As is not unusual among folks of a certain age, it's hard not to wonder about the effects of unfettered internet access on my impressionable younger self. Ah well, back to doomscrolling and staring into the vast content pit it is. Wait, what was I doing? Oh, yes, the news!Earlier this week Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that will require both Google and Apple's app stores...

Elden Ring Nightreign is FromSoft's experiment to see how players tolerate a Soulslike's worth of punishment when it's packed into a repeatable roguelike format, and the experiment is almost ready to commence. On Thursday, May 29, squads of nightfarers will be unleashed for co-op boss killing, and you'll need to know exactly when Nightreign unlocks if you want to be among the first to fight FromSoft bosses old and new.I...

Quality Assurance in games is one of the most underrated parts of game development. These departments usually employ people to go over games with a fine toothed comb making sure everything works correctly. But, due to the ever more complex nature of gaming, this can often be incredibly tedious work, even if you genuinely love the game. This could be an area of game development where AI might actually be...

The opening seconds of the trailer sold me on the whole enterprise. It's the unforgettable scene from the start of Half-Life 2 where a Combine cop tells Gordon Freeman to pick up a piece of trash. Only you're not playing Gordon Freeman in this scenario. You're playing the Scout from Team Fortress 2, a man who has a baseball bat and thinks every problem is a fastball.Lambda Fortress is a...

Few games commit to building an alternate reality like Vice Undercover. Much of the game is played on the fictitious Amigo OS, an amalgam of Windows 3.1 and early Apple operating systems with a dozen built-in applications, a boxy media player, and even a persistent Clippy pastiche with all sorts of eager advice for you. But this isn't a starry-eyed trip down memory lane—it's a "narco-thriller" where you poke around...

The FromSoftware aesthetic is best summed up by the famous quote from Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki. When presented with an early, gross and gribbly design for the Undead Dragon in Dark Souls, Miyazaki returned it with the comment that it should be more dignified, saying, "Can't you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?'"At some...

The videogame discourse cycle does another lap, racing past "videogames are too easy" and "singleplayer is back" and hitting the straight of "videogames are too expensive" one more time. This time Borderlands 4 is the game, $US80 is the potential price, and Randy Pitchford found himself at the head of the pack after saying that "if you're a real fan, you'll make it happen" and pointing out that "Game budgets...

The race to make the next great extraction shooter continues apace. While Bungie takes its big swing with a Marathon revival, newer outfit Embark Studios has been quietly working on a competitor: Arc Raiders, a third-person PvPvE shooter with the bones of Escape From Tarkov, the approachability of Gears of War, and the keen architectural eye of Swedish game development.This time last year, Marathon was the presumptive representative for the...

When confronted with a new MMO where the best blueprints and resources are hidden in a sprawling and deadly PvP zone, a lot of players have one important question: "So, what if I'm not into PvP?"Rest assured, you'll still be able to visit the 'deep desert' endgame zone of Dune: Awakening. According to Funcom, as shown in today's livestream, while the deep desert is almost entirely PvP, there is a...

Last year, I reviewed a new liquid cooler with a screen on it. It's called the Hyte Thicc Q60, and it comes with a 5-inch screen powered by an ARM chip and running Android. I had two main thoughts at the time: 'this is a novel idea' and 'this is absolutely ridiculous'. Little did I know that a year later, I'd be walking around the showfloor at Taiwan's top tech...