An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, players have complained that ballooning game download sizes are clogging up hard drives and Internet bandwidth. In a recent interview with streamer TeeP, Call of Duty: Warzone Live Operations Lead Josh Bridge admitted that the game's massive file size is also impacting the team's ability to release new maps. Asked about the possibility of adding the original Verdansk map to cycle alongside the game's current Caldera map, Bridge said, "We want that. We all want that," before addressing the "technical problem" that makes it difficult: "The install and re-install sizes are fucking insane, right? If we pulled out Caldera and say we're gonna drop in Verdansk, this could be essentially re-downloading, like, the size of Warzone," he said. "And every time we've done that, we lose players," Bridge continued. "Because you're kind of like, 'I don't want to re-download that,' [so you] uninstall. I think you can't fit anything else but Warzone on a base PS4."

Bridge is exaggerating, but only a little. Activision says you need a whopping 175GB of hard drive space on PC for a Warzone install. On Xbox, the base download is listed at nearly 92GB, similar to the size on PlayStation systems. Adding Modern Warfare onto the Warzone package increases the total size to about 250GB on PC and 150GB on consoles. About a year ago, Activision announced that the "larger than usual" Warzone "Season 2 Reloaded" patch would reduce the game's "overall footprint" on hard drives by 10-15GB (and 30-35GB when combined with Modern Warfare, depending on the platform). The "data optimization and streamlining" in that update would also ensure that "future patch sizes for Modern Warfare and Warzone [would] be smaller" than the 57GB update being offered at that point.

The results over the ensuing year have been mixed. A February Season 2 patch required only about 11GB of file downloads, for instance, while a December 7 update that introduced new maps required a 41-45 GB download on consoles. [...] In any case, Bridge was remarkably frank about Warzone's file size issues and said that "looking to the future, we're putting a lot more effort into how we sort that out on a technical level so that we can have that [map] rotation. We've been really looking at it, so we'll have more to talk about that, but that is ultimately a goal to ensure that there's a freshness and a variety of experiences."

More students are being exposed to historical narratives through game play -- but what exactly are they being taught? From a report: Analyzing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn't colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games. "The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV," Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, "games are about systems; they're about the mechanics," Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can "teach" people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. "The major challenge is getting players to recognize and think explicitly about these systems," Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you'll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you're unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox's Second World War simulator, and you'll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: "General Frost." The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works -- what The Atlantic's Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric."

Paradox's titles don't take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe's rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralized states in Europe and their rise to global primacy. The game uses a mechanic of "institutions," such as the printing press and the Enlightenment, which appear in a preset order at 50-year intervals, almost always in Europe, before slowly spreading around the world. Without these institutions, new technologies can be adopted only at much greater cost, meaning that over the centuries Europe slowly pulls ahead of the rest of the world technologically. The player is taught that what made Europe exceptional was the adoption of these institutions, which allowed technological growth to flourish and thereby gave European countries the advantage they used to dominate the world.

"Pong on a Commodore 64 is one thing... but Pong in a single C64 sprite? That's uncharted territory," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81.

Neowin reports: The Commodore 64 is an iconic machine. For many of us boomers, it was our introduction to programming... Josip Retro Bits is a YouTube channel that specializes in fun challenges on old hardware like the Commodore 64. In an older video, Josip creates a game of Pong using Basic. On the surface, this doesn't sound very interesting, but it's a real challenge because Basic is very limited when compared to writing machine code. Basically, the C64 is perfectly capable of a game like Pong, but not really in Basic. Spoiler alert: he does it. However, a commenter on that video had a novel idea. How about creating an entire game of Pong in a single spite?
That's a 24 x 21 pixels object. ("It can be seen as a bigger programmable character that can be moved on hardware on steps of one pixel," explains one tech blog.) And another spoiler alert: he does it again.

Here's the repository for the "Tiny Pong" code. It's written in C, with functions like drawScreen() and batSound().

And about 18 minutes into the video, he not only plays a game of Pong inside the sprite — he simultaneously makes that sprite move around the screen like the ball in a game of Pong.

bbsguru writes: Sony/PlayStation has been taking a lot of heat for making the new Gran Turismo 7 more dependent on microtransactions. Gamers say the well-reviewed game had taken advantage of those reviews by waiting until after it was released to jack up the cost of playing the game. Acceptance wasn't improved by the more-than-a-day outage that accompanied the changes. [To make matters worse, Gran Turismo 7 owners weren't even able to play single player because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game went down.] After several tentative responses, Sony is [finally] paying out, "gifting players with a million in-game credits and outlining the near-term updates for Gran Turismo 7 that will address the problems," writes Eurogamer's Martin Robinson. "We want to thank you for your continued patience and valuable feedback as we grow and evolve GT7 to make it as enjoyable and rewarding for as many players as possible," wrote series creator Kazunori Yamauchi in a blog post. "We always want to keep communication lines open with our community so that we can work together to build the best racing experience possible."

Sony is preparing to introduce a new video game subscription service for the PlayStation as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the plans. From the report: The service, which has been in development under the codename Spartacus, is Sony's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, a sort of Netflix for video games that has amassed more than 25 million subscribers. Sony's will debut with a splashy lineup of hit games from recent years, said the people, who requested anonymity because the plans are private. Sony's new service will combine two of its current offerings, PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus. Customers will be able to choose from multiple tiers offering catalogs of modern games and classics from older PlayStation eras.

According to Techdirt's Timothy Geigner, Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation was recently rendered unplayable because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game crumbled during a maintenance window. From the report: "The scheduled server maintenance, timed around the release of the version 1.07 patch for the game, was initially planned to last just two hours starting at 6 am GMT (2 am Eastern) on Thursday morning," reports Ars Technica. "Six hours later, though, the official Gran Turismo Twitter account announced that 'due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period. We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.'"

"Inconvenience" in this case means not being able to play the game the customer purchased. Like, basically at all. Why the single player content in a console game of all things should require an online check-in is completely beyond me. Console piracy is a thing, but certainly not much of a thing. There is zero chance that this DRM is worth the headache Sony now has on its hands. A headache that lasted for more than a full calendar day, by the way. And a headache that Sony's competitors picked up on to use in messaging to the public on social media.

Variety takes a long look at Halo, the new nine-episode TV show on Paramount+ adapting "Microsoft's crown jewel Xbox franchise": When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six years of development by Amblin Television in the 2010s, and a pandemic-split production in Hungary for the nine-episode first season that lasted nearly two years....

On June 6, 2005, in a stunt that instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, Microsoft sent a small platoon of actors dressed in full Master Chief armor to the major film studios (other than Sony Pictures, naturally). They were armed with a "Halo" screenplay written by Alex Garland and take-it-or-leave-it deal terms heavily weighted in the company's favor. The result was a movie co-financed by Universal and 20th Century Fox and produced by Peter Jackson, who hired up-and-coming director Neill Blomkamp to make his feature debut with the film. According to Jamie Russell's book "Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood," Microsoft was an uneasy and at times overbearing creative partner, and the project ultimately fell apart in October 2006. (Blomkamp and Jackson instead made 2009's "District 9," which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture.)

By 2011, Microsoft had parted ways with Halo's original developer, Bungie, and created an in-house studio, 343 Industries, to keep the franchise alive. As part of that effort, veteran Microsoft executive Kiki Wolfkill began exploring anew how to expand the game into a live-action adaptation — or, in Wolfkill's words, "linear entertainment...." Don Mattrick, then the head of Microsoft's Xbox unit, called his friend Steven Spielberg, himself a passionate gamer and a Halo fan. Soon after, 343's executives found themselves pitching Amblin Television presidents Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. "They asked for permission to get in before we came into the room, and they covered a large conference table with the canon of Halo," says Falvey. That canon — a vast science fiction saga that spans hundreds of millennia and involves ancient aliens who created colossal, ring-shaped structures called the Halo Array — comes as much from dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias as from the games themselves. "It was aisles deep," Falvey recalls. "It was incredible."

Everyone who spoke with Variety, actually, cited Halo's expansive mythology as the factor that differentiated the series from other video game fare and made it so attractive as source material for event-size television.... [W]hen Kyle Killen ("Lone Star") came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void. "We're going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity," says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. "In so doing, he's invited the audience to discover that guy's humanity too."

Eventually, Levine says, "we got the script to the place where we said, 'You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines...?'"

Kane estimates he wrote upwards of 265 drafts of the first nine episodes, balancing everything from the needs of the expansive production to story notes from 343 and Spielberg to the desire to fold in as much from the Halo mythology as possible.
The article calls the show the strong argument yet from Paramount+ "that it belongs at the big kids table with Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max."

The article notes Paramount+ already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). And Variety also reported earlier that South Park will stream exclusively on Paramount+ starting in 2025, joining the streaming service's 14 exclusive South Park "specials" (hour-long episodes like 2021's "South Park: Post COVID").

Microsoft has released a beta version of Microsoft Edge for Valve's Steam Deck that includes full support for Xbox Cloud Gaming. The Verge reports: "We worked closely with Valve and the Xbox Cloud Gaming team to bring support for Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate through Microsoft Edge Beta for the Steam Deck," says Missy Quarry, a community manager for Microsoft Edge. "We're particularly excited about this ourselves as we feel it can open new opportunities in the Linux gaming community."

While a number of Xbox Game Studios titles are able to run natively on the Steam Deck, Xbox Game Pass isn't available on Steam, so subscribers will have to stream titles from Microsoft's service instead. The Linux version of Microsoft Edge now includes support for the Steam Deck controls and is available from the Discover Software Center part of SteamOS. Microsoft also has detailed instructions for creating a link to Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck to make it easier to access in the future.

The New York Times, which acquired Wordle in January, is putting an end to unofficial takes of the game. The latest casualty is Wordle Archive, a website that let users play through hundreds of previous daily five-letter Wordle puzzles. According to Ars Technica, the site "has been taken down at the request of Wordle owner The New York Times." From the report: The archival site, which offered a backward-looking play feature that's not available in the NYT's official version of Wordle, had been up since early January. But it was taken down last week and replaced with a message saying, "Sadly, the New York Times has requested that the Wordle Archive be taken down." A Twitter search shows dozens of daily Wordle Archive players who were willing to share their results on social media up through March 7. "The usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them," a New York Times representative said in response to an Ars Technica comment request. "We don't plan to comment beyond that."

The Wordle Archive is still fully playable in its own archived form (as of March 5) at the Internet Archive, appropriately enough. Other sites that allow you to play archived Wordle puzzles are not hard to find, as are sites that let you play unlimited Wordle puzzles beyond the usual one-a-day limit. But some of those sites may be under threat, if the Times' treatment of Wordle Archive is any indication.

Rockstar's anarchic masterpiece has been freshened up for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X nine years after it was originally released. From a report: And so the boys are back in town. Michael, Trevor and Franklin, the sociopathic trio that lit up the gaming scene nine years ago, have been made over for the 2020s with this crisp new reworking of Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The game's violent narrative of shifting loyalties and doomed machismo felt wild and edgy back in 2013, so how does it fare in the modern era? The good news is, the overhauled visuals definitely give the game new zest and freshness. You can play in either 4K at 30 frames-per-second or in a performance mode that lowers the resolution but bumps up the frame rate to 60, giving wonderful fluidity to car chases, swooping helicopter rides and mass shootouts. The DualSense controller features on PlayStation 5 are very good too: improved driving feedback via the analogue triggers makes the game's cumbersome handling a little easier to, well, handle. It's been quite a joy to rediscover this alternate-reality California; to see the sun drop behind the downtown skyscrapers, or to hit Senora as dawn splashes orange-yellow light across the burning desert.

What the vast upshift in resolution can't hide is the fact that GTA V is a game originally designed for consoles that are now two generations out of date. The character models and facial details look positively archaic compared with, say, Horizon Forbidden West, and the building architecture too seems almost quaint in its stylised blockiness. Compare it with 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2 and you can see just how far Rockstar has come in its building of intricate next-gen worlds. In many ways, however, the design of the world itself has not been been bettered in the decade since it arrived. The size of San Andreas, the sheer variety of landscapes and the diversity of actions and activities is still incredible -- Cyberpunk 2077 may look better, but it doesn't let you play golf or tennis, or go on day trips on a bike, or set up incredibly complex car or helicopter stunts. Los Santos is a vast playground, a gangster Fortnite -- a factor underlined by the massive community that still gathers in GTA Online (which is where we find this new version's only totally new content -- Hao's Special Works, which lets you unlock faster cars and new tasks).

At the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit where its Stadia B2B cloud gaming platform was unveiled, Google announced the long-awaited availability of Steam on Chromebooks. 9to5Google reports: Google specifically said that the "Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks for users to try." That said, no other details appear to be live this morning, but we did reveal the device list last month. As we noted at the time: "At a minimum, your Chromebook needs to have an (11th gen) Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and a minimum of 7 GB of RAM. This eliminates almost all Chromebooks but those in the upper-mid range and high end."

Google today said "you can check that out on the Chromebook community forum." The post in question is now live, but without any actual availability timeline beyond "coming soon." However, we did learn that the "early, alpha-quality version of Steam" will first come to the Chrome OS Dev channel for a "small set" of devices.

Meanwhile, Google also said Chrome OS is getting a new "games overlay" on "select" Android titles to make them "playable with user-driven keyboard and mouse configurations on Chromebooks without developer changes." It will launch later this year in a public beta. Further reading: The part of the keynote where this announcement was made can be viewed here.

Google's Domain Name Registrar is Out of Beta After Seven Years

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Google had plenty of news about Stadia, the consumer-facing aspect of its cloud gaming products, at its Google for Games Developer Summit. On the flip side of that is the white-label platform Google's been working on: a way for other companies to license the game streaming tech that powers Stadia. Previously, that B2B offering was believed to be known as Google Stream. Google has now confirmed more details about the offering, including its name.

It's now called Immersive Stream for Games (which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue as smoothly as Google Stream). The Stadia team built it with the help of the folks at Google Cloud. The company says the service will allow companies to run their own game trials, let users play full games, offer subscription bundles or have full storefronts. In other words, publishers might be able to run their own versions of Stadia with their own libraries of games, branding and custom user interface.

We've seen a version of Immersive Stream for Games in action. Last year, Google teamed up with AT&T to offer people a way to play Batman: Arkham Knight for free via the cloud. Thousands of folks took advantage of the offer. AT&T plans to offer its customers access to another game soon with the help of Immersive Stream for Games. While that version of Batman: Arkham Knight was only available on desktop and laptop web browsers, the next game will run on mobile devices too. If all goes well, it could be a decent way for AT&T to show off what its 5G network can do. Immersive Stream for Games will include other features Google revealed for Stadia today, including a way to offer free trials of full games and a project aimed at making it easier to port games so they run on Stadia tech, as well as analytics. Developers and publishers can send Google an inquiry for more details.

Microsoft has finally released its DirectStorage API to game developers. This means one of the most promising features of the Xbox Series X is coming to the PC. From a report: DirectStorage promises to bring faster loading times thanks to optimized NVMe SSD accesses. Previously, a game could only perform one in/out access at a time. This didn't present any issues in the days of hard drives, but now that most gaming PC's have SSDs that can transfer gigabytes per second with hundreds of thousands of in out operations per second (IOPS) it's clear that a better method was needed. Enter DirectStorage. DirectStorage lets an NVMe SSD to reach its full performance potential by allowing multiple I/O operations concurrently. It allows assets to be transferred directly to the GPU, leading to better efficiency.

On the VRChat platform, there's a fake law-enforcement agency called The Loli Police Department, reports Input magazine.

Though it began as a joke, after four years its Discord channel now has 11,000 members, and "The tightly run community allows members to experience a fantasy version of police life and prides itself on being a source of chaotic good in the strange world of virtual reality." Members move through the ranks — from cadet on up — based on their activity level, which is tracked via the group's Discord. Everything is carefully orchestrated to mimic IRL police.... Karet, a 29-year-old game developer and LPD captain from Texas, says that the hard work of volunteers allows users to roleplay police activities in a realistic environment. "We have some of our own worlds — like the hospital for our medical division, where we can pretend someone is getting treatment, or the jail where we put criminals," says Karet, who designed the LPD station and jail.

One of Karet's favorite things to do is mess with users at random. "Lots of people in VRChat like to sit in front of mirrors," he says. "I will go up to the mirror and do a 'mirror inspection.' Then I say it's an illegal mirror and start looking for someone to blame and arrest. They just don't know how to handle that," he laughs. There are other ways to get people into trouble, too. "I can pull out a bag of weed and make it look like it came out of someone's pocket," Karet says. "They always say it's not theirs."

Being a VRChat police officer comes with its share of challenges. Members are aware that their form of roleplay — which frames spot checks and fake drug busts as harmless fun — doesn't sit well with some members of the community....

Despite the power dynamics at play, LPD members are not moderators of the VR world and ultimately can't make much in the way of real change. "One of our new officers came to me upset because they stepped in when they saw harassment, but then they got the brunt of the attack from the harasser," says Karet. "I commended him, but it's not what we do. We're just trying to have fun. So usually when we encounter something like that, we just leave the world." Thankfully, Karet says, the LPD can help their community somewhat. "We encourage LPD officers to help out new users. It's easy to spot them, so we often go and give them a hand, show them how things work," he says. The LPD used to run events for this purpose, but they were recently brought to a halt. "The events are on hiatus because it became a bit cult-y. Everyone was trying to recruit people into the LPD."

Gaming giant Ubisoft has confirmed a cybersecurity incident that led to the mass-reset of company passwords, but has declined to say what the incident actually was. From a report: In a brief statement, Ubisoft said: "Last week, Ubisoft experienced a cyber security incident that caused temporary disruption to some of our games, systems, and services. Our IT teams are working with leading external experts to investigate the issue. As a precautionary measure we initiated a company-wide password reset. Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident," the statement said. The France-headquartered video game company is best known for its Assassin's Creed and Far Cry brands. According to the company's latest earnings report from October, Ubisoft had 117 million active players.

A new profile of Jack Thompson, the notorious anti-violent video game crusader of the mid-2000s. The Verge: When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don't remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on. [...] Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse.

"Americans are famous for moving on," he told me. "We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn't do that. I'm 70. I'm still here. I haven't died yet." [...] Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson's warnings come home to roost, and the real villains -- Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson -- will be unmasked for all to see. It's hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking. "It's going to work, and that's going to get people's attention," said Thompson. "People are going to freak out. They're going to say, 'Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?' ... [they'll want to] do something about the games and their distribution."

Does the Nintendo's larger and more vivid Switch suffer from the image-burn in that has crippled several devices with such display? An unusual and unexpected comprehensive test hasoffered some answers. InputMag: After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image -- one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild -- Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in. As reported by ArsTecnica, the damage is minor -- on a white screen, like the Switch's main menu, there was a faint "blue ghosting," that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, "It's still a little subtle. It's not anything that I would do an RMA request for." The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects -- white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn't have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.

Google appears to have built its own solution for running Windows games on Stadia. Google is planning to detail its Windows "emulator" for Linux next week at the company's Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15th. From a report: Reddit users have spotted a session at the summit that will detail "how to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch." The session will be led by Marcin Undak, on Google's Stadia porting platform team, and promises a "detailed overview of the technology behind Google's solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia." It appears that Google has built its own Windows emulator for Linux to help developers port games to the service without having to modify titles for Linux. If the emulator runs live on Stadia instead of just testing environments, this could open the door to a lot more games making their way to Stadia in the future

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: People are review-bombing a hospital in India with one-star reviews after a doctor tweeted a video of himself during a procedure with an unconscious patient. The anesthesiologist, who goes by Dr. Shreeveera on Twitter and his YouTube channel, filmed himself supposedly in an active operating room where he had just anesthetized a patient and was preparing for an invasive procedure to remove a gallbladder. He claimed to be defending himself against people claiming he's not a real doctor, because they disagree with his passion for the "console wars." "Console wars" is shorthand for the decades-long argument between gamers about which platform -- Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo devices, PC gaming, and so on -- is the best.

Shreeveera posted the video to Twitter, writing, "Here I am after inducing anaesthesia, intubating & putting a patient on controlled mechanical ventilation for a Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy case in OR. Slandering my identity, profession coz you Xbots can't Argue FACTS!" according to gaming news outlet Dextero. He added, "SAVING LIVES- My Job. CONSOLE WARS- My Hobby." He was allegedly trying to defend himself from accusations that he wasn't a real doctor. Dextero, which viewed the video before Shreeveera locked his Twitter account, says that he pans around an operating room holding up the phone to record himself, showing the patient on the operating table.

Shreeveera posted an unlisted apology video on YouTube on Monday, saying that he's received a lot of backlash and racist harassment because of his video. He says he regrets posting the video and acknowledges that his obsession with console wars is childish, but also tries defending himself and his hobby. "I'm a human being guys, I make mistakes, please let's move on ahead," he said. "I do not hate anyone on a personal level. If I do not like the console they're playing, I just make points regarding what that console is giving you... this is just a hobby of mine." Judging from his YouTube channel, Shreeveera is clearly a PlayStation fan and an Xbox hater.

According to Deadline, Prime Video is turning PlayStation's mythology-themed game franchise God of War into a live-action TV series. From the report: I hear the series adaptation comes from The Expanse creators/executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and The Wheel of Time executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins as well as Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions, which collaborate on all TV series based on PlayStation games. This would mark the latest big deal for a TV series based on a popular video game title in a red-hot streaming marketplace for gaming IP. Peacock just landed another SPT/PlayStation property, Twisted Metal, with a series order and Anthony Mackie starring. HBO has coming up the high-profile PlayStation game-based series The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Netflix has a Resident Evil TV series in the works, while Paramount+ is about to debut Halo.
[...]
The God of War franchise from Sony's Santa Monica Studio spans a total of seven games across four PlayStation consoles. The action game series launched in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, with the first God of War. At the center is ex-Spartan warrior Kratos and his perilous journey to exact revenge on the Ares, the Greek God of War, after killing his loved ones under the deity's influence. After becoming the ruthless God of War himself, Kratos finds himself constantly looking for a chance to change his fate. Following several titles on various PlayStation consoles including the PS3 and the handheld PSP, Santa Monica Studio brought new life to the franchise with the 2018 game on the PlayStation 4. In it, Kratos comes to the Norse wilds where he gets a second chance at fatherhood with his son Atreus. The installment a slew of honors at the 2018 Game Awards, including Game of the Year. An eighth God of War installment, God of War: Ragnorok, is in the works for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and is set to drop this year.