Items tagged with PC gaming
Video games are all violent, right? They're always about big, burly, buff men stomping around battlefields shooting at bad guys or monsters with ridiculously-oversized guns. Or if they're not about that, then they're about impossibly-proportioned buxom babes flouncing around fantasy fields, firing off fireballs or...
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We're fans of GPD around here. The Shenzen-based startup has been successfully selling super-portable micro-PCs running full-fat Windows for half a decade now, and its latest model, the Win Max 2, looks to be its most powerful yet—even if it stretches the bounds of "portability" a bit.
As you could surmise from the...
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If you're not a hardcore racing fan, you may not have been aware that this year's F1 cars have seen significant redesigns to comply with the latest regulations for the racing class. Indeed, every team's cars look and perform quite differently this year, and that means big changes for Codemasters' latest entry in its...
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A whole new generation of new PC hardware is just around the corner. We've got new CPUs and GPUs on the way very soon from both AMD and Intel, as well as NVIDIA's purportedly-power-thirsty next GPU generation. For the more frugal folks in our audience, well, we probably don't need to tell you what that means: killer...
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Do you have a DOS box? No, no, not the excellent DOS emulator software—I'm talking about a dedicated older PC for DOS software. Mostly popular among retro gamers, building a DOS box is a tricky task in 2022 as much of the necessary hardware has shuffled off to the great e-waste landfill in the sky.
Among the rarest...
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The Electronics Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, was canceled yet again this year. In its place, serving a similar role, we have Summer Game Fest. It's still going on this weekend, but the biggest announcements came from the opening stream on Thursday. Among gameplay demos of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and...
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When we talk about modding third-person fantasy RPGs on the PC, you almost assuredly will start thinking about the Elder Scrolls series, and particularly Part V: Skyrim, with its enormous library of user mods. Those games have official modding tools straight from Bethesda, and they're built in such a way that they're...
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Have you played the PC version of 2018's God of War? Despite the lack of a subtitle, it's the 4th main-series game in the franchise, and whatever your feelings on the title, its PC port was patiently crafted with love and care. It has quality keyboard and mouse controls as well as excellent performance. If you...
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If you're a hardcore desktop PC gamer, you probably sneer at framerate limiters. "Why would I want to limit the glorious power of my monster PC," you may ask, but for folks on thermally-, power-, or battery-constrained machines, framerate limiters can be a godsend. There's no need to crank out ≧60 FPS all the time...
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These days, video game audio is so complex that it's actually simple. Computer processors and audio hardware are advanced to the point that everything can simply be multi-channel digital audio. Game sound effects and music tracks are just digital samples; digitized recordings of real-world sounds. Digitized audio has...
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A lot of people go into FromSoftware's games with the wrong ideas about what they're all about. Titles like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and now Elden Ring are often described as online action RPGs, but that's not really accurate. The games do have online multiplayer components, but in actuality they are primarily...
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Elden Ring this, Elden Ring that—if you're tired of hearing about the game, well, that's understandable. In the nearly-two-months since its release, FromSoftware's fantasy epic has conquered online gaming discourse, and memes from the title's fans have penetrated the mainstream. To some degree that's because it's one...
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Along with its public release of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games shipped a free sample project called "City Sample." It's basically the city from the Matrix Awakens demo, but with all of the Matrix-specific stuff stripped out. Superficially, it's a complete city environment, with roads, buildings, cars, highways...
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The PlayStation 2 stands as one of the most successful game platforms of all time. In fact, it is actually the best-selling game console of all time, moving over 155 million units in total. It has a massive library of more than 3800 games, and many of the biggest franchises of today made their debut on the PS2.
With...
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The majority of big game studios these days prefer to license preexisting engine technology, like Epic Games' Unreal Engine or Bethesda's infamous use of the Creation (neé Gamebryo) engine. While you do give up some control over the low-level aspects of your game—and it's not a silver bullet for technical issues—it's simpler and easier to
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The Steam Deck is fully-released now, and reviews have shown that while it's not flawless, it's a fantastic value for PC gamers that want to play on the go. For as little as $399 you get a powerful handheld that can play just about anything on the market competently—as long as your game runs on Linux with Proton...
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Elden Ring is, by any honest account, an extremely long game. This author has over one-hundred hours in the game, and by his own reckoning, is only about halfway through the title. Many other players have expressed similar sentiments on Reddit and elsewhere.
The thing is, like most open-world games, Elden Ring...
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One of the greatest new features that you'll find in a lot of games is a photo mode. These modes usually let you pause the game, and then tilt, pan, swivel, and zoom the camera freely for taking epic screenshots. The concept isn't new; many older games (including From Software titles) had this capability, but it was...
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From Software's latest dark fantasy epic, Elden Ring, is out now for PCs and consoles, and this writer spent over ten hours last night playing it. In a word, it's fantastic. It's not flawless, but if you like action RPGs, fantasy settings, or just video games in general, you owe it to yourself to play this...
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Have you played Splatoon or Splatoon 2? Those games have nothing to do with Fortnite; don't get excited for an Inkling skin (as cute as that would be). However, those games are widely lauded for their excellent integration of gyro aiming in a third-person shooter. For those unfamiliar, gyro aiming lets you move the...
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It is very likely that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time needs no introduction for HotHardware readers. Released to universal acclaim in 1998, the first three-dimensional Zelda title is regarded as one of the true all-time greats. The creator of Dark Souls called it "a textbook for 3D action games," and the father...
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The 2018 unsubtitled God of War game is out on PC, and we've been testing it to see how it runs. We'll have that article for you sooner than later, but in the meantime we've been checking out all the chatter surrounding the game. Among that noise is a brief interview with two lead developers from the game's creator...
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