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While 2018’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was always-online, it also didn’t have a singleplayer campaign (you could play against bots, but you still needed to be connected to the internet). The 2019 remake of Modern Warfare was the first CoD to be always-online on PC while also having a full singleplayer mode, and it’s been that way ever since. Over in Console Land, the singleplayer stuff remained accessible without a constant internet connection, though without your skins and so on. That’s not the case for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which will be always-online for everybody.

As the CoD blog explains, “To deliver the highest-quality visuals while also reducing the game’s overall storage space on your hard drive, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will use texture streaming across all…

Games get a lot of tat attached to them to bump that bottom line—boring t-shirts, $45 posters for unreleased games, the works. Sometimes you’ll get diamonds in the rough that genuinely give you something cool, but there’s a secret third option between tat and genuine novelty: Ordinary things executed with such perfect marketing fiat that you’ve just gotta throw your hands up and say shoot, you got me.

Such is the case with these two bottles of probably-okay wine—announced back in February (thanks, SiliconEra) the buzz around these finely-aged draughts of existential dread only kicked up recently on Twitter, going viral to the tune of 69,000 likes.

Honestly, while $80 is a little pricey for some wine—you do also get a nice glass, and the novelty of knowing t…

Three’s a crowd but four’s a party, as they saying goes. But is four really a party? Four might be fine for a dinner, a card game, or a wife swap, but if you want to have a real party you’ve gotta invite more people over.

In Baldur’s Gate 3 you can have a total of four characters at a time in your party, but deciding who stays behind at camp while you go running around the world can be tough. Now there’s a mod that changes that restrictive party limit.

The Party Limit Begone mod lets you have up to eight adventurers in your party instead of just four. I’ve tested it and it definitely works, and it’s also a breeze to install. Just download the mod (you’ll need a free Nexus Mods account if you don’t have one) and extract the folder into your Baldur’s …

Solve today’s Wordle exactly the way you want to with our helpful range of tips and advice. There’s a fresh clue for the May 17 (697) game waiting below if you’d like a hint, or today’s answer is only a quick click away if you need to rescue an unlucky game. You’ll also find past answers, general help, and plenty more.

The results of today’s opener really could’ve gone either way for me—one green and one yellow isn’t a terrible start, but it’s not good enough to guarantee a swift win either. Happily, luck was on my side this time, my follow-up almost gave me today’s Wordle answer, and my third go polished off a satisfying game.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, May 17

The word you need to find today describes a long, thin pie…

However much or little help you need to win today’s Wordle, you’ll find everything you need right here. Come take a look at our handy tips, take a peek at a clue for the March 15 (1000) puzzle, or ensure your thousandth Wordle is a guaranteed win by clicking through to today’s answer.

I found a single green on my first go, and that meant the yellow I discovered at the same time could only fit in one of four places. Somehow I still got it wrong three times. As terrible as that performance was, at least when it did finally land in the right spot the whole game turned around in an instant, as if today’s Wordle answer hadn’t spent several rows trying to hide from me at all.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, March 15

A sudden burst …

The way kids’ show characters like Dora the Explorer pause for responses as if they can hear all the five-year-olds shouting at them is mildly unsettling, and probably contributes to the confused notions kids sometimes have about television. The ones that lead to questions like: Can they see me?

Amanda the Adventurer, a “found footage edutainment horror” game that released on Steam this week, exploits that creepiness by having us watch and respond to VHS tapes of a made-up kids show starring a little girl named Amanda, who in the first episode bakes a pie without parental supervision despite the protests of her poor little friend, a Wooly the sheep.

Amanda of course does the Dora thing, where she asks you, the viewer, for advice. Except that when she asks something,…

Vizio has agreed to pay out $3 million to settle a 2018 California class action lawsuit that accused the company of misleading consumers over the refresh rates of its TVs. Vizio had been claiming that black frame insertion technology increased the “effective refresh rate” of its TVs from 60Hz to 120Hz.

It also applied the same language and thinking to 120Hz panels, boosting the “effective” refresh rate of those sets to 240Hz. The settlement terms (via The Verge) allow anyone who bought a Vizio TV in California after April 30 2014 to claim, receiving between $17 and $50 depending on the number of claimants.

Vizio, of course, explicitly denies any wrongdoing, the implication being that it sees the settlement as expedient rather truly justified. That said, as part of the settle…

Here’s a weird new indie that has my undivided attention: Arctic Eggs, a game where you’re in a miserable future seeking to escape a dystopian prison with nothing but your wits, strong wrists, and a frying pan. You cook for others, you cook to survive, and you cook to explore the low-poly, lo-res, scanlined brutalist heckscape that is this weird frozen penal colony.

Arctic Eggs takes place almost entirely via the action of walking, talking, and frying pan flipping. You ain’t got no spatula to cook from. You got a pan, and moving it with a mouse is how you slide the food so you can roll it perfectly up and off the edge and into the air for a beautiful flip that you just absolutely must catch again because there are no sunny-side up eggs in this dystopian landscape.

An incompl…

Known for offering bags of storage in a teeny tiny format, SD cards have been pretty slow at piling on the gigabytes over the years, compared to HDDs, SSDs, and other storage formats. Western Digital plans to step things up a notch or two, though, stating that it expects to launch 4TB models in its SanDisk range next year.

News of the forthcoming products, reported by Anandtech (via Ars Technica), is likely to be well received by anyone with a digital camera or handheld device who’ve been frustrated by the fact that SD cards have only just reached the 2TB level—and I when I say ‘only just’, I’m talking about January of this year.

While the SDUC (Secure Digital Ultra Capacity) format of the 7.0 SD specification permits up to 128TB, no such drives exist on the market. Th…