Hideo Kojima – the acclaimed video game director who helmed the stealth-action Metal Gear series for decades before founding his own company to make Death Stranding, a supernatural post-apocalyptic delivery game this publication described as "2019's most interesting blockbuster" – is still starstruck, or perhaps awestruck. "George [Miller] is my sensei, my God," he proclaims gleefully. Kojima is visiting Australia for a sold-out chat with Miller, the creator of the Mad Max film franchise, at the Sydney film festival. The two struck up an unlikely but fierce friendship nearly a decade ago, and Kojima says that, as a teenager, the first two Mad Max films inspired him to become a movie director and thus, eventually, a video game maker. At the panel later, Miller is equally effusive, calling Kojima "almost my brother"; the Australian even lent his appearance to a major character in Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding 2. It's actually because of Miller that much of this latest game is set in a heavily fictionalised version of Australia, Kojima jokes.

Hideo Kojima said his documentary, Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds, will be distributed exclusively by Disney . The legendary game designer posted Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) that the film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this summer, will launch globally in the spring of 2024. Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds tracks the pioneering auteur during the development of Death Stranding while providing a rare glimpse into his creative process as he launched his studio, Kojima Productions. The film also includes "shots from the early days of our independent studio, memories from my childhood and my creative journey," as the designer said. The film strives to capture the artistic side of gaming, which Kojima embodies as well as anyone.

We may not have had quite as much unfettered reading time as we did in the lockdown days of the COVID pandemic, but Engadget's editors have still managed to pick out, peruse and ponder a broad variety of this year's most intriguing books. Whether we learned how to wield a wok, listened to life lessons from Hideo Kojima, or dove into the seedy underbelly of an alt-universe 1940's San Francisco, here are a few of our favorites from 2022. Classic noir cinema was a staple in my house growing up -- I mean, my first celebrity crush was on The Thin Man series co-star, Myrna Loy -- so any story from the days when mugs were mooks and gals were dames holds sway over my heart. But The Thin Man, like the rest of the media made at that time, only showed a very narrow, very male, very white view of life. Christopher Moore's latest novel, Razzmatazz, adds some much needed color to the otherwise black-and-white world of noir.

For many people, the list of their most hotly anticipated video games will include "whatever Hideo Kojima is working on." If you're one of those folks, you may be interested to learn that a video showing the Death Stranding auteur's next title seems to have leaked ahead of a formal reveal from his studio, Kojima Productions. The video, which has been removed from Streamable for violating the platform's terms of service, shows a character who looks like Mama from Death Stranding. That character was played by Maid and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actor Margaret Qualley. The character shown here navigates dark corridors with the help of a flashlight while an ominous figure follows them.

On 8 July 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was delivering a political campaign speech outside the Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara City, Japan, when a man approached and shot him in the back using a homemade firearm. Even before Abe died from his injuries, footage of the assassination had been posted online. Social media users began to speculate as to the identity and motive of the killer. On the internet forum 4chan, a site notorious for its anarchic, often hateful trolling, an anonymous user posted a photograph of the video game director Hideo Kojima, claiming this "left-wing extremist" was the perpetrator. If the post was intended to bait the gullible, it worked.

It has been 469 days since covid-19 cut us off from our colleagues. We've now logged more than 11,256 hours at home, but we've been far from idle. The past year-plus bathed the nation in stress and suffering, a number of us enduring it alone. And as we've self-isolated in our homes, separated by walls and miles from colleagues, friends and family, the distance strained the bonds that unite us and the calm that keeps us sane. As we observed and reported on a year embroiled by racial injustice, marred by an assault on Democracy and the deaths of 593,000 Americans from covid-19, it felt impossible to look away. Lest we be overwhelmed, it was also imperative that, from time to time, we did. For a number of us, video games provided a refuge, proxy worlds to inhabit while ours was unsuitable for life as we knew it. Instead of grabbing beers at a bar, friends paired up in multiplayer lobbies. They donned headsets and delivered life updates in disembodied voices, along with descriptions of which players looked a little "sus." Vacations were scrapped and replaced with byte-sized getaways to war-torn battlefields and post-apocalyptic hellscapes that somehow instilled serenity.

Independent video games were the big winners at this year's Bafta Games awards, which took place as a live-streamed event on Thursday evening after the planned ceremony was cancelled due to Covid-19. Sci-fi action puzzler Outer Wilds took the best game award, as well as game design and original property. Offbeat detective adventure Disco Elysium also won in three categories: debut game, narrative and music. Other winners included space station thriller Observation for British game, Apex Legends for multiplayer and Untitled Goose Game in the family category. Metal Gear Solid game designer Hideo Kojima was awarded the Bafta fellowship, with his latest title, Death Stranding, also taking the award for technical achievement.

In our early 20s, we could spend whole days immersed in epic role-playing video games, sacrificing months to the demands of the latest Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest adventure. But, in our 30s and 40s, we're lucky to catch 10 minutes of Fortnite here and there. However, now that many of us are finding we have time on our hands, it could be the opportunity we need to attempt some of the more chronologically demanding narrative video game masterpieces of the last decade. Here are 15 that should see you through the next six months – and beyond. Ubisoft's tale of vengeance-seeking mercenaries battling through the chaos of the Peloponnesian war gives us a vast reproduction of ancient Greece, almost Homeric in its depth and detail.

In the world of cinema, we're led to believe that a given film lives or dies by the creative decisions of a single, all-powerful hand: the director. In the world of video games, things are (usually) different. Instead, game players and critics tend to celebrate (or condemn) the work of studios and development teams. This focus on a collective group of individuals as opposed to a monolithic auteur feels more honest. After all, video games are made by hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of hardworking creatives.

Imagine a world where babies are stored in life-support jars, humans are stalked by oily ghosts, and the American president is played by Lindsay Wagner, the helter-skelter-haired star of 1970s cult TV show The Bionic Woman. This is the dystopian milieu of Death Stranding, which will hit shops soon, just in time for the hectic Christmas period. In this epic video game, by far the most controversial of 2019, players must traverse a future America to reconnect its "chiral network" (a posh internet), while dodging mysterious BTs (beached things). For reasons unknown, the living and dead coexist, with the protagonist able to connect to the "other side" via a "jar baby" in an artificial womb. One recent demo focused on such gimmicks as urinating to create mushrooms.