The Last of Us won’t come to PC for a couple months yet—it’s slated to launch on Steam on March 3, a full decade after its original PS3 debut. The TV adaptation arrives next week, though, and by all reports it’ll be a very good way to get your Naughty Dog fix while you wait for the game to arrive.

Movies based on videogames haven’t exactly set the world on fire, but it’s been a very different story with television adaptations in recent years. Shows like Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners have received widespread acclaim, the Halo TV series is not bad (and it gave us the opportunity to do this), and while The Witcher series on Netflix is based on the books and not the games, I’m claiming it as one of ours anyway.

If the critical response is any indication, The Last of Us is set to join those ranks, and may even be the best television rework yet. It holds a 98% rating at Rotten Tomatoes across dozens of critic ratings, and enjoys breathless superlatives like:

<…

Take it from someone who’s used many a gaming laptop as a day-to-day machine—what you’re looking for is balance. You’ll want a set of components that the cooling system can handle, a decent amount of storage space, a good-looking chassis, and a great screen. All for a price that won’t make your bank manager call you just to make sure you’re feeling ok. 

Which is why this Acer Predator Helios 16 is such a good deal, currently available at Newegg for $1,400. For a very reasonable price, you get some components that make a lot more sense than some of the overpowered (and as a result, immensely hot) combinations we see in some of the more expensive lappies on the market. 

Let’s start out with that display. This 240Hz IPS LED backlit panel is, unfortunately, not the Mini-LED model you get in the ultra high-end version with the RTX 4080. Boo. Still, with that refresh rate and a 500 nits peak brightness rating, it’s still mega-fast and plenty punchy, and will st…

Improve your daily Wordle with our helpful tips, dig yourself out of a rut with a helpful clue written especially for the July 12 (753) game, or take a cheeky peek at today’s answer—it’s only a single click away, after all.

Well, this Wordle certainly took some time. I eventually uncovered a few letters, but they refused to behave and for a worryingly long while I wasn’t sure what to do with them. In these situations, all you can do is stick at it and keep guessing until a vital green or precious spark of inspiration hits, so I kept on trying until today’s Wordle answer revealed itself.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, July 12

The answer today refers to a type of movement—a sort of swift circular spin, performed by anything from trained dancers to leaves on the wind. The same word can also mean “giving something a go” too. There’s just one vowel in this one.    

ViewViewViewView

Is there a doub…

In 2023, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, along with digital identity company Yoti and “youth marketing solutions” provider Superawesome, filed a proposal with the FTC for a new “verifiable parental consent mechanism” called Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation. The FTC has now issued its response to that proposal, and the answer is “no”—for now.

The ESRB’s proposed technology stirred feathers almost immediately, and understandably so: The idea of having to essentially submit a selfie to prove to a machine that you’re old enough to play GTA 6 is inherently intrusive, and that’s before you even get into questions of technological bias and whether or not the thing would work well enough to justify the headaches that would inevitably erupt for at least some users.

The ESRB moved quickly to reassure the public that the system is not meant to identify individuals but simply to estimate age, and that it would not store any data after the analysis was complete…

AI is obviously the topic of the moment and, while we seem to have gotten past the dichotomy of Terminator / saviour, a major source of concern remains the safety of this technology. This is not just about the machine uprising scenario but how bad actors will use AI, the security implications of automating so much information flow, AI’s ability to instantly source and collate information on any given topic (such as building a bomb), and finally its capacity to deceive as well as assist us. 

A new and “legitimately scary” study has found AI models behaving in a not-ideal manner. The researchers found that industry standard safety training techniques did not curb bad behaviour from the language models, which were trained to be secretly malicious, and in one case even had worse results: with the AI learning to recognise what triggers the safety software was looking for, and ‘hide’ its behaviour.

Researchers had programmed the various large language models (LLMs) to act…

Player First Games, the developers of MultiVersus, has been acquired by Warner Bros. “We have worked with Player First Games over several years to create and launch MultiVersus, and we are very pleased to welcome this talented team to Warner Bros Games,” said David Haddad, president of Warner Bros Games, in a statement to IGN.

The development and release of MultiVersus, the free-to-play Smash Bros if Smash Bros. was Warner Bros, has been a real rollercoaster. MultiVersus released in July 2022 in open beta, eventually attracting millions of players with platform fighter brawls and the raw magnificence of Ultra Instinct Shaggy. But in March 2023, after MultiVersus had been playable for almost a year, Player First Games announced that—unbeknownst to most players—it had actually been in a prolonged public test and closed the servers.

MultiVersus disappeared for nine months, forcing fans to speculate about its continued existence based solely off o…

Valve might have sprung a leak. A handful of screenshots supposedly from Valve’s next big game, allegedly a competitive shooter called Deadlock, appeared on 4Chan and Twitter yesterday. The word from multiple dedicated Valve sleuths on Twitter is that Deadlock is a 6v6 third-person shooter that takes inspiration from Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2.

The most confident descriptions of Deadlock are coming from Gabe Follower, a Valve-focused content creator.

“6 vs 6 battling on huge maps with 4 lanes. Usable abilities and items. Tower defense mechanics,” he said of the project yesterday on Twitter. “Fantasy setting mixed with steampunk. Magicians, weird creatures and robots. Fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite.”

Gabe Follower also claims that Deadlock is the up-to-date title for a Valve project we already knew existed: Neon Prime. The name change could be explained by a previous version of Deadlock supposedly having a sci-fi art style…