Fallout: New Vegas is a sprawling RPG filled with sketchy factions, greasy NPCs, rubbery morality, and tough decisions, all of which ultimately lead the player to one of four possible outcomes that share one thing in common: They're not great. Which isn't to say they're not satisfying, just that there's no optimal outcome where everybody's happy and nobody gets hurt. The wasteland is a pretty crappy place, after all, so outcomes tend to be crappy too.

In a recent interview on The Examined Game with Steven Lake, New Vegas designer and director Josh Sawyer revealed his own personal 'best of a bad lot' pick for the endgame, and it's independence all the way.

"It is very hard. I mean, some people would say like, I love Caesar, and great," Sawyer said. "But it's kind of hard to hand everything over to an individual like Caesar or Mr. House. It feels dangerous. And then with NCR, you just realize like, man, they got a lot of problems. Like, they have a lot of problems right now. They're doing things for a lot of very questionable reasons.

"Even if you find people that you feel are very virtuous and and are sacrificing a lot to fight in the Mojave and not because they're trying to be imperialistic, even though NCR is being very imperialistic, it's difficult to wrestle with that and come away and say like, yeah, I think NCR is great."

For Sawyer, then—and most players, apparently—an independent New Vegas is the least worst choice. "I know it's going to be dysfunctional, I know it's going to be bureaucratic, I know there's going to be corruption—but also it hasn't been tried yet, right? Like we haven't organized this yet, so let's give it a try."

Sawyer said Obsidian tried to portray independence as having its own "drawbacks of dysfunction," arising from the proliferation of bureaucracy and the corruption that inevitably follows. Even so, I think I have to agree that it's probably the way to go: If there's one thing history keeps on trying to teach us, it's that handing the keys to an unstable autocrat or a fascist military superpower (or, god forbid, both at the same time) never goes well.

For myself, I wrapped up Fallout: New Vegas with a fifth option that isn't canon, strictly speaking, but is my head canon: I got so sick of getting jerked around by the competing Mojave factions that when Mr. House asked me to take out the Brotherhood of Steel, I just packed up my stuff and wandered back out into the desert, never to return. Was I a little bored with Fallout: New Vegas at that point, after sinking countless dozens of hours into it? Sure. But turning my back on the grasping travails of the last ragged remnants of humanity and disappearing into swirling sand and crackling radiation, to be remembered only as that guy who did that stuff—that's real warrior of the wasteland stuff, baby.

Sawyer, in case you hadn't heard, is reportedly heading up a new Fallout project at Obsidian, which would be nice except that it came amidst the recent major cuts at Xbox, which saw roughly 25% of the studio's workforce let go and the cancellation of multiple other projects, including a sequel to Avowed.

There are, somehow, those of us who still haven't played the hit 2023 RPG Baldur's Gate 3, and I know that because someone asked My Chemical Romance front man Gerard Way at a recent concert.

As spotted by IGN, the question came via a large paper sign made by fan KatanaLuciana, who recorded the interaction for TikTok. The sign caught the eye of a bandmember, who then tapped Way's shoulder to get his take between songs.

"No, I've only played Baldur's Gate 1," Way announced to the room. "Not that I probably wouldn't have liked 2 or 3. I did play the Icewind Dale expansion, but I just ran out of time, you know?"

Way's nerd bona fides are well documented—he's a longtime D&D player, once streamed Overwatch and discussed his love of D.Va, and co-created the Umbrella Academy comic series that later became a Netflix show—but I'm not sure he's talked at length about classic CRPGS. He clearly knows some ball, so we'll forgive him for remembering Icewind Dale as an expansion rather than a standalone game.

"Did you play Baldur's Gate 3?" he asked fans. "Is it good? I would assume so, the first one was a lot of fun. It was the closest thing at the time to playing D&D."

At risk of putting my foot in my mouth, if he loved crusty ol' Baldur's Gate at the time, imagine how Larian's modern masterclass would hit. The studio quickly caught wind of Way's interest, of course, and reached out to help correct the injustice.

".@gerardway of My Chemical Romance, what do you mean you haven't played the critically-acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons RPG, @baldursgate3," the official Larian account posted. "There's a code with your name on it if you fancy trying it."

Somebody get that man a Steam Deck, because I can't imagine a better game to pass long hours of touring.

If Palworld's 1.0 launch has brought you back for a fresh round of legally distinct Pokemon—as it's done for millions of other players—you're going to be crafting a lot of items. Thousands and thousands of items.

Luckily, while the game would normally expect you to hold the F key for the duration of every building and crafting interaction, there's a way to spare your finger the combined ache of every straw Pal bed and roasted berry. And no, you don't have to buy a 100g weight to hold down F for you like this hapless soul on Reddit did. You just need to switch two settings.

TIL that I'm stupid 🙃 from r/Palworld

How to stop holding F to build in Palworld

To liberate your digits from prolonged F presses, hit Esc to open the menu, then select Options > Game Settings. Move over to the Keyboard tab (or Controller tab, if that's your style) and turn both "Single button for hold interactions" and "Change build mode from Hold to Toggle" to ON.

Make sure you've enabled both options; the former only affects interactions in the world, but you'll be left having to manually hold F for crafting and building back at base if you don't turn the latter on as well.

Hit Esc once more, and select YES to apply and save your selections. And there you go! No more overtaxing your index finger whenever there's something you can't leave for your Pals to finish.

I've seen some reports from players who say those settings won't stick after closing the game, but I haven't run into that issue on my end. Might be worth a double check at the start of your next few sessions once you've made the switch, just to be sure.

Otherwise, go—live deliciously. Bask in your regained seconds of manual freedom. Think of all the bad posts you'll be able to scroll on your phone while slapping together your next batch of Pal Spheres. Has there ever been a truer form of luxury?

From the archives: This interview was originally published 10 years ago this month in PC Gamer #293 (UK, July 2016), and conducted not long after the release of Stardew Valley. You can see how developer Eric Barone was just realizing how life-changing Stardew would prove to be, and many of the game's now-beloved features, like multiplayer, were still to come in the future.

Also check out out 2025 interview with Barone on YouTube in which he looks back at Stardew's release, discusses why he just can't stop working on the game, and what he hopes to accomplish with Haunted Chocolatier.

"You know,” Eric Barone says, “as a kid I never really thought about how games were made. They were just these things that existed, almost like magic."

He first turned his hand to programming four years ago, as a way of improving his CV. Juggling game design, bills and a job at a local theatre, he put his coding skills to the test by singlehandedly creating Stardew Valley—the farming simulator RPG that was released in February this year. It’s since sold several hundred thousand copies. “Now I feel like a wizard because I understand the magic.”

Raised on the console classics of yesteryear, Barone spent much of his youth obsessed with his family’s Super Nintendo, spending hours in front of Mario Kart, Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. Back then, he admits, the thought of making a game didn’t cross his mind all too often, although he recalls occasionally tinkering with Basic on his parents’ PC. One game captured his heart, and would go on to heavily inspire his debut venture some way down the line.

“I guess there was a period where I stopped following current games and just kept playing old ones,” says Barone. “And I spent countless hours playing Harvest Moon. I loved it.”

In 2011, Barone graduated from the University of Washington-Tacoma with a computer science degree, but struggled to find work shortly after. In a bid to make himself more employable, he decided to pursue computer programming as an entertaining way of learning something new, and began creating what was essentially a Harvest Moon clone.

At first, he worked from his bedroom at his parents’ house, but before long he moved into an apartment with his girlfriend. “She was supporting us,” he admits.

“Although I did work part time as an usher at the theatre. My girlfriend was working as a lab technician at the local university and we were living off of that. I think she probably had some doubts, but she wanted to support me and knew this was what I wanted to do, that this was my dream.”

Farm labour

In addition to his theatre shifts, Barone spent anything between 60 and 80 hours per week developing what was first known as Sprout Valley. He was learning on the job, constantly iterating, poring over the minutiae of his code and adding new things.

Within a year, he had a working game—one that was basically finished—yet would go back and axe whole sections, features and storylines as his expectations changed and the scope of the project increasingly widened.

“When you get to that point, where you need to redo it all, it just feels depressing—when you know you’re in for another year or more of work, at least,” says Barone.

“That happened to me several times.” Worse still, Stardew Valley, as it was eventually renamed, was nearly cancelled. Barone had neglected to backup any of his work, so when his computer crashed about a year or so into development he was convinced it was over. He frantically gathered new hardware, besides the existing hard drive, and, luckily, was able to salvage everything from there.

Harvest time

“In retrospect, it feels like crazy that it all worked out,” he says. “The whole development was so sloppy. It was the most indie development you could imagine: no professional style at all, figuring it all out as I go, and just the scrappiest code you could imagine. I’m almost embarrassed to have other people look at my code!”

Yet Stardew Valley’s overnight success paints a different picture. Although born from fond childhood memories, it is a deep and engaging game that seems to have struck a chord with PC players—particularly those who missed the console-exclusive Harvest Moon almost two decades ago. Barone concedes that part of the reason he started down this path was precisely to this end—that the absence of such a game on PC implied there were people, like him, who wanted one.

It appears he was right. Even though Barone expected his first foray into development to be a hit among Harvest Moon fans, he is still genuinely surprised by its burgeoning global success, not to mention the extremely positive feedback he’s had from players.

This is of course his reward for teaching himself how to code, for working alone, and for staying positive for moments of uncertainty that spanned four whole years. I ask Barone what kept him going throughout that time.

“I just really wanted to be a game developer,” he says simply. “I’d told everyone I was making a game, all my friends and family, so there was a lot of self-imposed pressure to prove myself.” All the students who’d graduated when he had were working by this time.

“If I’d failed and had to get an entry level job to gain experience, well, it wouldn’t have been an ideal way to start my career. I’d put all my eggs in one basket.”

With the help of Starbound publisher Chucklefish, Barone’s future plans include multiplayer support, console ports, and many more as yet unannounced ideas that he seems desperate to introduce. He also plans to tour this year’s gaming expos—something he’s never managed in the past.

“My wildest dreams have come true and I’m in this whole new world,” says Barone. “My life has completely changed in one month.”

Just a week after South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games returned to independence amidst the latest round of sweeping layoffs at Xbox, the studio is looking for work. In a message posted on LinkedIn, Compulsion said it is "expanding opportunities to collaborate with studios across the games and entertainment industry."

"We invite partners to leverage the talent and creativity of the award-winning team behind South of Midnight, a game that was honoured with a BAFTA Award, a Peabody Award, seven Canadian Game Awards, and recognized on multiple 'Best Games of 2025' lists," Compulsion wrote.

"With deep experience in creating acclaimed original IP, we bring our artistry, technical expertise, and collaborative approach to every project. We are excited to support the development of memorable experiences that engage and entertain players around the world."

It's a disheartening message. South of Midnight did indeed win all those awards and more—one high-profile win that went unmentioned is the Games for Impact crown at the 2025 Game Awards—and we liked it quite a lot too: It earned at 83% in our review, and reviewer Andrea Shearon went on to play through it twice after after the fact, selecting it as her Personal Pick Game of the Year for 2025.

It wasn't a huge seller, though, and all that critical praise wasn't enough to secure Compulsion a future as an Xbox-owned studio, much less ensure it a follow-up release. Microsoft, which acquired Compulsion in 2018, earned some plaudits for allowing it to go independent rather than simply closing it, but my worry at the time seems reinforced by this post. Cutting Compulsion loose as an "independent" studio, especially in the oxygen-deprived environment the game industry has blundered into, may have merely delayed the inevitable falling curtain—and, one might argue, gives Xbox a way to avoid blame should that happen.

Compulsion launched as a support studio—its website says it got its start in 2009 "as a home office providing services to other game studios," including THQ and Atari—so this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory. But the environment then was very different than it is today: Sweeping layoffs and studio closures over the past several years have left countless developers without work in an increasingly constrained industry.

Quite a few Compulsion employees seem to share that feeling: A couple weeks before the independence announcement, numerous people at the studio began actively looking for new jobs, reportedly with the blessing of studio leadership.

One of the biggest end goals in a farm sim (other than a massive wine-making operation) is getting married to your favorite townie. Moonlight Peaks lets you really play the field by going on dates with pretty much everyone before you lock down one chosen beau.

I've been through the process a couple times already, so I've broken down everything you need to know about popping the question, prepping for a wedding, and how to get divorced if you want to head along to your second (or third) marriage. I won't judge you for getting married early and then realizing that you want to date Samael later.

Marriage in Moonlight Peaks

How to get married in Moonlight Peaks

1. Reach 8 friendship hearts with your partner
2. See your partner's 8 heart cutscene (check your map for sparkles indicating where to go)
3. Invite your partner on a date
4. At the end of the date, you can now propose marriage instead of a hug or kiss
5. Set a date for your wedding when prompted (check your calendar after to see it logged there)
6. (Optional) Starting the day after your proposal, buy white attire from Third Eye Threads to wear on your wedding day
7. Your wedding ceremony will take place first thing on your wedding day

What happens when you get married

• Spouse moves into your house
• Spouse unlocks two final (10 total) friendship hearts for you to earn
• Anyone else you were dating becomes "hurt" and goes back to only four hearts
• You can no longer invite other characters on a date and are locked at four hearts with other marriage candidates

When you propose and become engaged, your partner will temporarily have the "fiancée" relationship label and a total of 11 friendship hearts. Any other character who you had a "dating" or "partner" relationship with will be in their feelings about it and temporarily gain the "hurt" relationship label. They will be reduced to just four broken-looking friendship hearts, will have sad dialogue when you chat with them, and will not accept gifts from you. This status seems to only last a day though, so singles in Moonlight Peaks move on fast.

After you get married, your spouse will move into your house but will still go about their own business in town by exploring or going to work like they always have. They will go back to having eight friendship hearts and will have two new hearts to earn while married for a total of 10. You can continue to ask your spouse to go on dates together, which will help you earn those final hearts. You cannot have children in Moonlight Peaks, but you can get divorced.

Divorce in Moonlight Peaks

How to get divorced in Moonlight Peaks

1. A few days after your wedding, Llemi will come to your house to tell you about divorce
2. Visit Llemi's house in the Pink Grove (must progress the main story and unlock Luna Bay to reach it)
3. Tell Llemi you want to divorce your spouse
4. Sleep until the next night and your spouse will return to "friend" status

Getting divorced in Moonlight Peaks is arguably way too easy. When Llemi first comes to your house a few days after your wedding to just casually drop the possibility of divorce into your mind, he calls it "A clean slate. No bonds, no vows, no lingering what-ifs. A love undone as if it had never been."

Despite his protests about breaking your partner's heart when you actually come to take him up on the offer, "as if it had never been" seems to be how Moonlight Peaks treats divorce because your ex-spouse will be totally unfazed by your marriage ending. They'll return to being your "friend" the following day with only four hearts, no "hurt" relationship label, and will not acknowledge the divorce in dialogue at all. In fact, they'll act like they want to start dating you all over again.

Remember though, getting married in the first place locked all your other relationships at four friendship hearts. If you want to tie the knot a second time, you've got a lot of gifting and dates to do to make it back up to eight hearts with your next prospective spouse.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die, a lovingly-crafted homage to the classic Nintendo 64 James Bond game GoldenEye, made quite an impression when it turned up at the PC Gaming Show in 2022, but all hasn't gone quite according to plan since then. An early access release expected later that year didn't come together, and updates on Steam have been few and far-between since then.

But today we got the update we've been waiting for—developer Replicant D6 announced that Agent 64: Spies Never Die is set to launch on August 11.

"After a grueling five and a half year of work, I can finally put a final release date down," the dev wrote in a short-but-sweet update on Steam. "Everything is almost ready and set. Let's make it worth it!"

There was no multiplayer in Agent 64 when we first laid eyes on it, but that changed a year later when Replicant D6 announced plans for split-screen multiplayer, and then again in 2025 when online multiplayer was revealed.

That's a big deal: Multiplayer was a major part of GoldenEye's success, so it was a bit surprising that such a spot-on remake intended to move ahead without it. Replicant D6 said earlier this year, however, that "singleplayer remains the main focus of the game," which as a fan of singleplayer shooters I take as good news.

Another big deal: The Agent 64 singleplayer demo that was slated to be pulled earlier this month is being left online until August 9, just a couple days ahead of the game's release, so you still have time to give it a rip. The demo, available for free on Steam, includes the first two missions of the game, so it should provide a pretty good sense of what it's all about.

If Steam is struggling to load on your PC or phone, it's not just you. The store is currently struggling, with multiple issues shown on SteamStat.us.

Currently the store and community pages are reflecting a "Very Slow" status, with several regional servers overloaded and Deadlock's multiplayer API reflecting an Internal Server Error.

The Steam API itself seemns to be flickering between normal and offline. The store and community are also throwing some "Bad Gateway" errors, which means they may not load at all.

We get it, Steam: it's Monday.

It took all of one day for Marvel Rivals to enrage players after the release of season 9 with a new, unasked for, and slightly confusing patch. It buffed tons of heroes some of which in no way needed a helping hand.

"Our temporal scanners have been working overtime, analyzing battlefield telemetry and listening to chatter from you, the community," a blog post explains. "We've seen the meta shifting, and to ensure the combat arena remains as dynamic and competitive as possible, we are deploying this emergency hotfix. Rest assured, our Watchers will remain vigilant, and further recalibrations will be made as new threats emerge."

My guess is that by 'temporal scanners' NetEase means 'hero pick rate list' and a decision has been made to try and get each and every hero's pick rate up, or at least above 1% (looking at you Storm). Unfortunately, the way in which NetEase has gone about this isn't exactly slick.

LIke buffing Cyclops and Gambit—yes you heard that right—I've played against both Gambit and Cyclops since this patch, and it sucks just as much as you'd expect. It's also improved Black Widows kit while also making her completely homogenous with other hitscan heroes. But the most frustrating part of the latest patch is all the general buffs to Strategists.

Other than Gambit getting more self-regen and Bridge Boost healing, we now have Invisible Woman, Jubilee, Rocket Raccoon, and Ultron buffs alongside a class buff that gives Strategists more ult charge for healing. Now the healing to energy conversion efficiency is at 70%—a mere decrease of just 5% of what it was pre season 9 compared to the 15% decrease Vanguards and Duelists got.

Strategists that were somewhat nerfed include Ultron and Mantis, as her healing provided by Healing Flower has gone down from 15+3% of max health to 12+3% of max health. Even this is just a small change.

"The front lines of season 9 have been intense," the patch notes explain. "We've seen our Strategists absorbing more pressure than ever, which has suppressed their efficiency in gaining ultimate ability energy. Therefore, we will be partially reverting the efficiency of ultimate ability energy gained from healing actions for Strategists."

And, in completely forseen circumstances the change hasn't left people happy. "What are we doing with this one," streamer Flats says in a social media post. "EVEN IF they had data showing the character is weak. No exaggeration Gambit is a PERMA BAN in ranked and has been for four seasons. I know they likely want every character to be 'broken' this season but this guy isn't seeing the light of day."

It's become predictable that whenever NetEase decides to dial up the fun and dial down the balance players begin to yearn for said balance: "Revert this change please, I want more neutral gameplay that takes skill." The complicated part is that players will also yearn for the fun when NetEase decides to prioritise balance. Personally, I think NetEase needs to pick a lane for Marvel Rivals and commit to one or the other before everyone gets estranged.

I'm pretty staunchly opposed to the use of generative AI—for me, it's the one-two punch of dubiously sourced datasets and the argument that these models can replace the human creatives they so often rip off. That said, even I'm a little bit intrigued by AI's application in cybersecurity.

Case in point, Microsoft recently shared that it is deploying AI to "identify [issues] faster, prioritize risk, and scale vulnerability discovery across the Windows codebase" as well as "reduce the time between discovery and customer protection." Specifically, Microsoft Security leverages a multi-model agentic scanning harness—or MDASH, for short.

MDASH uses multiple different AI models, including "leading third-party AI vulnerability discovery models," on dedicated Cloud infrastructure to scan for vulnerabilities within Windows.

The executive vice president of Windows + Devices, Pavan Davuluri, explains, "A scanner pipeline scans critical binaries and validates candidates using multi-model debate across multiple model families. Confirmed candidates then flow to a separate, Windows-specific prove pipeline that helps eliminate remaining false positives, so only the highest-confidence findings reach the engineering team."

Multiple times, the emphasis is placed on the use of AI tools "to reduce the time from discovery to protection," whereas 'human expertise' is still what handles key security decisions and fixes.

Davuluri goes on to add, "As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release. This is evidence that defenders are getting better at identifying and addressing issues. Our focus is to effectively utilize these AI tools to support faster protection, stronger engineering systems and more actionable guidance for customers."

Microsoft is far from the only company leveraging AI, with Firefox's CTO raving about Claude Mythos' bug-hunting capabilities after it found 271 vulnerabilities in the browser earlier this year. Last year, we also saw an AI hold the top spot in a leaderboard that ranks people who hunt for system vulnerabilities.

Obviously, I'm still not thrilled by the fact that these cybersecurity applications are necessitated by threat actors increasingly using AI in their attacks. For example, one AI-assisted hacking group hit targets with a complicated 'social engineering' scam involving deepfaked CEOs, spoofed Zoom calls, and a malicious troubleshooting program.

That said, both LLMs and AI agents can also be manipulated themselves, with security researchers finding that both bad maths and even poetry can be leveraged to get around AI models' safety guard rails. With all sides leveraging machine learning to some degree, it's hard not to feel like it's a bit of a race to the bottom—or wonder which side will win out.

Everything I know about crime scene investigations I learned from the TV series CSI: Miami, a show where sexy people get murdered and different sexy people—plus David Caruso—solve the crime by doing lab work.

My memory of the show is that Caruso always kicks off the episode by saying the first part of a sentence, then puts on his sunglasses and finishes the sentence with a devastating zinger related to the sexy murder victim. But that's sort of not true. His zingers in this 8-minute montage of Horation Caine one-liners are pretty darn underwhelming. Sometimes he just states the obvious, like when a body that had been thrown off a building was determined to have been killed elsewhere:

"Priority number one…" *sunglasses* "...is for us to find the murder scene."

Yep. That's… that's the thing everyone already knows you need to do. Wasn't a cool thing to say, and didn't need to be said at all.

Hoping to fill his shoes this week, I'm trying out a new career in Forensics: Crime Scene Detective, and unfortunately it seems I'm about as good at solving crimes as David Caruso is at delivering memorable zingers.

My first case is to collect evidence from a drug dealer's apartment. Not drugs, unfortunately, but electronic devices that include communications to his clients, perhaps text messages that read "hey if you would you like to buy some illegal drugs hmu 💉💊🌿🤪"

At the apartment I get to label, photograph, and collect evidence, which is rad. I've seen them do it on TV a million times: placing little yellow plastic numbered markers next to things like bullet holes and blood stains and then taking photos. In the alleged drug dealer's apartment there are just a couple smartphones and a password written on a post-it note, so I label 'em, snap 'em, and take them back to the lab.

That's where the problems begin. I use the password to access one of the phones, but the other is damaged so I have to open it up and "desolder" it: heat up the memory card so the glue melts and it can be removed—but without heating it up so much it's destroyed. I gingerly heat the card and try to remove it. Nope. I try again. Nope.

Ultimately, it goes the way things go anytime I toast a bagel:

• It's untoasted
• It's untoasted
• It's untoasted
• It's burnt beyond all recognition.

My first act of lab work and I nuke the evidence. And not only did I destroy this device, it turns out I also missed a third electronic device somewhere back at the apartment. I guess this drug dealer… *sunglasses* …is going to continue dealing drugs.

Embarrassingly, I flub my next two cases, too. Finding fingerprints is kinda fun: I shine a purple light around a room until I spot one—and it's always just one, because people only touch a surface in their home with a single finger then never touch it again. After labeling and snapping a pic, I sprinkle dust on the print and lift it with tape, which I bungle on the first two attempts by using almost no powder and then by using way too much. That makes it tricky, or some might say, impossible, to match prints back in the lab.

My second case: Unresolved! I'm glad this game doesn't simulate getting yelled at by the chief of police.

My third time out I'm hopeful because there's blood, and I'm good at collecting that: you just stick a Q-tip into it. But again, I wind up torpedoing the lab work. I use some sort of machine to extract DNA and then compare results on a readout to see if it matches. I know it must match: this is a crime-solving game, so I figure most of the cases will result in a "solved" scenario instead of a "nope, this one stumped us" ending, but no amount of fiddling with the knobs helps me ID a perp.

Why am I dealing with squiggly lines, anyway? Aren't we living in the grim future of no privacy and information harvesting? Surely I should just be able to feed both DNA samples into a computer and it gives me two pictures, and if the guy looks the same in both pictures, he's guilty. Why doesn't science work like that?

Finally, I get a case involving a gun. I'm an American and a former gun store owner, so this should be a slam dunk. No one was killed, this is just sort of a "please don't fire a gun in your apartment" type of case. The bullet is lodged in a wall, so I do that fun thing where you put a stick in the hole and it points where the gun was fired from, and then something more fun: shining a laser along the path of the bullet, and then spraying some kind of mist so the laser can be clearly seen and photographed. Awesome.

And for the first time, I don't bungle the evidence back in the lab. I take the gun, fire it into a water tank, and collect the bullet for comparison, which is done basically the same way as in The Great Mouse Detective: line 'em up and twist 'em to see if the scratches match. Finally, I score 100% on a case—and it only took four tries. What's that famous saying? Let justice be done though three hardened criminals go free so you can imprison one guy who shot his own living room wall.

It's about time I reveal the shocking twist in this story: those four cases were just the tutorial. That's how bad at this I am: I even fail at being given step-by-step instructions on how to do basic tasks. It's with real trepidation that I take my first real case, praying it involves someone else shooting a gun because I nailed that. C'mon, violent gun murder!

I open the folder and it's a coin burglary. Shit. Someone has been stealing antique coins. Filled with dread and disappointment, I go to the perp's apartment.

It's not so bad: at first. I dust for several fingerprints and do a decent job at lifting them. I find a whole crapload of evidence to label and photograph, including an actual pile of coins—which the game oddly does not consider relevant to this case.

But while I know I'm pretty good at working the crime scene, I'm just utter shit in the lab. And here's another twist—in my first real case I was also terrible at the scene! I missed several additional fingerprints, a second electronic device, and at least one password. Labwise, I failed to even complete the fingerprint analysis. My score for this case was a mere 16/100.

I hope someone can solve the case of my brief investigative career, because it's dead.

Performance Evaluation

Nvidia's RTX 50-series cards have a tendency to run cool and quiet. On average, at least. The current generation of Nvidia GPUs were previously claimed to have had their hotspot sensor removed, which lead to limited temp readings in real-time monitoring tools like GPU-Z, as only the regular GPU and memory temperature data is available.

However, Brazilian modding and repair channel Paulo Gomes claims to have gained access to hotspot measurements on RTX 50-series GPUs via MODS, or Nvidia Modular Diagnostic Software, an internal Nvidia tool that appears to have leaked to some repair channels and Discord servers (via Techpowerup).

By the seems of it, RTX 50-series GPUs do in fact have a hotspot temperature reporting sensor, but it's disabled at a driver level on boot. The Nvidia MODS tool bypasses the driver restriction, allowing users to see the exact hotspot temperature, making it easier to diagnose a misaligned cooler or improper application of thermal paste.

Which is what Paulo Gomes has been doing in order to diagnose RTX 50-series cards with abnormal gaming performance and high fan noise, due to thermal throttling.

In the given example, a Gigabyte RTX 5070 Ti was reporting an average temperature of around 68 °C , but had an actual hotspot maximum temp of 107 °C due to poor cooler contact. After replacing the thermal paste and ensuring the cooler was correctly fitted, the hotspot temperatures dropped to 100 °C, resulting in much better performance.

Given the sheer number of AIB coolers strapped to Nvidia's latest efforts, it's no surprise that some become victims to poor implementation of thermal interface material. That being said, it's not the first Gigabyte thermal paste-related issue we've been made aware of.

As to why hotspot data is blocked in the first place for RTX 50-series cards? No idea. Many Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs have passed through our hands since release, and we've not had issues with poor performance (relative to expectations) or thermal problems with any of them.

Still, the MODS tool is said to be out there, floating within the murky world of Discord. Be careful with what you download though, yes? There's nothing worse than getting an unintentional dose of malware to compound your PC issues, let me tell you.

On Saturday, June 20, something weird happened here in Chicago: 4,000 people gathered in person (and over one million tuned in to the stream) to watch Deadman All Stars, a PvP tournament of Old School RuneScape. Even with my only RuneScape experience having been getting cyberbullied in it by half of a pair of evil blonde twins at my middle school circa 2006, the good vibes were infectious.

Old School is hot and, by almost any metric, in a new golden age surpassing its original run in the aughts. But MMO PvP as a live esports event? It shouldn't work, but it did, and I got to talk to Old School RuneScape creative director Kieren Charles about how Deadman All Stars came together, as well as the logistical challenges of bashing a 25-year-old MMO into shape for it.

But first, glory to the victors, Team Dino Nuggets, consisting of the eponymous Dino, as well as B0aty, 61M, Sick Nerd, and MMORPG. Well played to runners up the Odablock Warriors, Framed Friends, Westham Weasels, Rhys Rhinos, and Purpp Rebels. My personal favorite player handle at the tournament belonged to Skiddler on the Rebels.

Tourney Hero

RuneScape has a rock-paper-scissors sort of combat system, where every method of attack has strengths and vulnerabilities. So high-level RuneScape PvP involves a lot of item switching, inventory management, and fast inputs. Combat is based around classic RPG dice rolls, and two players in end game gear will tend to miss most of their attacks, furiously swapping armor and weapons until one slips up or the RNG delivers a hit.

Jagex senior communications manager Danni Amos told me that the players mostly brought their own kit⁠—mice, keyboards, etc.—to ensure maximum comfort and that their muscle memory was on point. Much like how high-level Counter-Strike players sometimes opt for a low-res, 4:3 view to maximize performance and focus their aim, I was delighted to see the tournament players were all rocking with a tiny, 640x480 window on their massive, curved gaming monitors.

Amos told me that serves to limit the distance their mouse has to travel between the inventory menu and the play field, but I also find it rhymes with how you might have illicitly played RuneScape in a school computer lab or on the family computer back in the day.

"We actually started experimenting in competitive e-sports over 10 years ago now," said creative director Charles. "We've done mini events like this in the past in the UK, but it was 50 people." He attributed the Deadman format to prominent Old School RuneScape video maker and official Jagex collaborator, Solo Mission.

Matches are set up like a fighting game crew battle, or maybe a Pokémon fight with no substitutions. Each team's first guy goes out to duel: Team A's first player wins, so he stays out and keeps fighting until he runs out of health and healing items as Team B's second member tries to take him down, repeat until one team's roster is depleted. It's a great format, pairing the purity of 1v1 with a layer of strategy and teamwork. There were a lot of hero moments, players sticking it out way longer than they had any right, or managing stunning upsets.

There's also an added wrinkle with Deadman's prep stage: All the players had to start from scratch with fresh accounts, with a 120-hour playtime limit over nine days to level and gear up. But the tournament itself did not occur in OSRS' live game: Jagex had a special instance of the MMO running right there at the theater.

Logistics win wars

"RuneScape was definitely not built to have a LAN setup at all, so it's actually been a really interesting challenge for the tech team to work out how we make it a LAN event," Charles told me. "It was no small undertaking. We were doubting at times whether we actually can pull it off, because [with] a lot of the setup, the code expects to communicate with this server, speak to that server, and all of a sudden it's not really a thing."

After everyone was geared up and ready to go, they sent their save files to Jagex to load onto this special, instanced version of the game, with the offline Old School RuneScape server whirring away in a back room of the Rosemont Theater.

"There's so many advantages to doing it. A lot of these online events, they have the risk of DDoS and network attacks⁠—you've got to mitigate that," said Charles. "But also it's ping, it's reaction [time] for the players. The smaller the ping, the better they will play.

"So the fact the server is right there next to where they're playing, they're playing in perfect conditions in a way they've never played before. But now that we've done it, I imagine this is the sort of thing we could do when we do similar events in future."

And there seems to be a high likelihood of that: Deadman All Stars was Jagex's first time hosting an event in North America, yet it was also its biggest, surpassing even RuneFest in the UK. And at a time when much of the games industry is struggling, it's heartening to see a game and community thrive like this.

For PC hardware enthusiasts, the good news has been awfully slim pickings of late. What with the ongoing RAMpocalypse, new GPU generations apparently delayed indefinitely and the seeming inevitability of ever more expensive computer chips, it's nearly all gloom and doom.

Nearly, that is, but not quite. The glimmer of hope in the barren wasteland that used to be affordable PC gaming? That'll be monitors. They keep getting cheaper and better at the same time, a bit like computer chips used to. In fact, in the last few months I've reviewed the most affordable examples yet of two cutting-edge display technologies, mini-LED and OLED.

Both can now be had for under $350 in 27-inch 1440p format. Representing mini-LED is the remarkable KTC M27T6S, a monitor so good it actually shifted my view on mini-LED technology in general.

Stepping up for OLED is the Alienware AW2726DM. Alienware has form when it comes to bringing OLED display technology in at a lower price than the competition and the AW2726DM makes what many gamers see as the ultimate display technology more accessible than ever before.

We're not quite at price parity, of course. The mini-LED KTC monitor comes in around $290 to the Alienware OLED's $350. But they're close enough for cross shopping to be pretty plausible. So the question is, should you make budget mini-LED or budget OLED your PC gaming panel of choice?

What are OLED and mini-LED?

First up, it's worth understanding just how dramatically different these two display technologies are despite the fact that they both exist for essentially the same reason. The name of the game for both mini-LED and OLED, after all, is improved lighting control.

What you might call traditional PC monitors in the flat-panel era have typically used LCD technology with a big, dumb monolithic backlight. OK, you could vary the brightness of that backlight. But that isn't much help if you want to display both bright and dark image elements at the same time.

Mini-LED is actually still an LCD-based display tech. But it attempts to fix the lighting issue courtesy of an array of individually addressable backlight zones allowing different brightness levels across the screen. Current mini-LED monitors usually have in the order of 1,000 to 2,000 such zones, enabling much better lighting control.

Of course, the ultimate in lighting control would be on a literally per-pixel basis, with each pixel acting as its own light source. And that's exactly what OLED panels deliver. Indeed, it's worth noting just how much more precise OLED is than mini-LED in that regard.

While the KTC M27T6S's 1,152 mini-LED dimming zones might sound like a lot, the fundamental resolution of the backlight is extremely low, something in the order of 40 by 25 zones. With a native image resolution of 2,560 by 1,440, the result is over 3,000 pixels in each zone. But with OLED, each of a 1440p panel's 3.7 million pixels has individual lighting control. That's a huge difference.

OLED panel tech comes with other fringe benefits, too. They have much faster pixel response, not far off two orders of magnitude faster. LCD panels generally come in at about 1 ms claimed response, while OLED is typically rated at 0.03 ms. OLED also has better viewing angles.

Not everything goes OLEDs way, however. Full-screen brightness is a notable weakness and it just so happens that's something mini-LED does very well. Even the very latest OLED monitors top out under 350 nits full-screen, while some mini-LED monitors can exceed 1,000 nits.

OLED also comes with the worry of burn-in. The evidence is building that OLED burn-in is something that the vast majority of users won't have to worry about for many years. But it is a real problem and something you don't have to think about at all with mini-LED.

What's better for gaming, budget mini-LED or budget OLED?

On paper, the Alienware AW2726DM looks like the faster, more responsive monitor. It's got a slight edge when it comes to refresh, hitting 240 Hz to the KTC M27T6S's 200 Hz, or 210 Hz if you want to use the slightly silly "overclocking" feature.

The Alienware's Samsung-supplied QD-OLED panel also offers massively faster 0.03 ms claimed pixel response. The KTC's IPS panel is only good for 1 ms, and even that's only for the less demanding MPRT metric as opposed to the Alienware's grey-to-grey rating.

In practice, the subjective gap isn't nearly as big as the objective specifications. Yes, the Alienware is faster. But the difference isn't nearly as dramatic as 1 ms versus 0.03 ms would have you expect. That says a lot about how far IPS panel tech has come and the fact that the KTC has sourced a pretty nippy example of the IPS panel breed.

Put it this way. If the KTC M27T6S was superior in most other ways, you wouldn't take the Alienware AW2726DM just for its speed. It is faster, but that speed isn't a killer blow. A possible exception here is esports, where refresh is king in terms of latency. But then if competitive online shooters are your absolute priority, you don't want either of these monitors. You're better off with the fastest 1080p panel you can find for this kind of money, and it's probably going to be a TN.

Instead, where the Alienware really delivers is HDR visuals, albeit with some caveats. The Alienware AW2726DM is actually only rated at 400 nits for peak HDR brightness, where the KTC will hit 1,000 nits. But the way we dumb humans perceive brightness isn't as simple as comparing specs.

Contrast matters just as much for perceived brightness as outright brightness. And the Alienware absolutely nails contrast. It can do a single pixel hitting 400 nits right next to another putting out basically zero nits. That means it's far, far better at achieving precision lighting across the whole image and a subjective sense of contrast. Small, bright details actually look brighter because they are surrounded by greater contrast.

In other words, OLED black levels are actually, well, black. The go-to test that really emphasises the difference here is a starfield panning across the display. The Alienware's OLED panel has no problem perfectly lighting individual stars as they scan across the sky.

Mini-LED monitors always involve some kind of compromise with that kind of image. The KTC M27T6S actually does the starfield test better than any other mini-LED monitor I've seen, which is pretty remarkable when you consider it's a budget model. KTC has done a really nice job on the M27T6S's backlight algorithm, that's for sure. But it's still nowhere near as good as OLED.

If all that seems a little abstract, what this all translates into is a much more natural and immersive game world using an OLED panel. There's no backlight bleed, no glowing at the edges of the screen, just what feels like a window into a stunning game world.

The Alienware's glossy panel coating actually heightens that sense, it's so clear and crisp. KTC has gone for a fairly coarse matte anti-glare coating and it both slightly softens the image and further compromises perceived black levels and contrast. In darker game scenes, the Alienware QD-OLED therefore absolutely hammers the KTC mini-LED.

However, ramp up the brightness and the tables are somewhat turned. There are some desert scenes in Cyberpunk 2077 that really show what mini-LED can do with HDR enabled. The KTC M27T6S absolutely pops, it renders the afternoon so bright that it almost hurts your eyes.

Running the two monitors side-by-side, the Alienware OLED looks awfully dull by comparison, it simply runs out of pop when you try to light up a large proportion of the panel. Meanwhile, the KTC never looks anything but retina-searingly bright.

The thing is, however, the QD-OLED panel's deficiencies are much less obvious in isolation than they are when you've got the super-bright mini-LED monitor sitting right next to it. Your eyes adjust to the light levels, to at least some degree cancelling out the objective brightness advantage of the KTC. On the other hand, you never stop seeing the washed out black tones, the lack of contrast, the glow at the edges of the panel, with an IPS panel, even one with a mini-LED backlight.

What's better for daily computing?

First, let's square away something that is often overstated. Just as OLED's speed isn't quite as massive an advantage in the real world as you might expect, the mini-LED KTC M27T6S's font rendering is not, in truth, dramatically better than the QD-OLED Alienware AW2726DM.

Yes, that QD-OLED panel has a suboptimal triangular subpixel structure, as opposed to conventional RGB-stripe. And yes the KTC's fonts are clearer, but only marginally. The bottom line is that neither monitor has particularly good pixel density and even the KTC doesn't render terribly nice fonts. If that's what you care about, you need something like a 27-inch 4K panel or even a 5K model.

For daily computing, both monitors are likewise plenty fast enough. So, it's more the static image quality where the differences lie. As ever, the QD-OLED Alienware has much better black levels and contrast, the mini-LED KTC can run brighter.

There are caveats to all that, however. For starters, there's the question of how bright you actually want a monitor, day-to-day. Arguably, the KTC is too bright for daily comfort in SDR content when set to full reheat.

But what if you do tend to prefer a really punchy looking monitor? Does the QD-OLED Alienware fall short? The simple answer is yes, but it can be mitigated. In SDR mode, the Alienware only hits 200 nits. However, if you switch to HDR mode and then max out the SDR content brightness in the Windows Display Settings menu, you can get pretty good results.

It works best if you prefer to run apps and view websites in dark mode. As with pretty much all OLEDs, the more of the screen you light up in HDR mode, the lower the peak brightness you can achieve. With both monitors running Windows in dark mode, HDR enabled and SDR brightness maxed out, the brightness gap is substantially closed and the Alienware feels really very punchy. And at the same time, it retains its contrast and black level advantage.

The exception to that involves the characteristic purple tint of QD-OLED panels in bright ambient light. This can be problematic during the day, if you, for instance, situate the Alienware right near a big window that lets in lots of natural light. In that scenario, the QD-OLED will also look a little overly warm in terms of colour temperature, while the KTC's IPS panel looks more neutral.

So, what's the best budget panel technology overall?

This is going to sound like a massive cop out, but much of this comes down to personal preference. No question, there are some objective pros and cons. The Alienware and its QD-OLED panel is definitely faster, it has better black levels and contrast, plus superior viewing angles.

The mini-LED KTC, on the other hand, is clearly the brighter of the two and renders fonts more precisely thanks to its RGB-stripe subpixel structure. But what you, personally, make of those pros and cons will be another matter.

The fact that it's not an absolute slam dunk for one or other of the two options is in itself telling. But if you absolutely twisted my arm for a verdict, it would go something like this. It all comes down to brightness.

The QD-OLED option is better in almost every other way, so the question is what you make of its outright brightness. In standard SDR mode, I'd say the brightness of the Alienware AW2726DM is problematic. If I had to use it in that mode all the time, I'd still take it over the KTC M27T6S because of the far superior contrast, black levels, speed and viewing angles. But it would be a close run thing.

On the other hand, if I am allowed to switch on HDR mode, ramp up the SDR brightness in Windows and view basically all my apps in dark mode, then it's a much clearer win for the Alienware and thus for cheap OLED tech. But there would be times in games when it looked just a little bit dull and I'd know, deep down, the KTC and its sizzling mini-LED backlight would have given a more vibrant experience in that moment. As ever, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Good luck!

While I'm still side-eyeing and tentatively approaching AI for use for things like ideation, the world around me is breezing on by, putting it to use in every which way you can imagine. Some ways weird, some wonderful, and some probably incredibly wasteful. What's not wasteful, to my eyes, is putting it to the task of 3D printing housing for mainboards, which it can apparently do very well.

David Soria Parra, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, has used Claude Fable to successfully design a three-tray rack for three 13-inch Framework mainboards. The mainboards are the actual processor-clad circuit boards inside Framework laptops that you can either buy separately or tear out of one of the built laptops. Presumably three of them will be used for a multi-PC setup, or a server, or something like that.

Parra was working on the project since at least early June, having the AI use Fusion 360, AKA Autodesk Fusion, via an "MCP server", which is a way to let an LLM communicate with it (safely).

Apparently it researched the dimensions and so on, and then came up with a design. Parra said it was "straight from Claude to printing", although the finished product, Parra says, took 2–3 iterations with the model:

"I connected the fusion 360 MCP server and used Claude Code with dynamic workflows. Claude created the Fusion file and the stl for every component. So it was print ready. It also got me the bill of material to buy."

The recent final picture shows three Framework mainboards sitting in the 3D printed frame. The LLM even made sure there's a cutout for the heatsink and room for the heat pipe.

I suppose how well it works in practice, ie, how high temperatures get, will be the main question. Still, for the AI-tentative and completely design-inept like myself, this is the kind of thing that catches my eye. A cool project, for sure. Now just hand me one of those Framework mainboards given you seem to have so many spare.

Steam's new Games Made in Sweden sale is out here reminding me just how many great titles we owe to our Scandinavian cousins. Vermintide, Darktide, Payday, Valheim, Amnesia, Satisfactory—the list goes on and on. Currently, a lot of these games have decent discounts, such as Vermintide 2 (one of our games of the year for 2018) for only $3 / £2.34. For my money, it's still the best Warhammer Fantasy action game around, even eight years on.

But what really caught my eye in the sale was three of my favorite microstrategy games, each an absolute banger in its own right: Bad North, Kingdom Two Crowns, and Battle of Polytopia. You can grab all three for under £10 or just over $10. Here are the deals plus a bit about each game:

Bad North ($2.99 / £2.55)

Wonderfully simple yet surprisingly tough, Bad North is all about defending beautiful diorama-esque islands from a huge viking invasion nipping at your heels. Each turn you hop to a new island defence, gathering soldiers, upgrading units, and unlocking abilities in an ever-escalating game of tag.

It's such an elegant formula I was certain it was inspired by hnefatafl (or viking chess) since it contains a similar concept of fending off encircling enemies, but when I interviewed Oskar Stålberg, he assured me it isn't. Stålberg's equally brilliant island-building game, Townscaper, is also on sale, should you prefer something a little more chill.

Kingdom Two Crowns ($3.99 / £3.35)

Kingdom Two Crowns is a vibe. Not just one of my favorite microstrategy games, but one of my favorite games, period. Buoyed by a brilliantly chill soundtrack from Amos Roddy and some of the most gorgeous pixel art you will see in a game, the Kingdom series, for me, is the best iteration of the "build a town, get attacked at night" formula.

You ride across your sidescrolling kingdom on a menagerie of steeds, upgrading your defences, uplifting your population, and uncovering each island's mysteries through trial and error. It also has split-screen or online co-op. Perhaps my favorite mechanic is the coin purse—you can tap to drop coins to pay for upgrades, but you can only hold so many and they'll spill out when it overflows.

The game also lets you pick a number of different settings, including vikings, ancient Greece and feudal Japan.

The Battle of Polytopia ($4.49 / £3.41)

Last, but not least, The Battle of Polytopia is a no-nonsense 4x done fast. It's honestly quite cathartic if, like me, you're the kind of player who rarely gets time to finish his 4x campaigns, or peters out before the end. In Polytopia, you can face off against other players in a quick 30ish minute game instead of pouring days into your standard 4x playthrough.

It's got a surprising amount of depth, too, with 16 different civilizations, three game modes, and even diplomacy mechanics. Definitely one to grab if you're growing tired of endless playthrough bloat.

There are tons of other great games available in the Games Made in Sweden sale (though sadly not Arc Raiders), but still, thanks for all the good times Sweden!

If you're rockin' a current-gen AMD graphics card, there are yet more hints that multi frame gen (MFG), ie, frame gen that promises more than 2x frame rate, could soon be with us. 'Soon' is relative, of course, especially in the case of AMD, but detective work by a user on the Chinese forum Chiphell has revealed the presence of FSR MFG ratios up to 8x hidden in recent drivers (via Wccftech).

The user discovered the setting in the RadeonTuner tool, which hooks into the official AMD driver and provides a different app on top. This app, crucially, can present things in the driver that the regular AMD Adrenalin app might not yet give you access to. Things such as the FSR ratio drop-down.

To be clear, we already knew that MFG was probably being worked on by AMD, because earlier this year there was mention of "frame generation ratios" in documentation for the ADLX API. This implied that game developers were now being allowed to tinker with frame generation ratios, which implies the existence of ratios above 2x. In other words: multi frame gen.

Now, we have more confirmation of this, and not only that, but (A) it's seemingly in the actual drivers rather than just SDK documentation, and (B) the ratio maxes out at 8x. For reference, Nvidia's Multi Frame Gen maxes out at 6x.

As someone who uses an AMD RX 9070 XT as my daily driver, I am keenly aware of just how long it's taken AMD to implement promised technologies that Nvidia has already long been able to deliver. Technologies, that is, like multi frame gen, not to mention the latest upscaling and frame gen technologies in general, in more than a smattering of games.

The RadeonTuner tool also seems to show FSR Ray Regeneration and Neural Radiance Caching overrides, which will presumably allow us to override a game's settings to force FSR ray reconstruction and neural caching for better ray tracing.

I can't help but wonder, though, whether AMD users would rather more adoption of the latest FSR technologies we already have, such as regular 'Redstone' ML-powered frame gen and upscaling. There have been improvements on this front of late, though, with the technologies being allowed via driver-level overrides even for previous-gen AMD GPUs.

I also can't help but wonder how 8x frame gen will work in practice. I know for my part, I struggle to deal with the latency of even 3x or 4x frame gen on Nvidia cards. But I'm particularly sensitive to latency, so maybe 8x frame gen will have its place.

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of social media is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can now have a public feud that the rest of us have to witness. Case in point, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk are having a tiff on X, and it's starting to get out of hand.

Responding to an X post from Elon Musk, in which the SpaceX CEO and world's richest person declared that Altman "takes scamming to a whole new level," the OpenAI chief said: "Homeboy you're the one selling public market investors on short-term space data centers."

To which Musk replied: "We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves."

"After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple's phone technology! Wow." Musk continued. "What do you plan for an encore? That's tough to beat."

The open source AI charity claim relates to the much-reported Musk vs Altman trial earlier this year, in which the former accused Altman and OpenAI of breaching a non-profit contract by pivoting into a for-profit business, with Musk alleging he had been deceived into donating $38 million earlier in the company's history.

Musk lost the trial after an advisory jury decided the statute of limitations prevented a verdict in his favour. As for the Apple claim, the company has filed a lawsuit against two former employees who now work for OpenAI, alleging theft of intellectual property.

Apple claims that one of its former staff members "surreptitiously accessed and downloaded dozens of Apple’s confidential hardware-related files, including voluminous, detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data," before using that info to help OpenAI, among other complaints.

As you would imagine, the replies to Musk and Altman's posts regarding these issues are full of cheerleaders for either side, along with various other allegations against both tech chiefs. Because it's the internet. And civilised debate is apparently a rare thing.

As is, I don't know, arguing in private? Reading these posts is a bit like stumbling into a WhatsApp group you weren't supposed to join. Both seem to have withdrawn from the internet slappyfight for now, hopefully because someone from their respective legal teams has told them it might not be the best idea.

Or perhaps a second round is in the works, who can guess? Still, there's little love lost between the two, and a whole lot of drama playing out on a very public stage. Anyone got any popcorn?

Games on Steam have already been enjoying the various shades of the Steam Deck Compatibility check mark for some time now. Well, now you can check a title's compatibility on both the Steam Machine and SteamOS right there on its store page.

A few beats after the Steam Machine's June release, you can now check whether Valve's funky game box is up to the task of playing the depths of your backlog at a glance. On Steam, just click 'learn more' next to the Steam Deck compatibility rating for a brief breakdown of what works and what doesn't across Valve's various hardware and software platforms.

However, not all games enjoy a full Steam Machine compatibility rating; as spotted by Ars Technica, Black Myth: Wukong's compatibility is still listed as unknown, accompanied by a message that says "Valve is still learning" about the 2024 game, and that it doesn't "currently have further information regarding Steam Machine compatibility." In the case of Wukong, this could be because the game is too GPU and/or CPU intensive, causing the title to fail to reach a minimum threshold of, say, FPS while in-play on Valve's game box.

Otherwise, the game is listed as running "successfully on SteamOS". That means you're not limited to the Steam Machine's hardware specs (or indeed its disappointing price point or availability). You could instead opt to enjoy Wukong plus all the benefits of SteamOS on hardier hardware from someone other than Valve, such as the Lenovo Legion Go S.

Swapping to SteamOS on your home machine, for example, can come with its own share of drawbacks, however. For just one thing, Valve's Linux-based OS is known to often not play well with the kernel-level anti-cheat systems you'll increasingly find in competitive games nowadays.

Anyway, Valve is apparently "still learning" about a number of games when it comes to Steam Machine compatibility, including but not limited to Dragon’s Dogma 2, Elden Ring Nightreign, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and Resident Evil Requiem. That said, a number of games that are just about 'Playable' on Valve's handheld—such as 007: First Light—make the most of the Steam Machine's more powerful hardware and get bumped up to 'Verified'.

Personally, I've been jumping between much less graphically demanding titles. Level-based diorama builder Shanty Town enjoys 'Verified' status on both Steam Deck and Steam Machine, plus SteamOS compatibility. My other favourite this month has been Magical Princess (I feel like the title says it all), which instead enjoys the caveat-laden rating of 'Playable' on both the Steam Deck as well as the Steam Machine due to some text input and button glyph display shenanigans.

For now, you can't filter store results via Steam Machine or SteamOS compatibility, though that feature will likely soon follow. After all, the Great on Frame category was recently introduced, likely heralding the Steam Frame's imminent release. When that VR headset drops, we'll potentially see a similar compatibility category arrive too.

Summer Games Done Quick, the (self-explanatorily) summer version of Games Done Quick, has tallied a lovely $2.4 million in raised money for Doctors Without Borders, a charity that provides medical care around the world to those in need.

The number's been announced via a BlueSky post celebrating the milestone, one which was—and I must emphasise, briefly—undercut by a momentary lapse in sponsorship choice. Yesterday, the organisation announced it'd be doing a speedrunning showcase with SNK, developer of the Metal Slug franchise, for its anniversary.

SNK is a Japanese studio, but as of 2022, it's majority-owned by the MiSK Foundation—which itself is owned by Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Given the country's history of human rights violations, that's pretty contradictory to the mission statement of the charity GDQ just finished raising over $2 million for.

This prompted some immediate backlash and, credit where it's due, GDQ pulled the sponsored stream a mere three hours later, writing: "We have canceled our sponsored stream with SNK. We have heard the concerns from our community regarding this partnership, specifically the company’s majority ownership by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and the human rights concerns tied to the Saudi government.

"We will not accept the funds from this sponsorship or continue to work with this sponsor again. GDQ is committed to supporting human rights and inclusivity, and we recognize that this partnership conflicted with those values."

GDQ then went on to explain it "failed to conduct the level of review our community should expect from us and that was an oversight we deeply regret and take full responsibility for."

And while it does seem like a particularly large oversight—SNK's owner is no great secret, it's on the studio's Wikipedia page—I'd truly be a cynical, stone-hearted bugger to say the great effort of $2.4 million raised for a charity that actively helps people is, in any way, meaningfully undermined by a temporary lapse in judgement. Especially given the nigh-on immediate cancellation of the stream itself.

"Going forward," GDQ says, "We will review and strengthen our process for evaluating future sponsors and partners, including closer examination of companies’ ownership, to make sure they're aligned with our values."

Destiny 2 isn't going anywhere, but it also isn't… well, going anywhere. The game's servers will still be running for the foreseeable future, but Bungie has since ceased updates to its flagship shooter to move onto other projects, tragically laying off much of its staff in the aftermath of that decision.

It's a sorry state of affairs, and one that Warframe developers have lamented before, despite being in competition with the game from a ruthless, capitalistic sort of perspective. In actuality, there's a lot more camaraderie between developers, with live ops lead Megan Everett calling it "heartbreaking" back in June.

That sentiment has been repeated again by creative director Rebecca Ford in an interview with our friends over at GamesRadar+ during TennoCon: "It's horrible news, because it shows that even if you care so much, the business side of this industry always gets the last remark."

Ford says that even though the Destiny 2 team had their own successful IP and worked hard to keep it afloat, that kind of commitment just doesn't protect you from anything in the current industry:

"That's not the first time it's happened, and it'll happen again, where the business aspect of the videogame economy makes the decision for you, and it is existentially threatening at every level, because the idea that we aren't in charge of our own goodbye is something I wake up thinking about every single day."

It's something that's been grimly echoed throughout the industry, both during Microsoft's shock studio closures in 2024, which saw Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks unceremoniously closed, and in the bloodbath years that've ensued from all corners of the videogame industry.

A greater shame, too, because according to those of us on the PC Gamer team who've stuck with Destiny 2 for years, it's been left in one of its best states—though as we've seen with other games, you can be genuinely turning a corner and still get sucker-punched.

Palworld recently celebrated its launch into 1.0 and out of early access with 27-pages of patch notes and no price hike, and the devs were rewarded with the best turnout they've seen since the game first released into early access way back in January 2024.

A peak of 855,525 concurrent players turned up for the 1.0 release on Steam alone yesterday placing Palworld back up near the top of the Steam charts. It's a massive achievement and one that was properly celebrated, not least by Pocketpair's head of publishing and communications, John "Bucky" Buckley.

"I promise I'll try not to just be posting Steam numbers every day but really, thank you so much, gamers," Buckley said in a social media post. "Obviously, we had high expectations for 1.0 internally, but this is staggering. We really hope you are enjoying your time in Palworld again."

Palworld's all-time peak still sits at 2.1 million, a ridiculous achievement that places it above the likes of Counter Strike 2, Dota 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds. In fact, the only two games that have managed to beat Palworld's all-time player count on Steam are Black Myth: Wukong and PUBG, of course.

Players seem to be enjoying the full release so much that they're asking for even more content, in usual fashion. Ideas like randomised maps, switched-out resource nodes, and even a sequel have been thrown around. Players really can't get enough of Pals and guns.

There are some players, however, who aren't asking for even more content days after a major update. Instead, they're asking for fixes. "I just want them to finally fix and polish the many systems involved in bases and pal behavior," one player says. "Building/stability, missing pieces, pathfinding and interactions, clipping, proper work priorities and so on. It's a huge part of the game and I was honestly disappointed with 1.0 in that regard. The state this is in is fine for EA but hard to accept for a full release."

After a successful launch weekend, Palworld's biggest challenge, as it is with all games, will be retaining players. That's not to say it needs to be reaching the heights of last weekend from here on out—hell, even if it pulled in an eighth of what it did yesterday that would still be impressive—but with so much competition it'll have to keep players hooked one way or another.

A report from The Wall Street Journal tells the tale of Tim Cook's visit to the White House last summer, in which the Apple chief attempted to persuade the administration to abandon plans to impose tariffs on 100% of all semiconductor imports.

Apple was eventually granted an exemption to the tariffs, in return for a commitment to invest $100 billion into US manufacturing efforts. However, the WSJ says that US president Donald Trump and US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick also "urged" Cook to use Intel's manufacturing plants to make some of its chips.

Later that same month, the US government converted $9 billion in federal grants into a 10% stake in Intel, making it the company's largest shareholder. Trump announced in June of this year that Apple had agreed to build chips with Intel in the US in a Truth Social post, although neither company has issued a formal confirmation of the deal beyond a reported preliminary agreement.

According to the WSJ, Apple plans to have Intel make chips for Mac laptops and iPhones, according to one of its sources familiar with the negotiations.

Intel's stock price, meanwhile, has risen significantly over the past year, more than quadrupling since CEO Lip-Bu Tan took over the reigns in March of 2025. As the outlet reports, much of that good fortune can be attributed to CPU demand for AI servers, but the WSJ argues that the Trump administration's "financial and strategic patronage" has been "the more crucial factor."

Tan is said to visit Washington around once a month to meet with officials from the US Commerce Department, and "talks on the phone regularly" with Lutnick. Meanwhile, Bill Frauenhofer, described as the US government's "chips czar" is said to receive a quarterly briefing from Intel CFO David Zinser, with members of his staff meeting regularly with Intel executives.

All of which is to say, Intel's links with the US government seem to run very deeply indeed, after previous years of financial strife. And Apple, for its part, will be keen to secure chip manufacturing capacity for its products beyond that of TSMC, given the Taiwanese chip giant's capacity constraints in the middle of the AI boom.

So, the deal between the two makes a lot of sense. However, this arrangement certainly fits with the Trump administration's push to bolster chip manufacturing on US soil, and given the federal investment in Intel, it also appears to be a good bet financially for all involved.

Not least of all Apple, which, if these reports are correct and the deal goes ahead, managed to avoid some major tariffs in the process. Make of that, as they say, as you will.

Catching Panthalus isn't something you'll be able to do early on in Palworld. As with most other legendary pals, this newly-added giant whale is a tricky fight, and what's more, you'll have to complete a quest before you can even face it.

Despite the fact you get the Panthalus quest after the new tower boss added in 1.0, you can actually do it yourself at any time provided you visit the Ancient Civilization Researcher at the Deserted Islet. This means that if you're strong, but haven't progressed the towers much, you can still fight Panthalus and catch it.

How to get Panthalus in Palworld

To catch Panthalus, you first have to unlock its boss fight on the Deserted Islet, a fair way to the north of the Windswept Hills, just north of the Twilight Dunes. It's quite easy to spot, since it's right in the middle of the channel between Ice Wind Island on the left, and the ruins at the southern tip of the Astral Mountains on the right.

Here you'll find an Ancient Civilization Researcher, who will ask you to collect four bones from around the map, beginning the Panthalus quest. Besides being able to reach the researcher, there isn't an unlock requirement for this quest, though Panthalus is a very tough fight.

You also don't need to unlock this quest to find the bones—you can gather all four and then speak to the Ancient Civilization Researcher for the first time after, so it's entirely up to you which order you do things in.

Marine Echobone location (124, -524)

The first bone is on the skull of the giant whale skeleton to the west of where you start in the Windswept Hills. It's really easy to spot at a distance, since it emits a glowing light, so simply fly over and continue west up the skeleton to the skull where you can grab it.

Silent Echobone location (356, -111)

The second bone is a reasonable distance to the northeast of the Windswept Hills, east of the Verdant Brook, and northwest of Eastern Wild Island, right by where the Level 55 Jormuntide hangs out. As with the others, you're looking for a giant whale skeleton.

Head to the Altar of the Windcaller fast travel point, then go south across the water, over the protruding ribcage (and Jormuntide), to spot the glowing item on a low down bit of bone at the back.

Seafoam Echobone location (-515, -545)

This third bone is located far to the west of the Windswept Hills towards the center of Mount Obsidian. You'll want Level 2 Heat Resistance for this, so wear the Tropical Outfit or Heat Resistant Pelt Armour and keep your fire pals stowed.

Travel to the Eternal Pyre Tower Entrance fast travel, then head due east over the cliff edge to spot the giant skeleton on the right side of the lava pools area below. The item is just inside the skull, which is on the side of the skeleton closest to you.

Tidewind Echobone location (-265, 483)

The final bone is in the north of the Astral Mountains, which are themselves to the far north of the Windswept Hills. If you've already unlocked the Deserted Islet where the Ancient Civilization Researcher is, you could also head there and continue north. You should also bring at least Level 2 Cold Resistance for this icy biome.

From the Land of Absolute Zero fast travel, head west over the cliff and down into the frozen lake where you'll spot the head of the giant skeleton and the item glowing on top of it.

How to craft the Echoing Flute

Now you need to head to the Ancient Civilization Researcher on the Deserted Islet. If it's your first time speaking to them, you'll have to accept the quest first, and then speak to them again. This will get you the Faded Schematic, which you can use to craft the Echoing Flute at any workbench using the four bones you found.

After that, head back to the researcher, speak to them, and interact with the glowing symbols on the stone nearby to unlock the Panthalus boss.

How to beat Panthalus

As with any other legendary pal, Panthalus is really hard. The other way you get this quest is after the newest tower boss, so it's not something you're expected to do early. You also only have ten minutes to defeat them. You'll want to bring strong gear like a Plasma Cannon or Multi Guided Missile Launcher, but most importantly, bring a high level, fast-flying pal you can ride during the fight.

Panthalus's entire arena is water apart from one small island, so land-based pals will get decimated. Being able to fly fast will help you avoid most of the attacks. Once you reduce Panthalus's health fully, it'll collapse and you'll get an opportunity to catch it with a sphere—this is 100% guaranteed, so you can focus on the fight knowing you'll for sure catch the legendary pal at the end.

It was still a ways off, but I'd kind of latched on to '2028' being the end in sight of the raging memory supply crisis. However, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung reckons we should only be so lucky.

"We forecast that ‌next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective," Kwak recently told Reuters. Not only is 2027 apparently set to be even worse, but Kwak also predicts the situation won't improve for years beyond the 2028 date I'd been holding on to, when SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung are all set to complete capacity expanding builds.

"Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations," Kwak said, "We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030. But we are doing our best to solve the problem."

The company also began trading on Nasdaq last Friday, with a US megalisting of shares that was seven times oversubscribed. SK hynix said then that it wants to use the resulting capital for at least two more construction projects in South Korea: a fabrication hub in Yongin, as well as an advanced packaging facility in Cheongju.

Kwak also said that the company is considering a number of other global sites for future wafer ⁠fabrication investment. He said, "The ​US, Japan, and Southeast Asia are all under consideration. Nothing has been decided yet. We are evaluating which location can provide the greatest business advantage."

The tech stock market is still incredibly volatile though; while SK hynix shares were up 13.3% at $168.85 on the Nasdaq Friday afternoon, the company's shares then plunged by 15% in Seoul on Monday. According to Reuters, this marks the company's biggest one-day decline in nearly 20 years. As for the company's US-listed shares come Monday morning, those dipped by 9.2% to $152.50.

What explains that dip? For one thing, analysts say that South Korea's recent multi-billion dollar investments in the AI chip industry, plus all of those other capacity-expanding builds I mentioned earlier, has heightened investor anxiety that tight memory supply may tip over into oversupply in the coming years. Jing Jie Yu, an equity analyst at Morningstar, said, "Our base case here is the fresh capacity in 2027 and 2028 coming up in earnest will improve supply dynamics, thereby leading to price erosion."

Furthermore, the AI bubble is arguably looking a bit strained. Morningstar's director, Lorraine Tan, said, "Despite accelerating artificial intelligence adoption, monetisation remains uncertain and profitability for key players, such as OpenAI, appears to be under pressure. Funding is also shifting toward debt or equity, raising concerns about the maintainability of current spending levels."

In other words, yes, the industry is hoovering up all the memory, but if AI spending fails to see a sensible return on that investment, or data centre build out calms down, the bubble may burst and there will be much less demand for all of that silicon.

If you ask Microsoft Copilot if it's a web app, it answers in the negative. Technically, as the AI points out, Copilot now interfaces with you through an Edge-based web app installed on your Windows 11 PC, but the model lives elsewhere in the cloud.

And said Copilot app is getting a helpful new feature, according to Windows Latest, referred to as PC Insights. This will allow it to connect to Windows APIs and analyse your system hardware, answering questions like "what is my current CPU usage" and helping you find what might be slowing down your PC.

Other example prompts found by Windows Latest include "Do I have enough space for a 100 GB game," "What graphics card do I have," and "Is my antivirus running?"

The feature is said to be currently rolling out to Copilot US users, and sounds rather useful, even if it can't directly fix PC performance problems by itself. Unfortunately, the web app can be something of a RAM hog, which raises the possibility that Copilot itself may be contributing to your dog-slow PC performance on a RAM-limited machine.

Windows Latest recorded 791.7 MB of RAM usage from the Copilot app at idle, suggesting it can reach up to 1 GB of system RAM usage in total. I've left the Copilot app open in the background as I write this article, and it's currently sitting at around 560 MB—making it the third most RAM-heavy application currently running on my PC.

That might not sound like a big deal, but anyone using Copilot to help find resource-sapping applications running in the background may find it's the app itself that's taking the biggest chunk of precious RAM space. And it's not like we're living in a world where extra system RAM is cheap and easy to obtain.

It's not the only RAM-sapping offender I have to bat away on a regular basis, either. The WhatsApp, err... app is also a web-based affair these days, and regularly carves out 1 GB+ chunks of my system resources. Which seems a bit rich, given the previous, non-web app implementation barely used any RAM capacity at all.

Although Microsoft has committed to making Windows 11 leaner and meaner in response to user critique in recent months, it still feels like a bloated OS in comparison to... well, almost any other operating system you can think of.

And while I welcome the idea that Copilot will soon be able to help less-computer-minded users track down potential system problems, it seems like one of the most useful things it could do to improve performance would be to shut itself down entirely. Which is... not the greatest state of affairs, let's be honest.

If you've forgotten Silent Hill: Downpour it was the western-developed Silent Hill that went semi-open world and had a bunch of sidequests in it, but was still a bit too busy trying to retell Silent Hill 2 only with the villain in a different hat. It wasn't a disaster, but to say "at least it wasn't Silent Hill: Homecoming or the arcade game" is to damn it with such faint praise you may as well be whispering from the other side of the street.

Still, those sidequests were tasty. Ignore the main plot about a prison escapee being chased by embodiments of his own guilt—wow, a man in prison has a dark past, what a shocking development—and you could explore a town full of ghost stories and little mysteries. The one where you follow color-coded ribbons to find out what happened to a missing girl was a particular favorite, a reminder that Silent Hill can still be properly haunting when it tries.

Good luck trying to play it today, though. Downpour came out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and absolutely nothing else, which means your best bet is probably to emulate it in RPCS3. Or to wait for a PC native port to come along, and what's that? Oh, it's a trailer for a PC native port someone's been chipping away at.

Indie_RU's port isn't just a way to play Downpour on PC with an uncapped framerate and higher resolutions, nice as that always is. It's also restoring cut content, letting us wield extra weapons like the Bogeyman's hammer and bringing back deleted cutscenes, notes, dialogue, and entire sidequests. It's also restored a boss battle seen in an early trailer where you fight the "Monocle Man" who was reduced to a cameo in the finished game.

Apparently we can expect the finished product around September/October, which is also when we're expecting Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn Interactive's Scottish take on the series. I've got my fingers crossed that's going to push the series in an interesting direction, because all those arena battles in Silent Hill F weren't really my cup of rusty tea with mud in it, or whatever they drink in Silent Hill.

Last month at the PC Gaming Show we got to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at Total War: Warhammer 40,000 including glimpses of a battle between the Astra Militarum and orks. The video above, revealed at BiliBili World, is a more detailed look at the same battle in the Armageddon Theatre campaign, and looks sick as hell.

Though I'm not convinced my PC will be able to run it. Seeing the framerate drop when the explosions go off and limbs start flying through the air has me looking at my wallet in concern.

While the spectacle looks neat, once again the part I'm most interested in is the cover system. A couple of minutes into that video, you can see the player send infantry into barricades and it looks like they dynamically split into smaller squads to suit the cover available, and to take advantage of cover provided on the upper storey of a ruined building.

Then the ogryns come along and stomp through a bunch of it. Like the sentinel walkers in an earlier part of the footage, the hefty lads trash barricades they pass through while the regular infantry are animated vaulting over them. Looks like we'll have to be careful to maneuver around any protection we want to preserve for the sake of keeping the little guys alive.

Though maybe that's not in character. As the narrator says watching a barrage rain destruction on one and all, "These men did their duty." The average Imperial Guardsmen has an estimated life expectancy of 15 hours in combat, and once you've done your duty tying down enemies with jump-packs long enough for the artillery to load, well, both you and your cover are expendable.

As reported by WCCFtech, the Dutch consumer organization Stichting Massaschade & Consument now believes it has an even stronger case in its €400 million ($457 million) lawsuit against Sony over the 30% rate it charges on every game sold through the PlayStation Store, a "Sony tax" that retail games are not subject to⁠—the same retail games Sony has announced it will discontinue by 2028.

"The end of physical discs removes the last place where a PlayStation game could still be bought and sold at a competitive price," SM&C chair Lucia Melcherts told WCCFtech. "No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it.

"That is exactly the harm our Fair PlayStation claim is about: a price can never be fair when the buyer is left with no ownership and no alternative."

It's illustrative to compare this situation with Epic's Apple Store challenges and the antitrust lawsuits faced by Steam⁠—with one brought against it by another, different Dutch consumer group. Apple, which sells the hardware and maintains its own storefront⁠—a system which closely maps to Sony's⁠—was ultimately forced to relinquish some of control of that ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Steam's flat 30% take (sound familiar?) from everyone on the platform, be they EA or a bedroom programmer, is my least favorite part of my preferred storefront. But it doesn't own our PCs the way a console manufacturer or Apple controls a non-jailbroken device. Indeed, you can install alternate operating systems, competing storefronts, and even physical PC games onto Steam Decks and Steam Machines.

Tweaktown reported PlayStation's 2025 revenue as ¥4.69 trillion ($29 billion), but a $427 million lawsuit isn't anything to sneeze at, and the company is likely to face other challenges to its policies around the PlayStation Store. Whether it's physical discs or some other concession to consumers and watchdogs, as advocated by analyst Daniel Ahmad, something's gotta give.

First spotted by Kotaku, prolific director Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, Interstellar) recently gave his takes on AI in filmmaking and the explosive success of Backrooms in an interview with The Telegraph (readers may encounter a paywall). The interview comes as part of the lead up to Nolan's next film, an adaptation of the Homeric epic, the Odyssey.

"This is why I never bought into the arguments that young audiences’ attention spans are too fried to enjoy a three-hour Greek epic," Nolan told the Telegraph in reference to the reception of Backrooms and the indie horror hit, Obsession. "Those films are so mysterious and ruminative. I mean, parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them."

Nolan also pointed out how Obsession and Backrooms directors Curry Barker and Nate Parsons prioritized practical effects, and have been publicly skeptical of AI's future in film. "I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime," Nolan said of AI's popular rejection in the arts⁠—particularly among Gen Z⁠—despite the tech's aggressive push.

"So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it." said Nolan. Regarding his own children in the age cohort, Nolan observed that "Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh.

"They see it for what it is very quickly⁠—and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well. And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in film-making it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling."

It's been an interesting knock-on effect of gen AI that analogue methods now have increased value independent of aesthetics: Written words, blue book exams in schools, and stop-motion animation can all function as proof of work.

That's increasingly important because there has been an almost unanimous rejection of generated material or assets by audiences and critics in serious or commercial endeavors, be they games, film, writing, music, or visual art. If you get caught doing it in the games industry, you're gonna have a jpeg-of-text apology posted to Twitter in your future, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #302 (UK, March 2017). You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

My playthrough of the first game was more disaster than Dishonored. At the time, I didn’t quite grasp that slitting every throat I met in those early Dunwall levels would send me spiraling toward the dreaded High Chaos ending, never to return.

As the hours rolled on and the increasing swell of rats began to gnaw on Corvo’s bootstraps, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to redress the balance by going full stealth, stifling the screams of my foes without shuffling them off their mortal coil.

Alas, Arkane’s Chaos system was more severe than I’d anticipated. The rats continued to scoff their way through the mounds of decaying flesh strewn about the city, and poor Emily might as well have been crowned Queen of the Dunwall rodents by the end, her citizens having long since been digested in a million tiny rat stomachs.

No wonder Corvo felt so sluggish when he possessed them—his hosts had been binging on the Great Dunwall Rot-off. Fortunately, Arkane evidently managed to get the exterminators in before the events of Dishonored 2, and I finally got my chance to do things right.

In a fit of madness, I decided to embark on a perfect, no-kill, no-detection run—a tall order for someone whose last attempt at stealth ended up elbowing half of Prague to death in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

40 hours later, I finally succeeded, but not without having doused my trigger finger in several vats of anti-itch cream first. Indeed, there were several moments during the Clockwork Mansion mission where I almost gave in.

After five hours of quick-saves and hasty restarts (yes, five), I could have happily shot Kirin Jindosh in the face during our eventual confrontation, but the opportunity to strap him to his own electric chair and reduce him to a babbling idiot felt like better revenge.

Even the Grand Designs team would struggle to piece his house back together, let alone someone who can’t even spell their own name anymore.

Little did I know that Jindosh would have one last laugh, as just a couple of chapters later I encountered his infamous Jindosh Lock, a sealed door that you can only open by solving a riddle. I could have squeezed some hints out of the local neighbourhood gang lords, but I was determined to solve it peacefully. So I sat there, staring at it. I don’t know how much time passed, but even my monitor got bored waiting, going into sleep mode long before I cracked the combination.

Paper case

Damn you, Jindosh, I thought. This scrambled brainpan isn’t going to get the best of me. So I put my keyboard aside, grabbed a pen and reached for my dusty gaming notebook, something I haven’t touched since scrawling my way through The Witness earlier in the year. I tore out several scraps of paper and made cards for every last variable, shifting them around until, at last, my brain whirred into life.

Admittedly, it was immensely satisfying solving Jindosh’s last remaining masterwork, but it did make me wonder whether I should have been so merciful just a few hours before. I won’t spoil the solution here, but I will say you should definitely start with the alcohol (both literally and figuratively). It helps. A lot.

As reported by Massively OP, senior developers at ZeniMax Online Studios said that the company has returned to its circa 2015-2018 headcount, before it staffed up for the development of canceled MMO Blackbird. The estimate is similar to one recently proffered by id Software in a statement on X, "The Everything App."

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) Discord moderator Baratron relayed the statement from the Elder Scrolls Online Tavern event in Hesse, Germany, where a number of devs are interacting with fans.

"According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), ZeniMax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset,” Baratron told the UESP Discord. "Which, as we know, are both highly acclaimed DLCs.

"So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode."

For context, ESO's Orsinium (containing the region of Wrothgar) and Summerset DLCs were released in 2015 and 2018 respectively. In id Software's statement last week, it wrote that "The team today is about the size we were when making Doom (2016)." According to WARN Act filings, ZeniMax Online and id Software laid off 213 and 136 employees respectively. ZeniMax also laid off 62 people in 2025 immediately following the cancellation of Blackbird.

I have some sympathy to members of these studios wanting to counter narratives of their decline⁠—see also Outer Worlds 2 director Brandon Adler's harsh words for outsiders who flippantly claim the studio no longer has the same developers who made classics like KotOR 2 or New Vegas. It is also not inherently sinister for two studios with the same parent company to adopt a similar PR line.

At the same time, it doesn't sit right with me. It is an admission of undoing a decade of growth and development at these studios. Even if the headcount is the same on paper, a studio on the upswing is a vastly different environment from one that's just been gutted. The 136 people fired from id and 213 from ZeniMax were brought in for a reason. Game development has changed in the span of 10 years.

Bungie and BioWare probably hit similar headcounts as in their golden ages amid wave after wave of layoffs in the 2020s, and it did not improve their output or efficiency. It did not bring back Halo: Reach or Mass Effect 2.

If this is a PR justification Microsoft would like to exploit in the coming days, I have no interest in indulging it. It carries the tacit implication that those who were laid off did not matter, and beckons to that nasty "lazy devs" rhetoric.

It's a line of thinking that, at its heart, allows for this wanton misery and mismanagement to have been a necessary course correction by the adults in the room. I have no patience for it.

We're officially seven months into 2026. First of all, what the hell? I don't know about you, but it feels like this year has absolutely whizzed by despite… not a whole lot happening. Apart from, y'know, an insane number of layoffs and the industry slowly crumbling while a giant GTA 6-shaped asteroid slowly approaches.

But in the mess and chaos, we've still been blessed with some pretty good videogames this year, as well as killer soundtracks to go alongside them. I'll admit I've not quite been on top of my 2026 gaming this year—I'm well and truly back in my Final Fantasy 14 brainrot era, and have also discovered Project Zomboid 13 years too late. So we're on a little retro vibe right now.

That doesn't mean I haven't had time to play any new releases, though. Or that I've not been listening to their music even when I haven't quite gotten around to actually playing the damn thing yet. While there's still another five months of potential videogame bangers ahead of us, I wanted to take a look and see which tracks really grabbed my attention so far in the big 2026.

If you've got some 2026 favourites of your own, I'd love to hear which soundtracks or specific videogame tunes have been on your radar this year. Be sure to drop a comment and let me know!

In case you haven't heard, Sony recently announced that it will stop producing physical game discs come 2028—a move PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon argued continues a trend of consoles turning into little more than worse PCs. But Daniel Ahmad, a videogame market analyst and director of research and insights at Niko Partners, argued in a post on X that we've all done this song and dance before (thanks, Gamesradar).

"[It's] like Apple removing the CD Drive from its laptops starting in 2008," Ahmad said in the post. "There were definitely a high number of complaints at the time, but not a single person is complaining about it today. You couldn't find many people complaining in the early 2010s either."

He does add one apt caveat to this comparison, saying "this time a new laptop will cost $5,000 and my old one with a disc drive works just fine." Ahmad argued that this was an inevitable outcome for Sony: "If not PS6, then PS7." Digital sales of full games have come to make up the overwhelming majority of sales for both Playstation and Xbox, therefore "the truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point."

But he also points out this isn't just a "market-driven" change, but a "platform-led push by Sony" to squeeze out more money per user⁠—something the company's leadership has said is a major priority moving forward. Sony makes more on a digital game sale on the console's bespoke marketplace (in other words, a closed ecosystem further emphasized by the company's move away from PC ports) than it does on a retail game sale.

As console prices continue to balloon in the wake of the RAMpocalypse, the company is looking for extra ways to "focus on hardcore gamers who are willing to spend more than ever" even if it means alienating players who refuse to make the switch to digital gaming.

As for whether the backlash could change Sony's course, Ahmad isn't sure: "I'd say it's unlikely, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do end up clarifying certain aspects … Regardless of whether we're talking about bringing physical back, or embracing digital, the conversation needs to shift to consumer rights and what a license should enable. Stop Killing Games was one part of it, but gifting, family sharing, refunds, and other aspects are just as important."

I still use an external CD drive on my PC with some frequency, and it's hard to imagine the Playstation 6 coming with an attachable alternative (like the PS5's digital-only version has) now that Sony is leaving physical game discs behind. But this move has also been precipitated by the degradation of physical games' value: We all probably remember the first time we opened a box to only find a download code, or waited a good long while for an install process that was way too big to be a day one patch.

Christoffer Bodegård got into PC gaming via a DOS machine inherited from his father. "The Swedish state had a thing where basically everybody got a computer, especially state employees," says Bodegård. The first game he played on it was Disney's The Jungle book, which he recalls as being "pretty hard". But the most significant game from Bodegård's childhood was Dragon Age: Origins, which he played just before entering high school.

"I'd played roleplaying games before, but that was the game that made me go 'I love this genre,'" he says. "So doing the thing I always do, I did research on top 100 lists and just played everything … the last one I played was Planescape: Torment. That raised the bar for everything."

Bodegård's fascination with both D&D and CRPGs would ultimately lead him to create one of his own—Esoteric Ebb. Built over eight years and designed to replicate the unpredictability of tabletop RPGs, it sees you play as the world's worst cleric tasked with solving the mystery behind an exploding tea shop on the eve of a fantasy realm's first ever election.

Esoteric Ebb released in March to rave reviews and commercial success. Bodegård is currently exploring ideas for his next project, which he says will use "the technology that I made for Esoteric Ebb"—though it won't necessarily be a sequel. But he took a break from that to guide me through the many branching pathways of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing the same game I've been playing since it launched, basically on and off, and that is Victoria 3. I play all Paradox games and am a superfan, arguably, but I only have like 400 hours or so in Victoria, so I'm barely getting [started]. I suck at the game, basically, is what I'm saying. But I love it, it's really fun to simulate the economic aspects of that period, alongside all the political stuff.

I tried getting into Victoria 2, because my friend Max is really into it, and he tried to convince me. Played some multiplayer with him, I could never get into it. This was a year before Victoria 3, so I always said "OK, I'm gonna push that aside, I'm gonna get it when it comes out."

Now, of course, Victoria 3, it's such a debatable topic, because the mechanics—I'm trying to be a good representative of supporting Swedish game development, but Paradox, they're doing fine either way—I think it's a masterpiece in the making. It's so close to being absolutely amazing. You can just see all the things that [need improving]. Obviously, the developers are also aware of [those], they need a couple of years to work on it … I like the fact that they've supported it to actually finish making their masterpiece.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

The actual previous game I played was Abiotic Factor. It's really good. It's Half-Life with the boys. I finally have time to play games with the boys again. We have a D&D game going but, playing these general games, I usually take all the time where we usually hang out and play games and just sit and work on Ebb while they're playing. So I'll watch their stream or whatever. They play a lot of Final Fantasy 14. I purposely made the choice not to play it with them to instead work on Ebb years ago.

But it was half [price] off for Abiotic Factor, and I think one of them said "Hey, do you want to play?" and I was like "Yes, I want to play." It was really fun. It was like "Yeah, we're all into Half-Life." I'm not a base builder, but I can go around and shoot stuff, and it's just fun.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I had to look up the specific release months and dates for these games, because I had four games that were 1999-2000. And these are some of my classic favourites. The four of them were Heroes [of Might and Magic] 3, King of Dragon Pass, Deus Ex, and Diablo 2. Which one comes first? It was Heroes 3 in February.

Which is good! Because I have a top list of games on my personal website, and at the top is obviously Heroes 3. That was basically the game that was truly influential for me. I was introduced to it by my cousin and I played it forever. I still play it. I have the modded version called Horn of the Abyss.

I like the fact that it's inspired a bunch of stuff, and I get why it's popular now. It's because of the core game loop of randomised maps, the AI being fun to fight against, building up numbers, going and killing a thing, having very strong different strategies especially for multiplayer, for hardcore players, mixing that with an extremely solid fantasy base.

Amazing music. Amazing aesthetics. Just it being a good experience to press the 'End Turn' button and have that little jingle play. It's dopamine. It's just really well designed. When we were doing the jingles for, like, the short rest [in Esoteric Ebb], the composer was like "OK, you know Heroes 3?" And we were like "Yeah! Of course, why wouldn't we?"

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

So technically it's Esoteric Ebb, because I didn't turn off the thing of Unity being counted into the hours on Steam until way too late, so I have like 1,000 hours of Ebb. But that's cheating because that's work. The real game is Europa Universalis IV. That is the game I play the most.

I was absolutely addicted to that for a very long time and then I finished the game, and I'm done in a spiritual sense. One of the caveats is that I am also terrible at the game still, so that's fun. Absolute ass. Complete bullshit. But here's the thing, I picked it up again—which also boosted the numbers—when I got into the greatest mod of all time.

Anbennar is essentially classic D&D fantasy, but in a way that fits the [EU IV] worldbuilding. It's extremely deep, extremely elaborate, extremely fun, extremely creative, and it fits a grand strategy gameplay loop perfectly … they have things that mirror the real Europe Universalis IV timeline, right? A clash between the main religions, the league wars, they have the black powder rebellion for the French Revolution.

They have all of these different things and all of it is very interesting, because they take, not just from a world building perspective and aesthetics, but the fact that they take mechanics from this—and also Victoria 3—and they revert them and twist them into something entirely new. So when you play, for example, the dwarves, you're in the mountains, most of it is uncolonized, it's just a bunch of caves, and you're playing essentially as an adventuring band using the mechanics of tribes from North America.

You move across the map as a state that is an adventure band, you grow, you go on adventures, you delve for treasures, you fight against other tribes, and then you eventually settle and expand, and it's an entirely new way of playing the game with the same mechanics, and it's absolutely incredible.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

That's Deus Ex. Ever since I played it for the first time, also in high school, I just don't uninstall it, because sometimes I hop back into it, and I've had some projects that are first-person. I want to do a first-person game at some point, that would be really fun, specifically like Ultima Underworld. I sometimes joke in interviews that if somebody gave me unlimited resources, that I would try to make an Elder Scrolls killer, but I want to do it in my style.

But Deus Ex is one of the core inspirations for a lot of the design decisions in Esoteric Ebb. It's such a classic. I try to do something different every time. It's such a good RPG because of that. You can take inspiration for how to create choice opportunities for players, where they specifically don't always have to make choices in text. With dialogue choices. There's much of that, but I enjoy way more when your choices are more "Do you go left or right? Do you hop up or do you go down, do you crash through the window or do you pick the lock?"

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

The one that's more unique and weird is Notepad++. I love it. I modded the hell out of my version so it looks really weird. I built it so that it works perfectly with Ink files, because I write scripts in Ink.

It has everything in it in order to code, and you can also plug in everything. You can edit it as much as you want, getting the highlights for different code stuff, and it just works with everything. And the reason why I love it is because it's like Notepad, meaning that it's very lightweight.

That's the main reason why I don't use all these really cool tools for interactive writing that exist … [they're] slightly not fast enough for me. When people ask how this game has so many choices while some games don't have as many choices, part of that is just stuff like voice acting … [But] it's also a thing of exhaustion on the side of the writer.

If the writer feels like it's slightly annoying to add another choice option, and it takes a little bit longer to click and add that bubble and structure it, they are going to be infinitely more likely to not add more choices. When you're writing and it's super-fast and really quick to add 15 different choices, even just as a joke, then you're much more likely to.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I had a period where I would drag and drop images to my desktop from the internet to just save them. I stopped doing that when I started actively using the command Windows+Shift+S to take screenshots and just copy those into Discord instead.

So my desktop is cleaner now, but I had a period where my desktop would be covered in images from stuff I'd saved, to the point where at the end of the year it would be completely filled. I have an old laptop, I think, that's like, you can't see the desktop. That's insane behaviour as a person.

What's old is new in League of Legends Classic, which was teased a couple of weeks ago in the wake of leak after leak. The full reveal came during yesterday's MSI Finals, where the mode debuted in a showmatch starring pros like Doublelift and Cpt Jack. It's a Frankenstein's monster of different eras with a huge emphasis on season three: a bunch of old kits are back, but some of the art has been modernized and various late additions like ward trinkets have made it in.

More details can be found on the Riot Games website, which reveals that the mode will release later this month on July 29. It names a bunch of old, busted builds poised to make their triumphant return: ability power Master Yi (God help us), pre-rework Sion (God help us), any mage with Deathfire Grasp, and so on.

But unlike, say, World of Warcraft Classic, it won't split itself up into era-locked versions—the mode will change with the times as voted by the community, similar to Old School RuneScape. If we, the common MOBA proletariat, can vote the 3v3 map Twisted Treeline back into League of Legends, it might just restore my faith in democracy.

And yes, the old upgrade systems are back. Runes and quintessences will let you pile on incremental stat upgrades, and the old mastery pages will simplify the system back down to three talent trees. Old summoner spells are back too, so if you've been missing the likes of rally and revive, you're in luck.

If you're hungry for more details, RiotMeddler has been on Reddit confirming various factoids. For instance, more old-school champions will be added over time—Graves and Urgot were examples he gave of characters he was particularly excited for, and others like Sion will be there day one. And if you're hoping to hear that sweet champion select song of auld, it's coming back.

Player reaction online seems mixed, especially with regard to the mode's 'era mashup' approach. "They really should remove the modern mechanics (trinket, base gates) and the modern models should AT THE VERY LEAST be toggleable into the old base skins," commented Reddit user WitchySofia.

The art style seems a prominent point of contention: "I want Meddler to tell me why they had an artist spend time making a brand new, never before seen health bar graphic that's uglier than the old health bar," said Reddit user TheScyphozoa on the same thread.

Comparisons, like this one from Reddit user JaxIsBadDontPick_ indeed suggest that the game version used in the showmatch has more muted colors and newer character models than League actually had a decade and a half ago.RiotMeddler confirmed in a different thread on Reddit that a dev blog with "a range of details" will go up Tuesday.

I've sunk legendary galleons, sailed across the Caribbean procuring plunder, and I've experienced Edward Kenway's redemption arc from start to finish. But upon rolling credits on Ubisoft's nostalgia-fuelled remake, I came to a realisation: almost everything good in Black Flag Resynced exists in the original game.

Sure, it's prettier and quality of life changes do help sand away the rougher edges, but removing all friction from a game isn't necessarily a good thing. Take stealth sequences, for instance—Black Flag Resynced now allows you to crouch anywhere, but it also removes all fail conditions from stealth missions, making the system somewhat redundant.

This give-and-take is something I experienced frequently with the remake. Resynced makes climbing far faster, but this means you no longer have to think about movement as you zoom up the side of almost every structure in sight. And don't even get me started on removing hidden blade combat, fisticuffs, and temporary weapons. The new cutlass-only fighting may be slightly harder, but it's ultimately bland thanks to fewer options.

I've now spent 40 hours with Black Flag Resynced, but I find myself unconvinced it ever needed a remake, especially one which more often chooses to change core components over retaining the feel of the original. It'd be a lie to say Resynced isn't good, but almost everything good in it is still good in Black Flag. Better, in fact, if a fond nostalgic adventure be your wish and you'd prefer not to toss a handful of dubloons in the sand for a game you likely own.

Hopping into the original Black Flag after playing Resynced, I was shocked by how remarkably well the game has aged. The combat still feels fluid (albeit easy thanks to chain finishers) but it benefits from the classic high profile, low profile control scheme that came to define the first three Assassin's Creed games—something the remake also does away with.

The movement and climbing also feel far more grounded. Instead of zipping up the sides of cathedrals, you've got to route yourself somewhat, especially since Black Flag includes a bunch of tailing sequences that require you to keep a target in sight at all times. Many players despised these, but after playing Resynced where stealth never mattered and I could murder my way through every situation, the challenge felt positively refreshing.

Alongside the visual upgrade, one of the few unequivocally positive changes is that ship combat feels far more dramatic in Resynced. The Jackdaw (Ed's ship) has new firing modes and officer upgrades, but naval battles are also significantly harder. Where, in the original, you could feasibly defeat a legendary ship without a fully upgraded Jackdaw, that feels almost impossible in the remake—ships fire fast, accurately, and use mortars more.

If you found naval combat in Black Flag too easy, this is definitely a good change. For my part, I found that the tough ship battles came to revolve around Lucy Baldwin (one of the new officers) and her Perfect Brace ability, which all but mitigates damage when you time a brace appropriately.

Even 13 years later, Black Flag's story is still first-rate, exploring, as it does, a man driven by greed and personal ambition, qualities that still make him a breath of fresh air by comparison with Assassin's Creed's usual goody two shoes protagonists. It's so well-written, in fact, that the new quests Resynced adds can't help but come off poorly by comparison.

The same goes for retaining the in-game shop that lets you purchase cosmetics that look like they're right out of Skull and Bones, or even buy the locations of in-game collectibles for real money. And don't forget the inexplicable addition of the weird Animus projects from Assassin Creed Shadows. I'm not sure who thought adding a battlepass mechanic to the remake was a good idea, but honestly, it sucks.

Ubisoft added many of these elements to modernise Black Flag, but ultimately creates a juxtaposition between old and new which really doesn't reflect well on either Ubisoft itself or the state of our industry. Black Flag was a formative game for me, arguably the beginning of open world bloat for the series, but a fun, well-written adventure with some of the best side content around—no wonder it's one of the few Assassin's Creed games I 100%-ed.

But Resynced ultimately doesn't feel like the same game to me. I thought it did, but then I went back and played the original Black Flag and remembered what it was actually like. I suppose it depends why you're playing a remake. If your goal is to revisit your past experiences and nostalgia, the original will serve you far better in that endeavor.

I'd never considered the prospect that some people might cheat at playing Helldivers 2. But I suppose it's inevitable given some people will find ways to cheat at anything. In this case, rogue Helldivers have found ways to game super credits—the premium currency used to buy Warbonds—to earn them at impossible rates, and it's become such a problem that Arrowhead has implemented new ways to tackle it.

"You've told us that cheaters and exploiters ruin the experience that it feels unfair when someone games the super credit system while you're out there earning yours the hard way," Arrowhead wrote in a Steam post. "We heard you, and we're starting to implement changes that will tackle issues like this."

Arrowhead only explains these changes in the broadest terms, stating they include "improving our monitoring methods for suspicious super credit activity." Basically, if Arrowhead sees a player earning credits "at an unreasonably high rate" there are "now steps in place to counter this."

The developer stresses that players who earn super credits the traditional way—grinding maps, clearing POIs, looting bunkers etc "will never experience any change". Instead, the system is targeted at "Cheaters. Botters. People using automation and duplication exploits to hoover up super credits at rates no human Helldiver could ever reach legitimately."

Ultimately, Arrowhead claims that "A healthier economy means the super credits you earn through honest service to Super Earth stay worth earning". This could be a joke, but it is a slightly odd way to frame the solution in any case given Helldivers 2 doesn't really have an economy. At least, not one that players have any real say in. It isn't like you can buy and sell items from other players, or that the price of Warbonds is affected by the game in any way. Not to mention, the main benefactor of these changes would be Arrowhead, as it is the studio which ultimately profits off of super credits.

Which isn't to say that cheaters should be allowed to roam freely, especially if players' games are being clogged up by bots. But I do wonder if the prevalence of credit cheaters in Helldivers 2 is symptomatic of a broader problem—namely that earning super credits is tremendously boring.

As has been the case since launch, players can only acquire super credits from the same dozen or so points of interest that appear randomly on a map, and scouring those POIs time and again grew tiresome ages ago. Compounding the problem is that the fastest way to earn super credits is to play on easier difficulties, creating a contradiction between natural player progression and unlocking premium items.

To be clear, I'm not saying that earning super credits should be easier—although given Helldivers 2 is a premium game that has sold 20 million copies by this point, Arrowhead could afford to be a bit more generous with them. But I would like earning super credits to be more fun, perhaps tied to some new side objectives or combat challenges rather than blithely hoping they appear in some random bunker or shipping crate.

Super credits aside, Arrowhead's broader efforts to address player concerns with Helldivers 2 appears to be working. The studio has adjusted and reworked many different aspects of the game lately, from performance to player progression.

As a result, recent Steam reviews have shifted from mostly negative to mostly positive in the space of a couple of months. While I wouldn't say we're in the "We're so back" phase of the game's turbulent relationship with its community, Helldivers 2 is kind of back, which is good to see.

When the excellent Command & Conquer successor Tempest Rising released last year, it featured three factions battling for supremacy across a war-torn future Earth. But only two of those factions—the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty—were playable with their own singleplayer campaigns. The third faction, the mysterious Veti, were wholly computer controlled.

Developer Slipgate Ironworks has always said the Veti would be made playable at some point. Indeed, it has been testing the faction's multiplayer integration for some time. But the question of whether the Veti would receive any singleplayer missions has remained unanswered, until now. It turns out the Veti will be getting their own campaign, but you will have to pay extra to play it, as it's arriving in the form of an expansion.

The Veti's Wrath sees you play as Tempest Rising's third faction across 11 new campaign missions—the same size as the campaigns for both the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty. Slipgate doesn't provide many specifics about how the campaign will pan out, but it does say that the early campaign missions "will serve as a tutorial for the faction" in a similar vein to the campaigns featured in the base game.

The Veti are very different from the other two factions, an ancient race that has slumbered beneath the Earth for centuries, boasting a distinctly Ancient Egyptian aesthetic. This carries through to how they play too. Conversion and sacrifice are two major themes of the Veti's playstyle, with the faction able to raise dead enemy soldiers as "enlightened", which can then be spent as a resource to upgrade structures and provide other benefits.

While the full release won't be happening until later this year, you can also play a snippet of the campaign right now via the Tempest Rising demo. This includes the first two Veti missions, plus the first two missions for both the GDF and the Tempest Dynasty. It's also worth noting that, while you'll have to pay to play the Veti in singleplayer, they will be available as a multiplayer faction in the base game at no extra cost.

If you're an RTS fan and missed out on Tempest Rising when it launched last year, I'd strongly recommend you give it a whirl. As I explained in my Tempest Rising Review. It's a genuinely great riff on the classic C&C formula, and one of the few RTS games of recent years that really understands the importance of a strong single-player offering. It's also 30% off this weekend, meaning you can grab it for $27 (£21). That discount ends tomorrow.

I Counter-Strike 2, small changes can have huge ramifications. There aren't many games where the addition of volumetric smoke grenades would be a headline feature. But in CS2's hyper tense battles, true 3D smoke cover has game changing consequences.

Now, with the advent of Season 5, Valve has made another tiny-yet-huge change. Put simply, it's changed how the bomb works, giving players more of a chance to survive after it detonates. Valve detailed the changes in a Steam post (via PCGamesN). "Now, when the bomb detonates, an explosive wave of destruction will flow from the bombsite through the map."

This won't make much difference if you're standing close to the bomb, with Valve emphasising that "you're toast". However, Valve explains that "the shockwave dissipates around corners and doesn't go through walls" meaning that a bit of canny positioning will keep you alive after detonation, preserving your precious gear into the next round.

But how will you know if your hiding spot will keep you alive? Well, Valve has thought about that too. As the bomb counts down, your health bar will flash to highlight how much damage you'll receive in your current position once it goes off. The shockwave effect has been pre-calculated for all defusal maps, which presumably means it'll be the same each time.

Valve hasn't posted any clips showing the new bomb tech in action, but Valve YouTuber Gabe Follower has uploaded a video detailing the changes in Season 5, alongside some footage of the shockwave. He also discusses another new feature which, currently, is only available in private testing: A new console command that enables players to detonate grenades remotely by shooting them. You can imagine the knock-on effect such a system would have in a Counter-Strike match, so it'll be interesting to see whether Valve implements it more widely.

Alongside the bomb changes, Season 5 also introduces two new weapon and sticker collections, one with an Arabian theme and another that's all about spy tech. There's also a new map, Cache, which replaced Overpass in the active-duty map pool, plus five community maps that have been added to various modes.

While Counter-Strike 2 remains the biggest game on Steam, it's not the only entry in the series that's doing well for itself at the moment. Its predecessor, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has racked up an impressive player count after it was de-absorbed from CS2, attracting tens of thousands of players despite not being listed on the steam store.

After Traffic and Breaking Bad used it for scenes set there it became know as "the Mexican filter", though it's sometimes used for scenes set in South Asia or anywhere a bit tropical. You may recognize it as "the piss filter" that stained the original incarnation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's the yellow gradient that's usually intended to make things look warm, and it's not to everyone's taste. Like piss, I guess.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the latest videogame to fall under the stream, making Edward Kenway look a bit more tanned and the waters look a bit more green. I didn't think it was particularly excessive until I saw some before and after screenshots with it removed, and yeah, it does seem a bit dehydrated actually.

These images come courtesy of Blu, a modder who has cooked up a reshade called ACBlackFlag Natural Colors: "A simple reshade preset that removes the ugly yellow filter from the game and corrects oversaturated colors."

You'll need the latest version of Reshade to install it. While you're at it, the ACBlackFlagFix will let you uncap the cutscene framerate, set cloth to animate at 60 fps, and remove pillarboxing, while Fast Launch will get you through those annoying startup videos at a rate of knots.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced "the most significant restructure in Xbox history", which is what you call it when you lay off thousands of people and cut four game studios loose. Double Fine and Compulsion Games returned to their indie roots; Ninja Theory and Undead Labs were sold off. While it seemed at first like Obsidian Entertainment had avoided the headsman's axe, we soon found out they were also hit with plenty of layoffs of their own.

We also found out someone apparently pushed the button marked "in case of emergency get Obsidian to make a new Fallout game," with Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer reportedly heading the project.

So a mix of good news and bad there. Online, the response has included plenty of suggestions that Obsidian "already kind of gutted all the original writers and talent that made old Obsidian games what they were" and that it wasn't the same studio as the one that made games like the original New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic 2.

Brandon Adler, a game director at Obsidian, disputed these claims on LinkedIn, saying, "The number of times I've seen people, with no understanding of who has worked on our previous games or what they contributed, talk about how Obsidian isn't who they used to be... is staggering. Most of the time they are not just wrong, but spreading an enormous amount of misinformation."

As Adler explained, plenty of people in leadership roles at Obsidian are the same people now as they were in the past. "Like, literally the same people", he wrote. "The through line from KotOR2 to our current games is pretty clear."

Of course, that doesn't mean the studio hasn't changed. "But the DNA at Obsidian is the same as it always was. The same DNA that created KotOR, New Vegas, NWN2, and Stick of Truth."

Personally, I'm interested in whatever Obsidian does next because Pentiment was a masterpiece, and seeing people confidently declare that a new Fallout game from Obsidian would be a disaster because they personally didn't care for The Outer Worlds 2 seems like a bit of a stretch.

Adler also noted that it has been a tough time for the studio, for the obvious reasons. "This has been an extremely difficult week at Obsidian", he wrote. "Not only have I had to say goodbye to some amazing game developers, but I've had to say goodbye to some of my best friends. I truly feel for every one of them. Know that if you are looking to hire one of these former Obsidian devs, you are hiring some of the best people around – both professionally and personally."

I've developed a bit of a reputation among my coworkers for loving niche, lo-fi indie games that make you feel bad and gross and weird on the inside. I'm flattered to stand out in such a way, but I also don't ever want to be typecast. Anyway, Brno Transit is a game about being trapped underground with your nasty, weirdly sexual boss and neurotic coworkers as reality disintegrates around you.

I loved developer Spytihněv's previous game, the Soviet boomer shooter Hrot, so I've been eagerly awaiting his next project. Much like fellow FPS designer David Szymanski (Dusk, Iron Lung), Spytihněv zigged rather than zagging, following up Hrot with a short narrative horror game rather than another shooter.

You're a novice train conductor learning the ropes under Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic. It's "the dampest subway east of anything that matters," according to Spytihněv, and I think it helps set the tone out of the gate to know that Brno does not have a subway system in real life.

What follows is a surreal, scatological (a Spytihněv signature), and homoerotic (that's new!) delve into guys being dudes on the job. For me, it called to mind Szymanski's Iron Lung (but more fleshy, sexual, and human) or 2024's breakout Mouthwashing (but not as character driven, and somehow even less life-affirming). The controversial Horses also sprang to mind, but with less explicitly harrowing subject matter⁠—and more explicit full-frontal nudity, let's go boys.

Even more than Mouthwashing, which portrays one of the most evil fictional workplaces I've ever seen, Brno Transit captured the feeling of starting a job where you matter so little as to want to die, while the apathy and neglect of your coworkers is somehow even worse than if they actively hated you.

This game runs on surprise, so I'll try to talk around the real zinger moments, but it's one long sequence of "Go here, do this. Why did you do that? Now you have to fix it. Embarrassing." If you've ever talked to a coworker at a shit job and felt like they were a space alien playing a prank on you with how they think and view the world, Brno Transit will speak to you on some level.

Your first day ends with you eating a tainted hot dog that gives you the runs and the voms, sending you scrambling for a bathroom as gurgles and whines fill your headphones. The doorless, exposed toilet in the employee area is indefinitely occupied when you reach it, while the bathroom in the station above is out of order. I don't know if there's another way of finishing this bit, but I had to take the train to another station to find an open commode. I haven't shared this exact stress dream or level of gastrointestinal distress, but it was still incredibly gnarly and relatable in the moment.

You black out and wake up on a dirty floor mattress in the conductors' area, with splotches of feces and a trail of brown footprints trailing backwards from your resting place. Out in the depot, an entire train is covered in crap, and the first order of the day is to hose it off, Powerwash Simulator-style. How could this have all been you?

Events only get stranger and grosser from there, and I was hooked. Brno Transit shares a brown, desolate, hopeless world with the preceding Hrot, despite being set closer to the modern day. It's a new standout of the mundane or on the job horror subgenre. I want these awful subway stations to get love like the Backrooms or Exit 8.

Model trains

Brno Transit is a medley of nastiness punctuated with surreal hilarity, and while much of the humor is front-and-center in the scripted story, one of my favorite moments was emergent: I had to do a double take out of the corner of my eye to notice a passenger randomly hanging off the end of a train as it left the station. The simulated little world of Brno Transit, which exists whether you're paying attention to it or not, is what really takes it to the next level.

Undergirding the scripted story stuff is a continuous simulation of a small subway system with two lines, one counter- and the other clockwise. It feels like zooming into someone's model train set, and does a superb job of evoking a much larger world than what's just in front of you.

A diverse array of NPCs mill about the stations or wander on and off the trains. They have this sense of anonymity and guarded hostility that really nailed the feeling of making eye contact with strangers on the subway⁠. You don't matter to them, don't bother them.

This effect, plus the the shifting and jostling of the train cars, the way the lighting changes as you pass through tunnels, as well as Spytihněv's excellent sound, music, and foley work add up to this uncanny feel of actually riding the subway. I was reminded of how no one's done nighttime better than Thief or Thief 2, even with their aged graphics. These three games are punching well above their weight in art and atmosphere.

You have to ride the train to start, but you quickly take control of your own engine, carefully adjusting your acceleration to avoid hitting stops too late or too early, doing your best to slot seamlessly into the pre-existing schedule of trains constantly running on this loop. It's a simplified approximation of a whole-hog train sim like Densha de Go!

A free ride mode unlocks after completing the story, and I feel like there's all kinds of weirdness left to discover under Brno. At one point in the story, I stumbled into a skull-filled catacomb attached to one of the stations, with unnerving music, a confusing, switchback layout, and a bumbling tourist snapping photos. I thought for sure this was part of the critical path, but it was just there. What other odd shit is waiting for me at all the stops I never explored on the critical path?

Brno Transit would have been an easy recommendation for me at $9 if it was just the standout surreal horror narrative adventure, but the fact that it's built on top of this little model train world truly sets it apart. I love this freaky little game, I love a Spytihněv joint, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

It's easy to feel like the videogame industry is an endless tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that's because it is. But it also brings in a lot of money, and our beloved PC gaming space in particular is growing faster than both mobile and console markets. Thursday, a report from Alinea Analytics said Steam is just exiting its biggest six months ever.

"In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year," wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis. "That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

The full blog highlights some of the biggest reasons for all this growth: new games are more expensive, friendslop megahits like Meccha Chameleon rake in mountains of cash before you can blink, and third parties like Ubisoft are back on Steam after they tried and failed to escape Gabe's dread labyrinth to play ball with Steam's lessers.

The full list of causes and takeaways is in the blog, but this all follows a very long upward trend: as the report states, Steam's yearly revenue has gone from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. A growing percentage of all those sales is from old games, too: so far, "just 21%" of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games that released this year, down from 29% in 2024.

That said, plenty of new games have been big moneymakers so far: the top five in terms of gross revenue for new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2 (Meccha Chameleon snuck into sixth place). It might be especially galling to see a first-party Xbox game at the top of that list given, you know, everything. It's hard to imagine this growth will continue—or even amount to much—if the industry's biggest companies continue to destroy the teams they depend on.

The latest EA Sports College Football game has finally arrived, which is tantalizing news if you were excited for the series' hotly anticipated comeback a couple years ago. Less tantalizing is the game's reception, which so far has been marred by widespread backlash to its egregious microtransactions. Complaining works: in a post on X yesterday, the official CFB account said those microtransactions are out.

"Your feedback on Road to Glory and Dynasty is that we've missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options," the statement reads. Notably, Road to Glory is a single-player mode (in a game that already costs $70)—a prominent point of contention amid the negative feedback.

"This was added independent of deeper mode progression with the aim to give players more choice … tomorrow morning, we will remove all paid progression options from Road to Glory and Online Dynasty." That's today, so if you were planning to dump some change into those modes, you may have missed your chance.

The backlash was led in part by YouTuber Bordeaux, who got the hashtag "#CFBPlayDontPay" trending on social media. In response to the statement from EA, he posted "we did it" with a clip from Breaking Bad: Walter White saying "I won." Fans are generally elated—"Never let anyone tell you that organizing against giant corporations doesn't do anything," said Reddit user UnrealAce on a thread approaching 5,000 upvotes. "They tell you it doesn't work so you don't try because they KNOW that it works."

"Organizing" might be a strong word given that EA folded in a matter of days and it's not like anyone marched on the developer's offices, but it's hard to argue with the results. That said, it doesn't necessarily seem like the beast is dead.

A line in EA's post notes, "Our goal for live service plans in CFB28 and beyond will be to deliver valuable features and content with greater transparency and communication." Given that and the lines stating EA "missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options … they're not adding the value we intended," the statement suggests the problem here was merely the rollout and not the notion of paid progression itself.

I'm somewhat prone to pessimism in this column, though that's not without cause. MMOs aren't exactly a dying breed, per se—we've got Guild Wars 3 to look forward to, and most of the old guard, while a little grey in the beard, have respectable playerbases and are thrumming with things to do.

But it's hard not to feel my blood pressure notch up a few numbers at this week's Xbox layoff news for… well, a number of reasons, really. I'm irate in particular, however, at the current state of Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS), developers of The Elder Scrolls Online, who seem to have become Microsoft's punching bag.

Left hook

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more depressing set of facts than Zenimax's past couple of years—back in July of 2025, Microsoft put thousands of people out of work, including those at ZOS and, more to the point, the cancelled Project Blackbird.

Blackbird was Zenimax's next major project, and while I can't say for certain it would've revitalised the MMO market or anything, we sure as hell need more new MMOs. It was in development for over half a decade, something the then-founder Matt Firor had described as, admittedly, a bit of a "large bet."

Still, the odds weren't bad. The then-CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer reportedly had to be torn away from it, and it was slated for a tentative 2028 release. And listen, even if you've got a cynical heart—five years of work from a development team of around 300 people getting flushed right down the toilet, along with 62 jobs (per a WARN notice), is a damn shame.

It was something that shook Zenimax to its core—but the studio did manage to pull through. I actually spoke to some of them back in January, speaking with executive producer Susan Kath who said that "the team has very much rallied … I see a lot of enthusiasm from the team as we're going forward. Folks are excited about their work. I'm excited for them to be doing this. We're looking forward."

Game director Nick Giacomini also echoed: "We are excited by what we're doing. We're excited by this transformation, this change, this evolution. It's like a second wind, and we've definitely got our eyes on the future, because this is our home. We are determined to make it continue to be so for us, for our players, for as long as we possibly can."

Indeed, things were looking up for ESO. It had found itself in a bit of a rut, as most MMOs do from time to time—but a new commitment to a seasonal model and a whole heap of reworks seemed dedicated to addressing long-held quality-of-life complaints and shaking things up.

The air, to me, felt like a smaller-scale version of the turnaround that World of Warcraft had after the disasters of Shadowlands, commitment to roadmaps and all.

Right hook

Fast-forward less than half a year later—an unconscionable amount of time in shareholder land, I have to imagine—and Zenimax Online Studios has been all but gutted. As PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield figured out earlier in the week, an estimated 60% of the studio has been laid off between 2025 and 2026, with 213 of those layoffs happening this week.

That's a reduction of 275 developers at the studio in a year and a half, and, look—I don't want to cry that the sky is falling for ESO. Quite the opposite, I am hoping against hope that it'll manage to find a second wind somewhere down the line—but you simply cannot lose the contributions of 275 people without a massive dip in quality.

It's a response echoed by employees at the studio itself. Andrew Young, who left it in 2024, wrote: "There’s really no one left and no changing it now". Other employees were sent reeling, stunned at the absence of teams they'd been working with for years and forced to pick up the pieces.

I want to point out that Xbox saw fit to lay these people off literally as its first season launched—with layoffs occurring on Monday July 6, and the season launching on July 8.

Just imagine it—you work on ESO, the layoffs from last year hit you hard, but you're determined to turn things around. You're using words like "rallied" in interviews, you're finally getting to sort out complaints players have been having for years, you're trying new things. And after a year of work, your first season of the new era of your game is coming out. Two days before it arrives, Microsoft lays off 213 of your team. That, or you're shown the door yourself.

This is despite the fact that your game has brought in over $2 billion in revenue over its lifetime. That figure, posited in 2024, was touted 10 years after the game's launch. That means that ESO was raking in an average of $166 million a year.

Now obviously, that figure's going to have dips and peaks, that's just the nature of doing business—but the sheer boneheaded, next-quarter blinders you have to have on to believe that a game that historically brings you in $166 million annually somehow isn't profitable seems absolutely absurd to me.

And sure, maybe this reaction holds water if the fanbase wasn't liking your new changes—except they did! Here's just a few quotes from the Elder Scrolls Online subreddit:

• "What the fuck man. ESO was really getting a second wind," says u/PompeiiSketches.
• "The game seemed to be on the up and up, what happened?" says u/Crimsonmaddog44.
• "Absolute insane behavior to make cuts to the team that has gotten tons of players (myself included!) back into engaging with the game" says u/Ion_bound.

In a post on the game's forums, understandably stating that Zenimax'll have to be shifting its schedule around a bit, support is present, too:

"I just came back because of your roadmap for the future, and knowing now the people working on it are getting cut by a company that's billions in the green is really heartbreaking," writes one user, "know we haven’t always been happy with you all but those affected, whether they remain or not, did not deserve this. Especially in an era where things were finally looking up again. I am horrified," writes another.

This really does paint a picture of an MMO that was finally getting its sea legs back, just for Xbox to sweep in and knock it right off its feet again.

Holding shares

I will state it plainly: I think the way that Zenimax Online Studios has been treated is cruel, senseless, and short-sighted. There's no capitalist argument to be made about shareholders or prices or changing industries that's going to reach my ears on this one—it's downright unconscionable.

This is a studio that was making a profitable MMO with big dreams for the future, one that had somehow, miraculously, recovered from having a massive project that'd been in development for half a decade shuttered overnight. One that was just about to release the first proper season of its new imagined identity for the game that earned Microsoft over $160 million a year for the past decade.

It has been sacrificed almost wholesale on the altar of growth, by a company that spent over $68 billion on Blizzard, with Microsoft itself spending over $80 billion in 2025 on AI pipedreams. Its developers have been laid off to support a fantasy of getting 1 billion daily players, somehow, in a portfolio that's down 1,600 working roles and will be down 1,600 more by 2027.

More than that, this is an MMO we're talking about. If ESO takes a nosedive from here on out (and god, I am hoping it doesn't), that'll be one less game in an already-dwindling genre that's struggling to put up a fight amongst the unhealthy ambitions of the current industry's gluttony. ZOS deserved better.

The idea of taking serious hardware horsepower on the go was always the dream of my misspent, console-gaming youth. Don't get me wrong, I've always loved how older handheld systems made a calling card out of their limitations (and in the case of Nintendo, offered a hardware gimmick or gaming experience you couldn't find anywhere else). The fact that now you can play many of the same games on a portable device that you can also play in your gamer den would've blown my younger self's mind.

Unfortunately, the dream-come-true of handheld gaming PCs feels like it is coming to an end.

Our Andy updates our handheld gaming PC deals each week and recently shared a shocking revelation: 'Somehow, the $1,000 Asus ROG Ally Xbox X is the best value gaming handheld I can think of right now.' If you've got the cash then, sure, the Asus ROG Ally Xbox X with its AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, 24 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of onboard SSD storage makes sense for the asking price. But where does that leave you if you're on a much tighter budget?

The memory supply crisis has raised the pricing floor of all handhelds. Case in point, the device that we still rate as the best budget handheld gaming PC is the Steam Deck. The more affordable LCD models were quietly discontinued last year, leaving those looking to buy a Steam Deck new with only the very shiny OLED models to choose from. Years after release, the price for the base 512 GB OLED model has increased from $549 to $789. The 1 TB model has seen an almost 50% price increase, jumping from $649 to $949. The answer, then, to where that leaves the more budget-conscious? Without a paddle.

Despite this price hike (and the handheld's aged internals), both models of the Steam Deck sold out in North America shortly after the increase was announced back in May. The 1 TB model, which is going for £779 where I'm based in the UK, appears to be out of stock again at the time of writing. But I doubt this is a sustainable trend.

Let's zoom out a smidge. I update our best SSD deals every week, so I've not had the luxury of ignoring how storage prices have been climbing since the tail end of last year. Research suggests that memory prices are likely to rise as much as 50% in Q3 alone. Recent analysis by Bernstein suggests prices won't dip until 2028, when major manufacturers are expected to complete a number of capacity-increasing builds.

But here and now in 2026, it's not just gaming PC components that have seen price increases as a result of the memory supply crisis. For example, the Playstation 5 has seen three different price increases over the last six years and now costs a minimum of $650. I've written about it before but, despite buying a launch day PS5, it's becoming increasingly unlikely I'll pick up a PS6 day one. After all, if the PS5 Pro costs $900 today, how much more will the PS6 cost?

Hey, maybe Bernstein's predictions will bear out and hardware pricing will look a lot more sensible by the time Sony's next-gen console drops in 2028 or even 2029. But in the here and now, handheld gaming PCs remain in an arguably much more difficult position within the consumer market.

For those who don't already have a gaming PC, there's little doubt that a $650 base PS5 is going to look like the more economical option (particularly as Sony won't be bringing its handful of exclusives to PC in future, but maybe it's just me mourning the loss of, like, four games). If you already own a gaming PC, you'll likely want to save your pennies for increasingly expensive component upgrades. Where would a handheld feature in either budget?

The data suggests gamers generally are still willing to part with the cash for new hardware—though they aren't necessarily picking up a handheld gaming PC. A recent Circana report shared that the handheld of choice was overwhelmingly the Nintendo Switch 2, with the hybrid console largely credited for a year-over-year hardware spending increase that grew by 69%, climbing to $500 million this past March.

The Switch 2 saw its own price increase announced back in May, so it's worth pondering how much of this recent consumer clamour was motivated by a desire to scoop the console before it became more expensive. Even so, Nintendo's handheld is set to cost $500 from September 1 in the US.

There are plenty of PC gamers who have no interest in what the big N is doing these days, but a broad-view of today's gaming audience suggests a lot of gamers are more platform-agnostic. For instance, a 2023 Comscore report found 76% of gamers play across multiple platforms. Therefore, it's hard to ignore handheld gaming PC's most obvious competitor, even if the Switch 2 is underpowered compared to many of the available portable gaming options.

In short, the most performant handheld gaming PCs ask a price that's far too rich for my blood, and the best budget option is arguably not quite as compelling as Nintendo's offering (even after the price hike comes into effect later this year).

To paraphrase Andy's point, there's a chance gaming handhelds eventually revert to occupying a boutique niche for gamers with especially deep pockets. That's how they were in the before times prior to the Steam Deck's launch, with smaller Chinese outfits, such as OneXPlayer, releasing expensive, weak, poorly optimised devices. That's not really the future I want for handheld gaming PCs, but it's a strong possibility. However, given the state of, well, everything, I find myself taking a bleaker outlook.

In the longer term, it doesn't feel like handheld gaming PCs are the most economical proposition for brands or manufacturers either. For example, back in March Ayaneo suspended pre-orders for its uber-powerful Next 2 gaming handheld after costs approached 'twice the price we originally set'. To be clear, I strongly doubt Valve is going to pack it in with the Steam Deck any time soon. However, smaller companies with a much less diverse portfolio than, say, the company behind one of the largest storefronts for digital games, are likely to struggle.

What seems certain is that prices will continue to rise and meaningful chunks of the devices' audience will be priced out. My concern is that the maths may simply no longer math, and hardware companies will increasingly decide that handheld gaming PCs specifically just aren't worth it. For my wide-eyed younger self, I hope I'm wrong.

Star Citizen received a major update back in May, one which implemented a "full reset" of its sci-fi universe while also adding a bunch of new features. Unfortunately, Alpha 4.8 also added a lot of bugs to CIG's space MMO. So many, in fact, that the studio has been forced to change course on its next update, postponing plans for several new features and turning it into a gigantic bug-squashing exercise.

CIG announced the new plans in its latest roadmap roundup (via MassivelyOP), stating that the studio has "reassessed our bug prioritization process following the release on Alpha 4.8.0" and that "based on reports from the Issue Council, Spectrum, Reddit, direct player feedback and other sources, we have identified nearly 100 issues that significantly impact core gameplay systems and quality of life."

Alongside this, CIG is also looking at fixing "broader quality of life issues reported by new players" as "while many veteran players have learned workarounds for common problems, they shouldn't have to." This includes addressing "many of the issues that commonly affect the first hour of gameplay." I'm sorry, the first hour? I feel obliged to point out here that Star Citizen recently surpassed $1 billion in player funding.

CIG says that "roughly 20%" of these issues have already been addressed so far. But the task ahead remains substantial, requiring CIG to pull developers away from building new stuff to address the issues. "As a result, we've temporarily paused work on a small number of features while we focus on improving the stability of these foundational systems."

The main casualty is Siege of Orison, a dynamic event that originally appeared in Star Citizen several years back. But it is seemingly returning with newly introduced instancing for FPS play, giving players more control over these mission spaces. However, players will now have to wait a few more weeks to play it. "We're moving all Siege of Orison and all instance-related content out of alpha 4.9.0 and into a new 4.10 scheduled for mid-August."

This doesn't mean alpha 4.9 will be wholly devoid of new features. The patch will introduce a series of repeatable "support the miners" missions, some new combat clothing, improvements to ship combat UI, a new gun, and two new hairstyles. Alpha 4.10.0 meanwhile, will add a new mission giver, a heavy machinegun, a rebalance to fuel consumption alongside the instancing system and Siege of Orison.

Since hitting the big $1 billion milestone in May, Star Citizen has raised a further $26 million from its spaceship-loving player-base. While development rumbles on, the full release of the MMO remains years away. Its single-player component, Squadron 42, is scheduled to release in 2026, though with less than half of the year remaining, a specific release date is yet to be confirmed.

First reported by Tom's Hardware, Linux-based gaming just got a massive shot in the arm thanks to developer Noah Cagle. That's right, baby: Hannah Montana Linux is back.

Ok, maybe less a "shot in the arm" and more a "completely neutral development"—more on that in a second—but HML is a fully fledged OS capable of doing all the OS-y things you could possibly want, and it won't take screenshots of your desktop or try to sell you a chatbot either. "If you want to," said Cagle in his video about the project, "you can use Hannah Montana Linux as your main day-to-day operating system."

Cagle's project is an "update"—perhaps, arguably, a "remake" or "homage"—to a 2000s original with a delightfully retro webpage. But the OG Hannah Montana Linux has not been updated since 2009, leaving it unable to access most of the modern internet⁠.

Which is good, because a lack of security updates means it would probably be super vulnerable to threats if it could. Little is known about the 21st Century Prometheus who gave us this gift, nor why they ultimately decided to turn their back on us.

Cagle built this updated OS on the Debian distribution of Linux and the KDE Plasma desktop. For context for my fellow knuckle draggers who exclusively interact with this stuff via Steam Deck, Steam OS is built on the Arch Linux distribution, but uses that same Plasma desktop. The key differentiation for Cagle's project is that, out of the box, it boasts a striking pink and purple color scheme, custom Hannah Montana icons, and a remastered 1080p version of the original HML's 4:3 wallpaper.

But can it game? As a skin of Debian Linux, we just have to look to how the parent distribution handles things, which is to say "pretty well." Bazzite and SteamOS seem to be preferred for gaming largely on the basis off their user friendliness, while Valve's black magic Proton compatibility layer is designed to work across Linux distros. You can game on Debian, so you can game on Hannah Montana Linux. But you probably want an AMD GPU: Nvidia still doesn't play nice with Linux.

And, increasingly, we on the PCG staff are getting Linux gaming radicalized, with news writer Joshua Wolens leading the charge. Noah Cagle's open source Hannah Montana Linux is free for your enjoyment on GitLab, and you can keep up with the developer's future projects via YouTube.

Mortal Shell 2 finally has a release date, and it's arriving sooner than you might think. Like so many other games releasing this year, Cold Symmetry is getting ahead of Grand Theft Auto 6's attention tidal wave blocking out November's horizon, and will launch at the tail end of August.

That makes the August-October release schedule even more stuffed than it already was, with games like Star Wars: Zero Company, Gears of War: E-Day, The Blood of Dawnwalker and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 all releasing in that window. Yet despite the vast amount of competition, I don't think Mortal Shell 2 has much to worry about, for two reasons.

First, Mortal Shell 2 is releasing right at the start of that crush, so it won't be jostling for space in a way that a lot of those late August, mid-September games will be (I'm concerned for that new A Plague Tale game, for example). Mainly though, it's because Mortal Shell 2 looks absolutely rad.

The basic premise appears to be "What if Dark Souls was metal as fuck?" and that comes through like a power chord on a 400-watt amp in the release-date trailer. There's a real emphasis on absolutely bodying enemies in the sequel, with combat that's several factors more brutal than the original. By the looks of it, you'll be constantly tossing enemies around, battering them with massive weapons, and performing utterly gnarly finishers on them. It reminds me of id Software's modern Doom games in a lot of ways, with as much emphasis on kinesis and aggression as being bludgeoned to death by a big boss.

I was a fan of the original Mortal Shell, which did an impressive job of replicating the challenge and satisfaction of Dark Souls despite being made by a tiny team on a fraction of the budget. But stylistically it did little to separate itself from FromSoftware's work. As such, I'm pleased that Cold Symmetry has found a way to give the sequel a stronger identity. Combined with the fact that it's ranking fairly high on Steam's most wishlisted page, I think it could prove to be one of the year's bigger hits.

Mortal Shell 2 releases on August 20. It isn't the only big hack 'n' slash releasing in the coming months, either. Onimusha: Way of the Sword arrives just a couple of weeks after Mortal Shell 2 launches, and that was one of the best games we saw at this year's Summer Games Fest.