There was a guy at the gym who looked like if Gene Wolfe and Dr Robotnik had a baby, the baby grew up, and got really stacked

Welcome Ice-Pick Lodge to the Hooded Horse family! They're making Darkwood 2: a sequel to the unforgiving survival horror game originally created by Acid Wizard. We'll be publishing Darkwood 2 in consultation with the Acid Wizard team. Read more: store.steampowered.com/news/app/370...

Clearly the password they should have used is 0451

My wife and I have been together for 20 years. We spent the anniversary looking after vomitting children, frantically washing sick-covered bedding, and vomitting ourselves

Nothing like trying to do a review for a large-ish game while your daughter and then your wife are sick with a vomitting bug...on the other hand, who needs more than 4 hours' sleep anyway?

There is some especially potent lurgy wandering around this autumn. I've had two pretty nasty throat infections in the last 4 weeks (or possibly one that just never went away) and lost a kilogram. Hopefully that's the end of it

When you ask your mate, who is a networking expert, which router to buy and you get a lecture about different systems without any recommendations regarding what to actually get

There is a release date

One of my favourite things to do is get screamed at by middle-aged men. Here are Blood Incantation, Oranssi Pazuzu, and Sijjin screaming at the Albert Hall last night. Blood Incantation played the whole of the brilliant Absolute Elsewhere, plus a bunch of deeper cuts. It was all very enjoyable

Without Rebecca there would be no Fallout, amongst many other excellent things 🙏

Hey, look, I'm in this one with a review

Read an article about how AI might be like the dot com bubble. At the end it said it was written by AI and then checked and refined by a journalist. I can't work out if that's ironic, or depressing, or good productivity, or what

We have 007: First Light at home

My daughter's school awards points on an app for good behaviour. One half of me hates the gamefication and metricisation of everything, especially my children. The other half is imagining shoving other parents' faces into the app while screaming, "I am going to bury you underground"

Hot take: the golden age of TV drama is over; the golden age of TV science fiction has begun

One of the great things about listening to game soundtracks is that you will hear some amazing bit of composition, then you'll look up the title and it'll be called "Sewers" or "E3 Trailer Music"

If the Luddites were today, I wonder if they would have to put up with dozens of LinkedIn posts each day explaining how good and how terrible power looms are

Are you a game developer who, when faced with the prospect of making layoffs, found another way forward for their studio instead? If so, I'd love to speak to you for GamesIndustry.Biz. We're working on an article with the working title, 'You don't always have to make people redundant'. Get in touch!

Smart move to thoroughly ground Season 2 in the world building of the best "modern" Fallout game

Some of the best prose I've ever come across in a videogame, and some captivating world-building. Well deserved

OpenAI: ChatGPT-5 is PhD-level smart. Me, struggling to open a packet of crisps: yeah, that sounds about right.

Is Clair Obscur an allegory for the generations that laid their lives down in the World Wars? Someone "paints" a conscription order and an entire generation is written out of existence. (This thought prompted by Vasily Grossman's For a Just Cause)

I preferred it when they were called expansion packs, rather than DLC

In the gym. Someone is setting up their phone on a tripod. Didn't think this actually happened in real life, never mind in budget gyms...

Whoever is responsible for the fabric animations deserves a raise youtu.be/ybhy197kCUU?...

A wasp flying through your eye line during a video call with people you've never met before is one of the worst first world problems to have

Oooh, Neverwinter Nights 2 is finally on Steam, including Mask of the Betrayer! store.steampowered.com/app/2738630/...

The new Pocketmags app is amazing. Obviously I prefer the printed Edge, but at least the digital version is now a genuinely viable alternative

I'm back in Edge today with a review and a feature on the making of STALKER 2. I wrote this to work in complement with GSC's own War Game documentary, covering more of the design and engineering side. Enormous thanks to GSC Game World and the PR team for their candour and access to materials

There is always a lighthouse, there is always a man

In other news, I think it might be time to finally quit Dune: Awakening. I don't have the energy to grind for another ornithopter

I wrote a thing about Dune: Awakening for Eurogamer. TLDR: very faithful to the lore, but struggles with the themes and philosophy of the books. Huge thanks to the editors for giving me the space to, essentially, get my Dune nerd soapbox out.

Saw Nine Inch Nails on Tuesday. One of the best shows I've been to. Incredible sound quality, clever staging, and a set list full of hits, deep cuts, and interesting remixes. £45 for a t-shirt and £100 for a hoodie is daylight robbery though 😭

One thing I really appreciate about Dune: Awakening is the way the tips menu ties things back to the lore. Wait, Frank Herbert didn't have sandbikes, did he? That's just some videogame nonsense. Well, ack-tually, Dune explicitly refers to a "one-man groundcar"

"While exploring recent academic contributions, your work stood out to me as especially impactful" Mate, I've had literally 3 citations...

The joys of attempting to play an MMO in its first 24 hours...🙄 Even took a day off for this, like a mug

Alan Wake II crashing ceaselessly on my PC, apparently due to a GPU error (driver is up to date, nothing is overclocked, etc). Particularly galling given I have a 4080S - like I'm being punished for my graphical extravagance. Worse, apparently this is a well known issue that's been around for months

It's a new Thief game, which is almost as rare and precious as a Half-Life at this point (with all the Alyx parallels of doing a new installment in VR). But the font and footage suggest it's a successor to the extremely disappointing 2014 reboot... youtu.be/xrtbCcnZEhQ?...

If you're going to send a very friendly email about a vacancy to arrange an "informal chat", please don't then run the chat like it's a formal job interview. Not cool

So I'm looking to ramp up my freelance work after my hours for a client got slashed. 💀 I'm available for reviews, mock reviews and guides, as well as LGBTQ+ and HoH consultation. I'm an award-winning writer with experience in narrative design and PR. aimeehart.journoportfolio.com RTs appreciated.

All hail the God Emperor of Dune www.scientificamerican.com/article/46-0...

Since I am late to almost all the discourses, I can only conclude that I am not as chronically online as I think I am. Is that good or bad?

How much is motion sickness an issue for you with VR? 1 being almost nothing affects you and 4 being you need strong assists like teleport / regular breaks?

So I guess I now need to gather my friends and rewatch all of Andor and Rogue One back to back... how does one do this when one has children?

@limmy.com should be deployed in all gaming article thumbnails www.thegamer.com/oblivion-rem...

It's somehow taken more than 4 years but I've finally completed the parental rite of passage and stood on my kids' Lego

A few hours in now and maybe I don't like it after all. The survival and combat feel very bland and really get in the way of the world-building. E.g., the fact that Arrakis is swarming with tiny individual player-made bases feels either like some kind of Wild West prospecting or weird gentrification

I've only played a couple of hours, but I'm surprised to find myself really enjoying the Dune: Awakening beta. Even more surprised that, despite my scepticism going into it, so far I like what they've done with the lore. And the aesthetics are deftly placed somewhere between Lynch and Villeneuve

This is it. This is as good as spam emails get

Is there a way to block the YouTube feeds without signing out of YouTube? Tired of YouTube siphoning my time with braindead shorts, but need to stay signed in for age verification on things like 18+ trailers