Code your own adventure, without code

You could call it the summer that Saudi Arabia swallowed sports. On June 6th, news broke that Saudi-backed LIV Golf was merging with the Professional Golfers’ Association, funded to the tune of over a billion dollars by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). In soccer, the world’s most popular and lucrative sport, the kingdom has brought global superstars such as Karim Benzema, Neymar, and Jordan Henderson to the desert to play their trade, laboring not only under the region’s sweltering heat but virulent criticisms of sportswashing. For established institutions, it was a summer of humbling disruption in which they had perhaps quietly sensed, for they would never admit it, the dawning of a new world order. 

A game can't so much as include a puddle without being pelted with demands for a fishing minigame these days. The people insist on fish, which is great for the protagonists of cozy life sims, who get to spend relaxing days hooking crappies at the pond. I'd be less pleased if I were the guy meeting giant tentacles in Lovecraftian fishing game Dredge, or one of the protagonists of upcoming survival horror game Drowned Lake, who can expect to reel in «abominations» alongside fish, equipment, and lost items.

Publisher Critical Reflex and developer Monumental Collab have announced horror fishing adventure game Drowned Lake for PC (Steam). A release date was not announced.

The demo for settlement-builder and survival RPG Bellwright got a nice reception at Steam Next Fest earlier this year, racking up enough daily players to sit at the top of the list along with games like Lies of P and Warhaven. 

Establishing your own Tortuga for an army of pirates sounds like a recipe for a municipal planning nightmare, but Republic of Pirates makes the job look like a sea-breeze. Republic of Pirates was revealed during the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted today with a trailer showcasing seafaring city-building, management, and ship combat. While there’s a long pedigree of pirates in the history of PC gaming, this reveal is more like Anno 1800 than contemporary swashbuckling like Sea of Thieves or classics like Sid Meier’s Pirates. 

By Amrita Khalid, one of the authors of audio industry newsletter Hot Pod. Khalid has covered tech, surveillance policy, consumer gadgets, and online communities for more than a decade.

Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud-computing unit announced updated versions of its in-house computer chips while also forging closer ties with Nvidia Corp. — dual efforts designed to ensure it can get enough supplies of crucial data-center processors.  

The current event in Genshin Impact, Thelxie’s Adventure, has multiple puzzles and challenges that the player must complete to reap the rewards. The first puzzle introduced is helping Freminet debug the adorable Thelxie’s motherboard.

The Thelxie’s Adventures Event in Genshin Impact has a special puzzle for players to solve. Thelxie talks but in different beeps and no one seems to know what he is saying — until now.

Thelxie’s Fantastic Adventures is the leading event for the 4.2 update in Genshin Impact. What starts as a fetch quest to find missing fish turns into an honorable quest to save a child from his loneliness.

EK pre-configured custom kits | 24% off site-wide sale If you're eyeing up a major overhaul of your gaming PC's cooling and case, you might want to check out EK's site-wide 24% off sale for Black Friday. The Loop kits it has on offer are all the pieces you need (sans the actual hardware) to build a properly looped gaming PC that will likely run a whole lot cooler than anything an air-cooled rig could offer. You still have to build the PC yourself, but it takes out a lot of the pain of planning it.

"It’s crazy to make your own engine" "The cost is too much" "We haven’t released a game yet, is custom tech a smart way to spend our time and money right now?"