Month: October 2024

Final Fantasy 14 isn’t a typical game to watch people speedrun—while certain parts of the game do have a speedrunning history, and there is a dedicated community running the game, completing it in record time still typically takes hours. These cutscene-skipping blitzes are impressive, sure, but they don’t exactly make for great viewing unless you’re really into the nuts and bolts of the game.

If you want to speedrun for charity, like how gamers at the European Speedrunner Assembly (ESA) have been this week, you might be stuck on ways to make Square Enix’s flagship MMO watchable for hours on end. As it turns out, all you have to do is give viewers the power to screw you over for 20 dollars.

While raising money for the Swedish Alzheimer’s Association, speedrunners Nashla…

Watch On

Geralt of Rivia is a well-known card game aficionado, and not just for Gwent. It turns out the famed witcher is also a big fan of Balatro—so big that he’s now actually in the game.

Geralt and a couple of familiar friends have joined Balatro in the game’s first ever “Collaboration Pack,” a crossover that adds optional face card backs from not just The Witcher 3, but also Dave the Diver, Vampire Survivors, and Among Us. The card cosmetics can be unlocked through a new “deck settings” menu that enables players to customize their decks with new cards.

“It was surreal having these conversations,” Balatro developer Localthunk said. “Some of the biggest names in gaming praising my little project and wanting to collaborate—absolutely wild. I’m glad we made…

Tinybuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik stirred up a hornet’s nest at a recent Develop Brighton presentation when he seemed to imply that the company uses artificial intelligence to monitor its employees in order to determine which of them are toxic or suffering burnout, and then deal with them accordingly. Nichiporchik has since said that his presentation was taken out of context online, and that he was describing hypothetical scenarios aimed at illustrating potential good and bad uses of AI. 

As reported by Whynow Gaming, Nichiporchik said during his presentation that employee communications through online channels like Slack and Google Meet can be processed through ChatGPT in what he called an “I, Me Analysis” that searches for the number of times an employee uses those words in c…

This Prime Day deal isn’t exactly the Bloodborne you’ve been waiting for, but it’s the one you’re getting. Bloodborne: The Board Game has weird monsters and weird weapons just like FromSoftware’s action RPG. And, right now, it’s the only way to play Bloodborne on your “desktop.” (You know, like on your desk.)

In this tabletop version of a game everyone still desperately wants to come to PC, you (and up to four other players) take on the role of a hunter in the cursed city of Yharnam. There are secrets to find and grotesque beasts to fight, and it’s a race to cleanse the city before the Blood Moon rises. All the action happens via a complex combat deck that mirrors the game’s satisfying, transforming trick weapons.

Bloodborne: The Board Game typically costs around $87.99, but…

Google’s Stadia is due to close on 18 January and, in its final weeks, those that enjoyed the service are mourning its demise. It has to be said that, whatever mistakes Google may have made with Stadia, the way the company has handled the wind-down is exemplary (for consumers, anyway). No doubt it helps to have all the money in the world behind you, but the way the company has pro-actively refunded its backers and prepared its controller for future bluetooth use can only be applauded.

The last couple of days of service have brought a somewhat sentimental surprise from the Stadia service: Google has released the first game Stadia was ever used for, an internally developed version of Snake called Worm Game. This solo and multiplayer title was “used to tes…

AMD’s next-gen Zen 5 CPU is shaping up very nicely. Well, it is according to the latest rumours which indicate the new CPU design will crank out roughly 30 percent more performance than AMD’s existing Zen 4 architecture, as used in Ryzen 7000 Series chips like the Ryzen 9 7950X. That would make Zen 5 the biggest ever upgrade since the original Zen CPUs arrived back in 2017.

The latest purported data dump comes from YouTube channel RedGamingTech. A number of rough performance estimates for multiple core configurations are provided. 

According to the channel, the 16-core variant of Zen 5 will knock out around 49,000 points in the multi-threaded run of Cinebench R23. That compares with the 38,000 points that the Ryzen 9 7950X achieves. Similar uplifts are claimed for 12, e…

Earlier this week, Epic revealed its latest cross-marketing campaign, which brings Tesla’s Cybertruck—a vehicle that’s earned four NHTSA recalls in seven months and has been called a “guideless missile” by safety experts—to Fortnite. The announcement earned a rare sense of unity from Fortnite players, though perhaps not the one Tesla might’ve hoped for.

On X, users reacted to the crossover by declaring open season on Fortnite Cybertruck drivers, with players making a general commitment to focus fire on the detestable polygon as soon as they see it—all other targets be damned.

It’s not just Fortnite players expressing Cybertruck discontent. Some of Fortnite’s own developers have shared their frustration with seeing Tesla’s infamous truck/icon of excess in …

Here comes Fractal Design with the new Terra Mini-ITX PC. And it’s making me feel very much okay about not loving the RGB-bathed monstrosities still dominating the PC gaming space.

I’ve been complaining about my hatred of the Cyberpunk aesthetic, and from that you’d probably guess I’m not so into PC cases heavy with RGB lighting. Thankfully, as Fractal’s Head of PR, Victor Elveljung, told me today at the product launch event, “We have your back on that one.”

“We have a different take on it,” Fractal Design’s, Susana Hernando tells me about the company’s thoughts on the prevailing RGB LED aesthetic. “This is kind of Scandinavian, and builds on the Aurora Borealis, that’s the idea behind this.” 

It’s certainly a much more subtle approach, and I appreciate that. But …

I’ll make no bones about it: I preferred Grand Theft Auto 4 to GTA 5. The latter is great and all but I never got over the more grounded and gritty take of GTA 4 and in particular its tragic central cast, defined and trapped by their lives in the criminal underworld. GTA 4 had two great expansions, The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and the Damned, both introducing their own protagonists and side stories. One of them was the biker Johnny Klebitz, who, unlike many of Rockstar’s leads, ends his GTA 4 arc in a better place.

An early twist in GTA 5 upset the apple cart: One of that game’s three protagonists, the psychopathic Trevor, finds a drug-addled Johnny and beats him to death. This has always been an unpopular twist, which perhaps indicates narratively it was a good one (boo!),…

Helldivers 2 is one of my favourite games of the year so far. I also barely get to play it at the moment, thanks to a payload of server problems that’ve knocked its Steam user review average down to “Mixed.”

It’s hardly the first game to suffer from server problems at launch. I’m used to the catastrophic waiting times of MMORPG expansion launches like Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker, which fully had to stop selling copies while it waited for things to calm down. I anticipate Dawntrail will be much the same.

It’s a frustrating situation for players—some of which are more understanding than others. A small contingent of not-so-patient ones have been calling for the Helldivers 2 team to ‘just buy more servers’ or some variant thereof for a while now, which came to a head the…