The South Korean game ratings board’s worst-kept secret has finally gotten an official announcement. The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story promises to be a “gritty indie 2D hi-bit pixel action RPG that lets players raise a rogue mage army and lead a revolution,” and it’s set for release in Spring this year.

Mageseeker is being developed by Digital Sun, who also made the roguelite dungeon crawler/shop sim Moonlighter, and will tell the story of Sylas, an escaped mage in the Runeterran kingdom of Demacia, who was introduced to League of Legends itself all the way back in 2019. Demacia’s rulers repress magic they deem forbidden while wielding it themselves to entrench their power, an arrangement that I suspect won’t survive through the game’s ending.

This is Mageseeker’s first official announcement, but it’s not the first we’ve heard of it. Last month, South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee leaked its existence in a now-deleted listing on its website, so…

Big tech firms haven’t enjoyed a good start to 2023. The wider economy, the war in Ukraine, lingering pandemic related issues, and soaring inflation has meant many of the world’s biggest companies—including Meta and Alphabet among others—have taken huge hits to their bottom lines. Sadly, for those involved, that means staff cuts. Intel is the latest company to announce a new wave of layoffs.

Just a couple of weeks back, Intel released a grim set of financial results. It saw a loss of $2.8 billion, the largest in the company’s history. Add to that a massive 36% drop in overall revenue and it’s no surprise that Intel is seeking to tighten the purse strings.

Rumors began to surface last week, with Dylan Patel of Semi Analysis tweeting about major budget cuts and layoffs. Though unconfirmed at the time, Intel has since released a statement to Tom’s Hardware, which follows:

“Intel is working to accelerate its strategy while navigating a challenging macro-eco…

The PC version of Horizon Forbidden West has been generally very well received, even if opinions of the original game are varied. That’s because it’s got the full gamut of upscalers on offer (DLSS, FSR, and XeSS), along with ultrawide monitor support, and even includes the use of DirectStorage. However, when it comes to frame generation, AMD’s system was notable by its absence. In a chat with its senior director and principle programmers, Nixxes explained to me why it won’t appear until a later patch—it’s waiting for AMD to release the next update of FSR.

We were talking about performance enhancing tools and features and I asked the developers who ported Horizon Forbidden West, Nixxes Software, if there was a specific or technical reason as to why Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation was included but not AMD’s FSR system.

“The short version is, we’re sort of waiting for FSR 3.1,” says Michiel Roza, the Principal Optimization Programmer at Nixxes. “Because we wanted t…

Many PC enthusiasts don’t like the fact that the best top-end GPUs use lots of power and try all kinds of ways of reducing the consumption, such as undervolting, frame rate caps, or lowering the max power limit. Graphics card vendor PowerColor is experimenting with a slightly different approach by using an NPU to manage the power usage in games, without impacting performance, in a system called Edge AI.

A demonstration of the work in progress was on display at PowerColor’s Computex stand. While we didn’t get a chance to see it in action (there was a huge amount to try and see at the event), tech site IT Home and X user Harukaze5719 managed to grab some pictures of the setup and see it running on two computers running Final Fantasy XV.

PowerColor’s engineers hotwired an external NPU to an AMD graphics card, in one of the computers, and programmed it to manage the GPU’s power consumption while rendering. At the moment, there’s no indication of exactly what’s going…

In an event the songsmiths will someday call ‘the shot heard around the world,’ an Overwatch hostess club has been unceremoniously scrubbed from Twitter (via Automaton). But not to worry, it lives once more.

Named OW_CabaretClub, the club wasn’t some kind of Overwatch-themed physical location but rather a Twitter-based service that let Overwatchers hire women to play alongside them for a fee. Punters could, if they were so inclined, get in on some flirtatious multiplayer or fall asleep with their partner in voice chat. 

The idea comes from Japanese hostess clubs—which any Yakuza player will be familiar with—where people (mostly if not entirely men, let’s be honest) can turn up and find a drink and a lady who will pay rapt attention to whatever they say.

It wasn’t long before the club’s Twitter account was blasted off the face of the Earth. Speculation is that Blizzard didn’t take kindly to its existence and the breach of its terms and conditions, b…

Some days the Connections just don’t seem to add up—not before you’ve run out of guesses, anyway. This is where we swoop in to help. You’ll find all the answers for today’s NYT Connections game waiting below, as well as a full range of hints for the September 15 (#96) puzzle if you’d just like a quick hint.

The tricky ones are almost always painfully obvious in hindsight, aren’t they? I really struggled with today’s purple-coloured Connections, so much so I ended up working around them until I had nothing else left to pick. And now I’ve stared at them all in a neat row, I’m wondering how I ever thought they didn’t go together.

NYT Connections hint today: Friday, September 15 

Give yourself a helping hand with our hints for today’s game.

Yellow: Everything in this category is the sort of animal you might find on a farm. A dairy farm, specifically, although some of these are more common than others.

Green: Ca…

Set in a dark sci-fi world, Steel Seed sees you play as the protagonist, Zoe, and her flying companion drone, Koby, as she investigates a dangerous underground facility. Steel Seed has already shared a couple of other trailers full of Zoe taking on hordes of evil robots, but now we get to see it all again, this time set to classical music. 

The new trailer for Steel Seed, shown at the PC Gaming Show, sees Zoe explore a couple of new locations of the underground facility as a mysterious voice who goes by Savi talks about her past and purpose. 

As Zoe ascends some sunlit stairs, we find out that not only has she been alive for centuries, but that this world was created by her father with the help of Savi. But with questions about her past left unanswered and clearly, no one around to lend a helping hand, there’s nothing left but to explore this strange facility and try to figure things out for herself. 

But it’s not all about self-discovery, there’s al…

Win your weekend Wordle. Win your weekday Wordle. Win every Wordle ever made with our help. Whether you want to make a beeline for today’s answer, or you’d rather mull over a clue for the March 16 (1001) game as you drink your morning coffee, everything you’re looking for is just below.

Green… green… gre- ah, a grey. Great. I was sure I had today’s game solved in just a couple of goes, instead, I found myself staring at a scattering of green letters that didn’t seem to fit anything I had left to try. They didn’t fit, did they? I mean, what else coul—ohh, there it is. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, March 16

Thinking of poisonous substances is going to help you win today’s Wordle, as this word describes any sort of poison that naturally occurs in plants, animals, or insects.  

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, a letter is not used twi…

Struggling with the June 26 (1103) Wordle? Not any more. Now you’re here, today’s answer is only an easy click away. Not struggling, but would still like a little help? Got it. Spend a little time with a fresh clue for today’s game, and give your guesses a hand.

I’m a bit surprised by this one. My opening guesses didn’t look like anything special at all—a single letter changing from yellow to green—but it turned out to be just the thing I needed to find today’s answer on my next go. The letters just seemed to sort themselves out for me. Thanks, Wordle.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, June 26

You’d do this to dough if you were making bread, and also to someone’s back if their muscles needed a massage. Wherever it’s happening, this is the act of (gently) pressing and stretching something by hand.    

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no d…

The hardware in Valve’s 2021 Steam Deck can run circles around Nintendo’s 2017 Nintendo Switch, but there’s been one point of comparison where Nintendo’s had the upper hand for the last year: the screen. The Switch OLED model debuted just six months before the Steam Deck, and once you go OLED on a TV, phone, or gaming handheld, it’s pretty hard to leave those rich colors and deep blacks behind. The Steam Deck has just passed its one year anniversary, and for the whole year I’ve seen one question about the Deck pop up more than any other: is Valve going to make an OLED model?

The short, polite answer, from Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, is that Valve “understands the limitations of the current tech that’s in the Deck, in terms of the screen.” 

“We also want it to be better. We’re looking at all avenues,” he says. But the longer answer is that there’s a lot more to swapping out a screen than just… swapping out a screen.

“I think people are looking at thing…

There were a bunch of new handheld gaming PCs floating around the Computex show this year, whether it was newbies such as the Zotac Zone, or companies trying to fix initial mistakes with their first devices, such as the ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI. But in a twist of almost Shyamalanian proportions it was Adata who actually presented the most interesting handheld of the show.

Now, I’m not going to say it’s the best because we’ve only been shown a couple of prototypes of the Adata Nia so far, and not with necessarily finalised silicon either. But there’s a great ethos behind it, some interesting new tech choices, and even some potentially performance-enhancing eye-tracking tricks, too.

But it’s also the approach to pricing which is refreshing. I would doubt the Zotac Zone is going to be coming in cheap with its trackpads and OLED screen, and neither the Ally X or MSI Claw 8 AI. But Adata is at least looking for the normalised pricing of the Steam Deck, and trying to keep …

Earlier this year PCG reported on a crypto rug-pull with a new twist: The CEO of the firm involved didn’t appear to exist. The news came in the wake of a Guardian Australia investigation into Hyperverse, a crypto scheme that collapsed with an estimated $1.3 billion in losses, and during its time was fronted by a chief executive by the name of Steven Reece Lewis. Reece Lewis had one hell of a C.V., but when the wheels came off he appeared to have vanished into thin air. Now the man behind the crypto baron has been found and, in another twist truly emblematic of crypto, it’s an actor who was paid a relative pittance.

The HyperVerse scheme was launched in late 2021 with a video featuring Reece Lewis alongside video messages of support from such luminaries as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Chuck Norris (it appears these were scripts commissioned through Cameo rather than endorsements). The company said Reece Lewis was a University of Leeds graduate w…

If you’re looking for a new Wordle angle, hoping to refine your game or want to win today’s Wordle at all costs, then you’ve clicked through to the right place. You’ll find everything from our extensive Wordle archive to hints, tips, and clues just below. If you need the answer to the January 21 (581) puzzle, then that’s just a quick click away too.

I almost came unstuck at the end of today’s puzzle, as I found myself staring at four greens, and all of the most obvious consonants had already been used or eliminated. Luckily there’s no time limit on Wordle, so a quick break gave me the fresh perspective needed to finally see what I’d missed the first time around—and kick myself for not spotting it earlier.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, January 21

Today’s answer is used to describe a short piece of text often found on the back of books, usually praising the work and designed to attract someone’s attention and encourage them to o…

Windows 11 is a mess. Weirdly, I find that quite endearing. After decades of its existence as a deathly dull operating system, I’m kinda into Windows showing us its fallible side. But does it need to do it so damn often now, and in such strange ways? The latest is the way that Windows 11 will auto-translate the context menu’s option to compress data into a .zip file for people in the UK to say ‘postcode.’

Though only sometimes.

Because yes, Windows 11 is a mess and cannot even decide when to be consistent in its own weird foibles. 

For those of you a little confused about what a postcode is, it’s effectively the same as a US zip code; a way of distilling a postal address down to but a few characters. Hence why some rogue auto-translate function in Windows 11 is occasionally switching ‘zip’ to ‘postcode’ in the UK’s Windows menus.

I’m a person in the UK, and my machines have always offered up the option to ‘Compress to Zip file’ on my gaming PCs. Though t…

Back before survival MMO Dune: Awakening was a glint in Funcom’s eye, the Norwegian studio was working on another multiplayer open world survival game: Conan Exiles. The gritty survival sandbox had a lot going for it, like a base building system, bloody combat, and a punishing survival experience, but there was one feature in particular that caught everyone’s eye.

Conan Exiles had a… well, the game labels it “endowment” but we wound up informally calling it a “dong slider.” In character creation, you could change the size of your character’s penis (if they had one) from demi to venti, if you catch my drift, and all the sizes in between. What’s more, your character’s junk was fully physics enabled: when you jumped up and down while naked, your package would jiggle and shake and bounce around. It was quite the sight.

The revelation about the game’s genital physics blew up, and I’m not exaggerating: our story about Conan Exile’s endowment slider was…