Old worlds return, and a flood of AI slop follows

With Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake arriving on Switch 2, James Wood of This Week in Videogames counts it as the third version of the 1998 game and the 32nd Zelda title if remakes and re-releases are included. He compares Zelda to the musical Hadestown, which retells an old myth in a new setting, and argues that the series is one of the few ongoing mythologies in games, built on the Triforce and a repeating clash between Link, Zelda and Ganondorf.

Wood is wary of the official timeline and of Skyward Sword's attempt to canonise the cycle's origins, which he says swapped emotional resonance for a tidy, IP-approved answer. He hopes games can be more than canon, and wonders whether iterative remakes can give the cyclical tragedy new humanity.

CounterpointFans who value the official timeline and Skyward Sword's origin story would say that settled lore gives the series coherence, and that a defined beginning for the cycle adds depth.

Polygon's Oli Welsh says the beta captures classic WoW's slow, dangerous leveling while smoothing its rough spots, and that the game comes alive between levels 10 and 20, with dungeons, city economies and air taxis. He praises the looking-for-group board, which he says produced friendly parties, and the lighting applied to the original art, calling the result WoW as it was meant to be. His reservations are the new Skyborne elves and their flying-island zone, which felt like a cop-out, and whether Blizzard can expand a lore-heavy world without a level cap above 60 turning it into the content treadmill it later became.

Welsh's verdict is that the game is magical and has a reason to exist beyond nostalgia.

CounterpointPlayers who prefer modern WoW's instant matchmaking and quicker pace could read the slow leveling and manual group-finding as friction rather than virtue, and Welsh himself concedes he doubts the cap can hold.

Previously: The game launches November 4, with major updates planned roughly every four months. — Monday November 2 edition.

Aftermath's Nathan Grayson reports that Itch deleted a couple of terabytes of AI-generated uploads and extended its AI disclosure requirement to tabletop, comics and soundtracks. The platform also added disclosure filters to places where they were lacking, including the search page. Itch is enforcing rules that are two years old and still allows AI content that adds substantial value and is disclosed. Grayson notes that undisclosed AI content leaves a small staff playing whack-a-mole.

CounterpointCritics who want an outright ban on generative AI on Itch say disclosure filters put the burden on users, while Itch's own policy holds that some AI-generated work can be useful.

Previously: Aftermath called Anthropic's new Claude rule against recreating specific existing games a token gesture. — Tuesday November 3 edition.

Ford James describes GTA 5's Mount Chiliad mystery, which includes a hologram UFO and a mural of five X marks, a UFO, a cracked egg and a jetpack. The Chiliad Mystery subreddit has pursued it for 13 years, and fans are still posting new theories. Some think the mural is just a hint to finding the game's UFOs, while others think the mystery stretches into Red Dead Redemption 2 or awaits resolution in GTA 6.

James argues that a puzzle with no clear answer keeps a community engaged far longer than a solved one, and says GTA 6 should include something similar.

CounterpointSkeptics point to the lack of any jetpack or flyable UFO in the game files, which suggests the unsolvable mystery may simply have been a dead end that cost players years.

EFF's Aaron Mackey says records released in settlement of its 2021 FOIA suit show the U.S. Postal Service's internet Covert Operations Program, iCOP, monitored social media posts about protests in 2020 and 2021. Targets ranged from a Million MAGA March to Save the Post Office rallies and protests outside then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's home. EFF says it received few documents on internal safeguards, and that the agency lost the emails after a hard drive was dropped and the underlying messages were deleted under a retention schedule.

EFF argues that the Postal Service's claim that iCOP did not infringe on First Amendment rights rings hollow, since monitoring protest organising was a feature of the program, and that surveillance itself chills protected activity.

CounterpointThe Postal Service's Chief Postal Inspector said the review of public posts did not single out any group and was meant to provide situational awareness, a rationale law enforcement defenders extend to protecting postal staff and facilities.