Alert, this is an April Fools article that sneakily managed to escape its dedicated section.

Wrong link for “70-Year-Old Banned From 'World of Warcraft', Mistaken For Bot?” That title sounded amusing, but the link goes to a boring old Actiblizzard article.

For the curious, yes, the "on GOG" meant a literal (time-limited) code you then had to manually redeem on GOG, and the "on Origin," likewise. Alien: Isolation on EGS however merely asks you to hook your Amazon account up to Epic, and then the game is redeemed to your account, with no code supplied. Of course most would already have that in their EGS account already, since it was a no-Prime-strings attached Epic freebie in the past.

The other games either show up in your Twitch app, or the more recent Amazon Games app.

Curious I'm the only one endlessly amused by Blue's tongue-slip of

has been replaced by interim CEO Andrew Wilson

The Andrew Wilson who's also the CEO of Electronic Arts?
But then the quoted block of text says Alan Wilson.

What's the special occasion to resurface that Ken Levine article from 2012?

Blue, I wonder if it would be possible to separate the real news items from all that "Now Available" spam. Like that article on Lost Judgment hiding near the end, between all the nothing items.

To be honest, I doubt anyone cares even a little bit for all that empty "Now Available" fluff. Anyone so interested can browse the new games on any store/platform much easier than reading through these text-only titles. And it's not like you're listing every single Steam release. Why should Xbox get special treatment?

This formula is the only allowed phrasing for titles on Zdnet.

Haha, yes, that title really floored me, before I read the rest of it.
What a difference a missing word can make,

Frans wrote on Feb 5, 2021, 14:50:

• it gets stored in MySQL, which along with its tables and string columns are set to UTF-8 (utf8_unicode_ci)

Which version of MySQL is it? Older versions of MySQL, and all versions of MariaDB, required the use of their specially named "utf8mb4" character set instead for true utf-8, one that also supports 4-byte characters such as all emojis.

Frans wrote on Feb 5, 2021, 14:50:
Separately, we still have a problem with UTF-8 characters in single stories. In fact, the two Cyberpunk Exposé stories showing up in the popular threads box mid-January is how I first noticed it. And one of them is still erratic on the Share/Comments links:

• 1: Cyberpunk 2077 Development Debacle Exposé
• 2: Cyberpunk 2077 Exposé Follow-up

Currently for me, your #2 link consistently serves the title of the story as Cyberpunk 2077 Expos0xE9, which is invalid utf-8, and as such, consistently shows broken. Both in the h2 posting title, and the top-level title tag which then ends up as the tab's title.

However, the issue is only on this /s/ "Share" link, which I gather was statically generated one time.

If I click over to the comment viewer board.pl version, it is always correct. It's served as a proper Cyberpunk 2077 Expos0xC3A9…

If I had to guess, not all statically generated pages got refreshed after you have fixed whatever was borked in the perl settings earlier, and some corrupted static pages remain.

Thank you for all the work you do for Blue!

Everything went smoothly for me by going through their convenient free.ubisoft.com page.

Other than the part where I might have already got this through a previous giveaway of theirs, which is why I even opened the comments here to try and confirm that. No matter, I did not play it before, and I'm not going to now. I just cannot resist free games!

Always feeling such an unjustified sense of disappointment when I go to redeem my rightfully deserved free gift, and turns out it's a duplicate, the button saying Owned already.
Apparently I got this back on August 30, 2019.

It’s been available on Windows on Steam since May ‘19. This is only about hawking the Microsoft Store / Game Pass version.

Blue wrote on Nov 27, 2019, 12:32:
story number 205970 is our first locked thread,

Clicked through for the comments here expecting a chuckle over more bad password anecdotes, but then… Ooh, heated topic, tantalizing controversy, had to plug that number in and see for myself what could have been so divisive. Something going Epic Game Store exclusive? Loot boxes? Politics in video games? Aaaand it's a goddamn boilerplate press release on a game selling well. Geez, can't not laugh at how that would be the very last thing I'd have expected to even warrant a comment, much less emotions flaring up.

Flatline wrote on Nov 4, 2019, 13:07:
What I don't understand is why do modern browsers still fucking support auto play of video? It's fucking the bane of my existence. They *can't* work for product visibility, I've never had one of those POS ads start up and been like "huh.. I'm going to watch this!" It's more like "oh god stop it fuck stop it fuck you okay i'm closing the goddamn tab and not coming back if I can't stop this fucking video"

Safari has made the change to only allow autoplay of videos with no audio by default, a couple years back. You can change the default globally or on a site-by-site basis, going back to allowing all autoplay, or blocking it entirely. Making blocking even silent video autoplay the default has the issue of encouraging going back to the highly inefficient, grimy old animated GIFs, which were always allowed to “auto play” historically.

I assumed most other browsers have adopted Safari’s restrictions on video autoplay by now.

On first reading the title, I got worried it was the "Binding of Isaac Creator" dude that was accused of abuse. Heh. Glad there's no need to have mixed feelings over another game yet again.

Read Dead Online, now that’s a game I’d be excited to try

Funny how the article on that Germans / Nazis news is the one that is blocked from being opened in the EU including, of course, Germany. They might get Nazis now, but no news artcle for you.

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons

We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact q6news@khq.com or call 509-448-6000.

Activision offers new details about Turning Tide

That’s so very unexpectedly nice of them, offering some advertising for the competition! :p Haha, sorry, this was too funny.

Shit, I hate the speed at which time flies. October 21, 2016 was already well over a year ago.

Acleacius wrote on Dec 20, 2016, 13:14:
They told the plot and the villain, in the PR release. The name of the villain, do you get it? No? Did you know the name of the villain in Dishonored?

Haha, now I see your case a bit, but one day you'll see it for yourself and laugh about it too. This is really not that kind of game anymore.

The intro is an autoplaying non-interactive sequence. You can't walk around, slow down, take it in at your pace, meet people, none of that this time. In less than a minute, there's Delilah. Who kindly introduces herself right away. ”Hello, I'm Delilah and I'm going to serve as the villain in this video game. I'm super stereotypically evil and irredeemable, by the way! Enjoy!“

I think it was Carmack who once said that video games need a story as much as a porn film. No matter Bethesda's beef with him these years, whoever decided on how much narrative Dishonored 2 needs definitely agrees with that ethos.