Month: September 2024

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to convince regulatory agencies that its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard is a good idea, it has now announced 10-year partnerships with a couple of streaming platforms you might not have encountered before: Boosteroid and Ubitus.

A quick recap: Sony is not thrilled with the idea of Microsoft owning Activision Blizzard, largely because of worries that it will make the Call of Duty series exclusive to Xbox consoles. To counter those concerns, Microsoft offered Sony a 10-year deal to keep the series on PlayStation, a proposal that Sony rejected. To demonstrate its seriousness, Microsoft then went about setting up 10-year Call of Duty agreements with various other big-time players in the business, including Steam, Nintendo, and Nvidia.

That is reportedly having a positive effect with EU regulators, but Microsoft isn’t easing off the gas just yet. But with the major platforms (minus Sony) now accounted for, it’s now taking aim at smaller-scale operators, like streaming platform Boosteroid, which on March 14 announced an agreement to bring Xbox PC games to its platform—including Activision-Blizzard games once the acqu…

This past weekend a Reddit user going by LATIN0 posted an image of what they estimated to be six pallets of Magic: The Gathering cards that had been dumped at their local landfill. What would be a treasure trove to a dedicated player was taken as a curiosity by LATIN0, who only knew the game existed from a decade of Reddit use. So they snapped a picture, dumped their trash, and moved on with their life. Later, they posted the quirky picture to Reddit alongside a few more pictures of opened sealed packs.

All without knowing that the retail value of those pallets and boxes was, at a conservative bent, something to the order of $100,000. Depending on contents, however, that could easily have been more than $250,000 worth of MTG cards, containing as it did a mix of Secret Lair, Modern Horizons 2, and Unfinity cards spanning 2019 through the end of 2022. That higher figure is if more of the valuable cards like Modern Horizons, which retail for near twice the price of a regular MTG pack, or the nicer Secret Lair cards were present. Either way, it doesn’t matter now—you can’t take stuff from a landfill, so almost all of the cards got left there by LATIN0 and their co…

The first major patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 has dropped—and it’s a doozy, so much so that it can’t even fit on the Steam page: “Patch 1 is too big for our usual patch notes due to Steam’s character limit”. 

It’s an all-around tune-up to Larian’s hit RPG—which was already pretty damn good on release, with our Baldur’s Gate 3 review knighting it with one of PC Gamer’s highest scores. That said, any new release has problems—especially a game of this scope and size. I myself noticed an uptick in performance problems and story weirdness in Act 3, even if it wasn’t enough to spoil the experience, so I’m pleased to see Larian rolling out fixes in relatively short order.

First off, the patch addresses a whole goblin horde of animation bugs, glitches, and dialogue issues—such as Shadowheart talking about a fight with Lae’zel she’s never had. Here are some of my favourites pulled from my initial scroll-through:

• “Lae’zel no longer floats up and down during your dialogue where you discuss dating.”
• “Fixed some cameras that couldn’t contain the force that is Astarion in a dialogue with him at night at camp.”

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