Category: Equipment

California, the biggest state in the US when it comes to both population and the sheer volume of tech companies squeezed into its borders, has just passed the country’s most extreme right to repair bill in the US (via Ars Technica). It’s the third state to pass such a bill, but goes further than either Minnesota or New York in that it forces companies to support their products for longer. But while it will cover gaming PCs and laptops, games console manufacturers get a free pass.

The bill just has to go back to the Senate for a procedural vote, but having already pass wholly unanimous votes previously in both the state Assembly and the Senate, that should be a formality before it is finally signed by the governor. The bill will then join the other two bills, coming into effect next year.

In New York, the right to repair bill will come into effect in January 2024, while Minnesota and now California will see their own bills come online in July 2024.

Where the California bill stands out, however, is that it is requiring companies to support any product sold after July 1, which costs $100 or more for at least seven years. If a product costs between $50 and $99.99 t…

Hideo Kojima took the stage at The Game Awards tonight—no surprise there—but didn’t show up with a Death Stranding 2 trailer like we might’ve expected. Instead, Kojima was joined by actor and director Jordan Peele to announce horror game OD.

We knew Kojima was working on a game other than Death Stranding 2 with support from Xbox Studios, but this is the first we’re seeing of it.

“[OD] is a game, don’t get me wrong, but it’s at the same time a movie, but at the same time a new form of media,” Kojima said through a translator.

The OD trailer embedded above doesn’t tell us a whole lot, except that it’ll feature Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier. The strange sentence they’re repeating is one that contains all the phonemes in English: “The hungry purple dinosaur ate the kind, zingy fox, the jabbering crab, and the mad whale and started vending and quacking.”

“I’m a huge fan of Hideo, this man is an icon,” said Peele when he joined Kojima on stage. “I can say that from the first moment I played Metal Gear Solid 2, I knew I was experiencing the work of an artist whose craft just hits different. And he’s been an inspiration to me, and the op…

Throughout 2023, Microsoft routinely issued updates for Windows 11 each month, fixing security problems, adding new features, and borking a few things along the way. But as the latest figures from Statcounter show, Windows 10 users just weren’t interested in the newer operating system whatsoever and it remains the OS of choice for two-thirds of all Windows PCs.

As reported by The Register, Microsoft struggled to significantly improve the uptake of Windows 11 last year. At the start of 2023, its worldwide market share was just 17% and while the final quarter saw that figure rise to 26%, it’s still well short of Windows 10’s dominance (67%).

Windows 7 was officially retired in 2023, hence why its share went from 11% to 3.4% over the past 12 months. This is probably why Windows 11 gained some ground, as organisations switching from the 14 years old operating system would only be able to buy enterprise licenses for the latest OS.

The strict hardware requirements for Windows 11 did it no favours at all, especially given that they could be easily bypassed, allowing older PCs to run the OS with relatively few issues if you knew how. Sales of new PCs haven’t been espec…

With the US ramping up bans on sending high-performance PC parts to China—and China now returning the favour—you’d think there would be a degree of interest in smuggling high-end PC parts into the country. This is not that. This is the case of a smuggler trying to move 44 AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics cards right under everyone’s noses.

The smuggler’s plan? Walk right out the front door of the airport with boxes full of GPUs. That’s right, walk right on through nothing to declare with an innocent smile on their face and hope Chinese customs won’t sniff him out. Unfortunately for the smuggler, they did.

According to the Mydrivers report (via Tom’s Hardware), the 44 cards were intended to be refurbished and sold for profit. How much profit can you make on seven-year old, second-hand, most likely heavily used graphics cards? My guess would be ‘enough’ but I doubt it’s a massively profitable venture. The 8GB of VRAM on these cards isn’t ideal for working with AI models, either.

Getting just one RTX 4090 could be a very worthwhile trip for a smuggler these days, however. That card’s price has reportedly skyrocketed since the US has halted Nvidia from sellin…

Battlefield 2042 had some problems when it launched a couple years ago, but I said then that it was a fun game, and I say it again now: It’s fun! I feel a little less alone in thinking so lately, because it’s presently sitting at the respectable position of #13 on Steam’s list of top games by daily players, which of course doesn’t include players who own it on console or other PC stores. 

Pretty good for a game that was once being called, in polite and impolite terms, a complete disaster.

It helps that BF2042 just had a free weekend, but that free weekend is over and its daily peak is still hitting 90,000 to 100,000, the highest Steam numbers the game has seen since launch by a lot. The biggest factor here is its currently discounted price of $10, but whatever the reasons, this is the most enthusiasm I’ve seen for DICE’s latest large-scale multiplayer shooter since 2021 (if I’m not including enthusiasm for hating it).

What many thought of as the new worst Battlefield is still recognizable as the game that launched two years ago, but its peculiarities and series firsts have been hammered into more traditional shapes. More cover has been introduced to the bi…

It was way back in 2014 when ambitious multiplayer dinosaur survival game Ark: Survival Evolved entered early access on Steam. It was a complete smash. Despite issues like glitches, bugs, dismal optimization, and no small amount of behind the scenes drama, Ark became one of the most played games on Steam and would remain that way for nearly a decade.

In 2017 Ark finally left early access, and now here we are six years later in 2023 where the remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved… has just entered early access.

Time is a flat circle covered with dinosaurs.

The Unreal 5 Engine remaster is called Ark: Survival Ascended (which has already seen its own share of drama) and is surprisingly due out today. The trailer can be seen above showing off some graphically improved dinosaurs and survivors running around and blowing each other up. 

It looks nice! It’s just a little hard to get excited about because it seems like a better idea to just keep playing the original game and wait for the sequel, Ark 2, which is due out in 2024.  

How much does the Ark remaster cost? I genuinely don’t know! Despite it coming out today there’s no pricing on its Steam p…