Clavosenrollo

Halo Infinite trundles on, both a testament to the enduring appeal of the foundations laid down by Bungie and, in some ways, an indictment of how Microsoft has handled it since. This once felt like the most important FPS series in the world. Now Halo’s just another free-to-play shooter in a sea full of them, kicking desperately against the straits that carry it off. 

We can speculate as to why, but for me the problem with Halo Infinite was that it launched in such a barebones state. The multiplayer is great but multiplayer was only ever one side of Halo, and the way 343 either chose or was compelled to launch Infinite felt like a bit of a crash landing. Halo games once launched with a dizzying array of content ready to go, different modes and ways of playing that eked everything out of the fundamentals. Infinite? It’s all been or is being added post-launch. We only got campaign co-op and Forge six months ago.

Which brings us to one of the best Halo custom gametypes, which 343 has just announced will arrive in Infinite this summer. Infection first appeared in Halo 3 and is basically a zombies mode, in which a small group of infected hunts un-infected playe…

Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update changed so much about the game, it’d probably be quicker to list things it didn’t touch than the systems it tweaked or wholesale refinished. But the most impactful, I think, is the skill tree revamp, which changes how you build V and what you’re capable of. I only played about two hours of Cyberpunk in 2020, so when I really sunk my teeth into 2.0 I was shocked to look back at how the trees were designed before. There were still cool skills there, but without the more obvious build paths and synergies in 2.0. I asked CD Projekt Red how that change came about.

“After we discussed what improvements we wanted regarding perks in update 2.0, the team investigated progression systems of various games, including Dying Light, Borderlands, and even Dota 2,” gameplay design lead Karol Matyasik said in an interview with PC Gamer. Those are popular games, and I can see why Dying Light and Borderlands 2, especially, would be useful reference points for Cyberpunk 2.0. But what Matyasik said next really makes sense when you look at how CD Projekt changed things up.

“When it comes to the structure of 2.0 perks, I think the old school design of Di…

Thank you, PS4 players, but we’ll take it from here. Hitman: World of Assassination (née Hitman 3) has gotten its August patch, and it’s bringing back some, well, pretty unfamiliar faces, actually. Alongside the usual bevy of updates, tweaks, removals and enhancements, it’s also accompanied by a couple of new pieces of DLC. 

Those are the Trinity Pack, a collection of three new suits which, sure, you can buy if you’re really into Hitman’s dress-up aspect, and The Sarajevo Six Campaign Pack, a collection of six bonus missions for the maps from Hitman 1 that have been exclusive to that game’s PS4 version for the last seven years.

“This six-mission campaign tells a self-contained story that revolves around former members of a paramilitary unit known as CICADA,” who all got up to some very unpleasant stuff during the Siege of Sarajevo. It’s up to you to sort them out, in a set of six missions across Paris, Sapienza, Marrakesh, Bangkok, Colorado, and Hokkaido. You know, if I ever thought I was at risk of being murdered by Agent 47, I’d just go on holiday to a location that hadn’t featured in any of the games he’s in. These guys are clueless. You can pick up th…

The Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset has had something of a rough ride since its release. While the engineering involved is impressive, the $3,499 price tag in combination with some early adopter woes seems to have taken some of the shine off of a device that Apple CEO Tim Cook described as “the beginning of a new era for computing”.

Apple’s most recent earnings call makes slim mention of the headset, instead focussing on overall revenue, a fair bit of AI and machine-learning doublespeak, and sales of iPads, Macbooks and iPhones. However, we did glean a little tidbit of information from Tim Cook’s introductory remarks, as he revealed that “more than half of the Fortune 100 companies have already bought Apple Vision Pro units, and are exploring innovative ways to use it to do things that weren’t possible before”, before moving on to other topics.

The reveal that some of the world’s top-performing companies bought at least one of the new headsets isn’t surprising, given that a substantial number of them are tech industry or tech industry-adjacent businesses that likely wanted a look for themselves at Apple’s latest doohickey. 

After all, given Apple’s …

Clouds. I’ve never trusted them. Floating up there all high and mighty, constantly threatening rain. What makes you think you’re so great, eh? With your posh names like cumulonimbus. You’re just water vapour, you know. You’re not better than me!

It’s about time somebody put those fluffy reprobates in their place. Step forward Bethesda Softworks, which has spent the last eight years wrangling atmospheres while making sci-fi RPG Starfield. The studio’s been having particular trouble with clouds lately. Not only have they been doing regular, horrible cloud things like obscuring mountain summits and plotting hurricanes in the ocean, they’ve also been vibrating. It’s like I’ve always said, give a cloud a vertical inch, it’ll take a vertical mile.

Specifically, those vapoury monsters have been oscillating when PC players use DLSS performance mode. In other words, taking it out on the little fella with their early RTX graphics card. Mercifully, Bethesda has pushed a new patch to the Steam Beta branch that puts a stop to all that noisome reverberation. That’ll show those billowing berks.

The patch also makes a few other changes that aren’t cloud related (so if any of y…

In a joint venture with Honda, Sony unveiled this prototype car during its press conference at CES 2023, which will hit the road in 2026. The Afeela is a tricked-out electric vehicle that seems to be an upgrade from the Vision-S concept car Sony showed off a few years back. 

The Afeela has got everything you’d expect from a prototype car made by Sony and Honda. Sleek design, a load of sensors and safety features, and even a big fancy dashboard with screens to watch movies and play PlayStation 5 games on the go. 

On the car’s exterior is the ‘media bar,’ a long horizontal display between the headlights. Yashide Mizuno, Ceo of Sony Honda Mobility, says the purpose of the media bar is so that the car can “express itself by sharing various types of information to people around it.” It can show off custom colors as if it were RGB on a laptop, the EV’s battery level, or even the weather. 

However, it wasn’t until we got to the 34:50 mark of the presentation that Mizuno said that Sony Honda Mobility was working with partners to explore “the possibility of how the media bar can create fun and exciting mobil…