Mokee

MissMikkaa, the streamer who defeated the Elden Ring uber-boss Malenia using a level one character and a dance pad, has yet another bizarre boss kill to her repertoire: This time, she’s taken down Margit, the Fell Omen, with an acoustic guitar.

See for yourself:

You’ll notice that MissMikkaa is using a real acoustic guitar here, and not some kind of Guitar Hero-style controller. You might then naturally wonder how it works. The answer, she said in another tweet, is a program called Abject Audio Inputs, which binds audio frequencies to keyboard inputs. Basically, you can use any sound to control your keyboard, recorded or live, “as long as you are able to keep a certain consistency in your tone.”

“My guitar is connected via an XLR cable to my gaming PC,” MissMikkaa explained while demonstrating the setup during a recent livestream. “Basically how the software works is that it has these frequencies that it looks for, for this specific [in-game] action, which is W. So when it hits that frequency, for example when I do a G [chord]—you saw that it hit it—that means it does a W [keypress] for four seconds. Now if I want to attack, I have it assigned to th…

Intel and AMD didn’t have much to show us at Computex, but there were one or two interesting side shows. How  about 16 Intel Performance cores humming along at 7.2GHz?

Of course, you can’t get more than eight Performance cores in a current consumer CPU from Intel. But you can get 16 Performance in one of Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs. 

That’s exactly what Level1Techs managed to achieve at the Computex show with help from ASRock’s performance team. Running a 16-core version of Intel’s latest Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU in an ASRock W790 motherboard, they started out running the chip at 6.1GHz and achieved a massive Cinebench R23 score of around 46,000.

Note, all 16 cores in the Xeon chip are Performance cores based on the same Golden Cove spec as the big P-cores in a 12th Gen Alder Lake desktop CPU. It doesn’t have any Efficient cores. Also, for context, a stock-clocked Intel Core i9 13900K scores around 38,000 in the same test.

They managed to get the chip running as high as 7.2GHz, which is awfully impressive for a huge CPU with 16 of Intel’s biggest and most powerful cores. But the system wasn’t stable enough to complete any benchmark run…

One of the few things that’s ever tempted me to get a VR headset is the idea of having an old favorite transformed by the tech—projects like the VR versions of the O.G. Resident Evil 4 or its recent remake. I still don’t have a headset, but modder elsuperaguas’ first person project for the RE4 Remake (as reported by DSOGaming) looks to offer a similarly immersive transformation with no VR required.

This video by YouTube channel Residence of Evil gives you a good impression of how it works in action. The mod shifts the camera to the first person, but otherwise leaves Leon’s body model and animations intact, leading to a slower-paced sort of FPS with a real grounding in the world⁠—pretty similar to RE7 and Village’s gameplay, all things considered. I could see the reduced situational awareness making the game much more stressful and difficult, but isn’t that part of the fun?

Elsuperaguas’ project has a number of dependent mods⁠—amusingly, you have to make Leon’s head invisible in order to make room for the new first person camera. Still, it surprises me how few tweaks it takes to turn RE4 into a functional FPS. Just a few years ago, Capcom…

Finish your weekend with a quick Wordle win—today’s answer is only a quick click or scroll away now you’re here. Or if you’re in the mood for some puzzling you might want to use our tips to boost your guesses, and then take a look at our clue for the September 29 (1198) Wordle to help keep your game on track. However you want to play, we can help turn it into a winner.

I had a bit of a stumble at the start today—just a case of too many grey letters and not enough caffeine in my system—but it soon sorted itself out and left me staring at Sunday’s answer. Could I have done better? Definitely. But days like this are a helpful reminder that Wordle is supposed to be a fun game, not a test.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, September 29

A person can only be this word if they’re sitting on top of something, like a bike or a horse, but not a chair.

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today?

There are no double letters in today’s Wordle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day

If you’ve decided to play Wordle but you’re not sure where to start, I’ll help se…

Ken Levine, best-known for System Shock 2 and Bioshock, is not one for social media. Levine was the co-founder of Irrational Games and led the development of that studio’s varied output in different creative roles for almost two decades, before the experience of developing Bioshock Infinite led to the studio’s total restructuring as a much smaller operation.

Anyway, before Bioshock, there was SWAT 4: an excellent 2005 game, published by Sierra Entertainment, that was something of a revival for a more sim-oriented 90s series of shooters. Believe it or not, and this is going way back into the weeds now, SWAT began as a spinoff of the Police Quest adventure series, itself intended as an “authentic” depiction of law enforcement, hence SWAT 4’s emphasis on proper rules of engagement and tactical gunplay.

SWAT 4 was a critical and commercial success and, as Irrational began concepting the game that would eventually become Bioshock, publisher Sierra wanted another SWAT title. Levine has said in the past the studio also “wanted the money really badly.”

Irrational had made several very good games by this point—parts of SWAT 4 hint at the studio’s future direction&…

Ever wanted to feel like you could drop a 9th level Meteor Swarm on all your problems? I’d recommend you find less violent fantasies, but this new line of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired swag might help. 

The clothing line is class-based, featuring full garment sets for the Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric. It’s all pretty much premium LARP gear—and regrettably a smidge overpriced. A full set will run you just shy of $200. Those wizard robes, though. They exude some powerful vibes.

They might also stand the test of time, too. Speaking to PopInsider at New York ComicCon, Chief Creative Officer of Burgschneider Thomas “Beol” Miller promised the outfits will take some wear and tear. “These costumes are designed to be worn and used and abused … We want you to be able to run around in the woods with your friends or sit at a table and spill something on it and it’s still going to be the same the next day.”

Despite my best efforts, I’ve never LARPed. I haven’t done my time in the lightning bolt trenches. I do, however, wonder how competitively priced this officially-sanctioned D&D swag is compared to, say, your local vendor at a Mediaeval…

According to Microsoft Game Studios head Matt Booty, a man who presumably doesn’t mind being haunted by his words, Starfield currently has fewer bugs than any previous Bethesda game has had at launch.

“We have an awful lot of people internally playing [Starfield],” Booty said on a Giant Bomb stream this week (via VGC). “Working with Todd and the team, I see bug counts and, just by the numbers, if it shipped today, this would have the fewest bugs any Bethesda game ever shipped with.”

I love a statement like that. Booty’s just talking about “the numbers,” so even if turning your spaceship left erases your C: drive, he might technically be correct. But even if the statement is true in spirit, and Starfield has a relatively bug-free launch, Booty has set himself up to be quoted whenever so much as one inch of an object clips through another object. 

I respect the bravery of making yourself the guy who said Starfield wouldn’t be as buggy as other Bethesda games. Maybe it’s just his way of collecting bug reports to pass on to Todd Howard and team, since you know every one of them is going to be tweeted at him?

Speaking of, has anyone sent Booty this still …

Reports of the PC’s demise are oft exaggerated. But there’s no getting away from the fact that sales shrank for eight consecutive quarters—or two years in old money—after the pandemic-fuelled sales boom. Things have not been good, peeps.

Happily, the latest figures for the second quarter of 2024 from market analysts IDC paint a much brighter picture. Q2 saw PC sales grow 3% versus the same period in 2023. That follows a positive Q1 2024, which was up 1.5% over 2023, so this is more than just a blip.

Intriguingly, PC sales in China are down significantly. IDC didn’t put a figure on China sales, but does say that if you take China out of the picture, volumes in the rest of the world grew by over 5%. Pretty healthy, then.

You could say the same about Lenovo, which very marginally increased its lead at the top of the table. Its market shared edged up to 22.7% from 22.5% for the same quarter in 2023. HP is in second place at 21.1% and Dell slipped slightly in third to 15.5% market share. Dell had 16.4% of the market in Q2 2023.

If it seems surprising that Dell is third and Lenovo number one, well, IDC says that laptops outsell desktops at a rate of…

Of all the roles that gaming has put me in, I’ve never been a debt collector for a sleazy, run-down, corrupt city badgering people for their tax money. That’s about to change. Shaking out the pockets of the populace is the main goal in Debtors’ Club, as shown off in a new trailer today during the PC Gaming Show.

Debtors’ Club puts you in command of a small army of lazy bureaucrats, cheap thugs, and corrupt officials as you attempt to squeeze all the money you can out of a failing city’s debtors. You’ll beg, cajole, bluster and bluff a long list of dog walkers, bowling alley owners, and water aerobics instructors along your valiant path to… I dunno, sleeping poorly at night or something? 

Each day, you’ll attempt to call in the city’s debts by hassling citizens over the phone and sending various employees out on missions. Roguelite elements make your playthrough unique to you, whether you’re a kindly officer giving people the benefit of the doubt, or sending your “Paci-Fist” enforcers out to rough people up at the drop of a hat.

With an art style reminiscent of Sunday cartoons and an irreverent sense of humor, Debtors’ Club looks to make your descent…