The screen’s gone black. There’s a little loading bar in the top right hand corner, and occasionally the darkness gives way to momentary visions of a chrome body shell floating in limbo, accompanied by a low robotic whirr.

I’ve overcooked it, just a little bit.

Suddenly my view of the car comes back. It’s jiggling about, blurrily textured as though it’s travelling at the speed of light, between an empty void of sky and a featureless brown-ish disc. My futuristic phone rings.

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Back when Matt Nava was art director for glistering mountain pilgrimage Journey, he and his colleagues at thatgamescompany took a research expedition to California's Pismo beach, a swathe of desert that rolls right up to the Pacific Ocean. The spectacle of land and ocean overlapping did a number on Nava. "It looks like the dunes of the Sahara, you know, these massive sand dunes," he tells me. "But it's a beach, and so the ocean is right there. And it's amazing visually, because you have the waves of the ocean, and you have these sand dunes, which are wave shapes, and it's so easy to imagine them moving just like the ocean."

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If there’s one thing we’re thankful for in 2025, it’s the emergence of handheld gaming PCs. For those of us with less time to kill than we used to have, or just stuck on ungodly commutes, being able to fire up a huge chunk of a Steam library while on the go almost feels like it shouldn’t be possible without some sort of ‘monkey paw’ recompense but here we are.

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Now $349.99 (Was $389.95)

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For the first time in its two-and-a-bit years on this Earth, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has a new class of Imperial bastard to bop ‘eretics with. The Adeptus Arbites are – in direct contrast to the frazzled convicts you normally play as – shiny-helmeted space cops, and the fact that they cost a tenner to unlock has done little to slow their near-complete takeover of the average mission lobby. Them and their dogs, the AI-controlled Cyber-Mastiffs that very slightly elevate the Arbites’ design above a naked Judge Dredd pastiche.

Well, I say "Them," but my own Arbitrator is absolutely among the numbers. I’m the police, it’s me. And who could blame us, because siccing that invincible, unflappable, EMP-detonating K9 unit upon Nurgle’s finest is the most fun I’ve had in Darktide since learning to throw rocks.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! No cool industry person this week. Instead, a minor celebration. The RPS content management system tells me that I have used the 'Booked For The Week' tag….52 times! I have forgotten to post a few times and there was a brief hiatus, but in terms of volume at least, I'm declaring this the column's official one year anniversary. Chin chin!

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Last week I mentioned that I was reading Tokyo These Days, a manga about the production of a manga magazine. I have paired this, somewhat accidentally, with Shirobako, an anime about the anime production process. I'm four episodes in and there's almost no drama to it that isn't drawn directly from the difficulties of that production, to the point where the main tension of episode three hinges upon an FTP server being down. Wonderful. Sunday will be for watching a bit more of that, then, and avoiding the heat.

Ever wonder if the oversaturated trailer showcases of not-E3 and demos of Steam Next Fest actually produce a return for developers? Simon Carless's always interesting newsletter GameDiscoverCo dug into the numbers to discover the top announcements of not-E3 and who won Next Fest. These events clearly work for some - in particular those with huge marketing budgets announcing the ninth mainline entry in a beloved 30-year-old series - but standing out has never been more difficult.

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Hehe. Hohoho. Ollie couldn't dream of such devious placement. This is my column now. Videogames? Yes, several. Here's what we're playing this weekend.

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I saw her in MindsEye. I saw her in minds, aye. I saw her in minds, why?

I don’t know, but in MindsEye, I can’t stop seeing her.

“Could have been worse,” Robin Hood says to me, hours after I saw her, “At least she wasn’t naked, on the toilet, or naked on the toilet.”

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PC gaming hasn’t seen much 3D hardware since Nvidia shuttered its goggles-based, Alec-damaging 3D Vision prospect in 2019. Death by lack of compelling use cases, or by VR coming along and doing the whole "S'like it’s coming right at me" thing more comprehensively? Maybe a bit of both, but in any case, Samsung is having another go with its new Odyssey 3D gaming monitor. Outwardly resembling just another 4K IPS screen, its three-dimensification of select games involves collaborations with their original developers, with the final effect being delivered without the need for any glasses or headwear at all.

I recently had a go on the Odyssey 3D, and it’s certainly a few steps up from yer dusty Nintendo 3DS. A combination of eye-tracking cameras and an internal array of lenticular lenses produces the 3D effect, maintains it as long as your head stays roughly centred, and at least for me, manages to avoid inflicting agony of the eyes or brain. It’s impressive tech, though if it’s to become a serious desk-topping option, the Odyssey 3D will need a lot more games to get on board with it.

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