Your typical gaming rig doesn’t need anywhere near 256GB of RAM, but we do use our PCs for things other than gaming. Things like content creation or virtual machines come to mind. Either that or running Chrome with a hundred tabs open.

If you are one of the few that needs capacious amounts of system memory, you’re in luck. MSI has begun the process of rolling out Intel 600 and 700-series motherboard BIOSes that support up to 256GB of system RAM. These BIOSes are in addition to those it has already rolled out that add support for 256GB of RAM to its AM5 motherboard range.

When Intel’s 12th Gen family and 600-series motherboards launched, the maximum amount of VRAM you could install was 128GB. For most of us that was fine, but when you start factoring in RAM-hogging things like virtual machines, software development, multi-channel music production or any of a thousand other things, even 128GB can be limiting.

Then came non-binary memory, which meant you could buy mod…

It may come as no surprise that Intel is releasing new lower-power versions of its 13th Gen chips. These new 65W versions of its Raptor Lake processors promise to deliver much the same spec as their more power-hungry counterparts, albeit with more moderate clock speeds to help keep demands low on the system. That should mean it’s these chips that end up in cheaper 13th Gen prebuilt gaming PCs from here on out.

In terms of the differences you can expect, we have the Core i9 13900 for example. This chip contains the same eight Performance-cores and 16 Efficient-cores as the K-series Core i9 13900K. However, the Core i9 13900 is rated to a 5.6GHz boost clock—200MHz slower than the full-fat Core i9 13900K and the same as the mobile Core i9 13980HX. 

Otherwise there are all the benefits of Raptor Lake architecture here in full, so I’d argue it’s a pretty sweet deal. Or at least not something I’d worry about if I were buying a prebuilt PC today—this chip seems…

Back in 2019, a live-action version of Final Fantasy 14—the critically-acclaimed MMORPG with an expanded free trial, you know the one—was in the works. Announced as a collaboration between Sony Pictures Television and Hivemind (responsible for Netflix’s The Witcher series), it seemed like a natural pairing.

Unfortunately, it looks like that particular project is dead in the water according to Hivemind’s co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani on Twitter. When asked for an update on the project, he responds that it’s “Dead.” He continues to write: 

“We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig & [Jake Thornton] along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board. The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk. Amazon came closest.”

Jake Thornton, a scriptwriter on the project, also noted that the project’s failure “was a real result of Covid unfortunately. We took i…

In what scientists will someday call “a marketing collabo of supernatural potency,” Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone has revealed that he wants to get some kind of crossover going with Fortnite. Specifically, he’d like to transplant a few of the citizens of his sedate farming sim into Epic’s Omniverse, handing them a combat shotgun and letting them go ham on other people’s licenced trademarks.

Barone was asked about his willingness to do a Stardew/Fortnite crossover by YouTuber Panedwards (via IGN). “I’ve been trying to,” came Barone’s reply, who particularly wants “Pam in Fortnite” but is “open to doing a collab” in general.

If you’re not up to date with the latest edition of the Stardew Yellow Pages, Pam is the character who’s a crusty, jaded old diner waitress in everything but, ah, her actual career. She’s the Pelican Town bus driver and Penny’s mother, a salt-of-the-earth working class kind of person who’s seen it all and knows what it’s like when times get tough.…

Valve’s let slip a preview for SteamOS 3.5, the system that runs the Steam Deck, among a few other things, and you can now opt-in to an updated build rich with visual improvements and tweaks—among a few other fixes. 

The biggest single change is that Valve has rebalanced the Steam Deck’s default colors. It’s now using the sRGB primary colors, meaning it has a slightly warmer and more vibrant set of colors by default. By going to Settings -> Adjust Display Colors you can tune Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature, either with a test image or whatever game you’re running. You can also swap back to the previous color set or to a boosted color range that’s more vibrant but will possibly introduce some gradient clipping.

The big new feature is that a Steam Deck can now support High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) on external monitors, the trick being of course that the display and your USB-C adapter have to support it. Still, good news for tho…

Valve has put out a blog post revealing that Team Fortress 2 will be getting a “major update” this summer⁠, which is to say that it won’t just be getting the usual injection of new cosmetic items, but a whole smorgasbord of “items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?”

The only catch is that it will all have to be provided by the community: Valve has put out a call for Steam Workshop submissions to be made by May 1 for this “as-yet unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed) (unless you want to develop summer-themed stuff) update.”

To put things in perspective, Team Fortress 2’s last major update came just last October with “Scream Fortress 14.” If that doesn’t sound too bad, I would like to note that TF2’s last non-Scream Fortress major update was all the way back in 2017 with Jungle Inferno. This additionally seems to have been the last time TF2 received new content made in-house by Valve with …

One of the best things about Starfield is mods. There are already hundreds of them, ranging from the silly to the sublime—we’ve got a running list of the best Starfield mods, to help you stay on top of them all. There’s just one drawback: If you use mods (or console commands), your Starfield achievements will be disabled. That’s a real problem! The solution? You guessed it: A mod.

The mod in question is called Baka Achievement Enabler (SFSE), and what it does is very simple: “Prevents achievements from being disabled with mods or when using the console.” It’s not too difficult to get running, either. You’ll need to use the Starfield Script Extender—that’s the SFSE bit in the mod title—which enables “additional scripting capabilities and functionality” in Starfield. Once that’s in place, grab the Baka Achievement Enabler mod, extract it into your Starfield root folder (the one with the starfield.exe file) and run the game using the sfse_loader.exe fil…

Some game announcements just immediately grab my attention, and Vampire Therapist is definitely one of them. Honestly, it had me at the title—I mean, Vampire Therapist, there’s no way you don’t want to know more about that—but the underlying concept looks genuinely interesting too: It’s a dark comedy narrative adventure about a cowboy who was turned into a vampire in the 1800s and is now seeking help coming to terms with immortality and finding meaning in his unlife.

The lead character in Vampire Therapist is Sam, who apparently still insists on dressing in his old-time cowboy duds. Guiding him on his journey to self-discovery is Andromachos, a 3,000-year-old vampire who’s left behind his life as a warrior and assassin in order to become a therapist for the undead. After some time together, the two team up to help a bizarre array of clients including “self-hating vampires, agoraphobic social media addicts, supernatural narcissists, and victims of centuries…

In a surprise move, Frictional Games has introduced Steam Workshop support for its foundational horror game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The change came four days before the launch of the latest game in the series, The Bunker, and brings The Dark Descent more in line with later games from Frictional like Soma and Amnesia: Rebirth.

“We are well aware (and in awe) of the countless mods and custom stories made throughout the years,” Frictional wrote in its announcement. “And now we’ve finally ensured you can publish and install them smoothly via Steam.”

Frictional has historically been friendly to modding already, making level building tools for its in-house HPL engine freely available and including a “custom story” option right in the main menu of compatible games, making accessing user-made campaigns a cinch. Previously, mods for The Dark Descent could primarily be found on ModDB and NexusMods.

The Steam Workshop compatibility offers more convenience for players who …

A very specific quirk, but an entertaining one: Google spits out results related to the Book of Genesis from Wikipedia and the website of The Holy See and the band Genesis when you search for some terms related to Sega’s Mega Drive console. 

It looks like Google’s picked up on the fact that Sega’s Mega Drive videogame console from the late ’80s was named the Sega Genesis in North America, and uses the terms Mega Drive and Genesis interchangeably for results. However, as Twitter user CaptainBalkon found out, it gets its Genesises (Genesus?) confused.

If you search for the specific term, “Book of Megadrive” (Megadrive needs to be all one word, weirdly), you end up with the Wikipedia page for the Book of Genesis on the first page, and The Holy See’s webpage for the holy text. Though as other users have experimented with the phenomena, you can get it to spit out all sorts of interesting results.

The search engine will spit out the song ‘I Can’t Dance’ by Genesis i…

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…

All the help you need to win today’s Wordle is right here. Keep on scrolling and you’ll discover everything from general tips and guides to a handcrafted clue for the November 21 (885) game. Need a little more? No problem. Today’s Wordle answer is never more than a click away.

My second guess practically handed me today’s Wordle on a plate—it’s a shame I couldn’t quite see it at the time, and ended up fumbling around for all sorts of odd words that perhaps only exist inside my own head. Still, a messy win in four is much better than no win at all.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, November 21

Today’s word is a type of instrument, one that produces sound using a combination of keys, hammers, and strings. Whether in grand or its smaller upright size, it’s not the sort of musical object someone could carry around with them. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is …

People like the Fallout TV series on Amazon an awful lot—we called it “the best Fallout since New Vegas”—and that seems to be having quite the spillover effect for the Fallout videogames. All of the games in the long-running post-nuclear RPG series have seen a significant jump in players, and they’ve also muscled their way into Steam’s top-selling games chart.

SteamDB noted on Twitter (via Eurogamer) that “Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam with the release of the Fallout TV series.”

Fallout 4 is the biggest beneficiary, spiking up to more than 83,000 concurrent players over the weekend, compared to a high of 24,000 the weekend before, a few days ahead of Amazon’s Fallout launch. Fallout 76 arguably set an even more impressive mark by surpassing 39,000 concurrent players on the weekend following the TV series release, a new all-time high on Steam for the four-year-old game. Fallout 3—my favorite of the Bethesda Fallouts, and I…