John Romero, famous for his work on Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein and, ah, Daikatana, is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Not for his hair, which remains inexplicably snubbed by awards committees across the globe, but for his entire career up to this point. At the annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) in March, Romero will take home the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on “iconic and genre defining first-person shooters” over the years. We are still making plenty of Doom clones, after all.

Romero isn’t the only one being honoured. The judges will also give a posthumous “special award” to Mabel Addis, regarded as the first female game designer, who died in 2004. Addis worked as lead designer on The Sumerian Game in 1964, using her knowledge of ancient history to design something that paved the way “for game elements that wouldn’t become mainstream for decades”. 

The Sumerian Game was a piece of edutainment that took the form of “pho…

Hello Games may be working on Light No Fire, but they’re not done updating No Man’s Sky either. The latest update is its 27th and it’s called Orbital because it overhauls the game’s space stations. In addition, it contains what Hello Games calls “our most requested feature of all time”, a ship editor for customizing your shiny space vehicle.

“We haven’t introduced customisation previously,” Hello Games explained, “because so many players love exploring to find the perfect ship already out there to purchase.” Ship customization has only been added after the designers came up with a way to integrate it into the exploration loop. Players will have to salvage ship parts as they travel, trading them to get the exact right piece. Those salvaged parts will let you change how your craft looks and works, and even let you create new kinds of starship.

As for space stations, they’re perhaps the only part of No Man’s Sky that hasn’t been revised in a previous update. But as of Orbit…

MSI has unveiled its upcoming X870 and X870E motherboard range at Gamescom 2024. Cowcotland visited MSI’s booth and noticed an interesting addition to these boards. It seems all of them featured an 8-pin PCIe power connector located at the bottom of the boards. But why, you might ask?

Cowcotland reports these connectors are included to handle the demands of next generation Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. That indicates some of these cards are likely to consume serious amounts of power. Assuming such cards are a matter of months away from seeing the light of day, MSI is likely already aware of at least the basic requirements of such cards.

Secondary power connectors are not a new feature. They tend to be found on high-end or overclocking-focused motherboards. Their purpose is to provide extra juice to high-power graphics cards, but seeing them included on more mainstream options is interesting indeed. 

A standard PCIe x16 slot can provide up to 75W of power. If …

The developers of hit deckbuilder Monster Train are gearing up to release their next game: Inkbound, a unique turn-based RPG that’s designed to play fluidly either cooperative or solo by using many of the same tricks as action RPGs and MOBAs. Outside of combat players move freely, while inside it they move around and toss out attacks freely on their turn before the enemies take a shot.

Like Monster Train, Inkbound is a roguelike based around drafting abilities, upgrades, and equipment to make synergized builds for maximum efficiency—all about that exponential growth curve from scrub to unstoppable. The game story takes place inside the Atheneum, a magical library of sorts, where solo or in four player co-op you enter stories to explore them.

Just like Monster Train, developer Shiny Shoe will release Inkbound into Steam Early Access. It’s set to arrive in just a couple of months, on May 22, 2023. 

As part of the run-up to releasing Inkbound, Shiny Shoe ha…

Starfield lets spacefarers battles enemies with both guns and melee weapons, but it also allows players to bash their foes with their gun. And it appears not everyone knows about this, as inadvertently revealed by the YouTuber Causal Loop, who  completed the game’s main story using only the butt of his weapon.

“Guns are designed for a single purpose,” Causal Loop begins “but ammo’s expensive, heavy, and there’s no honour in killing someone who can’t even see your face. So what if you wanted to become a true badass who, instead of pulling the trigger, used their gun as a blunt instrument to spread carnage throughout the Settled Systems?”

The rules for Causal Loop’s playthrough were pretty straightforward, only kill enemies with gun bashing, no companions unless they’re forced by the story (as companions will attack enemies with whatever’s to hand), and play on normal difficulty. Causal Loop’s only exception to these rules was when the game forced him into space comba…

Bethesda has released the first hotfix for Starfield that will take on “a few top issues” with the game, including potential quest blockers and stability and performance issues.

“This is a game we’ll be supporting for years and years to come, so please keep all the feedback coming!” Bethesda said. “Even if we don’t get to your requests immediately, we’d love to do it in the future, like city maps. Our priority initially is making sure any top blocker bugs or stability issues are addressed, and adding quality-of-life features that many are asking for.”

To that end, Bethesda has rolled out the first Starfield hotfix, taking the game to version 1.7.29. It doesn’t make a lot of changes but it does take on a trio of problems that can prevent quests from being completed, and also promises better overall performance and stability. 

Bigger things are on the way: Bethesda also said today that a “regular interval of updates” will add official DLSS supp…

Leaked documents, including spreadsheets, emails, and chat messages, show that Nvidia has been using millions of YouTube videos, Netflix, and other sources to train an AI model to be used in its Omniverse, autonomous vehicles, and digital avatar platforms.

The astonishing, but perhaps not surprising, scope of the data scraping was reported by 404 Media, who investigated the documents. It discovered that an internal project codenamed Cosmos (the same name but different to Nvidia’s Cosmos Deep Learning service) had staff use dozens of virtual PCs on Amazon Web Service (AWS) to download so many videos per day that Nvidia accumulated over 30 million URLs in the space of one month.

Copyright laws and usage rights were repeatedly discussed by the employees, who found some creative ways to prevent any direct violation of them. For example, Nvidia employed the use of Google’s cloud service to download the YouTube-8M dataset, as directly downloading the videos isn’t permitted by …