callbacks

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode One: “The Next Generation.” In the 25th Century… There’s a wounded starship playing possum in the beautiful, merciless vastness of space, and inside, is a museum. The captain’s quarters holds a trove of props from that old TV show you watched when you were a kid, maybe you still do as an adult. There’s a hypospray, a ready room terminal playing the logs from “The Best of Both Worlds: Part One” and the captain’s dead husband’s personal effects.…

Throughout my nearly 20 hours of playing through Sonic Frontiers, running through Starfall Islands, and getting to the bottom of Sonic’s friends getting stuck in digital purgatory, I kept getting blasts from the past. The newly released adventure is filled with wonderful callbacks to previous games, both in terms of gameplay and story canon. It may be a brand new “open-zone” game, but it beautifully blends modern open-zone gameplay mechanics with classic side-scrolling ones. Some of the previous Sonic titles have…

Activision has shown off the gameplay reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II as part of Summer Game Fest. The trailer features a first look at the game in action and follows a group of operatives infiltrating a ship in the middle of the ocean. You can watch the full gameplay trailer below. There’s still a lot left to show, but based on the trailer above, it’s clear that developer Infinity Ward is leaning into nostalgia. The ship itself is reminiscent of the Wetwork map from Call of Duty 4: Modern…

Text on a chalkboard. Credit: Cottonbro, Pexels, CC0 (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) In Sweden, a study that sent fictitious applications in response to real housing ads has found that male applicants with foreign-sounding names received fewer callbacks than male applicants with a name that signals Swedish ethnicity. Hemrin Molla and colleagues at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, present these findings in…