Month: December 2024

Mention AI and robots to most people and they’ll typically think of end-of-world scenarios, involving lasers and glowing red eyes. Not so Google DeepMind who’ve made a big step forward in robotic AI technology by training a system to beat the average person at table tennis, rather than the global eradication of humanity.

Footage of the robot in action was posted on X by Google DeepMind and as someone who has some experience of programming robot arms, albeit in a limited manufacturing engineering capacity, I was really impressed by what I saw, and the study’s research paper is well worth reading.

It’s more than just a camera keeping track of the ball and then motors wildly swinging a paddle about. To start things off, Google DeepMind built a database of all the initial states a table tennis ball could have, such as position, speed and spin. From here, the robot arm just practised various movements, getting used to switching between fore- and backhand grips, applying topspin, and so on.

Then it was pitched against real players, with the AI system designed so that would monitor how different people would behave and play, and use that information to refine the ov…

Just a few weeks ago we reported on rumours that there could be a Legion Go Lite and a Legion Go Gen Two approaching—that’s two new Legion Go handhelds. Now, however, there’s reason to believe there might be three.

The reason being that Notebookcheck has discovered EEC filings (via VideoCardz) for a Legion Go S 8ARP1, 8AHP2, and 8ASP2—three separate models. There’s also speculation over what these enigmatic model names might mean, and they might hint at a mess of upcoming AMD Z2 processors spanning three different generations.

AMD’s Z1 Processors (the Z1 and the Z1 Extreme) adorn a couple of the best handheld gaming PCs today: the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. The Z1 Extreme processor is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the mobile 7840U (Phoenix Point architecture) or 8840U (Hawk Point) processors, but made specifically for handhelds.

There’s therefore been a lot of excitement surrounding possible AMD Ryzen Z2 or Z2 Extreme processors, primarily because these could boast next-gen Strix Point architecture that we already find in some gaming laptops. Along with Intel’s new Lunar Lake processors, Strix Point chips provide imp…

I love every single one of Dead Cells’ animated trailers—they’re funny, well-produced, and hit me right in my weakness for chunky and expressive linework. I’m not, however, entirely sure how the writers and animators are going to dig up a compelling narrative from Dead Cell’s bloated, five-year-long story.

Dead Cells – The Animated Series will be made by Bobbypills—the same team responsible for their trailers—and co-produced by the French Animation Digital Network. It’s set to span 10 seven-minute episodes and will “initially be exclusive to France before being made available worldwide” in 2024.

While I’m confident the series will be good fun, ‘good fun’ doesn’t carry a good story. They’ve added plenty of lore and worldbuilding to the 2018 roguelike since my initial excursions as the Beheaded, but the act of tying those threads together into a single narrative is a huge task. I can only imagine that Motion Twin’s narrative docs resemble the dizzying web of biomes and interconnected tunnels which make the game itself.

There’s also the issue of tone. Bobbypill’s style is loud, messy, adult, and charming, with killer…

This article was updated on May 12 with a comment from Respawn.

Is the point of battle royale games to survive, or to eliminate competitors? The latest season of Apex Legends has centered that question with a new ranking system that’s stupefying top players. To “prove how bad the system is,” NRG pro sweetdreams challenged himself to hit the game’s highest rank, Apex Predator, without scoring any kills. After playing for almost 19 hours, entirely livestreamed, he succeeded.

“I mean, that is just so dumb,” said sweetdreams after climbing into Predator rank on the stream. “I don’t even know what to say, bro. I don’t even know what to say. That is one of the dumbest screenshots in the history of the game, on the right side of your screen [where his rank is displayed].”

Reached for comment, a Respawn rep told PC Gamer that the studio is “seeing a majority of players settling in as expected” to the new ranking system, with some anticipated outliers, and that it’s listening to feedback and will make fixes if necessary.

“We’ve also seen some instances of players exploiting the early days of the season to make a point,” Respawn said. “We’re keeping a clos…

Microsoft’s Recall feature was, I think it’s fair to say, not entirely well received. The idea that Windows 11 would take screenshots of your desktop regularly to provide you with a searchable history might have seemed useful to some, but privacy and security concerns meant Microsoft had to backtrack pretty quickly.

Well, how about Windows AI taking a looksie at your local media files? Twitter user @XenoPanther has been digging around in the latest Windows Insider Preview Build and has apparently found reference to something called “intelligent media search” (via TweakTown). According to XenoPanther, the feature is planned to allow search by “spoken words in your indexed video or audio files”.

“By clicking ‘I agree,’ you consent to scanning the media files on your device. If needed, the required model will be downloaded and installed in the background.

“Once the AI model is set up, it needs to transcribe your media files and index them before enabling content-based search. We’ll inform you once the process is complete.”

It’s important to clarify that this looks like the only current source for this potential feature, and there’s a lot that’s left unclea…

Few things seemed like more of a closed book to me than Vlambeer, the developer of Luftrausers, Nuclear Throne, and Ridiculous Fishing. A studio made up of Jan Nijman and Rami Ismail, Vlambeer shut its doors in September 2020 after 10 years in business, and announced “the end of Vlambeer” in a short, straightforward Twitter post. It was time for both its members to move onto new things.

Or not. Because in another post on Twitter yesterday, Nijman put out a “videogame company acquisition announcement” revealing that he now owns “100% of Vlambeer.” In a tweet around the same time, Ismail announced that he had “sold my 50% of my old games studio Vlambeer to co-founder [Nijman].” Vlambeer, it seems, is back from the dead, albeit without Ismail’s involvement.

Per a blog post on Ismail’s website, “Vlambeer never quite fully ‘shut down’,” but has rather been in a state of limbo since its founders announced its closure all the way back in 2020. Despite the “dwindling amounts of time we had for it,” Ismail and Nijman “tried to keep up with customer support & maintenance,” for the studio’s catalogue of games. “It felt like a strange limbo in which neither of us co…

The videogame industry’s unending anni horribiles continued today as Sega announced it would be laying off 240 staff across Sega Europe, mobile developer Sega HARDlight, and Total War studio Creative Assembly. To top it off, the corporation has also sold Company of Heroes developer Relic Entertainment, which will transition to being an independently-run studio with the aid of “an external investor” in the years to come.

In a statement on Twitter, Relic told fans that its shift to being an independent studio was a “huge change” for the company, but that it wouldn’t affect ongoing support for Company of Heroes 3 or its upcoming 1.6 update this April. 

Though grim, the layoffs aren’t entirely unexpected. In September last year, Sega announced that it would be making “structural reforms” at its European studios after abruptly scrapping Hyenas, Creative Assembly’s doomed live-service shooter. The company made another series of cuts around that time.

But it wasn’t done, as Sega has now released a statement announcing this latest round of layoffs, and which refers directly to its September promise of “structural reforms”. Sega says that it is responding …

There were a lot of heaters at yesterday’s big Sony “State of Play” announcement stream, but only one of them (ok, two, I can’t deny Alan Wake 2) really set my heart aflutter: Revenant Hill, a cozy, autumnal “stray cat in a strange world” game that just might put Stray on notice. Revenant Hill will be the first release of The Glory Society, a developer co-op founded by Night in the Woods creators Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson.

Night in the Woods is something special, an adventure game set in a diminished industrial town called Possum Springs, a place like rural Pennsylvania, but populated entirely by adorable anthropomorphic animals, and whose proud history of labor resistance has been appended with a sad coda of post-industrial decline. You play as Mae Borowski, the first member of her family to go to college, and also the first to then drop out of college, as she puts the pieces of her life back together in the shadow of a vaguely supernatural mystery.

It’s like Daria meets Twin Peaks, a loving, melancholy portrait of a dying town brought to life with Benson’s gorgeous storybook art and animation. It’s the perfect game to play in the fall too, with …

There was an earlier time on the internet where it felt like there was a constant stream of little tchotchkes and gadgets to stumble upon and develop intense fixations over. I’m not sure what changed—learning firsthand how tight disposable income is probably had a part—but online trinkets don’t hit like they used to. Now, the only trinkets I see are what surfaces from the homogeneous soup of nerdy Etsy products and this one ad that inflicted me with the knowledge that there’s a niche market of dudes who want to buy beard straighteners. But today was different. Today, I found the Pixel Window.

The Pixel Window is an in-development project from monoli, a Japanese material designer and art student-turned-engineering Ph.D. who blends those backgrounds to, as a Google translation of monoli’s webshop puts it, create “a small laboratory you can wear.” Monoli’s made a series of wearable and handheld prisms, including color-diffracting cubes and the Pixel Mirror, which produces an inverted pixel image of what’s behind it.

Following in the Pixel Mirror’s footsteps, monoli has been teasing a successor since February, finally revealing the Pixel Windo…

If there’s one thing that might hold you back from your next headset purchase being cable-free, then it’s likely to be the battery life. While a good wireless gaming headset unchains you from your desk, it does mean keeping an eye on the battery indicator and rummaging around for charging cables on occasion.

Well, rejoice, because our best wireless gaming headset has a truly monstrous 300-hour battery life, meaning those visits to the wall plug will be much less frequent. I’ve found the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless for $139 at Amazon, and at that price, it’s an even more obvious pick for cable-free gaming audio.

It’s not just that battery life worth shouting about, either. With a set of 50mm dynamic drivers, the Cloud Alpha Wireless offers a powerful, rich, and well-balanced audio experience, perfectly suited to gaming audio and more than capable of delivering your tunes with gusto as well, as we found in our review.

And while those red accents might look a bit out-there in photos, seeing one in person reveals that it’s a bit more refined. Sure, there’s a little bit of gamer aesthetic going on here, but it’s not outlandish enough to make you look like too much…

We reported just the other day that AMD’s AI GPU business has gone from zilch to about the same as its combined CPUs sales in less than a year. Well, the news from Intel isn’t quite so good. It looks like the Gaudi 3 AI chip is a flop.

Speaking to the usual throng of implausibly-well remunerated bean counters on the latest earnings call with investors and analysts, CEO Pat Gelsinger said that Intel will not now meet its modest target of selling $500 million worth of Gaudi 3 GPUs in 2024.

To put that into context, AMD recently revealed that it sold over $1.5 billion of its MI300 AI chips in September, while Nvidia is likely to exceed that $500 million figure for Gaudi 3 by a factor of over 100 in 2024. In short, Gaudi 3 has made almost no impact.

Gelsinger also revealed that Intel’s use of fully integrated memory for the impressive Lunar Lake laptop chip will very much be a one off.

“It really is a one-off with Lunar Lake,” Gelsinger said of the chip’s on-package memory. “That will not be the case with Panther Lake, Nova Lake and its successors as well. We’ll build it in a more traditional way with memory off-package and the CPU, GPU, NPU and I/O capabil…

There’s a chance that, even if you’ve never used the program, you recognize the iconic Bucolic Green Hills of the Windows XP background image. Twenty years ago today, the world got its hands on both the Bliss wallpaper and the classic Windows operating system for the very first time.

As pointed out by @DayTechHistory on X, Windows XP launched officially on October 25, 2001. XP follows up Windows 2000, which is almost equally iconic. Widely praised for its performance and stability, Windows XP is known for having chunky icons, and an incredibly popular, violin-driven startup sound. That wallpaper is among the very best Windows has ever had (find out where in our ranked list of them all).

It’s a very simplistic OS, that doesn’t try to immediately sell you on One Drive and Xbox Game Pass, like Windows 11.

The final update for this legendary OS was in May, 2019, where it received one last security update. According to the latest Steam Hardware Survey, only 0.10% of Steam’s user base is on a Windows OS before Windows 7. However, Windows XP does seem to still be used as terminals and backends for businesses, especially those that don’t need access to the broader in…

Wizards of the Coast is launching a Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth crossover set for Magic: The Gathering, which will feature one card so rare that only one of them will be printed.

That card is, of course, The One Ring, “the treasure, and temptation, of Sauron’s power” that caused so much trouble in Tolkien’s Third Age. You know the story:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

There will be multiple editions of The One Ring card, including a main set version and bundle alt-art and extended art versions, which are available through increasingly limited channels. But the true prize is the 1 of 1 Ring, “a traditional foil card printed in the Black Speech of Sauron using Tengwar letterforms” that can only be found in an English-language Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth col…

Following the shocking mass-resignation of publisher Annapurna Interactive’s entire 25-person staff, a new report from IGN has provided more details about the gaming division’s dispute with its parent company, Annapurna Pictures, and its billionaire owner, Megan Ellison. Anonymous former employees shared concerns about the Interactive division’s future under Annapurna Pictures, and claimed that Ellison refused to continue working with them on an agreement to spin off the division. Spokespeople for the parent company claimed that the division’s leader failed to respond to their efforts to move the process forward.

Annapurna Interactive was founded as a gaming-focused subsidiary of Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures in 2016, tapping veteran gaming talent including former Sony employees Nathan Gary and Hector Sanchez. After a run of producing successful films like The Master, Her, and Zero Dark Thirty, Annapurna Pictures began to struggle financially in the late 2010s. The Interactive division, meanwhile, enjoyed continued success with games like Stray, Outer Wilds, and Neon White. Gary was named president of Annapurna Pictures overall in 2021, but a source that spoke to IGN alle…

World of Warcraft revealed its roadmaps for both retail and Classic yesterday, and while there’s plenty of exciting news—including a confirmed Summer release window for The War Within—one particular stop on the road hit me like a cannon full of grapeshot. A black flag with a skull and crossbones.

So, some context: back in September, WoW players were hoisting the mainsails in preparation for a pirate-themed expansion. This was due to a cosmetic item on the store (which Blizzard have used to foreshadow expansions previously, such as with the Dragon Pack) and an in-game book called “Return of the Nightsquall.”

Added to The Forbidden Reach zone in Dragonflight Patch 10.0.7, this book can be found on the Irontide Ship on the northern shore of the island, via an interactable called “Pirate Proclamation”. It proclaims that “The Nightsquall has returned!” and that he’s building the “biggest fleet the world has ever known.” It foreshadows an alliance of Irontide, Defias, Bloodsail, and Freebooter pirates embarking on a raid to the Dragon Isles.

Then, president of Blizzard Mike Ybarra replied to a curious fan with the words “no pirates” and that, it would see…

Back in June if you, er, recall, Microsoft decided not to roll out the controversial Recall feature for Copilot AI PCs that screenshots everything you do. Now Microsoft has delayed Recall again, appealing for time to “refine” the feature.

Indeed, after Recall was delayed in June, the plan was to roll it out for testing for Windows Insiders members within a few weeks. That plan was then punted out to October. But even that limited aspiration has now been canned and it seems Microsoft isn’t confident enough to release Recall merely as a beta feature for testing.

“We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we’re taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders,” Brandon LeBlanc, senior product manager of Windows, told The Verge, adding “originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs by December.”

Lest you have forgotten, Recall uses AI algorithms running locally on a PC to screenshot everything you do on your computer, creating an timeline you can sc…

Software bugs are a fact of life. In today’s feature-packed applications, it’s no surprise that, given the increasing complexity of many modern programs, something at some point is going to fall over. However, if an app’s primary purpose in life is to handle text, you would hope the simple act of typing wouldn’t cause it to close.

According to Microsoft, this exact issue is affecting certain installs of Outlook, Word and OneNote, and its Outlook and Office teams are currently investigating (via Neowin). In a support post, MS defines the problem as:

“After updating to [Office] Version 2407 Build 17830.20138 or higher you find that Outlook, Word, or OneNote may unexpectedly close when typing or doing other authoring tasks such as spell check.”

Yep, the simple act of typing or performing a spell check can cause the applications to close, undoubtedly inspiring a choice selection of curse words from affected users. Microsoft says that you can confirm the issue by looking for Event 1000 or Event 1001 in the Windows Event Viewer Application Log and that the issue may be caused by older language packs:

“The faulting module name will vary depending on what langu…

AI is a worrisome subject. From the potential of LLMs misinforming people en masse through chatbots or generative AI posing a risk to the future of many great artists’ careers, all the way to Skynet taking over and conquering humanity. Alright, one of those is far less likely to happen than the others but it’s still a debate many are having, and a chief AI scientist at Meta reckons we all have nothing to worry about.

In a new report for The Wall Street Journal, Meta Chief AI scientist Yann LeCun was asked if humans should be afraid of the future of AI. To which he said: “You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.”

LeCun has an impressive resume in AI, winning a Turing Award in 2018 for his work in deep learning. He has since been proclaimed as one of the “godfathers of AI”, as pointed out in the original report. That is to say, he has tonnes of experience in the field.

He told the reporter above that AI is dumber than a cat, and this mimics a similar report from Apple scientists on the limitations of LLMs (Large Language Models) reported recently. This report suggests that LLMs can’t reason as humans do, and shows a “critic…

2024 games: Upcoming releases
Best PC games: All-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best MMOs: Massive worlds
Best RPGs: Grand adventures

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that’s a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.If nothing catches your fancy this week, we’ve gathered thebest PC gamesyou can play right now and a running list of the2024 gamesthat are launching this year.

Slot Waste

Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) is the director and driving force behind Final Fantasy 14—and other projects at Square Enix besides, also directing the series’ 16th entry. He’s also in Monster Hunter Wilds, sort of. Presumably determined to see their favourite developer hit giant creatures with a giant instrument, fans recreated Yoshi-P in the game’s character creator during the game’s beta last week, as you can see below:

During a recent live letter for Patch 7.1: Crossroads, Yoshi-P was altered to this development, taking it on the chin about as well as anyone would after being painstakingly recreated in a videogame by a stranger (as spotted and translated by aitaikimochi on X).

“‘Congratulations on being in Monster Hunter?’ What does that even mean?” asked the gently baffled game developer, to which he adds after having it explained: “I haven’t checked social media. But apparently they made me into a character, but I look tired? … I have to apologise to the Monster Hunter team for my unseemly presence then.”

Personally, I think the man’s being a little down on himself, here. He’s downright spritely for a bloke in his 50s who still directs massive gami…

When a group of people working on some of the biggest games in the first-person shooting genre gathered for a roundtable hosted by our own Evan Lahti at GDC, the subject of rookie retention came up. The most popular shooters today are competitive—with extraction shooters and battles of the royale variety maintaining their dominance—so is it an issue that the first experience many players have is getting demolished by veterans?

David Fifield, general manager for the Hunt franchise at Crytek, called this “the brick of getting in”, making it sound appropriately like a heavy blunt object just waiting to fall on the heads of fresh meat playing their first games of Hunt: Showdown. 

“We have an achievement in Hunt called Debut,” Fifield said. “It’s ‘kill your first enemy Hunter’, 40% of our players never get it. We’re a PvP game where you come in, you do some things, and 40% of the people trying Hunt have never killed another player.”

Hunt: Showdown is a PvPvE game in which haunted gunslingers dodge dying horses while crouch-walking across the weird west, hoping to take down monstrous bosses for their bounties then escape with the loot. Standing betwe…

Microsoft’s been busy. As has the rest of the tech industry, seemingly. I leave the room for what feels like one second and everything’s “AI this” and “AI that”. Now, Microsoft’s rolling out what it’s calling a “full operating system (OS) swap” that seems at pains to pave the way for AI.

Yes, Windows 11 24H2 is finally here—at least for those included in the first update roll-out segment—and it has some surprisingly neat features. I say “surprisingly” because all that Windows Recall talk had truly put me off 24H2 and its many pre-release Insider Preview builds. And because it seems to be a little buggy (via Windows Latest)

Despite this, the new Windows 11 version does indeed have some pretty cool features—though whether this justifies the “full OS swap” designation is questionable. Here are a few of my favourite features included in the update:

• Wi-Fi 7 support
• “A refresh button for Wi-Fi networks along with a scan progress indicator to help you find the networks you need.”
• “Clear labels in the context menu indicate actions such as cut, copy, paste, rename, share, and delete, simplifying your daily tasks.”
• The abi…