Thomas Mahler, director of No Rest for the Wicked and creator of Ori, has launched a new review site called VideoGamesCritic.
He wants give players more weight than professional critics, Two-thirds of the score comes from Steam users, while critics make up the remaining third.
Mahler says sites like Metacritic and OpenCritic mainly show what critics thought about a game, while his site focuses more on what the people actually playing it think.
“Press still counts, it just can’t outvote the people who bought the game.”
The site also gives reviewers and outlets a trust score based on how closely their opinions match player reactions.
It also takes newer Steam reviews more seriously, so a game that improves over time can see its score change.
Mahler calls VideoGamesCritic “the one source of truth for gamers.”
@CrossWorldsJPN Hey, would it be possible to add an unranked world versus mode? I’m a mid-to-high level player myself, but a lot of my friends don’t play as seriously. Having a mode without any ranking or score pressure would be great. Even if we lose together, I’d still have a lot of fun.
1/5
I'm a paying Grok user and since yesterday I haven't been able to access my account. At first I got “Authentication failure – User is blocked”; later it changed to a generic login error. I received no explanation or notice about why. @grok
Researchers proved every major LLM is secretly obsessed with Japan.
And they finally figured out why.
For years, we’ve been told that AI is entirely Western-centric, that it just reflects Silicon Valley and American values.
A landmark paper by Cardiff and Basque researchers tested 31,680 cultural prompts across 24 languages on frontier models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
The results shattered that assumption.
In six out of eight frontier models, Japan was the single most frequently referenced country when asked open-ended cultural questions.
Ask about traditional dances, festivals, or everyday practices in an open context, and the AI defaults to Japan.
Over and over again.
Here is the twist nobody expected.
This bias doesn't come from raw pre-training internet data.
The researchers tracked where the obsession forms. It emerges after pre-training, during the supervised fine-tuning and alignment phase when humans teach the AI how to behave.
Why Japan?
Because decades of global soft power, rich cultural export, and clean, universally admired digital archives make Japanese culture uniquely "safe" for AI safety filters to lean on.
When labs train models to be harmless and universally pleasing, the AI defaults to the cultural equivalent of comfort food.
It avoids controversy by talking about anime, sushi, and tradition.
Yesterday I joined the Sonic Racing CrossWorlds offline tournament and received an official VIP Member card. I honestly think this is the coolest thing the official has ever done.
Now I’m officially a licensed CrossWorlds racer!😎
Grok was handed the ball and fumbled it hard today.
Extremely disappointing.
On top of that, Supergrok users have reported some insane new limits quickly exhausting image or video gen.
I want Grok to win, but these two dumpster fires are self inflicted.
Three years ago, I promised an American reader that I would translate “Megami Tensei” into English myself. In order to fulfill that promise, I am publishing this translation.
However, since contractual matters were resolved this month, my partner and I are in discussions with an overseas publisher regarding the translation. My translation is not polished enough as English. But it is faithful to the original text. I hope it will help a translator I trust understand my Japanese. And I believe that translator will turn the sequels to “Megami Tensei”—"Warrior of the Demon City” and “The End of Reincarnation”—into wonderful English novels.
Therefore, I will remove this text by the end of July. In the meantime, I hope you will take the time to savor what “Digital Devil Story” is all about.
https://t.co/eUyW8JXzmV
Valkyrie Profile is a 1999 PlayStation RPG from tri-Ace, published by Enix. You gather the souls of fallen warriors and train them to fight at Odin's side, exploring mysterious dungeons and battling dozens of unique enemies with an innovative combo-driven combat system across 50+ hours and multiple endings.