Month: October 2024

Helldivers 2 players completed what I can only describe as their first real-life Major Order over the weekend. After Sony revealed that it would be going ahead with its initial plans to require the monstrously popular co-op shooter’s Steam players to link themselves to a PSN account, an uproar of furious divers retaliated with military coordination.

The major thorn for most players? The requirement would shut out around 177 countries unable to make a PSN account under this returning rule of law. Over 200 thousand negative reviews later, Sony backed down. Cue the fist-bumps, the chest-bumps, and the hoo-rahs. It’s a vindication of one certain community manager’s suggestion to make their upset known via a 500kg review bomb—one that ‘almost, but not quite’ had them fired. 

But when you drop a bomb, you’re left with rubble. While I’m sure the many screengrabs of red lines circulating the internet—threatening one of Sony’s biggest PC wins ever—absolutely contributed to the reversal, they also left a red mark on the game’s review score. 

However at the time of writing, its “Overall” review score is now Mostly Positive, while its “…

Baldur’s Gate 3’s Patch 7 deputized a well-liked side character, the Tiefling bard Alfira, to full companion status. The only problem is that it’s only temporary, and in the most “cursed monkey’s paw” way imaginable. Cenalexis_01 on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit figured out how to make it permanent, though, and the exploit requires the sort of obscene, beautiful abuse of Baldur’s Gate 3’s open-ended systems I’ve come to relish seeing. Spoilers ahead for the Dark Urge origin.

One of the defining scenes of BG3’s Dark Urge (Durge to their friends) origin is their unwilling murder of Alfira. Partway through Act 1, she’ll show up to your camp during a long rest and the Durge will unavoidably kill her⁠—though it is possible, through shenanigans, to make stand-in Quil Grootslang show up and take the fall instead. Patch 7 made it so that Alfira even joins your party and can be leveled up for a brief window, sparking some hope she was a surprise new companion added in the patch, but no dice: It was just meant to twist the knife a bit more.

But as cenalexis_01 has demonstrated, you can have Alfira as a full companion if you really want, it just e…

If you saw the season two finale of hit Adult Swim cartoon Smiling Friends last week, you could make out in the lower-right corner, taking up a generous 4% of the screen, the distinctive quadruple back buttons of the Steam Deck being slapped by the fingerless hands of supporting character Glep, a 1,695-year-old frog guy, reclined in a bean bag chair.

An official Valve gaming handheld, clearly visible for eight seconds of an 11-minute cartoon? Truly, this was the moment PC gaming became mainstream.

OK, no, this was not the dawning moment of cultural acceptance of our decades-old hobby, which you could reasonably argue is the first and oldest gaming platform. By my count, PC gaming has enjoyed mainstream visibility on par with its console counterparts arguably as far back as 2017 or 2018, when the generation that grew up on Minecraft reached ages that made it a perfect audience for games deeply steeped in the spirit of PC gaming. (Also, technically, Smiling Friends referenced PC gaming a whole year earlier last season when it showed us a depressed Satan spending time playing Rust and hanging out on Discord. Relatable, Satan.)

If mainstrea…