Agen95

Amazon has surprised everyone by announcing that the Fallout show will premiere on Prime a day early, on April 10. The Twitch stream of the first episode doesn’t seem to have changed date, however.

Prime TV’s Fallout series is only a few days away, and there’s a way to check out the first episode even if you don’t have an Amazon Prime subscription. Fittingly enough for a TV show based on a videogame series, the Fallout premiere on Thursday, April 11 will be broadcast live on Twitch.

“Adventuring through the Wasteland is dangerous, take a friend along for the journey,” Twitch said on Twitter. “Join this awesome list of streamers to watch the first episode of #Fallout. LIVE on their Twitch channels April 11.”

Those streamers are Shroud, BrookeAB, TheOnlyRyann, DEERE, CohhCarnage, KingGothalion, ThatBronzeGirl, DansGaming, SweeetTails, Elspeth, Techniq, Swiftor, GassyMexican, Tooniversal, and bloodyfaster. They’ll all be streaming the first Fall…

Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser left the studio in 2020 and founded a new operation in 2021 called Absurd Ventures. It turns out that he’s brought some heavyweight former Rockstars with him to the new gig: As noted by French site Begeek (via Stephen Totilo), Rockstar’s former vice-president of writing Michael Unsworth joined in October as Absurd Ventures’ head of story and creative management, and former writer and producer Lazlow Jones is onboard as executive producer.

Unsworth brings an enviable list of credits to the table from his time at Rockstar: He joined the studio in 2007 as senior creative writer and contributed to games including Midnight Club: Los Angeles, LA Noire, Max Payne 3, Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5, and Red Dead Redemption and RDR2. He was promoted to vice-president of writing in 2021, but departed Rockstar earlier this year, a move that left some fans concerned about what it might bode for the soon-to-be-revealed Grand Theft Auto 6.

Jones joined Rockstar…

In Polygon’s recent interview with design director Emil Pagliarulo, it was revealed that Starfield very nearly had a voiced protagonist in the style of Fallout 4’s sole survivor.

When asked whether this choice was a response to the fan reception of that game’s controversial dialogue system—which only gave you the general vibe of what you were committing to words—Pagliarulo responded: “Not directly, but it certainly played into it … in pre-production, the plan was to have a voiced protagonist. We hired an actor, we got the voice, we listened to him and we were like, You know what, this guy is too specific.

“[In Starfield,] you can make every different type of person. We realised that the only way to really do [that] and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist.”

While we’ve obviously known your space explorer would be a silent protagonist since last year, I’m surprised we even came close to Fallout 4 setting…

Out of all the action roguelikes that ape Vampire Survivors’ style, HoloCure is the only one to infuse it with vtubers, the streamers who use 2D anime avatars you’ve probably seen all over Twitch and YouTube. But even if you aren’t familiar with the vtuber agency that employs these ones, Hololive, HoloCure is surprisingly slick to play–and it’s completely free.

HoloCure started as an early access fan game last year and exploded in popularity once Hololive’s vtubers started playing it on their streams. All 38 of its pixel-art characters are based on Hololive’s popular vtubers, like Gawr Gura and Usada Pekora, and it has tons of references for fans. Gawr Gura, for example, is a shark girl from Atlantis that attacks with a trident and can summon a massive shark that wipes out an entire screen of enemies.

You only start off with five (of 38) vtubers to play as, but you pick up coins to gacha roll for more. Those same coins can be used to raise basic stats like health, …

Konami finally announced the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection this week, bringing the first three 3D entries in Hideo Kojima’s classic stealth series to modern platforms. ‘Solid’ was always a bit of an in-joke: Not just referring to the protagonist Solid Snake, but to the series becoming 3D. It began on the MSX home computer platform with Metal Gear, and now the official PlayStation store has let slip that the Master Collection will include the first two games in the series.

This is not a huge surprise, because those games (Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) were remastered by Kojima Productions itself back in the time of Metal Gear Solid 3, for the Subsistence re-release. They’re actually pretty good, especially when you know what came later. The versions of the game in the Master Collection appear to be identical to those in the 2011 HD Collection, and the MGS3 there is Subsistence (which is a good thing, because among other things it added a player-controlled came…

Windows, whether you love it or hate it, is by and large the operating system most people use. Until fairly recently if you wanted to game on another platform like Linux or Mac you could often be fresh out of luck. With the introduction of Proton and the Steam Deck, things are getting more accessible for Linux platforms, even if game-breaking third party issues persist. But there’s not a lot of options for lower powered machines when it comes to running a new version of Windows. That is until Tom’s Hardware spotted NTDev’s work on Tiny11, a cut down version of the current Microsoft OS.

For the most part we like Windows 11 well enough. It’s sure had some teething problems, but with constant fixes it’s starting to become worthy of most PC gaming setups. It runs well on most modern machines, but given it needs over 20GB to install and around 8GB of RAM to run, it’s simply not the answer for some older, or just smaller builds. Those kinds of setups would often be left looking to L…

Twitch has now confirmed a Bloomberg report of major layoffs at the company, saying that more than 500 people—roughly a third of its total workforce—are being let go.

“Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient,” CEO Daniel Clancy wrote in a message to employees that was also shared publicly on the Twitch blog. “Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.

“Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today. As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing …

Streamer LogicalSolutions, who finds himself a central figure in Escape from Tarkov’s “illegal” datamining saga, took to Twitter last night stating that he had been banned from the game. This morning, LogicalSolutions announced that his account was now reinstated, all with little clear communication from Tarkov developer Battlestate.

LogicalSolutions also shared a screenshot of a purported text conversation with Tarkov game director Nikita Buyanov from after the ban. Buyanov stated, “You shouldn’t share how you datamine and everything. We saw it so you broke the rules again.” 

LogicalSolutions denied having shared any datamined information since Battlestate’s announcement of a crackdown, to which Buyanov stated “you lie” and shared screenshots of LogicalSolutions sharing information on stream⁠—screenshots which the streamer states are from before Battlestate’s announcement.

In a broadcast this morning, LogicalSolutions stated that he received no co…

As we’ve continued developing AI to boldly go where nobody has gone before and where many of us never wanted to go in the first place, we regular folk have had plenty of concerns. Whether it’s the potential for AI job takeovers or deepfake misinformation, there’s plenty to worry about. However, one concern that’s not been discussed so much is the risk of an AI monopoly. Thankfully, the US, UK, and EU are on the ball enough to see this risk and are now coming together to prevent it.

Four governing bodies spanning the US, UK, and EU, have signed a joint statement which, according to the UK government, “affirms commitment to unlock the opportunity, growth and innovation that AI technologies could provide with fair and open competition.” 

That’s the positive spin, anyway. But we all know the flipside to competition is monopoly, and it seems that this is precisely what these agencies are hoping to prevent. The four agencies in question—the CMA (UK Competition and M…