Busy week, this one. We've had a whole load of games announced over the past few days, and there'll doubtless be a whole lot more this weekend. Most of them we can't play yet. But as a general rule, talking about games makes us want to play games, even if they're completely unrelated. Everyone has those moments where they see the trailer for a new multiplayer hero shooter or some such thing, and for reasons only known to themselves, they say, "yes, I really must play more Simpsons: Hit And Run." So: here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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This year’s Day Of The Devs boasted an entire seven exclusives, plus a load of other nifty features and previews for exciting indies we already knew about, but are no less excited to be reminded of. It’s been over ten years now since Tim Schafer and the folks at Double Fine kicked off the non-profit initiative to help shine a spotlight on games what they thought were nice. No way! I love games what I think are nice! Here’s everything from Day Of The Devs 2024, dutifully arranged for your clicking pleasure.

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Are Tamagotchis a thing now again? I’m getting a sense they might be, but I’ll always associate them with the nineties. Ah, to return to a simpler time, where kids tripped each other up in the school hallways to steal toys , before Pokémon cards came along and everyone leveled up to stabbings. Sorry, Petal Runner devs, for opening a news article about your lovely wholesome game talking about stabbings. This gorgeous, fuschia-splashed, slice-of-life RPG is, if anything, the antidote to stabbings. In terms of game fatigue, anyway. It won’t cure tetanus, at least I don’t think so.

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Sonar Shock is a reminder that some of the best game concepts or settings seem so obvious as soon as you play them.

System Shock on an unreasonably huge submarine on an equally ludicrous trip around the Northeast Passage via Cape Agulhas? With a satirical Soviet setting that isn't just "lol russia" or "I think Stalker was about machismo and gun attachments"? And> a third thing that I'll get to in a minute because this intro is getting out of control? God yes.

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Whether or not they actually amount to anything, rumours of a new Doom have had me diving back into Doom Eternal recently. There’s at least one level in it that feels like essay-bait, so I’m obliging. The centerpiece of Mars Core - the FPS’ best level - is a comically massive superweapon called the BFG-10000. Oh, Chekov. If only you could see what we’ve done with your wisdom. The literary subtlety to gun-big-enough-to-scar-planets pipeline will eventually subsume all of pop culture, and those of us who chose to specialise writing about headshots will alternate between grins and tears from the wreckage.

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Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is no more. No, EA haven't once again taken Dragon Age 4 back to the drawing board; instead, they've just changed its name. The next entry in their trad-fantasy RPG series is now called Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and we'll get a "first look at gameplay" next week.

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Taipei’s annual Computex event is always a big, circled, triple-underlined mark in the PC gaming hardware calendar. Whereas CES splits its focus across tech, cars, and the occasional overdesigned white good, Computex is all computing, all the time, making it a prime source of reveals and showcases for the hardware bits that make games happen.

Sadly, Computex 2024 is unlikely to go down as a classic, largely because this year’s show has been mesmerised by AI and the most tedious applications thereof: search, but different somehow! Run art-stealing generation tools faster! Oh, Computex, what have they done to you, and why do you have seven fingers on one hand?

Granted, AI is a broad field, and not everything about it is necessarily gross or creatively bankrupting. But it also doesn’t deserve to overshadow all the other useful, unexpected, and curiosity-piquing gaming tech that Computex has to offer, from new Steam Deck alternatives to resurrected CPU lineups and promising graphics card updates. Here are those highlights of the show so far...

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After the climatic end to a decade-long saga in Endwalker, anticipation is high for Final Fantasy XIV’s next expansion, Dawntrail. I got to try out the game and talk to Director Naoki Yoshida (aka Yoshi-P) about new Jobs and the difficulty of incorporating fan feedback (not to mention the reasons the Warrior of Light has such great skin - you'll see). But how can the Square Enix possibly hope to follow the highs of Endwalker, including space travel and a fight against the physical embodiment of sorrow? By taking us on holiday, of course.

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From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, I thought: no bother, like. Everyone has different skills. Then, I realised that some other people might be less enlightened than me about the whole ‘having limits’ things, and that there was a lot of money to be made hawking implants. Enter space strategy story-spewer Stellaris, specifically, it’s spost specent spee-LC The Machine Age. It adds many options for your space civs, most of which I’m too rusty with the ever-yawpening sandbox’s myriad nuances to appreciate. But what's this? A new origin that lets you play as techno-religious corpo-cult obsessed with transcending the limits of their meat prisons through cybernetic augmentations? I recognise that from toys! Let’s do some clicking.

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If you're SPOILER sensitive, please do not read this article. Just don't do it. I'll be talking about a bunch of stuff that's SPOILERY. But I'll obviously try and not be too> spoilery for those who've decided to keep reading this, and hence, probably aren't as SPOILER sensitive. Right, onwards.>

Life In Jars is this YouTuber I've followed for a while. He makes videos that might involve, say, scooping up some puddle water, leaving it in a sealed jar for a while, then coming back to it a few months later. He'll report on the results, which are often tremendous. Look at the LIFE in that jar! The little wriggly lads just wriggling around. The blobs whose job is to float and squidge indiscriminately. A lovely bit of fauna sloshing about there, like a forest dwelling for those who implement the five-second rule. It's a reminder that bog water is rather beautiful, actually.

Having spent three hours with Elden Ring expansion Shadow Of The Erdtree's opening area, I can't help but think of Life In Jars. What resides in the shadowy dome of the Big Tree is horrendous! Miserable! The forgotten creatures and their crumbling homes are grim. But oh my word, the shadows have spawned a beautiful disasterpiece. Just, errr, those other jars? The fun guys with the scoopy arms and little legs? Yeah. I have bad news.

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