Update: After agitating fans with a statue depicting the demise of Mass Effect Trilogy protagonist Shepard, BioWare has “paused” sales of the item. All pre-orders will be cancelled and refunded too.
“Earlier today, we announced the sale of our latest Mass Effect Shepard statue,” the BioWare Gear Store announced in a tweet. “This statue was intended to be part of a series, commemorating some of the key and most emotional moments in the series. The way we announced it did not convey that properly, nor does it give the moment in the series the credit it deserves. As a result, we’ll be pausing sales on the statue until we can share the larger plan with you.”
It’s a sad day for appreciators of death statues, but as the statement above implies, it may very well see a return with some more, erm, persuasive context.
Original story:
BioWare’s merch team seems to love doing statues. The Dragon Age side of the BioWare Gear store …
Upcoming action RPG Mortal Crux is a game that always seems to have transformed in strange and unexpected ways every time I check in on it. Case and point: its full 3D in-game aquarium for communing with the fruits of a disquietingly extensive fishing minigame.
This isn’t even supposed to be a fishing RPG—the quickest sell I’d make for Mortal Crux is that it looks like Divinity: Original Sin, but as an action RPG instead of turn-based. Developer Jesse Walker has a similarly whimsical sensibility and eye for detail to Larian, with environmental destruction, physics based puzzles, and elemental knock-on effects galore spicing up soulslike hack n’ slash combat, and you’ll be able to experience it all in up to four-player co-op.
But everything’s better with a fishing minigame, and as we covered back in our PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted showcase in November, Mortal Crux will be tying the feature into a full-on fishing-focused questline.
Now it sounds like thi…
Skybound Entertainment has kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to support the development of a new videogame based on the hugely popular Invincible comic and animated TV series. This isn’t a Kickstarter-style campaign, though, but an investment into Skybound itself, being run through the Republic investment platform.
“Most crowdfunded videogames are centered around indie games and retail investors rarely have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of AAA game publishers,” the Invincible investment page says. “Skybound is developing a highly produced, high-octane blood bath that is anything but indie. Our bona fide global hit IP, Invincible, is at the center, and we’ve hand-picked our own team, consisting of more than 30 gaming industry veterans, to make it happen.
“We have successfully raised $18 million from everyday investors and fans via Republic/Seedrs, and we are inviting you to join us once again. What do you say? Guts, gore, and potential investor glory?”
I was impressed by the atmosphere and detail of last year’s sci-fi city building sim Ixion, but it was undoubtedly a game with a few scorch marks seared across its hull. One of the bigger issues was its unpredictable level of challenge, something Alexander Chatziioannou noted in his review: “The way Ixion stealthily slides into doom-spirals of unsustainability makes reloading preferable to redesigning.”
Developer Bulwark Studios has clearly been listening, as the game’s latest update introduces a suite of difficulty options. In a press release, Bulwark detailed the three primary difficulty options as follows:
- Journey: For players who want to enjoy the game’s narrative and is recommended for those unfamiliar with the city-builder genre.
- Default: The intended Ixion experience and is recommended for players familiar with city builders.
- Challenge: An unrelenting fight for survival; this mode is for Admin…
Microsoft’s AI tool Copilot is already part and parcel of Windows 11, but at least it’s free and you have the option to completely ignore it. Copilot Pro, on the other hand, is a subscription service that was originally only available for business users. But now, the software giant is letting anyone get in on the extra AI action, for a mere $20 per month. Oddly, Microsoft’s main target audience for this appears to be 365 subscribers, because naturally they’ll all want to pay out even more money.
Before I jump into the details of the scheme (discovered via The Verge), can I just raise one thing to start with: Has Microsoft completely lost the plot? $20 per month? That’s double the current fee one pays for a Family 365 subscription. You could buy a copy of Valheim for that much, twelve of them every year. Surely it can’t be serious. Sadly it is and it’s not called Shirley, either.
So what exactly are you getting for this ridiculous sum of money? First of …
Google’s streaming dream died in January this year: the Google Stadia streaming service joined a laundry list of projects the company has canned over the years. Google could open a Ben & Jerry’s-style flavor graveyard for them all. We know the streaming platform struggled with market share since its release in 2019, and I never was a fan of its business model, but today we do have some insight into why Google closed Stadia down, from the person in charge of doing so.
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
“For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one …
Ambitious full conversion mod Fallout: London finally arrived late last month, and it’s a “truly impressive modding achievement” according to our own Joshua Wolens—and he’d know, he lives in the UK and has an accent and everything. The mod can also be a bit difficult to get running smoothly at the moment, unfortunately. As Joshua also said, “it crashes smoother than any Bethesda game I’ve played.”
The developers of Fallout: London, Team FOLON, are aware of the issues and are hard at working fixing them. According to an announcement in the mod’s official Discord today, there’s a hotfix and a proper patch in the works, and they can even provide direct help to players having trouble getting the mod working.
“We are absolutely blown away by the incredible support from the community for our mod. Your enthusiasm and feedback mean the world to us!” said Team FOLON. They also acknowledged their work isn’t done yet and outlined what steps they’ll be taking next.
The m…
It takes a brave kind of person to announce they’ve fully decompiled Paper Mario mere days after Nintendo finished mounting hacker Gary Bowser’s head on a proverbial spike, and that person is Ethan Roseman. Spotted by VGC, Roseman—a coder—has announced that he’s “reached 100% completion” on a project aimed at decompiling the Nintendo 64 classic, opening the way for mods and unofficial PC ports.
The completion of the project means that, sooner or later, we should be able to play Paper Mario on our desktops without having to resort to emulation.
As draconian and litigious as Nintendo is about these things, previous projects of this type have managed to avoid the gaze of its lawyers so far. Decompilation projects for Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, and Perfect Dark all remain in good health, so Roseman’s project should—in theory—remain online for the foreseeable future.
The reason is probably because projects like these don’t really infrin…
Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update will arrive tomorrow, March 19, and may represent the last set of major additions to the game from creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. Barone says to expect “a lot more… than people think” and in the runup to the patch’s release has become drunk with power, posting a single patch note every day.
This has now reached a level of absurdity that one can only admire, with Barone’s Sunday announcement being the sentence: “You can now drink mayonnaise.”
Believe it or not, there is context for this. Way back in October 2021, a fan of the game going by the handle Sage asked Barone about a rumor they’d heard: “we can’t eat Mayo and Pickles in Stardew Valley because you don’t like either of those foods. Is this true?”
“I like pickles,” replied Barone at the time. “But mayo… I plead the 5th. But if I remember right, the real reason you can’t eat them in the game is because they are in a glass jar and I didn’t want to have to d…
Turn your daily Wordle into a guaranteed win with a range of help designed to suit your needs. Prefer a lighter touch? Then you’ll enjoy our general tips. Need a bit of guidance? Take a look at a clue for the December 3 (897) game. Just want to savour a speedy win? Click or scroll your way to today’s Wordle answer.
There’s nothing quite like a peaceful bit of puzzling to start off a Sunday morning. No drama, no last minute problems to trip me up, just a smooth game of Wordle that gave me plenty of clues and quickly led to today’s answer. Let’s hope I can keep this relaxed streak going into next week.
Wordle today: A hint
Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, December 3
If someone or something adjusts or alters itself to better suit its new surroundings or changed circumstances, it would _____ to them.
ViewViewViewView
Is there a double letter in Wordle today?
Yes, a letter is used twice in today’s puzzle.
Word…
In terms of longevity, influence, and jaw-dropping community projects, if there’s a console counterpart to Doom, it’s Super Mario 64. Nintendo’s generation-defining platformer and its timeless movement mechanics, adorable aesthetic, and a speedrunning community that occasionally leverages quantum mechanics to get faster clear times have ensured that Mario 64 has always remained relevant.
But where Doom’s community has long had tools to go beyond the hardware and software limitations enforced by its 1993 release, Mario 64 diehards have had only a few janky editing tools to work with. Even with such limitations, there’s been no shortage of incredible romhacks for Mario 64 over the years, but there’s always been a high technical bar to triple jump over when it comes to making custom stages.
That bar can now be cleared with a well timed long jump, thanks to Rovertronic and Arthurtilly’s Mario Builder 64, an in-depth, intuitive, thematically appropriate leve…
Roblox Corporation has announced the creation of a new category of experiences, which is what it calls the games people create on the platform, for people aged 17 and older. “17 to 24 year-olds are the fastest-growing group on Roblox, and in 2022, people over 17 made up 38% of our daily active users,” said Roblox in the announcement. “We’ve heard your feedback on wanting to be able to build experiences that feature more mature themes and storylines that appeal to older users”.
Users wishing to create or take part in anything in this category will need to provide a selfie and a photo ID to Roblox. This means Roblox now has four categories of experience, starting at “All ages” (“infrequent mild violence and/or light unrealistic blood” allowed), then Ages 9+ (“mild violence, heavy unrealistic blood, and/or mild crude humor”), Ages 13+ (“moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, and/or unplayable gambling content”) and now the Ages 17+ band…
This week, I discovered a TikToker deliberately developing the worst game of all time—complete with impossible platforming, unskippable dialogue, and a rocket launcher that has to be reloaded 150 times between each shot. I ended that post anxious that creator Everywhere Nowhere might one day release their abomination into the world for people to actually play. I’m afraid that happened sooner even than I feared.
You can now try Monster Sniper Season 3 for yourself on the developer’s itch.io page, and… wow. I knew it was going to be bad, but watching it in TikToks really didn’t do it justice. Actually getting your hands on it is a whole other world of pain.
Thanks to maybe the most ungodly control scheme ever devised—in which you control the hero’s movement with the mouse, and control your weapon with the keyboard—it’s almost impossible to steer through the ludicrously unfair platforming sequences. The music consists of one screeching, loopin…
Thermometers are peaking, birds are chirping, and the air outside is hot and thick. You know what that means, folks, a new season (of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) is here, and it’s bringing all sorts of changes (to the maps and gameplay of the hit Activision-published FPS) with it. Bad news, though: If you’ve got dreams of completing Modern Warfare 2’s season 4 battle pass, you’ve got about two fewer weeks than you had last season to do it. Chop chop.
MW2’s season 4 patch dropped yesterday, introducing, well, too much to go through bit-by-bit. I’ll link the full notes below, but the stuff that leaps out at me is the new maps, new operators, and the changes to the game’s extraction shooter DMZ mode. Oh, and the fact that this season will only last 48 days, a big drop from the 63 days in season 3. That does mean you’ll get to the new content in the mid-season update (and the next season) a little sooner, but you’ll have to scurry if you wanna unlock everything in the battle p…