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Disney Lorcana’s sure been interesting to follow. Aside from the big, dramatic lawsuit where the words “the legal equivalent of alchemy” were used in a courtroom, it’s also picked up some pretty good steam as a competitive card game.

Which shouldn’t be a surprise, really: When you see an Elsa card going up on eBay for $7,000, things start to click into place. Disney’s branding is potent, and from what I’ve heard, Ravensburger has put together a fun TCG to back the mouse up. It’s honestly surprising that Disney’s own-brand Magic: The Gathering didn’t happen sooner.

And yet all that branding, all those highly marketable characters, even the pristine copyright-extending might of Mickey himself are powerless before the unstoppable force of the metagame, which has placed one of the least iconic Disney characters of all time into a position of godhood.

As spotted by TheGamer: Hiram Flaversham, Toymaker (which honestly sounds like the name of a Dark Souls Boss) i…

At D&D Direct earlier this week, we got an update on the new virtual tabletop system that Wizards of the Coast is developing in Unreal Engine 5, and it’s not looking bad at all. (If only they’d released it in March of 2020, right?)

Like other virtual tabletop gaming programs out there, D&D Virtual Tabletop seeks to emulate the in-person experience while also taking advantage of the properties of a digital playspace.

“We want players to really feel like they are playing together,” wrote game director Kale Stutzman in a blog post, “so we have created various ways to interact with the 3D space, including pointers, pings, simple drawing tools, dice, and minis. All these systems update in real-time so you can see exactly where your friends are and what they are doing.”

DMs will be able to spawn minis and tweak monster stats on the fly, and roll checks (like comparing an attack roll to the target’s armor class) can be done manually or be automated.

Visually…

Back in March 2023, CDPR’s then-CEO Adam Kiciński said the quiet part out loud on an earnings call, and referred to the studio’s Polaris project (a new Witcher trilogy) as The Witcher 4. Naturally the studio went into immediate damage control mode and denied the first Polaris game is The Witcher 4, but here’s what Kiciński said at the time: “We want to release three big Witcher games within six years, starting from the release of Polaris, which is Witcher 4.”

CDPR first announced Polaris in October 2022, and has referenced it a few times since (though the only information about the game comes from fan theorising about the teaser image). It’s started 2024 in the same way, telling Reuters that production on Polaris is going into full swing this year. 

“We’d like to have around 400 people working on [Polaris] by the middle of the year,” said joint CEO Adam Badowski. That’s a lot of developers, but we already know from some recent quarterly results that…

If you’ve been scratching your head at today’s Wordle, you might want to take a peek at our hint, written especially for the March 6 (991) game. Or maybe you’d rather get straight to the best bit and celebrate the latest addition to your win streak instead by clicking through to today’s Wordle answer. However you want to win, we’ve got it covered.

I couldn’t have done worse on my first go today—or much better on my second. As sudden turnarounds go, this was a good one, a full row of grey letters turning into four greens and yellows. My third guess was almost a formality—a nice, easy, win at the end of an extraordinary game.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, March 6

If someone’s eyes are welling up, if they’re feeling so down they could almost cry, or they’ve just been chopping onions, they might be described as looking a bit _____. 

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Is there a double letter in Word…

Endlight comes as close to an embodiment of pure chaos as any game I’ve ever played. It’s a simple concept and very simple to play—navigate freely through twisting, shifting, and bizarre 3D landscapes to find and collect golden hoops—but I found the violent onslaught of lights and noise that envelops the action to be very off-putting at first. The deeper I dug into Endlight, though, the more I found it to be a remarkably engaging, surprising, and unexpectedly funny game—and one that I will (probably) never be able to play again.

Endlight is developed by Jim McGinley, who describes himself (not entirely seriously, I suspect) as “one of the greatest players of TRS-80 action games today,” and it was in many ways influenced by those old-time games. “The best TRS-80 games filled the screen,” McGinley said. “People aren’t doing that anymore, but Endlight is. No matter where you look, there’s NO empty space.”

He’s not kidding. It’s virtually impossible to get …

Even among Hideo Kojima’s most diehard fans (not to be confused with Die-Hardman), I think it’s a damn near universal opinion that Kojima made the wrong call when he replaced longtime voice actor David Hayter with Kiefer Sutherland in Metal Gear Solid 5. It didn’t help that compared to Hayter’s gravelly-but-slightly-goofy performance, Sutherland seemed a bit subdued—or phoned in, depending on who you ask. 

Other than little cameos here and there, Hayter hasn’t officially played Snake in more than a decade. But a new teaser trailer on Konami’s YouTube channel has fans freaking out, because it stars Hayter and teases more to come.

The 28-second teaser for “Metal Gear Solid Legacy series” begins with Hayter in shadow, slowly turning to face the camera as his voiceover plays alongside clips from the games. He talks about the popularity and impact of Metal Gear, and closes the teaser with “I hope you’re ready, because this is only the beginning.” You can definitely…

Lexar’s NM790 is a brilliant NVMe PCIe 4.0 gaming SSD, as it offers great performance for a very reasonable price, as we discovered when we reviewed the 4 TB version. It doesn’t have the very latest flash memory and controller chips, but the whole setup is very balanced and Lexar has done a fine job of configuring everything to work well.

There are, of course, better gaming SSDs but they’re more expensive and the NM790 should be more than quick enough for most gamers. What it doesn’t have, though, is a very large cache. Let me explain.

NAND flash, the type of memory that’s used in SSDs, isn’t super quick, especially when being written to. So when you’re trying to get lots of files copied from your PC’s system RAM onto the drive, the data needs to be buffered somewhere to stop things slowing to a crawl. And the table that stores the locations of where everything is on the SSD also needs to be constantly updated.

So-called DRAM-less SSDs, like the NM790, use a portio…

As We Descend, a pretty stylish-looking upcoming deckbuilder from new studio Box Dragon, will be published by Coffee Stain, the same folks publishing hits like Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic.

Describing itself as a “roguelike deckbuilder with the soul of a strategy game,” As We Descend has a nice aesthetic that seems to blend magic with technology in a desperate, dystopian city-vault that is humankind’s last outpost on a devastated world. 

As We Descend will have a roguelike structure, with each expedition out of the city having you compose your unit of several squads of specialist units, with retrieved tech from outside the vault giving you more types of units to access. Combat will have two zones for your units to move between: A forward defense area and a rear support zone. The key to success will be in moving them between the two in response to enemy intents.

The other part of the game will be exploring cityscape of the vault in order to “make contacts, ga…

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Ever wrestled to remove a graphics card, tears of frustration curling down your cheeks as you desperately fumble for the release catch, all the while cursing the heavens at the notion that somebody, anybody, thought this was a user-friendly or remotely ergonomic retention mechanism? Then you’re in good company.

But rejoice, because Asus has a new revision of its PCIe Q-Release mechanism, now known as PCIe Q-Release Slim. And it might just be the GPU slot we’ve all been waiting for. It’s totally tool-free, there’s no button, and once you understand how it works it’s totally intuitive.

Last time around, the Asus PCIe Q-Release involved a more easily accessible quick-release button that essentially popped the retention clip that holds a GPU into the PCIe slot. That saved you from having to get directly at the clip to manipulate it, the latter procedure often presenting something of an ergonomic nightmare for those who lack sextuple-jointed fingers. In other words, …