The first patch for Bethesda’s busted Fallout 4 next gen update leaves its biggest problems intact, and you’re still better off downgrading the game-

Fallout 4’s 14.4GB “next gen” update dropped at the end of April, dovetailing neatly with the very popular Fallout TV show on Amazon. It promised all sorts of bells and whistles to bring the (nearly decade old, my god) game up to date to the standards we expect from videogames in 2024.

And then, forgive me, it bombed. Hard. Very little visibly changed, mods went haywire, and the changes that were noticeable were mostly the parts of the game the patch broke. But fear not, because Bethesda has now put out Next Gen Update 2, featuring “fixes and improvements to address some of the feedback you provided us with on the previous update.”

But, well, that’s about all the good news I have for you. For the most part, the community has responded to the patch with an emphatic s…

This $310 RX 6700 XT makes Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4060 look slightly silly-

Choose your weapon: AMD’s last-gen Radeon RX 6700 XT or the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti? On pure raster performance, there isn’t much in it. So, it’s almost certain that the RX 6700 XT will have a hefty lead over the upcoming RTX 4060, which isn’t quite out yet but Nvidia just brought forward to June 29th.

After all, for the plain RTX 4060 Nvidia has hacked the CUDA down from 4,352 in the 4060 Ti to just 3,072. Yuck. Anyway, the point here is that ASRock’s take on AMD RX 6700 XT can now be had for just $310 on Newegg. That’s just a whisker more than the RTX 4060’s $299 launch price.

OK, Nvidia’s DLSS scaling tech remains superior to AMD’s FSR. But as we found with the RTX 4060 Ti, the Frame Generation bit of DLSS 3 doesn’t work quite as well with smaller GPUs as it does o…

The latest Sims 4 bug fix stops Sims from committing autonomous incest-

When everyone said they wanted Sims to have more interesting lives, I don’t think any of us meant incest. Nor did EA intend it, so a Sims 4 patch yesterday has addressed the sudden tendency for Sims to try pursuing a romance with their relations.

A few different bugs cropped up after the romance-focused Sims 4 Lovestruck expansion and a base game update last week but the two most prominent were Sims being way too mean to each other for no particular reason and Sims deciding to develop illicit relationships with their family members. It was happening through the “Neighborhood Stories” feature which allows Sims outside your played family to have life milestones of their own like marriages, pregnancies, job changes, or accidental deaths without your direction. Nice, in …

This grappling hook horde survival shooter’s free demo already has me hooked-

First spotted by AlphaBetaGamer, Van Hellswing’s free demo already gets my hearty recommendation. It’s basically like Devil Daggers⁠—horde mode PFS survival against floating, swarming enemies⁠—except you’re trapped in a vertically complex arena and given a sick grappling hook.

That movement’s really the star of the show here. Despite the name, Van Hellswing’s signature move is more of a Zelda hookshot deal than a Titanfall, Spiderman swing one, but it’s a joy to use. It caps off a moveset that also includes a double jump, dash, wall run, and bunnyhopping, and developer Codeclue has really made the perfect bedrock for almost any kind of shooter they wanted, not just a survival arena.

Your sole weapon is a double barrel flintlock, which you use…

Today’s Wordle hint and answer #814- Monday, September 11-

Don’t worry if you’re close to running out of guesses in today’s Wordle, because all the help you need is right here. You’ll find a fresh clue for the September 11 (814) just below, alongside our general tips and advice. And if you need something stronger, today’s Wordle answer is never more than a click away.

Well I got today’s solution, but I wish it hadn’t taken an embarrassingly long time, as well as every go on the board, to do so. I had everything I needed right in front of me quite early on, I just seemed to miss the woods for the trees today.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, September 11

Someone or something that had been around longer than something else could be called the _____ of the two. Or to put it more simply: the opp…

This wonderfully ’90s RTS looks like a lost Command & Conquer game-

I’m kind of amazed by how accurate DORF Real-Time Strategic Conflict feels to a specific era of classic RTS games. From the chunky animations, to the synth-heavy music, to the early 3D look of its scurrying little units, it’s about as evocative of Command & Conquer and its ilk as you could possibly get in 2023. Just look at it in motion.  

Promising “elaborate base-building, resource-gathering, and massive battles with powerful and unique units”, the game has been in development by a team of just two people since September last year via a Patreon page. There, supporters are able to vote on what features and units they want to see in the game. Though considering they recently voted to keep the name as-is rather than change it to the brilliant ‘Wartrash’, I’m not sure they …

Vampire survival game’s new expansion adds awesome multi-level castles with all the Dracula vibes-

Vampire survival game V Rising remains in early access, and is celebrating its first anniversary with the Gloomrot expansion: In which developer Stunlock Studios has basically said sod it, let’s add Frankenstein’s monster. The studio has now released a trailer for the expansion, which arrives on May 17, but the big takeaway for me is just how awesome the new castles look.

The Gloomrot expansion adds a ton of new stuff to the game, but what has fans most excited is the multi-level building. A big part of V Rising’s vampire fantasy is building your own gothic crib from which to terrorise the world, replete with ornate furnishings and all the Dracula trappings one could wish for. There was a bit of an issue though: The castles could only have one floor, which led players to th…

Vile treachery- When you ‘ran’ on the Citadel in Mass Effect, it just changed the FOV to make it look like you were going faster-

Just to say it up front: I’m very smart. My mom says so. That means it’s totally fine that, according to recent Tweets from former BioWare cinematic designer John Ebenger, I’ve been bamboozled into thinking my characters are moving faster when they aren’t, thanks to techniques like “speed lines” and “whooshing sounds.” Yes, I’ve basically fallen for the video game equivalent of when you trick a dog by pretending to throw something. I’m not at all upset and I’m handling it very well.

We owe this latest reveal of game developer villainy to Twitter user @dyingnome, who tweeted on Saturday that a Dragon Age: Inquisition dev once admitted that they “just added some wind lines” to obscure the fact that DA:I horses weren’t actually going any faster while sprinting. Ebenger quoted …

Valve won’t let devs frontload Steam screenshot galleries with a dozen trailers anymore, says many don’t know ‘how best to manage’ the space-

Valve loves tweaking and futzing with Steam to ensure that everything is running just so. Some of it is front-facing, like the recent beta client update that added “game notes” and a slew of other new features, and some happens more in the background—for instance, the discount policy changes for developers it rolled out in early 2022. But even by those measures, the changes that went live today are really granular.

Steam store pages are now limited to just two videos on the left-hand side of the thumbnail row. Developers can add as many as they like, but any excess videos will be display on the right-hand of the thumbnail row, after the screenshots. Page owners can set which two videos they want before the screenshots, and which will come after, through the…

Western Digital is planning to split its SSD memory and hard drive operations into two new businesses-

Hot off the news that the long-running plan to merge with Kioxia has ground to a halt yet again, Western Digital’s board of directors has approved a plan to split the company up. Its NAND flash and hard drive divisions will become entirely independent public companies, pending final board approval and other regulations.

Western Digital, or just WD as a brand name, has been around in the world of technology for 53 years and these days it’s best known for its self-titled SSDs and HDDs, as well as SanDisk mobile storage. In the NAND flash world, it’s the fourth largest supplier of such chips, behind Samsung, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory Corporation), and SK Hynix.

To make SSDs and tiny flash cards, Western Digital uses manufacturing plants owned by Kioxia, and the two have w…