Category: Season 3

If you use a device that is connected to the Internet on a daily basis, you consume news on a daily basis as well. That’s not really surprising, is it? But where exactly is your news coming from, and is it important that you should care about these sources?

On March 28, 2024, Diablo IV was added to the Xbox Game Pass catalogue. It became the first game to join the catalogue after Activision-Blizzard’s acquisition by Microsoft was legally completed. Naturally, I was interested to give it a try. Since I have never really been invested in the Diablo franchise, I had no idea what to expect. All I wanted to do was to try out the campaign once and then never think about the game again. And I’m guessing there are a few other people out there who are of the same mindset. You have never really played any Diablo games, but you are a Game Pass subscriber, so you are curious to check out this big-ticket title. Well, this video is exactly for people like us, who want to know if the game is worth playing just for the campaign. There will be spoilers along the way, but as you will see, it may not really matter.

This video talks about User Generated Content or UGC, in video games. And while I have done a fair amount of research before making this video, I’d like to point out right at the start that I have almost zero experience in interacting with user generated content in games. I’m the kind of guy who goes from one game to another, so as soon as I finish the core experience that the developers have built, I move on to another game. So I won’t be able to offer any first-hand experience of what UGC feels like. Instead, all I am doing here is sharing what I have learned during my research on this topic.

Artificial Intelligence continues to be the next-big thing that not a lot of people really know much about, but still everyone can’t stop talking about it. Naturally, there’s a lot of talk about AI in the world of video games as well, especially fear around how many jobs it will impact. The good news is, no one really knows yet, so at least for now, things are proceeding as normal. The bad news is, once someone figures out how to effectively utilise AI to skip some human tasks, a lot of video game jobs will be in risk. In this video, we will talk about the state of AI in video games today, and how it can impact the games of tomorrow.

What can we say about Starfield seven months after its launch? If you simply go by critic reviews, you might assume that it’s great. On both Metacritic and Opencritic, it currently features scores above 80, which is excellent. But critic scores aren’t that useful for a game like Starfield. Critics are constantly going after their next review deadlines, so they hardly spend enough time with a game after its launch. And games like Starfield usually show their true depth only after you put in several hundreds of hours in it.

Sifu is the second game released by French indie studio Sloclap, and it is a kung fu based action game set in modern-day China. This is one of those titles where the gameplay is the selling point, and the story takes a backseat. Earlier this week, I talked about how using the easy difficulty option in games allows me to experience more games. Sifu is one of those games where choosing an easier difficulty can actually dilute the core experience of playing the game.

Many people look back fondly at old games like Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros. and think of how they enjoyed playing them as kids. A lot of those people are now adults, playing video games well into their 30s, 40s and beyond. But there’s one thing that these people keep forgetting about those games: most of them were extremely difficult to play!

The golden rule of game design is that a game should be simple to learn, but difficult to master. And that’s exactly what the early video games did. Arcade games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong were extremely easy to pick up and start playing. But as the levels went up, the game became harder and harder, which was necessary, because Arcade games were designed to make the player pay for each play session. If the game was too easy, one player could end up playing the entire day, leaving other customers waiting impatiently for their turn. Of course, even the most difficult games eventually became easy, because kids had a lot of time to practice, and became extremely good at the games. More details in the video!