Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) For anyone trying to buy a modern piece of gaming hardware, good news is beginning to peek through the dreary clouds of chip shortages and manufacturing hold-ups. This week’s optimism comes from a player outside the expected console- and GPU-making fray. Valve, the longtime software maker responsible for…
Category Archives: Blog
Enlarge / It’s not a Razer device unless it’s posed next to a bunch of custom RGB lighting, right? In great news, the Razer Kishi V2 includes zero glaring lights, which we prefer here at Ars Technica. (credit: Razer) In the years since the phrase “don’t you people have phones” became a Blizzard-mocking meme, I’ve…
Enlarge / Spellbreak battles are full of splashy elemental explosions and floaty acrobatic dodges. Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Boston-based Proletariat, the studio behind the magic-heavy battle royale game Spellbreak. Spellbreak will shut down by early 2023 as the workers at the 100-person studio transition to work on World of Warcraft and its upcoming “Dragonflight” expansion. VentureBeat…
Enlarge / In the new expansion pack The Delicious Last Course, Miss Chalice makes three. (credit: Studio MDHR) Some people will look at an expansion pack like Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course and make up their minds after a single glance. This $8 add-on’s beautiful brutality follows the same path as the original 2017 game Cuphead,…
Enlarge / A seemingly lost turn-based version of Doom RPG is now fully playable on modern Windows PCs, thanks to efforts from the Doom reverse-engineering community. (credit: id Software) The creators of the Doom series have presented plenty of official and unofficial historical retrospectives, but these often leave out the weirdest official Doom game ever made:…
Enlarge / All four of the mascots seen in this SGDQ promo image appear in various speedruns hosted over the past week. (credit: Summer Games Done Quick) The Games Done Quick series of charity events has long been a favorite among the gaming fans and critics at Ars Technica since it combines classic, beloved video…
Use cash to buy orbs. Despite backlash from some players, Diablo Immortal‘s free-to-play, microtransaction-laden game design seems to be working out just fine for Blizzard’s bottom line. Using data from mobile analysis firm Appmagic, MobileGamer.biz estimates that the iOS and Android versions of the game brought in $49 million in earnings from just over 10 million mobile…
Enlarge / This… isn’t supposed to happen in Ocarina of Time. Here’s the story of how some fans made it happen anyway—all on a stock N64 with an unmodified Ocarina cartridge. (credit: Summer Games Done Quick) Shortly after our guide to Summer Games Done Quick 2022 went live, the event hosted an astounding demonstration of a…
Enlarge / True external display support is coming to M1-powered iPads in iPadOS 16. (credit: Apple) CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple formally announced the latest update to its iPad operating system, iPadOS 16, during the keynote presentation of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday. As usual, the tablet operating system will share many of the features and…
Enlarge / MetalFX Upscaling, as visually described by Apple at WWDC 2022. (credit: Apple) CUPERTINO, Calif.—At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling. The system will leverage Apple’s custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution…