Month: September 2024

As initially reported by The New York Times and confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, Jon Stewart’s Apple TV+ series The Problem with Jon Stewart was canceled just weeks before filming of the third season was scheduled to start. According to one of the NYT’s sources, “Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives”. According to THR’s sources, executives told Stewart he had to be “aligned” with them regarding the show’s topics, and that led to him deciding to leave.

Apple is reportedly working on its own AI large-language model, and has banned its employees from using other AI tools, such as ChatGPT. AI tools are also used by the iPhone’s photography and search sof…

When you think about it, it’s not all that weird that there’s a grim, Bloodborne-esque action RPG based on the story of Pinnochio. 

If you’ve ever read the original The Adventures of Pinocchio (not the Disneyfied version) you know the fable is plenty dark already. When Pinnochio first meets Jiminy Cricket he immediately kills the talking bug with a hammer. Pinnochio’s friend, a little boy named Candlewick, gets turned into a donkey and is forced to work on a farm until he dies of exhaustion. It’s dark stuff!

So the life of Pinocchio makes fertile ground for Lies of P, Neowiz’s action ARPG set in 1800s steampunk London. IGN got firsties on the new gameplay trailer you can see above, though I gotta say in the two-minute running time there’s maybe ab…

It is of course a made-up accolade, but there’s a strong argument for Wudijo being the best Diablo 4 player out there: or at the very least the most hardcore. The German scourge of Hell is a veteran Diablo 3 streamer and became the first player to reach level 100 solo in Diablo 4’s hardcore mode (as well as the first to solo world boss Ashava), while making a ton of videos advising players on how to get the most out of their chosen class. Demons: after this guy’s done a day’s work, there’s a lot fewer around.

Wudijo’s been omnipresent in the Diablo 4 community pre- and post-launch, and recently answered a whole load of questions on the Diablo 4 subreddit (including his preferred breakfast choice of “nutella on bread”, which suggests my daughter may grow up to …

YouTube megastar James ‘MrBeast’ Donaldson has filed a lawsuit against the company he partnered with to launch MrBeast Burger, a business venture that began selling fast food in December 2020 using the influencer’s brand. The MrBeast Burger concept operates using so-called ghost kitchens, which is where a company sells the menu item online but then the order is fulfilled by a partner restaurant supplied with the branded accoutrements of packaging etcetera: or so the theory goes.

MrBeast’s suit alleges that Virtual Dining Concepts, the Florida company he partnered with for MrBeast Burger, has been delivering food of terrible quality, so bad it’s often “raw” and “inedible”, and has been unwilling to engage with or act upon his complaints (thanks, Bloomberg). It says th…

As we inch toward Baldur’s Gate 3’s 1.0 release at the end of August, Larian has been sharing more looks of the game beyond its first act. Baldur’s Gate 3’s latest trailer at the Summer Game Fest finally showed us Larian’s interpretation of Baldur’s Gate itself, one of the iconic RPG cities, and the sight of some of my beloved old haunts in full 3D has me giddy.

I’ll get to beloved star of stage and screen Jason Isaacs in a second, but first: Sorcerous Sundries. One of my biggest questions about Larian’s follow up to BioWare’s classics was how the Studio would bring the city to life, and the shot of this magic emporium’s stained glass dome dappled in the morning light and doing justice to BioWare’s original pre-rendered background art had me grinning. Earlier in …

A feature of online life for anyone who’s ever expressed the vaguest of interest in videogames is weird adverts for shovelware games. You know the type, my lord: little vignettes where someone’s building a house, or saving a damsel from a burning pyre, or mixing gloop in an oddly satisfying way.

Well now someone’s made a minigame collection on Steam with perhaps one of the most outstanding titles I’ve ever seen. I am going to give this name its own paragraph and allow it to retain caps lock for the full effect:

YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!

Or YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT for short. Mostly I just admire the over-enthusiastic “YEAH!” at the start of what boils down to a stickman minigame collection. It seems inspired by a…

Battlebit Remastered released on Steam two weeks ago and the $15, 254-player FPS has been a top seller on the platform ever since, outperforming several big-hitters and even Starfield pre-orders. Why? There’s no catch, as PCG’s Morgan Park put it, this is just a lot of (very good) game for the money. In an age where it feels like every game’s trying to nickel-and-dime you with season passes and cosmetics, that counts.

Now developer SgtOkiDoki has announced that, in the two weeks since launch, Battlebit Remastered has sold 1,800,000 copies. That sure looks like an overnight success but it had a long road here: Battlebit was first announced on Steam Greenlight in December 2016, and was the first project for a collective of experienced modders.

In a new intervi…