gaming

take-a-trip-through-gaming-history-with-this-charming-gdc-display

Take a trip through gaming history with this charming GDC display

Remember when —

Come for the retro Will Wright photo, stay for the game with a pack-in harmonica.

  • Only the most dedicated “Carmen” fans—or North Dakotan educators of a certain age—are likely to have this one in their collections.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • These “pretty cool stickers” came from a “Carmen Day” kit the producer Broderbund sent to school to encourage themed edutainment activities that went beyond the screen.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • As a nearby placard laments: “When female human characters were depicted in early video games, they often fell into stereotypical roles”—nature-loving girls or sexualized adults being chief among them.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Despite the lack of diverse female representation in early games, early game ads were often equal-opportunity affairs.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Don’t be fooled by the wide variety of headshots on these boxes—you needed to invest in “Alter Ego: Female Version” to get the full suite of personas.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • We’re struggling to think of any other video games that came packaged with a harmonica.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • A standard Game Boy Camera hooked up to USB-C output via a customized board. VGHF used the setup to trade customized postcards for donations (see some examples in the background).

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • “EXTREME CLOSE-UP IS EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT.”

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Be the coolest beachgoer in all of Zebes with these promotional sunglasses.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • A ’90s photo of the Maxis team, including a downright baby-faced Will Wright (back row, second from left).

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • VGHF’s Phil Salvador told me that this cow was one of the top results when you searched for “’90s mousepad” on eBay.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • The brief heyday of music-based CD-ROM “multimedia” experiences is rightly forgotten by most consumers, and rightly remembered by organizations like VGHF.

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

  • Ever wonder what specific pantone swatch to use for that perfect “Joker jacket purple”? Wonder no longer!

    Kyle Orland / VGHF

SAN FRANCISCO—Trade shows like the Game Developers Conference and the (dearly departed) E3 are a great chance to see what’s coming down the pike for the game industry. But they can also be a great place to celebrate gaming’s history, as we’ve shown you with any number of on-site photo galleries in years past.

The history display tucked away in a corner of this year’s Game Developers Conference—the first one arranged by the Video Game History Foundation—was a little different. Rather than simply laying out a parcel of random collectibles, as past history-focused booths have, VGHF took a more curated approach, with mini-exhibits focused on specific topics like women in gaming, oddities of gaming music, and an entire case devoted to a little-known entry in a famous edutainment series.

Then there was the central case, devoted to the idea that all sorts of ephemera—from design docs to photos to pre-release prototypes to newsletters to promotional items—were all an integral part of video game history. The organization is practically begging developers, journalists, and fan hoarders of all stripes not to throw out even items that seem like they have no value. After all, today’s trash might be tomorrow’s important historic relic.

As we wrap up GDC (and get to work assembling what we’ve seen into future coverage), please enjoy this gallery of some of the more interesting historical specimens that the VGHF had at this year’s show.

Listing image by Kyle Orland / VGHF

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“we’ve-done-our-job”:-baldur’s-gate-3-devs-call-off-dlc-and-step-away-from-d&d

“We’ve done our job”: Baldur’s Gate 3 devs call off DLC and step away from D&D

Baldur’s Gate Closed —

Larian boss says BG3 is “a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Karlach, the tiefling barbarian, infernal heart glowing, axe at her back.

Enlarge / Sometimes your infernal-engine-powered heart just isn’t in it.

Larian Studios/Hasbro

Swen Vincke, director of the colossal entity that is Baldur’s Gate 3, is not leaving the door open to future expansions of that already fully packed game.

At this week’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), Vincke made it clear during a talk and in interviews that Larian Studios is not going to make any major new content for Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3)—nor start work on Baldur’s Gate 4, nor make anything, really, inside the framework of Dungeons & Dragons’ Fifth Edition (5e).

Not that Vincke or his team are bitter. Their hearts just aren’t in it. They had actually started work on BG3 downloadable content and gave some thought to Baldur’s Gate 4, Vincke told IGN. “But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong.” On top of that, the team had new ideas that didn’t fit D&D 5e, which “is not an easy system to put into a video game,” Vincke said.

“You could see the team was doing it because everyone felt like we had to do it, but it wasn’t really coming from the heart, and we’re very much a studio from the heart. It’s what gotten us into misery and it’s also been the reasons for our success,” Vincke told IGN.

After returning from winter holidays, Vincke told the Larian team, “We’ve done our job. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. So let’s pass the torch to another studio to pick up this incredible legacy.” The team, he told IGN, was “elated.”

Onto the next act

Vincke’s enthusiasm for having determined Act 1 of “this thing I’ve been working on,” as he posted on X (formerly Twitter) in early January 2024, has some new context from this new dialogue. Larian, it seems, is working on another RPG, just not one involving a certain port city in a particular tabletop scheme.

At GDC, Vincke said Larian was “a company of big ideas… not a company that’s made to create DLCs or expansions,” according to PC Gamer’s recap. “We tried that actually, a few times. It failed every single time. It’s not our thing. Life is too short. Our ambitions are very large,” Vincke told the crowd.

As you might imagine, Larian Studios is ready to say goodbye to D&D games, but Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro almost certainly are not. As of February, BG3 had made around $90 million for Hasbro. Hasbro’s CEO followed up on that report by noting that BG3 was “just the first of several new video games that will be coming out over the next five to 10 years.”

One of those is likely to be “an innovative hybrid of survival, life simulation, and action RPG,” from the makers of the notably survival/life/RPG-like game Disney Dreamlight Valley. Gameloft Montreal pitches the game as a space where “the rich lore of this legendary franchise meets real-time survival in a unique campaign of resilience, camaraderie, and danger at nearly every turn.

It feels safe to say that you will not be able to romance Beast, Maui, or Mike Wazowski in the next big D&D game. Larian’s time in the Forgotten Realms is over, and the team is likely to have many people waiting to see where they’re going next.

“We’ve done our job”: Baldur’s Gate 3 devs call off DLC and step away from D&D Read More »

switch-emulator-suyu-hit-by-gitlab-dmca,-project-lives-on-through-self-hosting

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting

They can run… —

Developer says there’s “no way to confirm” if Nintendo was involved in takedown.

Is a name like

Enlarge / Is a name like “Suyu” ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

Suyu

Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project’s open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo.

While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab’s public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice “from a representative of the rightsholder.” GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

An email to Suyu contributors being shared on the project’s Discord server includes the following cited justification in the DMCA request:

Suyu is based off of Yuzu code, which violates Section 1201 of the DMCA. Suyu, like yuzu, is primarily designed to circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures, namely Suyu unlawfully uses unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games, or ROMs, at or immediately before runtime without Nintendo’s authorization. Therefore, the distribution of Suyu also constitutes unlawful trafficking of a circumvention technology.

A Suyu Discord moderator going by the handle Princess Twilight Sparkle shared a message Thursday evening citing the project’s “legal team” in reporting that Suyu will have to use the self-hosted Git repo “in the foreseeable future. Getting our GitLab back most likely needs us to go through a lawsuit, which is going to be very difficult… Thanks for your understanding.”

Troy, listed as a “Core Suyu Developer” in the Discord server, wrote Thursday afternoon that the DMCA request came from an “unknown source” and that there is “no way to confirm” if Nintendo was involved. “There is also a possibility that the person who sent this DMCA is a copyright troll, like on YouTube, based on the wording of the DMCA reason that was sent to GitLab,” Troy wrote.

Suyu Discord moderator and contributor Sharpie told Ars Technica that “we don’t have any more information than you at this time.”

Earlier this month, Sharpie outlined to Ars many steps the project’s developers were taking to avoid potential legal consequences, including avoiding “any monetization” and taking a hardline stance on any discussion of piracy. Despite those precautions, Sharpie admitted to Ars that “Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of.”

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting Read More »

amd-promises-big-upscaling-improvements-and-a-future-proof-api-in-fsr-3.1

AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

upscale upscaling —

API should help more games get future FSR improvements without a game update.

AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

AMD

Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD’s “Fluid Motion Frames,” which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1, which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available “later this year” in games whose developers choose to implement it.

Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia’s equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

It also means you can use FSR 3.0 frame generation with other upscalers like DLSS, especially useful for 20- and 30-series Nvidia GeForce GPUs that support DLSS upscaling but not DLSS Frame Generation.

“When using FSR 3 Frame Generation with any upscaling quality mode OR with the new ‘Native AA’ mode, it is highly recommended to be always running at a minimum of ~60 FPS before Frame Generation is applied for an optimal high-quality gaming experience and to mitigate any latency introduced by the technology,” wrote AMD’s Alexander Blake-Davies in the post announcing FSR 3.1.

Generally, FSR’s upscaling image quality falls a little short of Nvidia’s DLSS, but FSR 2 closed that gap a bit, and FSR 3.1 goes further. AMD highlights two specific improvements: one for “temporal stability,” which will help reduce the flickering and shimmering effect that FSR sometimes introduces, and one for ghosting reduction, which will reduce unintentional blurring effects for fast-moving objects.

The biggest issue with these new FSR improvements is that they need to be implemented on a game-to-game basis. FSR 3.0 was announced in August 2023, and AMD now trumpets that there are 40 “available and upcoming” games that support the technology, of which just 19 are currently available. There are a lot of big-name AAA titles in the list, but that’s still not many compared to the sum total of all PC games or even the 183 titles that currently support FSR 2.x.

AMD wants to help solve this problem in FSR 3.1 by introducing a stable FSR API for developers, which AMD says “makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.” This may eventually lead to more games getting future FSR improvements for “free,” without the developer’s effort.

AMD didn’t mention any hardware requirements for FSR 3.1, though presumably, the company will still support a reasonably wide range of recent GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. FSR 3.0 is formally supported on Radeon RX 5000, 6000, and 7000 cards, Nvidia’s RTX 20-series and newer, and Intel Arc GPUs. It will also bring FSR 3.x features to games that use the Vulkan API, not just DirectX 12, and the Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK) so it can be used in console titles as well as PC games.

AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1 Read More »

playtron’s-wildly-ambitious-gaming-os-aims-to-unite-stores,-lure-“core-casuals”

Playtron’s wildly ambitious gaming OS aims to unite stores, lure “core casuals”

Core Casual Corps —

Headed by former Cyanogen CEO, it’s a Linux OS that might not be fully open.

Mock-up of a potential Playtron device

Enlarge / This isn’t what the first PlaytronOS-powered device will look like. That could be your Steam Deck, a 5G device from your cell carrier, or maybe your car.

Playtron

The Steam Deck’s OS is purpose-built for handheld gaming, but it’s confined to one device, unless you’re willing to head out to the bleeding edge. Beyond SteamOS, there is Windows, which can let down ambitious Deck-likes, there is the Nintendo Switch, and there are Android-based devices that are a lot like Android phones. This setup has got at least one company saying, in infomercial tones, that there has got to be a better way.

That company is Playtron, a new software startup that aims to fix that setup with a Linux-based gaming OS that’s tied to no particular game store or platform. Playtron has $10 million, coders from open source projects like ChimeraOS and Heroic Games Launcher, and the former CEO of Cyanogen. With that, it aims to have “Playtron-native devices shipping worldwide in 2025,” and to capture the 1 billion “core casual” gamers they see as under-served.

Demo of Playtron running on a Lenovo Legion Go, uploaded by Playtron CEO Kirk McMaster.

What devices will Playtron use to serve them? Some of them might be Steam Decks, as you will “soon be able to install Playtron on your favorite handheld PC,” according to Playtron’s ambitious, somewhat scattershot single-page website. Some might be “Playtron-powered 5G devices coming soon to markets around the world.” Really, though, Playtron aims to provide a gaming platform to any device with a CPU and a screen, be it desktop or mobile, ARM or x86, TV or car.

  • I have looked at this Venn diagram for long stretches and have still not figured out if the target is someone who is deeply into gaming or turned off by having to choose a platform or both or neither.

    Playtron

  • Additional mock-ups of hypothetical Playtron devices from Playtron’s website or possibly just Playtron logos on existing devices.

    Playtron

Sean Hollister at The Verge spoke with Playtron CEO Kirk McMaster. He has also viewed internal planning documents and tried out an alpha of the OS. McMaster told Hollister that handheld-maker Ayaneo plans to ship a Playtron device in 2024, while “numerous OEMs and mobile operators” are looking at 2025. Playtron aims to compete with Windows on price ($10 instead of what McMaster cites as $80 per head), and against Steam with a non-Steam platform that, McMaster claims, will still prevent cheating with a Fedora-Silverblue-based immutable file system. There are also some mentions of AI tools for helping casual gamers or determining launch configurations for games. Also, there are crypto-focused investors and a mention of offering crypto-based game purchases, though Playtron may also not have a store at all.

Another notable thing Playtron has is McMaster, the former head of Cyanogen Inc. That project launched in 2013 with $7 million in venture funding and an ambition to turn the free and open source-minded Android ROM community, CyanogenMod, into a for-profit OS and apps vendor. Google reportedly tried to buy Cyanogen Inc. at some point in 2014 but was turned away, as the company saw itself as growing. By the end of 2016, Cyanogen Inc. was shut down, and the Android ROM community reorganized around LineageOS. Ars’ 2016 “Deathwatch” cited McMaster’s “delusions of grandeur,” noting his claimed desire to “put a bullet in Google’s head” while maintaining an OS that was almost entirely dependent on Google’s open source Android code.

McMaster told The Verge’s Hollister that, from his time at Cyanogen Inc., he “learned that you shouldn’t try to commercialize an open-source project with a significant history because it can lead to culture wars.” There are strong hints that Playtron will not be entirely open source, though it will encourage the Linux coders it has hired to continue contributing to projects like ChimeraOS.

Playtron’s wildly ambitious gaming OS aims to unite stores, lure “core casuals” Read More »

report:-sony-stops-producing-psvr2-amid-“surplus”-of-unsold-units

Report: Sony stops producing PSVR2 amid “surplus” of unsold units

Too many too late? —

Pricy tethered headset falters after the modest success of original PSVR.

PSVR2 (left) next to the original PSVR.

Enlarge / PSVR2 (left) next to the original PSVR.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

It looks like Sony’s PlayStation VR2 is not living up to the company’s sales expectations just over a year after it first hit the market. Bloomberg reports that the PlayStation-maker has stopped producing new PSVR2 units as it tries to clear out a growing backlog of unsold inventory.

Bloomberg cites “people familiar with [Sony’s] plans” in reporting that PSVR2 sales have “slowed progressively” since its February 2023 launch. Sony has produced “well over 2 million” units of the headset, compared to what tracking firm IDC estimates as just 1.69 million unit shipments to retailers through the end of last year. The discrepancy has caused a “surplus of assembled devices… throughout Sony’s supply chain,” according to Bloomberg’s sources.

IDC estimates a quarterly low of 325,000 PSVR2 units shipped in the usually hot holiday season, compared to a full 1.3 million estimated holiday shipments for Meta’s then-new Quest 3 headset, which combined with other Quest products to account for over 3.7 million estimated sales for the full year.

The last of the tethered headsets?

The reported state of affairs for PSVR2 is a big change from the late 2010s when the original PlayStation VR became one of the bestselling early VR headsets simply by selling to the small, VR-curious slice of PS4 owners. At the time, the original PSVR was one of the cheapest “all-in” entry points for the nascent market of tethered VR headsets, in large part because it didn’t require a connection to an expensive, high-end gaming PC.

In the intervening years, though, the VR headset market has almost completely migrated to untethered headsets, which allow for freer movement and eliminate the need to purchase and stay near external hardware. The $550 PlayStation VR2 is also pricier than the $500 Meta Quest 3 headset, even before you add in the $500 asking price for a needed PS5. Sony’s new headset also isn’t backward compatible with games designed for the original PSVR, forcing potential upgraders to abandon most of their existing VR game libraries for the new platform.

Even before the PSVR2 launched, Sony was reportedly scaling back its ambitions for the headset (though the company denied those reports at the time and said it was “seeing enthusiasm from PlayStation fans”). And since its launch, PSVR2 has suffered from a lack of exclusive titles, featuring a lineup mostly composed of warmed-over ports long available on other headsets. An Inverse report from late last year shared a series of damning complaints from developers who have struggled to get their games to run well on the new hardware.

Put it all together, and PSVR2 seems like a too-little-too-late upgrade that has largely squandered the company’s early lead in the space. We wouldn’t be shocked if this spells the end of the line for Sony’s VR hardware plans and for mass-market tethered headsets in general.

Report: Sony stops producing PSVR2 amid “surplus” of unsold units Read More »

“you-a—holes”:-court-docs-reveal-epic-ceo’s-anger-at-steam’s-30%-fees

“You a—holes”: Court docs reveal Epic CEO’s anger at Steam’s 30% fees

Not just for show —

Unearthed emails show the fury that helped motivate Epic’s Games Store launch.

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long been an outspoken opponent of what he sees as Valve’s unreasonable platform fees for listing games on Steam, which start at 30 percent of the total sale price. Now, though, new emails from before the launch of the competing Epic Games Store in 2018 show just how angry Sweeney was with the “assholes” at companies like Valve and Apple for squeezing “the little guy” with what he saw as inflated fees.

The emails, which came out this week as part of Wolfire’s price-fixing case against Valve (as noticed by the GameDiscoverCo newsletter), confront Valve managers directly for platform fees Sweeney says are “no longer justifiable.” They also offer a behind-the-scenes look at the fury Sweeney and Epic would unleash against Apple in court proceedings starting years later.

“I bet Valve made more profit… than the developer themselves…”

The first mostly unredacted email chain from the court documents, from August 2017, starts with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell asking Sweeney if there is “anything we [are] doing to annoy you?” That query was likely prompted by Sweeney’s public tweets at the time questioning “why Steam is still taking 30% of gross [when] MasterCard and Visa charge 2-5% per transaction, and CDN bandwidth is around $0.002/GB.” Later in the same thread, he laments that “the internet was supposed to obsolete the rent-seeking software distribution middlemen, but here’s Facebook, Google, Apple, Valve, etc.”

Expanding on these public thoughts in a private response to Newell, Sweeney allows that there was “a good case” for Steam’s 30 percent platform fee “in the early days.” But he also argues that the fee is too high now that Steam’s sheer scale has driven down operating costs and made it harder for individual games to get as much marketing or user acquisition value from simply being available on the storefront.

Calculating.... calculating... profit maximizing point found!

Enlarge / Calculating…. calculating… profit maximizing point found!

Getty / Aurich Lawson

Sweeney goes on to spitball some numbers showing how Valve’s fees are contributing to the squeeze all but the biggest PC game developers were feeling on their revenues:

If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1,000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter [user acquisition] or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990’s.”

Based on experience with Fortnite and Paragon, Sweeney estimates that the true cost of distribution for PC games that sell for $25 or more in Western markets “is under 7% of gross.” That’s only slightly lower than the 12 percent take Epic would establish for its own Epic Games Store the next year.

“Why not give ALL developers a better deal?”

The second email chain revealed in the lawsuit started in November 2018, with Sweeney offering Valve a heads-up on the impending launch of the Epic Games Store that would come just weeks later. While that move was focused on PC and Mac games, Sweeney quickly pivots to a discussion of Apple’s total control over iOS, the subject at the time of a lawsuit whose technicalities were being considered by the Supreme Court.

Years before Epic would bring its own case against Apple, Sweeney was somewhat prescient, noting that “Apple also has the resources to litigate and delay any change [to its total App Store control] for years… What we need right now is enough developer, press, and platform momentum to steer Apple towards fully opening up iOS sooner rather than later.”

To that end, Sweeney attempted to convince Valve that lowering its own platform fees would hurt Apple’s position and thereby contribute to the greater good:

A timely move by Valve to improve Steam economics for all developers would make a great difference in all of this, clearly demonstrating that store competition leads to better rates for all developers. Epic would gladly speak in support of such a move anytime!

In a follow-up email on December 3, just days before the Epic Games Store launch, Sweeney took Valve to task more directly for its policy of offering lower platform fees for the largest developers on Steam. He offered some harsh words for Valve while once again begging the company to serve as a positive example in the developing case against Apple.

Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people. We’re all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?

After being forwarded the message by Valve’s Erik Johnson, Valve COO Scott Lynch simply offered up a sardonic “You mad bro?”

GameDiscoverCo provides a good summary of other legal tidbits offered in the (often heavily redacted) documents published in the case file this week. Wolfire is now seeking a class-action designation in the suit with arguments that largely rehash those that we covered when the case was originally filed in 2021 (and revived in 2022). While Epic Games isn’t directly involved in those legal arguments, it seems Sweeney’s long-standing position against Valve’s monopoly might continue to factor into the case anyway.

“You a—holes”: Court docs reveal Epic CEO’s anger at Steam’s 30% fees Read More »

google’s-new-gaming-ai-aims-past-“superhuman-opponent”-and-at-“obedient-partner”

Google’s new gaming AI aims past “superhuman opponent” and at “obedient partner”

Even hunt-and-fetch quests are better with a little AI help.

Enlarge / Even hunt-and-fetch quests are better with a little AI help.

At this point in the progression of machine-learning AI, we’re accustomed to specially trained agents that can utterly dominate everything from Atari games to complex board games like Go. But what if an AI agent could be trained not just to play a specific game but also to interact with any generic 3D environment? And what if that AI was focused not only on brute-force winning but instead on responding to natural language commands in that gaming environment?

Those are the kinds of questions animating Google’s DeepMind research group in creating SIMA, a “Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent” that “isn’t trained to win, it’s trained to do what it’s told,” as research engineer Tim Harley put it in a presentation attended by Ars Technica. “And not just in one game, but… across a variety of different games all at once.”

Harley stresses that SIMA is still “very much a research project,” and the results achieved in the project’s initial tech report show there’s a long way to go before SIMA starts to approach human-level listening capabilities. Still, Harley said he hopes that SIMA can eventually provide the basis for AI agents that players can instruct and talk to in cooperative gameplay situations—think less “superhuman opponent” and more “believable partner.”

“This work isn’t about achieving high game scores,” as Google puts it in a blog post announcing its research. “Learning to play even one video game is a technical feat for an AI system, but learning to follow instructions in a variety of game settings could unlock more helpful AI agents for any environment.”

Learning how to learn

Google trained SIMA on nine very different open-world games in an attempt to create a generalizable AI agent.

To train SIMA, the DeepMind team focused on three-dimensional games and test environments controlled either from a first-person perspective or an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. The nine games in its test suite, which were provided by Google’s developer partners, all prioritize “open-ended interactions” and eschew “extreme violence” while providing a wide range of different environments and interactions, from “outer space exploration” to “wacky goat mayhem.”

In an effort to make SIMA as generalizable as possible, the agent isn’t given any privileged access to a game’s internal data or control APIs. The system takes nothing but on-screen pixels as its input and provides nothing but keyboard and mouse controls as its output, mimicking “the [model] humans have been using [to play video games] for 50 years,” as the researchers put it. The team also designed the agent to work with games running in real time (i.e., at 30 frames per second) rather than slowing down the simulation for extra processing time like some other interactive machine-learning projects.

Animated samples of SIMA responding to basic commands across very different gaming environments.

While these restrictions increase the difficulty of SIMA’s tasks, they also mean the agent can be integrated into a new game or environment “off the shelf” with minimal setup and without any specific training regarding the “ground truth” of a game world. It also makes it relatively easy to test whether things SIMA has learned from training on previous games can “transfer” over to previously unseen games, which could be a key step to getting at artificial general intelligence.

For training data, SIMA uses video of human gameplay (and associated time-coded inputs) on the provided games, annotated with natural language descriptions of what’s happening in the footage. These clips are focused on “instructions that can be completed in less than approximately 10 seconds” to avoid the complexity that can develop with “the breadth of possible instructions over long timescales,” as the researchers put it in their tech report. Integration with pre-trained models like SPARC and Phenaki also helps the SIMA model avoid having to learn how to interpret language and visual data from scratch.

Google’s new gaming AI aims past “superhuman opponent” and at “obedient partner” Read More »

lost,-circa-2008-timesplitters-4-prototype-discovered-on-ps3-dev-kit

Lost, circa-2008 Timesplitters 4 prototype discovered on PS3 dev kit

A historic find —

Redditor paid a reported $670 to rescue the unit and archive the game for posterity.

Timesplitters 4 available to the public until this month.” height=”238″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ts4monkey-300×238.png” width=”300″>

Enlarge / This image from a 2007 teaser was one of the only remaining bits of Timesplitters 4 available to the public until this month.

Longtime readers and first-person shooter fans might remember how excited we were for the announcement of Timesplitters 4 in late 2008. Unfortunately, an intriguing trailer was the last we saw of the game before the project was killed amidst Free Radical’s bankruptcy later that year.

Today, though, we actually have a chance to see and play what we missed over 15 years ago. That’s thanks to an eagle-eyed eBay trawler who grabbed an aging PlayStation 3 development kit that happened to have a prototype of Timesplitters 4 sitting on its hard drive.

Reddit user Flimsy-Zebra3775 posted about the find earlier this month, asking the PS3 subreddit community for guidance on what looked like a working prototype of the long-lost game. After reportedly asking the seller “a lot of probing questions” and confirming that the prototype could be booted, Flimnsy-Zebra reportedly paid 525 pounds (about $670) for the dev kit, saying, “for history and my collection, it’s worth it.”

Footage from the now-archived prototype, running on an actual PS3.

Once the dev kit was in hand, Flimsy-Zebra shared the prototype files with the Timespliters subreddit and Hidden Palace, a site devoted to archiving these kinds of prototypes for posterity. While the incomplete build doesn’t work on PS3 emulator RPCS3, fans have uploaded a few videos of the game running on actual PS3 hardware, showing off battles with computer-controlled bots outside a gothic castle (and some incredibly kick-ass music, to boot).

Free Radical founder (and noted GoldenEye/Perfect Dark developer) David Doak confirmed the footage’s authenticity on social media, reminiscing that “this is exactly the kind of nonsense that [insert any publisher name] wasn’t interested in back in 2008. You’re welcome.”

After Free Radical closed for good in 2014, a studio with the same name was re-formed under publishing conglomerate Embracer in 2021 to once again try to make a version of Timesplitters 4 a reality. Ironically enough, that Timesplitters 4 project was also shuttered amid massive layoffs at Embracer late last year. Who knows, maybe in 2040 a prototype version of that completely different Timesplitters 4 will turn up on some random dev kit, ready for archiving.

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here’s-how-the-makers-of-the-“suyu”-switch-emulator-plan-to-avoid-getting-sued

Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued

Is a name like

Enlarge / Is a name like “Suyu” ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

Suyu

Last week, the developers behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu took down their GitHub and web presence in the face of a major lawsuit from Nintendo. Now, a new project built from the Yuzu source code, cheekily named Suyu, has arisen as “the continuation of the world’s most popular, open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu.”

Despite the name—which the project’s GitHub page notes is “pronounced ‘sue-you’ (wink, wink)”—the developers behind Suyu are going out of their way to try to avoid a lawsuit like the one that took down Yuzu.

“Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of,” contributor and Discord moderator Sharpie told Ars in a recent interview. “There are multiple plans and possibilities for what to do next. Things are still being organized and planned.”

Doing things differently

The Suyu project arose out of “a passion for Switch emulation” and a desire not to see “years of impressive work by the Yuzu team go to waste,” Sharpie said. But that passion is being tempered by a cautious approach designed to avoid the legal fate that befell the project’s predecessor.

After consulting with an unnamed “someone with legal experience” (Sharpie would only say “they claimed three years of law school”), the Suyu development team has decided to avoid “any monetization,” Sharpie said. The project’s GitHub page clearly states that “we do not intend to make money or profit from this project,” an important declaration after Nintendo cited Yuzu’s profitability a few times in its recent lawsuit. Other emulator makers also told Ars that Yuzu’s Patreon opened the project up to a set of pesky consumer demands and expectations.

The Suyu devs have also been warned against “providing step-by-step guides” like the ones that Yuzu offered for how to play copyrighted games on their emulator. Those guides were a major focus of Nintendo’s lawsuit, as were some examples of developer conversations in the Yuzu Discord that seemed to acknowledge and condone piracy.

Xenoblade Chronicles the day before its release.” height=”626″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/yuzuleak-640×626.png” width=”640″>

Enlarge / In a blog post cited in Nintendo’s lawsuit, the Yuzu developers discuss compatibility with a leaked copy of Xenoblade Chronicles the day before its release.

Suyu, by contrast, is taking an extremely hard line against even the hint of any discussion of potential piracy on its platforms. The Suyu GitHub page is upfront that the developers “do not support or condone piracy in any form,” a message that didn’t appear on Yuzu’s GitHub page or website.

The No. 1 rule listed on the Suyu Discord is that “piracy is prohibited.” That includes any talk about downloading games or “asking for system files, ROMs, encryption keys, shader caches, and discussion of leaked games etc.” Even a mention of the word piracy with regard to legal questions is enough to earn a warning on the Discord, according to those rules.

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sixty-four-is-a-beautiful-system-design-toy-that-reveals-something-rather-dark

Sixty Four is a beautiful system design toy that reveals something rather dark

What is an idle clicker, really? —

Please do not load up this game if you have real tasks to accomplish, I beg you.

Your author is eight hours in and only recognizes roughly 50 percent of the objects and resources in this provided screenshot. It gets deeper—and weirder.

Enlarge / Your author is eight hours in and only recognizes roughly 50 percent of the objects and resources in this provided screenshot. It gets deeper—and weirder.

Playsaurus

There haven’t been many times in my life where I’ve wondered if this feeling I have is something that oil barons must have felt at the height of their Gilded Age powers.

But Sixty Four got me there. I’m still not sure I’ve ever played a $6 game that had me so fully engaged while also deeply disquieted about the nature of humanity.

Sixty Four (Windows and Mac, on Steam) has been running for more than seven hours on my computers. “Running” isn’t quite right, though. Early on in Sixty Four, you’re actively clicking, upgrading, and figuring out what’s going on. As the game goes on, and you figure out some virtuous loops, you can technically leave it running in the background while you do other things, checking in occasionally to fuel a machine or start a conversion. I write “technically” because while the game is capable of working in the background, indifferent to the human need to build, refine, and expand, you very well may not be.

Trailer for Sixty Four.

What are you building, and why? Where are you? It’s not clear. Sixty Four starts you in a blank white space, with a single machine, an Extracting Channel. Push it down, and you’ll see big black cubes emerge from the ground. Click on those cubes many times and they break into 64 smaller cubes, then eventually burst and collect in your inventory. With enough black cubes (Charonite) stashed, you can build machines that make cubes easier to break and faster to extract. Eventually, you can keep your extractor pressed down with a pressure pump and have an “Entropy resonator” click the cubes for you.

Your job shifts from cube-clicker to system-builder to optimizer. You set up machines to do things, machines that improve those other machines, machines to feed those machines that improve those other machines, machines that help you recover more resources from machines you later discard. At one point, the blocks cover so much of your screen that you build a radio tower that turns them into tiny lines, blowing like dandelion fluff from source to storage.

  • All I need is this extraction channel. And these fans to speed it up. The fans, a pressure pump, and some destabilizers. That’s it.

    Playsaurus

  • Well, okay, maybe I’ve built out a few more things, but it’s only because the resources changed.

    Playsaurus

  • The game’s forced isometric perspective can be a bit stifling, but you can peek through stuff with a keypress.

    Playsaurus

  • Resources don’t just get collected, they fly out from origin point into your upper-left inventory. It’s fun to watch.

    Playsaurus

  • The game’s night mode is perfect, doing just enough shading while not obscuring things too much.

    Playsaurus

The resources flow at mesmerizing rates, with a beautifully chaotic, percussive sound. There is literally no reason you are doing this except that you can, in fact, do it. It gets more expensive to build another Extracting Channel, but you have to, because you need the Elmerine for your desablizers and pump stations, and we’ve dug way past Elmerine now. It only seems excessive if you don’t know how elegant this system you’ve built is, and how, with the next machine, it works even better.

Meanwhile, your friend keeps messaging you. You were supposed to head to their house, but you started messing with these machines. They can’t find you, and your messages about putting yellow stones inside machines, and how you can use the “Q” key to clone or destroy machines, are making them worry. The last few messages sent in my game regard Hell Gems, rare green cubes that show up very deep into … whatever it is from which we’re extracting. At this point, the friend is more bemused by my plight than worried. You can hide the friend’s messages, so you have more room for the important stuff.

From screenshots and glimpses in the trailer, you can glimpse how Sixty Four will go beyond mining (there’s a dev commentary video, too, but I’ve yet to watch it). I’ve seen some things, like Hollow Fruit and fission. The trailer suggests players will “Face the darkness” and “Find the light.” Is it going to get a bit meta? Probably, but that’s fine by me.

Each new object is a marvel of Sim City 3000-era micro-design, including a kind of unexplained but consistent numbering scheme for your machines. The isometric view can block your view sometimes, but there’s a transparency button to help, and (also like classic Sim City) you can make design choices specifically to address this, putting your less needy devices behind the resources. I dig the sounds the game makes, especially when your setup is semi-automated, but you can, of course, turn off the sound. There’s also a night mode toggle, too, which doesn’t crudely inverse the colors, but dulls the white background quite a bit.

Update: I’m now at eight hours in. Since I started writing this, I’ve spent another hour feeding my machines. I just need 32 Hell Gems to feed the Hell Gem Injector, which ups their occurrence in blocks. Once I’ve pulled 128 Hell Gems, I can swing an Excavating Channel, which puts me back into Elmerine and Qanetite, so I can feed the smaller devices. If I’m not expanding, I’m failing, and we can’t have that.

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Devs left with tough choices as Warner Bros. ends all Adult Swim Games downloads

Game preservation is important —

Some can relist games on Steam or consoles—but without reviews or fan content.

A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles.

Enlarge / A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games’ titles.

Adult Swim Games

Warner Bros. Discovery seems set to remove at least 16 games from its Adult Swim Games subsidiary from games markets and has told the affected developers that it will not transfer the games back to them nor offer other means of selling them in the future.

Ars reported Wednesday on the plight of Small Radios Big Televisions, a Steam and PlayStation game made by a solo developer who received a notice from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it was “retiring” his game within 60 days.

In a comment on that Ars post, Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games’ Fist Puncher, noted that they had received the same “retired” notice from WBD. “When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators,” Kain wrote.

Kain noted that his game’s players “have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which will all be lost.” In addition, Kickstarter backers of the game will lose access to a game in which they have a cameo, and his firm, Team2Bit, would likely face backlash if they re-released the game under their own account, forcing a second purchase from some customers.

“It seems like more and more the videogame industry is filled with people that don’t like and don’t care about videogames. All that to say, buy physical games, make back-ups, help preserve our awesome industry and art form,” Kain wrote on Ars early Thursday. Kain also posted about the predicament on the Fist Puncher discussion page on Steam.

Adult Swim Games has not published a game since 2020. Its parent company has said it was due for a “tough” quarter, and perhaps year, as its tentpole game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed to find a sustaining audience. On a broader level, WBD has been conspicuously culling titles and removing access to its content, sometimes in pursuit of tax advantages. The firm has killed and hidden away films including Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, removed canceled shows and well-regarded animation and kids’ content, and, just this week, closed down gaming and anime studio Rooster Teeth.

Ars has reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery for comment and has yet to hear back.

“It takes literally three clicks”

Polygon received confirmation from the developer of the rhythm/bullet-hell game Soundodger+ that they received a delisting notice. Michael Molinari told Polygon that he, too, requested his game be transferred—and “explained clearly that it takes literally three clicks to transfer ownership to me”—but a WBD representative rejected his request.

Molinari said the rep cited “logistical and resource constraints” and “the limited capacity of our team,” referring to Adult Swim Games. Molinari said he was told he could republish his game—but without any of its community content, reviews, patch notes, or other accrued content. Molinari also said he was required to remove all mention of Adult Swim Games from any future release, which struck him as erasing due credit.

Steam lists 16 games (and individual soundtrack purchases) in an Adult Swim Games bundle on Steam. The Delisted Games site lists 18 Steam games still published by Adult Swim Games, six games now under different publishers, and two mobile games.

From 2011, it feels important to mention.

From 2011, it feels important to mention.

Adult Swim Games

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