การสร้างภาพแฟนอาร์ตด้วย AI เป็นอีกหนึ่งกระแสนิยมที่มีมาให้เราได้เห็นกันเป็นประจำ และจะเป็นอย่างไรหากอยู่ดี ๆ เจ้าหมูเด้ง หรือเจ้าฮิปโปแคระชื่อดังในตอนนี้ถูกจับโยนเข้าไปผจญภัยในโลกของ Final Fantasy VII! ล่าสุดเพจสร้างภาพ AI ชาวไทยก็ได้ออกมาโชว์ภาพสุดแหวกนี้ให้เราได้ชมกัน พร้อมกับแจก Prompt ให้ไปเจนภาพกันเองได้ด้วย!คำพูดจาก สุดยอดเว็บเดิมพันออน
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Continue ReadingIntel has already said that it’s designed the most efficient x86 processor ever in its upcoming Lunar Lake mobile chips—which, in tandem with its performance claims, has made us rather excited about the prospect of battery-sipping mobile devices with some genuine gaming grunt. Now a report says that BOE’s new Winning Display 1Hz tech, combined with V2 of Intel’s Intelligent Display Technology, can reduce display power consumption by up to 65%.
There’s a combination of technological trickery said to be at play here to achieve such a drastic reduction in power usage (via Tom’s Hardware). According to Sina Technology, Intel’s IIDT 2.0 tech uses ALLR (Autonomous Low Refresh Rate), UBRR (User-Based Refresh Rate) and PixOptix to not only detect a users presence and reduce the refresh rate when it’s not needed, but also reduce backlight power consumption.
The report also claims that, using AI, the refresh rate can be dynamically adjusted on different parts of the panel, separately. So, you could be viewing a video on one side of the screen with a smooth refresh rate, while making notes on the other at a much lower speed, thereby significantly reducing battery drain.…
Continue ReadingCryptic Studios, the developer of the Star Trek Online and Neverwinter MMOs, has become the latest studio to lay off employees. The studio has confirmed that “difficult personnel changes” have made as a result of parent company Embracer Group’s ongoing restructuring.
Word of possible layoffs first came to light in October, when Twitter user bogorad222 (via MassivelyOP) noticed that multiple Cryptic employees had changed their LinkedIn profiles to indicate that they were looking for work.
One of them was Star Trek Online community manager Mike Fatum, who said in a LinkedIn update that “things are weird in the world right now, and it seems like the right time to open this back up. I’m an experienced Senior Community Manager, Writer, Convention Host, and Personality and I’d like to hear from you.”
Oddly, Fatum said on Twitter shortly afterwards that layoffs had not actually occurred: “To further clarify, none of the teams at Cryptic have changed at this time.”
Whatever the situation was in October, it’s now confirmed that layoffs have occurred. “As part of the Embracer Group’s comprehensive restructuring program, Cryptic Studios will now operate …
Continue ReadingFamed Nintendo director Shigeru Miyamoto once said, so the story goes, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” Did he really utter those words? Apparently not. But Valve founder Gabe Newell shares the sentiment: He said so, in very plain terms, in the new Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary that released today on YouTube.
The topic came up in a segment on Valve’s early struggles with Half-Life. The game had been slated to ship in November 1997, but a few months ahead of that the team realized it wasn’t coming together: There were interesting ideas and discrete segments, but the whole “wasn’t fun yet.”
“We were getting into three months before supposedly shipping in ’97, and it’s like, this isn’t gelling,” engineer Ken Birdwell says in the doc. “This is really not good. This is like a quick knockoff, cash-grab, stupid, and let’s not do that.
“There was a lot of disconnect between what all of the different groups were doing, what engineering was doing, and what level design was doing, and what animation was doing. We had a bunch of monsters that had no plans to get in the game because nobody else was assigned to work on them, and…
Continue ReadingBaldur’s Gate 3 is a game of grand adventure, a game of nuanced character choices, a game of creative problem solving, a game full of literally hundreds of spells. It’s also a game where you can have sex with a bear. Guess which of the above rocketed Baldur’s Gate 3 to viral mainstream attention just a few weeks before release? I expected Baldur’s Gate 3 to be big, but I did not expect a marketing campaign highlighting a sex scene with a bear (okay, to be clear, it’s a sex scene with a druid who can transform into a bear) to help Baldur’s Gate 3 pull in 800,000 concurrent players over the weekend.
“Yeah, me neither,” Larian founder Swen Vincke told me in an interview on Monday. But he did explain why the Baldur’s Gate 3 studio thought it was a good showcase for the game, which turned out to be the exact right instinct in the leadup to release.
“We wanted a scene people were going to talk about, but we wanted to show that this was a cinematic game, with characters that have depth to them. The bear’s obviously a druid, and he has a story. He’s been around for hundreds of years. He’s lived with bears for part of his life also, so that’s where the bear t…
Continue ReadingAnyone with a more-than-casual interest in League of Legends almost surely knows about Porofessor and League of Graphs. The sites are indispensable tools for the passionate player, stats aggregators that show who’s winning what, when, where, and with which League champion. What those League-heads might not know was that the two sites, and their associated Legends of Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics versions, were made by one person as the company Wargraphs. That person has now sold the company for a pretty nice paycheck.
The deal was for €50 million, about US $54.6 million at today’s rate. It’s probably a steal for Wargraphs’ Porofessor and League of Graphs, which have some 10 million downloads and 1.25 million daily average users, while the websites have about 4.5 billion page views since their launch. It had a healthy income of about €12.3 million in the fiscal period ending November 30th, 2022.
Wargraphs, the single-employee company run by Jean-Nicolas Mastin out of Paris, now belongs to MOBA Network, a company based in Sweden that “acquires, develops and operates gaming communities for the global gaming market.”
“Together with the founder, who will…
Continue ReadingDespite being a game full of chunky, blank-faced weirdos with awful hair that makes you swing at an enemy 20 times before you can land a single hit, Morrowind is an incredibly immersive game, sucking you into Vvardenfel and making you feel like part of its world. Modder abot over on the Morrowind Nexus has now, finally, torn down that last barrier between Morrowind and a perfect simulation of reality: with abot’s new mod, the Nerevarine leaves behind footprints as they walk.
Okay, maybe a little silly, but it’s such a great idea—just one of those little details you forget about while running up your eighteenth snowdrift in Solstheim with a train of awful little max-level goblin men chasing you down. And really, obsessive detail like this absolutely fits in a game that actively drains your stamina while you slowly jog around its alien moonscapes.
I also love how abot got this mod to work. They utilize the Morrowind Script Extender to detect that whenever that distinctive clop clop clop sound effect of a Morrowind character’s footsteps plays, and spawns in the footprint texture accordingly. Abot also includes a helpful menu to adjust who leaves fo…
Continue ReadingDead Island 2, which has yet to apologise for making me write the words “Flesh system” over and over again, has changed its release date once more. After a parade of delays that saw the game slip from year to year and month to month, Dead Island 2’s final surprise is that it won’t be releasing on April 28. It’ll be releasing a week earlier, on April 21. It’s an Easter miracle, my friends.
You’ve got a little over two months until you can see a game that was first announced nearly ten years ago, in the Edenic world of 2014. I have to admit, I’m very curious to see how it’ll turn out. We’ve had two Dying Light games in the vast interim between Dead Island 2’s announcement and release date, and I liked them both quite a bit more than I did Dead Island. I’m hoping the second game manages to grab me more forcefully than its predecessor did.
We’ve heard quite a bit about Dead Island 2 in the last few weeks. Whether it’s the game’s procedural wounding and dismemberment system, known as the—here it comes again—”Flesh system,” or its card-based “skill deck” mechanic, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect come April. I’m cautiously optimistic: everything I’v…
Continue ReadingCD Projekt Red has laid off “roughly 9%” of its staff, with around 100 people losing their jobs over the next seven months.
In a statement on CDPR’s website, CEO Adam Kiciński says the layoffs are part of “ongoing process of several deep transformations within the studio,” which he considers “key to making quality games, on time and without crunch.”
“To meet our own high expectations and ambitions to create the best role-playing games, we not only want to have the best people but also the right teams,” Kiciński says. “What we mean by that is having teams that are built around our projects’ needs; teams that are more agile and more effective. At this point in time, we’re certain that for CD Projekt Red to grow, we need to be consistent in implementing that approach.”
Kiciński continues: “There’s no easy way to say this, but today we are overstaffed. We have talented people on board who are finishing their tasks and—based on current and expected project needs—we already know we don’t have other opportunities for them in the next year.”
He clarifies that not everyone’s layoff will be immediate, adding “some …
Continue ReadingFans of part-time battle royale and full-time brand chimaera Fortnite are in an uproar right now, following an update to the game’s Creative mode islands that’s left players unable to equip some of their paid cosmetics.
The update in question is Fortnite’s introduction of island age ratings. Released yesterday, the new patch has made it so that the game’s islands—spaces mostly created by players where they have full creative reign—can now be given their own age ratings. That means island makers can, if they so choose, set a rating lower than Fortnite’s own T for Teen ESRB rating on their created spaces.
All well and good, except Fortnite’s head-spinning array of cosmetic items also have their own age ratings now. Try to equip a cosmetic rated T for Teen on an island with a lower E10+ or E rating, and you’ll find that it’s been replaced by a dull and miserly default skin, no matter how much you paid for it.
A lot of players are outraged by the change. Sure, Fortnite’s main modes are still rated Teen—meaning you can equip whatever cosmetics you want in them without fuss—but there are still plenty of players who spend a bunch of ti…
Continue ReadingDevelopers from Motion Twin, best known for incredibly popular roguelite Dead Cells, are in on the joke when they talk about the process of making their new game meaning they had to throw away tons of progress and start over. “We fail all the time. We’re like, OK, what we did is pure shit, let’s try again. It’s a roguelite production,” said designer Yannick Berthier, as he walked me through Motion Twin’s new action game Windblown.
The studio’s first new project since Dead Cells is also a roguelite—art truly imitates life, I guess—that plays substantially faster than their previous 2D action, with an incredibly zippy dash move key to staying alive in the now-3D combat environments. Also key to combat is the weapon system, which lets you swap between two weapons on the fly to combo attacks into unique finishers. “Every weapon has a hidden, super powerful attack that can only be triggered by playing with the other weapon equipped,” said Berthier.
Motion Twin artist Thomas Vasseur, who was driving the demo, chimed in to elaborate. “The goal for us is to have a lot of synergies between weapons, so every time you unlock a weapon you’ll have to think about…
Continue ReadingIt took eight long years, but the Five Nights at Freddy’s film is finally just about here, and today we got our first proper look at the real stars of the show: Foxy, Bonnie, Chica, and of course, Freddy himself.
The trailer opens with a break-in at the infamous Freddy Fazbear’s pizza joint, a half-robbery, half-vandalism job that ends very badly for the four unlucky idiots who decided it would be a good idea. With that bit of setup out of the way, the video (and the whole film) moves to more closely follow the events of the first game in the series: A security guard takes a job watching over the decrepit eatery, only to discover that its beloved animatronic mascots are a little more active, and a little less friendly, than he was led to believe.
There’s actually no gore in the trailer, but there’s a clear implication that the full film will contain more than its fair share of sticky unpleasantries. A guy gets done in Alien-style by Mr Cupcake, for instance, and while there’s no blood visible in the clip I can’t imagine his face is going to come out of that looking very good; there’s also an implied encounter between the world’s most egregiously over-bladed meat grin…
Continue ReadingIn response to criticism of his decision to take a role in Hogwarts Legacy, voice actor Sebastian Croft has affirmed his support for trans rights in a statement posted on Twitter.
Croft was announced last week as the actor providing one of the player character voices in Hogwarts Legacy. As with all things related to Harry Potter, it’s a fairly high-profile role, but author JK Rowling’s increasingly strident transphobia has blanketed the game in controversy, and the actor faced criticism from a number of people on social media for taking part in the game.
“I was cast in this project over 3 years ago, back when all Harry Potter was to me, was the magical world I grew up with,” Croft tweeted in response to one callout. “This was long before I was aware of JK Rowling’s views. I believe wholeheartedly that trans women are women and trans men are men.
“I know far more now than I did 3 years ago, and hope to learn far more in the next 3. I’m really sorry to anyone hurt by this announcement. There is no LGB without the T.”
Croft’s role in Hogwarts Legacy is particularly galling to online critics because of his high-profile “allyship” with the LGBTQ+ c…
Continue ReadingLinear perspective is the overarching method of representing 3D objects on a 2D plane, just like how games show up on your gaming monitor. It encompasses the one, two, and three point perspectives you probably learned about in school, and has been the major leading perspectival schema in art since it’s conception, way back in the fifteenth century.
Now, Robert Pepperell of the Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales (via New Scientist) is making us question everything we understand about how perspective should be represented in videogames.
The current standard of linear perspective was developed by architect, poet, and humanist, Leon Battista Alberti. He’s widely considered the father of Early Renaissance in the art world, and popularised the linear perspective techniques which are still used by architects and artists alike today (game artists included) when trying to capture accuracy and realism in a scene.
If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a technique that gives the illusion of depth and volume as you draw parallel lines back from each corner of a 2D object to merge at certain points (the vanishing points); there’s one vanishing point for one point pers…
Continue ReadingMarty O’Donnell, the Halo composer fired by Bungie in 2014 and—the way things have been going—possible future potentate of the United States, announced his intention to run for Congress as a Republican in Nevada a few months ago. Now, in an interview with the controversial far-right newspaper The Epoch Times (via Kotaku), he’s explained why he thinks he can pull it off: “I’m a gamer, so I intend to win.”
“I’m not going to lose because somebody thinks they can spend more money than me, because they can’t,” said O’Donnell, who faces six other candidates in the upcoming June 11 Republican primary for Nevada’s third congressional district. O’Donnell faces quite the funding gap against both his Republican competitors and the district’s incumbent Democratic representative, Susie Lee, but reckons his gaming experience gives him an edge they lack.
In fact, O’Donnell reckons a lot of the lessons he learnt in game development can be brought into government. “What I see happening in Congress is like a walk in the park compared to making Halo 2,” the former composer told his interviewer, and promised to break up a stagnant and homogenous political sphere with his can…
Continue ReadingThe week before I traveled to Tokyo to play Shadow of the Erdtree for PC Gamer’s next cover story, I knew I needed to brush up on my Elden Ring skills. Instead of tackling the game solo again I decided to recruit a friend and try out the Seamless Co-op mod, which turned out to be a blast—I recommend it to anyone going back to Elden Ring after their first playthrough.
Co-op has always been my favorite way to experience FromSoftware’s games, and in some ways Elden Ring makes it easier than Dark Souls to summon friends to take on bosses and dungeons together. But it also has some frustrating limitations, like not being able to ride Torrent in the open world. So when I interviewed FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki for the cover story, I brought up how Seamless Co-op makes it possible to play the entire game in a single uninterrupted multiplayer session, and asked what he thinks about that way of experiencing the game.
“It’s definitely not something we actively oppose or want to downplay, wanting to go through the whole game together,” Miyazaki said. “In terms of where we were with Elden Ring, it was simply a case of wanting that more loose, casual style&mdas…
Continue ReadingHow many Google accounts have you created in your lifetime? And how often do you log into them? If your answer to those questions is “I don’t know,” then Google’s latest policy update is most likely aimed at you.
Google is updating its policy on inactive accounts to protect users from “security threats, like spam, phishing scams, and account hijacking.” To do so, Google accounts that have not been used or signed into for at least two years will be deleted, starting later this year.
This means you kiss the entire Google Workspace suite (Drive, Gmail, Docs, etc.), Youtube account, and Google Photos goodbye. So if you have a folder of pictures from your college days or an old draft of that sci-fi novel you said you would finish, you should log in and keep that account active.
According to Google, the rationale behind the policy change is a matter of security. It claims the chance of unused accounts becoming compromised are higher since they often use old passwords and are less likely to have two-factor authentication attached to the account.
Even though the policy change is in effect now, Google will start deleting accounts in December 202…
Continue ReadingThe everlong battle between Microsoft and the European Commission gained a fresh page in its annals, as not only does the Commission believe the software giant has breached EU antitrust laws, but it also finds changes to how Microsoft distributes Teams to be “insufficient to address its concerns” and that “more changes to [its] conduct are necessary to restore competition.”
That’s according to a recent statement by the European Commission (EC), in which it reports its preliminary findings in an antitrust investigation into Microsoft and its cloud-based communication application, Teams. That all kicked off when Slack Technologies (now owned by Salesforce) lodged a complaint with the EC in 2020, in which it alleged that Microsoft had illegally tied Teams to its productivity software packages.
Three years later, the EC opened an investigation as to whether Microsoft was in breach of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, essentially a law that prohibits companies from abusing a dominant position in the EU market. Around the same time, Alphaview (a developer of video-conferencing software) also lodged a similar complaint, and the EC has decid…
Continue ReadingPC hardware and gaming are like a perpetual arms race for the enthusiast’s money. Games continue to excel at technical levels with realistic graphics, audio, and physics engines that demand more and more out of our little machines. Even without jumps in computation, storage alone can be a constant battle forcing you to decide which 100GB game you’ll need to delete for your newest adventure. Or you could just buy some more storage with Samsung’s current sale.
Samsung is having a sale across a range of its SSDs over on Amazon and the official Samsung store. For PC gamers there’s big savings on M.2 format drives, and there’s plenty on offer for console gaming fans too.
You can grab a 1TB stick of Samsung’s 990 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD with a 41% discount down from $170 to $100 on both Amazon and the Samsung store. For Aussies, that brings the price to AU$155. The 990 Pro is a great choice for any PCIe 4.0 compatible build, basically maxing out the protocol in our review testing. One of our main concerns was the price, but with $70 off it’s a much more friendly offer at the moment.
If 1TB isn’t going to hold all of your games you can get the 2TB 990 Pro for 38% off. This o…
Continue ReadingThe galactic campaign against the Terminids isn’t close to over, but Super Earth has bigger problems on its hands.
As announced on social channels, Helldivers 2 is pressing pause on its bug war and pointing fleets of helldivers toward an emerging front. The Automatons, a faction of titanium death machines and Terminator wannabes, have launched “surprise invasions of multiple developed worlds” in the Xzar sector.
As a result, two playable planets have unlocked in the Xzar sector and a new major order has come in: “Complete at least eight Defend campaigns against the Automatons.”
The update came as a surprise to players. Up to this point, the community has cumulatively completed missions to “liberate” planets and gradually progress deeper into enemy territory, but today’s unannounced Automaton pivot suggests developer Arrowhead Game Studios isn’t above throwing a few curveballs at its cooperative war simulation. Considering Helldivers 2 has now been out a full week, this sort of developer intervention might become a regular occurrence.
It’s a good time to switch things up. As much as I’ve enjoyed racking up a buggy body count that’d put your local extermina…
Continue ReadingHelldivers 2 may not have any official modding support, but you simply cannot stop players putting weird stuff in your game. A couple of weeks ago, YouTuber and modder ToastedShoes dropped Master Chief, Buzz Lightyear, the TARDIS, and more into the war for a truly chaotic take on managed democracy. Now he’s showing off an impressive collision with the Star Wars universe.
Not only are the Helldivers themselves reskinned as clone soldiers (including fan favourites Rex, Cody, and Hunter), the Automatons have been recast as Separatist droids. Though the weapons and stratagems are unchanged, it’s surprising how well it all fits together for a convincing recreation of a Clone Wars battle. Finally, you can experience what it would be like to scrabble in the mud against horrific odds while the Jedi are off somewhere else messing about with their lightsabers.
You can’t try the full Helldivers 2 Star Wars mod for yourself just yet, but you don’t have long to wait—ToastedShoes promises it will drop later this week. In the meantime, you can at least try one of the skins, a trooper of the 501st in phase 2 armour. Do note though that modding Helldivers 2 is done at you…
Continue ReadingGetty Images has begun legal proceedings against the creator of AI art tool Stable Diffusion. Filed this week in London’s High Court, Getty Images’ action claims that “Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright,” and used these images for its own commercial gain.
Getty Images and image library rights holders like it are set to be some of the most affected by AI image generation, and while some have embraced the technology, such as Shutterstock, others have largely rejected AI art. Getty Images falls into the latter category. Getty Images banned the upload and sale of AI images in September 2022, in a bid to keep itself safe from legal challenges.
Getty’s CEO, Craig Peters, had previously said that there are concerns for AI-created artwork, including “unaddressed rights issues.”
Little did we know at the time, the legal challenges would come directly from Getty itself.
“Getty Images believes artificial intelligence has the potential to stimulate creative endeavors,” a statement from Getty Images says. “Accordingly, Getty Images provided licenses to leading technology innovators for purposes related to training ar…
Continue ReadingIt won’t have escaped your notice that Intel has been in the news a lot recently, either talking about its race to be at the cutting edge of chip manufacturing, getting billions of dollars from the US administration, or having a few issues with its high-end CPUs running the latest games. It’s certainly been very busy, though, building all kinds of new facilities for making processors, as well as expanding its research laboratories. In a brief report on its 10 largest construction projects, Intel shared that the total cost of all the current investments will be over $160 billion by the time it’s all finished.
If you’re wondering whether that’s a lot of money for such things, then rest assured, it absolutely is. Yes, semiconductor foundries all cost many billions of dollars to design and build, and TSMC has spent in the region of $65 billion to construct three chip-making plants in Arizona. However, Intel is also spending a bucket load of cash on improving its research and development facility in Hillsboro, specifically over $36 billion.
To put that into perspective, Nvidia spent a little under $9 billion on R&D in its last financial year and although the company n…
Continue ReadingAsus is recommending users update the firmware on some of its most popular routers in order to address critical security vulnerabilities. The updates include fixes or mitigations for nine security vulnerabilities.
According to Bleeping Computer, the CVE-2022-26376 and CVE-2018-1160 vulnerabilities are the most worrisome. The first is a memory corruption vulnerability that could let attackers launch DoS attacks or even execute code. It carries a critical 9.8/10 severity rating according to the NIST’s National Vulnerability Database.
The second is a five-year-old vulnerability with the same 9.8/10 critical rating. It too can allow an attacker to execute code. Both methods place the router at risk of becoming part of a botnet or used for all kinds of nefarious purposes.
The list of affected models follows: GT6, GT-AXE16000, GT-AX11000 PRO, GT-AX6000, GT-AX11000, GS-AX5400, GS-AX3000, XT9, XT8, XT8 V2, RT-AX86U PRO, RT-AX86U, RT-AX86S, RT-AX82U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX3000, TUF-AX6000, and TUF-AX5400.
Asus clearly believes these are significant issues. “Please note, if you choose not to install this new firmware version, we strongly recommend disab…
Continue ReadingRockstar has released the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 early, and in 12 hours it’s already smashed through 60 million views (and counting). Needless to say the 90-second video is jam-packed full of details and hints about what we’ll be getting up to in Vice City, and if you want the nuts-and-bolts breakdown we’ve got you covered. But one element of the trailer really jumped out at me: TikTok framing, and the real-world parallels.
It’s no surprise that GTA 6 will incorporate its own version of TikTok, because the series has always jumped on the tech trends of the moment: characters use their iFruit phones, you can surf Live Invader (Facebook) or Bleeter (Twitter), and pretty much any piece of pop culture you can imagine has its GTA equivalent. What Rockstar’s seized upon with TikTok feels more in-depth than that though, and a reflection of how TikTokers and people filming constantly is now a fact of contemporary urban life.
What especially interested me about the GTA 6 take on this, however, is that several of the TikTok-esque clips in the trailer are lifted directly from real life. The first time I watched it I recognised GTA 6’s hammer lady (timesta…
Continue ReadingSquare Enix has debuted a full trailer for Final Fantasy 14’s upcoming expansion Dawntrail at Final Fantasy Fan Festival 2024. The trailer shows off a look at the new world continent and its inhabitants interacting with a diverse lineup of FF14 classics.
The trailer is dominated by the generic player-stand-in Adventurer journeying towards the new continent of Tural alongside others, including a soon-to-be-playable female Hrothgar, and doing battle with a huge two-headed lizard-like Mamool Ja creature. Other scenes sweep through a sprawling city alive with strange new creatures and familiar ones not seen before in these numbers.
Dominating the environment of the trailer are lizard-like Mamool Ja, a tribe that has been around FF14 for a long time now but only as mercenaries far from home. The Dawntrail expansion will take players to the continent that the Mamool Ja call home, and presumably explore their home nation(s).
However, I must note that above all else this trailer includes an extended sequence of a chinchilla doing cute stuff. Stealing a peanut. Sitting on a shoulder. Running around. Making someone smile. Merely existing.
You can wat…
Continue ReadingBandai 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 nearly two-thirds of you have some work to do before you can access the DLC.
And thus, Bandai’s PSA:
Now, this number does bear a little further analysis. First and most obvious, it only represents Steam, so while it’s probably a good barometer of the situation across the board, it doesn’t accurately reflect how things are going for console players, who may or may not be more conscienti…
Continue ReadingWatch On
One peasant and his pitchfork versus the zombie horde looks to be the concept behind God Save Birmingham, the recently-announced survival crafting game from Ocean Drive Studio. With a short alpha trailer dropped this week at Gamescom and a recently-posted Steam page, God Save Birmingham will be a “physics-based” game set “in a painstakingly recreated medieval market town.”
The trailer shows a pretty normal-looking dude dodging zombies through the muddy roads and fields of a medieval village, all while armed with little more than a pitchfork. The big pitch for God Save Birmingham is that its mechanics are physics-driven, so you see the character stumble and slide around the world—and the zombies engage in some real slapstick stuff like tripping over benches.
For a lot of people—me included—the appeal here is definitely the look at historical authenticity and realism.
“Explore a carefully reconstructed 14th century Birmingham, in all its bucolic, bubonic glory. Stop by the Markets or the Burgage Plots to forage for resources. Raid boarded-up smithies for tools, grab a drink at the nearest tavern, and explore historic architecture at the…
Continue ReadingFinal Fantasy 14 is a game with, for the most part, solid job design at endgame—Dawntrail’s had some bumps in the road but, for the length I’ve played, class balance has typically been more-or-less decent with only some minor variance and snafus. Outside of the endgame, however, it’s all over the shop.
Jobs are assigned AoE attacks at complete random, some like Dragoon don’t get their proper kit until level 50—arguably 60—and newer jobs, like the Pictomancer, completely tear apart at the seams when level synced to older content. One such quirk is the existence of lower-tier healing spells like Benefic and, to the chagrin of Reddit user BakaDango, Cure.
“Last night, after a 30+ minute Alexander [raid],” BakaDango writes, “I finally have had enough of dealing with Cure 1 [White Mages]. At this point, I can recognize the Cure 1 jingle from a mile away and every time I hear it, I feel great pain. Rather than try to explain this over and over or convey this in a macro, I decided to make this site.”
While this might seem petty on the face of it, as a FF14 player myself—they’re right. They’re absolutely correct to have made this thing and to be…
Continue ReadingI’ll make no bones about it: I preferred Grand Theft Auto 4 to GTA 5. The latter is great and all but I never got over the more grounded and gritty take of GTA 4 and in particular its tragic central cast, defined and trapped by their lives in the criminal underworld. GTA 4 had two great expansions, The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and the Damned, both introducing their own protagonists and side stories. One of them was the biker Johnny Klebitz, who, unlike many of Rockstar’s leads, ends his GTA 4 arc in a better place.
An early twist in GTA 5 upset the apple cart: One of that game’s three protagonists, the psychopathic Trevor, finds a drug-addled Johnny and beats him to death. This has always been an unpopular twist, which perhaps indicates narratively it was a good one (boo!), because as well as the character’s death the state he’s found in suggests things all went wrong for Johnny after The Lost and the Damned’s ending. Players didn’t like the fact he was killed, but they especially didn’t like the fact he was such a shell of the character we knew.
Ever since this happened Johnny’s afterlife became an urban legend among the GTA community, with players claiming t…
Continue ReadingThere’s a fine line between adorable and horrifying, and Among The Wild has one boot on either side of it. Revealed at the PC Gaming Show today, the first game from Swedish developer Nuggets Entertainment is a first-person farming sim, exploration adventure, and creature-collector. And those creatures sure are cute… except, are they?
For instance, the pudgy yellow-beaked birds we see in the trailer are almost cute but their eyeballs are just a little too big and their pupils just a bit too beady, such that they border on sinister looking… so while I do want to pick them up I don’t really want to hug them. Then there’s your mount, which has the stocky pink body of a giant pig (cute!) but the face and horns of some sort of… pug-faced lizard? I don’t even want to know what unholy union led to that creature—but it does look fun to ride around on.
And then there are the stars of the trailer, those round fuzzy creatures with mouths that are a little too wide to be trustworthy. You just get the feeling they might look around, blink a few times, and then abruptly swallow someone’s pet cat without ever losing that bi…
Continue ReadingIf a high refresh rate gaming laptop is what you desire, I’ve found a deal well worth casting your eyes across. It’s this Acer Predator Helios Neo 16—and while the 240 Hz display is definitely the headline feature, the rest of the specs are pretty impressive for its $1,450 asking price at Best Buy.
A very fast panel can make all the difference for competitive multiplayer gaming, as the faster you can see your opponents, the better chance you have of making yourself look like a hero rather than, I don’t know, me, a multiplayer zero. Speedy displays are plentiful these days, but a 240 Hz IPS unit in a gaming laptop under $1,500 is a bit of a boon.
Still, while it’s all very well having a super-speedy screen, if your components can’t feed it pixels fast enough then it’s a bit of a waste. Thankfully, here you get an Intel Core i9 14900HX in tandem with a 140 W TGP RTX 4070. That’s one of Intel’s latest and greatest mobile CPUs stacked with an Nvidia GPU that really can deliver the goods.
Sure, it’s not an RTX 4080, but the full-fat RTX 4070 in combination with some DLSS 3 upscaling and potentially some Frame Generation should be able to pump a serious number …
Continue ReadingOne would hope that, when reading a recipe, a human being has at some point crafted it personally, adjusting the ingredients and techniques inside over a process of elimination and careful adjustment to create a delicious result. Or, if you’re receiving a recipe from grocery delivery service Instacart, you could hope that the app’s AI-generated recipes would lead to something delectable.
Sometimes, sure. And others? Might be best to give it a miss.
Instacart announced in May of last year they they would be partnering with OpenAI to launch an AI-powered “Food Inspiration Search Tool” and AI-generated recipes, which given AI’s tendency to go slightly off the rails on occasion strikes as a dubious idea right from the off. However, it was users of the Instacart subreddit that were first to notice that something odd was happening with the accompanying images.
Those scanning the photos (via Business Insider) without paying too much attention may have let them pass, but more than a cursory glance reveals some ingredients that look entirely made up. From conjoined chickens to hotdogs with the interior of a tomato, it’s a telling indicator of what looks like the s…
Continue ReadingTo the best of my recollection, February hasn’t always been one of the biggest months for game releases, but the industry’s habit of delaying games from the holiday season to the start of the next year has turned it into a magnet for big games that needed “extra time for polish.” And boy is February 2025 stacked.
The last-minute delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows just added another big game to a month that was already spilling over. Here’s what I’m talking about:
Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Avowed, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are all in February because of delays. The others might’ve picked early 2025 in part to avoid those formerly 2024 games, but as happens so often now, that didn’t work out.
It sure is a lot of big action RPGs—the kinds…
Continue ReadingWatch On
The original Doom and Doom 2 are back in a big way: Bethesda Softworks announced at QuakeCon today that newly-updated editions of the groundbreaking 1990s shooters, bundled with a pile of additional content, are now available in a single package.
Developed in partnership with Nightdive and id Software, the Doom + Doom 2 bundle features cross-platform deathmatch and co-op gameplay for up to 16 players, modding tools that enable modders to share their work directly in-game (sounds similar to the mod integration in Bethesda’s RPGs), and an updated soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult including brand-new Doom 2 recordings (although you can opt for the original soundtrack if you prefer). There’s also a range of new accessibility options including more legible fonts and a high-contrast mode, plus improved performance with support for 4K resolutions via Nightdive’s Kex engine.
The full package includes: