Final Fantasy 14 has sent my unintimidating, run-of-the-mill-looking cat girl on all manner of world-saving missions. She's squared up with a dying god on the moon, fist fought an alien super weapon, and even confronted the literal embodiment of nihilism at the ends of the universe. My girl has been through a lot, but the MMO is pretty good at making me feel like there's no challenge I can't rise to meet.

Well, that is until you give her a fishing rod. For a cat person, my little Warrior of Light absolutely sucks with a rod and tackle box. You would think the hero of the universe could do a little black magic and complete her fishing log, but nah. I haven't even caught fish that Final Fantasy 14 added over a decade ago. It's that dire.

So I'm not joking when I say that nothing, and I mean nothing, in Final Fantasy 14 intimidates me in the same ways some of its strictest fishing challenges do. I don't care how hard the raid is or what new world-destroying evil awaits in the next expansion; the Bobgoblin Bass is enemy number one forever and always.

As for the title of enemy number two, I'm awarding that to the Purse of Riches.

Like so much of the ultra-rare aquatic life in Final Fantasy 14, both fish are finicky bastards that only nibble on your reel under specific environmental conditions. For the Bobgoblin, you have to wait for the MMO's weather system to bless an old Heavensward map with a very specific weather pattern. Then it's all got to happen within a certain in-game time window.

Before Square Enix updated Fish Eyes—an ability that removes time requirements from rare fish in old expansions—you had to wait for the stars to align in a brief five-minute window every few days, weeks, or sometimes even a month. The opportunity could arise at any time, even at 3 am on a Wednesday night, because the fish don't care if you have to wake up for work in a few hours. Happen to sleep in and miss it? Tough. Your next chance is in another five-minute window a month from now.

Fruity Snacks, one of the MMO's resident angler experts, has even documented the freshwater terror's downtime on X, but now there's another sea creature driving FF14's bravest players mad. It's my aforementioned enemy number two, the Purse of Riches. If you don't catch the elusive guppy by August 1, you'll have to wait 92 days before you can try (and possibly fail) to catch it during another short window. Then it's back to waiting.

Maybe I wouldn't have even bothered with this particular challenge right now had it not been for a post on X from Mr Happy, who blessedly warned players about the upcoming drought in its availability window, but I'm back on my bullshit (achievement hunting in Final Fantasy 14), and need to make a dent in my long-neglected fishing log.

"Getting a house, fishing and finding enough inventory for hoarding glam," wrote Happy in a response to another player. "These challenges scare hardcore FFXIV players."

The PSA was much appreciated, but his follow up is what really rekindled my reluctant interest in the MMO's most cursed job. Fishing may seem like one of those things snubbed as "casual" for whatever reason, but he's got the right read of it. I've spent weeks and months throwing myself at Ultimate raids, Blue Mage challenges, and the no-death dungeon runs of Criterion Savage, but I'm still too intimidated by these soul-crushing spawn windows to get serious about fishing for more than a day.

I say that, but here I am, writing this just after failing to catch the Purse again, and I'll be waiting in this same spot for its next spawn window in 11 days. Remind me to bring more than 10 pieces of bait next time. That was more embarrassing than any goofy raid death.

Japanese fans of the mega-franchise Love Live!, which spans anime, manga, live performances, and games, recently spotted that the domain for the official fan club of Aqours expired and is now up at auction. Top bid? 97.14 billion yen, or $615 million dollars to you, sir.

There are various iterations of Love Live!, all of them being either Jpop groups or solo idols, but Aquors is arguably the most wide-ranging and successful, with over a decade's worth of games, several anime seasons, and live performances. The official Aquors fan club was shuttered in June 2025, which probably explains the timing of this, and fans are fuming that Bandai Namco has let the registration lapse in this manner.

After the shutdown last year, the Aqours Club domain—lovelive-aqoursclub.jp—switched from its previous form to display a fairly standard "thank you and goodbye" message to any visitors. As of May 1 2026, however, that's changed to an auction for the domain hosted by Japanese registration service Onamae. The auction ends on May 27, and obviously is being gamed: either it's Love Live fans making a point, which seems the more likely explanation, or trolls having a laugh.

The main cause of consternation among fans seems to be that a once-official domain being acquired by a third party opens up the brand and fans to malicious behaviour: this may seem pie-in-the-sky, but the domain currently remains linked across many other official Love Live! sites, including the main one.

Japanese news outlet ITmedia writes (thanks, Automaton): "If the domain falls into the hands of a third party, there is a risk that phishing sites mimicking the official fan club could be created. Since the domain is identical to the genuine one, it cannot be ruled out that such sites could bypass browser security features or cause password management tools to automatically fill in usernames and passwords.”

The Aqours fan club ran alongside the second season of the anime focusing on this particular version of the group, and was tied-in to various pieces of merch and games around it: the old "buy a CD and enter this code for a year's free membership" kinda thing.

But I did promise you furious fans. "Is Bandai Namco stupid or what?" asks AkiraReynir (via machine translation). "A fool who discards the domain less than a year after ending service! They've apparently already forgotten that their brand domain got hijacked before, and that there was a series collab on onamae.com. Beyond saving."

Eesh! The Japan DNS Operators Group has previously made calls for "end-of-life planning" when it comes to such sites: "When discontinuing a domain, it is recommended to put it into dormancy, perform reverse SEO measures such as requesting removal from search engines and backlink sites, and removing content from archive sites, and only make a decision [about abandoning the URL] after the number of DNS queries falls below a predetermined 'threshold.'"

Well, that clearly hasn't happened here: though I somehow doubt Onamae are getting their $615 million. But it does prove at least, as PCG's Jessica Kinghorn put it, that Love Live fans are "simply something else."

The Overwatch gang has finally arrived in Fortnite, and you know what that means. That's right, we're talking about Tracer's butt again. Fans are convinced that Tracer's backside got buffed in her Fortnite incarnation, and you know, I think they might be right.

Some quick history, for those who either weren't around 10 years ago, or are fortunate enough to have memory-holed the whole thing: One of the big controversies in the early days of Overwatch (and this is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I swear it's true) was the bodaciousness of Tracer's booty. First, gamers complained that an over-the-shoulder victory pose had too much ass, so Blizzard changed it and then other gamers complained that there was not enough ass.

Ten years later, former Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan said the amount of ass actually "stayed exactly the same"—it was merely the pose itself that changed. As PC Gamer's resident knower-of-Overwatch Elie Gould said, a decade of water under the bridge had turned the whole thing into something of a joke, although there's no doubt in my mind that an undercurrent of resentment and rage continues to flow through some corners of the online world.

Which brings us to today. Just a month after Kaplan's comment, Tracer's caboose is back in the conversation, because some of the folks on the TracerMains suibreddit—and today I learned there is a TracerMains subreddit—seem pretty sure that she's been re-proportioned for the Fortnite crossover.

Tracer has a bigger butt in Fortnite from r/TracerMains

Look, I'm not here to objectify videogame characters or anything, but speaking entirely observationally and clinically, yeah, that's a big dumper. The Unreal Engine's really working overtime to render this one.

For purposes of comparison, here's the original Tracer tush that caused all the uproar a decade ago:

So yeah, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that one of these things is not like the other.

Another angle:

The way I see it, there are two possibilities at play here—three, I suppose, if you include the possibility that we're all just imagining the maximizing of those glutes: One, the good folks at Epic know what they like and they're not afraid to let their freak flag fly, or two, the Unreal Engine is just naturally back-loaded, so to speak. I have no idea which it might be, but I hope it's the former.

As a conscientious videogame journalism professional, I have reached out to Epic Games to ask if they did indeed give Tracer some newly embiggened ham cakes, because that's the sort of thing I do on a Friday afternoon when everyone just wants to get out of the office and go home. I'll let you know if anyone replies.

When a pirated version of early access survival game Subnautica 2 started going around before its release, some took to bragging about dodging the game's $30 price tag directly in the official Discord channel.

"Thanks for pirating a game that I've spent years working on," game design lead Anthony Gallegos replied to one such self-reported pirate. "I'm disappointed that you'd do that when it's kind of how we make our living. I hope you rethink your life choices."

A subset of users on the r/piracy subreddit responded harshly to the designer's expression of disappointment, with some claiming that he must be fabulously wealthy. "This is like a man in a solid gold suit spitting at a homeless person," decided one poster.

It's obviously no surprise that the denizens of r/piracy approve of piracy, but the hostility was surprising. Even diehard pirates can understand that it is not endearing to brag about pirating someone's game to their face, and the perception that regular employees of a game studio are swimming in cash is naive. Gallegos is rather far removed from a music industry exec suing Napster kids in the 2000s.

It didn't help that there is persistent confusion about Krafton's failed attempt to get out of a $250 million payout that it may owe developer Unknown World's founders and CEO, some of which could be distributed to others at the studio—we lack details.

In another comment on the official Discord channel, Gallegos straightened out the record a bit.

"Just to be clear, pirates are gonna do their thing. We were all kids once. Money and the economy is very hard. I get it," wrote the designer. "It wasn't the piracy that bothered me. It was the people that flagrantly walked in here and wagged it in the faces of people who were waiting to play legitimately. That was the part that aggravated me. That and the Reddit responses that keep talking like i'm a millionaire. I'm very much [not]. I don't own a home. I rent.

"There's a lot of misinformation going around and we just wanted the best launch possible for our people. All that to say, I understand and thank you for supporting the studio ultimately. I cannot condone piracy, but I get why people do. I would much rather people buy the game, try it for an hour, and return it than go play it illicitly."

This prompted a second, more sympathetic thread on r/piracy, in which users discussed the Discord bragging as a breach of pirate etiquette, or a narcissistic need for validation.

"Going into the server to brag you're playing a leaked game is such a shitty move," reads one of the top comments.

"Just pirate and play, there is no need to make a moral crusade," says another.

One person summed up their attitude as: "I'm someone who just wants free shit. The taunting is completely unnecessary."

Subnautica 2 launched on Thursday for $30 in early access, which feels like a sensible price to me based on my experience so far. There's plenty I think could be improved, and the full world and story isn't there yet, but it's good fun and offers some lovely undersea vistas.

Overwatch players expected a lot more for its 10th anniversary in-game event. For many, grinding for loot boxes that contain old skins with new colorways and some sprays didn't feel worthy of such a significant milestone, not to mention the huge amount of games you have to play to earn them in the first place.

In a game with a massive catalog of cosmetics—many of which were only available for a limited time—players had hoped there would be a way to earn them through the anniversary event. It was a reasonable expectation to have considering Overwatch 1 used to offer anniversary loot boxes that contained almost everything that has ever existed in the game. And it didn't help that the Chinese version of the event seems to shower players with rewards, some of which aren't even available for everyone else, like skins from old seasonal battle passes.

The disappointment players expressed on social media was strong enough to prompt a response from game director Aaron Keller on X. In it, he called the reactions "fair" and announced some improvements to the rewards coming next week.

Instead of needing to grind out almost 100 matches to earn the anniversary loot boxes, you'll only need to complete 60, with wins counting as two. In addition to that, the loot boxes rewarded to everyone for filling up a meter based on players collectively completing challenges will be doubled next week and tripled the week after. And in the final week, everyone who logs in will get a special anniversary loot box that has four Legendary skins.

Keller also announced that the next season will have a new event with "even more rewards" and that the team is working on ways to offer more free cosmetics "later in the year." In other words, the 10th anniversary celebration will continue for the next few seasons in some shape or form.

"I understand that future rewards don't make this specific event bigger, but I hope it gives some context for how we're thinking about this year as a whole," Keller wrote.

Early reactions to the news are mostly positive, although some players still think the recolored anniversary skins aren't good enough. I've seen people argue that Blizzard should be handing out some of the most expensive skins in the game for free and others say that they're surprised they got anything for free.

Personally, the flood of pricey shop cosmetics over the last few years has kept my expectations low when it comes to events like these, but I still think Blizzard could've done something more exciting for the 10th anniversary. The "classic" mode that attempts to emulate the original game as it was when it launched is a neat addition, and it would've been cool to see a bunch of cosmetics that actually tie into the game's history. It's Overwatch after all, an FPS that basically created an entire sub-genre. Not a lot of games do that and also manage to stick around for a decade. A set of slightly renewed skins and some sprays that recreate memes doesn't really match the gravity of such an achievement.

After a long and legally tumultuous development, Subnautica 2 made its splashdown into early access yesterday with an impressive launch, drawing hundreds of thousands of players in its first 30 minutes and selling more than 2 million copies before 12 hours were up. Today, Unknown Worlds is following up that triumphant launch day with its first early access roadmap, giving us a glimpse at its plans for Subnautica 2's first few updates—albeit a fairly vague one.

"Updates will vary from focused improvements that address systems and smaller features, to hot fixes when needed, and then our larger expansions," Unknown Worlds says in its roadmap announcement. "So, as we build towards the next big drop that expands on the world, biomes, creatures, resources, tools, vehicles, and brings you the next chapter of the story, we’ll be planning on adding several improvement updates in the meantime!"

The first of those incremental updates will be focused on quality-of-life and general usability, featuring planned improvements for the biomods system that provides active and passive perks through the exciting application of fish DNA, a tune-up for taking care of blight infestations, better spaceship wrecks, smoother vehicle docking and fabrication at bases, and adjustments to PDA memos and voicelog audio priority. It'll add some new features, too. Like a sprint button. You know, like landwalkers do.

Incremental update number two will be aimed at polishing up co-op play, with improvements planned for HUD signals, base-building, and pinning recipes. That's also when we can expect in-game voice chat, player emotes, trading, additional player customization, and—crucially—the ability to revive your friend after they've been savaged by a large predatory eel.

After those arrive, Unknown Worlds says we can expect major updates with more substantial additions like new world regions and biomes, more creatures, additional resources to collect and tools to craft, and best of all: more submersibles.

"And, of course, we will continue to roll out bug fixes, balance tuning, optimizations, and other related updates throughout Early Access," Unknown Worlds says. "We’ll be monitoring your feedback very closely to help guide those ongoing improvements!"

Somewhat frustratingly, the roadmap doesn't include any timeframe for when we might expect any of these minor or major updates. But rest assured, once there's a more accurate forecast for how Subnautica 2's tides are changing, we'll have it for you here.

While Deadlock's sort-of-launch last year was proof that Valve does, in fact, still make videogames, its immaculate vibes served as a different sort of reminder: That the studio remains among the best in the business of characterful animation. From Meet the Heavy's moments of tender minigun affection to the cyclopean gesticulation of Portal 2's Wheatley, Valve's artists and animators are masters at the subtle craft of imbuing even virtual and inhuman characters with humanity.

Which is why it felt fitting to learn that Valve's house style has Muppet DNA in the mix, thanks to a Jim Henson Company puppeteer that helped the studio bring its characters to life.

I learned about Valve's rainbow connection while doing a regular reappraisal of the studio's lore, as all professional writers on the PC games beat are dutybound to perform. In Geoff Keighley's The Final Hours of Portal 2, an interactive book about the project's closing stages and its developers that was originally released for the iPad in 2011, there's a moment where the nascent Game Awards magnate mentions the presence of "the puppeteer who played the character of Red Fraggle on the 1980s television show Fraggle Rock."

That puppeteer, I soon learned, was Karen Prell. Prell was hired to work at the Jim Henson Company in 1979 at the age of 20, after Muppets creator Jim Henson had watched an audition tape that Prell had made while still a teenager. Henson was impressed enough to invite her to audition for the Company in person in New York City, where she was hired the same day.

During her tenure of working and performing alongside globally-recognized innovators in the crafts of puppetry, animatronics, and practical effects at the company, Prell was asked by Henson in 1982 to puppet Red Fraggle, one of the show's central—and eventually, one of its most popular—characters, when she was just 22. In 1986, she achieved puppetry apotheosis in Henson's Labyrinth, where she was the puppeteer of the worm.

In 1997, Prell entered what she calls on her website her "second career" by entering employment at yet another landmark institution of the visual arts: She signed on as an animator at Pixar, working on films like A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, and Geri's Game—that delightful short of the old man playing chess, which just warped my brain backwards in time by two decades simply by being remembered.

Career number three came for Prell in 2007, when she was convinced by her animator peers and friends to interview at Valve despite never having played a videogame in her life. As you might expect from a studio given the chance to hire someone who boasts experience as both a Jim Henson Company puppeteer and a Pixar animator, Valve didn't pass on the opportunity.

Prell's earliest work at the studio was as an animator and playtester on Left 4 Dead, during which, Keighley writes, "the younger Valve employees got quite a kick out of hearing Karen scream expletives after a Boomer zombie had spit vision-impairing bile on her screen." From there, she'd continue to have a hand in some of Valve's most beloved games, contributing concepting and animation for TF2 and its Meet the Team shorts, in-game animations and mocap cleanup for Left 4 Dead 2, and—her crowning achievement at Valve—Portal 2's Wheatley.

"Wheatley was designed, modelled and rigged by Richard Lord before I tackled his acting," Prell writes on her website. "Wheatley’s animation process involved creating an extensive and intricately planned library of reusable movement and acting components that could be rapidly composited together to create unique actions for each of his hundreds of lines of dialogue. Wheatley’s acting, movements and timing were heavily influenced by the stylized acting I employed while performing hand puppets."

As Wheatley's animator, Prell did the impossible: She bestowed life on an orb. With all his carefully crafted squints, dilations, and emphatic plate flexing, Wheatley manages to seem more lively and emotive in 2011 than some humanoid characters are today. I mean, look at Kliff Crimsondesert. Guy barely seems to register that he's alive. And if that wasn't enough, she also contributed animation work for the co-op bots and GladOS, assisted with localization, and even pitched in on Portal 2 apparel and merchandising design.

After appearing in the credits of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Artifact, Half-Life: Alyx, the latest Valve release that lists Prell's name is 2022's Aperture Desk Job. After making an indelible mark on the studio's visual language, she returned to career number one, reprising her role as Red Fraggle for Apple TV's 2022 reboot of Fraggle Rock.

Readers, games media's quest to bring you word of the latest, greatest, dearest and weirdest videogames has once again taken it to distant shores. Also taking it to distant shores: an unslakeable lust for fried squid.

That's why our pals at GamesRadar+ are bringing you a new showcase from Japan's BitSummit Punch 2026: the BitSummit Punch Mixtape Presented by GamesRadar+. Try saying that on one lungful.

Airing on May 26 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm BST / 6 pm CET, the BitSummit Punch Mixtape is a 60-minute affair featuring interviews, trailers, world premieres—all the many delicious fruits of the videogame showcase circuit.

The show will go live on GamesRadar's website, its YouTube channel, and its Twitch. If you can see a GR+ logo, odds are good the BitSummit Mixtape is airing there, is what I'm saying. You'll also be able to find out more about all the games on show over at the official BitSummit Steam event page.

Which should be enough to convince you to pin the date in your diary, so far as I'm concerned, but just in case you are not yet fully tempted, consider: this year's BitSummit theme is "High Impact."

That is to say, this year's theme is hitting things really hard, in the grand tradition of excellent Japanese fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken. So you better believe this year's event is big on a new generation of devs doing the good work of making punching feel good.

But even if you're a lover and not a fighter, it's worth your time to tune in. The show's got a true grab-bag of genres lined up for you on the big day, and there's only one way to catch it all live as it happens.

It's tuning in. Tuning in is the only way to catch it live as it happens. Just wanted to make sure we're clear.

Game developers are burning through genres, high concepts, and even annoying machines that scammed you on the boardwalk as a child to fuel quick-hit Balatro-likes or Vampire Survivors-likes at the same rate the smartphone industry's sucking down rare earth minerals. I get why: compulsive play is core to the design, they can be made relatively fast and relatively cheap, and a day or two on the Steam charts (or a viral Twitch stream or YouTube video) can drive 100,000 sales at a time when just surviving to make another game feels like a real win.

But good lord are there a lot of them. 257 new roguelites have dropped on Steam in the last 30 days, according to SteamDB, and even discounting the shovelware there are too many to keep track of. There are the deckbuilders, the action games, the… Minesweeper-likes? That tag doesn't even cover games like Far Far West that prioritize weightier descriptions—FPS, online co-op, loot—perhaps because that combination of words carries an innate implication with it. Of course a co-op horde shooter with randomized loot is a roguelite. Duh.

Perhaps this bite-sized style of repetitive play (with soothing metaprogression!) is what our fractured psyches are best suited to at the moment. They're the game equivalent of doomscrolling without looking up for four straight hours, most of that time wasted on glazed-over unblinking eyes except for the one really funny video that will stick in the mind (the game equivalent of a truly sick Balatro hand). At least we're playing "gambling" games instead of pouring the last dregs of our inflation-ravaged checking accounts into prediction markets, right?

I was ready to declare that I'm fully worn out on the format—that I hope we're nearing the bottom of the barrel for ideas that can be crammed like Play-Doh through the deckbuilder or Survivor mold—and then some jerk went and announced Pin-Crawl, "a dungeon crawling pinball rogue-lite."

Ah damn. Ah hell. As translator Stephen Meyerink posted on Bluesky where I first saw the game: I'm in danger. You're killing me here, Eddy.

Pinball is my kryptonite, or maybe more accurately the cheese you can bait a trap with to make me go all Monterey Jack. Is its pull diminished slightly by not being an actual, physical pinball machine? Sure! Nothing beats the real thing.

But in the same way that Balatrofying mahjong was a grave threat to my friend Baxter, the compulsive nature of crafting wildly multiplicative roguelite builds but with the trappings of pinball is like a lab-grown block of cheese bioengineered to my exact olfactory wavelength.

Pin-Crawl, which has a page on Steam but currently no release date, doesn't at a glance have the same pixel art and particle oomph as Xenotilt or Demon's Tilt, which are great (but more conventional) digital pinball tables. But Pin-Crawl has the roguelite twist, where upgrades start doing crazy shit like bombarding the screen with stars or triggering frenzied multiballs and "spells to give you a unique advantage against the dungeon's inhabitants." It has stats! Bosses! Meta progression, no doubt, that will make more exciting things happen the longer I play, even if I don't get any better at the actual pinball!

I want to say no thanks, I don't need any of that. But I can't. I do need it. I need it because I played Sonic Spinball as a child and haven't been entirely right since.

This is not the first game to put a twist of this sort on pinball: there's another one coming out this year, even. But more common, somehow, is the pinball metroidvania, which requires a bit more commitment and I think is a tougher sell. Pinball is better in short sessions, and metroidvanias need a bit more narrative pull to keep you engaged over the long term, a tricky marriage that in my experience only Yoku's Island Express has pulled off brilliantly.

Despite being a metroidvania, Yoku's Island Express is a breezy game, easy to polish off in a single weekend. I assume that whenever I play Pin-Crawl the weekend will instead evaporate, leaving me wondering where the hell 48 hours of my life just went—but at least I'll have one 3.6-billion point multiball combo to show for it.

Remember the metaverse? I do, occasionally, when circumstances conspire to remind me. It will never not amuse me that there were two schools of thought during those heady days: Self-proclaimed super-genius Mark Zuckerberg renamed his whole damn multi-billion-dollar company after it, and PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon called bullshit. Guess who was right? (Hint: Not Zuck.)

Like a heart continuing to beat after the brain has gone silent, the multiverse of metaverses has quietly persisted, but bit by bit, those organs are starting to shut down too. Meta said in March that the VR version of Meta Horizon Worlds is closing in June, and now vtuber agency Hololive has announced that its metaverse project Holoearth is going away too.

"Since launching Holoearth we continued operations with the support of many users, but after careful consideration regarding the ability to provide service into the future we arrived at this decision," the Holoearth team said in the shutdown announcement (via Delisted Games). "We offer our sincerest apologies for being unable to meet the expectations of everyone who supported us, and we deeply appreciate everyone who found enjoyment through Holoearth.

"It is our hope that the myriad of experiences in Holoearth, the bonds formed among users, and the time spent in this world will remain with everyone as cherished memories. While the time remaining until the end of service is short, we hope you can continue to enjoy the world of Holoearth until the final moment."

The concept of Holoearth as a more immersive way for fans to interact with vtubers sounded interesting, and the popularity of Hololive—one of the biggest vtuber agencies in the world—gave it at least the potential to be a viable moneymaker, which was of course the real point of the whole thing. But it was somewhat limited, too: As we noted in 2025, for instance. Holoearth split vtuber audiences, which regularly number in the thousands, into instanced rooms of 50, which would commonly fill up quickly. Such relatively small groups might have also diminished the feeling of being in the midst of a big community of fans, one of the big attractions of Holoearth in the first place.

"Holoearth was created with the theme of 'another world,' and has strived to be a place where talents, creators, and users can connect and make new experiences that transcend the boundaries of the virtual dimension," Holoearth project lead Ikko Fukuda said. "The time you spent there, along with each encounter and memory, are precious to us, and will remain with everything involved in this project. Furthermore, the technologies and learnings cultivated through Holoearth will live on in Hololive Production's future efforts, helping pave the way to new experiences.

"There may have been some shortcomings on our part along the way—but even so, we are grateful that everyone continued to visit, enjoy, and support the world of Holoearth."

Well, that's certainly nicer than what we got from the Meta Horizon Worlds shutdown.

The "final moment" for Holoearth will arrive on June 28, when the service will be shuttered outright. Sales of the premium HoloCoin currency have already been halted, while the sale of "Holoearth premium items" and user-made items will end on June 3. Non-premium items will remain up for grabs until the service shuts down. Any Holocoin or Creator Points that are unused when Holoearth goes offline will be refunded.

Blizzard recently dropped the first big patch for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, addressing several issues that cropped up in the first few weeks of the expansion. Disabled items that were breaking the game came back and a mountain of bugs were fixed, including one that was supposed to help players make their characters a little tougher against the demons of Sanctuary.

It was not, however, supposed to grant them near-immortality.

One of the main defensive mechanics in the game is called resolve. Basically, it's a buff several classes can stack up that reduces their damage taken from all sources. In Diablo 4, this kind of damage reduction is incredibly important as you move up in the difficulty tiers in your search for better loot. Monsters fling lightning bolts at you, leave poison pools on the ground, and make all sorts of other attacks that frequently overlap when you're clearing through crowds of them.

To not get popped like a balloon, you need a lot of damage reduction. The recent patch fixed one of the strongest ways to achieve this: a Legendary power called Glynn's Anvil. Before, it did absolutely nothing. But now, when you slap this power onto one of your items, you'll gain 4% damage reduction for every stack of resolve you have, capped at eight stacks, or 24% damage reduction, by default. That would be a lot on its own, but Blizzard didn't catch a separate bug that takes this to game-breaking levels of damage reduction.

Several classes, like paladins and spiritborn, can add a stat onto their gear that increases their resolve cap by three. That wouldn't be a problem if upgrading your item—and therefore the stat—didn't inexplicably bring it up to 12, an increase that was clearly not intended. You can exploit this weird math on three pieces of gear and increase your total resolve stacks to 44. With Glynn's Anvil now working, that gives you 176% damage reduction, AKA the closest thing to immortality you'll ever achieve in Diablo 4.

Diablo 4 creator MacroBioBoi demonstrated how ridiculous this bug is in a recent video. Without the resolve stacks, he took a 30,000 damage hit. With them, he was tickled for merely 4,000 damage. He still takes damage because the math for damage reduction is multiplicative, which essentially means you can't perfectly negate 100% of it. But Macrobioboi's results show how absurdly powerful this can be for max level characters who are already built to be pretty tanky. It's the difference between needing to chug an emergency potion and not drinking one ever again, especially if your build naturally regains life over time.

And this is without taking advantage of the unique mechanics different classes have that interact with resolve, like a Legendary power that gives you an increased chance to block incoming attacks for every stack of resolve (a 100% chance to block is easily achievable with this bug).

Blizzard must've been so busy playing whack-a-mole with people achieving infinite damage it missed a bug that let people achieve infinite defense. It's been a few days and the studio still hasn't mentioned that a fix is incoming, but I doubt this is a bug that will last very long. Some of the game's most valuable loot is locked behind bosses who can one-shot you with some of their attacks and I'm sure Blizzard wouldn't want half of the classes essentially getting it all for free.

Valve has released a huge update to the Steam Community Market, which is ostensibly in beta though it has already been enabled for all Steam users (you can choose to opt-out). It is a big change in how the whole thing looks, feels and works, with a bunch of significant upgrades along with more granular tweaks to the whole experience of buying a virtual gun.

PC Gamer's already covered the changes, though I'll go over some of them again, but the main reason I noticed the update was that a Counter-Strike gun I've had listed for ages, and had long since forgotten about, somehow sold earlier this week. It was an M4A1-S Guardian skin in "Field Tested" condition, and I'd stuck it up years ago for $40 and promptly forgotten about the whole thing.

To be clear, I'm about as far from a big-time skin trader as you can get: I just used to play a hell of a lot of CS:GO, and over the years accumulated a whole bunch of skins. Most of which are next-to-worthless, of course, but whenever I get one that I don't intend to use and is worth a few quid, up it goes. I don't study the market or the fluctuations of individual items, but thanks to this update I was able to easily identify a P90 that, for some reason, is now worth $36.

It may be sheer coincidence that my M4 sold, but the marketplace experience is now so much smoother on both sides of the equation. Sorting through items you might want to buy is now a dream (especially so when you look at the prices on an AWP Fade), and I just listed that P90 in roughly ten seconds start-to-finish.

Counter-Strike 2 is the guinea pig for the marketplace changes, for the understandable reason that it's probably the largest item-trading community on Steam, though Valve says there are "more than 13,000 games" on the platform that offer tradeable items, and over 700 that feature in-game items (the large discrepancy will be down to the number of games that have stickers).

Counter-Strike items have been used "to experiment and build out this extensive item integration," but the features will work across all games, with many being applied automatically and retroactively.

As for the wider marketplace changes, a quick whistle stop tour. Item listings are nice and all, but you know what's better? BIGGER item listings. These now include more images, more detailed descriptions, and callouts for specific item information "wear/float, pattern template, applied accessories, etc."

Counter-Strike items now have automatically generated images for each listing showing the particular item rather than a generic version. The most obvious benefit of this, in the case of Counter-Strike 2, is that you used to have to start up and view the item in-game to see this information, and now it's all there on the marketplace. Valve also notes this is not just about new listings: "As part of our internal testing we generated over 27,000,000 unique images to backfill existing Counter-Strike listings."

If you're after a super-specific item, you'll now get a larger listing view of it and be able to easily flip through the variants to make comparisons. Similar items will all be grouped on one page to this end, with tabs to filter them / preview details. All of this extra data is also worked into the new marketplace's "filtering, grouping, and visibility", unique item properties can be added to listings, and attached items like stickers and charms have their information surfaced "to show better images and current values."

Alongside the major changes are a slew of quality of life updates, including: "automatic loading of listings while scrolling, broader access to advanced search from more page headers, breadcrumb navigation, and text entry support across long lists."

There's no two ways about it, this is just a vast improvement to the experience of browsing the Steam marketplace: which has always been functional but not the most friction-free and pleasant experience, with stuff tucked away in all sorts of nooks and crannies. And I do think that my M4A1-S suddenly selling after being on there for so long is thanks to this update. Either way I'm halfway towards my new Steam controller: Thanks Gabe!

It's a common lament in gaming communities that the people with the most decision-making power over the industry—from CEOs of major studios to politicians drafting new policy—often seem the least informed on how it actually works. But beyond mentally filing such moments away as further proof that all rich people are idiots, we don't tend to talk much about why there might be such big gaps in these people's knowledge.

A new report released by charity OKRE and trade association UKIE suggests that there's a huge lack of accessible data covering the games industry. "The full impact of the videogames sector is currently not well understood, not just in terms of its economic value, but particularly in relation to its wide-ranging social and cultural influence", it claims. "As a result, decisions about and within the sector are based on a limited, partial view."

The report itself doesn't make for the most digestible reading, but the gist is that it argues for a more unified and comprehensive framework for games industry-related research, and proposes one that could be used going forward.

For that to actually make a difference, what we'd need next is for games companies, academic researchers, and politicians to pick it up and run with it. How likely that is to happen I've no idea, but it's certainly an interesting angle of thought.

Many a time I've found myself annoyed with mainstream media coverage of games that seems to understand them only in terms of how much money they make ("It's bigger than the film industry!") but have a dreadful grasp on their cultural relevance and how players actually experience them. But if the only unified, reliable, far-reaching data about the industry that's being put out into the wider world is about sales and share prices, maybe that's a natural result—and maybe a different approach could further everyone's understanding of the medium for the better.

If you've got the academic know-how to take it all in, the full report is freely available to read online.

It looks like infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll is staging a comeback: The Hollywood Reporter says he's begun production on a new film called 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead, a spiritual successor to his 2003 flick House of the Dead, based on the Sega game series of the same name.

The report says Michael Roesch, a long-time Boll collaborator who worked with him on films including Blubberella, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (which somehow features Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Kristtanna Loken, Matthew Lillard, and Burt Reynolds, to which I say, what the hell), Bloodrayne (with a comparably stack cast—Ben Kingsley! Michael Madsen! Michelle Rodriguez! Billy Zane! Udo Kier! Meat Loaf!) and House of the Dead. Jonathan Cherry and Ona Grauer, who starred in the 2003 film, will return for this one.

Boll's been out of the gamer eye for some years now, but he's continued to produce and direct poorly-received flicks based on other topics, like migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the Bandidos gang, and "the first QAnon mass murder." His return to the world of videogame cinema was apparently inspired in part by director Paul W.S. Anderson, who's working on an officially licensed reboot of House of the Dead.

"When I heard that Paul Anderson is rebooting House of the Dead, I immediately knew that it will be a soulless CGI orgy," Boll said. "And I want to do a completely different zombie movie: Bloody, gory and handmade."

How "completely different" Boll's new film will be remains to be seen: The plot isn't known at this point but the title is kind of a giveaway. "We're upgrading from a house full of zombies to a castle full of zombies," Roesch said.

Well, look: Nobody's going to see these things for the enthralling cinematic experience they offer. Uwe Boll was making videogame adaptations long before Hollywood took the medium seriously, after all—primarily as a means of exploiting loopholes in German tax law.

You know what you're in for when you go to see one of his films—shlock and garbola—and at this point in his long, legendary career (and I mean that entirely unironically, this is a man who challenged five of his harshest critics to boxing matches and beat the shit out of all of them) I'd be disappointed if he delivered anything else. Imagine if Uwe Boll demonstrated growth as a commercially viable director by putting out, say, a serviceable Mortal Kombat film? I think the world would be a lesser, sadder place for it.

Boll's House of the Dead has a Rotten Tomato score of 3%, by the way, and no, that's not a typo, there's no missing number, it's just 3. Here's a trailer:

A release date for 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead wasn't announced, but principal photography is set to start on September 5.

Baldur's Gate 2 sent us on a lot of unusual detours: running a playhouse, going undercover in the Underdark disguised as a drow, becoming trapped inside a magically-transformed circus tent. I love 'em all, but now I know we missed out on possibly the most audacious detour—one that would have involved time travel, alternate dimensions and the return of BG1 villain Sarevok.

James Ohlen is the man behind this quest-that-was-not-to-be. The co-lead designer on Baldur's Gate 2—now taking a break from games to recover from burnout—had an understandable desire: "I wanted to have a time travel plot."

The storyline would involve someone using "the Planar Sphere to go back and help Sarevok actually win, and he would become this dictator of the Sword Coast," Ohlen tells us. Sarevok, the protagonist's half-brother and fellow Bhaalspawn, served as the original Baldur's Gate's antagonist, before becoming a companion in the excellent Throne of Bhaal expansion for BG2.

While this all sounds potentially quite elaborate, Ohlen didn't go wild with the scope, and told his colleagues it wouldn't be as big as they thought. "It's just, what district was it, the Market District? It's just that district. We just have to change everything there."

Athkatla's market area is Waukeen's Promenade, the first location you visit when you escape the twisted laboratory right at the start of Baldur's Gate 2. It's by no means a tiny area, and I imagine quite a lot would need have been added, removed and tweaked to make it fit a version of the future where the mad child of a dead god was in charge of a whole region—though not, it's worth noting, the region in which BG2 takes place.

Ohlen's inspiration was a storyline from DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, "where some of them realise that the timeline they're in is wrong, and then they remember the original timeline, and they have to figure out how to get back to the original timeline".

Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. "Kevin Martens [co-lead designer] was the one who was like, 'James, it's enough. Enough!' So I was like, 'OK man. OK, all right.' I did the design for it, but no dialogue had been written yet or anything like that."

It's hard not to feel like we missed out—but every big RPG has unfinished ideas like this, sitting on the cutting room floor. At some point, you've got to say, as Martens did, that it's enough. And BG2 certainly had no dearth of fantastic quests. Still, let's pour one out for the alternate dimension where horrible Sarevok got everything he wanted.

Framework, the company known for ultra-repairable laptops and desktop PCs, is launching a wireless touchpad keyboard, and it has become the company's most waitlisted item. When you consider the company is not traditionally known for accessories, it's strange to think that's the device people really want.

As announced on the company's X page today, the "Framework wireless touchpad keyboard is by far our most waitlisted product! We may need to increase our plans for production capacity." Given that Framework created this new keyboard having become frustrated with a certain Logitech option while designing and testing the Framework Desktop, you might recognise a recognisable board in the bin behind it in the picture above.

For what it's worth, the waitlist is what you get put on if you choose to fill in your email on the site for the keyboard. Framework will notify you when it is in stock, giving you the option to buy it.

In fairness, the keyboard does seem very cool. It comes with "an integrated touchpad that you don't hate", according to the company, making it supposedly ideal for sim rig and living room use. Effectively, it will allow you to easily use a computer from afar without needing a mouse or the likes of the Steam Controller.

Thanks to its open-source CAD design and ZMK-based firmware, it's designed to be very moddable—the control board can also be purchased separately, should you want to make your own keyboard. The standard built keyboard has a 68.8 x 865.6 mm touchpad with multi-touch support and 1.5 mm key travel. The keyboard can be connected with a wire, via Bluetooth, or with its USB-A dongle. No price point has been announced yet, though.

Not much more is known about the keyboard yet, but it doesn't seem to be designed for gamers. The touchpad naturally won't be great for gaming, and we don't know much about the keys themselves yet.

However, should you want to run your rig from a distance, there's a clear selling point. And it seems, based on the waitlist, I'm not the only one who thinks that.

Still, to think a PC and Laptop manufacturer doesn't have a PC or laptop as its most-waitlisted device speaks volumes about the current market, and the troubles of the memory crisis.

It's the 20th anniversary of the Republic of Gamers (ROG) and although we've already been treated to a special edition copper-themed Crosshair motherboard, it looks like Asus has something extra lined up for PC Gamers: its own line of DRAM kits.

Well, strictly speaking, it's just the one kit so far, and even then, it might just be a one-off, as part of the ROG celebration. Videocardz reports that Asus dropped the deets on the DRAM at its ROG Day 2026 event in China, but for everyone else, there's a preview look at the DDR5 set via 林大餅Bing's YouTube account.

Apparently developed via a collaboration with Biwin, the 48 GB dual-channel kit is rated to 6,000 MT/s with CL26-36-36-76 timings. That CAS latency is very tight, and I dare say that a good number of AM5 motherboards won't like it very much. Naturally, you can expect it to be fine with Asus' high-end boards, AMD and Intel flavoured, as it comes with XMP profiles for both platforms.

In terms of looks, well, it's ROG-a-go-go, as you'd expect, but I have to say that I quite like the design: angular, but not garish, with a rather classy colour scheme.

As for the price, Videocardz says that it's listed as 5999 yuan, which directly converts to a fraction over $888. How much of that is down to the RAMpocalypse is anyone's guess, but a 48 GB set of Biwin DDR5-6000 CL28 is $540 at Amazon. Specialised DRAM kits are always pricier than the regular stuff, so once you account for that (plus a bit extra for the ROG tax), I reckon we'll be looking at around $850 retail.

The interesting thing about all of this is whether or not Asus has been planning on entering the desktop memory market en masse. If this DDR5 kit is the only thing it's going to release in this sector, then the specs and pricing make sense, but if it's part of a long-term strategy to announce being a competitor to Corsair, G.Skill, and many others, it couldn't have come at a worse time.

ROG enthusiasts won't really care, though, and will probably try to snap up a set as soon as they can. After all, the only part of a complete gaming PC setup that Asus currently don't offer is a CPU and a memory kit. Oh, and internal SSDs, though you can get external units.

But if it's happy to start producing its own branded DRAM, I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of M.2 drives suddenly appeared, perhaps even followed by an Arm-powered processor by the end of the decade. Anyone fancy a 100% ROG rig?

One of my favourite memories of the old Forza Horizon and Motorsport games is that satisfying feeling of progression you get moving from your first crappy ride and eventually splashing the cash on a supercar. It's been absent in recent games in both the open world and track racing genres of Forza, but things were looking up when Playground Games confirmed that wristband progression would be returning in Forza Horizon 6.

In the Developer Direct at the start of the year, Torben Ellert, design director of FH6, said, "You'll start out as just a tourist in Japan", requiring you to earn a place in the Festival first. "After that, you'll rise through the ranks, unlocking wristbands as you complete races in faster, more exciting cars," Ellert explained.

And that's not untrue. For about five seconds, you are a tourist. Technically. I mean, you're best friends with the Horizon Festival organisers, and you're given a handful of free cars almost immediately, so take that newbie badge with a grain of salt. I don't know about you, but I'm yet to receive a fleet of cars on a holiday. That's nepotism, baby.

After that, you'll rise through the ranks of the Festival, earning higher-tier wristbands as you complete events across Japan. These wristbands dictate the performance cap of the vehicles you can use. The opening qualifiers restrict you to C-rank vehicles, but each successive wristband raises the floor. You'll quickly be racing B and A-rank cars in the Festival events. At face value, it's got the career progression I've been craving, and it's certainly a step up over its predecessor which gave out the Corvette C8 as a starter car.

But Forza Horizon is, ultimately, an open-world racer that wants you to drive around in whatever you want whenever you want. These restrictions in the main events don't actually prevent you from driving more powerful cars in the open world or Discover Japan events, like street races.

But my main gripe is that it's just too damn easy to climb up that ladder. My garage was immediately overflowing with cars as a reward for playing previous games. It's even more noticeable if you have the Premium edition, which includes a bunch of bonus rides across its different packs. And it only snowballed from there.

Once again, Wheelspins are a car crash for progression, handing out expensive cars and bucketloads of cash like it's candy. You rarely ever need to buy or tune a car for an event because you'll already have earned at least one applicable ride for free. This is quite a feat considering Wheelspins have intentionally been made rarer in Forza Horizon 6 explicitly to encourage more satisfying, linear progression.

Similarly, there are two new progression paths—Horizon Festival (the wristband races) and Discover Japan. They're a fantastic way to house all the different activities you can do, but you'll get rewards like cars or thick wads of cash all the time for completing tasks, like races, stories, and even food delivery missions.

All of this is to say that I don't have any connection or fond memories of my starter car. In fact, I don't even remember which one I picked because I've not actually used it past the first race, and you're given all three anyway. Just a few hours into your holiday in Japan, you've got multiple houses with garages stocked with cars. The progression mandated by the Festival races begins and ends there.

Alas, I must admit that half the fun of Forza Horizon is to drive around in fast cars, but there's no ignoring that it loses most of the satisfaction without the build-up. And it's hard to force yourself into that career progression when you're presented with a stacked list of cars before every race and repeatedly handed new ones just for breathing.

Forza Horizon 6's tug of war between complete, free-wheeling freedom and linear, rags-to-riches progression isn't a replacement for a proper career mode. It's a compromise at best.

And frankly, part of me thinks I wouldn't actually like more forced progression if my wish came true anyhow. I'd probably be missing my supercars if I couldn't use them at all until 30 hours later, once I'd paid my dues. Especially given how slow collecting all 550 cars in the Forza Horizon 6 car list would be. I had a blast turning a crappy kei truck into a super-powered S2 rank beast, or tuning it to do backflips and handstands.

Perhaps Playground Games' approach of encouraging more linear progression in the main races, but letting you complete side content however you'd like, really is the best of both worlds after all.

Wired or wireless? This used to be a big debate when it came to picking a gaming headset, but these days it's a pretty simple question to answer. Wireless cans have come on leaps and bounds in the past decade, so wired only really makes sense if you're min/maxing your audio quality options.

The Rig R5 Spear Max HD is the latest addition to Nacon's Rig gaming headset brand, and it's attempting to do just that. It's a wired gaming headset with an included USB Type-C DAC for high-quality audio sources, and it's got some fancy graphene drivers that promise to deliver "studio-grade game audio."

Plus, it's got a modular design that means you can swap out the ear cup sideplates, or switch the microphone and cable unit to either side. For the relatively reasonable price of $150, it's all looking rather good on paper. It's pretty comfy and sleek-looking in person, too.

However, there are two things here that give me pause. One, although a $150 gaming headset with an included DAC and fancy drivers strikes as good value, it's still a wired headset in 2026, and chaining yourself to your PC with a cable feels a touch old-fashioned. And two, while the R5 Spear Max HD can often sound good for gaming, it feels like it's been tweaked so far into gamer-first territory that it suffers in the musical department.

It's an interesting set of cans with lots of nice touches—but there are enough drawbacks to prevent me from giving a wholehearted "yes please" to this quirky-yet-flawed set.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD: Features

The R5 Spear Max HD is a modular wired gaming headset, which means it has a more interesting specs sheet than most. The outer ear cup plates can be removed and swapped for different models with a clever magnetic system, and the microphone can be mounted on either side (along with the integrated cable) via a similar method.

Apparently, there are more accessories coming for this snap lock system in future, but as far as USPs go straight out of the box, it's a pretty neat design.

In terms of the chassis itself, the R5 Spear Max HD feels miles ahead of other Rig offerings when you pull it from the box. Do I detect a solid metal frame underneath some high-quality plastics? And are those plush memory foam ear pads? Mmm, very nice.

The biggest feature, though, is the inclusion of a USB Type-C DAC, which comes as a separate, portable unit. It's slightly smaller than a box of matches, and can decode audio up to a 32-bit, 384 kHz sample rate. The headset itself connects via a 3.5 mm audio-in port, but there's also a Type-C charging port and an extra aux connection, too.

It's a pretty nice inclusion for the price, and is designed to make the most of this headset's Ora-provided "GrapheneQ" drivers. These 40 mm graphene units aim to improve gaming audio with their ultra-stiff, ultra low-distortion qualities. More on that in a moment.

In the meantime, I think it's fair to say that the Rig set certainly has specs to impress—but part of me feels it might be a bit elementary when you consider it's a wired model, and the industry has definitely shifted towards wireless gaming headsets in recent years. Still, in terms of what you get for its $150 MSRP? Not bad. Not bad at all.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD: Sound

The R5 Spear Max HD makes some bold claims in the audio department. Given its fancy graphene drivers and the inclusion of DAC through a wired connection, I had my ears fully prepared for some excellent sonic chops.

However, it's clear the Rig set has been tuned for a very gaming-focused sound. That probably sounds like an obvious thing to say in a gaming headset review, but while its tendency towards pronounced treble at the top end and booming bass at the low make for some good gaming experiences, it does make the R5 a bit of a one-trick pony.

Listening for footsteps in Gray Zone Warfare, for example, is definitely enhanced by the quick, angular treble response. And similarly, a chucked grenade in Helldivers 2 has all the weighty, bassy chonk you could hope for. However, while the R5 Spear Max HD is a good fit for shooters and action gaming, something more orchestral and delicate, like the Crimson Desert soundtrack, shows a weakness in the musicality department.

The mids and top end sound like they're sharing a little too much space, and there's simply not enough room for those frequencies to coexist. The effect is rather narrow, and the tight soundstage leaves me wishing the drivers would loosen up a touch and allow the audio to breathe. It's a slightly claustrophobic experience, with some messy edges that show the downsides of such an aggressive tuning.

This isn't the first time I've had these complaints about a set of graphene drivers, either. While their tendency to respond very quickly makes them a great fit for gaming, in terms of music listening, podcasts, and day-to-day audio duties, the sonic palette can feel like it's missing something.

This is improved by the Dolby Access app, which allows you to adjust the EQ to find smoother, more pleasant sounds. Still, despite much fiddling, the Rig set has a tendency to recess certain frequencies in the treble and upper midrange, washing them together to create a touch of confusion.

It's not a bad sound by any stretch, but if you're planning on using this set for more than gaming, expect some of the nicer sonic subtleties to become lost in the crush.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD microphone test

The microphone sounds pretty narrow, too. While it's a very focused sound, it can end up sounding like I'm addressing air traffic control rather than speaking into a quality capsule. Plus, with no available noise cancelling, there's a bit too much background noise included for my liking, even in a very quiet room.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD: Ergonomics

I've sometimes been left disappointed by Rig gaming headsets in the ergonomics department, but this one's covered in plush materials and sensible design choices. The inner headband is squidgy and compliant, and the ear pads are as soft as you could possibly ask for.

It's not the lightest of sets at 388 grams, but the soft inner materials make for a comfortable ride atop my dome. One thing to note, though, is the clamping force. I have a relatively small head (and brain), and it feels a touch firm. That's fine for me, but those of you with larger skulls may find it a bit much.

The microphone has been coated in a rubberised, pliant-yet-resistive material that feels good underneath the fingertips. The R5 Spear Max HD's snap lock system means the microphone/cable unit can be prised from one side and clipped into the other with relative ease, and the locking mechanism feels reassuringly secure.

The swappable outer earcup covers work very well, too. The magnetic force attaching them is very strong, and they snap into place with a meaty clack. However, the plates are fairly thin, and the space underneath them is left hollow—and while that might be a boon for acoustics, it does lead to some unwanted noises.

Touching the mic stalk in order to flip it down gives you a front-row seat at a tinny plastic concert. Similarly, touching the outer ear cups to take the headset on and off resonates a hollow plastic tone through the earcup chambers, which is unpleasant to listen to.

It's not a big deal, but the unwanted reverberation has made me wince more than once. Otherwise, though, the Rig R5 Spear Max HD feels like a solid device, and one that I've worn for multiple hours with no major comfort issues.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD: Aesthetics

The Rig R5 Spear Max HD makes an excellent first impression in the looks department. It's a handsome set of cans, and one that I'd be happy to wear outside—if it wasn't wired, that is. The all-black with a touch of gold aesthetic is pleasant to behold, and reflects the (mostly) premium material choices underneath your fingertips.

And while those of you with a desire for loud colorways will be disappointed, I'll personally take understated style over a bright, "look-at-me" headset design any day of the week. Top marks, I reckon.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD: Software

In terms of Nacon/Rig's own Windows software, this is going to be a very short section: there isn't any. However, the included DAC can interface with the Dolby Access app. This is a simple bit of software that enables Dolby Atmos support, and allows you to pick from some preset EQ options, as well as customising your own.

It certainly helps to smooth some of the rough edges in terms of this headset's musical response, but it can't work miracles. Still, it's much better than nothing, and there are plenty of options here to help you tweak the R5's sonic tendencies.

There's no noise cancelling option for the mic, though, and as it's quite a hiss-prone unit, the omission of proper native software to reign it in strikes as a glaring omission.

Rig R5 Spear Max HD: Value

In the product briefing for the Rig R5 Spear Max HD, I kept diligent notes. Boutique graphene drivers, gotcha. Included hi-res DAC, yep. Premium design and materials, with a swappable module system. Check. This'll be expensive, I thought.

And then the MSRP was revealed: $150. Honestly, I was expecting a $200+ price tag with this many features, so props to Nacon for keeping the sum to a reasonable figure.

That being said, it's a wired gaming headset in a market swamped with great wireless options. And while the graphene drivers and DAC are great things on paper, and make for some decent gaming performance, I still want a $150 headset to sound lovely in the musical department. Again, the R5 isn't a bad-sounding set of cans, but the tuning really does give me pause.

And the microphone's a bit noisy, too. The Rig's biggest problem, though, is the existence of the Razer BlackShark V3. It's a wireless set with an excellent chassis design, harmonic plug-enhanced 50 mm drivers that sound great for gaming and music, and a pretty good mic. All for, you guessed it, $150.

Sure, it's not got a clever modular design (removable microphones don't count, right?), and the R5 is perhaps a touch sleeker in the looks department. But the Razer sits at the top of our best gaming headset guide for a reason, along with many other excellent headsets for very reasonable prices.

While I admire the Rig R5 Spear Max HD for what it attempts to achieve, in practice, I can think of plenty of other headsets I'd rather drop my cash on. It's pretty good value on paper, but the proof is in the listening—and in this case, I think your money would likely be better spent elsewhere.

Slay the Spire 2 has—among some of my coworkers—been a bit of a contentious little game. Back when it first came out, my fellow writer Robin Valentine wrote that Slay the Spire 2 felt more like a remake than a sequel after beating it with an eight year old deck, calling it "a really impressive late expansion pack." Still good, but treading over old ground.

Here are my creds: I've since been consumed by Slay the Spire 2, I've put nearly 140 hours into it (a number that shocked me when I went to check it for this article), and I've currently squeaked out Ascension 10 wins on Ironclad, Silent, and Regent (and am working on my wins with the Necrobinder and Defect now).

And while I do agree with Robin that a lot of the same decks can win those earlier ascensions, the more I play, the more I'm deeply taken by Slay the Spire 2 in a way that I was never absorbed by the original—which I went back and played a bit of before this and just didn't have the same zest for.

Slay the Spire 2 is samey, sure, but it's deceptively so. There have been several core, granular baseline level changes that have, in my estimation, made it feel very different.

Different energy

The first, the most obvious shift, is in the ancients—at the end of each act of STS2, you have a chance of rolling between a set of ancients, each of which will have their own trade-off boons. In STS1, beating one of the acts netted you a relic which almost always gave you one more energy per turn—and, because of how tempo worked, the non-energy relics were almost never worth taking.

Slay the Spire 2 has such a better variety in this regard. They can be completely run-defining. Getting one extra energy per turn is still incredibly valuable, but relics that offer that often come with major downsides.

Take Vaaku's Whispering Earring, for example. You get one extra energy, but you have zero control over your first turn, with Vaaku playing your cards from left to right—this is a massive gamble, but it's almost always possible to survive a bad first turn, right until it isn't.

Tezcatara's Seal of Gold is also majorly impactful, too. At first glance, losing five gold per turn for extra energy doesn't seem terrible—but I've had entire builds won with the right choice of relic from the merchant. Take my Ascension 10 Regent win, where I managed to snag a Mystic Lighter to buff a sharp-enchanted Seven Stars.

Suddenly I had a card that dealt 18 damage seven times (for a total of 127 damage) for a piddly one energy, with cards to help buffer the star cost and recycle it back into my draw pile. If I'd taken the Seal of Gold, I wouldn't have been able to afford it.

Nonupeipe's Glitter relic is a stand-out, giving all Act 3 card rewards a once-per-combat replay. This thing alone has completely steered my gameplan from a thin deck to a thick boy with lots of value.

Speaking of, the card enchantment system's great, too—I want to shout out Clone, which is absolutely absurd in some runs, letting you get potentially dozens of the same card type if you're able to finesse rest sites enough to use it. Momentum turns every card into the Ironclad's Rampage, Royally Approved can make any card a core component of your deck. The possibilities make my roguelike heart giddy.

Enemies close

Then there's the enemy design, too—I just like STS2's encounters a whole lot more. Yes, even the absolute bullshit ones. I'm looking at you, Hunter-Killer.

STS2's rogues gallery is flooded with brutal encounters that scale quickly and, at higher ascensions, require you to cover your bases. Rather than trying to thin your deck to get an infinite loop, Act 1 becomes a make-or-break rush to make sure you've got defense, damage, draw, and energy generation all handled ASAP.

This is much better than the feeling I got from STS1, where I just felt as though I was trying to stumble into a synergy. All of my runs in STS2 feel more constructive—I'm building up a solid deck brick by brick, rather than just fishing for the right combo of cards. And that steadier pace makes it feel all the more exciting when I do stumble into something special.

It's a complete shift in design philosophy—one that extends to the bosses, too, which challenge your decks in far more interesting ways than in the first game. So often in STS1, the Timekeeper (screw that guy) would often just spell doom for my deck, and given the fact you only see who you're fighting in Act 3, it would almost always be too late to change course.

In STS2, though? There's not a boss I can't design around. Even the Doormaker (who will be taking a sabbatical soon, per the game's beta branch) can be prepped for simply by spending Act 3 making your deck just a little bit thicker.

Again, it's subtle, but STS2's pacing is completely different. You can see this in how some cards have fallen out of favour—the Ironclad's Demon Form, for instance, now just isn't very good, because opportunities to play a three-energy power are few and far between.

And yes, some of the old decks are still there, but there are new ways to play even the old guard, too—the Silent's Sly mechanic completely changes the feel of the character, for instance, and the Ironclad's old archetypes are actually more niche. I've won far more runs on Ironclad just by going for value and energy generation than I have with the Barricade + Body Slam or Whirlwind + Double Tap shtick.

All in all, I think STS2 feels markedly different—the tempo of fights has changed, the meta has been adjusted, its two new characters are big departures, and you've got far more interesting and diverse incentives to swap up your strats mid-run. There's a reason I'm going for A10 runs on every character here, but gave up my climb in STS1: I simply like this version a lot more.

Which is impressive, given the rock and a hard place developer Megacrit found itself in. Slay the Spire 2 was never meant to be a sequel, with Megacrit wanting to develop DLC for the first game. Alas, Humble Games shut down, making issuing major updates to other platforms a near-impossibility.

Megacrit has, in my estimation, made lemonade out of lemons here. I'm not glad it was forced into making a sequel, but I'm certainly happy it did.

I will admit, when I first heard about EverQuest Legends, a reimagined version of the classic MMO as it existed at launch, I had some trepidation. For years I've told anyone who will listen that what made EQ special was the friction. Slow resource recovery, meaningful danger just getting around, and extreme penalties for death and carelessness made it important to work together and gave us downtime to build relationships. I still believe all these things, but having spent the last week playing the Legends closed beta in advance of its July release, I believe something else as well. Smashing hordes of mobs is fun.

You get to load your character up with three classes in EQL, and for my first run I chose magician, shadowknight, and wizard. Not because I thought they were a particularly strong combination, but because they were iconic to my experience with EverQuest. My first ever character was an ill-fated high elf wizard who wasted most of his time looking for a crimson robe instead of a green one, my main man back in the classic through Planes of Power era was a shadowknight, and the little dude I spent truly obscene amounts of time on during the pandemic was a mage on p99 Green.

The start of leveling was a very familiar experience. I ventured into the noobie area outside the gnome starting town of Ak'Anon and started hunting skeletons, kobolds, and clockworks. Cast a little nuke, send pet, and commence beatdowns. Very quickly, however, I started to notice my strength. Instead of being just a squishy mage, when I pulled agro off my pet I was tanky enough to beat the mob to death with my sword. I had lifetaps and harm touch to go with my mage damage. And at level 10, I got access to wizard with even better nukes and access to root so I could split packs.

You choose a primary class, which is locked in until you get an unlock token at level 50, but you can freely swap your secondary and tertiary classes as you like. All classes get XP until level 10, but after that you only level up the classes you have equipped. This lets new players do tons of experimentation as they start their journey, not that I did any of that. I was too busy blastin'.

I leveled to max with my first three classes in about 50 hours, which included a bunch of dinking around and taking notes. By the time I hit my final ding, I was pulling huge packs of frogs or kobolds or whatever, blasting them with a supernova, and shrugging off all their hits with planar armor while my water pet shredded them with dragon loot and they broke themselves upon my damage shield. In short, I felt like a god. And that's without playing enchanter or bard!

All systems go

This isn't to say that I spent all of my time alone, though. I felt totally able to do what I wanted to do by myself, but I also spent tons of time in groups. One of the brilliant things they've done is to give every player credited with a kill the loot. We kill the frenzied ghoul, we all get a shot at a Flowing Black Silk Sash. This made the usual problem where surly neckbeards sit on rare camps just… not an issue. I would roll in somewhere, get an invite, and we'd just jam. I didn't have to have any loot arguments with anyone, no one was /randoming for stuff, and there was just way more gear to go around.

All of this extra gear doesn't go to waste. With a system called item merging, you can feed additional copies of duplicate items to one another to level them up. They go from +0 to +10, and gain additional damage, AC, and stats as they do. You can also crank up the difficulty of zones, which makes the monsters stronger and gives them a chance to drop higher level items. Challenge difficulty 4 zones and you'll find +4 items as well as higher level currency items called motes of potential that can be used to level up your gear.

This is all very helpful when you want to start leveling additional classes. At any point you can go to a town and swap your loadout to change things around. When you do so, your character level becomes the lowest of your equipped classes, but you keep your alternate advancement (AA) points and equipped gear. This arrangement ends up being not only lots of fun because you get to experiment with new things, but also serves as a recycling system to get max level players back into lower level zones so there's more people to group with. You also make tons of AA experience when you do this, so you're adding to your overall character power at the same time.

Going in, I thought the item merge system was going to be a balance nightmare. Couldn't we just merge a bunch of common, low level items together until they were OP and circumvent the best parts of EverQuest, like finally looting that Ykesha? In practice though, I've really enjoyed it. Not only can you level items up, but hitting certain level thresholds lets you pull out their procs or focus abilities and stick them in other items, and that opens up a whole new world of customization. The yak I got in Lower Guk I picked up was useful when I got it, but it was even more useful when I merged up a +7 Footman's Sword and socked in that stun proc. I'm sure the system won't be perfect, but it's enough fun that I think we're solidly in the realm of worth it, and the devs have been very active in the beta tweaking and tuning things.

All in all I think experienced EverQuest players will find a lot to like here, and it will be substantially less intimidating for new folks. Old heads like myself will appreciate the classic zones without weird updates like the Freeport overhaul or *shudders* Luclin character models. New players will probably appreciate the fact that they can start their enchanter without having every level 1 monster be a mortal threat, as well as some other modern quality of life features they've included like spell loadouts and a group summon ability.

EverQuest Legends isn't slated to release until July, and I'm sure there will be lots of changes in the intervening time. Major systems like raid instancing are just starting to hit the beta server, and lots of questions remain. I know a lot of folks, myself included, would love to hear an announcement from Darkpaw about a brand new EverQuest game or a true remaster, but until that magical day comes I think EQL is going to be another solid way to enjoy Norrath.

If you aren't caught up on the situation, US President Donald Trump, alongside representatives from Micron, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, all boarded Air Force One a few days ago to take a trip out to China and nurse the rocky trade relationship between the two countries. From that trip, America was hoping to trade some AI chips with China, but not quite enough for it to take the lead in the AI space race. Either way, it might not have gotten past China's officials yet.

The US approved the sale of Nvidia's second-best AI chip, the H200 to 10 Chinese firms yesterday. This would total 75,000 units each. As reported by Bloomberg, Trump said on Friday that China has not yet approved this deal from its end, “because they chose not to, they want to develop their own.”

Despite this declaration, Trump does say that the conversation came up and he reckons "something could happen on that."

Trump has not yet elaborated on what this means, what could happen, or how those talks went. However, Trump has reportedly been chatting to Chinese President Xi Jinping about what guardrails could be implemented on this tech going forward. When asked what kind of guardrails these would be, Trump reportedly said, "Standard guardrails that we talk about all the time."

Notably, China reportedly approved the import of H200 GPUs just a few months ago, but the US government put caps on how many could be sent to the region. It's been a rather tumultuous time for the two entities, with both banning, unbanning, taxing, and untaxing the AI chips.

Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has historically been very pro-trade when it comes to AI tech and China. When Nvidia effectively left the Chinese market due to import bans imposed late last year, Huang argued, "it's important to be mindful that what harms China could oftentimes also harm America".

Just last month, Huang bemoaned this market drop and argued the US should export AI "like crazy" to China. It's naturally within the interest of Nvidia to sell its AI tech to whoever will take it, as it owes the growth of AI for it becoming the world's first $5 trillion company, after all. Though, the company says its share in China is "zero" today.

And, in turn, exporting some AI chips would be beneficial to the US too, as it can claim taxes on that tech. But all parties seem to be aware that China cannot over-rely on American AI technology. Huang said last year that "we don't have to worry" about the Chinese military using AI chips because "they simply can't rely on it".

And so, the US and China (and by extension, Nvidia) seem to be at a stalemate. Whether or not Trump's big trip will see any returns on American investment is anyone's guess, but he seems pretty positive about it anyway.

As far as the memory shortage is concerned, we're yet to see much light at the end of the tunnel. Case in point, there's mutterings about yet another hardware price spike, and this time it may mean the already pretty expensive Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU could go up in price by as much as $300.

To be clear, no consumer-facing increase has yet been announced. However, a source on Board Channels reports that add-in-card (AIC) partners in China have been warned of a 2,000 RMB (or $300) price increase. If true, this increase will likely trickle down into a sharp uptick that PC gamers will feel as well. Reportedly, the price increase affects both the RTX 5090 and its China-exclusive RTX 5090D V2 variant, which enjoys 24GB of GDDR7 memory (via VideoCardz).

For comparison's sake, the model of the RTX 5090 available to those with the cash in the UK and US enjoys 32 GB GDDR7. With that much memory, rumours of a price increase are far from surprising, especially as the PS5 has already seen a significant price increase for similar reasons. The price of the Nintendo Switch 2 will also increase later this year. The Steam Machine is still hoping to launch this year, too, but who knows at what price amid the memory supply crisis. At the very least, there's no word yet on similar price increases for Nvidia's other 50-series cards.

Current pricing for the RTX 5090 isn't really in the ballpark of affordable to begin with. If you've been keeping up with Nick's graphics card price watch, you'll note that a reasonably priced RTX 5090 hasn't featured in some time. You may also have seen Best Buy asking for an eye-watering $5090 for the high-end GPU. That's a particularly egregious example, though the MSRP $1,999 card has been venturing closer to the $3,500 mark since the start of the year.

Still, if you've been looking to upgrade your rig recently, then you don't need me to tell you how much the memory supply crisis has impacted component pricing—though, those still a little unclear on the situation should give our Jacob's RAMpocalypse explainer a read.

The short version is that the AI industry is hungry for memory chips, causing an outsized demand that leaves the capacity of even major memory manufacturers like SK hynix at 'essentially zero right now'. Like many other major players, SK hynix has various capacity-expanding projects in the works, though these likely won't have a meaningful impact on supply until 2028 at the earliest.

Limited supply means higher prices, with HP recently warning that memory now makes up around 35% of the cost of its PCs. Worse still, the limited supply situation has also given rise to pretty convincing counterfeit DDR5 modules as well. Alas, running a gaming PC without RAM or a GPU isn't really an option—unless playing Snake in the BIOS is your idea of a good time.

Fans have been clamouring for Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone's next game, Haunted Chocolatier, for a almost five years now, and while he's largely kept a lid on its development he has revealed in a recent interview with GameInformer that it's not taking more of his time than Stardew Valley.

"It’s kind of hard to switch gears sometimes, to be honest, but it’s just what I’ve got to do," Barone says. "It’s just another challenge, because I have two games that I’m working on. I just have to do it. It’s not my preference, but it’s just what needs to be done." Barone is now working on Haunted Chocolatier five days a week, with the remaining two being spent on Stardew Valley.

"It’s a lot harder than when I was making Stardew Valley," Barone adds. "I’ll be honest. [During the making of] Stardew Valley, I was a nobody. Nobody knew who I was. I didn’t get fan mail. I didn’t have business people asking me for this or that all the time. I could just literally lock in and work.

"I need to just disappear, go into a cabin, and work without distraction. So it is very difficult and distracting, I’ll be honest, to have Stardew Valley and have people sending me fan mail. I appreciate that people love the game so much. But it is true that it’s difficult to juggle all those things and to be able to fully lock in."

Hopes have certainly been set high for Haunted Chocolatier, Stardew Valley isn't exactly the easiest game to follow on from. But Barone isn't pulling any punches: "It’s way bigger than Stardew Valley, at least in terms of the amount of maps, the amount of monsters, the depth to the whole item system, and all the equipment slots and all the stuff like this. Everything is cranked up."

But unlike Stardew Valley's cosy farming, Haunted Chocolatier will explore slightly different, more creepy themes. "The ghosts, the haunted nature, the castle, allows for a lot of interesting, creative things that I can do that are kind of creepy," Barone says. "Not totally horrifying, but maybe slightly, you know, creepy stuff. I want people to be delighted by things that are unexpected and that they’re kind of like, 'Wow. Like, I have no idea what’s going on, but I like it.'

"There are other things I want to share, there are other ideas I have, there are other themes I want to explore, just to fully express myself as a creator. So that’s why I feel like I need to make Haunted Chocolatier and beyond. It’s part of my own need to fully express myself while I’m on this earth."

While there's no chance that it was developed because Apple had chosen to do something similar, one can't help but draw parallels to the MacBook Neo. The newly announced Googlebook has your phone and AI at the heart of it all, and will supposedly bring "the best of Android…and ChromeOS", utilising hardware from Intel under the hood.

That's pretty much it as far as details go, other than some swooping imagery of glossy-looking laptops, a short tweet from Intel on the collaboration, and a statement about "working with industry leading partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo."

Naturally, Gemini AI is going to be at the forefront of what the Googlebook can do, but if you have an Android phone, you'll be able to cast apps and access files directly from the phone without having to wire things up or install them. How well all this will work in reality is anyone's guess at this stage, but if it works as seamlessly as suggested, a Googlebook might be a good choice of laptop for work-on-the-go.

The real question of importance, however, is precisely what hardware is going to be underneath the hood. Since Intel is involved, the most obvious pick is either a small Panther Lake chip or even smaller Wildcat Lake. Both options are going to be very nice to have, though they really need fast LPDDR5 memory to shine.

Given how expensive DRAM is at the moment, if Google takes a leaf from Apple's MacBook Neo and goes with something like 8 or 12 GB, then it's unlikely that you're going to see any Googlebook topping a benchmark chart. That said, Wildcat Lake is light on power demand but strong on single-core performance, so you never know.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the Googlebook is the legacy of Chromebooks. These have been around for many years now, and while generally very cheap, they've accrued a reputation for being slow and of limited capability. Google's new devices are unlikely to be at the bottom end of the price scale, but the spectre of the Chromebook is going to be hard to exorcise.

We'll know for sure when the first models appear later this autumn.

The Repair Tool is one of the most important gadgets in Subnautica 2, which is surprising given you don't need to fix your tools like in most survival games—all they need are new batteries. However, your vehicles, like the incredible Tadpole, as well as your base, can get damaged. And you don't want to keep building new ones.

By finding enough Repair Tool fragments, you'll be able to learn this blueprint and build your own. It doesn't take that much effort either, as you can find the pieces you need just a short swim from the Lifepod.

Subnautica 2 Repair Tool fragment locations

To unlock the Repair Tool blueprint, you need to scan three fragments. The good news is that there are more than three possible fragments to find, so you might have scanned one or two already.

As I show in the video above, these are the three Repair Tool fragments I scanned, all of which are close to the Lifepod:

1. On a desk inside Chap's base in a small cave roughly 220 meters southeast and 40m deep from the Lifepod, with the entrance at the base of a stone pillar. NOA will send you here early on to collect Chap's blackbox.
2. On the sofa inside the shipwreck directly south of the Lifepod, across the deep gap, about 300 meters away. There's a small entrance on the south side that you can swim through, then go through the hole in the floor to reach the lower level.
3. On the floor next to the locked door inside the shipwreck about 60 degrees to the northeast of the Lifepod, 380 meters away. You can enter this wreck by swimming underneath it and through the hole in the floor, where you'll see the Repair Tool on the ground next to a locked door. In the hangar, you'll also find a Processor, Tadpole, and Bioreactor you can scan.

Once you've scanned three fragments, you'll have unlocked the blueprint and can craft the Repair Tool at a fully functional Fabricator using the following materials:

• 1x Titanium Ingot
• 1x Wiring Kit
• 1x Basic Battery
• 1x Sulfur

As you'd imagine, the Repair Tool is mainly used to fix up your vehicles, like the Tadpole. I know from experience that it's really easy to ding this submarine into rocks and take other unnecessary damage, so I always carry the Repair Tool to patch it up. And that's not to mention any hostile fish that can attack your pod, which will deal even more damage.

However, the Repair Tool can also be used to unlock certain doors. For example, inside the shipwreck to the northeast of the Lifepod, where I recommend collecting the third fragment, you can break open the doors to grab the Rebreather blueprint.

Black Mirror's Bandersnatch was an ambitious and slickly produced experiment in interactive TV, presenting an episode of the series in the form of a choose-your-own adventure with multiple possible storylines and endings.

Aunty Donna's Bandersketch is… well, a lot sillier. The popular Australian comedy group's parody version invites you to help them write a new sketch under a looming deadline, without getting distracted by lunch, Gangnam Style, or sudden unexpected death.

It's not quite as elaborate as I was hoping, but it's still well worth playing through to see how many bizarre game overs you can get. One of the choices you can make just sends you off on a 40-minute unskippable walk around Melbourne and you've got respect the sheer stupidity of that.

If you're not familiar with Aunty Donna, they do great work—not only producing their own sketch comedy, but also running Grouse House, a platform for other comedians in the Australian alternative comedy scene. I'm particularly fond of their excruciatingly impossible guessing game MUGG, which mines laughs out of what is essentially a series of mental breakdowns.

It's clear as well that games are a big inspiration for them—a previous video saw them playing through a live-action videogame that somehow turned into an excuse to drink an inadvisable amount of milkshakes.

Bandersketch seems to have been made to help promote their new Grouse House TV subscription service—very much following in the footsteps of Dropout in attempting to fund comedy videos away from YouTube. If you enjoy it, maybe check out what they've got on offer. If not… well, frankly, I hope YouTube sends an evil entity to steal your soul and add it to their collection of the damned.

With the power of Linux installed on a Nintendo Switch, and open-source firmware called Klipper, YouTuber Cocoanix has figured out a way to speed up their 3D printing by 1000%. A model that usually takes 90 minutes to print took a mere eight in their latest video.

As spotted by Hackaday, Cocoanix didn't technically need to use a Nintendo Switch. They simply needed some sort of device to run Klipper through and offload some of the 3D printers' work. Cocoanix even argues "for most people, a Raspberry Pi is a better choice".

Klipper is an interesting bit of firmware. Where standard 3D printing firmware like Marlin runs on the 3D printer's microcontroller, Klipper is designed to let you offload that work onto a separate device. As Cocoanix puts it, Marlin is "a bit like asking a calculator to run a spreadsheet".

In this case, the Switch can handle the math and G-code processing, sending precise instructions to the printer in real time, and this not only improves speed but quality too. "The result is a cleaner, faster print with less ringing and ghosting"

Another benefit of Klipper is that it makes it easier to adjust code and edit files on the fly; you don't need to recompile firmware or save and restart. Using Linux on the Switch, they connected the handheld to the 3D printer, found its unique serial ID, connected the two devices, and "then I started pushing the printer to find its limits".

Those limits were 400 mm/s at 17,000 mm/s² of acceleration. Cocoanix say this is very impressive for the hardware, and a test print was only held back by the lack of better cooling and a stock hotend and extruder in the 3D printer.

Cocoanix argues that "Klipper is one of the best things you can do for an old printer" and they note "it's free, it's powerful, and apparently you can run it on a gaming handheld".

It's just a shame that upgrading to a Nintendo Switch 2 wouldn't get you shinier 3D printed models—Gotta use that ray tracing-capable chip for something.

After years of outrageous power levels, self-destructing chips, and underwhelming laptop options, Intel's pair of Arrow Lake Refresh processors—the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus—are so good that almost all of Team Blue's recent failings can be forgiven. And in the case of the 270K Plus, it's received one more special 'award': it can now be picked up as a delidded option from Thermal Grizzly.

The process of removing the IHS or integrated heat spreader from a CPU (aka delidding) isn't something that most PC users would consider. Partly because you need specialised hardware to do this, and there's a distinct risk of permanently damaging the chip in doing so, but it's mostly because there's no major advantage in doing so when using the processor in stock form.

However, for the overclocking crowd, it's a bit of a must because allowing a cooler to have direct contact with the CPU die (or dies, in the case of AMD chips), can potentially get a serious reduction in operating temperature. This is turn lets you crank up the voltages to achieve much higher clock speeds.

If that sounds of interest, but you don't want the hassle of delidding, you can always head over to Thermal Grizzly and buy a pre-popped processor from there. Naturally, since these are all done by hand and carefully prepared for use with liquid metal, they don't come cheap.

Actually, that's not true, because TG has just added the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to its list of delidded options, and thanks to Intel's low MSRP for the CPU, a bare butt KP chip will only set you back a fraction over $525.

That's cheaper than a stock Core Ultra 9 285K (currently $560 at Amazon) and even without overclocking, the 270K Plus is better than its bigger brother in games, due to its higher internal bus clocks and other tweaks. Throw some serious overclocking into the mix, and hey presto! You now have the most powerful desktop CPU Intel has made in years.

AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D will still be better for gaming, and any AM5 gaming PC you buy or put together now will readily take a next-gen Ryzen with a BIOS upgrade. Intel's LGA 1851 socket only supports the Core Ultra 200S chips and nothing else.

But for sheer all-round brilliance, especially if you game and do a lot of content creation workloads, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is very hard to beat for the money. Only the considerably more expensive Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9950X3D2 Dual Edition are better. I should know because I've not only tested every single one of these chips, but I also use a 270K Plus in my own rig now.

My happy place is learning about cool things made by cool people with their own two cool hands. A self-powered, actually credit card-sized computer definitely fits that bill.

Now, some would describe any number of Raspberry Pi computers as 'credit card sized.' I'd personally love to see those folks attempt to slide one of those boards into a wallet—or even a jean pocket, for that matter. Reddit user krausler also takes umbrage with describing the Raspberry Pi this way, so they've only gone and made a teeny tiny computer that could neatly slide under my keyboard.

Their creation is called the Muxcard, and it measures a mere 1 mm in depth. The redditor explains that working with such a thin form factor was a challenge, requiring them to essentially "find a way to make my own custom flexPCB." They go on to write, "Finding small/thin enough components wasn't really the main challenge, mechanical stability was," before noting that "going just 0.5 mm thicker would probably have saved me months of engineering."

In terms of components, the Muxcard's main chip is an itty bitty ESP32-C3FH4, but this SoC still offers both Wi-Fi and even some low-energy Bluetooth functionality. Speaking of, power is handled by an ultra-thin lithium polymer battery. As for a screen, it's got a wee 1.54-inch, 200 x 200 E-Paper display. Rounding out the feature set are an accelerometer and an NFC reader.

Though obviously limited, it's an impressive featureset for the form factor. Still, even krausler admits that calling their prototype a 'computer' "might be a little [bit of an] overstatement, but it's technically perfectly within the definition of one."

I built a fully self-powered computer in actual credit-card size (~1mm thick) from r/electronics

They go on to appeal to their fellow redditors, "If you should have suitable words for it that sounds cool, feel free to suggest." My suggestion would be 'CompCard'—I love a good pun that conjures both the idea of fortune without strings attached, and also the retrofuturistic tech all those trendy teens are tooling around with in the Shin Megami Tensei series. Talk about cyberpunk—anyway, I digress.

As mentioned, putting this thin thing together was a challenge. "Solder and general material fatigue, pressure distribution (particularly focused pressure) and other strain related issues were the real problem," Krausler writes, "This doesn't even include battery protection and some other things to solve."

They go on to add, "At this scale, the project turned into a weird mix of electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering." Krausler goes into some technical depth and documents much of the build via their GitHub Repo. I don't know about you, but I have a sudden hankering to break out the soldering iron again.

The original director of BioWare's long-running MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic—which is now being run by Broadsword—had not played a single game in the genre when he started work on it, he has revealed.

In an interview, BioWare veteran James Ohlen described the studio's founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk calling him into their office in 2006, halfway through the development of Dragon Age: Origins, and asking him to oversee a new office in Austin, Texas, making MMOs.

"And I was like, 'I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I'll do it.'

"The day after, I created a character in World of Warcraft and started down that path ... I was playing all the MMOs and getting to a high level and I forced myself to love them," he says, chuckling.

"But before that, no, I just wasn't a fan of the genre."

The Old Republic, which is still going today, launched in 2011 and was the most expensive game ever made at the time, with estimated costs north of $200 million.

"How the hell did they trust me with this much money? And I didn't even like MMOs! I don't understand how the world works. The world is weird."

He said he was "depending on his lieutenants" such as lead writer Daniel Erickson, lead combat designer Georg Zoeller and lead PvP and flashpoint designer Gabe Amatangelo, who was the "MMO expert" handling the endgame.

"And really I was just making sure that they weren't all going to kill each other," he says. "I was making decisions at the highest level, but really it was like, how do I empower [them], and how do I make sure that story is still a big part of it, because that was supposed to be the big differentiator."

Ohlen—who was also lead designer on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic—quit BioWare in 2018 after 22 years.

In the full interview he discussed his regrets around The Old Republic's rocky launch. The team built around 200 hours of content for players spread across eight origin stories—in hindsight, Ohlen would've preferred 60 hours across a couple of meatier origins, he says. He wanted it to be Knights of the Old Republic online, but in the end it felt more like "WoW in space".

"When you're doing that much content the quality starts going down. You have to start depending upon rules instead of creativity, and the content got more vanilla. I feel like if we had maybe just two storylines and a shorter game, that would have had a huge impact," he says.

He also revealed how his grand plan to relaunch the game under a new name—Star Wars: The New Republic—was denied by EA's board despite the backing of EA exec Patrick Söderlund (EA acquired BioWare in 2007).

"The big challenge was Patrick Söderlund, who hates Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I convinced him … it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career," he says.

"We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic, until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300 million, they're like, 'Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'"

It ultimately marked the "beginning of the end" for him at Bioware, he says.

The Old Republic's longevity proves its success. It underwhelmed at launch despite rave reviews but it has, by all accounts, kept a loyal fan base. In 2019 EA revealed it had brought in close to $1 billion.

2019 was also the year Ohlen co-founded Archetype Entertainment, the studio behind sci-fi RPG Exodus, but he left in December 2025 and in the interview he explains why. "I was running on fumes, and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just need to step away."

If you're in need of Celestine in Subnautica 2, that means you're finally ready to craft that Tadpole Depth module—say goodbye to imminent hull breaches everytime you try to dive. You can only get Celestine in the biome around the Alien Ruins, meaning you have to complete the Tadpole Pens and cross that vast and spooky stretch of sea to this new biome.

Once you have your Celestine, you can use it for the depth upgrade, or process it into Strontium for other modules like the Strike Armor. While you're here, you might also want to know how to get Creature Enamel, since you'll also need that for the Enameled Glass the upgrade requires. Otherwise, here's where to find Celestine.

Subnautica 2 Celestine location

You can find Celestine in the biome around the Alien Ruins research base, but specifically, at lower depths. There's a great location about 200 meters southeast of the Alien Ruins, over the cliff, and down to the rocks below, though beware of the two Needlers patrolling nearby. There's loads of Celestine in and around the Needler nest here, but obviously, the closer you get, the more dangerous it is.

Assuming you don't have the Tadpole Depth module yet (otherwise why would you be searching for Celestine), you'll have to exit your Tadpole at 250 meters down and swim a short way to smash the Celestine nodes with your Sonic Resonator. Each node looks like a bunch of small, light blue, jagged crystals, a little similar to how big nodes of salt look.

If you're unsure, watch the video above for the exact location. Since Celestine is quite deep as materials go, this location is definitely your best bet while remaining relatively close to your Tadpole for oxygen and protection from Needler projectiles. Now, simply head back to your base, assuming you set one up nearby, and use the Modification Station to make the Depth Module for your Tadpole.

The Steam Controller is full of surprises. It screams when you drop it and it even sings songs if you program it to. You don't have to program it yourself, however, just drop a MIDI track into this software on Github and it'll do its best to to sing its little heart out.

It's called SteamHapticsSinger and it's been recently published by CrazyCritic89. Though it's a fork of previous iterations of the same software originally created 10 years ago for the Steam Controller (2015), from Pila and Roboron3042, this time with fixes and upgrades for the new Steam device.

Here's the application in action, using a MIDI file of Portal's 'Still Alive' included with the package.

I also gave it a go with the Wii Shop Soundtrack, which was musical perfection in rumble form.

And another absolute smash-hit.

Alright, so it couldn't quite pull off a Rick Roll, nor match the musical genius of Rick Astley. But it's still hella impressive.

You can throw a bunch of MIDI files at the software and see what sounds good. You just drag and drop onto the exe file. You do need USBDK to get the software working in the first instance, however, but it should also work with the Steam Deck and original Steam Controller too. I'm just waiting for someone to lash 20 of these things together and start an orchestra. Though maybe once that reservation queue is a little lower, yeah?

Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, one of the most impactful indie games of the last decade and dev behind the upcoming highly anticipated Haunted Chocolatier, knows a thing or two about being creative. And like many other creatives he's recently been touting the importance of human-made art and listening to your gut instead of relying on a machine to drop prompts in your lap.

"I think anything’s lost when you use AI for any creative thing, any step of the way—unless it’s being used for very specific zoomed-in cases, maybe," Barone says in an interview with GameInformer. "You’re offloading creativity to an algorithm, which I think is always gonna undermine the pure and authentic human element of what you’re doing."

AI being used as a creative tool is an unfortunate yet all too common development we've seen in this industry—whether it be in benign AI video contests, Sony using it to "augment artist capabilities, or a as glorified yassification tool. But even still there are even more artists holding steadfast in their own creative capabilities by demonstrating just how valuable human-made art is.

"For me, as someone who wants to express myself in an artistic way, I wouldn’t ever want to use AI for any sort of creative thing, because it’s beside the point of what I’m doing," Barone continues. "My goal is to express myself in a creative way. Why would I let an AI do that for me?

"At the very least, let another human being express themselves if you need help. That’s probably what I would say. There are plenty of humans out there that would like an opportunity to express themselves. I feel like that should take priority over a soulless machine."

But Barone isn't the only creative to warn against the lacklustre beast that is AI:

• Mass Effect's director dubbed it as "creatively soulless".
• Rockstar's co-founder sees AI's products as too "generic" to be any real threat.
• Take-Two's CEO not-so-lovingly refers to it as "a combination of metadata with a parlor trick".
• Baldur's Gate 3 actor Neil Newbon declares: "AI sucks".
• Larian's publishing director denounced any idea that it could replace QA workers.
• Demonschool's devs even said they'd "rather cut off our own arms" than use it.

As Barone hints at, some studios can use machine learning to actually improve the work load of their creatives, such as Warcraft using it to cut out the busywork, leaving them more time to get on with the good stuff. That's not what concerns me. I care more for retaining the complexities, imperfections, and astounding creativity of art made by fellow human beings—I enjoy playing games that have clearly been made with a passion and dedication that only a human is capable of.

If you're looking for Creature Enamel in Subnautica 2, it likely means you've arrived at the Alien Ruins, having crossed that spooky stretch of ocean between the Tadpole Pens and the Research Base. And yes, if you heard a groaning sound coming from the depths below you but didn't encounter any trouble, consider yourself lucky.

When you activate the Biobed respawn point in the Alien Ruins and examine the Fabricator, you'll see that there's a new crafting option for Enameled Glass, requiring, you guessed it, Creature Enamel. Below, I'll show you where you can find this material in the new biome you've just entered.

Subnautica 2 Creature Enamel location

You can find Creature Enamel sticking of black mineral deposits in the biome around the Alien Ruins. It's quite easy to recognise since it's basically a bunch of white sticks that look like bone, protruding from black lumps of rock. There's a load of it, shown in the video above, on a rock pillar about 200 meters southeast from the Alien Ruins research base.

This area is filled with patrolling Needlers who'll spit spikes at you if they notice you, so try to be stealthy. As with gold, titanium, lead, and quartz, you just need the regular Sonic Resonator to blast these apart—it might not work the first time due to their strange shape and your position, but if you try again you'll get it.

Each set drops a few bits of Creature Enamel, so you don't need to mine all that much to start crafting Enameled Glass.

Naoki Yoshida's opening keynote at April's North American Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival made one thing clear: the team is serious about change. Or at least, it appears to be. Especially, for a studio that's dug its heels in the sand about any sort of drastic change in the past half-decade or so.

For upcoming expansion Evercold, abating the stagnation that's permeated the MMO since 2022 (even longer than that, some may argue), seems to be Creative Studio 3's number one priority. An entirely new combat system that promises to highlight job individuality and skill expression, changes to gearing to make it less unfriendly to anyone hoping to play more than one job in savage or ultimate raids, and deprioritising daily tasks to give players more flexibility to complete their in-game goals week-to-week.

Those are all genuinely great things that I am incredibly excited to see manifested in Evercold. But I can't help but carry that eager anticipation with a side of cautiousness. A wariness of a company who has been so reluctant to tweak even the tiniest cog in its core setup at the risk of upsetting the balance. Of creating a little more friction for the sake of a more interesting experience.

Because I so desperately want these changes to spark bigger overhauls. These are all well and dandy, but if we can still look at a two-year life cycle for an expansion and know exactly what to expect—an alliance raid on the .1, .3, and .5 patches, savage raids on the .0, .2, and .4 patches, etc etc—then I don't know how much that staleness will actually fade away.

I want Evercold to be the expansion of risk-taking. Of experimentation. I never expect Creative Studio 3 to return to the puzzles and mazes of A Realm Reborn's dungeons, but I crave more than the whole "two packs of trash mobs into boss" pattern that persists across all of them. More opportunities to dictate the pace and flex those tank mitigations and healing spells, more enemy varieties that do more than the odd auto attack, bosses that don't automatically open every goddamn fight with a raidwide attack.

I really think the studio has hit its stride with designing higher-difficulty fights in Dawntrail—the Arcadion savage raids are some of the best the game has ever seen. And while I haven't been a fan of every extreme fight, they've all stood out to me for different reasons. Valigarmanda in particular stands strong as one of the coolest trials with its incredible power fantasy tank busters mid-fight. Putting more of that pizzazz into designing its story-difficulty dungeons would go a helluva long way.

Final Fantasy 14's overworld has also been criminally underutilised for years now, and Evercold is the perfect time to return its relevance. I don't want its use to remain solely on lightning-fast hunt trains and FATEs that stand idle and undefeated mere months after an expansion's launch—which are also two things that require being in non-cross-world parties to make them viable, something which isn't possible if you're utilising the Party Finder function. Which is also usually the perfect time to actually make use of the overworld, since Party Finder locks you out of doing any instanced stuff like dungeons or field operation zones in the meantime.

Having "evolved" jobs and quality-of-life changes is great, but it means very little if the ways to put them into practice remain the same as they have done for a half-dozen years and a handful of expansions. I don't want Creative Studio 3 to abandon its core identity entirely—I'm not in complete agreement with folks who think fight design should veer into WoW's more reactionary direction—but it doesn't have to.

It just needs to make Final Fantasy 14 a more dynamic, engaging world to exist in once more. I'm sure we'll discover more about how it plans to do that during July's European Fan Festival. I'm just sincerely hoping that Creative Studio 3 doesn't let its fresh new ideas sit in stagnant water.

The Fabricator is your lifeline in Subnautica 2, allowing you to craft all kinds of helpful equipment and supplies. However, you'll quickly reach a point where you're unable to make certain items because it requires a 'fully functional Fabricator'.

It's much less confusing than it makes it out to sound, but this Fabricator upgrade will be a roadblock if you don't figure it out. So here's what you need to do.

How to get a fully functional Fabricator in Subnautica 2

To get a fully functional Fabricator, all you have to do is unlock basebuilding, construct a base, and build a Fabricator inside it. For some reason, the game doesn't explain that the Fabricator pre-installed in your Lifepod, which you'll have been relying on so far, is just a basic one, despite it looking identical to any you build yourself.

So grab the Habitat Builder and make a basic, sealed base anywhere you like if you haven't already—I'd recommend one of the best base locations. Then, go to the 'interior facilities' section and you'll see the Fabricator in the production category at the top, which you can place on a wall.

To build your own upgraded Fabricator, you'll need the following materials, which are all easy enough to collect from the caves around the Lifepod:

• 1x titanium
• 1x copper
• 1x quartz

This now-upgraded Fabricator works exactly like the basic one in your Lifepod, only that you can now access all the restricted blueprints, like the Sonic Resonator, Repair Tool, High Capacity Air Tank, and the Wakemaker. With that in mind, there's no point returning to your Lifepod now unless you run out of power during the night and need to quickly craft something simple, or until you craft a NOA in your base.

It seems like the Steam Controller is a hit. After selling out immediately, Valve implemented a reservation system to get your hands on it without having to fight so many scalpers. If you recently purchased one, and your package has been sent to the wrong country by mistake, there's a chance Valve will reimburse you with a game of your choosing. That's not bad for a short wait.

That's according to user hvhhggggh over on the Steam Subreddit. Their Steam Controller was reportedly routed to the UK by accident, and while they wait for it to be rerouted, Valve said, "To thank you for your patience, we would like to offer to add a game to your library. Please pick any standard-edition title available for purchase in your region and reply here with your selection"

I have reached out to Valve to confirm if this is the real policy around Steam Controller shipping delays and if there are any caveats. Given that most of the games on Steam are not owned by Valve, one would assume that the company would be paying out of pocket for any non-Valve choices here.

The email does clarify that only a "small number of packages were mistakenly sent to the UK", but we don't have concrete figures on how many just yet.

It is worth noting that this user reached out to complain when their package was late, so that's worth doing if yours has also been held up in shipping. This gesture from Valve has been met with widespread support, with the original Reddit user calling it an "Average Valve W".

The top comment is a double compliment for Valve, saying "Sometimes I wish I had a reason to use the customer service and experience something like this, but so far Steam has been a frustratingly great experience and I have no substantive complaints."

Average valve W from r/Steam

When someone mentioned that they could pick the most expensive standard-edition game out there, the original poster said Forza Horizon 6 was on their list. They later confirmed it was between that and 007 First Light, but Forza being Steam Deck verified made them pick the new racing game instead.

Though a seemingly small gesture, giving away games to those getting their Steam Controllers late has picked up a lot of goodwill for the company, and the original Reddit thread is filled with users sharing good experiences with Valve support.

At least those who get their controllers late will have a fancy new game to test the controller with.

We got our first look at Alienware's first budget gaming laptop at CES earlier this year, and now, nearly half a year later, the Alienware 15 is here, and you can go buy it over at Dell.com right now.

But before you go rushing off to throw your money at one, there are some things you ought to know about. I'm not necessarily blaming Dell here, but the specifics of this new machine tell you all you need to know about the PC gaming hardware market. In short, it's in real trouble.

For a start, the Alienware 15 is not a new mega value proposition in the same way the new Alienware AW2726DM OLED gaming monitor is. That's a brand new OLED gaming monitor, using a quality Samsung panel that is still very competitive with the current generation of OLED gaming displays, but for an affordable price brand new that you'll only otherwise see from OLEDs on special offer.

That's not the case with the Alienware 15 laptop. This is a brand new gaming laptop that Dell is determined to point out is still sporting the Alienware DNA and build quality, just with some judicious cuts here and there, and a potentially dubious specs sheet.

One thing to note is maybe a little trite, but this looks far more like a Dell Gaming laptop (a brand now seemingly defunct) than anything with the traditional style and aesthetic of an Alienware machine. It sure does look like a corporate slab. But that's not necessarily a terrible thing.

What kinda might be is that it's 2026 and this is a gaming laptop that is launching with an RTX 3050 configuration from the off. Now, that config is not available in every territory—in the US, the bottom rung will be the RTX 4050, and only RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 options are available today—but in the UK, we're treated to the full last-last-gen horrors. It's not even that cheap; the RTX 3050 system is still £979 😱

It's also restricting its GPUs to a total graphics power (TGP) of 85 W, which is going to hold back your new RTX Blackwell graphics chips if you can stretch your wallet that far. Given the impressively thin chassis, that's maybe okay, and the same as the Alienware 16 Aurora machines.

What I struggle with a little more is the way Dell is resolutely going with single channel memory across the board for its new machine. I predicted we'd see more vendors doing this very thing with the RAMpocalypse forcing manufacturers' hands in terms of dealing with ludicrous memory pricing, and lo, it has come to pass.

But it's not just at the bottom end of the configuration scale, because despite having a pair of SODIMM slots in the back of the Alienware 15, the 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB configurations include just one single stick of RAM. Alienware said "we're doing our best to hold to" its pricing in the face of memory volatility, and that meant that "out of the box it was best for us to go with single channel."

Sure, you're getting the same raw capacity, but going with single channel over standard dual channel memory (basically using two discrete sticks) means you are halving your memory bandwidth. I will say, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference in most games—Alienware estimates about a 5% performance hit—but in general use, it does affect what you can do with your system.

None of this would be that painful if it weren't for the price. I will say again, this is not a cheap laptop, even if Dell wants to call this an entry-level Alienware machine. The RTX 4050 version in the US, with an AMD CPU, is going to start at $1,300, and right now, you're looking at $1,500 for the RTX 5050 system with 16 GB single channel memory and a 512 GB SSD. Worse still, you cannot configure an Alienware 15 with an RTX 5060 for less than $2,290, with 32 GB of single channel memory and a 1 TB SSD.

For comparison, you can buy an RTX 5050 version of the Alienware 16 Aurora for $1,200 with 16 GB of dual channel DDR5 memory and a 512 GB SSD. Or, y'know, you could buy an actual budget gaming laptop with an RTX 5050 inside it for $799 instead.

It's not all bad, because the Alienware 15 will be a genuinely good machine, just not a budget option. At least not until the sales really bite into it. The rounded chassis looks good, it has ditched the big bum of the Area-51 machines, and it comes with a full numpad. Dell has also ensured that its 15-inch screen is still a 16:10, 1200p option, not the more traditional 15-inch 16:9 panel.

So, it'll be a quality machine, though it's not really the super-affordable, entry-level Alienware you might have hoped for post-MacBook Neo.

Getting Titanium Ingots in Subnautica 2 threw me through a hoop when I first needed to find them to craft the Sonic Resonator. Why? Because unlike the basic materials you'll have been searching for so far, you actually have to make Titanium Ingots using a machine, adding an extra step to the process.

The good news is that it's not actually that hard to do once you figure it out, but you will need to scan and unlock a specific facility to do it. And you'll need to follow the same process with later ingots, such as silver, lead, gold, and lithium.

How to make Titanium Ingots in Subnautica 2

To make Titanium Ingots (and other metal ingots), you need to build a Processor in your base using the Habitat Builder tool. If you haven't unlocked this facility yet, you need to scan one to acquire it as a blueprint. You can find one in the Old Habitat about 350 meters to the north of the Lifepod, where NOA will actually send you to find Quaker's black box.

To build the Processor, you'll need the following materials:

• 2x titanium
• 1x mild acid (made in a Fabricator)
• 1x copper wire (made in a Fabricator)

Place the Processor and interact with it, where you'll be prompted to choose a recipe for the machine to manufacture. Then, press the button to load the ingredients, and it'll automatically start creating the item. In this case, you're looking for the Titanium Ingot at the top of the list, which requires three titanium pieces each and 30 seconds processing time. Be warned that using the Processor will draw additional power from your base, so make sure you have a good cushion of extra electricity.

You'll need Titanium Ingots to make the Sonic Resonator and the Repair Tool, as well as key base elements like the Bioreactor, Tadpole Dock, and the Tadpole vehicle itself. So you'll need lots of titanium, and for that I recommend a large trench by a natural current not far from the Old Habitat, roughly 350-400 meters north of the Lifepod.

You'll need to repeat a similar process later on, but with lithium and Plasteel Ingots to craft the vital High Capacity Air Tank upgrade, and Strong Acid to make Power Cells.

Battlestar Galactica's resurgence in 2003 was a landmark moment in science fiction, taking a weirdly Mormon '70s sci-fi romp and turning it into a gloomy space thriller full of political and military drama. "Yes," it said, "sci-fi will have its prestige drama moment as well." We'd had DS9 and Babylon 5 years before, but Battlestar clawed its way out of its niche and became a mainstream phenomenon.

In comparison, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is a lot more understated. The static character art, pixelated bridge and cute polygonal ships do not scream "space opera", but beneath its slightly muddled presentation sits a game that elegantly captures the tension and chilling proximity of extinction that made for such an exceptional show.

The short pitch: It's FTL in a convincing Battlestar Galactica suit. It's probably the best sci-fi property to go down this route, too. Sure, Voyager is also a comfy fit, which is why we got Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, but I bounced off that quickly. It had the structure down, but it really dropped the ball when it came to space battles. In Scattered Hopes, like FTL, the space battles are the meat.

In your first run, you'll start with a small fleet of mostly civilian ships led by an outdated gunstar (smaller but faster than a battlestar), and you must jump across space to meet up with the titular vessel, managing constantly dwindling resources, ship armaments, squadrons and the humans onboard—both your crew, who can be assigned various roles and level up, and the factions that represent the last of humanity.

There's a fair amount to juggle, and plenty of pressure, but a relatively simple structure holds it all together and gives you room to focus.

Scattered Hopes is divided into two distinct phases: fleet management and combat. When you're safely inside a new system, you have a few turns to do a spot of management. Assigning squads, levelling up characters and picking their next ability, putting out fires—often literally. There are crises and opportunities, sometimes with multiple steps, and while the rewards can be tempting, there's always a cost: time, resources, health.

Systems have points of interest that you can spend resources to explore, or you can send one of your crew to investigate for greater rewards—if they have the energy. Maybe you'll send your pilot to explore a planet and pick up valuable resources, or ask your XO to bring a drifting civilian vessel into your fleet.

These civilian vessels can't fight, but they serve as support ships. By training their crew, you'll net bonuses that help the entire fleet, turning them into handy resource factories. Let's hope you don't get them blown up.

Unfortunately, Scattered Hopes really wants to blow them up.

After you've used up all your turns—sometimes leaving some problems unresolved, prioritising the most important problems—the Cylons will appear and battle commences, with the tattered remnants of the Twelve Colonies fighting simply to survive another day.

Survive is the key word here. You won't be blowing up massive Cylon capital ships. Your goal is just to stay alive until you can jump out of the system and into (fleeting) safety. Combat plays out in real time, but you're expected to make liberal use of the tactical pause feature, giving you breathing space to adjust your tactics and plan for the next assault wave.

The friction you'll experience in the fleet planning phase is echoed here in the combat phase, where you'll be dealing with mounting crises with limited resources. But this time the crises are nuclear warheads and Cylon ships, and the limited resources are your squadrons. The good news is that, for the most part, your wee ships (and the weapons attached to your flagship) are pretty bloody powerful. Unfortunately, that isn't quite the safety net it might seem, given the superior numbers fielded by your robotic foe.

While it is common for battles in tactics games to feel like discrete puzzles, it is so much more overt in Scattered Hopes. Each enemy fleet is its own conundrum, spitting out various complications—different enemy squadron classes, missiles, nukes and exotic guns, along with weird modifiers that will force you to make tactical adjustments, taking into account your own vessels' speed, manoeuvrability and damage potential.

And you've only got a small box of tricks to deal with this whole mess—which you naturally must use as efficiently as possible.

It's simple at first. Send your speedy Viper towards an area where you know a lot of lightly-armoured vessels are jumping in (you always get to see where enemies will appear) and it'll sit there waiting to strike. Using one of its abilities, you can make sure it hunts down and kills every last one of them. Meanwhile, you keep your Raptor closer to the fleet, where it can use its impressive range to take out enemies and missiles hurtling towards your vulnerable ships. It's slow and can't fire when moving, so it works best as a turret.

Should a bunch of new enemies appear while your squadrons are engaged, you can use your flagship's flak cannon to take out a large group, if they're lightly armoured. If they're not? Bring out the nukes!

The nuclear option is a risk, mind you. Specifically when it comes to friendly fire. But sometimes you need to make hard calls. If you've got enemies bearing down on you and there's no chance your nearby Viper will be able to take them out, it might be worth the cost to just annihilate everything, Viper included, if it saves the fleet.

Hard calls like this become increasingly common as the Cylons amp up the pressure, or when you encounter enemies with traits that are tricky to manage. Maybe you'll be fighting Cylons with the Tactical Jump mutation, which gives them an immediate speed boost when they jump in, potentially making it tough for your Viper to hunt them down and kill them. Or you might be unfortunate enough to jump into a system that's full of mines just waiting to blow up any squadrons that get near, necessitating a significant change in strategy.

You'll be able to unlock the ability to field more squadrons, and there are all sorts of enhancements you can choose for your ships, squadrons and characters, but the Cylon threat just keeps on escalating—you might be getting stronger, but it never gets easier.

While the main goal is simply surviving until you can jump, you still need to consider what you'll be left with when you get to that point. Scattered Hopes emphasises this in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most effective is the ship health system.

Your flagship and civilian ships can take a real beating, but you can't just wait until they're on the cusp of destruction to act. See, each ship has three thresholds, and once their health gets below them, you'll have to deal with a negative situation, from moderate to major, depending on which threshold you've passed. So the health of your ships matters long before it gets to zero.

I'm a big fan of how developer Alt Shift has handled the combat portion of Scattered Hopes, but the human element is what makes it a Battlestar Galactica game. Between brawls you'll have to deal with the opposing needs of the fleet's various factions, all the while realising that you can't please everyone. When factions are happy with you, you'll get opportunities that benefit the fleet, but when their respect for you drops, they'll only generate crises, costing you valuable time and resources.

You'll also need to manage the morale of your crew, and the health of the whole fleet. When people die, get injured, or become too sick to work, the fleet's health goes down, and when it drops to zero that's you done.

So you'll need to make deals, piss people off, go out for drinks with colleagues and do your best to hold everything together by whatever means you have available. Which will be a lot harder if a human-looking Cylon infiltrates the fleet. Paranoia, witch-hunts, all that tension from the show is present here too.

It's stressful! And great! It's got so much of what I love about FTL, but it's still charting its own course. The fleet management and scale of the combat phase change things up dramatically, making the FTL-like structure feel new again. So it's weird that it's not made much of a splash. Maybe BSG doesn't have the cultural cachet it once did (it definitely doesn't), but even if you never watched it, or simply have no fondness for the misadventurers of Adama and Starbuck, Scattered Hopes still has plenty going for it.

It's rare, especially in this day and age, to see a genuine comeuppance play out in real time—which is why I'm savouring this particular piece of glee as I'm informed that Subnautica 2 has hit a 2 million copy milestone in just 12 hours, after selling a million copies in one.

Per a press release sent to PC Gamer, "Peak concurrent players across Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Xbox exceeded 651,000, with Steam alone reaching a peak of more than 467,000 concurrent players. This marks approximately nine times the all-time peak concurrent player count of the original Subnautica, which launched in 2018."

As to why this is bad news for Krafton CEO Changham Kim, it's a doozy. Back in July of last year, it was revealed that the entire leadership of developer Unknown Worlds had been gutted.

Things went to court, where Kim was accused of kicking out the studio's former heads over a potential payout (to the tune of $250 million, if the game reached certain sales targets) that would earn him a "reputation as a pushover and endanger his position as CEO." Krafton was also accused of purposefully delaying the game to avoid the payout window.

During a cross-examination, it was also confirmed that Kim had gone to ChatGPT for advice on what to do: "Now, ChatGPT [is] start[ing] to answer that it is difficult to cancel the earn-out," Kim wrote in a message to Krafton head of corporate development Maria Park.

A judge ordered former Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill be reinstated over a "material breach of contract". Basically, Krafton has to pay the money it said it would pay, and "can—and must—act in good faith to navigate their remaining contractual relationship."

Obviously, that hinges on Subnautica 2 doing well. Which it has done. Tremendously.

It's not clear what the exact requirements were for the returned Unknown Worlds leadership to get their payout, but I'm willing to bet that, at the very least, 2 million copies being sold in 12 hours has put them on the right track, if not already well over the finish line.

Now, I'm no cutthroat capitalist businessman, but I do have to wonder out loud if trying to sabotage the launch of a game with a huge amount of hype around it (Subnautica 2 was the most wishlisted game on Steam for a while), spoiling one's working relationship with the people who made it, and dragging oneself to court and being forced to admit you, a big CEO, were relying on ChatGPT for advice—if all of that is worth just paying the money you said you'd pay in a contract you signed.

I suppose it's neither here nor there, but I will eagerly await the news of Unknown Worlds getting their payout with a deep sense of schadenfreude.

Subnautica 2 is here, and its sales figures are already impressive. However, it's important to bear in mind that it's an early access game (albeit a very good one) and that bugs are definitely present. For example, the game can refuse to provide a 4K resolution option, even if it's running on a machine with a 4K monitor.

Have no fear, though, because the fix appears to be very simple. Select fullscreen in the graphics settings menu, which will default your resolution to 1080p, hit apply, and then restart the game.

Bing bang bosh, a 4K option magically appears. If you've got the monitor to handle it, that is. I've personally tested this method alongside our Rob, who was also plagued with this particular issue, and it works perfectly on both of our machines.

Gaming PCs can be finicky beasts, though, so some have taken to Reddit with alternative methods. One suggestion is to set your UI scale to 100% in the Windows 11 display settings menu, which also apparently fixes the bug.

Another redditor suggests a slightly more involved method. Reach_or_Throw says that accessing the game's .exe file properties menu and navigating to the Compatibility tab, before checking the box in the high DPI settings marked "Override high DPI scaling behaviour", also fixes the issue after a restart.

Comment from r/subnautica

If that doesn't work you could always take a dive into the config settings, which are stored in:

C:\Users\[name]\AppData\Local\Subnautica2\Saved\Config\WinGDK\GameUserSettings.ini

There are entries marked "LastUserConfirmedDesiredScreen" for width and height that you can manually set, too. Remember to save afterwards, and hopefully that does the trick if all else fails.

However, the simple fix listed above seems to squash the bug on our systems, so hooray for that. Subnautica 2 certainly has its quirks, but otherwise it's been a relatively smooth ride in our testing so far. It even runs pretty well, especially if you're prepared to drop a few settings from Epic to High for a mega frame rate boost.

Early access often leads to troubled waters, but at least these stormy seas seem to be easily quelled. I've run out of water gags now, so I'd best get back to it. Hopefully, it's all plain sailing from here.

Lucifer Rotsac is a very important plant in Subnautica 2, since it's used to make rubber. That's pretty handy when you're trying to survive on a hostile alien water planet and desperately create sealed environments so you don't drown. But it's not immediately obvious where you're meant to find it.

Thankfully it's actually really easy to collect wholesale, so you won't need to do tons of back and forth, unlike silver, which will be the main hurdle in your initial hours under the ocean.

How to get Lucifer Rotsac in Subnautica 2

Lucifer Rotsacs are glowing orange orbs nestled inside green coral plants, known as Cradle Shootroots. The best place to find Lucifer Rotsac is just 80 meters directly southwest of the Lifepod, surrounding a rocky archway. As demonstrated in the video above, I've found roughly 16 Lucifer Rotsacs here, and they'll respawn periodically, too.

As you venture further into the ocean, you'll see that Lucifer Rotsac is actually quite common, often spawning tucked against rock formations and inside caves.

You can collect the Lucifer Rotsac by hand. The Cradle Shootroots, however, must be cut using your Survival Multitool, but can be a great source of fibrous pulp early on. And you'll want a bunch of that too, since it can be used to make basic oily salads as well as fiber, another component in Basic Fins.

Two Lucifer Rotsacs can be turned into rubber at any fabricator, including in your Lifepod. And rubber's required to make a bunch of early items, including Air Bladders and a Standard Air Tank.

Clearing your first Angel Comb in Subnautica 2 is a multi-stage challenge, as you move from chamber to chamber, destroying viral blooms in order to heal this very sick undersea flower. Angel Combs offer Adaptations, and the first one grants Heat Tolerance, meaning, you guessed it, that you can enter the lava vent area without fear of underwater combustion.

You'll find other Angel Combs later in the game, but you can complete these the same way, so here's what you need to do.

How to complete an Angel Comb in Subnautica 2

As you progress through Subnautica 2, you'll find a number of Angel Combs infected by viral blooms. These pods are sealed shut, but contain Adaptations, such as the one to digest food you grab at the start of the game, and will help you cope better with increasingly hostile environments.

The first Angel Comb you can heal of its viral infection is 200 meters northwest of the Lifepod, bearing about 300 degrees on the compass, in a cave. This Angel Comb contains the Heat Tolerance Adaptation, which is vital if you want to continue the story to investigate the Tadpole Pens and gather materials like gold.

First, though, you'll need to:

• Unlock the Sonic Resonator tool
• Improve your O2 capacity by crafting the Standard Air Tank and bringing at least one Air Bladder
• I also suggest bringing some medical kits, a distraction flare, and to either craft the Wakemaker, or at least grab the Dash Biomod from the Welcome Center to the south-east of the Lifepod

Now to clear an Angel Comb, you need to follow each of the big tubes from the central comb chamber until you find the chambers with the viral growths. The water will be murky here, and each chamber will contain flower growths, plus larvae-like fish who will attack when you get close. You need to blast each flower with the Sonic Resonator to destroy it.

I recommend charging up, then using the Dash to quickly close the distance and remove each, since the worms will stop attacking after each flower is gone.

There are two chambers like this, and then you'll have to head back to clear the central one with the comb itself. If you find yourself running low on oxygen while doing this, look for funnels blocked with Bloom Sap—you can hack this away with your Survival Multitool to get oxygen.

Since the central chamber is much more challenging due to the patrolling big predatory fish, you'll want to toss out that distraction flare to occupy it and then quickly blast the flowers around the room.

Once done, the Angel Comb will open, letting you claim the Heat Tolerance Adaptation by interacting with it. Now you can head to the lava zone without fear of melting.

Forza Horizon 6's Japan is absolutely massive, which is great and all, but when you're asked to find a very specific location to uncover Treasure Cars, searching the whole map is a monumental task. Sometimes it's a house, other times it's a wind turbine, a radio tower, or a waterfall. Point is, the hints you're given aren't great at narrowing down the location. They're like Barn Finds, except you're not even given a search area.

All Forza Horizon 6 Treasure Car locations

There are nine Treasure Cars in Forza Horizon 6, hidden throughout the map of Japan. You don't need to do anything before you can find the car, unlike Barn Finds, which require you to increase your Discover Japan level first. So you can visit the locations below to add a unique car to your collection, free of charge. Check out our Forza Horizon 6 cars list to find out what other vehicles you can drive.

You can watch the video above, or read on below to find all the Treasure Cars, sorted by region in the order you're likely to encounter them:

1969 Dodge Charger R/T

• Region: Minamino

The Dodge Charger is the first Treasure Car you'll get a clue for after earning your first Horizon Festival wristband. You can find it behind the buildings on the side of the road by the golf course in the centre of the Minamino region, next to the Airfield Trail dirt racing event.

1991 Nissan Figaro

• Region: Tokyo City

The Figaro is in a car park along the southern coast of Tokyo City, where you'll see the Rainbow Bridge on your right—the westernmost bridge of the few in the city.

1985 Mazda RX-7 GSL-SE

• Region: Ohtani

Ohtani is a very large region with lots of radio towers, but the specific one you're looking for is in the mountain range far west of the region, on the border with Shimanoyama, west of the Horizon Festival Site in Ohtani. There will be multiple red radio towers nearby, but it's the one next to the large wooden house and the white tower, too, so it sticks out.

1985 Nissan Safari Turbo

• Region: Ito

Ito is also one of the largest regions, and it's very mountainous, making it hard to find the Wind Farm mentioned in the clue. You need to head to the mountain at the northmost point of the region, past the Toyota 2000GT Barn Find and Minka House.

Take the winding dirt path up the hill where you'll find the Safari Turbo at the base of a wind turbine, next to some railings and boxes on the road on the west side of the mountain.

1987 Porsche 959

• Region: Shimanoyama

The Porsche 959 is one of the easier Treasure Cars to find, mainly because Shimanoyama doesn't have many buildings, and the hint you're given shows a shop. What you're looking for is the corner shop near the car park along the southernmost road in Narai-Juku, a town in the north of Shimanoyama. It's east of the Narai-Juku Circuit road race, west of the Fuji Unkai House.

This overlaps with the Mitsubishi #1 Sierra Sierra Enterprises Lancer Evolution Time Attack Barn Find, so grab this if you've reached Discover Japan level Adventurer (6/7, the purple stamp) or take note and return later.

2005 Ford GT

• Region: Nangan

The Ford GT gave me the most trouble of any Treasure Car, as there's a long stretch of coastline to search. You're looking for the coastal trail overlooking Tokyo City in the east of Nangan, which you'll find on the easternmost main road going along the coastline. Here, there's a narrow dirt path in the hills, closer to the coast—you can just about make it out on the map.

1981 BMW M1

• Region: Hokubu

The hint you're given for the BMW M1 points you towards a railway, which isn't much to go on in a big region with a railway running the whole way through. You need to go to the large railway bridge cutting through the open fields in the middle north of the Hokubu region. It's not far from the Hokubu Ascent street race event, and you'll see the railway tunnel to the south.

1995 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR

• Region: Takashiro

The Lancer Evolution can be found on the dirt road leading to the waterfall in the western corner of the Takashiro region, not far from a temple. Take the dirt path by the bridge leading along the river.

This Treasure Car more or less overlaps with the Nissan #23 Pennzoil NISMO Skyline GT-R Barn Find, which you might have unlocked by the time you enter this region if you've been increasing your Discover Japan rank.

1974 Lancia Stratos HF Stradale

• Region: Sotoyama

You can find the Lancia Stratos behind the wooden lodge on the snowy path up to Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, near the centre of the Sotoyama region. The nearby main road (which leads towards Hakusan Mountain Lodge) cuts through the snow-covered mountain pass like a ravine, making it a good landmark—you can just about see it in the background of the clue photograph.

Everyone's favourite tradition continues yet again in Forza Horizon 6 with Barn Finds, iconic cars you'll have to track down before you can add them to your garage. Like previous games in the series, you'll need to search a designated area for the barn—only this time around, you unlock new finds by increasing your Discover Japan stamp level.

All Forza Horizon 6 Barn Find locations

There are 15 Barn Finds in Forza Horizon 6, unlocked in batches as you increase your Discover Japan level from Visitor to Master Explorer. Improving your Discover Japan ranking and getting new stamps boils down to breaking mascots, beating food delivery jobs, street and touge races, and, most importantly, completing stories (the activities with yellow badges).

Each time you uncover a Barn Find car, you will need to wait for it to be repaired, so you can't use it right away like you can with Treasure Cars—unless you want to pay a large chunk of credits.

You can watch the video version above, or look below for all the Barn Find locations in the order you'll unlock them:

Honda NSX-R GT

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Visitor (yellow stamp, 1/7)
• Region: Ohtani

This Barn Find is located in the wooded hills along the northwest edge of the search area, close to where the two nearby roads pincer together. It's rough terrain, so don't use a slow city car like the Nissan Figaro as I did.

Toyota 2000GT

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Sightseer (green stamp, 2/7)
• Region: Ito

The Toyota 2000GT is in the north of the Ito region, not far from the Minka House. More specifically, it's in the small patch of trees near the seawall on the southeastern edge of the search area, between the two paths down to the beach.

It's also just a short drive from the 1985 Nissan Safari Turbo Treasure Car further north.

Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Sightseer (green stamp, 2/7)
• Region: Ito

The Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 Barn Find sits near the borders of three regions, but it's located in southern Ito. It's up the small wooded hill south of the crossroads junction on the southern edge of the search area.

Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Traveller (blue stamp, 3/7)
• Region: Nangan

You can find the Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R in the far south of the search area in Nangan, past the houses on the main road, where you'll see a dirt path leading off towards the barn.

Nissan Pao

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Traveller (blue stamp, 3/7)
• Region: Minamino

You'll find the Nissan Pao in the woods to the northeast edge of the search area, in a barn down a dirt path leading off the main road.

I recommend grabbing the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T Treasure Car further to the east while you're in the area, as well.

Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Ohtani/Tokyo City

The Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3 is located in the bamboo forest next to the dirt road between the two main roads (which lead to Mei's house) in the Ohtani section of the search area to the north.

Peugeot 205 Turbo 16

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Shimanoyama

You can find the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 in the barn at the end of the wide dirt road leading up the short hill from the main road in the northeast of the search area.

Lincoln Continental

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Hokubu

The Lincoln Continental is nice and easy to locate, found in the patch of trees next to the farmland just south of the centre of the search area.

Nissan #23 Pennzoil NISMO Skyline GT-R

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Takashiro

You'll find the Nissan Pennzoil Skyline in the woods on the eastern edge of the search area, between where the road curves in a 'u' shape.

You can also collect the 1995 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR Treasure Car by the waterfall not far from here, so I recommend grabbing it while you're in the area.

Mitsubishi Montero Evolution

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Navigator (orange stamp, 5/7)
• Region: Shimanoyama

The Mitsubishi Montero Evolution is in the forest on the southwest edge of the search area. If you zoom into the map, you can actually see the dirt path leading to it from the main road, not far from the Bandai Azuma Skyline Drift Zone challenge.

Lamborghini Diablo SV

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Navigator (orange stamp, 5/7)
• Region: Ito

The easiest way to reach the Lamborghini Diablo SV is to follow the main road cutting through the search area until you reach the longest, deforested strip in the centre of the location, near a three-way junction. The barn is on the eastern edge of the search area, so go down the hill with the chopped trees opposite the blue digger, and around the bend on your right.

Nissan R390 (GT1)

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Adventurer (purple stamp, 6/7)
• Region: Ohtani

You can find the Nissan R390 along the dirt path cutting through the northeastern edge of the search location, near the border between Ohtani and Shimanoyama. You can also reach it from the main road outside of the search area to the northeast, near the Bridge Underpass Trailblazer start gate.

Mitsubishi #1 Sierra Sierra Enterprises Lancer Evolution Time Attack

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Adventurer (purple stamp, 6/7)
• Region: Shimanoyama

The Mitsubishi #1 Sierra Sierra Enterprises Lancer Evolution Time Attack (rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) is in the woods almost directly in the centre of the search area, overlooking Narai-Juku town to its south. Take the high dirt road leading from the Narai-Juku Circuit road race event, then go down the path on your right where you'll see the barn over the hill.

It's just up the road from the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 Barn Find, and very close to the 1987 Porsche 959 Treasure Car.

Nissan #11 Tomica Skyline Turbo Super Silhouette

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Master Explorer (gold stamp, 7/7)
• Region: Ito

You'll find the Tomica Skyline in the southwestern edge of the search area. Near where the main road enters the zone to the west, there's a wide dirt path leading south towards the barn between some oddly skinny trees. You can actually see it quite easily on the map, which is rare for Barn Finds.

Mazda #55 Mazda 787B

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Master Explorer (gold stamp, 7/7)
• Region: Takashiro

The last Barn Find, the Mazda #55 Mazda 787B, is one of the hardest to track down, despite most of the surrounding area being open fields. It's located in the woods directly north of the search area, past the buildings, walking trails, and farmland in the region. There's a dirt path coming off the main road in the northwest edge of the zone.

You may think getting locked out of your account because you've forgotten the password is annoying, but have you ever gotten locked out and lost almost half a million dollars in the process? That's what happened to X user @cprkrn, when they stored five bitcoin ($402k at the time of writing) in an account in 2015 and forgot how to get back in.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, cprkrn used Anthropic's AI model, Claude, to get access again. After using 'like 7 trillion passwords ', they found a password that happened to be the one before the current one.

Thinking they had no way back in, they reportedly dumped their college computer into Claude, which found an old wallet file that, once decrypted, got them into their account.

This computer had a mnemonic device that they seemingly didn't spot, and Claude put that together with the rest of their account details to get into the account. The LLM didn't hack into the account, or anything so elaborate, it just found the pieces to get into the account, lost in an old computer.

If you're wondering how and why they lost their password for an account that is so valuable, they were apparently "Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password."

There's an ironic silver lining here, in that we don't know if cprkm would have held onto the bitcoin so long if they hadn't lost access. According to the account history, 5 bitcoin were purchased on April Fools' Day in 2015. By this point, the cryptocurrency was worth around $245. Now, one bitcoin fetches $60,000. That's a fair jump in value, though it is down from its peak of $90,000 in October, 2025.

Still, cprkrn would have been aware that they had somewhere close to half a million dollars in a locked account for years now. They report that dumping their computer into Claude was their 'last ditch effort' to get the account back.

You may be wondering what they plan on doing with all that cash now that they finally have it back. Their answer? Asking electronic artist and DJ Deadmau5 to play at their wedding. I suppose there are technically worse ways to spend the money.

Even though Asus is doing its very best to let us all know that this year marks the 20th anniversary of its Republic of Gamers (ROG) branding, you may well not have picked up on the fact that it's releasing all kinds of one-off goodies to celebrate two decades of high-end gaming gear. But whatever else Asus has got planned, it's not going to top this pure blast of nostalgia for me.

Fellow PC enthusiasts, I give you the Asus ROG Crosshair 2006. Yes, I know it's just a motherboard, and if you're a recent starter in one of the best hobbies around, you might not think much about it. But if you were a hardware enthusiast around the start of the millennium, then you'll know exactly why this is ticking every box for me.

Back then, every PC component aimed at the hardcore crowd was plastered with copper heatsinks, often in some ludicrously over-the-top form that was unnecessary, since power levels back then weren't anything like as high as they are now.

To that end, Asus took its very first ROG motherboard, its latest ROG X870E Dark Hero model, and blended the two in what can only be described as a total smorgasbord of copper. Alas, it's not real copper. For example, the VRM heatsinks are "lightweight aluminum" that have been given "an eye-catching copper hue."

That's pretty disappointing, truth be told, but not entirely unexpected. After all, copper is horribly expensive these days, and that amount of the metal would make the motherboard very heavy and absurdly pricey.

And while copper has one of the highest thermal conductivities of any pure metal (second only to silver) and roughly double that of aluminum, the latter is more than good enough for use in today's cooling contraptions.

I don't really care, though. To me, the Crosshair 2006 is all about remembering the grand old times of PC modding, tweaking, and messing about. I'm not suggesting that it was better or easier to do back then; it's just that there were bigger gains to be found from overclocking stuff compared to what you can typically get with today's hardware.

This motherboard isn't a return to those days, just a visual reminder of my glory days of PC hardware schenanigans, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Working out how to investigate the Tadpole Pens in Subnautica 2 is the game's first proper puzzle, as you venture into the area's Hot Caves to recover the door code that'll let you inside. NOA doesn't seem to send you to the Tadpole Pens until you've found the other black boxes, at least that's how it was for me.

This is a significantly longer trip than finding any of the previous black boxes, so stock up on the usual water, food, batteries, health kits, and maybe bring a distraction flare just in case. All that said, here's how to reach the Tadpole Pens, as well as the Zip black box location so you can open the door inside.

How to get the Tadpole Pens code for the door in Subnautica 2

Once you've got the quest to visit the Tadpole Pens from NOA, you'll get a signal indicating "Investigate Tadpole Pens", around 675 meters to the east of the Lifepod in the lava vents area. To get here, you're going to need to unlock the Heat Tolerance Adaptation by clearing the Angel Comb 200 meters northwest of the Lifepod, bearing 300 degrees on the compass.

This requires the Sonic Resonator tool, which you use to destroy the viral flowers in the area, letting you claim the Adaptation as you did with the one to digest food. I'd also suggest upgrading your O2 tank and building a Tadpole, as well as a Wavemaker to swim faster.

When you arrive at the Tadpole Pens, you'll find a door that you can't unlock, discovering that a colonist called Zip took the door code down into the Hot Caves in the area. If you wait long enough, NOA will give you the Zip black box location as a mission, but that also means heading all the way back to your base. Instead, use the video above to find Zip's black box.

If you can't see the video, then you need to:

1. Head south from the Tadpole Pens, on a bearing of about 195 degrees, through the ravine with all the lava pipes above until you spot a cave entrance in the ground
2. Go inside and take the glowing blue tunnel entrance to the southwest, descending further in
3. You'll reach a chamber with a big lava vent in its centre—go down and to the right to discover a small cave entrance on its right side
4. Exit your Tadpole here, as it'll get crushed if you go any deeper, then swim down to the bottom of the cave ahead
5. You'll find Zip's black box, and so the door code, on the big purple growth, so look for the little human hologram that indicates where it is

Once done, you can head back to the Tadpole Pens, open the door, and enjoy the surprise that waits within.