aDeserving winners – Balatro, Astro Bot, Metaphor: ReFantazio dominates the board – game award Last Thursday brought us many end-of-the-year announcements, like unexpected gifts under the tree. It was the best show ever in terms of newsworthy announcements. It felt a bit like an old-school E3 conference. Of course, if you haven’t watched the three-hour video game awards show live from LA, which aired just after midnight UK time, here’s what you need to know.
Seeing it for the first time The Witcher IV
We’ve known for a while that another dark fantasy RPG was in development at Poland’s CD Projekt, and now we know. next witcher game Instead of father figure Geralt, the film stars Ciri, a white-haired warrior and villain, and the trailer shows her locked in a battle with a striking and gruesome monster. I had a good look at this whole trailer – I spent about 200 hours on The Witcher III back in the day and I’m looking forward to this one Very.
new games from naughty dog
The next project from the developers of The Last of Us will be called Next Project. Intergalactic: Heretic Prophet And as the name suggests, this is science fiction. You are trapped on a planet at the edge of the known galaxy, where no one has returned for 600 years, cut off from communication with civilization. Although the premise feels a little tired, I love the stylish lines and bright colors of this space fantasy, as well as the clever use of Pet Shop Boys in the trailer.
us too saw the new trailer Another AAA game that looks promising is Mafia: The Old Country, set in Sicily. (Guardian games columnist Dominic Diamond recently played the remake of the original Mafia to see if he was too old to be a Mafia after all.)
A sequel I wasn’t expecting
I loved In the 2006 Zelda-like painting Okami, in which he plays a wolf god who fights demons across ancient Japan with the help of magical ink, I long ago gave up hope of seeing a sequel. (Apart from “Oishinden,” which was produced in 2010) by a different studio). It was then announced that the game’s original director, Hideki Kamiya, was working on it. Okami 2 The announcement of his new studio, Clover, was as much of a surprise as the announcement of Shenmue III at E3 2015. The studio name is an inside joke. Kamiya’s previous studio, which created the original Okami, was Clover.
Another unexpected announcement from Capcom: new onimusha game – Another PS2-era hit about samurai in feudal Japan. Just as exciting, but much more forgiving than the Ninja Gaiden action games (also side scrolling sequel). Sega is also participating in the revival, with the Like a Dragon team tasked with working on a new installment of the Virtua Fighter series. And 90’s dinosaur hunter Tulloch is taking on a new challenge in his next game. Tulloch: Origin (Warning: Violent trailer).
A future co-op classic
Swedish developer Hazelight is known for A Way Out, a cooperative game about two brothers trying to escape from prison, and It Takes Two, a magical realist platformer about a couple on the brink of divorce, Masu. The next piece is about two aspiring writers, one science fiction and one fantasy, who are trapped together in a VR simulation of their own story. Fight by switching between dragons and mechs. it is called split fiction.
Meanwhile, a new game from the creators of Overcooked is also coming. It’s a creepy cooperative horror incident. called stage frighttwo players run through an escape room-style scenario. and AlsoFrom Software has New Elden Ring co-op spinoff This is a bit like Elden Ring meets Monster Hunter. While I’m a bit skeptical of this, I’m also happy at the prospect that From Software’s new game might actually be completed. Because playing it totally counts as quality time with your partner.
And finally…
Fumihito Ueda led the team at Sony’s Japan Studios that created a trilogy of standard games: Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, and Toriko the Man-Eater. All of these games made me think differently about how games express ideas. I’m currently back to game development at a new studio in Tokyo. Project: Robot. There’s only a one-minute trailer here, but I’m still going to play anything this guy is in if I get the chance.
what to play
In the craziness of working parenthood in December, I found peace of mind. naiada free-flowing game about becoming a water nymph. Swim through beautiful river scenery, following schools of small fish, listening to chirping birds, enjoying piano music and the sounds of nature. Sometimes they reunite lost ducklings with their mothers, or make brief appearances in the human world (unfortunately, these are the most frustrating parts). I felt like I was immersed in nature on the steam deck.
After newsletter promotion
Available: computer
Estimated play time: 3-4 hours
what to read
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bloomberg We interviewed the CEO of cd project red To learn more about how the studio has changed since Cyberpunk 2077 in preparation for The Witcher IV.
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If you want to know more about the background of the Okami sequel, check out VGC great interview and Hideki Kamiya.
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classic adventure game under the steel sky I turned 30 last week – eurogamer To commemorate this occasion, we conducted an interesting interview with the manufacturer.
www.theguardian.com
The Unexpected Winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes: Uncovering the Surprising Science of the Year
The 34th Ig Nobel Prize was awarded today for 10 unexpected things – all so surprising that, in keeping with the Prize's long tradition, it makes people laugh and makes them think.
of Award Ceremony The event took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the lecture hall was filled with paper airplanes thrown by audience members honoring the Ig Nobel tradition of bringing in pieces of paper to be transformed into disposable aircraft.
Peaceful Dove
This year's Ig Award winners cover a wide range of subjects, including humans, plants and other behaviours, including some birds.
Before deciding to use live pigeons to guide the flight path of a missile, you might want to conduct an experiment to see if it's feasible to house a pigeon at the nose of a missile. Such an experiment was conducted in the 1940s by psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was posthumously awarded this year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
Skinner's daughter Julie attended the ceremony and accepted the award on his behalf. B.F. Skinner was a giant in the field of behaviorism. A few years after his experiment with putting pigeons on missiles, he Written“Something happened in the short time frame of the Pigeon project that took a long time to be understood. The practical challenges before us have led to new ways of thinking about organismic behavior.”
A botanical sense of style
A similar rethinking of attitudes could come from the work of Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, two 2024 Ig Nobel Prize laureates in Botany. They found evidence that some real plants mimic the shapes of their artificial plastic neighbors. For more information, see their study,Bochyra trifoliata Mimicking the leaves of an artificial plastic host plant“
Marjolaine Willems and her colleagues won the anatomy prize for investigating whether the hair of most people in the Northern Hemisphere curls in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) as the hair of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.
For details, see their paper “Genetic determinism and hemispheric influence in hair formation“
The wind blows
Countless metaphors and phrases are associated with the work that earned Takebe Takanori and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Found Many mammals can breathe through their anus.
The tenacity of the Probability Prize winners František Bartos, Erik Jan Wagenmakers, Aleksandra Sarafoglu and Henrik Godman, along with around 50 colleagues, many of them students, has paid off. ShowedWe know, both in theory and from 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as you started with.
Painful placebo
Lieven Schenk, Tahmin Fadai and Christian Büchel won the medicine prize for demonstrating that a placebo that causes painful side effects can be more effective than a placebo that does not cause painful side effects.
(Their study It reminds me of the prize-winning paper by Dan Ariely and his colleagues, but doesn't explicitly cite it. 2008 Medicine Award They demonstrated that expensive counterfeit medicines are more effective than cheaper counterfeit medicines.
Jimmy Liao won the Physics Prize for demonstrating and describing the swimming ability of dead trout. series of paper He writes about his discovery of this unexpected aspect of fluid mechanics.
Drunken Bug
Earthworms can stay drunk and can become drunk when they consume alcohol. Tess Heremans, Antoine Debray, Daniel Bon and Sander Woutersen method Chromatography is used to separate drunk and non-drunk bugs.
The research award for demography (the statistical study of population) went to Saul Justin Newman for his research exploring whether demographers notice important details: Newman found that many of the people famous for having lived the longest lived in places where birth and death records were poorly kept.
Newman wrote two papers on the subject, each with a title that succinctly explained how his conclusions leaped.The oldest old and the oldest old are concentrated in areas without birth certificates and where life expectancy is shortThe other one is “Records of super-longevity and noteworthy ages show patterns that suggest clerical errors and pension fraud“
This year's gathering of Ig laureates ended with a flourish: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize. experiment That's just what they did in the 1940s: They exploded a paper bag next to a cat standing on a cow's back to see when and how the cow would spill milk.
Eli's daughter Jane and grandson Matt were also in attendance to accept the award and watch demonstrations including a toy cat, a man in a cow costume and five Nobel Prize winners making an exploding paper bag.
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
Winners of the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year Awards: 17 Captivating Images from Below the Surface
Alex Dawson’s stunning photo of a freediver examining a whale carcass has won this year’s award. Underwater Photographer of the Year.
“Whale Bones was photographed in the most extreme conditions,” explains jury chair and renowned photographer Alex Mustard. “A breath-holding diver descends below the Greenland ice sheet to witness a carcass. This composition invites us to think about the impact we have on the great creatures on this planet. Since the advent of humans, wild animals were reduced by his 85%.
“Currently, only 4 percent of mammals are wild animals, and the remaining 96 percent are humans and livestock. We need to change the way we do things to find a balance with nature.”
Portuguese photographer Nuno Sa has been named the Save Our Seas Foundation’s 2024 Marine Conservation Photographer of the Year. His photo, dubbed “Saving Goliath,” depicts a beachgoer’s futile efforts to save a stranded sperm whale off the coast of Portugal.
Underwater Photographer of the Year is an annual competition that celebrates the best underwater photography since 1965.
Today’s competition attracts entries from all over the world, with 13 categories testing photographers in themes such as macro, wide-angle, action photography, and shipwreck photography, as well as four categories specifically for photographs taken in British waters.
Below are the winners of this year’s contest and our favorite ranked images.
Winner – Macro Category
Source: www.sciencefocus.com
