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Baldur’s Gate 3’s dungeon master was almost as vindictive as the DM I had who cackled every time I failed a perception check and fell into a spike pit. This is according to the voice of Baldur’s Gate 3’s narrator and dungeon master, Amelia Tyler. “The direction I was given was Scar from the Lion King,” Tyler said in an interview with TheGamer. “Like, ‘I’m enjoying watching you fuck up. This is gonna be great.'”

In the end, the narrator’s mean streak was toned down during early access to be less judgmental of the players’ choices. “We want it to feel like it’s not another person challenging the player,” Tyler explains, “it’s their voice. I’ve been a voice in their heads their entire life and I know how they think and am totally on board with whatever choices they make.” While admittedly my own inner voice can sometimes sound more like a villain, maybe it was a good decision to only be mean to players when they roll a natural one, “in which case I’ll rip the piss out of them mercilessly,” Tyler admits. Justified.

If the narrator’s looming judgement is still too much for you, maybe Tyler’s recording session outtakes can help you centre yourself a little. Even as someone…

Sneakerheads rejoice! If you’re one of those people who dreams of owning every pair of Air Jordans released since 1985, or you see yourself loafing about in a pair of Chewbacca Crocs (no judgment here), then this PC might appeal to you. You can kick that old clunker PC to the curb with the Cooler Master Sneaker X.

The Sneaker X began life as a PC mod built by JMDF, which took out the best art direction award at the Case Mod World Series in 2020. Cooler Master (via Videocardz) liked what it saw, and decided to put it into production. It was shown off at this year’s Computex in late May. 

There are several versions of the Sneaker X, depending on where you live. In the US, there are two versions listed for preorder. The Professional version comes with a Core i7 13700K, RTX 4070 Ti graphics card, Z790 motherboard, 2x16GB of DDR5 memory and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The CPU is cooled by a Master Liquid PL360 Flux AIO cooler. But before you get too excited, it’ll set you back a whopping $3,799. That’ll get you more than a few pairs of vintage Reebok Pumps.

If $3,799 rubs your little pinkie the wrong way, there’s the Enthusiast version with an RTX 4070 that’ll set you …

It might be strange to recall after Hitman 3’s stonking success, but series developer IO Interactive was in a very precarious situation not so long ago. When 2016’s Hitman failed to please IOI’s owners at Square Enix, the corporation began scrabbling around looking for someone to take the studio of its hands. 

We know how that turned out—thankfully, IOI eventually managed to buy itself out from under Square—but a recent feature in Edge magazine has cast a little light on just how much worse things could have been for Hitman and IOI in general. We’re talking free-to-play Hitman, companies-offering-$1-for-the-whole-studio levels of grim.

“I didn’t even have 90 days into taking over [as CEO],” IOI CEO Hakan Abrak told Edge, “and then I got the call from [Square Enix president] Matusda-san: ‘We have to divest IO’.” It came as a shock, but the nasty arithmetic of it all shook out. “Looking at the books, IO had not made money for almost ten years in a row” by the time Square Enix started looking to divest it, said Abrak, and that fact made acquiring it an unappealing prospect for other potential owners.

“Some companies would offer $1 to take over IO,…

Intel has posted some pretty grim financial numbers, with revenues for its most recent quarter down fully 32% year-on-year leading to a loss of nearly $700 million. And yet, Chipzilla remains bullish about it roadmap and the imminent arrival of its new chiplet-based Meteor Lake chips.

Without getting into the weeds re the numbers, Intel’s sales were down for both PC and server chips. While that nigh-on $700 million loss in Q4 2022 sounds—and is—bad, it hardly spells doom for the company. After all, Intel made nearly $5 billion in profits in the same quarter in 2021, so a single quarter of losses isn’t going to bankrupt the firm.

But it does reflect Intel’s broader struggles with getting its Intel 7 technology (the node formerly known as 10nm) up to speed, and to a lesser extent other disappointments, including its Arc graphics products arriving late and underperforming.

With the broader global economic downturn, however, some tough numbers from Intel are hardly a surprise. Intel is far from alone in the tech sector in suffering a downturn in recent quarters.

Moreover, Intel is predicting another bad quarter for Q1 2023. But what matters, argua…

The game of the moment? The medieval city builder, Manor Lords, of course. The game burst into early access over the weekend and has so far sold over one million copies on Steam. Moreover, it reached a high point for strategy games at over 170,000 players playing at once. With figures like that, for a game in early access, I’ve come to expect reports of performance issues. Yet there have been surprisingly few. Of those, the developer says, most ending up in a system crash are the result of outdated drivers.

“99% crashes so far are old drivers. And when people say ‘I updated the drivers’, I check logs and see old drivers,” the Manor Lords official account says on X.

All three GPU manufacturers have released driver packages with optimisations for Manor Lords:

• Nvidia GeForce Game Ready driver version 552.22, available to download since April 16
• AMD Radeon Adrenalin version 24.4.1, released on April 25
• Intel Arc driver version 31.0.101.5445, released on April 24

Nvidia, AMD, nor Intel list any specific performance increases in Manor…

Over the past few years of listening to gaming executives talk about the industry during earnings reports, I’ve found Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick to be one of the more circumspect bosses in the business. He’s been relaxed about the rise of Xbox Game Pass, noting whenever he’s asked about it that subscriptions are still a small part of the business, and he didn’t declare NFTs to be the future of commerce five minutes after finding out about them. It’s a low bar, but it’s mildly refreshing to hear a tech exec respond to buzzwords with something other than a golden retriever’s unconditional enthusiasm. So it went on Monday when Zelnick was asked during an investors call what he thought of advances in AI tech, at least at the start of his response.

“You know I’m the first person to be skeptical of other people’s hype,” said Zelnick. “And I would like to note that AI stands for ‘artificial intelligence’ and there is no such thing as artificial intelligence.”

The CEO thinks some of the hopes and fears AI has inspired are overblown, reasoning, for instance, that the handheld calculator didn’t stop kids from learning math, so writing bots like ChatGPT won’t mean the end of …