Month: September 2024

Update 05/18/23: John Carmack has posted a defence of his decision to attend the conference, which can be read in full here.

“It is unfortunate that Rob [Kroese] has made BasedCon so intentionally provocative,” writes Carmack. “I told him as much after the event last year, I felt a little uncomfortable.  There is a demographic that welcomes the in-your-face posturing, but it drives away sympathetic people that would otherwise be happy to talk about craft, stories, and technology.

“Even when someone gives you a clear signal, it is a mistake to extrapolate it to an entire constellation of beliefs and behaviors, and then to assume they are contagious by association.  That shortchanges a lot of people.

“I’m not a culture warrior, and I don&…

The mysterious boat league has been a deep cut bit of lore in Path of Exile’s community for something like ten years now. “Redacted” forum posts, bits of fishing lore on items removed from the game, and hinty posts from the legendary former community manager Bex (we miss you!) have resulted in a playerbase frothing at the mouth for it to finally happen. With PoE’s latest league, the Settlers of Kalguur, we’ve finally got it—and it’s a doozy.

The 3.25 patch for Path of Exile released last week, and it’s already being hailed as one of the best ever. A news post from the Grinding Gear Games team on the Sunday of launch weekend said they had a new record peak of 350,000 players, content creators have been glowing, and anecdotally I’ve never seen my friends so excited for a leagu…

Back in February, someone leaked more than 200 pages of an art book from the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Nintendo wants to know who: A TorrentFreak report says the company has filed a DMCA subpoena with Discord, seeking the identity of a user who shared the images.

The images were only up briefly before Nintendo sent its initial DMCA takedown request, which Discord responded to very promptly—in just eight minutes, according to the report—with a promise to take down the art book content. Several hours later, Nintendo asked that the channel named “Tears of the Kingdom Official Discord Server” also be taken offline because some of its members were still sharing the leaked content.

Naturally, that was not the end of it. On April 7, lawyers for…

Netflix is finally shuttering what was once the central concept of the 25-year-old company: DVDs that you rent online and come in the mail. These days, of course, Netflix is a streaming titan, and as we’ve also seen in gaming over the past 25 years, physical media is disappearing. September 29 will be the last day of service for those who still eagerly await the arrival of red envelopes in their postbox.

“It has been a true pleasure and honor to deliver movie nights to our wonderful members for 25 years,” said Netflix in a tweet. “Thank you for being part of this incredible journey.” (Perhaps a bit much considering we’re talking about putting discs in envelopes.)

If you want to rock like the coolest dad on the block in 1999, you can still experience the novelty of DVDs in th…

Lucasfilm has registered several new domains for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, including one that specifically refers to the title as a game. The registrations were first spotted by X user Kurakasis and include:

http://indianajonesandthegreatcirclegame.com

http://indianajones-and-the-great-circle.com

http://indianajonesandthegreatcircle.com

Kurakasis further notes that Lucasfilm applied for a European trademark for The Great Circle two years ago.

The great circle is a mathematical term that refers to the largest circle that can be drawn on any given sphere, and is a term used in relation to Earth itself. This conveniently lines up with the earliest teaser image for the game, which features among other items a book titled Ancient Circle (it may …

The System Shock remake is almost here, which makes this a fine time to recall that developer Nightdive Studios is also working on an update of System Shock 2. The System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition, as it’s formally known, won’t be a full do-over like the upcoming remake of System Shock, but it does promise to make Irrational’s great immersive sim look and play as well as it possibly can.

System Shock 2 was originally released in 1999, and even back then it wasn’t a great-looking game. It was a brilliantly good one, though—it’s no exaggeration to say that System Shock 2 is the game that made me a forever fan of the immsim genre—and while it unfortunately wasn’t a sales hit, it earned widespread critical acclaim and proved tremendously durable and influential: There is li…

The community of happy creators who love Bethesda’s recent games for the settlement-building is off to the races in Starfield, thrilled to create a vast variety of ships of their own design—and their favorites of others’ designs. Let’s get in there and see some of the best I’ve seen, shall we? We’ll see stuff from Firefly, Star Wars, Mass Effect, Aliens, Prometheus, and the ever-beloved Expanse.

“She’s torn up plenty, but she’ll fly true.” from r/Starfield

My attempt at making Serenity from Firefly from r/Starfield

There are also, of course, plenty of people building perhaps one of the most iconic single spaceships in sci-fi history: The Millenium Falcon. They’re seeing various levels of …