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Big Papa Kratos is coming back to Steam.

During Sony’s State of Play stream on Thursday, the company dropped the news that God of War Ragnarök, the acclaimed sequel to the 2018 reboot of God of War, will be arriving on PC September 19. 

Dad Kratos’s second outing was a big hit in 2022—”Everybody but us is having a great time in God of War: Ragnarök,” we wrote not-at-all-passive-aggressively shortly after its release. While Elden Ring more or less swept the 2022 awards season as the top dog for Game of the Year, Ragnarök was still an impressive runner up. It took home the trophy at a number of publications that year, including at our sister sites Tom’s Guide and Laptop Mag. It also earned high praise in reviews; GamesRadar+ awarded it 4.5/5 stars, writing “There’s a light start that feels padded—still good but missing depth—which leads into a weighty finish that’s every bit the equal of its predecessor.”

Hopefully God o…

Released today, Nvidia driver 537.34 adds optimizations for Lies of P and Mortal Kombat 1, but more urgently includes some Starfield-related performance notes. The biggest is the addition of a resizable BAR profile that Nvidia says will improve Starfield performance on RTX 30-series and 40-series GPUs.

Before this update dropped, we explained how to enable Resizable BAR manually for Starfield. You can find more details in that article, but the short of it is that BAR stands for “Base Address Register,” and the feature has to do with improving the game’s access your graphics card’s memory. According to Nvidia, this update improves Starfield performance by an average of 5% on RTX 40-series desktop GPUs.

The Resizable BAR profile will be “automatically applied for gamers running the latest Game Ready Driver (537.34) or the previous release (537.17),” Nvidia said. The new 537.34 driver also adds Starfield to the “optimal settings” GeForce Experience feature, which tweak…

I’ve probably looked at more motherboards just today than I have in the past three combined. That’s because every manufacturer has brand new Z790 motherboards ready to show off ahead of a yet unannounced Intel processor generation (that’s the Raptor Lake refresh, by the way). But one thing I’ve noticed across nearly every board I’ve seen today, be it from ASRock, Gigabyte, or MSI, is that they all are fitted with seriously beefy coolers on their PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots.

Some of these coolers are included on the motherboard, and even these integrated designs are looking beefed up with the coming generation of SSDs. But take a look at some of the coolers included or available as extras for PCIe 5.0 drives and things get out of hand pretty quickly.

Just look at the size of the cooler and fan loaded onto the MSI Spatium Pro PCIe 5.0 2TB Frozr+ drive. That drive is capable of a very impressive 14,520MB/s sequential read according to the benchmark results on display, and thanks to…

Ever since E3 was shattered into a million pieces by the pandemic, publishers have been sprinkling their own showcases across the calendar to highlight their new games. These days we can barely go three weeks without an event from Microsoft or Sony or, indeed, Nacon, which is bringing back its Connect event at the end of this month.

The publisher, which is probably best known right now for the recent release of the thoroughly alright Robocop: Rogue City, has run its Connect event for several years now. Its upcoming showcase will peel back the living tissue and reveal the metal endoskeleton of another movie franchise tie-in, namely its upcoming open world Terminator survival game.

The game was announced two years ago, and is in development at Nacon Studio Milan. While little is known about it at present (even the title is still under wraps) Nacon has confirmed that it’s set in the post Judgement Day era of the timeline, but before the formation of John Connor’s resistance…

Bandai Namco and Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada are readying the banhammers, with warnings of rank resets and account suspensions, after players quickly discovered that the leaderboard’s ‘top’ online ranked users were cheating or win trading to inflate their standing.

Accusations of win trading to reach a high rank aren’t new to Tekken or fighting games in general. What is new is the fact that it’s far easier to gauge when it’s happening now, something which legitimate players were mighty quick to sniff out. There’s the fact that every player has a radar chart now, which pulls stats from five different categories. While genuine high-ranking players will have a pretty even spread with some high numbers across the board, rank booster stats look a lil’ more skewed and the numbers a lot lower.

There’s also the new replay system, which lets you watch the online games of any other player. Not only is it a great way to find out how other players fight with your mai…

The origin of the Backrooms, a photo of a liminal space deemed so eerie it earned internet and gaming stardom, has been uncovered by four image-savvy detectives scrubbing 4chan, and a chance encounter with an archived internet page from 2003. 

In case you’re unfamiliar with what the Backrooms are, here’s the rundown. In 2019, an image was posted to 4chan displaying an eerie set of rooms devoid of natural light—capturing people’s imaginations so vividly that it spawned its own lore. 

It’s considered a liminal space, which is loosely defined as an area that’s not quite surreal, but getting close. It’s the manmade equivalent of the uncanny valley, a building or a space crafted from normal parts, but arranged in an abnormal and unsettling way. Hallways that lead to nowhere, rooms serving no natural purpose, brutalist interiors with flickering lights or, in some cases, swimming pools. There’s no exact criteria for what comprises a liminal space—…

Behold the Sax-A-Boom. This garish beauty is a toy instrument resembling a saxophone, apparently first released in 1998, with eight buttons and a speaker, with each button triggering a synthesised musical loop. It wasn’t an especial hit at the time but, at some point, one found its way into the hands of Jack Black and Tenacious D. 

Tenacious D has a live song, simply called Sax-a-Boom, which the band would crack out to the delight of audiences over the years. But it was Black’s later appearance on Jimmy Fallon in 2018, during which he played a Sax-a-Boom alongside in-house band The Roots, that saw interest in the toy shoot through the roof. According to the Tenacious D wiki, and who knew that existed, Black’s advocacy has seen the instrument become “highly collectable and rare.”

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Now an enterprising modder has added the instrument to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. TalonGrayson’s mod has the straightforward title “Sax-a-Boom Hunting Horn” and, …

UL Solutions, the makers of the ever popular 3DMark benchmarking software, has announced 3DMark Steel Nomad. It’s set to replace the now aging Time Spy benchmark, and it’s sure to bring even the best rigs to their knees, as any new 3Dmark software should!

Steel Nomad is a heavy non-ray tracing cross-platform benchmark. It will support DirectX 12 via Windows, but also macOS and iOS using Metal, Android using Vulkan, and Linux using Vulkan. So far, only three screenshots have been teased and they certainly look good. For now we don’t have any information on the structure of the test(s), though a CPU test would seem likely.

Why doesn’t Steel Nomad support ray tracing? Well, there are the Speed Way and Port Royal benchmarks for that. Despite the industry and Nvidia in particular shouting about ray tracing from the rooftops, enabling it still incurs a hefty performance hit, and mid-tier graphics cards don’t yet have the horsepower to run ray traced games consistently, particu…

Continuing a long legacy of co-op games with wacky themes, Unrailed 2: Back on Track returned to today’s PC Gaming Show to share one of its coolest new features: the “terrain conductor” mode that lets you build your own levels. 

When we previously saw Unrailed 2, the team at Indoor Astronaut gave us a look at abilities and different wagons available—and the fact that everyone is an animal, an obvious upgrade over humans—but now we can see just how easy it is to use its level maker mode. Filling the blank canvas with grassy fields, thick groves of trees, and rocky mountain ranges is easy enough that it looks like a sort of voxel-based MS Paint. Being accessible and quick to use is a big plus, regardless of whether you want to create a cool puzzle for your friends or just draw rude pictures out of trees.

One of the examples shown includes a map separated into two halves by mountains, which are in turn bisected by conveyor belts. You can see the play…

Skip straight to the best bit and win today’s Wordle in record time—the answer to the November 13 (877) puzzle is never more than a cheeky click away. Or if you’d like guidance rather than a quick victory, keep on scrolling and you’ll find a clue written just for today’s game, as well as general tips and tricks designed to boost every guess you ever make.

I did well enough today—a win in four is fine, if not anything worth shouting from the rooftops. But I still managed to make a fool of myself when I was one guess away from today’s answer and had the majority of the word filled in. It was right there, plain as day, and I somehow still spent far too long wondering what on earth I was supposed to add to this mysterious word to win. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, November 13

Today’s answer is the colour of spring grass and fresh shoots. People might figuratively go this colour with envy, or when…

E3 returns in June, and for the first time since 2019, it’ll return to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The gaming industry’s biggest convention was cancelled in 2020 and 2022 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with a scaled back online version hosted in 2021. Much has changed during those three years however, and now Ubisoft has joined Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo in confirming it’ll be a no show.

A spokesperson for Ubisoft confirmed as much to VGC. “E3 has fostered unforgettable moments across the industry throughout the years,” the statement read. “While we initially intended to have an official E3 presence, we’ve made the subsequent decision to move in a different direction, and will be holding a Ubisoft Forward Live event on 12th June in Los Angeles. We look forward to sharing more details with our players very soon.”

Perhaps unsurprising, if it weren’t for the fact that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said last month on a confere…

Overcome every problem today’s Wordle could possibly throw your way with our help. Keep on scrolling and you’ll find great tips that’ll help make your opening guess work its hardest for you, as well as a clue written just for today’s game and, if you get really stuck, the answer to the December 9 (903) puzzle.

A single letter tripped me up, and that meant today’s Wordle shamefully took one guess more than it otherwise could have. That’s not ideal, but it’s still much better than staring at my screen for ten minutes the way I do some days, wondering why the English language has decided to get up and leave me for the duration of a Wordle session.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, December 9

A slight change in position or direction could be described using today’s answer, as could going up or down gears in a car. Also, someone working until 4am would be working the night _____. 

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Is there a double …

Looking for some weekend Wordle help? There’s a hint for today’s puzzle waiting just below, ready to offer a clear path through the grey letter fog. Need something a little more direct on the weekend? You’ve got it. The answer to the December 23 (917) Wordle is only a quick click away.

A win in three quick guesses on a Saturday morning? I love it. Just a nice case of almost being right, almost being right in a slightly more accurate way, and then sitting back as today’s Wordle answer revealed itself. What more could I ask for? Other than for tomorrow’s puzzle to turn up a little earlier than usual so I can play again, that is.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, December 23

Today’s answer refers to a sort of slant, angle, or gradient. A surface of some sort—a hillside, or the path leading down it—going from a higher point to a lower one, for example. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordl…