Dune- Awakening’s combat ‘is much more second-to-second and intense than you would find in an MMO’-

One of the things Denis Villeneuve’s Dune film highlights is that warfare on Arrakis relies on some quite contrasting flavors of fighting. When the soldiers of House Atreides and House Harkonnen clash in the movie, aircraft are raining artillery fire from above while warriors protected by Holtzman shields duel with old-fashioned blades down below. That sense of battles taking place on multiple, overlapping fronts is something Funcom’s massively multiplayer survival game Dune: Awakening aims to capture as well.

Speaking to us as part of an exclusive interview in the PC Gaming Show, creative director Joel Bylos describes a game that will escalate from the player being a lone outcast sneaking around with a knife, stabbing people to steal their water, to all-out war. “By the end of th…

GTA 6’s first trailer has recreations of a load of real viral video moments in it, and it looks like Rockstar’s version of TikTok will play a big part-

Rockstar has released the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 early, and in 12 hours it’s already smashed through 60 million views (and counting). Needless to say the 90-second video is jam-packed full of details and hints about what we’ll be getting up to in Vice City, and if you want the nuts-and-bolts breakdown we’ve got you covered. But one element of the trailer really jumped out at me: TikTok framing, and the real-world parallels.

It’s no surprise that GTA 6 will incorporate its own version of TikTok, because the series has always jumped on the tech trends of the moment: characters use their iFruit phones, you can surf Live Invader (Facebook) or Bleeter (Twitter), and pretty much any piece of pop culture you can imagine has its GTA equivalent. What Rockstar’s seize…

Fallout showrunners talk about the show’s take on New Vegas- ‘The idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us’-

I will begin by stating the obvious: There are going to be spoilers about the Fallout television show on Amazon. Much like being in the neighborhood when a nuclear blast goes off, you can either avert your eyes or suffer the consequences.


The Fallout series on Amazon is a hit, but not everyone is entirely happy with it. I am of course talking about lore nerds who take issue with the game’s handling of New Vegas. Todd Howard himself shot down fan theories that Bethesda was attempting to use the show to retcon Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas from official existence, but as Chris Livingston noted in his own deep-dive debunkification of those theories, there were still questions left unanswered.

And seriously, this is where the spoilers begin.

The Fallout series…

Microsoft’s auto AI upscaler will only be available on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ AI PCs to begin with-

Earlier this year, it came to light that Microsoft had been developing an AI upscaler for Windows, called Automatic Super Resolution (ASR). The concept behind the system is that any game can get a boost in performance and better anti-aliasing, even if it doesn’t support DLSS, FSR, or XeSS. Microsoft has now made the feature available, except very few people will get to use it for now because it’s only enabled on new Copilot+ AI PCs that sport Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processor.

The details of this limitation are found in the newly updated FAQ section of Microsoft’s Copilot AI PC page (via Videocardz). The main reason why it’s currently limiting its new technology to these specific Arm-based PCs is two-fold. 

Firstly, it provides an additional promotion for Microsoft’s Co…

Starfield system requirements- you’re gonna need a 125GB cargo hold-

If you’ve been struggling to manage your PC storage in the last year or two, you might want to look away now: Starfield’s system requirements demand 125GB of your SSD, making it the data equivalent of a red giant. Remarkably, this isn’t the largest game we’ve seen recently: Jedi Survivor required a whopping 155GB of storage, adding a whole Prey on top of what Starfield asks of your drive. But it still puts it firmly in the category of +100GB games, which is becoming the norm for PC gaming blockbusters.

Potential Starfielders should also note the phrase “SSD required” in the requirements. So if you’re still mucking about with a drive that requires—gasp—moving parts, time to toss it out the window and grab yourself a li’l data brick.

Meaty girth aside, Sta…

Samsung workers union is calling for an indefinite strike, to which the bosses claim there will infeasibly be ‘no disruptions’ to production-

With an estimated 15-fold increase in operating profits, everything looks rosy for Samsung Electronics, thanks to the AI world’s demand for memory chips. However, while DRAM, flash memory, and other chips are ranking in the money, thousands of workers are going on an indefinite strike and independent research predicts that its worldwide market share in chip manufacturing will tumble from 31% to just 9% by 2032.

It’s fair to say that Samsung Electronics, the chip manufacturing and electronics division of the Samsung Group, is going through some mixed fortunes of late. AI’s insatiable appetite for high-end RAM and flash memory chips has pushed prices by as much as 20% in the second quarter of the financial year (via Reuters).

Although that growth has subsided, it still resulte…

SteamDB’s browser extension now lets you claim Steam discovery queue rewards without actually looking at your Steam discovery queue-

If you like collecting Steam trading cards but aren’t really interested in bashing through your Steam discovery queue on a daily basis to pick them up during Steam sales, the SteamDB browser extension now makes it easy to score the reward without doing the work.

The SteamDB extension is available for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, and it does a lot of good things, like displaying a game’s lowest recorded price, showing concurrent player counts, automatically accepting the subscriber agreement on purchase pages, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I’m a pretty well committed Augmented Steam user and not terribly inclined to change, but a newly-added feature in the SteamDB extension has me thinking about maybe running them both. (Yes, the interface gets a little crowded, but it’s wo…