The week's highs and lows in PC gaming

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Titan Fall Highs and Lows

THE HIGHS

Phil Savage: Birdbrained
I was at Rezzed yesterday, EGX's conference for indies, PC games and pretty much anyone else who decides to turn up. It's a great show to aimlessly wander through, soaking up weird, obscure shit like Plug & Play, or Line Wobbler, or 'Playstation 4'.

Possibly my favourite game of the show was Aviary Attorney. It's simple to describe: Ace Attorney, but birds. There's investigation, cross-examining and criminally dangerous puns. There's also art by an 19th century caricaturist; which is kind of strange, but whatever. It's funny, and, while the demo was short, showed promise as an investigative adventure.

Ori and the Blind Forest Slide

Tyler Wilde: Ori and the Traffic Violation
I got pulled over early this week while driving once around the block to a new parking spot. Dammit. Then I started getting sick—it seems you can never use enough hand sanitizer at PAX. But I don’t care, because I got to review Ori and the Blind Forest, and it’s so damn delightful it’s going to be hard to get me down for a while. It’s beautiful. It’s challenging. It’s the best game I’ve played this year. And now that I’m done I get to play Cities: Skylines. What a week!

Tom Senior: Grand Theft Auto on TV
From news reporting to television drama, the mainstream media's ability to misunderstand games is depressing. Games seem to have become the latest target in a succession of empty moral panics (see also: comics, video nasties). I've lost track of the hand-wringing TV and radio roundtables staffed by pundits who have never touched a controller, yet feel comfortable publicly damning an entire creative medium from a position of barefaced ignorance.

It's refreshing, then, to learn about a feature-length drama focusing on videogames as a creative pursuit. The BBC's 90-minute film will focus on the story of the conception and creation of Grand Theft Auto. It will be interesting to see how they frame the public outcry that surrounded the game. The furore over Grand Theft Auto's depictions of violence seems so laughable in hindsight, and since then GTA has grown into one of the biggest entertainment products in the world. It's a positive story to tell.

Cities Skylines Los Santos Slide

Chris Livingston: Boy, that escalated quickly
I can't stop talking about Cities: Skylines because I can't stop playing Cities: Skylines. Others are doing more than just playing, though, they're creating their own stuff using the game's map and asset editors. The day after the game launched, its Workshop already had 1,600 items. The next day, almost twice that. As of this morning there are over 5,300 maps, buildings, mods, and tools.

Whether you're looking a nice new building, like this lovely little house with a backyard pool, or something a bit more extreme, like a map of GTA V's Los Santos, or maybe just a way to silence a noisy bird, a quick spin through the Workshop will probably result in you subscribing to a dozen things you didn't even knew you wanted. Like a tiny self-storage lot. I didn't know I wanted one. But then I saw it and I wanted one. And now I have one.

Evan Lahti: PAX East!
To be honest, we flew to PAX East last weekend not quite sure what to expect. We had a handful of appointments—Overwatch was there, as well as stuff like Gigantic—but because PAX was scheduled for the same week as GDC, we weren’t certain that there’d be much else. The Indie Megabooth proved us wrong. PAX’s indie area was swarming with weird, artistic, funny, and thoughtful games this year. Go check out our PAX East coverage for a look at what we saw.

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