Month: September 2024

The Starfield mod pipe has been gushing out bangers, like one that overhauls the UI and another that adds Nvidia’s DLSS, but, until today, none of them have inserted the funny blue train that seems to get modded into every videogame in existence: Thomas the Tank Engine.

BulwarkHD has corrected that with a mod that transforms Starfield’s most innocent companion into Starfield’s most horrifying companion. Thomas the Tank Engine Vasco Retexture is a mod that wraps the nice little robot in the skin of the happy blue train, and it couldn’t be more disturbing to look at. The mod paints the lanky robot blue and red and slaps Thomas’ unblinking face onto the front of his body.

“That is creepy as f*#@.” NexusMods user Tyyphoon said in the comments, echoing any regula…

Back in January, Turn 10 presented us with the traditional listing of the Granular Technical Advancements™ coming in Forza Motorsport. It was an impressive rundown of things like “a fully procedural cloud system,” car paint “sourced using a spectrophotometer” which frankly sounds like a gizmo that gets wheeled out during one of those silly ghost-hunting shows, and the pièce de résistance, “hardware accelerated convolution reverb [that] accurately reproduces how sounds in Forza interact within an acoustic space.”

(All kidding aside, “convolution reverb” is actually a real thing, which I know because Tyler looked it up.)

What Turn 10 did not say at that time was what sort of hardware you’d need to actually take advantage of all these modern new wonders, but…

Diablo 4’s nature as a live service game means that players have since launch been trying to work out how it handles recurring events: when and where the world bosses spawn, when helltides are due to occur, and the same for legion events. A rough consensus formed pretty early, but now they’ve only gone and blown the bloody doors off.

A player called Shalzuth recently posted the fruits of their labours to the Diablo 4 subreddit, claiming to have worked-out (with help) the spawn times for all the above: to the extent they’ve now got a section of a popular Diablo 4 site with countdown timers and maps for each.

“World Bosses spawn on a repeating pattern, with a repeating time, with some blackout times,” said Salzuth. “Many world boss times have been spawned,…

My forays into the Starfield ship builder tool have so far been utilitarian: a weapon upgrade here, an extra cargo bay there, and maybe a few more windows so my crew doesn’t have to stare at white walls all day. Reddit user FLDJF713 has been on a different mission: to construct a monstrosity of a spaceship almost entirely out of hallways.

They call it the Hallway Fighter 9000, and it features no fewer than 12 consecutive “companionway” modules that, together, create a Z-shaped cruiser that requires an ungodly amount of time to navigate.

Before you ask, no, there is no strategic intent behind the design: “Oh yeah I was bored of quests and decided to dedicate time to this,” replied the cursed ship creator in a comment. 

Because I can. Th…

Looking for the best Prime Day VR headset deals might not be at the top of your to-do list when it comes to upgrading your gaming setup,  but if you’ve been looking for an excuse to splash out, the Meta Quest 3 is on sale right now at Amazon. It scored an impressive 91% in our review, and this Prime Day deal knocks $70 off the list price coming in at $430, which is the lowest we’ve seen it. And while a VR headset is certainly a luxury, this deal takes some of the sting out of the cost of what is, after all, an expensive bit of kit.

• We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

So what do you get for your money? The Meta Quest 3 is more powerful than its predecessor the Quest 2, g…

All the help you need to make sure Monday’s Wordle goes just the way you want it to is right here. We’ve got a brand new clue written just for the September 23 (1192) game if you’d like to get off to a great start (or make sense of those yellow letters you found on your way), and today’s answer is ready to go if you want to make sure your week starts with a win.

When I surveyed all of the green and yellow letters that had appeared on my very first row, I assumed I was in for a quick win in two. No? Fine. A slightly less quick win in three then. No? Again? Really? I may have had no way of knowing that I should have gone for that letter instead of the other one I tried first, but winning in four easy guesses still stung.

Wordle today: A hint

Stellar Blade was originally introduced in 2019 as Project Eve, after which it fell off our radar until 2021, when we said it looked like a cross between Nier and Bayonetta. A year later it got a new name—Stellar Blade—and became a PlayStation 5 exclusive, and that was pretty much that for us.

But it may not remain that way forever: Developer Shift Up said in its latest financial report, shared on Twitter by Okami13_ (via RPS) that it is now looking into a possible PC release.

The English-language wording of the Google-translated report is a bit wonky in spots, but it specifically notes the importance of the PC market: “The expansion of PC-based gaming platforms such as Steam and the Epic Games Store has made AAA titles more accessible to PC users, pushing them b…

Watch On

The submarine-captain simulator used to be a pretty big deal, but it—among many other simulator genres—has fallen out of favor in the past decade. Depending on who you ask, the last great submarine sim was one of the last few Silent Hunter games released between 2005 and 2010—all of which are surely heavily modded in some way.

No more, though, as Deep Water Studio’s UBOAT is set to release some time soon and seems to have really taken genre fans with its blend of operations detail and life on-board the infamous convoy-raiding German submarines of World War 2. First released in 2019, the Early Access period is now coming to a close with the release of a beta for the complete game this past week.

Though it’s definitely a simulator of fighting on a Wo…

Start your week with a Wordle win. Keep on scrolling and you’ll soon find everything from general advice you can use every day to a helpful clue written just for today’s Wordle. If you want more, the answer to the February 19 (975) game is here if you need it, too.

The dreaded “one missing letter in a row after row of greens” reared its head again today and snatched my chances of securing an early win. Thankfully, this happened early enough that I was able to guess my way to today’s Wordle answer, I just wish I’d found it a few rows up the board. Hopefully tomorrow’s game will be less stressful.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, February 19

The answer today refers to the cost of something, usually how much money you’d expected…

Walton Goggins plays The Ghoul on the Fallout TV show, who over the course of the series becomes a memorable and conflicted link between the world as-was and as it is in the present day. It’s a fantastic performance, which will be no surprise to those who’ve followed Goggins’ career, and while basking in the aftermath of the show’s success the actor revealed a surprising detail about one of the locations.

Some of the outdoor scenes in Fallout were filmed in Namibia, on what is sometimes referred to as the Skeleton Coast, including in an actual diamond mine (thanks, GamesRadar+). A new photograph released by Amazon shows The Ghoul at this location, looking downcast and moody as is his wont, but Goggins says the real explanation is a little more base. 

“[Amazon] ju…

Crusader Kings 3’s next expansion, Tours and Tournaments, has finally got a solid release date. You’ll be able to take your medieval show on tour on May 11, when the DLC hits Steam and the Microsoft Store. 

Tours and Tournaments is CK3’s second bonafide “major expansion,” and aims to beef up life outside the confines of the throne room. “Prove yourself in one of the many forms of gallant Tournaments, either abroad or at home,” reads the blurb, “or use the festivities to murder a quarrelsome rival”. Murdering quarrelsome rivals is, like, my favourite thing to do, so I’m eager to see how Tours and Tournaments innovates in the space.

The DLC will add new “grand activities,” like fancy weddings and “stirring falconry hunts,” that will let you use new means of winning the he…

Sqword is a word game where you try to make as many words as you can in a five-by-five square grid, earning more points for longer words. It was made by Josh C. Simmons and his friends, and is freely available at sqword.com. However, it’s also been picked up by multiple browser game portals, who took it without permission and ran it behind their own ads for profit.

As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. “The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page”, he wrote. “I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place o…

First reported by Ars Technica, ResetEra user delete12345 has made an interesting discovery about Steam libraries: we’re not allowed to bequeath them to our loved ones in the event of our untimely passing.

Delete12345 asked Steam Support about the hypothetical scenario, and got a clear, professional, but very disappointing response. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable,” the support rep explained. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its access to another account.

“I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”

Now, I was going to suggest that you can just give your designated heir the Steam login and password without getting lawyers involved⁠—barri…

Improve your daily Wordle guesses with our guides and tips, take a look at a hint for today’s game designed to give you a nudge in the right direction, or skip straight to the best part and read the answer to the April 15 (665) game—however you want to win today’s Wordle, we can help.

The answer to today’s puzzle was an obvious one… eventually. I had all the information I needed quite early on, but this was one of those days where I couldn’t see what I had until I was in danger of running out of guesses. It was frustrating, but at least I got today’s Wordle answer in the end.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, April 15

If someone was in an extreme and most likely prolonged level of physical or mental pain, today’s word would be …

All the help you could need to win today’s Wordle just the way you want to is right here. Go straight for a guaranteed win with a quick click to today’s answer, give yourself a few pointers with our handy tips, or guided assistance with our clue for the October 27 (860) game.

My second guess today turned out to be almost right in a very wrong way, leaving me with a lot of yellows that in theory could’ve been sorted very quickly, if only I had any idea how to organise them. Let’s just say I took the nail-biting scenic route to today’s Wordle answer, and leave it at that. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, October 27

As a social rank, this word marks someone out as beyond upper class. This is the realm of dukes, princes, and…

A new book from Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast chronicles the early history of the tabletop RPG, and therefore a vital step in the evolution of RPGs as a whole. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977 will release on June 18, 2024, and compiles a slew of documents from the development and release of the first tabletop RPG.

The first chapter of the book is a doozy for people who’re interested in the formation of what an RPG is, detailing and providing documents from the two inspirations that combined to become Dungeons & Dragons: Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor roleplaying wargame and Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren’s wargame Chainmail. It’s deeply cool to see what may well be images of one of the first real RPG character sheets, with its list of sim…