Industry vet Laralyn McWilliams has passed away

The Coen brothers’ filmography is tragically straight. Acclaimed for their stylistic breadth and wit, their films are rich and willing to play with gender roles in ways that welcome queer readings — the screwball hijinks of The Hudsucker Proxy and the winking choreography behind Channing Tatum’s dance numbers in Hail, Caesar! are among the many playful flourishes where the space between quirk and intent are as wide as the viewer wants it to be.

Intel's software team has delivered another performance-tuned driver update for the Intel Arc GPUs featured on Core Ultra chips, offering a massive boost in performance in several games.

Next Tuesday, March 5 should be a big day for Xbox Game Pass, as it's highly likely that will be the day Microsoft announces the Wave 1 games for March 2024. While there have been rare exceptions to the rule, Xbox Game Pass announcements usually come in two waves. The first wave is typically announced at the beginning of each month, while the second wave announcement tends to drop in the middle of the month.

The co-creator of Halo, Marcus Lehto, has seemingly departed Electronic Arts.

Hollywood is in mourning as Star Trek: Discovery actor Kenneth Mitchell has passed away at the age of 49 from complications with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Update:

2022's Game of the Year, Elden Ring, has surpassed yet another impressive milestone of 23 million copies sold. This comes just one day after the full reveal trailer of Elden Ring's hotly anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, which already sits at over six million views on Bandai Namco's YouTube channel. The thrilling trailer showcases parts of the new Land of Shadow area, as well as some of the fearsome new bosses players will face off against, causing a swell of excitement and hype among fans online.

Palworld has been played by more than 25 million players since its launch, its studio Pocketpair says.

Microsoft has confirmed the second wave of February games for Xbox Game Pass, which also stretches a little further into March. Between February 22 and March 5, Xbox Game Pass subscribers will be able to claim 6 new games, although one of them is an addition to the Cloud Gaming platform.

One of the best RPGs of all time has made its way into the Xbox Game Pass catalog during the second batch of titles planned for February 2024. Every month, games cycle through Microsoft’s subscription service, with some new additions arriving, while others leave. During the first phase of February’s additions, Xbox Game Pass got even better with the addition of into its library, allowing customers to play not only the highly popular survival horror game but also its predecessor,, which had been added in January.

Two more games, Tales of Arise and Return to Grace, are being added to Xbox Game Pass on February 20. Rumors about Tales of Arise possibly coming to Xbox Game Pass began at the beginning of the month when Bandai Namco’s action RPG briefly showed up in a “coming soon” announcement on Xbox Wire. The game was quickly scrubbed from the list, but not before eagle-eyed readers spotted it, shared it on social media, and dug up the cached version of the article. As it turns out, the announcement was just made a week too early.

Yoshitaka Murayama, the creator of Suikoden, director of Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, and head of Rabbit & Bear Studios, has passed away at 55 following complications from an ongoing illness.