Nanolathe is the latest example of a fascinating subgenre of real-time strategy game: Chris Taylor's 1997 hit Total Annihation but with something more. Nanolathe offers an open source MIT-licensed 2.5D RTS engine reimplementing the original plus three decades of the quality-of-life tweaks: a perfect access point for anyone who played it way back when but might now be intimidated by Beyond All Reason's sprawling 150-player Götterdämmerungs. — Read the rest

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I'm about to say something bold and trailblazing: the triple-A game development industry isn't particularly creative and has stagnated significantly, in large part thanks to overinflated budgets bringing with them astronomical revenue goals that heavily discourage risk-taking or innovation. Cower as this fresh young firebrand says what we're all thinking! — Read the rest

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Remember when the PS5 Pro launched and we all lost our collective minds about it costing $700, which is, to be fair, still an egregious price for a console? Good times.

If only we knew, right? The enormity of the AI component crunch hadn't quite hit us yet, and a future where people could still afford to play video games still seemed possible. — Read the rest

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2014 horror game P.T. has left an enduring legacy behind, just as much for what it wasn't as what it was. It was a pitch-perfect bite-sized horror experience from the mind of gaming auteur Hideo Kojima. It wasn't, however, a full-sized, multi-hour game with a massive bag of tricks — that was teased at the end. — Read the rest

The post You can now play P.T. natively on PC, no remake required appeared first on Boing Boing.

It's taken 37 years for Nintendo's humble Game Boy to hit puberty, but the hour has finally come. What's even cooler than a video game console you can carry around in your pocket? One the size of an actual person that runs on game cartridges a family of four could eat dinner on, of course. — Read the rest

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I mean, fair play, if the Hollywood machine can turn games like Minecraft and Call of Duty into movies, nothing is off limits. If you've never played Embark's twin titans The Finals and ARC Raiders, the former is an immensely stylish capture-the-flag shooter with some of the best movement in any game I've played and the latter is an extraction shooter responsible for ruining scores of friendships. — Read the rest

The post The Finals and ARC Raiders, multiplayer games with no plot, to get film adaptations appeared first on Boing Boing.

Embark's promised big next step in Arc Raiders is set to release on October 8th. Will it bring back the fading player base?

Arc Raiders had one of the most exciting launches and ramp-ups in years. It held on for a few months, but then rapidly lost players, at a rate that seemed intentional but was not. — Read the rest

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As a big fan of Naughty Dog's zombie-killing/teenage angst simulator The Last of Us, I was gutted to discover that an ongoing multiplayer mod for The Last of Us: Part 2 had been axed by Sony. The moment you decide to charge for a mod, you're making money off someone else's IP and open to be beheaded for it. — Read the rest

The post Playing The Last of Us in first person is like an entirely different game appeared first on Boing Boing.

With the hype behind Grand Theft Auto 6 reaching cataclysmic levels, it was only a matter of time before our other American cultural institutions started taking notice. Let no one say that Saturday Night Live hasn't cast off its reputation for being slightly behind the times: they've finally done a GTA 6 sketch. — Read the rest

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Remember when your friends roped you into Lethal Company, then Peak, then Big Walk, then that game where you just walk around a run-down house picking up leaves? So-called 'friendslop' — a term I really, really hate that describes small, low-scope co-op indie games — has become a thriving industry all its own, rivaling even the dreaded cozy game in its ubiquity. — Read the rest

The post The next co-op indie darling is probably going to be an egg-cracking simulator appeared first on Boing Boing.

Id Software's 1992 shooter Doom now runs on toothbrushes, alarm clocks and all sorts of other modern gadgets that contain tiny supercomputers. But it doesn't run on the 8-bit home computers (or even 16-bit ones) that are even older than it is. — Read the rest

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In the early days of computer game development, Star Trek was a popular topic for young programmers with access to mainframes. Players could hunt Klingon ships across the galaxy's numbered sectors while conserving their dilithium crystals and photon torpedoes. The programs were copied, edited and expanded by those who played them—or just made over from scratch. — Read the rest

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My RTX 3090 is at a board-level repair shop, and I'm not going to spend the kind of money a modern, already two-year-old video card costs to replace it if it's dead. I threw GeForce Now on my 2017 Linux/Windows laptop, and it seems to work better than my 24Gb Nvidia monster card, even when it was working. — Read the rest

The post A ThinkPad T480 just replaced my RTX 3090 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is fifteen years old. While it's undoubtedly one of the best games ever made, anything will start to wear thin after a decade and a half, except perhaps true love and/or illegal narcotics. With the sequel still nowhere to be seen outside of vague promises from Bethesda that it is a real game that's still being worked on, we swear, Skyrim's fans have had to get… creative to squeeze more enjoyment out of their favorite game. — Read the rest

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