Chris Trottier

Trump thinks he can threaten Canada with annexation, and that we'd just be fine with travelling to the USA and drinking American booze? Sorry, that's not how this works. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-13/canadians-back-ban-on-us-booze-as-trump-administration-balks-distillers-suffer?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2ODMxNzA3MiwiZXhwIjoxNzY4OTIxODcyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUN0ZKME5LSzNOWUcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI5MDQxQkExRUE2ODg0MDFDOUJGRDEzMDczNkRFRUZGMCJ9.C4AhtvtdarSwpiJou_pJ0E0sg76FEIYCEo3YkO2M9Eo&leadSource=uverify%20wall

Looking at this list of upcoming new releases, I just had a realization: There’s lots of Switch 2 exclusives. There’s lots of PC exclusives. But PS5 and Xbox exclusives are few and far between. If it’s on PS or Xbox, it’s likely on PC too.

Eurogamer.net

The 94 most exciting games of 2026

Eurogamer's list of the many, many brilliant-looking games we're anticipating the most in 2026.

The fact that someone bought GOG, Steam's main competitor, for $25M is just wild to me. Steam pulled in $17B of revenue last year. Meanwhile, GOG recorded a -0.9% net profitability in the first half of 2025. By the way, I love GOG. I own over 500 games on that platform. And I can say "own" without qualifications because everything there is DRM-free. But damn, for an industry that pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars, it's crazy how such an important service makes no money! View quoted note →

CD Project RED no longer owns GOG. However, it was bought by CDPR co-founder Michał Kiciński. So it looks like it's in safe hands.

GamesIndustry.biz

The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps

"We see DRM as something which can make the life of a legal customer more difficult," says Michał Kiciński, "so there is no reason to...

I get a lot of grief for buying games, abandoning them after 10 minutes. But I'll never understand joining a server, doing absolutely nothing for 12 hours, then getting angry when something eventful happens. 😆

I really love this modern version of Atari. I’m not going to pretend every game they publish is a banger. But the ones that are good are genuinely brilliant, and it feels like the whole world is sleeping on them. The story behind Mr. Run and Jump is that it started as a homebrew project for the Atari 2600. And it’s a pretty nice platformer, which I’m saying with the full knowledge that Pitfall exists. A lesser company would’ve ignored it. Nintendo and Sega ignore homebrew on their old systems all the time. Atari looked at this and went: yeah, we can make something of this. So they did. They turned it into a modern release, while still letting the 2600 version exist as the weird little origin story it is. The game even starts with a nod to that homebrew version. Then it opens up into this full glowing neon version of the idea. And it’s a precision platformer. No gimmicks. Just tight movement and a ton of jumping options that chain together. Double jumps, dives, long jumps, wall jumps, all that stuff. You’re basically learning to fly, except the game is constantly trying to kill you for it. There are enemies everywhere, but you don’t fight them. You dodge them. Spikes, skull-looking things, bouncing hazards, crush blocks. The whole world is an obstacle course and you’re just threading needles at full speed. This is not a graphical tour de force, and it shouldn’t be. It’s built on an Atari 2600 homebrew concept. It stays true to that DNA. But the music is excellent. The soundtrack is genuinely catchy, and the sound effects are satisfying in that clean arcade way. Also, the funniest part is you can buy this as an official Atari 2600 cartridge, and it even runs on the modern 2600+ hardware on an HDTV. That’s such a niche flex, but I respect it. Atari isn’t making blockbuster hits anymore, and I’m fine with that. What they’re putting out instead is gold. I want one of these to break through and become a real hit, because I like what they’re doing and I want them to keep doing it. And I’ll give them credit: they’ve been letting indie developers make things with their IP, and a lot of the time it’s turning into something actually worth playing. Mr. Run and Jump isn’t even nostalgia bait. It just feels like an Atari game made in 2023, which is a harder trick than it sounds. So yeah. If Atari was a key part of your childhood like it was mine, this is one you should pick up. It was my first console when I was 3 years old. I still remember it. And this game feels like it belongs in that lineage.

I’m not a fan of Golden Axe on the Sega Genesis. I realize a lot of people love it. And I think most of that is nostalgia goggles. It hit in 1989, right around the Genesis launch window in North America, so it became one of those early “look what 16-bit can do” showcase games. If you were coming from the NES or Master System, yeah, this looked closer to the arcade cabinet than almost anything else at the time. It was basically Sega yelling “arcade perfect” before Sonic even existed. But actually playing it now? I find it slow and plodding. The animations aren’t fun. It’s way too easy to feel like your inputs are being ignored. It’s not even that it’s hard. It’s that it feels sticky. And truth be told, there are better beat ’em ups on the Genesis. Obviously Streets of Rage is way better. But it’s not just that. A year later the DOS version came out and it just blows away the Genesis port. If I’m recommending an early 90s Golden Axe release, it’s that one. VGA graphics. AdLib and SoundBlaster support. The music is way better. The colour looks way better. The animations are a little wonky, sure, but the trade-off is it runs faster. It’s no longer as plodding, which makes it a much more playable game than the Genesis version. I get why people remember the Genesis one though. This game, along with Altered Beast, really did make a statement for the system. But here’s the thing: if the Genesis ended in 1989, like Sega went bankrupt or something, would Golden Axe be the best statement it could’ve made? No chance. We saw so much better effort just a couple years later. Even homebrew developers have put out more visually compelling stuff than this, and that’s not a lie. Honestly, in capable homebrew hands, somebody could make a really good remaster of Golden Axe that would blow this version’s socks right off. Also: this isn’t even my favourite Golden Axe title. Funny enough, my favourite Golden Axe game is on the Sega Master System. Completely different game. Golden Axe Warrior. It’s not a beat ’em up. It’s a Zelda-like action RPG, and I genuinely love it more than the original Zelda on the NES. If you ever find a copy of Golden Axe Warrior, you should absolutely pick it up. But the Genesis Golden Axe? Unless you’re very nostalgic for this particular version, I’d skip it.

Supposedly, Black Desert is "unsupported" on Linux. Well, that's poppycock. Because here it is running with Bazzite on ultra settings---at 1440p no less---and I've achieved a high frame rate. But I'm not running this game just to experiment. I noticed that this is a Korean-made MMORPG. And since I've never played a modern Korea-made MMORPG, I thought I'd give it a shot. It's pretty good. Nevertheless, the tutorial is really long, and I find that it takes a long, long time to really get going. Frankly, I don't think I can give this game that much investment of time since there's so many other games that I want to experience. Nevertheless, if Black Desert is your thing and you're wondering if it works on Linux: yes, it does!

Thanks to auto-dubbing, I can now see Korean retro-gaming YouTube channels and understand what's going on. And I find the South Korean history of gaming fascinating because consoles didn't take off. PCs were the rage over there. So over in this video, we get to see lots of MSX releases. So many of these titles simply didn't make it to North America because the MSX never took off here. Can't wait to see it for myself on my upcoming trip to South Korea.

Every console generation, the internet likes to wage a console war. This generation’s fight seems to be Switch 2 vs. Steam Deck. And I think everyone arguing about it fundamentally misunderstands what the “war” even is. Let me explain. I was among the first people who bought the original Steam Deck. Mine showed up in 2022. And at no point did I think, “Ah yes. The Switch killer has arrived.” I actually liked what the Switch did. It was a low-cost handheld for my wife and kid to play what they liked. Which, at the time, was Nintendo games. My Steam Deck motivation was way simpler. I wanted to play PC games on the go. Until the Steam Deck, that basically wasn’t a real option unless you wanted to spend $2,000 to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 30 FPS on a “gaming laptop” that doubled as a space heater. There were PC games I owned for decades, like Septerra Core, that never had a console release. And suddenly I wasn’t tethered to a desk like it was 2004 and I was waiting for MSN Messenger to come back online. At the time, I didn’t even know the Steam Deck would run almost my entire library. I just figured: if it can play 10% of my games, it’s worth it. And it ended up being one of the best gaming investments I’ve ever made. Now fast forward to today. Despite my love for the Steam Deck, I would *love* to get a Switch 2 for my family. Problem is, neither my kid nor my wife wants it. My kid is busy playing Roblox on her iPad, as nature intended. My wife wanted something *more* comfortable than a Switch, still had Joy-Cons, and could play the Phoenix Wright Trilogy. So she didn’t get a Switch 2. She didn’t get a Steam Deck either. Not comfortable enough for her, and no detachable controls. She got a Lenovo Legion Go. Now if the Legion Go were a “console,” it would be a complete non-entity. If we’re being charitable, maybe it sold 400,000 units. That’s not even in the same solar system as Nintendo numbers. But the Legion Go is *not* a console. It’s a handheld PC. It literally ships with Windows. So comparing units sold isn’t apples-to-apples. It’s apples-to-a warehouse full of uncounted apples, because nobody even agrees on what counts as “a PC platform sale.” How many Dell Alienware desktops have been sold? How many HP laptops? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. We treat PCs as interchangeable objects that all run the same stuff, because functionally, they do. And that’s also true for handheld PCs. Valve sells a few models. Lenovo does. Asus does. MSI does. There are a dozen more from smaller OEMs, many based in China, and half of them sound like Amazon brand names generated by a dying CAPTCHA. It’s worth remembering that “handheld PC” is not a platform. It’s a form factor sitting on top of a platform, which is x86. At one point, Windows mattered. Now, because of Proton, Linux is basically as viable as Windows for gaming. It doesn’t matter if a game was made for Windows. It’ll probably run on Linux too, unless a developer decided to install kernel-level anti-cheat like they’re defending nuclear launch codes. In other words, this “platform” is wildly diverse. Handheld is one form factor. Desktop is another. So is a NUC. So is a laptop. And soon, thanks to FEX, it’ll include ARM devices too. So how does any of this affect Switch 2? Here’s the actual competition. Let’s take Monster Hunter Wilds, released February 2025. Capcom expected the bulk of sales to come from consoles. 10.7 million units sold. But 6.2 million of those were on PC. And when you buy Monster Hunter Wilds on PC, that *one* copy lets you play on a TV, a monitor, or a handheld. You can dock your handheld to your TV. You can stream your desktop to your phone. You can play it on a $4,000 rig or on a tiny handheld you bought because you told yourself it was “for travel.” *That* is what Nintendo is competing against. Not Steam Deck. The entire PC ecosystem. Now, am I saying PC is better than Switch 2? No. It’s genuinely nice that the Switch 2 has a cartridge slot. There’s something wonderful about physically owning a game. And Nintendo’s 1st party stuff is still magical. I don’t necessarily think it’s “better” than everything else, but it’s absolutely the Disney of video games. Sometimes you want Disney. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you want anime garbage with 14 systems stapled onto it and a UI designed by a committee of sleep-deprived interns. Sometimes you want Sword Art Online. And if you want Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, you’re probably playing it on PC, because it never got ported to Switch. Meanwhile, I got it on Steam at 90% off and I can play it on my Steam Deck… despite the game releasing 4 years before the Steam Deck even existed. So this Switch 2 vs. Steam Deck “console war” doesn’t really matter. If the Steam Deck didn’t exist, I’d still play Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet on a PC. And I still wouldn’t be playing it on a Switch.