A movie version of Portal is back on track, Star Trek and Lost director J.J. Abrams has said, nearly a decade after we first heard of its existence.

The project still sounds far-off, and there's no word on what has been holding up development - but the wheels now seem to be turning.

"We actually do have a script that's being written for the Portal movie now at [Warner Bros.]," Abrams said today (thanks, IGN) "We're really excited about the take and the pitch, so it feels like that thing's finally on the rails.

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Valve has finally fixed a security vulnerability in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that could be used by hackers to gain remote control of a player's PC - an issue the company had reportedly known about for two years by the time its existence was publicised last week.

News of the exploit was circulated in a tweet by not-for-profit reverse-engineering group The Secret Club. It explained one of its members, Florian, had contacted Valve two years prior to report a remote code execution flaw which made it possible for a hacker to take over a target's PC by tricking them into accepting a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Steam invite.

Although the exploit - one of several vulnerabilities reported to Valve by Secret Club members - had the potential to affect any game utilising Source Engine, The Secret Club stressed only CS:GO was still verifiably at risk. "We cannot say for sure if and when things have been patched in other games throughout the time without us being notified about it," it wrote.

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Another week, another set of attention-grabbing headlines in video games. Join Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent and me in the video below as we run through the news that matters. Bong!

We start with the PlayStation 5's first big update, which comes five months after the console came out. This update finally lets you move games to USB storage - a feature the PS5 really should have had at launch. We chat about why this improvement is so important, but also discuss the state of the console itself as it approaches half a year out in the wild. Is the PS5 where it needs to be? Is it already playing catch-up in terms of features with Microsoft's Xbox Series X? And what do we want next from PS5?

Elsewhere, we chat about Nintendo's latest indie showcase (there's a lot of Fez talk, sorry!), before moving on to the ever-eventful world of Cyberpunk 2077. (Emma's report on what could be DLC for that game is well worth a read.) Can CD Projekt turn Cyberpunk around? The company has vowed to stick with it, at least.

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It's been nearly a year since the bot situation in Team Fortress 2 escalated to a point where Valve had to get involved, but despite those efforts to curb the infestation, the problem has not gone away. Along with bots using game-ruining hacks, bots in casual servers are continuing to use racist usernames and spam voice chat with loud noises. There are now reports that bots are increasingly being used to advertise bots and bot immunity - and disturbingly, that some claim to offer links to child sexual abuse images.

Eurogamer has seen screenshots of bots using Team Fortress 2's chat function to advertise links to ecommerce platforms such as Shoppy, where bot hosters have found ways to monetise their disruptive efforts. Along with offering the option to rent bots, stores are offering the option to purchase "bot immunity" to allow the player to be ignored by that particular brand of bots. It's basically a virtual protection racket.

This seems to have been an issue for the past few months, as posts about bot immunity first appeared three months ago, but reports of these adverts are continue to pop up on Reddit.

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The FBI is reportedly investigating cheating in professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive matches in North America.

As spotted by Kotaku, the commissioner of the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC), Ian Smith, said the organisation was working alongside the FBI on an ongoing investigation into "a relatively small but significant group of players over a long period of time, organising match fixing in North American MDL".

"[It's] what I would describe as classic match-fixing - players being bribed by outside betting syndicates in order to fix matches, rather than players just doing it off their own bat opportunistically. It's been going on for longer, [and] it's much more organised," Smith told YouTuber slash32.

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The Left 4 Dead community has been left confused and amused by the appearance of a purple-coloured fifth protagonist to the game's fan-authored wiki.

"Purple Francis" was recently added to the encyclopaedic fan resource in quite some detail. While drive-by vandalism of wiki pages is common, the character was an unusually committed creation, spread across dozens of the site's pages. It was enough for the matter to quickly get noticed and blow up on Twitter:

Wiki entries detailed a fictional backstory and development history for the character - including his removal by Valve from retail copies of the game due to negative feedback, since Purple Francis was "just a recolouring of Francis" turned... purple.

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A number of professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players have been punished for breaching the Esports Integrity Commission's - ESIC - anti-corruption rules.

"ESIC issues sanctions against 35 players for betting-related offences & extends bans for 2 players previously sanctioned in October 2020," ESIC reported. "ESIC will continue to investigate further offences in Australia, NA and Europe in cooperation with law enforcement."

"Sanctions issued in today's release are not for match-fixing," the organisation adds. "However, ESIC is of the view that there is a high possibility that it will issue match-fixing charges arising from the ongoing investigations, potentially including against players sanctioned today."

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An update to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive this week pulled bots from competitive matches - and now players are remembering them at their best.

Prior to the 7th January update, when a CS:GO player disconnected or was kicked they were replaced by a bot to keep teams even.

Following the update, players who disconnect or are kicked in classic competitive and wingman modes will no longer be replaced by a bot. This means there is no more 5v5 if a player leaves - teams will always be a player down. If the the entire other team leaves, one bot will be left on the other team, idling in spawn.

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We've all been there - a match where something's gone wrong, or you end up frustrated with your teammates. But I doubt you've ever had the power to get someone banned over a gameplay disagreement, and it seems one Valve employee was unable to restrain themselves from doing so, as Firewatch co-creator Sean Vanaman has now apologised for giving out an unwarranted manual ban.

The situation began when Dota 2 player minijuanjohndoe posted on Reddit claiming they'd been sent to low priority - essentially a temporary matchmaking penalty - simply for suggesting a tactic the Valve employee didn't like (via Dot Esports). "So can employees just send you to low priority for telling the team to let mid tower go and he just thinks its a bad idea?," minijuanjohndoe asked, having discovered he'd been bickering with a Valve employee during their argument over tactics. minijuanjohndoe provided an image of their behaviour score to prove their innocence, and later gave the name of the player who had given them the penalty - Vanaman.

"The team looked into this case, and concluded the user clearly did not deserve the ban," Vanaman said in response to the post. "Even if the user did deserve a ban however, we all think it's clear that manually banning users is not a good idea because of how hard it is to be objective in Dota games that you are in. My mistake in this case being a sterling example. As employees, we should have no special privilege when playing Dota."

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Earlier this month Valve's Gabe Newell announced he - alongside Weta Workshop and Rocket Lab - would be launching a garden gnome into space for charity, with $1 being donated for everyone that watches. And now the time has come to wave goodbye to Gnome Chompski, who is preparing for lift-off early tomorrow, 20th November, in the UK.

The whole affair is, of course, inspired by Half-Life 2: Episode 2's Little Rocket Man achievement - still one of the finest achievements ever created - which required players to carry an otherwise innocuous garden gnome from the start of the game to a rocket ship near its end. This is not, as anyone who's tried it will tell you, an easy task, thanks to the gnome's infuriating tendency to randomly launch out of Episode 2's open-top vehicles, courtesy of some exuberant physics.

Newell's recreation of Gnome Chompski's Episode 2 adventure thankfully skips to the end, and will see the iconic garden ornament - actually a 6-inch titanium recreation of Chompski created by Weta Workshop, in this instance - blast into space at 2.44pm NZT/1.44am in the UK on 20th November, which equates to 8.44pm EST on 19th November.

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