A decade ago, Abubakar Salim lost his father. That grief lives within him. An actor by trade, with credits in Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon’s upcoming season, he searched for years for the right medium to work through the hurt. A film. A TV show. Nothing did …
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It’s been nearly seven years since the original Nintendo Switch came out. In that time, the company has sold a staggering 132 million-plus units and has become the portable home of dozens of exclusive and indie games. But we’ve also been waiting a long time for Nintendo to announce its …
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Bloom, a non-player character with a face like a potato and a black beanie pulled tight around his ears, wants to know about my strategy and how I fare in combat. “I follow a map and I punch hard,” I reply into the microphone. Text of our conversation flashes across …
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Mobile gaming has never received the same respect as console and PC gaming. Yet it generated over $90 billion in 2023, accounting for half of the global games market, and runs the gamut from casual to AAA titles. It's continuing to grow, and the boundary between mobile gaming and “regular” …
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The popular farming sim and ultimate cozy game, Stardew Valley, dropped a major update on Tuesday after months of anticipation. Stardew’s 1.6 update has an insane amount of new content that touches every area of the game, from new menus and DIYs, to a new farm layout, new crops, and …
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Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s titular flowers can make the game Get Weird, whether it’s by changing the game’s stage or turning Mario into something slightly terrifying. One prototype idea in particular, however, would have temporarily turned the game into a live-action one. During the development process of Wonder, the game’s …
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developers had a problem: The land of Hyrule kept falling apart. Anyone who has played Tears of the Kingdom might be able to guess why. Some of the game’s big advances—Link’s Ultrahand and Fuse abilities, which allow players to create any tool …
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Burnt rubber and gunfire are not the most pleasing of smells, but for action games, they might be the most common. At least, that’s true for GameScent, a new device that aims to make gaming more immersive by adding smell to the equation. GameScent, which dropped late last month to …
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On February 24, 2022, Stepan Bandrivskyi woke up before dawn and got ready for a special day: his birthday. It wouldn’t be a particularly happy one. Hours earlier, a couple dozen miles away, Russian tanks had rolled across the borders of his native Ukraine. The full-scale invasion had begun. Like …
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The first time someone invited me to a Slack Huddle—an audio call that happens inside the app—I didn’t know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and …
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