2026

Remember Chort? He’s a sub-boss in one of Final Fantasy 14’s newest dungeons—a magnificent large-and-in-charge lad who rolls up into a ball and charges around the arena like a giant, fleshy Sonic the Hedgehog. I couldn’t stop laughing the first time I fought him, and I wasn’t the only person to immediately fall in love…

In a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, prolific actor J.K. Simmons dove into his relationship with the games he’s acted in. While not much of a gamer himself, the script for Portal 2 (where Simmons voiced Aperture founder Cave Johnson) seems to have left its mark on the actor. “Tom Britney from…

Like it or loathe it—and for the record, I am firmly in the latter camp–generative AI has continued to seep into every aspect of game development. What felt like the odd shovelware AI thumbnail here or generated texture there has transformed into “developers” parading around entirely vibe-coded videogames as if it’s something to be celebrated,…

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, a game with a title that feels like it ought to have a colon or an em dash somewhere in there, is finally here and it’s selling like whatever the nautical equivalent of hotcakes is. Hardtack, I guess. Not only did it sell 2 million copies in a single day,…

A vulnerability in Meccha Chameleon, which has already been patched, allowed multiple Steam Workshop maps to distribute malware to players. As a post on Medium from user Feint discussed (via Kotaku), “A couple of my friends reported seeing a command prompt window briefly appear while Steam was downloading a custom workshop map … What I…

Disk Cleanup (Image credit: Future) Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?” Raphaël Colantonio became a PC gamer for…

I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents’ laptop as a young’un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive. The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at…

If you feel like you don’t read enough books—which is entirely possible with the many other distractions clamouring for our collective attention—there are various ways to boost your literary consumption. Pick a book that really excites you, rather than something you feel you should read. Choose something short that you’re less likely to get bogged…

One aspect of Helldivers 2 I’ve repeatedly lamented is how many of its new toys are locked away inside Warbonds, with too few new weapons, equipment and stratagems unlockable through regular play. Hence, it’s worth giving Arrowhead credit when they do let you unlock a new toy through spending requisition slips and nothing else. Such…