Yacht Club Games: "Mina the Hollower er vår Zelda"

It's the 20th anniversary of the Republic of Gamers (ROG) and although we've already been treated to a special edition copper-themed Crosshair motherboard, it looks like Asus has something extra lined up for PC Gamers: its own line of DRAM kits.

Well, strictly speaking, it's just the one kit so far, and even then, it might just be a one-off, as part of the ROG celebration. Videocardz reports that Asus dropped the deets on the DRAM at its ROG Day 2026 event in China, but for everyone else, there's a preview look at the DDR5 set via 林大餅Bing's YouTube account.

Apparently developed via a collaboration with Biwin, the 48 GB dual-channel kit is rated to 6,000 MT/s with CL26-36-36-76 timings. That CAS latency is very tight, and I dare say that a good number of AM5 motherboards won't like it very much. Naturally, you can expect it to be fine with Asus' high-end boards, AMD and Intel flavoured, as it comes with XMP profiles for both platforms.

In terms of looks, well, it's ROG-a-go-go, as you'd expect, but I have to say that I quite like the design: angular, but not garish, with a rather classy colour scheme.

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As for the price, Videocardz says that it's listed as 5999 yuan, which directly converts to a fraction over $888. How much of that is down to the RAMpocalypse is anyone's guess, but a 48 GB set of Biwin DDR5-6000 CL28 is $540 at Amazon. Specialised DRAM kits are always pricier than the regular stuff, so once you account for that (plus a bit extra for the ROG tax), I reckon we'll be looking at around $850 retail.

The interesting thing about all of this is whether or not Asus has been planning on entering the desktop memory market en masse. If this DDR5 kit is the only thing it's going to release in this sector, then the specs and pricing make sense, but if it's part of a long-term strategy to announce being a competitor to Corsair, G.Skill, and many others, it couldn't have come at a worse time.

ROG enthusiasts won't really care, though, and will probably try to snap up a set as soon as they can. After all, the only part of a complete gaming PC setup that Asus currently don't offer is a CPU and a memory kit. Oh, and internal SSDs, though you can get external units.

But if it's happy to start producing its own branded DRAM, I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of M.2 drives suddenly appeared, perhaps even followed by an Arm-powered processor by the end of the decade. Anyone fancy a 100% ROG rig?

Baldur's Gate 2 sent us on a lot of unusual detours: running a playhouse, going undercover in the Underdark disguised as a drow, becoming trapped inside a magically-transformed circus tent. I love 'em all, but now I know we missed out on possibly the most audacious detour—one that would have involved time travel, alternate dimensions and the return of BG1 villain Sarevok.

James Ohlen is the man behind this quest-that-was-not-to-be. The co-lead designer on Baldur's Gate 2—now taking a break from games to recover from burnout—had an understandable desire: "I wanted to have a time travel plot."

The storyline would involve someone using "the Planar Sphere to go back and help Sarevok actually win, and he would become this dictator of the Sword Coast," Ohlen tells us. Sarevok, the protagonist's half-brother and fellow Bhaalspawn, served as the original Baldur's Gate's antagonist, before becoming a companion in the excellent Throne of Bhaal expansion for BG2.

While this all sounds potentially quite elaborate, Ohlen didn't go wild with the scope, and told his colleagues it wouldn't be as big as they thought. "It's just, what district was it, the Market District? It's just that district. We just have to change everything there."

Athkatla's market area is Waukeen's Promenade, the first location you visit when you escape the twisted laboratory right at the start of Baldur's Gate 2. It's by no means a tiny area, and I imagine quite a lot would need have been added, removed and tweaked to make it fit a version of the future where the mad child of a dead god was in charge of a whole region—though not, it's worth noting, the region in which BG2 takes place.

Ohlen's inspiration was a storyline from DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, "where some of them realise that the timeline they're in is wrong, and then they remember the original timeline, and they have to figure out how to get back to the original timeline".

Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. "Kevin Martens [co-lead designer] was the one who was like, 'James, it's enough. Enough!' So I was like, 'OK man. OK, all right.' I did the design for it, but no dialogue had been written yet or anything like that."

It's hard not to feel like we missed out—but every big RPG has unfinished ideas like this, sitting on the cutting room floor. At some point, you've got to say, as Martens did, that it's enough. And BG2 certainly had no dearth of fantastic quests. Still, let's pour one out for the alternate dimension where horrible Sarevok got everything he wanted.

It looks like infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll is staging a comeback: The Hollywood Reporter says he's begun production on a new film called 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead, a spiritual successor to his 2003 flick House of the Dead, based on the Sega game series of the same name.

The report says Michael Roesch, a long-time Boll collaborator who worked with him on films including Blubberella, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (which somehow features Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Kristtanna Loken, Matthew Lillard, and Burt Reynolds, to which I say, what the hell), Bloodrayne (with a comparably stack cast—Ben Kingsley! Michael Madsen! Michelle Rodriguez! Billy Zane! Udo Kier! Meat Loaf!) and House of the Dead. Jonathan Cherry and Ona Grauer, who starred in the 2003 film, will return for this one.

Boll's been out of the gamer eye for some years now, but he's continued to produce and direct poorly-received flicks based on other topics, like migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the Bandidos gang, and "the first QAnon mass murder." His return to the world of videogame cinema was apparently inspired in part by director Paul W.S. Anderson, who's working on an officially licensed reboot of House of the Dead.

"When I heard that Paul Anderson is rebooting House of the Dead, I immediately knew that it will be a soulless CGI orgy," Boll said. "And I want to do a completely different zombie movie: Bloody, gory and handmade."

How "completely different" Boll's new film will be remains to be seen: The plot isn't known at this point but the title is kind of a giveaway. "We're upgrading from a house full of zombies to a castle full of zombies," Roesch said.

Well, look: Nobody's going to see these things for the enthralling cinematic experience they offer. Uwe Boll was making videogame adaptations long before Hollywood took the medium seriously, after all—primarily as a means of exploiting loopholes in German tax law.

You know what you're in for when you go to see one of his films—shlock and garbola—and at this point in his long, legendary career (and I mean that entirely unironically, this is a man who challenged five of his harshest critics to boxing matches and beat the shit out of all of them) I'd be disappointed if he delivered anything else. Imagine if Uwe Boll demonstrated growth as a commercially viable director by putting out, say, a serviceable Mortal Kombat film? I think the world would be a lesser, sadder place for it.

Boll's House of the Dead has a Rotten Tomato score of 3%, by the way, and no, that's not a typo, there's no missing number, it's just 3. Here's a trailer:

A release date for 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead wasn't announced, but principal photography is set to start on September 5.