Magnum88

เกิดใหม่เป็นลูกโอชิ เป็นหนึ่งในอนิเมะที่ได้รับความนิยมอย่างมากในตอนนี้ โดยอนิเมะเรื่องนี้มาพร้อมกับเพลงเปิด ที่มีชื่อว่า IDOL ซึ่งขับร้องโดย YOASOBI ออกมาให้เราได้ฟังกันแบบเต็ม ๆ ซึ่งเพลงนี้ก็เรียกได้ว่าไพเราะโดนใจมาก ๆ โดยล่าสุดเพลงดังกล่าวขึ้นท็อปชาร์ตของญี่ปุ่นไปเป็นที่เรียบร้อย

นอกเหนือจากท็อปชาร์ตของญี่ปุ่นแล้ว เพลงนี้ยังครองตำแหน่งอันดับหนึ่งบน Spotify บนญี่ปุ่น นอกจากนี้วิดีโอ MV ของเพลงดังกล่าวยังขึ้นเพลงยอดฮิต�…

If you think FLAC is the audiophile’s friend when it comes to lossless music files, a large language model (LLM) has news for you, as it’s now laying claim to compression as part of AI’s growing realm of influence, too.

A study titled “Language Modeling Is Compression” (via ArsTechnica) discusses a finding about an LLM by DeepMind called Chinchilla 70B and its ability to perform lossless data compression better than FLAC for audio and PNG for pictures.

Chinchilla 70B could significantly shrink the size of image patches from the ImageNet database, reducing them to only 43.4% of their original size without losing any detail. This performance is better than the PNG algorithm, which could only reduce the image sizes to 58.5%.

Additionally, Chinchilla compresses audio data from the LibriSpeech to just 16.4% of their actual size for sound files. This is impressive, especially compared to the FLAC compression, which could only reduce the audio sizes to 30.3%.

Lossless compression means nothing is lost or left out when data is squeezed into smaller packages. This differs from lossy compression, which is what the image compression format JPEG uses. That remove…

Last week brought the unexpected news that Flappy Bird, the 2014 viral hit, is making a comeback. But the game’s creator Dong Nguyen was notably absent from the announcement, and the more you look into the apparent reboot the murkier it gets. Trademark shenanigans, a new “foundation” behind the relaunch, and the unmistakeable whiff of crypto: oh my.

Now Nguyen has made his first public statement in seven years, confirming he has no involvement with this relaunch of Flappy Bird, and doesn’t believe he’s sold any rights.

“No, I have no related [sic] with their game,” writes Nguyen on social media. “I did not sell anything. I also don’t support crypto.”

Necessary context for this is that Nguyen’s reaction to Flappy Bird’s overwhelming success back in 2014 was a surprising one. At the peak of the game’s popularity, Nguyen withdrew it from sale, saying that it was “a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.”

As detailed in our original report, Flappy Bird subsequently became the subject of a behind-the-scenes trademark dispute in the United States between Nguyen and a Delaware-based company called Gametech. The long-and-short of t…

Fallout: London is a truly impressive mod, according to PCG writer Joshua Wolens—that is when you’re able to actually get it working and navigate all the performance issues and bugs. 

Since the mod’s release, players have reported a few game-ending crashes, including one fondly named the “train crash,” which has plagued most players. Not only will boarding the train to navigate apocalyptic London likely lead to your game crashing, but it will also cause a strange bug that halves players’ HP. 

“The issue with the train crash is quite a known one, and it’s been reported on quite a lot,” project manager Dean Carter says in an interview with VG247. “We never had that. We wouldn’t have released if we had that. None of our testers had that. So we’re not sure if something actually happened with the final upload or something, but it’s those sorts of ones that have been a bit of a surprise to us.”

“You put your heart and soul into anything, and eventually you sort of realise, no matter how hard you’ve worked, everything’s held together with duct tape. So, [Fallout: London’s] held together better than we thought, but lots of the issues that we’ve ha…

Following a takedown request issued by Nintendo, the famed physics sandbox Garry’s Mod is removing “all Nintendo related stuff” from its Steam Workshop.

“Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down,” Facepunch Studios said in a Steam update. “This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.

“Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod—that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.”

The “not a mistake” line may have been prompted in part by earlier DMCA claims against Nintendo-related mods that some Garry’s Mod players claimed were fraudulent. It’s not clear whether that was actually the case, but it seems to definitely not be the case now.

Nintendo is notoriously protective of its property, and it’s not shy about getting heavy with people it thinks are getting out of line. Earlier this year, for instance, it sued the makers of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, forcing a near-immediate halt to its development (and sticking the d…

If you can’t take the heat, get out of the hellpod. It’s been 48 hours since something exciting and concerning happened in the world of Helldivers 2, so naturally, Arrowhead turned on the fire tornadoes. You’re reading that right: columns of hot death have been spotted on the aptly named Hellmire in Terminid territory.

I wouldn’t dare report on a lethal weather event I won’t run toward myself, so I set course for Hellmire to meet these spicy twisters in person, and try out the new guns in the “Cutting Edge” premium warbond. It’s the first post-launch warbond added to the game, and it’s similar in size to the Steeled Veterans bond—three pages consisting of four weapons, three armor sets, and a handful of other goodies for $10 worth of Super Credits. I banked a modest pile of medals for the occasion to immediately unlock a gun on the first page I’ve been eyeing for a week: the LAS-16 Sickle.

The Sickle is the second laser primary weapon, sitting comfortably next to the Scythe beam rifle. Some might skip the Sickle because of its relation to the utterly underwhelming Scythe, but allow me to set you straight: the Sickle is its bigger, stronger, faster brother, and …

April is already a monster month for city builders and colony sims, and yet another city building game has just been announced, this one with a bit of a Civilization theme. The cities you grow and manage in most city builders can last for years, sometimes decades, and occasionally hundreds of years… but what about for thousands of years?

That’s your goal in Memoriapolis, a strategy city builder from French developer 5PM Studio. Beginning with a small hunting camp in ancient times you’ll eventually grow the settlement into a prosperous city, then guide it through four different historical eras over a span of 2,500 years. That’s a long time for a city to exist, and as you pass from pre-Middle Ages all the way to the Age of Enlightenment, your capital can become a blend of different architectural styles, some old and some new.

To make your city last through the centuries you’ll need to set up trade routes, manage the economy and your city’s resources, make political decisions, and keep your citizens safe and happy. You’ll also construct Wonders, which can be real historical buildings like Notre-Dame de Paris, Windsor Castle, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. These Wo…

I recently got around to playing Pentiment, and while I won’t spoil the experience for anyone I will say, “Man. Wow. Holy cow,” as I stare off pensively into the distance. After contemplating the nature of existing for a few days, my main takeaway was that Obsidian should just give Josh Sawyer a few million dollars every five years or so, and tell him to come back when he’s done.

But what would Sawyer do if he actually found himself in that position—or more specifically, the position of having as many million dollars and as much time as he wanted? In a wide-ranging interview with Touch Arcade he said he probably wouldn’t make Pentiment 2, but he would make Pillars of Eternity 3—as long as someone was really ready to back up the money truck.

“I don’t think I would make Pentiment 2,” Sawyer said. “I really do feel very satisfied with that game. It’s not like I don’t wanna return to it ever, but I just did it, so I’d probably wait a little bit.

“I think if it truly was an unlimited budget, I think I would try Pillars 3 because I know what the budget was for [Pillars of Eternity 2:] Deadfire, which was not a whole lot and I have …

My mom recently showed me that you can pick a point on Pikmin 4’s map and then press a button to return to the game with your character looking in that direction—a delightfully convenient feature. Nintendo really has a knack for designing in-game maps. Bethesda, however… well, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, don’t we?

Among all the praise and other commentary, “bad maps” has emerged as a common Starfield criticism as players make their first excursions into outer space. The starmaps aren’t very exciting, but it’s really the surface maps that are the target here. They’re rendered as topographical point fields, which looks sort of cool, but communicates little, especially in cities, where buildings and streets aren’t represented at all. To illustrate how devoid of information they are, the map above represents the city of New Atlantis, which looks like this from the ground:

We’ve all played enough GTAs or the like to expect at least a basic street map, so when he started working on his Starfield review, Chris reasonably wondered if the maps were bugged or something—nah, that’s just how they are.

Others have had the same feeling: A Red…

Remember that incredibly goofy dance music video with the dancing crabs that everyone loved back in like 2018? People did a bunch of memes of it. Anyway, the artist who made that, Noisestorm, made a roguelike third-person action shooter about crabs. It’s called Crab Champions, and though it released into early access on April 1st, 2023 it’s anything but a joke. It’s actually kind of… good?

No joke, as of this writing, it has 1,314 reviews on Steam—and 98% of them are positive. Turns out this isn’t a gimmick at all. It’s not just the Crab Rave game: It’s Crab Champions and it is here to slay.

In the shooter you blast through island after island of crabby foes collecting loot, guns, and generally becoming godlike via making an overpowered build. You plow through 20-40 minute roguelike runs which feature remarkably smooth movement and combat mechanics. 

You can play it solo or with up to three other people cooperatively, and in this it’s pretty much like Risk of Rain 2 but everything’s crabs. It’s just crabs everywhere, goofy clacking claws and sideways walkin and long leggedy hops galore. The weapons have good variety and there are all manner of weir…

Starfield can be an inventory management nightmare sometimes. Whenever you make a modification to your ship, the game sends all your loose miscellany to your cargo hold, filling it with junk. 

Not to mention it’s an open-world RPG—while a lot of the loot really isn’t worth snagging, it’s hard to swat away that reflex to hoover up every loose book, sandwich and pencil holder. Fortunately, it seems like players are finding a use for all this tat—elaborate Rube Goldberg machines.

The first of these comes from sandwich pirate Muaxh03 on YouTube, who combo’d a pile of books into a football, leading to a row of tasty dominoes. Not sure about the food wastage, though—considering the sheer amount of man-hours and quicksaving that must’ve gone into arranging all of these, I think we’re way past the five-second rule. Maybe the floors are just cleaner in space.

Then there’s this monstrosity by Holy Moe which makes use of a whole library of books and several lunch trays to achieve their physics dreams of punting a football at a wall.

While I’m a big fan of the excessive physics experiments, like dropping thousands of potatoes i…

PowerWash Simulator just keeps on truckin’ man: The first person shooter(?) where you blast muck off the environment to make it shiny and new again just got two new free maps, and I’m kind of in love with their summertime vibes.

The aquarium and submarine were the winner and runner-up respectively of PowerWash Sim’s second community map vote, where they won out against other potential levels like a luxury yacht or rock climbing gym. While I would have loved to see PowerWash Sim’s take on some crystal caves, the one-two punch of nautical fun that did win out is extremely charming.

Watch On

Instead of the cramped confines of a submersible, PowerWash Sim’s new level sees you cleaning one up from the outside while it’s in dry dock. The sub’s a bright orange, scientific affair, the sort of thing that “Jackpots” Jimmy Cameron would use to go down and hang out by the Titanic while dreaming up a new Avatar film to enchant our hearts and heal the world.

The aquarium looks to be a much more involved affair, with twisting hallways and multiple enclosures to clean⁠—a level of attention that probably befits the contest winner. What really got my goat is that you…

I just discovered Victor Love, also known as Master Boot Record (MBR), an Italian musician forging impeccable chiptune compositions with a doomy, apocalyptic twist. His music seems to be the perfect soundtrack to life as we amble ever closer to an impending hostile AI takeover (or at least some big-tech company willing the Torment Nexus to open).

Not only does MBR use synthetic 8-bit music samples, he takes a lot of inspiration from IT in terms of nomenclature, too. Many of his songs are named after command prompts, and “Master Boot Record” itself is the name given to information found in the first segment of a storage drive.

Love makes it clear that his songs are decidedly “100% synthesized, 100% dehumanized”. His discography consist of “486DX-33MHz-64MB processing avant-garde chiptune, synthesised heavy metal and classical symphonic music.”

In other words, it’s dark, intelligent music for hackers and axe-wielders alike.

The music wills you to “configure yourself for optimal performance”, and that it does. Frenetic and hyperactive, Love’s music is full on from the start. It’s marked by fanciful cybernetic trills, rising operatic chord progressions, and t…