— Razer A larger display may make mobile gaming better on a tablet as opposed to a smartphone, but you still have to deal with those clunky touchscreen controls. Instead of furiously tapping on a tablet, however, Razer now offers the Kishi Ultra controller that can fit an iPad mini or other tablets with displays up to eight inches. It may feel a little absurd to cram a tablet between a controller, but the Kishi Ultra’s design makes for a more premium handheld gaming experience with better ergonomics. It can still fit iPhone 15 and other smartphones, but since it uses a USB-C connection, those ..read more

— Bethesda Game Studios Amazon’s Fallout TV show has been a huge hit with viewers, but some key moments in the series have fans of the games scratching their heads. The fate of the Brotherhood of Steel airship and the city of Shady Sands in the show are raising so many questions about the canon of Fallout as a whole that Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard has stepped in to clarify the show’s place in series lore. And while his statement might lay to rest fears of one of the most beloved Fallout games being erased from the timeline, the conversation raises a much bigger question — why ..read more

— Square Enix The Rising Tide finally answers one of the biggest burning questions from Final Fantasy XVI: what happened to Leviathan the Lost? The second and final DLC adds on an entirely new area, main quest, and a handful of side quests to boot. As Clive’s final outing, fans will likely want to know exactly what the journey will entail, and The Rising Tide even has a few extra surprises packed in. Here’s everything you need to know about how to start The Rising Tide in FFXVI, and how long the DLC takes to beat. How Long Is FFXVI: The Rising Tide The Rising Tide is quite a bit longer than ..read more

— Microsoft Here’s another terrifying look into the future of AI, courtesy of Microsoft. Microsoft introduced the VASA-1 research project that can take a single image and an audio clip and transform it into a high-quality video of a talking head that looks eerily similar to the real thing. We have to stress that it’s just a research project at the moment, meaning it’s not readily accessible, but that doesn’t make it any less disconcerting. There are innocuous examples with VASA-1, like infusing Mona Lisa with Anne Hathaway’s rap skills but we’re more concerned about the likelihood that this w ..read more

— Disney+ Marvel has used Disney+ to rapidly expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe through live-action television, but animation has been a different story altogether. The first animated Marvel series on Disney+ was technically canon to the MCU, but its multiversal hijinks didn’t affect the main storyline. X-Men ’97 appeared equally ambiguous. While former showrunner Beau DeMayo stated unequivocally that the series exists as its own entity, the situation was a little more complicated. Emi Yonemura, who directed Episodes 3 and 5, tells Inverse that Marvel seriously considered making the series ..read more

— Netflix As Glen Powell’s Gary Johnson tells us in Hit Man’s opening moments, the titular figure doesn’t actually exist outside of our collective imagination. It’s a concept, a character invented by noir and generations of paranoia. But that doesn’t make the idea any less appealing; one can get caught up in the fantasy no matter who you are, as Powell’s mild-mannered leading man soon discovers. The Top Gun: Maverick alum co-wrote and stars in Hit Man alongside a frequent collaborator, director Richard Linklater. Based on an outrageously true story published in Texas Monthly in 2001, Hit Man ..read more

— NurPhoto/Getty Images Imagine Baldur’s Gate 3, except the millions of dialogue lines and outcomes are generated by AI aided by humans. Google’s cloud department is exploring the idea of living games, that video games could respond to player input in the moment, and spin off in a million directions that even the game developers may not entirely foresee. Jack Buser, the director for games at Google Cloud, is hard at work bringing that vision to life. “Let’s say you’re building an avatar or you’re going to a shop in a medieval town, you’re like, I like that sword but I wanted it to be purple a ..read more

— Lucasfilm One of the funniest bits in A New Hope wasn’t entirely written by George Lucas. When Han Solo tries to fake his way through a check-in from Imperial security, he famously concludes the call by blasting the intercom and saying, “Boring conversation anyway.” According to 1997’s Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays by Laurent Bouzereau, this dialogue was punched up by Lucas’ friends Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, a husband and wife writing team who provided more than one iconic Star Wars moment. Han and Luke’s ad-hoc plan to rescue Princess Leia set a canonical precedent: the Empire ..read more

A 4-billion-year-old volcano? New research finds that Io, the solar system’s most volcanically active moon, can brag just that. A recent study of Io’s sulfurous atmosphere suggests that Jupiter’s moon has been a volcanic hellscape for almost the Solar System’s entire 4.57 billion-year history. And it’s been recycling the same stockpile of sulfur from its boiling magma mantle through volcanic eruptions that whole time. That could have implications for two of Jupiter’s other moons, Ganymede and Europa: the Solar System’s iciest astrobiology hotspot. Caltech planetary scientist Katherine de Klee ..read more

In August 1998, you could turn on the Disney Channel and catch an episode of Aladdin: The Series or the reality show Bug Juice. But the most important thing happening on the kid-friendly channel that summer revolved around a quirky group of animated robots called the Zoogs. Created to promote a new block of tween entertainment called Zoog Disney (which would eventually include Lizzie McGuire and Even Stevens), the Zoogs existed in a space between TV and the internet called the Zeether. “We’re swimming in the data stream, between the TV and computer screen,” the robots would sing over a funky ..read more