“The cover art that became the iconic GTA cover art; Stephen Bliss did that in about two evenings,” Houser says in a new interview with IGN, which is a bit mad when you think how long that look has stuck around.

None of this is brand new, mind, since Houser told much the same story back in 2011 when GTA 3 turned ten, but it’s a good one, and it’s doing the rounds again. The art that got binned looked like an old movie poster, with a blown-up bridge, police firing into the air, and helicopters, which felt too heavy for a game due in October 2001; with so little time left, Rockstar had to ditch it and start over.

Bliss tells it a bit differently, though. He has reportedly said he was given around a week to produce the replacement, and that the original cover had already taken roughly six months to paint and was being lined up for the Christmas 2001 release, which sits awkwardly next to the two-evenings line. (Read what Bliss did next in our interview, where he discusses the Fear City project.)

What came out of the scramble was a template Rockstar has been using ever since, a segmented layout that lets every new game fill the panels with its own cast and cars and locations while still looking like part of the family, which is why Vice City, San Andreas and now GTA 6 all feel like they came out of the same house. The logos have always had that family look too, to the point that fans still pick them apart every time a new one releases.

The bit I like most is that the original wasn’t cancelled everywhere. It stayed as the cover for the European release, UK included (I still have it buried away in my garage), while North America got Bliss’s redesign, so plenty of British players may well have held the very version Rockstar decided America couldn’t handle then: an action-heavy collage rather than the grid of panels everyone pictures now.

That means two generations of players can remember the same game looking completely different, and it all comes down to a rushed replacement and a first idea that got thrown in the bin. What remains is a graphic design template Rockstar has used ever since, and like all great designs, it has become as iconic as the game it sits in front of.

GTA 6 releases 19 November for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Launched to celebrate Toy Story's 30th anniversary, the new Toy Story: Retro Roundup! + Toy Story 3 Complete Edition is the kind of mixed bag of the good and the curious that makes these retro game collections and remasters so engaging. This one has a slightly complex buying choice: you can buy each game digitally for $24.99 / £22.49, or get the physical double pack for $49.99 / £39.99. The double pack with Toy Story: Retro Roundup! is where you get the meat of what Digital Eclipse does so well – deep histories, interviews, concept and design docs – while Toy Story 3 Complete Edition is the standout game, for reasons I'll explain.

Which brings us to Toy Story 3, a game where, somewhere, in the 2010 movie tie-in, there’s a much better game than we have, and it’s been sitting there the whole time behind a campaign that you feel obliged to play, like being told you can’t have pudding until you’ve cleared a plate of greens. We’ve always known it, but playing Toy Story Complete Edition on Switch, remastered to 4K and 60fps, makes that idea starker and more obvious than ever.

Back when this first released, everyone was torn between the PS2-era habit of letting a silly idea grow into a whole game and the ability to render larger, detailed worlds – the kind of stuff that was about to swallow AAA gaming – and Toy Story 3 is a licensed platformer that mostly does things the old way while smuggling in one idea that’s years ahead of its time.

Story mode: the greens

In Story mode, you play Buzz, Woody, and Jessie across scenes lifted from, or inspired by, the third film (plus a wink at Toy Story 2 for the fans in the form of a video game inside a video game), swapping between them to solve platforming puzzles, which sometimes means using someone’s special ability and sometimes, more often than not, it means literally throwing Jessie at the problem. It’s all just… okay.

Every level has its own gimmick, so you get the obligatory tiny-toy-in-a-huge-bedroom bit with boxes and beds to hop across, then some rail grinding, then kart racing, then an After Burner-style shooter section with Buzz zipping towards the screen, then a Sam Fisher-ish stealth stage where you’re sneaking round a prison dodging spotlights and springing toys from their cells. Avalanche keeps it all moving at a fair clip, which is the problem: the second an idea starts to get interesting, you’re dragged off to the next scene; the platforming gets fiddly in ways that don’t feel intentional, and a couple of the bosses are more annoying than hard. Defeating Emperor Zurg while platforming and shooting is as much a battle with the camera and controls as it is with the Big Bad; 2010’s problems are now 2026’s problems.

It reads like a studio ticking the licensed-game boxes: a bit of racing, a bit of shooting, a bit of stealth, and it all pales in comparison to the side of Toy Story 3 that’s been sitting in the corner of the map screen, teasing and taunting me: Toy Box mode.

Toy Box: the pudding

Toy Box is the ‘extra’ mode on the edge of the in-game board game map, and the whole game feels Pixar-y from the moment you start playing. It turns Toy Story 3 into something else, something meaningful, cosy, and fun. You wander the small sandbox world freely, take on simple missions, unlock buildings, and bolt them onto the town, and the sleepy little settlement slowly fills with life until it feels less like a map with objectives and more like a playset to, well, play with. Toy Box gets under the skin of the license; it inhabits the spirit if not the descriptive nature of the film, and it does so without needing the tried-and-true play-the-movie formula.

While missions are small fry, like finding Slinky’s lost cows, running errands, winning races, parachute target challenges, rescues, and secret item searches, there are around 100 of these ‘missions’, and they build and dovetail to help grow the town itself. Dressing the townsfolk up as famous characters opens new missions, and the dressing-up is entertainment in itself because you literally throw these little weebles through shop doorways to change outfits.

All this feeds back into the town, unlocking more buildings, opening more things to do, and earning more coins; and because the map teases you with glimpsed secrets and items to collect, you end up following whatever you’re curious about. You can drive a toy car, chase down bandits, parachute with the Army Men, deliver the mail, grow giant vegetables, and hurl cows down wells, and there’s a loose story threaded through it all that I mostly ignored because the fun was in the mucking about.

You can see where it went next, too, because the DNA runs through later Disney and LEGO games, which is quite something for a game mode Disney was cool on ahead of development. A famous cast, and a familiar world handed to you as a playground for your own nonsense? For a 2010 movie tie-in, that’s a daft amount of foresight.

But there's more…

Much of what I’ve written here is as true now as it was at release, and I haven't mentioned many ‘remaster’ features because they’re slim on the ground. Toy Story 3 Complete Edition gets you up to 4K and up to 60fps on PS5, and 1080p at 60fps on Switch 2; it looks great in handheld mode, but that’s it. Still, it helps, with sharper environments and smoother platforming, and Toy Box looks especially good, with its glossy moulded-plastic townsfolk and little objects you can shove around.

What it doesn’t have is anything else. No new features, no extras, no behind-the-scenes material, just the original game on newer hardware, so if you’re after the lovingly curated history lesson Digital Eclipse does so well, that’s the companion Toy Story: Retro Roundup! collection, with its interviews, archive material and soundtracks, as well as its own cast of Pixar games that includes various console versions of: Toy Story, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!, Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, and Toy Story Racer – A Bug's Life is a bonus.

Bought as a double-pack, Toy Story: Retro Roundup! + Toy Story 3 Complete Edition offers a better balance of retro-gaming insights and gameplay. While Toy Story 3 is the best game here, because, well… Toy Box mode, the extras are well worth it for a small price bump. Plus, Digital Eclipse's collection of documentaries, interviews, oral histories, concept art folders, and design-doc files builds an engrossing story of what game development was like in the 1990s and early Noughties.

The Digital Eclipse special sauce

The older games are a mixed bag of excellent, good, and flawed curiosities, with Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! being the standout 3D platformer (and here features enhanced PlayStation graphics that can be toggled between original-resolution and new upscaled graphics), while Toy Story Racer remains a fun me-too Mario Kart, and the original Toy Story is a Mega Drive / SNES platformer that set a visual standard by aping 3D rendering in 2D design, and for that alone, is worth persevering with.

A Bug's Life has all the camera flaws and quirks of a standard '90s 3D platformer tied to a film license, but it's also a rarer entry. All the games include Digital Eclipse's extras, like rewinding from deaths and even cheat passcodes, so you can overcome those unplayable flaws we used to accept.

This is a big 30th anniversary-primed collection of pure nostalgia. Toy Story: Retro Roundup! is worthwhile and makes this package more complete and interesting, because the headline act, Toy Story 3, remains as it's always been – a patchy playthrough of established platforming ideas in Story mode and a Toy Box addition that remains a real delight: a Wild West sandbox full of plastic cows and giant carrots that I’d happily lose an evening to when I'm not disappearing down Retro Roundup!'s rabbit hole of classic game documentaries.

It sounds like a smart move from Sharma, who brought in disc-to-digital tech that seems to put gamers first and change how we access games. It also feels like acceptance, as mentioned: Morrowind running in a browser tab. But if it means we can finally play Halo 2 online again, experience Fable's quirks, and maybe even a renewed Ubisoft King Kong, then Labs sounds interesting.

Labs is a small team of game makers, engineers and scientists led by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, and the pitch is making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and letting more players become creators and co-creators; although, according to a company spokesperson, it’s mostly pulling together projects that were already underway rather than starting from scratch, and nobody new has been hired.

Is Xbox Labs an AI project?

The focus is three things, porting games to Apple Silicon, looking at browser distribution through WebAssembly and WebGPU (which Sharma says is closing in on 90% global browser support) and developing and supporting modders, which is territory Nvidia has been working in for a while with RTX Remix, its open-source toolkit for remastering classic games, and some projects will likely reach players as features in the Xbox Insiders programme while others turn up through different channels, with Van Vliet saying it won’t be limited by scale, so AA and indie games are in the frame at least to begin with.

That could be a big deal for game preservation, because older games tend to get stranded on ageing hardware or stuck waiting for an official port (see today's Toy Story 3 review) that never turns up, and anything that makes them easier to run without a publisher commissioning a full remaster is good news for the retro games that would otherwise just quietly vanish.

AI gets a mention too, with Sharma arguing that games share the traits that made coding the first big workload for AI agents, and pointing out that people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the time spent writing code worldwide, but the spokesperson was clear that Labs hasn’t been told to use AI and will only reach for it where it’s useful or necessary, which is a very different tone to Epic’s AI-first Disney game, and Microsoft’s own Muse AI experiment for generating gameplay still looks more like a proof of concept than anything that will remake your favourite games, so don’t expect a pile of AI-generated ones.

Where does remixing leave Xbox’s IP?

But there's an aspect to Labs that Xbox hasn’t revealed yet or tackled – because publishers own valuable IP and have built businesses on controlling how their games get distributed, how will a fan-made port compete or complement the official release of a retro remaster or rerelease, as a remix could pull in characters, assets, or code the original developer never signed off on.

Sharma’s pitch is that Xbox’s priorities aren’t changing: it’s still committed to making great games, to its current and future console hardware, and to being responsible when it comes to protecting old game series and IP, as well as the communities around those games. Labs lets gamers and fans explore new tech without abandoning official work already underway, which is reassuring, but it doesn’t say where the line is when players start remixing games they don’t own.

There are no release dates yet; Xbox says it will build in the open and judge success by whether more people are playing and creating, and until we see what comes out of Labs, and how this rubs alongside IP holders' own projects, it feels like a gamble (and Microsoft is notorious for launching ideas and cancelling them). I'm happy to wait and see how this pans out.

Sign up to Xbox Labs for news and updates.

One was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with its shrinking potions, grinning cats and mad hatter tea parties. The other was The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, set in Narnia: a magical land of talking lions, snow queens and a lamppost in the middle of a forest.

Delightedly, I worked my way through all seven in the Narnia series, more than once, and I loved every single one. So when the animated TV movie of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was broadcast in the early 80s, I couldn't have been more excited.

Children, I find, are very forgiving of limited production budgets. But here was the exception. This movie was, we all agreed, pants. And it gave me my first lesson that the pictures in your head don’t always translate onto the screen.

In 2005, then, I had low expectations for Disney’s live action movie adaptation. But I was pleasantly surprised. Tilda Swinton was exceptional as the White Witch, the visual effects were spot on, and overall the filmmakers took the books seriously.

Narnia: The Magician's Nephew trailer

Unfortunately, while the sequels (2008's Prince Caspian and 2010's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) were well made, they bored me silly. So when in 2023, Netflix announced Greta Gerwig would be bringing Narnia back, my attitude was muted to say the least.

Reboot fatigue? Absolutely. Plus I'm very much not a kid any more. So I quickly slipped this into the 'Not for me' file, and quickly moved on.

The teaser poster

The things you loved as a child, though, have a habit of burrowing into your brain and leaping out when you least expect them too. And when Netflix's PR sent me the teaser poster for Narnia: The Magician's Nephew last night, that's exactly what happened.

Suddenly, I was more excited for a film than I've been for a long time (could it be one of the best movie posters ever?).

Most of the frame is taken up by Aslan the lion’s head. But rather than going for a full-on rendering, he's more a lion-shaped hole in the light, filled with stars, his mane glowing amber at the edges like a solar eclipse. How magical is that?

The background surrounding him has a pale, pearly sheen, like oil on water, heightening the mysterious, otherworldly atmosphere. And right in the centre, Digory and Polly ride Fledge out of a starburst, trailing a streak of rainbow light.

The tagline, “A universe begins”, is small and muted, and that's key. When the image is conveying everything you need to know, the words don't need to shout. The atmosphere, the sense of scale and majesty, all combines to evoke a single message: Aslan isn’t just in this universe, he is the universe.

I also love how the typeface seems to have time-travelled straight off a 1970s paperback. It hasn't, but it's a lovely callback to those parents and grandparents who'll be taking their little ones to the pictures, and passing on their love for Narnia lore.

The right direction for Narnia

Contrast this with the bog-standard movie posters we've got used to in recent years. The cluttered collage of actors, all pointing in random directions. The undisciplined attempt to cram in as many plot points as possible. The lack of one clear, big idea, which this design can absolutely claim to have.

Of course, this is just one poster (though the logo was very good, too). And so logically, it's not evidence that every creative decision Greta Gerwig is taking with this movie will pay off. But it's reminded me what the Narnia books felt like to read as a child: vast, mysterious and a little bit spiritual. And that ain't nothing.

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew arrives in cinemas on 11 February, with IMAX previews the day before. I’ll be counting down the days.

It essentially mimics the Apple Watch face, but bigger and on a stand. It looks as though it'll fit beautifully into a modern household, sleek and beautiful but not standing out unnecessarily. After a period of criticism of Apple's lack of innovation it's so satisfying to see a new product launch with such excellent design credentials.

I don't want a smart home, but I do want an excuse to have this device (even if the ads are stressing people out).

• Pre-order HomeView now at Apple

If you do want a smart home, you'll want to know what it can do as well as how it looks. So here goes.

HomeView is Apple’s new smart home display: a 7-inch screen on a domed speaker base, made to sit on a counter or, in a separate wall-mounted version, hang in a hallway. It’s built around Siri AI, Apple’s rebuilt assistant, which is still in beta at launch.

You can talk to it or use touch to control lights, locks, thermostats and camera feeds. It recognises up to six people by face, so each gets their own home screen and private content. It also works as a speaker, a FaceTime screen and a hands-free kitchen timer. It supports Matter accessories and Apple’s new Home Collection range, made with LG and Schneider Electric, which starts arriving in December.

Here's an overview of what it does:

Physical design

• The body is aluminium, with a 7-inch Liquid Retina display attached to a domed speaker base by a stainless steel hinge. The hinge tilts the screen, so it’s comfortable to view on counters or tables of different heights.
• There are four colours (silver, starlight, rose pink and space gray), each with a matching USB-C cable.
• The wall-mounted model has the same display and comes in space gray and silver. It attaches with one of three mounts from Schneider Home, which can be self-installed or professionally installed.

Display

• True Tone is on board, and automatic brightness runs from 500 nits down to 0.3 nits, which Apple pitches as suitable for a nightstand.
• The interface changes with distance, showing simple information from across the room and more detail as you step closer.
• Users can choose from different “faces”. Apple names Photos (depth effects, shared albums as a photo frame), Flow (reacts to movement), Snoopy, Home Modular and Home Camera, which can show up to nine camera feeds.

Audio

• The display has two full-range drivers. The base adds a down-firing woofer and two passive radiators, with computational audio adjusting loudness and bass in real time.
• The wall-mounted version uses two drivers and is tuned for on-wall placement.

Personalisation

• It recognises up to six people by face, and each gets their own Home Screen. Personal content only appears when the enrolled user is recognised and their paired iPhone or iPad is nearby and recently unlocked.

Sustainability

• The base enclosure is 100% recycled aluminium, and the release also lists recycled gold plating, tin solder and rare earth magnets.

It's priced at $299, which feels accessible when you look at the prices of the digital calendars out there.

This device is a 21.5-inch touchscreen that puts everyone's schedules, 'chores', meals and photos in one place. It needs no subscription, and after a few weeks it's the first piece of family admin tech that has stuck. It's aimed at families, but I think creatives should look at it too, and I'll explain why. (See our review of the Everblog Fridge Calendar here.)

• Buy the Everblog HomeCal for $349 now

Setup

This is the part I put off for ages, dreading the inevitable glitches that come with new devices, and especially anything that involves family admin. Actually though, setup was mostly really easy. Syncing my calendars took minutes, as did adding the same calendars from other accounts. And much to the delight of my children, the photo library sync meant the screen had family pictures on it almost immediately. You can also download entertainment apps like Spotify and Netflix, which is handy when the screen lives in the kitchen.

Other reviewers agree it's simple on the whole, with one sticking point. Some found it easy to connect to the network, but said it takes dedicated time to get your lists and chores set up. That matches my experience – it took the best part of an evening. Compatibility is broad, too: it works with Apple, Gmail, Outlook or any calendar that supports sharing a URL.

Design and interface

It's a sleek physical build (luckily, since it'll take up quite a bit of wall space), with a clear display, and the interface is simple enough that my children use it without help. Each person gets a colour-coded profile, and the home screen lays out the calendar, chores, meal plan, apps and photos in separate blocks so it's easy to understand at a glance. It's also bright enough to read from a distance, which is helpful when you're busy doing something else in the kitchen.

The interface is simple and intuitive, with a clear font and sensible spacing for the different elements. It isn't as customisable as I would have expected, you seem to get one choice of homescreen layout, but it doesn't really matter in the long run.

In regards to the profiles, one reviewer liked being able to toggle them on and off to cut clutter when a day fills up, but wished there were more colour options. I can see why, though I didn't have the same issue with only four of us. If you have a big family, you'll run out of distinct colours quickly.

Performance

It works really well. Syncing is clean and simple, it handles several people's calendars at once, and you can assign a profile to each event. Sync runs both ways, so an event added on the screen appears on our phones. It has changed how our family organises itself, and how I organise my work.

I should be straight that not everyone has had this experience. MacSources reported slow or unreliable calendar syncing, and said the upcoming events list only showed an event added on the device itself. That review is several months old, and I haven't had the problem, but check whether it's been fixed if syncing matters to you. Another reviewer found that some of the device's own features don't sync with each other, so certain items had to be entered more than once. And The Gadgeteer couldn't get a work Outlook calendar to sync, which they put down to strict employer security rather than the device. If your work calendar sits behind a locked-down IT setup, expect the same.

Why should creatives care?

Having the family's logistics on a screen in the hallway frees up my brain for other projects. I'm not holding school appointments, work schedules and who's cooking on Thursday in my head, so that space goes to actual work. If you're a freelancer or run a studio, that headroom matters more than any feature on the spec sheet.

There are a couple of practical extras for creative people. The companion app lets you add events, chores, recipes and goals away from the screen, and they show up straight away. There's also an AI import tool that can pull in events and tasks from a photo, voice recording, PDF or email. If client briefs and booking confirmations reach you as PDFs and emails, that could save some retyping.

I'd like to see a dedicated work view. With multiple profiles already in place, a separate view for client appointments, deadlines and calls would make it a proper studio calendar as well as a family one. For now I keep work events in their own profile, which does the job, but it isn't the same.

Price

This isn't cheap. You can get one at full price for $699, but it's currently on sale at 50% off, which brings it more into the realms of affordability.

Should I buy?

If you need a functional tool that will overhaul your admin and organisational life then yes. But I think it's expensive.

He continues to find inspiration in the natural world for his art, which he mostly makes using watercolours and coloured pencils (see our guides to the best watercolour paints and the best coloured pencils). Below he talks us through four examples of his work.

Portobello and the Hatmaker

“A character study I did for a book that I hope to work on in the future. I wanted to focus more on creating strong silhouettes and character design, while trying to tell a full story with just a couple of characters.”

Fin and the Foul Root

“I created this fun concept over the course of a week-long workshop. It was the most planning that I had ever put into a piece. I began working more with colour compositions and character design before moving on to the final piece.”

Animal Band

“This was one of the first pieces where I started to work with a warmer colour palette and began to dive a bit deeper into narrative. In this story, during every fall, the animals and fairies welcome in autumn by staging a concert and a festival.”

Firewood Brigade

“A continuation from ‘Animal Band’. I wanted to show more of their village, including glimpses of everyday life. This one depicts the firewood brigade that delivers firewood to all the animals and fae folk on especially cold nights..”

You can see more of Gabriel's work on his 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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After the whimsical delight of the embroidered Apple logo for the Welcome Home event invite, the launch advert for Apple HomeView is stressful viewing.

For those concerned that they don't have enough screens in their lives with only an iMac, MacBook, Apple TV, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch, Apple HomeView is finally here. Coming in two formats: tabletop or wall-mountable, it offers another surface on which to check your messages, speak to your AI assistant, control smart devices and watch stuff.

The novelty is that it's designed with a shared experience in mind rather than being geared towards a single user. HomeView can recognise up to six faces and dynamically change its interface depending on who's standing in front of it and how far away they are.

Both models have a 7-inch Liquid Retina display, while the tabletop version combines an adjustable screen with a speaker base (and looks a bit like a G4 iMac, some think). The interface changes with viewing distance, showing simpler information when the user is further away and more detail when they approach. There's also a range of customisable faces.

HomeView will allow access to some general content for everyone, including conversational requests via Siri AI, but private Messages and Calendar content will appear only when an enrolled person is recognised and their paired iPhone or iPad is present and recently unlocked.

Apps supported include Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple TV and various third-party media apps. There's a 12MP Center Stage camera for FaceTime, and Handoff allows some activities to be continued from an iPhone. Apple says expanded access to certain server-based AI features will require a separate subscription fee in the future.

The ad above shows a kind of Modern Family scenario with a sickly yellowish colour grade. The HomeView somehow makes a morning routine even more chaotic, and the ad seems to drag on and on, with every second making me feel more anxious than excited about the product.

Part of the problem is the characterisation of the family. Many people might be able to relate to them, but would anyone aspire to be them? They're so unlikeable, so stressed out over a morning routine, with the screen they drilled a hole in the kitchen counter to install becoming the centre of their world. If they're going to fight over a shared device, perhaps it would be better for each person to have their own screen to look at.

Maybe Apple should invent it: it would be like a portable digital tablet that could run apps, messaging and provide information about the weather. Oh... wait.

Both the tabletop and wall-mounted Apple HomeView models start at $299/£299. A mount for the later costs extra. Preorders are open on the Apple website in initial launch markets with delivery starting from 13 November, 2026.

It could be the ultimate smart home device for the family that hates each other.

Preorders are also open for the new Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini 2. Meanwhile, iPhone Duo pre-orders begin on Friday 16 October.

With those sizes, even a higher-end iPhone 18 Pro can fill up fast, and external storage is a must if you want to shoot at 60 fps or 120 fps. The price of SSDs has has hit sky-high prices in 2026 due to the demand from AI data centres, but, every so often, a great deal appears, and right now the tiny, ultra-portable Lexar Professional Go is reduced from $379.99 to $229.99 at B&H Photo.

This is the cheapest price I've seen since the big memory price hikes earlier this year. This is is for the 1TB SSD alone. Adding the hub for an extra $20 gives you a charging solution for accessories, and the 2TB versions have discounts too.

• Shop Portable SSD deals at Amazon

The Lexar Professional Go Portable SSD is a fairly unique modular storage accessory for Apple or Android phones that have a USB-C port. The minuscule external SSD is designed for mobile phone videographers in general but especially benefits those with a recent iPhone who want to shoot in Apple's heavy ProRes 4K videos at 60 or 120fps, which was introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

You plug the SSD directly into your phone's USB-C port, allowing you to bypass the phone's storage completely and save video directly to the SSD as you shoot. It's one of the most highly rated solutions for portability and compatibility. The small size makes it easy to carry in a pocket or pouch and to click it on and off of your phone (just make sure you remember where you put it!)

When the creator of the Dragon Quest series has something to say about AI, it's worth listening, and this week he’s been astonished by a detective game he knocked together with generative AI, Claude.ai, in about half an hour.

It’s called Interrogation Room Komiya; it's all in Japanese, but Claude can translate. Horii shared it on X this week; it’s a small browser mystery where you sit across from a suspect, choose your lines of questioning, and then hit him with evidence until his story falls apart or you get slapped with a 'Contradiction' notice when pitching evidence. I failed my first go, but was told to "Serve tea to soften the repulsion, wait silently", which is always good advice. There is more than one way to attack and tease out a confession, and that’s the whole game; one Horii called the experience “truly astonishing”, as Nintendo Life reports in a VGC story.

Context is important here. In the early 1980s, Horii made The Portopia Serial Murder Case, another detective adventure, and he wrote the story, drew the pictures, and programmed it himself. Now he says: “By using AI, even if I can’t draw pictures or program, I can just give instructions to the AI and create a decent game all by myself.”

Keep a level head for AI games

Let’s not get carried away, though. Thirty minutes gets you a small mystery, not a commercial game release with all the testing and artwork and sound and polish that goes with one, and a working prototype isn’t automatically fun or original. Still, if you’re an indie dev with no budget and no team, or you’ve got an idea and zero coding know-how, being able to see whether it works before you sink months into it is huge, because that idea might otherwise have lived in a notebook or in your head forever.

The flip side is the bit that makes people nervous. If anyone can prompt a game into existence, what happens to the artists and programmers who spent years learning their craft, and to the junior roles where the next lot learn the trade? Nobody has a good answer yet, and for a while now we’ve known AI will affect game development, but we're still fumbling around with how exactly.

But Horii is the best argument for both sides because he knows how to pace a reveal, what makes a game satisfying, what to leave out, and what to develop further, and none of that came from the AI; it came from him and his forty years of experience and ideas.

According to a Bloomberg report, the game was pencilled in for March 2027, but developers have now been told to work to an “AI first” model using tools like Anthropic’s Claude, with one director reportedly telling staff there would be “no more hand-written code” and the artwork set to come out of full AI workflows, and if you head to Reddit to see how that’s landed, you’ll find players circling the same question over and over, which is what AI is actually bringing to games that makes any of this worth doing.

The big departure with this Epic announcement is the scale and intent. There's a difference between using AI to take some of the grunt work out of making a game and building a production pipeline around AI-generated content. Plenty of artists and developers can see the appeal of using AI to speed up repetitive tasks, help with coding or get through early concepts, leaving more time to refine the work that makes a game distinctive. Asking AI to generate the artwork itself is a different proposition, particularly when that artwork is part of what gives a game its identity.

Why gamers are pushing back against AI-generated games

Over in the r/Marvel discussion, one of the most upvoted comments from monkeymad2 points out: “The leadership demanding “no handwritten code” will also have a negative effect on games (and software generally) both on the game being made & the industry as a whole” Another is blunter about what’s behind it all and simply writes: “Aaaaand I'm out.”

That worry crops up across gaming communities, mostly because there’s a big difference between AI helping developers get through their day and AI being the way the whole game gets made, and while some people are happy with the first part, many more are furious about the second.

In r/Games, one commenter drew a line between AI-assisted software development and art made through full AI workflows; they also pointed out that using AI isn't a magic bullet. Lazzyman64 wrote: "The fact they want ALL of the art to be generated is insane to me. Maybe if they wanted it to be used to generate material textures I'd probably get it, but getting good results by throwing an AI at all assets is a recipe for disaster when they inevitably waste tokens not getting what they want and having to make it all manually anyways."

Many gamers, likely indie devs and artists, see Epic's pivot less as a bold new way of working and more as an attempt to rescue a production already in trouble, a point the game's delay and lack of a new release date only reinforce. iceburg77779 wrote, "Epic's Disney project has been rumoured to be a complete mess for a while, so them pushing to finish this project with AI makes this sound like even more of a mess".

Sweeney says more and better; fans say prove it

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has quickly defended the bigger AI plan, saying that after the report that Epic was moving developers around to maximise AI acceleration, the aim wasn’t to get the same amount of work out of fewer people, but to let everyone build “MORE and BETTER stuff”. AI tools could well help teams prototype ideas faster, take care of the boring repetitive jobs and make more ambitious games than they could before, but players don’t play prototypes or workflows; they play the finished thing, and so far nobody’s explained why it’ll be better rather than just cheaper and quicker to churn out.

It's why Sweeney's promise of “MORE and BETTER stuff” gets to the heart of the problem. More content is easy to understand as a production goal, but better is much harder to measure. A studio might use AI to generate assets faster, write code more quickly or give developers more time to experiment, but none of that automatically makes a game more enjoyable, its art more memorable, or its world more convincing.

The reaction in r/fuckepic is about as hostile as you’d expect, with commenters picking at the quality of AI-generated code, laying into Epic’s leadership and tying the whole thing back to the company’s earlier job cuts, and the timing doesn’t do Epic any favours there because it announced 1,000 job cuts in March 2026, which makes “this isn’t about doing more with fewer people” a tough line to sell. Add that not everyone was sold on a Marvel and Star Wars crossover shooter in the first place (one commenter in the Marvel thread said as much, and that was before the AI news landed), and this project is carrying a lot of baggage before anyone’s seen a single frame.

Artists raise concerns about AI-generated artwork

Artist Karla Ortiz, who has worked on Loki, Doctor Strange, Eternals, Forspoken, FFXVI, and Magic: The Gathering, and has been a vocal opponent of AI responded on X, writing: “All Artistic GenAi models are trained off the works of artists like myself. This was done so without our credit, consent or compensation. Which is why artists like myself are suing GenAi companies.”

For artists like Ortiz, the argument over AI-generated artwork goes beyond whether the results look good. One of the biggest concerns is that generative AI models are trained on existing images, including work artists may not have agreed to use for that purpose. That raises difficult questions about consent, credit and compensation, particularly when the technology can produce images that imitate the visual language of working illustrators.

This also raises the question of what happens to the people whose work made these systems possible if studios increasingly turn to AI-generated assets instead of commissioning artists, and it also raises the issue of originality and stagnation: AI can't create, only replicate, so where does Epic's Disney game go without artists?

Reddit isn’t the whole gaming audience, and not every player is against AI in development, but the threads do show how fast a studio’s production choices can turn into part of a game’s pitch, and right now Epic’s pitch is that handing the work to AI will give its developers more creative freedom, which is a promise it’ll need to back up with something playable.

Ortiz’s response also highlights the legal and ethical concerns many gamers, artists, and creators have about how AI has been trained, and includes artists like; it’s a position that isn’t going away and one Epic Games will need to consider, though everyone is aware AI will have the biggest impact on the future of gaming.

When will Epic's Disney game be released?

Of course, there’s no finished Disney game to judge it against, and no new release date has been announced, according to the reporting currently available, so “MORE and BETTER stuff” will be measured against the game when it actually releases, and right now there isn’t a game to judge.

When I reviewed the Huion Kamvas Slate 13, I liked the tablet and couldn’t stand the pen, because it was a handsome thing with a lovely large screen and the kind of build that makes you want to pick it up and draw, and then you did draw, and the stylus was so inconsistent that the whole thing became a chore, which is a bit of a problem for something sold as a digital art tablet.

The Kamvas Pad 12 is smaller, comes with the new PenTech 4.0 stylus, and feels designed for drawing from day one rather than having a pen bolted on at the end. There’s still a hint of lag; the processor isn't as powerful as the Snapdragon in the Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14 or Apple's iPads, but for Huion’s standalone tablets, it's a big jump.

While it's not as powerful as its rivals, Huion has been canny enough to get the core, small things right: pen tech, display, setup, drawing experience, and do it all at a reasonable price. As an entry-level Android art tablet, or for casual art creation, it's more than capable. For the price, $499 / £449, it's worth the money as a starter drawing tablet.

Kamvas Pad 12 design and setup

Android tablets have come a long way, and setting this one up took me a few minutes: I linked it to my Android phone, let it copy across my account and data, tapped through a few screens, and that was that. ibisPaint X, MediBang Paint, Clip Studio Paint and Huion’s own HiPaint are all preinstalled, and I added ArtRage and Heavy Paint, which I always use on Android tablets because they tell you pretty quickly whether the hardware can cope with proper painterly brushes.

Huion is generous with the extras. In the box, you get the new PenTech 4.0 (PW600C) battery-free stylus, spare nibs, a drawing glove, and a folding case that doubles as a stand, and that's where I start grumbling, because it’s a case first and a stand a distant second. It’s fine for protecting the screen in a bag, but if you prop the tablet up, lean in a bit, or draw with any enthusiasm, it wobbles, and I’d happily take a less elegant case if it meant something solid to draw against.

At 12.2 inches, 2400 x 1600, and a 3:2 aspect ratio, the tablet is a good size to carry around and offers enough digital canvas to work on without being a pain to carry. For this review, I stepped outside and down the country lane by my house to try sketching outside, and it was an easy, fun way to doodle. Honestly, I prefer it to the Slate 13 because you can sling it over the sofa and sketch when an idea strikes, and it feels more iPad-sized and easier to use.

The drawing experience

The stylus offers 16,384 pressure levels, needs only 2g to register a mark, and never needs charging (and it adheres magnetically to the top of the tablet), but the specs don’t tell you much until you’re actually drawing, and what I got here was a far cry from the Slate 13. The nib moves nicely over the etched glass, which has just enough tooth to give a bit of friction – not paper exactly, though much closer than the glossy screen of my iPad Pro, unless I stick a textured protector on, and the longer I drew, the more I liked it, especially on small details where you want a steady line.

I tried a test sheet of tiny dots, circles and tightly packed lines, then drew over existing marks to test repeated accuracy and to see how well the cursor followed the nib, and it did well: fast flicks don’t stutter, slow lines don’t wander or trail behind the way they did on the Slate 13, and accuracy holds up out to the edges of the screen. The iPad Pro and the Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14 still win on fine line detail and outright precision, but the gap is much smaller than I expected, and for everyday sketching, inking, and painting, it will work.

Slow right down on very fine detail, and you can see a little latency, the line sitting maybe a millimetre behind the nib. Loose painting and big sketching hide it well, but if you’re used to a top-end iPad Pro or Wacom, you’ll spot it, and that’s really the only thing that kept me from calling the pen flawless.

Also, palm rejection isn't the best, and you will need to use the included drawing glove. I use ArtRage, which has the colour wheel and colour picker in the bottom right of the screen, right where I rest my wrist, but on several occasions it activated and changed colours mid-stroke when I didn't use the included glove.

ArtRage has stalled a few Android tablets in my tests, so I was braced, but the oil brushes here shove and blend paint around the canvas without any of the stalling I’ve seen elsewhere. The 90Hz display helps, as strokes look and feel smooth. The blurb says colour covers 99% of sRGB and is factory calibrated to a claimed Delta E under 1.8, so taking that into account, the Kamvas Pad 12 is fine for illustration and online work, though if you need wide gamut for print you’ll want something else (yep, it's that pesky iPad Pro recommendation again).

At 236 ppi, it’s sharp; the laminated panel keeps the nib close to the mark most of the time; and I found the nano-matte glass cut reflections and fingerprints when used, while adding the slight texture glossy tablets lack but what you'd expect from a dedicated drawing tablet.

That all said, if you’re someone who uses lots of layers or has a graphics-heavy creative workflow, perhaps making use of complex vectors or want to model in 3D, then the Kamvas Pad 12 will come up a little short – it’s a solid Android tablet with a nice display and stylus, but it’s not in the same league as more expensive tablets with faster, more powerful processors that pip Huion in the heavy art workload space – with its OLED display and Snapdragon processor, for example, Wacom's MovinkPad Pro 14 is a better choice, but it is double the cost. This shows where Huion is pitching the Kamvas Pad 12: hobbyist and beginner artists who want to learn digital painting but don't need a heavy pro workload.

The Android app drag

The Kamvas Pad 12 runs Android 16, so installing the best Android drawing apps, hopping between them, and keeping two open at once is painless, and I was up and running in ArtRage and Heavy Paint almost straight away. HiPaint is Procreate-like to a fault, with an interface and toolset anyone who’s used Apple’s app will recognise, but looking like Procreate and being Procreate are different things, and its reliance on newer AI tools may annoy artists who just want brushes and a canvas.

Clip Studio Paint, ibisPaint and MediBang are all decent for illustration and comics, but Apple’s ecosystem is deeper and more mature, particularly if your work depends on one specific app. Blender for Android and ZBrush are heading to Android tablets, which could make things interesting for 3D artists (though I'd question whether the MediaTek Genio 720 could handle heavy 3D well enough, though Nomad Sculpt worked nicely), but for now the software is the main thing to consider before you buy. That’s the Kamvas Pad 12’s biggest weakness, and it isn’t really Huion’s fault: they’ve built a good drawing tablet for the apps available now, but they can’t fill Android’s gaps on their own. If your tools are on Android, you’ll be happy here, and if Procreate is essential, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

It’s still an Android tablet, so it handles streaming, video calls and casual games without fuss, helped by the 90Hz screen, and the MediaTek Genio 720 keeps the price sensible. If you want to run demanding 3D games at high settings, you'll want a higher-end Snapdragon or Dimensity chip, but for everything else, like casual games, it’s fine. There’s no keyboard, but the on-screen one is fine for Google Docs or a quick social post (though I did find finger recognition to be a little laggy); split-screen is handy for keeping a reference open while you draw, and Huion rates the battery at up to eight hours, depending on brightness and workload, which matched my experience when in use.

You're not buying the Kamvas Pad 12 to catch up on Netflix or the latest episode of Carrie, though; you're buying it to draw, and that’s where Huion's tablet is at its best, by offering a good art creation experience for less than many of its rivals.

Should you buy the Huion Kamvas Pad 12?

For $499 / £449, you get a stylus that feels right, a sharp textured screen and enough responsiveness to make sketching and painting fun, plus a box of accessories so you can start straight away, though I’d swap the case for a proper stand.

The Kamvas Pad 12 isn’t an iPad Pro replacement, and Wacom has a better Android tablet, and with a little lag on fine detail, the very best line work is still going to Apple (or Wacom), and Android’s creative apps are thinner on the ground, but at a fraction of the price of a top iPad Pro, I can live with that.

It won’t replace my desktop tablet, and I like the smaller screen more than I expected; after the Slate 13, it’s a relief to use a pen that feels like it belongs, and Huion has definitely improved on its first-gen release. For the price, specs, and experience, the Kamvas Pad 12 is a solid entry-level art tablet.

A true and instant classic among handwriting fonts, the new design demonstrates how typography can be used as an unexpected tool to honour the past. Both intricate and functional, the contemporary typeface shines in its classic appeal.

Aptly named Michelangelus, the new font takes direct inspiration from the Vatican archives. Created by The Fabbrica di San Pietro, the institution in charge of maintaining the basilica, the team called upon Italian design agency Studiogusto to build a custom typeface. The goal was not to recreate Michelangelo's hand, but to adapt it into a modern, functional script that could appear on signage inside the basilica alongside digital and printed materials.

Studiogusto was invited to the Vatican, where they studied Michelangelo's original manuscripts. “There’s kind of a geometry, there’s kind of use of empty and filled spaces,” says Stefano Caliandro, studiogusto’s creative director. “His impatience, his precision, his energy are in his calligraphy.”

Flourishes of Michelangelo's original handwriting can be seen in certain letterforms, like the small dot at the top of the ‘h’ or the bottom of the ‘y’, but for others, the team had to get creative. They found no examples of the artist using modern numbers, so each was based on letters, like the number one, which is based on the letter I. In total, over 500 characters were created across regular, italic, bold and bold italic styles.

The font is also available through Microsoft 365 and as a download, broadening the reach of St. Peter’s Basilica's history and the artist whose vision helped shape it. “Sharing it with everyone gives them a chance to form a personal connection with the history of the Basilica and of Michelangelo. If the typeface also makes people want to know more about the history, it will have achieved something important for us,” the Fabbrica’s communications office says.

For more typographical inspiration, check out the best script fonts or take a look at our guide to achieving perfect font pairings.

Now there's potentially a more complete competitor on the horizon: an open-source AI-generated replica of most of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. The package was vibe-coded in the programming language Rust using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 with the aim of providing a free software suite covering everything from image editing to digital art, video, vector illustration, effects and motion design.

They're at a very early stage, and the developer clarifies that they're not yet in a state where they can replace existing software, but I decided to test it out with the help of my cat, Gurí.

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ArtCraft takes on Creative Cloud (and beyond)

The ArtCraft package was developed by software engineer Brandon Thomas, who says he was inspired by frustration at Adobe's subscription costs and cancellation fees. Many will feel able to relate.

The suite comprises LightCraft (Lightroom), PhotoCraft (Photoshop), FilmCraft (Premiere), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign), VectorCraft (Illustrator) and PrintCraft (Acrobat). The same developer has since launched AI-coded versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint too (WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft).

The apps are free and available in early alpha for PC, Mac and Linux systems. As for legality, the develop claims that nothing copyrighted has been copied. Adobe and Microsoft's lawyers will surely be scrutinising that as I write.

Installation is straightforward via the ArtCraft Installer. You don't need to create an account or provide any details. The apps are also incredibly light, weighing up to around 50MB compared to the several gigabytes of each piece of software they're intended to replicate. That's apparently due to the optimisation that comes with clean-room reimplementations written in Rust compared with legacy apps built on decades of accumulated C++ code, dependencies and overlapping frameworks.

LightCraft

I tried LightCraft, PhotoCraft and FilmCraft since these are the areas I'm most familiar with. I used the apps on a Windows PC based on an Intel Core i7 and Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU. Content was all shot on a Canon EOS R5.

LightCraft is the Lightroom copy for raw image editing. I tested it using some quick shots of Gurí, who wasn't impressed at being woken up to participate, hence the grumpy face. The app didn't seem to want to import the CR3 files direct from the camera, so I had to bring them onto my computer first, which was a minor irritation.

A bigger issue is that there's no native camera-matched colour profiles or lens profiles, which means starting from a different base, already a step back from where I would be starting in Lightroom. You can make optical corrections for vignette and chromatic aberration manually, but who wants to do that?

That aside, I was surprised at how far advanced the program is. Most of Lightroom's main controls are in approximately the same places. Clarity, Texture and Dehaze are grouped under Effects separate from the other contrast controls, which seems counterintuitive, but Light, tone curve, HSL and colour controls all behave as expected.

What didn't behave as expected was sharpening. Even the standard 40% looked terribly harsh and added fuzzy artefacts to images. Hitting Alt doesn't bring up an overlay like in Lightroom, so masking required some guesswork, and even at 80% the artefacts remained.

Masking in general has issues. When I tried to select the subject (Gurí), I seemed to get a radial mask instead. Lightroom selected the cat immediately. Object selection isn't currently available natively – you need to install Meta's SAM 3 Model manually. The same goes for AI denoising.

PhotoCraft

I found PhotoCraft more convincing in that I had no compatibility issues. It can open and save PSD files as well as TIFF, JPG, PNG and other common formats, although not HEIC, apparently.

Again, anyone who's used Adobe's software will immediately feel at home. Most of the main tools are in the same place, and you add the same kinds of adjustment layers, masks, blend modes and filters – although you can also do most of this in Canva's Affinity, which is also free, or in open-source Krita.

Again, automatic selection and masking seemed less precise than in Photoshop. The same for content-aware fill/Delete and fill and the spot heal tool. Everything felt like it was only just usable. Filters wouldn't preview for me, which meant having to use guesswork to decide the amount of blur, grain or any other effect to apply.

I don't use Photoshop's generative AI features like Generative Fill or text-to-image generation, but if you do, you'll find those absent in PhotoCraft too.

FilmCraft

I intended to test FilmCraft the way I would normally edit a video, but things got off to a bad start. I shot some footage in 4K at 25 and 100 fps in Clog3, but it turns out that FilmCraft doesn't support 10-bit 4:2:2 playback, so I had to convert the clips using Handbrake before I could start editing. Then I was hit with the issue that there's no native ability to create optimised media, so trying to edit in 4K was painfully slow. I went back to Handbrake again to downsize.

Once I had the footage converted, the editing interface did generally work for basic trimming, cutting and adding transitions. It looks like Premier and has most of the basic tools, including the workspaces for colour and effects. As a DaVinci Resolve user, some of my gripes were as much with the Premiere way of doing things. I could import LUTs and make basic colour adjustments, but, like in LightCraft some artefacts seemed to crop up in shadows.

For Premiere uses, be aware that the software can't open or save .prproj files.

Conclusion

ArtCraft is a work in progress, and the developers recognise that. It's impressive how much it can do considering that it was made and tested using AI and weighs next to nothing, but it's not currently stable or complete enough to be able to replace existing software. Shifting work to a new platform takes time and is only worth doing if you know a new platform is going to be reliable for the long term.

That doesn't mean that Adobe doesn't need to be worried. Any program is going to have bugs in early alpha, and ArtCraft is making a big commitment to ironing them out. I'm not entirely convinced there's a need for it when there are very good free or well-priced Adobe alternatives out there in the form of DaVinci Resolve, Krita, Canva's Affinity and Calvary and Maxon's Autograph without having to resort an ethically debatable use of AI, but greater UI similarities could likely win over many users if ArtCraft really does reach Creative Cloud parity.

Some will enjoy the irony that after embracing AI so heavily, Adobe now faces potentially losing its own job as a result of the same technology. On the other hand, ArtCraft also justifies the company's AI obsession. Adobe saw this kind of thing coming and turned to AI to try to keep ahead as traditional tools become easier to copy.

Sometimes people complain when an Adobe release comes around without a big headline new feature, but ArtCraft makes you realise that the most important things are the smaller features you take for granted, as well as basic compatibility, accuracy and reliability.

You can find the installer and download the various ArtCraft apps at Getartcraft.com.

As one of two franchises that define the Metroidvania genre, especially among indies, look at the excellent Silver Pines; it's surprising it's taken this long for Castlevania to make a proper return, even though a revival right after its 40th anniversary couldn't have been better timed.

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse also feels like a result of the franchise's other collaboration projects in recent years, with developer Evil Empire having worked on the Return to Castlevania expansion for acclaimed roguelite Metroidvania Dead Cells, while its new art direction, while not exactly mimicking, does seem to take inspiration from the well-received Netflix anime adaptation (the European and Japanese cover art does, however, have a brilliant illustration from renowned artist Katsuya Terada).

Similarly to how the series' 3D iterations, Lord of Shadows, took cultural inspiration from its Spanish developer MercurySteam, French indie developer Evil Empire sets Belmont's Curse in a Paris engulfed in flames and overrun by monsters, with legendary vampire hunter Trevor Belmont called to save the city. But to freshen things up for a new generation, you play as his daughter, Rose Belmont, who also carries the titular curse.

A more gymnastic Belmont

Compared to her predecessors, and likely influenced by more platformer-oriented Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight and Ori, Rose is more fluid to control, with sliding and wall-jumping from the start. Even the signature whip, the Vampire Killer, isn't used as a weapon so much as a traversal tool. As a result, her animations feel very dynamic, especially with details like her ponytail and blue cape moving with a cutout-animation feel. That clarity is important especially when the camera is often further away than I would like, though it's also made up for some very striking background vistas, such as the blood red sky of Paris while Notre Dame cathedral burns.

Given the anime influences, from the character portraits during dialogue to the occasional use of lo-fi animated cutscenes, this is actually a 2.5D game, though the painterly shaders make it feel as if you aren't looking at any 3D models, while there's a lack of moments that transition to a 3D cinematic camera like the modern 2.5D Metroid games. It does beg the question why the team didn't opt for a 2D hand-drawn style in the first place, especially when the result is that Belmont's Curse has surprisingly high spec requirements on PC compared to similar games in this genre.

You might have noted that I've made comparisons several times already, but unfortunately it's a little unavoidable when in Castlevania's absence, there have been so many other games inspired it that have taken up the mantle and been successful in their own right. It's hard not to see what Belmont's Curse takes from them rather than what it brings to the table.

Not that there's anything particularly bad here. The more agile moveset gives you fast, responsive traversal and combat, with more weaponry and skills opening up as you progress through Paris's different areas, including an air-dash and a holy light that can parry enemy attacks. An interesting touch to the narrative is that the bosses you fight aren't just one and done, but there's a kind of mystery building up to their identity and where to find them, and then once you have defeated and trapped them into a tarot card arcana, you don't just absorb their powers, but they continue conversing with you in your head. That makes for a pretty entertaining dynamic when it includes legendary foes like Medusa, but also new characters like a particularly interesting take on beloved French historical icon Joan of Arc.

That's fine, but I had also hoped that the curse referred to in the title might have also had a fundamental change to differentiate this Castlevania's gameplay rather than merely serve as a plot point. What there is instead feels like ideas cribbed from other Metroidvanias, notably the relics, which are just Hollow Knight's equippable charms, where the benefits gained from specific actions can be helpful, but also a little too specific. Rose's moveset also means considerably more tricky traversal challenges, with some areas feeling like a Super Meat Boy level. This is also where I found the controls could feel fiddly, whether it's the whip not always grappling, or a particularly dastardly mechanic that makes certain parts of the environment appear and disappear while you have to jump through, wall-jump off, land on, or fall through them.

A very accessible Metroidvania

One relief for players who've been knocked back too much by Hollow Knight: Silksong's challenges is its pretty comprehensive accessibility, including the ability to respawn just before a boss room, or even avoid dying. Ultimately, it won't compromise the real challenge of Belmont's Curse, which is just trying to figure out the next way you should be going, and then wading through its long-winded level design even with the inclusion of shortcuts and fast-travel points.

The real curse of a new Castlevania may be trying to live up to its legacy when so many indies have found novel ways to build on its foundations. Nonetheless, for longtime fans having to subsist on retro bundles over the years, it's still worth sinking your teeth into.

The electric Citroen 2CV revealed at the 2026 Paris Motor Show is only a concept vehicle, and the specs for the future production model have not been revealed. The company says it aims to enter full production in 2028, and it's targeting a price of around €15,000.

The concept car is a promising taster. It looks unmistakably like the classic 2CV, originally released in 1948. It has the rounded headlights and curved canvas roof along with the famous ribbed bonnet. With a targeted weight of around one tonne and compact 3.76m length, it also has compact proportions, bucking the tendency for revivals to supersize previously small cars.

On social media, the design is being compared to the equally iconic Little Tikes Cozy Coupe, a ride-on toy car aimed at under fives. But I wouldn't say that's necessarily an insult.

The new 2CV feels honest and practical with its lightweight construction and simple body panels, but it's also delightfully quirky, putting the fun back into compact car design.

It's charming, nostalgic and faithful to what made the original car special when it was designed for French farmers who had been relying on horses and carts. Whether the suspension will be as impressive is another question, but a €15,000 electric car inspired by the original 2CV's "mobility for everyone" philosophy could be exactly what Europe's EV market needs.

In 2026, though, it feels different. Following the latest UK price hike, Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan costs £13.99 a month, and Premium costs £20.99.

But if Netflix were worried they'd take some heat, then Disney+ has done them a favour. Last month, it updated its UK subscriber agreement to say all its tiers “may include” promotional content, sponsorships and “advertisements before/after playback”.

Disney insists that ad-free subscribers aren't going to suddenly see traditional ads interrupting films and shows. But it seems pretty clear we're heading in that direction eventually.

How did we get here?

It's not that long ago that any ads on paid-for streaming seemed like a distant dream. It was only in November 2022 that Netflix launched its first ad-supported plan in the UK for £4.99 a month, pitching it as a budget option to offer people "more choice". Then in 2023, it stopped offering its cheapest ad-free plan to new UK subscribers, so the entry price for ad-free viewing jumped up a bit.

Meanwhile, in February 2024, Amazon Prime Video started showing ads to everyone by default, and charged £2.99 a month extra to switch them off. Disney+ followed suit with its own ad tier that November.

Spotted the pattern yet? Ads arrive as a cheap option, offering "choice". Then once people are used to the idea, the gap between cheap and ad-free widens, until ad-free starts to feel like a luxury. Even the cheap option doesn’t stay cheap for long: Netflix’s ad tier has just gone up a third already, from £5.99 to £7.99.

None of this is because streaming bosses hate us. It’s just maths. For years, streaming was all about subscriber growth, and investors were happy to carry big losses as long as the numbers kept going up.

Then in 2022, Netflix reported its first downturn in subscribers for a decade, and Wall Street changed its mind. Since then, profit has mattered more than growth.

Trouble is, most people who want a streaming service already have it, so the companies have to make more money from each viewer instead. They can do that in two ways: raise the price, or sell ads. An ad tier lets a streamer do both.

So where has all this brought us to? Several monthly subscriptions, live sport with ad breaks, ads before shows, and streamers sold to us in bundles by Sky and Virgin Media. Similarly, in the US, Disney now sells Disney+, Hulu and Max together in a single package.

We thought we'd seen the end of the cable or satellite TV package. We've just reinvented them on the internet instead. We thought streaming had freed us from expense, ads and hassle. We thought wrong.

Remember, though, we still have one weapon that cable and satellite customers never did. In the old days, cancelling was an old and cumbersome process. With streaming, cancelling takes about 30 seconds. And there are now plenty of free ad-supported services to take the place of the ones you've been paying for.

That's worth bearing in mind, next time you pull up that streaming interface on your TV, yet still can't find anything to watch.

Find today's best streaming services below:

The best billboard ads are the ones that use bold visuals to their advantage, and Sour Patch Kids' out-of -the-box approach is a prime example. Characterful, slightly silly and irrefutably fun, the new billboards prove brands need to step out of the comfort zone to make a big impact.

Created by global creative agency VCCP, the playful ads feature Sour Patch Kids in various states of chaos. One design shows the characters playing tug-of-war with one of their pals, while another features a casual game of tennis with one of their heads – a perfect blend of dark and silly storytelling.

The most eye-catching of the ‘Not As Sweet As They Look’ campaign is an immersive ad that sees the kids destroying a neighbouring Oreo ad. Physically tearing it off the billboard, the eye-catching design blurs the lines between reality and fiction, making the design all the more immersive for passersby.

“Everyone in the creative department keeps collaring us saying 'why don't people rip each other limb from limb, or pull each other’s heads off, or tear down each other’s billboards in advertising any more? Fair point, we thought," say Chris Birch and Jonny Parker, chief creative officers at VCCP. "So when Sour Patch Kids came along asking for their first ever campaign with their sweet but sour persona, [we] could finally scratch that itch. And isn't it glorious? Simple, clever, beautiful and disturbing.”

For more ad inspiration, check out the Other Mommy crying billboard that gets creepier over time, or take a look at how KFC reached new heights in this towering billboard ad.

The truth is, Xiaomi is no stranger to making some of the best camera phones. In fact, when we were considering the most powerful camera phone on the market, the Xiaomi 15 came out as the overall winner. That was before Xiaomi released its latest lineup of phones, and there would be no surprises if the 17T Pro found its way into our guide.

Speaking of the Xiaomi 15, we said, "With Leica-engineered cameras, Xiaomi is out-muscling Samsung and Apple," and that continues with the 17T Pro. If Xiaomi continues the partnership, there's no reason why Xiaomi won't begin to substantially displace the iPhone as the favoured choice for creative professionals.

Key specs

Design and Screen

• A sleek modern design with smooth edges everywhere
• A camera bump that follows the bezels of the phone

Everything about the Xiaomi 17T Pro is designed and engineered to perfection. This begins with the large 6.83-inch AMOLED display, which offers an almost full bleed right to the edges. This is only interrupted by the small front camera cut out at the top. It's an incredibly capable display that is vibrant, bright, and predictable.

Creatives will love the 12-bit colour depth and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, which guarantees a full and accurate representation of the images it displays. This makes it ideal for reviewing media content on the device without needing to transfer it to a dedicated monitor.

Continuing with the display, at a whopping 3500 nits of peak brightness, I found the phone more than capable of delivering the necessary brightness in all scenarios, including direct sunlight. Using it in the field or in all types of unpredictable settings is not a problem with the 17T Pro.

Turning our attention to the main frame, there's a gorgeous flat aluminium finish that ensures a premium look. The colourways on offer are Black, Deep Blue, and the one that I tested, Deep Violet. The finish is beautifully matt, and it effortlessly diffuses all reflections. All corners and edges are smooth and subtle, providing a comfortable grip at all times.

At the back is the Leica camera bump, which for perfectionists follows the same bezel design as the main frame. This provides a coordinated and well-thought-out design. With the quality and quantity of camera technology packed into the 17T Pro, it's no surprise that the bump is rather sizable. As a result, if you lay the phone down, the top end of the phone sits off the surface by about 5mm.

Design score: 5/5

Features

• A fast and efficient Mediatek Dimensity 9500 processor
• A high-capacity battery that will last you all day and excellent cooling

The 17T Pro obviously features some of the most advanced camera hardware of any phone on the market, but I'm glad to see that the rest of the smartphone hasn't suffered from a lack of attention. Don't worry, we'll get to those sumptuous camera specs and associated performance in a minute.

At the heart of the phone is a Mediatek Dimensity 9500 processor which keeps all the apps, processes, and camera smarts moving along smoothly. You won't find any lock-ups or slow-downs here. Even when pushing the creative limits, the 17T Pro kept up like a champ.

Now, because you'll be using the phone for all your creative projects, there's no use having a sub-standard battery. Thankfully Xiaomi has packed it with a huge 7000mAh silicon-carbon battery that the brand claims delivers more than 20 hours when in constant use and 9.5 hours of video recording. This battery life means you can take it on set, even when you're on location with no access to a power supply. The battery supports 100W wired and 50W wireless HyperCharge.

To complement all the power and battery capabilities is the Xiaomi 3D IceLoop system, which ensures the phone stays cool and efficient. The cooling system combines 6W/mK high thermal conductivity gel for rapid heat dissipation. Having used the phone for several months, there hasn't been a single time where it has even felt remotely hot to touch.

In terms of software, the main feature of Note is the Xiaomi HyperIsland, which serves up a superior status and notification experience. I love the fact that it occupies minimal space but at the same time enables a high level of multitasking. It's ideal for the creative professional who is always on the go.

Features score: 5/5

Camera Performance

• Superb photo and video capabilities
• An overall quick and efficient performance

The primary reason that anyone would consider buying the 17T Pro is because of its incredible Leica-engineered camera technology. The phone is packed full of the very latest hardware and software that delivers one of the most impressive camera arrays out of any smartphone anywhere.

The main camera is 23mm 50MP with a 1/1.31-inch sensor size. Images are clear and sharp, although the default 'Leica Vibrant' crunches the colours too much. I found myself using the 'Leica Traditional' most of the time as it delivered a more realistic set of colours and contrast.

But what is most impressive about the main camera is the f/1.67 aperture, which lets in an unreal amount of light. I tested it in some of the darkest places I could find and it was still able to provide a pretty clean, noise-free image. The cherry on the cake is the optical image stabilisation, which helps guarantee sharp results are achieved every single time.

The main camera is backed up by an equally impressive 115mm periscope telephoto camera with 50MP and f/3 specs for solid performance in most scenarios. With an equivalent focal length of 115mm, I was able to zoom in and capture more detail than my eyes were capable of.

And if that level of zoom wasn't enough, Leica offers an ultra zoom feature achieved with AI, of course, that allows for 120x magnification. The zoom amount is so high that the results verge on microscopic, enabling you to capture very small details of items close to you or objects a long distance away.

But it's not just the phone's telephoto camera that has stolen the headlines; in fact, the 15mm ultra-wide camera with an aperture of f/2.2 is equally useful for creatives. The 15mm equivalent focal length means you can capture more of the world around you without moving backwards. The resolution tops out at 12MP which is similar to most of the competition but still a big reduction from the 50MP of the main and telephoto alternatives.

The 17T Pro also delivers industry-leading video recording capabilities with 8K resolution at 30fps and 4K at 120fps. There is even 4K HDR10+ at 60fps for enhanced video quality. With these specs, the 17T Pro is designed not just to meet the needs of photographers but also video content creators.

Across all cameras, the 17T Pro delivers a high-level of colour consistency so that you can switch between lenses without the resulting photos looking like they're taken with a different camera. All in, the 17T Pro is a creative dream that delivers excellent results.

Performance score: 5/5

Price

• Prices begin from £799, although discounts are often available

All 17T Pro models top out at 12GB of RAM, which means the only choice you have to make is between three colours and three storage capacities. The handset is available in Black, Deep Violet, and Deep Blue colourways, although these are identically priced within each storage bracket.

Prices range from £799 for the 256GB model up to £949 for 1TB. Sitting in the middle is the one I tested, which offers 512GB of storage and retails at £849. At the time of writing, the prices I've quoted were discounted by £100, which shows it's worth waiting for a price drop.

Value score: 4/5

Buy it if:

• You plan on using your phone for serious photography
• You love telephoto photography
• You want a slick, well-designed phone from a top brand

Don't buy it if:

• You only need a reliable smartphone for messages, calls, and social media
• You're a serious mobile gamer
• You want a smartphone with repairable parts

It was just the kind of sweet tribute you'd expect to see after the passing of two global celebrities, so close to each other. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but certainly very shareable. In the corner was the signature "BLOPER", the pen name of New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper.

One problem, though: Brendan didn't draw it. A fan of Dolly Parton had simply asked ChatGPT for "a New Yorker-style cartoon", and the chatbot had made one. Then – and here's the kicker – faked Brendan's signature for good measure.

Brendan first heard about this from his brother; then emails and DMs from strangers started piling up. "I had people writing to me about this cartoon, asking if it was mine," he told Nieman Lab, a reporting project at Harvard University that covers the future of journalism. "It was very surreal."

Nieman Lab went on to investigate further, and identified more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures have been appearing on ChatGPT images.

I've covered plenty of AI controversies over the past few years, but this feels like a pretty big deal to me.

Yes, the line between inspiration and outright copying is a murky one. But a fake signature is crossing the Rubicon. It's making a clear statement that a human, a named human, has made this work and stands behind it. And in this case, an utterly false one.

A billion dollar company has created a platform that purposefully imitates work and passes it off as their own. And that's wrong; legally, ethically, morally, any way you care to slice it. For anyone who works as a creative, this is massive.

After all, your name is your reputation, your business. Imagine a potential client stumbling across a piece of dodgy work with your name attached to it. If they told you about it, you could at least set the record straight. Yet in reality, they probably wouldn't mention it. They just wouldn't book you again, without you ever knowing the reason. It doesn't bear thinking about.

The lesson? Next time you see an image doing the rounds on social media, think before you like or share. You could be doing a fellow creative a great disservice.

Customers often re-use Lala cream pots to store all kind of other things in the fridge: beans, salsa, tinga or leftovers from the day before. It's such a familiar household ritual that it's inspired jokes and memes around the common problem of not knowing what's inside the pots. Lala's now come up with a solution, officially recognising that its packaging isn't for its own product alone.

The 'Mexiconteiners' project was a proactive idea born from observation and developed by the creative agencies Zurda México and Conciergency. They designed a Lala cream tub with a dedicated space where people can write what's stored inside once the original product's gone.

"It was 100% a lightbulb moment born out of lived experience," says Diego Gueler Montero, chief creative officer at Zurda México. "You don't need a focus group or a massive research study for this, you just need to have grown up in Mexico.

"Every single Mexican has played that fridge Russian roulette: opening a Lala container expecting cream, only to find leftover beans, rice, or salsa. It’s a generational inside joke the brand had never officially acknowledged. All we did was connect the dots between that universal truth and a product innovation."

What made the idea so strong is that Lala wasn’t telling customers what to do with its packaging but recognising the spontaneous reuse that has already been happening for years. Rather than run a standard product promo, Zurda saw an opportunity to spark a conversation that reinforced Lala's place as an everyday staple.

"We realised we didn't need to push the product itself; we needed to celebrate the container’s second lifecycle," Diego says. "That second life is the ultimate proof of how deeply rooted the brand is in our culture."

It seems such a simple and obvious idea after the fact. But it needed the right execution.

"The challenge was to make that new function feel completely integrated into the brand," says Valentina Zuchiatti, chief creative officer at Conciergency. "We incorporated illustrations and graphic codes rooted in Mexican culture and everyday life, together with a dedicated space where people could write what they were storing inside, while keeping the pack unmistakably Lala."

Customers responded, completing the circle. The campaign sparked a new wave of memes on social media as people made the design their own and shared what they kept in their containers.

Conceived as a campaign, the design now has the potential to be a long-term platform.

"Reusing Lala containers has been a habit in Mexican fridges for decades, we just gave it an official name," Diego says. "Given how huge the response was, it stopped being just a temporary campaign and turned into a permanent cultural asset the brand can keep building on."

"What’s especially exciting is that the idea didn’t stop with the original Mexiconteiners," Valentina adds. "It’s now expanding into other Lala products and collaborations, including licensed editions such as Peanuts. What began as a cultural observation on one pack is becoming a flexible design platform that the brand can continue to reinterpret."

Playing Silver Pines feels like stepping into an animated horror graphic novel. There’s a little Jock in the scratchy ink, a bit of Frank Miller in the contrast, and in the darker creature silhouettes and corners of town you fear to explore, just a bloody splash of Mike Mignola.

The art sells the game. It’s genuinely unsettling in places, and the town feels fully formed, slowly unfolding its secrets with the same teasing paranoia as Silent Hill. That’s quite the debut for Wych Elm, a five-person studio spread across Sweden and Norway, clearly passionate about its inspirations; Twin Peaks' dark Americana mingles with X-Files investigations as much as Konami’s classic.

You play private investigator Red Walker, sent to a half-abandoned, half-forgotten town in the middle of nowhere to find missing musician Eddie Velvet. The trail takes you from the Miner Diner to the Crimson Bear Motel and Rodney’s General Store, and the case quickly turns into something much stranger.

That Silent Hill comparison is apt: Silver Pines is the Metroidvania Silent Hill no one saw coming, and the combination works beautifully. The side-scrolling design feels layered and dense. As you stroll in trepidation through Silver Pines’ dimly lit streets, the challenges ahead are teased in the distance: a crumbling Town Hall, an illuminated cable car, and the oppressive bulk of Mt. Siah Kopa, which you just know you’ll need to climb to get to the bottom of the town’s secrets.

A town full of wrong turns

Those secrets unfurl in the same way. Find and use a cog to get the sewer sluice gate working on the docks, which in turn opens new sewer tunnels and more puzzle routes. Hunt down a set of bells scattered across town to mend that mysteriously musical cable car (a real Resident Evil hangover). You can also veer off the path to free a cat locked in a cage under the Pet Clinic, meet some cryptic residents, or stop to stroke the horse randomly plodding outside the Quiet Hour Cafe.

Behind the weirdness is the familiar back-and-forth of a Metroidvania. A found torch lights up dark rooms, a sledgehammer smashes through cracked walls, a box cutter slices open tarps to new rooms, and the shotgun blasts apart wooden barricades. Your guns open up the map as much as they kill things, because rusted padlocks, boards and vent grilles are all there to be blasted. Each new tool and solved puzzle opens up another corner of town, and uncovers stories that play on your mind, gnaw at you and demand you explore more.

The map does much of the heavy lifting in Silver Pines. Snap a photo of a locked door or odd object, and the game pins it to the map, so when you return with the right tool, you know exactly where to go. The Polaroids are a lifesaver for backtracking, but the map also has logic, and areas are memorable enough that you’ll often have an ‘ah-ha’ moment and race to put the solution into practice.

The story arrives in pieces, found in drawers, pinned to notice boards and on hushed, crackling phone lines to strangers who tease leads. These notes and documents are scattered everywhere; some help solve puzzles, but many just add to the world-building, like conversations that stick in your head for an hour before you find out why they mattered. Everything hinges memorably, making puzzle-solving feel earned rather than pulled from thin air; it took me far too long for the playing-card symbol puzzle to click, but once it did, I had a proper ‘ah-ha’ moment.

In fact, the puzzles generally are more logical than some of the game’s inspirations. They lean towards Resident Evil’s item management, lock gizmos and code-breaking rather than Silent Hill’s more surreal ideas. If you’re stumped, a solution is always hiding in plain sight, whether it’s a clue in a pinned newspaper clipping, a number on a framed baseball jersey, or something glimpsed through a smudged shop window.

You handle keypads and doors by hand, so you tap the digits yourself and watch the key slide in and turn. Even the Crimson Bear Motel’s gate code changes with every save, so you don't have to look it up.

When the town fights back

Combat can be a little awkward at times. Manually wrapping a bandage to heal takes longer than you’d like when a dark, ghostly dog thing is pouncing at you. Generally, though, it’s snappy and surprisingly aggressive for a side-scrolling indie. The shotgun you prise out of a locker at the Crimson Bear Motel rips apart enemies and scenery, and later variants get more powerful, sending papers and debris fluttering satisfyingly with every shot.

Survival horror means managing everything. Your inventory is a tight grid, and Hip Bags hidden around town add extra slots. Guns take up space, ammo is scarce, and weapons wear down as you use them. You mix herbs and empty bottles into tonics, and melee swings drain stamina, which you can restore with coffee from the filter jugs dotted around town. You can also equip Mementoes for perks like extra stamina and faster reloads, letting you tailor your approach to combat.

Upgrades make an actual difference, too. The rifle's scoped sight extends how far you can pan the screen, so you spot enemies sooner, and life gets a bit easier.

The little things matter

Small design choices and attention to detail lift Silver Pines from a Metroidvania Silent Hill to something of its own. You save at payphones, drop in a coin, and call Mr Jackman. A lone I Want to Believe poster in an office made me smile, a TV show that eerily plays episodes of a paranoia show as you pass, and the misty decay of the town’s worn Americana just gets under the skin. In all of this, and in the puzzles and map design, Silver Pines captures the weirdness of Twin Peaks and the mystery of The X-Files.

On Switch 2, it’s an engrossing couch game. The side-scrolling format suits picking it up for an hour at a time, and the art direction gives you plenty to look at even when a puzzle has you stumped and frustrated. I never wished it were a bigger 3D horror game, because those restrictions are part of why Silver Pines works so well.

My complaints are small. One is the mid-fight healing, and the game can’t escape the genre's trappings: the back-and-forth wandering and nosing around every corner of the map to find that one tool, for me, a crank and then a sledgehammer, that finally opens the route you need to progress. And sometimes, that blocked path you hoped would lead somewhere just offers yet another roll of tape or minimal reward.

But these are small, probably very personal frustrations for what is one of the year’s most interesting games, and with three endings to chase and different difficulties that make a difference, there’s a reason to go back and explore Silver Pines more. Plus, it’s an engrossing Switch 2 sofa must-play.

If you need the tools to get started, see our guides to the best 3D modelling software and the best laptops for 3D modelling.

Usually, upon creation, a joint’s orientation is set so that it automatically points to its parent in the hierarchy. So, for example, X will be the primary axis and aim at the next joint in the chain.

This is to make animation more predictable, meaning you get a better twist around the joint. Imagine rotating your upper arm while keeping your elbow in place; this works because, in theory, the axis you’re rotating around runs down the humerus bone. There will be times, however, when you may need a different primary axis. This could depend on a number of things, like the game engine you are working on for example, or to help reduce gimbal lock, something we discussed in last month’s issue.

There will also be times when the axes are reset or even changed by accident, so they need to be corrected. Fortunately, editing rotational axes is very easy to do and you have full freedom to configure them any way you like, and at any angle too. Let’s take a look at how you would approach this in a simple, three-joint arm setup.

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As a long-standing mentor across several programs, Chloé is passionate about supporting the next generation of design talent and helping more women move into leadership roles. As part of our 5 Questions series, I caught up with Chloé to discuss career imposter syndrome, pet peeves and the 24/7 drive of the creative mind.

As you'd expect, the show itself was sprinkled with spectacle, pizzazz, and plenty of Disney magic. Bart Simpson opening proceedings. Stitch arriving on the big screen with his new pink co-star. Giant red balloons bouncing around the arena for a mass game of Keepy Uppy. Fantastic.

But D23 isn't just about feelgood vibes, it's mainly about announcing new projects. And the list of forthcoming films made me decidedly underwhelmed.

What's coming next

In the animation corner: Frozen 3. Incredibles 3. Coco 2. Zootopia 3. A sixth (yes, sixth!) big-screen outing for Ice Age. A second Simpsons movie. In the live action corner, meanwhile, we're getting a remake of Tangled, and a sequel to 2025's previous live-action remake Lilo & Stitch.

If you count up the films Disney and Pixar announced, only four are original: Pixar's Ghost Market and Gatto, and Disney Animation's Clay and Hexed. The rest is a company repurposing its past.

I've written before about why I think Disney's live action remakes are all wrong, but a live-action Tangled is really depressing. The 2010 original was already made with CG, so turning it into "live action" – which will doubtless be dominated by CG anyway – feels less a brave reinvention and more like a tweak of the 3D software.

Not to mention that when it arrives in March 2028, it'll be remaking a film that's barely 18 years old. One that very much hasn't aged, and anyone who's interested will have seen on Disney+ already.

What's depressing me most is that I can see the business reasons for what they're doing. The live-action Lilo & Stitch took over $1 billion at the box office in 2025, so a sequel is a slam dunk.

Original animated films are expensive and risky, as Pixar learned when Elio struggled at the box office last year. If I was a Disney investor, I'd be screaming "Make Frozen 3!" from the rooftops.

But over the long term, that just means Disney will end up eating itself. If you think about it, every franchise Disney is milking today was once a risky original. Where are the next risky originals coming from?

The good news

Admittedly, there is some new stuff on the way. Hexed, Disney Animation’s next film, is an original that hits cinemas in November. At D23, Disney announced two big additions to its voice cast: Jodie Foster as Queen Celeste and Walton Goggins as a character called Beef Roger Crummchuk. That name alone makes me want to buy a ticket .

Pixar, meanwhile, has Gatto, a Venice-set adventure from Enrico Casarosa, the director of Luca. The latter's sunny take on the Italian Riviera was charming; a shame it went straight to Disney+ in 2021. At least Casarosa is getting a proper cinema release this time, with Gatto due in March 2027.

Further out, there’s Ghost Market, a totally original Pixar film due in March 2028, and Disney Animation’s Clay, also set for 2028. Disney's said very little about either, and Clay is only a working title. But I'm still eager to learn more.

Finally, there's The Bluey Movie, and while that's based on a well-known character, a jump from TV to the big screen can often lead to great things: just look at Aardman. The irony? Disney didn’t make it: they're only distributing it.

Yes, one of the most exciting projects at Disney’s event was an idea someone else had, and which somebody else is making. In the meantime, I'm putting my trust in Laika to bring some child-friendly movie magic back to our cinemas.