Authorities in Massachusetts have brought to trial a man who allegedly ran a cryptocurrency mining operation out of the crawlspace beneath a high school in Cohasset, a small coastal town about 20 miles outside of Boston. The operation was discovered in late 2021 by a by a town employee who noticed electrical wires and temporary ductwork in an “elevated crawl space” nearby the school’s boiler room.

The narrow crawlspace contained what appears to be two sets of specialized mining rigs, one cluster of five and another of six computers, according to photos released by the Cohasset Police Department. The equipment was patched into the school’s electrical system and was housed in several coolers with ducts venting hot air to the outside.

Police’s primary suspect in the crime is on…

Overwatch 2 just got a small mid-season patch that buffs a few of the heroes and improves competitive matchmaking slightly, and while most of the changes are pretty minimal, one sticks out like a sore thumb: Sigma’s ultimate is even more terrifying than it was before. 

Sigma’s ultimate Gravitic Flux lifts enemies in an eight-meter radius, launching them into the sky and then dragging them back down to earth, dealing 50 damage on take-off and then follow-up damage of 50% of a hero’s max health once they are slammed into the floor. This means most squishy heroes like Tracer or Ana can be killed in one fell swoop. 

There aren’t a lot of ways to counter this, with the few exceptions being a personal/projected barrier from Zarya, Mei’s cryo-freeze, or Kiriko’s protectio…

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor released in an unhappy state. So unhappy, in fact, that its user review rating on Steam rapidly hit “mostly negative” (although it’s improved to “mixed” since then) and EA had to come out and promise fixes for its condition. It’s a shame, since the game underneath all that technical mess is actually pretty good. Today, Respawn detailed its upcoming fourth patch, which is set to hit PC “as soon as possible this week,” with more than a few PC-only fixes.

The changes all look pretty granular to me, although any improvement is welcome, and EA is quick to emphasise that more work remains to be done. Still, you can look forward to ray tracing fixes, less hitching, improved non-ray tracing performance, and some tweaks to alleviate visual errors and bugs.…

Review bombs are an endemic part of the modern media landscape at this point. Whether they’re about player frustration, politics, or just because a crypto company bought your game, we’ve all become well-accustomed to the long red candles that pockmark Metacritic and Steam user review charts during periods of controversy. But there’s usually some discernible reason for the review bombs, even if it’s a really bad one.

Not so in the case of Chained Echoes, a 16-bit throwback JRPG from developer Matthias Linda that is, by all accounts, really rather good. But as spotted by GamesRadar, its Metacritic user review score wilted beneath a wave of negative reviews that contained no actual written text whatsoever, leaving its dev and publisher helpless to do anything about it.

“Chained…

The Finals, the highly-destructible FPS from ex-Battlefield devs, surprise launched at The Game Awards last night. The shooter had just recently ended a very successful open beta that attracted hundreds of thousands of players, but many (myself included) wondered if Embark Studios still planned to get the game out before the end of 2023. Now it’s here, and launch day is going well: The Finals is one of the most-played games on Steam right now, peaking at over 200,000 concurrent players on PC alone.

There is one hangup, though—a lot of people aren’t happy that Embark slowed down player movement between open beta and launch. The pushback is strong enough that The Finals currently sits at “Mixed” on Steam with over 3,000 negative reviews, and a lot of them are about movement. Read more

Feel free to give the answer to today’s Wordle a click if you need to turn Sunday’s game around in a flash, or take a look at our clue for the July 28 (1135) puzzle if you’d like to try that out first and have a few guesses to spare. Whatever makes Wordle fun for you, we’ve got something here to help you make the most of it.

Oh, that was so nearly a lightning fast win in two. If only I’d had some sort of amazing clue to help guide the way, or maybe even the chance to sneakily peek at today’s Wordle answer, I could’ve avoided being one letter off an incredible win. Go on—treat yourself.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, July 28

Today’s answer refers to an item of clothing, a long, loose, shirt-ish, dress-ish thing. This c…

Wizard101, an MMO for kids that’s older than most of its playerbase, is coming to Steam. Well, kind of. Wizard101 has already been on Steam for US players since 2018, but as of yesterday the venerable and family-friendly massively-multiplayer online RPG (FFMMORPG) is also available on Steam in Europe, where it had previously been absent.

If you’re anything like me, that news has you asking yourself one question: Why the hell does Wizard101 sound so familiar? Here’s the answer: This is the game that found itself beset by bizarre messages from a hacker in September 2022, which said things like “BRADLEY COME DOWN TO MY OFFICE THIS INSTANT,” “dick and balls,” and—my personal favourite—”The next world is my boss’s asshole,” a statement of such weighty profundity it sounds m…

All the help you need to win today’s Wordle is waiting below. Give your own guesses a nudge in the right direction with a fresh clue just for today’s game, or skip to the win with the answer to the March 10 (995) puzzle. However you play, we can help.

A solid block of three greens became something of a sticking point today, the Wordle answer clearly within reach but refusing to come to mind. Knowing some letters just couldn’t work with the combination I had in front of me wasn’t as helpful as it could have been, because if it wasn’t those, then what the heck was it? A quick break and a fresh angle helped a lot with this one. 

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, March 10

You’ll want to grab on tight to any …

I think it fair to say that Crystal Dynamics should now be viewed as the savior of the Tomb Raider franchise. Picking up development after Eidos dropped development duties following the nadir of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, it rebooted the series not once but twice, leaving Lara in the position she is today—a relevant hero who’s had some cracking adventures as of late and is reportedly getting more soon, too.

View Tomb Raider: Underworld on GOG

The most recent trilogy of Tomb Raider games was great (culminating in 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider), but the trilogy of releases that Crystal Dynamics released before that (Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld), showed plenty of quality, too, and especially the last release, Tomb Raider: Underworld.