Ah, it's a Friday night, time to rela-

Wait a minute, long-time Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer's retiring, his assumed replacement and Xbox president Sarah Bond has resigned, and the suit now being tapped to take over Spenny's gig currently has the following job title: president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product. Right, guess I'm writing a news.

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So much of what the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7X Wireless Gen 2 does, it does right. Its build quality is outstanding, having a thickness and solidity that most wireless headsets lack. Its stretchy headband, as on pretty much all SteelSeries headsets, successfully tricked my entire skull into thinking it was lighter than it is. It’s flexible, working over Bluetooth or a 2.4GHz dongle, the latter’s USB-C connection also making it a plusher Steam Deck alternative to the Arctis GameBuds. And it sounds, both in games and music, fabulous: audio is powerful but detailed, like you could peel apart the stacked-up layers of a song mix or shooter soundscape into its individual tracks.

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My initial interest in the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X Wireless was sparked by it being, essentially, an over-ear version of the Arctis GameBuds, with a near-identical USB-C 2.4GHz receiver that lets it pull double duty with both a main PC and Steam Deck (slash, handheld PC of your choice). Happily, it’s turned out to be a very fine headset in general, performing a convincing impression of a higher-end model despite its current tag falling towards the lower-middle of wirelessdom.

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For once, I bring what should hopefully be good news for folks looking to buy or upgrade their PC hardware without having to factor in a bunch of inconveniences they can do nothing about. The RAM crisis is still in full swing, but the US Supreme Court have struck down the majority of President Trump's tariffs on imports. These tariffs have been another of the key annoyances complicating the state of play when it comes to hardware companies being able to sell you the bits you need at prices which haven't been driven far above where they should typically be.

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Midsummer Studios announced their existence in May 2024 with a promise to “revitalise the life sim genre”, but now, they’re closing down. Co-founder and former XCOM developer Jake Solomon confirmed the news on social media this week, saying goodbye with some brief pre-alpha footage of Burbank - a build-your-own-TV-series project with a lot of generative AI in it.

“We built a studio, we made a game, and I'm really proud of both,” Solomon writes. “Before we close the doors at Midsummer Studios I'd like to share a glimpse of Burbank, the game we poured our hearts into.”

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Nightsoil is a sombre little top-down narrative adventure about a gong farmer – that is, a collector of human waste – in 1854 London, at the height of the cholera epidemic. Gong farmers were, I understand, required to work after sunset, to avoid causing revulsion among the decent folk. In this case, you’re a gong farmer at the end his tenure, working his final shift alongside his trusty carthorse Ol’ Boy, while reminiscing about his bygone youth and the happier days that might have been.

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The thing you need to understand about Fogpiercer is that this deckbuilding roguelike, in which you control a train battling Mad Max-style road bandits, knows the secret joy of artillery. It is one of the few games that recognises that while it's satisfying to hit an enemy with a shell from a howitzer, it's even more satisfying to target the space next to them and use the force of the blast to give them a sideways shove into a wall.

It's a mechanic that puts Fogpiercer into the same fine company as Into The Breach.

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Valve currently have three Steam Deck models on offer: you've got the standard 256GB LCD variant (basically no longer in production), the 512GB Steam Deck OLED, and a beasty 1TB edition of the latter. All of them are lovely handheld PCs, but whether you've got one of these or you invested earlier in a smaller model, you might still be itching for a little more capacity to make that 32-hour flight to New Zealand a lot more bearable. At this point you have two options: a microSD card, or for storage with more clout, one of the best Steam Deck SSDs.

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The Stop Killing Games campaign's organisers are currently awaiting a chat with European Union politicians about server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play. Said chat's been set up by a petition which racked up just under 1.3 million verified signatures at its final count, with that being one of the alleys the group have gone down in pursuit of action against publishers being able to abandon games without leaving a way for them to be kept running.

Rather than simply adjusting their ties and googling nice places to visit on a trip to Brussels while they wait for their meeting, the group have announced some more action they'll be taking to get their message out in the ling term. Two Stop Killing Games non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are going to be set up to cover Europe and the US.

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Ubisoft are laying off around 40 people at Ubisoft Toronto, the studio behind the forthcoming remake of the original Splinter Cell. That’s approximately eight percent of the studio headcount. It’s all in the service of Ubisoft’s drive to cut costs after restructuring their operations around a big dollop of Tencent funding, which has elsewhere seen Ubisoft propose to lay off up to 200 people in Paris, and chop fixed costs by €200 million over the next two years.

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