Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I can’t remember the first time I felt “immersed” in a videogame, but I can remember the first time I got stuck under a swimming pool float as a kid, scratching at a scabby foam ceiling roamed by mocking silver jellyfish of air. I can remember the first few times I drowned in videogames, fighting the waterlogged handling in Sonic’s Labyrinth Zone, or operating the agile sarcophagus that is Lara Croft in Aztec print grottos of antiseptic blue.

I find the continuing use of “immersive” to describe believable videogame worlds weird and a bit alarming. Partial immersion would be one thing – the videogame as nice hot bath at the end of the day, the videogame as splashing around in a stream of thought, the videogame as a kind of apple-bobbing. The “immersion” of the “immersive sim” is a different matter entirely: it’s a box of clockwork you’re invited to tease apart, not some hyperreal enclosure. But the “full” or “total” sensory immersion repeatedly offered by big-budget, photoreal 3D games seems a lot like suffocation.

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The best thing about the ROG Xbox Ally X is that it finally acknowledges the truth – a truth that, despite continued denials by device after device, at least partly accounts for why the little old Steam Deck still rules the world of handheld PCs despite being slower and lower-rez than almost everything that followed it. You know it, I know it, and at last, Microsoft know it: Windows 11 just isn’t that good as a handheld OS.

Thus, the biggest upgrade that the ROG Xbox Ally X – and its little brother, the ROG Xbox Ally – makes is not to its hardware, but the software. Instead of booting straight into the Windows 11 desktop, a miserable experience when your only navigational tools are thumbsticks and a touchscreen, it defaults to a far more gamepad-optimised (and specifically gaming-focused) ‘Xbox’ mode that provides quick, D-paddable access to your choice of launchers and the games installed within. Yes. Great. Cool. Big fan. I still wouldn’t buy one.

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Ubisoft have opened up the pandora’s box of mid-2000s shooters and deployed Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow onto Steam, rendering its PC version easy to grab for the first time in ages. It’s not a remaster, so don’t get too excited, as you might still have fun getting things to run as smoothly as your covert ops.

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Misbehaving bullets, your hour of reckoning is nigh. A Battlefield 6 hotfix has been deployed with the goal of stopping you from refusing to register hit damage when you embed yourselves in virtual flesh. Bouncy ladders, your time will likely come soon, as EA’s Battlefield Studios are busy trying to work out the arcane secrets of your rubbery rungs.

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Given how quickly older games can be delisted or end up near impossible to run properly without tinkering nowadays, efforts like GOG.com’s preservation program are always nice to see. There’s obviously a money-making motive behind it for the storefront, but keeping retro works in working order’s a noble way to earn that cash. As it turns out, though, the folks behind the CD Projekt-owned site underestimated just how difficult an undertaking the program would be.

That’s not to suggest they’re giving up though, just that they’ve had to re-evaluate some of their ambitious early goals.

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Soon, I will eat more than one moon. But for now, both you and I can eat a single moon as a demo starter for the main course Skate Story‘ll ollie into our lives when it releases in December. It’ll have to do, washed down with a glass skater making a stone philosopher feel some type of way by busting out sick combos.

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Despite having initially indicated they’d prefer not to do so if it could be avoided, Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have now confirmed that they’re holding off adding new stuff to the shooter while they focus in on improving its performance.

It’s for the best, as issues with stability and bugs overshadowed the verdict players had on Helldivers 2’s last big update, Into the Unjust. Not all of the concerns raised by players recently were new as of that update, see the game’s long-beefy PC file size, but the result’s been a backlog Arrowhead would have struggled to avoid confronting.

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Since Battlefield 6 rolled onto the, er, battlefield late last week, a huge patch having been smashed against its hull to see it off, EA and their Battlefield Studios have understandably only put out a few more tweaks. Their latest little round of changes are server-side rather than being a proper patch, and enact a bit of balancing clearly deemed too important to wait for the next big patch’s deployment.

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Shortly after you finish celebrating the arrival of next year, a plague will rock up. Well, the full version of Pathologic 3, a game in which you play a doctor tasked with saving a town from a mysterious contagion will rock up. I’m sure that if you turn off all of the lights and pay someone to sit in the next room coughing every two minutes, the difference’ll be negligible.

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The year is 3025. Real life recieves a patch which renders you able to see every item you own with such fidelity that your eyes basically become microscopes. This is cool, your friend says, we’re now only a little bit behind the level of detail Skyrim modders have kitted out 2011’s finest lizard yelling simulator with.

If you’re wondering what’s inspired me to reach for my crystal ball, it’s the emergence of yet another Skyrim mod which takes the RPG one step closer to featuring as many dynamically moving parts as our own reality. It allows folks across Tamriel to look at a calendar and decide they need a fresh hairdo without any input from your character, who’s then left playing catch-up on all the new trims like a distant aunt at a family gathering.

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