Month: September 2024

The poor, unwanted MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines stratagem has been foisted upon players yet again in Helldivers 2—these mines, which have been ready-to-go since April, have been rejected by the community three separate times. No, really:

• April: Helldivers 2 players ignore the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines in favour of the RL-77 Airburst Rocket Launcher.
• May: Those same players are tasked with killing 2 billion Automatons to get the anti-tank mines. They fail to do so.
• June: Patriots are given a choice—get the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines or save the sick, imaginary videogame children. They chose the children.

Essentially, avoiding these mines—which are, objectively, a new gameplay feature players are choosing not to receive—has …

There’s a clue for today’s Wordle waiting below, just in case you need to give your guesses a bit of direction but don’t like the idea of instantly giving the game away. Although if you do like the idea of an instant win, you’ll be pleased to hear that the answer to the May 11 (1057) Wordle is only a click away.

Wordle’s been making me work hard to keep my win streak this week, so it was a bit of a relief to start the weekend with such a quick and easy win. I’ll take a whole week of smoothly solved puzzles if you don’t mind, Wordle.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, May 11

A watery word is going to help you win today. This word is closely related to the rise and fall of the sea, as the moon exerts its influence on our oceans.…

The latest developer update for Overwatch 2 saw Gavin Winter, senior systems designer, explain some of the biggest changes coming in season 10, and one of them will hopefully help you help that one friend who can’t seem to get out of bronze. 

There’s been a lot of talk concerning Overwatch 2 season 10, and what this means for the game going forward, with a new DPS hero, Venture, being added and plans to “give the game a regular heartbeat.” However, I’m more interested in the competitive changes scheduled for the next season and what this means for groups and matchmaking. 

In a developer update posted to Twitter, Winter explains that “Overwatch is at its best when you’re playing with friends,” and it’s for this reason that Blizzard has decided to revise its grouping…

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The tough thing about making a Transformers game is that you can’t just make an action game about giant robots. You’ve also got to be able to handle the vehicle side of things, and there aren’t a lot of studios out there who are equally adept at making racing games or flight sims as they are at making big robot action games. 

Transformers: Galactic Trials, in development from 3DClouds, seems to be leaning more heavily on the racing side of things. The singleplayer mode has you traversing “battle-race circuits” that consist of both combat and driving challenges you have to face in the relevant forms, while collecting Prime Relics that can be spent to improve skills as well as unlocking more characters and skills. The press release says it has a “rogue-lite combat elem…

One of Japan’s leading OLED panel makers, JOLED, has gone bust. While JOLED didn’t make any of the panels in the latest generation of OLED gaming monitors, its demise is worrisome on several levels.

JOLED is a relatively new company—having been formed out of the OLED business units of Sony and Panasonic in 2015—but it’s a sad matter for PC gamers that the outfit filed for bankruptcy on Monday (via Nikkei Asia).

As for why that matters for PC gaming, for starters JOLED was a pioneer in a new “inkjet” process of manufacturing OLED panels which promises to dramatically lower costs. Both LG’s WOLED and Samusng’s QD-OLED use a more expensive vacuum deposition manufacturing process that involves vaporizing the OLED material in a vacuum chamber before using masks to res…

Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 are all the rage right now, but I’m here to tell you about something different. It’s a lush indie puzzle-adventure game “inspired by the myth of Babel” called Chants of Sennaar, and it’s out now on Steam.

Chants of Sennaar first caught my eye because it looks, superficially at least, like an up-close take on Monument Valley, one of my favorite mobile games, which finally made its way from iOS to PC in 2022. But Chants of Sennaar is much more than a geometric brain-teaser: It takes place inside a massive, twisting tower, filled with chambers, passageways, and people who no longer speak to one another. 

Into that breach steps you, a prophesied Traveller, whose arrival promises to break down those ancient, metaphorical walls and restore balanc…

Steam informs me that Fallout: New Vegas is my second-most-played game of all time (after Crusader Kings 2), and I will still take any excuse to boot it up again. Lucky for me, then, that some enterprising modders have launched an ongoing online contest taking place entirely within the borders of NV’s Mojave Desert.

Called Ready Courier One and created by a modder named TommInfinite, the mod is “an online contest for Fallout: New Vegas where anyone can win the prize.” The contest centres around 26 riddles about various bits of Fallout lore. You install it, get presented with a riddle, and set out to press N on the answer—which can be anything from an NPC to a minor static object—somewhere in New Vegas or its DLCs, except Honest Hearts for some reason. It knows…

The signs that Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is coming soon are everywhere and nowhere all at once. Fans are latching onto anything and everything they can find to prove FromSoftware is about to drop the release date. This week’s clue comes from a tiny Steam update labeled as DLC, and, while it is slightly more credible than a date from a controller manufacturer, it’s still mighty thin.

Earlier this week, a new DLC app identification number was added to Elden Ring on Steam (via SteamDB), suggesting that FromSoft is preparing to list Shadows of the Erdtree on the store page. Naturally, Elden Ring fans saw this and immediately started constructing a theory that starts with an announcement at tomorrow’s Xbox Developer Direct.

It’s not as big of a leap as it may seem: E…

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The submarine-captain simulator used to be a pretty big deal, but it—among many other simulator genres—has fallen out of favor in the past decade. Depending on who you ask, the last great submarine sim was one of the last few Silent Hunter games released between 2005 and 2010—all of which are surely heavily modded in some way.

No more, though, as Deep Water Studio’s UBOAT is set to release some time soon and seems to have really taken genre fans with its blend of operations detail and life on-board the infamous convoy-raiding German submarines of World War 2. First released in 2019, the Early Access period is now coming to a close with the release of a beta for the complete game this past week.

Though it’s definitely a simulator of fighting on a Wo…

Thanks to AI-generated content the internet sure has been showing me some weird stuff lately. That includes the obvious things like images with far too many fingers and teeth, but also uncanny valley horrors like the recurring face of Loab. This time, AI has delivered us a pizza commercial that might just be more terrifying and hilarious than anything Loab could offer.

Tom’s Hardware spotted the video on Pizza Later’s YouTube showcasing this wonderful effort in AI. The video is an absolutel smorgasbord of uncanny treats as it advertises the hippest new pizza place around: Pepperoni Hug Spot. I don’t want to ruin the experience too much, but get ready to see people eat pizza in a totally normal and cool way.

Over on Twitter, Pizza Later explains a little about the process beh…