Lately, every time I boot up my PC to play a game I end up playing , a fantasy skiing rhythm roguelike where you dodge obstacles, slash through bad guys, and take on bosses. The music rules. It’s stuffed with story and characters. The menus are full of lovely details and satisfying button presses. It has snow. I’m astonishingly bad at it, largely because I am wretched at rhythm games, but I’m loving it anyway.

You play as Skaii, who travels through

Storied development studio Crystal Dynamics, famous for their work on everything from Tomb Raider to Marvel's Avengers to Gex , earlier today that as a "result of evolving business conditions", they had "made the very difficult decision to part ways with a number of our talented colleagues".

Those conditions are numerous; there's an overall downturn in the video game market, particularly at the AAA end that Crystal Dynamics operate, in which it feels like more projects are being cancelled and studios closed then games are being

It’s been a tough couple years for IGN. Despite parent company Ziff Davis recently , management decided to engage in some bad old-fashioned ritual bloodletting across multiple properties–including IGN, which lost eight staff, or 12 percent of its union . This follows buyouts last year that saw talented senior staff head for the door , as well as before that. But the work those ex-employees were responsible for didn’t just go away; it got offloaded onto the increasingly beleaguered few who remain. Unionized

For over fifty years, has been that dude—no matter the mask, no matter the era. As an “anime guy,” I knew he had hands through cultural osmosis. But I hadn’t actually stepped into any of its series trenches until I came across dismantling a villain from ass to appetite with such violent poetry, I binged the whole show just to understand the lore behind the mauling.

While sentai teams (like Power Rangers ) fight in coordinated color-coded squads, Kamen Rider has been charging

This morning, The Guardian published an article about the question of , quoting folks with various opinions on whether the word-guessing program has or could develop consciousness and, if so, what responsibility humans would have in response. This would all make an interesting week in a college philosophy class, and was going to make for a quippy little blog on this site, before published a horrifying story about ChatGPT’s role in a 16-year-old’s suicide. I’m now of the opinion that

It’s been a hell of a summer for anime: We have The Summer Hikaru Died , Dan Da Dan , New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt , Call of the Night , and so much more. But both Isaiah and Chris have been floored by one show in particular: City the Animation . We sat down to talk about the ambitious slice of life anime from the Kyoto Animation.

Isaiah: Upon your very glittery recommendation, I finally took some time away from watching and writing about shonen anime to check out City

The perils of backing a crowdfunded game ; a successfully-financed campaign failing to deliver is hardly an outlier, and is often down to the team behind it being inexperienced. In the case of the RPG Grimwild , however, the lack of a delivered project is for potentially more serious reasons.

The tabletop RPG, which (before ), promised a "cinematic narrative rules system" which eschewed the finer points of rules in favour of a game that was more "concerned with the dramatic over the realistic". After a

The state of Overwatch 2 in the three-ish years since its release could be mapped onto the . Peaks and valleys, false starts and lost features, and waxing and waning player numbers have plagued Blizzard’s hero shooter sequel, which was promised as one thing and has since morphed into another entirely. The years-long identity crisis Overwatch 2 has faced since its 2022 launch has greatly affected its playerbase, and the launch of hero shooter Marvel Rivals last December seemed to take an even bigger chunk out

On Saturday, NYC Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani announced that his campaign would hold a across the city the next day. The themed event would be entirely accessible by public transit (one of his campaign issues), and there would be a surprise at the end. The number of people who showed up, and some of the design of the hunt itself, made for some wobbles, but it was a clever way to explore the city and hang out with friends, and the latest manifestation of Mamdani’s “what