Category: Equipment

It won’t actually hit the markets for another couple of years, but Intel’s forthcoming Lunar Lake CPU architecture has made an early appearance in the SiSoft Sandra database. The entry has all kinds of confusing information and while it only covers the numbers from just one benchmark, they’re actually quite promising.

Intel’s roadmaps for its CPU architectures can get rather confusing at times, especially since the various designs don’t get used in every segment. For example, we’re currently on Raptor Lake and will be for the next generation of Core processors. After that, it’ll be Meteor Lake, which is bringing in a whole new way of putting chips together for Intel.

However, Meteor Lake won’t really be used for desktop CPUs, in that you won’t be able to go out and buy one t…

GeForce Now is a great way to game on a handheld gaming PC, such as a Steam Deck. You can play games that aren’t available on that Linux-powered handheld. For example, Destiny 2. And usually you’ll save heaps of battery by streaming rather than playing locally. What’s not been so great is trying to install GeForce Now as something akin to an easy-to-use app. It’s traditionally required a good deal of tweaking, and I’ve long wished for a GeForce Now app on Steam Deck. Thankfully, Nvidia is now going to do the brunt of that fiddling with the settings for you.

New GeForce Now installation files are now available for Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Legion Go, and the MSI Claw. These include a script that will effectively install Google Chrome, the web browser of choice for running GeForce Now, …

I’ve never seen an episode of Peaky Blinders, the Netflix series about a gang of Birmingham criminals set at the tail end of World War I. Hell, until I looked it up just now I assumed the name was some obscure rhyming slang, but it turns out they were named for their fashionable peaked flat caps. To get to the point, three years ago Peaky Blinders was turned into a top-down heist puzzle game in the vein of Commandos or Shadow Tactics called Peaky Tactics: Mastermind and now you can get it for free.

That’s surprising, because Peaky Blinders: Mastermind was delisted from Steam on December 30 of last year, presumably because the license expired. It’s still not available to buy on PC, though it is also one of the current free games you get with an Amazon Prime subscription as well as …

Hideki Kamiya, formerly of Capcom and PlatinumGames, is now out in the world as a civilian. The legendary director is responsible for some of the best action games ever made, in particular Bayonetta, but following his departure from Platinum earlier this year (a company he co-founded) it doesn’t seem like he’s going to be involved much in games anymore. 

Hopefully I’m wrong, but at the moment Kamiya seems content to make YouTube videos showing off his ludicrous car and talking about his love of aquariums. In the latest he addresses some audience questions about his games and, when asked about Bayonetta, the violins really start playing.

“I worked on Bayonetta 1, 2, 3 and Origins,” Kamiya said. “I’ve talked about this in various interviews: that the Bayonetta series woul…

In a rare act of restraint, it took me an entire four days to watch the eight episodes of Netflix’s new Castlevania series, Castlevania: Nocturne. It really was worth savoring: season after season Powerhouse Animation Studios has upped its game, and it’s been nearly two-and-a-half years since the final season of the show’s original run concluded. That was a lot of waiting, but it sounds like the wait for more Nocturne will be shorter. 

Today Netflix returned Nocturne has been greenlit for season 2, and the team even had a teaser trailer ready to go. 

“SEASON 2 of Castlevania: Nocturne is OFFICIALLY IN PRODUCTION!!!” co-director Samuel Deats wrote on Friday. “Those are ACTUAL Storyboards, Layouts, and Animation for Season 2. 😁 …. Sorry to keep you waiting.…

After a whole 48 hours of mourning for Hearthstone’s doomed Mercenaries mode, it’s now time move on in the form of a new mini-set coming to Standard next week. I’m delighted to say that Naxx will once again soon be out. Yes, the next slimline expansion is called Return to Naxxramas and it drops on February 14, because card games are for the lovers.

The set contains 38 cards, four of which are Legendary minions, and we can exclusively reveal one of the coolest, most flavourful of those below.

Yep, your boy Rivendare is back, and he’s brought his equally dead friends.   Rivendare, Warrider is a neutral minion with 6/6 stats that costs 6 Mana. His text reads: “Deathrattle: Shuffle the other 3 Horsemen into your deck.” But what do they do, you impatiently trill.…

Every week for the past few months the developers at Paradox Tinto have been posting developer diaries and in-progress map screenshots from the game that everyone knows is Europa Universalis 5, but which for now they’re just calling Project Caesar.

This week was a big one, as yesterday’s Tinto  Maps post was the grand heart of early modern Europe: The Holy Roman Empire. Historical strategy fans long knew that this would be an immense undertaking at the level of fidelity which EU5 intends… but I don’t think anyone truly saw this coming.

The shockingly detailed detailed map shows just how absurd a patchwork of principalities, prince-electors, prince-bishoprics, free cities, prelates, archbishop-electors, and imperial peasant republics the incredibly complex Holy Roman E…

Stylish and gorgeous, Songs of Silence has been teasing us with a story-focused approach to 4X strategy for most of the year, but now we’ve had another look as part of the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. The team at Chimera Entertainment showed off Songs’ three factions—the Firstborn, Starborn, and Crusade—in combat, with units ranging from warriors mounted on flaming rams to giant three legged cauldrons and a menagerie of other fantastic creatures duking it out. 

The mix of turn-based strategy in managing your territory and moving about and handling your troops through the real time battles is as gorgeous as the rest of Songs, and with inspirations like “our all-time favorites, such as Ogre Battle, Kohan, and Warlords,” according to creative…

It seems Lies of P’s chilling take on the tale of Pinocchio isn’t finished yet. A Neowiz job listing discovered by Okami Games has revealed that DLC “is planned for production.”

I was iffy on Lies of P at first. The idea of “Pinocchio, but soulslike” was undeniably intriguing, but sometimes an overt embrace of weirdness can mask, well, less-than-stellar gameplay. But the closer it got, the better it looked, and in the end it lived up to the hype: It’s not without flaws, but as we said in our 74% review, “Somehow, Lies of P 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.”

Bit of a spoiler here, but Lies of P also lays a very clear foundation for future stor…

Intel’s taken inspiration from Apple’s M1 and M2 chips with a new Meteor Lake chip that includes LPDDR5X inside the chip package. The neatly compact processor has been teased with two Samsung memory packages loaded onto it—a bid to improve performance and reduce a device’s overall footprint.

The chip, as noted by Tom’s Hardware, includes 16GB LPDDR5X-7500 memory from Samsung, bearing a close resemblance to how Apple has configured its latest ARM M2 chips. You can tell it’s a Meteor Lake chip by the many tiles combined to make it up, which uses Intel’s Foveros tech. Though as far as we know this architecture will only be used for mobile applications, such as laptops, for the time being.

You could say Intel was copying Apple’s homework, but it is fair to say this sort of…

After burning out on approximately 17 billion indie roguelikes between the years of 2011 and 2018, I swore to myself that I’d never be swayed again by a procedurally generated dungeon crawler that I’ll never finish. I’m breaking that rule for Sulfur, an upcoming FPS featured in today’s PC Gaming Show that’s incorporating the best parts of extraction games like Hunt: Showdown and Dark and Darker into a singleplayer roguelite. Watch the trailer above.

To be fair, I’d probably play more roguelites these days if they looked this cool. I’m smitten with Sulfur’s flat-shaded environments and enemies that look like they crawled out of a 2010s Cartoon Network show. You could almost mistake it for one of those colloquially-coined “cozy games” that appear by the dozens on Steam, but Sulfur’s…

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree earned an immediate reputation for its punishing difficulty, to the point that it suffered a brief barrage of negative reviews from players who thought its boss fights were excessively brutal. The DLC’s final boss, as you might expect, is particularly nasty—so nasty that it took legendary boss-deleter Let Me Solo Her three hours of attempts. Seems like all the fuss might be a little unnecessary, though, because over the weekend, Elden Ring streamer Ainrun killed Erdtree’s last boss with a single hit.

There will be spoilers for Shadow of the Erdtree’s final boss ahead, considering—well, you saw the headline.

Before you get your hopes up about walking through that last fog gate and one-shotting the bo…

One weird demo out of the whole Steam Next Fest has charmed me, and for reasons I rarely get charmed by: It’s delightfully janky, strange, referential, and crude. Apocalypse Party is certainly chasing the roguelike action trend, but it’s so off-beat and willing to let you craft absurd combos to slaughter fantasy zombies and monsters that I ended up charmed instead of repulsed.

There’s not really a plot here. You’re some kind of interdimensional mercenary plucked by an angelic capybara from the brink of death to rescue a fantasy kingdom by defeating three demons. There’s no coherent aesthetic though. Weapons you find are as likely to be an assault rifle or machine gun as throwing knives or lightning spear or magic, returning throwing shield. Characters are like, a Hong Kong cop, a …

Remember Gundam Evolution, the free-to-play multiplayer shooter from Bandai Namco that launched with fanfare in September last year? Well stop remembering it. It’s going away forever on November 29, barely a year after it released, because it can apparently no longer “provide a service that satisfies [its] players”. Throw another body on the pile; they’re dropping like flies out here.

“We want to express our gratitude to everyone who has played the game and supported us to this point,” said executive producer Kazuya Maruyama in a news update on Steam, “At the same time, we would like to sincerely apologize to our fans and players.” Maruyama doesn’t go into why Gundam Evolution is getting switched off, but a quick glance at its SteamDB page suggests that it’s struggled to …

Six weeks after GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin was removed from Steam due to a letter from Nintendo claiming it “violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights,” the emulator’s developers have issued a detailed response on the Dolphin blog. The response, with input from legal counsel, announces that the Dolphin team will not be re-attempting to launch the emulator on Steam. “We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam,” the post states. “Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it … given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve’s requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible.”

That announcement is just a brief portion of the pos…

Earlier this week, Palworld developer Pocketpair found itself in the crosshairs of a Nintendo patent lawsuit, making it the latest target in an infamous history of Nintendo legal action. Nintendo hasn’t yet clarified the specifics of its lawsuit claims, but analysts and legal experts have already been offering their takes on how strong its case might be.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultant Kantan Games, told GamesRadar that “Nintendo is going into this lawsuit thinking that they’re going to win. And I fear, looking at the track record, it’s highly likely that they win.” Having explored Nintendo’s litigation history, I don’t know if I’m qualified to speak to its odds—but I’m pretty confident it won’t be pulling any punches.

Writing in the US, it’s di…

27 inches, 170Hz refresh, a quality IPS panel and 1440p native resolution. What more do you need from a gaming monitor? In a word, nothing, especially when you can have all that for just $189.

Yup, the Acer Nitro XV272U has been given the Amazon Prime Day treatment and as someone who reviews these things for a living, I can tell you it’s an absolute steal. In fact, the only problem is that Nvidia has recently decided that 1440p GPUs start at $599 in the RTX 4070.

• We’re curating all the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

The $399 RTX 4060 Ti is pitched as a 1080p GPU. And with just 8GB of VRAM running over a measly 128-bit bus, that’s pretty much correct. Luckily, you can currently grab an AMD …

Prepare yourselves for a 24-core laptop processor. Over at CES 2023, Intel has revealed its next-generation mobile chips based on the Raptor Lake architecture. Among them, its new high-performance 55W parts named the HX-series. 

The tippy top of the HX-series is the Core i9 13980HX, a 24-core, 5.6GHz mobile part that looks to be even more overkill than the last.

This Core i9 is basically ripped right out of a Raptor Lake desktop processor. It’s been resocketed with the laptop-friendly BGA socket (and a bloody massive footprint versus the slimmer U-series) yet otherwise the specs scream desktop-grade processor. It offers 24 cores in total, that’s eight Performance-cores (P-cores) and 16 Efficient-cores (E-cores), and puts it on a level-footing with the Core i9 1…

I rarely do this, but I’m just going to open up by saying that this article contains major spoilers for Hades 2’s early access. We’re talking (current) end-game stuff. It’s also genuinely the funniest thing I’ve seen out of a Supergiant game period.

As previously mentioned in the game’s FAQ, Hades 2 has about as much content as the first game does already—including a final boss fight with the titan of time himself, Chronos. See, he went ahead and punted the entire royal family of the underworld out of their house and home, hence why protagonist Melinoë has it out for him.

You, the player, might also develop a vendetta against him—not just because he’s hard (he is, I’ve already died to the blighter a couple of times)—but because of one …

In addition to Fortnite’s transition to its fifth chapter, Epic has revealed a collaboration with Lego to introduce a new Lego-themed survival crafting mode⁠ for the long-running battle royale—including minifig versions of many pre-existing skins⁠—coming December 7.

Details are sparse on what Lego Fortnite actually entails⁠—the Lego website describes it like a separate game, but my guess is that it will be covered by the Fortnite launcher. You can view the minifig versions of skins in-game already, but they are not usable in Fortnite’s battle royale mode. The Lego FAQ advises to expect more details with the game’s launch on December 7, and it describes Lego Fortnite as “the ultimate survival crafting adventure.”

The special Lego Fortnite s…

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update is now live, releasing yesterday after Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone had enough time to wake up and make a cup of coffee—very funny, Barone. After waiting beside my PC all day for any signs of life, I immediately updated and jumped into 1.6 to start a brand new farm (and try to romance Sebastian all over again), and it looks like I wasn’t the only one. 

Stardew Valley broke a new record yesterday as it beat its own player count on Steam, reaching a whopping 146,159, meaning it’s currently the seventh most-played game wedged between Helldivers 2 and GTA 5. Previously, the record for player count in Stardew Valley was 94,879 back in January 2021, around the same time that patch 1.5.4 was released.  

This is not bad going for a game that…

Back in 2019, Magic: The Gathering Arena left beta testing at the same time as Throne of Eldraine launched, a set devoted to fairytales and Arthurian legends. (The trailer, featuring a gingerbread love story, is still one of the most memorable Magic trailers ever made.) Four years later, Wizards of the Coast is about to return to that setting with Wilds of Eldraine, which finds the land bereft of rulers and cursed to suffer under a magical slumber. It’s all a bit Grimm.

Fitting the theme, one of the main focuses of Wilds of Eldraine is enchantment, in both new and returning cards. One that’s returning is Parallel Lives from Innistrad, which doubles the number of tokens you get whenever an effect creates them. Since another theme of Wilds of Eldraine is cards that hand out food tok…

Krafton, the South Korean mega-publisher that owns PUBG: Battlegrounds and most recently released The Callisto Protocol, has published a strategy note about 2023 (spotted by Eurogamer) that’s based on a talk livestreamed to its employees.

The company says the key items were “sustainable growth” and expanding publishing operations globally, which it helpfully summarises as “more games, new publish[ing] strategies.”

“We remain steadfast in our ultimate vision to secure and expand powerful game-based IPs,” said CH Kim, Krafton CEO. “To achieve this, now is the time to concentrate our capabilities in 2023 and emphasize our need to innovate and focus organizational capabilities, strengthen our publishing capabilities and systems, and continue investing in the…

There are few artifacts of videogame culture that can teleport me to a specific time and place more powerfully than the sound of the MP5 from Modern Warfare 2. For months in 2009, the prickly whine of an MP5 followed (ideally) by the chime of a 3-killstreak UAV meant that I was in my happy place—getting a few matches in after school, probably sipping an energy drink I bought with quarters.

I was the perfect age to become a Call of Duty obsessive and still associate the series with some of my fondest memories of gaming, which is why I’m not surprised that, 14 years later, Activision is bottling up that nostalgia and selling it back to me with Season 3 Reloaded’s “Throwback Audio Pack.”

“The ultimate taste of nostalgia is coming with Season 03 Reloaded,” reads today’s

The New York-based indie studio Dang is closing after releasing only one game, but what a game. The hyper-fast and movement-focused Boomerang X released in 2021 and was notable among other things for supporting an experimental type of gyro controller, the Flick Stick, as well as mouse-and-keyboard, so that players could whizz its deadly shuriken-boomerang around in the fanciest of patterns. The game sits with around 800 “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam though, judging by this announcement, that sadly didn’t translate to sales.

Dang announced its shuttering via a screenshot of a statement written in Notepad, which is certainly a vibe—the studio later said it was because “none of us really wanted to make a professional-looking closure announcemen…

Sam Barlow’s studio Half Mermaid, the developer of Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality—one of highest-reviewed games of 2022—are teasing a pair of mysterious new projects on Steam called, mysteriously, Project C and Project D.

The newly-arrived Steam pages for both new games are heavily redacted. The description for Project C opens with a biblical quote—“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known”—and then teases “the new cinematic” something that promises something “for the first time ever in a videogame.”

Project D, on the other hand, is a survival horror something—game, perhaps—whose description includes the words “1983,” “nurse,” “nightm…

Poor Intel. Last year was pretty rough for the 55-year-old semiconductor firm, as it accrued just $54.2 billion in revenue, 14% less than the year before. After paying all its bills for manufacturing, research and development, and biscuits, there was just $1.7 billion left over in net income. Poor Intel. 

So when the US administration announced the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, with a total of $280 billion up for grabs, Intel jumped right in to get some of that golden booty. Only now it’s asking for a further $10 billion, at the very least, to ensure Intel’s US developments can continue.

This news of Intel’s re-enactment of Oliver Twist (via Wccftech) isn’t in the least bit surprising and not because of the company’s recent financial results. Cutting-edge semiconductor…

First spotted by GamesRadar, Withers pulled out all the stops in Baldur’s Gate 3’s new post-game epilogue, calling in a favor with the Forgotten Realms’ god of music, Milil, to perform for you. Fans noticed an uncanny resemblance to Larian composer Borislav Slavov, and while the artist didn’t confirm it either way, it seems like a deliberate homage.

Slavov previously did the excellent soundtrack for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and his score for Baldur’s Gate 3 is up for best music at this year’s Game Awards. I didn’t clock the resemblance between Slavov and Milil right away, but seeing them side by side, that’s totally him, right? In response to GamesRadar’s reporting, Slavov simply replied “Well..🙃” on Twitter.

The Forgotten Realms has a ton …

Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous computer hackers in the world and the subject of an over two-year manhunt in the 1990s, died of complications from pancreatic cancer last Sunday, aged 59. His death has been confirmed to the New York Times.

Mitnick is a legendary figure, one of those people whose life story reads like an elaborate work of fiction. After getting his start with a punch card machine that let him get free bus rides at age 12, he graduated to phone phreaking and hacking as he got older, breaking into networks owned by corporations like the Digital Equipment Corporation. The police weren’t too keen on that, and he was sentenced to a year in prison and three years of supervised release in 1988.

He almost made it through, but right toward the end of his supervis…

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.

…

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…