Hey, how are you holding up out there? It’s difficult to convey the right amount of weirdness we’re facing at the moment. “Bizarre,” doesn’t even begin to cover it, and anything more begins to feel overwritten, grandiose, or nihilistic. Anything less, and it’s unrealistic, naïve, or heartless. I find myself walking a similar tightrope-rollercoaster in my day-to-day: I woke up early this morning to bake bread, then took a stress nap at 4pm (which more closely resembled light coma than nap). I miss going outside for pointless excursions to corner shops, I miss grocery stores, and I miss the gentle fluorescent hum of department stores. I miss museums, cramped art supply stores ventilated by a single box fan, and tourist shops selling saltwater taffy. It’s not much, but I want to get back there. I am sure that I am not alone in this.

As I said to my adviser earlier, and as my mother recently told me, and as I heard on the news or saw in some inspirational-but-grounded tweet: the only way out is through. In the meantime, here are some games for staying indoors and remembering the outdoors.

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For Valorant, Riot’s new Counter-Strike-with-Superpowers FPS, regular anti-cheat was never gonna cut it. From the beginning, they’ve been flaunting the shooter’s technical guts – 128-tick servers, flawless ping, and an anti-cheat system that makes it “impossible for a player to cheat in game-defying ways”. But that level of protection comes with a level of access that’s raised a fair few concerns.

In an attempt to reassure fans, Riot are awarding up to £80,000 to anyone who manages to use Valorant’s anti-cheat for ill-will.

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I was gearing up for a second playthrough of Half-Life: Alyx this weekend. I really wanted to use the physics engine to have a little fun this time around, so I took a peek at some inspirational Let’s Plays to see what I could try. Then I uninstalled Alyx and put my headset away. I can’t even juggle in the real world, never mind doing it in VR while backflipping. So here’s the videos that humbled me.

Warning! Here be spoilers.

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Is it just me or does keeping up with Call Of Duty: Warzone playlists feel like a “who’s on first” skit? First trios were gone, then back but only as a shotty and snipes mode. They added quads, duos, solos—wait didn’t the whole thing launch with trio squads? Infinity Ward have announced another change to the Warzone playlist and I think I’ve got straight what’s actually in the game right now. Maybe. Battle Royale mode is back to trio squads and Plunder mode is now duos. Whew.

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Games are full of fantasies but the ultimate escapism is living in a huge apartment in New York and somehow having your biggest problems be trivial inconveniences like your favorite deli using a new brand of pickle. I made that up, but it sounds like a Seinfeld plot to me. Two developers who know lots more things about the 90s sitcom very much want to flex all their Seinfeld lore into a for real licenced adventure game that looks like it came out in the show’s heyday. They don’t have permission yet, but they’ve released a new trailer asking the internet to help them get it.

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If you’ve not tired of winter yet, you can have it back in The Long Dark. The Canadian wilderness survival game has been added to Xbox Game Pass for PC. It’s joined by ye olde mechanical adventure game Machinarium. You can now play both if you’re subscribed to Microsoft’s ever-evolving library of games.

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In Fallout 76’s Wasterlanders update, we finally got to see actual living people return to the region. Most are just regular guys and gals trying to make a living, but there are some that have banded together into factions: raiders and settlers. We’ll go over everything we know about both of them here. (more…)

Getting older doesn’t mean you need to hang up your dating game. We’ve all seen Golden Girls, right? (Disclosure: I have not seen Golden Girls. Is it sexy?) New dating sim Later Daters walks you through the uncertain waters of post-80 dating with a bit of warmth and a bit of humor, just as the doctor ordered.

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The Master Chief Collection is rolling right along. Now that Halo Reach and Combat Evolved have both been released, Halo 2 Anniversary is on the flight deck. Beta tests for the next remake begin today for registered Halo Insiders—a program you can still freely chuck your name into if you want to get into tests for either Halo 2 or the rest of the Master Chief Collection.

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Desktop PCs can be huge, clunky things that take up buckets of room sometimes, but what if I told you that you can still have a super powerful PC without having to put up with an enormous PC tower? Enter PC case maker Lian Li’s new motorised gaming desks. Dubbed the brilliantly catchy DK-04F and DK-05F, you can now gaze at the innards of your machine right underneath your keyboard. Who needs a gaming bed when you’ve got one of these beauties?

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