A team of Diablo speedrunners spent months searching the 1996 RPG's 2.2 billion valid randomly generated dungeon seeds to find the layout used in a stupidly lucky speedrun they suspected to be illegitimate, says a new report from Ars Technica's Kyle Orland.

The three minute, 12 second sorcerer run by Maciej "Groobo" Maselewski was first uploaded to Speed Demos Archive in 2009. Watching it "feels like watching someone win the lottery," writes Orland, thanks to a seemingly random streak of entrance and exit stairways right next to each other, allowing for a rapid, safe descent through the dungeon. Groobo lucked out again on the ninth floor, nabbing the Naj's Puzzler item needed for later teleporting exploits.

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Sundays are for bracing for the February half-term week here in the UK, during which schools are closed and parents must occupy kids while it's still mostly cold and rainy outside. Quick, tidy the house, book in the playdates, get the shopping done, catch-up on sleep. And do some reading, obviously.

V Buckenham wrote a fun design analysis of "can you pet the dog", breaking down each word in turn.

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Greetings, pals. Nursing a nice post-Valentine's Day hangover, I hope? Had I remembered it was Valentine's Day when I selected the image, I'd possibly have picked something slightly more romantic than a group of potters going about their business.

Anyway, now for the best part of the week! No, not the playing of games. The talking about> the playing of games! Whether the playing of games actually happens is inconsequential. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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In an ultimately failed attempt at cobbling some Elden Ring: Nightreign impressions together, I spent a little over three hours of my Valentine’s Day fruitlessly trying to get a match going in the roguelike spinoff’s doomed PS5 network test. I hope said test provided FromSoft with some helpful data, considering Nightreign releases in May, though it would have been a lot easier for everyone if I could’ve just sent Hidetaka Miyazaki an email saying "Sir, your server infrastructure is made of biscuits."

In the interests of a more productive outcome, here are some lovely/interesting/terrifying little PC games that I could have started and finished while waiting for the closed beta to sort itself out, and that you might enjoy regardless of whether you’ve just spaffed away a perfectly good afternoon.

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Dell is currently offering an excellent 27-inch Alienware gaming monitor for just $200 in its latest round of discounts ready for Presidents Day.

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Elden Ring Nightreign will officially arrive on May 30, 2025, across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. But for those eager to get an early taste, Bandai Namco is running a network test this weekend—offering a first look at what’s to come.

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Identifying a new genre is a fool's task, but I've never been wise. Sometimes a blossoming genre can be obvious, as when a huge success like Doom or Dark Souls comes along and inspires games for decades to follow. But sometimes a new genre is quiet, low-key, hiding just beneath the surface of a tumultuous industry. Sometimes you have to go fishing for it.

Let's catch the slippery "hangout game".

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I’m not saying you should> play Avowed on a Steam Deck, merely that you can> play Avowed on a Steam Deck. Much like how Nic found the game itself, squishing Obsidian’s latest RPG into a handheld makes for a sometimes-good, sometimes-terrible time, for reasons mostly shared between the Deck’s relative lack of horsepower and Avowed’s hardware-agnostic proclivity for stuttering.

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Avowed has more The Outer Worlds DNA in it than just the Obsidian link, and from a technical perspective, that might be worrisome – the latter RPG’s Spacer’s Choice Edition was one of the most wretchedly broken releases of 2023.

Happily, Avowed does at least launch in much better shape, and with some genuinely fetching fantasy visuals that may even justify flicking on ray tracing. The PC version does, however, still seem to have a few loose wires, which are worth watching out for even if you can tidy some up with the right settings.

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Gosh, haven't done one of these in a while, have we? Or possibly one of these. Or these?! The silly amount of tags for this semi-regular format are surely proof of its enduring appeal, so we're back in Hivemind form to talk about Obsidian's latest RPG Avowed. We've all played it, and we all have mildly different opinions on it - the stuff that thrilling conversations are made of. Onward!>

Nic: James did you work out how to freeze things yet?

James: I’ll explain this quickly so Nic can get on to complaining about Avowed having the wrong kinds of boxes. But yes, I did get stuck on an early main quest that required me to use ice magic to create frozen platforms for crossing water, an otherwise neat little systems thingy that had not been communicated or hinted at before that point, but was> communicated and hinted at during the following> main quest.

Otherwise, I’m having an okayish time? It doesn’t have the Skyrim-tier expansiveness I always hope for with these kinds of games, but its world is a pretty one, and it’s got some quality close-quarters mageing.

Nic: Look. I feel passionately about those crates. There are two types of crates. You can only smash the crates that have the special 'smash me' icon on them. I don't want a crate to "come hither" me. Takes all the fun out of the petty vandalism.

It's funny though because those two qualities you mention, James - the world and magic - are the same ones I thought were Avowed's strongest elements. How are you both finding the actual questing?

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