After being briefly borked by the release of Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring’s Seamless Co-op mod is now ready to use in the expansion. Passing a message from mod creator Luke Yui yesterday, Seamless Co-op Discord moderator Dalvik wrote that “While not perfect, it has reached a state where it can be used to play Elden Ring and the DLC in co-op.”

FromSoftware‘s unique implementation of cooperative play is great for if you need to bring a stranger or friend into your game for help on a boss, but Elden Ring’s open world and death/boss defeat disconnects make it a chore to experience the whole thing beginning to end with a friend. Seamless Co-op fixed that, with a no muss, no fuss, impressively polished solution. It runs in a separate .exe with its own saves and on its own servers, bypassing Easy AntiCheat. Once you’ve made it to your friend’s instance via a simple password match system, you stay there until you’re ready to leave.

After a few years in Early Access, niche sim-management game City Bus Manager has released its full 1.0 version, adding a ton of new scenarios and a big increase in scale to its simulation of running a bus company pretty much anywhere in the world. Buying buses, hiring staff, and upgrading your HQ are one half of the gameplay—the other half is all about setting up routes on maps that reflect real-world road layouts.

The coolest part of that is how you can pick pretty much anywhere in the world to set up your bus company. Famous cities are definitely on the menu, but so are smaller towns or even sprawling multi-city metroplexes like the corridor between Northern Virginia and Baltimore. The 1.0 release also expands the limit on map sizes tenfold, and removes the limit on the number of bus lines you can run. With that 250-line cap gone, you can simulate all 300-something New York City bus lines.

With Fallout back on everyone’s minds after the success of the new show, the original game’s lead developer Tim Cain has been weighing in on different aspects of the series over on his YouTube channel. While Fallout clearly still means a lot to him, Cain didn’t seem keen to return to the series when responding to his viewers’ frequent queries.

“There’s a lot of different questions being asked there,” Cain said. “Would I want to remake Fallout as a 3D game? Are you asking if I would like to make a Fallout offshoot like Fallout: New Vegas is… Do I want to make Fallout 5?” Whatever he thinks of those respective possibilities, Cain was clear that he’s not worried about authority, creative freedom, or even pay⁠—within reason, of course. Cain explained that his primary motivator, especially now that he’s semi-retired, is his own interest in a project.

It took me 10 hours in the Land of Shadow before I begrudgingly faced the Dancing Lion. That 10 hours was spent exploring the new world as thoroughly as I could, finding all but one map fragment, diving shallowly into various dungeons, and feeling that unique joy that comes with exploring a FromSoft world for the first time. The magnitude of the panorama seen after beating Rellana was lost on me, because I had already discovered that part of the world in reverse. Elsewhere, I had already explored most of Shadow Keep before hitting the back door of the Golden Hippopotamus. If we’re to take Elden Ring’s bosses as the main course—which I think increasingly they are—then I had basically nibbled around the chocolate chips of the cookie.

Those first 10 hours were the most absorbing 10 hours I’ve spent with any game this year. By that time I had my scadutree blessing level up to eight, and I had respecced away from a shoddily constructed mage into one of those famously OP blood builds that some true Elden Ring heads look upon with derision. I was having fun. The Land of Shadow is stunning; it’s one of those game worlds I can barely believe exists. It may be a cliché to make this comparison, but it really does look like a fantasy paperback cover brought to life. I can’t imagine a fantasy game ever looking more inviting than this. 

When AMD announced the Ryzen 9000-series CPUs at Computex, one particular little nugget caught my attention. The 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X was given a very respectable 65W TDP. That’s well below the 105W and 120W TDPs of the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D respectively. 

A new rumor suggests AMD might have jumped the gun on that, at least when it comes to gaming performance. AMD’s Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Consumer Processors Donny Woligroski confirmed the 9700X won’t have the grunt to beat out the 7800X3D in gaming, even if it’s stronger in non-gaming workloads.