Latest News - Page 32

Apple kicked off WWDC 2026 by addressing one of the most consistent pieces of user feedback from the past year: Liquid Glass. The translucent design language that debuted across Apple's software ecosystem last year had users divided, with many users finding the transparency effects difficult to read.

While Apple improved things over the years, it is finally adding a new slider that lets users control exactly how much Liquid Glass they want. Rather than a simple on/off toggle, the slider moves between fully opaque and completely clear, giving users genuine control over the look rather than forcing a single default.

Apple said, "Since everyone's preference varies, we're adding a new slider and settings to adjust Liquid Glass, so you can set it anywhere from ultra clear to fully tinted." Beyond the slider, Apple is updating how Liquid Glass is rendered across the system. The goal is to improve contrast and readability by increasing visual separation between content layers, so that buttons and toolbars stand out more clearly against the background.

The first image of an Intel Nova Lake-S desktop CPU has leaked online, giving us our earliest look at the processor that will sit in Intel's new LGA-1954 socket. Posted on X by user PoTAToOOOO, the image shows the pad side of the chip, labeled simply as "NovaLake-S LGA1954."

The photo confirms several details about the new platform. The notch placement on Nova Lake-S has moved from the left side, where it sits on current Arrow Lake-S processors, to the right side, making the chip physically incompatible with older sockets. The overall package size also differs, so there is no question of backward compatibility. The leaker notes that the front side of the package looks almost identical to Intel's Alder Lake 12th Gen processors in terms of general layout, though the socket has moved from LGA-1700 to LGA-1954.

The pad layout on the backside shows at least 35 capacitors, compared to 36 on the current Core Ultra 9 285K, with more contact pads distributed along the edges than on current-generation offerings. The chip will support both single-lever and dual-lever ILM socket configurations.

Telltale Games made a surprise appearance at Summer Game Fest 2026 with a double announcement for The Wolf Among Us series. After nearly a decade of silence, Telltale Games unveiled a new trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2. The game now has a 2027 release window, along with a remastered version of the 2013 original arriving this holiday season.

The Wolf Among Us 2 takes place approximately six months after the first game's events, with players returning to Fabletown as Bigby Wolf. "Return to the role of Bigby Wolf, sheriff of Fabletown, as a deadly conspiracy tears apart the precarious peace among the exiled Fables. Betrayed, framed, and exiled, Bigby must work from the shadows to save a city consumed by corruption, vengeance, and fear."

The game is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. At the same time, the remaster brings back all five episodes of the original game with updated visuals, an improved UI, and accessibility upgrades, along with over an hour of bonus content, including deleted scenes, cast interviews, behind-the-scenes videos, and image galleries.

The 50% Game Pass price hike damaged the Xbox brand on a substantial level, and current CEO Asha Sharma says that the business still is not healthy...yet.

Last year, Microsoft made one of the most unpopular moves in gaming history by raising the price of Game Pass Ultimate from $20 to $30 a month. Game Pass' subscriber counts were scorched in the aftermath, with multiple millions of users leaving the service and not renewing their memberships.

The not-so-surprising info was revealed by new Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball, who told The Game Business that Microsoft lost millions of Game Pass subscribers after the steep price jump. No current Game Pass subscriber counts were provided, but as of February 2024, months before Ultimate was hiked to $19.99 per month, the service had 34 million subscribers. An update in June 2025 said Game Pass was at 35 million.

Exclusive games are back at Xbox, and leadership now says exclusivity is here to stay in a radical business shift aimed at fortifying the core value of the Xbox platform.

Yesterday, Microsoft surprised fans by announcing not one, but two Xbox console exclusive games: Gears of War E-Day, coming in 2026, and Clockwork Revolution, coming in 2027. But these aren't the only exclusives that Xbox plans to withhold from PlayStation and Nintendo--management says fans can expect more Xbox console exclusives in the future. And apparently Microsoft has already made a decision on what they will be.

Xbox's new chief strategy officer Matthew Ball offers more info and insight on the exclusivity plans, confirming that more games would be included in an effort to bolster the brand. "This is the start of a program," he said.

XERON made its debut at Computex 2026 and unveiled a new line of intriguing PC cases, power supplies, coolers, and accessories.

XERON gave us a tour of their booth,, and the first product that stood out amongst the rest was the S Lab series, which features a large S-shaped, lightweight suspension design, along with an integrated sheet-metal frame that adds more aesthetic flair and leans more into the "Art Gallery" design language.

The case arrives in both black and white, with glass panels on both the front and side panels. With all this glass, XERON has equipped an innovative unobstructed air intake channel for the CPU, GPU, and PSU, and the top of the case features a removable mesh dust filter. On the front of the case are 2x USB-A ports, 1x USB-C port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Nintendo has announced a new Direct showcase will be held tomorrow, Tuesday, June 9, 2026 at 7AM PST/10AM EST with nearly an hour of reveals and updates.

On the heels of Summer Game Fest, the Xbox showcase, and various events like IGN Live and the PC Gamer Show, fans are eager to see what Nintendo has in its hand of cards. The show begins tomorrow morning and is expected to include big reveals to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the group's heaviest-hitting franchises, including Mario and Zelda.

Rumor has it that Nintendo will release a new Zelda Ocarina of Time remake for the Switch 2 in celebration of the big four-oh. That project is believed to be coming this year, whereas a new mainline 3D Mario game isn't expected until 2027.

Without a GeForce RTX 50 SUPER Series refresh this year (thanks to the current memory crisis and AI boom), or any new models on the horizon, we're basically in that period of waiting for the next-generation to arrive. However, this doesn't mean we won't see anything new, as at Computex 2026 we got to see a couple of prototype designs from INNO3D for a pair of new premium and flagship GeForce RTX 50 Series cards that could come to market sooner or later.

Now, it's worth reiterating that these designs are prototypes and not finalized, but we were told they would be paired with higher-end models in the GeForce RTX 50 Series lineup, such as the RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. The first design immediately caught our attention, as it features a dual-fan push-and-pull cooling design reminiscent of NVIDIA's Founders Edition models that debuted with the RTX 40 Series.

Basically, you've got one large fan on either side of the card, with INNO3D noting that the minimal all-metal design took inspiration from the Founders Edition lineup. Albeit, here you've got a cooler designed for overclocked performance, with a few interesting touches like a fin stack featuring an almost 3D checkerboard pattern, and the 12V-2x6 connector located on the rear of the GPU rather than the side. Available in black or white, it's definitely stylish and something we'd love to see paired with a GeForce RTX 5080.

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is the latest and arguably the most impressive version of MSI's gaming handheld to date, and not just because it's been upgraded to feature the new Intel Arc G3 Extreme processor. At Computex 2026, we got to go hands-on with the new Claw 8 EX AI+, playing through the opening mission of Battlefield 6's campaign, and yeah, like our hands-on with Acer's new G3 Extreme Atlas 8 handheld playing Forza Horizon 6, it's extremely impressive.

Seeing this level of fidelity and 60+ FPS fluidity on a PC gaming handheld with in-game settings set to 'High' is pretty remarkable. It's a level of clarity that can rival modern-day consoles when viewed on a portable display, and thanks to Intel's latest Panther Lake architecture and next-gen Arc Graphics, the G3 Extreme processor takes full advantage of XeSS 3 and its AI-powered suite of Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation (MFG) technologies.

In fact, with a more capable GPU and XeSS, handhelds with a G3 Extreme processor easily outperform handhelds with AMD's Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor and its integrated RDNA 3.5 graphics. Thankfully, the Arc G3 Extreme processor is just one part of what makes the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ an impressive handheld, as the company has gone to great lengths to deliver a premium-feeling device.

NVIDIA introduced DLSS 4.5 at the beginning of the year, with a new second-generation transformer model that delivered a notable improvement in image fidelity when using DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution upscaling or DLSS 4.5 Frame Generation to boost smoothness. More than an incremental update, it even restored details that were otherwise lost when using similar technologies or the already-impressive DLSS 4.0. In a way, it lived up to the DLSS promise of delivering 'better than native' image quality more so than anything we had seen to date.

However, there was a missing piece. Without a new and improved DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, the full benefits of DLSS 4.5 are absent in titles with heavy ray-tracing and path-tracing modes. Thankfully, that's about to change, as NVIDIA has confirmed that DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction is coming in August as part of a new GeForce Game Ready and NVIDIA App update, and will be immediately available in all of the 25 to 30 games with native DLSS Ray Reconstruction support.

At Computex 2026, we got to see DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in action in Remedy's Alan Wake 2, Capcom's Pragmata, and Machine Games' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with NVIDIA providing several side-by-side examples to showcase the benefits compared to the existing Ray Reconstruction. But before we go through that, here's a quick primer of what exactly Ray Reconstruction is and what the new DLSS 4.5 version brings to the table.

Hideo Kojima, creator behind genre-defining titles like Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, has been vocal about his stance on AI on numerous occasions. The boiled-down summary is that he believes AI belongs in the room as a tool, not at the table as a creator. But that position came under scrutiny recently when an AI-generated promotional film featuring Hideo Kojima sparked a wave of reactions online.

The film was created for the Satellites II exhibition, a collaboration between Kojima and Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, presented as part of Prada Mode New York. The six-minute short depicts the pair as space travelers crash-landing on an alien planet, and Refn confirmed it was made using AI. For many fans, seeing Kojima appear in AI-generated content felt at odds with the themes running through his games, particularly the Metal Gear Solid series, which has long warned against over-reliance on technology and AI-driven systems of control.

In response to the online discussion about the ad, Kojima reiterated his views on AI. Speaking with The Washington Post (via Kotaku) for a profile tied to the Satellites II exhibition at New York's Hotel Chelsea, he stated he does not believe AI will create meaningful art within his lifetime. "Art is life," Kojima said. "But in 50 years, 100 years, I don't know. Maybe AI could create art, but while I live, I don't think I'll see it. I'm not interested in it."

GMKtec has revealed the EVO-X3, the follow-up to its well-received EVO-X2 Mini PC, and the company has also confirmed that a more powerful variant with AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 495 processor is coming later this year.

The EVO-X3 launches with the same AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 chip as the EVO-X2, targeting users with similar performance needs. GMKtec is already preparing a more advanced variant featuring the Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 495 version, which includes 192GB of LPDDR5X memory. That expanded memory pool would enable up to 160GB of configurable VRAM, allowing it to run significantly larger AI models locally.

Beyond the chip, the EVO-X3's most important IO upgrade over its predecessor is a native OCuLink port for external graphics card support. This port provides far greater bandwidth than the USB4 ports on the previous model.

Visitors to the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis Steam page recently spotted something most game listings don't have: an "AI Generated Content Disclosure." The notice, first reported by Eurogamer, explains that AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content, and that any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans later on in the development cycle.

On the surface, that sounds reassuring, but the phrasing is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The statement says assets were "replaced or refined by humans," and it's that "refined by humans" qualifier that gives pause, since it leaves open the possibility that AI-generated elements still exist in the final product in some form. Gamers going in should know that while Crystal Dynamics insists all finished content is human-crafted, the exact scope of AI involvement during production remains vague.

The backlash has been predictable. Some fans say they want nothing to do with the game following the disclosure, while others have pointed to previous rounds of layoffs at Crystal Dynamics as added context for why the situation feels concerning. This isn't an isolated incident. AI creep in game development is becoming a pattern, and studios are increasingly open about it. We covered how Ubisoft has been experimenting with generative AI in Far Cry 7, with an insider describing the early results in less-than-flattering terms.

Microsoft used the XBOX Games Showcase 2026 to announce a nostalgia-heavy hardware drop: the XBOX Series X25 Limited Edition, a special edition console dressed in translucent OG Green to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the XBOX brand.

The design pulls directly from the original XBOX, right down to the iconic "X" lighting up green when you power the console on. It's a detail longtime fans will recognize immediately, and it's a smarter tribute than just slapping a logo on a colored faceplate. The console carries 1TB of storage and features an "X25" logo on the translucent green chassis. Under the hood, nothing has changed. This is still a standard XBOX Series X, so you're paying for the look, not a hardware bump.

Alongside the console, Microsoft is also releasing the XBOX Wireless Controller X25 Special Edition in the same translucent OG Green finish. It brings back the original ABXY button colors and features black and white bumpers, a direct nod to the classic "Duke" controller's iconic face buttons. The controller will be sold separately as well, which is good news for anyone who already owns a Series X but still wants the throwback aesthetic on their desk.

Microsoft has changed its mind on exclusive Xbox games, and two new titles will stay on Xbox and Windows. Now Xbox management clarifies exactly how this approach will work.

The recent Xbox showcase really underlines Microsoft's clear-cut attempts to cater to its enthusiast fanbase. The event saw the highly-anticipated return of exclusive games at Xbox, with Gears of War E-Day and Clockwork Revolution confirmed as Xbox platform exclusives (they're coming to both console & PC). But what about other games? Selecting exclusives among Xbox Game Studios titles will be made on a case-by-case basis, leadership says.

In a recent interview with Gamertag Radio, Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty says that live games will stay multi-platform, but other games have a chance at being Xbox platform exclusive. And if it's got a date, it's got a platform, the exec says.

It looks like DDR5 overclocking records are falling fast at Computex 2026, and GIGABYTE just claimed the biggest one yet. GIGABYTE's in-house overclocking team hit DDR5-13556 MT/s at Computex 2026, setting a new world record for memory overclocking. The run used Corsair Vengeance DDR5 memory paired with the Z890 AORUS TACHYON DUO X ICE motherboard.

The team was led by well-known overclocker Hicookie, alongside teammates Sergmann, Saltycroissant, Madness777, and Exaberries. That same team was also invited to G.SKILL's 12th Annual OC World Record Stage at Computex, where they took 10 global first places in CPU frequency and other benchmark categories, this time using the newly launched X870 AORUS INFINITY motherboard with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processors.

The Z890 AORUS TACHYON DUO X ICE is a two-DIMM board purpose-built for extreme memory overclocking. It uses GIGABYTE's CQDIMM technology, which is designed to improve signal integrity and push memory performance well beyond what standard platform configurations can achieve. The two-DIMM layout is key here, as fewer slots mean less electrical load on the memory controller, which is how these extreme numbers become possible.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma backed up her words with firm commitments to fans by announcing two new exclusive games.

Exclusives are back at Xbox. Today at the big Xbox summer showcase, the group confirmed two games would be kept exclusive to the platform: Clockwork Revolution, the new BioShock-like shooter from inXile with time-bending mechanics, and Gears of War E-Day, the next mainline game in the long-running series.

"Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be XBOX console exclusives. These are not timed exclusives. Games already announced for multiplatform releases will stick to that plan - we're committed to investing in and growing XBOX both on console and beyond," Xbox's Matt Booty said at the show.

Halo Studios today revealed new info on the new multi-platform Halo CE remake, confirming the game will have a bunch of guns from previous games in the series as well as specifics on the new prequel missions.

The new Halo Campaign Evolved remake is coming July 28, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, with a price point of $50 for the base version and $70 for the deluxe. There's also a $200 collector's edition that comes with a Master Chief statue.

This version of Halo has been 25 years in the making, and the graphics really do show big enhancements thanks to UE5 overlaying on top of the authentic Halo Reach engine. Campaign Evolved is a kind of playground for old-school Halo fans, mixing in weapons from other games, from Halo Infinite's bulldog shotgun to Halo 5's railgun and even Reach's powerful needle rifle.

Studio MDHR's next game, Mighty Cuphead Adventure, is a pure blast from the past, CRTs, 8-bit graphics and all.

Indie developers feel like the intrepid creatives of our modern gaming era, and Studio MDHR's latest venture really goes above and beyond when it comes to passion projects. The devs are making their new game Mighty Cuphead Adventure specifically for SEGA's 40-year-old Master System, and will release a special version of the game on a physical cartridge that actually plays on the decades-old system.

The game is described as "a new, fast-action platform shooter with arcade-quality graphics," and will also launch on modern consoles as well as PC. Judging from the other Cuphead games, this new one could be pretty challenging and give old-school enthusiasts something new to try.

Creative Assembly and SEGA reveal new details on Alien Isolation 2, including screenshots and brief atmospheric footage.

Alien Isolation 2 made a presence at this year's Summer Game Fest, showcasing new eerie footage and setting the stage for another entry in the industry's most terrifying game of cat and mouse. The footage shows the game's protagonist investigating a crash landing, and eventually shows what looks to be our hero(ine) meeting their demise in a xenomorph kill animation.

SEGA has confirmed that Amanda Ripley will not star in Alien Isolation 2, and the sequel will instead feature a "brand new setting, story and protagonist" set in a "new adventure with the same deadly tension" that thrilled players in the first game.