Ever since it started making its way into homes, 3D printing has been huge for creative nerds. Be it altruistic creations like these 3D printed accessible controller adapters, or a Steam Deck, this tech paves the way for all stripes of makers to print previously impossible objects with relative ease in their own homes. Relative ease does tend to be a key word though, as one enthusiast learned when printing this impressive map-view model of their Cities: Skylines city.

The idea of printing out your own city from one of these games is a great idea. If you’ve played a city builder before you know that these metropolises grow out of nothing to become huge sprawling problems in no time. But those problems are yours, unique to you and your choices. Dumptropolis may be a dump, but it’s m…

Learning things and getting smarter is normally a cause for celebration, but in the case of Kelvin, everyone’s favorite Sons of the Forest flunkie, it’s having the opposite effect: A recent patch gave him a bigger brain, and some players do not like it.

Lauren Morton recently declared Kelvin “the new best boy of videogames” thanks to his adorable blend of energetic industriousness, childlike friendliness, and, well, let’s call it not-fully-developed problem-solving skills.

“Kelvin is not a dog. He is not a toddler,” Lauren wrote about her best digital pal. “But my friends and I have been cheering on every one of his little feats as if he were. He runs with small, fast-paced little steps. He tosses items you request exactly where he’s told (what a smart boy). He smiles in a d…

Despite being based on one of the most iconic RPG series of all time, there’s something oddly dry about the upcoming board game Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz. Set during the events of Mass Effect 3, the premise is basically a sidequest that never was—taking place over the course of a single night as Shepard and crew board and fight their way through a crashed Cerberus ship to recover research data.

Even for those who can still remember the specific story details of a game that came out 12 years ago, the stakes here feel low. Why does this pretty minor mission matter, when we already know how the wider story plays out? It’s a serviceable excuse for a series of linked combat missions, but there’s no drama to it or any hook to pull you in. And from what I’ve played so far of …

Recent action roguelike Spiritfall has a new spin on the genre, incorporating the combat style of platform fighters like Super Smash Bros and MultiVersus with the ever-upgrading power curve of the roguelike genre. By choosing from some 150 or so blessings your divine warrior can synergize out some wild combos to defeat your enemies—or make a bad build, die, and start over.

“Spiritfall is a fast-paced Action Roguelite with combat inspired by Platform Fighters. Slash, smash, launch, and wall-splat a multitude of enemies using an ever-changing arsenal of divine powers,” say the devs.

“This game asks the interesting question: what if Hades was Smash Bros?,” says a review on Steam—specifically, the review that has been marked as helpful more than the other ones. It’s …

With only a few weeks left until the Steam Summer Sale, you might think Valve would ease off the gas on its near-constant festival sales. You’d be wrong. The latest in Steam’s onslaught of genre fests is a celebration of simple joys like scrounging, avoiding starvation, and sprinting pantsless through the woods until you learn how to turn plant fiber into clothes.

While the name might not have the best mouthfeel, the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest is offering discounts all week long on survival classics. Terraria‘s at half price for $5, Rust is up for grabs at $20, and No Man’s Sky is down to $30—the cheapest all three have been in the last two years.

Recent survival crafting favorites are getting their share of sales, too. Februa…

The Steam Deck has been a huge hit for Valve, opening up the world to PC gaming on a portable console style PC. They’re great little machines that make wonderful travelling companions. Whether you’re headed to a bar or 2,500 ft above the surface of the Earth, the Steam Deck is ready to go. That is, unless you wanted to play some Ubisoft titles.

A new update for the Ubisoft Connect launcher completely stuffed launching Steam games on Linux platforms. According to GamingOnLinux, trying to launch any Ubi titles on desktop Linux or Steam Deck resulted in an unrecoverable error popup from Ubisoft Connect. From there all you could do is click OK and accept you’re not getting on for that Division raid tonight.

Thankfully now there is a bit of a fix, using Proton Experimental. This …

Walton Goggins plays The Ghoul on the Fallout TV show, who over the course of the series becomes a memorable and conflicted link between the world as-was and as it is in the present day. It’s a fantastic performance, which will be no surprise to those who’ve followed Goggins’ career, and while basking in the aftermath of the show’s success the actor revealed a surprising detail about one of the locations.

Some of the outdoor scenes in Fallout were filmed in Namibia, on what is sometimes referred to as the Skeleton Coast, including in an actual diamond mine (thanks, GamesRadar+). A new photograph released by Amazon shows The Ghoul at this location, looking downcast and moody as is his wont, but Goggins says the real explanation is a little more base. 

“[Amazon] ju…

World of Warcraft’s always had an issue with its storytelling—I mean, it’s historically had a lot of issues if you tally them all up—but first and foremost is the problem that, if you want to cap off the expansion story, then you’ll need to get your raiding boots on.

That’s nothing too unusual for the expansions of WoW’s yesteryear, where being invested in the game’s story was more of an optional thing for lore enthusiasts. Still important, which was why it was all there, but by no means the central draw. Times, however, and tastes have changed.

To keep up with said times, WoW’s really shifting how it handles its storytelling in some big ways. Follower dungeons were a huge step forward, letting players experience Dragonflight’s story beats witho…

First reported by the New York Times, a major chapter in Activision Blizzard’s reckoning over an alleged internal culture of misogyny and harassment has ended. The California Civil Rights Department (formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) has settled with Activision Blizzard for $54 million, dropping its sexual harassment suit.

In addition to the $54 million paid to the state, Activision Blizzard has set aside $47 million to handle accusations of gender discrimination in pay and promotions. According to the settlement, Gilbert Casellas, a former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, concluded “there was no widespread harassment or recurring pattern or practice of gender harassment” following an investigation into Activision Blizzard.

In Ju…

Yesterday Bobby Kotick gave a pair of interviews to CNBC and The Financial Times, during which Activision Blizzard’s longtime CEO was typically bullish about Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of the publisher. Kotick pointed at comments from UK prime minister Rishi Sunak about the UK becoming “the Silicon Valley of Europe,” and warned that “if deals like this can’t get through, [the UK’s] not going to be Silicon Valley, [it’ll] be Death Valley”. Then he said the UK’s regulator “lacked independent thought”.

Well, that’s nice. In a piece of perfect timing, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has today issued its findings after a preliminary investigation of the deal, and it looks likely to recommend further scrutiny. Its biggest issues are that…

Remember that last Matrix movie? The one about capital subsuming all critique, turning it into a trendy and infinitely exploitable set of meaningless images and signifiers divorced from their original context? How it laments the way the culture industry can’t let a good thing lie, instead pounding every last inch of profit out of any marketable property until there’s nothing left but a tasteless grey mush?

That was cool. Anyway, they’re making another Matrix movie.

Per Variety, The Matrix 5 (which will surely become The Matrix: R-something at some point during production) will be the first entry in the series without one of the Wachowski sisters directing. Instead, it’ll be helmed by Drew Goddard, the screenwriter behind The Martian. Goddard will also write the script and pr…

When World of Warcraft developers were working on the new spider-themed Nerubian race for their new The War Within expansion, they brought in an arachnophobia expert to tell them what, exactly, makes spiders scary to some people.

The result is the expansion’s new arachnophobia mode, which turns almost all spiders into crabs at a click of a player’s mouse. Players who ponied up for the game’s Epic Edition pre-order will get a chance to dive into the new WoW expansion for the first time today during early access and see the new mode for themselves.

At first glance, crabs might not appear much better—lots of legs, lots of clicking noises—but Blizzard’s expert assured developers they are. Players agreed, said WoW associate art director Tina Wang in a group inte…

This week, I discovered a TikToker deliberately developing the worst game of all time—complete with impossible platforming, unskippable dialogue, and a rocket launcher that has to be reloaded 150 times between each shot. I ended that post anxious that creator Everywhere Nowhere might one day release their abomination into the world for people to actually play. I’m afraid that happened sooner even than I feared. 

You can now try Monster Sniper Season 3 for yourself on the developer’s itch.io page, and… wow. I knew it was going to be bad, but watching it in TikToks really didn’t do it justice. Actually getting your hands on it is a whole other world of pain.

Thanks to maybe the most ungodly control scheme ever devised—in which you control the hero’s mov…