I grew up in a town with nearly no public transportation, so for most of my childhood I walked, skateboarded, and biked to get around, but freedom—true freedom—was only gained as a teenager when I got my first car. It was a hand-me-down from my grandfather, so it wasn't sporty or cool, but it was the only real escape from the drudgery of school, the oppression (real or imagined) of parents, and the growing panic that adulthood, which meant a job, the military, or more damn school, was waiting at the end of the summer.

Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG that perfectly captures the freedom and possibilities of being young and having a beat-up old car, just enough money to fill it with gas and snacks, and only the vaguest of destinations in mind. Just like in real life, road trips in Keep Driving feel like a carefree summertime journey where you blast some tunes, eat junk food, and watch your troubles shrink in the rearview mirror—until that check engine light starts blinking, your tank is almost empty, and you realize there's something a bit odd about that hitchhiker you picked up.

Map quest

The game begins with the perfect excuse for a road trip: an old friend who lives all the way across the map has invited you to a music festival. With three months of summer stretching out before you, grab a few supplies from your house, open the map to pick a route, and start driving. Your car is your inventory: store useful stuff in the glove box, extra supplies in the trunk, and eventually people (and maybe the occasional dog) in the empty seats.

As you travel between any two map locations in Keep Driving, you encounter a handful of obstacles, called road events, that slow you down: mud puddles and potholes, traffic jams and biker gangs, and situations every driver has encountered at some point like "vague lanes" or a bug that flew in the window and can't find its way out. These road events are Keep Driving's version of turn-based combat, as each turn threatens to damage four different attributes: gasoline, cash, the car's durability, and your energy levels. To dispel them, you need to match the threats with pips on your skill cards or items in your glove box.

It's a simple combat system that's easy to grasp within a few tries, and while it never really gets any more complex, it requires a lot of preparation to survive. Most skill cards have only a few uses before they need to be replenished by sleeping in a town, and glove box items (like duct tape, which protects durability, and cigarettes, which prevents loss of energy) have limited uses before you'll need to buy more at gas stations and convenience stores.

If an event depletes you enough, by emptying your gas or totaling your engine, it doesn't mean the end of your run. You can call a tow truck (if you have the cash) to take you to the previous town, or spend energy walking to the closest gas station, or in the most dire of circumstances, do the unthinkable: call your parents and tell them you need help. I had to do it in one of my runs, and it brought back the shame of doing it (way more than once) in real life. Thankfully, Keep Driving spares you the actual lecture from Dad.

Need a lift?

And then there are the hitchhikers. As you cross the map you'll encounter solo travelers making their own way through the world: a punk rocker with a dog (who takes up an extra seat), a young woman in a wedding dress who left her groom at the altar, a burnout who lost his job and is estranged from his wife, a mechanic who will smoke all your cigarettes. None of them have names, just labels you might use to describe a stranger: The Kid, The Songwriter, The Punk. I assume they think of me as "The Driver."

At first hitchhikers feel like they're just a tool to employ in your road events, since each brings a unique skill card to the dashboard, but as you travel together they each slowly reveal more about themselves and their journeys through quick bits of text conversation. Drive with them long enough and they'll unlock new skills, and eventually reveal their own quest you can choose to pursue. The Punk wants to go to a club in a distant town, so can you drop him off there? The Bride wants to let loose and have some fun: got any weed? More importantly, as they start to feel like friends, or at least the kinds of temporary friends you made out of necessity when you were young and exploring the world.

Developer YCJY Games does an impressive job of developing characters who are, technically, just pixelated square portraits you lock into inventory slots. With minimal text, their stories and personalities come through, and by the end of the trip it's clear that we're all crammed into this car for the same reason: because we're all a little damaged, a little aimless, a little adrift.

I was genuinely sad to see some of my passengers climb out of the car once I'd completed their quests, and not just because it meant losing the extra skills I'd been relying on. (Except for one of them: I was happy to be rid of a kid I'd picked up because they kept having to stop to use the bathroom.)

These characters also introduce you to crime, of which there is an amusing amount in Keep Driving. I even picked up a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit who didn't really convince me he was innocent. Even him I wound up liking, though he's a pain to manage (no one will sit next to him) and his initial skill is one you have to pay $10 a pop for. Weirdly, it wasn't even him who was the biggest troublemaker: a hippie named "The Hurricane" kept wanting me to get high, had a skill that could only be used if I was driving while drunk, constantly filled my inventory slots with trash, and whose third level ability would let me shoplift from stores.

In a game where you can be pulled over by the cops and arrested, driving with a gun and a baggie of coke with an escaped convict in the passenger seat definitely turns a chill road trip into a white-knuckle affair.

As required for any memorable road trip, Keep Driving has an utterly kickass soundtrack. I'm not going to pretend I'm cool enough to have heard of Swedish indie bands like Westkust, Makthaverskan, Zimmer Grandioso, and Fucking Werewolf Asso, but they've got a new fan and their tracks will be part of my next real roadtrip. Even one of my hitchhikers, a musician whose guitar took up an annoying amount of room in my trunk for one of my trips, presented me with a CD of some of his songs when we finally parted ways.

There are more than a half-dozen endings in Keep Driving besides just getting to that concert and hanging with your buddy. (Yes, you can get arrested.) I've found several of them and I'll keep playing until I've collected them all, and then I'm going to play some more.

Keep Driving is the sort of game I should love on the Steam Deck, but unfortunately, some of the interactions like dragging items around are pretty fiddly and the smaller pixel art icons are hard to read on a smaller screen. Otherwise it'd be perfect for sinking back into the couch, getting high or drunk (or not, your choice, say no to peer pressure), letting the road take you where it will, and making some temporary friends you'll never forget.

While it's natural to question if Overwatch's pivot to mid-game power ups is a direct response to Marvel Rivals' team-up abilities that can similarly elevate heroes, Overwatch 2 lead gameplay designer Alec Dawson told a roundtable of press at Blizzard's Irvine campus this week that perks were in the works long before Rivals was the new hero shooter hotness. That said, the motivation ultimately came from a growing feeling that Overwatch was at risk of stagnating.

"One of the things we all agreed on was that Overwatch needed to evolve and needed to have more choice," Dawson said.

When Season 15 introduces hero perks on February 18, heroes will earn XP throughout the match and level up twice, picking between two perks at levels 2 and 3. The goal, as Dawson tells it, is to identify the creative ways players are already using heroes and designing perks that serve that fantasy.

"People have always asked for Lifeweaver to be more of a damage dealer. How do we look at that and then give that to you in a way that makes sense for Lifeweaver?" he said. "Another [hero] that's representative of that is Sombra. One of her major perks lets her heal allies with her hack. People have talked about 'support Sombra' for a long time. How can we give a little taste of that?"

Perks didn't start out so adventurous. Dawson talked about early versions of perks that were more conservative than their current iteration and said it took a lot of time and playtesting to learn to stop holding back.

"There was one Tracer perk where, when she recalls, she would get back one blink charge. The one we're shipping with is when she recalls, she gets back all of her blink charges."

That desire to be less protective and "less precious," as game director Aaron Keller put it in a presentation to press, about what an Overwatch match can be has become a guiding principle for Dawn's team.

"There's a little bit of letting go of the fine balance that we've been chasing and see how it all plays out to some degree," Dawson said. "We should be a little scared of what we're putting out there, in terms of how it might affect the game. Within reason, of course.

"I think perks are that. It's gonna be a lot for players to learn and we're going to be monitoring how that happens over time, but also giving it room to breathe."

When asked if the overnight introduction of 168 buffs across 42 heroes means Blizzard is embracing a degree of balancing chaos, Dawson copped to Overwatch's reputation for overcaution and fuddy-duddy balance patches.

"We think players do crave slightly more complexity than we've been giving them for a while," he said. "When we look at some of our balance patches, they've been a lot of tuning and recycling. We want to step out of that and make sure that when we make balancing decisions, they are really felt. I think perks give us a nice turning vector for that."

Multiple Blizzard devs mentioned how excited they are that perks will give the team "new knobs to turn" for future balancing passes. Dawson also mentioned that perks will change seasonally, whether that means balance adjustments, ditching underperforming perks, or through two planned yearly "perk drops" to keep the system fresh—a similar approach to Marvel Rivals' rotating team-up bonuses.

"I do think the team overall wants to make sure that we don't forget Overwatch is supposed to be fun," Dawson said. "We're supposed to have a little bit of wackiness, but also let these heroes play in the ways that our players want to play them."

Overwatch 2 Season 15, starting February 18, will bring hero perks to both Quickplay and Competitive. Stadium, Overwatch's new third-person mode with its own upgrade story unrelated to perks, is coming in Season 16 alongside new hero Freja.

Just two weeks after launching on Steam, "multiplayer extraction survival horror" shooter Level Zero: Extraction has reached the end of the road. In a message posted to Steam, community manager Antishyr said the game has "underperformed compared to our expectations," and thus "it's no longer feasible for our relatively small teams to sustain the game from a financial standpoint."

"As the project's community manager, on behalf of [developer] DogHowl and [publisher] tinyBuild, I'm informing you that Level Zero: Extraction has reached the state that will, most probably, be its final form for the time being," Antishyr wrote. "The final patch for the game was released on January 30th, 2025.

"Level Zero: Extraction is an ambitious debut title from Doghowl. Our desire was to create a game unlike any other by combining the extraction shooter and asymmetrical horror genres. Although we ended up seeing that those are not easy to blend, we're grateful we had the chance to try and gain so much invaluable experience."

Level Zero: Extraction actually began life in 2022 as Level Zero, an asymmetric survival game in which a team of scientists struggle to repair their facility and get the hell out, all while trying not to be brutally butchered by a xenomorph-ish alien monster. But after a couple years of silence, it was "re-announced" as Level Zero: Extraction, a more conventional-looking extraction shooter that cast players as gun-toting mercs rather than pencil-neck geeks.

I wondered at the time about the wisdom of trying to muscle into the crowded extraction shooter genre, but art director Alex Golenishchev said it was "an organic evolution of the concept," and that the combination of genres "empower each other, and ... offers a unique experience" that other extraction and horror games do not.

Sadly, it did not work out. Level Zero: Extraction had a peak concurrent player count of just over 2,600 following its early access debut in August 2024, but that quickly fell off to sub-100 numbers by mid-October. The 1.0 release in January didn't turn things around, achieving a peak concurrent player count of just 98 immediately after launch. At this moment, there are 20 people playing.

Level Zero: Extraction servers will remain online, so the game will continue to be playable, and wipes will continue to happen on the first Thursday of every month but there will be no further weekend events, and of course no new maps, weapons, cosmetics, game modes, or any other features. As for Doghowl, it's now working on a new multiplayer game, this one a co-op experience: "We really hope that the invaluable experience gained with Level Zero: Extraction will help our emerging studio in future efforts," the studio said.

The Epic Games Store rang up 295 million users in 2024, an increase over 2023 of 25 million, and the "Epic ecosystem" grew as well, to 898 million "total Epic cross-platform accounts," up by 94 million from the 2023 number. What really surprised me, though, is that 1,100 new games were released on Epic in 2024, taking the total number of games on the storefront to over 4,000. Frankly, I didn't realize there were 1,100 games on the Epic Store in total.

That's still a far cry from Steam, which saw nearly 19,000 new games arrive in 2024, but it's definitely movement in the right direction. Epic credited that growth of its game selection to continued adoption of its self-publishing tools, the Epic First Run exclusivity program and Now on Epic program for older games (which has been extended to January 31, 2026), growing daily and monthly active user numbers, and Epic's generous revenue share options.

Epic ran into unexpected financial issues in 2023, saying it was "spending way more money than we earn" and laying off 800 employees as a result. Nonetheless, the game giveaways continued apace in 2024, with more than 595 million free games claimed—up from just under 586 million freebies in 2023—averaging out to $2,229 in "total value per player." Epic also confirmed that "the program is not slowing down and will continue in 2025, on both PC and mobile."

The Epic Games Store launcher is still a little rough around the edges: Epic said in its 2023 year in review that it had made performance improvements "reducing loading time to a third of the prior load time according to benchmarks from Q1 2023 for 95% of users," and it's definitely better than it used to be (for me, at least) but still a little sluggish, particularly when dealing with large libraries. Work on that will continue in 2025: The download manager expected in 2024 is set slated for the first quarter of 2025 (so, soon), enabling users to "control the timing of updates, schedule downloads, and reorder your queue, amongst other quality-of-life changes."

Other notable features on the way include gifting, preloading, an overhaul of search and browse functionality "with several under the hood improvements," and new social features including "all new voice chat, text chat, game independent parties, invite/join/play and looking-for-group features across all Epic Games Store supported platforms."

Epic also shared a rundown of its top PC games in 2024, and while specific numbers aren't included it's interesting to see how they break down across three separate categories. Farming Simulator 2022 raised my eyebrow, but 2023 and '24 editions weren't released, and the most recent version, Farming Simulator 2025, didn't come out until mid-November 2024.

Mythic

• Genshin Impact
• Rocket League®
• Honkai Star Rail
• Grand Theft Auto 5
• Fortnite

Legendary

• Wuthering Waves
• EA Sports FC 24
• Destiny 2
• Fall Guys
• Alan Wake 2

Epic

• EA Sports FC 25
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Cyberpunk 2077
• The Sims 4
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Dead by Daylight
• Satisfactory
• Warframe
• Farming Simulator 2022
• Dead Island 2

(Why isn't "Epic" the top tier in the list? I do not know, but it seems like a pretty big oversight to me.)

Not a bad year overall, then, and more free games in 2025 is definitely something to happy about. And yes, there is an infographic—get the crash course version of Epic's year in review below.

It impressed me just how well Avowed managed to thread the needle on this challenge that seriously stumped Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a similarly actionized follow-up to a lore-dense, tactical RPG series. Obsidian didn't have to contend with a decade-long attrition of staff and a parent company with no understanding of the studio and IP it had invested in, but I think failing the balancing act of placating series fans while also creating new ones made for a final nail in The Veilguard's coffin, so it shocked me to see another studio stick the landing immediately after.

Strange lands

So much of Avowed sounds, on paper, like The Veilguard. It's an action pivot compared to prior games in the same setting. For the first time in the series, the previous game's choices can't be imported. In addition to the gameplay shift, Avowed is set in an unexplored corner of the world, with few returning characters.

But the difference is all in the execution. Across 16 years and four entries, Dragon Age never had a consistent identity, with each successive release overriding the previous one's art style, mechanics, and, in the case of Veilguard, tone. The look and feel of Pillars has evolved⁠—most notably with the injection of tropical pirate summer fun in Deadfire⁠—but it's always remained rooted in its unique combo of more grounded early modern historicity and colorful, almost psychedelic fantasy paperback spectacle.

Avowed also makes a cleaner break with Pillars of Eternity narratively, while simultaneously not invalidating the events of those games the way Veilguard did. It helps that Avowed doesn't push a half-measure accounting of previous player choice like Veilguard's Inquisitor customization. Avowed just opts for the tried and true RPG standby of "The exact events are shrouded in mystery…" while referencing characters and quests from previous games in clever, surprising ways. A real knockout for me was running into the parents of Pillars 1's intro companion who dies at the end of the tutorial (spoilers), the "Trask Ulgo special." I checked and, sure enough, Calisca mentioned her parents being in Avowed's setting of the Living Lands all the way back in 2015.

What's more, as Dragon Age went on, the weight of its story shifted entirely to its characters from its setting and politics, culminating in The Veilguard's pure focus on its party roster as avatars of their respective factions. Pillars had strong, memorable characters, but Obsidian's consistently been more of a setting and themes-first joint. A new game set in Eora was largely only beholden to those themes and that history, not the decade-plus personal sagas of Morrigan, Solas, and the Inquisitor which had subsumed Dragon Age's fictional politics.

Avowed is framed in a way that may have benefitted a new Dragon Age project: It's a follow-up to, but also a spinoff of, Pillars of Eternity. It's unclear if we'll ever see another mainline Pillars game, but Avowed doesn't inherently preclude the possibility. Each new Dragon Age game tacitly carried the message, "this is what Dragon Age is now," with an implication as the series went on that its more tactical, old-school roots were an aberration, and that the later games' shift to action was always the plan.

Inquisition and Veilguard were both "omni-games," the big, all-encompassing, world-saving story where you visit multiple nations in Thedas and see everything the setting had in store. They ironically made Dragon Age feel smaller than Origins or DA2's focused corners of the world. There's no room to hide something new and surprising in Dragon Age anymore, we've seen everything in its world at breakneck speed, with no time for any of it to soak in like those first two games had.

Dragon Age 2's unique story structure and tangential connection to Origins always made it feel like a great spinoff instead of a sequel⁠—ironic, considering it was the only one to get a number⁠—and a fourth entry in the series really would have benefitted from a similarly lower-stakes, more focused framing. It sounded like The Veilguard's original incarnation, codenamed "Joplin," was attempting to do just that prior to its cancellation by EA in favor of live service efforts like Anthem.

Hardcore to the mega

Even with the star of CRPGs rising once more thanks to the stunning successes of Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3, the one-two punch at the peak of our Top 100 Games list, Pillars of Eternity has always lacked the same capacity to "break containment" to my eye. I love these games, but in addition to quietly having one of the highest skill ceilings in the entire genre⁠—Josh Sawyer's insanely demanding "The Ultimate" challenge is my favorite example of that⁠—they have a correspondingly high skill floor, even more so than crusty classics like the OG Fallouts and Baldur's Gates.

The Bethesda-style first person RPG is one with a ton of everyman and hardcore sicko appeal, and pitching a Pillars spin-off in that vein was an inspired move to get more players interested and invested in this genuinely special fantasy setting. Avowed hits you with capital-L Lore from the jump, but in a similar way to Disco Elysium, Dragon Age: Origins, or any given Elder Scrolls entry: You can almost sink into it like a warm bath, actively engaging or just filtering it out as "generalized fantasy bullshit" at your leisure, the quality of its quest and character writing more than enough to carry the day. The response among PC Gamer's non-Pillars heads who have been playing Avowed has been a positive, healthy interest in its world and characters.

It doesn't hurt that this is also a genuinely excellent action RPG. Among first person RPGs, games like Deus Ex or Dark Messiah still reign supreme in my heart thanks to their open-ended simulations, but I don't think anything in the subgenre can touch Avowed when it comes to polished, well-balanced mechanics and feel⁠—when the fighting starts, it's less a sim, and more a high quality, very game-y action experience like Mass Effect 2 or The Witcher 3.

I hope to see Pillars of Eternity 3 and Avowed 2 some day, and Obsidian's understanding of its audience and fictional worlds, coupled with a commitment to staying within its means to put out more consistent releases that don't each have to be a mega-hit, makes both of those games a real possibility moving forward.

The strike was in protest of "layoffs and exhausting working conditions" in the game industry, and saw more than 1,000 people take part across the country. While there have been strikes at individual French studios in the past, this is apparently the first-ever industry-wide strike, according to an RFI report, and comes as the industry continues to grapple with layoffs, studio closures, and other labor disputes. As of 2022, there were 580 game studios in France.

The STJV was somewhat more pointed in its description of the game industry, calling it a "corporate circus" in a call to strike issued in January. It also issued four "highly practical" demands, which it said "come in response to decades of corporate mismanagement, opacity and denial of workers’ suffering:"

• Preservation of jobs, the cancellation of layoffs and the accountability of decision-makers who must first make sacrifices themselves when their companies face difficulties.
• Companies’ full transparency about their financial situation and economic health, so that workers can plan their future, and profit sharing with workers.
• Consideration for work-related health and personal life, through work reorganisation and the reduction of work hours.
• Direct participation of workers in decision-making at their companies in order to avoid management errors and control the proper use of private and public funding.

The union also said that, "as this is a national strike call, no action is necessary to go on strike: just don’t go to work." All very French, indeed, and in the wake of the strike it called for "an even wider movement" to follow.

"Unionise, go on strike, gain new rights!" the union wrote on Bluesky. "Together, we will win ✊"

The GG25 Grève Bundle is meant to raise funds for the STJV's strike fund, which helps compensate striking workers for their loss of income. The theme of the bundle—no surprise here—is "strike," and in keeping with the whole "according to your ability" thing, there are three tiers at $1, $5, and $10, although you can kick in more if you want to do a solid for workers.

While there aren't any real blockbusters in the lineup, Coldridge looked very promising when we checked out its demo last year, and many years ago (it originally released in 2013) we were quite taken by Tetrobot and Co. Off the top of my head, Blocks That Matter, Minami Line, The Purple Hike, and Flipon look like they might be cool too if you enjoy deeply indie games, and I like Phoenix WRONG just because the title makes me laugh.

STJV said the previous edition of this bundle raised $1,500 with an average donation of $11 (the top-tier bundle price is $10 but), and with two weeks to go this bundle has blown way past it, earning more than $28,000 and an average contribution of over $15. The Grève Bundle on Itch.io will be available until February 28.

James "Lycerius" Moore spent nearly a decade playing one game of Civilization 2 off and on, pushing it as far into the future as he could. In a 2012 Reddit post, he described the world that resulted as "a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation."

Only three civs were still standing in 3991 AD—the Celts (Lycerius' civ), Vikings, and Americans—and they were in constant conflict over an earth that could barely support human life.

"The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars," Lycerius wrote. "As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway."

Attempts to cooperate with the other nations were futile.

"The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2,000 years," said Lycerius. "Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the UN forces a peace treaty."

You can still read Lycerius's original Reddit post about the The Eternal War, which spawned a whole subreddit of its own where players loaded his save and attempted to either win the war or negotiate peace, as if it were a chess puzzle. Someone managed to defeat the other civs in 58 in-game years.

In 2012, we published an interview with Lycerius in which he discussed his sudden fame (the story got quite a bit of mainstream attention) and the question of whether Civ 2's projection of the future might have been prescient.

"I think people in general have this morbid curiosity about the world and where it's going, and I think they saw this and just kind of latched on," he said. "You know, it's by no means an accurate simulation of world affairs or anything like that, it's just a game roughly based on such things, but I think it really captured a lot of people's imaginations."

Over a decade later, I'm wondering if maybe Civ 2 was more accurate than we knew.

Meanwhile, Civilization 7 has launched to mostly positive reviews from critics—we said it was good, but not as good as the last two games, in our Civilization 7 review—and "Mixed" reviews from Steam users. I like it, but now that I'm thinking about Civ 2 again, I'm pining a little for the feeling of those older games.

Civ 7 feels more positive overall about humanity's agricultural and industrial revolutions—it omits the effects of climate change, for instance, something I hope is added in an expansion as it was in Civ 6's Gathering Storm. And though it was a little clunky from a political theory perspective, I like that your citizens in Civ 2 could revolt and temporarily replace your government with anarchy, and that corruption and waste were simulated.

If you want to play Civ 2, it's not too hard to find a copy online, but it's not available for sale digitally anywhere. You can still get Civ 3 on Steam and GOG, though. I don't know whether it'd be a fruitful pursuit for Firaxis, or if any copyright snarls would block it, but I'd sure love a lightly remastered collection of Civs 1-4 someday.

I know that all sounds incredibly cool, and elements of Omikron undoubtedly are, but let me slightly temper your expectations: It's a very average game, even by David Cage standards. That's not to say it wasn't also massively ambitious, had some great ideas, and of course involved Bowie (if you're interested, it can be had on GOG). Which was mainly because one of the key designers was a massive Bowie nut.

"[David] Cage’s list of bands went Björk, Radiohead, Future Sound Of London, Garbage," Omikron’s senior designer Phil Campbell told MOJO. "I threw Bowie on there because I’d been in the fan club since I was 11: And I knew he would complement the world we were creating.”

Campbell worked for Eidos at the time, which had signed up to Cage's vision and partnered with Quantic Dream to make the game. They initially wangled a meeting with the rock legend just to talk about "licensing his old music" but Bowie quickly got interested in the game's ideas.

"He loved David Cage’s vision for Omikron," says Campbell. "That you were sucked into this world, the themes of oppression and being awakened, and he loved [art director] Loïc Normand’s visuals. The next meeting he brought Iman and Joe [Duncan Jones]. Then he brought [guitarist and Bowie collaborator] Reeves Gabrels.”

Bowie was sold, and decided to not only write new songs for Omikron but hole-up with the developers for two weeks in a Paris apartment. Long known for using the "cut-up" collage technique when writing lyrics, Bowie had even upgraded to doing this on a PC. "I saw the computer program he used to do his William Burroughs lyric cut-ups on," says Campbell. "He said, 'I used to do it manually but now I have this.'"

Such close involvement meant Bowie's presence in the game increased, and Omikron would eventually feature a virtual band called The Dreamers that played three concerts in-game. He also became Boz, a living hologram involved in the resistance. "I can’t remember when it was decided that Boz should be Bowie," says Campbell. "It might just have been us pushing our luck. But he was super-super on-board. We put him through the indignity of having dots stuck all over his face for the motion capture. He’d never done that before."

Bowie even wondered at one point, in-line with the game's themes, whether he could "leave his Bowie persona in Omikron, and come out as David Jones… it fitted the spirit of the game: Omikron was a giant trap, you could lose your soul in there forever."

Omikron sold "OK" says Campbell, but the 600,000 or so units it shifted were almost entirely in Europe. "It got no press in America. David did some chat shows: Letterman would show the box. But something about it didn’t gel enough for people even to try it. I think David was a bit pissed off."

Despite that, Omikron had a definite influence on Bowie that's felt on the 1999 album Hours, which features a rework of the game's theme as New Angels Of Promise. And it certainly encouraged his thirst for exploring new ways to use technology.

"We talked about buying up a bunch of old satellites that were circling the Earth," says Campbell of a post-Omikron hangout. "He was going to relaunch Ziggy Stardust from space. The idea was that Ziggy would beam us transmissions: 'Are you receiving me…?'"

If that puts you in mind of Starman, and a certain Top of the Pops performance, you're not alone. Bowie would drift away from videogames after Omikron, though they didn't forget him: Hideo Kojima's entire oeuvre is shot-through with Bowie worship, reaching its peak with 2015's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, featuring The Man Who Sold the World as its key motif alongside the player building up the Diamond Dogs mercenary force.

One more historical nugget from the time of Omikron is this 1999 interview Bowie did around the game's release. "The idea of developing a soundtrack idea for a game is really quite unusual," begins Bowie. "The idea of writing songs specifically for a game was really a compelling factor and the one thing we wanted to do. They didn't give us a preconceived idea of what we should do, we were left to our own devices."

Bowie's asked about his own experience with computers. "Not many people know this," says Bowie, beginning his answer with a Michael Caine impersonation. "But actually I was the first artist to take computers out on the road in the very early 1980s, the Serious Moonlight tour, 1983, and we were going online then and delivering all the facts and figures back to home base. So my experience with computers does go back a long time. I've been working on the Internet now for about two years and actually six months in operation, and I've been producing art on the computer since 1994, that's when I did my first series of things. So I can mouse about."

And his experience with games? "My son is the games merchant in our household," says Bowie. "I've played games, of course I played Tomb Raider and like every other hot-blooded male fell in love with Lara… momentarily, then I realised that it's not real, it's just not real, and this is definitely the end of the millennium."

Bowie goes on to discuss he and his collaborators' approach to the soundtrack, saying "what we're trying more to do than anything else is provide an emotional heart to the game. The one thing I did find in the games I viewed before we started work was that a lot of the games have a cold emotional drive.

"I think the one thing that we noticed immediately is that most of the material used in games is taken off albums," says Bowie. "Very rarely is music actually produced with the game. They've taken an album track here and an album track there, and it sort of works some of the time."

Finally he's asked about his own involvement in becoming a character in a videogame.

"I said my priority was that I looked about 24 years old and that was my input really," laughs Bowie. "And then for weeks and weeks they kept sending me sketches and it was 'no, no, no… YES, that one!'"

Fishing rears its ugly head in all sorts of games, but it's become a plague for me personally now that it's stock standard for all of the many cozy game derivatives of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. If we were to rebrand the whole lot as "4F games," it would be a critical member: farming, foraging, fishing, and friendship. But one of those things is not like the others.

Fishing, uniquely among activities in the farmlife sim umbrella, forces me to stop playing the game. In a genre where time is the ultimate resource, fishing makes me waste it. Each day of Stardew Valley involves a lengthy checklist that I can never quite complete. I need to water crops, chop trees, say hello to the villagers, and remember to sell my goods, hopefully sliding into bed just before 2 am. But if I want any chance of completing the community center bundle to unlock my greenhouse before the first winter I need to spend time fishing, too.

But time fishing is spent, well, just fishing—and looking down at my phone while I wait to hook something. Every minute my bobber is in the water I feel antsy, like I should be doing ten other more important things. I don't resent it so much on rainy days when my crops get watered for free, but on a sunny summer afternoon I can't help watching the day tick away, imagining all the trees I could be cutting or friendship I could be earning if I weren't stuck with my feet planted at the edge of the river waiting to catch another pile of trash.

When that happens—catching things I don't even want—it only adds insult to injury. I plant carrot seeds and get carrots. I buy cows and get milk. I cast my fishing line and I get… who the hell knows what? In most farmlife games you're meant to learn which fish spawn in different waters and conditions like catching salmon in the river only during the autumn. Even if you know your stuff though, you could just go home with a lot of seaweed and smallmouth bass instead.

It's realistic, I'll give it that. I don't even think I would want fishing to be more guaranteed to give me what I'm angling for. It sure does raise my blood pressure when I waste a whole afternoon without catching that one thing I still need to add to the community center, though.

Fishing continues to fail at hooking me because the pool of fishing minigames itself has stagnated. The most dominant style is Stardew derivative: press a button repeatedly to balance your fishing bar over the top of a moving fish. The slightly less popular stamina-based fishing minigame asks you to pull on your rod to exhaust a fish from fighting, though not so much you snap your line, and then reel it in while it rests. Others don't actually involve a minigame at all and you just need to press a particular button on cue when a fish bites your hook. I still don't know if I'm grateful to that style for reducing the demands fishing makes on me or if I resent it for making fishing feel even less engaging.

There are a few standouts among fishing minigames in the farmlife space. I do enjoy how Roots of Pacha turns fishing into a sort of stealth game where I'm chasing a fish with my bobber and trying not to alert it. The Garden Path also has a novel fish concept that involves whistling a tune and trying to navigate to the right pitch on a grid while you fish.

Fishing turns up in other genres, too, but even without the pressure of a life simulation's daily clock I just find myself checking out bored. Survival crafting games like Valheim include fishing, as do some MMOs like Final Fantasy 14. I can almost get behind fishing in an MMO where I already enjoy a bit of lounging in town chatting with friends. In that case, though, I don't really need the fishing as a watercooler activity excuse. Heck, fishing is even in some of the Yakuza games. I wouldn't know if it's any good though—I refuse to try it.

I accept that fishing is just a non-negotiable part of one of my favorite genres. It's a popular minigame, including with some of my PC Gamer colleagues, who were scandalized to discover my anti-fishing stance. But I'm not afraid to say it anymore: Fishing is the worst part of any game it's in. Except maybe fishing games, but even then it's borderline.

Dark and Darker, a fantasy PvPvE extraction game, made a big splash when it first appeared in early 2023, even though it was in a pretty rough alpha state at the time. Before long, though, Nexon started making noise about it, accusing Ironmace of using "stolen" code and assets to build the game. Nexon was reportedly working on a similar project, codenamed P3, but pulled the plug on it in 2021; Ironmace was founded shortly thereafter by former Nexon employees.

Long story short, Nexon filed a complaint, Ironmace issued denials, investigations were conducted, and in March 2023 Dark and Darker was removed from Steam. The studio managed to turn the delisting into a bit of a PR coup by continuing to distribute its game through BitTorrent—"going old school," as the studio put it—which an awful lot of players loved. Still, it's better to be on Steam than not, and after a court dismissed Nexon's preliminary injunction against Dark and Darker in January 2024, it returned to the storefront in June of that year.

Legal wrangling continued, however, and now the courts have come down with something of a split decision: Ironmace did not commit copyright infringement but did infringe on Nexon's trade secrets. What's the difference, you wonder? The Copyright Alliance says copyrights are specific, individual rights applied to "an original work that is fixed in a tangible medium like a photograph, a book, or an mp3 file." Trade secrets, on the other hand, are less specific: "Information that has an economic benefit due to its secret nature, has value to others who cannot legitimately obtain it, and is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy."

So, I guess, because Nexon's P3 was never actually a thing, copyright infringement is out, but because Ironmace seemingly built Dark and Darker on a foundation originally laid by Nexon—which had more or less kept a lid on the whole thing—trade secret infringement is in. And that's going to cost Ironmace 8.5 billion won (roughly $5.9 million) in damages.

The good news for Ironmace is that Dark and Darker continues: The early access version on Steam holds a "mostly positive" user rating and continues to put up decent player numbers—currently there are nearly 14,000 people playing on Steam.

The bad news is that this may not be the end of the matter. Nexon said in a statement that the award is "meaningful, as it addresses illegal infringement actions that disrupt fair market competition." But, it added, "After carefully reviewing the ruling, we plan to seek further legal judgment through a higher court." I've reached out to Ironmace for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

One need only look at some of the more questionable corners of modding to see that the human impulse to see virtual humans naked shall never subside. But now we may have a new origin point for one of videogaming's most persistently grubby habits. Brace yourself: It's over four decades old, and involves… Smurfette.

Nothing new under the sun is there. This news comes courtesy of the wonderful Videogame History Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the medium's history, and recently added a scan of Electronic Games magazine, volume 2 issue 16. As well as featuring an excellent cover photo of a nerd fighting a bald man wrapped in a curtain, it includes a reader letter relating to the nude Smurfette discovery.

"Content warning: glitched naked pixel smurf," says VGHF, in what is both one of the greatest content warnings of all time and four words you probably won't ever see jammed-together ever again. "Just discovered in our archive: We thought 'nude codes' in games dated back to the original Tomb Raider, but we found a functional one in Electronic Games way back in 1984."

The game in question is Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, and on the letters page one enterprising soul shares their discovery. Unfortunately this contribution is not named, so our hero must remain unknown.

"There's a way to keep Smurfette's dress off until your energy runs out." No notes on that part. "You need the Roller Controller, or two joysticks plugged into one port through a Y-adapter. Stand on the skull and push one joystick down and the other up. Smurf gets lower and lower. When he disappears, the lady does her striptease act. Smurf will reappear at the top of the screen."

As can be seen from the image, if you squint a bit this does look like the Smurfette sprite suddenly has no dress, and a blue pixel beneath her arm one could very arguably describe as a breast. It seems self-evident that this is a visual glitch rather than anything intentional on the part of the programmer/s, though it is also a set of inputs that leads to an apparently naked character so certainly fits the definition of "nude code."

Props to Jupiter Jazz on Bluesky whose reaction inspired this article's headline: "Good to know the exact year we left gods light."

Well I hope we've all learned something today, especially those of you that zoomed-in on the image of poor Smurfette. Our nameless discoverer choosing to describe the moment of activation as "the lady does her striptease act" really does drive home that, back in the day, you had to make your own entertainment.

Over on the Baidu forums (as spotted by Wccftech), two pictures were posted, one of which showing what was claimed to be the AMD Radeon 8050S integrated GPU but the CPU's OPN actually suggests it is the 8060S-equipped AI Max+ 395. This is more than likely just a prelaunch software or database issue. This device managed to achieve a GPU score of 10,106 and a CPU score of 5,571 points in 3DMark Time Spy.

For clarity, that GPU score places what is currently assumed to be the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 around 2,000 points in the GPU category ahead of the average score of laptop RTX 4050 scores on 3DMark's website, and just a few hundred points behind laptop RTX 4060 scores. 3DMark is a pretty good benchmark for understanding graphical power though it's important to note it's not the be-all and end-all of gaming performance. A wider suite of games might give a better idea, but nevertheless this is a good starting point to figure out where AMD's top APU lands.

Ryzen's APU goes without a dedicated GPU, like those measured laptops above, which means if the score holds firm in actual testing, we might be able to expect RTX 4060 laptop performance out of this chip when it lands in gaming laptops, and at least one tablet from Asus.

We were hoping for a little more from the big leap in graphics cores to make the larger APU worth it over more power-savvy numbers for handhelds, like the Ryzen AI 9 HX 390. AMD previously suggested the top-end chip would perform similarly to an RTX 4070 gaming laptop (well, tablet) but these early figures put it closer to an RTX 4060 laptop. Discrete performance from an integrated GPU is still impressive but not quite what we were expecting.

It reportedly took AMD four goes to actually get the Strix Halo APU right and that's because it's more bespoke than one might think on first look. Strix Halo uses its own Zen 5-based CPU CCDs and it uses a new way to interconnect them, as the methods to get the Ryzen 9 9950X up and running saw limitations in power efficiency.

This power efficiency could allow the chip to become less power-hungry, which is a natural boon for the battery life of gaming laptops. That being said, the configurable wattage of this chip goes all the way up to 120 W and any change in the power of a given machine could make for large fluctuations in performance.

He then admitted last year that maybe he went a little overboard with chucking them in every single game, though of course there was still one in Shadow of the Erdtree. One upcoming FromSoft game that notably doesn't include a poison swamp, however, is Elden Ring's roguelike spinoff Nightreign.

That's probably because, as Kitao Taidai joked, Miyazaki isn't the one rubbing his purple-tinged hands all over the game. As reported by Famitsu, Taidai approached the subject of Nightreign's poison swamps, or lack thereof, during a livestream of the game over on YouTube. "There aren't any," Taidai told viewers (via a machine translation). "This time, the director is not Miyazaki, but [Junya] Ishizaki, who has been the battle director of Elden Ring, so maybe no one wanted to include it."

Ouch, a devastating blow to Miyazaki's neverending love for bubbling, venomous marshlands. It does make a lot of sense that if any Souls game was going to be missing one, it'd be Nightreign. The game's focus seems to be leaning a lot more heavily towards being a fast-paced slashfest—hell, our Morgan Park surmised it was closer to Fortnite than it was to Elden Ring when he had a hands-on with the game earlier this month—and I can imagine forcing players to trudge through toxic sludge isn't the kind of thing you need when trying to pull that off.

It does feel like a tiny bit of a shame though, but I'm sure Miyazaki's DNA will be running through Nightreign even without him at the helm. I would love to tell you myself, but, uh, I haven't had much luck trying to get into the (unfortunately non-PC) network test that's currently running this weekend. Either way, I'm sure Miyazaki will make up for Nightreign's missing poison swamps with plenty of dastardly creations in whatever creation he'll be cooking up next.

Physically, the 272URX looks like a dead ringer for MSI's larger 32-inch 4K OLED monitors, including the MSI MPG 321URX we reviewed last summer, just slightly smaller. So, it's a reasonably slick looking monitor with slim bezels and a smattering of RGB lighting on the rear.

It offers a similar collection of inputs, including dual HDMI 2.1 ports and DisplayPort. The latter, however, is upgraded to DP2.1 this time around and in the full UHBR20 spec, which allows for 4K 240 Hz without compression, albeit the only GPUs with DP 2.1 support among Nvidia GPUs are the very latest RTX 50 cards. AMD's Radeon RX 7000 also support the 2.1 standard.

Alongside that you get USB-C with 98 W power delivery and a two-port USB-A hub. So, connectivity is well covered. Actually, a lot of the panel specifications look similar to earlier 32-inch 4K OLEDs from MSI. So along with the 3,840 by 2,160 resolution, there's that 240 Hz refresh and 0.03 ms response, all really nice numbers even if they're identical to the 32-inch alternative.

The same goes for quoted panel brightness. At 250 nits full screen and 1,000 nits in a 3% window, there's no advance over the 32-inch 4K model, which uses Samsung's 3rd Generation QD-OLED panel technology.

There's been mixed messaging from various monitor makers over the status of this new class of 27-inch 4K Samsung QD-OLED. They're all using the same panel, but some are marketing it as 4th Generation.

Adding to the confusion, at CES this year both LG and Samsung showed off new TV-spec large OLED panels capable of much higher full-screen brightness up around 400 nits and peak brightness of 4,000 nits in a 3% window thanks to new quantum dot materials and a so-called five-layer tandem OLED structure.

While the MSI MPG 272URX does indeed get Samsung's new for 2025 4th Gen monitor panel tech that also sports the new QD material and five-layer tandem OLED structure, the higher pixel density is limiting in terms of brightness.

Our understanding is that without the new panel tech, this high density 4K panel would actually have been less bright than previous QD-OLED monitors. Indeed, there's also a new 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED panel that ups full screen brightness to 300 nits thanks to the new QD-OLED technology being applied to a lower pixel density.

Firing the MSI MPG 272URX confirms that the new-for-2025 QD-OLED tech looks very familiar, at least in this implementation. Pretty much all the strengths and weaknesses of the older 3rd Gen QD-OLEDs are apparent from the get go.

Oh, with one exception. 4K on a 27-inch makes for a very tight pixel density of 166 DPI, up from 140 DPI on those 32 inchers. If nothing else, that elevated pixel density puts to bed any remaining issues with font rendering on this monitor. Text looks really nice.

It's true that Samsung has retained the slightly odd triangular as opposed to vertically striped RGB subpixel structure. On panels with lower pixel density, that resulted in text fringing and a slight softening of image detail. But here, with that 166 DPI density, it's all good.

Fonts look super crisp, image content is incredibly sharp. Of course, the same is largely true of the 32-inch QD-OLED class. Yes, this 27-incher is a tiny bit sharper. But it's a subtle upgrade in that regard and one which comes with a rather more obvious downgrade in panel size. At this price point, 27 inches feels a bit stingy.

Moreover, if the improvement in font rendering with the jump from 32-inch to 27-inch 4K is marginal on the Windows desktop, it's pretty much invisible in-game. If for whatever reason you actively want a physically smaller display perhaps for ergonomic reasons, great. But don't go buying this monitor because you think it's going to make a 32-inch 4K look a little fuzzy. It absolutely doesn't.

Anywho, getting back to that carried over QD-OLED 3rd Gen panel vibe, this MSI betrays the same marginally oversaturated colors and warm temperature of the 32-inch model and frankly many other QD-OLED panels. It's not absolutely ideal, but it's something that you adjust to and can mitigate to an extent via calibration.

Likewise, the slightly purple-grey tint of the actual QD-OLED panel itself when reflecting ambient light remains present. In really bright ambient conditions, it compromises black levels a little. But again it's only a minor distraction even then, and in typical ambient conditions and especially at night, it's a non-issue.

While we're talking relative compromises, it's immediately obvious from the full-screen brightness that this new 4th Gen QD-OLED tech for monitors as applied here isn't a big step or really any step at all in that regard. That means the full-screen brightness performance is OK, but only just. Actually, MSI has been pretty conservative with its ABL or automatic brightness limiter in SDR mode. If you crank up the SDR brightness in HDR mode, you actually get a punchier result.

The only problem is then that the SDR color mapping in HDR mode isn't all that good. So, you need to use the sRGB SDR mode to get accurate SDR colors and that in turn means compromising on overall punchiness.

Speaking of HDR, that's where the MSI MPG 272URX really sings. Night time scenes and indoor in-game locations look utterly stellar. A good example is a section of Cyberpunk 2077 set at night on a raised metal gantry next to a rocket. Along the sides of the metal walkway are dotted a few boxed-in fluorescent light installations.

And, oh my goodness, those lights absolutely pop. They're incredibly bright next to the dark background, but also have crisp, sharp borders. No LCD comes close to this performance, even one with a few thousand dimming zones. There's always some light bleed, always some blooming.

That said, when rendering brighter outdoor game scenes, this new MSI is no different to all other recent OLED monitors we've reviewed. It can look a little dull because even this latest OLED tech isn't capable of driving large sections of the panel really hard.

HDR aside, the other big advantage over LCD is obviously response. By way of comparison, I've been playing with a 520 Hz IPS monitor this week, too. While it has a very slight latency advantage, in subjective terms, it's nowhere near when it comes to clarity, motion blurring, and color stability in motion. It's just no contest.

With this monitor, you don't have to worry about overshoot, smearing, inverse ghosting, any of the stuff that all fast IPS and VA LCD monitors suffer from to at least some extent. Like pretty much all OLED panels, the 272URX's pixel response is essentially a solved problem.

What almost certainly isn't a done deal, however, is OLED burn-in. This is a really tricky subject on which to draw definitive conclusions. But there are three things we can say with confidence. First, MSI has equipped the 272URX with a full suite of burn-in mitigation features, including pixel shifting, logo and taskbar detection and various panel refresh cycles.

Second, that won't absolutely guarantee you'll never have a problem with burn-in. Third, MSI provides a three-year burn-in warranty, so you are covered for at least that long. It's also worth noting that Samsung says this latest QD-OLED panel tech is even more durable than before, but for now that's just a claim. Beyond that, it's very hard to say what might happen with long term ownership other than it will likely depend on your usage and how you set up things like the Windows interface.

All of which means this new MSI QD-OLED is a largely similar proposition to other QD-OLEDs we've seen. The HDR experience is mostly stunning, though it does disappoint that OLED technology still isn't capable of being punchier across larger sections of panel.

The SDR experience is mostly fabulous, but a little more compromised. Relevant to both modes are the new OLED TV panels announced at CES. Samsung has implied their boosted brightness will trickle down to gaming monitors in the near future. So, if you have any concerns over full-screen brightness, it would be worth waiting until those panels appear.

More specifically regarding the 272URX, I'm not convinced by the 27-inch form factor. The benefits over 32 inchers in terms of clarity, image detail and font rendering is marginal. At the same time, the larger 32-inch form factor scores for both gaming immersion and desktop working space in Windows.

However, if you prefer the smaller 27-inch form factor, then you'll love this monitor. It's super sharp and gives you all the existing benefits of QD-OLED tech. So, if it's pixel density above all else you've been waiting for, the MSI MPG 321URX might be for you. In all other regards, it's a mostly familiar OLED experience despite the new QD-OLED panel technology and that includes full-screen brightness that's barely good enough. If you're after something brighter, look out for those upcoming 4th Gen 1440p QD-OLED models, which we hope to review soon.

Some people look at a 3D printer and think "this will make useful parts for my projects." Some people hear an air raid siren, and assume there must be an historical war re-enactment taking place nearby.

I am the third type of person, who hears a 3D-printed air raid siren and experiences a flash forward to my apocalyptic future yet to come. Bear with me here folks, I'm cooking.

Youtuber Mark Makies has created a 3D printer air raid siren. This you probably know, if you viewed the video above (via Hackaday). What I'm not entirely sure of is why it sounds like both a comedy bit in once-popular children's TV show Noddy's Toyland Adventures, and the sound of impending doom, all at once.

It's a cool project, anyway, and I'm all down for that. A combination of cheerfully-coloured 3D-printed components and RC parts have been employed to make something both charming and terrifying, and for this Mark should be applauded.

Internally, a brushless motor controlled by a speed controller turns a rotor, which pulses air pressure inside a stator. The slots inside the stator (stay with me, this is technical) make a wooooooo sound through the honking trumpet, and cause the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. Something like that, anyway.

Impressive. A potentiometer attached to the speed controller means the pitch can be adjusted by ramping the speed of the motor up and down, meaning those wooooos can become weeeees, and so forth. And for some reason, it reminds me of my youth.

I grew up in a small town just outside London, and every Tuesday morning a WW2 air raid siren would go off, waking me from my slumber/hangover. To this very day, I know not why. Friends would discuss it over an afternoon pint. Why does the siren sing for thee?

Still, it was both a useful way to tell me I was late for work, and a good excuse to check the skies to make sure the end times had not begun while I slept, blissfully unaware of my potential fate. The world kept turning, and the siren, it seemed to sing for no reason at all.

This video takes me back to those times. Ah, the halcyon days. Now, I fear that one day, I will hear the siren again. Hopefully it's a brightly coloured one, at least.

In fact, the FT claims Arm could unveil its first in-house processor as early as this summer with future chips powering a revolutionary AI strategy—including a new Jony Ive-design personal device.

The first chip is said to be a server CPU, so it won't be going into your next gaming PC. But it's still very big news with all kinds of implications.

The FT says the move is part of a broader plan by Arm's Japanese owner Softbank to move heavily into, yup you guessed it, AI, with a planned $500 billion to be spent on infrastructure in partnership with OpenAI.

That initial in-house Arm chip is actually said to be a server CPU that can be customized for clients, the most notable of which is claimed to be Meta. It's not clear how that chip, which does not appear to be overtly AI-aligned, fits in with Softbank's broader strategy for Arm.

That said, the FT mentions how Arm's move could be part of plans by former Apple designer Jony Ive in partnership with OpenAI and Softbank to create a new AI-powered personal device with a revolutionary, highly intuitive interface.

Back on the humble old dumb PC, Arm moving into making its own chips will surely only serve to accelerate the long-mooted annexation of the PC, with Intel and AMD's x86 processors eventually usurped by Arm chips.

That's been predicted for decades and yet never actually materialised. However, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips have been the most plausible possible usurpers, yet. Meanwhile, Nvidia, which tried and failed to buy Arm recently, is also said to be planning a new PC chip of its own based on Arm IP.

It's worth noting that Arm currently licenses both its instruction set and actual CPU designs. But it doesn't actually commission the production of any chips itself.

What's more, it's not clear what the implications might be with its ongoing fight with Qualcomm. During court fisticuffs with Qualcomm late last year, Arm pointed out that it has never built chips itself. However, it also said it is also always considering new strategies for the future.

Anyway, this is ultimately a case of wait and see. Will Arm do its own chips? Will they eventually go into PCs? Could Arm become a major player in AI? Could your smartphone be replaced by a whole new device paradigm powered by an Arm-made AI chip? Honestly, who knows!

US pricing has yet to emerge. But the AOC Agon Pro AG276FK is about £500 in the UK, implying a likely sticker of around $550. If so, it'll be priced right next to the likes of the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG27FFX2A, which is a dead ringer by most specification metrics.

What we're dealing with here is a 27-inch 1080p IPS gaming monitor that's being sold unambiguously on speed. Along with the nosebleed-inducing 520 Hz refresh rate, AOC rates this monitor's pixel response at 0.5 ms GTG and an eye-popping 0.3 ms for MPRT. That is awfully quick.

Such figures rarely if ever map well to reality. But they're useful as comparators and AOC is certainly positioning this monitor as being one of the fastest IPS panels out there. Of course, fast for an IPS is nothing for an OLED monitor, pretty much all of which are rated at 0.03 ms, an order of magnitude quicker on paper. But then good luck finding a 520 Hz OLED monitor for 500 bucks. They barely exist at any price.

Elsewhere, AOC says this monitor is good for 400 nits and has HDR400 certification. To be clear, this is not a true HDR panel. There's no local dimming and it's not capable of high dynamic range rendering. But it will decode an HDR signal correctly. That's just about better than nothing, especially given HDR sizzle really isn't what this monitor is about.

Apart from the towering refresh rate, this AOC justifies its price point with a well built, all-alloy stand that offers a full range of adjustment including height, tilt, pivot and swivel. Design wise, AOC has gone for a quirky asymmetric vibe, slim bezels on three sides of the 27-inch IPS panel, a smattering of RGB lighting, plus a slide-out headphone hanger on the right-hand bezel.

For connectivity there are two DisplayPort 1.4 connections capable of the maximum 520 Hz refresh rate. Admittedly, the pair of HDMI 2.0 sockets are only good for 240 Hz, but they're primarily there for console connectivity which only requires 120 Hz.

Rounding out the core features are a comprehensive OSD menu that includes overdrive controls and low latency modes, plus AOC's GMENU app that provides access to much of the OSD functionality within Windows.

Ultimately, there's nothing too exotic about this monitor on paper bar the refresh rate and response. So, the question is just how fast does it feel? Oh, and just how bad does 1080p look on a relatively large 27-inch panel?

To address that second point, the pixel density works out to just 82 DPI. This week, I've also been playing with one of the new breed of 4K 27-inch OLED panels. It offers in excess of twice that DPI figure. And, boy, you really can see the difference. On the Windows desktop, fonts look awfully craggy and the whole panel has a pretty pixelated look.

Actually in-game, however, it's not that bad. For sure, it's not as sharp as a 1440p 27-inch monitor, let alone 4K. But the detail level is tolerable. And, of course, the lower resolution means you've much more chance of hitting that 520 Hz refresh rate in terms of actual frame rates.

Well, much more chance in some games and with some GPUs. Ultimately, this is a display designed for esports, for online shooters. So, you can hit 520 fps-plus in something like Counter-Strike 2. But you're not going to see frame rates like that in, say, Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled, probably not even with a really high-end Nvidia GPU.

Speaking of Nvidia GPUs, the new RTX 50 series with its Multi Frame Generation tech will certainly help boost frame rates in some games up bearer this monitor's refresh rate. The problem is, while you'll get the motion fluidity, you won't get the other important benefit of 520 Hz refresh, namely low latency.

Latency is totally dependent on fully rendering frames in the 3D pipeline, not guesstimating them with AI trickery. So, to get the full benefit of the AOC Agon Pro AG276FK, Frame Gen isn't going to help.

Anyway, if you can get your favourite shooter running up around 500 Hz, the sense of immediate response is very sweet. I tend to find the returns diminish above 240 Hz or so. But really competitive esports players will definitely appreciate just how instant this panel feels in terms of response to inputs. It's pretty electric.

The other factor in a sense of speed is obviously pixel response. Here, qualifiers are needed. For an LCD monitor, this thing is seriously quick. There are four levels of pixel overdrive available in the aforementioned OSD menu. Happily, the fastest mode is actually usable.

That's not always the case. With a lot of gaming panels you'll find the max overdrive mode is a mess of overshoot and inverse ghosting. Here, a whiff of overshoot is evident when you wiggle an app window around on the Windows desktop. But actually in-game, it's barely visible. Certainly, there's little to no motion color shift, something that can be pretty distracting.

So, this AOC is about as quick as current LCD technology gets. What it's not is as quick as an OLED. Of course, even the cheapest OLEDs are about $100 more expensive and won't get near 240 Hz. So, to some extent you have to decide where your preferences lie. Personally, I prefer the overall compromise of a 240 Hz 1440p panel. But then I'm not a really serious esports aficionado. The days when I was actually any good at Counter-Strike are sadly long behind me.

Speed aside, this is a very nicely calibrated monitor in sRGB SDR mode. It looks punchy and vibrant, the colors are accurate, it's just a very nice thing bar that blocky pixel density. The HDR mode is well setup, too, including nicely executed mapping of SDR tones. So, if you want you could leave this monitor in HDR mode all the time and get great image quality for all content types.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with HDR at all. That's because, as mentioned, this isn't a true HDR monitor and where both SDR and HDR versions of any given content are available, there's little benefit in choosing the latter.

All told, then, I feel pretty well disposed toward the AOC Agon Pro AG276FK despite it not being my kind of monitor. I'm not majorly into esports these days, so 240 Hz or thereabouts is plenty for the vast majority of my gaming, and I'd much, much prefer something with better pixel density.

But that's my remit and not necessarily yours. If yours does indeed major on sky-high refresh and ultra-low latency, this AOC definitely delivers and does so with excellent image quality given the limitations of this panel type. It's not for me, this AOC. But if you're seriously into esports and you don't care about general Windows performance, it might just be for you.

Except it's not called System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition anymore, apparently. It's just unveiled itself as System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, which is a pretty nice way of spinning the six years since it was announced all the way back in 2019. When life gives you lemons, make the lemonade look like it was your plan all along.

Not only that, but Nightdive has finally announced a date… on which it will reveal the release date. Those rapscallions. We'll get to hear when the game will make landfall on March 20, during the Future Game Show Spring Showcase at GDC 2025. (The Future Game Show is run by, well, Future, which also owns PC Gamer).

Of course, given that System Shock 2 was a 1999 game, this year will actually mark its 26th anniversary, but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely, so it's either stick with 25th Anniversary Remaster or wait another four years until it can come out as the 30th Anniversary Edition. I prefer this option.

Aside from the date for its release date, Nightdive doesn't have much more info for us just yet on its dolled-up SS2, save that the March 20 announcement will be accompanied, naturally, by a new trailer.

Nevertheless, I am excited. Every fragment of info the studio has dropped about the remaster makes it look like it's taking very special care with it, preserving its brilliant System Shock-iness while making it run spick-and-span on modern, high-res machines.

Yeah, so first of all, Nightreign's network test is kinda weird. Instead of running for a set period of time—you know, like how most games'll run their tests or betas for 48 hours or so—instead it's choosing a sprinkling of three-hour pockets from now until February 17. That first session wrapped up at 6am PST / 9am EST / 2pm GMT today… not that it really matters, since it seems like barely anyone was able to get in anyway.

Happy Valentine day from r/Eldenring

The Elden Ring subreddit is full of folk laughing through the pain as Nightreign's servers appear to have crapped out less than an hour into the session. I gave things a try myself at around 11:30am UK time, only to be repeatedly met with login errors at the title screen. The FromSoftware player support Twitter notes that the "game server is experiencing high traffic, making it difficult to match" before shortly following it up with acknowledgement that the whole thing was borked.

"Currently, there is a malfunction on the Elden Ring Nightreign game server," the account posted. "We will restart the server to restore service." Well that happened, around 40 minutes later. Not that it seemed to make much difference, mind.

I continued to try myself between 12:30pm and 1:30pm UK time, and the furthest I was able to get was into the hub. The game never actually managed to throw me into a match, forcing me back to the title screen to start the whole thing all over again. I finally gave up shortly before 2pm, resigning myself to a session lost before crawling back to my beloved desktop.

The whole sub rn from r/Eldenring

That doesn't mean everyone was unable to play, though. There are a scattering of Reddit posts of folk who managed to successfully get through the matchmaking and take on the network test's bosses within.

But, unfortunately, for the most part, it seems like would-be Nightreigners missed out. The FromSoftware Twitter page posted one final apology as the first session concluded, added that it may rerun the test to make up for things. "We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to all players due to the game server issues," the post read. "Today's network test will end at 23:00 [Japan time] as scheduled, and we will proceed with improvement work. We are considering holding an additional test for today's session. Your understanding and cooperation would be greatly appreciated."

Ultimately, it's a frustrating situation for both sides. Of course it would've been rad to try and dive in, but I'm sure FromSoftware was having an equally bad time at trying to put out the fires as I was getting hard stuck in a log-in-disconnect loop. Unfortunately for me, the next session runs at, uh, 3am in the UK, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow's 7pm session to give things another go. Hopefully FromSoftware manages to get things a little more stable before then, and I'll be over here hoping that PlayStation and Xbox users get to be the guinea pigs so that when the network test inevitably comes to PC, we won't suffer the same issues. Hopefully, anyway.

Alright, let me qualify that. It's certainly possible that AMD has a 32 GB test card rattling around in its labs, because hey, everything gets a little crazy on a Friday and the team thought it might be fun. But as for one turning up on sale in March? Nuh-uh.

That's it. That's the tweet. It's no surprise that AMD isn't planning on cramming the RX 9070 XT with an excessive amount of VRAM, because it's been very open for some time about its humble aims to bring mid-range cards to the market this generation, not high end.

32 GB of VRAM would only really make sense for AI and high-level rendering purposes, not a stated goal of this generation of AMD GPUs. And while we've certainly seen controversy regarding a perceived lack of VRAM in cards like the RTX 4060 Ti in the past, 32 GB would be over-egging the pudding significantly for a mid-range GPU.

Plus, it's fairly expensive. VRAM, that is. Stuffing a card full of it while trying to keep the price competitive with Nvidia's offer of the RTX 5070 for $549 makes about as much sense as, ooh, I don't know, offering one with a gold-plated cooling shroud for bragging rights.

Although, anything's possible. Just wanted to add that qualifier, in case AMD announces the RX 9070 XT Gold Standard edition in a week. And hey, companies do be doing crazy things sometimes. One for the future maybe? Perhaps. Just not now.

This batch of cards will need to be high-performing (for their product category) and relatively cheap to sell well, and that's something that AMD appears to be keenly aware of.

At least, we're sort of hoping so at this point. Given the claimed advantages of DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation (we've yet to test it on a mid-range card, although we've been diving in to the figures for the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090), the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 look like they'll have an uphill battle on their hands this generation to grab some market share.

And 32 GB of VRAM, for no real reason other than a marketing-friendly number on the box? That really doesn't seem like the play. Anyway, here's the word, straight from the horse's mouth. You can all go back to your bunks.

As ever with Humble Bundles, what you get is down to what you pay. Spend $45 (£36) and you'll get the full 53-item set, meaning a bunch of Pathfinder Kingmaker PDFs, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a physical Pathfinder Kingmaker Bestiary hardback book. For $35 (£28) you get the same stuff minus the physical book. $30 (£24) nets you the ebooks without the game, while the $15 (£12) and $5 (£4) tiers net you a diminishing number of ebooks.

Whether or not it's worth it is dependent entirely on how much use you'll get out of many volumes of Pathfinder books. Grabbing the bundle just for Kingmaker would be daft: the game's been on sale for prices as low as $3 in the past, and is actually currently available for a paltry $4 on IndieGala if it's all you're looking for.

But if you're a pen 'n' paper sicko, it could be well worth it. Pathfinder Kingmaker—the TTRPG, I mean—is all about players building a kingdom from scratch, and dealing with all the administrative and political headaches that inevitably causes.

As for the game, well, back when we took a look at it at launch, Andy Kelly wasn't wowed by the game in his Pathfinder: Kingmaker review, and it's definitely been overshadowed by its sequel, Wrath of the Righteous. But it underwent a comeback over the next few years, adding in stuff like a turn-based mode and free DLC. Quoth our own Jody Macgregor in 2021: "Replaying Kingmaker today is quite a different experience than it was in 2018.

"Turn-based combat means area-of-effect spells actually hit the enemies you want, and your characters don't charge into battle directly over traps that have already been discovered. It's easier to manage your kingdom thanks to crisis points that can be spent to improve the odds of dealing with disasters, while the build points you need for construction and research projects can be bought right there in the kingdom management menu rather than by exiting it, then physically leaving your throne room to find the one merchant in your settlement who sells them." Sounds a lot less tedious to me.

In a blog post on the, err, YouTube official blog, Mohan takes a moment to mark the internet video sensation's 20th birthday, with his four "big bets" for YouTube in 2025 (via Sweclockers). "YouTube will remain the epicenter of culture", he says. Heavens help us all.

"For more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube. Viewers are watching, on average, over 1B hours of YouTube content on TVs daily, and TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S" says Mohan.

"It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love."

I feel like following a statement on Shorts viewership with a "yes, really" qualifier is perhaps a tad defeatist, but I'll admit that even I watch the occasional YouTube Short. On my TV, though? That's sacrilege, surely.

In other news, YouTube TV apparently has more than eight million subscribers and YouTube Premium has over 100 million happy payees. Given YouTube's increasingly aggressive (and incredibly lucrative) policy of filling my watching hours with ads, I've considered paying for one myself on occasion.

Ah, who am I kidding. That'd eat into my Steam budget, and I feel its kinda like letting that sort of ad-based incentive win. Anyway, Mohan also boldly states that "YouTubers are becoming the startups of Hollywood," as would-be filmmakers are starting off on the platform in the hope of graduating to the really, really big screen:

"Creators are bringing that startup mindset to Hollywood: leaning into new models of production, building studios to elevate their production quality, and exploring new creative avenues.

"We're committed to meeting creators where they are with tools and features that power their businesses and communities" he continues. "We’ll continue to support their growth through more traditional revenue streams like ads and YouTube Premium, while introducing new ways for creators to partner with brands to bring their products to life."

Ah good, more brands. It seems like most of my favourite creators are now acting like the QVC shopping channel and hawking dubiously-effective wares, although I've not yet been tempted to buy anything simply because a gurning thumbnail-enthusiast has shoved it in my face mid-video.

Still, it must be working in general. There's gold in them thar hills, or so I've been told.

And actually, while it's fun to poke fun, I think Mohan has a point. Even my dear sainted mother has been known to watch YouTube on her televisual box, and if that's not a sign of mass-adoption, I don't know what is. YouTube is on your phone, your desktop browser, and now, it seems, increasingly replacing the other apps on your TV set-top box.

A brave new world indeed. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to tie a ring of daisies in my hair and frolic among the heather. It's a beautiful day outside, y'know?

As spotted by SteamDB, the site known for tracking Steam data (via PC Mag), users who downloaded survival crafter PirateFi were informed that "The Steam account of the developer for this game uploaded builds to Steam that contained suspected malware".

As a result of this, Valve urges users to either run a "full-system scan using an antivirus product that you trust or use regularly" or "consider fully reformatting your operating system to ensure that no malicious software remains on your machine". Both are smart ways of counteracting potential malware but this is a worrying message to get from a trusted platform such as Steam either way.

The Steam reviews for the game paint a suspicious story. The first few days of launch saw a handful of positive reviews, from accounts that had played the game for no more than two hours, though many of them aren't entirely fresh accounts. The latter point is normally a good sign of legitimacy.

However, later negative reviews are mostly from fresh accounts, accusing the game of stealing their data, spending their Steam wallet, and one user even suggests the game's screenshots are stolen from another pirate game. Given that the new negative reviews are from fresh accounts accusing the game of stealing their old accounts, those old accounts could potentially account for some of the positive reviews.

According to PC Mag, a Telegram account named Jose Andres offered people $17 an hour to moderate the web3 survival pirate game. In those same chats, they claim the game has had over 7,000 players. It seems this 'job' was just a scam to get more people to play the game as part of the induction process for it was to download PirateFI.

After being active for six days, Valve took action and took the game down on February 12. Based on the SteamDB figures, it seems likely the 7,000 players figure was just part of the talk to build up trust for their scam as the game has an all-time peak of five players. However, many report the game doesn't open so the likelihood of having many concurrent players is pretty low. According to those analytics, Gamalytic reckons the game got around 800 downloads and VG Insights thinks that number is up to around 1,500.

Either way, this sets a bad precedent for the safety of the Steam store and we don't yet know about internal changes made by Valve to catch future attempts. Hopefully, this remains an isolated event.

We have reached out to Valve for comment.

How much? $55 dollars to you sir. And as with many Kickstarters, the sting is in the shipping: That total goes up to around $85 for one mug when you include shipping. I mean, even if you've had a particularly fruitful day in the mines, that's a lot of money for a plastic mug.

Now, I'm not necessarily complaining. Grown adults can spend their money on what they like, DRG players adore the game, and the mugs look great. It should also be said that, with 30 days to go, the Kickstarter has sailed beyond its initial $200,000 target and is currently around $300,000, so lots of folk are happy to pay this price.

Still… hell of a lot of money for a mug. And what amused me about this is the rationale for the price. One person backed the Kickstarter for a dollar, only so that they could leave a comment for Scorched Steel Industry saying "$85 (with shipping) for a plastic mug is too expensive for many of us."

SSI's response is an instant classic. "We are aware the price of the mugs is quite high and not for everyone sadly. It is explained by the very high cost of the steel molds and the number of parts requisited [sic] for each mug. A few of the manufacturers we talked with told us it might be the most complicated mug made industrially on Earth, and amongst the most complicated projects for them."

I'm not sure exactly how, but "the most complicated mug made industrially on Earth" feels seriously on-brand for Deep Rock Galactic. But there's more! "We also chose a rather expensive polymer to get the best look and properties" and, very reasonably, "small batches of just a few thousand pieces are very expensive compared to mass production in the hundreds of thousands or millions."

I didn't want one of these mugs this morning, but I'm slowly leaning towards them. DRG fans are mostly mollified and amused by this explanation, though there's still some grumbling about the steel molds argument (there are four mugs, but they clearly share the same mold).

"Yeah, I don't think anyone who knows about Kickstarter stuff is going to say these are cheap," says ChillyG27. "But still, you can make it to be the most high tech safe and secure mug in the world, but it still remains an 80 bucks plastic mug."

"Made of neither rock nor stone," notes SergeantSleepy1995 disapprovingly. HowlingHipster meanwhile makes the decent point that "people are treating these like fun casual drinkware and not collectors items. These come across like the millennial nerd version of the pink glass dishes my mom hoards in a cabinet."

Speaking as a dad whose daughters are obsessed with Stanley Cups, and who deeply resented having to pay $45 for a god damn cup, I can tell you that no mug is worth this amount of money. But it's all in the eye of the beholder, and very much you pays your money, you takes your choice. But let's just enjoy that line one more time: "The most complicated mug made industrially on Earth."

Counterswapping is a pretty contentious subject in Overwatch. The actual definition is when players repeatedly switch their hero to one that counters someone specific on the other team, but a lot of players have watered this down and take it to mean anytime someone is playing a hero that counters something that they are playing, even if it's just a coincidence and not intentional.

Despite the fact that countering enemy players is just part and parcel of what it takes to win in a hero shooter—it would be kind of pointless just to lie down and die instead of swapping to another character that is better suited for the match—I can understand why, at its worst, counterswapping is annoying.

Because every perk is unique to each hero, they won't carry over if you switch mid-game. So, every time you pick a new character, you'll have to start back at level one. Even if perks unlock slightly faster for new picks, players are hoping that this disadvantage will work as a disincentive for those who spend too much time counterswapping.

"Yep, probably a good thing, though the level of catchup mechanic is important," one player says. "And that initial meetup likely is still not so bad to stop first fight swaps, but it's a step forward. Remove some ult charge retention, and we're getting somewhere." While other players point out that this could specifically help with counterswapping tanks.

Tanks in 5v5 Overwatch tend to have the hardest time when it comes to counterswapping, because they are often the lynchpin of a team, there's only one of them, and they have some very obvious counters. For example, if I went Hog, the enemy tank should probably go Mauga, then I would go D.Va, then they'd go Sigma, then I'd go Doomfist, then they'd go Zarya, then I'd go Reinhardt, then they'd go Ramattra, and then I'd be back to Hog and the cycle begins anew.

It's incredibly convoluted, and realistically, no one should be changing that much each fight, but as the only disincentive before was restricting ult charge, it was a possible strategy. It still is, even with perks, but now there's one more reason not to, and that may be enough for players just to switch things up a couple of times and then leave it at that.

Blizzard has made previous changes to try to dissuade players from counterswapping as well. Season 13 introduced a small update to the scoreboard, which meant if you switched hero mid-fight, players on the enemy team can't see who you've picked for 15 seconds. "This change adds more friction to counterswapping, especially in the extreme case where two players on opposite teams are both sitting in spawn with the scoreboard open and rapidly switch their heroes in response to each other's choices," a developer commented.

While this update was a small help, it didn't completely eradicate counterswapping from Overwatch 2, and it's pretty likely that this perk feature won't either. Swapping is just part of the game—it's why there are counters, there are so many heroes, and you can switch heroes mid-fight. So next time you get someone yelling about CounterWatch in your chat, just remind them that you wouldn't do it if it weren't a massive strategic part of the game.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme sees you take the role of the fearsome eponymous boss, and wait around for some little nobody covered in rags to fight you again and again. Fighting this upstart for the first time in my boss room took as much effort as stepping on an ant, I only had to use one move on him, and the so-called Hero fell with no resistance. But as I headed back to my throne, I could hear the patter of footsteps approach my door once again: He was back.

This pretender kept coming back no matter how many times I crushed his tiny soul or spilt his blood across my throne room, and each time he'd become a little stronger. Soon Hero learnt that he could avoid my dash by jumping over me, or that if he dodged my pentagram spell at the last second, it couldn't damage him, meaning that I had to start switching up attacks and try out new ways to corner him. It was bloody annoying going up against some chump who was allowed infinite retries to kill me, and not at all fair.

After one particularly close fight, Hero even asked me whether I'd think it best to change, learn new moves, or at least try to become better in some way. My answer was quite stubborn, and I stayed firm in my belief that I was the pinnacle of all evil, the greatest warrior to ever live, and far too stuck in my ways to try out any new tricks now. So the fighting continued, and even though I beat Hero, I did cut it a little close at times.

It wasn't until I was whittled down to my last quarter of health that I decided a bit of change may be a good idea and showed off my final form, an eldritch beast that let out a hideous screech that killed Hero instantly.

Unfortunately, even that attack didn't work for long. Eventually, Hero returned with a new golden glowing shield which could repel my screams, and before long he had all my tricks figured out and was at last able to kill me. But I put up a pretty good fight before all of that.

Despite the aggravating premise, The Dark Queen of Mortholme was a neat inversion of the usual, and between the increasingly demoralising fights lay a smartly told story that was a nice surprise for such a short game. I was just expecting to fight for as long as I could, but I didn't count on coming to terms with how to dig yourself out of a rut when you're going nowhere or learning how to accept one's own mortality.

The story only progresses during the short conversations between the evil Queen and Hero before a fight commences. At first the Queen looks down on Hero, but by the end of the whole ordeal, I think she sort of warms to his persistence and admires his can-do attitude, even if I found it a little irritating. Even so, it was a wholesome way to frame the story of a Hero fighting and eventually winning against the world's greatest evil.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme, is a 20 minute game that explores the capacity for change as well as a slightly unconventional relationship, it's fun, cool to look at, and just the right amount of frustrating. It's also irrevocably changed the way I look at boss battles from here on out. I feel as if I need to hobble back to Morgott's final resting place in Elden Ring just to apologise for how annoying I must have been trouncing up those stairs time after time, donned in his half-brothers armour, the strongest sword I could find, a mimic tear, and Melina to help me out—that wasn't fair or very nice of me at all, I'm sorry.

This rumour, and it very much is a rumour, comes from an equities analyst at investment bank Baird who cited discussions between TSMC and Intel. According to the Wall Street Journal and to broadly précis this particular yarn, the rough idea is for TSMC to send some of its best engineers to Intel's fabs to sort them out. They can then be spun off into a separate entity managed by TSMC but co-owned by both companies.

If you're thinking this sounds like wild speculation, it does. But the markets are taking it seriously, with Intel's share price spiking by fully 6% when the rumour broke. So the question is, does it make sense?

For starters, if there's any truth to this story then it speaks volumes about the health of Intel's all-important upcoming 18A node. And not in a good way. If 18A is all Intel is cracking it up to be, then there would be no need to parachute in TSMC engineers and Intel wouldn't be looking to spin off its fabs.

Personally, I doubt 18A is as healthy as Intel claims, otherwise CEO Pat Gelsinger would not have been ejected, sorry retired, from his role. So, let's take this rumour seriously for a moment and consider the implications.

On the one hand, the idea that TSMC in part or whole takes control of Intel's fabs could be great for the US chip industry and the broader chip supply chain. The world's chip supply would no longer be so dependent on production in a location constantly teetering on edge of a geopolitical crisis thanks to tensions between Taiwan and China.

More chips produced in the US also sidesteps any concerns over increasing electronics prices thanks to the possible imposition of hefty tariffs on Taiwanese chip of up to 100% by the Trump administration.

On the other, handing over control of even more of the world's cutting-edge chip production to TSMC looks like a megamonopoly in the making. And it's hard to find any examples of long term and overwhelming monopolies in important industries working out well for the average consumer.

You could take the view that if Intel's fabs are in more trouble than the company is letting on. It might be a choice between partnering with TSMC or watching those fabs go up in proverbial smoke.

In other words, the real-world choice might be between partnering with TSMC or seeing Intel's fabs down and ceasing to exist in the medium term. In which case, it's got to be worth giving the TSMC thing a go. After all, the US government could take control of or shutter those fabs should it wish.

Moreover, if tensions between China and Taiwan increase yet further, TSMC may benefit from a larger US presence. It already has a 4nm fab of its own up and running in the US, with 3nm and 2nm fabs in the planning.

In the long run, that could once again make the US the global center of chip production. And yet the idea makes my spidey sense tingle. You only have to look at graphics card prices to see what happens when one company dominates. The idea that TSMC swallowing up Intel's fabs is going to be a good thing for we mere gamers doesn't feel at all convincing.

In the end, the only thing we can be fairly confident of is that the next decade or so looks likely to be volatile if not tumultuous in the tech industry. Tariffs, AI, geopolitics, scalpers, fake frames, a mooted mega monopoly in chips, it's all pretty baffling. Long gone are the innocent days when the most controversial aspect of building a new gaming PC was whether you were an Intel or AMD fan. It's all so much more complicated now.

But the devs at Heart Machine tell PCG they're undaunted, and despite a "teamwide 'oops, guess we made it too hard' moment" when the game first hit Steam, they've got "No regrets" about releasing in early access. "There is no amount of time you can spend in isolation that will make the game great," says lead producer Michael Clark. "You get the best version of a game by maximizing the amount of feedback-and-iteration loops you can go through, and Early Access is the way to do that for a title like this."

So, for now, Heart Machine has turned its first barrage of mixed feedback into an early access roadmap, released yesterday. The devs promise a February update consisting of performance fixes, a combat and gear rebalance, bug fixes, and new stuff: enemies, affixes, a new player character, and so on.

That'll be followed by another (relatively) small update in March before a bigger, named patch in April: the Buried Below update. That one will feature more tweaks, more new stuff, and an "improved onboarding" experience for new players who find themselves a little baffled by the game at first blush. Which, yeah, I get that. Although I liked my time with HLB, I could easily see a new player getting overwhelmed with how much is going on and bouncing right off. Better hand-holding wouldn't go amiss.

I've got high hopes for the game, and Heart Machine sounds very open to change. "We had a lot of balance changes going in right up to launch," says Clark, "and we had been tuning things to be more difficult, as we had found that we were getting pretty good at beating our first Cycle on a fresh save." But they might have overcorrected just a little: "We knew that we were better at the game than a new player would be, but we misjudged the difficulty.

"We want the game to be tough, but fair and clear to understand… We aren't looking to make it easy, but it should be fair and you should be able to analyze what you did wrong and git gud." Not a bad philosophy, if you ask me. Here's hoping Heart Machine pulls it off.

Set to air at 8 AM EST / 5 AM PT on the AMD Gaming YouTube channel, the RX 9070 live stream is going to give more information on the cards that are confirmed to launch in early March.

With the RTX 5070 Ti set to launch on February 20 and RTX 5070 launching on March 5, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards will likely launch just after these two Nvidia cards.

These will be AMD's first graphics cards to use the RDNA 4 microarchitecture so there's quite a lot of hype and/or speculation surrounding them. Notably, these cards are reportedly targeting the more midrange market so won't be a replacement for that RTX 5090 card you've been looking for.

They could, however, sway you away from the cheaper 50-series cards if the live stream and subsequent launch suggest RDNA 4 has led to big performance gains.

In the wake of Nvidia's card selling out nearly instantaneously, AMD's David McAfee announced AMD is "planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally for its launch in March."

We know surprisingly little about AMD's next set of graphics cards right now but a recent leak suggests the AMD RX 9070 XT can run the latest Monster Hunter Wilds benchmarking tool at 211.7 average fps, which is mighty impressive.

This is at 1080p with frame gen enabled but impressive nonetheless. If these stats bore out in real tests, and customers can actually get them on shelves, AMD could have a surprise hit on its hands.

I know I just hope the price is right to compete, and an FSR improvement wouldn't go amiss.

As a way to get more people to watch, there are three codes that appear during the stream that you can redeem for Stellar Jade. This time it looks like the new faces will be quantum harmony character, Tribbie, and imaginary destruction character, Mydei. It also looks like we're getting reruns for Luocha and Topaz, so there are a whole lot of potential characters you can grab.

As usual I'll include the codes below as they go live during the stream and further down the page you'll find details about how to redeem them if you haven't done so before. You'll want to claim these fairly fast since livestream codes usually expire within a day or so.

Honkai: Star Rail codes—All current livestream Stellar Jade

• 7A324EYX6SHT - 100 Stellar Jade and 50,000 credits
• 4A2KLEHFPBGF - 100 Stellar Jade and five Traveler's Guide
• DB22LWYXPSY3 - 100 Stellar Jade and four Refined Aether

How to redeem Honkai: Star Rail codes

Before you can redeem your codes you'll first have to unlock the mailbox by finishing the "A Moment of Peace" Trailblaze mission. Once that's done, you'll have two options. Either you can do it through the game:

• Launch the game
• Enter the phone menu
• Click the three dots next to your avatar portrait
• Select the redemption code option
• Input a code and choose redeem
• Claim your rewards from your mailbox

Or you can do it online:

• Open the Honkai: Star Rail redemption site
• Enter your details and select your server
• Put a code into the box
• Grab your rewards from the in-game mailbox

As we discussed, back at CES Nvidia originally said both GPUs would be available in February, though didn't put a specific date on that. So, a March 5 release for the RTX 5070 is definitely a delay. The question is why?

Hopefully, the delay is mostly about making sure there's plenty of availability at launch, what with RTX 5080 and 5090 cards predictably selling out in picoseconds after their launch. Pushing the launch of the RTX 5070 back by a couple of weeks could help with that.

However, we suspect it's as much about triangulating the 5070 release to undermine the launch of AMD's competing Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT. Those two GPUs were originally rumoured to launch earlier this year.

AMD never said that would happen. However AMD has said that it decided to delay both cards to give them a little polish. "We are taking a little extra time to optimize the software stack for maximum performance and enable more FSR 4 titles," AMD's Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics rep David McAfee said on January 22.

Likewise AMD has since inked in "early March" as the launch window for those new GPUs. With that in mind, Nvidia also moving the RTX 5070 to early March seems like a little too much of a coincidence. Odds are, it's an effort to win the PR war with AMD by ensuring that the RX 9070 GPUs have to share the news cycles with the RTX 5070.

Incidentally, it could be quite the fight. The latest rumours suggest the 9070 XT could have a boost clock of 3.1 GHz and offer performance comparable to a 7900 XTX in the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark.

Copious caveats apply and we'll have to wait and see just how good the 9070 XT is. But if those rumours are right, this could be one of the most exciting GPU launches in years. Oh, provided AMD gets the pricing right.

Of course, all of this will be academic for most gamers unless both Nvidia and AMD manage to get a decent number of cards onto retail shelves. Comments on X in response to Nvidia's announcement of the launch dates say it all. "When will availability for the 5090 and 5080 cards start?" one X user replied. Well, quite.

This latest court filing describes the bid for OpenAI's governing non-profit publicised on Monday as "serious." This, despite Musk allegedly telling staff at X over email, "Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even."

Furthermore, sources told Reuters that OpenAI's board of directors had apparently not received a formal bid from Musk's side as of Tuesday. Still, the original bid has arguably succeeded in at least one of its goals: to draw public attention to OpenAI's reported intention to go for-profit through its latest restructure, and to get us all talking about it—like this.

Whether any amount of public attention will keep OpenAI non-profit still remains to be seen though. The company started as a non-profit, before shifting into a 'capped-profit' structure back in 2019. The non-profit part of the company Musk et al allegedly want to buy is what steers the ship of the wider, capped-profit company. The aforementioned restructure intends to go more traditionally for-profit in the form of a public benefit corporation.

OpenAI is presently playing it cool. The original unsolicited bid was dismissed by OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, who went as far as to write on X, "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want".

Theoretically, the board could still accept a bid despite this rejection from Altman, though a recent comment suggests that's unlikely; counsel to OpenAI's board, Andrew Nussbaum, provided a statement to Bloomberg News which further clarifies the company's stance: "The nonprofit is not for sale."

For those unaware, Elon Musk co-founded the company that went on to create ChatGPT alongside Sam Altman back in 2015. Musk then left in 2018, with the company saying at the time his departure was to avoid a potential conflict of interest as Tesla became more interested in AI.

Last year, OpenAI shared redacted emails and DMs suggesting that this split was anything but wholly amicable. Not only that, but these messages also indicate that Musk wanted to push OpenAI towards becoming a for-profit organisation as early as 2017.

Sam Altman recently told Bloomberg Television, "I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this." The Musk-backed competition in question is xAI and their boorish chatbot Grok. You know what? I think I'm finally getting it.

If you want more of that, I've got good news. Games Workshop's Warhammer+ subscription includes a streaming service called Warhammer TV that's been trickling out animation since 2021, and there's now enough of it to easily justify subbing for a month to mainline the best of them.

Purist space marine action is sometimes dismissively called "bolter porn" by people who for some reason don't want to see boltguns in their negligee, but if large armored men fighting desperate last stands while the soundtrack swells is what you want then Angels of Death has it in spades. It's about a ship full of marines from the Blood Angels chapter who've been bundled across the galaxy by a warpstorm and stranded on a mysterious irradiated planet.

The Blood Angels' defining features are immaculate cheekbones, and their struggle to hold back a genetic flaw called the Black Rage. Angels of Death depicts the Black Rage with psychedelic style in its limited color palette of black, white, gray, and red, and these regular freakouts emphasize the larger-than-life quality of the Blood Angels—even their anger is bigger and more dramatic than that of mere mortals.

Angels of Death isn't all space marines being Greek gods with guns though, and some of the best scenes take place back on their ship, which the ruthless shipmistress has to hold together in their absence. There are plenty of those classic bridge crew scenes where people shout about bearing and shields while lurching from left to right with each impact, and the ordinary human support staff of the marines get to be equally steadfast and cool.

But if it's desperately ordinary characters struggling through a world of shit you really want, then Interrogator will be more your thing. It's likewise limited in its color palette, fittingly for a story where everything is about shades of gray, though the animation is 2D rather than 3D. The disheveled noir protagonist is an agent of the Inquisition trying to track down his old boss's killer with frequent pauses to demolish a frankly heroic quantity of drugs and alcohol. He's the galaxy's most deadbeat down-and-out detective and he lives on a planet that's 50% divebar backalley, 50% dirty rain.

Those are both fairly long series, which have been conveniently assembled into movie-length "final cut" versions as well. Warhammer TV also has one-off animations, of which the best is Iron Within. It's about Astra Militarum soldiers whose world is being overrun by dark eldar, and who are so cut off from the rest of the Imperium they regard space marines as legends who probably don't exist, and certainly aren't worth calling for help. Broken Lance, which is about the neo-feudal mech pilots of the Imperial knights, doesn't quite match Iron Within for ultra-grimness, though it is interesting to see the way the Imperium marries medieval worldviews with its highest-tech machinery.

More recently Warhammer TV's been doing three-part series like Pariah Nexus, in which a fanatical Sister of Battle and a marine from the Salamanders chapter are forced to work together on a world being overrun by the skellybot necrons. In a nice change the transhuman space marine is more compassionate than the baseline human he's paired with, and the story continues into the first episode of another three-parter called The Tithes. This one's an anthology though, with each episode about a different way the citizens of the Imperium are expected to pay for its protection, and how much more it ends up costing them.

There's no papering over the nastiness of the Imperium in The Tithes, with the second episode about a boatload of psykers being shipped off-world, many of whom will ultimately be used up like Duracells to keep the Emperor's power on, while the last one's about the lives of Imperial soldiers being less valuable than their ammunition. It's great, grim stuff.

The other three-parter is more skippable. The Exodite explores a three-way conflict including the t'au, who I've yet to see written as viewpoint characters in a way that didn't put me to sleep. With their mechs and vaguely Japanese culture they're easy to see as an attempt at appealing to anime kids that's been awkwardly glued onto the setting, not nearly goth enough to feel like they belong. The Exodite doesn't do enough to change that impression.

Hammer & Bolter is an anthology series that's been running since Warhammer TV began, and the quality's a real roll of the dice. The original run of episodes were one-and-done peeks at different corners of the Warhammer 40,00 universe, with the highlights being episodes about a tech-priest and her robot called Kill Protocol, Sisters of Battle in a typically desperate last stand called A Question of Faith, and Cadia Stands, another Astra Militarum story about how war is futile and also hell.

The main thing letting Hammer & Bolter's early episodes down was the animation quality, which was 2D and jerky, with battle scenes sometimes cheaping out into a pan across a still image like a Ken Burns documentary about the 41st millennium—though the most recent episode, Return to Cadia, switches to more impressive 3D animation.

Later episodes include a few that explore the fantasy Age of Sigmar setting, and are also skippable. The best of the bunch is Monsters, from the point of view of the Darkoath marauders. Warhammer fiction often presents stories from the point of view of its "villains", like all the stories about space marines (boom, got 'em), and Monsters does present the dark-god worshippers sympathetically enough. By the end you understand why they go around making blood oaths to beings who are definitely not daemons, no way, our gods are just different to your gods and certainly aren't Lords of Chaos wearing fake beards.

The one series totally dedicated to Age of Sigmar is Blacktalon, which explores what it's like for the amnesia immortals called Stormcast Eternals, summoned from beyond death to fight and die again and again like they're playing a roguelike. It's not impossible to make these shiny-armored mirror universe Chaos Warriors seem exciting, but Blacktalon doesn't manage it. It's another 2D animation that looks like it had a lower budget, with timing that's slightly off and makes characters look like they're reacting too slow in the action scenes, every hit so telegraphed it doesn't have a sense of impact—like the half-speed rehearsal of a fight scene rather than the actual thing.

It telegraphs its twists just as blatantly, making you wait entire episodes to reveal things you probably already figured out for yourself as its protagonist grapples with a case of The Flashbacks for six episodes.

Still, between Angels of Death, Interrogator, Iron Within, Pariah Nexus, The Tithes, and whichever Hammer & Bolter episodes look like your cup of tea, that's enough shows to binge over the course of a month-long subscription. Of course, that's not all Warhammer+ offers. There's also a vault with old rulebooks and magazines to read, a couple of apps for tabletop players, and shows on Warhammer TV that aren't animation. While the painting tutorials aren't for me—you tell me to make a 60/40 mix of two paints as step one of a complicated multi-stage process and I've already given up—there's a lot of other stuff I've ended up watching.

Like Scrap Demon, a competitive modeling show where players are challenged to make something out of a random assortment of plastic sprues. Though there's a time limit and a trophy it's not as off-puttingly competitive as most reality shows—everyone's happy to trade parts with each other, and it's got a gentle vibe. It's basically The Great British Ork-Off. I also watch some of the Battle Reports, which condense down a wargame playthrough and often have a fun theme—one recreates the ork fighter pilot comic Deff Skwadron, while another's a destruction derby.

Some of this stuff, like the painting tutorials, resembles the kind of thing you could get free on YouTube, but it's a relief to watch videos about games that aren't drawn out to please the algorithm, and which usually wrap in under one hour instead of being dragged out for two or three. There's a pleasant lack of the parasocial too. I've watched so many hours of Ify Nwadiwe playing Commander on YouTube I feel like I know him personally—which obviously isn't true, but you know the sensation I mean—while, despite them seeming nice, I don't know anything about the hosts of Warhammer TV's shows. They're just a collection of first names and regional accents. Nobody here is relying on me liking, subscribing, and visiting their Patreon to make rent, and that's a relief.

And so, while I happily recommend a hit-and-run sub to Warhammer+, I'm going to keep my own sub going. Though new animations are added slowly, other stuff pops up on a weekly basis, including interviews with Games Workshop's writers and designers, and a year-long subscription means I get an exclusive miniature for free. The biggest downside to Warhammer TV is that it's a worryingly good advertisement for all things Warhammer, and I don't need more reasons to spend money on little plastic dudes.

Fine. Fine. If Wordle was going to be like that, lumbering me with some unhelpful yellows and nothing more, then I was going to take them, make some wild guesses I normally wouldn't, and see what happened after. Which in this case meant immediately revealing four green letters which led me straight to today's answer. Nice. Unexpected, but I wasn't going to complain. 

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, February 14

A simple song or a short tune. Some piece of music that's straightforward and easily forgotten, but not necessarily unpleasant.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

You might need this. The answer to the February 14 (1336) Wordle is DITTY.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• February 13: RUMBA
• February 12: RAPID
• February 11: SCORE
• February 10: GOODY
• February 9: BONUS
• February 8: STEEP
• February 7: SWATH
• February 6: PUPIL
• February 5: PEDAL
• February 4: TOOTH

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Obsidian's 100-year plan isn't—and I hope this isn't too disappointing—a decade-by-decade breakdown of future projects that ends somewhere around Fallout: Old Vegas (I'm assuming that pre-apocalyptic settings are popular in 2103). It's more of a thought exercise, but Morgan and Britch said that they genuinely want Obsidian to continue beyond their lifespans. "Are we serious? … Yes," said Morgan. And why not? Nintendo was founded in 1889.

One of the pillars of the plan is staying "lean and invested," meaning small enough that none of Obsidian's employees feel like a cog in a machine. Morgan and Britch said that in recent years they'd been considering opening multiple international offices, but in the end decided to partner with existing studios rather than risk weakening Obsidian's culture by getting too big.

Leanness can also refer to Obsidian's games: It doesn't aim for unprecedented scale or the most advanced graphics, and before it greenlights a game, Britch says the studio spends a lot of time determining how much to invest in the project with the assumption that it will be a "mild success," not a smash hit.

They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss.

(Big bets do sometimes pay off, though: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind as a recent example, though I can't say exactly how its scale and budget compares to Avowed's, and Cyberpunk 2077's launch troubles notwithstanding, CD Projekt continues to make a case for RPGs that take a long time and a lot of money to make.)

Obsidian has also laid off staff at times in the past, and has been in a precarious position at least once, but has appeared stable since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. That hasn't been the case for Microsoft's more recent acquisitions, which have been hammered with layoffs and studio closures from their new Xbox bosses.

The difference there can't be attributed to some secret sauce of Obsidian's—it's a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard or Bethesda, which Microsoft clearly had different plans for—but the studio's strong showing at a time when much of the industry seems to be reenacting Homer's jump over Springfield Gorge does lend credibility to the idea that Obsidian has sustainability ideas worth listening to.

Obsidian has released three games in the 2020s so far: survival game Grounded (we reviewed it positively), narrative adventure game Pentiment (we reviewed it positively), and now Avowed (another good one). Some studios don't even announce a new game in that amount of time.

Among other things not mentioned here, Morgan and Britch's plan includes building institutional knowledge by aiming for "the lowest turnover rate in the industry" and continuing to release the kinds of games they're known for (player freedom, worldbuilding, all of that) at a consistent pace, "not rushed, but often."

Britch described his vision for Obsidian as a 1973 VW bus with a trunk full of tools and a manual that's being continuously annotated, and summed up the plan by saying that Obsidian is more or less going to keep doing what it's been doing, "not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games." It's aiming for somewhat profitable games, then, made well and at a consistent pace.

"Positive previews that highlight the immersive world, stunning graphics and variety of gameplay brought by the dual-protagonist approach," Ubisoft wrote in its Q3 2024-25 financial report. "Pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise."

Preorders don't tell the whole story, not by a long shot, especially when they've only been open for a few weeks. But there's not much else to go on in the pre-release period, so you go with what you've got—and as far as it goes, Ubisoft CEO Frederick Duguet said the numbers are encouraging.

"Odyssey's been the second-biggest performer in the franchise history, very close to Valhalla in terms of units sold on a comparable time basis," Duguet said during today's investors call. "At the time when we launched Odyssey, it set a new benchmark for the franchise, it was a very successful first week. So that's what we can say at this stage. When we look back, Odyssey has been accumulating 40 million players to date, so it's been really a great success. So what we see as a preorder benchmark is encouraging."

Duguet acknowledged that the bulk of the preorder period still lies ahead, and that leaves a lot of time for things to either catch fire or fizzle out. But, he said, "What we can see to date, it's really positive."

The other upside for Assassin's Creed Shadows is that it looked very good in pre-release previews. The delay sucked, sure, but after spending six hours with it in January, PC Gamer's Morgan Park thinks it'll be "worth the wait," writing that even though Ubisoft has a lot riding on it (after years of struggles, this is as make-or-break as it gets), Shadows "showed a level of confidence I haven't seen from the publisher in years. Six hours is a drop in the bucket of what's likely a 40-60 hour game, but I'm feeling a lot better two months ahead of Shadows than I did two months ahead of Star Wars Outlaws."

Stealth is even less fleshed-out in Avowed than it is in The Elder Scrolls or 3D Fallouts, and I never found it feasible to quietly pick guys off from afar like in those games. It's always nice to start a fight with extra sneak attack damage, but overall, an Avowed ranger build feels a bit like an Infiltrator from Mass Effect or a Nightstalker from Destiny, using an on-command invisibility power to get out of a hairy situation or line up extra damage.

Thankfully, the guns in Avowed feel amazing, and better still when dual wielding two pistols together. A low-level ranger ability makes time dilate when you charge up a power attack, and I get into this flow state with my flintlocks, charging up my next shot as the other pistol reloads, blasting away in slo-mo with my ammo never running out like some kind of early modern Chow Yun-fat. Even before finding any cool unique weapons or unlocking some of the crazier active abilities, being able to adopt this playstyle in a fantasy RPG made my heart sing.

I was worried that this would wind up getting boring, that I'd just be clicking on enemies' heads before they could ever touch me while also missing out on Avowed's more out-there abilities, but neither turned out to be true. Enemies in Avowed are surprisingly good at tracking you as you move, with melee attacks that close gaps and magnetize to you when, in other games, your foe would just be eating air as you slowly backpedal away. With no shield and minimal health and armor (gotta pump it all into damage), I felt like I was playing a movement FPS, dodging enemies and projectiles left and right to line up shots with my badass rad guns. This Skyrimmy RPG is hiding a great boomer shooter if you want to play it that way.

Meanwhile, Avowed's fantastic unique weapons make up for missing out on its spells. Melee jock types start with flaming swords and only go up from there, while my faithful companion through the entire game has been a lightning pistol with a chance of spawning chain lightning on each kill. For a while, I was rocking dual pistols in one weapon slot with an arquebus in the other, taking advantage of a perk that auto-reloads holstered weapons to swap between them instead of waiting for reloads. I've since swapped my long gun for a bow that shoots out a weaker (but still deadly) chain lightning on every power attack, more than making up for my prior lack of AOE damage with spammed bolts ping-ponging between mobs, staggering them over and over as they try to get a word in edgewise.

I am also now joined by my new best friend, a spirit bear summoned through a late-game ranger tree ability. Summons in games can go one of two ways, but thankfully my ursine attendant is an absolute unit. If it's possible to take him down before his timer runs out, I haven't seen it happen, and he does beastly damage to boot.

So Avowed may be a wizard game first and foremost what with its wild spells and shockingly in-depth system of grimoires intertwined with ability tree upgrades, but if you're like me and have that specific brain sickness that constantly demands playing as a sneaky sniper DPS edgelord type, Avowed's got you more than covered.

"A thing I noticed," observes host Bing Gordon at one point, "nobody who's ever left Blizzard seems to have done great… there's some secret sauce there." Which is obviously an over-simplification of the situation: Hundreds of hugely talented but lesser-known names have come and gone at Blizzard over the decades. But it's clear what he's driving at as Gordon names senior leadership like Mike Morhaime and Chris Metzen, which is that sense that nobody's really left Blizzard and created the new Blizzard, or even something close to it.

"Look, when we bought Vivendi Games you can't imagine what these guys were doing," says Kotick. "They had 25 different development projects that were not the Blizzard franchises, they had a social media division, they had a mobile gaming business, they had like thousands and thousands of people and the whole company wasn't making any money. Only Blizzard is, and only World of Warcraft is making any money."

Kotick felt such an environment wasn't doing Blizzard any favours, and had led to stagnation around the studio's golden goose. Necessary context for the start of the next response: Activision merged with French media publisher Vivendi to form Activision-Blizzard in 2008, before five years later Activision-Blizzard spent $8.2 billion buying back the majority of Vivendi's shares in the company.

"And so we traded for the company and my view is World of Warcraft is going to continue," says Kotick. "But you have to make it less taxing and demanding on your time. Because you couldn't enjoy it and be competitive in it without playing four hours a day. And people age out. They have kids. You just couldn't play it."

But the game's broad appeal was obvious, and the business model had proven a masterstroke even if, inevitably, players did age out of it (I know I did). "You'd be shocked," says Kotick. "150 million people churned out of World of Warcraft [over its history]. That's a crazy number. Those are people paying $15 a month. It was the best subscription business of all time."

At this point the host, who's sure to be a favourite among gamers, suggests that the only issue was that a WoW subscription could've been priced more highly. Surprisingly enough Kotick pushes back against this idea, though that's only because he thinks there are better ways to monetise such an audience.

"We never raised the price," says Kotick. "My view was we come up with value-added services, come up with new things to sell, but just leave the price. We could figure out how to come up with other things to sell them. And it's a prickly audience, you know? You don't wanna do too much to agitate them. And even a dollar increase would've been a problem in my view."

A notable element there is Kotick's understanding of WoW's audience, which may not be appreciated by many players but I think is broadly accurate from the perspective of a publisher. MMO players tend to be incredibly invested in and protective of their chosen game, and while some suits would think that's a no-brainer for a year-on-year increase in the subscription price, Kotick saw even a dollar increase to the baseline subscription as creating a problem the publisher didn't want. He was still laser-focused on getting money out of players, of course, but these kinds of instincts are what saw wild success for Activision-Blizzard and that eventual $68.7 billion sale to Microsoft.

Some may find the tone of this business-focused podcast galling, because Kotick left Activision Blizzard in 2023 under something of a cloud and remains something of a villainous figure among gaming fans: The epitome of the cutthroat capitalist out for profit over artistry. Kotick casually pronouncing on the failures of Vivendi should also be taken in the context of his own failure to adequately deal with systemic sexism and harassment problems at Activision Blizzard.

But no one can deny that Bobby Kotick understands the videogame business. And arguably wasn't wrong about Blizzard either: Among other things Kotick thinks the Warcraft movie was a disaster, burning out Chris Metzen to the point he left was a huge mistake (and Kotick was behind his return), and that the studio had lost focus on serving WoW players. WoW is now arguably in something of a golden age. You do wonder where it would be now if Vivendi stayed in charge.

In practical terms, the advance list of Steam sale dates is mostly useful for developers, so they can plan out how they want to take part in all the various events. But it's also of interest to the public at large, because while Steam sales may not be the thrilling special events they were in days gone by, they're still great opportunities to save big piles of money.

It's also nice from my own personal, admittedly unusual perspective: I used to have to pay very close attention to Steam at certain times of the year, and then mash out a panicked Steam sale is live! news story the moment it popped up on the storefront. Now, I can plan, and it's much less stressful.

In any event, here's what you've got to look forward to over the second half of 2025:

• Automation Fest: July 14 – July 21
• Racing Fest: July 28 – August 4
• 4X Fest: August 11 – August 18
• Third Person Shooter (TPS) Fest: August 25 – September 1
• Political Sim Fest: September 8 – September 15
• 2025 Steam Autumn Sale: September 29 – October 6 (Please note this is a different time frame compared to previous Autumn Sales)
• Steam Next Fest - October 2025 Edition: October 13 – October 20
• Steam Scream 4: October 27 – November 3
• Animal Fest: November 10 – November 17
• Sports Fest: December 8 – December 15
• 2025 Steam Winter Sale: December 18 – January 5

The Autumn Sale is the one of particular note. As Valve said, it's taking place in "a different time frame" this year, and that's putting it mildly. The September 29 start date is two months earlier than the late November dates of past years: The Autumn Sale began on November 27 in 2024, November 21 in 2023, and November 22 in 2022.

Valve didn't say why it made the shift, but the obvious reason is simply to space things out between the Autumn and Winter Sales. The 2024 Winter Sale began on December 19, just a couple weeks after the Autumn Sale ended. That's not much of a chance to recover your financial situation between two major seasonal sales. It also spaces things out more evenly across all Steam's seasonal sales, leaving roughly three months between each.

So now you can strategize how you want to blow your gaming budget for the balance of 2025: For what's left in the way of Steam sales and events in the first half of the year, here's our list of all the upcoming Steam sale dates.

What other bosses from its older games is FromSoftware sticking into Nightreign? What does it all mean for the lore? Well, on the first point, FromSoftware's not talking. But on the latter, it's given a pretty straight answer: Don't worry too much about it.

"The primary reason for these existing bosses in Nightreign is from a gameplay perspective," Nighteign director Junya Ishizaki told Gamespot in a recent interview. "Of course, with this new structure and with this new style of game, we needed a lot of different bosses… so we wanted to leverage what we deemed appropriate from our previous titles. We obviously understand that our players have a lot of affection for these characters and they have a lot of fond memories of battling them in these games, so we didn't want to encroach too much on that lore aspect. We wanted them to make sense within the atmosphere and vibe of Elden Ring Nightreign."

Reading between the lines, I think Ishizaki's point about not encroaching "too much" means we won't be seeing a ton of Dark Souls bosses pop up in Nightreign; Elden Ring already gave them more than 100 to pull from. But if the developers already put two in the reveal trailer (in addition to The Nameless King, Dark Souls' Centipede Demon popped up), I think we can expect a few more to show up, too. I wouldn't mind another crack at the Dancer of the Boreal Valley.

PC Gamer's Morgan Park recently went hands-on with Nightreign and came away with the same appraisal that I did—the game feels an awful lot like a mod, which isn't an insult. It's FromSoftware in looser form than usual, more experimental than it's been in the last decade. But the studio has a history of this approach from its pre-Souls days, particularly with its Armored Core spin-offs.

With the news that Nightreign will have post-release DLC including more characters and bosses, I'm looking forward to seeing just how wacky this thing can get.

There was initially some question as to whether this is actually an official Rockstar Discord, but it is: There's a little note about it at the bottom of the latest GTA Online update on the Rockstar News Wire. The Discord includes dedicated looking-for-game channels as well as others for community challenges, bounties, and other activities in GTA Online and Red Dead Online, and there's one dedicated to "Rockstar classics," although it seems to be mostly GTA 6 talk right now too.

But Grand Theft Auto 6 is the big topic, and as you might expect it's pretty chaotic in there. I got rolled when somebody proclaimed a new GTA 6 trailer had dropped on YouTube, leading numerous others to declare they'd seen the same thing. In a panic, I rushed to Rockstar's YouTube channel to check it out, and... no. There was no trailer. Of course not.

As noted by Kotaku, insults and slurs are also common, although things have apparently calmed down somewhat since the Discord first went live—it's hard to keep up but I've only noticed a couple instances of overt racism. Bizarrely, there was also apparently some kind of AI-powered chatbot firing off weird answers to inquiries, although it was taken down quickly.

But the sheer volume of messages is the number-one challenge: Slowmode is currently enabled, meaning you can only post a message every 10 minutes, but with more than 43,000 people currently online and eager to share their thoughts it's pretty much a non-stop flood of speculation, hope, a bit of doomsaying, and "trailer 2 when?"

On the speculation front, an awful lot of people seem to think (or at least hope) that the rollout of an official Discord means a new GTA 6 trailer, release date, or something substantial is imminent. In most cases I'd probably agree, but with Rockstar it's just impossible to say: It just does what it does, when it wants, how it wants. A new trailer could absolutely be on the way, but it's also possible, as was theorized ahead of the GTA 6 reveal in 2023, that Rockstar is just messing with us.

For those just tuning in, Grand Theft Auto 6 remains on track for release on consoles sometime in the fall, although a specific release date has not yet been announced—and no, it's not confirmed for PC yet, either.

Druckmann mentioned the casting process in a talk with Santa Monica Studio creative director Cory Barlog (God of War) on Wednesday at the D.I.C.E. Summit, an annual industry get-together put on by The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

While watching the auditions live, Druckmann said he "was sure it was going to be a different actor." After later studying the audition videos "frame-by-frame," however, he began insisting on Bailey for the part even though the consensus at the studio had been that she wasn't right for it because "she's in everything." That includes Druckmann's previous project, Uncharted 4.

In one moment, studied carefully, Bailey showed a "vulnerability" that none of the other actors had, Druckmann said. He played the video back to others at the studio, and they were convinced.

For her performance as Abby, Bailey won a Game Award and a BAFTA Award, and was nominated for a D.I.C.E. Award. She also made a cameo in the HBO show based on the game. Actor Kaitlyn Dever will be playing the live-action version of Abby in the show's upcoming second season.

The Last of Us Part 2's story and characters, particularly Abby, also led to online threats and harassment directed at Bailey and others involved with the game.

A similar 'almost didn't get the part for being too popular' story was recently told about the casting Troy Baker in Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. According to Baker, Bethesda's Todd Howard wasn't into the idea of casting the prolific videogame actor as Indy, but test audiences disagreed.

The story of Bailey's casting was a brief anecdote in a larger conversation about creative decision-making—an example of a situation in which Druckmann went against his first instincts after careful examination. Barlog described a much more metaphysical process in which the right decisions "just feel correct" and appear to him as a "sort of sine wave vibration."

The Last of Us Part 2 originally released on PlayStation in 2020, and a remastered version will be out on Steam this April.

Obsidian is very much on the record as the anti-RPG romance developer. Studio design director Josh Sawyer has expressed a distaste for them that goes back decades, arguing they're often objectifying, crass wish fulfillment. When there are romantic subplots or themes in Obsidian games, they typically run toward the tragic or subversive:

• Wooing one of four partially cult deprogrammed weirdos in Knights of the Old Republic 2.
• Playing wingman for Parvati in The Outer Worlds.
• Seducing a nun, leading her to terminate the resulting pregnancy in Pentiment.
• The achingly tragic love lives of Boone, Arcade, and Veronica in New Vegas.
• And more!

Obsidian explicitly denied that there'd be anything of the sort in Avowed multiple times in the run up to the game's release. "We are building thoughtful relationships with our companion characters," project lead Carrie Patel told IGN last January on the back of Avowed's first gameplay reveal. "Ultimately, I personally am a fan of making that an option, but I feel like if you're going to do it, you really, really have to commit and make sure that you're giving all to fulfilling that in a way that feels both true to the character, but also creates an engaging player experience. So not something we're doing for Avowed, but I wouldn't say never."

We haven't seen how it ends, but there's an optional romantic element to your relationship with Kai, Avowed's poster boy and a new hall of famer when it comes to chummy RPG warrior companions. After completing Kai's multiple act companion quest, Battle Scars, there's a debrief conversation back at camp. Afterward, I had the dialogue option "I feel like we've really gotten to know each other, haven't we?" pop up in Kai's general dialogue tree. That starts a conversation where you can affirm your friendship with Kai, or say you want something more.

And Kai's game! He reciprocates, but basically says "let's talk more about this after the final boss." There may be another conversation down the line to fully commit, but my guess is that this is a choice that will primarily play out in Kai's Fallout-style epilogue card when I roll credits. Again, not Baldur's Full Monty territory, but an explicit part of Kai's story, and largely in line with what we saw in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's romances.

What we're not sure about yet is if there's some behind the scenes approval over your choices in the game that affect whether or not you get this option⁠—I'm the only one to see it so far on the PC Gamer team. What's more, we don't know if both male and female characters can pursue Kai, or if he's only interested in men, and there are at least some indications that fellow companion Giatta may have her own romantic subplot. We'll have to see as we make more progress in our own games and more people in general get their hands on Avowed, but I find something very resonant, very Obsidian, to the possibility that Avowed may have only one romance revolving around a gay shark-man. That's videogames to me, baby.

That particular game has all kinds of odd things about it, such as the 1% low frame rates and wonky upscaling, but it looks great and for the most part, it runs pretty well too, though it's best to ignore the actual frame rates and judge it on feel. Avowed's developers, Obsidian Entertainment, aren't new to Unreal Engine as they made The Outer Worlds and Grounded with it, although it was the previous version.

So I'm pretty certain that one can't blame UE5 for the fact that enabling FSR 3 does almost nothing for low-end GPUs and induces ghosting and pixel crawling. It can't be blamed for the large disparity between the average and 1% low frame rates, nor the highly variable frame times. Sometimes it is down to a game's engine (looking at you, RE Engine) and while all the games I listed at the start of this article have performance issues of one kind or another, Avowed's are so uniquely odd that it surely must stem from choices made by the developers.

Take Silent Hill 2, for example. Looks fantastic but its performance at launch was all over the place, not to mention being riddled with bugs. Subsequent patches from developers Bloober Team have solved many of these problems but when I last tried the game, it still had a certain degree of jank to it. And like Obsidian, those coders have plenty of experience using Unreal Engine.

One might argue that if two experienced teams can't get their games to run properly with UE then the software must be at fault, but Avowed and Silent Hill 2's problems are very different. Performance-related, yes, but the fundamental issues aren't the same.

Games like Doom Eternal or more recently, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, are often used as keystones for the argument that UE is rubbish. The idea is that if Id Tech 7 can be used to make such great games, and both run super well, it must be a superior piece of software. Right?

However, Id Tech 7 is proprietary and the two development teams for the above games, Id Software and MachineGames, are both subsidiaries of the parent company that owns the engine (ZeniMax Media). It was heavily customised for Indiana Jones but the point I'm making is that the coders in question are all very familiar with Id Tech—one team made the engine and the other has used nothing but Id Tech engines.

Unreal Engine is an all-round development engine that can be used for visual effects in films and TV shows, as well as video games. It's quite easy to pick up and work with—heck, if I can do it, I'm pretty sure anyone can with enough grit and determination, because I'm old and rather scatty at times. Of course, what I've made with UE5 has been nothing more than simple exercises, graphics tests, and other tomfoolery, and creating a full-blown AAA game is on a level of complexity so far removed from what I'm doing that it's akin to comparing making a paper aeroplane to a commercial jet.

Epic is aware that UE-based games have had common issues, especially with PSO compilation (aka the dreaded shader compilation stutter), as well as traversal stutter, but it's actively trying to do something about it with numerous updates to Unreal Engine 5. There again, recompiling millions of lines of code every time a new version of UE comes out isn't something that any big developer is going to relish, due to time constraints and the possibility that it might bork something.

Unreal Engine does have faults but given its remit, I'd say they're acceptable. To me, the problems all stem from time. Game publishers need something to go out on schedule, they need them to recoup the millions of dollars invested in them as soon as possible, and performance testing and fine-tuning code is very time-consuming.

This is why so many big games are released in such a shoddy state—they can always be patched later, when there's more time available to carry out such tasks in depth.

I have no doubt it will be the same for Avowed. The preview code I tested was rather wonky-donkey but with the overall game being really solid and a lot of fun, there's a good chance that all of its foibles will be fixed post-release.

Then again, the performance might not be 'fixed' if the developers are happy with how it is already or if the sales aren't great. Obsidian Entertainment is also working on a sequel to The Outer Worlds, again with UE5, so it will only be able to allocate a certain amount of workforce time to fixing Avowed.

In my mind, time is the real problem, not the engine or the developers using it, and unfortunately, time costs money. Are we happy to pay even more for our favourite games, so developers can employ more staff to do more work, to ensure PC projects run perfectly on release? That's a debate for another time, I think.

EA's opinions on live service games came to the fore in the wake of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's failure to meet sales expectations. In a subsequent investors call in January, CEO Andrew Wilson said "games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives," and that while Veilguard "had a high quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played ... it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market."

The obvious takeaway was that, in Wilson's opinion, if Veilguard had "shared-world features and deeper engagement"—that is, if it was a live service game—it would've had a better chance of doing the kind of numbers EA wanted. We rather strongly disagree with that assessment, and so does Fares, who recently told Eurogamer that Hazelight "will not have them, I do not believe in them."

"I think [live service] is not the right way to go," Fares said. "I hope more and more [developers] focus on their passion, and what they believe in. At the end of the day, we see clearly—and Hazelight is living proof—that when you trust in your vision and go with it, you can still reach a big audience. That's what I want people to focus on."

Fares said he understands that publishers have to worry about the "money issue," and that there have to be some boundaries—"You can't just say, 'Give me $100 million, I want to do what I want to do'"—but publishers "have to respect the creativity as well."

"There has to be a balance," Fares said. "It can't just be towards the finance side. So, no, it will not happen with a Hazelight game, ever. I guarantee."

Hazelight has indeed found success with its somewhat offbeat co-op formula: It Takes Two was a big sales hit and claimed game of the year wins at both The Game Awards in 2021 and DICE in 2022. That's presumably bought the team a certain degree of freedom in its work that other studios might not have. Split Fiction is another co-op action game, similar to It Takes Two, but it looks every bit as weird (and good), with no visible injection of trend-chasing or need to "reallocate toward our most significant and highest potential opportunities."

Not everyone can get away with publicly shooting holes in EA's grand strategy, no, but as PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde succinctly (and, to be clear, complimentarily) put it in his Split Fiction preview, "Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios aren't normal."

Split Fiction is set to launch on March 6.

Avowed remains tagged with an "unknown" Steam Deck compatibility rating on its store page, but I decided to give it a shot and see if it could be stretched to a playable frame rate on the handheld. Its minimum required GPU, the GTX 1070, came out all the way back in 2016, and recent RPGs with 10-series minimum specs like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Elden Ring have all been able to hit 30fps on the Deck. Unfortunately, Avowed is not joining their ranks.

Just exploring the open world with every setting minimized and FSR performance enabled, I was getting a sluggish 20-25 fps, and I didn't even bother trying to get into a fight with those numbers. I suppose you could go further and try lowering the resolution below the Deck's 1280x800 native res in addition to the upscaling, but at that point we're reaching a state well below the most ambitious, ill-considered Nintendo Switch ports in terms of "you don't have to live like this."

It makes sense with Avowed primarily targeting 30fps on Xbox Series consoles, and the GTX 1070 min spec is a step above the GTX 1060 or 970 demanded by so many games that can reach playable frame rates on Deck. Avowed is still well worth experiencing sitting upright at your desktop, though, and I've found it to have pretty smooth performance at medium-high settings and 1440p on an RTX 3070. For a full breakdown of Avowed's performance across various hardware configurations and resolutions, you can check out Nick's in-depth Avowed performance analysis.

As proof, the new Fantastic Four movie trailer that came out this week shows everyone using their powers except Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards, because even a level-100 Zaddy can't make stretchy noodle arms look cool.

This is why I'm so excited for Season 2 of the live-action Twisted Metal series on Peacock—even though I didn't (and probably won't) watch the first season. Twisted Metal Season 2 is coming this summer, as announced by a new teaser you can see below, with Anthony Mackie as John Doe, Beatriz as Quiet, and hey, the first appearance Anthony Carrigan as Calypso. (You like him. He played NoHo Hank in Barry.)

Cars, guns, explosions, yeah yeah yeah, but there it is, at the very end, the tiniest glimpse of a driver I can't wait to full see realized in live action:

Yeah, that's Axel sticking his hand into a giant gear that starts turning. In the Twisted Metal games, Axel is a guy named Axel who drives a vehicle named Axel that is basically two giant wheels his outstretched arms are locked into. There's no cab in Axel's car, his body is just out there completely unprotected while he drives around between huge tires shooting rocket launchers that are mounted on his shoulders.

They're gonna put Axel on the screen. They're gonna put this gloriously dumb vehicle on the screen in live action:

You can also catch a couple frames of Axel standing next to Axel as it's parked in the background in this shot:

It's probably going to look really stupid, a guy driving around between two enormous tires, which is probably why they only teased Axel instead of showing Axel, but who knows? Maybe it'll look awesome. Or maybe it'll look so stupid it'll just be awesome. Either way, like Axel, I'm ready to roll.

A final transmission sent from Angel's Venture at 5:07 AM PST warned its citizens to evacuate the planet immediately. By 6:39 AM, all signals were lost.

Players who jumped into Helldivers 2 when it launched last February might remember Angel's Venture as one of the very first Terminid planets that divers were ordered to capture. Millions of battles were fought among its amber forests and pink/green foliage. Its lush landscapes made for the perfect first impression of this special game, and now they're gone. A chilling anniversary.

Super Earth high command has declared 24 hours of mourning for those lost:

"This is an incalculable loss. The land cultivated by generations. The lives of the Super Earth citizens whose evacuation could not be prioritized. The proud pines shading the Democratic Youth Scouts campground. All gone forever, ripped to shreds by savage cosmic forces," the in-game dispatch reads. "Finally the Illuminate, hiding behind their mask of intelligence and sophistication, have revealed what they truly want: carnage."

The Helldivers 2 community's long-held suspicion that it's the Illuminate who have seized control of the black hole, officially designated the Meridian Singularity, was on the money. For weeks, the singularity has been cultivating "dark energy" via an in-game tracker. The more energy it absorbs, the faster it moves.

That's an existential problem for us: The galactic map shows the Meridian Singularity on a direct course for Super Earth. Directly in its path are five other planets that could suffer the same fate as Angel's Venture if we can't stop it soon: Moradesh, Ivis, Nublaria I, Pilen V, and New Haven. The future is uncertain, but I have full faith in the government to work out a solution in the eleventh hour.

Though, it's impossible to ignore the irony here. Let us never forget that the Meridian Singularity itself was the result of Super Earth hubris. Last summer, Helldivers were deployed to spread an experimental chemical weapon called 'Termicide' across bug planets. Termicide not only failed to contain the Terminid threat, but triggered reckless mutations that spawned flying Shriekers. Super Earth's solution? Dark matter bombs that eventually swallowed the planet of Meridia whole, creating the Meridian Singularity.

Hmm, maybe we're not in good hands after all. Rest in peace, Angel's Venture.

And in the case of Avowed, it's quite an important thing because, for the most part, it feels really smooth. Not always, of course, and not on every PC that I tested it on, but the experience is far nicer than the performance numbers suggest it should be. For example, on my Ryzen 7 5700X3D and GeForce RTX 4070 test rig, it averages 68 fps at 1440p, with the High quality preset and no upscaling.

Pretty decent, right? Not amazing but not bad, either. However, the 1% low frame rate (the fps that the game is faster than, 99% of the time) is just 34 fps. That's a big difference to the average performance and in lots of other games, you'd notice that quite easily. Not so in Avowed—in fact, it feels smooth as butter on that particular PC, with those settings. Only the odd bit of traversal stutter spoils the picture.

And it's got me wondering if we, as PC gamers, worry too much about performance. Or rather, focus too much on the performance figures. Yes, I know that makes me a big ol' hypocrite, given that my job here is to test stuff, produce charts with lots of numbers, and then judge the products on the basis of those figures.

There's a big difference between the performance of hardware and that of a game, of course. It's not like one can go 'Ooh, this CPU feels like it's running really fast.' It either is or isn't, and the only way to be certain is to run tests and get numbers. For games, it's different—unless it's a competitive one, especially if it's going to potentially be a source of income for you. But even then, surely it doesn't matter how fast it's running, as long as it feels okay and doesn't prevent you from achieving your desired goals, yes?

The obvious issue here is that feeling is subjective, and something that feels okay to me might be excruciating for someone else. But I don't think that, in the case of games, it's so subjective that my opinion is completely irrelevant. After all, I'm in the fortunate position to be able to check out a game across more PCs than most gamers come across in years of owning a computer, so I can at least comment on relative feel.

I often come across comments in discussions about a particular game or piece of hardware, where the gamer will say something along the lines of 'It has to run at 120 fps for me or I'm not interested.' Without wishing to sound like I'm denigrating such opinions, that's something I just don't get—on my own gaming PC, I really don't care what frame rate I'm getting and I never bother to check the same metrics that I collate for performance reviews. It's literally a case of firing up the game, playing it as is, and then tweaking some settings until it feels great.

Avowed really is a perfect example of this. As with all games that I do performance analysis for, I spent a couple of hours getting to a point where I could carry out repeated test loops to collate and average data. Actually, I played past that point just to see if there was something better to use but depending on how much time I have, that's not always possible. Anyway, after the said hours of working through Avowed's opening stages, I came away feeling really positive about the game, marvelling at how well it ran.

Then I started to collate performance data across all my test rigs and was somewhat surprised to see how low some of the numbers really were. A 1% low of 34 fps compared to an average of 68 fps should feel a bit janky—not quite stuttery, but certainly not smooth. And yet it does in Avowed. It actually feels worse if it runs too fast if that makes any sense.

I know I can't abandon performance charts and just write meandering prose about how a game feels at 1080p Medium, but I do think that sometimes it's worth leaving the numbers to one side for a moment and reading everything first. It's akin to ignoring a game's review score until you've absorbed everything the reviewer has said. And having just realised how few people are going to do that, I guess I'll be doing hours of testing for performance figures for many more years to come.

For myself, though, I'll just keep going by feel. Maybe I should invent a feels-per-second metric? Ugh no, that's just another number.

In a preview build played by PCG senior editors Wes Fenlon and Robin Valentine, the camera toggle was exclusively accessible via menu, requiring you to pause the game, go to accessibility settings, and hit the toggle any time you wanted to switch. It seemed intended as a measure for players who suffer from motion sickness in first person games, a last resort for enjoying Avowed at all, rather than the casual quick switch we're used to from Bethesda joints or, indeed, prior Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or The Outer Worlds.

The option's presence in an accessibility settings menu when you first launch the game makes it appear that this is the case in the final release as well. Indeed, Robin didn't realize that there was a hotkey to toggle your camera view until I told him after dozens of hours in the game. By default, this is assigned to the "U" key, but I like having it as a thumb button on my mouse for even easier access.

Just like in Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, though, this is definitely an inferior way to play the game. Even after decades of animation improvements, it's still got that kind of floaty, disconnected feeling I've associated with the third person camera options for this subgenre of RPGs. From Morrowind to Skyrim, Fallout 3 to, er, Fallout 4, it's slippery moonwalking and gently levitating jumps all the way down. Avowed is a much more immersive, tactile experience in first person.

But I still like having the option, and I sorely missed it in Cyberpunk 2077, which keeps you perma-locked to a first person perspective. I enjoy idly flipping to the third person view while hiking around the overworld, taking in the character I spent so much time tweaking, as well as the cool armor upgrades I've found throughout the game. Even if that third person view isn't ideal, it's still better than not having it at all.