Enlarge / Everyone is focused on the Pals that look a lot like Pokémon; meanwhile, this guy is just a Totoro painted yellow. (credit: Pocketpair)

This past weekend, a monster-catching survival game called Palworld took Steam by storm ; the game has sold over 8 million copies and has been sitting at the top of Steam's "Top Selling" and "Most Played" charts all week. As of this writing, Steam's dashboard claims that just under 2 million players are currently exploring Palworld , twice as many as Counter-Strike 2 (the second game on the list).

You can tell just from looking at screenshots from developer Pocketpair that many of Palworld 's monster designs are clearly inspired by designs from the Pokémon series, but the game's surprise success has led to greater scrutiny. Some observers have claimed that Pocketpair has taken actual 3D models from the games and modified them to seem original. (That has also prompted counter-claims that those 3D models were fudged to make them seem more similar, though it seems the alterations just scaled the models up and down to make them easier to compare.)

Today, the Pokémon Company released a brief statement about "another company's game released in January 2024," which could be a reference to a non- Palworld game but can only realistically be a reference to Palworld . The company will "investigate and take appropriate measures" in response to any asset theft or other infringement that it discovers.

• 

  Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Of all of Nvidia's current-generation GPU launches, there hasn't been one that's been quite as weird as the case of the "GeForce RTX 4080 12GB."

It was the third and slowest of the graphics cards Nvidia announced at the onset of the RTX 40-series, and at first blush it just sounded like a version of the second-fastest RTX 4080 but with less RAM. But spec sheets and Nvidia's own performance estimates showed that there was a deceptively huge performance gap between the two 4080 cards, enough that calling them both "4080" could have lead to confusion and upset among buyers.

Taking the hint, Nvidia reversed course, " unlaunching " the 4080 12GB because it was "not named right." This decision came late enough in the launch process that a whole bunch of existing packaging had to be trashed and that new BIOSes with new GPU named needed to be flashed to the cards before they could be sold.

• 

  XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year's RX 7600 , but with a mild bump to the GPU's clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600.

It's a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren't worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It's priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you otherwise generally need to jump up into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond.

The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we've already seen. The clock speed bumps do provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM does become apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn't fundamentally alter the AMD-vs-Nvidia-vs-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600's most glaring weaknesses.

Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair)

I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. But I need to collect enough resources to make a Pal Sphere to catch some Pals so I can assign them to work at my base and gather even more resources.

I am in the very opening minutes of Palworld , a game made by an obscure Japanese indie studio named Pocketpair. Some combination of algorithmic providence and word of mouth helped the game score some impressive achievements in its first Early Access weekend: over five million copies sold and nearly 1.3 million concurrent Steam users playing the game, beating out the high watermarks for big-name games like Cyberpunk 2077 , Elden Ring , and Baldur's Gate 3.

The game's success means it has already been through multiple cycles of minor Internet controversy, mainly related to circumstantial evidence that its monster designs may have been created by generative AI or from the actual 3D models used in the Pokémon games .

Enlarge / I'd like to pretend I'd built a settlement this neatly compact and organized—with street grids, even—but alas, this is a provided screenshot. (credit: Hooded Horse)

Back when WarCraft , StarCraft , and other real-time strategy games were all the rage, I could never actually play them against other people. Even playing against the computer, I might only eke out a victory through dumb luck or an opponent's huge mistake.

The problem was, I was never ready to attack until I had my base perfectly in order—until the workers carrying oil or crystals or whatnot had the most efficient route from the mine to the base or until my buildings were arranged for optimal use of the revealed land. I just needed one more little guy, one more tower. OK, maybe two. I'm a turtler's turtler .

Against the Storm , which releases from Early Access on Steam for Windows today, has been a deeply satisfying outlet for this pent-up need to build and prosper—in a delightfully WarCraft -ian manner—without the messy business of war. There is still adversity: an ever-advancing "Impatience" meter, hostile spirits you uncover in the woods, and the typical constraints of resources, supply chains, and worker morale. Plus the rainstorms in the title, which occur both in-level, slowing you down, and at a macro level, washing away your little towns to make you start again.