We're up to our necks in Persona. Whichever entry you're keen on, there's something for you. Persona 3? Enjoy the port of Persona 3 Portable, or the Persona 3 remake, or its Episode Aigis DLC. Enjoy Persona 4? Why, that's getting a flashy remake of its own. Or maybe you're a Persona 5 fan? Revel in the veritable mountain of P5-themed stuff that is sprinkled all across videogames like the fallout of a meteor strike.

Oh, unless you like Persona 1 and/or 2, of course, in which case please return to your hole and cease speaking.

So it goes. Despite being the games most obviously in need of a gloss-up, Persona's PS1-era games have never gotten much love from Atlus and Sega. But maybe that could change? In a recent chat with GamerBraves, Persona series producer Kazuhisa Wada said that—so far as he's concerned—Persona 1 and 2 remakes are damn-near a necessity.

"At this point, I can’t say for sure [if Persona 1 and 2 remakes will happen]," said Wada, but added that "personally, I think it’s something we should definitely do. I think we have to do it."

Of course, right now, Wada and Atlus are preoccupied with Persona 4 Revival, which comes out in February next year. “Persona 4 is, personally, a very important work for me, a very important title, and I think it’s a title that speaks to a lot of people within the series as well."

It's not shocking that the Persona team's focus has been fixated on 3, 4, and 5. P3 was the game that knocked the series into the social sim high school drama we all associate it with. P1 and P2, meanwhile, were different beasts, more in line with the Shin Megami Tensei games the Persona series originally sprang from than later entries. I'd be very keen to get a chance to play them on modern systems.

Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames. And ocassionally hedgehogs.

The arc of history curves in mysterious ways. Beloved actor Keanu Reeves—Ted, Neo, John Wick himself—may not be Buddhist, but he does, in fact, owe the existence of one of his blockbuster roles to the teachings of one of Buddhism's most important figures.

How, you ask? And what exactly does this have to do with videogames? Excellent questions that can only be answered by a causality chain, tracing the butterfly effect of a man walking westward 1,400 years ago to the modern day movie star known for his iconic delivery of the word "Whoa."

Join us, as we tip over the dominoes to link past to present...

The origins of Chinese Buddhism 🔗 Keanu Reeves big dogging Sonic the Hedgehog

The foundational text

620s AD: Around the year 627, Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang begins a 17 year journey from China to India in search of Buddhist texts...

He returns in the year 645 with hundreds of Sanskrit manuscripts, which he will work to translate until his death. One of Xuanzang's disciples writes and publishes a book titled Records of the Western Regions, a dictated account of his pilgrimage.¹

A legendary journey

1590s: Xuanzang's account inspires 1,000 years of folktales, both written and in the oral tradition. In the late 16th century, a fictional account of the journey of Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang and the monkey king Sun Wukong is published under the name Journey to the West.²

From the west to the east

1984: Manga artist Akira Toriyama decides to follow up his hit comic Dr. Slump, which was set in a vague satirical version of America, with a new series that has "Chinese scenery" instead.³

Toriyama uses Journey to the West as the template, saying in a 1995 interview "I thought it would be easy if that story served as the basis, since all I would have to do would be to arrange things." His protagonist Son Goku is modeled after the Monkey King.

The Super moment

1991: After Dragon Ball becomes increasingly popular as a battle manga, Toriyama gives Goku a power-up called Super Saiyan. He draws Super Saiyan Goku with a golden aura and blonde hair instead of black so that his assistant can spend less time inking Goku's hair each issue.⁴

Sonic's power-up looks mighty familiar

1992: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 debuts in November the following year. When he powers up by collecting the Chaos Emeralds, Sonic glows gold and transforms into Super Sonic.

Coincidence?? No.⁵

Sonic needs a shadow

2001: To give Sonic a more powerful rival, Sonic Team creates Shadow the Hedgehog, the "ultimate lifeform." He canonically approves of stealing candy from babies⁶, and is also maybe Vegeta.⁷

Keanu is the ultimate life form?

2024: After being cast as the voice of Shadow, Keanu Reeves looks an interviewer dead in the eyes and declares that he, either as a human man or the voice of a CGI hedgehog, can beat up Sonic the Hedgehog.⁸

Sources and further reading

1. Xuanzang, Wikipedia
2. How to understand Journey to the West, Stone Bridge Press
3. Akira Toriyama Super Interview, Kanzenshuu
4. The Truth About the “Dragon Ball” Manga, Kanzenshuu
5. Sonic the Hedgehog & Dragon Ball – Influences and Inspiration, Zed's Writings
6. Shadow the Hedgehog - This is like taking candy from a baby, YouTube
7. Iizuka says Shadow the Hedgehog wasn't inspired by Vegeta, but fans have receipts that say otherwise, PC Gamer
8. Keanu Reeves Talks Voicing Shadow, YouTube

Read more on PC Gamer

• Black Myth: Wukong's care and attention to its setting made it one of my favorite gaming experiences of 2024
• Enslaved was a one-of-a-kind post-apocalyptic epic
• Keanu Reeves went on an intense 'internal journey' to inhabit the role of evil Sonic the Hedgehog With a Gun

Famed British political figure Count Binface has issued a public demand to Sega to quit horsing around and finish Shenmue 4, and suggested the company may be nationalized by the UK government if it doesn't move with sufficient haste.

For those not in the know, Count Binface is not an entirely serious political figure: He's really more akin to Darth Vader with a giant trash can for a helmet, whose policies include things like banning loud snacks from movie theaters, a price cap of £1 on croissants, nationalizing Adele, and "the hand dryer in the gents' toilet at the Crown & Treaty, Uxbridge, to be moved to a more sensible position."

The Count—writer Jonathan David Harvey in his unbinned form—is a novelty politician, but he does run in actual elections in the UK, and he's been in the news lately for facing off against Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, best known as one of the leading figures of Brexit, in the ongoing by-election in the riding of Clacton. As such, he's a busy guy, but he still has time to share thoughts on the state of Shenmue.

"I need to say a galactic 'hello' to Sega on behalf of the Shenmue fans," Count Binface says in the clip. "Now, I'm not just saying 'hello,' Sega. I've got a little bone to pick with you, because the fans would like to campaign for an update from you, Sega, about Shenmue 4."

🚨 BREAKING: @countbinface.bsky.social has cast his vote for Shenmue and now he has a message for @sega-west.bsky.social and @sega.jp The campaign continues. The people have spoken.#LetsGetShenmue4

— @shenmuedojo.com (@shenmuedojo.com.bsky.social) 2026-07-22T21:30:55.073Z

After a quick complaint about Shenmue 3 ending on a cliffhanger that remains unresolved, the Count continued: "I wonder whether Sega needs to be nationalized along with Adele. What do you say? Shall we harness the power of the Shenmue to ensure that there is no delay with updates ever again? I quite like the sound of that. I'd like to reboot Sega World in London's Trocadero and have old Sonic the Hedgehog back in his prime. Oh, that would be wonderful. But hey, I digress."

He might actually be serious on that last point: As noted by Metro, Count Binface's manifesto when he was running for mayor of London in 2021 included turning the Trocadero "back into a truly top-notch video arcade."

His demands of Sega may be somewhat less pure, however. As Metro pointed out, the video was shared by the Shenmue Dojo fan site but hasn't appeared on Count Binface's own socials, suggesting that this whole thing may have been an op. Count Binface does in fact have a Cameo page, after all—political campaigns are expensive.

Still, as political corruption goes it's pretty small potatoes, and even if he is taking stacks of cash in brown paper bags, Count Binface is expressing a legitimate concern. Shenmue 3 is now seven years old and while it was quite good, it wasn't conclusive. There was excitement a-plenty when a purported Shenmue 4 trailer leaked in 2025, but that turned out to be a fake, and there's been nothing since to suggest that the game is in development. Will an edict from Count Binface change that situation? Probably not, but it can't hurt to try.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer re-review provided by:

I’m not sure anybody has ever had more fun making a game than Sumo Digital did when it made Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.

On paper, the brief from SEGA would have been as desperately mercenary as they come: make a copy of Nintendo’s monumentally popular Mario Kart, but with Sonic. Take Nintendo’s near-perfect party game series and smear Sega’s blue weirdo and his friends all over it.

Sumo seems to have understood that it was never going to make something pristine with the materials it was given. SEGA found itself resolutely Mean Girls-ed by the end of the ’90s console wars, too scrappy to mean anything as a brand and personally victimised by Nintendo’s radiant coherence.

As mascots go, Mario is a stranger proposition than Sonic—a portly plumber is a weird hero to invest in when you’re a child—but sheer craftsmanship overruled the rule of cool. Sonic found himself too inherently ’90s to hold onto that cool very long anyway, destined for a faltering retreat from the mainstream and a new career in fan fiction.

The first wonderful thing about All-Stars Racing Transformed is that it accepts this: not just about Sonic, but about SEGA’s whole brand. The core cast includes everybody you’d expect: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and so on, each driving cars that transform into planes and boats as stages change over the course of a race.

Then somebody put their hands on the crossover lever and gave it a push: you can also play as the bloke from Shenmue, who rides around in an OutRun cabinet, or as B.D. Joe from Crazy Taxi. You can play as AiAi from Super Monkey Ball, who appears to have the Dreamcast logo shaved into his head: a gang sign that only middle class ’90 kids will understand.

Nintendo has done this sort of thing before, of course, in the Smash Bros. series. Hell, Sonic is in Smash Bros. Not content to be outdone, however, Sumo leaned even harder on the crossover lever and snapped it off, wholesale embracing Sega’s latter-day existence as a publisher of sober PC strategy games.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that you wanted to do sick drifts across the deck of After Burner’s aircraft carrier as a tank-driving general from Company of Heroes: but you do, you really do.

You want to fuck up Tails with a well-aimed swarm of bees as a Roman centurion from Total War. You want to fly around a level from Sonic 3 as actual human racing driver Danica Patrick.

Harvest time

You want to do it all as Racing Transformed’s inarguable star, Football Manager: just a regular man in a football-themed car who likes to bellow things like “get in!” as he tumbles from a collapsing bridge in Panzer Dragoon Saga and transforms into a boat.

I can’t express how happy I am that somebody decided to make this, that they were willing to shatter the ideal of a ’90s console brand into pieces and throw it to the crowd.

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Assembly's recent What's Next livestream dropped a few bombshells about the upcoming 9.0 update and the Lords of the End Times DLC. It's good news for anyone who loves vampires and Chaos, and for anyone who has ever found themselves underwhelmed by the conclusion to an Immortal Empires campaign.

First things first, it was mentioned that the long-awaited siege rework will be part of the 9.1 patch, and so wasn't part of this latest discussion. Neither was any info about Neferata, who is currently being worked on. And patch 8.1 is still coming too, which we'll hear more about next week.

What was included was the reveal of new endgames themed around the End Times. Where previously an Immortal Empires campaign could build to an endgame crisis, these "do not satisfy what we wanted them to do" according to associate design director Sean Macdonald. Each one basically just spawned extra armies. Now, most of those crises are being shifted to the midgame where they'll serve to power-up factions, with End Times events as the dramatic conclusion to a campaign.

There are three of them in the works. One is an altered version of the existing Vermintide crisis, one is based on Nagash (a legendary lord who will be part of the Lords of the End Times DLC), and the one CA focused on during the livestream features Archaon, the best boy of Chaos. Whichever one you get will be introduced with a cinematic and a note explaining the campaign mechanics.

Archaon, for instance, has a huge ward save that makes him basically undefeatable until you weaken him by taking out his lieutenants. While you're doing that, he can devastate provinces after razing enough regions in them, meaning even if you take them back you won't be able to rebuild there until he's defeated. Archaon's also able to confederate with any other Chaos faction, not just the Warriors of Chaos he could previously. To help you fight back, once Archaon's invasion begins other forces will be more likely to ally against him, making for a climactic dust-up.

If you're playing a campaign as Archaon, you'll have the option of continuing as you were or becoming the endgame crisis yourself, gaining the ability to devastate provinces, each of which increases how powerful you are, and eventually leads to your victory.

On that subject, victory conditions are due for a rework in update 9.0 as well. Each legendary lord will get their own unique victory conditions, a checklist of objectives that might include ranking up thematically appropriate units, confederating with specific friendlies, constructing their most famous landmarks, and so on.

The Vampire Counts rework is good news for me, an undead player from way back, and anyone else who has been holding off on a replay until the bloodsuckers got some love. They've been basically untouched since The Grim and the Grave DLC came out 10 years ago, which is wild given how significantly some of the other factions have been freshened up in the meantime.

The rework includes changes to how recruitment works, so Raise Dead will let you replace lost troops based on how many people died in a battle, each corpse in a province becoming a potential unit for you. Vampires, meanwhile, will be more powerful but more difficult to find. You'll have to discover a lair in a settlement and then either capture it or send an agent there, after which you'll be able to customize the vampire you get, spending resources to choose their bloodline and so on. Also, Vlad and Isabella von Carstein can both become legendary lords if you play a campaign where one starts as a hero. Which is nice.

For a finale, CA revealed another legendary lord coming with the Lord of the End Times DLC. In addition to Nagash and Boris Todbringer (and Neferata, who will presumably be the traditional "free-LC" released alongside the expansion), the Glottkin are joining the Warriors of Chaos. The brothers Glot are a trio of heavily mutated siblings marked by Nurgle, with the monstrous Ghurk so large he serves as a mount for his brothers Otto and Ethrac. Though a part of the Warriors of Chaos faction, the Glottkin will have access to Nurgle's daemons, as well as new units like the Putrid Blightkings, Basilisk, and Chaos Siege Giant.

That leaves one more Lord of the End Times still to be announced. I'm pretty sure it's going to be Thanquol, the Skaven Grey Seer infamous for failing upwards after being defeated every time he shows up in a Gotrek and Felix book, and going through rat-ogre sidekicks at a rate of knots. If it's not Thanquol, someone's going to have to check in on the guy who's been ratposting for over 200 days in anticipation.

Atlus RPG series Persona could be getting a live-action Netflix adaptation, according to a new Variety report. The production company responsible for Stranger Things, 21 Laps, will be substantially involved, as will Story Kitchen, another production company with a focus on game-to-film adaptations like Sonic The Hedgehog, as well as forthcoming projects including Tomb Raider, It Takes Two and Vampire Survivors.

The writer and showrunner is Christopher Monfette, who has worked on a bunch of nerd stuff including the forthcoming VisionQuest (a Disney series featuring Marvel's Vision) and Star Trek: Picard. Joining the list of seven executive producers is Sega's Toru Nakahara who has also executive produced the Sonic film trilogy.

I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for a live-action Persona to materialize. Persona 5 has been an enormous success: the core game, taking in Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, had sold 10.46 million copies as of August 2025. It's released on three console generations since its initial launch in 2016, and spawned five spin-offs in Persona 5 Strikers, Persona 5 Tactica, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, Persona 5: The Phantom X and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. Its success has led to remakes of Persona 3 and Persona 4.

Of course, there have already been lots of Persona screen adaptations: Persona 5 has its own animation series which ran between 2018 and 2019, as did Persona 4 in 2011. A Persona 3 anime miniseries also exists. And for those who want to go way back, the wider Shin Megami Tensei series was originally a novel trilogy, and crossmedia promotion is very much in the universe's DNA.

Still, this is the first live-action Persona series, and I'm pretty skeptical about how the overwhelmingly American production crews are going to handle it. I'd be surprised if it had a Japanese cast, equally so if it took place in a Japanese locale. Adapting a series so inextricably linked to anime is also going to require some careful tonal adjustments in its move to live action. Or they could just cast Jack Black or that Parks and Recreation guy and call it a day.

More exciting is the prospect of Persona 6, which after a long wait was finally revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase earlier this month. There wasn't any gameplay footage, or screenshots, nor even a release window, but Atlus does at least intend to release it one day.

When Atlus announced its remake of Persona 4 (or more accurately, of Persona 4 Golden), a cry went up around the land. Mostly, I think people were rightly excited about Kanji Tatsumi in 4K, but there are a few peccadilloes in the original game's design that some folk—including here at PC Gamer—were eager to see Atlus iron out. Namely, those dungeons, which in P4 and P4G were quite the slog: a series of procgen corridors that went on for around 10 floors each.

"I think Persona 4 Revival should veer off from Reload's changes," wrote our Mollie Taylor last year. "Each of its dungeons are the perfect vessel to go full Persona 5 style. Palaces that serve as grand setpieces for each character, handcrafted to get real into the weeds of their insecurities and internal conflict."

I'm not sure Atlus has gone quite that far. From the snippets we see in its recent Persona 4 Revival Broadcast, Yukiko's Castle and the Bathhouse both look to be the many-floors-of-corridors affairs of the original games, though I don't doubt Atlus has put in more events and NPC dialogue to spice up the grind, much as it did before in Persona 3 Reload. To be fair, we only get a brief glimpse, so perhaps the studio has something more up its sleeve, but that design looks very familiar to me as someone who has experienced a lot of Persona 4 over the years.

One thing which is quite a bit different, though, is the combat you'll be doing in those dungeons. The Investigation Team/Scooby Gang has a lot of new toys at its disposal for fighting shadows, all lavishly coloured and animated. The three Atlus focused on in its broadcast were: Baton Pass, Send Flying, and Prime Time. Baton Pass is an easy one—it's the mechanic introduced in Persona 5 that lets you give your turn to another party member after downing an enemy.

The other two are more novel. Send Flying is a new mechanic that lets you, more or less, turn individual enemies into vectors for disease. Afflicted a shadow with the fear ailment? You can attack it to send it flying into another foe in the arena, inflicting them with the exact same debuff. Which, hey, great. I've always thought that Persona should let me ravage my foes with communicable viruses.

Prime Time, meanwhile, is a meter that fills as you do battle. Once it tops out, you can, well, activate Prime Time, which drops all your skill costs to 0 and lets you hit foes with a "Prime Time finish," which looks a lot to me like a P3R Theurgy attack.

The only other new combat mechanic that seems notable to me is the addition of a Guard manoeuvre in the overworld. Initiating combat looks much the same as it did in base P4: hit a foe when they're off-guard and get advantage, get hit yourself and get disadvantage. But guarding adds a new wrinkle: if an enemy hits you while you're guarding, they'll bounce off and become dazed, letting you either gain advantage in the full battle or else run away.

Which is all very slick and fun, but I do have to wonder what Atlus is doing to compensate for all these new tricks in your toolbox. Persona 4 was not a difficult game (with the possible exception of Yukiko's bossfight), and the addition of these new combat mechanics feel like they'd make the battle system entirely trivial. Here's hoping the shadows get some new toys to make your life harder, or else I'm going to start feeling bad.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sega is pulling out all the stops as it celebrates its successful three and a half decades of international brand marketing: There's exclusive Sonic merch from limited edition fashion collabs, a "musical odyssey" featuring live orchestral renditions of Sonic music, and—of course—a life-sized statue of Sonic featuring a fluid-filled chamber allowing fans to gaze lovingly at his DNA.

Wait, hold on.

No, yeah, I'm reading that right.

Announced yesterday with a reveal video on YouTube, Sega has unveiled the "Sonic the Hedgehog DNA Figure," which it describes as "a life-sized figure containing 'Sonic's DNA'"—a claim that would already invite a number of unsettling questions without the company's haunting deployment of quotation marks.

According to Sega, the figure was created in collaboration with the Lom Baby project from Transeeds, a self-described "science collective comprised of artists, engineers, scientists, and other members" specializing in "bio art." Claiming to employ "cutting-edge biotechnology," Lom Baby's previous works include the exhibition of "dragon meat" at Tokyo's National Art Center and recreating the T-Virus from Resident Evil in partnership with Capcom, a thing that is apparently fine and cool to do.

With that same biotechnology, Sega says "the essence of Sonic—who has raced through the ages—has been brought into the real world as 'DNA.'" Unfortunately, that does little to answer some fundamental questions I have about this whole process. For example, what methods does a bio art collective utilize to secure the genetic information of a fictional hedgehog? Or did they fabricate a chimeric simulacrum of Sonic's genome from assembled components? What's in Sonic's genes?

That last bit, at least, I have an answer for: Based on what's shown in the video, Sonic's genome evidently includes components like "velocity cells," "exploration DNA," and a "boost system." You know, like hedgehogs have.

To complete this act of blatant scientific hubris and genetic idolatry, Sega and Lom Baby have placed Sonic's synthesized "DNA" within an emerald, which has itself been submerged in a milky suspension inside the translucent thoracic cavity of a chrome Sonic effigy. After all, if we couldn't see the DNA jewel, how could we be expected to believe Sonic's genetic essence was actually in there?

"The DNA encapsulated within the Chaos Emerald symbolizes that 'Sonic's core' will endure, never fading, into the future," Sega says. Great!

Unfortunately, if you want to admire Sonic's "DNA" in person, you'll need to travel to Japan to do it. The Sonic the Hedgehog DNA Figure exhibition begins on Tuesday, June 23 at the Tokyo Sega Store.

We got what I would call our first proper look at some Persona 4 Revival last weekend, showing iconic moments like: The Scooby gang falling into their first TV, Charlie summoning Izanagi for the first time, karaoke with Yosuke (pretty sure that's new, unless I'm forgetting a Golden addition), and Marie being annoying in the Velvet Room.

But the most important thing we saw was, uh, something we heard: new voices. Much like Persona 3 Reload before it, Persona 4 Revival is recasting at least some of its characters—no Yuri Lowenthal as Yosuke, for instance. And at least one old cast member is pretty sad about it: Erin Fitzgerald, the voice of Chie Satonaka in Persona 4 Golden (via GamesRadar).

"I'm okay chat. I'm just deeply grieving," Fitzgerald wrote on Bluesky in the wake of the new trailer. "Everything in life is transient. I celebrate that the experience happened. I am grateful that I lived it FULLY. Thank you for sharing the journey with me. Yukiko, I will love you forever. Yosuke, let’s go get a burger. 💚💛💚💛💚 Chie out".

Fitzgerald was, herself, a replacement for Chie's original actor in Persona 4's PS2 version, Tracey Rooney. Rooney's take was, frankly, iconic (Aha! Is this our chance?), but there's no denying she sounded a bit too sedate and mature for the high-energy action girl Chie is written as.

Nu-Chie's voice actor is thus far unnamed, but from the snippet we got in the trailer? She sounds good! To my ear, she bridges the gap a little between Rooney's mature Chie and Fitzgerald's caffeinated Chie. Her dialogue sounds a touch more naturalistic than it did in Golden—but don't get me wrong, we are still operating in the realm of High Anime.

I’m ok chat.I’m just deeply grieving.Everything in life is transient. I celebrate that the experience happened. I am grateful that I lived it FULLY.Thank you for sharing the journey with me. Yukiko, i will love u forever. Yosuke, let’s go get a burger. 💚💛💚💛💚 Chie out

— @erinfitzbadass.com (@erinfitzbadass.com.bsky.social) 2026-06-10T15:19:05.367Z

I can understand why Fitzgerald's sad not to come back (outside of the obvious 'It is nice to have a paying job' reasons). Persona 4 is a game that endures in no small part due to how attached you get to its cast of goofballs. Why should the people who played those goofballs be any different? I'd be sad not to get voice direction for galactic punting a tank again too.

Original story:

It didn't take long, but it happened to me. Less than a week after PC Gamer's Andy Chalk wrote about how these gaming trailer livestreams would start to have their hype trains robbed and wrecked by AI disclosures, I saw it. Crazy Taxi: World Tour, a game I was reasonably excited for, was made with help from generative AI.

"At Sega Corporation, we utilize generative AI as a support tool for developers, aiming to provide better content to our users and enable developers to focus more on creative tasks," the game's Steam page reads. "No AI was used in reference to the performers in the game."

I assume that last bit is referring specifically to voice work. Game Informer's Brian Shea got an expanded statement from Sega which he posted on Bluesky. It includes the extra line, "Assets generated were still subject to review by the development team." It's still a bit vague, but suggests that it was used to create art and not only as a coding assistant.

Fans on social media are not happy. "Using AI slop to make shit for you, more like Lazy Taxi," wrote mat-draws on Bluesky. It's quickly becoming the thing to say. "Lazy Taxi," concurred Bluesky user tehsnakerer. "Lazy Taxi," mused mluckas, also on Bluesky. On Reddit, user RORSCHACH_INC_ commented, "Know what... think I'll just walk home."

It's perhaps especially galling given the faux-counterculture aesthetics Crazy Taxi has always wrapped itself in, blaring pop punk as you try not to crash into the nearest KFC. The AI use, combined with the fact that this is apparently an open world campaign-driven game that takes you across five different cities, suggests that a Crazy Taxi game in 2027 is a very different prospect to the 1999 arcade classic.

Here's my shameful confession: I'm a Warhammer 40k dilettante. Oh, sure, I laugh along as friends make their incisive bon mots about Tzeentch, and the Blood Legion, and horrible Horus and his heresy, but deep down I know I'm a carpetbagger. I've only learnt about all these things from wiki-dives. I've never bought a single Dan Abnett book. Never painted a single mini.

My excuse is that Warhammer 40k is so huge—so incomprehensibly vast—that I struggle to know where to jump in (also I think collecting minis costs like a trillion pounds), but friends? I think I've found it. We got a long draught of Total War: Warhammer 40k and some insight from the devs themselves at the PC Gaming Show just now, and I absolutely cannot wait to get grimdark.

This is, of course, the 40k follow-up to Creative War's Total War: Warhammer series (which has been going for around a decade now and which I still almost call Total Warhammer every time). The fantasy-flavoured stylings of the previous games have been swapped for galactic combat between Space Marines, the forces of Chaos, Orks, Orks and, indeed, Orks.

The PCGS trailer was my first time seeing a smidge of the game in action, and it sure looks like it's ticking all the boxes: nightmarish combat at an impossible scale where the deaths-per-second are measured in the seven figures, and the war is waged on every possible front, from ships flattening cities from orbit down to individual Space Marines taking out individual opponents on the field of battle.

I'm pretty eager to get my hands on this one, especially given how good the earlier Total War: Warhammers already were. I may not have to wait long, as Creative Assembly says to keep an eye on the game's social channels for upcoming beta windows. This is it, folks. I can almost feel the money I'm going to blow on minifigs leaving my bank account already.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

At today's Summer Game Fest showcase, we learned that a pair of new Cuphead games are in development. One is a "hand-animated" successor to the original 2017 sidescroller, which emulates golden age cartoons. The other is retro in a different way: "an 8-bit action platformer named Mighty Cuphead Adventure."

The really notable thing about Mighty Cuphead Adventure is that it's being developed in assembly—a low-level programming language—to the specifications of the Sega Master System, an 8-bit console released in the mid-'80s.

"While the game will absolutely be compatible with modern consoles and PC," developer Studio MDHR said in a press release, "players who want a true blast from the past will be able to experience it on a physical cartridge on the Sega Master System home gaming console."

The commitment to developing Mighty Cuphead Adventure with techniques from the '80s mirrors the commitment to using hand-drawn, 1930s-style animations in the main Cuphead series. The developer will share more details about the game "in the months ahead."

A new trailer for Yakuza prequel game Stranger Than Heaven premiered at Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest. It ended with a perplexing announcement: Tupac is in it.

That's Tupac, as in Shakur, as in the legendary rapper who has been dead since 1996. His likeness is the last thing we see in the trailer with zero explanation. The character doesn't speak, but his actor is simply credited as Tupac.

Game director Masayoshi Yokoyama took the stage alongside rapper Snoop Dogg, an actual living and breathing person also appearing in Stranger Than Heaven, to talk about the creative...uh...choice.

Snoop's elaboration was not illuminating.

"The Tupac estate and my son and myself, we work very closely together. It just made sense to put him in this game because his likeness and his spirit still lives on, and I feel like it was so connected to what we're doing. What do y'all think?"

Snoop then gestured to the crowed, which responded with medium applause. In a follow-up press release, Sega expanded on how the character will be used and depicted.

"Tupac’s portrayal of the character Amaru in STRANGER THAN HEAVEN is made possible with the permission and ongoing supervision of his estate, Amaru Entertainment. RGG Studio is treating this integration with the utmost respect for his legacy, crafting every aspect in the close collaboration and without the use of AI, including his character design based on archival footage and photographs. More details regarding his role will be shared at a later date."

Sega also announced the release date for Stranger Than Heaven: January 15, 2027.

Almost exactly a year ago, Persona 4's seemingly inevitable remake broke cover for the first time at an Xbox Games Showcase. Well, sort of. There wasn't much of it, you see. The trailer consisted mostly of the game's protagonist running around a barren Inaba Shopping District, with the odd panning shot of other—equally depopulated—locations from the game, giving the impression Atlus was in early stages on the project and had been forced to whip up something quick out of the materials it had for a reveal.

But perhaps it's due sooner than that first trailer would suggest. Fans have spotted that Persona 4 Revival now has an ESRB rating—which you can verify for yourself on the game's Xbox store page—suggesting that, well, there's enough of the game to rate, for one thing. Those of you hip to the calendar might also note that this rating has popped up very close to the June 7 Xbox Games Showcase; I'd bet all my Third Girl's Talc we're getting some P4R news there.

So, when will we finally get hi-definition Charlie Tunoku? This is just speculation, but Atlus revealed Persona 3 Reload—its Persona 3 remake—in June of 2023 and released it in February of 2024. That went quite well: Persona 3 Reload became the fastest-selling game in the studio's history, so I wouldn't be surprised if it went for the same one-two punch again (albeit with the caveat that any announcements this weekend won't be the game's reveal), putting out P4R in February of 2027.

We'll just have to wait and see. One wrinkle, though: Persona 4 Revival's ESRB (and PEGI) rating is identical to Persona 4 Golden's, which makes sense. But, as spotted by The Gamer, P4R's Japanese CERO rating is actually lower than Golden's: CERO B rather than CERO C, meaning it's suitable for ages 12 and above. That's the same as the rating for the original, non-Golden PS2 Persona 4.

Which is a bit curious, isn't it? It's possible, of course, that CERO has simply chilled out since it rated P4G—or that Japanese children have become cooler—but I do wonder if it means some of the risqué scenes added for P4G have been pared back or stripped out.

Persona 3 Reload, after all, didn't come out with all things Persona 3 packed in: the female protagonist from Persona 3 Portable never showed up at all, while the Episode Aigis FES content had to wait for a DLC. Is Atlus pulling the same trick again? We probably don't have to wait long to find out.

I've been waiting 20 years for this. All the way back in 2006 a supplement for the Warhammer TTRPG called Tome of Corruption quietly slipped in an illustration of a tiger-headed warrior preparing to attack an elephant in the jungle. The idea there were beastmen with the heads of tigers somewhere in the Warhammer World's nation of Ind was hinted at in a few books, but that was the first illustration I'd seen of one, and the first suggestion they were a legit thing and not just one of the many exaggerated rumors about distant lands Warhammer books are stuffed with.

Two whole decades later, I'm playing an army of tiger warriors in Total War: Warhammer 3 and they rule. I'm as surprised as anyone that a whole new species got plonked into Warhammer this late in the day, though perhaps the most surprising thing is that they come in the form of a DLC that's only five dollars.

The value for money of Warhammer 3's DLC has been a point of contention for a while now. Creative Assembly tried splitting up lord packs so that instead of buying multiple legendary lords bundled together you could just pick one you want, though at $9 a pop, players still quibbled. So, while Bhashiva the White Tiger is a legendary lord, she's packaged in a new format called a "character pack" that only costs $5 and doesn't include new Regiments of Renown or as many bells and whistles as other DLC. To save you skipping to the end, I think it's worth the money.

While Bhashiva's individual campaign mechanics aren't unique—the insignias she can award to units resemble orc scrap upgrades, for instance—the combination of mechanics does end up feeling different. The currency to pay for those insignias is earned by completing missions for your neighbour, the Iron Dragon, and that relationship adds a distinct flavor.

Bhashiva's a mercenary general whose people are refugees from Ind, given a new home in the Mountains of Mourn by one of Cathay's draconic rulers, Zhao Ming. Every five turns he offers three tasks you can choose to tackle or ignore, which sometimes reward you with new units or magic items, but always pay iron favor. As well as buying insignias, that's the currency you use for hiring additional units from the Cathay roster, and for increasing the total number of armies you can have.

So yeah, there are limits on both your units and armies, though I never found them too painful. Tiger warriors aren't restricted in the same way as the regular Cathayan troops you've got access to, and I wanted as many tigers as I could get, mainly using Cathayan crossbow units and a grand cannon or two to plug gaps. Plus, I quickly amassed a fortune in iron favor. Even when you're not working on those tasks Zhao Ming staples to the office notice board, fighting his enemies and taking their settlements pays a steady amount.

Bhashiva's other big campaign mechanic is the Tiger Court, where you dedicate relics to three philosophical pillars in return for buffs to tiger warrior units. The Way of the Thousand Gods represents the religion of Ind, and includes defensive enhancements to physical resistance and melee defence. The Prophecy of the White Tiger is about dedication to Bhashiva's lineage, white tigers who return when danger looms, and has a sweet ability that means tiger warrior reinforcements show up to any battles that aren't sieges. The Teachings of Kamau venerate a legendary tiger warrior hero who sounds like their equivalent of Sigmar, and I prioritized that one for the sake of increasing my armor-piercing damage.

Relics pop up in pre-set settlements across the map, some of which can be earned by reaching them with trade caravans, which work just like the caravans the other Cathay factions use, though narratively you're guarding them as mercenaries rather than acting as merchants yourselves.

The relics and Zhao Ming's jobs provide more structure to Bhashiva's campaign than I'm used to on the Immortal Empires map. (You can't play her on the Realm of Chaos map, which is fine since I'm pretty sick of it anyway.) You start at war with some of the Ogre Kingdoms and have more to the south, while Grimgor's orcs are immediately to the north and Chaos Dwarfs to the east.

Each has a relic or two in their settlements, but none of Zhao Ming's first batch of quests gave me a reason to target the Chaos Dwarfs, while one quest promised a payout if I spent 10 turns whaling on the orcs. Also, the tiger warriors don't have a lot of armor penetration until you dedicate some relics to the Teachings of Kamau, and I didn't fancy taking on the tiny Chaos tinheads until I'd done something about that.

I ended up allying with the ogre tyrant Greasus Goldtooth, since he was already friendly with my boss Zhao Ming, who surprisingly kept offering me missions to defeat Goldtooth and take his settlements. While I slaughtered Grimgor's orcs with pleasant ease and then took the fight to the Chaos Dwarfs, Zhao Ming was constantly needling me to fight ogres. Ignoring those tasks made completing the 10 of them I needed to finish a long campaign harder than expected—sometimes those goals ask you to take a settlement or defeat a foe on the other side of the map, or select a target that quickly gets taken by an ally, rendering them moot. I spent a bunch of turns pursuing other objectives while waiting for a task I could accomplish to show up.

The real sticking point turned out to be relics. While I earned a few with caravans, I also lost several caravans due to all the enemies I made along the trade routes. I'd carefully angle them away from the Chaos Dwarfs I was at war with only to have a horde of daemons or one of my other foes take them out. Conquest is the way to go, though I did encounter an annoying bug where one settlement with the green relic icon above it didn't pay out when I finally took it over.

The campaign would have gone quicker if I'd known to prioritize relics right from the off, and maybe not stayed friends with the ogres, but it didn't drag. Though I always autoresolve insignificant late-game battles, when I fought the ones that mattered I had a great time with my army of ferocious Tony the Tiger lookalikes. The base dual-axe tiger warriors are fast and hard-hitting enough that I didn't feel the lack of cavalry, the iron claw warriors who fight with guandos are both a strong general upgrade and useful anti-large specialists, and the stalkers who throw discs as precursor weapons when they charge (like the Lizardmen skinks do with javelins) can serve as vanguard-deployment flankers.

On the battlefield the tiger warriors are enjoyably savage, though I learned the hard way not to throw Bhashiva at problems on her own and expect her to tank them all. Tigers together strong. Off the battlefield I'm less enthusiastic that Bhashiva's entire personality is based around honor and dedication to Zhao Ming, when a more rough-edged relationship with the slightly mental dragon man—who you can't declare war on or confederate—would be interesting. I don't own a cat, but the idea of them as blandly loyal servants rather than hand-scratching little maniacs seems like missing a trick.

After waiting 20 years to have more than a picture in an RPG book to go on, I'm still stoked with what we got. Having cleared out the Chaos Dwarfs, I ended up in a protracted war with Clan Rictus, and sending my cats after the rats felt like a much more thematic match-up. Now that I think about it, the bird-headed Tzeentch is Bhashiva's ancestral enemy too, so maybe there's more cat to them than I thought.

The Bhashiva character pack will be available on May 21 during the Warhammer Skulls event. An update at the same time will add a free legendary hero called Taoyan the Merciless, who is recruitable by any Cathay army.

In 2021, Sega published an annual report touting the strength of its business and a new "priority strategy" for the coming five years: the creation of a "Super Game," which would "stand head and shoulders above normal games." The plan, at the time, was for that game with global appeal to launch by March 2026. This week, Sega announced it was canceled.

And not just canceled—canceled as part of a striking decision to "lower the priority of F2P" in its future plans, with some 100 developers already transferred away to work on "Full Game" development—the old-fashioned kind you pay for up front and then own.

Sega cited the disappointing results of the free-to-play Sonic Rumble Party as one reason for the pullback, but given the five year investment, I think it's clear that far more went into the decision than that one data point. Sega, like everyone else, has seen the risks of big bets on lavishly expensive live service games in the last few years:

• Concord shut down and its studio shuttered
• Highguard shut down and its studio shuttered
• Spectre Divide shut down and its studio shuttered
• 2K's Project Ethos sent back to the drawing board as soon as it debuted
• Ubisoft's Project Q, which you absolutely did not remember, canceled
• Sony announced plans for 12 live service games in 2022; seven of them were canceled
• Microsoft canceled Blizzard survival game that had been highly praised by employees
• Then Microsoft an upcoming MMO that boss Phil Spencer had reportedly played and loved
• So many live service games shut down in 2023 that you probably can't remember them all

And so on, and so on. A 2025 "state of the industry" survey found that one out of three triple-A developers was working on a live service game. That's a recipe for pain when each of those games not only has to compete with what's coming out in the same calendar year, but also the games already deeply entrenched in peoples' lives.

World of Warcraft is 22 years old. League of Legends is 17 years old. Minecraft is 15 years old. Grand Theft Auto 5 is 13 years old. Fortnite and Destiny 2 are nine years old. Apex Legends is eight years old. Millions of people still play them all, and millions more are leaping from one free Roblox experience to another. Sega may have peeled some of them away with its Super Game, but how many would stick around, and keep pumping money into it, beyond the first few weeks, if they spent a dime at all?

For every Helldivers or Arc Raiders that does manage to hit a jackpot, there's a procession of glassy-eyed gamblers stumbling out of the casino, five years and $200 million lost to a single bet.

In a statement to Game File, Sega said that its goal had been "to create a new form of entertainment that goes beyond the concepts of conventional games."

"Given the ambitious nature of the project, we adopted a long-term R&D phase for technical validation and related activities," a Sega spokesperson said. "We proceeded cautiously, with the intention of moving to full-scale development only after we can confirm sufficient feasibility. However, in light of intensifying market competition, the emergence of competing titles based on similar concepts, and our business conditions, we made the decision to discontinue the development of Super Game during the fiscal year ending March 2026."

Half a decade ago, this cancelation may have elicited cries of dismay. In 2026 it's hard not to see it as cause for celebration, because Sega didn't pair the announcement with layoffs that cut one of its studios to the bone or closed it outright. It didn't bet the whole company on the hope it could deliver something that "goes beyond the concepts of conventional games." It may have taken a years-long detour, but it's now recommitting many of its skilled employees to working on a new Sonic or Crazy Taxi or Jet Set Radio or one of its other series that millions of players already love.

Former Sony boss Jim Ryan, who spearheaded the company's live service ambitions, left in 2024. Capcom keeps posting record profits largely on the back of singleplayer games that more and more people are willing to buy. Other major players like NetEase are pulling back on funding gargantuan projects like MMOs. None of that means the games industry has "learned its lesson" or is about to arrive at a "shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less" utopia—the CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies are always going to place big bets that have a tiny shot at paying off with obscene riches, because they aren't the ones who will get laid off when it doesn't work out.

But I hope it is a sign that the future will be a little less boom or bust. It may have taken a reckoning to get here, but the less time publishers spend obsessing over that one-in-a-million hit, the more time they can spend making good games, not just big ones.

I'm a big fan of Two Point Museum, the latest and greatest of Two Point Studios' revival of the Bullfrog-style management sim. But I am also a fan of how the developer has approached the release of its DLCs. You can pay for expansions like Zooseum and Fantasy Finds to get a big chunk of extra stuff to build, but you also get a portion of the DLC for free with each of the game's updates.

Such is the case with Two Point Museum's latest add-on, Arty Facts. As the name implies, this expansion lets you add an art gallery to your institution. The pack adds 27 new art exhibits for your guests to gaze meaningfully at, but it also adds a new "art studio" room where your experts can create paintings of their own. According to the expansion's launch trailer, the art studio facilitates "millions of potential outcomes", thus providing an "endless" stream of custom art.

I was curious about how this system works, particularly whether it used any generative AI given it's filtering into games everywhere these days, often without clear disclosure. So I posed the question to Sega, which publishes the Two Point games. Sega got back to me pretty quickly with a thorough rundown of how the art studio works, the upshot of which is there is "no generative AI involved".

To summarise, there are three types of art the new in-game studio can produce, namely paintings, portraits, and sculptures. Each of these artworks is randomly generated from a catalogue of relevant assets, such as 3D models in the case of sculptures, or pre-made character icons in the case of portraits.

But the way each artwork type is generated is slightly different. Paintings, for example, have four layers that are each randomly generated, as are the colour palettes of the painting, and the size of both the canvas and the frame. Portraits, meanwhile, have various filters that help define the variation of the images. As for sculptures, players can actually choose between three different materials—clay, marble and bronze—with randomised variations in colour in each.

All told, Sega says the system can produce more than 250 million combinations, far more than you're ever realistically likely to see. That's a lot of extra customisation in a game that already offers a broad array of options, which is pretty neat.

As for the other exhibits, they aren't just limited to paintings and sculptures. You can also create five interactive art displays. This includes performance art exhibits such as mime acts and Shakespearean pastiches, giving Two Point Studios' world class animators yet more room to flex their muscles.

You can put all your curation skills to the test in a new Museum location, Undee Docks, a fittingly urban space to showcase all those emerging artists. There's also new gift shop items, new themed café foods, and a fresh expedition map to explore, which sees your experts get metaphysical as they traverse a living sketchbook.

As mentioned, the DLC's release coincides with an update to the base game that lets you try some of the DLC's features for free. The Arty Facts taster lets you play up to the first star of Undee Docks and explore the first three POIs of the expedition map, and you get full access to the Art Studio.

Two Point Museum: Arty Facts is available for $10/£10, with a 10% discount until May 14. If you're interested in management sims and are yet to try out the base game, you absolutely should. It's the most accomplished game Two Point Studios has made, and its blend of museum construction, expedition wrangling, and general institutional management represents a small but significant step forward for the genre. And if you don't want to take my word for it, check out Mollie Taylor's similarly effusive Two Point Museum review.

RGG Studios is finally ready to talk about Stranger Than Heaven, the next major action game from the Yakuza studio that appears to be a Yakuza prequel after all. In the 30-minute video, executive director Masayoshi Yokoyama introduces the sprawling brawler from the comfort of a swanky jazz club.

Beginning in 1915 and spanning 50 years, Stranger Than Heaven tells the story of Makoto Daito, a half-Japanese, half-American boy who leaves America to live in Japan. On the way there he meets Yu Shinjo, who becomes, as Yokoyama describes, Makoto's "oldest friend and biggest rival," as well as Orpheus, an international smuggler played (and faced) by Snoop Dogg.

It's a lot to take in, and honestly, it looks fantastic.

Stranger Than Heaven takes place in five cities across five decades: Kokura, Fukuoka in 1915, Kure, Hiroshima in 1929, Minami, Osaka in 1943, Atami, Shizuoka in 1951, and finally Kamurocho, Tokyo (the setting of the majority of the Yakuza series) in 1965.

Yokoyama says singing and songwriting is a major throughline of Stranger Than Heaven: Makoto is himself a singer and gifted musician—a skill that's gamified by the ability to "record" sounds from Makoto's environment and use them as inspiration for original songs.

Going only by what we saw today, Stranger Than Heaven is going for a moodier, more tragic drama than the Like A Dragon series. The combat is certainly more brutal: RGG's reimagined action moves away from fighting stances and face button mashing to attacks that correspond to Makoto's different limbs. The shoulder buttons and triggers on either side of your controller correspond to his right and left legs, creating combos through boxing combinations. There's also a bigger focus on weapons—Makoto does a lot of stabbing throughout the show.

This was probably immediately apparent to Yakuza diehards, but it's not lost on this casual fan that Stranger Than Heaven appears to tell the origin story of the Tojo Clan, the yakuza group that much of the series centers around. It's no coincidence that Makoto is also the name of the founder of the Tojo Clan. According to the character's wiki page, Makoto Tojo is mentioned in Yakuzas 1 and 2, then briefly as well in 6, but has never been properly depicted.

I'm seated, but I also have questions. Setting the game across five cities and five decades makes it sound huge, but I wonder if some of these chapters will be significantly shorter or smaller than others. Yokoyama referred to each of the eras as "stages," making it sound like we may not be allowed to return to each city to complete side stories or visit our businesses. Does Stranger Than Heaven even have traditional Yakuza side stories?

A question for another day. While today's video is focused on story and combat, more details are coming in the leadup to launch. That launch? Sometime in winter, which could land it in 2026 or early 2027.

The Total War Show & Tell included info on the historical games and destructible terrain in Total War: Warhammer 40,000, but a sizable chunk of its midsection was there to get us up to date on all things Total War: Warhammer 3. Including, right off the bat, game director Rich Aldridge saying to expect a patch "addressing some issues players have seen around idling AI and clustering around settlements. That will be coming very soon."

After that the focus was on upcoming update 8.1, and the previously revealed legendary lord Bhashiva, the White Tiger. Among other abilities, she'll have a teleport called Heaven's Gate that lets her bounce around the battlefield, explosively attacking everyone around her wherever she ends up. The other addition for Cathay was one we hadn't seen before, a free DLC hero called Taoyan the Merciless. Cathay's getting an overall rework at the same time, with a redone tech tree, unit buffs, and the like.

The big news was the reveal of a legendary lord who'll be joining Nagash as part of the Lords of the End Times DLC: Graf Boris Todbringer, who'll be in charge of the Ulrican faction based in Middenheim. Apparently, he'll be a touch more aggressive than the existing Imperial lords.

"Boris is much more about taking on anyone and everyone that's in the Empire right now," says associate design director Sean Macdonald. "And anyone that's even thinking about getting the Empire, he's taking the fight to them. No more defensiveness. He's embodying the god Ulric, the god of war, winter, and wolves, and he's bringing that war with him to all the foes of the Empire. He's got his claws out."

In battles you'll have the choice between Todbringer's regular campaign voice actor and YouTuber Angory Tom from the Yogscast. He's memorably cosplayed as "Toddy" in the past, and is exactly as over the top as you'd want a man who wears a castle for a hat to be.

Two new units for the Ulricans were shown, the Knights Panther and the Teutogen Guard. The latter are bodyguards for the high priest who is basically Ulric's pope, Ar-Ulric Emil Valgeir. Heavy hints were dropped that we can expect to see Ar-Ulric as well, presumably as a legendary hero, and two more units suggested in silhouette. They sure look like Hunting Hounds and the Celestial Hurricanum from tabletop Warhammer to me.

Looking ahead to the update 9.1, the siege update, we're finally getting rid of ass ladders. Sure, Creative Assembly say they're "removing pocket ladders as the default setting," but you and I both know the ladders siege attackers currently summon from nowhere are coming out of their butts. After the update, ladders will default to being tower things besieging units bring into battle with them, though if you really love ass ladders they'll remain in the menu as an option.

The Total War: Warhammer 3 section of the showcase ended with a promise that we should expect more in May, with more news about free additions specifically coming in June.

One of the things on our wishlist for Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is a cover system, and the Total War: Show & Tell makes it clear that we're going to get our wish. And also, if we don't like that cover, we'll be able to blow it up.

"You've got all of these tactical options and then strategic elements that can come out of it," battle product owner Dave Petry says during a map flyover. "One of the really big and exciting things that we're doing here is that destruction is going to come into play. That forest, if you don't like it, you don't have to keep it. If you find that pesky forest is getting in your way and you can't see around it then you can get rid of that thing. Or you can use it to hide in."

The developer roundtable four months ago mentioned there would be destructible buildings, but it's nice to have it clearly stated that we can just delete other stuff off the map if it's in the way.

"Being completely clear, not absolutely everything is destructible, right?" Petry clarifies. "We've kept it to areas where it really works and it makes sense and it feels like it can add to that depth." As the camera pans over a hive-city warzone with plenty of steep angles and gothic architecture, he says, "We are dealing with a universe which is full of really powerful but flat-firing weapons, so cover becomes incredibly, incredibly important."

One way to blow up that cover will be with orbital bombardments, and the showcase takes a few minutes to spin around a hive world as seen from space. It looks like something right out of the last stage of Spore, only covered in toxic gas and cities so big they cover entire countries. It's 40K as heck, and does assuage some of my concerns.

Sure, the Astra Militarum troopers we see are lined up like Napoleonic regiments, but they're the faction where that's probably most apt. Total War: Warhammer 40,000 still has a release date of "to be announced" on Steam, so there's plenty of time for stuff to change too.

PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage is a man of impeccable taste, but I still hold a tiny grudge against him for not breaking the seal on PC Gamer's 98% review threshold to award Vanquish, the Xbox 360-era PlatinumGames shooter brought to PC in 2017, an unprecedented perfect score. "Beyond the laser-focused core loop, there isn't much to Vanquish. You start with knee-sliding acrobatics, and end the same way—around six or so hours later," Phil wrote in his 80% review when Vanquish arrived on PC.

True enough, past Phil. But also: the Vanquish knee slide is the sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, followed closely by the second sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, in which at the press of a button Vanquish hero Sam Gideon pops off the helmet of his super suit, blasts a cig, and then flicks it away. There's an achievement for distracting robots with a cigarette before you shoot them. Only the Pope could do it better.

I'm afraid the math is clearly on my side here: that's a 100/100 right there.

On a superficial level, I've seen some chatter in the last couple weeks that Capcom's excellent Pragmata has a bit of a Vanquish vibe to it. I get the comparison, in that it's a pretty straightforward third-person shooter made by a Japanese developer, also starring a guy in a white astronaut-style space suit. You can do little jet-powered dashes in Pragmata, though nothing as prolonged or flashy as Sam's rocket knee slides in Vanquish.

Having finished Pragmata, I don't think the two games are particularly similar in tone or pacing or even how the action feels in the hand—but I understand the comparisons anyway. Because what Pragmata reminds the Vanquish faithful of is the sensibility of all-killer-no-filler action games circa 2010. "We didn't know how good we had it," and that sort of thing. By recognizing Pragmata in 2026 for its earnest and unpretentious focus on shooting robots with one neat trick up its sleeve, we can right the wrongs of Vanquish and games like it not selling as well as it deserved way back when.

(Let's be real: It's mostly the suits, though.)

Whatever the reason, I'm excited to report Vanquish's numbers on Steam in the wake of Pragmata's release are up. Way up. If, uh, you go by percentages and only look at the last couple months of activity. According to Vanquish's SteamDB page, it's up an impressive 34.8% in peak players over the last 30 days, for a gain of 16 whole people knee sliding in simultaneous bliss. Meanwhile, the average player count is up even more, at a 52.9% increase—that's 26 more people playing Vanquish every day on Steam, on average! Twenty six people whose lives are for certain better this month than they were in March.

Is this MONUMENTAL increase in active Vanquish players actually due to Pragmata's release? Is it, in fact, even noteworthy? Rude of you to ask for a reality check, frankly. I'm not a "data guy" or even what they call "good at math," but I'm also not a liar, so I have to admit that this spike is pretty much in line with Vanquish's history over the last few years, and it saw even more players jumping back in in September 2024, September 2025 and even this February.

You could maybe attribute each of those bursts of interest to recent Steam sales, though they don't seem to happen during the sales themselves. Vanquish is, coincidentally, on sale right now, for 70% off, a discount Sega has been throwing at it every couple months for most of the last decade. But the shape of the player chart for the past few weeks is noticeably a touch spikier, and exhibits slightly higher troughs, than its past lows. Given the fondness Pragmata has stirred up for Xbox 360-style shooters, I think the correlation just barely holds water.

But even if it doesn't, you could make it so by replaying Vanquish right now, or buying it for $6. Despite now seeming quintessentially of its era, it was almost a send-up of other third-person shooters in its day, with over-the-top gruff hoo-ra American heroes battling against evil space Russians, as written by Japanese developers. It has QTEs that were becoming overdone and garnering a player backlash, but you can't hate the QTEs in Vanquish because they're so damn cool. It's a cover shooter that actively discourages you from spending time in cover. I don't think I will ever play the first couple Gears of Wars again as long as I live, but I hope to slide my ass around in Vanquish many more times before I die.

It may be an 80% game, but it's the most 100/100 80% game of them all.

By the year 2072, Atlus will have released Persona 4 and 5 upwards of 58 times in genres as far-ranging as musou, rhythm, fighting, dating sim, shop-management, grand strategy, and fishing. Approximately 86% of videogame characters will be Chie. If current trends continue, we'll all be killed by Exponential Persona long before biodiversity collapse gets us. I can't wait, personally.

But for as much as Atlus clearly loves releasing games featuring Joker and Charlie Tunoku, one portion of its fanbase has been neglected for decades: the poor, lonely bannermen-and-women of Persona 1 and 2, who have been after remasters, remakes, or just plain re-releases for the classic, pre-Katsura-Hashino entries in the series for literal decades at this point.

How excited they must have been when Atlus announced that "Persona and Persona 2: Innocent Sin / Persona 2: Eternal Punishment are coming to Amazon!" (via GamesRadar). How glum they must have been when it became clear the games were "coming to Amazon" in the form of some t-shirts and tote bags, a mug, a thermos, a phone case, and two baseball caps. Admittedly, it's a pretty slick mug.

But take heart, true believers, because the merch drop was accompanied by something peculiar: a surprise rebrand for the OG Persona games. The Amazon swag has launched under the never-before-seen rubrics of "Persona 1 Origins" and "Persona 2 Duality."

What could this mean? Well, nothing, potentially. But it would be a little odd to dream up a rebrand for a pair of 30-year-old games that amounted to nothing more than a new label for some t-shirts. You best believe there are already people out there taking this as a sign that Atlus is finally doing something with the beloved elder Persona games.

Punters on Reddit are already trying to figure out just what this might mean for the games, albeit with some well-earned cynicism: "It's good news so should be fake," declares one much-upvoted comment from Aardvark_Happy.

There's not much weirdness I'd put past Atlus, but I do feel pretty confident saying this is almost certainly not the last we'll see of the brands Persona 1 Origins and Persona 2 Duality. In an ideal world, that's because we'll get games using those names in the future (and remember that Atlus honcho Kazuhisa Wada has said he'd like to remake the original Personas).

In a less-than-ideal world, it's because Atlus will announce some sort of Japan-only stage show based on the '90s Personas. Keep your fingers crossed, folks. At least you can pick up a new thermos while you wait.

Now that he's got Minecraft and Super Mario Galaxy under his belt, celebrated loud man Jack Black is looking for his next videogame movie gig. And it turns out he's got excellent taste, because he's got his eye on Yakuza.

Chatting to ScreenRant to promote Super Mario Galaxy, where he lends his voice to Bowser, he revealed that he'd be willing to jump ship from Nintendo to Sega.

"I'm going to throw my hat in that ring," he said. "I don't know if there [are] any parts for me, like a portly American, but talk to me. Sega, give me a jingle."

While the Yakuza series is mostly set in Japan, American characters do crop up from time to time, sometimes as slapstick parodies. The last two Yakuza games were also set in the US—specifically Hawaii. They're on my to-play list because Yakuza games are a million hours long and I'm still catching up.

Anyway! I could see him fitting in perfectly. The man's a delightful weirdo with the right energy to pull off one of Yakuza's eccentrics. He's got less experience in dramatic roles, though, and one of the most important elements of the long-running series is its ability to careen between absurd and deadly serious situations.

One minute you're hunting down underwear thieves, and the next you're in an hour-long cutscene about shady pharmaceutical companies.

Can he pull off pathos, is what I'm wondering.

Amazon's Yakuza TV show was a bit of a dud, though, so Black might end up waiting a while for that call from Sega. I imagine he'll still be cropping up in more videogame movies, though. It seems like that's his thing these days. Though I do wonder if he regrets playing Claptrap in the Borderlands disaster—who wouldn't?

At the very least, he's probably going to be able to keep getting work as Bowser. I hear that Mario is a big deal. I wouldn't know, of course, because as PC Gamer's online editor I am contractually obligated to ignore other platforms and definitely not stay up all night playing Pokopia.

Sega Sammy has released a new set of financial results, along with a Q&A explaining some of the finer points, but the long-and-short of it is: you all say you like our games, so why aren't you buying more of them? Amidst some truly incredible corporate jargon (what's a "B2B Omnichannel Solution Provider"?) Sega says that the "high valuations," i.e.the review scores and user feedback that some of its recent titles have received, simply didn't translate into increased sales, and that things are "stagnant."

Over the course of 2025 Sega released a bunch of critically acclaimed titles, including Virtua Fighter 5: R.E.V.O., Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Two Point Museum, Yakuza 0: Director's Cut, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S, Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army,

Maimai DX CiRCLE, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance. Sega subsidiary Atlus, meanwhile, released Metaphor: ReFantazio, which was nothing less than a critical darling.

On the less upbeat side of things, Rovio has been on a consistent downward trend ever since Sega bought it in April 2023. The company has written off $200 million of its $776 million acquisition because "profitability of the business had fallen below the initial forecast"—in other words, maybe just making tonnes of Angry Birds games isn't the brilliant strategy some thought.

Sega is a little hazy about exactly which of its 2025 games are depressing its executives, but does specifically mention Sonic CrossWorlds Racing as having sold around one million units, which is apparently below forecast. It also acknowledges that some users weren't happy with Football Manager 26 at launch, and says it is committing resources to both titles in efforts to improve their sales and reception.

"While the development costs per title for our mainstay titles are lower compared to so-called AAA titles in the industry, we recognize that our strength lies in the relatively high acclaim we receive for quality," says Sega Sammy president Haruki Satomi. "On the other hand, we also recognize that such high evaluations have yet to translate into a further increase in unit sales."

What can be done? The power of marketing, my friend! "While continuing to hone our development capabilities—the source of our strength—we believe there is still significant room for improvement and earnings upside in our 'power to sell,' namely our marketing and sales mechanisms. As explained earlier, we are currently undergoing reforms in this area to realize a scale-up in sales.”

Sega is further reviewing its corporate structure in an effort to have a more effective globalised publishing operation. None of this is especially rocket science but, outside of the Yakuza series, Sega did have a long period where a lot of its big-hitters were coming from its European studios in particular.

It's not all doom and gloom. Sega says existing titles "performed as expected", that Sega Football Club Champions is off to a strong start and should benefit from this year's World Cup, its amusement machines are doing better than ever, and it is enjoying "record" character licensing revenue. Good old Sonic always delivers when it comes to the merch, at least.

Do you ever wonder if Crazy Taxi is just a little too crazy? Wouldn't it be nice to explore those beautiful Dreamcast-era cityscapes at your own pace, practically feeling the sun on your skin as you pass every Pizza Hut, KFC, and Fila sportswear store? If your response to that is 'yes' and not 'wow, that game sure had a lot of product placement,' then I have great news for you: Will at wretched.computer has you covered.

Will's Crazy Taxi level recreations, described by the programmer as a "winter madness project," have been added to noclip, a "digital museum of video game levels" started by graphics programmer Jasper St Pierre. Beyond Crazy Taxi, noclip features locales from Mario Kart 64, Psychonauts, Quake, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, and more—not just rendered any which way, but as Will outlined in a blog post, using "an open source recreation of each of those games' original rendering methods."

Will has contributed to the site before, supplying it with fly-around versions of Halo and World of Warcraft. The Crazy Taxi project is exciting not only because it's the first arcade cabinet I beeline for on the rare occasion that I see it in the wild, but in Will's words, because it "didn't already have the secrets of its file formats neatly displayed on a community wiki" or "have any tools already for viewing its maps."

It's surreal seeing a level I've explored dozens upon dozens of times from a new angle, and without the stress of weaving past trucks on the highway. It gets a little laggy in particularly dense areas, but it works well, and now I wish I could fly around the world like this in nearly every game I own.

It's also helped me appreciate the world design in Crazy Taxi more, as it's easy to see just how rife with landmarks the arcade mode level is; oodles of visual cues tell you where you are at any given moment, and the winding roads strike a nice balance between claustrophobic corners that reward precise drifts and long straightaways that let you gun it past every oncoming car. There are also more routes around the downtown area than I realized, which I could probably have taken more advantage of were I better at Crazy Taxi.

Will goes into the technical challenges that arose making this possible, and the post I linked above is the first in a series that will go even deeper. Given that the upcoming "triple-A" Crazy Taxi sequel is still a ways off, this is the most exciting news that the cabbie-gaming community has gotten in awhile.

Preserving videogame history is no easy feat. Besides the ephemeral nature of digital downloads these days, a significant obstacle over the decades has been the interests of corporate entities as they seek to protect their intellectual property. For example, a London-based collector was raided by the police last year after he purchased dev kits reportedly marked for disposal during a Sega UK office clear out.

The collector, Darius Khan, purchased a hardware lot from an e-waste subcontractor for £10,000. This included dev kits, controllers, autographed copies of games, and even prototype cartridges. Some time after listing parts of the find for sale online, UK police then raided Khan's property, alleging that the Sega dev kits had been stolen.

YouTube channel Gamers Nexus travelled to the UK to investigate, sharing an hour-long documentary on the case.

Darius Khan recounted the raid to Gamers Nexus, saying, "Seven o'clock in the morning—approximately—bang, bang, bang on the door. [...] I look through the peephole and I see a bunch of police, probably four or five police officers. I open the door [and I'm told], 'Mr. Khan, you're under arrest for money laundering. We're here to seize dev kits.'"

Even though Khan has yet to be charged with a criminal offence, this case is both strange and concerning. So, let's rewind a bit.

When Sega moved its UK head office from Brentford to Chiswick, London last year, it hired a e-waste company, Waste To Wonder, to dispose of hardware that was left behind in the old office building. This company hired a subcontractor that then took the lot, which contained dev kits and more besides, to an export yard that processes waste to then be sold to various buyers across Africa.

Darius Khan negotiated a deal with the e-waste subcontractor to buy the discarded hardware before it could be processed. Darius began listing parts of the find on both eBay and Facebook marketplace, which included Sony PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, as well as Nintendo DSI and Wii U dev kits. The Video Game Preservation Museum also started an online fundraising campaign to purchase the lot. Though not yet confirmed, it's likely these online listings and the fundraiser are what drew legal attention.

Darius was also contacted by a man using the name Paul, who claimed to be interested in the dev kits he had for sale. This man was actually a private investigator working for Fusion 85, an agency that specialises in protecting intellectual property. The agency has worked with Nintendo in the past, though it has not been confirmed who Fusion 85 were working for with regards to investigating the dev kits.

'Paul' visited Darius' home to inspect and take photographs of the hardware, before going quiet. Then in July 2025, 10 plain clothes police officers knocked on Darius' door (via The Daily Mail).

The officers confiscated the dev kits and prototype cartridges from Darius' home, but left other hardware bits such as controllers and cables. Darius was then held by police for eight hours, during which, Khan alleges, police asked him to sign a form relinquishing his ownership of the dev kits. He refused.

It has since emerged Sega had hired another firm, ITR Secure, to specifically dispose of its computer hardware. Still, sources told The Daily Mail that an on-site manager had instructed Waste to Wonder workers to clear out everything, including the dev kits.

Waste to Wonder denies any wrongdoing. Speaking to The Daily Mail, managing director of Waste to Wonder Michael Amos says, "IT [equipment] was not in scope and we never allow subcontractors to sell items. We no longer work with that subcontractor."

This tangled legal case is still ongoing, and it is not yet clear who—if anyone—will be charged. The fate of the seized dev kits also remains unknown. Arguably, Sega should have returned these dev kits to their respective manufacturers when they were no longer needed. Instead, the company's seemingly lax inventory management and e-waste disposal practices have proved a costly mistake.

If videogames are about anything, it's solving deep-rooted and overdetermined social problems by hitting them really hard and also sometimes magic. And few games have ever videogamed harder in that regard than Metaphor: ReFantazio, Atlus' polychromatic RPG from 2024 that puts you in the shoes of a young man on a quest to defeat racism forever via turn-based combat.

It's really quite good. 95% good, even, if you check our Metaphor: ReFantazio review, and I've subjected you to my meandering spiel about it because it's currently 50% off on Steam as part of Sega's Year of the Horse sale. That brings it down to $35 (£30), though that is without its profoundly inessential DLC that lets you dress up its characters in Persona-game school uniforms.

Is it worth it? I'd say so. It was, after all, PC Gamer's best RPG of 2024, and it's an engrossing and lavish thing. It was headed up by Katsura Hashino, a name you likely recognise as the director of Personas 3 through 5, and the whole thing really feels like Atlus just gave him and artist Shigenori Soejima a pile of money and let them do whatever the heck they wanted. If you've ever enjoyed a Persona game, odds are you'll have a good time with Metaphor.

If you haven't ever enjoyed a Persona game, because you've not played them, well what do you know? Persona stuff is on sale too. That Persona 3 remake is currently 60% off for $24 (£22), Persona 5 Royal is 70% off for $18 (£15), and offshoots like Persona 5 Tactica and Strikers are also discounted. Anyway, don't buy any of those.

Well, okay, you can buy those, but prioritise Persona 4 Golden, if you're only going to pick up a single Persona thing. Firstly, it's cheap as chips: a mere $10 (£9). Second, it's a classic.

Don't misunderstand me: parts of P4's design and narrative haven't aged great, but I fell in love with its ridiculous cast back in the Giant Bomb Endurance Run days and those kooks are as fun as ever. 100+ hours of punting tanks with Chie for 10 bucks? A bargain at twice the price.

Yakuza Kiwami 3—seemingly the last in RGG Studio's series of Kiwami remakes—released last week, though not without controversy. Between some baffling cuts, strange retcons, and the casting of an actor, Teruyuki Kagawa, who confessed to sexual harassment in 2022, even stalwart series fans weren't predisposed to love Kiwami 3.

So it's no surprise they don't. In fact, at the time of writing, Kiwami 3 is the worst-rated game—by the metric of user reviews—of the entire series on Steam. Make no mistake, it's not been review-bombed and it's not universally loathed; Yakuza Kiwami 3 doesn't occupy the doldrums of an Overwhelmingly Negative user rating. Nevertheless, it's currently at a 63% 'Mixed' review score, putting it squarely bottom of the leaderboard relative to the rest of the games.

Why? Well, all those things I listed up top, mostly. "Creatively bankrupt doesn't even begin to describe the current state of RGG," goes one well-reviewed, uh, review by Steam user Jigen Daisuke.

"The retcons made to the story of RGG3 with Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties are absolute abominations and an insult to the original game, the entire Kiryu saga, and any fan with even an ounce of critical sense. Not to mention all the content removed in favour of reused minigames from other more recent entries (a Kiwami classic) and the recasting (another Kiwami classic)."

It's hard to find a negative review that doesn't lament Kagawa's casting, the retcons, and the cut content. "Even ignoring the casting of someone who sexually assaulted others on camera, this is an inferior remake," says BravestAsh8434. "[Sexual assault] allegations from one of the cast members. Changing too much stuff from the original and leaving too much out. Rushed and unpolished, frequent crashes on my system," writes jack.

And so on and so forth in that vein. At 63% positive, it's not hard to find positive reviews, but it's quite a diminished result for a game in a series as beloved as Yakuza, and whose weakest entries even usually have their fanatical admirers. It's worth noting that the only other two Yakuza games with Mixed reviews on Steam are the recent relistings of Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1. RGG, it seems, is on a downward trajectory in fan estimations of late.

As reported by VGC and Japanese gaming outlet Beep21, Sega console designer Hideki Sato has died. The engineer and former Sega president was 77. Sato's career with Sega began in the 1970s⁠—SegaRetro.org lists his earliest projects as the arcade games MonacoGP, Turbo, and Star Jacker.

Sato's most notable contribution to gaming history, however, would be leading the engineering teams behind every Sega home console from 1983 to the company's exit from the hardware business in 2001. The full list includes:

• SG-1000 (1983)
• Master System (1985)
• Mega Drive/Genesis (1989)
• Saturn (1994)
• Dreamcast (1999)

Following the death of Isao Okawa in 2001, Sato became Sega's company president, overseeing the publisher's difficult transition away from the hardware business that had defined his career. Sato stepped down from this role in 2003, shortly before Sega's lifesaving merger with pachinko manufacturer Sammy. Sato would ultimately leave Sega altogether in 2008.

Sato's designs are historically significant as the first consoles to challenge Nintendo's dominance of the post-1983 crash home market, paving the way for the likes of PlayStation and Xbox in the future⁠—though the success of Sony's PlayStation and PS2, direct competitors with the Saturn and Dreamcast, would ultimately spell the downfall of Sega's own console business.

Sato's final design, the Dreamcast, was a sales failure, but these days it is fondly remembered as a machine well ahead of its time, boasting a library of cult classics, experimental features like the combination memory card/second display VMU, and groundbreaking online functionality. The Dreamcast's Phantasy Star Online was the first successful console MMO, while enthusiasts tinker with Sega's browser and other online features to this day.

Thanks to Sato's leadership, as well as others in the immediate post-Dreamcast era, Sega successfully navigated its withdrawal from console manufacturing. Sega has survived to be an influential third party publisher, with a portfolio including the likes of the mega-popular Yakuza/Like a Dragon Series, as well as the ever-present Blue Blur himself, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 and its tie-in game, Dark Ties, release tomorrow, and that might be your lot, at least insofar as Kiwami games go. In a recent Japanese-language livestream spotted and translated by fans on Reddit (and verified by PCG's crack international cadre), RGG studio boss Masayoshi Yokoyama declared that "I think Yakuza Kiwami 3 will be the last one one, and the Kiwami line will come to an end."

Which might be for the best, all things considered. Though I enjoyed the slice of Kiwami 3 I got to play ahead of its reveal last year, the game and its studio have been torching fan goodwill in the time since.

Despite notionally being a remake of Yakuza 3, the third Kiwami looks to have severely cut back on the original game's subquests, inserted an iffy retcon or two, and most egregiously cast Japanese actor Teruyuki Kagawa, who in 2022 admitted to sexual harassment, in the role of antagonist Hamazaki.

None of which, I imagine, has anything to do with RGG and Sega's inclination to retire the Kiwami brand—that will likely have been decided long ago—but it certainly lends a particular vibe to Yokoyama's announcement: like the games are retreating from the stage amid a shower of tomatoes rather than bowing out with a final curtain call.

This is not to say, though, that RGG is done with Kiryu. In fact, it sounds like Yokoyama has plans for something like a new, post-Kiwami 3 timeline that might diverge from the stories told in the original Yakuzas 4 through 6. "I don't think it'll continue as the Kiwami series anymore, I think a different series will begin.

"Not something like Like A Dragon 9, but rather a new series on a different line, with a different meaning. That might be something you'll understand when you play Yakuza Kiwami 3."

Ordinarily, I'd be keen to see whatever madness RGG was cooking up, but I'd be lying if I said the furore around Kiwami 3 hadn't put a big dampener on my warm feelings towards the Yakuza series. I don't think it's just me, either; I reckon RGG has quite a bit of work to do in order to win fans back.

I've always deeply admired cosplayers. I'll never forget attending Final Fantasy 14's Fan Fest back in 2023 and being absolutely star struck by how people had so beautifully brought their Warriors of Light to life—towered over by bunny girls with carefully-constructed ears and replicated job gear, and wishing I was also representing my Viera in the real world.

Unfortunately I suck at arts and crafts, don't have a lot of money to get someone else to do it, and I'm just… well, a bit shy. It can be a rather vulnerable thing, putting yourself out there in the hot-glued shoes of a fictional character. But it's also a way to display your love for a piece of media, your love for the craft, and for the characters we become so deeply attached to. I've only ever been brave enough to cosplay once in my life, at 17-years-old in a rather cheap-looking fit I'd scooped up from a UK-based anime store.

But I'm also the type of person who wants to show the world the things I like. I want people to know my interests! The second-best way to do that which isn't parading around in a hairsprayed-to-hell wig that probably doubles as a fire hazard? Wearing merch, of course. My problem? Videogame merch has always been kinda bad.

Well, it was for a very long time anyway. I distinctly remember circling around conventions and it always being the same damn thing. Gildan t-shirts with prints of varying quality. Even the official merch was the exact freaking same! It's something I was more than happy to do as a teenager, but as I've gotten older and really honed in on my sense of style (which is, generally, not wearing ill-fitting tees) I've yearned for more fashionable ways to show off the thing I love more in the world.

Are we totally there yet? Hmm, no. I don't think so. Those standard fit t-shirts are still rife across artist alleys, official merch stores, and budget-brand clothing retailers peddling every license they can get their hands on. It's annoying because some of them sport wicked cool designs, too—one of my favourite pieces of videogame merch is still my metalesque Hades tee from Final Fantasy 14, but I rarely wear it because, again, I look naff in a tee.

But. But! It's getting so much better, and it makes me feel all giddy inside. Most of that is thanks to collaborations with brands who can do much better than the clothing section of yer ma's supermarket from down the road. Kara's written about some of them for this very column in the past: Minecraft's collaboration with Very Cool, and Steady Hands—the maker of incredibly cool videogame gear—recently putting out a Sonic collaboration that has me ecstatically waiting until payday so I can scoop up the Shadow the Hedgehog cardigan.

Not to harp on too much about Sonic, but 2025 really was a good year for its merch. It partnered with Timberland for some slick themed colourways, and it took all of my power to not rip my pal's Sonic x Puma racer shirt off his back and run away with it. They're just two collaborations that perfectly toe the line of affordable and fashionably nerdy, and I'm desperate for more brands and videogames to get in on the fun.

Insert Coin has long dabbled in some slightly less traditional garments, which I've always appreciated. Do I love a bomber jacket? Rarely, but I'm glad to see them getting made regardless. It did do a proper Persona 5 Shujin Academy blazer though, which I most definitely rated.

You've even got places like ZA/UM's own clothing brand which has been peddling designer-priced pieces inspired by Disco Elysium for the last few years. Why yes, that does include an almost-200 dollar plastic carrier bag, thanks for asking.

So here you have it, my plea to clothing brands and videogames everywhere: As someone too shy to cosplay, please make cooler merch so I can show how much I love the stuff you make. Merch that doesn't require me to buy a $200 bag I can nab for 20p at my local Tesco/Walmart/[insert local grocery store here]. Give me dresses! Cool jeans! More sneakers! Jazzy tops that aren't just a t-shirt! I may be older, wiser, and more fashionable than I once was, but I don't love videogames any less.

Football is the world's most-watched and popular sport, and outside of the World Cup the pinnacle is the English Premier League. Right now we're coming to the end of the mid-season transfer window, where clubs have the opportunity to buy and sell players, and amidst the incessant speculation one of the league's top managers felt the need to remind the football media that the beautiful game is not, in fact, a videogame.

The moment arrived during a press conference featuring Tottenham Hotspur manager Thomas Frank, a Danish coach whose witty asides are not quite papering over the fact that the club is having a terrible season. Frank took over in June last year from Ange Postecoglou, a garrulously amusing Australian who committed the cardinal sin of winning something with Spurs and was promptly sacked.

Nevertheless the North London club remain one of the biggest around, and one of the players it's been heavily linked to over this transfer window was Antoine Semenyo. Semenyo instead chose to join Manchester City for £62.5m and, while Tottenham have made other signings, Frank was asked to address losing out on one of the club's main targets.

"It was clear, there is no doubt, that the club wanted to sign Semenyo," said Frank. "They did everything and I think that is a clear signal that [club owners] the Lewis family is very committed. That's the quality of players we are looking for to improve the squad."

Frank went on to say he didn't want to become "obsessed with a short-term fix" because there could be a "big summer ahead" for Spurs, before digressing on the complexity of the transfer market, which is when we get to Sports Interactive's Football Manager series.

"The fans just want the best for the club, just like I, the owners, the staff, the players. Everyone wants the best for the club," said Frank.

"But the transfer window is not Football Manager, unfortunately. It is not. It would be a lot easier, but also a little bit more boring. We would not have as many good stories to talk about."

Devastating news for armchair Guardiolas everywhere. I don't want to put words in his mouth here, but it's likely that Frank's also thinking about the whole social media ecosystem that now exists around transfers, whereby clubs are linked with around a dozen players for every one they sign, and managers are peppered with questions about every rumour going.

In Football Manager, and I'm simplifying here but not by much, you put in an offer on a player, wait a day or two for a response, and if the offer is accepted begin negotiating a contract with a player, then wait another few days for a yes or no. Obviously in real life there's much more human complexity to it, such as whether a player wants to uproot their life and family to move to a new city or country. Or, as is likely the case with Semenyo, whether they think they'll have a better chance of trophies elsewhere.

Frank remains under pressure at Tottenham, with the club 14th in the Premier League, though it has qualified for the last 16 of the Champion's League. The team has been unlucky at points, and conceded some sickeners: exactly the kind of thing that, if football really was like Football Manager, would've had Frank going for more than a few cheeky reloads.

Lara Croft's up there with the most iconic game protagonists of all time—but there was a time when her design was nearly swapped out in favour of… well, just take a look.

That's a picture that comes via @tadashidaiba on BlueSky, who shared scans from an issue of Saturn Fan magazine (thanks, Gamesradar). And to be fair, the actual sketch looks cool as hell—not exactly the Lara we know today, mind, but something that wouldn't be out of place as a Street Fighter character, or a member of Final Fantasy 7's party.

The example 3D render in that very same scan is, uh, not what I'd call good. Uncanny, haunting eyes that catch none of the sketches' original charm, peering straight into the soul, as though they know all my sins. Like something that belongs in an analog horror video from the late 2000s.

These images also cropped up in a 2021 X post by co-creator Paul Douglas, who writes: "Quite late in TR1 development, Victor (Core's publisher in Japan) decided our western character design wouldn't go down well there. So they faxed over some of their own designs—that we didn't implement."

Given the sketches and model resurfacing in the present year, Douglas went to Bluesky to reiterate the close call: "Victor wanted us to change in-game Lara to appeal more to a Japanese audience. Huge eyes/head etc. They faxed through examples really late in dev."

He explains that Toby Gard, the game's other co-creator, "really didn't want to alter Lara. As a compromise all that was changed was the manuals & guide. Not sure who did that render or illustrations."

One eagle-eyed replier reckons they've cracked it, though: "I started digging around. The Japanese Saturn manual credits 'Takanori Wada' and 'Hiromasa Ohta' for graphic support. That second one was the character designer for Keio Flying Squadron, who worked at Victor for many years. And this image is signed 'Ohchan.'"

I started digging around. The Japanese Saturn manual credits "Takanori Wada" and "Hiromasa Ohta" for graphic support.That second one was the character designer for Keio Flying Squadron, who worked at Victor for many years. And this image is signed "Ohchan." www.mobygames.com/person/45518...

— @foxhack.bsky.social (@foxhack.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T16:12:55.720Z

Just to make sure, I went ahead and found the manual myself and, sure enough, there's Ohta, though his second name's spelled as "Ota" in the credits user Foxhack cites. MobyGames doesn't have much else after the '90s save for a few arcade credits, where it's also sometimes spelled "Oota", which I figure's just down to translating his name into the English alphabet.

Anyway: Ota/Ohta/Oota did a good job on the sketch, at least—but given the clear limitations of the PS1 at the time, I reckon Lara's less anime-inspired look was the right call.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is, by this point, the undisputed master of recycling. By reusing characters and environments and minigames across the Like a Dragon series (and then remaking the games to do it all over again), it's able to pack each new game with a luxurious volume of stuff while simultaneously piling cutscenes to the rafters.

So it's not at all surprising that the biggest new feature of Yakuza Kiwami 3's Dark Ties expansion is a roguelite mode that lets you beat up hordes of thugs copy-pasted from the streets of Kamurochō. Even so, there's something cleverly meta in building an entirely new and compulsively replayable randomized mode out of spare parts.

It's almost a flex on games that do just one thing. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth contained within itself a whole Pokémon subsystem and Animal Crossing-style island building as mere side activities; why shouldn't Dark Ties tempt you to spend 20 hours doing runs to level up sidekicks, unlock new weapons, and earn stat-boosting gear like you would in any other roguelite?

That's the gist of Hell's Arena, a new underground fight club hiding down a Kamurochō back street in the expansion starring Yakuza 3 villain (antihero?) Yoshitaka Mine. Despite being a series baddie, the bit of the Dark Ties plot I got to play at a recent Sega preview event seems to suggest Mine will spend most of his expansion going around doing good deeds, not unlike Kiryu in the main game. "Most," of course, depending on how hard you get hooked on the new roguelite mode.

Where the two yakuza differ most is in combat: Kiryu fights with a bruising heft while Mine is snappy and light on his feet, with a marquee move that I instantly fell in love with. While performing a heavy attack, a well-timed button press lets Mine leap off the chest of an enemy and ping-pong to another.

It's a really fun "offense is the best defense" trick for avoiding an incoming attack or seeing how quickly you can make it through a brawl. It also reminded me of the rhythm of the Batman Arkham combat, even if Yakuza welcomes a bit more frantic mashing than the more measured timing of Batman's punches and parries.

Mine's the ideal character, in other words, to steer through a fast-paced combat dungeon that spurs you from floor to floor with a constantly ticking timer. Hell's Arena consists of Brawler Hell, a basic cage match situation, and Survival Hell, which is where the real meat is. There's a real Squid Game air to the setup, with masked VIPs watching contestants try to battle their way through the gauntlet. If you die on a run you'll lose all the money and treasure you accrued, but you'll unlock shortcuts as you go that let you cut and run when continuing gets too risky.

If Survival Hell were just "fight a bunch of dudes while a timer ticks down" it'd be a mild diversion, but as usual RGG has assembled its leftovers into a buffet. There's a lot more going on here:

• Unlockable Survival Weapons you can equip before a run, mapped to the D-Pad, with a wide range of bonus effects like healing you or freezing enemies
• Unlockable Mercenaries you can take into fights with you, each with their own stats and perks like boosting drop rates or stunning enemies
• Findable treasures called Gospels with delightful names like "Quadriceps of the Gods" that offer you permanent stat boosts across runs
• Random drops that can refill your Survival Weapon uses or boost your healing or money earned for a brief time
• Multiple difficulty levels to clear, each featuring more enemies that hit harder and rewards in the form of new Survival Weapons and Mercenaries
• Minibosses guarding the ends of each floor, as well as optional treasure chests holding tempting Gospels
• A shopkeeper who'll sell you songs from a boatload of other Sega games, like Persona and Virtua Fighter

Survival Hell's mazelike concrete corridors are fitting for a literal underground fighting ring, though it's a bit of a shame that a mode encouraging just one more run isn't set in Yakuza 3's beachy Okinawa map instead.

Still, the variety of Survival Weapons and Mercenaries and the light buildcrafting potential of finding ones that work well together has me scared of how much time I could dump into Survival Hell while ignoring the plights of Kamurochō's citizens. Even on a save file with almost everything unlocked and loads of Gospels under Mine's belt, I was humbled by the hardest difficulty level. The second brawl knocked my ass out, meaning I dropped all my potential earnings and the 5,659,300 yen I'd paid to bring along four strong sidekicks.

That was a lot of dough! I'm sure Dark Ties is full of other ways to make money, but I have a feeling I know exactly what I'd do if that had actually been my save file: Drop the difficulty down a notch and head straight back into hell.

In the glory days of the video arcade, no idea was too weird for a multi-thousand-dollar machine built around a CRT. Take, for example, two of Sega's more obscure late '90s arcade cabinets: Magical Truck Adventure (which does not feature a truck) and Emergency Call Ambulance (which does feature an ambulance). Released in 1998 and 1999, neither has been re-released in any sort of arcade collection or made available digitally until now, via in-game emulation in Yakuza 3 Kiwami. Both are delightful.

Magical Truck Adventure is classic Sega arcade stuff: bright and bubbly and immediately throwing all sorts of stuff at the screen within seconds. You take control of one of two kids operating an old-fashioned train handcar, chasing down a pair of crooks who've stolen your magical jewel and decided to flee by rail, making them incredibly easy to catch.

At least if you're in good shape: the physical arcade machine requires you to constantly pump the handcar's lever to maintain speed, while a pair of pedals allow you to lean left or right off the rails and jump over the barrels and other random obstacles they hurl your way. You also teleport/time travel between stages, naturally.

Magical Truck Adventure is a short game (with a few branching paths depending on how well you do in each stage), which is ideal considering how tired your arms will be after a couple levels. I've played the real arcade machine several times and never gotten past the second level, so I enjoyed playing the emulated version at a recent Yakuza Kiwami 3 preview event immensely. Flicking a couple analog sticks up and down is a lot less tiring!

This emulated version of Magical Truck Adventure can't capture the fun gimmick of controlling a game via frantic lever action, but it's still a fun, cute game that I'm glad people can now play without seeking out an incredibly rare arcade cabinet.

Emergency Call Ambulance, meanwhile, I have never seen in an arcade or indeed even heard of, but it is nuts. You're an ambulance driver speeding away from the scene of some disaster with a grievously wounded patient, and each level is an on-rails course that gives you just enough time to make it to the hospital, assuming you don't collide with oncoming traffic or take even a few turns a little too slowly. In the first level, another ambulance briefly passes you in haste and then immediately careens off the road into the sea.

This game really feels like it belongs to another era, when arcade designers were trying to transplant any job or situation into a game you could play in three minute bursts. It's simultaneously hilarious and incredibly morbid: if your passenger's health ticks down to zero before you reach the hospital, the screen fades to black as they whimper "I don't want to die!" A green heart monitor flatline appears on screen for about one second before it starts playing jolly music and tallying your score.

I can't think of a better pairing for Yakuza's tonal whiplash between character melodrama and absurd sidestory hijinks. It'd be a stretch to say they're worth paying $60 for Yakuza Kiwami 3 all by themselves, but I'm very glad Sega has scooped them out of arcade obscurity after so long. Kiwami 3 is out on Steam on February 11.

I've been utterly obsessed with Warhammer 40,000 lore videos recently. You may not think learning about the 19 extra organs Space Marines have would help lull me to sleep, but it does. I'm jumping on the Warhammer bandwagon at a great time, because the recently announced Total War: Warhammer 40,000 just hit an impressive milestone; it has over one million wishlists on Steam.

Creative Assembly announced its existence during The Game Awards in December. Getting over one million wishlists in barely a month is no small feat, and the Total War team shared a message on Steam stating it's "unbelievably excited" to share more with us all soon.

So far, we've only had one trailer for Total War: Warhammer 40k. It was introduced by David Harbour of Thunderbolts* fame (and West End Girl infamy), and it's an absolute delight to behold. We get a glimpse at gorgeous cinematics of elite Space Marine squads fighting against ork hordes, both with giant war machines onside to level the battlefield.

We also see some pre-alpha gameplay, showing the devastating weaponry that can be fired from orbit to help defeat the bigger enemies. The giant death beam reminds me of the WMDs in Tom Clancy's EndWar.

We'll get to fight both planetside and amongst the stars in a galaxy-spanning war that will hopefully live up to the vast scale of the 40k universe.

The game has excited the tabletop sickos among our ranks at PC Gamer, so much so that they even made their own wishlist for the Emperor that includes all the features they want. Hopefully he can take a break from psychically warring with the Chaos Gods and give it a once over.

What we do know is that the ancient alien race, the aeldari, will be a playable faction, as will the human legions of the Astra Militarum. I can't wait to take the former rulers of the stars for a spin—I'm sure they have some horrifying and devastatingly effective tricks up their sleeves. Do they even have sleeves? I haven't gotten that far in the lore videos yet.

Plans for a new Ecco the Dolphin game were quietly revealed last May, in addition to remasters of the 1992 original and its sequel Tides of Time. At the time a website was launched bearing a 8,500 hour countdown. Andy Chalk did the maths way back then, and figured out that the countdown would end some time in April 2026.

Which is still nearly four months away. Nevertheless, here we are in January 2026 with a bit more info on these forthcoming Ecco games. It's now confirmed that new California-based studio A&R Atelier is developing the new game, with original Ecco producer Ed Annunziata on board as chief creative officer.

In a press release issued today A&R Atelier confirmed there are "several new Ecco the Dolphin products and games" in development, though whether these include the already-confirmed remasters and a new game, or something more, isn't specified. I've reached out to A&R Atelier for more specific details, though I assume they're keeping it under their hats for the big April reveal. I'll update if I hear back.

In the press release Annunziata said that a new Ecco game "has been years in the making". It's unclear how big A&R Atelier studios is or who else might be working on the projects: the website is just a splash page with the company's logo. The newly fleshed-out Ecco the Dolphin website has a touch more info.

"The team behind Ecco the Dolphin includes original creators from the classic games, alongside talented new team members who share a deep love and respect for this iconic franchise," the site reads. "Together, we're dedicated to expanding the Ecco the Dolphin IP to the level it has always deserved."

If the '90s feels like ancient history to you, perhaps you don't know that Ecco the Dolphin was a huge deal when it launched for Sega Genesis in 1992. It quickly became a bestseller on the back of extensive marketing—I still remember the TV advertisements—though if you were one of the kids lucky enough to have played it, you would have been hit with one of most pitilessly difficult games of the era.

Sonic Adventure 2 was one of the first games I remember watching my sibling play, mostly because they would often fight about who gets a turn next while I just sat there, not really knowing what was going on. But I really liked the characters, and that feeling stuck around long after I started playing Sonic games for myself. It didn't take long for me to realise that merchandise for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise was dominated by the titular blue flash. Which is fair enough—it is named after him—but you'd think after this many years we'd see a little more merch for the wide variety of other characters.

I know you can get figures, plush toys, and plenty of t-shirts featuring the core group: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and now Shadow the Hedgehog too. But what about Rouge, Blaze, and even Amy? Or Cream, Big, and Vector? Luckily, Steady Hands, a US-based clothing brand have answered the prayers of people like me with their latest Sonic collection. Before you start, yes, you do have plenty of Sonic items to spend your rings on if he truly is your favourite character. Yet the thing that really impresses me with this collection is how many other characters you can now get merchandise for, and especially how it's not all limited to printed t-shirts.

I love a very specific clothing collection that spans more than just t-shirts, which might've been obvious from my column about Cool Shirtz Minecraft collaboration, and Steady Hands always delivers. From their shorts themed around Shadow and Sonic and with embroidered silhouettes for each on the front, to a huge variety of knitted cardigans featuring all sorts of characters on the backs, there's bound to be something to appeal to all sorts of Sonic players.

The item I adore most in this collection though has to be the vintage-looking Chao cardigan. I absolutely adore these little creatures and have done since I first laid eyes on them when I was younger, and this cardigan manages to create something even sweeter with their design. If you're after something even more specific, Steady Hands has created both an angel and dark Chao equivalent too.

The individual character cardigans also focus on a much wider range of famous Sonic faces, alongside the classics, but most importantly feature one of the series' most underrated characters: Blaze. Rather than just having a print of her on the back, the lavender cardigan has an impressive backprinted knitted into the design, which means no worries about it fading or cracking in the wash either. It also looks fantastic alongside the darker purple Rouge cardigan, but I think that's just me looking for an excuse to buy both.

I also adore that characters like the Werehog from Sonic Unleashed get their time in the spotlight in this collection. It goes to show that I'm far from the only person who is a little bit sick to death of seeing the same Sonic design plastered on cheap t-shirts and hoodies and I don't doubt so many people are elated to finally get decent merch of their favourites too.

Although we have plenty of items in this collection already, hopefully it expands in the future and Steady Hands produces more items featuring even more characters, like my beloved Big the Cat or Cream the Rabbit. For now, I'm happy just knowing merchandise for Blaze does in fact exist somewhere outside of a second-hand figure I found many many years ago, and she's not one of the characters Sega have let disappear into the void.

David Rosen, one of the original founders of Sega Games in post-war Japan, has died at the age of 95 years old. Spokesman Brad Callaway told the arcade industry's RePlay magazine that Rosen died December 25, 2025, at his home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family.

Rosen was a former US airman stationed in post-war Japan and the Far East, and after his service ended in 1952 stayed in Japan, first founding the company Rosen Enterprises, Inc., which sold Japanese art in the US market and also had a successful business in photo booths called Photorama. In 1957, the company's focus changed to importing coin-operated amusement machines to Japan, which proved lucrative, and establishing its own venues.

"Right off the bat, the machines were tremendously successful," Rosen told Next Generation Magazine in 1996. "At this point, I was opening up arcades with these shooting and hunting games throughout Japan, and we were fortunate… I don’t know [how many we had], but by the time I left, there wasn’t a city in Japan that didn’t have one of our arcades."

In 1965, Rosen Enterprises merged with Nihon Goraku Bussan, which used Sega as a brand name for coin-op machines: the name comes from a contraction of SErvice GAmes Japan. "We decided to merge, and in trying to establish the name of the company, we decided Sega was the best known name, and we took Enterprises from Rosen Enterprises," recalled Rosen. "So our new company became known as Sega Enterprises Ltd, and I became CEO/President after the merger."

Within a year, Sega had produced its first original game, Periscope, under Rosen's direction, a machine that would establish the company's successful export business. This was a game, but not a videogame: you aimed a submarine's periscope and then fired 'torpedos', a line of coloured lights, to sink cardboard ships. Periscope was a massive hit and, while it may seem basic now, was pioneering in how it used technology. "We were doing lots of things that hadn't been done before," Rosen would later tell Wired, "like adding sound and special effects."

Rosen became the face of Sega in the 60s and 70s as it grew to become one of Japan's biggest manufacturers and exporters in the arcade market, where the company built its reputation before entering the home videogame market: the company's first console, the SG-1000, would release in 1983.

There's much in the way of further corporate shenanigans to Sega's history over these decades, but we pick up again in 1984 when Rosen and Hayao Nakayama put together a group to purchase Sega's Japanese assets back from the Gulf+Western conglomerate. Nakayama ran Sega Japan, while Rosen established Sega of America in LA and became chairman, overseeing, among other things, the hugely successful US launch of the Genesis / Mega Drive. He would also remain a director of Sega Japan until his resignation in 1996.

"Sega was involved in videogames very shortly after they were invented," said Rosen in 1996. "Certainly, we were importing games like Pong from day one. We started producing our own videogames shortly thereafter.

"Sega has tremendous engineering and technology capability. It's an interesting situation that really comes out of our coin op business. Basically, due to the coin op business, we have this ability to translate and transpose the engineering know-how into consumer product, consumer-oriented product. Sometimes we become over-sophisticated and think anybody can understand the operating system and thereby program for it. But that rectifies itself in time."

The Subway Slammer is the first baddie in gacha spinoff Persona 5: The Phantom X. He is also a total clown show—at least in the Western world, anyway. Despite representing Japan's very serious butsukari otoko problem—an ongoing violence against women that usually involves men intentionally bodychecking women in crowded spaces like train stations—his English localised name and dialogue made him absolute meme bait when the game first launched over this way.

The reaction was much different to the one in Japan, Chief Producer Yohsuke Uda tells me. When I asked whether the team thought it was down to cultural differences, he agreed. "There may be some nuances that were lost in translation when we did that," he said. "So it was definitely interesting, or rather surprising, when we went to Anime Expo [in Los Angeles], and when Subway Slammer appeared on the screen, a lot of people were cheering for him."

I do have to wonder whether or not that was the team's first exposure to how heavily clowned upon the Subway Slammer was—I would sure as hell be confused if I were in their shoes. But at the same time, it doesn't seem to bother Uda all too much. "We felt like it also served as a way to shine some light on a serious issue that is unique in Japan. At the same time, it allowed us to show that the issues we show off in Persona are something that actually happens in reality, and it's a serious societal issue.

"Although the way the audience took it was different from what we expected, it was still a positive way where we can let people know this is an issue that's happening in Japan."

I mean, I guess that's the glass-half-full way of looking at it, for sure. It's nice to know that it didn't seem to bother the team too much, and certainly hasn't stopped them from continuing to try and inject more real-world situations into their writing.

Persona 5: The Phantom X has just kicked off its half-anniversary update. It introduces the original game's Justine and Caroline as playable characters, along with a new story and a bunch of gifts to commemorate the occasion.

Persona is a series defined by its calendar system. Everything revolves around it: the school schedule, dungeon deadlines, and social events. So what happens when you try and stuff that core gameplay system-shaped peg into a gacha-shaped hole?

Well, you don't. Instead, you remove it. Persona 5: The Phantom X still retains some kind of calendar, but set dates have been swapped out for a far more vague "yesterday, today, tomorrow" system. It makes sense for a game that is constantly shifting and changing with story and character updates, but making that move wasn't an easy one.

"Initially it was very difficult to convince the team that we needed to get rid of the calendar system," Chief Producer Yohsuke Uda tells me. "When we created the game the most important thing we wanted to do was maintain that Persona 5 gameplay and game feel. But if we kept the calendar system from Persona 5, there might be differences in how each player played the game and some people might be on a different date. So it would be difficult to make sure everyone had the same experience."

Uda says that ditching that for a broader system was key to being able to "maintain that Persona 5 feel" and "to make sure that we didn't lose any Persona 5 experience in any way."

Of course, one of the downsides to a largely formless calendar is that it also strips The Phantom X of the changing seasons that we often see in the mainline Persona games. The way to get around that? Well, live service comes in handy here with seasonal events. "We'll be doing more seasonal events—for summer, for Christmas—that are aligned with the real life time or life calendar. And that's how we hope to make sure Persona 5 X keeps that Persona 5 feel."

It is surprising how well that system works, at least from what I played back when I reviewed the game. It's a nice way to bridge the gap between singleplayer JRPG Persona 5 and always-online gacha spin-off Persona 5.

The Phantom X is currently celebrating its half-anniversary—introducing Persona 5's very own Caroline and Justine as playable characters along with new story to play and a heap of goodies to celebrate six months.

Persona 5: The Phantom X has just kicked off its half-anniversary celebration marking a whole six months since the release of the gacha spin-off (at least in Japan and the Western world, anyway). It's not been an easy journey, to say the least. The game's launch was criticised for stark differences between reward distribution in the Chinese version versus the global release and was arguably (and very surprisingly) eclipsed by horse girl gacha Umamusume: Pretty Derby releasing just one day sooner.

In the time since global launch, the teams at both Sega and Atlus have been hard at work on The Phantom X to bring the standards up to what gacha gamers have come to expect. When I asked what the team's biggest initial challenge was, operations director Yuta Sakai told me: "It was definitely the game balance or the balance of the events. So when we created the Japanese and English versions, we made various adjustments from the original release—the Chinese and Asia versions—and it was mostly focused on the quality-of-life and making sure that the game would fit new players because we had some extra features that were not originally present when it was first released.

"But of course, we had a lot of feedback from our players—especially Western and English-speaking players—regarding these changes. So when we look back at it, there are some features that we were glad we made changes to, and there are some features where we took the feedback that we got and made changes as we went on."

Some of those player-driven changes have come in the form of an improved gacha banner that guarantees the [player will receive the] character after 110 pulls, as well as an increase in rewards for daily and weekly in-game tasks. It's been a much-appreciated sprinkling of changes over the last half-year, primarily thanks to those who continued to play even when The Phantom X arguably wasn't in its best shape.

Take your time

As well as smoothing things over with the playerbase, Atlus and Sega have been hard at work alongside developer Perfect World to bring an update to both the Chinese and global versions of The Phantom X simultaneously for the first time. Persona 5's very own Velvet Room attendants, Justine and Caroline, have been added as playable characters to both versions.

"We had to change the workflow completely because it was something that we've never done before," development producer Jun Matsunaga told me. "Atlus gave us permission to use Justine and Caroline as a global character in the series for the first time." Matsunaga added that introducing the two during the global version's half-anniversary was "the perfect timing to have this simultaneous release."

I do have to agree with Matsunaga that now seems like a pretty good time for it, and it seems as though for Atlus and Sega the last six months have ultimately come out as a positive experience despite a somewhat rough first footing.

"Thank you very much to our players for sticking with P5X these past six months," chief producer Yohsuke Uda said to me. "In the past six months, our fans have been very passionate, and they've given us a lot of feedback that we will continue to listen to and continue to take into our future development, and continue to make P5X a better game for the future as well.

"And with our half-anniversary update, this is going to be the first time a Velvet Room attendant is going to be playable. The Velvet Room is a central location for the entire Persona series, so we feel like that's something very special for fans of Persona. And we hope that if you're interested in playing as Justine and Caroline, you'll hop onto P5X and give it a try."

I don't know anything about you, reader. You and I are perfect strangers. Except, I do know one thing about you: you did not get to this article from a Google search using the PlanetWeb 3.0 browser on a Sega Dreamcast, the greatest console ever manufactured, because that's no longer possible as of this week.

The browser, which launched in 2001 and came with the console as a pack-in, was probably not a popular way to browse Google. I assume it was mostly a novelty even when the Dreamcast launched, though it was the rare console with an official keyboard peripheral (how else are you going to play The Typing of the Dead?) and even a big MMORPG in its first-party software lineup.

While perhaps sad, this isn't the result of some anti-Dreamcast campaign within Google. As Tom's Hardware put it, "Google closed a PlanetWeb browser compatibility window that had somehow remained ajar for a quarter-century."

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what happened and when, though users online are stating it's been like this for a while, and that it's impacted similar console browsers (the New 3DS's, for example). In the end, that it worked for this long is more surprising than the news of it shutting down.

If you need to connect to the internet on a Dreamcast or play one of its online games today, none of the homebrew methods for doing so are impacted by this change. It's just a bit harder to surf the web using the console, but I don't see why you'd care about anything the internet has to offer you once games like Shenmue and Space Channel 5 are on the table.

In 2009, I was an office drone pretending I gave a toss about insurance premiums, at least by day. By night I was carving up the world, fiddling with firing lines and worrying about getting hundreds of men blown up by cannons. At least when I wasn't dealing with bugs. I was playing Empire: Total War, now known as Total War: Empire.

Empire was Creative Assembly's most audacious strategy game, working at a scale the studio had never attempted before. A world at war, split into different theatres, separated by oceans that were just as full of conflict. It also flipped Total War on its head, where the emphasis was on firearms and gunpowder, not swords and spears.

That ambition was to be its downfall. Empire was notoriously buggy, saddled with ineffectual AI, had the series' worst siege battles, and in attempting to simulate the whole world, a lot of sacrifices had to be made.

Before launch, however, I was stunned by its scope and all the promise hidden inside it. This was going to be the ultimate Total War.

Last week, Creative Assembly announced Total War: Warhammer 40,000, a game with an audacious scope, doing things Creative Assembly has never done before, with a greater focus on ranged battles full of devastating firearms. I am stunned by its apparent scope and all the promise hidden inside it. I'm also reeling from deja vu.

While Creative Assembly hasn't revealed too much, we do know that planet-destroying fleets will be a part of it; we might even be getting some space combat for the first time, just as Empire gave us our first proper sea battles.

It's surreal seeing how many of the same boxes it's attempting to tick.

Now, if this was the early 2010s, I'd be extremely worried. Creative Assembly simply didn't have the tech or experience to match its ridiculous ambitions. The Creative Assembly of today, however, just might.

Years of advances and a company that's so much larger, with multiple studios now working away on Total War, puts it in a much stronger position. It's also important to look at what Creative Assembly has been working on for almost a decade: The epic strategy series Total War: Warhammer.

Total War: Warhammer is undoubtedly closer to Creative Assembly's core than 40k is, but it was still a big leap. With factions like Kislev we've got an abundance of firearms, too, though mechanically they are less dramatically different from archers and the like than they are from the musket infantry of Empire or the Space Marines of 40k, with their oversized plasma guns and bolters.

With Warhammer, Creative Assembly also gave us something intimidatingly massive. With the Mortal Empires campaign—which became Immortal Empires with Warhammer 3—we got a world-sized campaign map featuring hundreds of factions. It fully committed to this massive-scale war, instead of splitting things up into theatres and making countries province-sized.

And it worked! Immortal Empires is Creative Assembly's greatest achievement. But compared to what the studio will need to do to truly capture warfare in the far-flung, grimdark future of 40k, it's almost conservative.

It's hard to imagine Creative Assembly not needing to make significant concessions to try and wrangle the seemingly infinite number of worlds in the Imperium and beyond. Like I said in our Total War: Warhammer 40,000 wishlist, "I want that scale to matter. To be more than set dressing. What I don't want is for entire worlds, containing billions of lives, to be reduced to a node on a space map, represented by a single battlefield. I want the size of the galaxy to create wrinkles and logistical conundrums."

But for that to happen, will we be looking at only a small numbers of worlds to fight over? Just a slice of the galaxy, rather than a map that'll make your head spin as soon as you look at it. I want to have my cake and eat it too, but Creative Assembly will need to draw the line somewhere.

Creative Assembly might be larger and more experienced than it was during Empire's development, but the last year has shown us that it's still more than capable of shipping things with game-breaking bugs, too. Not only did Creative Assembly introduce a bug that meant some factions would basically just stay at home instead of, you know, embarking on a total war, it released an update that actually spread it to more factions.

There were issues before then, too. In 2023, the studio had to apologise for the quality of Warhammer 3's Shadows of Change DLC, while also offering players a bunch of freebies to make up for it. It also fundamentally changed the way it released DLC in light of this.

At the same time, it apologised for Total War: Pharaoh, which was presented as a mainline historical Total War, when everyone pretty much knew it was just one of the company's Saga spin-offs. These are smaller-scale games focusing on historical flashpoints, developed by Creative Assembly Sofia, rather than the core team.

Pharaoh had all the hallmarks of a Saga, but it was marketed like a regular Total War, and priced that way too. Creative Assembly eventually reduced the price and offered partial refunds.

All this is to say that Creative Assembly has been making a lot of mistakes over these last few years. Not to the point where I'd give up on it, though—it always acknowledges them and puts plans into action to rectify these issues. And after Shadows of Change, there's been a marked improvement in the quality of its Warhammer DLC. Sofia even made an Immortal Empires-style campaign for Pharoah, effectively turning it into Total War: Bronze Age.

I absolutely believe that Creative Assembly is in a better position to make something as ambitious as Total War: Warhammer 40,000 than it was with Empire. And I desperately want it to succeed. I'm a 40k devotee, so the promise of a game that brings it to life in a way we've never seen before has me salivating more than an ork getting ready for a WAAAGH!

But I also thought Empire was going to be a game changer. I've been wrong before.

It no longer matters whether you believe RPGs should have more romance in them or less; the tender bonds between gamer and NPC have broken their containment in worlds virtual. At a recent event held by Sega celebrating the Like a Dragon series' 20th anniversary, a woman who goes by lala_nyan0617 on X donned a wedding dress and locked arms (er, tried to) with her new (pretend) husband: a cardboard cutout of Kazuma Kiryu from Like a Dragon.

She posted her photos with the Dragon of Dojima on X, stating, "I'm so happy to have met a wonderful person like Kazuma Kiryu. From now on, I'll always stay by your side and support you," according to the site's machine translation.

Okay, it wasn't a real wedding, and plenty of other people showed up with matrimony plans of their own for all sorts of characters; it's all going down at a Japanese fan celebration called the "Weddings, Funerals, and Other Ceremonies Exhibition." Held in Tokyo from Nov. 28 to Dec. 22, the exhibit is meant to "express the essence" of the Yakuza games through "symbolic ceremonies in the drama of life," according to an announcement on YouTube.

Still, it's a fun photo op, and she had the chance to snag both mock marriage and divorce papers, as seen in the video. I don't know if I'd want to be wed to someone who gets into so many bare knuckle brawls, but there's no denying he's a class act. He's in some pretty good games, too.

If you want to get married to a Like a Dragon character (or mourn them at a funeral), another instance of the event is being held in Osaka this coming February.

It was inevitable: following its successful Warhammer trilogy, Creative Assembly is now working on a 40k game. But that inevitability doesn't make the announcement and the potential for massive grimdark wars any less exciting.

The reveal has left us thirsty for more information, but while we wait for Creative Assembly to spill, we've been busy speculating and dreaming. Thus, I have enlisted my fellow Warhammer and tabletop freaks to help me come up with a wishlist. Here's what we're praying the Emperor will bless us with.

Make it meaningfully huge

Fraser Brown, Online Editor: I usually think game developers should scale things back—games are too big, too expensive, and too full of nonsense. This is not what I want from a 40k game, though.

In Games Workshop's miserable future, everything is big: an empire spanning a million worlds, spread across the entire Milky Way; gargantuan hive cities where billions of people live and die without ever stepping outside; flying cathedrals so large that they contain distinct societies, full of people who will never set foot on a planet; giant, power-armor-clad warriors carrying guns as large as a person.

Total War games are already known for their immense scale, but if Creative Assembly wants to capture the endless wars of the 41st millennium, it's gonna need to go the extra mile.

But I want that scale to matter. To be more than set dressing. What I don't want is for entire worlds, containing billions of lives, to be reduced to a node on a space map, represented by a single battlefield. I want the size of the galaxy to create wrinkles and logistical conundrums. I want to see orks and Space Marines be dwarfed by mechs the size of overly-ambitious skyscrapers—to stare at the battlefield and wonder, "How the heck am I going to deal with this" before watching my army getting crushed underfoot.

Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer: I'm genuinely very curious to see how Creative Assembly will handle the scale of 40k. Warhammer Fantasy's 'World-That-Was' was well defined, but part of the attraction of 40k by comparison is that it's this gigantic universe which can contain a seemingly infinite number of settings within it. It's something that both game developers and Black Library authors use to great effect, inventing and fencing off their own little planet or system to make their own.

For example, will Total War: Warhammer 40,000 feature the Sabbat Worlds from Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series? How about the Kaurava system from Dawn of War: Soulstorm? How do you decide what is canonically part of that big 40k map and compile it, while also ensuring the scale isn't so large that the series' RTS battles become irrelevant. CA has obviously found a way to do that which appeases Games Workshop and I'll be fascinated to see what that even looks like.

Let me paint

Fraser Brown: Plenty of Warhammer games give a nod to their tabletop origins with things like army painting, but in Creative Assembly's Warhammer trilogy the closest we got to that was a single daemonic leader who could be customised much in the same way as we might indulge in some kitbashing.

This time, I'd like something a bit more robust. Just changing some colors would be nice, but since we're dreaming here, I'd like to suggest something a bit more ambitious—a system that lets us tailor both the aesthetics of our units, from colours to emblems to accessories, as well as the actual gear they bring with them. Something that reflects the wargear system of the tabletop game.

Let me stick bits and bobs on my troops, and then see that reflected in their model. If I want to give my Space Marine a wolf cloak and a power claw, let me do it. Yes, I really hope we get some Space Wolves love.

Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: 100% this. It's a shame to zoom in on a unit in one of the Total War: Warhammer games and see a bunch of elves with the exact same haircut. If we're talking about tyranids from the same hive fleet then sure, they can have a uniform look, but a bunch of ork freebooters or aeldari harlequins should look flashy and individual. Let us choose our own color schemes and hats and whatnot.

Give us some wild endgame scenarios

Sean Martin: As with most longtime Total War players, I have a morbid fascination with endgame scenarios. I'll never forget the first time the Mongols invaded in Medieval 2 and I saw their doomstacks rolling across the map towards me. It's a long-standing feature of the series, but one that's particularly well-suited to 40k.

It could be a giant warp storm splitting the map, a massive ork waaagh, a Black Crusade, a tyrannid hive fleet invading to feed on your planets, or necrons crawling out of the ground as you discover you've been sitting on tomb worlds this whole time.

A lot of these scenarios will be limited by the number of factions available at launch (four are confirmed), but just as Total War: Warhammer had Archaon's invasion, I hope we'll get a fun endgame crisis to start with.

Fraser Brown: I'm expecting big things here. I mean, this is a universe where entire planets getting taken over by alien cults is just a normal Friday, and where the Imperium will gladly annihilate a world just to stamp out the influence of the Ruinous Powers. The bar is set pretty high.

Terrain should matter

Jody Macgregor: Total War is about regiments of infantry and cavalry, about ranks and flanks. Which is fine for Warhammer Fantasy, but in a 40k game I want mobile squads rushing from objective to objective, and I want them to be able to take cover in the rubble of a bombed-out hive or the trenches of a battlefield.

Total War's never really mastered "shooting from cover", but with Astra Militarum in Total War: Warhammer 40,000 then I want to see them sliding in the mud to get down behind some barbed wire while being showered by the dirt as mortar shells go off.

Part of what I am asking for is pathfinding that can actually handle moving a unit through a narrow city street. But I think sieges would be more fun if holding the walls was actually a better tactic than ditching them to occupy a chokepoint somewhere in the streets behind them.

Sean Martin: I was also pondering how Total War: Warhammer 40k could handle cover, because you're 100% right, Jody: the game will need a cover system. I always thought Dawn of War did a good job with cover, making it area-based, and considering Total War already has AoE terrain effects in 90% of its games (like long grass in Troy, water or trees in Total War: Warhammer etc.), I wouldn't be surprised if we got something similar.

Three Kingdoms also has pre-battle constructions like towers or anti-cavalry fences even on non-siege maps, so maybe we'll see that put into practice for building trenches and such. My one hope is that we get city maps of some kind, where we can use the streets and structures to chokepoint enemies or fire on them from above. So much of 40k warfare is city-fighting that it won't feel quite right if it's all just open field.

Battlefleet warfare is important

Sean Martin: It never bothered me too much when Total War: Warhammer didn't get naval combat. Sure, it would've been nice to have dragons burning ships, witness Druchii sea monsters rising from the waves, and I think I speak for us all when I say not including the swashbuckling skaven pirates of Clan Skurvy was a missed opportunity.

Unlike Warhammer Fantasy, though, it's almost impossible to not include battlefleet warfare in 40k. Some of the most important conflicts in the setting are space battles, with navies, orbital defense platforms, and battle barges blazing away above planets to secure a foothold—hell, if we ever get the Imperial Fists, we're going to need The Phalanx, their supermassive mobile star fort HQ.

I guess you could have space battles on a map inside a ship and justify it as your troops breach torpedo'd in, but it wouldn't really feel accurate, considering most shipboard combat in 40k is close quarters. Whether it's orbital bombardments, deep strikes, virus bombing planets, or even cool potential campaign events like a space hulk or a Blackstone Fortress appearing, space battle is inextricably linked with 40k. I really hope Creative Assembly doesn't skimp here.

Fraser Brown: I'd be so down for this, but Creative Assembly's attempts at just regular naval combat have left a lot to be desired, so space combat feels like a tall order. Granted, there are already multiple systems ripe for adaptation, not least of which is Battlefleet Gothic, the tabletop game, and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, its videogame counterpart. Honestly, as long as it's better than Rogue Trader's space combat, I'll probably be happy.

Make it weird

Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: Too many Warhammer 40,000 games play it safe with the story, throwing heroic Space Marines against nefarious baddies and calling it a day. There's so much more than that to the setting, and some of the best 40k games we've had have been ones that embrace its weirdest elements—from Mechanicus' squabbling tech-priests to Darktide's absurd dystopia.

Something on the scale of Total War seems like the perfect opportunity to have your cake and eat it too. There's space enough for both straight-faced Imperial heroism and all the fringe strangeness. And given we got everything from chaos dwarfs to zombie pirates in the studio's Warhammer Fantasy series, there's plenty of room to be optimistic.

In practical terms I think for me that means two things. One, I'd love to see the game really delve into the personalities of some non-human factions. Show me the galaxy from the perspective of some real weirdos, like the Genestealer Cults or the drukhari.

The other is it'd be great for it to bring in all sorts of obscure elements and even things we don't normally see on the tabletop. Let me have a jokaero advisor to tune up my weapons, battle hrud pirates out in lawless space, and recruit mercenary Blood Axe orks to fight alongside my Imperial Guard.

Fraser Brown: Yes! It's gotta be weird. Ultimately, Warhammer is a slapstick satire that some people take far too seriously.

Gimme those massive units

Sean Martin: A big universe needs big units, and there are fewer things bigger in 40k than Titans. My favorite battles from the Black Library books have always involved these colossal walkers, as princeps and their crews harness each god machine's spirit and hunt each other across ruined cities and blasted battlescapes. It's part sci-fi bridge crew, part mech-battle.

I really hope Total War: Warhammer 40k lets me be the kind of player who brings three Imperial Knights to fight an entire opposing army. We've certainly seen an escalation in unit size in Total War: Warhammer with the Dread Saurian and Rogue Idol of Gork and Mork, but some of 40k's units have the potential to be so much bigger.

Beyond a certain level it does become game-breaking (considering a rare Imperator class Titan is hundreds of feet tall), but it'd be a shame not to see smaller titans, Imperial Knights, or even ork Gargants take to the battlefield to stomp enemies.

Since last year we've been speculating about the possibility of Creative Assembly following up its Total War: Warhammer series with a take on the endless science-fantasy grimness factory that is Warhammer 40,000. And what do you know, at The Game Awards we finally got to see it, as announced by David Harbour, who will also be in it.

The big question about Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is how it's going to handle scale. Will there be multiple planets to conquer, and realtime space battles to fight? Will units line up in regimented, well, regiments or will they fight in looser squads like they do on the tabletop? Will there be titans?

The trailer sure makes it look like we'll be fighting over at least seven planets as the Ultramarines, orks, and Astra Militarum. (Aeldari appear in the splash screen, so that's our four factions.) And yep, that's an ork gargant, so we're definitely expecting titans to play a part. The scale seems massive, with orbital strikes being called down from voidships, and a huge number of troops on screen.

According to the press release, we'll be able to "Crusade across a galactic sandbox - capturing planets, upgrading fleets, and managing your war economy as you carve a path to dominance. Conquer worlds, bombard enemies from orbit, and command cinematic real-time battles over planetary strongholds. And when all else fails… unleash apocalyptic weaponry to eradicate entire planets!"

Multiple space marine chapters are shown as well, so whether we're stuck as Ultramarines in the campaign or not, at least in multiplayer I expect we'll be able to repaint our little guys. "For the first time in Total War," says the presser, "forge an army that’s truly your own. Shape every detail from the faction’s title, heraldry, iconography and arcane wargear. Define their traits, sharpen their tactics, and unleash a signature style of destruction that leaves your mark upon the galaxy."

Though it doesn't have a release date yet, you can wishlist Total War: Warhammer 40,000 on Steam.

History and fantasy enjoyers aren't being left out. Just last week, Creative Assembly took the opportunity of Total War's 25th anniversary to announce Total War: Medieval 3 is in pre-production and Total War: Warhammer 3 is getting more DLC, with the next add-on being Lords of the End Times.

Let me take you back to the year 2000, perhaps the peak of me naively thinking things were going to be great forever. Smash Mouth's All Star was constantly on the radio. It sometimes still snowed in October here in Colorado and I'd get a few extra days off school. And I discovered a little game called Shogun: Total War that may have literally changed the course of my entire life.

OK, it wasn't exactly little for the time. I remember being baffled by how I was supposed to free up 700 MB for one game. But the rest was history. Until it branched out into fantasy in 2016, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Total War is a series that I've been onboard for since the very beginning, that shaped my love for both strategy and history, which are still two of the main things people pay me to write about. And I just started up another campaign in Total War: Warhammer 3's new DLC just last night, so I've never stopped playing it either. Across 16 major releases (with Medieval 3 now announced to be on the way) and a quarter freaking century, we've been together longer than any of my romantic relationships and almost all of my interpersonal ones.

So it's hard to find someone whose history with the series goes back further than mine does. But lucky for me, I got to talk to Creative Assembly's battle architect Scott Pitkethly, who has been with the company since before the release of Shogun. And you might be surprised to learn what else CA was up to before they hit it big with their digital toy soldiers.

"When I joined, I wasn't working on Total War to begin with," Pitkethly recalls. "We were still doing sports games at that point and we were porting to the PlayStation 1. That was the very first thing I did. But they were developing Shogun: Total War downstairs."

The birth of Shogun

The seeds of the project were planted not with a Kurosawa movie marathon or even a desire to make an RTS, but someone's side project of extremely optimized 3D terrain. Programmer Anthony "TAG" Taglione showed up one day with a spline-based landscape visualizer he had written entirely in assembly language, which I can only equate to maybe building an entire house out of toothpicks. It's very efficient once it's done but extremely labor-intensive compared to more abstract programming languages.

"Just this amazing landscape demo… no game whatsoever," Pitkethly says. "And he turned up with that and said, 'I want to make a game using this.' And he actually wanted the entire team to make the whole game in assembler apparently. That was a method we decided against."

We were thus robbed of a world with a Total War so hyper-optimized that it could run on a digital watch, but we did get the original Shogun out of the deal, so it's hard to complain. Two years later, CA would release Medieval: Total War, moving the action to the European continent. But something much bigger was already in the works, ditching the 2D sprites and flat, board game-like campaign map of these primordial precursors. Pitkethly was at the center of it.

"We were doing this whole new initiative, Rome: Total War," he tells me. "And it was a completely new codebase. Everything was 3D. All the characters were 3D. The campaign map was going to be 3D. It was going to be this completely fresh thing. So I was given the opportunity straight out of university. Never worked writing game code before. Someone's like, 'There you go! Make the game!'"

It's kind of a humblebrag to say the first game you wrote code for was Rome: Total War, which I still think is one of the highlights of the series and holds up surprisingly well today. You can even play it on a phone now, which makes my brain hurt to think about in the same way quantum time dilation does. Is any of this actually real? Are we being pranked? Anyway, that's beside the point.

2006's Medieval 2 would follow quickly after 2004's Rome, after which Total War took its first—and so far only—two swings at the gunpowder era with the ambitious but troubled Empire (2009) and its expandalone follow-up, Napoleon (2010). There was a brief return of black powder in the Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai expansion in 2012. But I was curious why every Total War game since then had focused more on bows and swords. Warhammer's fanciful fantasy roster does feature some guns, but they tend to be more in a support role. Try as I might, I still can't get handgunner-focused armies to work for our boy Karl Franz.

Musket madness

"There definitely are technical challenges," Pitkethly explains. "The most common bug I used to get in Empire from QA would be: I've got my line infantry. They see the enemy and they are in range. And I click to fire, but they don't fire. They just move forwards. Bug! And I had to describe to them, well actually, the line-of-sight is being drawn from the barrel of the gun that guy actually is holding. So if you zoom down to the height of that man, you'll see that there's a tiny hill in the way.

"But part of my role as the battle architect is supporting all content, all eras, so it's definitely something that we are working on and supporting. And there will be more gunpowder-based games in the future."

Shogun 2 in 2011 was a big leap forward for the series visually, and Pitkethly still calls it "the purest Total War." But it was immediately followed by Rome 2, which was released to a very mixed reception, with numerous bugs and broken promises. Creative Assembly would polish it up eventually, though. I happen to think the Emperor Edition you can grab right now is actually quite good, if your only memories of Rome 2 were from that rocky launch time. And a lot of that was thanks to Creative Assembly Sofia, a studio that's going to play an even bigger role later.

From there, we got Attila, which is still my pick for most under-appreciated Total War game. I'll wear my biases on my sleeve: Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages are my favorite era of history, and I was absolutely jumping up and down with excitement when one of my favorite strategy series decided to take the often ignored time period on. I thought the way climate change in the north and the Huns in the east pushed everyone into the southwest corner of the map, over the bones of the collapsing Western Roman Empire, was one of the most interesting and compelling campaigns in any strategy game ever. But alas, it had a lot of performance issues and kind of still does. This is the time often thought of as Total War's first slump era.

"It's always unfortunate when we disappoint the fans," Pitkethly says. "When we make a misstep, and sometimes it's things we should have seen coming. And other times it's things we couldn't predict.

"But I think we're definitely getting better as a company with understanding and working with the community, and trying to resolve those issues. And we are listening to people, and we are making progress. Obviously there will still be mistakes. We'll get things wrong. But I think we'll rectify them more quickly. And I think that's something we are making fairly big strides in improving."

Chaos is coming

Things were about to change in a big way once again, though, with Total War's first steps outside of history and into fantasy. In 2016, Total War: Warhammer launched with the Old World campaign and eight playable legendary lords from four races. Over a trilogy of major releases and a forest of DLC, that number is now over 100 playable lords from 24 races on the colossal Immortal Empires map, with more already on the way in the just-announced Lords of the End Times DLC. Things are finally coming full circle, considering very early on in development of the first game, Games Workshop decided to kill Warhammer fantasy, which took the Total War devs by surprise.

"I'm sure I can say this now," Pitkethly told me. "We didn't know about End Times when we started Warhammer. So halfway through development of Warhammer 1, I remember Games Workshop saying, 'Oh, by the way, we're going to blow that world up.' And we're like, 'What?! We've got three games worth of content to make in it!'"

I still think this may have been one of the all-time most baffling decisions in the history of media licensing. But what do I know? The first two Warhammer games would be punctuated by the pretty good but mostly forgotten Thrones of Britannia in 2018, focusing on a smaller geographical scope of the British Isles around the time of the Norse and Norman invasions. And then lightning would strike once again in 2019 with the superb Total War: Three Kingdoms.

Based on the classic, semi-historical Chinese novel and featuring epic martial arts duels between its larger-than-life leaders, this is still one of the high water marks for the series. Sadly, support for it ended unexpectedly, the main campaign was left in a somewhat buggy state, a hinted steppe DLC vanished, and a long-rumored sequel has yet to materialize. This topic, of all the things I asked about, was the one Creative Assembly was most tight-lipped about.

"It's a tricky one," says game director Pawel Wojs, who also tells me Three Kingdoms represents some of his proudest work. "We always have a lot of things to focus on, and we have to prioritize. And at that time, we had to focus on other things. There's not really much more we can say about it. … The Three Kingdoms team had already moved on to other things that were different. It's definitely a very tricky thing."

"I think it's something we probably will talk about in the future," Pitkethly adds. "And I think everything is always up for grabs. It's not like that's never going to happen. There's always things that we want to be doing. There's so many great bits of history that we want to come back to. It's just time and where the technology is, and the games we want to make first."

While Warhammer was chugging along with sequels in 2017 and 2022, Creative Assembly's support studio in Sofia took its first solo flight with A Total War Saga: Troy in 2020, based on the Homeric account of the Trojan War. They would follow it up with 2023's Ancient Egypt-focused Pharaoh, which eventually added the entire Troy map to its own and expanded into Mesopotamia to make a full-blown Bronze Age grand campaign. It's another one I feel was a bit underappreciated, to be honest. But historical fans were still clamoring for a return to more familiar pastures.

And it seems like they'll be getting their wish, with Total War: Medieval 3 having just been announced—though it sounds like it's a ways out yet. There's even going to be another, different, major Total War title announced at The Game Awards next week. And Warhammer fantasy isn't done either, with the undead overlord Nagash and his buddies finally coming to really piss on our picnic next summer.

The future of Total War

But what does the future of Total War look like even further down the road? The new Warcore engine, which is the basis for Medieval 3, is a big part of that.

"Now more than ever, we are focusing our technology on the future of Total War," Pitkethly concluded. "So previously we always were thinking about the next game. And then the next game… So we've really reorganized ourselves to be able to think about the long term and how we make games that we can keep making for a long time.

"We can't know what technology is going to be like in five years, let alone 25 years. But it's something we're definitely thinking about. And we're concentrating a lot of effort—significantly more than we ever have before—on thinking about the Total War platform."

Total War has had its ups and downs, but it has still remained one of my favorite strategy series for all of the 25 years it's been doing its thing. I'm interested to see what changes a new engine will bring, since I was definitely starting to feel around the release of Pharaoh that a lot of its very basic mechanics are starting to get a bit stale. But I suppose all we can do now is wait and see.

And yes, I probably am going to start my 15th Wood Elf campaign in Immortal Empires. Some things really don't ever get old.

It's taken a long time for TV adaptations of videogames to get, you know, actually good. Now we've got The Last of Us, Arcane and Fallout all showing off. Back in 2005, though, we just had Time Commanders.

BBC's Time Commanders was an exciting prospect for any strategy nerd who could drag themselves away from their wars to watch people fighting them on TV. It used the Rome: Total War engine—back before Creative Assembly flipped the game titles—to create massive battles for contestants to conduct, not from their PCs, but by giving orders and acting like generals.

It was cheesy and slow, but at the time it was incredibly exciting to see a small corner of gaming standing in this prime-time spotlight. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it was all a big ol' lie.

"That was developed at a point when Rome was not finished," Scott Pitkethly, Creative Assembly's battle architect, tells us. "And I remember being told, 'Oh, we've got this great contract to do this thing. It's going to be really great for the company.' Which, you know, it was. But how are we going to make this work? We're not ready for this!"

Rather than the show taking a PvP approach, contestants fought an AI opponent, playing as Rome against Hannibal's Carthaginians, for example. But that's the first lie.

Pitkethly recalls: "Obviously we wanted the AI to play historically—I'm going to go behind the curtain a bit here and ruin it—but there literally were humans that had been told by the historians, 'This is what Hannibal would have done in this situation,' moving their troops."

The AI opponent was actually a human opponent, effectively following a historical script. "So we literally had devs behind the curtain, multiplayer, playing against the contestants," says game director Pawel Wojs. But that wasn't the only assistance humans were providing.

"We had to put little cheat codes in," Pitkethly adds, "because the contestants might make a poor strategic move, or a really good strategic move." The show's creators wanted the battles to have a coherent narrative, which would have been harder to do if the battle fell apart in five minutes because the contestants didn't have a clue what they were doing. "So we had to have all of these cheat codes so we could actually make the game unfold in the way they wanted it."

Technically, the devs were the only people actually playing the game, since the contestants just stood around arguing and telling other people, sitting in front of a PC, what to do. "It's kind of embarrassing," says Pitkethly. "But it's television."

Even knowing it was all smoke and mirrors, though, doesn't taint my fond memories of the original run. It also returned for a three-part special in 2016 with now-cancelled MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace, using Total War: Rome 2 instead, but I think we can throw those episodes in the bin now.

Time Commanders, for all its trickery, really captured the joy of big strategy games, and at the time reinforced my love for them. A young Pawel Wojs had a similar experience.

"I'm at university, and I see Time Commanders on TV. And I'm like, 'Oh my God, that looks like Total War. But that's Rome! Rome: Total War, that's not released yet, but I'm sure that's what it is.' And I remember watching the credits for the first time: 'Oh, Creative Assembly! It is Rome!'"

The BBC isn't allowed to advertise products, so unless you knew Creative Assembly and stuck around for the credits, you might not know you were watching something that you'd eventually be able to play yourself. But Wojs knew.

"I waited for that game. Played it to death. And I was studying game development at university, Master's in Game Art, and I had my final year portfolio up on a website … Most people were doing character-focused stuff. I was all about the worldbuilding. And Creative Assembly reached out to me and invited me down for an interview based on my work."

Wojs' first project unfortunately was not Total War, as he ended up on Viking: Battle for Asgard, but then he got to work on Medieval 2. And he stuck around long enough to see that get a sequel, too.

At last night's 25th anniversary stream, Creative Assembly and Sega announced that Total War: Medieval 3 is in pre-production. It's "the rebirth of historical Total War," the studio says.