Signal · dispatches
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Reporting on the systems, tools and people quietly deciding what the next decade runs on.
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Indie Week: Closer Look at Pixel Piracy
Twelve years after a rough Early Access exit, Quadro Delta’s crew-management pirate sim is being kept alive by an unofficial patch, and its worst…
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Radio Talk Show Host Finds His Mojo Downtown
After eleven years in a windowless suburban studio, a late-night host moved his show into a downtown storefront where anyone can watch him work.…
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The Stomping Land: Prehistoric Survival With Dinosaurs
Tribal camps, bone currency and a tyrannosaur that hunts players on purpose. The dinosaur survival game asks a question the genre usually avoids: what…
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Setting Up a Team Brawler is More Complicated Than Many Realize
Four players, melee weapons and forty milliseconds of disagreement. Designers at three studios explain why the crowd-brawler genre keeps breaking in the same place:…
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Behind the Tourist Spots in Brussels
The Grand-Place takes nine minutes to photograph. What the coach tours skip, a Congolese high street, a working lambic brewery, a flea market that…
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The Model Under the Desk
Two monitors, a second-hand accelerator and no inference bill. Small studios are quietly moving the work back onto their own hardware, and the arithmetic…
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‘Alien Isolation’ is the Best Game in the Franchise Since ‘Alien vs. Predator’
Creative Assembly built one alien, gave it a memory, and let it wander. Two decades of licensed shooters had been asking the wrong question…
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Hotline Miami is Action Packed Son of a Game
Two hits and a locked door. Dennaton’s top-down massacre works because it never lets you feel skilled for longer than eleven seconds, and the…
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Agencies Around the World Are Planning Their Next Lunar Trips
Nine landers, five agencies and one patch of cratered ground the size of a county. The hardest part of the new lunar decade is…
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The Solar Flare of 1859, and What It Would Mean Today
In 1859 a geomagnetic storm set telegraph paper alight and let operators send messages with the batteries disconnected. The modern equivalent would be a…
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