There are now three Magic: The Gathering cards for Sting, the magic sword Bilbo claims from the troll hoard. To be fair, they're all mechanically distinct. In The Lord of the Rings set there was an artifact card called Sting, the Glinting Dagger, and an instant called Hobbit's Sting that did more damage the more food you had. Several the hobbit-themed cards are empowered the more food tokens you have...

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 2026 is a fantastic 16-inch gaming laptop. There you go, review over, we can all go home. But wait, because it's got a serious flaw that should make you hold your fire before pressing the order button. And that flaw, as those familiar with the ongoing memory crisis may have already guessed, is the price.Asus has sent me a 64 GB DDR5, RTX 5080-equipped machine...

Let's be real, come August 27, the Grand Theft Auto 6 "extended look" is not going to be exclusive to Netflix for six hours as advertised. It's going to be exclusive to Netflix for however long it takes for someone to record it and distribute a torrent.You wouldn't download a car, but would you download an ad for a game about stealing cars?It would be, I've now had to consider,...

Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames. And ocassionally hedgehogs. The arc of history curves in mysterious ways. Beloved actor Keanu Reeves—Ted, Neo, John Wick himself—may not be Buddhist, but he does, in fact, owe the existence of one of his blockbuster roles to the teachings of one of Buddhism's most important figures.How, you ask? And what exactly does this...

During Take-Two's latest earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said the current computing hardware crisis—you know, the one that's making it more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia's QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online—is, to quote the man directly, "not a good thing."But while the skyrocketing costs of consoles and components are threatening to price customers out of the...

Fantastic new puzzle game Big Walk drew some early complaints over the volume of its proximity voice chat, which was too quiet for some players and mic setups, and developer House House has now released a patch that it hopes will resolve the issue while respecting the spirit of the game.The studio has a fine line to walk, because Big Walk's primary source of friction is the challenge of communicating...

Critical Hit(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Critical Hit, where Mollie (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle. This week I'm that "someone else", and I'm here to talk your ear off about time signatures!So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played...

I can turn an overgrown property into an industrial vineyard in a single year no problem. I've done it in the valleys, islands, and fields of countless farm sims. Usually it's just as easy to pluck one of its provincial hotties out of town to become my spouse (the overworked leader type, ideally), but magical girl-inspired Fields of Mistria has given me a bad case of choice paralysis. I love...

Games about cleaning are the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy. But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten...

If you've looked at memory prices recently, you've probably seen Corsair DIMMs selling for astonishing prices. The 32 GB Vengeance DDR5 RGB kit sitting in my PC right now is selling for $480 at Amazon, whereas I bought it for $90-$100 just a couple of years ago. Corsair RAM can still be some of the cheapest comparatively, but it's very pricey nonetheless.So, Corsair must be raking in money hand over...