Sundays are for finally biting the bullet and spending some of your Christmas money on a boxset of 2000s British Touring Car Championship season reviews. You stick the first DVD in, a three hour trip back through the 2000 season of car touring around the finest tarmac-filled fields Britain has to offer. You think of the American readers, and make a mental note to explain to them that the action you're watching is a bit like NASCAR, except with no oval tracks, smaller engines, and a lot more exchanges between drivers you can accurately describe as 'politely grumpy tantrum throwing'.

Nyooommmm. A Ford Mondeo flies by, Swiss ace Alain Menu at the wheel. Smash. James Thompson and Jason Plato have attempted to meld a Honda Accord and a Vauxhall Vectra together to form the world's first Honhall Veccord. Screech. Another Mondeo slides around a bend. You can't make out the number on the door. Is it Rickard Rydell or Anthony Reid at the controls? Oh smeg. It's neither. Adrian Edmondson somehow flashes a cheeky grin through a full face helmet as he dips the machine down through Paddock Hill bend.

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Ah, it's a Friday night, time to rela-

Wait a minute, long-time Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer's retiring, his assumed replacement and Xbox president Sarah Bond has resigned, and the suit now being tapped to take over Spenny's gig currently has the following job title: president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product. Right, guess I'm writing a news.

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For once, I bring what should hopefully be good news for folks looking to buy or upgrade their PC hardware without having to factor in a bunch of inconveniences they can do nothing about. The RAM crisis is still in full swing, but the US Supreme Court have struck down the majority of President Trump's tariffs on imports. These tariffs have been another of the key annoyances complicating the state of play when it comes to hardware companies being able to sell you the bits you need at prices which haven't been driven far above where they should typically be.

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The thing you need to understand about Fogpiercer is that this deckbuilding roguelike, in which you control a train battling Mad Max-style road bandits, knows the secret joy of artillery. It is one of the few games that recognises that while it's satisfying to hit an enemy with a shell from a howitzer, it's even more satisfying to target the space next to them and use the force of the blast to give them a sideways shove into a wall.

It's a mechanic that puts Fogpiercer into the same fine company as Into The Breach.

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The Stop Killing Games campaign's organisers are currently awaiting a chat with European Union politicians about server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play. Said chat's been set up by a petition which racked up just under 1.3 million verified signatures at its final count, with that being one of the alleys the group have gone down in pursuit of action against publishers being able to abandon games without leaving a way for them to be kept running.

Rather than simply adjusting their ties and googling nice places to visit on a trip to Brussels while they wait for their meeting, the group have announced some more action they'll be taking to get their message out in the ling term. Two Stop Killing Games non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are going to be set up to cover Europe and the US.

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Ubisoft are laying off around 40 people at Ubisoft Toronto, the studio behind the forthcoming remake of the original Splinter Cell. That’s approximately eight percent of the studio headcount. It’s all in the service of Ubisoft’s drive to cut costs after restructuring their operations around a big dollop of Tencent funding, which has elsewhere seen Ubisoft propose to lay off up to 200 people in Paris, and chop fixed costs by €200 million over the next two years.

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Embark are continuing their meteorological experiments in extraction shooter Arc Raiders with a rousing injection of wind. There’s a hurricane coming to the game on February 24th, a new map condition that limits visibility, degrades shields, impedes movement, and makes you suck even more at shooting things. Still, this stormcloud has a few silver linings. With the gale at your back, you’ll naturally move a lot faster. Also, you may find it easier to avoid detection in the open if you disable your shield.

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You don't have to wait too much longer to murder the steeple for a second time, with Slay The Spire 2's early access release now set in stone. Following the delay which pushed it back to this previously secret Thursday, it'll arrive on March 5th, 2026.

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It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City's inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.

But sprawl Frostpunk has - firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game - a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.

Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.

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Another intriguing Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod has emerged to confront your party of quirky RPG adventurers. This one's a short story which lets you take a break from BG3's main story to attend a dinner party at the house of a not-at-all creepy rich bloke, who happens to be very good at jamming out on the organ via illusions.

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When the website of Highguard suddenly began blaring that it was "unavailable" not long after news broke of layoffs at developer Wildlight, you could have been forgiven for thinking a Concord-style pulling offline might be in the shooter's near future. That doesn't look to be the case, though, with the studio having just announced a couple of new additions set to arrive in the game this week.

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There's now a mod for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which swaps out the likeness of actor Teruyuki Kagawa. Kagawa's casting in the remake, which saw him lend both his voice and likeness to secondary villain Goh Hamazaki, caused fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor.

Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn't specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in the article. Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently said Kagawa's casting was the result of developers RGG Studio having "tried to think of someone who makes you go, 'This guy's a creep'".

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"Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out," the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. "We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made us stay in the first place,” he continues. “I have two options. I could falsify my reports and declare line 9 safe for construction anyway, or I could quit. Either way, the company can’t lose."

Approximately 15 minutes later, I’m talking to a monkey sat atop a pile of goods in a random abandoned house. "YOUR PRESENCE IS WEAK. FATE DELIVERS ME AN UNWORTHY ADVERSARY," it says, before declaring its name to be the KING OF TRADE. Immediately, one of the voices in Herschel’s inner chorus, dubbed Statehood, starts shouting back about needing to defeat the forces of capitalism.

Both of these are scenarios I ran into while playing the Next Fest demo of the spy CRPG finally emerging from ZA/UM, following years of reported bad times and discord at and around the Disco Elysium studio. Both of them feel simultaneously like encounters you could plausibly have run into in the original Disco, and like they could just as easily be pale imitations dressed up to resemble that first game’s much quoted trenchcoat of surrealist detecting.

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The next big update to Destiny 2, Shadow and Order, has been delayed as it undergoes a substantial round of tweakage and expansion. Such a substantial round of tweakage and expansion, in fact, that it'll no longer be called Shadow and Order when it returns.

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Former staff of Enotria: The Last Song developers Jyamma Games have revealed to RPS that they’re owed months of unpaid salary, following layoffs at the company last year. They've shared an inside look at a troubled independent studio dealing with payment delays, multiple changes of direction, and general confusion that stretches back to spring 2025.

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In the aftermath of reports claiming that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) deepened their reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology last year, No Azure for Apartheid have issued a statement demanding the company cut ties with the agency.

No Azure for Apartheid are the same worker-led group who've carried out protests against Microsoft's dealings with the Israeli military, amid what Amnesty International and a UN enquiry have called a genocide in Gaza.

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Ironically, considering the rampant dysentery moving through my campground in brown, sputtering waves, the problem I'm facing in Transport Fever 3 is a blockage. The trucks I've loaded with antibiotics are stuck in a traffic jam that stretches all the way to the pharmacy in the next city over. If I'm to save the inaugural Woodstock festival, I must find a way to get traffic flowing again before the timer runs out.

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Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, has had its release pushed back a little further. The studio have taken on feedback from the demo they recently released on Steam - that's the one which kept surnaming me - and reckon a few more weeks of acting on it are in order to get the game ready to go.

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Why is everything rolling sideways on my desk all of a sudden? What’s this mysterious force, dragging my chair towards the wall? Why are all the cars in the vicinity tumbling and rolling in the direction of *checks press release* ...North Carolina, USA? It can only be gravitational disturbance caused by the impending 1.0 release of a massive strategy project. This time it’s Heart of the Machine, a “4X-style”, “dimension-busting” sci-fi game developed by Arcen Games and published by Hooded Horse.

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Moon Beast have released a pre-alpha demo for their action-RPG Darkhaven. You know, the one from the former Blizzard North devs, which harkens back to Diablo 2 while stirring in a dynamic world and terrain destruction reminiscent of Minecraft. I did a big interview feature about it. Now, you can play a very early build and decide whether I've been quaffing the Kool Aid.

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