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.
Warren! Warren! Warren!
ARRGGHHH! WHAAAA! HUHHHH! Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, keeps shouting my last name at me. It might because the game's main character, a jacketed gap jumper and baddie shooter, is called Warren. It might also because I did plenty of falling and accidentally got shot by a robo-sniper in Replaced's demo, which is now live ahead of the full thing's release next month.
As well as praising Hitler and banging on about white genocide and creating naked images of actual women and children, apparently Grok can be a resource for answering questions about videogames. According to an investigation by Business Insider into what's been going on at xAI since Elon Musk stopped being the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency and started micromanaging the chatbot, that's been one of Musk's top priorities.
Business Insider's sources say that "a model release was delayed for several days because Musk was dissatisfied with how the chatbot answered detailed questions about the video game 'Baldur's Gate,' according to people familiar with the matter."
I assume they mean Baldur's Gate 3, unless Musk really did prioritize teaching Grok where to find the Ring of the Princes +1 on the Coast Way.
Employees make xAI sound like it's become a hectic place to work, saying, "Because the company is so small, everything is a fire drill". When a problem occurs, it's solved by relocating teams of workers to a "war room" for months at a time until it's solved. Three of Business Insider's sources corroborated that, late last year, there were at least five war rooms running at the same time. "One, they said, was dedicated to teaching Grok how to play one of Musk's favorite video games, 'League of Legends.'"
Google's Gemini AI was so bad at playing Pokémon it took more than 813 hours to finish Pokémon Blue, so it can't be easy to teach them how to play videogames. I guess the question is, why bother? Musk's already paying someone to play Path of Exile 2 and Diablo 4 for him, does he really need to work a bunch more people to the bone just so he doesn't have to play League of Legends either?
Baldur's Gate 3 romance: Who to pursue
Baldur's Gate 3 multiplayer: How co-op works
Baldur's Gate 3 endings: For better or worse
Baldur's Gate 3 multiclass builds: Coolest combos
Best RPGs: The greatest you can play now
2026 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.
Steam page
Release: February 21
Developer: Alexandre Declos, Pas Game Studio
Horripliant is a horror grid-based dungeon crawler, or blobber, that borrows systems from the autobattler and idle game genres. The unnamed knight protagonist must gather resources to bolster their camp and upgrade gear, and as you'd expect, there are increasingly lucrative ways to expedite this process beyond lowly manual clicking. During enemy encounters the combat takes care of itself, essentially pitting the baddie's stats against yours. Don't worry though, Horripliant doesn't play itself: it also features some especially cryptic puzzles. The art style is appealingly rugged, drenching the whole affair in the aura of a long-forgotten shareware nasty.
Steam page
Release: February 17
Developer: Digital Image Design Ltd.
F-22: Air Dominance Fighter originally released in 1997, and while this thorough revamp is published my Microprose and certainly looks a lot like a ye olde Microprose sim, it was originally published by Ocean Software. F-22 may look like one of those steely flight sims of yore that require a 200+ page manual to figure out, but it actually leans arcade-ward: the Steam page claims it "couples deep modelling of avionics, flight dynamics, and radar with easy controls". The graphics have been marginally improved, but not so much that it F-22 doesn't retain its distinctive '90s charm.
Steam page
Release: February 17
Developer: JZPS Games
Here's a deliberately garish 2D platformer about guiding a disembodied head—and an ugly one, to boot—through increasingly challenging gauntlets. If that's not your idea of a good time, I feel sorry for you, but it gets better: the ugly head's attack is a guttural, quite chilling scream (hence the name, I suppose). There's not much more I can say about this: get a load of the art style, and if it doesn't have you smashing that 'add to cart' button then it's clearly not for you.
Steam page
Release: February 20
Developers: brlka
Love Eternal is another 2D action platformer, and despite its pared back approach to pixel art it's by all reports a quietly disturbing "psychological horror" with a richly discomforting atmosphere. In terms of the things you do with your hands, it looks like what would happen if you jammed VVVVV's gravity-switching mechanic into Celeste. In the words of one Steam review, Love Eternal is what happens when "VVVVVV woke up after having a rough tummy night and decided to eat Mulholland Drive."
Steam page
Release: February 17
Developer: Colectivo Rayente, Juanjo GarBas, Juanma Cabrera
Carmencarmen is a free game about exploring a rundown urban wasteland in a quaint yellow hatchback. It's an hour-long narrative-driven affair about talking with the people (or things) you meet, but there's a simple pleasure in handling the hatchback—it can drift and you really must drift it—and honking its horn. If I'm making this sound carefree and whimsical, do be warned that this outing gets very weird, and the early 3D art style only exacerbates its surreal-verging-horror leanings.
Discord's age verification rollout has been met with... shall we say, dismay by many users of the platform, with many hunting for a better, more privacy-focused alternative.
The news was even less well-received when Discord informed some UK users that they may be part of an "experiment" with an age verification provider called Persona, the lead investor of which, in its most recent rounds of capital funding, was a venture fund co-founded and directed by none other than Peter Thiel.
You know, the co-founder of Palantir, a surveillance technology firm that's been hitting headlines recently for working on apps to help track targets of the US government's deportation efforts. And claims that it may compile databases from the private information of US citizens. Naturally.
Discord later said that it had concluded testing with Persona's platform. Anyway, security and private data concerns around Persona's data verification efforts have been spreading, and now three security researchers say they've discovered a Persona frontend that was exposed to the open internet on a US government-authorised server (via Rage).
Quoting directly from the researcher's blog, the team says its work was supposed to be a "passive recon investigation," which quickly turned into "a rabbit hole deep dive into how commercial AI and federal government operations work together to violate our privacy every waking second."
"We didn’t even have to write or perform a single exploit, the entire architecture was just on the doorstep," claims the team.
"53 megabytes of unprotected source maps on a FedRAMP government endpoint, exposing the entire codebase of a platform that files Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN, compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs.
"2,456 source files containing the full TypeScript codebase," the blog continues. "Every permission, every API endpoint, every compliance rule, every screening algorithm. Sitting unauthenticated on the public internet. On a government platform no less."
Beyond the astonishing thought that such data could be accessed so easily, it certainly seems like Persona operates more deeply than anyone would reasonably expect. The researchers say that the full verification program performs 269 individual verification checks across 14 check types, including "SelfieSuspiciousEntityDetection".
"What makes a face 'suspicious?'", say the researchers. "The code doesn't say. The users aren't told."
What we're often told, however, is that age verification is in our best interests, in an effort to prevent children from watching harmful content. Still, it doesn't take a genius to realise that there's a whole lot more value in facial recognition data than simply verifying that someone's old enough to view adult material.
How much of this leak applies to Discord's earlier testing is unclear. However, it's an excellent example of why privacy advocates have been vocally uncomfortable with the idea of current digital age verification methods, and why you should be very, very picky about who you hand your data over to. If, let's be honest, anyone at all.
Developer: Red Company Publisher:Bullet Proof Software Release: 06/94 Genre: Action RPG In the US RPGs were few and far between during the 8-bit era. But by the midpoint of the 16-bit generation localizations were picking up. Both...
The post The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang appeared first on Classic-Games.net.
An advert released to promote Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has been banned after the UK's Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints that it "trivialised sexual violence" following an investigation.
Replaced, the highly-anticipated cyberpunk platformer from Sad Cat Studios, has been delayed.
Elden Ring Nightreign is a pretty sweet co-op game full of surprises. It also has one of the best original soundtracks of 2025, and that includes its Forsaken Hollows DLC. Sadly, we were barred from putting together the ultimate FromSoftware-made Soulslike playlist until the expansion's music was made officially available. Now, the wait is finally over.
Circan’s November 2025 video game sales report has easily been one of the most anticipated. For one, November is always one of the most lucrative for the games industry, but this year in particular has seen several major hits - including new entries in two rival series.
Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin would probably be quite surprised by how the world of Elden Ring - which he helped developer FromSoftware create a backstory for - actually turned out in the end.
43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
Elden Ring Director Hidetaka Miyazaki has revealed during an interview with Game Informer that much of the game world in the fantasy epic had evolved during development that collaborator George R.R. Martin would be surprised by how it turned out.
The Game of Thrones author helped craft the world and characters of Elden Ring during its planning stages, although these were largely shaped by FromSoftware’s narrative team. As such, Miyazaki-san feels that Martin would be surprised by some of the changes as they were quite significant compared to what was originally planned out.
The Dark Souls creator explained the reason for taking over is because “as a player walks through this world, […] they have a very fragmented understanding of the lore, the surroundings, and the type of monsters, whereas I don’t.” He added that it’s important Elden Ring’s biggest moments “aren’t lost,” which is achieved by bringing “the map and level design” together “to serve as a guide, to help players pick up more information and piece together what they think that world is.”
Publisher Bandai Nasco Entertainment announced in April last year that Elden Ring had reached 30 million shipments and digital sales globally, and in May 2025 received a spinoff in the form of Elden Ring: Nightreign. Elsewhere, a movie adaptation of the franchise is currently in the pipeline with Alex Garland set to direct, who revealed that he provided a 160-page draft script to gain Miyazaki’s approval to helm the film.
Elden Ring was released in February 2022 for PS5, PS4, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. You can read our full verdict on the game here.
[Source – Game Informer via GamesRadar]
The post Hidetaka Miyazaki Reckons George R.R. Martin Would Be Surprised How The World Of Elden Ring Evolved From Its Starting Point appeared first on PlayStation Universe.
Today the overwhelming majority of workers at Doom studio id Software – 165 of around 185 total employees – announced that they’re forming a wall-to-wall union in conjunction with Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union that’s aided thousands of game workers across Microsoft in organizing.
"id Software is historically important – one of the more famous American studios that survived a length of time that few others have,” id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was part of the organizing effort from the jump and filed the initial paperwork to CWA, told Aftermath. “So it feels really awesome to get this done for something with such historical and cultural importance."
Workers at id began organizing around a year and a half ago, but things kicked into high gear following Microsoft’s unceremonious closure of several Bethesda studios in 2024.
"With Bethesda unionizing, it was a push for people [at id] to start talking, and that's when it started,” id Software lead services programmer Chris Hays told Aftermath. “But then the big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people. People decided that it was time that we took our future into our own hands."
"The big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people."
id itself, Hays said, has suffered “a few” layoffs “here and there” in recent years, but nothing comparable to the scale of Zenimax Online Studios, which lost hundreds of employees earlier this year amid Microsoft’s latest round of mass layoffs and project cancellations. Now, he believes, is the time to secure workers’ rights – before the scythe swings, as opposed to after.
"Not that we're not scared that [layoffs] will one day come," said Hays. "In fact, avoiding each of the previous rounds has made us more anxious about if the next round will be us. And the most recent round of layoffs happened after several [studios] had already organized. People [at id] can see what it was that they got. We got to see them negotiating where they didn't actually lose their jobs [for a couple months]. They were still on payroll. They still had their health insurance. ... They had the extra time to make sure they could get their lives [in order], and many have actually gotten their jobs back through negotiations on where they could place people in the company."
CWA has been able to successfully unionize so many studios within Microsoft and Activision Blizzard in large part due to a legally binding neutrality agreement it struck with the company in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. That deal lapsed earlier this year, but according to Hays, only on the Activision Blizzard side of things.
"For us under Zenimax, there's actually a separate neutrality agreement, and that one is still valid until May [2026]," said Hays. "But that was definitely on our minds when we were looking at when we wanted to think that we had enough support [to unionize]. … We knew that it was really special for us to have the neutrality agreement, to have the freedom to be able to talk to each other more openly and not face the kind of pushback you would have in other unionization campaigns. We wanted to make sure that we took advantage of the benefit while we had it."
While the union plans to conduct a bargaining survey before members go to the table with Microsoft to hammer out a contract, preliminary discussions have focused on a few pillars: benefits, remote work, and AI.
"There's a lot of blind spots in our benefits, and a lot of us don't know what we have and what we don't and where things are lacking,” said Hays. “When talking with a lot of people, some would say 'Oh, I think we're lacking this particular kind of benefit, or something around child care.' Personally, I'm really motivated to get protections around remote work and responsible use of AI."
"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more.”
Remote work has been a sticking point at multiple Microsoft studios, with many issuing return-to-office mandates despite teams’ demonstrable success collaborating from across the country – and even the globe – in 2020 and 2021.
"We actually launched Doom Eternal during covid,” said Hays. “The month of [the launch], we started our work from home. ... We did a launch event, the whole internet fell apart, and we had to learn how to do all of that remote. And then starting a project [Doom: The Dark Ages] from the beginning, all remote, we learned a lot of lessons. On my team, we learned to change how we work, to be more remote friendly. We ended up becoming more productive as a result. So we've done this before. We've learned lessons, and I think we can continue to use that. We shouldn't just throw away all the great wins we got with remote work."
As for AI, Willis was cagey about precisely how it’s being used within id, noting that going into specifics would involve divulging secrets about proprietary tech. But he said that in his view, some of the current applications are “good,” while others are… less so.
"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more,” Willis said. “In what ways and how careful they're being about implementing it within the studio to actually benefit the creation of a better game or a more efficient process, I personally don't think that's being done in a careful enough way to have it be beneficial.”
Last year, the Zenimax QA union secured AI protections that commit the company to uses of AI that "augment human ingenuity and capacities ... without causing workers harm" and require that Zenimax provides notice to the union in cases where "AI implementation may impact the work of union members and to bargain those impacts upon request." Willis and Hays hope the new union can make something similar happen under id’s roof.
"We are going to be in a fortunate position in that we have a lot of other people who've gone through this,” said Hays, “so we can look at what they have bargained for, especially around AI, and take that as a starting place, which hopefully means that it's going to be easier for us than anyone before."
Microsoft’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – which continues despite a supposed ceasefire – is also potentially on the docket.
"It would be difficult to say [if we’ll make Israel a core bargaining issue] without seeing what the bargaining surveys comment on, but I can say for myself personally that, yeah, I want no part in [Israel's] usage of Microsoft tools and the deals between Israel and Microsoft," said Willis.
"The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience."
More broadly, Willis believes the union will allow for more input from developers, as opposed to execs who have never shipped a game and, indeed, might not play them at all.
"We see the direction the industry is headed,” said Willis. “The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience – not just from the management standpoint, but zero experience in actually making games. ... I find little evidence of them really enjoying games or playing games personally."
“I think the more video game studios that unionize, and the greater percentage of video game employees that are in a union, it's not just better for them as individuals or folks that are raising families or have mortgages; it keeps talent from shedding,” he added. “You get to keep people in the industry who have experience and the amount of game credits that allow them to do things and create games that a contract-only or much more volatile workforce simply couldn't.”
AftermathNathan Grayson
The emulator just got even more simplified, which will make it convenient to run games directly from the ISO files. ISO-Based Disc Loading Comes to RPCS3 Emulator, But Only Decrypted ISOs Are Supported The popular PlayStation 3 emulator, RPCS3, just got a big update. Usually, one would need to extract the contents of the game ISO files to allow RPCS3 to run the game, but the new update just eliminated this step. Contributor Functionable submitted the code, which removes a long-standing inconvenience for users who had to extract the disc images into folders to run the game. This might look […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rpcs3-adds-direct-iso-loading-for-ps3-disc-games/
OK, I'll admit it: I actually quite like the newly revealed Fallout crossover in Black Ops 7. I'm not proud of it, given my past criticisms of Call of Duty's bizarre, totally unrelated collabs. Sure, seeing Ella Purnell call in a UAV or The Ghoul wall-bouncing with a rocket launcher is jarring, but as a fan of Fallout (the games and the Amazon series) they're pretty cool skins. However, I'm not sure liking it is the same as supporting it. I think some elements work well here, but on the whole, seeing Pip-Boys and blue jumpsuits in Black Ops 7 before Season 1 has even wrapped does absolutely nothing to support CoD's mission to be more "authentic."
Read the full story on PCGamesN: While Black Ops 7's Fallout crossover looks the part, it does nothing but hurt CoD's quest to become more "authentic"
Seeing Battlefield 6 go from over 700,000 peak concurrent players on Steam to barely scraping past 100,000 is certainly something, especially as ARC Raiders’ popularity increases. But it’s still far better than Call of Duty, which hit nearly 53,000 concurrent players in the past 24 hours on the platform.
Why is that a problem? The Call of Duty App doesn’t just include Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which launched last year to underwhelming reviews due to its campaign. It also tracks Black Ops 6, Warzone, the Modern Warfare series, and much more. Keep in mind that these player counts follow Holiday discounts and even a free week. The sad part is that this isn’t even the lowest in the past week, as it reached 39,015 peak concurrent players on January 8th.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 topped last November’s US sales charts (even if Battlefield 6 emerged as the top-selling premium game of 2026). Engagement with the app on consoles in the region was also as strong as ever, only lagging behind Fortnite and eking out ahead of Grand Theft Auto 5.
Nevertheless, Activision has pivoted significantly by announcing that it would no longer release back-to-back Modern Warfare and Black Ops titles. “We will drive innovation that is meaningful, not incremental. While we aren’t sharing those plans today, we look forward to doing so when the time is right.” Its developers have apparently been building the “next era of Call of Duty,” and judging by the current release cycle, it may be Modern Warfare 4.
In the meantime, check out our review for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 here. We gave it a five out of ten for the multiplayer (despite netcode and hit registration issues), and Zombies (despite the overtly safe gameplay loop). The campaign is an utter disaster, but at least Treyarch released an update to let you skip it and go straight to Endgame.
The European Commission (EC) has opened a 'call for evidence' (via LWN.net) to inform the "European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy." In other words, it's looking for experts and relevant parties to help it figure out how to push towards open source software.
This has the SteamOS-loving and Linux-pining part of myself getting all excitable on a Friday afternoon, because any movement towards open source software can only mean more publicity and acceptance of, and potentially even funding in, open source projects in general, including Linux and its gaming-related off-shoots like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
According to the EC, the European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy it's looking to create will set out "a strategic approach to the open source sector in the EU that addresses the importance of open source as a crucial contribution to EU technological sovereignty, security and competitiveness".
"A strategic and operational framework to strengthen the use, development and reuse of open digital assets within the Commission, building on the results achieved under the 2020–2023 Commission Open Source Software Strategy."
Judging from the aforementioned Commission Open Source Software Strategy documentation, the main goals of this previous strategy was to have teams "build and extend a collection of solutions they can use to run digital government solutions", move the EU towards relying upon this open source software, and develop an internal culture oriented towards open source, as well as promote its adoption elsewhere in public offices.
In other words, it wasn't a limited push; the Commission seems to really want to lean into open source as much as it can. Which is fantastic, of course, and helps explain this recent call for evidence. To this end, it established the Open Source Program Office to oversee and help implement the push.
The recent call for evidence, however, seems to focus more specifically on solving the EU's reliance on foreign software: "The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users’ choice, hampers EU companies’ competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors."
You only have to look at the fines the EC dishes out to big tech firms to know where it stands on a lot of that.
Catch up with CES 2026: We're on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
The call for evidence is intended to figure out how to shape its strategy, taking input from the open source community, businesses, public experts, researchers, and more—essentially, anyone knowledgeable and relevant. It's nice and fitting to see that the EC is openly sourcing feedback to help inform its movement towards EU-first open source software.
The EC also wants to ensure the EU is going further in this direction than before. It points out that while it has "invested in open source and its communities, with good results" (for example, through the Next Generation Internet initiative and investing in RISC-V hardware and related open-source software stacks), "supporting open-source communities solely through research and innovation programmes is not sufficient."
All very good news for anyone with an interest in seeing Linux do well, of course, however indirect that path might be—any positive movement towards an open source philosophy can only help open source companies, movements, and products. And given the increasing interest in Linux in the PC gaming industry, mostly thanks to SteamOS, that will be increasingly relevant to us PC gamers moving forwards.
Which is a good thing, I think. Whenever I think about open source, I'm reminded of the discussions I had with various experts about age verification and digital ID in general. From the time I spent discussing and reflecting upon those technologies, the one thing I came out most certain of was that the most promising visions of the future is one where technologies are based on open standards.
Speaking of which, the EU has adopted an open source framework for age verification.
If we do end up handing our personal data off to verify our identities—an idea I think we should refrain from considering to be inevitable—wouldn't it be best if the codebases, zero-knowledge proof-based or otherwise, are available to be combed through by anyone? And heck, a general open source culture might even encourage us to think beyond solo providers for these services, perhaps considering blockchain-like approaches to such potentially ubiquitous systems.
But I'm getting way ahead of myself. First, we need more open source in general. So, good on you, EC, keep that ball rolling.
