This weekend, readers, there's an extra challenge for you. In addition to the excellent tales of game-playing and cat-contentedness we always get, I'd like anyone who's interested in partaking to tell me: what's the very best thing about that genre you don't like? What is it that always draws you back in before you remember that these aren't your sorts of games? For instance: Counter-Strike-style shooters. Clean, low time-to-kill gunplay: yes yes yes! Having to rely on belligerent teammates: no no no.

While you ponder, here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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"Last year we ran a big games careers festival in Downham, on the border of Lewisham and Bromley in London, in a leisure center in the heart of a very deprived community that hasn't seen anything like this in that space," Into Games CEO Declan Cassidy tells me over a call. A UK-based non-profit focused on enhancing social mobility in the UK games sector, Into Games reported last year that, in terms of socioeconomic access, game development has one of the worst records "of any creative or technical sector".

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Last year Assassin's Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft's latest open world game had a "smaller" map than its predecessor, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. He compared it instead to Assassin's Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla's exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.

That story sparked a couple of thoughts for me. A surge of relief, of course, because life is short and video games are often far too long. And secondly, the realisation that I don't really know what "bigger" and "smaller" mean in a video game, and I'm not sure anybody else does either.

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Alienware has revived its heaviest hitter. The Area-51 gaming laptop has officially returned and it's aiming straight for the top of the food chain. First teased back at CES 2025, the new models are available to order right now.

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I should have been more specific when I said I didn’t want developers to make distinct Steam Deck 'versions' of their games: while locking settings, console-style, isn’t an ideal solution to ensuring capable performance on underpowered handhelds, offering the option> of full Deck optimisation is very much welcome. That’s exactly what The Last of Us Part II Remastered does, which goes a long way in explaining why it’s a far better game for portable PCs than TLOU Part I was at launch. I’d still see the bottomless blackness of those bugged-out Joel eyebrows in my nightmares, had the horror not rendered sleep impossible.

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Whatever peace treaty that allowed erstwhile PS4/PS5 exclusives to slink over to PC has, generally, been a fruitful one. I only say generally because the porting process has seen the occasional whoopsiedoodle, from the face-warpingly sorry state of The Last of Us Part I’s initial release to the more recent intrusion of mandatory PSN sign-in requirements.

Happily, The Last of Us Part II Remastered gets off to a much better start. Tech-wise, anyway: the PC version, out today, performs smoothly and is nowhere near as buggy or crashy as Part I was at launch. And while PSN account syncing is still here, it’s fully optional, dodging the territorial block-outs and Steam Deck compatability problems that Sony’s other recent ports were yoked to.

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Let me start this with the memory that always surfaces when I write about Dark Souls multiplayer - the anecdote I’ve told in several articles, hoping that somebody (you?) will explain. It’s 2011 and I’m making my way through Lordran for the first time. I’m in the woods with my longsword and Grass Crest Shield. There is a glimmer through the trees and another player appears, wearing exotic equipment. I raise my guard, anticipating a swift defeat, but the other player only stands and waves. They beckon me deeper into the wood.

It’s rarely smart to follow a stranger into the woods. I do so anyway, keeping my distance, shield held out like a passport, and am led to a clearing in which another player kneels. The second player does not react to my arrival. The first player gesticulates urgently.

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GeForce RTX 4090 might be yesterday's flagship, but it's still faster than nearly every GPU on the planet—unless you've somehow tracked down an RTX 5090 at MSRP, in which case, congratulations on your black-market wizardry. For everyone else, Alienware currently has the cleanest way to get a 4090 system right now without jumping through flaming eBay hoops.

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I’m a small-time drug dealer from the south, says the hypnagogic text hovering before me as I start Schedule 1. It says I’ve arrived in town with no cash, no product, and no contacts. I only know one way to make money, the text implores, and it’s time to get to work. Stuff that.

It’s time to turn over a new, cannabinoid-free leaf. I’m going to begin again as a productive member of society, earning an honest living, fully cooperating with any esteemed law-enforcement officers who decide to detain me in the course of their duties. What could possibly go wrong?

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Jokes aside, you’d have to be a pretty big dork to think that the world isn’t wide enough for both handheld PCs and traditional consoles like the Nintendo Switch 2 (even if the latter is hogging a new FromSoft game). Partly because they are, to an extent, ingrained in each other, via the classic hardware marketplace of borrowed ideas: there’s probably no Steam Deck without the original Switch, and I’d bet my own mousing hand that the Switch 2’s optical sensor-packing Joy Cons are inspired by the Lenovo Legion Go.

No doubt the manufacturers behind portable PCs watched the Switch 2’s Nintendo Direct showcase and began furiously scribbling notes on what they could crib, be it the magnetic clip-on peripherals, the fan-equipped dock, or whatever internal wizardry that seemingly lets it run Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at 1080p. Fine by me. Just please don’t, whatever you do, follow Nintendo’s lead of trying to plaster over games with the gurning, disembodied heads of our friends and families.

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