"I think one of my most-played games is Pokemon Pinball, but the idea to make a pinball game came from Mario... he came to me and say 'JP, I want to make a custom engine for Playdate and we should make a pinball game.'"
To answer that question, our resident RPG-enthusiast Ram Iyer put together a set of five general questions about Baldur's Gate, which we ran against xAI and the three major models in a kind of quasi-benchmark that I've decided to call BaldurBench. In the interest of journalistic transparency, I've made all the chat transcripts public, so you can see them here: Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Virtual Cram School Wish High is a new online school by Tokyo-based company Luminaris. According to the publication, all teachers are "active VTubers," meaning streamers who use digital avatars to represent themselves instead of showing their real faces. Tuition at the online academy is the equivalent of around $63 per course per month, on subjects including mathematics, English, physics, chemistry, world history, Japanese history, and geography.
Project Genie, which is currently only available for Google's AI Ultra subscribers, uses AI to build virtual worlds. That sounds interesting, if not necessarily revolutionary. Videogame developers already model and build virtual worlds all the time. Project Genie's simple concept, though, belies the tech's potential impact. The new system, and the Genie 3 model behind it, have the potential to forever change how videogames are built and played.
Some part of me feels that could just as easily be one of those mementos of Earth. That's because playing feels like stepping through time, which is neither a comment on the quality of its gameplay or its fidelity, both places in which it is no slouch. Rather, it's a comment on its essence.
The Quest 3S can play the same games as the pricier Meta Quest 3, with Batman: Arkham Shadow and Maestro performing impressively well in our testing. Additionally, you can stream Xbox games with a Game Pass subscription and even wirelessly tether it to a gaming PC to play SteamVR games like Half-Life: Alyx. The Quest 3S is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor that's in the pricier Quest 3,
The Analogue 3D finally launched late last year with four controller ports on the front supporting the N64's original wired gamepads. If you wanted to go wireless, your best option was the 8BitDo 64 which offered a similar button and joystick layout as the N64's original controllers, but with a modernized design. For a more authentic but conveniently wireless N64 experience, Analogue has released an update for the 3D today that adds support for Nintendo's modernized N64 controller.
Though the Virtual Boy was both a commercial and critical failure, the console's infamy is part of what has made it such a fascinating piece of Nintendo's history. Original units are still going for hundreds of dollars on bidding sites, and hobbyists have spent years keeping the Virtual Boy alive through emulation and homebrew games. For a long while, it seemed like Nintendo wanted nothing more than for the public to forget that the Virtual Boy ever existed.
Instead, my family and I have been jumping around and slicing flying fruit in our living room using the Nex Playground. It's a tiny gaming system built entirely around Kinect-like games. With its camera and onboard computer vision processing, the $249 Nex Playground can track up to four players as effectively as Microsoft's clunky old Xbox motion tracker. Simply put, the dream of the Kinect, as well as Nintendo's Wii, lives on in the Nex Playground.
Mortal Kombat 2 was not just a thunderous success befitting Raiden himself, it also established many of the crucial players and much of the relevant lore in the franchise. And now, 23 years later, it seems as if the game's film counterpart will be following in its footsteps.