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Blizzard recently introduced its 39th Hero to its multiplayer shooter Overwatch 2, in the form of Mauga, a tall, thick-set Samoan tank who, players have noted, looks rather like Pixar’s portrayal of the Polynesian demigod Maui in its animated film Moana. Well, it appears there’s more of a link between the two than just a passing resemblance, as Mauga directly references Maui in his voice lines.

This was observed by gaming YouTuber Dan Bumbler, who posted a short video clip of Mauga on the website formerly known as Twitter. In the clip, Mauga utters two voice lines. The first is simply “pleasure’s all mine”, while the second is the phrase “You’re welcome”. Crucially, Mauga doesn’t just say the second line, he sings it. “Y’know, I had a suspicion, and OF COURSE MAUGA SINGS HIS “You’re welcome” VOICE LINE. Blizz, u cheeky bastards,” Bumbler says.

If you’ve seen Moana, then you’ll know exactly what this refers to. If you haven’t, well, when Maui first meets Moana in the film, he sings a full musical number titled “You’re welcome” during which he repeatedly utters the phrase “Y…

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You are Forrest Nash, late-night radio host in the 1980s, and somebody is murdering the people who call your station. That’s the setup for Team17’s Killer Frequency, a first-person horror adventure that that has you give instructions from guidebooks and maps to people over the phone in order to save their lives as they’re stalked by a merciless murder-movie-style slasher.

It’ll release on both Steam as a flat-screen experience and VR platforms when it comes, which is “soon.” It’s made by publisher Team17’s in-house studio, Team17 Digital.

A trailer for the game, released this past weekend, shows frantic gameplay where the DJ protagonist is called on to both do their job at the station and figure out the solutions to callers’ problems.

The big sell here is a square kilometer of nighttime radio station to explore, complete with physics-based books, vinyl records, cassette tapes, and machinery to get working. It’s kind of a fun idea to run your own soundtrack—and the gameplay trailer is complete with thumbing through a crate of records for the one you want.

Marketing info stresses the real-time nature of the gameplay. “Interact with a variety of eccent…

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the long-awaited murder-trip to feudal Japan, has finally been revealed in both a cinematic trailer and a breakdown of the new characters coming to the series: The shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke, the first playable character in the long-running series to be based on a real-life historical figure.

Players will take on the roles of both Naoe and Yasuke over the course of the game in an “intertwined story” set in the late Sengoku period, each of them offering a distinct narrative perspective and gameplay.

“With our dual protagonists, we have two fantasies, the samurai and the shinobi,” game director Charles Benoit explained. “We want the player to experience both, and we cannot squeeze both fantasies into one character because the samurai and shinobi came from different social classes. They have different lives. So we cannot really mix them together.”

As implied by the trailers, the two characters have very different playstyles: Yasuke is a stand-up fighter, while Naoe is all about stealth. “It creates this distinction right away,” Benoit said. “Yasuke can fight with all these advantages, in stature he’s a big guy—he can break …

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Microsoft’s April security updates for Windows 11 and Windows 10, KB5036893 and KB5036892 respectively, were previously identified by the company as causing VPN disconnection issues for some users, leaving some without a way to hide their IP address or change locations. Now Microsoft has released security update KB5037771 for Windows 11, which is said to fix the issue alongside some other known bugs.

In a post detailing the changes made in the May 14 update, Microsoft notes that the VPN issue was resolved and recommends users install the latest security update for all Windows devices, which to be honest is just good advice in general even if you’ve not been experiencing any VPN problems yourself.

For Windows 10 users, update KB5037768 appears to fix the same issue.

The bug was originally said to affect Windows 11 (versions 23H2, 22H2 and 21H2) and Windows 10 (versions 22H2 and 21H2), although looking at the Windows forums and subreddits it didn’t appear to be a particularly widespread problem. 

However, it wouldn’t be a surprise if most users didn’t notice that Windows may be the cause for frequent VPN disconnects, as some VPN providers can often exp…

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Stock in GameStop (GME) has been on a precipitous decline in the last 24 hours, after the troubled retailer announced worse-than-expected quarterly results alongside the surprise termination of CEO Matthew Furlong. GameStop does not have a replacement, though the company’s largest investor Ryan Cohen has been named executive chairman. Following these announcements GameStop skipped the standard quarterly earnings call with investors.

All of which has clearly not inspired confidence in whatever’s going on over there. The quarterly results showed a loss in the first fiscal quarter of $50.5 million, or 17 cents per share, though an equally troubling element was that sales had fallen year-on-year by 11% to $1.24 billion. The stock has lost around 20% of its value since these announcements, and is now worth about a quarter of what it was during the meme stock surge of early 2021.

GameStop’s press release announcing the departure of Furlong was an exercise in ice-cold corporate brevity. The release reads:

“[GameStop] today disclosed that its Board of Directors has elected Ryan Cohen as Executive Chairman, effective immediately. Mr. Cohen’s responsi…

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Poncle have announced a new DLC for our best roguelike of 2022: Vampire Survivors, in collaboration with Innersloth’s Among Us. This new DLC called Emergency Meeting is set to arrive on PC on December 18, 2023.

The announcement came as part of the Day of the Devs livestream on the Game Awards YouTube channel, with an impressive animated trailer which also highlighted a bit of crewmate gameplay at the end. Emergency Meeting will bring new “Crewmates, weapons, power-ups, and a stage inspired by the Imposter-hunting hit, Among us” according to Poncle’s Emergency Meeting FAQ.

Vampire Survivors received a mighty score of 87 in our review, so the prospect of 9 new characters, 15 new weapons, 1 new stage, a fresh adventure, and 20 in-game unlocks, is a juicy one that I am personally excited for. Because of complications with separating DLC achievements with the base game achievements, there won’t be any added to Emergency Meeting. If and when that becomes possible, Poncle says that they will add separate achievement lists for each DLC, “but until then we prefer to play it safe and not risk to compromise anyone’s completion rate”.Continue Reading

A week after suddenly springing back to life—and more than eight months after the open beta was taken offline—Player First Games has announced that Smashlike fighting game Multiversus will go into full release on May 28.

Multiversus made quite a splash when it launched into open beta in July 2022, attracting millions of players and running through two full seasons before it was unexpectedly ended a year later. I thought there was a good chance it was gone for good—Warner’s been rolling that way lately—but the resumption of activity on Multiversus’ social media accounts last week pretty clearly indicated otherwise.

Much has changed during its time away. Multiversus has moved to Unreal Engine 5 and has been “rebuilt from the ground up to support our new netcode,” which director Tony Huynhy said will provide more consistent and accurate gameplay regardless of platform. Each character in the game will have “new attacks and combat mechanics,” and a new PvE mode with “unique rewards” has been added.

Huynh also teased the addition of “some really exciting brand new personalities” to the Multiversus lineup, although nothing specific on who’s com…

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All the help you need to win today’s Wordle is right here. Keep on scrolling and you’ll discover everything from general tips and guides to a handcrafted clue for the November 21 (885) game. Need a little more? No problem. Today’s Wordle answer is never more than a click away.

My second guess practically handed me today’s Wordle on a plate—it’s a shame I couldn’t quite see it at the time, and ended up fumbling around for all sorts of odd words that perhaps only exist inside my own head. Still, a messy win in four is much better than no win at all.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, November 21

Today’s word is a type of instrument, one that produces sound using a combination of keys, hammers, and strings. Whether in grand or its smaller upright size, it’s not the sort of musical object someone could carry around with them. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you’ve just started playing the pop…

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When the first Oculus Rift headset broke cover it brought with it the promise of affordable virtual reality in the home and it was going to be some brave new world of gaming… which inevitably hasn’t come to pass. So yeah, VR isn’t the pinnacle of PC gaming by any stretch of the imagination, but it can still deliver some of the most immersive, tangible gaming experiences you can find. And with the Meta Quest 2, one of the best VR headsets around, now being priced down below the $200 / £200 mark, VR is now an affordable extension of your gaming PC. And I reckon a worthwhile one at this price.

After all, if you want to experience Half-Life 3 you’re not going to get any closer than grabbing a crowbar and braining a Combine grunt in the outstanding Half-Life: Alyx.

As a package, the Meta Quest 2 for $199 at Amazon (or £199 at Amazon UK) is the perfect pick for anyone wanting to dabble in virtual reality who hasn’t already taken the plunge. Admittedly, most of the VR-curious will have already dropped cash on some kind of VR facehugger, but this is bringing the price down to a level where it can almost be picked up on a whim.

The Quest 2 is an older gene…

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Valorant studio head Anna Donlon says Riot Games is taking new steps to address toxic behavior in the game, and delivered a pointed message to the most egregious offenders: “If you need to make truly evil statements under the guise of regular shit talk to enjoy gaming, then please play something else.”

The video message (via Kotaku) comes after several recent instances of abusive conduct were shared on social media: In one clip that recently went viral, a player was repeatedly threatened with rape. In the video, Donlon said addressing that kind of behavior is a priority for Riot, and “one of the most challenging issues” it faces, and that Riot’s systems and technologies “have been making a lot of progress” in reducing toxicity.

At the same time, she acknowledged that those systems cannot catch everything: “At the end of the day, there are still some people in this world who want to take out their insecurity or their bad day or their hate or their whatever on some stranger through their computer screen.”

“Too often it takes someone experiencing the worst behaviors—something egregious, something painful, something threatening for us to better understand whe…

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As I was reminded during the Diablo IV beta, I love to see an endgame boss intended for a large group of players getting soloed by one absolute madman. Destiny raids, which are designed for fireteams of six guardians, are no stranger to low-man completions, but there’s still a special level of prestige for whichever chad among chads manages to solo the final boss first. That honor for the latest raid, Root of Nightmares, has just gone to TheSnazzzyRock, who a day ago posted the video above in which he beats Nezarec, Final God of Pain, in just under 12 minutes and three damage phases. 

Even if you accept the current community sentiment that Root of Nightmares is relatively easy as Destiny raids go (it doesn’t require the absolutely bewildering symbol memorization that Vow of the Disciple did), I confidently maintain that what Snazzzy has done here required astonishing skill, patience and concentration. The biggest stumbling block isn’t dealing with the swarms of mobs in the arena, or the boss stomping around, but in trying to single-handedly perform mechanics that were designed to be done by six players.  

The final encounter revolves around pl…

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Bungie has won a $4.4 million arbitration award against AimJunkies after a judge found that the cheat maker violated the DMCA by bypassing Destiny 2’s protections and reverse-engineering the game in order to develop cheats which it then sold to players.

Bungie unleashed the lawyers against multiple Destiny 2 cheat makers beginning in 2020, including PerfectAim, GatorCheats, and Ring-1. But it ran into a snag against AimJunkies in May 2022 when a judge dismissed the copyright infringement portion of Bungie’s claim: AimJunkies argued that its software was an original creation and so does not constitute an “unauthorized copy,” and the judge in the matter ruled that Bungie had failed to demonstrate otherwise.

The judge in the case gave Bungie leave to re-file the complaint with additional evidence to bolster its claim, however, and also determined that other, separate claims, including trademark infringement and DMCA violations, were sufficient to proceed. The bulk of those claims—everything excluding the copyright, trademark, and “false designation of origin” allegations—were referred to arbitration, as agreed by both AimJunkies and Bungie.

Following a…

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