Let’s be honest: 2023 wasn’t exactly the best year for stunning GPU releases. Not for cards that blew our collective minds or opened our collective wallets. However, that’s not to say we haven’t reviewed some great candidates for our graphics card of the year, and it’s quite telling that our picks here fit squarely into the mid-range to budget end of the market.

This is where the GPU battles were fought in 2023, as Nvidia and AMD squared off against each other to deliver gaming GPUs that focussed on bang for our collective bucks.



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I think you know what I’m talking about here: Far Cry 9 comes out on September 7, but if you shell out an extra $15 for the Premium Deluxe Plus Edition, you can get a five-day head start clearing the bases of whatever caricature of a 20th century revolutionary movement Ubisoft‘s cooked up this year.

And I don’t mean to dog on Ubisoft too hard here⁠—it feels like every game is doing this. Starfield, Modern Warfare 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and Like a Dragon: Ishin are just a few games that pulled the deluxe “early access” move in 2023.



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Choosing a $2,000 gaming monitor as my pick for 2023 isn’t exactly democratic, even if the monstrous Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC is already $500 cheaper than when I reviewed it earlier this year. But it is one of those rare cases where a premium priced product gives you something genuinely special.

At 57 inches, the G95NC is a beast. And the problem with big monitors is typically fat pixels. That’s why 4K TVs don’t make great desktop monitors. Sure, you get a lot of sheer display panel for your money. But at ‘normal’ monitor viewing distances, the sub-100 DPI pixel density of a big 4K TV is awfully ugly.



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Make today’s Wordle win a sure thing with our tips. On this page you’ll find general advice for the daily game as well as a helpful clue for the December 26 (920) puzzle. And, whether you need a last-row save or just want a quick victory, you’ll find today’s Wordle answer too.

“OK so that’s the last letter locked in straight away… and here comes the first, that’s unusually helpful… but what to put between them?” Somehow I was firing on all Wordle cylinders today, and easily spotted today’s answer amongst the unused letters. Hopefully today’s Wordle will cause you no more trouble than it did me, but don’t worry if it does—you’re in the right place.

Today’s Wordle hint

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, December 26



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I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Razer Blade gaming laptops since it really nailed that matte black MacBook aesthetic over the last few years, and managed to jam high-end graphics silicon inside that sleek chassis and still make it fly. It’s unhealthy because the damned things are so frickin’ expensive, commanding a premium because there hasn’t really been another PC machine to come close.

Now, I don’t want to channel the Jeremy Clarkson/Top Gear ‘…until now’ thing too much, but Lenovo has almost come out of nowhere this year to hit the top of my most-wanted gaming laptop list. The latest Legion machines offer a level of style, performance, and build quality that belies their relative affordability.



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Win Wordle your way every single day with our help. There’s a whole range of general tips and advice ready to go, as well as a handy clue for the December 25 (919) puzzle, and, as always, today’s Wordle answer in easily accessible form just in case you need it.

Wait, that letter goes where? Are you sure, Wordle? And today of all days, when I’ve got my own body weight in potatoes to peel before the sun rises and a forgotten present to wrap (Happy Christmas if you’re celebrating, by the way)? A messy win’s still a win though, isn’t it, even when I’m kicking myself for not seeing the pattern as soon as I should have done. 

Wordle today: A hint

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, December 25



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I’ve been playing and writing about videogames for an awfully long time now, and I’ve seen my share of controversies come and go. Hot Coffee, anyone? At some point long ago, I may have thought that such things would become increasingly rare as our medium matures.

But it seems that the opposite has happened. As gaming has become bigger and more influential, it’s intersected with a wider set of issues.

2023 was no exception, and so here we are to round up some of the biggest controversies of the year. There are so many, I’m morally required to split these into two articles to reduce the risk of scrolling-related injuries—we’ll have the second half posted in a couple days.

Dungeons and Dragons updates the Open Gaming License

(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

Our eyebrows: 😳

What happened: For 20 years, Dungeons and Dragons’ Open Gaming License enabled companies to create tabletop RPGs based on D&D’s rules without having to pay royalties to Wizards of the Coast. That was all thrown into turmoil by a January leak of a planned updated of the OGL: WotC planned to assert stricter control over third-party products, and companies making more than $750,000 on OGL products would be required to start paying fees. The reaction to the planned changes was overwhelmingly negative, leading Wizards of the Coast to apologize and amend its plans, but many of the most contentious points in the updated OGL remained. It also pledged to release the core D&D ruleset under a Creative Commons license. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy the vast majority of the player base, who simply wanted the original OGL to remain in place.

The outcome: The D&D community got what it wanted: After a brief effort to ride out the storm, Wizards of the Coast threw in the towel and walked the whole idea back completely. Still, the damage was done, and numerous third-party publishers, presumably spooked by the whole affair, continued to push forward with efforts to distance themselves from WotC’s grasp. 

Hogwarts Legacy grapples with JK Rowling’s legacy

(Image credit: Avalanche Software)

Our eyebrows: 😓

What happened: The trouble with Hogwarts Legacy wasn’t the game but the creator of the Harry Potter franchise, JK Rowling, who for some reason has spent her post-Potter years transforming herself from beloved children’s author to notorious transphobe. Avalanche Software and WB Games did their best to distance the game from Rowling: An FAQ on the Hogwarts Legacy website says the author “was not involved in the creation of the game,” and Avalanche reportedly pushed to have a “trans-inclusive” character creator in the game. Voice actor Sebastian Croft also voiced his support for trans people, tweeting, “I believe whole heartedly that trans women are women and trans men are men.”

Still, the bottom line was that Hogwarts Legacy is a Harry Potter property, and that means Rowling was going to make money from it. That left Harry Potter fans with a dilemma: Should they play the game they’ve been dreaming of, knowing that the author will benefit? Some people took a “forgive-but-not-forget” approach, but others drew a harder line in the sand: One person went so far as to create a website enabling people to see which of their Twitch followers had streamed the game, presumably so they could express their ire or perhaps unfollow altogether.

For die-hard Potter fans, the situation was made more difficult by the fact that Hogwarts Legacy turned out to be quite good.

The outcome: Despite the uproar, Hogwarts Legacy was a big hit, Warner made an actual billion bucks across 15M copies in five months, and we’ll no doubt be seeing sequels in the future. Rowling, for the record, remains an unrepentant transphobe. 

Atomic Heart includes a racist cartoon

(Image credit: Mundfish)

Our eyebrows: 😒

What happened: Atomic Heart was already facing controversy over developer Mundfish’s Russian roots sparked by the invasion of Ukraine and concerns that the game might seek to glorify the Soviet Union and rehabilitate the KGB, its notorious intelligence agency. A different and more concrete issue came to light early in the year when players noticed the appearance of a racist caricature in a clip of Nu, Pogodi!, a beloved Tom and Jerry-style Soviet children’s cartoon that first aired in 1969: Segments of the show appear on television sets in the game’s safe rooms and they’re generally pretty innocuous, but one bit contained a dated (to put it politely) depiction of an African tribesman shooting a bow and arrow. As we noted at the time, it’s the sort of thing that would carry a content warning similar to what Disney has added to its classic films when they air on streaming services, but it appeared in Atomic Heart completely without context.

The outcome: A few days later, developer Mundfish apologized for the inclusion of the clip, and pledged to edit the relevant bits. 

Six Days in Fallujah finally comes out

(Image credit: Victura)

Our eyebrows: 🤨

What happened: The military shooter Six Days in Fallujah sparked immediate outrage when it was announced in 2009. Developer Atomic Games promised it would be a sensitive and fair treatment of the infamous 2004 battle, with input from US Marines, Iraqi insurgents and civilians, historians, and senior US military commanders. But the use of a contemporary, then-ongoing US war as a setting for a videogame did not fly: Six Days was quickly dropped by publisher Konami, and the whole thing fell off the map and was forgotten until a surprise return in 2021. That triggered a a second backlash over fears that it would glorify or distort the events of the war, but the pushback wasn’t as furious: The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Valve, Microsoft, and Sony to refuse to distribute the game, but more generally there seemed to be a resigned acceptance that Six Days was going to happen, wrapped in a hope that it wouldn’t be as bad as some feared.

The outcome: When it finally arrived in June it was thoroughly unremarkable, in large part because it was an early access release and thus missing most of the promised content. But what we saw didn’t give us much hope that the game would achieve its lofty goals. It was “just a barebones milsim,” we said at the time, lacking any of the context that was promised: “What I’m seeing is a game that’s more interested in depicting American valor than the actual losers of the story it’s telling: Fallujah,” staff writer Morgan Park declared. 

Reddit goes dark

(Image credit: Reddit)

Our eyebrows: 😒

What happened: Reddit announced planned changes to its developer terms in April that would, among other things, enforce a rate limit on access to its free API and introduce a new “premium” option for developers who want more. And it was really premium: The creator of the Apollo Reddit client for iOS estimated it would cost him $20 million per year to keep his client operating at the new rate. It was an extremely unpopular move, and in response thousands of subreddits took part in what became known as Reddark: A 48-hour shutdown in protest of the planned changes. That’s just a tiny slice of the total number of the estimated 2.8 million or so subreddits floating around out there, but it included some of the biggest and totalled a combined subscriber count of more than 2.5 billion.

The outcome: Some subreddits stayed dark beyond the planned 48 hour window, prompting Reddit to pressure moderators to reopen, and threatening to remove those who did not. Protests continued in different forms—users on the Steam subreddit, for instance, began posting messages about literal steam—but in the end it was pretty much a return to business as usual: Most subreddits reopened, and the API changes rolled out as planned. The Apollo client, sadly, is no more

Linus Tech Tips gets sloppy

(Image credit: Linus Tech Tips)

Our eyebrows: 😑

What happened: The popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips came under fire in August after a botched installation of Billet Labs’ Monoblock cooling system led to a strong recommendation against it: “The experience of building with it is a nightmare,” channel founder Linus Sebastian declared, “and the advantages over literally any other solution are negligible.”

That led to a callout from competing channel Gamers Nexus, which accused it of “rushing content out the door” in order to achieve “quantity over quality.” Gamers Nexus also accused LTT of selling the one-of-a-kind Monoblock prototype, rather than returning it to the manufacturer as promised. After initially defending the work, LTT posted an apology video that concluded with Sebastian admitting that he’d taken the complaints personally and overreacted to them, although he continued to defend the channel’s behind-the-scenes dealing with Billet Labs. The channel also suspended production for a week in order to work on improving its content.

But that apology was something of a flop among followers, who felt it was too jokey and focused more on promoting items in the LTT store than on actually addressing complaints. Allegations shared by former LTT social media manager Madison Reeve, who said on Twitter that she was forced to leave the company because the toxic work environment and pressure to produce content was “ruining [her] mental health,” eventually prompted a more serious response from LTT CEO Terren Tong, who told PC Gamer that the company would conduct a “thorough assessment of the allegations,” including hiring an outside investigator, “and will commit to publishing the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”

The outcome: There’s been no word on the results of those investigations at this point, and while analytics sites like Social Blade and VidIQ indicate that the channel’s viewership took a hit as a result of the controversy, it appears to have bounced back to relatively normal levels since. 

Lies of P won’t say ACAB

(Image credit: Neowiz)

Our eyebrows: 😐

What happened: An early Lies of P gameplay trailer featured a brief appearance of a decapitated figure strung up in the arches of a bridge, with a crudely painted sign bearing the message APAB hanging from its neck. The message was obviously a play on ACAB, an acronym meaning All Cops Are Bastards that’s taken on a charged political connotation in recent years due to its adoption by people opposed to police violence. But sharp-eyed fans noticed that the message was gone in later videos—in its place was a different sign saying “Purge Puppets.”

Lies of P director Ji-Won Choi later confirmed that the message did in fact stand for All Puppets Are Bastards, and said that it was removed in order to avoid controversy. “We took it out eventually because we wanted everyone to enjoy the game exactly how we intended it to be enjoyed, and not judged based on any trends,” Choi said. “We really wanted the world that we designed to be interpreted by the players exactly how we aimed it to be, so we took out factors that could be a little risky.”

The outcome: Proactive self-censorship is rarely a good idea, but neither is co-opting real-world social struggles for a videogame backdrop. And unlike Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s use of “Mechanical Apartheid” and “Augs Lives Matter” in marketing materials, in this case it was a single sign, not intrinsically tied to the game’s narrative, and the whole thing blew over pretty quickly. And Lies of P turned out to be pretty good



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We’ve already reported on Qualcomm’s new 12-core Arm uberchip, the Snapdragon X Elite, and its claims of x86-beating performance and efficiency. But it takes two to tango when it comes a major transition like moving from x86 CPUs to Arm chips. You don’t just need hardware, you need software, too.

And that, dear PC fans, is where Windows 12 supposedly comes in. Reports indicate that Microsoft is planning to add specific support for Snapdragon X Elite in future builds of Windows. 



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Want to give your daily Wordle a boost with our tips and tricks? Or maybe you’d really like someone to tell you exactly what the answer to the December 24 (918) game is without making you work for it. Whichever way you want to play, you’ll find all you need and more (even a clue written especially for today’s puzzle) right here. 

I had a bit of a stumble today, right before the answer popped into my head. It was my own fault, really. I was so sure it was going to be that, that when it wasn’t (not quite, anyway) I sat staring at my screen in an irritated sort of shock, as if Wordle had got it wrong and not me. Still, a win’s a win.

Wordle today: A hint

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, December 24



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Oh my god, I am so freaking tired of live service games. I know, I know, they’re a necessary evil. It’s 2023, baby, videogames ain’t what they used to be. They cost way more to make and developers have to continue toiling away on patches and expansions post-release. Money has to be made and, for the most part, one-and-done sales just ain’t cutting it anymore.

The natural development of the industry’s need for a constant revenue stream is, regrettably, the live service game. Ever-present, ever-evolving experiences that eat away at all my time and occasionally my money. Dailies, weeklies, monthlies, battle passes (a thing I already have thoughts on), limited-time cash shop items, loot boxes. I could go on.

Updates often fly in at such an alarming rate it’s nigh impossible to keep up with everything I enjoy unless I somehow manage to turn games into a job even more than I’ve already done. Overwatch 2, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Diablo 4, and Honkai: Star Rail are just some of the ones I dabbled in this year and inevitably fell off because the commitment was simply too much. It’s like several tiny toddlers yanking on my arms, demanding my attention. It’s a constant battle to get me to continue playing, but what I really want right now is a break from it all.

Live service games prey on one of my biggest weaknesses: my intense FOMO. Missing out on bonuses, seasonal events or chipping away at some lengthy progression drives me to keep playing, even when it’s 2am and I’m desperately trying to finish my dailies so I can go to bed. Who knows when that sick crossover event is going to come back? Will it ever come back? Welp, better make sure I’m playing every day just in case it never sees the light of day again. I am the sucker who falls for it every time, despite my attempts to get away.

The problem in trying to take a break from something like live service games is that they are literally everywhere. The industry seems to have hit a peak saturation point with them over the last couple of years, leading to me being crushed under a metric ton of time-consuming doodads. Almost every multiplayer game I play is vying for my attention long beyond when it reasonably deserves it. I can’t just play a game, enjoy it for what it is and pop it back on my virtual shelf to return to in five years when I get a nostalgia hit. After all, will it even still be there for me to enjoy?

Dead or alive

Because unfortunately, it’s not just me who suffers at the hands of live service shenanigans. Developers have seen their projects killed in a matter of months when player count and profit misses the mark. As Morgan Park wrote earlier this year, live service keeps killing off modestly successful multiplayer games. Super cool ideas are getting wrapped up in all the nonsense that comes with games as a service, meaning they never get their full opportunity to shine.

A screenshot of the Call of Duty in-game store, showing a series of increasingly out-of-place cosmetic bundles and featuring a Nicki Minaj skin.

(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)

Just this year we’ve seen the death of real neat games like Knockout City and Rumbleverse, the latter of which barely made it to the six month mark before biting the dust. It was even up for two DICE awards right before its closure. Babylon’s Fall was closed down less than a year after releasing, and despite Spellbreak’s attempts to innovate on the battle royale formula, it too shut its doors.

Hell, Creative Assembly’s Hyenas wasn’t even given a chance to make it out of the gate. Despite beta tests, the game was scrapped right at the finish line. Quantum League, Paladins, Gundam Warfare, Super People 2. All games that were shuttered this year alone. Clever, creative or risky ideas are being thrown to the dogs, doomed before they even get a chance to fight back. As much as I complain about all of the time I dedicate to grinding in a live service game, none of that compares to the hours developers spend intensively toiling away for a product that sometimes doesn’t even get to release.

Clever, creative or risky ideas are being thrown to the dogs, doomed before they even get a chance to fight back.



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