I'm Mike. I write about new releases, the industry's stranger decisions, and the hardware you actually need — with opinions, and without pretending a press release is journalism.
"Pay-to-win" gets thrown at everything, which means it now identifies nothing. Here's a precise definition, an eight-point checklist you can run in ten minutes, and an honest look at what a fair free game actually looks like.
A VPN does not lower your ping. Here are the five situations where one genuinely helps a gamer — and the five providers I'd actually use if you're in one of them.
Almost everyone who overspends makes the same mistake: buying an expensive part for games that don't use it. A budget framework that stays correct when the parts change.
The inflation argument is correct and almost entirely beside the point. What publishers leave out of the maths, and what eighty dollars would have to buy for me to pay it happily.
Competitive gaming's business model collapsed, then a sovereign wealth fund bought the sector. What the money genuinely fixed, and the part I find difficult.
One year in, the hardware argument is settled. Here's the software: the launch titles that held up, the best game most people skipped, and the one purchase to avoid.
You're not competing with other gamers for drives — you're competing with datacenters. Why storage got expensive, and eight things that genuinely help.
The revolution happened in the tooling, where you can't see it — and the flagship promises ran into problems that turned out to be about design and money, not capability.
A clear separation between what Rockstar has confirmed, what's been credibly reported, and what people are simply making up. Roughly 10% of what you've read is the first category.
I called it a flash in the pan in 2024 and I was wrong. What the full release changes, why the creature-as-workforce idea actually worked, and whether to go back in.
These games are cheap. What they cost is time, in quantities that will make you reconsider your relationship with sleep. Seven picks, sorted by what they actually demand from you.
I have chronic roguelike fatigue, and I've put thirty hours into this one. The trick: your base and your battlefield are the same object, so every decision gets to matter twice.
Most shooters ask you to be good at aiming. Extraction shooters ask you to be good at deciding when to leave. The most approachable serious entry in a brutal genre.
The genre's problem was never complexity — it was that the complexity lived in your fingers instead of your head. The first RTS in years that seems to have diagnosed this correctly.
The most encouraging thing to happen to this franchise since 2010, and I did not expect to write that sentence. Hands-on impressions, the PlayStation shock, and what worries me.