Update March 16, 2023: Intel has informed us that an interpretation of a comment given by Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, to CNBC’s Katie Tarasov—which seemed to suggest that it was open to using Intel’s Arizona fab for new GPU production—is incorrect. 

When Huang was quoted as saying: “oh absolutely, we’ll use Arizona,” he was referring to TSMC’s advanced node facilities being constructed in the state, and not Intel’s own fab in Arizona.

Original story: Ever seen a man eat his own head? Probably not, but you’re very likely going to see something almost as strange, an Nvidia GPU made by none other than arch rival Intel.

Nvidia’s CEO and leather jacket aficionado Jensen Huang has seemingly confirmed that the company plans to …

The hottest game on Steam right now is an FPS that’s not technically out yet. Hundreds of thousands of people are trying out The Finals, a highly-destructible competitive shooter from ex-Battlefield devs currently in open beta.

The beta is so popular, in fact, that The Finals has claimed the top spot on Steam’s top wishlisted games, beating out longtime juggernauts like Manor Lords, Hades 2, Ark 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong. The Finals has hovered among the top 20 wishlisted games for about a year now, but its rise to the top happened all at once. An influx of 200,000 enthusiastic players will do that, though it also helps that several games that previously dominated the list, like Starfield, Atomic Heart, and Party Animals, all released in 2023.

It’s also a potent reminde…

Black Friday is less than a month away now, and we’re still in that sweet spot just before everyone starts to put their prices up so they can pretend they’ve got comparatively bigger discounts on Black Friday itself. That means the deals here have a pretty good chance of being the same sort of price once the real deals madness begins in earnest towards the end of the month.

To ensure a little confidence in what you’re spending your cash on if you do buy early, Best Buy and Newegg have both created a kinda of pricing guarantee. We’ve broken down Newegg and Best Buy’s Black Friday price promises to give you a clear picture of where they can and can’t help you.  

• We’re curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals

Watch On

Survival and crafting sensation Palworld already stole dozens of hours of my life earlier this year and now it’s trying to hijack my summer too. Pocketpair has been teasing its plans for the first major update to Palworld for this summer. In a new trailer at today’s Summer Game Fest, it revealed lots of other items on the feature list along with a release date: June 27.

As laid out in its Palworld early access roadmap, we’ve been expecting the three on three PvP arena mode, building updates, raid bosses, and lots of new Pals. Here’s what it showed off in the new trailer:

• A whole new island with lots of historical Japanese architecture and cherry blossoms
• More new Pal reveals, including a mimic chest that seems like a little puppy, but dead…
  

Forspoken was a divisive game, one of those that felt a little half-baked: There was lots to love, and an abundance of ideas, but it ultimately left many players unsatisfied and feeling like the whole thing didn’t hang together. The game’s reception unfortunately led to its developer, Luminous, being unceremoniously snuffed-out and absorbed into the larger body of Square Enix, and in a new financial presentation by the publisher it’s clear why. 

“Reviews of Forspoken […] have been challenging,” said Square Enix in the presentation (via Eurogamer). “However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development c…

The Crew is being taken off the streets: Ubisoft announced today that sales of its online racing game have been halted on all storefronts, and it will no longer be playable on any platform after March 31, 2024.

“We understand this may be disappointing for players still enjoying the game, but it has become a necessity due to upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints,” Ubisoft said. “Decommissioning a game, and especially our first one, is not something we take lightly. 

“Our goal remains to provide the best action driving gameplay experience for players and to deliver on it, we are continuing to provide new content and support for The Crew 2 and the recently launched The Crew Motorfest.”

It is disappointing, and also an indictment of a system in whic…

Stellaris’ new story pack has been announced, and presents players with a whole new avenue for profoundly unethical behaviour. Focusing on pre-spaceflight civilisations, the First Contact pack includes new origins, new ways to interact with species that haven’t reached the stars yet, and (if you really want to screw with their heads) cloaking technology for your ships.

The new origins all hew to the pack’s first contact theme. There’s one where your species was quite literally abducted by aliens, but managed to cast down the subjugators; another where you only figured out spaceflight by repelling an alien invasion (somehow) and using their tech; and a final one where your civilisation is a kind of galactic Sentinel Island, with most of the population favouring staying at home and …

Only Up! is a game where “you have to get as high as possible.” And no, not like that—it’s a low-budget indie platformer about climbing to the top of a weird, floating structure made of railway tracks, giant slices of fruit, floating islands, and things far weird than that. And right now, nearly 150,000 people are watching it on Twitch.

The top channel on the Only Up! category right now belongs to xQc (and yes, that xQc, the guy who got $100 million to stream on Twitch competitor Kick less than a week ago), who at the time of writing has 71,000 people watching him play. But as you can see from the category front page, he’s far from alone:

The concept of Only Up! is simple: You are Jackie, desperately trying to escape the poverty of the slum in which you live. …

Risk of Rain 2 keeps on trucking. After last year’s Survivors of the Void expansion added two new survivors and a smattering of new items and stages, Gearbox is following it up with Seekers of the Storm, which will again include “new survivors, new levels, and monsters, and more.” The most notable bit of the “more” this time is almost certainly a new villain named The False Son, who is born out of some deep deep Risk of Rain lore I had no idea existed.

I’ve played 133 hours of Risk of Rain 2, but I was lost within the first 30 seconds of the dev diary above introducing Seekers of the Storm. I guess I haven’t been reading enough cryptic diary entries, because when Gearbox loremaster Kayla Larson starts dropping references like “The False Son is made in [Providence’s] image by Lemur…

Great news, VR fans. Valve has just released SteamVR 2.0 in beta. This is the software that powers the entire virtual reality experience on Steam, from hooking up to hardware to the interface you use to whizz around virtual worlds, and it just got a ton more features.

“Today we are shipping SteamVR 2.0 in beta,” a Steam representative says. “We see this as the first major step toward our goal of bringing all of what’s new on the Steam platform into VR.”

Today’s beta release adds Steam Chat and Voice Chat, an improved Steam store with VR front and centre, and an updated keyboard. It also adds “most of” the current features from Steam and Steam Deck. That’s potentially pretty big, as since the launch of the Steam Deck, we’ve seen both Steam Deck and Steam receive heaps of impr…

Solve the April 22 (672) puzzle in a flash—today’s Wordle answer is only a quick click away. Once you’ve won, feel free to spend some time with our guides and tips or take a look at our extensive archive of past answers. Wherever you click, you’re sure to find helpful advice that’ll improve your daily game.

There was a danger I’d end up with a “skyscraper” today—building a tower of greens without ever finding the letters around them—but I just about managed to avoid this frustrating situation, revealing today’s Wordle answer with a few guesses left in the tank.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, April 22

If an individual person or a large corporation has run out of money or is struggling for cash, they might be described as…

Keep on winning Wordle, and do it in your own way with our handy range of helpful hints and tailored tips. If you’d like a clue created especially for the March 4 (623) Wordle, you’ll find it just below, and if you’re stuck or short of time, then don’t worry, because today’s answer is only a quick scroll or click away.

After a run of unproductive openers Wordle decided that today would be my lucky day, my first two guesses giving me just enough of everything to turn that third row into a winning set of greens.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, March 4

In fashion, today’s answer is used to describe the seasonal shifts in colours and styles. Perhaps a certain sort of collar or trouser length is currently the hottest thing around, for example.…

Whether you’ve been playing Wordle since the very beginning or it’s your first game, you’re sure to find all the help and advice you want right here. Need the answer in a hurry? Not a problem—just click or scroll straight to it. Did you just need a little nudge in the right direction? Great: you’ll find a fresh clue for the April 20 (670) Wordle below.

I decided to go with an opener I don’t normally use today, and somehow it immediately turned over three of the five letters I needed to find. I’d got the answer in two—great stuff—although now I have to wait longer than usual for tomorrow’s Wordle fix.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, April 20

Today’s answer is most commonly used to describe the shallow and usually round di…

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…

The Augmentation Evoker came to World of Warcraft with patch 10.1.5 last week, bringing a whole new type of DPS to the game. For the uninitiated, this new spec works by buffing party members to bump their damage numbers rather than melting faces itself. It’s comparable to the Dancer from Final Fantasy 14 or the Bard from Dungeons & Dragons—basically, when an Augmentation Evoker’s in the group, everyone does better.

So obviously they’ve been getting kicked out of groups for no reason. A reddit thread on the World of Warcraft subreddit emerged with a compilation of screenshots from the Wyrmrest Temple discord, community server for Evokers. Typing “!augdps” in the augmentation channel will have Carlygos, the server’s friendly bot, drop an ever-evolving montage of people mis…