Grand Theft Auto Online’s latest update, San Andreas Mercenaries, arrived yesterday and adds a new type of mission, various cosmetic content, and a bunch of quality of life changes. What’s got the fans angry, though, is what’s happened to hundreds of vehicles.

Rockstar giveth with this free update but has also done quite a job of taketh-ing away around 200 cars and motorcycles from the in-game stores. To add insult to injury, a bunch of them have now been made available to GTA+ subscribers, the game’s premium offering, through the Vinewood Car Club (which only GTA+ players can access). 

This is a 10 year-old game. Rockstar had flagged that it would be removing some cars before the update, but players assumed this meant getting rid of a few old bangers that no-one uses anymore. That wasn’t the case.

For its part Rockstar said “many lesser-used vehicles have been removed from dealership websites to streamline the shopping experience … these …

Buying a new gaming PC today can be a bit of a minefield given the price of new graphics cards and the fact that almost everything is more expensive. But there are still ways to get cheap gaming PC deals if you’re willing to be a little creative, and exercise those screwdriver muscles.

Honestly, it’s not that creative, I’m just recommending pairing a cheap base PC with an affordable graphics card and combining the two to make one excellent, affordable gaming rig. Easy.

Of course that does necessitate getting the side off your new machine and installing a new component yourself. Thankfully, jamming a new GPU into your rig is one of the most straightforward upgrades you can do, and the most effective as a PC gamer, too.

It’s well worth learning how to do it, anyways.

This Ipason machine was the same price around Black Friday last year, and we recommended it then as a good base to build from and that stands today. We’d never recommend it at the $850 ori…

This article was originally published on December 19 and was updated on December 20 to include a response from Microsoft. Click here to jump to the response.

Since the release of Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 update KB5033375 for December’s Patch Tuesday, there’s been a deluge of reports from unhappy users with Wi-Fi connectivity issues, according to Bleeping Computer. A quick search of Reddit reveals a large number of users who’ve installed the latest update complaining about dropped connections or an inability to access Wi-Fi networks, and the picture is much the same on Twitter and the Microsoft Community Forums.

This issue appears to affect enterprise wireless networks with fast-transition/fast-roaming enabled, such as those used on campuses to help with seamless movement between access points. As such some universities have already recommended their students uninstall the update until an official fix is provided. The problem does not seem …

The delightfully friendly MMO from Journey’s developers, Sky: Children of the Light, finally has a proper PC launch date. It’s been in open beta since 2019, first on mobile phones and then on consoles, but never on PC—the Steam page has promised a release date of “To be announced” for the past year. Like Thatgamecompany’s other emotional flying adventure, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when this one would finally turn up on my PC and I think the wait is going to have been worth it. Sky launches free-to-play on April 10 on Steam.

Sky is one of the upcoming cozy games I’ve been most anticipating this year because, and don’t tell the other PC gamers, I’ve already been playing it on my Nintendo Switch for years. It borrows a lot from the success of Thatgamecompany’s big hit Journey: exploration by flying, a stellar soundtrack, a restrained approach to multiplayer, and some excellent sand surfing. It’s full of puzzles, secrets, and platforming challen…

If at first you don’t succeed, patch, patch, and patch again. You might already have noticed, but Cyberpunk 2077 is having a bit of a renaissance this month, on the back of its sweeping 2.0 update and yesterday’s release of its (really rather good) Phantom Liberty expansion. In No Man’s Sky-like fashion, Cyberpunk seems like it’s finally making good three years after its disastrous launch, and hey, it looks like people are taking notice.

According to SteamDB numbers, Cyberpunk hit its second-highest Steam player count ever in the wake of Phantom Liberty’s launch, topping out at 246,754 players yesterday afternoon. That’s the most people that have played the game simultaneously since the game’s launch all the way back in 2020. 

Back then, it hit just over a million players, which might make yesterday’s quarter of a million seem relatively paltry, but it’s worth remembering that Cyberpunk 2077 was subject to one of the most intense hype cycles I’ve ever seen …

A particularly nasty glitch with Madden NFL 23’s Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) seems to have irretrievably destroyed a bunch of players’ CFM save files. After investigating connection issues with the mode last week, EA tweeted that it had fixed the problem and that users would be able “to play CFM without issue”. But players who tried to log in during the 22-hour period between the ‘fix’ and 12:45 am EST (9:45 am PST/5:45 pm GMT) had their save data blitzed by bugs that still lurked in the system. Players who didn’t log in during that time should be fine, though.

EA says (via Ars Technica) it’s working on restoring players’ corrupted saves from backups, but says its “team is currently projecting around 40% of leagues to be recovered,” leaving over half of those affected (I know, my maths skills are impressive) to restart the long climb to franchise glory. Multiple Reddit users are telling tales of franchises with upwards of 30 players going down the drain because of the glitc…

Last week, we speculated about whether or not Grand Theft Auto 6 will release on PC on the same day as consoles. Most of us predicted that Rockstar will once again wait a year or so after the console release date before dropping the PC version, and I regret to report that we were probably right.

The first GTA 6 trailer, above, only tells us that Rockstar’s next open world crime spree is coming in 2025, with no platforms listed, but in a press release, Take-Two announced that GTA 6 will release on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. There’s no mention of the PC in the press release, which suggests that Rockstar will once again hold the PC version for a later date like it did with Red Dead Redemption 2.

Asked for comment on the status of a PC release, Rockstar told us that all of the information currently available is in the statement.

I was one of the few who thought Rockstar would get with the times and give up on this silly timed console exclusivity game. It feels awfully ol…

I really appreciate the principled refusal of research scientists to let casual truths remain casual. A group at Oxford has asked, more or less: Do people feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator? And the answer they got was: Yep, over 70% of PowerWash Simulator players feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator.

Congrats to the PowerWash Simulator developers: How many games have been deemed fun by a team of Oxford scientists?

There’s a bit more to it than that, of course. Videogame mood studies tend to focus on long-term effects, but that might be putting the cart before the horse, say the Oxford Internet Institute researchers behind the study, which was published in August. They think that understanding how games affect mood in the short term is necessary if we’re going to understand their potential long-term mental health effects.

The researchers also have a few problems with previous studies on the mood-altering properties of games: The experiments ofte…

The original Starter Set was an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th edition rules released in 2014 that included a scenario called Lost Mine of Phandelver. This better-than-average adventure for beginners, available relatively cheap in a boxed set you could buy at a bunch of chain stores rather than just dingy nerd shops, served as a gateway to D&D for a lot of people. Even the Adventure Zone podcast started out playing it.

The digital version of Lost Mine of Phandelver has been available on DND Beyond for free since 2022, but it won’t be for much longer. Wizards of the Coast released a new Starter Set last year with an adventure called Dragons of Stormwreck Isle in it, and just published Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, a longer campaign that incorporates a tweaked version of Lost Mine of Phandelver as its opening chapters. So, from October 10, they’ll be replacing the free version of Lost Mine with a different free adventure called Intro to Stormwreck…

Square Enix plans to overhaul its approach to making games, as it seeks to improve individual game quality and increase its overall profit margins.

As reported by Bloomberg Japan, the move was announced by Square Enix’s president Takashi Kiryu, at a financial results briefing for analysts held yesterday.

Speaking at the conference call, Kiryu reportedly said “We are reviewing from scratch what the organisational structure is, and what the best way is to materialise the contents of the pipeline.”

Details about this new system will apparently be revealed by “at least this spring”, while analysts attending the conference said it will go into effect in April. But broadly, Kiryu wants Square Enix to double-down on developing games in-house and curb the amount of work on games that is outsourced to third-party companies. The analysts further stated that the new system will include a checking mechanism to judge the quality of games.

As a publisher, Square Enix has b…