There are reports today that Nintendo held behind closed doors Switch 2 demos for prospective game developers at the Gamescom 2023 show in Germany last month. Both VGC and Eurogamer have apparently heard this from their own sources—presumably the developers themselves—with the former claiming the next-gen handheld console will again be running Nvidia hardware.

The demo included an updated version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to make the most of the improved hardware, running at both a higher frame rate as well as a higher resolution. Though everyone seems to be keen to point out this was only a tech demo and not some indication that a remaster was on the cards. Though, y’know, it’s easy money, right?

But the more interesting thing for us PC gamers, is probably the suggestion that Nintendo was demoing the hardware running Epic’s The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo.

The original demo was built to highlight the power of the…

Oleksandr Zinchenko is a Ukrainian footballer that currently plays for Arsenal in the English Premier League and the Ukrainian national side. The full-back and midfielder is still only 27 years old but has already had a storied career, winning the Premier League four times with previous club Manchester City alongside the FA cup and another four EFL Cups. And as well as being a world-class footballer with the world at his feet, Zinchenko loves a bit of Counter-Strike.

In 2023 Zinchenko founded esports organisation PassionUA alongside former NA’VI coach Mykhailo Blaghin (who won the 2017 PGL Major with Gambit). The goal is to assemble a Counter-Strike team consisting of young Ukrainian players that can compete at the top, and shortly after its founding the focus switched to Counter-Strike 2.

PassionUA is obviously a long-term project for Zinchenko and one he seems to be deeply involved in, but today things got even more hands-on than anyone was expecting. A member of Passi…

Stray, the post-apocalyptic puzzle-platformer about a cat, a drone, and a bizarre city populated entirely by robots, is being made into an animated movie that Annapurna Animation head Robert Baird said will be “the first and greatest hopepunk movie that’s ever been made.”

Not being familiar with the term, I immediately assumed that Baird was making up some nonsense ‘-punk’ subgenre in a bid for attention. As it turns out, I was being hasty and unfair: Wikipedia says “hopepunk” was coined in 2017 by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland, and it’s essentially the opposite of grimdark. “Works in the hopepunk subgenre are about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges,” the Wiki page says.

I’m honestly not sure how well Stray fits into that particular definition. I haven’t played it, but the intro, at least, doesn’t sound very hopeful: It’s set in a world where humanity has gone extinct following the failure of its last despe…

The first of two planned beta tests for Sony’s competitive hero shooter, Concord, is underway now. This one’s for pre-orderers (as well as PlayStation Plus subscribers) and both the PS5 and PC versions are included. The next beta, which runs July 18-21, will be open to everyone.

You will have to make a PSN account from the get-go for this one—Sony’s not making that mistake twice—but that nuisance aside, Concord is running smoothly on my slightly aged RTX 2070 Super.

I liked what I played of Concord at a recent preview event, but I wasn’t able to try the PC version then. Returning to the comforting embrace of mouse and keyboard hasn’t turned me into an FPS god against the PlayStation players, but at least I’m not running into walls anymore.

The developers at studio Firewalk, many of whom are ex-Bungie, say they’re after an “aim vs brains” balance that allows players to succeed with either superior shooting or superior tactics and teamplay. It’s a bit pre…

AMD’s RX 7800 XT is a great card for the money, often beating out the RTX 4070 for $100 less. Though it’s not perfect. It struggles to match the GeForce card once ray tracing is enabled, and in terms of power efficiency, it’s nowhere close. That said, power efficiency is one metric that can be messed with, and as Techtesters have since discovered it’s possible to make the RX 7800 XT helluva lot more power efficient and still match the RTX 4070 in many games.

In our testing, the AMD-designed RX 7800 XT sucks around 258W from the wall on average during gaming, hitting peak wattage around 295W. An overclocked card, such as the RX 7800 XT TUF Gaming OC Edition I tested, can consume as much as 270W on average. 

Meanwhile, the RTX 4070 Founders Edition eats up around 197W on average in the same test, with peak wattage of just 232W.

On the two reference cards that works out to:

1080p

• RX 7800 XT: 0.43 Frames/J 

Long time RPG developer Tim Cain (Fallout, The Outer Worlds, Troika Games) has revealed another surprising fact about the Fallout series via his excellent YouTube channel. The games are known for their open-ended RPG gameplay and allowing player freedom, but according to Cain, one of their hallmarks, the so-called pacifist run where you don’t directly kill enemies, was originally an accident.

Cain, a veteran developer who created or had a hand in some of the best CRPGs ever made, has been putting out near-daily vlogs about his work for over half a year now. Some highlights we’ve covered include the “true purpose” of Fallout’s Vaults, a Troika Games Lord of the Rings demo, and a version of The Temple of Elemental Evil made to test a US Department of Defence AI project.

“It was accidental in Fallout,” Cain said of the seminal RPG allowing players to beat the game without killing anyone. “We’d designed the game and done the main quest and all that. And at one point, I belie…

According to a “reliable source” cited by Dualshockers, Creative Assembly is currently working on three new Total War games, with a licensed Star Wars game being one of them.

Since Sega abruptly canceled Hyenas a mere two weeks after its beta, it makes sense for Creative Assembly to have shifted focus back onto the series it’s most famous for. “To put it simply, Creative Assembly was good at offline games in the RTS genre,” Sega boss Haruki Satomi told investors at the time, “but they took on the challenge of developing Hyenas, an online game in the FPS genre… Although the game itself was good, we decided to cancel the development of Hyenas because we did not think it would reach a quality that would satisfy our users.”

Given the success of the Total War: Warhammer trilogy, which is nearly complete bar some DLC, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the series take a stab at another licensed setting like Star Wars. And with three games reportedly in the works, one of t…

Wooting, the makers of our favorite gaming keyboard right now, has surprise dropped a compact keyboard that is surprisingly adorable for a keeb with only three keys.

Three keys? Yeah, the keyboard affectionately called the Wooting UwU is designed with one game in mind, the free-to-play rhythm game called osu!

If you haven’t played the game, it only requires just a few click clacks of a keyboard, along with some swift and melodic movements of a mouse, or even a tablet. The game’s become super popular on social media apps, namely TikTok, because it’s absolutely frantic at times, and Wooting is hopping on the train with its own specially designed keyboard. If you can call it that.

I’ll admit I did think it was a little early for an April Fool’s joke when I first caught sight of the UwU, but then I delved a little deeper into this thing and, yeah, it’s pretty cool. It comes with support for all the excellent features we love about the Wooting Two HE and Wooting 60HE, m…

Looking for a Wordle win? Whether you’re about to tackle a blank board or you’re one guess away from losing, you’ll find all the tips you need to beat today’s puzzle right here. Learn how to make the most of every single line with our general advice, take a peek at a clue for the March 3 (988) game if you’d like a helping hand, or reveal today’s answer if you need to.

Today’s Wordle got off to a great start, and I soon found myself staring at four bright green letters… and one gap. One gap that stayed grey after trying that letter… and that letter, and that letter… Just this once though I ran out of letters to try before I touched the bottom of the board, so it didn’t feel too stressful to eliminate the other possibilities on the way down to my Wordle win. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, March 3

To make yourself clear, you might have to _____ your pur…