You’ll find a complete batch of hints for the September 27 (#108) NYT Connections game waiting just below if you need the help, as well as every answer for today’s game if you’re too close to losing to risk another guess. However you’re doing, we’ve got your back.

One particular group of Connections quickly caught my eye today, and with that out of the way the rest quickly tumbled. Well, close enough to “quickly tumbled,” anyway. Ish.

Today’s purple-rank set of words weren’t entirely obvious until I saw them all lined up in a row, but hey—a win’s a win.

NYT Connections hint today: Wednesday, September 27

Take a look at these clues if you need a little help with today’s game.

🟨🟨🟨🟨

Yellow: These four aren’t parts of every tree, but they are produced by some of them.

🟩🟩🟩🟩

Green: If you’ve got a sweet tooth you might walk out of a shop…

We all know it’s coming. But Nvidia’s RTX 4070 graphics card hasn’t actually been announced let alone released. And yet it appears in a new official slide from Nvidia detailing latency performance in Counter-Strike 2 courtesy of its Reflex anti-lag technology.

The no-longer-rumoured RTX 4070 is shown against the RTX 3060 and elderly GTX 1060. While frame rates are what you’d really want to see for an overall picture of performance, latency is in part derived from frame rate. So, this does constitute the first official, if infinitesimally narrow, snapshot of the RTX 4070’s performance.

You can add that to the avalanche of ‘leaked’ information, which at this point is giving a pretty clear indication of what to expect from the 4070.

In pure raster performance terms, the rumours suggest the RTX 4070 will slot in at about the same level as the last-gen RTX 3080. But it will supposedly retail at $599, $100 less than the RTX 3080’s MSRP, albeit the 3080 typically sold for…

It’s an older model, but it checks out. When Razer released the Raptor 27-inch a couple of years back, it looked painfully pricey at $800 for a 165Hz 27-inch 1440p panel. But now you can snag it on Newegg for just $299. Suddenly, a slab of slick Razer-engineered luxury on your desktop just got a whole lot more attainable.

There are, of course, now faster 1440p monitors running at 240Hz and beyond. There are high-refresh 1440p IPS panels available for sub-$200, too, which we’ll come to.

But this Razer is a bit special when it comes to design and engineering. And 165Hz is surely quick enough and slick enough for most gamers. The rest of the Razer Raptor 27’s spec are decent, too.

You get HDR400 certification, 480 nits peak HDR brightness, IPS panel tech and multiple inputs including HDMI, DisplayPort and USB-C. The latter does support power delivery, but sadly only up to 15W.

The only snag is that, as an older model, the IPS panel’s response time is a tiny bit …

Diablo 4 is about to dramatically change as an action RPG, and you’ll be able to play this massive update early via Blizzard’s “PTR”, or public test realm, starting today.

From April 2 to April 9, PC players using the Battle.net launcher (not Steam players, sadly) can get their hands dirty testing out Blizzard’s redesigned loot progression, including two new crafting systems that let you customize your items to your liking.

The PTR won’t have every change coming in season 4—like the unique seasonal mechanics—but there are new items, class balance changes, and a new endgame dungeon to test out and provide feedback on before the finished update goes live on May 14.

PTR release times

Diablo 4 season 4 PTR release times 

Blizzard gave us the dates for when you’ll be able to play Diablo 4’s season 4 PTR, but it hasn’t specified the exact time it’ll go live. My best guess is that you’ll be able to download and play it around …

Wordle was a lockdown phenomenon: one of those games that, merits aside, simply landed at the right time. I’ve kicked the habit now but like pretty much everyone else I had a Wordle phase with the family WhatsApp group and, yes, when I’m nearly out of chances I have gone running to my six-letter friend Google. Wordle’s enormous popularity was such that, in January 2022, the New York Times purchased the game from creator Josh Wardle for a sum “in the low seven figures.”

That was perhaps the most inspired move of a wider push by the gray lady to be a bit less, well, gray: especially when it comes to its burgeoning gaming section, which is now a major revenue driver for the paper. The NYT’s games section is the subject of a new Vanity Fair feature, which covers the events around the game’s acquisition.

The deal followed the Times publishing an article about the game’s success in early January 2022 after which Jonathan Knight, a games industry veteran who now w…

It’s a week since Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti went on sale. Not only can you still get hold of one, they’re also available for the official launch price of $799. 

That does rather imply that the new GPU isn’t exactly flying off the shelves. But whatever the reason, the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB does look like decent value from Newegg.

In terms of pure raster performance, it’s a hair slower than the AMD Radeon RX 7900XT. But then that graphics card will cost you around $100 more. And the AMD GPU can’t match the RTX 4070 Ti when it comes to ray-tracing grunt.

Then you have to factor in Nvidia’s suite of DLSS technologies. Sure, AMD has its own frame generation technology in the works, but there’s no firm date on when it will appear or how good it will be.

As an overall proposition, then, the MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB looks very appealing. In terms of alternatives at this rough price point, you can also choose from an RTX 3080 10GB …

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Star Trek fan. But I do love the idea of the Starship Enterprise, a spaceship big enough to hold hundreds of crew members including officers, scientists, soldiers, and even civilians. The Enterprise is basically a small city flying through space, and as spaceships go that’s more interesting to me than a ship like the Millenium Falcon or Serenity.

Jumplight Odyssey, which just announced it’s launching into Steam early access on August 21, puts you in charge of a starship not unlike the Enterprise, in a game developer League of Geeks describe as “FTL meets Two Point Hospital, with a little RimWorld thrown in.”

Well gosh, I like all of those games, and I also like what I’ve seen so far of Jumplight Odyssey. The FTL part comes from the predicament your ship is in: with your homeworld destroyed, you’re searching the galaxy for a new system to call home, but you’re being pursued every step of the way by a powerful enemy fleet. That …

Yams. It’s all yams. Everywhere I look. Every crate, every bookshelf, every corpse pocket: They’re all stuffed with yams. I have become the protagonist of a vegan Edgar Allen Poe story, and it’s my own damn fault. I’ve installed the Morrowind World Randomizer mod (spotted by Micky D on YouTube, above), and it only went and randomized the world of Morrowind. They should put a warning on it.

Created by a modder named Diject, the randomizer is possibly the most thorough mod of its kind I’ve seen. While I’m used to mods like this switching up enemy types and container inventories, the Morrowind World Randomizer shakes up whatever it can get its hands on.

Textures are altered, characters become a mad, identikit patchwork of species and sizes, and doors that used to obey the basic, agreed-upon laws of physical space now lead to completely different areas depending on whether you’re entering or exiting them. 

When I first activated the mod at the start of a new game,…

Update #3: As of 7 am PT—slightly later than predicted—a hotfix has been released to fix the issues that caused players to lose Seals, Triumphs, Medals and other achievements. Hotfix 6.3.0.6 is available now.

In addition to the deployment, Bungie has rolled back player accounts to their state as of yesterday, January 24, at 8:20 am PT—just after the weekly reset. Likely this was necessary to actually restore the missing Triumphs. Bungie notes that any progress made between that time and the game being taken offline will now be lost.

It’s a small price to pay to restore the collective weight of player achievements over the years. Nevertheless, let us pour one out to this one player who earned Hierarchy of Needs in that timeframe—a rare Exotic drop from the new Spire of the Watcher dungeon that you only get up to three chances to earn per week. May your future clears be blessed.

so_what_are_you_los…

Desktops with laptop CPUs are not a new concept. Over the years I’ve reviewed several examples, including NUCs and AIO PCs, but high-performance gaming PCs with laptop CPUs are something else entirely. 

Lenovo has released just such a PC (H/T Tom’s Hardware). It’s not a budget tier PC with low-end specs either, this model ships with a choice of i9 14900HX or i7 14650HX CPUs, with GPU choices ranging from an RTX 4060 up to an RTX 4070 Ti Super. Add 32GB of RAM to that, capable cooling, a very good looking case, and you’ve got yourself a high quality gaming PC.

It’s a China-only release for now, but there’s always the possibility the Lenovo Legion 7000K will see a wider release in the months ahead.

So, why would Lenovo opt to release a desktop gaming PC with a mobile chip when it could opt for something like an i9 14900 or 14900T instead? It’s a good question.

I’m a huge believer in power efficient, quiet PCs. I would like to assume that’s the thinking beh…