Slay the Spire 2 is getting badges—not the ones you get on Steam, but not entirely different, either. In the notes for a new beta patch, developer Mega Crit said badges are a bit like achievements, in that they let you know about the cool things you accomplished during your run. “Badges may appear at…
As was recently spotted by Kotaku, Esquire Singapore published a feature in March all about live-action One Piece actor Mackenyu Arata called “Mackenyu in Resonance.” It includes what writer Joy Ling calls “an unprecedented interview for both parties,” which isn’t so much an interview as it is a transcript from an AI chat bot masquerading…
RTS games generally aren’t my thing, mostly because I’m not very good at them. But I loved the original Homeworld: Enemy AI was too easily exploited (although for me, that’s a feature, not a bug) but the setting and presentation were magnificent—more than enough to make it one of the most unforgettable games I’ve ever…
I wondered, last week, if the new call for aid put forth by the Skyblivion development team was a sign that the long-awaited mega mod—the one recreating The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in the newer tech of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition—might be delayed again. It was supposed to be out in 2025…
Thanks to the breathtaking power of artificial intelligence, we may now use natural language to beg the computer to perform a function that once came as naturally to its binary brain as breathing does to ours. Google—a company worth 3.5 trillion dollars, uncontested owner of both the almighty internet search algorithm and the web browser,…
Norman Caruso, better known online as The Gaming Historian, has spent the last decade and a half making Ken Burns-style documentary videos for his YouTube audience; he currently has over 1 million subscribers. He’s covered everything from a TV with a Super Famicom built into it to the Sega Mega Modem. But now he’s calling…
Samson, the open-world crime brawler being developed by Liquid Swords, looks to me like a Grand Theft Auto game leavened with a healthy dose of Condemned: Criminal Origins. It’s a much smaller-scale project than (relatively) recent GTA games, of course—because what isn’t?—but a tale of a low-level mook making his way in a city filled…
You’re spoiled for choice these days if you love games about doing chores, which I guess I can’t fault you for given the thousands of hours I’ve spent making numbers go up in various MMOs. If cozy cleanup games like Unpacking or PowerWash Simulator aren’t enough to sate your hunger for affectionately simulated mundanities, you…
Spoilers a-plenty, obviously. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has a lot of easter eggs. Too many, in our opinion. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that the whole film is essentially propped up by constant hits of nostalgic dopamine. But that’s not to say that the easter eggs themselves are bad –…
Echo Point Nova is a wonder. Greylock Studio’s indie FPS enchanted us in 2024 with its high-flying, hoverboarding, hyperchill gunplay, and—if ziplining onto a cloud with an energy grappling hook to shotgun blast an enemy soldier during a slow-motion backflip somehow left any room for doubt—it secured a permanent place in our hearts with a…