NYT Mini Crossword today: puzzle answers for Friday, August 23
Love crossword puzzles but don’t have all day to sit and solve a full-sized puzzle in your daily newspaper? That’s what The Mini is for!
Testing News
After a string of poorly received patches, a Helldivers 2 "experimental server" is being actively "worked on" at Arrowhead
Helldivers 2's game director has finally confirmed that a test server is "being worked on" at Arrowhead. However, to prevent unreleased content from leaking online, it'll need some sort of NDA.
Steam reviews now show when the writer played primarily on Steam Deck
Steam is continuing to refresh its customer review system with a small but potentially impactful new feature. Reviews will now note if the user had primarily played the game on the Steam Deck.
'People are pro crabs': WoW's artists tested leg angles and other features before choosing crabs for its new arachnophobia mode
When World of Warcraft developers were working on the new spider-themed Nerubian race for their new The War Within expansion, they brought in an arachnophobia expert to tell them what, exactly, makes spiders scary to some people.
Pixel 9 Pro XL Has Terrible Gaming Performance; Test Shows New Tensor G4 Is Slower Than Tensor G2 When Running Genshin Impact, Despite Running Cooler
The Tensor G4 was never going to stand out in against the competition in gaming performance, which was to be expected, as a Google executive previously pointed out that the chipset was not designed to break any benchmarking records but to improve the user experience.
Helldivers 2 creative director holds surprise Discord Q&A, says "the criticism is valid" and "the worst thing would have been if we f**ked up and no one cared"
Former Arrowhead CEO and longtime Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt spent a good chunk of the afternoon chatting to the game's still somewhat disgruntled Discord community about weapon balance, future update ideas, and other game design bugbears. In particular, he reiterated that "weapons should feel powerful" and dug into the recent unpopular changes made to flamethrower-type weapons, bluntly saying the updated fire visual effect "looks like [Team Fortress 1]."
PlayStation VR2 PC Adapter review
Ever since Sony launched the PS VR 2, with its handy do-it-all USB-C plug, back at the beginning of 2023, PC gamers have been wondering when they'll be able to use it too. It seemed so obvious—just plug it into a spare USB-C port on your PC and let SteamVR do the rest.
'I can look and it goes where I want it to': Neuralink participant is using his brain chip to play Counter-Strike 2 with just his mind
While we've heard much talk of the supposed superpowers Elon Musk's Neuralink project might enable, it hits differently to see it working for yourself in a game. Musk's current chip-on-brain testing project («PRIME») has had two participants so far, and it looks like the second one's wasted no time getting to gaming on PC.