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It feels quite fitting that a game like Big Hops released today, the day after Awesome Games Done Quick wrapped up, because this thing feels like it has a guaranteed spot in Summer Games Done Quick already. You’re a frog! Who hops around! What’s not to love? It helps that the platformer feels so good in motion, too.
There is a strange deliciousness in experiencing a game from a perspective that it does not otherwise allow. Sure, things don’t always look right, there’s just this opportunity to rethink how you view a particular world. Recently, it appears that someone playing Arc Raiders got to do just that, by switching it into a first-person shooting mode as opposed to its usual third-person camera, all thanks to an accident.
What’s the genre called for games that recreate a desktop PC interface? There’s gotta be a name right, there’s enough games to justify it, but PC game is kind of already taken as a term. In any case, while we ponder over that question, let’s look at an upcoming addition to that genre, Imprinted, a horror game where you are tasked with restoring mysterious, damaged cassette tapes.
Once again it appears that Pocketpair appears to be going after a bit of Pokemon’s pie, this time of the card game variety. Where the latter’s started life as a physical medium, the former’s attempt at such a thing, literally just called Palworld Official Card Game, announced today, looks to be of the digital-only variety, though what there is to learn about it is a touch slim overall.
A poster advertising a definitive edition of Tom Clancy’s The Division appears to have been spotted by folks attending a Ubisoft-run eSports event in Japan. At least, that’s assuming this isn’t some elaborate ruse designed to draw in spies from other game studios, while only Jack Ryan can see what’s truly going on.
On Friday, while on the phone to friend of this parish Jeremy Peel, I knocked an entire mug of tea over my laptop. I won’t immortalise in text what I said in that moment; it’s for the best that those curses are lost to the aether.
I immediately shut down the PC, mopped it clean with a kitchen towel, and flipped it over, leaving it splayed open to air dry. I even went so far as to plonk it down in front of a dehumidifier to really sap the tea out of the machine.*
There it sat for two days, a modern day Schrodinger’s laptop. Possibly fine. Possibly broken.
As we stumble into what increasingly looks like a hardware-unfriendly 2026, RAMnarök shows no signs of petering out. As tech giants continue hoarding memory chips to build their AI farms, and suppliers gleefully jack up their prices in turn, consumer-grade RAM is still laughably expensive – and SSDs, most of which also need these in-demand chips, are seeing some nasty inflation as well.
I bring this up now, when storage prices began climbing back in November, because the past week has been particularly fucked, vis-à-vis the kind of SSDs you’d want in a modern games PC. Keepa, Amazon-tracking the browser extension I’ve long used to gauge the honesty of Prime Day and Black Friday deals, makes for grim reading: the 1TB WD Black SN850X currently sits at £162, having been £116 on January 5th, and £85 on November 5th. Nearly double the price, in barely two months.
Every once in a while, a game rocks up that so quickly finds itself in my Steam wishlist I don’t even remember clicking the button. Today, that game is Rakshasa, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and Baldur’s Gate inspired first-person RPG set in modern India where you must face off against demi-gods and “centuries-old flesh-eating monsters” inspired by Indian folklore. Yeah! Hell yeah! Yeah, yeah sign me up!
Wizard Pool! It is, probably, exactly what you think it is. You are a wizard, and you play pool. Well, admittedly there is a smidge more to it than that, alongside a healthy amount of charm. Styled in a way that looks like an N64 game in the kind of way you remember that era looking rather than how it actually looked, you play as Kue, a budding young wizard tasked by his uncle to complete a trial in the form of a tower filled with magical, illogical pool tables.
I think as long as you make a new year’s update post before the incredibly arbitrary date of January 13th, you’re still able to do so without me thinking “come on, it’s almost February”, which is exactly what EA did with their new years Sims update post. Perhaps reassuringly, after word came last year of EA’s concerning acquisition, the post opens by doubling down on what the team has previously said regarding staying committed to their values (those values including inclusivity is welcome though I wish they’d be more explicit about who is being included). But the post also, sort of, goes into what’s next for the series.
