Month: September 2024

Soon we will all be Pinocchio. Lies of P releases on September 18, and we say it’s a pretty good time. Our reviewsays the Pinocchio Soulslike “pulls off its gritty Pinocchio retelling, managing the impossibility of incorporating elements from both the folktale and the 1940 film without feeling, y’know, absurd.” 

Those who ordered the digital deluxe edition of Lies of P get a jump on the release date and can start playing, well, right now. While the early access period was meant to start at 8 am PDT on September 15, it was delayed by an hour and 15 minutes due to “technical issues from Steam’s end,” according to developer Neowiz. That issue has now been resolved, but if you’re still having trouble downloading Lies of P, Neowiz recommends clearing your Steam download cache.

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Indie developer Dapper Dog Digital released their “love letter to the Metroidvania genre” this week with BioGun, a platforming action-adventure that takes place entirely inside a whimsically microscopic world of viruses and vaccines. And whimsically enjoyable it is, with a hand-drawn world and characters that have a wide, delightful, and cartoonish variety in their design.

As you explore the chambers and environment of the cell-eat-cell world you find yourself in, your little vaccine upgrades their DNA and modifies their playstyle using nanotech to get new powers, tweaking how they move and shoot, and earning all kinds of new guns for the side-scrolling 360-degree shooting—which I’ve gotta say feels pretty tight and controls well as of launch.

Also, the soundtrack is r…

Eurogamer’s interview with Mac Walters, who was a writer on all three games in the Mass Effect trilogy before becoming creative director of Mass Effect: Andromeda and then Mass Effect Legendary Edition’s project director, makes for a good read. Going all the way back to the series’ origin as “Jack Bauer in space”, it’s a revealing history of BioWare’s work on Mass Effect.

Some of the most interesting material covers Andromeda, which Walters joined late. He’d been working on Anthem along with most of BioWare Edmonton while Andromeda was being developed by BioWare Montreal, previously a support studio responsible for most of Mass Effect 2’s N7 missions, Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer, the Omega DLC, and so on. Only after Mass Effect director Casey Hudson left BioWare in 2014 was Walter…

Ready yourselves for a special edition of the Meta Quest 3. The theme? Xbox. The point? It comes with Xbox controllers and Game Pass in the box.

Meta has announced that it will be opening up the OS included with the Meta Quest 3 to other hardware manufacturers, including Lenovo and Asus. The latter is supposedly creating a dedicated gaming headset with all the ROG trimmings, too. But not to be left out, Microsoft reportedly has teamed up with Meta for its own headset, an Xbox themed Meta Quest.

“Xbox and Meta teamed up last year to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) to Meta Quest, letting people play Xbox games on a large 2D virtual screen in mixed reality. Now, we’re working together again to create a limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox,” Meta says.

Assumed…

Anno 1800 gained an impressive score of 84 from us back when it was reviewed in April 2019.  Reviewer Rick Lane said this “rich and sumptuous city-builder” was “comfortably the most engrossing city-builder I’ve played since Cities Skylines”, but If you’ve not had the chance to try it then the Anno 1800 Free Week event is an opportunity to find out for yourself. The free week runs from November 2, 4PM UTC, to November 6, 8AM UTC, on PC through Ubisoft Connect, Epic, and Steam.

With over 10,000 reviews on Steam and 81% of them being positive, this City Builder’s reputation speaks for itself. If the recently released City Skylines 2 isn’t quite scratching your strategic planning itch, then a free week with Anno might be exactly  what you’re looking for. You’ll start o…

Are you playing Mortal Kombat 1 on Steam? Have you noticed that your free drive space has been disappearing without obvious cause and at a potentially alarming pace? If so, there’s good news, or at least an explanation that will help you deal with it: It turns out that Mortal Kombat 1’s crash logs are really big.

A crash log is a file generated when a game craps out that provides a record of data like when it happened, what you were doing, and what else your PC was running when it happened. Developers use crash logs to figure out why a game isn’t working like it’s supposed to, so they can track down and fix whatever problem ails it. These files are typically very small, because in most cases they’re just a dump of raw text, largely indecipherable to non-programmers.

In the c…

Apex Legends is going through a bit of a rough patch right now, as players have reported account resets after the latest update. While the issue has now been fixed, there are still a couple of problems hanging around. Respawn has just told people to “hang tight” and wait for more information. 

It all started earlier today when Respawn made note of all the reports: “We’ve rolled out an update to address this issue. Any account logging in now will not experience any lost progress or content,” says the Respawn Twitter account. “For players who are missing progress or content after our update this morning—please hang tight for now. We’re working on an additional fix to restore your accounts to their state before our update, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.”

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Blizzard has put a halt to trading in Diablo 4 while it works to fix a duplication exploit that came to light over the weekend, and warned that players caught taking advantage of the bug could find themselves in trouble.

“We’ve suspended player trading in Diablo 4 until further notice due to a duplication exploit,” community manager Rich Bantegui wrote in the Blizzard forums. “We are working on a fix to amend this issue and will update you once we’ve reinstated the ability to trade. We will continue to monitor this activity to ensure a healthy playing experience for all.

“Any account that engages in gold and item duplication exploits will be actioned in accordance with our End User License Agreement.”

To be specific, Blizzard’s EULA prohibits the creation, …

The launch of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree means, among other things, a resurrection of the timeless debate over difficulty in Dark Souls games. In the eyes of many soulslikers, Elden Ring was notably gentler than its predecessors because if you’re getting hammered by one demigod clown or another, you can always take off, do something else for a while, and come back later when you’re better equipped to clean house.

Even so, Elden Ring does not have any kind of difficulty selector: It is what it is, and you’re either the windshield or the bug. And this is how it needs to be, according to game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who said in an interview with The Guardian that decreasing the difficulty might open up the game to more players, but would also compromise the experience.

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Watch On

War is hell: The scent of cordite, the clamour of artillery fire, the blood and the smoke and the guys from Five Nights at Freddy’s popping up randomly to scare you. It’s a nightmare made flesh, and something we ought to have grown past as a society, but which remains as a sad holdover from another age (2014, release year of Five Nights at Freddy’s).

Or, at least, that’s the case in Five Nights at Hearts of Iron 4, a mod/crime from an author named Krumtum that you can currently find over at the Hearts of Iron 4 Steam Workshop page. It does exactly what it sounds like: Mashing up the characters of FNAF and the unrivalled destruction of the greatest conflict in human history in a real peanut butter/chocolate-style combo.

“Have you always wanted HOI 4 to be more scary?” asks ou…

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s not-so-happy tree friend is set for a nerf. Players have been in an uproar about the Gaia skin—which turns MW3’s Nova into a kind of arboreal sleep paralysis demon that some people liken to Groot—ever since it was introduced as part of the game’s season 6 battle pass. But now Sledgehammer says not to worry: The studio is going to temporarily disable the skin soon while it works on a nerf.

The news came as part of a recent AMA on Reddit, in which Sledgehammer devs answered COD players’ questions about the game and its future. One such player, Deagil_, asked the team what it was “going to do about the Gaia skin and the problems it has brought forward to MW3 from MW2?”

If you’re not sure as to why the so-called Groot skin has gotten …

The Dornier Do X was the biggest, heaviest, and most powerful flying boat in the world when it launched in 1929. It was also magnificent, weird, brashly ambitious, deeply flawed, and inevitably doomed—and, for those and unrelated reasons, my favorite plane of all time. We’ll never be able to fly in one in real life (they’re all long gone) but now we can get a sense of what it was like in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which just added the great flying boat as a new Local Legend.

The Do X was a massive beast, powered by 12 engines generating more than 7,200 horsepower. Even with all that juice propelling it, the sheer bulk of the plane meant that it generally flew low and slow, especially when carrying a full load of passengers. What it promised in place of haste was high-end lu…

Every time I think I’ve mentally adjusted to Magic: The Gathering’s crossovers, a new one comes along and further discombobulates me. Hatsune Miku and King Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail will soon be able to share the same deck in the same TCG. What a time to be alive.

The crossover event is part of Magic: The Gathering’s “Secret Lair” series—essentially, a bunch of normal cards get reskinned as part of ongoing collaborations with artists and properties. The set will take place in two parts—one with five cards, the other with three (plus a token). Courtesy of IGN’s exclusive preview, here are the nine cards you’ll be able to get your hands on, plus the card art as shared on the Magic: The Gathering subreddit.

• Tim the Enchanter, replacing the “Pr…
  

In the tech manufacturing equivalent of digging around down the back of an old sofa, Framework has unearthed a bunch of completely functional old laptop mainboards while shutting down its original Framework 13 factory. It’s checked them out, updated the firmware, and is now selling them for a fraction of the original price, with an i5 board costing just $199.

That’s a hell of a price for the basis of your own tiny custom PC. Offering older hardware for a discount is one of the ways Framework is able to offer more of a value proposition compared to the expense of its full current-gen systems. And it’s also a great way to reduce waste and ensure they get used and not just dumped into landfill.

This commitment to re-use is one of the reasons I’m so into what Framework is doing …

War never changes, but Fortnite sure does, and soon it will change yet again: The Fortnite Twitter account teased today that Bethesda’s famed RPG series Fallout is on its way to the game.

The image of the Brotherhood of Steel power armor helmet is unmistakable, while the emojis in the body of the tweet are a little more subtle but still clearly a play on the famous image of a winking, thumbs-up Vault Boy.

There’s no indication as to what sort of Fallout stuff the crossover will include, but there’s plenty to choose from: Power armor is an obvious choice, along with the famous blue and yellow Vault jumpsuits and surely some form of Vault Boy implementation. Post-nuclear map features also seem like a good bet. And maybe some Ink Spots?

It’s been almost 10 years since the…

Diablo 4 has been in the wild for over a week now, and one of its occasional delights is the wild: the glimpses of fauna amidst the hell-beasts, the cute little bunnies out snuffling for food as the battle twixt good and evil unfolds around them. Inevitably, as you and the forces of hell are splashing AoEs across Sanctuary, there is collateral damage. And while you’ll never weep a tear for the thousands of ghouls slaughtered, seeing the corpse of a fluffy thing caught in the crossfire surely melts even a Demon Hunter’s heart.

For reasons best known to itself, Blizzard decided this was just the job for what I’m going to call the game’s worst achievement: Endangered Species. The achievement gives a list of various wildlife in the game that players have to work their way through and,…

The record is broken, the titan is fallen, yesterday’s revolutionary upstart has become today’s defeated incumbent: The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine expansion—CDPR’s excellent swansong for one of the best RPGs of all time—has officially been supplanted by Shadow of the Erdtree. 

In the eight years since it released, Blood and Wine has claimed the record for “best-reviewed expansion for a roleplaying game,” but that’s just history now. In a tweet earlier today, CDPR congratulated FromSoft on nabbing the title out from under it: “Elden Ring gets to wear that crown now,” read a tweet from The Witcher’s official account, “Congratulations to the entire team at FromSoftware on their stellar work!”

CDPR is taking the development gracefully. In fact, it looks like a s…

Guns are characters, and over its 31 years in the videogame gun business, Doom can claim some real superstars, the FPS equivalents of Brando or Hepburn.

Newly announced Doom: The Dark Ages kicked off today’s Xbox Games Showcase with another stunner, an over-the-top contraption that is instantly the thing I am most eager to shoot in this new quasi-medieval Doom prequel that Bethesda says “tells the epic cinematic origin story of the Doom Slayer’s rage.” 

It’s some kind of wood chipper scattergun that uses skulls as ammo, and the way it animates is ridiculous. Slowing down the playback of the trailer, I see a door sliding away to lift a fresh skull into a rectangular chamber, beneath which is at least one more visible skull (implying the existence of a skull magazi…

All hail the orb, crypto-fuelled hoarder of biometric data. Such is the will of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, with his Worldcoin cryptocurrency-adjacent iris scanning project. A project that is under scrutiny from government officials.

Yes, Worldcoin is now scanning the irises of humans world over. The purpose? To connect (and collect the data of) would-be crypto investors, so that they can be inducted into the totally anonymous crypto-bro ingroup that Worldcoin is offering. As well as provide a platform for “global proof‑of‑personhood” in a world consumed ever more by AI.

Which doesn’t sound anything close to a Torment Nexus moment.

“World ID is a new privacy-first decentralized identity protocol”, the site notes. “It enables seamless sign in to websites, mobile ap…

At the end of March Microsoft announced a new preview version of its Agility SDK (via Guru3D) which incorporates a new feature that could deliver gaming PCs that no longer use traditional system memory. Just like an Xbox Series X.

For now, though, GPU Upload Heaps is here to allow both the CPU and the graphics card simultaneous access to the video memory strapped to the GPU. This means that your PC will no longer need to copy large chunks of data from the CPU to the GPU, or therefore retain copies of data both in system memory and in VRAM.

The upshot of this is that, in certain situations, you will see increased game performance because CPU and RAM utilisation should be decreased. 

GPU Upload Heaps seems to be another step on the journey started by the introductio…

After the FTC submitted a filing criticizing Microsoft’s Game Pass price increases, the Xbox parent company responded with a letter of its own to the US Ninth Circuit Court, first spotted by Tom Warren of The Verge. In it, Microsoft argues that the new cheapest console Game Pass tier is actually a better deal for consumers despite the $3 per month price hike, because it also unlocks online multiplayer functionality now⁠—otherwise $10 a month on Xbox.

“Earlier this month, Microsoft announced changes to its gaming subscription service, Game Pass, to provide consumers valuable options at different price points,” the letter begins. “Microsoft is offering a new service tier, Game Pass Standard, which offers access to hundreds of back-catalog games and [emphasis the…

Blizzard is trialing some small changes to Overwatch 2’s format in a series of short-lived Hacked Events. According to a Blizzard blog post earlier this year, this is an effective way to “quickly understand what [players] like and possibly implement changes to improve gameplay.” 

The Previous event introduced faster respawn times, payload speeds, and match starts. While I didn’t massively adore most of these changes, they didn’t make a real difference to my games, unlike the most recent event, Double Trouble. 

Opening Overwatch 2 after a long day just to see the Quick Play icon turn purple is disarming enough, but learning that this was part of a Hacked Event, which removes the one hero limit for Role and Open queue, allowing teams to play two of the same support o…

Despite being based on one of the most iconic RPG series of all time, there’s something oddly dry about the upcoming board game Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz. Set during the events of Mass Effect 3, the premise is basically a sidequest that never was—taking place over the course of a single night as Shepard and crew board and fight their way through a crashed Cerberus ship to recover research data.

Even for those who can still remember the specific story details of a game that came out 12 years ago, the stakes here feel low. Why does this pretty minor mission matter, when we already know how the wider story plays out? It’s a serviceable excuse for a series of linked combat missions, but there’s no drama to it or any hook to pull you in. And from what I’ve played so far of …

Nathan Evans is a singer from the fine town of Airdrie in Scotland and, during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, became TikTok famous for a very old reason: sea shanties. This young man is a master at belting out the salty old songs of our forebears, and his renditions of classic sailor songs found a wide audience: over 2020 his versions of standards like Leave Her Johnny, The Scotsman and The Wellerman were all over TikTok with millions of views.

Someone at Bethesda clearly noticed, because in Starfield there’s an occasional random encounter you’ll have in orbit: a spaceship with a notably Scottish captain singing shanties that have been adapted for the cold vastness of space. The IMDb credits for the game show that this is Evans himself floating in the void, ligh…

It’s been more than two years since Ubisoft announced that the original Splinter Cell is getting a full remake, and we’ve heard virtually nothing about it since then. But eager fans are hoping that void will finally be filled during the next Ubisoft Forward showcase happening in June.

Ubisoft announced its next online showcase on April 3, promising new information on “updates and upcoming releases.” No further details were shared—don’t want to spoil any surprises—but long-suffering Splinter Cell fans perked up when Twitter user MauroNL3 noted that Ubisoft Toronto, the studio making the game, had changed its Facebook header and profile images to Sam Fisher’s iconic glowing goggles just the day before.

It is, admittedly, very thin as evidence goes, and unfortunatel…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the few RPGs rich in evil options where I actually stuck to mostly heroic deeds in my first playthrough. But I’m doing my total scumbag run at the moment, which means the news that Larian’s working on some more evil endings is music to my ears. 

Chatting to IGN, CEO Swen Vincke teased some of what the studio’s got planned for us before it bids farewell to the Forgotten Realms for good—specifically, more campaign conclusions for evil-inclined adventurers.

“So they’re working on the evil endings right now,” Vincke said. “I’ve seen some of them. They’re really evil. So the evil players will be satisfied with that.” 

You can already screw everyone over and herald in a dark age through your actions in Baldur’s Gate 3’s final moments…

Elden Ring wasn’t just FromSoftware’s biggest game ever: it was also the studio’s most high-profile collaboration with someone outside the world of game development. George R.R. Martin wrote the lore for The Lands Between, which FromSoftware built upon to create their fantasy game’s story. FromSoftware hasn’t done that kind of collaboration many times in its history, but there is one other famous example. Throughout the Armored Core series, FromSoftware has relied on mecha designer Shoji Kawamori to guide the visual style of the hulking piles of metal players pilot and destroy.

Kawamori isn’t famous on the international level of George R.R. Martin, but he is a legend within his old field. Or fields—he started working as an animator in the anime industry as a teenage…

Are you ready for yet another battlefield in the war between AMD and Nvidia? Well, it turns out you can get very different results when driving certain HDR monitors depending on whether you are using AMD or Nvidia graphics hardware.

As Monitors Unboxed explains, the reasons for this are complex. It’s not necessarily that AMD or Nvidia is better. But it certainly adds a layer of complexity to the whole “what graphics card do I buy?” conundrum. As if things weren’t already complicated enough, what with ray tracing, FSR versus DLSS, and all the other stuff you have to weigh up when choosing a new graphics cards.

The investigation here centres on the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF. That’s the slightly cheaper version of Alienware’s 34-inch OLED gaming monitor which ditches Nvidia’s G-Sy…