Part two of the news:

Namco pixel artist Hiroshi Ono dies at 64
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/namco-pixel-artist-hiroshi-ono-dies-at-64/
Former Namco pixel artist Hiroshi Ono, also known as Mr Dotman, has died at the age of 64.
Ono joined Namco in 1979 as a graphic designer, contributing his work towards some of the company's most iconic arcade games. Along with providing cabinet artwork for Pac-Man, he is perhaps best known for his sprite work on the excellent Galaga and Dig Dug (thanks, VGC). Much of his early work went uncredited, but also provided art for the likes of Mappy, Xevious and New Rally-X.
>> D.E.P.

Apex Legends' next hero is another Titanfall 2 throwback
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/apex-legends-next-hero-is-another-titanfall-2-throwback/
Ash, the cold, calculating android (sorry, Simulacrum) lass from Titanfall 2's shifting factory level will be Apex Legends' next champion, as confirmed by a new Stories from the Outlands trailer posted today.

Valorant cheating 'at an all-time low'
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/valorant-cheating-at-an-all-time-low/
Valorant's Vanguard anti-cheat technology proved deeply controversial when it was revealed last year. (...)
A year and a half later, Riot's strategy appears to be paying dividends. Riot anti-cheat analyst Matt “K3o” Paoletti said in an update posted today that the rate of reports for cheating in Valorant are the lowest they've ever been.

New World invulnerability trick is hilariously easy to pull off
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/new-world-invincibility-exploit/
New World players have discovered an apparent invincibility exploit that's easy to perform: You just have to switch to windowed mode and drag the game window around. While repositioning the New World window, players enter a state of suspended animation, and as the above video from Kona shows, can't be killed.

This horror game set in an abandoned toy factory isn't playing around
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/this-horror-game-set-in-an-abandoned-toy-factory-isnt-playing-around/
(...)
The inherent creepiness of dolls is what makes an abandoned toy factory a great setting for a scary game. In the first chapter of horror adventure Poppy Playtime, you're a former employee of Playtime Co., revisiting the toy factory years after every employee abruptly vanished. Seems like a bad idea! You should really let sleeping dolls lie. Trust me.

Dead by Daylight models are being sold as NFTs, no one is pleased
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/dead-by-daylight-models-are-being-sold-as-nfts-no-one-is-pleased/
Non-fungible tokens are basically digital items that use blockchain technology to grant "ownership" to those who pay for them. Ownership is in scare quotes, because you really only own a sort of receipt that says a non-unique digital file is yours. It's an extremely divisive phenomenon, partly because creating NFTs requires environmentally damaging, energy-intensive blockchain mining, and partly because the scene is rife with scams. That hasn't stopped their proliferation, and it hasn't stopped Dead By Daylight studio Behaviour from licensing its in-game models for NFTs. Specifically: You can now buy a Pinhead NFT.
>> As I posted yesterday, Valve has decided to ban games with cryptocurrencies and NFTs from Steam. Will this affect this game?

Blue Box Game Studios says it's getting death threats over Kojima conspiracy
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/blue-box-game-studios-says-its-getting-death-threats-over-kojima-conspiracy/
Abandoned developer Blue Box Game Studios says it's received numerous death threats over the last few months, "online but unfortunately also physically."
(...)
The whole situation has drawn a lot of attention to Abandoned and Blue Box, unfortunately not all of it good. The developer released a statement on Twitter earlier this week, revealing it's been dealing with death threats over the last few months, seeing a recent uptick.
>> The world is full of morons.

Fortnite's Halloween event has massive monsters and Ariana Grande in a spacesuit
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/fortnites-halloween-event-has-massive-monsters-and-ariana-grande-in-a-spacesuit/
As is now obligatory for any kind of service game, Fortnite has announced its 2021 Halloween event: The Wrath of the Cube Queen. Fortnite being Fortnite, however, the largest live service game in the world and the vanguard of Tim Sweeney's beloved metaverse, it's doing it at quite the scale.

Voting is open for the Golden Joystick awards 2021
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/voting-is-open-for-the-golden-joystick-awards-2021/
While 2021 has been a sleepier year for games, that doesn't mean we haven't seen some absolute bangers grace our monitors this year. We've seen a strong library of releases over the last 12 months, and now you get to decide which ones were the best of the best. The 39th Golden Joystick awards are upon us, so get your voting caps on.

New World players have discovered an apparent invincibility exploit that's easy to perform: You just have to switch to windowed mode and drag the game window around. While repositioning the New World window, players enter a state of suspended animation, and as the above video from Kona shows, can't be killed.

......

Intel Core i9-12900H Alder Lake-P Laptop CPU With 14 Cores & 20 Threads Spotted, Coming To High-End Gaming Laptops Soon

https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i9-12900h-alder-lake-p-laptop-cpu-with-14-cores-20-threads-spotted-coming-to-high-end-gaming-laptops-soon/

Corsair Unveils Brand New Elite AIO CPU Cooler Lineup With LCD Panel, Upgraded ML-Series Fans & iCUE Elite LCD Add-On

https://wccftech.com/corsair-unveils-brand-new-elite-aio-cpu-cooler-lineup-with-lcd-panel-upgraded-ml-series-fans-icue-elite-lcd-add-on/

Apple introduces M1 Pro and M1 Max chips with up to 10 CPU and 32 GPU cores

https://videocardz.com/press-release/apple-introduces-m1-pro-and-m1-max-chips-with-up-to-10-cpu-and-32-gpu-cores

It sounds impressive but most of their slides are marketing fluff so it's hard to tell where it will land. For gaming, you may as well ignore it as without Windows compatibility, all that power is effectively pointless. For productivity/workstation, it sounds like it could be a real beast while being very power efficient.

Apple Unveils Redesigned MacBook Pro With Notch, Added Ports, ProMotion Mini-LED Display, M1 Pro or M1 Max Chip, and More

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/18/apple-unveils-redesigned-macbook-pro/

A laptop with a notch?

They did it to shrink the bezels but Dell managed to shrink their bezels with their XPS line while being able to keep the webcam and still including face unlock. You are telling me Apple couldn't figure out a way to decrease the size of their webcam? It doesn't even include FaceID. Sure the webcam is better but I am sure Apple could have figured it out if they really tried.

Other than that, it's a pretty impressive laptop. They brought many of the ports back. No USB-A but can't win em all. Mini-LED display has 10,000 mini-LEDs, 120hz, 1000 nits sustained brightness, 1600 nits peak brightness, 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 1 billion colors, etc. It basically puts every single PC monitor, whether it be on a laptop or desktop, to shame in regards to image quality. It will also have the best speakers in the laptop market. Overall, it's certainly impressive to say the least. For the longest time, Apple was offering subpar windows laptops with Intel where the only reason to get them was if you are in the Apple ecosystem or liked their build quality. Now, they are truly unique devices that offer many features that you can't get anywhere else. But at the end of the day, for Windows users that want to play games, it's still a skip.

what you fail to realise is that next year they have the same device without the notch GG

Nah, Apple likes to stick with their designs for a while even if it's terrible. Remember the butterfly keyboards? Those were utter trash that kept on breaking. Apple kept them for like 4-5 years.

^ Or the touchbar they finally admitted defeat on.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-m1-max-giant-new-socs-with-allout-performance

Some notes on specs from Anandtech based on what Apple has said so far:
- M1 Pro die is very different from the M1. It's a larger microarchitectural change than just an upgrade.
- 256-bit LPDDR5-6400
- Apple's performance comparisons were against the Intel Tiger Lake i7-1185G7 and i7-11800H. M1 Pro performs 1.7x better than the i7-11800H while at 70% less power consumption.
- M1 Pro GPU performs a bit better than the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB while at 70% less power consumption.

Anandtech on the M1 Max:
- Anandtech thinks the M1 Max isn't an SoC anymore, but rather a GPU with an SoC around it.
- 512-bit LPDDR5-6400
- M1 Max performs a bit lower than the mobile GeForce RTX 3080 while at 40% less power.

Copy Pasta from interwebs. 

I don't know what impresses me more, how can this happend by moving the windowed game around, or the person that did it and discovered the exploit.

I think at face value, those numbers make sense if we think about the types of benchmarks Apple would be running. Most of these benchmarks are probably rendering/productivity tasks and Apple has a ton of built in accelerators for just that in the SoC. Apples own slides show that they have media accelerators and such that are specifically made to speed up rendering and such tasks. So while M1 Pro/Max are probably as fast as Apple might be claiming, I highly doubt it's as close to a 3080 mobile in every task such as in gaming. And the kicker is, because of Apple's limited software support outside of Pro apps, it won't be all that easy to compare.

The efficiency is quite impressive though but than again... If Nvidia released Ampere on TSMC's 5nm, I would suspect that would also be quite impressive. Still, when you look at what's on the market today, it's hard to deny that it's not impressive. I just wish it did everything than just "Pro" things with light media consumption.

some games when played fullscreen and you tab out, put the game on pause directly, this feels very similiar