Well, now we know why Google closed Stadia

I have to admit, I am enjoying watching the lawyers go gloves-off in the ongoing war over Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Last December, Microsoft's lawyers went ham in a filing to the FTC, accusing the US regulator of violating the US constitution, an accusation it later sheepishly walked back. Then just a few days ago, Activision's squamous overlord Bobby Kotick made the rounds in interviews on CNBC and the Financial Times, accusing the UK regulator of being co-opted by "FTC ideology," whatever that is, and saying the body lacked "independent thought".

And in case you thought the bellicose rhetoric was only coming from the Microsoft/ActiBlizz side, today Sony told the FTC that the way Microsoft was treating the PlayStation maker amounted to "obvious harassment". Maybe I misunderstand the term, but I'm pretty certain harassment happens between people, not massive corporations. Still, never mind what I think, the judge agreed with Sony, telling Microsoft to rein in some of its more ambitious requests for Sony's private information.

I can't tell you how this thing will eventually shake out. It looks grim for Microsoft at the minute, but things could just as easily swing the other way in the weeks to come. Whatever happens, I just hope the litigants keep saying absolutely wild stuff in the relevant documents. Keep it coming, guys.

Even though Nintendo keeps a tight grip on its games (up until it decides to cast them into the void forever), ingenious PC users keep finding ways to translate the many, many bonafide gaming classics it owns onto our platform of choice. This time, a YouTuber going by the totally unpronounceable handle of C1ous3r has created a facsimile of the original Legend of Zelda (via Kotaku) entirely within the confines of Minecraft, without downloading additional mods or resource packs.

The Intel CPU architecture that was never meant to be has become the processor generation that no longer is. Intel has popped a proverbial cap into Rocket Lake, otherwise known as its 11th Generation Core processors. They are, in their entirety, officially EOL'd or shifted to end-of-life status.

January saw the closure of Google's Stadia cloud gaming service and, while Google managed the process well and no-one was left out of pocket, now we know the big reason why. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has been in the headlines for saying it will oppose Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and as part of that it released various statistics about the games industry, including the cloud gaming market. It makes painful reading for most companies in the sector apart from, funnily enough, Microsoft.

There's nothing I love more than a game world that wants to tell me a story, but it's rare that I'm the one asked to do the telling. Season: A Letter To The Future has a vast horizon when it starts, painting a fascinating post-apocalyptic-ish setting where the player is tasked with documenting what they find. Yet the more I travel through Season, the more its vista shrinks, taken up instead by the story its narrator wants to tell and leaving no room for my own exploration.

I have a confession to make: I've never seen a single episode of the US Office, which remains an opaque and beautiful mystery to me, something I only brush up against when my downstairs neighbours put on yet another episode and the theme wafts up through the floorboards. I have played several hundred hours of Mass Effect, though, so I feel at least 50% qualified to tell you this Office/ME mashup is very well done indeed.