Gaming Roundtable
- Matt: Finished FF7 Remake, starting Mewgenics, and playing Core Keeper with his wife.
- Brandon: EQL.
Wolverine: Sony's Mixed Bag
Insomniac's Wolverine launched September 15 as a $69.99 PS5 exclusive and drew the studio's weakest critic score in years: a 77 on Metacritic from about 115 reviews, against 90 for Spider-Man 2 and 87 for the first Spider-Man. MP1st calls it the lowest-scored single-player PlayStation-developed AAA game since Days Gone in 2019, though Push Square notes a couple of smaller PlayStation titles scored lower. Critics knocked the linear structure, repetitive combat, a 12-15 hour campaign, and scent-trail handholding that can't be switched off, while praising Liam McIntyre's Logan and the weighty combat.
Players and wallets tell a different story: the PS Store rating opened at 4.85/5, and Alinea Analytics estimates 1.9 million PS5 copies in about three days, which would make it Sony's top first-party game of 2026 so far (an analyst estimate, not Sony's numbers). Insomniac says it's gathering feedback and hinted the scent trails could be fixed. So is Wolverine a bad game, or just a not-Spider-Man game?
Copilot Wants to Be Your Operating System
On September 25, Microsoft rolled out a rebuilt Copilot that Satya Nadella called a "new OS for work." It comes in three parts:
- Home chats while looking at your files and can take over Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
- Code builds apps from natural-language prompts using GitHub Copilot's tools.
- Autopilot (a rebrand of Scout, not the Intune Autopilot) runs in the cloud, keeps working while you sleep, and has its own identity, memory and workspace inside your tenant.
Home and Code roll out to Frontier in the coming weeks and Autopilot goes to private preview; for now it's still just an app. The pricing is the real story. Microsoft 365 Copilot stays $30 per user per month for everyday use, but the heavy agent work (Cowork, Code, Autopilot and frontier models) bills through Copilot Credits at $0.01 each pay-as-you-go. New Copilot Business licenses bought through CSP default to usage-based billing with an adjustable $10 per user per month limit.
Microsoft's case: you choose models and match cost to value, nothing is billed until an admin creates a spending policy, spend can be capped at tenant, group and user levels, and its own testing found Cowork 30-40% cheaper per prompt than a rival (a claim not independently verified). EVP Charles Lamanna compared it to filling up your gas tank at the pump. The other side: Cowork is the first mainstream Microsoft product to require both per-user and usage billing, pay-as-you-go has no ceiling unless you set one, and GitHub's move to usage billing in June saw some developers' bills jump. We ask who's really in control, and who governs an agent that acts with your credentials and never logs off.
ShinyHunters Takes On the FBI
On September 22, ShinyHunters claimed on its dark-web site to have breached the FBI. The FBI says it's aware of claims of unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is investigating, and the portal went offline. The group claims data on nearly all agents and job applicants; its sample covers about 5,000 agents, with names, home addresses, Social Security numbers and assignments. 404 Media found at least some of the sample appears authentic, but Reuters couldn't establish where it came from, and the FBI hasn't determined whether its own infrastructure or a third-party provider was involved.
The hackers say they pulled 2-3 TB through an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day, which is unconfirmed. Their demand isn't money: they want the FBI to retract a May 2026 advisory that described the group's methods and told victims not to pay. The takeaway for defenders: threat actors read your advisories and take them personally, and if the way in really was a zero-day, no patch SLA would have stopped it. (Separately, a Pentagon breach at the Defense Manpower Data Center exposed records on about 2.76 million living and 294,000 deceased people, with no known link to the FBI incident.)
Watch & Listen
Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/digitalascent/ (audio-only episode)
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/TheDigitalAscent
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@TheDigitalAscent
Hosts & Credits
- Hosts: Brent, Matt, Brandon
- Technical Design / Production: Brent
Sources
- Upcomer — Marvel's Wolverine is the lowest-scored PlayStation Studios game of the PS5 era. Players scored it 4.85 out of 5
- MP1st — Marvel's Wolverine Is Now the Lowest Scored AAA Single-Player PlayStation-Developed Game Since Days Gone
- Push Square — Wolverine PS5 is one of the lowest rated first-party Sony games of the generation
- VGC — Marvel's Wolverine review: uninspired gameplay leaves Logan feeling declawed
- GamesRadar+ — Analyst estimates Marvel's Wolverine sold 1.9M copies in 3 days
- Khel Now — Marvel's Wolverine reportedly sold nearly 2 million copies
- TechSpot — Microsoft calls Copilot's biggest update a new OS for work
- TweakTown — Microsoft overhauls Copilot once again, CEO calls it a new OS for work
- Microsoft Learn — Usage-based billing overview: Copilot Credits
- Microsoft Tech Community — Evolution of the Copilot pricing model
- Topedia — New Microsoft 365 Copilot Business subscriptions from CSP partners will come with PAYG preconfigured
- GitHub Blog — GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
- Windows Latest — Microsoft begins removing Copilot from Windows 11, starting with Notepad and Snipping Tool
- AP (via NY1) — FBI investigates apparent breach of its jobs website; hackers claim to have sensitive employee data
- SecurityWeek — ShinyHunters claims FBI hack, demands retraction of threat report
- Nextgov — ShinyHunters claims FBI data theft, demands bureau retract cyber warning
- Help Net Security — FBI job portals remain offline after ShinyHunters claims breach via PeopleSoft zero-day