Electronic Arts and Middle-earth Enterprises "announced on Monday an upcoming free mobile game called The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth," reports CNET: With the role-playing game, Lord of the Rings fans can look forward to experiencing the iconic universe in a whole new way.... The game will feature immersive storytelling with iconic plot lines, turn-based combat and a selection of characters from both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to battle the evils of Middle-earth.

"The team is filled with fans of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and each day they bring their tremendous passion and talents together to deliver an authentic experience for players," Malachi Boyle, vice president of mobile RPG for Electronic Arts, said in a statement. "The combination of high-fidelity graphics, cinematic animations, and stylized art immerses players in the fantasy of Middle-earth where they'll go head-to-head with their favorite characters."

Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb writes: IBM announces IBM i (some you of you may know it under the old name of AS/400) 7.5 the first new release in three years since the 7.4 release. One of the big headlines with the IBM i 7.5 announcement is Merlin which stands for the Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration....

With the Db2 product, IBM i is now receiving Boolean data types with support for this new type in RPG and JSON environments. Larger Indexes, the previous limit was 1.6TB indexes, that has now been increased to 16TB. And Db2 is now fully compliant with SQL:2016 the most recent publication of the SQL standard, beating Oracle to the punch on full support of the standard. And finally, QSYS2-based functions for using HTTP requests to publish or consume Web services, including the use of embedded SQL in REST services. These are enhanced versions of the functions that were seen in 7.3/7.4 where IBM removed the requirement for a JVM to use SQL to consume web services.
IT Jungle has many more details. Some of the highlights: Merlin provides a lightweight, browser-based development environment for creating new applications or modernizing existing RPG-based application. It's an alternative to Rational Developer for i (RDi) based on Eclipse, which many developers seem to hate. Developed in partnership with ARCAD Software, Merlin comes pre-loaded with tools like Git and Jenkins for DevOps-style code management, as well as an RPG code-converter. It runs in a Linux-based Red Hat OpenShift container running on the Power platform. While it's not technically tied to IBM i version 7.5 or 7.4 TR6, Merlin represents an important change in how IBM is packaging and delivering capabilities for IBM i shops, as well as a recognition that IBM should take a more active role in helping users modernize their codebases....

IBM is now enabling customers to buy subscriptions to IBM i for periods of one to five years. Allowing customers to use operating expenditure (Opex) budget lines instead of the dreaded capital expenditure (CapEx) accounting code for subscriptions. IBM is focusing on lower-end IBM i environments at the moment, so the subscription is limited to four-core P05 machines at this time. As part of this shift to software subscriptions, IBM is rethinking how it bundles ancillary products that are often used with IBM i. 11 packages are being moved into the core OS entitlement.

"Club Penguin Rewritten," a popular remake of Club Penguin enjoyed by thousands of gamers, has been seized by the City of London Police, with three people in connection with the site's shuttering reportedly arrested for allegedly distributing copyrighted material. "Over 140,000 users were members of a Discord server for the game until today, when every message on the Discord disappeared," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In 2007, Disney purchased Club Penguin -- the children's RPG that served as my first introduction to online fandom -- for a whopping $700 million. Even then, as a child with little context about tech industry acquisitions, the purchase seemed foreboding (at least my friends thought so on the Miniclip forums, where I fraudulently claimed to be 13). But eventually, those of us who were dedicated fans of virtual sledding games and dance parties grew out of it, and after once boasting 200 million users, the game was shut down due to lack of interest in 2017. Disney tried to shuttle remaining players to a new mobile game called Club Penguin Island, but it only lasted for a year. But ever since the end of Club Penguin -- when the iceberg finally tipped in a strangely emotional moment -- there have always been remakes out there for nostalgic adults to relive their days of collecting puffles, dancing in the pizza shop and speed-running bans.

Only one message on the Discord remains, posted early this morning by an admin: "CPRewritten is shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney," the admin said. "We have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation." TechCrunch reached out to the City of London Police and Disney to verify these claims but did not hear back before publication. In 2020, Disney shut down "Club Penguin Online," another copy of the game that acquired over a million new players during the pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: The parent company of Dungeons & Dragons developer Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, announced Wednesday it is acquiring D&D Beyond, one of the franchise's most popular officially licensed digital toolsets and online storefronts. Wizards said on its official website it has "no plans to stop supporting D&D Beyond," and all purchases made by consumers will be honored going forward.

D&D Beyond is the creation of Curse, and launched in 2017. The platform is, at its core, a web application and mobile app that provides players and Dungeon Masters (DMs) with the tools they need to play D&D in person or online. Features include a character builder, a character sheet, and a digital dice-rolling function. For DMs, it allows users to purchase official campaign books and other materials digitally for use inside the app. Prices for D&D books are traditionally more or less the same on D&D Beyond as they are on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at your local game store. D&D Beyond was purchased by Fandom in 2018 and, according to Hasbro, the relationship has been very lucrative since that time.

"Over the last three years, the royalty paid to Hasbro by D&D Beyond has represented a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue for Dungeons & Dragons," Hasbro said. That is undoubtedly true, as financial disclosures show that Wizards -- and its attached digital properties, including Magic: The Gathering Arena -- earned more than $1 billion for the first time in 2021. [...] Wizards' new president, Cynthia Williams, has bigger goals in mind. "The strategic acquisition of D&D Beyond will deliver a direct relationship with fans, providing valuable, data-driven insights to unlock opportunities for growth in new product development, live services and tools, and regional expansions," Williams said in a news release. "As part of Wizards, the brand's leadership will soon be able to drive a unified, player-centric vision of the world's greatest role-playing game on all platforms."

"Lost Ark has comfortably passed 1 million concurrent players after just 24 hours, becoming the second most played game in Steam history by concurrent counts," reports the Verge: The Diablo-like MMO launched Friday in the West, after Amazon Games collaborated with Smilegate RPG to localize and translate Lost Ark and make it available in English. It has now passed concurrent records for both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which regularly dominate the top of Steam's most-played games.

Lost Ark is so popular right now that it has experienced server issues and there's a queue just to start playing. SteamDB lists concurrent players of Lost Ark at 1,311,842, passing CS:GO's record of 1,308,963 players and Dota 2's of 1,295,114. It's not clear exactly how many of those players are actually actively playing the game and not sitting in a server queue, though.

Either way, it's now second place on the top concurrent list behind only PUGB...
The article notes it's Amazon's second big hit after its game New World "set a concurrent record of 913,634 players four months ago."

GameSpot also spotted a playful clause in the game's terms of service. It specifies that while players must be human (and not AI), that doesn't apply if Earth is taken over by robots, simians, or aliens. "In that event, Amazon said these beings will be allowed to play Lost Ark and other games. 'We welcome our alien, robots, ape, or other overlords, as applicable,' Amazon said."

Vodeo Games, which was founded this year by Threes designer Asher Vollmer, has successfully unionized with CODE-CWA -- the Communication Workers of America's Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. Engadget reports: Operating out of various locations in the US and Canada, the all-remote team of 13 is an unusual case for a few reasons. Foremost, about half of the bargaining unit are independent contractors -- typically the exact sort of workers left out of, or deemed ineligible for, a union. And while much of the push to unionize digital workspaces in recent years has focused on curbing abuses by management and pay imbalances, Vodeo's does not appear to stem from a need to course-correct away from imminent disaster. Rather, their desire to unionize seems rooted in wanting to maintain an equitable workplace. "They're not organizing because there's some big scary boss, like Bobby Kotick or someone," campaign lead for CODE-CWA Emma Kinema told Polygon. "They're organizing because they care so much about the work they do, and they want more of a say over how it's done -- the conditions in which they work to actually make those games that they care about."

"All workers deserve a union and a say in how their workplace is run, no matter where they work, what their employment status is, or what kind of conditions they work under," Myriame Lachapelle, a producer at Vodeo Games, wrote in a statement to press. "We have been inspired by the growing worker organizing within the gaming industry and hope we can set a new precedent for industry-wide standards that will better our shared working conditions and inspire others to do the same." Vodeo released its first game, the Peggle-like RPG Beast Breaker, in September to largely positive reviews. It's available for PC, Mac and Switch.

Programmer Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus) is a former employee at Loki Software, one of the first companies to port videogames from Microsoft Windows to Linux, according to his Wikipedia page. He's still hosting many Loki software projects at icculus.org, "as well as several new projects created by himself and others."

He's also Slashdot reader #32,040, and dropped by this week with a very special announcement: I took Zork 1 and made it into a multiplayer game!

You can try it yourself by telnetting to multizork.icculus.org with some friends. Telnet seemed appropriate for a game from 1980, at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem.

A detailed technical explanation about hacking the Z-Machine to make this work is over here and source code is, of course, available. Enjoy, and don't get eaten by a grue!

Vice reports: The AI-powered story generator AI Dungeon has come under fire from fans recently for changes to how the development team moderates content. Notably, the player base is worried that the AI Dungeon developers will be reading their porn stories in the game. Separately, a hacker recently revealed vulnerabilities in the game that show that roughly half of the game's content is porn.

AI Dungeon is a text based adventure game where, instead of playing through a scenario entirely designed by someone else, the responses to the prompts you type are generated by an AI... This week, AI Dungeon players noticed that more of their stories were being flagged by the content moderation system, and flagged more frequently. Latitude, the developers of AI Dungeon, released a blog post explaining that it had implemented a new algorithm for content moderation specifically to look for content that involves "sexual content involving minors... We did not communicate this test to the Community in advance, which created an environment where users and other members of our larger community, including platform moderators, were caught off guard... Latitude reviews content flagged by the model for the purposes of improving the model, to enforce our policies, and to comply with law."

Latitude later clarified in its Discord at what point a human moderator would read private stories on AI Dungeon. It said that if a story appears to be incorrectly flagged, human moderators would stop reading the inputs, but that if a story appeared to be correctly flagged then they "may look at the user's other stories for signs that the user may be using AI Dungeon for prohibited purposes." Latitude CEO Nick Walton told Motherboard that human moderators only look at stories in the "very few cases" that they violate the terms of service...

All of this has been compounded by the fact that a security researcher named AetherDevSecOpsjust published a lengthy report on security issues with AI Dungeon on GitHub, which included one that allowed them to look at all the user input data stored in AI Dungeon. About a solid third of stories on AI Dungeon are sexually explicit, and about half are marked as NSFW, AetherDevSecOpsjust estimated.

Four times in recent weeks, the White House press secretary was relayed questions from someone that Mediate describes as "a gag persona for a former Secretary of State made of Legos."

The reporters believed they were helping a real reporter who was prohibited by Covid protocols from attending. Politico reports: That colleague, who goes by the name Kacey Montagu, doesn't exist — at least not as an actual reporter. Since late last year, Montagu has taken on the identity of a White House correspondent extraordinaire with a fictional outlet to boot: White House News, shortened in emails to WHN... In communications with confidants, Montagu has posed as a member of White House Correspondents Association, claiming to be a reporter for The Daily Mail, the British tabloid known for its gossipy coverage of celebrities and political figures. Montagu also communicates regularly with top White House reporters and has had several exchanges with White House officials.

But Montagu never joined WHCA and The Daily Mail. There is no Kacey Montagu, except as a digital impersonation of a White House correspondent...

Montagu's activity is a remarkable illustration of how the online landscape, along with the age of pandemic-related virtual work, has opened up avenues for the mischievous-minded to infiltrate the top echelons of power. What's perhaps more remarkable is that he or she did it all without raising a solitary eyebrow... until Thursday.
Montagu had started a Twitter account showing the schedules of White House officials, which ultimately attracted a following by actual White House correspondents and even some minor government staffers, according to the article.

Acquaintances...believe Montagu's White House moonlighting began as something to boast about in the online global gaming platform called ROBLOX, where users jokingly call themselves "Legos." Within that platform is a role-playing group called nUSA, where people from across the world engage in a mock U.S. government exercise...

Another longtime member of the community in touch with Montagu said they suspected that they created the account "just for the memes" and never assumed things would progress this far.

During its fourth-quarter earnings announcement, Tesla unveiled the long-rumored refresh for its Model S sedan. CNET reports: On the outside, the Model S has a new front bumper with slightly different intakes, a tweaked rear diffuser and new 19- and 21-inch wheel designs. All of the exterior trim is now finished in black to match the Model Y, but the paint color palette remains the same, with white being the only no-cost option. The interior is the star of the show, though. It's been completely redesigned, marking the Model S' first major update since its debut in 2012. There's a large 17-inch central screen much like that of the Model 3 and Model Y, but the S retains a 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster in front of the driver, as well. Tesla says the new center screen is basically a gaming computer with 10 teraflops of processing power, and the released images show it running the popular fantasy RPG game Witcher 3.

Most radical is the new steering wheel. It isn't exactly a wheel anymore, instead looking like a yoke right out of Star Wars or Knight Rider. There are no stalks, either, meaning the turn signals, lights and other typical features are now controlled by touch buttons on the "wheel." There's more carbon fiber or wood trim covering parts of the dashboard and door panels, and the door cards and center console have been redesigned for more storage space and better looks. The rear seats look more sculpted and have a new fold-down armrest with cupholders. Rear-seat passengers get an 8-inch screen that offers the same infotainment and gaming functions as the main screen, and it even works with wireless gaming controllers. The Model S has three-zone climate control, a 22-speaker audio system, heated seats all around (and ventilated front seats), ambient lighting and a glass roof as standard. White, black and beige remain the only interior color options. The maxed-out "Plaid Plus" model, which comes in at $139,990, features over 1,100 hp and will hit 60 mph in under 2 seconds. "It also boats a sub-9-second quarter-mile time, a top speed of 200 mph and a range of over 520 miles," reports CNET.

It might have taken more than 20 years, but a game intended for the original PlayStation has at last made its way into the world. Engadget reports: A group of Japanese developers worked on Magic Castle for eight months in the late '90s. They used Sony's Net Yaroze, a system with which hobbyists could make games for the console. The team sent the RPG to several publishers, but most didn't bite. Sony showed interest, but it wanted the developers to ditch their game and move to a different project. The team rejected the offer and later disbanded. And so the unfinished Magic Castle stayed on the shelf for over 20 years. Until now.

One of the developers, who goes by PIROWO, rediscovered the Magic Castle source code a while back. They decided to finish and release it, four console generations later. Magic Castle has some interesting tricks up its sleeve, as EuroGamer notes. It features dynamic music and you can customize the position of the user interface. There are four character classes to choose from and 20 floors with randomized elements to make your way through. You can download the game from the Internet Archive and play it with an emulator.

Today a staff writer at Salon argues "The Mandalorian" has redeemed the Star Wars universe: The Disney+ series "The Mandalorian" has been both a critical triumph and commercial success. In my judgment, it's the most compelling live-action story in the "Star Wars" universe since 1983's "Return of The Jedi".

To that end, the story in "The Mandalorian's" first two seasons about a mysterious bounty hunter and "the child" (who is actually more than 50 years old) he's entrusted with as they navigate their way through a dangerous world — rife with "scum and villainy," where the remnants of the evil Empire still terrorize the galaxy — has accomplished something difficult in science fiction and other genre entertainment. Longtime and serious "Star Wars" aficionados are enthusiastic about "The Mandalorian's" attention to detail and obvious love and respect for George Lucas's "Star Wars" universe. More casual "Star Wars" fans can enjoy the series for its story of family, friendship and adventure, and of course for "baby Yoda," aka Grogu, "the Child," a character described by legendary film director Werner Herzog as "heartbreakingly beautiful...."

Where does "The Mandalorian" go next? Why is it such a compelling TV series and story? Is there such a thing as too much "fan service" in a genre film or TV series? Why has "The Mandalorian" been such a success, compared to the most recent "Star Wars" films? Disney and Lucasfilm have recently announced plans for 11 new TV series and at least three more feature films. At what point does "Star Wars" become overexposed and made into something common, a parody of itself?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Bill Slavicsek, one of the writers and developers of the much-beloved "Star Wars" roleplaying game from West End Games. He is also the author of the "Star Wars Sourcebook," "A Guide to the Star Wars Universe," many guides to RPGs and, more recently, "Defining a Galaxy: 30 Years in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...." He was one of the main game designers for the Dungeons and Dragons RPGs and is currently the lead writer for the massively multi-player RPG Elder Scrolls Online. Fair warning: This conversation contains spoilers for Season Two of "The Mandalorian," which is now available on the Disney+ streaming service.
Meanwhile CinemaBlend shares some commentary from another source, writing that "We need more Star Wars discourse like this." No arguing about bloodlines, or one director undoing the plotlines laid down by another. Just all of us, being amused by a cat who delightfully thinks that he or she can catch the lightsaber that a brooding Kylo Ren is tossing away during a pivotal moment in J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker... And it even has Mark Hamill's seal of approval...

Kitty cats aside, it's a very good time to be a Star Wars fan. The Mandalorian just wrapped up an incredible season of television on Disney+ and Kathleen Kennedy recently ushered in a wave of new programming that will keep Star Wars on our radars for years to come.

Software developer/sys-admin Hawke Robinson is the CEO of RPG Research, a 501(c)3 non-profit, volunteer-run, charitable organization founded in 1977.

He's also long-time Slashdot reader kmleon, and shares this story from the gaming-news site The Gamer: RPG Research recently sent out an urgent call requesting more volunteers, more warehouse space, and more donations to help meet the overwhelming demand it is currently facing. In a truly good news/bad news situation, the organization has seen donations increase by 600% from previous years, while 2020 has increased demand for the organization's programs by more than 1,000%.

The increased demand is simply more than RPG Research is currently staffed and equipped to handle, resulting in the call for aid. Along with the need for more volunteers, RPGR is also seeking a sizeable warehouse to house office space, events, the RPG Museum, as well as to hold the RPG bus and trailers. The ideal warehouse being sought is "a 2,000 (minimum) to 4,000+ square foot warehouse" somewhere "in the greater Spokane Washington or Post Falls Idaho region...."

The international (six continents) organization began studying roleplaying games and their effects in 1983, and since then have presented their findings through various programs in educational settings, prison systems, and therapeutic medical settings.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Polygon: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has acknowledged the existence of racist stereotypes in its sourcebooks, and pledged to make changes to ameliorate the issue. In a blog post published on June 17 titled "Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons," Wizards of the Coast said that depicting a diverse array of human beings -- beyond "fantasy versions of northern Europeans" -- is "one of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D." The developers noted that while they want to feature characters "who represent an array of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and beliefs," the game still contains problematic depictions of fantasy races.

Among these races are the orcs, who are often characterized as a savage horde of creatures who lust for battle, and the drow, an evil dark-skinned subrace of elves who dwell in a subterranean matriarchy. Wizards of the Coast specifically addressed these two groups in laying out recent and future changes to D&D products: "We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do." They add: "Later this year, we will release a product (not yet announced) that offers a way for a player to customize their character's origin, including the option to change the ability score increases that come from being an elf, a dwarf, or one of D&D's many other playable folk. This option emphasizes that each person in the game is an individual with capabilities all their own." The publisher also said "it's adjusting material that maligns or stereotypes real-world ethnic groups like the Roma," reports Polygon. "The company has revised the adventure Curse of Strahd, which includes a people known as the Vistani that 'echoes some stereotypes associated with the Romani people in the real world.'"

"In addition, the publisher said two future books will be written with a Romani consultant so as to characterize the Vistani 'in a way that doesn't rely on reductive tropes.'"

Age of Empires 2, a 21-year-old game, could well be having its best year ever. From a report: Since its HD re-release in 2013 the game has had a steady growth in average player count, but with the release of Age of Empires 2: Definitive edition last year and COVID-19 lockdowns inflating player counts across the industry, Age of Empires 2 is boasting totals that beat some very big-name games. It's now by far Steam's most popular RTS, with both the Definitive Edition and the 2013 HD Edition having higher player counts than closest competitor Company of Heroes 2. This year's big tournament boasted the largest Age of Empires 1v1 prize pool since 2002.

Last month, in April, the games' combined average player count was over 50,000 players. April 12 was the definitive edition's all-time player peak, and the combined total of the games was 59,995 players. That's well into the top 150 all-time peak player counts on Steam... for a 21-year-old game. The two games generally average higher player counts than popular free-to-play game War Thunder or industry darling Stardew Valley. They're on-par with the popular action RPG Path of Exile. Their average is nearly as many as perennially popular premium games like Civilization VI or Terraria. Both versions of Age of Empires 2 sit in the top 100 games on Steam, with the Definitive Edition sitting at #25. Combined, however, the Age of Empires community on average pushes up to the #15 spot -- or higher, on peak player count days.

You'll be able to complete the trifecta of tiny 16-bit throwback systems on March 19, 2020, when Konami releases the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. From a report: It'll include Dracula X, Bonk's Revenge, Gradius and many more games, including many Japanese exclusives. Konami said last week that it will sell the device exclusively through Amazon, with preorders opening up on Monday, July 15 during the online retailer's "Prime Day" promotion. The U.S. will get the TurboGrafx-shaped device shown above, while Japan will get a version modeled after the PC Engine and Europe's model will be styled after the CoreGrafx revision. No price has been announced for the U.S. model, but the Japanese one will cost 10,500 yen or around $100. The game library will be almost identical across all three systems, including 24 American versions of games and 26 Japanese versions. There is a little bit of overlap between the two -- for example, both the U.S. and Japanese versions of the action RPG Neutopia are included. That means it's not quite 50 games total, but it's still a rich lineup, which even includes CD-ROM games and some games from the Japanese SuperGrafx system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PetaPixel: A team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have figured out how to capture super slow-motion footage using what's called an "Event Camera." That is: a camera that sees the world in a continuous stream of information, the way humans do. Regular cameras work by capturing discrete frames, recapturing the same scene 24 or more times per second and then stitching it together to create a video. Event cameras are different. They capture "pixel-level brightness changes" as they happen, basically recording each individual light "event" as it happens, without wasting time capturing all the stuff that remains the same frame by frame.

As ETH Zurich explains, some of the advantages of this type of image capture is "a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds." The downside is that there's no easy way to process the resulting "footage" into something you can display using current algorithms because they all expect to receive a set of discrete frames. Well, there was no easy way. This is what the folks at ETH Zurich just improved upon, developing a reconstruction model that can interpret the footage to the tune of 5,000+ frames per second. The results are astounding: a 20% increase in the reconstructed image quality over any model that existed before, and the ability to output "high frame rate videos (more than 5,000 frames per second) of high-speed phenomena (e.g. a bullet hitting an object)," even in high dynamic range "challenging lighting conditions." Their findings have been published in a research paper titled High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) on Wednesday, Netflix shared details of its plans to develop its original shows into video games. Hollywood Reporter reports: Among the program of upcoming games, Stranger Things 3: The Game was highlighted, described by Netflix as "an adventure game that blends a distinctively retro art style with modern gameplay mechanics to deliver nostalgic fun with a fresh new twist." Playing as a character from the show, the user will be tasked with solving puzzles and battling the Mind Flayer. Dave Pottinger, CEO and co-founder of BonusXP, shared that the game will feature old-school graphics.

Two characters from the game were revealed at the panel: Max, who will exhibit karate kicks and the ability to add fire damage to those kicks; and Eleven, described by Chris Lee, director of Interactive Games at Netflix, as "the most powerful character in the game" -- she will have psychic push power. The game will launch on July 4 and be available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One and other consoles. In addition, a special announcement was made at the panel about a Stranger Things mobile hybrid RPG/puzzle game that will launch in 2020. The game is a collaboration with Next Games, which is based out of Helsinki, Finland. Stranger Things isn't the only show that's planning to have its own game. "Netflix show The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is also set to become a 'turn-based tactics' game challenging fans to recruit an army and act as their commander in a series of campaign battles," the report adds. "No specific date was mentioned, but the game will launch this year on various consoles."

The world has immensely changed since 1999, when a company in Southern California launched an online game called EverQuest that would go on to serve as the model for many more titles to come in the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) space. And unlike many games that sought to replace it over the years, this one is still going strong. ArsTechnica has a long-form piece on the old game, its journey and what it has evolved into now. An excerpt from the story: This sword-and-sorcery-based game was developed by a small company, 989 Studios, but it eventually reached its pinnacle under Sony Online Entertainment after SOE acquired that studio roughly a year after the game's launch. Today, EQ marches on with a dedicated player base and another developer, Daybreak Games, at the helm. I've been a dedicated player since the early days, and others like me would likely acknowledge the game peaked early. A variety of factors have whittled down the once-mighty player base since: many just simply walked away, either busy with life or quit because it took up too much time. The impact of World of Warcraft over time is also undeniable.

But while it's no longer a leading game in the MMO space by any stretch (WoW does hold that title), today's EQ retains a small but dedicated fanbase whose members complain as much as they praise it. And in an era where most games have a shelf life of four to six months, EQ has officially spanned four presidential administrations largely off that kind of support. [...] The game still has a trickle of new players, according to Longdale, but it's understandably hard to attract a whole new generation of young players to a DirectX 9 game with 15-year-old player models and a broken Z-axis (that's correct, you can't go straight up and down in EQ like in WoW) where solo play is darn near impossible.

dryriver explains the new buzz around "Dreams" for PS4 (now in open access). Created by the studio that made PS4's Big Little World, Dreams "is not a game. It is more of an end to end, create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC... essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine." Dreams lets you 3D model/sculpt, texture, animate and create game logic, allowing complete 3D games to be authored from scratch. Here is a Youtube video showing someone 3D modeling a fairly sophisticated game character and environment in Dreams. Everything from platformers to FPS games to puzzle, RPG and Minecraft type games can be created.

What is interesting about Dreams is that everything anybody creates with it becomes available and downloadable in the DreamVerse and playable by other Dreams users -- so Dreams is also a distribution tool like Steam, in that you can share your creations with others.

While PC users have long had access to 3D modeling and game authoring tools, Dreams has for the first time opened up creating console games from scratch to PS4 owners, and appears to have made the processs quicker, easier and more intuitive than, say, learning 3D Studio Max and Unity on a PC. Dreams comes with hours of tutorial walkthroughs for beginners, so in a sense it is a game engine that also teaches how to make games in the first place.
Back in January Push Square gushed that "There's simply nothing like this that's ever been done before... This is one of the most innovative, extraordinary pieces of software that we've seen on a console in quite some time..."

"And it can be browsed for hours and hours and hours. It's like when you fall into a YouTube hole, and you're clicking from recommended video to recommended video -- except here, you're jumping from minigames involving llamas to models of crustaceans to covers of The King of Wishful Thinking..."

"It's an astounding technical achievement with unprecedented ambition."