Chris embraces our cyberpunk subscription overlords. Josh kills the innkeeper (accidentally). Meanwhile Robert plunges down the .Hack hole.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 610: “No One Should Learn Japanese from Super Robot Wars” appeared first on RPGamer.

Kelley hoards all the PS5s. Chris needs a build for the I'm Bad playstyle. And Josh gets treatment for his cat's demon tapeworm.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 645: “Rob Zombie’s Drag-Gula Lost” appeared first on RPGamer.

Chris walks in on Anna playing Tactics Ogre. Alex is head of the elemental winds. And Kelley's cat stole a banana.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 669: “The 1 of 1 Ring to Rule Them All” appeared first on RPGamer.

Chris discovers the truth about butt-type Pokémon. TAM chooses to outfit his battle-leotard with option 3 -- pants. Kelley thinks all the games look amazing, she doesn't want to play it. And Josh claims that, "God gave me a H.O.T.A.S., and I'm going to use it!"

The post RPG Cast – Episode 682: “Hodor With a Full Vocabulary” appeared first on RPGamer.

Kelley turns into a trashy paranormal romance novel. Chris opens up a Pokémon sweatshop. And Josh only interacts with League of Legends side content.

The post RPG Cast – Episode 708: “My Oculus Ow!” appeared first on RPGamer.

A veteran aviation expert said Boeing could take up the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in its third week remained in first place on the Steam Weekly Top Sellers chart (excluding revenue generated by free games) for Week 46, 2024, which ended November 12, 2024.

There were two new releases in the top 10 this week. Planet Coaster 2 debuted in fourth place, while Farming Simulator 25 came in fifth place.

Steam Deck is up two spots to second place, while Baldur's Gate 3 re-entered the top 10 in third place. EA Sports FC 25 is up two spots to sixth place, Cyberpunk 2077 re-entered the top 10 in seventh place, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard fell from second to eighth place.

Ahead of its release next week pre-orders for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl came in ninth place.

Here are the Steam Weekly Top Sellers by revenue for the week (excluding free games):

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
2. Steam Deck
3. Baldur's Gate 3
4. Planet Coaster 2 - NEW
5. Farming Simulator 25 - NEW
6. EA Sports FC 25
7. Cyberpunk 2077
8. Dragon Age: The Veilguard
9. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - Pre-orders
10. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Here are the Steam Weekly Top Sellers by revenue for the week (including free games):

1. PUBG: Battlegrounds
2. Counter-Strike 2
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
4. Apex legends
5. Throne and Liberty
6. Steam Deck
7. Baldur's Gate 3
8. Dota 2
9. Planet Coaster 2 - NEW
10. Farming Simulator 25 - NEW

The Steam charts are ordered by revenue, include pre-order numbers, and hardware. If a game appears multiple times it is because it has multiple editions.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463048/planet-coaster-2-and-farming-simulator-25-debut-on-the-steam-charts/

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was flabbergasted Wednesday by a surrogate’s defense of Donald Trump, calling his explanation for the former president’s bombastic statements literal “bulls---.”

On AC360, former California Lieutenant Gov. Abel Maldonado, a Republican, said that Trump’s recent comments calling for the military to “handle” Democrats were simply his way of expressing his inner New Yorker. “He’s a fighter,” Maldonado added.

The conversation began when Cooper brought up Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who, alongside other military leaders, have begun to warn of the dangers of re-electing the former president. Milley has called Trump a “fascist to his core.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Movies can’t, by definition, be all things to all people, and yet Anora—winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or—manages to vacillate between assorted registers with stunning, and ultimately affecting, aplomb.

Another of The Florida Project and Red Rocket writer/director Sean Baker’s tales of marginalized individuals struggling to survive and find themselves in an often-unforgiving world, the film is a character study, romance, crime saga, screwball comedy, and vérité drama all wrapped into one unique and dexterous package. More impressive than its nimbleness, however, is its poise and empathy, the latter of which is chiefly bestowed upon its protagonist, whose life is thrown for a rollercoaster-grade loop-di-loop thanks to a chance introduction.

Ani (Mikey Madison, in a star-making turn) is a Brighton Beach 23-year-old who lives with her sister and earns a living stripping at a local club. Anora, which hits theaters Oct. 18, introduces her at the end of a long pan along a bench where men are receiving lap dances from erotic professionals. Fixating on Ani’s face as she flashes the fake smile that her customers crave and her superiors demand, Baker’s camera creates immediate, intimate engagement with the young woman, and that continues as it presents snapshots of her daily (or, rather, nightly) routine at her place of employment.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A hotel worker called 911 to request urgent assistance before musician Liam Payne fell to his death from the third floor of the building in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old British singer and former member of the boy band One Direction died after he “jumped from the balcony of his room,” Buenos Aires Security Ministry Communications Director Pablo Policicchio told the Associated Press. He added that police had been called to the Casa Sur Hotel in the Argentine capital after receiving an emergency call shortly after 5 p.m. local time about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

A transcript of a 911 call published by the BBC shows a worker at the hotel telling the operator that they have “a guest who is high on drugs and who is trashing the room” and the staff therefore “need someone to come.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Disaster was averted at a Kentucky hospital when an ostensibly deceased organ donor began “thrashing” around in the operating theater, a preservationist tells NPR.

“He was moving around,” Natasha Miller recalled of the patient, whom NPR identified as Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II. “He was crying visibly.”

The two surgeons assigned to the transplant naturally refused to go through with the procedure, which was reportedly scheduled to take place at Baptist Health Richmond Hospital in October 2021. But when her colleague called Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which coordinated the harvest, Miller said the supervisor told them they “were going to do the case” and needed to “find another doctor.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

One of my favourite satires is the Screwtape Letters, an epistolary novel by Narnia scribe C.S. Lewis. It consists of messages from an oily elder demon to his nephew about how to correctly groom the soul of an unsuspecting human being. It's a claustrophobic send-up of managerial politics and nepotism, with World War 1 unfolding in the background. A real pick-me-up. Sintopia is the Two Point incarnation of that premise - in other words, brighter and breezier and definitely more slapstick than Christian. It puts you in charge of a world divided between Earth and hell, and challenges you to ensure a steady movement of optimally sinful souls between one and the other. Say your prayers and watch the trailer.

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Today in "person you already like says something you already agree with, but it’s still good to hear them say it" news, Arkane founder and im-simmy RPG studio WolfEye head Raphael Colantonio has spoken on Microsoft’s decision to shutter Prey (2017) studio Arkane Austin - alongside a handful of others - back in May.

Colantonio, who founded Arkane in 1999 and departed in 2017 to form Weird West studio WolfEye, recently chatted to Jeremy Peel for PC Gamer about Arkane’s closure, saying:

I think if you look a little bit, it's obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that just came down to, 'We need to cut something.' Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They're playing a different game.

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Some extremely fresh vintage workwear that I bought for entirely practical reasons aside, I’m not exactly a fashion person. I have nobody to impress most days but my cat, and the only item of clothing she appears to have an opinion on is my Oodie, which is very comfortable for both of us and also smells like a chicken shop, which I imagine is more pleasant for her than me.

This aside, I found myself taking a whole bunch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard screenshots as I played just to capture the RPG’s various outfits. They are ridiculous. Incredibly intricate and detailed, as well as being obscenely impractical for the most part. I do not like any of them in the sense I would wear them, but I like all of them in the sense that they display artists allowed to run free like caffeinated weasels and indulge their every whim.

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Real gamblers play russian roulette with shotguns. That is the core concept of Buckshot Roulette, the Inscryption-looking game of blinksweat and bulletworry. It's been out for a while now but the developers have just added a fun extra - a 4-person multiplayer mode.

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Some days, I wonder if every word written before a trailer is actually superfluous. It’s a visual medium, after all. What can a description achieve save to clumsily gesture at the true shape of something; a dog-eared tour brochure for a thrilling weekend spelunking in Plato’s cave? I can usually shake this feeling, but gory zombie action game Showa American Story is my breaking point. There is nothing I can impart about this thing that will not be conveyed better by allowing its new trailer to wash over you like a tide of sheer videogame. Here’s it:

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People have asked me, a Call Of Duty liker, "How's the new COD?" - such is the mass appeal of Call Of Duty that even a lot of my non-industry pals are invested in whether Black Ops 6's shooty really does bang. And every single time my brain clunks into gear and I turn inwards, where I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say. So much so that a fog develops and out of the fog emerges a figure - it's me. I'm holding an M4A1 with an extended barrel and a vertical foregrip. My brain and body perform a pincer movement of physical response: 1) I shrug 2) I say, "It's like Call Of Duty".

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To say that Factorio: Space Age throws out the rulebook is an understatement. It'd be more fitting to say it's somehow automated the whole process: an inserter plucked out the rulebook from my brain and deposited it in hot magma, while a new rulebook was churned out in a nearby machine and plopped into my brain from the other side - only for that to be immediately plucked out and incinerated as well. With each new planet and each new phase, Space Age reinvents itself. I'm battling hyperbole here, but ah hell, I admit defeat. Factorio: Space Age is a masterpiece, the final form of perhaps the most well-crafted building game I'll ever play.

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Foxhole is one of my favourite games to read about, even if I don't play it. It's a massively multiplayer World War 2 game, viewed from above, where battlefield logistics matters as much as aiming and flanking. Its developers have just announced a major new update coming next summer, Foxhole: Airborne, which adds planes to the game for the first time.

Planes, in a topdown MMO? It makes a little more sense if you watch the trailer.

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The dominion of hated Super Earth threatens to expand afresh as Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt toys openly with the prospect of Helldivers 2 cross-over games, beginning with tabletop wargame Trench Crusade and extending to, well, take your pick. Arrowhead's appetite for other licenses appears insatiable. It's the kind of sheer expansionism you'd expect from Earth's loathsome regime, whose "managed democracy" propaganda continues to enthrall thousands of hapless disposable imperialists. Pilestedt even wants to make a Fifth Element game! Milla Jovovich is spinning in her grave. Milla Jovovich isn't dead, you say? Well, that's good news at least.

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Got an email about this. Looks cool. Is free. “I’ll write about that,” I thought. “I’ll write about that for Rock Paper Shotgun, a place that semi-regularly posts articles about cool and free games.” So here we are. If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, assuming the only reason I’d open an article in a superfluous and straightforward manner is because I’m about to deliver some sort of third sentence twist, you’re completely wrong! There’s no twist at all. I’m simply going to deliver some information about the game in a neutral tone. You can find VED: Purification, a free prologue demo to RPG VED, here.

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Nostalgia, when you think about it, is bollocks. There has never been a better time than right this second – averaged out, and despite repeated attempts to the contrary, humanity has never been healthier, freer, or more enlightened by knowledge. It’s true of games too. For every by-committee platter of passionless map markers, there are thousands of more personal, more creative, more interesting works, all adding to the decades' worth of great stuff we can still play today.

What isn’t bollocks is the emotional pull that nostalgia, for all its lack of cold, hard reason, still manages to wield inside our warm, squishy brains. Hence, the centrepiece of Apex Legends’ Season 23 update is a mode that recreates the battle royale FPS as it was back in 2019, defaulting back to the original map and weapon arsenal while cutting the 26-strong legend roster to the earliest ten. It’s a Fortnite-style rolling back of the clock, and a passably enjoyable one, but also a reminder that the good old days weren’t always that good.

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for a little while already, what with me giving its multiplayer largely a thumbs up. Still, it's an ever-evolving thing and Activision have announced the game's first seasonal drop. It's a hefty one with a lot of additions, so I'll try my best to break down the good stuff. TLDR: there's some new maps for multiplayer and zombies, new modes, and a few extra bits. I'm mildly excited for more. More in this case is good.

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Warframe developers Digital Extremes have announced a new round of early access for their 2025-bound fantasy action-RPG Soulframe, which I saw a bit of last year and think is pretty promising. They're now adding 2000 players to a Preludes build of the game every week, with each invite email including an additional four invite codes, so you can get your friends involved.

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Let’s try and get you up to speed on the fascinating oddity that is simulation game Ecosystem, on the off chance that Nate's coverage of it hasn't stuck with you like an unwelcome brain parasite you’re nonetheless unwilling to get removed for fear of the lingering emptiness it might cause (he once described an eel as “a quaver with erectile dysfunction”). Broadly speaking, this game is Spore’s evolutionary-biology-degree-having cousin. It’s been in early access for about three years now, but with the latest "Crustacean" update, it’s just hit 1.0. Once again, carcinization has come for all things.

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Great God Grove is, in a word, bonkers. I’ve stopped a small community from completing a blood ritual, played the role of matchmaker to a group of lonely hearts that involved organising a date with god, and plastered a statue with paint as part of a revolutionary movement to uplift the power of art. My time with GGG has been a pick n’ mix of colourful escapades, and together with its story of godly woes, striking art style, vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing puppet work, I’m now a die-hard LimboLane devotee.

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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell held a news conference today after the second day of the annual owners meeting. Watch his remarks in the player above.

NFL players will be encouraged to stand for the national anthem at the start of the football games, the league’s chief told reporters today.

After two days of meeting with owners of each NFL team, representatives for the players’ union and players themselves, the NFL has reiterated its decision to keep its existing policy of not requiring players to stand during the anthem. Goodell said yesterday that the league wouldnot instate a rule that would penalize players who refuse to stand for the anthem.

“We believe everyone should stand for the national anthem,” he told reporters at a news conference today. “That’s an important part of our policy. It’s also an important part of our game that we all take great pride in. And it’s also important for us to honor our flag and our country and I think our fans expect us to do that.”

Goodell’s remarks came after President Donald Trump continued his criticism of the NFL this morning. On Twitter, Trump said: “The NFL has decided that it will not force players to stand for the playing of our National Anthem. Total disrespect for our great country!”

After former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem last year to protest police killings of unarmed black men, dozens of other players joined him to draw greater attention to social and racial injustice. Last month, Trump said the NFL ought to fire players who didn’t stand for the anthem.

The players “are not doing this in any way to be disrespectful to the flag,” Goodell said today. “But they also understand how it’s being interpreted.”

Goodell also said the league wanted to stay out of the political arena over the issue.

“We’re not looking to get into politics,” he told reporters. “What we’re looking to do is to continue to get people focused on football.”

The post WATCH: NFL commissioner says players ‘should stand for the national anthem’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

To transport our planet across the universe, we would need to bring the whole solar system to sustain life on Earth – on this episode of Dead Planets Society, our hosts contemplate how to shepherd all that baggage on this scenic journey

If we want to terraform the Red Planet to make it better able to host microbial life, tiny rods of iron and aluminium may be the answer

A planet orbiting extremely close to a white dwarf may have formed inside its star – this could be the origin of some of the most promising worlds beyond our solar system to search for life

After a star explodes, the resulting supernova remnant collapses in on itself and could begin the cycle again, creating generations of stars enriched with heavy elements

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Brown dwarfs could be hiding dark matter inside their cores – if they are, there would be signs that could help us track it down

NASA is investigating a strange noise coming through the speaker on Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which has been beset with technical issues

The second-closest planet to the sun is more geologically active than we thought and could have more than 17,000 venusquakes a year

A distant planet should have been consumed when its star expanded to become a red giant, perhaps offering insights into planetary migration

These dazzling images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are from the upcoming book Cosmos: Explore the wonders of the universe, which has a foreword by astrophysicist Becky Smethurst

Cracks running through samples of asteroid Ryugu were probably formed by the repeated thawing and freezing of water inside it, which could have helped asteroids like this carry the building blocks of life to early Earth

A computer simulation suggests that some collisions between exotic, hypothetical stars would make space-time ripple with detectable waves

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

Asteroids that regularly fly between Earth, Venus and Mars could provide radiation shielding for human missions to explore neighbouring planets

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn: The elegant maths behind modern AI explores the mechanics of the AI revolution, but doesn't examine its ethics

In Still Wakes the Deep, you play as a Glaswegian electrician on a 1970s oil rig. The well-crafted setting gives way to horror, but I wish I could linger in mundanity for longer, says Jacob Aron

Computer code dating back to the 1960s is still vital to banks, airlines and governments, but programmers familiar with the language are in short supply. Now AI models are being trained to fill the skills gap

An AI-powered model found that approaching intersections more slowly could lower yearly US carbon emissions by up to around 123 million tonnes

A new procedure turns an alloy of nickel and titanium into a material as strong as steel but 20 times stretchier – and one application could be building planes with shape-shifting wings

Information on faces recognised, voice commands and internet searches can be extracted from an Amazon Echo smart assistant without help from the user or manufacturer

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. This time, Rowan Hooper takes us to the early 2030s, when a technological step change enabled us to produce all the food we needed without the use of animals