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In a turn of events few saw coming, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the organizer of the once-iconic annual gaming conference E3 officially declared dead in late 2023 is making a return with a new event dubbed the Interactive Innovation Conference, or iicon for short.With E3 now just a memory of a bygone era in gaming history, and Geoff Keighleys Summer Game Fest and The Game Awards taking its place as the key industry events, the ESA has made it clear that they have no plans to resurrect E3, and instead, iicon will cater to a different, and for many, far less exciting audience.According to the companys official statement, instead of gamers and game creators, iicons target audience and attendees will be comprised of changemakers, visionaries, thought leaders, and innovators in the interactive entertainment industry which includes not only games but also film, television, music, sports, healthcare, education, and finance who will gain access to visionary keynotes and engaging discussions and workshops. Translating from corporate speak to plain English, the new conference, accessible by invitation only, is envisioned as a networking event for execs and CEOs from major companies, and as such, will most likely be out of sync with the reality as you and I are experiencing it and should not be seen as a spiritual successor to the ESAs beloved event.For decades, video games have been at the forefront of technological and cultural innovation, said CEO of the ESA, Stanley Pierre-Louis. With iicon, we are creating a space for visionaries across industries to come together, connect and reimagine whats possible through interactive entertainment.The statement goes on to say that attendees will have the opportunity to learn from and engage with industry icons, including leaders from companies like Amazon Games, Disney, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Square Enix, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. Games.However, its important to note that this slick wording doesnt mean all of those studios will be present at iicon. While executives from Amazon Games, Take-Two, Xbox, Ubisoft, and Square Enix have spoken favorably about the conference, its still too early to say for sure if they will actually attend, especially considering that two years ago, studios like Nintendo,Sony, Xbox,Ubisoft,SEGA, Tencent, and many others announced one by one that they would skip the planned E3 2023 event, which, if not caused its abrupt demise, most certainly accelerated it.The Entertainment Software Association and its member companies are among the innovators and leaders shaping the future of culture, business, and human connection. Its a natural role for ESA to host and support an event that fosters an open exchange of new ideas with our peer industry leaders, notes Doug Bowser, Chairman of the Board at the ESA. iicon is bringing together changemakers from across industries to envision how the strengths of the interactive entertainment industry can break entirely new ground.The first iicon event is set to take place on April 27-30, 2026 at the Fontainebleau Resort in Las Vegas. You can learn more by clicking this link.Dont forget to join our80 Level Talent platformand ournew Discord server, follow us onInstagram,Twitter,LinkedIn,Telegram,TikTok, andThreads,where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.Source link The post E3 Organizers Unveil Their New Conference That Will be Nothing Like E3 appeared first on CG SHARES.

Walmart has a fantastic deal on an entry-level Asus gaming monitor right now. While supplies last--and it has already sold out once--this Asus Tuf 23.8-inch gaming monitor is only $79. This particular model normally goes for $149, so you're getting quite the deal. Asus TUF 23.8" 1080p Gaming Monitor $79 (was $149) Specifications:23.8-inch IPS display1920 x 1080 resolution165Hz refresh rate1ms response timeAMD FreeSyncAsus Extreme Low Motion BlurBuilt-in speakersPorts: HDMI (x2), DisplayPortIf you're in the market for a gaming monitor with 1080p resolution, this 23.8-inch Asus TUF monitor has solid features for the price, especially since it's nearly 50% off at the moment.It has an IPS panel, supports refresh rates of up to 165Hz, and offers response times of 1ms thanks to Asus' motion blur technology. Other notable features include built-in speakers and three connectivity ports: two HDMI and one DisplayPort.It'd be a challenge to find a more capable monitor for less than $79 right now. See at Walmart Walmart has nice deals on a few other Asus gaming monitors right now, too. If you'd prefer a curved monitor, you can buy a 24-inch curved Asus monitor with similar specs for $100 (was $169).Continue Reading at GameSpot

A member of the Ukrainian Special Forces UAV (uncrewed aerial vehicles) unit, Typhoon, says that gamers might be better-equipped to pilot drones in real-life conflict than youd first think. The similarities between the likes of Call of Duty and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine are admittedly slim, but where one has the ability to instantly retry failed attempts, the other has serious and deadly consequences.Drones are being used by Russian and Ukrainian forces, humming ominously across the skies. On the face of it, piloting an uncrewed system like a drone might seem to bear a lot of resemblance to video games with their headsets and joystick-like control systems, but it gets far more complicated when youre forced to take into account potential sabotage such as signal-jamming or attacks on your drone. Typhoon operators also need to consider the terrain and the real-time battlefield situation, as well as communicate and coordinate with command.Speaking to Business Insider, members of Typhoon have said that, despite the massively heightened stakes in conflict, gamers sometimes possess more transferable skills than you might assume. People might think flying a military drone is like playing Call of Duty, until they realize theres no restart option, an operator says. In Call of Duty, players can equip the Breacher Drone, which is a pocket-sized drone that flies in a straight line until it either collides with something or detects an enemy and explodes.Continue Reading at GameSpot

One Piece is a world slowly sinking into the sea, its past buried in a void and its future gearing up for destruction. Fans have been speculating about the nature of this world for almost twenty years now, and in chapter 1113, Dr. Vegapunk finally stepped forward to reveal the truthat least, some degree of it.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the acclaimed Kingdom Come Deliverance. The game sees players once again take the role of Henry, who has found himself downtrodden and desperate in a new area. The game is a continuation of the first, offering more of the same charm and detail that made the first title so popular.

Last week, we asked you to climb to new heights in the game of your choice using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this weeks highlights:m1rko_vp shares Jin scaling the side of a building in Ghost of Tsushima.Misfunkshun shares Eivor climbing up a cliffside in Assassins Creed Valhalla.call_me_xavii strikes Astro Bot climbing up a ladder made of fellow bots.fsantos1697 shares Chloe climbing up a rope within a cavexenobitz shares wrestlers scaling a cage in WWE 2K24.Hedronik shares Alan climbing up a ladder during the Herald of Darkness sequence in Alan Wake 2.Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this weeks theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week?THEME: RomanceSUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on February 12, 2025Next week, were feeling the love. Share moments that spark romance in the game of your choice using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

Ive been saying for a long time that video game titles are stupid. What does Horizon: Zero Dawn even mean? Arent Dead Space and Killzone the same titles in a different font? Games need to be more honest with their names, like A Game About Digging A Hole.Theres nothing to hide with this one: You have a shovel and yearn for a really big hole. Its a small hole at first, but it gets bigger with time. The deeper you go, the more secrets you find, and by secrets I just mean different rocks. There are a lot of rocks and they fill your backpack up pretty quickly, pulling you away from the hole every few minutes to sell them on the computer. I dont know who is buying them and A Game About Digging A Hole, as weve established, isnt about that, so I wont be asking questions.Every dollar I earned went towards the hole. You can buy a better electric shovel, a bigger battery for the shovel, a larger backpack, and a jetpack for leaving the hole, of course. Like a clicker game, every upgrade just makes you more efficient at digging a hole. And youll need those upgrades because digging a really big hole is a lot of work. Once youre 50 meters deep into the earth, its a challenge dropping back down to where you left off without hurting yourself. Thankfully, health care is extremely cheap in the fantasy world of A Game About Digging A Hole and only costs you the price of a few rocks.If theres anything A Game About Digging A Hole is missing, its a good satisfying sound effect for carving away dirt. I want to hear that Minecraft crunch every time I click. Whats there doesnt hit the same way, and the drill you get later on just sounds like a vacuum. These are minor issues, however, and the game makes up for them by forcing you out of the hole so frequently that you get the satisfaction of seeing your hole grow. Sometimes I would just stand at the top and look at it, admiring every little detour I made to place a lamp or to uncover treasure. The hole tells a story.After a few hours, you become a hole god. Dirt is your medium and the hole is your masterpiece. Youre rich on rocks, youre fully kitted out, and you have nothing to lose. A Game About Digging A Hole only has one secret, and its what you find at the bottom. Youll know it when you see it; the ground will give way to a tunnel and in that tunnel youll face a challenge the hole never prepared you for. The trial that awaits isnt easy, but neither was digging the hole, when you think about it. You started with a single scoop and built a hole empire. Nothing can stop you.A Game About Digging A Holewas released Feb. 7 on Steam. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Cyberwave Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can findadditional information about Polygons ethics policy here.

If youre struggling to find the perfect gift for the Player Two in your life or just want to get yourself something nice for Valentines Day, SteelSeries is currently offering a 50% discount on its entire catalog of gaming accessories when you purchase a second item of equal or greater value. Just add two items to your cart and use the code VALENTINE50 to knock 50% off the price of the less expensive item.This promotion applies to everything in the SteelSeries store, including headsets, speaker systems, wireless keyboards, and more. Even items that are already on sale, like the Arctis Nova Pro wireless headset, are eligible. Theres no limit to how much you can potentially save with this promotion, but the 50% discount can only be applied to a single item. If youre having trouble making up your mind, weve picked eight of our favorite items that you may want to check out, including the Apex Pro TKL wireless Hall-effect keyboard, and my personal favorite pair of gaming earbuds, the SteelSeries Arctis GameBuds.

When Ethan Marcotte conceived RWD, web technologies were far less mature than today. As web developers, we started to grasp how to do things with floats after years of stuffing everything inside table cells. There werent many possible ways to achieve a responsive site. There were two of them: fluid grids (based on percentages) and media queries, which were a hot new thing back then.What was lacking was a real layout system that would allow us to lay things out on a page instead of improvising with floating content. We had to wait several years for Flexbox to appear. And CSS Grid followed that.Undoubtedly, new layout systems native to the browser were groundbreaking 10 years ago. They were revolutionary enough to usher in a new era. In her talk Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed at the An Event Apart conference in 2019, Jen Simmons proposed a name for it: Intrinsic Web Design (IWD). Lets disarm that fancy word first. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, intrinsic means belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing. In other words, IWD is a natural way of doing design for the web. And that boils down to using CSS layout systems for laying out things. Thats it.It does not sound that groundbreaking on its own. But it opens a lot of possibilities that werent earlier available with float-based layouts or table ones. We got the best things from both worlds: two-dimensional layouts (like tables with their rows and columns) with wrapping abilities (like floating content when there is not enough space for it). And there are even more goodies, like mixing fixed-sized content with fluid-sized content or intentionally overlapping elements:Native layout systems are here to make the browser work for you dont hesitate to use that to your advantage.Start With Semantic HTMLHTML is the backbone of the web. Its the language that structures and formats the content for the user. And it comes with a huge bonus: it loads and displays to the user, even if CSS and JavsScript fail to load for whatever reason. In other words, the website should still make sense to the user even if the CSS that provides the layout and the JavsScript that provides the interactivity are no-shows. A website is a text document, not so different from the one you can create in a text processor, like Word or LibreWriter.Semantic HTML also provides important accessibility features, like headings that are often used by screen-reader users for navigating pages. This is why starting not just with any markup but semantic markup for meaningful structure is a crucial step to embracing native web features.Use Fluid Type With Fluid SpaceWe often need to adjust the font size of our content when the screen size changes. Smaller screens mean being able to display less content, and larger screens provide more affordance for additional content. This is why we ought to make content as fluid as possible, by which I mean the content should automatically adjust based on the screens size. A fluid typographic system optimizes the contents legibility when its being viewed in different contexts.Nowadays, we can achieve truly fluid type with one line of CSS, thanks to the clamp() function:font-size: clamp(1rem, calc(1rem + 2.5vw), 6rem);The maths involved in it goes quite above my head. Thankfully, there is a detailed article on fluid type by Adrian Bece here on Smashing Magazine and Utopia, a handy tool for doing the maths for us. But beware there be dragons! Or at least possible accessibility issues. By limiting the maximum font size, we could break the ability to zoom the text content, violating one of the WCAGs requirements (though there are ways to address that).Fortunately, fluid space is much easier to grasp: if gaps (margins) between elements are defined in font-dependent units (like rem or em), they will scale alongside the font size. Yet rest assured, there are also caveats.Always Bet On Progressive EnhancementYes, thats this over-20-year-old technique for creating web pages. And its still relevant today in 2025. Many interesting features have limited availability like cross-page view transitions. They wont work for every user, but enabling them is as simple as adding one line of CSS:@view-transition { navigation: auto; }It wont work in some browsers, but it also wont break anything. And if some browser catches up with the standard, the code is already there, and view transitions start to work in that browser on your website. Its sort of like opting into the feature when its ready.Thats progressive enhancement at its best: allowing you to make your stairs into an escalator whenever its possible.It applies to many more things in CSS (unsupported grid is just a flow layout, unsupported masonry layout is just a grid, and so on) and other web technologies.Trust The BrowserTrust it because it knows much more about how safe it is for users to surf the web. Besides, its a computer program, and computer programs are pretty good at calculating things. So instead of calculating all these breakpoints ourselves, take their helping hand and allow them to do it for you. Just give them some constraints. Make that <main> element no wider than 60 characters and no narrower than 20 characters and then relax, watching the browser make it 37 characters on some super rare viewport youve never encountered before. It Just Works.But trusting the browser also means trusting the open web. After all, these algorithms responsible for laying things out are all parts of the standards.Ditch The Physical CSSThats a bonus point from me. Layout systems introduced the concept of logical CSS. Flexbox does not have a notion of a left or right side it has a start and an end. And that way of thinking lurked into other areas of CSS, creating the whole CSS Logical Properties and Values module. After working more with layout systems, logical CSS seems much more intuitive than the old physical one. It also has at least one advantage over the old way of doing things: it works far better with internationalized content.And I know that sounds crazy, but it forces a change in thinking about websites. If you dont know the most basic information about your content (the font size), you cant really apply any concrete numbers to your layout. You can only think in ratios. If the font size equals , your heading could equal 2, the main column 60, some text input 10, and so on. This way, everything should work out with any font size and, by extension, scale up with any font size.Weve already been doing that with layout systems we allow them to work on ratios and figure out how big each part of the layout should be. And weve also been doing that with rem and em units for scaling things up depending on font size. The only thing left is to completely forget the 1rem = 16px equation and fully embrace the exciting shores of unknown dimensions.But that sort of mental shift comes with one not-so-straightforward consequence. Not setting the font size and working with the user-provided one instead fully moves the power from the web developer to the browser and, effectively, the user. And the browser can provide us with far more information about user preferences.Thanks to the modern CSS, we can respond to these things. For example, we can switch to dark mode if the user prefers one, we can limit motion if the user requests it, we can make clickable areas bigger if the device has a touch screen, and so on. By having this kind of dialogue with the browser, exchanging information (it gives us data on the user, and we give it hints on how to display our content), we empower the user in the result. The content would be displayed in the way they want. That makes our website far more inclusive and accessible.After all, the users know what they need best. If they set the default font size to 64 pixels, they would be grateful if we respected that value. We dont know why they did it (maybe they have some kind of vision impairment, or maybe they simply have a screen far away from them); we only know they did it and we respect that.And thats responsive design for me.