AI in video games is a caustic enough subject that Valve requires developer disclosure if a title utilizes the generative technology. This way, people who have qualms about AI or its impact can opt out of purchasing anything that uses the genAI. One developer, however, is saving everyone from the moral quandary in the first place by just deleting their game altogether.

Hardest is a free-to-play roguelike on Steam that was released in the summer of 2025 with the tagline, "stop time, summon tsunamis, shoot with bubble guns, feed cards to mimic, collect rare negative cards!" Except for a user who says the game helped him bond with his son, Hardest mostly got a negative reception. "I assume the whole thing is AI slop," one reviewer wrote.

You'd think flopping like this would be the end of the story, but half a year later, Rakuel, the developer, has undergone a revelation. On Jan. 10, the indie creator posted an update to Hardest announcing that he would pull the game from the platform by the end of the month.

Plus, Nex Playground heads to Europe and Phasmaphobia devs launch publishing arm

Fortnite now allows creator-made games to sell in-game items — and immediately, the platform's most popular experience Steal the Brainrot has added $45 premium item bundles and a chance-based roulette wheel.

and here we go..

Today's game is some more Halo 3. Me and my friend went through with our plans to play Halo 3 today. We almost went through the entire game in one sitting like usual. The only thing that stopped us was a crash at the very end of The Covenant. We still had a damn good run though.

There was The Storm, where me and my friend took the Razor Back up the lift and ramped it up too the Scarab. It looked dorky at first but then it looked badass. The game kept trying to buck me off the scaffolding though while driving so something tells me its not supposed to be up there.

During the level we ended up also getting distracted by a bag of chips on the ground and we got into this discussion me and my best friend had about Arbiter getting his head stuck in the bag trying to eat it like how a cat might get it's head stuck in a bag. He ended up drawing this wonderful rendition of Arbiter with a bag stuck on his head after, which i have asked permission to share. Whether his stature is one of elation at the chips or terror at the bag stuck on his head i'm not sure.

During the very first level one of our Marines got stuck too. I'm not sure how, but he was looking at the ground like there was something interesting down there. I like to imagine he saw a cool bug or something.

During the level The Ark, my friend controlling the Arbiter got this weird visual glitch where High Charity flashed on screen. I have to assume it was a bug, but i like to imagine it's Arbiter was thinking of home. I tried to capture it in Theater but the game won't let me go in first person in Theater mode for Arbiter for some reason. I'm not sure why.

After all that though, as i mentioned above, i had to stop on the level The Covenant due too the crash. It's crazy to think with Halo 3 i've reached the point i can play through it in one day. Just after this it'll be Halo 4 again and i've have completed the Master Chief Saga, which will be great. Maybe after me and my friend can pick up LASO CE again.

I played the shit out of this game for a year or so before it just completely died. I came across a post about it earlier today that reminded me how great it was. I miss it a lot. Relatively slow moving, strategic, 3D space arena teamed CTF, I made some great friends playing that game.

Today's game is Halo 3. I was bored and doing a little "Spring Cleaning" of my Steam Library, narrowing everything down to what's on hold and what i'm playing. Right now Max Payne and Halo are in the Currently Playing, while my on hold looks like this:

I had the overwhelming urge though to play the last mission of Halo 3. I'm not exactly sure why today of all days, but i found the Warthog Run Score being stuck in my head while packing today.

The entire climb up too the Control Room feels really different on Single Player. In Co-Op me and my friends are all cracking Jokes. But in Single Player it feels like you're immersed (at least to me). It's honestly impressive Halo can immerse you in like that so deeply. It's something i noticed while playing Reach on Legendary Solo. It honestly makes me want to try and play the whole franchise on Legendary solo (instead of just Halo Reach and Halo 4 like the achievements ask for)

The SMG in Masterchief's hands also looks super tiny. I know he's larger than the average soldier but it looks kind of silly when you see it.

I of course, made sure to give Sgt. Johnson a kiss on the forehead before leaving. Such an iconic character deserves it. Sleep well my Sweet Prince.

Soon after that though the heroics kicked back in and me and Arbiter sprinted to the Warthog run. I honestly struggled a little on this section, as i suck at leading my shots with the Plasma rifle. With the plasma pistol i can use the charge blast, but with the rifle i'm basically left to fend for myself in the Aim department.

I was able to make it to the Warthog run though after that and did it all in one try. The run, as usual, was iconic. This is honestly one of my favorite final levels in the Master Chief Halo games. Halo CE's is a close second but i just cannot find it in me to enjoy the Warthog physics in that game. Halo 3's at least are bearable, though i don't like how i skid to a complete halt whenever i do a jump.

i got this clip of my last few seconds of the run, which i really like how it turned out. Me and my friend were talking about playing Halo 3 again tomorrow, so i might play the rest of the thing (I know, i'm a bit of an addict. How many times has Halo featured on here?). Anyways, it was nice to get that out of my system, even if it did take a whole 30 minutes from me.

The Quake community regularly performs map jams. While I haven't tracked the efforts of the previous ones, this jam results in a large, nonsequential set of maps on offer, combined with a full conversion that creates new enemy variants, and remixes Quake's known weapons into new forms (dual nailguns, a rebar cannon, a multi-missile launcher, and a gemstone that functions like Doom 3's soul cube).

When you load in, you're brought to a museum-like "gallery" with portals into each of the maps created for the jam, denoting their author and difficulty level; sorted into "main offerings", "new faces", and other sections.

The simplest way to set the mod up is as a mod for Quake (though ironically, you'll be replacing both the main paks, AND the engine)

Today's game is Phasmophobia. After moving PCs it took me a while to get it set up again on my PC. Apparently i needed the SteamDeck=1 command to get Voice Chat to work on Non-Steam Deck devices. After that though it worked perfectly.

We have a new friend that's joined our group, but the problem with games like these is that they're only ever 4 player. So our solution?

I messed with pipewire and merged my Mic and Discord's Output into one Audio Source, then fed that into Phasmophobia. Then i streamed Phasmophobia too my friend on Discord.

The result was all my friends could hear him through me and he could hear them through my stream. It was like having a second voice in my body.

Is it convoluted? Yeah. Is my flow chart a mess? Probably. But it was a lot of fun to setup, though it definitely needs more work. I wonder if i could make some sort of Widget to toggle it on and off per a game to make it cleaner.

Nerd stuff aside, we only played a few matches. All our games kept taking quite a while because we'd die and then the Ghost just... wouldn't show up. Nothing at all. We spent a total of maybe 2 hours playing in total.

By the last match we needed to lower our sanity, so i just took to watching my friends through the window like a creep. The player model kind of looks like Todd Howard, so just picture him watching you through your living room window at night and you get the idea.

After that wore off to bring my sanity down lower i started tossing stuff on my dead friend. Just random stuff like kitchen supplies. I thought i was probably going to die because everyone was left in the truck. But one of my other friends went back in for a photo, and the moment he did the ghost started a hunt. I was already safe back in the truck by then and we lost him.

That ended up being our last game for the night and we went back. We were going to do one more but one of our players started having Wi-Fi issues, thanks AT&T.

Talk about Source spaghetti!

I like how this article does not talk about the anti consumer practices engaged in by Nintendo, that might push some customers away from their consoles. /s Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA. There is already a switch in my household, but the price along with the ability to remotely brick the device, is what made our household pass on the switch 2. We bought a second steam deck instead.

Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.

“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that's not a verbatim quote, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.

Happy 2026! It's been way too long since I posted a new game review. (Has it seriously been 4-1/2 months?!) Life has been interfering with my gaming lately, and my list of games I want to review is only getting longer and more daunting. Then, StarRupture released 3 days ago!

I've been anxiously awaiting this game for a while now. I participated in the playtest in July 2025 and I've been excited for this early access to drop on Steam. My friends and I have been counting the days.

Apologies for the blurred Discord chat in the top left of some screenshots; it loaded Discord in Legacy Mode until I switched the game display to borderless fullscreen. Even then, I still needed to blur my friends' names in the bottom left as it pulled their Steam names for the characters they played.

StarRupture is a first-person survival crafting/factory automation game, similar to Satisfactory. But its developers have been working very hard to separate it from Satisfactory through unique story and gameplay mechanics. For instance, you have four characters to choose from, all with names, numbers and backstories.

You can swap characters anytime during gameplay, so you're not tied to your decision. So far, despite all of them having unique backgrounds and specialties, they all seem to play identically, so I don't think it really matters which one you choose. Pick the background you like best. I went with the Scientist at first, but when my friends joined and none of them wanted to play as a girl, I gladly switched to the Engineer.

Remember I said they all had numbers? That's because they're all convicts! Their crimes are varied (the scientists' former job and criminal record just says "CLASSIFIED"), but they're all serving time on the remote planet of Arcadia-7. Their sentence requires them to harvest resources for five different corporations. Ideally, working this job will eventually pay off the debt they owe to "society" (read: major corporations).

You awaken from a Regeneration Chamber and find yourself in a small ship on the planet's surface. These Regeneration Chambers are how you come back every time you die in this game. A "sleeve" (clone) is generated in the chamber for you, which is fed constant video and audio of your activities to keep their brains stimulated until they need to be awoken. As you'll learn from lore scattered around this planet, death is no longer something to be feared in this sci-fi world, as long as your data disc isn't damaged.

An AI voice introduces herself as GAL - the Galactic Assistance Liason - of the Claywood Corporation, a sixth corporation who oversees your sentence. She's there to guide you through your job and ensure you complete all tasks to help ~~benefit the corporations~~ pay your debt!

You and your fellow convicts are part of the ARGOS Project, the first team in more than half a century to explore, harvest resources, and document this world as a potential New Earth.

But first, you must complete a training program before you're trusted to collaborate with the other corporations. You step off your spaceship and walk to a nearby clearing for your first view of the planet surface.

First, you need to harvest a Meteorite Heart. You do this by using the Harvester tool to extract minerals from the outside of meteorites. Once you've collected all the resources, it will crumble to pieces and you'll receive the Meteorite Heart.

Note: If you just shoot the Harvester blindly at the meteorite, it will eventually crumble and you'll lose out on valuable resources, so target those colored minerals!

Also, notice the three rows of six bars on the side of the Harvester? When all 18 of them light up, your Harvester will overheat. Make sure to reload it with [R] before that happens. It will automatically reload if it overheats, but it will take twice as long.

Once you have a Meteorite Heart, you can build a Base Core with your Building Tool, which will define the build area of your base. You can't build outside of the range of the Base Core, but it seems as though you can build as many Base Cores as you want in the game so far. So spread them around the map to build bases at all the various resources you need to collect. This umbrella-looking thing protects your base from the deadly rupture of the nearby star, Ruptura.

What's that? You thought the game just had a cool-sounding title? No, the sun literally ruptures in this game! It completely engulfs the planet in fire, incinerating all signs of life. Then the planet goes through a rapid regrowth and regeneration period over the next 10 minutes or so, eventually restoring all signs of flora and fauna to the surface. Ensure you've built a Habitat to retreat to; you won't survive out in the open during the wave blast.

Make sure you harvest all the flaming rocks after a star rupture. They're a rare resource called Ignitium that can only be found in the immediate aftermath. Once they cool, they're gone, so take advantage of the opportunity to collect them.

I haven't been timing the star ruptures so I don't know if they happen on a schedule or if they're random. Sometimes it seems like they happen about every hour or so, sometimes it feels like it's only been 20 minutes since the last one. But you have a decent amount of time to explore before the next one hits. Just ensure you keep a Meteorite Heart and some building materials in your inventory so you can quickly whip up a Habitat anywhere you're exploring when the star is about to rupture.

So what is this Habitat? It's the living quarters you build on the planet surface. You can stack them up to 3 containers high and connect them with ladders (Vertical Connectors) inside, or set them side-by-side and make a doorway (Horizontal Connectors) between them. You need to build an airlock to get in, and if you don't want to feel claustrophobic inside, install windows (Viewports) on the walls.

Once inside, you need to build a Corporate Terminal. This is the screen you'll use to track your progress with each corporation. They don't want to give you full access to their equipment - you're a risky investment to them - so you need to earn the right to use more advanced tools and machines. You will need to fulfill their requested items for each level, until you've earned enough data points to progress to the next level.

How do you fulfill their requested materials? By building an Orbital Cargo Launcher. You see, there's a space rift nearby that can transport resources light-years away in seconds! It's how you got to this distant galaxy in the first place. The Orbital Cargo Launcher will send them to the rift, transporting them back to Earth where the corporations can collect them.

An interesting thing to note: Unlike Satisfactory, which used power lines to power all your machines, StarRupture uses platforms and rails to conduct power. You initially build solar panels and then build connecting platforms to your machines to power them.

Whereas Satisfactory uses conveyor belts to transport resources, StarRupture uses bendy rails. And they don't fill up with resources; they only transport the amount of resources that the receiving end can process. If it fills up, no more resources will travel down the rail.

Here's me adding too many machines to my power grid and overloading it. I need to add some more solar panels to get everything up and running again. You can tell by the light color on the platforms, rails, and machines. Red is down, green is online, yellow (on the machines) is pending action.

Once you've completed the initial training, you unlock access to all five corporations. They will have different resource requirements for each level of advancement, with equipment rewards related to that corporation at each level. You will have to use more advanced machines to make more technical items as you progress, so prioritize whichever corporation you feel will benefit you as you go.

• Future Health Solutions is a pharmaceutical and medical corporation, providing you with food and health equipment.
• Selenian is a space mining corporation, providing you with more advanced machines for harvesting, mining, smelting, constructing, etc.
• Griffits Blue is a military corporation, providing you with weapons to defend yourself from the wildlife.
• Moon Energy is an energy corporation, providing advancements to power technology.
• Clever Robotics is a drone and logistics corporation, providing more advanced tech solutions for transportation of resources and equipment.

Like Satisfactory, resources come in one of three qualities: impure, normal, and pure. In this game though, you can actually tell the quality at a glance.

Below are three Titanium Ore nodes. The crumbly dark one in front is impure, the jagged silver one to the middle right is normal, and the perfectly-shaped rainbow one in back is pure. As far as I can tell, the only difference is how quickly you can mine them; the more pure, the more resources you can obtain in the same time period.

When you're between building factories, make sure to go out and explore the ruins of past settlers and explorers. There's plenty of lore to be found from old tablets and still-functioning computer screens in the wreckage of former Habitats and factories. You'll need to find blueprints for more advanced recipes, and those can only be acquired through exploration of ruins. Don't be afraid to loot dead bodies, which will show up everywhere on your map once you've explored an area.

Don't forget that this is a survival game. Grab some of the local plant life and make sure to keep your food and water bars charged. They drop slowly, so you have plenty of time to craft and explore between meal breaks, and your character complains if they're getting hungry or thirsty, so you'll get a reminder in advance. You will die if you don't eat and drink though.

Also, beware of the local wildlife. They're giant alien spider bugs and they only get tougher and more numerous, the farther away you explore. There are the Slashers and Young Slashers, which are the standard alien spiders you'll see everywhere:

Then there are these blue infected ones called Exploders. They live up to their namesake and explode near you, releasing a blue cloud of infection that will kill you if you don't get out of it soon.

There are also Spitters: green spider bugs who shoot a sort of acid at you from afar. Or their larger variants, the Flingers, who will fling a giant acid spray from their tail from a quarter mile away, coating an area in green. Not pictured because they always kept their distance and I couldn't get close enough to get a decent screenshot before they scurried away.

Finally, there are massive tan-colored spider bugs called Goliaths, covered with impenetrable armor across their arms and body that look kind of like moose horns. They can shield themselves almost completely while charging at you, and they'll easily take out your shield and half your health in a single blow. Give these a wide berth unless you have some beefy weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammo, and some friends helping out.

Below, he's covering his face with his armored front arms as he sneaks up on me. That pistol isn't gonna do shit; time to run!

The aliens will also attack your bases more often, the higher you level up your Base Core. If you're not there to defend, they'll infect the base, which will shut everything down. You need to clear out any lingering bugs and disinfect the base. You can tell which bases are infected because they'll show up as red on your map and the base itself will be covered in a blue cloud of infection.

Have you noticed that massive engine-like structure sticking out of the mountain in the background of all promotional media for this game? It's a building you can find and explore. Took me a while, but I was able to get over there, and it's absolutely enormous! That's literally an entire mountain it's sitting on!

See that small fan-shaped semi-circle in the dirt on the bottom left of it there? There's a hole at ground level I was able to use to get inside. Unfortunately, the door into the actual structure wasn't powered and I need a Power Cell to open it; an advanced technology that I haven't unlocked yet. I'm excited to see what's inside!

This game just opened early access, so it will probably have tons of updates over the next few years before fully releasing. So if you're playing this game and come across bugs (not the kind you shoot), let the developers know! Hopefully it'll only get better over time. They already have a roadmap posted with more features and content planned, so there will be updates to come.

There's so much more I want to discuss about this game, but I don't want to ramble forever about small details, so just go check it out for yourself on Steam! Its normal price will be $20 but it's currently on sale for $16 until January 20th.

Today's game is Max Payne. I continued my playthrough today with a friend who's on call. I was just kind of peeking around with the camera when i noticed the writing on the wall behind Max (literally). I probably missed it my first playthrough because i was blind, but it's kind of ironic that the writing was literally on the wall the entire game.

I also dicked around and tried to make it look like Max was playing Basketball. There's not really much too this one, i just thought it was funny to try and make him look like he was playing.

I also wanted to talk about the difficulty fix. This life right here? On my first playthrough without the fix i spent an hour struggling here. With the fix it was the same difficulty as everything else though. I highly recommend the fix to anyone playing as it's the result of a bug (and makes it far more tolerable).

Though i will say i wonder if it makes it too easy, like this fight here was supposed to be like a boss fight sort of. I ended up just hanging out up here for the most part and shooting at them with the Desert Eagle. Besides that though it's really handy to have. I stopped at this fight for other reasons, but i want to sit down and finish chapter 1 soon. Hopefully i'll find the time.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41334665

Steam adds support for branch-specific Workshop mod versions

This should save mod authors and users a huge headache due to not needing to worry about updates breaking everything*.

• Provided the developer has enabled and set up the relevant feature set.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/36712639

Ubisoft's first North American union, located at their Halifax, Nova Scotia studio, was certified on December 18th, 2025. Now, not even a full 30 days later, Ubisoft Halifax is closing.