While Monster Hunter Wilds' performance issues dominated the conversation about its reception on PC, one of the other ongoing sources of player frustration was the entry's approach to difficulty. Initially, a number of players thought the game was too much of a sleepwalk—but once later updates started amping up the threat level, many of those same players thought Capcom's solutions were inelegant, relying on arbitrary increases to monster damage.

In an interview with PC Gamer at this year's Tokyo Game Show, Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka said Capcom's goal for the base game was to avoid driving away newer players—but he's working to ensure the expansion's endgame will satisfy players who thought its approach to difficulty missed the mark.

Speaking via translator, Hiraoka said balancing difficulty is "one of the most challenging things to get right in a game," and his objective—first and foremost—is to prevent a situation where players don't feel like they can finish the game they've purchased, because it's not likely that those players will ever come back.

"In my mind, that's where the difficulty curve should be for Wilds, and I think we achieved that—but the player base was so good and so skilled. We had a bit of a gap in expectations. Maybe players got better than we expected in the intervening years," Hiraoka said. "We've grown the audience greatly since Monster Hunter: World, and that was a game where a lot of players dropped off before finishing the story because it got too hard too quickly. We're trying to tackle that issue, which I see as a problem."

The reception to Wilds' difficulty, he said, has been a learning experience for Capcom, informing how the studio is working to appeal to "not just the hardest of the hardcore" with the Ascendance expansion while making sure challenge-oriented players don't feel alienated by the effort.

"We expect that if you purchase the DLC, you're going to want to see as much of the story that we've presented as possible—but for players who want to go far beyond and have the really toughest challenges, we expect that the endgame loop is what really satisfies their needs," Hiraoka said. "We're working on that balance at the minute."

Along similar lines, Hiraoka said that the aggression showcased in Capcom's recent Ascendance weapon breakdown videos shouldn't lead players to believe that they'll be able to completely outclass monsters with their new Boost Bracer attacks. While the videos are edited to highlight the impact of those new mechanics, he said it's "not quite so constant and aggressive" over the course of an actual hunt.

"There is a cadence to it, where the player is building a gauge, keeping an eye on how many charges they have, and deciding when they want to bust out those actions. And you only have a certain amount of time in boost mode whenever you do activate it," Hiraoka said. "Overall, the player hasn't become this hyperaggressive, constant demon mode type of presence. It's a new tool in your box. How to strategize on when to use it, and the way it changes each weapon's gameplay, is for the players to discover."

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist the expansion on Steam now.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming! Not to us on Team PC, mind: It will eventually, but right now it's a strict console exclusive. Why? Hard to say: Publisher Take-Two Interactive has taken pains to reassure PC gamers that they're very important and loved, but also, y'know, not now.

The latest reassurance to gamers on personal computers came during Take-Two's annual shareholders meeting, held yesterday, during which Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the potential impact of PlayStation 5 Pro shortages—ironically, driven at least in part by the looming launch of GTA 6—on the company's plans for releasing the game on PC.

After clarifying that the question is really about "the cadence of PC launches," Zelnick continued, "The strategy of the company is over time, generally speaking, to launch for any platforms for which there's a meaningful audience. But that isn't always the case, and certainly if platforms were no longer viable, we would change that strategy. And I would note that the PC platform is becoming more and more important to our company over time."

So, what does that mean? Essentially, that Zelnick doesn't want to talk about it: GTA 6, for better or worse, is a console exclusive, and that's clearly where the studio's focus is.

Which isn't to say Zelnick's response isn't confusing, but that's something of an ongoing pattern: In May he said PC can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases, but that GTA 6 is debuting on consoles because Take-Two is focused on "serving the core consumer," which apparently does not include PC gamers—those gamers who, you may recall, can account for up to half the total sales of major game releases.

Those struck me as inherently contradictory statements, and saying the PC is "becoming more and more important" when it's clearly already very important doesn't really clear that air. I can understand why Zelnick wouldn't want to just come out and state the obvious reason for holding back GTA 6 on PC—double-dipping—but if he did, we'd at least be able to relax and say, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense.'

Speaking of not wanting to talk about things, Zelnick was also asked about GTA Online during the meeting, to which he reminded attendees that GTA 6 is "a singleplayer experience," and that GTA 5 Online "continues to be a robust business for us" that Take-Two will continue to support. The CEO of Twitch thinks GTA 6 multiplayer will come out next year, but it's not entirely clear whether he's speculating or relaying inside info.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19. We'll get it someday.

In a previous life, long before I began making millions writing about videogames professionally, I wrote marketing copy for a finance firm I still don't really understand. Do you know the fine art of embedding payment iframes in customer payment gateways? I did. Once. Do you know the riotous history of the SWIFT international banking system? What about SEPA? No? What a sheltered life you must lead.

My point is this: absolutely nothing is more interesting, cooler, or sexier than finance and banking. We all know it. There was a whole song that was pretty much about just that. And now, I have integrated this glamour into Grand Theft Auto 5. I have installed Realistic Bank System – San Andreas ONE.

Exciting times: I can get into debt now. The thrill of thrills is that San Andreas ONE lets you apply for lines of credit in ways that are fascinatingly reminiscent of real life. GTA 5's protagonists even get actual, meaningful credit scores (based on… something) that impact their eligibility to open new lines of the stuff. Franklin's was 680 (Good), in case you're wondering. That gave him a positive soft eligibility for getting a loan. Yes, this thing has soft and hard credit checks.

Anyway, I got a $30,000 line of credit and set it as my default payment method. Anything I purchased in GTA 5 would go onto the credit card, not my actual money, at least until I maxed the thing out. This was largely immaterial, as in my position as megacelebrity and CEO of Facebook, I am incontinentally rich. But still, nice to have.

The only thing that didn't quite take was the mod's implementation of physical bank branches. I could go in, sure, and mix with the hoi polloi who also wander in to do their banking, but I couldn't actually interact with the teller. In fairness, this might be because of the constant, chaotic churn of my modded Los Santos, which is ever disgorging flaming corpses in and around their desks. I guess it would be sort of hard to work in those conditions.

Over the last two weeks, Capcom dropped a parade of weapon breakdown videos showcasing the new Boost Bracer mechanics coming in the Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance expansion. Serving as a sort of on-demand sicko mode, the Boost Bracer lets hunters juice their combat actions with additional speed and impact, and adds some deliciously over-the-top attacks to the existing weapon movesets.

PC Gamer spoke to some of the lead Monster Hunter developers at TGS to pick their brains about how the Boost Bracer evolves the flow of Monster Hunter combat—and which weapon they expected to gain the most fans with its new moves. Asked what weapon they'd stake 10,000 yen on climbing the popularity rankings in Ascendance, one of the developers had an immediate answer.

"Hammer," series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto said without hesitation. "I think the hammer should definitely go up a place or two."

As a hammer main myself, my natural inclination is to cosign Tsujimoto's objective appraisal of the weapon's self-evident efficacy, utility, and inherent nobility. But I'm obligated as a journalist to acknowledge that there might be some slight favoritism in play.

Tsujimoto, who's worked as Monster Hunter series producer since the release of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 in 2007, has a decades-long record as an avowed hammer diehard. At the 2023 Justdan Game Festival in Taiwan, he revealed his Monster Hunter Rise guild card, which confirmed that he'd used the hammer in each and every one of his 895 completed hunts.

He literally doubled down on his hammer devotion in prerelease interviews for Monster Hunter Wilds: Asked by PlayStation Asia how he'd utilize mid-hunt weapon swapping—a new feature in Wilds—he said "both of my weapons will be hammers."

To Tsujimoto's credit, and at the risk of revealing even more of my personal biases, I'll note that the hammer's Boost Bracer toolkit does look pretty sick. In its Ascendance hammer breakdown video, Capcom showed off the return of Rise's Impact Crater switch skill as the new attack that'll let hammer hunters enter boost mode. And once they've engaged sicko status, they'll have access to a mid-charge boost dash for repositioning and closing distance, as well as a brutal new one-armed slam that can follow up the hammer's heaviest charged attacks.

If you suspect this coverage has a compromising pro-hammer slant—and at this point I suppose I can't blame you—Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka offered a second opinion: While the long sword has always enjoyed its place at the top of the MonHun weapon popularity rankings, he said gunlance will likely win over some converts.

"There's definitely an appeal—a special kind of romance—to gunlance this time that'll maybe see it go up the rankings as well," Hiraoka said.

If you haven't seen the Ascendance gunlance breakdown, I should clarify that the appeal in question involves using the gunlance's explosive shells to perform airborne plunging attacks and overheated stake thrusts. If that isn't a special kind of romance, I don't know what is.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance launches in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, though there's early access available before then. In the lead up to launch, The Coalition has posted expanded system requirements for the upcoming bug blast. These include what the game asks of your rig for top performance on the top settings—it's not easygoing, to say the least—but providing your GPU is at least capable of ray tracing, most should get by fine on medium settings.

An RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT will be required in order to run the game at 4K with the Ultra preset enabled. This is targeting a steady 60 fps, and I would assume, from the 12 GB of VRAM noted in the table below, that one should be able to swing it on a lower-end card with some assistance from upscaling.

Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, so we're not short of options there.

Otherwise, GPU demands are similar to those we saw back in June: an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 at a minimum, or an RTX 3060 Ti/6700 XT as recommended. It's only at 4K Ultra that demands seem to really ramp up. Though there is a blanket requirement for a ray tracing-capable graphics card to play Gears of War: E-Day. The devs explicitly say so on the new system requirements table:

"A hardware ray tracing capable graphics card is required. Graphics cards without dedicated hardware ray tracing support are not support."

You can't ask for it to be clearer than that. The game comes with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination.

CPU demands are pretty wide-ranging: from a mere Ryzen 5 2600X at a minimum, to a Ryzen 5 5600 as recommended. For 4K Ultra, it looks like eight cores or more are best; furthermore, a 3D V-Cache chip is recommend: the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The studio also suggests an Intel Core i7 14700K. I'd assume newer Arrow Lake chips would suffice, too, despite their slightly weaker performance at times.

RAM requirements are modest enough, even at 4K, at a mere 16 GB. Though only 12 GB are required to play the game. You'll have to make way for the game on an SSD, however, as 115 GB of storage space is required. That does actually need to be a solid state drive, so sayeth the devs.

In the first minutes of Control Resonant, Dylan Faden—prototypical sadboy, perpetually kicked puppy, and regretful mass murderer (he got better)—is thrust into a metaphysical war when Jesse, his psychokinetic former protagonist sister, wakes him from a seven year coma by stabbing a magical shape into his chest. She promptly disappears, leaving the Federal Bureau of Control directorless, outgunned, and forced to rely on the man who once killed hundreds of its staff to confront the cataclysm of interdimensional forces violently reshaping Manhattan into a labyrinth of otherworldly logics.

Dylan and the FBC might be going through it, but Remedy is flexing all its finest talents: sculpting uncanny hellscapes, placing tactical redactions in bureaucratic lore collectibles, and capturing endearingly human performances in circumstances beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, melee combat isn't on that list of strong suits—and Resonant's open world expects you to do a lot of it.

New weird

Remedy's environmental artists and lighting tech specialists are at the height of their powers in Resonant: The stark, brutalist surrealism that saturated the Oldest House in the first game has boiled out of its breached walls and onto New York's streets, reconstructing blocks of brownstones and downtown shopping districts into a sprawling, dreamlike mazework of impossible architecture and alternative physics.

Roadways have abruptly become cliff faces, with pavement—and the buses parked on it—bent skyward at perpendicular angles. Rows of pixel-stretched structures bleed into chasms where chunks of cityscape have simply fallen away.

Whole neighborhoods spiral upwards, outwards, inwards. Some are swallowed in the telltale oilslick haze of Hiss corruption. Others have been reconfigured according to the alien logic of the Patterning—a newer, stranger force whose spreading influence sorts apartments, taxis, streetsigns, pigeons, and unevacuated denizens into inscrutable designs of sprawling radial symmetry.

It's arresting, at turns breathtakingly incomprehensible and queasily familiar. Nestled into the mutated Manhattan's warped streets are pockets of untouched city life: abandoned cafes and laundromats and bespoke art galleries, which only heighten the sense of eeriness through their proximity to reality's active unspooling.

It's gorgeous, a sequel that's begging for an inevitable photo mode update. And it's a pleasure to move through, with Dylan's accumulating collection of mobility superpowers—floating, air-dashing, double-jumping, and eventually, freely reorienting gravity—allowing for truly impressive feats of traversal design.

I just wish I could say the same for all the hours of fighting I had to do.

Break in the pattern

I wanted to enjoy the concept of Resonant's combat. While Jesse wielded a manifold pseudogun in the OG Control, Dylan employs a different sort of shape-shifting weapon technique courtesy of the object his sister impaled in his sternum. It's called the Aberrant, and in his hands, it can assume and discard the shapes of different melee weapons on demand: Depending on your preference, it can be a hatchet; a scythe, a pair of short swords, a hammer, a drill, an orbiting, levitating sawblade, and more.

Playing a guy who can throw rocks with his brain and has a stick that can be infinite swords should be cool. In practice, it's… aggressively fine.

While eventual unlocks add necessary depth and variety, Resonant's opening hours suffer from the cardinal sin of its combat design: It's an action game where basic attacks don't have the juice. On its own, pushing the attack button won't achieve much except lightly grazing the heavy enemies that need to be killed to finish each fight. Instead, Dylan has to pile on temporary damage bonuses—granted most easily by staggering and executing lesser enemies—to make swinging his magical mystery club worthwhile.

Resonant's handful of boss fights are more engaging threats to navigate (though the sheer heft of their health bars still feels like a slog). But the endless rounds of generic creep culling that make up the bulk of playtime don't provide particularly interesting problems to solve. Instead, they're the same predicament with a binary outcome: Either you've stacked enough damage buffs that hitting a heavy enemy will accomplish something, or you can spend your time whittling away at its health bar until you get a chance to set yourself up properly.

To be fair, sometimes a guy will have a forcefield on him. This provides the benefit of occasionally making things more annoying.

Still, if all the pieces of Dylan's combat kit are moving with the right rhythm, it can deliver sparks of satisfaction. When there's nothing to trip up my flow of staggering fodder, buffing myself with their execution, and tearing into heavy enemies with damage-boosted obsidian daggers and stone-clad fists, Dylan's capacity for carnage makes an enjoyable spectacle as he launches from one short-lived target to the next.

Something inevitably will trip up our boy, however: My last ounce of power—the resource that fuels my combat abilities like rock telekinesis or toggleable fire damage—will be wasted when inconsistent auto-targeting flings my boulder at the wrong enemy. I'll earn an expendable damage buff from a perfect dodge just for Dylan to lunge past the Hiss horror I intended to merc and spend it whiffing at empty air.

I'll be staggered enough times by the sheer volume of Mold monster projectiles that I'll miss my peak damage Goldilocks window. An enemy will teleport away just as I'm winding up a triple-buffed finishing combo. Or, after watching the same enemy's execution animation a few dozen too many times, it'll just feel like another few seconds separating me from the parts of Control I'm actually interested in seeing.

That said, I'm still willing to award points for the fact that the Board—the FBC's unknowable astral plane patrons—celebrate every one of Dylan's executions with an exultant, interdimensional honk.

Altered items

Even without those irritations, the spectacle of Dylan's repetitive executions can't sustain Resonant's 30+ hour playtime. Its combat isn't compelling enough to seek out—but it expects that I'm eager to do so. As I beelined towards the story leads and sidequests that most caught my interest, I'd enter areas where the enemies had scaled past my current level—a nebulous figure calculated from my current number of weapon upgrades, spent talent points, and collectible health and power increases.

An underleveled Dylan makes Resonant's damage-sponginess even more pronounced, forcing me to circle back to combat encounters and world activities I'd intentionally noped out of just to get the Faden family's sweet, soft killing machine back up to par. But even that progression scheme feels confused. Keeping pace with enemy scaling provided an excess of weapon upgrade materials and talent points—resources I needed to spend to level up, but had regularly run out of interesting options on which to spend them.

I quickly settled on a comfortable and capable set of weapon forms; once those were maxed out, any additional resources I gathered were spent on weapon shapes I never needed. Meanwhile, the glut of talent points I earned meant I was regularly choosing talents for abilities I didn't even have access to. By the time I unlocked the game's final combat ability, I'd already been upgrading it for hours because I had few other options left on the tree.

As progression lost its luster, the late game's inflating enemy health pools and damage resistances stifled whatever welcome Resonant's combat hadn't already worn out. Mercifully, its granular difficulty adjustment settings helped soothe the chafing: Once I'd seen all the moving pieces in Dylan's combat arsenal, I simply juiced his outgoing damage and stagger buildup to speed combat along in the story's last few quests. I recommend anyone else do the same—ideally, earlier than I did.

While carving up Hiss by the hundreds didn't hold my interest, Resonant's world did. Not all of its open world attractions are winners; I'm still not sure I understand one particular side activity I kept completing by aimlessly hurling boulders at rampant bits of junk. But I kept returning to Resonant for the privilege of existing within it.

It's not just because the world looks good—never before has the texture of concrete been so celebrated—but it's dense with intention that makes poking at its corners feel rewarding.

From the placement of blacked-out bureau reports to the deliberate layering of gravity-bending traversal routes, the pockets of Resonant's Manhattan that stage its puzzles, side quests, and collectibles feel hand-crafted and considered where so many open world spaces feel perfunctory. That exploration might cash out in another chest of materials or another wave of Hiss guys to delete, but as long as I got to soak in another FBC memo, bespoke apartment interior, or ominous arrangement of questionably mundane objects, I got the prize I wanted.

Human resources

Story-wise, the sequel can't fascinate in quite the same way Control could before it was a known quantity. But the embattled, functionalist footholds the FBC are fighting and failing to maintain throughout the city have an altogether different effect. Seeing the organization forced to abandon the redaction-heavy deniability of its paranatural purview to operate in the open and on the backfoot makes its mission of managing interdimensionally cursed radios and hellgate slide projectors feel impressively real.

That's thanks in large part to the talent and direction of Resonant's voice cast. From its prime players to its nameless, proximity-barking NPCs, its performances feel so thoroughly, believably exhausted: Since the first game, half of the FBC has been isolated in lockdown within the Oldest House for seven years, only reconnecting with their bewildered and directionless fellows in the outside world when this new, unknowable apocalypse breaches containment.

And I can feel it. There's a natural, organic cadence to the cast's line deliveries, making Resonant's writing read as genuine—whether its characters are overwhelmed to the point of breakdown by the scale of the crisis, entering a reverie over the metaphysical implications of a murderous stereo, or seething at the presence of the man who killed scores of their comrades.

Speaking of: Let's talk about my sweet, slaughter-stained son, Dylan. Having endured repeated tragedy, isolation, unethical experimentation, and hostile interplanar possession for most of his life, he's effectively a good-hearted 10 year old in the body of a 30-something year old man who can manipulate profound paranatural forces. I might have preferred another outing in Jesse's shoes, but I warmed up to the younger Faden sibling more than I expected—aided by his growing, stumbling rapport with his impromptu FBC handler, Special Agent Zoe De Vera.

Thanks to his compound of sheltered naivety and his regret over being an implement of attempted omnicide, Dylan's the best open world protagonist the FBC could hope to have fall into its lap: Even if he was worldly enough to know when not to offer his help, he's too guilt-ridden to withhold it. And as the game delves deeper into his past as the subject of the FBC's experimentation under all-timer bastard Dr. Casper Darling, he's an excellent lens for exploring the fallout of an organization that knows just enough to be dangerous to all of reality.

If only that fallout was more fun to fight.

Hideo Kojima took to his social media channels earlier today to announce Bill Skarsgård as the new lead for his upcoming stealth-action game, Physint. He also reaffirmed some of the game's casting announcements from before it changed hands from PlayStation to Xbox after a seemingly messy split with Sony. Physint's top-billed cast are:

• Bill Skarsgård
• Charlee Fraser
• Don Lee
• Minami Hambe

Alongside the casting announcement, Kojima shared a new poster for Physint featuring Skarsgård, Fraser, and the new tagline "The Next Cold War Begins." Tucked away at the bottom is, perhaps, the most exciting news for me personally: Third-billed on production behind Hideo Kojima and Hideo Kojima is the GOAT, Yoji Shinkawa, on "character and mechanical design."

The longtime Kojima collaborator and Metal Gear character artist also worked at Kojima Productions on Death Stranding, but it's comforting to get confirmation he was unaffected by the recent production dust-up.

Speaking of Physint's continuity, Fraser, Lee, and Hamabe had all been confirmed in a prior Kojima Productions announcement about Physint's cast. Skarsgård as leading man John Physint (working name) is the only new casting info⁠—though, like with Shinkawa, it's probably worth clarifying after everything that's happened.

I was initially disappointed. Based on John Physint's shadowy appearance in the game's first teaser, I was hoping Kojima would spring for Robert Pattinson in the role. He's a known gamer on a bit of an all-time career hot-streak, and feels like a perfect fit for Kojima's oeuvre. Skarsgård was pretty great in Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu, though, and I can only hope he brings a similarly unsettling, sexual energy to Physint.

Kojima seems to be spinning up marketing for the game again now that Microsoft has scooped it from Sony. The PlayStation parent company reportedly cut Kojima off for going over budget and missing deadlines. There's been no definitive word, but it's hard to imagine that Kojima will be allowed to keep using Sony and Guerilla Games' proprietary Decima engine (which also powered Death Stranding) now that he's left the fold, potentially delaying this game that already felt like it was years away.

Kojima's other big upcoming project, O.D.—also published by Xbox⁠—looks much closer to release. Its "Knock" trailer from last year makes it look like a return to some of the ideas explored in Kojima's legendary demo for the canceled Silent Hills, P.T.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that Grand Theft Auto 6 multiplayer will launch next year, in 2027.

Rockstar hasn't made any official announcement about GTA 6 multiplayer, what's going to happen with GTA Online, or when we can expect the PC version. It's a safe bet that Clancy is not authorized to make such an announcement, but his comment doesn't sound speculative.

"We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators," Clancy told the publication. "You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer."

I've reached out to Rockstar and Twitch for comment.

I grew up by a dry riverbed. This was, on the whole, positive, because what a big empty riverbed is good for is setting things on fire, firing air rifles, and walloping golf balls into orbit. Some say they never stopped travelling. They're still out there, somewhere, in the space between the stars.

The reason Grand Theft Auto 5 is worse than a riverbed is that you can't do that last thing. Or, well, you can, but only at officially designated golf courses, which are prisons for the soul. I have now fixed this omission. I installed Street Golf, which lets you play golf, but in the street.

Much like the previous two mods I've bolted onto GTA 5's sagging frame (LifeInvader Business Mod and Become A Celebrity), I was immediately impressed by how much of the mod there is. This is no ramshackle creation—the possibility of equipping a golf club and whacking some balls in the street—but comes with a suite of tweakable menus, golf stats, and potent balltypes. Normal balls? Yes. Fire balls? Absolutely. Detonating balls? Very much so. And super balls, which you can set to travel about 200x further than any other ball in your arsenal.

Being as I am now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, who is instantly replaced by an almost-identical bodyguard whenever he happens to get pancaked by a flying car or assassinated by a squad of mercenaries, I opted to use him as a kind of ambulatory mini-golf windmill.

My shots were angled towards him, alternately sending him cartwheeling hilariously down the street, sending him cartwheeling even further down the street (super ball, you see), or setting him on fire. The detonating balls never quite worked. The mod procced some sort of achievement when I successfully nailed him in the dome with a maximum-power shot.

It's a pleasant distraction. Whenever the travails of my life in Los Santos get too much I can, at any moment, drop into Golf Mode. Would that real life were the same way.

Back in May, myself and some of the fantastic PC Gaming Show team went to Finland to interview the brilliant creative minds at Remedy. We learned a lot about Control Resonant, the upcoming ARPG sequel to 2019's Control. We showed you a snippet of those interviews in our June PC Gaming Show, but now, we've declassified the full video.

In case you need a refresher, Resonant follows Dylan Faden, brother of newly-appointed FBC director Jesse Faden, who spent most of the original Control locked in a cell because of his dangerously powerful abilities and possession by the Hiss. After waking from a coma, he discovers the Hiss have escaped the Oldest House and are running rampant in Manhattan, New York. Simultaneously, or maybe because of their incursion, the island is being affected by an otherworldly threat called the Patterning. It's turning people into monsters and making everything look weird.

"It's not simply a matter of ordering things in a predictable way, it's affecting the people," says creative director Mikael Kasurinen. "It affects time, it affects light." Everything in the city is topsy turvy: Fortunately, Dylan has the ability to flip the gravity and walk on walls and ceilings—or are those ceilings and walls? It's hard to tell.

Remedy didn't look to other videogames for inspiration. Instead, the work of M.C. Escher was used for inspiration, as were films like A Field in England (a real trip that I'd encourage everyone to watch) and Paprika. But why not games? "There's this tendency of people not taking risks, and games start to resemble each other quite a lot," art director Elmeri Raitanen says.

What intrigues me most about Control Resonant is the Resonants themselves, people who have been twisted into monstrous bosses. Dylan can defeat them and gain their power, but you're not forced to fight all of them, or even specific ones, lead level designer Anne-Marie Grönroos explains. Being a more open world game than its predecessor, Resonant may require you to defeat a certain number of bosses, but there will be more than that number available to fight, and developers can't always be sure what powers you'll have at any given time.

This can lead to some unpredictable outcomes: The devs told me about one playtester who didn't get the gravity shifting ability until much later than they'd expected. That variability will make it interesting to see what sort of challenge runs emerge when the game launches.

Personally, I'm gonna go for all the bosses, they look awesome. We get a good glimpse of a giant that spits lava, a big floating head, and a smaller, more elegant Resonant who was once a dancer, performing in Manhattan when the Patterning struck.

Remedy worked with real dancers to get her movements right, and the score for her fight was very important, too. "I went through quite a lot of my kitchenware and built a rhythm based on Fibonacci numbers," composer Petri Alanko says. So beats in the music follow a pattern of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on—you take the last number and add it to the number before it to get the next. Isn't maths neat?

That's not the only sonic trick Alanko used. Because Dylan is figuring out who he is without the Hiss possessing him, he's basically been reborn. "In the beginning, almost all the sounds that are related to him, they are formed of sine waves, which is basically the simplest form of sound," Alanko says. "Whenever he's evolving as a person, or as a weapon, some other frequencies, other nuances, other textures, the tonal effects behind whatever Dylan does, gets more complex and more, let's say interesting."

While Dylan and Jesse are related, don't worry about the Control universe going the way of Star Wars and only caring about one family. Kasurinen, the creative director, says he envisions a whole world, filled with different stories and characters. He took inspiration from pen and paper roleplaying games, and wants to create a universe with rules, but where players can see it from different perspectives.

You'll be able to see Resonant properly for yourself when it launches September 24. You can pre-order it on Steam. And don't forget to check out our upcoming PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, airing September 20.

You might have heard that I am Mark Zuckerberg now. This is true. Indisputable, even. But something isn't right—wherever he went, Zuckerberg Cool Original was recognised. He was a famous, or infamous man. When I stroll around Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5, even as the enormously wealthy owner of its barely-disguised Facebook parody, no one recognises me.

No longer. I have installed the Become a Celebrity mod (coincidentally, from the same author as the LifeInvader Business Mod), with the aim of becoming a prominent man about town. As with the LifeInvader mod, it's actually rather impressive in its feature set: the mod measures your public approval and your overall fame on separate axes, and allows you to undertake little repeatable quests to change both.

You start out, naturally, at zero fame, and the only things you can do to improve it are so-called "Z-lister" gigs. This means: busking. This means: busking upwards of 20 times at disparate locations scattered around Los Santos, each performance netting you about $500 and 0.5 fame points (which is not many fame points). This is fairly arduous, and made harder by all the flying cars, gang warfare, etcetera.

Also, people don't seem to appreciate it. As Franklin stood on the steps of city hall, strumming his heart on guitar, only his hired bodyguard offered any applause. Elsewhere, Los Santos either looked on impassively, ignored him, or died (due to the hazards, you see). Sometimes, to be fair to the stoic crowd, Franklin's guitar-playing animation would not trigger, and his 15-second performance would consist of him standing still and sort of grimacing.

I did it, though. All 20 gigs, eventually letting me crest a new summit of fame and take on a whole new type of gig: the Meet and Greet. In a sunny spot in the Los Santos business district, my fans gathered to revere and adulate me. They whooped, they clapped, they bounced up and down as Franklin stood stock-still and stared blankly into the middle distance. This is what it's all about. This is what I deserve.

The event was brought to an end when a significant portion of my fanbase was hit by a truck.

I have shifted from a position of 'really? A third-person action D&D game?' to cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons. Partially because of a really solid showing at Gamescom, actually leveraging the prospect of playing a spellcaster with a bunch of interesting interactions and some swanky-looking combat.

My optimism continues to grow after an interview with IGN, in which general manager Dominic Guay tells the site that the game will be getting rid of traditional quest markers—there's a compass you can turn off, but that's about it: "We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint."

While I'm not always opposed to a waypoint—it really depends on the kind of game—I can say that a surplus of hand-holding is always irritating. Developer Invoke Studios has lucked into a topical time to talk about this stuff, too, since such obnoxious waypointery has made us feel a lot better about not getting the PS5 exclusive Wolverine anytime soon.

Guay continues that "the core team on this game have worked on other open world games before and we've done the, let's say, the heavy-handed guiding approach before. What ends up happening at some point—and it's normal—a lot of players will just [blindly follow] the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity because you're like, well, why even bother? And so we didn't want to go there. We wanted the player to explore."

Instead of typical quests, the game revolves around "Mysteries", which sound like a sort of light immersive sim way of going about things. Like asking for rumours in a D&D game, players can bumble around town chatting to NPCs to accrue clues and information—creating the illusion of stumbling across something organically.

"Not only are there multiple entry points, but depending on how you stumble upon them, it might change how you interact with them … You can chance upon that Mystery from a completely different place, and then it'll lead you toward that settlement, and you'll know before coming in there's something fishy going on here. So then you'll approach that settlement differently than in this case where you learn it from within."

Not all of these mysteries are so straightforward—but this all sounds pretty solid to me. What'll really make this system good is whether Invoke Studios can pull it off in a way that feels natural. Creating the illusion that I'm some super-smart warlock detective is neat on paper, but if every beggar I bump into starts talking about a sinister basement, I might feel just as coddled as I am with big glowing map markers and prompts. Or yellow paint. At least we aren't doing yellow paint again.

Let's skip the preamble: I am Mark Zuckerberg now. The original Mark Zuckerberg? Who cares? He's knocked out in a ditch somewhere. Whatever. He's the past; I am the future. Specifically, the future of Mark Zuckerberg, who I am.

The latest mod I have installed into my increasingly uncontrollable build of Grand Theft Auto 5 is LifeInvader Business Mod, which grants you the ability to buy Rockstar's thinly veiled (which is to say, not veiled at all) parody of Facebook for the cool sum of a million bucks. I did not actually have a million bucks, but one of the 46,000 other mods I have installed let me grant myself that amount at the office's front door. In real life, this is called quantitative easing.

The mod is actually quite robust. It's not just a matter of buying the website and letting passive income roll in. You get a whole new menu through which you can staff up—acquiring devs of varying levels of talent—expand your server capacity, and even hire security to keep the hoi polloi away. You can donate to charity to buff your business' reputation, and have to keep an eye on staff morale.

Staff morale, by the way, is largely unimpacted by the flying car which has careened through the second floor window and begun gyrating around the server racks, gathering a pursuing swarm of monitors and wastepaper baskets behind it like a Saab Pied Piper. Nor do they mind, particularly, when armed men burst in and try to shoot their CEO, and they are equally unfazed when that CEO uses his laser vision to turn those men to hot slag.

Actually, while all this was ongoing, the mod kept serving me notifications: staff morale was at a steady 100% because the boss had showed up in the office, which is both appreciated and also not my experience of what happens when the boss shows up in the office. But Facebo—sorry, LifeInvader's developers are made of a different, hardier stock. It's a privilege to own them.

It's been just about a year since Kingmakers, the game about bringing a gun to a knife fight, was delayed just ahead of its planned launch, and we've heard nothing about it since. Today developer Redemption Road finally broke that extended silence with a new "deep dive" trailer detailing everything players will be doing in the game, and also opened the door to signups for an upcoming playtest.

First things first: I would be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge the awkward cinematic interludes. They're really not great, and all I can say is that hopefully they're just bits of exposition built specifically for the trailer and not actually part of the game.

That aside, there's a lot going on here. Fighting large numbers of hopelessly outclassed enemies is still the central hook in Kingmakers, but you're also going to be leading armies on a strategic scale, building and managing settlements, and collecting resources so you can buy better equipment.

I'm really not sure how I feel about all that. Rolling into Bannockburn behind the wheel of a Leopard 2 has obvious appeal, but do I really want to be worrying about placing farms and erecting fortifications when I could be punching 120mm HEAT-sized holes in some peasant's hovel? But on the other side of that coin, what happens when the novelty of 'you have a sword, I have a SAW' wears off? Sooner or later it might be nice to have other things to do, especially if you're the kind of gamer who occasionally asks questions like, 'Why am I in Bannockburn with a Leopard 2?'

(The famous Battle of Bannockburn, for the record, does not actually feature in Kingmakers, which is about assisting Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵ in his 1403 uprising against the English.)

If you have similar questions about how the full Kingmakers experience will compare to the initial bonkersness of its 2024 reveal, the Kingmakers playtest may be a way to find answers, or at least get an early feel for which way it's headed. Go to the Steam page, mash the playtest signup button, and when (or if, I suppose) the time comes you'll receive an email notifying you that you're in.

One thing that isn't included in today's video, sorry to say, is a new release date—Kingmakers is still listed on Steam as "coming soon."

First reported by Phrasemaker, Lies of P publisher Neowiz has filed an EU trademark for something called "Wonders of O" categorized as, among other, similar things, a bit of "virtual reality game software." While not 100% confirmed, there's a strong possibility that this is the Lies of P sequel we know is in development.

Similarly, it's difficult to see it being anything other than a Wizard of Oz adaptation in the same way Lies of P was a sicko's souslike Pinocchio. The name aside, Lies of P's post-credits scene ended with a view of a woman in ruby slippers clicking her heels⁠—prepare yourself for the tragic Cowardly Lion boss fight now, it'll be easier that way.

It just feels right, don't it? They're both fairy tales published in the Victorian era⁠—1881 for P, 1900 for O⁠—and while defined in the popular imagination by later Hollywood golden age film adaptations, the original works are far weirder and more interesting than most people give them credit for.

It seems like the marketing machine is starting to heat up for The Wonders of O. A few weeks ago, Lies of P developer Nough, formerly Round 8, put out a mini documentary hyping up its name change and work on the Lies of P sequel. Back in 2023, PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter liked Lies of P well enough in his 74% review, but at the end of last year, our colleague Harvey Randall expressed his excitement for the studio's next game based on the quality of Lies of P's Overture expansion.

Here's some logic for you: Grand Theft Auto 6—fattened on its billions—cannot help but be the greatest game of all time. This I have gathered from the apocalyptic euphoria that surrounds its release. But GTA 6 is not out yet, and the greatest game of all time, currently, is The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the PlayStation 2, original Xbox, and GameCube.

Ergo, QED, post hoc ergo propter hoc, abracadabra: GTA 6 will basically be like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.

With that key fact in mind, and with the aim of continuing to transform Grand Theft Auto the fifth into a facsimile of GTA 6 (this time on PC), I have installed Superman V into GTA 5. Your heroes now have laser eyes (also cryo eyes, pulse eyes, solar flare eyes, and so on), super speed, freeze breath, the ability to fly, and X-ray vision—which so far as I can tell is a heat-haze effect that happens intermittently.

I have waved goodbye to guns, much like the protagonist of A Farewell To Arms, who also probably did that after learning he could set people on fire by staring at them.

It works alarmingly well. I can ignite passing cars with my heat vision, freeze cops where they stand, and subject Los Santos' now-roving ambient hit squads to the carcinogenic effects of sustained X-ray exposure. I can also fly, which sometimes works, and sometimes results in Franklin, Michael, or Trevor tumbling lazily but uncontrollably through the sky, like an airborne flower.

My only concern is that, at this point, I am rapidly running out of keys on my keyboard with which to activate the various mods I have installed. At time of writing, hitting any of my function keys will summon a pile-up of distinct mod menus: Enhanced Native Trainer, Menyoo, the one that controls giving people piggybacks, the one that controls summoning dogs. What if what breaks by the end of this thing is not GTA 5, but my ability to control it?

Just a couple months after hitting "quite a big milestone" on its way toward a planned release in September, a multiplayer mod for The Last of Us Part 2 has been scrapped thanks to a cease-and-desist letter from Sony.

"Hey everyone, as you all know, the TLOU 2 multiplayer mod that has been in development since January was supposed to release this month," mod maker Speclizer announced on X (via RPS). "Unfortunately I recently received a letter on behalf of Sony Interactive Entertainment requesting for the mod not to be released.

"Extremely sad that this never got to see the light of day but I hope you'll continue to follow me onto the next project, this time something of my own. Thank you all for the incredible amount of support over the last year. I hope to bring you something bigger and better soon!"

A specific release date for Speclizer's mod hadn't been announced, but it definitely looked close. In their most recent developer update video, Speclizer said the mod had "gone from a buggy 1v1 test to something that actually feels like a real multiplayer mode," with a loadout system, multiple weapons and skills, five maps, and basic leaderboards.

Part of the eagerness for this mod arises from Sony's decision to cancel The Last of Us Online, which got the axe in 2023 so Naughty Dog could keep its focus on big-budget singleplayer games. TLOU Online director Vinit Agarwal said earlier this year that the game was really good, which I suppose is what you'd expect him to say, and also that Naughty Dog had "developed it almost to 80% completion," which makes the disappointment of not getting it even more acute.

So that makes this the second time a Last of Us multiplayer joint came this close to release, only to be cut off by Sony. But it is perhaps not entirely surprising: Sony has ordered a halt to other mods in the past, and in at least one case caused a modder to preemptively pull his work offline before Sony brought the heat.

As some have noted on The Last of Us Part 2 subreddit, Speclizer was also supporting the mod through a Patreon page, and while the plan was reportedly to release the mod for free when it was complete, even a hint of monetization on unofficial projects like this is generally a recipe for trouble.

In the wake of GTA 6, series veterans will wax nostalgically about the era of Rockstar expansion packs. No sooner had you finished The Lost and Damned, they'll tell their nurse in between spoonfuls of prunes, The Ballad of Gay Tony landed on your hard drive. There was none of this 'waiting a decade for a new GTA' nonsense.

Fewer will remember the first age of Grand Theft Auto, when even the expansion packs had expansion packs. Really—GTA birthed GTA: London, which in turn begat GTA: London 1961. The latter was released for free online in the summer of 1999, where only a subset of disc-spinning PC gamers were ever likely to find it. Which might have been for the best. Because GTA: London 1961 is perhaps the most punishing visit to the British capital ever conceived. Even including 28 Days Later, and the press reception of Meghan and Harry.

The original Grand Theft Auto already demanded a lot from its players—splicing a nascent open world structure with the limited lives and scorechasing of the arcades. To pass a given level, you'd need to complete several back-to-back chains of missions, thereby building a sufficient multiplier to reach the target score. Getting busted would halve your multiplier instantly. And since cops only needed to bump into you to effect an arrest, like a ghost in Pac-Man, you could easily wind up back at square one, with a dwindling pool of missions to pick from.

To this brutal ruleset, the designers of GTA: London 1961 decided to add mission timers tighter than Adam West's batsuit. How does 20 seconds from East Bermondsey to West Southwark strike you? Or 30 from Westminster Palace to the City of London, where the bankers work? Even in GTA's shrunken top-down metropolis, it's an extraordinary ask—only possible if you pick precisely the right route, floor it, and somehow avoid any serious collisions along the way. "You got to be a little faster," explains your cock-er-ney paymaster, helpfully. "Or Harold'll have your guts for gardening with!"

And should you fail, even once? Those same gangsters will throw you out on your arse, ending the mission with no way of recovery. "This ain't some leisurely afternoon stroll with a stunning bird! This is major international crime, and time and crime waits for Norman, as Harold once said! You blew it, you nob!"

I can't help but wonder how Harold can afford to be so picky with his drivers. If he's got Charlie Croker on the other end of the blower, why is he talking to me in the first place? Good riddance.

Except, without the largesse of old Harold, making money in London is no walk in the park. It might be a drive through Hyde Park, knocking down pedestrians in precise combos to try and max out your score the hard way. Or a slow, repetitive shift at the docks, feeding endless stolen cars to the crane in exchange for £100 notes. I scuppered my chances there by rolling an enormous red bus halfway into the Thames, blocking the crane and making future deliveries impossible.

Thankfully, I'm not the first person to be astonished by the obscenity of those mission timers. And GTA: London 1961 belongs to a time when in-game values could be easily tweaked via notepad files buried on your PC. A kind fellow traveller named Duckilous left instructions on the GTA Forums—an added 30 seconds here, an extra 2375 frames there—and it's no exaggeration to say that those simple inputs are transformative. "I am not a modder for the classic GTA games," my saviour writes. "This is something I just figured out in one day."

Duckilous' GTA London: 1961 remains a frantic, frazzling dash through pixellated renderings of some of the world's most famous landmarks. But that extra inch of breathing room makes all the difference. Another half a minute per mission means you actually have time to read what your objectives are before haring off towards them.

You even get a moment to appreciate the, ah, prose: "What the hell are you doing? You left Mr Caukenbolls all alone. Now some gang has kidnapped him. You'd better find him and get him back here, unharmed! A miss is as good as a moron in this game, mate."

Crucially, the added time means you get to complete more objectives, and therefore access more missions further down the chain. Among GTA: London 1961's scenarios are the theft of a rival gangster's clothes during a pond swim, the filming of a bespoke documentary for Harold to watch at home, and the first-ever implementation of driveby mechanics in the series. There's even a bit of Bond-lite cruising in a Jaguar with a union jack paint job, called the Jug Swinger.

But it's all over pretty fast. This, I now realise, is what the vicious timers were likely covering for: a damning scarcity of scripted missions. I managed to complete four of seven and, having failed the others, was left scraping around to make up the shortfall in my level score.

When run over with a 3x multiplier, policemen yield 3000 points each, and I calculated I'd need to pancake only about a dozen to reach the target. But eventually, even the coppers stopped showing up. London's streets turned eerily quiet, as if every last response unit in Scotland Yard had at last been totalled or exploded. The war was over.

In the end, I was combing the city from Camden to Camberwell, searching for one last way to eke out enough damage to sufficiently impress London's criminal class. And eventually, I found it: a tank parked on a football field. The cars and buildings of Westminster rocked with concussive force as rockets flew. Buckingham Palace's window bill for 1962 would be enormous. But I could finally say I'd completed GTA's toughest challenge to date. Give or take a 30 second timer.

Polyarc, the studio behind the Moss series of VR platformers, has announced it is shutting down, three months on from releasing its latest game on Steam.

"After nearly 12 years riding the joyous rollercoaster of emotions that is making video games, our time together has come to an end," the studio posted on LinkedIn (via IGN). "As we wind down active development, we are saying our farewells to each other."

Founded in 2015, Polyarc made its video game debut three years later with Moss (now known as Moss: VR). Initially released as a PSVR exclusive, Moss launched onto Steam in June 2018, quickly establishing itself as one of VR's best games.

Unlike most VR games, which naturally focus on first person experiences. Moss took classic third-person platforming and infused it with the unique perspective of VR. Players simultaneously controlled Quill—the game's heroic mouse protagonist—using conventional action/adventure controls, while also overseeing the game's storybook 3D as the reader, VR touch controls to manipulate objects and assist Quill in solving puzzles.

The result was an experience not quite like anything else—at least until the similarly excellent sequel arrived in 2022. Together, both games earned Polyarc over 160 awards and nominations, and were relatively commercially successful, especially on Meta platforms.

In 2025, Polyarc released Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss, a PvP strategy spinoff set in the same universe. However, Glassbreakers seems to have failed to attract much of an audience. Polyarc encountered further struggles later in 2025, losing funding for one mid-development project and failing to secure an alternative 'hail mary' funding deal with a third-party publisher. This culminated in the Polyarc laying off two-thirds of its staff earlier this year.

Polyarc's final release—Moss: The Forgotten Relic—arrived in July. Codeveloped by Blackbird Interactive, The Forgotten Relic is a compilation of the first two Moss games plus the original game's expansion The Twilight Garden, all reworked as a traditional, non-VR experience. Like most of Polyarc's output, the reception to The Forgotten Relic was very positive. However, the game clearly didn't sell well enough to preserve what remained of the studio.

As part of its statement, Polyarc posted a link to a Google spreadsheet listing the 30 developers affected by Polyarc's closure and their contacts, to help with future recruitment: "Working together over all of these years has been an honor. Bringing surprise and delight to those who played our games has been a privilege. Thank you to everyone at Polyarc, our work is now finished."

As Polyarc winds down, all the Moss games (except Glassbreakers) are currently on sale, with The Forgotten Relic at 20% off, and the VR versions of Moss and Moss 2 at half-price. While The Forgotten Relic has been well received, if you have a VR headset, it's well worth dusting it off to play both Moss games as they were originally designed to be experienced.

You've no doubt spent dozens of hours in GTA 5 doing millions of dollars of property damage with your fleet of speeding vehicles and arsenal of deadly weapons.

But what if you could do something good for the city of Los Santos while still satisfying your insatiable bloodlust and appetite for destruction? For example, blowing up and running down a couple hundred Flock cameras.

Thanks to the GTALPR mod (which stands for Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader), you can! The mod adds 235 Flock cameras to GTA 5, and in the modder's words, you can "do whatever the flock you want" to 'em. Shoot 'em. Smash 'em. Take 'em out with cars and tanks and shotguns. And you can even make a tidy profit while fighting back against the surveillance state.

What's especially cool about GTALPR, created by modder Morry, is that these cameras aren't just static props, they actually work. They'll photograph you as you drive past them, and you can save and format these photos for social media or your own scrapbook. The cameras will also alert the cops to your location, sometimes even if you're not breaking any laws—just like real Flock cameras are prone to do, because they suck.

Destroying the Flock cameras drops a bundle of components you can sell for extra cash, a nice bonus at $600 a pop. And if you want to go on a rampage, "there is built-in speedrun functionality, with a stats screen tracking number of cameras destroyed, and fastest time to destroy 10, 50, or all cameras," Morry says. That's rad. The mod also lets you place your own in-game cameras to save snapshots of your exploits around the city.

"Anyway, Flock is a scourge on America," the modder states bluntly on TikTok. "It's a private eight billion dollar surveillance company that operates over 100,000 cameras across the country. If you think the 235 in this mod are bad, just understand that that is literally one tenth of the cameras currently installed in LA County, which Los Santos is based on."

The modder, however, warns at the end of the video that "destroying Flock cameras in real life is illegal and will not, as far as we know, give you a loot box with $600."

Works for me. Learn more about the mod here, and grab it for yourself on Github. And thanks to FRVR for spotting the mod.

Reviews for Insomniac's long-awaited Wolverine are out, and, well, it's not great. I mean that in the very literal sense: It's fine—good, even, at least in some ways—but it's not great, and that's a problem for a game that was positioned as one of Sony's biggest PlayStation 5 exclusives of the past few years. The bar was high, and the ol' Canucklehead didn't quite clear it.

This is especially unwelcome news for PlayStation right now, given that its plate is already pretty full with other bad news. The platform's live service travails have gotten so far out of hand that it's managed to kill Destiny 2, and there's a reasonable expectation that Bungie itself might not be too far behind.

More recently, it pulled a massive botch with Hideo Kojima's Physint that led to the auteur partnering with Xbox on the project instead. Sony may have had its reasons for pulling the plug, but strictly from a PR perspective, that's the kind of self-own that leaves a deep scar. Similarly, the company is taking heat for its decision to end physical disc production in 2028, a move that may be rationally defensible but is nonetheless really pissing a lot of people off.

And now, this: A major PS5 exclusive that's landed with all the grace of an egg chucked at a school bus. Because of its platform exclusivity, we can't tell you what we think of the game, except that we're feeling a little better about not getting it. We can, however, tell you what other sites think of it, so let's do that.

"Missing that crucial X-factor"

GamesRadar: 3/5

GR's Leon Hurley says Wolverine's mid-game feels like the game Insomniac wanted to make: "It's lively, layered, and just a fun place to be." Alas, "the rest of the game feels thin, and largely consists of boxy corridors that top and tail Tokyo with shallow combat luges broken up by cutscene checkpoints and little else."

"Good character work props up flashy combat that wears thin over time"

IGN: 6/10

IGN reviewer Simon Cardy found much to like in Logan's character: "Liam McIntyre’s performance grants Logan a personality to match his trademark blades – a sharp, surprising hidden depth, housed in a bulky, blunt instrument of a body. He delicately balances the shadows of his past with the future of mutantkind, all while managing his Jekyll and Hyde nature, as animal instincts sometimes break through the compassion he strives to show." Actual gameplay, though, "wears thin well before the conclusion."

"Insomniac’s most violent game yet is a globe-trotting Wolverine adventure"

Shacknews: 8/10

Donovan Erskine at Shacknews said Wolverine "does an excellent job adapting the iconic mutant," with "some excellent character moments in what is otherwise a fairly standard comic book story." As others noted, he said combat became "repetitive" as the game progressed, but found it "deeply satisfying" despite that.

"A gripping, emotional bloodbath"

DualShockers: 8.5/10

Christian Bognar provided one of the more upbeat takes on Wolverine for DualShockers, writing that Insomniac's portrayal of the character is "a success," thanks to its "deeply personal story that explores what it means to live with trauma, loss, and regret." Christian also felt the combat in Wolverine was a step up from that of Insomniac's previous Spider-Man game, despite lacking Spidey's "freedom and versatility."

"Relentless momentum"

GameInformer: 8.5/10

GI's Matt Miller is clearly a fan, writing that "the high speed, brutal slashing, and unstoppable force of Wolverine are captured better than any film or game to come before." And where many other reviews found the game wore thin before its conclusion, calling it "an intense and unrelenting ride" that "doesn't wear out its welcome."

"Marvel's Wolverine's claw-fueled combat doesn't feel as deep as its systems suggest, but that didn't stop me from grinning ear to ear carving through its lengthy campaign"

TechRadar: 4/5

Writing for TechRadar, review Matt Cabral said Wolverine's fighting mechanics "suffer from a lack of meaningful depth," but praised the game's production values: "Supported by visceral, varied, and extremely violent melee combat, this set-piece-packed, cinema-rivaling spectacle puts you behind the claws – and mutton chops – of the fan-favorite superhero like never before."

"Only aims as high as its stout hero"

GameSpot: 6/10

Tamoor Hussain declared in his take for GameSpot that Wolverine is "a fun but forgettable experience that’ll entertain you for a few hours." But it also demonstrates the limitations of the character himself, especially when compared to the open world and energetic dynamism of the studio's previous Spider-Man games: "Wolverine might be the best at what he does, but what he does hasn’t let Insomniac’s developers be the best at what they do."

"Uninspired gameplay leaves Logan feeling declawed despite a strong narrative:

VGC: 3/5

Like many other reviewers, VGC's Jordan Middler enjoyed Wolverine's characters and story, but found everything the game's "tightly crafted and emotive story moments" to be lacking. "The third-person hacking and slashing is fine, but it barely evolves from hour one until hour twelve," Jordan wrote. And while Wolverine has a handful of other abilities at his disposal, they didn't really add much to the power fantasy and felt "ineffective" compared to Logan's standard moveset.

"Uninspired action carried by Logan's puppy-dog charm"

Eurogamer: 3/5

In yet another review that praises the characters and narrative of Wolverine while being cooler on the gameplay, Chris Tapsell wrote that the combat isn't bad, it's just overly repetitive. "After the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh wave of jump-and-parryable-attack guys comes at you with the exact same cadence of parry timing and bullet-dodging you just start to glaze over a little ... When you're putting your fist through someone's eyes, face, heart and feeling absolutely nothing, it's a sign something's a little off. In the blandest terms: too many of the same enemies, dealt with in the same way, for too long."

"A gloriously conflicted lead is let down by crude, boring battling"

The Guardian: 3/5

Keith Stuart at The Guardian is yet another reviewer who enjoyed Wolverine the character more than Wolverine the game. "Despite the full-bloodied use of Wolverine’s claws and a generous array of moves and combos, combat lacks both the bone-crunching impact of the Batman Arkham games and the balletic joy of Spider-Man. As the game goes on and the enemies line up, it feels increasingly like a chore. Logan becomes what he always dreaded: hired muscle."

"A patchwork quilt of ideas from other PlayStation games that frequently bump against each other"

Giant Bomb: 2.5/5

Giant Bomb's Shawn McDowell came in on the lower end of the Wolverine review spectrum—he liked the voice acting and "mostly-good combat," but not much else. "[Spider-man] is all about exploring every nook and cranny of New York through fast, fun web swinging, quietly taking out baddies from the shadows, and frequently getting into street brawls with thugs. If they were going to use that as a template for Wolverine, a character with far fewer tools who isn’t associated with the big city, how would that make sense? Turns out, it often doesn’t."

And a few unscored reviews, just for fun: The Verge says "Wolverine’s bloodthirsty focus on action is something that makes it stand out," Kotaku called it "refreshing in its straightforward focus" but also "stagnant," and Polygon pulled no punches, calling Wolverine "the biggest disappointment of the PS5 era."

Marvel's Wolverine comes out on September 15, and—as we've covered pretty well already—is available exclusively on the PlayStation 5.

Despite vocal opposition from some commissioners, the city of Miami Beach has voted in favor of a Grand Theft Auto 6 promotional campaign that will see Rockstar drop a reported $3 million on the city in exchange for what looks to be some surprisingly light-touch advertising.

The vote on the proposal was streamed on September 10 on the City of Miami Beach YouTube channel, and it was close, finishing at 4-3 in favor. Opposition to the campaign was rooted in familiar concerns about the nature of the GTA games themselves: Violent, criminal, and just a bad influence all around.

"Grand Theft Auto is an adult videogame where players steal cars, deal drugs, commit robberies, murder civilians, and assassinate police officers," commissioner David Suarez said to kick things off. "That's their right. They can make it, they can sell it, and they can advertise it. But that doesn't mean that the city of Miami Beach has to help them do it.

"We ask our police officers every day to put themselves in harm's way protecting this community. We spend enormous resources fighting drugs, violent crime, and disorder. And we've spent over a million dollars over the past three years on a spring break marketing campaign trying to move Miami Beach away from an image of chaos and lawlessness. Now, we're going to take our beaches, one of the most recognizable symbols of this city, and turn them into a space for Grand Theft Auto. What kind of message are we sending to the world?"

Suarez also played a montage of clips from past GTA games and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, showcasing an extensive range of crimes that players can commit: "I for one don't want Miami Beach associated with this connotation of a brand. I don't think that this is worth what they're offering. I don't think it's worth really anything."

Commissioner Monica Matteo-Salinas countered by pointing out that "we're not going to be doing live action GTA in the city. We're not giving away pistols and cocaine to people." Instead, she said, the campaign is about people who play GTA, and videogames in general, who aren't going to embark on crime sprees because of a videogame, but who might just drop a lot of sweet tourist dollars on Miami Beach.

Money was also a focal point for commissioner Joseph Magazine, who said GTA 6 is coming to the world regardless of what Miami Beach does. "That spotlight's coming. The question remains whether we actually stand on the sidelines and allow that narrative and die to be cast or whether we actually take control and create an opportunity that works for the residents."

Rattling off a list of projects the city has had to put off due to lack of funding, he continued, "Protecting Miami Beach doesn't mean hiding. It doesn't mean shooing something away that's going to happen. It means the confidence to engage, to strike partnerships, to actually take control over something that we can embrace."

Magazine added that he'd spoken to police about it, and it seems like they're not particularly concerned: "One actually kind of laughed at me, he goes, 'Dude, you think a videogame is going to change what we do in the city or that's what we're worried about?'"

Interestingly, it sounds like this campaign will be fairly subtle compared to the excesses of GTA itself. Commissioner Laura Dominguez said GTA 6 logos won't appear on city property like lifeguard chairs or "iconic public places," but instead "will be advertised discreetly with our partner, the Boucher Brothers ... it'll be on their chairs and their umbrellas."

Boucher Brothers is a Florida-based "hospitality management" company that provides services to municipalities in the state. Amusingly, it's also famous enough that it's being parodied in Grand Theft Auto 6 as Sol Sisters, whose umbrellas can be seen in the background of the first GTA 6 trailer. The similarity in design is hard to miss.

Despite the hand-wringing from some commissioners, the vote ultimately passed 4-3, authorizing the Miami Beach city manager to negotiate a deal with Rockstar for a GTA 6 marketing campaign.

It should be noted that, as far as I can tell, this campaign is different from the proposed collaboration with Miami-Dade County that came to light last week: Miami Beach is a resort city within the county, and this particular campaign was focused on that city specifically. That could indicate that other such collaborations, with other cities in Florida, are in the works—I've reached out to Rockstar to ask and will update if I receive a reply.

The Independent Workers of Great Britain union held a rally today in Glasgow, Scotland to mark the beginning of the final workplace tribunal hearing that will resolve the case of 31 former Rockstar employees who were fired by the company in October 2025.

The dispute turns on the cause of the terminations, or lack thereof: Rockstar says the employees were fired for leaking information about "upcoming and unannounced" games in a public forum, while the IWGB says it's plain-and-simple union busting, and that Rockstar further erred by firing the employees immediately rather than following a disciplinary process or granting the former employees any opportunity to appeal. The fired employees are seeking a ruling declaring that their terminations were unfair, along with reinstatement or compensation.

"We believe Rockstar has tried to get away with Grand Theft Employment Rights," IWGB union president Alex Marshall said. "After a year of fighting to get answers, we hope this tribunal will finally back them into a corner and bring the truth to light. As the world gets its first proper look at GTA 6, this hearing will give people a chance to look behind the scenes at what happened to the workers who helped make it."

One especially powerful moment at the rally was a speech given by former Rockstar programmer Rachel Crawford, who worked on Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and was among the employees terminated in 2025.

Closing out the rally, @nershly.bsky.social beautifully speaks about her experience being fired by Rockstar and how they try to use fear.

— @austinkelmore.com (@austinkelmore.com.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T13:29:32.149Z

"The modern workplace runs on fear. Fear of speaking out. Fear of being punished. Fear of being fired, losing your livelihood and even your home.

"On October 30 2025, I was fired by Rockstar Games. I was fired without warning and without even being given a clear answer as to what it was I'd done to deserve it. Within minutes, I was out the door, feeling humiliated and ashamed, and ever since I've replayed that day in my head, wondering what I could or should have done differently.

"On that day, fear asserted its dominance. I felt its claws deep in my heart, urging me to run with my tail between my legs and never to look back. I saw it in my former colleagues, too afraid to talk to me or even, in some cases, to look at me. I heard it every time the ones who did speak to me told me how powerless they felt to do anything to stop or undo what had happened, even though they knew it was wrong.

"Fear wants to rule us. It closes our minds, our hearts, and our horizons. It makes us small, sad and hopeless.

"But today, we are fighting fear. This long-awaited hearing is an opportunity to put fear in its place below us. Over the next five weeks we will face fear and show that we refuse to be silenced by it. In spite of fear, we will stand up proudly, speak our truth, and demand a better industry—a better world—that we all deserve.

"And we're not just fighting fear in the courtroom. Many of my former colleagues at Rockstar Games have taken up the union's flag and are now pushing for the recognition, protection, and power that fear has denied them for too long. Fear will not defeat them and it will not defeat us. Union makes us strong."

The hearing is set to run until October 16, just over a month ahead of the console release of Grand Theft Auto 6, which happens on November 19. The union and fired workers are asking people not to boycott the game, saying in August that "we spent years pouring our hard work, skill, and creativity into making GTA, and we want people to experience the universe that we helped build." Instead, supporters who want to do a solid for the cause are encouraged to contribute to a fundraising campaign launched by the IWGB in support of the legal action against Rockstar.

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Rockstar reiterated its defense on the matter. "“Rockstar Games' position has been clear and consistent throughout," a Rockstar representative said. "Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal.”

I came to Onimusha: Way of the Sword for the sick samurai action, but I stayed for the surprisingly engaging, funny, and heartfelt storytelling. Musashi Miyamoto has made it into my top five all-time favourite protagonists, but the great character development doesn't just stop with him: Shizuka Gozen, Dokyo, and Sasaki Ganryu all deserve their flowers, and as it turns out, one of them is getting some.

Mild spoilers for Onimusha: Way of the Sword ahead.

An Onimusha: Way of the Sword prequel webcomic has dropped seemingly out of nowhere, and it follows my second favourite character, Sasaki Ganryu. The story starts with Ganryu battling Musashi and ultimately suffering a humiliating defeat. According to the official Webtoons page "what follows is a bloody quest to reclaim his honor that leads him down a path of madness and obsession," as he stumbles across an oni gauntlet that gives him more power than he could've ever imagined.

The comic begins before the opening of the game, with its first chapter taking place on a deserted island where Ganyru is waiting to fight Musashi. The fight itself doesn't last long, as Musashi makes quick work of him with a paddle, before announcing he's headed over to Kyoto and jumping into the sea and swimming back to the mainland.

Ganryu obviously doesn't heed Musashi's warning not to follow him and after shaking off his bloody defeat catches a boat so he can follow Musashi because he's "the only swordsman who gets my blood boiling"; jeez guys, get a room.

There's no word as to how long this webcomic will last, though, so it's anyone's guess as to what its later chapters will include. It may end with their fight at Kiyomizu Temple as that would link the webcomic to the game pretty seamlessly. Although, I really hope it doesn't stop there.

I'd love for it to bleed into the game and cover Ganryu's descent into madness after his loss at the temple and before their fight at Arashiyama. Ganryu was already showing signs of a breaking at Kiyomizu Temple, but he's like a completely different person when you see him in Kyoto with his corrupted Oni Lady.

I'm already well into my second playthrough on its Carnage level difficulty, before long I'll have to move onto whatever next game climbs to the top of my to-do list. But at the very least I'll have this webcomic as a solid source of Musashi and Ganryu content; that'll help me through the dark days ahead.

I'm still not sure what to make of Control Resonant. I liked Control quite a lot but as a shooter, and I feel very ambivalent about the new and very different ARPG-style gameplay in the sequel. Our Morgan Park seemed cautiously optimistic following his preview session in June, but it's such a fundamental shift in the underlying gameplay that for me, many questions remain.

One question that doesn't remain any longer, though, is whether I—and you—will be able to run it. With Control Resonant now just a couple weeks out, Remedy has dropped the final PC system requirements, breaking down what you can expect from the game when it launches on September 24.

Across the board, you'll need 16GB RAM and 120GB of free space on your SSD—you can try rolling with an HDD but that's going to result in what you call a sub-optimal experience. It's no secret that this is a bad time to be upgrading pretty much anything, but SSDs are effectively essential these days: If you don't yet have one, our elite hardware hitters are on top of the best cheap SSD deals you can find today, so give it a look. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit only if you please, is also required.

Beyond that, we get into the details:

We're excited to announce the final PC system requirements for CONTROL Resonant! Please have a look at this chart to see how the game runs on your rig.CONTROL Resonant arrives September 24th on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Pre-order now! #CONTROLResonant

— @remedygames.com (@remedygames.com.bsky.social) 2026-09-09T16:19:23.230Z

Minimum (1080p, 30 fps)

• Upscaler Preset: Quality
• Graphics Preset: Low
• Ray Tracing Preset: Off
• CPU: Intel Core i5-8500 or AMD Ryzen 5 3500
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, or Intel Arc A580
• VRAM: 6GB

Recommended (1440p, 60 fps)

• Upscaler Preset: Balanced
• Graphics Preset: Medium
• Ray Tracing Preset: Off
• CPU: Intel Core i7-10700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, or Intel Arc B580
• VRAM: 8GB

Enthusiast (4K, 60 fps)

• Upscaler Preset: Performance
• Graphics Preset: High
• Ray Tracing Preset: Off
• CPU: Intel Core i7-10700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
• VRAM: 10GB

Ray Tracing Minimum (1080p, 30 fps)

• Upscaler Preset: Quality
• Graphics Preset: Low
• Ray Tracing Preset: Low
• CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super, AMD Radeon RX 6600, or Intel Arc A580
• VRAM: 8GB

Ray Tracing Recommended (1440p, 60 fps)

• Upscaler Preset: Balanced
• Graphics Preset: Medium
• Ray Tracing Preset: Medium
• CPU: Intel Core i7-10700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 9070
• VRAM: 10GB

Path Tracing Enthusiast (4K, 60 fps)

• Upscaler Preset: Performance
• Graphics Preset: High
• Ray Tracing Preset: High
• CPU: Intel Core i7-10700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080
• VRAM: 12GB

Obviously the high-end spec is, well, high, but Control Resonant looks reasonably restrained at the lower end, so aging rigs will hopefully be able to deliver a reasonable experience. The 120GB SSD space is a bit of an eye-popper—that's triple what the original Control demanded—but three-digit storage requirements are increasingly the norm, so... I refer you once again to our guide to the best cheap SSDs, I guess. Sorry.

Control Resonant is out on September 24 and is up for pre-purchase now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The fidelity of Grand Theft Auto 6's world makes random violence look considerably less silly than it did when the characters had boxy claws for hands, but Rockstar isn't stopping players from doing what they want in Vice City and its environs.

We know that because we've seen the GTA 6 leaker shoot up a nudist party, murder the residents of a homeless encampment, and beat a delivery driver to death—quite a contrast with the mission-focused gameplay in the official reveal.

A little devil icon in one of the leaked videos did lead us to wonder if GTA 6 would judge us for antisocial behavior, a la Red Dead Redemption 2's Honor system, but the details that have come out since the reveal suggest that 'Criminal Profiles' aren't quite like that.

According to a preview from TGG on YouTube (embedded above), Rockstar doesn't want to punish players for how they play, or create a situation where they have to grind their reputation up to a 'better' level in order to progress.

Here's the short version of what TGG learned on his trip to Rockstar North:

• There are four main Criminal Profile states: Professional, Aggressive, Violent, and Psycho
• There's also a fifth 'shattered' state where the meter cracks and can't be changed; TGG got the impression that this is for players who clearly don't want to engage with the system
• You can turn off Criminal Profile notifications
• Jason and Lucia can have different Criminal Profile states
• Staying in the Professional state is about "restraint and control" and "not killing or injuring anyone unless you have to"

This all aligns with IGN's learnings, but adds a few new specifics. What neither source came away with are specifics about how or how much Criminal Profiles will affect the story—will it lead to different endings, or just slightly change how NPCs interact with us?—but a comment from GTA 6 co-studio head Rob Nelson suggests that we will notice the effects of our actions.

Asked what he's most proud of in GTA 6, Nelson told TGG that it's "the way the whole thing works together."

"We've got a lot of very complicated systems working in an interconnected way," said Nelson. "You can forget it's a game that has been designed to try and work this way. I think it allows you to sort of roleplay as heavily or as lightly as you want to.

"The idea that you have a fair amount of choice now in terms of the way you can approach situations. You can still cause as much carnage as you can imagine. How does that make you feel if it has an impact on certain things? Do you still want to do it? Do you want to do it more? Do you want to do it less? Do you care at all? It's up to you and what matters to you."

Samurai adventure Onimusha: Way of the Sword notched over a million sales on its launch day, Capcom has announced.

The success is deserved, per our reviewer Wes, who said that Way of the Sword "whips ass" in his 83/100 review. (And if the demo had you worried that it wouldn't be much of a challenge, Wes says not to fret too much: "I died plenty, particularly to bosses that ruthlessly punished my poor parry timing or overeager button mashing.")

According to Capcom, the one million launch day sales for Way of the Sword has put the Onimusha series as a whole at 10 million lifetime sales. The last new game in the main series was Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, which released 20 years ago.

"In addition to regularly releasing major new titles each year, Capcom is focusing on re-activating IPs that haven't had a new title launch recently," the developer said. "The company is working to further maximize corporate value by leveraging its rich library of content, including this title."

New Lost Planet game when?

It's become a cliche to say that Capcom's on a bit of a run lately, but here's yet another mile marker in the developer's 2020s streak, which has included a pair of well-liked Resident Evil remakes, two new Resident Evil games, Monster Hunter Rise and Wilds, Pragmata, Street Fighter 6, and Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, among other games.

It already felt weird and wonderful to say that PC Gamer has reviewed Metal Gear Solid 4, a game for the personal computer. Now it gets even weirder: MGS4 mods are incoming, with TriggerHappy on YouTube already showing off a custom map in Kojima's 2008 stealth-action classic.

Back in 2021, modder Jayveer showed off a map ported from Metal Gear Arcade into Metal Gear Online 2, the multiplayer accompaniment to MGS4, but to my knowledge, TriggerHappy's is the first demonstration of a custom singleplayer map in MGS4.

It's 55 beautiful seconds of Old Snake crouch walking around Groznyj Grad, the iconic fortress level of Metal Gear Solid 3. Only now it's infested with Gecko walkers mooing their incongruous moos and showing off their distractingly shapely legs. Stupid, sexy Geckos. TriggerHappy laconically describes the gameplay as "initial testing for adding AI to a custom map."

The enemy AI certainly seems to work: Those Geckos are not happy to see Snake, and it's not because they believe a man of his age shouldn't be putting so much stress on his back and knees. It's unclear how TriggerHappy got this custom map working, or how far away we are from widely available map making tools, but this is an exciting first step in the realm of custom content for MGS4.

I've mostly connected Master Collection modding with the essential performance and visual fixes that the community needed to cook up after Volume One's disastrous initial launch. Thankfully, not only has the Volume One situation vastly improved with official patches, but Konami shipped Volume Two (containing MGS4 and Peace Walker) in a much more acceptable condition.

Looking at the MGS4 Nexus, the projects on offer are fairly simple: Custom textures, miscellaneous tweaks, and an FPS unlocker all stood out to me. You can get DLSS5 working in there too, if you're into that sort of thing. Metal Gear is not a series I've ever strongly associated with modding, but I'm excited to see where we might go from here.

In a Gamescom interview with IGN, Saber CCO and former id Software dev Tim Willits said that the company's upcoming Space Marine follow-up is not using generative AI in its development. The studio has otherwise been embracing the technology, which was at the heart of the recent Rideshare Stimulator controversy.

"There is absolutely no generative AI in Space Marine 3 or Hellraiser or Stuntman or Turok or Jurassic Park, or [Saber's John Wick game]," Willits told IGN. "But like we said, we're going to experiment with it. Try it out in Rideshare, see if it works. See if people like it. If they don't like it, we're like, 'All right.'"

It seems that Saber is far more circumspect about using generative AI in its big ticket games, especially when there are license holders like Lionsgate or Paramount to consider.

Warhammer 40K owner Games Workshop, for its part, is enforcing strict internal rules against genAI use in any of its products or advertising, a crowd-pleasing stance that contrasts with rival tabletop giant Wizards of the Coast's willingness to play footsie with AI usage.

But Willits, like Saber CEO Matt Karch, is solidly pro-AI, and sees smaller projects like Rideshare Stimulator as an opportunity to feel it out. "If you're going to experiment, it's a good one to experiment on," Willits said. "If anyone tells you that they have it figured out, they don't. It'll take a couple years and things will settle out and we'll figure it out."

PCG news writer Joshua Wolens had his own conversation with Willits at Gamescom, and touched on similar topics. Willits believes that team size and overspecialization are major contributing factors to the industry's current economic crisis, but also argues that this crisis isn't as bad as it's being presented. Willits also said that, had the OG id Software crew gotten their hands on generative AI back in the day, they would have aggressively used it.

Listen, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little biased towards parry-based action games. Sekiro will forever be my favourite FromSoftware game because of just how excellently it captured the back-and-forth feeling of swordplay, not only with its timed deflection mechanic, but its mandate to have you keep the pressure on.

But I appreciate that, for some, parry fatigue might be setting in. My fellow writer Mollie Taylor's sick of it, for instance—and I do understand. I think there are some games which use it as a bit of a crutch, and even the ones that don't can wear out their welcome.

Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for instance. I liked it, but I wouldn't want every turn-based RPG I play to have a timed block in it. Still, it's fun to have the occasional one where stats can be overcome with deft enough bumper hands.

But to paint every parry-based system with the same brush seems short-sighted to me, because this deceptively simple mechanic has a ton of juice still left inside it: no other game proves this more than Onimusha: Way of the Sword, which, as far as I'm concerned, has broken new ground in terms of what parries can do.

Onimusha has one parry button, or at least, it has one parry button on the surface: your block, which when timed just as a blow is coming in, will send a series of sparks flying. The trick that Onimusha pulls—and most good parry-based games will do this—is in actually giving you several parry buttons. Onimusha is parries all the way down. You've got:

• The parry. Hit the block button at the right time and see sparks fly.
• Your deflect, an advanced version of the basic parry that requires you to hit another button while blocking.
• The Issin counter, a parry for people with huge cajones with massive risk and massive reward.

This is the trick to making a parry-based action system feel good, like finely-chopping veggies so you don't notice them in your soup. Not only do each of these parry-like mechanics have a unique attack they counter, they also serve different purposes, giving you a toolbox of ripostes to your enemy's assault.

The basic parry builds up a meter, the Blazing State, which increases your damage and stagger—naturally graduating you to the more demanding deflect ability as time goes on once it's full. Deflecting also counters unavoidable attacks.

The genius here is in the back-and-forth minigame between parrying and deflecting, since your Blazing State depletes over time, and refreshing it is easier than building it up from scratch. Meaning that even when your sword's on fire and you're deflecting, you still want to throw in the odd parry to keep your weapon ignited.

Then there's the Issin counter, my beloved. The extremely tight window for using this thing seems too punishing at first, but Onimusha throws in highly-telegraphed attacks for you as a treat—these are Issin bait. Slow, ponderous swings with clean windows that'll have you salivating the moment you see their wind-up.

It's often said that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a rhythm game in disguise, and the same is true with Onimusha. And just like DDR has multiple directional arrows to keep things interesting, so too do these games grant you a broad toolkit, one that both locks you into an engaging and fatal game of rock, paper scissors.

There's also that sliding scale of risk, too, the progression from parrying, to deflecting to Issin counters encourages you to make more daring plays. The easiest defensive option gives the smallest reward, whereas an Issin counter shears off a huge chunk of health and stamina from your foe. And even then, both Issin and the deflect are riskier for different reasons! Deflecting has a more complicated set of button presses, like trying to throw out a dragon punch in a fighting game, whereas Issin has strict timing requirements.

Onimusha's at the forefront of parry experimentation, but it's not the only one. My favourite non-standard parry, outside of Onimusha, is in Nine Sols' Unbounded Counter. You hold a different block button, are vulnerable for a short-wind up, and then are given a short window whereupon releasing the button creates a parry. Hold it for too long, and you'll whiff, opening yourself up with another window of vulnerability. It requires you to know an attack's coming three business days in advance, which is why it feels so good to pull off.

Point being, I think the parry gets a bad reputation because it's viewed as an overly simple solution to engaging action combat—fie, I say! I bite my thumb at thee! Parries, like any other game mechanic, can be ham-fisted in their implementation. But they can also be very, very clever.

The reason I don't want parries to go anywhere isn't just because I like them, but because I think there are genuinely so many interesting potential versions of them we're yet to see from inventive devs. I want more games like Onimusha to surprise and delight me, and I want to see what ways a humble defensive button press can be altered to send me to action combat heaven.

At the Game Developers Conference earlier this year, Aggro Crab developer Nick Kaman told me that he thinks there's a lot of meat left on the bone when it comes to co-op "friendslop" games, and that he wants to keep working in the space. Aggro Crab is still down to zig and not zag, though, and will be publishing and supporting a very different sort of game, the upcoming platformer Rebounder.

It's tough enough to stand out in the games market these days, let alone as a 2D platformer, so I'm always excited when one really breaks through and catches my eye. Rebounder is killing it on the art front, presenting everything in this color-limited, comic book, cel-shadey view that I really dig. It dovetails with the story and designs, a sort of blue collar, working class sci-fi reminiscent of Scavenger's Reign, Alien, or Mouthwashing.

"On a remote lunar worksite, valuable resources from an ancient age flow underfoot, and shareholders demand extraction," reads Rebounders' synopsis on Steam. "Contract workers fly-in and fly-out; blue collar labourers from around the galaxy all trekking to the edges of civilization for the next gig.

"A Rebounder runs lines. They pull up their boots each day and speed through hazardous terrain to deliver precious cargo from point A to point B by any means necessary. It’s the gnarliest trade in the universe."

Rebounder looks to be no slouch on the gameplay front either: Its Steam page references kaizo games, hardcore, challenge run fangames/romhacks built out of classic 2D platformers (mostly Super Mario World). It's a style of game I've always loved to watch, but it feels relatively unapproachable for the average Joe. Taking kaizo games' lead as inspiration for a full game strikes me as a brilliant move.

"I think someone got really interested in mario shell jumps," observed top commenter ChampionBob on Rebounder's announcement trailer. Tricky jumps requiring deft manipulation and timing around defeated Koopa shells are a kaizo staple, and Rebounder seems to replicate that style of platforming with its grody little sci-fi bits and bobs.

So it looks rad, the story sounds neat, and it's cribbing notes from a style of fangame that hasn't seen a ton of imitation yet⁠—I'm on board, let's rock. Rebounder is targeting a general 2027 release window, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

If you're sick of parrying in videogames, then Onimusha: Way of the Sword might hit you, dear reader, the wrong way—especially since its roll is extremely slow. The game's introduction to its combat is a competent, though incredibly careful one. It establishes its full suite of defensive abilities with a glacial pace. Like you're a deer and it's afraid you'll bolt into the underbrush.

The problem with this is that it gives the wrong impression. Onimusha's combat is utter action game bliss when it really gets going—but it takes a minute to get there. Not only does it drip-feed you with mechanics, but it starts off with the most ubiquitous one: The parry, or timed block, or deflect—whatever you want to call it.

And listen, parry fatigue is widespread. In fact, one in four action game players has experienced it in the past five years alone. I get it. But if you find yourself afflicted, you should persevere.

The secret that Onimusha keeps, like a hidden oni gauntlet under its cloak, is that this parry with its forgiving timing (and admittedly sick-as-hell sound design) is just one of the many tools that protagonist Musashi has tucked away. A basic percussion drumbeat that's later joined by the other instruments of this rhythm game in disguise.

Though Musashi only starts with the aforementioned timed block, his kit unfolded like a beautiful lotus flower throughout my 30-something hour playthrough. You've got your deflect, a more involved parry that requires you to be holding down the block button first, and you've also got a timed dodge that's better against unarmed attacks. Then there's the Issen.

The Issen is by far my favourite tool of his defensive kit—a reversal that demands you hit an attack button at the last moment, leaving you completely open, with perfect timing. The risk matches the reward, as an Issen can one-shot most regular mooks and deal a hefty amount of stagger and damage both. It'll also give you souls that charge up a super state where you can do it even more.

All of this pairs nicely with the attacks enemies throw at you. There's the interplay between weapon and unarmed attacks—letting you swat aside sword-swipes or dance around fisticuffs. There are grabs, which force you to break rhythm and dodge at the right time to counter them. There's blade barrages, which ask you to remember what button you were just mashing, and blade locks, both of which can trigger randomly.

They might enter a countering stance, requiring you to smash them with your fists to knock them off-balance—or they might throw an un-avoidable attack, forcing you to parry or deflect. Onimusha at its peak never lets you rest for long, and enemies are always throwing out some new combo of threats for you to deal with in the world's deadliest game of rock paper scissors.

As someone very familiar with this genre, a Sekiro sicko with plenty of hours plugged in its imitators, like Lies of P and Nine Sols, I'm happy to say that Onimusha has one of the most textured, compelling combat systems of its ilk. It's really well-designed, which is why it's just a shame it takes so long to get there.

But get there it does. By around the midpoint of the game, Onimusha has shrugged off its unfortunate, hand-holdy AAA introduction and fully started baring its teeth. And it turns a weakness—a propensity for repeat boss and miniboss encounters—into opportunities to flex on old foes.

Once the combat starts clicking, these mandatory rematches start becoming a stage on which to demonstrate your mastery. Enemies that once gave you trouble can be dispatched deftly because you know their dance now, and you've acquired more than enough tools to deal with them. Meeting with these foes again felt like catching up with an old rival and showing off what I'd learned since.

If Onimusha feels unwieldy or over-familiar in the first few hours, I encourage you to stick with it—and if you're skeptical about the raft of parry-based games, I still think you should give this one a go. Slow start aside, it's a best-in-class action game that rewards your investment tenfold.

Every new Rockstar game is more simulation-heavy than the last, and Grand Theft Auto 6 aims to bring players closer to real-life in a variety of ways. One of these is the addition of vehicle refuelling, which will require players to stop off at gas stations (or petrol stations if you're a Brit like me) and watch your disposable income vanish in a stream of fossilised plant matter.

This mechanical tweak has proved somewhat controversial among Grand Theft Auto players, with some believing that refuelling cars will be inconvenient and interrupt the flow of driving and shooting the series is built upon. Yet while Rockstar is sticking to its guns on the matter of refuelling, co-studio head Rob Nelson recently stated that filling up your car won't be a massive drag on your adventure across Vice City.

Nelson's comments come via YouTuber TGG (via GamesRadar+) who recently saw an extended preview of Rockstar's hotly anticipated crime sim, which included refuelling in action. TGG says that gas stations allow players to both repair and refuel cars, and facilitate recharging for electric vehicles alongside refuelling for cars powered by internal combustion engines. Selecting the refuel/recharge option triggers a refuelling cutscene that TGG says lasts around 10 seconds.

The preview was apparently overseen by Nelson, who commented on the refuelling during play. "Hey, that's pretty fast for a fill up," Nelson observed when getting gas. "You can't complain about that." It also appears there is some trepidation within Rockstar about the refuelling, as when discussing the system with TGG, Nelson stated. "We'll see what people say," before asking "Do you think people are going to like it?"

For his part, TGG reckons that "Fuel isn't really going to be an issue unless you're not thinking about what you're doing". And I think this is probably going to be the case for most people unless Rockstar makes the need to refuel too frequent. When Red Dead Redemption 2 arrived in 2018, some players complained about the simulation-heavy elements of that, like how Arthur Morgan moved and having to fiddle around with your saddlebags for inventory management.

Officials with Miami-Dade County have held talks with Rockstar about using facilities and landmarks in the county to promote the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, according to a recent report by The Miamian, saying it could represent "a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience." Just one problem: the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office is dead-set against it.

The Miamian report (via RPS) says the county submitted a pitch deck to Rockstar on June 29, after which staff had "some conversations with Rockstar about potential opportunities around the launch of GTA 6," said Carlos Suarez, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

"Nothing has been formally agreed to or approved, and any idea would have to go through the appropriate review and approval process," Suarez said. "Given Miami-Dade's clear influence on the game, we think there could be a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience."

Miami-Dade is the inspiration for Vice City in the GTA series, and by "inspiration" I mean it basically is Vice City, although Miami exists as a separate city in the game's fiction. Vice City will serve as a central location in GTA 6, and will represent the seat of Vice-Dale County, much as the city of Miami is the county seat of Miami-Dade. Given that, the campaign makes obvious sense, and most of the ideas floated don't sound too overly disruptive.

Some examples:

• A display aircraft wrapped in Vice City logos and a GTA 6-inspired baggage claim at Miami International Airport
• Vice City signage and colors at the Metromover and Metrorail transit stations
• Vice City-inspired installations or public art at PortMiami
• A "family appropriate" celebration of "Miami car culture" with cars, bikes, DJs, food, artists, and branded installations at Tropical Park
• A Vice City Radio Lab at the city's main library, providing access to recording, editing, and digital media equipment to support "music production, podcasting, oral histories, neighborhood storytelling, sound engineering, video-game development, and other creative programming, while reflecting the central role that music and radio play in the GTA experience

The pitch also includes ideas for Rockstar funding permanent upgrades to county infrastructure:

That all sounds pretty cool to me, and some of it is quite civically wholesome, too. Yes, it's all part of the monstrous marketing machine for the biggest videogame of all time, but it also seems like the county is coming at it as a way to celebrate the real people and civic culture that led Rockstar to embrace Miami in the first place, and that counts for something.

The big stumbling block, of course, is that the GTA games are the polar opposite of civic-minded and wholesome, and that's led Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz to speak out against the idea.

"Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity," Cordero-Stutz told the Miami Herald. "Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office work every single day to prevent."

Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez also spoke out against the idea: "We should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence."

The sheriff isn't wrong. GTA games have always been notoriously violent: Former attorney Jack Thompson, at one time the videogame industry's foremost nemesis, spent years campaigning hard against the games and publisher Take-Two Interactive before he was finally disbarred for his relentless antics and misconduct.

But the game industry, and its audience, have matured in the 25 years (that's right, look it up) since Grand Theft Auto 3 changed everything: GTA is still steeped in criminal violence, but the shock factor—and the hand-wringing over it—are long gone. These days it's completely mainstream, as evidenced by the performance of the GTA 6 reveal showcase on Netflix, which was the platform's biggest show of the week.

Would Miami-Dade have to tone down some of the seedier elements of GTA 6 for its "family appropriate" events? Sure. But I also have no doubt that a significant number of sheriff's deputies and police in the county grew up playing GTA themselves, and I bet an awful lot of them will be calling in sick when GTA 6 drops.

Okay, two things. First: Los Santos Customs will be taking a hiatus next week, as I spend nine days in a row sleeping and attempting to develop the antibodies to counter whatever exotic German illness it is I acquired at Gamescom 2026.

Second: it's snowing in Los Santos, just like the real-life LA.

I have installed WinterV Beta, with the aim of making Grand Theft Auto 5's weather a little more interesting than it usually is. The pitch is simple: what if there was snow? Well, reader, having played a little GTA 5 with WinterV Beta, I can assure you that there very much is snow. Plus, all the world's lighting takes on a kind of a sickly, ochre hue, which is also just like LA.

From the sky: flurries of flakes. On the roads: cars covered in a sheen of powder, tyre-chains inexplicably equipped (the snow does not, in my version of GTA 5 where a significant chunk of the exterior map has absconded to the phantom zone, settle). In the air: a crisp winter chill. Santa Claus is coming to town; fire a truck at him.

I can't tell you if the presence of snow on the city roads impacts car handling because, as we have established, cars in my GTA 5 no longer have handling. Nevertheless, it does change the vibe quite a lot. As someone who's spent a lot of the last month looking at GTA 5—a change is as good as a rest.

But also, it is time for a rest. I will see you the week after next, whereupon we'll probably finally convert this game into GTA 6. I can feel it.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is the latest victim of the dreaded AAA videogame disease: Padded Runtime Via Unsatisfying Upgrade Materials. It could be a lot worse: thankfully there's no level gating in Onimusha that requires you to accrue an arbitrary set of stats before you can tackle a particular quest. It's not an RPG, and I'm sure as soon as Twitch streamers get their hands on it they'll be flexing on the hardest bosses without ever upgrading their gear by a single percentage point.

But for us mortals, Onimusha's runtime is padded out by a pretty boring hub world full of pretty boring upgrade materials like cotton and iron that you use to very, very slowly increase your damage, health, stamina, and Oni power gauge. It's a dull system that doesn't evolve a single bit over the entire game. There are also rarer upgrade materials that you use to unlock abilities and enhancements on the skill tree.

This structure encourages you to spend quite a few hours playing the least fun bits of Onimusha, but I do have some good news: there's a way to bypass some of the tedium that you can easily overlook.

Buy key upgrade materials from Yorimasa's shrine

A few hours into Onimusha: Way of the Sword, you'll complete a quest to purify Yasui Konpiragu shrine, saving its guardian Oni spirit from an evil Genma infestation. Once done, Yorimasa will begin selling you items for red souls, the standard "currency" you accrue from killing enemies. If you're anything like me, you'll take a cursory look at what's for sale, go "I don't need any of this stuff right now" and then go play about 10 more hours of Onimusha without bothering to revisit the shrine.

Don't do that! Check back in after you complete every major story mission, because Yorimasa's Monument expands the shop inventory several times throughout the game. And after awhile he'll begin stocking some of the key crafting items, including:

• Leather
• Fine Silk
• Tempered Iron
• Tamahagane
• Malacite Mass
• Byakue's Talisman
• Dohatsu-ten's Horn

Yorimasa doesn't sell all these right at the start, but early on you'll probably be getting the basics like cotton cloth and regular iron at a pretty steady clip, and won't need as many of these rarer materials. There are five upgrade tiers for your clothing, sword, and gauntlet, though, each of which require a substantial number of materials to work your way through. Unless you spend hours and hours doing sidequests in Kyoto and chasing down every shiny chest your Oni vision highlights for you, you're going to need more of these items than you accrue naturally throughout the game. (Even putting around 35 hours into Onimusha I didn't quite max out any of my gear.)

By the mid- and late-game, at least, you can supplement your findings with some stock bought from Yorimasa's finite supply. If you have the red souls, I recommend buying as many as you can; hunting for them really drags down Onimusha's pacing.

Unfortunately, this is also a very quick way to go broke.

Okay, so how do I get more red souls?

The higher tier upgrade items can cost upwards of 8,000 souls, so even after spending a few hours on a big story quest killing enemies you'll blow through your soul wallet by upgrading a couple skill tree nodes and buying some materials. If you don't want to run into a late game cash crunch, here are a few tips:

• Spec into the skill tree node that increases red soul rewards: It's not the sexiest option up front, but prioritize this early on so that you start earning more souls sooner so you can buy your way through the skill tree later
• Use Soul Suckers before big fights: These are the sorts of inventory items I have a bad habit of ignoring. Don't be like me: stick the red Soul Sucker in your Hozuki pouch and use it right before you carve through a big pile of scrub Genma to up your payout. If you're confident, it's also worth using one when you've got a Byakue or Dohatsu-ten close to death, then follow-up with the next tip for an even better reward.
• Finish off enemies with the Flashing Void: While you won't get this Oni armament until later in the game, using it as a finisher nets you more red souls. Do that! Otherwise I know you're just going to be sitting on that Oni meter saving it for the "right" moment.
• Upgrade the Reaper's Charm if you really plan to grind: I'll be up front and say that I didn't do this myself, because I didn't get my hands on the Reaper's Charm until I was far enough into Onimusha to be pretty over fighting the basic baddies, and reckoned the investment wouldn't pay out. But if you keep this charm equipped to a slot from the moment you get it, you can maximize your red souls earned with a baseline 15% buff even before taking advantage of the tips above. Just keep in mind there are only so many upgrade materials Yorimasa will sell you before you go all-in grinding for souls.

What's that sound I'm hearing? Could it be the sound of five rings? Well, no, because that's not the kind of rings Musashi wrote about. It's the sound of a desperate bit of wordplay constructed to lead into a post about the launch times and release date for Onimusha: War of the Sword. Musashi's the protagonist of that one. That's the joke. I'm doing my best out here.

If our Wes Fenlon's Onimusha review stirred your appetite for samurai action through its descriptions of the "sublime mix of classic Capcom action and weighty physical swordfighting," you're likely eager to know precisely when you can don the demon gauntlet for yourself. I've gathered the Onimusha unlock times below—and you won't have to endure any more wordplay to get there. I promise. Maybe.

When is the Onimusha: Way of the Sword unlock time?

Onimusha: Way of the Sword launches on PC at 12 am EDT / 5 am BST on Friday, September 4. Unlike consoles where it's launching at midnight in each respective timezone, it's a simultaneous global release on PC—which means, if you're east of a UTC -4 timezone, you'll be playing a few hours later than you would otherwise.

Here's that unlock time for timezones around the globe:

• Los Angeles: 9 pm PDT on Thursday, September 3
• New York: 12 am EDT on Friday, September 4
• London: 5 am BST on Friday, September 4
• Berlin: 6 am CEST on Friday, September 4
• New Delhi: 9:30 am IST on Friday, September 4
• Sydney: 2 pm AEST on Friday, September 4
• Auckland: 4 pm NZST on Friday, September 4

If you're not covered in that list, don't worry about calculating the time yourself. Here's a convenient countdown timer instead. Don't say all I ever did for you was half-baked Book of Five Rings references:

Is there preloading for Onimusha: Way of the Sword?

There is! Unless, for some reason, you're choosing to buy it on the Epic Games Store, where Capcom says preloading isn't available. And maybe you are. I don't know what your life is like.

On Steam with the rest of society, however, you can get your game installed early, so you won't waste any time waiting for all the relevant files to download before you can get to demon-cutting.

The problem with Grand Theft Auto 5, really, is that its world lacks verisimilitude. Unlike GTA 6, which will be more real than real, a psychosis-inducing perfect recreation of reality that we will be both unable and unwilling to tear ourselves from, Los Santos in GTA 5 is just sort of… stagey. It's a big Hollywood set (of Hollywood), all outside and no inside.

I have now added the inside. I installed Open World Interiors, whose aim is to furnish various GTA 5 businesses with actual, inhabitable inside zones. Restaurants, hospitals, gyms—all these and more, so the pitch goes, unfurl beyond you as new territory to explore and conquer.

That's the pitch. In reality, stepping outside of Franklin's Beverly Hills house quickly revealed that a significant chunk of Los Santos had been inexplicably deleted. I do not know where it has gone or why it has gone there. Maybe, one day, it will return.

Some things do work, though! Navigate through the hit squads and flying cars until you find a fast-food joint, and you can now dip inside, at which point you will be confronted by a taster's plate of Los Santos freaks sat in infrangible silence while one of the game's radio stations plays, inscrutably, from somewhere.

So, all well and good—Los Santos has an inside now. Only one thing is broken (apart from the large chunks of the outside that are broken): attempting to enter a gym will send you plummeting into the fathomless void at the secret heart of the world. You will scream. The radio will continue playing. "This is the rhythm of the night," declares Corona as Franklin tumbles, screeching into the void. After falling for some time, he reappears in front of the gym's doors. Los Santos is a mysterious place.

Crimson Desert is like the videogame version of a 6-in-1 shampoo—it does just about everything, and with its upcoming DLC Charting the Unknown, I guess that also includes The Sims.

Today's State of Play showed off a trailer with what we can expect to see, and there's a lot. Like building a whole-ass castle, for example. It looks like you can go pretty ham on some Sims-style building within those stony walls, too—the trailer shows a tool which you can drag to build walls and rooms inside the castle. Yup, just like The Sims! There's a whole bunch of furniture as well, including a slightly unusual framed portrait of a tiger that Kliff has deigned to display outside his home, for whatever reason.

It looks like you'll be able to build a village around this castle as well, perhaps similar to the Greymanes camp you form in the main game. There are people cooking, little village stalls, and plenty of chatter that seems to be happening either within the castle walls or just outside of them. How different it'll be to the Greymane's camp remains to be seen, but it is looking like a surprisingly cosy endeavour.

Something I am curious about, though, is the fact it looks like Kliff can romance (or at least gussy up to) other characters. There's a tiny snippet of him offering flowers to one of the game's witches—something she seems pretty darn jazzed about, by the way—though it's unclear what purpose it actually serves. I wonder how Kliff would actually rizz anyone in Crimson Desert, for how limited his dialogue is.

Some other bits I noticed include:

• Running on water
• Underwater traversal, including grabbing onto a shark like some sort of aquatic Uber
• Both a traditional looking ship and something more steampunk-looking
• Fellow Greymane Andrew cheffing it up in the castle
• Some crazy laser-eyed mechanical cyclops monster

The most surprising part of all of this, though? Charting the Unknown is set to release October 15. Yes, this October. A mere seven months after launching and somehow cooked up in the midst of a dizzying number of patches and tweaks that have contorted Crimson Desert into something that is completely unlike the game I reviewed back in March.

How Pearl Abyss has managed to do all of this is beyond me, but hey, it's coming pretty darn soon. I am admittedly pretty giddy at the idea of going full Sims-esque castle building, so I'll undoubtedly be returning to Pywel before long.

Some players came away from Onimusha's demo worried that the game would be too easy, a concern I've addressed in-depth based on my own time with the game. The good news is that I think the challenge level is well-judged for most people, and Onimusha does have a hard mode.

For those who hoped to jump right into the hardest possible difficulty from the main menu, though, I've got some bad news: you're going to have to beat the game first.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword's default difficulty options

Story: "A difficulty level that lets you focus on the story. Recommended for action game beginners."

• Musashi deals more damage and stamina damage and takes less from enemy attacks
• Action prompts default to on, showing button icons for how to deal with incoming enemy attacks

Action: "A difficulty level for those who like challenging battles. This difficulty level will keep you on your toes. Recommended for experienced action game players."

You can freely change between these two options from save points throughout the game.

Individually adjustable difficulty tweaks:

• Action prompts
• Tips (tutorial messages)
• Navigation UI icons

How to unlock Onimusha: Way of the Sword's Hard mode

There's just one way to unlock Onimusha's harder difficulty level: Finishing the game. No shortcuts, sorry! Here's the in-game description:

Carnage: "A difficulty level where a single hit could mean death. A high-stakes mode where carelessness can kill, but victory is all the sweeter."

If you choose this difficulty, it's locked in. You can't change to Story or Action. But you do get a bit of a leg up, because Carnage is a New Game+ mode that carries over some of your progress from a completed save.

What does the hard mode New Game+ carry over?

• Awakened Oni abilities
• Enhanced basic and special abilities
• Acquired Hozuki Pouches and upgrades
• Items, offerings, and "some" materials
• Charms and charm upgrades
• Unlocked outfits
• Tutorial drills and boss rematch unlocks and completion
• Genma Notes and rescued Lion Dogs

There's a lot that doesn't carry over to NG+:

• Story and sidequest progress
• Clothing, sword, and gauntlet upgrades
• Materials for those equipment upgrades
• Red souls used for upgrades, skill unlocks and buying materials
• Spirit Mirror save points
• Oni bow
• Progression of items buyable with red souls

We're long past the days of assuming the Steam Deck can comfortably handle the new big-budget action game of the moment, but here's a nice surprise: Valve's handheld is not a bad way to play Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

It's not quite the optimization darling that Resident Evil Requiem was earlier this year, but it's much better news than Monster Hunter Wilds or Dragon's Dogma 2. After testing Onimusha in its taxing Kyoto hub area, I'd add this to the win column for Capcom's proprietary engine.

To set expectations: Onimusha is a stubbornly 30-40 fps game on Deck. It can get as high as the 50s and 60s in the right conditions—turning FSR 3.1.4 upscaling on while in corridor areas outside the main hub—but you will eventually shoot back down to the 30s when there's a lot of action on screen. So if you're of the mind that a lower, stable framerate is ultimately the most comfortable way to play a game, then you can confidently lock it at 30 fps and turn off the performance overlay.

That's how I played a decent chunk of it over the last few days, pausing here and there to see which graphical bumps I could get away with. The default configuration cranks everything down to its lowest setting, but I made a few tweaks that meaningfully improve the picture quality without ruining the stable framerate:

• Texture quality: Low > Medium
• Upscaling: Off
• Resolution: 1280 x 800
• Frame Rate: 30

Perhaps a few more of the "lows" could become "mediums" without a problem, but truthfully, low already looks pretty good on the Deck's small screen. Capcom has done well not to compromise on the most important part of the picture: Musashi Miyamoto. His model is still nicely detailed, as are the cloth sims of his flowy cloak. That said, upgrading the texture quality to Medium solves the problem of some prominent world objects being noticeably blurry, but that's my only complaint with low preset so far.

Perhaps a controversial choice, but I say turn off Onimusha's FSR 3.1.4 upscaling and take the frames hit. The ghosting effect around moving objects (and especially Musashi's hair) is distracting and ugly, and the gains aren't even that impressive. If 40 is your sweet spot, you'll get it more often with FSR.

I'm only 6 hours into the story, so maybe this changes, but Onimusha isn't so fast-paced that I feel bogged down by the 30 fps lock. Last night I took down the first genuinely challenging boss of the game, Rasho-gan, on the Deck, then switched to my RTX 5090 PC to fight him again. It looked nicer, but I didn't feel a significant advantage.

For my money, Onimusha is the ideal definition of Deck "playable". The performance isn't so impressive that I'd choose to play it handheld when my PC is sitting right there, but it's good enough that I'd happily slice up Genma from the comfort of a hotel room.

Back in June, Capcom revealed Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance, a "massive," Iceborne-style expansion promising new and returning monsters, new regions to hunt in, and—of course—new combat options. In the announcement trailer, Capcom offered a brief glimpse at the Boost Bracer, an enigmatic new mechanic that seemed to augment hunter fighting styles with additional jolts of combustion-fueled power.

Three months later, we're now getting our first real insight into how the Boost Bracer works and how we can expect it to alter the flow of hunting in Wilds. Earlier today, Capcom uploaded both a video overview of Boost Bracer mechanics and a great sword-focused boost action breakdown, with similar videos expected for each other weapon type.

Having watched both, I feel safe in saying Capcom's borrowing some pages from one of its other flashy action franchises: With the Boost Bracer, Ascendance has more than a little Devil May Cry in the mix.

The overview video sticks to the broadest possible strokes, but from what we can tell, early impressions of the Boost Bracer as being 'a thing on your arm that makes your attacks go crazy' seem right on the money.

The most basic component of Boost Bracer combat is the Boost Driver: a new kind of attack that each weapon type will have its own version of. Based on a gauge seen in the great sword video, Boost Drivers seem to operate on a charge system similar to the wirebug charges that powered switch skills in Monster Hunter Rise.

In fact, some of the Boost Drivers shown in the videos appear to be returning switch skills; as a hammer main, I'm extremely pleased to see Impact Crater making a reappearance. Unlike wirebugs, however, deploying a Boost Driver will temporarily enter the hunter into a new Boost state, which is—by all appearances—a sort of sicko mode for lizard swordfights.

As the videos explain, being boosted offers a number of benefits: Guarding will be more effective. Some weapon combos will be extended with dramatic new attacks, like an explosive final shot that bow users will be able to tag onto their power volley combos. Some existing attacks will be enhanced with greater impact: a boosted dual blade demon combo was augmented with echoing slashes after each attack, while the charge blade's elemental discharge produced… even more discharge. (Sorry.)

Capcom says "boost can also be activated during certain actions," with footage indicating that the boost state input can be woven on command into great sword charges, sword and shield plunging thrusts, gunlance guards, and likely many more maneuvers.

As a system for layering explosive, enhanced variations into combat—and a healthy dose of added visual flair—there are some undeniable shades of Devil May Cry in the Boost Bracer. It's not quite the Exceed system, but I think Nero would approve. Maybe? I don't know. The boy is troubled.

I'm withholding judgment until I can try the Boost Bracer for myself, but so far, I'm pleased with what I'm seeing. It seems like a bit more of an intuitive concept for adding over-the-top attacks than Rise's bug-powered ninja maneuvers, and it looks like less of a disruption to the moment-to-moment flow of MonHun combat than the Clutch Claw proved to be in Iceborne.

I just hope those boosted actions aren't too effective—if the combination of the Boost Bracer and Focus Mode trivializes Master Rank, it'll feel like a pretty major misfire. But something tells me an elder dragon will be making me regret those words by this time next year.

Monster Hunter Rise: Ascendance will launch sometime in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

We saw many things during Grand Theft Auto 6's weird Netflix reveal, and it's official: GTA is simmy now. The gendarmes will meticulously document your physical appearance, and escaping them will necessitate changing it up. Jason and Lucia will also, the prophets tell us, feel the effects of sleeplessness and bad diet, just like mortals.

One thing we haven't seen from official sources: cars needing petrol. That particularly sim-ish feature has only been part of contraband GTA 6 leaks. Nevertheless, I have completely internalised this mechanic into my vision of the game. If you can't trust anonymous online weirdos trying to flog you some crypto thing, who can you trust?

So, naturally, I had to incorporate a working gas mechanic into my ongoing quest to turn GTA 5 into GTA 6 or kill it by trying. I installed Fumes – Animated Persistent Fuel, whose functions are thus: "Every vanilla and online vehicle carries a real fuel tank. It empties as you drive and it is still empty when you come back to that car tomorrow.

"Refuelling is not a menu," it says, casting subtle shade on all those non-hardcore car-gassing mechanics out there. "Get out, walk to the pump, take the nozzle off it—it goes in your hand and the hose comes with you on a real physics rope." Yes. All of these things are refuelling, to me.

It works like this: on your minimap, while driving, a new meter now tracks how much petrol your car's got left in it. Run out, and your journey's at an end. You know, like how cars work.

This was difficult to test. As we've already well-established, my current installation of GTA 5 is a nightmare merry-go-round of frictionless cars and increasingly contradictory mods. To actually acquire a car, I first had to figure out how to make one stop, and how to make sure it did not get immediately detonated by the hordes of hitmen and ambient gang violence that have become the burden of my Los Santos life. It's harder than it sounds: even throwing myself beneath a car's wheels didn't really help. Yes, the driver would get out to ask if I was okay (I was not), but the car would keep going.

I eventually commandeered one, however, by teleporting (Franklin can teleport now). The mod worked! Also, numerous other mods I already had installed kept throwing errors, which is probably fine. But amid the error messages and chaos, I managed to make it to a petrol station, in order to test the mod's robust in-person refuelling mechanics.

Never mind.

Netflix's exclusivity deal for the Grand Theft Auto 6 reveal in August struck me as a little silly. Sure, it'd probably make "a little pocket change," as PC Gamer's Harvey Randall put it at the time, but a video that would remain exclusive for only six hours? Not days? How much of an impact could that really have?

Well, uh, quite a lot, as it turns out. We already knew that Netflix was probably pretty happy with how it all worked out, but a Variety report nails it down more specifically and impressively, saying Netflix pulled in 31.1 million views with the GTA 6 reveal between its August 27 debut and August 30, which is when the window for its weekly top 10 ranking closes.

That's not just a huge number, it makes the reveal showcase Netflix's most-watched title of the week, topping the English-language film list, where it was classified, in 87 out of 93 countries.

It's not a direct comparison because of the differences in how they count "views," but that Netflix number—again, over just four days—is almost double the 17 million views YouTube has put up in total since the showcase went live on that platform.

Here it is, if you haven't seen it—although given those viewership numbers, my guess is that if you wanted to see it, you likely already have.

The GTA 6 reveal was a unique phenomenon, not the sort of thing that's easily duplicated year over year, but it was obviously a big win for Netflix, which got to be the tip of a very pointy spear for a short but lucrative stretch of time. Take-Two hasn't said what it got out of the deal, although I imagine money would figure prominently.

But the scale of its success makes me wonder if maybe we'll see more of this in the future: GTA is a rare bird but I could see Microsoft setting something up for future Call of Duty reveals, possibly, or Sony opting for a similar exclusivity window for particularly important State of Play showcases. Gaming is mainstream now—maybe this is what that ultimately looks like.

Rockstar announced today that Nopixel V is "the next evolution of the GTA 5 roleplay community," which has led to some head-scratching from casual GTA RP followers (like myself), because Nopixel V isn't something you or I can just jump into and play.

Nopixel Studios runs both public and private GTA 5 roleplaying servers, and Nopixel V is the latest version of its modded sandbox. The Nopixel V beta was developed in collaboration with Rockstar, and will be accessible through the Rockstar Games Launcher, but only for invited streamers, a list of whom can be found on the Nopixel website.

"Over time, access [to Nopixel V] will expand, including more phases of invites," Nopixel announced on its Discord server earlier in August. However, "for everyone on nopixel Public and nopixel 4.0, nothing changes."

So, at least for now, it doesn't sound like there's a way into the Nopixel V improv troupe other than being called up from one of the minor leagues. Rockstar's announcement thus focuses not on the opportunity to play Nopixel V, but to watch it being played by streamers.

Those details aren't too surprising once unpicked—streaming and server whitelisting are endemic to the GTA roleplaying scene—but the impending release of GTA 6 contributed to some of the head-scratching. One might expect talk of "the next evolution" of GTA roleplaying to have something to do with the big new GTA game releasing in a couple months, but alas, Rockstar has yet to announce any plans for GTA Online as it relates to GTA 6. (Nor has it given GTA 6 a PC release date.)

It may be a long time before we can go on Vice City escapades with friends, in-character or otherwise, but in the meantime, Nopixel V does sound exciting for the RP scene it concerns.

"Collaboration with Rockstar Games has been an important part of bringing this release to life," the Nopixel team writes. "Since the start of Nopixel V, our teams have worked together to develop new capabilities and refine a set of development tools which have enabled us to push the boundaries of what's possible in Grand Theft Auto 5."

Invited players will start streaming Nopixel V on September 8, and the modders are sharing details about the project throughout this week. Their first post discusses Nopixel V's modifications to the GTA 5 map, which include the addition of 1,000 ownable properties.

The Plague Tale series were puzzle-stealth games about kids trying to survive a Horrible History version of France during the Hundred Years War, sneaking past soldiers and using light to frighten hordes of rats that could strip them to bones in an instant. I loved their atmosphere of pulpy Grand Guignol supernatural history, but didn't love a lot of the actual videogame parts.

Too often a fussy sneaking section would end with an accidental step over an arbitrary line, then back to a checkpoint at the start of the area. In the second game, A Plague Tale: Requiem, I once had to skip through two cutscenes to get back to the beginning of the section I died at—a sin I might have uninstalled the game for if I were less invested in the story.

If you were expecting another game of hide and squeak from this spin-off, you'll be disappointed. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a prequel that takes pirate-adjacent smuggler Sophia, a popular character introduced in the second game, and dives into her past without feeling the need to throw in a plague, slingshot, alchemy, or other hallmarks of the series. Though it does include stealth in the back half, the focus of Resonance is a Mediterranean treasure hunt with a brand new sword combat system. It's Tomb Raider with stabbing instead of shooting.

Lara Corsair

The stabbing's quite good. I'm sick of parrying in games, but while the enemies in Resonance have a stagger bar that fills the more of their combos you deflect, you can also fill the bar by picking up a random object and smashing it in someone's face. Grabbing a bottle and hurling it into a soldier's gob makes you feel like a proper rogue, and there's a meaty kick too, which not only staggers enemies (and makes ones with shields drop their guard), but can push them off ledges to their death if you can't be bothered mastering parry and dodge timings.

I liked the kick so much it was the first thing I upgraded with the "resonance points" you earn from defeating groups of enemies or finding seashells lying on the ground. Though it's linear, sometimes a side passage or optional puzzle will hand out rewards like resonance points, a new sword, or jewellery that might increase your crit chance or parry timing window. Sophia actually wears the jewellery you find, and by the end of the game I'd put on so many bracelets it was a wonder she could lift her arms.

The Minoan ruins you're exploring are gated by puzzles that can usually be solved by manipulating lenses to shine light at the right spot or standing on symbols in sequence. It's pretty rote stuff, with a couple of properly bullshit leap-of-logic headslappers thrown in to keep you on your toes. (The Black Temple door puzzle can go and do one.)

The structure will feel familiar to anyone who has played prestige videogames with cinematic pretensions. You struggle through a crack squeeze so the camera can be nicely lined up to show you an impressive vista that's just finished loading; you slide down or fall off things so the previous area can be dumped from memory safe in the knowledge you can't turn around and go back. Where the first two Plague Tale games were mid-budget medieval Last of Us minus Joel, this is more of a mid-budget melee-combat Uncharted.

Don't mess with the bull

The predictable structure is the worst thing about it. Though Sophia has a book of clues and a special sphere that lets her read hidden messages and manipulate beams of light to get ahead of the generic soldiers racing to the treasure, every time you arrive in a new area it turns out you've been beaten. The soldiers have rammed through a wall or found an inlet so you've got opponents to fight, and previous plunderers have also made it through and filled the area with precarious scaffolding so you've got something to platform off and have collapse beneath you. It really dampens the exploration vibe to know you'll never actually win the race, because if you did the formula would break.

Still, Resonance is a competent example of the playbook it's following. A gorgeous one, too. Characters look great, with expressive faces and glistening eyes, and the contrast between bright blue-water outdoors and tunnels full of bones lit by glowing spores emphasizes the claustrophobia as you descend further into the ruins. Returning composer Olivier Deriviere has turned in another banger, moving on from spooky strings to Greek-Cypriot chorals that suit the change in location.

While plenty of things have changed, and this time the checkpoints are well-placed enough that I didn't ragequit even once, Resonance does preserve the series' trend of getting more gruesome as it goes on. By the final hours it's essentially a horror game. The jolly pirate treasure hunt becomes a mythic journey to the heart of darkness, and while it'll seem a weird shift if this is your first Plague Tale, the series has always been bleak and wilfully ambiguous about what's really going on. We finish these games with as many questions as answers, and that one defiantly arthouse element is a valuable thing Resonance has chosen to preserve as it otherwise shifts to popcorn blockbuster.

If Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve isn't one of your most anticipated releases in this fall's overstuffed launch calendar, I'm just going to say it: It should be. You might be wondering, 'But isn't Ace Combat just, like, planes?' And it is. But it's some of videogames' most ridiculously indulgent anime-ass melodrama, mediated through high-g fighter jet maneuvers and the constant refrain of a missile lock alert. It's like if all of Metal Gear was dogfighting, and in our hands-on AC8 preview, it continued to leave a very strong impression.

As of today, I've got even more reasons to be excited for October's next entry—and a few causes for concern. This morning, Bandai Namco published an "Online 101" video providing a primer on AC8's multiplayer offerings, all of which I'm pleased to report are accessed through online lobbies where you can mingle with other players as your very own Ace Combat pilotsona.

AC8's multiplayer seems to take place in a sort of pocket airbase universe where nobody exists except fighter pilots and the people who facilitate things that fighter pilots do. There, after creating your pilot-self by choosing from a selection of pilot-core faces and features, you can mill around with your fellow pilot-kin, communicating via a rich gestural pilot dialect of emotes. There is a stage for pilots to stand on. There is an arcade for pilots to play, and there the pilots can play Pac-Man. For these creatures, it is a sort of Eden.

But the true place of your pilotsona is in the air, and AC8's multiplayer matches are based around two primary modes: Co-Op Assault is a competitive PvE mode, where two teams of four pilots aim to earn the highest score within a time limit by destroying hostile NPC forces.

Co-Op Warfare adds PvP to the mix. It's still a score race, but both competing teams will be dogfighting in the same airspace as they try to outscore their opponents. As pilots destroy NPC targets, they'll earn a higher threat level. The higher your threat level, the more points you earn—and the more points you'll award the other team if they shoot you down.

After returning to the airbase from either mode, there's a chance you'll be offered access to special time-limited missions with extra rewards: That could be Scramble, where you and your matchmade wingmen will duel a squad of NPC aces, or Emergency Sortie, where you'll instead be tasked with destroying "iconic colossal weapons from the Ace Combat series"—like that giant horrid railgun, or that big, wretched drone full of smaller, wretched drones.

Bandai Namco also teased limited-time PvP modes, like straightforward 4v4 deathmatches of eight-pilot free-for-alls.

Ranking up will unlock new aircraft, upgrade parts, aircraft-specific performance enhancements, and both pilot and jet customization options—which brings me to the less thrilling portion of the video. As is apparently inescapable, even Ace Combat is going to have battle passes now, but it sounds like players won't be locked out of any aircraft rewards after each two-month premium pass season expires: "Any aircraft DLC included in the premium pass will be available for purchase separately after the season ends," Bandai Namco said.

That's something, I guess. But it brings me no joy to know that the pure, innocent spirit of my pilotsona will be tainted by the blight of microtransaction schemes. They deserve better than this.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve launches on Steam on October 1.

The recent GTA 6 "extended look" on Netflix wasn't very clear on whether you can swap between its protagonists Jason and Lucia at will. Apart from a moment where the camera pulls away from Lucia and back down to Jason miles away, there wasn't a lot of swapping going on, especially during the action.

According to an interview on Famitsu with Rockstar North's co-studio head Rob Nelson (translated by GamesRadar+), the ability to swap characters will depend on the mission and where you're at in the story.

"During the story, there are times where you can't switch from one character for some reason," he said. "There are some missions where you are free to switch as much as you want, but there are some sections where we want you to experience it from a certain character's perspective, like GTA 5, so we limit switching."

As an example, Nelson said you used to be able to swap between Jason and Lucia during a mission early on in the game, but the team decided it would make more sense for Jason to take the lead with his military background. Other missions, like the one we saw in the extended look where the two are escaping a bank robbery, will do the swapping for you. After firing at the cops as Jason in the backseat, you'll be put in the driver's seat as Lucia so you can make your getaway.

The mission where Jason and Lucia are under attack at the end of the extended look, however, will let you freely swap between them, Nelson said. We don't see this actually happen, but I think I can see how it would play out, especially if part of the objective is to survive long enough to reunite the two by the end.

Nelson makes it sound like the in-mission hot swapping will be reserved for pivotal moments in the story and everything else will be locked to one or the other. I had hoped that maybe GTA 6 would be a co-op game disguised as a singleplayer game, but it looks like we'll have to play by Rockstar's rules. That said, we already know you'll be able to freely swap outside of missions thanks to Dazed's preview of the game, so there will be plenty of time to see what kind of mayhem you can cause with that kind of power at least.

Moon Studios announced today that its upcoming action RPG No Rest for the Wicked will not go into 1.0 release in October as planned, but will instead launch in March 2027, following an open beta test currently slated for December.

"The honest truth is that we're a small team, and we're holding our games to a standard we won't compromise on," the studio wrote in a Steam update. "We're close, but close isn't good enough for our full 1.0 launch. The extra time will help us improve performance, tighten the class system, and polish the whole game to the standard you all deserve. We'd rather take a few more months than ship something that we know isn’t quite perfect yet.

"This extra time also means more closed and open beta tests in the coming months, which means you, our community, can get your hands on it and help us shape the final 1.0 build." That will include the open beta in December, details of which will be shared in the future.

I should note here that absolutely no mention was made of Grand Theft Auto 6, which comes to consoles in November, in either the Steam update or a video message posted by Moon Studios chief Thomas Mahler. Some studios have made a point of avoiding the GTA 6 behemoth, others are theatrically charging straight at it; it's impossible to say how much of a role Rockstar's monster played in the decision to push No Rest for the Wicked into 2027, if any, but at the very least I imagine it has to be considered a nice side effect.

Regardless, this really isn't the most devastating delay of all time. No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access on Steam more than two years ago, in April 2024, and has since seen significant updates, drawn in nearly 65,000 user reviews, and sold more than a million copies. Moon Studios chief Thomas Mahler warned in January that once 1.0 hits, No Rest for the Wicked's price will be increased from its current $40 to $60.

I imagine it like one of the cutscenes that play in Civilization when you construct a wonder of the world. A scant few days ago, humanity put its differences aside. The guns fell silent. Nary a harsh word was said. For a shining moment, we were one—ensconced in the warm glow of our television sets and monitors as we took in our first legitimate glimpse of Grand Theft Auto 6.

I guess people without Netflix subscriptions continued shooting each other.

Anyway, amid the hullabaloo we got our first insight into how GTA 6's wanted system will work. Seems simmy. Cops will now remember things like your physical description and the clothes you're wearing as they work to bring you to justice, and it all, in general, seems a bit deeper and more involved than in GTAs of yore.

So I brought it to the GTAs of yore: VI Wanted System does what it says on the tin—it brings a facsimile of GTA 6's cop-suspicion mechanics to GTA 5. Clothes, hair, and what-have-you all factor into the police's hunt. Losing the heat doesn't mean you're free anymore: you'll have to anonymise yourself to evade pursuit entirely.

I immediately put it to the test by opening fire on all and sundry in downtown Los Santos. Very quickly, the cops had my physical description and knew the expensive clothes I was wearing. This did not, necessarily, help them find me, as they were too busy dealing with their frictionless vehicles, ongoing gang warfare, and ambient hit squads that were also out to kill me. Nevertheless, they theoretically had a better chance of pinning me down than before.

My attempts to lose the heat by dipping into a clothing store were foiled by the store's 'no selling to people flanked by angry, armed cops' rule, so I was forced to dash home through the cacophonous and exploding streets of Los Santos in order to find a new shirt. This helped, somewhat, but the rest of me remained an issue.

San Andreas' barbers are less strict about their clientele, it seems, because I was able to get a haircut just fine, the probably offensively camp stylist remarking that my outfit was "Goooooorgeous" in what felt like a divine stamp of approval on my effort to avoid being punished for murder.

I tested the system to breaking point by standing in front of the police station. They did not recognise me. They did recognise that I had a shotgun equipped and which I had forgotten how to holster using a keyboard. The cops began to shoot me to death. I considered my mission successful.