In early 2021, millions of ordinary people across the United States began buying shares of the declining video game store GameStop in increments of tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars. Their investments were mocked by financial experts, who cited the store’s poor underlying metrics. But the masses’ collective action proved shockingly powerful: they pushed GameStop’s price from under $3 to as high as $483 in late January 2021, causing the hedge funds that had bet against it to lose billions of dollars.

Nearly three years later, the new movie Dumb Money attempts to dramatize and make sense of the strange episode. Paul Dano stars as Keith Gill, a trader and livestreamer whose full-throated support of the stock on the subreddit community Wall Street Bets catalyzed a movement around “meme stocks”: assets that surged in price fueled by social media enthusiasm. Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson and America Ferrera all play various characters swept up in the mania that …

The Ratchet & Clank series recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and, remarkably enough, it’s been around all this time without any of the games finding their way to PC. But as is the way of all PlayStation things now, barring Bloodborne, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is coming to PC on July 26.

The game is being handled by Nixxes Software in collaboration with original developer Insomniac Games (which is probably quite busy with Spider-Man 2 at the moment). In a blogpost making the announcement Nixxes’ Julian Huijbregts says the game “is a visual spectacle that is perfectly suitable for newcomers”, and it’s true that the Ratchet & Clank games have always been showcases: Sony loves to launch a new PlayStation in the vicinity of a new game in this series, to give the early adopters something to show off. As for this entry specifically, our sister site GamesRadar+ called it “the best in the series” and awarded five stars.

And the PC version is go…

An upcoming turn-based tactical RPG will put players’ choice of survivors against a horde of giant, mutated rats in the struggle to cross the ruins of a fallen city and survive another day. Shardpunk: Verminfall will release on April 13, 2023, and sounds like an interesting blend of the turn-based tactics, RPG, resource management, and survival genres.

The core of Shardpunk looks to be fast-moving tactical fights over the course of a day spent scavenging in the ruins of your steampunk-ish capital city—one where you must constantly move to outrun the oncoming vermin horde. At night your team shelters somewhere and you make choices about managing their health, morale, equipment, and stats.

“In Shardpunk: Verminfall you already lost. Now you need to run for your life while saving as many people and pieces of equipment as possible. Keep on moving and use every skill and item at your disposal to reach the safety of fusion core-operated bunkers,” says the developer.

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Gordon Freeman is a nerd who cuts a heroic profile, but in Abiotic Factor you’re just a nerd: a regular, lab-coat-wearing new employee in a Black Mesa-like science facility that’s undergoing an unspecified security situation. Your job, at least for starters, is to avoid dying.

Out in early access on Steam today, Abiotic Factor’s premise seems to be striking a chord with co-op survival crafting fans: It hasn’t hit Steam’s top concurrents chart at the time of writing, but it has jumped to seventh place in Steam’s US top-sellers list just a few hours after launch.

I like how much Abiotic Factor commits to the ’90s parody corporate scientist theme: its character creator features 19 ties, 12 kinds of glasses, and 11 snazzy belts. And how refreshing it is to play a co-op survival crafting game that doesn’t immediately ask you to punch down a tree! The rough equivalent in Abiotic Factor is bashing an old beige computer case to bits and harvesting its power supply. 

A…

Even good UI changes are met with hostility from belligerent software users who liked things the way they were, so I won’t claim to know whether or not the choice to move Chrome’s downloads list from a bar at the bottom of the screen to a tray at the top right is good UX design or not. I’ll just meet it with hostility.

Until today, I was living in a dreamlike state of delusion over the loss of Chrome’s download bar. I tilted my head at its absence every time I downloaded something, but rather than believing that some cruel Silicon Valley fiend would really move my downloads from the place they’ve been since before I even started using Chrome—so, for decades—I shook it off, found the file in Explorer, and left the mystery for another day.

It wasn’t until I saw a tweet from Rust creator Garry Newman that I really comprehended the situation. “Chrome moving the downloads to the top right has ruined my entire life,” he wrote.

The update happened on …

Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion (due June 20th) is currently looming large over my gaming time, inspiring the urge to return to The Lands Between and hoover up everything I missed in my first playthrough. There’s plenty to be getting on with, because not only is this world vast but absolutely riddled with secrets both above and below the surface⁠—including the dead hand of annoying Soulsborne bosses past. 

One category of miscellanies, however, is not down to the authorial intention of FromSoftware but the dedicated efforts of dataminers who, drunk on the power of having stripped-down many previous Soulsborne games, have discovered some astonishing details buried away in the game’s code. A great recent example of this was the discovery of unused underground areas, tied to a planned ‘Cataclysm’ system (never implemented) which would have seen the map change as you play.

This new revelation isn’t on quite that scale but, for those who’v…