Caoliu

Ahead of next year’s 10th anniversary for Hearthstone, initial design lead Cora Georgiou took to the stage at BlizzCon today to reveal what’s coming next for both the standard game mode and its (arguably more popular) Battlegrounds spin-off.

We already know quite a bit about the next expansion, Showdown in the Badlands, which is Hearthstone’s riff on the Wild West. Georgiou announced that it will also be the first set to include a neutral ‘Hero’ card (ie one that replaces your current hero power, in addition to conferring other bonuses).

That card is Reno, Lone Ranger, it costs 8 Mana, and the text reads: “Battlecry: If your deck has no duplicates, empty the enemy board and limit it to 1 minion for a turn. It’s high noon!” Reno’s new hero power reads: Shoot t…

I understand the desire to iterate and improve, but let’s face it, tech aesthetic design peaked in the ’90s. Visionary designers all over the world have yet to truly improve on the coloured clear plastic look. Being able to see the tech underneath is still far cooler looking than any decal or colourway yet to be invented. Plus you can get that little pop of personal flare with the colour of your choice. You only need look at a GameBoy, Digimon, iMac, or in more modern times a Dbrand teardown skin to see what I mean.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one who thinks so as Jsaux has released a series of transparent back plates for your beloved Steam Deck. Right now only the brown variant is in stock, but blue, green, purple, red, and crystal clear options are on their way. The colours loo…

The New York-based indie studio Dang is closing after releasing only one game, but what a game. The hyper-fast and movement-focused Boomerang X released in 2021 and was notable among other things for supporting an experimental type of gyro controller, the Flick Stick, as well as mouse-and-keyboard, so that players could whizz its deadly shuriken-boomerang around in the fanciest of patterns. The game sits with around 800 “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam though, judging by this announcement, that sadly didn’t translate to sales.

Dang announced its shuttering via a screenshot of a statement written in Notepad, which is certainly a vibe—the studio later said it was because “none of us really wanted to make a professional-looking closure announcemen…

Nvidia’s next-generation consumer GPUs, reportedly named Blackwell, are a hotly debated topic, especially now we seem to be inching ever closer to a likely release date. While Nvidia remains tight-lipped about its latest crop of graphics cards, the rumour mill does seem to be getting closer to a consensus with a report suggesting that board manufacturers are anticipating a launch in the fourth quarter of 2024.

According to Money UDN, board partners are anticipating an initial launch of high-end cards like the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 at the end of this year (via Videocardz), while analysts are optimistic about a boost in shipment volumes and a potential upping of the average selling price of graphics card products.

Known Nvidia leaker Kopite7kimi has appeared to confirm the spe…

Mortal Glory 2 released this past week, a tactical battle game about fantasy gladiator teams battling to the death on an arena circuit in pursuit of fortune and fame. It’s a vicious game all about making your best attempt, getting further than you thought, dying, unlocking cool new stuff, and then making another go of it.

The most appealing part of Mortal Glory 2 is that the combat is fairly simple: Movement rules, abilities, debuffs, terrain, and attacks are pretty straightforward and easy to understand. The AI itself is pretty good at what it does, too: It knows how to fight and optimize its moves to get results.

…but there’s a ton of variety of weird fantasy species to recruit then mix-and-match with equipment and weapons and potent relics to fight with. There are wizar…