Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

I’ve had an emotional connection with Street Fighter since I was 13 years old.

It was early March 1991, and my friend and I were celebrating his 14th birthday in Santa Cruz, California, spending as much of our weekend at the boardwalk arcade as possible. His mom handed us each a $20 bill for the change machine, and we were determined to stretch our quarters as far as we could.

Scrolling brawlers like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Final Fight were our favorite games. We also loved squaring off in what I consider the first true fighting game, the buttonless, Robotron -style, twin-joysticked Karate Champ .

When we came across a Street Fighter II: The World Warrior cab sitting in the middle of the arcade, we stopped dead in our tracks. Everything about it, from the six buttons per player to the large dynamic sprites and backgrounds, felt larger than life to our teenage brains.

Enlarge / Releasing Alan Wake 2 on pre-shredded discs would probably just add insult to injury, right? (credit: Getty Images)

Anyone who pays attention to the game industry knows that the segment of players buying games on physical discs has been becoming less and less important as physical releases themselves become more and more niche . Still, even in recent years, you could usually count on big-budget console games from major studios to receive at least a perfunctory disc release to fill up the dwindling GameStop shelves .

So it was a bit of a surprise that yesterday's release date announcement for Alan Wake 2 came alongside news that developer Remedy Entertainment and publisher Epic Games currently have "no plans to release Alan Wake 2 on disc," as they put it in a new FAQ . When you look a little deeper, though, what might be more surprising is that there haven't been more major console publishers willing to give up on discs completely.

The rainbow of their reasons

The Alan Wake 2 FAQ does note, correctly, that "it is not uncommon to release modern games as digital-only." In fact, measured on a per-title basis, the vast majority of console games are now not available on disc at all. Still, such disc-free releases are still relatively rare when it comes to the kinds of major games that dominate the console charts.

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  PlayStation Q next to a PS5, for scale. [credit: Sony ]

Amid a plethora of game trailers, Sony dedicated a single minute of its more-than-an-hour-long PlayStation Showcase livestream on Wednesday to reveal two new hardware products.

The most buzzworthy of these is surely Project Q—that's the internal name, as the final name is still pending. Whatever it is called in the future, Project Q confirms a long-standing rumor: It's a new PlayStation handheld.

The device will be focused on streaming; Sony says it will allow users to stream any non-VR game from a local PlayStation 5 console using Remote Play over Wi-Fi. In fact, it won't be able to play games on its own; it's all about the streaming functionality.

Enlarge / There's really not much more context for what's going to happen in Alan Wake 2 than what you can see in this image. Well, maybe a typewriter.

Alan Wake 2 has a release date, an evocative trailer, and the requisite amount of meta-contextual horror to come.

The latest title from Control maker Remedy Entertainment, a sequel to the acclaimed Alan Wake will arrive on October 17, 2023, on PC (exclusive to the Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. Given the studio's track record, we expect to see some impressive ray tracing, storylines that make you question what a story really is, and novel gameplay conceits.

In typical Remedy style, you don't get much direct information, but instead, some teasing hints. After some flashes of cultish horror, we meet Saga Anderson, an FBI agent that Remedy states ( in a PlayStation blog post) will be a second playable character.

It's been more than 25 years since the last game in the storied Marathon first-person shooter franchise came out, but developer Bungie is (sort of) returning to its roots by rebooting the IP with a new game simply titled Marathon .

The game was revealed as a PlayStation 5 title in a short cinematic trailer during Sony's not-E3 "PlayStation Showcase" stream Wednesday afternoon. That said, it is also coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S. Bungie says it will support cross-play and cross-save between those platforms, just like the developer's current flagship title, Destiny 2 .

The cross-platform nature of it wasn't a foregone conclusion though, as Sony closed an acquisition of Bungie in July 2022. This is Bungie's first non- Destiny title in 13 years.

Enlarge / Not every screenshot from a developer properly explains what a game is really about or what about it is entertaining. There's not a single screenshot from Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun I've seen that doesn't give you the gist of it in a single frame. (credit: Auroch Digital)

" What is that sound ?" my wife yelled from the other room, 20 minutes into my first session of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun .

I was playing the game on the Asus ROG Ally I had connected to the TV in our tiny, temporary rental. The handheld Ally was propped up on an inactive heating panel, and it was rumbling non-stop. Every thunderous step of my Space Marine Sternguard, every shot, every explosion, every chainsword dismemberment rattled the wall-mounted panel, and she could both hear and slightly feel that one room over. I explained what was happening, but I was smirking the whole time, struck by some distant memories.

Tearing through dumb-as-rocks soldiers and demons? Stomping around in armored boots that sound like a mid-'90s Nine Inch Nails rhythm track? Losing track of time in the depths of a catacomb? You can't go home again, but Boltgun gave me the occasional sense that I was back in front of a CRT monitor and Creative Labs speakers, annoying everybody within earshot.

Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Earlier this month, AMD briefed the press on its first mainstream RX 7000-series card, the RX 7600. A mostly incremental upgrade over the original RX 6600 but with many of the new features from the RX 7900 XTX and XT , it would come with a price cut, from the RX 6600's $329 to $299. Nvidia then briefed the press on its new mainstream RTX 4060 series. The prices for the higher-end 8GB and 16GB RTX 4060 Ti are already set at $399 and $499. The price for the lower-end RTX 4060 was left undisclosed.

A few days later, presumably having caught wind of AMD's pricing plan for the RX 7600, Nvidia announced the price for the RTX 4060 : also a surprisingly low $299. (This entire time, review embargoes and briefings have been shifting by a few days here and there as the companies maneuver around each other.) Then, around 36 hours before this article was published, a new update came from AMD: The RX 7600 will now be launching for $269, $30 less than the RTX 4060 and $50 less than the old RX 6600.

This is what competition in the mid-range GPU market looks like after a years-long cryptocurrency-and-scalper-fueled shortage and many more months of Nvidia and AMD focusing on their pricey flagships. These are new, modern cards with modern features available at a price that can at least be called "literally affordable" even if they aren't quite "budget."

Enlarge / A few of the 3DS variations that were once supported by Nintendo. (credit: Mark Walton)

It has been years since Nintendo stopped producing its Nintendo 3DS line of portable hardware and months since the company officially shut down the 3DS eShop for new downloadable game purchases. But those facts haven't stopped the company from issuing a new firmware update that seems at least partly focused on impeding some of the most common methods for installing homebrew software on the defunct console.

Monday night's surprise release of 3DS firmware Ver. 11.17.0-50 is the first official system update for the console since last September and the fifth update since the hardware was officially discontinued in 2020. The official patch notes for the sudden update cover the now-standard (if vague) promise of "further improvements to overall system stability and other minor adjustments [that] have been made to enhance the user experience."

But console hacking groups quickly noticed that downloading the update ruined many of the documented hacking methods that could previously be used to install custom 3DS firmware.

Activision has sent cease-and-desist letters to two makers of popular fan clients for legacy Call of Duty titles in recent weeks. The move cuts off access to the many gameplay and quality-of-life improvements brought by these clients and stops what fans say is the only safe way to play these older games without the threat of damaging hacking by opponents.

The first victim of Activision's recent efforts was SM2, a major Modern Warfare 2 modding project whose development started over two years ago . Since then, the modding group has been working on updating that seminal 2009 release with new weapons, in-game perks, a redesigned UI, new streak and progression systems, and even a recent move to a more modern game engine .

Those efforts stopped last week, though, before the mod could even release its first version. The SM2 Twitter account reported that "a team member received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the SM2 project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently."