PC Gaming
The Ur-Quan Masters, an open-source remake of the revered sci-fi exploration-adventure Star Control 2, is coming to Steam next week, free for all and with a slightly different title—Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters. The Ur-Quan Masters situation is a bit complicated, but here’s the crash-course version. Star Control 2 was developed by Toys for Bob…
Years of videogames operating like shopping malls made me assume that Helldivers 2‘s day-one monetization would be the same old story: battle passes, boosters, and cosmetics that cost as much as the game itself. It does give that impression at first—Helldivers 2 has two battle passes out the gate, a rotating cosmetics shop, and actual…
The World of Warcraft community discovered almost by accident recently that the lead creator of the game’s stories has quietly left Blizzard. Warcraft narrative director Steve Danuser’s departure wasn’t announced, but rather discovered by fans who noticed an update to his LinkedIn page that sets the end of his Blizzard employment to last November, right…
Wizards of the Coast parent company Hasbro announced lower-than-expected financial results today, but it did make good book on one front: The company said it’s earned about $90 million dollars through its licensing deal with Larian for Baldur’s Gate 3. Hasbro said in its full-year financial report that its overall revenues declined 15%, due to…
The next big Baldur’s Gate 3 patch is coming this week, and although its kissing-related changes are obviously the star, there’s more to it than “improved smooches.” Larian announced today that the patch will finally fix a party management inconvenience that I imagine near-universally prompted players to think “ugh, that’s slightly annoying” an hour or…
As part of its continuing efforts to diversify The Sims 4 character creation, Maxis has added new skin details to Create-A-Sim. These patches of depigmented skin are caused by vitiligo, an autoimmune disease that affects an estimated 1% of the US population and 100 million people worldwide. Maxis says that Sims of all ages can…
Lara Croft may need no introduction, but her first three artefact-swiping, wildlife-bothering, lever-pulling adventures were in real danger of becoming exactly the sort of forgotten relics she hunts for. Tomb Raider Remastered hauls this trio of excellent action-adventure-puzzle hybrids and their original expansions—foundational examples of a style of adventure game we’re still enjoying today—back into…
Here’s my toxic trait: I get annoyed when games aren’t on Steam. Not for any principled reason, not because I love my Steam Deck (though I do), and not even because Steam—per our own ranking of the PC’s many launchers—is the best client of the bunch. I just don’t like my collection being scattered all…
The story of Boggles first came to my attention several weeks ago, after a tweet containing some clips of his material went semi-viral and Twitch slapped the young Australian with a 30-day ban. The videos are fake incidents of him pretending to stick forks in toasters then being electrocuted, the joke being he kept doing…
If you thought Intel had already strung every drop of performance out of its top Raptor Lake die, you’d be wrong. Though it does appear that it’s getting tougher and tougher for the company to crank up clock speeds. The unreleased Core i9 14900KS has been spotted in the OCCT benchmark database with a supposed…