Even this week Ian Dean sat down with Nikola Todorovic, the co-founder of Flow Studio, the AI filmmaking company partnered with Autodesk. In that interview, Todorovic declared that "we can cut production costs by 95%" and that “AI can fix a broken film industry." These are bold claims that can often leave ordinary creatives wondering what that means for them.

It seems like the laptop industry is also forcing us down a path that we wouldn’t necessarily have chosen. I’ve grown tired of the number of laptops that I’ve now reviewed that have the letters ‘AI’ tagged on the end of their name. Even if you just wanted an ordinary high-performing laptop, you’ll probably be forced into buying a device that is marketed towards AI workflows.

That said, we’re probably in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Just because the term "AI" is seriously overused in the laptop industry doesn't mean that all AI laptops are inherently bad or worse, evil. It just means that we, as those reviewing them, have to work harder at identifying the wheat from the chaff.

I recently had the fun task of throwing “every creative AI tool that I could think of at the Acer Nitro V 16 AI” just to see what happened. I expected, like most other AI laptops, just to fall over and beg mercy at the hands of me, the creative purist overlord. But that isn’t what happened.

In fact, the laptop bossed through tasks in ComfyUI, background generative AI in Photoshop, and AI video effects with NVIDIA Broadcast. “These applications were quick, responsive, and wholly reliable.” I was left wondering if I had thus far been too harsh on laptop manufacturers.

I still stand by my belief that AI-branded laptops are seriously overhyped, but I now appreciate, more than ever, that there might be a place for them in the creative industry. I just wish the people who named laptops at these big manufacturers would only use AI in the name when it genuinely warrants it.

Just please don’t create a second category called ‘AI Pro’ laptops. If that happens, I think the hope of a creative world that isn’t dominated by AI might vanish.

If you like the idea of getting one, see our guide to the best AI laptops.

In July, Pepsi posted a line of copy on Threads that read: "Pepsi Wild Cherry is what happens when regular cherry stops asking permission." At surface level, they were talking about the flavour of a soft drink. But some interpreted it as a joke about consent, and the post was deleted within hours.

The following month, a 60-second ad for golfing brand Callaway showed a man violently shoving a woman to the ground. It was meant to be a parody of the horror film Obsession, but if you'd not seen the film, it looked horrific. After howls of protest, the clip was deleted the same day.

In September, we got a Sydney Sweeney controversy. (Yes, another one.) Under the tagline "just sports", the actor appeared without any clothing, covering her body solely in footballs, basketballs and sporting equipment.

Female athletes lined up to criticise the ad for sports prediction company Novig, with Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus calling it "a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft".

In the same month, football club Oxford United launched an American-style clothing range bearing the words "United 93" to mark its founding year of 1893. No one, it seems, had made the connection that United 93 was the call sign of one of the planes hijacked on 9/11, made world-famous by the 2006 film of the same name.

What's worse, the range was trailed for launch on 11 September, the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

Then there was the sneaker brand Converse, which posted an Instagram image of K-pop star Karina promoting its Chuck 70 X trainers. In the shot, a star-shaped spotlight created a triangular white shape on her skirt that resembled a KKK hood. Again, condemnation came thick and fast.

So what, exactly, is going on here?

Accident or intent?

Line these ads up side by side and it's clear they're not all the same kind of failure. Oxford United and Converse look like genuine accidents: you'd have to be pretty paranoid to think either brand deliberately set out to reference 9/11 or the KKK in its content. The issue, though, is whether they should have spotted the potential for offence.

With the benefit of hindsight, the answer cannot be anything other than yes. At the same time, it might be glib, but I'm going to say it anyway... everyone makes mistakes.

I'm by no means immune to this myself. About 20 years ago I wrote a review of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for a women's magazine, and mistyped it as Lord of the Rings: The Twin Towers; another accidental reference to 9/11. A dozen colleagues also failed to spot the error and it got printed, in the days when print circulations ran into the millions. Not exactly a career highlight.

The Sydney Sweeney ad for Novig, though, is something different. Its chief executive, Jacob Fortinsky, has clearly stated that the campaign "forces us into the national discourse", suggesting they were not surprised by the backlash but were deliberately trying to stir things up.

Pepsi and Good Good Golf sit somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. On paper at least, neither brand set out to stir up a backlash. But at the same time, both were deliberately trying to be edgy, and edgy content typically leaves far less room for error.

Changing landscape

So are brands being sloppy, or are audiences overly sensitive? I actually think this is a false dichotomy, and we should start thinking about these controversies in a different way. My question is this: in general, does anyone actually care about ads any more? Like, at all?

For context, when I grew up in the 1970s, ads were the topic of conversation, along with the weather and the price of milk (there was a lot of inflation back then). "Have you seen that ad where…?", you'd ask your mates, and they'd invariably say yes. The jingles, the slogans, the stories that formed TV ads of that era were literally better known than the shows they interrupted.

But think of three TV ads you could describe to your friend today that they'd all know about. My guess is you can't. And that's no accident; it's a symptom of how we consume media in 2026.

We rarely go to the cinema. Few buy printed newspapers or magazines. The broadcast TV that once dominated family life has largely been replaced by ad-free streaming. We even browse the web with ad blockers.

Pulled towards controversy

In that light, is it any wonder some brands specifically go out to stir up controversies, even if they risk being cancelled? Or that, even when controversies erupt by accident, companies think: "Unfortunate, but not the end of the world…" Because in the words of Oscar Wilde, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Perhaps the answer to my headline, then, is neither soft audiences nor sloppy brands. It's that ads have simply stopped being things we watch, and become things we argue about instead.

Which means if you don't personally like getting drawn into massive rows, you might want to start skipping the ads… even more than you do already.

The environments/structures often feel isolated, suspended or disconnected from any natural world due to alienation, technological dominance and the consequences of rapid urban or digital expansion.

This image presents a massive, floating architectural structure that feels both futuristic and industrial. The composition is dominated by sharp, geometric forms, stacked platforms, exposed frameworks and interconnected corridors that create a sense of complexity and precision. The greyscale palette, enhanced with subtle red and cyan offsets, gives the image a glitch-like, digital distortion effect.

(If you need the tools to start out in 3D art yourself, see our guides to the best 3D modelling software and the best laptops for 3D modelling).

How I build a scene

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I want to talk about the growling in Marvel’s Wolverine before anything else, because about three hours in, it stopped being a character trait and started being a bit. I mean that as both a compliment and an accusation. Logan growls when he's angry, growls when he's hurt, growls when he's about to attack, growls when his coffee is cold, and, at one point, growls seemingly because the scene had gone four whole seconds without a growl. Liam McIntyre commits to every single one of them with total sincerity.

Which is a shame, because there's a much better Wolverine hiding directly underneath the noise, one the game spends 14 hours trying to get to, and even then, when the game’s Logan begins to find a third dimension, the gameplay, the stuff you actually do, remains a one-note growl.

Here's the setup, kept deliberately light on specifics: three years after walking away from Team X, Logan gets dragged back in alongside Mystique and Sabretooth, the whole mutant task force reassembled to deal with Bolivar Trask, a billionaire with a very particular theory about human superiority and no interest in hearing counterarguments. Jean Grey shows up. So does a genuinely large cast of familiar Marvel faces, and the story moves – Canada, Madripoor, Japan – in a way that stops this from feeling like yet another superhero game wedded to New York. It's a good story, and in the end, it’s the best reason to keep playing once the combat starts repeating on you, which it does.

Unlike Insomniac’s past Marvel Spider-Man games, Wolverine is tight, linear, corridor-to-arena brawling, with Logan kicking down doors, sniffing out leads, tracking a scent through a room like a bloodhound with a grudge, and, mostly, putting his claws into whatever's unlucky enough to be standing there.

The first time it clicks, it really feels good. Logan launches himself claws-first across a room and just, well, shreds something, in a blur of animation and blood and snapped furniture, and it's exactly the unhinged, over-the-top violence you came here for. The animation team clearly built the whole game around selling his physicality: Logan’s heavy, messy, and leaves damage and broken furniture everywhere in his wake, and none of it looks like a man trying to solve his problems elegantly.

Claws for concern

It soon wears thin because, despite the enjoyable brutality of Wolverine’s core combat, the more I play, the more I notice the gap between how the combat looks and what it actually asks of me. On paper, it's a lot: basic attacks, parries, dodges, and leaps into distant ledge-sitting that turn enemies to shreds. Then there’s Special Techniques like Tornado Spin and Knee Breaker, plus three tiers of Rage that escalate into bigger critical hits. Adaptations can reshape health and parry windows, and the four rechargeable Techniques you can equip at once can help you manage a ninja horde. It sounds like a good mix of combat ideas to play with, right?

Not quite, as in practice most fights come down to hammering one button, tapping a second to parry, tapping a third to dodge, while the camera does its absolute best to keep up with Logan bouncing between six enemies at once. Underneath all this motion that aims to feel front-footed and aggressive, the actual rhythm is quite defensive: parry enough times, stagger the enemy, punish the stagger, repeat. Bosses dress this up in bigger arenas and flashier animations, but the loop never changes – wait, watch for the tell, parry, and hit.

To be fair, because there's real craft buried in this system, Special Techniques do genuinely clear rooms, Rage does give you a real jolt when the meter fills, and environmental attacks are a joy in a way I wasn't expecting and remind me of the cult classic The Punisher in intention, if not execution. There is something close to primal satisfaction in spotting a conveniently positioned forklift halfway through a fight and doing my utmost to line up a kill.

But a handful of good ideas surrounded by a lot of sameness and simplicity is still, at the end of the day, just a handful of good ideas. Games like Ninja Gaiden 4, Control Resonant and the inventively rhythmic Hi-Fi Rush have shown that melee combat is at its best when your attacks have flexibility, depth and agency, when combo strings do the work of one-button Techniques, and when the game keeps engineering situations where you actually want to experiment, not simply line up a one-time kill. Wolverine has spectacle, but it doesn't always have agency, and those are not the same thing, no matter how much blood and broken chairs you put on the screen to disguise the difference.

Bored of Canada

That safeness – I keep circling back to that word, sorry, but it fits – runs through more or less everything else, too. The motorbike sections look spectacular exactly once. The slow, tense walks toward an oncoming threat are genuinely impressive, exactly once, before you clock how little control you actually have over them. Bosses are animated with real Insomniac care and still, underneath the choreography, slot into the same basic template every time – wait, parry, attack.

Wolverine is the first game in a while where you feel the Sony formula pressing up against the edges (and it's the first where bugs – floating NPCs, enemies stuck in geometry, AI stuttering and glitching – break the spectacle). The brand’s need to make everything as broadly accessible as possible works when enough is going on to carry the lightness that brings. Spider-Man could get away with it because swinging through Manhattan tackling ad-hoc crimes is pure joy in and of itself. God of War skims the problem because exploration, puzzles, and upgrades constantly feed each other. Wolverine, on the other hand, doesn't have quite as much structure to lean on – it's a linear brawler where the combat is the game, and when the combat is this thin, narrow even, there isn't a second system or loop standing by to pick up the slack.

The unlockable costumes, and there are a lot of them, from comics, films, animation, all lovingly modelled, are typical of this, because they don’t do anything other than fan service. Claw variants and costumes don't meaningfully change how you play, and the wider Adaptation system, which, to its credit, does affect, to a small degree, things like health and Rage and parry timing, and isn't a system with zero teeth, never quite grows into the kind of character build-crafting that could've given the combat a second dimension it badly needs.

At its heart, Wolverine is enormous style with comparatively modest substance, and that's Wolverine in a sentence, and I keep wishing it weren't.

Sense and sensitivity

It’s not all beige, and every so often, Insomniac's actual creativity breaks through and reminds you what this could've been. Stealth sections tease Wolverine's creature appeal but never fulfil the promise. Logan's senses turn a room into something more tactile, and I love how the DualSense touchpad lets you feel your way around a wall to find a hidden room, and some of the puzzle beats lean into this, asking you to use his senses to find keypad codes. It's a genuinely interesting character as game design. But again it's underserved – one scene where catching a stray conversation can lead to ways to disrupt a nightclub is wonderful, but the outcome is pre-destined, making it feel like the game is often playing itself.

Madripoor does something similar. After hours on a fairly tight leash, reaching the rooftops of Lowtown and just looking out across a city that suddenly feels enormous is a real jolt. Finally, somewhere to poke around. So I poke around. I find a collectable, maybe an environmental detail worth a screenshot, and then you wander a few steps too far in the wrong direction and the game gently, firmly, grabs you by the shoulders and resets you; occasionally I need to reload a checkpoint because the game breaks, and the leash is back.

It's a shame, because you can feel – in the senses, in Madripoor's rooftops, in the odd puzzle that trusts you – that Insomniac has the craft and talent to make Wolverine do more, be better; it just didn't let itself push further into these ideas.

That studio talent is clearly evident in the visual design, though, and consistently impresses. Real-world scanning and reference give the environments genuine physical weight, and the character work is arguably the strongest thing here – Logan, Jean, Mystique, and Sabretooth all carry themselves with real conviction, and the relationships between them give the game a warmth it badly needs, stopping the whole story from collapsing into angry men shouting about mutants and memory loss at each other for 14 hours. (It gets close; it doesn't quite tip over.)

The Logan-and-Jean thread is where the writing is at its best, and Mystique and Sabretooth bring a personality to the story that its central, permanently scowling, always-growling, raging hero doesn't always supply on his own. His history is familiar Wolverine territory, but Insomniac gives it real emotional weight, and leaves me actually wanting more of this world, albeit with more to do.

Is Marvel's Wolverine worth playing?

There is a good Wolverine game in here, visible in flashes, such as when Logan hurls himself across a room, cinematically dismembers an enemy, and in its destructible environments that feel fun to dismantle, character-led ideas that tease there’s more to Wolverine that growl-hit-growl, and Madripoor's rooftops opening up for ten unsupervised minutes. I just wanted more of those minutes and less of everything holding them back.

Marvel's Wolverine is solid and frequently spectacular, with a story worth finishing, but the combat only works within the narrow lines Insomniac drew around it, and for a character whose entire identity is running headlong into a fight and making a mess of it in his own way, this game plays it remarkably safe.

Contrast this with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x that I also had the pleasure of using recently. This laptop managed 13 hours. To me, that seems about right. It’s significantly more than a standard working day, but it leaves enough in the tank to work through the day and into the evening. It also allows for five hours of degradation before it’ll start to ‘eat into’ a workday.

Even though I’d prefer not to, I don’t have any issue with carrying a charger around with me. The fact that most laptops support USB-C charging means that more often than not I have a compatible cable with me at all times anyway. For me, it’s more about the correlation between battery life and both reliability and dependability.

You see, if I own a laptop that can last a little over an hour, I’m always going to be worrying about it losing charge completely. It might say it has 30 minutes left, but what if I start a power-intensive task which cuts through the remaining battery juice faster than the laptop expected?

If I’m constantly worrying about remaining battery time, then I’m not able to wholeheartedly devote my attention to the task at hand. This isn’t the only issue, though.

If your laptop doesn’t have the necessary performance to last much longer than a Netflix episode, then you better make sure you’re near a power socket at all times. You can say goodbye to working on the road or in that artisan coffee shop. You could carry a power bank around with you, but who wants to do that?

For me, all of this links directly into my ability to be free and creative. I need my hardware to be ready to go when I need it to. Creative tools are there to serve us, not the other way around. Popular laptops are those that manage to combine great performance without draining the battery too quickly.

I’m still incredibly fond of my 2023 MacBook Pro. I’ve had it for three years, but it still lasts through the day. I push it hard, and yet it reliably delivers. At risk of putting it too strongly, it has become a friend that I can rely upon, that I know will be up to the task whenever I need it to be.

So, when laptop brands are designing a laptop, I really wish they would pay as much attention to the battery as they would about whether it has an NPU in it or whether it boasts the latest NVIDIA GPU. There’s no use owning a high-spec laptop if it’s constantly plugged into the wall. I could buy a better desktop machine if I wanted that.

To avoid the problem, see our list of the best laptops for battery life.

Below, he gives us a tour of his studio in Massachusetts. If you need to stock up on supplies for your own art, see our guides to the best art supplies and the best watercolour paints.

My studio is located above my garage on my property in Petersham, Massachusetts. It is set back from the road and close to the edge of the woods that is backed up to conservation land. climb the wooden stairs along the back of the garage early each morning to begin my day.

I attempt to avoid the enveloping tendrils of bittersweet that are determined to pull the whole staircase down some day soon. I know they need to be removed but they are just so enchanting-looking! The large windows behind me offer a wealth of natural light upon my stretch canvas.

I use Windsor & Newton professional-grade watercolour paints; the tubes are lined up in my bright orange fishing tackle box. I use a combination of wet on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. Water, air, earth, fabric. The technique that is used depends on the texture of the material I am trying to capture.

The studio’s tiny wood stove keeps me warm in the winter. Shelves line the walls’ edges with reference materials, art books, fantasy novels, tiny figurines, ghoulish faces, puppets and photos of my family. When I have the time, I add a bit of detail to a large oil painting that I’ve been working on for years, featuring a unicorn and small fawn running through the woods. I also occasionally work on sculpting and carving puppets.

I have my son in law’s camera set up to capture time lapses of the painting process. I’ve been asked to post videos of my painting process. I’m trying to get over the idea of having a camera behind my head for hours on end. My daughter says, “You have to do it for the socials!”

I am always listening to music while I work. Movie soundtracks are common; Last of the Mohicans, Cloud Atlas, the odd circus-themed sounds of the Cirque Du Soleil shows. I also listen to ambient, orchestral, natural-inspired sounds like David Lanz, Patrick O’Hearn. I enjoy the whimsical, fairy-like voice of Tori Amos and the earthy tones of Fiona Apple.

The objects around my work area include a pencil sharpener from the 80s that I use constantly, a white mask I wore at a costume party years ago and a brown tackle box that stores most of my Windsor & Newton paints.

The old-school curly-corded phone, attached to a broken fax machine that no longer works, may ring once or twice during my work day. Can’t answer if I’m using wet on wet technique! At a certain point during the day I might sit in my big, blue armchair to rest my eyes. I pretend it gives me time to let the fairies and elves rearrange the shapes in my brain before I start painting again.

My Yamaha piano used to be up here. I never learned to read music, but rather play by ear. Now the piano is in my living room. Playing helps me unwind. A glass of red wine also helps.

I like to say that I have the best commute ever: a short walk from my house, across the driveway and ahhh!, I have arrived at work, though there is nothing about this I would call ‘work’.

You can see more of Gary's work on his website.

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David Rager, creative director at NASA, talked about his role overseeing the agency's visual brand and iconic Graphics Standards Manual. This has involved reviving the iconic 'worm' logo, which was resurrected to the delight of NASA fans back in 2020.

We caught up with David after his talk to discuss his journey to becoming creative director at one of the world's most storied federal agencies, and the challenges of maintaining a brand built on trust in the age of AI.

With Pokémon celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, we've already seen a number of collabs with iconic brands like Polaroid and Target, with lines selling out fast. From cute tees to quirky tumblers, these are some of the best Pokémon merch deals to be found today, so catch em while you can.

So strong was Inca Kola's reign that Coca-Cola gave up fighting and bought a stake in the brand in the late '90s. It still owns the global trademark outside of Peru and has a 50% of the brand's domestic operations.

But that deal was a bone to competitors. Rival blue-and-yellow-branded beverages can now claim to be more genuinely Peruvian than the original. And, of course, it wouldn't be a cola war without Pepsi also on the scene. Its Triple Kola also uses the same colours.

That competition has led to the latest Inca Kola rebrand, but some people think it's taken the wrong direction if it wants to reassert its position as the original national treasure of the Peruvian beverage market..

On the face of it, the new Inca Kola logo is relatively subtle tweak, but it's proven to be pretty controversial. The design reduces the previous identity to its core elements, stripping away the white borders around the type, along with the shape of Peru behind the text and the 'since 1935' legend below.

It's simpler, clearer and more readable. More visible on the shelf? Maybe. It also feels younger and more modern. But some customers have taken offence at the decision to remove the outline of the country from the logo.

"It went from being a brand with an identity to being a bland brand with no visual appeal," one person writes on Facebook. "They've decided to globalise the design", someone else thinks. "They might as well put a gringo flag on it," another critic suggests.

So is the Inca Kola logo just another victim of the trend towards minimalism? Removing the country outline and the established date might seem like a counterproductive move if the aim is to reassert the brand's historical status as a source of national pride.

But the design agency Epoch says there was a need to make the brand stand out more. Also, perhaps the Peru-ness on its own is now longer the asset it was now the brand's largely owned by Coca-Cola.

Instead, the rebrand leans into the feeling of belonging, with the work being done by other assets. The simplification of the logo draws more attention to its shape. This now becomes an asset in its own right, serving as a framing device for brand visuals that present Inca Kola at social gatherings or paired with food, depicting it as the drink that brings Peruvians together.

One of the most interesting parts of the rebrand is the sonic logo created with Echoic Audio. The four-note mnemonic was created by tapping on traditional glass cola bottles – a sound already associated with the brand.

"Our creative exploration centred on honouring the brand’s iconic colours, shapes and patterns," Epoch says of the rebrand. "We modernised these elements, bringing them to life through an uplifting visual identity, sonic branding and brand world. Visuals put an emphasis on how the brand brings people together and its importance with food."

But Sihoo also makes a couple of more luxurious chairs, still with an emphasis on value for money. The Doro C300 Pro has a wide seat, breathable mesh, lumbar support, lots of adjustability and fantastic armrests. And right now it's reduced by $80 from $459 to $379 at Amazon.

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I'll get to that later, but first, let's recap: Those old enough to have been gaming since 2002 may recall the original Stuntman, developed by Newcastle-based Reflections and published by the long-defunct French outfit Infogrames. It showed that a video game could provide the perfect consequence-free environment to indulge one’s fantasies as a Hollywood stunt driver, and it spawned a 2007 sequel titled Stuntman: Ignition.

All good, throwaway fun, but perhaps not the most obvious candidate for a franchise reboot. Nevertheless, Saber Interactive is in the process of bringing back Stuntman, in the form of Stuntman: Hollywood, which will be released at an as-yet-unspecified date in 2027.

Stuntman: Hollywood has an interesting provenance. According to Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits, whom I interviewed at Gamescom, its origins date back to a period which the company probably wouldn’t recall as the best of times – when it was owned by the notoriously over-expansive Embracer Group, which bought Saber Interactive in 2020, then sold it in 2024 for $247 million, to a company owned by Saber co-founder Matthew Karch.

But there was another factor in play: Saber Interactive’s relationship with film company Universal Pictures. Willits explains: “Stuntman was an IP that Embracer owned, so when we were in the Embracer family, we were like, 'Hey, we love driving games.’ The team that we had, which was coming available, had experience in that driving genre, and we had a great relationship with Universal because we have Jurassic Park and Turok, and Universal was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this’.”

Back to the Future and Jurassic World? Marketing genius

Obviously, any gamer who wants to pursue a vicarious virtual career as a stunt driver would want to do it on the sets of the biggest, most blockbusting films. Willits adds: “So we were able to get The Fast and the Furious, Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Back to the Future and Jurassic World for it. And the movie people were really excited – they gave us ideas, and they even helped us with some assets and stuff. It’s been a dream to work with Universal on this.”

One of Saber Interactive’s biggest assets is turning out to be its cultivation of strong relationships with the movie industry – which would seem an obvious route for a video games publisher to pursue, since movie IPs form a fantastic basis for successful games. But strangely few game publishers schmooze the movie world as assiduously as Saber Interactive.

Willits points out that his company has also been working with Lionsgate, as it is in the early stages of creating a John Wick game: “Working with Lionsgate has been great; working with Keanu and Chad Stahelski directly is amazing – those guys are so awesome. Chad, the director, is a big video game fan, and if you watch a John Wick movie, it kind of feels like a video game.”

Hands-on with Stuntman: Hollywood

Willits describes Stuntman: Hollywood as “Bite-sized awesomeness,” and based on my hands-on experience with the Gamescom demo, that description is accurate. The Gamescom demo featured five stunt-driving runs, each ending with a gloriously over-the-top stunt, such as launching a Ferrari Testarossa onto the back of a speeding super-yacht. Each of the five runs in the demo was short – between five and ten minutes – but intense. Throughout, I had a director in my ear, telling me what to do and praising my better efforts. I also had a line showing my ideal route, along with other indicators, such as proximity, when I had been told to get as close as possible to an object without hitting it.

I inevitably made mistakes, but Stuntman: Hollywood proved relatively forgiving, allowing a certain number of howlers per run. On one run, I got things so horribly wrong (basically getting confused about which route I was supposed to take) that I had to retry the run. At the end of each run, I was given a rating, which in a proper playthrough of the game (as opposed to a time-limited demo) would have added replay value as I sought stunt-driving perfection.

I had to perform various tasks in each run, including drifting at prescribed points, generating sufficient speed to make jumps, passing as close as possible to objects and cars without hitting them, actually hitting objects (causing a satisfying amount of designed on-set mayhem), weaving at specific points to avoid explosions and following a tight route on occasions. There were often plenty of those movie car-chase staples – piles of cardboard boxes – to decoratively scatter. And every run built up to a satisfying crescendo, with a long, speed-building precision section before perfectly timing a bravura jump.

Stuntman: Hollywood, commendably, didn’t shout in a cheesy manner about what film I happened to be on the set of, but it was pretty obvious. The car I drove in each run provided a clue: a white Ferrari Testarossa for a Miami Vice sequence, an off-road motorbike in Jurassic World, the inimitable KITT in Knight Rider, and a pumped-up Toyota designed for drifting in The Fast and the Furious. The game also includes the DeLorean from Back to the Future and a fearsome reinforced muscle car from Death Race, another movie IP that features in the game.

Handling was pretty much what I'd expect from each machine, though you could press a bumper to induce drifting. All the cars had plenty of power on offer (it was a shame I didn’t get to drive the Back to the Future DeLorean, which was famously a pig to drive in real life, though I suspect it would have got a power boost in the game).

Film stunts brought to life

Graphically, Stuntman: Hollywood was pretty impressive, with the high-resolution detail typical of modern driving games. The game avoided the trap of obsessive realism, with a slightly cartoony look to some of the objects I drove through and around, and individual art direction for each run that took cues from the films or TV shows it was based on. For example, it replicated that distinctive 1980s pastel-and-neon look nicely for the Miami Vice sections.

Overall, Stuntman: Hollywood stuck to the spirit of the franchise while dragging it into the modern era visually. It was great fun to play, and very addictive. Sure, it will be pretty throwaway and ephemeral, but if you ever fancied yourself as a stunt driver, it should more than tick all the boxes.

Stuntman: Hollywood's release date is TBD, but it will launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

Because after week of using the Pomera DM250 digital typewriter, I'm convinced that this is the writing device I've been waiting years for. It's small, it's light, and most importantly, it's distraction-free.

• Get the Pomera DM250 digital typewriter for $549

Until recently, the digital typewriter space was owned by the Freewrite Traveller, but that device has faced criticism for its slow e-ink display. The Pomera's LCD screen is super crisp and snappy, with no lag. It makes for a seamless writing experience.

The clamshell design of the Pomera DM250 is delightfully simple. The keyboard isn't mechanical, but it's sturdy and responsive. And as for the software, it couldn't be simpler. It's a simple word processor plus file management tool – that's about it. There are a bunch of shortcuts to learn for editing text, but it all becomes second nature quickly.

And that simplicity is what makes it such an effective device. I'm as brain addled as everyone else when it comes to the digital world. I've tried writing on my laptop and my iPad, but there's just too much distraction readily available on those devices. The Pomera does have WiFi, but only for emailing your writing to yourself (which is a pretty neat way of getting text of the device, by the way).

The Pomera DM250 has entered the chat at an auspicious time. The conversation around digital detoxing is only growing, and single-use devices are becoming more and more popular. From the reMarkable paper tablet to the many dumbphones out there, so-called 'analogue' devices are capturing people's attention like never before. And the Pomera DM250 is as as single-use as they come. It's a writing device, and that's it.

Perhaps the biggest downside to the device is the price. At $549, it really (really) isn't cheap. If you're a writer, the question is how much focus is worth to you.

Continuing our regular series of artist showcases, he briefly introduces four examples of his work below. If you're inspired, see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best laptops for drawing and digital art.

The Sicilian Court portrait research

“Portraits are my first research step. Defining a character’s core emotion creates a strong foundation that guides later design decisions and research.”

The Lord of Balux

“This illustration began with abstract complementary blue, orange and yellow shapes. This opposition is a nice narrative framework to contrast the brooding baron with the feast behind him.”

The Tower of Atlan

“This environment piece began with loose three-value sketches and a colour pass. I designed the architecture in Blender, overlaid the 3D with the colour key, and completed the rendering on Photoshop.”

Marceline

“Fan art helps me escape my habits. Recreating Distant Lands: Obsidian let me explore saturated purples, artificial lighting, and subjects beyond my usual knights.”

You can see more of Marc's work on his ArtStation profile

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In one sense, it feels like a standard design conference, with friends, colleagues and people who've only just met in the queue all hanging out on comfy sofas, swapping work stories and side project ideas. So far, so fun.

It's when you enter the official sessions, especially the big keynotes, when it starts to feel less like you're at an OFFF or a SXSW and more like a press conference. New tools, new features will be revealed. There'll be whoops and cheers from the audience.

The atmosphere is somewhere between a Steve Jobs keynote and a high school pep rally. In fact, at my first attendance in LA in 2018, despite my journalistic neutrality, I found it difficult to resist the compulsion to join in. The energy in the room was that infectious.

Which made one particular moment at the 2023 conference all the stranger.

The keynote was being given by David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's Digital Media Business, and he was enthusing about generative AI features in Adobe Firefly. Then he stepped up to give the equivalent of a comedian landing a punchline: creators had already generated over three billion images using Firefly since its launch. He then paused, clearly expecting a cheer that would bring the house down.

Only to be met with dead silence.

It was a moment that encapsulated exactly what most creative professionals think about gen AI. My guess is that most of the people who'd created those three billion images had not been professionals, just people who wanted an easy fix, that might even save them from hiring a creative professional. There was a disconnect there, that Adobe didn't seem to have registered. Not a good look.

So what's the story three years on?

What's changed and what hasn't

This year, Adobe Max takes place in Miami Beach from 10-12 November. While we don't know what will be said, revealed or announced just yet, they have shared the session list. And while there are a massive 208 sessions to wade through, I think it tells us a lot about where their head is right now.

I've read the whole thing, so you don't need to. And here's what I think it tells us. Adobe is still going all in on generative AI, but unlike in 2023, it's realised you might hate it for doing so. Reading the session guides feels like Adobe telling you "We're not like other AI companies, honest", just a little too often.

Adobe's own guide to the event highlights a 25-session AI track, and almost every AI session comes with this kind of language. The After Effects session "isn't about replacing your craft". The agentic AI session promises "creative partners, not crutches". Phrases like "without sacrificing craft" and "creative control" crop up so often, you feel like you're playing a drinking game.

One session is even titled "Why AI Is Not Our Creative Titanic". It's being given by Laura Jordan Bambach, former D&AD President and an old friend of Creative Bloq, so I'm sure it'll be a great talk. But I'm sorry, I have to question the title. It seems like an odd way to soothe people's worries, given that nobody who sailed the Titanic expected it to sink either.

Who's the main audience?

Look further down the AI session list, and seems to clear to me who Adobe's main audience is for this stuff. It's not the individual designer or freelancer. It's marketing directors, agency bosses and procurement teams who buy enterprise software at scale.

Firefly Graph is pitched on "governance, scalability, indemnification". Omnicom is showing off an "agentic operating model". One agency boasts of "producing over one million assets for brands like eBay, Spotify, and Just Eat". Another asks: "What if your team could deliver bigger, bolder, more premium content — within the same budget, crew size, and timelines?"

The session that puts all this into sharp relief is Tony Harmer's all-day Illustrator lab, which promises "a unique upper hand in mastering traditional skills in Illustrator without the AI". The absence of AI is no longer the norm, but an outlier, a curiosity. Is it just me, or does that not feel a little shocking?

What creatives want

Tony won't be alone in drawing crowds: there are some great people speaking at this event, and I don't want to diminish that in the slightest. In particular, Aaron Draplin's logo day, David Blatner's InDesign tricks, Laurie Ruhlin's styles lab and Lightroom masking deep dives are the kinds of sessions working professionals will gladly queue up for.

My guess is that when AI does turn up in these particular sessions, it'll be the useful, unglamorous kind: cleaning up dodgy audio in Premiere, masking skies in Lightroom, getting InDesign to handle resizes. Because if you ask most working designers, they'll tell you they don't want Adobe software to generate their work. They just want it to take away the grunt work, and be straight about pricing and training data.

My reading of Adobe Max 2026, though, is that while Adobe still cares about those people, the overall direction of travel is towards scale, volume and the enterprise buyer: towards "content" rather than work. Not because Adobe's leaders necessarily want that, but because the brutal logic of delivering shareholder returns will leave them with no other choice.

Ironically, one talk asks: "If everyone can create, who will create what matters?" It's a great question. I might be just a cynical old man shouting at clouds. But from where I'm sitting, Adobe's current answer seems to be: whoever's paying for the enterprise licence.

While there's no formula for creating the best poster designs, there are a few ground rules – make it eye-catching and make it legible. What you don't want is fans complaining that your design is an eyesore.

The poster design itself is pretty straightforward, featuring Fury and Joshua in a faceoff. Where the design falls short is its typography structure. Large bold text reading 'finally' gestures to the long-awaited match between the legendary fighters, with 'Fury' and 'AJ' vertically bodged on in what I can only describe as a unique... stylistic choice.

The result is a poster that appears to read 'U vs J' – notably not the initials of the fighters. "There has got to be a better design for this poster… “finally U vs J” is crazy," one fan responded on X. "That’s a terrible poster design," another added, while one chimed in, "This hurts my eyes to look at. F grade on the promo graphic. Sheesh."

For more design news, check out why this design might be the worst typography cockup of 2026 or take a look at why Taylor Swift's Patient 0 cover was accused of a Photoshop mishap.

Now one solo dev is taking things further with a delightfully full-on DIY approach to making a game. As well as making all the art for his game with his own hands, he's also making all the music and sound effects with his own voice. The stick-figure visuals might not be GTA VI-level fidelity, but Punch to Defend looks like a whole lot of fun.

If your inspired to finally get to work on your own masterpiece, see our guides to the best game development software and the best laptops for game development.

Milan-based dev Kuro Naeda describes Punch to Defend as an "incremental tower defense game made with love and bad decisions".

"Haters will say I didn't make it all alone but, believe it or not... those are drawings of a man in his 20s," the developer says of the somewhat rough-and-ready game art. "And so are the sound effects and music."

Said sound design consists of Kuro singing, beat boxing and otherwise mouthing sound effects with as much gusto as Michael Leslie Winslow in the Police Academy movies.... Perhaps without quite the same range, but it's amazing all the same.

As for the gameplay, "you upgrade little guys, fight increasingly stronger enemies and make numbers go up. You earn tears, buy upgrades and keep pushing until the game becomes unreasonable".

Challenges unlock fusions, letting you combine units into new ones, and every fusion gets its own artwork, abilities and stats.

"You can even fuse a unit with itself. Yes, that's a lot of work for something this stupid, but here I am," the developer writes on his Kickstarter page, where he's already achieved triple his ambitious funding target of $113.

"Not being able to draw or make music shouldn't stop anyone from making games. Except me probably," he writes on Reddit.

Asked about why he set his funding target so low, the developer explains: "It's a one man project, I just need the money to upload it to steam and some extra for pizza and coffee".

"The kickstarter funds will be used for beatbox equipment maintenance," he clarifies in another comment. "Food (maintenance) that arrives in my mouth (beat box equipment)".

Did Bentley get something right that others got wrong? Or has it just been less ambitious in the design stakes?

Several factors help the Bentley Torcal avoid the controversy that dogged Jaguar and Ferrari's EVs. It has some impressive headline figures – 876 hp and 996 lb-ft of torque – but luxury car branding is more about emotion than numbers, and Bentley got that right too.

Unlike Jaguar, this British carmaker isn't breaking away from its heritage to start afresh. There's no rebrand; it's the same Bentley we know, it just happens to have made its first fully electric car.

Design director Robin Page has said that the goal was not to create a new design language, but to build "another great Bentley". His team "decided that our best route would be to embrace our heritage and DNA, but in a modern, progressive way," he told Dezeen.

That's the story, and it's impressively consistent.

There is a new Bentley logo, but it's a relatively subtle tweak on a familiar design. The Torcal follows the same philosophy. The influence of the Bentayga is clear in signature Bentley cues like the long bonnet, prominent grille and large rear haunches.

That grille is probably the most controversial feature. In an all-electric car, its original purpose becomes obsolete, but as a design choice, the illuminated diamond pattern provides a striking night-time identity and an EV-era signature feature. It's a touch of bling that might appeal to younger drivers, but having it there also preserves instant recognition.

Inside, physical metal controls, wool upholstery, handcrafted materials and the absence of excessive screens avoid the coldness of ultra-digital cabins. The approach to sound is equally handcrafted. Yes, there are fake engine noises, but they're presented as a feature rather than a compromise. Bentley commissioned musicians to create the "Bentley Dynamic Symphony", recreating its iconic V8 engine sound using drums, viola, and bass guitar.

Even the car's name is a nod to its heritage reputation for precision mechanics. The name of the Torcal mountain range in Andalusia comes from the Latin verb torquere, the same root as torque.

Essentially, Bentley changed the powertrain but avoided the identity-level controversy seen around Jaguar or the existential questions that inevitably surround Ferrari's Luce.

Maybe it had an easier task. Ferrari's brand equity is difficult to separate from engines and motorsport. People buy Bentleys for luxury, comfort and craftsmanship, which are traits that translate more easily to an EV and aren't threatened by a silent electric powertrain. Jaguar was a dead brand that needed to go through a painful reset.

None of these approaches is right or wrong in itself. Jaguar has largely succeeded in what it wanted to achieve, and so has Bentley. But will either of them convince wealthy customers that they want an electric car?

Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
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If you check Nintendo Switch 2 prices regularly, you'll already know that this limited-time deal is unlikely to last long, so if you've been waiting for the moment to get Nintendo's newest console, you'll want to be quick.

If you're in the US, check out Nintendo's tariff refund sale. Also see our guide to the best Nintendo Switch 2 accessories if you already have a console secured.

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Switch 2 bundle deals

Nintendo Switch 2 one year on

A year after release, Switch 2 feels fresh and manages to sit between other gaming brands in a unique way. Nintendo does that no other gaming brand can do, capturing the joy of old-school gaming even while it innovates.

Nintendo Switch 2 features a performance bump, improved visuals, and new social features compared to the Switch 1, while retaining its hybrid handheld/TV console design. Inside is a custom NVIDIA chip that includes AI-powered upscaling similar to DLSS. But really, it's those first-party games and exclusives you're here for: Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Starfox and more.

This pocket-sized 5,000mAh power bank offers fast-charging while keeping things relatively cable-free. It offers a far more practical approach to charging than 90% of the bricks out there, and at the new price, I think it's one of the better super-practical, cool-looking tech deals.

Of course, if you want to explore more heavy-duty laptop chargers, we've got a guide for the best power banks out there. But if it's portability you're after, the Sharge Flow Mini is a strong recommendation.

Sharge Flow Mini 2 deep dive

At the heart of the Sharge Mini 2 is a 5,000mAh cell configuration, with a built-in USB-C cable for immediate top-ups with dual swappable connectors for iOS and Android. It's all pretty seamless, and the metallic trim, splash of orange and charge lights all look pretty cool (not something I ever thought I'd be saying about a power charge).

When put head-to-head with other options, such as the $55 Anker MagGo 5K, the Sharge Mini is smaller and costs nearly $30 less.

So it's perfect, right?! Well, no, and while the compact power bank battery reaches up to 22.5W and handles steady low-battery background anxiety well, it still trails the market-leading capacities found on the larger Anker Prime 20K. Yet that is $89! So for the sub-$30 price, I still think the Mini Pro is a great option.

Crisp blue skies, real-life planes modelled to every nut sitting alongside hyperactive anime heroes and sci-fi flying fortresses – oh yes, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is the most Ace Combat-y of Ace Combat games, and from takeoff it’s not really interested in being anything else. If you’re here wondering if Project Aces has finally decided to reinvent what it does, well, it doesn’t, and about six hours in, I didn't really mind.

Ray-traced clouds, a new war, the return of squadron orders you can bark at your wingmen mid-dogfight (well, via the D-pad), and for a while I waited for the moment the formula cracked open and did something really new. It never quite does. Lock on, cycle targets, cycle weapons, fire – Ace Combat's been running that loop in these blue skies since 1999 (for me, the series true self started with Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere), and Ace Combat 8, for all its polish, is still that loop wearing a nicer flying jacket now joined by teammates.

That's not really a complaint, because it's comforting to return to what it's like to play a game from a developer that understands what’s needed, and when it works – and it works often – Ace Combat 8 is still a wonderful, faintly ridiculous flight of fancy, with controls easy enough that you spend most of a mission looking at the sky instead of worrying whether you're flying it correctly, right up until a flying mega-wing-thing the size of a city block rises over the horizon and you remember exactly what game you're playing.

The story, such as it is, hangs a fresh look on that old formula, as it’s not in first-person: 2029, the Federation of Central Usea overrun, its navy shattered, and you aboard the ageing carrier Endurance, where a propaganda unit has turned a legendary pilot called the Wings of Theve into a rallying myth – except the legend was never real, and somehow you inherit the name anyway, flying with Baxter, Tasha and Coster as Joker Flight while what's left of the FCU tries to take its home back. It's Ace Combat doing what Ace Combat does: a war story about borrowed identity, the underdog doing what’s right against the odds, mostly as an excuse to strap you into increasingly swift and agile fighter jets.

Wings of Theve, and one thousand aircraft against your four

Like previous entries, the spectacle is where Ace Combat 8 earns its keep, because just as a mission starts feeling like another exercise in target practice, things shift a gear and a new mini-boss, an elite squadron, a change of objective, the horizon suddenly fills with something enormous or numerous, and Project Aces throws the next thing at you, usually a massive flying wing or 'land ship', and the soundtrack swells dramatically, convincing me that whatever's sitting at the far end of my lock-on reticle actually matters.

While Ace Combat 8 plays a little coyer with its biggest moments than Ace Combat 7, saving the real spectacle for later, when it arrives, it arrives properly: the space elevator returns, scaled up further still, and one of the best missions in the game puts you against a Land Battleship – a destroyer bolted onto tank treads – as it tries to ram and bring down the iconic megastructure, and you pick apart its armour plate by plate before it can fire again.

This is exactly the sort of setpiece event that sounds like nonsense but feels fantastic in flight, and making use of Unreal Engine 5 mostly just means more of it – more aircraft, more bombers, more tanks, more explosions – right up to a finale when a radio operator tells you, with sincerity, there are a thousand aircraft against your four (I counted around 100 planes at one time, but more and more were added). I gulped. Then I grinned. That's the whole review, really, if you want the short version.

What surprised me is how close Ace Combat 8 is willing to bring you in for a game that spends so much time at missile range with jets tumbling and rolling around each other until you're watching the enemy aircraft rather than the battlefield behind it, which is where the series has always been at its best, better than any attempt to play this straight as a simulator ever managed. The new clouds help here and become more than eye-candy and emerge as genuine tactical leverage: they break line of sight, mess with missile tracking, give you somewhere to vanish when a dogfight's gone wrong, and more than once I caught myself using weather instinctively to escape danger rather than simply admiring how good it looks rolling across a skyline and over mountains, and that backdrop finally feels like a place rather than a 3D-rendered diorama.

Systems that promise more than they spend

This is also where Ace Combat 8's attempts to grow up are more interesting on paper than they are in-game. Like previous entries, you have aircraft and special weapons to unlock, parts to fit, and MRP (Military Result Points ) to earn and spend. The returning squadron system lets you issue basic commands, like sending wingmen after targets, but it hasn't really evolved since AC5 and is less complex than AC6. However, you can now spend MRP on them and not just yourself, adding a degree of tactical plotting through the aircraft upgrade tree, so when you call them back to cover you, they have the gear to make it work.

It feels like squadron commands should be a genuinely tactical layer sitting on top of the old arcade skeleton, but in practice, it rarely changes how I actually play. I leaned on a teammate to watch my tail a handful of times and enjoyed the couple of missions where directing the squadron actually mattered, but mostly I left them to it; your standard missiles will lock on and destroy almost anything anyway, and the special weapons settle into a familiar handful of ideas – long-range, multi-lock, auto-targeting bombs – by the campaign's final third I was flying the same loadout I'd worked out hours earlier and never really questioning it.

Squadron orders are useful, and customisation is handy, but none of it breaks the lock-on-and-fire rhythm underneath, and maybe that's the series' whole compromise, really: push too far toward simulation and you lose the immediacy that makes this fun, push too far into pure arcade, and you lose the pleasure of actually feeling like an ace pilot, and Ace Combat 8 sits in that middle ground happily. Sometimes too happily – I let out an audible sigh hitting a stealth mission built around radar avoidance – but give me a sky full of fighters and a stupid objective, and I'm in love with how Ace Combat 8 feels. Ask me to creep around a maze of radar cones, and I start wishing it would just get back to the good stuff.

The campaign also weaves in something more personal, with new first-person interludes aboard the Endurance that bring you closer to the characters. And your performance, not raw decisions, shapes who survives, who joins Joker squadron, and who is there by your side for the grand finale, when every ally made along the way races to your side. Queue dramatic orchestral music as that pilot you faintly remember helping 18 hours earlier sweeps in from behind the clouds to save you. It doesn't transform the storytelling, not really, but it gives the battles a bit more weight than the usual faceless setup because it could affect something.

Bigger skies, actual humans

Then there's the multiplayer, which might be where all those half-realised systems finally make sense, because *deep breath* online features a hundred-player Air Base hub, its own progression track, co-op missions, PvPvE, four-player Scramble runs against AI, eight-player superweapon raids, Co-Op Warfare that pits two four-strong teams against each other with NPC forces flooding the map, and Co-Op Assault turns it into a straight scoring contest. I only had limited time with it before review, so take this as a first impression rather than a verdict, but even my short play made one thing obvious – putting actual humans on the other end of the fight, and your aircraft and weapon choices matter in a way the campaign's AI wingmen never quite do. Understanding positioning, cover, and roles means you have to watch your team instead of hunting the next lock-on. It's a singular multiplayer mode, and there's honestly not much else quite like it.

Which, in the end, is probably the whole pitch of Ace Combat 8. Project Aces hasn't tried to reinvent anything here; instead, the team has taken a formula it's spent decades sanding down, dipped back into fan-favourite ideas, and made the skies bigger, denser, prettier, and bolted on a unique dynamic narrative system onto these wings to make the old loop feel worth taking flight with again.

Is Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve worth playing?

Sometimes I wanted more: the weapon system evolves from AC7 and promises depths it doesn't deliver; the squadron commands could have been more effective; and here and there you can see the rails the game adheres to running behind the spectacle a little too clearly.

But then the clouds break, enemy aces come charging out of them, the score kicks in, half the sky goes up in flames, your allies arrive, and I remember what Ace Combat does better than almost anything else – it takes the simple, stupid joy of flying a fighter jet, piles an emotionally charged amount of drama on top of it, and somehow convinces you the fate of this anime world genuinely hinges on whether you can get one more target locked.

The Goodtime State – Vice City Collection, now listed on the Rockstar Games Store, centres on Macca the Gator, a mascot from a fictional in-game TV show set in Leonida, GTA 6's answer to Florida. The $400 price gets you a Macca figure, a pair of Oakley Frogskins, a New Era cap, a Leonida Keys crossbody bag, a shot glass, a magnetic mirror, pins, stickers, a swizzle spoon, a razor-blade keychain, and a double-sided poster of the Leonida map, according to Rockstar's official listing.

There’s no game code and no mention of one anywhere in the bundle, but fans don’t seem to mind, because Rockstar is doing what it’s always been great at: developing fictional brands that feel as tangible as anything Taylor Swift or Sydney Sweeney put their name to.

Merch for a place that doesn't exist

And that’s what makes the box stand out: it isn't the price tag, but instead it’s the concept behind it. Rather than producing standard game-branded merchandise, Rockstar has designed the collection to look like something you'd actually buy inside Leonida itself: souvenirs from a fictional TV show, sold by a fictional tourist economy, to real people who haven't played the game yet. I can absolutely imagine buying this stuff at an airport store.

It's a natural extension of how GTA has always built its worlds (I still own my GTA IV dartboard and dominos from that game’s launch). The series has spent decades filling its maps with fake burger chains, parody beer brands (Pißwasser), dodgy adverts and radio stations that exist purely to make the city feel lived-in rather than designed. Rockstar rarely explains these details – we as players absorb them ambiently, glimpsed on billboards or overheard on the radio – until the setting feels like a real place with its own culture and history, not a collection of missions.

The Goodtime State box takes that same approach and makes it physical. The Leonida Keys bag, the branded cap, the souvenir poster. None of it feels like generic game merchandise; it’s not just a hoodie with a GTA6 logo, for example, and it doesn't read as tourist tat from a city that technically doesn't exist.

A souvenir, not a statue

Rockstar describes the poster as a double-sided map of the "full Leonida landscape," with Macca the Gator artwork on the reverse – deliberately framed as a keepsake rather than a reference item, according to the product description.

That distinction matters because Collector's editions have traditionally leaned on statues, steelbooks and hero art – items that signal this is the game you bought. The Goodtime State box instead leans into the fiction that Leonida is a destination, and it's full of the stuff you'd bring home from visiting.

Little is currently known about Macca the Gator beyond his appearance in the box art and figure – whether he's a children's TV staple, a washed-up local celebrity, or something stranger within GTA 6's world hasn't been detailed by Rockstar. That ambiguity appears to be intentional, consistent with how the studio has handled fictional media and brands throughout the GTA series. Rockstar also isn’t averse to sidestepping perfect brand tie-ins, such as when Phil Collins starred as Phil Collins in GTA Vice City Stories.

The bigger picture

The collection arrives as a pre-order, and collector's edition pricing across the games industry keeps climbing, with $400 putting the Goodtime State box well above typical special editions. Rockstar has not confirmed whether the collection will be limited in quantity or how it fits alongside any standard or deluxe editions of GTA 6 itself.

What's notable is the strategy behind the price: rather than selling players a bigger, shinier version of the game they're already anticipating, Rockstar is selling them a piece of the world itself – one built entirely from the kind of background detail most studios would never bother turning into a product.

Grand Theft Auto 6 releases on 19 November on PS5 and Xbox alongside this newly revealed $400 box of collector items.

If that sounds a bit like a nightmarish Black Mirror episode, fear not, as Meta has come up with an ingenious way to make things a little less dystopian. They've created a cute little mascot to distract you from the potential domination of a global superintelligence. Hey, at least it's got a cute character design.

The new face of Meta Muse is a little fuzzy guy with a soft smile and a distinctly unthreatening vibe. Aptly named Jolly, the character adds an endearing quality to Meta's once faceless AI, softening the technology for the more AI-skeptical among us. Alongside the new avatar was the debut of a pocket-sized device to house your AI pal – essentially turning Jolly into a glorified Tamagotchi.

Users can ask Jolly questions like a typical AI assistant, and thanks to the new Muse Realtime Avatar model, you can also call him up for a real-time video chat. Am I slightly worried there's a potential for parasocial connections? Yes, a little, but darn it if he ain't cute,.

I can't help but feel like there's something slightly infantilising about Meta's new AI avatar, given Zuckerberg's prediction: "In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use."

There's something about a cute character design masking the global takeover of Meta's AI that sits a little strangely with me. Pair that with the childlike novelty of Meta's new pocket AI device, and it seems like a calculated move to soften the more nefarious potential of the technology. With Meta's smart glasses already making headlines for privacy issues around both users and the company itself, the concept of an ever-listening pocket AI (however cute) certainly pushes the limits of my trust in Meta.

A particular kind of panic arrives when you start making something and realise you have absolutely no idea where it’s going. For many creatives, that feeling signals them to stop, find a reference and look at what worked last time; maybe open a familiar digital art software or iPad drawing app and find a safe place to return to. Do the thing you know you can do. Es Devlin takes almost the opposite view.

“I’ve learned that I make my most interesting work when I don’t know the rules and I don’t know what I’m doing,” she told Art Basel. She followed it with a line that feels almost like a manifesto for escaping your own creative comfort zone: “I don’t want to repeat experiments I’ve already done. Each piece has to be a prototype.”

That is quite a statement from someone whose work includes huge kinetic sculptures, Olympic ceremonies, Super Bowl performances and stadium-scale collaborations. These aren't exactly things you casually knock up to see what happens. Devlin says her projects can involve enormous resources and the time of many other people, meaning every new idea carries a genuine risk of not working as she imagined.

Not knowing what you're doing isn't necessarily evidence that you've made a bad start. It can be evidence that you haven't simply repeated yourself. Devlin has even created a room in her home for this kind of uncertainty: a space without a brief or commission where she doesn't know what she'll make by the end of the day. She credits advice from artist William Kentridge, who told her she needed a room where she could make a mess and not be in control.

With Devlin's first European retrospective, Es Devlin: Other Worlds, opening at London's Design Museum on 2 October 2026, it's a timely reminder that a 30-year career doesn't necessarily come from finding a formula and sticking to it. The exhibition brings together her work across sculpture, stage design, music, language and light.

What can we all learn from Devlin? Sometimes the uncomfortable bit at the beginning isn't the problem, and it might be the point of it all after all

Visit Es Devlin for art, insights, and inspiration in stage design, graphic art, and sculpture.

Our favourite Es Devlin art books:

Available now, both models could easily hit our lists of the best label makers, or the best laminators. But they're so much more than that. They serve as compact mini-print shops that print and laminate pro-quality, water- and scratch-resistant stickers and photos using ultra-vivid 300 DPI dye-sublimation technology.

That may be a mouthful, but it basically means these are very capable little things. The standard Cricut StickerPix Print (£159.99 for the Essential Bundle) works seamlessly with pre-cut sticker sheets—perfect for quick, uniform labels. Meanwhile, the advanced Cricut StickerPix Print + Cut (£249.99 for the Essential Bundle) adds a built-in cutter, automatically kiss-cutting custom shapes directly around your unique designs. Both connect effortlessly to the free Cricut Design Space app, meaning you can transform your smartphone photos and designs into tactile stickers in minutes.

So, who's this for? Well, everyone from label/sticker homebody maniacs to digital artists and small business owners.

If you run a market stall or Etsy shop, the StickerPix Print could be a really nice addition to your business. It’s efficient for batch-printing logos, price tags, QR codes, or packaging seals using the pre-cut circular and rectangular sheets. And, because the dye-sublimation prints come out completely dry and laminated, you won't have to worry about smudging labels. It's also ideal for anyone who wants to label their spice jars or craft room storage without fussing over intricate cuts.

I think there's also scope for illustrators to use these things, especially those who want to share their art at conventions – after all, everyone loves stickers! You can upload a hand-drawn illustration or a photo from your phone, and the machine will print, laminate, and precisely kiss-cut a custom border around the image so the backing stays intact for easy peeling.

For me, I'm excited to use them to create unique water bottle sticks and fun gifts for my son's birthday party bags.

Looking around at the other sticker makers in this price range, I think Cricut has successfully bridged the gap between a pro print shop and an everyday crafting tool. I can't wait to get my hands on them to fully try them out.

Continuing our regular series of artist showcases, he briefly introduces four examples of his work below. If you're inspired, see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best laptops for drawing and digital art.

Blue

“This was done as a quick paint over practice on top of an old painting I did in 2019. I wanted to see how I can edit a painting to make it more interesting and in alignment with my current taste. I find I am now much more expressive with my mark-making.”

Shopkeeping

“This image is inspired by Orientalist paintings that are pretty complex with a lot of props and materials. For this image, I tried to balance all of the different details while trying to imply some kind of narrative as well.”

Pigeons

“This is inspired by Old Master paintings. I was particularly interested in the hands; I wanted them to have some kind of swirling motion and gesture to them. Hands are always fun to paint.”

Spirit

“This is probably my favourite painting that I have done. I wanted to capture something spiritual and mystical, a sense of movement, yet stillness, while also letting the viewer’s imagination interpret what’s going on.”

You can see more of Brian's work on his website

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

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