Month: April 2022

In Rogue Legacy 2, you, your heirs, and your heirs’ heirs are all given the opportunity to die by the hands of monsters in a quest for gold and glory — as nature always intended. Now that the roguelite is moving out of early access, we have a few new (and updated) tips to set you on your way. Onward to death(s)!

To save or spend?

After your first run, each new run begins with handing over whatever gold you have left over after upgrades to Charon as he ferries you back to the castle. After hitting level 12 you can unlock The Living Safe that allows you to stash away 10% of your leftovers before you hop back into Charon’s boat. This may lessen the sting of his price a bit — but 90% of that sting is still there!

Try to use as much gold as possible on castle, weapon, or rune upgrades first before paying off Big C — even if that means making a lesser upgrade before the one you really want. Your chances of having a successful future are higher, as most of your gold will soon be gone, so it’s worth trying to get the best bang for your dollar. And remember that Charon is happy to accept zero gold if that’s all you have.

Unlock Health upgrades and Classes first

Very early in Rogue Legacy 2, your primary focus should just be snagging as much gold as you can in your first few unforgiving runs. You’ll start to unlock new perks as you build your castle, but for now keep your focus on upgrading your health and unlocking new classes as soon as you can.

Image: Cellar Door Games via Polygon

You may find another class that is a far better fit for you than the starting Knight, and having a larger health bar will buy you some time to experiment with your character’s abilities. Try out classes with more range like the Ranger or versatility in attack direction like the Valkyrie. You might be shocked by how much you enjoy playing as a lowly Cook and his surprisingly useful frying pan.

After that, take a look at unlocking the various NPCs that you can interact with on the dock, like the Blacksmith and Enchantress. Once those characters are available, you’ll need to start paying attention to other attributes — like equipment and rune weights or your level of resolve — but there’s no need to worry about them early on when they won’t even apply to your runs. …

Learn to use the Architect

One of the characters you’ll unlock as you expand your castle is the Architect, an older gentleman who’ll join you on the dock. The Architect has the ability to lock the dungeon rooms in place as you last encountered them … for a price.

Image: Cellar Door Games via Polygon

This can be extremely useful, especially if you’ve discovered a boss or a challenge and want to take a run at with a fresh character. If you only made it to an Estuary with your last sliver of life left, have the Architect lock the world into place and then transport directly to your goal instead of starting over from scratch. Just don’t expect to hold onto too much gold if you need to use him more than once or twice in a row. He won’t be able to keep his prices down for very long.

Keep an eye out for secrets

It’s important to take the time and be thorough in all rooms, no matter how difficult they may appear. After clearing out the space, make sure to check for cracks or holes in walls.

Image: Cellar Door Games via Polygon

If you come across these areas, use Magic to blast your way in and claim your treasure! It’s not a common reward, but it is a good way to be rewarded for looking for the details. You’ll usually be caught up with larger goals, but five extra seconds in a room might net you a few hundred extra gold!

Therefore …

All that glitters is not gold

When choosing your heir, you’ll be faced with a variety of randomly generated options — their class, spells, talents, and any other randomized heirlooms that will come along with them. That may also include traits that can handicap your run with the tradeoff of a higher percentage of gold collected.

Image: Cellar Door Games via Polygon

Stick with the 25-50% bonuses. These traits are often not annoying, and sometimes can be quite funny. Once you start seeing 100-200% percent bonuses, though, you’ll be wasting a run unless you’re at the absolute top of your game.

That being said, sometimes the laughs that Rogue Legacy 2 provides are worth it, and you just need to see what your Myopic, Colorblind, one-hit-kill Mage is really capable of!

Challenge yourself

There are two challenges that you’ll come across early in the game — the chance to gain either Ananke’s Shawl or Aesop’s Tome — and you should definitely try to conquer these as soon as you can.

Image: Cellar Door Games via Polygon

The Shawl is particularly useful, as it allows you to use your dash maneuver in the air as well as on the ground, giving you more options in battle, as well as opening up parts of rooms that might otherwise be inaccessible.

The Tome allows you to access tips from the glowing blue orbs and other helpful spirits you see scattered around the world. But, to be totally honest, there don’t seem to be many “puzzles” early on that are so confounding that you won’t be able to crack them on your own.

Bonus Tip: Smash everything!! (Except the things you shouldn’t! )

Almost everything — chairs, tables, books, lanterns, chairs, candles, and (obviously) enemies — is smashable in Rogue Legacy 2, and there’s a good chance it’ll give you a coin or two when you destroy it. You shouldn’t destroy all lanterns and crates in rooms that appear to have only lanterns. At least not until after you take a look as to what they might be making accessible to you when you jump on top of them.

Grab these Japanese-inspired games while they’re cheap

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Critical role will be joined tonight by The Late Show host Stephen Colbert in a charity stream to support Red Nose Day.

The adventure will premiere live on Critical Role’s YouTube and Twitch channels at 10 p.m. EDT. You can also watch it on YouTube on Friday at noon EDT.

Matthew Mercer will be the Game Master and guide Colbert, Ashley Johnson, MarishaRay, and Sam Riegel through this campaign. Johnson, Ray, and Riegel will be reprising their Mighty Nein characters Yasha, Beau, and Nott, all at level 5.

Colbert’s character’s fate has to some extent already been decided by fans making donation-based votes. He will have a bee that travels with him; the bee will be called Eric the 2nd, and be following in his father’s footsteps. He will be able to cast Polymorph once during the adventure, regardless of his class and level. He needs to recover his dignity that has somehow been taken from him. He will begin his journey with an instrument that is living and can despise violence.

Red Nose Day is a fundraising campaign dedicated to ending child poverty and ensuring a healthy future for all children. Since 2019, the Critical Role Foundation has raised around $790K for Red Nose day, including from its first collaboration with Colbert in 2019. The 2022 campaign has raised $115K even before the airing of the Colbert adventure.

You can find out more and donate at the Critical Role Foundation’s campaign page.

After adding support for the M1 through Rosetta last year, Nvidia has just announced that its GeForce Now cloud gaming service is picking up native support for M1 Macs through its latest app update.

Rolling out now, the GeForce Now app for macOS is adding official native support for the Apple M1 chip. Although support was available via Apple’s Rosetta compatibility layer from February last year, native support will improve overall performance for Apple’s new Macs. Nvidia touts lower power consumption and faster app launch speeds with this update.

To get these benefits of the new native M1 support, you’ll need to have the latest version of the GeForce Now app, v2.0.40. You can download the GeForce Now app directly from Nvidia’s website, or check for updates if you already have it installed.

The newest update to the cloud enables the GeForce NOW macOS app to natively support the Apple M1 chip. This update provides lower power consumption, faster app startup times and an overall elevated GeForce NOW experience on M1-based MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Minis.

This update comes just as GeForce Now is adding support for Amazon’s hit Lost Ark game. This is especially great news for Mac owners, as Amazon doesn’t publish the game with official macOS support. Other recent additions to GeForce Now’s lineup include God of War, Dune: Spice Wars, and more.

Call of Duty’s newest measure to stop cheaters is quite novel. Legitimate players are made inaccessible to cheaters. Developers told the community of the Ricochet anti-cheat system’s new feature, called Cloaking, in a blog post on Tuesday.

” With Cloaking, cheaters can be unable to spot other players in the game’s world.” Team Ricochet stated. “Characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to cheaters.”

Legitimate players, however, can still see and attack cheaters. “Generally, they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, ‘Who is shooting me?'” Team Ricochet wrote. Fair players are encouraged to “dole out in-game punishment.”

Ricochet is a kernel-level (meaning, very high-level access to software and applications installed on a PC) anti-cheat system that rolled out in Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Vanguard‘s multiplayer when the latter launched in November. Ricochet is on the watch for applications that attempt to interact with or manipulate the Call of Duty client.

The Verge noted that, although Team Ricochet has announced Cloaking only now, it or some form of it has been seen in-game since at least mid-February.

Team Ricochet noted that Cloaking will complement another mitigation technique, Damage Shield, introduced back in February. With Damage Shield, once Ricochet detects a player is tampering with the game, it disables their ability to inflict critical damage on others while still collecting data about what they’re doing and what’s on their system.

Elsewhere Team Ricochet stated that the studios in charge of maintaining multiplayer leaderboards have begun to delete cheaters. The deletion comes after “any security enforcement that results in a ban to a player.”

The team also reported that, since March 18 (when they reported that 90,000 cheaters had been banned that week), another 54,000 have have their accounts removed. “While we may not announce all bans as they happen, know they occur both daily and in waves,” Team Ricochet said.

In March, 9to5Mac exclusively reported that Apple was planning four iPhone 14 models without a mini version. The Pro models will have a larger screen thanks to the new punch hole + pill design that replaces the notch. Now, it seems the iPhone 14 panels’ lineup has leaked.

According to content creator Saran Byte, the iPhone 14 front panels have leaked on Weibo and show the aspect ratio is “slightly different on the Pros (19:5:9 to 20:9),” corroborating with our previous report.

Here’s what 9to5Mac Filipe Esposito wrote back in March:

Early iPhone 14 rumors suggested that Apple’s smartphone lineup in 2022 will have four new models but this time without a “mini” version. According to our sources, the new iPhone 14 (codenamed D27 and D28) will be available in 6. 1-inch and 6. 7-inch versions, and the current 5. 4-inch iPhone mini form-factor will be discontinued.

These mid-range phones will have the same display resolution as the current iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max. However, the display on the flagships iPhones 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max (codenamed D73 and D74) may be slightly taller to accommodate the new “notch + pill” design that will replace the notch.

As you can see in the image above, these are the four front panels of the upcoming iPhone 14 series. Although we can’t say for sure Apple will call the bigger iPhone 14 “Max,” our sources do believe it will have the same 6. 7-inch display as the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Earlier today, 9to5Mac reported on the iPhone 14 mockups, which give us a nice look at whether the iPhone 13 cases will work on the newer generation, as you can read more about it here.

Are you excited about the iPhone 14? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Related:

• Four features we expect to see on iPhone 14 this year