Gambarslot

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’…

To celebrate the launch of the Steam Deck OLED late last year, Valve constructed an entire orb built from 100 OLED prototypes it had “laying around the office”. Well, to celebrate and create the launch trailer using practical photography rather than some rubbish built inside a computer.

And, to commemorate that feat, Valve has created a behind the scenes timelapse video and blog post detailing exactly how it made the orb, and how it got all those 100 Steam Deck OLED prototypes working in unison to light the scene in camera.

Because that’s where it all came from. The idea to do the launch trailer for the new handheld in-house was something Valve came to early on, but it was only once it started to see the new OLED screens in the office that they realised just how bright their new panels were. 

“Startlingly bright. So bright, in fact, we wondered if we could use actual Steam Deck OLEDs as the only light sources to light our launch trailer. That…

Walmart is not the first place I think of when it comes to looking for the best PC gaming deals. And it’s especially not the place I’d think of looking for the best Amazon Prime Day deals, either, yet here we are in the topsy-turvy world of 2024 and Walmart is smashing it.

Whether it’s a $599 MSI gaming laptop, a $329 Samsung 4K IPS screen, a full RTX 4060 gaming PC for $699, an RTX 4070 laptop for under $1,200, or the cheapest RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti prices we’ve seen, Walmart has a bunch of deals for the discerning PC gamer. And we are naught if not discerning. 

I rather think that $699 gaming PC is the pick of the lot—it’s a serious machine for the money, without compromise—but if you’ve been looking for an affordable new machine this is probably where I’d be spending my money right now.

Normally I’d be thinking Newegg for my PC gaming goodies, it’s usually capable of beating out the Amazon moral morass of dubious discounts, but even just a cas…

There’s a helpful clue for today’s Wordle below—just the thing to turn a tough game around, especially when paired with our usual batch of universal tips and tricks. Failing that, the answer for the October 26 (859) game’s only a quick click away if you need to save an impossible puzzle.

Today’s Wordle was almost—but thankfully not quite—a complete disaster for me. One yellow took too many attempts to turn green, and when it finally did I felt almost as clueless as I did at the beginning. After much fumbling in the dark I found myself with one guess left, and two words that’d fit perfectly in the strange gap I’d uncovered. I’m glad I made it, but I hope I don’t come that close to losing for a while.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, October 26

A fascinating conversation, an unusual subject, or anything at all catches someone’s attention or curiosity could _____ their interest. Today’s answer is often mis…