Gaming

The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!

I watched (in a second screen sort of way as I tended to some work) the Game Awards last night. I’m not interested in talking about what the ceremony means—it’s an obviously vapid affair—but the powerful sweeping of awards by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was interesting to see. it also left me feeling a bit… odd.

Set to release February 27, 2026

Postal: Bullet Paradise developers Goonswarm have fiercely denied the accusations that they used generative AI to create elements of the game… and announced that they are closing down.

Horses, a first-person narrative horror game, was banned from the Epic Games Store just hours before it was set to launch on December 2nd. Then, a day after launch, the Humble store (temporarily) banned it as well. The decision shocked the developers at Santa Ragione, makers of the critically respected Saturnalia, as these storefronts were the homes they’d found for their game two years before it was preemptively banned from Steam.

First spin with 5K UHD 2160p Ultra Wide (45GX950A-B OLED, 45"). Banana for scale.

On Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. In the days since, it has become the most-discussed interview we’ve done in three years on the show. Listeners who wrote in to us said they were shocked to hear the leader of a platform with 151.5 million monthly users, most of them minors, express frustration and annoyance at being asked about the company’s history of failures related to child safety. Journalists described the interview as “bizarre,” “unhinged,” and a “car crash.”

Some days, I think I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read another email about a new roguelike or roguelite. This confuses me, because many of favourite games are roguelikes or roguelites, including Dead Cells, Balatro, FTL: Faster Than Light, and the recent Morsels, a reeking procedural dumpsite that speaks to the overproduction of Rogue/rogue derivatives at large.

Weird x86 chip is actually AMD-derived.

We recently reported on a strange little toy called the Barcode Battler that came out in 1990, after a time of handheld gaming dominated by the Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear. The Barcode Battler allowed players to scan the bar code on their cereal, cleaning supplies, and so on, and then use that bar code to create a character stat for a game. It was one of the first examples of this type of device and was launched in Japan by Epoch Co.

archive.is link

“I think it’s better not to release something than to release something weird, so I don’t have any negative feelings about that,” Yoko said.

https://azhdarchid.com/against-metroidbrania-a-landscape-of-knowledge-games/

Free until December 2.

Been an nvidia fan most of my life. But between Windows 10 EoL, and nvidia still gimping their GPUs ram it was time to move on. New 9070 xt. Figuring out optiscaler for fsr4 was an initial hurdle but now that everything is up and working initial impressions are great.

Following on from the success of the Steam Deck, Valve is creating its very own ecosystem of products. The Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all set to launch in the new year. We’ve tried each of them and here’s what you need to know about each one.

“Friction is nice. Makes things more meaningful.” So says Lady Love Dies, the protagonist of Kaizen Game Works’ cult indie-hit Paradise Killer, to an inquisitive AI-bot of a vending machine. This quote has coiled into my thinking regarding game design that apes early net art and user interfaces. How faithful should one be to the textures of historical technology and its representational qualities? How speculative can one be when games and technological preservation in general have become so fraught? The idiosyncratic friction of user experience is often an underestimated identifier for specific periods of digital history. Even when we’re seeking to subvert corporate interests to jealously guard IPs, or convince the more open and communicative organizations to adapt or invent new methods of sustainable and accessible archives, human memory and its malleability are the missing link. I mean this last point both literally and figuratively.

Video of DevGAMM Awards 2025 ceremony Lisbon (2025-11-07, YouTube)

Original Saints Row design director Chris Stockman is talking to the hellgods at Embracer Group about making a prequel open world game, possibly set in 1977 and containing absolutely no dildo bats. This comes almost two decades after Stockman left Saints Row development studio Volition, and a couple of years after Embracer closed Volition amid wider cuts.