaming began, but we still don’t have it. But could we? Do we even want to? Here’s a run-through of the current options and possibilities.

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?

This week, we’ve been extra busy covering Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. GamesRadar’s own George Walter called it “this year’s must-buy first-person shooter” in his Super Review, and we expected nothing less from developer, Infinity Ward.

What’s the best part of any car race? The mad crazy wrecks. Hockey game? When a 6’5” Czech man-beast levels a lesser player with a right hook. Ultimate fighting? The whole thing. We like seeing people destroy each other; it’s in our blood. Or maybe it’s in their blood, and the way it spills everywhere and inspires unanimous ‘YEAHs from stadiums full of adrenaline junkies too timid to risk their own

PC Gamer: What inspired you to resurrect Quake III Arena as Quake Live?

John Carmack: At the very highest level, Quake Live - what we originally called Quake Zero - was one of my experiments about what we could do usefully on the PC platform. The consoles are very good machines for a lot of things, but there are some things the PC platform uniquely does better, such as anything having to do with a web browser and the superior mouse