Apple iPhone cases suck. I bought a silicone one for my iPhone 16 Pro and it’s started falling to bits this week – despite me being a very light user of the case itself. (In the sense I work from home and the iPhone only rarely leaves the house.) Given that I have a lovely editor, I got to grumble about this over at Stuff in ‘Why I am never buying another iPhone case from Apple’. 

Got a way with words? Outlier will hand your ego back to you. It’s yet another game that presents you with a grid of words. The twist is that you have to keep thinking of unusual ones. Use the same ones too often and your score gets docked. It’s a fantastic game to dip into now and again, and it’s now part of my best browser games roundup.

Netflix will shut down two game studios. Game File and others reported on this. The news isn’t surprising but it is nonetheless disappointing. Games always felt an odd fit for Netflix, and even today I see people angrily saying that they don’t want to have to open the Netflix app to play games. So Netflix’s messaging about the product itself didn’t break through. (It’s a bunch of standalone mobile downloads that require a Netflix login to run.) But this is also another example of how tough things are on mobile, alongside a reality check for all those people who claimed Netflix would be mobile gaming kind and Apple Arcade was doomed.

Wolf(enstein) 3D comes to Game Boy Color. Shane McCafferty is apparently some kind of wizard. Having previously got an excellent version of OutRun running on Game Boy Color and then Roguecraft GB, now he’s released WOLF. Suffice to say, the hardware was never supposed to run such games. I can only imagine that, by next week, Shane will have GTA V running on the thing.

Words are important. That became evident this week when the British government decided to scare the wits out of everyone by using the national alert system to warn about the risk of wildfires. Terrifying as the alert was (ARE THE BOMBS FALLING?) and problematic as the tech was (I know several people who received the alarm hours after everyone else), the wording was also an issue. As Simon Cox said on Bluesky, language for alerts needs to be simple. If there’s a fire, shout FIRE! Don’t say “Excuse me, everyone, but it appears that an uncontrolled conflagration has taken hold within the premises and we’d cordially invite you to exit with utmost haste and proceed to a safe haven to avoid any advancing combustion”. 

Climate change is rubbish. Beavers are not. As ever, humanity spends billions trying to correct its own screw-ups. And then we reintroduce a handful of beavers and they sort everything with their magical terraforming powers. More beavers, please, and fewer tech bros.