Enlarge/ The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat.
AMD
Graphics card buyers seem anxious about buying a GPU with enough memory installed, even in midrange graphics cards that aren’t otherwise equipped to play games at super-high resolutions. And while this anxiety tends to be a bit overblown—lots of first- and third-party testing of cards like the GeForce 4060 Ti shows that just a handful of games benefit when all you do is boost GPU memory from 8GB to 16GB—there’s still a market for less-expensive GPUs with big pools of memory, whether you’re playing games that need it or running compute tasks that benefit from it.
That’s the apparent impetus behind AMD’s sole GPU announcement from its slate of CES news today: the $329 Radeon RX 7600 XT, a version of last year’s $269 RX 7600 with twice as much memory, slightly higher clock speeds, and higher power use to go with it.
RX 7700 XT
RX 7600
RX 7600 XT
RX 6600
RX 6600 XT
RX 6650 XT
RX 6750 XT
Compute units (Stream processors)
54 (3,456)
32 (2,048)
32 (2,048)
28 (1,792)
32 (2,048)
32 (2,048)
40 (2,560)
Boost Clock
2,544 MHz
2,600 MHz
2,760 MHz
2,490 MHz
2,589 MHz
2,635 MHz
2,600 MHz
Memory Bus Width
192-bit
128-bit
128-bit
128-bit
128-bit
128-bit
192-bit
Memory Clock
2,250 MHz
2,250 MHz
2,250 MHz
1,750 MHz
2,000 MHz
2,190 MHz
2,250 MHz
Memory size
12GB GDDR6
8GB GDDR6
16GB GDDR6
8GB GDDR6
8GB GDDR6
8GB GDDR6
12GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP)
245 W
165 W
190 W
132 W
160 W
180 W
250 W
The core specifications of the 7600 XT remain the same as the regular 7600: 32 of AMD’s compute units (CUs) based on the RDNA3 GPU architecture and the same memory clock speed attached to the same 128-bit memory bus. But RAM has been boosted from 8GB to 16GB, and the GPU’s clock speeds have been boosted a little, ensuring that the card runs games a little faster than the regular 7600, even in games that don’t care about the extra memory.
Images of AMD’s reference design show a slightly larger card than the regular 7600, with a second 8-pin power connector to provide the extra power (total board power increases from 165 W to 190 W). The only other difference between the cards is DisplayPort 2.1 support—it was optional in the regular RX 7600, but all 7600 XTs will have it. That brings it in line with all the other RX 7000-series GPUs.
AMD’s hand-picked benchmarks generally show a mild performance improvement over the RX 7600, though Forza is an outlier.
AMD
The 7600 XT’s performance relative to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 is also a little better than the RX 7600’s, thanks to added RAM and higher clocks. But Nvidia should continue to benefit from superior ray-tracing performance in a lot of games.
AMD
Testing against the 4060 at 1440p. Note that the longest bars are coming from games with FSR 3 frame-generation enabled and that Nvidia’s cards also support DLSS 3.
AMD
The complete RX 7000-series lineup.
AMD
AMD’s provided performance figures show the 7600 XT outrunning the regular 7600 by between 5 and 10 percent in most titles, with one—Forza Horizon 5 with ray-tracing turned all the way up—showing a more significant jump of around 40 percent at 1080p and 1440p. Whether that kind of performance jump is worth the extra $60 depends on the games you play and how worried you are about the system requirements in future games.
AMD says the RX 7600 XT will be available starting on January 24. Pricing and availability for other RX 7000-series GPUs, including the regular RX 7600, aren’t changing.
While the newest Legatus Pack launched in late December, the offering isn’t a new concept for developer Roberts Space Industries. The first Legatus Pack launched in May 2018 for a relatively reasonable $27,000. Before that, similar “Completionist” packs of all in-game content released up to that point would run players up to $15,000.
Fig. 1: Even accounting for inflation, the cost of a “complete” Star Citizen hangar keeps going up.
Ars Technica analysis
Fig. 2: The number of ships available in Star Citizen‘s completionist Legatus Pack has been going up at a relatively constant clip over the years.
Ars Technica analysis
Fig. 3: Adjusting for inflation, the per-vehicle average for Star Citizen‘s Legatus Pack has come down a bit in recent years.
Ars Technica analysis
Since the launch of that first Legatus Pack, which included 117 ships, RSI has updated its “complete” offering of in-game content in December of every year since 2019, upping the price and the number of ships included. An Ars analysis of those updates finds that, despite the sticker shock of the $48,000 package, the inflation-adjusted average price-per-ship has actually come down about 12 percent since peaking in late 2019 (the number of extra accessories included in the pack has also gone up from 163 in 2018 to 635 today).
It’s also worth remembering that this collection isn’t necessarily intended for individuals. In 2018, Cloud Imperium’s Eric Kieron Davis told Polygon that the Legatus Pack was something that “[some] players will use to deploy ships, items, etc. across organizations/corporations/guilds” which could have hundreds or thousands of individual players.
“It wasn’t created in a vacuum,” Davis continued. “We were responding to what the community asked for. We have some passionate supporters that are not looking at Star Citizen as your typical game purchase/transaction but rather a dream project they want to see happen.”
Enlarge/ A very small sample of the full collection of ships you can get in the Legatus Pack.
Still, the fact that anyone is even considering spending $48,000 on a single bundle of DLC for a game that—we have to stress again—is still in alpha after 11-plus years, is a testament to the devotion that Star Citizen continues to command among the faithful. Despite the drawn-out development, in 2023, RSI set its sixth annual nominal fundraising record of $117 million. That one-year take represents nearly 20 percent of the staggering $658 million the game has raised from players over its lifetime, and includes over $3 million raised in a single day during last year’s Intergalactic Aerospace Expo event.
Despite the game’s continued fundraising success, though, even some Star Citizen fans are balking at the optics of pre-selling tens of thousands of dollars of DLC before the game is even near launch.
“We’ve all put in the time to delude ourselves into thinking that ships are worth, in real world money, their pledge prices. They aren’t,” Reddit user magicmouse wrote in a recent thread. “You can rationalize it by saying that you’re supporting the development of a really cool game but, to outsiders, we look like total clowns for pledging hundreds of dollars for a ship that can be earned in-game in a relatively short period of time. I’m glad the game is financially successful and I’m happy to support it, but don’t fool yourself into thinking these purchases will ever look reasonable to somebody who isn’t mainlining the kool-aid.”
Enlarge / An Analogue Pocket running Super Mario World on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.
Andrew Cunningham
We’ve got a soft spot for the Analogue Pocket, the premium portable game console that melds 2020s technology with the design of the original Game Boy. Since its release, Analogue has added some new capabilities via firmware updates, most notably when it added support for emulating more consoles via its OpenFPGA platform in the summer of 2022. This allows the FPGA chip inside of the pocket to emulate the hardware of other systems, in addition to the portable systems the Pocket supports natively.
But aside from finalizing and releasing that 1.1 firmware, 2023 was mostly quiet for Pocket firmware updates. That changed in December when the company released not one but two major firmware upgrades for the Pocket that slipped under our radar during the holidays. These updates delivered a combination of fixes and long-promised features to the handheld, which Analogue has been re-releasing in different color palettes now that the original versions are more consistently in stock.
The most significant update for OpenFPGA fans is the ability to use display filters with third-party FPGA cores. Part of the appeal of the Pocket is its 1,600×1,440 screen, which is sharp enough to perfectly re-create the huge chunky pixels of the original Game Boy screens. By default, most FPGA cores now get access to a similarly high-quality CRT screen filter named after the Sony Trinitron TV, adding a touch of retro-blurriness to the sharp edges of 8- and 16-bit games. I’ve seen lots of bad, unconvincing scanline filters in retro game re-releases, and this isn’t one of them.
The basic Trinitron filter is available by default for “suitable” cores, which in our testing tends to mean “home consoles that were meant to be connected to a CRT TV.” FPGA cores for portable systems like the Game Boy or Game Boy Advance, which shipped with old but scanline-less LCD screens, don’t have the filter available. Third-party FPGA core developers will need to add support for additional screen filters themselves, something that most developers still haven’t done as of this writing.
A zoomed-in photo of the screen with no filters enabled. It’s sharp and crisp, and even zoomed in with a good mirrorless camera it’s difficult to make out individual pixels on the Pocket’s screen.
Andrew Cunningham
The same scene with the Trinitron CRT filter enabled. Subtle scanlines, visible CRT “pixels,” and just the right amount of blurring makes the picture look more period-accurate.
Andrew Cunningham
Zoomed out, scanlines off.
Andrew Cunningham
Scanlines on, default “integer” scaling used. This is the most accurate aspect ratio, but it leaves a black border of unused pixels around the screen.
Andrew Cunningham
Scanlines on, Integer+ mode used. This eliminates the black border and, to my eyes, looks just fine on the Pocket’s screen and makes the effect of the scanline filter easier to see.
Andrew Cunningham
The Trinitron filter looks good on the Pocket’s screen, but it’s subtle; you may appreciate the scanline effect more and notice its downside less if you’re playing while connected to a TV with the Analogue Dock. And at least on the NES and SNES cores I tested it with, it has the undesirable side effect of shrinking the game picture down on what is already a fairly small screen. This default setting can be tweaked without visibly degrading the image quality, at least not to my eyes; just switch from the default Integer scaling mode in the display settings to Integer+.
The screen filters are probably the most interesting and requested new feature for the Pocket, but both firmware updates have many other smaller fixes and additions. Firmware version 1.2 fixes numerous issues with sleep/wake and save states for various games, allows FPGA cores to use cartridge adapters, and lets FPGA cores know when the Pocket is in a dock; when docked, it also adds support for additional controllers and fixes issues with others. Version 2.0 adds support for custom color palettes for Game Boy games, allows FPGA cores to switch aspect ratios when docked, and fixes a “video issue with some openFPGA cores and resolutions” when docked.
To update the Pocket’s firmware, connect the device’s microSD card to your computer and drop one of the firmware update .bin files into the root directory (make sure you delete any older firmware files first since the Pocket won’t delete old update files once it’s done with them). Next time you boot the console, it should install the firmware update and reboot. As usual, when performing any software or firmware update, it’s best to ensure the console is fully charged or plugged in before you start the process.
Enlarge / I didn’t write this story just to share that high score in the corner, but I won’t say it had nothing to do with the choice.
When looking back at the short history of video game design, the ’90s and ’00s transition from primarily 2D games to primarily 3D games is rightly seen as one of the biggest revolutions in the industry. But my discovery this week of the one-dimensional, Pac-Man-inspired Paku Paku makes me wish that the game industry had some sort of pre-history where clever 1D games like this were the norm. It also makes me wish I had been quicker to discover more of the work of extremely prolific and clever game designer Kenta Cho, who made the game.
In Paku Paku, Pac-Man‘s 2D maze of 240 dots has been replaced with 16 dots arranged in a single line. Your six-pixel tall dot-muncher (the graphics are 2D, even as the gameplay uses only one dimension) is forced to forever travel either left or right along this line, trying to eat all the dots while avoiding a single red ghost (who moves just a bit faster than the player). To do this, the player can use a single power pellet (which makes the ghost edible for a short while) or the screen-wrapping tunnels on either side of the line (which the ghost can’t use).
It might sound simple, but playing effectively means carefully managing the ghost’s relative position to the player by quickly judging when you’ll have enough space and time to make it to a side tunnel or power pellet. This gets exponentially harder as the game speeds up with each new set of replacement dots, increasing the score multiplier as it does. Each game ends after a matter of minutes (or seconds) with that familiar “I know I can do better next time” feeling that marks truly compulsive game design (and has pushed me to a high score of over 10,000 points over a few hours of play).
Though Paku Pakuwas originally released last year, the game has been making the rounds among some major link aggregators recently, a perfect filler for the usual post-holiday drought of major game releases in early January. Hacker News users are even hard at work coding basic AI that you can paste into a browser’s command window for easy high scores.
The zen design of small games
Paku Paku is far from the first game to reduce gameplay to a single dimension (though the graphics use two dimensions, which might make the game “1.5D”?). Games like Wolfenstein 1D (which is Archived but currently unplayable due to the death of Flash) and installations like Line Wobbler use color as a sort of second dimension, representing different in-game characters and objects with dots of many hues. And dozens of 1D games have been tagged on indie gaming hub Itch.io, ranging from the silly (1D Flappy Bird) to the surprisingly effective (Colordash 1D) to the overcomplicated (1D Minecraft).
Paku Paku stands out from this limited crowd largely thanks to tight single-button controls and perfectly tuned risk-versus-reward gameplay that encourages that compulsive loop. Perhaps that’s because its creator has had a ridiculous amount of experience crafting this kind of simple game.
Enlarge/ Remember, this is the N64 platform running a game released at least five years after the console’s general life cycle ended.
Valve/James Lambert
James Lambert has spent years making something with no practical reason to exist: a version of Portal that runs on the Nintendo 64. And not some 2D version, either, but the real, blue-and-orange-oval, see-yourself-sideways Portal experience. And now he has a “First Slice” of Portal 64 ready for anyone who wants to try it. It’s out of beta, and it’s free.
A “First Slice” means that 13 of the original game’s test chambers are finished. Lambert intends to get to all of the original’s 19 chambers. PC Gamer, where we first saw this project, suggests that Lambert might also try to get the additional 14 levels in the Xbox Live-onlyPortal: StillAlive.
So why is Lambert doing this—and for free? Lambert enlists an AI-trained version of Cave Johnson’s voice to answer that question at the start of his announcement video. “This is Aperture Science,” it says, “where we don’t ask why. We ask: why the heck not?”
The release video for Portal 64’s “First Slice”
Lambert’s video details how he got Portal looking so danged good on an N64. The gun, for example, required a complete rebuild of its polygonal parts so that it could react to firing, disappear when brought up to a wall instead of clipping into it, and eventually reflect environmental lighting. Rounding out the portals required some work, too, with more to be done to smooth out the seeing-yourself “Portal effect.”
To try it out, you’ll need a copy of Portal on PC (Windows). Grab the “portal_pak_000.vpk” file from inside the game’s folder, load it onto Lambert’s custom patcher, and you’ll get back a file you can load into almost any N64 emulator. Not all emulators can provide the full Portal experience by default; I had more luck with Ares than with Project 64, for instance.
“It’s just so much better,” Lambert says of the latest version of the portal gun.
Valve/James Lambert
The “Portal Effect,” as seen inside the Ares N64 emulator.
Valve/James Lambert
Remember, this is the N64 platform running a game released at least five years after the console’s general life cycle ended.
Valve/James Lambert
How that familiar title screen looks, circa 2000-ish.
Valve/James Lambert
On the Project 64 emulator, I couldn’t see through the portals.
Valve/James Lambert
A bit more polygonal flavor for you. Note that I bumped the resolution way, way up from the N64’s original for these latter screenshots.
Valve/James Lambert
How does it run? Like the nicest game I ever played on Nintendo’s early-days-of-3D console. It does a lot to prove that Portal is just a wonderful game with a killer mechanic, regardless of how nice you can make the walls. But the game is also a great candidate for this kind of treatment. The sterile, gray, straight-angled walls of an Aperture testing chamber play nicely with the N64’s relatively limited texture memory and harsh shapes.
Lambert has a Patreon running now, and support does a few things for him. It allows him to pay a video editor for his YouTube announcements and regular updates, it could pay for a graphics artist to polish up the work he’s done by himself on the game, and it could even free him up to work full-time on Portal 64 and other N64-related projects.
His fans are already showing their appreciation. One of them, going by “Lucas Dash,” helped create a box and cartridge for the game. Another, “Bloody Kieren,” created an entire Portal 64-themed N64 console and controller. These people have put serious energy into imagining a world where Valve produced Portal in a completely different manner and perhaps fundamentally reshaped our timeline—and I respect that.
Enlarge/ A Vectrex console and CRT display with a cart for a long-lost game.
Tim Stevens
The Vectrex may be the most innovative video game console you’ve never heard of. It had everything it needed to prompt a revolution, including controllers far more sophisticated than the competition and the ability to render polygons a decade before gaming’s 3D revolution.
It was years ahead of anything else on the market, yet it could not have launched at a worse time. The Vectrex hit stores at the tail end of 1982. Over the next six months, the then-booming video game market went bust. The Vectrex, a potential revolution in home gaming, was swept into bargain bins, forgotten by all but the most ardent of collectors.
Forty years later, it’s having something of a comeback. New developers are breathing fresh code into this aged machine, hardware hackers and tinkerers are ensuring that tired capacitors and CRTs stay functional, and a new game has seen retail release after sitting unplayed for four decades.
This, finally, could be the Vectrex’s time to shine.
Vectrex history
1982 was a banner year for video games. Titles like Zaxxon, Pole Position, Q*bert, and Dig Dug were fresh in the arcades. In the home gaming scene, seemingly unquenchable consumer desire fueled a period of innovation unlike anything the now $200 billion industry has seen since.
To give some context, Sony sold 11.8 million PlayStation 5s in 2021, the console’s first full year of availability. Back in 1982, 12 million Atari 2600 home consoles flew off store shelves, despite the nascent home gaming industry amounting to a paltry $4 billion.
This boom drove the creation of the Vectrex. The system was born at LA-based hardware design firm Smith Engineering. Envisioned as a portable system with a tiny, 1-inch cathode ray tube screen, the Vectrex concept ultimately grew into the 9-inch screen production version you see here.
Kenner Toys was initially slated to release the system, but when that deal fell through, General Consumer Electronics (GCE) stepped in and brought it to market in late 1982 after a successful debut at that summer’s Consumer Electronics Show. The Vectrex’s initial buzz was so successful that Milton Bradley acquired GCE in 1983.
The Vectrex design was unique, a video game console wholly integrated into a portrait-oriented CRT. This was at a time when most households had just a single television set. Playing Atari back then meant fighting with your siblings and parents about who had control of the TV because missing an episode of The A-Team had real consequences. Not only was DVR technology still decades away, Sony was still trying to say that recording television programs on VCR cassettes was illegal.
But the real reason for the Vectrex’s integrated display was its reliance on a display technique not seen on a home system before (nor since). Vector graphics are a true rarity on the gaming scene. 1979’s Asteroids is probably the most famous example, while 1983’s Star Wars is far and away the most impressive.
Outside of a few exceptions, every video game you’ve ever played has been made up of a series of pixels. Whether it’s CRT, LCD, LED, or even OLED, you’re still talking about images made up of tiny dots of light. As the years have progressed, those pixels have gotten smaller and smaller. Likewise, the graphical power provided by advanced GPU systems like the GeForce RTX 4090 allows those pixels to assemble into ever-more realistic 3D worlds.
Ultimately, though, it’s all a bunch of pixels. On the Vectrex, there are no pixels. As its name implies, graphics here are all made up of vectors. That means straight beams of light drawn from A to B, electrons shot straight and narrow onto a cathode ray tube that glows in response. Connect three such lines, and you have a triangle, a simple polygon, the building block of all mainstream 3D gaming even today.
That lack of pixels means that, even 40 years on, watching a Vectrex game in action is an oddly captivating thing. There’s a fluidity in the rudimentary graphics, an innate sharpness that was not only lacking in other games of the period but that still looks novel today.
Overall fidelity, however, is admittedly low. Though color TVs were well and truly mainstream by 1983, the Vectrex is decidedly black and white, a problem “solved” by some crafty, budget-minded engineering. Most Vectrex titles came with a transparent overlay, a full-color sheet of plastic that clips in place over the display, injecting some hue into the unfortunately desaturated CRT.
Powering this was a relatively simple set of silicon with an 8-bit Motorola 6809 microprocessor at its heart, the same processor behind arcade classics like Robotron: 2084 and many later Williams pinball machines. It ran at a mighty 1 MHz with a whole 1KB of RAM at its disposal.
The chip was paired with an integrated control pad with an analog joystick, far more advanced than the four-way joysticks found on every other home console controller at the time.
All that specialized hardware led to a specialized price. The Vectrex launched in 1982 at $199—about $650 in 2023 dollars. Less than 18 months later, it was dead.
The collector
Sean Kelly is among the world’s preeminent video game collectors. “I’ve been collecting video games for a long time,” he told me. “I’ve had probably over 100,000 video games pass through my hands over the years.” At one point, he said, he had more than 50,000 in his garage.
If that sounds like an industrial operation rather than a mere obsession, you’re not wrong. Kelly is co-founder of the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, established in 2016 and home to many unicorns of video game collecting, like an original Nintendo World Championship cartridge.
Perhaps it was an affinity for another failed early ’80s console—the Intellivision—that initially fostered Kelly’s love of video games, but he’s had a huge hand in keeping the Vectrex alive. He began by releasing so-called multi-carts, Vectrex cartridges that contained multiple discrete games accessed first by toggling DIP switches and later via a software menu.
Considering many Vectrex titles saw limited releases or no release at all, multi-carts like this were the only way for those few die-hard fans of the system to ever have a chance of playing them.
One of those games was Mail Plane, where you plot optimal delivery routes, then load up the packages and navigate across the country.
Thanks to the Vectrex’s abrupt cancellation, Mail Plane never saw release. You’d be forgiven for thinking it had, though. At Sean’s website, VectrexMulti, you’ll find boxed copies of Mail Plane ready to order.
The game comes in the silvery packaging that was standard for Vectrex releases in its day and even comes with a light pen, a peripheral used for keying in those delivery routes.
Kelly sourced manufacturers for every aspect of the retail packaging. Different prototype versions of the game code were floating around, but Kelly says most were incomplete. “In addition to collecting the video games, I’ve also had a passion for hunting down the people that used to produce the games,” he said. This began a quest to find the most complete version of Mail Plane.
“We would find this former employee or that former employee had a couple of cartridges, and we would go through the cartridges and look at them,” Kelly said, and he ultimately sourced the one closest to final. “Nobody knows for sure if it’s 100 percent complete, but generally, we believe that that’s the most complete version.”
He gave other games the same treatment, including Tour de France, in which you frantically pedal across a polygonal route to Paris, grabbing water bottles along the way and carefully managing the stamina of your rider. It’s an odd title, one that Kelly laments hasn’t exactly been a sales success. “Tour de France is one of the ones that I will be buried with,” he said. “I lost money on Tour de France.”
Kelly declined to say which games have made money, but it’s clear in speaking to him that this is all about passion, not profits.
Along the way, releasing those games provided Kelly and his associates with some valuable experience ahead of a surprise: the discovery of a game that seemingly nobody, not even those who worked for GCE or Milton Bradley, had ever heard of.
Enlarge/ These symbols might not mean anything to you now. But give it a few runs, and you might lose a few minutes strategizing this ship’s ideal next turn, based on this image alone.
But there is always one type of game that is installed and ready to go for the next trip or idle couch moment: a roguelite deck-builder. Cobalt Core is the latest game in that slot, and it’s on Steam for Windows (and definitely Steam Deck) and Switch. It’s the most fun I’ve had in this particular obsession since Monster Train. Cobalt Core stretches into other genres, like perfect-knowledge turn-based tactics and space battle, but it’s cards and randomness down to its electric-blue center.
Launch trailer for Cobalt Core.
A few years ago, I didn’t know what a “roguelike deck-builder” was or what either of those compound phrases meant. Then, one day, there was a sale on Slay the Spire. That 2019 game refined the fusion of two game mechanics: constant failure against randomized encounters (ala Rogue, but with a “lite” gradual progression) and the refining of a deck of combat-minded cards (as in Magic: The Gathering, Dominion, and Netrunner). You attack and defend against increasingly tough enemies with your cards, you gain and upgrade and ditch cards as you go, you lose, and then you get slightly better tools on your next do-over.
Done well, roguelike deck-builders are a potent mix of luck, immediate and long-term strategy, and the slow dopamine drip of chained-together victories. I’ve lost entire work months to them, cumulatively. They should come with a warning label.
Cobalt Core has all those addictive elements plus a few more things to do with your cards. For one, there is space jockey positioning. You move your ship left and right against your opponents, lining up beam emitters and missiles, targeting weak points, and dodging. You do this with perfect Into the Breach-like knowledge of the opposing ship’s actions: it’s going to fire from this bay for 2 damage, use this bit to upgrade shields, and so on. This leaves you with the decisions of when to take hits versus dodging, where to launch drone cannons, whether to attack now or wait for better cards next hand.
A mid-battle scene, with your ship (on bottom) in the midst of delivering a hull-smashing attack, just before the enemy’s multiple red beams rain down.
Brace Yourself Games
You pick your battles in Cobalt Core, and also choose repair shops, random happenings, and mid-level bosses.
Brace Yourself Games
The cards you’re offered depend on which cremates you picked for this run, and each has a distinct discipline.
Brace Yourself Games
The cover art for Cobalt Core, which makes you really not want to get your new friends blown up.
Brace Yourself Games
On top of working those elements into fine shape, Cobalt Core cleverly embraces them in its plot and theming. Your ship is made up of quirky characters, each of whom adds their cards with unique play styles to your deck. You fight ship after ship, encounter celestial oddities, warp from sector to sector, then fight the titular object. When you beat it, you … do something, in space and time, it seems, then start over with imperfect memories of prior loops. Each win or notable loss unlocks new crew, cards, and memories, enough of which might explain what exactly is going on in this heady quantum plot.
What’s largely drawn me in is how neatly the game’s battles and runs fit into a casual gaming schedule. A single battle is usually less than five minutes, a sector of fights maybe 15–20, and a couple sectors plus a boss fight 30–40 minutes, though the decisions and early sections get faster as you learn them. You can save and exit anytime, even mid-battle, and it’s a fast-loading game. On the Switch or Steam Deck—for which this game is Verified and a real battery-saver—it makes for a generous couch, waiting room, or travel experience.
I’ve still got a lot to unlock in Cobalt Core after 10 hours of play, and could easily see myself hitting the 100-plus I put into Slay the Spire and Monster Train (or at least the 50 I threw into Inkbound or SteamWorld Quest). It helps that there’s much more singular personality and style in CobaltCore than other procedural card battlers. And humor, too, lots of it, accompanied by appealing 16-bit-esque graphics, making the grind for new cards and esoteric achievements feel far less grinding.
It’s also impressive how much character-building the game pulls off in service of pixel portraits that never move but frequently react, quip, and express their quantum confusion. I typically feel nothing for different characters in these games. But I’ve got a soft spot for the gunner Riggs, and feel bad when I skip him for, say, movement or hacking options.
My major complaint about Cobalt Core, this deep into its clutches, is that its soundtrack is catchy. This is normally a positive, but given how regularly I’m dropping in for a round or two or 10, I find my mental synth deck replaying the melody lines from a few different tracks. I can’t hum a single note from any of the orchestral-minded backings of my prior deck-builder obsessions, but these tunes are burrowing deep inside.
Cobalt Core is currently on sale (on both platforms), and its base price is $20–$25. If you know you like picking cards, beating bosses, and a long, meticulous triumph, I have to imagine it’s a great value. Maybe too much of one.
For decades after its 1989 release, each of the hundreds of millions of standard NES Tetris games ended the same way: A block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a “game over” message. That 34-year streak was finally broken on December 21, 2023, when 13-year-old phenom BlueScuti became the first human to reach the game’s “kill screen” after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits.
The game-crashing, record-setting performance. Jump to 38: 56 for BlueScuti’s disbelieving reaction to his achievement and a short interview.
What makes BlueScuti’s achievement even more incredible (as noted in some excellent YouTube summaries of the scene) is that, until just a few years ago, the Tetris community at large assumed it was functionally impossible for a human to get much past 290 lines. The road to the first NES Tetris kill screen highlights the surprisingly robust competitive scene that still surrounds the classic game and just how much that competitive community has been able to collectively improve in a relatively short time.
From hypertaps to rolling
If and when a player reaches Level 29 on NES Tetris (after clearing between 230 to 290 lines, depending on the starting level), the game reaches its highest possible speed. At this point, simply holding down left or right on the NES D-pad can’t usually get a piece all the way to the side of the well unless the board is extremely “low” (i.e., pieces only on the first one or two rows, maximum). Thus, for years, players that reached Level 29 found their games usually “topped out” just a few pieces later.
A demonstration of hypertapping technique.
The first known way past the brick wall of Level 29 was a technique that became known as hypertapping. By using a special grip that lets you vibrate a finger over the D-pad directions at least 10 times a second, you can effectively skip the “delayed autoshift” (DAS) that limits how fast pieces can move laterally when the D-pad is held down.
With hypertapping, players can effectively move pieces at Level 29 speed even when the board is stacked four or five levels high. While that gives a little breathing room, a run of bad pieces or execution can still put a hypertapper in an untenable position where the pieces start to stack up high, and completing new lines becomes essentially impossible.
The first Level 30 NES Tetris performance on record, from back in 2011.
A deep dive into the advanced Tetris control technique known as rolling.
Then, in 2021, a new, even faster button-mashing technique appeared on the competitive Tetris scene. This “rolling” technique was inspired by arcade player Hector “Fly” Rodriguez, who used a similar multi-finger roll to set button-mashing records on the Track & Field arcade game. Tetris players adapted this technique by combining it with a grip that lets you tap the back of the NES controller with a “roll” of three to five successive fingers. This roll of the fingers then nudges the D-pad into a finger on the other hand to register an extremely quick series of directional button presses.
Rolling is fast enough to get pieces to the sides on Level 29-speed boards stacked up to eight rows high, giving Tetris masters quite a bit of leeway in their quest for longer games. Cheez, one of the first players to master the rolling technique, hit Level 40 in 2021, but that was just the start of how far things could go.
A Level 146 performance from 2022 that shows NES Tetris can be effectively played indefinitely at Level 29 speed.
Enlarge/ It looks wild and different, like something nobody has tried before. And many accessibility experts say there’s a reason Tekken 8‘s style isn’t commonly deployed.
Bandai Namco/YouTube/Gatterall
Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further.
Tekken 8, due later this month, seems to aim even higher, offering a number of color vision options in its settings. This includes a stark option, with black-and-white and detail-diminished backgrounds and characters’ flattened shapes filled in with either horizontal or vertical striped lines. But what started out as excitement in the fighting game and accessibility communities about expanded offerings has shifted into warnings about the potential for migraines, vertigo, or even seizures.
You can see the mode in action in the Windows demo or in a YouTube video shared by Gatterall—which, of course, you should not view if you believe yourself susceptible to issues with strobing images. Gatterall’s enthusiasm for Tekken 8‘s take on colorblind accessibility (“Literally no game has done this”) drew comment from Katsuhiro Harada, head of the Tekken games for developer and publisher Bandai Namco, on X (formerly Twitter). Harada stated that he had developed and tested “an accessibility version” of Tekken 7, which was never shipped or sold. Harada states that those “studies” made it into Tekken 8.
A stark black-and-white mode is, as emphasized by commenter OOPMan, only one of Tekken 8‘s colorblind-minded accessibility options. The game, in its current demo form, offers modes for blue, red, and green blindness, for adding patterns to player characters, and adjustments for the stage and characters. But the inclusion of the striking filters, in any circumstances, drew criticism.
Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at Electronic Arts, asked followers to “Please stop tagging me in the Tekken 8 ‘colorblind’ stripe filters.” The scenes had “already induced an aura migraine,” Baker wrote, and she could not “afford to get another one right now.”
Accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton reposted a number of people citing migraines, nausea, or seizure concerns while also decrying the general nature of colorblind “filters” as an engineering-based approach to a broader design challenge. He added in the thread that shipping a game that contained a potentially seizure-inducing mode could result in people inadvertently discovering their susceptibility, similar to an infamous 1997 episode of the Pokémon TV series. Baker and Hamilton also noted problems with such videos automatically playing on sites like X/Twitter.
James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios, went further into explaining why moving solid lines on a video might cause issues for people affected by strobing. “Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe,” Berg wrote. “Human meat-motors aren’t big fans of that.” At a certain point, typically around 40 frames per second, people start to experience “flicker fusion frequency,” though some people can experience it at 60 fps (or Hz).
Tekken‘s Harada pushed back, writing later, “A few people, albeit very few,” misunderstood what his team was trying to do. There are multiple options, not just one colorblind mode, Harada wrote, along with brightness adjustments for effects and other elements. “These color vision options are a rare part of the fighting game genre, but they are still being researched and we intend to expand on them in the future,” Harada wrote. He added that developers “have been working with several research institutes and communities to develop this option,” even before the unsold “accessibility version of Tekken 7.”
Awareness of color blindness has come a long way from being a rare afterthought, and accessibility in games has grown along with the industry, if still requiring advocacy. Developers are discovering audiences they might never have imagined, like blind EA sports players. And a general awareness of accessibility needs, and the large market that can be tapped when they are addressed, has pushed many games toward inclusiveness. Yet there are, it seems, many more lessons to be learned for new and established developers.
In many ways, 2023 was a long-awaited return to normalcy for people who build their own gaming and/or workstation PCs. For the entire year, most mainstream components have been available at or a little under their official retail prices, making it possible to build all kinds of PCs at relatively reasonable prices without worrying about restocks or waiting for discounts. It was a welcome continuation of some GPU trends that started in 2022. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel could release a new GPU, and you could consistently buy that GPU for roughly what it was supposed to cost.
That’s where we get into how frustrating 2023 was for GPU buyers, though. Cards like the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 series launched in late 2022 and boosted performance beyond what any last-generation cards could achieve. But 2023’s midrange GPU launches were less ambitious. Not only did they offer the performance of a last-generation GPU, but most of them did it for around the same price as the last-gen GPUs whose performance they matched.
The midrange runs in place
Not every midrange GPU launch will get us a GTX 1060—a card roughly 50 percent faster than its immediate predecessor and beat the previous-generation GTX 980 despite costing just a bit over half as much money. But even if your expectations were low, this year’s midrange GPU launches have been underwhelming.
The worst was probably the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which sometimes struggled to beat the card it replaced at around the same price. The 16GB version of the card was particularly maligned since it was $100 more expensive but was only faster than the 8GB version in a handful of games.
The regular RTX 4060 was slightly better news, thanks partly to a $30 price drop from where the RTX 3060 started. The performance gains were small, and a drop from 12GB to 8GB of RAM isn’t the direction we prefer to see things move, but it was still a slightly faster and more efficient card at around the same price. AMD’s Radeon RX 7600, RX 7700 XT, and RX 7800 XT all belong in this same broad category—some improvements, but generally similar performance to previous-generation parts at similar or slightly lower prices. Not an exciting leap for people with aging GPUs who waited out the GPU shortage to get an upgrade.
The best midrange card of the generation—and at $600, we’re definitely stretching the definition of “midrange”—might be the GeForce RTX 4070, which can generally match or slightly beat the RTX 3080 while using much less power and costing $100 less than the RTX 3080’s suggested retail price. That seems like a solid deal once you consider that the RTX 3080 was essentially unavailable at its suggested retail price for most of its life span. But $600 is still a $100 increase from the 2070 and a $220 increase from the 1070, making it tougher to swallow.
In all, 2023 wasn’t the worst time to buy a $300 GPU; that dubious honor belongs to the depths of 2021, when you’d be lucky to snag a GTX 1650 for that price. But “consistently available, basically competent GPUs” are harder to be thankful for the further we get from the GPU shortage.
Marketing gets more misleading
Enlarge/ 1.7 times faster than the last-gen GPU? Sure, under exactly the right conditions in specific games.
Nvidia
If you just looked at Nvidia’s early performance claims for each of these GPUs, you might think that the RTX 40-series was an exciting jump forward.
But these numbers were only possible in games that supported these GPUs’ newest software gimmick, DLSS Frame Generation (FG). The original DLSS and DLSS 2 improve performance by upsampling the images generated by your GPU, generating interpolated pixels that make lower-res image into higher-res ones without the blurriness and loss of image quality you’d get from simple upscaling. DLSS FG generates entire frames in between the ones being rendered by your GPU, theoretically providing big frame rate boosts without requiring a powerful GPU.
The technology is impressive when it works, and it’s been successful enough to spawn hardware-agnostic imitators like the AMD-backed FSR 3 and an alternate implementation from Intel that’s still in early stages. But it has notable limitations—mainly, it needs a reasonably high base frame rate to have enough data to generate convincing extra frames, something that these midrange cards may struggle to do. Even when performance is good, it can introduce weird visual artifacts or lose fine detail. The technology isn’t available in all games. And DLSS FG also adds a bit of latency, though this can be offset with latency-reducing technologies like Nvidia Reflex.
As another tool in the performance-enhancing toolbox, DLSS FG is nice to have. But to put it front-and-center in comparisons with previous-generation graphics cards is, at best, painting an overly rosy picture of what upgraders can actually expect.
2022’s relative drought leads to an absolutely packed year of major epics.
It’s been a real period of feast or famine in the video game industry of late. Last year in this space, we lamented how COVID-related development delays meant a dearth of big-budget blockbusters that would usually fill a year-end list. In 2023, many of those delays finally expired, leading to a flood of long-anticipated titles over just a few months.
But the year in games didn’t stop there. Beyond the usual big-budget suspects, there were countless delightful surprises from smaller indie studios, many of which came out of nowhere to provide some of the most memorable interactive experiences of the year.
These two trends make it difficult to narrow this year’s best games down to just 20 titles. The “shortlist” we assembled during the winnowing process easily approached 50 titles, most of which could have easily made the list in a less packed year—or been swapped with a game that did make this year’s list.
Looking back years from now, 2023 may be mentioned in the same breath as 1998 and 2007 as years that were packed to the gills with classics. Here are 20 titles released this year that we think will stand the test of time, sorted in alphabetical order, with a single “Game of the Year” pick at the end.
Against the Storm
Eremite games; Windows
With most games I played and wrote about this year, even the titles I really liked, I would tell myself, “I could see playing this more.” With Against the Storm, I’m not just imagining it, I’m actively plotting ways to make it happen.
Enlarge / A (rather well-organized) village in Against the Storm, with the Hearth at center, constantly burning the resources you acquire.
This game is stuck in my mental queue because of how surprisingly well the core gameplay loop works. You create the kinds of little villages you’d make in a typical real-time strategy game, except there’s no real-time battle, just a gradual push against time to gather enough resources, deliver the right goods, and keep everyone moderately happy. You can save any time, but each session can also be played in about an hour. It’s deep, but it’s also calm. Even the “roguelite” map-wiping aspect of the game isn’t a punishment but, rather, a reminder not to worry too much about any one level.
Against the Storm is also now Steam Deck Verified, having made lots of changes to how controllers, gamepads, and on-screen text are displayed for that tinier screen. It’s a smart move to make this session-friendly game more couch-capable.
You can pick out a few distinct genre influences in Against the Storm, a handful of specific art homages, and probably quite a few mechanics plucked from other games. But it is very much its own game, one that has been tuned well over its early access period. I keep finding myself hoping for little stretches of time where I can break away from daily life so I can have a bunch of villagers, a queen, and unknowable forest spirits demand more and more of me. It’s quite weird, but it works.
-Kevin Purdy
Alan Wake 2
Remedy Entertainment; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S
I am not really in the target audience for Alan Wake 2. I only played a few brief moments of its predecessor, and I’ve never really gone deep on survival horror shooters, having bounced off the Resident Evil titles in my youth. And while I was initially thrilled with developer Remedy’s last title, Control, the combat felt too repetitive and grinding for me to keep pushing through it for one more head-melting story reveal or another cleverly worded office memo.
And yet I think Alan Wake 2 is an inspired, fascinating, entertaining game, one that I’d recommend to nearly anybody. Anybody, in particular, who digs The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Stephen King, Resident Evil, meta-fiction, Control, True Detective, or pondering dark myths amid the beauty of the Pacific Northwest’s majestic, damp forests or a lucid-dream version of New York City.
AW2 gives Remedy the breadth and budget to tell the kinds of stories it’s best at telling. Even if I found the gun-focused but bullet-constrained combat a bit of a slog at times, I wanted to push through. I wanted to watch Saga Anderson discover and react to the reality-altering mystery she was investigating. I wanted to have more moments like when Wake was thrust onto a talk show couch, unaware of the book he was there to promote.
There’s also a musical number. This isn’t a game where you can see the beats coming.
Like 2022’s game of the year, Elden Ring,AW2 feels like a distillation but also an expansion of all the games that came before it. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it provides a wonderful service for those who commit to sitting down with it.
Brotato
Thomas Gevraud; Windows, Switch, iOS, Android
Last year, the cheap, pixel-graphics indie roguelite Vampire Survivors was my personal game of the year. I wasn’t alone in my obsession. Although it wasn’t technically the first of its kind, Vampire Survivors kick-started a new genre in which an auto-attacking hero faces down ever-increasing hordes of enemies. I’ve played a ton of these “Survivor-likes” over the past year, and many of them are quite good. My favorite by far, though, is Brotato, which saw its 1.0 release this year.
In Brotato, you maneuver the titular potato-bodied hero around a small arena. Enemies rush toward your position, and when they’re in range, your character attacks them automatically. But instead of the 20- to 30-minute rounds common in the genre, a Brotato run is split into 20 bite-sized fights that last anywhere from 20 to 90 seconds.
Defeated enemies drop “materials,” which double as experience points and money. You visit a shop between rounds and can spend as much money as you want to buy items and weapons to buff up your character. This is where the game gets its addictive pull. There are 16 main stats, and the key to success is leaning into the ones that help your character the most. Items often have a positive and a negative, so balancing is key.
In short, the game is a min-maxer’s dream.
Forty-four unique characters, six difficulty levels, dozens of weapons, and hundreds of items—unlocked as you play the game—ensure you have a ton of content to chew through. The best thing about the game is coming up with wacky build ideas and seeing if you can make them happen. Adjusting your stats from round to round makes a huge difference, and choosing the right items becomes surprisingly intuitive.
The game is a scandalously cheap $5 (or free to try on mobile). If you are at all interested in stat-building in games, you need to try this.
Enlarge/ Given only this sign, and a glimpse of some pieces, a constant stream of playtesters stopped by to check out what was then called Corporate Vampire.
Kevin Purdy
“You don’t want Frenzy. Frenzy is a bad thing. It might seem like it’s good, but trust me, you want to have a blood supply. Frenzy leads to Consequences.”
It’s mid-afternoon in early December in downtown Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center, and I’m in the Unpub room at PAX Unplugged. Michael Schofield and Tim Broadwater of Design Thinking Games have booked one of the dozens of long card tables to show their game Corporate Vampire to anybody who wants to try it. Broadwater is running the game and explaining the big concepts while Schofield takes notes. Their hope is that after six revisions and 12 smaller iterations, their game is past the point where someone can break it. But they have to test that disheartening possibility in public.
I didn’t expect to spend so much of my first PAX Unplugged hanging around indie game makers. But with the tabletop industry expanding after some massive boomyears, some Stranger Things and Critical Role infusions, and, of course, new COVID-borne habits, it felt like a field that was both more open to outsiders than before and also very crowded. I wanted to see what this thing, so big it barely fit inside a massive conference center, felt like at the smaller tables, to those still navigating their way into the industry.
Here are a few stories of parties venturing out on their own, developing their character as they go.
How much vampire influence is too much?
Corporate Vampire (or “CorpVamp”) has been in the works since summer 2022. The name came from an earlier, more Masquerade-ish idea of the game, in which you could take over a city council, build blood banks, and wield political influence. But testing at last year’s Unplugged, and the creators’ own instincts, gradually revealed a truth. “People really like eating other people,” Schofield says.
Along with input from game designer Connor Wake, the team arrived at their new direction: “More preying, more powers that make players feel like mist-morphing badasses, more Salem’s Lot, less The Vampire Lestat.”
By the end of the weekend, they’ll have taken up a playtester’s naming suggestion: Thirst. But for now, the signs all say CorpVamp, and the test game is a mixture of stock and free-use art, thick cardboard tiles, thin paper tokens, glossy card decks, generic colored wooden cubes, and a bunch of concepts for players to track—perhaps too many.
Kevin Purdy
“Don’t do miniatures for your first version”
I played a few different games at PAX Unplugged that were at various stages before publication. One called WhoKnew? was on its second year at the conference. The first year was simply designer Nicholas Eife tagging along at a friend’s booth, bringing only a piece of paper and asking people who wandered by if they thought a trivia game based on the origins of idioms would work. This year, there was an actual table and a vinyl sign, with an early-stage board and trivia cards laid out.
I drew the phrase “The whole nine yards” and I chose “British Artillery” as its origin. Eife congratulated me (The length of a Vickers machine gun’s ammo belt as the origin of the phrase is far from a solved matter, but I will not concede my point.) I asked the designer what state the game will be in next year. “I guess we’ll have to see,” he said, displaying the slight grin of a person working entirely within their own timeline on a purely passion-driven project. It was almost uncomfortable, this calm, patient demeanor amidst the murmuring chaos of the show floor.
An Indie Game Alliance member demonstrates “Outrun the Bear” at the IGA booth at PAX Unplugged 2023
Indie Game Alliance
Perhaps looking for a less idyllic counterpoint, I asked Matt Holden, executive director of the Indie Game Alliance, what it’s typically like for new game makers. For a monthly fee, the Alliance provides game makers with tools typically reserved for big publisher deals. That includes international teams for demonstrating your game, co-op-style discounts on production and other costs, connections to freelancers and other designers, and, crucially, consulting and support on crowdfunding and game design.
Holden and his wife Victoria have been running the Alliance for more than 10 years, almost entirely by themselves. At any given time, the Alliance’s 1,800-plus current and former members have 30-40 Kickstarters or other crowdfunding campaigns going. Crowdfunding is all but essential for most indie game makers, providing them working capital, feedback, and word-of-mouth marketing at the same time. Holden can offer a lot of advice on any given campaign but has only one universal rule.
“Don’t make miniatures for your first version of your game, no matter how big your campaign is getting. Just don’t do it,” Holden said, then paused for a moment. “Unless you worked for a company that made miniatures, and you’re an expert on them, then go ahead. But,” he emphasized, “miniatures are where everyone gets stuck.”
Has the burgeoning interest in tabletop and role-playing changed how indie games get made, pitched, and sold? Holden thinks not. The victories and mistakes he sees from game makers are still the same. Games with unique and quirky angles might have more of a chance now, he said, but finding an audience is still a combination of hard work, networking, product design, and, of course, some luck.
Klaus Teuber’s four years developing Settlers of Catan as the paradigm. He had worked, reportedly unhappily, as a dental technician, tinkering with the game in his basement on nights and weekends, dragging new copies upstairs every so often for his family and friends to test. One day, it was successful enough he could quit messing with people’s teeth.
There were, I would find out, a lot of paths into developing a modern tabletop experience.
Cassi Mothwin, working the +1EXP booth at PAX Unplugged 2023
![Hand-cut tokens and make-do squares for an early version of <em>Thirst</em>.” height=”960″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IMG_3964-Large.jpeg” width=”1280″></img><figcaption>
<p>Hand-cut tokens and make-do squares for an early version of <em>Thirst</em>.</p>
<p>Kevin Purdy</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>The way <i>CorpVamp</i>/<i>Thirst</i> should go is that each night, a vampire wakes up, loses a little blood, then sets out to get much more back by exploring a Victorian city. In populated neighborhoods, a vampire can feast on people—but doing so generates a board-altering Consequence, such as roving security guards or citizens discovering bodies. Vampires accumulate victims and hypnotize them for Influence, depending on who the victims are (“Judge” versus “Roustabout,” for example), turn them into “Baby Vampires,” or simply keep them as blood stock. You win by accruing victory points for various misdeeds and achievements.</p>
<p>One player, who told the designers that a different game’s play-test saw him “break the game in 10 minutes,” seemed bothered by how Consequences can be triggered by a single player’s actions but affect all players. Another has a hard time keeping track of the tokens for influence, movement, and blood, and when to move them on and off the board. That’s called “mess testing,” Schofield tells me, and he’s working on it. Some things will be easier to learn and use when the pieces have better designs and materials. But the <i>CorpVamp</i> team can’t jump to that stage until the mechanics are locked down.</p>
<p>As that group finishes a test, another group sits down immediately, having stood nearby to ensure their chance. Schofield and Broadwater won’t lack for players in their three-hour slot. That tells the team there’s “evidence of a market,” that their game has “stopping power” and “shelf value,” despite its obscurity, Schofield says. But there’s lots of work still to be done in alpha. “The costs of powers are too high, the powers aren’t <i>badass enough</i> [emphasis his], and the tactile movement of placing cubes and flipping tokens isn’t quite right,” he later tells me.</p>
<p>After more iterations and some “blind” play tests (players learning, playing, and finishing the game without creator guidance), the game will be in beta, and the team will get closer to pinning down the look and feel of the game with illustrators and designers. Since their schedules only afford them roughly three hours of dedicated collaboration time every week, they lean on what they’ve learned from their product-oriented day jobs. “Frequent iterations and small feedback loops will iron things out,” Schofield says. “Process wins.”</p>
<p>Then they can “enjoy the problems of production and distribution logistics.” After that, “We’ll sell copies of <i>Thirst</i> at the next PAX Unplugged.”</p>
<figure><img loading=](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/who_knew-scaled.jpg)
