Month: September 2024

Habbo Hotel occupies a strange place in the mind—the same dusty corner of my brain where Runescape and Miniclip reside. I played it at a time where I was still quite small and, like many memories from my childhood, it’s fuzzy beyond belief.

For those unfamiliar Habbo Hotel is, by technical definition, an MMO without the RPG—a MMOG, if you will. It was first released in Finland at the dawn of the millennium, before making its way to English-speaking territories circa 2004-2005.

Architecturally, Habbo Hotel is a chat room—but it became a lot more than that to its players. Spawning from an age of innovation where most kids had to beg their parents to get them a WoW subscription or Runescape membership, Habbo players quickly began using the game as a platform for mazes, minigames, and roleplay. It was a sandbox that was technically an inch deep, but players still built castles in it.

And now it’s back, baby. As outlined in a press announcement, “after discovering an old decrepit server with some long-lost files … long-time Habbo developer and player Macklebee has lovingly restored an old version of Habbo Hotel first released in 2005”. It’s …

Continue Reading

Animal Well has achieved incredible success over the last few weeks since its release and is shaping up to be one of the most acclaimed Metroidvanias since Hollow Knight. At the tail end of this success, developer Billy Basso has hinted at the possibility of an upcoming game that dives back into its secret-laden world. 

In a Q&A on r/NintendoSwitch, developer Billy Basso and business/marketing manager Dan Adelman answered a few questions from fans, including what would come next. “I’m currently planning to make a game that will be in the same universe but may not be a direct sequel,” Basso says. This wouldn’t be the first time an indie developer has taken this approach, with Undertale’s dev Toby Fox choosing to release Deltarune in the same fashion.  

This news is pretty exciting, especially for the players who have managed to solve all of Animal Well’s elusive secrets and complete the game. Despite Basso previously saying that there are “puzzles that maybe take 10 years to solve—I want the game to be playable 10 years from now” in an interview with The Guardian, most players took around five hours before they rolled credits and then an extra 10-p…

Continue Reading

If you’ve ever thought to yourself that the Payday games are great but they’d be even better if they replaced the guns and bank vaults with swords, spells, and treasure chests, Starbreeze Studios has some oddly-specific good news. Its next big project is a “co-operative multiplayer” game set in the fantasy RPG world of Dungeons and Dragons.

To be fair, I don’t know if Project Baxter, as the new game is known internally, will really be something akin to Payday: D&D. Starbreeze described Baxter as “the next AAA title in our niche of cooperative multiplayer games” in its August financial report, when it was still negotiating for the license, but also seemed eager to differentiate it, saying “it is a completely new project, in a completely new genre, compared to Payday.”

Still, it sure sounds like the new game won’t stray too far from Starbreeze’s familiar formula: The new game “will carry the signature Starbreeze game cornerstones,” the studio said in today’s announcement, including “co-operative multiplayer, lifetime commitment through a games as a service-model, community engagement and a larger than life experience.”

“It is hard to imagine a better pairing …

Continue Reading

Longtime Rainbow Six Siege players may soon find they’re sitting on a gold mine. Today, Ubisoft kicked off the beta for the Rainbow Six Marketplace, a website that allows players to sell their unwanted cosmetics for R6 Credits. The marketplace is viewable by anyone, but Ubisoft is only allowing select beta testers to buy and sell items for now.

Those beta testers are wasting no time, either. On launch day, the marketplace shows thousands of listings for hundreds of distinct gun skins, headgears, outfits, and charms. Onlookers can’t see the details of individual transactions, but we can see how many total copies of items are for sale, what range of R6 Credits they’re being sold at, and how much the last one sold for. If these numbers are correct, players are already dropping $30, $60, and over $100 on rare cosmetics.

The most sought-after items so far include a line of “Glacier” gun skins that were only available during Year 1 Season 1 in early 2016. At the time of writing, the Glacier MP5 listing has 12 skins up for sale with the latest one selling for 20,000 R6 Credits, or approximately $125. Other big ticket items include the Death Sentence Jäger headgear that…

Continue Reading

BaroneWatch 2024 has concluded: The Stardew Valley 1.6 update is now live, and that means we’ve finally got the full rundown of all the changes in the long-awaited update.

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update, lest you’ve forgotten, was intended to be a small thing: Creator Eric Barone warned players in 2022 that it would be mostly focused on support for modders, and “won’t be huge.” 

That promise didn’t last long, as Barone kept piling things on: A new farm type, three new festivals, support for eight-person multiplayer, “new late-game content,” and more.

The promise of all those new things to see and do naturally got fans properly wound up, and Barone’s tease that the update “adds so much stuff to all the different aspects of the game” did not calm that situation down. Nor did his decision last week to start revealing the 1.6 patch notes in a slow-drip litany of one patch note at a time.

A few unforgettable highlights:

• A dirty secret revealed
• The one that’s been bugging Eric for eight years
• “Laying in bed all day”
• Time for a Mayonita!
• Continue Reading

Here are two things I learnt today. One, T-Pain—of Buy U a Drank fame—is working on Grand Theft Auto 6 in some capacity. Two, he’s a major GTA Online roleplay fan, and can often be spotted hanging out on the popular NoPixel RP server.

Or at least, that used to be the case. In a recent Twitch stream, T-Pain mentioned that his work on GTA 6 had actually gotten in the way of his GTAO double life. “I used to be [on NoPixel],” T-Pain told the audience, “and then, how about this shit? I used to be on NoPixel, then I started working on… GTA 6, and [Rockstar] told me I couldn’t do RP anymore.”

“They had this whole speech, like, ‘What if somebody took your album and re-recorded it, and more people were listening to that?'” elaborated T-Pain, suggesting Rockstar felt more than a little prickly about unofficial mods of its games. Either way, T-Pain was gracious: “Okay, I kinda get that,” said the rapper, “but I was having a good time!”

So it seems like Rockstar just didn’t want a big celebrity publicising unsanctioned and unofficial servers, especially if that celebrity was appearing in an official Rockstar product. 

The irony is, of course, …

Continue Reading

Foxhole developer Siege Camp has unveiled a new project called Anvil Empires that promises to let players take part in massive medieval battles of up to 1,000 people at a time in an open-world sandbox “with no safe zones or other artificial barriers to combat.”

The game takes place in the fantasy realm of Calligo, a persistent world in which three “desperate alliances” exist in a constant state of war. The continent contains an array of different landscapes and dangerous creatures, as well as “dark secrets” of indeterminate types for players to discover.

Medieval warfare is about more than just clubbing people in the face with heavy objects: You’re not going to do very well if you don’t have your supply situation nailed down. To that end, players will also have to build and grow settlements, trade with friendly neighbours and raid enemy bases, build supply and siege camps, and maintain the logistical lines to keep the army fed and fighting. 

Siege Camp (the studio, that is) says the in-game economies are “completely driven by players,” with settlements capable of growing to support hundreds of players at once. All of that will take place separately from th…

Continue Reading

The next game in Amplitude’s Endless series will be Endless Dungeon, a follow-up to 2014’s Dungeon of the Endless, which is my equivocating way of saying it’s not actually a sequel. Where that was a roguelike tactical RPG with a bit of tower defense thrown in, the new game seems more like a twin-stick shooter with a bit of tower defense thrown in. And it’ll be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store from May 14.

The trailer makes it look like a cross between Overwatch and Hades, and I sure hope it plays like Hades. If you want to find out for yourself, you can get an early look at Endless Dungeon’s in-development build until January 30, but only if you preorder the Last Wish digital edition. It also comes with bonuses including hero skins, badges, avatars, the soundtrack, artbook, and access to both a closed beta and then the full game 48 hours before its release.

The current OpenDev period Amplitude is calling “Final Rodeo” lets you play as four heroes in singleplayer or co-op multiplayer: Comrade (Gunsmith), Bunker (Tank), Blaze (Artificer), and Shroom (Medic). There are four districts open for play, a new boss called the Shelldiver, and a Saloon to hang out in…

Continue Reading

Epic has just announced some new procedural tools headed to Unreal Engine 5.2, the next build of the ever-popular game engine. These allow game developers to build out game worlds with a small sample of hand-crafted models, leaving the rest to Unreal Engine 5 to procedurally generate.

Epic’s VP of engineering, Nick Penwarden, calls the feature “pretty cool” as it gets a round of applause at Epic’s State of Unreal event, and that seems bang on the money. It is pretty cool as you watch a game world pop into existence or a landscape moulded in real-time.

In the stream, we see a designer pop a large rock formation into the centre of a creek bed, and logs automatically connect this to the surrounding environment.

“The cool thing is it communicates with other nearby procedural elements in the scene, like the creek bed,” Penwarden says. “A designer comes by and wants to direct the player to drive to the left, Jacob [the Epic developer controlling the stream] can simply move the assembly to the right and everything updates to accommodate that change.”

Move the rock formation back, and it goes back to the way it was originally. Though not exactly. It’s similar, bu…

Continue Reading

You know how Steam is famously strict about certifying new updates? No? I’ve just been handed a note, apparently Steam doesn’t give a hoot and the only explanation for Square Enix being so tardy with updates for the PC version of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters (and the mobile versions too) is that they forgot the rest of us exist.

Well, not any more. A light lit up on a board somewhere in Square Enix headquarters that said “maybe it’s time to fix the fonts on PC” and here we are in 2024, finally seeing the first six Final Fantasy games update to version 1.10.

The option to select the original “classic” font rather than the “modern” font is an important upgrade, but so are the assistance features added to the config menu. As the patch notes put it, “They offer options such as applying a x0 to x4 modifier to the amount of EXP, gil or Magic AP obtained or turning enemy encounters off.” Movement speed can also be adjusted on the same menu, which “allows you to switch the default movement speed from walking to running.”

Other menu options let you choose monsters from the bestiary to fight against, and listen to the original background music rather than the modern…

Continue Reading

For most prebuilt gaming PCs it’s expected to have to lose out on RAM or storage capacity in order to stretch to a bigger, better graphics card. Yet every so often we’ll find a deal that appears to offer it all and still come in at a competitive price. That’s what this Skytech PC is: one of the cheaper RTX 4070 Ti PCs we’ve seen with capacious RAM, storage, and PSU capacity.

Let’s breakdown this PC’s spec real quick. It comes with an RTX 4070 Ti, AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, 1TB NVMe SSD, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and 850W 80 Plus Gold PSU. All stuffed inside a neat-looking tempered glass case. For all that, you can expect to pay $1,650 over at Newegg.

Even by the standards of some of the Prime Day gaming PC deals floating around right now, that’s pretty good. That’s not only because it’s actually one of the cheapest RTX 4070 Ti machines we’ve spotted (there is this last-gen Ryzen 5 machine for $1,600), but it’s also not skimping on key components.

The RAM is obviously a stand out here. That 32GB of DDR5 is plenty enough for creative pursuits, like rendering massive files in the Adobe suite, but also more than enough for gaming. DDR5 is the latest memory standard, and it’s a nic…

Continue Reading

Developers at GDC gathered today to express their feelings about the state of the game industry, in what under the circumstances is really the only reasonable way to react: with a scream.

“The game industry is falling apart around us, and we’re all flocking to San Francisco for a week to pretend like this is fine,” the GDScream event announcement states. “Let’s take a minute where we all stop pretending, and express just how it feels to be a game developer in 2024.

“Join us for a collective moment of catharsis, camaraderie, and caterwauling. Let’s descend upon Yerba Buena and when the clock strikes noon, have ourselves a nice big GDScream.”

The public scream, organized by former Epic Games producer Caryl Shaw and Fortnite Festival designer Scott Jon Siegel, took place at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET and was exactly what it sounds like: A raw expression of outrage over an industry that has laid off thousands of developers over the past year, throwing countless lives into turmoil in pursuit of shareholder value.

Speaking to PC Gamer at the event, Siegel said he was prompted to organize the event by the frustration he’s felt over widespread layoffs and the recent “Gamer…

Continue Reading

2024 continues to be an awful year for employees of the game industry, as another three studios have reportedly laid off employees this week. People Can Fly, the developer of games including Painkiller, Bulletstorm, and Outriders, has confirmed that “layoffs have happened,” while a Kotaku report says Destroy All Humans! studio Black Forest Games and Ruiner developer Reikon Games have also made significant cuts to staffing.

People Can Fly development director Adam Alker said in an internal email that more than 30 people working on the studio’s current project, code named Project Gemini, were being let go. Project Gemini was described as “a triple-A game that is being developed in partnership with the publisher Square Enix Limited” in a 2022 financial report, and was meant to be on a scale similar to that of Outriders, People Can Fly’s 2021 co-op shooter. However, one source told Kotaku that Project Gemini’s singleplayer campaign is going to be reduced in size as a result of the cuts.

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, People Can Fly confirmed that “layoffs have happened,” but did not reveal how many employees were let go. “At this time we have nothing to add,” a rep…

Continue Reading

There’s a certain kind of scam, old as time, that revolves around selling people something that tells them to sell the same thing. That’s not how it’s presented, of course. The pitch is that if only you knew X (my secret knowledge) you would easily have Y (money, young lovers, cars). Perhaps the most egregious contemporary example of this kind of grift is Andrew Tate and his “Hustlers University”, but there are a million of them out there, and the internet has just turned up an example of what the future for this particular hustle looks like.

Take a bow Jake Ward, not only the latest guy who wants to make money by selling you a pipe dream but a pioneering example of an AI scammer. Mr. Ward’s modus operandi is simple. Creating content is hard. So why not just use AI to steal it?

This isn’t even me putting words in his mouth: Ward is flagrantly open about what he’s proposing, calling it a “heist” in some vain effort to make it seem daring and sexy rather than theft.

“We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor,” said Ward on X. “We got 489,509 traffic in October alone.”

Half a million clicks isn’t anywhere near wha…

Continue Reading

Improve your daily Wordle game with our guides and tips, give your guesses some welcome guidance with today’s clue, or turn your luck around completely and skip straight to the February 12 (603) answer. However much or little help you want with today’s Wordle, you’re sure to find it here.

Today was just one of those days where the greens seemed to appear out of nowhere, and that meant I was able to reveal the answer by my third go. A bit of luck mixed with a dash of an educated guess has got to be the perfect Wordle combo.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, February 12

“Large”, “huge”, and simply “very big” are all good alternatives to today’s answer. In fairy tales and myths this word’s sometimes used to describe extremely tall humanoid beings. You’ll need to unearth two different vowels today. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

There is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Anyone can pick up and play Wordle, but if you want to do it well and make all of your guesses count, these quick tips will help get you sta…

Continue Reading

Ubisoft has been making noise about a Watch Dogs movie since—I am not exaggerating—before the first game even came out in 2014. Now, over ten years later and with three games in the series, there might actually be a Watch Dogs movie.

It looks like Talk To Me star Sophie Wilde is now attached to the project as a lead,  while French director Mathieu Turi will direct a screenplay by Christie LeBlanc. Director Turi previously did horror movie Hostile. Screenwriter LeBlanc’s  major credit was the Netflix sci-fi horror-drama-thing Oxygen. It’s coming via New Regency, the same folks who helped thet Assassin’s Creed movie make it across the finish line.

That info comes via a report on Deadline, which details the choice of director and star alongside some studio and producer details.

Does this mean we’ll see an actual movie based on Watch Dogs? There’s really no way to know. More than a few gaming movie projects get to this stage and never see the light of day—and even then can take years more. I wouldn’t hold your breath before 2026 if you’re super excited for this one.

I suppose the real problem here is that Watch Dogs could be compel…

Continue Reading