Equipment

Resident Evil achieves complete global saturation, sells enough copies to make it the 8th biggest country on Earth-

I admit it: I kind of thought, given that the original Resident Evil 4 has been reissued more times than the Bible and the Little Red Book combined, that enthusiasm for its full-blown remake might have been at a low ebb. Well, shows what I know. Capcom just announced that the RE4 remake has topped 7 million sales a little under a year post-release.

Not only that, but the Resident Evil series as a whole has sold over 154 million games since it first emerged from a gross flesh chrysalis back in 1996, which means you could give a copy to the entire population of Russia and still have almost eight million left in reserve. Congratulations to Resident Evil on becoming the eighth largest nation on Earth.

Capcom attributes this success to “continuous support from the passionate fan base across the globe” and says it’s the publisher’s “flagship game series.” I suppose that’s the kind of thing you have to write in a press release, but it’d be good if one day a game company swerved on us and attributed its success to the Mandate of Heaven or an industrial quantity of psilocybin.

Anyway, those sales—both RE4’s and Resident Evil’s more generally—aren’t broken down by platform, but I’d be very curious to see those numbers. We live in a world where you can now play the RE4 remake and RE: Village on your iPhone. Are people really taking advantage of that? Is that what Capcom needed to push it over the 7 million mark after chalking up a little over 6 million sales by the end of 2023?

Alas, we don’t know, but one thing is almost certain: More RE remakes are coming. Last year, Capcom was asking fans which game they wanted remade next. After all, with RE4 out of the way, the only mainline games left are the much less well-loved RE5 and 6, unless Capcom fancies re-remaking 1, so the company is probably keen to know where it should direct its efforts next now that it no longer has an obvious next-in-line game.

My hope is that it settles on Code Veronica, the still console-bound adventure focusing on Claire and Chris Redfield: this was originally conceived of as the third mainline game in the series, before becoming a Dreamcast side-entry. Capcom would port it to other consoles, but it was last seen on Xbox 360 and has never had a PC version. With a year’s breathing room between us and RE4, I imagine we’ll find out what Capcom has in store sooner rather than later.

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Amazon Prime members have until midnight Pacific to get one of my favorite games for free-

As we advised last week, three games are currently available free for Amazon Prime subscribers, on top of its usual rotating freebie selection. Claim them before the Prime Day sales event ends at midnight Pacific on Wednesday night, and they’re yours forever.

The games are:

  • Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider
  • Chivalry 2

If you’re a Prime subscriber, you can grab the free games here. To take advantage of the offer, you have to link your Amazon and Epic Games Store accounts, and Epic’s launcher is where you’ll be able to access your new games. 

  • We’re curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

If you aren’t already using the Epic Games Store and the thought of dealing with a new launcher puts you off, I’m sympathetic, though to complicate your decision I’ll say that I th…

Orcs Must Die’s next entry will bring a roguelite twist next year

The Orcs Must Die series is getting another entry next year with Orcs Must Die Deathtrap, which will be the fifth game in the series from developer and publisher Robot Entertainment. The new release will have players, alone or as a team of up to four, battle oncoming waves of enemies in third-person action gameplay. This time, players will “evolve through rogue-lite progression” as they defeat hordes of orcs.

The reveal trailer showed off four different characters: An elf with a crossbow, a wand-wielding sorceress, a lady with a gun, and a large angry bear. “Each hero is tailored to different play styles and can operate independently or work together with complementing heroes, ensuring versatile and mighty orc-smashing,” said Robot Entertainment.

Space Marine 2 board game aims to indoctrinate videogame fans into the Warhammer miniatures lifestyle

Coming to approved Warhammer retailers this Saturday, the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Recruit Edition board game is “designed to introduce new hobbyists to the world of Warhammer, especially those that want to recreate the battles of the latest videogame hit.”

In other words, if you enjoyed Space Marine 2, this is your invitation to adopt a full-fledged Warhammer hobbyist lifestyle. Accept it at your own risk: You may one day find that you’ve dedicated a portion of your home to the painting of little guys that you can’t stop buying.

The two-player game is designed for 30 minute sessions, and includes 12 miniatures: one Lieutenant Titus, 10 Tyranid Termagants, and one Ripper Swarm. It also comes with five colors of paint, “a range of starter tools and game components,” and a handbook.

If you don’t imagine him charging forward mightily, Lieutenant Titus comes across as a bit wobbly. The big-headed Warhammer proportions contribute to the sense that he’s an unst…

Newsflash- That bargain MSI 4K 240Hz OLED gaming monitor is actually available to buy for once-

MSI’s take on the killer 4K gaming OLED segment has always looked appealing. How so? In a word, price. At $899, it’s easily the cheapest of the bunch.

Of course, there’s a catch. You kind of can’t buy the MSI MAG 321UPX. At least, you barely ever could, it has been sold out almost all the time. But now you can for that $899 price from Newegg.

I reviewed this monitor back in May. At least, I reviewed the MSI MAG 321URX, which is identical save for having a USB-C interface with 90 W of power delivery. This 321UPX model (note the “P” second from last letter where the other model has an “R”) only serves up 15 W over its USB-C connection.

That detail aside, you’re getting the same stunning QD-OLED panel. Though it’s not perfect. Like all monitors using the Samsung QD-OLED panel tech, it’s a little on the warm side in terms of colour balance. And the quantum dot tech and lack of polarising filter means that the panel kicks some ambient light back out in re…

A $4 tweak to Noctua’s AMD Ryzen cooler bracket lowers CPU temperatures by up to 3ºC-

PC manufacturers are always chasing ways to lower component temperatures, often going as far as using exotic materials, cutting-edge manufacturing techniques, or innovative new cooling methods. But sometimes the best solution is the painfully simple one, as Noctua proves with its new offset mounting bracket—a part that costs under $5 and lowers CPU temps by as much as 3ºC.

Noctua’s latest AM5 mounting bracket is offset by 7mm. That might not sound like much, but it’s importantly the exact distance required to set the cooler more centrally over the hottest and most thermally sensitive parts of an AMD Ryzen CPU: the core chiplet die (CCD).

It’s AMD’s chiplet architecture that’s the important thing here. AMD has been using chiplets in its CPUs for many years now, and on the desktop that means an IO die (cIOD) and one or two CCDs. It’s the CCD that run hottest, containing up to eight Zen cores each, and in both one- and two-core configurations they sit slightly of…

Overwatch 2 developer calls smurfing ‘the bane of my existence’-

The Overwatch 2 developers explained the constant battle they have to fight for fair matchmaking in a stream today, and said one of the hardest problems to solve are players who smurf.

“To be clear: please don’t do that,” lead meta designer Scott Mercer said of players who make fresh accounts to see how fast they can climb the competitive ladder or to dunk on new players, otherwise known as smurfing.

Mercer and senior software engineer Morgan Maddren said smurfing ruins matchmaking for new players because the system was made to expect gradual skill improvement. Overwatch 2’s swap to free-to-play from the first game brought in tons of fresh accounts, and the new matchmaking system was carefully built to handle that.

“The situation we don’t want is like, ‘Hi, I’m a new player to Overwatch,’ and we totally misevaluate your skill and you lose a bunch of games because we think you’re way better than you are,” Mercer said.

The team had to build systems to anticipat…