The Yakuza/Like a Dragon games are an annualized series, a new entry appearing every year since 2014, and sometimes two per year—as was the case in 2023, when Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio released both Like a Dragon: Ishin! and Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. With so many games coming out, making sure they feel at least a little different, with changing protagonists, locations, and time periods, is essential. Changing the combat system was one of the most surprising shifts.

When the turn-based JRPG combat of Yakuza: Like a Dragon was first revealed in a trailer on April 1, 2019, some players assumed it was an April fool’s joke and it would stick with the series’ brawler-style combat. But RGG was serious, and the mainline series is staying turn-based for next year’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

“RGG Studio’s games are narrative games”, chief producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto recently told Game Informer. “We always think flat about the most enjoyable form of t…

The artist, known on TikTok as artbypacoway (or Paco, for short) has a series of videos showcasing how he’s modernising a classic painting in a different way—by adding Fortnite to it. Honestly, it looks so amazing that it feels as if Peely was always meant for oil paintings. 

Paco has spent 12 days adding different characters and items from Fortnite to a classic landscape painting of a crooked bridge and a quiet stream that he found at a thrift shop. It looks like he’s finally finished with his project, so the last video showcased a quick explainer of everything he changed in the painting and why he did it. 

After sharing his idea on the internet a couple of weeks ago, he received “thousands of suggestions” about the project. “I tried to pick and choose what I thought were the most popular requests,” Paco says in the TikTok. These include the Loot Llama and a barrel full of fishing poles. But adding your favourite characters and items from Fortnite isn’t …

B&H has a wildly good deal on one of our favorite all-time NVMe SSDs, which you can pick up right now for only $165. The timing couldn’t be better if you’re looking for an easy but meaningful upgrade to your gaming PC before you commit the next 300 hours of your life to Baldur’s Gate 3, a game that requires an SSD and at least 150GB of available storage to meet its rather beefy minimum requirements.

The 2TB version of the drive usually costs $270, but right now, it’s over $100 off, making it an absolute steal and an easy recommendation.

When we reviewed the FireCuda 530, we praised its remarkable performance and unrivaled reliability, positioning it as the leading choice for premium memory storage. The only drawback we found was the absence of AES 256-bit encryption and its steep price tag.

With read and write speeds reaching an impressive 7,300MB/s and 6,900MB/s, respectively, the FireCuda 530 was one of the best NVMe SSDs last year before it was knocked off…

Microsoft’s Xbox Showcase gave us our first look proper at Playground Games’ upcoming Fable reboot and the vibes are as good as it gets. The trailer stars comedian and actor Richard Ayoade, a fruit and vegetable farmer with a very low opinion of heroes (“wafters”, he says, not unfairly). This is interspersed with clips of a Fable hero doing their thing, as she shanks a few bandits, sinks the odd pint, and seemingly wellies a chicken into the upper atmosphere.

Things take a turn after that and, if you want to see for yourself, watch above before reading on. A giant beanstalk grows, the next thing you know the hero’s at a massive door, and It turns out Ayoade is in fact a giant. “Well, this is awkward” he says to her before a quickfire action sequence chasing the diminutive hero around his house. The sequence ends with the hero in his grasp, being raised to his mouth, and turning to the camera to say “fff-” which abruptly cuts to the Fable logo, before a neat little coda suggest…

In a talk at last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Firaxis game director Joe Weinhoffer broke down the evolution of Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ tactical combat and explained the thinking behind the game’s most polarizing element: using cards to represent superhero powers.

“Is it odd that we have cards in a tactical superhero game? Yes, absolutely,” Weinhoffer said early in the talk. “We knew this would be a controversial choice, and that reception and first impressions would be mixed. We certainly had plenty of people see the game and say ‘oh, it has cards in it? Eh, nevermind, not for me.’ But was it the right fit for this game and our design goals? Yes, absolutely.”

We ended up loving Midnight Suns, awarding it runner-up to the 2022 GOTY. But back when it was announced in 2021, the marriage of deckbuilder and XCOM didn’t go over so well at first blush. Maybe that was because strategy fans have been waiting so long for a full-on XCOM 2 sequel; maybe it wa…

Atari, the stumbling veteran gaming company, is buying Nightdive Studios, the company responsible for the forthcoming System Shock remake, as well as a raft of other retro renovations including Turok, Shadow Man and PowerSlave. The deal is worth $10 million (half payable in Atari shares), and the acquisition is expected to complete by the end of April.

It’s not surprising that Nightdive would want to sell to a larger and more wealthy business. What’s surprising is that they’ve not sold to, say, Embracer Group, whose efforts to purchase every double A studio in the world are ongoing. After all, Atari’s recent business ventures haven’t driven a great deal of consumer enthusiasm: its Atari VCS console was dismal, its NFT side project depressing, and while its flagship hotel admittedly looks cool, it is very much not a videogame. Credit where it’s due, though: Llamasoft’s recent Atari-published game looks great.

Still, dearth of goodwill notwithstanding, welcom…

Plans come and go in PC hardware—some turn into shipping product, others get scrunched up and thrown in the bin marked “cba”. Let’s hope these two recently rumoured graphics cards come under the former, as we could do with some fresh cards under $260.

According to known leaker komachi_ensaka on X, AMD has referenced two new graphics cards: the Radeon RX 7400 and RX 7300. We don’t know where they’ve appeared, or really much more about them at all, though they’d be an unexpected development in a GPU generation we’d thought until now was all wrapped up.

The cheapest 7000-series graphics card available today is the RX 7600, though the last one to be announced was the RX 7600 XT back in January. That’s effectively the same card as the RX 7600, using the same Navi 33 GPU, except now with 16 GB of mostly pointless memory.

The RX 7400 and RX 7300 would allegedly use the same Navi 33 GPU as the RX 7600 XT. That means 2,048 cores is the absolute maximum config…

Many people—myself included— have had to deal with the woe of a wet phone. My experience came during the Songkran festival in Thailand. If you’ve ever experienced it, it means you get wet. Very wet. Some water got into my supposedly sealed phone pouch, and yes—I actually used rice to dry it out. It turns out that’s not the best thing to do, at least according to an Apple support document.

Apple released an official advisory on the subject of drying your phone, as spotted by Macworld (via the Guardian). The advisory lays out what you should and should not do if your phone gets wet. It says ‘Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.’

I don’t actually have an iPhone, but it’s safe to say that dunking one in rice is something plenty of people have done over the years. Without ever paying much attention to the subject, I have always assumed the rice submersion method…

Twisted Metal feels like it was created not to become a TV show, but to be put in a TV show as the archetypal violent game some maladjusted kid plays: It’s about lunatics who drive around in armored vehicles blowing each other up to win a competition, and that’s basically it. Character backstories are developed in 2001’s Twisted Metal Black—which I played a ton of in high school—but we’re talking “whoa, this clown’s twisted,” not Joel and Ellie. It’s still primarily about slamming into civilian cars and cackling at the scream sound effect that plays.

I don’t know how Peacock is going to make a show worth watching out of that, but I also don’t have any serious complaints about the first teaser for the series, embedded above. There’s a car, there are guns, and there’s a twisted clown in an ice cream truck. Maybe in an ideal world we’d be bombarded with practical effects—cars really slamming into each other, loads of pyrotechnics, grindhouse st…

Watch On

LEGO was a big part of my childhood, and I’m sure many of you can relate. There was something about those clicky, clunky little blocks snapping together to create chunky versions of whatever you could picture in your head. A creative freedom that was impossible to resist.

Was? Ah, who am I kidding—I still buy LEGO to this day, and it’s just as satisfying. However, human creativity these days has a contender, and that comes in the form of generative AI. YouTube channel Creative Mindstorms has built a “printer” of sorts out of Lego Mindstorms components that takes advantage of our new AI opponent, in this case, Open AI’s DALL-E 3.

Essentially, the process goes like this: A custom program sends user text prompts off to the AI with the instruction to create an image. Once the image is generated and received, the program then converts it into a 32×32 pixel version with colors that match the LEGO range. This is then “printed” by the latest of Creative Mindstorm’…