Atari has today announced the purchase of the Intellivision brand alongside “certain games” from Intellivision Entertainment LLC. This is a melancholy coda to the early days of home consoles in the West, where in the US market especially the Atari 2600 dominated the late 1970s scene. Intellivision was one of Atari’s main rivals, almost entirely because the machine had the backing of Mattel (these were the days when videogames were sold in the toy section of stores), and launched its first console in 1979.
The concept of a “console war” didn’t really exist, but the competition was real. Mattel had been working on the Intellivision (the name is a portmanteau of “Intelligent Television”) since 1977 and launched with a big-money ad campaign directly comparing the system’s capab…
Read moreSince the release of AMD’s RX 7000-series with the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, some reports have arisen suggesting that AMD-designed cards may be heating up to an uncomfortable level—reportedly up to 110°C on what’s known as the hotspot temperature reading on these cards. So much so that AMD has now admitted that there may be an issue affecting a limited number of reference design cards.
“We are working to determine the root cause of the unexpected performance limitation of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards,” AMD says in a statement (via Hardwareluxx). “Based on our observations so far, we believe the issue is related to the thermal solution used in the AMD reference design and with a limited number of cards sold. We are working to resolve this issue for the affe…
Read moreFlashback 2, the sequel to the cult classic ’90s platformer which came out before I was even born, has gotten a new gameplay trailer and a release window. You’ll be hopping, skipping and jumping your way to victory against the sinister Morphs when it comes out this November, a cool 31 years after the first game.
Taking place in “in an action-packed cyberpunk universe where the fate of humanity itself hangs in the balance,” the sequel is a direct follow-up to the first game that looks set to emulate its side-scrolling, Prince of Persia-esque gameplay. You’ll play series hero Conrad B. Hart—a name of frankly terrifying power—as he fights opponents who are “determined to enslave every civilization in the Solar System”.
Unlike the first game, the new one is a resplen…
Read moreIn an interview with Variety, prolific videogame voice actor, Jennifer Hale, whose credits include Mass Effect, Planescape: Torment, and the original Baldur’s Gate, defended SAG-AFTRA drilling down on AI protections for performers in its continued negotiations with major game publishers. Videogame voice actors have been on strike against publishers including EA, Activision, and Disney since July 26.
Hale told Variety that “AI is coming for all of us, because the truth is, AI is just a tool like a hammer. If I take my hammer, I could build you a house. I can also take that same hammer and I can smash your skin and destroy who you are.”
Similar to AI generation of text and images, generated voices are based on a human output, and as with the recent Writer’s Guild strike and …
Read moreUpcoming farm life sim Everholm calls itself “cozy, but not too cozy.” Launched through a creepy portal while in search of her sister, Lily lands on a mysterious island where everyone seems to know who she is. It’s got the cute cultivation of other Stardew-style farm games, but there’s clearly a mystery brewing too. Everholm appeared in today’s PC Gaming Show with a fresh trailer to announce that you can once again play its demo.
I got to try Everholm’s demo when it popped up in the Steam Next Fest earlier this year and quite liked it. There was a lowkey spooky vibe as I tried to meet everyone in town and always felt like there’s something going on around here I should know about as everyone seemed to already know me despite having just plopped through a magical portal into my ado…
Read moreMassive Entertainment’s The Division 2 launched in 2019 and, while it’s not the type of game that makes headlines every week, it has since tootled along quite nicely thanks to regular seasonal updates, and the promise of more to come from the series. The most recent update, however, has been a disaster on a scale that is still not yet fully clear: Perhaps even to the developer.
In a perfect encapsulation of the butterfly effect in coding, the newest season had been delayed due to a localization issue. “This past Saturday, in the process of creating the update which would resolve the issue, we encountered an error that brought down the build generation system for the Division 2,” said the studio in a statement posted to Twitter. “As a result, we cannot update the game until this sy…
Read moreThe single most expensive hat trade in Team Fortress 2’s history went down this week, with one player exchanging goods worth over 10,000 of the game’s crate keys (around $1.80 each) for an unusual Arcana Crone’s Dome, the characteristics of which make it the only one in existence. It’s a witch’s hat with some Halloween effects, basically, and the trade was first spotted by PyroJoe on X (formerly Twitter), who called it “the biggest singular unusual TF2 Hat trade” in the game’s history.
The hat-fancier is a player called Gummy from Singapore, who exchanged various items (including a lesser Crone’s Dome) that were worth approximately 10,000 keys when taken as a bundle. PyroJoe told PCG that this is now the single most expensive hat trade in TF2 history, though n…
Read moreDid you know that Assassin’s Creed’s Isu—the First Civilisation species that occasionally pops up to utter portents at you—have a whole constructed language that Ubisoft made for them? Me neither, since I stopped even trying to understand what’s going on with that series and its metaplot by AC3, but Ubisoft’s writers and artists have had to deal with the Isu language for years now, and at least one of them is less-than-thrilled about it: Hidden messages inserted into a recent AC comic show an artist’s frustration at having to write in the made-up tongue.
“If someone can explain how to write this shit it would be much appreciated,” reads an ancient and mysterious Isu tablet uncovered in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla—The Converts, a graphic novel which released last w…
Read moreArmored Core 6 was a triumph—it gave second wind to FromSoftware’s mecha franchise, brought new fans into the genre (myself included) and it let you gun down tanks as a 20ft-tall Pepsi Man, what more could you want? Co-op, that’s what.
Despite the fact that there’s several missions in the game with AI partners, there’s no online co-op—which is fair enough. Not only is the single-player experience already great, with some of FromSoftware’s best NG+ content yet, Armored Core 6’s mechs are so customizable I have no idea how you’d balance any mission around more than one of them. The Robot-Wars style PvP battles are a better use of the game’s online functionality.
That hasn’t stopped modder LukeYui from trying, though. As spotted by TheGamer, LukeYui posted a f…
Read moreFallout 4’s mega-ambitious, DLC-sized, and indiscriminately British expansion mod Fallout: London is rapidly approaching its official release date of April 23, and to mark the occasion its creators have released its final (of many) progress videos, showcasing the mod’s state ahead of its release and revealing a few appetite-whetting tidbits to pique your interest. First and foremost? Those mad lads have gotten Neil Newbon—Baldur’s Gate 3’s Astarion—to lend his voice to the project.
We don’t get to hear Newbon’s character speak, but we do get a brief shot of him getting up to something presumably ASBO-worthy in London’s post-apocalyptic boroughs. I’m pretty certain every party member from BG3 has their own cult following, but I think you could call Newbon’s seductive, f…
Read moreI used to be a Matt Damon guy, but the older I get, the more I find myself in Ben Affleck’s corner. I’m not really sure why—maybe it was the purportedly-drunken (and very funny) Armageddon DVD commentary, maybe it was the existential crisis he appeared to very suddenly and quietly suffer during a Justice League presser—but whatever it is, his recent appearance at the Valorant Champions 2023 event pretty well sealed the deal for me.
As noted by Dexerto, Affleck took his son to the event, where the two of them encountered Shannon Williams, who provides the voice of the Valorant character Jett. When Affleck’s son told Williams that his dad could be a Jett main, Ben interjected, “Yeah, but then they nerfed Jett, that’s the problem.”
It’s not a bluff: Jett did indeed …
Read moreUbisoft’s upcoming shooter XDefiant was at one stage scheduled to be released in summer 2023. The date was pushed back to October, before a public test saw yet another delay to an unspecified future launch date. The game did remain in Ubisoft’s Q3 2024 earnings report, however, indicating the publisher expected it to release before March 31, 2024.
Well, with a week to go, that’s not looking likely, and a report from Insider Gaming claims to have the goods on why. It alleges the game has missed “dozens” of internal milestones and quotes an internal source as saying “the neverending hunt to chase COD and add pointless stuff always breaks the current build.”
This may well raise eyebrows given that, delays aside, reception to XDefiant’s test periods has generally been …
Read moreApple has reportedly slashed production volumes of the Vision Pro mixed reality headset by nearly half. So says analyst and leading Apple soothsayer Ming-Chi Kuo.
Kuo reckons the original plan was for up to 800,000 units of the headset in 2024. This has now been cut to 400,000 to 450,000. He also notes that Apple has made the call to reduce production before the headset has even gone on sale in markets outside the US.
That suggests demand in the US has been much lower than expected. What’s more, Kuo says the poor performance of the Vision Pro could mean that a planned update to the headset in 2025 may be cancelled.
It’s tempting to conclude that once the initial flurry of sales to YouTubers and influencers died down, the underlying demand from real-world users was alwa…
Read moreIn what is surely the apex of both Baldur’s Gate 3 modding and my news writing career, a creator named Estgamers has developed the foulest fanmade BG3 spell yet: the foul hex of Testicular Torsion (warning: that link may not be work-safe depending on how cool your work is with both the concept of testicular torsion and medical diagrams of it in action).
Created by a modder named Estgamers, the Testicular Torsion Spell Mod is, well, a testicular torsion spell mod. It adds a new level 1 transmutation spell to the game that gets your enemies all twisted up in a way that’s both comical and intensely painful, dealing 1d4 of force damage. So long as they have testicles, anyway.
If you’re (mercifully) unaware of just what testicular torsion is, it’s basically the medical name for l…
Read moreAtomic Heart is currently sitting pretty on Steam with over 5,000 reviews rating the game ‘very positive’, despite the wider controversy about the game’s origins. The top review at the moment, however, summarises something that every player of Atomic Heart has to confront. Recommending the game after around 90 hours played, Matt_KPLS’s review says only: “BRB, i’m going to the kitchen to f*ck the fridge.”
One of the most bizarre elements of Atomic Heart is a vending machine called Nora that the player has to interact with after being attacked by it in a cutscene. With the aid of your glove, the attack is fought off, the appliance is beaten, and… things take a turn for the very weird. In some sort of transplant of a sub/dom fetish onto an appliance, the machine begins to trea…
Read moreNeopets is kicking off its new era by returning to an old one: The company’s newly-independent leadership has announced the creation of a trading card game called Neopets Battledome, harkening back to the original Neopets Trading Card Game from the early 2000s. I never played that one myself, but I bet there are a lot of 20- and 30-somethings out there who experience a kind of full-body time travel whenever someone reminds them of it.
Unlike the original Neopets TCG, which was made by Wizards of the Coast, the new card game is being made by Upper Deck. That’s the same company taking rival game-maker Ravensburger to court over upcoming CCG Disney Lorcana, if the name sounds familiar.
Neopets Battledome is set to hit in 2024, just in time for Neopets’ 25th anniversary. It’ll b…
Read moreLarian Studios announced on Monday that Jim Southworth, who led the Baldur’s Gate 3 cinematic animation team, has died. He was 56 years old, and had been diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2022.
“Jim was always ready to join in the fun,” said Larian UK studio head James Austin in a statement sent to PC Gamer. “Friends with everyone in the team. Eager to be with his animators yet old enough to be their father. He loved making games, and we loved making them with him. We will miss him greatly.”
Among Southworth’s other credits in his multi-decade career are sandbox MMO Boundless, multiple PlayStation EyeToy games and the early PSVR development, and ’90s animated series The Animals of Farthing Wood. He worked on Baldur’s Gate 3 for five years, starting in 2019.
Earlier t…
Read moreIn the company’s This Week at Bungie or TWAB update, the Destiny developer clarified the series of events that led to a number of players missing in-game titles, a bug that required a rollback of player progress and 20 hours of downtime for the popular looter shooter/MMO/Guardian-em-up game (credit to Massively Overpowered for the spot).
On January 24, a number of Destiny players logged in to find the unthinkable had happened: their triumphs were gone! All those achievements, precious ‘cheevos, lost to time, like tears in rain. All jokes aside, this is a major bummer in a game where some triumphs and seals require absolutely herculean trials to earn, while others are tied to legacy content and can no longer be acquired.
The bug ultimately required a rollback of player accoun…
Read moreWarhammer 40,000: Boltgun, the aggressively retro and also just plain aggressive-looking first-person shooter from Auroch Digital, now has a release date. It’s been revealed via a trailer showing off a variety of the 41st millennium’s monsters in the pixelated-sprite style of the late 20th century, which we’ll be pretend-murdering right here in the 21st century. Specifically, from May 23, 2023.
Those enemies include heretic cultists and a pick-and-mix bag of daemons who serve the 40K setting’s Chaos Gods. The little mucus-colored guys are Nurglings who work for Nurgle, god of pestilence, as do their bigger cousin the Great Unclean One seen being purged 20 seconds in and the horned amphibian with the tongue attack, which is a plague toad. The blue bird who looks like a skeksis from…
Read moreBaldur’s Gate 3‘s next major patch is on its way—scheduled to release this week, according to Larian Studios’ director of publishing, Michael Douse. Announced in a Twitter post yesterday, Douse reassures players: “we caught the nasty bug causing slowdowns and the good news is: it’s fixed in Patch 5!”
For context, Patch 4 tackled a few things, adding colourblind filters, fixing storyline hiccups, and tweaking kiss scenes, leading to some adorable head-bumps with Karlach while leaving poor Astarion lovers feeling like they were about to be broken up with whenever they went in for a smooch.
It also introduced a game-breaking bug that caused some massive slowdowns in Act 3, as highlighted in this thread from the game’s subreddit. “Companions do…
Read moreThe new Apex Legends battle pass scheme isn’t going over well.
Respawn announced this week that Apex will now get two short battle passes per season instead of one long one. Whether that part of the news is strictly a bad thing is debatable: Respawn says the new 60-tier half-season passes will still contain the same number of legendary skins as the old 110-tier passes, but with less filler.
What is obviously bad for players, however, is that they can no longer save up the Apex Coins they earn from battle passes and use them to unlock the premium tiers in future passes. The premium tracks will now require direct payment of $9.99 USD to unlock, no substituting in-game currency.
The only reasonable explanation for that change is the obvious one—that someone th…
Read moreSerial and somewhat hit-and-miss YouTube ‘leak’ channel, Moore’s Law is Dead, has unloaded some technical details and performance expectations for AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 and 6 CPU architectures. The headline takeaway is arguably that it involves more modest performance gains than previous rumours.
Just in case you’ve forgotten, AMD’s current Ryzen 7000 CPUs use the Zen 4 architecture. That was seen as a relatively modest improvement over Zen 3, offering as it did 13% performance gains on average over Zen 3 in terms of IPC, or instructions per clock.
In other words, for a single software thread running on a single CPU core at the same clock speed on both architectures, Zen 4 is on average 13% faster.
So, what can we expect from Zen 5 and 6? According to MLID, Zen 5 …
Read moreสิงคโปร์, 8 ธันวาคม 2023 – HoYoverse ผู้พัฒนาและเผยแพร่สื่อบันเทิงอินเตอร์แอ็กทีฟระดับโลกได้นำเซอร์ไพรส์ส่งท้ายปีมาให้กับแฟน ๆ และเหล่าผู้เล่นด้วยการประกาศว่า Genshin Concert 2023: Melodies of an Endless Journey จะออกอากาศในวันที่ 22 ธันวาคม 2023 เวลา 19.00 น. (UTC+8) ฟรีบน YouTube, Twitch, TikTok และ X (เดิมคือ Twitter) สำหรับ Genshin Concert ในปีนี้ได้ยกระดับไปอีกขั้น…
Read moreในเดือนมีนาคมนี้ ผู้เล่นจะได้ปลดปล่อยความคิดสร้างสรรค์ให้โลดแล่นด้วยCrayola Adventuresที่มอบประสบการณ์การเล่าเรื่องแบบปลายเปิดรูปแบบใหม่สำหรับสมาชิกทุกคนในครอบครัว ต่อสู้เพื่อชิงชัยการป้องกันปราการในBloons TD Battles 2+และสร้างอารยธรรมในแบบของตัวเองกับThe Battle of Polytopia+เกมกลยุทธ์ชื่อด…
Read moreBaldur’s Gate 3 was our 2023 Game of the Year and highest-scoring review in over a decade and a half for a whole host of reasons, but its open-ended player freedom and attending reactivity to all of our potential choices is certainly up there. A year out from release, Proxy Gate Tactician on YouTube has uncovered a particularly absurd edge case reaction involving the Netherstones and late-game Iron Throne and Steel Watch Foundry dungeons.
The Netherstones are Baldur’s Gate 3’s Triforce-y magical McGuffin, and you need all three to progress to the end of the game. Larian’s not in the business of restricting player control with unkillable NPCs or undroppable items, so you’re free to take the stones in and out of your inventory. To avoid a potential soft lock on losing the stones f…
Read moreIt has been a terrible month for Escape from Tarkov. The hardcore extraction shooter, developed by Battlestate Games, has had some ups and downs over the eight years since it was first released into beta, and is one of those where the most devoted players seem to love and hate it in equal measure. It can sometimes be hard, as a Tarkov-watcher, to know when something’s gone badly wrong (as it occasionally does), or when people are just blowing off steam before heading back in for another round.
But this time is different, and it’s an entirely self-inflicted disaster from BSG. In late April the developer announced a new package, Escape from Tarkov: Unheard Edition, that cost $250 and included access to a long-awaited PvE mode with co-op and persistent progress (the main game in Tark…
Read moreIf I didn’t have years of prior experience playing World of Warcraft, I imagine my first hour in The War Within alpha would’ve gone much worse. WoW immediately buries you in buckets of spells and items and quests that even had me gasping for air trying to make sense of it all. The new and returning player experience is rough, and Blizzard is willing to admit as much, according to a recent interview with Windows Central.
“We know that we have a lot of work to do on new player acquisition, but we hadn’t been focusing there, we were focused on retention,” vice president and executive producer Holly Longdale said.
And it shows: In a recent Activision Blizzard financial report, the company noted that Dragonflight has kept more people subscribed to WoW than recent expansions. Typi…
Read moreA few years ago we cheekily declared that the PC had won the console war, and it’s also true that I’ve spent the past couple decades gently mocking Sony and Microsoft for their 30 fps games and their Kinectimals, but now the PlayStation and Xbox are really looking quite pale and I’m starting to feel bad. I was just razzin’, but as we head into the summer showcases, confidence in the consoles feels lower than ever and I don’t know if they’ll ever get their old glow back.
It’s not just vibes: Console sales are down. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella marked a 26% decline in spending on current-generation consoles this April compared to last April. Xbox hardware in particular is struggling to sell: Microsoft reported a 30% decline in Xbox hardware revenue between the first few months o…
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