PC Gaming
In 2023, our Morgan Park wrote about the phenomenon of Cosmetic Uglification, in which shooters of the modern era are inevitably swallowed by a rancid mire of crossover skins until they’ve lost all semblance of a cohesive visual identity. In the years since, things have only become more dire, culminating in Black Ops 6 reaching…
The Pokémon Company says the US government did not have permission to use Pikachu and other Pokémon content promotional videos for the Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection agencies posted to X—but what it’s going to do about it, if anything, remains to be seen. The first video, a montage of ICE agents and…
Sony’s back with another State of Play stream today, and has promised “nearly five minutes of gameplay” from Saros, the upcoming follow-up to bullet hell roguelike Returnal. The State of Play stream starts Wednesday, September 24 at 2 pm Pacific (see when it starts in your time zone here) and you can watch in the…
During its pre-TGS showcase stream earlier today, Capcom announced that the next major Monster Hunter Wilds update, featuring Final Fantasy 14 collaboration content, will launch on Monday, September 29. First revealed back in August, Title Update 3 will add Eorzea-themed hunts, equipment, and cosmetics, which—while appreciated—still leaves Wilds’ glaring performance issues largely unaddressed. The headlining…
Nvidia has announced that its Audio2Face animation technology is going open source. On paper, that should make it much easier for a wide range of game developers to create AI characters with convincing facial expressions, including during real-time conversations with gamers. To recap and according to Nvidia’s own words, “by using large language and speech…
Seems like it was only the other week I was writing about Cloudflare throwing up its shields against a record-breaking DDoS attack—because it was. Yup, an attack pelting the servers with 11.5 Tbps (terabits per second) of data in less than a minute is more than enough to make me break out in a sweat….
With Payday 3 still struggling badly, Starbreeze has made the surprising and somewhat confusing announcement that it has launched a brand-new subscription service for its predecessor Payday 2—which, for the record, is still going gangbusters. Payday 2 has been operating for 12 years now, and in that time it’s racked up an awful lot of…
Back in August 2023, Rockstar Games acquired the team and tech behind FiveM, a Grand Theft Auto Online mod it had previously tried to shut down. FiveM enables the use of custom cars, maps, and weapons among other content, but crucially also allows for a much bigger player count in online games. Together, these capabilities…
So, Google and Qualcomm are bigging up what’s basically a desktop version of the former’s Android OS for smartphones (via 9to5Google). The idea, apparently, is to fuse “mobile and PC” into a single device. And given Qualcomm is part of this particular conversation, that device would presumably be running an Arm chip rather than a…
AI data centers are some of the largest consumers of electrical energy in the world of computing, and with gigawatt-sized projects currently in development, there is increased demand for sustainable means to power them. It just so happens that there’s one solution that’s entirely off-grid, with apparently zero emissions, and even generates the water required…