Watch On

Today at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, Capcom brought a new trailer for Monster Hunter Wilds, showing off new monsters, the latest hub area, and the return of well-done steaks.

The trailer begins with hunters discovering a strange flower in the new Scarlet Forest region, leading them to the lair of the Lala Barina—a new temnoceran monster. Pouncing down on the hunters from an overhead web of crimson threads, the Lala Barina is like a massive, vampiric wooly spider. Its front legs are split into trios of raking claws, and it can extend a thorn-like stinger from its rear. When enraged, the Lala Barina’s abdomen blooms into a flower-like formation, from which it can scatter paralytic blossoms. Seems like a nightmare; can’t wait to fight it myself.

From there, we get our first look at the hub area in Wilds that we’ll be returning to between hunts. It’s an “interim camp” built around a desert village, shielded from the sun by massive spans of overhanging canva…

Friends, it is my privilege and delight to inform you that, yes, there is still justice in the world. How do I know? Because Tomba, one of my favourite platformers of the PS1 era, is finally coming to PC a mere quarter-century after it hit (European and American) consoles in 1998. It’s being brought to modern systems by Limited Run Games—in collaboration with series creator Tokuro Fujiwara—and will run on LRG’s Carbon Engine.

Tomba (or Tomba! as it’s properly rendered) is a bit of a cult classic around certain parts of the internet, owing to its unique, hyper-colourful style and Metroidvania-ish gameplay. You play a purple-haired rapscallion as he wages a one-man war against a load of sapient pigs who have stolen his grandad’s bracelet. Pretty standard stuff.

I’d say I have incredibly warm memories of this game, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. I actually have incredibly warm memories of its demo, which accompanied an issue of Official PlayStation Magazin…

Having played the first few hours, I’m still a little shocked that brooding gothic action RPG Path Of Exile 2 (due out later this year) is set to be free. Or at least, every bit as free as its predecessor. During a preview event in Los Angeles, I got to ask the game’s director, Jonathan Rogers, if the game would be following at all in the footsteps of Diablo 4, which despite catching some flak for its aggressive live service monetization and MMO aspects, has still been Blizzard’s biggest financial hit yet.

His response for Path of Exile 2 was clear. “It’s definitely not an MMO. I’ve never liked MMOs, actually,” he said. Rogers explained that while he was a huge Diablo 2 fan, he firmly bounced off World of Warcraft and its more social side. He’s an ARPG diehard, still making the kind of game that appeals to him, and doesn’t feel that MMO elements bring much to the classic ARPG formula.

“I don’t think there’s a huge amount of value to the shared overworld. There’s a lot of…

Launch week server headaches have rankled everyone trying to play Payday 3, but the most frustrated are those who don’t even want to play the new co-op heist shooter online. Payday 3’s always-online construction means that solo players still have to connect to the matchmaking servers to start private heists, which has subjected them to the same errors and long queues as multiplayer heisters.

When I first launched Payday 3 today, I struggled just to get to the main menu, receiving an impassable “Nebula data error.” After relaunching a couple of times I was eventually able to start a private, invite-only heist, waiting through about 30 seconds of “matchmaking” despite playing with bots.

30 seconds of waiting isn’t a devastating inconvenience, but players have been reporting more frustrating queue times this week. On Steam, Payday 3 currently has a “Mostly Negative” user review rating, and discontent over its always-online design is the primary thumbs down motivator. A samp…

Look, I’m aware that the phrase “indie RPG set in early modern Hungary” sounds almost excruciatingly arch and high-falutin’, but for your own sake, don’t touch that dial⁠—Felvidek has the juice. I was already excited for this singular-looking JRPG-style project, but after making my way through its ~45-minute demo, I’m here to say it’s a must-play.

Felvidek centers on Pavol, a grinning, heartbroken buffoon of a knight tasked with investigating the arson of a nearby castle in the Slovak Highlands of the 15th century. Amid violence between Catholics, the proto-Protestant Hussites, and Ottoman Turks, something uncanny and supernatural seems to be unfolding that involves Pavol’s estranged wife.

Felvidek’s characters and writing managed to win me over after less than an hour of play: Pavol has a buddy-cop dynamic with straight-laced monk Matej, while both report to Jozef, a local nobleman who exudes confidence and composure—except for when he’s excit…

In an event the songsmiths will someday call ‘the shot heard around the world,’ an Overwatch hostess club has been unceremoniously scrubbed from Twitter (via Automaton). But not to worry, it lives once more.

Named OW_CabaretClub, the club wasn’t some kind of Overwatch-themed physical location but rather a Twitter-based service that let Overwatchers hire women to play alongside them for a fee. Punters could, if they were so inclined, get in on some flirtatious multiplayer or fall asleep with their partner in voice chat. 

The idea comes from Japanese hostess clubs—which any Yakuza player will be familiar with—where people (mostly if not entirely men, let’s be honest) can turn up and find a drink and a lady who will pay rapt attention to whatever they say.

It wasn’t long before the club’s Twitter account was blasted off the face of the Earth. Speculation is that Blizzard didn’t take kindly to its existence and the breach of its terms and conditions, b…

However you want to approach your daily Wordle, we’ve got something here that’ll help you out. There are a few quick tips below if you’d like to learn how to improve every single guess, every day, as well as a handcrafted hint for today’s puzzle, and the answer to the September 24 (1193) Wordle waiting to be used, ready to save your win streak.

I regretted my first guess the instant I typed it in—just one yellow letter? Not a great start. I wouldn’t have minded so much if my second guess hadn’t looked eerily similar, with the yellow doing nothing more than switch positions. It was well worth persevering with though, as I turned it around soon after. Make sure you use our clue if you find yourself in a similar position, and save yourself the worry.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, September 24

If something is today’s word, it’ll be convenient and useful in a clever way, as well as easily accessible. A jar opener ke…

Back in 2011, scores of Skyrim players became master thieves overnight thanks to the discovery of a simple exploit. The bucket trick, discovered just one day after Skyrim launched, made any NPC completely oblivious to thievery simply by blocking their line-of-sight. The trick? Put a bucket on their head. You’d think an exploit that trivializes pickpocketing and stealth would’ve been removed at some point, but the bucket trick survived through Skyrim’s many re-releases, and the same trick even worked in Fallout 4.

Which is why I’m sad to report that the bucket trick does not appear to work in Starfield. I can’t say definitively that there’s no way to block an NPC’s vision in Starfield, but I do know a humble bucket is no longer fit for the job. 

It is some consolation that you can still put buckets on NPC’s heads, and they still act like you haven’t done anything at all. I’ve bucketed nearly a dozen isolated Starfield NPCs of various head sizes and with several “buck…

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide may have had a rocky launch back in 2022, but you certainly can’t fault developer Fatshark’s dedication to improving its grimdark creation in the time since. While we have had new missions, enemies, and weapons, the biggest focus in the game’s updates thus far has been improving the core experience and basic systems, from performance fixes to crafting changes to a complete overhaul of class progression. 

And apparently that work is still ongoing. Following a major content drop with the Secrets of the Machine God update at the end of last month, Fatshark has revealed its next major project: a complete rethink of the itemisation system, to make investing in your weapons more satisfying. 

“We took the philosophy with this game to not be afraid of doing quite massive changes,” says Victor Magnuson, Darktide’s head of game design. “The start of that was the class overhaul. We felt at the launch that we weren’t really happy with how we ende…

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 rep…
  

It seems like there’s a new reason to be frustrated at AI almost every day, a reason that bubbles up through the primordial soup of festering unconsciousness and into the light of anger. There’s the effect on the economy, job thievery, copyrighted content thievery, and the simple fact that it’s just not right that lifeless neural networks should be able to convince anyone they’re conscious. And now, there’s another reason to be mad at the ethereal AI buggers: they’re clogging up server bandwidth without permission.

Yes, I was aware that some companies scrape websites for content to train their AI models, and yes, I was aware that they sometimes do this without a website’s permission. But I didn’t consider the impact this might have on the servers running these websites. CEO of iFixit, Kyle Wiens, is here to let all of us know that this does, in fact, occur, as they ask AI company Anthropic: “Do you really need to hit our servers a million times in 24 hou…

All the help you could need to win today’s Wordle just the way you want to is right here. Go straight for a guaranteed win with a quick click to today’s answer, give yourself a few pointers with our handy tips, or guided assistance with our clue for the October 27 (860) game.

My second guess today turned out to be almost right in a very wrong way, leaving me with a lot of yellows that in theory could’ve been sorted very quickly, if only I had any idea how to organise them. Let’s just say I took the nail-biting scenic route to today’s Wordle answer, and leave it at that. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, October 27

As a social rank, this word marks someone out as beyond upper class. This is the realm of dukes, princes, and aristocrats. As a personality, a _____ person would be considered good and honourable. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double lette…

Thermometers are peaking, birds are chirping, and the air outside is hot and thick. You know what that means, folks, a new season (of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) is here, and it’s bringing all sorts of changes (to the maps and gameplay of the hit Activision-published FPS) with it. Bad news, though: If you’ve got dreams of completing Modern Warfare 2’s season 4 battle pass, you’ve got about two fewer weeks than you had last season to do it. Chop chop.

MW2’s season 4 patch dropped yesterday, introducing, well, too much to go through bit-by-bit. I’ll link the full notes below, but the stuff that leaps out at me is the new maps, new operators, and the changes to the game’s extraction shooter DMZ mode. Oh, and the fact that this season will only last 48 days, a big drop from the 63 days in season 3. That does mean you’ll get to the new content in the mid-season update (and the next season) a little sooner, but you’ll have to scurry if you wanna unlock everything in the battle p…

Don’t worry if you’re struggling with today’s Wordle, because all the help you need to win is right here. Whether you’re hoping to turn a rough game around in an instant with today’s answer, or you’d just like a targeted clue for the December 4 (898) puzzle to put you back on track, you’ll find everything you need and more just below.

I can see a million different ways I could’ve uncovered today’s Wordle at least a guess or two earlier than I did, now I’ve got the answer staring me in the face. Uncommon letter choices can really turn a game around some days… but not this one.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, December 4

The most terrible outcome. The lowest someone can sink. The poorest quality something can be. The opposite of “best”. Think of that word, and you’ve won today’s Wordle. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle.…