That psychic shockwave you just felt was my brain registering the words "Yes, G-Police was definitely an inspiration" in the Steam forums for G-Rebels, an upcoming cyberpunk flight combat simulator. You've never heard of G-Police? Oh my god. Get in here, you prancing summer child, you daughter of chaos, you strawman son of a gun. Sit the fuck down. Everything is going to be OK now. I am about to tell you of G-Police, the only good videogame ever made.

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If you've been looking forward to Witchbrook, your broomstick's going to have to stay grounded for a little bit longer. Developers Chucklefish have opted to push the cosy magic schooler's release from this winter to 2026. At the same time, they've put out an interactive map offering the first proper look at its setting, Mossport.

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I can't remember the first time I felt "immersed" in a videogame, but I can remember the first time I got stuck under a swimming pool float as a kid, scratching at a scabby foam ceiling roamed by mocking silver jellyfish of air. I can remember the first few times I drowned in videogames, fighting the waterlogged handling in Sonic's Labyrinth Zone, or operating the agile sarcophagus that is Lara Croft in Aztec print grottos of antiseptic blue.

I find the continuing use of "immersive" to describe believable videogame worlds weird and a bit alarming. Partial immersion would be one thing - the videogame as nice hot bath at the end of the day, the videogame as splashing around in a stream of thought, the videogame as a kind of apple-bobbing. The "immersion" of the "immersive sim" is a different matter entirely: it's a box of clockwork you're invited to tease apart, not some hyperreal enclosure. But the "full" or "total" sensory immersion repeatedly offered by big-budget, photoreal 3D games seems a lot like suffocation.

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The people on the platform attached to the 30 foot long and continually growing goose's neck applaud. They're easily impressed by bouncing tingi, those being the strange mutant babies the goose keeps vomiting out. Far below, the base of the goose's neck juts out of its human host's body, next to a piggy bank the tingi keep dropping into. Far above, another goose with a neck made out of hotdog says 'Come to me baby'. Everything's as it should be in the Steam Next Fest demo of Tingus Goose.

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The best thing about the ROG Xbox Ally X is that it finally acknowledges the truth – a truth that, despite continued denials by device after device, at least partly accounts for why the little old Steam Deck still rules the world of handheld PCs despite being slower and lower-rez than almost everything that followed it. You know it, I know it, and at last, Microsoft know it: Windows 11 just isn’t that good as a handheld OS.

Thus, the biggest upgrade that the ROG Xbox Ally X – and its little brother, the ROG Xbox Ally – makes is not to its hardware, but the software. Instead of booting straight into the Windows 11 desktop, a miserable experience when your only navigational tools are thumbsticks and a touchscreen, it defaults to a far more gamepad-optimised (and specifically gaming-focused) 'Xbox' mode that provides quick, D-paddable access to your choice of launchers and the games installed within. Yes. Great. Cool. Big fan. I still wouldn’t buy one.

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Ubisoft have opened up the pandora's box of mid-2000s shooters and deployed Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow onto Steam, rendering its PC version easy to grab for the first time in ages. It's not a remaster, so don't get too excited, as you might still have fun getting things to run as smoothly as your covert ops.

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It is time to once again desecrate the much-pillaged tomb of Looking Glass Studios and have it away with the materials for a new dark fantasy immersive sim. Starhelm Studios have announced Project Shadowglass, a purebred first-person Thief-like with a light-shadow system, lockpicking, pickpocketing, noisy or quieter walkable surfaces, magical traps, heist planning and jailbreaks.

Lead developer Dominick John is one of the two people behind Youtube music parody outfit Space Bards, but it doesn't sound like you'll be singing much in Project Shadowglass. Not unless you really enjoy getting caught. Or are great at ventriloquy. Has an imsim allowed you to distract people using ventriloquy yet? Maybe next time.

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Misbehaving bullets, your hour of reckoning is nigh. A Battlefield 6 hotfix has been deployed with the goal of stopping you from refusing to register hit damage when you embed yourselves in virtual flesh. Bouncy ladders, your time will likely come soon, as EA's Battlefield Studios are busy trying to work out the arcane secrets of your rubbery rungs.

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Given how quickly older games can be delisted or end up near impossible to run properly without tinkering nowadays, efforts like GOG.com's preservation program are always nice to see. There's obviously a money-making motive behind it for the storefront, but keeping retro works in working order's a noble way to earn that cash. As it turns out, though, the folks behind the CD Projekt-owned site underestimated just how difficult an undertaking the program would be.

That's not to suggest they're giving up though, just that they've had to re-evaluate some of their ambitious early goals.

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I can't remember much about Battlefield 1942, two decades on, but I'm pretty sure I never thought "by golly, what if this + enormous sad stone monsters" while storming the beaches of Wake Island. It's one of many things that separate me from Fumito Ueda, director of melancholy PS2 titan-feller Shadow Of The Colossus, first released in 2005. In a new interview, he and other staff at Team Ico and Sony explore the game's development from start to finish, including some early dabblings with multiplayer.

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