Month: September 2024

NASA is currently testing an autonomous snake robot, which looks to have a lot of potential as an alternative to current Rover units. Dubbed the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), the project aims to create a robot that can handle much more extreme terrain than its predecessors. 

The project came to life through the “desire to look for signs of life in the ocean hiding below the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus”. That’s how NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab tells the story, anyway (via Universe Today).

With the difficult goal of traversing Enceladus’ rough terrain set—which would involve checking for extraterrestrial life inside the vents of geysers strong enough to blast vapour into space—EELS had its work cut out. So far, that goal has birthed an extremely resilient, versatile robot that looks like it can go just about anywhere.

“There is no textbook about how to design an autonomous snake robot to boldly go where no robot has gone before. We have to write our own”, says Hiro Ono, EELS principal investigator.

Right now, the prototype is 220 pounds, 13 feet long, and is propelled by screw-like segments, with a nifty grabber for a …

Borderlands is a funny old series—one I have plenty of affection for, clumsy story aside. Its formula hasn’t changed much in the past few years, ignoring the industry landslide of looter shooters all becoming live service games in favour of your bog-standard ARPG model, sans some expansion packs and class additions along the way.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, naturally, has a lot of affection for it too. So much so, in fact, that he appears to have said too much and all but-confirmed a new Borderlands game is in the pipeline with details coming soon, stopping short of a wink wink, nudge nudge.

In a recent interview with TheGamer, Pitchford opens with an “Oh man,” like he’s been busted vandalising public property in a Simpsons episode, adding: “I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job of hiding the fact that we’re working on something … And I think people that love Borderlands are going to be very excited about what we’re working on.”

Dear reader, I try not to put words in people’s mouths as much as possible, but this seems like a pretty clear-cut overshare to me—a new Borderlands thing is in the pipeline, and is going to be announced…

Songs of Conquest, the really quite good and really quite pretty Heroes of Might & Magic-like that first hit early access in 2022, has reached its final form. Well, kind of. The game has finally left early access for the sunlit uplands of a 1.0 release, but the devs promise more development to come: “This is merely the beginning of a new chapter in our epic saga,” they say.

If you’re not familiar, Songs of Conquest is a tactics game in the classic vein of stuff like Heroes of Might & Magic 3. You pick a faction and guide heroes around a sprawling world map, capturing resources, battling armies on a hex-based grid, and generally doing all you can to crush your enemies. At the same time, you have to defend your home base and guide it up a ladder of production from ‘dinky hamlet that spits out the occasional pikeman’ to ‘dread factory of war’.

It’s a good time, especially given the striking absence of HoMM-likes on the modern videogame market, and it earned the much-sought approval of PCG’s own strategy czar Fraser Brown in its early access form. With the 1.0 release comes a new campaign that will “conclude the epic adventure that began with the Baronies of Arle…

The cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 has evolved over the game’s Early Access period and beyond—Wyll in particular had a whole rewrite between the game’s conception and its full release. Whether it’s whole storylines shifting or just toning down Gale’s accidental thirstiness, finding the core of a character in a story this large is bound to be complicated.

But not for Lae’zel, according to a recent interview by IGN with Larian’s CEO and Founder Swen Vincke, as well as lead writers Adam Smith and Chrystal Ding. “In the beginning she was very aggressive towards the players, so we toned her down a little bit”, Vincke admits, but that was pretty much it.

“She is probably one of the companions that changed the least throughout the entirety of development. She was so very well-defined from the get-go,” he continues, noting that Lae’zel’s writer Kevin VanOrd “found her voice instantly.” Heads up—I’ll be getting into some spoilers for Lae’zel’s character arc and endings.

What Vincke is saying here makes sense: Lae’zel isn’t a simple character by any means, but she knows who she is—or, at least, she thinks she does. “She has al…

In a poll of Skyrim’s most annoying NPCs I suspect Nazeem the walking meme would score pretty high (“Do you get to the Cloud District very often?”), along with Cicero the jester, Whiterun’s shouty god-botherer Heimskr, and that one kid in Solitude who says, “I thought adventurers were supposed to look tough?” Spare a hateful thought for Belethor though, the sleazy owner of Belethor’s General Goods in Whiterun, who condescendingly says, “Dooo come back,” when you leave his store.

Belethor also says, “Everything’s for sale my friend. Everything. If I had a sister I’d sell her in a second.” That seems to have given prolific modder wSkeever an idea. Belethor’s Sister is a quest mod for Skyrim Special Edition that reveals the pawnbroker really does have a sister, named Lelaegh, and he really did sell her. Your job is to track Lelaegh down, rescue her, and then help her take control of her deadbeat brother’s shop.

Finding Lelaegh isn’t easy. The trail of people who have bought and sold her leads through various existing merchant NPCs and dungeons until finally you have to travel to the Soul Cairn from the Dawnguard DLC, which means you’ll need to do a chunk of that questli…

Get ready for some close-up card-driven brawling, because battler Fights in Tight Spaces has a sequel-spinoff coming: Knights in Tight Spaces, a fantasy themed throwdown that’ll have you take a party of ruffians engaging in a tactical brawl against not just action movie mooks like the first game, but skeletons and wizards and rock monsters.

It’s just as stylized as the first game was, though definitely refined into something even prettier than before, with a hybrid kind of lined and woodcut print looking aesthetic that’s much easier to read than the prior game’s black-and-red-on-white.

“Knights in Tight Spaces is a tactical deckbuilding game in the same universe as Fights in Tight Spaces, the successful game by Ground Shatter. It is a standalone title that sends us back to medieval times, building on the much-loved gameplay in new and dynamic ways,” says the developer.

The first game was notable for its use of tight terrain maps over the deckbuilding layer, forcing you into tricky tactical choices that had you carefully placing characters over and around obstacles and enemies. The combination of turn-based tactics and deckbuilding has been done before, but Figh…