November digs in. The conveyor belt of crowns, clowns and clones that is Videogaming rattles onward through the midnight forest. The rains swept past over the weekend and now the mud is waist-deep, worryingly responsive, and rank with the stench of neglected deckbuilders. Several sedan chairs carrying former BioWare creative leads are caught in a wave of slop, becoming a disorderly barricade of people crying out for Femshep to come save them from the GAAS. Tencent executives rush over with handfuls of rope, but whether they mean to drag the afflicted free or bind their limbs is unclear.

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It is strange to imagine – I thought as I battled a giant vomit-spewing plant monster in a hallucination induced by a biological weapon – that Call of Duty was once, at least notionally, about the human cost of war. That was a long time ago, admittedly. There are full grown adults who have never experienced CoD's original idea that you played an ordinary soldier snarled up in a terrifying post-industrial war machine. But I don't think the series has ever been further away from that concept than in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's hideous mess of a campaign.

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Ubisoft's UK publishing arm have filed a strategic report for the year ending March 2025 in which they warn that they expect yearly revenue to fall in the current fiscal year, ending March 2026. They attribute this partly to slumping sales of physical copies of games, and more broadly to the fact that people are fixating on a fistful of mega-popular games at the expense of all others, with subscription and streaming services like Microsoft's Game Pass making us all feel less inclined to buy individual new games. Plus ça change.

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Sundays are for remembering how to write on paper. I used to fill A4 notepads with scribbles as an undergrad but the habit has gradually fallen away, as I've sunk into the endlessly editable quagmire of online journalism. I've got a nice thick biro with Blue Prince press event branding, and a fresh moleskin notepad I got from a magazine subscription. I'm writing a story about spiders. It's heaven, though I do occasionally get the shakes for not being able to open a browser tab and read a random bunch of articles, like these ones.

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I think Horizon Zero Dawn was much more of a turning point for Sony than most people really discuss. The argument for PlayStation used to be its exclusives, those tentpole games like Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, LittleBigPlanet, the list does go on but you get the point. On the PS5, completely original first-party games feel few and far between, as Sony has joined in on the whole intellectual property above all else train that every other company has hopped aboard. So hearing Guerilla Games' studio director Jan-Bart van Beek say the Horizon series was always thought about as a multiplayer game feels like the last piece of the puzzle has been inserted.

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Saturdays are for lounging, half-dressed, half-washed, chair tilted back (or better yet, bed unrisen from), staring blearily up at a lovely array of pixels moving about at the command of a pair of thumbs on thumbsticks. Sadly, I'll be moving house instead, but at least I can read the comments section below and live vicariously through all of you, you half-dressed, half-washed bastards.

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