Dark Souls is an interconnected game—if you datamine out a full model of Lordran, you’re able to look at the entire breadth of it like it’s a model train set, from the swamps of Blighttown to the hallowed halls of Anor Londo.
Back when the game first came to PC, its port was pretty shocking—it took about six years before the remastered version sorted most complaints out. But we’re PC gamers. If a game isn’t modded to have rig-melting textures or Dewmer rocket boots, what are we even doing here?
Fromsoftserve and their DSR Graphics Overhaul mod (thanks, Gamesradar) is one such attempt to polish the classic to a mirror sheen. This thing’s really impressive. Far from just a bunch of texture packs, fromsoftserve has been laboriously giving the whole game a facelift: bringing dynamic shadows to Lordran, making Anor Londo’s windows see-through, and even adding new meshes to far-off locations.
This adds to the game’s feeling of interconnectedness, lettin…
Ever since Bungie added Forge to Halo 3, Halo Karts has been a thing. The inspiration of Nintendo’s all-conquering Mario Kart was obvious, but the various Halo Karts were built from Halo elements and played on Halo maps. Now the prophecy is upon us. A Halo Mario Kart mod as ludicrous as it is amazing.
Cursed Halo Kart, to give it the proper title, is a part of a much larger mod called Cursed Halo Again, which is a campaign sequel to the multiplayer map pack Cursed Halo. The Mario Kart ‘campaign’ here is based on that prior mod,Halo Karts, and tasks players with winning Mario Kart races in Warthogs against various comedy Halo duos to progress (this is, after all, a ‘cursed’ campaign). Everything mentioned here was created by modder InfernoPlus and the whole overarching project is equal parts bizarre and impressive.
The mod’s shown off below by Youtuber Mint Blitz, and it’s where I took the above absurd gif from.
Like, it almost seems one of thos…
Bad news, folks: The imminent release of Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC might mean we all have to start beating Malenia by ourselves. Let Me Solo Her, the jar-headed, dual-wielding hero who’s helped countless players overcome the game’s toughest boss, says it might be time to call it quits.
Speaking to IGN, LMSH confesses that—having “probably defeated [Malenia] 6,000-7,000 times now”—he’s “had [his] fill of fighting Malenias,” and could be ready to bow out of his two-year career as a legendary rent-a-hero. With 1,200 hours of base Elden Ring under his belt, he wants to make time for Shadow of the Erdtree, and is confident that “Mr Miyazaki will give us another masterpiece to enjoy” when the DLC hits. You and me both, LMSH.
So it sounds like our hero’s comforting, bejarred presence might no longer be a staple sight outside Malenia’s boss room in the near future, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see his ghostly apparition taking on Shadow of th…
Solve today’s Wordle in record time—just click or scroll straight to the July 20 (761) answer and we promise we won’t tell anyone. Prefer to work through your daily game at a slower pace? No problem. Spend some time with our tips and guides, or take a peek at today’s clue.
I didn’t put as much thought as perhaps I should have into today’s opener, choosing to go with my gut instead—and that left me without much of anything to work with. That terrible start was the jolt I needed to kick my game into gear though, and after that early wobble I ended up with today’s Wordle answer in four.
Today’s Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Thursday, July 20
You’ll want to come at today’s Wordle sideways. The answer can refer to the sides of a person or animal, as well as any sort of manoeuvre where a group or individual approaches another from the side, such as in a sports game. There’s one vowel today.
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Is t…
Fool’s Theory is a Polish studio headed by Jakub Rokosz, formerly senior quest designer on The Witcher 2 and 3 at CD Projekt Red. Relations must still be good between them, since Fool’s Theory is currently working on the remake of the first Witcher game, with CDPR having “full creative supervision.”
In addition, Fool’s Theory has an original game in the works, which it recently revealed. The Thaumaturge is an isometric RPG set in a version of early 20th century Warsaw in which spirit beings called salutors are summoned and tamed by occultists for their own ends. We’ll be playing one such salutor-botherer, who can be seen in the gameplay trailer commanding a couple of spirits, as well as getting in fistfights and jogging around various parts of Russia-controlled Warsaw.
Those spirits are a bukavac—the eyeless four-armed one with all the hooks and chains—and an upyr—the friendly looking skull-faced chap with the fur hat, who is apparently the ghost of a v…
Watch On
A new Goat Simulator game is on the way and this time it’s a remaster that’ll be releasing later this year. We got to see this announcement along with a trailer during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live.
“The greatest simulation game known to man and goat returns with familiar caprine chaos, upgraded graphics and lighting, many intentional features that definitely aren’t bugs, and fan-favourite DLC, all in one package,” Coffee Stain Publishing says in a press release.
Other than the graphics there aren’t a massive amount of changes, something that Coffee Stain pokes fun at in the trailer as it revolves around a prison named Cash Grab Penitentiary. After some generic suit gets led through the remasters ward, past Ralof from Skyrim along with a couple of other characters, we finally come across the goat Pilgor that’s somehow broken out of a maximum security holding, just in time for its own remastered game and all the cash that’ll come with it.
Howeve…
Sqword is a word game where you try to make as many words as you can in a five-by-five square grid, earning more points for longer words. It was made by Josh C. Simmons and his friends, and is freely available at sqword.com. However, it’s also been picked up by multiple browser game portals, who took it without permission and ran it behind their own ads for profit.
As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. “The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page”, he wrote. “I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.”
On the off-chance you have somehow missed out on encountering Goatse over the years, it’s a photograph of a bent-over man stretching out his…
Elden Ring got an update today, and things are getting downright illuminated in The Lands Between. The 1.09 patch brings a slate of bug fixes and makes all sorts of tweaks to Elden Ring’s weapons and combat, but the headline item here is that the game is finally getting ray tracing support. There’s just one problem: You probably won’t want to actually use it.
You can go switch ray tracing on in Elden Ring’s graphics menu, but what you won’t find there is a toggle for Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR support, the miraculous frame generation tech that lets you maintain a playable framerate even with taxing graphical gewgaws turned on. That means actually activating ray tracing has the potential to slow your game to a slideshow, especially at high resolutions.
That’s probably why FromSoft’s minimum and recommended specs for Elden Ring’s new ray tracing mode both suggest you play the game at 1080p: Any higher and you’d begin to sacrifice too many frames.
To be fai…
Speaking at the recent Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, Warner Bros Discovery executive JB Perrette said the company wants to expand more into free-to-play and live service games in order to avoid the “volatile” ups and downs of big-budget game releases.
It has indeed been a volatile year for Warner. The company rode into 2023 on the success of Hogwarts Legacy, “the best selling game of the year in the entire industry worldwide,” but a year later Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed to live up to expectations, a stumble Warner said left its games business facing “a tough year-over-year comp” in its first financial quarter. Tough enough, apparently, to force a shift in long-term strategy.
“Our business historically has been very triple-A console-based,” Perrette said near the end of his session. “That’s a great business when you have a hit like Harry Potter, it makes the year look amazing. And then when you don’t have a release, or unfort…
A few keyboards caught my attention at Computex today, but the most shocking of all was Ducky’s upcoming ProjectD Outlaw 65, a fully customisable, high-end DIY keyboard kit that’s so heavy you could probably kill a man with it—though you’ll have to put it together first. And don’t even get me started on the potential of a $600 price tag.
Of course, with the ProjectD Outlaw being a pre production model the pricing is still very nebulous. But when one Ducky spokesperson guessed somewhere in the region of $499 to $599, I had to physically hold my jaw closed. Especially since he just told me “everything on that keyboard you have to build from scratch.”
Oh and I assume he was talking about the tenkeyless model I’ve been tapping away on. I dread to think how expensive a full-size one would be.
When you’re potentially going to be forking out that much cash for a keyboard I’d have maybe hoped a little Ducky minion might come home with me and at least hold a scr…