Month: September 2024

Microsoft is making changes to the controversial Recall feature in Windows 11 that automatically captures images of whatever happens to be on your screen. Instead of being turned on by default, the feature will require users to opt in when it goes live.

Recall first came to light in May as part of the Copilot+ suite of tools for Snapdragon X Series laptops. It takes and stores an image of your screen “every few seconds,” the purpose being to make it easier (via the magic of AI) to find things you’d seen or been working on but have forgotten about: A funny tweet, a cool meme, or maybe that finance document you promised the boss you’d have finished yesterday.

Captured images are stored locally and aren’t shared with other users or used for targeted advertising, but even so it struck me (and an awful lot of other people) as an obviously bad idea. It got even worse when it came to light that the system was really not all that secure: It was just days before researchers reportedly figured out how to bypass Windows’ security to access the stored images.

In the wake of that, and widespread negative reaction to the idea in general, Microsoft has now partially reversed …

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Korean indie developers ProjectMoon, the studio behind off-the-wall hits like Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, has released a new, equally esoteric and inscrutable game called Limbus Company. It’s a mobile-style game that uses a twist on their delightful chaining combat mechanics from Library of Ruina, given depth with a match-3-esque interface and a variety of RPG interactions to optimize. It’s also set in the same strange, surreal-to-absurd, purgatorial anime city that the first two games are set in—immediately after the fall of the Lobotomy Corporation, in fact.

It’s a quick and dirty little turn-based combat game, but serves up bites of strange, voice-acted journeys through a supernatural city alongside those fights. As you match moves for each character in a round of combat they go up against enemies, and by matching your attacks to their defenses and vulnerabilities you empower those attacks even further—figure out how to match enough stuff in one round and you get rewarded with the wild jangling of coins and some extremely long combo animations.

And, to be clear, it’s entirely free-to-play. Which means something you either hate o…

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The US Federal Trade Commission is currently butting heads with Microsoft, as the regulatory body tries to block the software giant’s proposed $65 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer was the latest executive to take the stand and deny ever thinking about stuff he wrote a few years ago, and as part of the hearings a tranche of internal emails were made public. One of which shows the suits in Redmond licking their lips at the prospect of acquiring the iconic Sega.

A 2020 email from Phil Spencer to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hoodand makes the case for acquiring Sega in some detail, and requests “Strategy Approval to approach Sega Sammy regarding a potential acquisition of their Sega gaming studios.” Sega Sammy Holdings is the result of a 2004 merger between Sega (gaming) and Sammy (pachinko). Microsoft, understandably, only wants the videogames.

Spencer goes on to say Sega has “a well-balanced portfolio of games across segments with global geographic appeal [that] will help us accelerate Xbox Game Pass both on and off-console.” He attaches a memo and some bullet points about the Japanese giant, noting Sega’s gami…

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A recent indie release out of Japan is getting positive buzz. Tevi, a combination bullet hell-metroidvania-RPG, stands out among the genre with not just interesting and novel gameplay mechanics but an emphasis on a longer story and the kind of flashy character design you expect from a Japanese release.

The game’s primary conceit is that Tevi’s gear is all about melee, while her supporting cast dishes out ranged magical attacks and buffs from alongside her. The boss fights are big, bombastic, and wild, requiring deep understanding of the enemies’ attack patterns and a quick finger on the dodge keys to avoid waves of lasers and glowing projectiles. To counter this you need to keep up the pressure, forcing them into a vulnerable broken state via consistent attacks.

Tevi incorporates a lot of RPG elements, with 300-some pieces of gear to discover and upgrade via a flexible system of equippable sigils. While boss fights are the keystone of Tevi, it’s not a boss rush game—there’s a lot of story and exploration as well. Early reviewers even seem to say that it does, at times, emphasize a story and objective-driven nature over the exploration of a Metroidvania, though …

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Steam has removed a large clutch of games of various genres which all seem to have one thing in common: they were low effort shovelware. That might seem a slightly mean designation, but we’ve all seen the type of thing that this ban wave targeted. Extremely basic asset-flipped titles with popular words in the name, such as Zombie Defense TD or Play Football, out there just to try and make a few bucks from the unwary.

Ever since Valve opened up Steam this has and will continue to be a problem, the inevitable downside of what is inarguably an otherwise good policy. Steam’s biggest issue these days, for both developers and players, is discoverability, and the sheer mass of shovelware on there is a big part of that. While this ban wave appears to have removed 90 games total (per SteamDb’s tracking of removed apps, available via Discord), that’s still a drop in the ocean.

Not all of these titles were removed for the same reason. I doubt 3D Pacman was an official Bandai Namco title (kind of amazing it got on there in the first place) and Dong Nguyen would no doubt be surprised that Flappy Bird was apparently available too.

As well as the games themselve…

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen said when he left Respawn in September 2023 that he wanted “to pursue other adventures,” and now we know what he meant. Asmussen announced today the launch of a new studio called Giant Skull, “dedicated to building gameplay-driven, story immersed action-adventure games set in captivating worlds.”

“The Giant Skull studio culture is founded on creativity and curiosity,” Asmussen said. “We have assembled a talented team renowned for immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal, and our goal is to craft a rich universe that players will want to lose themselves in for years to come.”

That team includes Star Wars Jedi: Survivor technical director Jon Carr and design director Jeff Magers, former Fortnite, Valorant, and League of Legends art director Patrick Murphy, Fortnite lead producer Lauren McLemore, Epic Games animation director Brian Campbell, and Rocksteady chief operations officer Anthony Scott.

Unsurprisingly, details of the studio’s first game haven’t been revealed beyond it being “a AAA single-player focused action adventure” built in Unreal Engine 5. But even though…

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A couple added features aside, the Fallout show’s power armor is remarkably faithful to the suits found in the Fallout games: big, clumsy, ridiculous. They could’ve wound up looking very different, though, because according to Fallout show production designer Howard Cummings, Bethesda never insisted on adherence to the games.

“They didn’t say, ‘You have to do the game,'” said Cummings in an interview with PC Gamer this week. “They never said that. They said, ‘Show us what you think it should be.'”

Cummings didn’t know much about the Fallout games when he started working on the show, but after reading the script and researching the series, he says he “just loved it” and decided, “We have to try to recreate it as best we can.” Knowing the power armor would be his biggest task, it was the first thing he and prop masters Michael Jortner and Peter Gelfman started work on. That was a slight problem.

“It was so early on, Bethesda didn’t know what we were doing quite yet, so they weren’t sharing assets with me,” said Cummings. When they later showed Todd Howard and other producers what they’d been working on, the response was, “Oh, you’re doing the game,” he recalled.&…

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The RTX 3070 Ti is a fine graphics card from the last generation, itself not a million miles off the performance of the once-mighty RTX 3080. But it is still a $600+ graphics card and that makes it almost impossible to recommend anyone buys as a standalone upgrade.

But as part of a full gaming PC, well, it actually makes for a great new rig especially with this iBuyPower machine on sale at Best Buy for $1,500. That’s around the price that until recently was the preserve of RTX 3060 machines, and only recently has become the price tag you might expect for an RTX 3070 gaming PC.

The RTX 3070 Ti is comfortably faster than the RTX 3070 because it’s using the complete GA104 GPU. That gives it 6,144 CUDA cores vs. the older card’s 5,888 and uses the same high-speed 19Gbps GDDR6X memory as the RTX 3080/Ti cards.

In fact, that puts it above the AMD RX 6800 (non XT) card in terms of gaming performance, a card which itself was no slouch.

The rest of the spec matches up to GPU, too. The Core i9 11900KF (essentially the same as an i9 11900K but without an integrated GPU) is a couple of generations old now, but the eight-core, 16-thread CPU is still a powerful gaming …

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There aren’t many stories in the world of technology that could easily make it as a plot for a tense spy-thriller movie, but this one sure has all the right hallmarks for one. Last month, the US Justice Department carried out an authorised operation in which it neutralised a botnet, comprising hundreds of routers in homes and offices, that was used to carry out spearphishing and other credentials stealing. And it was achieved by using the very same malware as that by the botnet itself.

As reported by Ars Technica, the network was created by the officially titled GRU Military Unit 26165 (also known by the names Forest Blizzard, Fancy Bear, Sednit, and others), a state-sponsored hacking group that reported has direct ties to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU, for short).

But rather than using its own malware, or anything developed by the GRU, the group used a piece of malware called Moobot that’s been used before to insecure routers. In this instance, it infected the operating system on certain Ubiquiti Edge routers that were still using the default, publicly-known admin passwords

Once up and…

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There are plenty of survival crafting action sandbox games, but only one of them is purely focused on the concept of being a wizard with a gun*. That’s the aptly-named Wizard with a Gun, which got an upgrade to four-player co-op this past week in its new Better Together update and so I guess they’ll have to rename it to Wizard with a Gun and Several More Friends.

To celebrate it’s free to try on Steam this weekend, and 50% off until May 23 if you’d like to buy.

The Better Together update also added more stuff to the game: New difficulty levels let you experience it easier or harder, and customized difficulties let you tweak how it feels to play. There are also new libraries for your wizard’s tower, a proper upgrade to just regular bookshelves. And, apparently, a new ending or boss or something nasty lurking in the void at the end of time.

Wizard With a Gun is a cool pitch, giving you five minute jaunts into the collapsing apocalyptic world outside before you’re forced to return to your grubby little wizard’s tower to rearm, restock, and rewind the clock to before the apocalypse. Over time you collect stuff to upgrade your tower, your guns, and your magic clock …

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Sail through today’s Wordle with ease: just click or scroll straight to the March 20 (639) answer. Or if you’d like to spend some time with everyone’s favourite puzzle game, take a look at our helpful tips and guides, or check today’s hint if you get a little stuck.

I’d like to thank one particular letter for turning up green extremely early on, making today’s Wordle a real walk in the park. Some days those reveals cause more trouble than they do help, but this time around, I had everything I needed to win at my fingertips nice and early on.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, March 20

Today’s answer is a close-fitting item designed to cover the hands. Depending on the material and the design, it may provide protection, comfort, or a fashionable look. Fingerless alternatives are also available.  

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

No letters are used twice in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’ve decided to play Wordle but you’re not sure where to start, I’ll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all you…

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Make every game of Wordle a guaranteed winner with our help. Rush straight for another glorious victory with today’s answer for that instant score-boosting buzz, mull over the November 4 (868) clue if you’d just like a helping hand, or feel free to stay a while and check out our guide. 

Today’s Wordle soon had me stumped. I had three greens all neatly lined up in a row, but I just couldn’t see what I needed to add to finish the game off for far too long. Luckily for me, I had enough free rows left to make a few (slightly panicked) guesses, and I eventually stumbled on the letters I needed. Phew!

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, November 4

There are a few meanings for today’s word, but they all tend to involve extremes of something. This word is also the back half of an excellent Sonic The Hedgehog game’s title. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, a vowel is used twice in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to …

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Humble Bundle’s dropped another great TTRPG deal—this time for Lovecraft lovers with its Call of Cthulhu book bundle. At the time of writing, the bundle has raised over $22,000 for the World Wildlife Fund. It’s also a pretty damn good deal from a buyer’s standpoint, too.

The bundle includes the game’s Starter Set as well as a host of other supplements: including tips for the Keeper (the game’s equivalent of a DM/GM), a PDF full of horrible monster cards to break your players with, campaigns like Alone Against the Tide, and supplements to help you run stories from occult pulp mysteries to modern horror.

My experience with the system’s limited to a couple of one-shots, though I do recognise “Down Darker Trails”—a booklet that lets you transfer Call of Cthulhu to the weird wild west. While the system’s a little tough to chew through (and perhaps a touch blase about its approach to sanity mechanics, a legacy that other systems like Critical Role’s Candela Obscura are trying to veer away from) it’s still a good time. 

If you’d rather not deal with a 100-sided die—usually just handled with two ten-sided dice in my experience, though our Keeper …

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Friends, here is my story: Coming home to the UK from Summer Game Fest, hungry and heatstruck, I arrived at one of Los Angeles International Airport’s many food and coffee stands. Blearily, I ordered a latte and some kind of egg salad sandwich composed mostly of bread. The cashier told me that this humble repast would somehow be $21, in violation both of the social contract and mankind’s covenant with the Lord God.

Being an assertive and self-confident type, I said absolutely nothing and meekly paid up. But I shouldn’t have, because if I still had that $21 I could have bought the entire Dragon Age trilogy—base games and all the DLC—twice over in the currently ongoing Dragon Age Steam sale. In place of a thin film of egg smeared on a loaf of wholewheat and a latte that tasted of nothing and which I eventually tipped down a new shirt, I’d have 300 hours of quite excellent fantasy RPG. Yes, Dragon Age 2 included: 94%, baby.

Until June 24 at 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT / 6 pm BST, you can acquire Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition on Steam for a mere $10 (£8.50). The first two games cost $3 (£…

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