Earth Defense Force 6 is one of the most joyful shooters I’ve played in years, delivering mega-scale slapstick gunfights like nothing else while walking a tightrope-fine line between genius and idiocy in its design. It’s also a janky, rough-hewn piece of software with a mediocre PC port and egregious recycling of assets.

This cult phenomenon of a series began as a budget-priced PS2 experiment. A simple third-person shooter with a retro B-movie theme about a little soldier guy fighting vastly oversized alien ants and wobbly UFOs using guns that can demolish a skyscraper in one hit, or send your own ragdoll body tumbling for half a mile if you get caught in your own blast.

That core remains unchanged, enthusiastically amateur voice acting and all, although EDF now has four classes of soldiers, full online co-op and much more enemy variety. The joy of being a little guy with an impossibly powerful gun fighting hordes so massive and numerous that they blot out the sky remains unchanged, and is only amplified when the game gives you a lumbering Pacific Rim-esque mech and asks you to punch out some skyscraper-sized kaiju.

Deja vu

EDF is to guns …

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Flatout is an older game—it came out in 2005—but it’s a lot of fun. What it lacks in an accurate driving model, it makes up for in destructibility of both car and driver: When you smash into something at sufficient speed (which, in my case, is quite often) your helmetless driver is ejected through the windshield and over the hood, screaming and ragdolling into a horrific sprawl on whatever they ultimately hit. Good times! Anyway, it’s currently free on GOG as part of the week-long Valentine’s Day-themed Love at First Pixel sale.

Because hey—your flailing, broken body isn’t the only thing in the air. So is love.

In case there’s any doubt, the manual makes it clear that Flatout is not a “serious” racing game. There are quick races, time trials, and a career mode, all pretty standard fare for driving sims, but there’s also a multi-category Rag-Doll Sports mode where the goal is literally to crash your car forcefully and accurately enough to fling your driver a specific distance, height, or toward a specific target. For instance, the Darts mode:

“Propel your driver at the giant Dart Board to achieve the highest score. Usual darts scor…

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When it comes to path tracing, the first thought beyond stunning game lighting is likely to be the heavy performance drain that it can demand on even the most high end of PCs. However, with some tweaking of the settings it seems like even the Steam Deck can get in on the path tracing action, and it’s even capable of a respectable frame rate.

YouTube channel NightSightProductions has shared a video of Portal RTX running on a Steam Deck at a perfectly playable 30 fps, an impressive achievement given the demanding nature of the path traced illumination used by the game.

The video shows the settings menus before gameplay begins and reveals that the game is running at 864 x 486 resolution, with secondary bounces disabled in the RTX Remix developer menu, which seems to be the secret to maintaining a decent frame rate on the Steam Deck APU. 

Portal RTX uses 4 raw bounces on ultra settings, which is enough to bring any modern GPU to its knees at high resolution, so disabling secondary bounces entirely and lowering the res really takes the strain off that poor Deck.

Despite the chunky resolution settings used here and the fact that many game scenes look a lot…

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January 16: This article was originally published on January 15. After comment from YouTube and further evidence drawn from other sources, I’ve updated it to reflect the story’s development. Click here to jump to the latest information.

AdBlock users have been reporting widespread performance issues with the extension enabled on YouTube, and while suspicion justifiably fell on YouTube’s head, the problem may not lie in the platform itself.

In a thread posted to the YouTube subreddit over the weekend (thanks, 9to5Google) users noted that having AdBlock enabled caused slow load times and increased CPU usage, as one user writes: “This messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills chrome it seems.”

I decided to test this myself, and I noticed that having YouTube open with AdBlock increased my rig’s CPU usage by around 17%. While using AdBlock or similar programs is against the website’s terms of service, AdBlock is also a massively popular extension. On the Chrome web store it boasts 60 million users.

From what I could see the increase was pretty consistent—so not a dangerous spike—but lo…

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Final Fantasy 14 has been undergoing a series of DDoS attacks over the last few days, causing players to lag, be logged out at random, and even leaving some data centers inaccessible for hours. 

The attacks started on Monday, May 6, which was when the majority of problems were occurring for players. While North American and European servers appear to have bore the brunt of the issues, Japanese and Oceania servers were also impacted. The initial round of attacks lasted over 24 hours, from around 1pm GMT on Monday to 2:30pm GMT on Tuesday. 

Unfortunately for fishers, gardeners, and raiders, things aren’t over yet. A second wave hit the game yesterday, around 11pm GMT. That one is still ongoing, this time primarily affecting European, North American and Oceanic data centers. In a post on the Lodestone, Square Enix said it is “investigating the attack and taking countermeasures,” adding that “additional information will be provided as the situation develops.”

It’s a mighty unfortunate problem for the game to be going through, especially as hype ramps up for upcoming expansion Dawntrail. Many folk, like myself, are probably diving back in right now to do c…

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As reported by Czech publication Vortex, on September 7, Stalker 2 developer GSC Game World suffered a fire at the Prague office it moved into last year following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. GSC Game World employees have stated that no one was hurt in the incident, but one of the three floors occupied by the dev sustained heavy damage and requires “full restoration.”

Vortex reports that the other two floors used by GSC Game World were undamaged by the fire, but that the damaged floor may have been where the developer stored its backup servers. A GSC Game World representative confirmed that the fire occurred and stated that the incident was under investigation.

This was echoed by another GSC Game World employee with the handle Mol1t on the official Stalker Discord channel. Mol1t’s full message is as follows:

“It is true. Fortunately, none of the employees or office staff were injured in the accident. 

A fire broke out in our office in Prague on Thursday. Even though the fire was successfully put out, one of the office floors now requires a full restoration. Further details of the accident are still being investigated. <…

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The European Parliament just voted to adopt an EU Commission proposal to make the application of artificial intelligence safer. The new proposal, amended by Members of European Parliament (MEPs), aims to “ensure that AI systems are overseen by people, are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly.”

The AI Act makes a lot of sense considering the state of the artificial intelligence discourse right now, though the first prohibited practice in the original proposal is giving off some real I, Robot vibes.

Among a long list of disallowed practices, is “the placing on the market, putting into service or use of an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm.”

Of course, there’s always some grey area as to what constitutes physical and psychological harm. But that’s an opinion piece for another day.

European Parliament news gives the low down on the amended “risk based” AI Act, which passed into its draft negotiating stage wi…

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