When Lego announced its tech-packed Smart Bricks at CES, we were impressed by the potential – enough to give it our Best in Show award. But when the first Star Wars sets actually launched in March, we were less enamored. All that promise of clever interaction and creative play ultimately boiled down to a few […]
Nvidia’s announcement that it’s getting into the consumer laptop chip space with RTX Spark is huge. Apple has proved for years that Arm-based chips can perform incredibly well while also delivering great battery life – at least on the Mac. In the Windows world, performance hasn’t fully matched up under Qualcomm chips, mostly in the […]
Google’s new “24/7” AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I’m not sure it’s worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs. The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take on tasks and work on them […]
Microsoft is heading to San Francisco this week in a bid to win back developers at its Build conference. I’ve been attending Build since the days when Microsoft called it the Professional Developers Conference, and I can’t remember a more pivotal moment. As Microsoft continues to reshuffle its entire business around AI, it’s moving Build […]
Things are bad out there. Despite 2026 shaping up to be a great year when it comes to actual games, it couldn’t really be worse for the people that make them or the industry as a whole. Hardware prices keep going up, layoffs have shown no signs of stopping, and even big-budget titles backed by […]
Over the past several years, Microsoft has largely managed to withstand populist calls to break up Big Tech while peers faced sweeping lawsuits. But a probe by the Federal Trade Commission suggests that grace period could be nearing an end. Earlier this year, Bloomberg outlined the contents of civil investigative demands (CIDs) – similar to […]
Earlier this month, I finally achieved the elusive goal I had set for myself in Bungie’s Marathon. I collected six of the game’s rarest items, allowing me to attempt and then successfully clear the raid-style Compiler boss. I felt a massive weight lift off my shoulders – nearly 185 hours of playtime and I had […]
Cecil Baldwin’s résumé includes appearances on Gravity Falls, narrating the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, and performing as part of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company. But he is best known as the host of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, a long-running fiction show that blends macabre Lovecraftian horror with absurdist […]
You may have heard that Valve’s new Steam Controller can ring like a telephone or do the Wilhelm scream. But did you know it can sing songs, too? Let me show you. Here’s the new Steam Controller performing the “Ground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. 2: Here is “Still Alive” from Portal – fitting for […]
I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time – that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder. Lots of the top-line […]