-P A I N-

¤ Nickname: P A I N ¤ Grade: player ¤ New Tag: This World Shall Know ¤ Link of Hours Played GT link CLICK HERE!: https://www.gametracker.com/player/P A I N/NEWLIFEZM.CSBLACKDEVIL.COM:27015/

welcome

It's well known that id Software's Commander Keen tech was originally designed to accommodate a PC port for Super Mario Bros. 3, and in 2015, John Romero revealed footage of the proof of concept. Nintendo didn't go for it, but it was a breakthrough in terms of bringing smooth screen-scrolling to PC games. A copy of that Mario demo has turned up in a submission to the Strong National Museum of Play, seemingly at random. The museum's games curator Andrew Borman tells Ars Technica that the disc was among a larger submission from an unnamed game developer. This developer didn't work on the demo, though received it "during their work." "It wasn't something I expected to see in this donation, but it was extremely exciting, having seen the video Romero shared back in 2015," Borman said. The curator imaged the disc, booted the demo, and found it to match up with Romero's 2015 video. In addition to the footage we've seen, there's reportedly a "fairly flat" Level 1-4 in the demo. It's good to hear the demo will be preserved, but according to the Ars report there aren't plans to exhibit it to the public. Researchers "and other parties" are welcome to submit requests to access it, though. Romero's footage of the demo is below, and it's well worth reading Ars' report for more insight into the preservation plan.

Long gone are the days when you could accurately discern how powerful a PC might be just by looking at the physical size of the system. You can pack an impressive amount of computing muscle inside a small form factor PC, and a shining example of this has been Intel's modular NUC kits. Following up on the NUC 9 Extreme Kit (Ghost Canyon) released last year, Intel has now unveiled its more powerful NUC 11 Extreme Kit, codenamed Beast Canyon. The heart of the system is still a swappable Compute Element housing many of the core components, including a tiny motherboard, but it now comes jammed inside a bigger chassis. "No more playing around," Intel says. Note that I said bigger, not big. This is still a compact system, built around an 8-liter chassis measuring around 14 x 7.4 x 4.7 inches (357 x 189 x 120 mm). Inside sits that Compute Element cartridge containing the motherboard, processor, RAM, and storage. This enables both a wholesale system swap or piece-by-piece upgrades when and if the desire arises. "Packing the latest hardware components into a tiny 8-liter case, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit is loaded with features typically found in much larger gaming rigs and offers customizable design options," Intel says. There are two base models—the NUC11BTMi7 with a Core i7 11700B processor, and the NUC11BTMi9 with an unlocked Core i9 11900KB processor. Both are 8-core/16-thread CPUs based on Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake architecture, which is its newest (until Alder Lake arrives later this year). Pricing starts at $1,150 for the Core i7 model and $1,350 for the Core i9 configurations, each outfitted with a 650W 80 Plus Gold power supply. In both cases, you need to add your own RAM, storage, operating system, and optionally a discrete GPU (which you'd definitely want to do if you plan to play games with this). So it's not a cheap setup by any means. It is fairly flexible, however, with the potential to be a high-end gaming PC. To that end, the Beast Canyon NUC supports up to 64GB of DDR4-3200 RAM (SO-DIMMs) and houses four M.2 slots, split evenly between supporting PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 SSDs. Then there's the GPU support. Intel says you can cram a full-size, dual-slot 350W graphics card measuring up to 12 inches long inside the NUC 11 Extreme. It can be a tight fit, as our friends at Tom's Hardware discovered, but the potential is there to install a meaty graphics card inside this thing. Obviously the major caveat here is... if you can find one. Wireless connectivity consists of Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. As for the port selection, the Beast Canyon NUC serves up a 2.5G Ethernet port, a single HDMI 2.0b output, two Thunderbolt 4 ports. eight USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports (six in the rear, two up front), a 3.5mm front-mounted headset jack, an SDXC card slot (plus whatever ports are on your graphics card), and a Kesington lock slot. You'll also find two pairs of headers inside (USB 3.1 and 2.0). I've really come to appreciate SFF systems over the past few years, as they have become more powerful and capable (I hail from an era when hulking full tower desktops were a lot more common than they are now). Color me intrigued by the Beast Canyon NUC (minus the pricing premium), which Intel says will be available to purchase in the third quarter.

Occasionally, as a new wave of orcs washes in to crash against your fortifications, you'll catch a moan from a despondent greenskin on the breeze: "Feels like we're never gonna get there." It seems like a moment of realisation about their doomed role in tower defence, but invariably it's a thought they don't get to complete: they're dashed against the rocks, tarred and burned, or electrified so that their skeleton flashes through their skin. Recently freed from the shackles of Stadia, Orcs Must Die! 3 isn't usually a thoughtful fantasy game. It makes little effort to contextualise its maligned title characters, to ponder where they come from or why they do what they do. Yet it is a thinking person's game—a strategic siege simulator that rewards careful arrangement, inspired solutions, and a willingness to toss away past assumptions and approach a problem from a new angle. It's a game that makes you feel smart, even as you swing your mouse desperately to slug an imp in the eye with a bolt of magic. Imagine you're an interior designer, but in a universe where one of the tenets of feng shui is murder. Using a pre-allocated budget, you begin each level by buying, rotating and placing the traps of your choice in a small dungeon (or, less often, a large field), with the aim of causing as much damage as possible to any orcs who might pass through. Then it's open house: the doors smash inward, and enemies run down the hall and up the stairs, displaying a remarkably low aptitude for hazard perception as they do so. The traps they trigger come from the Tom & Jerry school of slapstick comedy, flipping orcs through the air or stinging them with beehives; those awaiting the upcoming Jackass reunion will find themselves well served. Afterwards, with all the orcs dead or absconded through the portal you're supposed to be protecting, you go again—building out your designs until the final wave. In a traditional tower defence game, the arrival of the action phase would be your prompt to sit back, take in the scene, and grit your teeth—hoping your walls will hold, and throwing down an extra turret or two when funds allow. In Orcs Must Die! 3, it's the moment to roll up the sleeves of your gown and jump in. There's fun to be had firing into the horde, seeking out headshots among your variously-sized opponents as if playing vertical whack-a-mole. The best secondary fire options include both freeze-bombs and a sweeping knockback that triggers a nostalgic round of ragdolling. On the whole, though, combat is best described as mash and peas - in that it offers mainly button mashing melee and peashooter projectiles. There's less complexity or opportunity for skill than you'd find in a dedicated action game—no Souls-like parry or active reload to master. That's for the best, and probably by design. Though it's possible to build a playstyle around empowered pugilistics, combat's really there so that you can dynamically plug the gaps left by your traps. Series veterans will know there's a panicked joy to personally sniping a kobold runner that somehow slipped between the blades of your pneumatic machines. If the fighting were any more involved, it would pull too much focus, upsetting the balance of this classic genre hybrid. Robot Entertainment has been making Orcs Must Die! for a long time—it'll be ten years old in October—and knows not to mess with the fundamentals. Not least because the last time the studio tried that, with 2017's Orcs Must Die! Unchained, the mixture exploded in its face. Yep, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a cautious sequel—even its large-scale War Scenarios feel familiar, if magnified. But it's getting more experimental over time, as Robot pursues a tower defence strategy for development. The game effectively soft-launched on Stadia last year—and having survived that first wave, the studio has built out from the foundations with a second story campaign and new endgame mode, Scramble. The latter is an ironman variant on the formula that puts me in mind of COD's Outbreak. The goal is to best five levels of escalating difficulty using a single set of rift points—the pool that determines how many monsters you can afford to let through the portal before failure. Between every stage, you're lumbered with a new debuff—perhaps swarms of orc archers who go after you rather than the rift—but get to pick a buff to counter it, like extra oomph for your acid bombs. The effect of this mounting metagame is to push you towards tactics outside your comfort zone, making Scramble a rewarding way to revisit some of the best maps. Frustratingly, both the second campaign and Scramble are locked until you've made significant progress in the story—a rake to the face of hardcore fans who already sunk those hours into the Stadia release. They'll be appeased, though, by the new acid geyser trap, which melts orcs down to their squishier parts, ready to be hit by a follow-up volley of darts or arrows. Ultimately, as ever with Orcs Must Die!, it's the intricate ordering of traps for maximum score combos that will hold the attention of top players for hundreds of hours. Newcomers are better off embracing the new saw blade launcher, the ricochets of which are not just entertaining but, when fired in an enclosed archway, capable of shredding a troll in seconds. With experience, you can predict and plan for the 45-degree wall bounces, filling entire corridors with bladed boomerangs. This is Orcs Must Die! at its best: a comedy scripted on graph paper. We may not know much about the orcs, and they may not know themselves. But after years in the wilderness, Robot Entertainment has shown it still knows exactly how to make Orcs Must Die!. What a pleasure it is to have those pea-green boys back.

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In a recent blog post, Microsoft encouraged everyone to "get nostalgic" with new Microsoft Teams backgrounds. The backgrounds feature highlights from Windows' legacy such as the 'splainy paperclip Clippy, Microsoft Solitaire, and that one grassy field that was everyone's wallpaper in the early noughties. Credit where it's due—they're nice looking backgrounds, certainly desktop wallpaper material if you don't like to have arty video call backgrounds. My sticking point is with part of the accompanying blurb for the Paint-inspired background: "A product of the 1980s, Paint was first introduced in November 1985 as part of the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0. And while the original Paint is still loved by many artists in the making, its successor Paint 3D was eventually released in 2017." Paint 3D was widely hated on release, and I object to the implication that Paint 3D is Paint's successor in anything other than chronology. Microsoft suggested removing original Paint in 2017 and it was so unpo[CENSORED]r a decision that they floated it back to the Windows Store after an online petition, and then right back to a built-in OS program—where it belongs, in my opinion. These backgrounds are a nice appeal to nostalgia, much like Paint itself, with its primary functions of 'crop', 'scribble' and 'draw big red arrow'—so stop trying to make Paint 3D happen. It isn't going to happen. You can find the backgrounds at Microsoft's blog, and potentially discover that you, too, have a burningly passionate opinion about some part of Windows history. Perhaps about Microsoft Solitaire? It was built-in to the OS for over twenty years, after which point they brought it back with ads you have to subscribe to to remove.

For the time being, Dell is no longer shipping certain Alienware Aurora R12 and R10 gaming PC configurations to half a dozen US states because those product lines potentially fall out of bounds of newly adopted energy efficiency requirements. When attempting to configure one of those systems, a warning message appears in bold red lettering to alert buyers that their order will not be honored if the destination resides in one of the affected states. This was first spotted by Marie Oakes, an independent content creator who highlighted the disclaimer on Twitter. "This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled," the message states. The Aurora R12 and R10 are built around the latest generation processors from Intel and AMD, the former featuring 11th Gen Core Rocket Lake CPUs and the latter wielding Ryzen 5000 series chips based on Zen 3. Unfortunately for both Dell and buyers who reside in affected states, the majority of Aurora R12 and R10 configurations consume more power than local regulations allow. There are exceptions, though. On the Aurora R12 page, the second cheapest configuration ($1,156) outfitted with a Core i5 11400F, GeForce GTX 1650 Super, 8GB of single-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD "complies with CES power consumption regulations" and "ships to ALL states." The five other customizable starting points do not. Oddly enough, that includes a cheaper setup which drops the 256GB SSD from the mix, adding a thirstier hard drive, but is otherwise the same. There are seven customizable setups on the Aurora R10 product page, and once again, only the second cheapest config indicates it ships to all US states. It includes a Ryzen 5 5600X, Radeon RX 5600, 8GB of single-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD. In a statement to The Register, Dell expanded on the shipment ban, as it relates to power requirements in California. "Yes, this was driven by the California Energy Commission (CEC) Tier 2 implementation that defined a mandatory energy efficiency standard for PCs – including desktops, AIOs and mobile gaming systems. This was put into effect on July 1, 2021. Select configurations of the Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 were the only impacted systems across Dell and Alienware," Dell said. In 2016, California became the first US state to approve energy efficiency standards for PCs and monitors. At the time, it was anticipated that the new standards would save 2.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and significantly reduce carbon pollution arising from fossil fuel-fired power plants. More regulations are coming, too. On December 9, 2021, Tier 2 requirements will expand to "computers with high-speed networking capability, multi-screen notebooks, notebooks with cyclical behavior, and monitors with high refresh rates." The formulas used to determine which systems pass muster are outlined in a Title 20 Appliance Regulations document (PDF). In short, various annual energy consumption metrics apply to different PCs, the least stringent being 75 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, for certain systems manufactured after July 1, 2021. Going forward, there is a whole load of calculations system builders will need to make around PCs shipping from July 1, but with various 'adders' (like the GPU, networking cards, and other hardware) that can modify the final calculation. It's quite dizzying. It remains to be seen if other PC makers will halt shipments of certain PC configs as well, and how the new rules will affect upcoming models.

When Capcom announced that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles would be coming to Steam on day one of its overseas release, the eruption of joy PC players felt was like hearing the words "not guilty" after a long, fierce trial. The original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy (released in the early 2000s) only made their way to Steam in 2019, so we're used to waiting longer. Not this time, though. The international versions of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and The Great Ace Attorney Adventures 2: Resolve are available right out the gate, neatly bundled together in this double feature. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles keeps up much of the melodrama and flair from previous games in the series. If you want backstabbing, tragedy, and lawyers slamming their hands on desks, aggressively pointing and shouting—it's all here. But, after playing all ten cases across both games, I never felt like the story reached the dramatic highs of its predecessors. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles has all of the drama of a telenovela, but at the heart of the series are its mysteries, and in that respect both games in the bundle are lacking. The story of the two prequels follows Ryūnosuke Naruhodō, a young Japanese lawyer who has traveled from Meiji period Japan to Victorian England to learn about Britain's legal system—touting itself as one of the greatest judicial systems in the world. Together with his legal assistant Susato Mikotoba, Naruhodō helps defend those in need of legal assistance in a series of dramatic courtroom battles. Although Naruhodō is Phoenix Wright's 19th-century ancestor, there's no connection to the previous games whatsoever, and London as a setting provides a fresh slate for new players and seasoned fans alike. It's a clever choice of location, and not just because British caricatures are easy pickings. Victorian London is a city with lots of thematic threads, and an important part of the story is the way that Naruhodō has to grapple with London's seemingly flawless judicial system and the heinous crimes that are lurking in the city's underbelly. We've seen this with characters in previous games—individuals who seem to place truth and justice above all else, when they don't really believe that—but this is the first time this duality has been explored on a societal level. It's an underlying tension that plays out across both games, each case revealing more about London's superficially pristine way of handling the law, and it's completely new to the series. Cor Blimey Guv'nor With this new setting comes a wealth of flamboyant characters. Among them is Susuato, the legal assistant whose impressive knowledge of Britain's legal system has helped stop our leading lawyer floundering on the defense bench more times than I can count. She may be softly spoken, but she's got a secret martial art move she calls the Susato Toss where she'll flip Naruhodō off his feet and onto his back when she's pissed off. There's also Barok van Zieks, a ferocious prosecutor known as "The Grim Reaper of the Old Bailey" who is really just a big diva. He drinks wine throughout courtroom sessions, crushes his golden chalice in his fist with dramatic flair, and occasionally pounds his boot down on the prosecution table when he gets annoyed. I love how far Capcom has pushed London stereotypes with some of the characters to the point where it's completely farcical. Helping you investigate is Tobias Gregson, a Scotland Yard officer who is constantly noshing on fish and chips wrapped in newspaper (even when he's been summoned to court) or the loveable street urchin named Gina, whose London accent is so thick I have to slow down my reading and try to decipher what she's saying. Cases are filled with Victorian London archetypes and you'll see a fair share of cabbies, coppers, street peddlers, top-hatted gentlemen, and corseted ladies. And who can forget the addition of the great detective Herlock Sholmes? Long gone are the days when Sherlock Holmes was an up-tight, stuffy detective. If Frogware's younger and 'cooler' take on the famous character is not your cup of tea, then Capcom's 'Herlock Sholmes' will have you smashing teacups. In The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Sholmes leans heavily into the eccentric side of 'eccentric genius' and helps Naruhodō with the investigation parts in-between trials. Instead of just collecting witness statements and evidence in these sections of the game, you'll now be helping Sholmes with his less-than-astute deductions in a new mini-game that Sholmes excitedly calls his "Logic and Reasoning Spectacular". It involves looking around a scene and picking out clues that help correct Herlock's dramatic deductions into making sense, putting the detective back on the right path. This deduction mini-game does liven up the investigation sections, letting you move the camera through the 3D space instead of just clicking the flat image looking for clues, it feels like you're properly snooping through an area. But it does pull away from actually gathering evidence for the trial. Story-wise, these scenes do relate to the incoming trial in some way or another, like introducing characters who will be taking the witness stand, but it takes up more focus than actually collecting evidence. I understand Capcom's desire to shake up the investigative portion with more hands-on deductions, which also make sense when you've got a Sherlock Holmes analogue lending a hand, but I miss gathering up all the evidence—there's not nearly as much to find. There's a missed feeling of showing up to court with a bag full of evidence, wondering how each object is going to fit into the wider case. As fun as Herlock's 'Logic and Reasoning Spectacular' is, it removes a lot of this feeling, leaving no sense of build-up to the trial. The courtroom system has also had a refresh thanks to the new setting. Trials now have a lot more dimensions than just witness testimonies and presenting evidence. Instead of convincing the judge, you now have to prove your client's innocence to a six-member jury who all have their own thoughts and opinions that you'll need to cross-examine. It's a system inherited from the Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright spin-off and breaks up the mid-trial monotony, ensuring that you won't be going through the same motions that we've seen in every other Phoenix Wright. If the courtroom wasn't busy enough with six new jurors, you'll also have to deal with multiple witnesses taking the stand simultaneously, all of them able to react to each other's testimony. The focus on one witness is now split between three or even four different people, and you'll need to keep switching between characters, and if one person behaves weirdly to another's testimony you need to poke them and find out why. Together with looking over evidence for clues, dealing with prosecutor shenanigans, and pressing witnesses for more info, there's a lot goes into winning a trial. This system is much more dynamic than previous entries in a way I didn't think was possible for an Ace Attorney game. One example is how the jury launches fireballs into an enormous judicial scale to give their verdict—that's Ace Attorney for you. Trials and Tribulations This is the first time in the series that it's delved into a historical setting, exploring the relationship between Japan and Great Britain during the Meiji and Victorian eras. The British Empire is portrayed as imperialistic and arrogant, a view ballooned by the character's banging on about the country's technological advancements and pristine judicial system. As a result, there's a lot of uncomfortable racial discrimination toward Naruhodō and other Japanese characters. It's a completely fair depiction of Victorian Britain in the 19th century. The fact that the games are made by Japanese developers who want to comment on the social, racial, and class discriminations of the era is a refreshing change in tone for a series that has a whole case about a pair of magical polka-dotted bloomers. But the way that the British main cast treats the Japanese characters is beyond uncomfortable and creates jarring tonal shifts in scenes. British characters sometimes describe Japanese characters as 'sneaky' and 'shady', and there's just a general distrust of anyone who doesn't have a thick London accent or isn't shovelling fish and chips into their mouths. It makes things incredibly awkward when you're chatting to witnesses, and even main characters you're supposed to like. Both games also fall into a lot of typical mystery traps. Surprise conclusions and left-field explanations are prominent in a handful of the cases, which takes much of the fun and dramatic detective work out of the story. During some trials, I felt baffled until the very end, only to be frustrated as an important bit of info is flung into the courtroom for dramatic effect. It often feels like the game favors an outrageous twist over creating a solid, clever plot. I love the melodramatic theatre of the Ace Attorney series, and choosing to focus on the conflict between London's orderly reputation and the grim reality of this city, full of secrets and criminals underneath its floorboards, is a welcome addition to the series. But I really play these games for the mystery. There have been some cases in previous games where I've felt completely involved, making sure all the clues are meticulously analysed and putting all the pieces together for a final, satisfying revelation. I didn't get those revelations in The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. With all the new systems and scandalous story twists and turns, I think it loses that important feeling. There's lots more to do and the game's presentation is gorgeous, but the core mystery of finding out 'whodunnit' can get a little lost amidst all the dramatics. review video

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Id Software fans are speculating about what appears to be a new project in development following the discovery of an Australian Classification Board listing for something called Project 2021B. The game, which is rated M for violence and online interactivity, is a multiplatform "computer game" being developed by id and set to be published by ZeniMax Europe. If the odd title rings a bell, you may be thinking of Project 2021A, another id Software development discovered in January—also through the Classification Board website—that's being published by Bethesda. There are several differences, though. Project 2021A is rated R18+ for "high impact violence," and its media type is virtual reality, leading sites like TechRadar to predict that a Doom Eternal VR game is in development. 2021B, on the other hand, appears to be a conventional videogame, and its rating comes in a lot lower than either Doom (the 2016 version) or Doom Eternal, both of which were rated R18+ for high impact violence, and blood and gore. That's two full tiers higher than 2021B's M rating. (M and R18+ are separated by the MA15+ rating, which is given to games with "strong violence.") It's possible that there's a direct connection between the two projects: The former could be a completely standalone Doom VR game unrelated to Eternal, and the latter a non-VR version of the same thing. Some Resetera users are guessing that it's nothing to do with Doom at all, but is in fact a Quake remaster or collection for next-gen consoles. The 25th anniversary of Quake 2 is coming next year, after all. Whatever's going on, Bethesda is staying mum for now: A studio rep declined to comment on the rating. We'll let you know if we hear more.