Month: September 2024

In the slew of Wordle imitators that emerged in the wake of its success last year, there are a few real standouts. There’s Nerdle, that challenges you to guess a maths equation; Worldle, which looks like a spelling error but is actually the one where you have to figure out a country from its silhouette; and, on the more intimidating end, there’s Quordle.

Quordle asks you to solve four Wordles simultaneously, all on one big grid. Every guess you make is applied to all four—even with a generous nine guesses, it’s still a nightmare of brain multitasking. 

But clearly Merriam-Webster thinks it has a bright future ahead of it. The company, known primarily for its US dictionaries, has bought Quordle, according to the game’s official twitter account. The URL has already changed to reflect the acquisition, and Merriam-Webster has welcomed it to its “family” of word games and quizzes. 

If you didn’t realise there was a family of word games and quizzes owned by a dictionary company, we’re in the same boat, but on their site you can enjoy such delights as Name That Thing, Spell It, What’s That From? and What Are You Wearing?. I’m now starting to wonder whe…

The Secure Boot feature on as many as 300 MSI motherboards reportedly doesn’t work as you might expect—or as the feature is intended. Specifically, the motherboards will allow unvalidated firmware and operating systems to load when Secure Boot is enabled.

Open source security researcher Dawid Potocki (via El Reg) first discovered the problem when attempting to set up Secure Boot on an MSI PRO Z790-A WIFI. “Unfortunately I found my firmware was accepting every OS image I gave it, no matter if it was trusted or not,” says Potocki.

That prompted him into checking other MSI motherboards and he found nearly 300 models had the same issue, including every AMD B650 and X670 and all Z790 and B760 Intel models. Yikes.

Secure Boot is technology designed to ensure that PCs only load software at boot that is trusted by the original manufacturer. More to the point, requiring Secure Boot to be enabled is increasingly a thing for PC games. FIFA 23 and Valorant are among titles that already require Secure Boot to be enabled.

MSI has responded to Potocki’s findings with a full explanation of the current configuration on MSI boards, plus some changes planned for a fut…

It’s been a while since my friends and I have played much Jackbox, in part because we’ve entirely lost track of which Party Pack games are where. And how could we not? Jackbox Games has made ten of the damn things. I can barely differentiate between Fibbage and Quiplash in my head, let alone remember whether Tee K.O. was in Party Pack 2 or 3. Thankfully, we’ll soon have a solution with The Jackbox Megapicker.

Arriving in July, The Jackbox Megapicker is a free launcher that will track all the Party Packs on your Steam account and present all the individual games within them as a sortable, filterable library. It’ll be simpler than ever to track down Civic Doodle, no matter what state you and your friends might find yourselves in after a few hours of your Discord hangout.

I’m curious to see how the Megapicker will work in action. Will it be a new repackaging of all the existing Party Pack games in a single piece of software, and it’ll just read the Party Packs on your Steam account to determine which ones you can launch? Or will it transition out of the Megapicker and launch the respective Party Pack executable for the game selected? However it works, it’ll almost certa…

Right now, Intel’s Magdeburg mega-fab in Germany is little more than a field with a few holes in it. Though those holes are of significant historical importance. Within them, archaeologists from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt have discovered the remains of multiple burial mounds, including a chariot burial, which date back to the Neolithic period.

The burial sites discovered at the site are believed to be around 6,000 years old.

“Two approximately 6,000-year-old monumental mounds that covered wooden grave chambers, each containing several burials, were located 200 m away from each other,” Dr. Oliver Dietrich said of the findings (via CBS News). “The landscape obviously remained important for prehistoric people over a long period of time. Around 1000 years later, the corridor in between the mounds was used as a processional route where cattle were sacrificed and people buried.”

Archaeologists have been looking into the site just outside of Magdeburg, Germany since 2023. It’s where Intel plans to build its biggest European facility, what it calls the “Silicon Junction”—a semiconductor plant that’ll pump out some of th…

Less than a week into Diablo 4’s full release, Sorcerers have taken the lead as the most popular class.

Maybe it’s the giant fire snake they can wrap around groups of enemies or the bliss of teleporting in and out of the fray. Sorcerers are one of Diablo 4’s OG classes, all the way back to 1996’s Diablo 1, so it’s not particularly surprising that everyone wants to play them.

These element-bending spellcasters have one of the most creative skill trees in Blizzard’s new action RPG. Their most effective builds make use of every school of magic in their arsenal and the Enchantment Slot system lets you equip spells for a passive benefit on top of everything else. If you want a class that paints the screen with fire, lightning, and ice, the Sorcerer is the perfect class to play.

As far as their power in Diablo 4’s most brutal dungeons and open world activities, they fall a little behind the other four classes. Barbarians and Druids struggle in the early parts of the game where melee classes lack the damage output and positional benefits of a ranged class, but they eventually evolve into the most devastating classes for the game’s endgame grind. Sorcerers, however, fa…

Back in January, Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone promised that the long-awaited 1.6 update will “absolutely” be out sometime in 2024. And he wasn’t kidding: Barone revealed today—the eighth anniversary of Stardew Valley’s release, by the way—that the update will arrive on PC on March 19.

“It’s the 8th anniversary of Stardew Valley,” Barone tweeted. “Thank you for all the support over the years! Today I am announcing the PC release date for the 1.6 update: –March 19th–. Console & Mobile will follow as soon as possible.”

It’s been a long time coming, to put it mildly. Barone revealed the 1.6 update in November 2022 with a warning that it was mostly for the benefit of modders and “won’t be huge,” but then it got huge anyway: New content will include three new in-game festivals, a new kind of farm, new items and crafting recipes, more than 100 new lines of dialogue, support for eight-person multiplayer on PC, “new late-game content, which expands on each of the skill areas,” and more—plus all the stuff for modders that this update was supposed to be about in the first place.

In theory at least, the completion of the 1.6 update should sign…

Ever since it first warped onto the scene, Star Citizen has been infamous for its rapacious monetisation. The game’s development seems never-ending but, long before you could play it in any form, Roberts Space Industries would sell you all sorts of space-things: Like this mine-laying ship that cost over $600 before mine-laying was even a feature in the game.

Here’s the thing about Star Citizen, though. Its devotees are fiercely loyal to Chris Roberts’ vision and will loudly defend the game’s monetisation, its protracted development, and whatever else the detractors take aim at. Those same detractors meanwhile, just point and laugh at folk who spaff $30,000 on virtual spaceships. 

But this time Star Citizen has truly outdone itself, with what surely has to be the single most expensive DLC in history. Yes, they warned us that this was the next step after horse armour, and Roberts Space Industries has delivered: Star Citizen now offers a $48,000 Legatus bundle containing every ship in the game (you’d hope so, too). The description of the bundle is as follows: 

PACKAGE – LEGATUS 2953

Ahead of all others, this defini…