Month: September 2024

A third-person, open world survival craft-em-up about underpaid space workers will release this week in Space Trash Scavenger. It’s an interesting looking one, with the conceit that it’s a world where every little planetoid and asteroid has its own little sphere of gravity, including your own self-directed and constructed mobile scavenging platform. The same kind of gravity you may remember from Super Mario Galaxy—but you’ve got a jetpack to scoot around between it all.

The campaign sounds pretty neat, with you building your mobile base to scavenge up loot and enable your platform to do interstellar travel, then jumping between partially procedural, partially handcrafted space systems to get rich selling your products on the galactic stock market.

There are also automation elements, where you can build up your space rig to process and rebuild trash all on its own—though that seems to be strictly optional.

“While you explore different Salvage Sectors, you will build up your base, creating a production line to atomise trash, then construct new products for sale—and this can all be automated with conveyor belts, bringing factory elements to the g…

Many PC gamers have been waiting with bated breath for a real non-bandaid fix for Intel 13th and 14th Gen instability issues. After months of reported problems, investigations, and workarounds, in July Intel finally said it had cracked the issue and would be rolling out a BIOS microcode fix come mid-August. It looks like the first of these are now officially rolling out from MSI and Asus.

MSI reports that it’s releasing BIOS updates for Intel 600- and 700-series motherboards with a 0x129 microcode update to “mitigate the instability.” 

There are also apparent 0x129 BIOS updates on the Asus ROG forum for Asus motherboard users to download, but these haven’t yet been pushed to official support pages like some of MSI’s updates have.

The previous interim 0x125 updates that motherboard vendors were rolling out messed with voltages, specifically eTVB (enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost) settings, to keep things ticking over safely until a root-cause fix could be delivered. This latest 0x129 microcode update, it would seem, is supposed to be that root-cause fix.

Here are the “first batch” of motherboards MSI has rolled out the latest BIOS update for:

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Did you know that Helldivers 2 has a mission where you get to raise the Super Earth flag? I did, but I sure as liberty haven’t ever done it. Not because of an absence of patriotism, you understand, but because it only ever popped up at lower difficulties.

That’s changed now, among a host of other weapon tweaks, enemy changes, and balance fixes dropped in the humongous Patch 01.000.300 today, which brings “a number of adjustments, fixes and improvements to aid your democratic endeavours”.

For starters, burning damage has been nerfed by around 15% after enjoying some time in the limelight. Heavier armour should be a little stronger, with ratings above 100 reducing the damage taken from headshots. Any reports of “concussive injuries” from a rocket slamming into the side of your dome are insurrectionist talk, and should be reported to your nearest democracy officer.

As for weapons, over 24 of them have been tweaked. I won’t list them all until the end of this article, but here are some of the highlights for now:

• The LAS-99 Quasar Cannon has had its recharge time increased by 5 seconds, which may be the death of one of my favourite strategies—puttin…
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Quantum computing is one of the next big leaps we’re looking towards in tech. This hugely powerful way of computing will turn our basic bits of ones and zeros into qubits with the property to be both or neither at the same time. It’s going to be huge for processing power, allowing far more complex problems to be solved with computers than ever before. It’s also going to be incredibly dangerous for our current way of computing life.

That’s why it’s good in some ways that quantum computing is still a fair way off for most of us. It’s currently difficult to develop, but researchers are coming up with smart solutions every day. Recently, we saw teams find a way to drastically reduce the cooling costs down from millions to only thousands of dollars. Now, AOL reports researchers from the University of Sussex and Universal Quantum have found a way to move qubits between computer chips far better than before.

One of the many hurdles of quantum computing is getting more of those darn qubits into the machines. The more qubits one of these bad bois is packing, then the more powerful they can be. Though it’s not necessarily as easy as shoving more qubits inside.

Right now…

September 24, 2024: We updated the weapons list based on the big buffs made in patch 1.001.100. The weapons which have changed tier are the R-36 Eruptor, CB-9 Exploding Crossbow, and the AR-23P Liberator Penetrator.

Puzzling out the best Helldivers 2 weapons is a trial-and-error process. While you have Stratagems that’ll let you call down heavy weapons, there are also lots of primaries to pick from when sorting your character’s loadout. As you progress through the game and gather Medals, you’ll be able to unlock even more guns in the Warbond, including assault rifles, shotguns, and even energy weapons.

Some of these are really good, and some of them, well, they’re not worth the effort or the Medals it’ll cost you to claim them. Here I’ve laid out my rankings for the best weapons in Helldivers 2. Since there are now also seven premium war bonds in the game—Steeled Veterans, Cutting Edge, Democratic Detonation, Polar Patriots, Viper Commandos, Freedom’s Flame, and Chemical Agents—I’ve ranked those guns as well and have marked each with SV…

Not many games have a story like Indika, a game about a 19th century Russian Orthodox nun journeying to the centre of her soul with an “unusual, horn-headed companion.” Drawing inspiration from Dostoevsky and Bulgakov and dripping with dark humour, Indika tells a tale of religion and authority, madness and belief.

But also, not many games have a story like Indika, whose developer Odd Meter left Russia when the country invaded Ukraine in February last year. Calling the invasion an “insane crime” perpetrated to “satisfy the ambitions of an elderly, weak-minded dwarf,” game director and studio founder Dmitry Svetlow decided to up and move Indika’s development—and the company behind it—out of Moscow to neighbouring Kazakhstan, even moving the “entire recording studio by truck.”

And both of those stories make it, for me, one of the most fascinating games to grace this year’s PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. The trailer is deliberately baffling, ricocheting between scenes of the titular Indika’s hard-going monastery life and moments of sheer, hallucinatory weird: Indika slyly lighting a cigarette, Indika in a tête-à-tête with the devil…

Today Bethesda posted a recap of the year Starfield has had in the form of a few fun facts: in 2023 players visited a collective 1.9 billion planets, spent 26 million hours building ships, and ate more than 18 million battlemeal multipacks. (Weirdly, no sandwich tally was provided.)

The same post also sheds more light on the major updates Starfield will receive in 2024, including an expansion. Beginning in February Starfield will receive updates “roughly every six weeks,” with those updates including new features we’ve already been teased with like “all new ways of traveling,” official mod support, and city maps.

While not elaborating more fully on those items, Bethesda also teased even more changes coming to Starfield in 2024, including the somewhat vaguely described “all new Gameplay options,” which sound like a way to tailor your next playthrough.

“With these new settings you’ll be able to alter your gameplay to allow for an easier or more challenging experience that will expand beyond our normal ‘Difficulty’ setting,” the post reads. “These will allow you to easily customize carry capacity, cargo access distance, ship damage, vendor credits, how you suffer …

Oleksandr Zinchenko is a Ukrainian footballer that currently plays for Arsenal in the English Premier League and the Ukrainian national side. The full-back and midfielder is still only 27 years old but has already had a storied career, winning the Premier League four times with previous club Manchester City alongside the FA cup and another four EFL Cups. And as well as being a world-class footballer with the world at his feet, Zinchenko loves a bit of Counter-Strike.

In 2023 Zinchenko founded esports organisation PassionUA alongside former NA’VI coach Mykhailo Blaghin (who won the 2017 PGL Major with Gambit). The goal is to assemble a Counter-Strike team consisting of young Ukrainian players that can compete at the top, and shortly after its founding the focus switched to Counter-Strike 2.

PassionUA is obviously a long-term project for Zinchenko and one he seems to be deeply involved in, but today things got even more hands-on than anyone was expecting. A member of PassionUA’s team, zeRRoFIX, ran into technical issues shortly after beginning a match against Bleed at the YaLLa Compass Spring 2024 Contenders.

With one spot on the roster, the call went out to Zinc…

Update: 02/10/2023: Subsequent to publication, the ban on St4ck’s account has been lifted. 

Valve has banned a prominent and somewhat controversial Counter-Strike skin trader, St4ck, whose account boasts one of the most high-value inventories you’ll ever see: by some estimates it is the third most-valuable CS skin haul out there. Pricing stuff in CS is always a bit of a guessing game, because when we’re talking about rare items you’re relying on middlemen and third party vendors for valuations, but PriceEmpire values St4ck’s inventory at $1.45 million and lists items including a Souvenir Factory New AWP Dragon Lore ($400K), five Katowice 2014 foil stickers ($90K apiece), and a metric ton of guns and knives that go for between $5K to $40K. 

Don’t your heart break? The reason for the ban is unclear, with some saying it’s an automated ban triggered by the user saying something nasty in a Steam comment, but there’s no evidence of this. Others have speculated that it may relate to St4ck’s reputation as an alleged scammer, and you don’t have to go too far back to find a multitude of videos about how this user…

The Augmentation Evoker came to World of Warcraft with patch 10.1.5 last week, bringing a whole new type of DPS to the game. For the uninitiated, this new spec works by buffing party members to bump their damage numbers rather than melting faces itself. It’s comparable to the Dancer from Final Fantasy 14 or the Bard from Dungeons & Dragons—basically, when an Augmentation Evoker’s in the group, everyone does better.

So obviously they’ve been getting kicked out of groups for no reason. A reddit thread on the World of Warcraft subreddit emerged with a compilation of screenshots from the Wyrmrest Temple discord, community server for Evokers. Typing “!augdps” in the augmentation channel will have Carlygos, the server’s friendly bot, drop an ever-evolving montage of people missing the point:

WoWhead confirms that as it stands, popular damage meter addons aren’t properly tracking the Evoker’s contributions to their group. Despite Blizzard’s mission statement that they aren’t designing the game around them, WoW’s numbers-obsessed community combined with a new experimental specialisation is a recipe for disaster.

These DPS meters will however track th…

A judge in California has ordered that Elon Musk be interviewed under oath about claims he made for the safety and capabilities of Tesla vehicles in 2016. This is all part of a larger lawsuit being brought against Tesla by the family of Walter Huang, who was in a Tesla with partially automated driving software in 2018 when he was killed in a car crash.

The suit brought by Huang’s family alleges that Tesla’s software failed; for its part, Tesla claims Huang was playing a game on his phone and disregarded vehicle warnings before the crash. Solicitors for the Huang family sought to depose Musk about his 2016 claim that the Tesla Model S and X cars “can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person—right now” (thanks, Reuters).

Musk can be seen saying those words in the below video.

Then came a pretty unbelievable twist that, sadly, may well become a common feature in high profile trials. Tesla’s solicitors opposed Musk being deposed, arguing both that he couldn’t remember details of the statement, and that the recording may not be authentic:

“[Musk], like many public figures, is the subject of many ‘deepfake’ videos and audio recordings t…

We’ve all had that experience in XCOM where you’re so determined to get yourself out of an impossible situation that you just keep reloading your save and trying different approaches as your soldiers die over and over. Now imagine that instead of that just being an embarrassing memory, it’s the basis for a whole new approach to the genre. 

In Every Day We Fight, just shown off at the PC Gaming Show 2024, you take charge of a group of civilians caught in an alien invasion Groundhog Day. Thanks to some strange sci-fi tech tech, every time your untrained fighters die, they wake up back at the start of the day, ready to go again.

Battles are turn-based, but you’ll also be exploring in real time, and the time loop structure gives it a roguelike flavour. As you make your way into different districts of the city, you’ll discover new weapons and resources that you can take advantage of in subsequent runs. Equally, the more they fight (and die), the more skills your troops will learn, going from regular folk to hardened soldiers over the course of the conflict. That’s sort of fun and bleak at the same time. 

Your goal is to track down and defeat “Rift leaders”…

The endless parade of incongruous Magic crossovers continued today with news that Marvel, the purveyor of movies, television shows, comics, videogames, and other popular media that you simply cannot get away from, is coming to Magic: The Gathering.

Comic book superheroes may not seem like a natural fit for a fantasy-based card game, but it’s really more about mass marketing than narrative cohesion: Hasbro, parent company of Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast, said its collaboration with Marvel will see the creation of “collectible products and tentpole sets” of cards for Magic: The Gathering. It’s done similar crossovers with Fortnite, Stranger Things, Street Fighter, Warhammer 40K, The Lord of the Rings, and other multimedia giants.

“We are extremely proud to collaborate with Marvel to bring its iconic characters to fans around the world in new ways,” Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Gaming president Cynthia Williams said. “These tentpole sets will build on the tradition of incorporating beloved fan-favorite characters and elements from world-class brands into Magic: The Gathering.”

Marvel, too, “can’t wait for fans to see how the Marvel Universe transl…

Wizard of Legend, the isometric dungeon crawler that we said “is probably the closest we’re ever going to get to a good Avatar: The Last Airbender game,” was a hit, selling more than 500,000 copies shortly after it launched in 2018. Now a sequel is on the way, revealed today by publisher Humble Games as “an entirely new” experience being developed by Children of Morta studio Dead Mage.

Dead Mage is “a perfect fit for what we want to do with the Wizard of Legend franchise,” Humble head of content strategy Becky Sayers said during today’s showcase. “Players are going to experience the same beloved charm from the original game, but this time with improved 3D graphics, an expanded storyline, and even online multiplayer”

Original Wizard of Legend developer Contingent 99 is also involved in the project, working with Dead Mage on a consultant basis.

“In continued collaboration with Contingent 99, the original creators of Wizard of Legend, we are bringing you an entirely new, exciting experience, which is authentic to everything the fans loved about the first game,” Dead Mage lead designer Javid Najibzadeh said. “This time in 3D with a new multiplayer mode, which you c…