> Fact 1: Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox announced this week that it will sell “some” of its upcoming video games for $80 — a hike from the previous standard price of $70, which itself was a hike from $60 just a few years ago. This comes in the wake of Nintendo Co.’s announcement last month that the new Mario Kart game for Switch 2 will be $80. ... > Fact 2: The three highest-reviewed video games of 2025 so far, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic, are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince and Split Fiction. Those games cost, respectively, $50, $30 and $50. ... > Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the best-rated games of the year just happen to be budget titles. But I think the two facts above point to something else — a critical flaw in the video-game industry’s operations that has contributed to its plateaued growth and widespread layoffs.

An examination of a large number of ChatGPT responses found that the model consistently exhibits values aligned with the libertarian-left segment of the political spectrum. However, newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. The paper was published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence systems trained to understand and generate human language. They learn from massive datasets that include books, articles, websites, and other text sources. By identifying patterns in these data, LLMs can answer questions, write essays, translate languages, and more. Although they don’t think or understand like humans, they predict the most likely words based on context. Often, the responses generated by LLMs reflect certain political views. While LLMs do not possess personal political beliefs, their outputs can mirror patterns found in the data they were trained on. Since much of that data originates from the internet, news media, books, and social media, it can contain political biases. As a result, an LLM’s answers may lean liberal or conservative depending on the topic. This doesn’t mean the model “believes” anything—it simply predicts words based on previous patterns. Additionally, the way a question is phrased can influence how politically slanted the answer appears.

Infinite shoe durability does what it says on the shoebox - disabling the wear and tear Henry accumulates on his footwear while gallivanting around the Bohemian wilderness, and so eliminating the need to replace or repair his favourite pair. To me, this is both a little baffling (again, surely you play a game like KC:D II for this kind of frictive minutiae), but also very funny, simply because I find the idea of infinite shoes very funny.

With the success of massive RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that actually offer player choice again, Peterson is excited to release his game to an audience that does want more again. After a rough period of RPGs where player choice and ingenuity were watered down, there’s now a hunger for more branching paths and player freedom.

Tune in on October 19. As the narrator for Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, Lenval Brown recorded 350,000 words of dialogue. His warm, crackling tone is one you'll associate with Disco Elysium forever after playing it, though he's also popped up elsewhere—like in retro shooter Ultrakill, city builder Republic of Pirates, and as the host of our own documentary series, Tales from the Hard Drive. To register for Voice of the Narrator: A Disco Elysium livestream, you'll need to donate to a gofundme to help Dr. Alaa Abu Musa and his family evacuate the Gaza Strip. (Suggested donations are $US60.) Then fill out the registration form linked at the Workshops 4 Gaza event page. The livestream will take place on October 19, from 3–5pm EST.