The rough beast that is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has cracked its shell and slouched towards the wincing light of day. They've released it, I mean. No verdict from us yet: our reviewer is still picking their way among the exploding motorbikes and mocking spectres of deceased Nicaraguan terrorists. But I can at least tell you with some confidence that if you're a fan of pausing games or mid-mission checkpoints, you might want to give it a miss.

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I remember having a chat with my old barber last year about the Skate trailer. We weren't concerned with the popular gripes. We were just stoked to record new edits and re-enter the classic Skate flowstate on a new engine that would hopefully have more grounded physics. My barber happened to be the frontman of Syracuse straight-edge hardcore band All 4 All. This was a punk rock barbershop, and fittingly, we both shared a fixation on landing tricks in Skate 3 as sketchy as possible.

To land sketchy is to land imperfectly, to look as if not in control. The leather jacket-wearing, kitchen-tattooing pro skaters in Baker, Zero, and Emerica videos were famous for making sketchy look really cool in the early 00s. I no longer live in Syracuse, but I imagine my old barber (shout out Sam, hope you're well) is just as disappointed as I that the new Skate doesn't even allow players to land sketchy.

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Remember Brendan from Cyberpunk 2077? If the answer's no, I don't blame you. He's a talking vending machine you can run into and end up going off on a short series of side quests about, but I totally missed him in my fist couple of playthroughs. Anyway, spoiler alert, but that quest arc in the base game ends pretty tragically, something a modder's now changed via the addition of an extra bit which lets you pay to have the semi-sentient snack box installed in V's flat.

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The Steam Frame, a new VR headset Valve just announced alongside a new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, is both a simpler and more complex virtual reality kit than 2019’s Valve Index. While it lacks the Index’s fancy finger-tracking controllers, the hybrid headset can run Steam games straight from its own onboard storage, aided by controllers that adopt a more conventional gamepad (or Steam Deck)-style layout. The Frame’s goal, therefore, is to let its wearers play as many VR and> non-VR games as possible – with its ARM-based Snapdragon chip posing both challenges and opportunities to spread that compatibility into Android VR games as well.

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Tomb Raider developers Crystal Dynamics have announced another round of layoffs, their third round of jobs cuts this year. The studio say "just under 30 team members across various departments and projects" are losing their livelihoods, and claim this is necessary "to optimize the continued development of our flagship Tomb Raider game, as well as shaping the rest of the studio to make new games for the future".

This year alone had already seen Crystal Dynamics lay off staff in two waves, with 17 employees being let go in March and an unspecified number of others handed their marching orders in August.

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Back in December, the reveal of Sloclap’s Rematch sent me into spirals of introspection about the classist origins of my apathy for football. Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is sending me into spirals of introspection about the fact that maybe football was a Dragon Quest RPG all along. Hypersonic penalty kicks that wreathe the ball in purple fire? Nobody told me football was this rad. So many years wasted, playing effing grass hockey.

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