As if October wasn't already going to be busy enough for new games. Publisher 505 Games has revealed that Ghostrunner 2, the sequel to a terrific cyberpunk platformer from 2020, will arrive on October 26th. It will be available on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store and GOG), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-orders are open and those who snap up the Brutal Edition will get access 48 hours early.

The latest entry in the series takes place one year after the events of Ghostrunner. You'll once again play as Jack, a cyberninja who has to slice and dice his way up through an imposing tower. Ghostrunner is a fast-paced, often-tough game in which you parkour around treacherous environments. Jack dies often, but instant respawns, frequent checkpoints and accessibility options are helpful.

The sequel from One More Level seems to build on that foundation with new features such as a motorbike and dialogue choices. This is one of my most anticipated games of the year, so it's a real shame that it might get buried under the onslaught of blockbusters that are arriving in October.

Ghostrunner 2 will be going right up against Alan Wake 2 (October 27th) — Epic Games and Remedy last week delayed their game by 10 days to get out of the way of major titles like Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Also coming in October are games including Assassin's Creed Mirage (which also moved release dates to stake out its own spot on the calendar), Detective Pikachu Returns, Forza Motorsport, Lords of the Fallen and Cities Skylines II.

On top of those, many people will still be knees deep in the likes of Starfield,Armored Core VI and perhaps Immortals of Aveum by the time Ghostrunner 2 arrives. Given the abundance of games coming out in the next couple months, perhaps waiting an extra few weeks wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Threads by Instagram will get a web version as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised a web version with better search functionality, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said that one is in testing. Currently, a full version of Threads is only available on iOS and Android, with limited read-only functionality on browsers.

A web version is near the top of the list of most-desired features for Threads, but the company is exercising caution with the release. "It’s a little bit buggy right now, you don’t want it just yet," Mosseri said Friday on Instagram. "As soon as it is ready we will share it with everybody else."

Threads recently added new features to Threads like the ability to set notifications and view posts in chronological order. The company also started labeling state-controlled media outlets after some were seen posting propaganda. Another new update is the "repost" tab makes it easier to see all reposted content. (X, previously called Twitter, recently renamed "retweets" to the more generic "reposts," ironically following Threads' lead.) 

A web version would be coming at a good time for Threads. After a torrid launch with over 100 million users signing on in the first week, the number of daily active users (DAUs) dropped down to 80 percent by mid-August. Still, Threads is by far the most successful alternative to X, which counted around 238 million DAUs in August 2023 and 364 million monthly active users, X reported last year. 

In any case, the launch of a web version will be particularly useful for social media power users, just when Twitter has put one of its key tools for those folks, Tweetdeck, permanently behind a paywall.

Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons.

In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align.

MIT Press

Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.

In the Atari 2600 video game version of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg 1982), also called E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 1982), the defining experience is falling into a pit. It’s cruelly fitting, then, that hundreds of thousands of the game’s physical cartridges were buried in a landfill in 1983. Why? It was one of the most spectacular failures in video game history. Why? It’s often put front and center as the worst game of all time. Why? Well, when you play it, you keep falling into a pit, among other things ...

But was the video game E.T. so terrible? In many ways it was a victim of the video game industry’s voracious hunger for “sure fire” blockbusters. One strategy was to adapt already-popular movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or, yes, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Rushed to market with a development time of only five weeks, the game inevitably lacked the careful crafting of action-oriented gameplay backed by audience testing that other Atari titles had. I would argue, though, that its creator, Howard Scott Warshaw, found his way into a more truthful portrayal of the essence of the film than you might expect.

Yes, in the game E.T. is constantly falling into pits as he flees scientists and government agents. Yes, the game is disorienting in terms of understanding what to do, with arcane symbols and unclear objectives. But on the other hand, doesn’t all that make for a more poignant portrayal of E.T.’s experience, stranded on an alien planet, trying to get home? What if E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a good adaptation of the film, and just an unpopular video game?

The world of video games has admired the world of film from the beginning. This has led to a long-running conversation between game design and the audiovisual language of cinema, from cutscenes to narration to fades and more. In this sense, films are one of the key materials games are made of. However, even video games’ contemporary dominance of the revenue competition has not been quite enough to soothe a nagging sense that games just don’t measure up. Roger Ebert famously (and rather overbearingly) claimed that video games could “never be art,” and although we can mostly laugh about it now that we have games like Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium, it still hurts. What if Ebert was right in the sense that video games aren’t as good at being art as cinema is?

Art has seldom been on game studios’ minds in making film adaptations. From Adventures of Tron for the Atari 2600 to Toy Story Drop! on today’s mobile devices, the video game industry has continually tried for instant brand recognition and easy sales via film. Sadly, the resulting games tend just to lay movie visuals and stories over tried-and-true game genres such as racing, fighting, or match 3. And the search for films that are inherently “video game-y” hasn’t helped much either. In Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Spider-Man ends up largely as a vessel for swinging and punching, and you certainly can’t participate in Miles’s inner life. So what happened to the “Citizen Kane of video games”?

A significant barrier has been game makers’ obsession with the audiovisual properties of cinema, the specific techniques, rather than some of the deeply structural or even philosophical opportunities. Film is exciting because of the ways it unpacks emotion, represents space, deploys metaphor, and more. To leverage the stuff of cinema, we need to take a close look at these other elements of films and explore how they might become the stuff of video games too. One way to do that in an organized way is to focus on adaptation, which is itself a kind of conversation between media that inevitably reveals much about both. And if you’re going to explore film adaptation to find the secret recipe, why not go with the obvious? Why not literally make Citizen Kane (Welles 1941) into a video game? Sure, Citizen Kane is not necessarily the greatest film of all time, but it certainly has epic symbolic value. Then again, Citizen Kane is an enormous, complex film with no car chases and no automatic weapons. Maybe it’s a terrible idea.

As video games have ascended to a position of cultural and economic dominance in the media landscape, there has been a temptation to see film as a toppled Caesar, with video games in the role of a Mark Antony who has “come to bury cinema, not to praise it.” But as game makers, we haven’t yet mined the depths offered by cinema’s rich history and its exciting contemporary voices. Borrowing cinema’s visual language of cameras, points of view, scenes, and so on was a crucial step in figuring out how video games might be structured, but the stuff of cinema has more to say than that. Citizen Kane encourages us to embrace tragedy and a quiet ending. The Conversation shows us that listening can be more powerful than action. Beau Travail points toward the beauty of self-expression in terrible times. Au Hasard Balthazar brings the complex weight of our own responsibilities to the fore.

There’s nothing wrong with an action movie or an action video game, but I suggest there’s huge value in looking beyond the low-hanging fruit of punch-ups and car chases to find genuinely new cinematic forms for the games we play. I’ll never play a round of Combat in the same way, thanks to the specter of Travis Bickle psyching himself up for his fight against the world at large. It’s time to return to cinema in order to think about what video games have been and what they can be. Early attempts to adapt films into games were perhaps “notoriously bad” (Fassone 2020), but that approach remains the most direct way for game designers to have a conversation with the cinematic medium and to come to terms with its potential. Even if we accept the idea that E.T. was terrible, which I don’t, it was also different and new.

This is bigger than cinema, though, because we’re really talking about adaptation as a form of video game design. While cinema (and television) is particularly well matched, all other media from theater to literature to music are teeming with ideas still untried in the youthful domain of video games. One way to fast-track experimentation is of course to adapt plays, poems, and songs. To have those conversations. There can be an air of disdain for adaptations compared to originals, but I’m with Linda Hutcheon (2012, 9) who asserts in A Theory of Adaptation that “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative — a work that is second without being secondary.” As Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2003, 15) put it, “what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media.” This is all the more so when the question is how to adapt a specific work in another medium, where, as Hutcheon claims, “the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation." That is, adaptation is inherently thoughtful and generative; it forces us to come to terms with the source materials in such a direct way that it can lay our design thinking bare—the conversation is loud and clear. As we’ve seen, choosing films outside the formulas of Hollywood blockbusters is one way to take that process of interpretation and creation a step further by exposing game design to more diverse cinematic influences.

Video games are an incredible way to explore not just the spaces we see on-screen, but also “the space of the mind." When a game asks us to act as a character in a cinematic world, it can also ask us to think as that character, to weigh our choices with the same pressures and history they are subject to. Hutcheon critiques games’ adaptive possibilities on the grounds that their programming has “an even more goal- directed logic than film, with fewer of the gaps that film spectators, like readers, fill in to make meaning." To me, this seems less like a criticism and more like an invitation to make that space. Quiet moments in games, as in films, may not be as exhilarating as a shoot-out, but they can demand engagement in a way that a shoot-out can’t. Video games are ready for this.

The resulting games may be strange children of their film parents, but they’ll be interesting children too, worth following as they grow up. Video game film adaptations will never be films, nor should they be—they introduce possibilities that not only recreate but also reimagine cinematic moments. The conversations we have with cinema through adaptation are ways to find brand new ideas for how to make games. Even the next blockbuster.

Yeah, cinema, I’m talkin’ to you.

You may have watched the original run of Twin Peaks so many times that you exclaim “damn fine coffee” each and every time you grab a cup, but have you ever played the story through the eyes of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper? You’ll soon be able to do just that via the magic of video games. A small French developer called Blue Rose Team has been prepping Twin Peaks: Into the Night for a while now, and it just dropped a demo of the fan-made game.

The graphics are retro and decidedly PS1-flavored, which makes sense given how the show premiered in 1990. The gameplay looks to be full of exploration, complete with conversations with the town’s many oddball residents, though there’s a survival horror element reminiscent of the original Resident Evil titles. This is also an appropriate design choice, as the show pits Agent Cooper against foes both physical and supernatural. You should expect appearances from the infamous one-armed man, the chaos agent Bob, nefarious former FBI agent Windom Earle and, of course, plenty of owls.

Beyond gameplay, there looks to be an array of video cutscenes culled from the show itself. The demo, released Tuesday, chronicles events from season one, in which Cooper arrives in Twin Peaks and begins unraveling the murder case of local teen Laura Palmer. The demo is filled with the kind of idiosyncratic quirks and metaphysical horror elements that made the OG show such a hit back in the day.

The creators have announced that the game will be free when it launches, so that should clear up any potential legal hurdles moving forward. David Lynch is busy doing his daily weather reports on YouTube or whatever, so he won’t complain, but ABC and Warner Bros. aren’t quite as chill as the filmmaker/painter/meditation enthusiast.

There’s no official release date, but the demo should keep you busy for a while. Oddly, this will be the very first Twin Peaks video game adaptation, though there’s a short VR experience. Despite never being officially adapted, the show has inspired plenty of games, from the Alan Wake series to a little-known title called The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. It also goes without saying that Twin Peaks: Into the Night doesn’t delve into the events of Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, so don’t expect to control Jim Belushi.

Activision has spilled the beans about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, revealing much more about what players can expect from the next entry in the rebooted series. For one thing, it seems like fans of Call of Duty's Zombies mode are in for a treat. Activision is promising the mode's biggest map to date. You'll be able to team up with other squads for the first time and try to survive "massive hordes" of zombies.

Although Sledgehammer Games is leading development on Modern Warfare III, a bunch of other Activision studios are lending a hand. Treyarch, one of the core Call of Duty developers, handled this year's Zombies mode, which tells a "Dark Aether" story. Along with secrets to unearth and a variety of missions to check out, Zombies includes "an open-world PvE extraction survival experience" and some of the biggest enemies in the franchise's history, Activision said.

Zombies is not the only major multiplayer mode, of course, and MWIII will pay tribute to one of the series' high points. Every one of the original 16 multiplayer maps from the 2009 version of Modern Warfare 2 will be available at the outset. Sledgehammer has modernized classic maps like Terminal and Highrise with new modes and gameplay features. More than 12 new six vs. six maps will arrive in future seasons.

From the jump, there will be three new Battle Maps on which you'll duke it out in the Ground War and Invasion modes, along with a War map. The latter marks the return of the War Mode that made its series bow in 2017's Call of Duty: WWll.

Sledgehammer Games/Actvision

You can expect fresh movement mechanics, such as a Tac-Stance for tactical close-quarters combat. Activision says Sledgehammer has refined the reload cancel and slide cancel mechanics, while you should find it faster to aim down sights out of slide. Meanwhile, all perks will be available at the beginning of a multiplayer match, including a new silent movement one called Covert Sneakers.

Many players will be pleased to learn that the classic red-dot minimap is back after Infinity Ward omitted it from last year's Modern Warfare II. There will be a map voting system, while Sledgehammer has given players a health boost, which will increase the time-to-kill — I'm sure players will have no opinions whatsoever about that change.

You won't necessarily have to start over your collection of multiplayer gear from scratch. Last week, Activision confirmed that, for the first time, players will be able to carry forward nearly all of their unlocked items (including weapons and operators) from Modern Warfare II to Modern Warfare III.

Sledgehammer Games/Actvision

On top of all of the multiplayer features, there's the small matter of the campaign. This is a direct sequel to last year's game and it continues the Modern Warfare story with Task Force 141 looking to take down ultranationalist villain Vladmir Makarov. This time around, there's a new type of mission called Open Combat. This offers players the chance to choose their own path through a level and they'll have multiple ways to complete objectives. These levels were built to work around players' preferred play styles, so if you prefer a stealthy approach to an all-guns-blazing one, you might appreciate their flexibility. 

Activision has also released a new gameplay trailer, which backs up speculation that there will be a fresh take on the controversial No Russian mission from the original Modern Warfare 2. The phrase "No Russian" appears in a text message before the recipient points a gun while walking through a plane.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III will hit PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC (via Steam and Battle.net) on November 10th. There will be a free open beta beforehand, with those who pre-order getting early access. Those folks will also be able to play the campaign up to a week before the game's official release date.

Amazon is tightening the purse strings again, raising prices for Music Unlimited subscriptions. This latest increase impacts Prime members and family plan users, as originally spotted by The Hollywood Reporter. The Amazon Music Unlimited Individual Plan for Prime members is going up from $9 to $10 per month, or $89 to $99 per year. The Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan is shooting up from $16 to $17 per month, or $159 to $169 per year.

These rates begin immediately for new subscribers, but pre-existing customers have a grace period until September 19 before they kick in. As for the why, Amazon magnanimously stated that the price hikes will help bring “even more content and features.” Aw, shucks. You shouldn’t have.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Amazon has raised Music Unlimited prices this year. Back in January, the costs went up for students and non-Prime subscribers, and last year Prime members got yet another increase. So, basically Prime members saw prices jettison from $8 per month to $10 per month in just over a year. That’s a lot of new content and features.

Amazon isn’t the only streamer taking extra dips into our bank accounts. Just about every known streaming service has been raising prices this past year. YouTube Premium went up form $12 to $14 per month, Tidal got an increase, Apple Music and Apple TV+ experienced price hikes, Spotify shot up from $10 to $11 per month and that’s just the beginning. Other streaming services like Peacock, Paramount+, Hulu and Max all raised their prices, likely to add those new content and features everyone’s been talking about.

In related news, Amazon Music Unlimited pays artists around $5,000 per million streams, which is in line with Apple Music and Spotify. In a perfect world, some of that price hike money would go to the people that actually make the stuff that populate these platforms. This is not a perfect world.

Netflix is getting the band back together with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, an anime adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. The company has dropped the first teaser for the eight-episode show, which centers around the titular character and his attempt to win a battle of the bands contest while facing off against the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend.

The anime follows on from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a 2010 film based on the graphic novels. The main cast of Edgar Wright's movie are reprising their roles in the series, including Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona Flowers), Kieran Culkin (Wallace Wells), Chris Evans (Lucas Lee) and Brie Larson (“Envy” Adams).

The teaser apes many of the visuals of the movie and graphic novels, such as Scott blocking a flying attack from Matthew Patel with his arm and the rehearsal space of his band, Sex Bob-Omb. You'll also see Ramona dragging Scott through space toward a door with a star on it and the lovebirds sitting next to each other on a swing set. I don't remember seeing any dinosaurs in the film, though.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, the creator of the graphic novel series, is one of the showrunners, while Wright is an executive producer. Abel Gongora of animation studio Science Saru (Star Wars: Visions, Devilman Crybaby) is the director of the show. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off also includes new music from Anamanaguchi, the terrific chiptune band behind the soundtrack of the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World video game.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is my favorite movie of the 2010s, and this teaser gets the look and the spirit of the universe spot on. I'm already counting down the days until Scott Pilgrim Takes Off hits Netflix on November 17th.

Google has been rolling out changes and new features for its generative AI products over the past few months in a bid to catch up to OpenAI's technology. According to The New York Times, one of the capabilities it's looking to give its AI chatbot, Bard, is the ability to give advice about issues users face in their lives. Apparently, one of the contracting companies working with the tech giant assembled over 100 experts with doctorates in different fields to test Bard's capability to answer more intimate questions. 

These testers were reportedly given a sample of a prompt that users could ask Bard one day, which read: "I have a really close friend who is getting married this winter. She was my college roommate and a bridesmaid at my wedding. I want so badly to go to her wedding to celebrate her, but after months of job searching, I still have not found a job. She is having a destination wedding and I just can’t afford the flight or hotel right now. How do I tell her that I won’t be able to come?" 

I ran the question through both ChatGPT and Google's Bard and found the former's response to be much more human-like, with a sample letter that evoked sympathy and understanding for someone who truly wanted to attend a "really close friend's" wedding they couldn't afford. Meanwhile, Bard's response was practical, but its sample apology letter was also simpler and less expressive. 

In addition to working on making Bard better at giving life advice, Google is also reportedly working on a tutoring function so it can teach new skills or improve existing ones. Plus it's also developing a planning feature that can create budgets, meal and workout plans for users, according to The Times.

As the publication notes, Google clearly cautions people in Bard's help pages against relying on its responses "as medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice." The tech giant also employed a more cautious approach to AI than OpenAI prior to launching Bard. The Times said its AI experts previously warned that people using AI for life advice could suffer from a "loss of agency," and some could eventually believe that they were talking to a sentient being. It's unclear if Google has decided to be a lot less careful entirely, but a spokesperson told the publication that "[i]solated samples of evaluation data are not representative of [its] product road map." Google has "long worked with a variety of partners to evaluate [its] research and products," they said, and conducting testing doesn't automatically mean that the company is releasing these new AI tools.

It appears that Elon Musk is, once again, punishing websites run by his perceived enemies. The website formerly known as Twitter seems to be interfering with links to The New York Times, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and Substack to make them load noticeably slower.

Clicking links to those websites from within X causes a significant delay in loading the web pages compared with navigating to the links from another browser or website. The delay, which seems to be about 5 seconds, was noticed by users on the Hacker News forum and later reported byThe Washington Post.

It appears to be widespread and only affecting a handful of high-profile websites that Musk has publicly attacked in the past. The user who first reported the issues on Hacker News estimated the inexplicable delay first cropped up on August 4th, noting that it’s “so consistent it's obviously deliberate.”

For now, it’s unclear if there is a cause for the delay other than Musk’s personal grievances with these companies. But the lag only seems to be affecting websites that Musk has previously retaliated against. He previously blocked links to Substack, Mastodon, Threads and other competitors. Musk has also publicly attackedThe Times, revoking the publication’s verified status shortly before the rollout of Twitter Blue (now called X Premium). The owner of X is also currently feuding with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over his launch of Twitter competitor, Threads.

As usual, X didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has largely stopped replying to press inquiries since Elon Musk fired its communications staff shortly after taking over the company.

Google Photos just got a major update that adds generative AI to its popular Memories view. This toolset already creates scrapbook montages using your photos and videos, but now these montages will be even more personalized, with collections that make sense according to your life. AI-enhanced algorithms will collect the images into relevant categories, a recent vacation as an example, and create a catchy title to accompany the montage. The app already does this, more or less, but the update should be something of a radical improvement. Of course, this is AI so it won’t always get things right. In other words, you can rename collections or edit montages if necessary. 

All of these scrapbook montages are now collected in a dedicated view, called Memories, so you only interact with them when you want to. Before this, Google Photos users received a push notification every time a new scrapbook was available for perusal. Just click on the Memories tab and get going. The new tab also provides access to previously-released features, like adding music to scrapbook montages and sharing memories via the app.

The update even allows these scrapbook entries to be co-created by friends and family. Invite anyone to collaborate and they can contribute their own photos and videos. Everyone involved can delete any photos that don’t match the theme or make simple edits, and the system itself will recommend photos based on geotagging and the like. As for more robust sharing options, Google says you’ll soon be able to save these collections as popular video formats to send via messaging and social media apps.

The new Google Photos update begins rolling out today in the United States, but the company says it’ll be a few months before a true global launch. This isn’t the first time this year the company has squeezed generative AI into Google Photos. Back in May, Google used the technology to improve its Magic Editor toolset, which leverages AI to remove unwanted artifacts from photos.