I'm a comic book nut, but I stay away from Marvel Rivals to keep my blood pressure in check. I do love the radical, supremely over-the-top character designs that NetEase landed on for Marvel's coterie of costumed heroes, though. You might be surprised to learn that the game used to be even more stylized—so much so that finding a hero before a match was borderline obnoxious.In the debut for a...

Nearly a week after a major hack forced it offline, the notorious imageboard 4chan remains inaccessible, and there's a growing feeling that it's going to stay that way—and that maybe it's not so bad.Founded in 2003, 4chan is—or was—something of a waypoint for a particular part of online subculture: Basic, unrefined, unmoderated, and almost entirely anonymous, which is what made it so notorious. Vice called it "the internet’s favorite hotspot...

We know a lot more about Bungie's Marathon reboot now than we did a week ago. We learned that it's a hero-based extraction shooter with abilities, economy, and a handful of maps in the vein of Escape From Tarkov. We know it's got weapon mods that should tickle the brains of Destiny buildcrafters, and Bungie also shared details on proximity chat, solo play, and cosmetics (it'll have them).Weirdly, one important...

Overwatch 2 Stadium is one of the biggest shakeups for the game since the sequel launched in 2023. Hero perks in standard Quickplay and Competitive let you tweak hero abilities through a handful of upgrade choices. Stadium, a new mode separate from standard play, lets you completely change how abilities function and even adds new effects for weapons and equipable items to give your team a boost. How many of...

We're in a golden age of ARPGs if you haven't been paying attention, but that doesn't make them any easier to balance. Since its launch, Diablo 4 has been criticized for its awfully gentle take on the Burning Hells; and though smacking loot pinatas until they stop moving doesn't have to be all that hard to be fun, lead live game designer Colin Finer is ready to kick things up...

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP. Developer: e-frontier Released: 2000 PCs: Windows 95-NT, Mac (Image credit: e-frontier) Sometimes I buy obscure old games for what I like to imagine are grand, noble reasons. A niche developer makes an unusual puzzley twist on the RPG, and I must learn...

Word to the wise, be careful about the images you post on social media. OpenAI's latest AI models, released last week, have sparked a new viral craze for bot-powered geoguessing. In other words, using AI to deduce where a photo was taken. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that could be a doxxing and privacy nightmare.OpenAI's new o3 and o4-mini models are both capable of image...

A new variant of Intel's latest Battlemage gaming graphics has been spotted in a shipping manifest and the hope is that it could be the killer $400 gaming GPU we've been waiting for. Think RTX 5070 performance for RTX 5060 Ti 8GB money. Well, that's the dream, anyway.X user Haze2K1 (via Videocardz) spotted a listing for an Intel BMG-31 GPU in a manifest on shipping data website NBD. Intel's latest...

Hold onto your holographic caps because researchers in Japan have managed to turn depleted uranium into futuristic rechargeable batteries. According to IEEE.org, Scientists at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency have been working to turn the depleted uranium waste products of nuclear power generation into batteries designed to be recharged by renewables.Sadly, this doesn't mean we'll be emptying leftover cans of drink and banana peels into our fuel canisters anytime soon....

China managed to make one of the coolest sounding premises staggeringly nerdy as the country pits humanoid robots against humans in a half marathon run. According to The Guardian, this meat vs. machine mini marathon was held at Yizhuang in Beijing on Saturday, where 21 robots joined the thousands of fleshy fitness fanatics in competition.The real downside to this news is the robots didn't win, or even come close. In...