Month: October 2024

It won’t have escaped your notice that Intel has been in the news a lot recently, either talking about its race to be at the cutting edge of chip manufacturing, getting billions of dollars from the US administration, or having a few issues with its high-end CPUs running the latest games. It’s certainly been very busy, though, building all kinds of new facilities for making processors, as well as expanding its research laboratories. In a brief report on its 10 largest construction projects, Intel shared that the total cost of all the current investments will be over $160 billion by the time it’s all finished.

If you’re wondering whether that’s a lot of money for such things, then rest assured, it absolutely is. Yes, semiconductor foundries all cost many billions of dollars to design and build, and TSMC has spent in the region of $65 billion to construct three chip-making plants in Arizona. However, Intel is also spending a bucket load of cash on improving its research and development facility in Hillsboro, specifically over $36 billion.

To put that into perspective, Nvidia spent a little under $9 billion on R&D in its last financial year and although the company n…

Asus is recommending users update the firmware on some of its most popular routers in order to address critical security vulnerabilities. The updates include fixes or mitigations for nine security vulnerabilities. 

According to Bleeping Computer, the CVE-2022-26376 and CVE-2018-1160 vulnerabilities are the most worrisome. The first is a memory corruption vulnerability that could let attackers launch DoS attacks or even execute code. It carries a critical 9.8/10 severity rating according to the NIST’s National Vulnerability Database.  

The second is a five-year-old vulnerability with the same 9.8/10 critical rating. It too can allow an attacker to execute code. Both methods place the router at risk of becoming part of a botnet or used for all kinds of nefarious purposes.

The list of affected models follows: GT6, GT-AXE16000, GT-AX11000 PRO, GT-AX6000, GT-AX11000, GS-AX5400, GS-AX3000, XT9, XT8, XT8 V2, RT-AX86U PRO, RT-AX86U, RT-AX86S, RT-AX82U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX3000, TUF-AX6000, and TUF-AX5400. 

Asus clearly believes these are significant issues. “Please note, if you choose not to install this new firmware version, we strongly recommend disab…

Rockstar has released the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 early, and in 12 hours it’s already smashed through 60 million views (and counting). Needless to say the 90-second video is jam-packed full of details and hints about what we’ll be getting up to in Vice City, and if you want the nuts-and-bolts breakdown we’ve got you covered. But one element of the trailer really jumped out at me: TikTok framing, and the real-world parallels.

It’s no surprise that GTA 6 will incorporate its own version of TikTok, because the series has always jumped on the tech trends of the moment: characters use their iFruit phones, you can surf Live Invader (Facebook) or Bleeter (Twitter), and pretty much any piece of pop culture you can imagine has its GTA equivalent. What Rockstar’s seized upon with TikTok feels more in-depth than that though, and a reflection of how TikTokers and people filming constantly is now a fact of contemporary urban life.

What especially interested me about the GTA 6 take on this, however, is that several of the TikTok-esque clips in the trailer are lifted directly from real life. The first time I watched it I recognised GTA 6’s hammer lady (timesta…

Square Enix has debuted a full trailer for Final Fantasy 14’s upcoming expansion Dawntrail at Final Fantasy Fan Festival 2024. The trailer shows off a look at the new world continent and its inhabitants interacting with a diverse lineup of FF14 classics.

The trailer is dominated by the generic player-stand-in Adventurer journeying towards the new continent of Tural alongside others, including a soon-to-be-playable female Hrothgar, and doing battle with a huge two-headed lizard-like Mamool Ja creature. Other scenes sweep through a sprawling city alive with strange new creatures and familiar ones not seen before in these numbers.

Dominating the environment of the trailer are lizard-like Mamool Ja, a tribe that has been around FF14 for a long time now but only as mercenaries far from home. The Dawntrail expansion will take players to the continent that the Mamool Ja call home, and presumably explore their home nation(s).

However, I must note that above all else this trailer includes an extended sequence of a chinchilla doing cute stuff. Stealing a peanut.  Sitting on a shoulder. Running around. Making someone smile. Merely existing.

You can wat…

Bandai Namco has a friendly FYI for all the Elden Ring players out there: The big Shadow of the Erdtree expansion arrives on June 20, which is less than two weeks away, and an awful lot of you have work to do before you’re ready to take it on.

Minor spoilers follow:

Back in February, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said players will access Shadow of the Erdtree through Miquella’s cocoon, which is found in the palace of Mohg, Lord of Blood. Naturally, Mohg is not cool with people like you messing with Miquella, so step one of the process is putting the thump on him.

And that’s where the problem lies. As streamer Cohh Carnage pointed out, less than 38% of Elden Ring players on Steam have earned the achievement for collecting Mohg’s head, which means that nearly two-thirds of you have some work to do before you can access the DLC.

And thus, Bandai’s PSA:

Now, this number does bear a little further analysis. First and most obvious, it only represents Steam, so while it’s probably a good barometer of the situation across the board, it doesn’t accurately reflect how things are going for console players, who may or may not be more conscienti…

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One peasant and his pitchfork versus the zombie horde looks to be the concept behind God Save Birmingham, the recently-announced survival crafting game from Ocean Drive Studio. With a short alpha trailer dropped this week at Gamescom and a recently-posted Steam page, God Save Birmingham will be a “physics-based” game set “in a painstakingly recreated medieval market town.”

The trailer shows a pretty normal-looking dude dodging zombies through the muddy roads and fields of a medieval village, all while armed with little more than a pitchfork. The big pitch for God Save Birmingham is that its mechanics are physics-driven, so you see the character stumble and slide around the world—and the zombies engage in some real slapstick stuff like tripping over benches.

For a lot of people—me included—the appeal here is definitely the look at historical authenticity and realism.

“Explore a carefully reconstructed 14th century Birmingham, in all its bucolic, bubonic glory. Stop by the Markets or the Burgage Plots to forage for resources. Raid boarded-up smithies for tools, grab a drink at the nearest tavern, and explore historic architecture at the…

Final Fantasy 14 is a game with, for the most part, solid job design at endgame—Dawntrail’s had some bumps in the road but, for the length I’ve played, class balance has typically been more-or-less decent with only some minor variance and snafus. Outside of the endgame, however, it’s all over the shop.

Jobs are assigned AoE attacks at complete random, some like Dragoon don’t get their proper kit until level 50—arguably 60—and newer jobs, like the Pictomancer, completely tear apart at the seams when level synced to older content. One such quirk is the existence of lower-tier healing spells like Benefic and, to the chagrin of Reddit user BakaDango, Cure.

“Last night, after a 30+ minute Alexander [raid],” BakaDango writes, “I finally have had enough of dealing with Cure 1 [White Mages]. At this point, I can recognize the Cure 1 jingle from a mile away and every time I hear it, I feel great pain. Rather than try to explain this over and over or convey this in a macro, I decided to make this site.”

While this might seem petty on the face of it, as a FF14 player myself—they’re right. They’re absolutely correct to have made this thing and to be…

I’ll make no bones about it: I preferred Grand Theft Auto 4 to GTA 5. The latter is great and all but I never got over the more grounded and gritty take of GTA 4 and in particular its tragic central cast, defined and trapped by their lives in the criminal underworld. GTA 4 had two great expansions, The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and the Damned, both introducing their own protagonists and side stories. One of them was the biker Johnny Klebitz, who, unlike many of Rockstar’s leads, ends his GTA 4 arc in a better place.

An early twist in GTA 5 upset the apple cart: One of that game’s three protagonists, the psychopathic Trevor, finds a drug-addled Johnny and beats him to death. This has always been an unpopular twist, which perhaps indicates narratively it was a good one (boo!), because as well as the character’s death the state he’s found in suggests things all went wrong for Johnny after The Lost and the Damned’s ending. Players didn’t like the fact he was killed, but they especially didn’t like the fact he was such a shell of the character we knew.

Ever since this happened Johnny’s afterlife became an urban legend among the GTA community, with players claiming t…

There’s a fine line between adorable and horrifying, and Among The Wild has one boot on either side of it. Revealed  at the PC Gaming Show today, the first game from Swedish developer Nuggets Entertainment is a first-person farming sim, exploration adventure, and creature-collector. And those creatures sure are cute… except, are they?

For instance, the pudgy yellow-beaked birds we see in the trailer are almost cute but their eyeballs are just a little too big and their pupils just a bit too beady, such that they border on sinister looking… so while I do want to pick them up I don’t really want to hug them. Then there’s your mount, which has the stocky pink body of a giant pig (cute!) but the face and horns of some sort of… pug-faced lizard? I don’t even want to know what unholy union led to that creature—but it does look fun to ride around on.

And then there are the stars of the trailer, those round fuzzy creatures with mouths that are a little too wide to be trustworthy. You just get the feeling they might look around, blink a few times, and then abruptly swallow someone’s pet cat without ever losing that bi…

If a high refresh rate gaming laptop is what you desire, I’ve found a deal well worth casting your eyes across. It’s this Acer Predator Helios Neo 16—and while the 240 Hz display is definitely the headline feature, the rest of the specs are pretty impressive for its $1,450 asking price at Best Buy.

A very fast panel can make all the difference for competitive multiplayer gaming, as the faster you can see your opponents, the better chance you have of making yourself look like a hero rather than, I don’t know, me, a multiplayer zero. Speedy displays are plentiful these days, but a 240 Hz IPS unit in a gaming laptop under $1,500 is a bit of a boon.

Still, while it’s all very well having a super-speedy screen, if your components can’t feed it pixels fast enough then it’s a bit of a waste. Thankfully, here you get an Intel Core i9 14900HX in tandem with a 140 W TGP RTX 4070. That’s one of Intel’s latest and greatest mobile CPUs stacked with an Nvidia GPU that really can deliver the goods.

Sure, it’s not an RTX 4080, but the full-fat RTX 4070 in combination with some DLSS 3 upscaling and potentially some Frame Generation should be able to pump a serious number …

One would hope that, when reading a recipe, a human being has at some point crafted it personally, adjusting the ingredients and techniques inside over a process of elimination and careful adjustment to create a delicious result. Or, if you’re receiving a recipe from grocery delivery service Instacart, you could hope that the app’s AI-generated recipes would lead to something delectable.

Sometimes, sure. And others? Might be best to give it a miss.

Instacart announced in May of last year they they would be partnering with OpenAI to launch an AI-powered “Food Inspiration Search Tool” and AI-generated recipes, which given AI’s tendency to go slightly off the rails on occasion strikes as a dubious idea right from the off. However, it was users of the Instacart subreddit that were first to notice that something odd was happening with the accompanying images. 

Those scanning the photos (via Business Insider) without paying too much attention may have let them pass, but more than a cursory glance reveals some ingredients that look entirely made up. From conjoined chickens to hotdogs with the interior of a tomato, it’s a telling indicator of what looks like the s…

To the best of my recollection, February hasn’t always been one of the biggest months for game releases, but the industry’s habit of delaying games from the holiday season to the start of the next year has turned it into a magnet for big games that needed “extra time for polish.” And boy is February 2025 stacked.

The last-minute delay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows just added another big game to a month that was already spilling over. Here’s what I’m talking about:

• Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 — February 11
• Civilization 7 — February 11
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows — February 14
• Avowed — February 18
• Monster Hunter Wilds — February 27
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii — February 27

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Avowed, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are all in February because of delays. The others might’ve picked early 2025 in part to avoid those formerly 2024 games, but as happens so often now, that didn’t work out.

It sure is a lot of big action RPGs—the kinds…

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The original Doom and Doom 2 are back in a big way: Bethesda Softworks announced at QuakeCon today that newly-updated editions of the groundbreaking 1990s shooters, bundled with a pile of additional content, are now available in a single package.

Developed in partnership with Nightdive and id Software, the Doom + Doom 2 bundle features cross-platform deathmatch and co-op gameplay for up to 16 players, modding tools that enable modders to share their work directly in-game (sounds similar to the mod integration in Bethesda’s RPGs), and an updated soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult including brand-new Doom 2 recordings (although you can opt for the original soundtrack if you prefer). There’s also a range of new accessibility options including more legible fonts and a high-contrast mode, plus improved performance with support for 4K resolutions via Nightdive’s Kex engine.

The full package includes:

• Doom
• Doom 2
• TNT: Evilution
• The Plutonia Experiment
• Master Levels for Doom 2
• No Rest for the Living
• Sigil…
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