The Best PC Game of All Time

A good story is a powerful thing. It is amazing to consider how much impact a book, movie or TV show can have upon on our lives, to the extent that when they end we feel like we’ve lost something. I’ve gone through this a number of times, perhaps most recently when Terry Pratchett passed away and I was hit with the realization that there would never been a Discworld book again. No more Tiffany Aching, no more Rincewind, no more Vimes. Years before that when I closed the final Harry Potter book I was momentarily lost. The same feeling would hit again when the movie adaptions came to an end. Stargate SG-1 was another, a long-running series whose ending left me feeling like a part of my life had just vanished. The point is, I’m still trying to come to terms with the idea that there will be no more Game of Thrones, at least not in its current form. For all the division amongst fans that season 8 has caused, I think we should all take a moment to remember how long Game of Thrones has been...

My weekend has been filled with violence courtesy of my little niece who firmly believes that beating up her uncle is the greatest thing in the world. Man, five-year-old little girls can seriously do some damage. Jeez. This week I chucked out my review for Close to the Sun, an intriguing game set in an alternate timeline where Nikola Tesla has become the richest man in the world. With all that wealth he constructed a huge ship called the Helios and then packed it with the greatest minds in the world. Of course, things go wrong, people die and we get to explore the ship in order to find out what went wrong. All said and done I really enjoyed Close to the Sun, but the ending left me feeling entirely unsatisfied and the tension that was so well concocted early on fizzled out. Go check out my review for the rest of my thoughts. I also put out another Patch Notes, this time talking about Randy Pitchford having a small meltdown and Valve’s brand new VR headset. So I’ve been putting some...

Screenshot: Joseph Harris (YouTube) Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! for the NES hasn’t had a new speedrunning world record in over a year. The last one recorded was set in April 2018 by Summoningsalt with a time of 15 minutes and 10.5 seconds. But over the weekend, Summoningsalt returned, shaving a fraction of a second off his previous record. He was able to do that thanks to a new strategy for manipulating the fight against King Hippo in order to expose his weakness as early as possible. King Hippo is impervious to every attack except when he opens his mouth, at which point he grabs his shorts to keep them from falling down and leaves his himself defenseless. However, there’s generally no pattern for when he’ll do so. He might open his mouth early in the round or continue to throw jabs, an outcome that can sink even the most expeditious speedrun attempts. On top of that, he needs to do it at least three times for players to KO him. But thanks to new insight into the game’s internal workings...