alyaza

The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty. You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong...

Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s...

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How did this all happen? After first touching base with our team and ensuring our interest, the team at Gunzilla Games secured the rights to Game Informer. From the start, the new owners insisted on the idea of Game Informer remaining an independent editorial outlet; they felt just as strongly as our team did that the only path...

I’ve spent years wandering many an inhospitable wasteland, so Atomfall’s pleasant post-apocalypse is pretty inviting. They’ve got tea here. And bakeries. And it’s extremely green—not because of radiation storms, but because it’s all pastures and woods and verdant hills as far as the eye can see. It’d be a nice...

There’s now an industry-wide union for video game workers in the US and Canada. The United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA) has a mission to bring together “artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, freelancers and beyond to build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status.”...

What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds, even when they’re trying to camp in a corner? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret?...

Former Activision boss Bobby Kotick has filed a defamation suit against G/O Media over a pair of 2024 articles....

Sony is working on a prototype AI-powered version of at least one its PlayStation game characters. An anonymous tipster has shared an internal video from Sony’s PlayStation group with The Verge that demonstrates an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West. After we published this story, the video was pulled from...

To celebrate the enduring influence of video games in the arts and in our wider culture, we’re asking players from around the world to help us decide the Most Influential Video Game of All Time....

It’s been a while since I looked at a main series Pokémon game and thought, “That looks nice.” This includes last week’s full reveal of Pokémon Legends Z-A, which going from the first bit of footage seems to feature a lot of hazy-edged grey rooftops, futurist UI, and eerily smooth NPCs, and not a lot of consistent,...

It sounds basic, but it was refreshing to hear a developer talk about their multiplayer shooter in terms of custom lobby rules and scaring the pants off your buds instead of metas and MMR. We’re in something of a golden age of co-op games about getting scared with your friends—Lethal Company and Phasmophobia made proximity...

Don’t have a whole lot to say in this intro paragraph. If you enjoy these, do a blog post with your own game and art recommendations. If you don’t have a blog, consider starting a free one on neocities or bear blog. I also have start putting more effort into my recommendation list on Itch.io if you want more recommendations....

A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the “The Legacy Collection,” these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines....

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Resident Evil and Street Fighter series developer Capcom is experimenting with introducing new technology, including generative AI, to tackle the ballooning costs and man-hours required for game development. In a recent interview with Google Cloud Japan, Kazuki Abe, a technical director at Capcom, gave some specific examples of...

Like it or not, horror gaming is often built on jump scares. Deriding a good cheap scare ignores the endorphin rush that draws so many players to the genre, in the same way that the “elevated horror” trend forfeits some of the soul of schlocky slasher flicks and ghost movies. Don’t get me wrong, Silent Hill and Alan Wake...

Last month, 461 video game workers with Microsoft’s ZeniMax Online Studios announced they were unionizing with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees–Communications Workers of America (CODE-CWA). ZeniMax employees join over six thousand workers across the tech and video game industry in the United States and Canada who...

Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba - the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about “a land full of people being made into a people without land.”...

[…]during the late 90s and early 00s, Taiwan was a powerhouse of game development, arguably only behind the US & Japan. They produced hundreds of games, played by millions of Chinese language speakers, going as far as influencing local literature and TV. Modern hits like Naraka: Bladepoint are openly advertised as spiritual...

It’s frightfully early in the year to be bustling, but I can’t get enough of the crowded streets of ancient “Chinese-style” RPG The Bustling World. The latest trailer is a series of sweeping yet intimate, colourful urban cross-sections, showing dozens of NPCs selling fish, shaking hands on balconies, shouldering barrels,...

I really tried to enjoy myself. God, I tried so hard. I attempted to find nuggets of joy within its hamfisted dialogue, one-note companions and the flashy but soulless fights. But I just couldn’t do it. Every time there was a glimmer of hope, it was dashed against the rocks of infinite disappointment....

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World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...

Tetris Forever is the latest in Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series, a format that bundles expertly emulated classic games with reams of multimedia information presented in an interactive timeline: filmed interviews, archive video, documentation, artwork, photography, and more. It’s officially the third entry in the series,...

In the letter, Democrat senator Mark Warner argues that Valve’s content moderation doesn’t meet industry standards, and says he wants Valve to “crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content”....