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EGX Rezzed, the games show organised by our corporate siblings (with a little help from us), was due to happen in London next weekend but ended up one of the many gaming events called off as a Covid-19 precaution. Now the organisers have announced new dates: July 2-4th, still at Tobacco Dock. Tickets will carry over from March's would-be Rezzed, though you can get a refund if you can't attend July's. As with other many other recent disrupted events, some digital dealio will be streamed in Rezzed's place next week.

Right out of the oven, here are the hottest new games on Steam from February and boy they are hot indeed. Put those games on the cooling rack and open a window, will you? Games with "sexual content," (in the parlance of professional business speak) do occasionally crack the list of top selling new games but four is quite a feat. There are other trends to note as well: nearly half of the list are newly in Early Access or have just graduated from EA to a complete release. It was a big month for small and sexy games!

Microsoft announced a new version of DirectX 12 yesterday, which is the bit of tech that allows games and other types of software to work with your PC's audio and video hardware. Dubbed DirectX 12 Ultimate, Microsoft are calling it "the best graphics technology [they've] ever introduced" and have declared it "future-proof" for next generation games thanks to its built-in support for ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shaders and other techy bits. But what exactly does it do and why should you care? We reveal all below.

If you've played more standard rounds of Rainbow Six Siege since self-isolating than your blood pressure can bear, there's a new playlist on the block to change things up. Ubisoft have introduced Siege's first Arcade mode and it's got the feel of goofing about with cheats for 007 on the Nintendo 64 an eon ago. Golden Gun's one shot kill mode will be available this weekend only in Siege's new Arcade playlist.

Spencer Yan was at the beach, chatting with a friend and pondering the horizon, when he felt the proximity of something like a god. "I was struck by this profound sense of coldness and acute loneliness. Everything got very bright all of a sudden, and then very dim, and I felt utterly alone and insignificant in the world, like all my actions would just evaporate.

"There was this kind of immense presence passing over me - the overwhelming terror that the sea was reaching out to devour me, each dark wave lurching closer and closer; or maybe it was the sensation of the sky looming over me, the clouds shifting and rapidly descending to crush me beneath their weight - and I felt completely immobilised." On getting home that day, Yan picked up a Bible. Later, he thought of joining the priesthood. Years later still, after abandoning that dream, he would translate his ideas about the divine into a videogame.

Over the last week or so, game developers and publishers around the world have been announcing their action plans amidst the Covid-19 outbreak. Bungie have offered advice to other companies, Ubisoft said Rainbow Six Siege might miss a few patches, and many others have sent their employees home, dev kits in hand, to make sure production plods along, all the while doing their part to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

These are just a few of the many things big developers are doing - one studio even sent their home-working employees care packages, complete with pastries and roll of toilet paper.

Despite cancelling its physical footprint due to the Covid-19 virus, GDC 2020 is carrying on in a fashion with a subset of planned talks now being delivered as GDC Virtual Talks that are wrapping up today. The physical conference, which should have been happening in San Francisco this week, has rescheduled for August. Organisers announced yesterday that they are now planning a three-day event called GDC Summer from August 4-6.

I can't remember when I first stumbled upon photographer Tatsuya Tanaka, but his Miniature Calendar series on Twitter always brings me joy. There's just something innately satisfying in seeing him appropriate modern, everyday objects and turning them into new fantastical landscapes for his seemingly endless supply of miniature model people. They're mostly fairly mundane scenes, such as using jacket zips transforming into freight train lines or pencil shavings as the floor of a bamboo forest, but occasionally he'll spice things up a bit by dipping into Dragon Ball, Super Mario and other game series, which never fail to make me smile (his "Smashroom" Street Fighter work is an absolute masterpiece).

His entry for March 17th, however, is arguably his finest work yet. I present to you "Hubway", a motherboard turned subway station.

To completely defox today’s word chain you’ll need to provide Roman, my Chief Foxer Setter, with the sequence of 24 words suggested by the clues below.

Wondering whether the latest in a long line of Panzer General descendants is worth 405 Botswana Pula or, to put it in terms easier to grasp, 4041 Albanian Lek? Me too. I should know by next Friday, assuming I can drag myself away from the quartet of WW2 wargames I've been using as wallet-kind appetite whetters. If Panzer Corps 2 is to drop a fascine into my corpse-dotted Ditch of Doubt, it will not only have to hold its own in the company of modern greats like Unity of Command 2, it will need to offer me experiences I can't get for nothing or next-to-nothing from hexy alternatives like...

The games industry has been hit pretty hard from the Covid-19 pandemic. Most events this side of the year have been cancelled or postponed, and now hundreds of workers being urged to work from home (including all of us here at RPS). The impact of this style of working will be different for everyone, so I spoke with some UK studios to see how they're getting on.

"What we fear might be affected is creativity, as a lot of what defines Bossa stems from impromptu chats, quick discussions, serendipity between team members. We'll have to offset these with more organised structure around online meetings, which invariably will change things a bit," said Henrique Olifiers, co-founder of Bossa, creators of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread.

Dust off that shotgun. Clean out that rocket launcher. Unsheathe your chainsaw, for the Slayer's time is upon us. Doom Eternal is out, and it's very, very good.

Doom Eternal has finally ripped and torn its way onto PC, and to help make sure your rig doesn't explode into its own fiery hellscape, I've been putting the game through its paces to find out how to get the best performance from id Software's fast and furious shooter, and how to get the best settings if you find your graphics card's getting hot under the collar. In my Doom Eternal PC performance guide, you'll find out just how Low differs from its Ultra Nightmare settings, as well as how many extra frames you can expect to gain by tweaking its advanced video settings. Cue the heavy metal music.

“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. “But also my favourite level in Doom.” He was a smart man, and he probably lives in hell now, on account of all the atheism. But listen, hell doesn’t seem that bad. Bit hot. Bit demonic. You could do a lot worse than a trip to the underworld, is what I’m saying, and as luck would have it, we have the perfect means for you to go there without singeing your eyebrows or being dunked in a toxic lake for eternity. That’s right: videogames. It’s always videogames. Here are the 10 best hells you can visit on PC.

Bookbound Brigade is a fun little game that came out in January, about a super-team of literary characters hopping through various books together to save their collective world. It borrows a lot from the near-ubiquitous Metroid formula, including non-linear levels, upgrades that need to be found, and tons of backtracking. I particularly like the mechanic wherein different group formations give the brigade alternative fighting techniques, movement speeds and the like.

I've always thought Cities: Skyline's coasts were missing something. Now, I finally know what it was: it's the clanging of bells, the swaying of battered old boats and the scent of a fresh morning's catch. Today, Paradox announced Sunset Harbor, bringing some good ol' fashioned fishing to your city's industrial roster. More than just bringing a little bit of Berwick to Paradox's city-builder, Skyline's next DLC pack makes sweeping changes to public transport across land, sea and air when it arrives next week.

A deadly outbreak, broken quarantine, a malevolent pharmaceutical company and store shelves utterly devoid of toilet paper. Perhaps Resident Evil 3 is hitting too close to home right now - or perhaps, it's never been more timely. With the RE3 remake's release just weeks away, Capcom have opened the gates to Racoon City a little early with today's free demo. Take on the Nemesis, evade the walking dead - but just remember to wash your hands, yeah?

Right after A Short Hike won the Independent Games Festival Awards grand prize last night, the Game Developers Choice Awards declared Untitled Goose Game the game of the year. Other games to win prizes Dev Choice Awards include Disco Elysium, Control, and Baba Is You - some good stuff. They also handed the Pioneer Award to Roberta Williams, the Sierra co-founder known for adventure games from Mystery House to Phantasmagoria.

A whole year-and-a-bit after she was first teased in Ashe's reveal trailer, flying holo-faced robot Echo is finally playable in Overwatch. Well, the test realm, at least. An Echo in more than name, Blizzard's latest brawler is a flying robot thief who can nab any other hero's abilities with her unprecedented ultimate.

Total War: Three Kingdoms is rolling the clock forward. The old warlords are dead - leaving behind a brand new generation of bloodthirsty scamps looking to make the most of China's power vacuum. Dropping today, the new A World Betrayed Chapter Pack adds two new factions, a new time period and some brand new units - but really, it's all about those rascals Sun Ce and Lü Bu stepping out of their fathers' respective shadows.

Twenty one years after its original release, RTS classic Age Of Empires 2 is finally, improbably, coming into its own as an esport. There's been a competitive AoE2 scene ever since 1999, but in the last couple of years, and particularly since the release of the Definitive Edition in November, it seems to have blown up somewhat. In fact, since 2pm GMT today, when the third Hidden Cup tournament kicked off, there have been around 30,000 people glued to this orgy of frenzied knight-spamming - and we're only on the second best-of-five matchup in the first round of 16 [Edit - in the 20 minutes since I started this piece, we're up to 35,000 viewers].

As big hardware spec reveals go, yesterday's PS5 specs deep-dive was pretty darn dry. Sony's Mark Cerny spent at least 50% of the 50-odd minute presentation talking about the console's SSD, and we still don't have any idea what the thing actually looks like. It was just abstract graph after abstract graph, a bit like the one up the top there, which I think is meant to portray how certain games affect the PS4's fan noise and power consumption. "Yep, axes are definitely more power intensive than cars, that sounds about right, yep, for sure," she says nodding sagely.

Nonsensical graphs aside, though, Cerny did thankfully spend a bit of time talking about the PS5's GPU, which, like the GPU inside the Xbox Series X, is based on a custom version of one of the upcoming AMD Navi GPUs. Admittedly, the Xbox Series X reveal earlier in the week had slightly juicier information about what we can expect from AMD's "Big Navi" graphics cards when they come to PC, but there were still a couple of interesting titbits in Sony's PS5 presentation that are worth taking a closer look at. For starters, it looks like 16GB VRAM cards will be very much a feature of AMD's 4K line-up. Here's what you need to know.

What's this? A mobile story, on my beloved PC gaming specialist website? Don't worry folks, we haven't lost it. After all, nothing screams PC like a MOBA - unless it's an obtuse, strategy board-game spin-off from said MOBA. Teamfight Tactics' long-awaited Galaxies update hit earlier this week, bringing with it new heroes and items, a fresh balance pass, and a load of new mobile players to square off against with full crossplay support.

Death And Taxes is a fun little balancing act, reminiscent of Papers, Please. It doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of Lucas Pope's excellence in that border crossing simulator, but is nevertheless a good experience in its own right. You play as a newly created (and customisable) Grim Reaper, in a world where death is a bean-counting job in an office. You assign your ultimate judgement using a big marker pen and a magic fax machine. Hence the name of the game, right? Your boss is Fate, and he gives you quotas each day that you have to fill. Fate has a nice bow tie. But at the same time as all this, the people who live and die also have an effect on the world, and some of them are objectively worth less than others (and in the game?!).

In a rare interview, Gabe Newell has said he's been spending "a lot of time" looking into brain-computer interfaces. "The Matrix is a lot closer than people think", he says, and it's going to be "an extinction-level event for every entertainment form that's not thinking about this."

He also talks about Half-life: Alyx, his fondness for Doom, and why he can't stop playing Dota 2.

While the Game Developers Conference is not happening this week, postponed by Covid-19 health concerns, its two big awards shows went ahead on livestream. The vile waterfowl of Untitled Goose Game ran off with the Game Of The Year Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards, and the chill A Short Hike scooped the Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival Awards. A Short Hike and fellow winner Mutazione are both free for keepsies on another few hours too. If you enjoy having your preferences validated by awards from distinguished-sounding bodies, read on!

I adore the shipwrecks in Sea Of Thieves. There's just something so thrilling about pulling up besides one and diving in to claim some sunken treasure. Maybe it's the fear of sharks lurking about, ready to strike, or perhaps it's the excitement of never knowing what sort of booty these lost vessels might contain.

You'll understand then, dear reader, why I'm baffled to learn I'm in the minority of Sea Of Thieves players who love these sunken beauties so dearly. According to Rare, shipwrecks were one of the least interacted with encounters in the game before they decided to beef them up with better loot.

Regular readers will know that I play a lot of The Sims 4 these days, although I don't actually play the game where you puppet a tiny person. I just build homes. My current project is building an ideal home for each of the RPS staffers, having started with a ferny cottage for Alice 0.

I've mostly been using the restrictions provided by the Tiny Living Stuff pack which came out at the start of the year (a length of time which might as well mean "a literal decade ago" at this current stage of the year of our lord, 2020). It turns out that being restricted to "just" 100 tiles in The Sims still allows you to build a home larger than the one most average real families live in, albeit smaller than the huge McMansions of most average Sims families. Anywho, I decided my next build would be for Sin, and took obvious inspiration from her hermiting around the RPS Minecraft server.

I'm not that into Batman, generally, but I'd broadly agree that Batman: The Animated Series is one of the best animated shows ever made. Visually it was unmistakable, combining bold, simple character designs and restrained use of tone and palette to make a unique noir aesthetic. It was super cool. Which makes The Adventures Of Batman & Robin: Cartoon Maker, B:TAS' 1995 "educational" spin-off CD-ROM, even more brilliant for how totally busted it was.

Live sports have had their seasons postponed or outright cancelled as the Covid-19 virus spreads globally, but that doesn't have to keep you from their digital counterparts. Stay safe and play football indoors, folks. The freebie fest continues with Football Manger 2020 now getting a week of free play starting today and lasting until next Wednesday, March 25th.