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“Starfield” is one of the most anticipated video games in recent history.

The game, which was released on Sept. 6, 2023, allows players to build their own character and spacecraft, travel to any one of a thousand or more planets and follow multiple story arcs.

The soundtrack is equally epic, with audio director Mark Lampert describing the game’s music as a “companion to the player,” with a “sense of scale” that “had to be totally readjusted,” in a recent interview about Starfield’s sound design.

Soundtracks for outer space have appeared in many films – “Star Wars,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Interstellar,” to name a few.

But the interactive music of “Starfield” does something different: Utilizing a palette of musical language that cultivates a contemplative soundscape, it launches the listener into the vastness of space while remaining curious, innocent and restrained. If you close your eyes, you can imagine it being performed in the concert hall.

That’s exactly what happened prior to the game’s release, when the London Symphony Orchestra performed the “Starfield Suite” before a sold-out audience at the Alexandra Palace Theatre, one of the world’s most prestigious concert halls.

As a conductor, musician and educator, I’m excited about games like “Starfield” because they’re drawing people to symphonic music like never before.

Classical music becomes exclusive
Before recording technology, the only way to hear music was to experience it live. Throughout early history, music functioned as an integral part of cultural life: It was played at festivals, accompanied religious services and even served as a means of communication.

During the time of the Renaissance, around the middle 15th to 16th centuries, there was a shift from music as function to music as art and entertainment.

Soon, live vocal and instrumental music became a form of popular entertainment, and people clamored for bigger and better sounds. In the 16th century, the marriage of art, drama and music was consummated in opera. During the 17th and 18th centuries, instruments continued to evolve, large concert halls and opera houses were built, and composers explored new ideas that pushed boundaries.

What’s now known as “symphonic music” was born: music that was performed by a symphony orchestra. A symphony is not only a large group of musicians, but it is also a piece of music written by a composer containing multiple movements.

To hear a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, you had to witness a symphony orchestra play it, and crowds clamored to gain entry to concert halls hear the newest and most acclaimed composers’ works.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, however, a set of social rules calcified around this music: how to listen, what to wear, where to sit and when to applaud. As tastes and technologies began to change in the late 19th century, the masses were drawn to new forms of music like jazz. Concert halls, meanwhile, became the realm of high culture, high art and high society.

A clear divide between popular music and what became known as “classical” music emerged. That divide still exists today.

Many argue that the classical music world is no longer accessible to most people – it’s seen as too intimidating and too stuffy, with works that are too long and tickets that are too expensive. Meanwhile, symphony orchestras around the world are scrambling to diversify their music and ranks within a tradition and culture that was long reserved for the highly educated, wealthy and white.

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Germany vs Serbia live stream free

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I never expected that Void Stranger, a monochrome, Game Boy-styled block puzzler become one of my favorite games of the year, especially after Baldur’s Gate 3 and Armored Core 6 captured my heart back-to-back, but here we are. It lured me in with its striking trailer and simple, accessible puzzle mechanics. My brain has never been built for puzzlers, but I’d enjoyed the studio’s previous game so much I put my money down and went in blind.

I am now 24 hours deep into a nightmare, and my GOTY list is one game longer.

The hundreds of block-pushing Sokoban-meets-Cave Noire puzzles in Void Stranger are just the surface layer of what I can only describe as a five-dimensional fractal puzzle box tesseract. Puzzles wrapped in mysteries, tied together with secrets, and the end is nowhere to be seen. Whenever I close my eyes, I see monochrome mazes. The last time I was this obsessed with a game, it was Deltarune’s second episode.

I guess that’s what I get for underestimating tiny Finnish indie studio System Erasure. They debuted in 2018 with ZeroRanger, a vertically scrolling shmup that is one of the best in its genre. Not just a finely tuned arcade game, it also featured a surprisingly gripping story, plenty of secrets and surprises and a truly spectacular hidden finale that I dare not spoil.

They brought all that energy and then some to Void Stranger, which has been in development for more than three years. Despite the radically different genre and even more minimalist aesthetic, it shares much of its vibe with ZeroRanger:

Drum-tight design
Stylish and well-illustrated cutscenes
A fantastic soundtrack
And a barrel-load of anime melodrama and existential ponderings.
I just didn’t expect a fathomless labyrinth that has driven me to create multiple documents packed with notes, screenshots, fevered theories and plans—something I’ve not done since playing the original La-Mulana. I am obsessed.


At heart, Void Stranger is a mechanically simple game with bite-sized levels. The goal of each single-screen challenge is simple; reach the stairway down to the next floor of the puzzle-dungeon. You can push some blocks around, but mostly you’ll be using a magic staff to relocate floor tiles to create new paths and prevent monsters from eating your face, carefully working around the limitation that each turn-based movement changes your directional facing, forcing careful routing.

Every couple dozen rooms it mixes things up with some new enemy or puzzle mechanic, gently introduced then slowly ramping up the complexity, but no puzzle takes more than a minute once you’ve worked out the solution.

Forgive any vagueness, but I don’t want to spoil the journey that you’ll be going on if you pick up Void Stranger. Just taken at this surface level, after six hours of play and nearly 150 levels I was happy with it, and felt I’d had my money’s worth. But it’s not long before I started seeing glimpses of Void Stranger’s true form. Several seemingly contradictory plot threads are dangled, just waiting to be connected. Puzzle elements with seemingly no purpose and rooms without intent kept cropping up, and all I could do was walk on by. Occasionally, Void Stranger even takes a break from being a turn-based puzzle game to throw me a little curveball. It was another six hours until I saw the ending.

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Japan vs Chile Live Free rugby

Japan vs Chile Live Free rugby

Mass Effect 4 will ditch the open-world elements of Mass Effect: Andromeda, according to a newly emerged leak. Even though the last installment in the franchise wasn't an entirely free-roaming experience, many fans still criticized Mass Effect: Andromeda as an example of semi-open-world games that would have been better if they were more linear.


While Andromeda marked the lowest point of the series in terms of critical and fan reception, BioWare still pledged to start developing its fifth entry, tentatively dubbed Mass Effect 4, in 2020. The company shared quite a bit of Mass Effect 4 teasers since then, but the upcoming RPG has yet to be treated to a gameplay reveal, so it is still unclear how far along its development actually progressed.

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Mass Effect Fan Makes Hilarious Video That Edits Michael Scott Into The Games

Whatever the current state of the project is, the game itself might not double down on the open-world elements from Andromeda, according to Windows Central's Jez Corden. Speaking during the latest episode of The Xbox Two Podcast, Corden relayed a rumor that the next Mass Effect title will ditch the polarizing Andromeda feature in favor of returning to the franchise's "classic format."


As a reminder, the original Mass Effect trilogy mostly consisted of hub areas connected to linear corridors, allowing players to choose the order in which to undertake missions. The action segments themselves were largely linear, but with a healthy dose of hidden areas that still rewarded exploration, with the end result being a handcrafted universe full of memorable set pieces that appeared larger than it actually is. In contrast, Andromeda adopted the semi-open-world design of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which released three years earlier. The game hence spanned a handful of fairly vast regions filled with quests and points of interest, which received a lukewarm response from the fandom.

Ditching that design philosophy in favor of the classic format would plausibly help BioWare tackle the seemingly massive scope of the next entry in the franchise. Namely, while the past four titles each took place in a single star system, the developer previously teased that Mass Effect 4 will have a dual-galaxy approach.

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Japan vs Chile LIVE FREE

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Star Wars fans were always inevitably going to recreate their favourite spaceships in Starfield, but one player has taken things a step further and built an entire Star Destroyer in-game that’s so big, you’ll need a 21-page guide to make it yourself.

Originally posted on the Starfield subreddit, master shipbuilder Jackygold shared exactly how to build the Imperial Star Destroyer in Bethesda’s space epic. It should be noted, however, that the ship can only be recreated on PC since several mods are required to construct a vessel this enormous. In fact, the ship’s considerable size made the creator’s PC severely lag. They recommend that “if you are already struggling to run Starfield, do not do this build as you may make your game unplayable.” More like the Imperial Starfield Destroyer, am I right? (Sorry.)

What’s arguably more impressive is the in-depth 21-page guide that Jackygold put together, detailing exactly how to make the mammoth ship yourself. The three main mods that you’ll need to install are Ship Builder Unrestricted (which happily removes ship size limitations), Shipyards Unlocked (which adds every ship part to the shipbuilding vendor), and Ship Builder Tweaks (which allows for parts to be placed closer together). You can find links to all three on Jackygold’s online guide here. The rest of the guide gives us step-by-step instructions, almost like a LEGO tutorial pamphlet.

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Starfield has only been properly released for a couple of days, but players have already come up with wildly creative ship designs - or redesigns. Just yesterday, we found that a locomotive enthusiast had made a ship based on childhood icon Thomas The Tank Engine. Before that, adoring Bethesda fans were hammering away to construct their favourite spacecraft from Halo and Star Wars. The Millennium Falcon had - as expected - been recreated within the first few hours of release.

For those starting out, take a look at our Starfield ship customisation guide. The Star Destroyer is a massive undertaking, after all.

Watch UFC 293 Fight Live Free

Watch UFC 293 Fight Live Free

Watch UFC 293 Fight Live Free

WHAT HAPPENED: She's the teenage queen of Queens: Coco Gauff had a well-earned Grand Slam coronation on Saturday at the US Open, with a 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 win over soon-to-be world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the women's championship.

Gauff is the 10th teenager to win the US Open women's title all-time and the first American teenager to be crowned at her home major since Serena Williams won as a 17-year-old in 1999.

In addition to Williams, Gauff joins Tracy Austin, Stefanie Graf, Monica Seles, Martina Hingis, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Maria Sharapova, Bianca Andreescu and Emma Raducanu on New York's under-20 roll of honor. (Austin and Seles each did it twice.)

play video Gauff vs Sabalenka Highlights | Final
After losing her first Grand Slam singles final to Iga Swiatek at Roland Garros last spring in straight sets, Gauff had an inauspicious start to her second. Sabalenka's big hitting was finding its mark more often than not in the first eight games, and she broke Gauff three times to take a one-set lead.

But soon, Gauff started to weave her web. Her world-class defense began to frustrate the No. 2 seed, who soon sprayed more groundstrokes long and wide, and buried overhead smashes into the net. The turning point came early on in the second set: Gauff saved two break points in the opening game, and took the lead for good when she broke Sabalenka to lead 3-1.

From 1-1, the teenager met the moment, and won nine of 11 games to take a 4-0 lead in the final set. She never looked back.

"I feel like I'm a little bit in shock in this moment," Gauff said afterwards. "That French Open loss was a heartbreak for me, but I realize that God puts you through tribulations and trials, and that makes this moment even sweeter than I could've imagined.

"I just knew that if I didn't give it my all, I had no shot at winning."


In all, Sabalenka racked up 46 unforced errors in the match to 25 winners. Sixth-seeded Gauff, meanwhile, hit 13 winners to 19 unforced errors, but in the deciding set, hit five winners to just two unforced miscues.

"In first set I was dealing with my emotions quite good," Sabalenka said afterwards. "I was focused on myself, not on the crowd or the way she move.

"She was moving just unbelievable today. But then the second set I start probably overthinking, and because of that I start kind of like losing my power. Then she start moving better. I start missing a lot of easy shots.

"There was key moments in ... the moments I lost, and those moments helped her to turn around the game."

WHAT IT MEANS: The 19-year-old came into these championships as the hottest player on the WTA Tour, having won lead-in titles in Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati, and checked off milestones with every victory. The title in the nation's capital was her first at WTA 500 level, and her triumph in Ohio was her first WTA 1000.

Now, she has a Grand Slam title to add to the trophy case.

Since a first-round loss to Sofia Kenin at Wimbledon, Gauff is 18-1 in her last 19 matches played, with her only loss coming to fellow American Jessica Pegula in the quarterfinals in Montreal. Twelve of those have been in a row, marking the longest winning streak of her career to date.

While Sabalenka will rise to world No. 1 on Monday as a result of bettering Swiatek's run at this tournament, Gauff, too, will hit a career-high ranking as a result of her triumph. She'll be the new world No. 3 in singles, and, as a bonus, will rise to co-No. 1 with Pegula in doubles.

UFC 293 Live stream Free
UFC 293 Live stream Free
UFC 293 Live stream Free
UFC 293 Live stream Free