Month: September 2024

Toxic Crusaders was a curious early ’90s cartoon for kids, based on a schlocky, campy action film series that was emphatically not for kids. I never saw the cartoon, which possibly never aired outside of the United States, but I am familiar with The Toxic Avenger series it was based on. That series has spawned four films, and all are incredibly silly, varying levels of offensive, and often obscenely violent. 

It’s the Troma Entertainment house style, basically, and a newly announced Toxic Crusaders videogame appears to be just as much a celebration of Troma as the Crusaders themselves. In a similar vein to the early ’90s Toxic Crusaders games, this new one is a sidescrolling beat ’em up a la Streets of Rage or, more recently, Shredder’s Revenge. Playable characters include Toxie, No-Zone, Junkyard, Major Disaster, Headbanger, Yvonne and Mrs. Junko. 

It’s the references to other Troma films that are interesting, to me at least. Apparently the game will feature cameos from other Troma films including Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, and Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D, which are all utterly stupid and, in their ow…

CD Projekt Red has announced its half year financials alongside some guidance on what its various teams are working on now, and will be in the future. The figures cover the period up to June 30 2023, and show a decrease in revenue and profit (hardly surprising given the absence of new releases in this time) which CDPR reckons will turn around with the release of Cyberpunk 2077: Project Liberty. 

CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz says the company’s spent just under $40 million on development costs in the first half of the year, thanks to the “most intensive phase” of Phantom Liberty development, and ramping up the staff on the next Witcher game, codenamed Polaris. The team on another Witcher project, Sirius, has decreased in size after the project was rebooted, and the Gwent team continues to reduce as the game reaches the end of content support. 

The most notable news to come from the report, however, is that following Phantom Liberty there will be no other expansions for Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński said CDPR is “very happy” with pre-orders of Phantom Liberty but this marks the “last time we are working on the REDen…

David Firth, the vivid imagination responsible for disturbing internet sensation Salad Fingers, revealed an in-development game earlier this month, a platformer following the misadventures of violent, mouthy delinquent Jerry Jackson.

Jackson’s main character traits involve being a horrible little creature, making adobe flash animations, and speaking in all caps. He’s a classic creation from the mind of Firth, who has been summoning sleep paralysis demons with his brain and trapping them in animations since 2004.

Firth first described the game in a video on his Youtube channel titled “I used to make games”, which explores his early dives into game development as a teenager. The video’s a ten-minute trip to an older internet era, one filled with crusty 2d animations made by edgy teenagers fed a diet of South Park.

“JErry jACkson LANDs turbo edition: the rune’s off time – the stones of jon – qeust 4 the godlen sand of power” is a sentence I had to fight with my spellcheck just to quote properly, and also the title of Firth’s upcoming game. It’s currently “a whole four levels long, has bosses, story, dialogue, multiple modes, and plenty of unnecessary violence.” Read More

I got to sit down and play Phantom Blade Zero at Gamescom last week and—after muddling a bit to find my booth in the chaos of a bustling floor—came away quite impressed. Judging by the reactions of my fellow demo-triers, one of whom managed to beat it a whole 7 minutes before me (I’m not upset), it’s looking to be a sleeper hit.

Phantom Blade Zero comes from S-Game, and it’s the studio’s first major effort and, as PC Gamer’s own Rich Stanton noted last year, it’s also inspired by an RPG maker game the team made back in 2010 named Rainblood: Town of Death. S-Game has since been pretty eager to draw a line between Phantom Blade Zero and soulslikes—revealing that while it’s certainly drawn inspiration, it’s definitely its own thing.

Having got my mitts on it, I’m in full agreement. Phantom Blade Zero feels, in spirit, a lot more like Team Ninja’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty—taking the trappings of FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and reinventing the genre into a wuxia action romp, like a hefty dash of Godhand or Ninja Gaiden thrown in the soulslike soup. It’s a genre diversion that I’m gleeful—downright kicking my feet and giggling&mdas…

In a joint venture with Honda, Sony unveiled this prototype car during its press conference at CES 2023, which will hit the road in 2026. The Afeela is a tricked-out electric vehicle that seems to be an upgrade from the Vision-S concept car Sony showed off a few years back. 

The Afeela has got everything you’d expect from a prototype car made by Sony and Honda. Sleek design, a load of sensors and safety features, and even a big fancy dashboard with screens to watch movies and play PlayStation 5 games on the go. 

On the car’s exterior is the ‘media bar,’ a long horizontal display between the headlights. Yashide Mizuno, Ceo of Sony Honda Mobility, says the purpose of the media bar is so that the car can “express itself by sharing various types of information to people around it.” It can show off custom colors as if it were RGB on a laptop, the EV’s battery level, or even the weather. 

However, it wasn’t until we got to the 34:50 mark of the presentation that Mizuno said that Sony Honda Mobility was working with partners to explore “the possibility of how the media bar can create fun and exciting mobil…

“Look, Arisen, a ladder! We should climb it, Arisen! I think, Arisen, there may be something to discover atop yon ladder, after we climb it, mayhaps?”

At first, I liked my main pawn. At least, after I changed her vocation from the entirely useless archer to the far more valuable mage. But then she and my other pawns told me, about six or seventeen times, that there was a treasure chest over there, did I see it? And a statue over there, perhaps we could climb it? And so many ladders, as if they were somehow the most important thing in Dragon’s Dogma 2. 

Maybe they are. I’ve stopped investigating them out of a sense of bloody-mindedness because I’m so sick of my pawns talking about them. There is, however, a solution. Well, there are two solutions. The first is to stop playing Dragon’s Dogma 2. The second is to download emoose’s mod, which is called ShutUpPawns.

The great thing about ShutUpPawns is it doesn’t disable pawn dialogue altogether. You can configure it line by line, going over a stored history of the last 10 things they said and blocking ones you don’t want to hear again. Or you can block an entire set all at once, such as the ladder or treasure c…

I have patience for most things to arrive on PC in due time, but Sky: Children of the Light, the online flying and platform puzzling game from Journey studio Thatgamecompany was not one of them. I’ve been playing the tiny MMO-alike game for two years on my Nintendo Switch because the online goblin in me just couldn’t wait. Sky: CotL still doesn’t have an official release date on PC, but it is participating in the Steam Next Fest so you can try it out, or migrate your existing account, right now.

Sky is pretty derivative of the things that everyone loved about Journey: minimalist storytelling, emergent friendships with strangers, and the pure joy of flying about and sand surfing to emotional orchestral music. Honestly, I’m still a bit shocked that it all actually gels in a live service game with season pass events but dammit it really does. It’s everything cozy about Journey but slightly more online.

Most of Sky is spent in its six main realms finding spirits, solving flying and platforming puzzles, and rounding up nearby strangers to unlock secret areas and shortcuts together. Oh, and collecting fashion and emotes—the one true motivation in any li…

Victoria 3 has announced its first piece of gameplay-focused DLC, and it sounds radical. The Voice of the People immersion pack releases on May 22 alongside Vicky 3’s 1.3 update, and adds a whole roster of historical troublemakers and rabble-rousers to the game in the form of agitators, “a new kind of character that rally your pops to support Political Movements that align with their Ideology”.

A full Victoria 3 game runs from 1836 to 1936, so you can probably guess the kind of historical figures the Voice of the People pack is playing with. People like Sun Yat-sen, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemberg will crop up, mobilising the unwashed masses against the benevolent rule of your empire’s political elite. Or, if you genuinely want to change things up, you can invite them in yourself, putting your country on the road to revolution.

Marx, for example, will try to kick off a movement for a council republic, while your more demure, bourgeois Victor Hugo types will settle for a presidential system, and other figures of other political strains will have their own causes. I assume Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s win condition will be the construction of a society that gu…

If you’ve ever thought to yourself that Team Fortress 2 would be perfect if only you could cram more players onto its maps, you are going to love today’s new update. It more than triples the maximum player count, from 32 to 100—and also, Valve says you probably shouldn’t do that.

Unlike the big content update that Valve released (but did not make) earlier this month, today’s update is a fixer-upper, because somehow people are still finding things to futz with in a 16-year-old videogame. It’s a testament to Valve’s commitment (although it’s not like it’s out there making new games or anything) but it also reflects TF2’s ongoing popularity: The game that launched in 2007 crushed its all-time concurrent player count record just two weeks ago, thanks in part to the addition of a fat seal, who joined the game in the fan-made map Selbyen, which was included in the summer update.

Still, with that many years under its belt, it can be tough to keep things fresh. That, presumably, is what led to the decision to pop the cork on the player count: It’ll be chaotic as hell on the smaller maps no doubt (although that’s not necessarily a bad thing—I’d love to try some 50…

Thermometers are peaking, birds are chirping, and the air outside is hot and thick. You know what that means, folks, a new season (of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) is here, and it’s bringing all sorts of changes (to the maps and gameplay of the hit Activision-published FPS) with it. Bad news, though: If you’ve got dreams of completing Modern Warfare 2’s season 4 battle pass, you’ve got about two fewer weeks than you had last season to do it. Chop chop.

MW2’s season 4 patch dropped yesterday, introducing, well, too much to go through bit-by-bit. I’ll link the full notes below, but the stuff that leaps out at me is the new maps, new operators, and the changes to the game’s extraction shooter DMZ mode. Oh, and the fact that this season will only last 48 days, a big drop from the 63 days in season 3. That does mean you’ll get to the new content in the mid-season update (and the next season) a little sooner, but you’ll have to scurry if you wanna unlock everything in the battle pass.

So, new maps. MW2 season 4 adds Vondel—a vaguely Dutch mish-mash of bridges and waterways—to the game’s line-up of battlegrounds. It’s a “medium-sized map” that you’ll be able t…

Nine months ago, we reported a problem with SD cards being ruined by the ROG Ally handheld gaming PC. Back then, Asus said that heat was the issue and released a BIOS update to adjust the fan speeds. How successful that fix was is unclear but Asus has now announced a 12-month warranty extension for the device’s SD card reader, which suggests all is still not well.

News of the change (via Notebookcheck) hasn’t been overly well received, with a fair number of negative comments on social media. The main focus of the ire is the fact that the extension only applies to customers in the US and that Asus is claiming that “a small number of SD card readers…may not perform as expected.”

Under dispute is the ‘small number’ part, though exactly how many customers have experienced the issue isn’t clear at all. It’s not happened to me, despite my best efforts to replicate the problem (even going as far as to block the air vents) but I do regularly update the firmware on the Ally. Since the problem first came to light, Asus has released nine BIOS files to fix several issues, though it oddly labels each one as being an ‘optional’ file.

If you do have an ROG Ally and you…

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

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

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, March 13

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

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

There are no double letters in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’ve decided to play Wordle but you’re not sure where to start, I’ll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and beco…

You’re now just one click away from winning the December 27 (921) Wordle—the answer’s ready and waiting if you need it. You’re also in the right place if you’re after a tailor-made clue for today’s game too, if you’d like a bit of help without being handed the solution on a plate. Whatever Wordle support you need, we’ve got it.

I soon found myself staring at (almost) all the right letters in all the wrong places after two guesses this morning, which usually means I’m either in for a very long game of “Where the heck does this go?” or I’m just one more attempt away from a win. Luckily for me, today’s Wordle was the latter. Hopefully tomorrow’s game will be just as simple—hopefully.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, December 27

The word you need to find today is a type of flower, the most common type having white petals and a bright yellow centre. If something is a fresh as one of these, it’s full of energy and ready to go. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle.  

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle …

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

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

You can see in this video exactly what Nvidia is talking about, with various light sources bouncing off multiple surfaces like water and metal in ways that are closer to real life. Nvidia says improved physically based lighting should remove the need for other occlusion techniques, which can be taxing on a GPU. 

Path tracing has been around for a while and …