Shams Jorjani, CEO of Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios, believes that's a big part of what will make GTA 6 special.

“Rockstar makes ridiculous, high-effort stuff and it's awesome that games like this get made,” Jorjani says, although there's a nice bit of self-interest in his enthusiasm. He's quite happy that GTA 6 isn't coming to PC at launch and that GTA Online isn't arriving on day one either, giving Helldivers 2 a little more room to breathe when Rockstar's monster finally lands.

It's his wider point that's more interesting, though, as he says: "Everyone in the industry right now is constantly pivoting strategies and obsessing over early player feedback just to survive. But Rockstar has the brand power to confidently take their time and run their classic play. They have the confidence and freedom to spend a decade doing things the old-school way because they know the core game will deliver. It’s going to raise the bar for sure."

He's got a point, because look at how games are being made now with early access releases, live-service roadmaps, player metrics, constant updates, community feedback, monetisation experiments, studios changing direction because players didn't like something in a beta… the feedback loop can start before a game has even properly found its feet and in the case of games like Concord, killed altogether before they have a chance to get going.

GTA 6 is bucking the trends

Rockstar's model is different and a little bit old-fashioned. Make the game, spend years throwing people and money at it, polish the hell out of it and trust that when you finally put it in front of the world, people will want to play it. Obviously, Rockstar can do this because it has Grand Theft Auto behind it and most studios don't have the luxury of spending a decade on a single game, particularly when development costs are enormous, and shareholders tend to prefer quicker returns.

But there is something fascinating about GTA 6 being made this way, especially from an artistic point of view. Give artists, animators, designers and developers enough time and money and what happens to the work? How much more detail can you cram into a world when you're allowed to obsess over it for years?

For Jorjani, the answer will be significant, saying GTA 6 is “going to raise the bar” when it releases, and perhaps even make some publishers rethink how they handle game development.

As if you didn't know, the Grand Theft Auto VI showcase will be live-streamed on Netflix today at 3pm ET / 8pm BST.

The Montreal and LA-based AI company reimagined the game’s characters and world for 10 short vertical video episodes for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram (see the first episode below.

HaZ, who's based in London, said protecting the game’s visual identity was a priority.

“I wanted complete control over a locked-down model trained exclusively on my assets," he says.

He worked with Nura Studios writer-director Abe Scheuermann, who developed and produced each episode in approximately one working week. This included scripting, animation, sound design, voice recording, music, cleanup and final delivery.

“The first test frames were trained exclusively on the original character sprites, animation and artwork I provided,” HaZ says. “I could send annotated notes and receive updates within hours, sometimes less, with the feedback addressed exactly. That level of responsiveness is rare for a director.”

Nura says the production remained firmly human-led. That included the voice cast. Graziela Larroca voices Astro, Elvis Deane voices AL, and Brian Ulrich performs a rotating cast of supporting characters. The music is by human composers, licensed through Epidemic Sound and edited to picture.

“I strongly prefer human voice artists because they bring nuances to a performance that are almost entirely absent from AI-generated voices,” Abe says. “The same philosophy applies to music.”

HaZ argues that rather than replacing a traditional creative team, Showcraft enabled a solo IP owner, one writer-director and three voice actors to complete a project that might otherwise have required months of production and significantly greater resources.

“AI can’t and won’t tell your story. That’s your job,” he says. “This works because the technology supports a clear creative vision, it isn’t about prompting random ideas to generate random shots.”

Astro Burn the game is available via Steam.

The collection brings together some of the best games of the 90s: Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja, Congo's Caper and Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics, released on the Super Nintendo between 1991 and 1995. These are very much games of their time, with bold, goofy character designs, grinning dinosaurs and bobble-eyed prehistoric beasts.

There's a particular charm to 16-bit game art like this that comes from making everything work with very little; it’s why fans love games of this era, and why remakes like Manic Miner HD cause a ruckus. The new Joe & Mac Retro Collection isn’t a remake; it’s the old games running on new consoles, with character designs readable at a glance, enemies needing a strong silhouette, and backgrounds that suggest a whole world without turning into an indistinguishable wall of pixels.

Joe & Mac is full of chunky characters, big expressions, bright colours and ridiculous creatures, with the whole thing leaning into a cartoon version of prehistory rather than anything resembling an actual history book. Dinosaurs, cavemen, monsters and weapons all get thrown into the same visual soup, and somehow it works.

It looks like one of those releases that will go the extra mile. The Joe & Mac Retro Collection also includes the Japanese versions of the games, including the uncensored Japanese version of Caveman Ninja, so there's a bit of preservation work going on here too. You can play the games closer to how they originally appeared in Japan, or slap on the CRT filter, adjust the aspect ratio and pretend you're back in front of a chunky old television.

There are modern concessions, such as save states and rewind to make the famously old-school difficulty a little less brutal, while a new Boss Rush mode gives returning players something they haven't seen before. Joe & Mac 1 and 2 also support two-player co-op. But the really nice touch is the Virtual Unboxing Experience, which lets you explore digital versions of the original boxes, manuals, and cartridges, celebrating how we used to collect and handle these games as much as play them.

Red Art Games is leaning into that with its physical editions, too, which include reversible covers, posters, stickers, badges and manuals, while the Rock Edition adds an acrylic stand and a retro-inspired box.

Pre-order Joe & Mac Retro Collection now; it releases digitally on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam on October 29. Physical editions for Switch and PS5 are due in early 2027.

With Apple's new iPhone launch event just around the corner, and rumours of a foldable iPhone Ultra doing the rounds, a lot of people are understandably holding out on purchasing the latest Galaxy Z series over intrigue on what the rival brand could reveal.

This is a smart move, and there's no rush to make a purchase as important as this without first weighing up your options. At Creative Bloq, we look at reviews through the lens of how tech can actually benefit creatives in daily use cases, and that's exactly how I've assessed the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra in my quick video review below.

VIDEO: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra review

*If you can't see the video above, please refresh the page.

Sample images from the Z Fold8 Ultra

One of the most important aspects of a camera phone for creative professionals is, of course, the camera. Even if you're more of a casual smartphone shooter, part of being a creative is creating content now (whether we like it or not), and having a phone that can walk you through the entire script, shoot, edit, upload process in one device is a key selling point.

I have no complaints in the camera department with the Z Fold8 Ultra, and during testing I found that it handled small details remarkably well when shooting with the 200MP camera. For a more in-depth look at the Z Fold8 Ultra camera, check out my camera phone shootout where I pit it against the standard Z Fold8 model.

Pain points: what it is it missing?

We need to address the S-Pen issue

I'm a long-time Samsung user and a proud owner of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, so it's hard for me to imagine life without the Samsung Ecosystem taking the wheel. What I mean by this is that things feel really easy with Samsung. Almost too easy.

My phone has my data and passwords backed up, it knows how I like things organised, saves my preferences, can replicate my tone in emails, and Galaxy AI has been tremendously helpful in keeping life on track for me as a journalist, photographer, hobbyist maker, and now social media manager.

What I'm getting at is that Samsung knows how loyal its users are, and it understands the reluctance to jump ship without a strong cause. That's why it's even more disappointing when companies let us down and remove tools that creatives rely on.

The Samsung S-Pen is a stylus that used to come included as part of Galaxy devices up until the Z Fold6 series, after that, it was abandoned following last year's Z Fold7 series (though it still remains on the flagship S Ultra series). Not having a stylus might seem like such a small element to moan about, but it made a huge difference for things like sketching, digital art, signing documents, and photo editing.

It feels like a huge and rather confusing loss to ditch this compatibility yet again with the Z Fold8 series, when arguably it makes the most sense to use a stylus with a foldable display with larger screen real estate to use it on.

Samsung: bring back the S-Pen. Even if it can't be part of the device physically and must be sold separately to use, that's fine by me. Okay, rant over. Let me know in the comments if this is a bugbear for you too.

Centred around prompt-based editing, the new AI-assisted editor, now available in beta, offers a dedicated interface for users to edit using a natural language prompt bar alongside other generative tools, powered by various AI models.

The new editor represents perhaps Adobe's most decisive move yet in its embracing of 'conversational editing'. The company has already added new AI assistants to the likes of Photoshop and Adobe Express. But now it's offering an entirely new editing interface for its most established software.

As well as prompt to edit, the new AI-assisted editor features some of Photoshop's other AI tools, including Remove Background, Generative Expand, Generative Fill and Generative Upscale.

While the advent of a brand new AI-assisted editor is unlikely to appease those lamenting the insertion of AI into every area of digital creativity, Adobe is keen to stress that like all of its AI offering, the AI-assisted editor is designed to fit into existing workflows. Or, if a user prefers, they can disable it altogether.

And the prompt to edit feature isn't limited to the new AI editor. "Prefer to keep working in the Pro Editor? Prompt to Edit offers the same natural language editing directly in the Pro Editor's Contextual Task Bar, so you can transform an entire image using simple prompts, with no selection required, right from the context bar you’re already using," Adobe announced in a blog post. "Whether you prefer prompts, precision tools, or a combination of both, Photoshop offers the flexibility to support the way you create."

And that got me thinking. As it's Back to School season, why not put that six-years' experience to good use and choose the best work set up for students – pick the best budget options in a host of areas that all creative students need.

And so below is my list of the nine most essential things that will elevate your work space, but won't break the bank. They include my all-time favourite budget ergonomic chair, the Sihoo M18, as well as the recently discovered $30 Bob Ross desk mat, which brings a smile to my face every time I look at it.

Kusama chose to spend more than five decades living in a Tokyo psychiatric facility. She worked at a studio across the road, and consistently described her artistic practice as more than a career. She described it as the only thing that kept her pain, anxiety and fear under control.

When talking about the art itself, her tone shifted to something much lighter – she spoke of polka dots gleefully and with love. This is a philosophy she stuck to all her life, outlasting the practice of most artists. Art was a survival tool whilst being the thing that delighted her most.

Here, I've pulled together the words she used to explain why she kept making work, a series of quotes many creatives might relate to and be inspired by.

Art as survival

"I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art." – Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama (Tate Publishing, 2013, p.60).

"I've sought for truth of art with an ambition and fought like hell all my life to accomplish my purpose as a human being." – From an interview with Tate in 2015, quoted in Hyperallergic's obituary this week.

Creating to the end

"I paint every day. I am going to continue creating a world in awe of life, embracing all the messages of love, peace and universe." – From a 2023 interview with The Art Newspaper, timed to her M+ Hong Kong retrospective catalogue.

"I do not feel the difference between my earlier creation and now. I never run out of ideas so I shall continue to show new things." – Same 2023 Art Newspaper interview.

"I will keep on making my art until the day I die. And even after I die, my spirit will keep creating new art." – Quoted in Artnet's obituary this week.

Legacy and mortality

On winning Japan's Order of Culture in 2016: "I feel there is little left in my life, but I am now still fighting to the death for my art," and "I am giving all I have so that many people will continue to be interested in my art, even after I am dead." – Reported by NBC News.

"I want to create things that are infinite, expand beyond the canvas." – Artnet obituary this week.

On process and pure delight in making

"Polka dots are fabulous"

"I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw," she continued.

"I will keep painting until I die."

– 2012 interview with the Associated Press.

On her life

Asked whether she'd accept a feminist reading of her work, she said: "I am too busy with myself to worry about a man-woman problem. Since I find a refuge in my work, I cannot be bullied by men."

On her strict, matriarchal upbringing: "In my childhood, I experienced so much hardship, all thanks to 'feminism.' My mother wielded a tremendous amount of authority and my father was always dispirited."

Interview with curator Akira Tatehata

Kusama spent close to a century using art as fuel to keep her alive, and as the thing she loved doing most. She kept working right up until her final years.

• Buy Switch 2 for £449.99 on Amazon
• Buy Switch 2 for £378.85 on Amazon

From 1 September, the Switch 2 is getting $50 more expensive in the US, climbing from $449.99 to $499.99 for the 256GB console without a game, and £24 more expensive in the UK. That's a painful price rise for a Switch 2 that’s just over a year old, and with the price change now less than a week away, buying now will genuinely save you money.

The timing is interesting because Nintendo has also announced new Switch 2 bundles arriving this autumn, including packages with games that may soften the blow slightly, but you'll still be paying the higher hardware price. In other words, waiting for those bundles isn't necessarily the bargain you might expect; for example, the standout Nintendo Switch Sports Resort bundle will still be $529.99, a post-price-hike saving of $27.98 but still $22.02 more than where we are now, and in fact an actual $80 saving – phew!

If you're reading this in the UK, there's a price rise here too, although thankfully it's not quite as brutal. Nintendo has confirmed that the Switch 2 will increase from £395.99 to £419.99 on 1 September, a £24 jump. That’s still a price increase that could go toward a new game or Nintendo Online.

What should you pay right now?

The official UK price is £395.99, but you don't necessarily need to pay that as Amazon is selling Switch 2 for £378.85, while some retailers are still sitting at the full £395.99 price, which means there's a proper deal here rather than simply buying ahead of a price rise. At roughly £380, Switch 2 today would effectively be £40 cheaper than the new £419.99 UK price from 1 September.

Those kinds of prices aren't guaranteed to return next week, though. If you find a Switch 2 around the £360-£380 mark before 1 September, I'd consider that a much more interesting proposition than waiting for Black Friday and hoping Nintendo's retailers discount the console enough to cancel out the new RRP.

So while you could wait, and there will be Switch 2 deals after 1 September, usually around Black Friday, they’ll likely be bundles that don’t really push the price down but offset a cost rise by offering an old game to sweeten the deal – the hardware price won’t escape the $50/£24 price rise that’s coming in just a few days.

It’s simple right now: if you've already decided you want a Switch 2, buying one before 1 September means you won't be starting from a $499.99/ £419.99 price tag, and if you can find one below £380 in the UK right now, even better.

Best Nintendo Switch 2 deals ahead of $50 price rise

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Solid build
• Some gamer aesthetics

There's been no attempt at building a thin and light laptop here, and very little in the form of subtlety or quirkiness in the Crosshair’s design. It’s a thick, brash gaming laptop, with a rainbow keyboard and a dragon on the back of the lid. There's some linework too, in the kind of pattern that recalls a cyberpunk tattoo, and vents at the back and sides through which you can see the copper fins of a heat sink.

It’s a 16in laptop, so was never going to be small, and is fairly thick with nicely rounded corners. The screen, in particular, has some heft to it - perhaps a byproduct of using an IPS instead of an OLED - but the hinge is nice and smooth, with enough stiffness to stay in place once you’ve got it in the right position.

The font used for the keycaps is a bit much - it’s very wide and slips in a lower-case N among all the other capitals - but it gets the job done. Being a gaming machine, the WASD keys are clear instead of black, allowing the backlight to shine through at the expense of being able to read them clearly. Those who know what WASD are used for will be able to locate them by feel, but hunt and peck typists may find themselves moving more slowly as a result.

The trackpad, in contrast to the generally solid build quality of the Crosshair, seems a little loose in its housing. It’s nice and smooth, and has a good click when you press in on it, but there's just a hint of wobble. Perhaps it’s only our review model that does this.

Design score: 3/5

Features

• Excellent screen
• Poor battery life

The MSI Crosshair 16 HX doesn’t come with Thunderbolt or USB4 in this spec - look out for an Ultra 9 variant with TB4 if that’s important to you - so the best you’re going to get is USB 3.2 Gen 2 (that’s the 10Gbps one). Luckily, you get three of them, including the lesser-seen Type-A version of the port, so you will at least be able to hook up some reasonably fast external SSDs. There's no SD card slot either, so drone pilots will be using one USB port to hook up a card reader. MSI’s choice of charging port is a rotationally symmetrical rectangle that looks just like a USB-A at first glance, so it’s quite possible to find yourself trying to stuff a thumb drive into it and wondering why it won’t go in either way up. It’s also possible to charge through USB-C if you’d rather side-step this problem.

Those Type-C ports also support DisplayPort, and there's a full-size HDMI 2.1 too, so the Crosshair is well equipped for connecting to external monitors. Its IPS screen is a rather lovely thing, though, so you might be tempted to stick with it if it’s large enough for your needs. It puts out 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, along with 100% of sRGB and 87% of Adobe RGB, with a maximum brightness of 475 nits.

The screen’s 2560x1600 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate point to its origins in the world of videogames, but for use in creative apps it works well. High-framerate video is super smooth, and colours pop, especially if you take the time to calibrate it. Another nice little feature, often overlooked, is the webcam privacy shutter - many gaming laptops omit this, but here it’s a simple slider built into the camera housing at the top of the screen, with a red panel exposed when it’s closed.

Battery life is where the Crosshair really falls down, however. At just 2hr 25m when only lightly taxed, you’re not going to get very far between plug sockets before needing a top-up.

Feature score: 3/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Mid-range Nvidia GPU
• Loud cooling system

The Core i7-14650HX is a 16-core chip with its Performance and Efficient cores split evenly into two sets of eight. The P cores can hyper-thread while the E cores cannot, for the possibility of 24 simultaneous software threads. At 55W, it sucks the same base power as the Core Ultra 9 275HX, but performs at a lower level. In the Geekbench 6 multi-core benchmark, the Crosshair scores 11,580 against the 275HX (in an MSI Stealth 18) total of 17,883. The 275HX can also process 24 threads, but is newer tech and in a larger laptop for better cooling, so it’s no surprise it pulls ahead.

Elsewhere, the GPU proves its worth in the rendering tests, steamrollering anything using integrated graphics just as you’d expect. The RTX 5070 sits in the middle of Nvidia’s hierarchy, and is a steady performer capable of framerates above 30fps in Cyberpunk 2077’s ray-tracing ultra mode, and even more if you enable Nvidia’s Multi-Frame Generation tech. When it’s doing this, you’ll certainly notice the fans, which have the usual sound of rushing air underpinned by a hum that’s presumably coming from the motors. It’s definitely at the louder end of laptop cooling systems, but seems effective at holding the GPU’s thermals in check.

In creative apps, the 16GB of RAM may be the deciding factor, as 32GB laptops will have an edge. The Photoshop results from Pugetbench look pretty good, but the tight 16GB of RAM may limit it when it comes to high-res video with lots of layers. That said, as the laptop is able to rely on its GPU when it comes to AI apps, it beats the Acer Nitro V 14, with its AMD processor and RTX 5060, in the Topaz Video AI test even though the Acer has more system RAM (but less VRAM).

Performance score: 3/5

Price

On sale at £2,099 (or $1,299 for an i7/5060 spec, and $1,449 for i9/5070) the MSI Crosshair 16 HX isn’t a cheap laptop by any means, but as there's a version with a newer Ultra 9 275HX out there that costs even more, it’s clear the 14th-gen processor has an effect on the price, as does the 16GB of RAM rather than 32. You can get a lot of laptop for this price, with the obvious candidate being a 14in MacBook Pro, or the Acer Nitro V 14 for a bit less.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• After-hours gamers

There's no denying that a laptop with this kind of graphics power, not to mention the lovely bright display, is great for photos and video footage, but its true love is to be plugged in and pumping rendered frames onto the screen. You can use it for both! There's nothing to stop you!

Buy it if...

• A bright, colourful screen appeals
• You can make use of the GPU
• Maybe a few rounds of COD later?

Don't buy it if...

• You value thinness
• Or battery life
• Or quiet fans

Also consider

The Cupertino tech giant has upgraded the silicon in both of its desktop computers. The new Mac mini comes with a choice between Apple's M5 Pro or new M6 chip, while the Mac Studio comes with either the M5 Max or M5 Ultra. In each case it's an iterative but significant jump that should mean better performance in creative software.

Preorders are now live, with prices starting at $899 / £899 for the base M6 Mac mini and $2,499 / £2,499 for the Mac Studio with M5 Max chip. Premium configurations of the M5 Ultra cost well over $10,000, but there are ways to save on all models. The Apple Store is offering trade-in credit if you have swap an older Mac: up to $480 for an older Mac mini and up to $580 for a MacBook Air.

The new Mac desktops will start shipping on 22 September. Also check out the brilliant new stop-motion Mac mini advert.

• Mac mini M6: $899 at Apple | Amazon | Best Buy
• Mac mini M5 Pro: $1,699 at Apple | Amazon | Best Buy
• Mac Studio M5 Max: $2,499 at Apple | Best Buy
• Mac Studio M5 Ultra: $5,499 at Apple | Best Buy

New 2026 Mac mini and Mac Studio: who are they for?

Announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live, the September release will feature a plethora of upgrades to the original 2015 open-world RPG, from visuals to gameplay and performance. Anyone who bought the original for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S will qualify to receive it, and, Nintendo Switch players will be able to claim a native Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, with pre-orders open at Nintendo now.

CD Projekt Red's The Witcher 3 Remastered promises enhanced combat, improved traversal and movement, overhauled mount handling, revamped monster behaviours, a skill tree update, transmogrification, expanded photo mode and new finishers.

In the brief "and more" section at the end of the reveal trailer, the developer listed no fewer than 30 upgrades, from cross-platform mod support to immersive meditation, refined animations, UI tweaks, updated textures, HDR and ray tracing improvements, a global lighting rework, new shading model and a new tone mapper.

Fans are excited about the move to full path tracing, including ray-traced hair, and revamped combat, while PC gamers are celebrating the elimination of DirectX 11 for native DX12.

And best of all, it's the kind of free gift that's almost unheard of in the industry. That decision is winning CD Projekt Red (CDPR) massive respect from players and differentiating it from competitors like Rockstar (GTA Trilogy) or Sony (The Last of Us Part I).

The studio could have charged for the upgrade or made it an entirely separate game to purchase, but it seems that after backlash over Cyberpunk 2077’s troubled launch, it's deliberately positioning itself as a studio that values players. It's even now giving away the existing DLCs Blood and Wine DLC and Hearts of Stone for free too.

It all makes great business sense. By giving the millions of players who already own The Witcher 3 a free upgrade, it strengthens brand loyalty, primes the audience for the paid Songs of the Past extension in 2027, and should help keep players engaged until The Witcher 4, which is expected in 2028.

The remaster is also a technical showcase demonstrating new cutting-edge features. Offering it free maximises visibility while ensuring that Geralt’s saga remains central to the franchise as we look forward to Ciri taking the lead in The Witcher 4.

CD Projekt Red also shared a new teaser for Songs of the Past, the upcoming third expansion of the game. The DLC will feature the new region of Letten, described as an idyllic land rich in rural tradition and folklore but with a dark secret lurking just beneath the surface.

The Witcher 3 Remastered will be available from 29 September. Songs of the Past will be released in 2027 as a paid expansion for The Witcher 3 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. It's available to wishlist now for select platforms.

As developer Eschatology Entertainment describes it, this is a first-person Soulslike shooter. That is to say you have campfires for checkpoints, enemies respawn, you have precious resources that you drop when you die, while combat is also deliberately slow and methodical. That's quite a few things that you probably wouldn't associate with a shooter. Rather than medieval dark fantasy, this is set in a weird, occult, and apocalyptic version of the 19th-century American West, so for western film influences, think El Topo rather than A Fistful of Dollars.

That setting also turns out to be very apt, given you don't have the luxury of fast reloads and have to make every shot count. It's something that takes some time getting used to with my starting weapon, an iconic-looking six-shooter, where you're having to pull the trigger once just to load a bullet before pulling again to fire (the UI design also shows the actual bullets cycling into the chamber itself). In typical shooting instincts, you'd aim for the head, but while that might work for the very basic hat-wearing enemies, there's a more devious design for how you encounter each enemy.

What Guns of Eschaton gets right

Given that eschatology concerns studying the End Times, you're also technically studying your enemies, ranging from the undead to freaky flying eyeballs that explode if they get too close. A key item you pick up at the start is a Codex. In another game, this would be like an enemy compendium you might idly flick through, but here it's an actual book you carry around and open up in real time with an illustration of the enemy in front of you. These illustrations are also annotated, highlighting different body parts with numbers that indicate the order you need to shoot them in order to deliver serious, effective damage.

Take, for example, the Doomed Lawman, whom you must shoot in the right leg (your left) first before going for the head. But if you're facing the Severed Lawman, who looks annoyingly similar with the exception that they wield a long-range rifle rather than a pistol, they have a different pattern, where you have to target their left leg, followed by their left arm and then their head, incidentally parts also wrapped in bandages. Still, it's tricky to tell the difference between them initially, especially when you are holding the Codex in front of you while also trying to aim.

You do have some advantages, like being able to dash to dodge bullets (being a Soulslike, this costs stamina), which also allows you to platform across small gaps in the absence of a jump button. Your enemies also handle the same kind of slow firearms, so you do have time to react as they cock their pistol. This also allows you time to respond to an enemy shot by parrying. That idea might sound ludicrous for a shooter, but your protagonist has the fortune of having a mysterious demonic entity's floating arms that does this for you. Successfully parry, and you not only stun your opponent but have a second or so of bullet time where, if you're slick enough, you can land all your shots to blow them away. It's also the way to deal with the occasional one-on-one showdown where the twist is not who can fire first but where you must parry first, and then shoot.

A Dark Souls gunslinger

In practice, however, after getting through the tutorial, I spent the majority of my session barely able to escape the opening town in the Forgotten Desert, which looks like your typical western location, albeit with the cosmological sight of floating rocks in the distance. If I wasn't just an awful shot at targeting these enemies' body parts or memorising the order they're to be hit, messing up the parry timing or forgetting to cock the gun barrel when I had them in my sights, I was being flanked by shots I barely had time to figure out the direction they were coming from before. In several cases, I got caught off guard by not realising a stick of dynamite had been chucked at my feet until I was blown away and once again met with the game's equivalent of the 'You Died' screen (get used to being told, 'No Rest. No Peace.')

I can imagine Guns of Eschaton being a divisive game that will demand patience to get to grips with, but it also felt like a humbling reminder of what it must have been like when I played Dark Souls for the very first time. From its take on the Weird West to parrying bullets, it's got Colt potential.

Guns of Eschaton is coming soon to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and you can wishlist on Steam.

Players will step into the role of a warlock called Kaatri on a quest to find someone she's lost with the help of powerful witch Tasha. The gameplay makes clear that we're not in for another Baldur's Gate 3.

Kaatri is played by Tricia Helfer, the Canadian-American actress and former model best known for playing Number Six in Battlestar Galactica. Her character is described as an experienced warrior newly bound as a warlock. She must master forbidden magic in a land where she's an outsider. Maggie Robertson (Orin the Red in Baldur's Gate 3) plays the witch Tash.

The game is a single player action adventure in which you can combine magic with melee, with combat giving players a plethora of tools. The gameplay shows a more action-focused experience than the turn-based RPG formula of Baldur’s Gate 3.

At one moment in the reveal, we see Kaatri holds an enemy in the air, finish another and picks up a sword to throw. Se also defeats an enemy after summoning tendrils from the ground.

Fans are praising the darker, gothic aesthetic and strong visual identity, hailing Kaatri’s design as a bold attempt at modernisation. Her look blends battle-worn realism with supernatural flair. One person writing on X describes her as a mix of Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings and Sarah Kerrigan from StarCraft.

In an interview with Variety, Maggie says she believes the game will be "different because we’re following one character’s story,”

"Warlock takes us through the relationships of these specific characters, Tasha and Kaatri. Instead of being pulled in many different directions, we’re asking players to focus on one relationship with a lot of emotional depth,” she adds.

Helfer says of her character: “We really get to understand her, know her motivations, and hopefully become captivated by the emotion driving her. And you’ll still have all the fun parts of D & D. You’ll still see iconic spells, characters, and locations from D & D. I think Warlock is trying to balance being a great experience that is both accessible to newcomers and longtime fans of D & D.”

The game is expected in 2027.

I was worried about Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, mostly because of the sword combat. When Asobo announced that Sophia, the pirate we met in the previous game, Requiem, would be running around with a blade and proper melee combat in her own prequel, I couldn't help thinking, do we really need this? A Plague Tale had carved out a little space for itself with an original blend of stealth, puzzles, rats, Medieval misery and beautifully written characters, and suddenly it looked like we were heading towards a 14th-century God of War. There are enough games where I can smash someone in the face with a sword; A Plague Tale didn't need to be another.

But the combat turns out to be one of the least important things about Resonance, and that's why it works so well. The combat is perfectly decent, Sophia is a nimble fighter, and there are some nice but unrevolutionary ideas around parrying, dodging and using the environment – kicking enemies off bridges and into ancient 'holes' is oddly satisfying. The aim is to always knock enemies off balance, such as kicking a shield carrier or throwing objects to stun enemies, which leaves them open to a final killer blow – you've done this before. A simple upgrade tree gives Sophia things like faster dodges and double kicks, and new hidden weapons offer buffs and debuffs, like a broken spearhead for stabbing through shields but only useful when running.

Sword fights are well implemented but feel basic compared to games that make melee combat the whole point, like Devil May Cry 5 or God of War. The ancient Minoan 'vision resonances' where Sophia lives out Theseus' trials centuries earlier show this most clearly, because these gladiatorial encounters don't really develop the system beyond the same parry-and-counter rhythm; in fact, by the credits Sophia is more skilled with a sword than Theseus.

But the thing I kept thinking about while playing was how recognisably A Plague Tale it all felt, despite the introduction of combat into the mix. The writing, the sense of place, the puzzles, the horrible creeping dread, the way a beautiful landscape will evolve into grimly dark decay – it's all still here and done better than ever before.

Still A Plague Tale at heart

Resonance is both a prequel to A Plague Tale: Innocence and Requiem, with Sophia setting out to uncover the truth about her past on the mysterious Minotaur's island. Sophia is already a very different lead from the series' heroine, Amicia. She's a plunderer, a pirate, confident with a sword, and has enough swagger to make the early sections feel lively and just a little carefree, particularly when she's travelling with sidekick Leni. There's a real sense that the two of them have stumbled into something exciting, and for a while Resonance is happy to let you enjoy that feeling.

But things turn dark – visions, secrets, supernatural – and the game doesn't simply turn the lights off and throw monsters at you, but Sophia's whole attitude changes as she discovers what is happening on the island, what it means, and the performance sells that change particularly well. She starts out excited and curious, then becomes frightened, remorseful and increasingly aware that she's dealing with something she can't simply stab her way out of.

That shift is reflected in the environments too, as the spectacular open spaces, brilliant blue skies, clear water, sandy ruins and enormous ancient statues give way to claustrophobic tombs and catacombs where the walls are crawling with the remnants of the Macula – the game's supernatural blood infestation. There's a lovely late-game scene where the sunrise catches the orange rocks and temple ruins, and everything looks almost impossibly beautiful, which makes the uglier things lurking underneath feel even more horrible.

Exploring is enjoyable; there are grapple hooks, hidden tombs, secret passages and ancient mechanisms, and while none of this is especially revolutionary – and the 14th-century Tomb Raider tag feels apt – Asobo has such a good eye for environments that I rarely minded following the obvious path. I kept wanting to see what was around the next corner, and uncover the next tease of why everything went to literal hell for King Minos centuries before, because looking around these crumbling ruins, something wild went down.

The same goes for the puzzles. Most of them revolve around light, using an ancient golden sphere that Sophia can upgrade as she progresses. It can become a prism for matching coloured light or uncovering secret messages and clues, among other things, and eventually a focused beam with a rather more practical use. I wouldn't call the puzzles difficult – there were two that made me properly stop and think –, but I liked the way the idea runs through the game, particularly because manipulating light feels like a natural extension of what A Plague Tale has always done with torchlight and darkness. The more I play, the more Resonance feels like an evolution of the series' core identity and mechanics.

That's because the combat is never allowed to take over. You still spend plenty of time sneaking, solving puzzles and exploring the medieval world's enormous environments, as Sophia's emotional story unfolds, drawing together multiple strings into a slow-burning revelatory arc, and when the game really wants to frighten you, it drops the combat entirely and embraces the series stealth roots.

The tombs of Minoa are covered in fluorescent dust, and Sophia picks it up as she moves around. The Macula has produced a new sort of worm-like creature that can track her by following that dust, so now your footprints become a track it can follow. You have to think about where you're walking, where you can hide, which areas are safe and how quickly you can get from one piece of cover to another.

Artistically, the new creature feels like an evolution of the rat horde in how it moves and attacks – the creature fears light, will suck the dust from the air, and you can see the glowing particles being pulled away from Sophia as it gets closer, and more so, every particle in the scene is sucked past at speed. Its breathing changes too, becoming deeper and more urgent, and as it breathes in slowly, those dust particles move rhythmically on screen; there were several points where I found myself sitting completely still, waiting for it to move away, just watching the particles ebb, flow and subside.

You can light cauldrons to create safe spaces; moving slowly while crouched leaves no dust behind, and jumping across gaps breaks the trail for a little while, but there's never quite enough security to make you comfortable. You're always watching that dust, listening for the creature and wondering whether you've left too obvious a trail, or questioning whether you can run to safety or keep crawling, creating a novel sense of risk and reward. It's a different mechanic from the rats, obviously, but it produces the same kind of tension.

The horror keeps developing as well, with an impressive late-game sequence involving crusted, desiccated figures that starts out looking like another piece of environmental dressing and then becomes much less harmless as they crack into life and chase you down, and like the earlier games' rats, make too much noise, and you'll be swamped in the mannequin-like monsters.

Resonance doesn't just repeat its best tricks either, as the further Sophia gets into Minoa, the more unpleasant everything becomes, and the Macula's organic tendrils start appearing everywhere, turning what should be grand ancient ruins into something diseased and almost alive. The story pulls it all together through Sophia's connection to an ancient Carrier and Protector, with events from the Minoan era bleeding into her own journey.

I don't want to get too deep into what happens here because much of the pleasure comes from watching the pieces connect, but this is where Resonance earns its place in the series. Sophia isn't simply discovering an ancient mystery and ticking off a list of tombs. The Carrier, the Protector and the Macula become tied to the choices she has to make, and the game's revelations gradually explain why she has been drawn into this particular story.

A particularly effective parallel is how Sophia begins the game thinking she can handle whatever is put in front of her, only to confront something that can't be solved with confidence, a sword, or a clever bit of tomb raiding. That emotional progression is more interesting than watching her become a better fighter, especially since, like Requiem, no one here is safe from a gruesome death, and that pendulum hanging over every plot twist gives Resonance the emotional hook I've loved about this series. By the final third, Resonance is fully back in the territory where A Plague Tale has always been strongest. It's miserable, beautiful, frightening and surprisingly heartfelt, with the different pieces of the game finally pushing in the same direction.

I went into Resonance thinking Asobo might have made a mistake by adding combat to the mix; instead, that side of the game is almost beside the point. It gives Sophia a different physicality, and it adds another texture to the game, but the series' identity is strong enough to survive the change, and the new stealth mechanics actually push it somewhere more interesting.

There are still things I'd change. I'd like the combat to have more depth, especially in those ancient sections, and the puzzles could certainly ask more of you. But those aren't the things that stuck with me after finishing it.

What works? It's the landscapes. Sophia's relationship with Leni and her growing connection to Theseus. The slow collapse of that carefree adventure into something much darker. The glowing dust being sucked from the air as something hunts me through the ruins. Those desiccated figures breaking and beginning to move. The orange light over the ancient temples, the huge detailed environments that kept me pausing to enter Photo Mode. The feeling that every time I thought I'd figured out what Resonance is doing, there was another nasty little idea waiting for me.

A Plague Tale didn't need to become a new me-too God of War or even a medieval Tomb Raider; it just needed to remain itself while finding somewhere new to go, and Resonance manages that brilliantly. For all my initial doubts, this is the strongest entry in the series yet, and it leaves Asobo with a much bigger, stranger world to play with next time.

Humankind 2 has finally been revealed, with Amplitude showing off its new historical strategy game at Gamescom during the Opening Night Live event, although it’s the trailer rather than the game itself that has people stopping to ask the same awkward question we hear too often these days: was this made with AI?

I can see why fans have asked the question – the footage, which showed a montage of Earth through humanity's different ages, has those short, sharp edits and uncanny quality we’ve all become pretty familiar with in AI-generated video. Except Humankind 2's trailer isn't made using AI. Amplitude says the trailer was made with real actors, practical sets and custom-made props, which makes the whole thing more interesting and creative than prompting a video into reality, and should be celebrated and not questioned.

The studio made a formal statement on its official X account, stating clearly: "The HUMANKIND 2's live-action announcement trailer was filmed at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia using real actors, practical sets, and custom-made props created specifically for the production. We will be sharing behind-the-scenes images from the shoot soon."

The trailer races through different periods of history, dropping us into scenes packed with costumes, characters, and elaborate environments, and a deliberately exaggerated first-person perspective runs through much of it too. A fisheye-style lens bends the edges of the image, stretching faces and rooms and giving the whole thing a strange, slightly surreal quality.

The reaction has been mixed, with some viewers convinced they’ve spotted AI artefacts, while others have pointed out that the footage looks much more like deliberately stylised cinematography, particularly when you take the fisheye lens and practical production into account. In fact, some on the studio's X account even blamed the developer for putting itself in the situation of being accused of AI, with X user 'centrist fan' writing, "you did kind of set yourself up there because I have seen 'historical figures doing a selfie' AI slop before, so making it the basis of your trailer was a decision".

The distinction between real and AI is becoming increasingly strange for artists and filmmakers to deal with because AI imagery has developed such a recognisable visual language so quickly. And this isn't the first time a studio or artist has been wrongly accused of using AI. We’ve got used to seeing certain kinds of faces, lighting, compositions and impossible camera moves in generated images, to the point where those choices can now make real footage look artificial.

And Humankind 2 is probably one of the more appropriate games to stumble into that particular argument because Amplitude’s original Humankind was built around letting players create their own version of history, mixing cultures and taking civilisations in directions that don’t necessarily follow the traditional historical timeline. The sequel expands that idea with new cultures, progression systems, and a revised interface, and is currently expected to launch on PC in 2027.

Neon Giant knows how to make a good-looking game. The dev's breakout game, The Ascent, was packed with cyberpunk detail, cramming neon, machinery, buildings and characters into almost every available pixel, and No Law looks like the studio is taking that same approach into a much bigger first-person world.

The new No Law trailer (below) gives us another look at Port Desire following the game's reveal at State of Unreal 2026, the game's cyber-noir port city, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to see the city as simply a backdrop for the shooting.

Port Desire is perched on sea cliffs, an industrial cybergrunge city where concrete, machinery and neon sit alongside surprisingly lush greenery. That contrast gives the world a look of its own, rather than making it feel like another futuristic city assembled from the usual cyberpunk ingredients.

It's also a city designed to be looked at from different angles. Rooftops, streets and alleys stack on top of one another, while the mixture of industrial architecture and vegetation gives the environment a sense of age and history. Neon Giant describes Port Desire as a trading hub where anyone can pursue their dreams, although judging by the trailer, some of those dreams are likely to involve considerably more gunfire than others.

This is where No Law becomes particularly interesting from an art direction perspective. Neon Giant has talked about building the game around the idea of "Density Over Scale", rather than simply chasing the biggest possible open world. It's a philosophy that makes sense for a studio coming from The Ascent, where the pleasure often came from simply looking around and seeing another layer of detail tucked behind the one you were already looking at.

The new trailer suggests that Port Desire is built around that same idea. A lot is happening in relatively compact spaces, with the city's vertical layout giving Neon Giant plenty of opportunities to change the view, lighting, and atmosphere as you move through it.

That's important for an Unreal Engine 5 game, because the technology can produce enormous worlds, but bigger doesn't automatically mean more interesting, and No Law appears to be betting that a dense world packed with visual information is more rewarding than an empty landscape that happens to be huge.

It also helps that the city isn't just there to be admired but explored, lived in and used. You play as Grey Harker, a retired veteran who has settled into a peaceful life growing plants after being critically wounded on his final deployment. Naturally, that peace doesn't last, and an unwanted visitor drags him back into the violence he thought he'd left behind.

From there, No Law gives you plenty of control over how you deal with its problems in a kind of emergent way that offers a sense of freedom. You can use Grey's tactical background to stay in the shadows, or push directly into combat, with sci-fi equipment, vertical movement and combat upgrades giving you different ways to approach encounters. Your decisions can also lead to different routes and endings.

That makes Port Desire's design more important than it might seem at first, as the city is built around different routes and approaches that need to feel like somewhere you can actually navigate, rather than a collection of pretty vistas placed between missions. The design of No Law's city aims for a new level of complexity and density, but that also means we need environment design that feels familiar and follows logic we understand.

We've seen plenty of cyberpunk cities since Cyberpunk 2077 raised the bar for the genre, but Neon Giant has already demonstrated with The Ascent that it has its own visual language for the future. No Law is taking that language somewhere considerably larger, and the combination of industrial architecture, greenery and vertical exploration gives Port Desire plenty of personality. The guns might get you into the city, but it's the city itself that I'm increasingly interested in exploring.

No Law will release in 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

Even though I've already put hundreds of hours into Elden Ring back when it first launched in 2022 as well as the release of its substantial Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in 2024, having the most revolutionary open world game this decade (second only to Nintendo's own Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom) on the Switch 2 was always a tantalising prospect when a complete edition was announced for the console in its original reveal.

Of course, that excitement turned to trepidation when initial reactions to the game's performance and optimisation at last year's Gamescom delayed Elden Ring Tarnished Edition from its original 2025 window. Naturally, it would have been a touch too ironic for this port to be a literally tarnished version compared to other releases, but it would also be in FromSoftware's interest not to make a hash of it, especially when it's partnering with Nintendo for Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods. And now, a year later, just in time for the next edition of Gamescom in Cologne, it's a relief that it's still a joy to journey back to The Lands Between in all its majesty.

Elden Ring but current-gen

While Elden Ring was actually a cross-gen release, the Switch 2 version certainly feels closer to current-gen than last-gen. It may not have the hardware grunt to deliver a smooth 60 fps, but the details, from shadows to foliage or the bright lights emitting from the ever-present Erdtree or the sights of grace, don't feel diminished whether you're playing docked or in handheld mode, while I didn't feel like I was stuck on the loading screen for long whenever I died.

The framerate overall feels stable enough that I can freely roam large stretches of this open world on my spectral horse Torrent, just marvelling at anything that catches my eye without things coming to a judder, or parry an enemy's attack and be able to blame myself rather than the game's performance if I mess up the timing.

But one of the refreshing things about coming back to Elden Ring is just how much of a leap it was for FromSoftware. Whereas other Soulslikes feel like they're still working from Dark Souls 3's design, what I had forgotten is how Elden Ring gives you so many more options than parrying, including just being able to block with your shield and immediately follow up with a powerful staggering counter.

More notable is that depending on the weapon you have, the ZL input changes to a much more diverse set of skills, or you can even change them with Ashes of War items. It gives you a much more flexible way to customise your build to fit your playstyle, while you also have the benefit of just being able to browse YouTube guides to all kinds of broken builds. Even then, if you're still struggling by yourself, you also have the ability to seek out and summon spirits to help you out, and while often they're just acting as a distraction, you can also upgrade their effectiveness while they don't increase a boss's HP like when summoning another player.

A map worth exploring

It's the same philosophy applied to its open world map, which just keeps expanding and expanding the more you explore, where you really can go in just about any direction you like. Want to take on a brutally tough enemy the moment you step out onto the grassy grandeur of Limgrave? You can, or just ride another way and level up with some more manageable mini dungeons, or find and summon spirits to aid you in battle. Or you might find a chest that whisks you off to the nightmarish rotting hellscape of Caelid that you normally wouldn't reach for another 10 or so hours (even though actually there's nothing stopping you from riding in that direction in a matter of minutes from the start).

If you run into one brick wall, you'll almost certainly find something a little more surmountable elsewhere, or conversely you can also just race ahead to some of the late game areas, including unlocking the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion that takes you to a completely different map. Found a weapon or spell you want to use but realised you invested runes in a different kind of build? Then there's a way to respec too, even if you have to work for it first. But the benefit of being a game that's been out for a few years is that there's no shortage of YouTube guides where you can find the most optimal route or a path to crafting the most broken builds.

Yet despite all the hours I've put into the game before, I also just enjoyed being able to rediscover The Lands Between by myself, taking different routes than I had before, forgetting about something I had discovered by accident the first time. I did nonetheless make use of one of the new starting classes included in Tarnished Edition (which will also be added to other versions as a free update), Knights of Ide, with a sword I feel definitely helped me breeze through my first couple of hours. But old habits die hard, and I was soon back to wielding my beloved Bloodhound's Fang, which had always been by my side until the endgame.

With such a rich lore to its world, especially one that Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin helped shape, the best way to experience Elden Ring, almost like any old book, is just to take your time and savour every drop of it. Even with its expansive cast of demigods, many whom I still sometimes struggle to keep track of given the similarities of their names – your Godfreys, your Godricks, or your Melinas and Melanias – it's the smaller questlines and their recurring characters that really give the game its charm, from the tragic Millicent to the jolly giant Living Jar Alexander, or that dirtbag Patches, who has appeared in many of FromSoft's games in some guise or another. There's no definitive or right way to play Elden Ring, but you'd be missing out if you were to skip the questline featuring a group of characters that the lads at RKG affectionately refer to as 'Welsh Avengers'.

Switch 2 delivers The Lands Between on the go

Tarnished Edition is, however, not without some blemishes. Admittedly, I haven't been able to sink in as many hours exploring every nook and cranny of the port as I did with the original release, but I still encountered moments when the game started dropping frames to the point of a slideshow. Yet on these occasions, I think it must also have been something else buggy happening under the hood, as I also spent time wandering in large open fields fighting multiple enemies, including a flying fire-breathing dragon, without the action grinding to a halt. For the most egregious moments, I simply found quitting out and opening the game again usually rectified matters, so it's more occasional bugginess than inconsistent performance.

The benefit of playing Elden Ring on Switch 2 is of course the portability factor but again there's caveats there too since this will definitely drain your battery faster if you don't have a power bank or plug socket to hand, while exploring the darker sections of the game such as its underground caverns and catacombs is going to be a struggle if you're playing outdoors or with sunlight coming from a train or plane window.

Ultimately, however, this remains a masterpiece with an open world that really does offer freedom and discovery, and after several hundred hours, I can still see myself happily rediscovering it all again without dreading another long grind or sluggish pacing that makes other open-world re-releases a tougher time. Well, okay, maybe Radahn is still an absolute pain, especially if you want to get to Shadow of the Erdtree sooner, but at least it's still a spectacular fight all the same.

The aim, it seems, is to create a direct narrative bridge to the December release of Avengers: Doomsday. But the extra footage and a subtle dialogue tweak won't be the biggest changes that fans notice. The entire movie appears to look very different because of altered colour grading, and the new aesthetic is dividing opinion.

Is Marvel recognising that it got it wrong in 2019? Or is it more a case that the fashion has changed since the washed-out look of the original release?

I'm pretty sure that Marvel Studios always knew that log video – the flat low-contrast straight-from-camera footage used to preserve detail – is intended to be colour graded, but Avengers Endgame was released at a time when there was a tendency for filmmakers to intentionally lean towards that washed-out log look.

It's an aesthetic that's since crept into social media now that more consumer cameras and phone can shoot log. Blacks look grey and colours lack pop. There have been different opinions about why it became popular, from people thinking that it looks more premium, to theories that colourists had simply become so used to staring at log footage that it started to look 'right'.

Whatever the reason, it seems that Marvel's finally rediscovered the saturation slider on DaVinci Resolve. At least, the Avengers: Endgame Encore trailer (above) suggests that the muted browns and grays of the 2019 release have been replaced with more vibrant tones.

But fans are divided over the results. For some, this is how the movie should always have looked. Thanos appears more purple, closer to his comic book design, and the final battle's richer saturation should address long‑standing complaints about the original’s “muddy” look.

Some even argue the original cut now looks “embarrassing” by comparison.

It's the "difference between fighting in a concrete basement versus fighting on an actual fiery battlefield," one fan reckons. "Thanos went from a bruised, shadowy eggplant to an actual high-definition galactic menace," someone else writes on X.

There's also speculation that the change has been made to align the MCU’s visual language with upcoming projects, most imminently Avengers: Doomsday.

However, critics question whether altering the original landmark film undermines its historical integrity and the Russo Brothers' original creative vision.

"People's tastes have been completely ruined by oversaturated TikTok edits. There's no way ya'll seriously think this looks better?," one person writes on X.

It's the Toy Story colour grading controversy all over again, but without the technical hurdle of the digital scanning process in the middle. Let me know in the comments which version you prefer, but I think I'd take the Encore look for Marvel's universe.

Avengers: Endgame Encore will be released on 25 September. Avengers: Doomsday will follow on 18 December.

The ad itself is a departure from Apple's traditional aesthetic in many ways, though it retains the usual minimal style across background and product. But the animated components – beginning with a yellow, Hulk-style strongman busting out of the Mac mini, are more in keeping with Apple's current marketing style – whimsical, less corporate and less polished. In that way, this ad is more similar to the style of its TikTok marketing posts, but with more craft added in.

"To show off the power and speed of the Mac mini, we turned it into a character capable of anything," says animator Justin Dasch. "So you got rocket ships, freaking race cars, buff dudes, and super complex robots doing multitasking."

See more of what the animation team had to say in the video below.

I'm enamoured by this ad. After the furore and subsequent apology that came out of Apple's iPad Pro ad of a couple of years ago (in which an iPad Pro crushed musical instruments, paint brushes and other symbols of tactile creativity), it's also an appreciated nod to the value of human creativity. The mac mini is positioned as an enabler rather than a replacement, and that's all creatives really want from their tech.

What do you think of the Apple mac mini ad? Let us know in the comments.

That's why I was surprised by how much I played of Mega Man: Dual Override. It has the same pace and challenge of the best retro games; I still hit that familiar wall, but it came later than usual, and I found myself wanting to have another go rather than simply deciding I'd had enough.

Playing on PS5 Pro, Dual Override looks lovely, with fluid, bouncy animation, bold environments and plenty of modern polish, but Capcom hasn't tried to turn Mega Man into something he isn't. The visuals are cleaner and more sophisticated, obviously, but the series' personality is still all over it, from the cartoon character designs to the ridiculously aggressive and flamboyant Robot Masters and the bright, chunky mechanical world they inhabit.

Mega Man goes back to basics

After my hands-on, I went back to Mega Man: The Wily Wars on Nintendo Switch 2, free on Nintendo Online, and played the original NES games again, which made me appreciate how closely Dual Override sticks to the core design. The levels still feel like collections of little platforming problems, with each screen asking you to work out how you're going to climb, jump, slide and shoot your way through it without getting knocked off a platform or smashed by one of the roaming robots.

That familiar Mega Man tension is there too: you know exactly what you should do, but getting your hands to do it without taking a hit is another matter. Dual Override sits right on that edge for much of the demo, challenging enough to make getting through a section feel like an achievement without immediately making me want to throw the controller across the room (which would have been embarrassing given I was sat in Capcom’s London studio).

The Robot Masters are where things get considerably tougher. The demo gives me three bosses to tackle one after the other, and as with the classic games, they're essentially puzzles disguised as fights. You need to watch what they're doing, learn their movements and attacks, figure out the patterns and rhythms, work out where the safe spaces are and then slowly turn that knowledge into something you can actually execute.

Big Press Don is the most straightforward of the three, a rocket-springed trashcan-like character with a mohawk who spends his fight bouncing around the arena. At first he's all movement and noise, but once I realise Mega Man can slide underneath him when he hops across the screen, the whole thing becomes much easier.

Astro Man is a different story. Fans will recognise him from Mega Man 8, and he's back flying around the arena inside an orb, firing smaller globe patterns at my on-screen Blue Bomber before dropping screen-filling meteors from above. His attacks aren't especially difficult to understand once you've watched them a few times, but trying to remember those patterns while also dealing with everything else happening around you is where the trouble starts.

Battling the new Twinkle Girl

Then Twinkle Girl turns up, and this is where Dual Override sheds any desire to be ‘easy’ and offers up a classic Mega Man difficulty spike. She's one of eight new Robot Masters in the new game and has a suitably chaotic fireworks theme, filling the arena with explosion patterns while mixing in slide attacks and other movements. I spent a fair amount of time simply trying to understand her rhythm before I could concentrate on actually damaging her.

Fed up with losing, retrying, losing again (and again), switching to Proto Man makes the fight a little easier. He's returning as a playable character alongside Mega Man and has his own abilities, including the ability to speed across the screen incredibly quickly, almost like an arrow. That makes it much easier to get out of the way of some of Twinkle Girl's attacks and close the distance when there's an opening. The problem is that Twinkle Girl doesn't just keep doing the same thing. She starts adapting to my approach and countering what I'm doing, so a tactic that works one, two or three times might not work quite so well the fourth. It adds another layer to the usual Mega Man boss routine, where learning the pattern is only half the job and you then have to work out how to use that knowledge when the boss starts changing things up.

There's more flexibility elsewhere too. The game introduces a new Override system that temporarily lets Mega Man and Proto Man push beyond his normal capabilities, but the boost comes with a downside: once it runs out, you suffer a temporary drop in performance. It's something you'll need to decide when to use rather than simply treating it as a button you hit whenever a boss gets difficult.

Custom Chips give you another way to tailor Mega Man and Proto Man, with upgrades including rapid-fire, a protective shield bubble, hover and other abilities – essentially giving you ways to play aggressively and defensively. I didn't get enough time with the system to know how much it will change the finished game, but it's an interesting addition to a series that's traditionally been very focused on learning its levels and bosses rather than building a character. The weapons still have that familiar trade-off too, because special attacks consume energy and you'll need to think about when they're worth using. One of the new weapons in the demo, for example, combines a powerful charge attack with an aerial dash, giving it a use beyond simply hitting an enemy harder.

Don't mess with what works

That's a lot of new stuff around a formula that, for the most part, Capcom clearly doesn't want to mess with, and after playing the demo I think that's probably the right decision. Going back to the NES games afterwards made it obvious how much of Dual Override's appeal comes from keeping those old ideas intact rather than reinventing them.

I'm still not brilliant at Mega Man, and I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities ahead for Dual Override to remind me exactly why I keep falling out with these games, but this is the first time in a while I've come away from a Mega Man hands-on thinking about how much further I might get rather than how quickly I can put the controller down.

Mega Man: Dual Override is coming in 2027 for Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC.

It’s a straightforward sword fight for about five seconds. Then a pack of wolves joins in. I fire an explosive bolt from my Magic Archer’s bow. The blast catches almost everyone, sending wolves and barbarians tumbling through the air and one unlucky wolf over my head, its four legs flailing comically. Before I’ve had time to enjoy the chaos, a huge woolly-horned thing clutching a tree decides it wants to join the fight.

This is Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, the new snowy expansion to Capcom’s elegantly chaotic role-player, again rendered beautifully in RE Engine, at its best. Battles here don't feel designed to play out one particular way; instead, a fight can go in any direction at any time, often with startling and random results. Playing Dark Arisen is proof again that Capcom is having a good year, coming after Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, even if those games don't have this expansion's playful sense of unpredictability.

Dark Arisen is beautifully chaotic

That sense of unpredictability is something Kento Kinoshita, game director of Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, tells me the team has deliberately designed into the expansion. The trick, he explains, is making encounters feel unpredictable without simply becoming random.

“There’s a certain unpredictability – not necessarily random, but a kind of sense that anything can happen when you’ve got so many different characters interacting with the enemy at the same time,” Kinoshita says.

It’s a philosophy that becomes obvious within minutes of playing Dark Arisen on both PS5 Pro and Switch 2. The new Norgan region is a beautiful, sprawling frozen landscape, full of crunchy snow, cold winds and distant hints of danger. But there’s always a sense that the calm could collapse into chaos at any moment, often if I stray off a path to nose around a cave, peer inside an abandoned castle doorway or just linger too long in one spot.

When it all goes sideways, combat demands you adapt. Playing as one of the new Hybrid Vocations, a Magic Archer, I’m constantly dipping into an array of combat shots, magic and spells, switching between fire and electricity depending on what’s attacking, or just instinctively because some shots look more impressive than others. One of the new abilities, the Vocation’s old-school-feeling targeting system, lets me sweep across enemies to highlight multiple targets, pinging each satisfyingly, before unleashing a flurry of projectiles, with empowered attacks capable of turning an already messy fight into something spectacular.

The result is combat that never feels entirely predictable. A fight can begin with a single enemy and quickly become a sprawling battle involving multiple creatures, your Pawns and the environment itself. Sometimes the smartest thing to do is rethink your entire approach halfway through.

That’s exactly what Kinoshita says the team wants. “We want to reward players for reading the situation properly and being able to handle whatever the game throws at them,” he explains.

It’s an important distinction to make, because Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t trying to create chaos for chaos’s sake. Its systems are designed to give you enough information and just the right tools to make sense of what is happening, even when the situation is rapidly spiralling out of control.

Exploring Norgan, anything can happen

That philosophy extends beyond combat and into how you go about exploring Norgan, which feels similarly flexible, with hidden cavern runs, ruined castle dungeons and unexpected routes to discover – using gadgets to climb and abseil to new areas of the map. Every new opening feels like it could lead to something useful, spectacular or capable of completely decimating my party.

Kinoshita says this approach is rooted in what makes Dragon’s Dogma different from other role-playing games. The combat has a physical, three-dimensional quality, with your adventurer able to climb and grapple onto enemies, while the game gives you a huge toolbox of items, abilities and Vocations to experiment with, including new Hybrid Vocations Magick Archer, Mystic Spearhand, Warfarer and Trickster- that expand on the base game’s character types. All of them come into use, because there often isn’t one correct solution to a fight.

That freedom is particularly apparent when Capcom’s developers start toying with Dark Arisen’s environments and creatures. Kinoshita says the team deliberately designed the new region, its enemies and its encounters as interconnected parts of the same experience. “We’ve tried to make sure that the enemy design and the encounter design and the map design really gel together and feel consistent,” he says.

The frozen environment is therefore more than a backdrop for the new monsters. It establishes the rules of the place. Snow, ice, storms and cold blue light create an immediate sense of atmosphere, while the occasional warmth of fire hints at a civilisation surviving within this hostile landscape. Then things start to get darker. Kinoshita describes the expansion as gradually shifting from the coldness of its northern setting towards something much more sinister, with that transition reflected in the enemies, environments and story.

The PS5 Pro demo culminates in the clearest expression of that ‘dark’ idea: a colossal dragon encounter that initially feels like a classic Dragon’s Dogma battle. There are huge attacks to avoid, fireballs and arrows flying across the arena, and the familiar thrill of climbing onto a massive creature to attack it at close range. Then the dragon resurrects the dead, and weaponises an army of zombies to tie me and my Pawns in knots.

Suddenly, the battle changes, as the series loves to do, and the undead adventurers become another threat, forcing me to divide my attention between the horde and the enormous dragon dominating the screen, demanding I change tactics on the fly – do I keep battling the creature or turn my attention to saving my Pawns? So, now I’m defending my party while trying not to lose sight of the creature itself, constantly reassessing where the next danger is coming from.

The dragon’s design has already given me clues about its undead nature, if I’d paid closer attention to the dramatic intro. Its skull is stripped down to bone, its long neck is fleshy and decayed, while its wings are riddled with holes and skeletal structures. Kinoshita says this undead dragon was conceived from the beginning of Dark Arisen’s development as something deliberately different for the series, both because of its combat possibilities and because of the story surrounding its existence.

Dark Arisen on Switch 2 spirals

That same design philosophy survives on Nintendo Switch 2, even if the hardware inevitably takes a visual hit compared with the PS5 Pro. The textures and lighting aren't quite as lavish, but the art direction remains intact: the cold vistas, dense environments and sense of an enormous world waiting to be explored. More importantly, the Switch 2 version still captures the expansion’s defining quality: its willingness to let situations spiral.

Playing Dark Arisen on Switch 2, a simple gryphon encounter becomes a literal wild ride as I climb onto its back for extra damage. Elsewhere, a slow crawl up a frozen castle reveals warriors and adventurers seemingly frozen in time before the ice dragon appears, blue light flashing across the tiny screen as its tail sweeps through the arena and my party fights for survival. It’s surprisingly easy to pick up and play on Switch 2, but there’s real depth beneath that accessibility. The complexity is on screen rather than hidden away in menus: watch what the enemy is doing, understand what your party can do, make a decision and be ready to change it.

That may be the most interesting evolution for Dark Arisen, and something Kinoshita says player feedback was instrumental in shaping the expansion. After the original Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched, players told the team they wanted more opportunities to explore the world. Looking back at the original Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen from 2013, he says players enjoyed the replayable loot-driven loop of Bitterblack Isle from that era’s Dark Arisen expansion but also wanted a more open area to explore, alongside a story that gave that exploration greater purpose.

Dark Arisen for Dragon’s Dogma 2 responds by taking that loop out into a much larger open region, tying exploration more closely to its story. But what stands out most after playing it on both PlayStation Pro and Switch 2 isn't simply the extra content that’s been added but the way Capcom’s understood that the best moments in an RPG aren't always the ones the developer can predict. They can build the snowy landscapes, design the dragons and create the combat systems; developers can decide how a monster behaves and where it appears, but once all those pieces collide with a player, their Pawns and a few unexpected creatures, the result belongs to you.

The best stories in Dark Arisen won’t necessarily be the ones Kinoshita wrote or even intended. They're the ones that happen when a gang of barbarians, a pack of wolves, a giant woolly monster thing and one badly timed explosive arrow all meet in the same place.

Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen releases 9 October on PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.

BBG Entertainment's new version of Matthew Smith's 1983 platforming classic is coming to PC and consoles this 'Autumn' (Nintendo Store has it listed as 5 November), bringing all 20 original levels to current-gen consoles, alongside modern controls, a new soundtrack, online leaderboards and an interactive history of the game.

And yes, you can still play it looking like Manic Miner did on the Spectrum, with the original pixel-art presentation with CRT filters available alongside the new HD version, which adds parallax scrolling, lighting, and a much more detailed environment.

Manic Miner's modern update

It's that HD version that's causing the fuss. The reaction on the Lemon64 forum, where retro gamers have strong opinions about this sort of modern remake, has been lively. One poster called the new visuals a "garish visual mess", complaining that the busier backgrounds make it harder to pick out the sprites and scenery. Another user couldn't hold back and was more direct, asking: "How can you ruin this game?!" and taking particular issue with the new version of Miner Willy.

There are plenty of people who aren't quite as horrified, mind you. Some fans are happy to give the remake a chance, particularly because the original presentation hasn't been thrown away. Like BBG Entertainment's other retro remake – Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary – the original version of Manic Miner remains untouched. BBG isn't asking Spectrum fans to accept the HD version or nothing, which is enough for me.

The remake includes the original pixel-art look I remember, so if you want your Miner Willy jumping around against those wonderfully crude, colour-clashing Spectrum backgrounds, you can still have that experience, and there's no need to jump down the retro gaming rabbit hole the likes of Sinclair GamerCard offer (though that is fun).

The new HD mode is essentially another way to play the same 20 levels, with more elaborate backgrounds, lighting, and scrolling effects, while the controls have been tweaked for modern controllers. Whether those changes actually improve Manic Miner is another question.

The game's visual style was born out of necessity, of course, but after more than 40 years those limitations have become part of what people, including myself, love about it. There's a charm to the chunky colours, simple shapes and instantly readable platforms, and when you start layering effects, shadows and detailed backgrounds over everything, some fans clearly feel that readability and charm get lost.

It's a familiar problem with remakes of old games, but Manic Miner is perhaps an especially tricky one because the original is so visually distinctive and managed to convey character in two or three pixel blocks. This makes redesigning Willy himself another sticking point. He's one of those videogame characters whose appearance is inseparable from the machine he came from, a tiny collection of pixels that became an icon, and giving him a more detailed modern makeover was always going to invite comparisons with the original.

Celebrates 1983's Manic Miner

As mentioned, the good news is that Matthew Smith's original game hasn't been forgotten in all of this, and the original version looks excellent. More so, BBG says the remake is officially authorised by Smith, with the developer involved in the project, and the game will include an interactive history of Manic Miner's creation. That gives the remake a little more credibility than yet another unofficial attempt to cash in on retro nostalgia.

Still, the early reaction suggests BBG has picked a difficult game to modernise. Manic Miner doesn't need much explaining, and it certainly doesn't need much adding to it, which leaves the remake with a rather awkward challenge: how do you make a 43-year-old game feel new without making it look like something it was never supposed to be?

We'll find out when Manic Miner launches later this year, but if the reaction from the retro crowd so far is anything to go by, the HD mode is going to be getting almost as much attention as the game's notoriously brutal platforming.

Manic Miner launches on PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series X/S and PC this Autumn.

To achieve this efficiently, I utilised a hybrid 3D-to-2D pipeline. I used Blender (see our guide to the best 3D modelling software) to construct the cavern’s massive multi-tiered architecture ensuring physically accurate perspective, complex bounced lighting and volumetric god rays.

Once this 3D foundation was established, I transitioned to Photoshop for heavy overpainting. This workflow enables me to solve complex spatial and level-design problems in 3D, while the final 2D paintover breathes life into the scene, breaking the ‘CG stiffness’ and delivering a warm, traditional hand painted illustration finish.

(Note that you might want one of the best laptops for 3D modelling or the best drawing tablets to work on).

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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This has resulted in an obsession with Burga, a brand that wraps all the essentials in a seemingly infinite array of stunning patterns. The designs span the product ranges so you can choose to go matchy-matchy, or you can get a smorgasboard of designs – and feel your dopamine rise when you use each thing.

• Browse the Burga website

Most importantly, the quality is premium across the products I've tried (I wouldn't recommend it if that wasn't true). The water bottles and coffee cups don't leak and insulate for hours, the phone cases are genuinely shockproof, the power banks have enough charge, the Apple Watch strap looks and feels seamless and the notebook is luxurious. Note: I haven't yet tried the AirPods case

I've popped a collection of patterns below to give a flavour of Burga's feel – but really, I recommend heading to the website and losing half an hour in a sea of colours and prints.

The below are UK links. In the US? Click through here on each product and you'll be taken to the US site.

The online calendar and scheduling tool has finally pushed the flush button on that, not because it looked like a toilet (or at least not officially), but because its product itself has evolved considerably in the intervening years. More than just a scheduling app, it now has a range of AI-powered productivity tools, and it needed to reflect this expansion.

The design studio Smith & Diction was charged with overhauling the Calendly branding as the company expands its productivity offerings further to to include an AI email assistant and meeting notetaker.

Like several growing productivity services, the brand has the problem that it's become much more than what most people know it for. At the same time, AI is also a challenge as well as an opportunity for the company because the technology has made it easier for people to vibe-code their own productivity tools.

Smith & Diction had the task of crafting a new logo, wordmark and colour and graphics system that would make Calendly feel like more than a calendar app and come across as a tool that still offers significant benefits over DIY solutions.

The result is an intentionally big leap from the previous identity. The neon colours and bold shapes have been flushed away and replaced by something much softer and lighter.

The original concept revolved around the idea of "making space": both making space on the calendar for work and letting Calendly take up some of the slack to give users more space in the day for what they enjoy.

"We wanted the brand to feel like an absolute breath of fresh air. Calm and confident, nothing extra — just like Calendly’s original, simple blue link," says Mike Smith, co-founder of the studio.

The logo turned out to be tricky. "if you put anything figurative next to the word Calendly you’d be like…why isn’t it just a calendar? So after dozens and dozens of explorations, we ended up right back where they started: 'a cool C'.”

But this cool C is more light-and-airy cool than grungy-toilet-bowl cool. From early on, the team began exploring the idea of a "ripple effect" to "represent the idea of how just sending one meeting link can change the trajectory of your business".

Early explorations included experiments with several rings, but the final iteration settled on a single asymmetrical ripple around the C.

As for the wordmark, Smith & Diction decided that the previous design was "too cutesy" for a serious small business tool. It set about adding more structure and sharpness to balance out the C mark's organic wobbliness.

They noticed that when tracked in tight, the letters appeared to lead into each other "with an invisible connection". This gave them the idea of creating this effect intentionally to represent the brand as "the invisible connector for people".

"We edited the C to flow into the A and tilted the E so it would flow into the N. All with just the suggestion of connective tissue," Mike says.

The new branding also includes a set of subbrand icons to represent Calendly's various prongs, from scheduling to payments and the AI assistant Callie. These were infused with "gloop" to soften the connections inside the icons, colour coded for ease of identification and housed in the same squircle as the primary logo.

The new colour system reinforces the feeling of simplicity and effortlessness. The harsh neons have been replaced with softer hues that fade in and out of each other.

The system also includes some AI-generated visuals, which Mike recognises was "pretty uncharted territory" for the studio but led to some interesting dreamy results "sort of like if you tried to paint what a breeze might look like".

Let us know in the comments what you think of the new identity.