It is always great when given the opportunity to check out a game before release and see what developers are bringing to the table. Recently, I was given this opportunity with Pixel Piracy by Quadro Delta. I thoroughly enjoy retro pixel games, but man, was I in for a treat with this. Pixels AND pirates -- I couldn't wait.

A custom ship build from the Steam Community page.

Now, keep in mind the game is in Alpha, and as such there are many things subject to change. But after playing this game for several weeks, I have pulled one thing away from it: this game is about crap.

Now, you might be thinking, "hey, that seems pretty harsh." Please let me explain.

Bethesda announced ‘Battlecry’ yesterday, its upcoming free-to-play melee action game. Battlecry is being developed by the studio of the same name for PC and supports up to 32-player matches.

Battlecry pits up to 16 players against one another on each side for bloody multiplayer combat featuring swords, axes, laser crossbows, and hand-to-hand combat. It mixes a few themes and art styles to form a unique blend of medieval, post-apocalyptic, B-movie, and more historically-based visuals.

We've put together a quick FPS performance optimization & screenshot settings guide for Watch Dogs, using configuration file tweaking to improve framerate. Our previous article/video guide for Watch Dogs covers removal of mouse acceleration and smoothing, and before that, we benchmarked Watch Dogs' performance on PCs, calling it 'horribly optimized.'

Here's the video tutorial for tweaking the Watch Dogs GamerProfile.xml file:

Update: Our very critical review of Watch Dogs is now online here.

Just a few hours after publishing a quick warning that the dog-fighting "Arena Commander" module would be available today, the team at Roberts Space Industries have delayed v0.8 alpha once again.

The delay comes in the face of two high-severity, game-breaking issues. In a statement, Chris Roberts justified the delay by pointing-out the lack of publisher pressure:

"It would be foolish to release an unstable build, even if pre-alpha for the sake of meeting an internal deadline. This is the power of the crowdfunding that made Star Citizen possible: a publisher would make us ship tomorrow regardless of the current build quality… but as you are all focused on quality rather than a financial return for shareholders we are able to take a few more days to deliver something that is stable."

Snow White only had to take one bite of an apple to fall under a life-altering spell. Likewise, Telltale Games has been offering its rollercoaster of an adventure series in potent, twisting episodic bites. Telltale’s most recent episode, “In Sheep’s Clothing,” is the smallest bite in size, but it might be the juiciest in the series thus far.

This The Wolf Among Us, Episode 4 - In Sheep's Clothing review & gameplay discussion will pick up from where we last left off. You can find our reviews of the previous three episodes here:

It's been known for a few days that Star Citizen's "Arena Commander" space-flight combat simulation module will be playable on May 29. We first reported on this module from the floor of PAX East, where we interviewed Chris Roberts post-unveil, then again about FPS mechanics, and one more time about Arena Commander.

Star Citizen's Arena Commander module is described in our post here. In short, it is a 'simulation' (within canon) of space-flight combat that is being released primarily for testing purposes. It is important to realize that this is very early alpha (0.8) and will be buggy and broken; the onus is on gamers to report issues they discover. This alpha test will help determine maximum player count, stress test server / back-end stability, and get us some hands-on with the shooting mechanics.

Game developers seem to have gotten it into their heads that gamers want mouse acceleration in all of their games. Skyrim is an example of this. In fact, my guide for removing Skyrim's mouse acceleration is one of our most popular articles on the site, showing just how much gamers want the feature. Apparently Ubisoft's decided to take a crack at forcing unpredictable, oft-sluggish / laggy-feeling mouse controls into Watch_Dogs.

Luckily, a quick configuration file tweak can remove mouse acceleration, reveal ports for forwarding, field of view, and other graphics settings. Before getting started, check out our recent Watch Dogs video card & CPU benchmark.

Update: We've posted an additional crash fix guide! If you're experiencing crashing to desktop, blue screens, and inability to connect to Uplay servers, check out our newest guide.

Update: Our very critical review of Watch Dogs is now online here.

The Watch Dogs launch has been a worrisome one for PC hardware enthusiasts. We've heard tale of shockingly low framerates and poor optimization since Watch Dogs was leaked ahead of shipment, but without official driver support from AMD and limited support from nVidia, it was too early to call performance. Until this morning.

At launch, AMD pushed out its 14.6 beta drivers alongside nVidia's 337.88 beta drivers. Each promised performance gains in excess of 25% for specific GPU / Watch Dogs configurations. As we did with Titanfall, I've run Watch Dogs through our full suite of GPUs and two CPUs (for parity) to determine which video cards are best for different use cases of the game. It's never as clear-cut as "buy this card because it performs best," so we've broken-down how different cards perform on various settings.

In this Watch Dogs PC video card & CPU benchmark, we look at the FPS of the GTX 780 Ti, 770, 750 Ti, R9 290X, R9 270X, R7 250X, and HD 7850; to determine whether Watch Dogs is bottlenecked on a CPU level, I also tested an i5-3570K CPU vs. a more modern i7-4770K CPU. The benchmark charts below give a good idea of what video cards are required to produce playable framerates at Ultra/Max, High, and Medium settings.

Update: Our very critical review of Watch Dogs is now online here.

Given the US' propensity for throwing the word 'sale' up in gigantic red letters at every opportunity, I figured I'd share a quick list of some of the better, actually-a-sale sales I've spotted today. Some of the better Memorial Day sales spotted feature the majority of Rockstar's games catalogue for $26, nearly all the LEGO games for $45, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for the PC, and AMD's R9 280X at $300.

We've never covered a game more extensively than we did Titanfall; it was the first game featured in our individualized video card benchmarks, we wrote crash fix guides to mitigate rampant bugs in beta, and produced a Last Titan Standing strategy guide for fans of the mode. The game has long been a bit of a shortcoming in my eyes, though; it wants desperately to be a twitch shooter, and yet so many things are wrong -- like the weaponset (should be more explosive, like in Unreal Tournament) and lack of a server browser. Once again, PC gamers have been handed a console interface and been told to toddle off and have fun.