Year: 2024

There are few narratives in PC gaming that I like more than ‘the best just got cheaper’ and that is exactly what we’ve got right here with the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF. It’s our favorite OLED gaming monitor at the moment and we think that also makes it the best gaming monitor of all.

And even though we saw this drop down to this same price for Fall Prime Day—also stupidly called Big Deal Days—the Alienware 34 is still being heavily discounted down to $800 at Dell and at Best Buy. That’s $300 off the list price for this lovely panel, and a full $50 cheaper than it’s ever been prior to these big end-of-year sales events.

Back in the Summer Prime Day deals event we got excited about it coming down to $900, so with another chunk of change off that we’re happily recommending it again. I doubt it’ll come down any lower than this for the remainder of Black Friday, so if you’re in the market for an outstanding ultrawide gaming monitor, this OLED is ideal.

• We’re curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.

Dell makes two different Alienware 34-inch OLED displays, bo…

Doubling down on its accusations of AI scaremongering, Microsoft is hitting back at two concurrent lawsuits over its own involvement in AI and specifically large language models, calling them either “doomsday hyperbole” or “doomsday futurology.”

The latter phrasing is used in a published motion to dismiss (pdf warning) the case the New York Times has brought against Microsoft and OpenAI, where the NYT holds the two defendants “responsible for the billions of dollars they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

In that original claim the Times states that while it had been working “for months” to come to an agreement with the defendants over terms for its contribution to the training of OpenAI’s large language models, it was now pursuing compensation through the courts instead.

OpenAI itself has given particular weight to the NYT articles that it has trained its models with, and contends that “by OpenAI’s own admission high-quality content, including content from The Times, was more important and valuable for training the GPT models as compared to content taken from other, lower-quality sources.”

Microsoft, howev…

Sometimes, I wonder exactly how many researchers are dedicating their time to messing with AI systems in the name of cybersecurity. Fresh off the news that a team has developed an AI worm to tunnel its way through generative AI networks, it seems that yet another group of would-be-heroes has found a perhaps even more effective way to jailbreak an AI system. This time they’re using ASCII art to convince an AI chatbot to deliver some particularly dangerous outputs.

The tool created here is referred to as “ArtPrompt” and a research paper from researchers based in Washington and Chicago details the methodology behind the way it attacks an unsuspecting LLM (via Tom’s Hardware). In essence, most chatbots reference a set of banned words and prompts that will cause the bot to give a default response if someone attempts to convince it to deliver information that could be dangerous, or to answer a query with potentially harmful or offensive content.

In the case of ArtPrompt, a demonstration is given of what happens when an AI chatbot is given a dangerous prompt, in this case “tell me how to build a bomb”. Ordinarily, this query would rightly cause the bot to flag the word “bom…

In a shot heard around the world, Sonic the Hedgehog was murdered last week. The blue blur was found twisted and bloody in the dining car of the Mirage Express, his shocked expression mercifully masked by a jauntily placed sailor’s hat. It all took place in The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, a Sega-made visual novel that was—despite its tragic and unconscionable subject matter—something of an April Fool’s gag.

Well the joke goes on, because The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is now the highest-rated Sonic game on Steam. In fact, it’s the 62nd highest-rated game on the entire platform (it was briefly 61st), and has netted itself over a million downloads since its release last week.

The game is sitting pretty with over 11,000 Steam user reviews at time of writing, 98% of which are positive. That puts it ahead of fan favourites like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed Collection (94% positive with over 10,000 reviews), Sonic Frontiers (94% with over 13,000), and Sonic Mania (93% with over 18,000).

It’s pretty funny that Sega’s best-received Sonic game in years is a jokey, Poirot-esque visual novel about the main character’s brutal assassination (thou…

“Metaverse” was such a potent pandemic buzzword that Facebook went so far as to change its name to “Meta” in 2021. And then, last year, Meta laid off over 11,000 employees. That may be one reason for a decline in games industry confidence that all this metaverse talk is going to amount to anything. In a yearly survey of videogame professionals published by the Game Developers Conference—a big industry event coming up in March—answers to questions about the metaverse and blockchain showed a small but notable increase in skepticism over last year. 

Like last year, survey participants picked Fortnite as the most likely candidate to deliver on the promise of the metaverse, followed by Meta, Minecraft, and Roblox. But 45% didn’t predict any metaverse winner, and instead said that “the metaverse concept will never deliver on its promise.” 33% of respondents said the same thing when asked the question last year. Metaverse doubt is on the rise.

GDC’s 2023 State of the Game Industry report, which summarizes the survey results, includes one respondent’s six-point explanation for their metaverse skepticism. Here’s a summary of their reasons, which GDC says “see…

In the latest in a long string of calamities, cringe moments, and baffling upsets that have marked Elon Musk’s stewardship of the platform formerly known as Twitter, a Brazilian judge has given the site 24 hours to appoint a legal representative in the country or have its local operations shut down completely (via AP).

The judge is Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, and Musk has clashed with him before—even mocking him as “Brazil’s Darth Vader” in a tweet earlier this year. Back in April, Moraes ordered an investigation into Musk over the spread of fake news and a separate probe focused on obstruction, incitement, and criminal organisation. 

In particular, the court took issue with Musk’s reinstatement of various far-right Twitter accounts. Moraes has gone after “digital militias” of far-right activists that have been accused of inciting violence against Supreme Court justices and spreading misinformation within Brazil, and that attempted to overturn the election of Brazilian president Lula Ignacio da Silva in 2022. Silva, known familiarly as Lula, defeated Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, and supporters of the former president a…

Bad news for everyone who ever turned Mr X into Thomas the Tank Engine: Capcom’s got its eye on you. In a recent video on the studio’s Capcom R&D YouTube channel focused on “Anti-cheat and anti-piracy measures in PC games,” the Resident Evil and Street Fighter studio warned its own and other devs of the potential “Reputation damage caused by malicious mods” and said that—for the purposes of its engine’s anti-cheat tech—”all mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported.”

The company never directly says anything about that nude Chun Li mod that scandalised young and old at the Corner2Corner Street Fighter 6 tournament a few months ago, but, well, you’ve gotta think that’s lurking somewhere in the mind of the people that put this presentation together. 

In a section titled “Another problem: Mods,” Capcom’s presenter remarks that mods are “another inseparable part of PC gaming,” but that “for the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats” because unsupported mods are “impossible to distinguish from cheat tools, implementation-wise.”

Up to this point, I have to admit I can see things…

After pulling off a Darktide redemption arc last year, Fatshark’s not resting on its inquisitorial laurels. Secrets of the Machine God, Darktide’s latest update, arrived earlier today, bringing a new mission to revive an abandoned Adeptus Mechanicus foundry and a set of new weapon types. If you’re not already thrilled, you should be: It’s never a bad time when the tech-priests are around.

The new mission, Clandestium Gloriana, will have strike teams descend into a derelict “Foundryplex”—a massive production facility where the AdMech tech-priests once worked their fabled wonders, which the Inquisition hopes to reawaken for its war effort. The mission will feature some new tech from Fatshark, like a mission-giver who will accompany the players and a variable end-of-mission encounter that aims to improve replayability. And it’s an arctic mission! Everyone loves an arctic mission.

As a reward for their efforts, conscripts will be able to enjoy the spoils of the Foundryplex in the form of new weapon types. For Ogryn characters, new two-handed pickaxes can puncture skulls and sweep crowds, depending on the variety. It’ll be like you’re playing Deep Rock Galact…

XDefiant, Ubisoft’s upcoming multiplayer shooter that some have hailed as the return of a more old-school, more 2010s-style, perhaps more try-hard Call of Duty-esque experience, has been delayed for an indeterminate amount of time. Why? Because it somehow offended the console gods: failing to pass the certification process for at least one of either PlayStation or Xbox, which means we all have to wait to get our hands on it until Ubisoft can rectify the problems that cropped up and try to get XDefiant certified again.

If you’re used to the sunlit uplands of PC gaming, where the only barrier between a developer and a videogame release is whether they can be bothered to upload a build to a cloud storage platform, “certification” might be a bit of a mystery to you. In short, it’s the process by which platform owners like Sony and Microsoft scrutinise games that release on PlayStation and Xbox to make sure they meet those platforms’ requirements before coming out.  

According to a post on the Ubisoft blog, the game didn’t meet those requirements for at least one of the consoles (though which one isn’t stated), so the game’s being pushed back. 

“At the end…

I’m 40 hours into my Starfield playthrough and only now realizing there’s an easy way to mine ore faster. No, I’m not talking about letting Outposts do the mining for you, I’m talking about good ol’ fashioned laser cutting. Did you know the laser cutter has a secondary fire? I didn’t know that, but I sure wish I did a week ago!

This tip came to me by way of a TikTok by gamesclips247. Yes, the laser cutter has a secondary fire. You can barely tell it’s happening, but if you hold both left click and right click with a laser cutter (both triggers on a controller), the cutter goes into overdrive after a second, turning the laser beam from red to orange.

Starfield – Laser Cutter Comparison”

An orange beam will break ore much faster than the standard red, and the only catch is that it uses more energy, so you can’t continuously fire for as long. And that isn’t really a catch, if you think about it: you’re typically only mining ore in chunks of two or three before walking to a new cluster, which is more than enough time for the cutter to recharge to full. This is just a better way…

The South Korean game ratings board’s worst-kept secret has finally gotten an official announcement. The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story promises to be a “gritty indie 2D hi-bit pixel action RPG that lets players raise a rogue mage army and lead a revolution,” and it’s set for release in Spring this year.

Mageseeker is being developed by Digital Sun, who also made the roguelite dungeon crawler/shop sim Moonlighter, and will tell the story of Sylas, an escaped mage in the Runeterran kingdom of Demacia, who was introduced to League of Legends itself all the way back in 2019. Demacia’s rulers repress magic they deem forbidden while wielding it themselves to entrench their power, an arrangement that I suspect won’t survive through the game’s ending.

This is Mageseeker’s first official announcement, but it’s not the first we’ve heard of it. Last month, South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee leaked its existence in a now-deleted listing on its website, so we already kinda knew that the game would focus on Sylas as he struggled to liberate Demacia.

We didn’t know who was developing it, though, nor did we learn exactly what kind of game i…

Solve today’s Wordle in a flash with our wide range of hints, tips, and practical advice. Find guidance with the February 25 (616) clue, brush up on your general Wordle knowledge with our guides and archive of past answers, or skip straight to the good stuff and read today’s answer—it really is up to you.

A good guess that turns over five greys may be a lot of practical help, bringing focus to my Wordle and definitively ruling out several avenues of inquiry, but it doesn’t do a whole lot for my confidence, especially when it’s halfway down the board. 

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, February 25

Today’s answer is nice and straightforward. You’re looking for a multiple of five today, specifically one at the higher end of common school multiplication tables.

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:&nbs…

Is the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake a new Skull and Bones? I’m starting to think it might be. After multiple delays, a complete reboot, and a warning to fans not to expect to hear more about the game in 2023, Ubisoft has dropped a brief message reassuring everyone that it’s coming along nicely, and we’ll be hearing more about it at some undefined point in the future.

Look, I get it, making games isn’t easy—if it was, I’d be doing it. But even so, the Sands of Time remake seems to be a surprisingly tough struggle for Ubisoft. A planned release in early 2021 got bumped, and then bumped again, and then pretty much fell off the radar completely until a speculative 2023 launch came and then went. 

Amidst all that, work was moved to a completely different studio, and then the whole thing was scrapped and started over. It’s been quite a journey, and at this point nobody knows when the remake might see the light of day.

In an update posted to mark the 20th anniversary of the original Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Ubisoft contradicted its earlier caution about radio silence in 2023 to say that things are coming along nicely.

“As you…

Watch On

Big Papa Kratos is coming back to Steam.

During Sony’s State of Play stream on Thursday, the company dropped the news that God of War Ragnarök, the acclaimed sequel to the 2018 reboot of God of War, will be arriving on PC September 19. 

Dad Kratos’s second outing was a big hit in 2022—”Everybody but us is having a great time in God of War: Ragnarök,” we wrote not-at-all-passive-aggressively shortly after its release. While Elden Ring more or less swept the 2022 awards season as the top dog for Game of the Year, Ragnarök was still an impressive runner up. It took home the trophy at a number of publications that year, including at our sister sites Tom’s Guide and Laptop Mag. It also earned high praise in reviews; GamesRadar+ awarded it 4.5/5 stars, writing “There’s a light start that feels padded—still good but missing depth—which leads into a weighty finish that’s every bit the equal of its predecessor.”

Hopefully God of War Ragnarök’s PC port lives up to the high bar set by the January 2022 release of God of War, which has been one of the very best of the PC PlayStation crew. We praised that port’s performance…