[Update: This issue is perhaps less imminent that I’d thought – Frontier dropped us a line to stress that it may be a fair bit longer than six months, though Braben did say “the change will need to come at some point” so it seems this will happen eventually.]

Like in real life, obsolescence in PC gaming is usually a slow process. An achy knee after running becomes an achy knee after hiking then all too soon you’re waking up achy, and your framerates dip lower and lower starting to stutter before you realise you simply can’t play shiny new games. But sometimes there are hard cut-offs, and two are coming soon to Elite Dangerous [official site]. Developers Frontier today announced that they plan to stop supporting 32-bit systems and DirectX 10 graphics hardware. They say it’ll help them make the game look prettier and run better.

Read the rest of this entry »

The pilots of Elite: Dangerous [official site] have been looking for direct evidence of alien spaceships for a while now, knowing that Frontier are planning to bring them to the game at some point. But today they finally found a crashed alien vessel that has been rumoured to exist for months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Planet Coaster [official site], our next great hope for building and managing theme parks, now has a release date. It’s been in (expensive) paid alpha for a while but it’ll be declared finished and properly released on November 17th. I’ve not touched the alpha at all but I am quite keen to start building the park of my dreams with that fine-looking editor. I have big plans for a park of pond-pocked forest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pilots in Elite Dangerous [official site] have discovered a hidden map in an alien probe after scanning the probe and applying a spectral analysis to the sound it produced. Probes like this have been around for a while but it wasn’t until last week that a player, Cmdr Rizal, “honked” at one (commander slang for using your Discovery Scanner) and documented the “reply”. Worryingly, the probe first sent out an EMP blast, temporarily cutting off the ship’s power. But after that, it spoke.

Read the rest of this entry »

We always knew they would come back some day. The race of aliens known as the Thargoids have been slotted to appear in Elite Dangerous [official site] for a while, according to the developer’s plans. And David Braben has said in interviews that he wants them to be just as scary as encounters in the previous games. But we’ve seen little in the way of actual evidence so far. While players have discovered alien life in the form of “space barnacles” and often come across ancient artifacts floating around, nothing that suggested a hostile race from beyond the stars had ever been found. Until now.

Read the rest of this entry »