Valve upgrade Steam's trailer player, and all it took was trawling through something like 400,000 videos

If you're the sort of person who likes to take in plenty of trailers when you're hunting for new stuff to play on Steam, Valve have just put out an update that should make doing so a bit more pleasant. The pipe-themed platform operators have casually gone through hundreds of thousands of videos as part of an effort to make Steam's trailer player easier to use and less likely to run into hitches as it shows you the video games.

To put it how Valve do in their news post about the changes, they've improved the player's "interface and streaming to help you browse more quickly". So, much like the Steam store revamp that's currently in beta, Mr Newell and co want you to be able to zip around at the speed of sound.

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Get this QD-OLED gaming monitor from Alienware for just $765 with a handy voucher vode

We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming monitors, and while the catchily-titled Alienware AW3225QF might not be on that list, it’s certainly rated very highly if you look around.

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Peak cannibalism is delivered by the co-op climber's latest patch

Well, after a prolonged period of teasing, Peak developers Aggro Crab and Landfall Games look to have bitten the human bullet. Nestled among the notes for the climbing game's latest patch are the words "added cannibalism".

It's not enough that you can mod Peak so that you and your buddies will be surrounded by the corpses of fallen climbers as you attempt to do an Edmund Hillary. The folks behind Another Crab's Treasure and Content Warning want you to casually nibble on your colleagues on the way.

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Oblivion Remastered mod delivers Tamrielic Teardown by letting you blow buildings to bits, with plans for full-blown house fighting

There are some mods that you need to read up on before you understand why you might want to give them a whirl. There are some mods with which that process can be accomplished via a single GIF. A new Oblivion Remastered work that makes it possible to hilariously reduce the contents of Cyrodiil's cities to chunks of flying rubble just by slapping buildings with spells is firmly in the latter camp.

Before you get too worried about the karmic balance of the modding wizard powerful enough to make this sort of wanton destruction possible, it's worth bearing in mind that they've previously given players the ability to build new homes any displaced citizens could probably move into.

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Good news, dorks - it is not too late to be a janky-ass wolf

The human world is a tedious place consisting of grocery trips, laundry and tax returns, so let's all go be janky-ass wolves. We shall coordinate to bring down elk amidst the engulfing winter snows of the Yellowstone Caldera, duel with cougars under starbound skies, and do adorable bellywiggles in what is possibly our own poop, though I'm not sure if the simulation covers the entire lupine digestive cycle. If that's not enticement enough, we can do some wolf sex and raise a litter of cubs together. We shall manage our cubs by means of leather spreadsheets that look like they were recently mauled by hungry, horny wolves.

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Killing Floor 3 review

Killing Floor 3 has an excellent headshot. It’s the kind of frisson-inducing gun/baddie interaction that most FPS games strive for and fail: somehow crisp and explosive at once, like popping a balloon full of wedding china. There’s a deliciously tangible sense that a metal cylinder has launched out of your hands at several times the speed of sound and shattered the entire existence of the snarling cannibal clone in front of you, a tactile treat that KF3’s waves of mutant men will happily feed you over and over again. Bloody good headshot, I say.

I just wish that, after hours and hours, this game would produce something else that excites as much as its dome-blasting. Or, at least, balances that instant gratification with more enduring reasons to keep tooling up and shipping out. Instead, it ends up coasting on gunfeel, and when asked for something new or something fresh, can only point towards pages of tedious stats.

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Microsoft begin rolling out Xbox account age verification checks in response to UK Online Safety Act

Microsoft have become the latest company to start introducing age verification measures in response to the the Online Safety Act that's just come into force in the UK. Folks logging into Xbox services with a Microsoft account from today will start getting optional notifications directing them to verify they're over 18, with the checks becoming a hard requirement in early 2026.

To be clear, these checks are UK-only for now, in line with this new legislation that aims to stop users who aren't verified as over 18 seeing content that's illegal or deemed unsuitable for children.

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Cyberpunk 2077 modder makes NPC cleanliness optional in order to avoid popular "non-sexy mods" being "hidden unnecessarily"

The Cyberpunk 2077 modder behind a bunch of the game's most popular romance mods is set to make NPC showering an optional extra in two of their works, with the hopes that these "non-sexy mods" will no longer be "hidden unnecessarily".

Their decision comes as a response to recent changes Nexus Mods have made regarding creations that're classed as "adult", something the modding site's done as a result of the Online Safety Act coming into force in the UK. The legislation's seen the likes of social media and porn sites also have to adopt new age verification checks before allowing users to access a range of content deemed unsuitable for children.

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A spidery new mech crawls onto the eternal battlefield of The Forever Winter

Dusty extract-o-shooter The Forever Winter got an update over the weekend that added another mech to the growing list of horrifying war machines that roam its post-apocalyptic world looking for fleshy idiots to squash and eat. "The StiltWalker is a multi-legged destruction machine: equipped with multiple missile and machinegun weapon systems," say the developers in an update post on Steam. Pfft. What's so scary about that? Just shoot some rockets at it.

"It is also equipped with a point defense system that can detonate explosive munitions that are fired at it from a distance."

Ah. Well. Nevertheless.

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This week in PC games: Hobbits, gigahorses, internet fixers, ninjas, hellships, junkbots and window cleaners

This week's big news is that Graham is leaving RPS. Graham, the rock upon which all of our bullshit is built. Graham, the last link to Treehouses gone by. We shall not see his like again. Expect supernatural calamities in keeping with such a terrible loss: rains of frogs, Atari reinventing Pong as a 100 hour gacha RPG, mass hysteria. Still, the wheel of releasing cranks on. Here's what's new in PC games this week.

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The Sunday Papers

What pressure! As I mentioned last week, this is my last ever Sunday Papers as I'm leaving Rock Paper Shotgun (and Gamer Network) this coming Wednesday. I'm not sure how to meaningfully summarise twelve years on this site or twenty years in the field, but after several aborted essays I rediscovered the columnist's crutch: bullet points.

You'll have to forgive the indulgence, because I present here just some of the values - and the personal taste, clearly - that I've tried to express through the site during my time here. Many of the values were instilled in me by my excellent colleagues (particularly the unimpeachable Alice O), and I only hope I lived by them more often than not.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Graham doesn’t want a big fuss about his last WAWAPTW, which is just as well, because I’m writing this at 4pm on a Friday and don’t have the energy to make one. Let’s save the goodbyes for a few days more, and in the meantime, simply share what we’re all playing this weekend.

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My best deals for PC gamers today include an Alienware x16 laptop and savings on premium keyboards and mice

Alienware’s Aurora mid‑range x16 laptop deal is the highlight today, coming in at the same price as the entry‑level model but with a stronger CPU. It’s effectively a free upgrade for anyone shopping smart. To round things out we’ve pulled together some of the best gaming keyboards and mice currently discounted and ready for headshots. Let's get into it.

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Indie gaming's only three genres have inevitably converged into grimdark Balatro with a whimsical egg idiot

Whimsy, grimdark, and gambling? And a roguelike to boot?! In my 2025 indie game? Eh, go on then. It looks neat. The trailer below features a desolate, hellish area called "The Pläins öf Päin" (umlauts mine) inhabited by lone egg idiot named 'eggo'. A curse on the egg idiot and his cracked shell, and a curse on the world for allowing this kind of tomfoolery to proliferate unchallenged.

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Ubisoft date Assassin's Creed Shadows New Game+ mode alongside plans to make its open world more convenient

Assassin's Creed Shadows will get a New Game+ mode on 29th July, Ubisoft have announced in a video about their summer plans for the feudal Japanese open world stab-me-do. They're also working on a free Assassin's Creed Shadows update that lets you fast-forward the time of day, an ability that would certainly serve me well right now, as I contemplate the seven grim hours of video game journalism that separate me from the weekend.

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My best deals for PC gamers today include massive discounts on Alienware gaming PCs and GPUs

Today’s deals cover a full range of Alienware desktops, with discounts across RTX 4060 Ti up to RTX 5090 configurations. The Aurora line gives you clean, efficient builds for 1080p and 1440p gaming, while the Area 51 range steps things up for 4K and heavier workloads. You’ll find variations with faster RAM, higher wattage PSUs, and better cooling depending on what you need.

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Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects

Thousands of creators today found their Itch.io projects missing from the online storefront - effectively delisted to anyone searching or browsing the site. Others still are reporting actual takedowns "with no notice", halted payouts, and those who have previously purchased their games being unable to download them.

Going by one image posted on the Itch Discord and shared on Bluesky by game developer Daffodil, filtering by the site's 'NSFW' category previously showed 28,114 results. It now shows 7,008.

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Brütal Legend goes free to grab as Double Fine pay tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, but you'll have be quick

Right, here we go, this is gonna have to be be quicker than the tempo of your average Motorhead thrashathon. Brütal Legend, the heavy metal action-adventure Double Fine put out on console back in 2009 (before coming to their senses and doing a PC port in 2013), is free to grab as I write this, but won't be for much longer.

Following the death of Black Sabbath frontman and general face of the metal Ozzy Osbourne earlier this week, the studio have decided to give out the game in which he talks to a roadie voiced by Jack Black for zilch. However, it's a deal that kicked off in the dead of the night UK time, and isn't set to run for much longer.

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My best deals for PC gamers today include up to $1,200 off Alienware laptops and the best GPU deals around

It looks like discounts are back on the menu (I need to watch the Lord of the Rings again). Alienware’s top-tier laptops are seeing price drops up to $1,200, with RTX 5090 and 4080 options going for less than you’d expect. Looking for a cracking desktop deal instead? The iBUYPOWER Element Pro is still one of the best 4K‑ready desktop deals around, and we’ve pulled in a couple of high-capacity Anker power banks for anyone lugging around their Steam Decks and ROG Allys (Allies?). On top of that, we’ve got some of the best GPU deals going right now — including PNY’s 5060 Ti and other fresh drops still in stock. Let's get into it:

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League Of Legends fighting spin-off 2XKO dangles Vi in front of fans alongside a closed beta

Riot's spin-off fighting game with the terrible name, 2XKO, is getting a closed beta in a few months and, to entice fans to sign up, the developers have released a new video showing off pink-haired League Of Legends bruiser Vi doing some biffing. I know you like biffing, so I'm telling you about this despite being unable to reliably write the title of this free-to-play wrecker without carefully typing it out like my mum composing an email with a single forefinger.

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ZeniMax staff discuss Microsoft's "inhumane" mass layoffs and how the future looks for the "carcass of workers that remains"

A new report delves into the behind-the-scenes chaos caused at Elder Scrolls Online studio ZeniMax by Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this month. Staff say the manner in which the corp let go of around 9k staff was "inhumane" and has left those who remain facing an incredibly tough future.

An unannounced MMO in development at ZeniMax, codenamed Project Blackbird, was one of the games cancelled by Microsoft as part of the corporate bloodletting, with Rare's Everwild and The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot also being canned. Just last week, the ZeniMax Online Studios United (ZOSU) union said they're still fighting on behalf of workers at the studio left in limbo by Blackbird's cancellation.

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Splitgate 2 devs 1047 Games lay off more staff as the shooter heads "back to beta", eyeing a 2026 rerelease

Splitgate 2 is being taken "back to beta" by developers 1047 Games, who say it "launched too early" and are now planning to rerelease it next year. The move has reportedly seen the studio lay off 45 workers, and they've confirmed that the original Splitgate's servers will be shutting down in a month's time.

The news comes following a mixed launch reception for the portal-filled shooter, which likely wasn't helped by studio CEO Ian Proulx controversially announcing that it was going live while wearing a MAGA-style “Make FPS Great Again” hat on stage at Summer Game Fest. The exec subsequently apologised for that boneheaded publicity stunt.

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Campaign asking EU to stop publishers "destroying" online games hit by anonymous transparency complaint

The Stop Destroying Videogames citizens' initiative, the EU petition that's part of the Stop Killing Games campaign, has had an anonymous transparency complaint filed against it.

That's according to Ross Scott, the YouTuber who's become the figurehead of Stop Killing Games, which in case you're out of the loop aims to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable when official support ends. Instead, the movement wants companies to be required to put concrete end-of-life plans in place if they elect to do things like turn servers off.

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Scientifically funny survive 'em up Abiotic Factor is hitting version 1.0 today, and your pets are in danger

What is the half-life of comedy? WRONG. Comedy is a vibe, not a substance, you buffoon. I know this because I am a man of science. I have played survival crafting game Abiotic Factor for an unspecified number of hours, and have learned many things. Most recently, I learned that the developers are releasing it from early access peer review today, but the shiny version 1.0 comes with a few notes scribbled hastily in the margins. If you already have a save file and don't want to lose any pet mutants you've trained, you might want to read on.

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Greedfall 2 studio Spiders set for layoffs that'll affect "most" of their animators and riggers, dev claims

Greedfall 2 developers Spiders are going ahead with a layoff plan that'll see "most" of their animating and rigging team affected, according to a post from a lead animator at the Nacon-owned studio.

This LinkedIn post by Erwan Perrin, whose profile cites him as having been a permanent Spiders staffer since 2021, has been reposted by at least four other workers at the the studio.

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This week in PC games: Wuchang, Killing Floor 3, open world spirit biking and some eerie glyph puzzles

Sometimes our patron news deity the Maw opens beneath my feet like a toothy sinkhole, and sometimes it leaps up and slobbers all over my face like an exhilarated labradoodle after a weekend at the kennels.

Down boy! Down, you ridiculous creature! Stop putting your tentacles in my ear. Who wanna biscuit? Do you wanna biscuit? Well, you can't have a biscuit - the only things I have to offer are new PC games. Here's what's coming down the chute this week.

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The current developers of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 are going "fully" indie again

A few of the UK's fanciest former indie developers are going indie again... with help from venture capital. Still Wakes The Deep and Dear Esther creators The Chinese Room have slipped the surly bonds of former parent company Sumo Digital in the course of a management buyout, with "facilitation" from Hiro Capital. Now "fully independent", they're focussing on the creation of original games, with two unannounced projects in the offing once they've finished developing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

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Scrapped Evolve sequel revealed by concept art, including an asteroid mining station straight of Dead Space

Turtle Rock's Evolve was, for me, an almost-brilliant asymmetrical shooter straining to extract itself from the jaws of a live service kaiju maddened by a sludgy diet of unlocks and micro-transactions. It was a huge round of hide-and-seek featuring one, very large and fast, upgradeable alien monster and four hunters equipped with jet packs, trackers, forcefield nets and assorted demolition gear. I had a grand old time at launch as the Wraith, a godawful sneaklizard with warping capabilities, like a xenomorph moonlighting as Corvo Attano. But such thrills were sabotaged by the grindiness of the early game and by an infuriating deluge of paid DLC. Publishers 2K Games delisted it in 2018, after attempting to reboot Evolve as a free-to-play game. The beast clings onto a little life care of a community Discord for existing owners.

Even given the reaction to Evolve's nickel-and-diming, it seems unlikely a sequel would have stripped out the live service progression elements and reverted to something like the menu-light horror movie sandbox approach of the developer's previous Left 4 Dead. After all, Turtle Rock went onto make Back 4 Blood, a zombie blaster marinated in grindogubbins. Still, I'd have liked to see them try it. And look, they almost did.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for counting the days. If you haven't heard: I'm leaving RPS on July 31st, bringing my 12 years with the site to an end (and 8 years spent with Gamer Network websites more broadly). This isn't like in 2021 either, when I nominally departed but continued to support the site from the management side and by writing evening news posts. This time is me gone for realsies. I have plenty of thoughts, more than I can reasonably fit in one post or a hundred. So: links? Links.

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Warframe’s 2025 end of year update is all about The Old Peace, as hallucinated via communal Matrix bath

Warframe scares me a bit. Ok, it scares me a lot. Here's this big free-to-play MMO that's been growing for over a decade, adding layers upon layers of complex sci-fi lore and context to its imposing metal form.

I couldn't tell you before googling it why one of my fellow article writers had declared in the chat for a recent press preview that Excalibur Prime users won't be spared when the revolution comes. I can tell you that its end of year 2025 update is called The Old Peace, and looks like it'll be a hoot.

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Soulframe’s getting a bear quest, and its devs want you to keep bearing with them as you wait for it to emerge from alpha

Fantasy MMORPG Soulframe remains nestled away in its closed alpha form as this year’s TennoCon arrives. Despite plans to open that beta’s doors to a bunch more folks over the course of this weekend, developers Digital Extremes are keen to keep Warframe's cottagecore sibling closed off for at least a bit longer.

The good news is that they have a bunch of new stuff they’re planning to unleash into fantasy land soon, as they continue to build a strong fairytale-infused foundation for the tale of the natural world clashing with technologically-advanced invaders.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Do you hear that? That is the sound of Saturday morning, sludging heavily over your head like a bucket of gunge in a 1990s children's game show. Don't let that sweet weekend slime slip through your fingers. It's time to fire up the graphical processifying machinery, or what many are calling the "personal computer", and play some games. Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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Deals for today: iBUYPOWER Element Pro RTX 9070XT gaming PC Drops to $1,499

$1,499.00

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Valve are now removing a bunch of sex games from Steam to keep banks and card companies happy

Valve have begun removing a variety of sex games from Steam in line with their recent updating of the platform's rules and regulations to allow banks and credit card companies to essentially forbid certain kinds of "adult content". In a statement to RPS, a company representative confirmed that games are being delisted as a result of the rules change, adding that the developers in question are being given Steam app credits as compensation. The alternative, Valve suggest, is that banks and card companies might pull the plug on all transactions, and users in general would lose the ability to buy stuff on Steam.

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The Dark Queen Of Mortholme is a reverse Elden Ring where you play the final boss

FromSoftware's RPGs have done much to explore the cycle of death and resurrection that games have historically taken for granted, but ask comparatively few questions on how the bosses feel about all this. What of the growing psychological weariness that comes from having to swat the same quixotic gnat over and over? What of the despair that grows from realising that, in the eternal battle between godly power and free resurrections 4 life, resurrections will always win out on a long enough timeline. Broken meta. Plz fix. My crumbling empire and poetically exposed eterna-hubris cannot take any more.

What I'm saying is, when people talk about Dark Souls being about "overcoming adversity", they are lying to themselves. Dark Souls is about being a tiny little cheater running face first into a wall until your head is so used to the shape of the bricks that they simply have no effect on your fat, dumb skull. Dark Souls is about using an unfair advantage to torture gods who are much better than you at everything.

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R.I.P Total War: Warhammer's arse ladders (2016-2025)

"When our fathers stood against the Persians," spake Greek statesman and general Pericles, "they had no such resources as we have now". Time, of course, muddies the clear waters of specifics, but I'm basically sure he was talking about the ability for each of his men to keep a thirty foot ladder snuggled safely away in their rectal passage just in case they encountered any massive walls.

Which is probably where Total War got the idea from. Since launch, The Total War: Warhammer series has given each troop, from the lowliest Chaos Chosen to the bravest and most beautiful ratman, the ability to magic a ladder from nowhere during sieges. There's a mod for Total War: Warhammer 3 that removes them, but now the end of arse ladders is getting official support, including tweaks to hopefully teach the AI how to behave without them.

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Avowed's summer update revamps fighter and ranger skills so those pesky wizards aren't having all the fun

I liked Avowed, and having read through the notes for its summer update, patch 1.5, I reckon I'll like it even more whenever I next decide to don the persona of a trickshotting Envoy.

This patch is the second of three seasonal updates Obsidian outlined that the game'd be getting over the course of this year. It's brought a substantial rework of fighter and ranger skills, some extra unique weapons for you to get your mitts on, Steam Deck verification, plus a bunch of other tweaks and fixes.

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I just discovered a Dwarf Fortress cave diving roguelite

We are straining Rock Paper Shotgun's innovative "News To Me, Anyway" subcategory to breaking point with Anoxic Depths: Caves Of The Yendori, a turn-based spelunking roguelite from Studio Tectorum. The scurvy bean-counters among you might protest that it came out 10 years ago, possibly before some of you were old enough to read, operate video games, or count beans. To you scurvy bean-counters I would say: if you're going to be so picky about details, how about you help me remember which way is up, because I am stuck in an underwater cave.

I have maybe 12 breaths left in my oxygen cylinder, and all I can see is rock texture. The ladder to the surface could be a foot away or 20. Soon, my body shall join those of the divers who came before. Ye gods, I love being this confused in video games.

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I'm travelling this week, and I wish I'd ordered one of these power banks for my Steam Deck

One of the best things about my job is that I get to fly around the world and go to events, and while I’m off to Warframe’s TennoCon this week (and very excited about it) there’s always a bit of a panic about what to pack to keep oneself sane on a long flight.

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Finally, a game about a boy who thinks he's a tomb searching for a dead body to bury inside of him

The first thing that happened to me in the demo for The Little Tomb: The Maholova Club And The Search For A Dead Body was a stuffed horse on a spring telling me it knew when and how I'd die. Many such horses. You play as Kofun, a boy shaped like a keyhole tomb who is also sort of an actual keyhole tomb but also a boy who wants to fulfill his destiny as a keyhole tomb, namely by finding a dead body to bury inside of himself. He lives in a park with his mate Haniwa, who is a Haniwa. Haniwa's secret is that he's very good at calligraphy. Here's some visual orientation in case you're not caught up yet.

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European Parliament vice president throws his support behind Stop Killing Games campaign

One of the European Parliament's vice presidents has voiced his support for the Stop Killing Games campaign, and said he's signed the group's petition to the European Commission to stop publishers rendering online games unplayable by shutting down their servers.

The petition surpassed a million signatures recently, though there are concerns that some of the signatories are fake. It has received some pushback from bodies representing game publishers, so it's no surprise the organisers have welcomed an endorsement from Nicolae Ștefănuță.

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Elden Ring Nightreign's inevitable randomiser mod is here to spice up your runs with extra funky map scrambling

It's time. Elden Ring Nightreign's gotten a randomiser mod, just in case the base game isn't quite maxing out your unexpected chaos-per-run meter at this point, despite its revamped bosses.

While FromSoft's roguelike-ish twist on the established souls formula already switches things up in a manner that's a bit like a randomiser mod makeover of one of the series' traditional entries, modder thefifthmatt has still found ways to tinker with it.

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Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition gets an August release date, with a chunky discount for Anniversary owners

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is out August 14th, with a 30% discount off the $30 label price for owners of the Anniversary Edition. That discount applies to both Steam and GOG, and will be available for the "foreseeable future" (Fateweaver noises). Other currencies aren't listed.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

You wouldn't believe how close I was to forgetting to poll everyone today for Playing This Weekend. In fairness, no one reminded me or sent me their paragraphs. What, so it's my responsibility to remind everyone to remind me? F'gawdsake.

Anyway, right on time as usual, here are the games we're clicking on this weekend!

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Don't miss these last chance deals on Steam Deck docks before Prime Day 2025 ends

Amazon’s dropped a ton of Prime Day deals on Steam Deck docks, but today is the last day to grab these exclusive discounts. Most of these are 20% to 45% off, with solid options for everything from budget setups to full desktop replacements. If you’re not a Prime member, Amazon’s offering a 30-day free trial so you can grab these deals without spending extra. Just sign up, check out, and cancel if you want. No pressure, just cheaper docks for today only.

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Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 drops in full today, so of course a modder already has Mary Poppins poppin' kickflips

It's time to get totally radical, dudefolks. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, the latest nostalgia-fest about avian athletes artfully acing acrobatic boardiness, drops in full today, July 11th. Though, thanks to pre-order early access meaning the game sort of released three days ago, its modding community is already off and running.

If you've spent the past few months watching old X Games reruns and thinking to yourself that all the shreddage might be better if Bob Burnqvist were an Edwardian nanny, a train chaser, or a gabagool enthusiast, I've got some good news.

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Total War: Warhammer 3 gets the best bad news yet about future updates

Tides Of Torment, the next DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3, has been pushed back from its original Summer release window to later in the year, with September onwards sounding the likeliest from a new blog post.

And that's…honestly where the bad news ends, as far as I'm concerned. The rest of the blog is filled with some exciting and pretty respectable thoughts about future updates. Even the reason for Tides Of Torment's delay ("the short answer was no", it didn't hit the team's standards) strikes me as a good sign, since it means the DLC team at least feel they've got the breathing room to not rush out something they're not happy with. It's too nice outside for my PC to be running the kind of temps 1000 angry sea elves are going to result in, anyway.

Ah, yes: Sea Elves are confirmed now, led by Sea Lord Aislinn. Expect more details from a new video in August, by the sound of it.

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Fancy snooping around The Witcher 3 palace from Blood and Wine? Well, this mod gives it a book-accurate interior

It's been years, Gerry from the Riviera, but you can finally stop knocking on a certain Duchess' door in the hopes she'll let you see whether some Elven staircases are as spirally as you remember. A Witcher 3 modder has used REDKit to open those doors and had a crack at making a lore-accurate interior for Beauclair Palace, the posh setting of the fantasy game's Blood and Wine expansion.

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The video game voice actor strike is over, with new AI agreements reached over 'digital replicas'

Following a "tentative agreement" reached last month between video game voice actors represented by union SAG-AFTRA and companies including Activision, Insomniac, and EA, the 11-month strike is now over. A new contract has been approved, "effective immediately". with 95% of participating union members voting in favour, with 5% opposed.

The terms of the Interactive Media Agreement include increased performer compensation, including overtime rates, and "guardrails" against AI - "including consent and disclosure requirements for A.I. digital replica use and the ability for performers to suspend consent for the generation of new material during a strike".

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Space Scum is a sci-fi strategy RPG take on Battle Brothers

I did scan strategy RPG Space Scum's trailer a few times for the hint of a feature that didn't make me immediately think, ah yeah, that's just like Battle Brothers innit. This is a bit unfair of me. After all, your dudes sit on chess piece-like plinths in this one. That's innovation, right? Anyway, I like the art and the bloke from the trailer looks like he'd nut me if I dwelled on the comparison too long. With someone else's face. So, here's a trailer. There's also a Steam demo from next month, although you can sign up for a playtest now.

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