Axis Studios, the Scottish animation and VFX company who made the 2011 Dead Island rewinding teaser, is shutting down. Per GamesIndustry, the studio has ceased production on all its current projects, with 162 employees laid off as the company enters administration.

Back in 2011, Axis produced a cinematic E3 premiere teaser that singlehandedly catapulted Dead Island to the forefront of public consciousness. In a slow-motion, rewound sequence, the trailer revealed how a family’s White Lotus-ass vacation met an early, grisly end at the hands of an amassing zombie horde. Even without any gameplay footage, the response at the time was huge. (Zombies weren’t quite as played out in 2011.)

I didn’t end up enjoying Dead Island very much, but I sure as hell bought it and that teaser is to blame. Imitated and parodied countless times since, Axis’s Dead Island trailer left a profound fingerprint on the long-running trope of big budget game reveals pairing gruesome viol…

Less than a week ago, Helldivers 2 players managed to stamp out the Automaton resistance “for good”. This earned them a pat on the back and a whole single minute of free time—Super Earth isn’t a dystopia, though, honest.

You might have noticed that “for good” is in air quotes, there. That’s because the final holdout worlds of Maia, Durgen, and Tibit were merely a setback for the Automaton scourge. There was ample reason to believe that the bots would be permanently turned off until a total galactic victory reset the board, but… well, other shoe—meet your drop.

“The Automatons have revealed their true force,” announces a dire warning via the in-game dispatches system. “A massive invasion fleet sweeping through our territory. Defences are scrambling. Slow its advance as much as possible.”

The new Major Order is a desperate defence of at least five planets as the Automatons swoop in from space. Want to know what makes it worse? Cyberstan is among th…

We’ve seen a new memory form factor show up in a few places at Computex 2024—across modules to motherboards. Not least surprising is how often memory manufacturer Micron mentioned it to me at the show. And how enthused it was with the memory form factor, which it is first with to market.

“I think the future really lies here, which is LP[CAMM2] running on the PC using this form factor,” Dinesh Bahal, VP and GM of Micron’s Consumer & Components Group, says.

LPCAMM2 is effectively a pancaked memory kit. It offers some similarities to soldered memory while still being able to be replaced by the user. For that reason, it’s seen as the perfect fit for the next-generation of thinner laptops, and Crucial is the first out the door with its 32 GB and 64 GB kit.

“So people went from the SO-DIMM is taking too much space, let me just start soldering it down. The problem with soldering it down is that I’m deciding my configuration upfront.”

LPCAMM solves that pro…

Update (August 16): Linus Tech Tips has posted an apology video, suspended video production for a week, and says it’s investigating allegations from an ex-employee. Latest story here.

Original story: Linus Tech Tips founder Linus Sebastian has admitted to “sloppiness” in the hardware review channel’s handling of controversy that erupted over its recent review of a high-end watercooling system, but says what really bothers him about the situation is “how quickly the pitchforks were raised.”

The trouble began with a June 24 video in which Sebastian and an assistant put together a watercooled PC using Billet Labs’ Monoblock, a system designed to cool both the CPU and GPU simultaneously. The Monoblock is not actually in production at this point: It’s available for preorder at the Billet Labs website for $841. The device tested by LTT was apparently a unique prototype.

The build did not go smoothly. The installation of the cooling b…

Stick “microcapacitors” onto to your list of future technologies that might just change the world. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have announced a breakthrough in microcapacitor energy storage and power density (via SciTechDaily), smashing through earlier records.

In simple terms, there’s a benefit in storing energy locally on-chip, which can save on power transfer between components. It just hasn’t been practical before because the very smallest capacitors have previously stored so little energy.

But the Berkley team have published a paper in the journal Nature, nattily titled “Giant energy storage and power density negative capacitance superlattices” and detailing a novel capacitor design made from engineered thin films of hafnium oxide and zirconium oxide, or HfO2-ZrO2 to the initiated.

The films are grown by atomic layer deposition, using standard materials and techniques from industrial chip fabrication. “We…

The answer to today’s Wordle is ready for you below, one quick click to turn a tricky game into an instant win. Or if you’d rather take your time with Monday’s puzzle, why not spend a minute with our helpful tips, or have a little peek at a clue for the April 15 (1031) game instead?

I knew I had today’s Wordle answer somewhere in the mostly yellow letter-soup before me, the only problem was nothing went where I expected it to, and the letters I hoped were right turned up grey. I had to take a quick break with this one, coming back to it a little later with a fresh pair of eyes.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, April 15

Providing someone with the tools or knowledge needed to perform a task could be described using today’s answer. This word is often found in RPG menus, used to apply armour and weapons to a character.  

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

There are no double let…

If you’ve been following the new Fallout TV show and wanted to get into the games on a gaming PC, you may have been put off by the prices of the best systems you can get. The thing is, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to enjoy a quality 1080p gaming experience—this $800 Yeiyan Yumi is proof of that.

Kicking things off is the Core i5 12400F processor. Yes, it’s three generations old now but its six cores and 12 threads are more than enough for most games, and the motherboard inside the PC supports more recent CPUs if you feel like upgrading at some point. As we discovered in our 12400F review, it’s fast, cool, and a great little processor.

It’s been sensibly paired with a GeForce RTX 4060. This graphics card has 3,072 shaders and a boost clock of 2,460 MHz, though it will often run faster than that. This is because Nvidia’s latest chips use relatively little energy and the RTX 4060 often uses far less power than its 115 W limit. Best of all, it supports …

Have you ever worried that your correspondence isn’t grimdark enough? Feared that your pen pal doesn’t understand how much you love Space Marines? Despaired that the birthday card you’re sending your mum includes no reminders of how good the art on the original Rogue Trader rulebook looked? Buddy, let me free you from your torment: Royal Mail is releasing a full set of Warhammer stamps.

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the venerable franchise (counting from the first release of the original fantasy wargame, simply dubbed Warhammer, in 1983), the collection features primarily recent art and miniatures from Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. That includes portraits of Space Marine Primarch Roboute Guilliman and Daemon Prince Be’lakor, photography of Stormcast Eternal and Ork miniatures, and more. 

But there’s some classic art in there too, to tickle the nostalgia glands of any long-standing fan—including the aforementioned Rogue Trader artwork (th…

The downside of digital ownership has reared its ugly head for enjoyers of Ubisoft’s open-world multiplayer racer The Crew. The publisher has revoked its licence for those who owned it on Ubisoft Connect, almost destroying fan ambitions to revive the game in both an offline and online format.

The Crew was pulled from sale back in December, with Ubisoft revealing that the servers would be shut down at the beginning of April. Frustratingly, despite a large portion of the game being doable in singleplayer, The Crew remained an online-only endeavour throughout its decade-long lifespan. That had already rendered the game unplayable, but it seems Ubisoft is determined to take things one step further to stamp out any attempts to continue playing it past its expiry date.

Fans began to notice earlier in the week that the licence to the game had been snatched away from them. A message at the top of the game’s library page reads, “You no longer have access to this game. Why not che…