Just two days after the disastrous release of Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition, Sega says it is removing the game from sale and putting the original back until it gets things sorted out.

WHAT HAPPENED:

• In September, Sega announced a remaster of Total War: Shogun 2, set to launch just a month later. Sean Martin, PC Gamer's number one shogunner, was very excited.
• In October, Shogun Sean took the remastered version for a test run and was not entirely impressed: "Any reason to return to Shogun 2 in 2026 is something to be celebrated, but I just wish Complete Edition felt more extensive and essential versus leaving so much undone."
• The next day, Shogun 2 Complete Edition launched on Steam, and it was ugly: Thousands of negative user reviews spurred by old bugs, ignored quality of life complaints, and maybe worst of all, accusations—thus far unconfirmed—of undisclosed generative AI use.
• Adding insult to injury, before the Compete Edition launched, Sega pulled the original from sale.

Which brings us to now: After two days of silence, Sega has finally made a move: It says "the current experience is not where it needs to be," and is thus "working with platform holders to remove the game from sale and to reinstate the original game while we investigate the issues."

Anyone who purchased Shogun 2 - Complete Edition will still have access to it, but how (or if) Sega will enable them to go back to playing the original version wasn't clarified.

Pulling Shogun 2 - Complete Edition from sale and restoring the original is obviously the right move, and today's message promises improvements to the game to bring it more in-line with expectations, so hopefully we'll see some of the more glaring bugs and QoL issues resolved.

But all of this is still a very bad look for Creative Assembly, which has had something of an up-and-down history with its games and players over the years. It's a particular shame coming so soon after the company's successful launch of the Lords of the End Times expansion for Total War: Warhammer, which has been widely praised.

The announcement of Total War: Warhammer 40k also has a lot of RTS fans, and WH40K sickos, very excited, and nonsense like this really takes the wind out of those sails: If Shogun 2 - Complete Edition allowed out the door in this condition, how are fans supposed to expect better in the future?

A few fans have also pointed out that in 2024, Sega's Aegis-CWA union accused the company of outsourcing Q&A and some localization services, resulting in the layoffs of 61 people.

As I write this, Shogun 2 - Complete Edition remains available for purchase on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store—Sega has not specified when it will be removed. It has also not yet responded to the accusations of gen AI usage in Shogun 2 - Complete Edition—I've reached out to ask about that and will update if I receive a reply.

Total War: Warhammer 3's Lords of the End Times expansion is huge, which is great for us but not so great for all the modders who need to update their work to be compatible with it. SFO Grimhammer 3, a popular total overhaul mod, isn't currently compatible with Total War: Warhammer 3 version 9.0, but its creators are working hard to get it there.

It must be galling then to see someone vibe-coding your mod to be compatible with the update, then reuploading it as their own—just another of the AI-coded submods of your work plastered across the Steam Workshop, usually with some ugly AI-generated artwork as the cherry on top.

"Due to the growing number of unauthorized reuploads of SFO: Grimhammer III," Venris, the mod's creator, posted on Patreon, "and more importantly, the use of AI in the process, I have deliberately corrupted the mod to prevent it from functioning with such unauthorized uploads. If this situation continues to escalate, I will make SFO: Grimhammer III private.

"SFO: Grimhammer is the result of nearly ten years of passion and love for this community and the fantasy world. As such, I do not permit anyone to take my work without permission. Especially not for AI-related purposes."

Venris concluded with the call to "Support modders, not AI" and a note that "SFO mods were, are and always will be free for everyone as long as I am here. No paywall."

I don't use SFO Grimhammer 3 myself, as a fairly vanilla player who sticks to camera enhancements and the like, but I understand the frustration. A look at recent mods for games like Skyrim or Project Zomboid shows a deluge of AI, with the comments on every one a list of complaints about how they don't work as advertised.

SFO's temporary sabotage seems to have had the desired effect of drawing attention to the problem, and Venris has now restored the mod to its previous state. "Thank you all for the support you have shown regarding the issue of my work being appropriated through the use of AI", he wrote in another Patreon post. "I appreciate both the supportive comments and the critical ones. Because of the discussion surrounding this matter, I have decided to restore a working version of SFO: Grimhammer III for game version 8.1.1 on Steam.

"I know that my actions will not stop those who choose to appropriate the work of other modders, but they have at least helped bring attention to a problem that is currently affecting the Steam Workshop of our beloved game. For weeks, the Workshop has been flooded with a wave of modifications created entirely using AI. I sincerely hope that the right people will take action so that we can all continue to share our work without fear of it being taken away by others.

"The use of AI in modding is a hot topic. I would simply add that AI should serve as a tool that supports modding, not replace it, and that is how it should remain."

It's hard to imagine Sonic the Hedgehog without his Jungian counterpart: the gun-toting, swear-uttering Shadow the Hedgehog. But Shadow is a relatively late addition to the series' extensive roster of anthropomorphic animals, debuting long after the Genesis days in Sonic Adventure 2—more than that, he was never supposed to stick around.

According to a report from One More Game, Sonic honcho Takashi Iizuka said at the recent Tokyo Game Show that Shadow's popularity was a big surprise to Sonic Team when SA2 came out. "If you have played Sonic Adventure 2, people may know that Shadow basically sort of died at the end of that game," he said.

"We were originally intending to just kind of 'die the character out' (kill him off), but the character Shadow was just so very popular that we decided to revive him in Sonic Heroes.“ He also noted that Shadow is his personal favorite character, and he wants to give him more of a spotlight in the future.

Not that Shadow has ever gone completely by the wayside. He's one of the only Sonic characters other than, well, Sonic, to have his own videogame (even if it wasn't exactly acclaimed) and he was more recently the star of Sonic X Shadow Generations, the best version of one of the best Sonic games on PC. He also remains a fan-favorite among modders, who have the cure if you thought Sonic Mania ought to have been Shadow Mania. We would also be remiss if we didn't mention that the great Keanu Reeves went on a personal journey to voice the beloved bad boy erinaceid.

Sonic Team's relatively lenient fangame policy follows a long history of granting fan whims a hand on the proverbial wheel. How might the world be different if Shadow had truly died at the end of Sonic Adventure 2? We would have never gotten to see him play Olympic-level sports against Bowser, I guess.

The Undead Legions don't have a tech tree. Instead, Nagash—the first and most powerful necromancer with the biggest hat and a goatee made of bones—has a personal web of enhancements called the Black Pyramid. When I saw this in the preview build I sent a screenshot to my coworkers who also had access to the preview and said, "This looks like Path of Exile."

They said the same, and so has everyone playing Nagash while streaming the Lords of the End Times DLC ahead of release. It's an unavoidable comparison when you see this multipath maze of upgrades so twisted it has its own search bar. It really does look like it came from the kind of action RPG you put 500 hours into then leave a negative review of on Steam.

While some branches are dedicated to improving specific troops and characters as well as your economy, plenty are direct buffs for Nagash himself. The nodes that connect those branches are also buffs for Nagash, so even if you dedicate yourself to activating nodes that let you summon every troop type in his expansive roster—he's got access to all three of Total War: Warhammer's undead flavors, the Tomb Kings, the Vampire Counts, and the piratical Vampire Coast—you'll inevitably be Nagashmaxxing as you go.

In no time at all Nagash becomes an absolute beast on the battlefield, casting Abyssal Swarms that create a vortex of bats, which don't harm his own troops but absolutely mince everyone else, then floating in to slice up the survivors with a sword the size of a train while his armor reflects projectiles back on whoever made the mistake of firing them.

Nodes on the Black Pyramid let me add spells to the Books of Nagash so he casts them passively, just lazily sucking the life out of enemies while also bashing them with his blade. Though to get the Books of Nagash I also have to find them out there in the world. Each of the tomes is held by a rogue army because Nagash loaned them out in the distant past and, like the world's crankiest librarian, it's time to collect.

Nagash also has to round up his mortarchs, the nine legendary lords and heroes (and one follower who acts more like an inventory item) he delegates to. These squabbling vampires, necromancers, and reanimated corpses have demands to fulfil before joining, like securing the lost fastness of Nagashizzar and activating 50 empowered sigils in the Black Pyramid. Adding them to the roster one by one feels like I'm slowly becoming Warhammer's most powerful Pokémon master.

What makes them and the Black Pyramid necessary is that when you play Nagash almost everyone hates you. Every time you perform the Ritual of Undeath to spread the Land of the Dead it comes with a diplomatic penalty because for some reason the neighbors don't like it when I turn my backyard into an ashen wasteland where the ground heaves with souls of the damned.

I have to do that to increase the cap on the number of necropolises I can build, which I need to activate more sigils on the Black Pyramid. They're also the only buildings with a decent defensive garrison, while everything else is a piddly little burial mound, mausoleum, or pirate cove that's easily taken by my enemies—who are almost everyone, because of the diplomatic penalties I keep accruing. It's a vicious cycle.

Nagash is the pointy end of an empire that is constantly on the verge of collapse, economically and diplomatically. He's a one-man army blender, but he can't be everywhere at once. After I recruit Luthor Harkon the vampire pirate as a mortarch I gain his holdings all the way over in Lustria, but both the dark elves and the skaven want to take them and if I send Nagash to help, the core of my lands will be hollowed out by the enemies we've got at home.

When the End Times come it's kind of a blessing. As the name of the DLC suggests, Lords of the End Times drops an enhanced apocalypse on your campaign—if you're not playing as Nagash there's a chance he could be yours, in which case good luck—and in my case it's Archaon and his Chaos invasion. He rocks up with five fortresses and 50 (!) roaming armies, which makes everyone else suddenly change their priorities and want to be friends. Suddenly, I'm the most popular girl in school.

Playing as Nagash is a precarious balance. You get to feel OP but also threatened, tearing up opponents when the big guy arrives but with an economy that means defensive armies are often blobs of whatever bony boys you can afford. I've loved it, but I'm also dreading having to face Nagash in my next campaign. He's going to absolutely shred me. Maybe it's not too late to send this soup back.

PAX Australia returns to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in October, and this year's Expo Floor promises to be packed with playable games.

For starters Sega will have four games to try including Total War: Warhammer 40,000 with three playable scenarios, as well as Alien: Isolation 2, Persona 4 Revival, and Yakuza's noir prequel Stranger Than Heaven. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer will also be playable ahead of its October 23 launch.

Square Enix's booth will have a hands-on opportunity for players to try Final Fantasy 14 on Switch 2, then create a bracelet and take a themed photo. FF14's localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and global community producer Toshio 'Foxclon' Murouchi will be taking part in a behind-the-scenes panel where they endure a hot sauce challenge while sharing war stories. Attendees will get an early peak at Final Fantasy 7 Revelation at a special showcase too.

The Ubisoft Community Esports stages will host Rainbow Six Siege competitions, an Assassin's Creed sea shanty singalong, the Ubisoft Cosplay Runway, and a Just Dance-Along, among other events.

PAX Australia runs from October 9–11, and badges are on sale at the official website. I'll be spending most of the weekend at the PAX Rising indie showcase trying to play as many of the more than 90 indie games on show as I can. There's plenty more worth checking out on the full schedule.

Crazy Taxi is a game all about speed—no time for any lore when the average time a passenger spends in your vehicle is under half a minute. I just need to know that you wanna go to the KFC, not why you're heading there in the first place.

Sega is somewhat trying to pump a narrative into its attempt at reviving the series, Crazy Taxi: World Tour—a game I'm not totally sold on yet based on a one-hour hands-on I had at Gamescom. I'm don't know how good a story you can get out of a bloke committing several traffic violations—though then again, you could argue that's every Fast and Furious movie ever—but Netflix clearly sees something in the zaniness as it's one of the many Sega projects the company has decided it wants to adapt.

As reported by Variety, in Crazy Taxi's case, it'll be taking the form of a comedy movie written by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (responsible for Naked Gun's 2025 reboot). On the production side, it'll be handled by Original Films and Toru Nakahara—both of whom also produced all three Sonic the Hedgehog movies along with the Knuckles and Sonic Prime television shows.

"We couldn't be more excited to continue our longstanding relationship with Sega and bring Crazy Taxi to life with our partners at Netflix," a statement from Original Film's Neal H. Moritz and Toby Ascher read. "This film is for anyone who's spent hours behind the wheel of a yellow cab on their Dreamcast, with the music cranked up, smashing through everything in sight just to make the next fare."

Now I am one of those people, but I'm honestly a little unsure how you can get a full 90 minutes of action out of someone with a painfully 90s updo picking people up and dropping them off about 20 meters down the road. Movies have certainly conjured up more material with less, though, so who knows?

That's not all Sega and Netflix has up its sleeve, either. It also has yet another animated Sonic television series in the works, along with a movie adaptation of Stranger Than Heaven. You know, that game that isn't even out yet.

I feel like we've been on a relatively decent hot streak for actual good videogame movie adaptations over the last few years, though I fear Netflix's penchant for turning absolutely anything into a straight-to-streaming romp may careen us right back into mediocre territory before long.

I've played just about every damn iteration of Crazy Taxi there is. My first exposure to it was the PlayStation 2 EyeToy version included in Sega Superstars, which involved me wildly gesticulating and yelling in order to get Axel's attention. Yes, for some reason you are the passenger in the EyeToy version of Crazy Taxi. I don't know either.

Then I spent a fair bit of time behind the wheel in both its Dreamcast and arcade versions—we don't talk about the myriad of mobile travesties—so I was pretty jazzed about the announcement of Crazy Taxi: World Tour. I was promptly un-jazzed by all the generative AI discourse that mired the hours following its reveal trailer, but you know.

Allegedly its use remains firmly in the conceptual stages of development, which I still don't love, but I was determined to not let that cloud my opinion of the game as I sat down to give it a whirl at Gamescom. And honestly? After an hour, I kinda felt like that was all the time I needed with Crazy Taxi: World Tour. As much as I wanted to be sold on a modern-day iteration, I'm just not quite there yet.

My time with the demo popped me behind the wheel as Crazy Taxi poster boy Axel, and dropped me into its thematically-appropriate Germany map. There'll be five cities with the full release, but I imagine most of what I saw in the game's amalgamation of various German cities will be true of the rest of the game.

The traditional Crazy Taxi time-attack style of picking up and dropping off as many passengers as possible is still here, and can be initiated at pretty much any time by stopping in their vicinity. Arguably the more fun part of World Tour, though, are the various side quests and challenges you can undertake. I stumbled (or coasted, I guess) past one that required me to drive around with a whole bunch of pizzas stacked in my back seat, while another one had an adrenaline junkie tag along as I drove off a huge ledge at high speed before coming to a breaking stop below, launching them into the air.

Each of these challenges comes with a star rating slapped onto them—the better I perform, the higher the rating. Pretty simple stuff. The problem is, beyond that, I didn't actually find driving around in Crazy Taxi all that fun. Drifting doesn't quite have that juice to it, and handling feels a lot tighter than it did in the original game, but that's to its detriment.

I also just don't love the way Crazy Taxi: World Tour looks. It has this awfully cheap quality to it, one that feels devoid of any real identity. It doesn't have that wonderful cartoonishness of the original that I'd immediately recognise as a game from Sega's catalogue. It looks like the kind of game that had generative AI heavily involved in its conceptual process. Which as we've already established, it does.

World Tour includes the zany Offspring songs of the original, real-life brands (the Puma store is back in World Tour) and Axel's wild green spiky 'do, but it's wrapped up in an utterly sauceless presentation, one that not even a relatively impressive recreation of Cologne's gothed-out-the-wazoo cathedral can save.

It sucks, because I would absolutely persevere through Crazy Taxi's duller driving portions in favour of seeing it bring real-world locations to life, but as it stands? I'm just not feeling it. I'll be keeping a watchful eye from the sidewalk, but I'm certainly not itching to hop back into the driver's seat of this Crazy Taxi any time soon.

The kids who grew up playing StarCraft on Nintendo 64 must have thumbs of steel. With the exception of a handful of games designed specifically for consoles like Herzog Zwei and Halo Wars, the RTS has not been a genre that's played well with controllers. It remains the heartland of the mouse and keyboard.

And yet, Total War developer Creative Assembly is committed to releasing Total War: Warhammer 40,000 on consoles. The studio's battle product owner Dave Petry told TechRadar at Gamescom he thinks it's a "myth" that controller support doesn't work for the RTS genre and that they've "landed something that really does work."

"Because yes, obviously, controllers are your primary method for using consoles, but it's just an input method. It's an accessibility tool, right? It's how you want to play or how you would like to play, and so we've always wanted to be able to bring that experience to people who want to use a gamepad."

Creative Assembly co-developed Halo Wars 2, which Petry cited as a specific example of a "really strong implementation of controller and RTS," though it benefits from its simplicity. When the more fiddly Age of Empires 2 came out on Xbox it had to have automated villagers who would gather resources and construct farms based on your preset preference, because that kind of micromanagement is a bit of a faff with twin sticks.

Of course, the Total War games leave building and tech trees for the turn-based side of the campaign, and it's only battles that happen in real-time. While the finer points of cycle-charging or drawing missile fire by marching your lord back and forth might not feel as nice with a controller, I'm sure it would be possible.

"I think we are learning that we can do this right, and yeah, it's definitely something that we're all keen to keep evolving as we ship and work on it," Petry said. "I think we've landed in a really solid spot. I think we're quite proud of where we are when it comes to the technical side of things as well."

There once was a time in which, if you were a fan of a videogame, you might get asked which of said games in the series you had played. Now, I'm not saying we need to bring this era back—it was an obnoxious period full of gatekeepers—but Sega president and COO Shuji Utsumi's recent words on the subject are a surprising sign of the times.

Speaking to Nikkei Gaming (thanks, IGN), Utsumi explains that (via machine translation): "For example, the 'Yakuza' series has been doing exceptionally well in merchandising, with 60-70% of its buyers being women. They've become fans of the 'Yakuza' world, story, and characters after watching our YouTube channel and popular YouTubers' streams. And among them are many people who have never actually played the game."

I'm assuming that Utsumi has stats to back that up, rather than just assuming that women don't play videogames (they do, I work with several of them), but it's indeed true that videogames have been enjoying a wider secondary audience thanks to let's players and streamers.

"Even people who have never played games are considered fans and 'gamers' by us," he adds, "transmedia's strength lies in increasing the entry points and contact points for people to become interested in IP. In some cases, their engagement is even higher than that of fans who actually play the games."

That buzzword—transmedia—essentially just means merchandise, movies, comics, and so on. Videogames might be a cornerstone for Sega, but it's using that as a foundation to build up a heap of other points of sale and advertising opportunities: "For example, if there are overseas users who are interested in the scene where a character eats a beef bowl in Yakuza, even a beef bowl can become merchandise. I think that's what merchandising is all about these days."

You heard it here first, folks—we're merchandising beef bowls, now. Maybe if it'd come out six years later, we'd be getting Ichiban-branded bread. It did look good for prison food.

Atlus will probably remake Persona 1 and 2 one day, according to a new interview with series producer Kazuhisa Wada conducted by Rock Paper Shotgun.

"For me, I think a remaster or remake is some kind of cultural preservation," Wada said. "As a creator, it’s your duty to take the things you’ve done and make sure they’re not lost, and are still around in the modern day. From that same perspective, Persona 1 and 2 are something we’ll probably eventually do too.”

Persona Revelations was released on the original PlayStation in 1996. It's actually been lightly reissued before, in 2009 for the PlayStation Portable, and surprisingly, there's even a 1999 PC port that was never released in the west. While it focuses on a cast of school students, the social links system—arguably the series' best trick—wasn't introduced to the series until Persona 3. It's the Persona game that feels closest to the older Shin Megami Tensei games, since it has first-person blobber-style dungeon exploration, though overworld exploration is conducted via an isometric third-person perspective.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin released in 1999, also for the original PlayStation. It replaces first-person dungeon crawling with third-person exploration.

Both games are definitely worth saving from obscurity: I wouldn't necessarily advocate for full-scale remakes, but reissues with a bit of spit and polish would definitely be welcome, especially if, as Wada says, the motive is preservation.

But I'm once again puzzled why Atlus and Sega haven't exhumed some of the brilliant PS2-era Shin Megami Tensei games that remain locked to antiquated consoles. We do have a fairly flimsy port of Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (you need to use a mod to unlock its 30 fps lock) and, confusingly, standalone curio Raidou got a very thorough remake last year; Atlus went as far as revamping its combat, among upgrades.

But where is Digital Devil Saga and its sequel? For anyone who can't get enough of Atlus's Press Turn combat system—and I fancy there are a lot of us—these can't come soon enough. And then there's the huge, oxygen-stealing elephant in the room: Shin Megami Tensei 4 remains a Nintendo 3DS exclusive. SMT 3 and 5 are both available on PC—and are both great, especially the latter—but this fourth instalment remains in utmost obscurity.

The Persona series is undeniably great, but there's a surreal sci-fi severity to the Shin Megami Tensei games that I really, really love. And since those PS2 games will probably scrub up better, and faster, than the Persona games, I'm begging Atlus to address their reissues in this order, please:

• Shin Megami Tensei 4
• Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 (perhaps together)
• Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon

After that, feel free to do what you like, Atlus.

It's like seeing an old friend: the clanking in the vents over your head, the way the ribbed tail passes over objects with a thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk, the head-within-a-head, the screaming. You are here, you are back, you have been impaled through the abdomen and killed.

I have played perhaps 20 minutes of Alien: Isolation 2 at Gamescom 2026 and I can tell you this: it is certainly Alien: Isolation. There are some new wrinkles, though—where the first game was a strictly inside affair, stranding you on the space station Sevastopol, the second game sets you down planetside in an entirely new character's shoes. Fewer air vents, fewer vital systems shuddering to a halt; a lot more weather, a lot more space.

You are Blake. Here are the two things to know about Blake: she is not Amanda Ripley—the first game's protagonist who did not feature at all in my time with Alien: Isolation 2—but she is Weyland-Yutani. Specifically, she's Weyland-Yutani management, and isn't that interesting? You're no working class hero. You're now in the shoes of a character who, in any Alien movie worth its salt, would likely reveal themselves as a villain and end up decapitated about 70% of the way through the film.

Planetside, too

The demo Sega and Creative Assembly put together for Gamescom was a little odd. It consisted of (what I must assume are) the game's opening scenes. Blake and a couple of Weyland-Yutani flunkies are on the surface of a planet and checking out a crash site. In practice, this divides the demo into two: the part where you're wandering outside and the bit where you've penetrated the crashed ship.

Why is this weird? Because the crashed ship was, quite literally, an area from the first Alien: Isolation—one of the units Ripley jettisoned from the Sevastopol in her adventures on the cursed station. It's also the only part of the demo that actually featured the xenomorph. That means I never got a chance to experience the alien in the new, outdoor environments, only in one I had already played before.

I'm happy to predict that being pursued by the xenomorph outside is going to feature whole new dimensions of stress and disorientation over the previous game. In their search for the crash site, Blake and co have to deal with a rising storm on the planet's surface. Rain builds and wind roars, cutting off your senses as you try to navigate the map. I found it stressful, and I wasn't even being chased by a monster at that point.

"You can be in an exterior, and you have the wind and it's really strong, and you throw a flare and it just flies back in your face," says Ana Sopikova, the game's art director, as she describes the new threats you face in the outside world. "What do you do now, right? Or the rain starts and it's really loud and you can't hear the alien's footsteps. So it's basically taken everything that people love, but just adding new layers on top of it… with everything being unscripted, it just creates much more depth in the experience."

Hello, you

After a lot of time getting rained on and lost, I made my way into the crashed ship, and the xenomorph wasted absolutely no time in oozing out of an overhead vent.

All the old fear hormones kicked in. By the end of my time with the first Alien: Isolation, the xenomorph had lost all terror for me. It was just a game mechanic—an obstacle like any other to be circumvented and handled. I guess that immunity wore off, because sneaking about the wreckage of this ship as the alien clanked about over, under, and beside me had my heart rate spiking.

Creative Assembly's still up to its old tricks. The studio makes ample use of Alien's analogue, mechanical world to force you to zoom in on cranks, valves, computer screens, and save points in ways that kneecap your awareness of the room around you and send your imagination into overdrive. It worked in the first game. It works here.

But it was all quite familiar. Without being able to take the alien outside, my experience of dodging it in the new Isolation felt much like it did in the old one. A lot of throwing objects to distract it, ducking under desks, and fervently praying that it wouldn't turn to walk down the path that would lead it directly to me. All good fun, but I'm ready to see how the xenomorph handles touching grass.

To hear Creative Assembly tell it, heading planetside will change the game when it comes time for Alien: Isolation 2's release. "In the first game, and in the sequel as well, [the alien] learns and it adapts," says Sopikova. "This is something that we're putting a lot of focus on, because we don't want the player to just pick their favorite tool and keep using it… And obviously, now with more elements, with exteriors, with the weather, with more variables at play, we can really expand on that depth of how the alien learns. What exactly does it learn about you? How does it affect the way it hunts, and how does it affect you ultimately?" Well, I'm eager to find out.

One of the significant differences between most historical Total Wars and the Warhammer games is that the factions aren't comparable with nations. In Total War: Warhammer 40,000, the Space Marines and Astra Militarum, for instance, are effectively two branches of the same military.

So when I was playing Total War 40k at Gamescom as the Ultramarines, I noticed that my settlement garrison was full of just ordinary soldiers—members of the Planetary Defense Force. These units only served to defend the settlement, like a normal Total War garrison, but they weren't the same units that I could recruit as a Space Marine faction.

"The way that the Imperium works together is going to be very important," Dave Petry, battle product owner, told me. "And working as a Space Marine with local planetary forces and governors to be able to get the support that you need in order to be able to be that tip of the spear, we want that to be the case."

How the Imperium works, and your relationship to it, is still a work in progress, but Petry added that Creative Assembly has been playing around with concepts like "gaining support to be able to bring along units with you to fight your battles". So we might be able to bring in some meat shields from the PDF, or units from the Astra Militarum, to fight alongside our Space Marines.

I already saw a hint of this in the demo I played. In both the medium and massive-sized battles, my Space Marines arrived to find the Astra Militarum already fighting orks. I wasn't able to control them—they were just an allied force—but hopefully this is just a taste of something meatier.

Petry also teased what sounds like a reputation system. "Collaborating among the Imperium is something we really want to be able to do, and managing your reputation in the Imperium as a Space Marine is also something that's very important. Like not doing things that look too much like building an empire or becoming too powerful." So you'll need to keep the Imperium happy and avoid being accused of heresy.

Creative Assembly wants to "fill the galaxy out," says Petry, so we can expect to see other elements of the Imperium appearing. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for some Adeptus Mechanicus fun in the near future. And the studio has already been teasing other Space Marine chapters, like my beloved Space Wolves, as well as xenos threats like Genestealer cults.

The good news is that you won't need to buy three games to see it all this time. Unlike Total War: Warhammer, Total War 40k is going to be a sandbox that Creative Assembly keeps adding to, rather than a series of separate games.

With Total War: Warhammer, Creative Assembly designed a trio of games, each with their own bespoke campaigns, but the core of the series quickly became the mode now known as Immortal Empires—every single faction and lord in one massive sandbox. And that's been a big inspiration for Total War: Warhammer 40,000.

At Gamescom 2026, battle product owner Dave Petry told me that the plan was to make the initial release of Total War 40k the "bedrock" upon which Creative Assembly will continue to build, rather than splitting it up into a trilogy.

"We're going to have major releases," he told me, "we're going to update this game with some significant stuff in varying sizes, but we're looking at what Total War is and looking at things like Immortal Empires. Like the true experience is the sandbox. That's what we want to build, and that's what we want to continue building on, and bringing that into one place so that there are so many different ways that players could enter and still get to experience the whole thing without being siphoned off and only getting to experience a part of it.

"We just felt that was super super important, and it also puts us in a position to build better together, and to work on the same thing in the same space with the same problems, and just keep making it better together with everyone. So yeah, it felt like the right thing to do, and it's just such a huge galaxy to fill. So it made sense to treat this as sort of like that bedrock to start building a new future."

Creative Assembly has already been teasing what might be added to the sandbox after launch, too.

Initially, we'll have four customisable factions: Space Marines, Astra Militarum, Aeldari and Ork. Compared to fantasy Warhammer, that's a pretty tiny number, but we can expect other Space Marine chapters to come down the line. Space Wolves are already confirmed, which is all I really needed to hear. But Genestealer cults are also on the table, and of course Chaos is always waiting in the wings.

Total War 40k is due in 2027, and from the hour I played at Gamescom, it's shaping up to be something pretty special.

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.

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.

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.

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.