One trailer at this week’s Future Games Show (embedded above, or on YouTube) was not like the others. Outside of some obvious throwbacks to classic game genres, particularly retro RPGs, Dome-King Cabbage bears little resemblance to the other games we’ve seen at Gamescom so far. It’s described on its Steam page as “a visual novel set in the world of a monster-collecting RPG,” but that phrase does little to indicate the surreal mixed media variety show the trailer makes it out to be.

Every frame is full of things to puzzle over and raises more questions than it answers. Why does the angel guy have no skin over his flesh, why is this VW bug driving over a brick road in the sky, and why are there copyrights for ’95, ’96, and ’98 floating across the bottom of the screen? It’s fanciful …

Palworld continues its runaway success, and after selling more than 6 million copies in just four days the developers now have another reason to celebrate: it’s managed to grab the second spot in Steam’s most played games when it comes to all-time peak concurrents. 

The critter-based survival game is giving every other game in the history of Steam a run for its money today, reaching a peak concurrent player count of 1,864,421. Not only does that make it Steam’s most popular game right now, it also secures its legacy as the game with the second highest all-time peak concurrent player count, stealing the spot from Counter-Strike 2 by a handful of people. 

With Palworld only launching last week, it may continue its ascent, though it has steep competition: PUBG current…

Streamer Pointcrow has won gold for conceiving of the daftest way to play Elden Ring. FromSoft’s magnum opus is an open world of exceptional scale and grandeur, a majestic achievement in the fantasy genre and PCG’s game of the year in 2022. Pointcrow has engineered a setup whereby this feat of human imagination and engineering can be played by a goldfish (first spotted by GamesRadar+).

It’s Pointcrow’s own pet goldfish, which goes by the name of Tortellini. To deal with the elephant in the room before we get onto the fish, it clearly cannot be said that Tortellini is ‘playing’ Elden Ring in any meaningful way. Sorry to say this but goldfish are not noted for their brains, personality, memory, or twitch reflexes.

Instead think of Tortellini as something of an accidenta…

Reports of Apple developing and manufacturing microLED displays have been circulating for years. But now it seems like the company is closing in on producing actual retail availability of products with the new display tech.

If that sounds like good news in terms of pushing forward display technology that seems to have been stuck in the development stage forever, well, we have concerns. Most especially about Apple ending up owning important intellectual property around microLED tech. That doesn’t automatically seem like a good thing if, say, you’re hoping for microLED PC monitors. Hold that thought. 

Nikkei Asia reports that Apple will be mass producing microLED displays itself, initially for the Apple Watch and then iPhone handsets. The idea, apparently, is to reduce re…

Sonic co-creator and Balan Wonderworld director Yuji Naka has been found guilty of insider trading, with the Tokyo District Court slapping him with a huge $1.2 million fine and a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence, suspended for four years.

It’s not far off the punishment prosecutors were gunning for earlier last month, the only exception being the four-year suspended sentence which will see Naka avoid any actual jail time unless he violates any of the court’s conditions or has any other nasty run-ins with the law during that time. According to a translated summary from SEGAbits, Naka was said to have shown “remorse” which led to the suspended sentence, despite the prosecution insisting otherwise. The fine remains largely the same though, with Japanese outlet Jiji reporting that …

Trust me, I’m just as surprised as you are that there are already deals on RTX 40-series-powered PCs circulating. In our daily roundup of the best PC gaming deals, one that caught my eye was this Skytech Chronos gaming PC with an RTX 4070 Ti for $1,799 at Newegg, $200 off its usual price. 

Powering this titan is an Intel Core 7 12700F CPU and an RTX 4070 Ti GPU combo with 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Together these components should provide some beastly 4K performance. Adding Nvidia’s framerate generation tech, DLSS 3,  to the mix gives you an impressive gaming rig.

The RTX 4070 Ti is a good choice for 4K gaming and gives AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs a run for their money. You get RTX 3090-level performance with a better cooler, efficiency, and value. 

If you’re not dipping …

Brandon Keener, the man behind the voice of Commander Shepard’s number-one guy Garrus Vakarian in the Mass Effect series, will portray companion (and potential number-one guy) Kai in Obsidian’s upcoming RPG Avowed—and his name isn’t the only one you’re likely to recognize.

Keener’s role in Avowed first came to light last week thanks to @PoweredbyidTech on Twitter, which naturally provoked some excitement: Garrus is everyone’s favorite stoic sexy bird man, after all. Obsidian essentially confirmed the casting (or at least hinted at it pretty unmistakably) a few days later:

Now it’s really official: Obsidian confirmed with PC Gamer that Keener will in fact portray Kai in Avowed, and also shared the rest of the talent behind the game’s main cast of companions. Here’s who …

Earlier this year Valve announced Counter-Strike 2, alongside a limited test that invited a small percentage of the playerbase in to smell the roses. Since then the developer has been using the test to, well, test things: rotating maps in and out, adding new features one by one, and generally fine-tuning this thing before the masses descend. And that time is at hand.

A new update brings an overhaul of the ranking system, a change in map length, a reworked version of the map Inferno, and opens up the limited test to a much wider range of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players. 

The changes to the ranking system are considerable, with an all-new CS Rating determining where players stand on global and regional leaderboards which refresh each competitive season. This rati…

If 2023 is the year of the PC gaming handheld, could November 24 be the day to pull the trigger yourself? It might not be a bad idea, what with the full-spec AMD Z1 Extreme version of the Asus ROG Ally going on sale for $620 at Best Buy for Black Friday.

The Z1 Extreme is, of course, the fully enabled variant of AMD’s awesome Phoenix APU, the chip that is making all these new-gen handhelds possible. It packs 12 AMD RDNA 3-spec graphics compute units. That compares with eight RDNA 2-spec CUs in the Steam Deck’s older Van Gogh APU from AMD.

In short, it’s the most powerful integrated GPU available for any PC and it makes for the best possible handheld PC gaming experience right now. The Ally also sports plenty of other juicy features.

For starters, the 7-inch screen is f…