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      Why are younger generations embracing the retro game revival?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 2 April - 11:13

    Retro video games and aesthetics are having a moment, but it’s not just gen X and older millennials reliving their heyday: younger millennials and gen Z are getting in on the nostalgia too

    The bouncy, midi melody of Nintendo’s Wii theme descends into a drill beat . A Game Boy Colour opens up into a lip gloss case . ASAP Rocky goes “full Minecraft” in a pixelated hoodie, and a panting man bobs up and down with his arm stuck in a bush . This is not a glitch. Both online and IRL, pop culture is embracing the aesthetics of retro gaming.

    On TikTok, #retrogaming videos have amassed over 6bn views. On YouTube , uploads have increased 1,000-fold. Spotify users are creating 50% more retro-gaming-themed playlists than they were at this time last year, and live streamers are cashing in on the repetitive catchphrases and mechanical movements of NPCs (non-player characters). So why, in this age of hyperrealistic graphics and ever-expanding technological possibility, are younger generations captivated by an era of technological limitation?

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      ‘It’s very easy to steal someone’s voice’: how AI is affecting video game actors

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 29 March - 10:02

    The increased use of AI to replicate the voice and movements of actors has benefits but some are concerned over how and when it might be used and who might be left short-changed

    When she discovered her voice had been uploaded to multiple websites without her consent, the actor Cissy Jones told them to take it down immediately. Some complied. “Others who have more money in their banks basically sent me the email equivalent of a digital middle finger and said: don’t care,” Jones recalls by phone.

    “That was the genesis for me to start talking to friends of mine about: listen, how do we do this the right way? How do we understand that the genie is out of the bottle and find a way to be a part of the conversation or we will get systematically annihilated? I know that sounds dramatic but, given how easy it is to steal a person’s voice, it’s not far off the mark . ”

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      If life is one giant computer simulation, God is a rubbish player | Dominik Diamond

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 29 March - 09:00 · 1 minute

    While religion doesn’t feature much in video games, I find the theory that we are all characters in a huge sim ever more believable – and appealing

    It’s Easter weekend, when Catholics like me spend hours in church listening to the extended editor’s cut of a story whose ending we already know. Sitting there for the millionth performance of the Passion recently, I got to thinking about how few religious video game characters I’ve ever encountered. It’s interesting that in a world where so many people’s lives are dictated by religious beliefs, there is such a scarcity of religion in games. I mean, you could argue that all games are Jesus homages, with their respawns and extra lives, but even I admit that’s a stretch.

    The Peggies in Far Cry 5 are a mind-controlling violent cult; those Founders in BioShock Infinite use religion to elevate and justify hatred of foreigners; and you have those wackadoodles in Fallout worshipping atomic bombs. Religion is almost exclusively used as means for leaders to get minions to do bad things. (Admittedly, they may be on to something here.) I guess that when so many video games are structured so as to set you up as a lone protagonist, up against a huge force, religion is a fairly obvious go-to villain.

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      ‘I wasn’t sure it was even possible’: the race to finish 80,000 levels of Super Mario Maker

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 28 March - 13:31

    A small team of skilled players set themselves a near-impossible task: to complete every level of Super Mario Maker before Nintendo shut its servers. Did they manage it?

    On 14 March, Team 0% was close to finishing its seven-year mission to complete every single uncleared level in the 2015 Nintendo game Super Mario Maker – all 80,000 of them. Two hellish maps stood in their way: Trimming the Herbs and The Last Dance. And time was ticking. Nintendo had announced it was shutting down the game’s servers on 8 April, and if the levels weren’t completed by then, they would remain forever unfinished. Team 0% would fail at the last stretch of their marathon.

    When Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for its Wii U console , it was packed with platforming levels made by its design team. But the game’s lasting appeal came from the tools it gave players to make their own levels that they could share online. The only barrier to uploading was that its creator must have completed the level at least once, proving that it was possible.

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      Pushing Buttons: What makes Dragon’s Dogma 2 a fiery breath of fresh air

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 15:00 · 1 minute

    In this week’s newsletter: Casting away all the tropes of today’s open world games, Capcom’s unforgiving, unpredictable RPG is a sequel unlike anything else

    • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

    I love when a game properly captures me, to the extent that I’m thinking about it throughout the day while going about my real life. It doesn’t happen very often these days, because I have played too many games in the past 30 years and am becoming immune to their most common spells. When it does happen, it’s usually because a game does something I haven’t seen before – like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last year, with its madcap contraptions. Or sometimes – as with Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I am very much still playing after reviewing it last week – it’s because it does something I have seen before but not for a very long time.

    In the 12 years between the original Dragon’s Dogma and this sequel, the only game that has come close to recapturing its chaotic and stubbornly idiosyncratic brand of fantasy action role-playing was Elden Ring. This is a game in which you can screw up quests by faffing about for too long before pursuing your next objective, where a griffin can show up in the middle of an otherwise unexceptional journey through the countryside and claw you near-instantly to death, where the interdimensional being who serves as your travelling companion can contract a mysterious illness and unleash the apocalypse on your game save. There’s only one save slot, so every decision you make matters. Makethe wrong one, and you have to live with it.

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      Atari 400 Mini review – a fascinating adventure in the land of 8-bit

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 14:00 · 1 minute

    Yes, it’s a museum piece – but this mini Atari home console, reconfigured for modern gaming systems, offers a compelling retro experience

    To a kid growing up in the UK in the 1980s, the Atari 400 and 800 machines seemed impossibly glamorous. While most of my friends had Commodore 64s or ZX Spectrums (along with the occasional Amstrad or Acorn Electron), I only ever saw Atari computers on cool TV shows and movies, such as Videodrome and Police Story. Launched in 1979, these two models boasted an Antic video processor providing superior graphics for the era, as well as a sound chip named Pokey for improved audio. They were, like the Apple II, seminal machines for young game coders looking to create new types of experience beyond simple arcade conversions.

    Opening up the new Atari 400 Mini was, then, an oddly emotional experience. The latest nostalgic release from Retro Games is a nicely detailed facsimile of the original computer, featuring a non-functional version of its famed membrane keyboard in luscious 1970s beige, orange and brown, as well as four joystick ports along the base (now USB rather than the original Atari joystick port standard). The console comes with a new version of the classic Atari CX40 joystick, which subtly adds eight extra buttons, thereby allowing for the fact that Atari 400/800 games could call on the keyboard to provide extra input options.

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      Unity lays off hundreds of Weta Digital engineers as it pivots back to games

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 29 November - 16:47

    Kaboom!

    Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    Game engine-maker Unity has announced plans to lay off 265 workers—or just under 4% of its roughly 7,000-person workforce—as it winds down a partnership with special-effects house Weta Digital and refocuses on its core gaming business.

    Unity spent a cool $1.625 billion in cash and stock to purchase the tech division of the Peter Jackson-led Weta Digital just over two years ago , taking in 275 company engineers in the process. The vast majority of those engineers are now being let go as Unity has "terminated its obligations to provide certain services to Weta FX and also amended certain intellectual property rights between the parties," according to a recent SEC filing and Reuters reporting .

    The Weta Digital acquisition came as game engines like Unity and Unreal were increasingly being embraced by Hollywood studios as the basis for their digital-effects work. The deal was also part of an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions Unity undertook after its late 2020 IPO . That buying spree included cloud gaming-service Parsec , mobile ad giant Ironsource , and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch , to name just a few.

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      These are the last Prime Day deals on Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation games

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 12 July, 2023 - 20:40 · 3 minutes

    GettyImages-1079392540-640x427.jpg

    (credit: Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images )

    We're in the final stretch for Prime Day , and a lot of the early sales have either been sold out or discontinued. If you're a console gamer, now is the perfect time to snag a terrific deal on some popular titles, and these are available on multiple platforms, ranging from Nintendo's Switch to Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S. Here are some of our favorite video game deals from Prime Day 2023.

    Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs .

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      How The New York Times managed to avoid ruining Wordle

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 24 March, 2023 - 12:19 · 1 minute

    Sometimes, building better Wordles means building the same Wordles...

    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 thanks in large part 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.

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