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Diablo 4’s fifth season will have an interesting-sounding new mode—an activity called Infernal Hordes that’s something like a roguelite. Using an item called in Infernal Compass, players will be able to enter the Realm of Hatred and fight timed waves of enemies. Those enemies will drop burning aether, and between waves you’ll be able to choose “Boons & Banes” that let you get more aether. 

Get through enough waves and you’ll fight the Fell Council, a group of three randomly selected from a pool of five minibosses. Beat those and you’ll get to spend your burning aether on the Spoils of Hell: Equipment, Materials, Gold, and Greater Equipment—which guarantees an item with a powerful Greater Affix.

Infernal Hordes will be available to test on the Diablo 5 Public Test Realm from June 25 to July 2, per Blizzard’s What You Need To Know post on the subject.

The Infernal Compasses used to take on an Infernal Hordes challenge will be gotten by clearing endgame bosses, Helltides, Nightmare Dungeons, and Whispers. There’ll be eight tiers of Infernal Compasses reached by upgrading your compass using scrolls found in the game, with higher tiers of compas…

Remember when predicting (guessing) the big Steam sale dates was basically a national pastime? It seems so long ago, and frankly a little bit weird in hindsight. (It was also very stressful for those of us tasked with writing Steam sale announcement news.) Now, though, we can plan our whole year in advance, because Valve has revealed the dates for every Steam sale and fest coming in 2023.

Valve changed its Steam sale structure in September 2022, cutting the Lunar New Year sale from its schedule in favor of a more evenly spaced seasonal schedule. The reasoning was simple: Lunar New Year sales typically dropped just a few weeks after the wallet-demolishing Winter sales, and it was just too much Steam sale in too little time. 

But then Valve hit us with a Chinese New Year sale instead, a slightly scaled-down event that kept the deal train running. And it’s not letting up: Between the big seasonal events, the Steam Next Fests—three of them—and various themed fests popping up throughout the year, the remainder of 2023 isn’t going to go any easier on your bank balance.

Here’s what’s coming through the year—aside from the Mystery Fest, which is …

Helldivers 2 has proudly announced it’ll be asking the bravest question a game has ever asked—”yes, the flamethrower’s cool, but what if we added more flamethrowers?”

The upcoming premium Warbond, dubbed “Freedom’s Flame” features two new primary weapons, a new secondary weapon, a booster, two armour sets (with a new passive), a title, paint for your mech, hellpod and pelican, fresh capes and—most importantly—the ability to finally chest-bump your mates.

Here’s the full run down of the new kit when it comes to toasting bugs:

• The SG-451 Cookout, a pump-action shotty that fires “a burst of incendiary phosphorus pellets.”
• The FLAM-66 Torcher, a primary weapon that’s also a flamethrower—a type previously relegated to support weaponry.
• The P-72 Crisper, which is a secondary weapon that also throws flames, but in a compact enough form to fit into your Super Earth standard issue freedom purse and/or tote bag.
• The “Fiery Drop” booster which, hilariously, turns your Hellpods into incendiary bombs.
• The I-09 Heatseeker and I-102 Draconaught armour sets, which come with a much-needed passive that reduces…
  

Hogwarts Legacy turned out to be one of the biggest games of 2023, with Warner Bros. boasting it was the “best-selling game of the year in the entire industry worldwide.” The expectation was that the game wouldn’t receive an expansion or DLC but, with over 22 million sales, it looks like the thinking may have changed at the publisher.

A new report by Bloomberg tells the story of the chaotic development of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Developer Rocksteady Studios, owned by Warner Bros., moved from the singleplayer Arkham games into developing a multiplayer live service title, and the transition was a bumpy one that’s ended up with the publisher taking an astonishing $200 million loss on that game.

At the end of the report, however, it is mentioned in passing that while Rocksteady doesn’t have a next main project to focus on, Warner Bros. is keeping it busy in the wizarding world: 

“Many of the studio’s employees are now helping to develop a new ‘director’s cut’ version of Hogwarts Legacy. At the same time, according to people familiar, the studio leaders are looking to pitch a new single-player game, which would return Rocksteady to its roots.”

Helldivers 2 has been 2024’s live service hit, a lot of which is down to how developer Arrowhead manages the overarching Galactic War with constant Major Orders, while being highly reactive to player behaviour. Usually that finds expression with things like exceptional rewards for exceptional heroics, though sometimes it even bleeds outside of the game itself: such as when the Helldivers chose to save a kids’ hospital for no rewards, and Arrowhead responded with a $4,300 donation to Save the Children.

Now for the first time some of the real world has found its way into Helldivers 2. Last week an update from Crowdstrike caused global IT chaos, affecting over 8.5 million Windows and Linux machines worldwide: this was serious business, impacting airlines, train companies, health and emergency services, and all the way down to whether you could buy a coffee. Loading up Helldivers 2 currently, which sees you begin the game on the bridge of your Destroyer spacecraft, sees the following “Systems Update” message: 

“A cybersecurity software update has caused an unexpected outage for all Destroyer surveillance systems. All personnel are ordered…

“Get good” this, “player toxicity” that, none of it really matters when you’re talking about just having fun with a cool videogame in this bitch of a life. That said, I have a very high standard for judging who has truly “gotten good” at soulsborne games: Those streamers who play with dance pads or Donkey Konga drums, challenge and speedrunners, and the guy in my college dorm who played Dark Souls 1 windowed on his MacBook Air without a controller or mouse⁠—he used WASD to move and arrow keys for the camera⁠—all come to mind. Now, MouseInATutu on YouTube joins that ancient and honorable company thanks to their predilection for the most excruciating challenge runs I’ve ever seen.

MouseInATutu goes in as a rune level one Wretch, limited to whatever weapons can be wielded with base stats and the Soreseal talismans. That’s already a tall order, but the biggest thing setting MouseInATutu apart is their abstention from rolling or blocking, two of the most basic functions in soulsborne combat. Instead, they rely entirely on timing and positioning, running out of the way of attacks and occasionally jumping to dodge otherwise-unavoidable moves like Rellana’s…

Everyone’s favourite DIY hardware repair outfit iFixit has announced a new partnership with Logitech to make it easier to repair mice. The slight snag, for now, is that it’s currently limited to a pair of non-gaming mice models.

iFixit says that from this summer it will offer “genuine parts for Logitech MX Master and MX Anywhere mouse models.” Strictly speaking, neither of those are part of Logitech’s G Series of gaming mice, though the MX Master is pitched as a performance mouse.

Of course, you’ve got to start somewhere and it’s perhaps not reasonable to expect iFixit and Logitech to come out of the gate with parts listings for every Logitech mouse, ever (just please hurry with the Logitech G502 Lightspeed – Katie).

Currently, if you link through to the new iFixit repair site for the MX Master, you can buy replacement batteries, feet and screws. And that’s it. There are no sensors, buttons, switches or wheels, for now. The same applies to the Logitech Anywhere series, which is even less likely to be a gamer’s choice.

Still, if you did need a battery replacement for either of these mice, you’ve now got a one-stop shop from which you can both order the par…

There are currently three Silent Hill games we know about in the works. There’s Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2, a prequel set in Japan called Silent Hill F, and No Code’s Silent Hill: Townfall. But there’s also a game-adjacent project called Silent Hill: Ascension being made by Genvid Entertainment, an interactive streaming series where viewers can vote to decide how parts of the story turn out.

Ascension’s set to begin on October 31, and while the marketing makes a big deal about how viewers will “shape Silent Hill canon forever”, there’s plenty of skepticism about what sounds like Twitch Chat Plays Trauma-based Survival Horror, especially regarding the fact the mobile version mentions in-app purchases.

Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid and executive producer of Silent Hill: Ascension, has been explaining the concept on Twitter, clarifying that all the episodes can be watched for free, either on mobile or other platforms, and “if people are afraid of weird F2P monetization, it’s not a game. We don’t sell magic swords to level you up for PvP arenas.”

Navok compares the in-app purchase to a Twitch subscription, saying, “IAP is similar to Twitch channel perks an…

In the same way it’s satisfying to slowly transform a pile of dirty dishes into clean ones or a level full of living Doom enemies into dead ones, I remember getting a kind of enjoyment out of defragging the hard drive of my 486 in the late ’90s. The visualization was a big part of it, that Windows app depicting a hard drive slowly transforming from messy navy to a cleaned-up sky blue via segments that became red as they were picked up. But the sound was a pleasingly physical thing too, a chuntering reminder that all this digital data had a real-world presence.

If you too feel a weird tingle of nostalgia for the act of defragging a hard drive, though not the necessity of actually doing it, have I got good news for you. Engineer Dennis Morello has recreated the experience of defragging your C drive in Windows 98 and you can run it in your browser right now.

In a blog post explaining this delightfully quixotic act, Morello says, “One of the biggest challenges was implementing a defragmentation algorithm that felt authentic.” The custom algorithm he came up with randomly selects how many clusters to process at a time, and adjusts the speed based on which imaginary drive …

Longtime YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach has revealed that he is directing and starring in an adaptation of Iron Lung, last year’s breakout indie horror game from Dusk developer David Szymanski. Markiplier has uploaded a teaser trailer of the project to his YouTube channel.

Szymanski’s most famous creation, Dusk, is one of the tent pole entries of the recent retro shooter renaissance. 2022’s Iron Lung, meanwhile, shares a similar retro rendering aesthetic but goes for more of a “claustrophobic horror” vibe than a “sliding around at 60mph serving both barrels to cultists” one. You play as the sole crewmember of the titular Iron Lung, a windowless submarine under an ocean of blood. You have to navigate this alien seafloor with the help of various analogue instruments and a grainy, black and white camera mounted to the exterior of the sub while something stirs out there in the rusty depths.

Markiplier, meanwhile, uploaded a full let’s play of the game last year. If the fact that he’s making a movie out of the thing didn’t clue you in, the YouTuber loved it, declaring, “That was excellent, that was incredible; I really loved that experience” at the end of the playth…

NASA’s James Webb space telescope was launched in late 2021, and since summer 2022 the space agency’s boffins have been releasing the remarkable images of the universe it has taken. These are stunning pictures, the kind that make you realise what ants we all are and question humanity’s place in the universe, and one of the latest really makes you question things.

I mean, you’ve seen it already. That is a zoomed-in fragment from this image taken by the James Webb, and it’s a near-perfect cosmic rendering of a question mark. I’ve got a minor obsession with these images and have had a few framed, even my desktop background is one of them, but I’ve never seen anything that made me question my spirituality more.

We’ll get to the theorising about what this actually might be in a moment, but first: the bad jokes. The reason this hopped out at me wasn’t just the astonishing image itself, but the fact that I first saw it thanks to a Reddit thread where most folks’ instant reaction was to relate this cosmic occurrence to videogames.

RemarkableToast notes: “Looks like NASA has a quest to turn in.” OldJames47 reckons “it’s a 10 Billion Lightyear escort quest but the NPC mo…

The Stardew Valley 1.6.4 update is now live on PC and it is surprisingly beefy, including new content, balance changes, visual improvements, fixes, and gameplay tweaks.

The 1.6.4 update was announced on April 10 with virtually no detail, as is the Eric Barone way, except that it would include “a new fishing thing, and some new mining-related stuff” and was expected to be ready “sometime next week,” which of course is now this week.

The mine stuff includes 20 new “alternate” mine layouts and 20 new volcano mine layouts, which appear after you’ve met certain conditions, while the fishing thing is a “fish frenzy,” which I assume means something like a group of piranha going bonkers, minus any actual deboning of cows—this is Stardew Valley, after all.

There are also four new “fairy styles,” a new cutscene that will play after you’ve helped your new neighbors expand their family, space for eight additional non-fish items in fish tanks, and more options in the Raccoon Shop. The Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Turkish, and Korean translations of the game have undergone edits, and there are numerous fixes for mod makers and users.

One of the more i…

Space Marines in Warhammer: 40k are so legendary that even I, as someone who has not painted a single miniature, am aware of how terrifying they’re supposed to be. Just to be certain, however, here’s a list of facts about these genetically-modified walking tanks that I’m finding out today:

• They have two hearts, one of which can pump adrenaline and steroids.
• They’re eight to ten feet tall (they do not start out this way).
• They have a small, liver-like organ that clots wounds instantly.
• They can shut down half of their brain to sleep, letting them rip and tear for hundreds of hours.
• They have a special stomach that lets them eat basically anything. They also have a separate organ that lets them eat things to gain their memories.
• They have three lungs, because why not?

I’m actually having to stop myself, because this isn’t even a third of the absurd genetic modifications a Space Marine is outfitted with. This legendary allergy to dying makes them pretty dang hard to represent in a videogame, as per an interview with Yann François, brand and creative manager for Saber Interactive’s upcoming Space Marine 2 (the ful…