Another weekend means another batch of streaming recommendations, and there's plenty of variety to choose from this week. Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali star in new Netflix thriller Leave the World Behind, while Todd Haynes' May December, which is already generating Oscar buzz for actor Charles Melton, has made its way to the UK via Sky Cinema. If you're in the mood for something a little more festive and lighthearted, try animated movie Merry Little Batman or Christmas rom-com Your Christmas or Mine 2, both on Prime Video.
25 Years On, Half-Life Still Feels Like It’s From the Future
19.11.2023 - 15:07 / ign.com
The 1990s was an astonishing period for video games – an entire decade where it felt like a revolutionary vision of the future arrived every six months. Super Mario 64 made the third dimension an essential addition to platformers, Baldur’s Gate brought astonishing scope to RPGs, and Resident Evil turned a simple house into a terrifying interactive nightmare. These examples remain immortal classics, but also paved the way to a better future for their respectives series and genres.
But there’s one ’90s classic that has an unusual relationship with the future. Half-Life, the revolutionary first-person shooter created by just 30 people at the then newly-formed Valve Software, still feels like it's a generation ahead. Its surface may have aged with blocky textures, primitive lighting, and stilted animation, but Half-Life is a masterclass of level design, atmosphere, and immersive storytelling. And despite being so influential on the entire video game industry, on its 25th anniversary it remains a singular triumph.
It’s apt that Half-Life’s exhilarating campaign, which oscillates through energetic shootouts and tense discovery, starts on a rollercoaster. Sort of. The train that carries your protagonist, Dr. Gordon Freeman, to their day job as a scientist at the underground Black Mesa Research Facility is an automated tour of the locations that await you; the many stages upon which a continual supply of innovative encounters and clever level design will guide you to a literally extraterrestrial conclusion.
21st century FPS classics, like the original Modern Warfare and Titanfall 2, follow in these footsteps. Half-Life’s variety is the root of missions like 'Into The Abyss' and 'All Ghillied Up'. But even those brilliantly varied campaigns struggle to keep up with the speedy evolution of Black Mesa’s corridors. Every single chapter has a defined, unique concept, from the hide-and-seek attack on the Tentacles in 'Blast Pit', through firing laser-guided rockets from a cliff ledge in 'Surface Tension', to solving portal puzzles in 'Lambda Core'.
This variety helps control Half-Life’s perfect tempo. After an opening that sits purposefully on the knife edge between astonishing and mundane, a science disaster tears open the fabric of space and aggressive aliens pour into Black Mesa. With just one goal – to reach the surface and find help – you ascend the facility’s floors in a desperate fight to the finish. But just as it seems like safety is within reach thanks to the arrival of the US Marines, you and all your colleagues are suddenly in the firing line as the army works to fatally silence any witnesses. This brilliant, shocking twist triggers Half-Life’s ever-escalating sense of jeopardy. It forces you back below
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techradar.com
08.12.2023 / 05:41
Exoborne is a new extraction shooter coming from the makers of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodhunt
Sharkmob has revealed its first original game project at The Game Awards 2023 — a tactical open-world extraction shooter called Exoborne.
pcgamer.com
08.12.2023 / 03:32
Den of Wolves is a 'mind-f***' heist game from the Payday designer set in a sci-fi city 'where late-stage capitalism has gone rampant'
The Den of Wolves trailer at The Game Awards first announces that we're looking at a new game from from the creator of Payday: The Heist and Payday 2, but then goes on to show something that has very little resemblance to a bank robbery: a pair of men growling at each other in a sci-fi dungeon that could've appeared in Cyberpunk 2077. So, what the heck is this game? As implied by the Payday connection, Den of Wolves is a four-player co-op game from 10 Chambers, the Stockholm-based studio co-founded by Payday 1 and 2 designer Ulf Andersson. But it's Andersson's vision for, like, Payday 5. Rather than present-day burglaries, Den of Wolves takes place in 2097 in a city run by unregulated corporations who've secured their global stock exchange against AI-powered hackers by somehow using biological encryption—that is, living human brains. It's a heist game inspired by Inception, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, and Blade Runner—in short, «mindfuck sci-fi,» as Den of Wolves narrative director Simon Viklund (also a Payday alum) put it to me when we met last week. The twist in The Game Awards trailer gives us a glimpse of what he's talking about, as the corpo's interrogation of some punk's subconscious is revealed to actually be the opposite. Clearly we're going to invade some mind palaces in this thing. I didn't get to see any Den of Wolves gameplay beyond the snippets of shooting everyone can see in the trailer, but Viklund spoke at length about the studio's vision during a presentation and interview.
tech.hindustantimes.com
05.12.2023 / 15:59
Wikipedia, wrapped. Here are 2023's most-viewed articles on the internet's encyclopedia
English Wikipedia raked in more than 84 billion views this year, according to numbers released Tuesday by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind the free, publicly edited online encyclopedia. And the most popular article was about ChatGPT (yes, the AI chatbot that's seemingly everywhere today).
gamesradar.com
01.12.2023 / 23:46
How to watch Doctor Who Wild Blue Yonder online: stream 60th anniversary episode 2 from anywhere
The Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials are here and the first episode, The Star Beast, more than lived up to expectations with David Tennant and Catherine Tate reuniting for new adventures in the Tardis. Episode 2, Wild Blue Yonder, will see the pair flung across time and space, finding themselves materializing on a seemingly abandoned spaceship.
gamesindustry.biz
30.11.2023 / 13:30
Regional pricing in games distribution is still necessary – here is why | Opinion
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videogameschronicle.com
30.11.2023 / 11:27
Remnant: From The Ashes and Remnant 2 receive surprise Xbox Game Pass releases
Remnant: From The Ashes and its sequel, Remnant 2, have been made available on Game Pass for console, PC and Cloud.
tech.hindustantimes.com
30.11.2023 / 02:45
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says the US Will Take Years to Achieve Chip Independence
Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who runs the semiconductor industry's most valuable company, said the US is as much as 20 years away from breaking its dependence on overseas chipmaking.
gamesindustry.biz
28.11.2023 / 16:05
PS4 and Xbox One launches underwhelm, but overperform | 10 Years Ago This Month
November of 2013 was a big one for games, with two major consoles launching opposite one another after years of discourse about the surely imminent demise of the console market.
wccftech.com
27.11.2023 / 07:50
AT&T and the U.S. Government Found to be Spying on Millions of Users in America for Years
It appears that AT&T and the U.S. government are both involved in a government surveillance program; based on the information revealed via leaked police documents, a White House Memo, as well as a letter by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice, all of these things combined, confirm that millions of Americans are being spied on.
rockpapershotgun.com
22.11.2023 / 22:09
Anyone can now buy FF14’s pizza emote, two years after you had to order $15 of delivery food to get it (maybe)
Two years after Final Fantasy XIV launched a pizza-eating emote to a surprising amount of controversy, anyone can pop along to the MMO’s in-game shop and buy it for under a fiver.
gamesindustry.biz
22.11.2023 / 12:23
Report: 83% of mobile games fail in the three years after launch
New research from mobile revenue growth engine SuperScale has found that 83% of launched mobile games fail within three years, while 43% are cancelled during development.