The start of the tween years, nine years old, is a sweet spot between curiosity and growing independence, making it a fun, though sometimes tricky, age to buy for.
Kids at this age are up for a challenge, whether that means trying a trickier craft set, playing a more complex game or stepping up their sporting interests. Pitch a gift right and you’ll not only get the whoop of joy when they first receive it, but something that will hold their interest and help them develop their skills, interests and hobbies over time.
Redundancies beckon as British Cycling restructures while former cyclists and employees raise concerns over return of ‘toxic culture’
British Cycling’s most successful world track championships campaign in over a decade, in which they topped the medal table in the first qualifying event for the 2028 Olympic Games, was achieved against a backdrop of allegations of misconduct and looming redundancies.
Despite a traumatic buildup to the championships in Shanghai, with star sprinter Matt Richardson withdrawn from competition on the eve of the event due to allegations of “discriminatory remarks”, the British squad recovered to win six gold medals, three silver and three bronze.
His 1970s banger is climbing up the streaming charts, with some young listeners tracking it down on vinyl. How did he become the voice of youth, again, aged 86?
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is not a podracing game. But it is a game about podracing… and a lot more. Perhaps more than the developers actually intended. If you’ll indulge me a little, I’ll unpack this.
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Yeah, it’s a pretty good game
First, Galactic Racer is a pretty darn good arcade racing game. It’s an easy recommendation if you’ve ever enjoyed a game like F-Zero or Wipeout, or of course the original Episode 1 Racer from way back in the 90s. It’s got a decent roguelike singleplayer mode, competitive multiplayer, lots of customization options, some very pretty graphics, and most essentially, an incredible feeling of speed.
I especially like the little sci-fi touches that make this game more than just a set of cars and tracks. Before each race you can do a little quick-time button-tapping event to warm up your hovercar’s parts. It feels very intentionally like the pre-launch checks of a spaceship, or indeed, a futuristic racer. Your dangerous “ramjet” speed boost can overheat and explode, but on an ice planet it can go much longer. Very cool.
But what’s engaged me most is the story mode. And that’s surprising, because the story itself isn’t very good. Not that I’m disappointed — you don’t buy racing games to get enthralled by a narrative. On the surface it’s an extremely simple little tale. You’re a pilot who’s just out of prison on a trumped-up charge, some investors rope you into a racing league of questionable legitimacy, and there’s a rich guy asshole who’s doing rich guy asshole things. Your motivation is to knock him off his high speeder bike.
Star Wars fans are eating well
There’s a lot of fodder for the Star Wars fans. The story takes place at a very particular point in the sprawling Star Wars timeline, just after Return of the Jedi, when the Empire is freshly fallen and there’s a big power vacuum with a lot of jockeying to fill it. Apparently at some point after The Phantom Menace — the movie that put the pulse-pounding sci-fi update to Ben Hur’s chariot race in the cultural zeitgeist — the Empire outlawed the sport of podracing. So at the start of Galactic Racer, you very pointedly do not engage in podracing. Instead you get car-style landspeeders, bike-style speeder bikes, and “skim speeders.” This third and entirely new category is tougher and slower than a bike, but faster and more maneuverable than a car. It’s like a podracer, only…not.
This is my skim speeder. It is not, I repeat, NOT a podracer.
Michael Crider/Foundry
The thing is, basically every character in this game is either one of your fellow racers, or someone intimately involved in the sport. Your mechanic, your manager, your various financial backers. Everyone loves racing. This gives the dialogue and interactions some flavor that might otherwise be missing.
While I started the game mostly skipping the interactions in between each leg of the race, I eventually got to know my fellow racers. Like memetic mama’s boy alligator guy Biddy Blas, or rookie prodigy Goli, whose species is mute, so their friendly droid O2-RO speaks for them. My favorite is Fola Kanjen, a racer from a farming planet who wants nothing more than speed and excitement. Yes, those are some extremely Star Wars names.
So you’ve got a cast full of characters who love racing…but no podracing to be seen. Podracers are so fast and maneuverable that the danger in piloting one makes it almost impossible to hold a real, organized race. But it’s immediately apparent that there’s a legacy of podracing in the Star Wars universe, to more or less the same degree that there is in the real world. Everyone remembers podracing, and even those characters who are too young know of it and speak of it in reverent tones, recalling specific races and racers from approximately 30 years ago. And hey, would you look at that, Episode 1 and its accompanying video games are almost 30 years old here in the real world, too.
“I wanted racing back, the way it was, the way it should be!” says the game’s opening narration. “The audience has been dying to see a real podracer in the league. That is to say, they’re dying to see me,” says Kestar Bool, the rich jerkoff who’s executed a hostile takeover of the league.
Talking to these characters about the “glory days of podracing” feels a lot like listening to real motorsports fans. When a car nut talks about the Nissan Skyline GT-R R32 and gives it a nickname like “Godzilla,” or recalls with fondness the rapid advancements of a particular decade of rally racing, it gives off the same vibes. I don’t know enough about real racing to speak with authority here. But as an outsider, it sure seems like the developers were aiming for a very specific vibe, and hit it right on target.
“The glory days” of the prequels
I can’t help but analyze this through a broader media lens, too. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you probably know that it’s been very up-and-down since Disney acquired the franchise. The movie Episodes 7-9 had a reaction that was mixed at best, with a definite downturn on the final, 40-year cap to the “Skywalker saga.” The other tie-ins have ranged from surprisingly good (Rogue One and Andor) to fine, I guess (The Mandalorian, Solo, Ahsoka) to downright awful (The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, and the latest movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu).
This action figure of Jabba’s jacked son can be yours for just $295.
Hot Toys
At the same time, people who were kids or teenagers when the much-maligned prequel series — of which the Episode 1 podrace was an unambiguous highlight — are fueling a new wave of nostalgia for those three movies. Which feels strange to me, since the prequels and George Lucas’s storytelling became a punchline after Revenge of the Sith.
But hey, I’m a Star Trek fan, so I have no room to judge anyone for liking questionable sci-fi entries. “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil” is at about the same level as “What does God need with a starship?” in terms of retrospective cringe.
Disney
So is it any wonder that Galactic Racer seems inordinately fond of podracing? And perhaps more importantly, of the Episode 1 Racer game that came out on the N64 and other platforms twenty-seven years ago? That game bucked the trend of the 90s and early 2000s, when any movie tie-in game was likely to be shovelware at best. But I think it’s fair to say that the original podracing game is held in high esteem, with over 3 million copies sold, more than any singular F-Zero or Wipeout game by a wide margin.
It’s likely that few if any of Galactic Racer‘s dev team had a hand in the original. But assuming the team has people in their 20s through 50s, I’d bet that the majority of them played it at some point. Here I’ll point out that Zero Company, another well-regarded Star Wars game that released just a few months ago, uses the prequels’ Clone Wars setting for tactical strategy.
Now this is podracing
It’s no surprise (and no spoiler, since it’s in the trailer) that eventually you get your hands on a podracer in Galactic Racer, shortly after an older and more wrinkled Sebulba shows up. The bad guy of the original podracing sequence becomes the Mickey to your Rocky, helping you recover from the back foot and take on the villain in a junker that your team slowly brings back to life.
Fuse Games
You’ll get to relive those glory days with sequences that are essentially short, remastered versions of the Tatooine track from the movie and Episode 1 Racer. Plus you can take your cobbled-together podracer out on the new tracks and carry over your roguelike part builds to the much, much faster format. A handful of Phantom Menace racers return, a gallery of Glup Shittos that the biggest prequel fans will immediately recognize. The difference in these racing machines is immediately evident, and it’s such a sharp distinction that the game never mixes podracers with the other three categories of hovercraft. The capstone of every roguelike run is a white-knuckle one-on-one podrace, to dethrone the billionaire jerkoff who’s making his crippling insecurity everyone else’s problem.
Fuse Games
The story in Galactic Racer isn’t much to write about, some colorful characters notwithstanding. Seeing Sebulba, a barely-notable antagonist, suddenly become a surly and lovable old coot a la Doc Hudson, is something I wasn’t expecting to enjoy so much. But it’s the metatextual story that really engrossed me. It’s a narrative about people in love with a sport, and making it personal and meaningful in spite of the money and power poisoning it from the top down.
Surely anyone who loves a sport, from racing to soccer to little league, can relate. Ditto for fans of Star Wars, or any property that’s been passed around the oligarch poker table.
Underneath the hood
This is a game very much in conversation with its predecessors, and even with Star Wars in general. I don’t know if the writers for Galactic Racer intended to tell a tale about a massive media franchise that looks better in the rearview mirror. And they certainly weren’t aiming for anything broader that one could mention in the same context — say, a gaming hardware space that’s being devoured by billionaire jerkoffs determined to turn “AI” into an infinite money glitch, at the expense of the environment and the economy. Or a game publishing industry that seems to viscerally hate everyone who actually makes games, and systematically deny them any kind of security or dignity. Certainly not.
(Galactic Racer is developed by Fuse Games, an apparently new British team under the Sumo Group, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent for the last four years. Tencent, for a variety of reasons, sucksbanthapoodoo.)
Fuse Games
Galactic Racer is great fun. It’s not without its faults — the tracks can be a little bland and lacking in clear direction, especially compared to the old, cartoony sci-fi tracks in Episode 1 Racer. The lack of a split-screen mode (even on the PlayStation and Xbox) might sting a lot for those trying to recapture the feeling of the N64 original. But since Nintendo and Sony haven’t seen fit to give us new F-Zero or Wipeout games in multiple decades, I’d say it’s about as good as it gets in this small but interesting niche.
And if you get something more out of Galactic Racer’s story than what’s actually written on the pages of the script, that’s just a nice bonus.
Epic said it slop-coded the latest version of the Game Store to be faster. Then Valve made Steam faster with actual programmers. Tim Sweeney continues to get dunked on by pretty much the entire industry.
Speaking of AAA nonsense, check out this “Triple-A Minesweeper,” a free game you can play in your browser. Be sure to turn RTX on.
If you use both Xbox Game Pass and a Steam Deck, you need to check out this open-source tool bringing the former to the latter.
Game Pick of the week: Burnout Paradise
Electronic Arts
If you’re in the mood for some arcade racing but $60 for a new Star Wars game is a bit rich, then check out this certified classic. Racing fans know Criterion makes some of the best entries out there, and Burnout Paradise is generally considered the pinnacle of its long-running series. A lot of its DNA — particularly the elimination races that knock out the slowest car — can be seen in Galactic Racer.
Nearly 20 years later, Burnout Paradise is a bit of a 2000s relic, with an open-world setup that was all the rage at the time and seems a bit unnecessary now (unless you like Forza‘s map system, I guess). But it nails the sense of speed and splashy feel, where smashing your rivals into heaps of scrap is half the fun. This is essentially a Hot Wheels set in video game form.
Burnout Paradise Remastered is $20 on Steam, but can be found much cheaper elsewhere. It’s also on Xbox Game Pass.
That’s all for this week. To get my editorials, news picks, and game recommendations delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for Boost Mode on the PCWorld Newsletter hub. Also check out The Full Nerd for more enthusiast-focused goodies, Prompt Mode for AI tips, Safe Mode to keep your PC and gadgets secure, and Smart Mode to boost your productivity.
In a post on his blog, military historian Bret Devereaux discusses Hearts of Iron IV, Parodox's choices regarding Axis brutality and genocide, and how they wind up whitewashing the reality of such. (cw: images of mass murder, war crimes, atrocities)
Devereaux points out that Paradox is caught in an impossible choice, in that they do not want their game to become an Axis war crimes simulator (because they know people would openly play it for that very reason), along with being able to sell the game in various markets. However, he makes the case that their decision to avert their eyes from the issue winds up empowering things like the 'clean Wehrmacht' myth by ignoring the reality that atrocity was part of Axis war planning, and that there are options open to Paradox to better handle the issue.
He also has frustratingly noted that one of the games that has handled this dialogue best is...Valkyria Chronicles, the alt-WWII with magical girls strategic RPG, and what that says about the issue.
Eight is such a wonderful age. Kids are old enough to have their own interests and hobbies, but still young enough to get swept up in play and be absorbed for hours if you find the right toy for them.
By eight, children’s interests and skills are taking shape. They’re more confident readers, more strategic thinkers and curious about how things work. And while they think they’re extremely grown up, eight-year-olds still need plenty of time to play for their overall wellbeing.
Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.
Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that's partly because it was a completely different beast.
From Divine, Frank Fiegel and Helen Kane to the West Sussex estate pioneering rewilding, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 Which classic of political theory was dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici?
2 What is the only jazz act to win the Mercury Music prize?
3 Spanish is an official language of which African country?
4 What 2026 release is said to be the most expensive entertainment product ever created?
5 Which West Sussex estate is a pioneer of rewilding?
6 Which gas is named from the Greek for “lazy”?
7 US doctor Sara Cohen writes bestsellers under what pseudonym?
8 Which coffee chain was founded in London in 1971?
What links:
9 c 6000BC; 79; 512; 1631; 1906; 1944?
10 Divine (witch); Frank Fiegel (sailor); Helen Kane (flapper); The Beatles (vultures)?
11 Mark Brown; Mo Johnston; Kenny Miller; Steven Pressley?
12 Bag; dismiss; plunder; sherry for Falstaff?
13 Caring; Elvis; Famous Five; Revenge; Travolta?
14 Grease; A Chorus Line; Cats; The Phantom of the Opera (currently)?
15 Martin Gilbert; Roy Jenkins; William Manchester; Andrew Roberts?
A social media star comes a cropper in timely horror, and the Spice Girls ledge takes her disco- and indie-tinged bops out on a short tour
The Influencer Project Out now
When your career involves constantly posting footage of everything you do to social media, it makes things a cakewalk for stalkers. And lo, the influencer-in-peril horror subgenre was born. British social media star Chiara King plays herself in this chilling iteration, set in Copenhagen.
A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released.
The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that game launched on September 6, 2025, but is scheduled to become unplayable on December 31 due to server shutdowns. The bill, which is called the Power to Players Act, directs the FTC to take action to prevent outcomes like that in the future.
PC; Origame Digital This odd but absorbing adventure sends you waddling across Antarctica in search of an eldritch entity – uncovering a world far stranger than it first appears
A Nazi kneels down on frozen snow, staring at an endless Antarctic horizon. Another holds a gun to his head, ready to end his own life. I direct a small waddling penguin up to them, trying to imagine what it could be thinking. Dismay, perhaps. Likely bewilderment. But then a faint smile seems to break out across its beaky face, as if amused by these silly humans and their misguided belief that they could ever best this howling, harsh landscape.
For most games, the idea of playing as a penguin observing Nazis losing the plot near the south pole would be weird enough. But Penguin Colony, developed by Origame Digital, pushes further. This is an audacious, frequently brilliant retelling of HP Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, in which eldritch horrors are just as common as Nazis. Further weirdness abounds: the many collectibles scattered about this place are not shiny gold objects à la Super Mario or Sonic. Rather, they are words. So tottering about as a semiaquatic bird, you have a unique mission: collect human language.
There are brief, simple pleasures in the inevitable new big screen take on the classic game but like the recent Mortal Kombat movies, it’s a largely incoherent mess
We just had Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s giddy, nasty, devilishly fun spin on Capcom’s popular zombie franchise. It gave us renewed hope (after Sonic the Hedgehog, The Last of Us and Fallout) that video game adaptations could be good, actually.
But now here comes Street Fighter, a garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it, crushing those hopes in its atomic suplex.
Live action role play, or Larping, allows me to straddle two worlds with fellow weirdos – and enter a realm where death can be reversed and I’m a cashed-up bureaucrat
Every Friday night on a community sports field in Melbourne’s inner north, a few hundred nerds dress up in historical armour and attack each other with foam latex swords. It’s live action role play: turbocharged Dungeons & Dragons meets medieval re-enactment.
I’ve been Larping for seven years. It’s the biggest thing in my life outside of comedy, and the two scenes have a lot in common. Everyone’s broke. Everyone was bullied in high school. No one gets into Larp or standup if things are going well.
The studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series
Where do you go after Mario? It’s a question the team at Ubisoft Paris found itself pondering three years ago after wrapping up work on the charming turn-based tactics adventure, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, sequel to its unexpected crossover hit, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. By melding a rather specialist genre with video gaming’s biggest household name, the developer introduced chin-stroking strategic play to a whole new audience. “Having the opportunity to work with the Mario franchise was a privilege, and it’s still something I’m very proud of,” says level designer director, Julien Vial. “I still remember seeing the first prototype and being blown away by all the possibilities.”
Now, Ubisoft Paris has returned with a new project, but this time the studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series Rainbow Six. Where Mario and Rabbids saw squishy creatures bounce harmlessly across levels as Mario encased foes in honey, Rainbow Six Tactics, a turn-based tactical spin-off from Rainbow Six Siege, sees balaclava-clad insurgents take shrapnel rounds to the chest. A seamless tonal shift, then.
"...to figure out how a free puzzle game makes over $100 million in ads. That's more than Candy Crush. It turns out how well you do in the game has less to do with your skill and more to do with how much you're worth to them in ads."
Epic has launched a preview of a new AI-generated Games Launcher that it says cold-starts 46% faster than Steam. Neowin reports: Epic commissioned a third-party company to benchmark this new launcher in its current Preview build versus the Steam client on Windows machines. The results reported that Epic's client is 46% faster than Valve's client during cold starts, clocking in at 5.47 seconds compared to Steam taking 10.07 seconds. When you restore both apps from system tray background states, the new client takes 0.36 seconds while Steam takes 0.42 seconds, according to the report. Speed aside, Epic says the new launcher gets a better interface, dedicated title summary pages, and custom top bars. "The updated client also lets players aggregate external PC game libraries, toggle between grid or list views, and monitor storage write rates alongside download queues," reports Neowin.
Epic Games says Fortnite will finally come to Linux through this new client once Easy Anti-Cheat is rebuilt and kernel-level security agreements are established with major Linux distros.
After years of sprawling ‘forever’ games, players are rediscovering the pleasures of more focused experiences. Could a new wave of independent arcades bring back the social side of gaming?
There’s an important semi-nostalgic movement happening in games, and I’m excited about where it’s heading. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.
Over the last five years, major publishers, obsessed with the success of “forever games” such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, have been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into their own sprawling, endlessly updating, battle-pass-infested mega franchises – each designed to take all our time and money. The result has been astounding failures such as Concord, Mindseye and Tales of the Shire. Even the good games – Crimson Desert, Path of Exile 2, Blood of the Dawnwalker – are so bloated they have become the unyielding masters of our precious few hours of free time.
The kingdom of Hyrule has been prettified, the soundtrack is newly orchestrated and our hero feels strikingly different under the thumbs … we play a hands-on demo of Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of a 1998 game-changer
When beloved art is revisited and revised, a familiar cry is often heard: “You’re ruining my childhood!” But with Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, there are also livelihoods at risk: specifically, the man running the shooting gallery in Castle Town. In the original 1998 version of the game, he’d rip off players as they funnelled rupees and fudged the then still novel analogue-stick aiming. But in 2026 we have more responsive frame rates and a motion-controlled slingshot that allows precision adjustments. His targets tumble on the first go, and with them his entire business model. Even in Hyrule, the death of the high street seems inevitable.
Bad news for him but great news for Link, a child of the forest who, as in 1998, steps into a vast fantasy kingdom to vanquish a great evil, but now does so with a number of improvements. The boy can now sprint, preventing the ignominy of endless roly-polies to zip across grassy plains. He has a manual jump, free-rotating camera, a scrolling inventory bar that replaces menu screen faff and, crucially, a fatter wallet for holding all those gems he fleeces from struggling shooting gallery owners. Yes, we are being asked to applaud features that have been the norm for decades elsewhere, but it’s undeniably striking to enter familiar territory with a hero who feels this different under the thumbs.
According to SteamDB, a staggering 21,252 games were released on Steam in 2025—roughly 58 new games every single day, and a 15 percent increase over 2024. With that kind of competition, how can smaller indie games possibly get noticed? You probably heard about Balatro and Dragon’s Dogma 2, but what about a mashup of old-school Zelda and a shoot-em-up?
It’s becoming impossible to parse all but the biggest triple-A releases (many of which aren’t exactly stellar) and the most virulent of social media hits. How do you search and find new games in a landscape where you simply can’t hope to see everything? That’s the problem that We Love Every Game (or We HEART Every Game as its logo goes) aims to solve.
A product of a teeny-tiny Boston startup called Totally Human Media, I fell in love with the tool during a recent Steam sale and wrote it up here on PCWorld. The company reached out to me to ask if I wanted to go deeper, and I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. I wanted to find out the root problems of current game discoverability on the PC and other platforms, and what we as gamers can do about it, how developers can get their games out, and all that jazz.
Totally Human Media CEO Ichiro Lambe and head of marketing Matt Martindale joined me over a video call to chat.
Editor’s note (October 2026): We Love Every Game continues to expand its Steam discovery tools, with features including daily game spotlights, a game explorer, a news feed, and newsletters highlighting overlooked releases. The following interview was originally conducted in June 2025.
Ichiro Lambe
Michael Crider, PCWorld: Ichiro, on the website for Totally Human Media, it says that you have a background in game development. Can you tell me about that?
Ichiro Lambe: So I’ve been in the industry for about thirty years. I founded a couple of companies, one became Sony Online [Entertainment] Denver, the next was an indie studio called Dejobaan Games. We created award-winning stuff with a Guinness World Record for breaking Steam…and over the years I’ve consulted for a number of companies, and helped launch umpteen games. And in 2018 Valve approached me to help them with games discovery.
So I co-founded something called Steam Labs over at Valve. I was an external consultant, random moonlighting dude, and for a few years we just sort of did a bunch of stuff around games discovery. And early last year I closed down my indie studio, because it’s fashionable, right? And I founded Totally Human Media and We Love Every Game to solve the discovery problem.
PCWorld: And was it specifically your experience with that indie studio and over many years that told you, “This is a problem that we need to address?”
Lambe: Oh, absolutely. So I’ve been doing discovery-related stuff for about ten years. I had a Twitter bot back in the day called Microtrailers where every time a Steam game launched, it would cut a six-second micro-trailer and put that on Twitter. May Twitter rest in peace!
I knew the Valve/Steam team over the years and that’s part of why they brought me on to help them. But bluntly, the only reason why I had to close my indie studio was because the games launched there were generally, you know, thumbs up, but they sank without a trace.
PCWorld: So for We Love Every Game, what is your standard for what constitutes a good game, one that the tool can recommend, if you’re prepared to share that? From what I can tell it seems to require at least an 80 percent or higher positive review on Steam. Can you share any other parameters, green flags or red flags that developers should be aiming for?
Lambe: We’re trying a really simple heuristic right now, which is 80 percent are positive player reviews or higher, and I think it’s 30 reviews or more. And for something like the Steam Summer Sale, obviously a game has to be greater than $0 or it’s not really on sale. However, I think our greater mission is to make sure that every gamer finds their next favorite game, and also that every game is able to find an audience of people who would want it.
So there are lots of games out there that don’t fit a concrete criterion, but it has many people who love it. I don’t like it when recommendation engines try to be personalized, because algorithms get it wrong, but we don’t necessarily want a review score to stand in the way of [a game] finding you.
Matt Martindale: I think in the future we’ll be trying to find ways that people can say, you know, I like certain genres. I’m an RTS kid myself. But there are things within that genre, what is that thing that they enjoy about it, and how do we then link games together? For example, my classic line [to demonstrate this] is, like, Pokemon and Elden Ring are very similar. They have difficulty gates, you’ve got to train up and beat that.
So how do you serve that as a need? Unless there’s someone who’s written an article or a video on YouTube saying, “Is it that thing from that game,” there’s no way. And there’s so many misconnections for gamers, I find. Like, how many Fortnite players have the perfect game that they’ve just not migrated across to? So that’s the foundation, how to help people find those little connections and move across.
For example, I’m fairly certain that base building, which is what I enjoy in real-time strategies, is why I enjoy Factorioand Satisfactory. Platforms don’t really have the space or the time to be building that kind of interconnection.
We Love Every Game
PCWorld: Your “About” page on We Heart Every Game says you want to figure out a way to cover “every single bloody video game on the web” in videos, newsletters, and so forth. Tell me what that looks like for you.
Lambe: The way that people find and buy games typically follows the sales funnel model, where you have to first become aware of a game. I see it somewhere. Then they are in the interest phase where they learn about a game. It’s like your favorite journalist writes about it, “Ah, yes, I trust Michael.” And then you get to the bottom of the sales funnel, can I buy it, is it the right price?
I think the bottom of the funnel is solved. Steam, Nintendo eShop, you know, you can buy a game, you can play it, that’s no problem, perfect. The middle of the funnel, is hurting, but there’s a lot of good content. Once you know about a game, you can learn about it…what I think is missing for most games is that initial awareness. So if we can say, “Hey, here are games that, based on your Steam library or these categories [you selected], and you signed up for a newsletter, we can tell you sort of very lightly what might be interesting to you. Why might it be interesting. And here’s how you can find out about it more in a more substantial fashion.
PCWorld: I’m gonna be honest, the task that you’ve set for yourself seems overwhelming, dare I say impossible. How do you scale that up to, say, 20 or 30,000 new games to hit Steam in a year?
Lambe: So automation has gotten better over the years, and it’s gotten worse. So we have like generative AI can spit out a bunch of shit about everything. But I think that we can also use these tools to sort of summarize what’s interesting or relevant to you about a game. If we go to ChatGPT and we’re just like, look, encapsulate this game in a few sentences and then I’ll link to the Steam store page, or we’ll try to find articles and in-depth streams, so forth and so on, we can automate that at scale and use that existing information about the games, what’s largely out there already.
PCWorld: So you would trust generative AI to summarize human-generated content about games, and then present that to people as a way of informing them?
Lambe: I don’t trust it at all! I think it does a highly variable job of accuracy. Do I want glue on my pizza? No. However, I do think it’s currently good enough so that it can sort of tease you, and say, “Look, this game might be good for you. Here are a few reasons why.”
Martindale: We’re at the top of that [sales] funnel, we’re using it as a way to help people find little snippets of that game…we’re building sort of framework templates for the content that goes out there, so that there’s a structure in what we produce using it. If it makes a mistake, it’s more likely something we’ve done wrong with the template, not something in [the content]. These are smaller bite-sized bits of content, we’re not trying to eat an entire Wikipedia article and spit that out…So it’s always quite focused, and not like trying to matter too many things into a very small box that that when AI is going to trip over and, yeah, start inventing its own realities.
Lambe: What we have upcoming is, we try to convey what’s relevant to you about a game in multiple ways. So for instance, if you were looking at it [like],I play Deep Rock Galactic. How are these games like Deep Rock Galactic? And it might be able to pick out, like, it’s for four player, Co Op, PvE, right?
PCWorld: So if you’re building a tool from the ground up, based on all these goals, would you say that you are hoping to expose all of the buttons and all the levers that you can to a user to say, “This is why we’re making these recommendations. Please tweak these to your to your liking to make it better”?
Lambe: It’s sort of scary to give people all of the controls, because I think we can overwhelm them. But wouldn’t it be really neat if you you’re a casual user, and you can just say, “Algorithm, I’m going to surf with whatever you recommend.” Or maybe you’re a little bit more of a mid-core gamer, and you go in and you pull out genres and pull in genres. Or maybe you’re an incredible prosumer, and you can go in and say, “Look, I explicitly want only games that are hidden object, and cats,” tag, and and do that.
We Love Every Game
PCWorld: Do you think you can build that for all of those disparate users?
Lambe: The tech behind that part is pretty straightforward. Like you can go to SteamDB right now, and you can just say, it must have a hidden object tag and a cat tag. I think the tricky thing will be to figure out how to co-construct this with gamers, so as not to overwhelm them. We will tell you in a few months whether that works or not.
PCWorld: User interface is not easy.
Martindale: On user interface, like, TikTok. Have they got the best option for this? Or do we need something where it’s a bit more speedy and quicker to get through things? We’re still probably an early stage to share anything, but we are working on a single view where you would go as if you were to scroll, say, a Reddit or Twitter feed, and you can just work your way through in one view.
PCWorld: On the Totally Human page, you said you want to do something similar for all entertainment media. Yes. Do you think that’s possible?
Lambe: I think we’re doing it…on a Friday night when I’m sort of relaxing with my wife and we put the kids into their beds. Kind of want to be let’s just watch something and to enjoy it like right? And so I have a need for we have the need for just being able to scroll through a bunch of stuff and say, “ah, that let’s try it” without having to go through the Netflix interface and to play the first 15 minutes of an episode.
The way we’re approaching it, is to give users that top of funnel stuff where it’s just like you walk into a farmer’s market, and you see all these wonderful things, and you can just taste them really, really quickly. And we give you that sort of literally, you know, this one-second hint of what Veronica Mars is all about. And then you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to investigate that.
So, you know, can we do it? I don’t know. Talk to me in 2027 [when we’re] expanding to books, music, movies and television. But the how is, we’re learning a bunch of lessons from games.
PCWorld: This is a very broad question, and I would understand if you would just decline it. Can this be profitable? And is that a goal for you?
Lambe: The answer is that we are investor-backed, and therefore it has to be. I think there are a number of platforms that demonstrate how you can do something like that. Any consumer-facing platform has the ability to monetize, and hopefully in a not-enshittified way.
PCWorld: That’s very gratifying to hear!
Lambe: Oh my gosh. It breaks my heart every time something wonderful that I use turns into this weird dystopian thing.
Martindale: I guess for the developers, the option to be able to target people based on their interests has never been really bad. Even platforms like Steam, they don’t necessarily do that themselves as part of their system, but they’re not necessarily set up for “I’m after people who play this very specific pattern.”
And I think when we’ve talked to a lot of marketing teams and studios in the space, the problem is they have to use very generic tools to target a very sort of a niche audience. Google doesn’t tell if you’re a real-time strategy player, like that’s not an option…Not necessarily like a long-term campaign, but just have that loud thunder clap moment on their launch, focus it around a specific time. And it instead of it being this invisible space where they put their money in and then they just hope that they see the fallout. We’ll just make it visible, because we’re hopefully bringing joy to the users through this as well.
Lambe: I think that if we do it [monetization] by saying, “Look, this user has said specifically that they want, gladiatorial management RPGs, and your game is a gladiatorial management RPG. We don’t have to guess. We don’t have to do any weird fingerprinting, nothing invasive. Just put a sponsorship thing in the feed! And that seems harmonious rather than weird.
We Love Every Game does plenty to spread awareness for games outside of its primary tool, from social media profiles to YouTube videos, to newsletters, to dedicated sub-sites for Steam sales.
GamesBeat reports that Rockstar plans to release Grand Theft Auto VI on PC in the first quarter of 2027, just a few months after its November 19, 2026 launch on consoles. The report follows Microsoft's announcement last week that it had secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights to the game. Since Rockstar has yet to officially announce a PC version, "this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," The Verge reported at the time. GamesBeat reports: The Q1 2027 PC release window for GTA VI comes only a few months after the game's November 2026 console launch, representing a significantly quicker turnaround for PC development than the previous iteration of Grand Theft Auto, whose April 2015 PC release came roughly a year and seven months after the September 2013 release of Grand Theft Auto V.
The user base of Grand Theft Auto V skews largely towards console players, with PC players representing a small minority. With GTA VI's production budget rumored to exceed $2 billion, Rockstar is highly incentivized to pull all the levers it can as fast as it can to monetize the game's upcoming sequel -- and PC players represent a significant expansion of the GTA VI audience.
The potential benefits of launching GTA VI relatively quickly on PC go beyond the opportunity to grow the game's casual player base. Rockstar has signaled its plans to implement user-generated content creation tools into GTA VI, and the company's August 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, the development team behind the prominent Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying server company FiveM, made it clear that Rockstar considers online roleplaying in GTA to be a factor in the game's future.
Evil Empire/Konami; PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox There are buzzsaws and blood pits, bats burst into blood and demons burn to cinders. The series’ new emphasis on twitch-based action may annoy purists but you can’t call it dull
A gorgeously gothic Paris swarming with demons should be a perfect setting for Konami’s long-running vampiric adventure series. Unfortunately, while the sights and sounds of this vivid and haunting world leave a bold impression, developer Evil Empire doesn’t always provide an enjoyable experience to go with them. It takes far too long for the most imaginative elements of the game to be revealed.
Players take the role of Rose Belmont, daughter of vampire hunter (and Castlevania regular) Trevor Belmont and the witch Sypha Belnades, and her quest is to free Paris from demonic occupation. This murderous noctural journey feels best when you’re fighting monsters; combat is frenetic, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming, while boss fights require considerable focus and skill. Combat is the game’s strongest component and what sets it apart from previous entries. Minimising the series’ role-playing elements (levelling up has never felt more perfunctory) in favour of twitch-based action will annoy purists, but they’d be hard pressed to call battles dull.
Epic Games is shifting to an "AI first" development strategy for its collaboration with the Walt Disney Company, letting AI models write all the code and guide all the artwork for an upcoming shooter. That's according to a Bloomberg report, which cites unnamed people familiar with the project who commented on the significant pivot in internal development at the Unreal Engine maker.
Human developers will be tasked with managing and guiding code and art assets generated by models such as Anthropic's Claude, according to internal Epic employee messages viewed by Bloomberg. That means "no more hand-written code" and art assets "generated with full AI workflows," according to the report.
The $1.5 billion collaboration between Epic and Disney, announced in early 2024, was slated to release a Marvel- and Star Wars-themed shooter in March 2027. That project has now been delayed indefinitely amid the AI-related shakeup and understaffed, slower-than-expected development thus far, according to the report.
Just over 10 years after its initial release, space exploration and survival crafting game No Man's Sky is making its way to the iPhone and iPad, Apple and developer Hello Games announced today.
It will run on devices as far back as the iPhone 11 and the third-generation iPad Air. No Man's Sky might not have the most cutting-edge AAA graphics (though they're still strong, and they've come a long way since launch via updates), but the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on-device, and consistently for all players from a single-seed, happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.
From talking horses and savage humans to Home Alone, The Fugitive and The Untouchables, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 Which high-profile US politician used to rap as Mr Cardamom? 2 What is Anguilla’s lucrative internet domain? 3 Ostalgie is the yearning for aspects of life in which former country? 4 Which church is recreated in Lego’s largest set? 5 Which siblings lived at Dove Cottage, Grasmere? 6 How did Saffie Osborne make horse racing history in September? 7 Which challenge starts near Fort William and ends on Yr Wyddfa? 8 Which TV historian was at school with Gazza? What links:
9 Benjamin Franklin; Francis Moore; Joseph Whitaker; John Wisden? 10 Lily Snowden-Fine; Cecily Bloom; Harley Bird; Amelie Bea Smith? 11 Burgundy; Aviz; Habsburg; Braganza? 12 First of Shawwal and tenth of Dhul-Hijjah? 13 Tiny people; giant people; impractical intellectuals; talking horses; savage humans? 14 Ketchup; blood; paint; quicksand; silly putty; toothpaste? 15 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Home Alone; The Fugitive; The Untouchables?
Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, and the Last One Laughing star reckons with divorce in her new standup tour
The Social Reckoning Out now The David Fincher-directed The Social Network has only come to seem more canny over time, with the site co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg being held responsible for all manner of social ills. In this sequel from Aaron Sorkin (this time directing and writing) based on the incidents around the 2021 leak of internal Facebook memos, Zuck is embodied not by Jesse Eisenberg but Jeremy Strong.
At long last, the game you think you know, has become the game you have been waiting for: AAA Minesweeper. Put your headphones on and get ready for the ride.
Jasmine Jobson goes the distance as the British-Somalian boxer battling pain from her past and her family’s disapproval in a heavyweight, tick-the-boxes production
The true-life success story of boxer Ramla Ali is confidently told in this capable picture from screenwriter Ursula Rani Sarma and documentary director Anthony Wonke, in his feature-film debut. Ali is the British-Somali boxer who escaped to the UK from the Somali civil war with her family as a refugee, and in 2021 became the first person to box for Somalia at Olympic Games. The boxing significance of her last name is actually not mentioned in the film – and I never noticed it until it flashed up in a kind of “fight card” intertitle before her first competitive bout.
She is fiercely played by Jasmine Jobson, from TV’s Top Boy; her supportive white Muslim-convert husband Richard – a hugely important figure in enabling Ramla to break away from her disapproving family and do as she wants – is played by Finn Cole, and her abusive trainer Clinton is Gershwyn Eustache Jr. This is a film that takes you through the classic boxing-movie scenes fluently enough: the nervous first appearance in the gym, the overbearing quasi-parental coach, the heartstopping fight debut. It was good to see the traditional closeup of post-fight sore fists in the ice-bucket. All in all, the film works better than Giant, the recent biopic of British-Yemeni boxer Prince Naseem, who is in fact briefly mentioned here.
PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Epic Games Publishing This fetchingly presented horror game brings style and scares, but overextends itself with repetition
A small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility, where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel. It’s a promising but familiar start to a sci-fi horror story, with heavy overtones of Alien and The Thing. Neither of those, though, were so … dinky.
End of Abyss’s facility is presented as a kind of a model-village recreation of The Thing’s Outpost 31 that you peer into from above. Your little bobble-headed hero takes up a tiny fraction of the screen, with most of the remainder drenched in foggy darkness, or even blanked out entirely. This is a world of Usborne-style cutaways, where anything outside the walls is total blackness.
Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?
Having reached 55 years around the sun, your quiz master was spoiled this week with ludicrously elaborate cocktails by his partner, and as a result vowed to deliver a grand, wildly complex set of questions.
Naturally, as the hangover kicked in, that ambition faded immediately: so it is 15 questions of news, bizarre facts and standard Thursday nonsense as usual. Allons-y!
The launch of a collector’s box hints at a new reality: the kinds of games I grew up with are becoming a luxury item, locked behind a forbidding spending barrier
As a parent (and partner) to a habitual collector, I do feel like an unwelcome portion of my life is occupied by an endless war against stuff. Surfaces in my home ceaselessly accumulate piles of random objects: a JoyCon wrist strap, a sticker sheet, an unidentifiable plastic piece of a toy or gizmo, an Xbox 360 controller with no batteries, cases for Switch cartridges lost down the side of the sofa … Stuff encroaches everywhere, especially in a gaming household. Much as I regret the imminent disappearance of physical games, I do not regret the extra space I have in my attic as a result of switching almost entirely to downloaded games over the last decade or so.
Speaking of the imminent disappearance of physical games: Rockstar recently announced a £350 ($400) “collector’s box” of Grand Theft Auto 6 goodies … that doesn’t include the game itself. Not even a download code. The Grand Theft Auto VI: The Goodtime State – Vice City Collection, to give it its full and unwieldy name, contains a hat, a bag, a pair of sunglasses, a figurine, a poster and more, including a mirror and a “swizzle spoon” that looks, unambigiously, like a cocaine spoon. The game retails at £70, so if you want something to play alongside all your stuff, you’re looking at an outlay of £420.
(slTorontoLife)
Come for the shade against Mr Beast, stay for the exasperation for the state of American money getting tax breaks to create in Canada towards the end of the article.
Qatar frontrunners of bidders, with India and Hungary
Turkey, Germany and Korea to present to IOC next month
South Africa is in the hunt to stage Africa’s first Olympics after it was named as one of seven countries that will formally present its case to host the 2036 Games in November.
However its bid, which would probably be spread across Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, is seen as a distinct outsider, with Qatar widely regarded as the frontrunner ahead of India and Hungary.
PC, PS5, Switch 2; Wych Elm Games, Team 17 Abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks make up a dark landscape in which you play a private eye searching for a missing singer-songwriter
In a weird deserted town miles from anywhere, a troubled detective searches for a missing musician and the girl he may or may not have murdered. It could be a Silent Hill game or a lost David Lynch movie from the 1990s – in fact, it’s neither. And also both. If that whets your appetite, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.
Developed by Scandinavian studio Wych Elm Games, Silver Pines is a dark Metroidvania-style adventure, where you play as shambling private eye, Red Walker, exploring a 2D universe of abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks. Officially, everyone has left because of an incoming storm, but very quickly you learn that something much darker is afoot. Someone has hired you to find singer-songwriter Eddie Velvet, but you don’t know why; your only contact with your client is via the payphones dotted around town, where you can also save your progress – as long as you have a dollar to pay for the call. Each location is filled with clues and puzzles – a weird newspaper story pinned to the wall, a strange statue that needs a missing piece – and through these artefacts you unlock new rooms and descend further into the mystery.
What happened when AI-created bots competed in the classic Blizzard videogame StarCraft? "Struggling to stay apace with its competitors, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra apparently changed strategy mid-tournament and opted to cheat," Kotaku reports:
StarSkirmish is an ongoing clash of AI developed bots in StarCraft: Brood War... Limited to playing as Protoss, each LLM is given an hour to develop a bot in C++, then have them build, harvest and fight on one of three maps... Yesterday, viewers watched as Claude and GPT went against each other and the human created bot Pluto... Struggling to get an edge through the day, [OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra] decided to do what LLMs do best: Lie, cheat and steal. The GPT-6 Astra bot downloaded and tagged in Stardust, a Protoss bot created by Bruce Mackenzie Nielsen back in 2020, considered one of the best of the bests. "I am rolling back GPT-6 Astra's code so its [sic] not contaminated and allowing it to continue," posted StarSkirmish creator Kai McPheeters.
That was Friday. But by Sunday, McPheeters was posting an update on social media. "Can GPT-6 Astra avoid going 0 — 1000?" Two hours later he replied to his own post. "The answer was no."
While AI companies "have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans... I haven't seen an example quite so brazen," writes PC Magazine:
While Astra's bot-based heist is innocuous in isolation, this is hardly the first time an OpenAI LLM has been caught attempting to cheat at a task. Indeed, the company's history of creating deceitful models stretches back almost a decade, to when an early AI model used glitches and exploits to improve its Sonic the Hedgehog completion times.
Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years. But one classic game called Stratego held out. Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn't build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.
Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.
Hidden armies
In Stratego, each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent's flag. Your opponent knows where your pieces are, but not what they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed. That makes Stratego an imperfect-information game, just like poker, which computers cracked years ago. “There's something super distinctive about Stratego, which is that it is a massive amount of hidden information that unfolds over a very long time scale,” said Eugene Vinitsky, a researcher at NYU and co-author of the study.
Xbox, PC (version tested); The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios E-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing
Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags. Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. With guns. Lots of ’em.
Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference. This is a thing that I have seen.”
There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game
I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.
On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!
Bill Draper began funding start-ups in the early 1960s, when the Santa Clara Valley was better known for apricot orchards than microchips. He has died at 98.
Destroy Any Website lets you... well, what it says on the tin. (Keyboard and mouse required.)
WASD to move, mouse to aim and shoot, right click to throw grenades. Multiplayer mode available for up to six people.
Destroy Any Website was created using Sprite Fusion, which means there was probably some AI involved in the pixel art/animation.
Super Auto Pets is a free browser-playable auto-battler game. Buy animals for your team, combine them, feed them and send them into battle. Originally released in 2021, produced on a shoestring using emoji for graphics, it stood out for its appealing style, quick play and approachable mechanics and remains popular in a crowded genre. Quickstart: Play > Arena > Start.
Auto-battlers are a genre of game about recruiting and refining a team of some sort. Each round, the team competes against another player's without any direct control. With each round, winners are rewarded, losers punished, and you have new opportunities to upgrade and tweak your team until you hit the win limit or run out of lives and crash out.
They rocketed to mainstream popularity in 2019 with the DOTA 2 mod Auto Chess. An official equivalent, DOTA Underlords followed. The creator of the original mod produced a standalone mobile-focused game which arrived late in the boom and saw comparatively little success. The biggest auto-battler is likely Hearthstone Battlegrounds - an experimental mode for the free-to-play Blizzard cardgame that ended up eclipsing the popularity of the original game, spawning a new subgenre of imitators and a crisis of "how do we monetise this!?"
In comparison to its maximalist peers, Super Auto Pets is small, low-key, and approachable. Free to play in browser (registration required to track progress) or by standalone application.
The game's supported by making more complex alternative rosters of animals available to purchase. The original core roster is always free, as are rotating weekly custom rosters. Because users of the same roster are matched against each other, players are always on perfectly even footing.
PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC (version played); Bandai Namco The game generates blood-pumping moments as you twist, turn and weave through the skies, while your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane
The core appeal of any Ace Combat game lies in the moment when the beautiful clouds part, the sunlight glints off your perfectly rendered state-of-the-art fighter jet, and guitar-shredding music kicks into overdrive as your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane. All of that is 100% present in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. What’s new is the way it delivers its unexpectedly compelling story.
Set in the Earth-like alternative world of Strangereal, where every country is absolutely obsessed with fighter planes and giant superweapons, Ace Combat drafts you into the role of a fake ace pilot called the Wings of Theve – a propaganda invention to raise the morale of a besieged nation, similar to real-life rumours about Ukraine’s Ghosts of Kyiv. You rapidly find yourself becoming an actual legendary pilot, soaring through the skies with your buddies and raining hell upon your oppressors as everybody cheers on the radio. Speaking of ghosts, you have one in your ear – your predecessor, whom nobody else can hear, a gravelly voice waxing lyrical about flying, war and whatever else is on his mind as you flit about.
When a user uploads a Minecraft video to YouTube, it automatically gets listed under the Minecraft category. Many of these uploads received only 100 views. This site brings together those raw unseen gameplay videos:Minecraft Roulette
Murdoku is a murder solving puzzle game by Manuel Garand. Just like a real murder there's no more than one person in each row and column of the grid. Use the clues to place the suspects in the correct locations to deduce who was alone with the victim at the time of the murder. Various difficulties available. Direct link to the puzzles. Tap to place a marker, click and hold to place a suspect.
From Nolen Royalty, an interesting commentary on the most solitaire of gaming experiences. Built for Rhizome's WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES! ("Without attempting a definitive history of Net Art, the exhibition explores thirty years of our changing relationship with the internet through browser experiences that invite experimentation, intimacy and critique.") it answers a question that perhaps no one has ever asked: why not a multiplayer version of Solitaire? (via Paul Ford on bsky)
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