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If you’ve ever dreamed of being stranded on a desert island, where you can build yourself a cosy home and get to know the local wildlife, Nordic Trolls’ new co-op survival game, Under a Rock, will let you do just that. Only, the wildlife in question is far larger (and more colourful) than you’re used to. And while they may give Disney vibes, a lot of these critters probably want to kill you.

Survival might be the first thing on your mind when you arrive on the Island but once you get to grips with your surroundings, you can turn your attention to more important matters, like building and decorating your perfect home. I’m a sucker for building in survival games, so I’m interested to see what structures the game is capable of—the glimpses we get in the trailer seem very promising. 

Thankfully, you don’t need to go it alone in Under a Rock as each world supports up to ten players, meaning you can delegate different activities so you can survive—and thrive—together. Of course, you’ll need to figure out a means to fight off the less-than-friendly animals doing their best to turn you into their next meal, as well as find a food source for yourself or…

Escape From Tarkov has had problems with cheaters pretty much from the start, but despite being vocal about its efforts to rid the game of their influence—and occasionally referring to cheaters as “scum of the Earth”—some players aren’t convinced that developer Battlestate Games is all that serious about dealing with the problem. A new anti-cheat effort rolled out in the latest patch might change some minds on that front: The studio is now offering “compensation for reporting players who violated game rules”—in other words, a bounty on cheaters.

“Players will receive in-game currency compensation after the report that led to the blocking of the violator,” the 0.14.9.5 patch notes say (via GamesRadar). “Compensation comes with an in-game message informing of a successful report. Compensation for several successful reports will be combined.”

It’s light on detail—there’s no word as to how much players will be paid for a successful report, whether any kind of threshold has to be met before payout occurs, or how reports from multiple people about the same cheater will be handled—and of course the value of an uptick in cheater reports is depen…

Nothing about Wakerunners looks like it came from the same studio as Dave the Diver, but, then again, nothing about Nakwon: Last Paradise did either. Mintrocket has a third game on its way and it’s a sci-fi MOBA where characters move around like they’re permanently wearing skates.

In Wakerunners’ dystopian sci-fi future, people broke off into factions and now fight each other on a dying Earth. While there are guns in the teaser trailer, most battles in Wakerunners will take place at close range. A “unique acceleration and deceleration mechanic” lets you slide around the arenas much faster than something like League of Legends and opens up opportunities for you to outplay the enemy team using one of its unique characters.

Next month, you’ll be able to play a demo of Wakerunners during Steam Next Fest that includes seven playable characters and five game modes. Each mode determines if you’ll be on a four- or five-person team and whether or not you’ll be chasing kills or capturing an objective. Wakerunners director ChaeHyun Lim told PC Gamer in an email interview that “most” matches will last “about 10 minutes long,” depending on the mode.

Lim says the game will “…

Interstellar highway sim Star Trucker has set a release date for September 3, 2024, announcing it with a chill new trailer during today’s PC Gaming Show. Set to twanging Americana, the trailer shows the life of a big-rig space trucker as the lumbering ship rolls through the retrofuturistic cosmos and deals with the usual issues of star trucking life.

There’s stuff like solar flares and micrometeor impacts disabling your equipment and requiring a savvy fix, sure, but also things like sassy radio chatter with other truckers, clogged interstellar highways, and the occasional bit of contraband transporting. There’s even a promising little bit where the trucker, disabled by a flare, reaches for their radio to call in some help.

Developer Monster & Monster says it puts an “interstellar twist” on the truck sim genre. One where you get certified for ever-more-hazardous cargos and understanding the dangers of a route, and its demands on your truck’s systems, will let you prosper. After all, a flat tire on the interstate isn’t the worst thing ever, but a blown-out radiator in space might leave you properly cooked.

Star Trucker sets itself apart from other spac…

At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2024, Intel gave us a particularly interesting glimpse at what could be the future of chip and interconnect design. The Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) chiplet integrates a Photonics Integrated Circuit (PIC) with an electrical IC. The chiplet was packaged with an Intel CPU and shown running live data.

Intel believes this technology is a game changer as it meets increasing demand for higher bandwidth across greater distances, while using less power. Of course, the initial applications will be used for AI infrastructure and HPC environments, where scalability concerns across racks and clusters are becoming increasingly apparent in large scale deployments.

Intel’s press release included the following statement: “As an analogy, replacing electrical I/O with optical I/O in CPUs and GPUs to transfer data is like going from using horse-drawn carriages to distribute goods, limited in capacity and range, to using cars and trucks that can deliver much larger quantities of goods over much longer distances. This level of improved performance and energy cost is what optical I/O solutions like Intel’s OCI chiplet emergi…

Watch On

Minecraft is turning 15 years old in a couple of days, and apart from making me reckon with the relentless passage of time, it seems like there are a lot of fun celebrations to be packed into the next two weeks.

The announcement was made in a short YouTube video on the official Minecraft channel, and basically serves as a small teaser of what is to come. There’s dancing skeletons, angry pillagers, and Jens Bergensten on a boat (I’m not really sure what that’s about). 

“15 days of exclusive items and daily specials, each one attributed to 15 years of building, exploring, crafting, mining, and adventuring,” declares the video’s narrator. “It’s going to be a block-tacular celebration. Every day has something to see, download, or play, so buckle up for 15 days of Minecraft-mania.” The celebrations will likely begin on May 17 (Minecraft’s anniversary), so it’s best to just keep an eye out for announcements on Minecraft’s news blog. 

As part of the celebrations, it would be nice to see some appreciation for the most intricate and impressive worlds created by block aficionados, whether that be a Minecraft remake of Fallout: New Vegas’ world map or a recreati…

As part of another adventure in numbers incomprehensible to the human mind, Microsoft has gained the upper hand in its rivalry with Apple, attaining a market value of $2.87 trillion and becoming the most valuable company on the planet. 

As reported by the Financial Times, Microsoft nosed ahead of Apple earlier today, on the back of a 1% increase in its share value. Apple’s, meanwhile, dropped 1%, leaving Steve Jobs’ baby with a market cap fully $4 billion lower than Microsoft’s. Apple’s market cap stood at $2.871 trillion, Microsoft’s at $2.875 trillion.

A pittance! Apple will, no doubt, regain its lead at some point in the weeks, days, or hours to come. The two companies have already swapped spots several times today. What’s interesting here, though, is the reason for Redmond’s sudden lead. You guessed it, folks, it’s AI.

Apple has largely kept its beak out of the ongoing AI gold rush—although it’s certainly paying attention and doubtless has big plans—while Microsoft is a massive investor in OpenAI and seems determined to cram the tech into everything from Bing to your actual, physical keyboard. 

Investors rather like that…

As you probably know by now, the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has not launched in the best of conditions, with many players reporting choppy performance in Respawn’s latest Star Wars adventure. Publisher EA has already issued a sort-of apology for the problems, and has promised more patches coming in the next few weeks.

One of those patches had landed today, which apparently provides “performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering.” That’s literally all the patchnotes say, though. There’s no specific information about what’s been fixed, or what’s been causing all the problems in the first place. But this is the second update EA has released in the space of a few days, and Morgan reported that the first patch alleviated some of the issues he experienced while reviewing it, so let’s hope this second patch further smooths things out.

The announcement also addresses a bunch of bugfixes coming to consoles tomorrow, but as EA point out, the PC has already had those. It doesn’t make any mention of other issues with the PC version that have been raised, such as the terrible implementation of AMD FSR 2.0 upscaling, and whether there’s any chance of getting som…