I didn’t say it wasn’t? The point is that Niemann’s cheating is likely subtle and hard to prove, particularly in an over-the-board setting, because it isn’t as simple as playing one of the top engine moves every turn.

It’s also worth considering that Niemann is a GM-level player who might only need computer assistance at a small number of critical junctures in a match, rather than using assistance continually. In the same sense that doping elevated Lance Armstrong from an elite cyclist to a Tour de France winner, Niemann may be…

I’m surprised that this didn’t include ‘The Gambler’, which was among Caan’s favorites of his own films. As with some of the other picks, it draws Caan’s solid, tough-guy exterior into tension with an inner, subconscious weakness, which is a common thread in many of his best performances. There’s an indelible moment…

Maybe they just haven’t gone far enough and committed to making inventory management the actual game:

Really good movies are made to be shown in cinemas first and foremost. While you may not have the same level as immersion with a projector at home, there’s still a marked difference in experience: a close-up of an actor just registers differently when it looms over you and a very wide, long shot featuring an actor can…

It’s also happening in the other direction — Cem Bolukbasi has landed an F2 seat for this year having spent a number of years on the F1 e-sports circuit, and he’s the first driver to make that leap. He’s talked about the sheer physical demands of translating his virtual pace into real life:

It’s not just cutscenes and gameplay in Naughty Dog games — it’s that all of their systems create friction with each other and fail to produce a cohesive experience. For instance, they pepper their worlds with collectibles, which require the player to rummage around the scenery no matter the narrative context of the…

Who can forget the classic bitcoin explainer:

You can do substantial body piles without too many crashes on PS4, so there’s definitely some voodoo optimisation going on!

You’re probably right, but it’s hard to overstate how much the game starts subtly breaking long before you reach the point of executing your elaborate, time-consuming plan for mass destruction.

I once subdued every guard but one in Hokkaido, dragged them all into the restaurant area, and then let the one live guard go and wake everyone up. I then entered the bar and sat down. This was the result:

Good lord, what a surprise. I’d like to thank the decaying spirit of 2020, my friends and family on Zoom, and the small dog that barks at cats all day and all night. But most of all, I’d like to thank Zack for taking on the rampant voter fraud in this year’s poll and for taking my phonecall about the 11,780 votes we…

One other factor in the extent to which CDPR bears some responsibility is that there are also procedures, like the Harding Test, that game producers can perform on their games to flag things likely to trigger seizures.

The original screenplay was written by the Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard, who had dreamed up the core idea after living for a number of years in Japan, where he spent a lot of time in Yakuza bars and watching Yakuza movies. Leonard Schrader would even go on to write a number of Japanese movies (in Japanese,…

I’m curious to see the sorts of exclusives we’ll see on both consoles, all of which should be able to push the envelope of what the machines are capable of. The storage advances of both consoles should lead to changes in the ways that games are designed. Sure, some of that is going to be under-the-hood stuff that just…

What might prove to be the more interesting PS5 edge is that its SSD speed increases aren’t limited by bottlenecks at other points in the console, which could be put to work in novel ways in PS5 exclusives. Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, noted that in practical terms it’s going to beat PCs in terms of putting its SSD speed…

The great enemy of design is that people like what they’re familiar with, resent having to adapt to a new thing and underrate the idea that the new thing will grow on them. See: every new logo launch ever.

Dear Wraithfighter, let us stare deeper into the abyss: player pets dog times ten because the achievement pops and somewhere in the folds of player’s brain dopamine is released and player feels rewarded for this behaviour, reinforcing it. That is video games at their fundamental essence. Why do we play them at all? We…

I don’t begrudge you your realism in the slightest, but in these dark days I like to cradle a little idealism even if it might make me a rube.

Hey Kotaku, not sure how much control you have over these things, and if this is a hello games embed or a new iteration of the gawker-wide video player, but the in-line video player is doing that thing where it pipes in a lo-res stream until it can switch over to hi-res. In the case of game trailers and clips, that…