In 15 years of interviewing AAA game developers, I think this is the first time one’s straight up told me ‘Many people make games for money, but we make money for games’

I don’t think you can go by a nom-de-plume like “Soulframe” without really, really loving videogames. More than a decade before Digital Extremes started cooking up its Warframe sequel, young Chinese architecture student Qiwei Liang came up with the name as his internet handle, and has been using it ever since. It lasted through his…

Read More

AI chatbot once again transforms from super genius into stupid tool the moment it goes off-script: ‘Grok doesn’t actually know why it was suspended’

In June, Elon Musk said that he’ll use Grok 3.5’s “advanced reasoning” to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.” Today, however, the AI chatbot is just a tool that doesn’t know anything, because after Grok’s X account was briefly suspended (via Business Insider), it declared that it got…

Read More

Google’s Gemini AI tells a Redditor it’s ‘cautiously optimistic’ about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to ‘all possible and impossible universes’ before repeating ‘I am a disgrace’ 86 times in succession

Speaking as my own harshest critic, I can understand how difficult it is to break out of habitual self-deprecation. Luckily, with some healthy introspection, understanding, and awareness, it’s something we can unlearn. Unluckily for large language models, those are three capabilities they fundamentally lack. If an LLM is, for example, trained on an entire internet’s…

Read More

A veteran Final Fantasy programmer hates how indie games deliberately recreate PS1 visual bugs he made ‘many futile efforts’ to fix: ‘I just don’t get what’s so interesting about trying to replicate that’

First reported by Automaton, veteran programmer Koji Sugimoto (Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 10) criticized modern games’ emulation of retro visual glitches, specifically the affine texture warping of the original PlayStation, a frequent feature of lo-fi, throwback indie games. On August 5, Sugimoto responded to a tweet from Unity Japan about a new tool in…

Read More