You’ll find hints for every colour in today’s game of NYT Connections just below, as well as all the answers for the September 29 (#110) puzzle if you happen to need something a little stronger. Just looking for a few general tips? Keep scrolling, we’ve got those too.

I took one look at today’s Connections and groaned—how the heck was I supposed to sort these out? There was nothing there for me. And then I stopped panicking and started shuffling, which turned out to be just the thing my brain needed to join a few dots. The puzzle unravelled not long after that, and weirdly enough I solved the colours in the right order today.

NYT Connections hint today: Friday, September 29

One clue for every colour, coming up.

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Yellow: The theme here is “crucial”. Something or someone a project can’t function without.

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Green: You could throw the…

Update, January 23: This story was posted January 22. In it, I theorise about whether Nintendo will take legal action against this Palworld mod—as it has with similar projects in the past. It’s been less than 24 hours, and surely enough there’s been a copyright claim, according to Toasted Shoes’ Twitter:

The extent of the legal action involved is unclear—but at the time of writing, the promised video has not yet been uploaded to YouTube. Original story follows.

Original Story: The phrase ‘Nothing’s certain but death and taxes’ needs an addendum—because the inevitability of Palworld having Pokémon modded into it is, statistically, more likely than both of those things. 

Medical science could outpace death given a couple hundred years. A post-scarcity society could move beyond the need for taxation—but the moment someone could send Pikachu to the mines, they were going to do it. Thus it was wri…

With Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 set to arrive very soon, developer Ninja Theory has now revealed the PC system requirements. The minimum spec is fairly undemanding, so any mid-range gaming PC should be able to handle it, but it doesn’t sound like the studio thinks you should play it that way.

First things first, the numbers:

Minimum: (Low graphics preset, 1080p)

• CPU – Intel i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600
• GPU – Nvidia GTX 1070, AMD RX 5700, or Intel Arc A580
• VRAM – 6GB
• System RAM – 16GB
• Storage – 70GB SSD

Medium: (Medium graphics preset, 1080p)

• CPU – Intel i5-9600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• GPU – Nvidia GTX 2070, AMD RX 5700 XT, or Intel Arc A580
• VRAM – 8GB
• System RAM – 16GB

Alright, bad news: There’s been a murder. Worse news: You’re going to have to solve it in bell-bottoms. The Rise of the Golden Idol—sequel to the excellent Case of the Golden Idol—just got a funky-fresh new trailer at the PC Gaming Show, showing off its new ’70s setting and a few of the ways you’ll be piecing together the puzzle pieces of its many terrible, terrible crimes.

And gosh, isn’t it striking? Where the first game was an 18th-century tale of murder and misfortune, Rise of the Golden Idol transports your crime-solving forward 300 years, and the artstyle has shifted to match. It’s not unrecognisable, but it’s lurid and seedy in a way that fits its new disco-era setting: A time of schlocky B-movies, technicolour televangelists and, well, yes, bloody murders that all seem to have some cursed thread connecting them. Some things never go out of style.

Idols, for instance, remain popular, which is no doubt why Rise of the Golden Idol puts you in th…

CD Projekt says Polaris, the next game in the new Witcher trilogy—which we are calling The Witcher 4 until somebody makes us stop—is now the studio’s biggest project, both in terms of the number of people working on it and how far along it’s come.

“Over 400 people are currently working on the game,” CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said in a financial presentation, “and we plan to move on to the production phase in the second half of the year.” There’s also a handy graph illustrating the breakdown: No, it’s not a huge shift in numbers from the previous report and for now it remains in pre-production, but even so work on The Witcher 4 is obviously dominating CD Projekt’s efforts.

It also fits with a statement made by joint CEO Adam Badowski in January, when he said CD Projekt would “like to have around 400 people working on [Polaris] by the middle of the year.” Given that number was hit by February, optimists might even say things are coming along a…

In what may be a unique event in world history, a Something Awful forums user has posted so hard that it’s become news—returning from the void after a decade-long ban purely in order to pick up the exact same tabletop game nerd debate that got him banned in the first place.

Let’s begin at the beginning. The Something Awful forums are (in)famous and, god help us, genuinely culturally important. Despite—or maybe because of—a $10 registration fee, all sorts of memes, turns of phrase, and general ephemera of internet culture have sprung from them over the course of their 24-year existence. It also bears the burden of being at least partially responsible for the creation of 4chan, which was originally created by disgruntled members of SA’s anime subforum.

The SA forums are also famous for giving moderators free reign when it comes to laying down the law. It’s not uncommon for users to end up eating bans (which you have to pay $10 to get out of) or l…

The Land of the Magnates is described as an “epic adventure of love, betrayal, and sacrifice” inspired by Middle Eastern myths, and follows prince Malik Shahbaz as he attempts to save his kingdom, which is “shrouded in darkness and silence following the death of its queen.”

A new trailer for Land of the Magnates, debuted at the PC Gaming Show today. The game is an action platformer that sees the disgraced prince battle monsters, solve puzzles, and traverse “magical realms” in search of a cure for his father, who’s been poisoned, and his lightless homeland—he’s really having a bad day, isn’t he? 

“From the cursed Black Forest to the Land of the Sun shrouded in darkness, from the domain of the Water Princess to the marble lands of the Monkey Kings, Shahbaz will have to lift ancient curses, defeat vile minions of the dark with his trusty sitar, and solve complex puzzles requiring quick thinking—and quick fingers,” says the developer.

Some of th…

Postal 2 is a notoriously bad videogame. Some people liked it when it launched back in 2003: PC Gamer, according to a Metacritic roundup, scored it 79%, calling it “a nonstop tour de force of insulting insanity.” Computer Gaming World, on the other hand, handily summed up the more common consensus, rating it a flat 0 and declaring that “until someone boxes up syphilis and tries to sell it at retail, Postal 2 is the worst product ever foisted upon consumers.”

The situation is somehow clearer yet more confusing on Steam, where Postal 2 has amassed an “overwhelmingly positive” rating across more than 71,000 user reviews. Irony is obviously a factor in that, with user reviews like “better than Cyberpunk” and “you can piss on people,” which is doable when a game is regularly available for $1 (and sometimes free), as is the case here. Still, that’s a lot of people who own Postal 2, and according to Steam Charts it’s put up better player numbers over the past 12 months than Marvel’s …

This is the best worst idea in videogames I’ve seen in a very long time: Treyarch says Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will give players the ability to talk directly to the people they’re holding hostage and using as meat shields.

The meat shield, for those not familiar with the maneuver, works like this: A bad guy is stunned or wounded but still on his feet, so you grab his shoulder, spin him around, put your arm across his throat, and march him forward into the gunfire that would otherwise turn you into a sticky mess. Here’s a great example of the move from the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger flick Total Recall, which I will link but not embed because it’s pretty bonkers in the way that only ’90s action movies are. (I will also note that the guy in this case isn’t so much bad as just really unlucky.)

Anyway, there’s not a lot of space between the shield and the shielded, and someone at Treyarch has decided that forced closeness would be a great opportunity for people to get to…

Update: Twitch is now back to full functionality, at least on my end. Twitter Support said on Twitter that it’s still “working on a fix,” so you may still be see loading issues as the site comes fully back online.

Original story: Happy new year! Twitch is down, sorta. My homepage is looking especially wonky as of Tuesday morning, with several main elements of the site, like the homepage carousel, not loading correctly or missing completely. I also seemed to be signed out of my account, making the site more-or-less unusable at the moment. I can’t see who I follow, but I can watch clips that Twitch thinks I’ll like (I rarely do). 

Twitch announced on Twitter that it’s “investigating an issue preventing multiple areas of Twitch from loading,” so rest assured the powers that be are on it.

Interestingly, streams that are already live seem to be functioning as they were (mostly). Following a direct link to a live channel started pla…