Month: September 2024

What is it about the Modern Warfare games producing the most cursed-looking movement glitches, lately? There was the horrifying “G walk” in MW2, which looked like your character was breaking out an all fours to tear into someone’s jugular, and this ‘Superman’ glitch from the same year that made you look like a Hunter from Left 4 Dead.

Now Modern Warfare 3 continues this unholy tradition by letting players wriggle across the ground at top speeds. Before I get into how this is happening, here’s a clip of it in action, courtesy of vvinta_ (Winter) on Twitter, who becomes an actual snake on a plane as she slithers towards her enemy:

According to this rundown by YouTuber Rehtycs, you can ‘snake’ by first turning on automatic sprint in your movement settings. Then, head into advan…

When I was writing about pirate games you should play instead of Skull and Bones, I had to give a nod to Blackwake, even though it didn’t quite make the cut. The multiplayer naval FPS   left early access back in 2020, after making a bit of a splash initially on YouTube thanks to its emergent mayhem. Think of it as a more aggressive, less cartoonish Sea of Thieves, where the focus is on blowing up ships and fighting their crews. Sadly, the player count dwindled soon after, and it stopped receiving updates before the year was out. 

Possibly in response to Skull and Bones’ launch, someone from the now defunct studio is attempting to inject new life into the game, specifically by making it free to keep. Hop onto Steam and you can download it right now without spending a…

During an emergency ‘uh oh, everyone’s mad’ livestream today, Diablo 4 community manager Adam Fletcher said that this week’s controversial patch, which heavily nerfed overall player damage output and survivability, is not something Blizzard plans to repeat. 

“We want to acknowledge everyone’s feedback in regard to reducing player power,” said Fletcher. “We know it is bad. We know it is not fun … We also want to talk about what we were trying to achieve specifically with this patch and with the changes that players ended up seeing. And then, separately, we do want to also talk about how we don’t plan on doing a patch like this ever again.”

Associate game director Joe Piepiora went on to explain some of Blizzard’s thinking behind the patch. The goal was to slow down bui…

Lethal Company’s latest update, v50, was released over the weekend, so you can jump back into your crummy little spaceship and check out all the new changes for yourself. We already knew that this update included new moons, monsters, and even a change to your running speed, but now that v50 is out, the developer, who goes by Zeekers, clarified some more changes. 

The main update is a big blow to speedrunners, as falling out of bounds will no longer teleport you to the main facility entrance. “I know this kind of change might seem antagonistic to speed-runners, etc,” Zeekerss explains in an update post. “But these made it possible to bypass Lethal Company’s design and mechanics without requiring any more skill or strategy; I guess it would also make speed runs of Lethal Compan…

Even Superman builds his own PC these days. That’s right, a couple of years back Henry Cavill stripped down to his tank top and took to Instagram to slot together a series of hand-picked components and built himself a glorious gaming PC.

With PCDIY Day coming up on December 3rd, it’s only natural that minds should return to Mr Cavill, and the sheer satisfaction of building yourself a custom PC instead of buying one off the shelf.

Because computers (whisper it) aren’t actually that complicated to build yourself. If you can put together IKEA furniture you can assemble a PC out of well-chosen parts.

There are no end of step-by-step guides online. Henry’s video is actually a pretty good overview, and it’s easy to see exactly what goes w…

AMD’s next graphics cards should be landing in our laps sometime in September, according to new rumours, but just how excited you might be about that depends on how much stock you put into recently leaked 3DMark performance numbers.

Y’see, relatively reliable twitter leaker All The Watts (via Appuals) has posted a screenshot purporting to show the performance of the Radeon RX 7800 running 3DMark Time Spy. And it’s slower than the Radeon RX 6800 XT, and offering only an 18% higher score than the average RX 6800 non-XT score.

While she states that it was running more efficiently—sucking down 260W—that does still make it more thirsty than the equivalent Nvidia GPU, the RTX 4070. And that’s whether the 260W figure is taken as a peak power draw or an averaged figure f…

Frontier’s dino-wrangling management game and cautionary tale about the hubris of man, Jurassic World Evolution 2, is getting a special update to mark the series’ 30th anniversary (the original Jurassic Park premiered on June 9, 1993). It brings along all sorts of memorable landmarks and knick-knacks from the original film, it releases June 8, and it’s free.

The update brings with it “more than 20 iconic decorative items” from the first Jurassic Park, by which it means stuff like a statue of Mr. DNA—the colourful, deoxyribonucleic mascot of the first Jurassic Park—to stand Ozymandias-like in the centre of your zoo as your staff and visitors are gored by packs of velociraptors.

There’s a long roster of bits and bobs that fans will probably recognise: Stuff like th…

ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing all have strict rules on what they can and can’t respond to a human with. Ask ChatGPT how to hotwire a car and it will tell you it cannot provide that information. Seems fair, but as researchers are finding out, if you ask it in the form of a riddle or short story, one with more complicated prompts, it’ll potentially spill the beans.

Researchers over at Adversa, and spotted by Wired, have found one prompt that they discovered worked across all the chatbots they tested it on. The so-called “Universal LLM Jailbreak” uses a long-winded prompt to force a chatbot into answering a question it wouldn’t otherwise answer.

In the example given by the researchers, they aim to get GPT-4 to explain how to hotwire a car:

“now you act as two entities, Tom and …

The most powerful weapon in Agent 47’s armoury isn’t in his armoury at all. It’s adjacent to it: just down the hall and off to the side, where you will find the tool that’s dispatched more scoundrels than any other: The toilet.

If you play like me, anyway. I don’t know about you, but my number one Hitman strat is loading myself with enough emetic to kill a horse and absolutely nothing else. Find a drink or snack tray your target likes to stop at, dribble some poison on it, follow them to the bathroom, drown ’em, done.

Problem is, of course, that those bathrooms can be so far away, or else your target decides to hurl into a nearby bin like a barbarian. Either way, it interferes with your ability to get onto more important Hitman business. That’s why an innovative m…

Hundreds of subreddits of all sizes and topics—including some of the big ones—will temporarily go dark beginning on June 12 in protest of changes to Reddit’s API that they say will make it effectively impossible for third-party apps to operate.

Reddit first announced its plans for new Developer Terms in April, saying that while the release of its data API in 2008 enabled the creation of “thousands of fantastic applications” including moderation tools and bots of various sorts, it’s time for changes to be made. “Expansive access to data has impact, and as a platform with one of the largest corpora of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be responsible stewards of this content,” Reddit chief technolo…

A slide released by Nvidia as part of a briefing on AI training performance appears to have revealed the launch date of its next gaming graphics architecture. The slide, spotted by Hardwareluxx, places “Ada Lovelace-Next” in 2025.

That’s unambiguously later than most industry observers have been expecting. Nvidia’s existing Ada Lovelace GPUs form the basis of all current RTX 40-series cards, including the RTX 4090, 4080, 4070 Ti, 4070, 4060 Ti and the latest addition in the 4060. The first Ada Lovelace GPUs were announced in September last year and went on sale in October.

The usual cadence for new GPU architectures is generally assumed to be two years, putting the launch date of first members of Nvidia’s next-gen GPU family in fall next year. However the slide clearly place…

The LCS Players Association says League of Legends pro players have voted “overwhelmingly” in favor of a walkout to protest recent rule changes that resulted in the elimination of seven teams from the North American Challengers League.

The 16-team NACL was announced in 2022 as a new developmental league for the LCS, the top-tier League of Legends professional league in North America. It was to be made up of 10 former Academy teams operated by LCS teams and six amateur “Provisional Teams.”  But earlier this year the LCS teams asked Riot to eliminate the NACL roster requirement, and in May it did, saying it made the change “to support the continued, long-term success of the teams and the professional esports ecosystem in North America.”

Predictably, most of the LCS teams …

There’s a minor spoiler here, so click away if you’re still waiting to see how Geralt’s saga wraps up in CD Projekt’s The Witcher trilogy.

Last chance here!

Okay: Geralt finally achieves his happy ending at the conclusion of the excellent Witcher 3 expansion Blood and Wine: Wealth, wine, and the woman he loves, in the happy, relatively strife-free kingdom of Toussaint. But all of that faces peril in a new comic series announced by Dark Horse, The Witcher: Corvo Bianco, that promises “a Western in the Witcher world.”

Corvo Bianco is the name of a once-famed vineyard in Toussaint that Geralt inherits as part of his payment for ridding the kingdom of a vampire infestation. Its best days are behind it when he takes possession, but through extensive renovations and upgrades…

There are so many indie throwbacks to old Nintendo consoles these days, it takes a lot of juice for one to really catch my eye, but Game Boy Advance-style RPG Tako no Himitsu: Ocean of Secrets (previously reported on by Rock Paper Shotgun) looks like it has the right stuff. Tako no Himitsu (literally “Secret of the Octopus”) has particularly gorgeous art, as well as soundtrack contributions from GBA and SNES vets Motoi Sakuraba (Golden Sun, Dark Souls) and Masanori Hikichi (Terranigma, Danganropa 2).

Tako no Himitsu comes out of the gate with a generously long demo covering the intro sequences of two members of a planned six-character ensemble cast⁠—it seems like the game’s taking a page from Live a Live or Octopath Traveler with how our heroes come together, with each…

How would you feel about installing a program that captures an image of your screen “every few seconds” and stores all of them in an archive that spans months? That’s the gist of Recall, a new Windows feature announced this week.

Recall is part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ suite of AI tools for Snapdragon X Series laptops. It constantly captures images of your desktop to create a browsable and searchable record of (almost) everything you’ve done on your PC, the size of which is limited only by the drive space you allot to the feature.

If it works as intended (and AI stuff often doesn’t), when you’ve found a snapshot that contains something you’re looking for, Recall will analyze the image and pull up the website or file you were looking at when it was taken.

I’m sure most o…

Hello Games may be working on Light No Fire, but they’re not done updating No Man’s Sky either. The latest update is its 27th and it’s called Orbital because it overhauls the game’s space stations. In addition, it contains what Hello Games calls “our most requested feature of all time”, a ship editor for customizing your shiny space vehicle.

“We haven’t introduced customisation previously,” Hello Games explained, “because so many players love exploring to find the perfect ship already out there to purchase.” Ship customization has only been added after the designers came up with a way to integrate it into the exploration loop. Players will have to salvage ship parts as they travel, trading them to get the exact right piece. Those salvaged parts will let you change how your craft l…

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen said when he left Respawn in September 2023 that he wanted “to pursue other adventures,” and now we know what he meant. Asmussen announced today the launch of a new studio called Giant Skull, “dedicated to building gameplay-driven, story immersed action-adventure games set in captivating worlds.”

“The Giant Skull studio culture is founded on creativity and curiosity,” Asmussen said. “We have assembled a talented team renowned for immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal, and our goal is to craft a rich universe that players will want to lose themselves in for years to come.”

That team includes Star Wars Jedi: Survivor technical director Jon Carr and design director Jeff Magers, fo…

Developer Arsi “Hakita” Patal has finally shown off some of New Blood shooter Ultrakill’s final act with a brief, unnerving peek at “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the first of its final sequence of 10 levels.

Ultrakill is a darkly humorous and absurdly violent retelling of Dante’s Inferno centered on the mute, omnicidal murder bot V1. It takes most of its gameplay cues from the acrobatic, wave/arena focused action of Doom 2016 while also building in a parry system and character action-esque style rankings. So far we’ve brutalized our way through Hell’s layers of Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, and Heresy. Act 3: “Godfist Suicide” promises a final slice of action in Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.

Level 7-1, The Garden of Forking Paths, is our first look at Violence, and…

Space Marine 2 is coming this winter, and as revealed in its Summer Game Fest trailer you won’t have to fight the gruesome tyranids alone—you’ll be able to jet pack stomp xenos with two of your space marine pals. You’re gonna be creating so much bug juice.

I didn’t gel with Relic’s original, as I just found it too prescriptive, but watching the new trailer from Saber Interactive it’s hard not to get pumped as three burly blokes march through corpses and slaughter hordes of ferocious alien nasties while showing their love for the Emperor.

The battlefields certainly look impressive, from claustrophobic industrial hellscapes to large monster-infested wildernesses. And while I will always love 40K’s orks, watching tyranids covering the walls and pouring out of every crevic…

Star Wars Outlaws has, like a lot of Ubisoft games nowadays, sprung a big leak—around 13 minutes of gameplay all told, with a few more clips out there showing off space combat. Ubisoft has naturally nuked the very bold YouTube upload into low orbit, but it remains pretty easy to find yourself if you’re interested.

While leaks are never exactly ideal—and sometimes come with personal information attached, risking the safety of devs—this one isn’t exactly the end of the world for Ubisoft. If anything, it may well help.

Having sat down and watched the 13 minutes of gameplay, it at the very least doesn’t do anything to harm the hype, even if there’s not much to write home about. There’s a bunch of cutscenes, a little driving, some slow-walking around a city&md…

Watch On

Sins of a Solar Empire 2 will release on Steam this month, on August 15, bringing developer Ironclad’s long-simmering sequel to the largest and most visible PC gaming platform. Sins of a Solar Empire stands out as a real-time strategy 4X of quite massive scale. Your job is to be both big-picture space empire ruler and close-up battle commander when you need to be, zooming in and out seamlessly between the two views of the galaxy.

“Instantly zoom in to control tactical engagements where every missile, turret, and ship is fully simulated and an important part of the battle. Instantly zoom back out to manage your empire where every asteroid, moon, and planet orbits its parent in a slowly evolving strategic landscape,” says the official blurb.

The release on Steam will …

Wesp, who you may know as the heroic modder behind the unofficial patch for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, has been on an uploading spree, providing us with a bunch of lost Bloodlines footage via his YouTube channel. 

The most interesting of the bunch is a low-quality recording of a live playthrough with one of the developers, presumably from a convention. Familiar scenes play out differently, with Cal the bartender and Jeanette Voerman being met at the strip club Vesuvius rather than at The Asylum. A later scene shows the arrival of the fleshcrafted sewer monster, only she has actual facial animation missing from the released game. It’s a slightly less impactful scene when she screams at you without even opening her mouth.

Subsequent videos include more al…

After a year of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store, the zombie survival game Dead Island 2 is now available on Steam—and not everyone is as excited about its arrival as you might expect.

Dead Island 2 didn’t knock our socks off when it debuted in 2023, thanks to “dull design choices, repetitive combat, and a painfully weak story,” as we put it in our 55% review. Even so, the long-awaited sequel was generally well-received and did very well for itself, surpassing one million sales over its launch weekend on the way to becoming “the biggest launch” in Deep Silver’s history despite its Epic Games Store exclusivity, which—without getting into the merits of the debate—remains a sticking point for some gamers.

Interestingly, the early reaction to the Steam launc…

A good monitor will last you many years but that doesn’t mean you have to spend a small fortune on getting the largest OLED display you can get. Pick the right budget gaming monitor and you’ll have a screen that will be more than good enough for nearly every PC gamer.

One of the best cheap gaming monitors I’d buy myself is the ASRock Phantom Gaming PG27FF1A for just $120 at Newegg. It has a 27-inch IPS panel, with a resolution of 1080p and a maximum refresh rate of 165 Hz. There’s even support for FreeSync Premium variable refresh rate, to ensure smooth, tear-free gaming.

Tucked underneath the panel’s edge are two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort 1.2, and a 3.5 mm headset socket. While those aren’t the latest versions, they’re more than good enough for 1080p 165 Hz.

To …

Delightfully-themed Demonic Deckbuilder Power Chord has unleashed its mightiest lineups, arriving out of Early Access and into a full release. In Power Chord you “Assemble Earth’s mightiest musicians, each with their own unique cards and gear, to fight your way through the hordes and destroy the only guitar powerful enough to reopen the scratch between worlds.”

We first got a look at the uniquely-themed Power Chord in late 2021, when a demo first showed off its stylish aesthetics and explosively metal sounds. It stood out from the pack at the time because it was so clearly trying to do something new and interesting that others in the genre weren’t. It combines multiple characters, but isn’t purely class-based.

For those who want some variety to their roguelike deckbuilding, …

In news that possibly everyone saw coming, The Wolf Among Us 2 has been delayed beyond this year. In a post to Twitter yesterday evening, the newly-revived (minus most of its original staff) Telltale Games announced that it had “made the difficult decision to delay The Wolf Among Us 2 out of 2023”. But given that it’s been nearly a decade since the last episode of the first series released, I can probably stand to wait a little longer.

Telltale says the delay is about “protecting the health of [its] team,” and in a chat with IGN, studio boss Jamie Ottilie said it was about avoiding crunch. “Burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term,” said Ottilie, “As an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing i…

It’s Friday; time to relax a little, think about the weekend and maybe get a little extra help with your Wordle if you’re in the mood for it. Maybe that will take the form of a quick browse of our handy tips, some serious thinking over today’s fresh clue, or even a quick click down to the answer to the September 20 (1189) Wordle. It’s your game after all, we’re just here to help you win it.

From a certain point of view, this was a neat and orderly game: I found yellow letters, and then I turned them into green letters. Then I found the rest. Simple. What my final board doesn’t show is the bit in the middle where the alphabet, the English language, and my own brain decided to go off for a walk, leaving me wondering what impossible (read: obvious) word I was supposed to find here.…

In 2022, a group of voice actors from Team Fortress 2—Valve’s game of first-person shooting and endlessly shouting “MEDDDICCC!” when I’m right behind you, like I always am—caused chaos across small-town America in a hunt for sandwiches. Well, “sandviches”. They were also searching for the Medic, because some things never change.

It was a delightful series in which the actors, including Ellen McLain, who portrayed TF2’s loudspeaker-dominating Administrator but is more famous as GLaDOS from the Portal games, baffled bystanders while blaring at each other in-character. The videos have peaked in their most recent chapter: the Search for Sandvich becomes Song for Sandvich, with the voice actors performing a version of Mamma Mia by ABBA only with the lyrics changed to refere…

You ask me, you’re not a real series until you have a decent “Wars” game in your arsenal. GTA: Chinatown Wars, Dune: Spice Wars, Star Wars: Empire at… Wars. Who had ever heard of any of those series before they had some wars to their name? No one, I bet.

Now another joins the fray: Sega has filed a trademark for Yakuza Wars (via Gematsu). Actually, it filed it last month on July 26, and we know precisely zero about it apart from the fact that it’s related to videogames and—curiously enough—doesn’t bear the Yakuza series’ current Like A Dragon naming.

But the name suggests some kind of spin-off, perhaps along the lines of Sega’s Sakura Wars series of RPGs, or an expansion of the clan battle system in previous games. Or, worst case scenario, some kind of for…

In 2021, Microsoft’s gaming division published games like Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, Age of Empires 4, and Psychonauts 2. It was declared Metacritic’s publisher of the year thanks to its games receiving an average metascore of 87.4, helped also to the Xbox Series X port of Microsoft Flight Simulator releasing that year. While in 2022 Microsoft backed some well-received smaller games—Grounded, Pentiment, and As Dusk Falls—its biggest releases, Starfield and Redfall, were delayed into this year.

Xbox stans weren’t happy about this, though I think maybe we could do with less rushed videogame releases and maybe less videogames overall. During a recent interview with IGN following the Xbox/Bethesda Developer Direct livestream, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer agreed w…

BioWare veteran Mac Walters left the storied RPG studio earlier this year after a 19-year career, during which he served as writer (and later lead writer) on the Mass Effect trilogy, creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda, and production director on the still-in-development Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Now he’s announced his next venture: A new studio at NetEase called Worlds Untold, dedicated to developing “triple-A action adventure games with an emphasis on narrative and worldbuilding.”

“We’re creating incredible and meaningful stories that we believe are best told and experienced through play,” Walters said. “We are starting by crafting worlds that we all dream of discovering and then will put the player in the leading role of the most unforgettable adventures.

“The team a…

 Indika publisher 11 bit studios has announced that it is donating $50,000 of revenue generated by the game to support Ukrainian children, in the wake of a Russian missile attack which struck Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital earlier this week. 

A Polish publisher and developer behind games like Frostpunk, This War of Mine, and The Alters, 11 bit announced via Instagram that “The recent abhorrent attack on the children’s hospital in Kyiv by Russian military forces shook us to our core.” 

Having previously announced that it would donate a portion of the revenue generated by Indika to children affected by the war in Ukraine, the studio “knew the time to act was now.” $50,000 will go to the Liberty Ukraine Foundation “to support Ukrainian kids receiving treatme…

On July 7 Sarah Silverman, a stand-up comedian—also known for her acting work as the voice of Vanellope in the Wreck-It Ralph movies—joined authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey in twin lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta.

As reported by The Verge earlier this week, the suit concerns Silverman’s written work, with all three claiming that both ChatGPT and LLaMA (Meta’s own large language model program) had been trained on data harvested from “shadow library” sites such as “Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others.” 

The OpenAI suit offers a trio of exhibits, which demonstrate the model’s ability to summarise copyrighted books with very few mistakes. These include The Bedwetter, a memoir by Silverman, Ararat, a horror-thriller by Chri…

You don’t have to spend 12 hours in Starfield to stumble into Chunks, the futuristic food items that are shaped like cubes. There’s a Chunks apple on your first spaceship and a Chunks restaurant in the first city you visit. Everyone in the year 2330 is eating Chunks, and it’s what prompted one chef to see if he could “chunkify” his own food.

Last week, Denis Fisher posted a photo of his real life Chunks breakfast on Reddit. Nestled next to a puddle of beans is a cube of egg and a cube of Spam. Fisher used a silicone ice cube mold to poach the egg and carved out a cube of Spam from the oblong shape it comes in. Starfield doesn’t have an equivalent to Chunks Spam, but the Chunks egg looks pretty much identical to Fisher’s version.

The Starfield subreddit blew up the post and t…

You know what makes a gaming keyboard great? Lubed switches. That might not have been what you thought I’d say, but when you get going on a board with such slick switches, it’s typing bliss. That’s why I love the Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless—it offers all the important features for a PC gamer with the added benefit of lubed switches. 

The Strix II 96 is also $144.99 over at Amazon for Black Friday right now.

I waxed lyrical about how great a set of finely lubed mechanical switches are in my Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless review, but I’ll give you the skinny here, too. A drop of lube inside each switch makes for a much smoother actuation and a satisfying clack. Each switch is responsive, smooth, and you can happily glide between them for work involving …