C:ArsGames looks at a vanguard of the multimedia FMV future that never quite came to pass. It’s Christmas of 1994, and I am 16 years old. Sitting on the table in our family room next to a pile of cow-spotted boxes is the most incredible thing in the world:…
Romero, Carmack, and colleagues discuss an oft-forgotten piece of PC gaming history. If you know anything about the history of id Software, you know how 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D helped establish the company’s leadership in the burgeoning first-person shooter genre, leading directly to subsequent hits like Doom and Quake. But…
Firaxis’ Ed Beach and Dennis Shirk talk major overhauls in “Test of Time” update. It has been difficult at times for new mainline releases in the Civilization series of games to win over new players right out of the gate. For Civilization VII—which launched just shy of one year…
Visual upgrades include new UI, realistic snow cover, better lighting. Back in November, Cities: Skylines 2 publisher Paradox made the surprising announcement that longtime series developer Colossal Order would be ceasing work on the series as part of a “mutual” breakup. Now, we’re getting our first glimpse into the kinds…
Despite proof-of-concept video, EA’s Frostbite Engine servers are difficult to pick apart. On January 12, EA shut down the official servers for Anthem, making Bioware’s multiplayer sci-fi adventure completely unplayable for the first time since its troubled 2019 launch. Last week, though, the Anthem community woke up to a…
No display? No problem for the UART-to-web-server “Doombuds” project. Over the years, hackers and modders at large have made it their mission to port classic first-person shooter Doom to practically anything with a display. Recently, though, coder Arin Sarkisan has taken the “Can it Run Doom?” idea in an…
Dense narrative deduction game tells a compellingly academia-tinged sci-fi tale. If you’ve ever fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or spent a pleasant evening digging through college library stacks, you know the joy of a good research puzzle. Every new source and cross-reference you find unlocks an incremental understanding…
But Nyxi’s Hyperion 3 upgrade comes with a pretty high asking price. When I reviewed the Switch 2 back in June, I noted that the lack of any sort of extended grip on the extremely thin Joy-Con 2 controllers made them relatively awkward to hold, both when connected to…
For our C:ArsGames series, we look at the controls conundrum of early 3D. For a lot of the games I’ve written about in the C:ArsGames series, I’ve come to the conclusion that the games hold up pretty well, despite their age—Master of Orion II, Jill of the Jungle, and…
Development hasn’t exactly been smooth since the extraction shooter’s 2023 announcement. It has been nearly three years now since Destiny maker (and Sony subsidiary) Bungie formally announced a revival of the storied Marathon FPS franchise. And it has been about seven months since the game’s originally announced release date…
