I miss boxing - not that I ever did it. It used to be a kind of combat-sport backbone running through the country. I remember sleeping at a friend's house when Frank Bruno was fighting Mike Tyson in 1989, and us kids were listening to the fight on a radio upstairs while our parents listened to it on a radio downstairs. Their cheers led ours. Boxing matches were big deals, they were moments where everyone seemed to turn around, but where are they now? Lying on the canvas alongside Jake Paul.

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Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Victoria knows something her husband doesn't; Tom endures the perennial terror known as entertaining a child over half-term; Bertie realises he's missed something important again; and Will makes mech combat somehow sound rather fun.

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Jake Solomon, a decorated game designer known for his work at Firaxis on games like XCOM and Marvel Midnight Suns, has announced that his studio Midsummer is going to close. In doing so, he also shared a pre-alpha look at the "Life Sims + The Truman Show" game the studio was making, called Burbank.

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Floundering PvP shooter Highguard lives on, as developer Wildlight releases a new content update and assures worried fans that ominous signs like the game's website going offline are "low priority" problems.

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Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard has flattened hope for a major Starfield overhaul by stating that the long-awaited update in development "is not Starfield 2.0".

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I feel for Avowed. It's a bit like an athlete that goes to an Olympics and makes it to a final but doesn't place. It's a great achievement, a success by many people's standards, but history doesn't care.

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This is much more like the Overwatch 2 I wanted when it launched. We're having a redo moment. Blizzard isn't calling this a relaunch but to me, it feels like it is. This is a reintroduction of a game that floundered back in 2023 at launch, but three years later, it's solid and it's stacked. Overwatch (the 2 was symbolically dropped from the title recently) knows what it wants to be now and this is the fullest and strongest this game has ever been. Arguably it's also the strongest the series (can we call it a series now?) has ever been, which is a provocative thing to say, I know. But I haven't been this excited about Overwatch since the original came out 10 years ago.

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Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Bertie plays a classic but finds himself getting a bit bored; Marie adopts a black cat called Salem; Tom can't get out of the menus; Victoria makes a young child cry; Dom Platinums a game and feels very smug about it; and Connor finds an inventive way to play two MMOs at once.

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It's tempting to believe that the Diablo 3 playerbase has been eclipsed by a resurgent Diablo 2: Resurrected on one side, and Diablo 4 on the other, but according to Blizzard, that's not the case. Apparently there's still a "massive" playerbase playing Diablo 3, and it counts players in the "millions".

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Hello and Happy New Year - is it okay to say that now? I'm not sure where the cut-off point is. Some people still have their Christmas trees up. We had ours out before New Year. Welcome back to What We've Been Playing! Or as I like to call this particular edition of it: What We Played Over Christmas, because it's been a couple of weeks since we've talked.

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Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian has changed its stance on generative AI following backlash faced at the end of last year.

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January is the month that, where I live, in the south of England, everyone gets serious again. All the paraphernalia of Christmas - all the merriment and cheer and colourful lighting - is cleared away in favour of sobering goals for the year ahead. It's never something that's appealed strongly to me, making goals, but I do feel the allure of wiping a slate clean and starting again. It's like a run in a roguelike game, I like to think. Time for a new me.

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Former Xbox exclusive role-playing game Avowed is coming to PlayStation 5, and it'll be released on the game's first anniversary: 17th February 2026 (note: the original PC and Xbox Series S/X release happened on 18th February 2025 but it's only a day's difference).

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Phasmophobia studio Kinetic Games is branching out into indie game publishing, and is actively seeking "creative games from small teams and solo developers globally, who have a clear vision for their title and are 12-18 months from release", a press release said.

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Nintendo has announced two pastelly new Joy-Con 2 controller colours for Switch 2, and said they'll release next month.

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The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and Rockstar Games have traded more blows following a preliminary tribunal hearing this week. There, the IWGB asked a judge to grant the fired Grand Theft Auto 6 developers interim relief.

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Netflix has today confirmed that the fifth and final season of The Witcher will air on the streaming service this year. It follows Season 4 in rapid succession - that series having launched at the end of October last year.

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The analyst who forecasted a Witcher 3 expansion release in 2026 has told me they're "100 percent certain [CD Projekt Red] will release significant new content this year".

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New games performed really well on Steam last year - notably better than the year before.

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The Duffer brothers, creators of Stranger Things, have said the final battle of the TV series was partially inspired by Baldur's Gate 3. Matt Duffer was apparently playing the game while devising the showdown.

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