I don’t know what I expected when I sat down to rifle through award-winning actor Nicolas Cage’s new Dead by Daylight voice lines today. I’m actually glad I went in without expectations, because nothing could have prepared me for this.
Nicolas Cage fully enters Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical multiplayer horror hit later this month, though he’s currently available on the Dead by Daylight public test build on Steam. Nic plays himself as a survivor, bringing his customary thespian flare and zany antics to the Realms.
He’s tried to prepare us for this, waxing lyrical about his mystical ability to mind-meld with us unsuspecting gamers like no actor before him, promising he’ll become fused to us, that we’ll become one. Well, welcome to the Nic Cage hivemind.
A video chock-full of Nic Cage goodness, courtesy of Youtube channel Syrekx, is now available. Here are a few of my favourite quotes:
- “I am completely and utterly cow-tit FUCKED.…
As AI gradually encroaches into every aspect of our lives, videogames have proven to be no exception. Almost all big publishers are starting to incorporate AI tools into parts of their process, in the hope the technology can automate tasks that would otherwise be labour-intensive. Modders have already started plugging things like ChatGPT into existing games (with very mixed results). And now John Ricitiello, CEO of major engine company Unity and former CEO of EA, reckons it could be used to replace things like Simlish.
“I was involved in launching The Sims in 2000, and it was wonderful game,” said Ricitiello in a new interview with the Washington Post. “And you know how they used Simlish, right? Did you know why? Because there’s so many things you can do in The Sims, it’s like a crazy number of interactions you can have because you’re actually creating characters. Those characters interact with each other. No writer could ever write all the appr…
Hideo Kojima’s games are loved by their devotees for, among other things, the amount of surprises his development teams manage to squeeze into unexpected places. There’s a level of detail to the worlds they create that is unique and, while much of it is ready to be found, certain interactions or possibilities are always buried-away for the most dedicated and experimental of players. Now fans have begun to take widespread notice of a Death Stranding secret that has previously been discovered, but never seems to have made much of an impression before.
The secret is that during the game’s climactic boss battle with Higgs, the comically evil antagonist, players can choose a pacifist route to frustrate the enemy. Do this long enough, blocking Higgs’ blows but refusing to retaliate, and the boss will grab Sam and trigger an animated sequence, one in which Higgs punches Sam repeatedly before pulling him close and biting off a chunk of his ear.
There seem to be two things in the…
I’ll admit I’ve never been a fan of League of Legends. I gave it the old college try after a group of friends convinced me to play about six years ago, but that’s as far as my experience goes. My partner on the other hand is an avid fan. Having spent over a decade playing, with his first ranked season being season two, he’s been trying to get me back in the saddle to no avail—until now. But that’s thanks to its new game mode and my partner convincing me it’s pretty much Vampire Survivors.
Swarm, the game mode in question, has you facing a constant onslaught of enemies with auto-firing weapons and seeing how long you can survive. As you take down enemies, you’ll earn power-ups which you’ll need for when a boss rears its head to shake things up. If you’ve played any amount of Vampire Survivors, you’ll instantly note the similarities between the two. It’s the exact same formula with a League of Legends reskin. From an outsider’s perspective, Swarm also looks li…
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of Starfield players gathering or spawning vast numbers of mundane objects and dumping them all in one place, but for now I think I’ve found my favourite. It involves a lot of milk, and not for the first time.
As shown off by Space_Scumbag in the Starfield subreddit, through the magic of console commands it’s possible to spawn far too many milk cartons in space, leave your ship, and then joyfully smash into them, sending them hurtling into the void. It’s truly a sight to behold.
Before the carnage begins, the cartons form a shape that calls to mind a race track, evocative of Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road, but it’s definitely not stable enough for a vehicle, as evidenced by what happens when the cartons are collided with. There’s something undeniably appealing about demolishing neat, orderly rows of objects, and thanks to the lack of gravity, colliding with these cartons sees them dramatically spin off in all directions. …
Watch On
In the early 2010s, Luke Muscat was team lead on two massive mobile games for Halfbrick Studios—the WarioWare microgame turned macrohit Fruit Ninja, and endless runner Jetpack Joyride. A decade later he’s gone solo, and is making an indie game for PC that looks like a cross between Dave the Diver and Dome Keeper.
Feed the Deep is a roguelike diving game where you explore procedurally generated undersea caverns to collect resources—the way you launch multiple lines to pick up colorful chunky objects in the trailer looks real satisfying—while avoiding obstacles like the waving coral tentacles that try to grab you. You’ve also got oxygen to consider, and air-consuming distractions that include a terminal where you can play a Rise of the Triad clone boomer shooter mid-dive for some reason.
That’s not the real weird part, though. The real weird part is that you’re exploring and harvesting in service of keeping some Cthulhu-esque eldritch monstrosity…
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is out Friday. I started playing it over a week ago, and while it’s undeniably a great game (read my review), it ran like crap on both PCs I tried it on. As Wes remarked earlier this year, we’re living in a new age of bad PC ports. Jedi: Survivor is just the latest of a string of releases that struggle to hit a minimum 60 fps mark and slow to a crawl at an alarming frequency.
Now that other reviews are out, it’s clear I wasn’t alone: several reported generally poor performance on machines that would kick my PC’s butt, including broken cutscene audio and slowdowns into single-digit frames when using the galaxy map or loading into a new level.
As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, German PC publication GameStar recorded some pretty disappointing stats in an 11-minute demonstration of Jedi: Survivor running on a 4090 and a top-shelf CPU: 30-40 fps at 1440p with occasional bumps up to 80-90 fps in enclosed areas. Even worse, the game devours up to 21GB of VR…
There are many things to love about World of Warcraft Classic. The ability to reminisce and feel nostalgic listening to the peaceful music of Elwynn Forest, the challenge of classic dungeons like Scholomance and Stratholme, dueling your fellow enthusiasts outside Ironforge, farming mats for elixirs and getting world buffs… I guess. Soon, however, you’ll also have the ability to be running a dungeon and have a blown pull result in the permanent and irrevocable death of your character!
Neat, huh?
World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore servers were announced earlier this year, and this week we learned that they’ll go live on August 24. Bringing a little of that cutthroat permadeath flavor to the world’s biggest MMO, Hardcore servers have no resurrections, no spirit healers, and no mercy. (Plus, your ear might become someone’s jewelry.)
Players have been rigging up their own hardcore challenges for some time on the Bloodsail Buccaneers and Hydraxian Waterlords serve…
The Pokémon-with-guns-and-abusive-labor-practices game Palworld is off to a roaring early access launch on Steam, racking up 370,000 concurrent users (and counting) in its first day of release. That’s proving to be a bit of a problem for the game’s servers, which are buckling under the stream, but developer Pocketpair says it’s working on the problem, and in the meantime says you should just keep hammering on it until you get it.
To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson’s thoughts on Snakes on a Plane, people either want to play this game or they don’t. I think the concept is just awful enough to be potentially funny—you can literally eat your Pals if you’re feeling peckish and they’re not serving any other useful purpose—but Lincoln Carpenter found it mostly off-putting and gross, saying it “could be a delight if it wasn’t so invested in being awful,”
“It’s over-committing to the bit, except the bit in this case is, well, abusive labor conditions and animal cr…
So yeah, ray tracing on the Steam Deck is now properly a thing. It’s been do-able if you wanted to dig in and do some Linux-y tweaking before, but with the latest beta OS Valve is starting to go native. For a device that costs less than the price of an RTX 3050—a graphics card no-one should buy at that price—to be able to enable ray tracing that’s worth a damn is seriously impressive.
Valve has announced the new Steam Deck OS beta in the handheld’s Preview channel, and updates the operating system of the device to the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver. So far, so dry, but the interesting stuff is in what that actually means in terms of games. For one, it gets rid of some graphical corruption issues that exist with the current build of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and GPU crashes “in several upcoming titles.”
The update also enables ray tracing in Doom Eternal.
What business has the Steam Deck running the graphically intensive pretties of ray tracing? You may ask. Bu…
The U.S. House of Representatives is currently in something of a crisis, as Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has failed in multiple attempts to be elected speaker of the house. This is an internal Republican spat but the effect has been to paralyse the government and leave the House unable to actually do anything. Or as the BBC puts it: Three days. Eleven votes. Still no US House speaker.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats are getting a bit sick of this, but Representative Jared Huffmann of California apparently decided to express his distaste through an echo of World of Warcraft’s most famous meme. During the latest vote to determine the next speaker, Huffmann voted for the Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, and he did so by shouting “Haaaakkkkeeeemmmm Jeffriiiieeess!”
The delivery is unmistakably similar to the way Leeroy Jenkins shouts his own name, before running off to get his entire crew slaughtered by dragons.
“Yup, I said what I said,” wrote Huffmann in respons…
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…
A little while before the fifth Patch of Baldur’s Gate 3 came along, I wrote up this news post about a teaser image Larian Studios had shared on Twitter, featuring Withers in a silly little hat warning “fun is mandatory”.
I joked about being scared at the time. Little did I know, I was very right to be. If you rain on Withers’ carefully constructed parade, his cosmic wrath is mighty. This was actually brought to my attention by camilams on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit, but I figured I’d boot up my save to test it myself. (Sorry, Volo. You were the only person I could bring myself to harm.)
What pushes Withers over the edge is actually murdering one of the guests. I ran around, blew up some furniture, stabbed people, and even got into a scrap with my old party. Withers doesn’t intervene until you actually cross the line and do a kill—even knocking someone out doesn’t count.
I’m honestly not surprised he reacts like this, considering the effor…
Adobe has announced a new AI feature for Photoshop that is available in beta today and, frankly, is one of the most remarkable demonstrations of AI’s potential as a tool I’ve yet seen. The feature, called Generative Fill, is powered by Adobe’s Firefly AI models and allows you to insert new objects and alter pictures with text prompts. Really, though, you should just watch what happens in the announcement video.
As someone who’s too cheap to fork out for Photoshop but routinely struggles to express his creative visions with MS Paint, this is the kind of thing that makes you think twice. Obviously Adobe is going to do its best to make the technology look good in a showcase video, but this thing is already in the wild and people have been using it to do things like inserting hippos into family photos.
Adobe designer Scott Belsky made the following points about the software:
- We’re leveraging context from your Photoshop file to optimize your prompt.<…
Keep your Wordle win streak growing, and learn how to make the most of your crucial opening guesses with our helpful guides and tips. Get all the help you need with today’s Wordle, too: there’s a clue for the March 29 (648) puzzle just below, and a little past that, you’ll find the answer to today’s game ready and waiting for you.
I struggled far more than I should have with today’s puzzle. Not enough greens and too many greys started me off on the wrong foot, and two more goes with little to show for it had me worried that there was no coming back. Thankfully, a couple of well-placed greens finally showed up, and I guessed today’s Wordle answer on my next move.
Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Wednesday, March 29
This term often refers to a steady stream of unfortunate events over a length of time—a project doomed from the start, a long road trip _____ with car issues—or some form of attack or unpleasantness that seems to come from …
Conservative politicians and commentators in the US are complaining that Xbox game consoles are now “woke” following an announcement earlier this month that Xbox Series X/S machines will be updated with an “Energy Saver” mode that reduces their power consumption when enabled.
This particular descent into partisan madness started on January 11, when Microsoft announced that the Xbox would be “the first gaming console to offer carbon aware game downloads and updates.” Simply put, it means that Xbox consoles will be capable of scheduling updates for times when the electrical grid is making use of lower-carbon sources of power.
It’s a smart idea—Microsoft said the new setting cuts power usage by up to 20 times compared to the regular sleep mode—and it’s actually not new: The “carbon aware” feature was rolled out to Windows 11 last year.
Naturally, that didn’t stop the right-wing commentariat and their political enablers from seizing on the update as t…