‘Goodbye Meta AI’ is the next major spam chain mail, and no it doesn’t stop Facebook scraping your data

“Share this with five friends before midnight or you may die” is a sentence that runs down the spine of many an ex-MySpace user. Not because they narrowly avoided death but because of the cringey feeling of believing that would ever work. Seemingly to counter Meta training its AI model on public posts, many are falling for chain mail once more.

A new post going around Facebook and Instagram that starts with “Goodbye Meta AI” claims that those who post this and the message that follows are essentially opting out of Meta using their data to train its AI model (via BBC). This is, of course, untrue, and speaking to the BBC, a Meta spokesperson said “Sharing this story does not count as a valid form of objection”.

The message continues: “Please note an attorney has advised us t…

Ducky has released a limited edition Doom keyboard but I can’t help but feel it’s missed the mark-

We’ve been fans of Ducky keyboards for a while here at PC Gamer, and beyond the fantastic build quality and the delightful naming schemes, one thing the company is normally pretty good at is nailing the visuals. From the super-pink and super-wonderful Ducky One 3 Fuji through to the subtle RGB of the Ducky Shine 5 RGB, we’ve delighted at Ducky’s refusal to adopt a stereotypical gamer aesthetic. However, it’s just released the limited edition Ducky x Doom SF 65% keyboard, and if I’m honest, it’s just not doing it for me.

When I first saw pictures of the keeb in question, I squinted. What at first looked like some kind of odd tie dye design revealed itself under zoom to be the Doom marine, mid rip and tear, in an iconic image all gamers have become familiar with. 

However…

Here’s how to watch the 41st annual Golden Joystick Awards-

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: the time when the games industry puts on its best evening wear and Troy Baker takes the stage to tell us which videogames are set to win after millions of public votes have been totted up.

It is, in other words, time for the Golden Joysticks, which airs tomorrow, November 10, at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT on pretty much any platform that can hold a livestream. That means YouTube, Twitch, Steam, Bilibili, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter. Oh, and also GamesRadar, TechRadar Gaming, and right here on PC Gamer.

All sorts of guests will join Troy Baker on stage at the Royal Lancaster Hotel this year, including names like Manon Gage, Maggie Robertson, Yuri Lowenthal, Stephanie Joosten, and BG3’s Karlach and Astarion themselves: S…

Earth Defense Force 6 review- a masterclass in asset recycling

Earth Defense Force 6 is one of the most joyful shooters I’ve played in years, delivering mega-scale slapstick gunfights like nothing else while walking a tightrope-fine line between genius and idiocy in its design. It’s also a janky, rough-hewn piece of software with a mediocre PC port and egregious recycling of assets.

This cult phenomenon of a series began as a budget-priced PS2 experiment. A simple third-person shooter with a retro B-movie theme about a little soldier guy fighting vastly oversized alien ants and wobbly UFOs using guns that can demolish a skyscraper in one hit, or send your own ragdoll body tumbling for half a mile if you get caught in your own blast.

That core remains unchanged, enthusiastically amateur voice acting and all, although EDF no…

Build an empire that will last for thousands of years in strategy city builder Memoriapolis-

In most city builders I usually wind up feeling like an urban planner or a mayor. In Memoriapolis, which launched into early access on Steam today, I feel more like a god-emperor because the city I’m managing isn’t just going to grow and expand for a few years or decades or even centuries, but for millenia.

There’s a bit of Civ in this new strategy city builder, in other words. You’re doing some traditional survival city builder stuff by building farms, quarries, and woodcutters, harvesting resources and using them to expand, setting up trade routes and expanding your buildable territory—but you’re also shaping your city’s culture and managing mega-construction projects called “Wonders” as you grow from the age of antiquity to medieval times and beyond.

I played a bit …

Humble Games is the latest to lay off employees, blames ‘trends that required this restructure in order to ensure our long-term success’-

Just one day after Amazon Games and 505 Games parent company Digital Bros announced significant cuts at their companies, Humble Games has confirmed that it too has laid off employees, telling Video Games on Sports Illustrated that the layoffs were required “to ensure our long-term success.”

Humble Games is the publishing arm of Humble Bundle, which began in 2010 as a low-priced collection of indie games raising funds for charity. It was initially presented as a one-off but the success of the program spawned further bundles and eventually a digital storefront. Humble Games launched in 2017 as “a multi-million-dollar investment for games large and small,” offering “a wide range of publisher services with trusted teams to cover ports, marketing, localization, and everything a develop…

Fallout- London sets a new record by becoming the ‘fastest redeemed game ever on GOG’-

War isn’t the only thing that never changes. Fallout fans never change either: they’re always ravenous for more Fallout games. As proof you need look no further than Fallout: London, the wildly ambitious full conversion mod for Fallout 4 that exports the irradiated wasteland from the US and imports it into England. The mod was released on July 24, and players pounced on it with such ferocity that it immediately set a new record on GOG.

“In the first 24 hours, the mod was redeemed more than 500,000 times, making it the fastest redeemed game on GOG ever,” according to a news post on GOG. That’s impressive, especially considering the digital games storefront has been around since 2008 and now hosts nearly 10,000 games. None of them—not Cyberpunk 2077, not even the Witcher games…

Grit and Valor – 1949 looks like a real-time World War 2 Into the Breach-

I am a simple man. I like mechs. I like mechs blowing up mechs. I like mechs blowing up mechs in alt history settings. There’s a good chance, then, that I might quite like Grit and Valor – 1949, a real-time tactics romp that’s evoking a lot of cracking games like Into the Breach, Iron Harvest and BattleTech. 

Developer Milky Tea and publisher Megabit showed off the RTS for the first time in the PC Gaming Show, giving us our first look at its dieselpunk mech-on-mech action. Here’s the skinny: World War 2 is still raging on in 1949, and the Axis powers have used their giant mechs to conquer Europe. Leading resistance mech pilots, you’ll have to put a stop to their plans and turn the tide of the war—specifically by escorting an EMP into the heart of Axis territory, w…

Game Informer, the longest running US gaming magazine, shuts down after 33 years-

The skies are gray above our hobby today as one of gaming’s oldest institutions, Game Informer, is closing its doors. This morning, GameStop abruptly pulled the plug on the Game Informer magazine and website, laying off its entire staff as it was “about 70% done” with the next issue, according to content director Kyle Hilliard.

The official Game Informer X account shared a farewell message titled “The Final Level: Farewell from Game Informer”, found below:

The sudden closure comes after a turbulent period for the Minneapolis-based magazine. Facing pressure from struggling owner GameStop, Game Informer had already gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since 2018, reducing the outlet’s size. In March 2024, Game Informer launched a new subscription, detached from GameStop’s r…

Diablo 4 hotfix deals with ‘Darcelpocalypse’, a bug that endlessly multiplied one elite enemy-

Diablo 4 has a fetch quest in the Scosglen region called Stolen Artifice, in which an NPC named Merryn sends you out from Braestaig to retrieve an item from a thief called Darcel. It’s a runic charm that was being used to help an ailing mother and child recover, until Darcel and his thugs stole it. The jerks.

This is supposed to be a typical sidequest, nothing too major, but players were finding it unusually hard. Instead of having to fight one Darcel, they were encountering dozens of Darcel doppelgangers. Though some managed to figure out which one was the original and kill him to complete the quest, others were forced to retreat and return, sometimes finding that hundreds of Darcels had spawned in their absence.

While some players put forward a theory that the issue was a …

Gobsmacked Microsoft president says UK’s regulator blocking the Activision deal is company’s ‘darkest day’-

Microsoft president Brad Smith is not a happy bunny. Yesterday the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, in a move that took almost everyone by surprise, blocked Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It’s a decision that could scupper the entire deal, though no-one’s yet sure of the ramifications. And so Smith is on the warpath about what a boneheaded, plain wrong, backwards-ass move the CMA has made.

“We’re of course very disappointed about the CMA’s decision but more than that, unfortunately, I think it’s bad for Britain,” Smith told BBC World News. “The strong message the CMA has sent is not just to surprise everyone who fully expected this acquisition to be approved, but to send a message that I think will discourage innovation and inv…

Gatekeeper is like an isometric Risk of Rain 2, so go ahead and try the free prologue-

If you, like me, are basically always hungry for another fast-paced horde shooting roguelike with crazy items and combos to build, I’ve got great news. Upcoming roguelite shooter Gatekeeper is just that, and it has a pretty dang generous free demo slash prologue version out now that’s fully-featured enough to include cooperative gameplay.

Gatekeeper casts you, and maybe some friends, as one of a suite of characters with different abilities, hopping from one level to the next completing randomized objectives, defeating bosses, and collecting loot and experience used to buy upgrades. Any given level has you blasting through waves of enemies while you simultaneously complete objectives like finding keys for weird obelisks, staying near pillars that want to kill you, or taking down a …

Hades 2’s technical test is shutting down today, but don’t worry, you won’t be deprived of your hot gods for long—early access will follow ‘relatively soon after’-

Hades 2 is looking sick as hell already, which shouldn’t surprise anybody familiar with Supergiant’s absurdly high pedigree—or the pecs, uh, I mean, perks of the first game’s long stint in early access. It had its technical test recently, and from what I’ve seen it’s certainly hitting the same thighs—I mean, highs—as its predecessor.

Said technical test will be shutting down today, however, Supergiant has promised that Hades 2 will be back in Early Access soon enough. Your hot gods will return soon.

“Thank you for your patience during the Hades II Technical Test,” the announcement reads on the game’s official Twitter, “which helped us identify and address a number of key issues we weren’t able to find before. We plan to start winding down the Test …

14 years later, the Deus Ex mod that’s a better sequel than Invisible War gets a massive overhaul-

For my money, The Nameless Mod (TNM) is one of the best Deus Ex experiences out there. It’s a lengthy total conversion mod for the original Deus Ex that transplants the original masterpiece’s immersive sim brilliance into a tale set in a Deus Ex fan forum, and it’s much, much better than that pitch makes it sound. Richard Cobbett called it “one of the best things to come from Deus Ex, and one of the best single-player mods in general,” in his Crapshoot of the mod, and it just received a huge update 14 years after its original release.

TNM 2.0, as the update is known, has been playable in one state or another for a while now, but it’s finally hit its full release as of yesterday, September 12. 2.0’s patch notes are sprawling, but the most noticeable feature is the way it overhauls …

Barring unforeseen shocks, the signs point towards a strong 2024 for the global PC market-

2023 has been a year to forget for PC manufacturers. After the work-from-home boom and seemingly endless global political and economic instability, a slowdown was always likely to happen. But if a new analysis from Canalys is to be believed, 2024 is shaping up to be a much better year for the PC market.

Canalys (via TechPowerUp) forecasts the global PC market to return to 8% growth in 2024. It attributes this growth to ‘tailwinds including the Windows refresh cycle and emergence of AI-capable and Arm-based devices.’

I’ll begin with Windows 12. Microsoft hasn’t announced a new Windows, but rumors are growing that it will launch sometime in 2024. Commercial Times, a Taiwanese financial newspaper, believes it will launch in June 2024. Windows 12 (if that’s what it ends up being…

For their new roguelite, the Dead Cells team scrapped 2 years of work on combat and redid it in just 3 weeks- ‘We need to be able to dare to kill a feature when it doesn’t work’-

Developers from Motion Twin, best known for incredibly popular roguelite Dead Cells, are in on the joke when they talk about the process of making their new game meaning they had to throw away tons of progress and start over. “We fail all the time. We’re like, OK, what we did is pure shit, let’s try again. It’s a roguelite production,” said designer Yannick Berthier, as he walked me through Motion Twin’s new action game Windblown.

The studio’s first new project since Dead Cells is also a roguelite—art truly imitates life, I guess—that plays substantially faster than their previous 2D action, with an incredibly zippy dash move key to staying alive in the now-3D combat environments. Also key to combat is the weapon system, which lets you swap between two weapons on the f…

FF14 players skip over perfectly serviceable catboy to thirst relentlessly over a giant, two-headed lizard jerk instead-

Final Fantasy 14 is known for its pretty, fanbase-fuelling men—and they typically share a few common characteristics between them.

They’re usually chiselled, handsome, beard-free husbands with a soft, sometimes boyish appeal. The one exception to this is Emet Selch, who reads as more of an exhausted middle-aged man (or perhaps an elderly millennial) trapped in a twink’s body. This rule, however, typically stands. I’m a victim of it myself, if my writer bio is anything to go by.

So naturally, the thirst object of brand-new expansion Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is (checking my notes, here) a… uh. It’s a two-headed lizard man. Hm.

That’s right—despite the fact that Koana, a beautiful, pretty, bespectacled, shy, wonderfully voiced cat boy is sta…

Asus and ASRock BIOS files provide yet more evidence AMD’s cheap Phoenix laptop APU will rise on desktop-

Motherboard BIOS updates are rarely newsworthy but the latest ones from Asus and ASRock, for some of their AM5 X670 models, contain an Agesa update that provides more evidence AMD is definitely going to release a Ryzen 7000G desktop APU, using its laptop Phoenix architecture. 

Just don’t ask when.

As reported by Hardwareluxx, the fresh BIOS files contain the 1.1.0.0 version of AMD’s Agesa software. This is essentially a checklist for PCs to follow when they first boot up, to ensure that the CPU, RAM, and motherboard chipset all correctly initialise. Any new processors have to be included in the lists, otherwise, the BIOS won’t function properly.

In this latest revision, there are clear entries for Phoenix 7xxx APUs. At present, desktop PCs sporting Ryzen …

Helldivers 2 dev says patrol spawn rates are busted and that Arrowhead’s walking its changes back, but ‘we want to give it proper testing’ to ‘see that it works this time’-

Helldivers 2’s patrol rates have been a little wonky for a while. After a patch angled at making patrol spawns equitable for solo players (in other words, harder), it was revealed that said update actually just made solo diver’s lives just as much of a living hell as a squad of four. Which didn’t seem like the intended effect.  

Well, Arrowhead games has taken note and is trying to do something about it, as per a recent announcement by community manager Twinbeard on the game’s official Discord. 

“As many of you have noticed, something has been off with patrols and spawn rate for some time now. This primarily leads to more enemies rearing their ugly heads than they’re supposed to, indirectly to players feeling overrun, kiting, and subsequently less fun game…

Helldivers CEO wants to keep the ‘T-pose of democracy’ fall damage bug- ‘We’ll add inflatable bouncy bags that deploy from under your armpits or some sh-t if we have to’-

The “T-pose of democracy,” as we learned yesterday, is a recently discovered glitch in Helldivers 2 that enables players to survive fall damage that would normally be fatal by doing a hug emote while sailing through the air like an errant (but loving) cannonball. It’s funny and clearly not supposed to be like that, but even so some players are hoping that Arrowhead will leave it alone. And it turns out they have a friend in a high place: No less than Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani.

The glitch is very straightforward: If you find yourself launched into the sky by an explosion or some other bit of kinetic bad news, you can reduce the damage you take on your inevitable impact—and thus increase your chances of survival—by holding an emote before you stick the landing. The “hu…

Halloween’s over but you can still scare yourself witless with this VR recreation of Amnesia-

There are some things in life that I admire but can’t claim to properly understand. These include the literary works of James Joyce, the vegan lifestyle, and people who want to play incredibly scary games in VR. I like horror games, but there’s a limit on my tolerance, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent landed right on that limit when it slithered out of Frictional Games’ culvert a terrifying thirteen years ago. Hence, the mere idea of playing that game in VR makes me shudder.

But if you are the kind of person who likes to put on white VR goggles and later take off brown pants, let me introduce you to Sclerosis: an Amnesia VR remake. To be clear, this is not an official remake of Frictional’s landmark horror. But it is also a bit more than just a mod. Sclerosis’ ModDB page describes it…

Intel quietly launches its speedy Wi-Fi 7 chipsets-

Intel has quietly introduced its first consumer Wi-Fi 7 products; the Wi-Fi 7 BE200 and Wi-Fi 7 BE202. Even though the Wi-Fi standard is yet to be fully ratified by the IEEE until some time in 2024, the first motherboards with the BE200 controller are set to launch very soon, alongside the launch of Intel’s 14th Gen CPUs.

The two adapters have appeared on Intel’s Ark site (via TechPowerUp). The BE200 is listed as being ‘Wi-Fi 7 Pre-certified’. Its maximum speed is listed at 5Gbps, with 2×2 TX/RX streams and support for the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands. For comparison, Intel’s AX211 Wi-Fi 6E controller tops out at 2.4Gbps.

Details regarding the BE202 are limited. No speed is provided and what type of device it will appear in is currently unknown. 

The BE200 is set …

Final Fantasy 14’s healers have had enough and are going on strike, after streamer tears through Dawntrail’s first dungeon preview without needing them at all-

Final Fantasy 14, as I’ve previously discussed, is a little too straightforward when it comes to its casual fayre—though that’s not to say said content is “bad”. Dungeons are often pleasantly cinematic, with interesting mechanics and banger soundtracks. They’re just… pretty easy.

This has been, it would seem, upsetting healers tremendously—because when there’s not a lot of incoming damage, you’re not really using your full kit. It doesn’t help that said healers’ damage rotation is usually “push one button, and re-apply a DoT sometimes”. Having a couple of healers at max level at present, I can confirm this diagnosis. In fact, healers are the job I hop onto to turn my brain off—which is great for me, but not so great if it’s your main role.

P…

David Hasselhoff cracks out the old leather jacket and KITT from Knight Rider to tell gamers to ‘grab your joysticks’ and fight global warming-

“You know I’ve been on some amazing movie sets,” drawls David Hasselhoff to the camera, “but my favourite set of all? Planet Earth.” Nailed it Hoff, makes ya think. Not content with his bit-part in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Baywatch and Knight Rider star now has his sights set on climate change and, specifically, getting us gamers off our behinds to do something about it.

Hasselhoff is the face of a new campaign called Make Green Tuesday Moves (MGTM), a “videogames climate change alliance”, which aims to offer unique DLC on the first Tuesday of every month using various celebrity endorsements. “MGTM will see proceeds from the sale of in-game items—which can comprise new and/or upcycled DLC goods such as characters, costumes and objects—invested into fully certif…

Hi-Fi Rush update includes a new ‘blistering 200 BPM’ challenge mode and a ‘not so little’ secret-

Hi-Fi Rush was an early surprise in 2023, being announced and released on the same day as well as being a cartoony rhythm-action brawler from a studio known for horror. Our review found it didn’t quite stick the landing but nevertheless delivered stellar moments, which is definitely how I felt about it: there aren’t too many games where you can beat robots into scrap to the beat of a Nine Inch Nails song, and Hi-Fi Rush certainly delivers that.

The game’s latest free update has arrived and brings two new modes, both of which are unlocked after you’ve beaten the main story. BPM Rush sees guitar-wielding protagonist Chai facing enemy waves with the beats per minute (BPM) of the music increasing as you progress, increasing both the speed of Chai’s combos and the enemy movesets…

GOG is giving away an old Amnesia game to celebrate the launch of the new Amnesia game-

Frictional’s latest horror game Amnesia: The Bunker is out today, and it is really good. Almost unexpectedly so, to some extent: Frictional has made some of the best horror games, but the Amnesia formula is well over a decade old now (and much older than that, if you count the Penumbra series) and it’d be fair to expect it to be a little stale by this point. But no: We called it “an essential horror game and an inspired next step for the series” in our 93% review.

To celebrate the release of The Bunker, GOG is making one of the older games in the series, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, free until June 9. It’s a bit of an oddity in the Amnesia pantheon: The GOG store page describes A Machine for Pigs as “the darkest, most horrific tale ever told in a videogame,” but in reality it’s ea…

Asus’s new motherboard hides ports on the back for cable management-

Cable management is one of the banes of the PC building world. Anyone who has assembled their own machine has battled against the slew of mandatory cables to get their machine running. First, there’s making sure everything can actually be plugged in, which isn’t always easy depending on your setup. Then, there’s hiding any evidence that this was ever done. 

Often this involves cramming all those loose bits of cable into a hidden pocket at the back of the case, but PC part makers don’t exactly make this task an easy one, with all those ports on the front of the motherboard. It’s enough to make many give up on cable management altogether. This might be set to change, with a new motherboard from Asus smartly sporting its connectors on the back. And gosh darn it all. it’s so simp…

I’m slightly less panicked about Dragon Age- The Veilguard after seeing 24 seconds of gameplay-

I wasn’t expecting to see Dragon Age: The Veilguard turn up at the Xbox Games Showcase over the weekend ahead of the gameplay reveal it had already planned for tomorrow. But turn up it did, with a CG trailer that had a lot of fans, including me, very nervous about the plastic-y, poreless character designs. Partly to quell that public panic, I’m willing to bet, BioWare just gave us a “sneak peak” at 24 seconds of the planned 15+ minute gameplay reveal tomorrow. Everyone take ten deep breaths. It looks better—probably.

As my colleague Robin Valentine pointed out yesterday, the CG trailer debuted at the Xbox show had serious hero shooter vibes, with a “hello fellow kids” kind of banter that I don’t associate with the dry, dark humor of Thedas. 

I was worried t…

Diablo 4’s poor Sorcerers spot a glimmer of hope for the Hydra to the tune of a 400% damage bump—turns out it’s likely just to compensate for a bug fix-

Diablo 4’s sorcerers have had, uh… a bit of a hard time, the poor guys. While they were super promising in the game’s beta—with a ton of sorcerous excitement when the game opened its gates—things haven’t exactly been smooth sailing since.

For starters, the pre-season one patch crushed them disproportionately—alongside other nerfs, it unilaterally ramped up enemy damage. Sorcerers were already pretty flimsy, so this gave them a critical glass jaw. It also snuffed out Devouring Blaze, a key skill in their toolkit. 

The class has never quite recovered, and while there’ve been attempts to bring them back up to par, as Blizzard makes Nightmare dungeons more intense the wins they’ve gained have only grown smaller. Also there was a unique that kinda ju…

Humble Games is the latest to lay off employees, blames ‘trends that required this restructure in order to ensure our long-term success’-

Just one day after Amazon Games and 505 Games parent company Digital Bros announced significant cuts at their companies, Humble Games has confirmed that it too has laid off employees, telling Video Games on Sports Illustrated that the layoffs were required “to ensure our long-term success.”

Humble Games is the publishing arm of Humble Bundle, which began in 2010 as a low-priced collection of indie games raising funds for charity. It was initially presented as a one-off but the success of the program spawned further bundles and eventually a digital storefront. Humble Games launched in 2017 as “a multi-million-dollar investment for games large and small,” offering “a wide range of publisher services with trusted teams to cover ports, marketing, localization, and everything a develop…

HP Omen’s affordable new 14-inch Meteor Lake gaming laptop is already on sale with a chonky $300 discount and an RTX 4060 GPU-

I’ve had my hands on the new Meteor Lake-powered HP Omen Transcend 14 for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed. I love a good 14-inch gaming laptop at the best of times, but the fact this machine is already impressively affordable—at least in the context of the mega-bucks Razer Blade 14—and comes with a stellar OLED screen makes it an instant favorite.

That is only compounded by the fact that it’s already on offer with a $300 discount and you can find the Transcend 14 for just $1,270 at HP right now. You will have to configure it a little as that link will just take you to the RTX 4050 version, which I wouldn’t recommend as the much more powerful RTX 4060 edition is just $70 more. Seriously, why wouldn’t you?

With the 65W version of Nvidia’s latest low-end mobi…

Hearthstone’s new Naxxramas miniset launches next week and we have a Legendary card to reveal-

After a whole 48 hours of mourning for Hearthstone’s doomed Mercenaries mode, it’s now time move on in the form of a new mini-set coming to Standard next week. I’m delighted to say that Naxx will once again soon be out. Yes, the next slimline expansion is called Return to Naxxramas and it drops on February 14, because card games are for the lovers.

The set contains 38 cards, four of which are Legendary minions, and we can exclusively reveal one of the coolest, most flavourful of those below.

Yep, your boy Rivendare is back, and he’s brought his equally dead friends.   Rivendare, Warrider is a neutral minion with 6/6 stats that costs 6 Mana. His text reads: “Deathrattle: Shuffle the other 3 Horsemen into your deck.” But what do they do, you impatiently trill.…

Here’s another e-waste crisis for the e-waste crisis pile- ‘Chromebook churn’-

One of the most essential school supplies for public school students has a sustainability problem. A report from the non-profit consumer advocacy group PIRG says that the planned obsolescence of public school-provided Google Chromebooks is costly to taxpayers and the environment. 

The biggest contributor to “Chromebook churn” is that these devices provided for students last, on average, about four years, claims PIRG. As of March 2021, 48.1 million K-12 students have been provided Chromebooks, and remote learning has become more commonplace due to the pandemic. This means a student will go through several Chromebooks throughout their school career.

A couple of factors contribute to the churn; the first and most common is that the Chromebook OS essentially has an expirati…

Here’s a farm life game but it’s about a sect of Chinese fantasy martial artists-

Farming game Immortal Life has just released from Early Access after a few years in development, bringing a unique spin to the genre of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley. YiFeng Studio’s fam life game is based on a sect of martial artists who, finding their home school devastated, resolve to rebuild the misty valley into a place of learning and beauty.

It’s heavily based in the Chinese fantasy aesthetics of wuxia fiction and the idea of “cultivation,” or improving one’s powers and spirit in order to achieve martial arts mastery and immortality.

To that end you use your powers to become and ever-more-potent farmer, deploying magic to plant seeds, water then, and harvest with enchanted tools. You also fish, cook, and craft to cultivate your soul. You also make bet…

Helldivers 2 players save democracy by turning a planet into an ominous black hole that makes whale noises- Which is fine and normal and not a wormhole to the Illuminate, stop asking-

The latest Helldivers 2 major order has had some issues—but fair play to Arrowhead, the climax of said order is very dang cool, and far better than the lack of rewards offered for the Menkent Line.

In case you’ve not been keeping up with your Super Earth-mandated news broadcasts, last week divers were deployed to Meridia, the site of a super colony of Terminids. They were instructed to inject dark fluid, an experimental substance that spaghettified some scientists and was “liberated from the Illuminate following the First Galactic War”, into the planet’s crust.

The Illuminate are a missing faction from Helldivers 1 that has yet to teleport their Protoss-adjacent butts into the sequel. But it’s fine. We treated the dark fluid with three separate democracy baths and homo…