When it appeared in last month's Xbox Games Showcase, Xbox Wire spoke with creative director Mike Chapman about how The Legend of Monkey Island came to be and what it was setting out to do. But was that enough? Of course not - there's so much more to talk about in this landmark crossover between Sea of Thieves and the Monkey Island series.

With that in mind, here's a whole new interview, digging deeper into the three-part expansion's storyline, how it uses Monkey Island as an inspiration for a whole new gameplay experience within Sea of Thieves, and, yes, whether there will be Insult Sword Fighting.

China announced on Monday (June 3) that it would restrict exports of two rare metals——both crucial materials in the computer chip manufacturing process. The nation's Ministry of Commerce stated that their new measures were necessary to "safeguard national security and interests". The Chinese government is contending with several sanctions from Western countries—most notably their access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment is now heavily controlled. Reuters has contacted a number of foundries about the potential impact of rare material shipment limitations. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has shrugged it off as a minor inconvenience, their spokesperson stated: "After evaluation, we do not expect the export restrictions on raw materials gallium and germanium will have any direct impact on TSMC's production. We will continue to monitor the situation closely."

WIN Semiconductors Corp—a Taiwanese firm that specializes in the provision of gallium arsenide wafers—informed the news agency about its low-level reliance on Chinese mineral sources. They are able to sidestep and procure gallium and germanium from suppliers located in Germany, Japan, and North America. The Japanese Semiconductor Equipment Association stated that it was too early to tell whether China's export restrictions will result in material shortages. Supply chains could be disrupted to some degree due to China controlling over 90% of the world's gallium and germanium production, but DigiTimes Asia proposes that new sanctions will not prohibit production and export activities. According to experts in the field supply lines will continue to operate, with buyers required to jump through some extra hoops in order to gain approval for certain market segments. The purification of gallium and germanium is mostly controlled by American and Japanese entities—the processed form of these metals is used in semiconductor production—DigiTimes reckons that these firms will probably feel the initial impact of new trade restrictions.

If it wasn't bad enough that we're in the middle of a pandemic, which has resulted in major shipping issues globally and a semiconductor shortage, it now looks like electronics are likely to get even more expensive due to skyrocketing prices of many rare earth metals.
Nikkei is reporting that many often overlooked materials, such as neodymium and the lesser known praseodymium, have increased by almost 74 percent since the same time last year and that's only one of several key materials that have increased in price by 50 percent or more in a year.

It's no secret that lithium has increased in price and it now costs about 150 percent of what it was costing last year. However, many other, less obvious materials have also increased in price, with copper up over 37 percent and tin up almost 82 percent in a year. To TPU's readers this mainly means that you can expect higher costs for PCBs and all the components that are soldered onto them, as tin is used to solder just about every component in place.

Colorful Technology Company Limited, a professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards, all-in-one gaming and multimedia solutions, and high-performance storage, announces the launch of the GPU History Museum in partnership with NVIDIA. COLORFUL has recently relocated to Shenzhen New Generation Industrial Park. With that, COLORFUL is proud to announce the launch of the first GPU History Museum in China. The museum will showcase the beginnings of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), to the development and evolution of graphics cards up to the present generation.

Sea of Thieves is one of the more interesting games coming from Rare since it's been bought by Microsoft. The company, which was previously almost locked in into developing games for the Kinect system, was felt by many as being creatively constrained and underappreciated by Microsoft's management. Well, Kinect is officially dead as a gaming peripheral, and as such, Rare has started developing games outside the Kinect box. Sea of Thieves is the first such, a pirate game with heart, and the company has just outed their system requirements for the game on Windows 10 PC's.

The system requirements are pretty extensive in the amount of configurations you can have for some preset experiences. The game can even be played on Intel's integrated graphics, according to Rare - at 540p with minimum details, though, so I doubt that's what gamers will be looking for as an actual gaming experience. For 1080p and 60 FPS play, Rare is quoting systems with at least an i5 4690 or an AMD FX 8150 (so, an Intel quad core or an AMD "octa-core"), 8 GB RAM, and a graphics card with at least 4 GB of VRAM. A GTX 770 or an AMD Radeon 380X are set as the graphics card requirement,s which Rare is putting on equal footing to the more recent, "modern" GTX 1060 or RX 470. The system requirements seem to scale pretty well with resolution and graphics settings, up to a 4K 60 FPS experience requiring the current top of the line graphics cards in the form of the GTX 1080 Ti or AMD's RX Vega 64.