What counts as cyberpunk anyway? Easy, it's whatever games are currently tagged as "cyberpunk" on Steam and therefore part of the Steam Cyberpunk Fest, a sale running until 10 am on August 10 with the baffling tagline: "They say never look back. Cyberpunk says ALWAYS be in the future. Think about it."

Whatever that means, what's important is the discounts that will help us fill our backlog with even more games about cyborgs and hackers and sticking it to the man. Here are some of the highlights.

• Slow-mo brawling with a bossy hacker lady who grades you, Ruiner: 90% off, $1.99
• Immersive sim about ex-spy on the run off the grid, Neon Struct: 90% off, $1.79
• Action RPG where you cross lovingly detailed arcology, The Ascent: 75% off, $7.49
• Baffling vomitcore corpo assassin simulator Cruelty Squad: 90% off, $1.99
• Best cyberpunk story this side of Snow Crash chapter 1, The Red Strings Club: 80% off, $2.99
• Recruit a ghoul samurai and convince people he's a movie star, Shadowrun Hong Kong: 75% off, $4.99
• Turn-based stealth is a good idea actually in Invisible, Inc: 75% off, $4.99
• Historic low price for Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade: 65% off, $13.99
• If ya basic, Cyberpunk 2077: 70% off, $17.99

There are plenty of other bargains in the list if you want to dig down the Steam page, and if you still don't own the original Deus Ex that's half-price while Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director's Cut is 85% off.

Steam's got a couple more sales planned for this month, with a Pins & Pegs Fest running from August 17–20 that will be all about "Games involving pins (pinball, bowling) and pegs (pachinko, bagatelle)" followed by the somewhat less niche-sounding PvE Survival Crafting Fest from August 31–September 7.

Dark Heresy is currently in beta, and Owlcat is keeping everyone informed about the inquisitorial CRPG's progress via a quarterly update. Said update collates news including the addition of daemonhosts to the enemies we'll face (if you've gone up against them in Darktide you'll know that's a big deal), community-voted customization options making it into character creation, and two new companions for us to collect for our squad like grim Pokémon.

The first of them, Laarthyr Cairnareth, is an aeldari corsair you might recruit or defeat depending how friendly to aliens you're playing it. He'll be worth having on your team thanks to his psychic powers, which he uses to find paths through the dangers of Warpspace via the labyrinth of tunnels his people use called the Webway. (If you need a guide through 40K's sea of proper nouns, Lexicanum is your friend.)

The second new companion to be revealed was Saro, a sanctioned psyker who stands in contrast to the defiantly unsanctioned psyker Idira, who was recruited in Owlcat's previous 40K game, Rogue Trader. Unlike her, Saro's mutant abilities have been turned to the service of the God-Emperor after a regime of thorough and brutal testing. As Owlcat's summary of sanctioned psykers puts it, "Their lives are usually short, and their existence is wretched, but their abilities, tempered by sanctioned rituals and an iron will, become a mighty force in the eternal struggle to defend the Imperium."

The update also includes some stats based on decisions players made in the beta. Apparently the most popular player-character choice was a Noble Officer from a Hive World, and the faction most befriended via Dark Heresy's reputation system was the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The most-bought item was the melta charge because, as Owlcat says, "Someone clearly likes big kabooms."

Owlcat recently reassured fans that, while its upcoming Expanse game is more of a cinematic-style RPG, the studio won't turn its backs on hardcore RPGs. And Dark Heresy sure seems like the kind of build-focused hardcore CRPG Owlcat is known for. It doesn't have a release date at the moment, and according to our Ted Litchfield, now is actually the time to get disgustingly into the previous game, Rogue Trader.

The Borderlands film was not good. I don't know anyone who likes it, and I've never read anyone say something nice about it on the internet. Even its creator, Eli Roth, doesn't seem to like it very much, and in a new interview with the director we can gain some insight into why it ended up as bad as it did.

Speaking to Variety about his new film Ice Cream Man which, as far as I can tell, is not a videogame adaptation, Roth said the exorbitant $120 million budget had the non-creatives worried. “As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse,” he said. “My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that’s left of center, because that’s what has worked for me.”

With a budget like that the film needed to cast the widest net possible. Lionsgate executives demanded tweaks to accommodate a family-friendly PG-13 rating, which seems like an odd creative choice given that a) it's a Borderlands adaptation and b) it's made by the guy who made Hostel and Cabin Fever. To be authentic, it basically needed to be an ultraviolent gorefest, which it wasn't.

“You got something that belonged to nobody,” Roth went on. “It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody. It’s for gamers, but it doesn’t have the violence the gamers want because it can’t be that extreme because it costs too much. You just wind up with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.”

PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens seemed to agree in his review (which was not classified a "review" when it was published, possibly out of mercy). "It's not just bad, it's bland tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving," he wrote.

Other critics ranging the games press through to actual film mastheads didn't like it either: even IGN—who loved the otherwise near-universally condemned Super Mario Galaxy Movie—called it "awful".

It's a shame because the Borderlands games can apparently spin a gripping yarn. Some of my colleagues really rate the storytelling in Borderlands 2, and Telltale's Tales From The Borderlands was received very well. But given the response to Roth's outing, it feels unlikely anyone will take another stab at it again.

And now it's official: Electronic Arts, one of the most storied publishers in videogame history, has been fully acquired by a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. EA said in a press release that the takeover "brings long-term capital, sector expertise, and strategic support" to the company, which is now "positioned to accelerate creativity and innovation to shape the future of entertainment."

"This moment recognizes the extraordinary people whose creativity, ambition and passion have made EA one of the world's leading interactive entertainment companies," Electronic Arts CEO and chairman Andrew Wilson said in a statement.

"We're entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition. Together, we'll invest boldly, accelerate innovation, and build the next generation of games and experiences for the hundreds of millions of players and fans who inspire us every day."

While EA's new ownership is nominally a consortium, the deal leaves Saudi Arabia firmly in control of the company, with an ownership stake of 93.4%. That's caused some concern among observers who worry that the kingdom's notorious repression of human rights, particularly among women and the LGBTQ+ community, leave the company's future support for inclusive games like The Sims—or anything that's not "guns and football," as former BioWare lead writer Trick Weekes put it—in jeopardy.

Wilson has previously said the company's values will "remain unchanged" under its new owners, but Saudi Arabia hasn't been shy about using videogames to sportswash its reputation in the past, and I see little reason to expect that to change now that it has full control of one of the world's biggest and best-known game publishers.

Still, money talks, as the saying goes, and an awful lot of it was thrown around in this deal. Saudi Arabia's purchase of EA is the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history, which imposes significant financial risks alongside all the moral ones. No one really knows what to expect from EA going forward, but—again, invoking Weekes—it does seem that anything not EA Sports FC or Battlefield is subject to at least some uncertainty.

The specter of an increased focus on AI has also loomed over this deal, as EA has spent the last year and change laying off game devs—a move possibly aimed at helping lighten the $20 billion debt load EA has taken on to finance the deal. That didn't stop the company from giving Wilson $38 million for a year of whatever he does, though—$8 million more than he got last year.

In any event, Silver Lake CEO and managing partner Egon Durban effectively confirmed that EA is indeed looking to AI as the future. "EA’s franchises are some of the most beloved in entertainment, combining exceptional creative talent with a relentless focus on players," Durban said. "As long-term investors in technology, we admire how EA’s innovation fuels imagination and human connection.

"We’re proud to join with PIF and Affinity Partners to invest heavily in EA’s growth, including what AI can do to enhance game development and player experience, and excited to partner with Andrew and the EA team as they raise the bar for fans everywhere."

And yes, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US president Donald Trump and owner of Affinity Partners, had similarly upbeat comments on the whole thing: "EA has created stories, characters, and communities that have become part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people. We're excited to support the company as it continues to reach new audiences, inspire the next generation of creators, and expand the ways people around the world connect through play."

While a minority player on the financial side, Kushner was presumably key in getting the deal done: Along with being Trump's son-in-law, he has significant financial ties with Saudi Arabia through the PIF's $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners. Kushner is also a US diplomatic envoy to the Middle East.

With the purchase complete, Electronic Arts will be delisted from the NASDAQ.

This Game Costs 200 Dollars is a game on Steam that, literally, costs $200. The listing describes it as a "psychological 'comedic' experience," and promises it's absolutely worth "every single cent" of its wildly inflated price. You might have doubts, but it was enough of a hook that for one brief, shining moment, developer Stolen Valor Studios—actually 18-year-old Michael Major—was a millionaire.

Major told his tale to WMUR-TV (via GamesRadar), saying This Game Costs 200 Dollars—released on January 30, nominally a sequel to This Game Costs 10 Dollars, which came out just days prior—was intended as a joke, and not something he expected anyone would buy. But a few months later, according to the report, he realized that plenty of people had purchased it—to the tune of nearly $1.4 million.

The problem? Nearly all of the people who bought it—most of them from China—immediately refunded it, most without playing it even once. Major said he doesn't know why people in China were buying and immediately refunding the game, but speculated that it may have come to attention via an ad or "scheme" of some sort.

"I have heard of expensive games on Steam being used for money laundering," Major said. "I have no idea. I could be on a hit list right now."

Major doesn't seem too fussed about the possibility of getting aired out by a Pyongyang button man, but it's fair to say that he's not taking any of this too seriously—including, it bears pointing out, his game. While the top-box description calls it "200 dollars worth of pure joy, amazement, and awkward conversations," the lead in the "about this game" section calls it "the swindle to end all swindles." Major insists throughout the store page that This Game Costs 200 Dollars is a real game, and at one point calls it "a real mind bending experience unlike anything that has ever been done before," both of which may be technically true. But it's all so patently absurd that if you actually spend $200 on this thing, well, that's on you.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I put some of my own time into This Game Costs 200 Dollars, and I'll begin by saying that despite its lofty promises, the cost is not justified. It's a simple, retro-styled top-down adventure-RPG, with rooms to explore and NPCs to briefly chat with, and occasional interjections from the developer to remind players how hard he worked on it, and that it really is worth $200. It's silly and clearly low-effort, but also kind of amusing and even clever in spots, in the gently edgy way of teenagers who are a little sharper than most: I feel like at least one of my nephews would put real time into this.

And yes, I finished it. I don't plan on pursuing any alternative endings, however.

One thing I found odd is Major's claim that he priced the game at $200 because that's the maximum allowed on Steam. As far as I can tell, Steam doesn't have a ceiling on allowable pricing, but if it does, This Game Costs 200 Dollars doesn't hit it: Congratulations On Your Purchase famously has a $1,000 price tag, as does The Leverage Game; True Love is $500, and Beach Volleyball Competition (which very considerately also offers a demo) is $290.

In any event, Major is not an instant millionaire, but he did make out alright on it. Docs he showed WMUR indicate that his net take is a little over $2,000—not a bad haul for a teenage lark.

Despite Valve warning them that matches will be "very rocky" to start, Deadlock players are struggling to adjust to the MOBA's new ranked mode.

Late last week, Deadlock finally got a proper ranked mode, replacing the rudimentary version that existed for the last couple of years. Valve reworked the matchmaking system behind it, added a bunch of rules for how you climb the ranks, and created a new standard mode for casual play.

Valve warned players that "the next week or so" would be turbulent as everyone settles into their correct ranks, but it seems like people weren't ready for how severe it would actually be. The Deadlock subreddit, as well as my YouTube feed, has been full of people discussing whether or not the new update was a miss.

Some of the criticisms don't surprise me: Players are discovering what it's like to be forced to play a casual mode while they tally up enough wins to play ranked. Valve decided that you need 15 wins on a hero to play them in ranked, which is, by many accounts, a Sisyphean effort in the chaos of the standard mode. It's even worse for all the people who spent their Deadlock careers maining a single hero and are only now trying to branch out.

Players cannot fathom why nobody is shotcalling over voice chat or playing like experts in a mode made to be a casual alternative to ranked. While my experiences in Overwatch make me sympathize with them a little, it also sounds like what you'd expect from playing an invite-only game that isn't finished yet. Not everyone cares about optimizing their strategies like their life is on the line and the small pool of players means the match quality will waver more than it does in bigger games.

Maybe the requirement for ranked is too high, but you have to draw the line somewhere so it feels like a place for people who take the game somewhat seriously. It also doesn't help that ranked players who were previously in the highest tier are finishing their placement matches three or four levels lower. This has made even ranked matches inconsistent, according to the people who have been in the mines for the last few days.

Like other games, Deadlock tracks your progress to the next rank through a points system and the numbers can fluctuate based on the skill level distribution of the players in a match. You can completely stomp a team and come out of it with almost no progress, for example. This has confused a lot of players as they struggle to reach the same rank they had before.

Given how much Valve has changed in the update, I suspect we might be seeing the result of a ranked system in the middle of recalibrating what each rank represents in the first place. It's very possible that a high-ranked Eternus player who only played Mina before is now only an Oracle player when forced to flex to other heroes or when put on teams with a wider spread of skill levels (potentially due to the fractured player based across modes now)."People need to remove their expectations and just enjoy the game," wrote one Reddit user. "If they can't enjoy it because of their rank then that's their problem not a problem with the game."

All I know is that matchmaking systems are extremely complex and extremely delicate. Small changes can feel huge to certain sections of players. Deadlock is a game with a lot of barriers to entry that is probably exacerbating the frustrations that normally come with any kind of rank reset. So far, Valve hasn't made any drastic changes, but I'll be curious to see how things shake out in the next month or so.

Cinder City, the upcoming "open-world cinematic third-person shooter set in a fallen near-future Seoul," popped some eyes earlier this year when it came to Steam recommending 64GB of RAM. That turned out to be a mistake, but the minimum requirement is still 32GB, which is a lot—more than the majority of respondents to the most recent Steam Hardware and Software Survey have, anyway—and as PC Gamer's Nick Evanson noted at the time, either the remaining specs contain other, still-uncorrected mistakes, "or the game is an unholy mess of non-optimization."

That complicates the usefulness of those system requirements somewhat, so here's a more practical way of determining whether your rig is up to snuff: A pre-alpha playtest set to run August 14-16, and you can sign up for a shot at access right now.

A few things to note: The playtest is open only to people in the US, you have to be at least 16 to take part, and it's all under NDA: "Recording gameplay, taking screenshots, streaming, publishing posts, or uploading any content related to the playtest is strictly prohibited."

But if you fit within that demographic and don't mind keeping your secrets, the playtest presents an opportunity to see Cinder City in a live environment and get a sense of how it's going to handle on your PC. Naturally it won't be the final word on the topic: It's a "pre-alpha" version, and publisher NC said when it corrected that wild RAM recommendation that "as optimization work continues, the final system requirements at launch may be lower than those currently listed."

Still, if the playtest runs reasonably well on your PC, you can pretty safely expect the final release version will too—and if it's a train wreck, hey, at least it was free, right? There's also the possibility that Cinder City will be a good game, which is always a nice bonus when it comes to this sort of thing.

And yes, there will be further opportunities to see how that optimization work is going, if you don't get into this round or find it kind of iffy: More playtests, which will seemingly be open to more regions, will follow this one.

Every few years or so I find myself idly wondering whatever happened to Midnight Club, Rockstar's arcade street racing series. I quite liked Midnight Club 2 back in the day, although I fell away from the series after that because, in fine Rockstar fashion, subsequent games weren't released on PC. The series as a whole ground to a halt in 2008 with Midnight Club: Los Angeles—despite going over well with critics, the series was never heard from again.

In a new interview with Kiwi Talkz on Insider Gaming, former Rockstar designer Kris Roberts, who worked on multiple Midnight Club games and Red Dead Redemption before leaving in 2010, said there were a few factors involved in the decision to kill the series, including missed deadlines and "non-trivial conflict" between Rockstar New York and the San Diego studio where Midnight Club was developed, but the obvious elephant in the room was Grand Theft Auto.

"The perception was we never got the accolades or the reception," Roberts said. "The New York perspective was, 'You’re not GTA.' When you’re the red-headed stepchild project—you know, we’re doing a good job, we’re world-class, but we’re still treated less than. It was challenging."

Roberts said the San Diego studio was working on a new Midnight Club when he departed, but it was subsequently cancelled: "It was pretty clear that there would be no more Midnight Club and everything was going to be GTA and stuff moving forward, and that’s just the way it was going to be."

Which sucks, because Midnight Club was pretty great (apart from the whole console-exclusivity thing), but also isn't at all hard to believe. Midnight Club: LA arrived in 2008, the same year Grand Theft Auto 4 came out, and if there was any doubt prior to that about where Rockstar's future lay, GTA 4 ended it.

The ending of Midnight Club also fits with the broader approach of Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive, which makes no bones about only being interested in major hits: When the company unloaded Private Division in 2024, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said, "Our job really is to focus on making the biggest and best hits in the marketplace. We're not the long tail company. We are top-ten hit makers around here." In an environment like that, being "good" often just isn't going to be good enough.

Baldur's Gate 3 is—my god—three years old at this point, but it continues to do numbers. I don't mean player numbers, though god knows it keeps doing those too, I mean that it keeps generating stats. How many deaths, how many murders, how many deployments of a weapon named "Poo-Scraper" in combat—that kind of thing.

Now, Larian is showing those stats off, in what seems to have become an annual tradition. In a post on Bluesky, the studio highlighted some of the dafter numbers that player behaviour in BG3 has produced.

First up, some normal ones: 500 million mod downloads and 13,000 mods uploaded. The story NPC that died most often across people's games was, by a country mile, the Tiefling leader Zevlor, who bit the dust 12.3 million times. Second place was the wizard apprentice Rolan, who died 8.6 million times.

You get the idea. Then the bizarre stuff comes. The Nut-Buster—literally just a rock—has been deployed twice in combat in the game's Creche area. Poo-Scraper, its accompanying blade, and property of the quasit Shovel, has been used four times in combat across Act 3.

It's that time of year again, you naughty number-loving nerds.

— @larianstudios.com (@larianstudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-08-04T17:02:27.680Z

Over 30,000 players have taken on the Netherbrain drunk, under 1% have managed to obtain 180,000 gold in a single playthrough and, most disturbing of all, just over 9,000 players experienced the game at a 9:16 aspect ratio. That is to say, they were playing with their monitor turned portrait.

But the worst stat, if you ask me, is this one: "More non-Dark Urge players have managed to murder Alfira than Dark Urge players." For reference, Alfira is the lovely, blameless bard you encounter in BG3's grove area during Act 1. If you're playing Durge, the game forces you to kill her during a cutscene (though you can, technically, avoid it with a bit of metagame shenaniganry). When I played Durge, it honestly upset me a bit. Alfira really is a nice person, toe to tip.

But more people have simply elected to murder her than have been forced into it by the game's narrative. I'd guess that's down to people doing (non-Durge) evil playthroughs, but still—congratulations, players, you are all monsters.

Last week, Valve finally fixed a longstanding issue with users not being able to access local network game transfers, and all was right with the world. Well, not really, as it has now fixed even more problems causing that issue. But this time, it might be done… hopefully.

In a discussion board announcing a Steam Client Update on August 3, Valve said it has "fixed additional cases preventing local network game transfers from starting."

It doesn't say what exactly those problems are, but one can assume they were reported after the local game transfer fix last week. If you're wondering why people care about this issue, local transfers are a way of bypassing using the internet to transfer games.

For a long time, users would attempt to transfer game files, but only be greeted with the option to download it via Steam itself. If your bandwidth isn't very good or you are operating on limited data, this could be a problem. That's especially true for 100 GB+ games that could take hours over the internet.

So now, as long as your Steam Client is updated to the latest stable channel, you should be able to transfer games locally without a problem. Provided you have another system with them already installed and waiting to be transferred, of course. Luckily, to actually get onto the latest version of Steam, you don't have to do anything. It should install and update all by itself.

As well as fixing the local network game transfer problem, the latest Steam Client update has also fixed a problem where Steam asked players to choose a user on startup even if it wasn't requested. It's a fairly light update but, if it actually fixes the local network woes, a pretty good one all the same.

I haven't yet seen any reports of local network game transfers not working after the release of the update, which is a good sign, and one commenter even claims it fixes their issues on GNU/Linux. If you happen to have multiple rigs, or even both a home rig and a Steam Machine plugged into your TV, I could see this being a great way to get around bandwidth problems and get your games a little quicker, too.

You ever get the feeling that a game has been made, if not just for you, then for a small cohort of absolute freaks of which you are a proud member?

That's the feeling I got when I encountered tabletop RPG 10,000 Swords Against Heaven, from author and game designer JK Saavedra, on social media. Billed as a "dark science fantasy cultivation RPG," it is a game about visiting spectacular and liberatory violence on a "magofascist" ruling class. The whole thing looks like a gorgeous ransom note penned by Vladimir Lenin, Michael Kirkbride, and The Buddha, and I am entirely, hopelessly in love with it.

Set in the post-nuclear world of Hingsajagra—"ravaged and murdered and defiled by the movement of history"—10k Swords sets you and your party up as Wanderers: "fools, wretches, revolutionaries, outcasts, radicals—who cultivate in themselves the Unalienated Human and Revolutionary Consciousness, becoming one with their Action and Intention. A beacon of the Oppressed and the Subaltern."

I can, perhaps, put that less artfully: you are mystics, vagrants, and communist kung-fu wizards in a war against capital. Your stats are things like Violence, Word, and Dialectics, and you can belong to Sects like Aswang assassins, Fangshi, and the Sword Dialecticians. The easiest thing to compare it to would be Disco Elysium, but shot through with the culture and history of southeast Asia rather than ZA/UM's post-Soviet, Baltic roots.

"You will travel far and wide, mastering technicks, magicks, and experiencing Reality to Cultivate Indomitability," goes 10k Swords' intro. "Wanderers must cultivate and organize to strike at the Heavenly Bourgeoisie and the Heavenly Mandate is the Neoliberal World Order."

Also like Disco Elysium—it is tremendously written. It has all the sweep and urgency of a revolutionary text and a religious exhortation, and all embedded among striking artwork. It's the sheer range of influences that really hits me—in the game's acknowledgments, it namechecks Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Bloodborne, Jujutsu Kaisen, Hannu Rajaniemi, and The Raid, plus plenty more besides.

You encounter them all as you leaf through its pages, creating something that feels constantly surprising, unique, and joyfully liberatory.

I'm gaga for it, as you can no doubt tell, and have already picked up the books in the same setting. My only issue is that I would really quite like someone to make a videogame, rather than a TTRPG, out of the whole thing. Not that I have anything against TTRPGs—it's just that none of my friends play them, so I am stuck pawing lovingly through 10k Swords' pages like I did with Vampire: the Masquerade books as a kid.

Endless Legend 2 seriously impressed me when it launched in early access last year. And now it's poised to escape its development shackles and appear fully formed, as the 1.0 launch now has a release date.

On September 17, you'll be able to begin your conquest of Saiadha in earnest. And if you dipped in during the early access phase, you can expect to be greeted by quite a few new features.

The final major faction will be making its first appearance on that same day. The Sandshapers are the oldest civilisation on the planet and aim to terraform the rather damp marble into a lovely, dry desert.

They'll be joined by a bunch of starfish, though I assume they prefer to be referred to as the Mangrove of Harmony. This is a new minor faction with its own hero, questline and recruitable units and pops. It was also designed in conjunction with the community, so if you hate starfish, you know who to blame.

Finally, there's a new spin on major factions in the form of rogue factions—splinter groups with their own bespoke quests, stories and mechanics.

At launch, we'll get two of them: a conquest-loving twist on the Kin of Sheredyn known as the Order of Zelevas, and a Necrophage offshoot known as The Severed Claw, which can enslave other factions.

Last year I called it "an incredible 4X" even in its unfinished state. The foundations of greatness were already apparent, though I didn't quite vibe with the combat—as much as it was a clear improvement over the disappointing brawls of Humankind. After a year of tinkering, I'm eager to see how much Amplitude has improved on it.

So make some room on your calendar for alien weirdos and planet-spanning quests. That gives you a couple of months to figure out what faction to play first.

It feels like the AI industry is getting all the cool stuff right now (not that it necessarily knows what to do with it, but I digress). Besides hoovering up all of the RAM and system storage it can get its mitts on, data centres tend to be where we're seeing technological advancements in memory.

That brings us to High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a fresh tech spec unveiled by SK hynix and Sandisk. The Korean memory manufacturer describes HBF as "a new memory layer between [High Bandwidth Memory] and SSDs," that should enable "high-speed data transfer similar to HBM while significantly expanding capacity by leveraging NAND technology."

At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think of HBF as a bit like HBM and NAND all rolled into one thing.

HBF is pitched as a solution to various "bandwidth and capacity scalability challenges," and emerges into a landscape where big tech is still very keen to throw money at its AI infrastructure build-out.

SK hynix says HBF will kick off with up to 512 GB of capacity, which isn't much by SSD standards but a fair chunk by HBM standards. Similarly, while lower than HBM bandwidth compared to some stacks of HBM4e memory, a bandwidth of 0.4 to 3 TB/s for HBF isn't too shabby.

Interestingly though, neither SK hynix nor Sandisk will be holding on to the HBF specification as proprietary tech—instead, it's been disclosed as an open standard via the Open Compute Project (OCP). That means any memory manufacturer could make its own HBF based on the open standard.

HBF tech will also appeal to manufacturers and hyperscalers alike as the specification uses the 'Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express' (UCIe) connection interface. Essentially, this would allow the fresh spec to be used with an array of processors, including CPUs and GPUs, within a single package.

Actually, let's talk about SK hynix in the context of the wider memory supply crisis for a sec. Company CEO Kwak Noh-Jung recently predicted that "Customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030." Similarly Samsung, another member of the 'big three' memory manufacturers, also recently warned of even more severe shortages ahead in 2027, and that this "will persist through 2028".

In a bid to combat this, SK hynix is set to invest over $60 billion in chip plants in its home of South Korea, though the supply crisis is still far from ending. Just for a start, memory prices are predicted to rise as much as 50% during Q3. As for memory manufacturer SK hynix, it just announced another record-breaking $55.6 billion quarter.

As an open standard, the HBF specification may not directly add to SK hynix's revenue pool—though any memory the company manufactures based on the specification surely will.

xAI has been at the centre of ethical and legal disputes over the last year due to the 69 mobile turbines it erected in Memphis to power AI data centers, and the environmental impacts of all that tech. Now, in accordance with an agreement with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, SpaceX and xAI have agreed to take them down over the next 11 months.

In a blog post, xAI says that it will be taking down all 69 mobile turbines that currently power its facility in Southaven, Mississippi, and will instead be swapping to power from a 1.2 GW power plant it is currently constructing. Between August 2026 and July 2027, it is expected to have removed all turbines.

The blog post says, "We care deeply about being good neighbors and we regularly reconfigure power operations to reduce noise from the facility and minimize our impact on the local Southaven community." One could suggest that if xAI really cared about being good neighbours, it probably shouldn't have, as the SLEC argues, "operated with a stunning lack of transparency that left impacted communities in the dark."

xAI also says that it will make investments to equip SpaceXAI mobile turbines with emission control technologies going forward. The 1.2 GW plant will reportedly consist of 41 permanent turbines, all of which are authorised under a Clean Air Act permit.

Many AI companies have been desperately expanding data centers in the hopes of catching up with the competition. Meta just last year was reportedly expanding AI capabilities by housing data centers in tents, and is continuing to throw money at its AI infrastructure buildout.

The rapid expansion of AI has not only led to environmental concerns and companies building regardless of whether the infrastructure is there to handle it, but it has also led to the memory crisis. The reason you won't get RAM at a reasonable price these days is because of how quickly AI has expanded and how little supply there is to go around. It seems AI is unlikely to go under soon, so the memory supply will be unlikely to meet demand for at least a few years.

Even Samsung, one of the three biggest memory manufacturers, reckons next year will see a "severe" memory shortage that will last until at least 2029.

Still, even if it took kicking up a fuss and legal threats from the NAACP to do so, xAI complying with the Department of Environmental Quality is still a good move long-term. It just feels a little rich for SpaceXAI to pat itself on the back while doing so.

We're some ways out from the release of Resident Evil's Code: Veronica remake, but that hasn't stopped me or the other 1,999,999 eager players from wishlisting the game as Capcom celebrates an impressive milestone.

"2 million biscuits for the 2 million of you who've wishlisted Resident Evil Veronica, thank you," an official social media post reads alongside an image of that innocent old lady who definitely isn't Mother Miranda in disguise, nothing to see here guys.

The hype around Veronica may seem a bit strange at first. Back in the day Code: Veronica sold fewer copies compared to other Resi releases of the time (although that's probably thanks to the Dreamcast). Even with its positive critical reception at the time, some fans have looked back at its tricky design choices more unfavourably as of late. But I love three things in my life, Resident Evil, Chris, and Claire, so I'm pretty sure I'll love the remake.

In all seriousness, Code: Veronica's story, vibes, and locations were all immaculate, and its iffy controls are something I have no doubt the devs will improve, especially considering their track record. Yoshiaki Hirabayashi is producer and Kazunori Kadoi and Yasuhiro Anpo are directing the remake, all three of them previously worked on the Resident Evil 2 remake and the Resident Evil 4 remake; two games I was so sure didn't need remaking.

But somehow they managed to do them justice and make some ingenious changes that really improved my experience. One such example was how the team managed to make Ashley go from the most annoying thing to ever grace my screen to a helpful and likable companion who actually exhibited some personal growth over the course of the Resident Evil 4 remake. For that, I am thankful.

With that kind of expertise on hand it comes as no surprise to me that Resident Evil fans are eager to wishlist Veronica, even with just an announcement trailer to go off.

After two former Apple employees started working for OpenAI, the Cupertino-based company alleged that trade secrets went with them and straight to the creator of ChatGPT. After it asked for a preliminary injunction to stop those employees and OpenAI from accessing confidential information, OpenAI publicly announced its defence, and followed that up with a blog post for good measure.

Titled "Apple is getting this wrong", OpenAI argues that Apple has built a reputation for obsession over small details, yet "this careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation."

It notes that Apple claimed it contacted OpenAI in February, but that contact was actually given to the wrong person, as Apple's lawyers mixed two names up. It also notes that Apple claimed it talked to OpenAI's General Counsel, "which they now concede never happened."

The two former employees, named Chang Liu and Tang Tan, are both defended by OpenAI. OpenAI claims that Liu is accused of trying to access confidential information after leaving, though OpenAI shares text messages of Apple employees asking for Liu's help to locate files. OpenAI claims that the problem here is actually Apple failing to properly manage system access when people leave.

Apparently no such evidence exists for Tan, but OpenAI claims "Tang has always been clear with the team that we do not want, and must not use, any confidential information from other companies."

OpenAI claims that the preliminary injunction is "based on false information" and unnecessary, as it doesn't want Apple's trade secrets.

The blog post argues, "We wish Apple had raised these issues with us before they filed their lawsuit and would have been happy to clarify all of this with them. We have taken the allegations in the lawsuit seriously and offered to work with Apple to resolve this." It continues, "Instead, they’re trying to change their narrative, including by making vague accusations about other former employees, and will likely keep repeating this tactic."

Apple is yet to respond to OpenAI's public blog post, but the company is historically less likely to use the same tactic of publicly posting blog posts about ongoing court cases. In regard to Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, the AI company put up two separate blogs recounting its relationship with Elon Musk and Elon Musk's nonprofit claims.

Naturally, a blog post like this is intended to garner public support, which can then apply pressure to Apple. Apple will need to come back with a strong response, should it choose to give one publicly.

The long war is over. Justice is done. The revolution, the necessity of which Assassin's Creed players have discussed for a long time, has taken place. Edward's hateful blowpipe is vanquished.

In a new patch for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Ubisoft proudly declares that "The Blowpipe Can Now Be Hidden." Players, it turns out, had rather taken against Edward's handy little dart-dispatcher.

Before this patch, it was an ever-present aspect of his costume once he obtained it in the game's story, and I suppose some folk didn't think it blended well with his outfits.

"We saw your feedback, and we have given players the option to hide the 'Blow Pipe' from Edward’s back," writes Ubisoft. "In order to do so, access your outfit in the inventory and select R2 for the option to 'Hide Gear'". If you're on the other side of the great blow pipe war, you can also opt to keep it visible.

I admit, I do find it kind of funny that—in a patch weighing in at between 1.8 and 3.7 GB, depending on your PC storefront of choice—this is the headline item. People have clearly been yelling in Ubi's ear about this goddamn pipe ruining their efforts to keep Edward in the dernier cri.

To be fair to them, I get it! A lot of the game's outfits don't really have an obvious place for the blow pipe to hang from, so it ends up hanging in space in an obtrusive way.

Anyway, there are, would you believe it, other changes in the latest Black Flag patch. For instance, there are now double the number of autosaves (10, in place of the earlier five), fixes for some broken tutorials and DLC notifications, and it revives the much-missed ability to toggle your hood while performing a leap of faith. There are also numerous fixes for gameplay issues, world stuff, textures, and so on, which I'll list below.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Title Update 1.0.6

General

• Increased number of autosaves from 5 to 10 to allow players to load from earlier progressions.
• Fixed an issue on PC where Cutscenes could be locked at 30 FPS when Graphics settings were set to ‘custom’ from any ‘Low’ presets.
• Added missing tutorial on how to ‘Throw Money’.
• Fixed an issue where DLC Pack notifications could appear at the start of a new game.
• Fixed an issue where Edward could start sliding right after fast travelling to a synchronized viewpoint while sprinting and jumping down.
• Fixed an issue on PC for Mouse & Keyboard where Quest icon could be marked/unmarked when selecting the Quest tab.
• Fixed an issue where players did not receive a purchase confirmation message for Resource Packs.
• Fixed an issue where players could be unable to parkour while holding down RT after remapping RT to sprint.
• Fixed minor crashes that could happen during Ground and Naval fights.
• Fixed an issue where Edward’s hood could not be toggled during the Leap of Faith.

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue where players could be unable to perform leg sweeps on enemies in an ‘attentive’ or ‘suspicious’ state.
• Fixed an issue where the Brute Elites were sometimes not charging towards the player.
• Fixed an issue that could occur when players tried to hire dancers while on top of a box.
• Fixed an issue where “Quick Use Rope Dart” may no longer be usable when interrupted by an enemy attack or after a rope dart hang.
• Fixed an issue where players were sometimes unable to assassinate drunk pirates in smoke after entering combat with them.
• Fixed an issue where Enemy ships sometimes did no damage when ramming the Jackdaw at certain angles.
• Fixed an issue where dead bodies on benches could be looted/carried after loading a save file.
• Fixed delayed reaction from guards upon seeing a hanging dead body.
• Fixed an issue where Edward wasn’t always turning to look at where he was aiming in a Naval battle.
• Fixed an issue where Edward could trigger a takedown while vaulting over the enemy.
• Fixed an issue where the Naval Convoy’s leader could go flying after lowering wanted level or sending it to Kenway’s fleet during Boarding.

World

• Fixed an issue where players may get stuck when attempting to parkour between a tree and a wall in Kingston.
• Fixed an issue where players could ‘Fast Travel’ to an unsynchronized viewpoint in Havana.
• Fixed an issue where there was no warning message displayed when trying to fast travel to a captured fort while in a restricted area.
• Fixed an issue where players could get stuck in free fall when climbing behind the chest at Mariguana Island.

Progression & Economy

• Fixed an issue where the Kraken wheel cost was listed incorrectly / the Kraken wheel is wheely expensive.
• Fixed an issue where ‘The Benjamin’ ship codex unlocked at a later quest.

UI/Menu

• Updated font for Simplified Chinese to allow for better readability.
• Fixed an issue where players may become soft-locked when switching to the Map tab while visualizing a Codex entry.
• Fixed alignment issues when language was set to Arabic.
• Fixed an issue where Ally ship icons were displayed
• Fixed an issue where the Vision Preset’s enabled black background for objectives remained on during Modern Rifts.

Visuals & Graphics

• Fixed multiple animation issues.
• Fixed minor ragdoll issues.
• Fixed multiple camera issues during assassinations.
• Fixed lighting issues while underwater.
• Fixed visual gaps present in the Fort wall of Nassau.
• Fixed Enemies’ blood coming out from hips instead of chin during the pistol finishing kill
• Fixed visual issues in Tavern Brawl with knocking out enemies near tables and chairs.
• Fixed clipping issues with the cape of ‘Hellion Armor’ when there are strong winds.
• Fixed issues where PSSR was not properly enabled if the same account was used first on PS5 and then on PS5 Pro

Localization

• Fixed incorrect localization of “Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced” on all platform packages in Simplified Chinese.
• Fixed incorrect localization of the Trophy/Achievement “Ed the Diver” in Simplified Chinese.

Audio

• Fixed various missing audio issues.
• Fixed missing audio for when a normal guard blocked melee attacks from the player.
• Fixed an issue where the Hideout’s watermill audio would be played after entering and exiting the menu despite the Hideout’s Garden not being unlocked.
• Balanced certain dialogues in Simplified Chinese to be more audible.

SPOILERS

Quests

• "Overrun and Outnumbered": Fixed an issue where James Kidd remained idle if the player skipped the cutscene and quickly used a “Sleep Dart” on an enemy.
• “Delirium”: Fixed an issue where the sails could be seen floating when swimming up.
• “Traveling Salesman”: Fixed an issue where low-quality civilian models could be observed if the player skipped through the cutscene.
• “Vainglorious Bastards”: Fixed an issue where the “Royal African Ship” could sometimes sink after the cutscene.
• “A Second Chance”: Fixed an issue where Edward could fast travel to the Jackdaw while carrying food, which may cause the food to disappear.
• “Mayan Mysteries”: Fixed an issue where the “Mayan Armor” could not be obtained due to missing a Mayan stone that was obtained before “Overrun and Outnumbered” quest.
• “A Cockalorum”: Lucy will sometimes go out of hiding during 'Reach the villa' objective.
• “The Sage's buried secret”: Fixed an issue where James Kidd could get stuck if the player blocks his route up the rocks.
• “What the Devil!”: Fixed an issue where players could unintentionally clear the objective “Board the HMS Demolition” as Edward.
• “Templar Ships”: Fixed an issue where players could remain stuck in combat if they were detected by enemies while eavesdropping on civilians.
• “Upton Travers”: Fixed an issue where the objective to ‘Kill Upton’ was missing after loading a save file.
• “Diving for Medicines”: Fixed an issue where players could lose autosave files if they participate in “Uptown Travers” during the main quest.
• Fixed an issue in certain quests where enemies did not react accordingly if inflicted by sleep/berserk dart while following another person.
• Fixed an issue where on Black Island, "Morgan's Treasures" and "Midnight Moonshine" could sometimes remain unavailable to players.

Though it's a chunky handheld gaming PC, we highly rated the original Lenovo Legion Go (though we liked the Legion Go S SteamOS a fair bit more). Unfortunately, owners of the two-year old hardware are now reporting that a recent BIOS update is bricking their handhelds.

The BIOS update in question is version N3CN42WW for the Legion Go 8APU1. At time of writing, this was still available from Lenovo's support servers, despite user reports of black screens and ineffective BIOS self-healing following the update.

In a recent post to the r/LegionGo subreddit, moderators have advised users to not update and to 'just comment with +1 if you are [affected].' Beyond this, the scope of the issue (and whether every Lenovo Legion Go is affected) is still unclear.

One Redditor claims that when they reached out to Lenovo directly, the company allegedly quoted them a little over €237 (about $273) to repair their Lenovo Legion Go (via VideoCardz). This was because the Redditor's device warranty had recently expired. Lenovo is otherwise still repairing or replacing handhelds free of charge for those whose devices still fall within warranty.

One commenter wrote, "Had the same issue, I just [paid around €120 to reactivate] the warranty, I want them to repair it, not at my cost. This is insane."

At least one other Redditor has taken matters into their own hands with a fairly non-standard recovery approach of direct SPI programming. PitStop Computers has also reported on its attempts to find a fix. Despite all of the aforementioned reports, Lenovo has not yet issued an advisory notice about the latest version of the BIOS.

Long story short, if you've not recently updated your Lenovo Legion Go, sticking with an older BIOS version is probably best for now. If you have updated and are experiencing issues on a device with active warranty coverage, reaching out to Lenovo remains your best bet. Should reaching out to Lenovo not be an option for you, you may want to explore rolling your device back to BIOS version N3CN40WW.

Last week, developer ShiftUp released a video marketing its upcoming sequel Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. A so-called "music video" which was riddled with generative AI, from Evie's harrowing grin to a very rubbish song with cringeworthy robotic vocals.

The video has garnered a whole bunch of backlash—from myself included—as people wondered why on earth a company raking in good gacha money (its other game, Nikke: Goddess of Victory, is a consistent high ranker on gacha revenue charts) felt the need to put out something so utterly devoid of soul. Or really, that didn't have anything to do with Stellar Blade: Blood Rain in the first place.

Well, ShiftUp CEO Hyung Tae Kim has now come out to tell us that we're just misunderstanding, guys!

"EVIE, the character at the heart of this video, was created from head to toe by our talented artists and modelers through more than a year of dedicated work," a tweet from him read. "The AI is not creating her from scratch. It is rendering and presenting the character based on the data, design, and craftsmanship our team created. We would truly appreciate it if you could view the work with that understanding in mind."

I think if anyone here is misunderstanding, it's Hyung Tae Kim himself. Anyone could deduce that Evie's design wasn't the thing being created with AI. But when almost every other aspect of your video is generated with AI—parts of her suit literally morph in and out of existence, the food she eats has that horrible AI slime effect to it, signs plastered along walls and vending machines are in garbled nonsense AI language—it not only undermines whatever vision you had in mind for your character's design, it cheapens your overall image.

And that's before you even get into the fact that the song is also AI-generated, despite ShiftUp having some crazy talented composers on board. If you really wanted to go all-in on a music video to market your game, you could at least get a real human to whip up a song.

Unfortunately, I don't envision ShiftUp or Hyung Tae Kim slowing down on AI usage anytime soon. South Korea is a huge consumer of AI, and its embrace of it has rippled into the development cycles of studios who reside there. Kim himself has been on the AI train since around 2022 (despite being a talented artist himself) which makes this unsurprising, but most certainly disappointing nevertheless.

You don't need me to tell you the memory crisis is looking bleak, but, well, the memory crisis is looking bleak. So bleak, in fact, that Gigabyte has just unveiled a new series of AM4 motherboards. Yes, the socket we thought we'd be done with by now.

The B550 X Series, as Gigabyte calls it, is "engineered to be the most powerful refresh of the AM4 platform motherboard."

Gigabyte says it is perfect for the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which was a reasonably beefy chip back when it launched in 2022. Gigabyte claims the 5800X3D is "widely regarded as the best cost-to-performance processor on the market" and that the motherboard is purpose-built to handle its 8 cores, 16 threads, and 96 MB of L3 cache.

AMD decided to bring back the 5800X3D this year, which AMD claims was "very hard, actually, very, very hard" to do. When stacked up against the best CPUs right now, like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, both chips have 8 cores, 16 threads and 96 MB of L3 cache. But the 5800X3D base clock of 3.4 GHz is outpaced by the 9800X3D's superior 4.7 GHz. That, and its newer architecture, translates to a performance uplift of around 30%.

The new B550 X series comes equipped with Wi-Fi 7 connectivity and comes with a 10-phase, 60A DrMPS VRM design. It's also got Gigabyte's own EZ PCIe latch and EZ-plug. It seems like it has some decent engineering features, but there's an elephant in the room here.

The reason PC builders are going back to AM4 is that the DDR5 memory needed to work with an AM5 motherboard is simply too expensive. Unfortunately, with DDR4 also seeing price increases, you will be overpaying no matter what build you make now.

Giving consumers more options is a decent way of handling some of the price increases, but ultimately it's a bandage on a much deeper wound. AI's growth has outpaced the hardware available, and it seems unlikely the memory crisis will be ending soon.

Even Samsung, one of the big three memory manufacturers, warns there will be a "severe" memory supply crisis next year and that "beyond 2029, it is hard to say because of more limited visibility."

So, if you want a rig that is anyway reasonably priced, you will either have to wait for a sale, or shop around for old parts, using old sockets and fitting in old memory. Naturally, an AM4 rig isn't the end of the world, and you will still get some good gaming on it, but it's a sign of just how big the memory crisis has become.

As you can see in the above video, I recently travelled to Osaka, Japan, to go inside Capcom's headquarters and play its upcoming action game, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, as well as talk to many of the lead devs who have worked on it.

And, as part of my developer interviews, I spoke with Art Director Hiroyuki Nara about the character design of Onimusha: Way of the Sword's bad guy, Sasaki Ganryu, who made a memorable appearance in the game's publicly released demo.

Sasaki Ganryu, like the game's hero, Miyamoto Musashi, is based on a real-world Japanese sword master who fought during Japan's Edo period. However, as with Musashi, Capcom has put its own spin on these fierce rivals. But how did the devs go about designing them?

When it came to designing Sasaki, Nara explains, "there's been some depictions of him in other fiction, but it's not something that we really consciously thought of when designing him [in Way of the Sword]. In this case, it was more a case that we wanted to create a character that would be a very strong contrast to Miyamoto Musashi. They both come into this game in this world with the same goal. They both want to be the best they ever was in terms of swordsmanship, but their way of thinking and their way of approaching life and things are very, very different.

"So that's something that's depicted very clearly in the way that they dress quite differently. Sasaki is very conscious of style and of people, how people see him and perceive him, whereas obviously Musashi is not quite on that wavelength. So we wanted to depict that clearly in the way that they dress, and he does have these elements of being quite cocky. [Sasaki] thinks that he's this naturally gifted swordsman. He's better than Musashi, so that's something as well that we wanted to kind of give away and kind of flashy nature."

As anyone who has played the Way of the Sword demo will know, Sasaki is very much Musashi's direct opposite in terms of looks, movements, and combat style. Whereas Musashi looks rough around the edges, dressed in humble, raggedy garb, Sasaki has the air of an aristocrat about him, with fancy, bright clothes and accessories. And whereas Musashi's combat style is based on power, with strong, wild swings of his katana, Sasaki's is very smooth and elegant, with slick, snake-like movements. I ask Nara about Sasaki's movements, and I get a surprising but, in retrospect, spot-on response in how the devs went about designing them.

"We want to have a really clear contrast between the way he moves and the way Musashi moves. So whereas Musashi's movements are quite wild and kind of rough and kind of powerful, Ganyu's movements are quite refined, but also they have an edge of eroticism to them. They're very alluring in the way that he moves. So that's definitely something that we were thinking about when they cast the motion actor for the role, and seeing those auditions and the person that was on screen and the way they were moving."

Want to see just how erotic Sasaki's movements and combat style are? The demo for Onimusha: Way of the Sword is available to download now (you can grab it on Steam). And, for a world-exclusive hands-on preview of the game, be sure to pick up the next issue of PC Gamer magazine, which also comes with an awesome A1 Onimusha: Way of the Sword poster.

PC cooling company Arctic has secured a tariff refund from the US government. The company isn't simply content to sit on the cash, though. As a result of the refund, Arctic is rolling back prices on its cooling components for US customers. On top of that, the company has also pledged to put the money to use in a variety of community initiatives.

The company shared via its blog, "In addition to the price rollback, Arctic is investing in community initiatives that support technology education and grassroots PC communities in the United States through hardware donations and technical support—we remain committed to fair pricing and making things right for the builders who support Arctic."

The company has yet to release further information on the specific community initiatives it plans to aid. However, the price rollback is already in effect on its US Amazon and eBay store fronts.

The company said, "Rather than only adjusting the specific items that saw a price increase, every recovered dollar is returned to the market through across-the-board retail price cuts, fulfilling our promise to the PC building community. It will remain active until every single dollar ARCTIC received from the tariff refund has been paid back to our customers."

Considering both the Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro, and the Arctic Freezer 36 currently feature in our best CPU coolers guide, I'd call that good news indeed.

To recap, back in February the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to justify far-reaching tariffs was unconstitutional. As a result, Nintendo, Lenovo, plus a number of other affected companies have since applied for compensation. Nintendo and Lenovo at least are also looking for interest in addition to the tariff refund.

It will be interesting to see which other hardware and tech companies announce similar price rollbacks like Arctic. That said, it's not just tariffs driving up the price of hardware. To take Nintendo as one example, Switch 2 pre-orders were delayed last year 'to assess the potential impact of tariffs'.

The console went on to debut at $450 in the US despite tariff turmoil, though that will increase to $500 from September 1 this year due to "changes in market conditions" (ie, the still raging memory supply crisis). As such, I strongly doubt Nintendo at least will be following Arctic's example and rolling back its hardware prices any time soon.

It might sound like a cruel joke in a time where memory is costing hundreds of dollars more than it used to, and GPUs are getting price hikes, but there's a new bit of software called Nukemark that is designed to bring even the best graphics cards to their absolute limits.

Nukemark is based in Unreal Engine 5.7 with Nanite, MegaLights, and its Lumen hardware ray tracing going as hard as they can with up to 8K virtual textures. The RTX 5090 reportedly only gets 15-20 average fps at native resolution, and developer Ezbench seems proud of that.

Even the trailer on the Steam page calls it the "stress test your GPU hopes you never run". Not one to back down to trailer marketing, I've decided to boot it up on my humble rig and put it through its paces.

My rig is equipped with an RTX 4070 Super, matched with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5. It's no slouch in the gaming department, and I rarely have problems running new games on it. I can often play games natively without upscaling or frame generation and get a solid experience. At 1440p, both of Nukemark's tests looked like a slideshow. You can see my results below.

Weirdly, the DLSS option seemed to make the tests perform worse, and I'm not too sure why. It could be some sort of bottleneck in my specific rig, or merely a software issue. Nukemark is an early access piece of software, which is expected to take 12-18 months to launch fully, so some hitches are perhaps to be expected.

I couldn't test the game at 4K as my max resolution at home is 1440p, but none of the tests ended with a result I would call 'playable'. In the best-case scenario (1080p on Pandora), an average of 23 fps looked so choppy that, if it were a game, I'd be asking for a refund already.

I suspect that when Nukemark says the RTX 5090 "sustains only approximately 15–20 FPS at native resolution", that native resolution is 4K. The two tests are full of the kinds of braggadocious visuals you would expect from stress-testing software. Emberhold, in particular, is drenched in lighting from magic, lava, and good 'ol ambience. It is littered with reflectable surfaces and fire. And, importantly, you are unlikely to get a 'playable' fps out of anything but the cream of the crop hardware right now.

So what's the point in Nukemark? Well, Ezbench Solutions says it's for system builders, overclockers, and gamers, but my gut says it's more for ego and for the curious. Nukemark rightly claims "Every scene is built to overload today's fastest GPUs" and it is "intentionally engineered to exceed the performance budgets of modern games."

So, in a sense, I suspect it will make for a better benchmark in the future. When some lucky gamer with far too much disposable income gets themselves an RTX 6090 and the 8 GB of memory they can afford from the leftover budget, they could be throwing it at Nukemark just to prove how powerful the next generation of cards is. My humble RTX 4070 Super and I, though, are just fine running the current crop of modern games at around 60 fps.

As Games Workshop let slip in a financial report last week, acclaimed horror writer/director Mike Flanagan, fresh off an adaptation of Stephen King's novel Carrie, will be writing a new live action Warhammer 40,000 series in production at Amazon. Noted Warhammer hunk Henry Cavill is producing the series, but has also reiterated in an Instagram post today that he'll be in front of the camera, too.

"We have already been working with [Flanagan] to craft the creative, and we're making some considerable advances in story," Cavill wrote on Instagram. "Importantly, some of you have been asking if I will still be starring in the lead role in the live action TV series—rest assured, I most certainly will! Who that character is, however, shall remain a secret for now!"

Warhammer 40K heads who know the series far better than I will surely have their theories—my guesses pretty much tap out with Gregor Eisonhorn, an inquisitor who's the star of many a Warhammer novel, and Demetrian Titus, the ultramarine in both Space Marine videogames. I'd take Cavill in green makeup playing an ork, though, if only to see how good of a Waaaagh! he can deliver.

While Flanagan is better known for horror than sci-fi, this isn't the first colossal media property he's attached his name to. Nearly four years ago he acquired the rights to adapt Stephen King's Dark Tower book series, and he's supposedly written the scripts for the first of five planned seasons. But Flanagan has yet to get anyone to sign on to pay for the show, so in the meantime he's pumped out Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher, film The Life of Chuck, Amazon miniseries Carrie, and the script for DC's upcoming Clayface movie.

If there's an ultramarine chapter focused on prolific screenwriting, Flanagan must be a member. One has to wonder how many "Warhammer 40,000 lore, explained" YouTube videos he's watched to get up to speed.

"As the fans will know, it's an absolute monster to wrestle but Mike's extraordinary talents are helping it take form wonderfully," Cavill wrote about the live action series on Instagram. "As a combined force and with the good folks at Games Workshop we are all working tirelessly to bring you the best, most Warhammer universe that you could possibly imagine."

Today in news that makes perfect sense, Dave Bautista may take over the role of Kratos in Amazon's God Of War TV series.

According to Variety, sources say Bautista is "currently in talks" to play demigod Kratos, the role that originally belonged to Ryan Hurst. Hurst, most recently seen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as Mentor, was injured while filming the series and had to bow out of the part to avoid delaying the production while he recovered.

Bautista immediately feels perfect for the part of Kratos, though I'd have to imagine the asking price for the movie star will be considerably higher than it was for Hurst, who has mainly played supporting roles. The show was also ordered for two seasons which were scheduled to shoot back-to-back, which would mean tying up Bautista for quite a while, no doubt raising his asking price even more.

On the other hand, this is Amazon we're talking about, so I have a hard time imagining they couldn't find an extra couple million dollars in the budget for Bautista.

It's not the only big videogame role that's been rumored for Bautista, who was lobbying hard back in 2022 to play the role of Marcus Fenix in Netflix's Gears of War live-action film. No casting announcements have been made yet for the Gears movie, though it sounds like the gears are still turning: director David Leitch said "I think" the Gears movie was still happening as recently as a few months ago.

I've owned an awful lot of ethernet cables in my life, in all sorts of colors. Black, blue, white, grey, yellow, green… even brown and red, I'm pretty sure. If you asked me what's the most common ethernet cable color outside black and white, I'd probably go with blue—but this weekend I learned that when ethernet was first designed in the 1970s, the first cables to use it were all yellow, for two primary reasons.

The first was that one of ethernet specification's creators, Rich Seifert, really liked yellow.

"It's my favorite color. I drove a yellow car, I have yellow furniture," Seifert said in a presentation at this year's Vintage Computer Festival titled History of Ethernet: Musings of an Early Networker. During the presentation he held up an original ethernet cable, clipped off a spool still in storage at his house, to demonstrate how bright it was back in the early 1980s when the technology was first rolling out. Specifically, ethernet was "1968 Corvette yellow," a tone I've learned car dudes refer to as "Safari yellow" to distinguish it from the other Corvette shades of the '60s and '70s.

The second reason Seifert pushed for ethernet cables to all be this specific shade of yellow was more practical than aesthetic, though, and it stemmed from the installation process at the time. While today ethernet is typically run over small twisted pair cables, it initially used a much bulkier coaxial cable that had to be physically connected using a vampire tap that physically "bit into" the metal cable, through its rubber shielding, to make contact. Ethernet's creators were worried about what might happen if you used one of those vampire taps on the wrong cable by mistake—a power cable, for instance.

"This stuff was strung up in ceilings, and it'd run all over the place and you'd drop taps down from the ceiling," Seifert said. "To attach a transceiver to this thing, it would clamp on, so you'd literally have to drill into the cable. There are a whole lot of cables up there in the ceiling. I did not want anyone drilling into a power cable. This would not be a good idea. So I wanted to make sure you could distinguish the power cable from the ethernet cable, so I made this thing as bright as I could possibly make it."

While Seifert's presentation from this weekend isn't online, an older version of the talk is, which covers most of the same ground. Here's the bit in question:

The ethernet spec was remarkably ahead of its time when it was first codified, supporting a 10 megabit per second capacity that computers wouldn't be able to saturate for years. It was also, at the time, a seriously power-intensive bit of computing technology. Ethernet controllers are now ubiquitous microchip elements we barely give a second thought, but in the early '80s you needed a pair of 9x12-inch circuit boards to the tune of $3,000, and they used something like 60 watts of power.

Today a Raspberry Pi 5—a whole-ass computer, ethernet controller included—runs on a 27 watt power supply.

The Czech Republic and Japan share an unexpected international friendship, and it's thanks to the profound, unifying magic of baseball. Japanese baseball fans adopted the Czech national baseball team as their foster favorite after the two countries faced off in the 2023 World Baseball Cup. The mostly amateur Czech team lost 2-10, but not before charming both Japanese fans and players with an early lead—and not before Czech pitcher Ondrej Satoria, an electrician by day, struck out the legendary Shohei Ohtani.

This week, Japanese solo developer Eba Game is channeling that international spirit of baseball and friendship. His game Ball Boy Simulator is due to launch on Steam later this month, but he's adding last-minute Czech language support (via Kotaku)—all for the sake of the one user he noticed had wishlisted his game from the Czech Republic.

"One day, when I checked my wishlist, I saw that just one person from the Czech Republic had signed up. I know from the recent World Baseball Championships how much respect the Czech Republic has for baseball and Japan," Eba Game said on X, via machine translation. "So for the sake of this one baseball fan in the Czech Republic, I implemented Czech language support. Wait for me, my Czech friend."

While Eba Game might be motivated by the unifying force that is baseball, Ball Boy Simulator seems like it's depicting a somewhat… less wholesome image of what the sport can entail. The Steam description says it's a psychological horror depiction of "the oppression and unreasonable treatment experienced in high school baseball clubs, based on the real-life experiences of the developer and those around them."

The Steam listing also offers a hint at how Eba Game might be intending to implement late Czech language support: Ball Boy Simulator's AI disclosure features the brow-furrowing disclaimer that "AI-generated content was used for some asset textures, portions of the background music, development-related assistance and technical questions, and parts of the game's social media promotional materials."

I'll confess I'm not clear on the international spirit of baseball and friendship's stance on generative AI in game development. We'll have to wait and see what level of localization quality Ball Boy Simulator's lone Czech admirer can expect.

Another week, another fun tidbit learned about our new favorite gamer turned movie star, Inde Navarrette, who creeped us all the hell out in the smash-hit horror film Obsession earlier this year.

We already marveled at Navarrette cooly streaming her Call of Duty killstreaks on Twitch while wearing a Toad hat, and we were charmed to hear she (in part) learned to build PCs by watching Henry Cavill do it on YouTube.

This latest revelation is encouraging, too: Navarrette is a big fan of Resident Evil. Hey, so are we! Celebrities: they're just like us.

In a video interview with Variety's Tiana DeNicola, Navarrette talked about the first videogames she ever played—her mom bought her Shrek: Super Party for PlayStation 2 and her dad was a big Call of Duty fan—as well as what games she's playing now, like God of War Ragnarök.

Navarrette is also playing horror games these days, which feels appropriate considering how spooky Obsession was, and says she's currently "on a Resident Evil kick."

DeNicola asked if Navarrette had been contacted by anyone to do any acting in a videogame.

"Yes, and I'm starting my journey with that soon," Navarrette said, and though she wouldn't reveal which game she would be acting in, it sounds like it could be an indie game rather than a triple-A blockbuster.

"I want to try something smaller to kind of test the waters," she said, "because videogames are obviously an interest of mine."

As for playing a part in a Resident Evil project: "I love that world specifically, the Resident Evil world," Navarrette said.

"That would be perfect for you," DeNicola said. "I think that would be amazing."

"I… would die inside," Navarrette said.

Oddly enough, Navarrette hadn't heard about Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film coming out next month, but seemed delighted at the idea.

"I will buy a ticket," Navarrette said. "That's exciting."

I have to agree with DeNicola, Navarrette would be a perfect fit for Resident Evil, either in a film or a game. Her performance in Obsession required both the type of heightened emotion and the extreme physicality that would be right at home in Raccoon City. Hopefully Capcom will make it happen someday. You can see Variety's entire interview on YouTube.

Last month, as it continued to navigate the PR craters left by its thousands of layoffs and IDF patronage, Microsoft announced that it was bringing four original Xbox games to PC through a new Backward Compatibility for PC program. Now, it seems Microsoft has bigger PC port plans in store, expanding its backwards-facing content strategy.

According to reporting from The Verge, a leaked document sent to developers indicates that Microsoft is planning to enable developers to allow their previously-released Xbox 360 games to be purchased and played on PC. The Xbox 360 backwards compatibility will reportedly be available on "Xbox PCs," Microsoft's upcoming Project Helix, and handheld devices.

Expected to launch via a "gradual" rollout between 2027 and 2028, the service will reportedly let developers opt into allowing PC backwards compatibility for their games in their Xbox 360 release catalogue.

An eventual emergence of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility seemed likely, as users realized last month that the four OG Xbox games newly released for PC were running in an Xbox emulator that was, itself, running inside an Xbox 360 emulator. With "minimal" reverse-engineering, emulator developers were able to get Microsoft's nested emulation solution to run dumped Xbox 360 games.

The leaked document also provided details for the disc-to-digital program that previous Verge reporting said was in testing at Microsoft, which will allow owners of Xbox One and Xbox Series X game discs to obtain a digital license for the game across Xbox devices. Unfortunately, that service doesn't seem to extend to Xbox 360 discs; if I had to speculate, I'd guess it's because 360 discs likely lack the disc-level licensing tech that Xbox had originally planned to utilize with the Xbox One launch.

But users who already own a digital copy of Lost Odyssey might soon be able to play it on PC—something PC Gamer has been hoping for since at least 2017.

Remember those 'I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC' ad spots from years ago? Such platform rivalry feels like old, mouldering hat these days (especially to a console-gaming interloper like me). That said, we live in a world where both the MacBook Neo and the Dell XPS 13, two notebooks alike in dignity, are vying for the crown of 'most affordable entry-level notebook' at $699 a piece.

The rivalry is old news, though a fresh twist in the tale is that apparently large Microsoft Word files actually open faster on the MacBook Neo. Independent testing carried out by PhoneBuff found that the Neo opened a 500-page Word document in a hair over 7 seconds, whereas a similarly specced Dell XPS 13 took 12 seconds (via Windows Latest).

It's quite the upset—you'd think that after all these years, Microsoft would offer the optimum Word Doc experience within Windows. To add insult to injury, the MacBook Neo doesn't even have Apple's speedy M-series silicon, but instead features what is essentially a repurposed phone chip in the A18 Pro. Though, to be fair, this 'mere' phone chip is still comparable to older M-series chips.

Notebooks like this can handle more than just note-taking. The Dell XPS 13 features an Intel Core 5 320 (a stripped-down version of the Panther Lake chips we like a lot), which should offer plenty of other opportunities to shine throughout PhoneBuff's testing. For instance, on startup the Dell XPS 13 races to the desktop in 24 seconds. The MacBook Neo takes very nearly twice as long, clocking in at 40 seconds. Mind you, that may not really be an, ahem, apples to apples comparsion as the notebooks are running two different operating systems.

But as both of the laptops tested were configured with only 8 GB of RAM, you'd perhaps expect this to be a closer run thing. PhoneBuff's battery efficiency and creative workload tests are a lot more variable, but there's only one thing that I'm interested in here: gaming performance.

Cyberpunk 2077 on a notebook? It's more likely than you think—though with some caveats, obviously. The MacBook Neo loaded up CD Projekt Red's techno dystopia in a hair under 41 seconds, whereas the Dell XPS 13 managed it in 55. When it comes to the game benchmark, though, you can't even attempt to run it at ultra settings on the Dell XPS 13.

Otherwise, when running fullscreen, the XPS 13 averages 16 fps in the benchmark, whereas the MacBook Neo averages almost 20 fps. Now, the MacBook Neo outperforming the Dell was not something I was expecting. Though I also wouldn't necessarily call 20 fps 'playable,' let alone 'enjoyable'.

Our Ian managed to get the MacBook Neo to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 30 FPS in his own testing earlier this year. He writes in his review, "The downside is that to get this, you need to dip below Steam Deck settings, using the Low graphics profile, with the resolution at 720p, and with MetalFX upscaling in performance mode. That's not great, and looks a little soft thanks to all the upscaling going on, but at least it is technically playable."

Personally, I think I'll be sticking with my rig for Cyberpunk 2077—though either notebook might still get a look in for less hardware-intensive indie releases and visual novels.

If you manage your gaming expectations accordingly, then the XPS 13's 13-inch OLED touch display is nothing to sneeze at. The XPS 13's OLED also enjoys P3 colour gamut, meaning it supports a slightly wider range of colours than the MacBook Neo. Furthermore, its 120 Hz refresh rate is twice that of the MacBook Neo's screen—at the very least, scrolling through a webpage will feel a smidge smoother on the Dell, even if its Intel Core 5 320 chip will struggle to keep up with your competitive favourites.

MSI has just announced the Pro Max OLED 271UPJW12, and if you aren't a monitor wizard who can make sense of all those numbers, that's a new 27-inch 4K inkjet-printed OLED monitor.

If you are unfamiliar with what that means, inkjet printing is a cheaper process than the traditional deposition process used by LG and Samsung. LG and Samsung produce almost every OLED screen for PC monitors right now, but TCL, the producers of this MSI panel, have been looking to burst into the market for some time.

The new MSI panel offers a 120 Hz refresh rate, up to 1,000 nits peak brightness, and an optimised RGB stripe subpixel layout that MSI claims "closely resembles the uniform RGB structure of traditional LCDs." This should eliminate colour fringing and enhance image clarity, and is something we've seen arrive on LG and Samsung-made OLED panels only recently.

As you might be able to guess from the 120 Hz refresh rate and 'Pro' moniker, this MSI panel is not traditionally intended for gaming. We don't yet have the response rate, but it's an OLED, so it's likely to be good. Yet the focus on colour precision over speed implies a use case for professionals. The monitor offers "99% of the DCI-P3 wide color gamut with an exceptional Delta E ≤ 2 accuracy."

In a way, this new monitor for MSI will be a good testing ground for what more OLEDs could look like in the future. If inkjet-printed screens get a foothold in the market, it could make for some more budget options, and a third option away from the duopoly of Samsung and LG.

Unfortunately, though, we are missing the two most pertinent bits of information about this monitor. We don't know when it's supposed to release or what pricing will look like. The MSI Pro Max 271UPXW12G, which appears to be the QD-OLED counterpart to the inkjet monitor, seems to sit around the $700 mark. If it can cut away substantially at that price, then the swap to inkjet will be well worth it.

Still, as it's an early model for inkjet tech, I'm not expecting too big of a price cut. And non-inkjet OLED monitors are becoming more and more budget-friendly. I check over our roundup of the best cheap gaming monitors every week, and regularly spot OLED panels around the $300-$400 price point.

Even Alienware put out a $350 OLED gaming monitor as recently as this year, so here's hoping OLED only gets more competitive in the pricing arena.

Dragon's Dogma 2 will be getting its first big proper chunk of DLC soon, and in addition to nixing those weird microtransactions that did more harm to word-of-mouth than the actual game, it's also slated to be getting a hard mode difficulty for players who have everything maxed out.

That's per a Q&A featured on the game's Steam page, where game director Kento Kinoshita stated: "We're working on a Hard Mode that will provide a satisfying challenge for seasoned players whose stats have reached, or are approaching, the level cap."

The actual hard mode itself doesn't have a release window, but it is coming, with producer Naoto Oyama adding: "Please stay tuned for further updates regarding the details of Hard Mode and its release window."

As for whether Dark Arisen itself will provide a meaty challenge for gamers looking to get thrashed about again, Kinoshita writes: "Both the Forsaken Dominion and Lost Rites are expansion contents, so we've designed them to offer battles with an even greater sense of tension and challenge than the main game.

"We're aware that there's a very wide range of player level across the community, so with that in mind, we're adjusting the balance so that everyone can enjoy the experience—whether they're just starting their adventure, still progressing through the game, or have already completed multiple playthroughs."

Kinoshita adds that, even in the normal mode of the DLC, "the difficulty gradually ramps up as players progress through the expansion content, with enemy encounters becoming increasingly challenging along the way. As players reach the middle and later stages of the content, we've balanced it so that even those who have already hit the stat cap can still enjoy a meaningful level of challenge."

So, to clarify, Dark Arisen will have endgame-appropriate fights—the future hard mode will simply add another layer of self-flagellation to the game which, despite some changes to its thorniness, is still known for being kind of hostile in a fun, wrestling-you-in-the-mud kind of way. I'm glad that those who've nonetheless tamed the game's grisly systems will have some real challenges in the future, however.

Valve's wireless VR headset, the Steam Frame, doesn't yet have a nailed down release date beyond the vague window of 'later this year'. I've got a hunch it'll drop soon though—and not because I put any stock in the Steam Frame subreddit's wild release date rituals. No, I'm instead feeling optimistic because both Lepton and FEX are now publicly available via Steam.

Both of these pieces of software are key for the Steam Frame and required for its operation. Lepton can be thought of as a 'container' for gaming on Linux that lets it run Android games inside of it. FEX is a similarly important tool for the Snapdragon-powered device, but a smidge more complicated.

At the risk of oversimplifying, FEX takes 32-bit and 64-bit x86 games and translates them so they can be understood by Arm-based systems. The Steam Frame uses an Arm-based Snapdragon SoC, hence why FEX is required. Without it, it wouldn't be able to play most of the VR games available on Steam.

To be clear, neither Lepton nor FEX have an easily accessible Steam store page. This 'public release' is mostly good news for developers. For instance, Android devs can easily create an Android depot containing an apk for their game on Steam (the first Android game to be purchasable on Steam popped up back in November, in the form of an apk file for Walkabout Mini Golf).

From there, devs can set the apk as the launch executable for players using the Steam client. Steam Cloud will even support save data stored in the external Android data directory—that's some thought out integration.

FEX could be handy for any Arm system. Besides Valve saying it's 'definitely' already investigating an Arm-based gaming future, Nvidia's recently unveiled RTX Spark 'superchip' pairs an Nvidia GPU core with a MediaTek Arm chiplet.

Though I personally doubt an RTX Spark laptop or notebook will be the most affordable option, the SoC seems set to be a disruptive presence in the space no matter what. Our Dave has already played a native Arm build of Alan Wake 2 on an RTX Spark laptop, but that still leaves plenty of games that will benefit from Valve's work on the FEX translation layer in the future.

Noctua is one of the very best fan makers on the market, but introducing its fan into the Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition gaming mouse seemed to involve a truly horrible sequence of fan tests.

Noctua has "custom-built torture-test rigs", all designed to put fans through their paces to see if they can withstand how the average gamer treats their mice. One video of six fans getting rapidly from left to right says, "This is what 30 sideways movements per second look like."

Effectively, the new Noctua mouse has a fan inside, which then blows air on your palm as you play. I've had the chance to try it out in the PC Gamer office, and so far, it's surprisingly pleasant. But ultimately, if you are gaming, you will do a lot of sideways movement and will often pick the mouse up and tap the top of the table. Noctua wouldn't want its fan to break down in a game, and it has taken to its blog to go over its testing methodology.

One test, conveniently named the 'drop test', has a series of fans on a motor that is picked up by a wheel and then dropped rapidly. You can see a video of that particular test in action below.

The results, according to Noctua, are positive for both tests. It says, "The answer to the question of how long NF-A4x10 fans can survive this type of torture is simple: surprisingly long!"

The horizontal test, pushing 12 fans back and forth rapidly, stopped after 280,000 cycles as one of the fans had failed. However, that turned out to be a bearing issue with the tape that fixed the fan coming loose.

In the vertical drop test, all eight fans were still functional after 20,000 drops. "After another 5000 drops, all the fans had their impellers pop out due to failures of the bearing lock-ring, but by this time, the foam padding at the base of the test setup that we used to soften the impact was completely shattered, so the impact force had become much higher than our accelerometer could measure."

So it seems like the gaming mouse is ready for the big league (ie gamers throwing their mice around because a monster has popped up on-screen). We'll just have to see how it fares for gaming in its other aspects. I have my hands on one, so you can expect my thoughts soon, though I don't anticipate dropping it 20,000 times.

If you've ever felt like your bike trainer has a disturbing lack of Rocket League or Forza Horizon, you are in luck. One app called Deck de France can let you use your bike as a controller for games, though it's pretty limited so far.

Shared on GitHub (via Hackaday), Deck de France is technically compatible with any smart trainer that broadcasts Cycling Power Service over Bluetooth Low Energy. That means it can work with the following devices:

• Tacx — NEO, NEO 2T, Flux, Bushido, Vortex, Satori, Booster
• Elite — Suito-T, Justo, Direto, Drivo, Rampa, Sterzo Smart (steering plate)
• Wahoo — KICKR, KICKR Core (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• Zwift Hub / Zwift Hub One (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• CycleOps — Magnus, H3 (broadcasts CPS — untested but should work)
• Garmin — Vector 3 power meter pedals
• Magene — S3+ Speed/Cadence sensor
• Power meters — Any BLE power meter pedals or crank-based meters (4iiii, Stages, Favero, etc.)

Effectively, the app can translate your pedalling power into actions. Sukolupo, the creator of the app, says the original use case is the Tour de France games. The harder you pedal, the faster you go.

That makes sense as it's the closest video game to actually cycling without actually cycling, which has always been a bit of an oddity to me—especially when cycling apps such as Zwift and Rouvy exist.

It also has some rudimentary functionality in other games. In Rocket League, pedalling activates boost. In the Forza games, pedal power is equivalent to acceleration. You can even control the throttle of cars in Grand Theft Auto.

The catch here is that you need a Bluetooth controller to do everything else. That means in the likes of Rocket League, you'd play as normal on a controller and pedal when you want to boost.

As of right now, it is shown working with the Steam Deck, but Deck de France technically works with any Linux PC. It actually seems strikingly simple to set up, with Sukolupo saying you can get it working in just five minutes. The instructions are all on the Deck de France GitHub repository and easy to follow.

So, if you're an avid cycler, or just want the weirdest way to hog all the boost in Rocket League, this seems like a fun way to add a little bit of exercise into a gaming session.

If Microsoft gutting its Xbox division, laying off staff, and struggling to give its console a real unique selling point hasn't quite put you off the brand, you will now have to pay hundreds more for its devices if you live in Europe.

As originally spotted over in a Resetera thread, the prices of Xbox Series S and Series X have just gone up (the change is reflected on the Microsoft Germany website too). The new changes are as follows:

This means the 1 TB model of the Xbox Series S now costs more than the 1 TB Xbox Series X console. As well as this, in June, Microsoft started sunsetting the 2 TB model, citing component costs. And Xbox hardware is seemingly already struggling to sell. As revealed on the latest earnings call, Xbox hardware revenue decreased by a whopping 29% "driven by lower volume of consoles sold."

As pointed out by VGC, Microsoft did previously confirm price hikes, but only in the US. With increases of $100-$150 across the board, Europe actually appears to have been hit worse by the changes. The 512 GB Xbox Series S got a $100 rise in the US, but a £130 (around $175) increase in the UK

Even though higher-priced hardware is bad for pretty much everyone in the gaming industry, there is some schadenfreude to be felt here. That's because console pricing is only so bad because of the memory crisis, and AI growth has led to that memory crisis. In turn, Microsoft has put a lot of money into AI, so as our Tyler puts it, "Microsoft doesn't know what to do about the memory pricing crisis Microsoft is causing."

Unfortunately, all signs suggest the memory crisis isn't ending soon. Samsung, one of the big three memory manufacturers, has warned of a 'severe' memory supply crisis next year, and it will likely take some time for supply to catch up with demand.

With the next generation of consoles still expected to launch at the end of 2027, or perhaps into 2028, it seems likely that whatever Sony and Microsoft do next will be hit by the same memory pricing and supply issues.

Both companies will likely take some losses on consoles to make it back in software, but even a small loss is unlikely to make a big dent in the astronomical prices of memory for the foreseeable future.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't any stranger to crossovers—but Evercold will be a first for the MMO, wherein both the raid series and the alliance raid series (8-man and 24-man raids, respectively) will be crossovers. With the latter being a whackadoodle Evangelion crossover, and the former being a far more reasonable FF7 one.

This won't be the first time FF14 has had crossovers with other Final Fantasy games, mind. There have been seasonal events with Final Fantasy 15, for instance, and the Omega raid series in Stormblood was chocka with FF game references—although that was justified by way of a computer simulation. Still, we got to kick Kefka's butt.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, current FF7 remake director Naoki Hamaguchi (who will be involved in the crossover) tells the site his team was really pumped to "come up with all these ideas", but at "the same time we have to be really careful that it's not impacting the FF14 patch release schedule, because then that would be putting the cart before the horse".

As a matter of fact, both Hamaguchi AND producer of FF14 Naoki Yoshida had to tell their team to "calm down" and "be reasonable", with Hamaguchi in particular instructing his team to "look at our bandwidth to see what's realistic and to make sure that they can do their best work".

Which I'm glad for, to be honest. While I've grown fonder of Dawntrail's host of content as the expansion has gone on, I can't help but feel as though Creative Studio 3 was spread a little thin between making Final Fantasy 16 and its MMO, working on limited resources that, for instance, caused Occult Crescent's first Forked Tower raid to only have one difficulty setting.

As a matter of fact, criticism of Dawntrail has been so firm that it's finally gotten Yoshida and co. to start making big changes to the game with Evercold, which is a reassuring sign that things are on track. I'm glad that the directors of both games, then, are being purposefully reasonable about how much their teams can handle—which is good, because the prospect of getting to fight Sephiroth in my favourite MMO does fill me with glee.

Last month I reported that replacement batteries for the original LCD version of the Steam Deck would return to the iFixIt store after a brief absence. Well, Valve sent more batteries, and you can purchase these replacements from iFixIt right now. Unfortunately, the replacement battery alone now costs $130.

Purchasing a new L-shaped battery without the kit bundle used to only set you back about $80. These new replacement parts for the Steam Deck LCD are still rated for 5200 mAh, and have the same 40 Wh capacity like the old ones, though they cost $50 more. That's a nearly 63% increase (via VideoCardz).

If you don't mind picking up a non-OEM part instead, iFixIt also offers an aftermarket version of the LCD battery for only 80 bucks. This was introduced as a stop-gap while Valve's batteries were out of stock, but they feature the same Watt and Milliamp Hour capacity.

It's also worth noting that you can purchase replacement batteries for the Steam Deck OLED from iFixIt too, though these still only cost $80. As it's for a newer model, the OLED batteries instead enjoy 50.08 Wh, and 6470 mAh. That's about 20% more capacity than the LCD Steam Deck, though its OEM batteries still cost $50 more.

As disappointing as it is, this price jump is perhaps unsurprising. For one thing, Valve quietly discontinued the LCD Steam Deck late last year. For another, in the midst of a memory supply crisis which is driving up the price of new gaming PC components by the day, more and more folks may be moving to fix up older hardware instead.

Remember the story about AI companies destroying millions of copies of books while scanning them to use as training data? In terms of bad optics, "destroying books" is right up there with kicking puppies, which is why the AI companies relied on third-party rebuyers to obfuscate what they were actually doing.

It didn't work, and now as 404 Media reports (having broken the original story), third-party book database company ISBNdb has deleted the part of their website advertising that they could be "your streamlined partner for sourcing printed books in bulk, tailored to your LLM training needs, delivered at the scale AI demands."

That page is still available on the Internet Archive, of course, as is their blog post about "Reframing the Destruction Narrative" in which they make wild claims like: "The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one."

The idea that asking a chatbot to hallucinate a summary of a book has exactly the same value as actually reading it seems bugloving nuts to me, but what do I know? I'm not getting my knowledge from the intellectual cycle. Anyway, ISBNdb is now claiming it never actually offered the service it dedicated multiple parts of its website to, telling 404 Media, "The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life."

Somebody out there sure is buying up a lot of old and obscure books, however. As reported by Guardian Australia, multiple secondhand booksellers have seen an uptick in online sales from third-party rebuyers, describing them as "waves of orders that did not fit with usual customer patterns."

In a new interview with PCGamesN to mark Owlcat's 10th anniversary, studio co-founder and creative director Alexander Mishulin talked about Owlcat's history and upcoming projects. Two things really caught my eye: Owlcat's still got hardcore CRPG fans covered, and the studio's bulked up to the heavyweight division.

"We will continue to make CRPGs because we love them," Mishulin said of the action-RPG versus CRPG question. "We do not want to become stagnant. We will be trying different approaches for our RPG games, trying to find the best possible fit for the idea of the game.

"We want to create the best possible RPGs, we like them, we play them, we get inspired by them and we want our games to feel the same, that we would enjoy them ourselves and hope that they will inspire someone else to create even better ones."

Owlcat's first three games share an engine, design sensibility, and overall structure⁠—you're a monarch or otherwise leading a state-level organization⁠—so the very Mass Effect-like The Expanse: Osiris Reborn represents a huge, if exciting, departure. I didn't think there was a danger of the studio permanently pivoting away from the house style that put it on the map, but Mishulin's statement is reassuring.

It's also backed up by the other game Owlcat has in development, Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy. It iterates on Owlcat's CRPG engine and the ruleset of Rogue Trader in a way that echoes the jump from Pathfinder: Kingmaker to Wrath of the Righteous.

But it's also a big departure in its own way: Owlcat is trading its customary ruler fantasy and light 4X elements for an ambitious, highly reactive, detective/investigation metagame⁠—it sounds rad.

The studio has massively expanded to work on two projects simultaneously: Both PCGamesN and Wccftech have reported that Owlcat currently consists of around 600 employees. Looking at other RPG big boys, Larian was north of 500 at last check-in, and Obsidian is currently in the low 200s following Microsoft's latest layoffs.

According to a 2024 fact sheet, CD Projekt Red has 1,134 worldwide employees, while a 2023 financial statement had its heartland studio in Warsaw accounting for 615 of them.

BioWare was likely pushing a 500-600 person headcount at its fullest extent in the 2010s (with the Montreal and Austin branches), but back of the napkin math has it now at 100 or fewer employees following post-Veilguard layoffs.

It's unclear how many separate offices Owlcat's staff is spread across. Originally founded in Moscow, the developer is currently headquartered in Paphos, Cyprus. This expanded manpower is certainly in the "Yep, that's enough people to handle two RPGs at once" range, and you could imagine Owlcat satisfying both action and CRPG fans by keeping up a multi-game approach, similar to what BioWare managed with Mass Effect and Dragon Age during its golden years.

North Dakota may not be the most dazzling US state, but it is one of them, and so it's set to be absorbed into American Truck Simulator's expansive recreation of life on the road. The game's next DLC will take players through the state's "sweeping prairies, fertile farmland, winding rivers, and endless skies."

I don't know that its skies are any more endless than, say, South Dakota's, but it's still a looker in the trailer (the advertising kind, not the big rig kind) that went up today. Predictably, it shows a bunch of semi trucks hauling supplies past herds of buffalo, small towns, and giant statues of fish. It brings the game up to a whopping 61 DLCs on Steam—though notably, a number of those are free and others are minor additions that come cheaper than the addition of a full-on state.

North Dakota will join the likes of Texas, New Mexico, Idaho, and so on when it launches, though no release date has been named yet. Folks on social media are getting their yuks in: "Easiest update ever," said Reddit user Fun_Assignment_269. "Do you even need to design any assets to replicate North Dakota?" A reply from logicalguest chimed in, "Lol! Empty field, CTRL-C, CTRL-V. DONE!"

Okay, maybe the new locale isn't that exciting. But this isn't some key-jangling, action-packed, high-octane thrill ride we're talking about, this is a game where you drive the speed limit and deliver goods while saying "10-4, good buddy" and blasting Jerry Reed so loud you get a noise citation. Perhaps the placid sights of one of America's most boring states is merely a blank canvas for the determined trucking roleplayer, the kind of player who sees a giant fiberglass catfish statue and says, 'Yes, this is what America is all about.'

Or maybe it's just boring anyway. I mean, this is North Dakota we're talking about.

Modder Elevna on the Nier Replicant Nexus has made my day with the full release of Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139…, a project that replaces the young protagonist of the cult classic's 2022 remaster with his grizzled, older counterpart from the 2010 original.

Let's back up: In Yoko Taro's vision for Nier, the titular protagonist (whose name you're allowed to change for some reason) was a waifish anime twink who kinda looks like Raiden from Metal Gear. This was during peak Xbox 360, the piss filter era, so Square Enix executives wanted a hero with a little more Unreal Engine 3 beefy masculinity to appeal to the west.

The compromise: Japan got two versions of Nier. Replicant on the PS3 boasted Yoko Taro's preferred "Brother" Nier, so named because he's siblings with fellow main character Yonah. The Xbox 360's Nier Gestalt featured "Father" Nier, who was aged up to his 40s, put on a powerlifting program, and made to be Yonah's dad. In the west, we basically only got Nier Gestalt no matter the console version.

Fast forward to 2022, and Nier gets a remaster because everybody took another look after the explosive success of Nier Automata and realized the original was always good⁠—I liked Nier before it was cool, and I'm not bitter about all those 6/10s it got. The cheekily named Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… brought Brother Nier to the west for the first time, giving us oldheads something to get excited about (aside from finally having a PC version).

Here's the thing, though: Yoko Taro, I love you and your eccentric auteur purity, but just this once, the shadowy cabal of risk-averse, art-hating, shareholder-worshipping executives was right. Father Nier is the man. Grizzled dads protecting their kids in the post apocalypse is played out, sure, but Father Nier is one of the high water marks of the form⁠—not the least because he's kind of an asshole who sucks and makes everything worse.

Nier shows a world well past its sell-by date, and while both Brother and Father Nier are men possessed by ungovernable rage, Papa Nier cuts it with this sense of mournful weariness that just ties a nice bow on the tragedy of it all. It's mostly sold by a career-best performance from prolific voice actor Jamieson Price, who I only just realized was also part of one of my favorite dialogue exchanges in any RPG.

There were rumblings Square Enix might do an official Father Nier DLC, but it never panned out. Cue Elevna's Gestalt mod, which offers a full, luxury Papa Nier experience in 2026. The original model is back and touched up, great, but Elevna also dug all of the audio files for Price's voiceover out of the original and ported them here, making the mod essential.

That would have been enough for me, but Elevna's attention to detail is truly impressive. Nier's alternate skins have also gotten Papa versions, and ver.1.22…'s bonus chapter now has repurposed voice lines from Price to smooth things over⁠—rewatching the chapter's cutscenes, Nier mostly makes small comments and combat barks that can easily be fudged. Elevna even ported back in relevant dialogue from other characters referencing Nier's age.

My favorite small detail: Nier's OG DLC (now just part of the game) features a dream arena where you fight as the other version of Nier⁠—Brother back in 2010, Papa in Replicant. Elevna's Gestalt mod swaps Brother Nier back in for the dream fights.

Nier Gestalt ver.1.22474487139… is a perfect mod by my reckoning, acting on a supremely niche demand (my supremely niche demand) at an almost absurd level of craft and care. It makes me happy. It's how I'll do my next replay.

I don't need to explain what Baldur's Gate 3 is since it's one of those games you hear about endlessly, whether you want to or not, because it remains a universally acclaimed phenomenon. PC Gamer's Fraser Brown gave it our highest score ever in his review, a positively covetable 97, and everyone I know who's played it did not stop once the credits rolled. But if you've yet to take the plunge, now might be a good time: it's the cheapest it's ever been on Steam.

Granted, that's just 30% off, but it's still a historic low which takes the game down from $60 to $42. That's 28 Costco hot dogs, and I can personally say I've gotten slightly more enjoyment out of Baldur's Gate 3 than I would get out of 28 Costco hot dogs. In the following paragraphs, I will try to advocate for why that is.

For one, BG3 takes Dungeon & Dragon's fifth edition and turns into a buildcrafter's playground—its turn-based combat is a meticulous recreation of the real thing that combines 5e's RAW with Larian's trademark elemental field combos and prop destruction, lending the improvisational feel which characterizes tabletop play. The purchase of 28 Costco hot dogs prescribes a very specific sort of evening that invariably ends in physical agony.

BG3 is also a compelling bit of fantasy fiction in its own right, with an action-blockbuster story that'll have you battling otherworldly horrors, adjudicating the fates of entire towns, and falling in love with your troubled companions. Its sense of choice and consequence is shocking given the 100+ hour scale of its campaign, offering you the agency to become a paragon of virtue or an angel-murdering psychopath. 28 Costco hot dogs, on the other hand, only offer you one choice: sitting on the commode until your legs go numb.

On top of all that, BG3 is eminently moddable: you can turn the game into a roguelike, supercharge your player character for a solo playthrough, or try out that fancy new third-person camera to pretend you're playing a wayward Dragon Age spinoff. Admittedly, the hot dogs are pretty competitive in this category, as hot dogs famously allow for a variety of toppings. I'll call this one a tie.

Anyway, BG3 is quite a good RPG that feels like a bold step forward for a very old style of game. If you like 5e, there's not a better way to experience it in a videogame, and if you don't like 5e or are unfamiliar with it, it's such a solid fantasy game in its own right that it might just make you a believer.

It's been a big week for Project Zomboid, the wildly successful zombie survival sim that, like a doomsday prepper holed up in a fortified basement, simply refuses to leave Steam early access. Its first major build update since 2021 coincided with a slight price increase for The Indie Stone's undead phenomenon, but this didn't stop the game from setting a new record for concurrent players on Steam.

As detailed on the Project Zomboid blog, build 42.20 brings an extensive overhaul to the game's setting of Knox County. For starters, seven of its towns have been completely reworked with new art that gives each settlement its own distinct architectural style, completely unique buildings and houses, and improved landscaping between the buildings.

In addition, the surface area of the map has been doubled, bringing the total number of tiles to 35,000. This map expansion brings with it multiple new and overhauled locations to explore, including a boy scout camp, an "entirely new" prison, and everybody's favourite spooky locale, an abandoned orphanage.

My favourite stat of all is that the build adds "400 procedural basements". There's no specific reason for that—I just like the idea of needing to procedurally generate a basement. Not all of Project Zomboid's basements are subject to algorithmic whims, however. There are also 75 unique basements that you may stumble upon during your adventures.

Alongside the changes to the map, build 42 expands Project Zomboid at a mechanical level. It introduces new animals like cows and chickens, while also making changes to the hunting and trapping system, opening up new opportunities for farming and wilderness survival. The update also brings an improved stealth system, fishing refinements, and the ability to drag corpses.

It's a significant update, and The Indie Stone has increased the price of Project Zomboid to reflect that. Prior to Build 42, Project Zomboid cost $20 (£16.75), but that's now been raised to $25 (£22.50), which is a substantial hike. But that didn't stop the game from reaching a new all-time player concurrent on Steam, with nearly 79,552 players flocking to Steam to check out the update in the early hours of Friday.

With build 42 now out, The Indie Stone's attention will presumably turn to the next planned update, which will herald the long-anticipated return of NPC survivors to Knox County. Given the average length of time between more recent Project Zomboid builds, I wouldn't expect to see this surface for a few years yet.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 just closed out its second year of post-release support with a one-two punch of updates. Patch 14, aka The Confrontation Update, adds a new enemy and significantly expands the game's PvP options. Since Confrontation's release, a separate update has added Steam Workshop support to Saber Interactive's hugely successful shooter.

Let's start with the Confrontation update, which, as the name, suggests is heavily focussed on Space Marine 2's PvP mode, Eternal War. Patch 14 adds two new PvP arenas, a medium-sized map called Sanctum, and Facility, which Saber describes as "one of the most compact PvP maps" available in the game. Alongside these maps, the patch adds weekly PvP rewards, meaning you can earn cosmetics and other in-game rewards by playing matches and completing challenges.

If you're more interested in the cooperative side of Space Marine 2, then the update introduces a new enemy for players to fight—the Scarab Occult Terminator Sorcerer. The Sorcerer is a tough miniboss opponent that will appear throughout the game's Operations mode, and furnished with a wide array of abilities. He's able to create copies of himself, teleport around the battlefield, and attack the player with a powerful laser beam. This video gives a good overview of the Sorcerer's moveset. It seems like he'll provide a stern test for even the most grizzled Ultramarine.

As for the Steam Workshop support, obviously it's early days for Space Marine 2 mods. But there are a few player-made extras that are worth checking out. The main one is the Astartes Overhaul, which has been available on NexusMods for a while. The mod rebalances Operations while adding new weapons and customisation options. It introduces three new classes to play as—Terminator, Chaplain, and Apothecary, as well as four new weapons including an Assault Bolter and an Artifex Bolt Rifle that comes with optional incendiary bolts.

Most of the other currently available mods are addons for the Astartes Overhaul. These range from adding some extra execution animations to letting you play with six or even nine-man squads. There are a few non-Astartes mods however Health on Executions makes Space Marine 2's grisly finishers even more like Doom's glory-kill system, while Rogue Trader Tyranids reworks the game's insectoid menace to more closely resemble their 1985 models.

While this wraps up Space Marine's second year of updates, Saber Interactive has confirmed that it will continue supporting the game for at least another year. The developer hasn't specified what new stuff will be coming to the sequel in the next twelve months, but a detailed roadmap will be revealed on the game's second anniversary in September.

Oblivion Remastered releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in August, which normally would be wholly irrelevant to PC Gamer. We've been merrily exploring revamped Cyrodiil for well over a year at this point. But you might want to hide your stealth archer in the corner of whatever dungeon you're exploring and check out Bethesda's latest promotional video for the Switch 2 launch. It's a little different from the usual fare of game footage and dramatic voiceovers.

To herald the Switch 2 version's imminent release, Bethesda brought back veteran Elder Scrolls voice actor Wes Johnson—who plays many characters across the series including Oblivion's default Imperial males—to reprise his most colourful role in the series, the mad, cheese-loving god Sheogorath.

In the video, Johnson—dressed as and in the role of Sheogorath—records lines in a sound booth and causes general mischief with the aid of an exasperated audio technician. As the video progresses, the Prince of Madness becomes increasingly baffled as to why he has to record lines he's already done before.

It's a shameless bit of marketing fluff, but it's nonetheless entertaining to see Johnson in full swing as Sheogorath. It's also a relief that he has apparently made a full recovery from the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered 18 months ago, during which he was hospitalised and put into an induced coma.

The responses to the video are similarly pleased to see Johnson in action. But there is an undercurrent of discontent to many of the comments. These mainly centre around the remaster's widely reported technical issues on PC. Not only do many Steam reviews report performance hitches while exploring Cyrodiil, but the game also suffers from a wide array of bugs. Some of these have been around since the original Oblivion released in 2006, while others are entirely new.

What doesn't help is that Bethesda and Virtuos appear to have abandoned the PC version. While Oblivion Remastered received a couple of patches after launch, the last one—update 1.2—arrived over a year ago. Consequently, recent Steam reviews have dropped down to Mixed, though the game still has a Mostly Positive rating overall. Let's hope the Switch 2 launch brings a bit of PC TLC too.

Sometimes I understand why modders flame out, burn their bridges, and give up entirely. Every time I look at a posts page on Nexus Mods, for instance. A perfect example of this has been the reaction to Relysia's True Third-Person Camera mod for Baldur's Gate 3, a labor of love that gives the traditionally birdseye CRPG an over-the-shoulder viewpoint.

Baldur's Gate 3 already has a third-person mode, you might say. All you have to do is plug in a controller and the camera will drop for a more console-RPG experience. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the Native Camera Tweaks mod. Hundreds of people on the internet have been tiresomely pointing this out over the last couple of weeks, every single one of them convinced they are the first person to make this vital observation the rest of us need to read.

Relysia has seen these comments and then, with admirable patience, made an eight-minute video documenting all the ways their mod is different. For starters, with the True Third-Person Camera mod, you can look up. The viewpoint when you play with a controller is locked into a downward angle and can't be changed. Native Camera Tweaks does let you look up, but when you need to bounce back to a more distant view you have to manually adjust the camera, where True Third-Person Camera switches with a simple press of the asterisk key.

There's also the fact True Third-Person Camera defaults to a slightly off-center over-the-shoulder view, where the other solutions default to centred third-person. It's the difference between Tomb Raider 2013 and Tomb Raider 1996. The Native Camera Tweaks viewpoint is adjustable, but you have to edit a file to do so, while True Third-Person Camera is compatible with Mod Configuration Menu for in-game adjustments to the POV position on the fly.

There's more to it than that, but basically, yes, it is a different experience. I've played with the mod for several hours and found it meaningfully distinct and the perfect excuse to start yet another playthrough.

Baldur's Gate 3 works better from this angle than a lot of other CRPGs because so much effort was put into making it look good in those up-close dialogue scenes. Not all of it, of course. Looking up when you're underground or on the bottom floor of a building sometimes reveals places where nobody expected you to do that, and you'll want to switch to the regular camera when you're sneaking or when a companion points out something they've spotted nearby but which you can't see. If Larian put this in as an option they'd have made a lot of extra work for themselves tidying up the kind of stuff that's forgivable when exposed by a mod.

The mod also changes back to the regular camera when combat starts, although Relysia is planning to address that in an update, adding "immersive combat mode, where the camera stays very close to the action throughout". I might stick to the top-down camera for combat myself, but it's always nice to have options.

A big part of the appeal of PC gaming is being able to personalize things to your persnickety preferences, and having multiple ways of doing that—even if it means having two mods with similar but different effects—is the perfect example.

You can download True Third-Person Camera from Nexus Mods, along with WASD Character Movement for the full "what if Dragon Age was turn-based" experience, and get Party Limit Begone while you're at it, because that's still the most essential mod for Baldur's Gate 3.

First reported by Automaton, Spanking Exorcist developer Actor made a free "apology game" available to download after missing a planned July 24 release date due to overzealous Steam content moderation. In the simple apology game, you press a button to simulate spanking the developer as punishment.

Spanking Exorcist's trailer shows a game combining first person exploration, unsettling, sex doll-looking lady characters, and slightly less scary, Sadako-looking forsaken waif lady characters. It strikes me as a perfectly adequate, replacement-level gag horror game for streamers to react to, if a bit more risque than your usual fare.

"I consent," you say. "I consent," announces the anonymous Japanese developer, Actor. "Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" asserts Valve. The uneven content moderation on Steam became a big story following controversial intervention by payment processors and the persecution of horror game Horses, but it's always been odd.

I'm fond of the theory that there's just one particularly zealous prude at Valve who really has it out for horny stuff from Japan. Anyway, you can still buy Furry Hitler (one and two), as well as Alex Jones' shitty videogame on Steam.

I was pleased to discover that Plantation Simulator was taken down (by its developer's request, not Valve's intercession) following negative reporting by Kotaku. Spanking Exorcist is fine by comparison. Harmless. Let my boy spank.

"We sincerely apologize for the delay in the release of Spanking Exorcist on this occasion," Actor wrote on X, "The Everything App" (auto-translated from Japanese). "As a token of our remorse, we've created a game where you can spank the butt of the developer, Actor … We would be delighted if you enjoy it."

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I followed the Google Drive download link and procured Apology.exe to try it out for myself, ignoring the protests of Google Drive and Windows. Computer, disable safeties, activate indie Japanese gag spanking game. Yes, I know the risks (I'm currently running a system scan as I write this).

There is not much to Apology.exe, just a cartoonish representation of a derriere viewed from overhead and surrounded by Japanese text. There's a link to Spanking Exorcist's Steam page, a button to quit out, and a button to make the butt jiggle in tune with a slapping sound effect. It is the slightest of droll diversions you could sample in this beautiful life, but I appreciate the bit.

And the story gets a happy(?) ending too. I'm thrilled to report that Spanking Exorcist proper is available for download on Steam, having released just six days after its initial target date. It's six bucks usually, $5.39 on a launch sale, and I'm probably not gonna get it.

In a July 29 IGN interview, prolific director Guillermo del Toro shared his love of the hardcore action-roguelike, Dead Cells, but lamented its difficulty, wishing there was a mode that eased up on the roguelike restarts. Dead Cells studio Motion Twin has since responded to IGN, and recommends del Toro try the easy mode it's already got in there.

"We'd like to officially add this moment into our own personal Cabinet of Curiosities," the studio told IGN. "We are surprised and truly honored to see that Mr. del Toro is a Dead Cells player, and we can even help him right now: there is an Assist mode in the game!

"This mode lets you resurrect at the start of the current biome or closest checkpoint, rather than restarting the entire run. Thank you very much Guillermo for your kind words and your time on the game. We hope this little message will help you!"

Assist mode kinda sounds like exactly what del Toro was asking for: "You get 35 levels in and then you start again, you get faster, but please do a version without respawning for the elderly players." We could be mistaken, but I and PCG news writer Elie Gould interpreted his complaint to be directed at the roguelike genre's consequences on death: Losing all your stuff and the map getting randomized. Hopefully the director will find what he's looking for in Assist mode.

And lest you judge del Toro too harshly for not catching Assist mode before going on the record about it, a frequent, recurring Google query we've noticed in our eternal quest for SEO succor is "How do I save in [X new videogame]," a question usually answered with "pause the game, then hit the 'save' button." None of us are free from sin. There are (almost) no dumb questions.

First reported in English by Automaton, veteran Japanese voice actor Megumi Ogata (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Danganronpa, Persona) recently spoke to the website TBS News Dig about AI voice generation and its effect on actors. This comes as the Japanese government is considering a legal framework similar to likeness rights to head off such infringement.

Ogata specifically addressed the prevalence of AI imitators on video platforms like TikTok, calling it an issue she “cannot turn a blind eye to.”

"My voice is a part of my identity," said Ogata. "I really don’t understand why somebody would want to make me say things that I don’t want to say as they please and then sell it as my own voice. It’s heartbreaking.

"Why can’t Japan, which calls itself a content superpower, establish rules for content use or tell the world, ‘this is our policy,’ or ‘this is a problem for us?’"

Ogata has a similar stance on the issue to other voice actors, including frequent Bethesda collaborator Wes Johnson, who once tweeted that "anyone trying to create a mod using an actor's voice via AI *without consent* knows they are wrong." Veteran videogame actor Jennifer Hale has been vocal about studios taking responsibility for their use of AI, while at the 2024 BAFTAs, multiple members of Baldur's Gate 3's cast tore into AI voice cloning.

One interesting wrinkle is the professional/amateur divide here: Much hay has been made about companies seeking to automate creative roles, but Ogata, Johnson, and BG3 narrator Amelia Tyler have all singled out modders and content creators as well. Any question of money aside, it's undeniably creepy to steal someone's voice and make them say whatever you want, even if it's for a seemingly innocent shitpost.