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I was a little hard on Life is Strange earlier this week, but it is still a game I overall liked—which is why it’s a shame to see Square Enix shooting itself in the foot with a publishing decision which, on the face of it, doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a direct sequel to the first game in the series, following Maxine Caulfield as she gains the ability to walk between parallel universes to solve the mystery of yet another dead best friend. The poor gal just can’t catch a break.
The game has, naturally, a Deluxe Edition and an Ultimate Edition. We can all probably agree that these are annoying inclusions, especially for a narrative-driven game, but at the very least the absence of a couple of outfits isn’t going to have a major impact on the story.
The base edition of the game costs around $50, the Deluxe edition is $60, and the Ultimate edition sits at a whopping $80—curiously enough, the only difference for t…
With plans to trim $10 billion from its budget, Intel is halting plans to build a cutting-edge foundry in the green fields of Magdeburg, Germany for around two years. The facility was originally intended to start construction in 2023, with production beginning in late 2027.
In a note sent to employees and later published, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the decision: “We will pause our projects in Poland and Germany by approximately two years based on anticipated market demand.”
That would see the fab delayed until at least 2030. The construction of the foundry had already been pushed back by various historical mishaps, including landing on a 6,000 year-old neolithic burial site and having the very specific misfortune of too much soft soil. Intel had also been chasing the German government for more money, which was roundly denied.
Rumours that the fab may soon be cancelled altogether have been gathering, though that’s often true of almost any minutely delayed c…
Remember late last year when Epic took a scythe to its back-catalogue, delisting almost every single Unreal game? At the time, the blow was softened by the news that Unreal Tournament 3 would become Unreal Tournament 3 X, a free version of the classic with full crossplay between PC storefronts, zero microtransactions, and “no strings attached”.
It was never really announced by Epic, mind you. Fans got wind of it thanks to the Steam description for UT3 (visible in this archived version), which was updated around the time Epic was going on its delist spree to include a full description of the new version. I guess there was a reason Epic never made a big splash about it, though, because it now appears to have been memory-holed.
A recent update to the UT3 Steam page, spotted by Wario64 on Twitter, has purged all mention of Unreal Tournament 3 X: Its name, its features, even the date on its copyright has been reverted to 2007 from 2022. Instead, the page is now…
I was recently over in China, visiting MSI’s factory where it makes motherboards, graphics cards, monitors, etc, and at the event, the company launched several new products. One of which was its MEG AI1600T power supply unit, replete with RGB lighting, a host of high-end features, and oh yes—two 12V-2×6 sockets for Nvidia graphics cards.
The days of multi-GPU setups (aka SLI and CrossFire) are long dead and given that MSI specifically notes that the AI1600T is “ready for AI computing usage”, it’s clear that this PSU is aimed directly at folks wanting to do a spot of homebrew AI stuff. But a few of us at the event got to talking about how it could be for something else.
In passing, one of MSI’s engineers had said that its new PSUs were all ready for the next generation of graphics cards and that obviously refers to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series, as they’re the ones that seem next in line to appear (AMD’s RDNA 4 series look likely to launch much later on).
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If you’ve ever heard the old radio dramas based on Sherlock Holmes stories you’ll know the joy of listening to actors crisply enunciate a conversation while accompanied by a soundscape of footsteps crunching on gravel. Expect something similar except with more arrows twanging and spells being whooshy in Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance, an audio drama in podcast form being produced as part of the build-up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
A prequel to the game’s story, Vows & Vengeance is about a retired thief searching for her lover in the Fade, with seven of the series’ eight episodes also highlighting a guest star companion from the videogame. Harding, for instance, the much-loved dwarf scout from Inquisition, will co-star in episode two. Based on the teaser, we can expect to hear characters like Solas and Varric pop up as well.
It’s reassuring that BioWare is going hard on narrative support for The Veilguard, with this podcast joining the short story anthology Tevint…
If you’ve ever been playing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and thought “I wish there was a tabletop version of this”, it’s possible there was a monkey’s paw in the vicinity. Games Workshop has granted your wish with the newly announced Darktide board game, but whatever you’re imagining in your head right now is probably cooler than what’s on offer here.
To get it out of the way early: there are no new miniatures in this box. The models are simply recycled from other Warhammer releases, rather than being custom sculpts based on the videogame, which gives it all a bit of an uncanny valley feel. Sure, those are traitor guardsmen, but they’re not quite the Moebian 21st.
The worst offenders are the four heroes, who while technically embodying the roles of Ogryn, Psyker, Veteran, and Zealot, don’t match the game at all and don’t look remotely cohesive with each other. Half of them are even holding weapons that aren’t in the game. More appropriate paint jobs would go…
European Commission VP of Values and Transparency Vera Jourová is demanding that the EU include rules for AI-generated content in an update to its Code of Practice on Disinformation.
According to Golem, Jourová has asked that the 44 signatories of the Code, which include tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Google, devise a set of rules designed to prevent services like Bing Chat and Bard from being used to generate and spread false information, including by labeling all AI-generated content.
When questioned about whether these new rules could affect freedom of expression, Jourová said, “When it comes to the products of AI, I don’t see any right of machines to freedom of expression.”
The Code of Practice on Disinformation is a set of standards the EU has been using to combat the spread of “verifiably false or misleading information [which is] created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public.” …
I was already riled up enough when yesterday I wrote about my frustrations with BioWare’s endless cryptic teasing of its upcoming games, so it’s probably a good thing for my blood pressure that it wasn’t until today that I realised the studio is monetising them too.
For the pretty steep price of $45 / £37.25 plus shipping, you can get a lithograph (basically a fancy poster) depicting the teaser image revealed this past N7 Day. That is, a character we don’t know anything about yet, wearing a futuristic coat that blends into an image of a location we don’t know anything about yet, from a game we don’t know anything about yet, that doesn’t even have a name yet. And they don’t even throw in a frame!
BioWare is no stranger to merch, of course—the N7 symbol was designed right from the start of the creation of Mass Effect as a logo that would look good on a sweatshirt—and I don’t begrudge any fan for splashing out on something fun from one of th…
2023 has been a bumper year for fans of Keita Takahashi’s Katamari, one of the most singular game series ever made, which recently saw the best entry released on Steam. Katamari is about rolling stuff up into a ball as the Prince of All Cosmos under the watchful eye of disapproving daddy The King of All Cosmos, and starts small-scale with you rolling up paperclips and erasers and fruit, before scaling into cars and trees and eventually whole city blocks. May sound a bit weird but what this all adds up to can only be described as a sincere and touching ode to the joys of play and childhood innocence (really).
It’s a special game, and someone at Google clearly loves it as much as I do.
Google has incorporated a Katamari minigame into its omnipresent search engine: you can start rolling a ball around the search results page, gradually increasing the ball’s size with text and buttons before sticking on things like the images. It’s a little bit of an OCD magnet actually, beca…
Gamers once again repressed by the state as judge throws out lawsuit against Activision acquisition-
It’s not been a bad week for Microsoft. Not only has the UK Competition and Markets Authority decided that, actually, it doesn’t have a problem with the Xbox-maker taking ownership of Call of Duty at all, but now GamesRadar reports that the dread hand of a California judge has thrown out a so-called “Gamers’ Lawsuit” against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
The Gamers’ Lawsuit was brought against Microsoft by a group of ten Call of Duty fans in December last year. Echoing arguments that have also been voiced by the US Federal Trade Commission, they said that Activision was one of “only several independent game publishers in the world that are capable of making the highest production quality and most graphics-intensive videogames,” and that any consolidation of those companies would invariably have a negative impact on videogame players.
They also claimed that Microsoft had lied about not having an incentive to limit the availability of Bethesda…
Former US senator and vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, whose crusade against violent videogames in the early ’90s sparked the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, has died at age 82.
A statement released by Lieberman’s family (via Politico) said Lieberman’s death was the result of “complications from a fall.”
Lieberman’s political career began in 1970 with his election to the Connecticut senate, a seat he held until 1980; he also served as the state’s attorney general from 1983 to ’89. He was elected to the US senate as a member of the Democratic Party in 1988.
In 1993, prompted by the rise of “realistic” violence and sexual content in games like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, Lieberman joined with fellow senator Herb Kohl to hold hearings on violence in videogames and its impact on children. Those hearings, and a proposed Video Game Rating Act of 1994, ultimately pressured the industry into forming the ESRB, a voluntary rating board tha…
Forget 1440p, all the cool kids game at 4K, right? It’s certainly much more doable these days, in no small part thanks to upscaling tech from Nvidia and AMD. Just as important, 4K gaming monitors keep getting cheaper and this year’s Prime Day deals have only made prices better.
Let’s kick things off with the Samsung Odyssey G70B or G7 for short. Unusually for a Samung, it’s an IPS model, which probably means it doesn’t actually use a Samsung-made LCD panel.
Either way, it’s 28 inches, hits 144Hz and 400 nits, so it ticks all the important boxes and it’s yours for just $400 on Amazon. I quite like the extra inch over 27-inch alternatives, so this is where my money would go at this end of the 4K segment.
- We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
That said, 32 inches is actually my favorite form factor for 4K, so if possible I’d up the ante to LG’s 32-inch 4K Ultragear for $525 f…
It’s long been known that AMD is working on its Zen 4-based Ryzen Threadripper Pro lineup. It appears as though the launch is close after some benchmark results for the 32-core Threadripper Pro 7975WX and 96-core 7995WX showed up in the SiSoftware Sandra database.
The results come via @momomo_us. The system in question is a Dell Precision 7875 with two different configurations, but also interesting is that the listing shows many of both chips’ specs.
The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX is a 96-core,192-thread monster of a chip with 12 x 8 core chiplets. Its boost clock is 5.14GHz with a surprisingly high 3.2GHz base clock. As we’ve come to expect from AMD, the cache amount is impressive, with 96 MB of L2 cache and a whopping 384 MB of L3 cache. It’s all but certain the chips will support 8-channel DDR5 memory.
The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975WX is a little more worldly with 32-cores and 64-threads. The listing reports a strange 4.0GHz/4.0GHz clock speed, so this is pr…
Just days after showing off multiple games at various Summer Game Fest showcases, Sumo Group has announced that it is laying off up to 15% of its total workforce “to ensure the security of the business going forward.”
“Whilst Sumo has been able to manage through many of the recent difficulties the games industry has faced, we have not been immune and reshaping operations across the business to better navigate the upcoming challenges expected in the coming months is a path we must now take to ensure the security of the business going forward,” the company said in a statement.
“The difficult decision to reduce our costs across the business in a number of ways is a direct result of these challenges, and unfortunately will include a reduction in the number of people the business can support. Every alternate route to limit the impact to our people is being considered but sadly this process of transformation will affect up to 15% of our people across the Group in Canada, UK,…
CD Projekt’s retro game-focused digital storefront, GOG, has been with us for a whopping 15 years now. To celebrate, GOG’s having a storewide sale and giving away free copies of the 2013 point-and-click adventure game, The Night of the Rabbit.
You can claim your copy by logging into GOG on a browser and scrolling down to the Night of the Rabbit banner on the store’s homepage. The giveaway will run this weekend until September 25, with the sale continuing through October 2.
In another life, before being sentenced to the pits of Mordor to slave away on The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, German developer Daedalic specialized in heartfelt, plot-driven point-and-click adventures with gorgeous, painterly art styles. The Night of the Rabbit was one such adventure from this heyday, and at the time, former PCG editor Richard Cobbett wrote that it had “no little amount of style or artistry ready for anyone who cares to drop in for this trip down the rabbit hole.”
The sale is no …