One Off The List is our weekly list feature. Is there something you think doesn’t deserve to be on this list? Comment with your reasons why, and next week it may be struck off. Listen, never mind that sharks are not the mindlessly violent animals we’ve been trained to fear, and simply additional victims of mankind’s global vertebrate binge. Dismiss, please, the ongoing cultural rehabilitation of this toothy swimmer, who is statistically quite poor at killing humans. Ignore also their adorable habit of falling asleep when you hold them upside-down. Forget it, forget it all. No more lovey-dovey thoughts for these wondrous aquatic beings, more maligned than malignant. This is a list about videogame sharks. And videogame sharks are the baddies. Here are the 9 deadliest sharks in PC games. (more…)

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Every Monday we send Brendan to the far-flung reaches of the early access galaxy. And sometimes we even receive a report back. This week he finds himself stranded on a stormy, alien-infested planet in Osiris: New Dawn . I have survived many things the dinosaurs of ARK, the mad men of Rust, a degeneration of the self in DayZ. This makes me perfectly suited to colonise and thrive on the dusty, Mars-like planet of Proteus 2 the only map of this new survival game. I crash-land on the planet, patch my suit up with duct tape and set off for the great unknown. I reach a huge crater and peer in what riches will I find here? What wonderful discoveries? Oh, look, a giant worm has leapt out of the ground. I have discovered a giant worm. Also, I have been eaten. …

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A tree fell in the distance, lumberjack style, and I knew I would have to investigate. A second tree fell as I approached, then a third. By the time the man in red armour turned and saw me, I had already resolved to die in whatever mundane or horrible fashion he deemed appropriate. Hours of DayZ and Rust had instilled in me an understanding of survival gaming s harsh realities. Yet, for some reason, all that time spent respawning had never eroded my essential curiousity for the human beings who inhabit these deadly environments. I said hello to the man in red. He held his axe aloft for a moment and stood eerily still. Hello, he said. Then he did something entirely unexpected. He took me into his home. Ark: Survival Evolved has been straddling the Steam bestsellers list for months since its release. Like the many survival games before it, the dinosaur infested island of Ark has been attracting PC gamers non-stop, as if they really were arriving to its pristine beaches by the boatload. And yet the response of the games media, outside of the YouTube dimension, has been kind of muted. You can understand why. It is another survival game. …

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