I love hearing about all the little bits of developer weirdness that go into making games—cursed rain orbs, hidden centrifuges, and, most recently, the revelation that Grand Theft Auto 3’s weird moon sniping easter egg was due to an unresolved dispute between artists. That last one’s thanks to a dev blog by Rockstar North’s former technical director, Obbe Vermeij.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Vermeij was a technical director at Rockstar North from 1995-2009, working on Grand Theft Auto 3 & 4, Vice City, and San Andreas. On November 11, Vermeij announced he’d be starting a developer blog about his “time at Rockstar North” on Twitter/X.

Vermeij’s insights—both silly dev anecdotes and genuinely fascinating details, like the reveal that GTA 3 had a short-lived deathmatch mode—were all pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the lion’s share of them are gone now, which Vermeij says are due to an email from his former colleagues.

“I got an email fr…

แมนเชสเตอร์ ซิตี้ กำลังเตรียมความพร้อมก่อนเกมยูฟ่า แชมเปี้ยนส์ ลีก เยือน สโลวาน บราติสลาวา วันอังคารนี้ โดย กวาร์ดิโอล่า เจอปัญหาใหญ่ก่อนเกมคือการเสีย โรดรี้ กองกลางตัวรับคนสำคัญที่บาดเจ็บและต้องผ่าตัดพักยาว

จากเกมพรีเมียร์ลีกที่ แมนเชสเตอร์ ซิตี้ บุกเสมอ นิวคาสเซิ่ล ยูไนเต็ด 1-1 กวาร์ดิโอล่า เลือกส่ง ริโก้ ลูอิส ลงตัวจริงตำแหน่งกองกลางคู่กับ ม�…

ปีกทักษะสูงวัย 27 ปีถูกตัดชื่อในเกม แชมเปี้ยนส์ ลีก นัดล่าสุด โดยทาง ปารีส แซงต์-แชร์กแม็ง บุกพ่าย อาร์เซน่อล 0-2 เมื่อวันอังคารที่ผ่านมา

ล่าสุด ขุนพล เปแอสเช กลับมาลงซ้อมที่ศูนย์ฝึกของสโมสรเพื่อเตรียมตัวก่อนเกมลีก เอิง ซึ่งมีคิวออกไปเยือน นีซ วันอาทิตย์นี้ แต่ยังไม่มีเงาของ เดมเบเล่ ปรากฏตัวหลังจากมีปัญหากับ หลุยส์ เอ็นรีเก้

อย่างไรก็ตาม อ�…

Could Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake CPU deliver a massive 45% IPC uplift over the 12th Gen Alder Lake family? That would be a huge increase in per-core, and per-clock performance, and it’s exactly what YouTube channel RedGamingTech is claiming for Intel’s upcoming desktop architecture.

To be clear, Arrow Lake is 100% a thing. It’s been listed on Intel’s public roadmaps, mentioned in earnings calls, the lot. As of right now, we know it’s definitely coming some time next year. Intel has also confirmed it will be one of a new generation of so-called “disaggregated” CPUs, which is another way of saying it will be built up from a number of tiles, or chiplets, like AMD’s desktop CPUs.

What we haven’t heard from Intel, is any indication of performance expectations. Enter RedGamingTech. They claim Arrow Lake will deliver a massive 45% IPC uplift over Alder Lake and thus a similar improvement over the latest 13th Gen Raptor Lake chips, which are architecturally largely the same as …

Marvel Rivals, the new Overwatch-style third-person hero shooter, has a killer theme song that I heard several times while waiting to log in as its closed beta was hammered by legions of other players trying to do the same. After about an hour, however, the servers seem to have stabilized and I managed to get in and play a match.

The servers went online a few hours ago and it seems like they weren’t quite prepared for the number of players who want to team fight as classic Marvel heroes, like Spider-Man, Loki, and Storm. Several players reported being stuck on the title screen on the Steam forums, and some say they were disconnected when they finally entered a match.

On Twitch, Marvel Rivals has already climbed into the top 10 most viewed games with a little over 68K active viewers, putting it above Fortnite’s 59K. Most streamers are in and playing now, but for a while there only the first 20 or so made it past the main menu. Even FPS streamer Shroud, who has gathered …

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A couple years back some developers asked a question: What if you had the block-bustin, ball-bouncing, pachinko action of Peggle, but it was a weird roguelike deckbuild-esque thing where you toss magic balls and are a goblin? The result was Peglin, and here in 2024 Peglin has finally hit its 1.0 release.

The 1.0 release adds the final four levels of the Crucible, the ascending tiers of difficulty, a new miniboss, and a new relic. There’s also a rework of a particularly annoying early game boss, the Leshy, and a host of other balance changes that make Peglin a little less frustrating at times.

Peglin has you, as a little goblin, tossing balls in order to break pegs that defeat enemies. The interesting twist is that you build up a sackfull of special balls to toss with different effects—you know, extra bouncy or explosive or whatever. That custom-build bag becomes your deck of tools to take out the enemies that stand between Goblins everywhere and freedom.

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…