The Steam Deck OLED devs on its speedy turnaround and why a more powerful Deck wouldn’t make sense – yet To quickly recap mySteam Deck OLED review, Valve’s refreshed handheld is brilliant, serving up major improvements to screen quality and battery life while making loads of little quality-of-life tweaks.Its revealwas a surprise, mind – haven’t Valve repeatedly said that therewouldn’t be another new Steam Deck for ages? Not quite. That warning was always qualified in that a morepowerfulDeck was still a ways off, and theSteam Deck OLED’s performance improvements are both tiny and a likely incidental result of its efficiency savings....

Stuck on today’s Wordle word for November 9? Read our hint or find the answer below! This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Every day,Wordlepresents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses? All you have to help you in finding the Wordle answer are the contextual clues you gain from each guess - but often, that’s not enough....

VFX and IT teams hit, months after customer service redundancies at the publisher Ubisoft has laid off more than 100 staff, continuing what feels like an unending wave of layoffs across the video games industry. The latest job losses spanning visual effects and IT departments come less than six months after theAssassin’s CreedandRainbow Sixpublisher made dozens of custom service staff redundant. Ubisoft confirmed that 124 staff had been laid off from its global workforce, with the vast majority - 98 people - cut from its Canadian business administrative services and IT departments, along with the Montreal-based VFX studio Hybride....

Built on the Doom II engine Deus ExandDoomhave two of the most iconic aesthetics in video games. Chuck the satanic hellspawn shooter and cyberpunk immersive sim together in a pot, season with a banging soundtrack and you’ll findBeyond Sunset. Developers Movie Games wear their inspirations on their sleeves, openly creditingDoom Eternaland Deus Ex as the two touchstones for Beyond Sunset’s gloriously violent and stylish first-person action. On top of those guiding lights, the whole game is built in a modern take onDoom II’s GZDoom engine, adding to the faithful ‘90s look of it all....

“What about S– nevermind, you get the idea.” Years of anticipation finally became reality last night when a videogame company posted a video of somebody in a sharp trench coat and mirror visor walking down a dim hall, swivelling dramatically to eyeball the viewer, then casually drawing a pistol and walking into a roomful of unfocussed Potential. This isMass Effect 5, actual title possiblyMass Effect: Epsilon - “epsilon” being the Top Secret Codename ofthis hidden page on the Mass Effect website....

Paratopic developers head to the tropics Paratopicwas a muddy, blood-filled VHS cassette of a game, a game of midnight highways, pinched, pixellated faces and acidic service station lighting. The next game from developer Arbitrary Metric,Roman Sands RE:Build, is… very different, at least on the surface. The first Act of the new Steam demo sees you staggering onto the beach below some kind of tropical resort. You wander up past the pools to the cavernous lobby and are immediately set upon by haggard guests, who appear to think you’re a member of staff....

Once more Into The Breach If there’s one genre I’ve never quite had the reflexes or spatial awareness for, it’s the bullet hell shooter. I’ve long admired their intricate dances of orbs and criss-crossing laser fire, but I have long resigned myself to merely being a spectator of such games, rather than an active ship pilot.Cobalt Core, however, is exactly my kind of speed. It’s not a bullet hell shooter, but it is about two spaceships facing off against each other in an eyes-locked duel of incoming cannon fire, and sliding side to side to avoid getting exploded as you attempt to unravel the mysterious timeloop your crew of weird space animals appear to be stuck in....

Almost five years since it launched - and two years after Epic revealed they hoped to gobble up half of all PC gaming revenue - the Epic Games Store is still yet to turn a profit. The reveal came during an ongoing legal battle between Epic and Google over the former’s efforts to dodge handing 30% of real-life money spent on V-Bucks in the mobile version ofFortniteto Google, as per the latter’s Google Play Store cut....

That’s 55% of the price of the 13600KF while delivering around 85% of the performance. Intel’s Core i5 12600KF is one of the company’s best value gaming CPUs, and today it’s down to $155 at Walmart (fulfilled via Newegg) versus its standard price of $220. This chip offers solid gaming performance in modern AAA games plus PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support (with the correct motherboard) all while costing significantly less than competing CPUs like the later 13600KF ($285) or AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600 ($229) which offer only marginally better performance at 1080p and are basically the same speed at 1440p or 4K....

Need a hint for today’s Connections? Read our guide for help with Connections #150 This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theConnections hint and answers for Thursday 12th December! Want a hint for Connections today?Piggybacking off the monumental success of daily puzzle gameWordle, the New York Times has another fantastically popular word game out now. It’s calledConnections, and if you haven’t played it before, now’s the time to start....

Guest Room Hallowe’en may be over (just), but for this month’s Reality Frights, I’ve got a wonderfully seasonal game for you. It’s the brand-new remake of the grand old mystery puzzlerThe 7th Guest, a game which Bill Gates notably referred to as “The new standard of interactive entertainment.” In fairness to ol’ William, he said this seven months before Doom blew out the new standard’s insides with a 12-gauge shotgun, shunting PC gamers’ tastes away from kitschadventure gamesand toward grisly murder-fests....

Let them fight I’m only starting to think about these questions, as we ramp up to next month’s reveal. Amongst other things, I’ve spent a lot of today trying to puzzle out how much the two projects will be in competition. The obvious route for Rockstar is to keep GTA Online going as a separate experience, rumbling onward with the existing pattern of upgrades and additions, at least until pressure to comprehensively rework the supporting technology becomes irresistible....

Update: Co-founder Sam Houser rubber-stamps earlier reports Original story: Rockstar will make a quick Grand Theft Auto 6 announcement as soon as this week ahead of the first properGTA 6trailer in December - the month of Rockstar’s 25th anniversary - according to a fresh report. The report in question comes fromBloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who has a solid track record for insider accounts of goings-on at Rockstar Games. The story is based on word from “people familiar with its plans”, who asked not to be identified....