Behind the scenes I have been chipping away at Horizon Forbidden West on the PS5, a game I would characterise as good, lots of fun, very pretty. (Sidebar: having recently conducted an inventory of all my posessions for international shipping purposes, it appears the PS5 is literally the most valuable thing I own. I am 32 years old). I'm not very good at it, to be honest, so recently knocked it down to easy difficulty in order to stomp on robot heads with greater efficiency. Good ol' Aloy.

Anyway, now that I have awakened a sort of mother-surrogate AI and started the actual business of saving the world, I cannot help but ask the key question: why can I still> not ride into battle atop a massive great robot T-Rex?

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There’s a YouTube channel I’m fond of called Virtual Japan, where a 4K camera serenely glides through gorgeous Japanese hotspots: Sapporo in the snow, Christmas lights in Tokyo, residential back streets in the pouring rain. You hear nothing but ambient city sounds and the tromping of a cameraman's feet. You could be watching a HUD-free FPS, albeit with incredi-graphics. Finally, in Ghostwire: Tokyo, someone has> made a game of it, albeit with occasional ghost zapping.

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While Elden Ring is a vast game you can marinate yourself in for weeks, soaking up its vast open world and big vibes until you almost feel new arms budding along your shoulders, it's also a game you can tear through at breakneck pace. Speedrunners have been grafting to cut times, and now someone has broken the half-hour mark by finishing the game in 28:59. Ridiculous. Watch the run below.

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Valve's Steam Deck can run most games, but that doesn't mean it can run most games well>. In listing out the status of their own games, Microsoft say that Psyconauts 2 is "Verified" - meaning it's fully supported - while Sea Of Thieves is merely "playable" and Halo Infinite isn't supported at all due to its anti-cheat.

Hopefully those games will be better supported in future, but, Microsoft say, "It's up to our studios how they fit Steam Deck integration for their games into their busy schedules."

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The highest court in the Netherlands has ruled that card packs in FIFA Ultimate Team are not a form of gambling. The ruling overturns a decision from 2019 that ruled that they were, and rescinds a €10 million fine given to EA for breaching Dutch gambling law.

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I know I keep harping on about it, but I'm so ready for spring. Sunset is now past 6pm and oh what a joy! Every morning, the leafy buds on the tree outside my bedroom window are just a little fatter. And who knows, maybe it'll even become warm. Until then, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on.

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I can't remember if I've mentioned this to you, dear readers, but I am currently mid-emigration. In about two weeks I'm moving to Ireland, which means for the past four months my live has been hellish. The paperwork the move involves, especially now we have from our European womb been untimely ripped, is a Kafkaesque nightmare. To ship my stuff without incurring importation tax I need to prove I'm going to live in Ireland and not just sell a bunch of second hand cutlery and old bras (one of those two things would probably be pretty lucrative, in fairness). This is all complicated even furtherer by the fact that I only found a flat to move to> yesterday, and still don't have the tenancy agreement for it, which means no proof of address. Life, oh life.

I don't really have the option to have a piece of toast and watch the evening news, because when I'm not scanning my passport or estimating what worth to attach to my towels for the purposes of the shipping company's insurance, I am packing said towels into boxes, along with everything else I own. Basically the only free time I have is my lunch break. And what I am doing in my lunch break is making huge, virtual jigsaw puzzles in Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams. It's either that or go and sit in the toilets and have a little stress-cry. And as the move date approaches, the size of the puzzles has increased. On Thursday I started one that is 6k pieces. This may have been a miscalculation.

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Aztech is a superb name for a game, and almost makes describing its premise redundant. Throwing in that it's from the same developers who made Mulaka meant I had to give it a go.

I'm glad I did. Aztech No Colon Forgotten Gods starts with its weaker foot, showing rough edges right away, but that’s overshadowed by its entertaining movement system. During its opening, a quest prompt tells you to go home to sleep, as though they didn't just give you a magical power arm that's also a goddamn rocket>.

My home was a short walk away. I didn't get there for 40 minutes.

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Overwatch 2 has been repeatedly delayed, but it looks like it's finally on its way - albeit in a changed form. In a blog post and video earlier today, the Overwatch team announced that they were decoupling the game's PvP and PvE modes, and that the PvP mode was now entering the first of several testing phases.

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Gods. Those jerks. You know what the problem with god games is? They've got no subtlety. It's all open worship and overt power, conquering and seizing so you're only superficially different to a 4X or management game.

Shadows Of Forbidden Gods is different. It's all about building the power of your evil god under the radar until it's too late for anyone to defeat you. The more I've played it, the more I start to suspect that this concept will always suffer from being gamed by player who'll seek the most efficient paths. Any system of influencing and manipulating characters will necessarily be abstracted, and at some point subtlety becomes just another numerical value.

I suppose what I'm saying is that SOFG is more fun if you revel in scheming and causing chaos, and given the choice between effective and interesting, will always do the right thing.

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