Thaiindy

‘What if you could build Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory?’ is a question I’m surprised video games haven’t answered yet. It’s a natural next step for the factory-building genre, taking the fundamentals of a game like Satisfactory and theming it around the one fictional factory everyone knows about.

Chocolate Factory, developed by Tbjbu2 (who I presume was named by the developer’s cat walking across the keyboard), does exactly this. But it also asks a far less obvious, some might say unnecessary question, namely ‘What if Willy Wonka had a massive gun?’.

Watching the announcement trailer (which isn’t on YouTube for some reason, but it’s viewable on the game’s Steam page) Chocolate Factory is clearly heavily derived from Satisfactory. It has a similar visual style, building sys…

Anticipation for news on Starfield is white-hot, and this hasn’t been helped by the many delays the game has had. Everyone’s jonesing to get their Skyrim in space on, but maybe some of us are Jonesing too much. Eagle-eyed PCG reader Jean Carrasquillo noticed, when googling the game’s name, something suspicious: The top result is a sponsored link to a Starfield open beta that promises you can “play now.”

Needless to say, the wise Jean did not click on this link and instead dropped us a line. Because it’s absolutely bogus, a scammy scam from the scammiest scamsters. There is no Starfield open beta. If there was, it would be plastered across every gaming website and billboard you could see. 

The link connects to a website called bizongrow dot com (don’t go there!) which re…

Some Wordles can be trickier than others, but whatever happens, we’re always here to help. Skip straight to another win with the answer to today’s Wordle if you need to, or use our hint for the May 14 (1060) game to give your own ideas a nudge in the right direction.

Wordle really made me work for the answer today. Every new line seemed to throw up grey letters more than anything else, and the few greens I had uncovered weren’t especially helpful. It took a fresh approach and just a slight dash of mild panic to find today’s Wordle answer.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, May 14

A large amount of something. A dragon’s hoard of gold. A great accumulation of wealth. The act of gathering up or collecting a lot of valuables could …

Update: Remember that launch date for AMD’s new 3D V-Cache powered Ryzen 7000 X3D processors has popped up on its own website we mentioned yesterday? The February 14 one? Turns out it was a mistake and it’s been removed from AMD’s website.

According to WCCFTech, the chips will still launch next month, but not on the 14th. That implies a launch later in the month. But the date has certainly been removed from AMD’s website.

We also still don’t know exactly how large a ransom you’ll have to pay for the benefit of the 3D-stacked cache memory. Currently, the Ryzen 9 7950X goes for around $570 and the 5900X for roughly $460. The X3D versions of those chips will obviously be more than that, but quite how much more isn’t clear.

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D, meanwhile, …

When Valve introduced the Steam Deck, the company was adamant that its handheld gaming device was, at its core, a PC, with all the customizability and user freedom that entailed. “You shouldn’t do any of this,” Valve said in a teardown video, before proceeding to show everyone how to take apart the Steam Deck. So when Valve now tells Steam Deck owners they shouldn’t be sticking their noses next to the handheld’s exhaust vents and taking a big, deep breath, I have to wonder if, y’know, they really mean it.

Okay, they probably do really mean it—but that’s not stopping people from huffing anyway.

In a now-viral Reddit post from Tuesday, a Steam user messaged Valve support to ask if it’s “safe to inhale the exhaust fumes from the top vent of the Steam Deck.” Valve…

Old School Runescape players are on another level, man. The game’s flooded with zero-sum games where the house always wins: yet compared to the person who gathered 1 million of the same crappy fish, this is small pennies. Despite this, I’m still somehow surprised whenever somebody goes so far out of the way just to prove a point.

As is the case with user lcarusLives on the game’s subreddit (thanks, Gamesradar) who—in what can only be either a stunning feat of stubbornness or a stern belief that crime doesn’t pay—has spent over 149 hours picking at least 13,500 fruit, all to obtain this funny little raccoon guy on their farmer purist account.

0xp Rocky Pet acquired on my Farming-Only UIM, “Is Farmer” from r/2007scape

Watch On

THQ Nordic has been very quiet about Titan Quest 2 since its reveal last year. That was probably wise—after almost 20 years’ wait since the first game, there’s a lot of pressure on new developer Grimlore Games to get this right. But we have now been treated to a new look at the game in action, and it’s looking… well, pretty good, but also a lot like Diablo 4.

As in the first game, it’s a classic action-RPG with a couple of major twists. The first is there’s no class system—instead, you build your hero by choosing two “masteries” (sets of themed abilities), making every character a hybrid. For the sequel, that idea has been expanded on with unique synergies for each possible pair of masteries, more firmly cementing that sense of creating your own class.<…

Palworld has taken off—with a huge player count that’s set Steam records, its own controversies surrounding unfortunate game mechanics, and AI worries. Now it has an updated roadmap, as posted to the game’s official Discord server this morning.

The top priority for developer Pocketpair appears to be bug fixes, like stopping your save rolling itself back—or the game hiccuping on loading screens. Improvements to the AI and pathing of Pals have been promised, which is neat.

I took the game for a spin yesterday, and ran into a problem where I set my base down next to a cliff, which caused all my captured pals to spawn in the geometry. Junji Ito’s The Enigma of Amigara Fault is a great piece of horror, but I don’t want it replicated in my silly Pokémon…

Quickly blaze a path to a magnificent Wordle win with today’s answer—it’s only a quick click away, after all. Or, if you’d rather take your time, feel free to spend a while pondering our helpful clue for the January 14 (939) puzzle. Whatever helps you win your daily game: the way you want to win it, is fine by us.

I was able to quickly rule out a lot of letters early on today, which is another way of saying “I had two rows that were almost entirely grey and had a little panic about it”. This soon turned out to be a pretty helpful situation, with today’s Wordle answer revealing itself with just a few more careful guesses.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, January 14

The answer today is used when someone is performing (or …