Month: September 2024

Raphael Colantonio wants you to imagine a spectrum. On its left you have Dishonored, the series he co-created with fellow immersive sim veteran Harvey Smith. It’s relatively linear and tightly mission-based; once you’ve finished with a level there’s no going back. On the right there’s Fallout: New Vegas—a rambling open world. 2017’s Prey is in the dead centre, open but dense, with some areas gated off until you have the equipment (or creativity) to get in.

Colantonio says the new immersive sim from his team at WolfEye Studios sits between Prey and New Vegas on that spectrum—”We favour density over size.” That’s all you need to say to rocket to the top of my wishlist. Billed as a “First-person action RPG,” Colantonio and WolfEye CEO Julien Roby make the game sound like …

The person responsible for leaking top secret US documents including Ukraine War plans that ended up on a Minecraft-related Discord server has been identified as Jack Teixeira, who according to The New York Times is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira was arrested earlier today, and is now in the custody of the FBI.

Teixeira allegedly shared the documents with members of his own Discord server, called Thug Shaker Central, a group of between 20 and 30 members who initially came together over shared interests in “guns, racist online memes, and videogames.” Most of the members of the group were teenagers, according to the report, who looked up to Teixeira as their leader.

Interestingly, the Times report says secret doc…

Konami recently published a corporate update on its digital entertainment business, which is predictably dry reading—the company is “Creating New User Experiences” and “Focusing on Further Expansion and Stimulation of esports” and I’m already overdosing on buzzwords. There’s one interesting titbit, however. Since its launch in July of 1987, the Metal Gear series has achieved 60 million total cumulative sales.

That’s based on numbers collected at the end of June this year. As the Wayback Machine shows, when Konami last counted sales at the end of September 2022, the Metal gear series was up to 59.3 million copies sold. Which means that even though there hasn’t been a new game in the series since the unloved Metal Gear: Survive in 2018, it’s still managed to rack up 700,000 sa…

The long-running legal beef between Apple and Epic Games is headed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Apple has filed a notice requesting a stay of a lower court injunction against it while it prepares to appeal a 2021 ruling on “anti-steering” practices that ordered the company to allow developers on the App Store to use non-Apple payment options.

The case began way back in August 2020, when Epic theatrically sued Apple over “monopolistic practices” on the App Store. A month later, Apple pushed back, and for the most part it came out on top when the initial ruling was handed down a year later. But Epic landed one good shot when the court declared that Apple’s policy of requiring developers to use its in-app payment system was a violation of California’s Unfair Competition…

Razer’s ominously monolithic slabs of high technology have never been cheap. In fact, the whole point of them is to be premium. Which is probably why there aren’t any good deals on current Razer Blade models right now. But Razer fans needn’t despair. There are some serious deals on last-gen Blade laptops.

We’ve chosen a trio of models all specced with RTX 3080 Ti graphics, two of which are on offer for $1,999, the other slightly higher at $2,099. In each case, that’s well over $1,000 less than you would have paid for the same laptop a year or so ago when they were current models. One of them is a slightly silly $1,600 off its original price.

The RTX 3080 Ti, of course, was the fastest laptop chip from Nvidia’s last-gen GPU family. To put it into a current performance context…

Forestry 2, the sequel to Forestry, is another expansion to Old School Runescape’s woodcutting skill. If you assume that something like chopping down trees is a casual, uncomplicated, nice way to kill a few hours—you would be gravely mistaken. I’m about to try and break this down for you, but even just skimming the surface is giving me conniptions. 

Basically, you go grab what’s called a Forestry Kit. This thing stores all of the odds and ends related to forestry, of which there are a lot. Like armour that gives you more cutting-down-trees XP while you’re wearing it. So far, so simple. 

To buy most of this stuff you need Anima-Infused bark. To get that, you need to complete events. To get these events to trigger regularly, as mentioned in the “new events sect…

Embark Studios’ The Finals is one of the most interesting multiplayers to come along for a while. It’s also a brand new game from a new studio, and it unsurprisingly has some issues at launch. Alongside its underwhelming AI-assisted voiceovers, weird bugs, and questionable balance at the start of Season 1, as Morgan has pointed out, it’s a sweaty beast, placing major emphasis on multi-way competitive shooting that can overly rely on being the twitchiest trigger finger, and neglecting the tactical potential of its fantastic destruction tech.

Last week, Embark released an update aimed at improving the game’s skill-based matchmaking, and what followed was a cavalcade of complaints from players on Reddit, claiming that the SBMM changes had ruined the game. Par for the course, then. Mo…

It’s May 4th and those Star Wars themed SSDs from Seagate announced last month have made it into a stunning PC from EKWB to mark the occasion. I’d love this build even without the subtle lightsaber theme, the blacked out case and components with the red and blue lighting is, uh, so good. 

But damn if it doesn’t make me wish there was a newer version of those Star Wars-themed Nvidia graphics cards to go with it.

Remember those graphics cards? I do, all too well. Mostly because we were handed one to giveaway back at my last haunt. A Titan Xp Galactic Empire edition. Oof, it was gorgeous. 

We did end up sending it off to one lucky winner, but not before prying it from Dave James’ hands. To this day he’s still horribly bitter about it.

There were t…

66 members of The Game Awards Future Class, a program intended to honor people “who represent the bright, bold, and inclusive future for video games,” and hundreds of others involved with the videogame industry have signed an open letter calling for a statement acknowledging the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza during The Game Awards show in December.

Gaza has been under siege since mid-October, following an attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants that reportedly resulted in 1,200 deaths, mainly civilians, and more than 240 people taken hostage. In response, Israel unleashed an attack on Gaza that has thus far killed more than 15,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities, roughly 6,000 of whom were children. Alongside the military assault, Israel also cut off food, …

A closed network test for Tekken 8 was held in July, with an initial run that was exclusively available to Playstation 5 owners followed by a broader test that included players on Steam. Letting PC gamers near Tekken 8 meant that someone fired up Cheat Engine because of course they did, at which point they managed to find a partial roster in the game’s files that includes six previously unannounced characters.

Those characters are Alisa, Raven, Shaheen, Steve, Yoshimitsu, and Zafina. By Raven they presumably mean the popular Blade-looking fighter added in Tekken 5, rather than Master Raven, his widely disliked replacement from Tekken 7. 

As a former Yoshimitsu main I’m pleased to see his return, though not surprised. He’s been in every mainline Tekken game since the ori…