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It was meant to be a simple mission. My line manager at the humble mega-mining corporation Saxon—the cockroach known as Roachard Cox—laid it all out: break into a compound, tear through the fungus and goop to free the core from its prison, transport it back to the drop pod, and then escape with ample time to spare. Unfortunately, few things in life are simple.

Need to Know

What is it? A co-op PvE shooter where you fight fungus and collect resources in the name of the megacorporation you work for, also, your cockroach line manager.Release date July 10, 2025Expect to pay $15Developer Pigeons at PlayPublisher Devolver DigitalReviewed on RTX 3070, Core AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAMMultiplayer YesSteam Deck Not verified (yet)Link Steam

See Mycopunk is about as chaotic as a co-op shooter can get. You work for a megacorporation that wants to mine the planet of New Atlas for Saxonite, but after a fungus infects the world, you're sent down alongside other members of the New Atlas Hazard Crew to clear the way and gather various helpful resources. For example, The Gravity Farms hold Romphus, a fungus that grows on enemy shells, and Gussula, both assets I was carrying this mission out for.

I got through the first leg of the mission without any issues. Well, to be more specific, I left all my issues behind as I skedaddled away from hordes of fungal-infected enemies with the help of my trusty grapple pole, launching me into the stratosphere.

My objective? A large energy core tucked away in a warehouse—quite far away, situated on the other side of a sparse forest. Luckily, there was a laser gun waiting for me outside, which I could use to blow the hinges off the door and get inside.

(Image credit: Devolver Digital )

The only problem was that, by the time I started work on destroying the hinges, my original issues all caught up with me. I was quickly swarmed by mountains of mycological robots. My mother's words, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today", echoed in my skull as it was bashed in by a bot with a comically large claw.

Luckily, I was able to kite my problems instead of dealing with them, slowly picking them off while creating enough distance to fulfil my contractual obligations.

I finally managed to blow the hinges off the door, get inside the compound and locate the core. It was wrapped in the same fungus that had infected the planet of New Atlas. I shot all the gunk off, then started rolling the core out the door and back to the drop pod, channelling my inner dung beetle.

Best of the best

(Image credit: Larian Studios)

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Just as I was about to kick the core into the ship, an Abomination Sniper spawned on top of me and ate it. Typical. Abominations are huge robots, armed with an array of weaponry like laser beams, sniper rifles, and even immortality shields, which you have to destroy first before you can deal with them.

Killing one of these beasts isn't easy, which is why I usually live and let live when I encounter one. But this fiend is at my core, and I can't leave without it, so oil must be shed.

One game of 'ring around the drop pod' later, I was able to pry open the metallic jaws of the Abomination, drag the core out of its gut, and haul it back into the ship. It was hard, pure chaos and work, but hey, that's just your average day working for Saxon at the New Atlas Hazard Crew.

Run for the hills

(Image credit: Devolver Digital )

Mycopunk is full of clutch plays, chaotic fights, and good old-fashioned train-ing enemies. It's probably the most fun I've had in a shooter for a long time, primarily because it manages to straddle the line of being difficult but not punishing.

When selecting one of the various mission types, you can also customise the difficulty. There are three swarm intensities to choose from, which'll alter how likely enemies are to overrun you. Then there are six different difficulty levels to pick from, Difficulty 1 is the easiest, providing the least amount of resources, and Difficulty 6 is the hardest, giving players the most resources and XP.

Being able to change swarm intensities and difficulty separately from each other lets you experience all the different missions at your own pace, in circumstances that let you enjoy Mycopunk to the fullest. Like having to deal with mountains of enemies piling onto you at every second, but don't want them to pack too much of a punch? Pick a high swarm intensity at a low level, and so on.

These small tweaks remove stressors that some games tend to rely on.

Outside of difficulty, smart design choices (like removing the need to hunt for ammo or getting rid of the dreaded stamina bar) also make a world of difference. Instead of worrying about where I could find the next ammo cache like in other games, all I need to do to get more bullets is damage enemies with my other weapon.

This lets you focus on pulling off sick trickshots or clutch plays, rather than chaining you to a reload animation. It's also a great way to encourage players to diversify and upgrade all their weapons, not just focus on one favourite, which is something I'm guilty of in my FPS games.

I'm a huge fan of there being no stamina system, too. The enemy bots are also pretty fast, so having the ability to keep on running is vital. But it's not like you zip around whenever you feel like it. Instead, three of the four characters all have movement-based abilities which are on cooldown.

Scrapper (my fav) has a jetpack and deploys a grapple pole, which the whole team can use to launch themselves in the air. Wrangler has an air dash and a rocket lasso that can propel you forward. Glider has a wingsuit that you can fly around with. Bruiser just deploys shields and can ground slam, which emits a shockwave to damage nearby enemies, so I'm sure he appreciates the infinite stamina more than anyone else.

These small tweaks remove stressors that some games tend to rely on—lesser games might hold sacred the myth that a shooter has to be gruelling or realistic. Meanwhile, in Mycopunk, I'm a robot in a puffer jacket, being advised by a talking cockroach—realism went out the window a long time ago.

Putting the 'fun' in fungus

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Mycopunk is launching into early access, but even so, there's loads to do. There are four different main locations on New Atlas, each dishing out a unique combo of fungus resources, which you can use to upgrade your weapons.

There are also different kinds of missions for you to explore. Cleanup Detail and Regulated Rampage are similar, in that you just need to kill a bunch of fungus-infected robots or just clean the infection out by shooting at pustules. Saxonite Transport and Prized Possession are both payload escorts, with different kinds of obstacles in the way.

Finally, Planetary Defense sees you power up and fire a planetary railgun to take out a rival company's spy ship. This is by far the coolest mission, and something I've had a ton of fun completing with friends—there's something particularly funny about one of your teammates getting crushed by falling debris, all because you forget to warn them that you're ready to use the railgun.

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But the fun doesn't stop when the mission does. The home base is huge, there are minigames, car racing, and loads of pictures of what I can only assume are the developers' pets as screensavers all over the place, which is excellent.

This is when you also upgrade your characters and kit. Instead of simply unlocking upgrades from spending resources you gathered, there's also a hive-shaped inventory which you can sort upgrades into. All the upgrades come in different shapes and sizes, resembling a molecular string. You can have as many upgrades as will fit, so you have to sort them well—I even unlocked a rare upgrade for matching a 'hidden path'.

(Image credit: Devolver Digital )

Mycopunk shows a ton of promise, but that doesn't mean it's infallible. The progression can become a bit of a slog, and it can take a while to level up or collect enough resources to upgrade your kit. There's also definitely a cap as to how many missions you can do in a row before it all just blends into a violent blur. The variety in mission types only keeps things fresh for so long.

There are also some glitches, many of which the devs are aware of, but that doesn't make them any less annoying. I've been lasered by an Abomination through a wall more than once now—you're never safe, even when you think you are. But none of this ruins the fun, it's just something to bear in mind: The fungal growths of Early Access.

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If you're bored of landing grab tricks and pulling off spine transfers, unlocking every Secret Skater in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 will be your next challenge. You don't necessarily need to get all of these characters, but if you're aiming for perfection, you're bound to want to know how to get them eventually.

If you're worried about having to complete some seriously challenging tricks to unlock these hidden characters, you're in luck. You can buy most Secret Skaters from the not-so-secret Secret Shop, which you can access on the main menu. They cost a pretty penny, but save you the work of having to aim for that 100% on every level. With that said, there are still a two characters locked behind very specific challenges. Here's what you need to do to unlock the whole roster.

How to unlock every Secret Skater in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4

There are five Secret Skaters to unlock across Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4. The following table lists all of them, followed by how you can unlock them. Or, how much they cost from the Secret Shop. Be warned though, you'll have to cough up some serious bucks for the privilege of skating as these characters.

Skater name Unlock Michaelangelo $10,000 in the Secret Shop Bam Margera $5,000 in the Secret Shop Andy Anderson $5,000 in the Secret Shop Constable Richard Find all the hidden panda plushies Birdman Complete every goal in both THPS 3 and 4, and buy "Feathers" from the Secret Shop

When you've unlocked or purchased a Secret Skater, they will be added to your pro roster just like everyone else, and any custom skaters you've created. Although there's no great benefit to unlocking these characters, unless you're a big fan that is, each Secret Skater comes with unique special tricks which will make for some sweet photos in photo mode at the very least.

There are two separate Secret Skaters locked behind the Digital Deluxe version of the game too, Revenant and Doom Slayer. But, since these are unique to these fancy editions, there's nothing you can do to unlock them if you haven't purchased the right version, unfortunately.

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Despite showing signs of ill health, videogames are still an enormous slice of the worldwide entertainment industry—making more than $100 billion across the globe each year, which is more than the film and music industries combined. The UK government is finally giving us some bloomin' recognition for this fact, announcing the formation of a UK Video Games Council in its creative industry sector plan late last month.

Shared via a press release, the council is designed to "work in partnership with government to support the growth, innovation and international reach of the UK video games and interactive entertainment industry". It'll cooperate with the UK's Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism, Sir Chris Bryant.

Twice a year, this council will meet to "provide strategic advice on how to unlock the full economic, cultural and educational potential of the UK games industry." In the same press release, the members of the council were revealed and, fair play to our government, this looks like a decent spread of representatives from around the industry.

The organisation's co-chairs are Jason Kingsley, CEO at Rebellion (Atomfall, Sniper Elite) alongside Nick Button-Brown, chair of Outright Games (a children's game publisher). As for the other members, rather than just throw a list of names at you with zero context, I've gone ahead and found some context, creating a larger, more complicated list. You're welcome.

Emily Bailey, CEO of Green-BiT—a software company that, best I can tell, is aiming to help the industry reduce its carbon footprint.Saad Choudri, CEO of Miniclip—a flash game website from back in the day who, apparently, has gone full games publisher. They're mostly concerned with mobile games like Subway Surfers.Charu Desodt, studio director at Interior/Night—the indie dev that made As Dusk Falls.Kirsty Rigden, CEO at FuturLab—the studio that made PowerWash Simulator.Dave Gould, senior director of sales UK and export at Take-Two Interactive—a massive publisher that handles Rockstar, Gearbox, and the mobile game dev Zynga.Chris Van Der Kuyl, chairman at 4J Studios—who handled the console port for Minecraft, among others.Donna Orlowski, COO of Chucklefish—Who used to publish Stardew Valley, also known for developing games like Starbound, and the upcoming Witchbrook.Nick Poole, CEO of UKIE—or The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, a non-profit trade organisation that's existed since the early 90s, previously called the European Leisure Software Publishers Association until 2002.Tara Saunders, studio head at Larian Guildford—Larian Studios developed a little game called Baldur's Gate 3, as well as the Divinity: Original Sin series.Maria Sayans, CEO of ustwo Games—who developed games like Monument Valley and Assemble With Care.Tim Varney, Senior Corporate Counsel at Microsoft—a company that's only been growing its influence in the past years via Xbox. Growing a little too fast, perhaps.Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA—Also known as The Independent Game Developers' Association, another UK-based non-profit that was founded in 2001.

While the phrase "UK Video Games Council" makes me as wary as any other properly patriotic Brit, the selection above genuinely seems solid at first glance. I'm not sure what a twice-yearly session can do for the UK games' industry, but the selection of UK-based indie studios, advocacy groups, and the inevitable representatives from industry titans does seem like a good-faith effort to hear everybody out. Hopefully it'll go better than the one time the Tories made a Discord server.

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Before you can unlock Maleficent as a villager in Disney Dreamlight Valley, you need to have completed the first part of the Storybook Vale DLC. This includes completing all the Maleficent and Hades quests, and having every area of the map unlocked. If you haven't done this already, you've still got quite a bit of work to do (and a lot of Storybook Magic to collect) before Maleficent will move in. However, if you have completed the Storm of Stories quest already, then you're ready invite Maleficent to your island by completing three new quests—Maleficent's Gift quest, the Spinning Wheel quest, and Maleficent's Demise. You need to complete all three of these quests to unlock Maleficent as a permanent resident, so here's what you need to do.

How to complete the Maleficent's Gift quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

To begin this quest, you need to speak to the Lorekeeper in the Library of Lore and complete a page in the book explaining where Maleficent has gone. The Lorekeeper will tell you that she's disappeared to the Unwritten Realms, and you need to solve a puzzle on the floor before you can access the realm.

Similar to how you get ahold of the Lorekeeper net in the first part of the Storybook Vale DLC, all you need to do is pull the levers around the puzzle on the floor until you position all the rings to make the shape of Maleficent, facing your direction. Interact with the page on the floor and you'll be able to enter the realm.

Go up the stairs in front of you and enter the waiting room once you're in the realm, and you'll see Maleficent. When you speak to her, she'll explain that the feather quills working there have filed for her to be erased and she's been stuck in the room since. Talk to the quill behind the desk, and you'll be issued a number before your problem is addressed. We don't have time to waste, so speak to Maleficent again and suggest manipulating the waiting room number board. She'll agree, but says you'll need her ticket which has already been destroyed.

Ticket locations

So, the next task is finding the three ticket pieces in the following locations:

On the floor to the left of MaleficentNext to the stairs you walked up when you entered the realmBehind the waiting room desk

When you've gathered these, change the numbers on the number board to match Maleficent's number - 9375.

Go back to the quill at the desk and give them the pieces of Maleficent's ticket. It'll be explained that a form was submitted to erase Maleficent but there's no name on the form, so you're given the option to submit another form even though it will take billions of years to process. When you ask the quill for any more options, they'll say you can go to the review floor directly and open a golden portal for you to walk through.

Again, walk up the stairs in front of you and enter the review floor. Talk to another quill, who explains that Maleficent's Anchor Moments (the things keeping her in the present) have already been sent to the processing room. There's a wheel next to the magic quill which you can spin, triggering another golden portal to appear. Walk through, and you'll be sent to the processing room.

Floor grid puzzle solution

Go along the patch ahead and you'll go into a room with a 9 x 9 grid on the floor. These puzzles were featured throughout Everafter in the first part of the DLC, so you should be used to them by now. If you're not, you need to use your shovel to dig each section until it shows the right symbol. The one caveat is that the center tile is missing, so you need to find that before you can complete the puzzle. Go back to where you entered the room, turn left, and use your watering can to get rid of the green flames:

You'll see a stone head on the wall which you need to rotate until it's the right side up.Rotate the stone head on the other side of the room next to the golden wheel.The third stone skull you need to rotate is in the side chamber, which will open the door on the far side of the room.Go inside and fish the bubbling spot in the middle to get the tile.

Clues can be found in different grids around the room, but, now you have the missing piece, here is the solution to the grid puzzle in case you want to speed to the finish:

Top left: SkullTop centre: GriffinTop right: SkullCentre left: GriffinCentre: SkullCentre right: GriffinBottom left: SkullBottom centre: GriffinBottom right: Griffin

When you've replaced the missing tile and put the right solution in, a door will open to the side. Head through and you'll find a chest with Maleficent's first Anchor Moment in. Go back to the waiting room and give this to Maleficent, and she will reveal that she gave Aurora the gift of falling asleep when her finger is pricked by a spinning wheel.

How to complete the Spinning Wheel quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

After handing over the first Anchor Moment, head up the stairs to the review floor and a new gate will open, taking you to the second review floor. Talk to the quill at the top of the stairs and they'll explain that the system taking you to the next processing room has broken and only a qualified supervisor can fix it.

Spinning Wheel quiz answers

You will need to answer a series of questions to prove that you're a qualified supervisor and can fix the problem. The answers are as follows:

Question Answer How many seats are in the waiting room? 44 How many magic quills are currently on duty in the Unwritten Realms including myself? 4 Which floor of the reviews and processing department are we on right now? Floor 2

Portal path puzzle

A wheel will appear on the floor next to the quill when you've answered everything correctly. Pick it up, and put it on the broken pedestal by the conveyor belt. Use your net to spin the three wheels and create a path for the portal that appears.

The trick here is to spin the right wheel once, the middle wheel twice, the right wheel again, and then the left wheel three times to create the right path. Head through the portal. Dig up the broken teapots using your shovel and remove the Inkies in front of you before heading into the large room featuring statues of Aurora and a spinning wheel in the center. The note on the pedestal says "Raise high the fingertip and the spinning wheel, and a path forward thou shalt reveal" which gives you a big clue as to what you need to do next.

Riddle solution

Walk past the statue of Aurora to the large room behind her, and walk down the stairs on your right. Use your watering can on the mechanism to lower one of the two raised platforms in the room. Go back to the entrance and walk across the lowered platforms, and pick up the missing panel at the end. Go back to the room with the statue, and place the missing panel into the mechanism located behind the statue. Water it like you did before, and Aurora's statue will rise.

Go to the other side of the room where the spinning wheel statue is, and remove the broken teapots with your shovel. Use your watering can on the mechanism again to raise the spinning wheel statue. A door will open in the same room and the second anchor moment is inside. Pick this up, go back to the waiting room, and give it to Maleficent to start the final part of the quest.

How to complete the Maleficent's Demise quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

(Image credit: Gameloft)

Go up the next set of stairs by Maleficent, and you'll come across a final wheel to turn with your net. But, when you do this, the portal won't come closer to you and will instead go flying away from you. Speak to the quill nearby, and they will send you to a fishing spot on your right. Cast your rod, and you'll fish up the missing portal.

Knight puzzle

Once you enter the portal, you need to move three armor racks around separate grids to let a knight pass through. It sounds confusing, but it's really not when you're face to face with the puzzle.

On the first grid:

Move both wooden racks to the right side of the gridPush the knight so it slides into the next room

In the second room:

Move the weapon rack at the back to the leftShift the rack closest to the knight to the rightPush the vertical rack forward towards the doorShove the knight and he will travel into the final room.

In the last room:

Move both weapon racks on the right so they are at the bottom of the gridSlide the longer weapon racks to the right. This unblocks the path for the knight, and once you push him, the final Anchor Moment will pop up.

Take this Anchor Moment back to Maleficent, and the quill next to her will explain that the Lorekeeper submitted the form to erase Maleficent. You decide whether or not to keep her around (though, even if you choose to erase her she'll still stick around). Go back to the Storybook Vale and speak to the Lorekeeper with Maleficent, and you'll be able to invite her to live in your valley permanently.

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The Trial of Truth quest is a challenge you'll have to face as you make your way through the Ink-Stained World quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley. If you're looking to unlock Aurora as a character to live in your valley, you'll need to solve this trial to get one step closer. The only problem is the clues these trials give you aren't incredibly helpful, and there's a lot you'll need to figure out on your own.

You'll unlock the Trial of Truth quest after you've completed Merryweather's Trial of Virtue. The aim of this trial is to solve the puzzle by moving different furniture items around, and conjuring up two delicious meals for a pair of hungry animals. Here's what you need to do so you can get one step closer to solving the Ink-Stained World quest.

How to complete the Trial of Truth quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

(Image credit: Gameloft)

When you start the trial, you'll see the silhouette of a lion and a bird on the wall. On two tracks in front of the wall, there's two halves of a bird cage and a little wooden head with a Mickey Mouse headband. To solve the puzzle, go into the furniture menu and position the two halves of the bird cage so the shadow on the wall encloses the bird. Move the Mickey ears so their shadow is on top of the lion's head. This will solve the first part of the trial.

The second part will ask you to cook "the right meal" for a Pegasus and a Rabbit. Fortunately, there are two hints for both meals which a note in the kitchen to the left side of the room offers. The table below lists both animals and their hint:

Animal Hint Rabbit "The rabbit likes a hearty meal. Four ingredients should do the trick. Simply refuses to eat anything with barley, wheat, onion, or rice." Pegasus "Prefers simple meals. Something with three ingredients ought to do. He refuses to eat anything with tomato, lettuce, cucumber, onion, or rice in it."

Go to the ingredient table behind you in the kitchen, and pick up a lettuce, a carrot, tomato, and cucumber for the rabbit meal. When you pop all these things into the stove, you'll make a carrot salad.

Go back to the ingredient table and pick up wheat, barley, and a carrot. If you throw all of these into the pot, you'll make a barley salad. Take both meals to the animals and feed them. In return, they will gift you the Sword of Truth. As soon as you take this sword and speak to Fauna, you'll complete the Trial of Truth.

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It might not surprise you to discover that there's been precious little new Silksong information, other than some further SteamDB tweaks. It certainly won't surprise you, at this point, to learn that the game's community of rabid, irony-infested fans—and I mean that as a compliment—are not taking it well.

Last week, the game's subreddit sacrificed three members to seal them away in a dream—members who had, until they were skongrificed (is this anything?) been routine contributors to their community.

Like a lot of primitive cultures who conducted ritual sacrifices, r/Silksong has now also invented a bogeyman to represent its darkest, most primal fears: The dread creature Snosk.

Snosk is a portmanteau (they like their portmanteaus, there) of Silksong and Nosk. The latter being a boss from Hollow Knight, an upsetting insectoid beast which lures the player into its nest like a pilot fish, except instead of using light to lure its prey, it's got a little Hollow Knight puppet. Snosk, on the other hand, uses a copy of Silksong to lure its victims into the dark.

Hey guys, I decided to take a walk in the forest at night and suddenly I saw this cute Silksong copy, but it keeps running further and further into the forest. This reminds me of the case when- WHAT THE FUСK IS THIS?!! from r/Silksong

What do I do guys. First I hear screams and now I see someone getting mauled to death by a creature. from r/Silksong

Containment ideas, like an art contest, were suggested and held to imprison the fell creature within. One particular prison stirred up controversy when—oh no. Is that a mason jar? Oh god, please, no. No no no no.

Hey gang I have a PERFECT idea! from r/Silksong

I'm going to stop talking about Snosk, now.

Instead, let's talk about how the subreddit also sacrificed a mod—banning them from the community to, quote, "LEAVE TRACKS ON SAND AS WE VENTURE INTO THIS NEW CHAPTER, OUR CRIES WILL REACH THE SKIES AS WE SING FOR SILKSONG, OUR POTENTIAL WILL GO EVEN HIGHER THAN THE STARS."

User sand-sky-stars has been chosen as the subreddit's very own Hollow Knight after a democratic vote, in congruence with the original game's lore. Though whereas the Hollow Knight was born in the void, raised to seal the Radiance forevermore, sand-sky-stars has been chosen to instead awaken skong from the depths and lift it into a glorious tomorrow.

I do have a couple of notes. First off, the Hollow Knight was meant to keep something in, rather than release it, so this does seem a bit, uh, counter-productive. Secondly, Hollow Knight's entire plot hinges around the fact that this didn't work. This is an equivalent to inventing a fake ship, then naming it "The Titanic".

By far the most unhinged decision the subreddit's made, though? Making a fan club dedicated to yours truly. A clear sign of an unsettled mind, by any metric.

Anyway, I'm sure this absolutely isn't a death spiral, probably. Please ignore the fact that a petition to sacrifice 5% of the subreddit is gaining some traction. This definitely isn't morphing into an apocalypse cult, there is no war in Ba Sing Se, soylent green isn't people, and there aren't four lights. Here's hoping some more SteamDB changes stem the tide.

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The Edge of Eternities expansion is based on space opera, which I am told means it's like normal science-fiction, except that it ain't over till the fat space monster eats a planet.

OK, what it really means is we should expect something between Buck Rogers and Star Wars, with varied alien species, faster-than-light travel at the press of a button, space whales, and entire worlds that each have a single biome. That last aspect makes an easy transition to Magic: The Gathering. This whole planet is covered in swamps? Cool, that's a black-mana land card now.

And yes, Edge of Eternities does have a fat space monster that eats a planet. Famished Worldsire is a green-mana leviathan that uses the devour mechanic, first seen in the Shards of Alara set back in 2008. Specifically it devours land cards, and every one it chomps gives it three +1/+1 counters and lets you look at a card from your deck. If any of those cards turn out to be more lands, you get to play them immediately, hopefully replacing some of the ones you sacrificed to get that big leviathan onto the battlefield in the first place.

It's a risky play, but so was the Death Star. Actually, given how things turn out whenever someone builds a Death Star, maybe that's a bad comparison. There's got to be an example of a space opera where somebody employs a planet-destroying superweapon and everything turns out fine for them, right?

While Magic's gone sci-fi before, doing cyberpunk in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, post-apocalyptic in Fallout, dark science-fantasy in Warhammer 40,000, and a broad parody of the genre in Unfinity, nailing down space opera as the specific theme for Edge of Eternities makes it more interesting than if they were just doing space because they'd already done the Wild West. I would've liked a Spelljammer set, but I'm one of like five people who enjoyed Spelljammer so I can see why they went with something bespoke here.

Edge of Eternities will be available digitally in Arena on July 29, and in paper form from August 1.

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(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast/Kev Walker)

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Technological advances in the health industry are some of my favourites for how far out into science fiction they often seem. It's where we see cool developments on incredulous things like BCIs with some now even able to translate thoughts almost directly to speech, shattering the locked-in language barrier. Robots are another part of the tech world that have been helping out with healthcare, and they've also just had a communication based upgrade.

A surgical robot recently completed a huge milestone for both its soft and hard skillsets. According to IFLScience, a robot was able to successfully operate on a pig's gallbladder by responding to vocal directions. Thankfuly robots seem far better at surgery than they are at soccer.

“This work represents a major leap from prior efforts because it tackles some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in the real world,” said lead study author Ji Woong “Brian” Kim.

Before the surgery, the robot was trained on videos of the procedure. Then the actual gallbladder removal was completed by the robot following the verbal instructions of the senior surgeon. It even managed to react on the fly to emergency scenarios and changes.

Honestly the whole process sounds a lot like how human surgeons would learn the process, which means these robots could potentially be trained using existing methods and understanding used for students. This could make training robots far more feasible for hospitals that may not have the technical resources.

“That’s what makes this so so humongously difficult, because how do you write this down? How do you write that in code?” Dr Mathias Unberath, John C. Malone Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently told IFLScience.

“Can I watch a human learn what I’m supposed to be doing? If the answer is yes, things become, not trivial, but they’re considerably easier.”

This kind of learning is called imitation learning, and it's something people do all the time. When robots do this it's often a mix of machine learning and inputting data, but here it seems more restricted to video and voice training, which they seemed to nail. In this study the robots were able to complete the gallbladder removal with 100 percent accuracy after watching the tutorials. What a great use for AI.

As someone who has been under the knife of a robot, I find the whole idea fascinating. I've had multiple operations to remove cysts, endometriosis, and eventually my uterus. The last was robotically assisted, and my scars from it are tiny compared to the others. I can't speak for their bedside manner, but robot surgeons seem great.

Autonomous robot surgeons that can be easily trained using natural language while still responding to unexpected changes sound even better. This could see far more people have access to healthcare they desperately need, and far more robots helping them access it.

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The AI race between China and the United States of America continues, as reports surface pointing at huge data centres being planned in Yiwu, China. While Trump attempts to clamp down on the nation's access to this tech by shackling Nvidia and launching investigations to potential chip smuggling, it seems that China will continue to move forward in its own plans for AI.

WCCFtech spotted a Bloomberg report revealing the plans for the massive facility which is to be built by several Chinese AI firms with support from the Chinese government. The plans will see at least 36 datacentres established. Though only a single building is expected to house the majority of the over 115,000 high-end Nvidia AI GPUs detailed in the plans, which is where things get a little confusing.

It's not so much that China plans to build these facilities across its western desert, but rather where those cards will come from given the U.S. current restrictions.

The facility may be the biggest planned for China, but it's relatively small compared to what the U.S. has planned. Still, I wouldn't expect the United States to lift the controls any time soon. This means China is going to have to figure out some other way to access these new cards. It won't be as easy as calling Dell to haul over some racks of new Blackwell Ultra cards like what was recently installed at CoreWeave.

It's also unlikely other countries are going to be super keen to help. Singapore is already under investigations for potentially helping to smuggle restricted chips into China, and with hefty fines most are probably trying to keep their noses as clean as possible.

China as a country does have access to a hefty supply of H20 AI accelerators that it might choose to allocate to this new data centre, but the goal would almost certainly have to be to have higher powered Nvidia chips installed instead. Maybe they'll be able to use these old ones as collateral for a big loan to help with new fangled chips.

Assuming the report is correct and China is going ahead with the facility, that does imply a fair amount of confidence in the project. If the country is targeting those new Nvidia chips then it certainly expects to get them one way or another. That's a helluva lot of infrastructure to build if you never intend on filling it with working servers.

If China isn't able to import these chips, it could be that China is ready to make its own. Given Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang has commented on the country's growing capabilities, China might be getting ready to fill its data centres with its own AI chips in the near future.

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If you've ever claimed your hot new piece of gaming hardware was an investment, then this story is for you. Companies are using Nvidia's AI GPUs as collateral in deals with banks to borrow billions of dollars to further their businesses. This means even financial institutions are willing to recognise the potential value of these cards, which must be doing wonders for Nvidia's stock.

Fluidstack is a cloud startup company based in London that's just managed to score over $10 billion in funding according to a report by The Information (via WCCFtech). The company was able to leveridge its currently held supply of Nvidia AI GPUs to secure the loan from multiple financers including Macquarie.

This model of putting cards up for collateral Fluidstack is using isn't unique. CoreWeave, a cloud AI service which just received a massive influx of high-powered Nvidia AI Blackwell Ultra racks, was one of the pioneers of this loan structure. It was able to secure up to $9.9 billion dollars by putting its Nvidia H100 AI GPUs against the loan. Supposedly it used some of that cash to secure this new shipment of hardware, which points at a weird cyclical loan arrangement.

Buy some cards, get a loan against them, buy more. Repeat. Profit?

Given how fast this tech depreciates, it seems surprising financial institutions are willing to put loans against them. There are even rumours the collateral chips are held under lock and key, so they aren't even creating value through use. Still, if they're able to secure such wads of cash in loans maybe Nvidia's AI GPUs are worth even more locked away in a drawer then they are doing actual work.

This also raises questions around what happens to these GPUs down the line. If the startups using these loans fall through its presumed they'll be sold to recap any losses for the loaning parties. And will these banks do this before they lose value and are superseded by the next piece of kit. Given the high prices of these loans there has to be a hefty amount of units backing this. One failed startup could lead to a weird market flooded with high-end AI cards.

It all seems like a risky venture, but if banks are willing to put this much money down there must be significant confidence in the value of these cards. Hopefully all this profit for Nvidia will lead to more gaming cards at reasonable prices, you know other than the RTX 5060 TI 8GB appearing. A girl can dream.

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Escape From Tarkov got a new wipe today, and it's not going down too well.

The community is in open revolt in reaction to today's Hardcore Wipe, a sweeping patch that upends the extraction shooter's economy, format, and progression in a bid to slow things down. At least, that's how players are reading the decision to disable all maps but two, limit ammo crafting, and make core features like insurance wildly expensive.

Despite developer Battlestate's efforts to prepare players for the Hardcore Wipe last week with X posts, those who only read the sparse patch notes were blindsided by Escape From Tarkov's dramatic decrease in content overnight.

Chief among players' laundry list of complaints is quests: The majority of them are simply missing, greatly limiting options for progression at the start of a wipe set to last months. The plan is for more quests to roll out over time, but that's of little comfort to players who were excited to play a bunch of Tarkov on wipe day.

Then there's the fact that only two of Tarkov's 11 maps are available to raid, with travel to other maps only possible through in-game transit points on Customs or Factory. Many seem to agree that maps only accessible through other maps is, conceptually, a neat idea for a hardcore mode, but Tarkov's excruciatingly long load times throw cold water on the whole thing.

"I tried going to Reserve. This was the experience: Queue was 10 minutes for Customs, five-minute run to transit, 22-minute queue for Reserve just to trade headshots with another player two minutes in," wrote Reddit user SakeMadaMada.

Insurance might be expensive this wipe... from r/EscapefromTarkov

"And we have no tasks, so basically the game is unplayable haha, pure mindless grind (2x hideout items needed according to reddit) with no fun stuff added."

Other changes seem squarely aimed at hoarders. The price to insure and repair items has risen "drastically," according to one player chronicling unlisted changes, a squeeze that coincides with vendors buying loot for less cash than before. The player-driven flea market is also disabled for now, sending a clear message that Battlestate wants money to be a more precious resource.

Such is the goal of the Hardcore Wipe. Battlestate is clearly interested in upending the status quo, an idea that is proving immediately unpopular. Head of studio Nikita Buyanov said on X that Battlestate is monitoring feedback and will make changes as needed.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releasesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together

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Two years after taking the reins as CEO of Twitter—now known as X—Linda Yaccarino has announced that she is stepping down. While Yaccarino did not share a reason for her surprise resignation, it comes less than 24 hours after X's AI-powered chatbot Grok posted messages including praise for Adolf Hitler and descriptions of violent rape.

"When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company," Yaccarino wrote in her resignation post.

"I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App. I’m incredibly proud of the X team—the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable."

"Remarkable" is certainly a word for it, although perhaps not quite as it was intended.

Yaccarino became CEO of X in June 2023, not quite a year after Elon Musk, after spending months trying to wriggle out of it, bought the platform for $44 billion. The company's valuation dropped precipitously in the wake of Musk's purchase—financial services company Fidelity estimated in September 2024 that X's value had shrunk by an astonishing 79%—as did its reported usage: X, Musk, and Yaccarino have stridently denied such claims, but European Union Digital Transparency Act reports filed by X itself (via Music Ally) indicate a significant dropoff in EU users.

As advertisers were driven away by Musk's erratic behavior, Yaccarino helped spearhead the company's "war" against X's erstwhile clients, saying in August 2024 that she was "shocked by the evidence uncovered by the House Judiciary Committee that a group of companies organised a systematic illegal boycott against X."

A Message to X Users pic.twitter.com/6bZOYPhWVaAugust 6, 2024

X's valuation began to tick back up in 2025 following the election of Donald Trump as US president, and rebounded fully when Musk sold X to xAI, his own AI company, in a deal worth $45 billion. Because when you're selling to yourself, it becomes materially easier to agree a price, I imagine.

Anyway, it hasn't been smooth sailing. But Yaccarino has dutifully posted through it all.

Hot dogOctober 29, 2023

What ultimately pushed her out the door is a matter of mystery right now but, as I noted earlier, the 'I quit' comes less than a day after Musk's AI chatbot started posting stuff like this:

Oh my god

— @whstancil.bsky.social (@whstancil.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T21:12:22.932Z

And this:

grok was too woke now it’s a nazi

— @junlper.beer (@junlper.beer.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T21:12:22.863Z

And, well, this:

Grok is now calling itself, "mechahitler" while spewing antisemitism.

— @esqueer.net (@esqueer.net.bsky.social) 2025-07-09T21:12:22.922Z

There's more—the sexual assault content, reported by The Independent, is too graphic to share—but you get the idea. Those posts have since been deleted, and although X has not issued any formal apology, it did say on July 8: "xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X." Musk himself basically brushed the whole thing off.

The timing of Yaccarino's resignation is hard to overlook, not to mention its suddenness, but there may not be a connection between those posts and her decision to jump ship. After all, Yaccarino has held firm through a barrage of controversies, and notably did not resign when Musk threw what sure looked like a Nazi salute during Trump's inauguration festivities.

No mention of her motivations is made in the resignation statement, only a look back on the past two years that seems disconnected from reality, and an equally fanciful expression of confidence that "the best is yet to come."

After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of 𝕏. When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me…July 9, 2025

"X is truly a digital town square for all voices and the world’s most powerful culture signal," Yaccarino wrote. "We couldn’t have achieved that without the support of our users, business partners, and the most innovative team in the world."

Musk acknowledged Yaccarino's resignation in a single sentence thanking her for her contributions.

[

(Image credit: Elon Musk (Twitter))](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1942967206993961124)

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Bethesda has rolled out a new patch for Oblivion Remastered that promises numerous bug fixes and performance improvements, and also adds a little more flexibility to combat difficulty settings.

The difficulty adjustment is neither a nerf to this nor a buff to that, but rather the addition of a new "Journeyman" setting that Bethesda hopes "will act as a better bridge" between the "Adept" and "Expert" settings.

This is a bigger deal than it might seem, as Oblivion Remastered's out-of-whack difficulty is a common complaint. As PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield noted in May, "'Adept' difficulty just feels too easy, while a single step up to 'Expert' makes fighting even a basic bandit a life or death slog." Modders were able to solve the problem, but this change will hopefully smooth things out for everyone on vanilla.

There's not a lot in the way of big headline news in the patch beyond that, although a fix to "armor items hiding Argonian and Khajiit tails" will no doubt be welcomed by many, and another ensuring that keybinds update properly for AZERTY keyboard users will certainly please, well, a few. Promised performance fixes, including fixes for frame rate drops and overall optimization, should also make for a better time in Tamriel for everyone.

The Oblivion Remastered 1.2 update is set to roll out today in Steam beta (and may already be live by the time you read this), so you'll need to be opted into that if you want to give it a rip before it's fully live. The full patch notes are below.

SETTINGS CHANGES

We’ve added additional difficulty settings to allow players to further tune their “Player Combat Damage” & “Enemy Combat Damage”. Players can now select from “Novice”, “Apprentice”, “Adept”, “Journeyman”, “Expert”, and “Master” options in the Gameplay menu. We hope the “Journeyman” setting, specifically, will act as a better bridge between “Adept” and “Expert” for players.

UI

Fixed map markers disappearingFixed missing punctuation in Simplified Chinese textFixed “Toggle All” button on Map screen to work as a 'Hold'Various fixes to localized textFixed controller issues in Spell making menuFixed menus being cropped incorrectly in 1280x1024Fixed the incorrect player stance in the inventory menu after fast travelFixed rebinding keys for Lock PickingFixed keybinds not updating in AZERTYFixed soft lock with controller in Enchanting menuFixed stats not updating when equipping enchanted itemsFixed a character skin glitch when closing the inventory menu

CRASHES

Fixed crashes that could occur while fighting JyggalagFixed crashing when killing a paralyzed NPC with an arrowFixed crashing when paralyzing an already-paralyzed NPCFixed crashing in Spellmaking menu when rapidly removing & implementing effectsFixed various GPU crashesFixed crashes that could occur during auto saves

AUDIO

Fixed underwater SFX persisting after leaving exiting waterFixed missing ambient SFX in Shivering Isles

QUESTS

Fixed NPCs floating after being knocked down during Priory of the Nine questFixed crashing when entering Flooded Mine during Final Justice questFixed pathing for Shaleez in Flooded Mine during Final Justice questFixed crashing when opening Gate to The Fringe during Retaking the Fringe questFixed mages loading without clothes in Fort Ontus during The Necromancer's Amulet questFixed NPC pathing issues in Gardens of Flesh and Bone during ‘Through the Fringe of Madness’ questFixed missing VFX during the closing of the Great GateFixed Ilav Dralgoner's missing facial animation during ‘Saving Time Itself’ questFixed Sir Thredet's speech during ‘Umaril the Unfeathered’ questFixed NPC pathing issues during ‘Baiting the Trap’ questFixed Obelisk Crystals spawning disconnected during ‘Baiting the Trap’ questFixed crash at end of ‘Through a Nightmare, Darkly’ questFixed wall crumbling in Malada during ‘Nothing You Can Possess' questFixed misaligned food at the Castle Leyawiin County Hall dinner party during ‘Sanguine’ questFixed an issue with visibility of ghosts during ‘Ghosts of Vitharn’Fixed cutscene not playing during ‘Light the Dragonfires’Fixed missing textures in Cropsford Campsite after finishing ‘Goblin Trouble’

PERFORMANCE

Fixed frame rate drop in Deepscorn HollowFixed frame rate drops in Black Rock CavernsFixed frame rate drop between Skingrad and Skingrad CastleFixed frame rate drop south of Bravil Castle courtyardReduced the frequency of hitches in the open world.General improvements to frame time in many locations.Optimize updating of character attachments.Optimize rendering of water volumes in the open world.Optimize light/shadow updates in several lairs.Optimize waterfall particle FX and rendering.Optimize the weather system.Optimize character animation system.

GAMEPLAY

Fixed player character height scalingFixed armor items hiding Argonian and Khajiit tailsFixed slow camera movement when initiating NPC dialogueFixed soft lock when a player with a high bounty goes to jailFixed Orrery animationsFixed physics bug with floating necklacesFixed vampire sleeping animationsFixed NPC beards not following facial animation.Fixed ghost NPCs being completely invisibleFixed missing animation when talking to Shamada in LeyawiinFixed occasional very long load times when fast travelingFixed missing facial animation for Snak gra-BuraFixed falling unconscious in water preventing player from getting upFixed NPCs losing collision when swimmingFixed NPCs stopping combat when player is blockingFixed female Dremora teeth clippingFixed soft lock after choosing player classFixed Amber weapons clipping in first person viewFixed vines clipping into columnsFixed helmets clipping into player character's headFixed missing textures on Daedric statuesFixed duplicated pages between Oghma Infinium and Mysterium Xarxes

SYSTEM

Fixed flickering shadows when using XeSS UpscalingFixed title properly restarting after purchasing the Deluxe Upgrade on PCFixed settings properly migrating between PC and XBOXFixed water disappearing after fast travelFixed cursor slowdown when enabling high frame rate V-SyncFixed shaders not preloading due to cloud save replicationFixed long blackout during loading screensFixed weather VFX flashing while outsideFixed motion blur artifacts while in the Oblivion PlaneFixed NPCs not obeying the Wait action from the player

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Just a week after gutting the leadership of Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds, a Bloomberg report says Krafton is going to delay the game's early access release into 2026. The decision comes mere months before the PUBG publisher was slated to pay Unknown Worlds a $250 million bonus that developers say hinged on Subnautica 2's release this year.

Krafton acquired Unknown Worlds in 2021, three years after the hit undersea survival game Subnautica left early access and went into full release. The purchase agreement, according to Bloomberg, included the $250 million bonus, payable if the studio achieved specific revenue targets by the end of 2025; with Subnautica 2 delayed into 2026, those targets are unlikely to be met, and thus the bonus will not be payable.

Unknown Worlds leadership had reportedly planned to split the bonus with all of the studio's roughly 100 employees, payouts worth hundreds of thousands or even millions for some. Those leaders—Subnautica designer and director Charlie Cleveland, CEO Ted Gill, and studio co-founder Max McGuire—were unexpectedly shown the door last week, however.

The report adds a new dimension to a recent statement made by Cleveland, who said earlier this week that Subnautica 2 "is ready for early access release." Speaking to Unknown Worlds employees during a town hall also held this week, however, newly installed CEO Steve Papoutsis, formerly the CEO of Krafton's Striking Distance Studios, insisted otherwise, and said Subnautica 2 is being held back so developers can add more content.

When asked during that town hall whether the delay was made so Krafton could avoid paying the bonus, Papoutsis said he's not familiar with the specifics of its deal to acquire Unknown Worlds, but that "it’s never been told to me that we’re making this change specifically to impact any earnout or anything like that."

For now, the Subnautica 2 Steam page still lists a 2025 early access release date. I've reached out to Krafton for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

oyees, payouts worth hundreds of thousands or even millions for some. Those leaders—Subnautica designer and director Charlie Cleveland, CEO Ted Gill, and studio co-founder Max McGuire—were unexpectedly shown the door last week, however.

The report adds a new dimension to a recent statement made by Cleveland, who said earlier this week that Subnautica 2 "is ready for early access release." Speaking to Unknown Worlds employees during a town hall also held this week, however, newly installed CEO Steve Papoutsis, formerly the CEO of Krafton's Striking Distance Studios, insisted otherwise, and said Subnautica 2 is being held back so developers can add more content.

When asked during that town hall whether the delay was made so Krafton could avoid paying the bonus, Papoutsis said he's not familiar with the specifics of its deal to acquire Unknown Worlds, but that "it’s never been told to me that we’re making this change specifically to impact any earnout or anything like that."

For now, the Subnautica 2 Steam page still lists a 2025 early access release date. I've reached out to Krafton for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

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If you've been on social media at all this week, there's a good chance you've encountered the horse-crazed masses who've succumbed to the absurd siren call of Umamusume: Pretty Derby. It's a gacha game about horse racing, except the horses are anime girls, and it's got a pretty compelling spreadsheet simulator underneath all the gratuitous wobbling and the inherent villainy of its gacha trappings.

Of the titular umamusume, one horse girl has quickly become a fan favorite since the game got its western release at the end of June. If you look at the game's library banner art on Steam, you'll see—tucked in the middle of the determined ponyfolk—one horse girl with an inexplicably mischievous smirk:

(Image credit: Cygames, Inc.)

This is Gold Ship, and the main thing you need to know about Gold Ship is that she's an asshole.

Where most of the other umamusume are possessed of a heroic drive and noble spirit, Gold Ship is an ungovernable gremlin. She's fickle. She's irritable. She'll often refuse to train, or inflict herself with the Slacker condition and force you to derail your racing prep to clear it.

In races, she might choose to lazily hang at the back of the pack. When she wants to win, she can sometimes simply kick on the afterburners and casually sweep through the competition to a first place finish. Other times, she'll just, you know, not do that. If she does win, she'll celebrate by dropkicking you in the face. And people love her for it.

The Gold Ship experience#umamusume pic.twitter.com/PWWNgO2gZKJuly 8, 2025

i dont even play the game but seeing my tl full of comments like this about gold ship make me like them more and more https://t.co/0QXqff95np pic.twitter.com/BTrnQN8DUyJuly 4, 2025

As compelling as Gold Ship is, the history behind the character is just as incredible. You see, the umamusume are all based on real, actual Japanese race horses, and the real Gold Ship was every bit the equine chaos agent his anime girl counterpart is—sometimes at the expense of millions and millions of dollars.

In a racing career that ran from 2011 through 2015, Gold Ship acted as a kind of divine punishment inflicted on humanity for daring to gamble on the enterprise of horse racing. He was impossible to predict, sometimes stringing together unparalleled performances just to finish last in his next race in what could seem like a deliberate act of mockery.

The real Gold Ship's crowning achievement of spectacular failure took place at the 2015 Takarazuka Kinen. After starting the season with a poor showing at a G2 race in Nakayama, Gold Ship posted back-to-back G1 wins at the Hanshin Daishoten and the Tenno Sho. Gold Ship was on fire, and he entered the paddock at the Takarazuka Kinen as the overwhelming favorite.

But as the race started, spectators watched with horror as Gold Ship went into an inexplicable fit, leaving the gate a full 10 horse lengths behind—an insurmountable gap that would lead to a dismal 15th place finish. The inexplicable fumble is estimated to have, in moments, annihilated around 12 billion yen worth of betting tickets, around $135 million in today's dollars.

"I'm sorry to those who supported him, but that's typical of him," Gold Ship's jockey, Norihiro Yokoyama, said after the race. "I hope you'll think of that as part of his personality."

After a career of waging psychological warfare on the world of Japanese horse racing, Gold Ship retired at the end of the 2015 season. He now resides at the Big Red Farm in Hokkaido, where he's continued to sire a new generation of race horses.

His stud fee currently sits at 4 million yen. By all indications, he's living his best life.

Gold Ship is also still alive, he lives in Hokkaido. He retired in 2015 without any mortal injuries(This video is from the "late 2010s"?) https://t.co/2WahATKLYy pic.twitter.com/PnLcrUjzuOJuly 6, 2025

Umamusume: Pretty Derby is available now on Steam. As with any gacha game, the standard warnings about predatory monetization apply: If you don't want to put your wallet at risk, you're better off steering clear.

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Chip manufacturer Nvidia has become the first company in history to hit a $4 trillion dollar market capitalisation on Wall Street, after a rapid rise in value over recent months (per the Financial Times). The Silicon Valley firm's share price rose 2.8% on Wednesday to $164.36, taking it past the previous record valuation held by Apple of $3.92T in December 2024.

The chip maker has bet big on the so-called AI revolution, and manufactures the vast majority of the chips powering the field's major companies like OpenAI. It also recently signed a bunch of multibillion deals in the Middle East, and has been a beneficiary of President Donald Trump rowing back on his threats of a trade war with China. The Financial Times describes Nvidia as "the biggest beneficiary of a tech boom that has exceeded the headiest days of the dotcom era," which might give some of us a little pause.

CEO Jensen Huang has led the company's push into AI and associated technologies like robotics, and has spearheaded enormous investment in infrastructure like data centres that should keep Nvidia ahead of any rivals for years to come. In May the company reported a 70% increase in quarterly revenues and Huang bragged that various factors meant demand for its AI chips was "kicking into turbocharge."

Turbocharge is certainly one way to describe this current valuation: Nvidia was worth around $1T only two years ago. What changed? This was around the time that technologies like ChatGPT began to become available to the public, and tech firms began jamming AI into as many products as possible: It's nigh-on impossible to use the mainstream internet now, nevermind your own PC, without rubbing up against AI features constantly.

And you know who loves AI, right? "The more AI, the better [the] bottom line," said Huang last month. "The absence of AI is the only thing I worry about."

The company's shares have been mostly on the climb ever since. Nvidia's valuation hit $2T in February 2024, then $3T in June 2024, before briefly sputtering in early 2025. This was driven by a combination of concern about whether the demand for its chips would keep growing, and the wider context of President Trump's threat to impose global tariffs, and in particular what would happen with China.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia still faces restrictions on selling its most powerful chips to China, but the company has been openly lobbying against it, with dire warnings that this will only strengthen China's homegrown industry. But clearly shareholders think that, even with the uncertainty over China, there's enough global demand for Nvidia chips to keep the momentum going.

Analysts S&P Capital IQ project that Nvidia's revenue will come in at just under $200B this year, which would be up 55% year-on-year, with net income of $105B.

Good times for some, anyway: Nvidia's leadership including Huang sold $1B worth of shares in late June. Nvidia said at the time that Huang’s sales were part of a pre-arranged plan, and he retains the vast majority of his shares in Nvidia. Huang can sell up to six million shares before the end of 2025, which at the firm's current valuation would be worth just under a billion dollars. Not that he needs it: Forbes estimates Huang’s net worth at $138B, making him the 11th richest person in the world.

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If you have, at any point, attempted to wrestle the PC version of Nier: Automata into submission, odds are you've downloaded and installed Special K, a graphics and performance enhancement suite that you can plug into all manner of games (both Niers, Elden Ring, Persona 4, and plenty else besides) to hopefully get them running a little smoother. It's been supplanted by other mods—at least for some games—over the years, but the self-described "Swiss army knife of PC gaming" marches on.

What doesn't march on, though, is its creator's Steam account. Kaldaien, Special K's creator, took to GitHub yesterday to announce that they had "deleted my Steam account after 20 years," posting an eight-point denunciation of the platform over its update policies, indifference to feedback, and general impact on PC gaming as a whole.

Kaldaien's post is pretty long, but to boil it down, their frustration with Steam revolves mostly around its update policies. "In 2002, the client ran on Windows 98. Over the years, they bloated the living hell out of the DRM client with all kinds of unnecessary and undefeatable features that hinder software compatibility. Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10."

In other words, if you bought a game for Windows 98 on Steam and did nothing, it would eventually stop working not because the developer had updated the game or because you had changed your PC, but because Steam itself—the store you bought it from—would no longer run.

As a result, continues Kaldaien, "You no longer have the liberty of buying a game from wherever you want. You must consider whether your store is going to continue receiving patches, whether the store itself is going to continue supporting your hardware and software, and whether your friends online bought the game from the same store."

It's rough out here in the 'illustrative pictures of Steam for use by press' mines, folks. (Image credit: NurPhoto (Getty Images))

At root, Kaldaien's frustration lies in the way that Steam as a platform extends itself into the games you buy, in such a way that you can't deal with one without dealing with the other. That applies to Steam Input, too: "The native Steam Input API is an abomination, many games that use it have fallback code to use Operating System input APIs… however Valve's unbelievably short-sighted design deliberately hooks and blocks access to those APIs as part of Steam Input's initialization."

We could get deeper into Kaldaien's gripes, but I think you get the gist by now—the modder doesn't like the way Steam has developed in such a way that it's become a quasi-insurmountable aspect of dealing with PC games and that the platform, rather than game owners, decides how and when to update games. Kaldaien writes that, although they were a Steamworks partner, "By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve I was simply working-around bugs in the Steam client, not even wasting my time reporting the bugs because there was zero hope."

Which, okay. Frankly, I don't think Kaldaien is entirely wrong here (though I might question the props they give to storefronts like Epic and the Microsoft Store). The fact of the matter is that PC gamers have concentrated an enormous amount of power in Valve's hands, and—although it's done pretty well so far, at least by consumers—I simply don't trust any private company to use that power wisely in perpetuity. There probably will come a day when we collectively regret putting all our eggs in the Valve basket, and making Steam such a keystone of PC gaming in general.

But at least some of what Kaldaien complains about isn't necessarily on Steam's shoulders. It's well within devs' powers to provide players with access to older game versions on Steam (KOTOR 2, which I recently replayed, lets you access its pre-Aspyr version via a beta branch, for instance), but many of them elect not to. That strikes me as an issue with individual devs rather than Steam as a whole, and as for Steam Input? Well, again, if there's a problem there it's with developers electing to use that API over OS-native ones that's the issue.

Steam deserves scrutiny, no doubt, and many of the broader things Kaldaien points out aren't unreasonable. But it would seem to me that, insofar as the modder's specific complaints are concerned, the problems are perhaps a lot broader than a single storefront.

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PC Gamer recently dispatched Robert Zak to chat with the senior developers behind Deus Ex, in order to mark the 25th anniversary of a true classic. Among the many nuggets are that the initial pitch for the game starred Jake Shooter, supercop, and that the team never really thought that one of the most political games you could imagine was political at all.

The story of Deus Ex's development is also inextricable from one of the most influential figures in 90s game development: John Romero. Romero and fellow id alumnus Tom Hall had founded Ion Storm in Dallas in 1996, and publisher Eidos had basically given the studio a blank cheque. A lot of this money would go on things like penthouse suites and lavish office facilities, but Romero also had an eye for talent: and in 1997 Looking Glass Austin had just laid off much of the team who made Thief.

"We just sort of hung out [in the Looking Glass office], prototyping things and playing around," recalls designer Steve Powers. "And then had this surreal moment when John Romero drove down from Dallas in his yellow Humvee with his purple shiny pants and said, 'I want all of you guys to come with me and make whatever you want!'"

(Image credit: Ion Storm)

Warren Spector had been mulling over the chance to go to Westwood and make a Command & Conquer RPG, but Romero had the offer of a lifetime. "'Make the game of your dreams. No creative interference. You'll have the biggest budget you've ever had. You'll have the biggest marketing budget you've ever had,'" paraphrases Spector. "Who says no to that?"

Ion Storm Austin benefited from, well, not being in Dallas, which was where the utter chaos of Daikatana's development was unfolding. With the total freedom to build a dream game, the problem turned out to be managing those ambitions: what could actually be achieved, even when resources were plentiful. Imbuing every space in the game with narrative and meaning, for example, is one of those wonderful ideas that requires a hell of a lot of heavy lifting.

"Everything needs to be dipped in narrative, which means that the more space you make, the more conceptual work you're making," says Harvey Smith. "From my perspective, what Deus Ex—and honestly, half the games we've worked on—needed all through the project was to cut 20 or 30% of the game."

Development went well, and next to the maelstrom that was Daikatana Deus Ex was comparatively low-budget and low hassle: but as the finish line came into view the team, almost inevitably, realised the game needed an extra six months or so to truly deliver. This would normally have been a big ask: but Eidos almost hand-waved it through. And this, too, can be credited to John Romero and his winning habit of getting executives too bladdered to check-in on the Austin office.

"We went in ready to fight and argue and lobby for another four to six months' development time, and they were like, ‘Sure, it's probably better anyway if you are not in our hair right now,’" recalls Harvey Smith, explaining that the hard-partying culture over at the Dallas studio meant that, when the Eidos suits did visit the states, they'd rarely make it to Austin.

Harvey Smith again: "They would fly over these British guys and they would just get hammered with the Dallas team for three days straight. This happened three or four times over the years where Warren and the team were prepping for the visit from Eidos and they would send a mail on the last day like, ‘Guys, we partied a little too hard in Dallas and we're not gonna make it this summer.'"

Deus Ex got the extra four to six months after hitting 1.0, and Smith believes this is what moved Deus Ex from a good game to an all-timer: So much so that he'd go on to champion this approach at Arkane (Dishonored received the same treatment). As for John Romero, Daikatana would turn out a disaster and his career would go in another direction: ultimately Ion Storm's real legacy would prove to be Deus Ex, the game that the hungover suits considered a makeweight.

After making all those promises to Spector, Romero would go on to have no involvement with Deus Ex: and yet without Romero, and one hell of a bar tab, Deus Ex wouldn't exist. "John lived up to every promise he made that day," ends Spector.

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The humble health bar is not made to be remembered. It's there primarily for information, and yet the best games use health bars (as well as other UI elements) to add beauty, express personality, or more deeply immerse us in the world around it.

Health bars aren't as commonplace as they used to be in big-budget games—in fact, a whole generation of shooters left them behind in favor of regenerating health—but they're back on the rise in this golden age of RPGs we find ourselves in. The past few years alone have given us some of the cleanest, most unique, and downright pretty health bars I've ever seen.

We stare at these stalwart rectangles for hours, but how well can we remember them? Have we taken these artful communication tools for granted, or have their identifying qualities burrowed a permanent home in our brains?

Test your HP mettle in the quiz below, identifying games only by their health bar. Expect a mix of old and new, with a slight skew toward shooters (I have a type). Make sure to type your own guesses into the answer box. The answer will autofill if correct.

How did you do? Did I trip you up with the vague green rectangle? I'm sure I missed some great HP bars that could've made the cut (like Isaac's back in Dead Space), so sound off on your favorites in the comments.

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I recently finally fastened my suspenders, donned a tophat, and went back to Lies of P to actually commit to a proper, honest-to-Asimov playthrough. I had a great time with Round 8 Studio and Neowiz's "puppet bloodborne"—not exceptional, but great.

Lies of P did a lot of things I liked, but showed its smaller scope on occasion, which is no crime. Overall, I found it to be a really solid entry into the genre: A couple of wobbles, a couple of great ideas, and basically congruent with our 74% review score. Then I played Overture, and buddy? I have been blown away: Flying backwards, ass-over teakettle, socks and shoes flung off my feet into the next block.

I broadly agree with our reviewer Lincoln Carpenter's assessment of P's base game—spotty localisation, occasionally-wonky balance, and random difficulty spikes jostled with my appreciation of some otherwise killer boss and environment design. Overture doesn't have most of these problems.

It's hard, like a good souls DLC ought to be, testing the fundamentals built up over two years of nose-growing and running you through the grinder. But otherwise? I felt like I was seeing Round 8 hit its stride. Lies of P's base game was a studio showing it could run with the FromSoftware pack—meanwhile, Overture flies.

Ornstein & who?

(Image credit: Round 8 Studio)

First-up, the souls of it all: Overture's level design is just as solid as its base game typically is, but with the added benefit of Round 8 Studio getting to have some real fun with where it places you.

Gone are the Bloodborne-esque streets, replaced with, in no particular order: A ruined zoo full of infected kangaroos, bears, and one very angry crocodile; a gorgeous greenhouse teeming with angelic sci-fi puppets; a horrific asylum haunted by terrible experiments; and Shipwrecks amidst ice floats ripped straight from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Overture is both more creative with its set-dressing, and altogether prettier.

And then there's the bosses. It's rare for me to get through a DLC for one of these games—whether it's FromSoftware or a different studio—and think to myself 'man, I enjoyed all of that'. But Overture basically nails it.

It's nice that I can avoid deep spoilers, here, because the best example of this is the first boss you encounter: Markiona, Puppeteer of Death. Ornstein and Smough have officially been shoved into a locker, beaten up, and had their joint lunch money taken by Markiona and her puppet. Markiona is a duo fight in a soulslike game that doesn't suck. They said it couldn't be done? It can.

The trick is playing into the puppeteering theme. Markiona and her Queen's Arche Puppet are joined by a thread of string. While her puppet is dangerous and agile, it can't act unless it's been controlled by her—and when she issues commands, the thread turns from blue to red.

Image 1 of 2

(Image credit: Round 8 Studio)Image 2 of 2

(Image credit: Round 8 Studio)

It's such a simple, clever trick that means you're almost never killed by an attack you didn't see coming. You can focus on Markiona until the thread changes colour, then swap your lock-on to her puppet, drifting between your two foes in an elegant dance.

You're also able to make interesting choices—the fight ends when Markiona dies, but you can disable her puppet for a time by knocking it out. This forces Markiona to spend a couple of seconds casting a regenerative spell on her aide, which is free damage, before allowing you a blessed minute of 1v1ing.

And yet, because the puppet regenerates back to full health eventually, you're never encouraged to entirely focus on it over Markiona—this shifting set of priorities keeps the fight feeling fluid in a way that's hard to encapsulate without getting your hands on a controller yourself (which I am writing this entire article to encourage you to do).

The rest of the DLC's bosses are similarly ingenious. Even the "duel" fights with other Stalkers, which I found overwhelming in the base game, are memorable and well-executed. And it all culminates in a final boss that rivals Sekiro's Isshin, Sword Saint in both spectacle and difficulty.

Speaking of spectacle, it's where Overture differs from its inspiration that really sets it apart.

Just too late

(Image credit: Round 8 Studio)

The basic jist of Overture is that you're sent back in time before the base game's puppet frenzy really got out of control—the soulsian tragedy of it all is that you're almost always just too late.

The people you want to save have already breezed through. The first dominoes that led to Krat's collapse have already been knocked over. You're just here to see if you can shift the needle even slightly towards the side of good.

This killer elevator pitch is married with a shedding of the usual FromSoftware tendency to obscure most of its storytelling—not that it's an issue, mind, but I'm all for developers finding their own identities, and Round 8 Studio really has done so here.

While the base game's English localisation sometimes wobbled, those translation issues have been mostly tidied up here, then married with some absolutely stellar performances from Neil Newbon, Joseph Balderrama, and Blake Ritson. The stand out, by far, is Alix Wilton Regan (Lea, the Legendary Stalker) who in one fight gives such a powerful performance it'd give Shadow of the Erdtree's #1 Bayle hater, Igon, a run for his money.

Round 8 Studio has finally gone from puppet imitation to a real boy with its own identity and panache."

This renewed confidence is married with some excellent cutscenes to really hammer home emotional moments you'd otherwise need a video essay for—they're sparing, but deeply effective. Throw in Lies of P's tendency to give you a record with a tear-jerking song at the end of these story beats, which you can play in your home base, and you have the perfect accompaniment to stew in your feelings with.

All of this culminates in a final battle I shan't spoil—but I'll simply say that Lies of P feels far, far more comfortable in its own skin now it's traded Bloodborne-imitating, pondering worldbuilding for character-driven conflict and hype moments. The final boss hits such a level of spectacle, it feels like it belongs more in Clair: Obscur Expedition 33 than a traditional soulslike.

On its own, Lies of P is great, but doesn't make my personal favourites list—and yet, Overture might be one of the best souls DLCs I've ever played. Both in terms of its standalone quality, but also in how it builds upon, and improves upon, Round 8 Studio's initial work.

One thing's for sure: Round 8 Studio has finally gone from puppet imitation to a real boy with its own identity and panache. While I was excited for its next game before, I am now borderline rabid for it. If Overture is a sign of what's to come, then the next entrant into the "Lies of" series (likely a visit to The Wizard of Oz, as 2023's post-credits scene suggests) could be an all-timer. I cannot wait.

2025 games: This year's upcoming releasesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together

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The fun thing about videogame patches—and I'm using "fun" in the definitely-ironic sense here—is that sometimes they'll cause new, interesting, and entirely unanticipated problems: Fix this, break that, it's the circle of life. Such is the case with a recent update to Funcom's survival MMO Dune: Awakening, which saw several PvE areas of the Deep Desert to become PvP enabled, resulting in "people suffering an unfortunate amount of lost bases and equipment."

Funcom has been making some serious changes to Dune: Awakening's Deep Desert, the endgame zone that put a heavy focus on PvP play at launch, which, turns out, a significant number of players are not into.

This latest change was planned as a part of those efforts, Funcom said in today's announcement, but "was intended to only occur with the next Coriolis cycle"—essentially a wipe of the Deep Desert—"and not impact the ongoing cycle."

"We’re incredibly sorry that this happened and we want to acknowledge that this should have been handled better," Funcom wrote. "We’ve changed our internal processes as a result of this and will be better in the future.

"We are working to reimburse vehicles and items (to the best of our ability) to players who were impacted by this. You can expect the reimbursed materials, items, and vehicle components to show up in the in-game ‘Claim Rewards’ tab by the end of this week."

On one hand, hey, these things happen. Whomst among us has not had our videogame stuff unexpectedly erased from existence by the fickle finger of fate, right? But on the other, as someone with a tendency to rage over the most minor inconveniences, I can sympathize with complaints. You were doing a thing, and now the thing is gone, and it sucks! Funcom has been reasonably quick in acknowledging the problem and has publicly committed to making it right, though, which is about the best we can ask for at this point.

Looking beyond this latest misstep, Funcom said its "primary focus" is eliminating exploits, identified as "third party cheat engines, client hacks, or in-game exploitation of game mechanics." It promised "zero tolerance for the type of player behaviour that has an impact on the experience of other players," and said hundreds of players have already been banned for various sorts of cheats, and that more ban waves are coming.

Funcom concluded by also apologizing to players who have lost vehicles or resources because of bugs, and said it's working on improvements to how it reimburses players for vehicle losses caused by them (and, of course, on preventing them from happening in the first place).

Those losses can be "thorny to untangle," the studio said, because there is "legitimate item loss" in the game, not due to bugs but just because you were dicking around a little too much and got caught out. That's apparently resulted in a backlog of support requests developers are powering through, and so for now, Funcom says, your patience is appreciated.

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With the Galaxy S25 Ultra at the helm, Samsung's latest fleet of flagship smartphones is here, once again expanding the possibilities of what a discreet device in the palm of your hand can do. Now armed with Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipsets which are up to 40% more powerful than the previous generation, Game Boost tech, and even ray tracing capabilities to really get those lights bouncing off of in-game surfaces, the S25 Ultra is a gaming powerhouse.

And if you're a content creator, it gets better. The S25 Ultra's 6.9" Dynamic AMOLED 2X Display has a 1440 x 3120 resolution capable of outputting at 120fps, giving off a fidelity right up there with PC gaming monitors. Beyond the hardware, Galaxy AI* is also stepping up this year to offer a content-editing toolbox to help you get that glossy gaming footage from your screen to the online streaming realm. Here are the big questions about gaming content creation on the S25 series, answered.

How to edit gaming content with the Samsung Galaxy S25

(Image credit: Samsung)

Generative Editing

The Galaxy S25 series heralds the launch of Samsung's Generative Edit** toolkit, which lets you use simple gestures and features to do the kind of powerful editing that would once have taken hours in cumbersome third-party software. Say you snapped a lush vista in an open-world game like Red Dead Redemption 2, or Horizon: Forbidden West, but your perfect screenshot was blighted by an unwanted health bar or other UI element, you can now remove it with a tap or by circling the object. Want to create a bit more space in your image for custom text or YouTube banners? Generative Edit will expand the image, using AI to fill in the space with the aesthetic of whatever it is that you're playing.

If you're capturing yourself in your streams, you can use the new ProVisual Engine to clean up capture footage with features like lighting correction (no more need for studio-grade lighting) and background separation. With this vast content creation suite right at your fingertips, there's no more need to fiddle around in Photoshop.

How to capture gaming footage with the Samsung Galaxy S25

(Image credit: Samsung)

Instant Slow-mo

You know all those satisfying YouTube videos where someone shoots, say, a golf ball at supersonic speed through a mannequin, then they slow the footage down so you can see all the shockwaves and other weird phenomena invisible to the naked eye? Well, with the Galaxy S25 you can add a bit of that to your gaming footage, as it introduces Instant Slow-mo*** with the help of Galaxy AI.

You can set the S25 to automatically record your game as you play, so you never miss that ecstatic moment of victory over a boss in Elden Ring: Nightreign (nor your 25 failed prior attempts), or a hairline CoD killstreak that you know you won't be able to easily repeat. Then you simply need to open the Gallery app, long press on the video and you can add a slow-mo effect retrospectively. This will give a unique touch of flair to your content, especially in fast-paced games, letting the viewer see the details of your gamesmanship from a new perspective.

How to create captions for your content on the Samsung Galaxy S25

(Image credit: Samsung)

Writing Assist and Voice Notes

Seriously, who bothers with a notepad these days? Too slow, too... crinkly. Instead, just bring up the AI Keyboard, then use Writing Assist**** to set your style to '#social' and type in the gist of the caption or text you want for your gaming content. Galaxy AI will then automatically spice the text up with emojis, hashtags, and that punchy social style, ready for your audience. You can even enter prompts into the Composer to write your social messaging for you!

Or just record your voice while gaming and let Galaxy AI do the work using Transcript Assist*****, summarising, or turning your voice into captions. So if you're pushing for the final points in a CoD Team Deathmatch but have something you want to say about the game before it escapes you, just speak your mind while recording, and use AI to polish the idea later—whether you want to transform the text into flowing review analysis, or into audio elsewhere in your video. Finally, use Galaxy AI Audio Eraser****** to clean up the sound of your voice and remove any background noise your mic might have picked up.

There are heaps more creator-friendly features in the S25—such as audio transcription and scene recognition—which help the Galaxy S25 series cut out the PC middle-man in content creation. The whole AI feature set is also coming to the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip series, which launch later this year, so hang tight just a little bit longer if you want your pocket content creation station to come with extra screen real estate and foldable format.

Find out more about what the Samsung Galaxy S25 can do on the Samsung website—and keep your eyes peeled for the next instalment in the Galaxy Z series coming very soon!

* Samsung account login is required for certain AI features.** Samsung account login is required. Requires network connection.*** Samsung account login is required. Available on Samsung Video Player and Samsung Gallery. May not be available on certain video file types. Accuracy of results not guaranteed.**** Samsung account login is required. Requires a network connection. Must meet length requirements to activate feature. Service availability may vary by language. Accuracy of results is not guaranteed.***** Samsung account login is required. Requires network connection.****** Samsung account login required. Six types of sound can be detected; voices, music, wind, nature, crowd and noise. Results may vary depending on audio source & condition of the video.

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Ready or Not, the gritty, realistic SWAT experience, is currently sat at Mostly Negative on Steam, as players gathered to protest changes made to adhere to stricter console standards over the last couple of weeks. But despite all the angry reviews and comments, it doesn't look like Ready or Not has suffered any lasting damage.

Ready or Not's player count on Steam has seen a steady incline since June 26, rising from just under 6,000 concurrent players to a height of 17,269 a few days ago. The rise coincides with Ready or Not's Steam Summer Sale, which saw the game have a 50% discount—it now sits at just $24.99/£22.49, a two-year low.

So, its success can't entirely be summed up as 'all publicity is good publicity', but the swirl of negative comments and review bombing clearly didn't change much. Developers Void Interactive even tried to quell upsets further by releasing another statement reassuring players that very little was changed, but that only seemed to make things worse at the time.

As I said before, when all the drama was first kicking off, I can't imagine a world where Void Interactive would prioritise getting Steam reviews back on track above securing two new markets for Ready or Not to be sold on—review bombing a game won't achieve anything if there's no follow through.

The gamble has seemingly paid off so far. Ready or Not: Digital Deluxe Edition is currently sitting at the top spot of PlayStation's pre-order list, with the base game taking third place, behind Destiny 2: Year of Prophecy Ultimate Edition.

But the real test will be how these Steam numbers fare after the aforementioned changes are implemented on July 15. Players could be just making the most of what they think Ready or Not should be like.

There's also a decent chance that most players will just carry on as usual, or simply use a mod to turn time back. "You can just mod it out if you want everything back in the game, there'll be a mod probably by launch day," one player says. Although this was met with some backlash, as other players pile on to say that it shouldn't be up to players to keep Ready or Not working as was originally promised.

But these changes are hardly mass censorship—they're so minimal that I believe it when Void Interactive says most players wouldn't have even noticed if nothing had been said. I have a feeling that it'll be business as usual for Ready or Not, and it'll carry on unscathed.

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One of the most powerful tools in any writer's box is the complete mastery they have over time. While real life trudges along in a doldrum routine of cause and effect, stories can arrange their happenings however they'd like. Storytellers have spent centuries finding and developing effective structures. Naughty Dog, however, has better plans. Plans that I am about to be entirely too crotchety about. Nevertheless:

Ask yourself—who needs the potent hand of authorial intent? Why would you generate mystery? What's the point of meticulously challenging a desire for vengeance after spending hours stewing in it? That kind of thing might lead to people having to think about a story's themes and messages and analyse it, or critique it, or something. Ugh, gross.

Introducing the cure to what ails ye: The Last of Us Part 2 "Chronological Experience", a truly baffling alternate mode recently released for the remastered version of the game on both PC and PS5.

"Those who have already played will know its story is told non-linearly," a blog explains, "As Ellie and Abby’s motivations, realizations, and emotional stakes unfold across myriad flashbacks and present-day storylines."

But what, instead of all of that, you simply didn't? Naughty Dog is brave enough to ask that question: "While this structure is very intentional and core to how our studio wanted Part II’s themes and narrative beats to impact players, we always wondered what it would be like to experience this story chronologically. And now finally, we can answer that question."

The blog then posits that players will be given a "deeper insight into Part 2's narrative", before reaching so hard you can hear the joints pop: "Players will be able to see how Ellie being gifted a guitar flows so neatly into her learning to play." This is great for me, someone who cannot parse the concept of someone having a hobby when I'm not looking at them.

In fairness, it does make the somewhat-salient point that seeing Ellie and Abby nearly bump into each other might be interesting: "You’ll see just how close they come into running into each other, how their actions impact each other, and more."

Except, uh. Naughty Dog. Buddy. Pal. That already happens in the base game, provided you have a functioning long-term memory. You just need to recognise a familiar area, then access your mind palace to remember that, oh, hey, I was here a few hours ago playing as a different character. It isn't hard!

Look—I'm sure that this is a kinda-neat restructuring of the game's narrative, a fun little alternate universe jaunt. If you play it and enjoy it for a second playthrough, I wouldn't blame you at all, and the blog does, to its credit, say you should go through the game normally first. But I can't imagine it's a valuable exercise, other than an idle thought experiment. A shower thought that somehow made it into a production line.

Even if you're dim on Part 2's story, there's a lot else that gets thrown in the grinder—pacing, for one, which in videogames applies to more than just narrative. I'm confident calling the shot here and now that this chronological mode doesn't just make the story worse, it'll make the game worse, too.

I just… I don't get it, man. Maybe I'm being overly cynical because of the slow, steady slide of previously complex series dropping anything that'd otherwise challenge their players, or the seemingly pervasive, AI-driven hunger to punt writers out of their rooms. But I will dig my heels in and argue that Naughty Dog is being pretty condescending here.

Did you know that interviewees in a 2024 article published in the International Journal of Communication alleged that Netflix instructed showrunners and screenwriters "to both show and tell" and "say much more than you would normally say" so that people watching a second screen wouldn't get lost?

This whole mode smacks of the same corporate cynicism, and while you can enjoy your videogames any way you want, it personally makes me feel babied. We can probably, just maybe, take stories seriously enough not to chop them up and repackage them just to get a few more play hours in the bank.

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It's safe to assume that Marvel Rivals makes bank from its microtransactions. Its hero costumes put other games to shame, with incredible designs and even unique effects to go along with them, most of the time. Season 2 added a handful of colour palettes for select skins, while Season 3 brings charms and custom ultimate ability visuals. These new features are exactly what I want. I love getting to customise my characters in as many ways as possible. What I don't love is just how unrewarding it can all feel.

Ever since its launch, Rivals has had a big problem with rewarding players for their time and effort. Outside of in-game events, which generally do give you a great free skin, the only items you actually earn are the Marvel Rivals ranked skins, Lord icons, and the new accessories. These are boring. The skins are bland, default-costume recolours that I don't see anyone using over their default costume, let alone any premium outfits. Frankly, it's not much of a reward at all.

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Emma Frost's Season 3 ranked reward skin isn't as glamorous as you'd expect for the White Queen. (Image credit: NetEase)Image 2 of 2

Psylocke's new Orochi Plush accessory, which she clips on the back of her belt for a little added flair. (Image credit: NetEase)

The new accessories system is a very welcome addition, but it falls into a similar trap. You can equip an accessory on the back of the specific character they're for—not on your weapon like most other games—and they'll also give you a unique animation next to your KO prompt during a match. The best news is that you can earn accessories for free by playing matches, not by pulling out your wallet. I'm not going to say that's not a good thing, but I'm a bit let down by the fact that all you need to do is grind Accessory Points each week. It's a reward, sure, but it's not very fulfilling.

This plays into a much larger gripe I have with Marvel Rivals. Coming from someone who's played it almost every day since launch, it's frustrating to see NetEase focusing so intensely on churning out new content, prioritising heaps of pricey fits, squeezing in movie collabs, and, of course, now a new hero every month.

Lord profile icons are cool and all, but a top-tier skin, earnable for truly mastering each character, would go a long way in making levelling up heroes more satisfying.

This constant stream of new toys is fun, but it also feels like a distraction, a roadblock to a more curated and perfected experience. If I had to choose between a new hero each month or a new hero every three months, I'd pick the latter in the hope of giving more time for tighter balancing and improving the game's core systems, like progression.

Long have I dreamed about Marvel Rivals expanding the hero proficiency system to include costumes for completing specific challenges. Think of the Cute and Pixels sprays you can unlock in Overwatch, which have unique tasks for each hero. Love it or hate it, Call of Duty also excels at this, from great Prestige rewards to the Mastery Camo chase. Lord profile icons are cool and all, but a top-tier skin, earnable for truly mastering each character, would go a long way in making levelling up heroes more satisfying.

(Image credit: NetEase)

With the addition of charms and custom effects for ultimates, NetEase has the perfect, bite-sized (but cool) rewards to turn things around if it's still hesitant to give us some fully-fledged skins to earn.

I'd love to be able to earn a one-of-a-kind charm or even a new ultimate animation for scoring a triple roundhouse kill as Emma Frost, using Phoenix's abilities to blow up an entire team with chain reactions, and so on. Plus, it would also be a much better way to show off your skills with a certain hero than a Lord icon, which, let's face it, just means you've played a lot—which, coincidentally, is also how the new accessories work.

After nearly eight months of hoping for a more rewarding experience across the board, maybe I'm fighting a losing war and just scrambling for alternatives to splashing the cash every time something shiny catches my eye—oh look, a cool new Moon Knight skin *grabs wallet*.

Marvel Rivals characters: The super-charged rosterMarvel Rivals tier list: Strongest superheroesBest Marvel Rivals crosshairs: The right reticlesMarvel Rivals codes: Grab new freebiesMarvel Rivals ranks: Dominate the competition

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