Half-Life 2 just got a patch that fixes a progress-blocking teleporter bug and makes a train easier to race

Last year, Valve brought the original development team back together for a 20th anniversary Half-Life 2 update. It integrated the post-launch episodes, added a new developer commentary track, brought in Steam Workshop support, and added a heap of map and gameplay updates. All of which was great—except for one progress-blocking bug it introduced to the … Read more

Wordle today: Answer and hint #1497 for July 25

Solve your daily Wordle game without breaking a sweat with our incredible range of help. Our tips can give your puzzle solving a general polish, while today’s hint’s happy to provide something more targeted if you need an extra lift. And if those green letters are just refusing to turn up on time, the July … Read more

Satellite internet provider Starlink is down (Update: now ‘mostly recovered’)

Update (4 pm PT): Starlink has “mostly recovered” from the outage. The incident lasted “approximately 2.5 hours,” and was caused by “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” according to the SpaceX subsidiary’s VP of engineering. Starlink, the satellite internet service provider operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has reported a “network … Read more

‘I can’t believe I beat Minecraft in an Overwatch queue!’: Twitch streamer turns interminable queue times into her advantage, completing Minecraft over 9 total hours of waiting for matches to pop

The only way to defeat long queue times is spend them doing something productive with your life, like beating Minecraft. Twitch streamer Aspen spent the last week in lengthy Overwatch queues—a common annoyance for high-ranked players—digging her way to the end of Minecraft. In one particularly long queue that lasted over two and a half … Read more

My heart’s already been stolen by this stop-motion adventure made out of wood and ‘mostly in a garden shed’

Éalú, from first time developers Beyond the Bark, starts with a strong premise: You are a mechanical mouse looking to escape a mysterious labyrinth. But its presentation is what really blows the doors down: Nearly everything is made out of wood, and rendered in full-on, stop-motion animation. Not real models keyframed to sprites either, such … Read more

Its demo only took me 10 minutes, but this claymation picture book puzzle game inspired by medieval alchemy is one to watch out for

All Living Things is one of those games I had to check out based on its look alone. It’s an interactive alchemical picture book with claymation art, and its demo has me looking forward to the full version of this short, experimental mood piece. I’m just a simple country games journalist who doesn’t know much … Read more

Palmer Luckey wants to know if you’d buy a ‘Made in America’ computer for 20% more than ‘Chinese-manufactured options from Apple’

Palmer Luckey, the previous founder of Oculus VR and co-founder of defence tech firm Anduril Industries, has a question for you: Would you buy an all-American computer from the latter for 20% more than an equivalent Apple machine? Luckey took to X to poll the community at large on their opinions of his hypothetical eaglebox … Read more

Relic’s taken a break from real-time strategy to make a turn-based hybrid of Advance Wars and cult classic Impossible Creatures—but it feels totally removed from the studio’s legendary legacy

An acclaimed—albeit struggling—RTS studio developing a cute turn-based tactics game full of retro sci-fi Martians and animal soldiers sounds like one of those terrible April Fools’ not-jokes that inundate my beleaguered inbox every April 1. But Relic’s Earth vs Mars is very real. Relic takes big swings. Homeworld still feels like a groundbreaking RTS more … Read more