The biggest story of the year so far in games has been Palworld, the "Pokémon-with-guns" early access game that broke and rebroke concurrent player records on PC. It's showing a few signs of being unsustainable, as those player numbers have dropped off in recent weeks and the developers reveal the eye-watering cost of keeping servers online for so many people (almost 6m a year), but it's still in with a shot of being 2024's biggest game in terms of pure revenue. There's something a little unsavoury about Palworld that has other developers and critics wrinkling their noses. It's not just the ick of turning guns on creatures that are, unlike Minecraft's blocky animals, designed to look cute. Its character designs are so close to Pokémon's that it has sparked allegations of plagiarism, with some 3D models of the game's creatures aligning improbably closely with those from recent Pokémon games.

Westworld isn't the first TV show to engross audiences in a sprawling mystery, encouraging you to scour every scene, every scrap of dialog for a morsel of meaning. It's something we've seen with Lost, The Prisoner and Twin Peaks. It has video games in its DNA -- after all, the entire show is about incredibly advanced live action role playing. Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy also treat the show's narrative like a giant puzzle, where clues are doled out carefully and audiences are often left to figure things out on their own. Viewers took the bait, filling the vacuum with countless podcasts, recaps and online conversations all focused on "solving" Westworld.

Writer and critic Jason Sheehan calls Red Dead Redemption his favorite Western of all time -- surpassing even The Outlaw Josey Wales. Writer and critic Jason Sheehan calls Red Dead Redemption his favorite Western of all time -- surpassing even The Outlaw Josey Wales. For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. I have always loved Westerns.

Red Dead Redemption arrives on Xbox One, ID@Xbox 100 million success stories, Battlefield 1's destruction and more! Every week, I summarize some of the biggest rumors and talking points in one handy post every weekend. You can also rely on this weekly column to catch up with all the latest Xbox One game releases. Welcome to the latest edition of This Week in Xbox One News. Red Dead Redemption hit backwards compatibility this week, causing a huge sales spike for the game on Amazon (via ICXM).

When Keith Stuart finished the Uncharted series, he found the game and its characters had got under his skin. After spending years with Nathan Drake and his partner Elena, he found the game had had a huge effect on him. And it sort of hurts. I realise that, as the game is only released today, you're not where I am yet; you have adventures left to embark on, and many hours of Nathan time ahead. Like an elderly relative at a wedding, I feel like clutching your hand and whispering "savour every moment".

Mezzo is a computer program designed that procedurally writes Romantic-Era style music in real-time to accompany computer games. Leitmotivs are associated with game characters and elements, and mapped into various musical forms.  These forms are distinguished by different amounts of harmonic tension and formal regularity, which lets them musically convey various states of markedness which correspond to states in the game story. Because the program is not currently attached to any game or game engine, “virtual” gameplays were been used to explore the capabilities of the program; that is, videos of various game traces were used as proxy examples.  For each game trace, Leitmotivs were input to be associated with characters and game elements, and a set of ‘cues’ was written, consisting of a set of time points at which a new set of game data would be passed to Mezzo to reflect the action of the game trace.  Examples of music composed for one such game trace, a scene from Red Dead Redemption , are given to illustrate the various ways the program maps Leitmotivs into different levels of musical markedness that correspond with the game state.