August 10, 2026
Headlines

June 2026

The creator of Ultima is reportedly reclaiming the series’ rights back from EA, and it could happen as soon as next year

The Fridge05 mins

Ultima is one of PC gaming’s most important cultural touchstones, with Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriot’s roleplaying series blazing trails across numerous genres. The mainline CRPGs received critical acclaim for their rich, dynamic worlds, while spinoffs like Ultima Underworld and Ultima Online were key texts in the evolution of immersive sims and MMOs. Ultima’s influence still…

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After losing over 30 pounds exercising in VR for six months, I can say it’s worth the effort (and sweaty faceplates)

The Fridge013 mins

James Bentley, hardware writer (Image credit: Future) This week I’ve been: Enjoying and bearing the British summertime in equal measure, whilst playing too many deck builders (Here’s looking at you, 2 fights in 2 tight spaces and Moonsigil Atlas). There’s part of me that feels like I’ve somewhat fallen for the sunk cost fallacy of…

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Microsoft researcher builds goat-powered neural network in Age of Empires 2 to show why we should ‘stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language’

The Fridge06 mins

Since large-language models like ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that appear human-like in tone, this has led to considerable discussion over whether LLMs might themselves be sentient. At present, there are far more reasons to conclude that AIs are not and will never be conscious. But the idea persists regardless. This is partly because…

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Guild Wars 3 is ‘significantly more’ of an MMO than the first game, but that doesn’t mean it’s like GW2: ‘All three of our games can coexist as different experiences’

The Fridge04 mins

Guild Wars 2 is one of the biggest MMOs going, but it’s a sequel to a game that’s just barely an MMO—the original Guild Wars is more of a mission-based ARPG with shared town hubs, characterized by the fact that it feels like an MMO what with its huge roster of character classes and /dance…

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