This moment has been a long time coming. Noctua, creator of many of the best PC fans, is making some more. Specifically, the NF-A14x25 G2, which is now set to arrive sometime towards the end of June.

Noctua’s ‘next-gen’ 140mm fan has been teetering on release for months, nay, years.  Every time it seemed to be getting somewhere Noctua would give it a kicking in testing and find something wasn’t quite right. 

Most recently, a “slight risk of critical deformation” over extended use, which pushed back the release by around six months. Though it was already pushed back by around a year prior, to redesign the frame. It’s also been in development for nearly a decade now.

The fan’s extremely tight tolerances between the blades and frame make any minor movement poten…

I’ll spare you my cat puns and tell you straight up: The life sim where you play as a cat is back. There’s gardening, foraging, decorating, wooing your cat mate, and quite a lot of feline combat, actually. Cattails: Wildwood Story is planning to launch later in 2023 but it has a demo available right now on Steam. 

I played the first Cattails game, which was just called Cattails and released in 2017, years back and was surprised that there’s actually a big territory control and combat aspect to it alongside all the usual cozy activities of similar life sims. That’s returned for the sequel, which sends your cat colony to claim a new home where you’ll put down roots but also fight against other cat factions around the map.

The new demo for Cattails: Wildwood …

It’s been a wild couple of weeks for tabletop RPGs—if you’re not caught up, you can read our summary of events here, but in short, Wizards of the Coast have moved to change the terms around companies creating Dungeons & Dragons-compatible products in a less than favourable direction, to the dismay of almost the entire community. 

In the wake of the controversy, several publishers have drawn lines in the sand, either moving away from D&D or challenging the legitimacy of the move. Notably, Pathfinder creator Paizo did both, and announced its own version of an open license, recruiting other major players such as Chaosium and Kobold press to join it. 

Now that’s starting to look like the beginnings of a trend, as Free League—the very successful publ…

So yeah, ray tracing on the Steam Deck is now properly a thing. It’s been do-able if you wanted to dig in and do some Linux-y tweaking before, but with the latest beta OS Valve is starting to go native. For a device that costs less than the price of an RTX 3050—a graphics card no-one should buy at that price—to be able to enable ray tracing that’s worth a damn is seriously impressive.

Valve has announced the new Steam Deck OS beta in the handheld’s Preview channel, and updates the operating system of the device to the Mesa 23.1 graphics driver. So far, so dry, but the interesting stuff is in what that actually means in terms of games. For one, it gets rid of some graphical corruption issues that exist with the current build of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and GPU crashes “i…

There are, at times, feats which show the ingenuity and resourcefulness of mankind, like the invention of the wheel, or the discovery of penicillin. Joining these accomplishments today is Twitter user ToT who, spitting in the face of financial limitations, has turned a game built to create, pose, and have relations with cute anime “waifus” into their own mecha factory.

Koikatsu Party (or just Koikatsu! in Japanese) is, from what I can tell, a game that mostly centres around bringing ‘your waifu to laifu’ (the Steam page’s words, not mine), dressing them up, and then having raunchy sex with them. Okay—that’s a little unfair. The game has plenty of wholesome options too, such as taking your digital dream girl out on dates, or posing them in a shockingly comprehensive studio.

Valve is making changes to Steam pricing in Argentina and Turkey that will see game sales in those countries switched from their local currencies—the Argentine peso and Turkish lira—to US dollars. The change is being made to address “exchange rate volatility” that Valve says has made it difficult for developers to set and maintain prices for their games.

Steam’s system of regional pricing has long been a contentious issue. We went deep on “the weird economics behind Steam prices around the world” all the way back in 2014, and while the world has changed since then, the underlying complexities have not. Price variations from region to region are based on numerous factors, but the broad goal is fairness: Ensuring that people outside of North America and Western Europe ar…

The question of difficulty is a bizarrely high-voltage third rail in videogame discourse. You can barely mention finding an Elden Ring boss a bit tough on social media without sparking some sort of global diplomatic crisis: Fathers denounce sons, sons denounce brothers, daggers are drawn and before you know it everyone is intensely angry and accusing one another of trying to kill videogames forever.

So I salute the bravery of Spelunky creator Derek Yu, who’s been musing about the issue of videogame difficulty—specifically, whether it’s a good idea for games to include easy-to-access god modes for players who get stuck—over on Twitter (via GamesRadar). 

Yu was responding to an anonymous discussion between two people, one of whom advocated for including god mo…

We did not hear anything about Beyond Good and Evil 2 at the recent Ubisoft Forward showcase, or at any point during the recent Summer Game Fest blowout. In fact, we haven’t heard anything about it for more than a year, and that wasn’t really about the game so much as the reportedly awful working conditions at developer Ubisoft Montpellier. Prior to that, we kicked off 2023 by counting the number of times Ubisoft has promised that BG&E2 is still in development, which for the record was 28.

But now we can up that number by one, because Ubisoft has given word that, yes, Beyond Good and Evil 2 is still happening.

The latest reassurance comes by way of Ubisoft’s Beyond Good and Evil 20th Anniversary Edition website, which went live earlier today after a multi-pronged botch t…

Diablo 4 requires you to make a new character every season and that fact has everyone imagining a world where that isn’t the case. It’s an RPG where you customize a character and spend hundreds of hours with them, why should you have to re-do that every three months?

It turns out, Diablo 3 has had an answer to this for years now. Its Rebirth feature lets you transfer an existing character over to a season, but all their items stay behind and they start the season at level 1. That might not sound like much of an improvement—and it’s really not—but you at least get to keep playing the same character you may have gotten attached to, and you can keep doing so every season.

The new character customization options in Diablo 4 would make a Rebirth feature even more valu…