Month: September 2024

In a fireside chat with AMD’s Dr. Lisa Su, the super-popular CEO has some words for anyone who might be feeling a little bit concerned about the inexorable rise of modern AI and what the impact of the rabid adoption of the tech might be: “we must go faster, we must experiment, but do it with a watchful eye.”

Maybe that’s not the most reassuring thing for the AI-concerned among us, the idea that actually things aren’t going fast enough, but think for a second… do you really want things to stay as they are right now in the world of AI? Do you want to be in this limbo state where the data used to create the AI models of today comes from some wild west scraping of vaguely private and kinda public data? 

Though, to be fair, if you are worried about where AI is going and what it is going to do, slowing down with the current models as they are might actually be more reassuring. For all their proponents and flashy demos, they’re currently, fundamentally, a bit rubbish. Sure, they can approximate some text output, and they’re getting a bit better at figuring out the right number of fingers and joints in a human hand for image generation, and they’re even …

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a sucker for celebrities who are big gamers. From Terry Crews building his own gaming PC to Chloë Grace Moretz asking for desktop-building tips—seeing big names getting down and nerdy is the way straight to my heart. I’m not sure anything will ever beat Keke Palmer though, whose dramatic Sims 4 playthroughs are peak relatability for anyone who’s ever played the game.

Multiple clips of Palmer—an actress known for her roles in films like Nope and Hustlers as well as the Nickelodeon show True Jackson VP—playing The Sims 4 have been popping off on social media. She’s been sharing her playthroughs on Instagram Live, providing hours of entertainment. Her dramatic narrations of her sims going about their business are iconic, spinning elaborate relationship problems with short breaks while each sim has to go for a quick pee break in between arguing. 

The thing that caught my attention, and the attention of many other regular Simmers, was how decked out Keke’s Sims game is with custom content and mods. Specifically Wicked Whims, a rather spicy mod that adds nudity, sex animations and tweakable options for pregnancy…

Just when you think you’ve seen every variation of survival game imaginable, along comes a game like Duckside. Developed by Tinybuild Riga, Duckside is a multiplayer survival sim in the style of Rust and DayZ, only everyone plays as a duck.

“Over 10 million ducks get killed per year by hunters, a statistic that would be much lower if ducks were combat trained,” states the game’s Steam page. “Enter Duckside, a persistent world survival game like DayZ or Rust… but you’re a duck, and so is everybody else.”

As reported by IGN, Duckside is developed by Tinybuild Riga, and aims to offer a familiar blend of resource gathering, tool and weapon crafting, base-building, and open ended combat against human NPCs and other player ducks. 

Beyond the novelty value of its player characters (which, let’s face it, represents 90% of this game’s raison d’etre) the most interesting wrinkle here is that being a duck means that you can fly around the map from the start. Such freedom of movement could add a fresh dynamic to Rust-style survivalism. Granted, you can fly in Rust too, but only after you’ve built a helicopter, which isn’t easy in a game where you start of…

A Pokémon that has been absent from the Pokémon TCG for over two decades is finally returning, after illusionist Uri Geller (who claimed the Pokémon was based on his likeness) seemingly got a new perspective on life. Geller first sued Nintendo in 2000 after seeing an image of the Kadabra cards in Japan, which has the name “Yungerer” or “Yungeller”(a clear reference says Geller to his own name), demanding $60 million in damages. While the suit was dismissed in 2003 in America, Geller continued to pursue it in other regions.

Nintendo remained tight-lipped about the matter, though fans noted that Kadabra began to be used more sparingly outside of the games and, in the case of the cards, eventually not at all. The Pokémon was removed from the trading card game in 2002 but will return in this year’s Pokémon Card 151, which features the very first game’s roster (including Kadabra). 

This news was broken by the website PokéBeach, which also received a message post-publication from Geller. 

“I am pleased Pokémon fans are excited to see Kadabra return to the card game,” said Geller. “Look, I want to thank…

Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish-founded studio behind the Angry Birds games, has agreed to its purchase by Japanese gaming giant Sega. Sega Sammy Holdings will pay $776 million (€706m / £625m) for the acquisition, which includes all eight of Rovio’s global studios, and it’s buying the company to “strengthen its position” in mobile gaming, which has always been Rovio’s main focus.

Rovio is known as the Angry Birds studio because, well, it hasn’t had another hit on the same scale. Later titles like The Croods, Nibblers and Retry enjoyed moderate success in some cases, but nothing like the grumpy avians. Angry Birds was released in 2009, as a paid app, and over the first six months of release became a word-of-mouth viral smash, eventually hitting the #1 spot on the App Store. By mid-2012 it had been downloaded over a billion times (Rovio claims it was the first game to reach such a milestone).

Rovio has released dozens of Angry Birds games, including direct sequels and the likes of Angry Birds Star Wars, as well as two Angry Birds movies. It went public in 2017 with a valuation of around $1 billion, and the lower price paid by Sega arguably reflects this ina…

Update: A few hours after it was pulled, Only Up! is back on Steam.

Original story: One of the most popular new games on Twitch can no longer be purchased on Steam. It’s not known why Only Up! was delisted, but it happened not long after an artist accused the game of using a 3D model they made without permission, leading to speculation that Valve gave it the boot over copyright infringement concerns. 

Shortly after the delisting, developer SCKRgames said on Twitter that Only Up! will return to Steam “soon.”

Only Up! takes after games like Getting Over It and QWOP, and more directly the Counter-Strike obstacle course map-making tradition. It’s one of those finicky platforming games that keeps the player in constant suspense and ends again and again in catastrophic failure, which makes it fun to watch. Although Only Up!’s Steam reviews were “Mixed” before its store page was zapped, it remains one of the most watched games on Twitch, with over 85,000 viewers at the time of writing.

A day before Only Up!’s store page disappeared from Steam, digital artist Aboulicious accused it of using a 3D model that they made. “Th…

In October of last year, a remake of Silent Hill 2 was announced. It’s been over a year since, and news of how the project’s coming along has been as quiet and as foggy as the titular town of Silent Hill itself.

These development draw-distance blues came to a head on Twitter last week when the studio, after being asked when they could expect some news, bluntly replied that it’s Konami’s job to handle that sort of thing.

Reading between the lines, you might see some frustration there. But I’m willing to take it at face value, especially since Bloober Team doesn’t hail from Konami itself—Silent Hill games are all partner projects, since the in-house studio “Team Silent” no longer exists. Still, Bloober’s CEO has some faith, saying Konami “knows what [it’s doing].” 

The recent disasters of Silent Hill: Ascension has created an atmosphere of doubt, though. In fairness, Konami’s weird discount chatroom experiment has been made by a completely different set of devs. Bloober has the chops to pull a remake off, making a game we gave a 90 in our Layers of Fear review. Still, there’s enough anxiety that Bloober Team felt the need to make a second statement thi…