[I played this spellbindingly complex 4X classic, and all I got was a lot of dead halflings]

Welcome back, then, Master of Magic, a 4X strategy game first published in 1994 for MS-DOS. Developed by Simtex and published by Microprose, Master of Magic entered a burgeoning strategy genre, which had already seen the likes of Civilisation, with a slightly wild 'anything goes' attitude towards turn-based combat and conquest. It's regarded as a stone-cold classic, but was also something of a buggy mess and subsequent years would see patched-up re-releases of the original, though never the sequel that some clamoured for. 

Now it's the subject of a remake, and a game that sits in an odd limbo zone. This is not an all-singing, all-dancing reimagining of the game, nor is it a slavish, like-for-like redo of the original. It's an updated and polished version of the game that feels relatively comfortable to modern hands, but would never pass as a contemporary title.

Master of Magic is prettier than I was expecting. It's not a graphical powerhouse by any means, but everything's clean and clear and the portraits in particular are great: full of character and little kinks. I'm a particular fan of the familiar for the baddie dragon wizard, a plump little red imp with a salacious grin. Each of the wizards has these familiars, which provide basic tips and also act as your deputies. If a town's ticking over, leave it in the hands of your familiar to keep it that way.

As with any 4X game you're thrown into your first map and will be slightly bamboozled by a raft of different menus, options, UI overlays, and your wizard's particular familiar. The depth you can go into is intimidating but the top-level stuff is relatively easy to get your head around, and you can also automate elements of it. The game generates the world map and you start managing a small settlement with one army detachment, which you can quickly set exploring, and after a few turns you'll be gifted a ghost explorer unit. 

What you won't get past, initially at least, is the difficulty. I played my first few maps on Easy before moving up to Normal and, in my very first combat encounter, ran about 24 halflings into a bunch of skeletons. Easy win for the lads, I thought, only to watch them all unceremoniously cut down. There's something quite charming about how retro Master of Magic is in this respect, or perhaps it's just my age, as the opposing units play their attack animation (usually a fairly simple stab), the damage number comes up, then if it was enough to destroy your unit you'll see six halfings upend themselves and fall dead in sync. And yeah, you'll be seeing a fair amount of that. 

The beta version I was playing had three wizards, each with their own buffs and army type: Merlin, who goes with halflings and has research-based buffs; dark magic specialist Sharee; then my ultimate favourite, the dragon chaos wizard Sssra. He's got dragon-type warriors, very useful because they can simply float over water, making map navigation so much easier, and a whole bunch of fire spells to boot.

Regardless of which wizard you pick, though, or where you're intending your tech tree to go, those early stages are spent exploring, sticking your head into caves and finding enemy towns, and mostly avoiding fights while you build up an army. Even the basic enemy types like gnolls are capable of taking a few lumps out of you, though sheer force of numbers usually wins out. The maps are also populated with fantastical creatures (that's their in-game designation too) that come with delightful effects like poison, magic negation, and thwacking great damage counts that will flatten whole detachments at a time.

There are two ways you start to negate the enemy advantage: first, by upgrading the types of troops you can produce and trying to make sure they get a few 'easy' fights in and some XP before you send them off to face a hydra. You can also, as things progress, start to hire your own 'hero' units. Then comes the game-changer: you're not just the commander here, but a master of magic.

Once a turn during combat, provided you have the various magical resources required, you can cast a spell. These can be buffs to your army units, which come in all stripes, landscape-altering spells, direct attacks on enemy units, 'control' spells like an immobilising web, and many more. In a game where the battles are usually a bit tighter than you might like, these interventions are often critical.

Now you might be thinking so far, so standard. But Master of Magic has a trick: in fact, it's got hundreds. The mistake I'd been making initially was to load up a game and just accept what the algorithm gave me. I'd land in an unforgiving little stretch of surrounded by hell-beasts with nary a treasure chest in sight and think "This is fine." But you don't have to take that.

First of all, you can just choose your own map parameters: I didn't really play around with this, but you can tweak a wide range of options to create a world along the lines you'd like: as lush or barren as you like. Secondly, which is what I did end up doing, you can just reload until you get something you like the look of, and then start delving into the fun stuff.

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Master of Magic's secret sauce is in how completely you can begin to manipulate and combine the different mechanics underpinning your wizard and their chosen race. So first you try and get a decent spawn, somewhere that isn't too challenging, has lots of potential loot, and will allow some easy early expansion. You get a production line going, paying bribes to get the more important structures up quicker, and begin to turn your home base into an economic powerhouse that'll fund the rest.

So you could raise taxes in a city, which would normally increase unrest, but then cast Just Cause to rally the population and Wall of Fire to render it (relatively) safe from outside attack. That'll cost mana upkeep, but if you've got some magic sources it's a pittance.

You can directly attack enemy units or use stuff like warp magic which will decay and degenerate them, turning some raging monster into an enfeebled little piggy waiting to be roasted. Your buffs align on a similar spectrum, some just improving weapons while others transform units into elites, grant them completely inappropriate abilities like flying, or make weapons ludicrously effective against given sub-classes.

On one run I went all-in on necromancy. At the start of battle I'd fight normally then, when enemy units were weakened, cast a bunch of ghouls behind them that would turn dead enemies into ghouls themselves. This could combo with a Terror spell for true panic, and eventually you're able to get werewolves, more powerful soul-sucking ghouls, and then the one I wanted but wasn't able to get: wraiths. This army was a bit weak really, until the death magic started happening, at which point battles would completely flip. And looking at the stuff further up the spell tree I couldn't reach, it gets even wilder.

The point being that all of this stuff can and should be stacked at once. Why have halfling swordsmen, after all, when instead they could be flying swordsmen with holy-infused weapons led by a newly-minted mega unit? Soon those skeletons begin to seem laughable: because they are, really, especially when you start moving onto the fire elementals, magic-packing demons and inexplicably powerful rift guardians.

The beta build of Master of Magic has plenty to do, but it also limits you to three wizards and three factions, and it feels like the spells are quite limited too. The game lives or dies on just how wild it is able to get with unexpected combinations, and this build isn't the best indication of that: even though I managed to get some odd combinations going, it felt like the training wheels were on.

Another aspect of Master of Magic that never really factored into my playtime, even though it's at the heart of the game, is the dual world mechanic. The world here is really two worlds, with certain points allowing you to travel between the two (eventually you are able to do this at will), and the goal is to dominate both by the time the dust is settled.

This is a days-long commitment of play, and the Master of Magic beta build I was playing ends automatically after 100 turns. Given that the spells can take anywhere from 10 to 50 turns to research, and the rather glacial nature of progress in upgrading settlements over time, this made each of my runs a bit of a sprint to see as much as I could before things re-set, whereas you'd definitely play the finished game as more of a marathon.

Slitherine strategy games are definitely of a type, and Master of Magic is perhaps some historical exemplar of it. This game won't be giving Firaxis any sleepless nights, but you can see how in its seemingly endless cocktail of armies, world-altering spells and items there is the potential for one of those petri dish experiences: a game that may not look like much, but has the potential to create epic stories. Even if sometimes that story may be that your army walked into a cave, never came out, and then a bunch of demons razed your hometown to the ground.

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[Remember Epic's action-Moba that got steamrollered by Fortnite's success? It's back]

One of the big victims of Fortnite's runaway success was, surprisingly enough, Epic's own videogame: Paragon. First released in 2016 after many years of development, this bombastic thirdperson Moba never quite gained enough of an audience and, when Fortnite took off, Epic decided to pull the plug. It did so in an interesting way though, closing the game but releasing all of its $17 million worth of assets, for free, on the Epic Game Store.

Several games have already been released that make use of Paragon's assets. Fault: Elder Orb has been on Steam since 2020, while Omeda Studios is working on a Moba called Predecessor. So we come full circle to a game that not only uses all of Paragon's assets, but has been granted permission by Epic to use the game's branding—welcome to Paragon: The Overprime. 

In development from South Korean studio Netmarble, PtO is an action-focused Moba, needless to say it's free-to-play, and it's intended to operate as a live service game with new heroes dropping in and out. It also features the frankly baller tagline: "We invite you to Prime where the space opera of a symphony of heroes echoes across the universe!"

The question with this will be just how different it is from Paragon because, hazy as my memory of Epic's original is, this seems pretty much along the same lines: pick a hero, level them differently in each match depending on skills and item choices, and ultimately help your team destroy the enemy base. We've all seen games make comebacks over the years, mostly unsuccessfully, but it's singularly odd to see a game semi-resurrected in such a fashion by a different studio.

We'll find out soon enough whether the Lazarus act was worth it. PtO is currently running a "final test" before entering early access in November, which you can enter by tweeting something about how good the game will be on social media (eurgh). The game is also, appropriately enough, coming to the Epic Game Store.

The test includes new characters and a new map, while in-game the big news is an improved item index, new lobby design, and a reworked tutorial/ training system for new players. One wonders if there will be any old ones too: it's striking to see that this game is using Paragon heroes as-they-were in Paragon, while layering more on top. If nothing else, PtO will be one hell of a curio to round-out the year.

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[Age of Empires' most beloved spin-off is getting a definitive edition]

Age of Mythology, the much-loved Age of Empires spin-off which first released in 2002, is getting a remaster. Announced during yesterday's Age of Empires 25th anniversary event, Age of Mythology Retold will gussy up the original game's graphics, tweak its gameplay, and in general do for Age of Mythology what the Definitive Edition did for Age of Empires.

Microsoft has been making noises about doing something with the Age of Mythology series for the past few years, but until now it's been the only Age of Empires game that didn't have some kind of definitive edition announced. The original game got a Steam release back in 2014, and even got a (not well-liked) new expansion in 2016, but it's taken this long for Microsoft's much-discussed "possibility" of an Age of Mythology return to turn into a reality.

It's a good thing, too, because Age of Mythology is a unique entry in the Age of Empires catalogue. Rather than taking (loose) inspiration from the real-life conflicts and civilisations that inspire Age of Empires, the game situates its battles in the spheres of Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology. Players select a cabal of major and minor gods to worship, granting them unique technologies, units, and abilities, and even special powers that can either help your faction or smite your enemies. It's a breath of fresh air if you're used to the more grounded nature of Age of Empires.

That's pretty much all the info we have about Age of Mythology Retold, and you might have noticed that most of it is actually info about regular old Age of Mythology. Besides an announcement that the project is happening and a cinematic trailer promising that "heroes will rise" and "legends will battle," information about the new definitive edition is remarkably scant. 

That's probably because development is still in very early stages, so we shouldn't expect to hear much more about the game for a while yet. Still, even if we have to stay patient before we can hear more, it's nice to know that Age of Mythology hasn't receded into legend itself.

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[How to complete the Halloween Quests in Disney Dreamlight Valley]

It's spooky season in Disney Dreamlight Valley and there are a few new Halloween-themed activities to do alongside unlocking the valley's newest resident, Scar. While there are no Halloween horror houses in Dreamlight Valley—unless you turn your own home into one, I suppose—little trick-or-treat buckets filled with candy will be dotted around the map. You'll even earn some Dreamlight for mass-harvesting pumpkins. Capitalism, am I right?

In this guide, I'll walk you through how to complete all the Halloween events to net you more Dreamlight.

Disney Dreamlight Valley Halloween guide

Stockpiling pumpkins

By now you've probably figured out that the easiest way to earn Star Coins is to farm pumpkins. You can buy the seeds from the Forgotten Lands biome, which costs around 15,000 Dreamlight to unlock. To complete this village challenge, you'll need to plant and harvest 100 pumpkins. They take around four hours to grow, so go ahead and plant them, water them a few times and then get on with your day.  You'll get some Dreamlight and a Pumpkin Stack as your reward. 

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(Image credit: Gameloft)

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A three-course Halloween meal

This challenge is much simpler than it sounds, though it would have been fun to whip up some spooky snacks with Remy. To complete this challenge, search for three different coloured candy buckets to collect three different types of candy. Eat one of each colour of candy and you'll unlock some Dreamlight and a Green Trick or Treater's Bounty, which you'll find in your Furniture inventory.

Trick or treat

For this challenge, all you need to do is give out ten gifts to the characters. It doesn't need to be their favourite gift or even Halloween-related—you just need to give them a gift. Do this ten times to earn a bunch of Dreamlight and a Mickey Mouse pumpkin. 

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Villainy wears a mask

The easiest way to obtain a mask is to order one from Scrooge's store or buy one from page three of the new Star Path. All you have to do is equip the mask and you'll earn more Dreamlight and a Purple Trick or Treater's Bounty. 

Sugar Rush

For this quest, you need to eat a lot of candy—45 pieces, to be exact. You can either eat the candy you collect from the Halloween buckets or make some yourself using sugarcane, cocoa bean or vanilla. You need to eat 15, 30, and then 45 to unlock a Happy Jack-o'-Lantern, Mischievous Jack-o'-Lantern, and Friendly Jack-o'-Lantern respectively. 

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[This unlucky customer bought an RTX 4090 and received a box of loose metal]

One unlucky PC gamer managed to secure an order for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 at launch only to receive a box full of heavy metal. Not the cool kind, either. Literally just blocks of metal that loosely weigh the same as an RTX 4090.

This isn't the first time we've heard of a box that should have a graphics card in it turning up with something else altogether inside. Often we hear reports of other, less powerful graphics cards being swapped out by customers returning the cards, only then for that same return to be shipped onto someone else. It's a sad state of affairs.

hey_guys_check_out_my_new_4090_side_note_newegg from r/pcmasterrace

The original post on Reddit from user NuclearInnardsBeep (quite a name) had garnered a lot of attention over the weekend, however. Not only because this was reportedly an order placed at launch for the GPU, thus not a return from another customer, but because Newegg reportedly locked the account of the customer.

We've been in touch with Newegg regarding the order, and a spokesperson told us that the reason for the lock was due to Newegg's process when dealing with potential fraud. 

"Newegg’s process is to suspend a customer’s account for a few days any time there is potential fraud in order for Newegg to conduct an investigation. The account was reinstated during this suspension period because there was no evidence available."

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I suppose it makes sense. Fraud that may look a lot like this likely happens all the time. Even some users responding to the thread on Reddit seemed to believe that the original poster was making things up, which they've been pushing to debunk. That doesn't appear to be the case following Newegg's confirmation to us, anyways, and the unfortunate reality is that this sort of thing is common enough to be very believable.

Newegg also confirmed to us that the card was brand new.

We also asked the retailer where the card may have ended up, but we were told there was no evidence available to say. It's a mystery. We probably won't ever know where or when the GPU switcheroo took place.

Newegg has refunded the customer though, and their account was reinstated. So in the end they're back where they started before they ever secured an RTX 4090 in the first place. Which kind of sucks as it's an even tougher job to find the card in stock today, but at least they're not stuck with two extremely expensive paperweights.

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[How to throw candy from a vehicle in Fortnite]

Throwing candy from a vehicle in Fortnite might seem simple but it can be pretty tricky if you're trying to complete this Fortnitemares challenge on your own. Of course, you'll need to locate some Halloween candy and that alone can be difficult if you're unsure where to look. Don't worry, though—I'll explain everything you need to know in this guide.

Fortnite's seasonal Halloween event so far has given us a chance to help defeat the Inkquisitor boss, turn into a werewolf, and destroy haunted household furniture. In fact, hurling candy from a car seems pretty tame in comparison. If you're ready to get started, here's how to throw candy from a vehicle in Fortnite. 

Fortnite: How to throw candy from a vehicle 

You must find at least three candies to throw from a vehicle to complete this Fortnitemares challenge. The method is pretty simple—equip your candy then right-click on your mouse to aim and left-click to throw it. If you're playing with friends, you can get one of them to drive while you sit in the passenger seat with no distractions.

This challenge is still possible to do if you're playing solo, but you'll need to switch from the driver to the passenger seat—left Ctrl key—before you're able to lob the candy.

If you need help locating Halloween candy to throw, look for Candy buckets outside doors around residential areas on the map. Good spots to look are Tilted Towers, Chrome Crossroads, Greasy Grove, and Cloudy Condos.

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[Wordle today: Here's the 494 answer and hint for Wednesday, October 26]

If you need a little help with your Wordle today then you've come to the right place. Here you'll find a fresh daily clue to set you on the right track, general tips to make every day that little bit easier, and if you'd just like to secure another victory then you'll find the answer to the October 26 (494) puzzle just below

I had an interesting build-up to the answer today: one green, then two, then three, then four, then the answer. I didn't see a single yellow the whole way through, instead it was a strange sort of green letter snowball from start to finish.

Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, October 26

Today's answer is used to describe the act of openly and intentionally disregarding some sort of reasonable rule—social or legal—in a disrespectful way. This is the person who jumps the queue, plays loud music in a quiet library, and sees speeding ticket fines as worth the cost. There are two vowels to find today.  

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:

• A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants. 
• A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The solution may contain repeat letters.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.

Previous answers

Wordle archive: Which words have been used

The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle solutions:

• October 25: FOGGY
• October 24: FAULT
• October 23: MUMMY
• October 22: SPIEL
• October 21: GROVE
• October 20: DENIM
• October 19: QUIRK
• October 18: EXIST
• October 17: STEIN
• October 16: SPADE

Today's Wordle answer

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

What is the Wordle 494 answer?

Let's save your win streak. The answer to the October 26 (494) Wordle is FLOUT. 

Learn more about Wordle 

Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.

You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.

After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

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[This ceramic 3D printer on Kickstarter can print big things with waste products]

3D printing is one of the coolest futuristic techs that can live in the modern home of the present day. Being able to download a digital file and with some time and patience turn that into a real world 3D object is absolutely mind blowing. We can print accessible controller mods to help more people play games, or our own fans for cooling PCs, or just a straight up Steam Deck shell. We are steps away from Star Trek's replicators in my mind's eye. Perhaps many many steps. But one of the biggest steps to jump over has to be the materials we use.

Most 3D printing, especially in the home, uses some kind of plastic filament. There are a lot of great initiatives being taken to cut down on the waste but it's still a lot of plastic. You can get other filaments, made from things like wood. However, it's still often buying a new resource to make things, using a printer that requires very specific inputs, with a fair amount of waste.

Ceramic printers are one of the logical next steps in integrating more materials, but are fairly uncommon compared to their filament brothers. There are difficulties with the printing process thanks to air bubble build ups, and are often fairly niche and expensive. Still they can often use a wider range of materials, and that's why the Matrix 3D printer on Kickstarter has caught my attention.

The Kickstarter page proudly states "In addition to ceramic materials, Matrix can print using a wide range of viscous fluids, especially environmental and ecological restoration materials, to help you realize your creative ideas." While this sounds deeply disturbing, what it means is you can print with things you likely have around your home already. Things like paper pulp, ground up eggshells, and waste coffee grounds can be used to print new things.

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The other big benefit this Matrix printer boasts is an increased capacity for builds. Often printers can be fairly limited in size, but this one can print objects up to 500 x 500 x 700mm on the largest model. They also come with up to 20L cartridge sizes, which can be swapped out mid print. This allows for some fairly large single prints, plus printing in ceramics or other malleable materials means it should be easy to piece multiple prints together, or add your own flairs by hand. 

Of course, being a Kickstarter means it's good to keep your wits about you when making decisions. Thankfully, the maker Cerambot has a decent track record, producing two ceramic printers on the platform in the past, and the Matrix is already more than fully backed. So hopefully this one is a safer bet than some of the vapourware around.

Right now there are still some spots left on the early bird backings, which can get you a Matrix M500 for $799 USD, or 47% off the RRP. The larger options are also available at discounted prices, but are all looking fairly limited. If you're hoping to be an early adopter of this multi-printing machine, you might want to get in fast.

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[The RTX 3060 is getting the 8GB release treatment]

We're currently in the middle of a turn in a generation of PC gaming hardware. With new GPUs dropping like the Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition, what we consider top-of-the-line hardware is currently in shift. Still, if you can't get your hands on a fancy new 40-series card, you're likely not alone. Between prices and availability, the dream of a brand new machine running the newest kit will likely remain just a dream for many of us. 

Thankfully, rehashes of older cards are still pretty commonplace, and are a far more affordable option. Right now it looks like the RTX 3060 GPUs are set to receive the treatment, with two brands releasing 8GB variants of the 2021 card. These should make for a much cheaper upgrade for those in need.

According to VideoCardz, both Manli and Asus are releasing GPUs based on the same RTX 3060 8GB SKU. These appear basically identical to the brand's 12GB variants, but with only 8GB of memory. This is using a 128-bit memory bus as opposed to a 192-bit so you'll be getting less bandwidth, and lose the future proofing the 12GB offered. It's definitely going to be a cut-down card, but with a price tag to match.

The Manli cards take cues from the brand's RTX 3060 LHR model whereas Asus is adding its new 3060 8GB to its Dual series of GPUs. Aside from that, both should be fairly similar with 3584 Nvidia CUDA cores, and 240GB of memory bandwidth along with the typical 170 watt TDP we're used to with the RTX 3060s.

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Of course, whether or not this card is going to be worth a look all comes down to the price. If this budget-specced GPU comes with a cost to match, it could be a really nice little upgrade for those of us still rocking 10 series cards. The good old 1060 still holds the top spot on Steam's Hardware survey, with RTX 3060 not sitting that far behind as the 6th most popular card. 

Given current RTX 3060 cards are sitting at around $400 USD, they're already a bit of a hard sell. The Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is often going for around the same, is worth the upgrade if you can get your hands on one. The lesser 8GB RTX 3050s aren't often under the $300 mark, and that's where I'd like to see these 8GB 3060s if they're going to get a look-in at all. Hopefully we'll be pleasantly surprised, and these really will become the budget build option to get us through.

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[Turn on this helpful Overwatch 2 setting right now]

If you've ever been deep into an Overwatch fight completely unaware that half of your team died 15 seconds ago, I implore you to turn on a setting new to Overwatch 2. It's a distinct sound that plays when a teammate dies and having it on has already saved my bacon more than once.

The sound itself is a familiar one for Overwatch veterans: a blaring, brief emergency siren that effectively communicates "oh god, back up, oh god." The alarm has been used in Overwatch for years to signify the death of teammates, but only in limited-time PvE events. Now it can be used in PvP, though it's off by default and easy to miss in the settings menu.

Blizzard has appropriately named this setting "Play Sound When Teammate Eliminated". You'll find it at the very bottom of this first page of audio settings:

(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)

Once it's on, you can basically stop worrying about the kill feed forever. It's been revelatory to unshackle from a small text feed that I frequently overlook and let the sound do the talking. I'm amazed at how quickly death alarms have improved my reactivity. It's now possible to stay focused completely on my aim or the person I'm healing and still instantly understand when teammates have died and we should fall back. Word of the handy new warning has slowly spread among friends and peers, and now everyone who's anyone is pro-death alert. Turns out the old way was slow and bad the whole time. This abrasive, unpleasant noise is pretty sweet.

Here's the alarm in action, demonstrated by me repeatedly leaping off a cliff as Soldier 76 (sound on):

You might be wondering about the similar setting above the teammate death alarm, "Play Sound When Enemy Eliminated". That one does what it says on the tin, but honestly, I can barely even hear it. It's a unique sound, but it's either too quiet or my brain decides to drown it out. That's fine by me—I'm more concerned with teammate notifications anyways, and I reckon it's already pretty obvious when we've wiped the floor with the competition and there's nobody left to shoot.

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['Joe Biden', who may or may not be the US president, is absolutely dominating Guilty Gear fighting tournaments]

Former US president Barack Obama famously received a gift of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt from his Polish counterpart, but current US president Joe Biden may be the one who has the real gamer cred. The word on the street says that when he's not busy managing domestic troubles or navigating international crises, the man they call POTUS is out there kicking 'donkey' and taking names at Guilty Gear fighting tournaments.

You think I'm kidding? Look at this:

NA+EU Open Tournament #29 Top 81: @POTUS 2: @jack_wachter09 3: @VisioN_NiL 4: @kaptinkillem 5: @agendine 5: TiredOcean7: @gamerdrive07: @burritoparty7 pic.twitter.com/ATLyhbRKTnOctober 23, 2022

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And this isn't just a one-off. According to his Start.gg stats page, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., the 46th President of the United States of America, has been showing up and cleaning house at Guilty Gear tournaments for the past two years. His first recorded competition took place in November 2020; he scored his first victory just a few months later, in February 2021, at the GGACPR Last Chance Qualifier. And by all appearances, the guy is a ferocious competitor: He's got results in 116 tournaments in total.

Now, is this really the US president kicking 'donkey' in the FGC? Probably not. But it's been going on long enough that the community is basically just rolling with it, as though it is.

(Image credit: MonachtVT (Twitter))

There's even a bit of fan art, courtesy of redditor krump0—apparently the president is a Chipp Zanuff main.

(Image credit: krump0 (Reddit))

And because nobody knows who the player behind Joe Biden is, some tournaments have taken to tagging in the official POTUS—that's President of the United States—Twitter account, because... well, what if? Maybe it's a bright pinpoint of light in the darkness of Joe's pre-bedtime doomscrolling.

Thank you to everyone who showed up and played in last night’s Guilty Gear Accent Core +R tournament! Good times, great vibes @JRiotx @POTUS @samvonehren Let’s run it back at the next one! pic.twitter.com/RKZrBKvhFdOctober 23, 2022

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I'm fairly confident that this isn't US President Joe Biden clearing the table at Guilty Gear tournaments—though I guess we'll know for sure if Biden brings up Guilty Gear Xrd getting rollback netcode at the next State of the Union. But regardless, I love the idea that this has just sort of evolved into a quiet, quirky little thing in the community. And that somewhere out there, someone this good at the game is forsaking the glory in favor of the meme. In my eyes, that's a real internet hero.

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[Overwatch 2's new Halloween PvE mission is so good that it's starting to feel like a sequel]

Overwatch has had PvE modes for a long time, but none of them are as thrilling as Overwatch 2's Halloween Wrath of the Bride mission.

Wrath of the Bride is a sequel to the Junkenstein's Revenge mode that Overwatch 1 players spent years grinding loot boxes in. A new monster-hunting squad is here: Junker Queen, Sojourn, Ashe, and Kiriko. Each of them are equipped in their Halloween Terror skins and are dropped into a medieval fantasy horror story set in a fictional German town.

Unlike the stationary, horde mode framework for Junkenstein's Revenge, Wrath of the Bride resembles co-op shooters like Left 4 Dead and Vermintide (but at a much smaller scale). You tear apart zombified robots and bosses along a path through a heavily-modified version of the regular PvP map. There are objectives, like having to find a key in a randomized location to unlock a gate, and boss monsters that disrupt what would otherwise be a simple shooting gallery with unique abilities to hinder your progress.

The boss encounters, at least on Hard difficulty and higher, demand you to utilize the four heroes' abilities tactically to dodge and nullify their high-damage attacks. I played the tank, Junker Queen, during a double Gargoyle Winston battle (You can't convince me this isn't a reference to Dark Souls' The Bell Gargoyles boss in a map that already has a bonfire). The Gargoyles work similarly to how an enemy player would play Winston. They jump in, electrocute you with his Tesla Cannon and hide in their big bubble shields. They leap around on your team as regular Zomnics crawl out of the castle and explode for nearly lethal damage. The trick is to pull them out of the bubbles with Junker Queen's throwing knife ability. That way, your team doesn't have to waste precious time breaking the bubbles.

Much like an MMO boss (but distinct from a normal Overwatch PvP match), tanking in Wrath of the Bride involves a lot of crowd control and kiting enemies around and away from your team while you work to hit Junker Queen's abilities that lifesteal her health back. In the final fight against a ghostly Sigma that is effectively a Nemesis- or Mr. X-type unkillable monster that chases you, it was my job as the Queen to circle him around the throne room to give my team time to pick off weak enemies and pump damage into the boss Sombra. And when my allies got downed, I used her Commanding Shout to give us temporary health to survive a revive.

In the solo encounter with Sigma, our Kiriko used her teleport to instantly escape a chase. And Sojourn's Disruptor Shot was incredibly useful for slowing surprise groups of Zomnics down to give us time to re-position and pick them off.

Overwatch PvE modes rarely make me feel like I'm puzzling out a proper boss encounter. Some of the special challenge modes Blizzard has done in the past get close—one forced you to strategically split enemies up so that they could take damage—but they usually have arbitrary difficulty spikes where success feels like rolling the dice instead of the result of tight teamwork. I remember spending days trying to finish the Retribution PvE mission on Legendary without anyone dying and losing to AI enemies that would randomly down people in one shot, ending a 10-minute long slog in failure.

I'm sure that Wrath of the Bride will get stale after repeated attempts, especially on the lower difficulty modes, but it's the first time the harder achievements felt not only possible but parseable. The PvE mission has a whole list of challenges to complete, including completing it on the four difficulty modes, photobombing the boss intros, defeating bosses, and performing specific actions during certain fights. None of them seem particularly hard to get, which is probably why the rewards are mostly sprays, voice lines, and battle pass XP.

This is Hallowgreed 

(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)

Wrath of the Bride actually feels like sequel material.

I'm glad Wrath of the Bride isn't another rehash of the same Junkenstein's Revenge template, especially because the rest of the Halloween Event is a letdown.

Halloween Terror is usually my favorite Overwatch event. All of the monster and witch skins are completely my vibe, but Overwatch 2's version is a little sparse compared to years past. The only new skins in the shop right now are Witch Kiriko (available as a bundlefor 2,600 Overwatch Coins or around $25) and ExecutionerJunker Queen (1,900 Overwatch Coins or around $20). There are no Epic tier skins to earn through weekly challenges and obviously no loot boxes filled with cosmetics. It's the first time during a Halloween event I haven't felt the urge to just play the game a lot to see what I can get. You can't even reliably grind for coins either. The surprise and anticipation is gone: you either buy the skins or don't. It's disappointing for Overwatch 2's first holiday event when the base game has already been light on cosmetics worth caring about.

Wrath of the Bride is the most compelling thing in the event and maybe the first thing in Overwatch 2 that actually feels like sequel material. The shifting objectives, propelled pace, and challenging bosses suggest that Blizzard might have a substantial amount of tricks up its sleeve for the story-based PvE mode coming next year. It's not groundbreaking, but it gives me hope for a game that has drained most of the optimism out of me.

The Halloween Terror event runs from October 25 to November 8.

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[Everything we know about the Fallout TV series]

While we can thank Hollywood for a nuclear payload's worth of post-apocalyptic media, too little of it, frankly, has featured hulking suits of power armor. That's thankfully about to change thanks to the upcoming Fallout TV series adaptation from Amazon Studios.

While a lack of official details about the Fallout show means we're just scavenging for scraps, some recent leaks and one official screenshot has given us glimpses at what the series will look like when it emerges from the production vaults. Here's what we know so far.

When is the Fallout TV series going to air?

The Fallout TV series is currently in production. Filming began on July 5, 2022, though there hasn't been a teaser or trailer or any sort of footage released yet. There's a lot involved in the production process, and how long it takes can vary quite a bit from shows. As a point of comparison, Season 2 of Netflix's The Witcher series went into pre-production in January 2020 and aired in December of 2021, but was heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Most television has a pace of one season/series per year.

I'd be willing to bet the Fallout TV series will start airing by around the middle of 2023, barring any major, unexpected hold-ups like a global nuclear war.

Have we seen anything from the Fallout TV series production?

In October, Amazon released a single still image from the series which you can scrutinize below. Click the upper-right corner to enlarge.

(Image credit: Amazon Studios)

That's Fallout, all right. We can see the opened Vault door, a figure standing just outside it, and what appears to be a dead body lying nearby. Vault doors typically don't open without some violence, so that all tracks. The figure leaving can't be identified, but there's the shape of a Pip-Boy on their wrist, so a dweller is definitely on their way out into the irradiated world.

We don't know much about Vault 33 other than it hasn't been canonically used yet, but historically Vault numbers below 50 indicate a west coast location. That jibes with reports that portions of the TV series are being shot in Utah.

Apart from that official image, we've also seen a handful of leaked set photos—which should obviously be taken with a grain of salt—that indicate that the show's production is incorporating plenty of the setting's established details.

In July, a Twitter user posted some photos of an outdoor set of one of Fallout's Super Duper Marts they stumbled upon while walking around Staten Island. Not long after, a set photo of Fallout's hallmark power armor appeared, showing its suitably huge disassembled pieces. Judging from the details, it looks like the T-60 power armor variant that appears in Bethesda's Fallout games, potentially indicating that the show will also focus on the eastern end of Fallout's American wasteland.

Fallout TV series"

Less than a month later, in August, unofficial Twitter account BethesdaArabic posted some photographs of the TV show's take on Vault interiors, complete with Vault-Tec propaganda posters. You can now find those leaked images on Reddit.

What is the Fallout TV series about?

Info on the plot has been very difficult to come by. We know it will deal with the irradiated, irreverent post-apocalyptic world we've come to know from the games, but not where on Earth it will be set, nor how long after the bombs fell.

Amazon has a bit of a delicate balancing act to manage here, as it will need to introduce the setting to a lot of viewers who have never heard of it while also making it feel authentic and satisfying to existing fans. If it were up to me, I'd say the best way to do that would be to focus on a region we've never seen in the games before. But I'd also bet we'll get acquainted with iconic organizations like the Brotherhood of Steel early on in the show.

Who is starring in the Fallout TV series?

(Image credit: HBO / Walton Goggins)

The Fallout TV series stars Walton Goggins, who recently voiced Cecil Stedman in Amazon's animated adaptation of Invincible. You may also know him as Boyd Crowder from Justified, or for his roles in The Shield or Quentin Tarantino's Hateful 8. We don't know much about his character, though there are some rumors floating around that he may be playing a ghoul. Since some of these irradiated immortals still have memories of life before the war, that would make a lot of sense—giving the audience a proxy character with one foot in a more recognizable society, reacting to the horrors of the post-apocalypse much as any of us would. And Goggins definitely has the bone structure.

The one other confirmed casting is Ella Purnell, probably best known to PC gamers as the voice of Jinx in the Netflix series Arcane. She also played the teen version of Angelina Jolie's Maleficent in the 2014 live action film. We don't even know her character's name, but if Goggins' character turns out to be a ghoul with knowledge of the good ol' days, it would make sense to pair him with someone younger who is more adapted to the post-apocalypse.

Who is writing and directing the Fallout TV series?

Amazon has named two showrunners to head up the project: Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.

Robertson-Dworet has writing credits on Captain Marvel and the 2018 live action Tomb Raider film. Wagner comes from more of a comedy background, with writer and producer credits on The Office, Portlandia, and Silicon Valley. This might suggest that Amazon wants Fallout to have a stronger comedic side, which would be in keeping with the tone of the games—they often contrast horror and bleakness with madcap absurdity.

Lisa Joy, who has writer and producer credits on Westworld, Burn Notice, and Pushing Daisies, is attached to write at least one episode. Jonathan Nolan, brother of director Christopher Nolan, is also listed as a writer and a director for at least one episode. Nolan penned the screenplays for The Prestige and The Dark Knight, and has worked as a writer/director on Westworld and Person of Interest.

Will Vault Boy be in the show? 

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Unless there are no thumbs in this version of the future, surely he's a shoo-in.

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[Amazon's Fallout TV series reveals its first official image]

The Fallout TV series announced by Amazon in 2020 began production this year, and now with 2022 rapidly drawing to a close—and with the 25th anniversary of the original Fallout upon us—we're finally getting our first look at it.

To be fair, the image shared on Twitter by Prime Video isn't much to look at: A figure standing in an open vault door, silhouetted by the bright backlight of the wasteland sun. But that doesn't mean we can't take anything away from it. First, though, you can see it full-size by clicking the icon in the upper-right corner of the image below:

(Image credit: Amazon Studios)

The most obvious thing is that the folks in the foreground of the image are apparently dwellers of Vault 33. According to the Fallout Fandom Wiki, Vault 33 hasn't been explored in Fallout lore: It's only been seen previously in Bethesda Pinball. Vault numbers below 50 also indicate a west coast location for the Vault in Amazon's series. 

It's also interesting that an August leak revealed images from inside Vault 32, not 33, although it's quite possible that the show will focus on more than one Vault—there were many of them, after all. The sign on the railing—no food or drink, operational silence, restrict movement, etc—also matches up with one seen in the same spot in Fallout 4.

It also seems likely that the Vault's opening will not be a peaceful affair. You will notice that someone appears to be down and perhaps dead just inside the door. As for the person standing in the doorway, they look to be wearing a Pip-Boy on their left arm and holding a pistol in their right as they venture out into the world—although I suppose it's possible that they're a lefty, they've just dropped the guy who answered the door, and now they're getting ready to cause some real trouble.

That would actually match up pretty well with the Fallout 2 intro cinematic, which includes a sequence that looks very much like this Amazon image:

It makes sense that Amazon would want to use Vaults with no established history for its show, because that gives creators the freedom to do pretty much whatever they want with the people inside of them. And even though we're not coming away with any big revelations from this image, it at least looks the part. I'd call that a good start.

Production of Amazon's Fallout series was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and it currently does not have a release date. For now, we're optimistic for sometime around the middle of 2023, and we'll keep you posted.

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[Modern Warfare 2 post-credits scene reimagines Call of Duty's most infamous level]

When I booted up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's campaign last week and was immediately asked to confirm that "I understand" some scenes include "graphic or intense content" before playing, I got a little nervous. The first time I can recall digitally consenting to be traumatized by a videogame was the original 2009 Modern Warfare 2, remembered best for the headlines its infamous mass shooting mission, No Russian, made across the world when it launched.

No Russian drew criticism at the time for being empty, unnecessary shock value, but our modern climate of constant fear of gun violence in the United States makes the original level especially difficult to watch. Infinity Ward's new Modern Warfare reboots are totally different stories than the late 2000s originals, but considering that the first reboot reimagined characters and events from Call of Duty 4 for its campaign, I opted into Modern Warfare 2's notice dreading a potential No Russian 2.

It never came, thankfully, but the campaign does eventually depict its own No Russian moment in the form of a post-credits scene that's really easy to miss. Go no further if you haven't finished the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 campaign, because we're diving into the spoiler zone. 

Modern Warfare 2 ends with Captain Price and his posse of less-iconic bros preventing the destruction of the White House by disarming a missile from a Chicago highrise. The story, which travels to Amsterdam, Spain, the Middle East, and settles mostly in a fictional city in Mexico, has almost nothing to do with 2009's Modern Warfare. The main parallels are that Shepherd, the general that betrays Team Price and eventually catches a throwing knife to the face, does eventually betray Team Price again, but for different reasons (and without killing anyone).

It's not until the very last cutscene of the campaign that CIA handler Laswell sics Price on his next bounty, Vladimir Makarov, the villain of the original MW2 and perpetrator of the No Russian event. Then, cut to credits. If you resist skipping the long credits sequence (or like me, just go back to the Cinematics section of the campaign menu), you're greeted with a post-credits scene. A faceless figure on a plane begins assembling a pistol out of parts hidden on his body and 3D-printed plastic.

We see a text from an "M" (probably Makarov) that says "Ready?" followed by "No Russian." The terrorist gets up, walks away with the gun drawn, and the scene ends.

So it seems like Infinity Ward is interested in revisiting Makarov as a villain, perhaps he'll even be a central figure in next year's rumored story expansions for Modern Warfare 2. I couldn't care less about Makarov or whatever plan for western domination he's cooking up, but I am glad that we weren't subjected to more playable civilian massacres. Modern Warfare 2 is, however, not without its cringey moments of military enthusiasm.

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[Steam's recommended prices go way up in many countries: +18% in Europe, +485% in Argentina]

Valve has made changes to its regional pricing recommendation system that should make life easier for developers, but it could also lead to higher prices for games in some countries.

Steam currently supports 39 different currencies, and that's a lot of monies for developers to deal with, especially small indies. As Valve said in today's announcement, it's easy enough to decide you're going to charge $20 for your latest release, but what's it going to cost in Qatari riyals or Norwegian krone? Rather than forcing everyone to horse around with manual exchange rate conversions, Steam makes recommendations across all currencies, based on your US dollar pricing.

"We think it’s a helpful guide, but with purchasing power and foreign exchange rates constantly evolving, we needed to make significant changes to those conversion recommendations to stay current," Valve said in the pricing recommendation update.

"We’re also committing to keeping this guide as valuable as it can be by establishing a more regular cadence to review prices. We’ll take a close look at these recommendations on an annual basis, and make adjustments accordingly."

That all seems quite reasonable. But the new price recommendations, shared on Twitter by SteamDB, reflect some astonishing increases. On a $59.99 game, for instance, the recommended price in Turkish lira jumped from ₺92 to ₺510, a 454% increase. The Argentine peso went up even more, from AR$649 to AR$3800, an increase of 485%. Other increases are less egregious but still noteworthy: Steam's recommended prices in Russian rubles are up 75%, the Indian rupee 80%, the Kazakhstani tenge increased by 97%, and the Polish zloty went up by 28%. Even my beloved Canadian dollar went up, although by a more inflation-correlated 13%.

(Image credit: Valve (via SteamDB))

To be clear, these increases do not reflect an increase in actual prices on Steam, only in the pricing that Steam recommends to developers, who are free to charge whatever they want in whatever regions they want. Nonetheless, it could have an impact on some games: Busy indie developers trying to release games on Steam probably don't want to sink a whole lot of time into figuring out unique prices for, say, Colombia and Switzerland, so at least some of them are likely to take advantage of Valve's recommendations to just get it done.

The massive increase in Turkish and Argentine pricing specifically could be driven by Valve's efforts to curtail region-swapping—the practice of using VPNs to purchase games at cheap prices. Some developers have taken individual steps to combat region swapping: Motion Twin, for instance, increased the price of Dead Cells in Turkey and Argentina earlier this year because "a significant portion of sales in the last year came from these two countries, without a corresponding increase in players there."

"The percent of our total sales from a given country will roughly equal the percent of our total players from that country," the studio wrote. "For Argentina & Turkey, their percent of total sales is 3-4X the amount of the percent of their total players.

"By no coincidence, the price of Dead Cells and DLC in these two countries are by far the lowest in dollar/euro terms, so it is extremely likely that people are changing their region to take advantage of a 70-90% reduction in price."

Fluctuations in exchange rates can also impact regional pricing recommendations, although Valve said that it's not the only factor that goes into it. From the updated Steamworks pricing page:

---

It's tempting to treat pricing as a simple problem of foreign exchange rates and tie each currency's price equivalency to the exchange rate. But that kind of strategy vastly oversimplifies the disparate economic circumstances from one territory to another. And while exchange rates do have macroeconomic consequences, they generally don't have short term impacts on an individual consumer's purchasing.

Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors. But in the case of games on Steam, we also drill down more specifically to entertainment purchasing to better inform those decisions.

All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence, so that we're keeping pace with economic changes over time.

---

Even with the recommended price increases, games in many of these regions remain considerably cheaper than they are in US pricing. AR$3,800 works out to about $24.50, while ₺510 is $27.40—each is still less than half of the cost of the game in the US. But the percentage increase is massive, and the net income per capita in both of those nations (and many others on the list) is significantly lower than that of the US. Developers who adopt the higher price recommendations may see reduced region swapping, but it's also going to put a lot more financial stress on consumers in impacted regions.

Some users on Reddit don't think the new recommendations will have much impact on big releases, because major publishers don't pay any attention to recommended pricing anyway—and generally charge more. "RE4 Remake was 25% above the new price even before the change, and FIFA 22 (yes, last year's) went for twice as much," redditor SchrodingerSemicolon wrote. "What this does is just increase prices across the board for those games that did follow [the guide] before."

Indie games are a different matter, however, because as several redditors pointed out, indie developers are the ones most likely to follow pricing recommendations. Indonesian gamer arhcerwartune said in a "frustration rant" on Reddit that "we got a big hit of +30% to +73% on games priced $10-30 which [is] the indie spot. I understand it's because [of] inflation and stuff but it's broken the purpose of REGIONAL PRICING."

I've reached out to Valve for more information on the recommended price increases, and will update if I receive a reply.

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[After 18 years, the precursor to Garry's Mod appears on Steam]

We all know Garry's Mod, the landmark physics sandbox mod for Valve's Source Engine that can be used for everything from creating custom game modes to messing around with Half-Life 2 characters. Since it first appeared in 2004, and was published by Valve as a standalone game in 2006, Garry's Mod has sold over 18 million copies, all under a steady $10 price tag.

But before Garry's Mod there was JBMod (Steam page), the first ever mod for the Source Engine. The mod was created to enable the physics gun (or physgun), a tool cut from Half-Life 2 that operated similarly to the gravity gun, allowing players to pick up and manipulate items using a blue beam of light.

As sometimes happens with mod projects, work on JBMod by its creator, JB55 (JackBox55), didn't last long before being passed off to another modder, but Garry Newman used JBMod as a source of inspiration, experimenting with his own mod to spawn manhacks and create rocket launchers that fired melons. Soon Garry's Mod (then known as GMod) had more features like the physgun and the ability to rope or weld objects together, and eventually its famous sandbox map, gm_construct, to serve as a physics playground. 

Despite initial criticism that Garry's Mod was too similar to JBMod, players began flocking to Newman's sandbox. The modders working on JBMod couldn't keep up with Garry's Mod's growing list of features, and eventually development stopped altogether.

Better late than never, I guess: As spotted by PCGamesN, JBMod has finally appeared on Steam, 18 years later. "The initial Steam release brings the original mod from 2004 to a more modern engine. Stay tuned for further updates! As always, JBMod 0.6 is coming soon," reads the mod's Steam page, which doesn't appear to have any official involvement from JBMod's original creator.

I tried out JBMod briefly today, and there's a sandbox map with item-spawning stations and the physgun, with console commands enabled to spawn items or load maps from Source Engine games you currently have installed. Beyond a quick glimpse at how the mod works, or a nostalgia hit for people who played with it back in 2004, there's not a whole lot there, especially compared with Garry's Mod. Still, it's never not fun to fling physics objects around, though the options for "Find a Server" and "Create a Server" are followed by the words "Not Recommended."

In response to the mod finally making its way to Steam after all these years, Newman says JBMod wasn't just a source of inspiration for Garry's Mod, but provided a lot of motivation to continue working on it:

I was actually terrified of jbmod when I was making gmod.. they always claimed to be just about to make a huge release that would render us redundant. This is one of the reasons I worked so hard for so long to push it forward so it couldn't get caught. https://t.co/jDvz1zFqHaOctober 9, 2022

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"I was actually terrified of jbmod when I was making gmod," Newman said on Twitter. "They always claimed to be just about to make a huge release that would render us redundant. This is one of the reasons I worked so hard for so long to push it forward so it couldn't get caught."

He needn't have worried: Garry's Mod has been one of the most-played games on Steam for nearly the entirety of its existence, and I don't imagine JBMod is any more of a threat now that it's on Steam too.

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[AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards will not use 12VHPWR power connector]

As we await the new generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards, which are set to be announced next week, we are learning a bit more about what's powering these graphics cards. Well, more specifically, what's not powering these graphics cards. 

Radeon senior vice president Scott Herkelman confirmed in a Twitter reply that the Radeon RX 6000-series and the upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs (presumably called Radeon RX 7000-series) would not be using the 12VHPWR power adapter.

Introduced with the ATX 3.0 spec, which is published by Intel, the 12VHPWR adapter delivers up to 600W of power directly to a GPU via a single cable. It's primarily in use today for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090.

AMD, however, will choose to stick with the tried and tested PCIe 8-pin connectors for its next-gen cards, likely two of them. Though we have seen some high-end cards arrive with three in the past.

AMD's confirmation comes after reports that bending the 600W 12VHPWR power cable close to the connector in the RTX 4090 could potentially cause overheating issues. Some Reddit users have also said that the power connectors on their RTX 4090 graphics card have melted, with some blaming the connector itself, though the exact cause of these unfortunate failures is yet to be determined. Nvidia says it is investigating.

AMD has already teased that its new GPUs will be more power efficient than Nvidia's power-hungry RTX 4090 and its 40-series brethren. RDNA 3 GPUs are looking to offer over 50% efficiency increase over its previous RDNA 2 generation GPUs, too.

We expect to see more information on November 3 as AMD officially announces its RDNA 3 GPUs at a 'together we advance_gaming' live stream. 

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[Welcome BBlove]

Hello BBlove,

Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

BBlove joined on the 10/25/2022.

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[The Steam Halloween Sale is live]

Halloween is still a week away, but the sweet treats are here already—on Steam, at least, where the Steam Scream Fest is now underway.

Predictably, Steam's big Halloween extravaganza is focused on the spooky and the scary: Horror, survival horror, dark fantasy, Lovecraftian tales, and other forms of supernatural shenanigans. A number of games holding seasonal events will also be spotlighted during the sale.

A few examples to help get you started:

• Thymesia
• GTFO
• Devour
• Darkwood
• Phasmophobia
• The Forest
• V Rising
• Gloomwood
• Ghost Exile
• Lunch Lady
• Darkest Dungeon
• The Mortuary Asssistant
• Little Nightmares
• Chernobylite
• Outlast
• In Silence
• Cursed to Golf
• Hunt: Showdown
• Dead By Daylight
• Endoparasitic
• Pathologic 2
• Carrion
• Conscript (demo only at the moment)

And if you prefer your Halloween horrors with a little bit of a softer edge, there's also a "Silly" category you can dive into, featuring games like Cult of the Lamb, Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp, Plants vs. Zombies, and Ghostbusters Remastered.

That's more than a few recommendations, yes, but in my defense there's a lot of good stuff going on in this sale and it's easy to get carried away. There are also new profile backgrounds, avatars, stickers, and other such digital items available in the Steam Points Shop.  

A number of demos for current and upcoming games are also available during the event. One game that's doing something a little different on that front is the survival horror shooter You Will Die Here, which is running six different demos over the course of the event, each of them building on the events of the last.

The Steam Scream Fest is live now and runs until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on November 1.

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[The Lord of the Rings survival game has dwarves reclaiming a post-apocalyptic Moria]

In the Third Age of Middle-earth, The One Ring was destroyed and Sauron vanquished. But it wasn't a time of celebration for the dwarves. 

The underground kingdom of Moria, also known as Khazad-dûm, had plunged into ruin. As the story goes, the dwarves had dug too deeply in search of mithril and accidentally awakened the Balrog of Morgoth, who killed most of Moria's dwarven population and caused the rest to flee the most fabled of the dwarven realms.

Moria wouldn't remain empty for long as goblins, orcs, and cave-trolls plundered the city. Gandalf eventually defeated the Balrog, but as the Fourth Age began, Moria remained a stronghold of evil and darkness.

That's where The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria picks up. The co-op survival game from Free Range Games and North Beach Games, announced this summer and releasing in 2023, is set in the Fourth Age as the dwarves set out to finally reclaim their kingdom beneath the Misty Mountains. As you might guess, mining, crafting, and base-building deep in the ruins of Moria won't be an easy task.

"Khazad-dûm is the site of a major catastrophe for the Dwarves," Return to Moria's game director Jon-Paul Dumont says. "And like any good post-apocalypse setting, nature has reclaimed much of it."

8 Games to Rule Them All

(Image credit: WB Games)

Dive into Middle-earth with our list of the best Lord of the Rings games.

That's not entirely a bad thing for the dwarves, as various subterranean creatures can be hunted for food and wild flora can be harvested in the cavern biomes. "There are abundant resources, especially for Dwarves, but they are hard to get to. The players will have to be clever to navigate its steep drops, collapsed tunnels and rickety platforms."

Navigating the ruins of Moria means contending with different hazards and environments. "A major part of the game is exploring the ruins of Khazad-dûm. That means city areas, caverns, mines, the darkest deeps and flooded chambers. Some lit naturally, some with ancient crystal and some totally dark. We're working hard on making sure the players will get a diverse set of environments to play in."

(Image credit: Free Range Games)

And of course the darkness is also filled with enemies, all those orcs, goblins, and trolls, the former servants of the vanquished Sauron who aren't ready to give up the ancient city.

"But Moria is not Mordor, so they are not going to be organized into an army, they will be more factional than we've seen before," Dumont says. "Part of the world building is also asking the question of how many orcs are left? What's going on with them after the fall of Sauron? They've had their dark lords disappear for millennia at a time before, do they believe that is what is happening again?"

Forging a path

(Image credit: Free Range Games)

"Dwarves are a great fit for survival," Dumont says. "In the best games of the genre, players get nothing for free, they have to make everything themselves. This fits with the image of Dwarves being the ultimate crafters and builders. They can't help but fire up forges and start metalworking right from the beginning of the game."

Crafting is central in Return to Moria. "We're all about the fantasy of giant, hot forges as you hone your metalworking skills," Dumont says. Players will mine for silver, gold, iron, and much deeper down, mithril. Various plants can be harvested for experimentation in dwarven breweries, and these boozy crafting stations can be "multiple stories tall." Delving deep into Moria also means unearthing long-lost crafting recipes first discovered by dwarves thousands of years ago. "The deeper you go, the more wondrous technology you find from the height of the Dwarves' power," Dumont says.

"By the late game, a huge focus is not just building a base to survive but restoring the ancient architecture of Khazad-dûm. The kinds of building blocks the players will have range from small to colossal. So, if you are building from scratch, you can make your dream fortress. Or if you are rebuilding you can clean it up and add to it."

Surviving the Pit

(Image credit: Free Range Games)

Along with familiar survival systems like hunger, energy, temperature, and the need for rest and sleep, there are two additional systems players will need to manage while toiling deep underground: light and noise.

Here's an exciting phrase for you: BEARD TECH.

"Darkness is a constant threat that can drain your will to continue, so you have to light the Black Pit," says Dumont. "The other mechanic that will get you in trouble is alerting the orcs by being carelessly noisy. Not to say it's a stealth game: after all, the Dwarves love to break rock and sing about breaking rock. It means choosing when to balance making noise and avoiding alerting the threats around them. Of course, if you eliminate the threat first, you can be as loud as you want."

Return to Moria is playable solo or with up to eight players, with scaled difficulty to provide a challenge depending on the size of each dwarven party. And as players make their way deeper into Moria, they'll discover more of the history of the ancient city.

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(Image credit: Free Range Games)

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Above: Gallery of concept art for The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria

"The other major part of our game is the intersection between procedural generation and environmental storytelling," Dumont says. "Each biome will be arranged and generated differently for each server, but will also help tell the story of Khazad-dûm. It feels like a real place, with a thousand years of history layered into the rock."

If you're not interested in a dwarven history lesson, that's okay too, says Dumont. "If you want to learn more about Moria and Dwarves and what they eat and where they farm and who Durin II was, we will have that. If you want to just break rocks and break orc skulls, you can do that too."

Dwarf-building

(Image credit: Free Range Games)

And as for your personal dwarven customization options, here's an exciting phrase for you: BEARD TECH. The words have been written on a Post-It on the Return to Moria board since the very beginning of development, according to Dumont.

"We've come up with some pretty stylish beards for players to choose, along with choices like color, adornments, piercings, scars and tattoos. Between the Dwarf Creator's body morph options, voice accents and customization of the crafted armor, players should be able to make any flavor of dwarf identity they want," Dumont says.

Dumont is especially excited for players to discover another system of Return to Moria: dwarven singing. "It's such a crucial part of the world Tolkien gave us. We have a whole soundtrack of original songs inspired by Tolkien's work, sea shanties, work songs, and jigs you can rattle off at the pub."

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria is planned for 2023 and will release on the Epic Games Store. If you're interested in more details, YouTube channel Nerd of The Rings hosted a chat with game director Jon-Paul Dumont and other members of the Return to Moria development team, which you can watch here.

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[Some of The Witcher show writers 'actively disliked' the books and games]

The Witcher has been a big (and, I think, somewhat unexpected) hit for Netflix, and it's done so while remaining reasonably faithful to the original source material. But according to writer and producer Beau DeMayo, not everyone on The Witcher writing team was enthusiastic about sticking to Witcher author Andrzej Sapskowski's vision.

DeMayo, who's serving as head writer on an animated X-Men project that's set to debut in 2023, told The Direct that he was careful to ensure that only X-Men fans were hired for the writing team because of bad experiences he'd had with non-fans on other shows—one in particular.

"I've been on shows—namely Witcher—where some of the writers were not [fans] or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material)," DeMayo said. "It's a recipe for disaster and bad morale. Fandom as a litmus test checks egos, and makes all the long nights worth it. You have to respect the work before you're allowed to add to its legacy."

DeMayo is credited as a writer on two episodes of Netflix's Witcher series, and a co-producer on two others, and he also co-produced and wrote the screenplay for The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, the animated tale of young Vesemir. He's clearly in a position to know what he's talking about, in other words, but even so it's surprising to hear that writers on the show were dismissive of the source material. Obscure Polish low fantasy isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, sure, but Netflix and those involved in it made a point of leaning into the show's commitment to Andrzej Sapkowski's short stories and novels.

Here, for instance, is Henry Cavill lovingly reading from The Last Wish:

Showrunner Lauren Hissrich also paid tribute to Sapkowski's work, telling IGN ahead of the show's debut in 2019 that "we're all big fans of the books."

"We're all big fans of the videogames as well, but this is solely based on the books and that's really where we drew our inspiration from—starting with the short stories," Hissrich said.

The reaction to DeMayo's revelation on social media has been what you might describe as split: Some say it's impressive that The Witcher was so good despite discord in the writers room, while others say that writers room discord explains why The Witcher failed to live up to its promise. A few pointed out—and I think this is probably the fairest take—that good scriptwriters should be able to adapt and improve on source material even when they find it sub-par—and that Sapkowski's original work isn't beyond reproach. 

Diehard fans can also sometimes lose perspective on what actually works in an adaptation or spinoff, and end up deep in the weeds as a result. Sometimes you need a little skepticism and pushback to keep things flowing. And, frankly, turning niche fantasy tales from a virtually unknown author into mainstream entertainment is a success that speaks for itself. Whatever was going on in that writers room, it worked pretty well.

(I will admit that I'm a little cranky about the show's treatment of Eskel—not because I have any great attachment to Sapkowski's characterization, but because it means no drunken prank calls to Novigrad wizards.)

Interestingly, the success of The Witcher on Netflix actually sparked a surge of interest in Sapkowski's fiction—for those just getting into it, we've got a very handy guide on what order to read the original Witcher books and short stories in.

 

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[People are grinding down the heat spreaders on their Ryzen 7000 CPUs for better cooling]

Are you looking for a way to lower your Ryzen 7000-series CPU temperature while also voiding your warranty? Sure you are. Some PC builders have actually resorted to grinding off the heat spreader on the Zen 4 processors to reportedly help improve cooling. 

PC hardware YouTuber JayzTwoCents (via Tom's Hardware) reduced the temperature of a Ryzen 9 7950X up to 10°C by shaving down the CPU's IHS by .08mm. The internal heat spreader on the Ryzen 7000 CPUs is 3.6mm, which is on the thicker side to make them compatible with coolers on AM4 motherboards. 

This method is called lapping, which requires a grinding tool, cleaning materials, and a lot of patience. You do this to remove tiny air gaps between the CPU and heatsink for better heat transfer, though in this case, it's simply to reduce the thickness of the heat spreader. The goal is the same; better cooling for better performance. 

Lapping isn't a new technique; it's an old one for overclockers. But it's fallen out of favor in recent years, alongside replacing an unsoldered chip's thermal paste with a liquid metal or a more suitable paste. Nowadays, chipmakers tend to do this stuff themselves. Clearly, we were overdue for a comeback.

JayzTwoCents saw a decrease in temperatures from around 95°C to 85°C. He saw a slight temperature bump (approximately 90°C) when maxing out all the cores to 5.40GHz. Still, it has surprisingly effective results despite needing a grinding tool and some sandpaper.  

This hack isn't for amateurs, and you need to make sure you've removed any excess particulates and residue after the lapping process since those are conductive, and that would be bad news for your CPU and PC when you boot up.
 

Cooling off

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Attempting this modification on your CPU will void the warranty, so practice extreme caution. If you grind it too low and don't mount the CPU right, the gap from the CPU to the cooler will cause a temperature spike. The same issue can happen if you opt for removing IMS entirely, which is what hardware YouTuber der8auer did and saw even more significant decreases in temperature of up to 20 degrees Celsius. 

Again, this used to be something we did in ye olden days of processors (a half-decade ago), and you can still purchase copper IHS kits if you dare risk removing the IHS from a soldered CPU.

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is a powerful multithread monster known to run hot, so I can see why hardware enthusiasts are looking for ways to cool things down without spending cash on an expensive CPU cooler. Also, grinding and sanding stuff is objectively a fun thing to do.

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[Shutterstock to offer AI art tool to users and pay artists who helped train it]

The image library service, Shutterstock, has decided to fully adopt AI-generated art with a new partnership with OpenAI, the makers of popular AI image tool DALL-E 2. 

The new partnership will allow customers to type in a request and instantly receive an image generated to match their request. Essentially, integrating the core OpenAI API into the Shutterstock platform, likely with some bespoke adjustments.

Customers will be able to use the tool sometime within "the coming months."

"The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E," says Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO. "We're excited for Shutterstock to offer DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of artists' creative workflows."

In return for helping out with the original training of DALL-E, Shutterstock contributors will receive compensation for their role in the development of the technology. Shutterstock also notes in its FAQ for the tool that it will "compensate all artists who were involved in the creation of each new piece of content."

Are these contributors unknowingly signing their own death warrant and being paid an amount to do so, or is that a gross overestimation of the abilities of AI art generation tools?

The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

I fall on the side of there will always be a place for human-made art. I'd like to think most would agree with that statement, too. However, it's impossible to deny the rapid increase in quality and ability of AI art generation tools. Those which have arrived due to increasingly impressive algorithms but also large human-made image sets. 

Shutterstock's model, in which contributors are paid for their contribution to an AI-generated image, does sound at least fairer than the more common alternative: artists' images are scraped for use in a dataset without recompense. Yet it does draw into question copyright and image ownership.

AI-generated art is a massively expanding and growing technology, there's no doubt about that, but there have been doubts regarding the value we put on AI-generated images versus those created by artists, and whether these are in any way comparable.

The other hotly-debated point is regarding copyright for AI-generated art. These tools are trained on large datasets of images and how these datasets are obtained has become a point of concern. One artist actually found their own private medical record photographs within a popular AI training data set.

Major Shutterstock rival and image platform, Getty Images, has outright banned all AI art from its platform citing copyright concerns.

Speaking to The Verge, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters said of the decision: "There’s a lot of questions out there right now—about who owns the copyright to that material, about the rights that were leveraged to create that material—and we don’t want to put our customers into that legal risk area... There have been assertions that copyright is owned by x, y, z, by certain platforms, but I don’t think those questions have been answered."

"I think we’re watching some organizations and individuals and companies being reckless... I think the fact that these questions are not being addressed is the issue here. In some case, they’re just being thrown to the wayside. I think that’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s responsible. I think it could be illegal."

Screen queens

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Shutterstock also does not allow AI-generated images to be uploaded by others to its platform, unless generated by the integrated OpenAI tool. That doesn't protect it entirely from copyright concerns, however.

In the FAQ for the service, Shutterstock asks users to not use AI art generated that may infringe on the intellectual property of others, such as using a recognisable trademark. It also says if you use the name of a celebrity, the tool is much more likely to actually depict that person using images in its image set, and asks users to not use these images for commercial use.

This was always going to become a divisive topic. Those companies at the forefront of digital image rights management, such as Shutterstock and Getty, now find themselves facing another fork in the road presented by AI image generation, and both are taking somewhat different paths. There's no simple resolution, ultimately, but I do expect to hear many challenges to these AI models for more years to come.

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[In a new Marvel card game, you kill Uncle Ben to get Spider-Man]

Marvel Snap is a new free-to-play card game set in everyone's favourite superhero universe, and it's got some considerable pedigree behind it. The game has been developed by former Hearthstone director Ben Brode’s studio Second Dinner Studios

, and is out now on mobile and PC. It goes for a shorter, more action-packed match experience than the likes of Hearthstone: games are over quickly, you play a lot of them, and it showers you with freebies.

One element of Marvel Snap has quickly attracted some attention, however: the Uncle Ben card (thanks, Kotaku). Lord knows who needs to hear Spider-Man's origin story at this point but, in almost all tellings of it, Peter Parker initially makes selfish use of his powers before letting a thief escape. This thief then goes on to kill Uncle Ben and, upon apprehending him, Spider-Man realises with horror that with great power etcetera etcetera.

These stories are now so overdone that it's easy to forget the primal impact that once had for the character, with the death of his beloved uncle proving the driving force for the young Spider-Man's character. This is now reflected in Marvel Snap by the Uncle Ben card, which uses a fairly common CCG mechanic: you put it down to get destroyed and replaced with another card.

Thus Uncle Ben is a 1-cost minion with the text "When this card is destroyed, add Spider-Man to your hand." So you put him down early, get him wiped from the board as soon as possible, and then you'll have the more powerful Spider-Man card to play with.

I'm really not sure whether this is so funny it's cool, or just another "press F to pay respects" moment. On the one hand videogames do suit this sillier side of comics, where all the characters are constantly dying and being brought back to life. On the other, I've never seen Uncle Ben's role in the Spider-Man mythos so starkly spelled-out: the guy just exists to die, over and over, and spark a Spidey appearance.

It's hilarious. Or is, at the very least, a weird old card: though apparently Marvel Snap is pretty great outside of this. What's especially odd is that, with a card like this, you'd typically combo it with a card that can destroy it for you: Carnage in this case. The first season of the game is Spider-Man themed and it's singularly odd that you can theoretically run a deck that plays out a little Spider-Man origin as you get it set up. You can try out Marvel Snap here.

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