Year: 2024

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Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred will continue a Diablo tradition of letting you recruit a team of mercenaries to help you slash through hell. A shieldbearer, scoundrel, berserker, and a literal demon are teased in the latest trailer that debuted during the Gamescom Opening Night Live stream.

Details on the mercenaries are still fairly sparse, but each of them neatly fits into an archetype that synergizes with Diablo 4’s existing classes. The shieldbearer, for example, holds up a magical barrier over a necromancer as they’re surrounded by monsters. Some of the mercenary’s skills mirror ones players have been using in the game already, like the berserker lady’s ability to yank monsters toward her with ropes that look very similar to the barbarians’ steel grasp.

I can already see a dozen ways the mercenaries will supplement existing builds. Sorcerers who frequently freeze packs of demons would surely love to have a demon child who can launch a wave of fire toward them as a follow up. And as someone who never plays barbarian, I’ll gladly hire a buddy to taunt and whirlwind through enemies for me.

The trailer is too brief to get into what kind of ways we’ll be a…

Bay 12 and Kitfox have released a new preview for Dwarf Fortress’ upcoming revamped adventure mode, the classic top-down RPG side of the famous colony builder slash fantasy world simulator. The preview itself focuses on the combat menus and actions, with Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams taking the viewer through the basics of the UI and how it works.

The preview shows off a party of three adventurers—Dwarf, Human, and Wombat-Man—out to battle a camp of goblin bandits harassing local trade.

Of especial interest for those entertained by how detailed Dwarf Fortress is would be the menu for wrestling, popping up at about six minutes, that shows off a pretty exhaustive list of things to grab on the bad guys. Normal stuff like their hand, their weapon, and the like of course, but also very, very specific things. Things like the individual fingers, for example, or perhaps specific teeth. Nothing like ripping out a goblin’s molars to start your day.

On a more serious note the preview also shows how you control your team in tactical mode, where you’re able to give each member of an adventuring party orders and have them play out at the same time. It seems p…

GOG is giving away Sigma Theory: Global Cold War, a strategy game set in a future where global superpowers compete over technological advances by sending agents and drones around an XCOM-style hologram of the globe. It’s a game of turn-based espionage that lists Tropico, Armello, Civilization, Plague Inc. and the board game Pandemic among its inspirations.

Sigma Theory was designed by Mi-Clos Studio, the creators of the Out There series, which is reflected in its regular transformations into a choose-your-own-adventure game—when you’re commanding agents in the field, for instance. Each of those agents comes from a selection of 50 named spies, all with their own backstory and personality traits that influence how well they perform and suggest which course of action you should tell them to take when being chased through the streets or trying to hijack secret documents.

There’s also diplomacy and research, with tech trees that might unlock hypnotic indoctrination, combat robots, accurate prediction of the stock market, alternative energy sources, or straight-up immortality. The Sigma Theory of the title is a scientific breakthrough that makes all this possible, pu…

At a press event following the Xbox showcase on Sunday, head of game partnerships Sarah Bond announced that the PC Game Pass library is soon going to be available as part of Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service. Just a few months ago, we called GeForce Now’s new ultimate tier (which streams cloud games from systems outfitted with beefy new RTX 4080s) one of the most effective and affordable ways to upgrade your gaming experience.

“In the coming months, you’re going to be able to play your PC Game Pass catalog leveraging GeForce Now,” Bond said. “You’re going to be able to do that on all the devices where GeForce Now is: low-power PCs, or Macs, or Chromebooks.”

A post on the Xbox website adds a bit of an asterisk to that quote, however, noting that “Game Pass members will soon be able to stream select PC games from the library through Nvidia GeForce Now.” There’s no indication of how many games “select” encompasses. The announcement expands on an Xbox-Nvidia partnership launched in May, with first-party Xbox PC games available on the streaming service.

GeForce Now currently lets you stream a selection of games you own via your Steam library through deals Nvidi…

AMD’s first CPU to sport 3D V-cache—the Zen 3-powered Ryzen 7 5800X3D—proved to be a real hit with PC gamers. And that was no surprise; the extra slice of L3 cache attached on top of the CPU die did wonders for minimum frame rates in dozens of games, especially the likes of Factorio, Minecraft, and many others that were traditionally really CPU-heavy.

So when AMD did the same with its Zen 4 chips, expectations were high. Fortunately, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D easily lived up to the hype and the newer architecture, high clock speeds, and mountains of cache just bulldozed its way to the top of the performance charts. It really is the best pure gaming CPU you buy right now.

We were happy to recommend the chip when it launched at its $449 release price, but now prices have dropped below the $400 mark—it’s $359 (w/ code BFDAYW23) at Newegg right now—it’s an even easier recommendation from our side.

Such gaming strength does put into stark relief what it’s not so good at, however. The relatively small number of cores and threads, and low clock speed owing to that L3 cache hat atop the compute die, means the are better choices if you’re going to be d…

Baldur’s Gate 3 was our 2023 Game of the Year and highest-scoring review in over a decade and a half for a whole host of reasons, but its open-ended player freedom and attending reactivity to all of our potential choices is certainly up there. A year out from release, Proxy Gate Tactician on YouTube has uncovered a particularly absurd edge case reaction involving the Netherstones and late-game Iron Throne and Steel Watch Foundry dungeons.

The Netherstones are Baldur’s Gate 3’s Triforce-y magical McGuffin, and you need all three to progress to the end of the game. Larian’s not in the business of restricting player control with unkillable NPCs or undroppable items, so you’re free to take the stones in and out of your inventory. To avoid a potential soft lock on losing the stones forever, chucking them into a bottomless pit or something triggers a unique game over where the Absolute wins and you immediately turn into an Illithid.

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But Proxy Gate Tactician wanted to see if there were any reactions to more specific ways of losing the stones, i.e. dropping them off in a dungeon you can only visit once in the entire game. The underwater Iron Throne, which you explor…

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Just a week after releasing an impressive “first slice” playable build, work on Portal 64, a fan-made effort to bring Valve’s beloved Portal to the 1996 Nintendo console, has been halted. Developer James Lambert said he was asked by Valve to take the project down, because it “depends on Nintendo’s proprietary libraries.”

Lambert has been working on the Nintendo 64 version of Portal since at least early 2022, when he posted a video of the first “graphics test on real Nintendo 64 hardware.” He also warned, however, that if he decided to move forward with the project, “I would pretty much have to rebuild the entire game from scratch.” 

And then he went ahead and did just that, to impressive effect: This is Portal on the Nintendo 64, which frankly I would not have thought possible before seeing it with my own eyes. Lambert’s work earned him acclaim from the Nintendo 64 fanbase, including our own Rich Stanton, who said that Portal 64 is “the most impressive homebrew game [he’s] ever seen.”

Unfortunately, releasing a playable build of the project appears to have crossed some sort of line. “So I have been in communication with Valve about the future of t…