Amy Lee is having a big year. First, Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” became a running bit in HBO’s The Rehearsal after Nathan Fielder hypothesized that an airplane pilot may have listened to the iconic 2003 rock song while pulling off a tricky landing. Now the song is front and center in FromSoftware’s new trailer for Elden Ring Nightreign, the upcoming co-op action game with a Fortnite twist. The combo...
Occult Crescent, the new field operation added to FFXIV: Dawntrail in patch 7.25 has many secrets. Among them are the hidden rewards that you can only find with the help of a Persistent Pot, a devilish little creature you might end up finding while looking for survey points or farming FATEs for the Phantom relic weapon. But if you know how to use them, these creatures can show you the...
There was more than the usual swell of anticipation for Nvidia's latest earnings call, primarily because the last quarter has been tumultuous in the wake of US tariffs and trade restrictions. On this front, and despite the fact that the AI chip giant still seems to be doing phenomenally well, Nvidia has admitted export controls have fully killed off its Hopper generation GPUs in China.During the company's recent Q1 earnings...
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...