The latest game in the first-person puzzler legacy of Portal, The Talos Principle 2, is getting pretty positive reception. Developed by Croteam and Devolver Digital, the game inevitably cribs some design logic and concepts from Portal and Portal 2, seeing as they’re in the same genre. Normally you’d just acknowledge the giants on whose shoulders you’re standing and move on. You wouldn’t hire them to make fun of you.

That’s just what The Talos Principle 2 has done, however, bringing on voice of malevolent AI GLaDOS and all-around voice acting heroine Ellen McClain to roast them in a short video called GLaDOS Plays The Talos Principle 2, embedded above.

In the little trailer GLaDOS takes Croteam to task for mimicking her brilliant incandescent particle gates, cubes, portaling devices, and other such innovations. She also makes fun of their robots for taking on human form, like cowards, and reveals a heretofore unknown fondness for cats.

Publisher Devolver describes T…

Have you ever asked yourself “What if The Brave Little Toaster was a sports movie?” No? Me neither, but here’s Toasterball anyway, a hysterical-looking little party game about toasters competing in a professional tennis or pong-like sport by shooting toast in the air to deflect balls. It’s a physics-based sportslike that’s definitely laser-focused on the delight of local multiplayer—either in person or via Steam’s Remote Play Together.

“Play against your friends in this unconventional tournament, where toasters are athletes and the laws of physics are merely a suggestion,” reads the store description. An apt one, I think.

It’s a good setup for a party game, a two-button control scheme that holds down one of the two pieces of toast in your toaster. The longer you hold it down, the higher it goes when you pop. When your toast comes out the toaster jumps, letting you move around.

When someone scores a random gameplay variant goes into effect. This is st…

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 made an appearance at today’s Opening Night Live showcase at Gamescom, revealing a brief gameplay teaser for the upcoming sequel to the middle-ages action RPG. Henry is back, and the world’s most plain-faced protagonist seems to have one goal in mind: Relentless swordfights with as many 15th century Bohemians as he can manage.

Henry begins the trailer getting threatened by a crown-wearing jagoff. But it’s not long before he escapes to do things that heroes do, like riding a beloved steed across the sunset-splashed Bohemian plains, where everyone has inexplicable British accents and every tree has Medieval Unfortunates hanging from its branches. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to tell that there’s a civil war on. That’s how visual storytelling works.

Henry passes through some taverns, some muddied streets, some more idyllic fields—all of which look lovely—and finally, after another brief diversion in the hanging zone, we ge…

Larian Studios has confirmed it’s working on FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.2 support in Baldur’s Gate 3—a much needed upgrade for anyone gaming on an AMD, Intel, or older Nvidia graphics card.

The developer in an earlier blog post confirmed the upgrade to FSR 2.2 is expected to happen “closer to September 6”, the date when the game is set to launch on PlayStation 5.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has two upscaling technologies to choose from at launch: FSR 1.0 and DLSS.

In my testing, DLSS is the far better option, delivering decent fidelity and a big performance uplift while enabled. The issue is DLSS is a proprietary technology limited to Nvidia 20/30/40-series graphics cards. FSR 1.0, on the other hand, has the potential to deliver even greater performance gains on all manner of graphics card, regardless of manufacturer, but at the expense of visual quality. While useful in a pinch, FSR 1.0 just doesn’t quite cut it.

FSR 2.2 is a major upgrade over FSR 1.0. W…

Refresh your daily Wordle with our tips, give your opening guesses a clear direction with a hint for the June 20 (1097) game, or go and grab yourself a quick win with today’s answer. Your game, your choice, our help.

I’m sure I could have finished this one a row or so earlier if my mind hadn’t completely skipped over one key yellow along the way. A simple mistake—and one I hope you don’t make now I’ve mentioned how it caught me out today. Good luck, and have fun with your Wordle.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, June 20

Smells, generally pleasant ones, might be described using this word. Think of flowers, fresh laundry hanging in the sun, and expertly crafted perfumes. Some dogs are very good at picking up these with their noses.   

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wor…

Find a fresh angle for your daily Wordle with our tips and tricks, give yourself a helpful hint for the August 27 (799) puzzle if you need a hand, or skip straight to the win with today’s Wordle answer. Whatever you’re looking for, you’ll find it here.

Oh, that’s annoying. I’d have quickly cleared today’s puzzle in just two goes if only I’d swapped one letter for another. Even so, I can’t exactly grumble at a lightning-fast win in three. I hope your game goes as well as mine did and you find today’s Wordle answer in your first couple of guesses.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, August 27

This word is generally considered the opposite of war, and John Lennon famously said we should give today’s answer a chance while being interviewed in bed. There are two different vowels in here. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, a vowel is used twice in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle …

Some Counter-Strike 2 players are receiving VAC bans after installing the latest AMD driver update, and Valve says the culprit is an anti-lag feature. Driver update 23.10.1, released earlier this week, fixed stuttering and crash issues with CS2, and added driver support for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Forza Motorsport, and The Lords of the Fallen. It also added CS2 support for Anti-Lag+, AMD’s Nvidia Reflex-equivalent tech that lowers input latency.

Following a Reddit thread that raised the alarm about inexplicable bans among AMD users, the official CS2 Twitter account confirmed the cause and issued a statement advising all AMD users to turn off Anti-Lag+ until the issue is fixed.

“If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban,” the post reads. “Once AMD ships an update we can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban.”

Anti-Lag+, which is only supported in the RX 7000 ser…

It’s fair to say that Starfield is Bethesda’s most important game release in years, probably the biggest thing it’s done since rejuvenating the Fallout series back in 2008. And Bethesda head of publishing Pete Hines recently made it clear that the studio is taking the job of bringing that game to life seriously—and that he’ll brook no suggestion that the studio is half-assing any part of it.

Over the weekend, former game developer Mark Kern, whose past credits include StarCraft, World of Warcraft, and Firefall, shared his thoughts on “the physiognomy of start screens.”

“The start screen of a game can reveal a lot about how rushed the team was and how much pride they took in their work,” Kern tweeted. “Starfield’s start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn’t care.

“Start screens are often done at the very end of development. Teams are too busy making the core game. It’s quite common for the start scr…

January saw the closure of Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service and, while Google managed the process well and no-one was left out of pocket, now we know the big reason why. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been in the headlines for saying it will oppose Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and as part of that it released various statistics about the games industry, including the cloud gaming market. It makes painful reading for most companies in the sector apart from, funnily enough, Microsoft.

The CMA’s provisional findings include a section on cloud gaming that includes statistics on how many people used various cloud gaming services. It doesn’t provide exact headcounts but each service’s market share as a percentage range, over the period 2021-2022, based on monthly active users, and the report makes clear these figures are based on information provided directly by the companies concerned. These percentages also reflec…