Wake up! These spider-looking phenomena just spotted on Mars are clearly Helldivers 2 bugs preparing for a surprise attack
Gamemaster Joel is clearly up to his old tricks, and we will not be fooled.
Stop me if you've heard one of these lines of propaganda before. Bugs can't fly. The Automatons haven't developed aerial gunships yet. There's no such thing as a heavy machine gun. These images from the surface of Mars are just "seasonal eruptions of carbon dioxide gas," not thousands of alien spiders gathering for an imminent attack on us, the good citizens of Super Earth.
Yeah, right.
Our colleagues over at Live Science and the esteemed members of the scientific community on whom they report seem convinced that this satellite imagery of the surface of Mars is perfectly innocent, despite all appearances to the contrary. "The dark, spindly formations were spotted in a formation known as Inca City in Mars' southern polar region. Images taken by ESA's Mars Express orbiter and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter show dark clusters of dots that appear to have teeny little legs, not unlike baby spiderlings huddling together," Live Science writes.
"The formations are actually channels of gas measuring 0.03 to 0.6 miles (45 meters to 1 kilometer) across. They originate when the weather starts to warm in the southern hemisphere during Martian spring, melting layers of carbon dioxide ice. The warmth causes the lowest layers of ice to turn to gas, or sublimate."
At PC Gamer, we're not so easily fooled. After months of Arrowhead Studios' lies and deception, we recognize a mounting Helldivers threat when we see one. Clearly the bugs have made it to the Sol System—we recognize a scuttling horde of vile Terminids when we see them.
Suspiciously, there's zero mention of this impending threat on any of Arrowheads' social media channels. Not so much as a clue as to the dire threat that awaits Super Earth. Ha! What better proof of a cover-up? Arrowhead's recent orders pitting the community against wave after wave of Automatons is clearly misdirection from the real threat, which will be sprung upon us any day now.
While they may not have been able to see through game master Joel's devious ruse, we applaud our fellow writers at Live Science and the European Space Agency for detecting this threat before it reaches us. With luck, our bravest helldivers will soon be en route to Mars to eradicate this so-called "carbon dioxide gas" threat with their most trusty tools: shotguns, explosives, and orbital bombardments.
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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).