A decade ago, a Monster Hunter environment was essentially a series of battle rooms, with loading screens between each piece of the map. Chasing down a monster to finish it off meant having to put up with a few of those loads every hunt. With its two latest games, World and Rise, Capcom did away with that technical limitation, but another major bit of rigidity remained: every mission had to be selected from a job board or NPC, then launched to load into a predetermined world state. 

In Monster Hunter Wilds, that’s gone, too.

Once you leave the hub and head out into the field to hunt, you can stay there as long as you want—setting up custom camps that serve as fast travel points with no loading, attacking monsters to automatically begin missions, and remaining in the field after slaying and carving up a monster. Those are all niceties that will cut down on the amount of time spent staring at loading screens, but Wilds is going deeper, maintaining the effects of…

September 26, 2024: We added a new code to coincide with the release of version 1.2 and removed an expired one.

Zenless Zone Zero codes are one of the best ways to get free Polychrome for pulling new characters in miHoYo’s latest action game. Sure, you’ll get plenty by playing the game at launch, but it’ll start to dry up pretty fast once you explore all the areas and complete the one-time achievements and goals in your Primer. You can do daily errands or events to get more, but you can also redeem ZZZ codes as they come for a little extra.

As with Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, we can also expect Zenless Zone Zero livestream codes with each new version of the game—a great way to supplement the Polychrome and Master Tapes that you’re squirreling away to acquire any new characters soon to release.

Here I’ll run through all currently active Zenless Zone Zero codes, plus include details for how to…

I don’t know if Baldur’s Gate 3 will bring back the famed Golden Pantaloons, but it will have some very nice Periwinkle Undergarments, and if you think you’d look adorable with them on you can pick up a pair (along with some other swanky duds) for free by watching two hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Twitch.

To get the Baldur’s Gate 3 Twitch gear, you’ll need to log into your Larian account, then use the “Connected Accounts” menu option to link your Twitch account. After that, you’ll just need to watch a total of two hours of Twitch Drops-enabled Baldur’s Gate 3 streams between 9 am PT on August 3 and the same time on August 17. 

You can earn the gear even if you don’t own Baldur’s Gate 3: It’ll be waiting for you in your Twitch Drops inventory whenever you start playing, as long as you have a linked Larian account. If you don’t, the Drops will expire in seven days.

Larian said in an FAQ that camp clothes will be available elsewhere in the game, but this particular…

Watch On

I have a little birdhouse in my soul for Life is Strange—first released in 2015, it was a unique, narrative-driven game that was charming and fun enough for what it was. It also kinda pissed me off.

I’ll try to keep why mostly spoiler-free, but essentially, the game gives you cosmic powers and then spends most of its runtime making you feel really bad about choosing to use them. There’s some underlying “growing up is about making hard choices” stuff in there that I get, sure, but hard choices are for people who can’t legitimately just fix everything with time magic.

It’s like being given water powers the moment your friend’s house is on fire, then being told that no, actually, trying to put that fire out was wrong. I like stories about dealing with a cruel and uncaring universe as much as the next guy, but the powers that be in the Life is Strange universe are just kind of capricious and cruel.

Anyway, I still liked it overall. I haven’t bee…

As the very successful launch of New World last year showed us, there’s still a big appetite for new MMOs these days, even if the heyday of the genre feels behind us. But what about a sequel to a classic? The father of Ultima, Richard Garriott, still wants to make a follow-up to what was arguably the first MMO, Ultima Online, but so far hasn’t had much luck.

Spotted by GamesRadar on Twitter, Garriott pitched a brief vision of what a new Ultima Online could be like, with “original-ish PvP rules”, but where the developers would do a better job of “protecting the innocent” and “encouraging folks to embrace the danger of straying from the path of safety”.

On top of that, he’s also keen to bring back singleplayer Ultima. The only thing that’s stopping him is that he doesn’t own the licence. EA has locked up Ultima in its vault, though it’s not languishing entirely. Ultima Online is still live, currently under the stewardship of Broadsword, the same studio that will soon be ta…

The crypto-trading platform Coinbase is being charged by the SEC in the US for acting as an unregistered securities exchange and broker, which essentially amounts to ruling against a big part of the company’s whole schtick.

The SEC accuses the crypto platform of failing to register as a securities exchange, and thus unable to offer significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping, and safeguards. Also that it’s been unlawfully running its staking-as-a-service program to allow people to earn profits from proof-of-stake algorithms common to a couple of major cryptocurrencies.

In the 101-page complaint, the SEC alleges that Coinbase, “made calculated business decisions to make crypto assets available for trading in order to increase its own revenues, which are primarily based on trading fees from customers, even where those assets, as offered and sold, had the characteristics of securities.”

Whether cryptocurrencies fall under the securities umb…

When I heard during the Xbox Showcase that Sea of Thieves is getting a Monkey Island expansion, I thought to myself, “That’s nice—I’m glad that Ron Gilbert is cashing in.” But as it turns out, he is not, and in fact he had nothing to do with it.

Gilbert is widely acknowledged as the creator of the Monkey Island games, which he co-wrote with fellow Lucasarts luminaries Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. He actually only worked on the first two games in the series before leaving Lucasarts, but returned to the series in 2022 with the outstanding Return to Monkey Island.

Clearly, the passage of time has not dulled Gilbert’s Monkey Island mojo. But when he was asked about it on Mastodon, Gilbert said that he wasn’t actually involved with the Sea of Thieves DLC at all.

“Nope. It was all done without my knowledge or input,” Gilbert said in response to a question about working with Rare on the DLC. To a separate inquiry, he replied, “Wasn’t even told about it. Happened b…