Entertainment

Steam Box? Gaming Chromebook? Take your best guess — but it sure looks like Johnny Deng, a Valve electrical engineer, is testing to ensure a powerful new “AMD Lilac” can properly control your TV (or vice versa) over HDMI.

It’s fascinating to think about. Why would Valve use ChromeOS instead of SteamOS? Valve did tell us it’d “love to work with third-parties” on living room extensions...

A Strands-maker website had also hosted an archive of The New York Times’ Strands puzzles, but the archive is gone now. The DMCA notice, which has been viewed by The Verge, was shared with the developer of the website yesterday.

Last month, I reported that the NYT sent a cease and desist letter to have an unauthorized Connections archive removed.

Most everyone’s feeling festive in the new trailer for Doctor Who’s latest Christmas special, but the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) himself seems to be dealing with an existential crisis.

Neither he nor his new buddy Joy (Nicola Coughlan) seem to know why there are two of him at the same place and time. But they’ll probably have a blast figuring it out when the epidode debuts on December 25th.

Nvidia has just released its latest driver (566.36) and it’s the first to include the optional Nvidia app instead of the GeForce Experience. It also includes Game Ready support for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and a fix for Forza Horizon 5 and God of War Ragnarök crashes. You can download it over at Nvidia’s website.

We pointed out yesterday that Bethesda’s original grid included some processors that don’t exist. You can see the corrected grid on Bethesda’s website.

Jim Kjellin, MachineGames’ CTO, also explained to The Verge why hardware ray tracing is required even at minimum specs:

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle uses a technique called global illumination to light the environment and characters. Our engine MOTOR, used by MachineGames, uses hardware raytracing to calculate this. While this isn’t what players may typically think of as “ray tracing,” the compatible hardware is required to do this is in a performant, high fidelity way.

Update December 5th: Updated quote attribution.

The developer of Stardew Valley (real name Eric Barone) shared a progress update about his next game, ConcernedApe’s Haunted Chocolatier, which he first announced more than three years ago. He’s still working on Haunted Chocolatier, but development was slowed down by the massive Stardew Valley 1.6 update.

“Regardless of dev blog timing, know that the game will eventually be finished and come out,” ConcernedApe says.

Genie 2 is “capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments for training and evaluating embodied agents,” according to a blog post.

Check out the videos in a blog post in this X thread from project lead Jack Parker-Holder. They’re really impressive, though I have some concerns about if future models could take away work from human developers.

This year Microsoft highlights your preferred gaming platform, total time played, and number of games played for its Xbox year in review. You can see how you stack up against other players, how much gamerscore you earned in 2024, and a list of your favorite games. There’s even a little shout-out from Xbox chief Phil Spencer, too.

In the most obvious piece of merchandise in recent memory, you can soon buy a pack of actual Balatro playing cards. Not included: a pen to mark them up appropriately.

Sony is launching a fancy free demo for Gran Turismo 7 with the clever name My First Gran Turismo. It’ll be available on December 6th on both PS4 and PS5, and is aimed at newcomers to the franchise, and racing sims in general. And if you get hooked? You can transfer over your progress to the full game.

AMD could be about to announce its next-generation GPUs at CES 2025 in January, and now AMD’s own ROCm library is referencing two unannounced GPUs. The RX 8800 and RX 8600 have both appeared in the ROCm code, just as AMD’s graphics boss Jack Huynh has confirmed he’s holding a CES keynote. Nvidia is also rumored to be launching its RTX 5000 series GPUs at CES.

The long-in-the-works crackdown will begin next week with “some very early, gentle messaging,” WBD’s JB Perrette said at a conference today, according to TheWrap. Perrette says you’ll be able to add a member to your account in the first quarter of next year.

Fortnite’s new Japanese-themed season is excellent, but some players have expressed frustrations about changes to XP rewards that appear to make XP gains slower.

In response, Epic Games just announced a few adjustments to boost how much XP you can get, and it’s promising to make “further adjustments as needed.”

The minimum PC specs for Indiana Jones mean you’ll need at least a 10700K CPU, RTX 2060 Super, and 120GB of SSD storage. Interestingly, Bethesda says GPU hardware ray tracing is “required” at minimum, so that rules out Nvidia’s older 10 series of cards. Bethesda also lists the i7-13900K and Ryzen 7 7900X, both of which don’t exist. We’ve asked Bethesda to clarify the typos here.

TNT Sports is going to show some NBA 2K25 overlays over real-life 2024 Emirates NBA Cup quarterfinals and semifinals matches. Weird, but interesting.

NBC Sports will similarly overlay elements of Madden NFL over the Houston Texans vs. Kansas City Chiefs NFL game that airs on Peacock on December 21st.

Update: Added details of NFL game with Madden elements.

Lisa Su confirmed she’d launch the first RDNA 4 GPUs in “early 2025,” and now AMD graphics boss Jack Huynh will officially host a livestreamed press conference on January 6th at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. It will “discuss how AMD is expanding its leadership across PCs and gaming.”

The rumor mill is expecting the unannounced AMD RX 8800 XT:

Developer Amano has shared an update on how it’s creating the realistic physics for its upcoming Playdate pinball game, Devils on the Moon. It’s not launching until sometime in 2025, but the game will use the Playdate’s left D-pad and A buttons to trigger the flippers. As for the crank? The developers haven’t revealed how it will specifically be used.

Subtitled episodes of Dragon Ball Daima have been streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll for some time now, but the series’ English dub starring Stephanie Nadolny as mini Goku and Paul Castro Jr. as mini Vegeta is finally coming to Crunchyroll on January 10th.

Fortnite’s nostalgia trip continues, this time with the return of OG, which brings back the game’s very first chapter. It’ll be available as a permanent fixture staring on December 6th.