Category: Equipment

Veteran PC game creator Warren Spector is credited with working on 46 games on Mobygames, though that may not be a perfectly comprehensive list for a designer and director who’s been making games since the 1980s. Actually, it’s definitely not a perfectly comprehensive list—while Mobygames has Spector’s credits on the likes of Deus Ex (producer and project director), Ultima 6 (writing), and Epic Mickey (creative director), there’s no way for the Mobygames database to include projects he wasn’t credited on to begin with.

As Spector revealed in PC Gamer’s roundtable interview with other longtime game creators, there were a couple games he decided not to be associated with during his career.

“I worked on two games that I took my name off of because I don’t want to…

The full PC system requirement for Forspoken, Square Enix’s next big action-RPG, have been released. The minimum requirements are mercifully modest, if occasionally nonsensical, kicking off with Nvidia GTX 1060 or AMD RX 5500 XT graphics as a minimum. Intriguingly, DirectStorage support from launch has also been confirmed.

Entry-level requirements on the CPU side start at AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600 from some six years ago or Intel’s similarly vintage Core i7 3770. You’ll be wanting minimum 16GB of RAM and 150GB of storage. All that nets you the rather modest result of 30fps at just 720p res. Youch.

To achieve 30fps at 1440p, Square Enix reckons you’ll need at least an AMD RX 6700 XT or Nvidia RTX 3070, which is quite a step up. CPU specs are upped to AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i…

Capcom just hosted its final Street Fighter 6 showcase before its June 2 release. We were treated to some extra deets on the story-focused World Tour mode, Fighting Grounds mode, some bits of training, and ways the game is being super newbie friendly. Oh, and Lil Wayne was there too. The end of the presentation dropped the (slightly spoiled) surprise that a demo was dropping right after this livestream. 

Unfortunately, those of us on PC and Xbox are going to have to wait to join in on the fun. The demo’s only available for people on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 for the first week. Everyone else will have access from April 26 and presumably up until launch. 

When the demo does arrive on PC, it’ll offer a “tiny peek” of the full release. There’s a segment…

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 star…

Two weeks ago, the Helldivers 2 community was blindsided by a patch that sneakily added Gunships and gigantic AT-AT walkers to Automaton planets. It was a hectic 24 hours as players scrambled to react to the new threats and finally liberate Malevelon Creek. Super Earth prevailed, and while Gunships became a mainstay of Automaton missions, the walkers mysteriously vanished.

This morning, Arrowhead did it again. What was shared as a routine bug-fixing patch was actually a back door reintroduction of Factory Striders, four-legged “dreadnoughts” equipped with a top-mounted cannon, rotating front lasers, and a mobile factory that continuously spawns Devastators. Standing nearly as tall as a Bile Titan, Striders are by far the largest, most resilient enemy we’ve seen yet.

We have …

Famed 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 do…

Overwatch 2’s third season aims to address the biggest issues players have had since the game’s launch in October.

Apart from debuting the new Antarctica Control map, season 3 will finally make skins easier to earn for free, tweak how Competitive works, and feature three events with skins and other cosmetics to earn and buy on the shop.

Anyone that logs into the game next week will instantly unlock the first five free tiers of the battle pass, a head start toward earning credits (a returning currency from Overwatch 1) to buy epic and legendary skins from the first game.

Loverwatch, a text-based Overwatch dating sim, will launch on February 13. In it, you can choose to date either Mercy or Genji and interact with them via dialogue options. It has a secret ending to unlo…

Two weeks ago, the Helldivers 2 community was blindsided by a patch that sneakily added Gunships and gigantic AT-AT walkers to Automaton planets. It was a hectic 24 hours as players scrambled to react to the new threats and finally liberate Malevelon Creek. Super Earth prevailed, and while Gunships became a mainstay of Automaton missions, the walkers mysteriously vanished.

This morning, Arrowhead did it again. What was shared as a routine bug-fixing patch was actually a back door reintroduction of Factory Striders, four-legged “dreadnoughts” equipped with a top-mounted cannon, rotating front lasers, and a mobile factory that continuously spawns Devastators. Standing nearly as tall as a Bile Titan, Striders are by far the largest, most resilient enemy we’ve seen yet.

We have …

Developers 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 f…

Famed 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 do…

Rockstar has released a patch for GTA Online that—hopefully—will fix the nasty security vulnerability discovered in January that enabled unscrupulous jerks to steal other players’ in-game money, reset their account progress, and even “corrupt” their accounts in a way that effectively leaves them banned from online play.

That’s all bad enough in itself, but was potentially only the tip of the iceberg. Speyedr, the creator of the unofficial Guardian firewall mod for GTA5 that aims to protect players from hackers, predicted that the vulnerability could eventually enable remote code execution, enabling hackers to run malware on any PC playing the game.

Rockstar acknowledged the problem shortly after it was reported, saying it aimed to take care of it in a “security-r…

Tiny people in a big world survival game Grounded has got a heck of an update on the way: Make It and Break It will hit on November 13th, bringing in a creative mode called Playgrounds that lets you make custom game maps and modes using tools that seem pretty dang close to whatever the development team is using themselves.

The update will come complete with a set of “gizmos and gadgets” that let you build mechanics for your custom game spaces, like spawning and sounds. It’ll also include the ability for players to more easily save and share those creations with others, enabling entirely new gameplay modes for Grounded—racing, arena battles, whatever—alongside new survival experiences more adjacent to the core.

The update was made with the express goal of letting …

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…

2023 was a bumper year for zero-day exploits—50% more zero-day vulnerabilities were exploited last year compared to 2022—and the majority of them affected operating systems and products used by run-of-the-mill end users, such as Windows, Chrome and iOS. Though before the doom and gloom sinks in, Google does have some positive things to say about software security in 2023 in its yearly threat report.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant keep track of all the zero-day security vulnerabilities they discover out in the wild. Any hole in a security system that some nasty person wearing a long trench coat can take advantage of goes onto their joint yearly report (pdf), separated into whether it impacted end-users or enterprise software.

The first takeaway …

Diablo 4’s class designer Adam Jackson has dropped details on the rarest Unique items to be found in Diablo 4, from that one cool hat to a sword which is the sire of all those other swords. It’s a sudden end to lots of guessing about which items were in, how many, and where they could be found.

The six rarest uniques are sword Doombringer, two-handed sword The Grandfather, the Ring of Starless Skies, helmet Andariel’s Visage, the helmet Harlequin Crest, and the amulet Melted Heart of Selig. For my money, “Melted Heart of Selig” is the one with the most kickass name but it is a close contest.

Those six extra-super-rare Uniques can drop from level 85+ enemies, and can come from anywhere you get a regular Unique. They always drop at item power 820, says Jackson, and “T…

Canadian Gary Bowser was indicted in 2020 before being jailed last year for his involvement with a Nintendo hacking group called Team-Xecuter. The charges related to his role as a salesperson and promoter of Team-Xecuter’s hardware and hacking tools, and Bowser pleaded guilty to his involvement. The US government requested a sentence of five years but, in probably the only bit of leniency Bowser received, he was jailed for 40 months in February 2022, and has now been granted early release 12 months later. He is currently in a US processing centre, and should be returned to Toronto in the next week.

But things are not going to end there. A large part of the case against Team-Xecutor was the financial damage it caused Nintendo, and the court slapped Bowser with an astr…

In the history of videogames, there are few botches more infamous than that of Godus. Envisioned as a god game in the style of Molyneux’s earlier work on the groundbreaking Populous, it was also intended to be the home of the winner of Curiosity, the game about smashing away pieces of a cube to reach the mysterious prize inside—a prize that turned out to be godhood in Godus.

This was where things started to go wrong. Molyneux quickly began dialing back the scale of the promised “life-changing” prize, and then Godus itself turned out to be pretty much garbola, and then it was all abandoned (including the winner of the Curiosity prize) until 2016, when Molyneux’s 22cans studio resurfaced with Godus Wars, a warfare-focused take on the idea of the original. Guess what? Also garb…

Grand Theft Auto 5’s world is expansive, detailed, and filled with chatty NPCs. But frankly, they aren’t chatty enough. It’s simply not sufficient for the denizens of Los Santos to loose trite one-liners at me as I dash past or careen into them in a 4×4, I want to have a conversation with them. I want to know what makes them tick. I want to get hands-on with their soul.

Anyway, there’s a new mod called Sentient Streets (via VGC) that doesn’t really do any of that, but it will let you conduct rambling conversations with cops, cultists, and criminals with the assistance of “30+ AI models”. It uses the Inworld AI Character Engine—the same tech that powers that not terribly fitting Stardew Valley AI mod we covered last month—and voices from ElevenLabs to build a m…

Konami has partnered up with Online Ceramics—the consciously, ostentatiously inelegant fashion house—to produce a line of Silent Hill 2-themed merch. Featuring tees, hoodies, trousers, and plenty more besides, the clothes all feature designs that look like they were assembled by someone with access to Google Images, a copy of Microsoft Paint, and a staggering deficit of aesthetic sensibility. 

They’re kind of amazing.

That’s just my opinion, of course, and the whole world seems to almost unanimously disagree with me, but this kind of ‘I made this in one afternoon when someone left me alone in the school computer room’ style is very much an Online Ceramics trademark, and I think it perfectly matches Silent Hill 2’s haunted ’90s vibes. I lack the verve to wear…

Genshin Impact codes are the best way to get free Primogems outside of playing the game and farming commissions, chests, and quests. With every upcoming version, miHoYo drops a new livestream detailing what’s coming in terms of characters and events, while also giving out these freebies to players. They’re an incentive to watch the stream, but you can always just redeem them anyway.

In version 3.8, there are plenty of rumoured reruns on the way, including Eula, Klee, Kokomi, and the Wanderer, so having a few extra Primogems definitely won’t hurt if you’re trying to grab any of them. I’ll add each Genshin Impact 3.8 livestream code as it drops during the program, plus you’ll find info lower down the page explaining how to claim your rewards. Also, make sure you red…

Bethesda’s space RPG Starfield didn’t have a stellar launch when it came to performance, with the mightiest of gaming rigs struggling to reach decent frame rates. The modding community got there first but eventually, Nvidia’s DLSS 3 was added and now after several months of beta patches, Starfield also boasts AMD’s FSR 3 and Intel’s XeSS frame rate boosting technologies.

It’s taken a while to arrive (and to be honest, far longer than it should have) but if you’re still playing Starfield, at least you can enjoy a decent boost to the game’s performance no matter what hardware your gaming PC is sporting. The latest public v1.9.67 patch includes AMD FSR 3 and Intel XeSS upscaling/frame generation systems to go alongside Nvidia DLSS. Whereas the latter only works on GeForce RTX graphic…

Marty 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, S…

I’ve recently started running a Pathfinder 2e edition game for my formerly 5e friend group—and while I’m not abandoning D&D in its entirety, I’ve been super impressed with the system so far.

One blessing to my wallet is how much of it you get for basically free—Archives of Nethys is an officially-supported hub that has all of the player content, creatures, and so on from all sources. It feels like piracy from a sketchy wiki—but it’s not, Paizo’s 100% okay with it.

It’s not in lockstep with official content, but it’s bountiful enough that I’ve not minded one bit. Conversely, its Foundry Virtual Tabletop (VTT) integration just… gives you everything bar the adventures themselves.

Basically, Paizo makes most of its money through official adve…

As I was wrapping up an interview with FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki for PC Gamer’s Shadow of the Erdtree cover story, I knew I couldn’t walk out of the conference room we’d been sitting in for more than an hour without asking The Question. You know the one: it’s been front of mind for PC gamers during every single major livestream and gaming event since Sony started putting its games on Steam. Bloodborne on PC when? 

I was, obviously, not the first person to ask Miyazaki about returning to Bloodborne or making a sequel; just a few months ago he told IGN that FromSoftware doesn’t own the IP rights. “Unfortunately, and I’ve said this in other interviews, it’s not in my place to talk about Bloodborne specifically,” he answered at the time.

I trie…

I’ve always thought that Fractal Design had a particularly Nordic approach to its products, what with all the clean lines, soft curves and the use of wood and other high-end materials. That was PC cases, though. Now the Swedish-based company has made some bold moves into new markets entirely.

The Computex press event today wasn’t just about new PC cases, as many expected. To many oohs and aahs, Fractal revealed not only a fabric covered, “chimney” style case that wouldn’t look out of place in a posh hotel suite, but also a wireless headset and a gaming chair to go with.

That case though. Named simply “Mood”, its fabric outer body not only looks great, but feels it too. The entire outer casing slides upwards off the top (which one journalist managed in two minutes flat, despi…

As I was wrapping up an interview with FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki for PC Gamer’s Shadow of the Erdtree cover story, I knew I couldn’t walk out of the conference room we’d been sitting in for more than an hour without asking The Question. You know the one: it’s been front of mind for PC gamers during every single major livestream and gaming event since Sony started putting its games on Steam. Bloodborne on PC when? 

I was, obviously, not the first person to ask Miyazaki about returning to Bloodborne or making a sequel; just a few months ago he told IGN that FromSoftware doesn’t own the IP rights. “Unfortunately, and I’ve said this in other interviews, it’s not in my place to talk about Bloodborne specifically,” he answered at the time.

I trie…

Games usually get cheaper as they age, but in a rare reversal, beloved factory management game Factorio will get a price bump on January 26, going from $30 to $35.

“This is an adjustment to account for the level of inflation since the Steam release in 2016,” Factorio’s developer announced on Twitter today (spotted by Kotaku). We reviewed Factorio after it shed its early access label in 2020, awarding it a very positive 91%.

Factorio has never followed the pack when it comes to pricing: It’s also notable for a message on its Steam page which informs prospective players that the developer doesn’t intend to discount the game anytime soon. Back in 2016, the company explained that the no sales policy is “about respecting the players who have already purchased the game” by not rew…

The 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…

Farming game Immortal Life has just released from Early Access after a few years in development, bringing a unique spin to the genre of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley. YiFeng Studio’s fam life game is based on a sect of martial artists who, finding their home school devastated, resolve to rebuild the misty valley into a place of learning and beauty.

It’s heavily based in the Chinese fantasy aesthetics of wuxia fiction and the idea of “cultivation,” or improving one’s powers and spirit in order to achieve martial arts mastery and immortality.

To that end you use your powers to become and ever-more-potent farmer, deploying magic to plant seeds, water then, and harvest with enchanted tools. You also fish, cook, and craft to cultivate your soul. You also make bet…

The prospect of playing as a ghoul has tempted players ever since we first set eyes on these decrepit, noseless creatures in the first Fallout. The series has had plenty of fantastic ghouls like Dean Domino and Raul Tejada in Fallout: New Vegas, John Hancok in Fallout 4, and the introduction of Chinese Remnant Spies in Fallout 3, who are ancient intelligence operatives that were marooned in the US when the bombs dropped. 

They’ve made for great antagonists and companions, but playing as one has always only been possible with mods. Until now, because the online series spinoff Fallout 76 is finally letting players become ghouls. 

Bethesda announced the intended changes during the Xbox showcase, but we got to see a sneak peek a bit earlier and discuss the change with …