Nikesale

I love virtual reality, and I’ve talked it up to many a friend, family member, and colleague. But even I must admit that paying $3,000 for a VR headset is a bit too rich for my blood—a lot too rich for my blood, actually. Yet that’s how much Apple is said to be charging for its first VR/AR headset.

I have no doubts in my mind that Apple’s headset will be a sleek, impressive device. It’s said to have been in the works for over half a decade now, and Apple tends to do hardware pretty darn well—it doesn’t even pain me a bit as a PC gamer to admit that. I do have some questions about the eventual ecosystem of software for Apple’s VR headset, as the company tends to keep its ecosystems locked down, but we’ll find out more about all of that very soon.

Apple is…

“Mad lad puts Neverwinter Nights into Baldur’s Gate 2 for some reason” was my coworker Joshua Wolens’ summation of Andrey Balabokhin’s truly confounding mod project, NWNForBG, which seeks to demake BioWare’s 2002 D&D RPG in its more critically acclaimed 2000 D&D RPG. The result is not how I’d recommend enjoying either game, but it’s one of the weirdest and most fascinating mod projects I’ve seen in a minute.

There aren’t really screenshots or discussion of the mod I could find out there, so my curiosity could only be sated by a direct hands-on experience. Getting there, though, proved a vexing odyssey into Baldur’s Gate 2’s funky modding ecosystem and NWNForBG’s own quirkiness.

Installing NWNForBG itself was relatively simple, but it also requires the BP-BGT Worldmap…

Activision Blizzard stopped releasing new Call of Duty games on Steam in 2018, opting to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 exclusive to Blizzard’s Battle.net platform on PC. That store exclusivity strategy ended just last year with Modern Warfare 2, and according to Microsoft’s lawyers, the whole thing was a “resounding failure.” That might be a slight exaggeration, though.

In a court document filed today (related to the recent hearing over Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard), Microsoft’s legal team affirms the notion that Call of Duty’s Battle.net exclusivity ended because it wasn’t performing like Activision Blizzard had hoped—but what success would’ve meant is stated in terms of Battle.net’s success, not CoD’s, which leads me to quibble with it a bit.

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There’s some new cause for optimism in the struggling CPU market. Just last week I wrote about a hopeful rebound following the release of data by Jon Peddie Research. Now new figures from Mercury Research further point to signs of a market recovery in the second quarter of 2023.

According to Mercury Research (via Venture Beat), Intel gained three percentage points of market share, coinciding with a three percentage point drop for AMD. This includes all CPU shipments, including IoT, SoCs and the custom chips found inside consoles. Overall, Intel still leads strongly, with 68.4% of the overall x86 market share, compared to AMD’s 31.6% share. If SoC and IoT shipments are excluded, Intel leads by a whopping 82.6% to AMD’s 17.4%.

A large part of the recent CPU market woes are a r…

Despite making a strong impression when it debuted in 2021, the peaceful “tiny MMO” Book of Travels struggled to find an audience. Layoffs at developer Might and Delight quickly followed, and while the studio promised that work on the game would continue, it was easy to assume that it would eventually be forgotten, and slide quietly into oblivion.

But it doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case. In August 2022 Might and Delight laid out ambitious plans for the future, and in a recent Steam update the studio said that it’s just about ready to “put out new gameplay content, and expand the world of Braided Shore.”

“We have put a lot of work into our backend, development tools, and improving the game performance overall,” Might and Delight wrote. “This work has enabled us t…

Though you (probably) can’t get the biological kind of infection from your personal sex toy of choice, apparently you can get the virtual kind. Dodgy cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to rip people off, and one of the latest examples comes courtesy of a vibrator. Yes, cyber-STDs are a thing.

A reddit user started a thread (the original post has since been deleted) saying their Malwarebytes app blocked malware from installing after connecting a vibrator to a USB port in order to charge the device. The vibrator in question is a Spencer’s Pussy Power 8-function rechargeable bullet. According to the Spencer’s website, the model in question has over 150 reviews and a near five-star rating, meaning more than a few of these dangerous little kitties are sitting in underwear d…

The chips we know and love are made with some of the most advanced manufacturing methods on the planet. The smallest nodes require billions of dollars in capital expenditures, a big part of which goes to Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines manufactured by ASML, the current market leader. But there’s a new challenger and some exciting tech on the horizon that aims to change the status quo, potentially leading to a fall in the cost of chips.

Japan-based electronics giant Canon (via Bloomberg) has developed what it calls Nanoimprint Lithography technology that it claims could scale down to 2nm. That’s small enough to rival EUV lithography, but the more important part of this news is the claim that Canon’s technology will have a price of “one digit less than ASML’s EUV tools”. In…

Update: In an email to PC Gamer, Valve confirmed the website and Valve Prism are fake. Original story below.

Sorry folks, Valve’s not announcing a new VR headset today—or at least not the Valve Prism, despite the surprise appearance of a website, valveprism.com, that very nearly looks like the real deal.

The new site started making the rounds on Wednesday and on first blush very much looks like a Valve production. The page design, fonts, and many of the technical details seem closely in line with the store pages for the Steam Deck and Valve Index. And it’s exciting to imagine Valve having a competitor for the Apple Vision Pro, with an equally impressive display in a wireless headset that no longer requires a PC to power it. T…