It’s been a long wait Nintendo says 14 Virtual Boy titles will be made available to Switch Online Expansion Pack subscribers over time. The eventual software list includes cult-classic Nintendo first-party titles like Virtual Boy Wario Land and Mario’s Tennis, as well as extremely hard-to-find third-party games like Jack Bros.…

But discovering the addresses was only half the problem. When you talk to a villager in Animal Crossing, the game normally displays dialogue instantly. Calling an AI model over the Internet takes several seconds. Willison examined the code and found Fonseca’s solution: a watch_dialogue() function that polls memory 10 times…

Like its predecessor, Silksong allows players to refill some of their health after gathering enough silk by hitting enemies. But even this nod to forgiveness is relatively punishing, since the health refill freezes your character in a defenseless pose for a few seconds. There’s nothing quite so deflating as seeing…

Daly’s pro se legal representation in the case was notable for its use of several novel affirmative defenses, including arguments that Nintendo’s “alleged copyrights are invalid,” that Nintendo “does not have standing to bring suit,” and that Nintendo “procured a contract [with Daly] through fraudulent means.” For the record, the…

Nintendo also accused Genki of “extensive use of Nintendo trademarks” in association with their unlicensed products, a move that “exploit[ed] and appropriate[d] for [Genki] the public goodwill associated with… Nintendo Switch marks.” The Switch 2 mockup Genki showed in a CES video ended up matching very closely with the final…

Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late ’00s. The community was working to get around Apple’s onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies…

A video shows how different storage media can affect Mario Kart World load times. CD Projekt Red VP of Technology Charles Tremblay has alluded to this same challenge when talking about the Switch 2 port of Cyberpunk 2077. In a June interview with IGN, Tremblay said the data transfer speeds…

However, it’s important to note that neither of those metrics gives as complete a picture as some Internet discussions suggest they do; Civilization VII launched on other platforms and game stores like the PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Game Store, and those wouldn’t be captured in Steam numbers—even…

An influx of players excited for this morning’s launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong are encountering widespread errors purchasing and downloading the game from Steam this morning. Ars Technica writers have encountered errors getting store pages to load, adding the game to an online shopping cart, and checking out once the…

A Sega fan and collector since his youth and an emulator hobbyist since the early ’00s, Nemesis tracked down his first LaserActive unit for $200 in 2004. By 2009, he was publicly musing about what might be needed to finally get emulation support working for the short-lived system. “I really…

Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren’t able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others…

Overall, though, you can see a clear and significant downward trend to the year-over-year pricing for game consoles released before 2016. After three years on the market, the median game console during this period cost less than half as much (on an inflation-adjusted basis) as it did at launch. Consoles…

The long and winding road It’s hard to remember now, but Star Citizen‘s then-impressive $6.3 million Kickstarter campaign came just a few months before Grand Theft Auto V first launched on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (remember those?). But development on Rockstar’s long-awaited sequel didn’t start in earnest until…

Then there’s the way the game stresses a number of early dialogue choices, telling you how your fellow agents will remember when you choose to treat them with eager support or stern rebuke at key moments. Without getting too much into early game spoilers, I’ll say that the medium-term consequences…

It’s been a busy year for Framework, the company behind the now well-established series of repairable, upgradeable, modular laptops (and one paradoxically less-upgradeable desktop). The company has launched a version of the Framework Laptop 13 with Ryzen AI processors, the new Framework Laptop 12, and the aforementioned desktop in the…

Hollow Knight: Silksong will be released on September 4. It will come out simultaneously on Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Switch, and the Nintendo Switch 2. On paper, “game gets release date” isn’t particularly groundbreaking news, and the six-year wait between the game’s announcement and…

Sony will join Microsoft and Nintendo in raising US prices across its entire game console lineup, the company announced today. Pricing for all current versions of the PlayStation 5 console will increase by $50 starting tomorrow. The price of the PS5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500; the…

Asus and Microsoft will be launching their ROG Xbox Ally series of handheld gaming PCs starting October 16, according to an Asus announcement that went out today. An Xbox-branded extension of Asus’ existing ROG Ally handheld line, the basic ROG Xbox Ally and more powerful ROG Xbox Ally X, both…

If you like something a little more statement-y, the Fractal Design North ($155) and Lian Li Lancool 217 ($120) both include the wood accents that some case makers have been pushing lately. The Fractal Design case comes with both mesh and tempered glass side panel options, depending on how into…

A lot of times, the titles that went for this on some level seemed more like simulations than games or stories. They were less consistently fun than other games, but they were often profoundly ambitious. Since they were all about helping a player live out something in their imaginations, they…

The Mini SSD card isn’t and may never be a formally ratified standard, but it does aim to solve a real problem for portable gaming systems—the need for fast storage that can load games at speeds approaching those of an internal SSD, without requiring users to take their own systems…

In my decades as a video game player and reviewer, I’ve used the humble PC mouse in hundreds of games for everything from first-person aiming and third-person character movement to basic menu navigation and unit selection. In all that time, I can’t recall a game that required the use of…

Bad news if you’re one of the handful of people using Steam to play games on a Chromebook: Google and Valve are preparing to end support for the still-in-beta ChromeOS version of Steam on January 1, 2026, according to 9to5Google. Steam can still be installed on Chromebooks, but it now…

Framework has also published basic templates for both the tiles and the top panel so that those with 3D printers can make their own. PC testbed notes We’ve compared the performance of the Framework Desktop to a bunch of other PCs to give you a sense of how it stacks…

Slowed tech progress, inflation, and global trade wars are doing a number on game console pricing this year, and the bad news keeps coming. Nintendo delayed preorders of the Switch 2 in the US and increased accessory prices, and Microsoft gave its Series S and X consoles across-the-board price hikesin…

The kinds of randomized options you’ll have to choose between waves. The kinds of randomized options you’ll have to choose between waves. Those inter-wave upgrades are also randomized in each run, adding some roguelike unpredictability that means no two play sessions develop quite the same way. You have to be…

The Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs won’t be totally abandoned after 2025; Nvidia says it will release quarterly security updates for these cards through October 2028. These updates won’t optimize performance or fix bugs in any new games, but if you still have an older or hand-me-down PC using one…

With Red Viper’s built-in color support, though, anyone with a 3DS modded for homebrew software can now easily add a bit of color to the Virtual Boy library. And running the emulator on the 3DS means you don’t even have to give up the Virtual Boy’s stereoscopic graphics to do…

I maintain a to-do list of story ideas to write at Ars, and for about a year “monthly column on DOS games I love” has been near the top of the list. When we spoke with the team at GOG, it felt less like an obligation and more like a…

The brief message has replaced many adult games previously available on itch.io. The brief message has replaced many adult games previously available on itch.io. Credit: Itch.io Linked takedown notices on some of those pages outline the specific types of content that are being targeted in itch.io’s new crackdown: We don’t…

Julian LeFay, “the father of The Elder Scrolls,” has died at 59 – Ars Technica Arena and Daggerfall before passing the torch to Todd Howard.”,”image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/LeFay-500×500-1753300630.jpg”,”listing_image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/LeFay-768×432.jpg”}”> Skip to content LeFay spearheaded Arena and Daggerfall before passing the torch to Todd Howard. Julian LeFay, the man often credited as “the father of…

This Kong’s got a funny face… Credit: Nintendo This Kong’s got a funny face… Credit: Nintendo As the game progresses, you’ll also unlock a handful of animalistic “Bananza” transformations from a menagerie of gigantic animal DJs (don’t ask). These temporarily grant DK new powers—a quick-dashing zebra or a fluttering, hovering…

PC-like power, console-like benefits Cyberpunk is a big get for the Mac’s gaming team, as it’s an enduringly popular open-world game with a distinctive look, but it’s also of a piece with all of the AAA gaming launches the Mac has seen in the last couple of years. It’s a…

There are countless Android-powered gaming handhelds, but they go beyond the usual slate of Android games by offering console emulation support. The problem is the game ROMs on these devices, which are not entirely legal. Italian YouTuber Once Were Nerd is learning how seriously some rightsholders are taking game piracy…

Valve’s famously permissive rules for what games are and are not allowed on Steam got a little less permissive this week, seemingly in response to outside pressure from some of its partner companies. In a Tuesday update to the “Rules and Guidelines” section of Steam’s Onboarding Documentation, the company added…

After 5 years in development, the Assassin’s Creed TV series is happening – Ars Technica Westworld, Halo alums.”,”image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/660e5a03fbff4e2940488bcd-1-500×500.webp”,”listing_image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/660e5a03fbff4e2940488bcd-1-768×432.webp”}”> Skip to content Series will be led by Westworld, Halo alums. The dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Credit: Ubisoft The dual protagonists of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Credit: Ubisoft The long-running video…

A collection of ports in the rear of the monitor. While the stereoscopic effect was overall comfortable for long periods in my tests, my eyes did have  a bit of trouble focusing during occasional scenes where objects in the foreground end up obstructing the main game action in the background,…

Greetings, Arsians! We love games here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, and I’m not just talking the latest AAA blockbusters—we love all kinds of games, from modern to ancient and all points in between. With that in mind, we’re trying something different for the next few months to see how…

In 2019, Nintendo announced a new benefit for subscribers to its Switch Online service: a pair of game vouchers, available for $100, that could be redeemed for any two Switch games on Nintendo’s eligibility list. If you already knew you were going to be buying first-party games, the voucher could…

Epic Games, buoyed by the massive success of Fortnite, has spent the last few years throwing elbows in the mobile industry to get its app store on more phones. It scored an antitrust win against Google in late 2023, and the following year it went after Samsung for deploying “Auto…

Two key writers of HBO’s series The Last of Us are moving on, according to announcements on Instagram yesterday. Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the franchise, and Halley Gross, co-writer of The Last of Us Part 2 and frequent writer on the show, are both leaving before work begins on season 3.…

Table of Contents Jump to section The road to Glacier To understand exactly what’s going on with the next Battlefield title—codenamed Glacier—we need to rewind a bit. In the early 2010s, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 expanded the franchise audience to more directly compete with Call of Duty, the heavy-hitter…

A clear improvement As you can see in the included charts, SteamOS showed noticeable frame rate improvements in four of the five games tested. Only Borderlands 3 showed comparable performance across both operating systems, with Windows eking out ever-so-slightly higher frame rates in that game’s benchmarks. Changing operating systems can…

There’s also a new loading screen with more detailed information and more interactive elements, which Firaxis says is a hint at other major UI overhauls to come. That said, players have already complained that it doesn’t look very nice because the 2D leader assets that appear on it have been…

Those who’ve played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game’s original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work…

Microsoft’s “Xbox Series” consoles haven’t exactly been tearing up the sales charts. Credit: Microsoft Microsoft’s “Xbox Series” consoles haven’t exactly been tearing up the sales charts. Credit: Microsoft On the PC side, though, Microsoft is still a force to be reckoned with. Practically every desktop or laptop gaming PC runs…

Earlier this week, the makers of the popular Mig Flash cartridge, which allows users to play Switch games loaded via an SD card without modifying the console itself, issued a firmware update enabling the cards to run original Switch games on the Switch 2. Since then, though, multiple Mig Flash…

Link’s Awakening, Switch 1, docked. Andrew Cunningham Link’s Awakening, Switch 1, docked. Andrew Cunningham Link’s Awakening, Switch 2, docked. Note fewer jaggies and sharper textures, especially on top of the posts. Andrew Cunningham Link’s Awakening, Switch 2, docked. Note fewer jaggies and sharper textures, especially on top of the posts.…

The nsOne project joins a growing community of homebrew PlayStation 1 hardware developments. Other recent projects include Picostation, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based optical disc emulator (ODE) that allows PlayStation 1 consoles to load games from SD cards instead of physical discs. Other ODEs like MODE and PSIO have also become…

While that kind of item-based back-and-forth isn’t new to Mario Kart, it feels like it has been taken to a new extreme by World‘s more crowded race track. If you’re in the middle of the pack, every tranche of item boxes you pass can lead, in short order, to a…

At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple unveiled a new iOS Games App that Apple Senior Director of Marketplace Platforms and Technologies Ann Thai promoted as “a new destination to help you get more out of your games.” The most relevant new social feature in the app comes in the…

One weakness of Valve’s Steam Deck gaming handheld and SteamOS is that, by default, they will only run Windows games from Steam that are supported by the platform’s Proton compatibility layer (plus the subset of games that run natively on Linux). It’s possible to install alternative game stores, and Proton’s…

Back in March, we outlined six features we wanted to see on what was then just a rumored Xbox-branded, Windows-powered handheld gaming device. Today, Microsoft’s announcement of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally hardware line looks like it fulfills almost all of our wishes for Microsoft’s biggest foray into portable gaming…

As an included freebie with the Switch 2 system, this would merely be tedious. As a game with a $10 asking price, it’s a little insulting. GameChat is cute, but screen-sharing is rough After a lengthy initial setup, starting a casual GameChat session with people on your Switch 2 friends…

Link’s Awakening, Switch 1, docked. Andrew Cunningham Link’s Awakening, Switch 1, docked. Andrew Cunningham Link’s Awakening, Switch 2, docked. Note fewer jaggies and sharper textures, especially on top of the posts. Andrew Cunningham Link’s Awakening, Switch 2, docked. Note fewer jaggies and sharper textures, especially on top of the posts.…

But this kind of online gaming moderation is typically designed for situations where players could be exposed to random strangers in online matches. Nintendo’s GameChat is already strictly limited to users whom players have manually added as friends on their system, who would be the only ones able to send…

It’s a whole lot of commotion for a GPU that is otherwise about as ho-hum as it is possible to be. It’s a noticeable but unexciting upgrade over its predecessor, and it performs a lot like a more-efficient RTX 3070 for $200 less (theoretically) than that card’s original MSRP. But…

Once I brought the original Switch close by to start the transfer process, I was warned that save files for games including Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu would be removed from the original system during transfer, presumably as an anti-cheating measure. This made the whole process…

The current state of the GPU market At this point in 2025’s graphics card market, the issue isn’t so much that mainstream cards like the 5060, 5070, or 9070 aren’t available but that they are rarely available for their stated retail price. This has always been an issue with AMD,…

“Free Roam” mode is Mario Kart World’s killer app – Ars Technica Forza Horizon, Diddy Kong Racing, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.”,”image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/mkw2-500×500.jpg”,”listing_image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/mkw2-768×432.jpg”}”> Skip to content Equal parts Forza Horizon, Diddy Kong Racing, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. That can’t be safe for a baby princess… Credit: Nintendo That can’t be…

You can use mouse mode to navigate system menus I stumbled on this feature when I was holding the Joy-Cons normally and one of my fingers accidentally passed over the mouse sensor, activating a mouse pointer on the system menu screen. When I put the controller down on its edge,…

Nintendo’s Switch 2 has a small handful of new releases in its launch lineup, but for the first few months after its release, the main thing you’ll be able to play on it will be your existing library of Switch games. And while Nintendo has promised reasonably comprehensive backward compatibility,…

There are a few crucial tweaks to the Elden Ring formula aiding you in this newly speed-focused effort. For one thing, your character now has an unlimited “surge sprint” that can get you from one part of the map to another at a pretty rapid clip. For another, there’s a…

That blue bar sure does take me back… That blue bar sure does take me back… If that kind of nostalgia were all there was to Desktop Survivors 98, it would probably not be worth much more than a 15-minute demo. But the underlying game actually takes the developing Survivors-like…

Valve’s instructions will walk you through downloading a SteamOS recovery image and copying it to a USB drive using either the Rufus tool (on Windows) or Balena Etcher (the preferred macOS and Linux utility). After turning Secure Boot off, you should be able to boot from the USB drive and…

Consoles like these may get banned from Nintendo’s online services, but they tend to still work offline. Consoles like these may get banned from Nintendo’s online services, but they tend to still work offline. Credit: Kate Temkin / ReSwitched “Unfortunately, ‘bricking’ personal devices to limit users’ rights and control their…

AMD didn’t provide much by way of performance comparisons, but it’s promising that the cards have the same number of compute units as AMD’s last-generation RX 7600 series. AMD says that RDNA 4 compute units are much faster than those used for RDNA 3, particularly in games with ray-tracing effects…

Tell it to the judge In an attempt to force Apple’s hand, Epic filed a motion on Friday arguing that Apple’s latest Fortnite denial is “blatant retaliation” for Epic’s court challenge and an attempt to “circumvent this Court’s Injunctions and this Court’s authority.” Epic says the iOS version of Fortnite…

For voice actors who previously portrayed Darth Vader in video games, the Fortnite feature starkly illustrates how AI voice synthesis could reshape their profession. While James Earl Jones created the iconic voice for films, at least 54 voice actors have performed as Vader in various media games over the years…

Anno 117 Pax Romana hands-on: Gorgeous, deep, and tricky to learn – Ars Technica Anno 1800, 117 aims to seize an even bigger audience.”,”image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Anno-117-farms-500×500.jpg”,”listing_image_url”:”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Anno-117-farms-768×432-1747428860.jpg”}”> Skip to content After a return to form in Anno 1800, 117 aims to seize an even bigger audience. Anno 117: Pax Romana is, first and…

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode,…

If you build up a big area of plains on your board, you can drop your “Farm” piece in the middle, and it converts those plains into richer plains. Put a “Woodcutter” into a bunch of forest, and it harvests that wood and turns it into plains. Set down a…

Like the acorn example above, we had known what to do—we had just not done it to the game’s rather exacting standards. The key was to use a glowing gem as a light source, which my brother and I had long understood. The problem was the text parser, which demanded…

In that sense, the vulgar Vader situation creates a touchy dilemma for Epic Games and Disney, which likely invested substantially in this high-profile collaboration. While Epic acted swiftly in response, maintaining the feature while preventing further Jedi mind tricks from players presents ongoing technical challenges for interactive AI speech of…

When Nintendo took the wraps off the Switch 2 in early April, it announced that around a dozen first-party Switch games would be getting free updates that would add some Switch 2-specific benefits to older games running on the new console. We could safely assume that these updates wouldn’t be…

Digital Foundry also notes that the Switch 2’s stated clock speeds can be tuned to higher theoretical maximums: 1.4 GHz for the GPU and 1.7 GHz for the CPU. Nintendo could eventually make use of this headroom for improved graphical performance and faster loading screens, as it did on the…

We’ve known for months now that Valve is expanding its Linux-based SteamOS operating system beyond the Steam Deck to other handheld PCs, starting with some versions of the Asus ROG Ally. This week, Valve began making some changes to its Steam storefront to prepare for a future when the Deck…

While working on our review of Doom: The Dark Ages last week, I was unable to test the game on the Steam Deck due to a bug that prevented it from launching on SteamOS. I didn’t consider this much of a loss at the time, since I figured the Deck’s…

Switch and Switch 2 users who try to hack their consoles or play pirated copies of games may find their devices rendered completely inoperable by Nintendo. That new warning was buried in a recent update to the Nintendo User Account Agreement, as first noticed by Game File last week. Nintendo’s…

In between all the parrying, you do get to shoot stuff. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios In between all the parrying, you do get to shoot stuff. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios In between these parries, the game seems to go out of its way to encourage a more fast-paced, aggressive style…

Yesterday’s naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo…

You could even argue that Nintendo is more likely to offer longer-term support for Game Key Card downloads since backward compatibility seems to be a priority for the Switch hardware line. If we presume that future Switch systems will remain backward compatible, we can probably also presume that Nintendo will…

Nvidia will release the GeForce RTX 5060 on May 19 starting at $299, the company announced via press release today. The new card, a successor to popular past GPUs like the GTX 1060 and RTX 3060, will bring Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and Multi Frame-Generation technology to budget-to-mainstream gaming builds—at least,…

While Gemini is using its own model and reasoning process for these tasks, it’s telling that JoelZ had to specifically graft these specialized agents onto the base model to help it get through some of the game’s toughest challenges. As JoelZ writes, “My interventions improve Gemini’s overall decision-making and reasoning…

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode,…

Consider the PlayStation 2. Not all of the PS2 Slim’s streamlining came from chip improvements—it also shed a full-sized 3.5-inch hard drive bay and a little-used IEEE 1394 port, and initially required an external power brick. But shrinking and consolidating the console’s CPU, GPU, memory, and other components took the…

A March video explaining the new Virtual Game Card system that launched via system update today. While that old system could be cumbersome to set up, it actually allowed for quite a bit of flexibility when it came to game sharing. As Nintendo noted on its official FAQ as recently…

Broadly, UESPWiki is an impressive information repository of The Elder Scrolls franchise. It also documents the dense, often convoluted lore of the franchise, as well as books and merchandise sold alongside the games, and the multiple tabletop games. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages as they appear today. Credit: Samuel Axon…

It has been over six years since Epic started undercutting Steam’s 30 percent revenue share for developers, asking for just 12 percent of sales on its then-new Epic Games Store. Now, Epic is going even further by reducing those fees to zero for a game’s first $1 million in annual…

Rockstar’s highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI will finally launch on May 26, 2026, Rockstar Games said in a Friday morning announcement. That means the game will miss the “2025” release window that the developer announced alongside the game’s first trailer in late 2023. That delay is needed, Rockstar said,…

End of an era Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent significant money to poach top journalists from popular gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After initially publishing as the Gaming section of Vox.com for a few months, the Polygon domain launched alongside a series of…

Microsoft is increasing the recommended asking price of Xbox hardware and accessories worldwide starting today and will start charging $79.99 for some new first-party games this holiday season. The announcement comes after “careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development,” Microsoft said. In the United States, this…

In a statement provided to Ars Technica, an Apple spokesperson said, “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.” An Epic return With the new court order in place, Epic says it will once again submit a version of Fortnite to…

To be sure, Patrick Stewart’s regal delivery in the early game helps paper over a lot of potential weaknesses with the initial narrative. And even beyond Stewart’s excellent performance, I appreciated how the writing is concise and to the point, without the kind of drawn-out, pause-laden delivery that characterizes many…

“Bethesda has always been supportive of community projects like ours, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon,” the team wrote at the time. The latest “making of” trailer for the ambitious Skyblivion modding project. Other publishers aren’t always similarly open to competition from fans, though. Nintendo has long taken…

US preorders for the Nintendo Switch 2 console went live at Best Buy, Target, and Walmart at midnight Eastern time last night (though the rush of orders caused problems and delays across all three retailers’ websites). The console listings came with a wave of other retail listings for games and…

Wizards of the Coast has released the System Reference Document, the heart of the three core rule books that constitute Dungeons & Dragons‘ 2024 gameplay, under a Creative Commons license. This means the company cannot alter the deal further, like it almost did in early 2023, leading to considerable pushback…

Bethesda isn’t officially supporting mods for the newly released Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But that hasn’t stopped some players from discovering that many mods created for the 2006 original seem to work just fine in the new game with a bare minimum of installation headaches. As noted on Reddit…

That said, Virtuos has also made changes on that front. Most notably, today’s announcement revealed that the remaster will have a completely overhauled leveling system, which is described as combining elements from Oblivion and Skyrim. That will be welcome news for many players. In many ways, Oblivion feels like a…

In the descriptions for those videos, though, Coincident acknowledged some of the reasons that Okuplok’s level has been “deemed impossible to beat in one segment” on Ultra Violence difficulty. Even if you have a perfect strategy mapped out for each segment, “some of the later fights are a pure RNG…

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode,…

A tipped-cap moment The center of Whisky’s homepage. The page now carries a persistent notice that “Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time.” Credit: Whisky The center of Whisky’s homepage. The page now carries a persistent notice that “Whisky is no longer actively…

For Sigman and the Darkest Dungeon team, it was important to establish an overarching design philosophy that was set in place. That said, the details within that framework may change or evolve significantly during development. “In this age of early access and easily updatable games, balance is a living thing,”…

The creators of Sunderfolk wanted to make a video game that would help players “Rediscover game night.” By my reckoning, they have succeeded, because I am now regularly arguing with good friends over stupid moves. Why didn’t I pick up that gold? Don’t you see how ending up there messed up…

The Switch 2 hardware will still retail for its initially announced $449.99, alongside a $499.99 bundle including a digital download of Mario Kart World. Nintendo revealed Thursday that the Mario Kart bundle will only be produced “through Fall 2025,” though, and will only be available “while supplies last.” Mario Kart…

Assassin’s Creed titles are cozy games for me. There’s no more relaxing place to go after a difficult day: historical outdoor museum tours, plus dopamine dispensers, plus slow-paced assassination simulators. The developers of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows seem to understand this need to escape better than ever before. I’m “only” 40…

Earlier this month, Nintendo let Ars Technica and other outlets have access to a small hands-on slice of Mario Kart World ahead of its planned June 5 launch. Today, a short livestreamed video presentation gave a bit of extra information about how exactly the full version of the free-roaming Nintendo…

As with its other 50-series announcements, Nvidia is leaning on its DLSS Multi-Frame Generation technology to make lofty performance claims—the GPUs can insert up to three AI-interpolated frames in between each pair of frames that the GPU actually renders. The 40 series could only generate a single frame, and 30-series…

Razer’s iOS app showing its width of game discovering. Who wants to stream some Solitaire? Razer’s iOS app showing its width of game discovering. Who wants to stream some Solitaire? I clicked the button, Razer said it released some RAM, and I guess that’s something you can do, if you…

As seen previously, the Joy-Cons will be bigger than on the original Switch and will feature larger shoulder buttons on the inside edges. The system itself has a larger, “more sturdy” stand that can be adjusted to sit at multiple angles. A second USB-C outlet on the top of the…

After dealing with years of widespread reports of “stick drift” on the original Switch Joy-Cons, Nintendo watchers have been hoping the Switch 2 would make use of magnetic Hall effect sensors that avoid most of the physical wear and tear that causes the problem. Now, though, a Nintendo executive has…

“No ads, no hosts, no sponsors, just games.” The Triple-i Initiative‘s pitch for its now-annual showcase of games, crafted by studios working somewhere between “Solo dev or very small team” and “Investor-minded conglomerate with international offices,” promises a lot of peeks at games without a lot of chatter, and once…

And there are real concerns and annoyances that will come with Game-Key cards. Normally, the physical copy of a game is playable right out of the box—or, at most, after downloading patches that are a fraction of the size of the entire game. This saves time, and it saves internal…

While Nintendo could theoretically avoid tariff impacts by moving Switch 2 production into the US, Wedbush’s Ives pointed out that the process would cost “tens of billions of dollars” and require “four to five years” to get a US factory of that scale up and running. Even then, the individual…

The current generative Quake II demo represents a slight advancement from Microsoft’s previous generative AI gaming model (confusingly titled “WHAM” with only one “M”) we covered in February. That earlier model, while showing progress in generating interactive gameplay footage, operated at 300×180 resolution at 10 frames per second—far below practical…

$70 was a common price for N64 software, and that was in 1997 dollars! $70 was a common price for N64 software, and that was in 1997 dollars! Hughes Johnson By 2008, top-end disc-based prices had settled to the current standard of $59.99. By 2008, top-end disc-based prices had settled…

Balatro is certainly habit-forming, but there’s nothing to be won or lost, other than time, by playing it. While the game has you using standard playing cards and poker hands as part of its base mechanics, it does not have in-app purchases, loot boxes, or any kind of online play…

Things just cost more now In justifying the $450 price of the Switch 2, Nintendo executives predictably pointed to the system’s upgraded hardware specs, as well as new features like GameChat and mouse mode. “As you add more technology into a system, especially in this day and age, that drives…

Actor Val Kilmer—star of Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever, among other roles—has died at the age of 65 of pneumonia, Deadline Hollywood reports. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015 and while chemotherapy and two tracheotomies helped him defeat it, the procedures destroyed his voice. He spoke…

We’ve known for a few months now that the Nintendo Switch 2 will support backward compatibility for older Nintendo Switch games, and as of today’s presentation, we also know that some Switch games will get special Switch 2 Editions that add new features and support higher resolutions and other features.…

A mouse? On a game console? Nintendo has a history of trying to differentiate its consoles with new features that have never been seen before. Some, like shoulder buttons or analog sticks, become industry standards that other companies quickly aim to copy. Others, like a tablet controller or glasses-free stereoscopic…

Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners. “Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to…

Road trips with just two people always have their awkward silences. In Dustland Delivery, my character, a sharpshooter, has tried to break the ice with the blacksmith he hired a few towns back, with only intermittent success. Remember that bodyguard, the one I unsuccessfully tried to flirt with at that bar?…

This morning’s announcement that Nintendo is delaying US preorders for the Switch 2 immediately increased the salience of President Trump’s proposed wide-reaching import tariffs for millions of American Nintendo fans. Additionally, the Entertainment Software Association—a lobbying group that represents the game industry’s interests in Washington—is warning that the effects of…

The Switch 2’s additional power opens the door to more complex games that could lag even more noticeably, especially if they’re ported from consoles that expect more than 50 times the storage bandwidth (Sony requires an SSD with read speeds of at least 5,500MB/s for the PlayStation 5). And that’s…

In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to…

You can read a lot more about original Switch games’ compatibility on the Switch 2, “Editions,” and upgrade packs elsewhere in Ars’ Switch 2 launch coverage. AAA games of recent vintage Switch 2’s “Partner Spotlight,” Part 1 With the promise of new hardware capable of 1080p, 120 frames per second,…

Not all game releases will follow Nintendo’s pricing formula. The Switch 2 release of Street Fighter 6 Year 1-2 Fighters Edition retails for $60, and Square Enix’s remastered Bravely Default is going for $40, the exact same price the 3DS version launched for over a decade ago. Game-Key cards have…

Williams’ success with APX led him to create several games for Synapse Software, including the beloved Alley Cat and the incomprehensible fantasy masterpiece Necromancer, before moving to the Amiga, where he created the experimental Mind Walker and his ambitious “cultural simulation” Knights of the Crystallion. Necromancer, Williams’ later creation for…

Implausible: Long-suffering Earthbound fans have been hoping for a new game in the series (or even an official localization of the Japan-exclusive Mother 3) for literal decades now. Personally, though, I’m hoping for a surprise revisit to the Punch-Out series, following on its similar surprise return on the Wii in…

Switch players who buy their games on physical cards are used to being able to share those games with other players simply by handing them the card. Now, Nintendo is planning a process to allow players to share their digital Switch purchases in a similar way. The new “virtual game…

GT Sophy can now race at 19 tracks, up from the nine that were introduced in November 2023. The AI agent is an alternative to the regular, dumber AI in the game’s quick race mode, with easy, medium, and hard settings. But now, at those same tracks, you can also…

When Nintendo finally officially revealed the Switch 2 in January, one of our major unanswered questions concerned whether games designed for the original Switch would see some form of visual or performance enhancement when running on the backward-compatible Switch 2. Now, Nintendo-watchers are pointing to a fleeting mention of “Switch…

More than just rolling for initiative Obsidian added a turn-based mode to Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire in patch 4.1, roughly eight months after the game’s initial release. Designer Josh Sawyer, who worked on Baldur’s Gate II and directed both PoE games, said in a 2023 interview with Touch Arcade that the real-time systems in…

The product has evolved into something akin to Slack, but for personal use. It’s used by artist communities, game developers, open source projects, influencers, and more to manage communities and coordinate work. In some cases, people simply use it as an extremely robust group messaging tool for groups of friends…

“I don’t feel comfortable dragging people through getting world buffs, flasks, and consumes etc., just to raid with the anxiety and probably the actuality of just being DDOS’d again and dying,” sodapoppin wrote. Blizzard to the rescue? Sodapoppin allowed that OnlyFangs might continue “if we get a rollback [of the…

Nvidia has seen its fortunes soar in recent years as its AI-accelerating GPUs have become worth their weight in gold. Most people use their Nvidia GPUs for games, but why not both? Nvidia has a new AI you can run at the same time, having just released its experimental G-Assist AI.…

Harrington (left) poses with Scott Walker. Harrington (left) poses with Scott Walker. Credit: Monica Harrington / Medium In a post-talk interview with PC Gamer, Harrington noted that her ex-husband remembers the authentication scheme being in place before they discovered their nephew’s newfound love of CD copying. Regardless, Monica said their…

Where previous models wandered aimlessly or got stuck in loops, Claude 3.7 Sonnet plans ahead, remembers its objectives, and adapts when initial strategies fail. Critical skills for battling pixelated gym leaders. And, we posit, in solving real-world problems too. pic.twitter.com/scvISp14XG — Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) February 25, 2025 One of the biggest…

I can say this for certain: The game’s tutorial does a lot of work in introducing you to the game’s core mechanics, which include choosing cards with sequential actions, “burning” cards for temporary boosts, positioning, teamwork, and having enough actions or options left if a fight goes longer than you…

“Google wanted games that only worked in the cloud—which don’t exist,” Raccoon Logic co-founder & creative director Alex Hutchinson told VGC in an August interview. “They were asking us to deliver the kind of games built by 400 to 600 people, huge Marvel license games and Star Wars tie-ins. They…

A bargain at twice the price The extensive Portal theming on the table seems to extend to the gameplay as well. As you might expect, launching a ball into a lit portal on one side of the playfield can lead to it (or a ball that looks a lot like…

A sample result from the DSP sample test program. Credit: Allan Cecil A sample result from the DSP sample test program. Credit: Allan Cecil Those heat effects paled in comparison to the natural clock variation across different consoles, though. The slowest and fastest DSPs in Cecil’s sample showed a clock…

A month ago, Civilization VII launched to generally positive critical reviews, but user reviews on Steam and Metacritic weren’t nearly so positive, at least at first. Take a look at the Civilization subreddit, and you’ll see a general consensus: The bones of this game are great, and even most of…

Using a Windows PC with an Arm-based Snapdragon processor in it feels a lot like using a regular-old Intel or AMD PC these days, thanks to the work developers have put in to get their apps running natively on Arm chips and the work Microsoft has done on Windows’ Prism…

Last year, Microsoft showed off a pair of concept videos highlighting how “real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot” might one day provide personalized guidance and companionship while playing a solo game of Minecraft. Now, Microsoft is announcing that it will roll out “Copilot for Gaming” as an “ultimate gaming…

Bring old Xbox games to PC The ultimate handheld system seller. Credit: Microsoft / Bizarre Creations The ultimate handheld system seller. Credit: Microsoft / Bizarre Creations Microsoft has made a lot of hay over the way recent Xbox consoles can play games dating all the way back to the original…

Nvidia has launched all of the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs that it announced at CES, at least technically—whether you’re buying from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, it’s nearly impossible to find any of these new cards at their advertised prices right now. But hope springs eternal, and newly leaked specs for…

When you think about it, the keyboard is the most complex video game controller in common use today, with over 100 distinct inputs arranged in a vast grid. Yet even the most complex keyboard-controlled games today tend to only use a relative handful of all those available keys for actual…

Like the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, these new X3D chips combine a pair of AMD’s CPU chiplets, one that has the extra 64MB of cache stacked underneath it and one that doesn’t. For the 7950X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and eight without; for the 7900X3D, you get eight…

Viral success (for someone else) VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was only alerted to the existence of My Baby or Not! on iOS by “a suspicious burst of traffic on our itch.io page—all coming from Google organic search.” Only after adding a “where did you find our game?” player…

One thing Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings does well is invoke terror. Not just the terror of an overwhelming mass of dark energy encroaching on your fortress, which is what the story suggests; more so, the terror of hoping your little computer-controlled fighters will do the smart thing and then…

The pricing effects of those tariffs might not be immediate, as console makers work their way through pre-tariff import inventories that are already in the US. But the effects are already being felt in parts of the gaming market, with retailer Newegg blaming tariffs for the rising prices of recent…

Even if they come with a performance hit, new upscaling algorithms can still improve performance by making the lower-resolution presets look better. We run all of our testing in “Quality” mode, which generally renders at two-thirds of native resolution and scales up. But if FSR 4 running in Balanced or…

Most readers come away from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 with the same singular desire: to inhabit the world of the book by playing a late ’90s first-person puzzle-adventure PC game that includes a “zero-g training sphere” for some reason. In 1998, publisher MediaX set out to satisfy that…

“4090 performance at $549.” That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the GeForce RTX 5070 when he announced the card at CES in January. Thanks to AI, this new midrange GPU would be able to match the frame rates of what had been the fastest consumer GPU that had…

Zach Barth, the namesake of game studio Zachtronics, tends to make a certain kind of game. Besides crafting the free browser game Infiniminer, which inspired the entire global Minecraft industry, Barth and his collaborators made SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks. Each one of them is some combination…

Game studio Monolith, part of Warner Bros. Games until yesterday’s multi-studio shutdown, had a notable track record across more than 30 years, having made Blood, No One Lives Forever, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, F.E.A.R., and, most recently, the Lord of the Rings series, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. Those…

For most modern players, the worst thing about a video game classic like Portal is that you can never play it again for the first time. No matter how much time has passed since your last playthrough, those same old test chambers will feel a bit too familiar if you…

AMD’s new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them. FSR and Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscalers have the same goal: to take a…

And let’s not forget that millions of gamers already have easy access to SteamOS through Steam Deck hardware. Those aging Steam Decks might not be powerful enough to run a game like Half-Life 3 at maximum graphics settings, but Valve games have a history of scaling down well on low-end…

AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES. The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete…

Inside the source code are some wonderful reminders of what Windows game development from 1995 to 2003 was really like. One experienced modder posted some gems on Bluesky, like a “HACK ALERT!” text string added just to prevent the Watcom IDE from crashing because of a “magic text heap length”…

The integrated heat spreaders put on CPUs at the factory are not the most thermally efficient material you could have on there, but what are you going to do—rip it off at the risk of killing your $500 chip with your clumsy hands? Yes, that is precisely what enthusiastic overclockers…

Sony’s first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR’s biggest hits. The PlayStation 5’s PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform,…

Don’t you dare give me hope The newly discovered engine updates are a particularly good sign for the HLX project after credible reports that the game had gone into a friends and family playtesting phase at Valve near the end of 2024. While many Valve projects have seen major changes…

The Monaco 2 demo includes four classes of thieves, each with their own unique way of distracting or avoiding the guards. I especially liked the socialite, who uses a toy poodle to charm nearby guards into ignoring her, and the tech specialist, who can use a drone to interact with…

In Framework’s first-party case, the PC starts at $1,099, which gets you a Ryzen AI Max 385 (that’s an 8-core CPU and 32 GPU cores) and 32GB of RAM. A fully loaded 128GB with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration (16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores) will run you $1,999.…

Though we’ve tested and re-tested multiple cards with recent drivers in our updated testbed, we don’t have a 4070 Ti Super, 4070 Ti, or 3070 Ti available to test with. We’ve provided some numbers for those GPUs from past reviews; these are from a PC running older drivers and a…

Popular Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch announced Wednesday that it will be imposing a 100-hour limit on the archived video highlights users can preserve permanently on the site. And while Twitch says that only 0.5 percent of users will be affected by these new limits, gamers are warning that the…

Valve’s updates to its classic games evoke Hemingway’s two kinds of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Nothing is heard, little is seen, and then, one day, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Day of Defeat, and other Source-engine-based games get a bevy of modern upgrades. Now, the entirety of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) client…

That demonstrator currently generates the resulting video based on pre-recorded inputs, at a rate much slower than necessary for actual live gameplay. In a private demonstration for press, though, Microsoft also showed an early prototype of a real-time WHAM-powered video-generation tool, which instantly generates new frames of gameplay based on…

Nvidia’s PhysX offerings to developers didn’t always generate warm feelings. As part of its broader GamesWorks package, PhysX was cited as one of the reasons The Witcher 3 ran at notably sub-optimal levels at launch. Protagonist Geralt’s hair, rendered in PhysX-powered HairWorks, was a burden on some chipsets. PhysX started…

It’s not quite in the realm of dedicated desktop GPUs, of course. If you’re playing at 1080p, it’s a formidable gaming device for modern titles. But if you want ray tracing or the 1600p experience, you’ll be seeing frame rates below 60 fps. The only work-around there is an eGPU setup,…

For years, Maciej “Groobo” Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorceror run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game’s randomly generated dungeon. But when a team of…

The GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 are both very fast graphics cards—if you can look past the possibility that we may have yet another power-connector-related overheating problem on our hands. But the vast majority of people (including you, discerning and tech-savvy Ars Technica reader) won’t be spending $1,000 or $2,000…

Avowed‘s quests almost all boil down to venturing from a city to some far-off spot on the map to talk to a key person or retrieve some McGuffin-style relic. Usually, that trip involves confronting and/or avoiding one or more groups of hostile forces along the way, though sometimes it just…

While writing a wide-ranging history of Windows Minesweeper for Boss Fight Books in 2023, I ended up playing many variations of Microsoft’s beloved original game. Those include versions with hexagonal tiles, versions with weird board shapes, and versions that extend Minesweeper into four dimensions or more, to name just a…

The 12VHPWR and 12V-2×6 connectors are both designed to solve a real problem: delivering hundreds of watts of power to high-end GPUs over a single cable rather than trying to fit multiple 8-pin power connectors onto these GPUs. In theory, swapping two to four 8-pin connectors for a single 12V-2×6…

Bismuth explains the unreasonable luck needed for a record-setting Tyson fight at around the 56:30 mark in this 2024 video. Summoning Salt says Tyson here gave him a “perfect pattern” during his first phase of endless uppercuts, something that happens only 1 in 1,600 bouts. And later in the fight,…

The developer’s statement notes that preorder customers are getting refunds. Answering a question that has always been obvious to fans but never publishers, the company notes that, no, Football Manager 2024 will not get an update with the new season’s players and data. The company says it is looking to…

Despite all this, The Sims is worth a look It’s telling that in a market with too many options, I still put the effort in to get the game working, and I spent multiple evenings this week immersed in the lives of my sims. Even after 25 years, this game…

A short emulator-aided demonstration of how the broken ladder glitch works (not shown: the dozens of frame-perfect inputs needed to pull it off). Better to be lucky than to be good While players have theorized about using the broken ladder glitch to pass the kill screen for years, it initially…

It’s been a month since we first heard rumors that the Switch 2’s new Joy-Cons could be slid across a flat surface to function like a computer mouse. Now, a newly published patent filed by Nintendo seems to confirm that feature and describes how it will work. The international patent…

AMD announced its fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, and the numbers were mostly rosy: $7.7 billion in revenue and a 51 percent profit margin, compared to $6.2 billion and 47 percent a year ago. The biggest winner was the data center division, which made $3.9 billion thanks to Epyc server processors and…

Since our first glimpse of the Switch 2 last month, we’ve been left guessing on many crucial hardware details, including the all-important launch price. Now, Nintendo has hinted that the unsteady state of the international money market may play an outsize role in that pricing decision. Addressing a question about…

I’ve spent comparatively little time playing other 4X games. I had a couple of weeks where I got really into Endless Legend, but it didn’t stick long-term. I played a lot of Master of Orion II back in the day, but I’ve only played a couple dozen hours of Stellaris.…

In the intro video, Salvador talks about looking through their archives and stumbling on the existence of Pretzel Pete, a little-remembered early 3D driving/platform game. Despite its extreme obscurity, the game is nonetheless mentioned in the 1999 E3 catalog and an old issue of PC Gamer, both of which are…

The strategy with the 5080 looks pretty similar. You get a mild increase in core count (up 10.5 percent over the original 4080 and only 5 percent over the 4080 Super), plus the same 16GB of RAM on the same 256-bit memory interface. Switching from GDDR6X to GDDR7 does get…

Sony’s game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company. A PlayStation account will “become optional” for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last…

Black & White was intriguing; it had classic Molyneaux over-reach and deserves, in the words of one Ars staffer, a re-release so that “a new generation can realize just how janky it is.” As detailed in a documentary by Noclip, the B&W games are stuck in publishing purgatory. Microsoft acquired…

Retro game enthusiasts may already be acquainted with Analogue, a company that designs and manufactures updated versions of classic consoles that can play original games but also be hooked up to modern televisions and monitors. The most recent of its announcements is the Analogue 3D, a console designed to play…

In place of Doom Eternal‘s “jump and shoot” gameplay loop, The Dark Ages focuses on more of a “stand and fight” mentality, the developers said. If Doom Eternal was like flying a fighter jet, then The Dark Ages is more like controlling a tank, they added by way of analogy.…

Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working downward from there. The company also appears to be winding down support for a few of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA release notes spotted…

We’ve tried to strike a balance between games with ray-tracing effects and games without it, though most AAA games these days include it, and modern GPUs should be able to handle it well (best of luck to AMD with its upcoming RDNA 4 cards). For the 5090, we’ve run all…

Four out of five game developers are currently working on a project for the PC, a sizable increase from 66 percent of developers a year ago. That’s according to Informa’s latest State of the Game Industry survey, which partnered with Omdia to ask over 3,000 game industry professionals about their…

So what’s up with that new dock? So what’s up with that new dock? Credit: Nintendo Using your old Switch Joy-Cons in portable mode is a different matter, as the Switch 2 seems to lack the physical plastic “rail” needed to slide those controllers into place. But since the Switch…

After 14 years, EA will retire its controversial Origin game distribution app for Windows, the company announced. Origin will stop working on April 17, 2025. Folks still using it will be directed to install the newer EA app, which launched in 2022. The launch of Origin in 2011 was a…

After months and years of rumors and official hints, Nintendo has finally pulled back the curtain on the Switch 2 with a first-look trailer (and sparse promo website) highlighting many small changes from the old Switch. The Switch 2 tablet, shown with original Switch Joy-Cons for scale. The Switch 2…

A scaled comparison between the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck OLED shows Nintendo’s system has a larger screen despite being narrower. Credit: Nintendo / Valve / Ars Technica A scaled comparison between the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck OLED shows Nintendo’s system has a larger screen despite being…