I was tempted to resist writing anything about the announcement of Ghost of Yōtei. It’s increasingly difficult to have a mature conversation about anything to do with video games without one pile-on or another happening, and I had more than enough of a pile-on from my review of Ghost of Tsushima to last me a lifetime. But I’ve been very…
Be warned: this article is half news and half me ranting because I am sick of layoffs. I hate hearing that people’s livelihoods are at risk, and I hate that it’s not easy to get back up anymore because layoffs are industry-wide. There is nowhere these talented people can go…
Microsoft has announced a substantial suite of changes to its Game Pass…
Another Not-E3 has come and gone, and some of the games have…
I feel for the people who are saying Final Fantasy XVI isn’t “their Final Fantasy.” I’m an arena FPS fan. I know what it’s like to watch something you love fall out of favour and either disappear entirely (Unreal, Tribes) or watch it try to contort itself into something else…
Read More
As anyone in PR or communications will tell you, the best time to make a catastrophic announcement is when everyone is busy looking elsewhere. You don’t want to hide it, but you want to push it through the news cycle at a time when you’ll only generate half as many…
Read More
Artists are forever predicting the future. Sometimes the predictions are merely a testing idea that doesn’t play out. Sometimes they nail it. We’re about to talk about an example of artists totally nailing it. Overnight (for us here in Australia) Apple revealed the Vision Pro; a new high-end set of…
Read More
Nagasaki in Japan has a unique characteristic among Japanese cities. It has always been the most open location to foreign culture and influence. Even when Japan closed itself off to the rest of the world, Nagasaki continued to be its connection to the outside. This meant that the city took…
Read More
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not a good game. I “awarded” it the rare 0/10 score here on DigitallyDownloaded.net, and most of the other critics have not been much more positive about it. As always happens when a game is a disappointment on any level, the fangs from…
Read More
“New US$69.99 price may negatively impact PS5 game unit sales, data suggests. Reports indicate that PlayStation users are buying less (sic) games, and Sony’s data suggests that higher costs are a reason why unit sales have dropped.” This lede, published by TweakTown, seems ludicrous. It’s one of those real stating-the-obvious…
Read More
I know that this is something of an unusual article for DigitallyDownloaded.net, but it has been such a weird week I felt compelled to write it. It truly has been a surreal week for political discourse here in Australia. Four days ago, our national broadcaster published an article about how…
Read More
AI has really taken the world by storm over the last year or so, and now developers are actively using it for everything from script writing, to art, and code generation. The problem is… this is not good at all for the creativity and artfulness of games. At all. That’s…
Read More
“My job is different now since Midjourney v5 came out last week,” an artist at an independent game developer wrote in a recent Reddit post. “I am now able to create, rig, and animate a character that’s spat out from MJ in two or three days. Before it took us…
Read More
I was almost going to skip past this year’s MLB the Show 23. Partly because I’m still playing last year’s edition, and… well, no, that was the only reason. I am still playing last year’s iteration and I don’t see any value in the iterative annual upgrades of sports games…
Read More