Baldur’s Gate 3 has launched to much fanfare, and the early signs are that we eatin’ good: real good, if Fraser’s work-in-progress review is anything to go by. Another indicator might be the PC Gamer Slack, which is currently crammed with discussions of characters, quests, secrets, bard idolatry, and modding it so you can have a backstory as a goat.

Such has been the heedless excitement, in fact, that I don’t think one of the PC Gamer staffers playing this thing actually read through the entire terms of service. Unimaginable, right? Well it’s tough luck for any of them who thought they may have a future with the Fey folk, because Larian’s lawyers (truly the most fearsome sub-class) have slipped-in a clause about the player’s “additional obligations under El…

Back in 2017, indie studio Runner Duck released Bomber Crew, a game we said wasn’t quite a World War II version of spaceship sim FTL, but was pretty close—a cartoony management game where you’ve got a mission to accomplish and a team of experts to do it with, until you accidentally lose an engineer over the English Channel and it all goes a bit pomaceous.

In 2020 Runner Duck followed Bomber Crew with a game even closer to its inspiration called Space Crew, a game of juggling plates only instead of plates you’re actually juggling Star Trek redshirts, and also the gravity has just failed. Its “legendary edition”, which includes a new campaign, away missions, and unlockable legendary crew, is available for a grand total of zero space or Earth dollars on Steam until March 13.Read more

Because we are hurtling towards the boring corporate flavor version of a late capitalism future, Microsoft is once again testing ads in the Windows 11 start menu. The frustrating and consumer-bothering inclusion of these ads has once again been spotted by BleepingComputer in an upcoming test build for the product. At this point, I’m beginning to think insider users are mostly just testing Microsoft’s ads rather than features for the operating system. 

This new insertion of ads comes as part of the KB5023778 Windows 11 non-security release, which features changes that should roll out with the official patch next month. As a non-security update it is optional—for now at least—and of course, it isn’t all bad. There are some welcome updates in here, including improvem…

Team Fortress 2 just received a huge update, upgrading it 64-bit, finally bringing the 17-year-old shooter into the modern age of gaming. But in true TF2 fashion, there was a problem that no one foresaw: the game kept crashing because it thought players were Gordon Freeman from Half-Life. 

The issue has since been fixed by the latest update on April 22, and all the patch notes reveal is: “Fixed a crash under 64-bit caused by some custom HUDs using Half-Life 2 HUD elements which assume the player is Gordon Freeman.” It’s a bit of an odd outlier, sandviched between ABI compatibility issues and snd_cull_duplicates command not working. I nearly glossed over it myself.

This issue seemed to only affect players who’d customised their HUD using elements from Half-Life 2’s UI vi…