Month: December 2024

Amazon Studios has announced that director Charlotte Brändström has come aboard the Lord of the Rings TV show to be part of the creative team for the fantasy program. Brändström will direct two episodes of the show.

The other Season 1 directors include JA Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) and Wayne Che Yip (Doctor Who). It remains to be seen if there will be other directors for the first season, which is currently filming in New Zealand.

Brändström was nominated for an International Emmy Award for the TV movie Julie, chevalier de Maupin. In addition to that series, she directed episodes of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, as well as Netflix’s The Witcher and Jupiter’s Legacy.

The showrunners for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show are JD Payne and Patrick M…

Gaming Corps, a fast-growing provider of original video games and premium casino games based in Sweden, has officially launched Super Hot Stacks, a classic fruit-themed slot where players can refresh and relax their minds this fall.

Fruity-licious visual:

True to its name, the main theme of the slot is a lot of delicious fruits that look like they might explode with the sweetness hidden inside them, giving the game a fresh look. However, since the fruits are in the foreground of the screen, the rest of the screen is purple with square patterns. Additionally, the brown reels are divided by gold lines, and the frames also have a gold color.

To win, players must form a combination of minimum 3 matching symbols on a payline running from left to right, beginning from the fa…

In Australia and casino operator The Star Entertainment Group Limited has reportedly announced that its Acting Chief Executive Officer has stepped down after less than three months in the provisional role.

According to a report from Business News Australia, the move from Geoff Hogg (pictured) comes only days before the state-sanctioned inquiry into the Brisbane-headquartered firm’s suitability to hold a Queensland casino license is due to release its ultimate findings. The source detailed that this examination is now widely expected to arrive at the same damaging conclusions as the recent analogous exercise conducted by officials in New South Wales that the firm should be stripped of its local certification.

Ruinous ruling:

The Star Entertainment …

In the western American state of Nevada and aggregated gross gaming revenues for August reportedly surged by a little over 3.5% year-on-year to surpass the $1 billion threshold for an 18th consecutive month.

According to a Thursday report from the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper citing official data from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, gambling-friendly facilities in Clark County accounted for almost 85% of the 31-day month’s finishing $1.2 billion tally while those located along the world-famous Las Vegas Strip amassed a figure that was slightly over $659.7 million. This positive performance purportedly followed a July in which aggregated gross gaming revenues from the jurisdiction’s 435 licensed casinos fell by around 3.1% year-on-year to stand at approximately $1.3 bill…

Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling. AMD’s frame generation technology. On the same GPU at the same time. Really? It’s cats and dogs living together! Or just the first game to enable that combo, namely Ghost of Tsushima, originally a Playstation 4 title and released just yesterday on PC.

That Nvidia leans into AI isn’t exactly news. And it’s the reason why you can’t have Nvidia Frame Generation on anything but the latest RTX 40-series Nvidia GPUs. Because Nvidia’s take on frame gen uses fancy AI Tensor cores and Optical Flow accelerators. And only the Ada architecture of the RTX 40-series has that stuff in the right specs to run Frame Generation.

But not AMD. Its frame gen is technically simpler and can run on the shaders of any fairly modern GPU, including Nvidia graphics cards. Up unt…

A cheap little indie released this week combines two notoriously time-sucking genres into one monstrous whole. Widget Inc has the production-matching flow of a factory game but the gameplay of an incremental, letting you build up successive layers of industry in order to make ever more complex technology over 12 tiers of tech and associated upgrades. By cleverly expanding to take advantage of machine adjacency bonuses and terrain types you can get those production numbers ever-higher in order to unlock and research new tech at a good pace.

It has a demo that takes a couple hours to beat and gives you a good taste of how the game’s simple first few tiers of tech play as you begin to unlock optimizations for a growing industrial complex. It’s pretty neat stuff and so far hasn’t sh…

You can now vote for your favourite games in the 42nd Golden Joystick Awards in categories like PC Game of the Year and Console Game of the Year. The polls will remain open until Friday, November 1, at 4pm PDT/7pm EDT/11pm GMT, so you have a month to figure out where your loyalties lie.

“2023 was one of video gaming’s best years ever, with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Larian Studios claiming a record seven trophies at last year’s Golden Joystick Awards,” content director Daniel Dawkins says in a press release. “2024 has been a challenging year for the games industry in so many ways, but the variety and diversity of releases over the last 12 months has made this one of the most difficult—and exciting—Golden Joystick Awards nominees list we’ve ever…