Sundays are more for cats. She's comfortable with me now, but she still seems a little terrified of my house in general. I'm going to spend some time with her and see if I can instill some sort of object permanence about my presence in the house. Before that, let's read this week's top gaming (and gaming-related!) posts.
“The lack of review scores during the new Madden's launch week was partly due to EA's design,” writes Stephen Totillo for Gamefile
For Madden NFL 25, testers received the game's code from EA on its anticipated launch date of August 13, according to a Game File check with four sources familiar with reviews from several popular publications.
Additionally, EA's rules for most of the reviews Game File discussed explicitly prohibited reviews scored until August 16.
This means that the average person could have written a rated review before the media that agreed to EA's terms, simply by purchasing the game on the 13th, playing it extensively over the next two days, and posting their review.
“It feels like they’re continuing to actively protect Madden from criticism,” one reviewer told Game File, asking not to be named for fear his comment would draw EA’s ire.
An EA representative did not provide any official comment when asked about the company's strategy regarding Madden reviews.
If you'll allow me to editorialize for a moment: this sucks!
For Polygon, Christian Donlan tested the puzzle game Malware.
It’s a beautiful judgment, but I’ve slowly come to realize that malware works so well as a game for the same reason that malware often works in the real world. These things succeed because they understand that, even before they’ve tried to trick me, I already feel slightly powerless in the face of the bland authority of a computer window. This is true even when, once I really think about it, the authority the window seems to possess is not the authority I remember giving it.
It comes down to the realization that computers are complex and work in ways that are far beyond my comprehension. It means that when they stoop to my level and offer me dialog boxes that I can at least read and analyze, I am already on the defensive. I already feel like I am not in a position to question much of anything. I have already lost.
“AI is changing video games — and striking artists want their due,” Mandalit del Barco writes for NPR.
Norris says companies are trying to get around the idea of paying performers who do body movements the same rate as everyone else, “because at this point they just treat us as data.” She adds: “I can crawl all over the floor and walls as this creature, and they’ll say that’s not a performance and therefore not subject to their AI protections.”
It's a nuanced distinction: The companies included “performance capture” in their proposal, including recordings of performers' voices and faces, but not the behind-the-scenes “motion capture” work of body doubles and other motion performers who are used to render the movement.
But Norris and others like her consider themselves “performance capture artists” — “because if all you’re capturing is movement, then why are you hiring an artist?”
Here’s a video of some sharks chilling out, just because I found a topic tag named “sss-shark” in the CMS and wanted to use it. Chat GPT strikes again, this time by (apparently) fabricating negative quotes from critics in a trailer for Coppola’s new film. Well, it’s not all bad news. “Tech companies are furious about a new law that would hold them liable when their AI does bad things,” writes Futurism. Turkish Olympic shooter Yusuf Dikec was apparently known on the Japanese internet as “ojisan free-to-play” due to his lack of fancy cosmetics, via Ex Research. This week’s music is “playlist to be a shark.” This tag needs some justification. Have a great weekend!