Category: Equipment

I’m not really sure why it works this way, but the Catholic church has released a statement previewing the message that Pope Francis is due to deliver on World Peace Day on 21 September this year. And the Pontiff, clearly having seen the faked image of him in a puffer jacket, is having none of this AI nonsense.

Pope Francis’ address is where the guy who’s got religion will tell you if your sin’s original, and this year’s theme is “Artificial Intelligence and Peace”. The announcement gives a precis of the talk which acknowledges “the remarkable advances made in the field of artificial intelligence” but will go on to rain holy fire about its “rapidly increasing impact on human activity, personal and social life, politics and the economy.”

Get ready to genuflect because Pope Fr…

Call of Duty spawns are always a little wonky on launch day, but they’re rarely as entertaining as this Modern Warfare 3 bug. Some console folk hopping into multiplayer early (presumably employing the good ol’ New Zealand region switch trick) are getting swept up in a nonstop bullet barrage as the map Quarry will sometimes spawn every player in the lobby at the same spot.

The results are a sensory nightmare of constant gunfire, blood squibs, and killstreak chimes. Not even the deliberately claustrophobic layouts of Rust or Shipment can compare to the wrath of the Quarry corner. 

modernwarfareiii from r/ModernWarfareIII

The culprit for the Quarry bug seems to be a specific mode: Hardpoint. Players in the comments of Reddit user…

Like I pointed out at the end of last year, mid-January to early February was pretty damn big for gaming. Games like Palworld I did not see coming, while others like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Tekken 8 have been having their moments. One game I pointed out but didn’t particularly expect to bang was Granblue Fantasy: Relink, a JRPG from a relatively niche franchise that’s gone through its fair share of development hell.

Yet here we are, nearly two weeks after release, and the game has kinda banged. It managed to sell 1 million copies in just 11 days across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Steam. Even on Steam alone it’s been doing pretty dang well for itself, regularly breaking 100,000 concurrent players over the past week-and-a-half and nabbing itself a spot on the…

I love Ramón Salazar, Resident Evil 4’s ridiculous little lord boy who manages to look like a child and an old man all at once, while somehow only being 20 years old, but his boss fight can be a bit of a chore in the recent remake. Luckily, there’s a way around it: Pelt that tiny aristo with eggs.

Spotted by Polygon, the trick actually involves RE4’s rare golden eggs, which you’d normally use to fully restore your health. But if you hang onto the ones you pick up long enough to use them in Salazar’s boss fight, you can take him down in just a couple of tosses. It works in any difficulty mode, too: You can see Larxa, a streamer, obliterate him using the method in hardcore mode in the tweet below.

The only trouble is that golden eggs can be hard to find, and you’ll prob…

Jon Peddie Research has just wheeled out its latest analysis of the graphic card market. And, boy, it ain’t pretty. Sales continue to fall. This time around, sales for the first quarter of 2023 are down 38% on the same period last year and 12% down on the last quarter of 2022.

Of course, these latest slumps come on top of the massive 50% year-on-year cratering of sales at the end of 2022 reported by JPR. Not good, is it?

Figures like these do come with a few caveats, however. By way of example, JPR erroneously included 60,000 Intel data centre GPUs into its figures last time around, only to have to rapidly adjust it figures. Errors can always be made, but the fact that its original figures suddenly put Intel on par with AMD with GPU sales should have rung alarm bells as bein…

CD Projekt Red’s two biggest RPG hits, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, are both known for big main quests and engaging characters, but more than anything you’ll hear people consistently bring up the little adventures they have between other stories. In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC this past week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Pawel Sasko said that’s mostly because they’re thinking of lots of ideas and only using the best ones.

“A good designer has an acceptance ratio of their ideas of between five to 10%,” said Sasko, “If someone has 10%, this is probably one of the best people we have in the team.” “

Sasko emphasized that for CD Projekt the key to weeding out the bad ideas was in the process of having quest designers pitch all of their ideas to the team so that …

Harold Halibut is one of the more intriguing videogame ideas I’ve seen in a while. It’s “a handmade narrative game about friendship and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean,” which is interesting in its own right. But it also employs a stop-motion visual style reminiscent of games like The Neverhood or Armikrog, or (for those of a certain age) those classic 1960s holiday movies. We got a closer look at Harold Halibut at the PC Gaming Show in 2023, and now you can take a piece of it for a spin courtesy of the demo that’s now available on Steam.

The demo promises about 1.5 hours of gameplay from the very beginning of Harold Halibut, although developer Slow Bros. said some people have needed twice that time to get through it. It’s a chunky demo, clocking in at 5…

Cities: Skylines 2 has announced that eight new regional building themes will come to the city builder via the Paradox Mods distribution platform. Created by a variety of well-known modders from the Cities Skylines modeling scene, the new packs will be Japan, UK, East-coast USA, West-coast USA, China, France, East Europe, and Germany

Spread across these thematic regions will be over 2500 new assets. These will join the two already in-game, the more generic European and American themes.

“We’ve teamed up with some of your favourite creators, including Titan, bsquiklehousen, Darf, RichardShi, MacWelshman, Badi_Dea, Feindbold, Gurny, and many more, to bring you 8 Free Region Packs, coming soon to Paradox Mods!,” said the announcement. Accompanying the announcement was a teaser t…

A new Bloomberg report says Electronic Arts has cancelled development of a new game based on the Apex Legends and Titanfall series that was in development at Respawn Entertainment.

The report, which cites three sources, says the cancelled project was a singleplayer game codenamed Titanfall Legends and set in the shared Apex/Titanfall universe. It was reportedly being directed by Mohammad Alavi, until his departure from the studio in 2022.

That would presumably be the project Alavi teased on Twitter in July 2021. “We’re developing a brand new singleplayer adventure from Respawn Entertainment,” he said at the time. “We’re a small, but ambitious team with a history of dreaming big and making splashes.”

Alavi’s LinkedIn page indicates the same thing, saying he was “creativ…

Come, ye weary faithfuls who have held fast to the dying flame—Grand Theft Auto 6 is upon us after ten long years. First, a rumour, then an official confirmation, and now, an official confirmation with a number attached. The sky may fall next.

As posted to Rockstar Games’ official twitter account, the GTA 6 trailer (slated to release in December) will be setting the internet on fire next week.

Just to reiterate this groundbreaking announcement, we will be getting an official, non-leaked look at an honest-to-god new GTA game Tuesday December 5 at 9 am Eastern. That’s 2 pm GMT if you’re in the UK. Not having to rise up bright and early to watch this thing is one of the few advantages of being on rain island as winter sets in.

At the time of writing, it’s been not e…

Apple has emerged largely victorious in the latest round of a legal battle with Epic Games, which focuses on antitrust laws and the way the App Store is run. Epic’s suit, sparked by various shenanigans around the hugely popular Fortnite, says that Apple’s marketplace violates federal law by banning third parties from using their own payment platforms on the operating system: That is, it’s a monopoly.

The suit began in 2020 after Epic updated Fortnite on iOS with a payment workaround, which would bypass Apple’s usual 30% cut. In response, Apple promptly banned the app. Essentially this is all about the cut the platform-holder is taking from third party developers, and whether those developers should have the right to implement their own payment systems. The 2021 judgement in the ca…

Fortnite has temporarily had leaderboards before, with limited-time modes like Solo Showdown and Blitz Showdown adding more competitive options, and Arena mode has its Hype Score and Bus Fare, but now the long-running battle royale is adding a way to determine your worth by labeling yourself Silver or Gold or whatever. As the Fortnite Team at Epic has announced, Arena is being discontinued and ranked play will arrive in the v24.40 update.

Rank improvement will be based on the number of kills a team or solo player scores in a match (with kills later in the match and kills of high-rank players worth more), as well as their placement at the end. A progress bar tracking how far players are from either hitting the next rank or falling back down to the previous one will appear on the le…

There was a small segment for Fallout 76 during the Xbox livestream at the Tokyo Game Show, in which the creative director Jon Rush took a second to celebrate all the wonderful camps made in the game so far and ended by announcing a new feature for Fallout 76 that’ll arrive at the end of the year.

“We wanted to give a huge shoutout to our playerbase over here,” Rush says. “The Japanese Fallout 76 community has been one of our most talented and dedicated. From playtime, to levels, to camp building, you guys have been an absolute joy to watch and play with.” After this, we got a little montage of some of Bethesda’s favourite camps, which are all significantly better than mine. But Bethesda’s time in the showcase wasn’t just spent looking at pretty pictures—there was also an …

I really thought Activision and Microsoft would drag it out at least until June, but nope, one day after launching a not-really-cryptic teaser site at thetruthlies.com, it’s official: Call of Duty is going back to Black Ops.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, as it’s officially known, will—as expected—be revealed on June 9 at the Black Ops 6 Direct stream, which will follow immediately after the Xbox Game Showcase. Details on what we can expect at the show haven’t been shared, but Activision said it will be a “full reveal,” which will presumably include whether they stick with the numbering scheme in the official title.

The current expectation is that Black Ops 6 will carry the series forward from the 1980s setting of the previous game, Black Ops: Cold War, to the Gulf W…

There’s snow on the ground, magic in the air, and the doors on your advent calendar have begun popping open to reveal the treasures inside. That can only mean one thing: It is time to look at Geoff Keighley. The Game Awards—an awards show, but for games—returns tonight, December 7, and promises to bring with it a gamut of premieres and trailers that you’ll probably want to tune in for.

There’s a lot of questions around this year’s show. Will we get Elden Ring DLC news? Will Kojima show off something incomprehensible appended with a release window? Will Swen Vincke be able to hold all of Larian’s awards this time? Pertinent queries all, and there’s only one way to answer them: Watching the show. Or reading our articles about the show. Two ways then, I guess. 

Bandai Namco has a friendly FYI for all the Elden Ring players out there: The big Shadow of the Erdtree expansion arrives on June 20, which is less than two weeks away, and an awful lot of you have work to do before you’re ready to take it on.

Minor spoilers follow:

Back in February, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said players will access Shadow of the Erdtree through Miquella’s cocoon, which is found in the palace of Mohg, Lord of Blood. Naturally, Mohg is not cool with people like you messing with Miquella, so step one of the process is putting the thump on him.

And that’s where the problem lies. As streamer Cohh Carnage pointed out, less than 38% of Elden Ring players on Steam have earned the achievement for collecting Mohg’s head, which means that n…

Working out exactly what the backpack number means in Once Human might take you a little while. It’s kind of unnerving the first time your rucksack—or Cradle as the game calls it—starts beeping and displaying a steadily climbing number. Usually, a counter like this would represent your proximity to something important, perhaps even a hidden treasure.

In Once Human, however, it’s more like when the radiation sensor on your Pip-Boy in a Fallout game starts going off: big numbers and lots of sound means stop and turn around. If you’re just starting out for the first time, you might want some help changing worlds or some Once Human codes for free stuff, but otherwise, here’s that number on your backpack explained.

So what does…

Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has rather cheekily brushed off discussions around a PC port for the game, telling fans to “buy a PS5” if they want to play it. He went on to ask, “Why is it like a PC version is releasing six months later?”

It’s possible that he’s forgetting Square Enix’s own PlayStation Showcase reveal trailer for Final Fantasy 16, because that’s why. The existence of a PC version of the upcoming RPG has been a strange one. The aforementioned reveal trailer very visibly added a footnote that, while the game was a PlayStation exclusive, it would also be on PC. Despite that, Square Enix seems to have done everything in its power to deny the port’s existence since then. All traces of a PC announcement have vanished. The closest we’ve gotten is a recent traile…

When you picture what a Final Fantasy game is, what does your mind jump first to? Shiny, pretty landscapes? Even prettier hair? Cute little creatures? Final Fantasy 16 really doesn’t fit that mould. With high-stakes action combat and a much darker tone, FF16 flips all of your expectations upside down.

The world of Valisthea feels as grubby as Game of Thrones. Both have medieval(-ish) worlds full of warring nobles vying for power with a cruel approach to their citizen’s welfare, and both face impending doom—in Final Fantasy 16’s case, a blight that is draining life and magic from the world, slowly consuming it and leaving it barren.

Those who can use magic without the aid of crystals are feared and marked as “Bearers”—forced to work as slaves and per…

We’re seeing genuinely next-gen gaming PCs actually getting tangible discounts right now, and this RTX 4080 with $260 knocked off the standard price is looking like a great gaming PC deal today. It’s a good-looking, super-powerful rig that’s $2,300 at Newegg right now.

Of course the Nvidia RTX 4080 card—represented here by a Gigabyte Eagle OC version—is the main draw of this machine. While we may not have been bowled over by the value prospect of Nvidia’s second-tier Ada GPU as a drop-in upgrade for the DIY market, when it’s presented inside a prebuilt machine it’s a far more tantalising prospect.

That’s because its $1,200 sticker price is tough to swallow on its own. But when that makes up more than half the price of a full PC, and one that doesn’t stint on the …

Ashfall is a Fallout-inspired MMO set in a world left devastated by—of course—nuclear war. As one of the few survivors of that war, players are forced to leave the safety of their shelter and venture out into the wasteland in search of the Core of Creation, “the key to saving what remains of the world.” That’s pretty much a straight lift from Fallout 2, but Ashfall branches out from its post-nuclear roots into what Netease describes as an “Eastern-inspired wasteland.”

That game world looked potentially interesting when we first checked out Ashfall earlier this year, although it seemed somewhat inconsistent in spots—possibly because the game is being made for mobile devices as well as PC, but also (my own speculation here) because there’s just so much going on: Gi…

Now, I’ll admit my own password hygiene isn’t always the best, though I have graduated from the days when I used “xxxxxx” for a few non-critical accounts under the reverse psychology assumption that it’s so obviously insecure, nobody would bother trying it. Genius, I know. But even I realise a four-character password is a big no-no.

And yet that’s exactly what was used to protect an encrypted file that was critical to the fundamental integrity of the Secure Boot, a UEFI BIOS security layer designed to ensure that a device boots using only the software that is trusted by the PC maker itself.

Ars Technica reports that, “researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Int…

Intel introduced its first hybrid desktop CPU architecture with a mix of Performance and Efficient cores, known as Alder Lake, back in late 2021. AMD isn’t expected to offer its own hybrid CPU for consumers and gamers until Zen 6 arrives and so probably not until 2026.

However, AMD has engineered some new smaller cores roughly equivalent to Intel’s E-cores, known as Zen 4c, and they could be quite a bit more powerful than Intel’s.

Semianalysis has a deep dive on 4c and there are a few take-away highlights. First, AMD’s small cores are bigger. Intel fits roughly four Efficiency cores into the space of one Performance core. AMD’s Zen 4c cores are about half the size of full Zen 4 cores, as found in its latest Ryzen 7000 CPUs.

More broadly, Zen 4c seems to be functionally…

Watch On

Good ol’ Geoff Keighley is back with another festival of games in LA—a sort of expo of electronic entertainment, if you will—and 2024’s Summer Game Fest livestream airs this Friday.

What time does Summer Game Fest start?

Summer Game Fest 2024 is on Friday, June 7 at 2 pm Pacific. That’s 5 pm Eastern, 10 pm in the UK. Find your time zone here.

Where can I watch Summer Game Fest?

You can watch the show live on YouTube  (embedded above) or Twitch. 

Here are some of the appearances that have been teased in advance of this year’s Summer Game Fest:

• Something from Remedy
• The new Skate game
• A Monster Hunter Wilds trailer
• “Special Capcom announcements”
• Dun…
  

30 days ago, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive broke its all-time record for concurrent players like the boss it is. This iteration of the game is eleven years old, while Counter-Strike itself has been around since 1999. Barely one month on, CS:GO has just done it again: This weekend it reached a new peak of 1.4 million concurrent players.

The previous record was 1.32 million in February 2023. The new record was reached on Saturday March 11 at 13:00 UTC, per SteamDB, and is 1,420,183 players at once. This type of sustained growth so far from the game’s release is remarkable and, while many have been theorising about why now, any answer eventually ends up back at the game’s rock -fundamentals. When Valorant came out I thought this might be the game to tempt me away from CS:GO. That …

In an interview at last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the developers behind indie sensations Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon said that the deal some small developers have come to rely on for funding in recent years—like Epic Game Store exclusives and Xbox Game Pass—are no longer what they once were.

“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”

Slay the Spire launched to slow sales in Steam early acc…

Hogwarts Legacy will have more than 100 sidequests, and it won’t just give players something different to do when they need a break. Narrative director Moira Squier told our colleagues at GamesRadar that the way players take on those sideline activities can have an impact on the main campaign.

“The main storyline is complicated and engaging, and involves a variety of different characters and viewpoints, but by giving the player choice moments throughout the game, we allow them to tell their own version of that epic story,” Squier said.

“Even the sidequests, of which there are over 100, allow the player to manipulate the main campaign by virtue of the experiences they’ve had. Interacting with someone in a sidequest will impact how you interact with them in the main storyline,…

I do not want to die in a bug-infested hellscape for nothing. If I’m going to get murdered over and over again in Helldivers 2, I better be getting a big stack of medals out of it. Such rewards haven’t exactly been pouring in, however, since one of the biggest sources, the daily personal orders, hasn’t been working. 

These daily challenges have been a bit iffy since launch for a lot of Helldivers, with countless reports of them not doling out medals upon completion, not updating, or simply not showing up at all. Another victim of the game’s massive population and resulting server issues. Late last month, however, they seemed to vanish for everyone. 

Daily personal orders are not the only way to get medals, of course, but they are one of the best ways to get a big s…

The team over at Arrowhead Games has been wildly busy with Helldivers 2—which is to be expected. After a meteoric rise in concurrent players that forced a raised cap to 700,000, the game’s playerbase has swelled to near-unmanageable levels which, as you might imagine, would keep a community manager very busy.

So busy in fact that Discord mistook said community manager for an automaton. At around 4 pm GMT February 21, Katherine Baskin (who is also the author of those charming Super Earth High Command dispatches you see on the game’s official Discord server) was locked out of her account due to “sending too many DMs too fast.”

“The Helldivers 2 server has over 400,000 people in it and I get [hundreds] of DMs a day about game support, moderation, etc,” Baskin wrote. “Can …

It’s that time again, folks. The Future Games Show is back, this time with its 2023 Spring Showcase, hosted by none other than Briana White and Cody Christian: Aerith and Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

Clocking in at 85 minutes and showing off 45 games, the Future Games Show Spring Showcase will kick off tomorrow, March 23, at 3 pm PDT / 6 pm EDT / 10 pm GMT / 11 pm CET. You can watch it, well, pretty much anywhere that’s capable of displaying video. That means Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, GamesRadar, and (for the first time) TikTok. Remember to set a reminder on YouTube so you can catch it right from the start.

45 games is a heck of a lot, and many of them are set to be a surprise. But to give you a brief taste of what to expect, you can look for…

Final Fantasy 14—a game that itself received a complete 2.0 revamp—will get a 2.0 version of the preview benchmark tool for its upcoming expansion, Dawntrail. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Why? Well, FF14 is having a massive graphics overhaul for its 7.0 update. This isn’t just a few new shaders slapped onto an ailing engine, it’s a complete remodelling of the world’s characters (akin to World of Warcraft’s revamp during Warlords of Draenor) as well as various lighting systems.

The benchmark uses this graphical revamp, so it’s the first time players have been able to see their transformed Warriors of Light. And while community outrage over some model updates does seem a touch over-the-top, I do think FF14 attaches you to your player…

Looks like autumn’s cosy vibes are coming early—and here I’ve been, a summer-avoidant gamer goblin wishing away the sun. Titled Whimsy & Wonder: A Cosy Games collection, the Humble Bundle’s latest entry is composed of some of PC Gamer’s previous cosy faves. 

Proceeds will go to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Legal Defense Fund, and the bundle’s sold over 6,700 copies at the time of writing.

Find a blanket to wrap up warm in and sink into a land of crunchy leaves and pumpkin spice. No, seriously, entering this level of cosy vibes without the proper safety equipment can be dangerous. You’ve been warned.

Cat Cafe Manager

I’ve never had the opportunity to go to a cat cafe, and I am violently jealous of those who have. I fully plan …