February 2025 - Page 5 of 10 - Gaming Army United

‘Not every story is told in that way’: Phil Spencer says that live service games aren’t the answer to every problem, and that smaller games play an important role

Live service games are treated like some great and powerful cheat code for generating awesome amounts of shareholder value. It’s so great that EA’s CEO thought that it could’ve saved Dragon Age: The Veilguard from underperforming, and a recent GDC survey revealed that a third of “triple-A developers” are working on live service games as we speak. But despite what it may seem, not everyone is interested in seeing these kinds of games dominate the big budget side of the industry.

“I didn’t want to see every game turn into some big service based game because they felt like that’s where the business model was,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer says in an interview with Xbox Era. “It’s not easy to do that. Not every story is told in that way. Not every game kind of supports that or creative idea supports that business model.”

Easy for Spencer to say, of course. When Xbox currently has some of the biggest live service games under its umbrella: Especially after the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which brought Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty. However, the publisher has also supported a few singleplayer games that don’t last hundreds of hours. Avowed is about to be added to Xbox Game Pass tomorrow, and smaller games like South of Midnight are on track to be released in a couple of months.

“I think it’s an important part of our industry because not every story is going to be 100 hours long, and not every medium is going to have some kind of mechanic that has a currency and everything else,” Spencer says. “They just want to tell their story and move. Some of my favourite games going back to like Limbo and stuff, these are fantastic games that I want to see continue in our industry.”

Despite what can at times seem like a strong push for more live service games, there are a ton of developers who, like Spencer, want to keep on giving players complete stories. A few former Dragon Age developers didn’t take the idea of adding live service elements to The Veilguard very well, and Hazelight chief Josef Fares declared that he’ll never make a live service game no matter what EA thinks: “It will not happen with a Hazelight game, ever.”

Naturally, Xbox isn’t swearing off live service games for good. It’s big enough that it can invest in various kinds of games, “part of our reason for trying to get a subscription going was to allow us to also support games that have a beginning, middle, and end,” Spencer says. But knowing that there’s a legitimate attempt to not just rely on live service is still quite reassuring, especially for those of us who are pretty sick of them right now.

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Layoffs at Funko Fusion developer 10:10 Games blamed on ‘complete commercial and critical failure’ of the game

10:10 Games, a studio based in Warrington, England, has laid off staff, according to sources quoted Insider Gaming, due to its first release being a “complete commercial and critical failure”.

Funko Fusion was an attempt to catch the lightning in a bottle of the Lego games, only instead of the charm of Lego they were working with the dead-eyed horror of Funko Pops. Still, they had characters from popular properties like Team Fortress 2, Mega Man, Back to the Future, The Walking Dead, and Scott Pilgrim to put through themed smash-and-grab collectible hunt levels, and it’s not like anyone can explain the success of Funko Pop. Maybe it could have worked?

It didn’t, however, ending up with an OpenCritic rating of 53, and sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam with 68% positive user reviews.

Insider Gaming’s sources said that performance of Funko Fusion was so poor that attempts to get funding for multiple follow-up projects failed, leading to staff being laid off because there “isn’t enough work to give the whole team”. Before the layoffs were announced, staff were encouraged to use up their vacation time, resulting in several of them discovering they had been let go while overseas on holiday. They were still expected to make it to consultation meetings, despite being in different time zones.

“Management seemed very keen to wrap up the process quickly,” a source told Insider Gaming, “and despite saying that they were fully open to suggestions and feedback, none of it has been taken on board”.

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LAN Party simulates LAN parties without the LAN

LAN Party Reveal Trailer – YouTube LAN Party Reveal Trailer - YouTube

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Have you ever wanted to have a LAN party but without the, you know, LAN? Just the watching over other peoples’ shoulders and taking a break for a movie? Well, developer LAN Party Technologies is delivering precisely that. It may well be perfect if you’ve ever thought that your friend group’s Discord server should have a fully-featured 3D front end where someone can post infinitely looping meme gifs on the wall.

The app is designed to be used alongside games and streaming media, allowing you to sync up and watch the same thing or show your screens in a shared environment while you do different stuff. The goal, says the developer, is to provide an “immersive and communal gaming experience.”

“With its emphasis on small-group interactions, LAN Party stands apart from competitors like Discord. Discord serves large communities in a 2D format, LAN Party is tailored for smaller groups of up to 6 and offers an immersive 3D environment where gamers can connect more personally,” said the developer in a press release.

Weirdly enough, it doesn’t actually integrate any kind of LAN or even VLAN capability. LAN with no LAN. Keep up with me here: It’s a fundamentally funny idea, some kind of recursive loop of gaming where we don’t employ the concept of LAN parties enough anymore so we created an app that re-creates the concept of LAN via WAN using synecdoche: Merely the concept of sharing space is there, not the reality of it.

You can watch “together” in a representational way but not within physical space or actual gaming connectedness. This is the kind of stuff postmodern philosophers absolutely lived for.

You can find LAN Party on Steam, where it will release into early access.

Anyway, I’ll be interested in the app when it simulates the part at the start of the LAN where you get together and spend several hours of your precious together time trying to get the networking apparatus to play nice and do we have enough cables to connect everyone’s machines and let’s figure out what game to play and what the hell do you mean Tim’s computer is still running Windows 8 and “he thought it’d be fine”?

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Metal Eden is a movement-shooter that looks like cyberpunk Doom Eternal

METAL EDEN Reveal trailer – YouTube METAL EDEN Reveal trailer - YouTube

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Buried in the onslaught of Sony’s State of Play announcements—a scattershot blast of Too Much Videogame I’m still tweezering out pellets of—was the announcement of Metal Eden. Being developed by Polish studio Reikon, who formerly made birdseye action game Ruiner, Metal Eden’s only been seen briefly before, back when it was codenamed Final Form.

Between the trailer, a website, and a preview over at GamesRadar, we know a few more things about Metal Eden now. For starters it’s about Aska, a woman who’s been digitally uploaded into a killer android called a Hyper Unit, where “hyper” is probably an apt description of her speed. She can dash, wallrun, grapplehook, and jetpack to parkour from place to place, and has a cooldown ability that lets her rip the core out of robotic enemies.

The cores seem like a big part of Metal Eden. You can use them to melee opponents, stripping their armor, or throw them as grenades, which also gives you more ammo. It sounds a bit like the modern Doom games and their finishers, though cores also play into Metal Eden’s three upgrade trees—and its mysterious plot, which Reikon hasn’t said much about yet. The logo of Armstech, a weapons manufacturer from Ruiner, flashes past a couple of times during the trailer, but that could just be an easter egg rather than a confirmation they share the same setting.

There are seven guns in Metal Eden, from your basic shotgun and grenade launcher to a lightning gun, and Aksa can also “Transform into an armored Battle Sphere”, which sounds Metroid as anything. It’s due out on May 6, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

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Former EA exec says the ailing mega-publisher missed a chance to snag Blizzard and other heavy hitters before Activision: ‘EA saw all those first and passed on all of them’

As reported by IGN, former EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon revealed on a recent Grit podcast appearance that the company had turned down opportunities to own Call of Duty and Guitar Hero, and even acquire Blizzard. Gordon was speaking to former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, whose company wound up capitalizing on all of those games.

Rather than buying Blizzard outright, Activision ultimately acquired the company through a merger with parent company Vivendi’s gaming division in 2008⁠—Kotick characterized Blizzard, and more specifically World of Warcraft, as the only profitable part of Vivendi’s games business at the time. Prior to this, Gordon recalled, “There was a time when [Vivendi] asked for $800 million [for Blizzard],” but that “[former EA CEO Larry Probst] wouldn’t meet with them.”

Summing up the contrast between EA and Activision’s respective acquisition strategies, Gordon said, “Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Blizzard, EA saw all those first and passed on all of them.” Bing further expressed, “This is why I have double-high respect for [Kotick] saying, ‘no, no, this is going to be good to own.’ And then you kept the people around.

“I’m pretty sure that some of those companies, the creative leaders, would not have stuck around, so you did some kind of miracle of keeping them productive for long periods of time.”

This wasn’t the end of things either. Kotick revealed later in the conversation that EA wanted to purchase or merge with Activision several times over the years: “They tried to buy us a bunch of times, we had merger conversations a bunch of times.”

I’m curious about where in the timeline the EA angle on Call of Duty falls, as Infinity Ward was first formed by disgruntled Medal of Honor developers who didn’t want to keep working with EA on that series. My guess would be that Gordon is referring to EA’s loss of this talent in the first place, rather than a later opportunity to swipe Infinity Ward and CoD from Activision.

The question of talent retention is an interesting one, because neither Activision nor EA have particularly sterling reputations in that regard. Founding members of Infinity Ward would ultimately leave the studio and found Respawn, ironically back under the auspices of EA, and the seemingly acrimonious split still has a prominent place in the Call of Duty mythos. Blizzard has struggled to find its way in recent years, particularly after the reveal of Activision Blizzard’s sexual harassment crisis in the early 2020s.

But while Activision has driven off key talent and garnered a relatively negative reputation among gamers, EA was, for a long time, unparalleled when it came to acquiring beloved studios only to close or gut them: Visceral Games, Origin Systems, Westwood, Pandemic, and now BioWare all spring to mind.

Whatever you may say about the two publishers from a perspective of creativity or artistry, in the grand game of business and pure cashflow, Kotick’s Activision clearly won⁠—not just over EA, period. The company’s reputation has comfortably shrugged off its harassment and labor rights scandals to the tune of Microsoft’s unprecedented $68.7 billion acquisition, continuing regular releases in mega franchises like Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. EA, by contrast, is a medium-sized fish in the industry pond these days, and not a particularly healthy one at that. Respawn’s Apex Legends and Jedi series are noteworthy bright spots amid flagging returns on EA’s sports franchises and its squandering of BioWare.

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Today’s Wordle answer for Saturday, February 15

Kick off your weekend with a win: today’s Wordle answer is only a quick click away if you need it, or if you’d just like to instantly fill the first row with green letters. We’ve got a hint for the February 15 (1337) Wordle just below to, here to give you some fresh ideas and get you a bit close to Saturday’s winning word.

How hard can it be to put one yellow letter in the right place? There are only five slots, but it seemed to take me most of today’s guesses to finally turn the stubborn thing green. Still, once that was in place… no. Nope. Actually it wasn’t as helpful as I thought it was going to be. I did manage to solve today’s Wordle, but mostly because there were no other letters left to try.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, February 15

You could use this word to describe a criminal, a thief, or those special curved canes shepard’s use when tending to their sheep.

Is there a double letter in Wordle today?

Yes, there is a double letter in today’s puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you’ve got the basics, it’s much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there’s nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path:

A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels.
Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There’s no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don’t need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares.

Today’s Wordle answer

Wordle answer

(Image credit: Future)

What is today’s Wordle answer?

Here’s your weekend winner. The answer to the February 15 (1337) Wordle is CROOK.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today’s Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

February 14: DITTY
February 13: RUMBA
February 12: RAPID
February 11: SCORE
February 10: GOODY
February 9: BONUS
February 8: STEEP
February 7: SWATH
February 6: PUPIL
February 5: PEDAL

Learn more about Wordle

Today's Wordle being played on a phone

(Image credit: Nurphoto via Getty)

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you’ll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You’ll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you’re wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you’ll see which ones you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns , it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.

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Keep Driving review

Need to know

What is it? A turn-based road trip RPG set in the early 2000s
Expect to pay: $17.99/£15.00
Developer: YCJY Games
Publisher: YCJY Games
Reviewed on: Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Steam Deck: Playable
Link: Steam

I grew up in a town with nearly no public transportation, so for most of my childhood I walked, skateboarded, and biked to get around, but freedom—true freedom—was only gained as a teenager when I got my first car. It was a hand-me-down from my grandfather, so it wasn’t sporty or cool, but it was the only real escape from the drudgery of school, the oppression (real or imagined) of parents, and the growing panic that adulthood, which meant a job, the military, or more damn school, was waiting at the end of the summer.

Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG that perfectly captures the freedom and possibilities of being young and having a beat-up old car, just enough money to fill it with gas and snacks, and only the vaguest of destinations in mind. Just like in real life, road trips in Keep Driving feel like a carefree summertime journey where you blast some tunes, eat junk food, and watch your troubles shrink in the rearview mirror—until that check engine light starts blinking, your tank is almost empty, and you realize there’s something a bit odd about that hitchhiker you picked up.

Map quest

The game begins with the perfect excuse for a road trip: an old friend who lives all the way across the map has invited you to a music festival. With three months of summer stretching out before you, grab a few supplies from your house, open the map to pick a route, and start driving. Your car is your inventory: store useful stuff in the glove box, extra supplies in the trunk, and eventually people (and maybe the occasional dog) in the empty seats.

As you travel between any two map locations in Keep Driving, you encounter a handful of obstacles, called road events, that slow you down: mud puddles and potholes, traffic jams and biker gangs, and situations every driver has encountered at some point like “vague lanes” or a bug that flew in the window and can’t find its way out. These road events are Keep Driving’s version of turn-based combat, as each turn threatens to damage four different attributes: gasoline, cash, the car’s durability, and your energy levels. To dispel them, you need to match the threats with pips on your skill cards or items in your glove box.

It’s a simple combat system that’s easy to grasp within a few tries, and while it never really gets any more complex, it requires a lot of preparation to survive. Most skill cards have only a few uses before they need to be replenished by sleeping in a town, and glove box items (like duct tape, which protects durability, and cigarettes, which prevents loss of energy) have limited uses before you’ll need to buy more at gas stations and convenience stores.

If an event depletes you enough, by emptying your gas or totaling your engine, it doesn’t mean the end of your run. You can call a tow truck (if you have the cash) to take you to the previous town, or spend energy walking to the closest gas station, or in the most dire of circumstances, do the unthinkable: call your parents and tell them you need help. I had to do it in one of my runs, and it brought back the shame of doing it (way more than once) in real life. Thankfully, Keep Driving spares you the actual lecture from Dad.

Need a lift?

A car on road trip

(Image credit: YCJY Games)

And then there are the hitchhikers. As you cross the map you’ll encounter solo travelers making their own way through the world: a punk rocker with a dog (who takes up an extra seat), a young woman in a wedding dress who left her groom at the altar, a burnout who lost his job and is estranged from his wife, a mechanic who will smoke all your cigarettes. None of them have names, just labels you might use to describe a stranger: The Kid, The Songwriter, The Punk. I assume they think of me as “The Driver.”

At first hitchhikers feel like they’re just a tool to employ in your road events, since each brings a unique skill card to the dashboard, but as you travel together they each slowly reveal more about themselves and their journeys through quick bits of text conversation. Drive with them long enough and they’ll unlock new skills, and eventually reveal their own quest you can choose to pursue. The Punk wants to go to a club in a distant town, so can you drop him off there? The Bride wants to let loose and have some fun: got any weed? More importantly, as they start to feel like friends, or at least the kinds of temporary friends you made out of necessity when you were young and exploring the world.

A car on a roadtrip

(Image credit: YCJY Games)

Developer YCJY Games does an impressive job of developing characters who are, technically, just pixelated square portraits you lock into inventory slots. With minimal text, their stories and personalities come through, and by the end of the trip it’s clear that we’re all crammed into this car for the same reason: because we’re all a little damaged, a little aimless, a little adrift.

I was genuinely sad to see some of my passengers climb out of the car once I’d completed their quests, and not just because it meant losing the extra skills I’d been relying on. (Except for one of them: I was happy to be rid of a kid I’d picked up because they kept having to stop to use the bathroom.)

A car on a roadtrip

(Image credit: YCJY Games)

Keep Driving has an utterly kickass soundtrack

These characters also introduce you to crime, of which there is an amusing amount in Keep Driving. I even picked up a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit who didn’t really convince me he was innocent. Even him I wound up liking, though he’s a pain to manage (no one will sit next to him) and his initial skill is one you have to pay $10 a pop for. Weirdly, it wasn’t even him who was the biggest troublemaker: a hippie named “The Hurricane” kept wanting me to get high, had a skill that could only be used if I was driving while drunk, constantly filled my inventory slots with trash, and whose third level ability would let me shoplift from stores.

In a game where you can be pulled over by the cops and arrested, driving with a gun and a baggie of coke with an escaped convict in the passenger seat definitely turns a chill road trip into a white-knuckle affair.

A car on a roadtrip

(Image credit: YCJY Games)

As required for any memorable road trip, Keep Driving has an utterly kickass soundtrack. I’m not going to pretend I’m cool enough to have heard of Swedish indie bands like Westkust, Makthaverskan, Zimmer Grandioso, and Fucking Werewolf Asso, but they’ve got a new fan and their tracks will be part of my next real roadtrip. Even one of my hitchhikers, a musician whose guitar took up an annoying amount of room in my trunk for one of my trips, presented me with a CD of some of his songs when we finally parted ways.

There are more than a half-dozen endings in Keep Driving besides just getting to that concert and hanging with your buddy. (Yes, you can get arrested.) I’ve found several of them and I’ll keep playing until I’ve collected them all, and then I’m going to play some more.

Keep Driving is the sort of game I should love on the Steam Deck, but unfortunately, some of the interactions like dragging items around are pretty fiddly and the smaller pixel art icons are hard to read on a smaller screen. Otherwise it’d be perfect for sinking back into the couch, getting high or drunk (or not, your choice, say no to peer pressure), letting the road take you where it will, and making some temporary friends you’ll never forget.

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mamem! #benfica #monaco #asmonaco #slbenfica #championsleague #ligadoscampeões

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FIM! #assassinscreedvalhalla #assassinscreed #acvalhalla #basim #end #odin

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Youtube’s CEO says it’s the ‘new television’ with 1 billion TV viewers daily, and apparently people watch Shorts on their TV now

I’m old enough to remember a pre-YouTube era, where children played happily in the fields and everyone wore fetching hats to church. Now, though, it’s a staple of so many of our lives, mine included. And according to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, it’s not just dominating the arena of our phone and desktop PC video watching, but on track to take over television, too.

In a blog post on the, err, YouTube official blog, Mohan takes a moment to mark the internet video sensation’s 20th birthday, with his four “big bets” for YouTube in 2025 (via Sweclockers). “YouTube will remain the epicenter of culture”, he says. Heavens help us all.

“For more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube. Viewers are watching, on average, over 1B hours of YouTube content on TVs daily, and TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S” says Mohan.

“It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”

I feel like following a statement on Shorts viewership with a “yes, really” qualifier is perhaps a tad defeatist, but I’ll admit that even I watch the occasional YouTube Short. On my TV, though? That’s sacrilege, surely.

In other news, YouTube TV apparently has more than eight million subscribers and YouTube Premium has over 100 million happy payees. Given YouTube’s increasingly aggressive (and incredibly lucrative) policy of filling my watching hours with ads, I’ve considered paying for one myself on occasion.

Ah, who am I kidding. That’d eat into my Steam budget, and I feel its kinda like letting that sort of ad-based incentive win. Anyway, Mohan also boldly states that “YouTubers are becoming the startups of Hollywood,” as would-be filmmakers are starting off on the platform in the hope of graduating to the really, really big screen:

“Creators are bringing that startup mindset to Hollywood: leaning into new models of production, building studios to elevate their production quality, and exploring new creative avenues.

“We’re committed to meeting creators where they are with tools and features that power their businesses and communities” he continues. “We’ll continue to support their growth through more traditional revenue streams like ads and YouTube Premium, while introducing new ways for creators to partner with brands to bring their products to life.”

Ah good, more brands. It seems like most of my favourite creators are now acting like the QVC shopping channel and hawking dubiously-effective wares, although I’ve not yet been tempted to buy anything simply because a gurning thumbnail-enthusiast has shoved it in my face mid-video.

Still, it must be working in general. There’s gold in them thar hills, or so I’ve been told.

And actually, while it’s fun to poke fun, I think Mohan has a point. Even my dear sainted mother has been known to watch YouTube on her televisual box, and if that’s not a sign of mass-adoption, I don’t know what is. YouTube is on your phone, your desktop browser, and now, it seems, increasingly replacing the other apps on your TV set-top box.

A brave new world indeed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to tie a ring of daisies in my hair and frolic among the heather. It’s a beautiful day outside, y’know?

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‘Not every story is told in that way’: Phil Spencer says that live service games aren’t the answer to every problem, and that smaller games play an important role

Layoffs at Funko Fusion developer 10:10 Games blamed on ‘complete commercial and critical failure’ of the game

LAN Party simulates LAN parties without the LAN

Metal Eden is a movement-shooter that looks like cyberpunk Doom Eternal

Former EA exec says the ailing mega-publisher missed a chance to snag Blizzard and other heavy hitters before Activision: ‘EA saw all those first and passed on all of them’

Today’s Wordle answer for Saturday, February 15

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, February 15

Keep Driving review

Map quest

mamem! #benfica #monaco #asmonaco #slbenfica #championsleague #ligadoscampeões

FIM! #assassinscreedvalhalla #assassinscreed #acvalhalla #basim #end #odin

Youtube’s CEO says it’s the ‘new television’ with 1 billion TV viewers daily, and apparently people watch Shorts on their TV now

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Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, February 15

Map quest

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