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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…

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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 …

Red Dead Redemption 2 flows like amber: thick and slow-paced. In fact, its brief moments of madness—those enormous shootouts with cops and bandits—only really get in the way of your real business of ambling slowly around on horseback in the midday sun. Well, no longer. A mod from creators Bolmin and Shtivi (via Rock Paper Shotgun) will finally let Arthur Morgan hang up his six-shooters and fulfil his true destiny: Becoming a Taskrabbit guy in 1899.

Jobs – Expanded and Enhanced is the mod in question, and it’s actually a remake of an earlier project made by Bolmin themself. It adds job boards to “every major town” in RDR2, giving you the opportunity to take on any of six new avenues of legal work. Those are:

• Chauffeur: “Take some passen…
  

What does it take to survive in space prison? Well, it takes space guts, it takes space fortitude, but most of all it takes space charm. That’s the premise of Space Prison, at least—a newly announced and wonderfully literally-titled game that styles itself as “social survival”. Playing as a human prisoner amongst all manner of weird and terrifying alien thugs, you have to be as much a diplomat as a brawler to thrive, working your way up the hierarchies of the major gangs to gain power and influence.

That means helping out your fellow prisoners, building connections, and even just listening to their stories—just because that guy’s a horrific, skull-faced monstrosity, doesn’t mean he doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a tragic backstory behind the space crimes …

While we had a lot of love to share in our Persona 3 Reload review, we couldn’t help but note one glaring omission in the remade slice of life dungeon crawler: Kotone Shiomi, the female protagonist added in Persona 3’s PSP port, Persona 3 Portable. Despite her absence, Players have held out hopes that Portable’s female protag option might return as other content from earlier versions of P3 arrives as DLC for Reload. Sadly, Persona series producer Kazuhisa Wada once again says it’s not to be.

In an interview from Game Informer issue 368—which, because GameStop obliterated the archive for its recently-shuttered magazine, is only available in print—an apologetic Wada said Atlus had considered adding Kotone to P3R while planning the upcoming epilogue DLC, Episode Aigis – T…

All being said, Helldivers 2’s latest patch appears to have been a solid hit with players, which is a relief. While the game’s never going to claw its way back to its stratospheric 400,000 player peak—a normal thing for most live-service phenomena—it’s nestled into a very respectable 50,000-player average. Doubly so considering everyone and their Mohg is playing a little game called Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, right now.

Well, there is one exception—it’s a good patch for everyone but the Spear—a rocket launcher I am about to humanise to a weird degree, because for some reason I just feel so bad for the little guy. In case you don’t know your history, the FAF-14 Spear has been a bit of an underdog since launch. Chiefly, because its targeting system wa…

During the same financial call in which Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav revealed Mortal Kombat 12 is coming this year, he also mentioned The Lord of the Rings. Rights to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories to film were part of the spending spree Embracer Group went on last year, and the co-chairs and CEOs of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, struck a deal with Embracer to make “multiple Lord of the Rings movies,” Zaslav said. “Lord of the Rings is one of the most iconic storytelling franchises of all time, and we’re so excited.”

A press release from Embracer Group goes into it further without actually adding any more real detail, except to clarify that this is a “multi-year agreement to collaborate on feature films based on The Lord of the Rings and The…

Over the weekend in Helldivers 2, the tireless forces of Super Earth proved that the narrowest of victories can bring the sweetest rewards—particularly when those rewards involve a surprise, galaxy-wide mech giveaway. When a Major Order demanding the liberation of three planets seemed doomed to fail, the Helldivers achieved a last-minute victory so impressive that High Command’s rolling out war robots to everyone who can fill a cockpit.

The Major Order in question enlisted the Helldivers to secure Charbal-VII, Charon Prime, and Choepessa IV during a temporary lapse in Automaton defenses, and they had only 72 hours to do it. As the operation entered its final hours, Helldivers had secured Charbal-VII and Charon Prime, but Choepessa IV remained stubbornly unconquered by libert…

A new mission appeared this week in Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion. Dual Destiny is an exotic quest hidden in the expansion’s new destination, The Pale Heart. It requires a bit of legwork to unlock, but your reward for completing it is the new exotic class item—a randomly rolled drop that combines the effects of two existing exotic armour pieces.

There are some powerful effects in the class item’s perk pool—replicating effects of buildcrafting standards like Heart of Inmost Light, Synthocepts, Star-Eater Scales and many, many more. Being able to pair two strong exotic effects together is obviously potent, and it should allow for some incredibly powerful Prismatic builds. And the desirability of this new type of exotic is precisely why drama, following a brief wi…

Who says you need to spend a lot of money on a speedy gaming monitor? Best Buy has a great deal on a 24.5-inch 1080p 240Hz gaming monitor from Lenovo for only $200. 

The Lenovo Legion Y25-25 launched in 2021 for $350; it’s recently dropped to $300 in recent weeks though. It hasn’t been this cheap since Black Friday. So, if you’re not ready to drop over $1,000 on a 240Hz 1440p OLED screen just yet, you can still get the most out of your RTX GPU 30-series GPU with this budget screen,

This Lenovo IPS is designed with competitive gamers in mind. It’s got a 240Hz refresh rate and a 1ms response time. This means you’ll be able to enjoy some pretty smooth gameplay from all your favorite shooters, like Valorant or Call of Duty: Warzone.

While speed is everything with this…