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GTA 6 Devs Slam Rockstar Games For Return-To-Office Mandate

A new report confirms that as Rockstar Games is entering the final stages of development on Grand Theft Auto 6, the company is mandating that employees must return to the office five days a week starting in April, to no applause from anyone.

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Helldivers 2's Galactic War Is Orchestrated By Just One Guy

When Helldivers 2 players first jumped into the frenetic third-person co-op shooter, they believed they were cleansing the galaxy of the Terminids, a bug species with a fierce hold on a number of systems. Soon after though, the robot automatons entered the fray, splitting the helldivers’ forces across a war on two…

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Yuffie Is Better Than Ever In FF7 Rebirth

Choosing which party members to take into combat is always an important part of a Final Fantasy game, and that’s especially true in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The just-released RPG offers intense, action-packed combat and gives every character their own signature fighting style. While you may have old favorites from…

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FF7 Rebirth Materia Basics And Recommended Loadouts

As a fantasy RPG, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth provides characters with all sorts of unique abilities. One of the main ways you gain new powers in Rebirth is through materia, magical orbs found throughout the game’s world that grant characters with spells, new powers, stat boosts, and the ability to summon powerful…

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Neil Druckmann Is Tired

Neil Druckmann, the co-president of Naughty Dog and creative director of The Last of Us, is tired. From the sound of it, he might be looking to change his career up so he doesn’t have to deal with the stress of leading a AAA team that puts out games on the scale of Sony’s flagship studio.

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Five Years Ago, Anthem Was A Warning

In January 2019, I was optimistic when I flew out to BioWare’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. I’d been invited to test out Anthem, the studio’s take on the live-service looter-shooter, before it made its way into players’ hands. I was immediately smitten by the polish of the demo, zipping around levels like I was Iron…

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FF7 Rebirth’s Character Folios, Explained

As a massive RPG, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has an extraordinary number of ways to grow and customize your characters. One of Rebirth’s newest additions to character building is the Character Folio, a network of abilities and stat boosts that make your characters even more powerful as you invest points in them.

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Former Call Of Duty Devs Form A New Studio To Make The Anti-COD

The last few years have seen a number of high-level departures from Activision Blizzard, with a great deal of those folks going on to found their own studios and compete directly with the giant. The latest team to spring up from the exodus is Netease-backed BulletFarm, founded and led by David Vonderhaar, a veteran…

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Keeps The Janky Spirit Of The Original

Final Fantasy VII has always been an extremely weird game, from the impromptu snowboarding excursion to fighting a Triceratops fused with a truck. That sense of weirdness seeps into every aspect of the game and often rears its head as a strange—and, more often than not, janky—minigame. The 1997 game takes a “throw…

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Should You Focus On Just The Main Story?

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has finally arrived. The second installment of Square Enix’s attempt to remake one of the most celebrated video games of all time is here for PlayStation 5. The massive RPG offers damn near close to (if not more) than 100 hours of gameplay. Now you might be asking yourself: Do I race to the…

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Does Aerith Die In Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Explained

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is out today. If you’re a big fan, you’re probably already playing it and aren’t looking at this article. If you’re a casual fan or onlooker who is mainly just interested in how it handles certain events of the original game, you’re probably wondering what happens to Aerith in the Remake retel…

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16 Things To Know Before Starting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Square Enix’s latest RPG, is an enormous game. And like any huge adventure, there are dozens of subsystems, features, and layers to navigate. If you’ve played the first game in the new trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Remake, you already have a good handle on the basics of modern FF7. But whether…

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EA Cancels Respawn Star Wars Shooter Amid Mass Layoff

Respawn’s unnamed Star Wars first-person shooter, first confirmed by EA in January 2022, has reportedly been canceled as the publisher pulls back on licensed games amid a large round of layoffs.

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Twitter Banned Runescape's Account Because It Thought An 8-Year-Old Created It

Earlier this week, the official Runescape Twitter/X account got banned. It’s since returned, but the reason behind its temporary ban was that someone at the social media company thought the account was created by an eight-year-old kid, which would be a violation of Twitter’s rules.

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I Thought This Final Fantasy VII Character Had Big Goat Ears For Decades

Let me be clear: I have never played a Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth may be out very soon, and the series may be one of the most influential in the history of video games, but I have never touched one. Aside from tangential knowledge gleaned against my will via the internet and coworkers, and what I’ve…

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59 Days Into 2024 And 8,100+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced

Within the last few years, video game industry layoffs have unfortunately become more commonplace. In 2023, we saw near-weekly layoffs across the entire industry. When the dust had settled, at least 6,000 jobs across publishers, developers, and other video game-related companies had been terminated. Sadly, it appears…

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New Fan Blog Argues (Rightly) That Final Fantasy VIII Is The Best

I have always been a staunch defender of Final Fantasy VIII. I love its broken junction system, the exceptional card game Triple Triad, and the central story of Squall and Rinoa. Not everybody is as enlightened as I am, though. Ever since its release in 1999, the game has been overlooked and underappreciated, often…

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Helldivers 2 Players Losing It Over The Fall Of 'Robot Vietnam'

If you’ve heard of or seen Helldivers 2, a co-op third-person shooter inspired by the movie Starship Troopers, you more than likely caught a glimpse of Malevelon Creek. It’s one of the game’s playable planets, controlled by one of two enemy factions, the automatons. You likely haven’t heard the world’s proper name…

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PS Plus' March Offerings Include One Of 2022's Best Martial Arts Games

As February comes to a close, Sony has removed the cloche to unveil March’s PlayStation Plus cuisine. (I’m feeling hungry right now, leave me alone.) The crop of free games you get next month for being a PS Plus subscriber is actually pretty solid, with the offerings including one of the best martial arts brawlers of…

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Some Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Discs Are Misprinted And Could Cause Problems

Due to a manufacturing error, physical editions of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth in Japan contain discs that are misprinted. This could cause problems for folks trying to play the highly-anticipated Square Enix RPG as they will likely end up inserting the wrong disc into their console.

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Cinematrix Is The Best Commute Game Since Wordle

As someone whose commute to and from the office every day is under half an hour, I am always looking for something short and sweet to do while riding the subway. Sure, there’s the New York Times Games app and its offerings like Wordle and the more recent Connections. But as of February 26, there is a new addition to…

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Remastering One Of The Best Star Wars Games Ever Made Wasn't Easy

First released back in 1995, Star Wars: Dark Forces is a first-person shooter that plays similarly to Doom, but included new (for the era) features—like rooms on top of rooms, looking up and down, and jumping—elevating it beyond a simple clone. It also had an original Star Wars story and introduced new, popular…

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PSA: Be Careful Skipping Cutscenes In FF7 Rebirth’s Flashback Chapter

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, part two of the ambitious project to remake 1997’s Final Fantasy VII, arrives tomorrow, February 29. Fans eager to play this new entry have likely spent some time in the game’s demo, which launched on February 6. Should you play the demo, you’ll get the chance to skip a large section of the…

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PSA: A Final Fantasy VII Spin-Off You Didn't Play Matters In Rebirth

Final Fantasy VII and its various spin-offs and extended media have gotten difficult to keep track of over the years. These days, each numbered Final Fantasy seems like an extended universe in its own right. Final Fantasy XV got a whole movie and anime mini-series before it was even out, both of which factored heavily…

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Tears Of The Kingdom Was Pirated 1 Million Times, Nintendo Claims In Lawsuit

Nintendo filed a civil lawsuit on February 26 against Yuzu software developer Tropic Haze, claiming that the team’s tech let folks illegally pirate 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom over one million times a full week and a half before it even came out. According to the Mario maker, the harm caused by…

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PlayStation's Most Underrated Exclusive Still Grips Me 7 Years Later

In recent years I’ve come to accept that I just don’t love open-world games. It’s partially because my life has only gotten busier and I have less free time to spend on games, so I gravitate towards shorter experiences. But it’s also because open-world game design tends to be boring and repetitive in my opinion. This…

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Shadow Of The Erdtree Is The Sekiro DLC We Never Got

If you thought you were getting through Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC unscathed because you have a 200-hour file and an NG+ character, Hidetaka Miyazaki has recently assured you’ve got another thing coming. Speaking to Famitsu, whose interview was translated via Reddit and reported by GamesRadar, Miyazaki…

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New Pokémon TCG App Fixes A Decades-Old Error

I’ve seen thousands of Pokémon cards in my time, and I had become so desensitized to an error on nearly every card in the United States that I’d forgotten about it. If you’ve ever seen an American Pokémon card, you’ll know that the back of each features art of a Poké Ball opening up. These devices are used in video…

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The Best Games of 2024 (So Far)

This year has carried over two significant trends for the video game industry from 2023 into 2024: a lot of excellent games are coming out, and, unfortunately, the people who make them are suffering. It’s still early, but we’ve gotten some fantastic new games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the surprise hit Balatro…

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Exquisitely Bad 'Willy Wonka Experience' Is Fyre Fest For Kids

Police were called to the scene of “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” in Glasgow, Scotland, as children burst into tears when the “immersive experience” promised in AI advertisements turned out to be a sparsely decorated warehouse.

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