Wikipedia – Nintendo Microsite

After the release of Tears of the Kingdom, I was afraid that we would never see a new game in the style of the 2D Zelda game. Yet, I have been proven wrong when this game was announced. To be very honest, I didn’t have very high hopes for this game. Especially since this game was announced this summer and released in late September. I felt that this game going to be a game to fill a gap while the developers are working on a much larger game. Now, the game is released, and I have played through a fair chunk of it. So, what is my opinion on this game? Well, that’s what I’m going to tell you in this first impressions article, while I all invite you to leave a comment of your thoughts and/or opinions in the comment section down below.

Renewing the Echoes

After a short introduction where you play as Link, the main story of this game is introduced. There are all consuming interdimensional rifts appearing all over Hyrule, and it’s eating various people in the kingdom.

Link gets eaten by one of those rifts while freeing Zelda and when Zelda tells her father, the king, about these rifts… A new rift appears and replaces the king with an evil clone of himself. Zelda gets thrown in the dungeon and there she meets a fairy named Tri. This fairy gives Zelda a special staff where she can summon objects into the world using echoes. With those echoes, she escapes the dungeon and sets out on an adventure to save Hyrule from doom before the land is fully consumed by the rifts.

Something I always love about the Zelda games is that there is a different core mechanic at the base of the game. In this game, we get two things. We got the rifts to another dark world, but we also got the magical staff, which we can use to summon various echoes into the world. These echoes mean you can tackle this game in various different ways. But I’ll talk more about that later in this article.

In terms of story, this game is hitting all the same beats as your typical Legend of Zelda game. It might be disappointing, to some, that in this game there is no voice acting anymore apart from the grunts and various emotional noises. Personally, I think it adds to the charm of this game. That’s because the characters in this game are way more expressive. While the story isn’t going to leave you at the edge of your seat of “what’s going to happen next”, it’s still well quite enjoyable, and the more expressive characters add quite a lot to the charm and atmosphere of the game.

Something I really like is how in this game, you are free to explore the world at your own peace. This game isn’t limiting you to go in a certain order. While this game isn’t fully open world like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, it’s somewhere in between. You can tackle parts in a different order. Like the first two major dungeons can be done out of order. Each area is its self-contained puzzle, and everything you need can be found in that general area.

In my introduction of this article, I said that I was afraid that was afraid that this game would be a short one where you were able to beat it in a few hours. That it was going to be a game that’s supposed to hold players over for the “next big 3D Zelda title”. To my surprise, this game is rather lengthy for a 2,5D Zelda game. It clocks in at 25 hours of casual playtime, which is, to my knowledge, one of the longest 2,5D Zelda games.

Climbing with beds

Something I find myself doing quite a lot while playing this game was climbing the area with beds. I summoned various beds stacked on top of each other to climb a wall. Since, I wanted to know if the developers hid a secret on that cliff face.

The exploration of this version of Hyrule is a blast to do. While you visit a lot of familiar places and meet your usual suspects like the Zora and the Gerudo, it’s a treat seeing them again. The only thing I missed a bit is showing the impact of the rifts. Something that this game only tells through dialogue was how things got impacted by the rifts. I wish it was shown a bit more visually. Like different animations of the characters before and after. But maybe, Tears of the Kingdom set the bar a bit too high for those expectations where each major area had a certain curse.

In terms of gameplay, this game really leans into the echoes mechanic. It also remembers that Zelda is a princess and didn’t really have combat training. So, you have to use summoned enemies to your advantage to let them fight for you. Now, you do have a sword, but you can only use it when your power meter has charge. I always reserved that for the dungeon bosses or when the situation got pretty dicey. Since recharging that meter is either done with potions or by defeating monsters from the rift world. These enemies aren’t exactly common in the overworld, and the energy bar drains fast.

In general, this game hits the same general gameplay beats as all other Zelda games. You go from dungeon to dungeon, learning a new technique or skill, defeating the boos and moving forward to another dungeon. There are also side quests in this game, that give you a nice reward. In this game, you also have a nice system to keep track of these side quests, like in Tears of the Kingdom. Something they also brought over from that game is the cooking system to a degree.

That’s something I personally feel mixed about. Maybe it’s me, but I feel the ingredients are quite rare to come by and there is no real way to farm certain ingredients like in Breath of the Wild. I have to admit that it adds a certain charm to this game, but I feel it’s a bit under implemented here. Like when you first meet the potion creators Deku shrubs, they talk about recipes… And I had a hard time finding any.

Like in Tears of the Kingdom, you can also eat most of the ingredients without cooking them. While I personally dislike the fact you have to do two clicks to consume an item, I do understand why they did it. To avoid you consuming them too much. Yet, this is a change from the two previous games and I honestly really feel it’s a set backwards. A fine solution would be to give the player an option to switch between both systems.

Grezzo playset

This game was co-developed by Grezzo. Their previous original Zelda game was Tri Force Heroes. But, this game looks very similar in graphical style to the remake of Link’s Awakening on the Nintendo Switch from late 2019.

This game looks like a plastic toy set and it looks amazing. While I was playing this game, I felt amazed at how expressive they were able to make everything without breaking the illusion that this is a toy set brought to live by our imagination. I don’t have a lot of complaints about the visuals and animations. And most of my complaints aren’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Just like, I don’t have any complaints about the music and sound design of this game. If you take the music and sound design in a vacuum, you would say that it sounds just like very other Zelda game. It sounds like a remix of the familiar melodies we all know and love from the Zelda games. But, this isn’t a problem, since it sells the illusion that you are a child playing with a sort of Playmobil toy set of Hyrule and trying to recreate the sound effects and music of the game.

In terms of controls, this game plays like a dream. I rarely had problems with the controls and something I really like is the fact that with one press of a stick, you can see a view from on top when you feel the camera is blocking something. Now, there is one thing that I do have some things to criticize about. And that’s about the jumping.

It’s pretty difficult sometimes to judge how high Zelda can jump. I had moments in combat where I wasn’t aware I could jump on a higher ledge until I saw an enemy jumping backwards on that ledge. I also got tripped up several times with how far Zelda can jump. Her jump is shorter than I think, and the amount of times I jumped into a pit misjudging the jump is quite a lot. Something that would have helped is something a small landing shadow when Zelda was coming down. Then again, that must have been a nightmare to implement… So, maybe I should keep her shorter jump just better in mind.

Now, something else. Something I really like is how this game has two difficulty modes. I’m playing through this game on the normal difficulty setting and I have to say, I’m happy that I did. This game can lure you into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t say that this game is hard, but it isn’t a cakewalk either. You really need to keep your wits about you and think fast sometimes.

Being aware of what’s around you is also quite important since this game loves to hide things in little side area’s and using the map system is a must. I love how you can put pins and such on the map. Yet, I have to admit that I still keep notes in my phone like: “treasure in Gerudo dungeon, need to check later”.

The more I play through this game, the more I realize that the critiques I can make about this game are more on the minor side. Like how it feels like a waste of time when you are scrolling through a long list of echoes when you just want to find one. An easy solution would be to give the player an ability to favorite certain echoes. But then again, the sort function in the quick menu has “most used”, “recently learned” … So, it’s kinda that.

Now, you have two save slots in this game. So, you can play through this game and let a friend or a sibling play through a different slot. Now, this game also autosaves for you frequently, in case you forget to save. The game also keeps like several autosaves in case you want to return to an earlier point.

Something I really like is how this game also has a quick travel system. The system works similarly like an owl statue in Majora’s Mask or a water vane in Link Between Worlds. It makes it easy when you feel stumped by a puzzle and want to return later. The fast travel locations are very fairly placed all over the land.

While I went quite critical in this game, the more I played it, the more it won me over. This game is a new 2,5D Zelda adventure game I hope we were going to see again. The last new, non remake 2,5D Zelda game was released almost 11 years ago. And, I’m so happy to see a return to this style. I’d love to see a this style also making an appearance very so often since it’s clear there are still various unique ways to explore Hyrule and tell a story about the Hyrule legend without going fully 3D.

Apart from a few small complaints you read in this article, I honestly don’t have any major complaints about this game. This is a game I’m going to finish for sure, since I’m enjoying my time with this title quite a lot. If you are into the series, I highly recommend this title to you. If you enjoy exploration and playing with unique mechanics, I also think this game is for you. This game is totally worth it’s price tag and it pleasantly surprised me.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Trailer – Steam store page

Today, I want to talk about a new game that’s going to come out later this year. It’s called Cave Hikers. It’s being developed by Porcupine Parkour. This small Croatian based studio reached out to me to review their demo in July. I would have written an article about it before, but I have been suffering from a writing burnout. Thankfully, I’m slowly getting back in the groove. And I’m going to make it up to the developers by publishing an article on their game today. Let’s take a look at the demo together, shall we? And I have a small surprise in store later.

Demo review

In this demo, you get an introduction to the gameplay. If you ever played a game like My Brother Rabbit, you will feel right at home in this game. This is a point and click game where you go from screen to screen. Each screen has a small puzzle or hidden object moment for you to take part in.

This game feels like playing through a children book. The voice of the narrator sounds like a (grand)father telling a story to their children. It’s extremely charming, and the story book art style really helps to sell this story.

Overall, there is no real tutorial in this game. Yet, the gameplay is quite simple. You learn quite quickly that this game is controlled with only the mouse. The menu system exists out of icons that make the game a lot easier to localize.

The demo is rather short but gives a very good impression of the full game. This game looks like it’s something I’m going to play. It’s a charming point-and-click game with hidden objects that feels nostalgic. Since the demo is so short, I don’t have a lot to talk about in terms of feedback.

The art style, voice acting, animation is all pretty well done. I only have a few minor complaints. The first complaint is that clicking to unmute the music or sound effects can’t be done right away. It doesn’t always register right away. And the second complaint is the in some rare spots, like with the red crystal at the end of the demo, the hitbox of placing it in the crusher is too tiny.

So, the game describes itself as:

Cave Hikers is a relaxing and humorous 2D interactive cartoon mockumentary that follows three characters through a cavernous world, on a quest to find the mystical “cave with an infinite ceiling”.

And I think it fits the game pretty well. Like I have been saying, the humor and charm of this game is there, and it’s pretty clear that maybe from some very minor things, this game is going to be an extremely charming game.

Now, how interesting would it be if I asked some questions to the developers of this game? Well, I had a few interesting questions in mind, so I went and asked them. Here are their replies.

Interview with the developers

– What games inspired you take to make this one?

It was mostly HOPA style games, which are usually made by much larger companies with inexpensive artists and a pseudo-realistic and kitsch-y style. So we went more in line with our own kind of art style, with some inspiration from Amanita games.

– What’s your process in creating puzzles?

It’s a strange process. As we started making the game in our free time for fun between odd jobs and more “serious” projects, we made a number of locations, creatures and simple mechanics. First we take a look at what already exists on the screen, then we intertwine the narrative with some clicking and potential puzzle elements. Then we play around with it until we are happy with the amount of “work” the player needs to do before accomplishing the goal.

Sometimes it includes a bit of moon logic. First, we make it clearer through conversation clouds and drawings. Then, whatever is unclear or hard to find for testers, we explain further through the Narrator.

– What are the funniest bugs or whoopies that happened during development?

For a while, we had a splash screen that looked exactly like the main menu, which created a lot of confusion! That was because the engine was upgraded, and also we started working with a much better programmer, we consolidated it into a coherent menu.

As for actually funny bugs, at one point we had Valeriano’s secret twin showing up at the cutscene. It took a while to realize we accidentally put two Valerianos of which one was outside the camera view.

– What engine did you use and why?

It’s Construct 3. At first, we made this project for fun and the Animator wasn’t exactly a programmer, so he used a really simple engine. (Un)fortunately, the project got out of hand and got some funding. Now we have a real programmer, but he had to learn Construct with all its limitations, but it’s also a really simple engine so we can still make a lot of the game without much hassle.

– What are some things you learned during developing this game?

Something that we re-learned time and time again… a game is easier to build if you have the whole team and a proper plan. Because otherwise you leave a lot of work and frustration for “future you”. We also learned that Construct can be a lot stronger than we initially thought… but also that it can be really stubborn in some areas.

– How many people worked on this game?

It first started with Sven the illustrator and Zvonimir the animator. At first, we were building a completely wordless game. But some testers were a bit confused at what the characters are really doing. So we hired Tom Bennet as the narrator and also Lea Konjetić to compose original music for the game. In the last six months, Fabjan the programmer also joined the team and superpowered our development process. All in all, five people, excluding all the translators.

Final thoughts

I’m very happy that games like these are getting more attention. Hidden object games have a strange reputation of being “too casual” or “boring”. Yet, I dare to argue there is something to love in these games. Especially when a game is created with this much passion and love.

I want to apologize to the developers again for taking such a long time in creating and article about the demo. But, I’m happy I did today. Since, if you have any interest in playing this game after reading this article, go and play the demo. Or share this article with somebody you think will enjoy playing this game. The demo takes roughly 15 minutes to finish.

I wish the developers a lot of luck and success with their game and when it’s fully released, I’m going to play this game and most likely review it on my blog. And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. Thank you so much for reading this article, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed making it. I hope to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Bully, Rockstar's enjoyable schoolboy adventure game, is now available as part of the GTA+ subscription on PlayStation, Xbox and "soon" on compatible iPhone and Android devices.

Rockstar announced that Bully would be coming to GTA+ earlier this year, back in April. We've been waiting for word on exactly when ever since.

It's great to have an easier way to play Bully again - though Rockstar describes the GTA+ catalogue as "rotating", so it's unclear how long it'll stick around. Also on GTA+? LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption, and Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition.

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Paradox Interactive's streak of game delays continues with the news its Chinese-Room-developed Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is now targeting a release in the "first half of 2025", rather than its previously announced "late 2024" window.

In a post on its website, Paradox called the delay a "proactive decision" derived from its commitment earlier this year to deliver "high-quality games" to its players. "Though [Bloodlines 2] is in a good enough place that we could have maintained our planned release window," it wrote, "Paradox and The Chinese Room collaboratively decided to prioritise polish."

Paradox says the delay will "create a quality assurance buffer, giving more time between testing and launch, ensuring we release the game when it's ready." More specifically, The Chinese Room will use the time to expand Bloodlines 2's story, providing twice as many endings as its predecessor, and to "adjust certain areas" such as Fabien - the voice in its protagonist's head.

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Just when Geoff Keighley had started to fade from your memory, he comes rubber-banding back with a vengeance - snap! It's Gamescom week and it kicks off with Opening Night Live this evening from 7pm UK time (other Opening Night Live timings here). A pre-show with additional announcements will begin at 6.30pm UK. We'll be watching and reporting on it live, as always, right here, so you can either keep abreast of announcements while you do something else, or you can join in with your thoughtful and amusing comments. Please keep us company. Please.

What do we expect to see today? Well, probably Geoff Keighley, but also the new Indiana Jones game, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Dune Awakening. We're also expecting Little Nightmares creator Tarsier to unveil its new project, which could be exciting. On top of that: Diablo 4 expansion Vessel of Hatred, Civilization 7, hero shooter Marvel Rivals, Lost Records (the project made by the creators of Life is Strange), Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (which was recently delayed), and Black Ops 6. Keighley's best pal Hideo Kojima has also been tweeting enigmatic silhouetted pictures of actors who are presumably playing roles in Death Stranding 2.

And before you ask, "Yes, there will be new game announcements," Keighley said on X.

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Nintendo's 135-year history will soon be brought to life inside the walls of a new purpose-built Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan - and ahead of its opening on 2nd October, legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed some of its intriguing exhibits in a new video tour.

The Nintendo Museum has been built on the site of the factory where Nintendo originally made its Hanafuda cards, and which was later used for quality checks during the Famicom era. That building and its unremarkable carpark are no longer standing, however, now replaced by a shiny two-floor monument to Nintendo's history and a Mario-themed plaza.

Miyamoto's 13-minute tour begins on the second floor of the museum, where several huge curved glass displays - containing many of the products Nintendo has released since its founding in 1889 - can be found. This whole area is intended to chart the evolution of Nintendo's approach to entertainment, from its earlier non-video game products - including copy machines, baby strollers, RC cars, and pitching machines - into more familiar territory, beginning with 1977's early video game forays, the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15.

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Final Fantasy 16 will launch on PC on 17th September across both the Epic Games Store and Steam.

The PC version has been long-awaited since the game was released as a PS5 console exclusive last year.

Today's news comes with a new PC specific trailer, see below. A demo is available to try out now.

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Konami has dropped a brand new story trailer for its highly-anticipated Silent Hill 2 Remake.

The teaser essentially matches the original's acclaimed 2001 E3 trailer, and the script is almost identical, too, all set against a fabulous reimagining of (one of) Silent Hill 2's end themes, Promise.

The Remake trailer is below. For comparison, here's the 2001 E3 trailer for Silent Hill 2:

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A new "modern camera" mod is now available for Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill 4: The Room on PC.

Modder ZealotTormunds has developed a mod that gives Silent Hill players both a first-person perspective and a more contemporary over-the-shoulder camera.

Both Silent Hill 3 and 4 typically use fixed camera angles. By freeing up these locked perspectives, Zealot provides players with the chance to get a closer look at the game's textures, enemies, and environments.

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Sega's Eternal Champions is the next video game franchise to get a silver-screen adaptation.

Whilst it's hardly surprising that filmmakers are still rooting through video game catalogues for ideas, I can't say I had Sega's 1993 fighting game on my bingo card for the next series to be getting an adaptation.

However, according to Hollywood Reporter, that's exactly what's happening, with Jurassic World trilogy writer Derek Connolly set to write the live-action screenplay.

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15 minutes of Astro Bot has once again leaked online, giving us a premature peek at what to expect when the game releases on 6th September.

In news unlikely to surprise you, the video has already been removed from YouTube (although you can still find copies of it if you're prepared to go looking), but eagle-eyed fans nonetheless managed to get a peek at the main hub, as well as a sneaky glimpse at some of the bots we can expect.

If you'd prefer to keep everything a surprise, head back to the main page now. For those excited and happy for a little head's up, read on…

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Kaitlyn Dever, the actress portraying Abby Anderson in the second season of HBO's The Last of Us adaptation, required extra security during filming for her own protection.

This comes from fellow castmate Isabel Merced, who is playing Dina in the show. Speaking with Josh Horowitz on Happy Sad Confused, Merced discussed the strong emotions the series can spark within some that have resulted in volatile reactions from so-called fans.

When Horowitz said he was concerned about Dever, and the toxicity she will likely receive "through proxy of being Abby", Merced stated there are "so many strange people" who "genuinely hate" the character. This is despite her being completely fictional. And, because of this, Dever was required to have extra security during the filming for the second season.

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For many, scaling Mount Everest has stood as the ultimate challenge of one's strength and endurance. An achievement of a lifetime. For long-time Doom players, however, there is an equivalent: NUTS.WAD. Legend has it that NUTS.WAD descended upon Doom players in the year 2001: a map from the future in which players are dropped into a single map with more than 10,000 enemies and a handful of power-ups. And now - for the first time ever - it's playable on a games console.

I'm half-joking, of course, but the ability to load in any Doom mod is just one great feature found in the latest version of Doom and Doom 2. Helmed by Nightdive in cooperation with id Software and Machine Games, this new version is worth looking at as it is the most feature rich, best-performing version of Doom on consoles. It's available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series consoles, Switch and even last-gen PS4 and Xbox hardware. The game was transitioned over to Nightdive's KEX engine and brings with it a vast array of enhancements - 120fps support on consoles, 16-player multiplayer including co-op, and a new soundtrack from the legendary Andrew Hulshult.

But it was the mod support that was my first destination and with it, the chance to see how Nightdive's work would cope with the NUTS.WAD challenge. This pushes beyond the limits of what Doom engine was intended to handle and now we can test it on console and the results are interesting. Before we go on, it's worth stressing that all current-gen machines can handle 4K gaming at 120fps - and yes, that includes Series S. The engine is optimised and fast - all the included content and every map I tested runs like greased lightning. I wanted to raise this caveat because the challenge of NUTS.WAD is so extreme and cruel that I don't want people to get the wrong idea. The fact that you can run NUTS.WAD at all is cause for celebration!

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Google rolled out significant upgrades for Gmail’s Help me write feature earlier this year, giving users the ability to dictate text prompts to easily draft an email. The company also previewed a new “Polish” feature that could fix drafts to create a structured email at the touch of a button. This feature is now rolling out to users along with new Help me write and Refine my draft shortcuts for Gmail on Android and iOS.

Google announced the rollout in a recent Workspace Updates blog, revealing that the new Polish option will be available as part of Help me write’s Refine my draft feature on Gmail for mobile and web. With this feature, you’ll be able to enter rough notes into a draft and Gemini will “turn the content into a completely formal draft, ready for you to review in one click.”

Since Gemini Live became available to me on my Pixel 8 Pro late last week, I’ve found myself using it very often. Not because it’s the latest and hottest trend, no, but because almost everything I hated about talking to Google Assistant is no longer an issue with Gemini Live. The difference is staggering.

I have a lot to say about the topic, but for today, I want to focus on a few aspects that make talking to Gemini Live such a better experience compared to using Google Assistant or the regular Gemini.

1. Gemini Live understands me, the way I speak

English is only my third language and even though I’ve been speaking it for decades, it’s still not the most natural language for me to use. Plus, I have the kind of brain that zips all over the place. So, every time I wanted to trigger Google Assistant, I had to think of the exact sentence or question before saying, “Hey Google.” For that reason, and that reason alone, talking to Assistant never felt natural to me. It’s always pre-meditated, and it always requires me to pause what I’m doing and give it my full attention.

Google Assistant wants me to speak like a robot to fit its mold. Gemini Live lets me speak however I want.

Gemini Live understands natural human speech. For me, it works around my own speech’s idiosyncracies, so I can start speaking without thinking or preparing my full question beforehand. I can “uhm” and “ah” mid-sentence, repeat myself, turn around the main question, and figure things out as I speak, and Live will still understand all of that.

I can even ask multiple questions and be as vague or as precise as possible. There’s really no restriction around how to speak or what to say, no specific commands, no specific ways to phrase questions — just no constraints whatsoever. That completely changes the usability of AI chatbots for me.

2. This is what real, continuous conversations should be like

Google Assistant added a setting for Continuous Conversations many years ago, but that never felt natural or all that continuous. I’d say “Hey Google,” ask it for something, wait for the full answer, wait an extra second for it to start listening again, and then say my second command. If I stay silent for a couple of seconds, the conversation is done and I have to re-trigger Assistant again.

Plus, Assistant treats every command separately. There’s no real ‘chat’ feeling, just a series of independent questions or commands and answers.

Interruptions, corrections, clarifications, idea continuity, topic changes — Gemini Live handles all of those.

Gemini Live works differently. Every session is a real open conversation, where I can talk back and forth for a while, and it still remembers everything that came before. So if I say I like Happy Endings and ask for similar TV show recommendations, I can listen in, then ask more questions, and it’ll keep in mind my preference for Happy Endings-like shows.

I can also interrupt it at any point in time and correct it if it misunderstood me or if the answer doesn’t satisfy me. I don’t have to manually scream at it to stop or wait for it as it drones on for two minutes with a wrong answer. I can also change the conversation topic in an instant or give it more precise questions if needed.

Plus, Gemini Live doesn’t shut off our chat after a few seconds of silence. So I can take a few seconds to properly assimilate the answer and think of other clarifications or questions to ask, you know, like a normal human, instead of a robot who has the follow-ups ready in a second.

Better yet, I can minimize Live and go use other apps while still keeping the chat going. I’ve found this excellent while browsing or chatting with friends. I can either invoke Live mid-browsing to ask questions and get clarifications about what I’m reading, or start a regular Live chat then pull up a browser to double check what Gemini is telling me.

3. TL;DR? Ask it for a summary

As I mentioned earlier, every command is a separate instance for Google Assistant. Gemini Live considers an entire chat as an entity, which lets me do something I could never do with Assistant: ask for a summary.

So if I had a chat about places to run around in Paris and test the new Panorama mode on the Pixel 9 series, I can ask it for a summary in the end, and it’ll list all of them. This is incredibly helpful when trying to understand complex topics or get a list of suggestions, for example.

4. Want to talk more about a specific topic? Resume an older chat

At one point, I opened Gemini Live and said something like, “Hey, can we continue our chat about Paris panorama photos?” And it said yes. I was a bit gobsmacked. So I went on, and it seemed to really know where we left off. I tried that again a few times, and it worked every time. Google Assistant just doesn’t have anything like this.

Another way to trigger this more reliably is to open Gemini, expand the full Gemini app, tap on Recents and open a previous chat. Tapping on the Gemini Live icon in the bottom right here allows you to continue an existing chat as if you never stopped it or exited it.

5. Check older chats and share them to Drive or Gmail

Viewing my Google Assistant history has always been a convoluted process that requires going to my Google account, finding my personal history, and checking the last few commands I’ve done.

With Gemini, it’s so easy to open up previous Live chats and read everything that was said in them. Even better, every chat can be renamed, pinned to the top, or deleted in its entirety. Plus, every response can be copied, shared, or quickly exported to Google Docs or Gmail. This makes it easy for me to manage my Gemini Live data, delete what needs to be deleted, and share or save what I care about.

Google Assistant still has a (significant) leg up

Despite everything Gemini Live does well, there are so many instances where I felt its limitations while using it. For one, the Live session is separate from the main Gemini experience, and Live only treats general knowledge questions, not personal data. So I can ask Gemini (not Live) about my calendar, send messages with it, start timers, check my Drive documents, control my smart home, and more, just as I could with Assistant, but I can’t do any of that with Gemini Live. The latter is more of a lively Google Search experience and all the regular Gemini extensions aren’t accessible in Live. Google said it was working on bringing them over, though, and that is the most exciting prospect for me.

Gemini Live still doesn't have access to personal data, calendars, smart home, music services, etc...

Because of how it’s built and what it currently does, Gemini Live requires a constant internet connection and there’s nothing you can do without it. Assistant is able to handle some basic local commands like device controls, timers, and alarms, but Gemini Live can’t.

And for now, my experience with multiple language in Gemini Live support has been iffy at best — not like Assistant’s support of multiple languages is stellar, but it works. On my phone, which is set to English (US), Gemini Live understands me only when I speak in English. I can tell it to answer in French, and it will, but it won’t understand me or recognize my words if I start speaking French. I hope Google brings in a more natural multilingual experience to it, because that could be life-changing for someone like me who thinks and talks in three languages at the same time.

Logistically, my biggest issue with Gemini Live is that I can’t control it via voice yet. My “Hey Google” command opens up the main Gemini voice command interface, which is neat, but I need to manually tap the Live button to trigger a chat. And when I’m done talking, the chat doesn’t end unless I manually tap to end it. No amount of “thank you,” “that’s it,” “we’re done,” “goodbye,” or other words did the trick to end the chat. Only the red End button does.

Google Assistant was a stickler for sourcing every piece of info; Gemini Live doesn't care about sources.

Realistically, though, my biggest Gemini Live problem is that there’s no sourcing for any of the info it shares. Assistant used to be a stickler for sourcing everything; how many times have you heard say something like, “According to [website];” or, “on the [website], they say…?” Gemini Live just states facts, instead, with no immediate way to verify them. All I can do is end the chat, go to the transcript, and check for the Google button that appears below certain messages, which shows me related searches I can do to verify that info. Not very intuitive, Google, and not respectful to the millions of sites you’ve crawled to get your answer like, uh, I don’t know… Android Authority perhaps?

The Google Pixel 9 series will arrive with Android 14 instead of Android 15, but there are still plenty of software improvements to be found here, especially when it comes to AI. There are at least ten new AI features that we are aware of, with some of the most exciting additions being Gemini Live, Add Me, and Pixel Studio.

Historically Google has announced new software and AI features but not all of them have rolled out right away. The good news is that most of the new features are arriving at launch, though at least a few won’t be ready at launch. With that in mind, let’s jump right in and take a brief look at some of the biggest new AI features on the Pixel 9 series.

Pixel 9 AI features that are ready from day one

Let’s start with all the Pixel 9 features that are live from day one. All of these are available for the entire Pixel 9 series unless otherwise indicated.

Magic Editor adds auto frame and Reimagine

There are two new Magic Editor features, both of which will at least be temporarily exclusive to the Pixel 9 family. The former automatically frames your selected target, even if that requires expanding the photo using AI. The second feature lets you swap out backgrounds to add fireworks, pink clouds, and more.

Google Keep Magic List

You can now talk to Gemini and have it make you a grocery or to-do list using Google Keep. You don’t even have to put specific list items, just say the meals, and it can do the rest. Obviously, how well this works will probably depend on how specific you get. We hope that you can even give it specific sites with the recipes you want, and it will do the work, but for now, that remains unclear until we have more hands-on time with the devices.

Gemini Live

You can now have live natural conversations with Gemini using Gemini Live, with your choice of ten different voices to pick from. While it will be available from day one, it is initially exclusive to Gemini Advanced users. We’ve tested Gemini Live out for ourselves and found it to be very impressive so far.

Pixel Screenshots

Pixel Screenshots uses on-device AI to analyze all your screenshots. You can then ask Gemini questions and it can pull up information from the screenshots in the form of easily digestable answers.

Call Notes

Call Notes is built into the phone app and lets you record your calls. From there it will create a transcript and use Gemini to create a brief summary of the call. You can even search for these summaries and transcripts at any time in the future just by asking Gemini. This feature may not be available at launch in all regions, so your mileage will vary.

Pixel Studio

Pixel Studio is a brand new AI-powered app using Imagen 3. You can create new images through text prompts easily, but that’s not all. There’s even the ability to edit and modify these images after they are created. This allows you to better refine the image on the fly without having to completely generate a new one.

Pixel Weather

This isn’t just a regular weather app, as it adds a few extra AI features to the mix including the ability to make AI weather summaries about the expected conditions and more. Pixel Weather is far from the most exciting addition to Google’s Pixel AI feature set, but it’s still a nice extra.

Add Me

Add Me is arriving at launch but will initially be listed as Preview (beta) feature. Add Me lets one user take a group photo, and then another user swaps out while the first user takes the spot they would have occupied if they could have been in the image with everyone the first time. Gemini then takes these two images and stitches them together, making it look like the whole group was all present in the shot at once.

Pixel 9 AI features that won’t be ready until later

While most of the features above will be ready right away, it seems that a major update to Video Boost is on its way in the future, but won’t be ready for launch.

Video Boost was introduced last year as a way to improve video quality, so it’s technically not new, but we’re counting it due to just how big an update this is. Rendering is now 2x faster, it works on zoom up to 20x, and there’s even support for AI 8K scaling. There’s also HDR Plus support in the works.

Google recently unveiled a series of exciting updates for its AI assistant, Gemini, during the Pixel 9 series launch event. While the introduction of Gemini Live mode stole the spotlight, Gemini is also getting a shiny new floating overlay panel for Android. (h/t: 9to5Google)

This new interface, currently being rolled out to Android users, features a visually pleasing glow animation that surrounds the panel whenever Gemini is activated. This subtle glow not only looks neat but is also a sign that your Gemini’s got a new trick up its sleeve: a contextual overlay that understands what you’re up to without taking over your whole screen.

This update was initially teased at the I/O 2024 conference in May and allows Gemini to deliver responses directly within the app you’re using rather than hijacking your entire screen. This design change aims to help users maintain focus on their current tasks while still benefiting from Gemini’s assistance. For those who prefer the more traditional, immersive experience, a quick tap on the top-right corner of the overlay will still expand it to full screen.

Additionally, the update also includes a new “Ask about this video” chip, replacing the previous “Ask about this screen” prompt, which appears when Gemini is triggered on YouTube videos. This feature allows users to request summaries or pose follow-up questions about the video’s content.

As for the glowing floating overlay, it’s still in the process of rolling out, so if you haven’t seen it yet, hang tight. Google says it’ll be hitting more Android devices in the coming weeks, both for regular Gemini users and those with Gemini Advanced subscriptions.

All in all, these updates are setting the stage for a more seamless and engaging Gemini experience. If you’re an Android user, keep an eye out for that glow.

Google's 'Help me write,' a tool that essentially started out as an AI suggestion feature for Gmail to help you complete common sentences, expanded to Chrome earlier this year and has evolved into a robust writing companion. Powered by Gemini, the tool's functionality includes writing suggestions and rewrites, with more significant updates rolling out now that will enhance its ability to polish and refine your email drafts.

Check out the amazingly talented dancers of ILL-ABILITIES. On their website, ILL-ABILITIES states that they are:

an International Breakdance Crew comprised of eight members from around the world:  Luca "Lazylegz" Patuelli (Canada); Jacob "Kujo" Lyons (USA); Sergio "Checho" Carvajal (Chile); Redouan "Redo" Ait Chitt (The Netherlands); Jung Soo "Krops" Lee (South Korea); Samuel Henrique "Samuka" da Silveira Lima (Brazil) ; Lucas "Perninha" Machado (Brazil); "Junior" Bosila Banya (France).

— Read the rest

The post ILL-ABILITIES showcases amazing differently-abled breakdancers appeared first on Boing Boing.

Qualcomm's new AI/Copilot PCs has overwhelming hype but their actions point to a far murkier picture.
Read more ▶

The post Qualcomm AI/Copilot PCs don’t live up to the hype appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Last week ARM unveiled their new IP that will be featured in the devices consumers buy in 2025.
Read more ▶

The post ARM Outs Their New IP lineup for 2024 appeared first on SemiAccurate.

tl;dr FLAN-T5 (11B) scored identically to GPT-3.5 (text-davinci-003) across the ten publicly available SAT Reading Tests. A finetuned 3B model scored within 7 percentage points of GPT-3.5 on held-out tests with 98% less parameters while maintaining generalization

Models: base, large, xl, xxl Dataset: HuggingFace Code: GitHub

After working on literAI I’ve been interested in further exploring language models from a narrative/literary perspective. One question I had was “how well do these models actually ‘understand’ longer prose?”

Now, it just so happens that there’s a test we make teenagers take every year to determine this very fact! That is, the SAT (specifically, the Reading part).

The SAT Reading Test, despite its name, is multimodal. There is always one section that includes a combination of charts, tables, and graphs. However, the questions are clearly delineated — typically only three questions on the test reference the data. For the purposes of evaluation I excluded these questions. First, the results.

FLAN-T5 11B scored identical to GPT-3.5, despite being less than 1/10th the size! It is also can be run on a consumer GPU (<= 24 GB) when loaded in 8-bit inference mode! This offers further data supporting the hypothesis that Google did the open source local compute LM community a great service when it released FLAN-T5.

One interesting aspect of the SAT Reading Test is that 30% of the questions reference specific lines within the passage under consideration.

Which choice best supports the conclusion that
Mr. Peters wants to attract attention?

A) Lines 80-81 (“Apparently… change”)
B) Lines 81-85 (“He straightened… hand”)
C) Lines 90-91 (“The young . . . Mr. Peters”)
D) Lines 91-93 (“He was… forty-five”)

SAT Practice Test #5 Question #9

As used in line 93, “becoming” most nearly means

A) emerging.
B) fitting.
C) developing.
D) happening.

SAT Practice Test #5 Question #10

This means that to properly answer the question the LM need to be able to count lines in the presented passage and reason about them explicitly in the context of the passage itself. The dataset I created faithfully represents the line breaks as they appear on the test. What it doesn’t contain is the extra line count helper column that appears next to the passage. For example, here is a snippet of what a passage on the actual test looks like:

Note the italicized Line and counter, which appears every five lines. Even the regular passages are multimodal! While it’s certainly just text, communicating it requires more than presenting it merely as a sequence of characters. To see how the models performed on these type of questions I took at look at how the best open source model (FLAN-T5) scored on the two question classes.

FLAN-T5 scored between 5-13% worse on the “line number” questions that it did on the other questions on the test. Could the model just need a little help counting?

To test this theory I finetuned the each of the FLAN-T5 models on eight of the ten practice tests, leaving the remaining two tests for validation. An especially huge thanks is in line to Philipp Schmid for his excellent blog posts on finetuning FLAN-T5.

The models themselves are available here: base, large, xl, xxl. Three of the four finetuned models outscored the original models, with the XL model showing the largest gain. Of particular interest is the XL model, which is within seven percentage points of GPT-3.5 while having 98% (!!!) less parameters (3B vs. 175B).

One problem with aggressive finetuning on small datasets is overfitting or loss of generalization. Do the finetuned models still perform as well as the original models on unseen tasks? To test this I ran the finetuned on a subset of the SuperGLUE metrics.

The above table represents only a few of the hundreds of metrics ran — see the data for full results. They are, however, representative; the finetuned (FT) models maintain the same generalization capabilities as the pre-trained (PT) versions! It may be that the finetuned models are (by this limited measure) “better” than the originals since they score higher on the SAT Reading Test while maintaining zero-shot unseen task performance.

In conclusion, FLAN-T5 continues to show itself as a powerful model, both in its raw reasoning capabilities relative to closed source models, but also in its ability to quickly learn new skills through finetuning — not to mention its accessibility on consumer-grade hardware. ty google

Demo: https://literai.hooloovoo.ai/ Source: Generator, UI

At my previous job I did some shader programming, and generally tinkered around with GPU workloads, and even had the chance to attend Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference a few times. I remember in 2018 or so being surprised that more and more of the conversation in this area was being dominated by these things called “deep neural networks”. During my CS studies I was focused on cryptography, but I was curious what all this was about and took an early version of Udacity’s Deep Learning Nanodegree (don’t laugh!)

The class was actually fairly insightful — making you learn about backpropagation, etc. from scratch and took you through the motions of the classic MNIST classification tasks and so forth. It ended with doing face generation using these fancy things called convolutional neural networks.

Neat, but still felt a bit gadget-y to me. Like every nerd I assumed that someday humanity would develop “artificial” intelligence, but at the time it didn’t seem like such a thing was imminent.

Of course, then came Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT.

When I want to learn something technical, I need to be able to thinker with it. Let me get into VS Code, get something working locally, something I can step into as deep as I want to. And then it’s just, you know, messing around with it.

Over the past six months I’ve been deep-diving the latest AI advancements, tinkering as I go (I recommend the excellent Neural Networks from Scratch book to get get jump started). A few projects I wrote along the way were txt2imghd and transformers-openai-api.

One pain point I kept hitting is that it seemed like the coolest stuff was all behind an API, instead of being openly accessible. Don’t get me wrong — I probably spent more money on GPU time to run open models than if I’d just paid the damn API costs, and I don’t begrudge companies trying to, you know, actually make money — but whenever I wanted to tinker the best stuff required carefully rate limited API calls. I wanna do dumb shit in a tight for loop without the fear of a gazillion dollar bill!

One night while perusing the latest arXiv posts I came across SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization, which used research into knowledge graphs to generate prompts for text-davinci-003 (the model behind ChatGPT) to create a large dataset of synthetic dialogues along with the accompanying semantic information (e.g. the intent of one of the speakers). This dataset was then used to fine-tune the open source T5 language model from Google to create COSMO, a model that can generate realistic sounding human dialogues.

I spend a fair amount of time listening to audiobooks and podcasts, and this got me thinking about potential applications. Could a podcast about a novel be generated by a model like COSMO? (As part of my research I contributed some SODA data into Open Assistant, a project to create an open source ChatGPT). Furthermore, could it be done using consumer-grade hardware, i.e. not on an A100?

Lo and behold, yacine had similar inklings and while I was working on my project released scribepod, powered by the 900-pound-gorilla that is text-davinci-003. This was partial vindication — yes, it could be done — but also somewhat deflating since it meant it would need to be tethered to an API.

Or must it be? COSMO can make the dialogue — but it needs some information on what to say. The critical task here is summarization; taking the raw novel text and distilling it into meaningful pieces that can be used as context when prompting the dialogue generating LM. Peter Szemraj has been doing fantastic open source work in this space, and I decided to use his long-t5-tglobal-xl-16384-book-summary model (again a fine-tuning of T5 — are we noticing a pattern here? Thanks Google!!!)

Okay, so I had an open source way to summarize text and generate dialogue. How about a bit of flair? Given the incredible results that diffusion models have had in image generation, I wanted to leverage these to give the podcast some imagery. My idea was a player for the podcast that would scroll between images generated from descriptions of the scene that the podcast participants were talking about. To do this, I needed to automatically generate prompts to Stable Diffusion models (Greg Rutkowski here we come).

The ChatGPT-solves-everything answer is to simply few-shot it with some examples of what you’d like using something like LangChain and let those 125 billion parameters work their magic. To maintain our open source purity I chose FLAN-T5 (paper; model), the instruction-tuned version of T5. FLAN-T5 produced very good, although admittedly inferior, results. Alas, such is the price we must pay (or not pay in this case).

Once the image descriptions were created it was simply the matter of generating a prompt and letting a Stable Diffusion model like Dreamlike Diffusion do the rest!

The final piece was to make actual audio. I cribbed yacine’s use of TorToiSe, and at last the amalgamation was complete — literAI was born! You can try out the visual player here.

I’ll save my poetic waxing about AI for another time. Rather, I’d like to simply appreciate the work of the countless researchers who contributed to getting us to the current SOTA. It’s frankly bewildering. I’m looking forward to where we’re going — and being a builder of it along the way.

Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023

review by R.U. Sirius

Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his “sacred rites.” Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.

Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.

As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli’s physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.

When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds’ evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was “combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay.”

What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli’s unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli’s interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It’s all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It’s not a cool cerebral picture. There’s a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there’s even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.

The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.

AI-Musement Park and MONDO
Vanilli’s Blockchain Busting Musical Experience “R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs?”

Immediate release from: 03/03/2023

“AI-Musement Park comprises a cornucopia of performances / talks / happenings /
documentary & discussion about AI, Intelligences, technocapitalism’s more than
pressing-ongoing urgencies.” -Eleanor Dare, Cambridge University & AI-Musement Park

R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? An original AI-Musement Park, PlayLa.bZ & MONDO 2000
History Project human and machine learning co-creation, taking the perspective of an AI that is
training itself on the R.U. Sirius & MONDO Vanilli ‘I’m Against NFT’s’ song lyrics, exploring a
surreal, mind melting and multi-dimensional 360 world of paradoxes and conflicting rules.

“Mondo Vanilli was originally intended to be a virtual reality band exploding all
assumptions about property and propriety in the 1990s. Today fabrication becomes de
rigueur as the connection to the real is intentionally confused by the banal political
tricksters of power and profitability… while storms pound our all-too-human bodies and
communities. I am thrilled to finally see MONDO Vanilli in it’s appropriate context.
Immersive. Come play in the simulacra one more time” -R.U. Sirius, MONDO 2000

R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? Is a satirical, irreverent block-chain busting commentary on
the propaganda relations fueled ‘Web 3’ hype around non-fungible tokens and the broader
issues that underpin our algorithmically massaged hyper-connected infinite scrolls and trolls
age. Challenging our assumptions about the nature of technology, creativity, and value,
reminding us that the digital world is shaped by powerful forces that determine what is valued
and what is not, and a click is not always for free.

Join Us! On Spring Solstice 2023 For “R.U. Cyber? :// Mondo 2000 History Project Salon”
at MozFest Virtual Plaza & Mozilla Hubs: AI-Musement Park 20th March / 8.30pm EU / GMT

• https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/plaza #Mozfest
• https:/ schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/LSNGRJ-1 #RUCyber
• https:/ www.mondo2000.com/2023/03/02/simcerity-r-u-against-nfts-period-question-mark-or-exclamation-point-join-mondo-vanilli-r-u-sirius-in-vr-on-march-20 #RUAgainstNFTs

About R.U.Sirius & Mondo 2000 #Mondo2000 #RUSirius

R.U. Sirius is an American writer, editor, and media pioneer. Known for being one of key
psychedelic & cyberpunk movement figures. Best known as Mondo 2000 editor-in-chief and at
forefront of 1990s underground cyberculture movement.

About Mozilla Festival #TrustworthyAI #AIMusementPark

Since 2010, MozFest has fueled the movement to ensure the internet benefits humanity, rather
than harms it. This year, your part in the story is critical to our community’s mission: a better,
healthier internet and more Trustworthy AI.

About PlayLa.bZ CIC #PlayLabZ #SpatialCadetZ

Co-founded by PsychFi, FreekMinds & Squire Studios we’re a next generation multipotentiality
multi-award-winning, multi-dimensional motion arts experience design laboratory, developing
DIY changemaking createch immersive experiences & software applications for social good
storycraft. Supporters & Friends: Mozilla Festival, Jisc: Digifest, Beyond Games, Tate Modern,
Furtherfield, Boomtown Festival, Sci-Fi-London, Ravensbourne University London, UAL, East
London Dance, NESTA, Modern Panic, ArtFutura, Kimatica, National Gallery X, Kings College
London, Looking Glass Factory, SubPac, Ecologi, The JUMP, BOM Labs, Mondo 2000

PR Contact: James E. Marks, Tel: 07921 523438 @: jem@playla.bz Twitter: @GoGenieMo

The post Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023: appeared first on Mondo 2000.

An Interview with Illuminatus TV Showrunner Brian Taylor

by Prop Anon

In December 2019, Deadline announced that Illuminatus!, the legendary underground novel, was on its way to becoming a tv show with Brian Taylor, writer/director of the movies Crank, Gamer, Mom and Dad, and the tv shows Happy! and Brave New World, slotted as the showrunner.  

Like Wilson, Taylor has taken risks with his craft. Whether it was developing “the Rollercam,” an innovative camera technique used to film Crank with his creative partner Mark Neveldine, or beta-testing the Sony RED camera while filming the underrated sci-fi gem Gamer, Taylor welcomes the inclusion of what Discordians call “the random factor.”

Wilson would give props to the risks Taylor has taken. Choosing to be the showrunner of a story with as labyrinthine a plot structure as Illuminatus! may be Taylor’s biggest risk of all!

In his last movie, Mom and Dad, starring Nic Cage and Selma Blair, Taylor presented a film that moved fluidly across the comedy, horror, and drama genres. This tonal shift, as he called it, is not only a desired type of story smart audiences want these days. It is also something Robert Anton Wilson mastered. It takes great wit, irony, and heart to make conspiracy theories funny and Wilson, arguably, is the first ever to have done it. As Happy!proved, Taylor can present shocking material with an ironically raucous gaiety, adding to the feeling of high voltage electricity than runs through all his movies.

There is no doubt that he possesses the gonzo style of sex, violence, and humor found in Illuminatus! However, as the astute Wilson reader knows, he and Shea masterfully utilized those pulp elements to draw the reader in to tell them about individualist-anarchism, critical thinking, and comparative religion. I hope that Taylor and his team can capture these more “esoteric” elements of the story. Perhaps by doing so, they will have outwitted the Curse of Greyface and accomplished the long-term goal of Discordianism — to make the whole world Popes!

I spoke with Taylor on October 5, 2020, as the California wildfires burned through more land than has ever been recorded. As the world has been jettisoned into Chapel Perilous and the walls are tumbling down, I wanted the straight dope. When will we get to see the Illuminatus! tv show?

Robert Anton Wilson once said that his biggest professional regrets was not seeing any of his books made into TVs or films, so, when Deadline announced in Dec 2019, that Illuminatus! was going to be a tv show and you were going to be the showrunner RAW fans sent a ripple of frenzy rumbled through the RAW-sphere.

BT: The Wilson Estate also has been super supportive and really stoked with everything I brought to it. They were over the moon. They were like “Oh my god, he would have loved this,” which is really good to hear.

Is this going to be the first project where you are the showrunner?

BT: Well, I was basically the showrunner on Happy! I guess for the purpose of this interview, it’s a good reminder that this show is not set up yet. Just because I’m developing it doesn’t mean that anybody will buy it or that it will ever be made. We hope so. This is a big ambitious swing. Making Illuminatus! is not like making Fleabag or something. This is a big fucking show. It’s a major work, a globe-spanning super ambitious piece of television. I felt the same way when Grant (Morrison) and I got a chance to take a shot at Brave New World. There’s been a lot of versions of Brave New World, but Illuminatus! not everybody can crack. Illuminatus! is not just sitting there waiting to be made. It’s an incredibly layered, abstract, and ambitious piece of literature. In order to honor that and honor its spirit the tv show must be just as subversive, just as chaotic, and just as impossible to pin down.

In terms of the time period of the story. Would you place it in the 1970s, like it is in the book, or would you update it and place it in present day?

BT: I think you have to make it contemporary. Why not? If you take out the names and dates, the book feels almost like it could have come out yesterday. Everything in it is more relevant now than it was then. I would have loved to hear Robert comment on what’s going on today. One of the major tenets of Discordianism is breaking down what they thought was a shared truth that was actually a lie. We were all living in a reality that we all agreed was real, but it actually wasn’t. Their idea of using subversive pranks to break down the idea of truth, to show the illusion that everybody’s living under and bring a sense of chaos to all of it was amazing. Sadly, that idea has been co-opted by the very authoritarians that Robert Anton Wilson would have hated. Promoting a type of chaos has become the active strategy of authoritarianism, starting in Russia and continuing here with Trumpism. The idea is to just completely break down and destroy the sense of shared truth. I wonder what Wilson would have thought about that.

How far along are you in the development process of the new Illuminatus! then?

BT: We’ve cracked how to bring it into the present day. That’s the main thing. How do you take these characters like Hagbard and move them into 2020, and then have that be relevant and potent. I think we’ve cracked all of that. We know what the pilot would be. We kind of know the shape of the first season and where we’d like it to go. I think it should be a three-season piece, where each season would roughly follow one book of the trilogy.

One thing that we learned doing Happy! was that shows metastasize and build themselves. We started out on Happy! with Grant (Morrison’s) comic book. That took us through about an episode and couple of scenes, which took us past the comic book. Then it was like, “Now where are we going?” And you’re in uncharted territory. Whereas I don’t think we are going to overtake the scale of this book and run out of material. But I do think that it’s going to have a way of metastasizing and becoming something different. How do you talk about Leprosy Mu (the biological warfare agent that gets loose during the novel) in a post-Covid world?

Production-wise, how far along is the show in terms of getting to the first table read?

BT: We are still in a stage where we’re looking for a partner. We need a network. We need somebody who is willing to take a chance on this thing. Obviously, it’s a complicated time to set up a show this ambitious, but it is also a good time to work on a project like this. You can basically build out the entire thing so that when it’s time to roll cameras you’re ready to go. It feels like that type of show to me because it is so global, and it really wants to hop around from location to location… it would need to be cross-bordered production. So, you’d want to go to Texas and shoot all of Texas. Then go to New York and shoot all of New York. Etc.

So, you’ve worked with some great actors.  Michael C Hall, Nic Cage, Chris Meloni, Jason Statham, Patton Oswald and, of course, the great Glenn Howerton. Have you approached any of them about appearing in Illuminatus!?

BT: Yeah, when we have the network and it’s more a go, a lot of those names you just mentioned are people I’d want to get involved. And those are all really smart people and people who would get the book and be inspired by it. There are some actors that would react with “Ah just send me the script because I don’t want to read all that.”

Illuminatus! is not the most inviting text. You want people who are really on the page. People who get it and love it. If you are doing something that’s really complicated like this, trying to make something different, you need everyone to be on the same page. Especially when it comes to television, which is exponentially more difficult to make well than movies. I didn’t realize that until I got into it. The amount of work involved in showrunning  and how quickly it comes at you… there’s nothing that can really prepare you for that.  It makes directing a movie feel like a cruise. It’s like an avalanche of stuff coming at you on a daily basis. And it’s all you can do to keep up, if you are trying to do something really ambitious — and Happy! was ambitious and this is even more so. One thing you figure out quickly is that you gotta have people helping you. You gotta have people involved that really get it and are not fighting against you all the time but who are helping it be better. On Happy!, the number one guy like that was Meloni. He deeply got the sense of humor of that show. So, it was like having an extra producer, an extra writer and director on set all the time who was just pushing it, not just to be better, but to be what it should be.

Sometimes you get the guest director come in — the show has a weird tone, weird sense of humor and material — so some directors and even actors would come in and not get it. They didn’t get the sense of humor, they didn’t get the irony, and they didn’t get the tone. It’s just like we were talking about. It’s that meta-modern idea of embracing all tones simultaneously. A lot of guys don’t know how to do that…they’re just used to one thing. It’s amazing how one person can come into the mix who just doesn’t get what you’re doing and the whole thing can come grinding to a halt. So when you have a situation where everyone gets it, it takes on this momentum and becomes really fun despite how difficult it is. Something like Illuminatus!… you have to have people who just deeply get it.

Yeah, you are perhaps going to have to have some sort of vetting process that involves lots of acid and strobe lights. How did the book hit you the first time you read it. Were there weird synchronicities around reading it?

BT: I was not one of those guys who read it as a teenager. I came upon that book later in life when my artistic sensibility was already established.One of the main feelings that I had reading Illuminatus! was this sort of revelatory feeling that this is where all this shit comes from. This is the seminal piece. This is the seed. Like everybody got everything from this book.

I always used to tease Grant (Morrison)…like when American Gods came out, I was like “Grant did you get any royalties on that? Somebody else is making The Invisibles.” When you read Illuminatus! you’re like “oh shit man, this is the original! This is where The Invisibles came from. This is where everything came from!” A lot of things that I look for as an artist and a lot of my sensibilities were formed by that book without even knowing about it because it influenced so many things that influenced me. And there is that psychedelic quality that the book has where you just fall into it. When you read the book, you feel like a different person. It definitely has more of an effect on your life than a book normally does. It kind of takes you over a little bit, and when you’re finished reading it, there’s this period of coming out of it that which feels like you are coming out of a dream and back into reality. You realize that that book was taking you someplace else. But because it’s Illuminatus! and its Robert Anton Wilson, you think, “Well, I think I’m not coming out of reality, but maybe I was coming out of something else.”

One other thing. Illuminatus! is just so smart and funny. I found that I just missed him, and the world misses him. I’ve seen these interviews where he talked about the things he looked forward to and where he thought the world was going, and there was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years.

There’s a sadness when you hear him talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad. In a way, you miss him but it’s also like I’m glad he didn’t live to see this. Selfishly, I want him here because I want to hear his perspective. I want him to put it in a context that isn’t so scary and sad because he just kind of had a way of doing that.

Orson Welles once said that when Hemingway died there was a period of about ten years where nobody spoke or wrote about Hemingway in America, but then suddenly Hemingway came back. Welles concluded with, “I think it’s mainly true that writers go into total eclipse right after their death.” So perhaps there are these gestation periods, and the world is now ready to start hearing the message of RAW. I mean the whole fucking planet is collectively going through Chapel Perilous right now. We are living in Illuminatus! right now. 

I really hope there’s a network out there that is smart enough and brave enough to pick this show up.

BT:  I think it’s going to be a really special show. It would be one of the greatest things I could hope to do. Grant and I were really excited to take a crack at Brave New World, but at the end of the day that sort of became very much a studio thing. It didn’t really express the punk rock mad energy that we thought Huxley deserved. Huxley was another one. He is up there on the Mt. Rushmore with Wilson. I think he deserved more. But that’s Hollywood. Sometimes things just get dulled down.

Coming out of Brave New World with Grant, I am not going to let that happen with Illuminatus! It’s better not to make it at all than to make the compromised version with no teeth. If we’re going to make it, it would have to be something that would make Robert proud. It has to be something that strives to have that type of impact and embraces the spirit of the material. If it can’t be that then I really believe it’s not worth the time to do it. Let the book stand. The book is always going to be great. So that’s the challenge. The challenge is… we’re going to do it and we’re not going to let it get polluted. We want to try to give this to people to mainline the pure dope of Illuminatus! Let’s see if we can pull it off. If we can, then it will be amazing!

The post To Mainline the Pure Dope of Illuminatus! appeared first on Mondo 2000.

I needed desk space badly as my desk of hobby/actual work was completely claimed by the A1 Mini and the AMS Lite doohicky sitting next to it. Together they were taking about three horizontal feet of desk space and I didn’t have six inches of desk I could see that wasn’t 3D printer related or not easily accessible.

I checked the options for compacting the printer and they were wall mount, which was rated “probably the best option” by several people I don’t know, and adding a riser to place the AMS directly over the A1 Mini.

As I don’t have a wall behind the unit (it’s a window) I decided to go ahead and try printing up this riser from here by Spar-Fuchs24.de.

Before I go too far into this story I’ll mention I’ve run two perfect prints and my table does not appear to be shaking around as much, but this may be hopeful thinking.

The print lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 hours – I was out of the office, looked in on Bambu Studio, and there was a printed riser just hanging out living its best life. I got into work today and that was no longer the case – at some point after printing it decided it was going to detach from the plate and make a run for it.

No damage noted I set about removing the printed supports and installing it on the machine. It’s pretty evident what you need to do – remove a top of pole screw, when you remove said screw the top comes off, there’s a plate in there with 3 screws that can be removed with the tools that shipped with the printer, remove that and set the 3 screws aside, and get to screwing them in.

I unloaded all my spools from the AMS because I suspected it was going to be a pain to mount with the spools on, and proceeded to mount it with no real issues. The tubing looked like it was not going to work any more as it was now pretty darn high, but worked fine.

Loaded up, two perfect prints in and with about two feet of additional desk space I’m enjoying it.

I’ll update if I end up with any sub par prints in the next bit, but the added weight seems to have caused the unit to travel less.

Oh yeah, while I cannot find this at the time I’m writing this I ran across a video yesterday while looking for a solution that said that the main problem with this was not being able to access spools 3 & 4 easily. The unit with spools weighs something like 2 fat guinea pigs, just turn the unit if this is a concern.

Added a riser to my Bambu A1 Mini and… well, it’s tall now by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

There have so far been very few AI innovations that have me excited, but Google has claimed they’re bringing Gemini AI to your Nest cameras to give you the ability to query them for events, and be alerted more intelligently.

The examples given were being alerted the dog is digging in the garden and asking if the kids left their bikes in the driveway, but the implications of what this could do are by far the most interesting AI use case I’ve encountered.

One can imagine a near future where you can say Hey Google, what was my kid wearing when I took her to school? When did a dog poop in my front yard? Where did I leave my keys? Did I come in with a coat last night? And many other things and get actually useful answers.

As an exhausted parent a few years ago I would have killed sometimes to know what my kiddos were wearing when we went to school so I would know whether or not I was getting everything when I picked them up.

Just knowing when people came and went from your house has an amazing array of useful (and some scary) uses as I live with two tiny amnesiacs who can’t remember which one did a chore, or what day their friend came over, or who left the door open, etc. I ended up putting cameras on the doors to try and solve some of this and by golly Gemini might be able to make them even more useful.

There are a host of other enhancements including a redesigned Google Assistant for the nest devices, but I’ll hold my excitement for that for when it rolls out.

Now if they could just add a walkie talkie or intercom feature that is NOT the broadcast feature so that you don’t have to scream to be heard across a house when there’s a device right in there, we’d be talking major advancement.

Hell, I’d let it listen in to our conversations at this point just so I could show my kids a transcript of them saying they would take the damned trash out.

Gemini AI coming to Nest cameras by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Today was an interesting day – as I may have mentioned I’m printing up fast removable suite number signs as a work project using a Bambu A1 Mini. Today’s task was to get our logo and a quick left/right directory for an elevator in which you’re given a quick orientation for which way to go when you exit the elevator.

The difficulty was our logo’s font does not exist, it was designed by an artist sometime in the 80s or 90s and we have a couple of high resolution files but no vector graphics. So my challenge was take a high resolution image and turn it into a sign with directional indicators to be placed in an elevator.

I decided I was going to use MakerWorld’s Make My Sign (free) for making this thing which did everything I needed it to do except provide arrows and turn a PDF the size of Rhode Island into an SVG.

For the arrows I just googled “left arrow emoji” and “right arrow emoji” and cut and paste them in a text box because that looked perfect. Placed white text on a dark background and I had everything I needed except our logo.

The task of turning a PDF image into an SVG involved me cutting the logo in Windows using windows-shift-s and pasting it into an MSPaint document, saving as a PNG, then going to PNGtoSVG.com (also free, no registration required, no emailing of link,) and playing with simplifying the logo from multicolor to 1 or 2.

Downloaded the SVG, imported into Make My Sign, resized, positioned, and printed.

Now it’d be really cool if I showed you what I made, but I’m not entirely enthused at the prospect of broadcasting where I work to the world (you can find it easy enough,) so I’ll just throw in the image of the Pocketables printable logo I made while attempting to figure out all the steps required to make my project work.

Fun times. As a note I have printed several suite numbers with the removable contraption but this one was fun and made me a wee bit giddy printing up my company’s logo. Yeah I’m boring.

Today I made my first 3D printed logo/sign by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

I’ve got my A1 Mini at work because 1) I’ve got a large work project I am doing on it 2) I have no space at home, and 3) every time that printer is printing I am sneezing. So I use it when I can be in another location.

I started a print on Friday with some brand new PLA from Bambu labs. I had printed a few things earlier in the day and had no problem but then one of the projects I downloaded from Maker World printed so weirdly I aborted it (globs, not sticking to the surface.) I was in a rush and closing down the software and accidentally chose to update preferences and now I get spaghetti.

Womp womp. The above spaghetti is off of a spool which was not the new spool and had been nothing but working prints until I accidentally updated something.

I highly suspect I managed to break the settings on a project, but yeah now I’m trying to figure out how to fix this. Fun time since it’s not at my house and I can’t clear the plate to fix until tomorrow.

So I now know spaghetti detection is not implemented yet on the A1 mini…

Oddly not seeing a lot of help when I’m searching this up other than delete a profile, log back into the program, and do not sync cloud profiles.

Will reveal the amazing solution when I find it. At a little over a month this is the first challenge I’ve faced made more of a challenge by being 8 miles away from me at the moment.

Fix appears to have been close Bambu Studio, open it, log out, log back in, do not sync cloud values and settings. I’m at 3/4ths of an SS Benchy with the new filament and no evident issues.

That said, the spaghetti I was printing up there appears to have been fine through about a quarter of the print and then the base was flung off the textured plate. I now have questions about whether this may be an issue of the print piece not being centered more than a bad setting.

But all appears well with the world at the moment… which is nice because I actually lost sleep trying to retrace my steps

Other possibility is a Dreo fan I recently reviewed was running at an odd number, may have been blowing on the unit and cooling the front of the plate down which is where all my fails seem to have occurred. I suspect Google Assistant misheard something and set it to Tornado.

Had my first spaghetti print on the A1 Mini by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Cadence’s Reela Samuel explores the critical role of PCIe 6.0 equalization in maintaining signal integrity and solutions to mitigate verification challenges, such as creating checkers to verify all symbols of TS0, ensuring the correct functioning of scrambling, and monitoring phase and LTSSM state transitions.

Siemens’ John McMillan introduces an advanced packaging flow for Intel’s Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology, including technical challenges, design methodologies, and the integration of EMIBs in system-level package designs.

Synopsys’ Dustin Todd checks out what’s next for the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, including the establishment of the National Semiconductor Technology Center and the allocation of $13 billion for research and development efforts.

Keysight’s Roberto Piacentini Filho explores the challenges of managing the large design files and massive volumes of data involved in a modern chip design project, which can take up as much as a terabyte of disk space and involve hundreds of thousands of files.

Arm’s Sandeep Mistry shows how ML models developed for mobile computer vision applications and requiring tens to hundreds of millions of multiply-accumulate (MACs) operations per inference can be deployed to a modern microcontroller.

Ansys’ Aliyah Mallak explores an effort to manufacture biotech products in microgravity and how simulation helps ensure payloads containing delicate, temperature-sensitive spore samples and bioreactors make it safely to the International Space Station or low Earth orbit safely.

Micron Technology’s Amit Srivastava, ULVAC’s Brian Coppa, and SEMI’s Mark da Silva suggest tackling corporate sustainability goals with a bottom-up approach that leverages various sensing technologies, at the cleanroom, sub-fab, and facilities levels for both greenfield and brownfield device-making facilities, to enable predictive analytics.

And don’t miss the blogs featured in the latest Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter:

Amkor’s JeongMin Ju shows how to prevent critical failures in copper RDLs caused by overcurrent-induced fusing.

Synopsys’ Al Blais discusses curvilinear checking and fracture requirements for the MULTIGON era.

Lam Research’s Dempsey Deng compares the parasitic capacitance of a 6F² honeycomb DRAM device to a 4F² VCAT DRAM structure.

Brewer Science’s Jessica Albright covers debonding methods, thermal, topography, adhesion, and thickness variation.

SEMI’s John Cooney reviews a fireside chat between the President of SEMI Americas and the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment on securing supply chains.

The post Blog Review: Aug. 21 appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Last month, Xiaomi launched its first smartphone with a clamshell form factor and a foldable display, the Mix Flip, a direct competitor to the Galaxy Z Flip 6. After debuting the phone in China, the company confirmed that it would launch the phone in Europe with a price tag between EUR 1,300 and EUR 1,400. However, there was no information about when it would launch the phone there and exactly how much it would cost in the region. Well, now we have some information on the matter that could be troubling for Samsung.

On X/Twitter, @Sudhanshu1414 claims that Mix Flip is already available to purchase in Europe from a few retailers and costs EUR 1,299 in the region for 12GB RAM + 512GB storage variant, which is the only memory configuration the company is offering there.

The story continues after the video…

In comparison, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 costs EUR 1,319 for the same memory configuration in Europe. So, the one from Xiaomi is undercutting the one from Samsung by EUR 20. Although that’s minimal, the Mix Flip is now technically more affordable than the Galaxy Z Flip 6.

Will that hamper the sales of Samsung’s latest clamshell smartphone? Well, we don’t think so. That’s because of two reasons. First, while the Mix Flip has excellent specifications, it is still not as durable or polished as the Galaxy Z Flip 6. Second, since it is the company’s first such device, people could avoid buying it in favor of the one from Samsung. That being said, Samsung could lose a few sales of its latest foldable clamshell phone in Europe due to the launch of the Mix Flip. It would be interesting to see which phone most people go with.

The post Xiaomi Mix Flip could eat into Galaxy Z Flip 6’s sales with cheaper price appeared first on SamMobile.

We’ve written a ton about Taylor Swift’s various adventures in intellectual property law and the wider internet. Given her sheer popularity and presence in pop culture, that isn’t itself particularly surprising. What has been somewhat interesting about her as a Techdirt subject, though, has been how she has straddled the line between being a victim of overly aggressive intellectual property enforcement as well as being a perpetrator of the same. All of this is to say that Swift is not a stranger to negative outcomes in the digital realm, nor is she a stranger to being the legal aggressor.

Which is why the point of this post is to be something of an open letter to Her Swiftness to not listen to roughly half the internet that is clamoring for her to sue Donald Trump for sharing some AI-generated images on social media falsely implying that Swift had endorsed him. First, the facts.

Taylor Swift has yet to endorse any presidential candidate this election cycle. But former President Donald Trump says he accepts the superstar’s non-existent endorsement.

Trump posted “I accept!” on his Truth Social account, along with a carousel of (Swift) images – at least some of which appear to be AI-generated.

One of the AI-manipulated photos depicts Swift as Uncle Sam with the text, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” The other photos depict fans of Swift wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts.

As the quote notes, not all of the images were AI generated “fakes.” At least one of them was from a very real woman, who is very much a Swift fan, wearing a “Swifties for Trump” shirt. There is likewise a social media campaign for supporters from the other side of the aisle, too, “Swifties for Kamala”. None of that is really much of an issue, of course. But the images shared by Trump on Truth Social implied far more than a community of her fans that also like him. So much so, in fact, that he appeared to accept an endorsement that never was.

In case you didn’t notice, immediately below that top left picture is a label that clearly marks the article and associated images as “satire.” The image of Swift doing the Uncle Sam routine to recruit people to back Trump is also obviously not something that came directly from Swift or her people. In fact, while she has not endorsed a candidate in this election cycle (more on that in a moment), Swift endorsed Biden in 2020 with some particularly biting commentary around why she would not vote for Trump.

Now, Trump sharing misleading information on social media is about as newsworthy as the fact that the sun will set tonight. But it is worth noting that social media exploded in response, with a ton of people online advocating Swift to “get her legal team involved” or “sue Trump!” And that is something she absolutely should not do. Some outlets have even suggested that Swift should sue under Tennesse’s new ELVIS Act, which both prohibits the use of people’s voice or image without their authorization, and which has never been tested in court.

Trump’s post might be all it takes to give Swift’s team grounds to sue Trump under Tennessee’s Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, or ELVIS Act. The law protects against “just about any unauthorized simulation of a person’s voice or appearance,” said Joseph Fishman, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.

“It doesn’t matter whether an image is generated by AI or not, and it also doesn’t matter whether people are actually confused by it or not,” Fishman said. “In fact, the image doesn’t even need to be fake — it could be a real photo, just so long as the person distributing it knows the subject of the photo hasn’t authorized the use.”

Please don’t do this. First, it probably won’t work. Suing via an untested law that is very likely to run afoul of First Amendment protections is a great way to waste money. Trump also didn’t create the images, presumably, and is merely sharing or re-truthing them. That’s going to make making him liable for them a challenge.

But the larger point here is that all Swift really has to do here is respond, if she chooses, with her own political endorsement or thoughts. It’s not as though she didn’t do so in the last election cycle. If she’s annoyed at what Trump did and wants to punish him, she can solve that with more speech: her own. Hell, there aren’t a ton of people out there who can command an audience that rivals Donald Trump’s… but she almost certainly can!

Just point out that what he shared was fake. Mention, if she wishes, that she voted against him last time. If she likes, she might want to endorse a different candidate. Or she can merely leave it with a biting denial, such as:

“The images Donald Trump shared implied that I have endorsed him. I have not. In fact, I didn’t authorize him to use my image in any way and request that he does not in the future. On the other hand, Donald Trump has a history of not minding much when it comes to getting a woman’s consent, so I won’t get my hopes up too much.”

It’s about the stupidest thing anyone could claim in defense of an unlawful detention and search, but Waterbury, CT police office Nicholas Andrzejewski did it anyway. He actually told a court (twice!) that someone respecting every single law applicable to them at the point of this unwelcome interaction was at least reasonable suspicion for a search, if not actual probable cause.

Here’s how this started, taken from the Second Circuit Appeals Court’s rejection [PDF] of the officer’s attempt to walk away from this civil rights suit:

At approximately 8:43 p.m. on November 12, 2018, Basel Soukaneh stopped his car with the engine running on the side of a street in Waterbury, Connecticut. Soukaneh’s iPhone GPS, located in a holder mounted to the car’s dashboard, was frozen, and he stopped his car to fix it. The area “was dark and [known as] a high crime area well known for prostitution, drug transactions and other criminal activity.”

Ah. The old boilerplate. These assertions about dark, high crime, drug area, blah blah blah presumably autofill whenever a cop starts a sentence explaining their reasonable suspicions on their incident report. It’s so overused and so devoid of actual facts that it’s become a parody of itself. Here’s Scott Greenfield’s take on this part of the officer’s narrative:

Was there articulable suspicion that a crime was being committed because Souhaneh stopped his car on the street? It was dark, as nights tend to be. It was in a high crime area, as is every area in pretty much any city anywhere. And yet, the court saw no problem with Andrzejewski demanding his license, for doing exactly what drivers are instructed to do by pulling over rather than driving while their attention is focused elsewhere. 

Any reasonable person will read this and realize that this self-proclaimed reasonable cop’s narrative has at least a couple of strikes against it. And that’s well before Officer Andrzejewski decided to convert this truly unnecessary non-stop into a full blown invasion of the interior of Soukaneh’s car and a constantly escalating series of rights violations.

Within seconds after Soukaneh stopped his car, Officer Nicholas Andrzejewski approached the vehicle, knocked on the driver’s side window, and according to Soukaneh, loudly demanded Soukaneh’s driver’s license. The interior vehicle light was on, so although the area was dark, Andrzejewski could see the activity inside of the car when he approached the window. As Soukaneh complied and handed his license over, he also provided Andrzejewski with a facially valid firearms permit. While doing so, Soukaneh also disclosed to Andrzejewski that, per the permit, he was in lawful possession of a pistol that was located in the driver’s side door compartment.

That this is being recounted in a court decision means the officer didn’t just take a look at the permit and wish Soukaneh a good evening. No, it went the other way. And it’s the sort of thing you need to shove directly in the eyeballs of every bootlicking person, police union rep, politician, and law enforcement official who claims police brutality only exists because people “don’t comply” and should just stop “breaking the law.” All laws were followed. Soukaneh did better than simply comply, he volunteered information. And this is what he got for being a model law-abiding citizen.

Following that exchange, Andrzejewski ordered Soukaneh out of the vehicle. According to Soukaneh’s description, Andrzejewski then violently “dragged [him] out of the car,” pushed him to the ground, yelled and screamed at him, handcuffed him, and pat-searched his person, recovering neither a weapon nor contraband. Andrzejewski then “shoved [Soukaneh] into the rear area of [Andrzejewski’s police] cruiser,” and left Soukaneh “bent over and partially on the floor of the vehicle.” Soukaneh remained “in that position, facing down and unable to see, until another police officer came along several minutes later and helped him sit up.”

Once the other officer repositioned Soukaneh in the cruiser, Soukaneh saw Andrzejewski search his “entire car, both front and rear,” as well as the car’s trunk. After the search, Andrzejewski returned to the cruiser and kept Soukaneh handcuffed and detained in it for an additional half hour, during which time “a group of seven to ten police officers gathered.” Id. At one point, Andrzejewski began writing on his onboard computer and turned to a fellow officer who had arrived at the scene and asked, “What should I write him up for?” The other officer laughed and the sergeant, who had also since arrived, told Andrzejewski what to write.

Unsurprisingly, the lower court rejected the officer’s request for immunity, pointing out that while the initial encounter may have been justified, nothing that followed that (pulling Soukaneh from the car, handcuffing him, searching his vehicle, detaining him for another half-hour while trying to figure out what to cite him with) was supported by probable cause.

The Second Circuit comes to the same conclusion. Simply being made aware Soukaneh possessed an item millions of Americans also own legally is not probable cause for anything the officer did past that point.

On the facts before us, Andrzejewski does not provide an articulable reason why he, or any
other reasonable officer, could conclude that there was probable cause to believe that Soukaneh possessed his firearm unlawfully in violation of Section 29-38(a). To find otherwise would consign those validly carrying firearms pursuant to a license to automatic detention because it would effectively presume that gun permits are invalid until proven valid, or that lawfully owned guns are per se contraband until proven otherwise. Such a finding would effectively render armed individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights meaningless when they are lawfully carrying firearms.

The same goes for the officer’s attempt to invoke qualified immunity by claiming no case on point would have made him aware he was not allowed to so thoroughly and lengthily violate this person’s rights. The Second Circuit says it’s not even sure why it’s spending so much time discussing this because it’s blatantly clear what happened here isn’t permissible under the Fourth Amendment.

This is not a close case, about which reasonable officers could differ. The law as it stood at the time of the events in question left no doubt that a person in possession of a firearm and a facially valid permit for that firearm had a clearly established right to be free from the kind of forcible and prolonged detention to which Soukaneh was subjected, absent any objective reason to suspect that the permit was forged or otherwise invalid.

That covers the forcible removal of Soukaneh from his car, his handcuffing, the search of his car, and his extended detention while the officer tried to come up with something to justify his actions after the fact.

It goes back to the lower court. But I imagine it will only be there briefly before Soukaneh is offered a settlement. Hopefully, that settlement will come hand-in-hand with the firing of Officer Andrzejewski. If this is the one time he got caught, just imagine what he’s gotten away with.

Axel might’ve began his journey on the villains side in the Kingdom Hearts series, but he is the poster child for starting wrong yet still finishing strong. Despite serving Organization XIII and antagonizing Sora and his party for much of the series, he experienced a change of heart (which is hard to do when you are a Heartless) and chose to serve as an ally to those he once persecuted going forward. While his past left much to be desired, he was meant to wield a Keyblade of his own all along… and Axel’s redemptive journey gives hope to all who have “lost heart” due to the sins of their past.

If you are anything like me, it can be difficult to forget our “unworthy” past and serve the Lord in the presence of those who knew what we once were… but our redemption is meant to give hope to those who share a challenging backstory like ours and are searching for more than just forgiveness and absolution. We aren’t meant to simply embrace His grace and sit on the sidelines… we were given a fresh start as well as a Keyblade of our own so we can push back against the same darkness that once oppressed us and set our fellow Heartless free.

He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians 1:13-14

And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight. Colossians 1:21-22

“There was a certain creditor who had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing with which to repay, he freely forgave them both. Tell Me, therefore, which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have rightly judged.” Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.” Luke 7:41-43, 47

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In most of my favorite video games I find that the famous “less is more” adage typically applies… I appreciate when a game sticks to what it does best and avoids the temptation to artificially pad the length of the game with broken mini-games or pointless fluff.  While side quests that add to the lore of the world are fun, excessive filler content or meaningless “follow this guy” missions only water down an otherwise excellent gaming experience… and may even dilute the story so much that a fantastic game is completely unenjoyable.

In our real world we often find “less is more” as well… each and every word we speak or write carries resonance far beyond what we may have intended, and even a well-meaning point of view can be diminished by the unintended context of the words that surround it.  The words we speak are powerful, and when we exhibit self-control over our written and spoken words we can deliver a message from the Lord with His love, grace, and clarity.  If we struggle with “opening our mouth and inserting our feet”, remember that short and sweet ensures His words are heard clear and complete.

In the multitude of words sin is not lacking, but he who restrains his lips is wise. Proverbs 10:19

But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. James 3:17-18

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Konami and developer Bloober Team released the official Story trailer for the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake. The trailer breaks down the game’s story, highlighting several characters. Additionally, several media outlets have released their hands-on previews of the game, revealing many details in the process. PlayStation Blog highlights the game’s over-the-shoulder perspective and more explorable buildings, some of which players will need to break the windows to get into. Additionally, the game’s layout has changed with enemies, items, and puzzles now in different locations. Lastly, the article reveals that the game will have a separate difficulty setting for players to focus on just the story. Silent Hill 2 will launch on October 8 for PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam.

The game’s details:

Having received a letter from his deceased wife, James heads to where they shared so many memories, in the hope of seeing her one more time: Silent Hill. There, by the lake, he finds a woman eerily similar to her…

“My name…is Maria,” the woman smiles. Her face, her voice… She’s just like her.

Experience a master-class in psychological survival horror—lauded as the best in the series—on the latest hardware with chilling visuals and visceral sounds.

Key Features

High-end Graphics and Sound – With ray tracing and other cutting-edge technical enhancements, the world of Silent Hill and its unsettling ambiance is even realer than before. And with the inclusion of new, immersive soundscapes, you’ll feel like you’re standing in the thick of it.
Larger Environments – Explore locations and buildings that were once inaccessible, or are newly added in the remake.
Enjoy the same acclaimed story, even while you experience the town of Silent Hill with fresh eyes across an expanded map.
Over-the-Shoulder Camera – The remake moves from the original’s fixed-camera viewpoints to an over-the-shoulder perspective, putting you closer to what James sees, for a more thrilling, more immersive experience as you explore the town and come face-to-face with monsters.
Evolved Combat Gameplay – Familiar weapons like the steel pipe and handgun make their return, but now with an updated combat system. Avoid attacks with carefully timed dodges, aim down sights, and more, making monster encounters more engaging and nerve-wracking then ever.

Stay tuned at Gaming Instincts via Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for more gaming news.

The post Silent Hill 2 Gets New Story Trailer and New Details appeared first on Gaming Instincts - Next-Generation of Video Game Journalism.

In a recent live panel discussing the development of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the upcoming and final Final Fantasy VII Remake installment will be “even bigger” than the other two games. “When I think about the third and final game in the Remake trilogy, it really does fill me with excitement, and I have such great expectations toward it as well,” he said. “I really hope the fans can have great expectations toward this game, and we will meet those expectations. We will definitely expand on and make the world of Final Fantasy 7 even bigger than it is now.”

Hamaguchi also noted that work continues on the third installment and expects it to beat expectations and expects it to be one of the most popular games in the history of video games. “The development team is hard at work as we speak, and we’re going to make the game something that even beats any of the expectations that you have towards the game,” he added. “I am absolutely confident that the third game in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series will be one of the most loved, most popular games in the whole history of video games once again.” Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launched on February 25 and is available now for PlayStation 5.

The game’s details:

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the second entry in the Final Fantasy VII remake project, which retells the story of the iconic fantasy game that redefined the RPG genre in three distinct games.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth picks up with iconic heroes Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith and Red XIII after they escape from the dystopian city Midgar and sees them embark on a journey in pursuit of Sephiroth, the vengeful swordsman from Cloud’s past who was thought to be dead.

In this standalone adventure, players will explore an expansive world, all brought to life with a new level of graphical fidelity, developed specifically to leverage the power of the PlayStation 5 console.

As players unravel a gripping narrative rich with mysteries to uncover, they will also witness the personal journey of each party member and strengthen their bonds to work together and face off against powerful enemies.

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The post The Third Final Fantasy VII Remake Game Will Be “Even Bigger” Than The Rest appeared first on Gaming Instincts - Next-Generation of Video Game Journalism.

Join us on a journey as we witness a daughter's growth, shaped by the choices you make as her father. While you'll guide her path with study schedules and part-time jobs, it's the unexpected encounters that will truly define her.

About “Princess Maker 2”

“Princess Maker 2” is a childrearing simulation game in which the player experiences being the father to a daughter granted to them by the stars.

They raise the girl for eight years, from ages ten to eighteen. Your daughter grows up to be an adult through various experiences in the game. The girl’s dream is to become a princess, but a wide variety of opportunities await depending on how you raise her. What kind of dream will you make come true for this girl?

Redrawing the graphics

This title is based on “Princess Maker 2: Refine,” released in 2004. Especially important graphics were redrawn by Takami Akai in a style similar to the PC-98 version. The graphics are drawn in high resolution befitting modern game systems, with a commitment to quality in the details.

Addition of an opening animation

An opening animation by Yonago Gainax has been added to the game. The animation, drawn by a team led by Takami Akai, envisions the future the player will have as the “father” with their “daughter”.

Knowing how your daughter is doing is the first step in raising her

This title is a social simulation, so it is very important to always be aware of your daughter's status and use this to raise her.

In “Regeneration”, parameters for assessing your daughter's status are always available, so you can check on her at a glance. Check what you should do for your daughter’s future, and raise her carefully.

Message from Takami Akai

I am deeply grateful to see that “Princess Maker 2”, which came out 30 years ago, is still so beloved by so many fans that we can release a new version. This time I was finally able to redo the graphics, which I had always wanted to do. Please enjoy the newly redrawn vacations and endings.

About Takami Akai

Born 1961. While still enrolled at Osaka University of Arts, he made his debut with the DAICON III Opening Animation. As one of the founding members of GAINAX Co., Ltd., he has worked on anime and tokusatsu shows, as well as games and events. His most noteworthy works include the "Princess Maker" series, Gurren Lagann, and Dai Tokusatsu Negiman.

• Release Date: July 11, 2024 (Nintendo Switch, Steam)
• August 8, 2024(PS5, PS4)
• Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, Steam
• Languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Trad/ Simpl)
• About Bliss Brain

Bliss Brain Corporation is a Japanese game publisher. Bliss Brain revives high quality games for the modern day and distributes them to the world in downloadable format. Currently, they offer "Princess Maker 2 Refine", "Princess Maker ~Faery Tales Come True~", and "Princess Maker 5" for download on Steam. "Wonder Boy Collection" (not yet released in Japan) will be released for the first time on PS4 and Nintendo Switch. Bliss Brain plans to release more new games in the future.

For details, visit https://blissbrain.co.jp.

About Yonago GAINAX

Takami Akai started this entertainment company in 2014, in his hometown of Yonago City, Tottori Prefecture. It does business based on the theme of contributing to the local community. With a small team of just 10 members, it works on unique jobs, including anime, games, and events.

For details, visit https://yonago-gainax.co.jp/.

Darkest Dungeon II is a turn-based, dungeon crawler, rougelike where you form a party of four and ride a stagecoach into what’s left of the world in an apocalyptic landscape. This game was a good mix of difficult challenges and fun strategy without many bugs, so let’s get into it.

When you first open Darkest Dungeon II, you’re shown a brief disclaimer that basically states that the game is difficult. After that, you get a cutscene that explains the game’s basic story and lore—the world is at its end, and you, a scholar, recruit a band of survivors to help you make a trek up a dangerous mountain to defeat an eldritch monster that resides in the mountain, or die trying.

After this, you hop right into the game. The first thing you do is choose your heroes. There are fourteen heroes from which you select four for your party. You only start with four heroes, but you’ll unlock more as you play.

There are two main parts to the game: the stagecoach and fighting. In the stagecoach, you drive across the land and choose paths to take while running into encounters, fights, and obstacles. The stagecoach is a little difficult to control, as the slightest movement of the joystick will throw the stagecoach from side to side. At the end of each area, you reach an Inn where you can heal your heroes and have them build bonds with each other which will help them out in and out of battle.

It’s during the fights that your choice of heroes matters. They have different stats that make them better or worse at certain things. Movement stats determines their place in the combat order. Each hero can have five moves at a time, and you can unlock more moves that you can change in between battles. The combat can be kind of complicated, but, fortunately, the game has built-in tutorials for every aspect, not just the combat. Besides that, the combat is just downright difficult sometimes. Random number generation can really screw you over in Darkest Dungeon II, so be wary of that.

Outside and within combat, each hero can acquire stress. Stress goes from 0-10. At low levels of stress, not much will happen. At higher levels, however, you’ll start to see some negative banter between the heroes. This will cause your heroes to not like each other as much and cause problems in and out of battle. Once heroes reach stress level 10 there is an 80% chance they will have a meltdown and a 20% chance they will be resolute. Meltdowns debuff the hero and make the other heroes like them less. Becoming resolute does the opposite and heals the hero, buffs them, and makes the other heroes like them more.

Darkest Dungeon II’s graphics are absolutely amazing. The game does an great job of contrasting 2D pictures with 3D models, and it looks beautiful. From the 2D characters and their attacks to the 3D stagecoach and 3D world outside of combat. Everything just fits so well together and is animated together so perfectly. I especially like the gloomy colors used to depict the wasteland of what’s left of the world.

The audio is also very enjoyable. The music isn’t repetitive, and each area is well represented by sound effects. While there isn’t a lot of music, it shifts into different songs after about a six-minute loop. This makes it so fights don’t go stale and are that much more intense and fun.

There was only one bug that I came across in the game and I don’t even know how it happened. While in a fight, the tutorials opened and I was unable to close them no matter what I did. No buttons worked, and it wouldn’t go away until I closed the game and reopened it. Again, I don’t know how it happened, but it’s a highly destructive bug that may cause you to restart a very good play-through.

Darkest Dungeon II is very fun. The graphics and audio are astounding, and the gameplay, while frustrating at times, still makes for a fun and enjoyable experience. When paired with the expertly written story, it makes for a great game. If you like the challenge of rougelites and roguelikes, this game is for you.

The post Review: Darkest Dungeon II (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

I gave up on an official translation of Ace Attorney Investigations 2 some time ago. The game, released in Japan for the Nintendo DS all the way back 2011, seemed like the one title in the series that would simply never get an English release, even after the miraculous Great Ace Attorney Chronicles release for modern systems in 2021. The continued adventures of Miles Edgeworth, the dapper, goofy-serious prosecutor who I'm pretty sure has a huge following on Tumblr, were denied to us. It's unlikely, I reasoned, that it would happen 13 years after the fact.

I'm very excited to have been wrong. Ace Attorney Investigations Collection finally brings the sequel to modern consoles with an official English translation, distinct and different from the (reportedly quite good) fan translations. The game has been jazzed up with new HD art, and tweaked to work on a single screen. Having received a preview code I'm finally able to play the spin-off, which, many fans contend, stands tall as one of the great games of the series.

After all these years, I can finally play Ace Attorney Investigations 2. I could stop writing this preview, step away from the computer, and finally see what all the fuss is about.  But I'm not playing it yet. Instead, I've been replaying Ace Attorney Investigations, a game I already finished in 2010.

The embargo stipulation for the preview session allows me to discuss the first three cases of the original game, as well as the first two of the sequel - and for a moment, I considered getting through those first three chapters and jumping right into the game I haven't played yet. Ace Attorney Investigations is, after all, often talked about as a lesser game in the Ace Attorney canon - a cute adventure for Edgeworth that, in my memory, was a pleasant but slightly meandering distraction. The thought of playing it again first felt like (and please forgive this extremely Australian simile) eating the lumps of raw capsicum and rubbery tomato in a pub side salad before digging into the schnitzel I'd ordered. I like the side salad just fine! But it's not what I'm at the pub for. 

But having revisited the first three cases of the game - which, as it turns out, I remember very little of - I can say that I was wrong again. Ace Attorney Investigations isn't an inessential spin-off. It's another properly wonderful Ace Attorney game.

Ace Attorney Investigations is a slightly different style of game than what fans are used to - there are no courtrooms, and you control Miles directly as he wanders through environments. The new chibi art style is a huge improvement over the DS pixel art original, even if a few of the animations have translated to it a little awkwardly. The narrative thrust of the whole thing is the same as the other Ace Attorney games - there's a series of murders to solve, and you need to investigate areas, talk to witnesses, present evidence, and eventually untangle testimonies to get to the truth.

But having revisited the first three cases of the game - which, as it turns out, I remember very little of - I can say that I was wrong again. Ace Attorney Investigations isn't an inessential spin-off. It's another properly wonderful Ace Attorney game.

A new mechanic, unique to the Investigations series, is the ability to deduce. Edgeworth collects facts as he investigates, and two facts can be snapped together in the deduction menu at any time to form a new piece of information. Miles is a prosecutor, but this is really a game about detective work, even more so than the other games in the series. Instead of surprise witnesses in the court, interviews are carried out in the field. Finding important clues  often yields immediate results, and the cases aren't protracted over several court days. This game still has that incredible user experience touch that all the games in the series have, where a successful objection during a testimony leads to the music immediately cutting out. Even without a courtroom or a judge, it still feels like Ace Attorney. It's never quite as exciting as that feeling of stepping into the courtroom, but those court battle elements - the back-and-forth of dissecting a testimony - can pop up at any time in a case.

The first three cases of Ace Attorney Investigations, which ease you into the new gameplay concepts and characters, are great fun. Each one is more isolated than the sprawling investigations of the mainline series - you travel from room to room rather than location to location. They're also jam-packed with easter eggs and fan-favorite characters, all of whom show up to play on their pre-existing relationships with Miles. It's fun to see some of these characters again, even if I know, on some level, I'm being pandered to. Ol' Edgy is a delight, too: the character has always projected a sense of seriousness and competency that might collapse at any moment, and seeing him get flustered by the other characters is always so much fun. Playing as Edgeworth humanizes him a little bit.

The third case also introduces Kay Faraday, the fan-favourite new addition to the cast, and her ability to recreate holographic simulations of crime scenes with her super-fancy phone - the exact kind of silly science this series excels at. The third case uses Kay, and a handful of other new characters, to facilitate a great series of twists and turns. It's one of those cases where the broad shape of what happened becomes clear early, but piecing together all the specifics is quite thrilling.

This game still has that incredible user experience touch that all the games in the series have, where a successful objection during a testimony leads to the music immediately cutting out.

After digging into these cases, I can't help but wonder why I didn't remember it more fondly. Ace Attorney Investigations is the first game in the series directed by Takeshi Yamazaki, who would go on to direct its sequel and the 3DS games in the mainline series, Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice (Shy Takumi, the director behind the first four games, helmed the incredible Great Ace Attorney titles, as well as Ghost Trick). It's possible that my memories of Ace Attorney Investigations have maybe been tainted by my opinions on Dual Destinies, the only Ace Attorney game that I flat-out do not like.

Beyond that, I think time has been good to the Ace Attorney series, and the slowed release schedule lets a game like this one breathe. When Ace Attorney Investigations originally released in 2009, it was, for those of us in the West, essentially an annual series. There had been a new Ace Attorney game on the DS every year since 2005 - and Investigations, as good as it is, wasn't as exciting as the bold (and slightly divisive) Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, not to mention the series highpoint Trials and Tribulations.

Now, releases have slowed - there have been five new games in English since 2009, one of them a crossover with Professor Layton. Revisiting a game like this means revisiting old friends, characters that the series has moved away from in more recent entries. If we ever see an Ace Attorney 7, Edgeworth could, theoretically, put in an appearance - but Dick Gumshoe has not shown up in one of these games for a long time, and neither have many of the side characters from the original trilogy who pop up in here. If there was a time where I felt like there were too many Ace Attorney games featuring these characters, it has long since passed.

Revisiting a game like this means revisiting old friends, characters that the series has moved away from in more recent entries.

Even with my renewed vigor, this isn't as good as peak Ace Attorney. The logic in the solutions isn't always as strong as they are in the best main series games - a few times in the third case I felt like my reasoning for presenting items on certain lines of testimony was just as solid as the actual answer. And for my money, the localization of this game - which is carried over exactly from the DS version - is not as strong as the other games in the series. There are more grammatical issues, more comma splices and run-on sentences, than you'd expect from an Ace Attorney game.

But these are minor quibbles, and I love this game. These characters, these cases, the feeling as the pieces start to fall into place: it's all vintage Ace Attorney. This just makes me all the more excited to move onto the sequel - the one I've been hearing good things about for over a decade now -  for my upcoming review. Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is the headliner of this release, but - judging by the first three cases, at least - the first game is well worth your time, too.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection releases for Switch, PS4/PS5, Xbox, and PC on September 6, 2024. SUPERJUMP will be publishing a full review, focused on the sequel, at that time. 

I hadn't expected that we Americans would get access to Omori until next year at the earliest. That may still hold true for a full manga collection, but you can read the first chapter online right now courtesy of Kodansha, translated fully into English. The website also has accessibility pages to allow for easier reading. Nui Konoito is doing the adaptation with Omocat, writing and drawing the pages.

The responses I've seen have been mixed. Some people aren't fans of the art, and others are questioning why events are reordered. I feel it's a great way to enter a familiar world when we don't have the RPG framework as a guide to dreams and reality.

Omori, a 2020 RPG that was supposed to come out half a decade earlier, has become an international success. It depicts a boy named Sunny forced to either confront a great tragedy that weighs on him and his original friends or withdraw into his dreams to become a hero to dream characters. Since it was originally supposed to be a manga from the creator Omocat, the existence of a Japanese manga serialized in Kodansha may see her vision and original intentions mixed with a new interpretation of the source material.

Context matters

Manga can be trippy, and there are several contenders for zaniness from Kodansha, Viz, Shueisha, and other magazines. The problem, however, is that still art cannot convey the trippiness that anime or video game animation can. You can't have random jump scares or jumps to different forms of media to indicate a mood shift. Accordingly, when translating a video game into a comic, you have to know when to make sacrifices.

Manga creators also have less time to set the stage and win over the reader. You can't spend an hour in Headspace with Omori wandering outside and then pull a bait-and-switch when Sunny wakes up since that could take up twenty pages. The creator has forty or fifty pages at most to introduce us to this game and the world. They need to be pragmatic about the important details to show.

And we do see pragmatism, along with gorgeous art. Rather than follow the Main Route word-for-word (a wise idea since the Main Route in Omori takes 25 hours minimum to complete), we get the first night and day depicted in the story. The creators choose to start with Sunny rather than Omori in a happy flashback, hinting at the tragedies that have affected this friend group. Sunny, not Omori, is the real protagonist of the story, and you don't need to conceal this for the twist of what Omori really is.

The authors trust that most readers who will be picking up the manga already know what Omori's main story is. Ergo, we don't have to start with the bait-and-switch of Omori in Headspace, when Sunny is the protagonist. We also don't have to go through all the details of microwaving steak inside a fridge long after the power has been turned off when a few silent panels can indicate the depression and disassociation that Sunny feels. Detailed art can substitute for the many activities you undertake just to get Sunny and Omori through their first night in-game.

The problem, however, is that still art cannot convey the trippiness that anime or video game animation can.

And speaking of detailed art, Nui Konoito goes all out on the scares. Sunny's hallucinations twist around him, showing how visceral his fears of heights, spiders, and deep water are. You feel for the kid, even if you know why he has become such a recluse. Little details, like him shielding his eyes when he goes outside for the first time in years, become very relatable for those that had to deal with the pandemic shutdowns. The Something and Hellmari hallucinations gain depth and texture. Without the limit of sprites, we can understand why Sunny sees long black hair everywhere.

Keep in mind that I'm not saying the manga is better than the game. Instead, it's a different interpretation, with varying visuals as a result.

What could the next chapter bring?

It's highly possible that the next chapter will take place exclusively in Headspace, now that we have set the scene. Omori has taken Sunny's place as the central character and is seeing his friends as they were six years ago. On the other hand, we could find out the aftermath of the fight that Aubrey starts in the real world.

Konoito has succeeded in keeping the wary reader guessing, and that is an achievement when most coming to the manga would already know the full story. We don't know what specific plot points will emerge in the dream world or real world, or what flashbacks we will see in which order. I'm looking forward to seeing how the manga unfolds.

In alignment with the 85th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, a new RPG sourcebook titled “Setting Europe Ablaze: The SOE Sourcebook” is set to be released. This book allows role-playing game enthusiasts to simulate the operations of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert British organization active during WWII.

Developed by military history and RPG author Russell Phillips, the sourcebook provides a flexible, system-neutral framework that caters to various role-playing systems. It focuses on the espionage and sabotage missions carried out by the SOE behind enemy lines, offering players a different perspective on WWII scenarios.

The title of the book, inspired by Winston Churchill’s directive to the SOE to “set Europe ablaze,” highlights the risky and impactful nature of the missions undertaken by SOE agents. These missions ranged from supporting civilian resistance groups to facilitating the escape of Allied servicemen.

Funding for the book’s publication was secured through a successful Kickstarter campaign, which exceeded its financial goal by 272%. Backers of the project gained early access to the sourcebook among other rewards.

The sourcebook “Setting Europe Ablaze” is now available for pre-order on major platforms like Amazon and Waterstones and will be released on DriveThruRPG starting September 1. Further details can be found on the author’s official website.

With the successful release of Deadpool & Wolverine, fans of the infamous anti-hero may be wanting to find more adventures featuring Wayne, and Sanshiro Kasama, the mangaka behind Deadpool Samurai, is here to deliver.

Though relatively underrated, Deadpool Samurai is a spin on the Merc with a Mouth by taking him on various adventures, some of which feature icons of Shonen Jump manga, like All Might from My Hero Academia. While it seemed as though the manga was over, Deadpool made an unexpected appearance in a brand-new Jump Plus manga.

The Merc With a Mouth’s Return To Manga

Initially announced as a project completely unrelated to the popular Marvel character, Viz Media announced that Sanshiro Kasama would be launching a new series on their online service titled Secret Steward, a relatively standard rom-com following a girl and her butler. When the series finally launched, though, it majorly deviated from what potential fans might have expected.

At the end of Secret Steward‘s debut chapter, the main character is struck by a giant truck in classic isekai intro style, instantly killing him. The driver who committed this heinous and gorey act is no stranger, though, with Deadpool proudly sitting behind the wheel, announcing the return of Deadpool Samurai to the manga reading service.

While unexpected, the twist was insanely clever – and was even partially set up, with Secret Steward‘s description being “Love hits you when you least expect it!” This type of return is rare, too, with many manga series returning without playing any sort of tricks on their readers. Regardless, it was the most Deadpool approach possible, and gave the anti-hero the opportunity to garner some new fans, too – if they weren’t too put off by the gore.