Enlarge / Just some of the game franchises represented by studios coming out in support of reproductive rights today.

Last month, Insomniac Games (Spider-Man) CEO Ted Price reportedly told his employees that parent company Sony "will not approve ANY statements from any studio on the topic of reproductive rights." That is apparently no longer true, as Insomniac and other Sony studios have tweeted statements in support of "reproductive freedom" in the wake of this morning's Supreme Court decision overturning the longstanding Roe v. Wade precedent on the issue.

"We are human beings who make games," Insomniac tweeted this morning. "Reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy are human rights."

By the afternoon, many of Sony's other North American game studios had started tweeting similar messages, including Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us), Santa Monica Studio (God of War), San Diego Studio (MLB: The Show), and Bend Studio (Days Gone). Some of Sony's European studios, including Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet), Guerilla Games (Horizon), and PlayStation London Studio, have also joined in with tweeted statements of support.

Enlarge / Players that Microsoft bans from Minecraft will soon also be prevented from joining private servers like this one. (credit: Tynker)

Since its initial release over a decade ago (and even following Microsoft's 2014 acquisition of developer Mojang), Minecraft has let players create private servers where they're in full control of what behaviors (and players) are allowed. Next week, though, Microsoft is set to roll out a new update that lets it ban a Minecraft player from all online play, including private servers and those hosted on Microsoft's subscription-based Realms plan.

Earlier this week, Microsoft launched a pre-release version of Update 1.19.1 for the Java Edition of Minecraft, which will go live for everyone on Tuesday, June 28. That update will add the ability to report users who abuse the game's chat system and allow for "reported players [to be] be banned from online play and Realms after moderator review."

On a recently updated "Why Have I been Banned from Minecraft?" help page, Microsoft notes that banned players will also get a message when they "sign into Minecraft on any platform (non-Java Edition) [aka "Bedrock"]." That message will clarify that "banned players are not allowed to play on servers, join Realms, host or join multiplayer games, or use the marketplace. They are also not allowed to access Minecraft Earth. Xbox players will no longer have access to their worlds [emphasis added]."

Enlarge / A diver with the Return to Antikythera project carefully excavates an artifact. (credit: Nikos Giannoulakis/Return to Antikythera)

The so-called Antikythera mechanism, recovered from the wreckage of an ancient cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera Island in Greece, might be the world's oldest analog computer. The mystery surrounding its purpose and origin continues to fascinate scientists and enthusiasts alike to this day. But it's not the only treasure salvaged from that Antikythera wreck. An ongoing underwater archaeological project most recently recovered a large marble head of a bearded male figure believed to be part of a statue of Hercules. Divers also recovered a marble plinth with the lower legs of another statue, two human teeth, and several pieces of the cargo ship's equipment.

As we've previously reported, in 1900, a Greek sponge diver named Elias Stadiatis discovered the wreck, which was apparently surrounded by rotting corpses on the sea floor. The captain, Dimitrios Kondos, didn't believe Elias at first and thought the nitrogen in his breathing mix had affected the diver's senses. So Kondos dove down to the site himself, emerging with an arm from a bronze statue. 

Kondos and his crew had recovered all kinds of artifacts from the shipwreck by mid-1901, including 36 marble sculptures (representing Hercules, Ulysses, Diomedes, Hermes, and Apollo, among others); a bronze statue dubbed "The Philosopher" (circa 340 BCE); a bronze lyre; pieces of glasswork; and three marble horse statues. Along with the Antikythera mechanism, these precious artifacts are now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Enlarge / You know the sweet old nursery rhyme: Mary had a little lamb, but then it was resurrected by the devil and forced to create a murderous cult. (credit: Devolver / Massive Monster)

When I first played Cult of the Lamb, launching August 11 on PC and all major console families, I imagined that its demonic tone came as an internal joke for its development team. Perhaps the creators at Massive Monster sat around looking at the sim-management likes of Animal Crossing and The Sims, then thought that the only way they'd surpass those games is by striking a deal with the devil.

Then they went ahead and made a sim game where players do exactly that. After 90 minutes spent playing the game's expanded demo, provided by its publishers at Devolver Digital, I'm inclined to think its choices about tone, art direction, and sim-meets-Satan gameplay were the right call. (There's currently a free public demo as well, available on Windows and MacOS, but it's much shorter than what I've sampled.)

The One Who Waits

Cult of the Lamb begins with the game's hero, a Disney-like cartoon lamb, being led to its slaughter as a form of religious sacrifice. But death is only the beginning in this game. In the afterlife, you meet a mysterious underground beast wrapped in chains, simply named The One Who Waits. You're given the option to rise from your grave, grow a cult full of devout followers, expand your mastery of the demonic arts, and defeat a series of monstrous rivals. You can answer this call in one of two responses: "yes" and "absolutely."

Next year's Final Fantasy XVI aims to be the first mainline, numbered game in the franchise to receive an M (for Mature) rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. That's according to producer Naoki Yoshida, who told GameSpot in a recent interview that the higher age rating is needed to tell a story with "difficult adult themes."

Responding to a question about "implied nudity" in a recent trailer for the game, Yoshida complained a bit about age ratings that he sees as "becom[ing] more and more restrictive recently regarding what can or cannot be shown." While acknowledging that those ratings are important to protect younger players, Yoshida said a lower age rating can be "somewhat of a hindrance" to storytelling.

"You find yourself changing things that you wanted to do in the game based on that rating," Yoshida said. "You wanted to show something, but because you have this certain rating that you need to go to—you need to move the camera away. And that ends up making the entire experience feel a little bit cheaper."

Enlarge / Beavis and Butt-head, seen here potentially succumbing to space madness. (credit: Paramount)

The Mike Judge-iverse has long toyed with the inherent comedy of utter stupidity. But as anyone who has looked beyond the incessant "heh heh heh" of Beavis and Butt-head knows, Judge's cartoons, TV series, and films are at their best when they toy with the question of exactly who in the room is the "smart" or "dumb" one.

The great news about this week's Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe, a straight-to-Paramount+ film debuting on Thursday, June 23, is that it finally sees Judge and co. bring a smart-kind-of-stupid approach to his most famous cartoon. This week's film achieves this far more successfully than the series' other feature-length film from 1996. Its ideas meld well with the series' bottom-of-the-toilet stupidity and feel fresh instead of like they were ripped from other Judge series.

Failing forward, all the way to space

The film opens with madcap comedy in its sights, as Beavis and Butt-head are in high school in the '90s, still oblivious to anything that doesn't resemble boobs, explosions, sticky snack foods, or phrases that sound like euphemisms. (Heh, heh. "Sticky.")

Enlarge / A promised patch should soon allow KOTOR II players to beat the game on Switch.

Last week, publisher Aspyr officially acknowledged the existence of a game-breaking glitch in the recent Switch port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. That glitch, which crashes the game after the "Basilisk Crash" cutscene on the planet Onderon, has the inconvenient side effect of making the Switch version completely unbeatable.

While Aspyr promised this game-breaking glitch would be fixed in the game's next downloadable patch, plenty of game developers in the past haven't had that option. KOTOR II on the Switch is the latest in a long line of games that were literally impossible to complete (or to get a full, 100 percent completion rate) when they launched.

Here, we're not talking about games like The Sims or Tetris that are designed not to have a win condition and/or always end in failure for the player (though some games that seem like they fall in that category are surprisingly beatable). We're also not talking about games where the player is forced to reset after accidentally stumbling into an in-game predicament where they can no longer make progress (TV Tropes has a massive list of games that fit this description).

It was admittedly an odd creative decision to split the fourth season of Stranger Things into two unequal parts. While Part 1 (consisting of the first seven episodes) was a bit bloated, it nonetheless told a compelling story, set up some very real stakes, and left viewers mulling over multiple cliffhangers. Fortunately, we don't have long to wait to see what happens next, and Netflix just dropped an exciting new trailer foreshadowing what we can expect from the final two episodes, each of which clocks in at well over an hour's run time. And things look pretty bleak for the Hawkins gang.

(Some spoilers for S4 Part 1 below, but we've tried to avoid revealing the biggest plot twists.)

Ever since the official trailer for Part 1 dropped in May, we've known that this season's big bad hails straight from classic D&D lore. It's Vecna, a once-powerful wizard who first became undead and then became a lich. Although Vecna (in the lore, at least) was destroyed, over time he achieved godhood. His left hand and left eye survived his bodily death and became powerful relics.

Enlarge / Sonic Origins comes with a few brand-new, nicely animated sequences. But do they tilt the scale to make this compilation worth $40? (Spoiler: nah.) (credit: Sega)

Here's a gamer version of "guess how many gum balls are in the jar": How many times has Sega re-released the very first Sonic the Hedgehog game?

If we don't ignore six-in-one carts from Sega Genesis and Mega Drive in the '90s, then the answer is somewhere near 30 launches. That count includes a port of the home version for early '90s arcades, the Sonic Jam compilation for the Sonic-starved Saturn, versions on various mobile platforms, multiple plug-and-play TV boxes, and a version exclusively playable in Tesla automobiles. Many of these releases came with other 16-bit Sonic games, as well.

Should you have missed any of the other 30-plus ways to play the series over the years—or have kids who want as much Sonic content as possible after seeing the series' live-action films—Sonic Origins launches later this week on PC and all console families. Sadly, I'm reviewing this $40 (or, honestly, up to $48) compilation of 16-bit Sonic games not because it's great, but because it's weird.

Enlarge / Kiosks, controllers, masks, and games: Gaming-preview events hit a little different in 2022, but we'll take whatever we can get. (credit: Summer Game Fest: Play Days + Seth Cuddeback)

LOS ANGELES—The past week's Summer Game Fest has mostly been a virtual affair, full of trailers for video games that may or may not launch in the next 18 months. Still, as the game industry draws closer to convention-preview normalcy, we scored invites to two early-June events with playable coming-soon games.

You may have already seen my biggest hands-on highlights from those events: Street Fighter 6, which is fantastic, and Sonic Frontiers, which is weird but promising. This article sums up the "best of the rest," based on hands-on tests at the Summer Game Fest Play Days event in Los Angeles and a series of remote-connection Tribeca Games Festival demos.

The events were missing some of the world's biggest developers and publishers—arguably because many of their games have been pushed to 2023. Despite this list skewing more to the indie side, we stand behind these game preview highlights thanks to how they felt to play.

While 2022 was yet another year without an E3, game publishers big and small haven’t stopped releasing tons of hype-filled trailers during the usual summer promotional season. After sifting through Summer Game Fest and the Microsoft/Bethesda showcase, we’ve spent much of the week watching literally hundreds of trailers, as featured in the Future Games Show, IGN Expo, Wholesome Direct, Day of the Devs, the PC Gaming Show, and many others.

We’ve picked out 25 titles whose presentations stood out for one reason or another. Scroll through for a collection of titles we’ll be watching over the next year or so. And keep an eye out for hands-on impressions from our own Sam Machkovech, who sampled a handful of these games at a Summer Games Fest event earlier this week.

A Little to the Left

Platforms: Switch, PC, Mac, Android, iOS
Planned release: 2022
Links: Steam | Itch.io (w/ demo) | Official website

The teaser for the fourth season of Westworld that dropped last month was tonally evocative and visually stunning, but it told us very little about what to expect from the narrative. Now we have the full trailer, and it has made us eager to learn more, as it looks like the show is about to head into some very interesting places.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below.)

As we've reported previously, Westworld's third season was the first to take place largely outside the tightly controlled environment of the original theme parks. Opening three months after the events of the S2 finale, Dolores (Evan Rachel Woods) had re-created her host body. We learned she was targeting an AI system called Rehoboam, which was developed by a company called Incite. To access the system, Dolores had to take on its creator, Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), and various other adversaries with their own motives for stopping her—including William, aka the Man in Black (Ed Harris), who vowed to destroy any remaining hosts.

Enlarge / This Buzz Lightyear is supposed to be the "real-life" version of the character, which the real-life humans in Toy Story saw before buying the cuter toy version of the Buzz character. Still with me? Yes, this week's new Pixar film is weird. (credit: Disney / Pixar)

Hollywood has produced quite a few superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy "origin" films, which rewind a series' timeline to take a deeper look at a popular character. But I'm not sure we've ever seen a film that goes to the trouble of telling the origin story... of a manufactured toy in a fictional universe.

That is what this week's Lightyear is: a fictional film that explains why a fictional toy was created in another fictional film. The overly serious Toy Story hero Buzz Lightyear, full of catch phrases and push-action tricks on his plastic spacesuit, wasn't originally a children's cartoon character, Pixar now says. The toy we grew to love was actually the children's-toy version of a serious "live action" sci-fi hero—or, at least, live in the way that Andy was a "real" person in the Toy Story universe.

Part of me hoped that such a twist on an existing fictional character would let Pixar run wild with classic sci-fi inspirations. But that's not what Lightyear is. This new film, debuting exclusively in theaters, is nowhere near the tribute to past boundary-pushing blockbusters that its trailer suggested.

Enlarge / Taking a close look... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Last November, The Wall Street Journal published a damning report alleging that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick withheld information about harassment allegations from his board of directors. The report also suggested that Activision executives failed to act decisively to address the kind of widespread complaints contained in a California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) lawsuit filed last July.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday, Activision's board of directors said the company has concluded its own thorough investigation of those claims, which it says shows that "we are not a company that looks the other way."

After consulting with external advisers, talking with employees, and reviewing contemporaneous notes, Activision writes "that there is no evidence to suggest that Activision Blizzard senior executives ever intentionally ignored or attempted to downplay the instances of gender harassment that occurred and were reported." The company's board of directors also didn't withhold any information from the company, Activision writes.

Enlarge / Archaeologists found a crude graffiti drawing of a penis accompanied by a personal insult at the ancient Roman fort Vindolanda. (credit: Vindolana Charitable Trust)

Archaeologists excavating the remains of a Roman auxiliary fort in the UK recently made a surprising and rather hilarious find: a small stone carved with the unmistakable image of penis—basically an ancient Roman d**k pic, accompanied by a crude insulting message directed at someone the carver clearly disliked.

The Vindolanda site is located south of the defense fortification known as Hadrian's Wall. An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. The Rev. Anthony Hedley began excavating the site in 1814, but he died before he had the chance to record what he found for posterity. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort had been called Vindolanda.

Serious archaeological excavation at the site began in the 1930s under the leadership of Eric Birley, whose sons and grandson continued the work after his death, right up to the present day. The oxygen-deprived conditions of the deposits (some of which extend six meters, or 19 feet, into the earth)  mean that the recovered artifacts are remarkably well-preserved. These include wooden writing tablets and over a hundred boxwood combs, which would have disintegrated long ago in more oxygen-rich conditions.

Enlarge (credit: Sony)

South African director Neill Blomkamp is set to direct a Gran Turismo movie for Columbia Pictures. Deadline first broke the news of a potential GT film in May, but on Tuesday, Sony announced a release date for the film: August 11, 2023.

Video games don't often make great movies, though I still have a soft spot for Super Mario Bros, even if the elevator scene with the koopas ruined slow dances at weddings for me forever. Although Blomkamp is no stranger to horror, the GT movie is unlikely to feature an army of subterranean dinosaurs.

Instead, the plot involves a teenager GT gamer whose skills see him through a series of competitions to become a professional racing driver.

Enlarge / Everyone's favorite heroes in a half shell are back—and they're here to reclaim their '90s arcade-brawling glory. (credit: Dotemu / Tribute Games)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge might be the best 2D beat-'em-up video game ever made. Depending on your preferences, it could drop down to #2 or #3 on your personal all-time list, but that still makes it an incredible, must-play game, and its production values and group-gaming fun factor are unmatched in the genre.

Since getting my copy, I've completed the game's campaign four times and hosted gameplay sessions with a number of friends, and I'm still not tired of the fun on offer. Shredder's Revenge is everything I have wanted in a Ninja Turtles arcade sequel: immediately accessible, gorgeously animated, hilarious, and packed with enough mechanical systems to make it satisfying to return to.

Beyond Guardian Heroes, beyond 2007’s TMNT

Shredder's Revenge rewinds to a 32-bit era of high-res, meticulously animated pixel art—perhaps one generation past the beloved likes of Guardian Heroes—and imagines a world in which Konami kept making TMNT arcade games. This week's new game, out on Windows, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch, imagines what directions the series might have gone in an alternate universe dominated by arcade games.

As it turns out, the main developers of this new game tried such a concept 15 years ago. The simply named TMNT for the Game Boy Advance looked and felt a lot like games from the series' arcade heyday, boosted by a satisfying combo-counter system and some experience-point chasing. Sadly, that solid 2007 game was lost in a portable-gaming world that had moved on to the Nintendo DS.

Enlarge / The pigments used to create the yellow rose in Abraham Mignon's Still Life with Flowers and a Watch have degraded, giving the rose a flatter appearance—the opposite of the 3D illusory effect intended by the artist.

The 17th century still-life painter Abraham Mignon was known for his depictions of flowers, fruit, forests, and grottoes, among other objects. But over time, certain pigments have degraded to such an extent as to alter the artist's intent. Most notably, a yellow rose prominently featured in Mignon's Still Life with Flowers and a Watch has become flattened and monochrome, particularly compared to the other blooms featured in the painting.

A team of Dutch and Belgian scientists used chemical and optical imaging techniques to examine the elemental distribution of the various pigments, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science Advances. In this way, they could infer Mignon's original painting technique—specifically how the artist built up layers to create what would have been a 3D appearance for the original rose.

According to the authors, over time, artist pigments and binders in oil paintings inevitably deteriorate when exposed to external factors such as light, relative humidity, temperature, and/or exposure to solvents, as well as incompatible pigment mixtures. The result was discoloration and color changes that can affect the paint's structural integrity, causing such defects as loss of transparency, brittleness, or micro-cracks.

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  Even in its early build, Diablo IV looks to be an atmospheric stunner. This gallery is full of game imagery. [credit: Blizzard ]

Blizzard has confirmed that the upcoming Diablo IV won't feature the kinds of game-altering microtransactions that have proved so controversial in the recently released Diablo Immortal.

Back in 2019, shortly after Diablo IV was first announced, Blizzard lead designer Joe Shely said that Blizzard "would not sell power" in the game. Instead, you'll be able to "acquire cosmetics" via microtransactions, he said, while adding at the time that "it's very early" in the game's development.

Some players worried if those Diablo IV plans were still operational, though, given Diablo Immortal's wide variety of in-game currencies and gameplay-altering purchase options that have gotten the game effectively banned in two European countries.

Enlarge / Sonic, seen here slip slidin' away through the mascot's most ambitious adventure yet. And so far, while it has its issues, Sonic Frontiers actually seems promising. (credit: Sega)

LOS ANGELES—Ahead of this week, the next fully 3D Sonic the Hedgehog video game, slated to launch on all console families by the end of 2022, wasn't looking so hot. Quite frankly, we've never seen a Sega gameplay reveal land as poorly as Sonic Frontiers.

Maybe you didn't see the preview footage, which debuted exclusively at IGN earlier this month, or maybe you blocked it out of your mind. Either way, I can now talk about a different kind of preview experience: going hands-on with something that looks and feels like an actual Sonic video game, as opposed to the zero-UI tech demo that was previously showcased.

Sonic Frontiers delivers fresh ideas that Sonic's 3D pantheon has sorely lacked for decades. In my brief time with the game, I could already tell that Sega is remixing the Breath of the Wild formula in a way that feels new and Sonic-appropriate. The game seems to fix many of my complaints about every full-3D Sonic game that followed 1999's Sonic Adventure.