Author: Rich Stanton
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Age of Empires developer confirms the game is mostly written in low-level Assembly code because ‘we could scroll the screen and fill it with sprites as fast or faster’ than competitors like Starcraft ‘even though we had twice as many pixels’
Some of the greatest stories about games are simply about how developers made the thing work. Ask any developer for their favourite workarounds and you’ll get a full evening’s worth of entertainment about how a giant tram is actually an NPC with a hat on, or how rabbits are actually what makes Azeroth work, and…
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Steam kicks off 2024 with its highest-ever concurrents and player count
Valve’s omnipresent games platform Steam has started off 2024 with a bang, registering both its highest-ever number of concurrent users and also its highest-ever number of users actively playing a game. Over the last weekend 33,675,229 concurrent users were logged-in to Steam, which beats the previous record of 33,598,520 set in March 2023. During roughly…
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Logan Paul’s NFT zoo catastrophe takes an unexpected turn: He’s buying back the eggs and suing his co-founders
One of the last things I did in 2023 was round-up the year’s crypto fails, during which I checked-in on an old favourite. In late 2021 mega-influencer Logan Paul, now probably best-known for the PRIME energy drink range and his burgeoning WWE career, began promoting a blockchain project called CryptoZoo, a videogame where players would…
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This multi-million crypto rug pull has a new twist: The CEO may not exist
The Guardian Australia published an investigation several months ago into a crypto scheme-slash-scam called HyperVerse, a fund that used major celebrity endorsements to attract millions of dollars from small investors before collapsing. Blockchain Global went bust owing $58 million USD in 2021, but now there’s a rather classic fraudster sting in the tail: The CEO…
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Portal 64 now has a playable ‘first slice’ with two-thirds of the game’s test chambers
PCG has for several years now been keeping tabs on the incredible passion project of programmer James Lambert, a major N64 fan who decided to make a version of Portal for hardware first released in 1996. Lambert has shared various updates over the years about the project, most recently showcasing the game’s opening, but things…
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Star Citizen truly outdoes itself with a $48,000 bundle for its most loyal whales
Ever since it first warped onto the scene, Star Citizen has been infamous for its rapacious monetisation. The game’s development seems never-ending but, long before you could play it in any form, Roberts Space Industries would sell you all sorts of space-things: Like this mine-laying ship that cost over $600 before mine-laying was even a…
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UK police begin first-ever investigation into sexual assault in the metaverse
UK police are investigating the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl in a VR metaverse, in what seems like the first criminal investigation of its kind. The chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, Donna Jones, told the BBC that the complaint was made in 2023 and the inquiry is ongoing. The…
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Popular Slay the Spire mod hacked to deliver malware on Christmas Day
A popular Slay the Spire mod called Downfall was compromised over the holidays, and used to push malware to users via a Steam update. The malware in question is called Epsilon and is used to steal information from infected hardware, and was present in the standalone version of the mod on Steam for around an…
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Counter-Strike 2 just remade my favourite game from the ground-up for free and let me keep my fancy AK-47, so of course it’s the true GOTY
If you were asked to name the most-successful game on Steam at the start of 2023, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s 30 million monthly players would have made that a good pick. Now we’re at the end of the year and, if you want to play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, you can only do so through obscure means.…
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2023 in crypto and web3: Scams, collapses, and finally some consequences
2022 was the year where cryptocurrencies and the industry around them lost a lot of credibility, thanks to the collapse of enormous exchanges like FTX and the overnight failure of major cryptocurrencies like LunaUSD. 2023 has been the year where we started to see the consequences for some of this stuff, alongside a whole host…