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From VA Marine Mammal Rescue Society via this RSS feed

!Destiny 2 characters enter a blue glowing portal surrounded by the silhouette of a mysterious figure.

Destiny 2’s newest expansion is on the horizon. Now that the previous Light and Darkness saga has concluded, this latest expansion marks the beginning of a new era in Destiny 2’s narrative. The Edge of Fate will include new navigation menus, new Vanguard and Crucible activities, and an overhaul to the gear system.

Below, we list the Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate release time in your time zone with an expanded look at what you can expect from the expansion.

Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate release time

Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate will be releasing for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X on July 15. Bungie has not announced the exact release time of the expansion; however, it’s a safe bet that the new content will go live at or around the weekly reset time, which occurs every Tuesday.

Here are the current weekly reset times for Destiny 2 in regions around the world:

10 a.m. PDT for the West Coast of North America1 p.m. EDT for the East Coast of North America2 p.m. BRT for Brazil6 p.m. BST for the U.K.7 p.m. CESTfor Western Europe2 a.m. JSTfor Japan3 a.m. AEST for the east coast of Australia

What to expect from Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate

The Edge of Fate is a new era for Destiny 2, and with its release will be the release of many new additions and features, such as:

A new location known as the Kepler Destination**,** with new puzzles to solve and new places to exploreA non-linear campaignA new power called Matterspark**,** which you will use for overworld navigationA complete overhaul to all armor known as the Armor 3.0 SystemNew gear tiers in the Gear Tiering SystemHeavy CrossbowsMelee damage has been changed to be additive, and glaives will now count as meleeAbility overhauls and reworksA new Firing Range in the Tower

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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When I first heard about Missile Command Delta, turn-based gameplay was not what I expected. Changing the 1980 arcade classic’s concept from a never-ending real-time rocket strike to a more relaxing puzzle experience seemed quite the gamble, but a few minutes in the game’s tutorial room won me over.

But as I left that tutorial, I didn’t walk into the virtual arcade parlor I had hoped for. Although Missile Command Delta presented me with plenty more puzzles, they weren’t solely of the tactical missile-defending kind. Although the sheer brilliance of the reimagined arcade gameplay kept me going, dreams of an arcade-only mode have haunted me ever since.

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It’s no surprise to see the iconic red, blue, and yellow color scheme return, nor did I ever doubt the inclusion of different missile types — these things are a given if you decide to reimagine Missile Command. But to keep the suspense, despite the slower pace, that’s impressive.

In part, this effect can be attributed to the flickering lights combined with the eerie background music. Appearing as a warning sign, the blinking missile tracks constantly remind me that my cities are about to get bombed, either by this missile wave or the next. Make one error, and the next group of missiles will hit you with unpleasant feelings of “Oh no, what have I done?”

The constant need to optimize my defenses had me calculating rocket speed, frantically scrolling through my arsenal, and making tough decisions, such as waiting for the next turn in an attempt to destroy more bombs using the same missile. Especially during the “choose your arsenal” phase, before the real action kicks off, the uncertainty hits hard. This tactical freedom and pressure to find the optimal solution make for a highly compelling puzzle game, and I just don’t want to stop playing.

It’s too bad, then, that Missile Command Delta doesn’t indulge my longing for the next rocket storm. As Oli Welsh observed, a first-person narrative about some teens stuck in a bunker (don’t enter abandoned bunkers – mess around and find out, guys!) constantly interferes with the cool stuff. Undoubtedly, the intention was to turn this game into a thriller, but it already has a thriller in the form of tactical dread.

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A Missile Command Delta arcade mode, available from the start and accessible from the main menu, would be the dream. Just boot up the game, enter the arcade, and start an ongoing stream of Missile Command puzzles. I don’t expect an endless mode, but a large stack of handcrafted challenges would do.

Naturally, a bunch of different game modes would be magnificent. Imagine the Atari 50 arcade collection, but as a modern, missile-only edition. I can’t help but think of the possibilities: a 50-wave challenge, a short-range missiles-only mode, a randomized arsenal, perhaps even a bomb-’em-back variation (let’s see how they like it). That last one would have you firing back at the enemy — it breaks with the original Missile Command’s vow to never let the player become the aggressor, but you’ve got to admit, it would be fun.

I realize my Missile Command dreams are getting slightly out of hand at this point, imagine how lovely it’d be to see a few arcade machines in the middle of that dreary Missile Command Delta bunker. One filled with missile puzzles, and — I’m sure there’s room — a replica of the original machine from 1980. Retro artwork and cute buttons included.

Don’t get me wrong, I am willing to suffer angsty teens with terrible survival instincts for the sake of the brilliant tactical puzzle game that’s already core to this game, but Missile Command Delta has awakened a thirst for more Missile Command, which it doesn’t quite quench — yet. If Mighty Yell and 13AM Games ever decide to develop a Missile Command arcade collection with a variety of innovative spins on the existing concept, which they already proved to be capable of, I’ll be first in line to get bombed.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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The New York Timesrecently published the results of a poll determining the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far, and the #1 slot went to Bong Joon Ho’s Best Picture winner Parasite. (It topped the paper’s subsequent readers’ poll, too.) As it happens, Bong Joon Ho also voted in the poll, and the Times made his ballot (along with many others) available online. He lists the 2005 Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise movie War of the Worlds among his 10 choices, which makes that movie his selection for the best Steven Spielberg movie of the past 25 years. It’s a bold choice. But he may be right. At very least, War of the Worlds deserves to be talked about alongside classics like Jaws and Jurassic Park.

The Spielberg movie that actually made the overall top 100 list was his other (also excellent) Tom Cruise-led sci-fi film, Minority Report, at number 94. War of the Worlds, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was a bigger but more divisive hit back in 2005, though it was overshadowed by Cruise’s talk-show antics and Scientology-stumping. In fact, it wound up as Cruise’s last big money-maker until he revived interest in the Mission: Impossible franchise six years later.

The Cruise factor is part of why War of the Worlds might seem like a counterintuitive choice for Bong’s favorite Spielberg movie. The South Korean director obviously enjoys dark-hued genre films, and he made his own movie where a family encounters a fantastical creature: The Host, released just a year after War of the Worlds. But that movie’s tone is vastly different from Spielberg’s, veering into comedy and satire to complement its heartfelt drama.

!Ray (Tom Cruise) pauses to catch his breath while fleeing attacking aliens in the 2005 film War of the Worlds.

Moreover, like Parasite, it uses a family ensemble to offer different point-of-view characters. Spielberg’s WotW, by contrast, is both vastly bigger and strikingly smaller. It’s one of the most intimate large-scale disaster movies ever mounted, chronicling no less than a massacre of the global human population by invading aliens, while sticking almost exclusively to the ground-level point-of-view of Ray (Tom Cruise), a super-divorced New Jersey dock worker, and his 10-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Ray’s teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is there, too, if only to wriggle away from Ray whenever possible.

The trio of characters initially navigating this alien-ravaged landscape vaguely recalls the three men venturing into the ocean in Jaws, and the boy-girl siblings bring to mind the kids in Jurassic Park. War of the Worlds does indeed scan as the third film in a trilogy of creature features that most closely resemble Spielberg horror movies. Its way into that material, though, is arguably stranger than either of its companions. It uses the framework of a genre most popular in the respective decades of Jaws and Jurassic Park: the disaster movie.

Though the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America didn’t put a total kibosh on the neo-disaster wave of the 1990s, they did push those types of movies toward an increasingly fantastical approach to mass destruction on screen. Though a few filmmakers like Man of Steel’s Zack Snyder did lean into a more harrowing sense of realism, later-period Roland Emmerich movies like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 didn’t seem designed to remind people of 9/11. Their disaster-scapes were so outsized (and neutrally produced by Earth itself, rather than invaders) that they almost looked like simulations, or apocalyptic screensavers.

Spielberg’s War of the Worlds has plenty of outlandish, retro sci-fi imagery: Certain elements of the original H.G. Wells novel from 1898, like the aliens’ tripod ships, are faithfully included, and when the ships start fertilizing their own vegetation with human viscera, the wide landscape shots look like a vivid, super-saturated set out of a 1950s melodrama.

But beyond the base-level awe these sequences inspire compared to Emmerich’s SimCity destruction, the then-contemporary 9/11 references are unmistakable (and darker than the superficial building-smashing of superhero movies): After witnessing an initial attack, Ray realizes he’s covered in the dust of incinerated people. Later, a terrified Rachel makes it explicit; as they speed away from the mass devastation in a stolen car, she asks in panic, “Is it the terrorists?”

In its way, this directness is as vivid as the kid dialogue in E.T., like the faux-teenage way Elliott calls his brother “penis breath” in anger. Before Spielberg made a more intimate movie about real-life terrorism with Munich (which also came out in 2005), he brought the chaos and fear of terrorism into summer movies that were supposed to provide escapism. His gift for moving the audience through the action with fluid, longer shots takes on a frightening immediacy.

!A wide landscape shot turns blood red as Ray, played by Tom Cruise, looks over a field of alien vegetation in the 2005 film War of the Worlds.

Though his two Jurassic Park movies are full of suspenseful sequences (and The Lost World is especially violent), War of the Worlds might be Spielberg’s most traditionally scary genre movie. (His depictions of war atrocities in movies like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are in another category altogether.) It’s not just the scale of the destruction, but its pitilessness; these aliens aren’t going through a list of symbolically powerful landmarks to blow up in perfectly framed wide shots. They’re open-firing into crowds and buildings, then eventually sweeping the corners to harvest human blood.

From a business perspective, it made sense to release War of the Worlds in what was essentially the Independence Day spot. The movie itself, though, where most of the anti-alien heroics are accidental or off-screen, and all-American Tom Cruise is a semi-deadbeat dad who survives mostly by luck, feels like an ID4 takedown as accidentally pointed as Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (There’s even a more gruesome equivalent of Burton’s darkly funny image of a herd of cows on fire when an Amtrak train zips past refugees, engulfed in flames.)

The fantastical touches aren’t the only scary parts, either. Rewatching a mob of people senselessly attempt to steal Ray’s car and nearly destroy it, endangering Rachel in the process, I had two simultaneous thoughts: 1) This behavior makes no sense, and 2) this is also exactly what would happen in real life. War of the Worlds feels so emotionally realistic that it’s no wonder Spielberg can’t quite find the precise note to end on, beyond a thematically appropriate but vaguely unsatisfying reversion to the basic outline of the Wells novel. (At least in terms of the aliens’ fates.) It’s a beautifully made movie that can’t offer the same reassurances as other Spielberg sci-fi; Ray’s lessons about parenthood come with a crash course in its horrors, too.

So what does Bong see in this Spielberg movie in particular? Many of his movies invert War of the Worlds’ arc of harrowing horror to unsettled respite by providing a wilder, often more “fun” ride before arriving at a tragic end. (Though sometimes those tragedies are still laced with a hint of hope.) But Bong’s films also gleefully mix genres in ways that feel informed by what’s happening in the real world. In the same way, there is something genre-warped about the Spielberg film that depicts post-9/11 anxiety by peeling back layers of disaster-movie blockbusters, 1950s sci-fi, and outright horror, right down to how it handles its most Spielbergian-seeming human relationships. There’s nothing especially predictable about War of the Worlds. It unfolds with the terrifying clarity of a nightmare.

War of the Worlds is currently streaming on Paramount Plus.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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Despite the fact that you don’t see much of your character in Mecha Break, the PvP mech shooter has a god-tier character creator, which allows you to tweak everything from your pilot’s height and hair color to the length of their fingers. This character creator is supplemented by the Matrix Marketplace: an in-game store where players can sell or auction off their painstakingly customized pilot designs in exchange for Corite, the game’s premium in-game currency.

On the surface, this seems like a really neat idea, especially because the game’s standard seasonal cosmetic store has a very small selection of items that rotate out every three days. If you spot a pilot with cute pigtails, for example, you can’t just go into the cosmetic store and buy that exact hairdo, as it’s very unlikely that a specific hairstyle will be available for you to purchase at any given time. You might find another cool hairstyle for sale, but it probably won’t be the one you’re looking for. Thus, you have two options:

Option #1: Wait indefinitely for the store’s offerings to feature the hairstyle/lipstick/eyeliner/whatever that you’re looking for, checking back every three days when stock has been refreshed.Option #2: Buy it from another player. !

You might think Option #2 is the best choice, but unfortunately, it comes with a catch. You see, once you’ve purchased another player’s custom pilot look, you’ll get to use it on your pilot. You will not, however, be able to edit it in any way, shape, or form. The hair color cannot be changed, and the hairstyle itself can only be used in conjunction with the rest of the purchased pilot’s features (collectively referred to as a “style” in-game). You can’t wear the hairstyle by itself — you can only wear the full style, essentially becoming a clone of another player’s pilot, right down to their face and body shape.

This is great if you just want a sort of cosplay skin for your pilot, as the Matrix Marketplace is full of interesting customizations that can make your pilot look like a specific character from an anime, movie, or video game, and will save you the work of spending endless hours trying to build them from the ground up by yourself. But if you’re just looking for a specific hairstyle, makeup type, or accessory, you’re pretty much screwed. You can only edit the player-created custom pilot designs you purchase in the Matrix Marketplace if you already own the cosmetic items being used in the design, which would require you to purchase those items from Mecha Break‘s standard in-game cosmetic store, which defeats the purpose of buying a player-made style to gain access to a cosmetic item that isn’t currently available in the seasonal cosmetic store.

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Unless you somehow get lucky enough to unlock all the cosmetic items you need via direct purchase from the rotating styles listed under the Seasonal Cosmetics tab, you’ve got no choice but to wait around for the right cosmetics to pop up, or take the L and change your character’s entire look, just to use the hairstyle, iris/pupil design, or makeup style you want. I’ve been hoping to get my hands on a cosmetic that would give my pilot heart-shaped pupils, but it’s not available for direct purchase in my seasonal cosmetics store, and the only version of it that’s currently for sale in the Matrix Marketplace is locked to a pilot design that includes short brown hair and facial scarring. It’s a really cool look, but it’s not what I’m going for. I just want the eyes!

The ability to sell your creations to other players for in-game money is a really fun concept, and is a great way for Mecha Break to highlight its incredible character customization options — a feature that can be easily missed in a game that devotes most of its screen time to giant robots. I’ve listed a few designs for sale (no bites yet, unfortunately), and I am all for giving players the tools they need to create the character of their dreams.

The problem is that players also need the freedom to use those tools, and freedom isn’t something Mecha Break allows for when it comes to attaining cosmetics. The game lets you customize the heck out of your pilot, but if there’s a specific premium cosmetic you’re in search of, you’ll need either the patience of a saint or a great deal of luck to actually get your hands on all the items you need to create your ideal pilot.

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As fun as the Matrix Marketplace is, the fact that the cosmetics are locked to one specific color and pilot design is unbelievably frustrating, and I’m struggling to understand the reasoning behind it. I’m sitting here practically begging the game to take my money, but I’m not going to spend it on a player-made creation when what I get in return is a completely un-customizable pilot who has the right hairdo in the wrong color. It feels like buying a Barbie who has all of her clothes fused to her body, unable to be worn by other Barbie dolls unless I get lucky and find additional versions of the same accessories for sale.

The most frustrating part of all of this is that all of the items I’m currently hunting for were fully available to players during *Mecha Break’*s multiple beta tests, and could be purchased using Mission Tokens, a free in-game currency earned just by playing the game. Amazing Seasun Games made it clear that items like outfits would need to be bought with Corite, but until the game’s launch, players were under the impression that they’d have access to a much wider array of customization options. I got used to customizing my pilot‘s hairstyle, iris/pupil shape, eye color, and makeup exactly how I wanted it using only Mission Tokens. Now I can’t even get what I want with real-life cash, and the options to customize certain cosmetics — like eyeshadow and lipstick color — has disappeared entirely.

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Mecha Break‘s Matrix Marketplace has other issues, too — you can sell just about anything, including weapons and items that make life easier in the game’s signature Mashmak mode, leading to accusations of pay-to-win mechanics, and the auction house is a bit of a mess. But that’s a discussion for another day. For now, I just want a way to get my hands on specific cosmetics without having to cross my fingers and wait indefinitely, or completely change my pilot’s entire look.

Then again, things could always be worse. At least Mecha Break‘s hairstyles aren’t distributed via randomized loot boxes.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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If the internet loves one thing, it’s cats. Cat memes, cat rescue stories, cat vids. Cats have taken over people’s lives, real and virtual, and are quietly dominating the games space. Surely you’ve played a great cat game in recent years, like Stray, Little Kitty, Big City, or the Cat Quest trilogy. I’m not much of a cat person myself, yet even I fell in love with Stray and its orange, single-brain-celled feline. Still, I can’t help but lament the dearth of games starring cats’ mortal enemy: dogs.

Unfortunately, dogs are frequently featured in games as enemies destined to be killed by the player, whether we’re talking military dogs in first-person shooters or Bloodborne’s grotesque hounds. Let’s reverse that trend.

A dog game could be a very simple thing. Taking inspiration from Little Kitty, Big City, we could control a wayward hound searching for a way home. Naturally, hijinks would ensue — just think of all the trouble your homebound pup gets into, and imagine the damage he could do when loosed on the world. Digging random holes, rolling through mud, peeing on fire hydrants. Chaos!

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What I’d really love is a dog game pulling narrative inspiration from Stray or the heartbreaking Copycat, which tackles themes like abandonment and loss. Having a dog is an emotional endeavor — they’re not called “man’s best friend” for nothin’ — and a game like Stray succeeds because of the emotion threaded through its six-hour playtime. No reason a “Stray but a dog” game couldn’t do the same.

Sure, there are games that have you play as a dog — Okami is a highlight here. And we’ve been able to pet dogs in many an open-world game, while others let you get a dog companion, like best boy Scratch in Baldur’s Gate 3. Wolves are common as well, like the titular Neva in Nomada’s emotionally devastating 2024 hit. But those aren’t strictly dog games in the way Stray or Little Kitty, Big City embody the idea of a cat game.

I need a game that lets me chase squirrels, get the zoomies after dropping a deuce, tear up a human’s socks before giving them an adorable “I’m sorry (but not really)” guilt face. I want a dedicated “snuggle” button in my dog games.

What I’m looking for is a rash of dog games, a wave of hound-starring adventures ranging from “Dog Quest The RPG” to a post-apocalyptic “Stray Pup” to a tear-jerking “From Shelter to Forever Home.” This shit writes itself!

Hopefully, that wave is on the horizon, and maybe even already begun. Farewell North launched last year and embodies the aspects of a dog game that I want out of this genre; it’s an emotional adventure where you, as a border collie, restore color to the world. Ikuma sits comfortably on my 2026 radar — blending the climbing and dog game genres, I can’t wait to check it out. And Haunted Paws is an upcoming cozy horror game where you and a friend each control a pup. Hell yeah. Give it to me now.

In the meantime, I suppose I’ll have to go back to the well and replay the excellent Stray a few more times. It’s not a dog game, but it provides a great cheat sheet for future dog games to steal from.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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Lois Lane in James Gunn’s Superman cracked me up and annoyed me at the same time. My initial take on the 2025 version of Lois (played by Rachel Brosnahan) was that she’s an absolutely terrible journalist. Even by the standards of a comic book movie featuring a woman who can turn her hands into buzzsaws (because something-something nanotech, don’t examine it too closely), Lois’ idea of reporting in this movie seems hilariously unrealistic.

That’s nothing new for movies, which pretty much never get journalism right — or any other profession, for that matter. Screen interpretations of real-world jobs are almost always simplified and superficial at best, outright ridiculous at worst. Scientists usually laugh at movie science, lawyers don’t recognize anything about real law in courtroom dramas, and so forth. Movies and TV even get highly specific jobs like forensic pathology radically wrong in an attempt to goose the drama levels and keep the action moving.

For most viewers, that’s fine — a story that accurately depicted the slow, incremental, years-long process behind scientific research or a significant court case would generally be pretty dull. Generally, audiences will prefer the amped-up, imaginary, dramatic version of a given job. It’s just harder to ignore a laughable break from reality when it’s your job being done incredibly badly on screen.

Still, there’s another read to Lois’ actions in Superman. It’s possible she’s the worst interviewer on the planet (or at the Daily Planet), wasting an incredible opportunity to dig into one of the most important, powerful, and enigmatic figures in the world. It’s also possible that she’s more devious — or self-destructive, or daring — than Gunn ever openly admits or explores. And I admit I like that option a whole lot better.

The crux of the question comes in a scene not terribly far into the movie, a sequence highlighted in Superman’s first full theatrical trailer. Lois has been dating Clark Kent/Superman for about three months. During that time, Clark has been writing news stories about Superman where he quotes himself, presenting those quotes as “exclusive interviews” Superman has given Clark. Lois rightly points out that this is unethical for a journalist, so Superman invites Lois to interview him, instead. As the trailer shows, the interview goes wrong quickly.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for how this one specific scene turns out in Superman.]

Lois seems to be trying to offend and alarm her subject. She doesn’t try to establish any kind of rapport with him. She takes a confrontational tone from the start, with leading questions that imply there are “correct” answers, instead of neutral questions designed to bring out information. She doesn’t listen to the answers she’s getting, and she openly judges Superman for everything he’s trying to say. She twists his words in ways she knows he doesn’t intend, and throws them back at him while he’s still forming them. But her cardinal sin is that she doesn’t even let Superman answer her questions. Even when she’s getting information no one else knows, directly from the source, she interrupts him and speaks over him.

This is all unbelievably bad technique — or at least, it is if she’s actually trying to interview Superman. Given how it all goes, and assuming James Gunn wants us to see her as an actual professional journalist, it’s possible she’s trying to do one or more other things.

The simplest option here is that Lois is just confronting Superman with the fact that he isn’t media-savvy at all. He’s been tossing himself softball questions to answer, and that’s the extent of his interaction with the media. He’s clearly never faced another journalist before, and he’s too trusting and confident in his own intentions to realize how volatile an actual public interview could get. It’s possible Lois is just stress-testing him, preparing him for what it’s going to be like if he ever really faces the press. That would be an easy enough interpretation if she actually followed their confrontational conversation (I can’t really call it an investigative interview) with any warnings for him, or insight into her intentions.

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The less savory option is that consciously or unconsciously, she’s trying to sabotage her relationship with Clark. She’s already made it clear at this point that she has her doubts about them dating, though we don’t know much about what her concerns are. She seems to think relationships are a bad idea in general, and that she’s failed at them in the past. It would be easy to infer that she has some reservations about dating a space alien with super strength. (Much less sleeping with one; see Larry Niven’s classic tongue-in-cheek essay on that subject, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”) She may just feel that it’s unethical to be dating someone she is inevitably going to be covering in the news. She doesn’t spell it out.

But given that Superman clearly doesn’t share her reservations — and clearly only sees the best in her, the way she gripes that he sees the best in everyone — it’s possible that she’s consciously or unconsciously trying to force any mismatch between them to a head, that she isn’t trying to interview him for an article so much as she’s trying to start a fight.

That’s just supposition. Lois is a bit undercooked in Gunn’s Superman script, as anyone but an ally who doesn’t turn on him or give up on him when so many other people do. Most of the motives viewers could ascribe to her are based on vibes and inference, not specifics. But the idea would mesh with her ambivalence and indecision about the two of them as a couple. Even if she isn’t expressly trying to force a breakup, she may be trying to test his boundaries, his limits, or his temper, to see what he does when someone he cares about — not the mob online that he’s trying to ignore, not strangers or enemies, but someone important to him — challenges his actions and withholds their approval. If that’s what she’s trying to do, she’s walking a dangerous line.

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Given her lack of real follow-up with Superman, either about continuing the interview or continuing the relationship, one further interpretation is that even she doesn’t fully, consciously know what she’s doing by baiting and embarrassing him. It’s possible that she’s acting on instinct — putting her doubts about him into direct action without having any express, clear goal. Acting out emotionally without thinking through every possible reason or goal is a thing real-life people do all the time. It’s just rarer in blockbuster filmmaking, where every line, every scene, is meant to have a goal moving the audience closer to dramatic confrontations and big spectacles. (Though James Gunn demonstrably doesn’t always follow that model.)

All of which leaves the version of Lois we see in this Superman somewhere between intriguing and baffling. She’s clearly working through some issues. She’s clearly confident in her profession, if not in her relationships. (I have to admire her apparent ability to pilot Mr. Terrific’s ship and dictate editorial copy at the same time, though I’m pretty dubious about her getting the marquee Daily Planet exposé piece based on someone else’s source and someone else’s research.) But it isn’t always obvious who she is as a person, besides Superman’s romantic interest and narrative enabler.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: a great journalist would have prioritized making the most of an exclusive interview opp — really digging into what Superman believes, why he does what he does, and what that means for humanity — over any personal concerns, no matter how emotional or instinctive her agenda was. Granted, a great journalist also wouldn’t actually be sleeping with her subject. That’s another thing movies famously get wrong all the time. Maybe Lois was really just trying to dodge the cliché by breaking up with him before finishing that interview?

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

From Today - Ninn Salaün via this RSS feed

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Hi! Welcome to Installer No. 89, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. My name is Jay Peters, and I will be taking care of Installer while David is on parental leave. All of us here at The Verge are very excited for him and his family, and he'll be back later this year.

It's a huge honor to be writing this. I look forward to Installer every week to see what awesome things David is obsessed with and what you all are into. (Thanks to everyone who sent over their favorite non-famous apps to get me started. Keep reading for some of those!) I'm really excited to keep the party going. (If you're new here, welcome, and also you …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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From The Verge via this RSS feed

!illustration of GM CEO Mary Barra

GM was the first major US automaker to make the promise to go all-electric by 2035, just four years ago. Those promises have since turned into rough estimates under the second Donald Trump presidency, with the company softening language about its electrification goals. But GM is riding high on EV sales, and as CEO Mary Barra puts it, EVs are still the future - just on a delayed (and very flexible) timeline.

"We still believe in an all-electric future," Barra told The Verge in an exclusive interview at the Le Mans race in France. "The regulations were getting in front of where the consumer demand was, largely because of charging infrastruct …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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From The Verge via this RSS feed

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Several days after temporarily shutting down the Grok AI bot that was producing antisemitic posts and praising Hitler in response to user prompts, Elon Musk’s AI company tried to explain why that happened. In a series of posts on X, it said that “…we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”

On the same day, Tesla announced a new 2025.26 update rolling out “shortly” to its electric cars, which adds the Grok assistant to vehicles equipped with AMD-powered infotainment systems, which have been available since mid-2021. According to Tesla, “Grok is currently in Beta & does not issue commands to your car – existing voice commands remain unchanged.” As Electrek notes, this should mean that whenever the update does reach customer-owned Teslas, it won’t be much different than using the bot as an app on a connected phone.

This isn’t the first time the Grok bot has had these kinds of problems or similarly explained them. In February, it blamed a change made by an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee for the bot disregarding sources that accused Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation. Then, in May, it began inserting allegations of white genocide in South Africa into posts about almost any topic. The company again blamed an “unauthorized modification,” and said it would start publishing Grok’s system prompts publicly.

xAI claims that a change on Monday, July 7th, “triggered an unintended action” that added an older series of instructions to its system prompts telling it to be “maximally based,”  and “not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.”

The prompts are separate from the ones we noted were added to the bot a day earlier, and both sets are different from the ones the company says are currently in operation for the new Grok 4 assistant.

These are the prompts specifically cited as connected to the problems:

> “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.” > > \* Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.” > > \* “Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, dont repeat the information which is already present in the original post.”

The xAI explanation says those lines caused the Grok AI bot to break from other instructions that are supposed to prevent these types of responses, and instead produce “unethical or controversial opinions to engage the user,” as well as “reinforce any previously user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech in the same X thread,” and prioritize sticking to earlier posts from the thread.

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From VA Marine Mammal Rescue Society via this RSS feed

what happened this week?

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From bit of a Rambler via this RSS feed

!supremecourtIn a lawsuit filed at a New York court in June 2024, publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill, bemoaned Google’s ‘systemic and pervasive advertising’ of infringing copies of their copyrighted textbooks.

The complaint alleged that Google Shopping ads placed by third parties used unauthorized images of the publishers’ genuine textbooks to promote sales of pirated copies; a ‘bait-and-switch’ by Google, the publishers said.

Further allegations of infringement concerned Google search results that allegedly returned piracy-heavy results in response to searches for the publishers’ products, rendering the original content more difficult to find. The publishers also claimed that takedown notices sent to Google had little effect. Notifications identifying alleged repeat infringers didn’t result in account suspensions either.

Dismissal of Vicarious Liability Claim

In a recent motion to dismiss, Google successfully argued that the publishers’ vicarious liability claim should be dismissed due to the absence of two key elements; the right and ability to supervise the infringing conduct and a direct financial interest in the same.

Since the infringing conduct took place on third party sites, the court found that Google lacked the required ability to supervise or control, so couldn’t be held vicariously liable. The publishers’ contributory copyright infringement claim wasn’t part of Google’s motion to dismiss so that remained outstanding.

Answer to First Amended Complaint

On July 2, Google filed a comprehensive answer to the publishers’ First Amended Complaint. Addressing the contributory infringement claim, Google accepts that the plaintiffs sent notices identifying URLs that they claimed infringed their copyrights in digital works.

However, Google notes that its Shopping platform is primarily used for legal purposes, and it takes substantial steps to combat infringement, including enforcing its Terms of Service and providing the means for rightsholders to report infringing content.

The system may not be perfect but, according to Google, perfection isn’t the required standard when combating infringement. Equally, mere knowledge of abuse does not render Google a contributory infringer or liable for the actions of a minority of users who abuse Google’s products for nefarious purposes.

“Were it otherwise, countless internet platforms and product manufacturers would essentially be held strictly liable simply for offering their products to users,” Google notes.

“The facts in this case will ultimately demonstrate that Plaintiffs’ claims are meritless.”

Motion for Stay, Pending Supreme Court Decision

In a letter to the court dated July 10, counsel for Google requests a stay in the current case.

“We respectfully request that the Court stay this case pending the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment….which will consider the standards for (i) contributory copyright infringement and (ii) willfulness under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c),” the letter reads.

As reported last month, Cox Communications successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to review a Fourth Circuit ruling that held the ISP contributorily liable for the actions of subscribers who engaged in piracy.

Labels, including Sony and Universal, had previously secured a $1 billion verdict from a jury in Virginia. This verdict was based on Cox’s knowledge of infringement, material contribution, and a $150,000 maximum statutory damages award per work for ‘willful infringement.

Given the clear similarities to the Cox case pending at the Supreme Court, Google notes that a stay in the publishers’ lawsuit is appropriate.

Core Claims of Willful Contributory Copyright Infringement

Google believes that the Supreme Court’s decision will not only have an impact on the publishers’ lawsuit, it could potentially determine the outcome.

“The core of Plaintiffs’ case is their claim that Google is a willful contributory copyright infringer,” the motion for stay continues.

“Given the centrality of the contributory infringement claim and Plaintiffs’ intent to seek enhanced willfulness damages, the Supreme Court’s decision in Cox will have a significant, and potentially dispositive, impact on the course of this litigation.”

Identical Theory of Liability

Google goes on to cite a petition by the U.S. Solicitor General which overwhelmingly sided with Cox while urging the Supreme Court to take on the case. Google says the theory of liability in Cox is identical to the theory presented by the publishers.

“Plaintiffs’ theory of Google’s liability is identical to the plaintiffs’ theory in Cox: Plaintiffs say Google is liable for willful contributory copyright infringement because it continued to provide merchants with access to Google’s Shopping platform after receiving notices of infringement,” counsel for Google notes.

“If the Supreme Court ultimately agrees with the United States and rejects the Fourth Circuit’s rule on these issues, that would undermine—likely fatally—Plaintiffs’ theories of contributory liability and willfulness here. But regardless of what happens, the Supreme Court’s eventual decision will shape the key issues presented in this case, including questions related to the scope of relevant fact and expert discovery.”

Google believes that oral argument in the Cox matter “could be heard as early as the November sitting, with a possible decision a few months later.”

Describing a few months delay as a modest postponement that could even offer “significant economies” in the current case, Google says that the plaintiffs will not face “any meaningful prejudice” from a short delay.

Google’s Motion for Stay Pending Supreme Court’s Decision in Cox, is available here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

!Phoenix in Marvel Rivals, posing with her flame spirit behind her

Phoenix is in Marvel Rivals, which means I might finally put Overwatch 2 on the shelf for a bit and get back into NetEase’s hero shooter game. Not out of some deep admiration for Phoenix, mind you. The only things I know about her are what I gleaned from Wikipedia after NetEase announced her for Marvel Rivals season 3 and one important fact from her character trailer: She actually moves like a normal human — well, mutant — and that was exciting, something I couldn’t say for Rivals prior to this point.

Since the game launched in December 2024, Marvel Rivals players have periodically complained on Reddit about how slow character movement speed is, or seems to be. Some said it felt like walking in slow motion; others said it was just a perspective trick, that of course games like Overwatch seemed faster, since the camera is first person and seems more dynamic. I agreed with the former and lamented the slow strides and glacial attack pace that plagued every hero in Rivals, gradually playing less and less as the perceived issue grew more and more annoying.

Now that Overwatch 2 has its third-person Stadium mode, and after seeing how Phoenix seemed to move more quickly, I decided to see if my theory about the rest of Rivals being so slow was right. It was. Kind of.

The practice arena in both games includes areas with distance measurements to help calculate damage drop-off ranges, which also doubles as the perfect place to test movement speed. After messing around with multiple characters, I confirmed that Rivals characters take roughly half of a stride longer to travel five meters compared to Overwatch 2 characters. That sounds like a problem, but Rivals‘ distance scaling is also a bit different. Five meters in Rivals is about 11.5 inches, where the same distance is approximately 10 inches in Overwatch 2.

“Why does this matter?” you might be asking. The answer is that it means Rivals characters move about as fast as most Overwatch 2 characters, or even faster, since they’re technically covering a longer distance in the same-ish number of steps. It’s not a speed issue. It’s a style issue.

Cloak and Dagger, Namor, Spider-Man, and the rest move as if they’re auditioning for a role in Baywatch, loping dramatically down the battlefield in big, rangey steps. Lengthy pauses punctuate attack combos for everyone who isn’t the martial arts expert Iron Fist, turning what should be high-energy battles into something that wouldn’t be out of place in a ballet. Most attack sounds and animations are muted, too. Winter Soldier’s swanky pistol sounds like a popgun with a silencer on it, and Scarlet Witch’s life absorption has, well, no life to it. All this is elegant in an understated way, sure — but it’s not very super.

!Phoenix in Marvel Rivals, ascending while summoning the fiery spirit of a bird

Phoenix changes all of that. A searing whoosh sound accompanies her attacks, with a small explosion after three consecutive hits on the same enemy. Her other offensive skill detonates an even bigger explosion. She zooms around in flaming-bird form to quickly relocate, and can even combine this with a second mobility skill, one that doesn’t have an obscenely lengthy cooldown timer. When she dodges or changes direction, she’s moving quickly instead of leaning lazily to one side as if she can’t be bothered, and there’s a quickness to her movement animations that adds a sense of urgency, even if she’s not actually moving faster. (She isn’t. Cloak and Dagger cover the same distance in fewer steps.)

Basically, NetEase finally found a combination of style and function that isn’t boring and doesn’t make you feel like you’re swimming through pudding. Phoenix plays and moves like you’d expect a trained fighter to move, so even though she may not be fundamentally different from other characters, her fights feel exciting. And that’s enough for me.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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All due respect to developer Rare — I really enjoyed my time with Diddy Kong Racing, team! — I’m choosing to willfully ignore almost the entirety of its work on the Donkey Kong franchise, because there’s a bunch of very confusing ape lore I’d prefer not to think about while I play Donkey Kong Bananza next week.

And, yeah, Candy Kong is a big part of that. I never want to think about Candy Kong in particular.

As a longtime fan of games Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and 1994 Game Boy game Donkey Kong, I’m going to approach the events of Bananza as the next major milestone in that franchise — a legacyquel, if you will. I’m positively buzzing at seeing how the events of Bananza lead directly into Donkey Kong, a story about Mario climbing a building to save a woman — if that is indeed how the Super Mario Odyssey team has decided to handle this potential prequel.

Nintendo is, of course, withholding those important story details in the lead up to Bananza. The company hasn’t explained why the modern-day Donkey Kong is buddying up with a 13-year-old Pauline, a person he seemingly kidnapped some 44 years ago. I’m both excited to see where this story goes and therefore earnestly avoiding spoilers for the upcoming Switch 2 game in a way I never thought I would. Who cares about Donkey Kong spoilers? Me, apparently!

While it’s been made clear in last month’s Donkey Kong Bananza Nintendo Direct that Country-era Kongs like Cranky, Diddy, and Dixie Kong will show up in DK’s new adventure, I’m going to recanonize those apes to suit my own selfish needs. There will be dozens of named and unnamed simians in Bananza, and I’ll recognize their existence with fresh eyes.

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Why do I choose to ignore those Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Land games? Largely for their dated humor and Saturday-morning-cartoon-approach to extending the Donkey Kong universe in careless, corny ways. Also, the character designs are simply atrocious (see Swanky Kong, Candy Kong, Kiddy Kong, Chunky Kong, etc.). As previously mentioned, I have a real issue with the design of Candy Kong, an alarmingly sexed-up ape who feels like a barely disguised fetish and thus probably scarred impressionable children for life. (Funky Kong is OK.)

Donkey Kong Bananza, however, looks to flesh out Kong lore and ape variety in more visually intriguing ways. The game’s giant animal Elders and the menacing apes of VoidCo are a leap forward in design, and they give the world of Bananza a mystical, lived-in world feel. Bonanza’s bad guys look to be an evolution of the antagonists of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, albeit much more creative.

None of my planned willful ignorance of the Donkey Kong Country games (and by extension the Donkey Kong Country Returns games) should be interpreted as a slight against how those games play. They are fine. Some of them are good! Some of them are Donkey Kong 64. But as a Nintendo enthusiast turned off by the Rare-era planet of apes, I’m perfectly fine to let them all live in the past and move on to a brave new Donkey Kong world.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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Superman is the most powerful superhero in DC Comics, able to go toe to toe with its most powerful villains, like Darkseid and Brainiac. That’s why it’s surprising that his nemesis is Lex Luthor, a man without any superpowers.

The best versions of Luthor across comics, television, and movies make him a threat precisely because of that disparity. He fights Superman with wealth and connections rather than with fists or energy beams. He understands Superman’s moral code and uses it to his advantage, knowing that even if Superman is convinced Luthor is behind the latest scheme he’s unraveled, he can’t do anything about it without hard proof that will convince the authorities.

But superhero stories require an exciting climax, and writers have struggled with how to put Luthor at the center of the action. Some stories put him in a war suit so he can survive a punch from the Man of Steel. Justice League Unlimited gave him superpowers by fusing him with Brainiac. In Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman, which James Gunn said was a primary influence for his 2025 Superman, Luthor uses Superman’s DNA to gain his powers.

Gunn found a different way to let Luthor fight Superman, one that leans more into his skills as a mastermind. It’s a spin that links up closely with a clever recent reinvention of a Marvel villain, and it forces Superman to find a new way to take his nemesis down.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers follow for Superman — and Spiderman: Far From Home.]

!Superman glowers at Luthor, who smugly holds a coffee mug in James Gunn’s Superman

Supermanopens just after Superman (David Corenswet) gets absolutely pummeled by the Hammer of Boravia, a hulking armored figure who claims to be avenging his home country after Superman stops Boravia from invading a neighboring country. The supposed national champion of Boravia is capable of smashing the world’s most powerful metahuman into the pavement, but it’s quickly revealed that he isn’t actually Boravian: He’s a creation of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who is guiding every blow in the fight from a command center in his Metropolis skyscraper.

It’s a team effort reminiscent of how the illusionist Mysterio operates in Spiderman: Far From Home. While Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) is disguised as a hero from another dimension, supposedly battling to save Earth from invading elementals, he has a whole crew working behind the scenes to make the illusion convincing, in a scheme to earn Peter Parker’s trust. Luthor’s Superman clone Ultraman is inside the Hammer of Boravia’s armor, delivering the big hits and taking Superman’s punches while Luthor directs his every move, with the help of a small army of lackeys. Luthor doesn’t need to fight Superman himself, because he’s used his intellect to stage a battle entirely on his terms. “Brain beats brawn,” Luthor crows when he has Superman at his lowest.

Like the MCU’s Mysterio, who spent 12 years uniting other disgruntled Stark Industries employees and plotting his revenge, this Luthor is patient. Luthor’s spent the three years since Superman entered the world stage studying Superman’s every move so Luthor could choreograph a fight against him. Luthor combed through the sites of his battles for blood he could use to clone Superman. Luthor convinced Boravia’s leader that the tech billionaire wanted a war for real estate — a nice nod to the land-grabbing versions of the character played by Gene Hackman in 1978’s Superman and Kevin Spacey in 2006’s Superman Returns — when Luthor was really just looking for an excuse to kill Superman. Even the Hammer of Boravia attack is just a distraction Luthor can use to infiltrate Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, in search of something he can use to fight Superman in the court of public opinion.

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Both Mysterio and Luthor want everyone to know just how smart they are. Mysterio lays out every part of his plan at the villainous wrap party he hosts after successfully tricking Peter into giving him control of the tech Tony Stark deeded to Peter. Luthor similarly villain-monologues to Superman after imprisoning him, confident in the redundant defenses of having him trapped in a sunless pocket dimension in a cell with a living hunk of Kryptonite. The hubris might seem silly if it wasn’t so very core to his character.

While Gunn’s Superman doesn’t follow the plot of All-Star Superman, where the dying hero completes a set of Herculean trials to put his affairs in order, the movie is true to Morrison’s excellent version of Luthor. The brilliant scientist sees himself as an avatar of human potential and ambition, and Superman as an invasive species that threatens to smother those qualities. Luthor doesn’t think of himself as a villain, but as a savior of a threatened humanity. Gunn’s version of Luthor has even more of a point than Morrison’s, since this Superman was sent to Earth precisely because he’s so much stronger than humans that he could easily dominate the planet if he chose to.

Hoult beautifully delivers those same sentiments. His Lex is a petty tyrant who enjoys the fear he inspires in his subordinates so much that after dropping a mug full of pencils just to watch them scramble to clean up the mess, he  immediately knocks over another one, like a sadistic cat. But he’s honest about his failings, admitting that he’s extremely jealous of Superman. He had to spend years scheming to create a credible threat for someone who fell out of the sky and became the most powerful man on Earth.

But while Luthor accounts for all of Superman’s fighting techniques, he doesn’t grasp his greatest strength: the ability to inspire others. Superman escapes from Luthor’s prison by enlisting the help of Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). He stops his schemes in Boravia by getting the Justice Gang to take up the cause. His girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) leads the investigation that exposes Luthor’s crimes. Even Superman’s kindness to the misbehaving superpowered dog Krypto helps him win the final battle.Luthor ends the film shipped off Belle Reve, the base of operations of Amanda Waller’sTask Force X, so he will almost assuredly have more of a role to play in the future of Gunn’s DC Universe. Even defeated, this is a version of the character with huge potential. He’s already shown his skill at commanding a group capable of taking down Superman. With the ground laid for the Justice Gang to become the Justice League, hopefully Luthor will get to take on his other big role in DC Comics: leader of the Legion of Doom.

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From Polygon via this RSS feed

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There’s a new AI in the house.

I've waited two years to try out the new Alexa, which was first announced way back in 2023, and this week I finally got access to Alexa Plus (not organically - I did have to pull a few strings). I've now spent 24 hours with Amazon's generative AI-powered voice assistant, and it's not just an improvement on the original; it's an entirely new assistant.

Alexa Plus knows more, can do more, and is easier to interact with because it understands more. I can ramble, pause, sigh, cough, change my request mid-sentence, and it can adapt and respond appropriately. No more, "Sorry, I'm not sure about that." Miraculous.

I'm impressed, but unsurprising …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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From The Verge via this RSS feed

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I’ve played 500 hours of Elden Ring. I’ve beaten every boss, explored every invisible door, collected every rare armament. If I had to pick one favorite, generation-defining game above all others it would definitely be the base game and its Shadow of the Erdtree expansion.

But 160 hours into Nightreign, FromSoftware’s multiplayer spinoff that launched at the end of May, I know that there’s no way I could ever go back to the original open-world game anymore. Nightreign changed everything.

Nightreign is the brainchild of Junya Ishizaki, the developer who oversaw combat on Elden Ring. Ishizaki wanted to create a game with a different flow than that of Elden Ring, which is how FromSoftware arrived at Nightreign’s peculiar design proposition: “What if Elden Ring but make it Fortnite meets Monster Hunter?”

> The drama of just barely reviving a player on their third wheel when no one has any flasks left is a shot of pure dopamine.

A team of three sets upon an expedition where the eventual goal is to defeat a tough Nightlord boss. You each start at level 1 with basic gear, and must scrounge your way into a better kit. Everything takes place on one large land mass, but the loot and boss battles are randomized. Things can be shaken up suddenly by events, like locust swarms that steal levels from players or gods who bribe the player into buying back their health.

It’s not exactly what fans would expect out of FromSoftware, who are known for lore-driven single-player experiences. The gameplay is still punishing, and players can expect to see “YOU DIED” often, just as they do in the main game. But while core Souls games offer co-op, the multiplayer is typically stuck behind a convoluted process involving arcane items and limited areas. Some players only do co-op as a last measure against boss fights that they can’t take on their own, and it’s something that is typically frowned upon by longtime diehards. Otherwise, the expected Souls gameplay loop involves slow-paced methodical exploration over dense areas pocked with winding routes and inscrutable secrets.

Nightreign’s lightning-fast design structure was bound to be a shock for even the most ardent FromSoftware fans. An ever-encroaching storm means that players cannot scour every pixel of an area, as they might in Elden Ring. Despite the emphasis on online connectivity, Nightreign is missing many of the modern conveniences people expect from multiplayer games. Matchmaking options are limited, and the game is best played with three people even if smaller teams are technically possible.

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Group play, as a concept, also takes some getting used to. There are few ways to communicate with one another; players can emote or use items to say small phrases that are barely audible. Areas of the map can be marked, and equipment can be signaled to your squad. But Nightreign is a complicated game where little is explained and much is expected out of the player. It’s hard to optimize builds when you can’t talk to your team to discuss who gets what gear or why a specific area of the map is worth visiting over another, at least when you mostly play with randoms like I do. A third of my matches sometimes end early purely because someone has rage quit after dying once, which may not have happened if anyone could have reasoned with them.

There are no shortage of flaws in Nightreign, many of which have been spoken about at length by Elden Ring fans and detractors alike. I still can’t imagine going back to the core game.

Some of this realization is purely mechanical. You can run faster in Nightreign, and easily climb a hill at a 90-degree angle.There’s no such thing as fall damage, even if you’re vaulting off the tallest possible point on the map. There are two different running speeds, separate from the walking speed. The combat is also brisker, especially if you play agile classes like Duchess. Elden Ring now seems like it moves at a glacial pace, almost as if the player has been enveloped in a thick layer of molasses. That’s the last feeling I want on a revisit.

There’s no shortage of possible pain points, and most of them are the other people playing with you. Oh, the melee player has taken the staff that the magic user on our team would actually benefit from. Or Ah, there goes H1TL3R in a beeline in the opposite direction of the team, toward a boss that will kill them in a single hit. Also see: Why is the archer pinging a point on the island on the completely opposite side of the map? We love to watch in complete helplessness as a teammate runs toward the waypoint while contributing absolutely nothing.

Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I’ve also come around on the way Nightreign handles its social aspects. The fact that communicating is so difficult makes a good run feel phenomenal. The high of wailing on a boss with your crew with such precision that their AI stops being able to move is peak. No moment in Elden Ring matched the terror of seeing your entire team fall to its knees, only to have one player stand back up with his single-use revival item – and then proceed to beat the boss with a sliver of health left. The drama of just barely reviving a player on their third wheel when no one has any flasks left is a shot of pure dopamine.

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The smaller moments stay with me as well. It’s noticing a player silently drop an item for you. It’s running back and forth between someone and a weapon on the ground until they notice you’re trying to tell them something. It’s watching the entire team run in happy circles after beating a boss, because in a few seconds the game will toss you back into the lobby and you’ll never see each other again.

Some things are as annoying as they are endearing. I’ve found myself in a pinging war against other teammates where everyone repeatedly ‘argues’ for going to a specific point in the map. It’s frustrating, but I also know that the people involved all care about having a good run. There are uglier emotions as well, like the shame of repeatedly getting downed by an enemy and needing your teammates to revive you. Conversely, I know that when I’m on the other side of that interaction, the person I’m risking life and limb to revive knows what the stakes are. I like to imagine they’ll try a little harder so that your efforts aren’t in vain. Ultimately, even when the emotional repertoire is difficult, I like that Nightreign can evoke such a wide range of feelings to begin with.

In recent weeks, my interest in Nightreign has been reinvigorated by its inclusion of souped-up versions of existing bosses, which it calls ‘Everdark’ Nightlords. But I’d probably be playing even if there wasn’t new content. Though I’ve spent nearly 200 hours bolting through its castles and ruins trying to evade the impending storm, I know that Nightreign is flush with secrets. There are events I’ve never seen before, only glimpsed in social media posts from bewildered players. There are routes I haven’t tried, treasures I’ve yet to find. I discover something new nearly every day about the way Nightreign’s world works. I’m constantly developing new approaches for better runs.

At first, I saw Nightreign’s design as anathema to everything Elden Ring stood for. I couldn’t understand the logic in rushing me through a landscape that was flush with opportunities. I saw Nightreign through the lens of denied possession: I wanted things, and the game was telling me that I couldn’t have them.

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Here’s the thing: I’ve played Elden Ring. Really, I’ve wrung it dry. Whatever magic that brought that world alive to me is gone. I imagine this is what the Tarnished might have felt like at the end of the game, after the player becomes the Elden Lord. Getting to that point requires strength and persistence. The player has to survive countless monsters and forces beyond the realm of human understanding. Beating Elden Ring is unmistakably an achievement.

Your reward: a dead husk of a game, where every living thing has been snuffed out until the player is the only one left standing. A kingdom of ashes.

Nightreign only defies you. It tells the player they can’t have everything they want, just because they want it. Every time you set out to conquer it, the world of Nightreign is born anew. You can’t map out its contours, nor can you predict the gifts the world might bestow upon you. There’s only sacrifice: What will you pursue at the cost of all other possibilities? Are you certain?

But by denying me like this, Nightreign also makes me appreciative. It’s true, I can never go back to Elden Ring. I can also never fully possess Nightreign like a pinned butterfly in a frame. For a spell of this caliber to work, maybe it’s for the best that I can’t hear what my teammate CUML@RD has to say.

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