In LA last week, horror production company Blumhouse announced that it was entering the video game market with its indie horror label Blumhouse Games. Jason Blum, Louise Blain and Zach Wood discuss its approach

A new indie video game publisher made its debut in Los Angeles last week: Blumhouse Games, a division of the horror movie production company co-founded by director Jason Blum in 2000. Unsurprisingly, its specialty will be horror. During the livestreamed Summer Game Fest showcase, Blum and creative lead Louise Blain announced a slate of six experimental horror games, the first of which, Fear the Spotlight, will launch later this year.

Blum described the games label as “going back to our roots, with a focus on indie horror, pushing boundaries and elevating new, original stories”. Like the company’s movies, from Paranormal Activity to M3GAN, its games are all low-budget productions with interesting ideas. The slate includes Project C, a new project from the creators of the brilliant and unusual cine-game Immortality; Grave Seasons, a farming-life game where one of the townspeople is a serial murderer; and Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-styled low-poly horror game about two teenaged girls and a seance gone awry, made by a two-person husband-and-wife team.

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© Photograph: Summer Game Fest

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© Photograph: Summer Game Fest

• US-born teenager was set for sport’s Olympic debut
• Sister pays tribute to ‘the most amazing brother’

JJ Rice, who had been chosen to represent Tonga at the Paris Olympics, has died in a diving accident. He was 18.

Rice’s father, Darren, confirmed his son’s death on Monday to the Matangi Tonga newspaper.

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© Photograph: Courtesy Rice Family

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© Photograph: Courtesy Rice Family

• Murray selected in singles team but unsure on doubles
• Boulter will be sole GB player in women’s singles

Andy Murray faces an uncertain wait to see if he will make the cut for the Olympic doubles draw alongside Dan Evans as he deliberates over attending his fifth and final Olympic Games in Paris.

Emma Raducanu, meanwhile, has opted out of competing at the Olympics despite also being offered one of the Olympic quota places. Katie Boulter will be the sole women’s singles selection.

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© Composite: PA/Action Images

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© Composite: PA/Action Images

The complete source code for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) version of Doom has been released on archive.org. Although some of the code was partially released a few years ago, this is the first time the full source code has been made publicly available.

↫ Shaun James at GBAtemp

The code was very close to being lost forever, down to a corrupted disk that had to be fixed. It’s crazy how much valuable, historically relevant code we’re just letting rot away for no reason.

• Ledecky wins 400m free to punch Paris ticket
• Walsh, 21, sets world record in 100m butterfly

Katie Ledecky is heading to her fourth Olympics, an accomplishment that seemed unimaginable when she was a 15-year-old kid in London.

These days, it wouldn’t seem like a Summer Games without her.

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© Photograph: Darron Cummings/AP

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© Photograph: Darron Cummings/AP

You may be too much in the parent role, forcing him into the child role

The question My son is 26 and intelligent and lives on his own. But he can’t hold down a job and spends his time playing video games and living on takeaways. He has inherited some money, which is about to run out.

The problems began when he started smoking cannabis at 16. It quickly became a serious addiction. He has struggled with depression since his teens and has seen several counsellors, but doesn’t appear to have made much progress. He takes antidepressants, which help a bit. He stopped smoking quite abruptly about a year ago, but not much changed. He is doing an access to higher education course and has a university place in September, but he rarely goes to college. He never cleans up, doesn’t do laundry and his personal hygiene is poor. I’ve been doing his housework, but he’s asked me to stop. I want to, but I also know how disgusting it will get.

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© Photograph: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

• Forty-one-strong Dolphins team named for the Games
• Campbell: ‘I can leave the pool with peace and with love’

Cate Campbell wished for the fairytale ending, but says her illustrious Olympic career finishes in peace and with love. The four-time gold medallist has failed in her bid to become the first Australian to swim at five Olympics. “By God, I gave it a really good crack,” Campbell said.

On a Saturday night when pop star turned swimmer Cody Simpson also missed selection for the Paris Olympics, Campbell was seventh in the women’s 50m freestyle at Australia’s trials in Brisbane. Campbell, after missing qualifying for the 100m freestyle final by one-hundredth of a second on Friday night, ends her Olympic career with four gold, one silver and three bronze medals.

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© Photograph: Patrick Hamilton/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Patrick Hamilton/AFP/Getty Images

Take a look inside the coaching WhatsApp group behind Simone Biles, Tom Daley and Sha’Carri Richardson

In January 52 phone numbers were added to a new WhatsApp group. It was called “Preparation for Paris” but may as well have been dubbed the Golden Group, assuming things go to plan this summer. Those phone numbers belonged to 52 leading coaches aiming for Paris 2024, hailing from 15 different countries and 19 sports. All of them are women.

It includes the two-times Olympic champion New Zealand shot-putter Valerie Adams, now a coach and chair of the World Athletics Athletes’ Commission. Simone Biles’s former coach Aimee Boorman is also there. So too is the Olympian Sara Symington, now head of Olympic and Paralympic programmes for British Cycling. The former American sprinter Mechelle Lewis Freeman is also involved, as coach for the USA women’s relay team, managing stars including Sha’Carri Richardson. Another is Jane Figueiredo, the longtime coach to British diver Tom Daley, set to compete at his fifth and final Olympics.

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© Photograph: FCN

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© Photograph: FCN

From Kaun Banega Crorepati to Lot’s wife, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which archipelago was the first Unesco world heritage site?
2 Which Oxford philosopher devised the trolley problem?
3 What was raised from the Solent in 1982?
4 Which company had 13 employees when Facebook bought it for $1bn?
5 What is the largest living reptile?
6 The TV show Kaun Banega Crorepati features in which film?
7 What branch of the US armed forces was created in 2019?
8 Which singer said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”?
What links:
9 Jeffrey Archer (FF8282); Imran Khan (804); Nelson Mandela (46664)?
10 Gibraltar; Hamilton; Jamestown; Stanley?
11 Chioma Nnadi; Edward Enninful; Alexandra Shulman; Liz Tilberis?
12 Orpheus and Eurydice; Lot’s wife; Bob Dylan film?
13 England (10); Germany (1); Italy (20); Scotland (54); Spain (36)?
14 Born Genoa; died Valladolid; buried Seville?
15 Cliff Booth; Cameron; Jane Gardner; Sonny Hooper; Colt Seavers?

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© Photograph: Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images

A teenage Riley gets to know Anxiety and Envy in the Pixar animated sequel, and Westeros descends into civil war as the Game of Thrones prequel returns

Inside Out 2
Out now
The first Inside Out gave us five personified emotions living inside the mind of 11-year-old Riley. Now a teen, Riley and her brain must contend with the arrival of new emotions, including Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

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© Photograph: Disney

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© Photograph: Disney

As anticipation builds for the upcoming Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games, security researchers and officials have observed an uptick in scams abusing legitimate Olympics branding. French Gendarmerie officials discovered over 300 bogus ticketing sites aiming to steal money and personal information by deceiving individuals who are in a hurry to book tickets for the events. Recent research investigates a prominent example (paris24tickets[.]com) from these websites. The site appears among the top paid results in Google searches and promotes itself as a secondary marketplace for sports and live events tickets.

Website Incorporates Official Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games Branding

The 'paris24tickets[.]com' website appeared professional and legitimate at first glance. The site advertised itself as a “secondary marketplace for sports and live events tickets,” and was displayed as the second result among sponsored Google search results for 'paris 2024 tickets.' It allowed visitors to navigate through upcoming Olympic events, select event specific tickets, and enter payment information. Its polished design resembled that of trusted ticketing platforms, along with the official Olympics ticket purchase site. Proofpoint researchers warned that the website was entirely fraudulent despite its authentic look and feel. The site was likely collecting users’ financial and personal information rather than actually processing ticket orders. The researchers acted swiftly to suspend the misleading domain upon its discovery. [caption id="attachment_77366" align="alignnone" width="2800"] Impersonating domain 'paris24tickets[.]com' (Source: archive.org)[/caption] [caption id="attachment_77365" align="alignnone" width="2800"] Official Olympics Ticketing Site (Source: https://tickets.paris2024.org)[/caption] The researchers noticed that in some cases, the scammers even sent emails promising "discounts" on coveted tickets to victims. This tactic was likely done to lure unsuspecting individuals, who may have been desperate to secure tickets at lower costs. Victims who have provided their personal or financial information on the fraudulent website risk having their identities and money stolen. The scammers behind these websites may also collect important personal data, such as names, contact information, and credit card details, for sale or further malicious campaigns.

French Gendarmerie Nationale Reported the Discovery of 338 Scam Sites

The 'paris24tickets[.]com' website represents just a tiny fraction of a much broader network of fraudulent Olympics domains. The French Gendarmerie Nationale had identified approximately 338 such websites since March 2023, and made subsequent efforts to shut them down; 51 of these sites were stated to have been closed while 140 of them were put on notice. The fraudsters behind these scams likely rely on sponsored search engine ads and targeted emails to drive traffic to impersonating websites. Offers of special deals and discounts are further lures to draw-in potential victims. [caption id="attachment_77367" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Source: Shutterstock[/caption] 200 French gendarmes had been mobilized as a distinct unit to monitor the internet and various different social networks for Olympics ticketing-related fraud and mass resales, under the direction of the Europol. These units work along with the DGCCRF (Directorate General for Consumer Affairs, Competition and Fraud Prevention) in France. Captain Etienne Lestrelin, director of operations at the unit, told France Info radio that social media such as Facebook, Leboncoin, Telegram and Instagram were often “the primary source of resale attempts.” He added, “This is an exchange from individual to individual. Except that the buyer does not know if the person really owns the tickets, since they are virtual tickets, not tickets paper. So people are selling you wind, we don't know what they're selling." Lestrelin advised that tickets sold at too low of a price can alert potential buyers: "You will never have a ticket below its original cost. The goal of people who were able to buy tickets in volume and with the intention of reselling them, it is to make a profit So it is an alert if you find a much cheaper ticket. The sentence to remember is that there is no. very good deals on the internet, it's not possible." He instructed that it was also not possible to own a ticket before the event begins and QR Codes are generated. Anyone who claims to be currently in possession of a ticket, or owns tickets that seem visually legitimate, is still a fraud. He warned buyers to be vigilant about buying such tickets outside of official sources because it can also be an offense. "You are associating yourself with the offense that the seller commits when he resells without going through the official website. This is a criminal offense," he stated. To validate purchases, buyers can cross-check provided references with the official Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games application. Buyers who suspect that they may have been duped can report to a police station, a gendarmerie or the DGCCRF. Legitimate ticket purchases can be made through the official ticketing website or official sub-distributor network.

An anonymous reader shares a report: City building simulations are not real life. They can be helpful teaching tools, but they abstract away many of the real issues in changing communities. And yet, sometimes a game like Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) will present an issue that's just too timely and relevant to ignore. Such is the case with "Economy 2.0," a big update to the beleaguered yet continually in-development game, due to arrive within the next week or so. The first and most important thing it tackles is the persistent issue of "High Rent," something that's bothering the in-game citizens ("cims" among fans), C:S2 players, and nearly every human living in the United States and many other places. C:S2 has solutions to high rent, at least for their virtual citizens. They removed the "virtual landlord" that takes in rent, so now a building's upkeep is evenly split among renters. There's a new formula for calculating rent, one that evokes a kind of elegant mathematical certainty none of us will ever see: "Rent = (LandValue + (ZoneType * Building Level)) * LotSize * SpaceMultiplier"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android; Zynga/Lucasfilm Games
Essentially Overwatch with wookiees, this fun team-based online shooter can be tense and exciting but lacks any truly original features

Announced three years ago at a Nintendo Direct livestream, Star Wars: Hunters is one of those games that you can’t imagine suffered a long and difficult pitch process. Someone just had to say “It’s Overwatch but in Star Wars” and the development budget was in their account that afternoon. It is a no-brainer, and of all the entertainment projects the Star Wars brand has been slathered on to over the past three years, it’s certainly among the most understandable and well crafted.

Set after the fall of the Galactic Empire, Hunters is a four-v-four team-based online shooter, which, like Overwatch, allows players to choose from a selection of hero fighters, each with their own abilities and strategies. You can be a minigun-wielding Stormtrooper, firing 500 rounds a minute into rebel scum, or a Miralukan sharpshooter with a long-range sniper rifle, or perhaps a Rebel warrior with team-healing gadgets. Basically it’s the standard team-shooter classes – tank, sniper, healer, etc – but with sillier names.

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© Photograph: LucasFilm Games/Zynga

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© Photograph: LucasFilm Games/Zynga

"Storytelling has been a social activity since the dawn of time. Board games can add another level to it with nuanced strategies for decision-making and objectives with epic stakes."

People like to make lists of storytelling board games. Designing a narrative board game is a distinct form of game design. TV Tropes, weirdly, covers Narrative Board Games. There are, of course, books about the stories built into boardgames. Board games have a robust history of recreating and validating imperialism, genocide, and slavery, which David Massey takes on in "Slave Play, or the Imperial Logic of Board Game Narrative." [SLPDF] Flanagan and Jakobsson take on the future of the board game in their book Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Storytelling has, of course, appeared on MetaFilter previously.

Survive a spooky theme park, embark on a punishing journey through ancient Iceland or try your hand at a magical card game – the year’s best games so far

Channelling the sci-fi military satire and extreme gloopy gore of Starship Troopers, Helldivers 2 was a surprise mega hit on its launch in February. Looking back we shouldn’t have been shocked: it delivers engrossing, hilarious co-op action in a range of desolate landscapes against horrible insects and crazed robots, and it makes each fight feel like part of a much wider story – a factor heightened by Arrowhead Game Studios’ excellent use of social media channels.

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Square Enix/Capcom

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Square Enix/Capcom

The Oscar-winning film took plenty of liberties with the truth but remains one of Britain’s favourite movies

It takes a bit of finding, but on the front of the old Carlton hotel in the sleepy seaside town of Broadstairs hangs a blue plaque. It’s an apartment block these days, but it marks the spot where some of the British team stayed and trained before embarking on their trip to the Paris Olympics almost 100 years ago.

More obvious is the confusion on the faces of the folk who stop and read it, desperately trying to reconcile their view of nearby Viking Bay and their memories of the opening scene from the old movie Chariots of Fire, where the cast splash along the surf to the soaring electronic score of Vangelis.

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© Composite: Alamy, Shutterstock

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© Composite: Alamy, Shutterstock

In the first of a series of interviews with remarkable Olympians, Britain’s most celebrated track athlete opens up about his relentless spirit, his disgraced ex-coach and the terrible secret he kept for 30 years

Twelve years on, it still gives you goose bumps – probably the greatest achievement in British Olympic history, accompanied by the greatest commentary. “Mo Farah gritting his teeth now, the arms have got to pump, the knees have got to come up high,” shouts Steve Cram from the commentary box, trying to make himself heard above the stadium din. He stands up, punching the air, willing Farah home. “He’s got to find something extra. He’s got to kick on. Come on Mo Farah. He’s going to get there. Mo Farah’s going to make it two golds on the run for Great Britain. Beautiful. The place erupts. He’s a double Olympic champion.”

This was, of course, London 2012. A week earlier, on 4 August, Farah had become the first Briton to win the 10,000m. Now, the refugee from Somaliland had become the first Briton to do the long-distance double – 5,000m and 10,000m. What’s more, he had done it at the same Olympics. Astonishingly, he did the same again four years later in Rio, a record equalled only by Finland’s Lasse Virén. Both Cram and Brendan Foster, who was commentating alongside him in 2012, have called Farah Britain’s greatest athlete, although for some he is a controversial figure. It’s a remarkable story. And we didn’t know the half of it back then.

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© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

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© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Activision has clarified Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 isn't 309GB after all -- or at least, you can download the core of it for less. From a report: This is despite Xbox's store page for the game stating that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's install size is a rather chunky 309.85 GB. This made many heads turn, because that seemed excessive. The Call of Duty team has now issued a correction with more detail. Writing on social media platform X, Activision stated the file size currently listed for Black Ops 6 "does not represent the download size or disk footprint" for its upcoming Call of Duty game. "The sizes as shown include the full installations of Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, Warzone and all relevant content packs, including all localised languages combined which is not representative of a typical player install experience," it explained, before adding: "Players will be able to download Black Ops 6 at launch without downloading any other Call of Duty titles or all of the language packs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report An unofficial site tracking titles in the Epic Games library may have just leaked a ton of upcoming games, as reported earlier by Wccftech. The site, called EpicDB, was taken offline shortly after it posted information scraped from the Epic Games Store catalog on Monday, but that didn't stop people from scanning the list and posting their findings. You can see the list of games from publishers like Bethesda, Sega, Sony, Square Enix, and others in a series of screenshots posted by a user on a ResetEra forum. While some, like Turok, are easy to spot, others are listed under previously rumored codenames, such as "Parkside" or BioShock 4. There are still other titles under codenames we haven't heard about. Some users speculate that "Momo" could point to a Final Fantasy 9 remake, while "Selma" may be the PC port of Red Dead Redemption 1. The codename "Utah" could also hint at the PC version of The Last of Us Part 2, which is rumored to be almost ready to launch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this week’s newsletter: While the blockbuster end of the games industry is in the doldrums, independent developers are leading a creative resurgence

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I’ve talked a lot about the declining state of the games industry in 2024: after an infusion of cash during the pandemic, when everybody was looking for safe ways to distract themselves and socialise indoors and the games industry’s growth was temporarily supercharged, this year has been an overcorrection. Studios and corporations that expanded too fast, made too many hires and acquisitions, have been laying off staff and shuttering studios. Developers looking for work have been finding fewer opportunities. And the games whose development was disrupted by the pandemic have been taking longer to make it out into the world, resulting in a comparatively sparse slate of titles this year compared with the bonanza in 2023.

You could see Summer Game Fest – the smaller event in Los Angeles that has de facto replaced E3 – as a reflection of this diminishment. What was once an enormous, expensive-looking sensory assault of a trade show in the cavernous halls of the LA Convention Centre is now a small cluster of buildings a few blocks from Skid Row. What were once ostentatious press conferences are now 90-minute-long trailer livestreams that you can watch on your laptop. I found it hard not to feel glum on my first day in Los Angeles last week; I felt like the best days of the games industry might be well behind us.

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© Photograph: Weta Workshop

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© Photograph: Weta Workshop

This summer is something else, a three-month run crammed with colour, drama, escapism. We’ll be there for every moment

• Support the Guardian’s award-winning sports coverage today

As the gloom of June gives way to the gloom of July, August and September, it is worth taking a second to consult the schedule. Because an unusually epic summer of global sport is well under way.

This is quite a thing. From Real Madrid’s triumph in the Champions League final at Wembley this month through to the women’s cricket T20 World Cup in October, we’re in the midst of a non-stop sporting bloom.

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© Illustration: Millie Chesters/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Millie Chesters/The Guardian

• The 14-times winner joins new French Open champion
• Murray may opt out of Games if not selected for doubles

Rafael Nadal is set to miss Wimbledon to prepare for the Olympic Games, where he will team up with Carlos Alcaraz in a dream doubles partnership.

The expected news was confirmed by Spain’s Olympic team captain, David Ferrer, on Wednesday, with Nadal having said last month that it would not be good for his body to switch surfaces from clay to grass.

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© Photograph: David Winter/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: David Winter/REX/Shutterstock

Word puzzles on LinkedIn. Logic challenges in The Washington Post. For news publishers and tech sites looking to both entice and engage users, games are serious business.

© Igor Bastidas

Preview of this autumn’s new edition promises fresh missions in the service of US power and a ‘ground floor’ rebuild of the gaming monster truck

Microsoft wasn’t messing about with its Xbox showcase this year. After a raft of announcements about job losses and studio closures, the company looked to give gamers what they wanted in its Sunday night Summer Game Fest slot, ending with a full 40-minute preview of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a game so large it will require a 300GB download, as well as continual online access even for the single-player mode, due to the amount of textures it’s going to be streaming from remote servers. As expected, the Xbox version will be available day one on GamePass, but there will be no platform exclusivity – the PlayStation version will arrive the same day: 25 October.

The game itself is set during the geopolitical tumult of the early 1990s, taking in the fall of the Soviet Union, the Gulf war and the transition of the US presidency from George Bush to Bill Clinton. As ever, the Campaign story is an airport novel spy thriller taking in deniable CIA ops, clandestine power struggles and conspiracies that go to the very top, dammit. Series regular Frank Woods has been gravely injured and withdrawn from active duty, giving way to reckless spec ops squad leader Troy Marshall and smart CIA handler Jane Harrow. When a mission screws up, they’re forced to go rogue, recruiting a ragtag team of tech nerds and glamorous assassins. It is almost definitely going to be your ass on the line here, sir.

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© Photograph: Microsoft

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© Photograph: Microsoft

In the middle of a troubled year for Xbox, Microsoft showed a packed slate of games for its Game Pass subscription service in 2024 and 2025

Xbox has not had the best year, so far. In January and February, a leaked announcement that formerly Xbox-exclusive games were about to make their way on to rival consoles the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch sent the most vociferous portion of its fanbase into a tailspin, convincing themselves that Microsoft was about to give up on Xbox exclusivity altogether. (In the end it was only four games, but Xbox’s leadership took their time clarifying.) In May, Xbox closed two well-loved studios that it had acquired in a spending spree a few years ago: Tango Gameworks (Hi-Fi Rush, The Evil Within) and Arkane Austin (Prey, Dishonored). All this comes on the back of flagging sales for its Xbox Series X/S consoles; analysts have estimated that the PlayStation 5 is outselling them lately by a factor of 5:1.

Microsoft will have been hoping to rescue the narrative with its Xbox games showcase, which was broadcast live on Sunday and screened at an event in Los Angeles for media, games industry and a coterie of Xbox fans. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a new Indiana Jones game and the return of brutal action-game series Gears of War led the pack in blockbuster games, but there were also plenty of smaller-scale announcements. With its Game Pass service, which offers an ever-changing library of games for a monthly fee, Microsoft has made a billion-dollar bet on Netflix-style streaming as the future of video games – and after its recent merger with Activision Blizzard, it now has a huge number of game studios making games for it.

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© Photograph: The Initiative/Crystal Dynamics

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© Photograph: The Initiative/Crystal Dynamics

With showjumping facing the scrap heap, Joe Choong and Liv Green fear having to leave their multi-discipline sport

At the end of a quiet, unassuming cul-de-sac, a steep hike from the centre of Bath, there is little giveaway of the dual Olympic ambition that has long absorbed the occupants of the last apartment on the street. But for those in the know, the signs are there: the vast number of trainers overwhelming the shoe rack outside the front door, the massage gun discarded on the sofa, the photograph on the window ledge showing two people beaming at the red-carpet premiere of the James Bond film No Time to Die.

The harsh, unforgiving world of elite sport is not a particularly welcoming place to find a fellow partner. Common ground located in shared aspirations can easily be lost in the cut-throat reality of individual success and failure. Joe Choong and Liv Green know that all too well.

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© Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

Vampire Therapist: "Guide vampires through centuries of emotional baggage, decades of delusions and the odd bout of self-loathing with real cognitive behavioral therapy concepts and become a Vampire Therapist! Even vampires need a shoulder to cry on when a neck to bite just won't do." Releasing July 18, demo available now.

Interview with the developer, who also voices multiple characters in the game. Cyrus Nemati is known for his roles as Ares, Dionysus, and Theseus in Hades (2018), among others.

KittyToy by Rakqoi (be sure to check out her itch.io user page for tips). Take care of and adopt stray kitties! Feed them, pet them, play with them! Inspired by Neko Atsume (discussed previously on the Blue).

Emmanuel Macron’s hopes for a summer of sporting pride now look like a very long shot

Emmanuel Macron had hoped that this would be a summer of sporting celebration for France, dominated by the first Paris Olympics for a century. Instead, events on track and field are now set to be eclipsed by political turmoil, following Mr Macron’s decision to call a snap parliamentary election following his humiliating defeat at the hands of the radical right in this weekend’s European polls.

In the lead-up to the Olympics - now less than 50 days away - Mr Macron had already been desperately searching for the feelgood factor. Having previously lamented the modest size of the national medal haul at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, he used a recent television interview to demand a top-five finish for France this summer on home soil.

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© Photograph: Lafargue Raphael/ABACA/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Lafargue Raphael/ABACA/REX/Shutterstock

"We took it to the streets and asked both hardcore and novice tabletop gamers." Meanwhile, on another forum... A loosely related blending of physical and digital. Some feel that It's The Apps That Are Wrong. A D&D-focused list of dice apps. There's also Elmenreich's "Game Engineering for Hybrid Board Games" [SLPDF]. Previously

Research article citation: Elmenreich, Wilfried. "Game Engineering for Hybrid Board Games." W: F. Schniz, D. Bruns, S. Gabriel, G. Pölsterl, E. Bektić, F. Kelle (red.). Mixed Reality and Games-Theoretical and Practical Approaches in Game Studies and Education (2020): 49-60.

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You put a dollar bill into the 'Ask The Brain' fortune telling machine and await its response. Roll a seven-sided die or use a random-number generator. One Two Three Four Five Six Seven

The post title is a nod to the time Mad Magazine did one better than this post - one issue came with a flexidisc record with EIGHT spiral grooves, each with the same song but a different ending. Here's all eight versions - in full or just the intro followed by each ending.

The first survey of Auriea Harvey, an influential Net artist turned game developer, traces the evolution of digital art from the 1990s to today.

About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other. I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding design decisions originate. Finally, I will conclude with some concrete ideas for improvement.

↫ Forbidden Tempura

Everything you ever wanted to know about 3DS cartridges and how they interact with the 3DS.

Many authors have written stories or novels inspired by RPG campaigns. There is debate about whether or not tabletop RPGs should be used as writing tools. Plenty of folks give the idea a thumbs-down, but save some room in your heart for the LitRPG. B&N has you covered with, of course, a list of novels that started life as RPGs.

P1: The Rule of Law P2: The Dark Dimension P3: The Chaos-Born Tiara P4: The Paper Victory

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"All this leads to the inevitable question, which one – perceived randomness or true randomness – should a GM aim to use in his [sic] games? After careful consideration, I don't think there is any one right answer to this question; depending on the circumstances, either could be correct." A neat previously featuring random maps.

It's Monday night at the National Guard Armory in northeast Minneapolis, which means it's time for Hmong Cornhole. A few dozen folks throw little bean bags into holes in rows of glossy wooden boards. They chat and fist bump and update scores on digital tablets. Kids occasionally run weaving through the boards, sometimes squirreling away bags from their parents.

It turns out that digital rights management and its consequences extend even beyond your passing when it comes to Steam. Valve has made it clear that no, you cannot will your Steam account or games to someone else when you die.

The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable” the response reads. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”

↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica

My wife and I make sure we know each other’s passwords and login credentials to the most important accounts and services in our lives, since an accident can happen at any time, and we’d like to be somewhat prepared – as much as you can be, under the circumstances – for if something happens. I never even considered merging Steam accounts, but at least granting access to the person named in your will or your legal heir seems like something a service like Steam should be legally obliged to do.

I don’t think Steam’s position here – which is probably par for the course – is tenable in the long-term. Over the coming years and decades, we’re going to see more and more people who grew up almost entirely online pass away, leaving behind various accounts, digital purchases, and related matters, and loved ones and heirs will want access to those. At some point over the coming decades, there’s going to be a few high-profile cases in the media about something like this, and it’s going to spur lawmakers into drafting up legislation to make account and digital goods transfers to heirs and loved ones not a courtesy, but a requirement.

In the meantime, if you have a designated heir, like your children, a spouse, or whatever, make sure they can somehow gain access to your accounts and digital goods, by writing stuff down on paper and putting it somewhere safe or something similar. Again – you never know when you might… Expire.

The Silicon Valley company was again lifted by sales of its artificial intelligence chips, but it faces growing competition and heightened expectations.

© Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going “off script” and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.

As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.

↫ Benj Edwards and Jose Zagal at Ars Technica

I’ve never used a Virtual Boy, and in fact, I’ve never even seen one in real life. It was mythical object when I was not even a teenager yet, something we read about in gaming magazines in The Netherlands. We didn’t really know what it was or how it worked, and it wasn’t until much later, in the early YouTube age, that I got to see what using one was actually like in the countless YouTube videos made about the device.

It seems it caused quite a few headaches, was cumbersome to use, had very few games, and those that were sold ended up collecting dust pretty quickly. In that sense, it seems not a lot has changed over the past thirty years.

Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it.

“We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” said Wilson.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

Ads in games are definitely not new – we’ve seen countless games built entirely around brands, like Tapper for Budweiser, Pepsiman, or Cool Spot for 7-Up – and banner ads and product placement in various games has been a thing for decades, too. It seems like EA wants to take this several steps further and use things like dynamic ad insertion in games, so that when you’re playing some racing game, you’ll get an ad for your local Hyundai dealer, or an ad for a gun store when you’re playing GTA in the US.

Either way, it’s going to make games worse, which is perfectly in line with EA’s mission.

With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vanguard to League that you can check out here. It’s a bit of a long read, but it does have some pictures.

↫ Lilu Cabreros in the League of Legends patch notes

The basic gist is that Vanguard is a closed-source, kernel-level rootkit for Windows that runs at all times, with the supposed goal of detecting and banning cheaters from playing League of Legends. This being a rootkit designed specifically to inject itself into the Windows kernel, it won’t work on Linux, and as such, the entire League on Linux community, which has been playing League for years now and even at times communicated with Riot employees to keep the game running, is now gone.

Interestingly enough, Riot is not implementing Vanguard on macOS, which League of Legends also supports – because Apple simply doesn’t allow it.

This is probably the most invasive, disturbing form of anticheat we’ve seen so far, especially since it involves such a hugely popular game. It’s doubly spicy because Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, which means a company owned and controlled by the Chinese government now has rootkits installed on the roughly 150 million players’ computers all over the world. While we’re all (rightly, in my opinion) worried about TikTok, China just slipped 150 million rootkits onto computers all over the world.

One really has to wonder where these increasingly invasive, anti-privacy and anti-user anticheat measures are going from here. Now that this rootkit can keep tabs on literally every single thing you do on your Windows computer, what’s going to be the next step? Anticheat might have to move towards using webcams to watch you play to prevent you from cheating, because guess what? The next level of cheating is already here, and it doesn’t even involve your computer.

Earlier this year, hardware maker MSI showed off a gaming monitor that uses “AI” to see what’s going on on your monitor, and then injects overlays onto your monitor to help you cheat. MSI showed off how the monitor will use the League of Legends minimap to follow enemy champions and other relevant content, and then show warnings on your screen when enemies approach from off-screen. All of this happens entirely on the monitor’s hardware, and never sends any data whatsoever to the computer it’s attached to. It’s cheating that literally cannot be detected by anything running on your computer, rootkit or not.

So, the only logical next step as such forms of cheating become more advanced and widespread is to force users to turn on their webcams, and point them at their displays.

I fired up League of Legends today on my gaming computer – which runs Linux, of course – and after the League client “installed” the rootkit, it just got stuck in an endless loop of asking me to restart the client. I’ve been playing League of Legends for close to 14 years, and while I know the game – and especially its community – has a deservedly so bad reputation, I’ve always enjoyed the game with friends, and especially with my wife, who’s been playing for years and years as well.

Speaking of my wife – even though she runs Windows and could easily install the rootkit if she wanted to, she has some serious doubts about this. When I explained what the Vanguard rootkit can do, her mouse pointer slowly moved away from the “Update” button, saying, “I’m not so sure about this…”

This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”.

Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders.

↫ Norbert Landsteiner

It’s wild to me that even for the very first video game, they already made what are effectively controllers anyone today could pick up and use. Note that this emulator can run more than just Spacewar!.

One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even “enhancement processors”.

↫ Fabien Sanglard

When I was a child and teenager in the ’90s, the capabilities of the SNES cartridge were a bit of a legend. We’d talk about what certain games would use which additional processors and chips in the cartridge, right or wrong, often boasting about the games we owned, and talking down the games we didn’t. Much of it was probably nonsense, but there’s some good memories there.

We’re decades deep into the internet age now, and all the mysteries of the SNES cartridge can just be looked up on Wikipedia and endless numbers of other websites. The mystery’s all gone, but at least now we can accurately marvel at just how versatile the SNES really was.

It all started in fall of 2022, when I was watching This Does Not Compute’s video on the history of graphing calculator gaming. Around the 5 minute mark, he offhandedly mentions the kind of processors TI’s graphing calculator line uses. Most of them use the Z80, the 89 and 92 use the M68K, and the Nspire line uses an ARM-based processor.

That really piqued my interest, since I already knew the processors that Sega’s retro game consoles used: The Z80 for the Master System, and the M68K for the Genesis. The calcs have a grayscale screen, but I wanted to know if anyone ever tried porting a Sonic game from the consoles to one of the calcs.

↫ grubbycoder

Right off the bat, after settling on the most appropriate graphing calculator to try and port Sonic 2 to, namely the TI-84+ CE with a 48Mhz eZ80 processor (“basically a 24-bit Z80”), 256 KB of RAM and a 320×240 display, the porting process runs into some serious roadblocks before any code’s even been written. Unlike the Sega hardware Sonic 2 runs on, the TI-84+ CE has no graphics hardware, the clock speed is effectively crippled at 12-20Mhz, a file format with a size limit of 64KB per file.

The rest of the story details the many difficulties that needed to be overcome, but in the end, the port is completed – and yes, you can now play Sonic 2 from the Master System on a TI graphing calculator.