Author: Ronnel Angelo Arsolon

Phantom Blade Zero hit 300,000 Steam pre-orders just days after they went live. For S-GAME’s upcoming action RPG, that’s about as clear an early demand signal as you can ask for.

Steam Download

You can see the push already. Phantom Blade Zero is climbing Steam sales rankings both in China and overseas, it’s showing up on wishlist charts, and some market estimates have it running at roughly 73% of Black Myth: Wukong’s pre-launch pace.

S-GAME says the pre-orders have blown past its own expectations. That matters because premium single-player games are now judged hard before release, often by wishlist totals, chart position, and how well those wishlists turn into actual pre-orders.

If you keep up with Chinese AAA releases, the Black Myth: Wukong comparison isn’t a small one. Game Science’s breakout hit sold more than 10 million copies in three days and has cleared 30 million overall. So if Phantom Blade Zero is moving at around three-quarters of that pace, it’s operating in a much bigger league than the usual niche action RPG conversation.

There’s another read on this, too. It suggests that Chinese-made premium single-player games can land with players around the world on PC. Some analysts think Black Myth: Wukong raised the profile of high-end Chinese action games with both players and investors, even if Phantom Blade Zero is being positioned a little differently, as a more combat-heavy “Kung-Fu Punk” RPG.

If you want in early, Phantom Blade Zero is up for pre-order on Steam for PC.

On Mario Day, March 10, 2026, Lego confirmed that Lego Super Mario minifigures are coming in 2027, finally bringing the standard Lego Mario a lot of people have wanted since the Lego-Nintendo partnership began in 2020.

Super Mario Run Download

The announcement marks a real shift for the Lego Super Mario theme. Up to this point, the line has revolved around the chunky electronic Mario, Luigi, and Peach figures, interactive starter courses, and playsets built around digital features. Reports now point to a standard minifigure-style Mario instead, using a specially molded head and hat. The current Lego Super Mario interactive line is also reportedly set to retire by the end of 2026, wrapping up a six-year run. Leaked details suggest a first wave of seven sets, including 4+ products for younger builders and at least one 18+ set for adult fans.

If you’ve been waiting for more familiar Mushroom Kingdom display sets, playsets, and collectible character packs, this new direction looks worth grabbing, especially with rumors of Luigi as a minifigure, a Bowser BigFig, and a Yoshi with a removable shell. Early fan reaction has already been very enthusiastic.

You’ll have to wait until 2027 for the new sets, and Lego still hasn’t fully explained the broader strategy, the impact on sales, or what any of this could mean for the long-term future of the Lego-Nintendo partnership.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are marketed by Meta and Ray-Ban as everyday consumer smart glasses. Since October 2024, though, they’ve also started showing up in police work in Florida, with at least two sheriff’s offices buying the consumer wearable for law-enforcement use.

Records show that Broward County bought several pairs in May 2025 for its undercover Internet Crimes Against Children unit. Okeechobee County bought six in October 2024 for “remote troubleshooting.” That should get your attention, because the glasses can take photos, record video, livestream, and respond to voice commands, all in a form that’s much less noticeable than a body camera.

If police transparency matters to you, keep watching this. Privacy critics say the main concern is covert recording, since the small LED light that signals recording could be easy to miss in real-world conditions, even though Meta says the camera won’t work if that indicator has been tampered with.

What’s publicly available leaves a lot unresolved. Rules on when officers can wear the glasses, whether they have to notify you, and how footage is stored or shared still appear limited. Broward County has reportedly withheld its policy. Similar glasses have also reportedly been spotted on U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, while the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) develops its own smart eyewear, with possible facial-recognition ties at the border.

WhatsApp beta for Android 2.26.31.2 gives an early glimpse of animated chat themes. The clue comes from unreleased elements found in the Android beta code, which suggest WhatsApp is working on a more customizable look for individual chats. You can’t download the themes or test them yet, and the feature is still being built.

WhatsApp Download

Even in its unfinished state, the animated chat themes feature already hints at how WhatsApp may organize it. The themes showing up in the Android beta code seem to fall into three groups: Featured, Doodle, and Minimal. Featured appears to use slow-moving animated wallpapers. Doodle refreshes the patterned backgrounds. Minimal goes in the opposite direction, with simpler plain-color styles. The same beta code also suggests that only be visible to you, not to everyone else in the chat. WhatsApp also seems set to tweak message bubble colors on its own to keep text readable, while still giving users the option to change those colors manually.

If you’re the kind of person who tweaks the apps you use every day, this one will probably be worth checking out when it finally lands. It also lines up with WhatsApp’s wider move toward more customization, and possibly with future WhatsApp Plus extras such as custom icons, exclusive stickers, and support for more pinned chats, though Meta hasn’t confirmed any of that.

For now, animated chat themes are still just an unreleased feature spotted in the WhatsApp for Android beta code.

GSC Game World has locked in 20 August for Cost of Hope, the first story expansion for Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. It’s coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Steam Download

This add-on opens up Iron Forest and the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, two parts of the Zone you haven’t been able to reach before. More than that, it’s the first time the series will let you properly explore the plant itself. GSC says to expect dozens of hours of new content, along with fresh weapons, gear, hubs, quests, and other unexplored locations. The story also feeds into the main campaign through PDA notifications, so it won’t sit off to the side as some separate post-game chapter.

Iron Forest sounds like exactly the kind of place this series does well: a dangerous industrial wasteland full of rusting factories and overgrown railyards. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant goes in a different direction, with industrial interiors, machine halls, administrative buildings, and abandoned reactor facilities, all of it stuffed with environmental storytelling.

If you’ve been waiting to see one of Stalker’s most famous locations done in full, this one seems easy to justify. And 20 August might end up being one of the game’s biggest post-launch days anyway, since free Update 2.0 is also expected around then. That update should move Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl to a newer version of Unreal Engine 5 and bring wider visual and technical improvements. All of that lands while GSC Game World founder Sergiy Grygorovych continues to say Microsoft paid a significant amount for timed Xbox exclusivity.

Cost of Hope arrives on 20 August for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Nintendo posted better-than-expected earnings today, based on its latest earnings report, with a boost coming from refunds tied to US tariffs it had already paid.

Nintendo Switch Online Download

Those refunds are tied to import duties on goods brought into the US. Since Nintendo had already absorbed those costs in earlier periods, getting that money back gave profit a one-time bump without any major surge in Nintendo Switch console or software sales.

That was enough to put results ahead of expectations. Still, the larger story hasn’t changed much. The Nintendo Switch is well into its life cycle, hardware margins are still getting squeezed, and the gaming market is uneven from one quarter to the next.

So if you were hoping this would lead to cheaper Nintendo Switch hardware, accessories, or games, there’s not much reason to get excited. Nintendo isn’t using that tariff relief to lower retail prices. It’s keeping the extra margin.

For consumers, that’s the part that matters most. This earnings beat looks like a result of timing and trade policy more than lasting growth, and Nintendo still has to show how long the current Nintendo Switch business can keep producing, how future Nintendo hardware will be priced, and whether people will keep paying premium prices without seeing any of that relief themselves.

A new cybercrime report puts numbers to a problem most people already sense: online scams, ransomware, identity theft, and data breaches are costing businesses and households around the world trillions of dollars each year. It also lands on a simpler point. Basic security steps still lower the risk.

The report says a single incident can now cost close to $10,000 on average once you count stolen funds from bank accounts, credit cards, or crypto wallets, follow-on fraud, recovery costs, account lockouts, and the broader disruption that comes with it. And the risk can start in very ordinary ways: a fake delivery text, a bogus bank alert, a phishing email, a social media message, a locked device, or someone posing as a trusted contact and pushing you into a transfer. For businesses, the fallout can stretch much further, including direct theft, downtime, legal expenses, regulatory scrutiny, customer compensation, reputational damage, system restoration, and breach notifications. Attackers are targeting more people, automating repeat campaigns with stolen data, and running like businesses themselves, with support services, affiliate programs, and phishing kits. Recovery can then take weeks or months, especially if identity documents, tax records, or business credentials have been exposed.

If you bank, shop, or work online, this report deserves a look. So do the basics: strong unique passwords, a password manager, two-factor authentication, software updates, employee training, tested backups, and a healthy dose of skepticism around links, attachments, and urgent payment requests. Small security habits still make a real difference.

The report is available online now.