Month: September 2024

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy may not have been the smash hit that Square Enix wanted, but it was still a darn fine adventure that managed to win over this die-hard fan of developer Eidos Montreal’s previous work on the Deus Ex games. Now, you can experience the studio’s sci-fi action game in cheaper, more portable fashion.

Guardians of the Galaxy recently became Steam Deck Verified, meaning it’s completely functional with the Deck’s default controller configuration, has legible text and appropriate controller icons, and exhibits stable performance on the base graphics settings. So if you fancy taking Star Lord, Gamora & co. on the road with you, you can be assured you’ll have a frictionless experience.

If you haven’t already picked up Eidos Montreal’s latest, now mig…

Awesome Games Done Quick Online will kick off on Sunday, January 8, launching a week-long high-speed gaming extravaganza featuring some of the world’s foremost speedrunners showing off their skills on an array of games from the past and present—and one starring a hard-to-kill action hero that never officially saw the light of day.

The AGDQ event gets underway with a pre-show set to start at 11:30 pm ET, followed by the first speedrun—an Any% run of Splatoon 3 on the Nintendo Switch—at noon. The PC swings into action at 2:14 pm ET (these schedules are very tight) with some Crash Bandicoot fun. That’s not really my cup of tea, but an hour after that a New Game+ run of Mirror’s Edge will begin, which is more my speed.

Here’s a Catalyst run from Summer Games Do…

Microsoft has taken out a huge advertisement in newspaper The Washington Post advocating for its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, one of only a few major public moves by the company to support its proposed acquisition in the last month. Curiously, the ad is endorsed by both Microsoft and the massive Communications Workers of America union, or CWA, highlighting Microsoft’s past year of public maneuvers in favor of labor rights and the rights of employees to form unions.

It’s a marked alignment, given that Microsoft just worked alongside the CWA to recognize a massive union forming at its Zenimax studio. It’s part of a pattern of Microsoft being very publicly open to union formation—almost as if in direct response to Activision Blizzard’s own behavior.

As spotted and …

Is it possible to know how AMD Ryzen 9000-series CPUs actually perform yet? It seems like every day there’s a new rumoured or actual change affecting how we should interpret the performance and value of these new processors. Right after learning that a Windows update can improve Zen 3, 4, and 5 gaming performance, we’re now hearing that TDP boost modes are here for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X.

Judging by a UEFI screenshot from X user kuroberu (via Wccftech), who claims to have received a new BIOS from MSI, the company looks to be adding a 105 W TDP option to its latest BIOS releases for the socket AM5 platform. This should allow the 9600X and 9700X—both 65 W chips by default—to run at a higher 105 W TDP, improving performance but also presumably increasing volt…

GamePressure recently published an interview with Feargus Urquhart, RPG standby Obsidian Entertainment’s CEO and one of its founders. The sweeping interview touched on Obsidian’s key moments and future plans after one of its best years ever, but I was most intrigued by the snippets of CRPG deep lore that were dredged up over the course of the conversation.

Most shocking to me was the mention that Obsidian was, at one point, in talks to create a videogame based on Avatar 2. “Back then, we were talking with them [James Cameron and 20th Century Fox] about making an Avatar 2 game,” Urquhart explained. “I don’t even know how long ago. Eight, six years, something like that.”

That would date this proposal to the mid-2010s, prior to Avatar: The Way of Water’s official revea…

Mastodon, the social media site that seems to survive by virtue of the fact that Twitter is now rubbish, has seen a number of popular accounts from the ex-blue bird move over to its platform, where they can live out their days in relative freedom.

One such account is the BBC Micro Bot (via The Register), and it serves an interesting purpose: Feed it some BASIC via a toot (yep) and it’ll handily output the result into its gallery, often with an accompanying post featuring a photo or video file of its eventual creation, and some of them are just plain gorgeous.

The BBC Micro Bot acts as an 8-bit computer emulator that interprets BBC BASIC, and for those younger members of our readership who have no idea what that means, allow me to explain. BBC BASIC is a version of the BASIC …

Just a couple weeks after Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu said it intends “to be aggressive in applying AI” to its content creation processes, the company has confirmed with VGC that its new multiplayer party shooter Foamstars does in fact use AI-generated art—but just a teeny little bit.

The presence of AI art in Foamstars was first revealed during a recent press event, during which producer Kosuke Okatani said that while most of the game was made by humans, there was a small amount of art created by Midjourney, a tool that converts text inputs into images.

“All of the core elements in Foamstars—the core gameplay, and the things that make the game enjoyable—those are all made by hand,” Okatani said. “However, we did want to experiment with AI as well. …