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Spoiler alert: This post discusses the Season 3 finale of Hacks.

Hacks, Max’s award-laden dramedy starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, returned for its long-awaited third season earlier this month. The series follows stand-up stalwart Deborah Vance (Smart) as she vies for renewed cultural relevance alongside her plucky young writer, Ava Daniels (Einbinder). Though the power in the pair’s tumultuous relationship has historically belonged to Deborah—a woman who is no stranger to forcing hands for her career’s sake—a seismic shift occurred this season.

Hosting a late-night show has always been Deborah’s white whale, especially after an earlier opportunity for her to do so fell through decades ago, but by the end of the penultima…

Headbangers: Rhythm Royale is flying from the roost later this month, and it’s so dumb and stupid I kind of love it. To boil down the concept: imagine Fall Guys, but with rhythm-based minigames in the style of Warioware. You can play a demo of it right now as part of Steam’s Next Fest until October 16.

Developed by Glee-Cheese Studio and published by Team17, Headbangers puts you in the talons of a pigeon, facing up against 29 other players (or, right now, a handful of players and bots—it’s still in a humble demo phase after all) to see who can keep tempo.

What’s neat is how much mileage Headbangers is already getting out of its concept. I played a few rounds where I chirped along at a garden party, played DDR on a spinning vinyl, did an instant-death finale on a retro …

A paltry eight years after we first heard rumblings of it, we’ve finally gotten our first shot of the upcoming silver screen version of Five Nights at Freddy’s. What’s more, we’ve even got a release date. Blumhouse Productions announced via its Instagram page that Five Nights at Freddy’s (the movie) will release in cinemas and on the Peacock streaming service on October 27 this year.

The picture gives us a first look at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, the restaurant (or chain of restaurants) in which the FNAF games take place. Standing outside, we can see the titular Mr Fazbear accompanied by a child who may or may not be Piper Rubio, who is listed as one of the film’s cast members.

And that’s your lot, I’m afraid. No sign of any other cast members, including once and future Shaggy …

It’s a bad time to be Activision Blizzard. The publisher is set to fork out $23.4 million to tech incubator Acceleration Bay after a jury ruled that it infringed on two of the company’s patents. 

According to Reuters, the patents are related to the “simultaneous sharing of information” used in multiplayer aspects of Activision Blizzard’s games. Acceleration Bay originally filed the infringement complaint back in 2015, before being dismissed and refiled a year later.

While Activision Blizzard argued that any monetary damages shouldn’t exceed $300,000, the jury disagreed. It ruled that the publisher owes $18 million for patent infringement in World of Warcraft, and a further $5.4 million for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Acceleration Bay la…

In search of typing utopia, one designer has gone to extraordinary lengths to have the perfect keyboard under their fingers. After five years of hard work and project expenses well into the six-figure region, the ultimate key stabilizer has been created. 

If you’re a fan of mechanical keyboards, you’ll know there’s not only a huge variance between the multitude of models on offer, in terms of how they sound and feel, but the switches and keys themselves also vary quite a bit. The space bar, shift keys, and other long buttons often sound dissimilar because they rock about when pressed.

Some of the issues can be mitigated by carefully lubricating and fine-tuning the stabilizing mechanism, but that’s just masking the fact that they’re not well designed in the first place.<…

Being a truly insufferable dweeb, I immediately gravitated towards the Sorcerer class in Diablo 4, and had a pretty good time turning the legions of hell into sparking pools of electrified sludge. But it seems not everyone had quite the same power fantasy. People who elected to play as the closed beta’s rippling, musclebound Barbarian have been lamenting that the class feels weirdly weak, unable to weather the blows that its up-close-and-personal, melee-focused combat style exposes it to.

But Blizzard tells GamesRadar that it has plans to change that. Diablo’s game director Joe Shely says Blizzard doesn’t “want a player who creates a Barbarian to feel weak at low levels,” and that the devs will be using feedback from the beta period to “balance the class so that their strength at …

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 …

Just in case that headline gave you psychological whiplash, let me try to explain. Nothing, Forever is an AI-generated Seinfeldlike (originally a direct parody, but those days are long-gone) that runs forever. Its earlier incarnation was banned from Twitch after it made a transphobic joke, after which it returned with a new cast of characters who were… less peppy than their counterparts.

Less interesting, too. At the time of writing, the neutered show has only around 100-200 viewers, a far cry from those halcyon glory days of its initial release where those numbers reached the thousands. Larry was swapped out for Leo Borges, the world’s dullest blogger, and we were left with a hollow shell of what once was.

Then, as spotted by 404media, the show fell into even further…

A new documentary from German games sites Game Two and GameStar has shed some more light on the disastrous development of The Day Before, and boy howdy, it’s worse than you thought. Game Two says it spoke to 16 former Fntastic employees, one of its former “volunteers,” and seven staff from The Day Before’s publisher Mytona. The picture they paint is, well, staggering.

Speaking anonymously, Game Two’s sources allege that working at Fntastic—The Day Before’s now-defunct development studio—was pure, megalomaniacal chaos. As they tell it, the game’s development was constantly buffeted by the changing whims of the Gotovtsev brothers, the studio’s founders, and the scope and style of the game would change whenever one of them got their hands on whatever the big game of the m…

Daedalic’s catastrophic Lord of the Rings: Gollum saga may finally be grinding to a conclusion. The patch notes for a beefy “major update” that dropped last week conclude with a note that, to my reading, pretty strongly suggests that the studio is putting a bow on it and calling it done.

Gollum was on unsure footing almost from the start, as gamers questioned (rightly, I would say) why anyone would want to assume the role of Tolkien’s tragic, clammy villain in the first place. A planned 2021 release gave way to 2022 and then 2023, pointing to some serious problems in development, and while I held out hope that the game would surprise us all as a sleeper hit (or even just with basic competence), it was not to be. It bombed badly: We scored it a relatively high 64% in our review, sa…

We’ve suspected AMD’s Granite Ridge family of Zen 5 based processors might show their faces soon, given that AMD has already said it’s aiming for a launch in the second half of this year, and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is set to deliver the Computex keynote on June 3. Now Gigabyte has released a BIOS update for several of its AM5 series of motherboards in anticipation of the new chips, and it seems to confirm that they’ll be called the AMD Ryzen 9000 series.

In a news post on the company website, the Gigabyte AM5 X670, B650 and A620 motherboards are confirmed to receive boot up support for “the coming AMD Ryzen™ 9000 series”, with the most recent AGESA 1.1.7.0 beta BIOS. 

While we’ve already seen leaks suggesting this name would be used for the new chips, this is the first o…

The controversy around AI-generated content for videogames is starting to impact the biggest digital distribution platform on PC: an anonymous developer recently made a post on reddit (first spotted by Simon Carless) about the rejection of their game, claiming that “Valve is not willing to publish AI-generated content anymore.” In a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve elaborated that it is not opposed to generative tools as a concept, but instead takes the copyright concerns around them extremely seriously.

The developer says they tried to get a game approved on Steam about a month ago “with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated” and received the following response:

“While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for …

Valve is making changes to Steam pricing in Argentina and Turkey that will see game sales in those countries switched from their local currencies—the Argentine peso and Turkish lira—to US dollars. The change is being made to address “exchange rate volatility” that Valve says has made it difficult for developers to set and maintain prices for their games.

Steam’s system of regional pricing has long been a contentious issue. We went deep on “the weird economics behind Steam prices around the world” all the way back in 2014, and while the world has changed since then, the underlying complexities have not. Price variations from region to region are based on numerous factors, but the broad goal is fairness: Ensuring that people outside of North America and Western Europe ar…

Watch On

It’s been five years since Grinding Gear Games announced Path of Exile 2—five years that I’ve spent wondering feverishly when I’ll get to reenter the endless grind for build-perfect loot. Now, thanks to a reveal at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live earlier today, we finally know when the sequel to the free-to-play Diablo-like will be playable. Path of Exile 2 is entering early access on November 15, 2024.

The trailer accompanying the early access announcement has every aesthetic hallmark you’d hope to see in a Path of Exile follow-up: It’s got fleshy horrors. It’s got ominous religious overtones. It’s got an overzealous figure declaring their intent to “sweep aside this world and build it anew.” It’s all in there.

We also get a look at a lineup of bosses we’ll alm…

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 mov…

Turn every game of Wordle into a winner with our help. We’ve got general tips to help you improve every guess you make, a clue written especially for the March 31 (650) puzzle, and the answer to today’s Wordle, only a quick click or scroll away.

That was tense. Every guess today seemed to throw up more problems than answers, my screen filling with grey boxes. The situation was looking grim: the few letters I had found just didn’t go together—until my next guess finally made sense of them. It was a close thing, but I finally, happily, stumbled into today’s Wordle answer.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, March 31

This word describes all of the items or people in a particular group, or an event that occurs regularly: something that happen…

Finish your Wordle year with a guaranteed win, however you want to go about it. Keep on scrolling and you’ll find general tips for your daily guesses, as well as a clue just for the December 31 (925) game and of course today’s Wordle answer if you’d rather cut to the chase. Whatever happens, you’re celebrating today.

Oh, that was embarrassing. Not so much the guessing itself, but the way I managed to waste an entire row thanks to a typo. It’s my own fault—my brain was so excited it forgot to properly engage my fingers first, and I had to suffer the sight of a guess I already knew was wrong throw away a whole row. I won’t make that mistake again. Well, not tomorrow, anyway. Maybe.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, December 31

Researchers over at MIT have discovered a new microLED fabrication technique, which could finally give us the pixel density we’ve been looking for when it comes to high resolution gaming monitors. Known as vertical stacking, the process involves, well, stacking microLEDs in order to pack more LEDs into a smaller area, while avoiding the defects associated with high pixel density.

Pixels have been shrinking for years, and recent advancements have seen microLED tech take pixel density to new levels, though not in any way that PC gamers like us can practically enjoy. The problem comes when balancing pixel density, resolution, and size of a gaming monitor.

It’s something of a juggling act, with each one affecting the other. If you want a high-resolution, high pixel density gamin…