November isn’t the last month of the year, obviously, but it is pretty much the last month of new TV shows that don’t involve people in garishly patterned sweaters discovering the true meaning of Christmas. And you know what? Television is finishing up 2023 strong, with a range of solid-to-excellent premieres for every imaginable taste profile. There’s a comforting family melodrama and the most uncomfortable Nathan Fielder project to date (which is really saying something); a dead-serious murder mystery set at the world’s most exclusive retreat, and a murder dramedy that unfolds in small-town Ireland; and a handful of great Anglophone imports, including, as a bonus, yet another not-exactly-new show about the dearly departed.

Black Cake (Hulu)

Sweet, dense, intoxicating, island-spiced, painstakingly assembled, and culturally hybrid, Caribbean black cake is a fitting avatar for the character at the center of Hulu’s epic adaptation of Charmaine Wilkerson’s b…

As reported by Insider Gaming and first spotted by Battlefield YouTuber DannyonPC, FPS veteran and Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto appears to have left his director position at Ridgeline Games, an EA subsidiary, where he was working on the next Battlefield game.

As art director on the first three Halo games, Lehto had a massive impact on the sci-fi series’ iconic look. Lehto was then creative director on the latter Halo games made by Bungie and part of the original Destiny team before departing the company. Lehto founded studio V1 in 2014, which struggled to find an audience for its experimental hoverbike FPS-RTS, Disintegration, before shutting down in 2021.

Lehto moved on to Ridgeline under EA that same year, with the studio said to be working on FPS games. It was later revealed that Lehto was director of narrative on the Battlefield franchise under the overall leadership of Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella.

It seemed like a good fit, with Lehto applying his expert…

Lince Works, the Barcelona-based developer of the Aragami games, has announced that it is halting development of its current projects and closing its doors for good.

Aragami and Aragami 2 are third-person stealth games that put players in the jika-tabi of a supernatural ninja protecting his people from invading armies. They weren’t huge hits but they were well-received on Steam, where they hold positive user rankings. In September 2022, a year after the release of Aragami 2, Lince Works announced that it was “time to move on and shift our focus towards brand-new adventures.”

But now that’s not going to happen. 

“The last couple of years have been particularly difficult as we shifted towards the development of new IPs and a new course for the company,” Lince Works said today. “We were ambitious about what we wanted to achieve as a studio, but sadly, although we made good progress, the economic context was not favorable and we ran out of time.

“It breaks o…

กลับมาพบกันอีกเช่นเคยกับ‘เกมมือถือน่าเล่นประจำสัปดาห์’ที่ This is Game รวบรวมเกมมือถือทั่วโลกทั้งโซนตะวันตก, จีน, ญี่ปุ่น ไปจนถึงเกาหลี นำมาฝากท่านผู้อ่านคอเกมมือถืออีกเช่นเคย ส่วนในสัปดาห์นี้จะมีเกมมือถืออะไรน่าดาวน์โหลดมาเมื่อยนิ้วกันบ้าง ถ้างั้นไปเราไปดูพร้อมกันเลยดีกว่าคร้าบ~

• MSI Thin GF63 12VE  | RTX 4050 | $899 $599
• Asus ROG Ally | Z1 Extreme | $699.99 $619.99

At face value, this might seem like a no-brainer. You’d go for the laptop every time, yes? Well, maybe not, especially if all you’re interested in is gaming on the go.

Let’s compare the specs of the two machines that relate directly to that task. Starting with the CPU, the MSI Thin GF63 uses Intel’s Alder Lake-powered i5 12450H. It has four P-cores and four E-cores, for 12 threads in total. With a maximum power of 95W and a boost clock of 4.4GHz, it’s a decent enough processor for gaming.

The ROG Ally sports AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip, which is essentially a Ryzen 7 7840U laptop processor. This is a combined CPU and GPU, better known as an APU, and boasts eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock of 5.1GHz. That sounds super impressive but the whole package has a m…

If you thought the era of the Epic Games Store exclusive was winding down, think again. Epic announced today a new program called Epic First Run that throws open the exclusivity doors to just about anyone with a new game.

The Epic Games Store has grown into a successful, major digital storefront since its launch in 2018 in large part due to exclusive game releases: Epic has used the massive financial success of Fortnite to pay publishers in advance to launch games on its storefront, and more to the point, not launch them on Steam, at least temporarily.

It’s managed to attract some big names over the years, like Borderlands 3, Control, Hitman 3, and Kingdom Hearts, but it’s been a ridiculously expensive endeavor, too: We learned in May 2021 that it had already spent more than $1 billion on exclusives. Despite not making money on them, Epic said in March 2023 that it was going to continue pursuing exclusives for its storefront, but would focus more on major releases, which…

It’s been almost 19 years since the Xbox 360 launched, which depending on your perspective might make it a retro console or make you a retro person—I for one had a lot more hair back then. Among the most notable features of the console, which launched a couple years after Steam, was its online game store where full games could be purchased and downloaded. That store is finally being retired.

“On July 29, 2024, Xbox will stop supporting the ability to purchase new games, DLC, and other entertainment content from the Xbox 360 Store on the console and the Xbox 360 Marketplace,” Microsoft announced last year, and now the day has come.

The shutdown only affects the ability to purchase games and DLC for the Xbox 360. Games that are already owned will continue to work, and there are also many backwards-compatible Xbox 360 games available to buy on newer Xboxes, so it’s not a total wipeout of a generation of digitally-distributed console games. (Many Xbox 360 games also …

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