2XKO ending its development (which Merrill phrases here as turning it into a "box game" instead, despite the fact Riot also laid off a bunch of people to make that happen), came as a deep frustration, but not much of a surprise given the current nightmare year the industry's been having. However—that number, "high hundreds of thousands, if not millions", is a somewhat desperate number.

Especially given the podcast has an annotation of monthly active users (MAU), which one'd assume would mean they asked Merrill for clarification. An active user is a unique user that logs in and does something at least once during a month, which means that the number would be far higher than concurrent users (how many of those users are logged in at any one time).

However, we can at least make some very loose guesstimates. Street Fighter 6 has a 30,000 concurrent peak on PC at the time of writing. Let's assume the average person has a seven hour window during a day to play, accounting for a nine to five job or chores/social obligations on the weekend—the concurrent count doesn't actually jump that much.

So let's say that in a 24 hour period, you've got around 30-35% of your potential playerbase online at any given moment. The rest are sleeping, working, running errands, etc. That leaves SF6 with roughly 100,000 people who are consistently playing the game on PC every day.

I wanna note: This is by no means an accurate number, it's kitchen napkin math and guesswork that assumes there's an even amount of SF6 players in each time zone and that they each have the same daily schedule but look, I'm working with what I have here (Capcom doesn't have monthly active users info available).

Let's be extremely generous and say only 25% play on PC, something that likely isn't even the case, I'm steelmanning myself here—that still leaves us with 400,000 players total in a 24-hour period. Monthly active users, though, is simply a tallying of: "Did this person log in at any point during the month". Assuming no new players came to SF6, that 400,000 daily total player count wouldn't change its impact on the MAU number.

Which means that you'd have to be getting in a lot of new or returning players every single day to bump up the monthly unique player count to anywhere near one million. SF6 has sold 7 million units total between June 2023 and June 2026. Even if you spread that out over the 36 months between those two dates (unlikely, sales are usually frontloaded) that'd still be just 194,444 potential additions to the pool every month.

In other words, even if you take one of the most popular fighting games in the world, with the most generous read possible on its total daily active user count, with the most disadvantageous PC/Console split to make my point, you'd still barely get over the 500,000 monthly active user mark. Shy of "high hundreds of thousands", and certainly shy of "millions" plural.

The comparison becomes weirder when you compare it to other fighting games that are still receiving support. Guilty Gear: Strive is still getting new characters and updates, and that has a 24-hour concurrent peak of 1,580.

In other words: There was no way in hell that 2XKO was ever going to get enough in the way of players to satisfy its expectations, which leaves a lot of questions here. Did Riot as a company just get overconfident from less niche genres? Did it not do the market research? Were the 2XKO developers just super inefficient?

Or did it simply have enough money to, like many studios before it, simply gamble and see if it could create something even better than Street Fighter 6—rolling the dice on the livelihoods of the developers who were making it? None of the answers to those questions are particularly flattering.

I've yet to get my sticky mitts on the Steam Frame, as our review sample is in high demand. But I've just learned it can be used as a makeshift pair of night vision goggles, as demonstrated by YouTube channel azadovski. And that's just freaking cool.

You mean I can wander around my house at night like some kind of Sam Fisher wannabe? Sign me up. Apparently, this is down to the Frame's impressive IR-sensitive SLAM cameras, combined with the set's passthrough capabilities. It also means no one will see me look like a wally with a headset strapped to my face. Two birds, one stone.

If you ask me, Deadlock's new update is going great, except for the small fact that last night I got jumpscared while running away from a Drifter because I accidentally slid into this here troll. Take a look at this scary guy. What is he doing here? Will we have to fight him in the future? Will he scare me again? The answer's: hell if I know, I hope not, and yes—yes he will.

Real houses that look like something I'd build in survival game, Part 2. My first house is always a square. But what happens when I acquire too many crafting benches to fit in my square? Time to build a loooooooong square. (Don't call it a rectangle: we're not fancy here.) It's blue because I crafted a buncha dye made from surplus blueberries and you know I'm gonna paint somethin' with it.

It's been a while since I set foot nervously inside the Playtime Co. factory, but last time I was there I was hounded through the halls and air vents by a towering blue plush toy that wanted nothing more than to hug me to death.

I played a bit of the multiplayer prequel to Poppy Playtime this week, and I can now report that there's something even scarier than that giant Huggy Wuggy doll roaming the factory. Her name is Miss Delight. You can meet her yourself because the Escape from Playtime open beta is now live on Steam and you can try out the game all weekend long.

This time you're one of the cute little Playtime toys, like a plush bunny, a cartoony cat, or a fluffy unicorn, and your goal is to escape the accursed factory with your pals by skittering through the dark corridors and shadowy rooms collecting supplies. Fill a cart with enough useful junk and you can advance to the next shift. Complete all the shifts and you're free. But it's not gonna be easy.

In my session we were stalked by progressively more monstrous toys each shift we completed. There are toy robots who speed toward you when detected and explode on contact, though if a teammate bonks them in the back of the head with a thrown object first, they shut down. There's also a Cat Bee (it's a cat dressed like a bee) that latches onto players and poisons them until, again, another player knocks them off with a thrown object. You can already see the purpose of sticking together.

Then there's Miss Delight. You'll know she's around by the clicking of her high heels echoing through the factory. She, like Huggy Wuggy, is tall, towering over you (especially since you're just a little stuffed toy) and insta-murdering you if she catches you. Thing about Miss Delight is that it's simple to stop her in her tracks: just shine a flashlight in what's left of her face.

But somehow Miss Delight standing there staring at you is worse than Huggy Wuggy chasing you down. Turns out there's something worse than an unstoppable monster, and it's a monster that stops. And stands there motionless. Staring at you. With bright, shiny dead eyes a gaping, hungry mouth. Just standing there, completely still, staring… right up your flashlight battery dies.

That's not the only warning about Escape from Playtime. Mob Entertainment has one too:

"We want to emphasize that this is very much a playtest looking for your feedback," the developer says. "This build has many work-in-progress aspects, experimental features, experiments with balance, and locked away features. Your feedback from this Beta Playtest will greatly aid in the development of the launch build and beyond!"

There will be a survey after you play if you'd like to give feedback. The open beta runs until 6 pm PT on Sunday, October 4, and supports up to eight players (with at least groups of four recommended). Find the full beta details here.

We've only got three months left in the year, but our list of upcoming 2026 games has enough October releases and updates to tide me over until this time next year. I just installed Silent Hill: Townfall, but who knows if I'll get to it before we start decking the halls or whatever the song says. I was hoping to deck a few monsters in Scotland. Alas.

It's a very my-steak-is-too-juicy complaint, but I've already overcommitted my October schedule to more survival crafting with Enshrouded's 1.0 update. I'm also trying to make time for MMO nostalgia when MapleStory Classic is out, and Final Fantasy Resonance will have to squeeze in there somewhere.

My own calendar is already buckling under the weight of this month's treats, so in the spirit of spooky season, I haunted a few colleagues with threats of dead pixels and ghosting until they shared their staff picks for the month. I'm pacified, for now. But I'll be back again next month with a turkey and the world's most mumbly protagonist.

October 2026 PC Gamer picks

October 2026 gaming events and sales

• LudoNarraCon begins its digital celebration of narrative indies on October 8
• Brasil Game Show kicks off its four-day convention in São Paulo on October 9
• PAX Australia returns for three days of gaming, cosplay, and panels on October 9
• League of Legends Worlds begins its quarterfinal and semifinal tournaments on October 15
• Paris Games Week celebrates its 15th anniversary with new programming starting on October 22
• Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show returns for its second four-day convention in Bangkok on October 29
• Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest makes its next (and final) stop in Japan on October 31
• As always, you can grab more Epic Store free games every Thursday, and check out weekly Steam sales for themed deals:
  • Oct. 1 – 8: Steam Autumn Sale
  • Oct. 12 – 19: Cooking Fest
  • Oct. 19 – 26: Next Fest (October Edition)
  • Oct. 26 – Nov. 2: Steam Scream 5 Fest

October 2026 game updates and DLC highlights

The October 2026 games calendar

New game releases, events, and updates you can check out during spooky season.

Masters of Albion's 'New Beginnings' update launches today, and it overhauls and upgrades many of the original early access release's systems. The above video gives an overview of what's new.

I bought Masters of Albion when it launched in April. But after scoping out what's new in this update, I feel the moment that I and, no doubt, many other PC gamers have been waiting for has arrived: it's the moment when Peter Molyneux's final title has properly started to take form and genuinely recapture the god game magic of old.

Here is what's new in Masters of Albion, with commentary from Peter Molyneux on each new feature. This is followed by my personal take on the New Beginnings update.

Engine performance just doubled

Nighttime gameplay is overhauled

There's a brand new, card-based Arcadium

Product orders now are narrative lead

The design table has been reworked

The Orkenstone now warps the landscape

The god hand has been upgraded

Masters of Albion's start has been enhanced

Mysterious new colossal structures now exist

My take on New Beginnings

Speaking candidly, before the New Beginnings update I struggled to recommend Masters of Albion to most PC gamers. And this was because, at launch, I felt the game was lightweight, even for an early access game. It had plenty of god game systems, sure, such as building and settlement construction, product manufacturing, and combat (strategic and action), and yes, there was the famous god hand of old to wield, but much like the game's rudimentary opening, the well of what you could actually do with those systems soon ran dry.

Be that the repetitive nature of product manufacturing, the eventual grind of nighttime, or the limited way in which you could impact the world with your god hand, what you could do made you recall Molyneux's great games of old, such as Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, and Fable, but you were left wanting more, as the systems were not as complex, fleshed out, or varied.

Molyneux has since described the original release of Masters of Albion as an 'initial sketch' of a game, and in many respects that is to be expected from the very first version of an early access game, but when you're trying to combine multiple parts of other genres together for your game, individual genres that in single-genre releases tend to flesh out their core loop at the earliest moment as it is all they deliver, rather than just a facet of what they deliver, it feels a harder sell to convince gamers to get invested when your game's systems start off in a more unfinished state.

To me, this ability to combine multiple genres together has always been where Molyneux has been at his creative, magical best, delivering unique experiences not offered elsewhere. But combining genres also poses its own problems, with the two most pressing being the depth of the systems and how they interact. You need the systems, such as city building and RTS combat, to be good enough to stand on their own and combine into something new, as otherwise the draw for gamers to just go play the single-genre game that does, say, RTS combat better will be too strong. Molyneux hit this problem in Black & White 2.

The good news is that the updates that New Beginnings bring all seem to directly address these two fundamental aspects in both fleshing out the bare-bones original early access release, or overhauling its core systems for the better, while adding extra interactivity and strategic weight. And I genuinely think those changes shift the game up to a whole new level. Suddenly Masters of Albion feels like a proper PC release and, while far from finished, is now in an early access state where I feel I can recommend it to god game fans, as well as PC gamers interested in getting a taste of this old-school PC gaming genre.

The game's engine optimisation is also a huge deal. This was my number one criticism from playing the game at launch. Despite having a powerful gaming PC, I struggled to hit 30 fps at times, despite the game not being a AAA graphical powerhouse. A much higher fps is going to make a big difference.

Finally, what I consider to be the really tantalising addition in this update, though, is the appearance of these mysterious colossal structures that dominate the skyline—especially because they are called out in the New Beginnings press release, which asks if they are "a link to the past or a foreshadowing of the future?" This, along with Molyneux's cryptic commentary above, indicates that Masters of Albion could very well be heading towards introducing Black & White-style giant avatars in a future update. If these are added, and we continue to see this level of acting on community feedback to refine and upgrade in-game systems, maybe Masters of Albion really will evolve into the ultimate god game. And that would be a fitting swansong for the man who created the genre.

If there's an Ace Combat fan in your life, you're likely already aware that it's a very good time for fighter jets dogfighting with arcade intensity. But if you're not already certain that exchanging near-infinite missiles is for you—you should be, but I acknowledge we all find truth at our own pace—Ace Combat 8's $70 price tag might seem a bit too high for a trial run.

Luckily, there's a phenomenal alternative that you can pick up for a fraction of the price: Project Wingman, a celebrated Ace Combat-inspired passion project that's currently available for $12.50 in the Steam Autumn Sale.

Project Wingman began development as a "portfolio piece" for its developers, eventually graduating to a successfully-backed Kickstarter project that nearly tripled its funding goals and ultimately launching on Steam in December 2020. It's an unabashed homage, drawing on the missile-heavy excess of its spiritual predecessors and elevating it to an even greater intensity of near-absurdist air combat.

It's more than an imitation, however: Project Wingman implemented its own roguelike Conquest Mode, where players can battle for territory against enemy squadrons and use the funds they earn in completed missions to build out their own airfleets. And unlike the latest Ace Combat—which had to issue an apology for its lackluster flight stick support—Project Wingman boasts comprehensive HOTAS compatibility for the intensive air combat sickos among us.

It's also got native VR support, if you think your stomach can tolerate the simulation of hammering a high-G turn.

But don't just take my word for it: Project Wingman is currently enjoying an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, where 93% of its more than 22,000 reviews are favorable. We were marginally less enthusiastic in our own Project Wingman review from 2020 due to an unsated hunger for a more hardcore flight sim experience, but if you're looking for an affordable entry into indulgent jet jousting, you'll be hard pressed to find a better option.

Project Wingman is available now on Steam at a sale price of $12.50.

The Talos Principle 2, my favorite puzzle game, is $3 during the Steam Autumn Sale. Croteam's Talos Principle sequel went underappreciated in 2023, which is wild, because this series is like if Aperture Labs dumped its entire warehouse of esoteric gizmos into the player's lap to tackle increasingly weird spatial conundrums. The puzzles are smart, peaceful, approachable, and many. Speaking from experience, it might be the greatest "podcast game" in the world.

ABOVE: A brief gameplay clip from Radiosol. You can't spend too long in the sunlight.

"A journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm"

I related this experience in PC Gamer's work chat and multiple of us bought Radiosol, called by its developers "a journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm," on the spot. It helps that it's only $9 on Steam, and that its jaggy megastructures look exceptionally cool.

As has become habitual when I see anything that looks mildly uncanny these days, I scrolled down to the generative AI disclosure on Steam: It was used for translations, the Moscow-based developer says, but not to generate any audio or art.

On X, developer TripletConcept also states that they used AI for "some coding and utility stuff like handling Git merges." The artist has been making art in this style since before the 2020s, as evidenced by their ArtStation profile.

I'm not far into Radiosol yet, so I'm still working out what I think—this is just my first impression, not a review. But so far, it's pretty sick.

You're a little wall-climbing spider-robot in the deserted ruins of megastructures, on your way to some kind of final battle for the fate of… it's unclear. Multiple subjects are broadcasting information to you as you work your way toward a pyramid for the big fight, leaping between shadows to stay out of direct sunlight.

So far, there's nothing in the way of combat. It's fun just being a spider-dude, executing big hops in the low-G environment—I have gotten the impression that this is not quite earth—to traverse unshaded stretches of desert. Currently, I'm seeking a "Megapol station" in the territory of the "Locus Group of Companies."

If you decided to check out Radiosol, my suggestions are A) prepare to have a lot of proper nouns thrown at you without context and B) commit the important parts of the menu layouts to memory, in the event that you can't help yourself from hitting the red button that turns off thinking.

Indie RPG team Lovely Hellplace is undeniably retro-focused: 2024's Dread Delusion and the early access Entropy are crunchy and polygonal as hell. But that also extends to design. Dread Delusion was like a stripped-down Morrowind, while Entropy is a classico JRPG with some PC gaming DNA spliced in.

When I spoke to lead developer James Wragg earlier this year, he told me that he thinks part of the appeal of older games is their willingness to be succinct.

Elsewhere in our conversation, Wragg revealed that he's never beaten Breath of the Wild, and whenever he plays, he just wants to revisit 2002's Wind Waker instead. I find this issue much more acute on replays, in my own experience: I've never beaten BotW a second time after that initial playthrough where I got all the shrines (I was unemployed). More recently, I've found myself turning away from my beloved Elden Ring to the far more snackable Bloodborne and Sekiro.

Fallout is such a good shout here: I had a fairly completionist replay a few years ago, and I wrapped it in about 12 hours. Even the fact that Wragg's previous game, Dread Delusion, was open world isn't as much of a gotcha as you might think: It's a pretty dense map and boasts a roughly 15-20 hour runtime.

I find myself much more likely to stop playing a game without hitting the credits these days than to finish something and wish there had been more of it⁠—and even then, the latter is a preferable feeling in my book. There will always be a place for long runners and sprawling open worlds in my heart, but not everybody gets to be Cyberpunk 2077 or Fallout: New Vegas, and that's what makes them special.

Entropy, meanwhile, feels like it has a massive world, at least from the slice of map I've seen. But being able to evoke scale without overstaying the game's welcome is something Lovely Hellplace already managed in Dread Delusion. If you're intrigued by Entropy and Wragg's approach to design, you can check out its free demo or $12 early access on Steam.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is about a lad named Henry and his small role in kicking Sigismund of Luxembourg out of Bohemia in the name of the imprisoned King Wenceslas I. Henry and his newfound pals conspire, heist, assassinate, and sabotage to loosen the usurper's grip on the economic stronghold of Kuttenberg, but what they never try is barging straight in the front door.

Just take the damn city! It can't be that hard. I say around 20, 40 men tops could do the job. In fact, if the story quests won't do it, I will.

Step 1: Raise an army

Surprisingly, this is the easy part. KCD2, for all its freedoms, does not natively allow Henry to roam Bohemia with a warband, so the mod "Companion Squad" from Steam user Triget will be the engine powering this righteous campaign.

With just two keystrokes, my army began to take shape in front of me: 10, 20, 30 mercenaries with unique names and faces stood at attention, ready to attack at my command. The gates of Kuttenberg stood before us—doors wide open—its treasonous protectors oblivious to our plans.

Step 2: Call in favors

A "Heroes" section of the spawn menu caught my eye. With a few more clicks, I'd called up all of Henry's friends (and enemies) for a quick favor, including Hans Capon, the entire Jan Zizka crew, Godwin, Erik, Istvan Toth, and even Radzig and Hanush made the trip from Rattay.

With a strained framerate, my army was 43 strong. Time to take back Kuttenberg—for King Wenceslas!

Step 3: I have no pants

As I entered photo mode to witness the might of my army, I realized I've been pantless the whole time. This is the first time I've loaded this particular save on my newer PC, and somehow Henry's padded hose did not make the transition. They are not in my inventory and no longer seem to exist. At least I still have my mens' respect.

Step 4: Charge!

The guard who searches everyone entering the city didn't take kindly to my unsheathed sword. We exchanged a few blows before my warband formed into a bloodthirsty mob that I will henceforth call the "murder clump" and killed the guy in about two seconds. Another guard started a 1v1 with me and the murder clump ate him too.

It turned out the army was set to "defend" me, so they only raised arms when I was in an active fight. This isn't what I had in mind for a grand coup, so I pressed F6 to switch their attack pattern to something more offensive.

Step 5: Overwhelm

Finally, the murder clump branched out and started attacking guards without my direct input. Kuttenberg's finest simply did not stand a chance. With no time to prepare a proper defense and word traveling slowly throughout the town, the small squads of guards responding to the commotion were immediately overwhelmed by a blob of plate armor and sharpened steel. Once the eastern entrance was clear of law enforcement, I joined the clump and charged down the streets in the direction of city hall.

Then we passed by an inn, and I watched in horror as half of the murder clump broke off to ransack the peaceful business. This is when I realized that the army was set to "Bandit mode."

Step 6: Accidentally become the bad guys

The murder clump attacked everything that moved. Nobles, innkeepers, silver miners, musicians, and yes, all the guards too. Other than their tendency to get stuck in doorways, they worked with ruthless efficiency, turning a military coup into the sort of scorched-earth ransacking that upended Henry's life in the first KCD. I tried to switch between "attack" and "defend" mode to spare lives where possible, but the army had spread out into smaller murder clumps, and they didn't always listen to my commands.

This isn't how I wanted to take Kuttenberg, but it did speed the whole thing up a great deal. It took less than 20 minutes for the city to basically run out of guards, other than the ones who fled.

Step 7: Apologize to God, or something

By nightfall, the streets were bloody and quiet. I'd lost seven soldiers of my own, Hans and Zizka were super dead, and I had a foot in the grave, too, thanks to guards targeting my bare legs. We stormed city hall and found a series of empty rooms. Sigismund had presumably turned tail when he saw our numbers—the coward!

I entered a room with a little shrine and let Henry say a prayer. A quick apology for all of the senseless murder should do the trick.

Step 8: Take office

In the next room was an important-looking office with a big desk. I took my seat in a fancy chair and crowned myself king, mayor, or whatever, of Kuttenberg.

Job done, but I can't say I recommend this strategy: I have completely messed up my save by killing countless quest givers, and every town in the region wants me to hang for my crimes. But hey, it was a lot faster than finishing the main story.

In the mere two days since The Witcher 3: Remastered released on PC, its Nexus Mods page has been a hive of activity, featuring updates for all sorts of customization packages for the game—including ones you'll only install if you're a coward.

By my count, more than 450 Witcher 3 mods are either newly released or updated since September 29, an overwhelming number if you thought you'd just poke your head in and see what's been going on. One thing that's going on is that a lot of mods are now using AI image generation to create thumbnails that immediately give me the ick. Why create a fake, AI-glazed screenshot for your HUD mod when we all know what The Witcher 3 actually looks like? Baffling!

Another thing that's going on, thankfully, is that some modders with names like GrimReaper2121 are still putting in good work with creations such as De-mastered Geralt. And loads of mods that date back to the 2010s, making them mainstays of The Witcher 3's mod scene, have been updated to play nice with the latest patch.

Here's a quick list of some notable ones:

• The Witcher 3 Mod Manager
• Fast Travel From Anywhere
• Boat Races
• No time for Gwent
• Complete Animations Redux
• Sort Everything
• AutoLoot Advanced Settings
• HUD Scaling Fix (All Aspect Ratios)
• Enhanced Camera
• The Stable - Roach-Horse Customization Mod
• Increased Creature Loot
• More Money For Traders
• Hoods
• New Clouds
• Jump in Shallow Water
• Disable storybook intro warnings videos

That last mod comes bundled with a perfect example of the kind of pure modder artistry you get when you use good ol' MS Paint for a thumbnail instead of some weird, cursed AI image generator.

This is the kind of thing we need more of in the world:

We also should all spend more time jumping in shallow water, preferably with our besties. That's the good stuff.

Warhorse Studios co-founder Martin Klima is just putting it out there: He isn't a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, and has no interest in playing GTA 6 when it debuts on consoles on November 19. Nonetheless, he's hoping that it's at least as big a hit as everyone expects it to be, for one particular reason: so other studios (like his) can take advantage of the opportunity to increase their prices, a move he believes is necessary for the survival of the industry.

The Grand Theft Auto series "doesn't appeal to me at all," Klima told PC Gamer in a recent interview, and not only that, he doesn't understand why everyone else is so gaga over them either. "I am not going to be playing GTA 6 unless I'm somehow forced to," he continued. "And the reason why it is so popular—it beats me. It's something which I just fail to understand."

Klima emphasized that he bears no ill will toward the GTA games or Rockstar, and in fact he thinks "it's really good that somebody is making these games that are really technologically marvels." And he hopes that when GTA 6 finally does arrive, it lives up to the hype.

The game industry is facing a big problem, in Klima's estimation. Games are ridiculously expensive to make, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as computing power continues to increase and gamers accordingly expect the complexity and scale of new games to match. But the new revenue streams needed to support those endeavours just aren't there: Audience growth has been more or less maxed out, and digital marketplaces are already providing maximal returns on units sold—as Klima put it, "We destroyed retail, and we took all their money."

The Covid-19 pandemic created an "artificial demand" that goosed things for a while, but that's faded away, as evidenced by the subsequent slash-and-burn wrought by industry executives who grossly overextended themselves and are now forcing others to pay the price. So, what's left?

"The last thing you can do is to increase the unit price," Klima said. "That would help a lot, but everybody's scared to death about it. Now, hopefully, GTA will blaze the trail, and it will allow us to increase the cost."

Rockstar and Take-Two are the only ones "who can afford, or who can dare, to increase the price of games, which I think is long overdue and also necessary for this business to survive," Klima said. "So I wish them all the luck."

I find the admission refreshingly honest: Not every game executive out there is willing to admit that they really want to jack their prices but won't do it until they can put the heat for it on someone else. That's typically the sort of thing you hear from industry analysts: In May, for instance, Bank of America securities analyst Omar Dessouky called for a higher price on GTA 6, not just for the good of Rockstar and Take-Two, but for everyone. If the next Grand Theft Auto can succeed at a higher cost, it will "raise the price point for the entire industry," he argued.

After months of speculation, Dessouky got his wish: Take-Two confirmed in June that GTA 6 will launch at $80, $10 more than conventional big-budget games—although by locking a significant amount of content in the more expensive Ultimate Edition, it's effectively a $100 game. That's a hell of a price, but even so I suspect Klima is going to get his wish too—and once the GTA 6 price normalization has set in, we're going to see quite a few more expensive games in 2027 and beyond.

Entropy is a very cool, very funky RPG you can play in early access right now. It's a turn-based ode to the likes of Final Fantasy 10 or Lost Odyssey, but it's also got some PC flair—lead developer James Wragg cites Fallout 1 and Games Workshop's tabletop Mordheim as major inspirations as well. I asked Wragg about the game's mercenary hiring and ambitious permadeath system in a conversation this past summer.

In addition to the injury system, Wragg was clear that you can get through Entropy with zero casualties via skilled play. But even then, the possibility of permadeath is still there, adding an edge to the proceedings.

I felt that acutely in this year's Star Wars Zero Company, which has a similar mix of authored snowflake squadmates and procgen mercenaries. I managed to get through that game without losing anyone, but the fact that they could have died lent the story and my achievement more weight.

I've loved what I've seen of Entropy so far, but haven't gotten super far into its latest, early access build. I'm curious to see how much more story meat its authored companions will have versus the mercenaries. If Wragg and the rest of Lovely Hellplace's stance on side quests (like em, love em, gotta have em) is any indication, there's probably a lot to chew on there. You can check out Entropy's demo for free, and the full early access experience for $12 on Steam.

Imagine for a moment: It's the year 2007. All software looks like glossy, rounded plastic, dewy glass, and photographs of verdant fields. Every electronic device makes ethereal chimes when it starts up. You've never heard the phrases 'live-service,' 'large language model,' or 'prediction market.' It's safer here, amidst the dreamy lime greens and ocean blues. It's better.

And now, thanks to a new house-builder that launched on Steam this week, we can live the definitely-healthy fantasy of retreating into the security of yesterday's software aesthetics. Frutiger Home is a home decorating sim where you can build an impregnable psychic cocoon out of the finest design elements of an era where technology could still feel optimistic, and not like perpetual cognitive radiation poisoning. Hooray!

All its architectural themes, available color swatches, and interior accent pieces are inspired by the Frutiger Aero aesthetic—a term retroactively coined by Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute co-founder Sofi Xian to describe the glossy, glassy, gleaming visual language that dominated tech and UI design from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. Here, sharp corners are an aberration. Every surface that can be polished, will be polished.

When I loaded into an empty home to begin decorating, one wall of the living room was dominated by a screen showing clownfish and dandelions. I could change it to show a collection of citrus slices, because of course I could. Once, our devices held these images in reverence. A computer was a window to an idealized version of nature: one that was mostly seagulls and water floating through the air for some reason.

It was the Zune's time.

After browsing the selection of furniture that looked like it was extruded straight from the dimension where sans-serif typefaces live, I stepped outside of my fully-rounded home and into a field where the impossibly green hillsides of that Windows wallpaper—you know the one—stretch into the distance, forever. You can join me here. I've placed two chairs with loops for legs. We can pretend it's 2007 for as long as we need to.

Frutiger Home is available now, on Steam, in 2026, for $5.

Rust's October Update

On the heels of Facepunch Studios adding necks to s&box it has now also added milk to Rust. *️⃣

October's Rust update is here and it's bringing livestock—cows and sheep—and their various secretions, offal, and dander for all your crafting needs. The new animals produce the following:

Animal stuff

• Dung
• Meat
• Bones
• Leather
• Milk (cows only)
• Wool (sheep only)
• Companionship?

There's an economy built around these new herbivores, so in addition to murdering them for resources you can also take your animals to a new Stable vendor and haggle over the price of sale. The same vendor will also buy the wool you harvest from sheep.

New fencing has been added so you can build a pen for your pals. Here's a rundown of some of the other new livestock features:

Animal stuff, cont'd

• Facepunch doesn't explain how to capture livestock, but says it "should all be pretty intuitive"
• Like plants, you can breed animals in search of "a god clone"
• If you anger the NPC vendor by haggling too much, you'll have to wait 15 minutes before selling them something else
• You can drink milk
• You can refrigerate milk for four hours, and then "skim" it
• Skimming milk gives you skimmed milk
• Skimming milk also gives you cream

• "Cream is a more powerful consumable."

• Milk and cream can be added to tea to buff its effects
• Raw and spoiled meat can be used in a biofuel generator
• Squirrels, rabbits, frogs, turtles, and other critters have also been added

Good to finally have confirmation that cream is more powerful than milk. There's plenty of other stuff in Rust's October update but I think I covered the best of the stuff, plus it's a really long blog and I don't feel like reading the rest. Help yourself!

Footnotes

*️⃣"On the heels of Facepunch Studios adding necks to s&box it has now also added milk to Rust" is a really weird sentence. Is it the first time that sentence has ever been said?

Oddly enough, no!

After searching for a few hours through various newspaper archives, it seem the same sentence was spoken on July 12, 1967 by Idaho governor Don Samuelson while giving a speech at the dedication of Farragut State Park. He keeled over a moment later and would remain unconscious for three days, apparently the victim of an unexplained and, quite honestly, fairly useless transmission from the future.

As he lay there on the ground twitching and mumbling, the Idaho Falls Post-Register reported, he received some "light boos" from the crowd. ⬆️

Nerial, which made a splash with Reigns in 2016 and landed another hit with Card Shark in 2022, has decided to close up shop after 13 years of operation.

"While this marks the end of Nerial as we know it, it's not the end of the game dev for us," Tamara and François Alliot, respectively the studio CEO and creative director, wrote in a farewell message. "We're going back to our roots. François' unrelenting drive to make games is as strong as ever, but first we need to take a break and reflect on everything that's happened, before coming back with a new perspective."

Oh no...

— @nerial.bsky.social (@nerial.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-01T18:17:37.063Z

It rules that we still don't know who made myhouse.wad. The surreal, unsettling Doom mod had a sort of ARG-lite element to it: The mod's original creator is said to have died, with Veddge, the uploader, either having expanded on something he left behind—or, more troublingly, having found the haunted map among the original creator's possessions.

I love it as a bit of creepypasta storytelling, but what makes me even happier is that Veddge has never broken character—they never even made another post on the DoomWorld forums after sharing myhouse.wad. If you had made something so popular and beloved, wouldn't you want to trade on that clout? Talk to John Romero yourself, give interviews about your artistic vision, parlay the success into a level design job?

Veddge hasn't even logged into their DoomWorld forums account since 2024. I would never resent someone choosing to dine out on their own labor and success, but to eschew that in favor of mystery and letting the art speak for itself, that requires a rare discipline I can't help but admire.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time.

You know the drill. Deep discounts up the wazoo, stickers to earn, and new stuff in the Points Shop, all of it adding up to Valve-powered seasonal trauma inflicted on your personal finances.

And I know what you're thinking: Are there really more than 44,000 games for under $5 in the Autumn Sale? And the answer is "yes," according to SteamDB anyway: The "sales" option on the site lets you filter games by a range of options, including price—cap the list at five bucks and that's what comes out.

In any event, it's a whole lotta deals, and the sheer volume of discounts on Steam means that some of these deeply-cheap games—maybe even a lot of 'em—probably aren't top-tier stuff. You might therefore want to apply more filters: You can set genre and feature tags, release dates, a minimum user rating or number of reviews, and all sorts of other things to winnow it out a bit. I like browsing as much as the next guy, but 2,105 games is a lot to dig through.

Alternate idea: PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield previously put together a list of 31 must-play games going for $5 or less in the Steam Summer Sale, and I'm going to see if I can bully him into doing it again. No promises, but Ted's a pretty good guy, and his taste in games is solid too. (Just please don't get him talking about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.)

The 2026 Steam Autumn Sale is a one-weeker, meaning it comes to an end on October 8.

Disregard that other thing I said. Grand Theft Auto 5 no longer only launches in windowed mode. It now only launches in fullscreen mode. We're choosing not to investigate this and are just hoping the whole thing works itself out.

Another thing to disregard: what I said earlier about Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The greatest game of all time is, in fact, 2009's Prototype, which is about being a really angry flu who can take on the appearance of anyone he eats. You can turn your arm into a sword, you fight some sort of flesh-Christ in Times Square. There's a lot going on.

Anyway GTA 5 is like Prototype now, in that I have installed Shapeshifter V. This allows you to immediately become any pedestrian you happen to stealth attack, to no real discernible end. It is quite novel, though. So an outfit you like? Take it. Also, take the in-fit. You are a great roving blob on a quest to consume and to replicate.

I am fairly certain that the act of becoming a new person doesn't change your voice, so do brace yourself for the piercing screams of Shawn Fonteno to emerge from the throats of old men and young men as they find themselves whipped up in a passing tornado or teleported a few thousand feet into the sky.

But these are bagatelles. Overall, shapeshifting is another fascinating patch in the great GTA 5 tapestry I am forging. I just have to remember to only launch that tapestry in full-screen now. Or maybe tomorrow it will be windowed again. What an adventure.

I was brought up with the mindset that when you start something you should see it through to the end, even if it gets a bit tricky. So perhaps that's why Resident Evil dropping its in-built Roman numerals irks me so.

It all started with Resident Evil: 7 Biohazard where the Roman numerals for seven were shoved into the 'Evil' and then continued with Resident Evil: Village. So, in the lead up to Resident Evil 9 I was on tenterhooks, eager to find out how Capcom was going to incorporate IX into its title.

I had my own theories, settling on Helix or Appendix as my favourite options. It made sense in my head, what with their respective links to DNA as well as the T-virus, and an icky body part that simultaneously means something that comes at the end of a story—I really liked appendix.

Alas, we didn't get either or those—we didn't get an IX at all—we got Resident Evil Requiem.

I made my peace with Requiem, it has cool connotations for the game, referring to a prayer for the soul of the deceased or a general act of remembering someone who has died. I also saw one promotional image that turned the 'q' in Requiem into the number nine, so that's something, maybe. But wait, there's more.

Resident Evil's executive producer Jun Takeuchi has revealed in chat with Japanese press for RE's 30th anniversary (via GamesRadar) that the name Requiem holds much more than just the above, bog-standard meaning:

"Let me give you a hint: 'Requiem' isn't just a title chosen for its meaning of 'requiem.' The spelling of Requiem (REQUIEM) contains not only the 'RE (response)' mentioned earlier, but also a 'Q (question).' In other words, this 'Requiem' presents both an 'answer' and a 'question.' I will explain the meaning of that at some point in the future."

Yeah, I don't think I'm entirely on board with this breakdown of Requiem. I guess it makes sense but it's also giving off GCSE English blue curtain vibes. I am, however, intrigued to find out more about this in the future, and perhaps we can also discover what the rest of Requiem stands for. Who knows, it could go something like: 'U' for you the player, 'I' for me, the player, 'E' for evil residents, and 'M' for me, the player, again (I get two because I'm special).

What's going on?

• System Shock 2 is an excellent videogame and all-timer immersive sim.
• Nightdive's 2025 remaster is exquisite.
• It's free on the Epic Games Store until October 8.
• You will have to remember your password and dig out a 2FA code probably. Sorry.

Is this really worth logging in for? Do you know how long it takes to log in to a thing?

What happened

• The Witcher 3's good (and available early) Griffin armour set is notorious for giving Geralt a 'dadbod' with the silhouette of a jaunty paunch.
• Some people, weak of heart and deficient of spirit, find that objectionable.
• The dadbod armour remains in The Witcher 3's recent remaster.
• Rejoice! A mod to fix it is already remaster-compatible.
• But you will be judged for using it. By me.

Is it morally wrong to slim down Geralt?

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, though the early access period is live right now. In the lead-up to launch, The Coalition has posted expanded system requirements for the upcoming bug blast. These include what the game asks of your rig for top performance on the top settings—it's not easygoing, to say the least—but providing your GPU is at least capable of ray tracing, most should get by fine on medium settings.

An RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT will be required in order to run the game at 4K with the Ultra preset enabled. This is targeting a steady 60 fps, and I would assume, from the 12 GB of VRAM noted in the table below, that one should be able to swing it on a lower-end card with some assistance from upscaling.

Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, so we're not short of options there.

Otherwise, GPU demands are similar to those we saw back in June: an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 at a minimum, or an RTX 3060 Ti/6700 XT as recommended. It's only at 4K Ultra that demands seem to really ramp up. Though there is a blanket requirement for a ray tracing-capable graphics card to play Gears of War: E-Day. The devs explicitly say so on the new system requirements table:

"A hardware ray tracing capable graphics card is required. Graphics cards without dedicated hardware ray tracing support are not support."

You can't ask for it to be clearer than that. The game comes with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination.

CPU demands are pretty wide-ranging: from a mere Ryzen 5 2600X at a minimum, to a Ryzen 5 5600 as recommended. For 4K Ultra, it looks like eight cores or more are best; furthermore, a 3D V-Cache chip is recommended: the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The studio also suggests an Intel Core i7 14700K. I'd assume newer Arrow Lake chips would suffice, too, despite their slightly weaker performance at times.

RAM requirements are modest enough, even at 4K, at a mere 16 GB. Though only 12 GB are required to play the game. You'll have to make way for the game on an SSD, however, as 115 GB of storage space is required. That does actually need to be a solid state drive, so sayeth the devs.

This week it's spring in Forza Horizon 6 and there's another challenge to complete. We've got the Nangan Treasure Hunt to track down, and doing it will grant you some season progress. The British Automotive Festival Series is currently underway and there are a couple of season reward cars to grab, namely the Lotus Esprit V8 and Lotus Emira. Finding and smashing this chest will get you a little closer to earning them.

Forza Horizon 6 Nangan region Treasure Hunt location

You can find this chest at the Irokawa Space Center in the far south of the Nangan region. It's an easy one to track down via the map screenshot above.

Basically, you need to:

1. Head to the southern end of Nangan where the space center is.
2. Drive to the upper level.
3. Find the chest in the north corner just to the left of the big rocket and all the fuel tanks.

Simply smash into it as usual and you'll get 100,000 credits, 5,000 XP, and three Season Progress points towards those two season cars. For more progress, make sure to complete the Ruriko-Ji Temple photo challenge, too.

If there's one thing I know about the age of information, it's that none of us have time for anything anymore, nor the attention spans to see them through. If I'm not getting a constant jitterbug hit of dopamine every two seconds from my doomscrolling, am I really awake? Don't answer that. I don't want to think about the answer to that.

And if there's one thing I know about videogames, it's that man, they're getting long. If only there was a way to make these things shorter, somehow? Like, say, giving our protagonist a gun? And not just a period-accurate flintlock or something, I mean an actual handgun. Let's just say a .45 pistol. If you know more about guns than me you're welcome to imagine something sexier.

I asked a few of my colleagues for their longest-played eligible games—that is, videogames that have an ending, do not feature guns as a common, standard feature throughout their runtime, and could be feasibly impacted by the inclusion of a pistol. Let's see how much time we can save…

On average: Yes, having a gun in games that do not have guns will save you time—and, depending on the game, irrevocably corrupt you. Or make you feel deeply uncomfortable about the parallels that might be drawn to the real world. However, you also might also get to see Genghis Khan with an AK-47. So there's benefits and drawbacks.

As someone who follows the game music scene closely, I am constantly on the lookout for interesting takes on NES classics. One of the best I've found in the last year has been Chips 'N Cellos, an artist who arranges classical music in the iconic style of Mega Man. The NES sound palette's fuzzy percussion and squeaking melodies are a perfect match for Bach, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Dvorak, it turns out.

What's the most stunning revelation in this Gears of War prequel? Marcus Fenix used to have a jump button. Yes, the king of cover-based shooting, a man more rooted to the ground than a scarecrow, spent his youth jumping to some bits of cover. So E-Day contains at least one literal leap forward for the franchise. Shame it's trapped in a slog of a campaign that's otherwise anything but.

But before I moan about that, plenty of good news first. Gears has never felt better to play. These third-person cover shooters have always been a blast when they're working, and a miserable swearing fit when you dodge roll into certain death instead of snapping into cover like you wanted to. Again.

That nonsense has finally been excised, mostly, thanks to slightly more acrobatic characters and some wise button remapping. It's amazing what a difference sticking run on L3 and giving climb its own designated button makes.

Gears of War's biggest haters are liable to characterise its cover-shooting as a dull game of whack-a-mole. Perhaps on Normal difficulty, but Hardcore is where the experience sings. Here, staying in the same spot of cover is rightfully punished. You've got to keep gaining better ground, constantly weighing up the risks of lining up a sniper shot, a chainsaw insta-kill, or making a desperate dash for cover. It's a turn-based tactics shooter with a missing pause button. There's a reason that it translated so smoothly to a tactics spin-off.

E-Day introduces new weaponry that makes cowering in cover harder than ever. It loves a blast of acid, this game, either delivered from a massive evil frog or a new gun that shotguns it at you. Devastating, but a loving kiss on the cheek compared to the Goreshot, a grappling hook only interested in grappling your torso from your body. So gloriously over-the-top, it almost makes up for the insta-kill tedium from the elite enemy who wields it.

That stuff's good, but it's the renovations to the old guard that stand out. The spike trap now opens with a hugely satisfying thunk-thunk-thunk as its horrible insides prepare themselves for a good gouging. The explosive arrow-firing torque bow gets a great glow up—the sound design as it finds its target is wonderful, practically a doomsday drum roll, so good I still enjoy it even when a locust is aiming it at me. And if I'm ever called upon to assassinate God, this game's sublime sniper rifle is what I'm reaching for.

So if the gunplay's a treat and the core combat never better, what's the problem? Well, almost everything else, unfortunately.

Dis-may

E-Day is a prequel, referring to the fateful day when the locust got bored of living underground and burst free from the surface to say a very messy hello. This is covered in the opening cutscene of the original Gears of War. And if you're wondering what insights E-Day has that weren't covered in said cutscene, same here.

The game opens with Marcus Fenix and Dom 'boy isn't it great that my wife and kids are alive' Santiago. Instead of the cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran of the original Gears, here Marcus is… a cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran. Oh.

Discovering Marcus was once a flamboyant drag queen who was changed forever by E-Day into the man we know today was probably too much to hope for. But the fact he's essentially exactly the frikkin' same is the first alarm bell that this prequel is struggling to justify its own existence.

Once the locust arrive, E-Day tries cosplaying as Resident Evil for a bit, complete with a trip through the panicking city to the police station. Some of these horror moments work. The drone gets an excellent introduction, though not so much for the poor sap stuck in the interrogation room with it. Other attempts at horror atmosphere are hilariously clumsy. I find the blood-soaked helmet of a transit worker, and the game immediately shatters any sense of foreboding with text popping up saying 'Bloody Transit Worker's Helmet Found!' Er, hooray?

The game then has some dumb fun giving little origin stories to its iconography—chainsaws being attached to machine guns! Grenades being tossed in emergence holes! Problem is, by the start of Act 2, you have the weaponry, armor, and the squad. At which point E-Day just becomes standard Gears of War again. You explore the ruined city (not open-world, more wide-ish linear) with goals never more complicated than 'shoot those locusts' or 'survive this wave of locusts' or 'why haven't you shot those locusts yet?'

Gears 5 understood the value of variety. It had sections where you had to stealth around a mad scientist's factory to stealth kill infected robots. Or ride a skiff down an icy mountain. Or fight an enemy on the stage of a Hamilton-inspired musical which starts rotating at the worst moment possible (play Gears 5—it's one of the best 7/10s ever).

True, not all of Gears 5's ideas worked. But I wanted a sequel that improved upon them, not a regression that believes the only thing you should ever be doing in one of these games is endlessly pulling the trigger. It's just slightly remixed combat encounters all the way down. Battle a giant frog and several snipers! OK, now two frogs, one sniper, and several shotgunners! OK, OK, now three giant spiders that fire insta-kill rockets, and loads of grunts, and the last checkpoint was seven minutes back! …Hey, why are you suddenly aiming at me?

Is the shooting strong enough to sustain this? Yeah, just, though it does get exhausting. It's an action movie with everything ripped out that isn't bullets going into bastards. The 20+ hour campaign is also waaaaay too long considering how one-note it is (well, aside from two crap shooting-from-a-turret-inside-a-helicopter bits, but I was planning on being nice and not bringing those up).

Moderate improvements

New for E-Day are mod slots for your weapons and armour. Mods include less recoil, better scopes, faster chainsaw revving, etc. Not as useless and incremental as the crap you get in [insert whichever live service shooter you currently have the most beef with here], but it's borderline and hard to get excited about. Far better is the gizmo that can send out rippling shockwaves that stun enemies, perfect for a chainsawin'. I found a mod for it that also sets enemies on fire. Lovely.

You get these mods for completing sidequests or finding them in cases. But E-Day is so terrified of you missing anything that tiresome all-caps text saying HARD CASE NEARBY blazes across the screen. And the location of the case is immediately added to your map. Oh and if you activate whatever this game's version of Eagle Vision is called, we'll show you exactly where the case is. Ugh.

Gears 5—which I promise to stop swooning over soon—did all this so much more elegantly. You had a robot companion with abilities that were upgraded with currency you found through exploring. No map markers, screaming text, or other BS that belongs in the Ubisoft dark ages. You were actually incentivised to explore properly, with any world-building or character moments you encountered along the way a nice bonus.

E-Day's a less interesting place to explore regardless. A city in ruin is one of gaming's most overdone settings, so you really have to pull out the stops to make it interesting, like in The Last of Us 2, or the opening Leon section of Resident Evil Requiem. Otherwise, seen one ruined city block, seen 'em all, like in the second half of Resident Evil Requiem (at least E-Day is less grey and brown, shockingly).

Other frustrations just feel like they shouldn't be happening in the seventh game of a series. There's a special place in hell for games that put checkpoints before long dialogue exchanges that you can't skip through. Normal difficulty still isn't challenging enough. Opt for hardcore and you get the compelling challenge, but also have to swallow the occasional ocean of stale piss, with boss health bars are so overlong I'm amazed they fit on the screen.

And how can a game with such outstanding skull-popping, blood-geysering headshots still have such pitiful damage feedback against elite enemies? There's no satisfaction in emptying clip after clip into a monster, not feeling like you're having any impact whatsoever until it finally falls over. Do I actually love E-Day's sniper rifle, or is it the only gunshot against the more bullet-spongy cretins that feels like it has any kick?

A new enemy at least has the decency to have a nice big eye that it doesn't like being shot in, which means I actually feel the impact of my gunfire. This thing is called… actually, to try and describe it myself when I can let the game do that in the following screenshot would be like snatching the pen from Shakespeare. My apologies. Take it away, E-Day:

Thank you, Lucas. God this game is infuriating. Great shooting trapped in a horribly overstretched campaign, telling a story that clearly didn't long to be told. It feels more like Microsoft taking a page out of the Jack Donaghy playbook and tapping a sign saying 'make it 2007 again'. Here's hoping multiplayer's a triumph. Otherwise Marcus is gonna have to open Gears 6 with one Hell of a drag show to make up for this.

We'll publish the final, scored version of this review once I've had time to try out the multiplayer, which wasn't available pre-release.

Embark is bringing forth a monumental effort ahead of Arc Raiders' anticipated major Frozen Trail update scheduled for next week . The devs have teased a bunch of new features like a temporary PvE mode, loot hotspots that change places, and a chance to build a base Topside, among a huge bevy of new items and arcs. And while I've been suitably hyped for all of this the issue of rampant cheating has still been in the forefront of my mind, Embark has now addressed this too.

"Cheating undermines what makes Arc Raiders challenging and fun, and disrupts the experience for everyone playing fairly," executive producer, Aleksander Grøndal says in a blog post. "At Embark, we take it incredibly seriously, and spend a lot of time and money in the ongoing fight against unfair play.

"The market for cheats is constantly evolving. Cheat makers profit from selling to players, often bundling malware with their software, and every time we improve our defenses, they adapt and find new ways around them. We adapt too. Our growing anti-cheat team is continually working to detect and block new cheats, close the pathways they exploit, and add obstacles that make cheating harder and less worthwhile. It's work we're committed to for as long as our games are live."

But Embark has shared its journey of combatting cheating in Arc Raiders for a long, long time now. Periodically peeping its head above the parapet to let players know that the anticheat does, in fact, exist and it's doing stuff. This hasn't, however, made a dent so far and certainly has fallen short of quelling the incessant rage of players. Grøndal admits that "simply saying we’re working on it isn’t enough", so he's trying something different this time around:

"In recent months, we’ve improved our ability to identify and sanction accounts that use cheat software, as well as accounts involved in economy exploits. We’ve also continued working to make it harder for repeat offenders to simply create a new account and return to the game.

"Permanent bans are now standard for all known cheat programs and, as a matter of policy, any account caught using cheats is permanently banned. No warnings, no second chances."

Accounts linked to those which have been banned for cheating will also now receive a permanent ban and Embark is set on more freely using hardware bans when "we have enough evidence that a single machine is being used for cheating".

Long term, Embark is growing its in-house cheat detection models which are "built around machine-learning" and other data. Alongside its Denuvo anticheat and Anybrain, Embark is also preparing to include Elytra, an anticheat which is being used at a "small scale" in The Finals but apparently shows "promise".

I'm not prepared to get too excited for any immediate change as we'll actually have to see what difference, if any, this makes to Arc Raiders rampant cheating. But it's certainly a very good sign that Embark is willing to take drastic measures to revamp the game, especially ahead of Frozen Trail.

"Video game cheating is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it will never fully go away," Grøndal adds. "What we can do is make cheating as difficult, costly, and short-lived as possible.

"We built Arc Raiders with love and dedication to the craft, and seeing it exploited by cheaters makes us as angry as it makes you. We are making progress, and we’re continuing to work to identify cheating more effectively, act on it more quickly, make it harder for repeat offenders to return, and improve the experience for Raiders who are playing fairly."

Almost a decade ago, we published a list of our favourite RTS units. There are some good picks in there. But I want to revisit the topic, and not just by listing some cool tanks. Real-time strategy is competitive. I want to find out what the best unit is, and for that we need a tournament. No deliberating, no debating, just brackets and voting.

Last week, PC Gamer writers created a shortlist, and now I'm pitting them against each other in randomised face-offs. And you lot now have two days to vote for your fave, after which the victors will move to the next round and we'll do it all over again.

But what does "best" actually mean? That's up to you! Better in a 1v1 brawl? Better looking? Better at pretending to be a completely normal tree? The choice is yours.

The war begins

Welcome to the first round of our apocalyptic war to determine the greatest RTS unit of all time. We've got 16 competitors duking it out, from Peons to the Executor Super Star Destroyer. Hmmm. That doesn't seem fair. But war isn't fair. There will be tears. There will be surprises. There will be grudges that remain for centuries.

But for now, let's meet the competitors. This is also where you lot come in. Underneath each set of two units, we'd like you to vote for your favourite. Now, I can't make you vote for my picks—that would be incredibly corrupt—but I'd certainly appreciate it.

Since there a lot of units to get through in this round, I'm going to leave the polls running until Sunday evening, and then we'll kick off the quarter-finals early next week.

One last bit of housekeeping: In cases where these units crop up in multiple games in a series, we've just picked one version. So while the Peon features in all three Warcrafts, I've gone for the Warcraft 3 version (because it looks extra goofy).

Peon vs Glass Dragon

Peon (Warcraft 3)

The real heroes of Warcraft, Peons are mistreated, disrespected and undervalued by orcish society, but they are the most critical cog in the Horde's war machine. They get called "dogs" and "cowards", and yeah, they might enjoy the occasional nap—but they work hard! They deserve a rest!

Orcs are classist dickheads. Without Peons, you'd have no great halls, no barracks, no trained warriors. Peons avoid conflict not because they are cowards, but because they know they are too important to die in battle—that the future of their people hinges on them building a new gold mine or chopping down some trees.

And if it comes down to it, they'll fight, either directly (which they are, frankly, terrible at) or by holing up in a burrow. They can do it all! Zug zug, my friends. Zug zug. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Glass Dragon (Rise of Legends)

Rise of Legends is one of those RTS games that sometimes I feel like I hallucinated from whole cloth. Fraser assures me that he's played it and it's rad, so I'm including the Glass Dragon here under the assurances that I haven't made it up.

Rise of Legends is an incredible game that blends steampunk and Arabian mythology and aliens (!) in a beautiful, messy RTS stew. The Glass Dragon stands out in particular not only for its ability to slag tanks, but its beauty. Just look at those beautiful polygons! —Russell Adderson, Contributor

Mammoth Tank vs Petard

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Petard (Age of Empires 2)

Greek infrastructure hates to see these guys coming. I love destroying buildings is what we're learning here. But can you blame me? The Petard is a unit with a noble and singular goal: to hurl himself at the nearest enemy structure and turn it to smoking rubble. Of course, the Petard dies in the act, but such is the price you pay for glory.

It might be grim, it might be heartless, but it's certainly effective. Also, it's fun—producing a horde of these guys and sending them rolling over to the enemy's nearest base like a horrible circus coming to town is, simply, a great lark. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Psyker vs Rohirrim

Psyker (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War)

I love a unit that's so powerful it hurts itself. Not only is Dawn of War's Psyker the best voice-acted unit in a game filled to the brim with fantastic voicework, but he's the perfect mechanical summary of the setting's relationship to the Warp. Imagine if, to cast magic, you had to tap into hell, filled with soul-hungry predators and daemons who'd happily possess you given the chance. Hey, or maybe your head will just explode from the strain.

This is represented by the Psyker's 'Perils of the Warp' mechanic, which gives him a small chance of dying anytime he casts one of his powerful abilities. So, while it's fun to hear him shout WITNESS YOUR DOOOOOOM as many times as possible, abusing his powers will lead to an untimely end. —Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer

Rohirrim (Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth)

The Ride of the Rohirrim is a very influential movie moment for a young lad. I, for example, decided that the only faction I could play in Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth was Rohan. And the only unit I would enjoy playing were the Rohirrim.

I'd get my long-haired horse boys fresh out of the stable, hand them forged blades (made the tips of their spears glow), as much heavy armour as I could afford, then arrange them into a neatly-formed flying V formation. My entire operation was focused on powering through as fast as possible until I could get my horde of superpowered spearmen on horseback. Every playthrough—every damn playthrough.

These Rohirrim were basically a cheat code. They could easily trample Sauron's armies under hoof. Just line them up, set them off, and watch carnage ensue. I'm rewatching the Ride of the Rohirrim as I write this and it makes me want to boot the game right back up again—goosebumps. —Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

High Templar vs Pride of Hiigara

High Templar (StarCraft 2)

I'm not one for all this lore nonsense, though the High Templars have lore abound if that's your jam. What I'm into is seeing a mass of enemy Terrans melt under the AoE of Psionic Storm.

Back when I was a wee wannabe Grandmaster SC2 nerd, discovering Templar Storm was game-changing. Previously, I'd based my game around making the sweet and simple Protoss ball of death—an army of smaller units and couple of big Colossus (Colossi?)—then crossing my fingers, but before long I discovered I could tech into Templars for that AoE. Just one or two of these bad-boys pulled in and I could melt my opponent's entire army of Marines or Zerglings. I'd never experienced anything like it. —Jacob Fox, Hardware Writer

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mirage Tank vs Ballista

Mirage Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3)

Most tanks are performative. They're like those folks who film themselves in the gym, flexing their muscles, grunting and getting in everyone's way. But not the Mirage Tank—it's sneaky. You wouldn't even notice it in the gym. You'd just be left to wonder, "Who put this tree in the gym?" And then it cuts right through you with its spectrum dispersion cannon.

It was already one of the coolest units ever created in Red Alert 2, but Red Alert 3's version introduces more disguises and enhances the unit's DPS capabilities. It can be a sneaky assassin on its own, but a group of them can make short work of an enemy base. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Ballista (Warcraft 2)

I edited C&C: Red Alert's rules.ini file so that attack dogs barked Tesla coil zaps, which was pretty cool. But lightning dogs were not an official unit, so I will instead call into battle the Ballista from Warcraft 2. Iconic, effective, and straightforward: this thing shoots a giant arrow. What are these other units gonna do against a really big arrow? Nothing. —Tyler Wilde, Editor-in-Chief (US)

Attack Cycle vs Super Star Destroyer

Attack Cycle (Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun)

The cheap and cheerful attack cycle is made out of recycled coke cans and implodes when it has a negative thought, but who cares? You can churn them out like paperclips, and a swarm of them will make short work of enemy walls, turrets, and foundries. They are the Nod philosophy crystallised: victory through numbers, speed, and lethal affordability. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Atreides Sonic Tank vs Dolphin

Atreides Sonic Tank (Dune 2)

I couldn't let a list like this go by without a unit from the absolute goat, Dune 2. It was hard to pick just one, but the House Atreides Sonic Tank is not only an absolute beast of a unit that melts infantry like a pat of butter at the beach, but also represents all of the weirdness and imagination of the source material. —Russell Adderson, Contributor

Dolphin (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2)

The Dolphin—what a superstar. You could be forgiven for treating these sleek, squeaky critters like nothing more than scouts, with their lack of armour and impressive speed. But you'd be wrong. They are killers.

In a group, Dolphins are unstoppable gods of war, able to deftly take out buildings and vessels with their sonic blasts. They should be feared and respected. Sure, the Soviets think they have naval superiority, but once the Allies start churning out Dolphins, it's game over, man. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Peewee vs Priest

Peewee (Total Annihilation)

In the dystopian future of Total Annihilation's all-out robotic war, the Peewee always seemed incongruously joyful to me. Though a basic Kbot, he happily marches around the battlefield swinging his arms like a proper soldier, and when the time comes to fight, he lets rip with his arm blasters, machine-gunning an endless torrent of energy balls. Frankly, it looks like fun.

Even the name "Peewee" gives me an image of a cute little blaster bot, which doesn't exactly fit its role as a warrior in a gruelling 4,000 year war between machine consciousnesses. —Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

Final Fantasy 14's free trial is massive—so massive, in fact, that it's become a bit of a copy/pasted meme over the years. The sentence "have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14" is burned into our brains.

And, to be fair, it's a bloody huge one, currently letting you play for free for as long as you want right until the end of Shadowbringers (with some big limitations, mind). Still, it's a few hundred hours without a single monthly sub payment. Well, Final Fantasy 11's gonna be following in those footsteps, per the FF11 site:

The site also mentions that previously-created trial characters will also be able to once again play the game, so if you started a free trial and ran out of game time, you can hop back in.

That's a pretty huge bump—especially since it also lets players do some of the "Limit Break" quests. For context, while FF11 technically caps out at level 50, players can up that to a maximum of 99 by doing a certain questline every few levels. And they'll have all the time in the world to do it in, hooray!

Honestly, this now makes two of Square's premier MMOs very generous—and as a fan of the genre writ large, I'm happy to see genuine efforts made to keep old dogs like FF11, which is doing pleasantly well, alive and kicking. There's a dearth of new MMOs out there, so I'm just glad to see efforts to maintain the old ones.

To great effect, mind. Back in March, FF11 was getting so many new players it had to pause character creation on its busiest server for a while and, checking this auction house database, the game still has around 88,000 active players.

The final expedition skin—at least for now, as Embark works out what it wants to do with the system—looks decent enough. It even has a cape, though I wouldn't say no to a couple more colour schemes. We won't see the new character prestige system until 2027, but even as someone who's taken part in every expedition, I'm glad it's getting some much-needed changes.

Why do all five expeditions? I genuinely enjoy the process. Using your in-game smarts and knowledge of item locations to prep optimally is a fun puzzle, especially if you're also starting from scratch (due to having done the previous expedition) so you have minimal resources to work with.

A part of me thinks that a mandatory character reset might be best for the health of the game at this point, but players aren't going to be happy if they're forced to part with the item hoards they've spent over a year accumulating. I'll be curious to see how Embark handles it, but for now at least, this is the last expedition outfit. Here's to more exciting stuff arriving with the Frozen Trail update next week.

That last mainline entry in the Fallout series, Fallout 4, was released in 2015. Fallout 5? That's most likely still half a decade away, if not more: Bethesda first needs to finish and release The Elder Scrolls 6, which is itself mostly likely still a few years away.

Sure, in the meantime we've had Fallout 76, and Microsoft has cracked the whip over the backs over what's left of Obsidian Entertainment to produce a Fallout something, but what's the earliest we'll be able to conceivably play Fallout 5? 2032? 2035? Could it really be 20 years between games in the main Fallout series?

Well, just because the best way to play some new Fallout is by watching the Amazon TV series while listlessly pressing controller buttons doesn't mean we should stop talking about Fallout. We here at PC Gamer impatiently rolled back that big Vault door to air out a few more thoughts about the RPG series.

If you're gonna remaster any Fallout games, it should be the first two

Hardcore mode is the best way to play New Vegas

Fallout 4 is more interesting than Fallout 3

The Fallout show should feel more free to stomp on established lore

Fallout doesn't have to be about a Vault Dweller

Fallout doesn't have to be about Fallout

Fallout Shelter is great and we need more spinoffs

Fallout 2 is over-rated

Are you aware of Oh!Ware? I'm guessing not. The deckbuilder has been on Steam for about a week as of this writing, with a humble 23 reviews to its name so far. It caught my eye though, because the fundamental mechanic underneath the very 2026 trappings of a roguelike structure and marbles standing in for cards is mancala—a slightly older board game you probably played at some point in your childhood.

And by "slightly older," I mean somewhere between 1,500 and 7,000 years older.

I was probably predisposed to love mancala as a kid: My dad was a big backgammon guy, and mancala is a lot like backgammon, but played with marbles or similar shiny colored glass pieces. (Kids still like shiny colored glass baubles in the TikTok era, right? I'm very out of touch.) What I didn't know about mancala until today is that it may be the oldest board game in recorded history, but precisely when and where it was invented is still undetermined.

"Some historians believe that mancala is the oldest game in the world based on the archaeological evidence found in Jordan that dates around 6000 BC," summarizes Wikipedia. But other, more concrete evidence of the game, as dug up by archaeologists, is thousands of years newer—around 500-600 AD. Mancala isn't definitively the oldest board game, then, with ancient competition from the likes of senet and mehen, but it's an OG regardless.

And now also a roguelike, though "deckbuilder" seems a bit off since the game is played with marbles. Does that make it a bagbuilder?

On booting up Oh!Ware's demo and skipping past the tutorial like I was hot shit, I realized I have not played mancala in at least 25 years and had no idea what I was doing. But I clicked a bunch to move some marbles around, collected mana(?) and killed a spider, who I really don't think had any business playing a board game that requires opposable thumbs. Then I was offered the archetypical pick three, but with amusing choices including "blessing marble" and "aggro marble."

I need to go study up on mancala now, but if anyone plays Oh!Ware, please let me know if I should aim for an aggro meta or a blessing meta. I really don't want to lose my marbles.

$30 extra just for early access and some cosmetics? I was a little taken aback to notice that the Gears of War: E-Day Premium Edition is $100, and all it gets you on top of the $70 regular edition is five days of early access starting October 1 and some skins (a "Bravo Squad Signature Weapon Pack" and five seasonal "customization packs").

I suppose this isn't really unusual today, when some games sell $60 skins, but I've gotta wonder who's biting on this kind of thing. It's gonna be on Game Pass in a week!

Coming tomorrow, I write about summoning an army (using mods) to conquer Kuttenberg in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. For Wenceslaus!

Log this under "Mods that I'm glad exist but, just being honest here, I will probably never actually install it": Bryan, the dope from Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie (which is great, btw) has been modded into Resident Evil 2. This is the everyman more games need: not a cop with nerves of steel but a screaming dope who can't hit the broad side of a torso monster with a full clip. Grab it on Nexus Mods.

The blue elves might not be the only wholly original addition to World of Warcraft: Forever. Blizzard started surveying players about a list of new classes, some of which have been requested by fans for years.

Last week, a survey popped up on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher to gauge interest in future additions to WoW: Forever. Participants were told not to publicly share anything from the surveys, but, well, you know how well people listen to warnings on the internet.

The full survey was posted online by some brave soul, and in it you can see several proposed classes: Monk, Demon Hunter, Tinker, Illusionist, San'layn, Necromancer, Rune Knight, Bard, Warden, Witch and Death Knight. Each one has a short description, their role in a group, the kind of gear they'd wear, and a breakdown of some example abilities.

The Witch class, for example, is a ranged damage-dealer and support that wears cloth armor. A cauldron ability that buffs anyone who drinks from it as well as a ranged attack called "Voidbolt" that drains the caster's own life are two of their example abilities.

Bard and Tinker are two classes I always see come up whenever anyone talks about potential new classes. Blizzard's suggested version of them sounds like they'd fit right in with the rest of the roster. The Tinker description says they'd climb into their own mech to fight; Bards would perform songs to heal and buff their allies.

Returning classes, like Demon Hunter and Monk, sound pretty close to the versions that exist in other versions of WoW today. The survey specifically calls out familiar abilities that they wouldn't have in WoW: Forever, and clarifies that Demon Hunters would start at level one, rather than level eight as they do in WoW's Midnight expansion.

Even though these class outlines are pretty short, they feel considered in a way that makes me think this is something Blizzard is almost certainly going to do eventually, if not shortly after the MMO launches in November.

Plenty of people shelled out the money to play the new elves in the beta judging from how many I see running around every time I log in. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard starts selling classes, too. Ideally there would be a way to unlock them for free by playing the game, but I have my doubts about the kinds of things Blizzard would give away these days if they'd likely prove lucrative. The survey already has some players worried that any additional classes might come out considerably more powerful than the others and ruin the throwback experience. They could be right, but it's still unclear how far WoW: Forever will veer away from the oldest version of the MMO. The full release on November 4 will hopefully provide some insight into what the future holds for Blizzard's retro spinoff.

Don't mind me: I'm just seething over not being able to actually hang out in Deadlock's occult New York for real. As Elie noted earlier today, Deadlock's latest update made its map even more arresting, fleshing out Valve's accursed big apple with new district stylings and reworked lanes.

Deadlock's world is so refreshingly flavorful that not being able to explore it in person almost feels like an injustice. I want to watch the advertised dimensional chess tournament. I want to browse the selection at Salt & Chalk Ritual Supplies. I want to ask the Umbria University librarian about the claw-handed man in the portrait. I want to hang out here, man.

It's almost enough to make me a MOBA guy. Almost.

Deadlock's massive new update isn't a sign of an imminent public release, according to the MOBA's first proper development update. The invite-only game continues to grow in scope and polish, but Valve says there's still a lot of work to do.

"We think building a multiplayer game is very hard and risky, and the best way to minimize that risk [is] to make sure that we are able to have it in players' hands from an early state to help us shape it and tell us what is fun and what isn't," Valve says at the top of the update.

Six new heroes and a ton of visual overhauls came to Deadlock earlier this year in the Old Gods, New Blood update. While not everything in the game was touched, the breadth of the update made it seem like Deadlock was entering the next stage in its development. The level of polish in the map and many of the game's systems reached a point where it was hard to call it "unfinished" as far as early access games typically go.

But Valve can and will do whatever it wants, and in this case that doesn't involve releasing the game to a wider audience. Looking back at that update in this new post, Valve says "there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development (like updating older hero artwork)."

Valve says the Deadlock team shifted away from focusing on specific areas of the game and started working on many things in parallel this year. Most of those things are in the new City Never Sleeps update, like the redesigned map and items, but some are still on their way: "This even includes things like progression and hero/hideout customizations, as we feel those are features we want to be able to adjust and significantly change based on feedback before the game is fully released."

"There are also other things we've been working on recently that are more speculative (as in we aren't 100% sure if they will be released or not based on how playtesting goes, though results so far have been promising) like large item redesigns/additions and alternative game modes that expand the scope of the game," Valve says. The new game modes could include the rumored PvE mode created by former Risk of Rain developers.

Visual updates for older heroes were originally planned to happen "towards the end of early development," Valve says, but it will "likely be gradually working on them in the near future for inclusion in upcoming updates alongside other work."

I'd love to know what prompted the team to move those up in the list because it doesn't sound like Deadlock's "early development" is over yet—or is it? Valve's update doesn't provide any clear indicators for when it expects it to feel finished enough to enter the polish phase.

Right now, it seems like the only sign of that happening will be whenever a bunch of heroes start getting attention. And even then, we don't know if Valve plans to release Deadlock to the public before every inch of it is perfect. If you want a peek at its spooky map or cast of weirdo heroes, you'd better find someone to beg for an invite because I don't think Valve's letting it out of the cage anytime soon.

"Xbox is not for sale," CEO Asha Sharma said in a new interview with the New York Times. "We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that."

Sharma's statement would seem to refute prior reports that a sale of Xbox is being considered, but it does leave open the possibility of other movement in that direction, including spinning it off or entering into a joint venture with other partners. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also recently implied that some kind of major structural rework could be in store, saying that after "streamlining" Xbox—a euphemism for laying off thousands of people and closing, dumping, or merging numerous studios—"we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people." What that model will look like will presumably become clearer once the cuts are finished: Announcing the most recent cuts, Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the "reset" (another euphemism) that began in July is now about three-quarters complete.

Holy [BLEEP], they got [BLEEP]ing Peaches to do [BLEEP] the Pain Away for the Hellraiser game. Most opportunistic promotional crossovers leave me cold (or annoyed) but I have to admit, this one, to borrow the words of PC Gamer hardware writer (and Peaches fan) Jess Kinghorn, is legit a banger. Originally released in 2000, Fuck the Pain Away was Peaches' big hit, and it's been used in numerous movies and TV shows in the years since. But what makes it work so well here is that this remix and video doesn't come off as forced or awkwardly shoehorned in: This is pretty much (warning, NSFW) what Peaches would do anyway.

The new Fuck the Pain Away video for Hellraiser: Revival is also extraordinarily NSFW—so much so that it's not embeddable here. You have to go watch it on YouTube.

Today's basically a national holiday for Resident Evil fans. September 30 marks 28 years since the day the cop inside Leon S Kennedy died, the day he'll never forget; when Raccoon City was wiped out by Umbrella's classic mishandling of bioweapons in Resident Evil 2.

So to celebrate the day that made Leon S Kennedy who he is, I've collated all the most traumatic experiences I've had in Resident Evil games:

But enough about me and all my trauma, what about you guys? I'd be morbidly interested to know what your most traumatic memories from Resident Evil are. But please, no more chase scenes, my heart can't take it.

Sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and do what's necessary. No sentimentality, no squeamishness—just pure, solution-oriented bluesky thinking. This philosophy once guided Maximilien de Robespierre and now it guides me, in my equally epochal struggle to simply make Grand Theft Auto 5 boot in spite of the vast cargo of mods I have now encumbered it with.

Long story short: the game ceased to launch even in windowed mode, which had hitherto been a surefire way to coax it from its deathbed. After many restarts and a lot of graphics noodling, I was forced to ask myself if this was it. If this was the end of my GTA journey.

Then I started deleting essentially random files from the game's directory and now it works. So let that be a lesson to you.

Now that's out of the way: new mod. This one is called TornadoV and what it does, you see, is it adds absolutely ginormous tornadoes to the already somewhat hectic map of Los Santos (or what remains of it). Hit F5 to configure your tornadoes, hit F6 to spawn them.

That last bit is a point of concern, as F6 is also my button to enable noclip and jet about the map at speed. So I can't do that without summoning a twister now, I guess. Okay.

It's good fun, anyway. Franklin really does go to pieces as the mod stuffs him in an express elevator to God's kingdom. As for the rest of the world, well, with everything in a constant state of explosion, fracas, and breakdown, a slowly migrating whirlwind really just sort of blends in.