The on/off saga of Meteor Lake for desktops has been settled once and for all. It’s been confirmed. Meteor Lake will be coming to desktops.

In an interview with PCWorld during Intel’s Innovation event, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the executive vice president and general manager of the client computing group, went on the record and categorically confirmed that Intel’s exciting new architecture will be coming to desktops some time in 2024.

Here are the money quotes, from the 6.30-mark of the PC World interview.

Q: Let me ask you, is there going to be a Meteor Lake desktop?
A: Desktop will come in 2024.
Q: So you are confirming Meteor Lake desktop?
A: Yes.

There it is folks,. If anyone woul…

Greg Styczeń, the solo developer of smash hit survival citybuilder Manor Lords, needs your help. Specifically, he needs your help deciding whether to adjust the game’s supply-and-demand system.

The issue is that when Manor Lords was first made available to critics and YouTubers pre-release, the feedback was that trade was “OP” and it was too easy “to just sell one type of good and make your town uber rich that way”, as Styczeń explained on the Manor Lords Discord server. He added a tweak to the system that punished flooding the market with just one good so that “basically if you start selling one type of item a lot, its price will keep falling until the exports stop completely. Same for the opposite, if you keep massively importing some type of good, its price will rise …

Music’s at the heart of Final Fantasy 14—the game brims with bangers, sure, but it’s also an irreplaceable part of the game’s story. 

I’ve teared up to the hopeful swells of Dynamis while playing Endwalker, been pumped up by the guitar riffs of Shadowbringers during its roaring climax. Countless leitmotifs course through the game’s soundscape like blood runs through a body’s veins. Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s over 200 musicians—organised by youtuber Husky by the Geek—playing the game’s greatest hits for 10 solid minutes.

This medley is a journey through each expansion, kicking off with the ripping Primal themes from A Realm Reborn before swooping into Heavensward, its mighty chanting replaced with electric guitar. “Brute Justice”&mda…

When I heard about this year’s Minecraft mob vote, I thought to myself, “Gosh, that sounds like fun! Some discussion, some debate, a little bit of good-natured trash talk, and at the end of the day, a new creature for players to enjoy.” Dear readers, I was wrong. A big chunk of the Minecraft community is not happy about the democratic process, and a petition calling on players to boycott the vote has now surpassed an astounding 300,000 signatures.

The mob vote is actually an ongoing thing: Every year, Mojang presents concepts for three possible mobs and gives players the opportunity to vote on which one will be added to the game. This year’s candidates are a crab, an armadillo, and a penguin, all of them “equally great,” according to the petition—which is central to the comp…

Update May 30, 2023: At the close of the US markets Nvidia’s share price finished at $401. That’s a 3% rise for the day, but below the threshold to maintain the $1 trillion market capitalisation it had briefly achieved earlier in the day. So close. Guess it’s going to have to give its executive toilet door card back now. Zuckerberg can sympathise.

At this level Nvidia’s only theoretically worth a paltry $992 billion. Pfft. 

Original story: Nvidia’s done it, it has now joined the $1 trillion club, getting its door card to the gold-plated executive toilet along with such tech luminaries as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (essentially Google). Oh yeah, and purveyor of overpriced technology, Apple. 

The milestone was reached toda…

Manchester United and England striker Marcus Rashford was recently doing some press duties with the Premier League, during which the footballer was given a sneak peek at the EA Sports FC 24 version of Marcus Rashford. The player’s form vastly improved in the 2022/23 season, with 30 goals in all competitions, and this is reflected in some improved ratings on the EAFC 24 card (the new version of FIFA Ultimate Team) over the FIFA 23 version. But not, apparently enough for Rashford.

The Rashford card’s overall rating has improved from an 83 in FIFA 23 to an 85 in EAFC 24. But when taken through how the game breaks down his skills, Rashford was unpleasantly surprised at points.

At least it began well. Rashford couldn’t believe he was rated an 87 for pace in FIFA 23 (to be fair, h…

The Diablo 4 Server Slam beta is underway now. 

This is the final public playtest before the action RPG’s launch in June. It’s open to everyone—you can download the Diablo 4 beta in the Battle.net launcher to join in—and will run until Sunday at 12 pm PT.

At the moment, the servers aren’t actually slammed: I made a character and started playing right away, with no queue. Maybe a certain Zelda game has something to do with that, but if things go anything like they did during the last open beta period, we’ll probably see queues appear as more and more people get off of work in North America. If there is a big rush this evening (not everyone is playing Tears of the Kingdom, right?), things will likely ease up into the weekend. 

This test dif…