Amazon delivery can be tough, unglamorous work. Workers must often reckon with complicated geography, demanding bosses, ever more biblical weather, and schedules that force time-conscious drivers to urinate in bottles. Surprising, then, that this is effectively the role in which one of the year's most anticipated video games casts the player. In Death Stranding 2, you arrange packages into swaying towers on your back, nudge the controller's left- and right-shoulder buttons to keep your weight balanced as you trip down rocky hills, and incur financial penalties for scuffing the merchandise if you take a tumble. The premise is a long trek from the super-soldier games, such as Call of Duty and Helldivers, that dominate the sales charts--even if you must occasionally battle the odd spectral marauder from a parallel dimension to clear the way to the next address on your delivery sheet.

Depending on who you speak to, Hideo Kojima is either a visionary prophet or a self-indulgent, wannabe movie-maker. But there's no doubting he's one of the most influential video game designers of all time – and he's got a new one out this week. Sequel Death Stranding 2, out on PlayStation 5 from Thursday, picks up the story of protagonist Sam Porter Bridges, a delivery man who lugs precariously balanced cargo across a post-apocalyptic Earth. We've only got four paragraphs here, so won't attempt to recap the – ahem – complex plot (Kojima's storylines and love of long cinematic sequences are the biggest source of "self-indulgence" accusations), but early signs point to a deeper, more varied experience in the moment-to-moment gameplay. And although people criticise them, Kojima's previous scripts have anticipated real-world events such as the rise of online misinformation and the Covid-19 pandemic with eerie accuracy. So maybe you shouldn't skip the cutscenes, acted by an all-star cast including Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux and Elle Fanning.

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.

The production pipeline for mainstream video games has always been hectic. The AAA factory is powered by rigid marketing plans and periods of soul-sucking crunch, and while this process has resulted in incredible games over the years, it's also been detrimental to developers' mental health and long-term job stability. Layoffs have long been baked into the video game industry, but in recent months, this trend has been running in overdrive, and it's happening at studios of all sizes. Hideo Kojima is partnering with Sony to build a new game that's actually more like a movie. Of course, you could say this about any of Kojima's games since Snatcher, but this time around, he's doing the Hollywood thing on purpose.

The Game Awards are done and the video game marketing machine is winding down for the year, but this industry never fully stops. This week, we're taking a look at what The Game Awards could have done better (a few things, it turns out) and breaking down some of the biggest announcements from last week's show. We're gonna talk about The Game Awards a lot this week, but one of the biggest announcements from last Thursday's show was the existence of Light No Fire, a new title from No Man's Sky studio Hello Games. It's a planet-sized, multiplayer game about exploration and community-building, and it uses procedural generation to fill every valley and mountaintop with life. There's no release date for Light No Fire just yet, but Hello Games has been working on it for five years. Also at The Game Awards, we saw the reveal of a Blade game from Arkane Lyon, OD from Kojima Productions, Windblown from Dead Cells studio Motion Twin, and Exodus from Archetype Entertainment, a studio composed of BioWare, 343 and Naughty Dog veterans.

The Game Awards is over and done with, leaving an empty theater in Los Angeles and plenty of happy game developers placing pointy statuettes on their mantels. To that end, Larian Studios and its massively successful RPG Baldur's Gate 3 was the big winner of the night, taking home the prize for game of the year, player's choice, best multiplayer game and more. Remedy's Alan Wake 2 was also on fire, winning best game direction, best narrative and best art direction, among others. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom paraglided away with the statue for best action/adventure and the RPG Sea of Stars won for best indie game, with Cocoon being awarded best debut indie game. Now that the actual awards are out of the way, let's get to the good stuff.

For me, there are few games that encapsulate the turn of the millennium better than Metal Gear Solid. This month marks the 25th anniversary of its release on PlayStation in Japan, but it hit UK shelves a few months later in 1999, the same year as the first Matrix movie. While my school peers were mimicking Keanu and dodging invisible bullets, whispers reverberated around the playground of a PlayStation game that was somehow even cooler. You played a grizzled spy who snarled at you through the speakers. You took out helicopters, duelled with cyborg ninjas and spent a lot of time hiding under cardboard boxes.

Emergent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities promise to improve performance and explainability of large language models (LLMs). However, uncertainties remain about how reasoning strategies formulated for previous model generations generalize to new model generations and different datasets. In this small-scale study, we compare different reasoning strategies induced by zero-shot prompting across six recently released LLMs (davinci-002, davinci-003, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, Flan-T5-xxl and Cohere command-xlarge) on a mixture of six question-answering datasets, including datasets from scientific and medical domains. Our findings demonstrate that while some variations in effectiveness occur, gains from CoT reasoning strategies remain robust across different models and datasets. GPT-4 has the most benefit from current state-of-the-art reasoning strategies and exhibits the best performance by applying a prompt previously discovered through automated discovery.

A documentary about Hideo Kojima, one of the most lauded video game designers on the planet, is on the way. A trailer offers a first peek at what's in store for those who plan to check out Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds. Kojima wrote on Twitter that the film will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Death Stranding, as well as "shots from the early days of our independent studio, memories from my childhood and my creative journey." The trailer encapsulates all of that while suggesting the film is a celebration of Kojima and his work. Friends, collaborators and fans including Geoff Keighley, Guillermo del Toro, Norman Reedus and George Miller are shown talking up Kojima and his credentials.

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.