Author: News Room

The tabletop world has seen no recent shortage of impressively large and robust board, miniature, and card games that carry a high price tag, but also deliver many hours of premium gameplay and storytelling. It’s somewhat less common to find games of that caliber that are also relatively easy to learn and play, even for slightly less experienced players. One of my recent favorites in this regard is Dragon Eclipse, from the prolific team over at Awaken Realms. It’s a cooperative campaign game specifically built to be played solo or with a partner. You tame magical elemental creatures and set…

I recently had a chat with a couple of college-going students, and during my interaction, I discovered some fascinating ways students are using AI these days. From helping with research to deploying it as a last-minute cheating tool, the spectrum is wide, but what really piqued my interest was when one of them admitted to occasionally asking ChatGPT to roleplay as her boyfriend. Now, the trend is not exactly brand new or shocking. There is a whole community out there that finds a sense of companionship or relief in virtual characters that act as a companion, partner, wife, friend, mentor,…

This year, the Madden franchise is hunting down the field for a quick strike to jumpstart itself and excite fans. In recent iterations, progress has come in fits and starts, so this year’s game is taking some big swings in its Franchise and Ultimate Team modes. Unfortunately, despite having all the tools on paper, not all of the game’s attempts pay off. Gameplay remains a strong component of the series, delivering a satisfying feeling on the sticks in the running game and animations that often look realistic. This is bolstered by the addition of the optional catch meter from College Football.…

The Pixel 11 series has plenty of new hardware and software features to talk about, but one detail that stood out to me has actually been around for a few generations. Google is continuing its seven-year spare-parts commitment with the Pixel 11 series, a policy it first introduced with the Pixel 8 back in 2023. It means batteries, displays, and other replacement components should remain available long after the usual upgrade cycle has come and gone. While this policy might not sound like something to get excited over, looking at where smartphone prices are heading, the promise carries considerably more…

Google has already confirmed that Googlebook will support more than one chipmaker, and a new leak may have revealed the first Snapdragon models in development. New code references uncovered by GbookHub reportedly link two Googlebook designs, codenamed Annite and Pic, to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 processor. Both are also said to be tied to a board platform called Mica. Snapdragon could give Googlebook a cheaper ARM option The Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 is an eight-core chip capable of reaching up to 3.4GHz. The code also references fingerprint support, while USB-A appears to be missing from these particular designs. GbookHub…

Capcom’s samurai action series, Onimusha, has been around for more than two decades… kinda. The first game, Onimusha: Warlords, arrived in 2001, and within the next five years, three more mainline games were released. The last one launched in 2006, and it’s been 20 years since without a sequel. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is set to change that when it launches next month, and ahead of that launch, it is the latest game to grace the cover of Game Informer (and subscribers can read the cover story right here). I traveled to Osaka, Japan, to visit Capcom’s HQ, play never-before-seen parts of the game for hours, and…

I spend enough time inside spreadsheets to know how quickly they can get out of hand. What starts as a neat table can eventually turn into hundreds of rows, endless columns, and a whole lot of scrolling to find the one thing you actually need. Google thinks Gemini can make that experience a lot less painful. The company is introducing Sheets canvas, a new Gemini-powered feature that can take the data sitting inside a Google Sheets spreadsheet and turn it into something closer to a custom mini-app. Instead of manually building charts, formatting cells, or figuring out complicated formulas, you…

When facing a complicated situation, the greatest decision-making risk is often not a lack of data, but a tendency to stick to an old idea of approaching a problem even after the situation has shown it may be ineffective. Humans often choose reasoning from an outdated perspective if it meets their prior expectations. And human systems, be they corporate hierarchies, software protocols, or even individual personal habits, are regularly structured for ease of continuity. This means that once someone has a diagnosis or is facing rebuilding a strategy from scratch, the psychological and operational cost of “starting over” often becomes…

If you have ever generated an image with Gemini and gotten annoyed by that stamped-on watermark, Google finally heard you. Gemini is rolling out a new setting called Media Watermarks that lets you toggle visible watermarks on or off across everything you create, including images made with Nano Banana, videos made with Omni, and music made with Lyria. Until now, that visible watermark was applied automatically with no way to turn it off. Rolling out over the next few days, you can decide if your image, video, and music creations made with Gemini will have visible watermarks. Invisible SynthID watermarks…

Electric cars have become a pretty normal sight on the road, but replacing jet fuel with batteries gets considerably more complicated when you’re trying to lift thousands of pounds into the sky. Heart Aerospace has just shown that it can be done at a surprisingly large scale. The company’s X1 demonstrator has completed its maiden flight, becoming what Heart says is the largest battery-electric aircraft ever flown. The X1 has a 106-foot wingspan, stretches 76 feet from nose to tail, and weighs more than 25,000 pounds at takeoff. The piloted flight took place on August 12 at Plattsburgh International Airport…