Banball

Intel’s taken inspiration from Apple’s M1 and M2 chips with a new Meteor Lake chip that includes LPDDR5X inside the chip package. The neatly compact processor has been teased with two Samsung memory packages loaded onto it—a bid to improve performance and reduce a device’s overall footprint.

The chip, as noted by Tom’s Hardware, includes 16GB LPDDR5X-7500 memory from Samsung, bearing a close resemblance to how Apple has configured its latest ARM M2 chips. You can tell it’s a Meteor Lake chip by the many tiles combined to make it up, which uses Intel’s Foveros tech. Though as far as we know this architecture will only be used for mobile applications, such as laptops, for the time being.

You could say Intel was copying Apple’s homework, but it is fair to say this sort of chip package is an obvious extension of new advanced packaging technologies used by Intel, TSMC (who produces Apple’s chips) and Samsung. Apple just got there first, at scale, while Intel has been to…

I knew I was afraid of heights going into Lorn’s Lure. It’s a fear that I’ve always mined for thrills in games, climbing high towers and leaping off them for the adrenaline. Of course I was going to play a sci-fi mountaineering adventure through the bowels of an impossibly massive brutalist megastructure. What I was not prepared for was discovering that I might also be afraid of the dark. And tight spaces. As Lorn’s Lure constricted into a choking warren of pitch black tunnels, it taught me new and exciting forms of dread.

I was least prepared to discover that over the course of its eight massive levels, Lorn’s Lure evolves into a twitchy, panicky first-person Celeste, full of air-dashing, wall-jumping and precise stamina management. Realizing that, I shouldn’t be surprised that I died over 1200 deaths (approximately 110 per hour) before the credits rolled. And I’ve only just begun unlocking the optional ‘simulation’ levels—equ…

Amelia Tyler—who you might also recognise as the voice of Malady from Divinity: Original Sin 2—has graced us with another batch of hilarious voice bloopers this week. She has the mammoth task of voicing the narrator of Baldur’s Gate 3 which, considering how big the game’s gonna be, seems like both a privilege and some form of divine punishment.

With all those hours plugged into the recording booth, things are bound to get a little weird, and Tyler’s been gracious enough to share this fantastic recording for our collective enjoyment ahead of the game’s release next month.

In case you’re in a public space and without any headphones, I’ve selected some of my favourite quotes from Tyler’s descent into voice acting hell:

•  “You may know me from such things as: lying on the sofa eating cheese for several months.”
• “Terror fuck. That’s my new death metal band.”
• “Larian. Can we have a word about line 19?”
• “Gale’s magic flute is r…
  

I don’t think I’m spoiling too much off the jump by saying that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty’s endings are emotionally charged and more than a little bit devastating. It is also a natural gamer behavior to goof around in such moments, but as reported by VG247, CD Projekt Red seems to have anticipated players attempting to bork one such scene, inserting hidden dialogue to reflect their apparent death drive. Spoilers for Phantom Liberty ahead.

If you side with hacker So Mi over Idris Elba’s Solomon Reed in Phantom Liberty’s main quest, one of the expansion’s potential endings will see you sending her to the moon on a rocket ship docked at the Night City airport. You’re supposed to tuck her in for the voyage then watch her fly away.

So long, suckers! from r/cyberpunkgame

User Prototailz on the Cyberpunk subreddit discovered that there’s just enough space on the threshold of the rocket’s hatch for V to stand on …

The initial choice of races in Baldur’s Gate 3 is solid—though it’s definitely not the full spread available for most Dungeons & Dragons players. You can’t rock up as a warforged, goblin, kobold, or aarakocra (don’t mention their in-built flight speed to tabletop players, it’s a whole thing)—aside from Dragonborn, it’s all very humanoid.

That’s fair enough, considering the game already has an absurd amount of backstory, class, and race-specific dialogue options and responses. I don’t think Larian wanted to wrestle with a thousand variations on the “Gods be good, that’s a big bull man!” every time you walked into a new encampment.

Especially for certain races, Larian would have to do as Troika Games did with Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines’ Nosferatu—which forced you to scuttle around the sewers and eat rats like some kind of cryptid. I think I just talked myself into wishing Larian had let me do that, but the point remai…

Well-known crypto investor NFT God, owner of one messed up looking mutant Bored Ape NFT who they call Henry, has had all their cryptocurrency and other digital assets stolen after clicking a sponsored download link on Google for popular streaming app, OBS.

“I lost a life changing amount of my net worth” reads the top post in a thread on NFT God’s Twitter account. Here, in this space where they post “Daily tips on personal growth”, the thread goes into some rich narrative detail about the incident (via Web3isgoinggreat).

“I sat on the couch numb. I knew this was only the beginning. This wasn’t a wallet compromise. My entire digital livelihood was under attack.” After wiping everything and resetting their passwords, the post continues, “My heart raced like a Ferrari as I ran to change my substack password on my phone.”

Not only had NFT God’s wallets all been drained, their personal Twitter had been compromised, along with their 1% Better business account. On top of t…

Assuming the next-generation of graphics cards will be more power-hungry than the last, we could end up in a pickle trying to keep them cool. I mean, look at the RTX 4090, it’s already massive. Our PC cases can’t take much more. But there’s more to cooling than bigger and bigger heatsinks, and over at Computex 2023, MSI has shown off a couple of concepts it’s looking into that can drop GPU temps by as much as ten degrees.

The first new cooling method is called Dynamic Bimetallic Fins, and it’s essentially a fin sandwich. The bread, so to speak, is made up of two aluminium sheets, and the tasty filling is a copper sheet. The combined fins end up being around 1mm thick, which is roughly 3-4x thicker than your regular single fin, but the mixing of metals helps dissipate heat better—dropping temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius according to MSI.

The one downside is sure to be the cost of such a creation. Triple the fins, triple the materials. Not to mention manufacturing …

There’s a lot to love about this wee gaming keyboard, despite the fact that I really, really don’t like normal 60% keyboards. That’s something I kicked off my review of the Mountain Everest 60 with when I checked it out way back in the mists of time (April 2022), but that’s because all I’d tried up to then were missing cursor keys and that’s a damnable pain in the posterior. I make far too many errors when I’m typing not to be able to jump around the page.

Thankfully the diminutive Everest 60 frame has space for full-size cursor keys, and the relationship grew from there. I’m a bit of an enthusiast keyboard nerd and was prepared to be pulling out the pre-lubed Mountain switches in favor of my own Halo True switches… until I started typing. 

The type feel of the Everest 60 and its supplied switches is fantastic. The dampening foam and silicone layers make it both sound and feel great, and the overall build quality is excellent. My two little boys have spen…

Blizzard has used an update about toxicity and cheating in Overwatch 2 to slip-out a bit of a humblebrag: Since launch, the game has attracted “over 40 million players, both returning and new.” Partly that’s because, unlike the original, Overwatch 2 is free-to-play, but even so that’s a staggering number of players ignoring the objective.

The Overwatch 2 dev team gives its approach to bad behaviour the D.Va-inspired and grandiose name of the Defense Matrix initiative, which I’m sure has the nasty sorts quaking in their boots. Blizzard says that early rollout of its system for detecting “disruptive” voice chat has begun and it has “proven to be exceptionally accurate and effective in identifying abusive chat and language.” When bad chat is identified, the game will selectively silence the guilty parties and in worse cases apply account suspensions.

Blizzard is also taking aim at inappropriate content in custom games, probably because a persistent problem for the game has …

Arrowhead Games has said time and time again as of late that, when it comes to Helldivers 2 patches, it’d be slowing down its cadence to deliver more on quality—and assuming there’s not some catastrophic bug lurking in the shadows, it’s clear by this latest patch that the studio meant it.

This morning’s update for Helldivers 2 is absolutely massive—so massive, in fact, that I’m not going to be able to cover everything here, though you can always head to the Steam news page and rifle through it yourself. Until then, here’s your quick debriefing, soldier.

At a glance, the largest change here is an across-the-board set of pseudo-armour penetration buffs to the game’s higher-calibre guns—as explained in a follow-up blog from former CEO, now-CCO Johan Pilestedt.

According to Pilestedt, “durable” body parts (which he characterises as big, chunky bits of the model that nonetheless have “non-vital organs”) were taking roughly the same amount of damage fro…

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is coming out early next year, and like its predecessors it’s likely to be rammed full of side-activities complex enough to be their own games. We’ve already seen a straight-up Animal Crossing send-up packed into it. I shudder to think what other dark designs the developers at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio have up their sleeves.

Turns out, likely a few—as revealed in an official behind-the-scenes video on the studio’s YouTube channel and translated by Automation Media. Studio head and writer Yokoyama Masayoshi says the game has a “monster-class” playtime that creates a unique problem for his team: getting you to actually play the whole thing.

“[It’s] longer than anything we’ve made so far. If you go at it continuously, you’ll get sick, and it won’t end with just one or two all-nighters. This means that a lot of people are going to hesitate to play the game, or will end up having it wait on their shelves. I found the possibility of that kind of…

Bear with me for a bit of déjà vu: narrative adventure Tell Me Why is free to keep on Steam for the whole month of June, to celebrate Pride month. If that sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that, and it’s not because you’ve unlocked time-shifting powers. By my reckoning this is the fourth year running that developer Don’t Nod has done this.

It’s a lovely tradition to keep going. The game itself is about a pair of twins confronting their past using a supernatural power—the link to Pride is that one of the two is trans, with their identity forming a major element of the plot. Don’t Nod was also really put on the map by the original Life Is Strange, another adventure with LGBTQ+ themes. This feels like a lovely way of putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to respecting the wider community—especially as it’s accompanied by a call from the developer to “give your money and support to trans creators, trans-inclusive charities in you…

The monumentally crowdfunded, mega-budgeted Star Citizen is once again having a free fly event, letting people try out the space sim for the grand price of nothing for one week. Until July 19 you can do all the free flyin you’d like, trying out one of 10 different spaceships in developer Cloud Imperium’s sandbox.

This particular free week is an in-game-world event called the Foundation Festival, a sort of civic pride celebration for the star citizenry. Part of it is an enhanced experience for new players alongside a new guide system that connects veteran players with new ones. Those who participate in the guided sessions during the festival will get bonuses of armor and weapons.

If you’re now wondering whether Star Citizen will actually run on your machine, well, let me point you at the technical requirements: But please recall that they’re more guidelines than actual rules. It might say you’re going to need just 16GB of RAM, but I doubt you’ll enjoy yourself with less t…