As a lifelong Warlock main since the launch of vanilla Destiny, I was delighted to log in at reset today and see that our class has won the 2023 Guardian Games. Let’s gooooooooo book club buddies, etc. I was also a little confused, because the event only began this week and it’s due to run until May 23. Even more bafflingly, another in-game pop up confirmed that Titans had actually deposited most medals and won the inaugural week. So, uh, shenanigans?
Before anyone starts accusing Bungie’s dev team of being stacked with cheating Warlocks (how else to explain Starfire Protocol having gone un-nerfed so long), it’s far more reasonable to assume that this is just another bug in a season that has at times resembled the insect enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. Guardian Games has previous form in this area, too. After 2021’s event, the Guardian Games statue in the tower featured a golden lion, indicating Titans had won, when it should have been Hunters’ snake instead. Hardly the most d…
Both the UK and US government have begun to circle warily around the recent emergence of powerful AI technologies, and are taking the first steps towards attempting to rein in the sector. The British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), fresh from pulling the rug out from under Microsoft’s proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition, has begun a review of the underlying systems behind various AI tools. The U.S. government joined in by issuing a statement saying AI companies have a “fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public.”
This all comes shortly after Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called “the Godfather of deep learning”, resigned from Google and warned that the industry needs to stop scaling AI technology and ask “whether they can control it.” Google is one of many seriously big tech companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, that have invested enormously in AI technologies, and that investment may well b…
Sqword is a word game where you try to make as many words as you can in a five-by-five square grid, earning more points for longer words. It was made by Josh C. Simmons and his friends, and is freely available at sqword.com. However, it’s also been picked up by multiple browser game portals, who took it without permission and ran it behind their own ads for profit.
As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. “The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page”, he wrote. “I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.”
On the off-chance you have somehow missed out on encountering Goatse over the years, it’s a photograph of a bent-over man stretching out his…
It’s time to slam that “forgot password link” on the Epic launcher and dust off your profile because the platform’s got another dinger for its free game of the week: The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s 2019 space gilded age spiritual successor to Fallout.
The Outer Worlds offers a more contained take on a first person, Fallout/Elder Scrolls-style RPG, with discrete, open-ended zones that offer a set path through the story. It’s a structure similar to my sweet baby, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which makes sense given who made both games. The Outer Worlds project leads Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky eventually found their way to Obsidian after the shuttering of their ill-starred studio, Troika, which made Vampire and two other RPG classics.
I like that The Outer Worlds is a more manageable RPG, one that you can absolutely finish even if you’re an adult with a job, and it does this without sacrificing depth and choice. I made a smooth-talking, sharply-dressed pistoleer, b…
World of Warcraft: The War Within, bar some iffy early access nonsense, appears to be landing pretty well—it’s early days, mind, but Blizzard seems to have meant it when it comes to bolstering its evergreen systems, changing how it tells its story, and making Xal’atath into the scenery-chewing dramaturge perfect to kick off the Worldsoul Saga’s chaos.
Speaking with Ion Hazzikostas at Gamescom, I asked whether the dev team—given that Blizzard announced three WoW expansions at once—has been planting seeds here that’ll sprout story beats years down the line. Not only did he say “absolutely”, he also revealed that the team’s already hammering out the wider details of The Last Titan’s patch quests.
“We’ve always known what the next expansion was going to be, but if I’m going to be honest, two expansions ahead was unrealistic for our traditional development processes,” Hazzikostas said. “But we’re in meetings right now figuring out not just what The Last Tita…
The metaverse might, generally speaking, be a bit of a bullshit concept. But one shining proof-of-concept for a lot of the ideas that circulate around it is Fortnite because, honestly, what even is this thing anymore but a platform for anything and everything. Stuff like an Ariana Grande concert or a Marvel showdown make obvious sense as brand crossovers, but at the edges there’s all sorts of weirder stuff like a Martin Luther King Jr. exhibition and, now, a map dedicated to informing players about the problems we’re facing with soil degradation, sponsored by food giant Heinz.
The interesting element here, in the context of metaverse ramblings, is that Heinz has been a bit of a saucy customer and, while presenting this as some sort of official tie-in and using the Fortnite logo, it hasn’t worked with Epic to create this or incorporate it in the game. There’s a certain irony in a mass market producer of processed food banging on about things like this, but then I guess who else…
The rupee appreciated 3 paise to 83.22 against the US dollar on Wednesday, tracking cues from positive equity markets and a weaker American currency against major rivals overseas. However, selling pressure from foreign equity investors weighed on the Indian currency, forex traders said. At the interbank foreign exchange, the rupee opened at 83.20 and then touched 83.22 against the greenback, up 3 paise from its previous close.
On Tuesday, the rupee settled at 83.25 against the US dollar. The dollar index, which gauges the greenback’s strength against a basket of six currencies, was trading 0.05 per cent lower at 105.77. Gaurang Somaiya, forex and bullion analyst at Motilal Oswal Financial Services, said the rupee traded within a narrow range even after more updates came in on the escalating conflict in Israel.
Also Read
According to…
The rupee continued its downward movement for the second straight day and fell by 8 paise to 83.21 against the US dollar in early trade on Tuesday amid massive selling by foreign equity investors and a firm American currency. Subdued equity market sentiment and elevated level of crude oil prices — hovering above USD 92 a barrel — also put downside pressure on the Indian currency, forex traders said.
At the interbank foreign exchange, the domestic unit opened at 83.19 and hit the lowest level of 83.23 against the greenback. It later traded at 83.21 against the dollar, registering a fall of 8 paise from its previous close. On Monday, the rupee declined by 19 paise to close at 83.13 against the dollar.
Also Read
Analysts attributed the downward movement of the rupee to a strengthening dollar amid increased month-end demand of th…