Month: September 2024

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…