In Vectorpark s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we ll be entertained.

Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels ( cli-fi ) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.

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Borderlands 3 is on the way, and developers Gearbox really want everyone to know, so they’ve launched one final piece of epilogue story DLC for enduringly popular looter-shooter Borderlands 2. Commander Lilith And The Fight For Sanctuary is free until July 8th brings the cast back together (including folks from Tales From The Borderlands) for one last fight. They’ve also slashed the price on Borderlands: The Handsome Collection (Containing Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and all their DLC) to under a fiver. Below, a trailer for the new stuff, featuring a gun that shoots exploding unicorns.

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To this day, the jaunty static of the opening jingle to Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town brings me back to a simpler time. Summer evenings spent hunched over my Game Boy SP, a pane of glass between me and nature s suburban bounty as I tilled my little squares of land, pet my happy little chickens, and bribed a town s worth of reticent heartthrobs into falling for my little blonde avatar, Pepper, with an onslaught of ores, animal products, and various culinary delights (but never cucumbers, ya gummy-mouthed fish-man).

Harvest Moon was about as wholesome as wholesome gets, my first videogame love, but as the days turned to years, we grew apart. Since then, I ve filled the hole in my heart with the usual suspects, (Stardew Valley, Rune Factory, and so on) until there was only one thing left to do: make my own Harvest Moon. And so began my ongoing personal quest to turn every game I own that is unfortunate enough to not be Harvest Moon into the farming simulation game they were always meant to be. Here, in true naturalist fashion, I present my field notes in the hope that we may go on to tame this new frontier together.

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Your time is important. And you know what? So is mine. Here s this week s podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. It s about how your life is dripping away every second you play Stardew Valley.

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Gearbox fully unveiled Borderlands 3 during a livestreamed event earlier today with an hour of largely-uncut co-op footage, showing off a brighter and more colourful sequel than I was expecting. Combat is more mobile, weapons have alt-fire modes, bosses look more interesting and players can now leave the dusty wastes of Pandora to go shooting and looting on other planets. You can see the full presentation below, and they’re setting streamers loose on the game now for three hours of freeform play, so Twitch will be flooded with footage later today.

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I say watch because this week’s podcast takes place in a real room in front of a real audience (don t worry, there s an audio version too). At Rezzed in London this month, we thought it d be fun to re-enact three of the most memorable scenes of PC gaming, exactly as you remember them. So strap on your eye-wideners and prepare for some wonderful acting. Including a 100% faithful adaptation of the most notorious moment in any Final Fantasy game: the death of… Aerosmith?

Alice! Alice, what have you done to these scripts!?

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As this is my penultimate edition of Steam Charts, before I return to nuzzle into the warm infinite belly of Horace for all of time, I thought it might be fun to take a bit of a look behind the scenes of Steam Charts, to see how this weekly column comes together.

So, hey, join me as we step behind the curtain, and learn a little bit about the magic of Rock Paper Shotgun.

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Ah, 2010! Lady Gaga and Beyonc were tearing up the dancefloor with Telephone, Inception was fuelling one million drunk ‘philosophical’ conversations, Jackass had gone 3D, and Civilization V had yet to reach that point in every Civ game’s lifespan where it’s declared superior to its successor. If you wish to party like it’s 2010, you might enjoy a new Civilization VI mod made by actual Civ 6 art director Brian Busatti. It aims to make Civ 6’s landscape, buildings, and units look more like Civ 5, less vibrant and more ‘realistic’. Yeah, but like, what if we’re still dreaming we’re playing Civ – does the game ever stop or will “one more turn” keep going forever? Makes you think, maaan.

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Steam s updated approach to review bombing, which prevents off topic reviews from counting towards a game s overall score, has kicked in for the Borderlands series. It seems to be the first time that the (optional) filter has been applied by Steam, after users flooded the series reviews following the announcement that Borderlands 3 will be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store.

Viewing the games with the option turned on puts a little asterisk next to the mark of how positive the game is, which leads to a note that reads: Period(s) of off-topic review activity detected. Excluded from the Review Score, based on your preferences. It doesn t seem to actually hide those reviews, however.

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There ain’t no rest for the wicked, a video game once told me, and Gearbox Software certainly have been busy. Today they launched remastered versions of Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, coming to PC as free updates. They’re all prettied-up a bit, while the first game also now includes all the DLC as well as features borrowed from later games in the looter-shooter series. These updates are probably more for the benefit of the latest consoles, jazzing ’em up for a fresh audience before Borderlands 3 hits in September, but hey we benefit too. Thanks, Ian Microsoft and Ian Sony!

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