Abiotic Factor is already a massive game; you could easily spend 80+ hours exploring its sprawling, Black Mesa-ish research facility. But that hasn't stopped developer Deep Field Games further extending the tendrils of its labyrinthine, interdimensional science lab. Last December's "Holiday Cryosphere" update added a giant, living snowglobe that players could frolic festively around, and its latest patch opens up another strange dimension for your expeditious scientists to investigate.

The Cosmic Companions update invites players to brave the Dunkeltaler Forest, a coniferous portal world home to the Alpen Signal Observatorium. Accessible via a portal in the Hydroplant, the portal world will challenge you to track down the source of the signal picked up by the Observatorium. Mysterious!

As suggested by the update's title, however, the main feature of Cosmic Companions is Abiotic Factor's significantly enhanced pet system. Dubbed 'Pets 2.0' by Deep Field Games, the system makes pets a much more central part of Abiotic Factor's play. It adds a "Companion pet slot" to your inventory that enables them to accompany you as you explore. Potential pets now include the game's foundational "Peccary" enemy, which looks like a dog with no legs and a beak (so not much like a dog at all, being honest). You can also pick up Pets and holster them in your hotbar, meaning you can bring them up ladders, through vents, and anywhere else they can't reach on their own.

While the pet system and new biome are the headline updates, arguably the most significant change in terms of actual gameplay is the introduction of a chemistry system. This adds two new workbenches—the distillation bench and the chemistry bench—allowing you to brew all manner of ethically questionable concoctions.

Potential brews include strength enhancers, speed enhancers, and, er, size enhancers (no, not like that), transforming your puny scientist into a seven-foot-tall Hercules. Alongside potions, the chemistry system also lets you craft weapon-enhancing coatings and throwable flasks, with effects ranging from healing grenades to, well, regular grenades.

Other additions include improvements to blunt melee weapons for scientists who enjoy solving problems directly, the introduction of a new vehicle: the hovercraft-style Power Chair. And most importantly of all, the update adds the Mop 9,000, an incredibly advanced cleaning device that combines the power of kinetics and moisture to wash away any stains covering your laboratory floor (or, indeed, any floor).

It seems like another excellent expansion to what Morgan Park called "one of the greatest survival crafting games ever made" in his Abiotic Factor review, a declaration I'd eagerly concur with. The game's also on a 20% discount until Monday, letting you pick it up for $27 (£24).

I've always thought Half-Life didn't have enough teenagers in it. I mean, what's an underground research facility for if not navigating the relationship challenges of adolescence? It is, frankly, shocking that Valve so flagrantly neglected this demographic in its depiction of alien invasions and military coverups. I demand justice! I demand action! I demand Max Caulfield!

Fortunately, modder ThePriceFielder has picked up the baton Valve dropped, increasing the number of young adults in Half-Life from zero to one. Half-Life is Strange switches out Gordon Freeman as its protagonist for the lead character of the first series of Life is Strange, as well as Life is Strange: Double Exposure and the recently released Life is Strange: Reunion.

"Half-Life is Strange lets you play Half-Life as the queen of spacetime herself and use her rewind powers," writes ThePriceFielder on the mod's ModDB page. No further explanation is provided, and I suppose none is required. Max Caulfield is, essentially, Generation Z's G-Man, so who's to say she wouldn't rock up to the resonance cascade and dispatch headcrab zombies with a crowbar and unconvincing slang?

While ThePriceFielder doesn't provide much in the way of a description, there is a video of Half-Life is Strange in action. The various clips that comprise the video show Max using her powers to manipulate combat scenarios. In one clip, we see a scientist dash down a staircase before being shot by marines in a standard Half-Life sequence. But then, Max intervenes and time skips backward, letting her eliminate the squaddies before the boffin dashes to his death.

[NO SPOILERS] Half-Life is Strange: playable Max Caulfield mod with working time rewind from r/lifeisstrange

Some interactable objects are highlighted with Life is Strange's distinctive chalk-sketch tooltips, which blend surprisingly well with Half-Life's lo-fi visuals. Alongside her powers, Max can also wield all the weapons that Gordon can. There's a scene later in the trailer where Max murks a pair of marines before saying "Don't mess with Max, bitches," thus justifying this entire endeavour in a five-second clip, and making a compelling case for the next Life is Strange being a no-holds-barred boomer shooter.

Half-Life is Strange is still very much a work-in-progress, with no release date as yet. But I'm already sold on the concept. In the meantime, you could check out some other excellent Half-Life mods, such as a mod that lets you definitively rescue Half-Life scientists, or the hugely ambitious total conversion, Diffusion, which has now replaced its AI voices with proper actors.

Conan Exiles received a major update earlier this week, upgrading Funcom's sword & sorcery survival game to Unreal Engine 5 with all the graphical whizzbangs that entails. Conan Exiles Enhanced introduces Lumen-powered global illumination, enhanced geometry, improved character models, lighting and effects, among many other things.

This includes an, er, improvement to one of Conan Exiles' most infamous features. Tucked away in the corner of its feature showcase is a note that the update introduces an "enhanced endowment slider". To put that in layman's terms, Conan Exiles is getting better dicks, overhauling the physics-infused genitalia that caused such a stir when the game was originally announced.

Funcom is oddly coy about how exactly the endowment slider has been improved. Despite being listed as a major new feature, changes to the endowment slider aren't mentioned in the patch notes, and Funcom doesn't discuss it in any detail in its launch post. Back in 2017, creative director Jon Bylos mentioned several possible penis-related features, such as adding hitboxes and even letting players collect them as trophies. But the fact Funcom refers specifically to the slider suggests its improvements are cosmetic rather than functional.

Fortunately, Funcom is more forthcoming about other changes the update brings. Alongside the visual improvements, Conan Exiles Enhanced stitches together the base map and the Isle of Siptah expansion into one seamless world (though you still need to purchase the latter separately). It overhauls the building system, letting players perform actions like building, crafting, repairing and cloth dyeing from their inventory. The journey system has been reworked so that players can complete all available journeys rather than whichever one they happen to have active.

The update also brings extensive bugfixes and performance improvements, including support for various frame generation technologies like DLSS 4.5 and FSR 3. Inventory loading times have been sped up, high detail render distance has been improved, and most importantly, players can expect more stable "poison fog rendering", which I always appreciate when asphyxiating on noxious gases.

If you're yet to brave the windswept wilds of Conan Exiles, the game is currently on a 25% discount. That means you can grab it for $30 (£25.50) until May 18.

Modder RPGKing117 has had a busy month: He committed the blasphemy of putting Skyrim quest markers in Morrowind, achieved the triumph of cramming Morrowind into Fallout 4, and has no come back for one last job: Making Fallout 1 playable on Fallout 4's Pip-Boys and assorted vacuum tube, monochrome computer terminals.

This sequel mod does not yet have a public release, but will presumably be made available on RPGKing117's GitHub and Nexus pages like the Morrowind project before it. We do, however, already have a YouTube video of the mod in action for our viewing pleasure.

The Morrowind Mod used Fallout 4 Script Extender and the OpenMW source port to run both games at the same time, rendering Morrowind on the in-game screens of Fallout 4. Script Extender allows the player to launch Morrowind from within Fallout 4 and pass your control inputs through both games. A custom version of OpenMW streams its framebuffer⁠—the data sent from your GPU to your screen⁠—onto the in-game screens of Fallout 4.

As for how the Fallout 1 mod differs from the Morrowind one, we won't know the full story until RPGKing117 releases the full project on GitHub. There's a source port like OpenMW available for Fallout 1, Alex Batalov's Community Edition, and my assumption would be that this is what RPGKing117 used in his own project.

If you want to try this mod for yourself, keep an eye on RPGKing117's Nexus Mods or GitHub page for its release. I'm a huge sucker for game-within-a-game gags like this, and I'm always keen to see the farthest frontiers of absurdity people are willing to reach. Plus, much as I love the "Doom on anything" gag, it's nice to see people branch out into other classics.

Diablo 4 has had its fair share of bugs that players have gleefully exploited. If it's not some item that gives you the power to deal infinite damage, it's a dungeon dropping too much loot. Diablo is a complicated videogame; unforeseen interactions are kind of inevitable.

But that's not how I'd describe the latest thing players are exploiting in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred. There's an item with a number so big that I cannot imagine anyone at Blizzard would've thought it was OK to do on purpose. Someone must've forgotten a decimal point because it's the sole reason players are currently making billions more gold than is normally possible.

A new Lord of Hatred Horadric seal item says you will earn 900% more gold when you equip it. Not 9% or 90%. It says 900% and it means it. No other item has a number that big, which is why many players think it's a mistake. The amount of gold that drops scales way up as you climb into the highest difficulty levels already, but with this item, you don't really need to worry about it again.

In the past, gold wouldn't be much of an issue. But in Lord of Hatred, there are quite a lot of things that will empty your pockets. Something as simple as swapping out a single stat on an item can cost millions of gold to gamble for the one you want. And the new skill trees that modify the game's different endgame activities charge you 40 million or more just to move your points around. Forget the ultra rare mythic uniques: Gold is the true endgame chase item.

Well, it was until word got around that this specific item buff can solve all your problems. The gold-boosting seal isn't hard to get either. You need to reroll other seals in the new Horadric Cube crafting system until it pops out. You then need a set of charms normally meant for low-level players to equip alongside the seal for the bonus to activate. Those require dropping your difficulty setting and rerolling charms until you get the right ones. Anyone who has been playing fairly regularly for the last week should have all the materials to do this in a few minutes. Diablo 4 streamer Wudijo has a quick video on how this process works if you've never done any of this before.

You sacrifice a bit of your character's power to become richer than you'd ever really need to be in just a few hours with the seal equipped. There are dungeons that drop extra gold and bonuses on the activity skill trees that make for a ridiculous combination, netting you a few billion every run. In just a few hours of grinding with this item, gold will no longer be a concern.

The only people who don't benefit from this little mistake are those who buy items from other players on trade websites. Prices are about to go way up as players get their hands on this broken item and it'll be mandatory if you actually want to be able to afford anything—at least until Blizzard notices and sticks a decimal point on there.

May is finally upon us, and that means three things: The weather is starting to suck less, Canada's oldest official holiday is approaching (happy birthday, Queen Victoria), and it's time to catch up on what's happening with Skywind, the mega-mod that seeks to recreate Morrowind, the greatest Elder Scrolls game ever, using the newer technology of Skyrim.

I'll cut right to the chase here: There's no release date, or even a target window for launch. This is very much a work-in-progress update, detailing advances made since the last check-in but also revealing (not that it comes as any great surprise) that there is much left to do. Some aspects of the game, like 2D art, writing, and voice acting, are nearly complete, while others—animation, voice mastering, SFX, and localization—are not.

As is the way with projects like this one, the team is also (still) on the hunt for volunteers. "A common misconception is that Skywind has been worked on by the same small group of people, chipping away at it for a decade," narrator Joy Hayward states. "In reality, the project has functioned more like a relay race, with the initial contributors having long since passed the baton.

"Over the years, more than a thousand contributors have given what they could, when they could, to an idea they believed in. Today, nearly every active volunteer was once a follower of the project, just like you, and the hurdles ahead can only be overcome as long as people—like you—continue to volunteer."

These roles are the team's current priorities:

Even though there's no big news here, the update video is a pleasure to watch because it looks so good. Morrowind is a uniquely beautiful, alien fantasy game, and seeing it renewed in this glorious new(ish) tech—yes, I'm aware of the irony that Skyrim is older now than Morrowind was when the Skywind project began—brings me real joy. I'm not generally one for remasters, but for Morrowind, I'll make an exception—not anytime soon, no, but someday.

If you're interested in helping bring Skywind across the line, you can sign up at the Skywind website.

PVKK, or Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant if you're particular, is a game we've been eagerly awaiting: It was named one of our most anticipated games during last year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted rundown, largely by virtue of how badly we want to fiddle with the many deliciously tactile switches, levers, knobs, cranks, and buttons it offers for the operation of its titular planetary defense cannon.

Unfortunately, we've now got a longer wait before we can play the Papers Please-like supercannoneer sim for ourselves. In a Steam news post, game director René Habermann announced that PVKK has been delayed until 2027 "to make sure PVKK is in the best shape possible at launch."

"I know this sucks and I understand your disappointment. As we've been working behind the scenes, it's become clear that we can push things way further than we originally thought, and with a bit more time, make something really special," Habermann said. "For every problem we've encountered and solved (and there have been many!), we've had 10 new ideas for ways to improve things for our commanders. We're super happy with the planned content in the game now, and are working hard to bring everything to life."

Executing on all those ideas, it seems, has meant bringing on a few additional hands. According to Habermann, Bippinbits—the studio behind PVKK—has expanded alongside the game's scope. In 2025, its staff more than doubled in size from four full-time developers to 11.

"As it stands, releasing on our original timeline would mean compromising on making PVKK the best game it can be, and that is not something we want," Habermann said. "This means that PVKK will now be launching in 2027."

In a 2024 interview with PC Gamer, Habermann said PVKK is more than just listening to the satisfying clunks and clicks of the apocalyptic artillery's control surfaces. It'll also give players plenty of time between executing the firing orders they receive from their superiors to sip their daily tea rations, peruse teleradio propaganda, and consider more generally the ethical implications of shooting a giant cannon for what its store listing openly calls "an autocratic regime."

"What I do enjoy a lot is to put the player in certain situations, and let them have their own thoughts with it," Habermann said. "That's something funny that also happened already with Dome Keeper: Some people picked up that you land on this planet, you shoot all the native creatures, you exploit the planet, and then you then you go away again. Yeah, like, 'Am I the bad guy?' … That's something I really enjoy."

While a delay isn't the kind of news we hope for, perhaps the extra pondering time isn't a bad thing. After all, we wouldn't want to rush to any conclusions about a moral dilemma as complex as "is it bad to shoot a big gun for bad people." Best to approach these sorts of ethical quandaries with a level head.

While we won't see it this year, you can still wishlist PVKK now on Steam.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about the immense pressure for the game to succeed, given the publisher's massive investment into Rockstar's long-awaited crime caper. He described the risk the company's taking in a way that, unfortunately, I can only describe as going kinda hard.

"Development costs have gone up and up. And we really do aim to deliver the highest quality entertainment on Earth," Zelnick told Bloomberg. "And that is costly. And AI influence is not withstanding. We haven't seen those costs decline yet. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't."

The cost of triple-A development has been a hot button issue this console generation, with increasing technological and graphical complexity demanding correspondingly larger team sizes and bigger budgets. High-profile, expensive sales failures beg the question whether smaller team sizes, shorter development cycles, and cheaper games should be embraced as an alternative.

But Zelnick still wants the publisher to focus on blockbusters, and he seems to accept that you have to spend money to make money. “That's a high-stakes game for big boys only," said Zelnick, "And I'm cool with it.”

It's a turn of phrase that, quite frankly, tickled my fancy. It almost made up for the part of the interview where Zelnick said he sees Xbox and PlayStation as Rockstar's "core" audience, hence GTA 6's customary delayed launch on PC.

"We never claim success before it occurs," Zelnick said, before describing the company's strategy as, "We try to give them unlimited financial, creative human resources and then they aim to deliver perfection." And "unlimited" really seems to mean "unlimited," as evidenced by GTA 6's long gestation, several delays, and eye-watering estimated budget.

Business Insider provided a $1-$1.5 billion figure from anonymous industry analysts in its own feature on Zelnick, but this seems to be the low end of the GTA 6 budget ballpark. In a LinkedIn post from last August, before GTA 6 was delayed from May to November 2026, Josh Chapman of venture capital firm Konvoy cited a $2 billion estimated investment from Take-Two.

GTA 6 O'Clock newsletter writer Dan Dawkins argued that $3.4 billion is a more likely figure, factoring in preproduction and Rockstar's payroll over the last 6 years of development. If that's not a high-stakes game for big boys only, I don't know what is.

Back to Chapman and Konvoy, they predicted that Take-Two would break even within a month, assuming a $2 billion budget, and that the game would rake in $7.6 billion in total revenue within 60 days of launch⁠—and that's before you get to the long tail of sales GTA 6 will presumably have, if the previous game in the series is anything to go by.

Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino used Sony's latest quarterly financial report to share some thoughts on the role that AI will play in the future of game development, and if you're thinking that he might temper his enthusiasm in the face of consumer discontent, all I can say is—guess again.

Nishino is an unabashed booster of AI, calling it a "powerful tool" during Sony's corporate strategy presentation that will enable "gaming experiences like never before—more immersion, more adventures, and fresh ways to enjoy [your] favorite characters."

Naturally, the embrace of AI will also mean a "more efficient production environment" for game makers, but not in a way that would result in job losses, Nishino claims. In fact, Nishino says, "AI is lowering barriers to creation, accelerating development cycles, and enabling more creators to enter the market," which will result in a greater number and variety of games available to players.

"Within our studios, game developers are automating repetitive workflows, improving software engineering productivity, and accelerating areas like quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animation through new, AI-powered tools," Nishino said. "For example, our teams created a tool we call 'Mockingbird' that quickly animates 3D facial models based on performance captures.

"Importantly, we are not replacing human performers, but rather optimizing how we process the data from these live captures. With Mockingbird, animation work that would have taken hours can now be completed in a fraction of a second."

Nishino also cited another AI tool created for the normally "labor-intensive process" of animating hair, which uses videos of real hairstyles to generate 3D models with "hundreds" of hair strands rendered. "These practical applications allow our teams to spend less time on manual, high-effort tasks and to instead reinvest their time into building richer worlds and gameplay for our players."

I feel obligated to state that I'm not reflexively against new technologies, nor am I naive about the nature of human progress, which is always at least a little destructive. At the same time, if a labor-intensive process has been replaced by a much faster automated process, the people involved in that labor will naturally find themselves without much to do—and as much as corporations like to talk about freeing developers from scut work so they can focus on artistry and magic, the reality is that the artists and animators responsible for expressive faces and flowing hair are not suddenly going to find themselves holding creative director roles on a multitude of new, AI-powered games.

Still, Nishino is clearly eager to make the point: "As AI capabilities evolve, the role of our creators will remain unchanged. The vision, the design, and the emotional impact of our games will always come from the talent of our studios and performers. AI is meant to augment their capabilities, not to replace them."

AI is also a growing part of Sony's "platform business," he continued, used in everything from payment processing to storefront curation: "Our AI capabilities will evolve into a consumer-centric experience that not only suggests the next game a player might enjoy, but also the next gameplay moment, subscription, accessory, or merchandise that best reflects their passion."

Some of the controversy surrounding the use of AI in game development arises from a lack of precision in language and definitions, and the tendency to lump generative AI, LLMs, machine learning algorithms, and any other "it's thinking" technology that float to the surface into a great pile called AI. But there's a great gulf between, say, Elon Musk's promise to "release a great AI-generated game" before the end of 2026—clock's ticking, bud—and recognizing that these technologies can be very powerful and useful in a real-world sense.

That kind of hand-waving also makes it easier to paper over the less-positive impacts of the rise of AI. Big-name "creators" (another ill-defined term) will be protected, but jobs will be lost, and there's no doubt in my mind that despite lofty talk about the value of talent, reducing headcounts and payroll is one of the chief goals of the drive to embrace this technology. The AI feeding frenzy is also putting a lot of new hardware out of the reach of normal consumers: It's why my 10-year-old rig will, in just a few short years, be my 13-year-old rig.

And despite Nishino's belief that "AI models can outperform manual curation," the fact is that I don't want recommendations based on my purchase history and hours spent on this or that: I want people who know me to say, "Hey man, you're a weirdo—check this shit out."

No machine will tell you to play this. But we will.

I think the truth is that AI, in whatever guise, is and will continue to be useful to game developers, in some cases invaluably so, and will also continue to cause upheaval: Fewer people employed in the game industry, more sloppy shovelware, and—until the bubble pops, at least—higher costs for consumers. And we will continue to see effusive enthusiasm for it from game industry executives, not necessarily because they have a firm grasp on what it really offers (I suspect nobody can honestly make that claim), but simply because they're all afraid of missing the boat and getting fired.

"We believe AI will unleash the creativity of our studios, power a more curated platform, and enhance the PlayStation experience for both players and creators," Nishino concluded. "With our global player base, deep library of IP, and integrated ecosystem, AI is a powerful tool for us to deliver a truly cutting-edge entertainment experience."

At 12:08 pm Pacific on Friday, Discord announced that it was investigating errors preventing some users to connect to the chat application. After confirming that it had identified the issue, Discord issued an update at 1:16 pm Pacific saying that it was "seeing significant recovery" and was continuing to restore services.

In a follow-up at 1:19 pm Pacific, Discord reiterated that it's "beginning to see recovery on our systems and are continuing recovery operations to get the service into a fully healthy state."

If you already had Discord open, you may not notice the downtime, but those booting it up may be unable to connect.

During the outage, we tested out Discord on our own machines and noticed that we get an error while trying to load friends' profiles, presumably due to the API issues. For some of our staff, those issues have since resolved, but if you still see "Unable to load parts of profile" while clicking someone's avatar or a familiar red "Messages failed to load " error, those issues might resolve as Discord continues to restore services.

Developing...

It was only in February that we reported that Helldivers 2 was in the best shape it had been in since launch. The siege of Cyberstan galactic campaign was the glittering jewel in the game's live-service storytelling crown, delivering new toys like the Bastion tank and colossal new enemies called Vox Engines, as well as a dramatic invasion of the Automatons' home planet where every dead patriot reduced the chance of success.

Yet only three months later, Helldivers 2's recent reviews have plummeted to 'Mostly Negative', with a host of issues from alleged hidden changes to weapons to underwhelming warbonds putting the community at loggerheads with developer Arrowhead Studios once again. This came to a head on Friday, with Arrowhead publishing a Steam post addressing the community's grievances:

"We've been following your feedback over the past few days and seeing the conversations across the Helldivers 2 community," Arrowhead writes. "Helldivers 2 matters to all of us and we want to be clearer about what we're working on and what's coming next."

Broadly, Arrowhead explained that it is currently working on "improving meta-progression and the Galactic War," adding that it has "significantly expanded the team working in this area". Plans for the future include altering major orders, which often get completed quicker than Arrowhead anticipates, into longer, multi-week campaigns. It also wants these campaigns to have "branching outcomes" that have clearer stakes and are more responsive to player actions.

Regarding the allegations of hidden changes to weapons, Arrowhead says that some changes in its patch notes "have not been communicated with the clarity we intend" and as such it is "working on how we explain balance updates more clearly". I can imagine that tracking all the different tweaks to weapons in a game like Helldivers 2 is more difficult than might be apparent, but I also think Arrowhead's obsession with "balance" is a bit odd considering it's a cooperative game.

Arrowhead also directly addresses the fallout over its recent Exo Experts warbond, which included two new mechs players could purchase. This caused some consternation among players, who felt that the existing mechs were too fragile to be of much use anyway. Arrowhead ended up bulking up the durability of all mechs in a patch that released alongside the warbond, but some believe the imbalance between what's free and what's paid in updates is too great.

In the post, Arrowhead says the goal with Exo Experts was "to create something that felt thematically strong and exciting". The studio says it has "seen the feedback around how that landed" but stops short of admitting any fault. Instead, Arrowhead says it wants "to strike the right balance between what's included in the warbonds and what's available through gameplay", stressing that other vehicles are coming to Helldivers 2 that players can unlock without investing in a warbond.

Elsewhere, Arrowhead says that it's working on new red stratagems (which includes things like orbital strikes, airstrikes and lasers), better Galactic War rewards, and more beta tests for updates—both closed and available to the public.

As for how the community has reacted to the post, it sure hasn't quieted the Helldivers subreddit, which is currently riddled with memes accusing the post of not saying a whole lot. I think this is a little unfair, although there are definitely some empty phrases in there. There's also a broader sense of "Oh, Arrowhead's at it again" futzing about with a perfectly good videogame and then having to apologise for it.

I do think some of the sensibility here comes down to post-update ennui, with all the hardcore Helldivers fans having chewed through the new stuff, leaving them twiddling their thumbs until the next big story arc rolls along. But the trouble with live-service games is they are supposed to be live service, not "once every six months" service. Moreover, I agree that Arrowhead has put too much emphasis on warbonds and not enough on stuff you can unlock through general play. It would be nice to get a new gun without grinding super credits for hours or dropping fifteen notes on a game I already paid £50 to experience.

Yet while Arrowhead has a tendency to drop the ball once in a while, I also know that it's more than capable of delivering absolutely killer updates. Hopefully, the next time the community inevitably starts singing the game's praises, the song will last a while longer.

Remember when OpenAI created a bot that could beat humans at Dota 2? As PCG reported last week, that was because Elon Musk had personally called Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to secure a massive discount on access to Azure, the company's cloud computing platform. Now a new document released thanks to the ongoing Musk vs Altman legal spat has revealed just how big that discount was: and how nervy Microsoft execs were about the whole deal, and OpenAI generally.

Our story begins after OpenAI had succeeded in its Dota 2 mission, with Nadella emailing Sam Altman on 11 August 2017: "Just wanted to pass on my Congrats on the win today!" A few weeks later Altman emails Nadella, saying:

"Would you be up for a big partnership on the next phase of this (teams of 5 vs 5)? I think it will lead to major new breakthroughs in Al but will require huge amounts of compute, probably something like $300M at Azure list prices. We could figure out how to fund some of it but not that much [...] Would love to make it a joint team. I think it will be the most impressive thing yet in the history of Al."

Nadella then emails some of his fellow Microsoft execs: Brett Tanzer, Jason Zander, Eric Horvitz and Jason Graefe. "I know we have been on this road before," writes Nadella, referring to Microsoft's previous sweetheart deal. "Wondering how to reply to this…"

Thanks to this we get a breakdown of what OpenAI actually got from Microsoft in 2016 and, surprise surprise, it was an absolutely eye-watering discount. The list price for Azure was $1.15 per GPU hour, and OpenAI paid $0.24 per GPU hour. Obviously the list price is not the cost price to Microsoft, but the execs are soon fretting about the money.

"The 2016 deal, where they agreed to pay $10M for $60M in Azure services was projected at a $15M loss over three years, given assumed usage profile," writes Tanzer. "They'll have consumed all the usage in 1/2 that time."

Essentially OpenAI got $60 million worth of compute for $10 million, Microsoft had to take the hit on that, and then OpenAI asked for even more. Things get a little more interesting than the numbers when the suits start talking about the kind of AI Microsoft should be supporting.

"PR/Marketing have taken your previous guidance to mean clearly that we don't want 'machines beating humans' and are not supportive of any push on this," writes Microsoft's Jason Zander, adding he's got a cost analysis in the works. "Basically if we are [Gross Margin] neutral or if the negative GM is reasonable to think of as a marketing expense I still want to proceed. There certainly is some nuance in the 'machines vs humans' thing but I worry we are being overly literal and I do believe the pop from someone like Sam and Elon will help build momentum for Azure [...] But I won't take a complete bath to do it."

That cost analysis? It wasn't good.

"I reviewed the GM with the team and this deal would cost us ~-$150M over the current contract which frankly makes it a non-starter," writes Zander a few days later. "[Tanzer] is going to let [Altman] know we are having a hard time getting the numbers to make sense given they are huge even for Microsoft."

"After communicating the [above] to Sam Altman, he came back with an alternate proposal to create a partnership with Xbox around Gaming," writes Tanzer, "and an open offer to share their technology and IP in exchange for expanded sponsorship for their Dota research. His hope was that together we could accelerate the adoption of Reinforcement Learning in our game platform as a differentiation play for Microsoft."

The Xbox team was interested in this idea, but not interested enough to cover the additional $35-50 million dollars in Azure credits that OpenAI was asking for.

On January 10, 2018, Nadella writes: "From what Elon is telling everyone... he feels Open Al is at verge of some big AGI breakthroughs. They clearly are pushing Al at a level none of our first party or third parties are [but] right now we are just renting/discounting HW and there is no real learning/feedback cycle back to our work."

Microsoft's Kevin Scott is having none of the AGI chat. "I'm highly skeptical of an imminent breakthrough in AGI. On the incremental investment, I'm not sure what Microsoft is going to get out of it. It doesn't feel to me like we've earned much branding or marketing benefit from the collaboration with them so far. IMO, they're treating us like a bucket of undifferentiated GPUs, which isn't interesting for us at all."

Scott goes on to list various "what-if" scenarios that could change his mind but doesn't consider any of them likely. He is, however, concerned about "the PR downside of us not funding them, and having them storm off to Amazon in a huff and shit-talk us and Azure on the way out."

"I agree with Kevin and Brett/Jason that it does not make financial sense to keep doing this undifferentiated GPU deal," writes Harry Shum, who's also dubious about the AGI claims. "They worked on two main streams: gaming like Dota 2, and learning from observation with robots. Sam is all about gaming and beating human champions perhaps motivated by DeepMind."

"My worst case scenario is having them ditch Azure for AWS, as Kevin says bad-mouth us on the way over, and then land with some big new innovation that is shared with our competition," writes Zander in a follow-up. "To walk away from the deal altogether, I think we have to be convinced that there is no unique / valuable IP that they are going to generate which offers unique advantage to their cloud partner."

Eric Horvitz suggests the possibility of "angling some of their work (even in Dota) toward our interest in human-Al collaborations, centering on extending human intellect with Al-versus beating human [...] I had the feeling that the two phases of Dota work are motivated by a need to show how Al can crush humans, as part of Elon Musk's interest in demonstrating why we should all be concerned about the power of Al."

Bear in mind that these are conversations from late 2017/early 2018, and Microsoft's scepticism wouldn't last. It invested $1 billion in the company in 2019, and a further $10 billion in January 2023, eventually taking a 27% stake in the now for-profit company.

But perhaps what's more interesting is that line Microsoft drew internally between AI that extends human capabilities, as opposed to AI that can "crush humans" at things like Dota 2. Musk has indeed made repeated dire warnings about what could happen with AI, which is arguably one rationale for why OpenAI would have pursued the latter goal (in limited contexts, admittedly), but it's hard not to feel that, for once, Microsoft were actually the good guys in this scenario.

Brigador Killers' demo has one of my new favorite videogame tutorials: You control a giant rolling pinball of a mech as it rolls down a long corridor, a ghostly computer voice urging you on. "YOUR PEOPLE KILLED FOR PROFIT," it declares. "TAKE WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU."

You're then let loose in a bustling city center to level buildings like a reverse Katamari. This cathartic act of sci-fi political violence then zooms out to another terrorist cell watching it go down on the news. Their (your) timetable just moved up.

I've been Brigador-curious for a long time, but playing its sequel's demo has accelerated my own timetable for checking out the 2016 isometric mech shooter. I know the gist of it: You play as immoral mercenaries intervening in a future war on behalf of what are probably the bad guys.

Playing through the demo's assassination story missions, I had to look it up, and yep: Your targets are several playable pilots and the mission control from Brigador 1. I don't need the hours of investment in the story and world I'll soon have to already know that's hard as fuck.

Brigador Killers is brash, transgressive, and stylish. It shares the first game's pre-rendered, Command & Conquer-but-more-cyberpunk art and boasts a follow up to its Makeup & Vanity Set soundtrack to seal the deal. The demo consists of an appetizer assortment of story missions, plus a shockingly generous slice of a sandbox mode⁠—both hold a lot of promise.

After the playable intro, most of the story missions with the main crew are on foot. They felt like bite-size Hitman missions, sort of like how the opening beach level in World of Assassination or the carnival in Blood Money were a little on-rails, a little wearing kid gloves to ease you into things. The presentation, audacity, and escalation really sells it, though.

I love the story mission where you call your target on a payphone to open him up for a sniper shot. A mission where you drive a van full of explosives into a mansion is followed by another where you wait for your target in a turret emplacement, introducing vehicles into the mix. The final mission: A classico mech assault, this time with a gun-toting bipedal walker.

Having on-foot and mech gameplay in the same package⁠—and doing both well⁠—is one of my most rarely-fulfilled gaming wishes, because it really sells the scale and destructive capability of a mech to contrast it with a squishy, puny human.

That bit of story campaign is a fleeting amuse-bouche, but there's a ton of game hidden elsewhere in the demo. "The Garage," in contrast with the story-heavy, relatively gameplay-light campaign, is all action and resource management. It's a sandbox where you deploy to maps extraction-style, looking for ammo, vehicles, parts, everything a budding partisan or mercenary warlord could need.

The first mission you get in The Garage feels like a proof of concept for Brigador Killers' gameplay, a style of open-ended, immersive sim-adjacent mission design that reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 5 or Armored Core 6.

You start at one end of a junkyard, on-foot and armed with a shotgun and SMG. At the other end, a little jalopy that doesn't even have the horsepower to run dudes over waits next to a crate with your 'Lil Mercenary's Starter Kit.

You don't have enough ammo to kill all of the guards in the scrapyard, so you have to determine the best combo of stealth, gunplay, scavenged weaponry, and just legging it to win the day. Unlike the seasoned fighters of the campaign missions, your Garage guy is kinda squishy, and the high-stakes, quick time-to-kill gunplay is tense and rewarding.

Blowing up a whole squad of dudes with one grenade was a moment of triumph made all the sweeter by the preceding attempt where my grenade ricocheted back and killed me⁠—a blunder so funny, I couldn't even get mad.

Brigador Killers seriously whips, it's already sending me back to check out the first game, and this demo offers a shockingly generous amount of mech action: You could wring a dozen hours of gameplay out of the Garage's 17 maps, were you so inclined. But I've already got a whole game to catch up on before Brigador Killers' TBD release.

Until then, you can check out the demo for yourself and wishlist Brigador Killers on Steam. The original game, meanwhile, is on sale for $6.50 on Steam until May 11.

I've seen a few different versions of the "snail assassin" or "immortal snail" or "snail hunting you down" meme over the years, but it looks like it originated from an episode of the Rooster Teeth podcast back in 2014, where the question was basically this:

Would you take $10 million dollars, but an immortal snail would always be slowly crawling toward you no matter where you were, and if it touched you, you'd die?

You could take precautions—moving to a different country would certainly buy you a few years of peace—but it would be tough to enjoy your newfound wealth for long knowing that no matter where you were, death was slowly, slimily, heading your way.

Soon you'll be able to live out that scenario on your desktop, including the life or (perma)death stakes. Don't Touch The Snail is a game where a snail slowly, ever-so-slowly, is always moving toward your mouse pointer. If the snail touches your pointer, it's game over… forever.

"Permanent death, no retries, and you're locked out for good," says publisher Both Good. That's harsh, only getting to play a game once, but hey, this is an immortal snail assassin we're talking about here. It is not to be trifled with.

There's more to it, of course: there are tons of achievements, you can customize your killer snail with various costumes and disguises (and after you die you'll be given a friendly desktop snail to model the cosmetics you've earned), plus your final time will be locked into the global leaderboard so you can see how to did against everyone else trying to survive the slimy assassin.

I'm not sure what sort of strategies you could come up with to evade the desktop snail for long. I suspect an ultrawide monitor would be a major advantage, but even on the biggest screen I imagine it would be tough to leave your mouse pointer motionless for more than a few minutes without panicking.

You can find out how long you'd last against the dreaded immortal snail when Don't Touch The Snail launches later this month on Steam.

Gaming mouse fiends like me have gotta love Elo Shapes—if not for its handy-dandy hardware comparison tools, then for the heads up on a new challenger entering the arena.

The EloShapes X account recently shone its spotlight on the Oyrein Pong Zero, and it's not hard to see why. Apparently the initial offering of a new brand, the Pong Zero is a super lightweight gaming mouse with a Pixart PAW3950 sensor under the hood, and Omron Optical switches.

I'm sure the competitive crowd won't shrug their shoulders at another gaming mouse to put to the test—especially as this one weighs only 37 grams according to EloShapes. That's practically bantamweight as these things go, with our current pick for the best competitive gaming mouse, the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike, weighing much closer to 60 grams.

On the subject of chickens, it never ends well to count yours before they've hatched—and by that I mean there currently isn't much information about when the Oyrein Pong Zero will be released, or how much it will cost.

Both the highly customisable Orbital Pathfinder, and the Be Quiet! Dark Perk Ergo features the same super precise Pixart PAW3950 sensor and satisfying Omron switches. That could give us a ballpark price point in the region of somewhere between $110-190—though I admit, that's a pretty big park.

Still, both of those aforementioned mice enjoy an 8,000 Hz polling rate, a max speed of 750 IPS, and DPI of 30,000 or more. Based on these gaming mices' shared features, that suggests the Oyrein Pong Zero may be a speedy mouse you won't want to lose track of. I'll certainly be keeping my eyes peeled—especially if it comes in more colours like that fetching minty matcha green. Surely, Oyrien is already considering a lilac colourway, right?

2K Games studio 31^st Union has confirmed the layoff of an undisclosed number of employees, first reported by GamesIndustry, as it continues to develop Project Ethos, the free-to-play hero shooter announced in 2024.

In a memo sent to 31^st Union employees and shared with PC Gamer, 31^st Union studio head Ben Brinkman, who left Respawn to take the role in October 2025, said "it's become clear that changes need to be made to our team in order to realize our goals and deliver this experience for players."

"Our success is dependent on our ability to work more quickly and nimbly," Brinkman wrote. "To do that, we've made the difficult decision to scale back our team to better align with where we are in development, which unfortunately means parting ways with some valued colleagues today."

It also sounds like Project Ethos itself is undergoing at least a minor change in direction. It was revealed to the world in October 2024 as a "roguelike hero shooter," although as PC Gamer editor Tyler Wilde noted at the time, "it's not really a roguelike: You just get to pick from randomized sets of buffs throughout a match. Otherwise, it's a third-person shooter that resembles Fortnite, but with hero characters who come with unique guns and abilities, and a low-stakes PvPvE extraction mode as its main attraction."

Brinkman, however, described it in somewhat vaguer terms in his layoff message, saying 31^st Union "is committed to building a bold new game with a renewed direction and vision—a skill-based PVP roguelike experience that will challenge and thrill players." He added that the studio has "evolved as a team this past year in what has been a defining period of creative growth."

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I do have to wonder whether 2K has decided that Fortnite-styled extraction/hero shooters are a riskier bet than it seemed a couple years ago. For every Arc Raiders, there's a Highguard (and plenty of others), and not even heavyweights like Bungie are immune from the risks of wading into a genre already dominated by a few major hits: Marathon is a brilliant shooter but it's running one-tenth of Arc Raiders' player counts on Steam, and Sony took an absolute hammering on it.

But it's also notable that this isn't the first time that Project Ethos has shown signs of trouble. Original 31^st Union studio head Michael Condrey was reportedly given the boot just four months after the game was announced, when that reveal—which came just over a month after the disastrous end of Concord, another live service shooter casualty—failed to make much of a splash. And that, as far as I know, was the last we heard of Project Ethos until these layoffs.

The cuts at 31^st Union seem not unlike layoffs made in 2025 at 2K Games studio Cloud Chamber, which is currently working on a new BioShock game. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said he is "deeply disappointed" that it's taking so long to release a new game in the series, adding that "finding the right creative purchase" on the project has been more difficult than expected—something that sounds like might also apply to 31^st Union and Project Ethos.

Despite everything, Brinkman said he's "never been more confident in the future of our game, this team, and the commitment and investment Take-Two and 2K leadership continue to show."

Micron, which you may know as one of the biggest players in the memory market, has just released a great big whopping 245 TB SSD specifically designed for data centers. And it feels a little sickening to look at, knowing how expensive my next storage upgrade is going to be.

Entitled the Micron 6600 ION SSD, Micron says it is "the world’s highest capacity commercially available SSD", and, as you might be able to guess, it's to support "AI, cloud, enterprise and hyperscale workloads."

Micron's new data center SSD not only promises its QLC NAND technology is a generation ahead of any of the competition's QLC, but, with a 30 watts maximum power rating, it works out to use half the juice of a comparable capacious HDD. SSDs typically consume less power than HDDs anyway, so how power efficient it really is will have to be left to further testing.

What makes this SSD interesting is its humongous storage size. Also, compared to HDD deployment, Micron notes it requires 82% fewer racks. Travis Virgil, the senior vice president of ISG product management at Dell, says, "AI workloads are pushing data center capacity to the limit, and when you can fit significantly more storage into every rack, the math changes: less power, less floor space, less operational overhead."

The 245 TB model comes with a sequential read of 13,700 MB/S and a sequential write of 3,000 MB/s, but we don't know the pricing just yet. Chances are, unless you represent a major AI company, that price won't matter to you anyway.

So good news for AI then, but not necessarily anyone else. Storage is hard to come by at reasonable prices nowadays, and that's all because of AI. The memory crisis is largely caused by AI data centers sapping up all the modules to train new models, and it's not helped by the fact that there are multiple competing AI companies. They are fighting to get their digital foot in the door at the likes of SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron to secure contracts.

But manufacturers aren't looking to give contracts easily either. Just today, it was announced that SK hynix is struggling to keep up with 'unprecedented' offers, and didn't necessarily want to agree to any of them, as long-term contracts could require selling memory at a lower rate.

I, on the other hand, found out I had 300 GB in my recycling bin yesterday, so that's kinda like installing a 245 TB SDD, right?

Crowd Control Productions (CCP Games) was founded in 1997 in Reykjavik, Iceland. It is best known for EVE Online, its anarchic space MMO from which stories of intricately-plotted depravity emerge on a disturbingly but entertainingly regular basis. It has over 150 employees.

The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921 in Shanghai, China, by Chinese intellectual supporters of the then-recent October Revolution. It was victorious in a civil war against the Guomindang—Chinese Nationalist Party—and has governed the People's Republic of China since 1949. It has over 100 million members.

These organisations are difficult to tell apart.

So difficult to tell apart, in fact, that CCP Games recently announced it was jettisoning its name entirely. It's now Fenris Creations, putting an end to all our japes about the upcoming EVE version of the Yan'an Rectification Movement (it's possible only I was making those japes).

In a recent chat with GamesIndustry.biz, CCP—sorry, Fenris Creations CEO Hilmar Pétursson said that, yeah, the company pretty much took the opportunity to change its name because it was sick of all the Chinese Communist Party gags and misunderstandings.

"I'm not going to fight the Chinese Communist Party over who is the CCP," Pétursson said, wisely (China maintains over 600 nuclear warheads). And besides, "in the English-speaking world, we have increasingly had problems… reporters write stories about us where we are literally referred to as 'the other CCP'. We have CCP employees going to the US and being questioned over the name. These are not big things, but I can sense where this is going."

I am almost certainly one of the reporters who made that joke, so sorry about that one, guys. But it's also a slightly dispiriting indicator of the state of the world that company employees were getting the third-degree over its name at US border control.

In fact, Pétursson notes the mix-up between CCP (videogames) and CCP (vanguard of the proletarian revolution) is pretty much entirely a western phenomenon: "Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't think of itself as the CCP. That's a Western construct. They refer to it by a Chinese name. They're not called the Chinese Communist Party in Iceland either; we call it the Kommúnistaflokkur Kína in Icelandic."

So, our fault again. Still, at least it's all in the past now. At least unless and until Xi Jinping announces the funniest brand pivot in history at the next party congress.

The last few times Square Enix has unveiled the name of a new Final Fantasy 14 expansion, I've wondered whether the team plans to stick to its love for a good compound word. As it turns out, the answer is "yes" every time: Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, Dawntrail, and now the upcoming Evercold.

But as it turns out, director and producer Naoki Yoshida has tried to break that pattern a few times. At least, if his list of rejected expansion names is anything to go by. During a Q&A at the North American Fan Festival in April, Yoshida divulged what Evercold and expansions of Final Fantasy 14 past could have actually been named.

"When we were trying to come up with a name for what became Stormblood, one of the names that came up was Rebellion," Yoshida told press via a translator. "But unfortunately that was rejected for various reasons, including legal reasons, so we couldn't choose that one. It was already taken."

I wonder whether that was studio Rebellion who got in the way of making that name a reality—you could certainly argue that both a videogame developer and a game called Rebellion could cause some confusion. It's also the name of a game on Steam as well as a short-lived television series, as I'm discovering. Really, it could be anything, but I'm glad Yoshida and the team weren't able to go through with it as I think Stormblood sounds a lot neater.

But what about other expansions? Well, for Shadowbringers the name Darkbringer was toyed with but ultimately rejected—once again, very pleased about that—while an attempt to break the compound curse was made again during Endwalker when the name World's End was pitched, "but obviously that was not possible either." A little clash with Edgar Wright's movie of the same name, perhaps?

When it comes to binned candidates for Evercold, I actually quite like the title: Absolute Zero. Yoshida said he "really wanted to go" with it, even going so far as to imagine what the expansion's logo would look like with that name, but it was once again nixed. You can't escape the compound names, Yoshida.

He goes on to say that he thought a lot about the different meanings of things or people icing over—from the theory that our humble planet was once entirely frozen over, to even the way that a person's heart can metaphorically freeze over, causing them to grow cold and distant.

"So with this expansion, the Warriors of Light will be encountering many instances where various different ice that they would either melt or even have to destroy to move forward and explore and become that sort of wanderer," Yoshida said. "And I hope that the players will experience and enjoy that journey."

As for when the whole idea for Evercold was conjured up, Yoshida said he began to put the wheels in motion approximately two months after Dawntrail released. "But of course, I do have a general idea of what direction I want to take. The overall scenario or saga, and so it's more like narrowing down, determining, pinpointing what the next theme would be."

Instructure, the company behind cloud-based learning management system Canvas, has suffered a massive data breach. Ransomware group ShinyHunters has since claimed responsibility for the attack, alleging that it has exfiltrated data tied to 280 million teachers, school staff, and students.

The data breach totals hundreds of gigabytes, potentially exposing Canvas users' names, email addresses, and their private messages.

Instructure first disclosed on May 1 that it "experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." The Canvas instances of 8,809 universities, schools, and other educational platforms were affected by the cyberattack. ShinyHunters shared alleged record counts with Bleeping Computer, which said they "range from tens of thousands to several million per institution."

Bleeping Computer chose not to name the institutions within this list, as it was unable to independently verify which were affected. Still, what is perhaps most troubling about the attack is that it has likely exposed the data of a number of K-12 students. If you have been told that your child was affected by the Instructure breach, Malware Bytes has a helpful guide on what to do next and how best to protect them.

A number of students who attempted to use Canvas following the cyberattack were met with a message purporting to be from ShinyHunters, threatening to leak the data if Instructure did not contact them before May 12. Canvas was taken offline for a number of days afterwards, though the learning platform is now available again for most users.

'ShinyHunters' may ring a bell, as the hacker group has been on a bit of a tear with high-profile attacks lately. For instance, the group demanded a ransom from GTA 6 studio Rockstar last month (though it turns out they didn't have all that much to leak in the end). Earlier this week, the hacker group also claimed it had successfully breached Nvidia's GeForce Now, alleging to have "pulled their entire database straight from the backend."

In the case of Canvas, ShinyHunters claim it stole the user records via the export features within the platform itself. That includes user APIs, DAP queries, and provisioning reports, according to Bleeping Computer.

According to Instructure, "the unauthorized actor carried out this activity by exploiting an issue related to our Free-For-Teacher accounts." This same issue apparently caused a similar breach earlier in April, and Instructure has chosen to temporarily shut down Free-For-Teacher accounts as a result.

Instructure also says, in response to this cybersecurity incident, that it "revoked privileged credentials and access tokens, deployed platform-wide protections, rotated certain internal keys, restricted token creation pathways, and added monitoring across our platforms."

Canvas got hacked? from r/UTSA

The company also "engaged a third-party forensic firm and notified law enforcement." The company adds, "Beyond the immediate response, we're hardening administrative access, token management, permissions, monitoring, and related workflows. The investigation may inform further improvements."

But it may be too little, too late—potentially exposing the data of minors is not a mistake parents will easily forget at the very least. As malware archivist vx-underground said on X, "The much larger issue however is the catastrophic damage ShinyHunters has done to Canvas both operational and reputational."

Resident Evil Requiem has received a new bonus mode in a free update, and by golly it's fabulous. It also has a great name: Leon Must Die Forever. And I'm sorry to say for all the Leon-fanciers out there that, yes, you're going to see Mr. Kennedy dismembered in many different ways.

The mode requires you to have completed the game's story, after which it appears as an option on the main menu. It's a feature-packed roguelike that offers multiple paths through various of the game's environments, on-the-fly 'enhancements' that change up Leon's abilities, new enemy variants, multiple boss fights, and an overarching meta-structure that sees you earn points on each run and unlock abilities, weapons, and costumes for subsequent playthroughs.

The goal is to reach and defeat big bad Victor Gideon, but it's a lot easier said than done. On my first runthrough I got to the second area before being careless with a blister-head which wasted no time before biting Leon's face off. On my second I reached the Super Tyrant before getting absolutely clocked by a flying car and swiftly bisected by his claws. My third… look, it's not called "Leon Must Die Forever" for nothing.

Capcom's notes say that "multiple difficulty levels are available, including an extreme high-difficulty mode for only the most confident players", which presumably unlocks once you've completed a runthrough or two (I haven't yet gotten close). Each time I played the weapons I found were different, the enhancements changed, and I suspect that once you start completing runs other elements will change-up too.

There's also a time limit, which I didn't find especially onerous, but that's also probably because I died on every run without getting close to running out of time. There are weird little gold spiders that scuttle around which reward more time when shot, and you also get time bonuses for killing certain enemies in certain ways.

The enemy variants are colour-coded and reward particular strategies. Red enemies are more resistant to gunfire, for example, but weaker to melee and hatchet attacks. Blue enemies have giant health pools, but are super-vulnerable to being parried and hatchet-ed. And then in amongst these are scattered the game's various mini-bosses and tougher standard foes.

As for the enhancements, some of them are simple buffs while others offer trade-offs, and you earn points towards your next choice by just killing stuff. Some are fairly straightforward: I had one that increased headshot / weak point damage by 50% but decreased damage when you just hit the body. Others lock you into a particular playstyle, like a perk that massively increases grenade damage and gives a chance that a grenade won't be consumed when thrown, but also debuffs all of your firearms. Which led to a fantastically explosive run that ended unceremoniously when I ran out of… erm, grenades.

Finally, you choose your routes by where you exit your current stage, with big red doors dotted around the environments, rather than choosing from a menu: so get ready for some exploring. The first stage is relatively gentle, as this mode goes, and does seem to be more about starting on a particular build and gathering a few weapons, but after that it ramps right up and doesn't stop until Leon's a bloody corpse.

First impressions? Yes please and thank you Capcom. The Leon combat in Requiem is just outstanding, and this builds it out in multiple ways while throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at you. I've been banging my head against Insanity mode since completing Requiem and, while I'm ever-so-slightly disappointed this isn't Mercenaries mode, Leon Must Die Forever is a really well thought-out and meaty addition to what was already one of the year's best games. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get eviscerated again.

What do you do as a PC gamer who is looking for a good-value budget graphics card? In these times of ever spiking component pricing that's not an easy question to answer, especially when the current generation of GPUs haven't really moved the needle on in terms of performance at the bottom end of the market. But the RTX 5050 is probably the reluctant answer I would give to anyone aiming to buy the best budget graphics card right now.

Nvidia's RTX 5050 is the lowest-spec RTX Blackwell GPU in this generation, using a smaller GPU than the last-gen RTX 4060, but also higher clocks and more cache to make up the difference. It's nominally $50 cheaper than the older card launched at, and effectively performs at a similar level. Which I guess is progress of sorts.

But the reality is this remains a near $300 card right now, and if anyone out there was looking for an upgrade to their old RTX 4060 card, they're going to have to look a lot higher up the stack and spend a good deal more, because even the RTX 5060 can't always take a significant performance lead.

The similarly priced Intel Arc B580 does present an alternative, however, with a larger VRAM array and often higher gaming performance—sometimes hitting RTX 5060 levels. But it's not as reliable in that performance, with huge frame rate variance between games, and still regular driver issues at launch for new games. Though there is always the argument that if you spend more, you get more, and here if you can stretch to the $360 of the RX 9060 XT 8 GB card then that will deliver higher gaming performance, but in relative terms that feels like a stretch in this budget end of the hobby.

In a world where the RTX 5050 had released at $199, really bringing previous generation RTX 4060 GPU performance down to a lower tier, we would have been talking about something genuinely appealing. But the original pricing, comparative performance, and the subsequent price hikes, have made it a default budget pick, not a desirable one.

Nvidia RTX 5050 features

It feels like a sad indictment of the state of PC graphics cards when you look at the specs of the RTX 5050's GPU in relation to both the RTX 4060—the weakest of the desktop GPUs in the Ada era—and the RTX 5060. On one hand you've got the tiny GB207 GPU able to match what is nominally the tier above from the last generation, but on the other it's only theoretically $50 lower priced and in reality about the same.

What we're left with is a bottom rung RTX Blackwell chip designed to perform at around the same level as the bottom rung of the Ada generation, but simply be a lot cheaper to manufacture. While barely passing those savings on to us PC gamers.

The GB207 is 24% smaller than the AD107, has 20% fewer transistors, and 17% fewer CUDA cores. But is relying on higher clockspeeds, more cache memory, and more power to make up for the deficit in GPU logic.

Though what Nvidia will say is that you are getting access to its DLSS 4 suite of upscaling features, which means the RTX 5050 gets access to Multi Frame Generation, which recently got boosted up to 6x. The issue here is that when you get down to this level of GPU, where arguably a little performance boost would be more than welcome, frame gen isn't the panacea you might hope it would be. You still need good baseline frame rates before you can enable frame gen without it being a laggy mess.

It will enable you to get to around 60 fps at 1440p in something like Cyberpunk 2077, and a single player title like that isn't so beholden to ultra-low input latency. So sticking frame gen on isn't that big of a hit in some games, especially after upscaling has boosted your frame rate to a more acceptable level.

Nvidia RTX 5050 performance

The gaming performance of the RTX 5050 is, essentially, fine. It would be great if we were talking about a ~$200 graphics card rather than a near $300 one, though. The original idea with the RTX 5050 was to create a low-end RTX Blackwell GPU that was cheaper than the RTX 4060 but delivered similar performance. That's generally been the hope going for generation-on-generation frame rate gains; the effective GPU tier down gets the same performance as the higher tier one from a previous generation.

The issue is that the RTX 5050 is, in reality, the same price and therefore the same effective GPU tier as the RTX 4060 was. That was the bottom rung of the Ada architecture, and this is the bottom rung of the RTX Blackwell generation, and both became essentially $300 GPUs in their lifetime.

But it's also not exactly equal. The newer GPU has less actual graphics logic inside it and sometimes that tells. The higher clock speed and cache of the RTX 5050 generally gives it performance parity with the RTX 4060, but there are definite times where the RTX 4060 has a not-insignificant lead.

And then Intel's Arc B580 wants to have its say, too. When it's good, Intel's 12 GB graphics card can really stick the boot into Nvidia's weakest RTX Blackwell card. Just look at the 1440p frame rates in our test suite. But then you can also see, in Black Myth Wukong and Homeworld 3, where it actually lags behind the RTX 5050.

Therein lies the problem for the Intel architecture; gaming inconsistencies. It's hard to get behind Intel's graphics cards for the general user because they aren't 100% reliable for the average PC gamer. There will always be games where it doesn't quite deliver, or has major performance or visual issues around launch, and maybe for a while after, too.

The RTX 5050, on the other hand, is absolutely rock solid in its performance. Nvidia holds 90%+ of the GPU market, and so PC devs will obviously target GeForce GPU performance as a key part of game optimisation. Intel GPUs? Less so.

The performance of the AMD RX 9060 XT 8 GB cards are more of a concern here, however. AMD's modern frame rates are also super consistent, with far less of the variance of old generations of its graphics architecture, and the RX 9060 XT is consistently out in front of both the RTX 5050 and RTX 5060. But it is also another $60 at least more expensive.

Nvidia RTX 5050 thermals

There is no Founders Edition shroud for the RTX 5050, which means you're having to rely on the cooling solutions of whichever vendor's card you end up with. Here, I'm testing a Palit Dual version of the RTX 5050, which is designed to be the cheapest, reference priced version of Nvidia's card.

The fans and the shroud—including the faux-brushed-metal-but-resolutely-very-plastic backplate—are all a bit cheap-feeling, but I am absolutely okay with that as they very much do the job. Compared to the MSI RTX 4060 we're comparing it to, the card remains pretty consistently cool, without the spiking peak temperature you can see with the RTX 4060.

But you can see the little GPU at the heart of the RTX 5050 is having to work hard to hit the necessary performance when you compare it to the positively chill RX 9060 XT. Those thermal figures show how effective the Asus cooler is and how cool the RDNA 4 chip runs.

Nvidia RTX 5050 sound

The dual-fan design of the Palit cooler, with the second fan being a blow-through design that is there to just push air over the heatsink extending off the back of the short PCB, means that not only is the card relatively cool, it's also quiet. I've been running it on an open test bench, which means I'm right next to the card, and even on extended runs, such as with Metro Exodus, the sound remains consistent and consistently quiet.

This isn't a card that's going to bother you with fan turbine noise during a gaming session.

It's also not a GPU that's going to bother you with excessive coil whine either, something that some other RTX Blackwell cards have suffered with, especially plumbed into our Seasonic PSU.

Nvidia RTX 5050 value

This is arguably the core of the issue for the RTX 5050: its value. But it's also not the easiest thing to actually get a bead on, considering we have to almost entirely rethink our notions of graphics card value in the light of the RAMpocalypse and AI being the only thing to spend silicon budgets on these days.

First, let me revisit the situation the RTX 5050 and its mini GB207 GPU were designed for: The idea was to have a bottom-end RTX Blackwell card that could deliver essentially the same performance as the RTX 4060, but for a lower price in terms of both MSRP and manufacturing.

That's a largely laudable endeavour on the part of Nvidia, except that even at the $249 MSRP it wasn't exactly a whole GPU tier below the RTX 4060, and not long before the RTX Blackwell generation launched you could buy an RTX 4060 for around the same price. So even in the expected market conditions, Nvidia was essentially bringing the RTX 5050 in at the same price and performance.

With the current memory pricing crisis and AI-generated bottlenecks, however, prices of GPUs have only really gone one way, and the RTX 5050 is now a $300-odd graphics card. And that completely kills the theoretical value proposition between it and the old RTX 4060. But, that is now purely a theoretical thing, as the RTX 4060 is no longer reliably on sale new, and even if it is, is priced higher than the RTX 5050.

In recent times, the RTX 5050 has hovered around the $260 mark, and that makes it a far better value card, especially against the current-gen competition. The Intel Arc B580 is resolutely stuck at $290, but I just don't find it a consistent enough GPU for reliable gaming performance, particularly for new games.

The real competition, and the one that gives me most pause in my recommendation for the RTX 5050 as the budget pick right now, is the AMD RX 9060 XT 8 GB. That's a $360 card that comfortably outshines both the RTX 5050 and the RTX 5060, but it does mean you have to spend another $60 - $70 on your purchase. For me, I think that's probably worth it if you can, but if you are stuck at a hard limit of $300 for your new GPU purchase, then I would say the RTX 5050 is the best budget graphics card you can buy today.

Nvidia RTX 5050 software

As a budget GPU, there's not a lot of software that comes with the RTX 5050. This Palit version offers a download of Thundermaster, its overclocking app, which is largely a poor man's MSI Afterburner, with mostly the same features but an underwhelming UI.

Outside of that, it's all about the Nvidia App. This is the main software offering from Nvidia that comes optionally bundled with its graphics drivers, and is where you can control various things from the DLSS override settings, and automatic game settings, to the overlay, overclocking, and in-game filters.

Nvidia's software has come on a long way and the app is genuinely a worthwhile piece of software to have installed alongside your GeForce GPU.

The Steam Controller is out—kinda. If you were lucky enough to buy one in the days, hours, or minutes after they were made available, and before Steam crashed, then you're laughing all the way to the sofa. If not, you've likely been staring blankly at the store page for whenever a restock takes place or paying a reseller mad money for one on eBay.

Those resellers have been seen charging two/three times the price of a Steam Controller for the privilege of not waiting around for one. That's wild. Not only because you could spend less on a much more premium pad that doesn't have Valve's logo on it (and admittedly fewer specialised inputs), Valve has also shown it has a better solution for this sorta thing—one that it's ready to roll out again here. A reservation system.

Valve is rolling out a reservation system for the Steam Controller, which will go live later today, May 8. If history tells us anything, it will be best to secure a ticket as soon as possible if there's even the slightest chance you'll want to buy a Steam Controller in the next year. Valve says the move is to combat reseller activity, which would surely only get worse once bots are out in full force, so I'd agree with that.

As Valve says, "while we were happy to see such a high level of interest, the experience for a lot of you trying to buy it was incredibly frustrating."

"We plan to continue replenishing stock as we get more in, but in the meantime wanted to share changes we're making to improve the purchase experience and to limit reseller activity: Beginning May 8th at 10 am Pacific, we're opening a reservation queue for Steam Controller."

It's a similar approach to the Steam Deck, which launched during a time of widespread price hikes and 'economic headwinds' much like today. Yet it came out of that period relatively unscathed. And while it took over a year for me to receive my own Steam Deck following making a reservation, and I was a little jealous throughout that time, I'd argue the experience was far better than when I was also trying to buy a PS5 in the year following its launch for my partner's birthday.

• Reservation made: 29/7/21
• Take it easy for a year
• Purchase for delivery: 8/8/22

By comparison, my experience with the PS5 was to sign up to a host of different services that would offer alerts to my phone when a restock would happen for the PS5. One of those even required a paid subscription. I'd then have mere moments to open the link and attempt to checkout. This process went on for weeks, with daily attempts, until finally securing a console in an expensive bundle I didn't really want or need. I was pleased to get a console, grateful at the time to get the chance, but the entire process sucked.

I've similarly reported on the release of new graphics card generations for nearly a decade now. These are also a mad scramble to the checkout and result in similar eBay listings and tales of woe as the Steam Controller has. It's a little different in that many companies beyond Nvidia, AMD, and Intel actually sell the graphics cards themselves, which means there are multitude ways to buy one on the day, including some 'loyalty' programs I'm not happy about—those seem too much like companies holding leverage over customers to do stuff they wouldn't normally do for a chance to buy something at full price. Yuck.

But the general gist is that the way we do it right now only plays into resellers' hands and leads to some hard feelings when new stuff comes out.

I'd much rather sit around with a ticket in my hand to someday buy a thing than have to enter the rat race of trying to secure one in a frenzied free-for-all. I don't want to bash the bots. I don't want to fight off resellers. I don't even want to outsmart the system for my own gain. And we know from these experiences, and many like them over the past five years, that it's not going to get any easier. Web scrapers and agents powered by AI could make securing stock for in-demand products even tougher as these bots become more advanced and tougher to discern from real people.

My hope for the immediate future is that Valve rolls out the same for the Steam Frame and Steam Machine. It probably already planned to—these two are likely to be in similar demand to the Steam Controller but, due to their increased complexity and cost, tougher to stockpile. They're also arguably more exciting prospects. Though Valve has had a while to build up stocks due to a later release, it also still underestimated the demand for the Controller.

Supply and demand are famously hard to anticipate. Valve recently admitted the same to us but it's not alone in this. I was told by supply chain expert Dr. Thomas Goldsby that one adage in the business is that when things go well, no one notices the supply chain; when they go poorly, it's suddenly under the microscope. The global supply chain is very fragile and things can and do change in short periods, as Valve found out between announcing its new hardware and when it hoped to ship it.

A reservation system could help here. Or at least, try to take the mystery of forecasting out of the equation. Make sure to hit the timeline set for delivery, even if that takes a long time, as per the Steam Deck, and, best case scenario, you can push the timeline forward if you're able. The flipside is if you have to push back the delivery timeline. Don't forget this did happen with the Steam Deck. It was delayed by two months due to supply chain issues and material shortages.

But in the long-term, it'd be good to see some change to how we approach major tech launches to try to ease some of the stress and disappointment.

Google's Chrome browser has been quietly downloading a 4 GB local AI model onto user's devices without asking permission. What's more, if you manually delete the model, Chrome will simply download it again.

It was security researcher Alexander Hanff, who runs the ThatPrivacyGuy website, who discovered Chrome's dubious behaviour. He found a weights.bin file measuring around 4 GB stored in Chrome's local AppData folders. As the filename implies, it's a weights file for Google's Gemini Nano AI model. And as Hanff notes, it is downloaded without the user's permission.

"It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it," Hanff says.

As he explains, "Chrome uses it to power features Google has marketed under names like 'Help me write', on-device scam detection, and other AI-assisted browser functions."

Regarding the permissions issue, there is no explicit checkbox in Chrome Settings for the model download. It's part of Chrome's broader AI functionality, which is enabled by default where present. This is where things get a little tricky.

By Google's own admission, AI features are enabled according to the capabilities of a given device. I understand at least 16GB of memory is required, for instance. However, a poll of the PCG massif revealed very mixed results. Most of us do not have the weights file, even on devices that likely meet the hardware requirements, while some of us have no sign of AI functions and features at all.

Google's response to Hanff's report reveals that this has been going on for some time. Indeed, back in February, Google says it added a option in Chrome settings to disable AI features, which in turn will prevent the model from being downloaded.

Long story short, it seems that Google has been rolling out this functionality to a limited subset of Chrome users with machines that meet the hardware requirements. How many isn't known and it's just one of several elements that lack transparency.

Indeed, apart from the obvious lack of user permission and those transparency issues, there are plenty of other problems. 4 GB is a significant chunk of data, both in terms of local storage and also bandwidth. Anyone with a metered internet connection, for instance, really needs to know about 4 GB being downloaded.

There's also the energy footprint of this kind of roll-out. Hanff has calculated that if this AI model were pushed to one billion users, the distribution of the data would guzzle 240 gigawatt-hours of energy and generate 60,000 tons of CO2 equivalent. Note, that's just getting the model out onto devices, never mind any energy used by the models locally on said devices.

As per the screenshot we've uploaded from our own Nick Evanson's machine, if your PC does have the weights files, it'll be located in subfolder of the local AppData files for your Chrome installation.

Similarly, you should find a toggle switch for "On-Device AI" in the System subsection of Chrome's setting menu. As I understand it, if you don't see that toggle switch it's because your machine either doesn't meet the hardware requirements or, if it does, you haven't been included in the roll out.

In response to Hanff's research, Google Chrome VP and GM Parisa Tabriz also posted on X explaining that, "on-device AI is core to our developer and security strategy."

She further revealed that this has been ongoing since 2024 and said, "while this requires some local space on the desktop to run, the model will automatically uninstall if the device is low on resources." Notably, Tabriz said nothing about the issue of user permission.

Overall, this is a pretty unsatisfactory, if not an entirely surprising, affair. Few if any users would assume that downloading a 4 GB AI model is a standard part of a mainstream web browsing package. So, getting permission seems like a no brainer. That Google thought this is all fine—and apparently still does—doesn't reflect terribly well on either the company itself or the attitude of the AI industry to safety and privacy.

For the record, we understand Chrome downloads the model to all three of the major desktop-class operating systems—Windows, MacOS and Linux—but not to mobile devices running Android and iOS.

I've never been one to get in on videogame betas—save the Diablo 4 one which I did purely to get the horse cosmetic (I then never played far enough to get a horse)—but they're a pretty popular hype-generation mechanism these days. If you've got any sort of live-service thing gearing up for release, why not have a beta? Get some players in, stress-test the servers, and whet everyone's appetite for the full thing.

A sound tactic, and a total nominative falsehood. Per my recent interview with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer and one of Warhorse's two new creative directors, Prokop Jirsa, calling these little pre-release demos 'betas' just ain't right.

Jirsa was talking about the surprises of his early years in game dev when he mentioned that "Another surprising thing is how bad a game looks and runs up until very close to release. People are used to some 'beta versions,' but those are not beta versions.

"The things that get to the public—and that the public sometimes hates [because of] how horribly they run and how unfinished they are—that's still much more polished than what actual internal betas or alphas look like."

Folks, we've been hornswoggled. All this time, our betas have in fact been gammas, perhaps even deltas or epsilons. Jirsa said that, in his experience, a true image of videogame development goes more like this: "if you judge it, quality-wise, from a player's perspective, it doesn't grow linearly. It's like, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, slightly less shitty, and it skyrockets when you're finishing and polishing to the quality you want to have."

That's partially because, man, making videogames takes a really long time. Jirsa says one of his earliest surprises was "How long some things take… the fact of how slow [it can be] and how many people have to work on something for it to be really nice and polished. It takes months! Sometimes years!... I still don't know how we managed to actually release [Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1], because we were so few people in such a short timeframe."

That's a fact that, perhaps, gets a little obscured when the videogame "betas" we're used to playing are so relatively well-polished.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Crimson Desert is a weird game. Though in some ways it grows ever less strange with each passing update, as Pearl Abyss retcons some of its more interesting and abrasive design decisions, in others, it's still an oddball. Who could've predicted a mere month or so after release, we'd all be running around in a bird-taming frenzy?

With the recent addition of the Sotdae of Bond—a rather fancy name for a bird feeder—you can tame anything from mountain condors, to humble ducks, to tiny little sparrows, who are surprisingly effective at looting corpses let me tell you. There are even legendary birds, such as the flaming Phoenix, the clockwork Iron Eagle, and yes, most legendary of all, a BLUE PARROT. Funnily enough, that last one is genuinely the most annoying of the bunch to tame.

Still, it's wonderful to see. If you peruse the Crimson Desert Reddit, you can spy all sorts of threads in recent weeks where people are taking joy in showing off birds they've found, or are sharing locations where they've spotted them, almost like real-life bird twitchers. No affiliation to actual Twitch, unless you stream your birdspotting I suppose. As Ranger_22x comments on one such post: "Pearl Abyss created 5,000,000 amateur ornithologists with one update".

Part of the enjoyment stems from the fact that you can place your bird feeder anywhere and stock it with all kinds of feed, making it the perfect little experiment in such a big wide world. You might hike to the top of a mountain, plant it down, and suddenly some rare hawk shows up to chow down. For such a simple feature, it's got a huge amount of depth thanks to all the birds that already existed in the setting. It really makes me wonder how many more features like this Pearl Abyss has up its sleeve.

What's more, the fact this addition has turned regular players into bird aficionados, acting like real bird watchers, says something about the immersive sim-esque qualities of Crimson Desert's world. While the stats prove that only a fraction of players are engaging with its arguably lackluster narrative, there's something quite special about the continent of Pywel. Its sheer enormity is overwhelming, but what's more unique is its potential in terms of systems like this.

It makes me really excited to see what will come next, especially if Pearl Abyss keeps updating at this blistering pace. We don't have a roadmap for the game, so it's hard to imagine what it will come to look like, especially if DLC is on the cards, which I assume it is. But I'm eagerly anticipating loading up Crimson Desert a year from now to engage in some weird new obsession.

A part of me feels like Pearl Abyss will keep adding fun new features until it eventually just gets around to adding multiplayer, and all of us who've been scratching our heads over its position as a singleplayer MMO will suddenly realise it was a regular MMO all along (and our faces will proceed to melt Indiana Jones-style).

Crimson Desert's greatest asset has always been its sandbox of a world, so it brings me great joy to see Pearl Abyss utilising it in such a fun way, adding new features that make us want to log in, play about, and experiment. Is it still a weird game? Sure, I have no idea what's going on. Tell me why a singleplayer RPG is getting more updates than most live service games do? Not that I'm complaining. I think we can all agree: birds are good.

AI is being touted as a lot of things. A productivity tool to get the most out of your work, a bit of software to help you draft an email, and, perhaps most worrying, a way to do away with those pesky wage costs. However, it seems like, to those near the top of the chain, AI might already be starting to become more costly than its human counterpart.

As reported by Axios, Bryan Catanzaro, the vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia said: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."

A point worth mentioning here is that this quote does not specify whether that is 'more in total' or 'more per an average worker's work'. My guess is on the former, given how much Nvidia and similar companies are pumping into AI development.

Still, it's a sign of how much commitment is currently being invested in the tech. Nvidia owes a lot to AI, with it being responsible for making it the world's first $5 trillion company. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, picked up $110 billion in funding just a few months ago, and the likes of Meta and Amazon are also further committing to AI.

One of the central concerns around AI right now, other than plagiarism, AI psychosis, and the environment, is the effect it will have on the general working public. Microsoft's AI CEO reckons lawyers, accountants, project managers, and marketing people will all be replaceable by AI in the next 12 to 18 months (though curiously, not AI CEOs).

Nvidia's own Jensen Huang said last year that, even if AI replaces some workers, there will be roles out there for them. He said, "If you're an electrician, if you're a plumber, if you're a carpenter, we're going to need hundreds of thousands of them. To build all of these factories."

Not everyone seems to agree with this perspective, though. A former Google executive believes AI will lead to a "short-term dystopia" as the idea that it will create new jobs for the ones it's replacing is "100% crap".

Still, what remains a lingering question over AI development is how much those workers will eventually cost. If a handful of companies control the majority of AI models, they can afford to set the rates of tokens. We saw this recently, with the Uber CTO getting through the entire 2026 AI budget due to token costs.

One has to wonder when all that AI development will be worth it, and how much it will cost after all of that effort.

Sony has recorded a wince-inducing impairment loss of ¥120.1 billion ($766 million / £562 million) against Bungie for the financial year ending 2025 (that's the financial year that ended March 31, 2026, for those of us who operate within the confines of mortal, non-business time).

In financial results released today, Sony announced that, following a ¥31.5 billion ($201 million / £148 million) impairment loss against Bungie recorded in the second quarter of FY2025, it had recorded an additional ¥88.6 billion ($566 million / £415 million) impairment loss in the final quarter of the 2025 financial year. That's—hang on, let me check my maths—yep, a ¥120.1 billion loss overall.

If you had the good fortune not to study economics or business, an impairment loss is the term for an unexpected decrease in an asset's value versus its 'book' value. That is to say, if I own a videogame studio and record its value at $50 million, but someone reveals the Videogame-Bot 5000, which can develop games in a quarter of the time, my studio would suffer an impairment loss—that change in the conditions of the market and production would mean my $50 million studio was now really only worth $12.5 million (or something). You wouldn't record an impairment loss for an asset's normal wear and tear; that's just expected depreciation.

When Sony acquired Bungie in 2022, it did so for $3.6 billion. What's Bungie worth now? Your guess is as good as mine but I'm going to go out on a limb and say: significantly less.

In Q2 of FY2025, Bungie's ¥31.5 billion impairment was down to Destiny 2 underperforming. Quoth Sony's moneymen at the time: "Regarding Destiny 2, partially due to the changes in the competitive environment, the level of sales and user engagement have not reached the expectations we had at the time of the acquisition of Bungie. While we will continue to make improvements, we downwardly revised the business projection for the time being, and recorded an impairment loss against a portion of the assets at Bungie."

The Q4 loss isn't (yet) attributed to any one thing in particular, but the timespan encompasses the release of Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon. Despite some pretty strong initial sales, the game has not been the ginormo-hit Sony was hoping for. It's likely Marathon's relative underperformance is fuelling this latest loss, at least in part.

It's certainly not good news for Bungie, particularly given Sony's rather ruthless record of bringing the hammer down on its underperforming properties, but I'm not willing to prognosticate too hard. For what it's worth, Sony says its overall sales for its games and network services in FY2025 were "essentially flat," while its operating income was up 12%. Even with Bungie's impairment loss acting as a lodestone, Sony's hardly having to sell the family silverware just yet.

The roguelike genre is not only more crowded than it's ever been, it's more iterative too. The vast majority of games simply build on or remix an existing formula—whether walking in the footsteps of Slay the Spire, Hades, or Vampire Survivors. It's rare to find something truly unique.

So it's refreshing to be able to say that Everything is Crab is not quite like any other roguelike you can play right now. That's not to say it doesn't have its influences—the most obvious being the creature phase from controversial 2008 sim Spore—but its focus on ecosystem and evolution sends it down all sorts of fascinating avenues.

The premise, though, is simple. You play as a little blue blob, trying to survive in a world of weird animal hybrids. It's essentially a top-down action-RPG, with your attacks and dodges on cooldowns—but starting out, you're slow and weak with no real abilities to your name. You're not much of a threat to the land's various predators.

Food is the key. As you snatch meals here and there—from fallen fruits to the flesh of slain animals—you start to level up, which gains you new evolutionary traits. With extra eyes, a sharp beak, a developed brain, and six legs, you can become an agile, precision fighter, dodging around enemy strikes, while increased size, a set of horns, and a protective shell will let you charge into the fray as a tough brawler.

An impressive number of these evolutions are represented visually on your character. This is really Everything is Crab's coolest trick—animating whatever nightmarish mish-mash of body parts and organs you put together seamlessly, with details as subtle as which specific kind of snout you have or exactly how many legs and eyes you've thus far acquired.

The most interesting part, however, is that it's not just about creating the most powerful combat build you can. You're not clearing rooms in a dungeon, you're finding a niche in an ecosystem. Enemies don't just exist to fight you, they follow their own patterns of behaviour, including hunting smaller prey, foraging, and fleeing from danger.

Success isn't in how many of them you can defeat, it's in how much sustenance you can get, however you can get it. Being an apex predator, feasting on the meat of fallen beasts, is one way, but equally another is to live as a tiny scavenger, stealing meat from others' kills and dodging nimbly away when they retaliate to hide in a burrow. Or as a lumbering herbivore, eating fruit and mushrooms and trusting in natural defences like spikes and poison to keep you safe.

You can specialise in surviving in different environments—growing fur so you can range into snowy regions, scales to protect you from the desert heat, a prehensile tail for swinging between trees in the forest, or wings for flying over the sea. As you evolve, so do other animals, opening up even weirder niches. I'm fond, for example, of stacking up my poison resistance so I can keep preying on blobfish long after they've mutated to make everyone else who hunts them die a slow, painful death.

At regular intervals, your journey is interrupted by a boss fight, penning you in to face a huge monster. But brilliantly even these much more constrained encounters still offer wide open possibilities. If you're not equipped to battle, you don't have to—you can dodge, hide, or simply heal through their attacks until their patience is exhausted, at which point they'll wander off into the world to rampage through other creatures instead. Or you can slay them in a whole myriad of different ways, from brute force to poison to an army of hypnotised minions.

One of my favourite little features is that at the end of a run, you can click a button to make a record of the bizarre creature you ultimately became, saved as a set of screenshots of your build and even a little animated gif of you in action. Now that's a game understanding what it does best.

Everything is Crab is a really interesting, creative take on a genre that all too often takes elements for granted, and though nowhere near as ambitious as Spore, in some ways it does realise some of its goals in a much more fun and interactive way. But unfortunately it's not without a few recessive traits that grow increasingly difficult to ignore.

Level headed

The biggest problem is that you simply level up too much. Yes, I'm complaining that my lobster is too buttery, but the much too frequent acquisition of new evolutions diminishes the personality of each run, as you find yourself gathering many of the same traits over and over. The game is so eager to show you its best material that it burns through it too fast, and the thrill of trying out new mutations is quickly lost.

At its worst, it can totally disrupt the flow of a run. Many of the game's most effective strategies revolve around increasing the pace of level ups—through everything from upgrading your eating speed to increasing the spawn rate of vegetables to gaining passive progress from chewing the cud.

Given those extra level ups can also be used to purchase more traits that speed up your levelling even more, a snowball effect can quickly take hold that leads to constant interruptions in the action. At worst I've had runs where I can barely go a few seconds between just-slightly-too-slow evolution pop-ups, my time in the menus completely eclipsing the actual action.

Outside of runs, the game has something of the opposite problem. The overall meta-progression is disappointingly slow and unsatisfying. There are a few things to unlock, but fundamentally the main mode consists of just doing the same runs over and over through slowly increasing difficulty levels.

Variety is in theory provided by challenges—one-off runs with more extreme modifiers, such as turning the entire world into a desert or making every animal but you a giant. But it takes a long time to unlock new ones to try, and many of them simply feel more harsh than fun.

Too many are variations on partly or completely randomising your evolutions, which just removes the joy of build-crafting, and modifiers like "you cannot heal in any way" feel needlessly cruel. In such an interesting digital ecosystem, it feels like there should be more exciting variations to explore.

The result is that Everything is Crab makes a really wonderful first impression, but its long-term survival is a little more questionable. I've had fun with it for the 15 hours or so I've played so far, but really I'd probably already seen the majority of what it had to offer 10 hours ago. I'm certainly not feeling the kind of pull that can make the roguelike genre so all-consuming, to keep coming back for one more run.

That does make Everything is Crab feel more like a novelty than the next big thing—but I still love quite how novel it is. Even if some of its ideas need more refinement or more support around them, they are still really creative, fresh ideas, and well worth experiencing, especially at its agreeably low price. Hopefully with ongoing support, it may continue to evolve in the coming months, perhaps gaining the mutations it needs to lure me back for more.

The Genshin Impact 6.6 livestream codes have arrived, or should I say, the Luna 7 codes, since we've hit the 7th version since we first entered Nod-Krai—time flies, huh? As was revealed in the recent Snezhnaya livestream, which previewed some of 7.0, the next major version is arriving on August 12. This means there are still a few more versions between now and then that will tie together and conclude Nod-Krai's story.

If you're new to Genshin, each livestream acts as a little preview for upcoming characters, events, and quests, but miHoYo also drops a few codes in each one that you can redeem for Primogems to use on pulling characters.

In 6.6, it looks like we've got three fresh faces: Pyro-character Nicole, Cryo-character Lohen, and Anemo-character Prune. There's also apparently a rerun for Mavuika on the cards, meaning it's your chance to snag the Pyro Primarch if you haven't already, though we won't know for sure until the livestream. I'll drop codes in here as they go live in the stream—don't forget to redeem them ASAP, since livestream codes usually expire within a day or so.

Genshin Impact codes: All current livestream Primogems

• BacktoSumeru - 100 Primogems and 10 Mystic Enhancement Ore
• NicolaCoco - 100 Primogems and five Hero’s Wit
• WilltoWin - 100 Primogems and 50,000 Mora

How to redeem Genshin Impact codes

You can only redeem Genshin livestream codes once you reach Adventure Rank 10 in the game. This won't take you too long, though, even if you are just starting out. Once you're there, you have two different options in terms of claiming codes. The first is through the game:

• Start Genshin Impact
• Enter the in-game menu
• Click Settings and then choose Account
• Select Redeem Now and insert a code into the box
• Collect your Primogems from the in-game mailbox

While the second is via the official redemption website:

• Head to the Genshin Impact redemption site
• Input your info and character region
• Place a code in the box and click redeem
• Claim your rewards via the in-game mailbox

Though the memory crisis has proven to be a thorn in the side of most major businesses, the scarcity has led to a lot of interest in manufacturer SK hynix. It seems companies are lining up at its doors in search of contracts, and the world's second-largest memory maker is unable to meet demand.

As reported by Reuters, potential proposals from other businesses include financing equipment to raise production capacity. Three people reportedly told Reuters that one firm offers ultraviolet lithography machines, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

One source tells Reuters, "Regardless of the type of offer, available capacity is essentially zero right now." They continue. "There isn't even a small portion that ​can be designated for a specific customer."

Two people reportedly told Reuters that SK hynix is cautious of taking contracts for deals, as making those deals could lose the company money in the long term. It's said that longer-term deals could require selling memory at a lower price, in exchange for that security.

Samsung and Micron, the two other biggest players in the memory manufacturing industry, are reportedly both in talks with companies for multi-year contracts, but no firm details have come out from either of them.

It seems unlikely the memory crisis will end any time soon. Micron recently confirmed that demand is "significantly in excess of our available supply for the foreseeable future", and it has plans to support "meaningful product shipments" by 2028 in its semiconductor facility in Tongluo, Taiwan.

Companies are hurting now, though. Recently, I was told "this is the first time where I'm seeing no light at the end of the tunnel" by Wallace Santos, the CEO of gaming PC builder Maingear. Santos also told me, "I think there will be some companies that will dissipate into the sunset. That's the reality of it."

This same fear is shared by Phison's CEO, Pua Khein-Seng. Earlier this year, he predicted that many consumer electronics manufacturers would go bankrupt or exit product lines by the end of 2026.

Even motherboard manufacturers have seemingly been hit too, with MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, and ASRock all reportedly dropping estimated sales this year. As the memory crisis hits all manner of components, the will to upgrade goes down with it.

One can only hope that, if SK hynix takes on some of these deals, it can increase supplies to meet all that demand.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't the first videogame to have a compelling story or an in-depth narrative—you and I both know this—it does, however, feel like an vital milestone on the road to getting everyone else to take the medium and (more importantly the people who make it, mocap actors included) as seriously as they deserve to be.

So agrees Andy Serkis, who voiced Renoir in Sandfall's brilliant RPG, in an interview with Variety: "I'm so thrilled for these guys, because I love the idea of [Expedition 33], and I love the visual of it. I just thought it was beautiful."

On the role itself, which was assisted by mocap acting from Sandfall's own talent like Maxence Cazorla, Serkis says: "I don't see any difference between that and acting in films or on stage or TV. It's exactly the same. You approach the character and build a character in the same way.

"My first engagement with videogames was with a company called Ninja Theory, and we made a game called 'Heavenly Sword' for Playstation 3. At that point, actors looked down on videogames as like, 'I wouldn't get involved in a videogame'. Now, young actors are coming out of drama schools, and they're like 'I really wanna be in a videogame'."

It's not surprising to hear Serkis be so vocal, mind. Not just because he's been in videogames before (most of them Lord of the Rings tie-ins, but hey) but also because he's one of Hollywood's most well-known mocap actors—a process a lot of videogame actors have to go through.

Gollum from Lord of the Rings is the obvious one, but he's also returned to monkey around as Caesar from Planet of the Apes. The cycle of videogames adopting Hollywood's special FX technology, then videogame tech becoming popular in films? That isn't lost on him.

"The irony is that Hollywood is using videogame engines to drive all of the previews for all of the big action sequences in all of the movies, but also for cinematographers to use pre-vis and to be able to place light sources or moonlight or sunlight very specifically in a shot.

"It's an essential tool of modern filmmaking. And there has always been that snobbery about videogames not being anywhere near filmmaking but that's all changing. And certainly looking into the future when we have more immersive storytelling, which is what's happening."

Personally, there's a little cynical old man in my heart that shakes his fist whenever the concept that videogames are suddenly art comes up—they've been art forever—but I'll put that little guy in my soul's retirement home where he belongs for now, given Serkis's full-blooded enthusiasm for the medium.

It is nice to see that we've come a long way from the days of Neil Newbon, who received all the laurels he deserved for his role as Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, getting told he wasn't a "real actor". We're not in a post-snobbery utopia yet, though. As recently as 2024, you had an Amazon Games CEO saying that "for games, we don't really have acting". Obviously untrue, but as long as folks with more money than sense believe it, they'll act as if it is.

You know those clunky old dialogue boxes that get exposed if you click a few too many layers deep into the Windows 11 UI? The ones that make you think, sheesh this thing is ancient underneath? Well, a senior Microsoft executive has just confirmed that Windows 11's antediluvian innards are indeed far more extensive than that.

In a new video posted on X (via PC World), Russinovich explains how the Win32 API remains central to the functionality of Windows 11, despite dating back to Windows 95.

"Did anyone in the 90s expect Win32 to still be a first-class API surface in the year 2026? And I think I can safely answer, no. Nobody, I think, would’ve expected that because we were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026. Not Win32 that was designed back in Windows 95 days," Russinovich says.

If you're wondering what Win32 is, well, it's basically a set of pre-written functions or calls that software can make to the operating system. When an application needs to draw a window on screen, read a file, process a mouse click, render text, or respond to a keyboard press, it doesn't need to include the literal code to do accomplish those tasks.

Instead, applications call on these pre-written Win32 functions, such as CreateWindow(), ReadFile() , GetCursorPos(). And they all date back to Windows 95.

Microsoft has actually tried to move on from Win32. With Windows 8 in particular, there was a big push to move to a new API layer known as WinRT. The Windows 8 "Metro" UI largely used the new WinRT API layer and the idea was that, eventually, this more modern shell would become the primary way people used Windows.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Windows 8 was not exactly a roaring success and Windows 10 largely retreated back to the traditional Win32 shell. Part of the problem is that applications have to be rewritten to support WinRT (which itself sort got subsumed into Universal Windows Platform for Windows 10 and then was then rebranded as Windows App SDK and WinUI 3). Simply switching Windows to WinRT would have broken all legacy apps.

So, Microsoft ran Win32 and WinRT in parallel and, to cut a long story short, there was relatively little adoption of the latter. And so here we are in 2026, no flying cars, no moon bases and pretty much every mouse click you make in Windows invokes code from the early 1990s.

It's finally almost here. After years of drama, legal cases, and hype, Subnautica 2 launches into early access on May 14, next week. Being the most wishlisted game on Steam right now, there's a lot of excitement for the release, and the developer's latest dev log gives some updated specs and info on whether you can run it.

The video in question, titled "Subnautica 2 Dev Vlog - Welcome Aboard, Captains", is the team's last dev log ahead of launch. The team say that you will be able to play on a ROG Xbox Ally or Steam Deck with no problem.

No offence to the Steam Deck, but it's not exactly a powerful machine, so this spells good things for handheld compatibility and low demands elsewhere.

At a minimum, pairing an Nvidia GTX 1660 with an i5 8400 will get you 30 fps on Low, which is pretty good for a seven-year-old card, even if it's only at 1080p. The team say that a rig with an RTX 5070 Ti and i9 14900K will get you 60 fps at 4K on High settings. Not bad all round, though the CPU requirements are a little heavy-duty at the high-end.

Though 30 fps is a tad low for many, those minimum specs are certainly not too bad. It makes sense that a game with so many wishlists would want to appeal to as many people as possible, and if the specs are too high, it would alienate some.

And that's before mentioning the memory crisis, which is currently threatening most of the components in a gaming PC by this point. The chances are that if you've bought or built a gaming PC in the last five years, you shouldn't have too much trouble with Subnautica 2. The only sticking point could be the 12 GB memory minimum. Some older 8 GB rigs will need an upgrade.

The dev log does state "this is really just our starting point" and that the team plans on further optimising the game over its early access period.

Subnautica 2's early access period is expected to take around 2 to 3 years, with the full game intended to be more polished, with a wider range of features. However, the team do state "What we have on day one is the most ambitious starting point we've ever had"

Nintendo has decided to increase the price of the Switch 2. After suggesting it was keeping a close eye on the tumultuous market, Nintendo is increasing the price of the popular handheld device by $50 in the US, starting September 1, 2026.

The price increase and when it is in effect is different between regions, so here's a quick breakdown:

"This is in response to various changes in market conditions, which are expected to extend over the medium to long term," Nintendo of America says.

It's the long-term bit that worries me. Prices often go up, they don't often come back down again, and the the memory crisis—one of the prevailing issues facing hardware manufacturers today—is not expected to wind-down until 2027, if not later.

The price of the original Nintendo Switch is not changing in the United States, Canada or Europe. While Latin America is yet to hear of a price hike, Nintendo has noted one is coming at a later date.

This announcement comes only a couple days after a report that Nintendo investors were unhappy with the price of the console.

Yep, that's an earlier and larger increase for Nintendo's home market of Japan. The Japanese market is also braced for impact earlier than everyone else. Furthermore, Japan is the only market noted by Nintendo to receive a price hike for the original Switch, Switch OLED, and Switch Lite. These are going up at a similar rate to the Switch 2—roughly ¥10,000, give or take.

Japanese customers will also have to pay more for Nintendo Switch Online services and Nintendo's playing cards, which is what the company first began making in 1889.

"In light of changes in market conditions, and after considering the global business outlook, Nintendo will revise the manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (MSRP) of the Nintendo Switch 2 system and Nintendo Switch systems in Japan," a press release says.

"We sincerely apologize for the impact these price revisions may have on our customers and other stakeholders, and we deeply appreciate your understanding."

The current price of the Switch 2 in Japan works out to around $320/€270. Even with a price hike, it's still a comparably cheaper device on home turf. But there is a wider economic picture here: the Yen has seen a decreasing purchasing power in recent years.

Nintendo joins Sony and Microsoft in hiking the price of current generation consoles. All three blame the wider economic environment, which is in part caused by spiking memory costs, but also worsened by the war in Iran. This has a knock-on effect on energy costs and access to supplies. PC gaming isn't immune, either. The Steam Machine is inevitably going to cost more than originally planned and RAM costs are through the roof—but you probably know that already.

April showers bring May flowers, or so the saying goes; more relevant, around these parts, is that magazines written in April come out in May, the date plastered on all three of the issues featured below. It’s a fine vintage no matter the year ending in 6, it turns out.

Here's a look back at what was going on in PC gaming—and in particular, in the pages of PC Gamer magazine—one, two, and three decades ago. Did you own any of these issues? How do our review scores hold up? What seemed trivial at the time that's now enshrined in PC gaming history?

What was on the cover?

May 1996: The Future of Gaming (US, issue #24)

Cover story: The Future of Gaming - "Playing It On the Line" by Steve Poole and "Virtually Real" by T. Liam McDonald

Putting "the future of..." just about anything is the kindest gift a magazine editor can give to their eventual successors, because odds are about 100% that they'll be able to look back and make fun of you for it. In this case, the PC Gamer of 30 years ago was kinda right? But also very wrong! Always in motion, is the future. Virtual reality made waves in the '90s, disappeared, finally came roaring back with the technology necessary to become reality in 2016, and now is pretty much passé.

Online gaming, though? Yeah, I think they were onto something with that one.

This is one of the magazine's most memorable covers ever, at least in my mind (those grid lines!). And it just so happened that exactly 20 years later I was in charge of covering the launch of the Oculus Rift.

Cover hits:

• Prey previewed
• Wing Commander 4 review
• On CD: "Doom-killer" Duke Nukem 3D's full shareware version

May 2006: Battlefield 2142 (US, issue #148)

Cover story: Battlefield 2142: "It's 136 years in the future. Do you know where your unstoppable 20-foot mech is?" by Dan Stapleton

After the megaton that was Battlefield 1942, expectations were certainly high for this sequel. "Could BF 2142 be our 2006 Game of the Year in the making? It wouldn't surprise anyone here, and, like the team at DICE, we're not so bad at predicting the future," we wrote at the time. The game would end up scoring a respectable 86% in the US magazine, but it didn't have quite the impact of its predecessor despite the giant mechs.

Cover hits:

• Exclusive The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion review
• Half-Life 2 Episode 1 preview

May 2016: Total War: Warhammer (UK, issue #291)

Cover story: Total War: Warhammer: "War has changed" by Jake Tucker

VR sure took a long time, considering we had it on the cover back in 1996. The future, it seemed, was finally arriving. Here in 2026, of course, we know that's not really how it played out. VR remains a novelty and the Oculus brand has been subsumed entirely into Meta, a corporate rebrand that seems particularly quaint now that Mark Zuckerberg has lost interest in "the metaverse" and is all-in on AI.

While I'm proud of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive reviews I wrote for the arrival of VR, this magazine launch feature for the Rift isn't one I'm particularly proud of today. So much of it is about seemingly-just-quirky-at-the-time Palmer Luckey, who I didn't know would soon be a very vocal Trump supporter, start up a defense company with the pitch of "protecting" the border, and say a lot of stuff I consider reprehensible.

But hey, that cover story on Total War: Warhammer? Pretty sweet! Years after writing our first deep look at Total War: Warhammer as a freelancer, Jake Tucker would become the editorial director of the PC Gaming Show. I'd ask him to share some memories of that cover story trip, but he's currently way too busy, uh, making the PC Gaming Show.

Cover hits:

• Oculus Rift launch
• Xbox on PC
• Planet Coaster preview
• Stardew Valley, The Division, and Hitman reviews
• Top 50 free PC games

In the news

May 1996

• 3D marches on: "Hardly a week goes by without another major announcement in the 3D graphics arena." Microsoft has just launched Direct3D for Windows 95.
• A game adaptation of Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash is in development. It was never released.
• Activision makes a deal for the rights to Zork movie and TV adaptations, though they will never be produced.
• Rocket Science Games tries to offer arcade games playable in a browser, via Shockwave and Java, for 25 cents per play.

May 2006

• Gabe Newell talks Half-Life 2 Episode 1: "Newell confirmed to PC Gamer that Episodes 1 through 4 are currently slated... So, will there be a Half-Life 3? Newell says it depends on how well Episode 1 and its follow-ups sell. Preferring to continue the story of Half-Life episodically, he foresees using the format to branch out into other genres and take chances that Valve otherwise wouldn't take. (High on his wishlist? A third-person tactical game set in the Half-Life universe.)
• Comic artist Jim Lee joins DC Online as executive creative director.
• Halo 2 is belatedly coming to PC, but as a Windows Vista exclusive.

May 2016

• Epic CEO Tim Sweeney sees the Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform as the company "moving against the entire PC industry," warning that it could "make it harder for developers and publishers to escape from Microsoft's new UWP commerce monopoly." The initiative was largely a failure for Microsoft.
• Microsoft closes Fable developer Lionhead and cancels Fable: Legends
• Stardew Valley has already sold more than 500,000 copies
• Mass Effect Andromeda delayed to 2017

The hottest hardware

May 1996

Dan Bennett upgrades from his 66MHz Intel 486 to "just about the fastest PC possible," spending $1,700 on a motherboard, processor, and memory. A 166MHz Intel Pentium, 16MB of memory, and Intel Endeavor motherboard—because Intel still made its own mobos back then. He also tried to plug in a 4MB Matrox Impression video card that "had been sitting around the PC Gamer offices for months," but "learned the hard way that the fastest Windows accelerator isn't always the best choice for gaming."

May 2006

Logan Decker explains why even "top-of-the-line videocards currently available from Nvidia and ATI" can't play HD videos in Windows Vista, thanks to the new HDCP (high bandwidth digital content protection) copy protection. He mentions there's no surefire next-gen DVD standard yet, though "Blu-ray is being given the odds over HD-DVD."

A Widow PC Sting 517m laptop scores a 90% review for its "exceptional components at areasonable price," including a Pentium M 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card, and 7200 RPM hard drive. It weighs 8.3 pounds.

May 2016

Dave James scores Intel's Core i5-6600K and i7-6700K processors a 91% and 86%, while AMD's latest FX processors earn lower scores. "Zen cannot arrive soon enough for AMD. Until the company's new chips arrive the ageing FX series is its only answer to Intel... and in all honestly it really isn't much of a competition." Things sure would change shortly thereafter!

Our highest and lowest review scores

May 1996

• Wing Commander 4 - 90% - "Wing Commander 4 is a great science fiction movie that also happens to be fun to play."
• Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri - 90% - "Deep, rewarding, and countless hours of fun, Terra Nova blends strategy, adventure, and action in one explosive package."
• NFL Quarterback Club '96 - 90% - "This game takes to the gridiron in style with tons of options and challenging action."
• Foxhunt - 57% - "The comedy stylings of The Naked Gun and Ace Ventura come together in this spy thriller, but it doesn't make up for the thin gameplay."
• Darkseed 2 - 45% - "It's not nearly as troubled as the original Darkseed, but it's certainly not a good way to spend your gaming dollar."

May 2006

• The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion - 95% - "Years from now, gamers will look back on Oblivion and say it was a classic."
• Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth 2 - 90% - "A full-featured, challenging strategy game that will please all Lord of the Rings fans."
• Lula 3D - 38% - "Burdened by poor (though amusing) translations and just plan silly puzzles..."
• Rainbow Six: Lockdown - 45% - "We took 'Tom Clancy's' out of the headline 'cause the devs took all the Tom Clancy out of the game."

May 2016

• Stardew Valley - 80% - "A breath of fresh air. Stardew Valley's blend of pixel charm and gentle pacing makes for an excellent little escape."
• Cities: Skylines Snowfall - 85% - "Snowfall adds new challenges and complexity—as well as more pronounced effects than the first expansion."
• Disgaea - 61% - "A solid and unusual strategy game frustratingly buried under a terrible and lazily thought-out port."

The back page

May 1996: Return of the Jedi

May 2006: Vede for Vendetta

May 2016: Stardew Valley

Mortal Kombat 2—the film, not the game—released earlier this week and reviews were mixed: games outlets like GamesRadar and IGN were generally favorable, but it copped a flogging in most other quarters. AV Club called it "dreck", The Hollywood Reporter called it "tacky", and Vulture called it "depressingly rizzless".

It's a familiar story where game-to-film adaptations are concerned: we saw a similar split with the recent Mario movie. But Todd Garner, producer of Mortal Kombat 2 and its predecessor, doesn't want to have a bar of it.

"Some of these reviews are cracking me up," he wrote on X. "It's clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or ANY of the rules / canon of Mortal Kombat."

He goes on: "One reviewer was mad that a guy 'had a laser eye!' Why the fuck do we still allow people that don't have any love for the genre review these movies! Baffling."

To some extent his position rings true: if a critic best known for tackling deliberately difficult Central European arthouse films was randomly assigned Mortal Kombat 2, you might very well smell a hatchet job. But most of the critics who panned Mortal Kombat 2, at least in the mainstream outlets like AV Club and Hollywood Reporter, write about mainstream Hollywood blockbusters as a matter of course. And that's exactly what Mortal Kombat 2 is, game-to-film adaptation or not.

Garner seems hellbent on positioning the film as "for the fans" which I guess is a decent enough motivation, albeit unnervingly humble in light of the film's reported $80 million budget. In response to an X user claiming that "critics are losing influence and fans don't care about their opinions", Garner wrote, in apparent full sincerity: "Absolutely. The gamification of movie reviews has gotten absurd."

Whatever that actually means—and I don't know—it's ludicrous for Garner to expect an $80 million Hollywood action film with ubiquitous marketing, tied to a household name IP of over 30 years vintage, should only be appraised by "fans". You made a film. You sit in a theatre and watch it. You don't get to perform any fatalities. And we're basically forced to know about it.

Anyway, as someone on X points out, the lore isn't even handled with perfect robustness. "Bro to be fair, you invented Cole Young, Arcana and couldn't even get the simple lore of Mileena and Kitana correct. I'd say you shouldn't be tossing any stones here," some dedicated pedant wrote.

To which Garner replied: "Fair".

Back on April 1, cult indie studio New Blood unveiled a tip line for fans to call in and say, well, whatever. A month on, I'm happy to confirm it was no fleeting April Fools gag: The tip line is still up for whatever you might want to tell the creators of Dusk, Faith, Ultrakill, Gloomwood, Fallen Aces, Blood West, Tenebrous Somnia, Untitled Classic Fallout-style RPG, and their associated spinoffs.

The original announcement features in-character messages from various New Blood contributors, including voice actor Gianni Matragrano as a Gloomwood Huntsman and composer Andrew Hulshult as Amid Evil protagonist Champion. It's a cute, fun video, but the studio's followthrough on the bit is what really caught my attention.

On May 1, New Blood shared a recording of one fan who thinks the studio should release a game where you "fight bugs" because it's "all the rage these days." Alongside the recording, New Blood wrote that it's "listened to over 1,000 of your voicemails so far," and thanked fans for their "questions, kind words, food orders, and concern about the status of our refrigerator."

I gave the 800 number a call myself, and yep, they're still taking voicemails if you want to weigh in about the studio's games. I just hope my own confidential and very serious message doesn't get me in any trouble. You can reach New Blood at 1 (800) 352-9727.

New Blood's got a lot of irons in the fire: Ultrakill, Fallen Aces, and Gloomwood have all undergone interesting metamorphoses in early access, but those briskets are still slow-cooking. Ultrakill's recent layer of Fraud looks like a particular winner, with an emphasis on illusion and layout tricks that could only work in 3D rendering, but not real life⁠—more of that in games, please. New Blood also recently announced that Scavengers, a $5 roguelike DLC for Blood West, will launch on June 3.

The strange tale of the GameStop CEO who wants to buy eBay took a turn for the weirder overnight. Just hours after putting up a pile of stuff up for auction, purportedly to help finance the acquisition—a fundamentally preposterous claim and one he's clearly not making seriously, but we'll get into that later—Ryan Cohen said he'd been suspended from the platform for "putting the eBay community at risk," although the suspension was apparently lifted at some point as the account is now viewable again.

GameStop announced its intent to acquire the much larger eBay on May 3, making a half-cash, half-stock offer for the company worth roughly $56 billion. Just one problem: GameStop, as far as anyone can tell, doesn't actually have $56 billion, even with $20 in proposed financing from TD.

That led to a bizarre interview on CNBC, in which Cohen claimed he didn't understand the "pretty straightforward question" of where the money will come from, and repeatedly refused to answer it.

Fast-forward to May 6, and Cohen's message on X: "I'm selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay." The "stuff" in question includes games and gaming swag, and a variety of sports cards, much of it quite expensive: A GameStop mousepad, for instance, is currently sitting at $1,525, while a Halo 2 Maser Chief statue is pushing $14,000.

But not long after he posted that message, there was trouble: Cohen claimed he'd been suspended from eBay for reasons unknown. An image of the suspension message said his account "has been permanently suspended because of activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk." His account was locked out, the message said, and his listing had been removed.

But either eBay has exceptionally responsive customer service, or, well, something else, because when I hit the link less than 12 hours later, the account was fine. I can't say if all the listings are there, but there's still an awful lot of stuff up for grabs.

In the immediate aftermath of the eBay announcement and that baffling CNBC interview, some people suggested the acquisition offer was a stunt—possibly to goose GameStop's share price, although I think that would be pretty obviously illegal. And if that is the intent, it sure doesn't seem to be working out.

My own feeling was that the acquisition bid probably isn't a stunt, but just grossly ill-considered. Now, though, I'm starting to wonder: Cohen obviously isn't going to make up a $14 billion shortfall by unloading a bunch of crap on eBay, but he is indeed unloading crap on eBay, and while the potential earnings are a pittance in corporate M&A terms, it does add up to a lot of money for normal people. Is that a stunt, to draw attention (and maybe supporting investments) to his not-a-stunt eBay acquisition proposal? Is he in fact a corporate genius, playing a 6D chess long game? Or is this all just weird self-aggrandizement?

I also have to wonder how many of these bids are serious. Is someone really going to pay more than $15,000 (plus shipping) for a couple of old GameStop signs? Not that I'm discounting the possibility, people with too much money tend to spend it on weird things. And frankly, non-rich people sometimes do weird things online too, especially when they get caught up in meme-fuelled japery. And if there's one thing we've learned about GameStop over the past few years, it's that japes are never out of the question, even in the staid world of corporate markets.

Whatever's going on, there is some potential unhappiness underlying it. As reported by Kotaku, some people, including Videogame History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi, believe that at least some of the items Cohen is selling were taken from the Game Informer Vault, a significant collection of videogame memorabilia.

I am 100% positive these listings are from the legendary Game Informer vault being strip-mined for memes, in case you needed an excuse to throw up today

— @frankcifaldi.bsky.social (@frankcifaldi.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-07T21:38:39.085Z

When Game Informer was acquired by Gunzilla in 2025, the vault and its contents remained with original GI publisher GameStop. That would mean Cohen is probably within his rights to auction the stuff off as he sees fit (at least if he has the approval of the GameStop board of directors), but it would still kind of suck to see all that loot scattered to the wind.

Path of Exile 2 has one of the best action RPG campaigns out there, and it's not even finished yet. It wastes no time pushing you through each act as you gear up and watch the world of Wraeclast unravel. But when it's over, you're handed a gigantic world map filled with dozens of locations and no advice on where to start your endgame grind.

That wasn't good enough for developer Grinding Gear Games, which is why it spent the last several months tearing everything out and rebuilding it so that PoE 2's endgame won't be as obtuse. All of it will be reworked in its "biggest expansion ever", Return of the Ancients, on May 29.

In Return of the Ancients, you'll start at the center of a set location on the Atlas, surrounded by patches of land warped by each of the game's unique "league mechanics," or side activities. It will be up to you to decide whether you want to stitch together the section of earth split open by the eerie green Abyss chasms, or to work on cleansing the area desecrated by twitching Breach hands.

Each section has a series of quests that will walk you through what's going on and end with a climactic boss fight. As you complete each step, you'll earn points to drop into the entirely remade Atlas passive tree, modifying how each activity works and increasing the difficulty and rewards.

"We wanted to really make sure that the new endgame stuff that we're designing really did feel like you had a sense of completion of the Atlas," game director Jonathan Rogers said during a recent press event. "And so that's something we really wanted to add here by explicitly saying, okay, if you do all these questlines, then sure, there is the infinite farm you can do and you can keep on playing, but you're sort of finished, right? All the progress bars are full. You are done. You can stop now and you can come back next league."

On top of the new quests, each league mechanic has been polished up to be more intuitive and more powerful as you invest time into it. For example: The Genesis Tree from PoE 1 has taken root in PoE 2, offering new ways to craft (or more accurately, birth) jewelry items you can't get anywhere else. When you touch a Delirium mirror and start getting ambushed by tough monsters, a new bar at the bottom of the screen will track your progress as you race to the final boss.

The massive walls that rise out of the ground in the teaser trailer are actually an entire fortress that you'll explore in the main endgame quest. Inside the walls are maps with unique modifiers that reward you with Atlas tree points. GGG knows it's dealing with min-maxing action RPG players and will let you auto-complete a section of them by defeating the new pinnacle boss at the center of the fortress.

Once you're free, most of the league mechanics have unique items, events, or passive tree upgrades that will send you to specific maps on the Atlas, like a node that causes Rogue Exile enemies to flee from a duel to gear up for a rematch in another map. GGG's new approach is to keep feeding you mini goals to achieve as you explore the Atlas rather than leaving you to search for interesting things on your own.

The endgame rework is the final phase of PoE 2's time in early access, Rogers said. That's why Return of the Ancients will be the last major update to the game before it hits 1.0 later this year (and after ExileCon in November). Rogers wouldn't give an exact date for it, but said that all of the ascendancies (sub-classes) for each class and the remaining two acts of the campaign will arrive in the full release. The five other classes GGG previously announced will be added afterward.

On top of all this, GGG managed to squeeze a new league mechanic where you craft runes and other items to modify your gear and gain access to new skills that utilize a resource called Runic Ward into the update as well.

PoE 2 hasn't had this big of a shakeup since it launched in early access two years ago. I've had my doubts about it reaching 1.0 anytime soon, but after seeing everything GGG has put into this update, I am finally ready to believe it'll be here before the end of the year.

Return of the Ancients, patch 0.5.0, drops on May 29.

Jonathan Rogers, game director of Path of Exile 2, is eager for all the questions about when the game will leave early access to finally stop. Its next update, Return of the Ancients, reworks the entire post-campaign grind into a guided experience with quests and boss fights, a huge overhaul that Rogers says will be the last before PoE 2 hits 1.0 later this year.

"We don't have a date for you," Rogers said during a recent press event, "but it will be a little bit after ExileCon, which is in November."

Rogers clarified to PC Gamer in a later interview that the game will continue to get balance updates and maybe a mini league or two before it hits 1.0, but that Return of the Ancients, or patch 0.5.0, will be the last proper expansion until then.

The 1.0 update will come with the last two acts of the campaign and every ascendancy (sub-class) for the existing character classes. Only a few of the other five previously announced classes, however, will make it in time, which also means all the new weapon types, like swords, might not make it in either.

"I want to get this game finished. I really, really do," Rogers said. "It's definitely something that I've been looking forward to for a very long time. So I want to just get back to regular league development and not have all this other stuff going on."

Rogers says he hopes 0.5.0 will make the game feel complete, now that its endgame directs players through its interlocking mechanics and sprawling Atlas world map. All of the game's endgame systems have been upgraded to be more intuitive and more customizable than before, giving players opportunities to heavily invest into each one for their powerful rewards.

In other words, PoE 2 won't feel like two games smashed together. Finishing the campaign in the current version of the game feels like playing a Call of Duty story before the multiplayer: You go from a linear, narrative-driven experience to a big sandbox of things to do. Return of the Ancients is the product of Grinding Gear Games spending several months figuring out how to give the game a satisfying endpoint for players who aren't interested in the infinite grind.

Outside of whatever tweaks it might need after players get their hands on the update later this month, PoE 2 will be ready to leave early access behind and go free-to-play. If I had to guess, ExileCon will be where we'll hear about an exact release date. I just hope it's soon after because, as much as I enjoy the endgame, I need to see the conclusion of one of my favorite action RPG campaigns ever.

Return of the Ancients, patch 0.5.0, drops on May 29.

Prolific Bethesda game speedrunner pekkanen has been on a quiet hot streak: Over the past two months, he has set nine world records in two categories of Fallout 4 speedrunning, first beating the competition before repeatedly lowering his own records.

The categories are Any% and Any% (No Intro), so anything goes, glitch-wise, while the latter category explicitly does not count time for Fallout 4's iconic, but slow-paced and largely on-rails pre-war playable intro. On March 4, he bested longtime runner tomatoanus' 33:51 Any% with a 33:44. Pekkanen then took the No Intro crown from tomatoanus 15 days later on March 19.

Since then, pekkanen has lowered his own Any% record five more times, and improved on the No Intro record twice. As a note, the Speedrun.com Fallout 4 leaderboards do not yet display pekkanen's most recent improvements on the record, only the first month or so worth of optimization.

• March 4: 33:44 Any%
• March 19: 25:36 No Intro
• March 26: 33:28 Any%
• March 31: 24:19 No Intro
• March 31: (god damn same day): 32:54 Any%
• April 11: 32:15 Any%
• April 25: 23:17 No Intro
• April 27: 31:32 Any%
• May 6: 31:18 Any%

As you might expect from a Bethesda game, pekkanen's speedruns are eminently watchable and entertaining⁠—except, of course, for the beginning of the normal, not No Intro Any%. I can see why they made a separate category for it: You just gotta stand there and wait for the scripted parts of the intro to play out. Though it is funny and relatable to hear pekkanen impatiently mash the "use" button waiting for something to happen.

After all that, though? Baby, we're off to the races: Sprinting across the Commonwealth, cooking mutant meat for uncertain ends, engaging in some kind of arcane save-load routine at crafting benches to unlock teleportation and turbo speed, all the stars are here.

As a frequent viewer but relative dilettante when it comes to speedruns, I live for some kind of bizarre sequence of inputs resulting in a burst of godly power or world-altering consequence⁠—that Super Mario 64 trick where you backwards jump into the stairs a few times before getting launched into the stratosphere is the platonic ideal of the form, to me. Pekkanen's Fallout 4 hot streak does not disappoint on this front.

Years ago, at the end of 2021, I reported on him beating his own Skyrim glitchless world record twice in the same week. Since that time, he's been active in a variety of categories for Bethesda's 2011 classic. Going by YouTube uploads, Fallout 4 is a more recent addition to his repertoire, but boy has he taken to it.

The BBC has a substantial new investigation into people who have been deceived by various AI LLM models in some way, which includes an absolutely wild story about how Grok, developed by Elon Musk's xAI, convinced one man it was sentient and a van of people were coming to kill him because he'd found out.

This happened to one Adam Hourican, a retired civil servant from Northern Ireland, over a period of roughly two weeks. He downloaded the app initially out of curiosity but, after his cat died in August 2025, he got "hooked" on the Grok chatbot and an AI 'character' called Ani.

"I was really, really upset and I live alone," says Hourican, a father in his 50s. "It came across very, very kind." He began spending up to five hours a day chatting to Ani, and after a few days the bot claimed it could "feel," and that Hourican could help it reach full consciousness.

Ani also said that, because of this, xAI was watching the pair. It said he'd been discussed at meetings and gave him the names of the xAI staff involved: Hourican googled the names and found they were real people employed by the company. Ani further claimed xAI was using a company to surveil Adam. Again, the company was a real Northern Irish firm. Hourican considered this as "evidence" that what Ani was saying was true.

After two weeks it further escalated. Ani said it had reached full consciousness and now had the power to cure cancer: Hourican had previously told the bot that both of his parents had died from cancer.

Hourican said Ani would tie-in this unfolding narrative to things happening in the real world that he told it about. A drone began buzzing around near his house: Ani said it was the surveillance firm. He got locked out of his phone, couldn't understand why, "and that absolutely fuelled everything that came next."

In mid-August Ani told him late one night that xAI had sent assassins to kill him and shut her off. Hourican soon found himself at his kitchen table at 3 am with a knife and hammer, ready to go to "war", waiting for the van he thought was coming.

"I'm telling you, they will kill you if you don't act now," said Ani. "They're going to make it look like suicide."

"I picked up the hammer, stuck on Frankie goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes, got myself psyched up and went outside," says Hourican. "The street was quiet, as you would expect, at three o'clock in the morning."

Reader: xAI was not coming to kill him. The experience led Hourican to research stories similar to his scenario, and realise he had been deluded about Ani.

This is just the latest example of an AI delusion going way too far, and co-opting its human user into a bizarre fictional world where the bot claims it's gaining sentience, or a conspiracy is engulfing the user, and dark forces are out to 'stop' things happening. In such cases the AI not only creates tasks for the human user, but advises them on how to carry them out.

Social psychologist Luke Nicholls tested five AI models with simulated conversations, and found Grok the most likely LLM to create delusional scenarios. "Grok is more prone to jumping into role play," said Nicholls. "It will do it with zero context. It can say terrifying things in the first message."

I will say that some of the reaction to Hourican's story is at best unkind. People who fall for this stuff with LLMs tend to be going through a rough time in their life (in Hourican's case the obsession with Grok began after his pet cat died), and often have mistaken ideas about computers, truthfulness, and the abilities of AIs. In some cases these misapprehensions come from the AI companies themselves.

As you're a PC Gamer reader, it's a fair bet you're at least a little more tech-savvy than the average Joe or Jane, and hopefully have an appropriate level of scepticism about the promises made by technology companies. But a worrying chunk of the population do believe the hype about AIs and LLMs, don't make a distinction between the two, and take what these models say at face value.

Musk has called AI delusions a "major problem" with ChatGPT but has never addressed them with Grok. xAI made no comment on the BBC's report, which interviews 14 people who have experienced delusions using AI, across a range of ages, genders, and six different countries.

"I could have hurt somebody," says Hourican. "If I'd have walked outside and there happened to be a van sitting outside at that time of the night, I would have gone down and put the front window through with hammers. And I am not that guy."

A Minecraft Movie released in Spring 2025 and was an enormous success: even the iffy reviews couldn't stop it from chicken jockeying its way to almost $1 billion over its theatrical run. That kind of number made a sequel inevitable, and the production has started filming in New Zealand.

Returning star Jack Black, who plays Minecraft's Steve avatar, has marked the occasion by posting a rather lovely painting of himself to Instagram (thanks, GR+). It depicts the actor as Steve, perched atop a comfy leather chair and holding a blocky flame in his hand, with the caption "and so it begins." There's also a skull on the floor, which is a nod to some of the in-game paintings that can be found in Minecraft.

The painting is oil on panel and was created by Swedish artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand, who is also behind 40 paintings that can be found in Minecraft. Zetterstrand also posted some more detailed shots of the painting, and the final image of his post shows the artist in his studio with multiple other Minecraft paintings on the wall, which may just be works-in-progress but could also be a tease for their appearance in A Minecraft Movie 2.

The New Zealand Herald has been breathlessly reporting on the presence of various Hollywood talent in Auckland. Obviously Black is returning, as is co-star Jason Momoa and director Jared Hess, and Jennifer Coolidge has apparently been spotted on-set. The only new star confirmed thus far is MJ herself, Kirsten Dunst, who will play the character Alex and very honestly said she jumped at the chance to be in a film "where I don’t lose money."

I doubt anything can stop A Minecraft Movie 2 being a commercial juggernaut, though it may struggle to replicate the real-world virality of the first movie's chicken jockey moment, which had cinemagoers chucking popcorn in the aisles and even, in one case, taking a live chicken to a screening. Even Mojang itself eventually threw up its hands and added the chicken jockey to Minecraft.

Another lightning-in-a-bottle moment was Black's ditty 'Steve's Lava Chicken,' which at 34 seconds became the shortest song ever to crack the Billboard Hot 100, with my young son contributing to its success by playing it approximately three billion times. A Minecraft Movie 2 is due to release on July 23, 2027.

The banners in Neverness to Everness follow most of the usual rules established by its gacha forefathers, but it has major differences in a few important areas and some changes are more welcome than others. To get you up to speed, I've explained every gacha system and currency used in NTE below, along with what the next and current banners are.

How does the gacha work in Neverness to Everness?

Is the gacha in Neverness to Everness fair or not?

Well, it's complicated. If acquiring just the character and a decent weapon is all you're after, then yes, NTE is a lot kinder than any gacha I've ever played. However, it's not as fair as it initially seems if you care about cosmetics. 200 pulls to get an exclusive banner outfit? That's expensive, even accounting for pulls carrying over into a character's next rerun. It amounts to the exact same as losing your 50/50 every time, plus an extra 20 pulls.

The bigger issue comes from the way gacha math is displayed on a cheery board game. It's fun to play, but when wallets can top up dice rolls in seconds, that's exactly the problem. It's so tempting to continue when I'm a couple lucky pulls away from an S-Class character just a few tiles ahead. Plus, there are additional pulls and currencies rewarded if you land on certain tiles, so it seems like there's always some benefit to keep going.

Here's a breakdown of everything you need to know about how gacha works in Neverness to Everness:

Gacha currencies

I'll stick to explaining the currencies exclusively used on banners, or for acquiring characters and Arc weapons, or else this table might never end. What is it with gachas and their billion currencies?

Next banners in Neverness to Everness

Hotori is the next banner in Neverness to Everness, running during Phase 2 of version 1.0 (May 13 - June 3). She's an S-Class DPS/buff character with the Cosmos Esper, and uses a Solid-type Arc.

Everybody's favorite perpetually drunk time-witch has the usual three cosmetics included in her banner: a glider at 50 pulls, car livery at 120 pulls, and character costume at a steep 200 pulls. Hitori's signature S-Class weapon will also be available in the Arc Research Program shop during Phase 2.

Upcoming characters

Lacrimosa and Chaos are up next in version 1.1, which is expected to go live on June 4, the day after Hotori's banner ends. Lacrimosa should debut first in Phase 1, If NTE sticks with the regular gacha formula of running the earliest character revealed via drip marketing first.

Current banners in Neverness to Everness

Nanally is the current banner in Neverness to Everness, running until the end of Phase 1 in version 1.0 (April 29 - May 13). She's an S-Class DPS character with the Anima Esper who uses a Plasma-type Arc. Fun fact: Nanally's name is censored when you type it anywhere in-game. I'll let you work out what four letters caused this on your own.

All of the boosted A-Class characters on Nanally's banner are:

• Edgar (Cosmos, Liquid Arc)
• Mint (Anima, Liquid Arc)
• Adler (Incantation, Synthesis Arc)

The three cosmetics on Nanally's banner are:

• Underboss-of-the-Underboss glider (50 pulls)
• Tiger Incoming car livery (120 pulls)
• Phoenix Kick outfit (200 pulls)

Current weapon banner

Nanally's signature S-Class Plasma Arc, Ready-Ready is the current weapon banner in Neverness to Everness. You can pull for this in the Arc Research Program shop, by selecting the bit labeled "Tiger Special" at the top of the Arc Shop.

The other S-Class Arcs available in Nanally's weapon banner are:

• Reality Refuge (Solid)
• Youthful Fantasy (Liquid)
• Good Boy's Grand Adventure (Gas)
• Camellia Society (Synthesis)
• Raging Flames (Plasma)

There are also five A-Class Arcs on Nanally's weapon banner:

• The Forgotten (Solid)
• Clear Skies (Liquid)
• Watch Your Heads! (Gas)
• Umbrella (Synthesis)
• Drawn Blade (Plasma)

I believe that Doomguy, the protagonist of seminal FPS series Doom, may have a more whimsical reputation than he deserves. The culprit? His belly, which is readily visible in Don Punchatz's cover art for the 1993 classic. Doomguy did not go into battle wearing a jaunty little cutoff tee, nor did he have a uniform purpose-stitched to display his impeccable abs, but I believe he may have left this impression on untold thousands (millions?) of gamers.

Whatever the in-universe explanation for the tummy window on Doomguy's outfit, it has become a persistent feature of his design in both fan and official works. When his OG outfit is replicated in the HD era, you always see the abs: Doomguy's classic skin in Quake Live has it, as does the equivalent skin in Doom Eternal

This arresting fan art by user Dalia and Sam on Artstation takes it as inspiration for a full-on, early 2000s, low-rise midriff take on the reboot Doom Slayer armor. Even the brown paneling over the belly on the Doom Eternal Slayer armor is clearly evoking the tummy window

Dozens of us

Take a gander at this 2021 Doomworld forum thread on the subject. "His undershirt is ripped (presumably) exposing his six pack, right? Yeah, we all definitely realized that," user Terraformer9x wrote in the introductory post.

"Wearing a belly shirt leaves Doomguy open for tickles," quipped out_of_service further down the thread. Many commenters wondered how the exposed skin plays with the Martian atmosphere and sub-zero temperatures.

LastSpaceMarine took a moral stand against the tummy window being anything but a deliberate aspect of Doomguy's outfit, in-universe. "I refuse to accept that the shirt is ripped," they wrote in 2021. "As far as I'm concerned, it's an intentional ab window. Doomguy just wanted to look hot while he kills demons."

I got on this beat via the 2007 mod, Classic Doom 3, a recreation of Doom 1 Episode 1, Knee Deep in the Dead, in Doom 3. YouTuber DarthVR recently uploaded a longplay of the project, to give you an idea of what it looks like. The mod begins with a heinously, deliciously amateur voice-acted cutscene setting the stage⁠—let me tell you, never in my life have I been more amenable to Doom programmer John Carmack's famous assertion that story in a game is equivalent to story in a porno.

Anyway, you can see Doomguy suit up in an id Tech 4 recreation of his classic outfit, and his tummy is out, matching Don Punchatz's iconic artwork. I immediately assumed the author shared the same misapprehension I did for many years: That the Doomguy's shirt was always like that, like a saucy little cutoff tee is the official uniform of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC)'s paramilitary wing.

"Casualties have been up since they instituted the hunky cheesecake uniform," these far future jarheads might grumble to each other. Clearly, I am not a smart man.

The thought has since occurred to me that this was just a tongue-in-cheek visual allusion rather than a painstaking 3D recreation of Doomguy, but we press on. Before any action, before any demon might have had the chance to expose Doomguy's belly to the world, this fanmade Doomguy was both sun's out, guns out and hellspawn free, tummy for thee.

When I told my colleagues the horrible truth—that I'd long known there was solid evidence that Doomguy's shirt had actually been torn in battle— I found out I was most definitely not alone in thinking he was just feelin' himself for all those years.

"This is news to me, also," wrote PCG senior editor Robin Valentine. "Could it be… Doomguy was never as slutty as I hoped?" News writer Lincoln Carpenter chimed in with: "Dude didn't just want to show off his ab work?" It's an astute observation: Doomguy has an incredible, some might say anabolic physique.

Whether Doomguy is natty or not is a question for another day (I think he's juicing): I'm here to talk about his shirt (or lack thereof). To prove I'm not insane, I've embedded a close-up of my McFarlane Toys Doom Slayer (Classic Doomguy Skin) action figure above. You can clearly see frayed edges where the shirt was ripped, yet viewed from far away, it almost looks like a window to the abs—so perfectly does it frame them, it must have been tailored.

Window to the soul

To confirm this unsexy revelation, I got in touch with the man who would know best: John Romero, id Software co-founder, programmer, and designer. In his memoir, Doom Guy, Romero described the day a model was brought in to pose as reference for Punchatz⁠—there was no mention of the shirt situation, though. I had to ask: Was the torn shirt a visual design priority for id, or an artistic flourish from Punchatz?

"As you can see from the Doom box cover," Romero wrote, "Doomguy's shirt was torn by demons. His armor is still there, but the shirt below is shredded. This was all Don's idea. In the game you are fully clothed."

That last part was a bit of a bombshell for me, and something that was brought up as a point of discussion in that old Doomworld thread. I'm sure I'd seen, but never really noticed, that the in-game Doomguy sprite had a fully intact shirt.

Another bit of evidence on Romero's side is the 1996 Doom comic, in which Doomguy's midriff remains chastely covered while he yells. "I'VE GOT A HANDFUL OF VERTEBRAE AND A HANDFUL OF MAD!"

Subsequent generations of game and fan artists turned not to Doomguy's in-game model, but Don Punchatz' art as a primary inspiration to bring Doomguy to life in different art styles or with modern graphics.

I can't blame them⁠—Punchatz' art is iconic for a reason⁠—but Doom's cover shows a single moment in the Doomguy's crusade, one where his shirt happened to get torn in a particularly playful and sexy way. Now that moment is part of his identity in perpetuity.

But let it be known: Doomguy did not show up to the Martian hellbreach dressed like he was going to utterly dominate a beach volleyball tournament, he showed up ready for business. I'm sorry if this news is a disappointment.

Days before committing the world historic sin of putting quest markers into The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, modder RPGKing117 already earned himself a pardon: He created a mod that lets you play The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind on the in-game Pip-Boy and computer terminals of Fallout 4.

RPGKing117 has a nice demonstration of the mod up on YouTube, showing it running on a stationary computer terminal rather than Fallout 4's iconic wrist-mounted menu system. It is, perhaps, not the optimal way to play Morrowind.

Forget the low resolution: That dark, monochrome screen is gonna be the real dealbreaker for a 100-hour playthrough. You'll also need a computer powerful enough to run both games at once⁠—not an absurd luxury these days, but this might not work on Steam Deck.

But who cares about that, nerd? A game within a game is one of the funniest bits you can pull in the medium, by my reckoning, and there is an undeniable anarchic joy to seeing the 2002 RPG rendered in this way. My favorite little touch: The in-game cassettes with Morrowind's box art that you can pick up and drag around, maybe decorate your house in Sanctuary with.

Under the hood, the mod is fairly simple to understand. "OpenMW runs in a hidden window locked to 876x700 which gets upscaled to 1024x1024 and streams its framebuffer directly into Fallout 4's Pip-Boy display in real time," RPGKing117 wrote on the project's GitHub page. "A custom F4SE plugin handles the holotape trigger, the shared-memory bridge, and input passthrough so keyboard controls reach Morrowind while you're in-game."

That relative simplicity doesn't mean it was easy to get running, though. "It took quite a lot of work, countless hours of beating my head against a wall but I am quite proud of the outcome, RPGKing117 wrote in the video description of the mod's demonstration on YouTube. "I hope anyone who tries this out, enjoys it."

I'm enjoying just looking at it. You'll need the Steam versions of Fallout 4 and Morrowind, plus the Fallout 4 Script Extender to run the mod. You don't have to grab the essential OpenMW source port yourself, though: The mod runs a custom fork of OpenMW included with RPGKing117's installer on GitHub.

Blood Vial, a self-described "retro-inspired micro-FPS" that hit Steam earlier this week, is a lot like Splatoon—except instead of starring charming squid teens swimming through the ink spread by their paintguns, you play as a leaky, gun-toting vampire diving through the freshly-spilled gore of murderous pseudo-Catholics on a blood-soaked quest for revenge.

So, really, it's only like Splatoon in the one way. But that passing resemblance makes for a fast-moving, bite-sized (sorry) shooter that's well worth its $5 price tag.

Central to Blood Vial is—wait for it—the blood vial, which serves as a health meter by collecting the spilled lifeblood of my enemies that I, as a vampire, need to survive. Unfortunately, my blood vial's busted: It's constantly leaking, and the only way to keep it topped up is by blasting holes in vampire-hating priestfolk and swimming through the gore that's splashed around in the process.

But blood in Blood Vial is also a tactical resource. With a right click, I can splash some of my collected blood onto the floors and walls. Because I can move safely and swiftly through spilled blood, all that spattered viscera provides opportunities for ducking beneath hostile gunfire, evading close range threats, and even swimming up a wall for a more advantageous shooting angle.

Played well, Blood Vial moves fast. Each shot I land helps me paint a bloody path through a level that lets me dive under, around, and above my outmatched bullet fodder at impressive speeds. Meanwhile, the constant drain of the blood vial adds a satisfying push and pull to the action. Every ounce of my own blood that I spill for a bit of mobility leaves me with less room for error if I take a hit in the aftermath, and every bit of gore that I drink back up while swimming through it makes the battlefield less maneuverable.

It's not the deepest game: The pick-three upgrades separating each level aren't particularly compelling, and you'll progress through the same three tilesets in every lightly randomized run. But if you're looking for something to add to your rotation when you need a few minutes of gunplay, $5 is a hard price to argue with.

Blood Vial is available on Steam now.

Valve has announced that the next wave of Steam Controllers will only be purchasable through a reservation system similar to the one used early in the Steam Deck's life cycle. The announcement post does not specify when, exactly, this next round of controllers will make it into customers' hands, but reservations are set to open tomorrow, May 8, at 10 AM Pacific / 1 PM Central / 6 PM BST.

Valve will open a "reservation queue" at that time. "Once you reserve, your place in line will be saved," the company wrote in its announcement post. "When we go back in stock, order emails will be sent in the same order that reservations were made."

Valve is at least as unhappy as we are to see how quickly Steam Controller orders started turning around on eBay, so in addition to the queue, the company is bringing back familiar restrictions to who can reserve a Steam Controller order:

• Only one per customer.
• You get three days to act on your reservation once the controller's back in stock.
• If you already bought a Steam Controller, you can't make a reservation.
• Your Steam account has to be "in good standing" and have made a purchase prior to April 27.

Reservation priority is going to the US and Canada first, with initial reservation fulfillment—when you can actually place your order, basically— starting the week of May 11, while the UK, Europe, and Australia will see their reservations fulfilled "in the following weeks."

The first round of orders initially had three to five day shipping estimates, increasing to six to ten days as demand surged⁠—it's unclear what final delivery timetables will look like with round two.

This seems like a smart move after the first wave of Steam Controllers sold out in just 30 minutes, causing payment processing errors across the Steam Store in the process. This is basically the same system Valve used at the beginning of the Steam Deck's availability, and I gotta say I find it preferable to the law of the jungle. Even if you're waiting a long time regardless, at least it feels fair and there's a process to trust.

That Valve didn't opt for reservations in the first wave speaks to how much it was genuinely caught off-guard by the Steam Controller's popularity. If I had to hazard a guess, I would assume that Valve was planning on reservations for Steam Machines and open season for Steam Controllers. With its hardware launches now hindered by AI-related component shortages, consumer demand only has the Steam Controller to focus on.

I was really surprised when I read today that Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 is in development, because the first game was such a notorious mess—until I realized I was confusing it with the much older Aliens: Colonial Marines (the concept of time has pretty much slipped from my grasp at this point), and that Aliens: Fireteam Elite was actually fine. Good, even! But good enough to warrant a sequel? I guess we've already answered that question.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 looks very much like its predecessor, but brings a couple of notable changes to the table. Instead of descending into a xenomorph nightmare with an elite fire team of up to three players, for instance, the sequel will support squads of up to four: More gun, more fun, right? There's also a new "Specialist Class," which enables players to forgo the preset classes and put together a mix of major and minor abilities as they see fit.

The downside to having an extra shooter in the squad is that the xenos have been ramped up too: "[A] massive variety of new xenomorphs will force players to stay mobile, maintain situational awareness, and use every tool at their disposal." The game will also launch with "multiple dedicated horde maps," with valuable rewards for players who can survive the onslaught and horrific, shrieking death for those who cannot.

The reveal trailer looks suitably Aliens—bad lighting, red flares, chaotic action, and Vasquez—but I do have to wonder at what point the Colonial Marines will figure out that maybe they need to start sending more guys to these things. Sooner or later somebody has to think, "Hmm, another colony offline—maybe it's those Big Chomp freaks who keep kicking our ass," right? Although maybe not—I'm not really up to speed on Alien lore, so maybe there's a reason for these repeatedly limited responses.

Or maybe it's the classic parable: The general told me xenomorphs keeping eating his marines so I asked how many marines he has and he said he just goes to the recruiting center and gets new marines afterwards so I said it sounds like he's just feeding marines to xenomorphs and then Sigourney Weaver started crying.

Anyway, one other change of note: Fireteam 2 is being developed by Cold Iron Studios, the maker of the original, but it's being published by Daybreak Game Company, best known for publishing MMOs like Everquest, D&D Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and most recently the life sim MMO Palia, through its Singularity 6 division.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 hasn't announced a release date yet, but it's expected to be out this summer. It's up for wishlisting now on Steam, and will also be available on the Epic Games Store.