Month: September 2024

Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. Sure, the planet’s on fire and they’ll spend most of their future looking after me in a retirement home as I ramble about how good I used to be at Balatro, but have you seen the games they’ve been getting lately? Back in my day, children’s games were dismal 3D platformer movie tie-ins—not magical storybook adventures made with real love and care that ingeniously riff on 2D Zelda, yet also have tons of personality all of their own. Bah!

You play Jot, the titular squire and star of a series of children’s books in which you foil the dastardly plans of a right git of a wizard called Humgrump. At first, the game is a wonderfully animated 2D storybook. You’ve got an upgradable sword that delightfully makes words like POW and WHAM appear when you hit enemies with it—it’s that sort of vibe.

After a brief spot of monster-bashing, you soon meet Jot’s adorable friends Violet and Thrash and the scene-stealing Moonbeard, a music-loving mentor figure who helps himself to some of the game’s best lines. Traditional light combat, puzzling, and pla…

Manor Lords’ sole developer, Greg “Slavic Magic” Styczeń, has made a plea to everyone with a review copy of the soon-to-be-released city builder: please stop messing around with the castle planner and breaking the game. 

In response to the recent issue, he tweeted, “I just saw one press review try to cheese their way and build town walls with the castle planner tool, please restrain yourself from doing so. I’ll add a *proper* town wall tool in one of the updates and the castle planner is meant for manors/castles. Should’ve locked it for now.” 

One instance of these irregular town walls, perhaps the first, seems to come from gaming YouTuber One Proud Bavarian, who is currently trying to “build historically accurate and authentic designs in Manor Lords” according to the video’s description. 

So far you can already build wooden fences which can work like scaled down town walls—it’s good for making everything look a bit more uniform. But that’s not enough for some, especially if, like One Proud Bavarian, you’ve got your heart set on building something that’s more historically accurate. It seems that there’s no stopping people once they’ve …

Lasers—pretty cool, eh? NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had previously figured out to use lasers to beam a video of Taters the cat through space to the Psyche spacecraft, which at the time was around 30 million kilometres away. For Americans and Brits, that’s really far away in miles. Today, however, JPL has figured out it can use lasers to communicate with that same craft now that it’s over seven times further away and still score a 25 Mbps connection.

The Pysche craft is around 226 million kilometres (140 million miles) away from Earth. It’s somewhere just outside of the orbit of Mars, on its way to visit an asteroid of the same name in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Despite being so bloody far away, data streaming is working a-okay.

The Psyche craft was able to send and receive information from NASA JPL’s high-power uplink laser facility in Wrightwood, California at around 25 Mbps in a test on April 8. That means, even at this mind-boggling distance, it remains comparable to domestic broadband. 

Though at that sort of distance, using a light-based comms system, you’re looking at something like a 750 second ping, or 12.5…