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Canada’s Capybara Games is a special developer. Its early history may have been work-for-hire but it’s now probably best known for the magical Superbrothers: Swords and Sworcery EP, and most recently 2018’s Below. Before those two, though, Capybara made the best Might & Magic game I’ve ever played: Clash of Heroes on the Nintendo DS.

Published by Ubisoft in 2009, Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes maybe didn’t get the acclaim it deserved at launch (or the sales). But word-of-mouth saw its reputation grow and grow, eventually leading to releases of a slightly reworked version on PC and consoles (because the original game used two screens). It is one of the most characterful and ingenious puzzle RPGs you’ll ever play, oozing smarts and surprises, and manages to wring more out of its central mechanic than you’d believe possible.

This gem is now getting a definitive edition from the retro specialists over at DotEmu, whose most recent project was the well-received Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. It’s not too far away, either, and will launch this summer on Steam and the Ubisoft store, as well as consoles. 

The trailer promises “refi…

In the most recent patch notes for Elden Ring update 1.13, FromSoftware covered plenty of small issues and bugs, most of which aren’t utterly game-changing. However, alongside an improvement to Torrent’s summon system, players are now also getting a helpful tip—check your peripherals and your mouse because they could be causing some framerate issues. 

“In the PC version, unstable framerate may be caused by third-party applications that control mouse behavior,” the patch notes say. “Deactivating these third-party applications may improve performance. The version number of this update shown at the lower right corner of the Title Screen will be as follows: App Ver. 1.13. Regulation Ver. 1.13.1.”

On release, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC had a couple of small problems, such as a micro-stutter that had the capacity to wreak absolute havoc. In an effort to try and fix this issue and others that players were reporting, FromSoftware gave a similar solution: “In the PC version, the frame rate may not be stable when playing the game while running a mouse-control related app.” To try and fix this issue, the safest bet would be to stop running the mouse-contro…

MSI has outed its new X870 and X870E motherboards for AMD AM5 processors, including the new Ryzen 9000-series chips. The big news is ATX 3.1 support and a big boost in PCIe power supply.

MSI says the boards’ new supplemental PCIe Power feature delivers a major boost in overall board and GPU power supply. That could well come in handy, what with expectations of ever greater power draw from upcoming GPUs, particularly Nvidia graphics cards like the rumoured 550 W RTX 5090.

The power boost comes courtesy of an integrated 8-pin PCIe power connector on the motherboard itself. Conceptually, it’s a little like the supplemental power connectors that already feed power to the CPU socket.

The PCIe Power feature pairs with support for the new ATX 3.1 standard to enable 2.5x “power excursion” for the PCIe graphics slot. In plain English, that ups power delivery from 66 W to a maximum of 165 W for the primary PEG-16 slot.

Of course, high-end GPUs suck down a lot more juice than that. The balance will come courtesy of the new ATX 3.1 12V-2×6 power connector for graphics cards, which is very similar to, and backwards compatible with the troubled 12VHPWR connector that…

So far, my day has consisted of scrolling through Twitter and examining all the horrifying designs that Dragon’s Dogma 2 players have managed to make now that the pre-release character creator is available. 

Even if you’re not planning to play Dragon’s Dogma 2, the character creator is currently free to try out on Steam and provides the perfect way to make the persona of your dreams or, more likely, nightmares. You can customise your Arisen, the playable character, as well as the Main Pawn, someone who will follow you through your journey. And if all the horrifyingly detailed amalgamations I’ve seen floating around are anything to go by, it’s also an incredibly creative and detailed tool. 

I’ve seen creatures that seem closer to a sleep paralysis demon than anything considered normal—even by fantasy RPG standards. Some of these designs would give me a heart attack if I stumbled across them in a game. So, instead of staring at all these ungodly creatures, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and begin to design characters—I just hope I don’t make more accidentally hideous creations. 

Apart from genuinely making me feel quite …

Intel fired a pretty hefty 5% of its workforce in 2023. Now reports are coming in that the company is planning yet more layoffs this year.

Bloomberg reports these new cuts could be announced next week. Currently, Intel has around 110,000 employees. The report doesn’t quote a specific figure, only saying that Intel plans to “eliminate thousands of jobs”.

Still, anything measured in thousands will represent multiple percentage points of the existing workforce. Moreover, this news adds to the broader negative vibe at Intel of late, what with those crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, not to mention Intel’s woefully inadequate response to the debacle.

As things stand, Intel still doesn’t have a clear idea of all the reasons why those chips are crashing, it isn’t recalling them, it hasn’t stopped selling them, it won’t say if warranties will be extended or how many chips it thinks has been damaged. Nice.

Bloomberg also reports that it expects Intel’s revenues for the second quarter of this year to be flat compared with the same period in 2023, with the possibility that the company will begin show some signs of growth in the second half of the year.

Despite a…

Meta, the social network formerly known as Facebook that is definitely going to rename itself Facebook in a few years, has announced that its metaverse division has made a huge loss, again, despite last year’s stunning addition of legs to avatars. The VR and metaverse division, Meta Reality Labs, lost $4.279 billion in the fourth quarter (compared to a mere $3.304 billion in the same quarter last year), with revenue of $727 million ($877 million a year ago).

The Reality Labs division used to be known as the Oculus division, before Meta decided it didn’t like that name, and is now the umbrella under which both VR and the wider metaverse project is accounted for. This was the quarter that saw Meta increase the price of the Quest 2 headsets by $100, and launched the ludicrously priced Meta Quest Pro headset ($1500), which explains some of the revenue dip. But the real headline is that Meta doesn’t care about these losses, seeing the metaverse project as its long-term future rather than the current money pit it is.

Meta says it’s continuing to invest in the upcoming Meta Quest 3 headset, which is aimed at the broader market, the Meta Quest Pro which is intended as…

One reason people play life sims, says former Sims studio head Rod Humble, is that they offer a noncommittal way to explore self-identity. Players can try on lifestyles and experiences they’re curious about, but if they feel uncomfortable, they can always hit the eject button by deciding that they’re playing a game about their sims rather than as them. That tendency to experiment and then retreat was completely apparent during focus groups, according to Humble, because players would deny doing things he watched them do.

“Remember, we’ve just watched these people play the game,” Humble told me, “and I had people come out and lie to us, to the whole group, about what they just did.”

Humble hasn’t worked on The Sims for a while now—he’s currently making a new life sim called Life By You—and he mostly avoided direct references to the EA series when I spoke to him at GDC last week, but it’s obvious that he was referring to The Sims when describing these focus group fabrications.

“I remember a bunch of young guys,” said Humble, “and they get into the room, it’s a mixed room, and we’re like, ‘Hey, what did you do?’ and they’re like, ‘Murd…

Two months after saying that Cyberpunk 2077’s massive 2.0 patch and Phantom Liberty expansion would be the last of the “big updates” to the game, CD Projekt has surprised everyone with an announcement that update 2.1 is coming in December with “new and hotly anticipated gameplay elements.”

It’s not overstating the matter to say that Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc is one of the most impressive videogame turnarounds I’ve ever seen. From an infamously catastrophic launch in 2020 to a highly-regarded RPG today, the whole thing has been positively breathtaking. And now, with the game finally in proper shape, CD Projekt said in September that it was finally turning its attention to the sequel.

“2.0 and Phantom Liberty are the last big updates,” game director Gabe Amatangelo told us at the time. “We’ll do a little something more, but those are the last big ones.”

But that “little something more” sounds like it might be pretty big: “On December 5th, the same day Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition hits the shelves, we’ll release a free Update 2.1 introducing new and hotly anticipated gameplay elements,” CD Projekt tweeted today. 

To ensure everyone knows…