I knew something was terribly wrong 10 seconds into Marvel Rivals’ tutorial. Actually, not just something. Everything. The annoying omnipresence of Galactus’ weird anime daughter, who serves as the host of these gladiatorial bouts; the fact that the map looked like a soulless facsimile of an Overwatch location, all brightly coloured but entirely forgettable; and worst of all, the combat itself, which is so unpleasant that it took all my willpower not to quit there and then.

My enthusiasm for hero shooters allows me to overlook a lot of flaws. I even enjoyed a stint in Star Wars: Hunters—free-to-play junk food, but fun nonetheless. And I wanted to like Marvel Rivals. The MCU has done a fantastic job of sapping my interest in comic adaptations, but that didn’t stop…

Gamers hoping to build a new Ryzen 9000-series system with an affordable B850 or B840 motherboard will reportedly have quite a wait according to a report from ComputerBase. Motherboards with the budget-friendly chipsets are unlikely to debut before 2025.

X870 and X870E options set to reach the market in the coming weeks, though given their features and specs, they are certainly not going to be cheap.

AMD always indicated it would stagger the release of the new chipsets. Still, it’s a bit disappointing to have such a long delay, as B850 boards in particular would no doubt add some additional incentive for mainstream users to upgrade.

Of course, you can use any currently available B650 or B650E motherboard (or A620 board for that matter) with a CPU like the Ryzen 5 …

The makers of MultiVersus say an option giving players the ability to purchase more lives with real money during campaign missions is in fact “a bug,” and not a feature that’s meant to be in the game. As you might imagine, I—and lots of other people—have questions.

Warner Bros’ answer to Smash Bros. made a big return last week after almost a year of dormancy, bringing with it a new campaign mode, which includes the ability to replenish lives with real money. As someone who spent many an hour exchanging money for life in various local arcades that struck me as not a particularly big deal, but given the reaction to the option on Reddit, many MultilVersus fans felt differently. 

Under the bug, players could buy a full refill of lives—the number wasn’t spe…

Shirley Curry, better known to gamers as Skyrim Grandma, said in a new video that despite the apparent Easter egg in the recent Starfield Direct showcase, she’s not going to appear in Starfield as an NPC. She’s also not going to play Starfield, because she’s “too angry” that she (and the rest of us) are still waiting for Elder Scrolls 6.

Curry rose to fame in 2015 when a Skyrim “let’s play” video she posted to YouTube attracted thousands of responses—and brought her thousands of new followers. She’s continued to post videos to her YouTube channel since then, growing in popularity to the point that in 2021 Bethesda announced that she will be included as an NPC in The Elder Scrolls 6. She has also, understandably, expressed some impatience with Bethesda on that front: She was …

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 t…

California, the biggest state in the US when it comes to both population and the sheer volume of tech companies squeezed into its borders, has just passed the country’s most extreme right to repair bill in the US (via Ars Technica). It’s the third state to pass such a bill, but goes further than either Minnesota or New York in that it forces companies to support their products for longer. But while it will cover gaming PCs and laptops, games console manufacturers get a free pass.

The bill just has to go back to the Senate for a procedural vote, but having already pass wholly unanimous votes previously in both the state Assembly and the Senate, that should be a formality before it is finally signed by the governor. The bill will then join the other two bills, coming into effect nex…

I’m genuinely hoping Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn’t sink itself. There is something to be said for live-service fatigue, but I am not immune to the appeal of numbers going up, and it looks like it could conceivably be a good time. Here to punch another hole in my hope-boat is the news that, yeah: the game has Denuvo DRM in it.

As spotted by PCGamesN, the game’s Steam Page now lists Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as incorporating “Denuvo anti-tamper”. SteamDB notes that the change took place January 20. 

Denuvo is a notoriously unpopular form of DRM. It’s blamed for a swathe of problems from crashes to major performance issues. Conventional wisdom is that Denuvo always makes your games run worse—that’s not necessarily always true, as the Den…

After pulling off a Darktide redemption arc last year, Fatshark’s not resting on its inquisitorial laurels. Secrets of the Machine God, Darktide’s latest update, arrived earlier today, bringing a new mission to revive an abandoned Adeptus Mechanicus foundry and a set of new weapon types. If you’re not already thrilled, you should be: It’s never a bad time when the tech-priests are around.

The new mission, Clandestium Gloriana, will have strike teams descend into a derelict “Foundryplex”—a massive production facility where the AdMech tech-priests once worked their fabled wonders, which the Inquisition hopes to reawaken for its war effort. The mission will feature some new tech from Fatshark, like a mission-giver who will accompany the players and a variable end-of-miss…

We haven’t posted much about twin-stick shooter slash base-building survival game The Riftbreaker since its 2021 launch, but fans of butchering hordes of bad bugs and nasty monsters with either a carefully-constructed network of defensive guns and/or your giant mobile killer mech suit have enjoyed a few years of expansions and major updates since then.

Now developers Exor Studios are working on the third big expansion to The Riftbreaker’s world, bringing the story of a stompy mech and its pilot to a new biome, the swamp. They’re also working on much-requested multiplayer co-op, enabled by its broad success even though they didn’t design the game for co-op at all.

“While swamps on Earth are rather uninviting and gloomy most of the time, Galatean Swamps are rich, colorful, and…

Amazon’s Fallout series was a big hit, and it turns out the critics like it too. The show has been nominated for 16 Emmy awards, including a couple big ones: Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Walton Goggins.

Most of the categories Fallout is nominated in are for awards that are generally handed out off-camera—things like “Outstanding Period or Fantasy/Sci-Fi Makeup (Non-Prostethic),” or “Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (One Hour),” the sorts of categories most of us likely haven’t even heard of. But it’s also up for awards in special visual effects, stunt performance, and writing for a drama series, which are nothing to sneeze at.

The highlight has to be the Outstanding Drama Series nom, which is great but, …

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen exited an online tournament on Thursday after accidentally moving his queen to the wrong square, allowing rival Hikaru Nakamura to take it with his king and ultimately win the match. Chess.com called the move a “horror mouseslip” for Carlsen, who left the event in third place with $15,000.

After beating Carlsen in that armageddon match (a special ruleset for tiebreakers), Nakamura went on to win the Chessable Masters tournament and its $30,000 top prize on Friday, putting him ahead of Carlsen in the rankings for this year’s multi-event Champions Chess Tour. 

The result of Carlsen’s fatal misclick can be seen in the screenshot above. At the top right of the board, Nakamura’s king (black) can be seen capturing Carlsen’s defenseless quee…

Turn every game of Wordle into a winner with our help. We’ve got general tips to help you improve every guess you make, a clue written especially for the March 31 (650) puzzle, and the answer to today’s Wordle, only a quick click or scroll away.

That was tense. Every guess today seemed to throw up more problems than answers, my screen filling with grey boxes. The situation was looking grim: the few letters I had found just didn’t go together—until my next guess finally made sense of them. It was a close thing, but I finally, happily, stumbled into today’s Wordle answer.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, March 31

This word describes all of the items or people in a particular group, or an event that occurs regularly: something that happen…

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…