My biggest gripe with current PCs is excessive power consumption. Second to that is the heat generated by NVMe SSDs. A motherboard with an acre of metal covering half the board, or SSDs cooled by tower heatsinks with tiny fans is just not what I want to see. It’s not like Gen 5 x4 SSDs deliver tangible performance improvements anyway.

That’s why the news (via Tom’s Hardware) of Intel’s efforts to create a bandwidth controller driver to address these issues is concerning. This driver has been developed for Linux users with the aim of controlling thermal issues inherent to high bandwidth PCIe devices by reducing PCIe link speed when necessary.



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With how advanced 3D graphics have gotten, I wish we’d use these rendering techniques to get more freaky with it, ya dig? Alan Wake 2’s funky lighting and lightning quick loading really scratched that itch for me last year, but 2022’s Scorn is really what I’m talkin’ about: a sickening fever dream that could only be brought to life in a game. Now it looks like we’re getting our first Scornlike in Necrophosis.

I’m a simple man: I love the work of H.R. Giger, the iconic Swiss artist who designed the Xenomorph, I’m a freak for Zdzisław Beksiński, a Polish painter who specialized in hauntingly beautiful and unnerving dreamscapes, and you better believe I was down for Scorn, a horror game that cribbed its whole look from both. There’s just not much out there like Scorn, and post-launch patches went a long way to addressing my biggest complaints when reviewing the game.



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Vampire Survivors continues to roll out new DLC in ever weirder, more delightful packages this month with Operation Guns, a full-on crossover between the worlds of Vampire Survivors and long-running shoot-em-up slash bullet hell slash action arcade series Contra. 

“Are you a bad enough Vampire Survivor to save the President’s cousin’s sister’s dog from the traitor squadrons of Red Falcon?” asks the DLC description. Which I suppose is a legitimate question to ask in the context of Vampire Survivors and also the skepticism-crushing enjoyment of recent reboot Contra: Operation Galuga.



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Rogue Voltage dropped on Steam this week, a roguelike deckbuilder of sorts where you wire up and configure weird devices to blow up your enemies in turn-based combat. The core of Rogue Voltage is making crazy machines that do weird stuff. How you do that is the cool part.

Like a modular synthesizer of sorts, your deck is a rack of components connected to each other by your wiring, and those components are the cards. Putting together all those inputs and outputs in different ways, wiring them in different orders, gives different resources. Those resources can be used, or with the right deck routed into capacitors and batteries to charge a bigger move next turn.



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There’s a clue for today’s Wordle waiting below, just in case you need to give your guesses a bit of direction but don’t like the idea of instantly giving the game away. Although if you do like the idea of an instant win, you’ll be pleased to hear that the answer to the May 11 (1057) Wordle is only a click away.

Wordle’s been making me work hard to keep my win streak this week, so it was a bit of a relief to start the weekend with such a quick and easy win. I’ll take a whole week of smoothly solved puzzles if you don’t mind, Wordle.

Today’s Wordle hint

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, May 11



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Crate Entertainment has been working its way through some very ‘PC gaming’ game genres: First it made an action RPG, Grim Dawn, then it made town builder Farthest Frontier (which is scheduled to leave early access sometime this year), and now it’s also working on a real-time strategy game. Unlike some of its contemporaries, however, Crate isn’t trying to crack the code to making a mainstream RTS megahit: Real-time strategy is a “nerd genre,” Crate Entertainment CEO Arthur Bruno joked in a recent interview with PC Gamer, and he accepts the limited audience that implies.

The idea that classic-style RTSes don’t appeal to the biggest possible audience today is widely accepted as common knowledge; it’s the reason game publishers have been somewhat RTS averse since the golden age of the ’90s and 2000s. During our chat, Bruno recalled how his plans to make a new RTS game were met with groans during a meeting with a certain well-known holding company.



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OpenAI is a company built on the work of others. Techbros may hail CEO Sam Altman as some sort of digital messiah but, with apologies to Monty Python, really he’s just a very naughty boy, who understands that if OpenAI hoovers up as much content as it can to train its models, then all we can do is close the stable door long after the horse is bolted. OpenAI trains ChatGPT on copyrighted content by design, and dares society to try and stop it (on which note, good luck to the New York Times with its lawsuit). 

One of the advantages of all that lovely venture capital flowing in is that OpenAI can afford all the lawyers it wants to fight these battles. But maybe there was something of a lull recently, because OpenAI has issued a “copyright complaint” against the r/ChatGPT subreddit for the use of the OpenAI logo.



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To get a roleplaying game going you have to make it past as many hassles as any party of adventurers ever faced in a dungeon—only instead of traps that sever your hand if you put it in a statue’s mouth they’re more like scheduling issues and the difficulty of finding a group you vibe with. 

Playing online with a virtual tabletop means at least people don’t have to come to your house, which is one hassle less, but can cause its own problems. Some virtual tabletops have to be paid for, some require everyone to sign up to the service, some demand players learn how to use complicated software, and so on. Which is why Discord pairing with Roll20 is potentially ideal—Discord is the default voice app for most gamers, and Roll20 is a popular virtual tabletop that’s lightweight enough to have a low learning curve, but featured enough that you can get advanced with stuff like realtime lighting and fog of war if you want.



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It’s one of my favorite times of the month: new Helldivers 2 warbond day. After a community vote that went overwhelmingly in favor of no delay, Arrowhead released the Polar Patriots premium warbond today, adding four new guns and other goodies to its rapidly-expanding co-op shooter.

You can unlock the items on the warbond’s first page in any order, but I suspect most people will go straight for the shiny new assault rifle: the AR-61 Tenderizer. It’s another boxy bullpup design that evokes the AR-23 Liberator starter rifle, but interestingly, it’s not an official variant of it. No, the Tenderizer is its own gun, complete with a bassy roar and a top rail that is the closest Helldivers 2 has inched toward the M41A Pulse Rifle from the Alien series. (Side note: The gun is supposed to be black like in the warbond trailer, but a texture bug made it green. Arrowhead says a fix is coming).



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At first Animal Well presents itself as a quiet, ruminative metroidvania. A simple time-worn videogame blob wanders a psychedelic subterranean labyrinth towards some obscure purpose, solving puzzles with a growing collection of tools. My cherished blob is neither armed nor dangerous, because while animals populate this murky realm—cats, dogs, crows, kangaroos, worms, stingrays—few are hungry for blobs. Most are content just to sit and watch, often in proximity to the many bizarre statues built in their honour. Built by who or by what? I’ve got no idea. I’m so far down the food chain most creatures don’t even consider me food.

Need to know

What is it? A free-roaming puzzle game with a bottomless well of secrets.
Expect to pay: TBC
Developer: Billy Basso
Publisher: Bigmode
Reviewed on: RTX 3060 (laptop), Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Steam Deck: Verified
Link: Official site

But in the rare cases animals do take issue with my presence the noise is terrifying. Shrieks pierce through the reverberant gloom with an exaggeration matched only by the oversized animals themselves, whose limbs don’t perambulate so much as they ooze across the screen. The whole world seems to wobble when shit hits the fan; loud drones breach the quiet. These encounters aren’t usually difficult per se, but they are unutterably stressful, cutting through the tomblike tranquillity with abrupt violence. There are never two animal species on screen at once, because all have staked their territory.



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