Month: October 2024

There’s a new Terminid threat on the horizon, and Super Earth doesn’t want us to know about it. Reports from Helldivers 2 players suggest a new type of enemy has joined the frey: a bug breed possibly called the “Shrieker.” They travel in packs, attack from the skies, and look annoying as heck.

That’s all been gleaned from a video shared on the Helldivers 2 subreddit by user Projectpatdc, who appeared very surprised to suddenly be attacked by an unknown Terminid foe. On Reddit, user Litnos has also shared a sighting, adding that the “Shriekers” appeared for them as a random side objective similar to Stalkers.

In the Reddit clip, Projectpatdc is in the middle of a standard refinery mission at level 5 difficulty when the Shrieker strafing begins. A single strike deals over half…

27 inches, 170Hz refresh, a quality IPS panel and 1440p native resolution. What more do you need from a gaming monitor? In a word, nothing, especially when you can have all that for just $189.

Yup, the Acer Nitro XV272U has been given the Amazon Prime Day treatment and as someone who reviews these things for a living, I can tell you it’s an absolute steal. In fact, the only problem is that Nvidia has recently decided that 1440p GPUs start at $599 in the RTX 4070.

• We’re curating all the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

The $399 RTX 4060 Ti is pitched as a 1080p GPU. And with just 8GB of VRAM running over a measly 128-bit bus, that’s pretty much correct. Luckily, you can currently grab an AMD …

Helldivers 2 has been suffering from success—a whirlwind launch that’s now PlayStation’s biggest PC success led to a swarm of server issues bugs, and not the kind you can shoot dead with a beam rifle.

Regardless, ambushed developer Arrowhead seems to be taking things in stride and, as PC Gamer’s own Fraser Brown notes: it’s already in better shape. From what I’ve seen and heard, Arrowhead owes its win to Helldivers 2 being a great bit of co-op shooter fun. Also (according to the game’s director and Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt) it aims to avoid the live-service pitfalls we’ve all come to loathe.

“We really applied ourselves to not make it p2w even though items are functionally different. The only item that’s p2w is the revolver—which will win you any ‘cool gun’ …

One weird demo out of the whole Steam Next Fest has charmed me, and for reasons I rarely get charmed by: It’s delightfully janky, strange, referential, and crude. Apocalypse Party is certainly chasing the roguelike action trend, but it’s so off-beat and willing to let you craft absurd combos to slaughter fantasy zombies and monsters that I ended up charmed instead of repulsed.

There’s not really a plot here. You’re some kind of interdimensional mercenary plucked by an angelic capybara from the brink of death to rescue a fantasy kingdom by defeating three demons. There’s no coherent aesthetic though. Weapons you find are as likely to be an assault rifle or machine gun as throwing knives or lightning spear or magic, returning throwing shield. Characters are like, a Hong Kong cop, a …

When Diablo 4 season 2, or the Season of Blood, begins on October 17, everyone playing a seasonal character will have to start over from scratch.

Season 1 characters will be kicked into the Eternal Realm, where non-seasonal characters live, with all their gold, items, and crafting materials. Any items that were in that character’s stash will transfer into a new withdraw-only chest that they can access from the Eternal Realm. The withdraw-only stash will hold your items until the end of season 2—which should be roughly three months long—before they’re permanently deleted. And any Malignant Hearts socketed into your gear or sitting in your bags will disappear in the process.

Some things will technically stay, though. Blizzard just announced that any rewards from ga…

Here’s one for those of us interested in the early days of home computing. UK based Retro Games is set to release the Atari 400 Mini, a modern take on the Atari 400 home computer, complete with a recreation of the classic Atari CX-40 joystick. And what a thing of beauty it is.

The system is a miniaturized version of the classic 8-bit Atari 400. It was released in 1979 and in many ways, was the first gaming PC. It had dedicated graphics and sound co-processors, upgradeable memory, plug-and-play peripherals and a membrane keyboard. It was regarded as being ahead of its time, but strong competition from Apple, Commodore and Tandy hampered its adoption. Additionally, its mostly closed software ecosystem led to a lack of development by third-party programmers. As a result, Atari’s 8-bi…

Day of the Devs has come a long way from its debut in 2012 as an indie games showcase hosted by Double Fine Productions and iam8bit. It’s now “a fully independent 501c3 non-profit,” which organizers say will make its fundraising efforts in support of indie developers “more transparent and public.”

The announcement of the shift to official non-profit status was accompanied by the start of Day of the Devs’ first fundraising campaign and details about its plans for 2024, including an in-person event in March in San Francisco, an online Summer Game Fest showcase, and then in winter a “Game Awards Edition” of Day of the Devs that will be both in-person and online.

“We have essentially always run things as a non-profit, but making it official—through a fiscal sponsorship par…

I didn’t have much hope for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. Homeworld is an epic, star-spanning tale of survival and triumph amidst the blackness and mystery of interstellar space; Deserts of Kharak, on the other hand, is locked into a single dusty world by the combined forces of gravity and insufficient technological advancement. How could that possibly compare?

You can imagine my surprise, then, when Deserts of Kharak turned out to be really good: We gave it a very rare 90% score in our review, calling it “a great tactical RTS with all the gorgeous aesthetics and atmosphere of the original series.”

The point of all this buildup is that Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is now free for the week on the Epic Games Store, and it’s not one to be missed. Even if you’re not an RTS fan, …

An upcoming base-building RTS has an interesting twist: It’s zombie survival, but you can use map data imported from the real world. Infection Free Zone will let you establish and lead your titular zone in an area of your choosing. Like your hometown, for example.

Taking charge of your survivor groups, you’ll be able to form them into squads and work crews to start rebuilding civilization under your banner. At first that means a few things, like going house-to-house scavenging for supplies with your armed units while your civilians scuttle around for building materials. Later phases of the game promise to let you build walls, factories, science labs, and more.

A demo, out now, lets you play on one of a handful of real-world locales like Paris, Cambridge, and the like. The fu…

For the many flaws No Man’s Sky had at launch, I really liked the way it zeroed-in on the feeling of discovery. 

My first dozen hours of naming planets, scanning weird tentacle horses, and cataloging unremarkable rocks was a real delight, so it’s no surprise that Bethesda has something similar in the works with its epic space RPG, Starfield. We have, after all, been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, snapping Dewgong in Pokémon Snap or scanning Shadow Moses as Solid Snake. 

I am, however, a little surprised that Starfield’s version of scanning creatures doesn’t just remind me of seven-year-old No Man’s Sky, it looks almost exactly like it.

We saw a bit of Starfield’s scanning in action during last month’s Starfield D…

Things are looking desperate on the Western Front in Helldivers 2 as some players are trying to recruit soldiers to rush Mantes and stop the breakout in the Xzar sector, but their calls for aid aren’t being answered. 

Right now, the Major Orders in Helldivers 2 are directing soldiers toward Zagon Prime and Fori Prime to fight against the Terminid hordes. But as the fighting dies down on these planets, some are trying to turn attention towards Mantes, a planet in the Xzar sector that has seen constant threats from the Automaton forces—if it falls, then the rest of the sector will go with it. “The Automaton front needs reinforcements,” one recruitment poster reads. “Please redeploy to Mantes and save the Xzar sector.” 

A couple of players on Reddit have pointed…

I’ll admit I passed on the original House Flipper craze because I’m not one for job sim games. But I really like to build and decorate houses, which, it turns out, House Flipper 2 is totally prepared to support. House Flipper dev Frozen District has already announced that the sequel would have a sandbox mode, but now it’s been shown off in a new trailer. I’m all in this time.

In the original game, your goal was of course to come into a house and fix it up by demoing walls, cleaning up trash, and rolling on a more charming color of paint. Sandbox mode lets you ignore all responsibility and simply build from scratch. You can edit the lot dimensions and terrain heights, use free-placement or snap to the grid, and switch to a top-down editor instead of the usual first-person pe…

Aliens: Dark Descent has released a story trailer with a couple minutes of teasing as to what we’re going to be getting up to on our squad-based RTS adventures on the planet Lethe. I bet it’s a nice vacation and everyone’s going home happy.

Spoilers: It’s not. Your squads of hard-bitten colonial marines look like they’re deploying into the classic horde of Alien monsters, corporate goons, and horrible mutant cyborg experiments the Alien franchise is known for. Except for that last part, the cyborgs. I think that’s the new bit in this game. I’d bet my last dollar they’re the work of some irresponsible androids and/or corporate experimenters,

“The nightmare begins when the Otago spacecraft crash lands on Planet Lethe after a Xenomorph escaped containment and caused the activat…

Would you like a game controller that “can suggest button remaps and sensitivity adjustments” based on how you use it? What about a gaming mouse that “adjusts DPI settings in real-time, ensuring that your cursor movements are always accurate and fluid?” Or a keyboard that will “suggest key remaps and macros tailored to your gaming habits?” Those are all the promises of AI Shark, a new peripheral maker from the former US CEO of the company that launched the GameShark in 1996.

“We have updated the product and brought it into the age of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and super computers,” the AI Shark website claims. What it doesn’t say is how.

AI Shark, which debuted at this year’s CES, is part of a wave of hardware companies getting on the AI bandwagon and claimin…

Owners of RTX 40- and 30-series graphics cards can now setup their own personalised large language model (LLM) on their own PC. It’s one that’s eminently capable of sifting through old documents or distilling down the essence of YouTube videos.

Chat with RTX is now available to download from Nvidia’s website for free from today, February 13. It works with any current or last generation graphics card with at least 8GB or more VRAM, which includes every desktop card bar the RTX 3050 6GB and excludes a few mid- to low-end laptop GPUs. It also requires 50—100GB of storage space on your PC, depending on the AI models downloaded.

There are two models to choose from: Mistral or Llama 2. The default is Mistral, and I’d recommend sticking with that.

The key parts of Chat …

Creating technology for the purpose of helping people with disabilities is a noble goal and one where strides seem to be being made to make the world a more accessible place for all. However, Honda reckons its UNI-ONE Segway-like device isn’t just for people with mobility issues, as the company has released a video showing someone having a whale of a time in one equipped with a VR headset.

In an interesting example of repurposing functional technology for entertainment purposes, the UNI-ONE, Honda’s self-balancing mobility solution first demonstrated in 2023, has been pitched as a “brand new multimodal experience that takes extended reality technologies to the next level” with the addition of VR (via Gizmodo). The company will be showing off the device at SXSW, inviting attendees …

“Mad lad puts Neverwinter Nights into Baldur’s Gate 2 for some reason” was my coworker Joshua Wolens’ summation of Andrey Balabokhin’s truly confounding mod project, NWNForBG, which seeks to demake BioWare’s 2002 D&D RPG in its more critically acclaimed 2000 D&D RPG. The result is not how I’d recommend enjoying either game, but it’s one of the weirdest and most fascinating mod projects I’ve seen in a minute.

There aren’t really screenshots or discussion of the mod I could find out there, so my curiosity could only be sated by a direct hands-on experience. Getting there, though, proved a vexing odyssey into Baldur’s Gate 2’s funky modding ecosystem and NWNForBG’s own quirkiness.

Installing NWNForBG itself was relatively simple, but it also requires the BP-BGT Worldmap…

There are those of us out there who simply adore small form factor PCs, especially those that can cram a decent level of performance into something the size of a shoebox. These days, it’s pretty hard to get around the TDP requirements of a high-end graphics card, though. 

I’d hoped the single slot Galax RTX 4060 Ti Unparalleled MAX 16GB would hearken back to the glory days of the likes of the GeForce 8800 GT, but sadly, it does appear that the 165W TDP of the AD106 equipped RTX 4060 Ti is a little beyond it.

Chinese tech site EXP Review (via harukaze5719) got their hands on one of these intriguing cards and gave it the full review treatment. The results show the card performs much like any other RTX 4060 Ti. That’s a good thing, as any concerns around thermal throttling…

Fuel cells are one of those technological developments, a bit like nuclear fusion, that occasionally show promise but always seem at least a few major steps away from becoming a reality in day-to-day life. However, Japanese researchers seem to have made some major developments in the efficiency of the tech, thanks to that wonderful, magical substance, caffeine.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering at Chiba University in Japan have published a study in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, detailing their discovery that the addition of caffeine to platinum electrodes in fuel cells lessens the obstruction of efficient oxygen reaction. 

Currently the presence of water affects the performance of fuel cells by reacting with platinum catalysts, meani…

Game genres are a bit of an ossified thing. You’ve got strategy, FPS, RPG, and something called action-adventure for when you don’t actually know where else to categorise a game. It’s always been that way and feels like it’ll always be that way. But it doesn’t have to be.

Spotted by GamesRadar, Kitfox Games and Ghost Ship Studios—the teams behind Dwarf Fortress’ premium edition and Deep Rock Galactic respectively—have united to launch a generation-defining campaign to get a new tag added to Steam: Dwarf. It kicked off in January, but things really hotted up yesterday when the games finally got a response from Steam. 

“The short answer is ‘no,'” explained the two studios in a statement, but fear not, la lucha continua. The statement went on to say that “the r…

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed multi-billion crypto exchange FTX, was jailed earlier this month until his trial date, following what a judge said was “probable cause to believe that the defendant has attempted to tamper with witnesses at least twice” while on bail. This related to Bankman-Fried sharing personal writing by his former partner and FTX colleague Caroline Ellison with a journalist: his bail was revoked on August 11, and he’s been detained ever since in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.

Now Bankman-Fried’s lawyer is saying that the conditions in prison are such that they’re preventing the former crypto king and billionaire from preparing for his trial (thanks, Sky News). The claim came during a court hearing in which Bankman-Fried was cha…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the few RPGs rich in evil options where I actually stuck to mostly heroic deeds in my first playthrough. But I’m doing my total scumbag run at the moment, which means the news that Larian’s working on some more evil endings is music to my ears. 

Chatting to IGN, CEO Swen Vincke teased some of what the studio’s got planned for us before it bids farewell to the Forgotten Realms for good—specifically, more campaign conclusions for evil-inclined adventurers.

“So they’re working on the evil endings right now,” Vincke said. “I’ve seen some of them. They’re really evil. So the evil players will be satisfied with that.” 

You can already screw everyone over and herald in a dark age through your actions in Baldur’s Gate 3’s final moments…

At GDC this year, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable in which a group of veteran RPG designers came together to discuss topics ranging from whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead to the impact of Elden Ring’s success. When the conversation came around to the subject of how much their games were based on what the RPG audience was looking for, versus their own personal taste, Obsidian’s design director Josh Sawyer—whose design credits include Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, Alpha Protocol, and plenty more—went all the way back to the beginning of his career.

“I’ve been playing D&D since 1985,” Sawyer said, “and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999 the first game that I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was lik…

First spotted by GamesRadar, Withers pulled out all the stops in Baldur’s Gate 3’s new post-game epilogue, calling in a favor with the Forgotten Realms’ god of music, Milil, to perform for you. Fans noticed an uncanny resemblance to Larian composer Borislav Slavov, and while the artist didn’t confirm it either way, it seems like a deliberate homage.

Slavov previously did the excellent soundtrack for Divinity: Original Sin 2, and his score for Baldur’s Gate 3 is up for best music at this year’s Game Awards. I didn’t clock the resemblance between Slavov and Milil right away, but seeing them side by side, that’s totally him, right? In response to GamesRadar’s reporting, Slavov simply replied “Well..🙃” on Twitter.

The Forgotten Realms has a ton …