The Sims isn’t the only PC life simulation game in town anymore. Dozens of smaller, more focused life sims have appeared in the years since Stardew Valley took off, and now upcoming Sims competitors like Paralives and Life by You are aiming for the same kind of broad home, relationship, family, and career simulation that EA’s 24-year-old Sims series is synonymous with.
Life by You director Rod Humble, who was the head of The Sims series for several years in the 2000s, thinks the fundamental inclusivity of the life sim genre is responsible for its growth.
“The reason that life simulation is so big, and I think it’s going to get bigger, is that it’s an inclusive game genre that anybody can use to tell stories that are rooted in real life,” said Humble in a recent interview with PC Gamer.
Humble, whose game credits date back to the early ’90s, says he prefers working on sims to games with authored stories because the latter are “exclusionary” by nature. “Who is …
The latest Warbond for Helldivers 2 includes a lot of ways to dispense electric justice—and ways to survive those zaps when they inevitably blow back in your face. Unfortunately, an entirely different problem’s been slaying Helldivers lately: A frozen game client.
For almost an entire week, weapons like the Arc Thrower, the Arc Shotgun and the Tesla Tower stratagem have been crashing games at random, even if you’re not the unlucky sod firing the things. It’s one thing for a weapon to boot you if you’re using it, it’s another entirely to hope your three other random teammates got the memo and don’t deploy with a game-killing gun.
Fortunately, that should all be fixed now. Arc weapons and stratagems should no longer crash your game. Community Manager Baskinator also shared a list of known issues the team at Arrowhead’s still working on, as per the game’s official Discord:
- Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play:
Cross-platform friend …
Bethesda has added one of the best unofficial Doom addons to its re-release version of the 1993 classic. Titled Base Ganymede, this megawad adds a new 27-map campaign to Doom set on Jupiter’s largest moon.
Unlike many Doom mods, Base Ganymede adheres largely to the style and conventions of the original game, using the base weapons and enemies, but providing different levels to expand upon the challenge originally conceived by Carmack, Romero et al. Its levels also follow the trajectory of the original game, starting out with familiar sci-fi bases, before becoming more surreal and hellish (in a literal sense) as the story progresses.
Base Ganymede was originally created by Adam ‘Khorus’ Woodmansey back in 2009. Well regarded since its release, it was honored in doomworld’s 2012 Cacoawards. “Base Ganymede is a megawad beaming with personality and charm”, said Doomworld’s Alfonzo back in 2012 “The maps showcase the Khorus design perfectly in being moderately sized with inte…
June 11, 2024: This story was originally written in May, but Tiny Glade’s demo is now publicly available in the Steam Next Fest and seems to be attracting tons of players.
There has been a lot of anticipation for Tiny Glade in the cozy gaming circles I follow. Its an adorable little building toy inspired by the success of Townscaper but has you build idyllic little castles instead of seaside cities. After getting to spend some time with its upcoming demo, I am hurting to play with the rest of it.
As in Townscaper, Tiny Glade’s premise is that your builds are all reactive. If you draw a little dirt footpath up to your cozy curtain wall it will sprout an archway. Widen that path and your single archway will split into two. Windows placed together may spawn shutters while dragging a circular tower close to your other buildings will have them mesh together as if they’d always been there.
In the demo I can doodle a…
You’ll find plenty of tips for your daily Wordle just below, sitting alongside a helpful clue for today’s game as well as the answer to the September 1 (804) puzzle. If you need help with today’s Wordle, you’re in the right place.
What looked like an easy win from the outset soon turned into a tense game of “almost, but not quite”, every guess dancing around today’s answer but never quite getting there. And then I realised that in my panicked rush to fill the gaps in my greens, I may have left a spare yellow behind. A spare yellow that soon sorted this mess out. Oops.
Today’s Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Friday, September 1
The part of the universe that’s beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Star Trek’s final frontier. A physical void or even an emotional gap between two people. Today’s answer can mean a lot of things, but they all refer to some form of significant emptiness. There are two different vowels to find in this one.
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Truck Simulator studio starts video series about ‘legendary’ truck makers in an act of truckception-
Damn son, does SCS Software love a truck. The venerable Czech studio is best-known for its various Truck Simulator games, the incredible success of which has led to the studio expanding and becoming almost a Truck Simulator studio. But that’s OK because, if there’s one thing that SCS and its players love, it’s a good old reliable truck.
How much do the players of this game like trucks? Enough that actual truck companies now pay SCS money to try and recruit in-game truckers into real-world operations. They can’t get enough of trucks; they’d take one to bed if they could. And SCS has decided to lean right into this with its latest project, a newly launched series called SCS On The Road, in which its developers visit truck makers and their facilities, both learning information that will be used in the games and sharing the behind-the-scenes experience with an audience that has probably dreamed of this moment.
The first episode visits the “legendary” Scania demo centr…
Stardew Valley players have theorized for years that harvesting crops from left to right is faster than harvesting them from right to left. Not hugely faster, hardly even noticeable, but just ever so slightly quicker. For non-Stardewers it’s the sort of thing that sounds a little weird and even ridiculous—not quite up there with fake moon landings and “Elvis is alive” conspiracy theories, but of a similar nature. Left-to-right, right-to-left—come on, be serious here!
Except in this case, well, it turns out that the temporally-sensitive farmers were correct: Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone confirmed today that there is in fact a bug that caused left-to-right harvesting to be faster than right-to-left harvesting, and it’s going to be fixed in the big 1.6 update coming out next week.
Now, this isn’t entirely new or unknown, at least among some deeply committed members of the Stardew Valley community. Three years ago, for instance, redditor Snow-Infer…
GPU silly season continues with a new round of claims from serial ‘leak’ outlet Moore’s Law is Dead. This time it’s the pricing and full specs for Nvidia’s rumoured RTX 40 Super GPUs.
Namely, we’re talking RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Super, and the word salad that is RTX 4070 Ti Super. All of what follows is merely a claimed leak, however the proposed line up does make sense. It also presents a good framework for considering the impact these Super GPUs will have on existing RTX 40 cards. And with that, here we go.
Up top, we have the RTX 4080 Super. As per another ‘leak’, it sticks with the existing AD103 die rather than receiving an upgrade to the AD102 monster used for the RTX 4090. Thus it tops out at 10,240 cores, runs a 256-bit bus, and packs 16GB of GDDR6X memory, whereas the regular RTX 4080 has 9,728 cores. And it’s yours for $999, fully $200 less than the RTX 4080’s launch price.
Next is the slightly silly sounding RTX 4070 Ti Super. That steps up from the AD…
Welcome to your latest Wordle win. Now you’re here, today’s answer is only a cheeky click away, ready to send your win streak score a little higher. If you prefer your help to be a little less definitive, feel free to spend some time mulling over the December 14 (908) hint, or take a look at our general tips and tricks.
I probably shouldn’t shout out Wordle answers as soon as they come to mind so early in the day, but I just couldn’t help myself. I didn’t have an especially smooth game—it took a few goes before I had much of anything to work with—but it all came together in one happy instant, and that made this Wordle win especially satisfying.
Today’s Wordle hint
Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, December 14
This widely used word generally implies something a person might wish to do in the future, or wish they had done in the past. Whether they could or should have is another matter.
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Is there a doubl…
You can click through the gallery above to get a good look at the stunning keyboards I snapped over at Varmilo’s booth.
Varmilo makes beautiful keyboards, so it’s no surprise that its booth at Computex 2023 was filled with fans taking snaps of its latest creations, including me.
If you know Varmilo, you know it has a legacy for making really, really lovely looking mechanical keyboards. This year’s new arrivals are no different. The Chinese keyboard company has turned up to Computex with some gorgeous bespoke keyboard designs that’ll appeal to fans of pastel colours, traditional asian art, and the weebs.
They’re not all new designs, some have been around a while, but with a few extra flourishes added to make them stand out even more.
These Varmilo boards aren’t form over function, either. They’re fully mechanical, with various picks of Cherry, Kailh, and Gateron switches, and usually come with PBT keycaps. That means a robust board with a clack you ca…