Year: 2024

Crusader Kings 3’s latest DLC, Legends of the Dead, arrived last Monday, bringing with it new legend mechanics that let your characters live on after death. But whatever, frankly, because it was accompanied by a free patch that finally introduced the game’s most long-sought-after feature: functional male pattern baldness.

CK3’s 1.12.1 “Scythe” update dropped Monday, and has “Added balding hairstyles and a system for male pattern baldness. Characters have a baldness value in their DNA which affects the age at which (male) characters start losing their hair.” That means god now rolls a die for every baby boy to determine if and when their follicles will start giving up.

I had a play around in CK3’s ruler designer, and found that—unlike other cosmetic functions in the game—this one doesn’t seem to be tied to a particular trait (like “Beautiful” or “Giant”). Instead, it’s hidden away in the many strings of code that define your character, like face shape or eye colour. On the plus side, that means the trait is purely cosmetic, and isn’t accompanied by any kind of malus to your stats. 

On the downside, it also means no bonuses. From Jean-Luc Picard …

Todd Howard did once say he wants more depth and better AI in future Bethesda games, but I’m not sure this is what he meant. Thanks to AI vocal synthesis software trained on Todd Howard’s voice, a YouTuber has made it sound like Skyrim’s game director gave a rousing presentation in which he explained The Elder Scrolls 6 will finally give players what they want: the opportunity to shag NPCs.

“Throughout the years our modding community has always been a big source of inspiration for us over at Bethesda,” Todd Howard definitely did not say while standing behind a podium declaring him President of the United States. “Looking at some of the most popular mods and requests, a pattern kept emerging. Things like SexLab Framework and OStim Framework, among other projects focusing on the more carnal aspects that we never thoroughly explored before in The Elder Scrolls series.”

While the words Robo-Howard goes on to say are clearly unbelievable, the echoing acoustics of the room and the awkward laughter and cheering all sound pretty authentic to an actual videogame presentation. So does the way Howard insists on adding phrases like “and more” or “among other things I won’t spoil…

The thing about football (or soccer, for our cross-Atlantic cousins) is that it’s just as much about the art of the deal as it is about the art of the beautiful game. The sport’s best and brightest are traded between clubs for price tags in the hundreds of millions, and assembling a dream team requires haggling, cajoling, and leveraging whatever angle you have to get the best players at the best price.

Unless you’re haggling in Football Manager 2024, that is, in which case it’s simply a matter of exploiting the poor AI with a very specific set of contractual terms that it will always, always accept, trading away players who should be worth nine-digit sums for the pittance of €2.5 million.

The glitch was brought to light by Football Manager players on Reddit, who noticed that the game’s AI seemed set to always accept a very specific set of transfer deal terms no matter how valuable the player in question was. Below, for instance, is one player nabbing Erling Haaland (who my football-understanding colleague Rich Stanton tells me is the best footballer in the world) for—you guessed it—a mere €2.5 million, plus six monthly instalments of &e…

A new trailer for psychedelic action-platformer Ultros has me freshly excited to see what’s going on in its bizarre world of plants and space demons when it releases on February 13, 2024. The game attracted our attention last year not just because of its colorful visuals, but because of its interesting looking dash, slash, and dodge combat.

Ultros is made by duo Hadoque—half of which is El Huervo, aka Niklas Åkerblad, an artist you may recognize from those trippy psychedelic melting-people portraits that so defined Hotline Miami.

For my part I am always immediately interested when you talk about a cosmic uterus containing a cyclical world-ending demon. However, when you then top that off with a trailer showing me the things which dwell in the uterus, which are terrible monsters, and also the wonders it holds which involve gardening space plants you have my attention.

“The new Himsa Ahimsa Excalation Trailer highlights the duality of ULTROS’ varied gameplay: challenging, fast-paced combat against monstrous alien creatures and enigmatic foes, alongside peaceful plant life cultivation and harmonious co-existence within the giant, co…

Yeyian is a US-based PC gaming brand that’s been around since 2017. I’d never heard of it, but this Prime Day-adjacent gaming PC deal has put it on my radar. What I like so much about Newegg’s $1,289 Yeyian Shoge gaming PC deal  is that I don’t have to caveat the recommendation with comments like “but you’ll need to upgrade the RAM” or “the custom mobo is a wildcard.”

This is the complete package: An ASUS motherboard with an ASUS Nvidia RTX 4070, an Intel Core i5 13400F, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM, and a 1TB PCIe SSD. 

OK, so I’d still suggest adding another SSD, because I can blow through 1TB in an afternoon, but it’s a lot better than the discounted gaming PCs out there with silly 512GB SSDs in them. That’s not enough for anyone who plans to put an RTX 4070 to any kind of good use.

Speaking of, the RTX 4070 is one of the best graphics cards you can get right now—basically an RTX 3080 with great extras like DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation for even higher frame rates in supported games. See our our review for more on that. 

The 16GB RAM is the minimum I’d recommend for a gaming PC these days, but perfectly good. It’s what we re…

I didn’t have much hope for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. Homeworld is an epic, star-spanning tale of survival and triumph amidst the blackness and mystery of interstellar space; Deserts of Kharak, on the other hand, is locked into a single dusty world by the combined forces of gravity and insufficient technological advancement. How could that possibly compare?

You can imagine my surprise, then, when Deserts of Kharak turned out to be really good: We gave it a very rare 90% score in our review, calling it “a great tactical RTS with all the gorgeous aesthetics and atmosphere of the original series.”

The point of all this buildup is that Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is now free for the week on the Epic Games Store, and it’s not one to be missed. Even if you’re not an RTS fan, it’s worth your time: I am not an RTS fan, and Homeworld remains one of the most moving and memorable games I’ve ever played. For me, the mechanics are secondary: Homeworld is great because of its setting, its story, and its aesthetic. It’s a remarkable story, remarkably well told.

“In spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count…

It would be fair to say that PCIe Gen 5.0 SSDs have had a difficult start in life. While Gen 4 drives have become something of a standard in many high-end systems, Gen 5 drives have failed to take off in similar fashion, primarily because for most users the previous generation SSDs bring great real world performance for a much more reasonable price. Beyond the high pricing and limited usefulness for this sort of speed as things currently stand, there’s still another rather large elephant in the room: Heat. 

However, Phison has announced several new products it’ll show off at its CES 2024 booth (via Tom’s Hardware), and one controller in particular seems designed to address those pesky thermals.

The snappily titled PS5031-E31T is an M.2 PCIe Gen 5 controller with a maximum sequential read and write speed support of up to 10,800 MB/s. This would put it on the slower end of the scale compared to other PCIe Gen 5 drives, but still a fair bit faster than the theoretical maximum of the PCIe 4.0 x4 speed limit of 7,880 MB/s.

However, because it’s designed to operate at lower power and therefore produces less heat, the hope is that it should enable Gen 5 drives to…

Asus has unleashed a splurge of premium new kit at the Gamescom show in Germany. The highlight has to be the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM gaming monitor, a 4K 32-inch OLED beauty. Asus also announced 34-inch and 49-inch OLED panels, plus motherboards, Wi-Fi routers and plenty more.

Asus reckons this is the world’s first monitor of its type and intriguingly the PG32UCDM uses Samsung QD-OLED panel technology rather than the LG WOLED alternative. Thus far, Asus has been in camp LG for its OLED gaming monitors.

Specs wise, Asus is claiming 1,000 nits peak brightness in a 3% window, with 250 nits full screen sustained brightness. That’s very much in line with existing QD-OLED monitors, such as the Alienware 34 AW3423DWF, so it’s good to see the tighter pixel density of 4K on a 32-inch panel hasn’t nerfed the brightness.

For refresh you get 240Hz and Asus quotes response at what is quickly becoming the customarily fast 0.03ms time claimed by many OLED gaming monitors. Throw in USB-C with 90W power delivery, DP 1.4 and HDMI, plus a KVM switch and you have one heck of a package.

Asus is also claiming exceptional cooling thanks to a custom heatsink plus a novel gr…