Key Note Gaming

The League Championship Series is the top tier of professional League of Legends esports , and one of the biggest pro esports leagues in the world. But according to esports journalist Mikhail Klimentov , it could soon be facing a work stoppage, as the LCS Players Association is calling for a vote on a walkout. The trouble began earlier this month when Riot announced that it will no longer require LCS teams to field a team in the North American Challengers League, a "developmental" league announced in 2022 made up of 10 former Academy teams—the previous developmental league—and six "Provisional Teams" made up of amateur players. It's basically a feeder league for the LCS, and each LCS team was required to field its own NACL team along with its main roster.  On May 12, however, Riot said it was dropping that requirement at the request of its LCS teams, "to support the continued, long-term success of the teams and the professional esports ecosystem in Nor...

At its Build event today, Microsoft announced that a new AI assistant called Copilot (as seen in a few Microsoft apps already) is coming to the Windows 11 preview build in June. I don't know if the introduction of Copilot as a Windows-wide "personal assistant" means that what's left of Cortana will be overwritten, but it may as well be, since Copilot serves the same function but with the ultra-hyped mirage of intelligence provided by a generative language model. Copilot can answer questions about Windows features, suggest Spotify playlists, summarize the contents of documents, and act on requests like "Can you send this logo to the Design Squad in Teams?"  That latter task, which appears in the video demonstration above, could've been accomplished by opening Teams and dragging the image there instead, but I suppose the point was to show off Copilot's ability to process natural language requests, not to demonstrate efficient computer use.  Micro...

Company of Heroes studio Relic Entertainment has laid off 121 employees and says the cuts are part of an effort to restructure the studio and ensure that "maximum effort" goes into its "core franchises." "Sega is in a healthy financial position and remains fully committed to supporting and investing in Relic Entertainment and the franchises it is responsible for, including the critically acclaimed Company of Heroes series," Relic parent company Sega said. "We’re confident that following this necessary restructure, the studio will be in a position of strength to continue delivering outstanding experiences to players all over the world.  "Making decisions like this is incredibly difficult, and as a studio that treasures its people and is proud of the culture it’s grown, the focus is on supporting departing employees with career transition services and severance packages. We would like to offer our sincerest thanks to each of them for the part th...

Need to Know What is it?  A Quake/Dusk-inspired retro shooter set in '80s communist Czechoslovakia. Release date  May 16, 2023 Expect to pay $20 /£15 Developer  Spytihněv Publisher  Spytihněv Reviewed on Core i5 12600K, RTX 3070, 32 GB RAM Steam Deck Unverified Link   Steam The star of the show in Sovietcore boomer shooter Hrot is solo developer Spytihněv's levels, all of which are inspired by or directly correspond to real-life locations in and around Prague. The tenement blocks, metro stations, churches, and castles of this twisted version of the city all feel like cheeky de-makes of real world locations, a MyHouse.wad blown up to massive proportions.  The levels twist and fold in on each other in surprising ways, and Spytihněv likes to troll. It almost feels like he's a dungeon master in active conversation with you—or chuckling at your blunders—rather than a level designer who created these areas and stepped back.  There's ...

It's a bad time to be a Call of Duty modder as Activision has cracked down on its second PC fan project in as many weeks. Following last week's shuttering of SM² , the team behind popular CoD modded client X Labs has also closed its doors after receiving a cease and desist demand from Activision. "We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently. Thank you all for your support over the years," the X Labs Twitter account tweeted today. Today, we have received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the X Labs project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently. Thank you all for your support over the years. May 22, 2023 See more Unlike SM², which was an unreleased project that aimed to make a "dream Call of Duty" by combining elements of many games, X Labs had already been around for years running dedicated servers for modded versions of fan-favori...

Personal electronic devices are a huge part of our daily lives from phones to laptops and beyond. But the unfortunate truth is as these devices get more and more advanced they also tend to become more complicated. Things go wrong a lot, and companies have made it purposefully difficult to repair these things ourselves. These practices often make it easier to buy something new than fix what we have, which while great for a corporation's bottom line, tends to be pretty awful for the Earth. That's why there's a huge movement fighting for what's called the right to repair. Consumers are demanding devices be made with repairability in mind, from accessibility to parts to not making it impossible to open a shell without breaking it. This movement has gained increased traction in the US, where a supporting Act has made it to the state senate in California. The California Public Interest Research Group reports that the legislation has passed The California Senate Appropriat...

Indie studio Rusty Lake is responsible for puzzle adventures like Rusty Lake Hotel , The White Door , and the Cube Escape series. Like everyone else on Discord, the studio needs to choose a new username as part of the shift Discord is currently rolling out , eliminating the old system where everyone had a four-digit number called a discriminator attached to the end of their name. Rusty Lake was lucky enough to be offered the chance to reserve a username relatively early in the process, but, wouldn't you know it, somebody else got there first.  In a warning to other indie developers posted to Twitter , Rusty Lake wrote, "We just received an email that we, as Verified Owners, could finally submit a new username and wow... 'rustylake' is already taken! If we as a server owner with 240K+ members can't even claim it…" As Rusty Lake went on to explain, this is an issue because "Now we have a risk of impersonation + extra legal costs to file a possible tradem...

Best of the best (Image credit: Bandai Namco) 2023 games : Upcoming releases Best PC games : All-time favorites Free PC games : Freebie fest Best FPSes : Finest gunplay On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the  best PC games  you can play right now and a running list of the  2023 games  that are launching this year.  Starship Troopers: Extermination Steam‌ ‌page‌  ‌ Release:‌ May 18 Developer:‌ Offworld Industries Launch price:‌ ‌$25 |‌ ‌£21 |‌ ‌AU$36.50 A 16 player cooperative first-person shooter set in the Starship Troopers universe? Somehow I missed that this was coming, ...

The "hyper-detailed recreation of another fictional world in Minecraft" thing is pretty well-established at this point—we were reporting on this big Game of Thrones build all the way back in 2013—but it still never ceases to amaze me what dedicated fans will get up to in Mojang's venerable voxel sandbox. It really never gets old, and I was particularly impressed by Minecraft New Vegas , a 1:1 replica of the Obsidian classic's world map for a Minecraft roleplay server. I think the thing that really gets me is their texture work—a lot of art seems to have been borrowed from New Vegas itself and filtered through Minecraft's signature chunky voxel look. Coupled with faithful recreations of classic locales, and some of the project's stills almost look like screenshots of the original game. In motion, it has a real funky "when worlds collide" vibe to it, almost like a cheeky de-make of New Vegas. The server also has weapons and a lot of sound effect...

A board game based on Dead Cells is doing really well on crowdfunding, racking up a smooth half-million dollars in the first five days of its Kickstarter campaign . Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board game is being developed with the official sign-on of developers Motion Twin and Evil Empire studios.  "We can tell that the designers had played Dead Cells and that they weren't interested in simply doing a carbon copy," said studio Motion Twin. Dead Cells was first released in 2017 and has been a perennial roguelite hit ever since, even attracting such high-profile crossovers as Castlevania . The board game is designed by a pretty all-star cast in French studio Kaedama, made up of design quartet Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders), Corentin Lebrat (Draftosaurus), Ludovic Maublanc (Cyclades), and Théo Rivière (The Loop). They're all people I'd trust to design it alone, let alone together. It'll be published by Le Scorpion Masqué, which is also the publisher of the quit...

Faking It is a game with a delightfully simple premise and absolutely devilish controls. First spotted by Alpha Beta Gamer , this free Ludum Dare game jam project from developers Alec Gamble and Hannah Payne casts you as president Hugh Mann, a politician whose numbers would absolutely tank if the public found out he's actually a tentacle horror from beyond the cosmos. Do you have what it takes to keep it together and placate the American public, or will you slip up and reveal your otherworldly nature to all and sundry? My first run through did not go so hot. You have to maintain a normal guy's speaking pitch with your mouse wheel, slap away your uncooperative tentacles when they pop up with a left click, remember to blink every few seconds by pressing the spacebar, and, most vexingly, individually pose each of your arms when prompted. Your left and right arms are mapped to ASDF/HJKL respectively, with each key representing its own position. This facet reminded me a lot of Be...

Eurogamer's interview with Mac Walters , who was a writer on all three games in the Mass Effect trilogy before becoming creative director of Mass Effect: Andromeda and then Mass Effect Legendary Edition's project director, makes for a good read. Going all the way back to the series' origin as "Jack Bauer in space", it's a revealing history of BioWare's work on Mass Effect. Some of the most interesting material covers Andromeda, which Walters joined late. He'd been working on Anthem along with most of BioWare Edmonton while Andromeda was being developed by BioWare Montreal, previously a support studio responsible for most of Mass Effect 2's N7 missions, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, the Omega DLC, and so on. Only after Mass Effect director Casey Hudson left BioWare in 2014 was Walters moved over to work on Andromeda, so his answers mostly focus on the later stages of its development. However, he does confirm the claim from a report on Androm...

There's a clue for today's Wordle waiting just below if you need some guidance for your May 21 (701) guesses, as well as a wide range of tips, guides, and past answers too. Still need more? You've got it. Today's Wordle answer is never more than a quick scroll or click away. I got so close today, only to slip up at the very last hurdle, finding myself with two possible choices, and I just happened to pick the wrong one. Considering how hard I had to work to uncover even four out of today's five greens, I'm still feeling quite happy with myself, if I'm honest. I tried, and I got most of the way to today's Wordle answer, and that'll have to do.  Today's Wordle hint (Image credit: Josh Wardle) A Wordle hint for Sunday, May 21 Being overly assertive in a rude or unpleasant manner is one way of using today's answer. This word can also refer to anything garish or otherwise obliviously loud and/or tactless too. There's just one vow...

In the Empire, people celebrate the first day of summer with a holiday devoted to Sigmar, who is believed to have ascended to godhood on that day. Sigmartag is a day of resting, retelling stories based on Sigmar's heroic deeds, and eating "Sigmar's sausages", which every province has their own version of. In the fan-run private server Return of Reckoning, it's a time of war. One of the things players lamented when Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning shut down after only five years of life was its Open Realm versus Realm conflicts, which Mythic Entertainment had adapted from the system it created for Dark Age of Camelot. By entering any of the oval-ish map areas nicknamed lakes, players joined a constant back-and-forth tug of war over contested ground between the factions. Lower-level player-characters would be temporarily boosted to help them compete, while those who were too high level for any given lake would be transformed into chickens as punishment. Dur...

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, a look back to one of the forgotten games that preceded Doom. Very few genres start with their most famous game. In the case of shooters, Doom set the template that everyone would try to build on as far as style, design, deathmatching, and feel, but it wasn't even close to being the first FPS. Nor was its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D.  Even without looking at other companies, id Software had two before either of them—fantasy-themed Wolf 3D predecessor Catacomb 3D (not the "Catacomb Abyss" series that used the same engine but was made elsewhere, as well as featuring the most eye-gouging wall textures ever inflicted on an unsuspecting world), and the super-miminalist Hovertank 3D back in 1991, which had simple coloured boxes for levels and turned heads less for its complexity as its speed—something that Wolfenstein 3D would late...

I did not have dark fantasy soulslike action RPG starring humanoid cats on my 2023 bingo card, but if you did, congratulations! Indie developers Astral Clocktower Studios are granting your wish and filling in that space with Kristala, its in-development debut title where your absolutely adorable widdle warrior must master the magic of six sacred crystals to fight a terrible curse that has mutated the other creatures of the world into monsters. That is presumably, of course, if your ickle bitty cutie warrior can stop trying to jump on top of the bookshelves and/or catch the laser pointer. I mean just look at them, they're such precise little housecat faces. Cute cate jokes aside, it looks like some interesting ARPG stuff. The game promises to have weapons, spells, armor sets, and items to collect and upgrade as you explore its environment and complete your quest to prove yourself by gathering your sacred crystal powers. The world design also intrigues me, even if it definitel...