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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 publisher Activision Blizzard plan to end hybrid remote/in-office work for QA staff based in Minneapolis, Austin and El Segundo next year, with employees who are unwilling to fully return to the office offered severance, in what the ABK Workers Alliance are calling the basis for a round of "soft layoffs".

It’s been encouraging to see how post-Steam Deck handheld PCs aren’t merely copying Valve’s homework. The Asus ROG Ally made a (mostly) successful attempt at slimming down while upping performance, and now we have the Lenovo Legion Go: an even higher-concept portable with Switch-style detachable controllers. One of which transforms into a mouse. It’s a bit mad but I’ve always loved the concept’s ambition, even as I rendered working protypes a little less... working.

I’m happy to report that this, the Legion Go’s retail version, is far more resistant to such improprieties. Moreover, it’s basically the best Windows handheld out there right now – though some occasional fiddliness, and the looming issue of the Steam Deck OLED, mean it isn’t necessarily the finest palmable PC outright.

With Christmas barely a week away, it's time to start celebrating my own RPS Christmas traditions. Games to play, songs to time, surprises to spring. Let's start with a wee surprise. Pull on your mittens, fill your flask with cocoa, and clip-click-skkrachk those ski boots, for it is time to play the free downhill slalom game Skeal.

Advent calendars are all about opening doors in search of wonderful treats, but you should probably leave this one closed.

After threatening to do so last week, ransomware group Rhysida have published well over a terabyte of stolen Insomniac Games data, with files ranging from personal information about Insomniac employees to details of forthcoming videogame projects, such as the already-announced Wolverine.

4K 144Hz gaming monitors continue to drop in price, with the very cheapest being this incredible MSI MAG274UPF at Best Buy in the US. It costs just $360 right now after a $90 discount, an extremely low price given the high-spec monitor that you get in return.

Meanwhile, in the UK the MSI is also the cheapest 4K 144Hz option from a mainstream brand (though AWD-IT's X= XRGB27UHD is cheaper at £350), so I've linked that below as well at a price point of £399 (was £549).

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is a phenomenal gaming CPU thanks to its Zen 4 architecture and added 3D V-Cache which boosts gaming performance far beyond standard Ryzen 7000 processors. That performance - and extremely modest power draw and a reasonable price - has caused the 7800X3D to become the best selling CPU by a huge margin according to a German PC part retailer.

Anyway, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D continues to drop in price. Recently we reported on a reduction in the UK, and now it's time for the US to get a turn on the deals train with a new asking price of just $339.99 - a full 40% off its US MSRP. That's a great price for a CPU that even comes with the breathtaking Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

The reboot of TimeSplitters started life as a “clone” of Fortnite’s battle royale mode before becoming a remake of TimeSplitters 2, according to a former developer at recently shuttered studio Free Radical Design.

Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree might see a release date in February - just in time for the game’s second anniversary - if an accidental retailer leak is to be believed.

Activision Blizzard will pay over $50 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit filed by the state of California alleging that the video games giant discriminated against women by offering them lower pay and fewer promotion opportunities.

Video game actor James McCaffrey, whose roles included the iconic voice of Max Payne and Alex Casey in this year’s Alan Wake 2, has passed away.

Multiplayer shooters have become defined in recent years by the methods they use to withhold power from players, whether that’s a hero shooter's unlocks and battle pass or a survival shooter's vast map of scattered goodies. Even before these systems became du jour, however, shooters often required you to be good at them before you unlocked their real pleasures, whether by perfecting your rocket timing in Quake or memorising level layouts in Counter-Strike.

The Finals' real master stroke, I think, is that it has found a design that lets it be generous with power - even while containing an unlock system, a battle pass, and a not insignificant skill floor. Those things aren’t an obstacle between you and the childish joy of smashing the world to bits.

We've reached another day on our Advent Calendar, shipmates! Yo ho ho and a bottle of stealth!

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week is the end of the year for us here at RPS, so this is the last look I'll bring you until the future arrives. In that spirit, please enjoy this bumper Christmas edition to tide you over until we're back. Don't read it in one go under the covers while guzzling chocolate coins, you little scamp.

It's the last week before the Xmas break, and the grapevine runneth dry. Soon, we will commence the annual Engluttification ceremony, a ritual of banishment in which we feed the Maw our entire Steam wishlists while singing an arcane carol of our own devising, Nth Days of Solstice, in which the famous partridge in the pear tree has Twice-Twenty Wings, and on each Wing I saw an Eye, verily, and a Mouth rejoicing for lo, the Great Catch-Up Period has come. But before that, there is still a little more News to cover.

Some games we're keeping under surveillance before we flee the premises: surreal turn-based RPG Entogious (18th Dec), construction-minded endless runner Project Bridge (18th Dec), 90s-style RPG Prophecy of the Shadow (19th Dec).

Time for day seventeen on the 2023 Advent Calendar! What's Christmas without a bit of nostalgia, eh?

Sundays are for almost pulling the trigger on a silent mechanical keyboard you definitely don't need. Let's read some of the week's best writing about games and game-related things.

Stealth tactics 'em up Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is an "all-time treasure", according to Katharine's review, and it has to be given that developers Mimimi announced their closure almost immediately after its release.

This might help extend its life closer towards eternity: as a "very final parting gift", Mimimi have released a modding tool that lets players create their own missions and stories.

The nominees for the public-voted Steam Awards have been announced and they are, perhaps more than ever before, baffling to me. If I was being uncharitable, I'd say that's because the list is overrun by games with large multiplayer communities that can be encouraged to vote for them - but who would want to be uncharitable? Let's instead say that the list is certainly not boring, even if Starfield gets a nod for "most innovative gameplay".

Infamous crowdfunded disaster Godus and its spin-off Godus Wars have both been removed from sale on Steam. A statement from studio 22cans says that "an upcoming technical change to Amazon Web Services" is to blame. Both games had been in Steam Early Access since first launching in 2013 and 2016 respectively, receiving few updates since and mostly or overwhelmingly negative reviews.

We come to the sixteenth door of the advent calendar, but unfortunately it's quite far up above you. You're going to have to climb.

This week most people are once again awake, but Alice0 has taken the day off, which means I needs must once again ask everyone to tell me what they're playing this weekend. I think last week I might have forgotten to update whatever it was I was playing. I can't remember. It's nearly the end of the year, what do you want from me? To do my job? Pah. Anyway, we're playin' some stuff, alright.

In the market for a new SSD and a new controller? Good news, Ebuyer has got you covered with deal that bundles the excellent Sony DualSense PS5 controller with a fast Crucial T500 2TB SSD, complete with heatsink. Bought separately, these would run you £180, but together you can pick them up for just £140.

This deal is marketed as the 'ideal PS5 upgrade kit', but it's actually just as relevant for PC users looking to pick up one of the best gamepads (alongside the Xbox Elite controller also discounted today) and get more game storage at the same time.

Microsoft's phenomenal Elite Series 2 controller is down to £100 after a £60 discount at Amazon UK. That's a great price for, in my opinion, one of the very best gamepads for PC and Xbox - and well worth picking up for the holidays.

If you want just the core controller without its accessory bag (purchaseable separately), you can get the controller for even less - £78!

If you’ve been holding out hope that Baldur’s Gate 3 might find its way onto PC Game Pass in the future, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s very unlikely to happen.

The upcoming film adaptation of Norman Reedus Walking Simulator - aka Death Stranding - has signed up arthouse darlings A24.

Ubisoft’s open-world multiplayer driving game The Crew will switch off its servers next spring, just shy of the series’ 10th anniversary. The shutdown will leave the car-based MMO impossible to play, with the game pulled from sale ahead of the move.

A number of staff have been laid off at 3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks - the developers behind Ghostrunner, Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem and more - as the game industry devastation wrought by Embracer’s restructuring efforts continues.

I don't look for Christmas games. Partly because they're basically all terrible, and partly because of how tiresome it is when everything is saturated with the same theme wherever you look. But Ebenezer And The Invisible World is about helping Scrooge run around London bashing capitalists and other evil spirits with his cane, and summoning friendly ghosts to prevent Caspar Malthus from genociding the working class. I simply could not find out what the hell was going on there.

Turns out, it's kinda good. But it has too many problems to reach much beyond that.

It's always saddened me that Simogo's brilliant text-based adventure Device 6 has been trapped on iOS-only devices since it first came out... ten years ago? Hell's bells, now I feel old. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a girl named Anna who must escape from a mysterious island, but the whole game is presented like you're reading a book - only one that you can click on and prod with your fingers to reveal new puzzles within that text. It's very clever, especially when it occasionally asks you to rotate your device to navigate parts of its game worlds - there's an excellent bit with stairs that I won't spoil, but seriously, if you haven't played Device 6 and you own an iOS device, go and download it now.

Once you've done that, you should also have a look this year's Delete After Reading, which does a very good impression of it for us folks on PC, hiding smart, tactile text puzzles inside its interactive spy thriller.