A music video you can play: Indie rock inside the Unity engine

For nearly as long as video games have been around, they've enjoyed a tight relationship with pop music. As early as 1983, Bally-Midway collaborated with Journey to make a game full of licensed songs and the band members' digitized faces (which followed more than a decade of pinball cabinets featuring megaton bands), and that says nothing of media sensations...

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Ars’ plea: Someone make this into a series

Enlarge / Vancouver Public Central Library. Libraries are where books sleep when you're not reading them. (credit: GoToVan / Flickr) The past few years have seen an explosion in high-concept, high-budget adaptations for premium TV and streaming services, like The Expanse and Game of Thrones. Following in the footsteps of antecedents going back to...

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Review: WandaVision sticks the landing with a very Marvel-esque finale

Meet the happy couple: Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany). [credit: YouTube/Disney+ ] For all its touted meta-elements celebrating different TV decades, WandaVision wrapped up its nine-episode run in classic Marvel...

21h

We’re living on a planet of ants

Enlarge Susanne Foitzik is a proud myrmecologist: an entomologist who specializes in ants (it was a new vocab word for me, too). Her lab at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich studies the dynamics between slave-making ant species, which capture ants of other species and get them to work for them, and the host species they exploit. What genetic...

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How to beat Paper Mario really fast by… playing Ocarina of Time?

Probably the only Paper Mario speedrun you've ever seen that includes extensive Ocarina of Time gameplay. The idea of using video games as a way to achieve some form of Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) on classic hardware has come a long way since seven years ago, when TASbot publicly reprogrammed a Super NES on the fly via Super Mario World. There...

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Valve scraps revamped Artifact, dumps free, unfinished “2.0” version on Steam

Enlarge / Two posters, two free end-of-life games. (credit: Valve) The weird, woeful, and nearly redemptive development of Valve's digital card game Artifact has ended. Effective today, Valve has launched the 2018 game's total-overhaul "2.0" version as a completely free—and "unfinished"—card-battling game dubbed Artifact Foundry, and while it's playable,...

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Loop Hero review: I’ve somehow gotten hooked on an RPG that plays itself

Enlarge (credit: Devolver Digital / Four Quarters) I cannot think of a single YouTube trailer that would do the addictive, compelling new video game Loop Hero an iota of justice. That's not a remark on its 360p resolution or 8-bit color depth; we've seen plenty of games work within such confines while looking beautiful and fluid. But this dark RPG...

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New Nintendo Switch production to begin in June, will be 4K when docked

Enlarge (credit: Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) Nintendo's next Switch hardware revision has long been rumored, but details on what to expect from a possible "Switch Pro" finally began firming up on Wednesday, thanks to an apparent leak from its screen supplier. Bloomberg Japan has the scoop, and it points to Samsung as...

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EA confirms it isn’t secretly “fixing” FIFA matches

Enlarge / EA has convinced a set of class action lawyers that there isn't a secret algorithm affecting the results for FIFA Ultimate Team squads like this one. (credit: Electronic Arts) A group of California players has dropped a class-action lawsuit accusing Electronic Arts of secretly using a "Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment" (DDA) to secretly affect...

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AMD’s RX 6700XT GPU launches March 18 for $479

Enlarge / The RX 6700XT GPU reaches retailers soon. When will it reach average customers, however? Honestly, who's to say at this point? AMD's RDNA 2 push continues on March 18 with a newly announced RX 6700XT graphics card, starting at $479 and featuring just about the exact downscaled options you might expect from a card costing $100 less than...

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