frustratingly

Released in 2012 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the original Dragon’s Dogma was an action roleplaying game tailored to a very specific audience. Brutally difficult, the gameplay centered on open-world exploration with a survivalist touch, wherein players and their NPC (non-player character) companions must trek through a “persistent” world that — at the time — felt organic as shifting day-and-night cycles and changing weather conditions imbued its somewhat bland fantasy world with a sense of life. Heavy on…

You know you’ve screwed up when you’ve simultaneously angered the White House, the TIME Person of the Year and pop culture’s most rabid fanbase. That’s what happened last week to X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly called Twitter, when AI-generated, pornographic deepfake images of Taylor Swift went viral. One of the most widespread posts of the nonconsensual, explicit deepfakes was viewed more than 45 million times, with hundreds of thousands of likes. That doesn’t even factor in all the accounts that reshared…

via Triumph Films The 1990s proved to be a curious decade for the sci-fi horror subgenre, and not in a good way. The decade was littered with a string of cult classics and underappreciated gems, but the majority of them tended to flop at the box office before finding an audience, with Screamers proving to be one of the most pertinent examples. In a similar vein to spiritual bedfellows like Paul W.S. Anderson’s enduring cult classic Event Horizon and the blockbuster-sized Jamie Lee Curtis disaster Virus,…

Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 pros and cons Pros Solid performance Battery life Fantastic display Cons Too much Samsung software Touchpad is almost too big Number pad isn't big enough to be helpful more buying choices When Samsung recently announced a trio of Galaxy S23 phonesThis 2-in-1 laptop has a 16-inch display that rotates nearly 360 degrees (thus the name!), to pull double duty as a tablet. It even comes with Samsung's iconic S Pen stylus in the box, so you can jot down notes or sketch directly on the…

Pros Buttons and analog sticks feel excellent Display looks great, especially at higher brightness Truly compelling gaming experiences when it works Cons Buggy interactions with numerous platforms and games Interface elements often work poorly with touchscreen Confusing UI inconsistencies make simple tasks complexPortable gaming devices have been around for decades, ever since Nintendo's Gameboy first offered a truly compelling gaming experience in a handheld. Since then, dozens of companies have tried to capture…

Overwatch 2 is a waiting game Somehow, despite all my bellyaching, I got roped back into Overwatch. I used to play pretty seriously with a team when I was in college, but I thought I was done with the game for good until Overwatch 2 came out (even if it doesn’t really count as a sequel in my book). The game is still full of bugs, but I’ve mostly been able to enjoy my experience because I’m trying out all kinds of new heroes I never thought I could viably play in the past. I used to be basically just a one-trick Mercy…

Harry Styles has spent a few years at that unfortunate stage of mega-celebrity when everything he says is subjected to forensic online scrutiny for intricate layers of meaning, implication and self-betrayal – so it’s just as well, for him at least, that he’s got very good at soundbites that, even when parsed to the nth degree, don’t say very much at all.The singer-actor’s interviews tend to be rife with uncontroversially quotable statements on the value of kindness, creativity and following your own path. His latest…