Month: September 2024

After not quite gelling with it the first time around, I recently returned to Total War: Pharaoh, largely prompted by the very positive write up from my strategy bud, Len Hafer. She reckons, thanks to the wide-ranging Dynasties update, it’s become one of the best historical Total Wars. And it’s a fair assessment, with Dynasties effectively turning Pharaoh into Total War: Bronze Age. But soon after getting stuck into my conquest of Egypt and the Near East, I bounced off it again. The problem? It ain’t Warhammer.

This is an unexpected development. Total War’s historical settings are one of the reasons I’ve returned to the series game after game, continuing a love affair that began with 2000’s Shogun: Total War. When I was meant to be getting my Master’s Degree in Classical Studies, I instead spent most of my time in Rome: Total War, reasoning that literally conquering the world with my legions was just as good as writing essays about them.

History is my jam. I read Thucydides for pleasure. If I’m in a new place, I will always find out if there’s a castle nearby, and visit it immediately. And when I visited Rome for the first time (to actually play Total War: Rome 2),…

The quest to get Doom running on absolutely everything will never end, and this week’s entry is a cracker. Teletext will not be a familiar word to many outside of the UK, but it refers to an information system that ran on televisions in the UK from 1974 until 2012, and was also adopted by various other countries: You pressed the teletext button on the remote, up would come a ‘homepage’ of sorts, and you entered numbers to go to specific pages on, for example, news and sports. There was even a long-running and much-beloved games section called Digitiser.

A new mod converts Doom into a teletext signal, allowing you to play the id classic in spectacularly flickering and blocky glory (thanks, RPS). It can be controlled using the TV remote, which is what really seals the deal, while Doom guy’s face is replaced by a smiley face.

“Since teletext is based on unidirectional data transmission, it is not possible to actually run DOOM in teletext,” says mod creator Lukneu. “However, running the original game on some device that also generates a teletext page which holds the scene is just as fine. The packages sent by doom-teletext hold the teletext rendering of the…

Intel’s technically unified both its Arc discrete and integrated graphics drivers, meaning that all the performance boosts we’ve seen benefitting the Arc A750 and A770 (less said about the Arc A580 the better) will arrive on its new integrated GPUs around the same time. 

Intel has just announced, and effectively released its new Core Ultra series of laptop chips. They represent Intel’s first chiplet architecture (tiles in its own parlance), and it includes a significant upgrade to its laptop graphical prowess. The new Meteor Lake graphics tile includes up to eight new Xe LPG cores, which puts it roughly on par with AMD’s 780M iGPU in the Ryzen 7 7840U.

It’s actually claiming a 10% average frame rate lead over the red team’s finest iGPU, but even if it’s around the same level you’re still looking at good 1080p gaming performance. And if you’re getting a thin and light laptop with actually playable frame rates then you’re going to want to stay at the cutting edge with driver updates.

Especially considering the last few Arc driver updates have added a significant extra level of gaming prowess to its GPUs. One in October delivered up to 119% higher frame rates…

Electronic Arts and Marvel Games are working on an all-new singleplayer Black Panther game at Cliffhanger Games, a new studio headed up by former Monolith Productions vice president and studio head Kevin Stephens.

“We’re dedicated to delivering fans a definitive and authentic Black Panther experience, giving them more agency and control over their narrative than they have ever experienced in a story-driven videogame,” Stephens said. “Wakanda is a rich superhero sandbox, and our mission is to develop an epic world for players who love Black Panther and want to explore the world of Wakanda as much as we do.”

Details about the project haven’t been revealed except that it will be “an original, third-person, singleplayer” game, but EA touted the talent it’s already assembled at Cliffhanger, which includes former leadership from the outstanding Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor team and “veterans of top franchises including Halo Infinite, God of War, Call of Duty and others.” Stephens himself also has credits on NOLF, FEAR, Tron 2.0, and Condemned: Criminal Origins, which all by itself makes this a game to watch in my book.

One big question is who’s going to handl…

Who says you need to spend a lot of money on a speedy gaming monitor? Best Buy has a great deal on a 24.5-inch 1080p 240Hz gaming monitor from Lenovo for only $200. 

The Lenovo Legion Y25-25 launched in 2021 for $350; it’s recently dropped to $300 in recent weeks though. It hasn’t been this cheap since Black Friday. So, if you’re not ready to drop over $1,000 on a 240Hz 1440p OLED screen just yet, you can still get the most out of your RTX GPU 30-series GPU with this budget screen,

This Lenovo IPS is designed with competitive gamers in mind. It’s got a 240Hz refresh rate and a 1ms response time. This means you’ll be able to enjoy some pretty smooth gameplay from all your favorite shooters, like Valorant or Call of Duty: Warzone.

While speed is everything with this monitor, you still get fairly decent picture quality with solid color reproduction (it covers 99% of the sRGB color space), which can’t be said for most competitive gaming monitors.

$300 was already a steal for this high refresh rate display; at $200, it’s more than competitive, especially if you’re putting together a nice budget PC build or looking to pair this with one of the best gaming …

I guess it’s gonna be a while until we see a Steam page for Horizon Forbidden West. In a chat with Famitsu (spotted by TheGamer and machine translated), PlayStation boss Jim Ryan has reaffirmed Sony’s commitment to keeping its exclusives off of PC until PlayStation fans have had their day with them.

Sony “fully understand[s] the importance of PS5 exclusive titles,” Ryan told Famitsu, saying that “PlayStation Studios’ main responsibility is to have people enjoy the game experience using the latest PlayStation”. To that effect, Ryan said Sony is committed to (excuse the awkwardness of the machine translation) “increasing the number of PS5-exclusive titles and staggering the release of the PC version”.

How long will those PC versions be staggered, you ask? Well, Ryan didn’t give a firm timespan exactly, but he did mention that discussions with PlayStation fans suggest that “selling the PC version two or three years after the release of the PS version is accepted favorably”. So don’t go thinking Sony is gonna start picking up the pace of its PC releases just because The Last of Us Part 1 came out on PC a mere six-ish months after it hit PS5. Given the state of that port,…

Accessible controllers have got to be some of the coolest innovations coming to the gaming world, whether fully integrated award-winning systems like Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive controllers or DIY efforts that are getting 3D-printed parts to gamers who need them. Gaming for everyone is an initiative that’s gaining strength, and it’s exciting to see another big player like Sony join the ranks.

The electronics giant just announced its own accessible controller setup, Project Leonardo. This newly developed interface is only listed as coming for PS5, which makes sense as that’s where most of Sony’s gaming interest lies. 

However, we’re seeing great Sony games make their way to PC gaming, and maybe even a PC game launcher. Despite Sony’s vaguenes regarding its future PC gaming plans, if we can get the wonderful new DualSense working on a PC, we’re fairly confident the Leonardo will become compatible with PCs.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, much like its namesake in the TMNT, this Leonardo looks like a turtle. It has a circular back large keys can be placed around, and a turtle-like head pokes out for a joystick style controller. Most of this seems like it can b…