Introduction

I have loved PC games since the 1990s. I play regularly, although not for long as I have family comitments and other hobbies.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III

My favourite action game as of 2025 is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (I have not been interested in the latest Black Ops games). I have also started playing Battlefield 6, but nothing beats the intense, fast-paced free-for-all matches in MWIII.

I created the montages below from game footage recorded over time, the first one being on the Shoot House map, which is my favourite. Creating these videos has given me some great DaVinci Resolve video editing experience. DaVinci Resolve is professional editing software and is mostly free. There is some functionality that is restricted for the licenced version only, but the free version is extremely generous and will not be limiting in any way for the casual user.

DaVinci Resolve is incredibly powerful, but once you learn the basics you can edit videos quickly and with very little effort. If you want to dive into advanced editing, colour grading, or more complex workflows, you’ll need to spend some time understanding those concepts and how Resolve implements them.

The videos below are free-for-all games with human players. I’m using the Gunslinger Ghost operator skin, and my in‑game name is TheGunslinger, inspired by the main character from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I chose this name long before I started playing Call of Duty – this was my Quake Live name we well.

I usually play for a bit on weekends while enjoying a beer(s). It does mean my reflexes and skill diminish progressively, but it’s all part of the fun.

Satisfactory

In 2022 I discovered Satisfactory (available on Steam), and was immediately addicted! This is a game that you can sink hundreds of hours into with no end in sight. While there is game progression that has a natural end, building factories and just about anything else you can think of is endless!

The game has a large modding community with some excellent mods. I did not use mods initially and did a lot of exploration on foot. I built a few factories to get started, but got to a point where I wanted to start building other cool stuff, not just factories, so started using mods mainly to get additional decorations, but soon got sucked in, and before long I was flying around building all kinds of stuff!

I got to a point where I decided I wanted to unlock all the building materials, trains etc. so I could build ‘the factory’, so I built a temporary desert factory to produce all the materials and components. I paved out a few areas in preparation but have not built anything substantial yet.

The video below was assembled from scenes rendered by a mod called Ficsit-Cam, which essentially allows you to place keyframes in space on a timeline and render it frame-by-frame, allowing for smooth video playback. It showcases the various structures I have created, but it pales in comparison to some of the amazing structures others have built!

I still plan to build large factories connected by trains in future and will get back to it at some point…

Quake Live

Quake Live was my favourite multiplayer FPS action shooter for many years, and as a veteran I have won my fair share of matches. This screenshot is from somewhere around 2012:

I had previously played Quake, Quake II and Quake III Arena before, but Quake Live made multiplayer modes much easier.

Quake Live originally launched in 2010 as a free‑to‑play title, but in 2015 it moved over to Steam and suddenly cost £6.99. I played it on and off until around 2018, by which point the player base had dropped off significantly. So I was genuinely surprised to see that it still alive today – and even more surprised to find more players online than I remember seeing five years ago!

I recorded this video footage in March 2026, and one thing became immediately obvious: the players who are still active are incredibly skilled. I spent most of the session getting absolutely demolished.

Quake Live has always had a very high skill floor though. I consider myself pretty good when it comes to Call of Duty, and while I used to win matches back when it was more popular, I barely survive today!

There are dozens of maps in Quake Live, but the following are my favourites:

Portal 2

Portal 2 is widely regarded as one of the smartest, funniest, and most innovative spatial reasoning puzzle games ever made, and it still sits among Steam’s highest‑rated titles with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating from more than 168,000+ reviews.

The portal gun completely rewrote puzzle‑game logic, letting players bend space to their will and introducing a brand‑new form of first‑person problem‑solving that felt unlike anything before it.

I have played this game from beginning to end 3 times, first in 2011, and most recently in 2025 with my daughter. It does not get old, as long as you forget how to do the puzzles 😄

Watch the trailer:

Hardware

As of January 2026 I have an NVidia RTX2070, which allows me to play most games at low to medium settings at quad HD. I would like to upgrade to an RTX4090 or RTX5090, but it would not make sense to do this without replacing my existing PC, as it is now a bit dated, but that is a significant expense.

My PC base spec is as follows:

History

1980s

When I was young, all we had were handheld games like the old Galaxy Invader 1000, Nintendo Game & Watch (Octopus, Donkey Kong), and console games like Atari Space Invaders, TV games – Pong, and others.

In high School we had a media Centre with a few ZX Spectrum 48K computers. I used to play Stock Exchange, Frogger, View to a Kill, Tornado Low Level (TLL) and others. As limited as they were in those days, they were a lot of fun!

In the late 1980s we lived near a video arcade, and I used to love playing games on the old arcade machines.

My favourites, other than the obvious Pac-Man and Tetris were:

1990s

In the early 1990s the Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) was the game console of choice. A friend of mine had one, and one of those multi-game cartridges – 100-in-1 or whatever it was, along with other single games. I was able to play most if not all of the above games, and many more on the SNES.

I have since created a Retro Arcade Console using a Raspberry PI and the RetroPie platform, and can play all these games on a large modern TV.

While studying Electronic Engineering at PE Technikon in 1991 I was introduced to my first PC ‘3D’ game, appropriately named Wolfenstein 3D – not in a lecture, but on a fellow student’s 386 PC with MS DOS in the Student Village 😄

In the late 1990s I was playing all the DOS 3D games I could download via 56K modem! Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Hexen, Heretic, Descent II, Death Rally… and I played the original Tomb Raider for DOS right through with my brother. What a game! All this on a 486 DX2 PC with 8MB RAM, and an ATI 3D Xpression with 2MB display memory!

2000s

By 2000 I owned a Sony PlayStation 1, and later a PlayStation 2 and 3, but by then I was playing mostly PC games. Gran Turismo is one of my favourite PlayStation racing games, and one I specifically bought a Logitech Driving Force GT steering wheel for.

I still use the steering wheel on the PC for Project Cars 2, Assetto, and BeamNG.drive.

Favourite Games

The following are some of my favourite games: