An old number from the Lord of the Rings DVD led a fan to a 2001 chess set
Sometimes the most interesting finds hide not in online stores, but in old things long written off. That is exactly what happened with this story about a Lord of the Rings chess set that resurfaced...
Here's what real dishes from Skyrim look like in real life
Virtual food in games usually exists just to top off a health bar or tweak character stats. But spend enough time staring at the texture details on plates in Skyrim, and sooner or later a...
The Samsara wheel of PC Gamers – new technologies slow down old powerful graphics cards
Upscaling and frame generation were originally created for one purpose – giving weaker hardware a second wind. In practice, the industry quickly found another use for them: instead of optimizing a game for real hardware,...
Some Fallout 4 fans were surprised to learn that the game is literally packed with references to Blade Runner
A good science fiction setting rarely exists in a vacuum – it always builds on the shoulders of genre classics. But when a game manages to weave in not just a reference, but an entire...
GTA 4 transports you to a world that no longer exists – that's its whole magic
Some games simply age, and some turn into time machines. The difference is simple: the first kind just look technically outdated, while the second kind accidentally capture a moment in history so precisely that every...
Enthusiast created a stunning bookshelf door for his wife styled like a hobbit home from The Lord of the Rings
Love for fictional worlds sometimes goes beyond posters on the wall or figurines on a shelf – it starts literally reshaping the house. A round door, green grass on the roof, a smoking pipe by...
The only official Mass Effect 3 themed Xbox 360 was found almost for free
Sometimes the most valuable artifacts in gaming history don't turn up at specialized auctions or through closed collector communities. They surface completely by accident, in the hands of someone who had no idea for years...
17-year-old GTA IV looks like a next-gen game thanks to DLSS5
Modders keep proving that old-game graphics are limited less by hardware and more by the year they came out. The moment a new rendering technology shows up, someone drags it into a decade-old title just...
Fallout fans wondered how characters manage to see anything through the power armor helmet
When artists design battle armor for the far future, aesthetics almost always win out over ergonomics. The result tends to be the same: a mighty warrior in an impenetrable suit whose head physically cannot look...
A detective conducted an entire investigation to understand why his PC turns off when he leans back in his gaming chair
Diagnosing random computer crashes usually starts with the obvious suspects – the power supply, RAM, the graphics card. Stress tests pass, temperatures stay normal, drivers are up to date, and yet the PC keeps blacking...
YouTuber created an exact replica of Whiterun from Skyrim using 80,000 LEGO pieces
Fan builds based on video games happen all the time, but once in a while something comes along that makes even people indifferent to LEGO stop and stare. That's the effect a massive LEGO recreation...
Gamer showed a typical morning in Skyrim after a couple of mods – with Soviet T-34-85 tanks and bomber dragons
Modding Skyrim stopped being about "tweak some textures and add a couple of swords" a long time ago. Fourteen years after release, the community keeps stress-testing Bethesda engine, and every time it turns out there's...
Fallout 4 fan raised an odd question – how many years of cleaning would it take Codsworth to turn the Wasteland from a dump into a decent place to live
The Mr. Handy robot butler series was built for suburban household chores – mowing the lawn, wiping down countertops, cooking dinner. Sending one of these things to clean up a ransacked amusement park where three...
Hearts of Iron 4 fan got so immersed in the strategy game that he started seeing Hungary in his cat after the First Vienna Award
Long strategy games do something strange to the brain: it stops seeing the world map as just a map. First you memorize the shapes of countries, then the resource provinces, and at some point your...
Portable Xbox in a Pelican Case Failed to Start at an Altitude of 10 Kilometers
Home consoles have long since learned to travel: people stuff them into Pelican cases, wire in a monitor and power jacks, and turn the whole thing into a portable gaming station. The logical next step...
Enthusiast built a PC in the nose of a de Havilland aircraft so that Flight Simulator would work authentically
Custom PC cases stopped being just about cooling a long time ago and turned into a form of self-expression – aquariums, wooden boxes, sometimes even replicas of tractor factories. But giving a system unit an...
In the Alien universe, there is a xenomorph king
The Alien universe leans heavily on insect biology, and insects come in a lot of different flavors. Bees and ants don't have kings, but termites do, and their king lives with the queen for decades...
Crusader Kings 3 player created a copy of himself – but gamers were more impressed by the real photo of the chad author
Character creators exist for pretty much one reason – to let people make themselves a little better looking than they actually are. Higher cheekbones, a sharper jawline, none of the asymmetry only the bathroom mirror...
Minecraft server on a smartphone with an AMD cooler and built-in UPS
When people imagine a home server, they picture a humming tower in the corner, a rack in the basement, or at least a single-board computer stuffed into a 3D-printed case. In reality, running a Minecraft...
After the free remaster of The Witcher 3 was announced, most gamers once again calling CD Projekt RED the best studio in the universe
Games industry has trained everyone to expect a familiar cycle – a studio ships a broken game, collects money from preorders, quietly patches critical bugs for six months, then moves on to the next title....
