Nintendo of America is suing the maker of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, saying it “unlawfully circumvents the technological measures” that prevent Switch games from being played on other hardware. 

Yuzu has been around for ages—we talked about using it to run Pokémon: Let’s Go back in 2018—but it was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that really brought it front-and-center for mainstream gamers. One day after the Switch-exclusive game went live, the Yuzu developers said they had it running at “full speed on most hardware,” with “no hacks needed.”

That was great for Nintendo fans, but Nintendo was clearly less enthused. The lawsuit (available in full on Scribd, via Stephen Totilo) describes emulators as “a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated videogames that were published only for a specific console on a general-purpose computing device,” and cites Tears of the Kingdom, which leaked ahead of release, a…

I’ve really enjoyed Assassin’s Creed’s transformation into a massive RPG series, but after spending hundreds of hours hoofing it across Norway, England, Ireland and France in Valhalla, I’m really looking forward to just chilling in Baghdad in Assassin’s Creed Mirage. 

Like Morgan wrote after the Mirage presentation, it’s exciting to see the return of the classic Assassin’s Creed approach, but it’s not just the return to sneaky shenanigans that’s piqued my interest. The reduction in scale also sounds like it can only be a good thing. Speaking to Easy Allies last week, Ubisoft compared the scale of Mirage to Revelation’s Constantinople and Unity’s Paris, which feels like a welcome departure from the country-sized escapades of the last few entries. 

Now, Paris is more than double the size of Constantinople, and we’re not sure where Mirage fits in that spectrum, but it’s reasonable to assume we’re looking at around 2km2, which is by no means a tiny space for a game…

After last week’s race to gas Terminid planets with super pesticide, I thought for sure Arrowhead would give the Helldivers 2 community a break. Then yesterday, a new major order came in: liberate a total of five planets in just three days—a daunting challenge, but not one that would be out of reach for the Super Earth fighting force that has exceeded Arrowhead’s expectations at every turn.

As expected, the helldivers showed up. The major order only calls for the liberation of two planets, Fori Prime and Zagon Prime, but to get to them, players need to liberate at least three other planets first. The most organized players have taken on the roles of generals drawing up elaborate battle plans and rallying forces to focus their efforts and ignore unnecessary planets. It was working: In just over 24 hours, Estanu was liberated, opening a path to Fori Prime. With two days left to check off Fori and make a break for Zagon, success seemed entirely possible.

But earlier t…

Oh how I’ve been waiting for this day. The game that swallowed several months of my life during lockdown, Satisfactory, is finally leaving early access and launching in 1.0 on September 10, just a hair over two months from today. Coffee Stain announced the release in a short, silly trailer that shows nothing new from the 1.0 update but does advertise surely its most important addition, flushable toilets. As we’ve written in the past, you can understand a lot about a game through its virtual toilets, and I look forward to reexperiencing Satisfactory with a new, empowered flush mindset.

There’s a bit more Satisfactory news from the last month or so to catch up on pertaining to the 1.0 launch. Last week Coffee Stain announced that the price will increase from $30 to $40 before the 1.0 release. “This is to account for inflation, but also because we’ve spent many years improving the game since its initial release and initial price,” community manager Snutt said. The price …

As any child running around the park holding a plastic raygun will tell you, most issues can be resolved by the correct application of a suitable amount of lasers, preferably of the pew-pew variety. However, one startup is aiming to solve the very real problem of orbital debris by using honest-to-goodness satellite mounted space lasers, which may end up proving once and for all that our childhood instincts were correct. 

The satellites are planned to be operated by Orbital Lasers, a startup backed by Japanese satellite operator SKY Perfect JSAT, and have been jointly designed by the operator in collaboration with the Riken research institute (via The Register). The plan is to use a technique called laser ablation to emit a powerful laser beam that vaporises the surface of a targeted piece of debris, and it’s the impulse emitted from this vaporisation that can not only prevent it from rotating in its current trajectory, but also be used to decelerate it, causing it to fall…

I don’t know what the partner cap on polyamory is, but this determined Stardew Valley player has definitely surpassed it by marrying 63 people simultaneously. If you have clocked the fact that there are not 63 people in the entirety of Pelican Town, Calico Desert, or Ginger Island from update 1.5, then you will not be surprised to hear that this was achieved with a hell of a lot of mods.

Streamer Yinny has posted quite a lot of modded Stardew Valley videos (many of which involve sexual dialogue mods so do beware the links) and last year undertook the challenge of simultaneously marrying 23 people in Stardew Valley. She achieved that feat with Free Love, a mod which allows you to have multiple spouses. I expected “multiple” to be, you know, like three maybe. 

But even 23 was not enough for Yinny, who has now gone on to marry a total of 63 people in Stardew Valley. She’s shown off her entire village (and then some) of spouses, who march into bed together each n…

Cyberpunk. One of the few genres of fiction where life is so, so, so much worse than the here and now, and fans go, “Ooh, neon,” and sigh wistfully at the prettiness of raindrops splattering on glowing adverts of cyborg geisha. 

In the latest trailer for Nivalis, the life sim from the studio that gave us Cloudpunk, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the story that propels our character to set up their own enterprise in the recesses of this grubby city. 

In Ion Lands’ previous game, Cloudpunk, the player flitted between the skyscrapers fulfilling jobs as a driver for a courier company, but if you looked a little closer, you could see small citizens skittering hither and thither. The team built upon this enlarging those little peoples’ lives into a business sim. Yet Nivalis is offering more than monitoring incomes and expenses. 

Shown off in the PC Gaming Show, the story trailer introduces us to the nameless artificial intelligence that will …

Typically, galaxy-brained hijinks like the one I’m about to dive into are usually confined to the realms of pen and paper—abusing some quirk from a DM’s homebrew rulings in a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

But thanks to some of Larian’s design decisions, druids in Baldur’s Gate 3 can turn their owlbear wildshape into a living meteor, using it to deal anywhere from 800 to a whopping 1,170 damage against the right enemy. For context, I have my Monster Manual open in front of me: an Adult Red Dragon, a monster designed to pose a threat to a party of four level 17 characters, has 256 hit points. This is enough to kill that monster four times.

You can see the devastating effect of this bug fluffy meteor for yourself down below—first by Reddit user Fishbleb, who uses it to flatten an Act 1 boss, and later by streamer Ellohime, who drops in “from the top rope” for 800 damage during Act 2.

So apparent…

We’re big fans of the latest OLED gaming monitors, but they do share one obvious issue. They’re all a bit short on pixels. But new roadmaps from the two big noises in OLED panel production, LG and Samsung, reportedly fix that with both 27-inch and 32-inch high-refresh 4K options incoming.

Of course, you can currently buy OLED gaming monitors and indeed TVs with the full 4K. But they’re all 42-inch and up models, so arguably oversized for desktop use. At that panel size, the pixel density isn’t all that either.

Salvation comes in the form of TFT Central’s latest OLED roadmap update. Happily, a number of new OLED panels are in the works that look absolutely ideal. 

For starters, both LG and Samsung have some new actually-monitor-sized 4K OLED panels in the works. Both are working on 27-inch and 32-inch models and they’re all set to offer full 240Hz refresh.

True to existing form, LG’s will use its WOLED tech while Samsung’s will be QD-OLED. Another intrigu…