Star Wars Galactic Racer bucks an unwanted trend. Over the decades, Star Wars games have earned a reputation for inconsistency: for every Knights Of The Old Republic or Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, franchise superfans have also endured the mediocrity of games like Kinect Star Wars or The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes. Two factors explain that inconsistency: the enduring appeal of the Star Wars universe (recently expanded with several TV series) brings a steady stream of not always well-conceived games, and the sheer size and scope of that universe can overwhelm developers.

In that context, Star Wars Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games – a new British studio run by ex-luminaries of Criterion, Burnout, and Need for Speed fame – has taken a sensible approach by limiting its take on Star Wars to one particular scene from George Lucas’s vast universe: speeder and pod racing.

In Star Wars Galactic Racer, you play the role of Shade, a retired racer now scraping a living as a glorified courier, but drawn back into the Galactic Racer series by its organiser, Darius Pax, annoyed at how his much-loved spectacle has been hijacked by Kestar Bool, an insufferably entitled (and annoyingly quick) plutocrat whose family has essentially subjugated the planet from which he and Shade both hail.

Choose your speeder

That backstory provides plenty of friction and jeopardy in Galactic Racer’s single-player campaign, while interaction with the other characters involved in the Galactic Racer circus adds a surprising amount of depth and interest to the rollercoaster ride of first qualifying for and then competing in the Galactic Racer series.

Before jumping in, I had to make plenty of decisions, the primary one being which speeder to pilot. There are three types: Landspeeders, Speeder Bikes and Skim Speeders. The former are all-rounders: solid, with decent handling and, in their base state, not much comparative speed. The Speeder bikes are fast, narrow (which comes in handy in tight spaces) and manoeuvrable, but also delicate. The Skim Speeders are fast but handle twitchily; they tilt so one edge digs in as a pivot for tight turns, whereas the Landspeeders and Speeder Bikes can be made to drift in twisty situations.

No Star Wars racing game, of course, would be complete without Pod-racers, and they do feature in Galactic Racer, albeit in carefully controlled conditions, given that they are much faster and much more fragile than the Speeders. Timeline-wise, Galactic Racer takes place after the Empire has fallen, and Sebulba, the pod-racer featured in Phantom Menace, is in the game, albeit as something of a down-on-his-luck has-been, owed money by Kestar Bool. You have to race and beat him in a Speeder, but you also cleverly get to play through his memories of pod-racing. In which you will no doubt admire Star Wars Galactic Racer’s spectacular, Burnout-style slow-motion renderings of huge wipeouts.

Pimp that Speeder

For the single-player campaign, I chose the Landspeeder, mainly for its handling and robustness (an important factor in Galactic Racer), and soon learned how to go about upping its attributes to make it faster and better suited to my playstyle: a crucial element of the game brought about by the campaign’s very clever structure.

For each multi-planet chunk of the campaign, I could choose a different path, taking in a multitude of races and activities. Beyond the basic Races, which carry little jeopardy (though you will lose your race-series entry ticket if you crash too many times), there are Eliminators, where last-placed competitors are eliminated at regular intervals, and you must finish in the top three. To add variety, Races could take place over various laps or as point-to-points.

Then there were Field Tests, in which I was set various different tasks in unfamiliar machinery – Nik Skandaro, for example, was all about getting me to perform takedowns, while Soren Zaks was obsessed with making me use the ramjet: a speed-booster which blew up if redlined for too long. I also found many mystery encounters with random positive or negative outcomes, such as rendering upgrades cheaper, earning me more money, or losing either upgrades or my one triggerable ability.

Abilities, favours, ramjets and afterburners

Each racing run was all about upgrading my speeder as much as possible, which I could do in several ways. Like the ramjet, all the speeders had an afterburner, which gave a shorter speed burst; like every aspect of my speeder, it could be upgraded by winning and buying parts.

Parts could also develop faults, bringing specific debuffs, though they could be repaired the next time the Galactic racer circus moved to a new planet. Favours, meanwhile, provided useful perks, such as increasing the number of crashes I could sustain in a race or adding extra Galactic Racer entry-tokens. At the end of each planetary series of races, I could catch up with my mechanic, the four-armed, simianesque, Scouse-accented Hibi, to spend the money I had earned from races, from my chosen backers and from the side-bets I could make with my fellow racers.

Surprisingly structured and coherent campaign

That all sounds complicated, and it was at first, but it soon settled into a system I could game, setting up my Landspeeder to prevail in the tricky but invariably epic races that each long season culminated in.

The campaign structure, in which I progressed from planet to planet yet could choose my own route, was exemplary, with a roguelike feel amplified by the odd spanner thrown into the works, such as the ever-infuriating Kestar Bool once taking away my ability for the crucial end-of-tour eliminator. The abilities I could employ (with long cooldowns) were hugely varied – ranging from short autopilot periods (useful for negotiating twisty bits) to concussion mines and shields.

Even when I dropped the ball in the final race of the tour and had to start a new one, I felt rewarded rather than punished, as I could start the next one with upgraded vehicle attributes and Favours. And all the encounters with Star Wars characters along the way added a sense of narrative to what is a racing game – a genre not renowned for its narrative.

Multiplayer and arcade modes

Star Wars Galactic Racer’s 12-player, drop-in multiplayer (with any gaps filled by bots) was great, too: wisely, it felt like a compressed version of the campaign, with five races leading up to the season decider on Derven Acos, a planet pretty much dedicated to speeder racing. Multiple online runs let me level up and eventually unlock my favourite abilities, and the racing, while fierce, didn’t feel dominated by specific players. Indeed, taking down the most fancied competitors added extra satisfaction.

Galactic Racer also has an Arcade mode, where I worked through a vast store of scenarios, setting times my online friends could try to beat across a wide range of machinery. It served as a pretty voluminous store of extra activities when I wanted to explore beyond the campaign without committing to a full six-race multiplayer series.

Fuse Games' attention to Star Wars' detailed lore is magnificent. For example, the planets are mostly familiar from the films and spin-offs, and their distinctive natures play into the racing. There’s Jakku, the desert graveyard for Imperial Star Destroyers, which provides all manner of jagged metallic obstacles to avoid. On the frozen Ando Prime, I found my steering would freeze if I didn’t drive through heating tunnels, and on the industrially ravaged Sentinel I discovered that too much time spent skimming over chemical pools would corrode my speeder and cause it to disintegrate.

Galactic Racer doesn’t get involved in any of the political elements of the various Star Wars adaptations – it tends towards the whimsical end of the spectrum, but I did encounter plenty of priggish ex-Imperial types and more bearable ex-rebellion luminaries. And Galactic Racer looks fabulous: its meticulously authentic environments are rendered in high fidelity that mirrors the films, populated by beings and vehicles that could only exist in the Star Wars universe. Countless tiny touches will delight even the most obsessive Star Wars fans.

Is Star Wars Galactic Racer worth playing?

Overall, Star Wars Galactic Racer is by far the best Star Wars game released in recent years, almost certainly the best Star Wars racing game ever and is right up there with the best ever Star Wars games, full stop. It feels right from the moment it begins and is really fun to play, with just the right amount of forgiveness for players whose driving skills aren’t preternatural, a campaign with unexpected narrative depth, and multiplayer that embraces all skill levels.

Which is quite a triumph for the first game from a start-up developer. Although it feels like the game a bunch of racing specialists always wanted to make, it also feels like a labour of love for all things Star Wars. Anyone who considers themselves a proper Star Wars fan would do well to check it out.

While the AI-powered information hub has been criticised for its thin sources and alleged bias, the new design marks a slick new era for the platform – but looks aren't everything. Despite its new logo design and improved UX, I still hold my reservations as to whether Elon's AI will ever replace the internet backbone, Wikipedia.

Grokipedia v0.3 features a swanky new script font logo and new and improved evolutions to its homepage and live edits page. Fashioned to resemble a library, it features interactive 3D book covers, a "Most read" section with a shelf of trending topics, and "Latest edits" made by contributors (and vetted by Grok).

The article pages have received some minor tweaks, with more minimalist side tables displaying key information. While the UX design has a more fluid feel, it's essentially a copy of Wikipedia's layout. (No points for originality there, sadly.)

Grokipedia was born in late October 2025, created with AI-cloned Wikipedia pages. Its v0.2 update arrived in November, only to be halted earlier this year after the platform halted autonomous AI edits and the review of user-submitted suggestions.

For more Elon news, check out the hard-hitting ad campaign that throws shade at Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg or take a look at the new SpaceXAI logo, which looks surprisingly familiar.

Here's an example that gets the balance just right. It's hypnotic, even beautiful, but a little bit unsettling too. Fabric appears to tear itself apart and then self-heal, stitching itself back together. And it wasn't AI generated; it was made in Houdini (see our guide to the best 3D modelling software).

Ruye, a 3D artist and motion designer based in Spain, used Vellum, Houdini's fast physics system for simulating soft-body effects like cloth, hair and deformable objects. The fabric is geometry, while the frayed threads are curves, and the piece was rendered using Octane.

The animation makes it feel like an eye is breaking through the fabric. There's something about the texture that's troubling, sitting between the look of frayed denim and something more flesh-like and alive.

It's particularly impressive how the tears stitch themselves back. The artist resimmed mulitple times to create the perfect timing on how the last strands curl back into place.

As some of those commenting have noted, it feels organic rather than procedural, as if the fabric were a living creature. I can imagine this effect being used in a sci-fi story about alien creatures – or it could be perfect textile for giving Bruce Banne clothes that can adapt when he becomes Hulk.

If you're inspired, see our guide to the best laptops for animation.

"The main inspiration for the setting was the Czechoslovakian movie called Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, and if you see the movie, you will see it has all the grotesqueness and weirdness that's in Inkblood," art director Natálie Konečná tells me. She had already been experimenting with brush styles while studying graphic design at university, which would come to define Inkblood's hand-drawn look.

The game's cutout-style animation, made in TVPaint and Photoshop, was something animator Ivan Štrobl came up with, though he admits it took time to implement. "There are definitely things we needed to change that were just too complex for me to animate," he explains. "Since the art style is really complex, it has a lot of shading. It's stylised, but at points it can feel a little bit realistic. But once we prepare the line art version of the animation, we figure out the pose of a hand, this expression of a face, and then I just take them and try to animate them mostly by cutout."

Having studied in Zlín, the Czech Republic's hub for film and animation, Štrobl also cites many inherent Czech influences in his work, including Czech illustrator Miroslav Šašek and animator Karel Zeman (the latter known for making fantasy films that combed live-action footage with animation). These influences clearly come through in Inkblood, even though it uses only 2D art and isn't just a flat point-and-click game.

"There is always a representation of something, like a magpie that is pointing at an item and picking up an object," says Konečná. "All the UI in the game is built-in; there's no extra layer; everything has to feel tactile."

As part of its unusual premise, you play as an inquisitor investigating a series of bizarre deaths by riding between locations in a carriage, with a map of the world displayed on your coachman's back. However, for reasons not exactly explained, you cannot leave your carriage (though it certainly says something about the oppressive bureaucratic Inquisition you belong to, or perhaps more likely working for against your will). This restriction also shapes how the world looks: when you arrive at a location, what you see comes from the three perspectives of the carriage's windows.

"There are no doors in the carriage, so you are a prisoner," Konečná laughs. "You don't speak with any characters outside; they put letters through. It has to feel like you are isolated in the carriage and you're just a passive viewer, but it also has to feel like a first-person camera, even though it's 2D."

Each of the five locations you visit (and their different window perspectives) was also designed to feel unique, whether through the weather depicted or the lighting used, with a soft parallax effect that creates the illusion of space.

"One thing to make the environment feel alive was creating a shader that basically imitates the Line Boiling effect on all the assets," Štrobl adds. "That was actually a recent addition. We figured out how to do it in After Effects and then had to figure out how to do it in Unity!"

The art gains further depth from the investigative tools you use to interact with the environments, which are themselves based on early-20th-century technologies like a camera used to take photos and compile clues.

The most unique investigative tool is a magnifying glass that lets you see into the past, an effect Konečná describes as cheap to produce but complicated to implement. "You just put two layers, present and past, and we just rework them, so one is at night, and the other is in the morning, for example," she explains. "There is a lot of layering in general in Inkblood, and I feel 2D games have to have a strong pipeline and baseline for this kind of layering."

Inkblood is coming soon to PC, and you can try a free demo on Steam

Meet the Freckle phone. Essentially a kids' version of humble dumbphones, the simple device blocks all the stress-inducing nasties like social media, browsers and app stores, aiming to be a companion for adventure, rather than a brain-rotting burden.

Built to withstand the sometimes chaotic lives of younglings, the square-shaped phone features a 3.1-inch screen and the company's own ClayOS software. While it can't be used for browsing and scrolling, it offers a number of functional features like basic maps, contactless payment and a walkie-talkie mode for chatting with other Freckle owners nearby. (Why do I sort of want one?)

At its core, Freckle is a machine manufactured for adventure. Its Quest feature sets fun tasks for kids to complete, like finding types of flowers, encouraging them to get outside, and parents can even set custom options. With an AI-powered 'Discovery Camera' that explains what it sees, kids also benefit from learning as they explore.

As a 00s baby who grew up right on the turn of the digital age, I look back fondly at my screen-free early years. While this smartech-free reality is getting harder to replicate for future generations, the Freckle phone feels like a ray of promise amid the endless churn of concerning news stories that speak of the new antisocial, scroll-obsessed generation.

Kids are growing up fast; they don't want to feel smothered by surveilled smartphones or worse, left behind with no phone at all. Part of me wishes the Freckle phone didn't need to exist, but with the situation out of my hands, it seems like a hopeful solution.

Looking for other dumbphone options? Check these out below.

Here, Bente talks us through her process creating a piece of art, which includes a good deal of spontaneity and feeling. For her work, Bente uses Photoshop and a Wacom tablet (see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best digital art software).

Bente Schlick on her art process

I don’t have a plan in my head for what I want to create. I have ideas. At some point I just start, and I’m looking at references and stuff, and then doing a little sketch and I’ll start with the colours.

I’m not thinking too much when I start. I’m just doing it. If I’m thinking too much, then I can’t work. My head is like somewhere else when I’m painting: it’s escaped to work on fantasy images. Maybe I’ll like the image and I finish it, or maybe I won’t like it and I will put it aside. I don’t think I ever like my work when it’s finished.

You can see more of Bente's work on her website.

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This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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Bourgeois took these words from a passage in her diary and embroidered them onto a handkerchief that belonged to her late husband, so you get a tiny, soft, very domestic bit of cloth carrying one of the blackest jokes in modern art. These days you can create something similar on the best Cricut machines, but here the original dates from 1996, and in 2007 Tate Modern put out a numbered edition of 1,000 in each of red, blue and pink to go with her retrospective, which goes a long way to explaining why you've probably seen the line on a tote bag or a gallery gift shop shelf without ever knowing where it came from.

The joke works because of how she lived with her material. Her art grew out of a complicated and often traumatic childhood, and she spent decades turning that into work that could hold hope and fear, guilt and repair, tension and release all at once, so a sentence that says hell and wonderful in the same breath is pretty much her whole practice squeezed onto a hanky. Museums tend to read it as ambivalence and black humour, and I think that's right, since she never says the hell wasn't hell and never takes back the wonderful.

What I like about it as a line for anyone making things is that it has no attached lesson. Most of us want a rough patch to turn into something useful before we'll admit to it, and many inspirational messages in our Quote of the Day series have stories with a moral, leading to projects with a neat title, and Bourgeois just says it was wonderful, deadpan, and leaves you to work out what she means.

So if you're making something out of a bad year and it hasn't resolved into anything yet, that's fine, and the gag you can finally crack about it in the margin of a sketchbook is a perfectly good place to start.

Best Louise Bourgeois books:

Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, and Seth MacFarlane all reprise their movie roles, but the voices aren't the only element that will feel familiar. For some people, the animation style is creating a sense of deja vu due to how much it looks like Seth's previous hit animation series, making Ted himself look very different from the realism of the 3D animated bear we know.

Seth has created or co-created several adult animated series: Family Guy, following the Griffin family in Rhode Island, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show (a spin-off from Family Guy), and the web series Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.

Ted: the Animated Series doesn't break new ground in terms of its animation style. It's "basically Family Guy again for the fifth time", someone complains in the comments on YouTube. It's "Family Guy with Ted as the lead character" someone else reckons.

But that's a bit like saying AC/DC's Power Up is High Voltage for the fifteenth time. Yes, but when you've found a house formula that works, why change it? From a marketing perspective, looking somewhat like Family Guy is arguably a feature rather than a flaw.

Seth has a recognisable style shaped by masters like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Matt Groening. Characters have simple clean shapes and strong silhouettes, making them easy to recognise and animate.

Restrained facial expressions and economical movement contrast with absurd situations and put the focus on the dialogue and humour, which is what the series is about.

The problem some people have with an animated Ted is that they see the realism of the bear's portrayal in the movies as part of the comedy and charm. But Ted was conceived decades ago as an animated television concept. I think it's going to be interesting to see it finally appear in the medium originally intended.

And with Family Guy increasingly constrained by network television standards, an animated Ted on streaming could potentially be more unfiltered, adult-oriented and experimental than the long-running Fox series.

Ted: The Animated Series premieres on Peacock with an initial batch of eight episodes from 17 December.

If you're inspired, see our guide to the best laptops for animation.

Both of these are resin printers that we rate highly for different use cases. The P1 Max is a large-format production workhorse with a massive build volume and a 4:3 aspect ratio, while the Photon Mono M7 Pro provides speed and detail for smaller models.

Both of these offers are part of Amazons' Early Big Deal Days, and you need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the discounts, but you can sign up for a 30-day free Prime trial (you can always cancel later before the subscription starts if you don't want the other benefits).

If you're not sure what type of machine to go for, see our guide to the best 3D printers based on our own reviews.

• Browse 3D printer deals at Amazon

The most recent to make headlines was the illustrious "Raincoat Pikachu", which went for a whopping $8.4 million at auction. With over 30 years of Pokémon character design, it's safe to say the franchise has reached the ultimate pop culture icon status and doesn't look to be slowing down anytime soon.

The 10 Gem Mint copy of the 2015 Pokémon Japanese XY Promo Art Academy Fujishima Pikachu (a.k.a. raincoat Pikachu) attracted 64 bids in total on Fanatics Collect before selling for a mighty $8.4 million USD, including buyer’s premium. Featuring an adorable red raincoat-clad Pikachu grinning under an umbrella, the cute stormy scene has a wonderful charm to it, but you might notice it has a certain... hand-drawn look to it. Turns out, that's what makes it so valuable.

Raincoat Pikachu was created by artist Y. Fujishima, winner of the 'Dress-Up Pikachu' category as part of a worldwide Pokémon Art Academy competition. His prize? 100 officially printed copies of his custom card. Despite not carrying the same polish as other rare cards, Fujishima's design is now the second most valuable in the world, second to Logan Paul's PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card, which sold for a record-breaking $16.5 million earlier this year.

Despite Raincoat Pikachu's wholesome origins, it's still perplexing how a single card can sell for millions, but given the previous popularity of NFTs and cryptocurrencies, I'm at least grateful we've returned to physical media. For more Pokémon news, check out the new Pokémon X Polaroid cameras or take a look at how Pokémon is fighting back against AI slop.

Since 1915, the Vauxhall griffin has been depicted holding a flag featuring the letter 'V'. But this 13th iteration of the logo has, for the first time, done away with the flag, whilst reducing the griffin to a flatter and more angular form.

“The Griffin emblem is instantly recognisable, with Vauxhalls seen on almost every street in Britain," Mark Adams, design vice president at Vauxhall, said in a press release. “Having adorned our vehicles in different forms for more than 120 years, we wanted to retain its essential elements while streamlining it for the next generation of electrified vehicles. As the Griffin is now illuminated on the front of our latest models, this simpler design also makes it clearer and easier to identify."

The new logo is set to start appearing on new Vauxhall vehicles in 2027.

From BMW to Rolls-Royce, we've seen no shortage of new car emblems in the 2020s. For the best of the best, take a look at the best car logos of all time.

And the great thing is that it brings with it some huge coffee maker deals. These include a massive $250 off the highly rated De'Longhi Dedica Maestro Plus at Amazon. That's half price!

See below for more details on this and other coffee maker deals at Amazon this International Coffee Day. Also note that Amazon's Early Prime Big Deals are popping up – sign up for a 30-day free Prime trial to grab those.

The best coffee maker deals this International Coffee Day

• Browse coffee machines at Amazon

To mark the occasion, we're looking at one of our favourite product designs of the last half century, the Moccamaster KBG. I've been using one since 2020, and it's become an indispensable part of my morning.

Since 1968, Moccamaster filter coffee machines and coffee grinders have been handmade by Technivorm in Amerongen, a town in the Netherlands. The KBG model was introduced in 1974, and since then has undergone few design changes. The launch of the Moccamaster KBG was so successful that the Technivorm factory was redirected to focus exclusively on producing Moccamaster brewers to keep up with the growing demand.

I've waxed lyrical about the Moccamaster enough on Creative Bloq. But in short, it's the Rolls-Royce of coffee makers. It's almost worth it for the design alone – this thing wouldn't look out of place in a kitchen from any of the last five decades.

And if the fact that I'm a fan of the Moccamaster isn't enough to convince you that it's a design classic, what about Gwyneth Paltrow? According to Homes & Gardens, the Goopster swears by it too.

The Moccamaster KBG Select is currently $369 at Amazon (or £269 in the UK).

To get started, you'll need a blank canvas of some kind, be it a physical sketchbook or one of the best drawing tablets. The next thing to organise is a ghoulish colour palette equipped with some of the best pens for artists and the best markers if you're drawing the traditional way.

Phoebe makes it look easy and shows that fine liners can really make your sketches pop when paired with colourful Ohuhu alcohol markers.

Which one of her monstrous milkshake designs is your fave? Be sure to check out Phoebe's other masterpieces on Instagram, and share your creations in the comments section below.

For more on the basics of drawing, see our how-to-draw tutorial series. You might also like to check out the best drawing books.

In our interview, Bente discusses aspects of her process when working to commission, and also her affinity for images and visual traditions that satisfy the desire that we all have to escape. In a touching note, Bente recalls that she illustrated a cover for ImagineFX magazine in 2009 when she was still studying at art school. “To be having this conversation for the magazine 17 years later is a bit like coming full circle,” she says.

The wraparound was challenging because you have to create a very wide illustration. You have to think in 3D, like how you wrap around it. And, also, the type on the back and the front has to work. The first thing I did for each cover, of course, was create coloured sketches.

Then I also created the spines with a graphic showing the most important things of each book: a tower, a tree and waves. Those spines are little icons. And then, of course, the people were important to each cover.

There was one character on the first book and then four people on the second and five on the third. And so, you have to work out how you do the composition. Then, I did some sketches of how it could look.

The publisher didn’t know where they wanted to place the type. So, I had several options: they could put it above or in the middle or at the bottom. And then I got feedback and that’s usually when you do a little revision.

My cover illustrations are a bit inspired by very Turner-like lighting, and I really like that. Usually, I am more focused on characters in my work. So, this was also a challenge for me, and this is what I like about working as an illustrator.

You learn new things or focus not just on the stuff you usually do. But with the Landovel book covers, you have to do something else with the little shadow figures. I really like those.

It was a bit different from things that I usually do and paint. It’s a challenge for yourself. And of course, you learn with every commission. You learn how to approach different subjects or colour or even composition.

Sometimes, clients say, ‘You can do whatever you want, just try different styles.’ In the end, they do have the vision. So, it’s better for them to say ‘Okay: we want blue, green, and orange, or red,’ and then I’m working with it, and it’s definitely more helpful. I can work quicker with it. I really liked working on Landovel because I did have a lot of freedom.

You can see more of Bente's work on her website.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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Back in 1983, the game's creator Peter Robinson watched it all from behind the cabinet. His company, Century Electronics, had spent six months on Hunchback, and a stranger had given it one go and left. The team went back and simplified the opening until the first screen was virtually a single hazard, then introduced each new obstacle gently. "Very gently bring in the next. Very gently bring in the next," Peter Drury says, recounting his time with Robinson.

This is the kind of story that fills Peter Drury's new book, The Arcade 1971-1999: The Stories Behind Classic Coin-Ops, Told by Their Creators, published by Bitmap Books. The 408-page hardback covers 120 retro games, from Pong and Space Invaders to Mortal Kombat, with contributions from more than 90 programmers, designers, artists and musicians. Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, wrote the foreword, and Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender and Robotron, wrote the afterword. Drury describes the response as "an embarrassment of riches": he wasn't sure either would say yes.

(Like the sound of it, read our guide to the best retro game consoles.)

Drury is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and a regular contributor to Retro Gamer since its 2004 launch. He was born in 1970 and grew up alongside the machines. He remembers first meeting his first arcade cabinet, Boot Hill, at the age of eight, after a swimming lesson at his local leisure centre. "They just sort of arrived," he tells me, adding: "This sounds weird, but you couldn't really believe that people had made them."

After two decades of talking to the people who did, he says the biggest surprise was how little planning went into making games we now remember so sentimentally. The thing he's learned from his many interviews for the book is, "These were made by human beings who were fallible… They didn't plan things out meticulously first, and were working out as they went along."

Code bugs as raw material

Some of the best-loved games began as faults. Andy Walker, who made The Pit alongside Tony Gibson at AW Electronics in Bridlington, told Drury it "started with a bug"; they were originally making a space game whose ship was meant to leave nothing behind as it flew across the screen, but left a trail that only cleared if you doubled back over it. "He's like, 'whoa, maybe there's a game in that'," Drury recalls, and the Dig Dug-like The Pit was born.

Drury recounts how Gotcha, made in 1973 and considered the first maze game, has a similar origin. A display fault on a Pong chip stopped the numbers from forming properly and produced something like a maze. Al Alcorn, Ron Milner, Steve Mayer and the team saw an opportunity rather than a defect and began creating a game around the flaw. "The number of times that I talk to people," Drury says, "it's the same story."

In addition to shedding light on developers' stories, the book also corrects some legends. The best-known is that Pong's first night in a Sunnyvale bar was so successful that the coin box filled and the machine broke. "So that's not true," Drury says dryly. The story comes from an early-80s book, whose account was so detailed it "should have been an indication that it can't have been a fly on the wall".

Drury asked Alcorn and Bushnell, who were actually there, and they recalled putting the machine down, going for a beer, and waiting. Eventually two players tried it and instantly understood it: "Oh, it's tennis. Job done." Then no one played it again that night. The bar owner called a week or so later to say the coin box was full and, as Drury tells it, mentioned people turning up in the morning, annoyed that it wasn't working. "Normally the only people that go to a bar in the morning are alcoholics," he says. "Now these were people who genuinely had wanted to go and play this game."

Bushnell knew they were onto something. "Let's not exaggerate," Drury adds, "but it was true."

Donkey Kong is another case. "Everyone associates that game with Shigeru Miyamoto, who is unquestionably a genius," Drury says. But the book includes an interview, translated by Kate Willart, with programmer Hirohisa Komanomi, whose team at the contract developer Ikegami Tsushinki built the game for Nintendo. Miyamoto wanted a big gorilla and sketched one screen with a hint of the rest. His hero, still nameless, couldn't jump. The programmers argued that it made for a defensive game, with the player constantly on the run. Add a jump, and suddenly you could take on the barrels.

"They put the jump in, and they designed the other screens," Drury says. "The game that people are still playing and still pushing up the high score… the people that really made it are not known, and I hope this book in a tiny way helps."

The same applies to the hardware. Drury's boxout features that hang in the book's pages detail the unsung roles of these classic games, including engineer Dave Sherman, who built the elliptical-tunnel hardware that gave some Atari games a 3D look. "Do you think the people that made the hardware get the same credit?" Drury asked him. "No, no, we don't."

Lurking on players

Like Peter Robinson, the game designers who got it right often stood back and watched. Ed Logg, creator of Asteroids and Gauntlet, once watched a player lose all three lives in a minute, swear at the machine, and immediately put in another quarter.

"He thought that was his fault, and that he could get better," Drury says. "That's the consistent message that came through [interviewing these game designers]: you've got to catch the player quick, it's got to be quickly understandable, and if they die, they've got to feel like it's their fault."

Logg's flying saucers in Asteroids – enemies that periodically cross the screen to shoot at the player's ship – nearly went the other way. Early on, their firing timer carried on after you shot one, so the next saucer arrived almost ready to fire. Players complained it was unfair. Logg reset it each time, and that tweak opened up "lurking": leaving one rock on screen, flying fast up and down, and picking off the saucers as they appeared. Players could stay alive for hours on one coin. Logg's first instinct was that he had broken the game, and he even produced a fix ROM for operators.

He decided to leave it, and those marathon sessions on Asteroids became priceless publicity. "Most people can't do it," Drury says, "but they want to emulate the one kid that can."

The coins count

These days we view retro games with a kind of reverence. Drury laughs and asks me quizzically, "Really?" when I suggest games back then were made for noble reasons – creative game design, new ideas, visual invention. As Drury's book reveals, none of this was romantic to the people involved. Games were sold to distributors, and the distributors made their money back a coin at a time.

"I was approaching them as, you know, works of art. I know that sounds pretentious," Drury admits. "And I was often reminded it's a commercial business." He describes one designer likening a poor cash-box result to being told your baby is ugly. Bushnell told him the arcade's advantage was instant feedback: put a game out, come back a week later, and count the quarters. "You can't argue," Drury says. It was an era of brutal honesty.

That cash-box logic ran through a game's core design. Drury points to the later gun game CarnEvil released in 1998, whose designer Jack Haeger admitted that one punishing boss was "a money sink". There was a cultural split too, as in Japan, Drury says, there is "far more emphasis on one coin, one play", while Western players were "softer, or we like winning" and happy to feed in more coins to carry on.

That pressure shaped games, including Crystal Castles, when designer Franz Lanzinger was recruited by Atari because he was a brilliant player and not an established developer. He wanted his game to have an ending, arguing that games aspiring to be like films should finish like them. In a business that depended on players coming back, he had to fight for it. Producer John Ray wrote management a diplomatic letter asking them to listen to Lanzinger. "It's the most diplomatic letter," Drury says. Management relented, and Drury's book reproduces the letter, so we can see a bit of history from when 'narrative' games emerged.

Drury says the people he interviewed were strikingly free of ego, "including Nolan and Eugene, to be honest, who really are superstars". Programming asked for a certain mindset, he says, and "being a good programmer is about your ability to code, not your ability to communicate or do a good interview". Drury offers an abstract example: if asked why a game designer back then would put a barrier on level three, they'd reply, "It was six weeks of my life, and it was a job, and I had a wife to go home to."

There was pressure of another kind. Brian Colin, who worked at Midway on the 1986 game Rampage, told Drury that deadlines mattered because people on the cabinet production line were waiting for a game to be made. At Midway, the game designers' offices sat in the factory corner. "You could look there and go; if I don't produce something, those lads aren't feeding their families."

Of the book's 120 games, 65 are Western, 55 are Japanese, and only three are British, despite the country's home-computer boom in the 1980s and 1990s. Drury asked The Pit's Andy Walker why. "We were great at making games; we weren't good at business," was the answer, and an arcade machine needs a manufacturing plant, whereas a Commodore 64 game could be duplicated "in his kitchen on a tape machine".

When arcades had to reinvent

By the '90s, the balance had shifted. "Arcade perfect" had once been the home console's impossible dream; once the Saturn and PlayStation arrived, home machines were "as good, sometimes better". The arcades answered by offering what the living room couldn't: communal experiences, from driving cabinets and 360-degree spinning seats, to light guns to the dance mat. Drury interviewed the designer behind Dancing Stage, who described a mode called "Come Dance with Me", in which a weaker player is carried by a stronger one, so long as one of them survives, they could keep playing forever. "It encourages strangers to play, to learn from each other, and it encourages the spectators to watch."

The book's final entry, from 1999, is Silent Scope, with its tiny LCD scope you looked down to snipe enemies, "and you can't get that at home".

Community mattered in Japan, too, which led to a particularly unique in-real-life trend. Drury cites the 1984 game Tower of Druaga, a 'fantasy Pac-Man with puzzles and combat', which never officially left Japan and was so full of secrets that players left notebooks behind the cabinets with tips like "level five, you need to deflect the fireball three times… That's the internet, or a bulletin board, a paper version of it," he says.

Drury also refuses to romanticise the venues themselves when I bring up arcades I went to as a kid – dark, smoky places with ancient machines heating up corners of the room with vector lines, and the pulsing glow of pixels. "We absolutely romanticise them," he says. British arcades grew out of travelling showmen storing their gadgets in seaside towns over winter, so video games slotted into an existing culture – one where "we let children gamble", with fruit machines beside Defender. "It wasn't all dark and smoky."

The Arcade reads as design archive

The book is as much a design archive as an oral history, and it includes personal photos, design sketches, and coding notes, plus concept art licensed from The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, showing early plans for Star Wars, Paperboy, and Gauntlet. The Star Wars storyboard by Dave Ralston even contains a small slip, Drury notes with relish: "You will fly Luke Skywalker's Millennium Falcon". Drury says he thought, "There's no Lucasfilm geeks there."

Contributors dug deeper still. Krull designer Matt Householder and artist Jeff Lee sent original pixel sketches on graph paper, and Householder kept a list of levels he planned, only five of which made the game. Another entry on the list simply reads "firemaze", notes Drury. "I'm like, what would that have been? He went, 'I don't know, maybe like Joust, but on fire.' That sounds pretty good." Howell Ivy, designer of Circus, supplied the paper on which he worked out the seesaw's trajectories pixel by pixel. And Scott Tsumura, one of the industry's first producers, sent a photo of himself at a whiteboard, mid-pitch, with sales forecasts scribbled behind him.

"It was almost as if someone had gone back in time and said, 'One day someone's going to ask you about that whiteboard,'" Drury says lauging. "What a wonderful little bit of period detail."

The lessons to learn from gaming's golden age

Drury is delighted by the indie game boom, which he wouldn't have predicted 15 years ago, when "it was all going towards AAA titles". But he is wary of its retro instincts. "I think people sometimes focus far too much on the visuals: 'I'll make it pixels, and therefore it will be retro.' Remember, they weren't simplistic back then. That was cutting edge."

What he thinks is worth borrowing is the discipline of games that were "easy to learn but difficult to master", a phrase he says Bushnell and Atari repeated like a mantra, and the joy of a control scheme you have to learn. He recently enjoyed Paddle Paddle Paddle, an indie two-player rowing game. "It can test the marriage," he says. And he admits, only half-joking, that modern conveniences like rewind are tempting: "I wish back in the day when I was playing Donkey Kong I could rewind that five seconds. I would not go up that ladder."

Not that he wants to abandon the old ways or the new. He has played The Last of Us once, and Heavy Rain once – "I made my choices, I'm sticking with them" – but will happily replay Robotron or Galaxians hundreds of times, and points to a game cabinet sitting comfortably in his living room. "That's five minutes of pleasure right there. There's definitely a place for both."

He is also concerned about what gets lost as the people who made these machines age. Circus designer Howell Ivy died this year. "Everyone's obsessed with preserving the machines, which is good, and the ROMs, which is important," Drury says, and adds: "But preserving the stories is just as important."

The Arcade 1971–1999 is published by Bitmap Books, priced at £34.99.

A more accessible and potentially versatile option is rapidly taken form. Blender for Android is expected as soon as the first half of 2027. That might raise a few eyebrows considering that the free and open-source software generally benefits from one of the best laptops for 3D modelling, but the Android port is already looking pretty performant.

In the presentation above from last week's Blender Conference 2026 in Amsterdam, the software developer Jonas Holzman reveals how Blender for Android is shaping up, while also expanding on some of the considerations that developers have made while building it.

The Android version of the powerful 3D software is intended to allow artists to move fairly seamlessly between platforms. You could start a project on desktop, and then move to you couch to sculpt on a tablet using touch and pen input, and then head back to the desk.

Other videos from the conference have appeared online, including footage of Blender 5.3 on a Wacom Android tablet shared by Cartesian Caramel.

Porting Blender for Android is no mean feat when you consider how much the desktop software relies on keyboard shortcuts, but the platform could be a game changer for portability as well as accessibility.

Blender can already be used with the best drawing tablets, and pen input popular for tasks like digital sculpting, texture painting, and working with the Grease Pencil. But traditional pen tablets and displays require connection to a computer, preventing work away from a desk.

Many people who have tested the current pre–built Blender Android Package Kit (APK) suggest it's close to ready to ship as a beta. You can also download it from Blender, to test for yourself.

Meanwhile, the development of Blender for iPad remains on hold for now. For some creatives, that could change the equation when it comes to choosing between an Apple tablet or a powerful Android tablet like the new Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra.

iPad has exclusives like Procreate for digital art, as well as ZBrush, but Blender is by far the most popular 3D software.

Of course, Android isn't only for mobile, particularly since the introduction of Googlebooks. Google's been trying to make Android a more viable system for creative professionals, and the arrival of a name as big as Blender could provide the boost it needs to be considered real competition for Windows and MacOS.

Alaturka is a retro in two senses: its setting and its low-poly PS2-style graphics and chaotic gameplay. It began as an educational project: the game's creator is an Unreal Engine tutor who live-streamed the entire process of building the game for students to learn from.

Burak Akşahin AKA Bufuak Games began developing Alaturka to answer a burning question: can a solo developer make an original GTA-style open-world game in Unreal Engine 5, and live stream the process. Some 18 months later, I think we have an answer. Burak's released the game's trailer (above) as he prepares for a commercial release.

The premise of the game is that you're a döner kebab apprentice to your uncle. You have to "slice the spit, deliver the wraps, and meet locals who offer shady jobs that pay better than honest work".

Burak developed the game in Unreal Engine 5. Initially, he also used Epic Games' MetaHuman for character creation, but he later abandoned this solution in favour of a more retro low-poly style so the game could run on more devices,

He built the game live, allowing student developers to witness crashes and bugs as they happened, and he's shared edited highlights of the process on his YouTube channel and on Reddit.

In the video below, he describes how he built a scalable weapons system and added AI vehicles and NPCs, driving logic and avoidance systems, animations and period vehicles modelled from scratch. He used a satellite image of Istanbul as a blueprint for his first level and added a day and night cycle complete with atmospheric sunsets over the Bosphorus.

Eight months ago, Burak reported a breakthrough towards achieving the chaotic PS2-era sandbox vibe he was aiming for with the addition of a chaos system. This allows chain reactions, panicked NPC drivers and pedestrians who fight back.

He's also been listening entirely to 70s Anatolian Psychedelic Rock to stay in the game's mood.

You can wishlist Alaturka on Steam. The release date has yet to be announced.

GTA 6 launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19,

The update means you can now use Claude, ChatGPT or Codex AI assistants to carry out workflows in what is one of our picks as the best 3D modelling software and the best animation software.

Maxon's not introducing its own AI assistant. Instead, it's added a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) whose server enables artists to direct Claude, ChatGPT or Codex AI assistants within Cinema 4D workflows.

Artists can then provide natural language instructions to the assistant of their choice to eliminate some of the more procedural, iterative and repetitive manual processes, theoretically without interrupting creative flow.

Maxon cites examples like organising imported objects into a consistent hierarchy, creating object and material variations, preparing multipass renders, organising scenes, and handling basic 3D camera tracking, UV mapping, rigging and animating. The videos below demonstrate processes for motion tracking and for automating repetitive tasks like creating render queue jobs and building scene variations from CSV data.

Maxon says its approach is designed to keep artists in control. Every action happens through Cinema 4D's own tools in the artist's own scene, running locally on their own computer. The results remain native Cinema 4D scene data rather than a flattened generated output, allowing artists to review, refine, undo or iterate on them as they work.

The MCP is switched off by default, requiring users to proactively enable it. The server is protected by an MCP adapter access token, and artists can choose which groups of Cinema 4D tools their assistant is permitted to use.

Actions are performed through Cinema 4D’s own API, and each batch of MCP-driven changes is broken down in the undo history. Commands are also written to a local audit log, providing visibility into what actions the assistant has taken.

The decision to support third-party AI assistants echoes how Maxon added 3D model generation in Cinema 4D via Tencent’s HY 3D AI engine.

MCP support is available beginning today in Cinema 4D 2026.4 or later on Windows and macOS. A new Cinema 4D iPad app is slated for release before the end of the year.

The MCP connection can be activated without additional installs. You can learn more on the Maxon website.

A-list names have always swirled around when it comes to Bond casting rumours, but to cast an of-the-moment face would be folly. The reason is simple – as a brand, Bond is bigger than any actor who might play him. The franchise doesn't need a big name, it needs the right actor, with the right combination of looks, charm, sang-froid and, perhaps, some new ingredient to take the character in a (slightly) new direction for the 2020s and beyond. And being a Marvel superhero or a pop star's boyfriend is no guarantee of these qualities.

The casting of Daniel Craig in 2005 was surprising for a couple of reasons. Firstly, while he had a respectable CV, Craig was by no means a household name. Compared with the names the tabloids were touting at the time (Hugh Jackman, Clive Owen), Craig was practically a nobody. And with his blonde hair and somewhat craggy looks, he didn't fit the traditional Bond image, leading to an early, pre-social media internet backlash. But the rest, of course, is 007 history. Craig was a triumph in the role not because he was the right name or face, but because he was the right actor.

Of course, with Amazon now in creative control of the James Bond franchise, there is a concern that the online behemoth might not understand the Bond brand, and might choose to lean into the Marvel-esque world of big names and spin-offs. But there are signs that Amazon is indeed trying to do right by 007. The hiring of Dune's Denis Villeneuve as Director and Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight as writer of the new film suggest the producers are going for pedigree, not superhero-style slop.

And so, regardless of what the newspapers and entertainment websites might tell you, I very, very much doubt any of the aforementioned A-list names are down to the "final stage" of casting, or whatever they want to call it. I'm willing to bet that the next 007 actor will be somebody we've barely heard of, or who has at least hardly been mentioned over the last few months of rumours. Because when it comes to James Bond, the only real celebrity is the spy himself.

Both tablets have been slimmed down compared to last year's S11 Series, while performance has been improved and the S Pen stylus still comes included for drawing, note taking and editing. They're almost certain to top our list of the best tablets with a stylus pen and the best iPad alternative, but can they justify what is a pretty hefty price hike?

Both the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra and Tab S12+ have thinner builds than last year's S11s, along with Dimensity 9500 power, 120Hz AMOLED displays and new AI/multitasking features.

At 5.1mm, the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra is Samsung’s thinnest Galaxy Tab yet, and its most powerful. Samsung says the 3nm processor delivers up to 61% faster NPU processing, 19% faster CPU performance and 17% improved GPU power compared to Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra.

That should make creative work like video and image editing much smoother. There's also a new Vapor Chamber intended to dissipate heat more effectively, which should allow more reliable performance during demanding tasks.

The S12 Ultra features a large 14.6-inch display intended for convenient multi-tasking, while the Galaxy Tab S12+ display measures 12.6-inch, with slimmer bezels than its predecessor to offer more screen space. Users can split the screens into up to three sections in Multi Window layout.

Both displays still have a max 1,600 nits of peak brightness, while a new Vision Booster is intended to adjust brightness in real time based on lighting conditions. As for battery life, Samsung claims up to 23 hours of video playback on a single charge, and that charging from 0% to 100% takes about 95 minutes.

The fact that Samsung's aiming at creatives is apparent in the various app subscriptions it's promoting.

Adobe Photoshop comes pre-loaded with four months of free access to the mobile plan. Notability also comes pre-loaded with a six-month free trial, plus 20% off the first subscription, and there's a 66% discount on LumaFusion video editing software and a six-month trial and 20% off the first subscription for the digital art software Clip Studio Paint.

But let's talk about the price. Both tablets get a $200 markup and there's no cheaper entry-level model this time around. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S12+ starts at $1,199 / £1,199 and Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra at $1,399 / £1,399. That compares to last year's S11 line up, which comprised the S11 starting at $799 and the S11 Ultra starting at $1,199 / £1,199.

Samsung tablets tend to come in for price cuts, so I'd be tempted to wait for a deal or to consider last year's S11 Ultra, which is likely to get some good discounts now that it's been superseded.

You can sign up for notifications on the Galaxy Tab S12 series at Samsung ahead of a 7 October release. See below for any Galaxy Tab S11 deals.

Written in green ink and addressed to “Mr H. Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey”, the Hogwarts acceptance letter has become one of the most recognisable objects in the franchise.

Nearly 25 years after the first film’s release, who could forget the scene where the letters pour down the fireplace and shoot through the boarded-up letter flap? Now, the latest trailer for the upcoming HBO reboot has been released, fans and the new generation are getting another take on this moment. This time with the arrival of Ron’s letter at the Weasleys’ breakfast table.

But why does the act of receiving a Hogwart’s acceptance letter resonate so much with audiences?

In a digital age where the whole world is accessible at just the swipe of a screen, the tangibility of the letter provides a refreshing rare moment of excitement. “I can’t wait to open it!”. It’s an antidote to the instant gratification of the online world and proof of something we’ve always known to be true: the build-up to the experience can be just as memorable as the experience itself.

A return to Hogwarts (and physical media)

It’s not just the wizarding world where letters are important. Physical media is having a major resurgence among Gen Z.

We’ve seen this before. Vinyl Records went from mainstream to niche to back to mainstream. Now the same seems to be happening for CDS, with John Lewis reporting a 96% increase in searches for all-in-one CD players.

Our own data tells a similar story. It appears Hermione isn’t the only one with her nose in a book. Out of the 1,900 Gen Zers we surveyed, 75% said they read books once a month or more. Research also shows that mail is the best way to communicate important information to this audience too.

But why the sudden interest in physical objects in a digital world. Younger generations are increasingly fatigued by infinite choice and endless streams of content[CR2] , causing them to seek active and intentional engagement. There’s an element of trust that is created too; you know exactly what’s in your hand. Online, there is ambiguity, not knowing whether the source is trustworthy, whether an unknown brand is legitimate, whether an influencer is genuinely recommending a product or being paid to promote it, or whether what you see has simply been selected by an algorithm designed to target you.

Earlier this year, McDonald’s tapped into this appetite for tangible experiences with the launch of its trading cards. The move highlighted how brands can use physical media to create deeper and longer lasting moments of connection with audiences.

Far from undermining the effectiveness of digital channels for marketing and their attributes of driving reach, immediacy and interaction, McDonald’s has shown, adding physical media into the media mix brings a different dimension to the experience.

Come to one's senses

Part of the appeal of physical media is how these objects make us feel. Putting on a record, cracking the spine of a novel or opening unfolding a letter are sensory experiences. They make us pause, pay attention and are ultimately more memorable for it.

Mail is a particularly good example. 97% of mail is engaged with by recipients on average. A letter with your name and address on it arriving on your doormat is much harder to ignore than one more message in your inbox.

Plus, mail remains the most trusted comms channel, with 71% of people saying they completely trust mail. The latest IPA Bellwether report indicates that some brands are already taking a page out of this spellbook as direct marketing investment is up by 3.0%. Making it the second fastest growing media channel.

What’s more, while most digital content is instantly forgotten, mail offers yet another advantage: staying power. Just think about how many times you’ve kept a letter as a reminder to do something when the time is right, such as a letter containing important information, or held onto a catalogue until you’re ready to use the promo code. In fact, the latest JICMAIL data shows mail is kept for 7.4 days on average

The desire for the physical extends beyond objects themselves. As consumers look to escape screen fatigue and reconnect with the real world, demand for tangible experiences is growing.

The queue of people waiting to have their photo taken at Platform 9 ¾ in Kings Cross, and the imminent opening of the new Harry Potter Shop on Oxford Street offers a wider lesson for brands. In an increasingly digital world, physical and digital media don't have to compete, but can work together to create one memorable experience, using the right channel for the right message.

The store is designed as an immersive experience inspired by Diagon Alley, with interactive elements, photo opportunities, exclusive merchandise and a Leaky Cauldron themed food and drink experience. Its appeal lies in giving fans something the screen can’t: the opportunity to inhabit a world they already know and love.

The message is the medium

Ultimately, the enduring impact of the Hogwarts letter lies in its ability to spark emotion and grab both our and Harry’s attention in ways that digital media simply can’t replicate. It’s a reminder that the best and most memorable experiences aren’t necessarily the most complicated or even high-tech. They can be simple, tangible experiences that are worth waiting for.

While it’s too late for me to get my Hogwarts letter, it's certainly not too late for brands to push the envelope and lean into the magic that physical formats can create.

The LiberNovo Omni Pro just about does it.

It is so absurdly plush that you can work, relax, and sleep in it, as I've found (I'm not ashamed to admit I've taken short naps in it – it was for WORK!) It’s the first chair I’ve used that gets its electronic functions absolutely right: useful without feeling like they're only there to push the price up. The design is a classy blend of cushioned support and clever biomechanics. Yes, it’s pricier than most chairs, but it’s worth it, and its intelligently designed lumbar support makes it a definite contender for the best chair for back pain.

Comfort & ergonomics

Have you ever sat on a chair that breathes? The LiberNovo Omni Pro does, kind of, and not in a creepy heavy-breathing-on-the-telephone way. Activate the OmniStretch mode and the lumbar support rises and falls with a gentle rhythm, stretching your back out and lulling you into a state of relaxation, like you’re in the womb of some enormous creature, an elephant maybe. Other chairs try to massage you with varying degrees of success, often feeling intrusive and awkward, but the Omni Pro does it a little differently and it absolutely works.

The fact that it’s so comfortable is down to the lumbar support, which itself is a masterpiece of less-is-more engineering. The back support consists of eight segmented panels that flex and rotate, and a single central electric piston pushes in the centre. The genius of the design is that the panels align themselves perfectly with the curve of your entire back, rather than just your lumbar, resulting in ergonomic perfection.

The core comfort provided by the back support is complemented by the rest of the LiberNovo Omni Pro. The squishy headrest provides a perfect level of support when the chair is upright and pillow-like relaxation when it’s reclined. The armrests are in the Goldilocks zone: firm, but they don’t make your elbows feel like they’re going to poke through your skin, and they cleverly move in tandem with the backrest to ensure they’re always in just the right place, with additional fore-and-aft and rotational movements if needed.

LiberNovo lists the chair as suited to people up to 6’ 1” tall. I’m a little taller than this, and I actually found it’s one of the few chairs that fits me in its standard size, but I would size up to the LiberNovo Maxi (which is basically the same chair, but bigger) if I had a choice.

The LiberNovo Omni Pro is the chair others should aspire to be. The ergonomics are so perfect that it feels like the chair is no longer there, you’re never conscious of it, which makes it harder to review. This is also the first chair I’ve found where electrical features are genuinely worth the extra overhead.

Design & aesthetics

Chair design is an art form in itself: it’s hard to think of any other product that can look so different depending on its angle. The LiberNovo Omni Pro is aesthetically pleasing front-on, with a cartoony and cloud-like design language that matches its comfort levels. But, from behind and the side, it’s much more organically mechanical, with the curved support, abrupt motorised section, and vertebral panels combining to recall the Space Jockey’s seat in Alien. This is no bad thing: it’s distinctive and it doesn’t hide the ergonomic-first design.

I was initially a little concerned that the non-mesh cushioning might be a recipe for sweat, but there is a fan included in the seat pad. Speaking of which, the movement and cooling systems require electricity, and LiberNovo includes a battery that can be removed and charged via USB-C. It’s not a huge issue, and trailing cables can be annoying, but if you’re the kind of person who might forget to charge the battery then it’s worth getting an extra when you purchase.

Specs

Assembly

Tech-heavy chairs tend to be, well, heavy, and the LiberNovo Omni Pro is no exception to this rule. Most of the 25kg heft of the item is contained within the bracket that arcs around the back of the chair, which makes assembly easier because everything attaches to it.

It’s a fairly straightforward assembly process with very few bolts, and you get a nice big card to explain the steps. One thing to note is that it’s a good idea to make sure the control levers are to the side of the chair, and not pointing to the front, else you have to go a few steps back to get them in the right place. Yes, I did this.

Price & value

The LiberNovo Omni Pro retails for $1,299 / £1,369 , but it’s currently on sale for $1,009 / £989 — and I think it’s worth it. Yes, that’s a lot to spend on a chair, but it is the most comfortable I’ve used, while being super versatile. LiberNovo is also including a hat at the moment, and I feel a bit disappointed that I don’t have said hat to let people know that I’ve got the chair at home.

The closest competitor I’ve reviewed recently is the Hbada X7 ($999 / £1,299 on sale), which is similar on paper to the LiberNovo Omni Pro. In reality, I found its relaxation features more intimidating than blissful. It also doesn't come with a hat.

Remember, you can spend a lot more on a chair: the Herman Miller Embody costs twice as much and is a masterclass in premium ergonomic design with similar levels of support to the Omni Pro, but it lacks the electronic features. And the hat.

Should you buy?

I had doubts about the LiberNovo Omni when I first saw it — it felt like it was taking too many risks in the fairly conservative world of office chair design. But every single decision LiberNovo has made here has been the right one: it’s a good-looking chair that’s luxuriously comfortable from the moment you sit down, it’s easy to tweak the settings so it’s just right, and the electronic features are genuinely useful.

This might not appeal to anyone who wants a chair that’s more lightweight and small (the Omni Pro takes up quite a bit of space), and the price is going to be out of the range of a lot of people, but this is hands-down the best premium chair I’ve tried so far, and the perfect centrepiece for a productive home office.

A company called Hozo sent me its new NeoSander for consideration, and I haven't been able to stop using it. Anybody who owns one of the best 3D printers will tell you what a pain it can be to clean up prints with noticeable errors. Support removal, a stuck brim, too much brim, general sanding – all problems that this sander can solve in mere minutes. If it wasn't obvious, I'm really impressed with it.

On the other hand, what I used to consider a complete or "acceptable" print now looks awful in comparison to the standard set by using the NeoSander. Take a look at the video I put together below for a quick unboxing and test run of the Hozo NeoSander and precise saw attachments (sold separately).

Testing the Hozo NeoSander on 3D printed PLA models

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Like what you see? Get yourself a Hozo NeoSander for less using our links below, where it's currently 10% off for the sander alone or 15% off for the Premium Combo.

I would absolutely advise getting the saw collection add-on for the NeoSander, as I found this to be a must-have for digging through tough supports or shaving off areas of overhung 3D parts. You could accomplish the same task using just the sander heads, but I found that the saws worked a lot quicker/cleaner.

Well ASUS has clearly been listening - or possibly listening to gamers - as the ROG Zephyrus Duo takes the 14in Zenbook Duo concept, bumps it up to a pair of 16in screens, and adds an Nvidia GPU. And not just any old GPU, but in the model we have here, a top-of-the-line RTX 5090. It’s immense, though rather expensive, and is the most bonkers laptop we’ve seen for some time. Which is a good thing. It’s just a shame it’s so outrageously expensive.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Two 16in screens
• Keyboard has no feet

The ROG Zephyrus Duo takes everything that was great about the Zenbook Duo and makes it, well, greater. In that it’s bigger, heavier and thicker than the comparatively svelte 14-incher. So you get a pair of 16-inch screens, a thicker body to allow for the cooling system, and more ports on the outside.

Approaching 3kg in weight it’s a chunky beast, but isn’t really designed to be used on your lap. There are five different ways you can arrange the keyboard and its hinged double screen, but only one of them looks like a traditional laptop suitable for resting on the top of your legs - all the others are going to require some sort of desk.

The machine is completely black, with a glossy line across the back of the lid and some logos embossed into the casing including the ASUS ROG angry eye staring from the stand that supports the screens. The keyboard, which attaches using magnets so it can be easily removed, is covered in a soft-touch material that feels almost like fabric, but probably isn’t. It’s matte black, though, which serves to make the RGB backlighting more noticeable, and with 1.7mm of key travel it doesn’t feel as compromised as the Zenbook Duo’s equivalent. It still has no feet to raise it up, however, making it an unsatisfying place to type if you have to place it flat on a desk.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Thunderbolt 4
• Extremely bright screens

The Zephyrus Duo really has it all. There's a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, which can be used for charging alongside the dedicated charging hookup. There are two 10Gbps USB-A ports that will match a lot of external SSDs as well as providing a home for a mouse and keyboard dongle if you want to use one. There's a full-size HDMI for hooking up to an external monitor, an SD card slot for importing that drone footage, and the keyboard has its own USB-C port for charging, though it also charges through its magnetic attachment point. All that’s missing is an Ethernet port, but you can replicate that through a Thunderbolt dock or rely on the Wi-Fi 7 for a stable network connection.

The screens are what’s really going to endear this laptop to creative users. While they might not make much sense for the gamers the machine is aimed at, as any attempt to use it as a single 32in display will be stymied by the hinge down the centre, creatives are potentially more likely to make use of them as separate monitors. So you can have your edit window on one side and your tool palettes on the other, for example, or turn them into portrait mode and have a development environment on the left and a web browser on the right. Twin them with an external monitor and you’ve got three, or set them to mirror one another so you can show off what you’re doing to an audience.

It’s lucky, then, that they’re particularly nice. They’re what ASUS calls ‘ROG Nebula HDR,’ which means OLED, and they’re its high-end touchscreen laptop displays. This means you get just short of 500 nits of brightness, with 100% sRGB, 98% DCI-P3, and 94% AdobeRGB colour response.

Battery life is surprisingly good for a machine with so much going on. Intel’s third-gen CPUs are well optimised for endurance, and looping a video on one screen saw it keep going for just shy of 13 hours. Adding the second screen saw this drop to 11 hours, but what’s really going to suck the juice up is activating the RTX 5090 chip, which neither of these tests required. It’s quite capable of depleting the battery in just two hours if you try playing a game while unplugged.

Feature score: 4/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Lots of power for creative apps
• Similar spec elsewhere produces better scores

With this kind of hardware on board you’d expect exceptional performance, and while the Zephyrus Duo is good, it seems to be paying the price for the unusual design and the thin body this necessitates. Where previous laptops equipped with an RTX 5090, such as the Razer Blade 18, have scored over 245,000 points in the Geekbench 6 GPU test, the Zephyrus Duo only manages 183,460. Likewise in Cinebench, where the Duo posts just 54,258 against the Blade’s whopping 102,452.

Over in the CPU department, the 16-core Ultra 9 386H is a 16-core chip that has a strangely low peak turbo frequency of 4.9GHz. We’ve been seeing Intel CPUs beat 5GHz for a while now, since the Core i7-8086K Limited Edition desktop chip in 2018 and the Core i9-9980HK for laptops a year later, so you have to wonder if it’s the cooling system in the Zephyrus Duo that’s prompted this choice, or if Intel is so confident in the IPC (instructions per clock) gains it’s made with Panther Lake that we don’t need that kind of speed.

Well, the Razer Blade 18 (Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, 24 cores) scores 20,294 in the Geekbench 6 multi-core CPU test, and the Zephyrus Duo (eight fewer cores) gets 16,514. That works out at 845/core for the Razer, and 1032/core for the Zephyrus. Not all cores are created equal, of course, but this makes it look like the 386H is working pretty hard. Its performance in the Cinebench 2026 multi-core CPU rendering test, however, sees it score 4702, only just ahead of 4678 from the i7-14650HX in the MSI Crosshair HX 14, a 16-core chip three generations older and loaded with more Performance cores. The 386H’s single-core performance, from a lone P core, is much better than the i7’s though.

This does, however, boil down to some pretty snappy performance in creative apps.

The huge GPU gives a big boost to AI operations, and while that CPU may not be keeping up with the greatest out there, it doesn’t do badly. Tasks that can be broken up and parallel-processed go flying by, the 64GB of RAM (something that likely contributes mightily to the price) means you can load up layers and effects and instruments without too much fear of slowdown.

Performance score: 4/5

Price

The model we’ve reviewed here costs £6,099.99 / $5,499.99. Even the entry-level model, which sports an RTX 5070Ti and less RAM but the same CPU, costs £3,999.99 / $4,499.99. You’re getting quite a lot for your money, with the RTX 5090 GPU, two 16in screens and a load of RAM, but seeing big numbers like these behind the £ or $ are going to put people off. The Razer Blade 18 we reviewed costs less (£4,999.99 or $5,399.99), and while you’ll need to spring for an extra screen to emulate the Duo’s USP, the performance is better from the 18-incher.

Value score: 2/5

Who is it for?

• Show-offs

Don’t get us wrong, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus is magnificent. The only issue is that the double screen is less useful for games than it is for productivity and creative apps, the enormous price will probably deter users with an eye on the budget, and you can get more performance for less cash elsewhere. It does, however, look really cool.

Buy it if...

• You prefer multi-display working
• You need a discrete GPU
• You have lots of money

Don't buy it if...

• Budget is important
• Your desk is already full of monitors
• You have a traditionalist view of computer design

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