I didn’t get much further in the extremely popular beta for the haute-couture-asaurus action of Monster Hunter Wilds than perfecting the exact orange-to-white ratio of my cat. Not because I wasn’t having fun, but because I immediately started looking up GPU prices after playing for ten minutes. As such, I didn’t spend enough time with the combat to get a proper feel for it. Cultural osmosis has once again allowed me to form an uneducated take, however, and I’m getting the sense there’s been some mixed reactions re: bonk quality. According to a clip shared on X by user Blue Stigma, there's a good reason for those misgivings. It's all about frames, you see.

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When nightmarish sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter launched into early access in September it was somewhat messy. Bugs and maddening enemy spawns diminished the tension of being a fleshy human scavenger in a mech battlefield. But one feature annoyed some players much more - fresh water. See, you need to keep your headquarters stocked with water, as it gets steadily used by your settlement's inhabitants. The catch being that this water diminishes even while you're not playing the game. If it runs out completely, then everything you've collected gets wiped. The developers have listened to complaints about this most Farmville of mechanics, and they've answered in an interesting way. Water thieves! Now, on top of the usual downward trickle, burglars will come to steal your H2O as well.

It's not as bad as it sounds.

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It’s tempting to frame Straftat as a throwback to an older, better time for the multiplayer FPS, when the lingo was coded in frags and gibs and sucking it down, when satisfaction was drawn entirely from performance rather than some convoluted, artificial system of progression. Not only would this be inaccurate, but it would also do a disservice to what Straftat truly is, namely a wild overcorrection in response to the direction of modern multiplayer gunfests, one that careens straight through retro stations to arrive somewhere new and exciting.

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I have zero archaeology experience or knowledge, but I bet archaeologists really love their jobs (for the most part). They get to analyse and discover cool artefacts and educate us on the histories of forgotten civilisations. That's dreamy stuff, that is. But I do wonder what it's like for archaeologists to discover and study something they shouldn't have; something with a disturbing secret - a curse, maybe. Bite-sized horror game The Children Of Clay explores this idea and I'd like more of it, please.

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Steam's built-in game recording feature has been usable in beta since the summer, but it has now been properly launched for every user, following a client update to Steam yesterday. It's basically another method of capturing funny ragdoll glitches and posting them on the "lol-games-are-dumb" channel of your friend's Discord. Or for posting that flukey knife throw in Call Of Duty to Twitter, as if you really meant to kill the man from across the map all along. Or saving a clip for your personal records, like the footage of that time you yeeted an innocent citizen off the 50-foot wall of a castle town in Dragon's Dogma 2. We all do that, right? Right?

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Back in the misty reaches of time (March) popular farming sim Stardew Valley got a big update that added more pets to the game (it also let you drink mayonaise but let's not get sidetracked). Those new cats, dogs, and turtles had the cute distinction of being able to wear hats, should you choose to kit your wee friends out. Now, following many months of smaller updates to the game, it seems those hats are causing a problem. "[If] you are experiencing performance issues in Stardew Valley 1.6, remove all hats from pets," said creator Eric Barone in a xeet. When asked the lore-accurate cause of this problem, he blamed: "a strange rash".

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In all honesty, Toads Of The Bayou could have been several notches less ribbet-ing than its Steam demo ended up being, because its stylised pixel fly-snatchers are just that good. There’s only one of the three characters available in the freebie (one of the others is a toad nun with a shotgun), but he’s got a little cutlass, a flintlock pistol, and a can-do attitude - at least when it comes to either stabbing or shooting things. The game itself is a little bit deckbuilder, a little bit Into The Breach: turn based strategy with perfect information and various tricks you can pull to make enemies hit each other instead of the thing you’re trying to protect. Indulge yourself on the gourmet tray-tray below.

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Warframe developers Digital Extremes have announced a new round of early access for their 2025-bound fantasy action-RPG Soulframe, which I saw a bit of last year and think is pretty promising. They're now adding 2000 players to a Preludes build of the game every week, with each invite email including an additional four invite codes, so you can get your friends involved.

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My brain is still thawing for the comment freeze, and thus there is sadly no cool industry person to talk to us about books this week. I'm currently reading Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. Jia Tolentino wrote about it for the New Yorker. Jia Tolentino also writes very good books. But enough about books, tell me about books! One's you've read, preferably, but I will also accept books you've formed opinions on based on their covers, as is good and proper. Book for now!

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Here’s a Steam quote for you: ‘The Rise Of The Golden Idol is the best game I’ve ever played where I spent most of my time staring at the screen going “well what chuffing well is it, then?!” Fiendish but fair, this detective puzzler demands a heady mix of observation, deduction, and logic, but rewards you with a progressively engaging story, and steadily more infuriatingly brilliant puzzles. Despite teaching you everything you need to know in the tutorial, it still manages to introduce new wrinkles and twists on the formula with each fresh chapter. My verdict? Imagine me lying my floor, massaging my temple with one hand and giving a fat thumbs up with the other.

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New research has revealed a growing mental phenomena sweeping the UK, which may only affect those with a certain income

Benefit increases, new investment opportunities, and several tax changes are due to come into effect in April.

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

Electromagnetic radiation leaking from the cable between your computer and monitor can be intercepted and decoded by AI to reveal what you are looking at

A newly identified smartphone vulnerability can reveal the floor plans of where you are and what you are doing - and it is possible that companies or intelligence agencies are already making use of it

Experiments show that viewers can usually identify video deepfakes of famous politicians – but fake audio and text are harder to detect

Smart TVs from Samsung and LG monitor what you are watching even when you are using the screens to display a feed from a connected laptop or video game console

Voice assistants can build profiles of their users’ habits and preferences, but the consistency and accuracy of these profiles vary

Motion sensors in smartphones can be turned into makeshift microphones to eavesdrop on conversations, outsmarting security features designed to stop such attacks

What happens if AI is trained to write choral music by feeding it a specially created vocal dataset? Moving new exhibition The Call tackles some thorny questions about AI and creativity – and stirs the soul with music

An AI-assisted robot can listen to spoken commands and assemble 3D objects such as chairs and tables out of reusable building blocks

Agents are being offered double the normal commission to help shift apartments throughout capital cities.

The Francis Ford Coppola film is now available to rentalopolis.

Just in time to watch with the whole family over Thanksgiving.

Black Ops 6 is here, and fans have been itching to know what's included in Season 1 - and now we have an answer. Here's what's included, and when you can play

Just got a PS5 or want to know what to prioritise in your backlog? We've got you covered with the best PlayStation 5 games for your console that you can play right now.

Hackers are exploiting EA FC 25 to nab millions of coins and snipe the world's best football players and EA seems unable to stop it - and this is how it happens

Every stock trader should consider a virtual private network to safeguard their trading, according to tech guru Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson.

An updated Android trojan called FakeCall hijacks bank calls. Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson says Android phone manufacturers and Google need to step up their game on security.

Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson reveals four signs of compromised Social Security numbers and offers five steps to protect yourself.

Apple has introduced a native call recording feature as part of Apple Intelligence with its release of iOS 18.1. It's easier than ever to document conversations.

The Adison Vein Locator gives medical professionals Superman-like X-ray vision for finding patients' veins for easy insertion of needles.

A virtual private network is a service that encrypts your internet connection, ensuring your online activity remains private and secure.

Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson says there’s been a rise in cybercriminal services using hacked police and government emails to send subpoenas and data requests to U.S. companies.

How private is your internet address? Very, says the Supreme Court of Canada. Police can’t just walk into a company and demand a suspect’s IP address by saying a Canadian resident doesn’t have an expectation of privacy of that information, the court ruled today. An IP address is vital enough that every resident expects it […]

The World Health Organization has declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern – a new variant of the virus has caused an outbreak in Central and West Africa and spread to Sweden

Red and processed meat, and even poultry, seem to raise the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a study of nearly 2 million adults, but not everyone is convinced

DNA from mitochondria, the energy powerhouses inside cells, sometimes gets added to our genome – and the number of these mutations in the brain could be linked to ageing

A network of neurons in the brain seems to be larger in people with depression, which could change how we think about the condition's causes

A band that measures the acidity of sweat could flag if athletes or manual workers are overexerting themselves

Rubbing a common yellow food dye onto a mouse's skin turns it temporarily transparent, so we can monitor its insides without harming the animal

A new diet based on research into the body's ageing process suggests you can increase your life expectancy by up to 20 years by changing what, when and how much you eat

People report greater life satisfaction six months after starting Parkrun events, which could partly be due to the supportive environment

Neuroscientists have been surprised to discover that the human brain is teeming with microbes, and we are beginning to suspect they could play a role in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's

More than 600 types of viruses that infect bacteria have been found living on toothbrushes and showerheads – and many of them have never been seen before