October 2023

With just a touch of bravado, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (or Europol) has announced “a major blow” to the Ragnar Locker ransomware group. To you and me, that name is mostly familiar because of the organisation’s 2020 attack on Capcom, which saw it demand $11 million and affect around 400,000 people’s…

Rocksmith 2014 has rocked out for the last time: Almost 10 years to the day after the acclaimed learn-to-play-guitar game debuted, Ubisoft has removed it from sale on all digital storefronts. “Nearly 10 years ago we launched Rocksmith 2014 and set out on a journey of learning and playing guitar together, practicing old favorites, and…

I am a fickle mayor, it turns out. My first Cities: Skylines 2 town ended up in the bin after only a couple of hours—but I think for completely understandable reasons. It looked lumpier than my middle-aged arse. The way Colossal Order’s city-building sequel deals with terrain, and the way buildings interact with it, is…

The Black Diamond is one of the first rare materials you’ll encounter in Return to Moria, needing it as you do to repair the Mapstone in the first camp in order to unlock fast travel. While you can randomly get this material by fighting Orcs and Goblins during horde events—the first of which occurs when…

Whether it is because we work from home or spend long hours in intense gaming sessions (or a little of both) we can spend a lot of time sitting at desks. It’s only natural then to want your desk set up to be attractive and inviting without sacrificing form and function.  We put so much…

In a recent Reddit AMA, the team behind Cities: Skylines 2, fielded a host of questions from the gaming community. Amongst all of its responses was a comment by Colossal Order’s Chief Technical Officer, saying that the game was made with a performance target of 30 fps. Why? Because the developers don’t believe there would…

Last week the developer of Cities: Skylines 2 warned players that the game doesn’t reach the performance benchmarks it was aiming for. I feel comfortable repeating this warning—while reviewing the game I had issues with frame rates, freezes and hiccups, occasional graphical glitches, and even a few crashes to desktop. Many other reviews cited performance…

Cities: Skylines 2 is here at last, and the new urban city builder honestly works a lot like the old 2015 one. If you’ve played Skylines before it won’t take you long to get up to speed, and if this is your first time playing there are lots of tutorials that will quickly have you…