Wonderwall

พูดถึงลุงหนวดมาริโอ้แล้วสิ่งที่เราต้องนึกถึงตามๆ กันมาก็จะเป็นอะไรไปไม่ได้นอกจากเห็ดชนิดต่างๆ ที่จะมีคุณสมบัติที่ไม่เหมือนกัน บางชนิดก็ทำให้มาริโอ้ตัวใหญ่ขึ้น บางชนิดก็ทำให้ตัวเล็กลง ไปจนถึงบางชนิดที่ทำให้มาริโอ้ได้สวมชุดคอปเตอร์ลอยฟ้า แต่ที่เกมเมอร์ต้องมองหามากที่สุดก็ต้องเป็นเห็ด1-Upที่ไว้เพิ่มจำนวนชีวิต หรือที่เราเรียกกันว่า‘เห็ดป๊อก’นั่นเอง

สำหรับเห็ด1-Upนั้น มักจะปรากฏขึ้นมาหลังจา�…

When I clicked on the trailer for Kingmakers, a new “action/strategy sandbox” game from Redemption Road Games, I was mildly interested by the thousands of simulated soldiers duking it out in an open field Mount and Blade-style. There really aren’t enough medieval combat games out there, and Kingmakers looked like a promising one. 

Then at around the 24-second mark, Kingmakers shows its real hand. You don’t play as any typical 14th century knight. You’re in fact a, well…you really should just watch it for yourself. Meet back here in 113 seconds.

Yep, you’re a time traveler from the future taking on hordes of medieval knights with modern firearms and vehicles. It’s like watching my high school lunch debates play out in real time. It’s juvenile in a way that makes me a little self-conscious for laughing so hard, but I can’t deny it’s a strong trailer—I had to take a minute to compose myself after the pickup truck plowed through an entire platoon like they were bowling pins.

As a lone future dweller taking up arms in medieval England to change the future, you’ll bring along “assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, armored SUVs, bikes…

It’s fair to say the launch of AMD’s launch of its Zen 5 desktop processors hasn’t exactly been plain sailing, nor did the good ship Ryzen land on golden shores. With only a minor performance increase over the last-gen chips, the Ryzen 9000 series was met with universal disappointment and sales have apparently not been all that great, either.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the chips, though, as Zen 5 is faster than Zen 4. The Ryzen 9 9950X is a multi-threaded monster and the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X are great CPUs for mainstream PCs. You wouldn’t be disappointed with any of them.

The problem is that Zen 4 chips aren’t actually that much slower, sometimes only by a few percent, and they are an awful lot cheaper to buy. On Amazon, the Ryzen 7 7700X is just under $250, whereas the 9700X is 30% more expensive at $324—the latter certainly isn’t 30% faster the its predecessor.

However, during my testing, I never quite got the same performance figures AMD did and given that countless other reviewers experienced the same situation, something was clearly not right behind the scenes. Part of the answer appeared to be that AMD used a ‘ful…

Out of nowhere Ludosity and Fair Play Labs have announced an upcoming sequel for Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, a fairly decent Smash-like that was only released in 2021. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 will release later this year and, going by the trailer, feels like more of a do-over than anything else: the key word is ‘more’.

There are new characters, more stages, revamps of existing stages, a new campaign mode, more modes in general, crossplay on all platforms, a visual spit-shine to every existing character and new mini-games. As well as this  there are new Supers, which sound exactly like the ultimate attacks in Smash Bros.: basically insta-KO-ing anything you hit.

The trailer shows some of the characters being introduced in NASB2, which include the oft-requested Squidward and Jimmy Neutron. The TMNT cast is also complete, with Donatello and Raphael joining in. The singleplayer campaign will apparently focus on stopping Vlad Plasmius, the baddy from Danny Phantom, from taking over the Nickelodeon universe.

It’s hard not to see this news in the context of NASB’s closest competitor, Warner Bros.’ Multiversus. For my money Multiversus was pretty great but, f…

If you skipped out on No Man’s Sky this year then now’s your chance to jump back in and see all the goodness they rolled out, as developers Hello Games are taking the holiday season to replay all the expedition events and offer up their rewards. There’s even a return of a 2021 expedition, complete with limited-edition golden starship to claim.

December 8-15 will see the return of Utopia, where you can rebuild an abandoned colony for the mysterious utopia foundation. Dec 15-22 is Singularity, the precursor to the Echoes update, where you’ll delve into a mystery that touches on the concept of artificial intelligence and the nature of living.

December 22-29th is the return of Cartographers, the “community favourite” update from 2021, that has you stranded on the planet Coul Major and trying to repair your starship. Finally, the Voyagers expedition will replay from Dec 29 to Jan 8, having you search out unique and remarkable places on a variety of worlds from their ocean beds to mountaintops, cataloguing your findings along the way.

No Man’s Sky has had a pretty big year, down to adding a robotic species in its Echoes update. The Autophage, as they’re known, are my…

B&H Photo has a deal on a high-end RTX 4080 gaming with a 240Hz 1600p display for $2,649, $100 off its listing price. More importantly, it’s a rare discount on pretty much the best RTX 40-series laptop we’ve gotten on hands-on so far this year. 

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is a powerful 16-inch laptop armed with an Intel Core i9 13900HX and, of course, an RTX 4080. Expect to hit some impressive frame rates at 1080p and 1440p. Add Nvidia’s DLSS 3 to the equation, and you’ll surely hit triple-digit framerates in many new games.

On the memory side, the 32GB of DDR5 SK Hynix RAM and a 1TB NVMe Samsung SSD should be more than enough for work and play.

The display is a bright 1600p, 240Hz IPS panel with HDR 400 support. We’ve seen many more 16:10 aspect ratio gaming laptops this year, and it might take some getting used to them, but so far, we’ve liked the extra screen real estate during gameplay where it’s supported. 

In our review, the Legion Pro 7I often outperformed gaming laptops with RTX 4090 GPUs inside of them, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus M16, which retails for around $4,000. So you sometimes get RTX 4090 caliber gaming performance on an RTX …

In the hours I’ve spent stripping planet Massage-2(Ab)b of resources to pour down the poorly optimized maw of my wretched Satisfactory production lines, my movement has only ever been clumsy. Getting around my base is a barely-directed stumble across gnarled conveyor belts. When I venture beyond my tangled sprawl, I’m trudging along with slapdash platform staircases and ill-advised jump pads. But thanks to the Satisfactory subreddit, I’ve seen a better, faster, more graceful way to navigate the early game on my way towards higher-tier transit tech—one where my feet will never have to touch the ground. Provided my materials last, of course.

New movement tech: Realtime Zipline from r/SatisfactoryGame

The trick, shown off by redditor farzher in a clip posted over the weekend, is a pretty straightforward one: Simply always be ziplining. The zipline, a piece of equipment you can research fairly early in the game, allows you to propel yourself along power lines, typically requiring those power lines to be built beforehand. However, you keep a lot of your momentum when you leap from a power line, which means—if you’re quic…

One of the mechanics coming to Magic: The Gathering in the western-themed Outlaws of Thunder Junction set is called Crime. It’s a way of rewarding outlaw behavior, with Crime specifically defined as using your spells or abilities to directly target an opponent, anything they control, or even their discards. When you do so, that’s called committing a Crime, and it’ll trigger effects from all your other criminal-themed cards in play. 

For instance: Magda, the Hoardmaster pays you a treasure token if you commit a crime that turn, and will eventually let you spend three accumulated treasures to summon a 4/4 scorpion dragon. The Freestrider Lookout lets you scout out the top five cards of your deck when you commit a Crime, while the Hardbristle Bandit untaps, so you can use them to block after an attack if you’ve done Crime that turn.

It’s all about rewarding aggressive play. You’ve got to act boldly in a western, goshdarnit. Cowboys are supposed to shoot first, and Outlaws of Thunder Junction rewards them for doing so.

To make it easier to commit Crimes—and easier to realize when you have so you remember to collect your rewards—Outlaws of …

Steam has surpassed 37 million concurrent users for the first time in its history: That’s 37,242,724 people connected to Valve’s digital distribution platform at the same time.

The new record, set on August 25, represents a sharp climb in concurrent users since the beginning of 2024, when the new year ushered in a new concurrent user record of nearly 33.7 million. The number of people actually in a game concurrently has seen a comparable pop, according to SteamDB, from 10.8 million when that January record was set to more than 12.5 million at the time of this newest record.

Steam is a very reliable “number go up” operation as a regular thing but even so, this particular peak coming in the later days of summer—not exactly a time of peak gaming interest, I don’t think—is interesting. The peak concurrent user count sailed past 36 million back in March and came oh-so-close to break 37 million in June, before sidling back down to mid-34 million peaks through most of July.

It’s always fun to speculate about the reasons behind Steam’s concurrent user peaks: Sometimes it’s the holiday season, sometimes it’s shitty weather, and sometimes it’s a really big ga…

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an odd bug—pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that’s played it has liked it, including PC Gamer’s Jeremy Peel in his glowing review. Despite everything, though, it didn’t sell nearly as well as it needed to, leading to layoffs at developer Firaxis and the departure of its creative lead.

There’s a few reasons this might be the case. First off, the venn diagram circles of tactical strategy combat/deck builder enjoyers and RPG likers don’t overlap much. There’s some—I mean, I enjoyed it—but I don’t think the people who really got into XCOM or Slay the Spire were, by and large, up for doing bookclubs with Steve Rogers. 

Then the messy post-launch support seemed to miss what was good about the game—an ill-advised seasonal pass bogged it down with superfluous characters who were, if I’m being honest, a bad idea from the offset. Midnight Suns has a lot of interpersonal conversations happening between your missions—and as much as I had a great time with my playthrough, why would I ever want to do another one just to party up with Morbius if it means skipping a deluge of natter? 

Ask the game’s …

Yesterday, game engine company Unity announced changes to its pricing plan that will see developers charged each time someone installs their game after certain revenue and installation thresholds are met. Unity has been around since 2005 and is one of the most popular platforms for game creation, used for big-budget titans like Genshin Impact as well as games like Vampire Survivors, Pokémon Go, Cuphead, Among Us, Subnautica, RimWorld, BattleTech (2018), and Hollow Knight.

The reaction to the change, which is set to take effect on January 1, 2024, has truly been something to behold: Everyone is mad. And I mean everyone, with that classic Gary Oldman emphasis:

The backlash has been nothing short of furious: Individual developers and indie studios of different sizes all came together with the sort of unity—ahem—that’s usually only seen during international sporting events. Some developers predicted Unity would very quickly abandon the new pricing scheme (so far, it has not), others suggested parts of the plan—specifically the retroactive contract changes—might not even be legal, and many swore they’d walk away from the Unity engin…

With Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc firmly in the rear-view mirror, CD Projekt Red is now full throttle on three separate projects. We already know, more or less, what two of them are: One is a new trilogy of Witcher games codenamed Polaris, and the other is a Cyberpunk sequel codenamed Orion. But one mysterious star-themed codename remains: Hadar, which we know is a “new IP” and, well, actually that’s all we know.

Until today that is. Get out your game genre Guess Who boards everyone, because CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has taken to Twitter to let us all know what Hadar isn’t. A few hundred more tweets like these and we’ll probably be able to figure out just what the heck this thing is gonna be. 

“Can only tell it’s definitely NOT a cosmic horror in feudal Japan,” said Nowakowski in response to a tweet from TheNeonArcade speculating that Hadar could be a either “cosmic horror,” or “feudal Japan,” or maybe even “modern day crime thriller.” Update your Excel sheets accordingly, folks. We’re still left with racing game, flight sim, football manager, Doom clone, Habbo Hotel-like, MUD and, well, every other genre on Earth.

In fact, it still te…

Is 34 inches and 3,440 by 1,440 the real-world gaming monitor sweet spot right now? If it is, then we’ve got a fantastic trio of deals with which to tempt you.

Arguably the best of the bunch is the MSI Optix MAG342CQR. It’s a 144 Hz model and it’s yours for just $249.99 as part of Amazon Gaming Week. That’s a whole lot of monitor for the money.

144 Hz refresh and 3,440 by 1,440 resolution aside, it’s rated at a reasonable 300 nits and 1ms MPRT response. That probably translates into 2ms GtG. This is, of course, a VA rather than IPS panel. You’re not going to get a 34-inch 144 Hz ultrawide IPS from a big brand for $250. Not even as a special deal.

But the response rating is still reasonably promising and you’re getting the same basic form factor, size and resolution as a $1,000 34-inch OLED. It certainly won’t feel like the budget option as it fills the field of view on your desk.

At the absolute cheapest end of the scale is the Acer Nitro EDA343CUR Hbmiippx. Yes, we have to put that entire ludicrous product name in there because there’s also an Acer Nitro EDA343CUR V3bmiippx that we’ll be coming to shortly.

Anyway the Hbmiippx, as it’s known for (re…

In a blog post published Friday, Wizards of the Coast announced that it is fully putting the kibosh on the proposed Open Gaming License (OGL) 1.2 that threw the tabletop RPG community into disarray at the beginning of this month.

Instead, Wizards will leave the previously enshrined OGL 1.0 in place, while also putting the latest D&D Systems Reference Document (SRD 5.1) under a Creative Commons License (thanks to GamesRadar for the spot).

The OGL controversy timeline in brief

• The original OGL was put in place with the third edition of D&D in 2000, and allowed other companies and creators to base their work off D&D and the d20 system without payment to or oversight from Wizards.
• A draft of a revised OGL 1.1 leaked early in January, which proposed royalty payments and creative control by Wizards over derivative works. This immediately incited a backlash from fans.
• Wizards backpedaled, introducing a softer OGL 1.2 that would still replace the original, and opened the community survey cited in today’s announcement.

With 15,000 respondents in, the results of the survey were pretty damning. 88% didn’t “want to publish TTR…

Skip straight to the best bit and win today’s Wordle in record time—the answer to the November 13 (877) puzzle is never more than a cheeky click away. Or if you’d like guidance rather than a quick victory, keep on scrolling and you’ll find a clue written just for today’s game, as well as general tips and tricks designed to boost every guess you ever make.

I did well enough today—a win in four is fine, if not anything worth shouting from the rooftops. But I still managed to make a fool of myself when I was one guess away from today’s answer and had the majority of the word filled in. It was right there, plain as day, and I somehow still spent far too long wondering what on earth I was supposed to add to this mysterious word to win. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, November 13

Today’s answer is the colour of spring grass and fresh shoots. People might figuratively go this colour with envy, or when they’re feeling sick. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, a vowel is used twice in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wo…

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Dwarf Fortress has existed as a free game for near-enough two decades, but its 2022 premium version—now with graphics—has gone from strength to strength. It turned Tarn and Zach Adams (Dwarf Fortress’ original creators) into millionaires, and had sold over half a million copies as of March last year.

But that’s old news, because the brothers told PCG at this year’s GDC that it’s now sold 800,000 copies and taken root on over a million wishlists. At this point, it seems like a million sales for one of the most profoundly free games in existence is all but assured. Do the brothers have a plan to reward themselves when they hit the milestone? Ah, well, not really.

“I mean, I didn’t actually think of [hitting a million sales],” Tarn Adams told PCG, “Because you’re like, when is that going to happen?”

Well, one good bet is when DF gets its imminent Adventure Mode update, which will bring the free game’s popular RPG-ish roguelike mode to the premium version (in beta) on April 17.

“We’re thinking of it like an update,” says Tarn, “It’s not Baldur’s Gate 3 or whatever… It’s just a gentle update. But it’s also the first time we’re commu…

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to PC Gamer that Halo’s franchise director, Frank O’Connor, has left Microsoft, telling us, “We thank Frank for his numerous contributions to the Halo franchise and wish him well going forward.” O’Connor’s departure was first reported over the weekend by Windows Central, who noticed that his LinkedIn had been updated to show him leaving Microsoft for a new role at an unspecified company.

O’Connor began working on Halo at Bungie in 2004, where he wrote the “Bungie Weekly Update,” a predecessor to the still-running Destiny bulletin “This Week at Bungie.” O’Connor left the company for Microsoft proper in 2008, after the release of Halo 3, where he held the senior role of franchise creative director, overseeing 343 Industries as well as other studios working on various multimedia projects in the setting. O’Connor is also credited as an executive producer for the Halo TV series.

O’Connor is the latest in a stream of senior developers and executives working on Halo to leave Microsoft and 343. Just two weeks ago, Halo creative lead and fellow Bungie vet Joseph Staten left Microsoft after nine years with the company. 343’s founder, Bonnie R…