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Russian streamer Anna Bazhutova, known on Twitch as Yokobovich, has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for livestreaming witness accounts of alleged atrocities committed by the Russian army during its occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

French news agency AFP, via the Moscow Times, says Bazhutova was found guilty of spreading false information about the Russian army on her Twitch channel. The live broadcast originally occurred in June 2023, according to the report (although other sources, including Radio Free Europe, say the incident took place in 2022), and included witness accounts of massacres carried out by Russian forces. The government of Ukraine has made similar allegations of mass killings conducted by withdrawing Russian forces that left hundreds dea…

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&rsqu…

This year’s US presidential election has, as ever, brought a hitherto-unknown degree of scrutiny to certain of its key players. One person who seems to have come out of it fairly well is the Democratic nomination for vice president, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose biography is basically a folksy paean to public service, on top of which he comes across as an actual human being rather than an Onion character.

One standout discovery among the deep-dives into Walz’s past is that the man has great taste in consoles, and was particularly attached to the Sega Dreamcast: to the extent his wife apparently took to hiding it from him. And lo the internet delivered, with one Resetera user turning out to have acquired the very console in question after it was handed down by Walz, and reca…

What’s the half-life of Half-Life? By my reckoning, it seems we’ll stop receiving updates to (one version or another of) Valve’s classic roughly around the time Chernobyl becomes habitable again. Not only did the original game get a big ol’ update last November, but now Black Mesa—its Valve-endorsed remake—has just put out a meaty list of fixes. It’s calling it the “Necro patch” for reasons I’m not entirely clear on but am very enthusiastic about.

Crowbar Collective called this one a “Mini patch” when it was in beta last month, but it sure seems hefty to me. It ports the game to a newer version of the DXVK renderer, tightens up performance, ends crashes, and switches the game over to use Steam Input for its controller support, which has been significantly improved in g…

B&H has a wildly good deal on one of our favorite all-time NVMe SSDs, which you can pick up right now for only $165. The timing couldn’t be better if you’re looking for an easy but meaningful upgrade to your gaming PC before you commit the next 300 hours of your life to Baldur’s Gate 3, a game that requires an SSD and at least 150GB of available storage to meet its rather beefy minimum requirements.

The 2TB version of the drive usually costs $270, but right now, it’s over $100 off, making it an absolute steal and an easy recommendation.

When we reviewed the FireCuda 530, we praised its remarkable performance and unrivaled reliability, positioning it as the leading choice for premium memory storage. The only drawback we found was the absence of AES 256-bit encryption and…

Mercury is nobody’s favorite planet. Our star’s closest companion is a hateful little ball pocked with craters and patches of graphite, continually blasted by solar wind. But according to a recent study from a team of Chinese and Belgian scientists (via Space.com), there are diamonds under all that rough. A 10-mile-thick layer of diamond, to be specific.

Those patches of graphite I mentioned have led scientists to theorize that in Mercury’s early history, it was host to an ocean of molten carbon that floated to its surface and cooled, leaving a carbon-rich mantle in its wake beneath the planet’s crust. Using data from NASA’S MESSENGER spacecraft, the study calculates that a section of its mantle previously thought to be graphite may actually be a 10-mile-thick layer of diamond.

In a move that seems to codify a sort of “Bastards” franchise, Blue Manchu is following up its 2019 roguelike FPS Void Bastards with Wild Bastards, a more open-ended, space western take on the concept. First announced at our PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted showcase, Wild Bastards is set to release some time next year.

“Roguelike FPS” gets part of the story with Void Bastards, but it’s really got a lot of that System/BioShock immersive sim DNA⁠—it has that same sort of hall-crawling light stealth, with RPG character progression closely tied to the limited resources you have at your disposal, encouraging you to tear through every cabinet in a room looking for sandwiches. You get a lot of those ‘shock series’ accidental eureka moments of leading enemies into traps or just ba…

World of Warcraft’s next three expansions are a bold gambit from Blizzard. They’ll be a story told in three parts, and—judging by the trailer for The War Within—they’ll focus on character development and emotional storytelling over big dudes in armour calling you a pitiful mortal while revealing the next step of their master plan. It’s also about to receive, arguably, its first actual in-game story cinematics, and Blizzard’s given us a preview in advance.

For context, this isn’t actually a cinematic from the expansion itself—but it is from the expansion’s pre-patch The Dark Heart, which’ll be arriving early next week. It’s going to set a precedent for the game’s storytelling going forward. Watching it, I couldn’t shake the thought from my mind: Holy crap, they’re…

World of Warcraft Classic isn’t necessarily hard, it’s just punishing—requiring, as many old MMORPGs did, a huge amount of patience on behalf of the player. It’s easy to accidentally pull too many mobs or wipe on an ill-fated dungeon run, forcing you to make a long jog back to your corpse. Adding permadeath to that equation, though? Yeah, that’s scary.

Not scary enough for one player, though: A Twitch streamer by the name of Rudeism has, beyond all good sense, decided to tackle the harshest version of WoW armed with nothing but his feet and two DDR mats next to each other.

As spotted by Gamesradar, Rudeism began his two-stepping journey through Azeroth yesterday, making it to level 6 after nearly four hours of grooving. That’s despite the fact that, around 25 minutes a…

When US presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it meant something different to the varsity Valorant esports team from Apple Valley High School in Minnesota. It meant they’d now been endorsed by the man who might soon become the vice president of the USA.

“Congratulations on an undefeated season and winning the Minnesota Varsity League State Championship in Valorant!” Walz wrote in a letter shared on the Apple Valley High School Esports Twitter account in 2022. The idea of a state governor knowing what Valorant is, even if just for the time it takes to sign a letter passing across his desk on a Tuesday morning, seems wild to think about, but welcome to the 2020s I guess.

Walz went on to applaud the “mental fortitude and…

Look, we’ve all been dunking on the whole ‘metaverse’ concept for a while now. As Phil Iwaniuk wrote for us back in February of last year, anyone who has played video games knows that the metaverse’s promised digital wonderland has existed since the days of the CRT monitor.

Second Life, Everquest, World of Warcraft. Heck: if you need a headset to make the comparison, VRChat got there first in 2014. Now there’s an actual challenger to that assumption. As reported by Automaton (translated from a press release on PR Times), there’s a metaverse project I’m weirdly optimistic about. 

It comes from the company Aominext, which develops distinctly anime-styled metaverse spaces that slough off the disturbing, soulless avatars we’re used to from Zuckerberg and his crew—reve…

The answer to today’s Wordle is only a quick click away if you need a hand—go on, we promise we won’t tell. Prefer something a little less direct? You’ve got it. Keep scrolling and you’ll soon find our general tips and tricks, as well as a helpful hint for the November 11 (875) game.

Well, that was confusing. I didn’t have all that much to work with until I was halfway down the board today, and what I did have didn’t exactly cause today’s Wordle answer to leap out at me. I ended up having to experiment with the letters I had left, rearranging them in my mind until I finally found a valid word that fit around the few greens I did have.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, November 11

The answer today is a sweet alcoholic dr…