PC Gaming

Game director “Soulframe” Liang accidentally started his career by making free games in RPG Maker and releasing them online. Two decades later, he’s making one of the highest profile upcoming games in China, the “kungfupunk” actioner Phantom Blade Zero. I recently flew to Beijing to spend a few hours with the game and have come…

I think unboxing experiences are a little overrated. While it’s nice to open your new purchase and find a level of care and attention paid to the packaging that makes every component feel like a rare gem, I don’t really mind if a product comes in a default, easy-to-recycle cardboard container. It makes me feel…

Data security in this day and age was already a joke. Besides one accurately guessed password putting a 158-year old company out of business, hackers keep finding zero-day flaws in Chrome like it’s going out of fashion. Speaking of, the latest data security punchline involves a zero-day flaw in Lovense, an app designed to remotely…

If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that live service game development is the industry’s equivalent of high stakes gambling, where publishers ante up millions of dollars in the hopes that their game might hit the jackpot of becoming a lifestyle like Fortnite and Roblox. But as we’ve seen from countless failed launches,…

When you get to a certain age, birthdays stop being as meaningful as they were when you’re younger, but in the case of a certain Microsoft operating system, this one is very special. That’s because on 29 July 2015, Windows 10 was released to the public, and I’m happy to celebrate its tenth anniversary. I’m…

Tales of the Shire‘s Bywater is absolutely brimming with things for you to collect while you wander around. But, when you’re finally ready to turn your harvest into delicious meals for your fellow hobbits, you may realise you’re a bit short on a few things. So, knowing where to find raspberries and all the other…

Having played a demo of Tales of the Shire in September last year, I knew what I was getting into. I’ve already shared my take on how I thought it was a great example of wasting a perfect opportunity, but even then I still remained hopeful that something would change before launch. Especially since the…

It’s no surprise that cooking plays a significant role in Tales of the Shire. While you wander around Bywater, you’ll gather a tonne of different ingredients, but when it comes to cooking, your meal options start off incredibly limited. This is where knowing how to unlock new recipes comes in very handy. Especially as each…

If you want to cook better meals in Tales of the Shire, then you need to know how to get better quality crops. As is the way with farming simulators, your crops are marked with a star rank which corresponds to their quality. Although there’s nothing wrong with a one-star product, if you want to…

As someone whose special interest is not going to prison, I’d be pretty keen on my lawyer not using AI to advise them in the courtroom. So I suppose I can be glad that I was not the debtor who enlisted the Semrad Law Firm in a bankruptcy case last year (via Damien Charlotin). The…