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…
Game Informer has seen boobs—specifically, the magazine has seen a topless character in Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s character creator, which it previewed as part of a recent slate of exclusive articles. It’s the most overt nudity the Dragon Age series has featured so far.
“This is a mature RPG,” game director Corrine Busche told the magazine.
The character creator didn’t show any below-the-waist private anatomy, however, and Game Informer reports that when it asked BioWare whether the RPG will include full nudity—say, during romance scenes—the developer said that it wants fans to discover that for themselves.
I had to read that a couple times to be sure I’d understood it correctly. BioWare wants players to discover for themselves whether or not there are penises and vaginas in Dragon Age: The Veilguard? What a weird and whimsical answer! Game Informer itself noted that it was an “interesting answer, considering we’re talking about genitals,” but d…
Earlier this month, Polish game devs, including several from CD Projekt Red, formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union (PGWU). This came in the wake of further layoffs at the company in July, to the tune of 9% of its workforce. At the time, CEO Adam Kiciński explained the move as something to help make the teams more “agile and effective”, but agile and effective doesn’t pay the rent.
“This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity,” explains the union’s website, “affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.”
The devs at CD Projekt Red have shed more light on the situation during an interview with IGN, saying that the aftershocks of the game’s crunch culture problems—both with the Witcher 3 in 2017 and Cyberpunk 2077 in 2019—led to that unnerving climate.
Linguistic QA Assurance Co…
Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, one of the worst games ever made, is getting a remaster. This crime against nature was announced by Limited Run as part of their recent showcase which, among other things, included a remastered GEX trilogy and a spiritual successor to Zelda CD-i.
I’m going to have to turn to my colleagues’ opinion on this one, because I’ve never played Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties—and after a bit of research, I’m grateful. Nonetheless, I’ve thrown on the marigolds to dive into what exactly this fully motion-captured thing is, so you don’t have to.
Here’s an excerpt from the back of the box: “Greed, sex, spirituality, white-knuckled chases, shameful propositions, a nun, humour, true love, jaded love, taut action, comedy, a bad guy, a good guy, a hero, spine-tingling suspense, a hot babe, a damsel in distress, and a hollywood ending!” This is quite a lot to take in.
What Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties appears to actually be, however, is a god-f…
Friends, I have a confession to make. You might have seen one or two stories on our website about Baldur’s Gate 3, an overall pretty solid RPG that practically everyone on staff here has been pouring hours and days of their lives into. But not me. I’ve been distracted by another venerable series, a contemporary of the original Baldur’s Gate games and the first game I ever remember laying my hands on. I’ve been playing Quake 2.
Nightdive’s Quake 2 remaster, to be specific—an incredibly thorough and caring touch-up of the original id game from 1997, and the follow-up to the studio’s equally excellent Quake 1 remaster from 2021. It’s fantastic, and—unsurprisingly—Nightdive has no intention of stopping there. Over on Twitter (X, whatever), studio CEO Stephen Kick is (once again) angling for Epic to let him give Unreal the same treatment.
Kick’s tweet came after former Unreal designer Cliff Bleszinski jokingly lamented the absence of a…