With apologies to said chicks for unnecessary specificity, there's no better way to enjoy giant robots than in video game form. And one of the best giant robot games ever made, Titanfall 2, is on sale today for just three greenbacks. I've poured out my love for this game and its predecessor before, bemoaning the fact the publisher EA and developer Respawn seem to have abandoned it in favor of Star Wars and battle royale. But to save you some reading time: it has a fantastic single-player campaign that's worth the price of admission alone. Fast-paced, parkour-infused FPS action in "pilot" mode contrasts with stomping around in your robot pal for big action set pieces. The sci-fi buddy cop story is decent and the level design is occasionally jaw-dropping.

NVIDIA's H100 chips are used by nearly every AI company in the world to train large language models hooked into services like ChatGPT. It's been great for business. Now, the company is ready to make those chips look terrible, announcing a next-generation platform called Blackwell. Named for David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics, NVIDIA claims Blackwell is the world's most powerful chip, reaching speeds of 20 petaflops compared to just 4 petaflops the H100 provided. Yeah, throw it in the trash.

My background came from God of War … I've never worked on a shooter, and you need a different team to do that. You might as well be asking me to make a racing game. And eventually over time, we built that trust to the point where we ended up calling [the franchise] Jedi." The much contested Jedi eventually became Cal Kestis, first introduced in Jedi: Fallen Order. His original reveal saw a slew of criticism for being, well, a little bland, but four years on, it's hard to deny that Cal has won over both gamers and Star Wars fans alike. Case in point: in a recent Disney poll, asking fans to vote on which lightsaber from the Star Wars universe they'd like produced for retail, Cal beat out legendary characters such as Anakin Skywalker and Qui-Gon Jinn. Of course, making the main character a Jedi isn't just a play to Star Wars fans – it's also a clever game design move, given that the well-documented journey of a Jedi developing their skills perfectly mirrors that of a player progressing through a video game, something Asmussen describes as "one-to-one storytelling". "I was hoping that we could come up with a character that the player could go along on the ride with," he expands. "So, he starts off kind of raw.

The two embrace after five years apart, one of Greez's four arms now replaced by a robotic prosthetic. It's a moment that encapsulates how I felt playing the upcoming game at a recent preview event Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment held in Los Angeles. Playing Jedi: Survivor feels like reuniting with a friend you haven't seen in a few years. Right from the start, Jedi: Survivor feels like a more refined Jedi: Fallen Order. The preview began on Koboh, one of the first planets players will visit when they get their hands on the game later this month.

It's been just under nine years since Titanfall landed on the PC and Xbox, and just under nine years since publisher Electronic Arts has been underutilizing one of its most interesting and promising franchises. With the rumor that EA has canned a third Titanfall game after years of development, I think it's time we look back on what this game was, what it could have been, and lamentably, what it never will be. What is Titanfall right now? Part of the first wave of Xbox One titles and one of the console's very few exclusives, the original Titanfall was the first game developed by Respawn Entertainment, which was founded by former executives of Call of Duty creator Infinity Ward. It made a splash from its introduction at E3 2013, wowing gamers with a mix of fresh, parkour-infused multiplayer shooting and the titular Titan mechs as a fresh addition to the genre.

The minds at Respawn Entertainment are wizards when it comes to the action-adventure genre. Twenty-fourteen's Titanfall and its criminally underrated followup, 2016's Titanfall 2, challenged traditional boots-on-the-ground shooters with a heightened sense of scale and verticality, while the more recent Jedi: Fallen Order etched itself as one of the greatest Star Wars narratives told in any medium. The Los Angeles studio's fixation with exoskeletons, Blade Runner, and visuals that bleed Wachowski and Masamune Shirow's Ghost In The Shell is nothing new, but they are intertwined with world-building to create headier pockets of science fiction bliss. The free-to-play shooter set in the Titanfall universe first launched in February 2019. No extended gameplay reveals that cringe out with comms from Chad and the rest of the QA team.

I have now played Apex Legends for over 500 hours. The online multiplayer shooter, developed by Californian studio Respawn Entertainment and released in February 2019, has been my obsession all year, seeing off a variety of pretenders from Doom Eternal to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Set in a science-fiction universe tied to Respawn's successful Titanfall series, it is another title in the battle royale genre alongside the Goliath that is Fortnite, as well as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Call of Duty: Warzone. You land in a hi-tech future landscape with two team-mates and then you scramble about, finding weapons, while 19 other teams try to kill you and everyone else. The last team left alive is the winner.

Activision is not just dipping its toes into the popular battle royale video game category. The "Call of Duty" publisher is jumping in, fully committed to take on favorites "Fortnite" and "Apex Legends." The new game, "Call of Duty: Warzone," which launches Tuesday on Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One and PCs, "is the most ambitious environment we have ever built in the franchise's history," said Patrick Kelly, who co-heads Infinity Ward, the studio that developed the game with support from Raven Software. Monday, Activision announced the game, which lets console and PC users play together, in a post on its official "Call of Duty" blog. Free to play online, and available to download starting at 11 a.m.

Rumors have swirled all weekend of Titanfall creator Respawn developing its own battle royale game, and... well, they're true. Geoff Keighley and pro player Myth have confirmed the existence of Apex Legends, a last-one-standing game to be unveiled and released on February 4th. They're not saying more at this stage, to no one's surprise, but esports consultant Rod Breslau understood it would be a free-to-play game with classes, up to 60 players in total, three players per team and no Titans -- sorry, folks, you won't pilot a giant robot to victory. The title would include purchases and loot boxes for cosmetic items and similar in-game content in an approach "very similar" to Overwatch. You wouldn't get a tactical edge by spending money, but you would look good no matter what you were doing.

You'd think that any big Titanfall 2 update would revolve around the game's namesake robots, but no -- Respawn wants on-foot action to be the focus next time around. It's preparing a free upgrade whose centerpiece is Live Fire, a six-on-six pilot-only mode. You have just one minute to either eliminate the entire enemy team or hold a neutral flag when time is up. The mode is important enough that there are even two new maps created just for the purpose. The release will also include a new Coliseum map (again, a pilot-only mode), a new execution and fresh commander intros.