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Every fresh look we get at Palworld makes it appear more fun and yet more disturbing than it did before. Palworld is a cartoony open world creature-collecting and battling game that is heavily inspired by Pokémon, but it’s also filled with machine guns and rocket launchers. 

And you’re not the only one spitting lead: guns aren’t just used by you against the monsters you’re trying to defeat and capture, but by the cute and fluffy creatures themselves. Yes, sheep can operate machine guns and a creature that looks suspiciously like Pikachu on steroids does wield a massive minigun.

We’ve already heard a lot of the unseemly things you can do with your Pals besides pit them in battle against each other. For instance, you can slaughter them and use them for meat. That’s pretty darn grim—though I do have to admit it’s also potentially delicious. But there’s more to do with your Pals, as shown in the new Palworld video above. 

There’s a base-bu…

We’re all a bit iffy about flying Boeings ever since that plane had its door ripped off, so why not try an alternative? For instance, the gargantuan mechanical dragonflies that dotted the skies above the Butlerian Jihad of 200 BG to 108 BG? Those have so many moving parts that could go horribly wrong that you probably won’t even think about the doors.

If you’re tempted, then I’ve got good news: Microsoft Flight Sim’s free Dune expansion is out now, bringing the Royal Atreides Ornithopter from those Denis Villeneuve films into the wide, flighty world of the game and giving you a chance to, uh, realistically simulate flying them. Can you realistically simulate a fictional thing? Yes. No further questions, please.

The tie-in is, of course, part of the marketing run-up to the release of Dune 2 in March, and also adds the desert plains of Arrakis—the science-fantasy North Africa in which much of Dune’s plot takes place—as a playable location to the game, complete …

Intel has been using a hybrid design for its Core processors since it launched the 12th Generation in October 2021. Since then, we’ve had Core i5, i7, and i9 chips with P- and E-cores, plus low-end processors with just a couple of P or E-cores. With very little fanfare, Intel has launched a range of Raptor Lake CPUs (via HardwareLuxx) for the embedded market that have no E-cores in them—they’re 100% P-cores.

Topping the new line-up is the Core i9 14901KE, with eight P-cores, a maximum clock of 5.8 GHz, and a TDP of 125 W. Basically, it’s a 14900K with the entire E-core block, including its L3 cache, completely disabled.

However, there are a couple of other changes under the hood. There’s no Thermal Velocity Boost and the base frequency of the 14901KE is 3.8 GHz—600 MHz higher than the 14900K. Intel’s database doesn’t say anything about higher power limits, so it could be the case that the 14901KE is capped at 125 W in all circumstances.

These are probab…

Development of Path of Exile 2 has been an adventure for Grinding Gear Games, with several major reworks and redesigns happening since the ambitious free-to-play ARPG sequel’s debut at Exilecon in 2019. Its latest big pivot is a literal game-changer. What started out as a gimmick for a single class has become what feels like the primary way to play for every class—an action-oriented control system, controlled like a top-down shooter on WASD and mouse. Or a gamepad, if that’s your jam.

This more action-style control method was technically unveiled last year. It’s the result of an attempt to make the game’s new mercenary class feel like it was lifted from an action game, with an assortment of fantasy crossbows that serves as analogues to classic shooter weapon archetypes like SMGs and shotguns, able to run and gun at the same time. It worked almost too well. So instead of cutting it back, Grinding Gear upgraded every other class to match.

According to…

Payday is going live-action. Again. In what I’ve decided is the prophesied second coming of 2013’s Payday: The Web Series, developer Starbreeze is once more committing to a filmic adaptation of its popular heist-em-up. In a statement released earlier today, the studio announced that it had entered into a partnership with Stockholm Syndrome, an LA-based production company, with the goal of developing a Payday project “for TV or film”.

As I noted before, it’s not the first time Starbreeze has translated Payday for the silver screen (or, well, YouTube). The company dipped its toe into celluloid waters a whole decade ago with the web series it made to promote the release of Payday 2, although I suspect a full-fledged “TV or film” project might get a slightly higher budget than those shorts. 

Starbreeze has made plenty of live-action trailers for the series over the years, too, so I suppose it’s only natural it’d eventually decide to greenlight a full-on production effor…

Everyone’s getting very excited about a few numbers, and rumoured codenames, that have ‘leaked’ around the upcoming Nvidia Blackwell graphics silicon set to launch in 2025. As usual, this has descended into a lot of folk attempting to read these alpha-numeric runes and come up with their own theories on the next generation of GeForce GPUs.

All told, this latest generation of graphics cards has been a bit of a disappointment. Because of the way the Nvidia lineup has been stratified each seems to be at least one level too expensive for the GPU specs and performance they’re offering. Well, apart from the top-end RTX 4090, which is the ludicrous GPU you’d always hope the top chip would be, though it could be said that it’s just be so much silicon smoke and mirrors obscuring the mess of cards below it.

On the AMD side, we’re eight months into its Radeon RX 7000-series generation and we’ve still only got three (and a half) cards to show for it. With rumours of failed chips and…

Update: The creator of the tool has posted a Twitter thread better explaining how it works and reiterating that it does not function as intended with non-AI generated images. They also note that “clearly there’s a lot of room for improvement here”, and that not everything is operating yet in the public-facing tool.

Stable Attribution does appear a rocky tool in practice for it, but it’s still in beta today. It’s not a simple process to discern where exactly an AI has learned to create what it creates, or how much any one image out of billions plays into the creation of another. Perhaps we’ll see this tool materialise into something useful for attribution with time, or the companies behind these AI image generators will find another way to calm artists demanding some token for their work in making it all happen. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking from me on the artists’ behalf.

Original story: AI art tools have enjoyed a meteoric …

Last week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced that it is launching a review of artificial intelligence models to ensure that “AI continues in a way that benefits consumers, businesses, and the UK economy.”

That is of course the same CMA that blocked Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision acquisition just two weeks ago. It’s now looking to conduct an assessment that will “best guide the development of foundation models and their use in the future.” The regulatory body says its review will focus on the effects of the development of AI foundation models (aka AI like GPT-3 or DALL-E 2, which are trained on vast datasets and have multiple uses).

The UK government has asked the regulators to “think about how the innovative development and deployment of AI can be supported against five overarching principles.”

Those five principles are:

• Safety, security, and robustness
• Appropriate transparency and explainability
• Fairness
• Ac…
  

A game developer and software modder has done what Microsoft has steadfastly refused to do for years: Add a layers function to Microsoft Paint. That’s right, you can now arrange separate parts of a drawing into separate groups and interact with them separately. What a concept! You can get mspaintcompanion free on itch.io, even.

The mod is a creation of 17-year-old game developer Talon Zane, and is available along with its source code for free. It’s a beautiful concept as an update to the 38 year old app, and more than anything just kind of an obvious upgrade that I think we all agree is confusing on Microsoft’s part.

“That’s right, you can now pile on as many layers as you need to perfect your silly little doodles,” says Zane, “no longer will you be confined to creating simple, one-layered monstrosities!” A lovely thing for myself, as I am a simple, one-layered monstrosity and need all the uniqueness I can get.

At this point there is someone reading this who does n…