What did you play last week?

No Man's Sky
(Image credit: Hello Games)

Chris Livingston has found yet another new way to play No Man's Sky, this time as a chef. His opponent—the Anton Ego to his Remy the Rat, the Gordon Ramsay to his Idiot Sandwich—is Cronus, the froggy alien who hangs out in the new multiplayer hub and apparently spends all his time disparaging food. What a jerk he is.

Malindy Hetfeld played Kentucky Route Zero, and noted how it makes otherworldly concepts like ghosts and office bears seem even stranger than they are by simply presenting them without comment. It's a unique game, and that atmosphere of mundane weirdness is a big part of why it's so special. Can't wait for the final episode. 

Samuel Horti followed in the footsteps of a GameFAQs poster who worked their way up to Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold in Skyrim without casting any spells. It's an interesting experiment in finding loopholes thanks to shouts and magic items and Speech checks, and a reminder that the Mage's Guild questline begins so promising and ends so flat. Still better than the Mage's Guild in Oblivion though, which was the only string of sidequests worse than the main plot.

James Davenport has been infected by Steven Messner's love for Final Fantasy 14, and it has come at a cost. That cost is getting the Rak'Tika Greatwood Theme stuck in his head, a looping bit of music that is costing him his sanity. I'm sure we've all had That One Song, the combat music that kicks in during every fight or maybe the theme for the area we got stuck in for hours. Much as I like Skyrim's score I turned it down in favor of my own music around 100 hours in.

Phil Iwaniuk played Vermintide 2 as a peacenik, more out of spite than anything else, and found it to be a learning experience. There are plenty of ways to help your team in Vermintide beyond just thinning the ratty horde, and it's worth engaging with those mechanics. Reading this has made me more excited to play Vermintide 2 than the new DLC has.

I've been playing Metal Wolf Chaos XD, the Japanese mech game where you play the President of the USA, finally released in the west and on PC. Everything about its story is over the top, with dialogue like, "The fight will continue as long as the America in my heart is still alive!" Actually playing it's a bore though—weapons that need to be upgraded before they feel good, levels you have to replay from the start if you die, and a lot of trudging around in a mech that handles like a big American truck to find the one tower you haven't blown up yet. If you want Japanese nonsense and bad dialogue I recommend Earth Defense Force 5 instead.

Enough about us. What did you play last week? Anyone pick up Remnant: From the Ashes, or Dicey Dungeons? Maybe the Winds of Magic expansion for Vermintide 2? Let us know!

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.