You know, I’d heard that Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC was hard. Mind-bendingly hard. Discourse-ignitingly hard. So hard that even the most stalwart of players, the ones who have truly gitten gud, were running into problems.

But now someone’s beat the entire thing on a DDR dance pad, so clearly you’re all just a bunch of whiners. This thing’s easy as hell, a statement I feel supremely confident making based on the four (4) hours I have spent in the base game in my entire life.

The hero in question is streamer MissMikkaa (via VG247), and let’s be honest: It was really only a matter of time. Not only is beating FromSoft games with dance pads a time-honoured tradition, MissMikkaa herself has a long and storied career when it comes to clowning on Miyazaki’s toughest bos…

After two years at the helm of League of Legends, executive producer Jeremy “Brightmoon” Lee announced today that he’s decided to step down.

“This year’s been a bit of a whirlwind,” Lee said in today’s dev update video. “The progress we’ve made as a team and, most importantly, what we’ve been able to deliver for you has been so rewarding. And with that, I’ve decided it’s the right time to step away from my current role. I’ll be passing the torch to a new executive producer in the coming months.”

The executive producer role is a bit amorphous but very important in the big picture: Lee’s LinkedIn profile says he’s charged with “ensuring the vision and strategy of League of Legends,” and “responsible for the multiple teams on League having a north star, clear commitments, and w…

I just wrapped up my first honour mode playthrough in Baldur’s Gate 3—and whenever I roll those golden dice, I feel a sense of pride. So of course the universe sends someone along to take a greatsword to my sense of self-worth by pulling off an even tougher challenge. Typical.

Bouch on YouTube has set themselves an absurd task: complete Baldur’s Gate 3, on their own, while every single enemy has a +99 to their attack rolls. Oh, also, they can’t have party members. Because obviously.

While they make it all the way to the Githyanki creche on Honour Mode before finally dying and switching to a ‘dishonourable’ playthrough, it’s the strategies they employ that are the real star of the show. I’m just going to highlight one of them here, but it’s a build I ha…

Max Payne and Alan Wake voice actor James McCaffrey has died after a battle with cancer, according to a TMZ report. He was 65.

McCaffrey’s death was initially revealed by actor Kevin Dillon, who paid tribute to his “best friend” in an Instagram post. After some confusion about whether it was actually the actor who had died, TMZ confirmed the report.

“One of Dick Wolf’s proteges, McCaffrey went on to a successful 35 year career in television and film,” McCaffrey’s rep told the site. “Trained at the Actor’s Studio, he never lost his love for creating characters; however, his good looks often pushed him toward leading man roles.”

McCaffrey appeared in numerous television shows and films over his career, including a long stretch as supporting character Jimmy Keefe in the a…

Here’s one for those of us interested in the early days of home computing. UK based Retro Games is set to release the Atari 400 Mini, a modern take on the Atari 400 home computer, complete with a recreation of the classic Atari CX-40 joystick. And what a thing of beauty it is.

The system is a miniaturized version of the classic 8-bit Atari 400. It was released in 1979 and in many ways, was the first gaming PC. It had dedicated graphics and sound co-processors, upgradeable memory, plug-and-play peripherals and a membrane keyboard. It was regarded as being ahead of its time, but strong competition from Apple, Commodore and Tandy hampered its adoption. Additionally, its mostly closed software ecosystem led to a lack of development by third-party programmers. As a result, Atari’s 8-bi…

It’s not often I get the option to field Australian forces in a wargame—apart from Emu War! I guess—but the new Commonwealth tech tree in World of Warships adds Australian ships like the Cerberus alongside cruisers from various Commonwealth nations, including the New Zealand cruiser Auckland and India’s Delhi.

The Commonwealth tech tree is part of March’s 13.2 update, which also brings a Commonwealth Team Event Pass with a bunch of rewards to unlock, including camouflages and historical commanders Harold Farncomb and Leonard Murray. It’s the first Event Pass to replace daily missions with weekly ones.

Next month, World of Warships is getting a Piñata Hunt event to tie in with April Fool’s Day, which will see two teams of seven ships compete to sink a speci…

Hideki Kamiya—director of Bayonetta and Okami, co-founder of PlatinumGames, “unemployed man,” and guy who has you blocked on Twitter—is making the rounds again, and this time he’s ready to spill the beans. Sort of. In a recent chat with IGN, the legendary developer shed some light on his departure from Platinum in October, telling the world that he just didn’t like the way the company was going.

“My work with PlatinumGames was based on a relationship of trust,” said Kamiya, but apparently that trust broke down. “I decided to leave because I felt that the direction the company was heading in was different from my beliefs as a developer. Without that element of trust, I couldn’t continue working there.”

That’s more than Kamiya has let on in the past. In previous up…

Owners of RTX 40- and 30-series graphics cards can now setup their own personalised large language model (LLM) on their own PC. It’s one that’s eminently capable of sifting through old documents or distilling down the essence of YouTube videos.

Chat with RTX is now available to download from Nvidia’s website for free from today, February 13. It works with any current or last generation graphics card with at least 8GB or more VRAM, which includes every desktop card bar the RTX 3050 6GB and excludes a few mid- to low-end laptop GPUs. It also requires 50—100GB of storage space on your PC, depending on the AI models downloaded.

There are two models to choose from: Mistral or Llama 2. The default is Mistral, and I’d recommend sticking with that.

The key parts of Chat …

Meta’s next high-end VR headset, the supposed Quest Pro 2, may be in doubt. But now there are reports of a new affordable mixed-reality headset from the firm.

According to The Information (via UploadVR), Meta has ditched plans for a mooted Quest Pro 2 premium headset in favour of a super-light, much lower cost headset codenamed Puffin.

Said to resemble a bulky pair of spectacles, Puffin apparently tips the scales at less than 110 grams and yet still offers pancake lenses and passthrough functionality with cameras. 

That’s achieved thanks to separating out not only the battery, a la Apple Vision Pro, but also the processing hardware into an external tethered “puck”. For context, the Meta Quest 3 clocks in at 515 grams, so the headset part of the rumoured Puffin dev…

The launch of Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards is a long way off, perhaps as much as two years away. There’s a lot of time for Nvidia to chop and change whatever GPU ends up powering the hypothetically named RTX 50-series. The rumor mill never stops, though.

The latest nugget of info to surface comes from Kopite7kimi, a usually reliable source of Nvidia information. They speculate that the flagship Nvidia RTX 50 card, presumably named the RTX 5090, will have a 512-bit memory bus. That’s something we can all appreciate given we had cards with 512-bit buses going back well over a decade.

Electrical complexities and manufacturing expenses are often cited as reasons to adopt a narrower bus, but if a card like the RTX 4090 at $1,599 doesn’t justify a 512-bit bus, what will…

The new pre-release patch for Manor Lords has just been released for all to try out, and it sure does fix a long list of problems, more so than the developer Greg “Slavic Magic” Styczeń had previously promised.

Styczeń had already promised fixes for inefficient sawpits, a homeless bug, harsh oversupply trade mechanics, poor archer damage, and an overpowered AI, but the actual patch includes this and much more. 

The biggest change is that the King’s Tax or Annual Royal Tax (the name’s still to be decided) is enabled for all players. “This tax is collected annually from all players (main player and AI) and goes to your liege,” Styczeń says in the patch notes. It’s counted per population and therefore should become a counterbalance for players who hoard huge…

Back in January we reported that Asus was planning a new model of the ROG Ally gaming handheld for 2024, and the time appears to be nigh. Or nighly nigh, because according to an announcement in the ROG Discord server, “the next ROG Ally is coming,” and ROG’s community folks will be “getting hyped” about the new hardware in a livestream on May 9. You’ll be able to watch the stream in the video above when it premieres at 12 pm Pacific time.

The announcement stops short of saying if the new hardware will actually be shown, so it might be a lot of talking around the details of an upcoming unveiling.

Will this be a full ROG Ally 2 reveal, or more of a hardware refresh like the Steam Deck OLED? Leaks have indicated that a refreshed model with more or less the same hardwar…

Developers at Bethesda Game Studios have elected to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, a national labor organization that has also worked with Activision Blizzard employees on collective bargaining efforts.

Unlike some games industry unions whose membership is isolated to QA departments—ZeniMax QA workers unionized last year, for instance—this is a “wall-to-wall union,” says the CWA, and was formed by votes from 241 “artists, engineers, programmers, and designers” across three offices. It’s the first of its kind at a Microsoft-owned studio.

Bethesda Game Studios, which was spun off from publisher Bethesda Softworks, is the company most people are referring to when they say “Bethesda”: The Todd Howard-led developer of the modern Fallout and Elder…

Few modern shoot ’em ups look as distinctive as Gunboat God. As the pilot of a constantly endangered gunboat, you’ll need to survive through “hundreds” of challenging levels riddled with weird monsters. This is slightly complicated by the fact that monsters come hurtling towards the gunboat from the air, from underwater and from left and right too. 

Gunboat God comes bearing a scribbly high-contrast art style sorta reminiscent of Luftrausers, but the spectacle hews closer to My Friend Pedro and Cuphead. This is due to the fact that, yes, the gunboat can jump and even course underwater for a brief spell, but it’ll also have to contend with the condition of the ocean too: shooting at unpredictable supernatural phenomena tends to be harder during a seastorm (my speculatio…

We mentioned a couple of weeks back that Nvidia had a new toy called RTX Video HDR coming. Well, it’s here as part of Nvidia’s latest driver release for the launch of the RTX 4070 TI Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. 

Long story short, RTX Video HDR uses AI algorithms to convert SDR video to HDR and it’s part of driver release version 551.23, all 600-odd MB of it. The tool only works with Chromium based browser like Chrome itself and Edge, but should be compatible with any video being streamed.

You will, of course, still need an HDR capable display and an Nvidia RTX graphics card, so it’s not quite free HDR for you and all your friends. But it’s very easy to enable. 

Once you’ve updated to the new driver simply pop into the Nvidia Control Panel, then under …

Nvidia really cannot keep a secret, can it? Yes, in a surprise to absolutely no-one, CES brings us the new GeForce RTX 40-series Super cards. The Ada Lovelace architecture refresh has been rumoured for a long while now, and here it is, either offering a little more performance for either the same sticker price, or in one particular case a fairly significant decrease.

The green team is launching three new Super cards, two of which are completely replacing their non-Super forebears and the third pushing the price down of its older Ada sibling. The first to launch this month is arguably the most interesting from a pure silicon standpoint—the RTX 4070 Super is the card getting the biggest GPU upgrade, which Nvidia is estimating will deliver up to 20% higher performance.

Fr…

In the slew of Wordle imitators that emerged in the wake of its success last year, there are a few real standouts. There’s Nerdle, that challenges you to guess a maths equation; Worldle, which looks like a spelling error but is actually the one where you have to figure out a country from its silhouette; and, on the more intimidating end, there’s Quordle.

Quordle asks you to solve four Wordles simultaneously, all on one big grid. Every guess you make is applied to all four—even with a generous nine guesses, it’s still a nightmare of brain multitasking. 

But clearly Merriam-Webster thinks it has a bright future ahead of it. The company, known primarily for its US dictionaries, has bought Quordle, according to the game’s official twitter account. The URL has already …

A six-core 3D V-Cache Ryzen CPU? Sign me up. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D sure sounds like a mighty gaming chip—enough cores to chomp through games, enhanced with heaps of cache, but without the prohibitive price tag of newer, high-end models. The good news is that it is confirmed and will be released on July 7.

At $230, the Ryzen 5 5600X3D will make for a great upgrade for anyone on AM4 that couldn’t quite swing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which will remain the fastest gaming CPU on that particular motherboard socket.

On the flipside, the chip will be a Micro Center exclusive, and it’s only classed as a limited edition. That’s potentially fine for a number of people in the US hoping to nab one for their AM4 gaming PCs in the near-future, but maybe not so much if it’s not availabl…

In yet another bloodbath during a terrible two years for the games industry, Bungie has announced that it’s laying off 220 people—roughly 17% of its workforce—across “every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.”

In a blog post titled “The New Path for Bungie,” Bungie CEO Pete Parsons announced that “Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure,” and shift the studio’s development focus entirely over to Destiny and upcoming extraction shooter Marathon. The new round of layoffs comes less than a year after Bungie’s last bloodletting in October 2023, the casualties of which included veteran Halo comp…

Developer of Manor Lords Gregg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń has confirmed that there are still a couple of kinks to work out, the biggest of which comes from lacklustre archers who don’t seem to be as effective as you’d think. 

Manor Lords is pretty accurate for a medieval city builder and management game. Despite this, Styczeń has previously commented about how “you can’t die on every historical hill” in a Reddit post: 

“Whenever I see someone on this subreddit bring up a good gameplay point that might be cool to have, invariably there will be some wise ass in the comments going, ‘but that’s not historical’, Styczeń says. “I think there needs to be some understanding that the game’s foundation is definitely rooted in historical accuracy, but there are abs…

Bite-size arena battle roguelike and self-professed “broken build sandbox” Path of Achra has hit its 1.0 release. Developer Ulfsire’s game is now finished, for whatever that means in a modern game. “I’m pretty much excrutiatingly grateful to you all who have helped bring it here, and 1.0 of course won’t be the end of updates,” posted Ulfsire.

The 1.0 release comes with a new culture, class, and god to add to the pick-three piles that make up a character. The new Arjana warriors blind enemies with magic tattoos. The new Myrmidon class is penalized for getting more dextrous but very good at blocking ranged attacks. The final new thing is the god Apophis, who makes you ever-stronger as you progress but slowly kills you via self-damage. I dunno. Sounds like just another snake cult.Read more

In case you didn’t know, AI and high performance computing is big business. There’s a reason Nvidia has a market cap of over a trillion dollars. That reason is exploding demand for its enterprise products including the mighty H100 Hopper GPU. Yep, this monster processor, which can cost $30,000 or more, shares much of its DNA with humble GeForce gaming graphics cards.

As a fun experiment, YouTuber Geekerwan (via Tom’s Hardware) took one of these monster cards for a spin through a couple of gaming benchmarks. The results were interesting, though ultimately good for a giggle if nothing else.

The H100 variant Geekerwan used was the PCIe version. It came equipped with 80GB of HBM2e memory, 14,592 CUDA cores and a 350W TDP. Compare that to an RTX 4090 with 24Gb of GDDR6X, 16,384 C…

There’s a hint for every one of today’s Connections groups ready and waiting for you just below, giving you just the nudge you need to win. Or if you’re running out of guesses and need a guaranteed save, hop on over to the answers to the September 10 (#91) puzzle. It’s entirely up to you.

Today’s Connections went from smooth to what felt like a full stop at the halfway point, the link between remaining words something of a mystery to me. They would’ve probably stayed that way too if I hadn’t had enough spare guesses remaining to puzzle out that final eight—that was a close one.

NYT Connections hint today: Sunday, September 10

Yellow: These are all animals, specifically the sort you’re most likely to see in a zoo. Unless you’re reading this from…

At the time of writing, Palworld developer Pocketpair is almost drowning in success. The colorful survival game had attracted some attention during its development, mainly because “Pokemon with guns” is an elevator pitch you instantly want to see in action, but its actual launch has seen that translate into what looks like a genuinely organic viral success: and four days after launch, it’s sitting pretty at over five million copies sold. 

Success, however, brings its own problems. Since launch Palworld has faced various bugs, including connection issues and players losing save data, and it’s clear from the game’s Discord that the developers were in no way prepared for this level of success and are currently firefighting as best they can. But one particular bug has the potenti…

It boggles the noggin that Nvidia can have posted the biggest ever loss in value for any company in the history of the world over the past three days, and that it will have precisely zero material impact on Jen-Hsun’s gang.

It makes sense after a stratospheric rise in market value, which briefly made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world, that there would be a correction, and that has happened over the past three days. It has now dropped in value by a combined total of 13%, which has effectively knocked over $500 billion off the stock.

Just over a year ago, at the end of January 2023, that sort of financial drop would have seen the company wiped out entirely, when its market capitalization was below the $500 billion mark. And yet here in June 2024 seeing that much wi…

The design guide for modern power supplies has been updated to recommend just one type of cable plug for graphics cards. It’s now recommended that the 12VHPWR connector capable of delivering up to 600W of power to a single GPU should use a plug design called 4 Spring, in a bid to reduce risk of rising temperatures.

The 12VHPWR connector is a pretty new concept in the world of PSUs, first introduced in early 2022 as a part of a wider redesign with the ATX 3.0 specification. The ATX 3.0 specification is basically a how-to guide to building a modern-day PSU for manufacturers, published by Intel, and it ultimately determines how different connectors and standards are actually brought to market.

In a recent update to the ATX 3.0 PSU specification, spotted by user harakaze5719 on …

When Rumbleverse released in August last year, you might have mistaken it for one of the many other live service games that suddenly arrive and are just as quickly forgotten: think Knockout City, Hyperscape (RIP), Rocket Arena. It certainly bears that distinctive Fortnite-aping style, but unlike Fortnite, it has clearly gained no traction at all: after only six months, the game will stop receiving updates on February 28.

Iron Galaxy Studios and publisher Epic Games announced as much today. “This project has been a labor of love to create a new experience in a popular and highly competitive genre for games. If you’ve been a part of that journey, we thank you – whether you jumped into the first playtest after our reveal, or just shot yourself out of the cannon for…

Start your engines and get ready to rumble, because here comes a game that combines high-speed cart racing with ruthless battle royale eliminations. Imagine Mario Kart but with dozens of other players, plus the frantic scrambling and colorful cosmetic options of Fall Guys—that’s not a bad way to get an idea of what Stampede: Racing Royale is all about.

The announcement trailer, revealed first in today’s PC Gaming Show, gives us our first look at the 60-player racing game from Secret Mode Games and Sumo Digital, and shows the potential for frantic chases, dramatic finishes, and the chance to completely and gloriously screw over your competitors with a well-timed attack. Power-ups gathered throughout the race include items like projectiles and explosive mines t…

In a recent interview with StrictlyVC (via Yahoo Finance), OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman spoke about the future of AI, good and bad, in the vaguest way possible—which scares me a bit.

Altman answered questions about OpenAI, the makers of the wildly popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, and AI art tool DALL-E, as well the overall AI landscape. While most of the interview is mostly a word salad of Silicon Valley terms, Altman did give his thoughts on the best and worst-case scenarios for artificial intelligence.

Altman said that he thinks “the best case is so unbelievably good that it’s hard for me to even imagine” and that it could help “resolve deadlocks and improve all aspects of reality and let us all live our best lives.” 

“I think that the good case is so …

A bizarre but extremely thorough new report at IGN claims that a prominent advocate for accessibility in videogames, who co-founded the Can I Play That? website in 2018, may not have actually existed at all—but instead appears to be the creation of her purported romantic partner, Coty Craven.

Banks first appeared as One Odd Gamer Girl in 2015, and quickly grew to become a well-known member of the disabled gamer community, according to IGN’s report. In 2018, for instance, she was featured in an interview with leading videogame accessibility website AbleGamers; in 2019, following her reported death, the site paid tribute to Banks in “A Farewell to a Friend,” calling her an “amazing ally” and “a brilliant light in the fight for accessibility.”

But five years later, the IG…

Blizzard has used an update about toxicity and cheating in Overwatch 2 to slip-out a bit of a humblebrag: Since launch, the game has attracted “over 40 million players, both returning and new.” Partly that’s because, unlike the original, Overwatch 2 is free-to-play, but even so that’s a staggering number of players ignoring the objective.

The Overwatch 2 dev team gives its approach to bad behaviour the D.Va-inspired and grandiose name of the Defense Matrix initiative, which I’m sure has the nasty sorts quaking in their boots. Blizzard says that early rollout of its system for detecting “disruptive” voice chat has begun and it has “proven to be exceptionally accurate and effective in identifying abusive chat and language.” When bad chat is identified, the game will selectively sile…

The Epic Games Store is bleeding money, but it’s also still bleeding free games, and a couple of good ones are on the line right now. This week you can pick up The Evil Within, the hit survival horror game headed up by original Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami, and next week it’ll be the sequel, The Evil Within 2. This is the first time that either of The Evil Within games have gone free on Epic, so you’ll probably want to grab them while you can.

The Evil Within “[goes] all-in with the awful quite early,” PC Gamer brand director Tim Clark said during a “first impressions” gameplay video that’s now nearly a decade old. (Man, time flies.) Former associate editor Tom Marks, who joined him on the journey, concurred: “Tyler and I played Alien: Isolation before, and it was an hour …

For once, the leaks were right. Logitech has announced the new G Pro X Superlight 2 wireless gaming mouse and the specs and upgrades are all bang on the leaked data from a few weeks ago. Oh and Logitech also has a new gaming keyboard to go with it, the Logitech G Pro X TKL.

For starters, that means Logitech’s uber popular gaming rodent does indeed get an upgrade from crusty old micro-USB to USB-C for wired connectivity and charging. The battery life is also up to a claimed 95 hours from the 70 hours of the OG model, despite overall mass being fractionally reduced by three grams to an even more featherweight 60g.

Arguably the biggest changes are in the main sensor, however, which is boosted from 25,000 DPI to 32,000 DPI and from 400 inches per second to 500. That said, the in…

Everybody’s favourite graphics card tweaking app has been fully updated for the first time since 2019. The new build of MSI Afterburner brings full support for Nvidia’s latest RTX 40-series GPUs and AMD’s RX 7000-series graphics. Intel’s new Arc GPUs also receive limited support.

Earlier this year, we reported on apparent problems that Afterburner’s lone developer, Alexey ‘Unwinder’ Nicolaychuk, was having securing his compensation from MSI.

As a consequence, Nicolaychuk said that Afterburner was “probably dead,” with the developer citing “war and politics” as impediments to progress and the implication being that his Russian nationality may have been a stumbling block.

However, back then MSI said it was in fact committed to the app, telling us that it fully intended “…