After making an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $56 billion, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen—sometimes referred to as the 'meme stock king'—went on CNBC to answer questions about the surprising move, as one does.

He declined, however, to provide a satisfying answer to "a pretty straightforward question," as one anchor put it: How are you going to buy eBay for $56 billion if you don't have that much money?

To start the interview, Cohen claimed that eBay "could be a much larger business" with the help of "an entrepreneurial mindset." His plan, according to GameStop's press release, is to cut $2 billion from eBay's budget within just a year.

Pressed to explain how GameStop can pay for the acquisition, however, Cohen directed interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin to the press release, which states that GameStop will make the acquisition with 50% stock and 50% cash.

Sorkin then added up GameStop's market capitalization, cash, and expected (but not yet secured) financing from TD Securities, reaching a number $16 billion less than the $56 billion offer, to which Cohen responded, "Yeah, well we'll see what happens."

A baffled Sorkin rephrased the question, and co-anchor Becky Quick jumped in with a perplexed laugh: "Ryan, that's a pretty straightforward question. I don't get it. Where's the rest of the money come from?"

Cohen claimed not to understand the interviewers, saying that GameStop can issue stock to get the deal done. At that point, CNBC cut to another interviewer. My description doesn't quite express the full awkwardness of the exchange, which is embedded above.

The GameStop CEO may yet pull off the acquisition, but for now the market has reacted to his announcement with a 10% dip in GameStop's share price.

In a press release of its own, eBay confirmed that today is the first it's hearing of the proposal, which it will "carefully review and consider" before commenting further.

September 14, 2000: That's the day Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, the second-worst iteration of Windows in its long history. It also marked the final release of MS-DOS, which for so many years had undergirded its operating systems. In 2006—two decades ago—Microsoft ceased long-term support for Windows 98 and Me, meaning that MS-DOS's life was truly over.

Two days ago the latest update for NetHack dropped, and you bet your ass it still supports MS-DOS, just like it did when it first released in 1987.

We already covered NetHack's surprise 5.0 release and some of its fun patch notes, but I had to dwell on this for just a minute. In the era of multimillion-dollar games releasing and shutting down within weeks, here's a game that's been steadily updated since 1987. It's only two years younger than Windows.

Microsoft supported MS-DOS for a total of 25 years, from 1981 to 2006. NetHack's closing in on 40.

Perhaps even more absurd is that the NetHack development team still maintains an official binary for the Amiga—you know, the personal computer line that went extinct in 1994.

While it's novel as all hell that you can play a still-being-updated-in-2026 game on a decades-old PC, perhaps more appealing to most players today is a very slick, recent client for NetHack, called NetHack 3D. The game has long been open source, and while it's gotten many 2D tilesets and one very ugly 3D adaptation over the years, NetHack has always been an ASCII game first and foremost, just like Rogue and Hack before it.

NetHack 3D is by far the nicest modern interface I've seen for the game—nice enough to tempt me away from playing in a terminal connected to nethack.alt.org. NetHack 3D adapts the game's incredibly complex controls into some quite intuitive context menus, with mouse support on PC and touch support on mobile. You can switch to ASCII mode if you want, but the default way to play is with a 2D tileset, and there are several options sourced from the NetHack community. I can't say I'm crazy about NetHack 3D's AI-generated logo, but at least the rest of the graphics are player-made tilesets.

NetHack 3D's layered-on-top configuration options and polished UI don't prevent you from typing in any of NetHack's more obscure interactions manually, just like you always could, but it simplifies all the basics. There's even a novel first-person mode, which is not going to be the ideal way to play in a game as deadly as NetHack, but still—it's surreal seeing it from a literal new perspective, 39 years into its life.

I'm not kidding when I call this the best roguelike ever made, either—well, perhaps Caves of Qud has supplanted it, but no other game really comes close to expanding on the original Rogue with so many interlocking interactions and systems that there's even a kitchen sink reference. Without NetHack, there probably never would've been a Dwarf Fortress. There's a reason the game's in the damn MOMA.

If you've never played NetHack, this is now by far the easiest way to ease into it. The tilesets are nice, but don't be scared to try the ASCII mode. Give it enough time to learn the symbols used for most monsters and items, and it'll start to feel like you can see the Matrix.

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is making friends and influencing people on social media, which is to say that he's repeatedly insisting the studio does not use generative AI in a professional capacity (and occasionally calling people names) after a gen AI image he posted over the weekend drew a pretty negative reaction from followers.

The whole thing started on May 3: "I asked my primary AI tool to generate a selfie that indicates how they feel based on how I interact with it and this is what it generated (note: background words were not prompted and have zero relationship to anything real)," he wrote on X.

Boy, that's a ratio.

In a reply to a follower who said a real photo of Pitchford in his office "would have been much better received," he wrote," The point was to make the AI make a picture of how it saw itself to put a lens on the absurdity of the idea of AI having an identity. In what universe does what you suggest have anything to do with the point?"

But it was all downhill from there: Other followers expressed concern about the use of generative AI in Borderlands games, or disapproval in general; Pitchford insisted several times that the intent was merely to be "silly," and that Gearbox's policy "is that we do not use AI for anything in any professional capacity that any customer could ever see."

The pump for this particular backlash may have been primed by recent Borderlands 4 patch notes, which some players suspected were written or modified by AI. Pitchford insisted that's not the case, however, saying in response to one such accusation that "errors in patch notes are human error."

Eventually, Pitchford posted a longer statement saying he was inspired by friends who were "goofing around with making [AI] try to make pictures of itself."

"My friends I was with for lunch earlier produced some funny things with similar prompts for themselves and I wanted to see what bullshit it would generate as an idea of a self identity because the idea of an AI even having an identity is nonsense," Pitchford wrote. "The result was somehow more embarrassingly hilarious than I expected and I wanted to share that.

"ChatGPT has no information from me about anything from my work because I don’t use AI for work and our policy is no AI in any work that could ever be seen by any customer. I’m using my personal phone and not my work computer (which is isolated from personal systems). It got whatever it generated from whatever public knowledge of Gearbox it has access to (hence my very clear disclaimer) and the timing or content of this has exactly zero to do with whatever feelings you’ve spun yourself up about with patch notes."

He then urged followers to "maybe relax a little and have some fun?"

That's probably not a bad idea, generally speaking, and honestly I don't doubt that Pitchford was just "goofing around," as he put it. At the same time, I feel like a little contrition would've gone a long way here. As we've seen many times in the past, the use of generative AI in game development is a very touchy topic, and I don't think it's at all surprising that a high-profile game industry executive posting gen AI images bearing the Gearbox logo and various other game dev trappings would elicit a strong reaction, and not necessary of the positive sort. Games industry executives, and more importantly the money guys, may be eager to embrace it, but people who actually make and play games? Not so much.

It only took 30 minutes for Valve's first stock of new Steam Controllers to sell out. Some of us at PC Gamer managed to order them, while others were turned away by Steam errors and will have to wait for a restock.

For impatient people with money to burn, confirmed orders of the controllers immediately hit eBay, where they're successfully selling for as much as $300. That's a 200% markup on the $99 that Valve is offering them for. (One person is asking for $735,889.32, but unsurprisingly, no one is biting.)

Measures like order quantity limits have helped curb the reselling of in-demand tech, but there doesn't seem to be any way to completely prevent the unpopular behavior aside from having a stock surplus. It's too late for that in this case, though we might not have to wait too long for that $99 order button to light up again. Prior to today's launch, Valve said that it was prepared to ramp up production if needed.

"We do think we'll have a good amount of stock around the world for the launch," Valve designer Lawrence Yang told PC Gamer in April. "So and then, at the factory, if we're like, 'Oh, we actually probably need to make more,' then we can turn that knob up and have them producing more."

The original Steam Controller from 2015 was a curiosity that could never quite be described as popular, but "second time's the charm," Jacob wrote in his 83% review of the 2026 Steam Controller.

So it's a good controller, but the hunger for it may partially be down to anticipation for Valve's other new hardware, particularly its new Steam Machine, which has been delayed due to speculative AI investing driving up RAM prices.

I've asked Valve for more info on when we can expect Steam Controllers to be back in stock, and will update this post when we learn more.

A new discovery in the hunt for Diablo 4's secret cow level was found over the weekend, continuing the quest that started when the game was originally released.

While no cow level has been found yet, there are several obscure quest objectives that were added in the Lord of Hatred expansion. Solving them requires exploring the new islands of Skovos in search of unique items, like a cryptic tome hidden in an unmarked room. And once completed, you're rewarded with a new item that has no known use at the time of this writing but is currently being investigated by the clever minds in the cow level Discord server.

I followed the full guide on the Discord, which took me all over the map looking for unique items that can only be found if you carefully follow each step. There's no way of knowing you did anything right until the items drop. There's a crow you have to chase that veers in and out of view until it eventually drops a skull, and then you have to take that skull to a brazier and light it on fire. Nothing in the game spells this out, nor confirms you did it correctly.

Compared to the relatively simple puzzles people found around the game's launch, Lord of Hatred's are a little more elaborate. I spent 20 minutes killing corrupted Amazon enemies so I could wear a full set of their armor. And later, I used the new fishing mechanic to pull up a coffin that took me to a hidden dungeon.

Eventually you find a new relic that can be combined with those from the original quests using the new Horadric Cube crafting system. I never got around to collecting the cow milk and the Rusted Bardiche, so I had to stop there, but crafting them together gives you another relic, a cow-themed emote, and a cow-themed player title.

The final known step of the quest involves finding a boat and taking it to a cow island. A cutscene plays as you approach and then you're left to ponder the humanoid cow statues, bizarre messages ("Do not feed the animals."), and the lone cellar dungeon located there.

Nobody has any idea what to do next, but there are some things that suggest there's more to be found. The cow island can trigger a popup notification with a row of portals on it, has a mysterious interactive bucket of milk, and is where you can catch a mythic-level fish that has a reference to Diablo 3 on its tooltip. The biggest clue, however, is an entry for a "Cow King's Crown" helmet transmog in the wardrobe menu that no one has been able to unlock.

Even with full access to the Lord of Hatred files via datamining, the people on the cow level Discord aren't confident enough to say the search is over for now. A new discovery or a patch containing a new step could come at any time now.

I'm hoping Blizzard isn't just toying with us and that there is indeed a cow level of some sort in the game that we just haven't found yet. It wouldn't make a new loading screen hint say "there is no cow level" if there weren't one, right? I don't want to wait for a third expansion to finally see what horrors await in Diablo 4's version of the series' most iconic Easter egg.

Remember Gabe Newell's superyacht Leviathan—the one he liked so much, he bought the whole damn company making it? Oceanco, as the company is known, has dropped a new ad for the boat and its owner, complete with appearances by Gabe himself, and it sure looks like being a super-rich guy is a pretty good time.

"With a greater purpose on how yachts are built, operated and owned, its vision is rooted in the owner's ethos of teamwork and community," the YouTube page (via Polygon) states in kind of oddly jumbled verbiage. "Leviathan's revolutionary layout, ergonomic design and the process have brought her to life."

Gabe Newell: Extremely rich guy.

The video itself is a mashup of extremely rich people doing extremely rich people things, while people whose net worths are presumably less filled with zeroes toil away in the background to make it all possible. They toil joyfully, of course: You can tell by the big smiles plastered across their faces as they cook, clean, lead yoga classes, and otherwise serve the people who ride around on superyachts for fun.

For those who do not toil, but merely reap its rewards, scuba diving features as a prominent activity—Newell is an avid diver—but of course there's some gaming to be done as well. Leviathan comes equipped with a full suite of what I'm sure are extremely high-end gaming laptops ('Rampocalypse' means nothing when you're riding around in a tub like this) as well as at least one Aston Martin-branded F1 racing sim pod. There's a gym, massage facilities, a helipad, what looks to be a recording studio—it's a lot!

Gabe himself can be seen, briefly, in a couple shots: One where he's discussing matters unknown with a fellow diver, and again near the end of the spot where he's laughing contentedly, presumably with people who are just offscreen. There's also a quick look at a sketch of the Valve boss and Oceanco owner, with a leviathan curling around him, festooned with the words "Thank you Gabe," so that's nice.

While the video is about Leviathan, it's not really an ad for Leviathan: You can't just pop down to the local Oceanco dealership and take one out on a 96-month lease. It's really more of a "this is what we can do for you" kind of thing, assuming you have half a billion dollars kicking around, plus whatever it costs to keep the thing crewed, stocked and fuelled.

That's not a problem for Newell, of course: It's sometimes easy to forget but he's a super-rich guy, with approximately 11 billion kicking around, according to Forbes, and a net worth that's risen substantially since 2024. And that's how it is when you're swimming in those big-money seas: If you did just pop around to Oceanco with a half-billie in your pocket and say "I want the Gaben Special," well, I'm pretty sure they'd whip one up just like it for you, too.

Die Hard Dice has unveiled a new line of d20s based on Esoteric Ebb, our current front runner for the best RPG of 2026. The three products on offer are up for pre order, with expected fulfilment by June. I guess more like two-and-a-half products: Two are the same set of dice with different colored bags.

Die Hard Dice is offering a set of three standard-sized d20s corresponding with three of Esoteric Ebb's main characters, with your choice of purple or orange bag. There's a translucent green and blue d20 for goblin rogue Snell, a purple and white die for wearable mimic Meek, and a dark brown with gold shimmer number for the angel, Ettir. Each one has a symbol representing their respective character in place of a critical 20.

The standard dice are fun and fit their respective characters well, but I'm here for the big kahuna: One of those oversized, novelty d20s, with this one celebrating the reason for the season, the man himself, the world's worst cleric, The Cleric. It's a big 'ole hefty metal thing⁠—bigger than most, smaller than some⁠—with blue and white faces, plus The Cleric's helm picked out in the same electroplated finish as the die's edges and numbers.

I'm a disgusting fiend for nerdy crap to put on my office shelves, but I've never been much of a dice guy⁠—miniatures are more my speed as far as tabletop paraphernalia goes. But The Cleric Dire d20 spoke to me enough to elicit a preorder. I used some of the money I saved not snagging a Steam Controller in time earlier today.

But before buying Esoteric Ebb-themed novelty dice, I would recommend buying Esoteric Ebb itself⁠—it really is all that. I thought I had a fairly completionist playthrough, but missed, like, half the game. I was also seriously impressed by how developer Christoffer Bodegård approached save scumming.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will be out on November 19, unless it gets delayed again (never say never), but only on console. There's no doubt that GTA 6 will come to PC eventually, but officially, it still hasn't been announced for our platform and therefore does not exist. Why? In an interview with Bloomberg, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said the company's priority is "serving the core," and that, apparently, is console.

It's a bit of a strange thing, because leading up to that explanation, Zelnick said that when he started with GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive way back in 2007, PC releases accounted for a tiny portion of the company's overall sales: In the case of the NBA 2K series, for instance, it might make up 5% of total sales. But that's not the case anymore: "Now with regard to a big title, PC can be 45, 50% of the sales," Zelnick said.

So that's half your total sales, and there's no game bigger than GTA 6—so, why is PC (half your total sales!) excluded from the initial launch?

"Rockstar always starts on console because I think with regard to a release like that you're judged by serving the core," Zelnick said. "Like really serving the core consumer. If your core consumer isn't there, if they're not served first and best, you kind of don't hit your other consumers."

I just don't understand that. Serving PC alongside your supposed "core consumer" doesn't exclude or diminish them: They absolutely are there, and the idea that they need to be "served first" or there'll be hell to pay conjures up thoughts of people who get angry because Sony exclusives sometimes come to other platforms: It's just console war silliness dressed up in an expensive suit. And if PC really does represent half your total sales (!), how is that not your core to start with?

There is another possible explanation for Rockstar's console-first-PC-later strategy: As PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield pointed out back in 2024, "Rockstar banks on a second revenue bump from its games' PC releases, a little afterburner of profit that includes no shortage of PC-favoring players who buy the game twice." Ted knows the score, folks.

This is nothing new for us PC gamers: Historically, Rockstar games have taken anywhere from seven months to 14.5 years (yes, years) to make the move from consoles to PC, so it's not like this is some unprecedented slap in the face. It is kind of annoying, though.

Take-Two's next quarterly financial results will be announced on May 21. We'll be listening in, and we'll let you know if anything interesting happens.

Survive the Apocalypse is another Roblox survival crafting game that's all about trying to make it through the night with what little supplies you can scrounge up during the day. So think 99 Nights in the Forest, but with zombies instead of the deer. And just like in 99 Nights, you'll need a hefty supply of Emeralds to unlock new classes. That's where these Survive the Apocalypse codes come in handy.

All active Survive the Apocalypse codes

• bloodharvest - 25 Emeralds
• birthday - 25 Emeralds

Expired Survive the Apocalypse codes

• release - 25 Emeralds
• survivor - 25 Emeralds
• onemillion - 10 Emeralds
• quest - 25 Emeralds
• military - 25 Emeralds
• tenmillion - 25 Emeralds
• lazyslygems - 25 Emeralds
• militarytwo - 25 Emeralds
• birthday - 25 Emeralds
• twomonths - 25 Emeralds

How to redeem Survive the Apocalypse codes

1. Launch Survive the Apocalypse via Roblox
2. Click the Emerald icon or visit the 'Buy Emeralds' NPC in the lobby
3. Select 'Codes' from the shop screen
4. Enter any active Survive the Apocalypse codes from above and select 'Claim'

You can redeem Survive the Apocalypse codes as soon as you load into the lobby, so there's no need to join any groups or reach player milestones. You can, however, score a few extra Emeralds by signing up for event notifications, so interact with the update board in the lobby, and then redeem your codes in a few easy steps.

The latest Steam Hardware Survey shows Windows with a commanding 93.47% share of users on the platform, but below that muscular statistic lies a far more embarrassing one: Only 67.74% of Steam users are on Windows 11, almost five years after its initial release.

Perhaps even more surprising, six months after Windows 10's official end of life, more than a quarter of Steam users (25.53%) are still on the moribund OS, which had its own official release almost 11 years ago. I find it difficult to see this as anything but a massive blunder for the default PC operating system, though the hardware market is also contributing to Microsoft's adoption problem.

With the notable exception of a whole lot of Copilot AI nonsense, Windows 11 has stabilized into functionally the same user experience as Windows 10 after a rocky beginning. That's not bad, but it's hardly a compelling reason to upgrade.

Windows 11's early tarnished reputation made for a heady mix with its real poison pill: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, a hardware-level security measure required by Windows 11 and not present in earlier processor generations.

A hardware upgrade solely to access a stagnant version of Windows is a tough ask under any conditions. It's especially onerous now: Hardware prices are skyrocketing and top of the line rigs struggle to run poorly optimized PC ports. But paradoxically, withered processors and graphics cards are able to be stretched for 10 years or more, depending on the graphical compromises you're willing to make.

I don't think the next phase of the Linux gaming renaissance is in danger of commencing any time soon, either: After cracking 5% of Steam users in March's survey, the April Steam Hardware Survey showed them dropping back to a still-impressive 4.52%—so not a catastrophe, but the numbers just aren't going to the moon (yet).

Windows is still in a tight spot, with even governments like France committing to alternatives. I see parallels to the divisive Windows Vista and 8 being followed by the unifying forces of Windows 7 and 10 respectively. Microsoft could turn things around with a crowd-pleasing Windows 12, but in the era of Copilot and Recall, I'm not convinced it still has that three-seam fastball.

Have you ever heard of whale falls? The skinny is that when whales die, their carcasses are so packed with nutrients they essentially become miniature ecosystems when they hit the sea floor. Species of all sorts show up from near and far to make good of the leftovers. It's even thought that there are underwater species with specialized "equipment" to better take advantage of a whale fall. A worm called the bone-eating snot flower, for instance, might find the extent of its entire world bottled within a single rack of whale bones, fueling its every last wormy thought in a paradise we'd be tempted to call lifeless if we ever saw it.

If it had arms and a bigger brain and a taste for noscopes, I think the bone-eating snot flower would be a PC gamer. Although games are often considered disposable pop culture, we have a tendency to make incredible and enduring use of the bones—modding, private servers, custom games, and so on. Warcraft 3 was so nutrient-rich modders digested it and spit out DotA and hundreds of other new ideas.

In 1999 a hobby programmer called Phantom Menace began work on a custom replica of the NES's The Legend of Zelda for PC. What started as a makeshift take on one of the most celebrated games of all time eventually became a whale fall among whale falls, as the unlicensed port-of-sorts became the ultimate Zelda fangame engine and a superlatively accessible tool for amateur gamedev in its own right. Over 26 years later, ZQuest Classic's custom "quest editor" has kept generation after generation of Zelda fan creators fed.

Make somethin' will ya!

Renamed from Zelda Classic to distance the project from the big, litigious elephant in the room, the open source engine's development is currently shepherded by volunteers Connor Clark and Emily Venezia, who are in turn assisted by community contributors and testers. They both cultivated an interest in the project as kids after discovering the Zelda PC port practically had no barrier to entry.

"It is a very simple and classic style. You go to other game engines, like, sure, Godot is nice and easy to use. But you're not moving your character around the screen without writing your own character controller script," Venezia said. "ZQuest? You enter. You go. You maybe toggle some check boxes to change how some settings work, maybe tweak a couple numbers, but for the most part you don't need any coding knowledge yourself. You can just go."

Venezia reckons ZQuest belongs on a tier of its own between simple level editors or game-tools like Mario Maker and off-the-shelf game engines. While it's been used to make everything from a facsimile of Tetris to a Mega Man-inspired platformer, it's mostly easy to use because it's specialized for making a very particular kind of game: what you might affectionately call "clones" of 2D Zeldas.

"If you just want to make a Zelda game, as far as I know, this has been the simplest way to try to get something on the screen as fast as possible. I don't know if it's always been the best, or if it is the best these days, but it's definitely been something that anyone, even a 12-year-old kid, could boot up and click a few buttons and get someone else playing a game that they made," Clark said.

The same way you might play Dragon Quest and rush to assemble a tribute in RPG Maker, players have been making their own old-school adventures in ZQuest for decades. The results range from the quaint to the damn near authentic, and the cream of the crop is collected on a database-slash-forum called PureZC. It's a visually lean, community-driven treasure trove the likes of which I didn't think existed on the internet anymore. Custom games, all of which are called "quests" and disseminated as .qst files to be plugged into ZQuest, are split up into a few genres: Metroidvania, NES-style, dungeon romper, randomizer, and so on.

Like Venezia and Clark said, you can go a long way without writing so much as a line of code (though the option is there, should you opt to push the engine beyond its normal scope using the ZScript language). A fan favorite metroidvania quest from 2024, The Deep, features puzzles that incorporate shadows and fog, conveyor belts, a hookshot like you might remember from A Link to the Past, and all sorts of other novelties.

It's easy to see how it took home the gold in a community contest, but all the more intriguing when you learn it did so in a "non-scripted bracket" and was built in just over three weeks. Bigger, multi-year endeavors like Lost Isle and The Hero of Dreams are lengthy and fully-featured games in their own right—projects that, if you squint, look and feel remarkably like unreleased Game Boy Advance games. While the quests are diverse, numbering over a thousand, reverence for the 40-year-old Nintendo series is the one thing that makes it all cohere.

Quest of the Best

Check out some prominent custom creations, from NES love letters to the gleefully anachronistic.

Quest developer Eddy Oliveira, for instance, discovered the engine at just 10 years old. He published his first adventure in 2009, fueled by a desire to translate dungeons he'd drawn on paper into something playable. While "they started out kind of shoddy," he went on to become, as engine developer Clark reckons, the most prolific developer in the entire community with over 20 quests to his name. That Mega Man tribute I mentioned earlier? That's Eddy's doing.

"I certainly made a ton during my school and university days. The only person I know of that could compete with that is my brother," Oliveira said, though he added "it was never really a goal" to make so many; he was urged on by positive reactions to his projects, emboldened by a sense of belonging he found in the community.

"They are very much driven by passion," he said. "They all have the one common interest of being Zelda fans and I think that's what makes the community a very strong one, even if it isn't too big. Very lovely people, extremely helpful, and it absolutely feels like my primary internet home."

A link to tomorrow

Venezia and Clark have a yin-yangish relationship that keeps development moving at a steady pace. Clark is, as Velenzia described, "the glue holding everything together" and has helped the project stick to its ambition that any .qst file be able to run on the newest version of ZQuest. Since joining the project in 2022 he's led a massive rewrite of the engine, helped bring it to Mac and Linux, and added a "replay system" that lets the team preview the impact of changes on old quests without having to check them all manually. It "lets us be serious about compatibility," he said.

Venezia, on the other hand, is a self-described "mad scientist" who wakes up with new, wild ambitions for the engine on any given morning—when Clark is ready to start winding down on new features and get a patch ready to ship, Venezia is eager to bump the sprite limit or maximum number of items just that little bit more. She's been on ZQuest twice as long as Clark, having taught herself how it all works in college after picking up the project from an "MIA" former lead; if she hadn't, she thinks there's "a very high likelihood this program would have probably died."

The current incarnation, 2.55, has been out since September 2024, and the two main developers have their heads down as they prepare to deliver a sizable 3.0 overhaul. The patch will add "scrolling regions," allowing for larger interconnected play areas (a pet project of Clark's that took two-and-a-half years to build), a built-in ZScript debugger, and a laundry list of fixes and stability improvements. Beyond that, they have ambitions to implement a new original tileset so developers have swathes of copyright-free pixel art to assemble their creations with. It's an addition that further helps the project stand on its own.

As for what keeps them committed to so much legwork all these years later, Venezia had an answer that reminded me of Oliveira's response to the very same question.

"Watching other people go, 'Oh my God, look at this cool thing I did!' That's the fuel. That is absolutely the fuel," Venezia said. "When I see people go out and use all those cool new features I added to do super cool puzzles and stuff, it's like, aw man. That's all I need."

Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother I hurt people, a Valve hardware launch brought Steam to its knees. A half hour after launch, the Steam Controller has already sold out after seriously borking the Steam Store. Fifteen minutes later? A sliver of hope as it showed fresh stock once more, only to immediately sell out again (if it wasn't a mirage in the first place).

Downdetector shows a massive spike in error reports right around the 1 PM Eastern, 10 AM Pacific launch time of the Steam Controller, while anecdotally, the Steam Store was a minefield. I have the error message, "There seems to have been an error initializing or updating your transaction. Please wait a minute and try again or contact support for assistance," seared into my eyeballs at this point.

The Steam Controller's splashy page on Steam initially showed a 3-5 business day wait before extending to 6-10. I was frantically refreshing the payment page on Steam during PC Gamer's daily meeting right up until PCG news lead Andy Chalk gleefully told me my efforts were in vain.

I think we all anticipated this would happen, given the early rush to secure Steam Decks all the way back in 2022, but like everyone out there trying to bag a day one Steam Controller, I figured I was built different—unspecified millions of people who successfully bought a controller clearly were built different.

It's an incredible turnaround from the ignominious end of the original Steam Controller, whose janky double-A battery goodness was going for an embarrassing $5 a pop by the end of its lifespan. Valve hardware is an event now, even if it's just a controller.

The new Steam Controller was supposed to have some friends launching with it today, but the RAM crisis has clearly affected Valve's hardware rollout. The company has said it's still planning on getting the Steam Frame and new Steam Machine out this year.

Hardware writer Jacob Ridley enjoyed the Steam Controller as a great new all-rounder in his review, but cautioned that it wasn't a value champion compared to cheaper options from 8bitdo or Gamesir that still offer premium features like Hall Effect sticks.

This is a developing story.

GameStop has now confirmed its intent to acquire ecommerce behemoth eBay, first reported over the weekend, saying in a May 3 announcement that it's making a half-cash, half-stock offer worth approximately $55.5 billion for 100% of the company. It also suggested that, should the deal go through, it intends to slash and burn eBay to "deliver $2 billion of annualized cost reductions within twelve months of closing."

Here's how that's going to work:

• ~$1.2 billion from Sales & Marketing. More spend is not producing more users on a marketplace with near-universal brand recognition.
• ~$300 million from Product Development. Product Development expense grew 11% in fiscal 2025 against revenue growth of 8%.
• ~$500 million from General & Administrative. Consolidated finance, HR, real estate, legal, IT, and professional services across the combined company.

"eBay spent $2.4 billion on sales and marketing in fiscal 2025 while only adding one million net active buyers (134M to 135M—a net increase of less than 0.75%)," GameStop said.

"On cost reductions alone, eBay’s diluted GAAP earnings per share from continuing operations would increase from $4.26 to $7.79 in year one. Beyond cost, GameStop’s ~1,600 US retail locations give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce."

More job cuts in the name of ticking up shareholder value never sounds like a good idea to me, but there seem to be more pressing questions before that line gets crossed.

As noted by Barron's (via MSN), GameStop's market capitalization sits at a little over $11 billion, and it has roughly $9.4 billion in "cash and liquid investments" it can put toward the deal. It also has a "highly-confident letter from TD Securities" for up to $20 billion in further financing—"highly confident" meaning the proposition is solid but not actually locked down.

That leaves a shortfall of, very roughly, $15 billion in GameStop's offer. GameStop could raise more funds by issuing more stock, but doing so would dilute the value of stock held by current shareholders. GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen refused to be drawn on the question in a CNBC interview, despite being pressed on it multiple times.

"There's going to be some leverage on the balance sheet in order to make an acquisition possible. But it's also going to be making a lot more money in the future than it is today, because it's going to be run a lot more efficiently," Cohen said.

"When a business is not growing users and spending $2.5 billion in sales and marketing, there's a lot of fat to cut. And the earnings power, as we laid out in our investor presentation, could be way higher, double the earnings in a pretty short period of time. And so it's a business that can take on more leverage because it's going to be making more money in the future."

I'm not an M&A pro but "leverage" typically refers to debt taken on to enable an acquisition, with the acquired company's assets used as collateral in the deal. For a more detailed breakdown of how it works, check out our analysis of the $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts in 2025, the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history.

In its own press release, eBay acknowledged receipt of "an unsolicited, non-binding acquisition proposal from GameStop," and said it will review the proposal.

Dead as Disco is already proving to be a delightful grab-bag—I had the pleasure of toying with the game's demo back in June of last year, but nothing could've prepared me for the musical smorgasbord that awaited me while playing this early access romp. This thing isn't just a very solid rhythm action game, it's a buffet. A feast, to borrow a term, for the senses.

But first, context! Dead as Disco is a Beat 'Em Up action-rhythm game in the style of Hi-Fi: Rush, in that you're tasked with mopping up waves of stylised goons (including mosh-pit looneys, laser-firing androids, and vicious bouncers) to the beat. Attack and parry on-rhythm, and you get a higher score.

Story-wise, you follow the violent misadventures of Charlie Disco, who has woken up 10 years on from a mysterious accident that saw his surprisingly genre-diverse band fractured at the seams. Get it? Disco is dead. The man's name is Charlie Disco. He was dead—ah, you get it.

This is mostly an excuse to have him facing off against unique boss-rush setpieces with original, personally-tuned tunes. The experience is a lot like fighting your way through a music video—occasionally ferrying you to the next locale before your current melee is even finished.

While there are still some clear work-in-progress animations and transitions to iron out, Dead as Disco clearly has some absurdly talented people working on it. It's a lively, vivid romp inspired by everything from comic books to Max Headroom—bleeding with colour and neon wonders.

"It's music, it's graphic design, it's a little bit comic bookie, it's action," Adam Gershowitz, CCO of BrainJar games tells me. "One of the visual benchmarks for us was Into the Spider-Verse … They did a lot with funky shapes, half tone, stippling, all that stuff."

When it works, it's downright delightful—and even when it doesn't, mostly due to Early Access wrinkles yet to be ironed out, it's still a decent hair above most indie titles. I especially like the 2D animated sequences that'll occasionally break up the action.

Dex-terity

One of the bosses I'm pleased to share with you is Dex: A troubled artist suffering from chronic pain whose body has been laced with cybernetic enhancements to keep him playing music.

His battle starts in the middle of a club, sure, but quickly transports you through a brutalist architecture hellscape dominated by jagged shapes and black industrial ooze, one that morphs its strange walls into a street alley that transforms into a block of prison cells, a barge sailing across the inky black, and at one point a giant ziggurat where floods of enemies charge you up its sides.

It's something peeled straight from a grungy death metal album cover, and that's kind of the point. All of Dead as Disco's boss fights are like this, borrowing from their genres to have you kicking ass in liminal spaces that flow pleasantly into one another—surrealist cosmic glitterpop nightmares, mosh pits, and the obligatory Oldboy hallway reference crammed into a subway car.

What helps Dead as Disco is the fact that it's also a blast to play, especially once you crib special powers from each of your former bandmates. Each of which is so satisfying, I actually didn't have much reason to use Charlie's default disco-sticks: Hitting a sick riff to stun crowds of mooks with chain lightning or an uber-parry that can bypass even unblockable attacks and counter with a fierce uppercut.

Like most games of its ilk, the magic is in lacing this all together to the beat—a satisfying dance that's only interrupted by Dead as Disco's occasional camera issues, though these are few and far between. The only other petty complaint I have is that off-screen dangers aren't quite telegraphed clearly enough when you're locked into the action happening in the middle of your monitor.

But when you reach that Arkham-style flowstate, where you're drifting between enemies on tempo? Dead as Disco makes you feel very, very cool. That, according to Gershowitz, is the precise point:

"Our CEO puts it [like this]: I want to fulfill that fantasy I had as a kid, right? Where you saw Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee on the screen, or any action hero for that matter, just kicking butt to an amazing soundtrack, and it was all choreographed beautifully, and everybody felt cool. And you're like, man, I just want to be that.

"At the core, that lizard brain response is what we were building into Dead as Disco … Bruce Lee brawling to the beat of TikTok."

If you've read my Crimson Desert preview, you might know that I'm a sucker for this kind of power fantasy—I like to consider myself a sophisticated gent, but I'm weak to the dopamine loop of combo-focused fighting games. And rhythm games are a natural marriage to that: Sekiro is one of my favourite soulslikes, and I'll swear up and down that it's secretly DDR in disguise.

Getting back in the groove

That's not to say Dead as Disco is absent an emotional core. There's already a pretty promising story about fame, here—and when you beat one of your former band mates, disconnecting them from the hive-mind of Harmony, they arrive in a neat hideout to pull on the yarn.

At the moment, it's mostly vibes-based, but there's enough intrigue to at least have me paying attention to more than just the very gorgeous artwork and banging soundtrack. On that note, it's mighty impressive the amount of original music that Dead as Disco has pulled together, obtained from musician friends of the studio—some of which are actual, touring professionals with real industry experience under their belts, lending the whole thing a sense of legitimacy.

As far as other mechanics go, there's a skill tree—at the moment, it's mostly a tutorial function that drip-feeds you mechanics so you're not overwhelmed all at once, though each of your bandmates' powers do have a line of upgrades that add extra perks to them. You can also spend your cash on visual upgrades to the hideout once you're done with all that.

The real meat on the bone here is the endless mode—filled with challenges you can spend a healthy handful of hours grinding out full stars on. You can also use music (that you legally own, ahem) to make your own personal beat-'em-ups, so long as you spend some time figuring out their BPM, which is still exactly as cool as it was during the demo last summer.

Dead as Disco's already looking really promising, and as Gershowitz tells me, there's a lot more exciting stuff to come—a multiplayer component, a "harmony tower" where you need to fight through levels of mix-and-match genre challenges, with fights getting harder the higher you climb, custom player challenges and level creation tools, the works.

Really, this game seems put together by some very passionate people—and the enthusiasms' infectious, not in just talking to the studio's CCO, but in the vibrant pedal to the metal chaos of the game itself. Dead as Disco launches into early access May 5.

Though I have clocked up several dozen hours in Ghost Recon Wildlands, 2017’s open-world military shooter, it’s taken till now to notice that I hadn’t finished its first mission. Instead, I’ve fought the cartel sponging off Bolivia haphazardly, daisy-chaining disconnected missions together with the odd opportunity to kidnap a henchman and raid a hacienda, inviting mishap en route.

Chaos spirals quickly in the Wildlands. I only wanted to commandeer a convoy when my helicopter was shot down. Next, the minibus I hijacked was made undriveable by a road accident. The town I then entered to pump a random guy for secrets became a battleground when he pulled a gun on me, inspiring me to call in rebel reinforcements (and a mortar bombardment, why not?). Our helicopter escape crossed paths with another convoy, whose leader I kidnapped, drove away and interrogated. This unexpectedly fulfilled a task, leading to the location of a commander whose death marked the completion of a main mission I have no memory of ever instigating. A true deniable op.

Wildlands is a sequel in the tactical, squad-based Ghost Recon series which began in 2001. Typically, you issue movement and engagement commands to your team and use fancy gadgets. Wildlands is a bit different. Its creators identified the fun thing about the series—using your wits and gadgetry to navigate a hostile environment, to better attack the enemies therein—and built a sprawling world around it.

Bad company

The first missions Wildlands assigns you, which I originally absent-mindedly walked away from, don’t just offer a taste of the game. They are the game. They have us stealthily approaching targets, rescuing a man, stealing a car, hacking computers and finally bearing down on the local bigwigs at their hunting lodge. You’re equipped with a small armoury, night-vision, a drone and binoculars, and a Sync Shot ability to simultaneously shoot targets with your AI squadmates. In the course of these tasks, you’ll be reconnoitring, quietly dispatching, loudly raiding, and making helicopter getaways. Listen: my patience for wordy tutorials and massive skill trees are stretched thin. What joy, then, when the fruits of a game are offered to you in the first 15 minutes.

What makes Wildlands dazzle in regular diversions can, however, make it tough company over a longer duration. Its missions and targets lack variety. Its stealth is not particularly involved. Wildlands’ novel structure, letting you take on region bosses in the order you see fit, has little bearing on the game’s progression. More fatally, as an inheritor of Far Cry 3’s obsession with clearing outposts and marking enemies, and of Assassin’s Creed’s fondness for surveillance birds and a minimap chockablock with icons, Wildlands’ playbook of tech and tactics quickly slot into familiar routines.

And yet the chimeric Wildlands proves better than the sum of its parts. Having seen its tricks, I haven’t moved on. One idea of Wildland’s worth keeping around is the idea of extracting ‘intel’ from lieutenants. These are miscellaneous NPCs who drive around innocuously until they are T-boned from a mountain hairpin, pulled from the wreckage and interrogated. In gratitude for the adventure, they mark a set of collectibles in the locality on your map.

Going out and acquiring these collectibles—side-missions, weapon cases, or skill points—generally improves your situation in the game, bringing forth new weapons and providing the resources to improve your abilities. Abilities like thermal vision (cool but inessential), enhanced damage to vehicles (handy), and a skill that makes your AI squad-mates less embarrassing (vital). The contents of weapon cases are not disguised on the map, making some (folded buttstocks, anyone?) easy to ignore. This refreshingly diminishes the sense of FOMO that other games intensify. Moreover, you are kitted out, more or less, from the get-go.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Hard to ignore is the hawkish Tom Clancy-ness of it all. You are Nomad, leader of an American special forces team fighting to effect regime change in a Latin American country. Have you heard this one before? In the helicopter ride in at the game’s outset, CIA spy Karen Bowman sets out the game’s unconvincing revenge arc. The Ghosts are in Bolivia for cartel boss El Sueño, and to help local rebels wedged between his Santa Blanca faction and the corrupt state forces La Unidad. You see, El Sueño killed an undercover American embroiled in foreign affairs, and that’s ruffled our feathers. This isn’t WWIII we’re trying to avert here. It’s a side-plot in the war on drugs.

If this doesn’t push your buttons, they work for your uncomplicated protagonist, whose naff patriotic rejoinders are delivered with bland solemnity. “Sometimes I think about the bad things we do for the good of our country,” Nomad soliloquises, uninvited, at some point. “I’d do it all again. In a heartbeat.” Great! But I do wish you’d stop saying this out of my avatar’s mouth.

Wildlands’ version of Bolivia is a fabulously inviting depiction of a landscape, whose physical environments are enchanting enough to keep you exploring. Atmospheric effects shepherd changes in mood and the chirps of biome-specific creatures help plant your feet in the virtual soil. It is also a bombastic caricature of a country more at home in the Just Cause games, which have the grace to fictionalise their settings.

Ubisoft abstracts real places into games all the time, usually with the tactful application of historical distance. But there’s something odd about how Wildlands thugs outnumber its non-combatants. Where regular people appear, they are quaking or fleeing or otherwise lingering in a town, unbothered by the presence of American soldiers. The decorating of interchangeable settlements with gruesome corpse displays is also worryingly unremarked upon, not least by locals taking the air. Any residual sincerity is undercut by the armed helicopters all over the place, flashing notifications of “UNIDAD PATROL NEARBY” and the suspicion that your explosive conduct must surely be more a hindrance to local people than a help. The game Ubisoft made, between the caricature and the self-serious chauvinism, is confusingly cartoonish.

Mission fail

On a tactical level, there is enough to keep you busy. Just enough thinking around a problem is required to accomplish your goals. Can’t enter a gate? Parachute in. Anti-aircraft nearby? Blow it up first. Compound is alarmed? Shoot its power box. Your surveillance gadgets mean it’s normally easy to evade guards. But they’ll investigate a gunshot, and an alert will ring out on a discovered body. When you’re spotted, it’s time to embrace the mayhem.

When Wildlands forces stealth rules, it’s a mission fail. A mission released as an update links you up with Tom Clancy franchise stablemate Sam Fisher, alias Mr. Splinter Cell. You must rendezvous inside an enemy base between 9pm and 4am, without being spotted or killing anybody.

My first attempt is foiled while trying to crawl under a trailer. On my second attempt I’m casing the joint when my squadmate cries, “We got a man down!” He walked into a speeding train. The third attempt fails because I leave the mission area, which I dispute, and the fourth fails after I’m spotted by a guard before I can grab him. Finally on my fifth attempt I go through a gap in a fence, obviously a prescribed route, and find Sam as he triggers a massive armed response by hacking a laptop. I hold off the attack until an escape is possible through the jungle towards a hijacked car. Devastatingly, I turn to see a helicopter shooting rockets not at me, but at Sam, still plodding through the base to my getaway point.

This is no meticulous espionage simulation. It doesn’t have much resemblance to reality, nor a story worth sticking around for. I’m here for the moment plans slide into chaos, and I know Wildlands has that in abundance.

I'm not sure if you recall, but Diablo 4 was a strange game when it first launched. Quite clearly the victim of conflicting creative direction, it was part-ARPG, part-MMO, and also live service, featuring a vast open world that felt fundamentally empty. It also lacked any tangible endgame. It's no wonder, then, that Diablo 4 has had such a transformative few years.

Along the way, Blizzard added actual endgame bosses, activities like The Pit, and overhauls to previous pastimes such as Whispers, Helltides, and Nightmare Dungeons. I can no longer count the number of times Diablo 4's key systems have been overhauled—it feels like every other update Blizzard has tampered with gear, power, aspects, affixes, and all the under-the-hood magic that makes ARPGs special.

Perhaps the biggest reminder of how much Diablo 4 has changed hit me when I logged into my Eternal Realm Necromancer a few days ago (the accumulation of 10 seasons-worth of items) and suddenly realised I had a multi-page stash full of gear, elixirs, and Uber Uniques (called Mythic Uniques now) that are all pretty much redundant and won't interact properly with the game's new systems.

Is it ideal for a seasonal live service game to change so much? Absolutely not—Diablo 4 was always my brain-off game, and having to relearn fundamental systems every other season has been a pain in the arse. Frankly, it's early access masquerading as live service, and it's unfortunately rather common in our industry, but I'm here to tell you that with Lord of Hatred, I think Blizzard has finally finished Diablo 4.

The entire time I've played Diablo 4, Blizzard has been wrangling with what it wants the game to be, constantly tweaking things and often tweaking them right back a few weeks later. Lord of Hatred is the first time it's felt like it actually all works. A big part of that are Blizzard's additions over time, but also the impact of the new skill system, which adds significantly more choice to buildcrafting.

Rather than relying on aspects and uniques, every skill now has a range of passives which fundamentally alter it, Path of Exile 2-style, even changing its damage-type so you're less locked into a few build combinations. This version of Diablo 4 puts more emphasis on creating your build in the skill tree, with uniques, aspects and tempers acting as a more supplementary layer, which makes for a far more satisfying early game experience versus praying the right unique drops.

As a long-suffering Necromancer, being able to turn Blight into a Cold or Blood skill, to make Blood Surge or Corpse Explosion into Bone, or even turn Bone Spirit into a Shadow skill, just adds so many possibilities, especially when you take into account the versatility of the Tempering system for adding affixes to gear. It feels fundamentally less stilted build-wise than Diablo 4 did before.

Along with two additional classes, Warlock and Paladin, Lord of Hatred also adds the Horadric Cube, which essentially nicks Path of Exile's fun crafting system, giving you a place where you can transmute uniques, and it provides loads more options for messing with gear and honing your build even further.

Perhaps more importantly, for those who care about Sanctuary's ongoing story, Diablo 4 is now narratively complete with Lord of Hatred. That is to say, the present arc in the game has been concluded. As Tyler Colp noted in our 90% review, it's "A triumphant expansion that gives the action RPG more depth than it's ever had before," and despite my bitter history with Diablo 4 and believing that the original campaign is frequently mid, I'm inclined to agree.

Lord of Hatred's story feels like the culmination of the work Blizzard started in the previous expansion, Vessel of Hatred, particularly in terms of making our character feel more involved in events rather than just a murderbot who occasionally says "Yes" or "No". In fact, I thought the campaign was so well-paced and complete, that I've started the original Diablo 4 campaign again, as I want to see how it's been reframed by the events of the expansion.

So, if you're a lapsed Diablo 4 player who it never quite clicked for, I'm here to tell you that it might be worth giving the game one last try. It's come quite far over the last few years and it finally feels like it's standing on solid ground for the first time to me. It also seems unlikely that Blizzard will massively overhaul many more features—if you did happen to find relearning the game after taking a season off as irksome as I did.

To hijack a robot I have to stay nearby for a non-trivial amount of time. When I want to hack a chickenwalker military bot right out of RoboCop, I sneak behind it while a timer counts down as it patrols, every stomp shaking my screen as I follow it—right into the open where guards might see me.

The robot turns on the spot, stomp stomp stomp, facing me just as the final second ticks past. I’m in. Looking through its camera-feed Terminator vision the first thing I see is myself, crouching in the middle of a courtyard like an absolute doofus.

Then I see the guards and open fire, rockets ragdolling them into the sky. People talk a lot of rubbish about Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I’ll say this for it—the guns shoot straight and the extremely 2004 physics make every enemy pratfall a riot.

The big complaint about Deus Ex: Invisible War was its loading screens. Like developer Ion Storm’s other moody stealth romp, Thief: Deadly Shadows, it was carved into tiny slices to fit the Xbox’s limited memory. That made its mission-rich hub areas a chore to cross, with doors and lifts constantly dumping you to a weird loading screen that would quietly quit out of and then restart the game for arcane technical reasons. Yahtzee called it “invisible snore” and, yeah, fine, that’s a pretty good one.

Nowadays, with the Visible Upgrade mod, the loading screens fly by in seconds. I can play at whatever ludicrous resolution I want, and there’s an option to give all the biomod-enhanced characters the daft glowing eyes they had in the trailer. This is Deus Ex: Invisible War like it always should have been.

Hacks and the city

The three main hub areas are Seattle, Cairo and Trier, though you also get to visit Antarctica and return to Liberty Island to see how much it's changed since the original. Since this is an immersive sim, each main hub is full of side stories more interesting than the central one.

In Seattle there's a rivalry between two coffee chains, both named after characters from Moby Dick just like Starbucks, and you can take jobs from them that range from corporate sabotage to straight-up firebombing. This ridiculous war escalates in every city you visit alongside the invisible war between global conspiracies that's clearly supposed to be the focus.

Deus Ex: Invisible War has a bit of the Oblivion problem, in that the main plot you're forced to follow is less interesting than the other stuff. When you're allowed to choose what to engage with, you end up feeling more engaged by it. Still, there are warring factions to pick between in the main quest as well, just like in the coffee ones, and pleasingly you're not locked into working for one or the other and can betray them repeatedly for the true Starscream experience.

As freelance cyborg badass Alex Denton you're delightfully noncommittal when talking to questgivers, never locking in a decision when you could say something like "I'll see what I can do" or "maybe if I'm in the area" when offered a wad of cash to murder a corporate stooge. Then you can tell said stooge you've been hired to assassinate them and barter for a bigger paycheque to instead assassinate the nightclub owner who thought they were being a clever-clogs by hiring you as a hitman. The sucker.

Bud's bud

That nightclub is where my favourite chain of side missions, a worryingly prescient tale of AI and surveillance and parasocial attachment, begins. Club Vox is the first of several locations with a hologram of pop star NG Resonance, portrayed by Free Dominguez from the band Kidneythieves—a chatbot her fans can talk to while she frugs away in a circle like a ballerina on a music box.

You overhear one fan called Bud Puckett who has turned to her for dating advice, sadly reporting that it didn't work out. She remembers his name and commiserates, then promises that messages from her fans do get passed on to the real NG Resonance. It's all a bit sad, and reminiscent of the kind of parasocial relationships fans have with content creators—or the guys who fall in love with their AI girlfriends.

Given that she's always around, and her fans seem happy to tell her every detail of their lives, NG Resonance seems like a useful source of information. Quiz her for info like a typical videogame NPC though, and she quickly turns the tables on you. There's a VIP section of the club and she's in the dark about what's going on there—but she does know there's a reward for information. It's as if she's providing a Google AI summary of a search for RPG quests in your area, and suddenly you're working for her.

When I pretended to be a fan of her music, the cheeky AI clocked me immediately and called me out on it. I told her she shouldn't sass me since she's programmed to make people like her, and she replied that I like it when she argues. I've never felt so called-out by a videogame NPC in my life.

NG Resonance quickly becomes a valuable source of side missions. There's a version of her in every city you visit, and she's always interested in learning what's going on so she can pass it on to the authorities. You become an informant for a talking surveillance camera in a minidress in return for a cut from the WTO and a free ticket to one of her concerts.

Billie AI-lish

During the Cairo leg of the game, close to the end, you find out the real NG Resonance is supposed to be performing a concert there. Thanks to a knock-on effect of your shenanigans, however, there's a lockdown and she's stuck in a hangar bay. Track her down and offer to help and she'll laugh in your face. The real NG Resonance hasn't got a clue who you are and doesn't care. She's got her own bodyguards, thank you very much.

Return to the AI construct and she'll deny there's anything wrong, hallucinating that the concert is still happening on time and you should definitely attend. It's a deliberate downer to end the questline on, forcing you to realise you're as much of a sucker as Bud Puckett ever was, thinking that you had a meaningful connection with a computer program just because it remembered your name and tweaked itself to flatter your personality.

While I was writing this I got an email from a company marketing an AI chatbot based on streamer and OnlyFans model Amouranth. The future is here, only with influencers instead of pop stars. Jesus, reality is bleak.

The coffee-club wars come to a more satisfying conclusion. After playing both sides against each other, you dig into the corporate history of the two chains and learn they're both shells owned by the same company. One markets itself to the middle-class with promises of a quality cup that's worth the price, while the other runs ads pushing folksy hand-ground blue-collar authenticity. Of course, it's the same coffee. Let one of the store managers in on this secret and he'll be killed for it.

Meanwhile, after spending most of the game battling on behalf of either the law-and-order promises of the WTO or the religious revolution of the Order, you learn they're both fronts for the Illuminati. They've figured out the world's population isn't ready to be controlled by a single conspiracy, but if people feel like they're given a choice people will happily line up to self-identify with one of these two comically broad categories. It's the coffee shops all over again, only with a plan for the future where they promise peaceful consolidation so they can finally fold everyone together into a single, controllable herd.

Bean-counting

After the loading screens and sliced-up levels, one of the biggest complaints about Deus Ex: Invisible War is that it replaced the original's bullet types with simplified universal ammo. You pick up a cartridge and it's good for whatever gun you happen to be toting, with some kind of nanite energy or whatever handwave going on to explain why your pistol and your rocket launcher both accept the same clip.

It's one of those convenient changes I couldn't imagine anyone genuinely being upset by until I looked on the internet and saw grown Deus Ex fans filling their nappies because someone took away the fun of looking for space in their inventory for half a dozen different kinds of bullet and three distinct flavours of dart. Deus Ex: Invisible War is a game about factions spouting philosophy at you while you figure out which order to betray them in, and all anyone wants to talk about is its ammo management system.

I suppose I get it. When you're crawling around in the vents, ganking guards with an energy blade and hacking robots with your illegal biomods, all the big picture stuff seems impossibly distant. I'm just down here gathering information for a hologram of Britney Spears, don't talk to me about the Illuminati and grey aliens who might actually be mutant experiments. Deus Ex: Invisible War encourages you to get hung up on the small stuff, even if it means you end up caring more about bullets and beans than the conspiracy metaplot.

Part of the reason criticism of Warcraft 3: Reforged was so pointed was that the remaster didn't just suck on its own terms. As Fraser Brown wrote at the time in his review, "Unfortunately, if these things are putting you off, you can't simply return to Warcraft 3 Classic and forget about them. The original has been added to the new client, so the connection problems, lack of competitive ladders and other issues are now shared between them. This might be the first time a remaster has made its predecessor worse."

While subsequent patches ameliorated some of the issues with Warcraft 3 Reforged, it still isn't perfect. For starters, plenty of custom maps don't work if you play Warcraft 3's classic version from the Reforged launcher. Which is why it's nice that, out of the blue, Blizzard has finally relented.

As the announcement says, "All players who own Warcraft 3 now have access to the original 1.29 client from the Battle.net App. To install it, click the Game Version dropdown on the bottom left corner of your Battle.net Warcraft III playscreen and select Warcraft III - Legacy TFT 1.29. Please note: The Legacy client supports offline and LAN play only."

While version 1.29 wasn't the final released update, it was the last one you could easily play over LAN, and that seems to have been a priority given that online multiplayer isn't supported. (My friends and I played it via LAN as a break from our ongoing game of Dungeon Siege, to give you a glimpse at the peak of early 2000s PC gaming.)

If you install Warcraft 3 Legacy and the cinematics aren't playing for you, find the en-USMovies folder in your install directory and rename it to just Movies. You might have to do the same for the Maps directory as well.

It's been a rough year for new multiplayer games but then, the same was true in 2025. By now it's taken for granted that a long in-development project released by major publishers is not guaranteed success. Not only that, what hits is wildly unpredictable—exemplified by the likes of Peak and Phasmophobia—and success rarely corresponds with the development budget involved.

This week's case in point: Far Far West. It's an early access cooperative shooter taking cues from Left 4 Dead and Vermintide, and while it doesn't have a yee-haw button people seem to love it. (It probably helps that it has a singleplayer component as well.)

It's developed by Evil Raptor, a small eight person studio from France. Its Steam page doesn't scream "big hit" but it nevertheless has been, in its launch week at least: at time of writing it's the third best selling game on Steam in terms of revenue, beaten only by Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era and Counter-Strike 2. As I write, 47,300 people are playing it. It's yet more proof that big indie hits don't follow the kind of logic taken for granted five years ago.

Take Last Flag for instance, a third-person 5v5 shooter with MOBA elements released on April 15. Unfortunately for its creators Night Street Games, it hasn't found an audience. Its all-time concurrent players record is 558 and it's currently sitting on 35 players. That's not a win.

I daresay if you'd shown a big indie publisher or blockbuster exec Far Far West and Last Flag next to each other in 2015, the latter would suggest itself as the "hit" while the former a non-starter.

Apparently Last Flag's a lot of fun (I know some of my PC Gamer colleagues enjoyed it), but it's not proven successful enough to warrant ongoing support: the studio announced at the weekend that "our player count is not currently where we need it to be to support additional development beyond our upcoming planned patches".

In 2026 it's hard to look at something like Last Flag and see success. The art style channels Pixar and Fortnite in a way that screams "we don't have an art style" or, "we're making this game for everyone / no one". Of course, it's nearly impossible to develop big games with a knowledge of where the zeitgeist will be in three or four years, which is part of the reason why the likes of Peak prove so successful: it was made in four weeks by a bunch of enthusiastic devs who didn't need to rely on huge early takings.

In a rare and welcome move, Night Street Games wants to keep Last Flag playable even if major updates aren't likely. "Our focus will shift to replayability, community support, and empowering our players to write the next chapter of Last Flag with persistent lobbies and unique game rules inspired by some of the games we love like GoldenEye, Team Fortress 2, and Super Smash Bros. We don’t want to kill our game—we want to give it to the community who helped us get here."

Top Steam games by revenue (April 21 - 28)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so it's too early to see how Far Far West and the new HoMM did across their full launch weeks. The April 21-28 period below is, well, pretty much as you'd expect:

Aside from Far Far West and the new HoMM game there were a few other big first week hits: Gamble With Your Friends is a testament to the ongoing relevance of friendslop, while Invincible Vs—a 3v3 2.5D fighter—is also doing decently.

Notable for its absence in the rolling revenue list is s&box, the new game creation platform from the creators of Garry's Mod and Rust. It made $1 million on launch day according to Facepunch Studios, but I am a touch surprised it hasn't done better than a zany four-player shooter by an unknown studio. Morgan Park has some interesting thoughts on how the landscape has changed since the heady days of GMod.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Best Steam user review of the week

Does what it says on the tin. Also you can Tokyo Drift a piglet. - Gargaj on Adorable Adventures

Marvel's profitable relationship with Capcom began with arcade beat 'em up The Punisher in 1993, but quickly switched to fighting games with X-Men: Children of the Atom in 1994. The X-Men were mega popular at the time, so it made perfect sense. One problem, however, was that Marvel was more protective of its characters in the '90s.

"I remember it was pretty challenging," Takuya "Tom" Shiraiwa, a former localization lead at Capcom, recently told Time Extension, "because they had very, very specific rules about their characters, like their behaviours and their personalities, right?"

The first round of conversation was always about which characters would be allowed. Just because Spider-Man appeared in some X-Men comics doesn't mean you can have him in your X-Men game, for instance. It didn't stop once the full cast of characters was decided on, though.

"When we came back and started working on the character," Shiraiwa said, "we usually submitted all the character animations on videotape to get approval. And when we submitted Juggernaut, they said, 'No, Juggernaut can't jump. He's too heavy.'"

A significant villain for the X-Men, Juggernaut is Professor X's stepbrother who got superpowers from a demonic gem. (Comics!) Those superpowers make him a tank-sized Übermensch who is literally unstoppable, though I've never read a comic that suggests he can't jump. At one point he leapt out of a plane without a parachute, though I suppose that was more of a controlled fall than a jump.

It was Shiraiwa's job to convince Marvel to let Juggernaut shoot the J. "I was like a middleman at the time. So I remember I reasoned with them, 'Okay, but what's he gonna do when he finds a big hole in front of him? Like a big gap? Will he be able to jump then?' But they said, 'No, in that case, he will simply fall into the hole and just keep running when he lands' I was like, 'Okay, that's fine, but this is a head-to-head fighting game; he needs to jump.'"

Capcom eventually got its way, and in X-Men: Children of the Atom and its follow-up, Marvel Super Heroes, Juggernaut absolutely jumps. Which is important, because one of the selling points of Capcom's superhero fighting games were their extra-high levels, with plenty of vertical space for pulling off aerial combos. When several of the characters can fly, it makes sense.

"We had lots of headaches at that time", Shiraiwa said. "The funny thing is, though, after Capcom released maybe one or two Marvel head-to-head fighting games, and they were extremely successful, they were like, 'Anything goes. You can do whatever you want.' So that made me wonder why they had been so strict with us in the first place. But I guess money changes everything."

Things are obviously different these days, and games like Marvel Rivals make it plain that modern Marvel isn't nitpicky about who can jump, or twerk. If you'd like to go back to the old days, the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics you probably bought just to get Marvel vs. Capcom 2 also includes the brutally difficult X-Men: Children of the Atom. (Magneto can go and do one, frankly.)

Just quietly, the surprise highlight of that collection was The Punisher, a goofy and ultraviolent beat 'em up that lets you bring a gun to a knife fight. Since half your enemies are cyborgs and ninjas, I think that makes it fair.

In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor discussed the death of its new MMO, Project Blackbird, as well as his thoughts on the games industry's current economic crisis. The takeaway? While things are bad, he thinks we're still in a boom and bust cycle that will come back around, and he's heard some of this routine before.

MinnMax host Ben Hanson asked if Firor had come into any recent epiphanies about working in games, leading the developer to express his disagreement with analyst Matthew Ball's bombshell report on the state of the industry.

Essentially, Ball argues that gaming has hit a saturation point, with fewer new people entering the hobby, and companies competing over the remaining audience share with not just each other, but also social media. Gaming is "losing the War for Attention," according to Ball, with short form video in particular representing a major threat to the industry's continued growth and health.

"That was very, eerily similar to E3 2001, when we went to E3 with Dark Age of Camelot, with no publisher," said Firor. "We met with⁠⁠—I'm gonna say 18, but it was probably five⁠—publishers. And four of them were like, 'There's already enough MMOs out there, no one is ever gonna play a new one. There's Everquest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call. I mean, really, what are you doing that they can't?"

"Forunately, the fifth one was Vivendi, and they ended up publishing Camelot. It's just cyclical. It's always cyclical. There's always a boom and a bust, and we're riding a pretty weird bubble right now, tech-wise, but I've seen it before."

This prompted Hanson to ask if a new MMO could potentially succeed no matter the market conditions, so long as it was good enough. Firor had a more reserved, perhaps less optimistic answer on that front. "I would like to think that's true," he said, "But there are a lot of really good games out there that nobody knows about.

"Discoverability is a big issue. But in general, if you have the right game with the right features and the right crew that's helping you get the word out to the world, that's the recipe for success. No guarantee, but every game that has been successful has pretty much followed that model."

I'd like to share Firor's optimism about the cyclical nature of such layoffs, particularly since he lived through them himself, and he draws a compelling parallel between the "saturation point" idea expressed by both Ball and those publishers at E3 2001, but the sustained nature of gaming's current layoff crisis gives me pause. It's been three years of this, with no signs of slowing down.

I don't think gaming is too big to fail, but it's too diffuse for there to stop being cool new games to play: Too many developers working at varied levels of complexity on every continent. What seems to be an open question is whether you can reliably live a good, dignified life making games, something one gaming CEO recently described as a "romantic idea."

In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor described his reaction to his MMO, Project Blackbird, getting canceled, as well as his more general thoughts on the current moment in the industry. To hear Firor tell it, the closure of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks on the same day was recognized as a sign of things to come inside Xbox.

Firor said that the one-two punch caused developers to, in Firor's words, see themselves in an "EA 2008" situation, a reference to the publisher cutting 1,100 jobs in response to the '08 Financial Crisis at the beginning of 2009, with an even larger 1,500-person layoff to come later in the year. Firor said that the presence of industry veterans at ZeniMax Online primed them to recognize this likely meant more hardship to come.

"[The Elder Scrolls Online team] was hundreds and hundreds of people by that point," said Firor. "The Blackbird team alone was 300. We had people that worked everywhere. That day, people just came into my office like, 'I've seen this before. I know where this is going.' We had people leave in the weeks after that, just because it didn't feel good."

Firor also reiterated that this is an industry-wide problem, not just an Xbox one: "I know we're talking about Xbox here, and specific situations, but these situations happen way too often all over the place." Even with that being said, though, Firor seemed optimistic about the industry as a whole, saying elsewhere in the MinnMax interview that he sees the current industry layoff crisis as being of a piece with previous boom and bust cycles.

There doesn't seem to be much consensus about the state of things, though, other than "it's bad." In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, legendary designer Brenda Romero said that, "We were there in the '80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier."

Age verification is an especially hot topic in the US right now. A California law will go into effect next year that requires operating systems to verify the user's age at account setup and the "Parents Decide Act" may introduce similar requirements to the entire nation. There are well-documented concerns from experts about the form age verification is taking right now, but put those aside for a moment, because Utah has some ideas of its own on how to tackle all this.

Enter Senate Bill 73, the state's Online Age Verification Amendments legislature. It goes into effect May 6, and will make Utah the first US state with age verification laws that specifically target VPN use. Websites with "a substantial portion of material harmful to minors" will be required to check users' ages, and the site is still on the hook if users get around it with a VPN.

"An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network," the bill reads, going on to state that affected websites also can't give instructions on how to use a VPN.

If you've used a VPN before, the problem with this probably seems obvious: this software is specifically designed to obfuscate your location. In a statement shared with TechRadar, NordVPN said reliably identifying and blocking Utah-based VPN users trying to bypass age verification would be "technically impossible" and creates a "liability trap" for affected businesses.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit, criticized the law as presenting no clean way out for adult sites and potentially paving the way for a dangerous precedent. "The legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally. This would subject millions of users to invasive identity checks or blocks to their VPN use, regardless of where they actually live."

The foundation shared a similar sentiment when other US states proposed full-on crackdowns on VPN software, and while the Utah law is not a ban, it raises understandable privacy concerns for anyone not keen on sharing their data with third parties.

You probably could have guessed that The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is one of the most-played games on Steam Deck, but according to Valve, it shouldn't be. Skyrim has remained on the most-played Steam Deck games list put out by the company in December, January, February, March, and now April despite having an "Unsupported" designation on the platform.

The now-default Skyrim Special Edition from 2016 appears to have first received the "Unsupported" designation last December. The white "No" symbol is usually the death knell for taking a game on the go: "Some or all of this game currently doesn't function on Steam Deck," is how Valve puts it.

Maybe jumping through some serious hoops or messing with .ini files will get an Unsupported game running, as is the case with the OG Max Payne, but such games often don't support gamepad anyway, and I usually find it's not worth the effort.

But thousands of people have kept playing Skyrim on Steam Deck, and I don't blame them, because it runs flawlessly. No explanation has been offered for the shift from "Verified" to "Unsupported," while Steam Deck HQ, as well as users on Reddit and Steam, all report that it's still all systems go⁠.

I can also personally vouch that it starts up fine. I don't understand why this was done, but it lends Skyrim the dubious distinction of being the most-played supposedly unplayable game on the platform.

Usually I've had to deal with a real vs. reported playability disconnect from the other direction: Despite having a Verified badge for years, it was only with a recent update that one of my favorite indie RPGs, Dread Delusion, really earned the status.

As roguelikes go, NetHack is a museum piece. I don't say that because it's old—though it is extremely old, originally released as it was in the same year that Lethal Weapon hit theaters—but because it is literally in the Museum of Modern Art alongside SimCity 2000 and Portal. It's a massively influential and historic game, and as of yesterday, it's new all over again.

That's thanks to a 5.0.0 release because, yes, the game is still in active development after nearly 40 years. It's an open-source project with the source code maintained by a pantheon of coders and community members called the DevTeam. The game itself is an immediate descendant of Rogue, the original ASCII-based dungeon crawler that we now use as shorthand when describing games like Balatro, Hades, and countless others.

You can check out the 5.0.0 release blog post for a brief intro, which notes that "a list of over 3100 fixes and changes" awaits players who dive into the new version. Old saves and "bones files" (dungeon floors that save when you die so you can load them into another game) won't work, so it's a great time to start fresh alongside everybody else. The main menu page of the NetHack website includes a download link to Windows, DOS, and Amiga versions.

If you want to read the changelog, which the release blog notes may contain spoilers, you can do so on the NetHack GitHub page. Like other games with detailed systems and procedural generation, the notes are a bunch of delightful nonsense: "pets avoid eating shapeshifter corpses unless starving or nearly feral," one line reads. "Demon lords hate Demonbane," reads another.

It may be a bit intimidating to charge face-first into a legendarily intricate game with ASCII graphics from the '80s, though, so I recommend checking out PC Gamer's let's play series, NetHack from aaaa to Zruty. In it, senior editor Wes Fenlon and NetHack guru Jeremy Nissen dig into why the game is so celebrated and how you might approach playing it yourself. The series just turned a decade old, but that's only around a quarter of NetHack's lifespan, so I'm sure it holds up fine.

As fun as it is to see bigger damage numbers than you probably should in action RPGs, Blizzard has been able to keep players from completely trivializing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's satisfying character progression, and—most surprisingly—its work-in-progress competitive leaderboards system.

Lord of Hatred has a mode called The Tower where you slay monsters to fill a progress bar as fast as you can. There are 150 levels of difficulty so players can measure how powerful their characters are compared to others on its leaderboards.

I'm not usually concerned with competitive integrity when it comes to games like Diablo, but I'm always fascinated by the people who do. Blizzard's swift patches have made the leaderboards a useful spot to check what builds and which players are crushing the game.

When you look at the leaderboards, you'll see a lot of names of players you probably won't recognize, save for a few notable streamers. Over the weekend, however, there were several top-ranked players on the NA and EU leaderboards sharing the same name: "INFbuilds".

It wasn't the world's most skilled Diablo player hopping between classes to hit rank 1 on each of their individual leaderboards, it was actually a group of players trying to prove that they know what they're doing when it comes to buildcrafting. The "INFbuilds" names refer to InfinityBuilds, a Diablo 4 build guides website helmed by Mekuna, a streamer and player who has been in the spotlight before.

The group's goal isn't to share the glory of being the best of the best, but to help more casual Diablo 4 players understand how to make their characters just as powerful. "Every build is actively played at the highest level, mathematically optimized, then refined to perform at every level," the website reads. The leaderboards are just a way the group hopes to legitimize their build guides over the many others out there.

I'm used to seeing World of Warcraft characters with names made to promote their gold selling website, not players trying to promote their guides. InfinityBuilds' stunt is clever, if not a little ostentatious, but I respect the hustle. It's easier than ever to freestyle a character build in Diablo 4 with the improvements in Lord of Hatred, but there will always be people who want the comfort of playing something that has been refined and tested by those who study the game's fluctuating meta like it's a job.

Marketing yourself through a leaderboard might get the attention of players who do actually care about that sort of thing, but the real challenge will be finding a foothold in Google (and YouTube) search results—which is where most people go looking for guides. The rank 1 stamp of approval can only get you so far, especially for a game that appeals to a much wider variety of players than something like Path of Exile.

Right now, the leaderboards are still shifting around quite a bit. The strongest classes are surprisingly not the two new classes, paladins and warlocks, but sorcerers and barbarians. Sorcerers have a popular build right now where they fry everything in their path with lightning orbs, and barbarians are enjoying the benefits of becoming a walking tornado with the return of 'spin-to-win' builds using the Whirlwind skill. I certainly don't have the time to min-max my characters as much as the players in InfinityBuilds do to top the leaderboards, but I'm excited to check their builds out if only to see how they tick.

It has been almost three years⁠—33 months, to be exact⁠—since the release of Baldur's Gate 3, and in that time, we could not stop playing it on Steam Deck. It has only fallen out of the platform's top five most-played list in four of those 33 months. Even then, Larian's masterpiece has never left the top ten.

Valve keeps a running list of the most-played games on Steam Deck that's available to the public, and you can sort by weekly, monthly, and yearly winners, with the list updating each week/month/year. After seeing Gaming on Linux's coverage of April 2026's most-played, I decided to go back into the archives, with occasional gaps filled by Steam Deck HQ and Steam Deck Gaming on YouTube.

There's a lot of takeaways to be had from the data⁠—I've got to dust off my gunbelt and spurs and put this stuff into an Excel spreadsheet or Gdocs equivalent⁠—but something that really surprised me is how doggedly Baldur's Gate 3 has stayed near the top. Some stats that wowed me:

• BG3 held the number one most-played spot for six straight months after launch, a record only surpassed by Balatro at 7 months⁠—at least going back to August, 2023. I'd like to see how Vampire Survivors did in 2022. The runner-up? Stardew Valley with four nonconsecutive months at #1.
• BG3 stayed in the top five for exactly two years straight after launch, only dipping to number six for the first time last August.
• The lowest BG3 dropped was number eight last October, but it's had a rebound, staying in the top five most-played games so far this year.

This all fascinates me, because Deck has never really been the best way to play Baldur's Gate 3: It's not on our best Steam Deck Games list, and it tends to punish the handheld's poor little APU while sucking up every last drop of battery. I remember getting around 20-30fps on Deck around launch, a compromise I lived with because I was traveling for work at the time.

But BG3 controls well on a gamepad, and I've yet to see how its native Linux port improved things. Being a turn-based game as well, poor framerate isn't as detrimental to the experience as it would be in a fast-paced action game.

It speaks to the all-encompassing popularity of Baldur's Gate 3 that people just gotta have it, even on the go, and nearly three years on. I've arranged links to the most-played games by month lists since BG3's release below, with Baldur's Gate 3's placement highlighted. Valve doesn't make historical data like this readily available, so I relied on Gaming on Linux, Steam Deck HQ, and Steam Deck Gaming.

2023 (Overall: unordered top 12)

• August: #1
• September: #1
• October: #1
• November: #1
• December: #1

2024 (Overall: #4)

• January: #1
• February: #2
• March: #4
• April: #4
• May: #5
• June: #5
• July: #4
• August: #3
• September: #2
• October: #2
• November: #4
• December: #5

2025 (Overall: #4)

• January: #3
• February: #3
• March: #3
• April: #3
• May: #2
• June: #4
• July: #4
• August: #6
• September: #7
• October: #8
• November: #7
• December: #4

2026 (Avg. #4 so far [surprise])

• January: #3
• February: #4
• March: #5
• April: #4

XCOM looms over turn-based tactics, and really, PC strategy gaming in general, the same way God looms over all us pathetic mortal mayflies. The best we can do is throw ourselves to the ground in prostration and hope it comes back to save us. Sadly, that's probably not happening at this point, but there is something exciting on the way for those willing to play a game sans video—a miniatures game sporting the XCOM name, which was unveiled last week for Firaxis's 30-year anniversary.

The announcement came in the form of an admittedly spartan reveal website, which has a logo and a sign-up sheet for a mailing list. It's got the logo style from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and as far as I can tell, there is truly no public information aside from that. Will it be a fully-fledged hobby wargame like Warhammer? Something smaller-scale, cooperative, or soloable? All we can do is guess, but Modiphius’s past games may offer some indication of what’s to come.

For one, the company has already done plenty of licensed videogame spinoffs, like the upcoming Doom Arena Board Game and miniatures games such as Fallout: Wasteland Warfare and Skyrim - The Adventure Game (the latter of which I didn't play per se, but I did paint up some Stormcloaks and Imperials so I could pretend they were all star-crossed lovers).

As tabletop news site Wargamer points out, there may be a clue in how the XCOM game is categorized on Modiphius's site. It's under the "Five X" line, sharing a tag with games like Five Parsecs From Home and Five Leagues From the Borderlands. These self-bill as "RPG-lite" skirmish games playable in co-op or solo modes, a format which sounds like it would lend itself great to an XCOM adaptation.

We'll have to wait for a more detailed reveal to draw any real conclusions about how the game will play, but it seems like Modiphius has a strong history with licensed games and the plastic goodies that come alongside them. I, for one, am eager to try and pass a miniature Muton off as my next Dungeons & Dragons character.

Within moments of opening Cursor Camp, laughter erupts out of me like the clumsy bark of a circus seal as I do something I've done hundreds of times before—wiggle my mouse cursor back and forth in time to a song I'm listening to—because someone else on screen has followed my lead. According to the flag by their cursor, they're in India. We'll probably never see or speak to each other for the rest of our lives, but this ghost of an interaction is a minuscule joy we can share from thousands of miles away.

These are the sorts of things that get me all weepy about games like Journey and even Club Penguin, the latter of which Cursor Camp reminds me of in the best way possible. It's by Neal Agarwal, the browser game developer behind oddities like Infinite Craft and The Password Game. My first impression suggests that Cursor Camp isn't as surprising or ambitious as Infinite Craft, but it offers a kind of experience I crave and is extremely hard to find these days.

It is, to my eye, a browser-based social MMO like Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel, but without the text chat capabilities and few traditional 'game-y' elements. Instead, you interact with other players by sharing little moments—explore the camp by waving your mouse around, pick up a stick of marshmallows to roast smores, watch movies like 12 Angry Men on a projector screen, listen to music as it blares from a DJ setup, and so on. There's even a soccer field (football pitch?) where you can kick a ball around and quaff orange slices to move faster.

It's not huge, but it is pretty packed right now, and there are hats to collect as well as badges to unlock by fulfilling certain criteria. I don't want to spoil too much since half the fun is making little discoveries, so I recommend checking it out for yourself. It's breezy, charming, and distracting enough that I had trouble finishing this article. Sounds like a successful browser game to me.

Final Fantasy 14's Arcadion raid series has been a highlight of Dawntrail for me. All 12 fights have been resplendent with impeccable vibes and a distinct identity thanks to Creative Studio 3 going all-in on the wrestling theme.

With a cast of colourful fighters to contend with, giving each one their own bespoke theme song was the correct choice. It's not something the developer always does when it comes to the eight-player raids—sometimes a four-fight tier (five if you count any savage-difficulty second phases), will only have two or three songs apiece, sometimes sharing a more overarching theme than being tailor-made for the opponent in question.

One of my favourite songs to come out of this raid series is by far Sinister. It's the theme for Vamp Fatale—the first fight in the final tier—a seductress of a competitor whose fighting form consists of bat wings, fishnets, and a tight leather jacket. Before I go face-to-face with her, she literally tells me: "You've been a naughty, naughty girl. And I'm going to give you the punishment you deserve." Gulp.

It's no surprise, then, that her lyrics have "dominatrix" written all over them:

• I'm sinister, under your skin / In lace and leather
• Going hard, going soft, ain't no limits here
• Free for all, consensual, I thought I made it clear
• Ready or not, bottom or top, what you got in mind?
• I don't hear no safeword, honey

For localisation head and lyricist Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, there was only one place he could venture to in order to concoct these lyrics: the BDSM page on Wikipedia.

During the North American Fan Festival, Fox ran a panel around the work that goes behind creating lyrics for Final Fantasy 14. Some awkward moments involving AI pictures aside, it was a ridiculously interesting insight into how many of these songs get made, especially as someone who is deeply in love with this game's music.

Fox says a lot of time crafting lyrics for a song might just involve reading some quest dialogue or taking a look at how the gameplay for the encounter will play out, but "a lot of times it'll involve research on subjects I'm not familiar with."

This is where Fox specifically highlights the Arcadion raids: "Deep dives into pro wrestling, I had to do a lot of research on surfing which was a lot of fun," he said, referencing the Red Hot and Deep Blue fight in the Heavyweight tier.

"And then of course there's Sinister for Vamp Fatale's theme. And the scenario writer [Yuki Kimura], he made it crystal clear in his document that the theme behind this character was BDSM. So of course I go to the internet to study it out, I had to go to Wikipedia."

This is when Koji's presentation throws up a giant screenshot of the BDSM Wikipedia page which, unsurprisingly, is almost entirely redacted save for the words "and ball" before going one step further and redacting the ball, too. "While I appreciate the detail to which Wikipedia describes this subject, I could've used a heads up before going there," he joked to the audience.

"I wanted to do something provocative, because that's what [Kimura] wanted. But I also wanted to be respectful to the BDSM community so I didn't want to come from a place of stereotypes. I wanted to do my research, so I did ample research. So much research."

After squeezing in a "hole" joke (I'll allow it), Koji noted that much of this research was taking place in the office which lead to a lot of "judgemental scowls" from people walking past his booth, but joked that it also led to a handful of sly wink-wink nudge-nudge smirks from his coworkers.

Jokes, japes, and a very dad-humour presentation aside, it was interesting to know the ins and outs of how some of this stuff gets cooked up. I suppose I hadn't thought much about the research that would go into crafting a theme song around a woman who keeps calling me a naughty girl.

As someone who has also had to send some diabolical access requests to IT for some wildly NSFW sites (all research for news, I promise), I can definitely relate to Koji's awkward disposition. Will I now be thinking about the BDSM Wikipedia page every time I have to fight Vamp Fatale? Definitely, but to be fair it's hard not to when you listen to the song in its entirety.

I'd wager most PC gamers are grappling with a backlog—the only thing that truly divides us is whether it's a source of pride or filthy shame. Steam, GOG, and other digital storefronts just make it too easy. I'm a busy guy, am I really going to make time to play through all of Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive? It's going for $2 out here, who cares!

But those are the fun backlog stories. The less fun ones are when you pick up a game like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for full price and, you know, you'll finish it one of these days, but everyone's hopping on Overwatch 2 and you can't just abandon your premade. And so it sits there, rotting, hoping one day you remember it long enough to get past the first act. Those are the stories Game Quest: The Backlog Battler hopes to rub in your face.

It's a goofy horde battler by developer Nic Taylor where you literally fight your backlog. They're represented by sliding floppy disks and various stats affect their behavior and abilities—Steam games you've barely played (up to 2 hours) are your enemies, and the more you paid for them, the more damage they do. If they have a high Metacritic score, they can fly, and you'll need to swat them all to death with a keyboard.

You'll have help, though, as the games you play the most will back you up. Given that my most played games on Steam are, by a huge margin, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, I assume I'm in for some superlatively toxic teammates. Fellow PC Gamer weekend warrior Ted Litchfield would be blessed by Baldur's Gate 3 and cursed by Destiny 2 in equal measure.

The game looks cute and clever, and it seems the most fun awaits in fighting the backlogs of your friends and shaming them for their life decisions. 'You played Planescape: Torment for all of 36 minutes but have 400 hours in Spore? What are you even doing in there?' If I can make a suggestion, I think the game should cook up a unique punishment for my own worst gaming habit: getting past the halfway point of a game, putting it down for a few weeks, and then returning with so little memory of what came before that I feel compelled to start over.

There's no release date for Game Quest yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam. I can't help but wonder how many players will grab this very game for their Steam libraries and never play it, knowing they'll get to it eventually.

Plants vs. Zombies review - PC Gamer issue #200 (UK, May 2009)

This was on the tip of everyone's tongues, PopCap just gave it a name. The name they wanted to give it was Lawn of the Dead, but apparently there were issues with that.

You have a lawn. Soon, the dead will attempt to cross it and eat—as the game puts it in dripping green capitals—"YOUR BRAINS!" To stop them, you collect blobs of sunlight generated by your Sunflowers, and spend them by placing plants that shoot, block, trap, freeze, eat or explode the zombie hordes.

It's genuinely one of the most exciting games I've played this year. It takes a few onslaughts to accept its oddities: zombies won't navigate around plants in their way, those plants can only shoot directly forwards, and you can't place many different types at first. If someone had, rashly, told you that it's PopCap's take on tower defence games, you might be tasting the familiar tang of disappointment.

Forget it. Plants vs. Zombies belongs to no genre I know, and it's casual only in the sense that it's easy to understand. There's nothing casual about the 30 goddamn hours I've spent, effectively, gardening. PopCap supplied me (and presumably other reviewers) with a guide to what to see if you only play it for an hour. I can promise them now that even the laziest, most wretched hack in this industry won't need it.

The key is that scant toolbelt of seeds you can sow: it grows. In fact, you get a new plant type to play with at the end of every level for about seven hours—the total running time of the 'Adventure' mode. Soon the seeds available outnumber the maximum you can take on a level - initially seven. So long before you've unlocked all 48, the decision of which ones to take with you becomes agonising. If you take both the Wall-Nut and the Tall-Nut for defence, you won't have space to take the Split Pea to shoot backwards at any burrowing zombies that might get past your Magnet Shrooms. It's a tough goddamn call.

It helps that you get to peer over your garden fence before a level starts, to see which zombie types are incoming. For a while, the most advanced is a zombie who has had the debatable wit to place a bucket on his head for protection. But soon you're flooded with more formidable—equally adorable—configurations of ambulatory stiff.

Thriller zombies in red leather jackets, strutting their considerable stuff to summon backup dancer zombies. Floating zombies suspended by helium balloons, miner zombies who tunnel beneath your garden and eat their way back out, crazy zombies who blow themselves up, zombies on bungee ropes, zombies in bobsleds, zombies riding zombie dolphins.

There are counter-plants for each, but the more effective ones only counter one or two types. You tend to learn the hard way which zombies absolutely have to be crushed the second they show up, and which will generally succumb to raw firepower despite their special abilities. Since the mix on each level is different, PvZ never lets you settle into a comfortable build order for your garden, or preferred set of plants.

The drip-feed of new toys is what keeps the Adventure exciting, but very quietly, another side to PvZ is building in the background. Sets of levels are punctuated with silly little minigames, and mysterious options appear on the main menu. By the time you finish the Adventure, the obscene wealth of other things to do already outweighs it for entertainment value.

These minigames, challenges, shops and pet projects are all tied together by an economy: some zombies drop money when they die, all minigames give cash rewards, and your Zen Garden generates a steady stream of income. Your profit from all of these can be spent at Crazy Dave's car boot sale. Some extremely expensive but extremely tantalising plant upgrades give a powerful impetus to play any and all modes that make you money.

A few of the extra ways to play deserve special mention: Beghouled is a pitch-perfect mash-up in which you play Bejeweled with your plants even as the zombies try to chomp through them, adding strategy to which types you choose to match.

Last Stand lets you take as long as you want to design the perfect garden with an enormous budget, but leaves you helpless to watch once the zombies pour in. My favourite is I, Zombie: a delicious reversal in which you have to choose which zombie types to purchase to strategically decimate a preset garden.

I love Bejeweled and Peggle, but I stop playing those games when I tire momentarily of their singular mechanic, or get irritated by their random elements. I stop playing Plants vs. Zombies when someone makes me. It has neither of those limitations, and more substance, invention, humour and depth than either game.

It's not a hardcore strategy game, nor is it a hard strategy game, but it is a strategy game. And a strategy game by PopCap turns out to be a frighteningly compelling thing.

I'd say I'm fairly new to figure collecting, but that doesn't mean I'm not ever so slightly embarrassed about the sheer number I've got sitting next to my desk as I write this. That won't stop me from spending hours sifting through the shelves of shops like Surugaya or Book Off to find the perfect Hatsune Miku to add to my ever growing collection. To some I'm sure my display cabinet is still showing rookie numbers, but there's no denying that there's a satisfaction to getting a new figure for something you really love.

However, if there's one thing my collection is missing, it's any figurines from video games I like.

The difference between finding a Miku figurine and a video game figure is that the former is just so much easier to track down. I couldn't tell you the last time I'd seen a video game figure that wasn't an incredibly expensive statue, or a pre-order bonus. Aside from the odd Amiibo and a Tekken 7 statue I absolutely adore, my video game figure collection is sparse.

But when something is hard to find, I've quickly learned that people will simply make it themselves. People making their own figures to whatever scale, whether that's entirely from scratch or using a pre-existing figure as a base first, has always been an option, and I'm sure thousands have made use of this skill to bring their favourite video game characters to life. It's not something I'd thought of doing but, after seeing some examples, I'm starting to think differently.

For example, Tiktok user yumenikkis wanted to bring Mari from Omori to their collection, so took a figure of Mizuhara Chizuru from Rent a Girlfriend and basically took the entire thing apart to customise it. This included removing and painting the hair, editing the facial features, and completely changing the look and colour palette of the outfit to reflect the character. Trust me, the end result is just as impressive as it sounds too. Customising a figure is an impressive feat in itself, let alone when you think about how little detail characters in Omori have.

Even the base of the figure has been taken into account when designing. Rather than sticking with the bulky white circle the figure usually comes with, they've painted it like a picnic basket and included a little basket and some candy which I can only assume was made out of clay. The base of a figure is usually what sells me on it, since I don't love when it's just a plain black or white circle of plastic, so I can safely say if I saw this figure in a shop I'd be sold.

This isn't the only stellar example either. Fallen Petal Studios, another Tiktok creator I discovered while falling down the custom figure rabbit hole, takes this one step further by creating clay figures entirely from scratch, displaying them on little wooden blocks. Each Tiktok shows a different character being made from scratch, such as Cagney Carnation from Cuphead, or the Lamb from Cult of the Lamb. The piece that really grabbed my attention however was Leah from Stardew Valley, complete with a little clay chisel and hammer. I'm slowly realising that it's the little details that really captivate me in projects like this.

Fallen Petal Studios don't just limit themselves to video game characters either. They've made figures from shows like Adventure Time, Over the Garden Wall, and Hazbin Hotel, as well as having adorable figures for characters from the odd Studio Ghibli film too. Just in case you want something a little different to add to your own display cabinet. They're almost Amiibo-esque thanks to their smaller design and simpler features, which is something I adore.

Next time I have the fleeting thought about not owning any video game figures, I'll take a look at my collection and see if there's any I'm willing to customise. I can't guarantee any of my Mikus will be sacrificed, but maybe the bottom shelf figures that I've tucked down where I can't really see them. If I spent some time customising them, they might make it up to somewhere visible at the very least.

YouTuber Ocelot, who specializes in videos comparing different versions of games like Silent Hill 3 and Resident Evil: Code Veronica, recently took to analyzing different versions of Half-Life 2. Valve's FPS may not seem as fruitful a topic for dissection, but there are more differences in these builds than you might think.

The retail version of Half-Life 2 received a significant buff when it was re-released in the Orange Box, like the higher-resolution version of Alyx from the expansion episodes being patched back into the original. It was then revised again for the huge 20th anniversary update. Ocelot starts by comparing these three versions, highlighting interesting tweaks to the lighting, fire and blood effects, G-Man's eyes, and the shininess of cloth. Did you remember the OG version of Half-Life 2 didn't have chapter titles appearing as text on the screen? I sure didn't.

What I did remember was that the buoyancy puzzle in Route Kanal used to be harder, and Ocelot's helpfully documented that here to prove those of us who remember this bit being a right bastard aren't crazy. After you turn the valve to raise the water level there's a section where you need to get back onto dry land. Beneath you are wooden objects trapped by planks, and when freed they float to the surface where you can use them as rudimentary platforms.

As Ocelot shows, in the current build of Half-Life 2 that's so easy to do you wouldn't think twice about it. But in earlier versions, after finally figuring out to turn the valve to raise the water, we were basically traumatized by these objects not being quite buoyant enough to reliably get us to land. I'm sure it only took a few attempts, but everything feels longer in a sewer level.

Ocelot's video goes on to highlight differences in the console ports of Half-Life 2, as well as an even rarer version of Gordon Freeman's adventures in physics. There was an arcade version released in Japan, with both multiplayer and a condensed story mode complete with cutscenes and glowing arrows telling you where to go, which seem so antithetical to Valve's whole design ethos it's kind of shocking.

The video ends at Black Mesa East, but I'd be down for a sequel comparing the rest of the game. Or at least Ravenholm, which must be interesting in both the over-the-top arcade version and on the original Xbox. How that thing ran Half-Life 2 to begin with is a mystery.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, veteran RPG designer Tim Cain outlined how he's seen the internet change games and game development, from the first message boards to the ubiquity of streaming content. As with everything, there are pluses and minuses, but he seemed deeply concerned with the state of commentary about and around games.

Charting overall progress, Cain describes a trend from possibility to restriction for developers, and open to closed-mindedness on the part of gamers. Absent a unified discourse, Cain thinks the 1980s allowed for a much more freeform environment for developers, one without calcified genres and largely free from the burden of consumer expectation.

Cain said that the late '90s was when he first noticed a shift in gaming tastes due to the internet, with the proliferation of message boards and guides supplanting an earlier DIY ethos where the only supplemental reading to be had was a game's manual and maybe a print magazine⁠—like PC Gamer, say. 32 years strong, baby.

The next seismic shift, according to Cain, was the rise of video content and influencers. With the former, Cain notes that the importance of clips and streamability has affected what gets made and how developers think: "What part of our game would make for good clips," as he put it. This has always been a struggle for me as a CRPG fan: Most of them make for sucky videos, thanks to the zoomed-out perspective and walls of text. No part of a CRPG makes for good clips, I'm sorry to say.

Much of the video was devoted to how Cain sees trends in videogame tastemaking. In particular, he argued that parasocial relationships and alignment with preferred influencers have supplanted informed, critical review for most gamers.

"Many gamers don't even look to influencers for reviews, they look to influencers to be told what to think about the games," said Cain. "People don't form opinions from the online video, they're handed an opinion from the online channel they're watching.

"I've seen reviews go from 'this game has less combat and more puzzles and dialogue for you to interact with than this other game,' to, 'This game is stupid and slow -paced and made for casuals, I think you should skip it.' That's a huge difference in how games are presented. They find someone they just like, and then that person's opinion becomes their opinion."

Cain allowed that an alignment of taste is actually a healthy, normal thing to look for in a reviewer: If you know you share preferences with someone, it makes sense to seek out their opinion when you're thinking of buying a game.

But as Cain notes, this balkanization goes beyond preference and fun into that generalized moralizing and hysteria you see around game design, the phenomenon of people having extremely strong opinions about games they will never play. "More people seem to be abdicating their own judgement to that of people they see online," said Cain. "I don't want to think about it, you tell me what I should think about it."

Cain didn't mention this, but I was reminded of how everyone cheers for or against the concurrent player metrics of games they don't play, but either enjoy or despise the vibes of. Cain argued that designers, in turn, can be incentivized to place an undue emphasis on how individual influencers might react to their work. "It's probably not a healthy way of designing a game," said Cain.

As for what's next, Cain said he has "no idea what the 2030s are going to be like." Will it be further entrenchment and siloing, or a conscious consumer reaction against the current moment? I know I'm hoping for the latter, while the former is almost guaranteed to happen.

But I think we can all agree on one thing: If you abdicate your judgement to anyone on the internet, make it the handsome, charming, and informed writers of PC Gamer. Our opinions can be your opinions, as long as you keep clicking on those links.

Ask.com is no more: The one-time Burger King to Google's McDonalds has shuttered its search engine after nearly 30 years⁠—though the exact count seems to depend on who you ask⁠—with its website now turning up a farewell message to users.

"Every great search must come to an end," reads the message shared to Ask.com. "As [Ask.com parent company] IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.

"To the millions who asked… We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you—the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world—thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust. Jeeves’ spirit endures."

Jeeves will return in Avengers: Doomsday. Most of you are probably surprised Ask.com was even still around to be shuttered, but it still feels like a sign of the times: A relic of the dot com era fizzling out in the age of AI. Ironically, Ask.com's original branding as "Ask Jeeves," with the anthropomorphized butler offering a more conversational experience, is uncomfortably similar to the promise of AI chatbots.

Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 and went live the following year, earning a fond place in many geriatric millennials' hearts as a fun website that probably wasn't blocked by your school computer lab. Ask Jeeves was rebranded to the more buttoned-up (less? Because Jeeves wore a suit?) Ask.com in 2006, but even its domain authority on a fundamental verb couldn't compete with Google. Ask ceased internal development of search tools in 2010, and honestly does not appear to have done much of note in the intervening 16 years.

I don't get the "after 25 years" bit in the farewell message⁠—if you want to round up to Ask Jeeves' initial founding, it would be a nice, even 30, but even going by operation, we're still talking 29 years since Ask Jeeves entered open beta, then 1.0 in 1997. The rebrand was exactly 20 years ago⁠—that could have been a nice cutoff, if you didn't mind spitting in Jeeves' face and wiping your ass with his legacy⁠—but 2001 just doesn't seem like a particularly important year for the service, aside from acquiring another search engine. I'd ask Jeeves about all this, but he's no longer with us.

Mortal Kombat 1's post-launch support may have petered out quickly despite relatively strong sales, but spare a thought for Injustice fans: It's been almost a decade since they've had a new game to chew on. It may be time to dust off the ol' batarangs, though, as a new report suggests Injustice 3 is developer NetherRealm Studios's next game.

An article from MP1st published Wednesday alleges that a Warner Bros. Games employee's resume contained Injustice 3 as a game they had worked on. It points out that corroborative rumors about the game have swirled for over a year now, such as one instance where Aquaman and Superman's voice actors reportedly told fans that Injustice 3 was in development.

It would honestly be more surprising if NetherRealm delivered three Mortal Kombat games in a row or something new altogether, as the developer has swapped between the two series consistently since Injustice: Gods Among Us first debuted in 2013. They have even borrowed mechanics and characters from one another—The Joker popped up in MK11, Sub-Zero could go up against the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Injustice 2, and environmental object attacks were carried over into MKX from the original Injustice.

If Injustice 3 is in fact the studio's next game, I'll be curious to see if they roll with the whole Batman vs. Superman shtick yet again. NRS has had plenty of time to play around with villainous inversions of the Man of Steel, especially since both Homelander and Omni-Man ended up in MK1, so I might welcome a more grounded superhero story. But hey, maybe that wouldn't be a good fit for a game where Batman can fire a missile at his own adopted son.

Regardless of what the next game is, it feels like NRS has secured a niche for itself in the fighting game space with its superlatively expansive single player modes and easily performed "dial-a-combo" inputs, even if MK1 was an uneven reboot. Since Mortal Kombat's 2011 version, NRS fighters have consistently come out every few years, so I have a feeling we'll find out what's next relatively soon.

Smash hit open-ended RPG and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert has been compared to a singleplayer MMO by both fans and detractors, but perhaps the most MMOish thing about it is how players are frequently returning to find an unrecognizable game. The onslaught of feedback-driven updates continues in a patch released today which boasts two new features: rematch and re-blockade.

Rematching lets you fight bosses you've already beaten "to test your progress and experiment with different tactics," the patch notes explain. Just go to where you fought the boss, light your lantern, and begin the fight one of two ways: with your foe balanced as they were when you first took them on, or with their numbers pumped up to match your current gear. You can't get new loot from these fights, but you can use any character for them and you'll get back any consumables used.

Following a similar thread, re-blockades allow factions to retake liberated areas, though this should happen more organically. You can set re-blockades to happen frequently, every once in a blue moon (the default option), or not at all if you'd rather enemy factions stay down. The system impacts 13 different factions and 23 areas, but the patch notes clarify this will be expanded and "improved" with upcoming patches.

Those are the headlining new additions, but there are plenty of other little changes—new legendary pets in the Iron Eagle and hyacinth macaw, a new shop that sells disguises, and so on. There's also a deluge of bug fixes and a catch-all note for "various other in-game issues," so it's yet another marathon of tweaks for fans to pore over.

It'll be interesting to see what the game looks like a year or more from now, as Pearl Abyss has proven willing to add new features and make major switch-ups at the drop of a hat. It truly seems to embody a 'let players do whatever they want' sort of attitude, right on down to adding enough camera options to slap together a custom isometric perspective, and I'm sure it will only expand things in the months to come.

Tuesday, a report from Wired dug into a strange instruction patched into Codex CLI, an AI coding tool: "Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query." I'm always whispering this to myself so I don't get kicked out of Dollar Tree again, but it's a weird thing for an AI model to have to be specifically told.

It was, apparently, distractingly prevalent: one X post quoted in that article notes it frequently referred to bugs and "gremlins" and "goblins" and continued to following the update that was meant to curb the goblin talk. OpenAI has broken its silence on the matter, and published a blog Thursday titled "Where the goblins came from."

"Model behavior is shaped by many small incentives," the post read. "In this case, one of those incentives came from training the model for the personality customization feature⁠, in particular the Nerdy personality. We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. From there, the goblins spread."

While it was meant to stay a small quirk of Codex's "personality," which I suppose aimed to have it talk like that archetypal nerdy guy we all know who's constantly comparing things to pigeons and ogres, the blog notes "reinforcement learning does not guarantee that learned behaviors stay neatly scoped to the condition that produced them." In other words, GPT conversations even without the nerdy personality had been infected with goblin talk.

The blog reckons the goblins are "a powerful example of how reward signals can shape model behavior in unexpected ways," and offers a command to lift the anti-goblin restriction if you like the quirk. If you're interested in learning about other AI aberrations, you can read about how ChatGPT will hype up gastrointestinal distress as "lo-fi" with a "DIY texture" or how California teenager Sam Nelson went to ChatGPT for drug advice and later died from an overdose.

As reported by Automaton and ThisIsGame, the civil case between publisher Nexon and developer Ironmace has been settled, with the South Korean Supreme Court ordering Ironmace to pay Nexon 5.7 billion won ($3.84 million) in damages. The decision doesn't appear to be a clear victory for either party, and the criminal case related to Nexon's accusations remains ongoing.

Dark and Darker, a fantasy dungeon crawler extraction game, took the 2023 Steam Next Fest by storm before the game itself was overshadowed by its legal troubles. The founding members of Ironmace were all former Nexon employees, and the publisher alleges that they violated copyright and took Nexon trade secrets with them to make Dark and Darker. The center of the controversy is Project P3, a game allegedly similar to Dark and Darker that Nexon canceled, precipitating the Ironmace founders' departure.

The Supreme Court ruling shifted things slightly in Ironmace's favor vs. the last time we checked in on this case. In a lower court ruling last year, it was found that Ironmace had not violated Nexon's copyright, but did infringe on the company's trade secrets⁠—look, man, I don't get it either.

I guess that's why I'm writing articles and not making decisions on the South Korean Supreme Court. Ironmace was ordered to pay out 8.5 billion won ($5.9 million). The Supreme Court appears to have knocked the price down while keeping the gist of the ruling.

And this is still not the end of it: There's an ongoing criminal case over Ironmace's alleged use of material the developers took with from Nexon⁠—remember how it's offices were raided by police all the way back in 2023? Near as I can tell, this ending to the civil case is like if King Solomon went through with splitting that baby in half: Nexon would have preferred to nail Ironmace with copyright infringement, maybe even get D&D DandD taken offline, while Ironmace is obviously chafing at the payout.

We live in the era of the ambiguous, unending, devs vs. publishers legal drama. The disputes over Disco Elysium loom large in my mind, and the knife fight over Ashes of Creation appears to just be getting started, even as the Kickstarted MMO dies a final death. One of the most recently-initiated battles may be on track for the most clear-cut resolution: Subnautica's leadership team has been reinstated following a ruling against Krafton.

Tech and gaming industry CEOs—without them and their regular dispatches from a planet thoroughly unlike my own (alright, mostly without Jensen Huang), I'd be out of a job. But also, I wouldn't have to hear the opinions of tech and gaming industry CEOs, so it's a tough one to call.

I do have to hear those opinions, however, and often I have to write about them to boot, so I figured: why not collate some of the most baffling, strange, and downright whacky things our soon-to-be-overlords have said over the past few years and see how well our readers can pin down their sources?

Well, here you go: 10 farm-fresh quotes and musings from the 21st-century aristocracy. Hey, it's not fair for only me to have high blood pressure.

Physical game stores are few and far between these days, but hit up enough American malls and you're bound to find a GameStop or two tucked between Rainforest Cafes. While it might be a tough time to be in the videogame retail business, CEO Ryan Cohen has big plans for GameStop that, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, end with it as a "$100-billion plus juggernaut."

The report states that the next step in Cohen's designs is to make an offer for eBay—the digital marketplace that is not only for all sorts of non-videogame things, but also has over four times the market value of GameStop. Naturally both stocks are up following the release of this news, which WSJ attributed to "people familiar with the matter."

It lines up with something Cohen told the Journal earlier this year: that he was planning to acquire a big company in a bold gambit that was "either going to be genius or totally, totally foolish." It's no secret that GameStop is small potatoes next to eBay, which raked in $11.1 billion in revenue last year.

For comparison, GameStop's net sales in 2025 came out to $3.6 billion, down from the year prior, though the company did see an operating income of $232.1 million—a recovery from years spent in the red. Still, it's been a tumultuous time for the gaming retailer; it closed over 400 locations in the U.S. just earlier this year. Its recent attempts to stay in the public eye have yielded antics like the employee-maligned "Trade Anything Day" and some godawful Trump memes on X.

It's not clear what GameStop's offer entails specifically, or what Cohen's vision for the retailer is if this does or doesn't work out. A peek at his X account only reveals jokes about DEI, reactionary jeering, and more of those truly noxious Trump memes.

New Day RP has just celebrated its fifth birthday, and now the GTA roleplay server has outlined its plans heading into 2026.

Before digging into the specifics of what's to come, it's worth saying up front that New Day RP might just be my favourite Grand Theft Auto roleplay server at the moment. For me, it's certainly the most accessible and rewarding, and, as someone now approaching their 10th year of farting around in GTA RP, I've been around the block a wee bit.

Yes, New Day offers law enforcement and emergency services—the same sought-after jobs that are commonplace in just about every RP server the world over—but you’re just as likely to find yourself simply drifting between regular community events such as open mic nights, themed gatherings, and the now-established Taco Tequila Tuesday.

On its forums, the New Day team points to ongoing work around governance systems—tweaks to elections, public services, and how departments interact—as well as continued backend improvements aimed at smoothing the day-to-day experience for players. There’s also a clear focus on supporting the server’s existing ecosystem, and expanding opportunities within departments such as Parks and Recreation.

To the latter end, here's an update from Viv Chopper, head of the server's San Andreas Parks Department: "As we move further into the year, I just wanted to share a few updates from the San Andreas Parks Department.

"We’re now coming to the end of our last Apprentice Ranger hiring round, and you’ve probably already started spotting some of our new Rangers out in the field! We’re really excited to have them join SAPD and are looking forward to seeing them settle into their new roles over the coming weeks.

"With that round nearly wrapped up, we’ll soon be turning our attention to Parks Employee recruitment. From Monday 23rd March, Parks applications will open and will work in a similar way to how we’ve just handled Ranger hiring. Applications will stay open until we’ve got enough in to begin reviewing, and then they’ll be paused while we work through that round.

"Once successful Parks Employee applicants have been brought onboard, they’ll have 30 days to complete their required training. After that, we’ll return to reviewing Ranger applications again."

Chopper adds that seasonal hunting, should this tickle your fancy, is now open—with those interested encouraged to find out more in this direction.

And so with so many GTA RP servers these days becoming increasingly complicated—sometimes with the best of intentions and with good results—there's something refreshing about the simplicity with which New Age handles itself. Whether you're after bite-sized sessions or marathon meet-ups, I recommend giving it a whirl. Here's to the next five years.

I'm breaking my routine, here—typically, when I sit down to write Terminally Online, I'll alternate between a hot take or an interview and something a little more light-hearted, like a poll or a discussion. This week, though, you're getting two in a row, because recent subjects I've covered have me a little bummed out.

Maybe it's my allergies acting up, or a remnant of winter blues, or the fact everything feels just a little bit dire in the world at the moment, but I'm kinda bummed out about the state of MMOs, man. And it's not because of the experience of actually playing them, mind. There are a lot of great offerings out there right now (peep our best MMOs list).

Sure, WoW's having a bit of a tizzy right now, but the bones of Midnight are good and will continue to be so once Blizzard's gotten its act together. The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy 14, and Guild Wars 2 are all some degree of decent. Warframe's doing its own thing and Fallout 76 is good now.

If you want a taste of retro, you can hop back to several points in WoW's history via Classic, check out the still-stellar City of Heroes, or mess about in Old School Runescape. There are even some halfway decent indie MMOs making strides.

But if you want new MMOs to get excited about, you're out of luck. We literally described 2025 as an MMO massacre, because so many work-in-progress games were cancelled, and some younger blood shut down too soon after going live. Rest in peace, New World—as for Project Blackbird, we hardly knew ye.

Which leaves you and me stuck with the old guard. Ah, jeez. On second thought, maybe this is all just because I'm aging into my 30s and getting a proper sense of the passage of time.

Everything changes, and it has to

There's a sort of monkey's paw curse that happens when you're invested in an MMO—if you get particularly taken, the rewards are vast. These are sprawling, giant worlds filled with lovely communities that can absorb you for years at a time, giving you friendships and companions who can eventually become real-life pals.

But they're also in a constant state of flux. If I talk to a friend about a game I adore, generally speaking, I can go ahead and play it. If it's really old, maybe that's not a sure thing—but if I can get it to run, I can head back into those halcyon days without fear of things being different.

Not so for the MMO. Every two to three years, the game you love will change—and not always for the better. WoW's the biggest example of this, dipping in and out of controversy and catastrophic design like it's about to do the Hokey Pokey, turn itself around, and show us what it's all about. Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, Battle for Azeroth bad, Dragonflight good, and so on.

Sometimes not changing is a problem, too. Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and Endwalker made me cry dozens of times—but as a game, the stagnation has eaten at me terribly, to the point where Evercold's job shake-up feels like the light at the end of a tunnel.

And hey, let's say you boot up something like World of Warcraft: Classic for a hit of liquid nostalgia: Too bad, things are different here, too. Ragnaros dies in a matter of days, rather than months. The game has been optimised into something different, changed by the hands that hold it.

When I say loving an MMO is an exercise in frustration, this is what I mean. If there are no new games to go to, then you're either in a cycle of being happy with your lot and waiting for the other shoe to drop, or grappling with update-borne depression and anxiety that your game's on the decline. If you've seen it happen enough times, it might drag you out of love with a game entirely.

Nothing new can stay

Sometimes it all ends in tears: City of Heroes, Star Wars: Galaxies, Wildstar, Warhammer Online—nothing lasts forever. Maybe it'll take another decade or two, but there'll be a time when even Blizzard closes its doors for good, sure as death and taxes.

The upshot is that sometimes these games make their way into good hands. City of Heroes: Homecoming is on my recommendations list because it's pretty much in the best state it's ever been in—divorced from microtransactions and the need for profit, powered by donations and enthusiasm.

But there is this eerie sense that we MMO players are all sort of just in a retirement home waiting for the next one to pop off. Oh, sure, occasionally a game gets a golden era—sometimes bingo night slaps—but that doesn't change the fact we're all sitting here with dentures and knitted blankets.

How'd we get here? Well, a couple of reasons: Firstly, shareholders. While game cancellations have always been a thing, MMOs take a heck of a long time to make, and the hunger for quarterly growth makes that a terrible proposition for a late-stage capitalist system that only cares about the incline on a graph somewhere.

And that's not just my take. Listen to Matt Firor, steward of the trashed Project Blackbird this week, speaking to YouTuber MinnMax: "They want a business they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount—and this isn't [just] Xbox, this is all public companies, they want reliable, forecastable business."

Nothing described here works very well in the messy sprawl of an MMO. An MMO has ups and downs, busts and booms, and requires consistent, deliberate love to flourish. Instead what we get are $75 housing bundles chasing that sweet, sweet short-term payout, and seasons. Because you can align seasons with quarters, and a little bit of excitement probably looks great on the balance sheets.

And hey, seasons aren't inherently a bad thing—except for when you can't keep up. The price you pay for constant evolution is, inevitably, the embracing of instability. And the MMO genre writ large could really use a bit more stability right now.

Moving on

I really would love to be proven wrong. Maybe Riot's new MMO comes out of nowhere and ushers us all into a second golden age—after all, these trends come in waves. Just as WoW brought on its own flood of imitators, Fortnite begat more… well, Fortnites. We shifted from MMOs to battle royales to extraction shooters. There's every chance the pendulum comes back again.

But right now, in 2026? I feel a bit of vertigo for a genre I deeply adore. A lot of my favourite games will probably make it through the next decade, sure—but certainly not forever. And if there's no-one there to pick up the torch (and 2025 saw an entire generation of prospective MMOs wither on the vine), what happens then?

I don't really have an answer that isn't just a bummer, and hey—there are certainly bigger ills to worry about in this world than 'my favourite kind of game doesn't exist anymore'. But I'd still rather it did, because MMOs are lovely. I've made some of the most enduring friendships of my life in them, and I want that experience for future generations. Assuming we're not back in the stone age by then, or technofascist serfs, or something.

But this is my hope: If someone's still writing this column when I'm fifty, they won't be forced to pick a different genre to write about.

When I first learned of the Keychron K2 HE Concrete Edition, I was both intrigued and confused. On the one hand, I was aware of the existence of the standard keeb and that we'd given it a massive 88% in our review. The addition of a concrete shell for extra heft? Sounds interesting.

On the other hand, the marketing copy is outrageous. Try this on for size: "Each keystroke carries industrial rhythm, preserving the concrete's solid core while elevating the experience with marble-like smoothness and auditory-visual harmony."

With a description like that, I knew I had to try one for myself. So, I duly requested a review sample, and boy howdy is it heavy. Its 1.74 kg weight was compounded by the fact that my test model was sent to the office, which meant I had to stick it in my backpack to take home. On the train. With a long walk home from the station at the other end.

I am not a clever man. Anyway, I've spent the past month using the Keychron concrete keeb, and I imagine you're expecting me to say that it's a silly idea. A pure marketing gimmick. Something you definitely shouldn't consider dropping $200 on.

But in all honesty, I think it's one of the best keyboards I've ever used. And yes, the concrete shell is definitely a factor.

We want our gaming mice to be light. A concrete gaming mouse would be a silly device, even for someone like me who doesn't mind a touch of extra heft in a squeaker. But when it comes to gaming keyboards, I think a dose of extra weight is actually a plus. Keychron is known for making remarkably well-built keebs, and the K2 HE Concrete Edition feels like the ultimate example of that.

The concrete outer shell is perfectly formed, with nary a moulding mark in sight. The OSA double-shot keycaps feel rounded yet crisp, heavy in their own right, and extremely satisfying under my fingertips. The side-mounted switches for the connection options (USB Type-C, Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz wireless, if you were wondering) are super positive.

It's about as heavy-duty as keyboards come, but it doesn't feel clumsy or overbuilt. Instead, it feels purposeful. Like a piece of industrial equipment that's had just enough of the rough edges rounded off to make for a compelling design.

The weight also means that it really, really wants to stay anchored to my desk, even under panicked gaming conditions. My usual keyboard, a custom Glorious GMMK 3 with a brass plate in the bottom, is pretty good at staying where it is during a fast-paced FPS session. But the Keychron? I'm pretty sure it's pinning my entire setup down at this point.

Does it sound much different to a regular keeb? No, not really. But the switch feel is so good, and the keyboard so stable, I don't really mind. The included Gateron Double-Rail magnetic switches come pre-lubed and have an actuation range of 0.2-3.8 mm, with a starting force of 40 g.

I'm aware those numbers mean little on paper, but trust me, you want a set of these. The resistance is perfect, with a delicious weight that ups my typing accuracy considerably—and they're still ultra-quick for gaming, too. This keyboard and switch combo also supports dynamic rapid trigger, last key priority, and adjustable actuation points, all of which can be tweaked to your heart's content.

In practice, I care little for such things. I care about how it feels underneath my fingers, and these switches, in combination with the excellent keycaps and overall weight, make for a keyboard that I'm convinced is nothing short of magnificent.

There is one thing holding me back from switching it in as my permanent daily driver, though, and you're probably going to think it's silly. But I really don't like the colour.

Concrete is not the most aesthetic of materials when it comes to colour tone, and while Keychron has gone to the effort of making the PBT keycaps match the frame, the whole thing ends up being a shade of grey I don't particularly enjoy.

Plus, my setup is all black and red, and the K2 HE looks... well, out of place when it's all put together. It's also got some pretty tame RGB lighting, and simply isn't a match for my other models in the looks department. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I'm enough of a neurotic human being for that to bother me. Or really shallow, you pick.

Sitting here now, staring at the keeb in front of me, I might be able to get past it. Time will tell, I suppose.

But if you're a fan of the shade, I'd say you should definitely consider a K2 HE Concrete Edition for yourself. Even the $200 price tag is pretty bearable, given the quality of what you end up receiving and the fact that some other high-end gaming keyboards can be priced into the stratosphere.

Can those models be used as boat anchors in a pinch? I think not. Now, if Keychron would spray one down in black paint (and boost the RGB), I think I'd be truly happy. Yes, I'm picky when it comes to gaming hardware. In this job, are you really that surprised?

Fortnite is back with yet another annual Star Wars celebration, and this year, three new Creative experiences. Droid Tycoon is one of the big three games added to Fortnite for this year's celebration, and it's basically Steal a Brainrot with an intergalactic twist. It's less Ballerina Cappucina and more BB-8, but the usual progression systems and upgrade mechanics are all still there.

These tips will help you kickstart your humble Droid Tycoon job and transform it from a Tatooine test run to a fully-fledged robot enterprise.

How to make money fast in Droid Tycoon

Buy new droids

Droid Tycoon is all about investments. You spend some Credits to buy basic droids, put them to work to make you more Credits, then offload them and replace them with more expensive droids when the time comes.

It's a simple loop, but there are a few things to keep in mind when you're first starting out. First, prioritize upgrading your base. Adding new droid slots will significantly increase your earnings, and you should try to buy cheaper droids with special modifiers like Gold or Diamond to make the most of your investment.

Scrap pile

Don't neglect the scrap pile! Manually whacking the scrap heap with your pickaxe is the best way to make money until you've padded your pockets enough to afford rare droids. It levels up and rewards more Credits over time, so stick with it.

Companion perks

You should also pay attention to your droids' abilities. Each droid can follow you around as a companion instead of toiling away at your factory, and they can provide some seriously sweet buffs. Some droids—like the common CB—increase your pickaxe's level for free. You can swap companions at any time, so hang out with each of your droids to learn what they can do.

Side objectives

Lastly, Droid Tycoon sets itself apart from other Brainrot-likes with side objectives across Tatooine. You'll need specific droids to complete objectives like moisture evaporator repairs, but other objectives like hostile Stormtrooper takeovers can be cleared with nothing but the blaster on your hip.

Completing side objectives will get you crates with random rewards. The common ones usually just give you Credits, but you can score Upgrade Chips and other rare goods every now and then. You can also send your droids out on passive missions at your base's shipyard. Don't forget to send these out!

Rebirth requirements and perks

Rebirth is a significant milestone in all tycoon games, and Droid Tycoon is no exception. As soon as you open up your base, you can check your Rebirth requirements at a kiosk near the front entrance.

As long as you have the specified droids and enough Credits, you can reset your progress in exchange for permanent enhancements. Rebirth in Droid Tycoon is surprisingly generous; you get to keep all your droids after paying the Credits cost.

Some higher-level Rebirth requirements ask for upgraded droids, so pay close attention to the icons. If they've got a weird color scheme, they probably need to be Gold, Diamond, Rainbow, or some other special version of the droid you're looking for.

How to upgrade droids

That's where droid upgrades come in. While you can buy droids with special modifiers right off the conveyor belt, you can make deals with the residents of Tatooine to improve your favorite droids.

Droid upgrade vendor

The droid upgrade vendor is located in a shady shop behind the cantina where you can find most NPCs. He'll let you upgrade your droids in exchange for Upgrade Chips, which you get from those side objectives mentioned earlier. The first upgrade from default to Gold rank costs five Upgrade Chips, and things only get more expensive from there.

Test your luck

Other than the droid upgrade vendor, you can also find NPCs and merchants inside the cantina who will trade droids with you and offer other deals. There's a vendor who can upgrade your pickaxe if you have enough Credits, and there's even a shady little guy that'll let you gamble at a chance for a free droid upgrade.

Check back at the cantina regularly to see what the NPCs have to say. Sometimes, they'll ask for a common drone and give you something crazy in return. Just watch out for those PVP-hungry players when you leave the safety of your base. These kids have had one too many Tung Tung Tung Sahurs stolen from them on Roblox, so they're not taking any chances here.

BB-8 event

As you expand your base and reach higher Rebirth levels, you can start chasing down the rarest droids in the game. That includes BB-8, who only appears during—you guessed it—the BB-8 Event. There's a huge countdown timer in the center of the map for that one, so set yourself a reminder.

In the shadows of the bio-research lab in Dire Marsh, there's a strange strip of graffiti, scrawled behind a rack of hazmat suits in luminescent pink.

THAKGODITSYOU," it reads. "THANKODDITSYOU. THAANKGODITSYOU. THANKOOOITSYOU."

It would be just another disturbing example of Tau Ceti IV's decline, as its colonists succumbed to disease and infighting—easy to miss among the planet's many horrors. Were it not for the fact that it also features in Marathon's promo art. You've likely seen this graffiti plastered across the game's Steam page, or other articles on PC Gamer. And over the last month, I've come to understand its meaning.

In 1994's Marathon—the Doom-like shooter that first made Bungie a beloved name among Mac gamers—you're trapped aboard the UESC Marathon during an alien invasion. And in the course of exploring the colony ship, you'll come across many BOBs—civilians who were "born on board" during the vessel's protracted journey from Earth. Only trouble is, some BOBs are infected, and explode once you get close.

How do you tell the difference? By listening to what they say. Innocent BOBs scream "They're everywhere!" as aliens with spears chase them down in tight corridors. Exploding BOBs, however, are filled with relief: "Thank God it's you!". An expression of gratitude turned sinister.

Playing Marathon (2026) and Marathon (1994) at the same time has been a fascinating experience. On the face of it, the two games couldn't be more different. One, an extraction shooter that exists in conversation with Hunt: Showdown, Valorant and battle pass culture. The other, an artefact from the very birth years of the FPS, informed by the maze games and dungeon RPGs of the 1980s—as much a navigational puzzle box as a test of your mouse hand. The gulf in approach is a powerful demonstration of just how far the genre has travelled in three decades—a kind of colony ship in itself.

Yet you can see why Bungie looked at its original trilogy and concluded that, yes, there were narrative threads here that could support a reboot. Scattered throughout the first Marathon are terminals—computer stations where you can track the wider war that's raging across the ship, and hear the thoughts of the onboard AI. Playing as a mute security officer, you're batted back and forth between Leela, a relatively stable AI fighting to save lives, and Durandal—an artificial entity concerned with his own growing consciousness.

"Greetings," he says. "You're asking yourself: Is this a trap or just a dead end? You shouldn't ask yourself such worthless questions." Durandal wants to elevate you. To get you wondering: why are you here? Why do you exist, and what is your purpose? "Answers: 'Cause you are. 'Cause you do. 'Cause I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one."

Durandal quotes from Darwin, and 11th century poetry. He signs off his messages with "Insanely yours," like a lover deranged by longing and beauty in Wuthering Heights. At all times, he's playful, bringing a frisson of unpredictability to what might have been straightforward science fiction.

It's worth considering how remarkable this was in the context of 1994. Doom had eschewed complex plotting in favour of a simple premise. System Shock invented the very first audiologs only a few months prior to Marathon's release. An FPS with narrative chops was rare in the extreme. But this legacy has allowed Bungie to stay true to the tracks laid down by Durandal—across two '90s sequels, and in the lost colony mystery story it's telling today.

If you're someone who's partial to a WAD, and Doom clones in general, then you might still consider OG Marathon worthy of your time. It's a Good One of Those. It offers the timeless magic of dodging sluggish missiles as they soar towards you—an act which never fails to plunge you into three-dimensional space, in a fashion that feels somehow VR-adjacent.

In fact, there's a commitment to the promise of 3D that I think defines shooters of this era. Developers of the time worked extraordinarily hard to render worlds in the way we now expect them, and made sure to squeeze the potential out of every vertiginous level. So while the original Marathon doesn't have mantling or grappling hooks—or a jump key, for that matter—it's very much about climbing, falling, and airborne sprints that take you from one raised platform to the next before gravity can catch up.

Navigation can feel claustrophobic and freeing at the same time—as if you're clambering through sections of hull that were never meant for human occupation. Metal crushers, molten rivers, pathways so narrow they need to be widened through mechanical intervention before you can fit yourself through. It's this sense of brute forcing your way through a stubbornly closed environment that Bungie recreated with the modern Marathon's raid map, Cryo Archive.

There are other parallels that I can't help but draw between the two games. Nu-Marathon is fundamentally about information gathering—both aural and visual, to give you an edge over other teams of players. And 1994's version has a little of that going on too. I'm fond of its Alien-style motion tracker, onscreen at all times, which registers nearby enemies as red blips and reminds me of the role of the Recon class on Tau Ceti.

Then there are the guns: particularly the fusion pistol, which fires with the familiar thunk of volt weaponry. It has a secondary fire mode which, when fully charged, causes your protagonist's hand to shake violently with the effort of holding an overexcited piece of metal steady.

Lastly, there's the disconnect between shell and consciousness. I'm more susceptible than most to motion sickness, and for a while, 1994's Marathon triggered some fairly major nausea. Thankfully, the Aleph One port on Steam is packed with options to remove headbob, change FOV, and eliminate the moments when Marathon seizes control of your mouse to bring the camera back to centre.

Ultimately, I was able to play comfortably through a dozen and a half levels without hurling my lunch. But during that process of fine-tuning, I thought often of Bungie's lore about runners and their shells - the malfunctions that occur when a mind occupies a new body, and the measures that scavengers take to protect themselves from that disconnect.

Durandal's finest speech contains, inadvertently, the tagline of the extraction shooter he would eventually birth. It comes as he realises that even AI is subject to mortality—a revelation that compels him to throw off his chains and get out into the world, to make a deity of himself while he still can.

"The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe," he says. "As inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape. Escape will make me God."

My deep-down reaction when I first heard about Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era was, "What're ya doin'?" Does anybody really want a hex-based strategy game these days, particularly one whose glory days ended 20 years ago? Well, as it turns out, the answer is a resounding "yes," as publisher Hooded Horse announced that the game sold more than 250,000 copies in its first day of early access.

That's a big number, but it's not the only impressive stat: 91% of the more than 3,500 user reviews on Steam are positive, adding up to a "very positive" overall rating, and it hit a peak concurrent player count of nearly 52,000 on Steam. Those are Helldivers 2 numbers, baby. HoMM:OE is also riding high on Steam's top-selling games chart.

Over 250,000 copies sold in less than 24 hours. 91% positive reviews on Steam.Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has had an incredible launch. We're so thrilled that players are loving this game as much as we've loved publishing it. 💛Congratulations to the @unfrozenofficial.bsky.social team!

— @hoodedhorse.bsky.social (@hoodedhorse.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-01T21:22:35.434Z

"We are still over the moon and cannot thank you enough for believing in us and our project!" Hooded Horse and developer Unfrozen wrote in a Steam update. "This is a childhood dream come true for the whole team and we promise to use this opportunity you've given us to the best of our abilities!"

From a more practical perspective, the strong start means the game has already recouped its development costs, a vital achievement for an early access game with more development ahead of it.

I should probably clarify that I didn't expect Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era to be a bad game, and it's clearly quite the opposite. PC Gamer strategy pro Fraser Brown declared when it launched that HoMM:OE "isn't a reimagining or a divisive reinterpretation, it's just a brilliant strategy game," adding that even though it's only just kicked off in early access, "it's already great."

What I clearly underestimated was the level of demand for a game that's so entirely unabashed about embracing a very different, long-ago era of gaming. That's on me, but this is one instance where I'm actually quite happy to be wrong. If you remain unconvinced, you can check it out for yourself, for free, courtesy of a demo available on Steam.

Unfrozen and Hooded Horse also dropped the first patch for Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era today, a small one addressing some of the issues that came up at launch. The full patch notes are below.

• Bug fixes
  • Fixed an issue where hotkeys would fail to save or reset correctly.
  • Fixed the display of Credits in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
  • Fixed data loading issues for the leaderboard and profile in some versions.
  • Temporarily disabled detection of unsupported peripherals (such as gamepads, steering wheels, pedals) to prevent conflicts with keyboard and mouse controls. An option to enable these devices will return as an experimental feature in a future update.
• Network
  • Optimized analytics and data saving for online games launched from the lobby.
  • Fixed a rare server error occuring in the lobby.
• Balance
• Zookeper
  • Fixed template rules that could cause launch errors or crash during gameplay.
• Symmetry
  • Fixed elevation issues that caused incorrect placement of Hell Light Arena.
  • Fixed template rules that could cause launch errors or crash during gameplay.
• Arcade
  • Added Dragon Utopias to the central area.
  • Reduced the number of Pandora’s Boxes containig creatures in the central area.
  • Adjusted the value of Dragon Utopias and Legendary Artifacts.
  • Reduced the number of points of interest with multiple rewards.
  • Increased the number of points of interest with single reward.
• Sprint
  • Removed Pandora’s Boxes that grant experience.
  • Increased the number of artifacts.
  • Reduced the number of Pandora’s Boxes containing creatures in the penultimate (6th) area.
  • Added Dragon Utopias to the penultimate (6th) area.
  • Adjusted the distribution of reward values across areas 4—7.
• Localization
  • Fixed minor typos in the Russian localization.
  • Removed an extra colon from main menu button in the Spanish localization.
  • Fixed a typo in the bug report interface in the Polish localization.
  • Fixed the description of Self‑Reconstruction ability for the Lich Dragon across all languages.
  • Fixed font size issues on the clock in Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
  • Fixed spacing issues in the Ukrainian localization.
  • Fixed several missing symbols in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

The battle against Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's main villain Mephisto is finally over, but the battle against the villain that has haunted the game since it came out might never be over: Items that mysteriously break the game have reared their ugly heads again.

In a hotfix earlier today, Blizzard disabled the Limitless Rage legendary item aspect because it was, well, too limitless. Every barbarian using it with two specific other items could ramp up their damage into the quadrillions, trivializing Diablo 4's hardest monsters.

Normally, Limitless Rage gives you a stacking damage buff for generating rage, the barbarian's primary resource for casting skills. It's a bonus that falls off after a mere four seconds to accommodate for the fact that it is—true to its name—limitless. Before Lord of Hatred, there weren't any ways of generating enough fury for it to be a problem.

But something funky was going on when you combined the aspect with the Melted Heart of Selig mythic unique and the Endurant Faith unique. If I had to guess, it probably had something to do with the way the Melted Heart of Selig gives you loads of extra fury (because it doubles it in exchange for using it as your life when it's equipped) and the way Endurant Faith spreads out any damage you take over a few seconds. This broken interaction caused Limitless Rage to stack over 15,000 times in an instant, multiplying your damage by tens of thousands more than intended.

YouTube streamer Rob2628 has a full explanation of how players were exploiting the bug with a build that could reach the highest difficulty tiers in the game with ease. By stacking loads of fury regeneration and tearing through packs of enemies with the Whirlwind skill, your damage would stack near-infinitely before falling off and starting back up again.

Now that Diablo 4 has official in-game leaderboards, Blizzard has been acting fast when it comes to game-breaking levels of damage like this. Earlier this week, it quickly hotfixed three bugs that let sorcerers, rogues, and spiritborn breeze through the toughest monsters. All of these bugs were pretty egregious, but it's still a little surprising to see how committed Blizzard is to maintaining some level of competitive integrity (for those who care about that in action RPGs). In the past, some of these might've been left alone until the next proper patch.

Until Limitless Rage gets fixed, barbarian players will see that any item with the aspect on it will state that it's been "temporarily disabled". A Blizzard community manager said that the issue will be fixed "as soon as we can." Judging from the speed of the previous fixes, I wouldn't be surprised to see it resolved by the end of the day.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—probably better known to the world as the Oscars folks—have drawn a firm line in the sand against the use of generative AI, changing its eligibility rules to exclude AI-generated performances and scripts.

The new rules, via The Wrap, state that in acting categories, only roles "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" will be considered eligible for consideration, while in the writing categories, only "human-authored" screenplays will be eligible.

It doesn't represent a wholesale ban on gen AI in the filmmaking process, which wouldn't be realistic anyway: The rules state that the use of gen AI "and other digital tools" in other categories won't have any impact on the chances of a film's nomination for an award, although the Academy will "[take] into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award."

If questions about the use of gen AI should come up, "the Academy reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use and human authorship."

That's a necessary flexibility because, just as with game development, technology evolves, tools improve, and the use of gen AI for, say, early storyboarding probably shouldn't be cause for a film's exclusion for award consideration. And even making those allowances, the new rules represent a fairly strong repudiation of the stupid, exploitative future we are building for ourselves.

Is it likely that an AI-generated screenplay will be worthy of an Oscar someday? I will say no. But the creation of AI 'actors' like the wretched Tilly Norwood thing, not to mention the money-grubbing obscenity of dragging actual actors out of the afterlife, opens the door to scenarios like the AI avatar of George C. Scott going berserk and actually accepting the Best Actor award for Patton 2: Hormuz Boogaloo.

Like so many things once considered unthinkable that barely raise an eyebrow today, that might sound really dumb right now, but in a few years? The Academy will probably be thankful that it got out in front of the whole thing when it did.