Rally Point: Unorthodox. Complex. Laborious. Not just XCOM again. Of course I love USC: Counterforce

What did you do while recovering from your big medical thing, Sin? Well. Loath as I am to talk about myself (“lol. lmao.” – Combative New Ed), I… don’t know? There was some Ultima Underworld, some workers, some resources, some Pagonians pioneered. But in the dimensionless vortex of first-time-off-since-2020, I think I did… nothing. The lists barely moved.

Except, finally, for a game I struggled with last year. A strange game, easily punished, as all turn-based games must be for dolt reasons, for not being bloody XCOM. USC Colon Counterforce is more like old XCOM, aka UFO. But it’s not a recreation of that, nor of Aliens, its other obvious inspiration. It diverges as much as it reminds, and makes some mistakes in a way that we all must, when pursuing our own identity instead of an impression of someone else’s.

I wish I’d given it a second chance sooner. I wish I could shake everyone and say “This! This is the way! There is more than one path, if you just look for it! Yes, the one before you stumbled. But look at it it. See the admittedly weakly-named USC, and its bruises. It is beautiful. It is itself”.

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For its gaming hardware contingent, CES 2026 was a good week to bury good news

CES 2026 doesn’t technically end until tomorrow, but then if it were a football match, it’d be the kind where the home side gets battered 4-0 and the cameras keep cutting to a stream of season ticket holders slumping towards the doors with 20 minutes left. An all-timer in the history of Consumer Electronics Show, it has not been.

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Minecraft’s getting cuter baby animals whose single pixel eyes you can stare into as you nudge them into lava

Minecraft‘s getting marginally cuter with its next update, as it continues to pretend it isn’t designed for the express purpose of teaching innocent children that in order to survive, you’ve sometimes got to beat some pigs and trees to death with your bare hands. Baby farm animal mobs, long just mini-mes of their adult versions with slightly different head/body size ratios are getting their own unique appearances.

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A new StarCraft shooter’s reportedly set to be revealed this year, possibly as a BlizzCon headliner

Right, so, Starcraft. A new shooter in the series is reportedly set to be revealed this year, possibly as the big headline act of Blizzcon in September.

The existence of such a secret shootery thing in the works at Blizzard was first reported by Jason Schreier last year, being one of the revelations to come out of his book on the publisher, titled Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment.

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Fortnite’s latest collab with an adult animated series that’s somehow still going is none other than South Park

You know what South Park feels like to me? It feels like randomly waking up in the middle of the night, looking around your bedroom as you think “cripes, it’s still not morning yet?” A feeling of waiting for the inevitable, the end, or the beginning. Not so much the contents of the show, none of that needs all that much thought, more so its very existence, which is now apparently transplanting itself into Fortnite.

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Whoops, looks like PEGI accidentally revealed that a new Life is Strange is on the way

If there were ever a dead horse that didn’t need so much flogging, it might be the Life is Strange series. Undeniably beloved by many, it has fallen victim to that whole franchising thing, having received an entry only in 2024 via Life is Strange: Double Exposure, a sequel game that was perhaps a little bit too messy. And here we are, in 2026, with PEGI potentially spoiling the reveal of a new entry in the series subtitled Reunion. Spoilers ahead for the game!

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The Elder Scrolls Online is ditching yearly expansions and folding its premium content into the base game, but it’s also gaining a battle pass

Back in September, studio game director Rich Lambert told GamesIndustry.biz that the Elder Scrolls Online team were exploring a move from big expansions to smaller, more frequent updates. Jump ahead four months and, well, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Wait, stop running away from me, I’m not bringing you old news reheated like the last of the (now decidedly whiffy) Christmas turkey leftovers, I come bearing fresh details like… a freshly cooked turkey that is seasoned with patch notes and battlepass infographics.

Yum.

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Jet Set Radio Future on PC? It’s not a guarantee, but a new project may lead to such a, well, future

You know what I might have most about games? There’s no universal way to play them. You buy a DVD, you buy a DVD player, and aside from maybe a region lock issue you’re as good as gold. If I buy Snowboard Kids for the N64, and I don’t have one of those, well, I’m up a particular creek. That has meant that many a game over the years has been stuck to particular platforms, one of the most surprising being Jet Set Radio Future, to this day a game that’s still only available on the original Xbox, and the Xbox 360 through backwards compatibility. But! Thanks to some techy wizards, that might change in the near future.

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