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Break out the swaddling blankets, fashion the tiny pickaxes, and roll back the child labour laws: Dwarf Fortress’ next update has been announced and it’s going to make everyone baby. The prosaically titled “Baby Update” doesn’t have a firm release date just yet, but it’ll give “every living thing” a distinct baby (and child, if applicable) sprite, from aardvarks to gorlaks. You can see a couple of the new sprites from the official Baby Update Preview (BUP) below.

Aside from being adorable, the new art should make it a bit easier to tell your various workers apart. Currently, dwarf children are depicted as adults in red shirts, making it difficult to know at a glance whether a room is filled with stout, idle workers or babbling infants. I suppose you’ll also be able to tell whether the adders and alligators in the room with them are cuddly, harmless babies or cuddly, harmless adults.

The update will affect “dwarves, animals, plants and monsters”—which, okay—and will be out sometime in the near future. There are a whole lot of different creatures in Dwarf Fortress, and “There’s still a few more sprites to do,” so neither Kitfox nor Bay 12 can put a sp…

In his office at EA, Andrew Wilson sits dreaming. Specifically, the CEO is dreaming about ways to deliver ads to EA players, up to (and including) potentially sticking them into the corporation’s $60/$70, “AAA” videogames.

That’s per a recent earnings call between Wilson and EA investors (via Tom’s Hardware), in which the EA boss was asked if there were plans “for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games.” Wilson’s answer? “We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.” Gulp.

To be clear, it sounds like EA’s efforts at in-game ads are still very much in the drawing board stage, but Wilson is clear that it’s something the company is dedicating a fair bit of brainpower to. 

“As we think about the many, many billions of hours spent, both playing, creating, watching and connecting and where much of that engagement happens to be on the bounds of a traditional game experience, our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us,” Wilson told investors.

In less flowery terms, that reads as: Loads of peo…

As reported by Word of Reel, the Borderlands movie’s co-writer Craig Mazin—known for his work on The Last of Us and Chernobyl—has pulled his name from the project, and will instead be listed under the pseudonym “Joe Crombie”.

The report goes on to note that “Aaron Berg, Oren Uziel, Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Zak Olkewicz, Chris Bremner and [Sam Levinson]” have all written on the film, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the project.

It’s another blow for a movie that’s been spinning its gears in the mud for a while now. Earlier this year it was announced that reshoots would be taking place under the supervision of Deadpool director Tim Miller after test screenings in 2022 didn’t deliver. The synopsis hasn’t exactly inspired confidence, either.

Reshoots aren’t necessarily an indicator of poor quality: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World had three days of “pickups”, which are small, minor shots made to complement existing footage. Several classics—Rocky, Back to the Future, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial—all needed to reshoot scenes, as well.

Craig Mazin removing his name, however? While he’s now known for two massive prestige dr…

Last year, we were slightly surprised to learn that not only does the German government sponsor a videogame award ceremony, it gives serious cash prizes to most of the winners. At the 2023 German Computer Game Awards—aka the Deutscher Computerspielpreis (DCP)—retro RPG Chained Echoes won Best German Game and a €100,000 endowment, and at this year’s ceremony on April 18, the same honor and cash prize went to Everspace 2 and Hamburg-based developer Rockfish Games.

One award that doesn’t come with a cash prize is Best International Game, which—surprise surprise—went to Baldur’s Gate 3 and Larian this year. It would be a little weird if the German government wrote Swen Vincke and the Belgian studio a check just to say, hey, loved the RPG, so another trophy for the trophy pile will have to do.

The point of the cash prizes is of course to support and encourage German game development, and Michael Kellner, Parliamentary State Secretary at Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, says he wants to ensure that German studios produce games like Baldur’s Gate 3 in the future. (And also do…

If the thought of fighting a big demon as an ever-burning phoenix, taking on hordes of enemies to an orchestral soundtrack, and riding on a big chicken (I guess) appeals to you, the Final Fantasy 16 PC system requirements are finally here. Though a very modest machine should be able to run it, you might struggle with that huge 170 GB storage size.

With just a GTX 1070 and a Ryzen 5 1600, you can run the game on minimum settings. This means a build worth just a couple of hundred dollars can get, what is admittedly, a gorgeous game running at 30 fps. Though these specs are pretty light, it is worth noting you need a graphics card with 8GB of VRAM. Sorry if you’re still rocking a budget powerhouse like the GTX 1060. 

The game even has a 16 GB demo you can download right now to test it out for yourself. It allows you to play through the first few sections of the game, and more or less seems to be the same demo that PS5 owners played before the game’s launch last year. As the demo takes you through a significant chunk of the story at the very start of the game, progress does carry over to the full game. If you like the demo and want to play more, you will be able to …

It looks like the not-so-minor matter of melting GPU power connectors is finally being addressed on graphics boards you can actually buy. Igor’s Lab has spotted that the new 12V-2×6 power connector that we reported on just two days ago is already being fitted by Nvidia to its RTX 4070 Founders Edition cards. Well, probably.

As Jorge explained earlier, the new 12V-2×6 power connector replaces the problematic 12VHPWR connector while maintaining backward compatibility with existing GPUs. You know, the one where Nvidia initially blamed gamers for not plugging the cable in properly before it become clear that the 12VHPWR spec could do with a little work.

In physical terms, the new 12V-2×6 connector looks very, very similar to the existing 12VHPWR, but the sense pins have been repositioned further into the socket to establish a more secure connection. The latching system has also been improved.

Igor’s Lab spotted that Nvidia-made RTX 4070 FEs are indeed already shipping with more recessed pins that seem to conform with the new 12V-2×6 connector definition. However, it’s not 100% clear if those cards have the full 12V-2×6 spec or some interim version with similar phys…