I thought it odd when Summer Games Done Quick announced today that access to a Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball speedrun will be restricted in order to ensure the comfort of the speedrunner. Performing under pressure, after all, is a big part of the whole deal, and nothing adds pressure to literally any task like doing it while other people are watching.

The announcement didn’t provide much clarity. “Heads up, SGDQ2024 Attendees!” Games Done Quick tweeted. “We’ll be closing our stream room doors at the start of tonight’s ‘Ken Griffey Jr. – Win a Game’ run by @JSR2gamers & PB, and will NOT allow further entry until the run has ended. Please plan ahead if you intend to watch in-person. Thank you!

“This decision is to provide the most comfortable environment for PB in a live environment. Our staff will address the audience in the room prior to the run’s start about what to expect and follow.”

“Who is this PB guy?” I wondered. “Why do they deserve this kind of special consideration?” My brain slowly ticked over, to no avail; finally, at a loss, I went to Google—and suddenly it all came back.

PB is Peanut Butter, and Peanut Butter is a dog—specifically, a Shiba Inu who not only appeared at Awesome Games Done Quick in January but actually set a record for speedrunning the 1985 NES platformer Gyromite. And if you don’t believe me, head over to speedrun.com and check the books.

Peanut Butter works in partnership with speedrunner and streamer JSR, who guides PB through the runs—although as we noted when the Gyromite record was set, “credit really does belong to his very good boy for pressing the right buttons exactly when needed.”

FromSoftware‘s major Elden Ring expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, has arrived to a rapturous reception: including the highest score PC Gamer’s ever given a piece of DLC (sorry, Geralt). There have been a few unforeseen issues, of course, prime among which was the deadliest bottle of perfume ever known, capable of absolutely melting through Erdtree’s fearsome bosses.

The culprit was the Lightning Perfume Bottle’s standard moveset, which creates a series of individual explosions: combining this with the Rolling Sparks Ash of War and aiming at the ground had the unintended effect of making every explosion detonate instantly and on top of one another, resulting in unholy damage numbers that could obliterate the final boss in 13 seconds. This also worked with the Frenzyflame perfume bottle. Well FromSoftware nose what you’ve all been up to, and today’s new patch nerfs that sweet smell of success into the ground.

In one of the more bewildering sentences I’ve ever written for this website, a man in Warwickshire, UK has been jailed after approaching police officers while wielding a Master Sword.

Anthony Bray, of Nuneaton, has been sent down for four months for “possession of a bladed article in public,” per a statement from Warwickshire police (via Wario64). Per the cops, Bray “approached officers with the item in his hand visible,” in Nuneaton town centre, “at which point he was arrested as he was carrying a bladed article.”

One of Elden Ring’s greatest joys is the freedom it provides for exploring different philosophies of combat. Maybe you favor the tried-and-true strategy of hitting things with extremely large swords. Maybe you delight in the arts of high wizardry, measured in laser beams and hurled boulders. The options are endless—but they’re also wrong. Thanks to the new thrusting shields from Shadow of the Erdtree, players are discovering that they’ve been wasting their time finding the best builds for blood loss or Frenzied Flame incantations. Instead, they should’ve been asking one question: What if I was attacking while I was blocking?

Shadow of the Erdtree introduced two thrusting shields, a new weapon type based on a simple concept: blocking things is great, but blocking things would be better if it didn’t keep you from hitting things. Presumably aided by the guidance of some divine benefactor, FromSoft designed the ultimate weapon to finally answer that age-old conundrum—by which I mean they made  shields what got pointy bits on them so you can poke guys while you’re blocking their hits. 

We may never see a lower price for the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 than what I caught it going for over the weekend, and that’s because it appears to have been a complete accident. Samsung discounted its ultrawide 49-inch OLED gaming monitor by £1,400—bringing it down to just £199.

To put that into perspective, this is a brand new gaming monitor that we scored 90% in our recent G9 OLED review. Though we looked at the cheaper model, the G93SC. The one discounted over the weekend was the version with smart TV functionality built-in, the G95SC. We thought that smart functionality pretty needless on a gaming monitor presumably connected to a fully-functioning gaming PC and yet I wouldn’t say no to it at that price.