Remember Chort? He's a sub-boss in one of Final Fantasy 14's newest dungeons—a magnificent large-and-in-charge lad who rolls up into a ball and charges around the arena like a giant, fleshy Sonic the Hedgehog.I couldn't stop laughing the first time I fought him, and I wasn't the only person to immediately fall in love with how ridiculous he was. He quickly became memed to hell and back—from his goofy name,...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was not the series' finest hour, but one aspect of the sequel that has gone down well with players is its experiments with matchmaking. For years, players have complained about the effects of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), which is intended to level the playing field by sorting players into groups of similar skill. But some players claim that SBMM can outright flatten the experience, neutering...

(Image credit: Dovetail Games)I've taken the train from Bath to London hundreds of times in my life, usually to visit game developers in the capital. And while I enjoy that part of the job, the journey itself is a dispiriting chore. Rail travel in the United Kingdom is a chaos of delays, overcrowding and overpriced sandwiches. Yet when I saw Great Western Express on Steam—an expansion for Train Sim World...

H. R. Giger's biomechanical nightmares have inspired plenty of videogames. If we go way back, his work was repurposed for baffling puzzle adventure Dark Seed, and more recently there was the fleshy horror of Scorn. Tormentum: Dark Sorrow was more in the vein of the former than the latter, a point-and-click adventure that took Giger's stylings (and those of Zdzisław Beksiński too) as inspiration for its hand-painted horrors.A full 11...

This year's Gen Con event is one Wizards of the Coast has said it's "pulling out all the stops for", with a keynote to be hosted by Theo Solomon (who played Wyll in Baldur's Gate 3) including a bunch of announcements about what's coming up for Dungeons & Dragons. One release seems to have been leaked early: a crossover with World of Warcraft.According to a news post on virtual tabletop...

Villains monologue at us so much in videogames it's become passe. Oh, you're so evil you took over the radio station and replaced the friendly voice that's been guiding me since the tutorial just so you can tell me about your evil plan? Yawn. Use that radio to sing a song at me, maybe then I'll pay attention.Sing during a boss fight and I'll pay even more attention. I'm not...

They say money can't buy happiness, so I guess Meccha Chameleon creators lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro will have to get a yacht instead. Much has been said about the ludicrous success of the hide-and-seek game, but a recent figure from Newzoo (shared by GamesIndustry.biz) further puts things into perspective: for June revenue on PC in a handful of western countries, it came second only to Fortnite.Newzoo analyst Mert Şahin told GamesIndustry.biz...

A new report from Reuters alleges that it took an alarmingly long time for OpenAI to respond to one of its prototype AI agents⁠—programs with the ability to act independently of specific prompts⁠—breaking containment and hacking another company. That company, Hugging Face, had reportedly neutralized the threat and contacted the FBI before ever being contacted by OpenAI.According to anonymous sources, OpenAI's testing of an agent powered by two advanced models⁠—GPT...

I liked Doom: The Dark Ages when it arrived last year, but I really ought to have loved it. The first two Dooms of id's modern trilogy are generationally great FPS campaigns with unmatched action, memorable guns, and late-game fights that will grind your teeth down to the gums. They successfully reestablished Doom around speed, hyper mobility, and improvisational gun swapping—ideas that id actively turned away from when it designed...

Jedi are a key ingredient in most Star Wars adventures, but a little bit of a Jedi also goes a long way. Put too many Jedi in your Star War and you end up with an Attack of the Clones or a post-New Game Enhancements Star Wars: Galaxies—the magic and mysticism of those berobed space wizards drowned in a sea of lightsabers.With its upcoming tactics game Star Wars Zero Company,...