Spectrum48's Philip Sinclair has spent 15 years rewilding a field, "rewilding" being a process of restoring ecosystems to something like a state of 'natural' equilibrium. Now, he's making a videogame about it. That game is Grow Wild, which is currently accepting playtest sign-ups. It sees you restoring biomes across the globe, touching down on sickly square arcadias like an avenging angel equipped with a trowel, magnifying glass, and probably some tartan-pattern slippers, out of shot.

It makes me think a little of Viva Pinata, but it's populated by representations of non-digital creatures, flowers and trees with convincing growth cycles. There are some lovely 'time lapse' shots in the trailer, below.

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Years ago I was lost in the Shaded Woods, a foggy forest full of moaning trees. I didn't have enough health to fight the invisible backstabbing murder ghosts, and every time I ran away from the spooky sound of their footsteps, I got lost in the fog all over again.

That's when a hacker invaded and injected me with hundreds of cursed swords, corrupting my save file and dooming Dark Souls 2 to crash over and over.

It was deep magic, more powerful than any game system or lore, overwhelming the code itself. To uncurse myself, I'd have to embrace the darkness and download cheat tools too.

And now I've tracked down my hacker, to thank him.

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The latest Marathon update looks like it will mean an easier time. UESC enemies have been made weaker, the frequency with which they chuck EMP grenades has been reduced, and free loadouts now come with even more ammo. Yet, after spending an hour over lunch being killed repeatedly in Maintenance on Dire Marsh, I can confirm that Marathon has not become a cakewalk.

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A team of modders are creating a Community Edition of Arkane's footloose fantasy RPG Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, with Valve's support and publisher Ubisoft's approval. The modders in question are the same outfit who received a "completely blank check" from Ubi to develop a modding SDK, back in 2023. Now, they're devising a new version using the latest Source Engine SDK. Kickbait, indeed.

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Intel have announced a handful of new gaming CPUs, the Core Ultra 200S Plus series, to release next month. After 2024’s original Core Ultra 200S family went for efficiency gains at the cost of frame-punching game power, these 200S Plus chips are once again tuned more for straight performance, which sounds good to me. I like lower electricity bills and heat generation as much as the next hardware editor, and was fairly optimistic about that initial batch of Core Ultras at first, but they ended up so slow and dull it essentially put me off writing about CPUs for a year and a half.

Say hello, then, to the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 250K Plus, which’ll be out on March 26th 2026 at $299 and $199 respectively. There’ll also be slightly cheaper KF variants, without integrated graphics, for each. Intel VP Robert Hallock says these will be the "fastest desktop gaming processors Intel has ever built," which they’ll need to be – while the blue team have been fiddling with efficiency, AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech has ran away with the gaming advantage, especially on the outstandingly quick Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

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A long time ago in a games industry far, far away, a team of LucasArts developers were making a multiplayer first-person shooter called Star Wars: First Assault. Slated to release on console in summer 2013, it was set in the original Star Wars era with Stormtroopers, Rebels, objective modes, team deathmatch, and maps on Tatooine and Bespin. It was also a stealth Star Wars: Battlefront revival project, pitched well before the EA DICE reboot. The devs envisaged a second game in 2014, offering vehicles and larger maps, followed by a full-blown official new Battlefront in 2015, complete with a singleplayer campaign and space dogfights.

According to some sources I spoke to at the time, the First Assault beta was only $10,000 in certification fees away from launching on Xbox Live in late 2012. But then, Disney blew up LucasArts like Alderaan and cancelled a swathe of Star Wars games, including the once-feted Star Wars 1313. First Assault never got its beta. Until now, sort of. A team of Battlefront modders including iamashaymin have finally gotten an ancient, leaked First Assault build working on a PC server. Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

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Never's End is the new strategy RPG from a former Destiny developer in which you lead a party of possessed villagers against a ravening (yet cuddly) tide of undead. At a glance, it's an elegantly muted Final Fantasy Tactics, with doll-sized characters on a spinnable grid-based map. In the hands, it's surprisingly reminiscent of Larian's Divinity: Original Sin games, with a nerdy application of thermodynamics that lets you transform each map into a vortex of mist, flame and increasingly naked skeletons.

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