Games

I somehow got my hands on a very early ALPHA build of the Under A Killing Moon Remake and... well, I livestreamed it, of course.

This is a full political and historical analysis of Disco Elysium's Ultraliberal ideology (or Neo-Liberal) through Joyce Messier. I trace the tradition from Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill through Hayek, Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, and Clinton, to the Chilean coup of 1973, Smedley Butler and the Business Plot of 1934, the 2008 financial crisis, and the present moment. The argument: what we call "liberalism" in contemporary political life is not the liberalism of the Enlightenment. It is something counter-liberal that emerged from within that traditions unresolved contradictions and intensified its most extractive tendencies, stripped away its emancipatory commitments, and kept the language of freedom as like a wolf in sheep's clothing. The game calls it Ultra. We should too. In addition to Joyce, we talk about the Ultra class' role in the pale eating the world. The Hegelian cosmological framing of the world of Elysium and gloss by Fukuyama's end of history, Slavov Zizek's Less than Nothing and the 2014 article which inspired Joyce's portrayal.

• Tony Blair, dread creature of the forbidden swamp by Sam Kriss

I always wanted to make a video talking about Silent Hill f, but I didn't want to just do a typical counting the story type. There are so many themes and layers to this story that I don't think I'm qualified to talk about but I can't denied that Silent hill f shocked me with its heavy themes of misogyny and how its horror goes beyond the story itself, is within all of us.

Bonus points if the demo has a benchmark! Today I tested out the FFXI Vanadiel benchmark, ARMA 2, and Lost Planet. The game that ran the worst out of the trio was ARMA, forcing me to play it at low-normal graphics presets.

Thanks!

Who’s ready to learn about the architecture of fake buildings in a video game from a guy who has no expertise in this subject? I know you are. We love GTA4 in this house.

I got to Room 46 after 19 hours.

What do I get for that? A cutscene, wherein the missing mystery lady recites here Red Prince poem. You see, she was your mother all along, and you were the Red Prince, but now you're the Blueprints. How fun, a reveal and a pun.

This means nothing to me, I don't know anything about any of these people except vague af stuff. All I know is they're rich aristocrats, and maybe the mother is some kind of dissident in hiding or something like that, which probably means she's a lib. I want to say these characters surely must suck, except that in order to suck, they would have to have some personality first.

It's great when you get to the (or rather, an) ending of your mystery game, and it answers nothing, but hints vaguely at more mysteries, none of which I care about. Instead I get cringe. Why would I want to continue? It didn't pay off this time, surely next time will be another Sherlock-ass non-reveal about non-characters.

Doesn't help that the game isn't that interesting mechanically. You probably solve about half a unique puzzle per hour. Meanwhile you're replaying and redoing the same shit over and over, thanks to the roguelite structure of the game. It's mostly resource management; the core mechanic is you pick a room, there's resources in there that could help you open more doors and make more rooms, until you run out of resources/doors and have to start over. This is fine and somewhat interesting, except pretty soon you're spending most of the time looking for the same old trinkets in rooms you've already seen many times, so the interesting bits are but a fraction of the playtime.

There are worse games, but still weird to me how much praise that game got.

Recommended to play instead: Obra Dinn (mystery), Into the Breach (puzzle roguelike)

i can't properly describe it but what i'm looking for are daily games (or just games with long term progression) that you can play from your browser that are either chill multiplayer or "solo social play" meaning mostly solo but have multiplayer/social elements. two very different examples i can think of are Kingdom of Loathing and Fallen London. unfortunately this is an old type of game, and almost all of them have been consumed by mobile gaming and MTX.

also a lot of these nostalgic games (such as Travian) have been reverse engineered or had their server files released, and you can self-host them. if you have any other examples i would be interested to hear them as well.

I just finished this game after 120~ hours. I didn't know you couldn't post reviews of Steam games you are playing through a Steam Family but don't own yourself. So I'm posting this here because I don't want my words to go to waste.

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Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a mixed bag. While I enjoyed it enough to play it for all 120 hours it took to finish the main campaign, it has many peaks and valleys and never quite stays consistent.

The character and combat systems and rules are deep and complex, which is great for minmaxxers, but can be overwhelming for those not familiar with the Pathfinder tabletop rules. Most "optimal" decisions are not necessarily intuitive to those unfamiliar, and the game doesn't spend a lot of time trying to teach you how everything fits together. It's up to you to figure it out over the course of the campaign. For example, some meta builds have you grabbing 1 level in as many as 3 different classes for the significant benefits that 1 level gets you over going deeper into your main class. But, if this is too much, you can also just play a Fighter to max level and pick whatever feats sound best. As long as you don't plan to play on higher difficulties. The choices available, while overwhelming and easy to choose wrong, are one of the biggest strengths.

The kingdom management is less so. Once you understand two keys things - spending money on building points and prioritizing Problems instead of Opportunities - it is more a matter of flavor as you watch your decisions unfold based on the advisors you choose to assist you. Optimal town management is not necessary or particularly interesting, as you can't interact with any of the buildings other than those of the craftspeople who flock to your kingdom. They don't change the layout of your city on the actual map, and you at most get a few bonus NPCs wandering around your cities with a few sentences of unique dialogue. Very few quests are affected by the decisions you make in the kingdom management, and you will run into many repeat cards through the campaign.

This is where the first valley shows itself. The game keeps a general flow of doing some quests in your kingdom, then returning to manage your affairs before venturing out again. This would be fine, except that at many points in the game, there is nothing for you to do except to assign advisors to cards, do a project that requires your presence and passes the time, then do it again. Over and over, with very little interesting happening until the next big story beat occurs on a set schedule and calls you away. In other words, the balance is too heavy in the direction of spending hours questing with little kingdom interaction, or spending 30 minutes watching kingdom cards fly by and reading flavor text.

As for the story, it also has its ups and downs. You have a strong cast of companion characters (mostly) to choose from, and even your non-playable kingdom advisors have full and interesting backstories. They interject in conversations and many have unique dialogue with certain NPCs or change quest outcomes/options entirely if they are present. But parts of the main story, partly due to the pacing issues I described above, are a let down. They are either too short to really care about the people involved, like Chapter 6. Or they are a little too long and overstay their welcome, like Chapter 5. The first few chapters are some of the better paced and more interesting, before the mysteries of the plot are fully revealed. And probably due to undergoing more extensive testing and feedback. They are a slow burn though, so some people will likely quit before getting to the payoff.

The combat is where you will spend the bulk of the game. If you are getting the hang of things, or already know Pathfinder rules, this will be a strength. You will either beat encounters with reasonable effort, or even breeze through them with your superior game knowledge, exploiting it to its fullest. If you are not understanding how things connect, it can be very frustrating and you are likely to be staring at a battle log full of Misses because you can not overcome the enemy's AC, or having your entire party crowd controlled to uselessness because you didn't learn a certain buff on your Cleric. This is especially true near the end of the game, where the final two dungeons test how closely you've been paying attention and throw every effect under the sun at you to a frankly obnoxious degree. If you have not selected the proper spells while leveling and kept your secondary companions equipped, this last chapter is miserable and I expect another point where many will choose not to continue. There are similar, but smaller, difficult encounters sprinkled throughout the game that will either equally challenge or frustrate players. Whether you play primarily in turn-based or real-time mode, or a mixture of the two, will also make a big difference in the ease and difficulty of some encounters.

While I did not run into any game breaking bugs, even playing on Linux, I did have an entire companion disappear from my game in the last chapter. They were suddenly no longer there, were never mentioned again even in my ending slides, and I suspect there was an issue with the cutscene that was supposed to return them to my party where it just never triggered. There are reportedly amny smaller bugs throughout with feats and items not having their intended effect, but either I did not encounter them or was unaware they were happening.

Overall, it was a good experience, but I don't necessarily recommend it for someone interested in the CRPG genre who wants an especially polished game. The indirect sequel, Wrath of the Righteous, fixed a lot of issues people had with Kingmaker as the developers learned from and responded to feedback. They are unfortunately unable to port these fixes back to Kingmaker due to rights issues and have since moved on. But it has a better and more usable UI, fewer bugs, a more active modding community, and so on. There are also many other great games out there in the genre, including Owlcat's other games, and many of them do not take near as long to complete. But if the idea of building a kingdom from scratch over 100~ hours appeals to you or if you'd prefer to start with a less polished game before playing smoother ones (to truly appreciate what was changed), then Kingmaker is worth a look and can be frequently found on sale for as little as 5 dollars.

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Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.

The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor’s aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations.

I have spent years covering how drones lose their way the moment an electronic warfare unit switches on a jammer, a problem that has spread from the battlefield into civilian airspace, from Ukrainian workshops cycling through navigation generations to American programs scrambling for alternatives. The unsettling part of this story is not the technology. It is where the training data came from, and whether the people who supplied it would have agreed had anyone explained the destination.

Pokémon Players Filmed Their Surroundings for Rewards and Fed a 3D Map

Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.

Those terms handed Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to the scans, meaning the company could resell the imagery to third parties. Floris De Hingh, a 34-year-old Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first available day in 2016, told Trouw he never connected the footage he captured to a system that would steer military drones. “I was just playing a game,” he said. He had even scanned the inside of his own apartment.

The collected scans, around 30 billion of them according to Trouw, became the raw material for a Visual Positioning System, or VPS. Where GPS depends on a satellite signal, VPS works out where a camera is by matching what it sees against a detailed 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a location. Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon, who previously led the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View, has said the approach suits robots operating where GPS regularly drops out, such as dense cities, and where signals are deliberately blocked, such as war zones.

Vantor Will Pair the Ground Map With Aerial Drone Navigation

The Vantor partnership, announced on December 16, 2025, joins two positioning systems into one. Niantic Spatial handles localization on the ground by aligning a camera feed against its model. Vantor’s Raptor software, launched in February 2025, does the same job in the air using a drone’s camera and Vantor’s proprietary 3D terrain data. Combined, the companies say, a drone overhead and a vehicle or dismounted operator below can share the same coordinates in real time with no satellite link. The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.

Vantor’s own framing is blunt about the problem it targets. The joint release names GPS “unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming” as the vulnerability, and lists autonomous drones, vehicles, augmented reality glasses, and other field assets as the platforms meant to run on the shared system. Niantic Spatial’s go-to-market lead told defense outlet Tectonic the goal is thousands of devices operating on one coordinate framework in an electronic-warfare-heavy environment. Field testing of the integrated system is planned for early 2026.

Vantor is not a startup dabbling in defense. Rebranded from Maxar Intelligence on October 1, 2025, it is a prime contractor to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, holding a follow-on award worth $70 million under the agency’s Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery program, which serves more than 400,000 U.S. government users. This is a company built around national security imagery, now adding GPS-independent navigation to its catalog.

Vantor Denies Using the Pokémon Game Data, Then Declines to Rule It Out

Asked directly whether the military-bound system relies on Pokémon Go imagery, Vantor told Trouw it would not use the game’s data. The company then declined to say whether the model it plans to deploy was trained on those scans in the past. Niantic Spatial, responding to earlier questions about a separate deal, said the scans were used to train an “early version” of its navigation model. On the defense partnership specifically, the company said it had no new information to share.

That gap is the heart of the dispute. Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw the conclusion is hard to avoid. “Without the huge number of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly,” he said. He added that AI models begin with a dataset and then absorb far more data until the original contributions blur into patterns that can no longer be traced. Once a scan is folded into the model, in other words, proving it is or is not in there becomes nearly impossible.

Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands, and the broader pattern of players being misled about where their data goes. He called the episode a red flag.

Niantic’s Roots Run Back to a CIA-Backed Mapping Firm

The military turn looks less like a swerve once you trace the company’s lineage. Niantic grew out of Keyhole, a geographic data firm that took funding in 2003 from In-Q-Tel, the venture arm financed by the CIA. An In-Q-Tel release from that year stated Keyhole’s services were used to support U.S. troops during the Iraq War. Google bought Keyhole the following year, and Keyhole CEO John Hanke went on to lead the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View.

Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015. The company collected camera imagery from players once before, through its 2014 game Ingress, using the same method later applied in Pokémon Go. In 2025 the structure split again: Scopely, owned by Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group and ultimately the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, acquired Niantic’s games business for $3.5 billion in a deal that closed in late May, while the technology platform spun off as the standalone Niantic Spatial under Hanke. The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.

The Consent Question Reaches Far Beyond One Game

Pokémon Go is not the only camera in your pocket feeding a map. Meta’s smart glasses continuously scan a wearer’s surroundings, Apple’s AR hardware builds 3D models of interiors, and Waymo’s self-driving cars reconstruct detailed street layouts. Niantic Spatial has signaled interest in more indoor footage specifically, and in March 2025 it announced a deal with Coco Robotics to guide delivery robots already rolling through U.S. cities and Helsinki.

Iris Muis, a data-ethics expert at Utrecht University’s Data School, framed the trap plainly: a user cannot picture how their data might be used later. Maybe in five years there is an application with effects you fundamentally disagree with. British game designer Adrian Hon has gone further, advising Pokémon Go players to stop making scans and consider smaller games less likely to resell data. De Hingh, who quit the game over a year ago because he was tired of the updates rather than the data terms, called the news an enormous eye-opener. “A game should stay a game,” he said.

spoiler DroneXL’s Take [This section is just warmonger puke only included for the sake of mirroring completely]

The navigation problem this solves is real, and DroneXL has documented it from the trenches. When I wrote about Ukraine’s FirePoint in March, the detail that stuck was not the 200 strike drones a day. It was that the company had built seven generations of navigation systems in roughly three years, landing on a terrain-matching setup that uses a cheap night camera to fly without GPS. Russia can jam GPS. It cannot jam a drone that does not need it. Visual positioning is the same insight, scaled up and packaged for export.

So I am not going to pretend GPS-denied navigation is sinister on its face. It is one of the most important capability gaps in the industry, the reason Shield AI’s V-BAT keeps flying when radio links die, the reason the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance evaluations are adding GPS denial to Phase II this year. The discomfort here is narrower and sharper. The training data came from people who thought they were catching Pikachu, under a license most never read, sold up a chain that ends at a sovereign wealth fund and a defense prime. Consent obtained for a game is not consent for a weapons program, even if the end use turns out to be defensible.

Vantor’s non-answer is what I would watch. The company says it will not use Pokémon Go data and refuses to say whether the model it is fielding was already trained on it. Those are not the same statement, and the difference is the whole story. Van den Hoven is right that once scans are baked into a model, tracing them back is close to impossible, which conveniently makes the denial unfalsifiable. The early-2026 field tests will tell us whether this air-to-ground system is real or a press release. They will not tell us whose footage is inside the model, and so far nobody at either company will. :::

Sources: Trouw, Volkskrant.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. :::