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Intel's next-gen Raptor Lake CPUs are headed to our gaming PCs on October 20. The first chips to arrive from the 13th Gen will be K-series chips, favoured by us PC gamers for our gaming machines, and we have high hopes for what they might offer. We already know to expect a significant uplift in both single-threaded and multithreaded performance but Intel has now offered further explanation as to how it hopes to give AMD's recently released Zen 4 processors a run for their money.
At launch, six 13th Gen processors will be available: Core i9 13900K, Core i9 13900KF, Core i7 13700K, Core i7 13700KF, Core i5 13600K, and Core i5 13600KF.
The 'K' chips come with onboard graphics, Intel's UHD Graphics 770, and slightly higher recommended retail price tags ($25 more) than the graphics-less 'KF' versions.
We've heard a lot about these new processors over the past few months, so let's say none of what I'm about to tell you will come as a complete surprise. Although I have been able to speak with a few key folks over at Intel about the upcoming 13th Gen architecture/CPUs, and there are some less talked about improvements that might be of interest to the budding PC gamer.
First off, Intel is promising a varied uplift in gaming performance over its last-gen Alder Lake processors. Somewhere between an impressive 1.2X improvement in games such as League of Legends or Rainbow Six: Siege through to generally higher fps in most titles tested internally by the company. With gaming workloads preferring single-threaded performance, and Intel touting up to a 15% increase there, these benchmarks fall roughly in line with our expectations.
However, Intel does also note a slight decrease in performance in games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Metro Exodus.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Intel)
Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Intel)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Intel)I had a chance to chat to Marcus Kennedy, general manager of gaming, creator, and esports, ahead of the Intel Innovation event and asked him why we're seeing that dip, and he largely chalked it up to game releases and updates perhaps not playing as nicely with the increase in Efficient-cores (E-cores) on these new 13th Gen new processors. He also cited potential bugs or simple benchmarking variance as potential causes.
"If you looked at that same graph when we got our A0 silicon 13th generation (early test sample), it was way more all the way to the left. We expect, by and large, that games will all take advantage of the increased performance and increased cores, faster frequency, all of that, without seeing regression."
We'll be getting these chips in for review and Metro Exodus is in our benchmarking suite, so we'll be able to test this for ourselves soon enough, anyways.
We know that there's a tonne of headroom in these bad boys.
Marcus KennedyGenerally, it appears as though Intel will manage to sustain top gaming performance ahead of AMD's Zen 4 processors with the 13th Gen. Again, it's something we need to test for ourselves, but seeing as neither the Ryzen 9 7950X or Ryzen 7 7700X managed to break Intel's Core i9 12900K in gaming in our reviews of those two chips, there's no real question that the faster 13900K will manage the same, too.
Though it's worth mentioning we have no direct comparison from Intel yet, as its benchmarks above were carried out using AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X and not its latest lineup (which weren't out at the time).
Kennedy also tells me Intel expects zero issues with game compatibility on Raptor Lake on release, as those issues have been all patched out since Alder Lake's release with the hybrid architecture in tow.
Image 1 of 2(Image credit: Intel)Image 2 of 2(Image credit: Intel)Faster P-cores are clearly a big part of that performance uplift with Raptor lake, as you can see in the graph above. With the Core i9 13900K managing up to 5.8GHz out of the box. For reference the Core i9 12900K managed to hit 5.2GHz out of the box, so we're talking a lot more speed here. Intel has also stated that speeds of over 6GHz should be well within reach for these chips, and beyond that, with LN2, over 8GHz. At least that I can attest to that myself, as during a recent trip to Intel's Haifa lab in Israel I watched a top overclocker hit 8.1GHz on an Intel Core i9 13900K (and reportedly 8.2GHz earlier that day).
"We know that there's a tonne of headroom in these bad boys, so you'll be able to crank it as high as you want, as long as you've got the thermals, as long as you've got the right cooling, we expect a lot of world records to fall," Kennedy tells me.
That's partially down to the new Raptor Cove Core design, which is built to offer improved speed paths over the Golden Cove Core design with Alder Lake, but also a slightly upgraded Intel 7 process, which Intel says offers better channel mobility. Intel's Dan Rogers, senior director of mobile product marketing, says that Intel has been able to shift the V-F curve (Voltage/Frequency) for Raptor Lake to offer better performance at high and low voltages, and further improvements to the memory subsystem and ring frequency helps reduce latency for greater gaming performance.
"This lower latency path to memory is critical for game performance, delivering 5% faster frame rates on average, just for this memory upgrade," Rogers continues.
Intel says a smaller portion of Raptor Lake performance comes down to an increase in L2 cache per core. The Core i9 13900K comes with 32MB of L2 cache in total, another big uplift over the Core i9 12900K which had less than half that at 14MB. That's 4MB per cluster of E-cores and 2MB per P-core. The L3 cache on the Core i9 13900K is also increased to 36MB.
A new dynamic caching policy called INI will see Raptor Lake swap between inclusive and non-inclusive caching where required, including in games, through machine learning and telemetry data.
Intel Raptor Lake K-series CPU specs Core i9 13900K Core i7 13700K Core i5 13600K Cores (P+E) / threads 8+16 / 32 8+8 / 24 6+8 / 20 L3 cache 36MB 30MB 24MB L2 cache 32MB 24MB 20MB P-core Turbo clock / base clock (GHz) 5.8 / 3 5.4 / 3.4 5.1 / 3.9 E-core Turbo clock / base clock (GHz) 4.3 / 2.2 4.2 / 2.5 3.9 / 2.6 Unlocked Yes Yes Yes Graphics Intel UHD Graphics 770 Intel UHD Graphics 770 Intel UHD Graphics 770 Total CPU PCIe lanes 20 20 20 Max memory speed DDR5 5600, DDR4 3200 DDR5 5600, DDR4 3200 DDR5 5600, DDR4 3200 Processor Base Power (W) 125 125 125 Max Turbo Power (W) 253 253 181 Recommended Customer Pricing (RCP) $589 $409 $319 RCP for KF version (no iGPU) $564 $384 $294 Further to speedier Performance-cores (P-cores) useful for gaming, Intel is increasing core counts with the 13th Gen. We're talking about an increase in E-cores here, up to eight more E-cores per chip, which will run at up to 600MHz faster than Alder Lake. That makes for more cores available to your OS to offload background tasks and less critical operations while you're gaming or for more multitasking chops while you're doing other things.
"Our E-cores now achieve both the IPC and the frequency of our original Skylake 14 nanometer cores at a considerably lower power," Rogers says.
A big part utilising these E-cores in Intel's hybrid architecture, first introduced with Alder Lake and the 12th Gen, is what it calls the Thread Director. This works with the OS to help provide information necessary for the OS to better decide how to divide up work between the P-cores and E-cores. The Thread Director is receiving an upgrade with the 13th Gen, with updated thread class boundaries via machine learning techniques, better thread classification, better handling of low quality of service tasks, and the ability to differentiate between user-initiated tasks and background ones. According to Kennedy, this upgrade, which is in further collaboration with Microsoft on Windows 11 and included in the new Windows 11 update, should see Thread Director simply "run better in general."
This lower latency path to memory is critical for game performance.
Dan RogersThe increase in E-cores with Raptor Lake makes the Core i9 13900K something of a multithreaded monster, with 32 threads available to it. Though the increase in cores could also make a big difference to gen-on-gen performance further down the stack.
The Core i7 13700K will ship with as many cores as the Core i9 12900K yet will come with the same recommended retail price as the Core i7 12700K at $409. The Core i5 13600K also features four more E-cores than the Core i5 12600K, however, is priced slightly higher than its predecessor at $319.
As we've seen with previous Intel generations, the cheaper chips in the lineup should make for mean gaming processors, but it's there that Intel will need to be the most competitive. AMD's Ryzen 7 7600X is shaping up to be a big improvement on the popular Ryzen 5 5600X, and so Intel will need to bring its best to market to compete.
Though this time AMD, and by extension PC gamers, doesn't have the benefit of a far cheaper platform versus Intel. With AMD's long-standing AM4 platform and backwards compatibility, and Intel Alder Lake requiring a new motherboard for compatibility, AMD's cheaper chips appeared the better overall buys once you considered the entire PC build. Whereas with the Ryzen 7000-series, AMD has shifted to the new AM5 socket, requiring a new motherboard, and has ditched DDR4 support. That means it's pricier DDR5 memory for AMD's option or bust.
Intel's Raptor Lake platform may prove slightly cheaper with existing 600-series motherboards already in the market, and with support for the cheaper DDR4 memory standard, though we'll have to see how launch day prices work out. Supply for all these chips will be a major determining factor in their actual on the shelf retail prices, and I'm cautious to say either one will be cheaper in the long run so soon after launch.
(Image credit: Intel)If you're more focused on performance and less on affordability, there are also new Z790 chipset motherboards launching alongside Intel's new 13th Gen processors. Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI, and more are all planning pretty serious high-end boards at launch, and I would suspect that cheaper boards are to follow.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the restThe new Z790 chipset offers a few upgrades, namely up to eight more chipset PCIe 4.0 lanes and up to five USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. The exact configuration of a Z790 motherboard will vary, but I imagine the top boards will take advantage of some of these new options.
Yet even with this new information from Intel today there's still a lot to consider when choosing between Intel and AMD for your next PC build, and we've only half the picture. We need to test for ourselves to know which we'll recommend for the next year or perhaps more, but it already looks to be a close race between the two. Whichever CPU ends up as the best CPU for gaming it will be an immense chip, that much is certain.
It comes down to a consistently competitive AMD versus a resurgent Intel: whoever comes out on top, it's a great time to be upgrading your CPU. Or at least at the very high end, we'll have to wait longer for the more affordable options.
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Metal: Hellsinger, the high-speed headbanging FPS from Hell, features a "great soundtrack and well-integrated rhythmic combat," we said in our 78% review. But what's a poor gamer to do if they want to rock out against the hordes of Hades but, well, they really just don't care for metal?
Enter the power of mods. Announced today by The Outsiders and Funcom, Metal: Hellsinger's free modding tool enables users to insert their own music into the game, and make it react appropriately to the player's performance. Want to be a K-Pop Killer? A Disco Death Machine? An EDM MDK? All things, at least insofar as musical massacres go, are possible.
To rock out with your mods out, you'll need Metal: Hellsinger on Steam or Game Pass—either the full game or the free demo will do—and a copy of FMOD Studio. With that in hand, head over to metalhellsinger.com/modding and snag the modding package itself: It's 383MB in size, so not too bulky. You'll also find a modding tutorial there, which explains the basics of the process.
A few points of note: You'll need to use the FMOD Studio template provided by The Outsiders (a blank FMOD Studio project won't work), all FMOD features should work but some "may have side effects" that could impact performance, and the music you use needs to have a fixed beats-per-minute because Metal: Hellsinger doesn't currently have runtime beat detection and so can't adjust to tempo changes on the fly. (Sorry, prog fans.)
Here's a crash course video:
The mod tools open the door to all kinds of new genres in Metal: Hellsinger, and to more metal too, all of which can be shared with other players via the Steam Workshop. And despite the BPM limitation, which I hope will be addressed in a future update, the results as seen in the Jazz: Bebopswinger video at the top of the page speaks for itself. It's a little thematically jumbled, sure—basically the videogame equivalent of Charlie Parker covering Dream Evil, which, yeah, it's kinda weird—but it works! To me, that's pretty metal.
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I thought multiplayer shooters had run out of ways to surprise me, but I had a genuine shock to the system yesterday morning watching this gameplay trailer for The Finals, a free-to-play FPS in development by the ex-Battlefield devs at Embark Studios. The trailer shows a brief look at what's apparently possible in The Finals: Entire buildings crumbling into hundreds of pieces at the whim of a grenade launcher while players parkour across the falling debris like Nathan Drake.
What I saw didn't line up with my current understanding of what's possible in online games. You can't do destruction this big in a multiplayer lobby, so how is The Finals pulling it off? If I hadn't seen it myself in a remote presentation by Embark, I wouldn't believe it.
The Finals is a team-based FPS set in a virtual game show. The premise immediately brought back memories of Ubisoft's mediocre, now shuttered battle royale game Hyper Scape, but this definitely isn't that. The Finals' main mode is played in 12-player lobbies (four teams of three) on a variety of completely destructible maps based on real-world locations. Embark called it an "extraction mode," but its description sounds more like a normal respawn mode. Players fight over boxes of coins and compete to hold the most dough by the end of the round.
So there's a lot of standard shooter stuff going on, but everything revolves around The Finals' server-side destruction tech, which promises that players can flatten "everything from furniture to entire buildings." Embark is really proud of the behind-the-scenes technology making this possible, so much so that it won't comment on how it works before The Finals releases. Mysterious! And another reason to stay a little skeptical, despite the video clips we're seeing.
Embark co-founder and chief creative officer Rob Runesson expects The Finals' unique tech to change how similar games are made going forward. "I think that many other studios that are working on dynamic shooters will panic now," he said. Creative director Gustav Tellby chimed in, "Well, let's hope they do."
The answer is probably a lot of smart math aided by generational advancements. It certainly doesn't hurt that The Finals is leaving last-gen console hardware behind. It's planned to release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, but not PS4 or Xbox One.
Dynamic destruction has long been a white whale in multiplayer games. There's a reason that most online games with destructible worlds, like Fortnite or Minecraft, are often made up of simple, block-sized pieces that rarely move: every piece of the environment, from its appearance to its location, has to perfectly sync across dozens of players, so keeping it simple makes sense. Some games have achieved truly dynamic destruction, notably Rainbow Six Siege and Battlefield (makes sense that Embark's DICE alums are interested in the challenge), but the scope is relatively small. While Battlefield has select buildings that can be punctured to trigger a canned collapse animation, buildings in The Finals will blow apart like chunks of swiss cheese until gravity brings them down. The dense, crumbly explosions in the trailer reminded me of what Red Faction Guerilla managed to pull off in a singleplayer game in 2009.
Tilleby says this level of destruction is "a holy grail" that Embark has been chasing.
"We want The Finals to be a game about intuitiveness, where if you think something should work, it probably will, and where if you want to play the game a certain way, the game won't stop you," he said. "It's a game that says yes more than it says no."
Malleable city blocks will certainly introduce unpredictability to The Finals unseen in any other multiplayer FPS, but I'm just as interested in the other ways you can interact with the world. The way Embark describes The Finals sounds like a physics-y systems-driven game, almost like an immersive sim. You can pick stuff up and throw it around, set fires, or make sky bridges with a glue cannon ripped straight out of Arkane's Prey. The same glue stuff can be found in barrels and thrown at the ground to create instant cover. Based on how prominent grapple hooks are in the trailer, that may be a default way to get around. Gunplay, unsurprisingly, looks a lot like Battlefield in terms of speed, mobility, and the types of guns on offer (I spotted your standard AK-47 equivalent, a light machine gun, and pistols). It's near future, but definitely not Cyberpunk 2077.
I'm immediately eager to check out The Finals for myself. Blowing stuff up looks like a lot of fun, but the novelty could wear off pretty quick if there's not a fundamentally enjoyable game at its core. Yesterday's press presentation didn't go deep on character customization or monetization, but Embark said there will be a battle pass and lots of cosmetics. The studio is also holding its first playtest later this week from September 29 to October 3, so we'll know soon how well the server-side destruction survives in a real network environment.
"This is not a marketing beat. This is for us to make sure we start building better games together with our community," Runesson said. Embark didn't mention when The Finals is coming out, but we know it'll be sometime in 2023. The studio recently delayed its other game, the co-op robo shooter Arc Raiders to 2023 so that it can focus on getting The Finals out first. Gameplay in the trailer is tagged as pre-alpha, so it's still pretty early.
You can sign up for the playtest on The Finals Steam page, but Embark said only a small number will get in this time.
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Intel is kicking off its Intel Innovation event over in San Jose and to warm-up for his keynote the company's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, did 10 pushups live on stream. It was quite unexpected, but what we do expect from the show is word on Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs and perhaps more on its Arc GPUs. See what I did there?
Forget the pushups, you've missed those forever now because the event is being streamed live—okay, fine, you can check it out at a live stream hosted on another channel called Quasarzone on YouTube—but you can still make it in time for Pat Gelsinger's keynote during Intel Innovation. Watch it over on the Intel website right now, September 27 at 9am PDT.
The event promises some announcements that may appeal to PC gamers, and I'd suspect Gelsinger's keynote to be where those are made first. Michelle Johnston Holthaus, executive vice president and GM of the Client Computing Group at Intel, has already appeared on the stream promising new things for the PC and "next-generation leadership products", so that's got to be Raptor Lake, right?
Intel has already teased plenty about its upcoming CPUs, but so far we've not heard an exact release date or price for these chips, so let's hope that's on the way.
Though I do suspect the event will be littered with more than gaming products, and Intel has already made much mention of AI. So be prepared to learn all about that sort of stuff at the event, too.
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Moondew Nectar is one of the hardest resources to gather in Slime Rancher 2 since it requires you to unlock two separate upgrades, and only spawns in a particular area at a certain time of day. That said, it's pretty valuable since it's the favourite food of the Flutter Slimes, and can be used to get rid of the Flutter Gordo Slime.
If you want to gather some Moondew Nectar for yourself, you're going to have to complete a somewhat lengthy series of steps, but by the end you'll have everything required to farm the nectar whenever you need it. So, here's where Moondew Nectar spawns, how to harvest the resource, as well as where to find the Flutter Slimes you'll feed it to.
How to get the jetpack
The jetpack requires Radiant Ore and Phosphor Plorts (Image credit: Monomi Park)There are two things you need to do in order to get Moondew Nectar, and the first is to acquire the jetpack. To do this, you're going to have to craft the Resource Extractor, and harvest some Phosphor Plorts and Radiant Ore.
It's a little complicated since you also have to unlock the Ember Valley region in the process, but we explain how to do all of this in the linked guide. Once crafted, you can use the jetpack to hover and boost yourself upwards in short stamina-consuming bursts.
How to unlock Starlight Strand
Image 1 of 3The Cotton Gordo Slime is to the west of the conservatory (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 2 of 3Feed the Cotton Gordo 30 veggies to explode him (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 3 of 3The warp activation device is below the Gordo Slime (Image credit: Monomi Park)The next step is to unlock the Starlight Strand region. This island is situated to the south-west and is where you're going to find both Moondew Nectar, and the Flutter Slimes you feed it to. Head west from the conservatory until you find the Cotton Gordo Slime shown on the map above. Feed this giant slime 30 vegetables and it'll explode, revealing a cave with a device that unlocks the warp point to Starlight Strand. Walk on over to the portal and teleport across.
Where to find Moondew Nectar
Image 1 of 4Moondew Nectar is found on the ground (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 2 of 4It's usually located below a blue flower like this one (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 3 of 4There are Flutter Slimes all over the southern pink side of the island (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 4 of 4You can recognise them by their butterfly wings (Image credit: Monomi Park)First thing's first, Moondew Nectar only appears at night, so you're going to want to head to Starlight Strand later in the day. Once there, use your newly acquired jetpack to navigate southwards across the pink side of the island until you find the big blue/pink tree at the centre. Moondew Nectar usually appears below blue flowers like the one in the gallery above, and you should be able to find at least one by that tree.
Now head further south until you find the Flutter Gordo Slime by the ruins. There is usually lots of Moondew Nectar around this area, and if you head east from the Flutter Gordo Slime and across the bridge, you'll also find lots of Flutter Slimes that you can capture and take back to the conservatory. Generally, if you keep an eye out for the blue flowers, you should be able to gather a decent surplus of nectar.
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Last week, a major Twitch streamer admitted he couldn't pay back loans from friends and fans because of a gambling addiction. It was a shocking revelation but, as the week went on, the reaction from other popular streamers spiralled into a battle that eventually had nothing to do with gambling. Petty drama erupted, serious allegations were revisited, and tweets were tweeted and deleted. By the time Twitch reacted by banning streams of unlicensed online gambling sites, it was becoming hard to tell what had caused it.
The messy, unpleasant fight has been hard to follow, especially for those who don't pay close attention to Twitch stars or their personal connections to each other. Here's the short version of how gambling debts led to multiple apologies about seemingly unrelated events. It was a good week for TwitLonger, if not for some of Twitch's top stars.
ItsSliker borrowed money from friends and fans to fuel gambling
Twitch's Very Bad Week kicked off on September 18, when streamer ItsSliker was accused of scamming both friends and fans out of tens of thousands of dollars. Screenshots that allegedly showed ItsSliker asking fellow streamers for money surfaced on Discord and Twitter; in them he offered vague claims about needing the funds for things like bills or flight tickets. The same day, ItsSliker admitted he was gambling the money away, saying in an apology stream that he "never intended on scamming anyone."
The discourse around Twitch and gambling has intensified this year, and even though ItsSliker wasn't actively gambling on-stream, the revelation angered some major streamers nonetheless. Pokimane, Mizkif, and HasanAbi began calling for Twitch to ban gambling streams, starting up the hashtag #TwitchStopGambling. Hasan and Mizkif also streamed a call with ItsSliker, confronting him about the situation and asking him to seek therapy.
Sliker's Twitch partner status and sub button were revoked, with the streamer promising to pay back the funds he had borrowed from peers and viewers.
"I will still pay off the people I owe," he said in his apology stream. "I don't give a 'frell' whether I reach 90 [years old]."
Streamers xQc (who recently admitted to dropping $2 million on gambling), Mizkif, and Ludwig have offered to refund those who gave Sliker money. xQc claimed the scams totalled $300,000, tweeting, "Me and @LudwigAhgren will be trying our best to get money back to those people. This is about the victims."
On September 20, Twitch announced that it would be banning "streams of gambling sites that include slots, roulette or dice games that aren't licensed either in the US or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection." It did not address the ongoing drama between streamers, nor is this an outright ban, but did seem to cool the situation down. Briefly.
Asmongold bites back
Some streamers weren't ready to let ItsSliker off so lightly, including Asmongold. On Monday, he tweeted: "How in the 'frell' is Sliker not banned on Twitch? Guy literally uses the platform to defraud dozens of people, streamers and viewers alike AND ADMITS IT." Asmongold then lamented that JiDion (a streamer who was permanently banned at the start of 2022 for hate-raiding Pokimane) is "still sitting a perma while Sliker gets to go live and laugh about actual crime." JiDion's ban was controversial earlier this year, as many streamers thought it was too harsh for a first offence.
Trainwreck and Mizkif fight in Asmongold's replies
Trainwreck, Twitch's second highest-earning slot streamer who has previously copped bans for sexist comments, accused Asmongold and OTK (an organisation which includes Mizkif) of giving ItsSliker a platform to wage "their war" against him.
Trainwreck vs. Mizkif has quickly turned into some very serious allegationsWtf is going on pic.twitter.com/F790f5tbJsSeptember 19, 2022
See moreIn a now-deleted response to Trainwreck, Mizkif shot back: "If we're going to deplatform people for scamming others shouldn't we have banned you for Jolt Coin a few years back?" Mizkif was referring to a 2017 incident involving Trainwreck and a cryptocurrency called Jolt Coin. Details about the incident are sparse.
Trainwreck responded to Mizkif with an unrelated accusation about an incident involving streamers CrazySlick, Adrianah Lee, Maya, and MitchJones. That leads to the next sequence of events.
Let's pause for breath. There are a lot of online handles flying around, hashtags, accusations and counter-accusations, but this is where it's all about to go thermonuclear. The important thing to note is that, essentially, what began as drama about one streamer's gambling problem has now divided streamers into two camps, and has become a license to dig up historical accusations. This is about to go way beyond slot machines.
Sexual harassment allegations resurface
In July 2021, Adrianah Lee published a TwitLonger post about an incident in early January 2020. She alleged that CrazySlick (not to be confused with ItsSliker from the earlier gambling controversy) had touched her neck and chest while she was passed out at a party despite her friends asking him to leave her alone. According to Lee, who heard the story from a friend who was there, Slick said at the time that he was checking to make sure she was alive. "He did not rape or assault me, but his actions DID make me uncomfortable," Lee wrote.
A year later, Lee alleged that Mizkif and Maya downplayed the situation in conversations with her in order to influence her TwitLonger post and preserve CrazySlick's reputation.
CrazySlick responded to the allegations on September 19, writing in a now-deleted tweet: "I have never sexually assaulted anyone and never will. I have never had any intentions of ever harming anyone. I go out of my way to check on someone and I get accused of rape, this is unfair, I will be getting a lawyer ASAP."
this isn’t “eye opening” for a lot of people in the scene. A lot of my “friends” and others knew the whole story before yesterday because I TOLD THEM! But they continued to make excuses for him and paint me to be a bad person so they could do what was beneficial to their career.September 20, 2022
See moreLee's Twitter feed is now packed with other women who say that CrazySlick has harassed them or behaved inappropriately; this thread started on September 20. Most are anonymous, although some streamers like fanfan have posted screenshots of Discord DMs allegedly from CrazySlick.
Maya also responded to the claim that she had downplayed the situation to Lee. "I asked her if she thought that Slick raped her or sexually assaulted her. At the time we agreed… at the time she said no. So I said okay, could you include that in your TwitLonger then?" Maya then apologised for inserting herself into the situation. On September 25, she posted a TwitLonger saying she condemned CrazySlick, adding: "I am sorry and I feel horrible for being part of the reason that Adrianah has experienced everything that she has in the past year." She finished by saying "I am stepping away from my online platforms indefinitely."
Mizkif backed Lee after posting a statement in which he apologised for downplaying other CrazySlick incidents and saying some "reprehensible things" in the past. Mizkif's apology
Ice Poseidon reveals old Mizkif messages
Last Tuesday, YouTuber Ice Poseidon tweeted: "Mizkif, I brought you into this world and now I'm taking you out," referring to the fact that Mizkif was Ice Poseidon's video editor before going on to have his own successful Twitch career. The tweet contained four screenshots of messages between the two between 2018 and 2019, in which Mizkif uses racist, homophobic, and ableist slurs.
Mizkif then posted a TwitLonger addressing both what he said in the screenshots and the claim that he tried to cover up CrazySlick's alleged behaviour.
Mizkif, I brought you into this world and now I'm taking you out pic.twitter.com/5ZkDcB2jsASeptember 20, 2022
See more"A little while after Slick's misconduct came to light last year, I made some inexcusable statements," Mizkif wrote, referring to a 2021 stream where he had called the situation "low-key." He said that CrazySlick has now "been told to vacate [the OTK network] house as soon as possible.
Regarding Ice Poseidon's screenshots, Mizkif said that his past use of slurs was something that he had already regularly admitted to. "I've been open about my past many times on stream and will address it here again: I was a dumb, edgy guy who said a lot of stupid things to my friends to try and come off as funny and cool," he wrote. "I can't change what I've said, but I can change who I am and how I conduct myself."
At the end of the TwitLonger, Mizkif wrote that he would be "taking a leave of absence and stepping away from organisational duties" at OTK while a third party investigates the CrazySlick situation and his past comments. A statement from OTK said that it "strongly condemns sexual harassment, assault and bigotry of all forms."
JustaMinx weighs in, catches accusations of her own
Streamer JustaMinx, who has two million Twitch followers, commented on Tuesday, calling out Mizkif and HasanAbi for streaming with ItsSliker after the scamming allegations and expressing her opinion on the CrazySlick and Lee situation.
Later, however, a clip of JustaMinx defending CrazySlick and calling Lee a "clout chaser" surfaced on Twitter. "Slick is good. Slick is weird, yeah, he is weird," JustaMinx said in the clip. "But he does it online. It's always how Slick is. And Adrianah is a clout chaser. So am I."
// sa mention, victim blamingminx: “slick is weird, it’s always how he is. and Adrianah is a clout chaser” if u like her u can go head & hardblock pic.twitter.com/WQRK1NIgQHSeptember 20, 2022
See moreShortly after, streamer toxxxicsupport published a TwitLonger about a TwitchCon party thrown by JustaMinx in 2018. In it, she said that Minx—who she considered a close friend at the time—had dismissed concerns raised following an "uncomfortable" party. She said that she felt pressured to take her clothes off during a series of drinking games, and that Minx initially "seemed so supportive," but later turned on her to protect men at the party. JustaMinx has not yet responded to that claim, with a statement uploaded to Twitter on September 23 explaining that she was currently not on the internet for the sake of her mental health.
Where we are
The drama continued over the weekend, becoming progressively messier. Many of those who have gotten involved have found blowback themselves. A handful of streamers have had their reputations tanked, with one streamer declaring their intent to step away for a while and others—like Mizkif and CrazySlick—simply going dark. The accusations made against the latter will linger, though seem unlikely to result in any legal action. More striking is how this has exposed the faultlines between streamers of the same generation who sometimes live together, stream together and party together.
The LivestreamFail subreddit has been a hotbed for all sorts of clips and tweets since everything kicked off, and it looks set to drag on still. There's a fantastic megathread that has compiled a ton of clips to browse for those who aren't quite done figuring out what on earth is going on.
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I'm not part of the audience Disney Dreamlight Valley feels designed for. The games I enjoy ordinarily are shooters or action games. Things I can win or lose at, with badass trailers, character skill ceilings, and multiplayer capabilities. I'm not a Disney obsessive, though I like the odd Pixar movie well enough. And yet, I'm hooked on Disney Dreamlight Valley and it's taking over my brain.
It's the perfect cosy little adventure I wanted without knowing it. I play it on stream, off stream, while talking to friends on Discord and even muted while watching YouTube videos in the dead of night. There is something so brain meltingly good about Disney Dreamlight Valley that I'm yet to understand, while also acknowledging that I despise a handful of its design decisions and want to boot Mickey Mouse off a cliff with a ceremonious "ah-ha".
I didn't know what to expect from Disney Dreamlight Valley. I hadn't heard of its development, which is odd considering I'm so invested in games, and couldn't imagine how a Disney game could work so well that my colleague Lauren Aitken called it the "perfect Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing life-sim hybrid". So why did I start playing Disney Dreamlight Valley? It's because I wanted to try and understand it.
(Image credit: Gameloft)Life-sims often have a short and sweet honeymoon period. It's the way Animal Crossing: New Horizons operates when you first land on the island and know you have so much to do, so much to achieve within a short time commitment. Eventually the days get harder to feel like I've progressed, and I give up because my island will never be as pretty as the ones I see on TikTok.
Disney Dreamlight Valley starts off in the same way, where you can see an entire village snarled up in thick purple Night Thorns and the houses of many residents that you're bound to meet after your introduction to Merlin from The Sword in the Stone. Life-sims plop you down in the centre of something you recognise the potential of, and give you a little push to start to make that potential a tangible reality.
While Animal Crossing's honeymoon period slows significantly so that you have to wait for fruit to grow over a couple of days and fossils to replenish, Disney Dreamlight Valley's timing is significantly accelerated. Most features you encounter in the game, with a few exceptions, replenish within an hour or less, and that means I can just keep going. With Animal Crossing there is a natural limit to my playtime but no such issue exists with Dreamlight Valley because it knows it's got you snarled up in Night Thorns too. And it's surprisingly comfortable in that spiky underbrush.
(Image credit: Gameloft)Meet your maker
Disney Dreamlight Valley removes the limits that can sometimes feel like they're holding you back. The constant replenishing of crops and naturally occurring resources is pretty great, especially when you play it as I do, as a background game while you're focusing on something else. I can do loops and loops of the area with always something to do and keep my brain occupied. Also manipulating the island to your taste is far easier in DDV than it ever has been in Animal Crossing, allowing a birds eye view of the entire island when placing furniture and plants.
The character creator is among the best I've seen in recent years and I felt actually represented as a mixed-race woman with natural hair. The hair options are better for DDV than they are for Elden Ring, who would have thought? Additionally, you can change these aspects on the go, you're not locked into how you look, and physical attributes like facial hair aren't locked into what body type you've picked for yourself. There are hijabs for people who may want to wear them too which makes this creator far more aware of the whole spectrum of people who will play the game from the very beginning. As a kid I often didn't feel like it was me I was playing in games with character creators. In fact Animal Crossing didn't have options for Black people until very recently so the character creation in Disney Dreamlight Valley was surprisingly appealing.
(Image credit: Gameloft)I'm enjoying its jank as much as the inane gameplay loop
But DDV comes with its own annoyances like the energy system, which is a drag, the annoyingly difficult task of approaching animals to feed them, shoddy targeting, and sometimes quests that lock you into 'frack' you can't avoid. Two examples of that include WALL-E wanting to feed animals and following me until that happened, which was impossible because that task is one of the few things you can do once a day. And the other is the time when I accidentally helped curse the entire valley and didn't have enough Dream Shards stored away to fix it instantly.
There are undoubtedly issues with DDV, but I just gloss over them as if they don't exist at all. It's hilariously bad at explaining tasks. Actually I had to use my knowledge of what goes into the dish ratatouille to make it in the game, but otherwise people have to look for guides on how to make it. That feeding animals once a day mechanic is never mentioned and almost seems like a bug the first time it doesn't work. I've been trapped in geometry here and there, and sometimes my character model's hair sticks out at a 90 degree angle. And yet the fact it still needs some fixing makes it all the more fun. I'm enjoying its jank as much as the inane gameplay loop of mining, farming, fishing, and shaking trees and I don't understand why.
(Image credit: Gameloft)Every time I end up playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, I question myself a little bit. Why am I here? What am I doing? Why aren't I playing something else right now? Mickey's cold dead eyes creep me out, and I occasionally have some weird bugs where my perspective blips across the screen for a second, but actually none of that matters when my rice and sugarcane crops are ready to be harvested and sold to Goofy.
I'm not sure what's nestled in the code of DDV that makes it just so appealing and yet I kind of resent it for being this fun right now. I don't quite understand why I'm enjoying my time as a magical pastel princess so much, but it's calling to that little part of me that wanted my wall pink as a kid and played with Barbies. I don't want to enjoy this game quite as much as I do, yet here I am, having a wonderful time helping WALL-E with his garden, wishing Goofy would shut up when he fishes, and chasing a rabbit to throw it a carrot, over and over again.
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The Last Rites quest in Wrath Classic can be a bit tricky to get to. The quest text isn't clear and the location itself is pretty misleading, meaning you can easily find yourself in the wrong place with nothing to help you figure out where you're supposed to go.
Even if you did the quest years ago when the original Wrath of the Lich King expansion launched, you may have forgotten the details. This can be frustrating if you want to get to level 80 as quickly as possible, so this guide should help point you in the right direction. Here's how to complete the Last Rites quest in Wrath Classic, including where to go to meet Thassarian.
WotLK Last Rites quest: Where to meet Thassarian
Last Rites is a quest found in Borean Tundra and you pick it up from Thassarian at Death's Strand, southeast of Taunka'le Village. The quest tells you to go to the Temple City of En'kilah, to the north, and use the teleportation orb to reach Naxxanar and meet Thassarian there. This may sound simple enough but it's easy to get lost.
The first part is fairly straightforward. Head through the gates of En'kilah and you should see a glowing white pillar of light on a platform to your right. Step into the light and you'll be teleported to Naxxanar.
There should be a set of steps ahead of you, and two enemies guarding a walkway at the top. Kill these two enemies to get them out of the way but instead of continuing forward, turn around so you're facing the way you came. Follow the circular pathway around to either side and you'll find a short ramp that takes you to another glowing white teleporter, directly above the one you entered through.
Once you're through here, you'll find Thassarian directly in front of you. Speak to him to initiate the next stage where you'll help him defeat Prince Valanar. Just be aware that this can be a pretty tough fight so you might want to bring a couple of friends to help you out.
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Broken Roads' creative lead, Colin McComb, has a long history with CRPGs. He previously worked on Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Wasteland 2. More recently he was creative lead on Planescape's spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera. McComb is now taking a chance on Drop Bear Bytes, a debut studio working on an ambitious new post-apocalyptic tale.
"Craig Ritchie called me up in 2020," says McComb. "He's the game director. He said, 'We'd like to get you on board with this game', and I was like, 'Sell me on it'. He said, 'Post-apocalyptic'. I was like, 'Done three of them'. He said, 'Philosophical'. I was like, 'OK, sounds good'. He said, 'Set in Australia'. I'm like, 'Intriguing'. And then he said, 'It gets weird'." Suitably convinced, McComb joined the team.
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)He's not the only veteran on board. "Leanne Taylor Giles, our narrative director, recently joined us from Ubisoft Montreal," says Ritchie, aforementioned game director and studio founder. "She worked with Colin on Torment: Tides of Numenera, so that relationship already exists. She loves Planescape: Torment—she's got a Planescape tattoo. So we're bringing together fans of the genre, and people who've been doing the genre for decades."
The morality system in this game is not just good versus evil, not just law versus chaos, light versus dark.
Colin McComb, Drop Bear BytesI ask McComb what sets Broken Road apart from the other RPGs he's worked on. "One of the big things is that the morality system in this game is not just good versus evil, not just law versus chaos, light versus dark, whatever. What we've got is what's called the Moral Compass." This system maps the actions you take along four philosophical quadrants: utilitarian, machiavellian, nihilist and humanist. "The important thing is we aren't going to judge people based on what they choose."
So a player can go full nihilist, where nothing matters and their only drive is to have a good time. Or full machiavellian, working for the sole benefit of the group that they're with. "That's fine. We'll give them complete reactivity. We're not going to punish them for it, except, you know, logically, people would react to you for being an 'wookie' to them." Conversely, you won't be overly rewarded for being a utilitarian or humanist. While some of the people you meet in the world will be more open to a person with a history of mutually beneficial decision making or a proven desire to help those in need, others simply won't.
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)Your actions throughout the game will move your position on the compass, represented as a cone that can rest across multiple quadrants. Depending on your current position, certain conversation options will open up to you. And, as in all great CRPGs, your approach in dialogue will have a major effect on your playthrough.
"We want this to be a game about rationality in order to understand other people's points of view," says McComb, "and to understand you don't need to solve every problem with a bullet. I love Wasteland, I love Fallout, but the solution for almost all of them is violence. With this game, we want to make sure that you can have a pacifist playthrough that will feel rewarding, but that if you choose not to go with the pacifist route, it's going to be just as good."
I did not go the pacifist route. I got to play a short hands-on demo as a hired gun—a mercenary who starts the game working with a team of scouts tasked with keeping the local area safe. Origin stories are picked during character creation—which also asks you a series of morality questions to help you find your place on the compass—and there will be four to choose from in the full game. "You can be a member of the barter crews," says Ritchie, "like the merchants and traders that do barter runs between locations. You can be a surveyor, which is like a cartographer or explorer that finds new settlements or sells information to the barter crews—'Hey, I've found a town that you might sell water to'. Or you can be a Jackaroo, which is basically an Australian cowboy. So farmhand, good with animals, knows how to handle a gun, can tinker and repair. So we've got a lot of RPG archetypes—this person is actually a ranger; this person is actually a fighter; this person is actually a cleric."
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)All of the origin stories will eventually converge—all players will face the same catastrophic inciting incident that kicks off the main adventure. But for now, I'm simply a mercenary arriving at the Kokeby Waystation trading hub. There I meet Tina, the teenager who runs the trading post. She asks me to get rid of the previous mercenary she hired, who's become more of a hindrance than a help.
I walk over, feeling confident in my diplomatic skills. But, sure enough, the merc is an arsehole. I could pay him off—an easy bribe to persuade him to be on his way. But I'm just not inclined to make his life any easier. The conversation turns antagonistic, and eventually guns are drawn.
The fight is quick enough that I don't get to experience much of the turn-based combat system. I'm backed up by two scouts, so even though the merc gets some shots off, he's quickly gunned down before any real strategy comes into play. But I do experience some of the reactivity of the story, as later in a bar one of Tina's associates chews me out for my rash use of violence. There's no omniscient karma system judging my style of conflict resolution, but this one guy now thinks I'm incompetent. Maybe somewhere down the road that will prove important. But also, maybe not.
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)Kokeby itself has a sprinkling of post-apocalyptic flavour—it's a little run-down and ramshackle, but otherwise nothing too extreme. "The game very intentionally takes you on a journey from the normal into the very, very weird," explains Ritchie. "So the beginning of the game very intentionally looks like it could just be a farming community in Western Australia." These are towns and trading posts where survivors were able to scavenge from stores of the pre-apocalypse world, and that defines their look and feel.
"As you start to venture out, it gets more and more and more crazy and wacky."
Craig Ritchie, Drop Bear Bytes"If you look at just the early game," says Ritchie, "it's kind of normal—where's the post-apocalypse? But as you start to venture out, it gets more and more and more crazy and wacky. That was a big part of it, so you feel very familiar. And then, within the first hour of the game, you're thrown out into this scary, harsh world and you've got to find a new place to be. That's all reflected through the town design, the clothing design and character design."
But as weird as it might get, the team also wants it to feel authentically Australian—both in the kind of problems of the world, and the wry, dark humour that can emerge out of it. Initially the studio wanted to set the game across the entirety of the country, but soon realised that, to pull it off, individual locations would be too shallow to really matter to the player. "We decided that instead we focus on Western Australia, and go deep," says McComb. That means each town will not only have its own distinct look and sound, but also its own narrative vibe—much of it satirical. "We represent different forms of government, which allows for different kinds of moral quandaries to be explored," says Ritchie, "as well as what's reflected in the clothing, reflected in the art, reflected in the feel of the town—everything's meant to have an essence that you can take away."
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)There's a serious edge to that authenticity, too. "From the very start of the project," says McComb, "before we even wrote a word, Craig made sure he had representatives of indigenous cultures speaking up and saying, 'Yeah, you can do that' or 'We'd really appreciate it if you didn't'."
In terms of the music, too, audio lead Timothy Sunderland wanted to represent his country at the point depicted in the game. A woodworker, he built makeshift instruments to capture the feel of people forced to improvise off the land. "The way you feel when you play them really puts you into the mindset of someone that's not quite got the best instrument and has to make do with what they've got," says Sunderland.
"I've tried to put as much atmosphere into it as possible. From where I'm from, a local elder recorded some didge tracks a few years ago, and he gave me permission to use them and just get them out into the world—because he just wanted to share his culture. And he's very proud about his playing which is incredible. So I layer a lot of didgeridoo in behind the scenes. And when you put a lot of reverb and delay on something like that, the atmosphere just just really opens up. It's been really fun to look at the different towns and speak to the narrative of what's going on in this town—what feel should it have—and find the right stuff for it."
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)The concept of post-apocalyptic Australia feels very different now—in the midst of the climate crisis—than it did back in the days of Mad Max. "We feel it a lot," says Sunderland. "Almost on a monthly basis, something is going on where—it's right in front of us, you know? Here's the proof."
"You just had floods…" says McComb.
"Exactly," continues Sunderland, "we go from one extreme to the other. We have bushfires that ravage an eighth of the country, and then we have floods that ravage a quarter of the country."
(Image credit: Drop Bear Bytes)But while environmental disaster is a theme in the game, for Ritchie it's one part of a broader message. "The design was, let's imagine you've got a decision tree for the next 10-to-20 years, and at every single point humans made the worst possible decision, whether it's climate change, political division and extremism, environmental collapse, and another financial crisis—just really being as poopoo as you can … we're not we're not trying to make some massive big statement, but looking at all the mistakes that people seem to be making these days."
Inevitably, as a more philosophical CRPG, Broken Roads invites comparison to Disco Elysium, one of the best games of the decade so far. I only got to play a tiny portion of the game—nowhere near enough to tell if it can match such a high bar, or even come close. What I can tell you is that, of everything I saw at Gamescom this year, Broken Roads feels like it has the most potential. If the team can fully realise their absurdly ambitious plans, they've got the chance to make something really special. I hope that they can pull it off.
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AMD's excellent Ryzen 7000-series processors are now available to buy from your local computer shop and online retailers. Just yesterday our Ryzen 9 7950X review and Ryzen 7 7700X review were set live, and if those whet your appetite for either processor, or the Ryzen 5 7600X or Ryzen 9 7900X, then you'll want to hop online immediately to secure one for yourself.
At least supply shouldn't be so much of a sticky topic for these new Zen 4 processors—supply for CPUs has been pretty stable this past year. However, even during the best of times we can see in-demand processors sell out rapidly at launch. The Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X were particularly hard to acquire from the previous generation, and it's likely that their high-end counterparts in the Ryzen 7000-series will be in similarly high demand.
For the time being, Best Buy has the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X all in stock and at their respective MSRPs. Excellent.
Newegg also has similar listings for the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X.
I have yet to find any of the new chips on Amazon US yet, however, and Micro Center only offers these CPUs for in-store pickup.
In the UK, Overclockers has the entire line-up in stock and ready to go. As does Scan.
But you shouldn't have a hard time spotting these chips. They come with brand new and very flashy black packaging that sets them apart from the older Zen 2 and Zen 3 chips.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the restIf you are planning on picking up one of these processors today, be sure to pick up a compatible AM5 motherboard to go with it. Unlike the previous generations of Ryzen processor, the new Ryzen 7000-series chips require a brand new LGA socket. That means a whole new motherboard and new RAM. These chips only support DDR5, so you need to pick up a couple of sticks of that, too.
But you'll be rewarded with fantastic gaming performance and serious multithreaded chops for your money. While we haven't yet seen everything that AMD's competition can muster in Intel Raptor Lake, we found AMD's new processors to offer an impressive uplift in performance over Zen 3 chips and deliver plenty of gusto for gaming. They're also excellent in Eco-Mode, which makes these chips seriously efficient.
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Need to know
What is it? A pixel art roguelike that combines mining for resources with defending your glass home from aliens.
Expect to pay: £14/$17
Release date: September 27
Developer: Bippinbits
Publisher: Raw Fury
Reviewed on: RTX 2070, i7-10750H, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Link: Official sitePeople who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. No, they need far more firepower than that. At least that’s the case in Dome Keeper, where tides of vengeful monsters assault your all-too-breakable transparent sanctuary, and bulking up your laser defences is the only way to stay intact. Mercifully, the soil beneath your feet harbours pockets of raw materials, which you can use to strengthen your hardware.
Dome Keeper’s roguelike routine is as beautifully simple as that: carve out chunks of soil during quiet moments, which last around a minute, then ascend home with whatever you find and repel the next assault. The reasons for your predicament are similarly simple, outlined in a miniscule intro that sees your glass spacecraft smash down on an alien landscape, squidging one of the locals. Now its kin are hellbent on shattering the killer snow globe, which sinks you into a suffocating loop.(Image credit: Bippinbits)It's suffocating because Dome Keeper is so tight and relentless, like the day-night cycle of a Terraria or Minecraft vacuum-packed into a single inescapable space. Your dome dweller, a smudge of pixel art, jet-packs around with worker bee urgency, knocking against blocks with a little drill until they crumble. All you need to do is direct them towards a block for the drill to do its job. Some of the soft rock surrenders instantly, some requires a few stabs. With luck the tunnels you carve out lead to deposits of iron, which you attach to wires with a tap of a button then drag back to base.
Inside your fragile haven, a machine processes your catch so you can convert it into something useful. Your weighty laser cannon, which rotates around the perimeter of the dome, can be bolstered with extra speed or power. Or you might want to improve your drill strength, speed and carrying capability. Or install a scanner that counts down to the next attack, and a remote display that lets you keep track of the dome’s integrity. If you want to beef up your shields or make repairs, meanwhile, you’ll have to locate rarer materials—water and cobalt—first.
Whatever you decide, the monsters come. Your dome sits exposed in the bottom middle of a single screen as they tumble and teem across the ground on either side, or spit projectiles from the sky. To begin with, they come alone, but a few waves later they start to swarm. The laser soon feels inadequate, shifting slowly across the dome while the shadowy creatures pound the glass from all angles. It’s impossible to keep everything from getting through. Time for more upgrades.
Just in time
(Image credit: Bippinbits)Dome Keeper never diverges from this cycle, yet its unassuming format is utterly absorbing. On the resource management level, it works because there are always pressing reasons to upgrade everything, and the benefits of every enhancement are transparent, so each cluster of ore secured becomes significant because of what it helps you achieve. And when you're fighting or mining, the demand for trade-offs and cost-benefit decisions remains powerfully present.
There will be moments when you return to find your base in chaos because you just couldn’t leave that last lump of iron behind.
Defence is all about prioritising targets, a process driven by the length of time it takes to sweep from one side of the screen to the other. The most immediate threat might be on the right, but sometimes it’s expedient to ignore that until you clear out the left first. In mining, you continuously weigh up how deep you should go, or how much iron to carry in one trip, since every unit slows you down a little. Thankfully, if you’re overburdened, you can dump part of your load, because nothing’s more deadly than letting the monsters start without you.
Most calculations in Dome Keeper thus exercise the time-keeping section of your brain—the bit that decides how late you can get away with leaving for an appointment, and convinces you against all logic that there’s still time to check your emails. There will be moments when you return to find your base in chaos because you just couldn’t leave that last lump of iron behind, like the idiot in a film that runs back into the burning building to grab a stash of money. Not that you should be early either—every second of downtime is wasted productivity.
(Image credit: Bippinbits)Even your mining patterns require consideration. Dig down rather than across and you’ll find harder rock but larger deposits of minerals. And if you tend to cut veins through the stone by digging in lines, you may want to take a cycle to clear out the patches in between, to create larger roadways for future trips. But then once you excavate a large area, it may be tricky to find your way back in a hurry, so perhaps leave some formations as landmarks, or as waystations to place resources on while you dive down for more.
Close to home
There are so many practical concerns here that you’ll forget the horror of your situation, which in itself is disconcerting. Dome Keeper is not a scary game, despite the shadowy, unknowable monsters who constantly harass you, but in part that’s because it makes you too busy to contemplate your existential crisis. Once you do, though, it’s uncanny. The dome is the goldfish bowl of modern life, where there’s no standing still, only expansion or failure. You work all day to survive at night, always in isolation, and tomorrow you have to scrape together more than you did today—otherwise you won't be able to keep improving your home and yourself. Once you chip away the rock around this metaphor, it’s hard to ignore, but it only adds poignancy to your endeavours.
Fortunately, as with any decent consumerist economy, shiny new toys occasionally arrive to light up the gloom. In the soil amongst the raw materials is some mysterious technology, shuttered away in caskets until you prise it free. Pull one such case up and you get a choice of two gadgets to play with, drawn from a selection of around eight in all, such as an elevator that can transport materials, a probe that can highlight resources in your vicinity, and a machine that can distil water from the atmosphere.
(Image credit: Bippinbits)You will have instant favourites—everyone should fall for the chirpy Drillbert, an encapsulated mini-dinosaur with a drill beak that you can set loose to tunnel in your stead—but all are potential game changers, especially once you upgrade them. The teleporter, for example, is initially like the time travel device in The Terminator, in that it transports you but rejects any baggage you’re dragging. That is until you re-engineer it to warp minerals, and then increase its efficiency so it saves you a lot of trouble carrying things.
Still, even these labour-saving devices are a burden of sorts. The more equipment you’ve got to run, after all, the more thinly your resources are spread, reducing how much you can pour into upgrades. Having a mod-con such as an elevator is one thing, but you really need the souped-up model that moves stuff quicker and more frequently, don’t you? It’s all part of the work-life cycle. Better get back to the mine.
Dig for victory
At least in Dome Keeper there’s a means to escape the cycle. In the default mode, Relic Hunt, you have to dig deep enough to find an ancient device and pop it into your dome to wipe out your enemies en masse. Playing on one of the game’s smaller map sizes, which you select before starting, a winning run here tends to take 30-45 minutes, while on a large map, you can be drilling away for over an hour. Each completion then unlocks new backgrounds, alternate loadout options, or modifiers you can choose to apply in future runs.
(Image credit: Bippinbits)The biggest prize, however, is Dome Keeper’s second weapon system, which swaps the laser for a sword that swings across the dome and fires like a harpoon. It asks for a touch more skill to time swipes and aim shots, but it becomes devastating when augmented, and it’s always nice to switch styles once in a while. The other major addition is Prestige mode, where you build up a score by surviving waves of monsters and compete in online leaderboards. The clever twist here is that you can send resources home to increase your score multiplier, which of course is a trade-off against upgrades. This should provide Dome Keeper with longevity even after you’ve explored every loadout and difficulty in Relic Hunt.
Still, because Dome Keeper is such a focused experience, it may need more meat to keep it fresh in the long term. While it never fails to hold the attention, by around the 10-hour mark you’re not seeing much that’s genuinely new. That goes especially for the monsters, which devolve into mere pests once you've survived for long enough. Developer Bippinbits has at least already promised a second character class, and hopefully more will follow.
Until then, a few minor fixes are in order. I lost an almost completed run when the game refused to reload my save on one occasion, while on another a run came to a halt simply because I couldn't find any water resources, which felt harsh. These incidents far from spoil a tremendously compelling overall experience, however, which crams so many tiny but consequential decisions into such a small space. For a tightly-crafted roguelike, there’s no place like dome.
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Radiant Ore is one of the trickier materials to access in Slime Rancher 2, and it'll require you to venture a little further out of the way in order to harvest it. Still, since it's one of the components needed to craft the jetpack, I'd say it's well worth it, especially as this will let you explore even more areas and procure rarer slime friends.
The jetpack is also required to gather Moondew Nectar—one of the game's most coveted resources. Though you will need to craft an upgrade to get Radiant Ore, you can do it right at the start of the game. Here, I'll explain the step-by-step of where to find Radiant Ore, and how to access the area so you can harvest it for yourself.
How to craft the Resource Harvester
You'll need Cotton Plorts and Newbucks to craft the Resource Extractor (Image credit: Monomi Park)In order to gather Radiant Ore, you're first going to need to craft the Resource Harvester upgrade using the fabricator in the cave underneath the conservatory. To make this, you require 450 Newbucks and ten Cotton Plorts. You can find Cotton slimes just to the west of the conservatory. Feed them veggies and they'll release some plorts you can gather, though you may want to put them in a pen to make the process easier.
Newbucks, on the other hand, come from selling plorts to the market at the back of the conservatory. You can see what each plort is worth on the board, and to sell them, you just fire them at the market. Once you've got everything, yeet your ten Cotton Plorts into the refinery near the fabricator and then craft the upgrade. Now you're ready to get some Radiant Ore.
Where to find Radiant Ore
Image 1 of 3The Pink Gordo Slime is to the west of the conservatory (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 2 of 3Feed this big boi thirty veggies (Image credit: Monomi Park)Image 3 of 3Find the Ember Valley warp activation point above the slime (Image credit: Monomi Park)The place to find Radiant Ore is Ember Valley—the westernmost island in the game's world. Head west out of the conservatory and keep going until you find the Pink Gordo slime shown on the map above. Feed this hungry boi thirty vegetables and it'll explode, unlocking a geyser that will lift you into the air if you stand on it. Jump up onto the left platform, run along to activate the warp point for Ember Valley, and head there yourself.
Radiant Ore randomly spawns throughout Ember Valley, but each outcrop gives you two pieces, meaning you only need to find five outcrops to get enough to craft the jetpack. While there, also make sure to grab those required Phosphor Plorts, since there are lots of Phosphor slimes in this area. When you've gathered everything, head back to the refinery, fire in the resources, and build that fancy jetpack.
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MultiVersus has doubled the amount of time needed to level up characters, much to the frustration of a handful of fans.
Each MultiVersus character has a mastery level, a brief glance at the amount of time spent with a character. Most characters don't have their full kit until level 15, with an assortment of perks and specials being locked behind the system. It means, ideally, you want to be hitting that level as fast as possible when trying out a new character.
Unfortunately, Player First Games says in its patch notes that "players could get to level 15 of the mastery track too quickly," doubling the amount of experience needed between levels three and 15. While it makes sense in minor ways—increasing player retention and giving people more time to feel out new characters—it's certainly a choice that has upset some. The game's official subreddit is a real mixed bag right now. While some players agree that the grind wasn't quite grindy enough, others are pointing out that it's simply making things needlessly harder for future players. Some have also expressed concern that it's an attempt to potentially sell the game's experience boost separately in the near future.
I feel like the reception wouldn't be so lukewarm if perks weren't locked behind the mastery track. While it's nice to give players something to work towards, it's frustrating having an important special or handy perk gated behind wins or time spent. As some have suggested, moving perks earlier in the track and offering cosmetics in later levels could have been a nice solution but for now, it seems like it'll simply take longer to have full access to each character's kit. Add to the fact that you can still level beyond 15, albeit rewardless, it would've been nice to see some extra goodies added to later levels.
MultiVersus is still mighty new, and Player First has been doing its best to communicate and feel out which direction is best for the game. It's still in open beta so it deserves some allowance, but changes that increase the time sink aren't always great. On the plus side this update also brings the much-requested character of Rick, so fans do have something to cheer for.
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People Can Fly began as a Polish studio, still best-known for the bombastic FPS Bulletstorm, before going through various investments and expansions across the 2010s, including being owned by Epic Games for a short time. It has ballooned to the extent it now employs 550 people with offices in Warsaw, Rzeszow, Lodz, Krakow, Newcastle, New York, Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto.
Strange thing is that it's still known for Bulletstorm, which first released in 2011. That's because it spent most of the subsequent years co-developing, doing Gears of War: Judgement and working on Fortnite with Epic, before 2021 saw the release of Outriders with publisher Square Enix. The live service looter-shooter didn't meet expectations, probably because it was a little dull next to the competition, and so eyes turn to the upcoming Project Dagger.
Which has just lost its publisher. People Can Fly has issued an oddly worded statement saying that it "expects that its co-operation with Take-Two Interactive will come to an end" and spinning Project Dagger being self-published as a positive.
People Can Fly says "it has received from Take-Two Interactive a letter of intent to terminate the development and publishing agreement by means of mutual understanding between the parties. This agreement pertains to Project Dagger, new action-adventure IP, that has been in development for the last two years."
Project Dagger remains in development at People Can Fly's New York studio, and the statement goes on to say that Take-Two has not yet agreed settlement terms—under which People Can Fly may be liable to repay advance money—and has declined to exercise an option to acquire the rights to the game via a buy out.
"Consequently, People Can Fly has retained the intellectual property rights to the Project Dagger as the sole owner of these rights and is now determined to grow the project on its own."
"I assume we will part on good terms," writes Sebastian Wojciechowski, CEO of People Can Fly, "and I don’t see reasons why we couldn’t work with Take-Two on some other project in the future." That is one hell of a way to begin a public statement. Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is known as something of a tough cookie within the industry, abrasive to work with even, and it certainly seems that People Can Fly has been somewhat blindsided by this announcement.
"We strongly believe in the Project Dagger’s potential and are now committed to continue its development within our self-publishing pipeline," continues Wojciechowski. "The game is still in pre-production—our team is now focusing on closing combat and game loops and migrat[ing] from UE4 to UE5. I’m conscious that this decision will add investments on us, but self-publishing is part of our strategy. Of course, we are not ruling out working with a new publisher if this creates a compelling business opportunity."
People Can Fly has a total of seven projects on the go, all of which have codenames. Gemini is a new game being published by Square Enix; Project Bifrost and Project Victoria are titles the studio will self-publish; Project Red is a game still in the concept phase; Green Hell VR is one of two VR projects, the other of which is based on an existing game from the group's portfolio. This means it's almost certainly either Painkiller VR or Bulletstorm VR, with the latter the likelier candidate.
People Can Fly was founded in February 2002, making this year the studio's 20th anniversary. Take Two's withdrawal from Project Dagger is hardly the most auspicious way to celebrate, and even though business is business it does seem like the publisher hasn't gone about ending the agreement in the most upfront way. People Can Fly clearly has faith in Project Dagger and one can only hope, after the slight misfire of Outriders, we eventually have a good reason to call it something other than the Bulletstorm studio.
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If you're on the rush back to school and you want an all conquering device to help you work and play, then grabbing a great laptop that's powerful enough to see you through your studies and allowing you to complete your work faster, is a serious option—not least ones from MSI, a juggernaut of the PC world for the last three decades.
They've been making some incredible tech for a good while, and with a wide range of laptops on sale in their Back To School Promotion (with up to a 35% discount, might we add) that are powered by NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series, you can be sure you'll be getting a device with a lot of power for a whole lot less. You'll have to be quick though, as MSI's deals are only running for another week—that is, until 30th September. Prices start at £849, but arguably the flagship deal is on MSI's Vector GP66 laptop—powered by a GeForce RTX 3080, it's just £1,549, which is an amazing price for such a powerful laptop.
Experience the power of GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics
Before getting into the nitty gritty of the laptop ranges themselves, it's worth exploring why RTX 30-series GPUs are the way to go for intense working and gaming alike. As the RTX moniker suggests, these provide GPU acceleration for top applications used by students in courses, such as 3D design, engineering, computer/ data science, and economics, meaning you can spend more time learning and complete coursework sooner.
They also feature ray tracing, which brings the powers of cinematic quality rendering to provide the most immersive and realistic lighting in visually intense AAA titles.
These cards also come with NVIDIA DLSS, which is another form of clever AI rendering trickery. It boosts frame rates while also displaying sublime image quality using the GPU's Tensor Cores. These two key pieces of tech are the cornerstone of the excellent gaming experience offered by the GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs from NVIDIA, whether you've gone all out with a GeForce RTX 3080 or opted for a more affordable laptop with the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti or RTX 3060.
RTX 30-series GPUs are at the core of each of MSI's powerful set of laptops, whether it's in a gaming laptop for playing the latest AAA games at full pelt, a creator laptop for curating standout pieces of content, or a business laptop for general day to day use. The Taiwanese brand has you covered for whichever purpose you need a laptop for with a wide selection of lines to choose from.
MSI Gaming Laptops
When it comes to gaming laptops, MSI has quite the selection of GeForce RTX 30-series powered devices that should be up to the task of whatever you need it to be.
MSI Katana GF Series
First up is the Katana GF series which provides the performance of a gaming laptop at a more accessible price point without compromising on design—these laptops look sleek and perform well.
(Image credit: MSI)MSI Crosshair/Pulse GL Series
There's also the Crosshair/Pulse GL series, which offers the core fundamentals from high-end gaming laptops with unique designs and collaborations with some of your favourite games to offer a truly one-of-a-kind experience.
(Image credit: MSI)MSI Stealth Series
To go with these two, MSI also offers their Stealth series of laptops which come in two different configurations—the Stealth M and Stealth GS. The Stealth M Series offer the benefits of sleek, urban style design into a thin and light gaming laptop chassis which makes it an ideal all rounder.
The Stealth GS series of laptops are also especially thin but offer more of a high-end experience with some of the best components available.
(Image credit: MSI)MSI Vector GP Series
For gaming laptops, MSI also has its Vector GP series which is marked out by its especially futuristic design and powerful internals that combine to offer a truly complete gaming experience as well as a laptop that can be used for other more intense workloads such as for complex rendering and engineering.
(Image credit: MSI)MSI Creator Laptops
For the creators, MSI has their dedicated Creator series of laptops that are well up to the task of the modern content creator and combine high graphics performance with efficient processors to offer a well-rounded user experience. They should be able to handle everything from editing to rendering and more besides, as well as be handy for gaming too, especially with their RTX 30-series power to boot.
(Image credit: MSI)MSI Business Laptops
And finally, MSI's Business and Productivity series of devices look the part with a crafted chassis and should be especially efficient both in terms of their under the hood power and lightweight chassis, all of which combine to make these laptops true productivity powerhouses.
(Image credit: MSI)Whichever line of laptop you might choose to go for, you can be safe in the knowledge that it'll be up to the task of whatever you throw at it, be it gaming, editing videos, streaming, or adding extra-credit-worthy attention to your coursework.
All of these laptops offer a lot of power behind them, and you'd be silly not to at least consider one of them for your next purchase to help you through school, college or university. You will have to be quick as these offers must end on the 30th September, so, what are you waiting for? Go, on, have a look!
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World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King Classic expansion launched just over 12 hours ago and a player has already made it to level 80. In fact, it seems he managed it in a little under nine hours.
Naowh from the EU guild Echo took to Twitter just before 8 am this morning to announce his achievement—as spotted by Icy Veins—presumably before heading off for a well-earned rest. If you're wondering how he managed it so quickly, it appears that Naowh took full advantage of a grinding spot that was present in the original WotLK expansion, allowing him to tag multiple zombies that are constantly summoned by an elite enemy, but still claim the XP from them when they despawn.
This feat is perhaps even more surprising when you think that the older WoW expansions were far slower to level in compared to modern Warcraft, typically taking weeks rather than days. But clearly knowledge is power when you know the game—and the zones—inside out ahead of time.
Naowh is no stranger to this type of feat, either, being part of the team that has claimed multiple world first raid titles, the most recent being mythic Jailer in the latest Shadowlands raid, Sepulcher of the First Ones.
So if you had your heart set on the world first level 80 title, sadly you're out of luck. Still, it means you can relax and just quest our way through Northrend or run dungeons with a group of friends the old-fashioned way—provided you've managed to get past the server queues, that is.
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A Race Against Time is a quest found in Wrath of the Lich King Classic in the Borean Tundra, which is one of the zones you might arrive in when you head to Northrend for the first time. You'll get this quest from Librarian Donathan at the Amber Ledge, a hub located on the coast to the north of Warsong Hold.
The objective for this quest might seem pretty straightforward, but it's not easy to figure out where you're supposed to get the item needed to complete it. So when you're ready, here's how to find Salrand's Broken Key and complete Wrath Classic's A Race Against Time quest.
Salrand's location. (Image credit: Blizzard)WotLK Classic A Race Against Time: Where to find the key
After accepting the quest, you should find the Beryl Shield Detonator item in your bags. You're going to need this to break Salrand's shield and defeat her to get the key.
You'll find several circular blue platforms just to the southwest of the Amber Ledge and you need to head to the largest of these. It's pretty easy to spot as it's the one with the glowing blue barrier around it. There are a number of enemies patrolling inside of it and you should see Salrand herself, floating in the centre. Use the Beryl Shield Detonator by throwing it anywhere inside the shield to deactivate it, then you're free to kill the enemies inside.
Once Salrand has been defeated, a small lockbox will spawn in the centre of the platform and you can loot Salrand's Broken Key from there.
If the area is particularly busy with other players and someone else tags Salrand, don't worry. You should still be able to loot the key from the box and complete the quest.
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The tech industry gender gap is still vast, even in this the year of our lord 2022. Frankly we should have been rejoicing when the Girls Who Code initiative set out to put coding books for girls out into school libraries. Sadly, that may not have been the case; four of the books were added to the PEN America's Index of School Book Bans after being removed from Pennsylvania's Central York School District libraries.
"I am so angry I cannot breathe," Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani writes in a LinkedIn post (via The Register) outlining the scrutiny over the books.
These are simply tales of young girls enjoying time with friends while learning to code, many of the protagonists giving voices to girls of colour. In fact, the books were a part of a suggested reading list, one that would encourage diversity in US teaching resources.
The Guardian reports that, although the free expression nonprofit initiative PEN America had listed the books as having been banned by the Pennsylvania school, officials deny the claims, calling them "categorically false." The school's statement notes that the book series "has not been banned, and they remain available in our libraries."
How the coding books managed to find their way onto the PEN America ban list is unclear, as Centre Daily Times reports, "PEN America did not respond to a request for comment."
Yep. I’ve been banned. Because some people choose not to focus on how awesome and empowering and inspiring these books are but instead choose fear. https://t.co/3rwmdhPLWcSeptember 24, 2022
See moreStill, it's evident Saujani wouldn't have stood for a full ban. There's some true Mom warrior energy in her post, calling out the Moms for Liberty group she's pegged as responsible for the bans. She even warns them that her group, Marshall Plan for Moms "won't let you roll back progress for our children."
Saujani spoke to Business Insider with concerns that "This is about controlling women and it starts with controlling our girls." Strong words, and even if the books haven't actually been banned in classrooms, the worry isn't entirely unfounded.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the restIt all stems from what The Guardian describes as a culture war, one in which conservatives went on a bit of an assault against material that they deemed potentially offensive or inappropriate for children—material seen as pushing liberal ideals in US classrooms.
The groups scrutinising the Girls Who Code series may not take issue with the idea of teaching girls to code, then. It looks like the books, and those who might learn to code with them, may instead be victims of a much more deep seated, political turmoil going on in the US right now.
The bottom line is maybe teach your own daughters to code, because it could end up that their classroom reading materials get caught up in some idiotic culture war. Here's how you can get involved with the Girls Who Code initiative, and bypass all the contention.
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No matter what sort of help you need with today's Wordle, from general tips to the full answer to the September 27 (465) puzzle, you'll find all of that and plenty more guides, hints, and clues to make your gaming go as smoothly as you like right here.
Finding two yellows in three guesses wasn't the great start to the day I was hoping it'd be. I'll be honest with you—I panicked and reached out for something, anything, that fit what little I had. Which immediately gave me the right answer. Thanks a lot, puzzle done, see you tomorrow. I think Wordle just wanted to give me a scare.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Tuesday, September 27
Today's answer is very, very, wet. Soaked to the bone, completely saturated, and deeply moist. People can be this word if they've been out in the rain, but it can also apply to anything that's been drenched in some form of liquid. There's a repeating consonant 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.
Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)What is the Wordle 465 answer?
Let me save your win streak. The answer to the September 27 (465) Wordle is SOGGY.
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:
- September 26: BRISK
- September 25: ADMIT
- September 24: GRATE
- September 23: GLORY
- September 22: SAINT
- September 21: RECAP
- September 20: ALIKE
- September 19: TRICE
- September 18: STICK
- September 17: CHUTE
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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Last week we got word that the Pimax online store was kicking off some sweet celebrations for its seventh anniversary. I've been hoping for some nice discounts, deals, and maybe some prizes, and Pimax is looking to deliver. This brand is responsible for some of the most intense and high definition VR headsets money can currently buy, offering much higher resolutions and wider fields of view which make all the difference.
Due to the nature of these products, they're not exactly the cheapest, but not unreasonable for what you're getting, either. Pimax offers great trade in deals for those wanting to stay on the cutting edge of VR, and that combined with these seventh anniversary deals makes it a great time to invest in a very fancy new VR headset.
First up for grabs is the Mystery Box, and you'll want to get in quick because these are in limited supply. For $499 USD or $755 AUD you can grab this incredulous cube which is guaranteed to contain at least one Pimax headset that's valued between $699 - $1899 USD. There are only 70 of these on offer, and only one will get the coveted pricey brand new Crystal headset in the box. Still, that price for one of Pimax's 8K Plus, 5K Super, or 5K Plus units is still worthwhile. It's not often you see a luckydip worth diving headfirst into.
There are still some great sales going on if you just want to grab your headset, but they don't quite compare to that sweet mystery box. Still, the deals are up to 25% off which brings a Pimax 8KX DMAS headset down from $1,387 to $1,049 USD – That also happens to be the amount of trade in credit you might get back for one if you chose to upgrade, making it potentially free in the long run.
Pimax Mystery Box | At least 1 Pimax headset | Valued between $699-$1899| $499
Right now you can pay a fraction of the cost to get a nice shiny new Pimax headset. It might even be a brand new Pimax Crystal worth nearly 4x the price. Even if you end up with a cheaper offering, it's still a damned good deal if you're up for a little surprise.View DealThat's a Ultra HD resolution headset with 200-degree field of view, if you're wondering why it costs more than others on the market. There are cheaper and more expensive offerings up for sale during the celebrations, so it's worth having a good look and many come with a free game at the moment too.
While things like the Oculus Quest are portable fun, this is high-end VR at home, and it's worth noting that this means you'll need a PC capable of running it. Pimax recommends at least an RTX 2080 for the 8KX, so make sure you've got the kit before you go adding to your collection. No matter the headset you choose, it's always a smart idea to take a second reading the required specs. Nothing worse than a shiny new piece of kit arriving in the mail only to become a paperweight thanks to incompatibility.
Virtual reality(Image credit: Valve)Best VR headset: which kit should you choose?
Best graphics card: you need serious GPU power for VR
Best gaming laptop: don't get tied to your desktop in VRFor the real VR fans out there Pimax is also running a competition to win some technical art. You can go into the draw to win framed deconstructed 8K X headsets by completing some social media shares, surveys, and the likes. There's even a digital art gallery currently being curated and entering that may also win you one of these pieces of art.
Pimax headsets going on sale is always a great opportunity to take the dive into the deeper end of the VR pool. Even if you're holding out for the new Crystal or the upcoming 12k editions, Pimax's trade in deals make it well worth grabbing a lesser headset in the meantime. And it certainly doesn't hurt to keep an eye on the Pimax website for any more special deals or gifts during the celebration period.
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The last week has been a strong one for Nvidia. The announcement of the RTX 40 series generated a lot of buzz, but the company has also been dealing with many complaints from gamers after updating to Windows 11 22H2. Users took to social media to report issues with stuttering and lag. After an investigation, it turns out that the GeForce Experience software was to blame.
According to Bleeping Computer, reports of issues surfaced last week. This thread over at the Windows community forum gives examples of the problems users were having. Reports of large fluctuations in CPU usage resulting in stuttering and lag were numerous. The issues were gone after rolling back to the previous Windows version.
Over at the official GeForce forums, Nvidia staff member Manuel posted the following: "Thank you for your feedback. Windows 11 22H2 added new graphics debugging tools which are inadvertently getting triggered and this is leading to some users to see lower performance in games. We are working on a fix."
That fix is now available. Nvidia posted an article on its support site directing users to either download GeForce Experience 3.26 beta or update from within the GeForce experience app itself, though to do so, you need to go to the app settings and ‘enable experimental features’ which gives permission to install the beta version.
Window shopping(Image credit: Microsoft)Windows 11 review: What we think of the new OS
How to install Windows 11: Safe and secure install
What you need to know before upgrading: Things to note before downloading the latest OS
Windows 11 TPM requirements: Microsoft's strict security policyIt’s well worth installing the update if you are experiencing issues, but if you’re not or haven’t yet installed the Windows 22H2 update, you might as well wait until Nvidia rolls out a non-beta version and driver. According to Nvidia, that should be released during the week of September 26. So, any day now.
Nvidia deserves credit for rolling out an update so quickly. The fact that it did indicates that it was a relatively simple fix and one that didn’t require a lot of testing before a public release.
Graphics card drivers are shockingly complex pieces of software. As someone with only the most basic coding knowledge, sometimes I’m amazed that the damn things work at all.
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For beacons meant to ward off disaster, lighthouses in fiction typically aren't places you want to end up. Whether we're talking about movies like 2019's The Lighthouse or 2018's Annihilation, the entrance to the nightmarish city of Rapture in BioShock, or the place you're ambushed by gunships in Half-Life 2, bad stuff tends to go down whenever you head to a stone tower with a bright, hopeful light at the top.
The lighthouse in base-building survival management game Diluvian Winds is no different. Sure, it looks cozy and it's filled with adorable anthropomorphic animals like beavers, bears, otters, and mice, but it's still in constant peril. As the lighthouse keeper (you're also a walrus) you need to manage a small crew of animal inhabitants, putting them to work procuring food, gathering resources, building structures, and making repairs.
What's the problem? Well, the animals sometimes get tired and their productivity wanes, and sometimes they have personal goals you fail to meet because you're working them too hard. And, oh yeah, occasionally a massive tsunami washes over the lighthouse and smashes the place to smithereens.
But that only happens once in a while. The day-to-day in Diluvian Winds, which has a free prologue on Steam ahead of its release (date TBD), is mostly about resource management, and it can be pretty challenging. Each morning you assign every animal a task that will take up their entire day: chopping wood, going fishing, or building a new structure onto the lighthouse's cabin. Each night you cook them a meal, hopefully a nice dinner of grubs, insects, and fish. When the weather gets threatening, you can assign them to reinforce your base in case that damn tsunami shows up.
Each animal has a few things they're good at: beavers have a bonus for wood collection, otters are good at catching fish, and so on, and once a week a caravan arrives with new animals, and you can invite newcomers to replace members of your roster.
(Image credit: Goblinz Publishing)Above all else, you need to generate enough fuel to keep the lighthouse's flame constantly lit, because without that beacon visitors will no longer be able to find your little seaside settlement. With only a small collection of workers, it can lead to some tough choices. If you're low on food, the weather is getting dire, and the lighthouse flame is nearly out, you may have to prioritize wood gathering above nourishment. There's nothing sadder than a bunch of hungry animals without enough bugs to fill their cooking pot. Building new structures costs wood, too, so choosing to expand your base at the expense of a healthy lighthouse flame is tricky, too.
You cute critter employees also have wants along with their needs. These can be simple, like wanting to work alongside another animal for a day, but some also want to feel hopeful and happy, which might mean building a garden so they have a place to relax, and then actually assigning them a day off. With a storm gathering and the lighthouse fire waning, it's hard to find time to let a hard-working bear spend time smelling the flowers.
Free demos and prologues are all over Steam these days, which is great, but rarely are they as extensive as Diluvian Winds, which I played for over 90 minutes before I deliberately let my lighthouse flame go out just to see what would happen. (Sure enough, it ended the game.) You can get a really strong feel for how the full game will work, and the screenshots on Steam show an even more elaborate base, including an underground area safe (one guesses) from the killer waves that keep messing up my lighthouse. There are even pictures in the game's artwork of visiting airships. It all looks great and much deeper than the prologue I played, which was already pretty impressive.
There's no release date announced yet, but hopefully it won't be too much longer because I'm eager to see the rest of the game. You'll find the free prologue here on Steam.
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Northrend is a vast continent so you'll want to unlock Cold Weather Flying as soon as you can in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic. There are 11 new zones to explore and at least two of those have areas that you won't be able to reach with a ground mount alone. Let's face it, flying takes a lot of the pain out of questing too.
One of the benefits of unlocking Cold Weather Flying on one of your characters is that you can buy an item that lets any alts you have learn it, too. So, if you're ready to learn how to soar through the skies of the chilly northern continent, here's how to unlock flying in Wrath Classic.
Wrath Classic flying: How to unlock
First up, you need to be level 77 or higher to learn Cold Weather Flying on your first character. It will set you back 1000 gold too—hopefully, you've set some money aside while levelling. You also need to have learned Expert Riding, which you should have if you played through Burning Crusade Classic, as this is the skill that allows you to fly in Outland.
If you meet all of those requirements, you can head to one of three flying trainers. These are:
- Hira Snowdawn: Kraus' Landing, Dalaran
- Pilot Vic: River's Heart, Sholazar Basin
- Roxi Ramrocket: K3, Storm Peaks
Where to get the Tome of Cold Weather Flying
Hira Snowdawn, the Cold Weather Flying trainer in Dalaran, also sells the Tome of the Cold Weather Flying which is an item you can send to lower-level alts. It will still set you back 1000 gold, so you're not saving anything currency-wise but the item can be used at level 68. Essentially, this means any alts you intend to level through Northrend can fly there as soon as they arrive in either Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, so levelling a second or third character should be much faster. The perfect excuse to level an alt army, right?
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On Tuesday evening NASA will attempt to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid 7 million miles away in the hopes of knocking it off its course. Its target is Dimorphos, a moonlet that orbits the asteroid Didymos.
NASA claims the pair pose no threat to Earth, so think of it as a practice run for the real deal. You know, just in case landing a crew of hotshot blue-collar deep core oil drillers to blow it up with a nuke isn't an option.
As reported by Space.com, success or not, the mission will provide important data so that scientists and engineers can use it for planetary defense in the off-chance a future asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. However, I'm pretty sure Kerbal Space Program already has an elegant way of redirecting asteroids.
DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is NASA's vending machine-sized spacecraft charged with the critical mission. Didymos, which is 780 meters, orbits the sun, and the smaller Dimorphos orbits Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The goal is to hit Dimorphus so hard it'll speed up the orbit around its larger twin by ten minutes, proving that the impact altered the path of the rock.
DART hitched a ride on top of the SpaceX Falcon 9 last November and traveled roughly 7 million miles before disembarking on its one-way mission towards the asteroid pair. Onboard is a CubeSat (a tiny satellite) that will detach and film the impact from a safe distance, in addition to the onboard camera that is expected to go dark once it crashes into the asteroid.
Steam in your hands(Image credit: Future, FromSoftware)Steam Deck review: Our verdict on Valve's handheld PC.
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How loud is the Steam Deck? And will it pass the Significant Other test?
Steam Deck - The emulation dream machine: Using Valve's handheld hardware as the ultimate emulator.At 170 meters, Dimorphos is considered a "tiny asteroid," according to Tom Statler, NASA mission program specialist in a press conference. He also added that "hitting an asteroid is a tough thing to do."
You can watch the live feed of NASA's DART Spacecraft smack into Asteroid Dimorphos at 7:14 pm ET. According to NASA, the feed should mostly be black with a single point of light. As the DART spacecraft gets closer to Dimorphos, the light point is expected to get bigger, giving a more detailed look of the asteroid right up to impact. There will be an expected delay as the images are being beamed to Earth from millions of miles away.
You can stop FIFA 23 from telling you you're bad at FIFA 23
in Gaming News
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We've all had less than ideal matches in games. No matter what you play, from Rocket League to League of Legends, you'll know there are games in which you could have performed better. Normally any scathing remarks come from your opponents or maybe even the people you're playing with, and you can mute or just block them from engaging with you again. But FIFA likes to use its own commentators to rinse you a little bit when you're not performing well and, if that rubs you the wrong way, you can now turn this feature off.
As reported by Eurogamer, FIFA 23 will give you the option to turn off any scathing remarks aimed at you, the player, when you're not doing your best. Ordinarily the commentators of the match will make some harsh comments about how your team is performing, just as they would in a regular match of football. This player's not getting on the ball fast enough, the defence is failing, the regular sort of feedback you'd hear as they critique what's going on when watching a game. But if it's the type of thing to disturb your mental game, there is now the option to prevent FIFA 23 from giving you that feedback if you don't want it.
In the EA Play trial that is currently live, the 'Disable Critical Commentary' option is available in the audio settings. This apparently doen't remove all negative comments entirely, though perhaps the ones that slip through the gaps are Constructive Criticism Commentary instead eh?
I'd imagine this sort of setting isn't only good to spare the thoughts and feelings of kids just getting to grips with the game but also for esports' sake. For competitive purposes it must be pretty hard to get over any nerves a player has if the game is also telling you you're playing 'frack' right? That's deeply unhelpful if you're trying to get back in the game so fair enough to EA for giving people the option to leave the haters behind.
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