25 years ago, Golden Sun heralded the twilight of an era for RPGs
Image: Camelot Software Planning/Nintendo
They just don't make games like Golden Sun anymore. After Camelot and Nintendo released the much-lauded RPG for the Game Boy Advance in August 2001, the genre began a slow decline both in volume and innovation. The genre shrank, and its eventual regrowth, in trying too hard to recapture past glories, has largely fallen short. Which is a shame. Golden Sun deserves every bit of praise heaped on it, as one of the only examples of a modern (at the time) RPG that built on its inspirations and turned them into something wholly new and captivating.
Deborah Ann Woll and filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly didn't sit down and decide to make a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in a haunted colonial village. But when they stepped foot inside Toronto's Black Creek Pioneer Village with a loose idea in mind, the pair found themselves enchanted by the weathered schoolhouse, creaking staircases, and centuries-old buildings. The deeper they explored, the more the location revealed the story they wanted to tell. The fictional town of Woodcreek grew naturally out of a very real, very spooky place. Tales from Woodcreek was born.
Early on in Big Walk, as you and your pals are scurrying around the world solving puzzles, you might come across a curious sight: a structure near the beach with an oblong prize (here at PC Gamer we call it a nubbin) inside a frosted glass container. Hanging on a hook above it: a sign with some numbers on it. Curious!
Sega is auctioning off Shadow the Hedgehog’s real-life Dark Rider motorcycle and giving the proceeds to charity.
Shadow the Hedgehog finally got his time to shine in the Sonic 3 movie, where he faced off against Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails in an explosive adventure that dominated the box office.
Mark Darrah was a programmer on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, along with Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire, and served as executive producer of the Dragon Age series from Origins through Inquisition before leaving in 2020—and coming back in 2023 to kick in on The Veilguard. He knows a thing or two about BioWare RPGs, in other words, and speaking to FRVR he said he also knows why Baldur's Gate 3 was such a great sequel—so great that it has overshadowed the games that came before it, made mounts of money, and is still among the most popular games on Steam three years after release.
After letting the speculation machine run wild for months, Take-Two announced in June that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch with an $80 price tag for the basic, missing-some-stuff edition. That's a lot of money, especially when you consider that most people will feel compelled to lay out the extra $20 for the Ultimate Edition, which promises "an exclusive collection of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel, and action threaded across all aspects of Jason and Lucia’s story." But Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reckons it's actually a heck of a deal for what you're getting.
The philosophy that turned a hero into the world’s greatest villain
Attack on Titan turned its hero’s battle cry into a villain’s manifesto
Image: Hajime Isayama/Kodansha
From his first introduction, Eren Yeager from Attack on Titan is not your typical wide-eyed, optimistic shonen protagonist. While characters like Goku from Dragon Ball or the titular Naruto chase dreams of greatness and recognition, Eren is consumed by an all-consuming rage against a world that has caged him. He is loud, stubborn, impulsive, and violently uncompromising. Above all, Eren wants to tear apart the system that made survival feel impossible in the first place.
Take it from me, a gamer rocking the last-gen Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super and still loving life: your rig doesn't need the most bleeding edge graphics card. That's especially true when the 50-series cards can easily set you back many more smackers than Nvidia's MSRP. The RTX 5090 is especially bad for this right now, with the cheapest deal I can find anywhere online still being $4,500/£3,499.
Image: Camelot Software Planning/Nintendo
Image: Hajime Isayama/Kodansha