Video games

Video games

These are the sort of things you see on the floor at the Portland Retro Game Expo, a yearly exhibition of video game culture and technology for vintage game collectors and dealers. Gamers are looking to relive their pasts and the pasts of others (who grew up with different systems or games), and, as with every gathering of ten or more people these days, Pokemon card collectors, hunting for the treasure their heart most desires.

We are truly sorry for the last-minute announcement. After thoughtful consideration, we feel it's best for the game and the community. This year, we ran many playtests with friends and fans, and we were confident that we could improve the game enough in time for December. In the lead-up to Early Access release, we broadened our playtests with a more varied playerbase, and the latest feedback we received made us realise the game isn't up to the standard we wanted it to meet for release.

By all appearances, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 features a not insignificant amount of AI-generated art, Kotaku reports. The game's over 680 Calling Cards - collectible backgrounds earned through in-game achievements or purchases - appear to be the main offenders, featuring art that imitates the knockoff animation style of ChatGPT. While it's hard to authoritatively claim that Studio Ghibli-inspired illustrations are a smoking gun, the Calling Cards players have spotted do at the very least seem unpolished for a splashy $70 game.

This new physical edition of the game arrives on PS5 and Xbox Series X on December 2. Preorders are now live at multiple online retailers. While there are no preorder bonuses, the new collection includes the full RoboCop: Rogue City base game, the RoboCop: Unfinished Business standalone expansion, and a bunch of bonus DLC--not to mention an exclusive steelbook case--all for just $50.

Thanks to the shutdown, there have not been too many innovative government programs operating over the past few months. NASA was able to continue its latest crowdfunding challenge, which asks people to help design new tires for future moon missions, largely because that is hosted by its partner site, HeroX. But beyond that, most everything was either shuttered or running with skeleton crews.

Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to be, by some accounts, the most important release in the history of video games as it relates to helping the video game industry rebound. But GTA 6 is not a magic bullet and cannot solve the wider issues within gaming as it relates to health and stability, according to analyst and NYU Stern professor Joost van Dreunen.

Chief among these is the "blink" system, which lets you warp instantly from point to point in a way that reminds me now of the similar nausea-preventing movement systems seen in many virtual reality games. Here, being able to go from one hidden corner to another without the risk of being seen revolutionizes the stealth gameplay. Hopping up to a nearby rooftop or down on top of an unaware enemy with a quick blink is incredibly satisfying,

Anno 117: Pax Romana takes the franchise's city-building formula back to the ancient empire but used modern generative AI tools in the development process. Fans have already begun ripping into one particularly egregious-looking piece of AI-generated imagery that appears in the background during a loading screen. "Very big difference between this and the high quality background art and loading screens of Anno 1800," one fan wrote. Ubisoft tells Kotaku it'll be replacing the offending image in an upcoming patch.

Though it's unclear how the world may have gotten to this point, the prevailing theory is that the world of may take place in some kind of post-apocalyptic timeline where humans and Pokémon have been separated for many years after some kind of disaster. There are clues hinting at this possibility dating as far back as the original reveal trailer from September. Ditto is shown escaping its Poké Ball in a cave that looks like it was, at one point, occupied by its trainer.

According to developer Hypergryph, the team has redone 80 to 90% of the cutscenes and dialogue, about 50% or so of the structure of the maps, and nearly 40 to 50% of the game's overall level design--a lot of the game I first played back in 2024 is just not there anymore. But, after previewing Arknights: Endfield again for over five hours ahead of the official beta's launch, I have no doubt I'd spend another 20 in this brave new world.

in the end, no longer means anything at all, and as such the fights over what is allowed to call itself one are mostly futile. It's best just left alone. But then along come the annual awards reserved specifically for whatever an indie game actually is, and suddenly the whole contentious topic is thrown into a harsh light, along with which comes a realization:

Dispatch feels like it harkens back to the early 2010s--a time when Telltale Games was creating incredible episodic adventure games inspired by graphic novels, superhero stories were beginning to fill to the brim with quips to counterbalance the angst of the genre in the 2000s, and office-based TV comedies were everywhere. If not for snippets of gameplay, Dispatch would simply be a great TV show that I would want to tune into every week.

Nostalgia has become one of the most powerful drivers in the tech and collectible markets. From miniature consoles to pixel-perfect Lego sets, the formula is well established: take a beloved cultural touchstone and re-engineer it for a modern audience. Nintendo, more than almost any other company, has mastered this to the point of it being an art (remember the Poke9mon Tamagotchis from a few months ago?) Hallmark's Keepsake line has long been a partner with Nintendo, translating iconic characters and scenes into physical ornaments for collectors.

Developer Guerrilla Games said the studio is "busily working on" new experiences where players can "hunt machines in the world of Horizon." "More on that to come," the developer said. Guerrilla has not announced any new Horizon games, but it's been reported for some time now that the developer is making a multiplayer Horizon game. Reporter Jason Schreier reiterated this today following the announcement of the MMO. The multiplayer Horizon game is "Guerrilla's next big project," he said.

When I tried Half-Life: Alyx streaming from a PC to Valve's new Steam Frame VR headset, I was blown away; thanks to the Frame's dedicated wireless adapter and a cool trick Valve calls "foveated streaming," I didn't detect any latency as I explored an industrial building and fought some head crabs. But the Frame also has an Arm chip inside, meaning it can run games locally.

You can now beam Vampire Survivors directly into your eyeballs, as developer Poncle's indie-bullet-hell sensation is out now on a new platform: VR. More specifically, it's available for the Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S, Meta Quest Pro, and Meta Quest 2, with a new trailer inviting players to "be the bullet hell, on your face." This version of Vampire Survivors will come with two of the game's DLC expansions, Legacy of the Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari, built in.