Key Note Gaming

The Borderlands spinoff Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a pretty good shooter. But if you've ever thought to yourself, "I'd like that, but different", the big Wonderlands Redux mod might be just what you're looking for. Spotted by GamesRadar , Wonderlands Redux is a free mod that has players stepping in for the legendary assassin Athena in order to carry out hits against dangerous "Legacy Targets," who are attempting to take over the Wonderlands. But it's more than just a handful of new things to shoot at. Wonderlands Redux adds a pile of new items and rarities, double-jumping and dashing abilities, and makes an impressive array of changes, balance tweaks, and quality of life changes.  Wonderlands Redux actually released on Nexus Mods a couple weeks ago, on April 15, and it appears to be a hit: In just two weeks, it's already been downloaded nearly 30,000 times. Players really seem to be digging it so far, too. Some people on Steam have re...

Spring has arrived and so begins the ramp up of new releases for the Netflix anime library. Kicking off the month of May, The Entertainment District Arc of Demon Slayer arrives on the streamer as season three . And since Demon Slayer’s already on our list as one of the best series available in the library, it's a given we think more seasons to watch the better. If, however, it’s a new sci-fi anime series missing from your watch list, then you’re in luck. The highly anticipated Japanese Netflix Original military sci-fi anime series, Yakitori: Soldiers of Misfortune , announced during AnimeJapan 2023 drops all six episodes this month. Based on Carlo Zen’s sci-novel The Saga of Tanya the Evil this adaptation comes courtesy of the animation studio ARECT ( Bright: Samurai Soul ). Now that you’ve binged all 74 episodes of Monster, maybe check out both seasons (26 episodes) of the May edition to the list, dark fantasy seinen series Ajin: Demi-Human. Note: As this is a list of anime s...

Don't tell whoever it is that signs my checks, but at least half my job is downloading images off the internet. I download a lot of images and put them on this website. Just a few years ago, I pretty much never had to worry about re-saving an image in a different file format. It was just the occasional super-high DPI 4K png, or whatever, that needed a little shrinking down. I had no idea what a terrible future awaited me—a future defined by rampant, annoying webPs. These little pests are everywhere! Why are they everywhere? And when the heck did this happen? According to Google Trends , which tracks the popularity of terms people are searching for, webP really started to take off in late 2021, but it's been a thorn in our sides a lot longer than that. Here's Foone tweeting about how annoying webPs are back in 2019:  no one has ever tried to save an image and gone "oh, it's a .webp!" and had that be an excited, positive emotion. May 3, 2019 See more ...

Did you know there are words just walking around out there waiting to blow up your day? Words that you thought you knew. Like wi-fi, for example . You thought you had a mutual understanding: you learned the definition of the word, how to spell and pronounce it, and in exchange you could go through life using it without studying the entire history of language. An innocent life! That's how I lived once. And then a portmanteau absolutely wrecked my shit. A portmanteau, if you don't know, is the smooshing together of two words to make a new one. Like brunch. Or biopic. Or email. Obvious, right? Well—until today, I had no idea how many other words in tech are portmanteaus rather than strong, independent creations imbued with their own meaning. The one that truly sent me reeling was modem. Deep breath . "Modem?" Fake word. It's just a modulator-demodulator. Of course it is. A modem's whole job is to modulate an analog signal into a digital one, and then demodulat...

Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai presented the original design documents for Kirby and other secrets of Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy in his 100th episode of "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games" on YouTube. The documents aren't new per se, as Sakurai said he presented them at Kirby's 25th Anniversary Orchestra Concert in Japan in 2017. However, he decided to give the same secret dev presentation in a way that is new to Kirby fans outside of Japan. In the video , Sakurai said he came up with the concept for Kirby's Dream Land around May 1990 at the age of 19 — he's 52 now — making the game simple enough to invite people who are new to video games and showing them how fun they can be. It was so simple that it was 20 minutes short. All Kirby did in the original game was hover, swallow and spit out enemies because he didn't possess any Copy Abilities until Kirby's Adventure. Kirby's Dream Land was developed in under...

May 4 is Star Wars day: It's May the fourth, you see, a groan-inducing play on the famous Star Wars invocation, "May the Force be with you." That date doesn't actually get here until next week—one week from today, in fact—but that's not stopping Steam and GOG from kicking off the Star Wars sales action right now. The May the 4th 2023 Sale on Steam has an array of Star Wars games marked down, some of them quite deeply. Star Wars: Squadrons is down to $6/£5/€6 (85% off), Battlefront 2 is $10/£9/€10 (75% off), and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is $5/£6/€5 (75%), or a little bit more if you want the deluxe edition, which includes the season pass. The KOTOR games, Dark Forces, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, and The Force Unleashed are all marked down too, although I cannot in good conscience recommend The Force Unleashed. But hey, I don't judge. The situation is pretty much the same over on GOG's less pun-tastically named Star Wars Sale , which has a slightly s...

If you have ever wondered how fish get around without bumping into anything underwater, a research team in Israel decided the best way to get the answer was by wiring goldfish brains to a computer.  In a study (via The New York Times ) conducted at Ben-Gurion University, researchers outfitted 15 goldfish with a special cyberpunk-esque headgear "to study this fundamental cognitive component in fish" by recording the "activity of neurons in the central area of the goldfish telencephalon while the fish were freely navigating in a quasi-2D water tank embedded in a 3D environment." “Navigation is an extremely important aspect of behavior because we navigate to find food, to find shelter, to escape predators," said Ronen Segev, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University, who was part of the team of team that performed the fish brain surgery. The surgery involved exposing the brain and attaching electrodes that were the size of a strand of human hair to a recordin...