Slender Man has captured a large part of the popular psyche–large enough that two girls stabbed a third girl 19 times, and other children commit acts of arson, all in his name. I can’t help but blend those headlines with subsequent forays into the Slender Man mythos. Although he is without a doubt fictitious–a legend manufactured wholecloth in full view of the internet’s many denizens–he’s transcended himself. He’s now a self-reinforcing curiosity of the modern era, reflecting the deep-seated fears of our connected culture.

For those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, Slendy, as some affectionately call him, was born on the internet forums of the 21st century. A few Photoshop projects featured a thin, suited figure without an apparent face. The first few images of him d…

There are a lot of things that I want to appreciate about Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization. I want to appreciate the marriage of RPG action and visual novel storytelling. I want to appreciate the way it candidly addresses the past trauma its characters have been through. I want to appreciate its devotion to imitating both the technical and social aspects of MMOs. But as much as I want to appreciate these things, I can’t just wave a magic wand and will myself to enjoy a game that exhausts me in the worst ways.

That said, if you only have a passing familiarity with the series on which it’s based then Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization isn’t necessarily the worst point at which to finally wade in. Rather than taking place in any previously used settings, Hollow Real…

PC hardware manufacturer NZXT has officially started recalling all its H1 PC Chassis after it failed to adequately address a design flaw that posed a fire hazard.

The H1, which strongly resembles the design of the Xbox Series X, features a PCIe riser for GPUs to fit in the space-constrained design. This riser features two screws that don’t feature enough clearance, meaning they could potentially short a 12V power rail on the connecting PCB. NZXT attempt to solve this issue by shipping nylon screws to H1 customers to prevent the short, but the company has acknowledged that it failed to resolve the core issue at hand.

In a statement on the recall, NZXT CEO Johnny Hou apologized for the design oversight, promising to improve QA processes moving forward.

“Going forward, we…

While its release date is still nowhere to be seen, Blizzard is finally starting to share some of the nitty-gritty details of what players can expect in Overwatch 2. The developer has previously gone over new game modes being added in the game, along with new maps and skins Come from Sports betting site VPbet . However, this is the first time it has gone over specific changes to either Sombra and Bastion.

Sombra, the game’s hacking fiend, potentially has the more contentious changes among the duo. Overall, she’ll be able to go on the assault more often thanks to some serious buffs to her hack ability, which now refreshes every three seconds. Enemies who are hacked still can’t use their abilities, although that’s j…

In Macau and local casino firm Success Universe Group Limited has reportedly disclosed that it lost approximately $18.3 million last year due in large part to the temporary coronavirus-related shutdown of its five-star Ponte 16 Resort Macau venue.

According to a report from Inside Asian Gaming, the final depressing tally represents a decrease of almost 300% year-on-year when compared with the about $9.5 million profit the Hong Kong-listed company made in 2019 to take the combined annual deficit for itself and its Pier 16 Property Development enterprise up to $18.7 million.

Considerable credit:

Success Universe Group Limited reportedly owns a 49% stake in Pier 16 Property Development, which runs the waterfront Ponte 16 Resort Macau, with the remaining majority stake con…

About:

Everygame Poker offers slots and table games from well-known game providers such as Betsoft, Nucleus, Tangente and Worldmatch.

Additionally, it offers poker tables to ensure that its players have an unforgettable experience and according to reviews, it is one of the most trusted poker rooms.

What’s more, its poker players may use the exact same account to play additional games at Everygame Casino and place sports wagers at Everygame Sports.

…

Inspired Entertainment Inc., a flagship B2B supplier of gaming systems, solutions and content based in New York, is pleased to reveal the expansion of its alliance with FanDuel, a flagship iGaming firm in North America, also based in New York, to debut top online gaming content in four important North American regulated markets such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ontario and most recently New Jersey, according to the official press release of Inspired.

Goals of the extended partnership:

The main reason for extending the alliance is Inspired’s desire to extend its presence in the aforementioned 4 markets and introduce its iGaming content to a brand-new audience. Examples of this visually appealing portfolio of online content that includes different mechanics and themes, which w…

Microsoft will be rolling out Xbox Game Pass Core to Xbox insiders this week. That means beta testers who currently subscribe to Xbox Live Gold will start seeing the new program a month early, with access to a selection of games like Doom Eternal.

Specifically, Xbox insiders in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead rings will gain access this week to Xbox Game Pass Core, according to Microsoft. The full library of games for the new service won’t be available yet. That said, certain titles like Pyschonauts 2 and State of Decay 2 will be accessible.

The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement has published data about the local casinos’ performance in Q4 2023, reporting a decrease in gross operating profit despite an increase in net revenue.

The report highlights Q4 net revenue of $781.9 million, reflecting a 1.3% increase year-on-year. As mentioned, gross operating profit declined by 3.6% to $148.5 million.

Additionally, the Division of Gaming Enforcement published data about its licensees’ full-year performance. According to the authority, net revenue reached $3.33 billion for the calendar year, representing an increase of 0.8% year-on-year. In the meantime, licensed casino companies in New Jersey reported FY 2023 gross operating profit of Read more

Why Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco Are Sparking Engagement Rumors

Does Selena Gomez just have her love on, or is she wearing something more?

The 32-year-old is sparking engagement rumors with her boyfriend Benny Blanco thanks to some strategically placed emojis.

Posting a mirror selfie to her Instagram Stories on Aug. 8, the “Love On” singer sported a champagne-colored slip dress, covering her hand with heart emojis as her producer beau stood in the background.

Gomez also shared a photo dump of PDA-packed pics with her man by the beach. Notably, the Only Murders in the Building star was not rocking any rings in the roundup, though it was clear she couldn’t keep her hands to herself.

The music producer has mad…

Update: In a statement to PCG, Larian says that the problem players are running into with the shared stash system is “not the intended behavior and will be fixed in an upcoming update.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 is excellent. Historically excellent, in fact, but it’s not without its flaws. The first of these, of course, is that Astarion was not voiced with Neil Newbon’s original Brummie accent, but the game’s awkward inventory system is a close-run second. I don’t know about you, but I probably spent at least a couple of hours of playtime standing stock-still in camp, desperately trying to give my chaotic inventory and those of my allies some semblance of organisation. It never worked.

The third patch for the game tried to ameliorate that a bit, i…

ถึงแม้แบรนด์ Xbox ในเวทีคอนโซลตอนนี้อาจจะไม่ได้โดดเด่นเทียบเท่ากับแบรนด์ PlayStation หรือเครื่องเล่นจาก Nintendo แต่เมื่อย้อนกลับไปเมื่อราว 10 กว่าปีก่อนต้องบอกเลยว่า Xbox รุ่น 360 นั้นได้รับความนิยมตามหลังเครื่องเล่น Wii เลยทีเดียวจากการแพ้ภัยตัวเองครั้งใหญ่ของ PlayStation 3 เช่นเดียวกับสเปคที่แรงและราคาที�…

หลังจากประกาศเปิดตัวสู่สายตาสาธารณชนมาตั้งแต่ปี 2021 ก่อนที่จะอัปเดตความเคลื่อนไหวในการพัฒนามาหลายต่อหลายครั้ง ล่าสุด Kakao Games ผู้ให้บริการเกมสัญชาติเกาหลีก็ได้ออกมาเคลื่อนไหวอีกครั้ง พร้อมประกาศเปิด Teaser Site และวิดีโอเทรลเอร์ prologue ที่เผยให้เห็นเรื่องราวภายใน Goddess Order เกมมือถือกราฟิก…

French esports club Team Vitality has announced that its star Counter-Strike player Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut, who helped the team win the last-ever CS:GO Major, has re-signed to stay with the Parisians until 2026. And boy is Vitality excited about the news.

The outfit decided that only one thing would do for this announcement. Zywoo is French and the king of the AWP-ers, Vitality is a French esports organisation, and arguably the team’s finest moment was winning the Paris Major last May.

Vitality therefore announced the player’s new contract by making him sit on a golden throne made out of Counter-Strike guns, with the Eiffel tower as a backdrop.

Vitality later posted a tribute video to the player:

The team later posted some close-up shots of the thr…

The traditional view has always been that games consoles were a useful but relatively petite contribution to AMD’s overall revenues. Turns out that’s not entirely true. In fact, Sony’s PS5 alone represented fully 16% of AMD’s revenues in 2022 and likely a quarter of revenues came from Sony and Microsoft consoles combined.

That’s according to an official AMD filing (via Tom’s Hardware). “One customer accounted for 16% of our consolidated net revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022. Sales to this customer consisted of sales of products from our Gaming segment,” the filing revealed.

That customer can only really be Sony and the PS5, which comfortably outsells the Xbox Series consoles. Of course, AMD wasn’t just responsible for the PS5’s APU, it also created the chips for b…

Only five days post-launch, Palworld has sold over seven million copies and become the second game ever to log over two million concurrent players on Steam. Its unexpectedly absurd level of success has led to much speculation over the source of its appeal—as well as some condemnation—but the notion that it’s “Pokémon with guns,” while not exactly accurate, must be at least part of the answer.

Finding someone to design Palworld’s firearms was apparently a challenge for Japanese developer Pocketpair, though.  

“Japan makes a ridiculous amount of RPGs,” said Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe in a lengthy blog post last week (translated from Japanese). “But how many Japanese-made shooters are there? The only one that comes to mind is Resident Evil, and that di…

Hideo Kojima recently gave an interview to the magazine Weekly Tokyo Keizai, in which he talked a little about the run-up to the release of Metal Gear Solid 2 and how real-world events almost scuppered the game’s release. At the time MGS2 was probably the most anticipated game in the world, and was due to release in November 2001. Then two months before the game’s release, the September 11 terrorist attacks happened, killing just under 3,000 people and changing the course of the world.

MGS2, which featured terrorist factions attacking New York, was suddenly a project with very bad timing indeed. Kojima and Konami went into crisis mode, with Sony also involved, realising that it simply could not release the game as-was in this context. Particular scenes, such as Arsenal Gear crashi…

The original PlayStation 5 is getting on a bit these days. First launched back in November 2020, the console set tongues a-wagging with its reasonably impressive spec sheet, including a fast SSD, a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU, and an RDNA 2 GPU that brought it up to greater performance parity with gaming PCs of the time.

While this latest leak for the upcoming PS5 Pro doesn’t go into those sort of hardware specifics—although we have summarised rumoured hardware specifications previously—it does reveal some potential performance numbers and upscaling features that might give us more of a clue as to what Sony has been cooking up behind the scenes for the new model. 

This latest information comes from YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, which has tradition…

Overwatch 2 has had some trouble in the past year-and-a-bit since its release—between promised PvE content being absent, an outright admission that the game has been in decline, and a ‘colourful’ reception on Steam, the game’s freemium model has been a point of contention—especially for players who bought Overwatch 1 fully-priced.

A recent controversy has made that sentiment worse, with players responding to the bitter fact that they wouldn’t be able to earn every cosmetic in the Winter Fair event even if they went for the premium option—things worsened after executive producer Jared Neuss responded to a player in a post on X, where he wrote: “It’s $5 for 4 Legendary skins”—though some of them are recolours of past skins—”which feels squarely in the s…

French indie studio Evil Empire, which has spent the last five years working on expansions for roguelike sensation Dead Cells, prides itself on being a “triple I” developer: independent, but still big enough to make “world-class” games. Evil Empire likes the label so much, in fact, that it’s spent the past few months organizing a new showcase with some other indie superstars, including the developers of Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Vampire Survivors, and Terraria. The Triple-I Initiative will be streaming on April 10 and will show off more than 30 games.

“We did collaborations with many indie studios [for Dead Cells]: Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain, Terraria,” Evil Empire’s marketing director Bérenger Dupré told me in an interview at last week’s Game Developers Con…

Starfield is out today—you may have heard something about that already—and if you want to be a part of the Big Launch Moment but would also like to save a few bucks, Newegg is currently offering $8 off the Premium Edition of the game, or $5 off the standard.

To take advantage of the lower price, head ’round to newegg.com and choose the Starfield edition of your choice. The deal applies to both Steam and Xbox versions of the game, but do note that if you go for the Standard Edition, you will not be able to start playing today: Early access is only available through the Premium and Constellation editions of Starfield.

On the checkout screen, you’ll see a field to drop in a promo code: Use STARFLD8 for the Premium Edition, or STARFLD5 for the standard edition, and t…

“I’m going to do something ridiculous every day until [x videogame thing happens]” might be a little pat now⁠—hell, there’s probably a sociological paper to be written about gamers performing devotion for companies as if they were implacable deities⁠.

But JPNB on YouTube was a pioneer of the form, fighting secret Elden Ring megaboss Malenia every week (initially every day) over a span of months until we finally got that Shadow of the Erdtree announcement last February. He hung up his spurs after that, but now he’s back once more to tango with the Blade of Miquella.

Watch On

During his original run, JPNB started out trying to fight Malenia every day until we got news of an Elden Ring expansion. As the wait dragged on, that quickly became “every few …

Unity’s found itself under fire from the public these past few months—and for decent reasons. In June, for instance, it announced that it would incorporate AI programs into its developer tools, something it didn’t really elaborate well enough on to soothe artists and developer fears alike.

Unsurprisingly, it then had to drop one of its AI partners after it was found to have just been pulling models wholescale from SketchFab, like this cat from Murdered Soul Suspect. Then there was the whole pricing fee fiasco, which is pretty much still ongoing, with revelations that it was a rushed-out decision in October amidst its CEO’s resignation. Trust in Unity has eroded, which makes any calls of ‘we’re doing the right thing here, we promise’ a hard sell.

Now, in an interview wi…

In August 2022, Embracer Group added Middle-earth Enterprises to its ever-growing lineup of studios and properties. And it’s not wasting any time doing something with it: Embracer revealed in its Q3 2022 financial report that it now has no less than five LotR games in development.

“There are currently five games in production by external partners, to be released in financial year 2023/24,” the report states. “There is also one film in production by an external partner.”

Embracer’s 2023/24 fiscal year runs from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, meaning that, if the schedule holds, all five games will be out within little more than a year.

The report doesn’t give any indication of titles or platforms, but it’s possible that we know of at least three of the games in develo…

If you’re struggling with today’s Wordle you’ll find a helpful clue below, as well as a range of general tips designed to make the most of every guess. And if you’re more than a bit struggling and would just like someone to tell you the answer to the October 15 (848) puzzle, please? I’ve got your back.

A nice, simple, win in three was just what I needed after all the frantic fun I seem to have had the rest of this Wordle week. I may not be able to boast about any fantastic turnarounds or sudden sparks of inspiration with this one, but at least I had one day where my eyebrows didn’t repeatedly crash into each other as I scoured my previous guesses for clues to today’s Wordle answer.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, October 1…

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Most headset or webcam mics are a disappointment at best, so a dedicated desktop microphone can be an easy way to hugely improve most setups. Most gamers could benefit from having a better quality mic for…

Microsoft must be wringing its hands in frustration as it tries to get users to move on from Windows 10 and embrace the wonders of Windows 11. It seems no matter what it tries, users just stubbornly refuse to move on from that old dinosaur of an OS. 

According to Statcounter (via Neowin), as of March 2024, Windows 10 accounts for just over 69% of desktop market share worldwide. That’s an increase of nearly two points from February. By contrast, Windows 11 claimed 26.7% in March, down from 28.16% in February. A couple of points here and there isn’t what you’d call a dramatic change, but a year’s worth of data shows Windows 11 has failed to win the hearts and minds of those users familiar with Windows 10.

It’s quite an oddity to see the market share of the latest Windows …

Guarantee yourself a Wordle win with our help. Make today’s game a little easier for yourself with a freshly written clue for the November 7 (871) puzzle, break it completely with today’s answer, or just polish up your general skills with our tips and tricks. 

Some days the grey letters help more than the greens. My opening guess only revealed a single yellow, and I have to admit I was a bit disappointed about it—until I took a breath and remembered that if it definitely wasn’t those letters, then it must be one of these instead. With that helpful thought in mind, a win in three came quickly. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, November 7

The word you need to find today is the upper edge or bou…