Former Infinity Ward dev says Activision told staff to ‘take the money and get over it’ after ‘cold-blooded’ canning of studio heads West and Zampella

In 2009, Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella were abruptly fired by the company’s owner Activision. West and Zampella had directed the original Call of Duty, and brought the series to superstardom through Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Their sacking just before the release of Modern Warfare 2 shocked the industry, and…

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Machine learning means we can read a 2,000-year-old carbonized scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius and turns out it’s all about the pleasures of stuffing your face

You hear that? That’s the sound of people everywhere saying ‘they can do that?’ after reading how researchers used imaging, computer vision, and machine learning to read ancient Roman text within what most would think amounts to little more than a stick of charcoal by looking at it. The 2000-year-old scroll is one of more…

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Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League review

The Justice League was long dead when Rocksteady’s quirky looter shooter finally clicked. I was 20 hours in, having just reached max level as Deadshot, discovering that Sucide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s endgame hunt for Brainiac is no joke—I was literally flying by the seat of my pants, ducking and rolling past walls of…

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Game designer Laralyn McWilliams, known for army training-sim-turned-game Full Spectrum Warrior and innovative F2P MMO Free Realms, has died

Game designer Laralyn McWilliams, known for her work as lead designer of Full Spectrum Warrior and creative director on the Sony Online Entertainment MMO Free Realms, has died at the age of 58. McWilliams’ career began in the mid ’90s as a beta tester on games including Daggerfall, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and Pirates! She…

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Modders resurrect forgotten first-party PlayStation RPG with a PC port that’s already better than the original and promise 4K and 60FPS ‘in the next few months’

A team of modders have breathed new life into cult PlayStation RPG The Legend of Dragoon, a first-party game for the original console developed by Sony Japan. The game was released in Japan in 1999 but wouldn’t reach North America until 2000 and Europe by 2001, and the combination of a mixed critical reception and…

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