Year: 2024

Courtesy of Free People

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Did someone say sale? Yes, you heard that right. Believe it or not, Free People just dropped a surprise sale on us, offering an extra 25% off their already mega-discounted items from the sale section (um… talk about a steal!). Which means if you're a fan of all their gorgeous boho pieces, this is the time to grab that credit card and RUN to Free People's site before it's too late. Seriously, it's almost hard to believe that their coveted Perfect Storm midi dress is on sale for less than $100 right now, with other frilly tops and statement camis also on sale for less than $20.

But if you don't know where to start, us E! girlies have you covered. We did you a favor and dug around their sale section for all the cutest boho basics, flowy staples, and more that are worth immediately adding to your cart. …

There’s a ton of cool weapons in Baldur’s Gate 3: the super slick pirate rapier Duelist’s Prerogative, the Magic Missile-launching hand crossbow Ne’er Misser, the… hunk of salami? Yes, while it’s probably best reserved as fuel for your long rests, the salami item in Baldur’s Gate 3 is also a 1d4 damage bludgeoning weapon, and YouTuber cRPG Bro has produced a character build devoted to the most dominant salami-based fighter possible.

Though the noble salami’s base damage is pretty piddly, it’s still a viable delivery method for Baldur’s Gate 3’s many sources of elemental damage and other on-hit effects. cRPG Bro opts for a Paladin/Warlock/Fighter multiclass not dissimilar to the Oathbreaker Warlock build in our own best multiclass guide.

The Warlock-Paladin combo means tons of casts of Divine Smite augmenting those otherwise-wimpy sausages, while elemental damage gear like the Caustic Band or Helldusk Gloves only further the salami pain train potential. Unfortunately, even though these weapons are as improvised as they come, the salamis don’t qualify for bonus damage from the Tavern Brawler improvised weapon feat. Still, cRPG Bro shows off the build working jus…

Rockstar has released a patch for GTA Online that—hopefully—will fix the nasty security vulnerability discovered in January that enabled unscrupulous jerks to steal other players’ in-game money, reset their account progress, and even “corrupt” their accounts in a way that effectively leaves them banned from online play.

That’s all bad enough in itself, but was potentially only the tip of the iceberg. Speyedr, the creator of the unofficial Guardian firewall mod for GTA5 that aims to protect players from hackers, predicted that the vulnerability could eventually enable remote code execution, enabling hackers to run malware on any PC playing the game.

Rockstar acknowledged the problem shortly after it was reported, saying it aimed to take care of it in a “security-related title update.”

That update is now live, and while the patch notes don’t go into great detail, it’s clearly aimed at addressing the exploit.

The patch notes, courtesy of Rockstar Support:

Security

• Implemented a new data protocol in GTA Online to improve the security of network sessions and player-to-player messaging
• Fixed an issue that could result in a…
  

Korean authorities have rated Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games’ original cowboy epic, as of June 15, 2023. The listing, discovered and quickly propagated online, has fueled rampant speculation that a remaster of the game is on the way. In other corners, like ours, that’s cause for some enthusiasm, given that the original Red Dead Redemption never released on PC.

Throwing a big ol’ wrench in that theory is this detail: It’s a rating for console, reports Gematsu, as the letters “NV” in its ratings classification indicates. PC games have an “NP” classification. That doesn’t rule out the existence of a PC version, but it does mean this exact listing ain’t it.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the original Red Dead Redemption on PS3 did have a Korean edition in 2010—this isn’t just a local release 13 years late. The Korean ratings board has been the source of leaks in the past, as with God of War: Ragnarok and Marvel’s Midnight Suns.

The last we heard of a Red Dead Redemption remaster was July 2022, when a Rockstar insider leaked that plans for a remaster of RDR and Grand Theft Auto 4 were sketched out and in consideration. That was before the disastrous recep…

Filming of the Borderlands movie began early in 2021, with Hungary standing in for the junkyard wasteworld of Pandora. Test screenings were held in November of 2022, and apparently the response inspired some changes to be made, as Deadline reports that it’s going back for reshoots with a different director in charge.

While gore-lover Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) handled primary shooting, Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) has taken over for the reshoots, which will take two weeks. Deadline reports that it’s an amicable handover, made necessary by Roth starting work on his next project, a horror movie called Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is based on one of the fake movie trailers that aired as part of Grindhouse, the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration from 2007 combining their movies Planet Terror and Death Proof into a double feature complete with mock advertisements for a string of other movies in the same style. Those joke trailers proved so popular that Thanksgiving is the third of them to be transformed into a real movie, following Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun.

Borderlands will star Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Jamie Lee Curtis as Pat…

When I attended Computex in late May, one of the most impressive things I saw was the Asus ProArt Cinema PQ07 display. There were few details at the time, and I wrote I would be surprised if it cost less than $100,000. I was wrong. It’s going to cost $200,000. My kidneys aren’t worth that much.

Some more information is now available, thanks to HDTVTest (via Notebook Check). The display comes in a massive 135-inch size, but its highlight is its use of Micro-LED technology. This means every pixel can be switched on and off, which gives it a very high contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 while being able to sustain a 2,000 nit brightness level. That’s unsustainable on OLED displays with automatic brightness limiting.

Other specs include a 95% DCI-P3 gamut and 4K resolution. This gives it a pixel pitch of 0.7815mm. You might expect 8K at this size, but commercial Micro-LED technology is still in its nascent stage, and at $200k for a 4K model, well, that Ferrari would start to look like a bargain.

Asus is targeting the PQ07 at professionals, but it would make a fine home cinema display too, even if there are much cheaper options, including projectors that are very good in …

A gaming mouse can be a pretty signature piece of kit for many PC gamers. They’re also probably one of the most divisive peripheral categories on the scene. Ask a group of PC gamers what their favourite gaming mouse is and you’ll likely get a different answer from each one. There are just so many variables even for specialised FPS and MMO mice. Now, here to add yet more variation to the scene is the Viper Mini Signature Edition, Razer’s smallest gaming mouse yet.

With the current market, almost any gaming mouse desires you have can be catered for. But one thing I still don’t see a lot of is smaller gaming mice. When you consider how many younger folks game, it’s kinda surprising—let alone adults with smaller hands, or just people who like a nice little portable mouse. The newly announced Razer Viper Mini Signature Edition is looking to fill that niche with a little mouse packed with big gamer cred. And with a big gamer price tag to go with it.

Razer describes the Viper Mini SE in its press release as, I’m not kidding you, “a magnesium alloy gaming masterpiece”, which would have given me some good use of that lol Verifier machine we wrote about recently. Pe…

Forget 1440p, all the cool kids game at 4K, right? It’s certainly much more doable these days, in no small part thanks to upscaling tech from Nvidia and AMD. Just as important, 4K gaming monitors keep getting cheaper and this year’s Prime Day deals have only  made prices better.

Let’s kick things off with the Samsung Odyssey G70B or G7 for short. Unusually for a Samung, it’s an IPS model, which probably means it doesn’t actually use a Samsung-made LCD panel.

Either way, it’s 28 inches, hits 144Hz and 400 nits, so it ticks all the important boxes and it’s yours for just $400 on Amazon. I quite like the extra inch over 27-inch alternatives, so this is where my money would go at this end of the 4K segment.

• We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

That said, 32 inches is actually my favorite form factor for 4K, so if possible I’d up the ante to LG’s 32-inch 4K Ultragear for $525 from Amazon. Again we’re talking 144Hz and 400 nits, but for my money the 32-inch category capitalizes better on all those pixels and LG does the very finest IPS panels. 4k is arguably overkill on …

Brazil’s gaming scene doesn’t get enough attention, Wes said in his feature on Brazilian gamers and developers last year, but it will get a big publicity bump soon thanks to Steam’s first-ever Made in Brazil Sale, which will kick off tomorrow with more than 500 games made by Brazilian teams.

The sale was the brainchild of BitCake Studio founder Eduardo Lamhut, who tweeted about his plan for the sale back in September 2022. From there, BitCake coordinated the development and approval of the sale, which has attracted more than 250 game companies and a range of genres “from action and adventure to strategy and simulation.”

“Talking to other developers, we suddenly realized that there was never a Steam sale just for Brazilian games,” Lamhut said. “We’ve already seen sales focused on Latin America, and various thematic sales in which Brazilian games were present, but we never had one focused on the national industry. Several countries have already done this, and it was time for us to do it too!”

And now it’s happening.

The Made in Brazil Steam Sale begins on February 18—that’s tomorrow—and will run until February 23, which not coincidentally is als…

Nature documentaries always have me rooting for the prey animals. It’s the circle of life and all that, but gazelles seem pretty chill, and when a pack of hyenas swoops in and starts lunging at the slow one it’s hard not to cheer on the underdog. My recent experiences in WolfQuest have widened my perspective, though.

My gray wolf, Dogmeat, takes no nonsense from mule deer and elk whatsoever—and yes, he goes right for the slow ones every time. Who can blame him? He’s a father of seven, and his first winter as a parent has been a rough one. With all the region’s prized elk migrating away from his territory, any trip for food is potentially lethal, and a fat enough cow puts food on the table for a week. It’s underdogs all the way down; and if I can’t win a peace prize, I can at least win father of the year.

I owe my ecological enlightenment to the power of edutainment, courtesy of a game developer called eduweb and the Minnesota Zoo circa 2007. WolfQuest simulates a gray wolf’s day-to-day in Yellowstone National Park; players hunt prey, mate, raise pups, parley for territory with other packs, and survive as long as they can in an environment rich with predators,…

A study by the Video Game History Foundation, a “non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games”, has found that most antique games are beyond the reach of fans unwilling to brandish the black flag on the digital high seas.

“87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered,” claims the study. “Just 13% of video game history is being represented in the current marketplace. In fact, no period of video game history defined in this study even cracked 20% representation.”

Their methodology, which you can read the full breakdown of here, used a randomised sample of 1,500 games released before 2010, “which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.” They also collected further, more targeted data on different consoles, or “ecosystems”: “Abandoned”, “Neglected”, and “Active”—giving the examples of the Commodore 64, the Game Boy, and the PS2 respectively. In total, over 4,000 games were included in the study.

Whether a re-released game counted as “accessible” was based on how much of the original had been preserved. For example, the foundation cons…

Whether you’re looking for general Wordle tips, a handcrafted clue for the May 25 (705) game to give you a nudge in the right direction, or today’s answer in record time, you’ll find all you need to solve today’s Wordle, and plenty more, waiting just below.

Wordle took some serious fighting to work into shape today, my yellows refusing to slot neatly into place until I was already halfway down the board. And even when they did, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them, so I resorted to auditing my keyboard and going with whatever letters I had left. Thankfully this tactic worked perfectly and gave me today’s Wordle answer just in time.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, May 25

Wordle needs you to find the name of a popular baked good today, specifically a dense, chewy circle of dough that’s sometimes split in two, toasted, and then covered in cream cheese. There are two different vowels to uncover this time. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

There are no repeat letters in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’re …

Quantum computers have been in the works for a long time and yet we’re still nowhere near exploiting quantum physics for massive computational power. You’d think that’d put all but the most driven researchers off investing in quantum computing, but some startups are now preparing for the quantum revolution by running quantum-inspired software on today’s powerful graphics cards.

Quantum computing promises to completely revolutionise how we process huge numbers of calculations. Some theoretical uses for it today include drug and vaccine discovery, managing logistics on a global scale, diving deeper into the human genome, super cybersecurity (or, on the flip side, super code-cracking), and similarly demanding stuff. The problem is it just doesn’t work yet at the sort of accuracy and scale required to be all that useful.

Some people were getting impatient with quantum’s development, so turned elsewhere. Today’s top graphics cards are in high demand for artificial intelligence acceleration, and it’s this recent burst of AI performance that has led to an emerging use for imitating quantum calculations. 

It basically sounds a lot like AI and quantum computing tea…

Fuel cells are one of those technological developments, a bit like nuclear fusion, that occasionally show promise but always seem at least a few major steps away from becoming a reality in day-to-day life. However, Japanese researchers seem to have made some major developments in the efficiency of the tech, thanks to that wonderful, magical substance, caffeine.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering at Chiba University in Japan have published a study in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, detailing their discovery that the addition of caffeine to platinum electrodes in fuel cells lessens the obstruction of efficient oxygen reaction. 

Currently the presence of water affects the performance of fuel cells by reacting with platinum catalysts, meaning that fuel cells need to make use of a substantial amount of platinum, a particularly valuable substance to maintain an effective reaction.

By immersing the platinum electrodes in an electrolyte solution containing caffeine, the researchers noted that there was a marked improvement in ORR activity, or oxygen reduction reaction. This was attributed to the caffeine absorbing onto the electro…

Three years after debuting for PC on the Epic Games Store, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a remastered bundle of the first two games in the long-running Tony Hawk series, finally made its way to Steam earlier this month. By and large it’s been well received, but there’s one persistent complaint: A lot of players would really like to see the always-online requirement dropped. Yesterday it finally happened, thanks to the 1.1 patch for Steam, but only partially—very oddly, the offline mode is only available on Steam Deck.

The 1.1 patch notes are very brief:

• Steam Deck users can now play offline. 
• The keyboard overlay now works properly for Steam Deck users.

There was some hope that the Steam Deck offline option would also apply to the standard Steam release, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Multiple users on Reddit and Steam confirmed that THPS1+2 is now playable offline on the Steam Deck, but say it’s still not playable offline on regular ol’ PCs. 

I fired it up with Steam in offline mode to double check, and sure enough, it refused to run without a connection:

Even better, there was no way to exit the game from …

A team of CD Projekt veterans including Witcher 3 co-director Mateusz Kanik, producer Jędrzej Mróz, and Cyberpunk 2077 senior producer Marcin Jefimow, have launched a new studio called Blank that is currently working on “a character-driven game set in an apocalypse, with a twist or two.”

(The studio name is technically Blank., with a period, but we won’t be using that.)

Kanik is serving as game director on Blank’s first project, while Mróz and Jefimow are onboard as executive producers. They’ll be joined at the new studio by Mikołaj Marchewka, formerly of Rookiez of Warsaw, in the managing director role, Witcher 3 game designer Michał Dobrowolski as design director, Witcher lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec as narrative director, and Gwent VFX artist Grzegorz Przybyś as art director.

The announcement of the new studio included what could be taken as a swipe at CD Projekt, which has grown to become one of the biggest game studios in Europe, and the nature of the game development industry as a whole. 

“After working for years in an increasingly conservative industry, we’re ready to make bold, impactful project…

Conservative politicians and commentators in the US are complaining that Xbox game consoles are now “woke” following an announcement earlier this month that Xbox Series X/S machines will be updated with an “Energy Saver” mode that reduces their power consumption when enabled.

This particular descent into partisan madness started on January 11, when Microsoft announced that the Xbox would be “the first gaming console to offer carbon aware game downloads and updates.” Simply put, it means that Xbox consoles will be capable of scheduling updates for times when the electrical grid is making use of lower-carbon sources of power. 

It’s a smart idea—Microsoft said the new setting cuts power usage by up to 20 times compared to the regular sleep mode—and it’s actually not new: The “carbon aware” feature was rolled out to Windows 11 last year.

Naturally, that didn’t stop the right-wing commentariat and their political enablers from seizing on the update as the next great transgression against freedom, and a new front in the culture wars, following equally idiotic sources of upset like M&Ms and gas stoves. Retweeting a story about the update posted on…

Win today’s Wordle exactly the way you want to with our help. There’s a clue for today’s game written up and waiting below if you just need a little nudge. There’s also the answer to the November 10 (874) puzzle in full if your win streak is in danger of leaving you forever. 

The neighbours must’ve heard the excited gasp I made this morning when my opening word revealed three yellow letters and a green: the Wordle answer was so very close, I knew if I was really clever with my follow up I could get this over in record time. So I checked and checked again before I committed and… a win in just two guesses? I’m so happy I could cheer (sorry, neighbours).

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, November 10

You’d take a dog for a walk on one of these and this item is sometimes referred to as a lead. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you’ve got the …

Tracking down the High Banks weapon and gear crates, when you first visit the hilltop town in Once Human, is the trickiest part of its exploration, but you’ll need to find them if you want to complete every objective in the Explore High Banks mission. The town itself isn’t too big, but there are quite a few buildings to investigate, plus a lot of monsters roaming around who make your job harder.

While the Mystical Crate is easy to find—guarded by the elite enemy in the centre of town—the other two are a little way out, so it’s understandable if you missed them. All that said, here’s where to find the High Banks weapon crate and gear crate to complete those objectives and get some loot.

High Banks weapon crate location

In a new interview with IGN, voice actor Doug Cockle, famed as the voice behind The Witcher trilogy hero Geralt of Rivia, says it’s “inevitable” that AI will be increasingly used in the process of game development, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing—but it is potentially “dangerous” if voice actors don’t take steps to control how their voice is used.

“AI is inevitable and developers will use AI,” Cockle said. “We are not 100% sure exactly what that means.

“They’re already doing it in various ways, filling in background, NPC voices, and things like that, which is unfortunate because those voices were all human beings at one point, and the voices are all modelled on human beings. So they have taken someone’s voice, put it into their database, digitized it, and are using it to say things that the individual never said. There’s something unethical about that and so there’s a lot of debate going on.”

The rise of AI opens the door to all sorts of interesting possibilities for developers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford voice acting in their games. Earlier this year, for instance, we learned about modders using the ElevenAI tool to add new voices to …