Login
Enlarge / Are we certain this famous Valve promo image wasn't generated by an AI? (credit: Valve)
Last week, we shared an anonymous report that Valve was blocking from Steam at least some games that make use of AI-generated artwork. Over the weekend, Valve confirmed that report, telling Ars in an e-mailed statement that the company is blocking games that use AI-generated content unless developers can prove those AI models were trained with data that does not "infringe on existing copyrights."
"The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show that a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music," Valve spokesperson Kaci Boyle told Ars. "In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game."
Boyle stressed in the statement that Valve's "goal is not to discourage the use of [AI-generated content] on Steam" and that the company's "priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can." Generative AI is "bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming," Valve continued.
Enlarge / It was nice while it lasted... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Back in 2020, we reported that emulator developers were using a hole in the Xbox Store's app distribution system to get around Microsoft's longstanding ban on emulators running on Xbox consoles. This week, though, many of the emulators that were distributed through that workaround have stopped working, the apparent victims of a new crackdown by Microsoft.
Xbox emulator makers and users can't say they weren't warned. In the "Gaming and Xbox" section of Microsoft's official Store Policies, section 10.13.10 clearly states that "products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family."
Microsoft's enforcement of this clause has historically focused on removing emulators published as "private" UWP apps to the Xbox Store. Those apps could be distributed to whitelisted users via direct links accessed on the system's Edge browser, getting around the usual approval process for a public store listing.
Enlarge / Sometimes, building better Wordles means building the same Wordles... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO—When The New York Times acquired daily puzzle mega-hit Wordle at the beginning of 2022, there were plenty of skeptics who were sure it signaled the end of the game's incredible viral rise. Apparently, those skeptics included some of the people at the Times itself.
At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference Thursday, Times game producer and industry veteran Zoe Bell said the new owners expected Wordle's daily users "would just immediately decline" after the acquisition. Partly that was out of fear that some players would recoil from the "huge corporate behemoth" that now owned the indie hit. But it was also a simple recognition of the usual cycle for viral "zeitgeist" games: "How long can exponential growth go on?"
Just over a year after the acquisition, though, Bell said the company's efforts at "preserving Wordle as an Internet treasure" have paid off. That's largely thanks to a patient, "first do no harm" strategy that didn't seek to directly monetize the game or introduce a lot of half-baked changes to the game's successful formula, she said.
Enlarge / The view is pretty great... (credit: HBO)
New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Sunday evening. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Does Ellie believe Joel?
In this episode, Joel and Ellie make it! They're in Reno, and they find the doctors they've been trying to find this whole time. They just need to let the doctors run a few tests, and then they can ride off into the sunset together, their surrogate father/daughter bond intact and healthy and totally great. Right?
But yes, backing up a bit, I like how this episode gets back to some quiet time between Joel and Ellie, who get to joke around and feed giraffes and be generally wistful about their journey together. They have obviously and fully become a surrogate father/daughter pair to each other, which is saying something, given how reluctant they were to even be in the same space back at the beginning of the series.
What did you do, Joel, and why did you do it? (credit: HBO)
Unlike just about every other group of people we've run into in The Last of Us universe, there doesn't seem to be anything especially sinister about the Reno Fireflies. Yes, they decide pretty quickly that the only way to study and transmit Ellie's immunity is to remove her brain (This is explained somewhat in yet another episode-opening flashback where we meet Ellie's mother and do in fact learn the incredible true story of how Ellie got her knife, a joke I made a few recaps ago that ended up coming true).
But they are not, as far as we know, a community of sadistic evangelical vigilante brain-removers. They are, to borrow a phrase, putting the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. And it's not that I don't feel deeply for Joel, who is clearly not ready or willing or able to lose another daughter. But his response to the situation...
It leads me to my question: is Joel the bad guy? Have we, the audience, been hoodwinked by Pedro Pascal's dadly charms into rooting for a monster?
The only way to come to the opposite conclusion is by being hopelessly sentimental about the whole thing. And Joel's actions are made even worse because, as Marlene points out, Ellie would pretty clearly be willing to sacrifice herself for that greater good.
That said, I think both the game and the show do a good job of threading the needle between not defending Joel's actions but still explaining them. By the time we get to these final scenes, we understand how and why a very broken Joel would essentially sacrifice the human race for this girl he met relatively recently. You don't have to agree with it to understand it from Joel's point of view, and I think that's an amazing narrative feat.
What wouldn't you do to protect this face? (credit: HBO)
But getting back to your initial question, I think the most monstrous, selfish thing he does is lie about it to a girl who has huge trust issues and who relies on him for everything. Maybe you can understand why Joel is doing what he’s doing, but it’s an unfathomable betrayal of this person who he claims to care about.
But then there's those last few seconds of the season—that tight close-up on Ellie's face—where you can almost see the gears turning in her head. Does she just trust Joel so much that she just puts any doubts aside? Is she convincing herself to believe Joel for the sake of her own sanity? Or does she know Joel is lying and is just pretending to accept his story to protect their relationship?
I was thinking about how this game came out in 2013 and how a decade ago we were still very much in the middle of an anti-hero era in movies and TV. I'm mostly thinking of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and their many imitators. These shows asked viewers to explore the psyches of (mostly) white (mostly) men who were doing bad things, but who could still elicit sympathy and understanding because of some combination of good writing and great, charismatic performances.
The problem was that sometimes those shows were too good at what they were doing, and at least some viewers went from understanding and sympathizing with those characters to rooting for them in ways that could be uncomfortable. Walter White was ultimately a manipulative drug kingpin, a murderer and a serial liar, a megalomaniac addicted to power and its exercise. A non-trivial portion of the show's fanbase spent most of the series upset at his wife for being "an annoying bitch" who was insufficiently supportive of his criminal enterprise.
I really liked what The Last of Us finale accomplished insofar as it subverted my expectations. I went in ready for a mostly heartwarming tale of found family in an apocalyptic setting, and the season does deliver that. But this episode's haunted, desperate Joel, too eager to project his dead daughter onto Ellie and too willing to go on a killing spree in the interest of "protecting" her, adds an uncomfortable layer on top of their dynamic.
How I feel about season two will depend on whether the show wants to acknowledge and explore that discomfort or whether it wants us to think that Joel is a flawed badass who was "right" to do what he did just because he did it for sympathetic reasons.
So that's my season-ending mini-essay. As a game player who has some idea of what's coming next, how did the finale leave you? How are you feeling about this season as a game adaptation?
Mother, victim, knife donor... (credit: HBO)
Part 2 aside, I feel like Part 1 has one of the best-presented endings in gaming, which carries over quite well here. These final scenes paper over a lot of the narrative's weaker moments. And that close-up on Ellie's face—with all the vagaries in every slight twitch of her eyes and chin—was even more impressive in a 2013 game, where motion-captured performances tended to be much broader and more over-the-top.
The show finale includes almost shot-for-shot remakes of many of the key scenes at the end of the game, right down to the music cues in many instances. But there is one subtle but important narrative change I noticed, which goes all the way back to the first episode.
Remember when that '60s talk show panelist suggested that a fungal outbreak wouldn't just be society-destroying but that a cure wouldn't even be possible?
In the game, while it's not 100 percent clear that the doctors will succeed in turning Ellie's brain into a vaccine, there's nothing explicitly suggesting it's a foolish effort. In the show, that one line at the very beginning of the first episode kind of changes the entire calculus.
If that panelist was right, then maybe Joel was (accidentally) right to save Ellie? Was that line an effort to soften Joel's decision in the end and make his actions more forgivable?
This is one of the things about this season that feels too rushed. We know that “smearing Ellie’s blood on an open wound” doesn’t fix anything, but that’s also not how medicine works unless you’re a kid who doesn’t know anything about medicine. So the show’s immediate jump to “the only way to get a cure is by harvesting Ellie’s brain!” feels a bit fast, even by the standards of post-apocalypse frontier medicine.
Regardless, I’m not sure the talk show does much to redeem Joel because it seems pretty unlikely that he would be thinking of one throwaway line from one talk show that would’ve aired when he was a kid. And if we’re going off that line, are we supposed to be shouting, “This whole mission is stupid! A cure is impossible!” at our screens this whole time?
Sitting and waiting for season two... (credit: HBO)
I'm not trying to suggest Joel had arcane medical knowledge driving his decision. But in the context of a TV show, it's hard to see why the creators would throw in a line like that for any reason other than adding a bit of "maybe Ellie's death would have been in vain"-type doubt nine episodes later...
My last question for you: as a video game adaptation, do you think The Last of Us is better or worse than the current best video game adaptation, Super Mario Bros. (1993)?
Joking aside, this adaptation made me think a lot of the 2009 Watchmen movie, which I think suffered from being way too faithful to the source material. Here we had just the right amount of faithfulness with (mostly) useful additions/changes for the new medium.
The source material provided a good starting point, but if they had just ended with that starting point, I think the conversion wouldn't have worked nearly as well.
I’m looking forward to season two, but I need to fire up a change dot org petition to get us back to 13 episode seasons, please and thanks.
And that, I think, is “the last of us” talking about this season!! Ha ha ha!
Enlarge / The Meta Quest Pro.
When we reviewed the Meta Quest Pro headset less than five months ago, we balked at the device's $1,500 price point, which represented a whopping 275 percent price premium over the Quest 2 (with much less than a 275 percent increase in quality). Meta is already taking steps to scale back that massive asking price, though; as of Sunday, the headset is now available for $1,000 in the US and Canada (a similar price drop will take place March 15 in other Quest Pro countries).
The price drop puts the Quest Pro in line with other high-end headsets, including the untethered $1,100 HTC Vive XR Elite and the $1,000 Valve Index (which requires tethering to a gaming PC). That said, for practically the same money, you can get a $550 PSVR2 and the $500 PlayStation 5 to tether it to. And the Quest Pro is still 150 percent more expensive than the cheapest Quest 2, which supports almost all the same software and delivers a sufficient VR experience for most users.
Speaking of the Quest 2, Meta has also announced a 14 percent price drop for the 256GB version of that headset, from $500 to $430. That price drop brings that expanded-storage option almost all the way back to the $400 that Meta was charging for it before last year's unprecedented price increase.
Enlarge / He looks nice... (credit: HBO)
New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
In the games, we get a quick cut from the events of episode 6 to Ellie hunting wild game in the snow. As we take direct control of Ellie for the first time, we don't even know if the unseen Joel is alive or dead.
We also don't know anything about the mild-mannered stranger named David that Ellie stumbles upon while hunting. He even seems like a plausible Joel replacement at points during the early, amenable parts of their in-game team-up.
Seeing everything from Ellie's perspective really heightens the tension and mystery of David's whole arc, and I feel like the show kind of ruined that pacing here.
David suffers the most. It’s like the show needed to stuff him full of red flags to make sure that viewers really didn’t like him or feel bad for him, but it also makes him into a cartoon character in a show where most of the antagonists have already been a little flat.
We are in need of a more interesting characterization... (credit: HBO)
But I did not believe for even one fraction of one second that Ellie was in any danger of joining up with this creepy fundamentalist/mushroom cultist/child-hitter/cannibal guy, and it makes it weirder that the last sequence between them is framed as this big emotional showdown.
And also... this community had a lot of other people in it? Where did they go? A more organic and satisfying version might have had David’s own community seeing what a creep he is and turning on him, rather than a big dramatic one-on-one confrontation between David and Ellie in the world’s most flammable restaurant. It doesn’t sound like that’s how it goes in the games, but it also sounds like the character is just handled fundamentally differently.
Just hanging out... (credit: HBO)
Here's my main question for someone going in fresh: Did you ever feel like David was potentially just a nice guy and someone that Ellie could justifiably trust and/or let down her guard in front of? I feel like the game went to great pains to push the player in that direction for a while before the heel turn, and it just didn't work for me here. Then again, I knew some of David's dark secrets from the get-go...
The first scene where David and Ellie meet, on the other hand—I could see it! David (played by Scott Shepherd, a fairly prolific character actor who has one of those “what have I seen him in?” faces) has a certain reassuring avuncular charisma to him. Unfortunately, we’ve already seen too many Bad Guy markers from him, even before you find out that he’s been reading To Serve Man.
That gun looks a bit heavy, Ellie... (credit: HBO)
And you’re right that Ellie’s butchering of David at the end of the episode goes on just a bit too long for comfort. I’m just not sure what to make of it. Surely Ellie has been traumatized as much as she could possibly need to be for story purposes. It’s not as though David was close enough to her to really betray her. Between the two of them, Joel and Ellie do enough violence this episode to sour their tearful reunion a bit. Which is not really where I wanted to be heading into the season finale of a show I have otherwise mostly liked.
Who doesn't love a good stealth section? (credit: HBO)
All that death has been building toward the big finale, though. Without getting too spoilery, I wonder if you even remember what Joel and Ellie are trekking for/toward at this point, and if you have any big predictions for the final episode?
Oh yeah, Troy Baker is here, too. (credit: HBO)
I would love to be pleasantly surprised! Maybe the show has settled into this predictable rhythm to make it especially mind-blowing next week when all the scientists end up being super chill and professional.
Enlarge / Will someone please get this girl an electric heater?
New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here right after the episodes air. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
The Jackson commune where they end up might be the only place outside of flashbacks that we've seen that feels genuinely safe, maybe even genuinely comfortable. There's no FEDRA, no vigilantes waving don't-tread-on-me flags, no sign of infected. They aren't doomsday preppers trying to go it alone. They have Christmas lights! They have movie nights.
Something about that setting plus seeing his brother again—it's easy to revert to a previous version of yourself when you see a close friend or family member you haven't seen in a while—totally shatters Joel's defenses, and all the emotional subtext of his relationship with Ellie just comes tumbling out.
Having electricity and alcohol really seems to have taken the edge off for the people in this episode; if it weren't for the barricades (and the handwritten labels on all the whiskey bottles at the bar, a nice touch), Jackson could almost be a normal town.
All that said, feels like a couple dozen guys from Kansas City with heavy artillery could overtake this idyllic hamlet and ruin it incredibly quickly.
It also doesn't hurt that Jackson has a consistent source of hydroelectric power, something that just won't be possible in a lot of other places.
I do think the Big Emotional Decision in this episode feels just a little rushed. Joel bares his soul, Joel talks Tommy into taking Ellie, and then in the morning Joel has changed his mind and that’s that. It does work, it’s just a big pivot point for their relationship and it all happens pretty quickly.
Are my timely sitcom metaphors working for you?
Like a lot of the show's action sequences, the one at the science lab is a bit hard to comment on because it's pretty straightforward. A small roving band of Generic Jerks comes upon Our Heroes and fighting ensues. It is thematically resonant that Joel's fears about his own capabilities are proven "right" so soon after he acknowledges them.
And then the whole sequence with the monkeys and the university and everything set off my "this feels like a video game" sensors. Am I off the mark?
I suspect that Ellie, having been trained in the ways of survival, will suddenly find herself in the role of Unlikely Protector while Joel convalesces, may make an unlikely friend or two in trying to find him help. I am not sure about that but I'm more sure than I am that the show is going to let a main character die this early.
Enlarge / Watch out, if SMB3 is any guide, he breathes lasers...
Nintendo is often referred to as "the Disney of video games." But while Nintendo has long matched Disney's reputation for family-friendly home entertainment, it had nothing that could compare to Disney's domination in the physical world of theme parks.
That started to change in 2021, when Super Nintendo World finally opened in Osaka's Universal Studios Japan. Now, a very similar experience is coming to America with the opening of the Super Nintendo World section of Universal Studios Hollywood.
Ars got a sneak peek at the new section of the park just ahead of its Friday opening and came away utterly enchanted by the charming interactivity and Disney-esque attention to detail apparent throughout the park's newest themed area.
Enlarge / I think we all need a hug after that episode's conclusion...
New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Part of me tried to hold out hope that they might change that fate for the show—they've changed a lot of other stuff about the narrative, including a lot about Henry and Sam themselves. But really that was probably just wishful thinking born out of a deep connection with the characters. The specifics might change, but this plot beat needed to stay in there, precisely because it's so emotionally raw.
So, you say lots of details of the Henry-Sam story are different than in the games, and you said last week that this Kansas City story and the characters in it were different from the games. Without knowing what's coming in the next few episodes, what purpose do the changes serve? Just reformatting things to be more workable on TV or something else?
By contrast, one thing the show managed to establish quickly was the friendship between Ellie and Sam. We've talked about her "tough girl" exterior here before, but the thing this story hammers home so well is that, deep down, she's just a lonely kid who's quickly realizing that everyone she grows close to could leave her.
The point of this disease is to mindlessly spread itself at all costs, and these mushroom guys don't really have a capacity for thought or reason or strategy. With that in mind, I am not sure what the evolutionary imperative is for a "tanky" character class that rips people's heads off instead of infecting them.
I get the point of that character in a video game, and it's because sometimes you need some enemies to be bigger/harder/scarier to break up the flow of gameplay. In a TV show, the moment just played a little silly to me. The best things about this episode were subtle, and that moment was the precise opposite of subtle.
I can almost picture the story meetings where the game guys were like, 'We have to get a bloater in here somewhere!' and 'Is now the time when we can show a bloater?' and the TV people just giving up and saying 'Fine, you can have 60 seconds during the underground Infected riot!'
One thing you won't learn about Tears of the Kingdom in this trailer is its higher-than-expected price point.
Last night's Nintendo Direct video presentation included new trailers and a few new tidbits about the long-awaited Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. But that presentation didn't mention one of the game's newest "features"—a $70 price tag.
The $70 base price—a first for a first-party Switch title—was confirmed by Nintendo's own eShop preorder page (and an accompanying press release) Wednesday night. Not all of Nintendo's major upcoming first-party releases will see a similar price increase, though—Pikmin 4, for instance, has been listed at a $59.99 MSRP on the eShop.
"We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis," Nintendo said in a statement provided to Game Informer.
Enlarge / Taking a close look... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Friday that Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $35 million to settle a probe into the company's handling of widespread workplace harassment and discrimination allegations.
In an administrative order, the SEC said that complaints of workplace misconduct at Activision Blizzard "were not collected or analyzed for disclosure purposes" since at least 2018. This left Activision Blizzard management "lacking sufficient information to understand the volume and substance of employee complaints of workplace misconduct," and therefore unable to warn investors of any potential business risks those complaints entailed.
The SEC also found that Activision asked departing employees to enter into "separation agreements" that illegally asked those employees "to notify Activision Blizzard of any requests from an administrative agency in connection with a report or complaint." That violates SEC rules designed to protect whistleblowers and prohibit employers from impeding employee complaints to government agencies.
Mitchell (right) at the 2007 FAMB convention with former Twin Galaxies referee Todd Rogers and what appears to be a Donkey Kong cabinet with a modified joystick. (credit: David Race)
Over the years, King of Kong star Billy Mitchell has seen his world-record Donkey Kong scores stripped, partially reinstated, and endlessly litigated, both in actual court and the court of public opinion. Through it all, Mitchell has insisted that every one of his records was set on unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware, despite some convincing technical evidence to the contrary.
Now, new photos from a 2007 performance by Mitchell seem to show obvious modifications to the machine used to earn at least one of those scores, a fascinating new piece of evidence in the long, contentious battle over Mitchell's place in Donkey Kong score-chasing history.
The photos in question were taken at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers (FAMB) Convention, which hosted Mitchell as part of its "80s Arcade Night" promotion in July 2007. Mitchell claims to have achieved a score of 1,050,200 points at that event, a performance that was recognized by adjudicator Twin Galaxies as a world record at the time (but which by now would barely crack the top 30).
Enlarge / Say so long to the original PSVR's glowing blue lights. (credit: PlayStation Blog)
Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations."
The PlayStation 5 maker now expects to sell just 1 million PSVR2 units by the end of March, down from sales expectations of 2 million units in that period, as reported last October. Sony expects to sell about 1.5 million more headsets in the following fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, according to the report.
The scaled-back sales expectations would put the PSVR2 slightly ahead of the pace set by the original PSVR headset, which sold just under a million units in its first four months and 2 million units in just over a year. But that kind of sales pace looks less impressive today, when a headset like the Meta Quest 2 can sell a reported 2.8 million units in its first quarter, on its way to total sales of over 15 million, according to market analysis firm IDC.
Enlarge / Artist's conception of D&D fans holding back WotC's attempts to change the game's license. (credit: WotC)
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) owner Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has halted its attempts to update the longstanding Open Gaming License (OGL) that has dictated the legal use of the game's rules for decades. The move comes after weeks of controversy and belated attempts to partially scale back leaked plans for an OGL update.
The original OGL 1.0a, first released in the early '00s, will now "remain untouched" WotC announced in a tweet Friday. What's more, the entire D&D Systems Reference Document (SRD)—which also includes creative content like classes, spells, and monsters trademarked and copyrighted by WotC—is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, meaning it's free to use as long as proper credit is given.
WotC's full retreat in this licensing battle comes as WotC says survey feedback on the latest draft update to the license was "in such high volume and its direction is so plain," that the company felt it had to act immediately, as Executive Producer Kyle Brink wrote on the D&D Beyond blog.
Enlarge / Screenshots you can hear.
Update (5:35 pm ET): As user Cuesport77 points out on Reddit, Nintendo offers a system-level button remapping function that can get around most of the issues highlighted in this piece. Going into the Switch's system settings and swapping the left and right analog stick inputs (as well as the inputs for any other buttons you want) can help provide more standardized "dual stick" controls for the game.
This isn't the most convenient option, as players will have to undo the customizations when switching from GoldenEye to any other Switch game (and then back when going back to GoldenEye). These customizations also don't seem to be available on any controller connected to the system when in portable mode.
Nonetheless, Ars regrets not recognizing this option existed before publishing the below story, which is included in its original form (with a few noted updates) below.
A scene from the upscaled Xbox version of GoldenEye 007.
Fans of '90s split-screen shooter classic GoldenEye 007 (not to be confused with the loosely related 2010 Wii title of the same name) will only have to dig out their N64 controllers for a few more days. After 25 years, the game will finally see its first rerelease on modern consoles, with Switch and Xbox versions hitting on Friday, January 27.
As previously announced, the Switch version will be part of the awkwardly named Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership, which costs $50 per year. New footage of that emulated version of the original game shows the same blocky characters, muddy textures, and pixelated sprites that players know (and love?) from the original game. In addition to the previously announced online multiplayer support, the Switch version will also feature a widescreen mode to expand the 4:3 aspect ratio of the original game.
GoldenEye 007 as it will appear on the Nintendo Switch starting Friday.
Xbox One and Series S/X owners, meanwhile, will be able to enjoy GoldenEye 007 as part of an Xbox Game Pass subscription or as a free DLC download that's now included with the purchase of 2005's Rare Replay. The first footage of that Xbox gameplay shows this version's upscaled 4K visuals, which smooth out those low-res original textures and the aliased edges on authentic low-polygon character and object models. This version only promises a "legendary local multiplayer mode," though, in addition to "alternative control options" for a modern Xbox controller.
Enlarge / A scene from Proletariat's Spellbreak illustrating union members dodging alleged management interference.
Last month, workers at Spellbreak studio Proletariat became the third group within Activision Blizzard to form a union. Today, though, the Communication Workers of America is pulling back on its push for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election that could have forced parent company Activision Blizzard to recognize that union. In doing so, the CWA cites actions by Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak that have made "a free and fair election impossible."
In a statement provided to Ars Technica, a CWA spokesperson said Sivak "chose to follow Activision Blizzard's lead and responded to the workers' desire to form a union with confrontational tactics." Those tactics include "a series of meetings that demoralized and disempowered the group," according to the CWA.
Proletariat Software Engineer Dustin Yost said in an accompanying statement that those management meetings "took their toll" on the group by "fram[ing] the conversation as a personal betrayal, instead [of] respecting our right to join together to protect ourselves and have a seat at the table..."
Enlarge / Yet another leader behind the Dreadwolf project has left bioWare.
BioWare's Mac Walters used a LinkedIn post this weekend to announce the end of a 19-year career at the company. The move is yet another in a long line of shakeups for the leadership team behind the sprawling, long-anticipated Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, on which he served as production director.
Walters' history at BioWare was primarily focused on the Mass Effect series, where he served as a writer and designer before rising to project director for 2017's Mass Effect: Andromeda and 2021's Legendary Edition remaster. He transitioned to the Dragon Age team after Legendary Edition to serve as Dreadwolf's production director, a role he said was akin to "both producer and director" in TV/film terms.
"So you have the vision for a product you’re helping to uphold—something you and the team want to do—but on the producer side, you are also responsible for figuring out how you’re going to support the team in creating that vision," Walters said in a May interview posted on the BioWare corporate site. "And then you work with the team to actually execute that vision.”
A sample game of Quordle. (credit: Merriam-Webster)
A year ago, the Wordle phenomenon was so huge that the venerable New York Times spent a "low seven-figure" sum to acquire the game and its massive player base. Now, a year later, the word-guessing game is still popular enough that blatant Wordle clone Quordle has been purchased by dictionary-maker Merriam-Webster.
As the name suggests, Quordle is simply a game of Wordle multiplied by four, with each guess simultaneously filling in information on all four boards. It's part of a wave of similar "multi-Wordle" clones that started with Dordle last January and has since expanded to include the ridiculous 100-fold guessing of Centordle and the absolutely ludicrous 1,000-fold Kilordle.
Apparently, "four at a time" was the sweet spot for Merriam-Webster, a 192-year-old dictionary company that isn't exactly known for daily puzzles in the same way that The New York Times is. But the Merriam-Webster website has included some basic word games and quizzes since at least 2015. And while the modern version of that Games & Quizzes landing page doesn't currently mention Quordle, the main Merriam-Webster website prominently features it as "a new daily challenge."
Enlarge / I'm sure they'll both be fine.
New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the premiere episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Anything that did surprise you in this episode, as someone who basically knows where all of this is going?
But yes, put me down as "generally uninterested in flashbacks that show us things we could have assumed given already-available information."
FreshRSS 
