Angelinan

You may know Inkle from interactive storygames like 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Overboard!, and the Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Series. All of these games were made with Ink, a scripting language the studio created that uses markup instead of script, and came with Unity integration built-in. Given how badly Unity dropped the ball then also tripped over the ball then ate the ball while rolling around in dirt this year, it makes sense developers with an interest in using Ink might want to divorce it from Unity.

Now they can, thanks to Nick Slaven, technical director at The Chinese Room, the studio that made its name with a Half-Life 2 mod turned foundational walking sim, Dear Esther—though nowadays it’s working on nautical horror game Still Wakes the Deep and long-awaited RPG sequel…

Microsoft has revealed a plethora of new accessibility updates designed to make gaming more inclusive for disabled players as part of its October celebration of the disabled gaming community. Sony has been following Microsoft’s lead, announcing more options for disabled gamers in the form of new, accessibility focussed controllers, but now we’re seeing more of this inclusivity being brought into Windows and PC gaming specifically. 

Accessibility for gamers with disabilities has become something of a hot topic in recent years, with one recent study from Samsung showing that 81% of participants who identified as living with a disability struggled to play their favourite games. Chief complaints identified in the study included hard-to-read text, fast paced gameplay and a lack of…

It’s Amazon Prime Day, or as I like to call it, Black Friday Summer League. The deals are out on this day where we all flock to the internet’s largest storefront and pick from the scraps of its pretty OK deals.

“Pretty OK” is how I’d classify my Prime Day so far. My Amazon page seems to think I want yet another new air fryer and a 1TB SD card (can never have too much storage, but you can definitely have too many air fryers). If you’re in the market for a modest PC upgrade, we’re actually finding the best deals outside Amazon itself. That’s right, Prime Day is now bigger than Amazon: Newegg, Best Buy, and Walmart are conveniently running loads of sales right now too, and some of them are better.

• We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals

The voice actors behind Baldur’s Gate 3‘s origin characters—Astarion, Gale, Karlach, Shadowheart, Wyll, and Lae’zel—gathered for a two-episode D&D game that was livestreamed this past weekend. An hour into the first 160-minute episode, I can confidently recommend it to fans of our favorite new RPG. I don’t know if I’ll make get to the end of the whole session anytime soon, but it’s a charming bit of fan service. Replays are available on YouTube, Twitch, and as podcasts.

After calling on Baldur’s Gate 3’s narrator, Amelia Tyler, to set up the scenario with an uncannily-good script read, DM Mark Hulmes smoothly introduces the actors to the game, keeping things snappy by prompting them with ideas for actions without overdirecting, and succinctly expla…

When I meet with Jonathan Knight, Head of Games for the New York Times, I have one big, burning question:

“What’s your Wordle streak?”

He takes out his phone to check. “I’m at 184 right now,” says Knight, who before joining the New York Times worked as a producer at EA, Activision, Zynga, and Warner Bros. “Every day for me, it gets more and more stressful. I’ve been stressed out lately playing Wordle.”

I know the stress of trying to keep a streak alive, and I lament that my own Wordle streak was recently up to 87, but I blew it—not because I got a word wrong but because one day I completely forgot to open the app. Miss a day, and your streak resets to zero.

“I know the feeling,” Knight tells me. “That’s why I’m only at 184 even though I’ve been playing it f…

4/1/2024: It looks like Super Earth celebrated too soon. Reports of massive, cloaked gunships in the skies of Automaton planets are appearing online. I’ve seen them for myself. Liberty help us all. 4/2/2024: They’re here, and it’s even worse than we imagined. Gigantic AT-AT walkers and swarming gunships have arrived on Automaton planets.

Victory is ours… already? Just hours after Super Earth initiated a major order to finally, once and for all, liberate community-favorite planet Malevalon Creek, Helldivers 2 players have delivered. Our greatest defeat can now be celebrated as one of our greatest achievements. The news became official with an in-game dispatch, as well as a rare Twitter announcement from the official Helldiv…

For those of you still trucking on with 8GB of RAM, I have some potentially bad news. According to a TrendForce report (via TechPowerUp) Microsoft has set a new baseline for RAM requirements in AI PCs at 16GB, which likely means that 8GB users may finally have to upgrade if they want to keep up with the latest Copilot features. 

This looks like good news for DRAM manufacturers at the very least, but for those of you that have been content to run on 8GB up until now and might be thinking to yourselves that you don’t really care for Copilot or AI features anyway, may I suggest that now might be the time to upgrade regardless?

While you might be content to let the integration of AI features in your OS pass you by (and to be honest, given the utility as things stand I would…

Mini PCs have a dedicated following. Count me among them! When news came that Intel was handing over the reins of its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) business to Asus, I was definitely intrigued by the possibilities. Consumers aren’t the only market for NUCs though, as Asus is courting commercial and enterprise clients with custom NUC devices designed for a wide variety of use cases.

The Register spoke with Asus senior vice president Jacky Hsu, who outlined plans Asus has to develop custom machines for various commercial customers. This includes embedded, industrial and application specific use cases across such diverse roles as digital signage, point-of-sale, cloud, AI or warehouse and factory applications, each of which have their own environmental considerations.

When we thi…

One of my biggest trivial complaints in life is that there’s a severe lack of fashionable gaming merch. Shapeless t-shirts with a design slapped on the front of them have their place, of course, but I’ve always longed for something a little more. Like Final Fantasy 14 fat cat sneakers, perhaps? Or even a fat cat hoodie? Well, an upcoming Puma collection is doing just that.

The sportswear brand is teaming up with the critically acclaimed MMORPG, putting its own panther-y spin on some classic motifs from across Eorzea. The collection’s been made to honour the game’s upcoming 10th anniversary—of its re-release, anyway—and has been aptly named A Wardrobe Reborn. There’s a little bit of everything here—sneakers, sweatpants, hoodies, hats and more. 

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