Category: Technology

At CES 2025, NVIDIA introduced DLSS 4, the latest version of its real-time image upscaling technology, and announced that it will come to all RTX GPUs. That includes the RTX 20 series that was discontinued back in 2020, but the older models aren’t getting all its features.

In the new GeForce RTX 50 series models, DLSS 4 will enable Multi Frame Generation. This feature will generate up to three additional frames for every traditionally rendered one, and it can help multiply frame rates by up to eight times more than traditional brute-force rendering. NVIDIA claims 4K 240 FPS fully ray-traced gaming will be possible thanks to Multiple Frame Generation when using its GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, the new $1,999 flagship GPU arriving later this month.

In addition, DLSS 4 represents what the company is calling the “biggest upgrade to its AI models” since the release of DLSS 2. DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution and DLAA will now be powered by the same advanced architecture powering AI models, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The company says that translates to improved temporal stability, less ghosting and higher detail of objects in motion.

A total of 75 games and apps will support DLSS 4 from day zero. When the new RTX 50 cards come out, games like Alan Wake and Cyberpunk 2077 will be updated with the ability to take advantage of the technology’s Multi Frame Generation feature. More titles will be updated with support for Multi Frame in the future, including Black Myth: Wukong, while upcoming ones like Doom: The Dark Ages and Dune: Awakening will support the feature at launch.

The GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs aren’t getting Multi Frame Generation, but they are getting DLSS 4’s enhanced frame generation, enhanced ray reconstruction, super resolution and deep leaning anti-aliasing capabilities. Meanwhile, GeFore RTX 30 series and RTX 20 series GPUs are getting the last three. 

NVIDIA

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/nvidia-announced-dlss-4-will-come-to-all-rtx-gpus-044835926.html?src=rss

Registration for the closed network test of Elden Ring Nightreign are open, publisher Bandai Namco announced today. The sign-up period for the co-op Elden Ring spinoff officially started on January 10 at 9AM ET and will run until January 20 at 9AM ET. You can add your name to the list now on Bandai Namco’s website.

The close network test will be spread across five different sessions on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X | S, running from February 14 through February 15th. You’ll be able to log in on each of those days from 6AM ET to 9AM ET or 10PM ET to 1AM ET the following day to put the game through its paces.

Selected players will be able to play “a portion of the game prior to the full game launch,” according to Bandai Namco’s sign-up page, with the goal of getting a sense of how the company’s servers and online systems will handle a mass of fans playing simultaneously. As to what that “portion” will actually contain, Bandai Namco says that players will get “to try the game’s co-op experience,” partnering with two other players to tackle a three day cycle filled with “increasingly challenging enemies and bosses.”

Nightreign appears to use many of the mechanics, armor, weapons and abilities of Elden Ring, but drops them in a revamped setting, “Limveld,” that’s design to change every time you play. Per Bandai Namco, you start each cycle of the game in the familiar Roundtable Hold, where you can pick one of eight characters with unique abilities and “Ultimates.” The Limveld map you play in will shrink each night, and introduce a new boss that if beaten, lets you progress to the next day. The process continues until the final, third night when you face off against a “Nightlord.” And if you fail at any point in the process and have to start a new run (as many will likely do) you’ll earn a relic that lets you “customize and upgrade” your character.

Elden Ring Nightreign was an unexpectedly announced at The Game Awards in 2024, and was a pretty big surprise, not only because Shadow of the Erdtree came out that same year, but because the game’s structure seems remarkably different than anything developer FromSoftware has made before. Anyone lucky enough to be a part of the network test will now be able to see how different it actually feels.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/you-can-now-sign-up-to-test-elden-rings-co-op-spinoff-192012608.html?src=rss

Skate City was an Apple Arcade launch title way back in 2019, developed by Agens and published by Snowman, a company well-known for its mobile-first games like Alto’s Adventure, the “sequel” Alto’s Odyssey, When Cards Fall and a handful of other intriguing titles. It’s been over five years since Skate City first arrived, but the Snowman / Agens team is back with Skate City: New York, which is out on Apple Arcade today. 

There have been a number of content updates to the original game over the years, but this is a full-fledged new title that feels quite familiar but also has a number of improvements and updates. I had a chance to try Skate City: New York a few days before its launch, and I also spoke with Snowman’s Ryan Cash and Andrew Schimmel about the new game, which they said has been in the works for a good three years now. 

As with the first Skate City, you’re rolling left-to-right in classic side-scrolling format here. To make things accessible, you can pull off tricks by swiping in one of eight directions on the lower half of the screen; the left side is for ollie-based tricks while the right shifts you to nollie. You don’t have to do anything precise to land, just launch the trick and the game will make sure you hit the ground rolling (unless you land on stairs or an obstacle, of course). That’s the basic starting point, but you can also do spins, manuals, grinds and more. It’s simpler than a game like the classic Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series or the recent OlliOlli World, but there’s still a lot of timing and dexterity involved in really nailing your runs. 

As you’d expect, the visuals are more dynamic and the backgrounds are much-improved over the original (which was still a lovely game). But what sets this one apart the most, according to Schimmel, is the fact the “Pro Skate” mode, which is the most involved part of the game, uses procedurally-generated levels. 

“We didn’t want to limit ourselves to the original [game’s] loops through the city, but instead make something that was more adaptive and dynamic,” Schimmel said. “Procedural generation was the answer and the biggest technical challenge.” It’s not something that I was able to pick up on immediately, since I’ve only played the game for a couple hours, but Schimmel’s confident it’ll make Skate City: New York have even more replay-ability than the original.

Snowman / Agens

Pro Skate reminds me a lot of Snowman’s Alto’s Adventure, but translated to skating — the goal is to go as far as you can and rack up as many points as possible while completing three objectives to level your progress up. Objectives are things like “land three 180-degree spins” or “grind for 100 meters.” But with levels more unpredictable than in the prior game, you’ll need to be better at reacting on-the-fly to new obstacles, which can end your run but also give you an opportunity for a good grind or trick. 

As with all of Snowman’s games, there are no in-app purchases here; instead, you’ll get points for completing challenges and leveling up in Pro Skate. You can then use those to customize your character with the much more flexible and expanded Skate Shop. You can tweak your character’s body, hair, facial characteristics, clothes, skateboard and so forth. I haven’t played around with it a ton yet but it’s obviously right off the bat that there’s a lot more personalization here. 

As with Skate City, Snowman promises that there will be a steady stream of fresh challenges and more parts of the city to explore over the next year and beyond. Schimmel referred to it as a “live services” game even though there’s no monetization aspect to it. I also asked how the team decided to release Skate City: New York through Apple Arcade versus having it be a one-time payment or even including paid updates in the game — Cash called it an “easy choice.”

“We haven’t done a paid up-front game since Alto’s Odyssey in 2018,” Cash said. “Apple Arcade and Netflix Games are where we’re at right now. And it was an easy choice when talking about Skate City: New York, because the first game was a launch title and found a lot of success there. It just made sense to bring it back to Apple Arcade.” The first Skate City eventually came to consoles and PC, as well, and Cash said that was definitely under consideration for the future, but the goal is to make a mobile-first title as good as it can be. 

While the game doesn’t feel wildly different than its predecessor, Skate City: New York still feels like a premium mobile game at a time when those can be hard to find. And Snowman and Agens have done a great job of balancing the pick-up-and-play aspects of a good mobile game with a deeper experience, at least from what I’ve seen so far. “We want a seven-year-old who’s excited about skateboarding to have fun,” Cash said, “as well as people like us who grew up loving skateboarding and really want a challenge.”

Skate City: New York is out today exclusively on Apple Arcade.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/skate-city-new-york-is-a-mobile-game-that-manuals-the-line-between-casual-and-deep-play-191526652.html?src=rss

The long-awaited streaming service Venu Sports is no longer happening, according to The Hollywood Reporter and others. The sports-focused streaming service was to be a joint offering by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox. There was no concrete reason given, other than corporate-speak.

“In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels,” the companies wrote in a statement.

We assume this move will also involve some serious layoffs, as Venu has been percolating for a while. To that end, the companies said they are “proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period.” There are no details as to what this support will entail.

The real reason for the shutdown is likely due to ongoing legal woes. Just as one threat disappeared this week, with Fubo dropping an antitrust lawsuit and joining forces with Disney, another popped up in its place. Days after Disney announced a deal to merge Hulu + Live TV with Fubo, a pair of satellite TV companies argued against lifting a pre-existing injunction that delayed the launch of Venu.

DirecTV and EchoStar suggested that Fubo and Disney’s newfound friendship doesn’t resolve alleged antitrust issues surrounding Venu Sports. DirecTV wrote to a judge, saying that the joint venture “restores an anticompetitive runway” for the companies “to control the future of the live pay TV market.” EchoStar wrote a similar letter.

An unnamed source familiar with Venu Sports told The Hollywood Reporter that the move to cancel the streaming service was made in the past few days and that the aforementioned legal snafu played a role.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/rip-to-the-entirely-hypothetical-streaming-service-venu-sports-180532990.html?src=rss

Life for Sleepers is fraught. They gain consciousness in a state of indentured servitude, an emulated human mind inside an android body, forced to work until they’re discarded. Those who escape don’t last long due to trackers in their bodies, and their hardcoded dependence on a drug known as Stabilizer. Without it, a Sleeper’s body will eventually reject its biosynthetic organs.

If this sounds like tech’s worst excesses of the present taken to their most extreme, you’re grasping what Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s creator, Gareth Damian Martin, is driving at.

“Citizen Sleeper was me drawing on things from when I was in my early 20s,” they tell me. In the past, Martin has spoken extensively about how the time they spent as a gig economy worker informed the alienation and atomization of labor that ran through the original game, which they released to widespread critical acclaim in 2022.

“With Citizen Sleeper 2, I’m no longer looking at things from that perspective, I’m thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things.”

For story reasons I won’t spoil, the protagonist of the upcoming Citizen Sleeper 2 has managed to deactivate their tracker and no longer needs Stabilizer, but that hasn’t made their existence any less precarious. Where Citizen Sleeper took place exclusively on a single space station, Citizen Sleeper 2 lets the player explore the Starward Belt, a location that’s referenced frequently in the first game.

With the change of locale comes a ship and crew for the player to manage, and a dramatic increase in scope. At approximately 250,000 words long, Citizen Sleeper 2’s script is nearly double the length of the original game’s. The stakes are higher too, with a corporate proxy war threatening to engulf the Starward Belt.

Jump Over the Age

Martin has been working on Citizen Sleeper 2 for nearly two years, or about the same amount of time it took them to complete the original game. All essential systems were already in place, allowing Martin to spend more time on gameplay experimentation and story writing, drawing in particular on two of the most beloved (and deeply human) space operas.

“You know, Cowboy Bebop is a really good story about the gig economy,” Martin says, laughing. “And people forget how little the characters in Firefly like each other, right? They’re more colleagues than friends, so there’s something really relatable in that.” During their days as a gig economy worker, Martin notes they met many people from different walks of life and places, and while the work pulls people apart almost by design, workers still find solidarity and human connection.

The new game inherits many of its predecessor’s gameplay systems. Each day or “cycle,” the player has up to five dice to assign to actions that can earn them money or advance the story. The likelihood of completing an action successfully depends on the die the player assigns to it. A five, for instance, has a 50-50 chance of producing either a neutral or positive outcome, while a six guarantees success. Each task also carries with it a risk factor, with negative dice rolls resulting in more severe results on “risky” and “dangerous” actions.

Then there are what the game calls “clocks,” the system that binds everything together. Most story objectives require the player to chip away at a task across multiple cycles. At the same time, there’s often a competing clock counting down the amount of time before a story deadline.

On the surface, all of Citizen Sleeper’s systems are simple, but they come together in a way that reinforces the game’s narrative. At least they did at the start. On my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper, my character eventually earned enough money that securing Stabilizer for them was not an issue. Martin tells me that was by design.

“I knew I needed to have players on my side,” they say of the first game. “I needed to win people over. If the game was too harsh, I felt like players wouldn’t give it the time that I wanted them to give to it. This time around, I feel in a very different position.”

Jump Over the Age

Citizen Sleeper 2, by contrast, is a more confident game — in itself, and in its players to accept a certain degree of suffering. There are story beats and content the players can miss, which was mostly not true in the first game. It also features multiple difficulty settings, and on the hardest one, the player’s Sleeper can experience permadeath. (If you want to continue that save file, you need to lower the difficulty, but your Sleeper will be forever changed.)

“I didn’t know how Citizen Sleeper 2 was going to end when I started making it,” Martin tells me, describing that as a “dangerous game” for a developer to play. “But because I’d made the first one, I felt confident that I could play that game, and that it would come to something really exciting.”

The intended effect of Citizen Sleeper 2 is for the player to feel like Martin is leading them through a tabletop RPG experience, like Dungeons & Dragons or Blades in the Dark. The story should feel improvised, surprising and moving.

Nowhere is that newfound confidence and TTRPG inspiration more apparent than with “Contracts,” Citizen Sleeper’s 2 signature new gameplay feature. Contracts take the Sleeper and up to two companions on jobs away from the safety of the Starward Belt’s population centers.

An early one tasks the Sleeper’s crew with diffusing a damaged corporate battle drone. In practice, that meant deactivating two separate systems on the spacecraft, with the catch being that as soon as I gained access to one system, the timer for both started ticking. Each Contract is a miniature pressure cooker, with self-contained risks that can’t be relieved until the Contract is over or the player fails.

Jump Over the Age

Contracts also allowed Martin to explore one of Citizen Sleeper’s less fully realized ideas, “that the dice are the Sleeper’s body.” During Contracts, negative and neutral rolls made during risky and dangerous actions will cause the Sleeper’s stress gauge to increase — a system reminiscent of the need to obtain Stabilizer in the first game. As the gauge fills, specific rolls will begin damaging the player’s dice. Each of the Sleeper’s five dice can sustain three hits before they break; they can’t be repaired until fully broken, and not until a Contract is over. Crewmates also have stress gauges, and filling them will leave them out of commission for the remainder of a Contract.

Further complicating things is that even after fixing the Sleeper’s dice, they don’t work as expected right away, due to another new mechanic called Glitch. Depending on the components the player uses to fix the Sleeper’s body, they will fill more or less of the Sleeper’s Glitch gauge. In turn, that means there’s a greater chance of a regular die being converted into a glitched one, which has an innate 80-20 chance of producing either a negative or positive outcome, and skill points do nothing to change those odds.

At first getting a glitched die feels punishing, but I think it is one of the smartest systems Martin has added to the game. The fact that glitched dice aren’t impacted by skills means they also ignore negative modifiers, which made them great for attempting tasks my Sleeper wasn’t good at, and it really felt like I was pushing my luck. In a nice touch, there’s even an achievement players can earn, an apt nod to Cowboy Bebop named “Whatever happens, happens,” when they score a positive outcome with a glitched die.

Jump Over the Age

I never felt comfortable playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the way I did with its predecessor. The game’s constant surprises meant I often had to push my Sleeper’s body to its breaking point to complete some of its more challenging scenarios. In that way, Citizen Sleeper 2 is far more successful at bringing together its narrative and gameplay ambitions.

I also found the story profound and essential at a time when it feels like the world isn’t moving in the right direction. The characters of Citizen Sleeper 2 are surrounded by endless hardship, and yet they find a way to move forward.

“Is it pointless that we continue to strive to have human, meaningful relationships and build lives when we know that there are structures bigger than us that might crush us at any moment?” Martin asks me. “Or is it that, even though those structures are so big and powerful, we still live and work with a sense that we can build something and have meaningful relationships because our realities are very personal, real and direct?”

Like any good GM, Martin isn’t interested in handing anyone the answer to that question but hopes Citizen Sleeper 2 might lead them to their own.

Citizen Sleeper 2 arrives on January 31 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/citizen-sleeper-2-asks-how-we-stay-human-in-a-hopeless-future-180050858.html?src=rss

Lenovo has a new series of updated Legion gaming laptops at CES 2025. The star of the show is the 10th-generation Legion Pro 7i. It supports up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, thanks to its cooling system that enables up to 250W thermal design power (TDP). It also has an AI engine that dynamically adjusts CPU and GPU wattage for optimal performance.

The 2025 Legion Pro 7i supports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and the aforementioned RTX 5090 on the graphics side. Lenovo’s Legion Coldfront Vapor cooling helps it support that high-end hardware. Tack on up to 64GB of 6400Mhz DDR5 (2 X 32GB) RAM and the built-in LA1+LA3 AI chip, and you’re looking at a souped-up machine for on-the-go gaming (and just about anything else you could throw at it).

The laptop has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10) OLED display. The screen supports up to a 240Hz frame rate and has a 1ms response time. It can reach 500 nits of brightness. The Legion Pro 7i has two USB-C ports (one of which is Thunderbolt 4), three USB-A ports and HDMI 2.1. With all that high-end hardware inside, it’s quite the beefy machine, with a starting weight of around 6 lbs.

It launches in March. But all that horsepower doesn’t come cheap: Lenovo says the Legion Pro 7i has an expected starting price of $2,399 — and you can safely bet that RTX 5090 variants will fetch a premium on top of that.

Lenovo

Meanwhile, the 10th-gen Legion Pro 5i (Intel) and Legion Pro 5 (AMD) offer up to an Intel Ultra 9 275HX (the same as the Pro 7i) or AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX, respectively. Their thermal power supports up to 200W, which enables up to an RTX 5070 Ti Laptop for graphics. You can order configurations with up to 32GB (2 X 16GB) of 6400Mhz DDR5 RAM.

It also has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10) OLED screen at up to 500 nits with a 1ms response time. But at 165Hz, its maximum frame rates don’t go quite as high as the Pro 7i.

Like the Pro 7i, the Pro 5 series uses Lenovo’s AI Engine+ with a Scenario Detection feature that dynamically tweaks the CPU and GPU wattage based on the moment’s needs. It has the same port setup as the Pro 7i, but at least it weighs a bit less (a minimum of 5.58 lbs).

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait longer for the more affordable Pro 5 series. The Legion Pro 5i launches in May (starting at $1,499), while the Legion Pro 5 arrives in June (starting at $1,399).

Lenovo

Lenovo also has a 10th-gen version of the (non-“Pro”) Legion 7i, which the company’s oddly specific PR copy says is for “gamers actively studying in STEM programs and fields.” It also supports up to an Intel Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 GPU and has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) OLED with up to 240Hz and 1ms. However, its Coldfront Hyper cooling maxes out at a lower 145W TDP, so you won’t get the same top-level performance as the more expensive Pro models.

Starting at 4.4 lbs., it’s notably thinner and lighter than the Pro models. (The fact that it’s more portable but still decently powerful likely explains Lenovo’s strange “STEM student” framing.) It has an all-metal chassis. It will be available in June for $1,599.

Finally, there’s also a 10th-gen Legion 5i. Sticking with the oddly specific PR framing, Lenovo says this model is for “university gamers in non-STEM programs.” (Gotta nail down every niche!) It has up to a 15.1-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10, 165Hz, 1ms) OLED and supports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. (There’s also an AMD variant with up to a Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU.)

The Legion 5i is slated for a May launch, starting at $1,299.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/lenovo-ces-2025-the-10th-gen-legion-pro-7i-gaming-laptop-supports-up-to-rtx-5090-graphics-160004703.html?src=rss

It was an interesting year for robots at CES 2025. While we had hoped the AI boom would bring a new wave of useful robots to the show, it seems that many robotics companies are still figuring out exactly how to best use AI. 

What we found instead was a mix of adorable robot companions, strange concepts and one, slightly terrifying humanoid. We visited a lot of robots at CES and, for better or worse, some really left an impression on us. These are the ones that stood out the most.

TCL Ai Me

Karissa Bell for Engadget

Of all the surprisingly adorable robots we saw at CES, TCL’s Ai Me (pronounced “Amy”) was one of the cutest. The concept was on display at TCL’s booth delighting and bewildering everyone who walked by. With a voice and eyes that are meant to sound like an actual human child, TCL seems to be pitching this as an emotional support/companion robot for kids. At the booth, Ai Me wasn’t doing much besides moving around in its wheeled, egg-shaped base, but the company says that the AI-powered robot could be used to control smart home devices or record vlogs, thanks to built-cameras and AI capabilities. 

For now, it’s unclear if TCL actually plans to sell this thing, but the company seemed to have put quite a bit of effort into its CES demo. In addition to the one slowly wheeling around a mock-up living room, TCL showed off a lineup of different outfits, including fuzzy bunny suits and a denim vest, for Ai Me. -Karissa Bell

Ropet

Karissa Bell for Engadget

As we walked over to the Ropet booth, a person was waving a plastic hotdog in front of the little robot and small cartoon hotdogs flashed across its eyes in response. I was pretty much sold at that moment, but it turned out to have some other pretty interesting things going on too. Ropet responds to voice, touch and gestures, and has its own cute little emotional reactions. It’s conversational if you want it to be, with ChatGPT integration. Mostly it’s just adorable. -Cheyenne MacDonald

Mirumi

Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget

Mirumi is one of those CES oddities that makes you simultaneously go, “What the hell is this?” and, “Omg I love this.” It’s small, fluffy and has no other purpose than to make you smile by looking around and staring at you like an innocent baby. I immediately felt the need to protect it with my life. — CM

Romi

Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget

Romi is a conversational robot that fits in the palm of your hand and is here for you if you want to chat, vent or just hang out. The newest model of the robot turned up at Unveiled, and we couldn’t help but be charmed by its cute facial expressions. It fits nicely in your hands, so you can carry it around the house with you while you walk around complaining about your workday. -CM

Miroki

Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget

Miroki was at CES last year, but the Enchanted Tools team was back showing off the latest version and some new skills, including LLM integration. If you were able to fight through the crowd surrounding it to get up close, you may have seen it rolling around waving at people, blinking its big cartoon eyes and flicking its ears like a deer. Undecided on whether it’s cute or a little unnerving. -CM

Scorpion

Scorpion is an AI bartender from Richtech Robotics that unfortunately wasn’t slinging drinks when we saw it (or scuttling around, apparently it doesn’t do that), but did perform a synchronized dance to “Apt.” with the company’s Adam bot. Come for the arthropodal robot, stay for the K-pop. -CM

Unitree G1 and “Robot Dog”

Karissa Bell for Engadget

Of all the robots we saw at CES 2025, Unitree’s take the prize for most terrifying. The company was showing off its new quadruped “robot dog” and humanoid G1 robots. The quadruped, which is essentially their take on Boston Dynamic’s Spot robot, showed off to onlookers by running around the booth, climbing stairs and sitting on its “hind legs.”

But it was the G1 that proved to be the robot we needed to worry about. I was taking photos of the roughly 4-foot tall humanoid when it suddenly ran at me full-speed. I was only a foot or so in front of it at the time due to the crowd in the booth, so the roughly 60-pound G1 slammed directly into my body at an all out run. The surrounding crowd met I was essentially pinned in place for a few seconds while the robot continued to attempt to run through me until its operator was able to regain control. Fortunately, this was a case of user error and not the beginning of a robot uprising. The person holding the gamepad-like controller for the robot had mistakenly mashed the joystick, sending it directly into my body. At least I can now say I know what it feels like to be body slammed by a robot. -KB

Mi-Mo

Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget

One of the more unusual robots we saw at CES, Mi-Mo is a six-legged table with a lamp on top. We didn’t see Mi-Mo do much besides shimmy around the show floor and “wave,” but there are some really interesting ideas behind the AI-powered robot. It runs on multiple large language models and “thinks and acts” based on its environment. Its creators say it could help with childcare and eldercare tasks. Mi-Mo will be available to developers and researchers as a dev kit later this year. -KB

Reachy 2

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

Pollen Robotics was here at CES showing off Reachy 2, it’s latest machine that’ll cost you $75,000 if you have that sort of cash laying around. It’s an adorable open-source machine with a human pilot that, its makers say, is ideal for tele-operation and data acquisition. I just think it’s cute, especially when it waves at you. -Daniel Cooper

Additional reporting by Daniel Cooper.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/the-robots-we-saw-at-ces-2025-the-good-the-bad-and-the-completely-unhinged-174529774.html?src=rss

As the world turns, so do the console generations. The Nintendo Switch is over seven years old, so it’s due for a refresh. Nintendo Switch 2 rumors have been swirling for years, but now they are really heating up. A sequel to Nintendo’s most successful home console ever is coming and it’s likely coming sooner rather than later.

Will it be a straight up sequel to the Switch with updated specs while retaining the same hybrid functionality or will Nintendo get weird with it? Will it even be called the Switch 2, or will the company go with something like the Super Switch or even the New Nintendo Switch? You can never tell with Nintendo. Heck, maybe it’ll call the thing the Switch U.

In any event, recent weeks have brought feverish speculation regarding all aspects of the forthcoming gaming console. It’s important to note, however, that very little information has been confirmed by Nintendo. The company operates on its own timetable. With that said, here are all of the rumors that are most likely to come true, given industry analysis.

When will the Nintendo Switch 2 be announced?

As previously mentioned, Nintendo marches to the beat of its own drum. We don’t exactly know when it’ll hold an event to reveal the console. A lot of people wrongly assumed it would happen toward the latter part of 2024, but that didn’t happen. 

Even Nintendo has trouble keeping the lid on a major console release, so we could learn something before the official reveal. There are parts that have to be sourced and shipments that have to be made. A senior analyst at MST Financial noted a spike in production equipment spending by Nintendo assembler Hosiden.

When will the Nintendo Switch 2 come out?

Once again, this is more or less a mystery. We aren’t totally in the dark, but it’s mostly rumor and speculation. One thing we know for sure is that Nintendo will announce the Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever it chooses to call it) by March 2025, as the company confirmed back in May. Some are saying there will be a March release date, which makes sense given the OG Switch came out on March 17, 2017. However, other reports put the console’s release window later in 2025.

Accessory manufacturer Genki, which has been a major source of leaks in recent months, claims the console will be released in April. 

Will it even be a proper Switch sequel?

Nintendo has a weird track record here. The baffling Wii U followed the massive success of the Wii. The Wii itself followed the more traditional GameCube. In other words, it’s possible it’ll be something out of left field and not exactly a true sequel to the Switch. However, this is unlikely this time around. As much as I would love to see wacky VR glasses or a completely bonkers console concept, all points indicate a more traditional approach.

Developers have already seen the hardware, though in a much earlier form, and it seems to be a regular old console. While Nintendo hasn’t confirmed hybrid functionality, it’d be a weird omission given the absolute financial firestorm of the Switch. We’ve also heard rumors of a Mini-LED display, which would track for a hybrid console. It’s highly likely this will be a straight-up Switch 2, or something like it, calling to mind the Super Nintendo.

To that end, recent rumors suggest a design that recalls the original Switch. According to reporting by VGC, photos of the console have appeared online and they show an 8-inch screen and magnetic Joy-Con controllers. There looks to be SL/SR buttons and front-facing player LEDs on these controllers. 

Will there be a bit of Nintendo weirdness? 

Everything leaked or rumored so far on this console has been fairly, well, traditional. It looks like the original Switch, but better. That’s awesome, but will there be any of that unpredictable Nintendo magic? Maybe! Recent reports indicate two puzzling additions that folks can’t make hide nor hair of. 

An accessory maker called Genki accidentally leaked an alleged mockup at CES 2025 of the entire console. If the Switch 2 is coming sooner rather than later, it makes sense that accessory makers would have these kinds of mockups. There looks to be a mysterious “C” button on the bottom-right side and nobody knows what it does. Could it initiate voice chat during gameplay? Could it calibrate the controllers? Could it create a room-sized hologram of Bowser in your living room? We’ll have to wait and see, and there’s always a chance that the button won’t even exist. 

Now onto the updated Joy-Cons, those same leaks seem to indicate a new sensor on the connecting side of each controller. It looks a whole lot like an optical sensor, which is what a computer mouse uses. This has led to speculation that players will be able to flip the Joy-Con over and use it like a mouse.

But why would anyone even want this? I can think of three words. New Mario Paint. In any event, take all of that Genki stuff with a big grain of salt, as Nintendo came out and said that the images and video were “not official.” The accessory manufacturer has also stated that its mockup wasn’t based on an actual console, but rather “leaked information that’s circulating in the industry.”

Is the Nintendo Switch 2 backwards compatible?

If it’s a sequel to the Switch, the next question has to be about backwards compatibility. The Switch’s library is absolutely massive, and continues to grow, so gamers would be rightfully peeved if they couldn’t play Tears of the Kingdom on their new next-gen console. There’s good news on this front.

The company has officially announced in a recent earnings report that the console will be fully backwards compatible. It will also feature access to Nintendo Online, so users will be able to play all of those old retro titles. 

What about specs?

The rumors regarding specs are all over the place, so it’s tough to pin down. We know one thing for sure: It’ll be more powerful than the ancient Switch hardware, which was already antiquated back in 2017. One analyst allegedly got a hold of a spec sheet from the Korean United Daily News that said the Switch 2 would boast an eight-core Cortex-A78AE processor, 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal eMMC storage. This tracks for me, as these specs are about as underpowered in 2024 as the original Switch was in 2017. However, some reports do indicate that the console would include 12GB of RAM. 

Another source suggests that the eight-core CPU will be packaged inside an NVIDIA-produced Tegra239 SoC (system on a chip). Given the current Switch runs on an NVIDIA chip, that makes a lot of sense. The CPU will be more powerful, but it’s the Switch 2’s new GPU that will be a major differentiator. It’s all-but-confirmed that the Switch 2 will support DLSS, NVIDIA’s “deep learning supersampling” upscaling tech, which would allow the console to render games at a low resolution internally while outputting a high-resolution image. (Fun fact: We actually wrote about how perfect DLSS was for the Nintendo Switch 2 when the technology was announced alongside the RTX 20 series back in 2018.)

There are still questions about the Switch 2 and DLSS: Will the system support newer DLSS features like frame generation? Will existing games be automatically tidied up by NVIDIA’s algorithm? Regardless of the exact implementation, DLSS upscaling will be a huge leap over the rudimentary techniques available to Nintendo Switch developers.

As for the display, there are many conflicting rumors. Early reports from solid sources suggested the Switch 2 would have an 8-inch display LCD display, but there have also been rumors about an 7-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate. Some analysts have suggested this would be an OLED screen, while others have said it would be a Mini-LED display. A Mini-LED display is basically an LCD display that has a backlight made of (surprise!) mini-LEDs rather than edge lighting. This allows for local dimming, making the blacks more black. I’m hedging my bets here. I think it’ll be a standard LCD, to cut costs, with an OLED or Mini-LED model coming later down the line. However, Mini-LED screens are slightly cheaper than OLED displays, so that’s certainly a possibility at launch.

As for resolution, recent reporting suggests that the console will output 1080p in handheld and 4K when docked. That’s much better than the OG Switch. 

How much will the Nintendo Switch 2 cost?

We don’t have too much information regarding price but we do have plenty of history to work with. The original Nintendo Switch launched at $300, which is pretty much the “magic number” when it comes to Nintendo console releases in recent years. The Wii U also came in at $300. 

However, there are plenty of rumors circulating that Nintendo could be upping the asking price for the Switch 2. Numerous outlets have reported it’ll be $400, or potentially even more expensive. However, the same analysts who say the console will be $400 were also fairly certain it would be out by the end of 2024 and, well, it looks like that ain’t happening. 

Dipping back into history, there is some precedence for a price uptick. The GameCube was $200 and the Wii was $250. The Wii U and Switch increased to $300 and, well, numbers like to go up. A $400 price tag would make it nearly as expensive as a PS5 and Xbox Series X. That would also put it at the same price as the 256GB LCD Steam Deck. 

Do we know about any launch games?

Nope! But it’s certainly been a long time since we’ve gotten a proper 3D Mario adventure, right? That would be one heck of a system seller. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. Past as prologue, we can expect something from Ubisoft and an off-the-wall title like 1-2-Switch. 

If there’s a gimmick or hook involved with the console, we’ll also get a game that takes advantage of that. A dual release of Metroid Prime 4, just like Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess before that, is also a possibility. Finally, there have been rumblings that the big launch title could be none other than Mario Kart 9. 

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That’s everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2 today. We’ll update this article with rumors we trust and with information we gather directly from sources. Any changes made to the article after its initial publishing will be listed below.

Update, January 10, 2025, 12:40 PM ET: This story has been updated with details about the Switch 2’s alleged “C” button, along with the Joy-Con optical sensors. We also wrote about the announcement window and launch games. Finally, we covered announcements from Nintendo and Genki regarding a potential leak. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-switch-2-everything-we-know-about-the-upcoming-console-110023968.html?src=rss

It was while walking past the RadioShack booth at CES 2025 that I spied the Kodak stand not far ahead. And it was while musing about the fate of those two storied — okay maybe not storied — names that I spied another Kodak booth two rows over. For a company that’s been dead more than a few times over, it’s certainly enjoying something of a renaissance. Look, it’s not as if there haven’t always been brands that die and get revived in pursuit of a quick buck. Especially if the price is cheap and there’s any residual degree of affection for it, but even so there are a hell of a lot of them now. Do we need four different companies selling Kodak-branded wares? 

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

Perhaps the most egregious example at this year’s show was from Mizari, an LA-based company that sells hardware under a variety of names. This year, it was showing off a lineup of products under the Memorex brand, including e-bikes, scooters and golf caddies. If you’re unfamiliar, Memorex made recordable media in the analog era: computer and cassette tapes, VHS, CDs and eventually DVDs. Its slogan was “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” boasting its superior audio quality. Does that slogan work as well for e-bikes, scooters and golf caddies? That’s less clear.

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

The company’s representatives said that using the Memorex name was an experiment to see how much affection the public has for the brand. They’re targeting people over the age of 40 who remember what they slammed in their tape decks. At the same time, they’re targeting younger generations who may feel the pull of that retro name, since we’re apparently in an era where anything old is inherently laudable. Mizari also holds the license for Delorean, albeit just to make e-bikes, scooters and go-karts, for the kids, you know?

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

RadioShack has been passed from owner to owner since it initially filed for Chapter 11 back in 2015. In May 2023, it was bought by Unicomer, a RadioShack franchisee from Central and South America which is now relaunching the parent brand in the US. It will act, like so many of these companies, as a distributor, adding its name to a variety of products made elsewhere. Its lineup is already 400 products strong, from gaming keyboards and mice to portable projectors and speakers. The idea, as you might have guessed, is to cash in on the fact people likely remember the name of this over some generic product they’ll find among the dregs on Amazon. 

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

The two Kodaks nearby share the Kodak name, but very little else: One is showing off the Kodak Mini Shot (lead image), made by Prinics Co. Walk 50 yards further down the plush CES carpet and you’ll find another Kodak (pictured above), this one selling digital photo frames and tablets. Staffers at both booths are happy to talk about which part of the sprawling Kodak license they are paying for. Hell, the latter Kodak stand was also advertising those same products under the Thomson name, an old French electronics company that was rebranded as Thales 25 years ago.

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

A little walk and you’ll soon find a large stand from RCA, which also holds the names Thomson and Blaupunkt. All three are nothing more than names and logos slapped on products that are shipped in from various manufacturers. RCA is famously known for making radio equipment and other electronics before branching into broadcasting, music and movies. So it’s natural, too, that you can pick up an RCA-branded e-bike and scooter, cashing in on all those bikes RCA made when your pop pop was in diapers.

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

Next to Mizari’s Memorex-branded exhibits was the third Kodak booth I’d stumbled across, this one showing off a wide variety of products. This included smartwatches, cameras, binoculars, mirrors with halo lighting and Bluetooth speakers, all made by various licensees. And, quite literally two booths over, was another Kodak stand, this time from C&A Global, which makes Kodak branded photo printers (and the HP Sprocket) as well as projectors and scanners.

Daniel Cooper for Engadget

I’m not sure I need to wave my hands around and try to make some sort of grand point about All Of This. One one hand, it doesn’t matter. Lots of low-cost products are sold to folks who aren’t going to interrogate their purchases. Given how common the practice of buying a dead brand and slapping it on whatever you sell, it must be profitable enough to justify doing it. But it just leaves me scratching my head, wondering who’s going to remember the tape company from the ‘90s and want to ride an e-bike with its logo on the side. Or who would think there’s any trust left in the Kodak brand given the near-homeopathic levels of dilution it’s subjected to. Maybe these companies’ real lingering value is to serve as a reminder to all the other tech brands that this is the fate that awaits them if they keep messing up. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/a-tale-of-four-kodaks-173040742.html?src=rss

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