Following Microsoft's $7.5bn acquisition of ZeniMax Media - the parent company of Bethesda, id Software, Arkane Studios, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks and more - back in September, many were eager to learn how competing platforms would be impacted. Now Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart has offered additional clues on Microsoft's future strategy, suggesting Bethesda's games will be "either first or better or best" on its platforms.

Speaking at the Jefferies Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference (as transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Stuart offered assurances that Microsoft has no intention of "just pulling all of Bethesda content out of Sony or Nintendo or otherwise". Instead, he explained, "When we think about Bethesda, [we'll] continue to sell their games on the platforms that they exist today, and we'll determine what that looks over time and will change over time. I'm not making any announcements about exclusivity or something like that. But that model will change."

As to how that may change, Stuart suggested Microsoft would "want that content, in the long run, to be either first or better or best or pick your differentiated experience, on our platforms."

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Look, I know there's been some big news about Mass Effect recently, but you're going to have to wait a while for that remaster and new game anyway - so why not try out this Fallout 4 mod with voice acting by Commander Shepard in the meantime? Oh, and it's also pretty great if you're into your Fallout lore.

Made by a group of modders including members of YouTube channel ShoddyCast, Fallout: Brotherhood is an "interactive movie mod" for PC and Xbox telling the origin story of Fallout's famous Brotherhood of Steel faction. Released at the end of October, the mod stars voice actor Mark Meer (male Shepard in Mass Effect) as Roger Maxson, military man and first high elder of the Brotherhood of Steel. The story is set in pre-war America and explores the origins of the Brotherhood in the Mariposa Rebellion, and reveals the horrific results of the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV) tests that prompted Maxson to rebel. There's even an introductory trailer to set the scene, which explains how the narrator acquired all his information.

Of course, with a description like that I couldn't just leave it there - so I downloaded the mod to have a poke around, and got in touch with some of the modding team behind the project.

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I still can't quite believe it's now been a decade since the release of Fallout: New Vegas, but yesterday Obsidian's much-beloved RPG turned 10, and Fallout fans (including ourselves) took a moment to look back and remember why the title was so great. One mod team decided to mark the occasion in particularly spectacular fashion by releasing a new trailer to show off progress so far. And I have to say, it really does look excellent.

Fallout 4: New Vegas, as the name may suggest, is a mod project seeking to remake Fallout: New Vegas in the Fallout 4 Creation Engine on PC. The team has been working on the mod for some time, having initially shared gameplay footage back in 2018, but the new trailer gives us a better idea of what the Mojave will look like when complete. There's also a lot of shooting. I think I spotted a bit of famous beginner area Quarry Junction in there - I can't wait to head in as soon as the mod becomes available.

Speaking of which, while it looks like significant progress has been made on the mod, there is still no set release date. "Progress is not linear, and we'd rather release the best possible F4NV, not a 'good enough' F4NV," the team explained in a FAQ section on Discord.

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Glitch speedruns can provide incredible insights into the way games are made - and more importantly, how they can be broken. Awesome Games Done Quick, the speedrunning charity event, is in full swing this week - and one of the most amusing runs I've seen so far is by the ever-entertaining speedrunner tomatoangus, best known for his Fallout anthology runs - including sex% speedruns. Yes, you read that correctly.

Having recently changed his name from tomatoanus to the more family-friendly tomatoangus ("the g is silent," he says), yesterday tomatoangus took the floor to show everyone his Fallout anthology speedrunning skills. Although he ran overtime, finishing at 2:16:21 instead of the 2:05:00 estimate (thanks in part to missing the Radaway right in front of him), the run was incredibly entertaining and informative - with tomatoangus sprinkling in fun facts to keep viewers engaged. This is a hole you'll want to go down.

One of the biggest revelations for me (aside from learning you can push Liam Neeson into dialogue triggers with a Nuka-Cola truck) was that Fallout New Vegas' end slides aren't actually a cutscene: instead, the player is placed in a small room facing a projector screen. After enabling player controls in the command console, tomatoangus walked behind this to display Ron the Narrator standing behind the slides, talking through the script. "You can kill him and drag him off, but then he just slides in from the other side - he doesn't want to leave," tomatoangus said. Now that is dedication to the job.

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Last year, I wrote one of my favourite articles of all time: a news piece on speedrunner tomatoanus, who'd set a particularly unusual record. He'd managed to set a "sex%" world record in the Fallout series - an unofficial speedrunning category involving having sex in each of the main games as fast as possible. (He's also done an equally impressive Fallout series world record speedrun).

In any case, that unusual username has become a bit of an issue when trying to register for charity speedrunning event Games Done Quick, with the organisers (understandably) taking issue with the "anus" in his username. I guess it wasn't wholesome enough for the family-friendly event. Or rather, too holesome.

According to tomatoanus' statement, GDQ had refused to list his name in three of the six previous events in which he had submitted runs. After contacting the organisers, a compromise was reached: tomatoanus could change his name to tomatoangus, and his submissions would be publicly listed.

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"One of my boring, pointless hobbies is making lists, recently these lists have been timelines," Connor Rawlings begins a reddit post by stating.

"Thus I present perhaps the most in-depth timeline of the whole canon Fallout series."

That's a huge claim, but one which - somewhat incredibly - seems to be true.

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Sex. Speedrunning. Not two things you expect to hear in the same sentence - and yet here I am, writing an article about it.

Speedrunner tomatoanus, who you may remember from his world record Fallout anthology speedrun (and his rather colourful username), has returned with yet another wacky video. Not content with whizzing through Fallout 1, 2, 3, New Vegas and 4 in under 90 minutes, tomatoanus' latest speedrun is all about sex. Specifically, getting it as fast as possible. Like a night out in Magaluf.

Similar to his other world record speedruns, tomatoanus played through the games considered by the community to be the "main" titles in the Fallout series, with the goal being to have sex in each game as quickly as possible. This apparently has its own unofficial category, called a "sex%" run, and has already been attempted by a number of speedrunners in Fallout 4 (check out these ones by Jinjenia and Duchys).

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There's been plenty of negativity surrounding the Fallout series as of late - so today it's time to focus on something rather more hopeful. Following in the footsteps of other remake mods like Fallout New California, one modding team is using Fallout 4 to give Fallout 2 a rad-ical makeover.

Fallout 4: Project Arroyo, named after the tribal village in Fallout 2, was publicly announced on Reddit back in December. Some commenters were sceptical as to whether the project would get off the ground - but earlier today the team shared more information and several screenshots to give us our first look.

"Fallout 2 became my favourite Fallout game when I began playing it," team member DoctWhite stated on Reddit. "The branching questlines, dynamic stories, and the immersive universe all called my name, however there was one problem for me. That is the game's isometric and outdated gameplay.

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Barren wastelands. Decrepit and abandoned towns. Desolate landscapes ravaged by time and trauma. Recognisable landmarks slowly but surely reclaimed by nature after our demise. Games have consistently embraced the post-apocalyptic setting. It invites excitement, apprehension and a deep curiosity, and plays on the thought-provoking hypothetical, the 'what if?'. And when these post-apocalyptic environments and landscapes are incredibly detailed, they can result in great efficacy and power.

Of course, all games use artistic license to a degree to ensure their pacing, setting and characters are primed for our experience and, as a result we give them a healthy amount of leeway when it comes to their landscapes. But just how much artistic license is an interesting area to investigate. Have the developers ruthlessly stuck to an accepted setting or set of circumstances? Or have they created their own unique setting from scratch? Or, have they landed somewhere in the middle? Overall, how 'accurate' is the representation of their chosen hypothetical landscape?

Games' post-apocalypses give us a window into what might happen should everything go down the tubes for humanity, but also the earth. There are people who are experts or who have written about such scenarios, and one of them is writer Alan Weisman. Some fans of The Last of Us may know his book, The World Without Us, which helped inspire Naughty Dog and its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic, or human-less, USA. His book details how the world would change immediately after a sudden disappearance or decrease in human intervention.

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"Come on. Lighten up. Have a whiff."

It's late into Cyberpunk 2077's demo when Dum-Dum extends a claw toward V, offering a hit from a skull-adorned inhaler. Perhaps sensing the veiled hostility behind the supposed peace pipe being thrust under her nose, she obliges. Arachnid eye implants shine through a red haze. Dum-Dum takes his own hit, and flared nerves settle. Between all the talk of cred chips and bots, the tension that fuels this choice stems from a ritual as old as time. Breaking bread. Chinking cups. Passing the proverbial Dutchie to the left.

Adult games, as a medium, are often enamoured with their own portrayal of taboo subjects, but there's a streak of silently judgemental conservatism dulling the libertine sheen. By confining their use to grim settings, these stories condemn altered states of consciousness as the territory of society's dregs. At the same time, they're perfectly happy to hijack their aesthetics when it suits. Unexamined praise can be as useless as uninformed panic, of course, but let's be clear here: games are, for the most part, shit at doing drugs properly. Here's a brief history of drug use in games.

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