Month: September 2024

After multiple changes to US law that kept it copyrighted for nearly 100 years, 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie—which contains the first appearances of Mickey and Minnie Mouse—is now in the public domain.

And what do we do when a beloved children’s character becomes available to use in new creative works? We make them into monsters. Three Mickey-themed horror projects have already been announced, one game and two movies.

The game is Infestation: Origins, and was announced via IGN hours after it became legally safe to do so. It’s a co-op horror game “in which you’re an exterminator treating sinister infestations caused by twisted versions of classic characters and urban legends”—Mickey being the prime antagonist, of course.

Infestation was origina…

Slay the Princess is one of our favourite unexpected hits from this year. It’s a choose-your-own adventure style narrative game about a dutiful mission to (you guessed it) slay a princess.

I’m too much of a wuss myself, but PC Gamer senior editor Robin Valentine highly recommended it back in November, calling it the year’s most fascinating horror game: “[The game’s] core structure is so compelling and fun, and such a good excuse for the game to throw in every wild, creative, and scary idea it can into a vibrant web of nastiness.”

He also said that experiencing it for yourself was vital—something that the game’s own developer has now officially echoed on Twitter (thanks, PCGamesN). “The game is at its best if your first experience is playing it yourself instead of watch…

Manor Lords isn’t just restricted to being a fantastic medieval city builder and management sim, if you choose to do so, you can also partake in wars and skirmishes for land and resources. 

Before starting your journey to manor overlord you can pick what path you walk. There are three scenario templates with predetermined settings. Number one is Rise to Prosperity, which simply focuses on building up your town and has no off-map adversaries, and no bandits or raiders. Then there’s On the Edge, where there is a higher chance of bandit camps and raids, and finally, there’s Restoring the Peace, which includes an off-map adversary as well as bandits and raids. 

While I only chose to live On the Edge, I’ve still had my fair share of raids and encounters with bandits, an…

After a week of Microsoft shutting down much-loved game studios like The Evil Within and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, as well as Arkane Austin, best known for Prey and Dishonored, one player decided to take justice into their own hands. They got one over on Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer (P3) by nuking his camp in Fallout 76. 

The act of vengeance was first spotted by a Fallout 76 player on Twitter early this morning, who posted a picture of their server’s map which shows a massive red circle around P3’s camp. The apparent culprit then replied to the post with a video of him walking around P3’s camp surrounded by a nuclear red mist, a screenshot of him encountering P3 in the wild, and a caption that just read “guilty”.  

It’s pretty well known at this p…

As reported by Insider Gaming and first spotted by Battlefield YouTuber DannyonPC, FPS veteran and Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto appears to have left his director position at Ridgeline Games, an EA subsidiary, where he was working on the next Battlefield game.

As art director on the first three Halo games, Lehto had a massive impact on the sci-fi series’ iconic look. Lehto was then creative director on the latter Halo games made by Bungie and part of the original Destiny team before departing the company. Lehto founded studio V1 in 2014, which struggled to find an audience for its experimental hoverbike FPS-RTS, Disintegration, before shutting down in 2021.

Lehto moved on to Ridgeline under EA that same year, with the studio said to be working on FPS games. It was later revea…

The latest go-around of the nigh-overwhelming Steam Next Fest is live, meaning that you once again have precisely one week to power through literally hundreds of demos of upcoming games on Steam.

It’s “nigh-overwhelming” because there’s just so much to play, and such a limited amount of time in which to play it all. It’s great for getting hands-on time with games you’re looking forward to, absolutely, but if you’re a “gotta play ’em all” completionist, it’s has the potential to be a very rough week. I calculated for the February Next Fest that you could dedicated approximately 12 minutes per demo if you wanted to get through them all, assuming you didn’t waste time on food or sleep; that is admittedly not the most precise measure possible, but neither is it realistic so I’m not go…

Keep on scrolling and you’ll soon find a hint for today’s Wordle, a fantastic selection of general tips and tricks, and even the answer to the September 10 (813) puzzle. However you want to play, you’ll find what you’re looking for on this very page.

Wow, that was a close call. Today’s Wordle answer only became obvious on my very last go, after I’d exhausted what felt like every other option the English language had to offer. Hopefully next week’s Wordles will bring more easy victories and fewer green-coloured skyscrapers. 

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, September 10

The answer today can refer to an estimate for a job—you might get a _____ from a builder for home renovations—as well as repeating or copying text or …

Big news for followers of Lara Croft Unification Theory: Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics has revealed a new piece of art for the character that may closely represent what she looks like in the series’ next game. This reveal has apparently been anticipated for years, as in 2021 Tomb Raider’s franchise director Will Kerslake said that Crystal Dynamics “envision a future for Tomb Raider unfolding after the established adventures” of the original Core Design games and its own prequel trilogy. “[We’re] working to unify these timelines,” Kerslake said at the time. 

With no new Tomb Raider game since 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it’s been a long wait; long enough for Tomb Raider fans to seize on the idea of “Unified Lara” as a big deal. As evidence, here’s the r…

Iron Gate Studios has brought in the new year by outlining its plans for Valheim in 2023. The Viking survival sim launched in early access in February 2021 and, despite its high level of polish and hugely positive reception, remains in that state. The studio reckons the game will be finished once three biomes are included. The first is the Mistlands, the subject of last year’s major update, and this year is going to be all about the Ashlands.

The Ashlands will apparently be “quite different from what we’re all used to”, being “a large chunk of land at the far south of the map, rather than small islands spread out over the world”. And unlike Mistlands, the development of which was kept under wraps until close to release, the studio says it wants to be transparent and “…

Remember that last Matrix movie? The one about capital subsuming all critique, turning it into a trendy and infinitely exploitable set of meaningless images and signifiers divorced from their original context? How it laments the way the culture industry can’t let a good thing lie, instead pounding every last inch of profit out of any marketable property until there’s nothing left but a tasteless grey mush?

That was cool. Anyway, they’re making another Matrix movie.

Per Variety, The Matrix 5 (which will surely become The Matrix: R-something at some point during production) will be the first entry in the series without one of the Wachowski sisters directing. Instead, it’ll be helmed by Drew Goddard, the screenwriter behind The Martian. Goddard will also write the script and pr…

At GDC, CD Projekt Red is showing off the future of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, one bouncing neon light at a time. It’s set to arrive with a new graphics preset, Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which will come to the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11. This gives you enough time to track down an RTX 4080 and its powerful frame-generating magic. You’re going to need it.

In what Nvidia calls a “technology preview,” Overdrive Mode will feature path tracing, aka full ray tracing, announced last year, that’ll “accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene.”. Light sources will now cast “physically correct soft shadows,” and colored lighting will bounce multiple times in a scene. In a game like Cyberpunk that’s drenched with neon lights, it’ll create more realistic direct …

Imagine having the ability to recall your memories with near perfect precision. As we move into an ever more AI-centric future, that dream looks set to come true. With researchers now having used Stable Diffusion to reconstruct pretty damn accurate, high resolution images by reading human brain waves, we could one day be pulling up images from the annals of our minds without having taken a single photograph.

Researchers Yu Takagi and Shinji Nishimoto, from the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka University, recently wrote a paper outlining how it’s possible to reconstruct high res images (PDF) using latent diffusion models, by reading human brain activity gained from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), “without the need for training or fine-tuning of complex…

Get as much or as little help with your daily Wordle as you want, thanks to our wide range of helpful hints and tips. Whether you’re looking for general advice, a clue for the March 13 (632) game, or the answer to today’s Wordle delivered on a platter, you’ll find it all right here.

I unearthed three yellows on my first go today—talk about luck. Taking four more goes to finally pin them down and find the other missing two letters wasn’t ideal, but at least I got today’s answer just in time.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, March 13

This word means to take responsibility for a mistake or something bad that’s happened. It’s also used when someone else holds another person (or thing) accountable for a similar negative situation. There are…

Wizard with a Gun is a top-down co-op roguelite about wizards who, as the title makes clear, are packing heat. It’s really good—”a lean roguelite that never feels like it’s wasting your time, even if it’s got some rough edges,” we said in our 80% review—but will be the last game from developer Galvanic Games, which announced today that it is closing.

“Despite the promising start of Wizard with a Gun, sales are not strong enough to sustain our studio,” Galvanic Games founder and president Patrick Morgan wrote on LinkedIn. “This last year has been particularly tough for games. While we had numerous encouraging conversations at DICE and GDC, the process of signing new projects, even in a good year, takes longer than the runway we had left.”

Morgan said he’s “incredi…

Quickly find your feet in today’s Wordle with a clue written just for the October 21 (854) game, brush up on your general guessing, or simply bask in the warm glow of an easy victory with the answer to today’s puzzle. Whatever your Wordle aims today, we can help you out.

It was only good use of all the grey letters I’d stumbled on previously that saved today’s game, helping me home in on the answer. It wasn’t quick but hey, some days any kind of win is better than none at all. As clever as I felt for finding the answer in the letters left behind, I’d definitely appreciate a few more greens next time. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, October 21

Today’s answer refers to a particular kind of smile, the sort with …