Last year, I had the pleasure of covering the existence of the Warhammer Conference, the world's first academic conference devoted to philosophical, theoretical, and otherwise scholarly appraisal of everything involving Space Marines, Chaos demons, and grim darkness both futuristic and fantastical. Today, I'm pleased to report that the Warhammer Conference is returning this September to Heidelberg, Germany for the second of what we can only hope is a long-lived annual...

World of Warcraft's latest patch was riddled with bugs and time-gated content, frustrating players and causing some pundits to pan it as a disaster, with even friendlier streamers noting that the patch process is broken and that Blizzard blew it. (See our full report for the details).I recently interviewed WoW senior game director Ion Hazzikostas, who said that the 11.1.5 launch did not go as planned and that Blizzard needs...

Suddenly it all makes sense: The director of the turn-based RPG with combat that plays like an action game, Clair Obscur, is also a hardcore Devil May Cry player.GamesRadar was snooping through Guillaume Broche's Reddit account—where he once made a post looking for voice actors—and found a YouTube video of him defeating Vergil in Devil May Cry 5 and taking zero damage. "Had another go at Vergil after 6 months,...

I began to suspect things were unstable when the president beat a man to death in the street. Daniel Webster was an odd choice of leader by the American people: his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, did a lot of hate crimes and died early, his popularity hovering somewhere around the level of 'active rebellion'. Yet when it came time for the election, the USA decided it wanted the man who, if...

This week marked 20 years since the reveal of the Xbox 360, an anniversary noted by Kotaku, and as someone old enough to remember getting hyped for this thing, I had to watch it.The reveal took place in 2005, and is basically a collection of signifiers that we're back in 2005: The video (embedded below) opens with an iPod ad featuring the Gorillaz, and then we get into the real...

Size Five Games' Dan Marshall has been making games for around 20 years, and was one of the early indie adopters of Steam when he released the excellent Time Gentlemen, Please! on the platform back in 2009. He's been around the block, then, and he's seen it change dramatically.Trying to figure out the secret to blowing up on Steam as an indie is an impossible task. There are so many...

Steam's newly automated monthly top-seller list now lets you go all the way back to 2004, and it's been a fun way to take a trip down memory lane. And as Jody noted, it's shined a light on one particular oddity: Rag Doll Kung Fu.Chances are you've never heard of it, but this fighting game has the honour of being the first ever third-party game to come to Steam, back...

A few days ago we reported on the deeply concerning, nay totalitarian, news that one of Oblivion's largest communities (the TES4 subreddit) found itself having to lay down a ban on people hornyposting about the flame Atronachs in Oblivion Remastered.I apologise for briefly providing context: developer Virtuos paid some special attention to the flame Atronach model, and made it rather shapely. Needless to say many Oblivion fans, and this certainly...

Elon Musk's Grok AI has been having a very normal one: It's become obsessed with South African racial politics and answering unrelated queries with frequent references to the apartheid-era resistance song, "Kill the Boer."It's an anti-apartheid song calling for black people to stand up against oppression, but the lyrics "kill the Boer" have been decried by Musk and others for promoting violence against whites: the word "Boer" refers to the...

Star Wars is turning May into a month-long cautionary tale about the dangers of associating your brand with generative AI. First, Lucasfilm's Rob Bredow unveiled a near-universally reviled Star Wars-branded short film of AI-generated animal mashups. And today, Fortnite added a Darth Vader NPC that can speak with players using "conversational AI," which has—regrettably—gone exactly as you'd expect.Epic's AI Vader generates responses to voice and text chat from nearby Fortnite...