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Baby Steps is a video game about hiking. This is, of course, a ridiculous concept.

Before we get to the game’s protagonist, an adult toddler in a thin onesie, or its unserious side characters and nonsensical narrative, we have to acknowledge the absurdity at its very core. Leisurely walking around in nature is perhaps the most organic, least technological activity a person can engage in, and the desire to digitize this experience, recreating it for consumption from the butt-shaped cushions of your couch, is silly. It’s such a patently Game Developer™ impulse that, actually, I find it adorable. Much like the rest of Baby Steps.

Baby Steps is a walking simulator from a trio of veteran game developers: Dance Central creator Maxi Boch, Ape Out developer Gabe Cuzzillo, and Bennett Foddy of QWOP and Getting Over It fame. It’s heading to PC and PlayStation 5 this year, and since its announcement video dropped in June 2023, it’s been a hotly anticipated curio for fans of annoyingly precise traversal mechanics and offbeat indie shit. It’s a larger audience than you might think.

I played about 45 minutes of Baby Steps at GDC 2025 while Boch, Cuzzillo and Foddy looked on and intermittently told me how good I was at walking. The game stars Nate, an unemployed adult dude who lives in his parents’ basement, as he explores an arid mountain landscape one shaky, unsure step at a time. Maneuvering his body in the proper way is the main goal, and it’s a tricky one. Using a gamepad, you control Nate’s legs individually, one per trigger, and his limbs are incredibly sensitive to small changes in button depression. Pull a trigger tight to lift and bend one of his knees, and release it bit by bit to swing out his lower leg and place his foot precisely where it needs to be. Press forward with the left stick to give Nate just the right amount of momentum, get your trigger rhythm right, and suddenly, hey, you’re walking here.

It sounds easier than it is. Thanks to the game’s incredibly precise mechanics, Nate falls over easily, faceplanting in the dirt and tumbling backward over rocky slopes like a ragdoll, covering his grey onesie in mud and sweat. This same precision also makes Nate shockingly sturdy at times, like when he pulls his whole body onto a ledge with a single step, ending in a perfectly balanced flamingo stance. There’s room in the controls for both mastery and mayhem, and by the time I put down the gamepad, I was walking Nate around with all the grace of a perfectly adequate five-year-old. I was proud of this accomplishment, too, damn it.

Devolver Digital

Literally placing one foot in front of the other requires so much concentration in the game’s first few minutes that it’s easy to ignore Nate’s surroundings, but as walking becomes easier, you’re finally able to look around and ask, “What the hell am I doing here?” The first two chapters of Baby Steps are set on a mountainside dotted with craggy rocks, patches of brown grass, long-abandoned wooden buildings, random carousel horses and dirt pits, and the only indication of where to go is an orange glow emanating from a ridgeline high above Nate’s spawn point.

The few folks Nate meets along the way — a charmingly aloof guide and at least one other, much more prepared hiker — are incredibly entertaining to interact with, but they’re also pretty unhelpful with existential questions. Nate murmurs and monosyllabizes his way through conversations, and he tends to get cut off by the NPCs’ eager observations. Like when I was playing, Nate fell and got stuck at the bottom of a muddy hole, and his guide friend showed up and immediately said, “This hole used to be dry. Hey, did you pee in the hole? Did you pee in this hole?” In response, Nate made anxious noises and generally panicked.

The comedy in Baby Steps is sharp and chaotic, with a delirious, improvised edge. Foddy does the voice work for most of the characters, and he tends to just make up their lines at the mic. The result is a messy yet refreshing conversational flow, and every cutscene I encountered made me chuckle.

Devolver Digital

Most aspects of Baby Steps made me smile, in fact. At one point I entered a fast-walking groove while wandering along a rocky path on the edge of the canyon, and I realized the birdsong and the thuds of my own steps had morphed into a rhythmic song, encouraging my gait with a steady, organic beat. The game’s soundscape comes courtesy of Boch, and it intentionally ebbs and flows according to the way you play the game. Combine this responsive, immersive soundtrack with the constant focus you have to keep on Nate’s movements, and Baby Steps quickly becomes a hypnotic experience. The game’s details only encourage this feeling — the mountain is strangely beautiful, rendered in crisp 3D graphics, and it’s completely explorable, with no invisible walls in sight. If you can see it, you can attempt to climb it. Nate’s onesie collects sweat along the small of his back, under his arms, and in all the crannies you’d expect, and it also picks up mud when he falls, but the stains wash away when you get in water. On-screen prompts are rare. There are hidden hats to wear and penis graffiti to admire, and Nate can take numerous paths to reach the same point, bouncing pancake butt leading the way.

Behind all the absurdity, Baby Steps is an incredibly well-crafted, hyper-detailed relaxation tool. While it is laugh-out-loud funny, its mechanics cut deeper than its oddball trailers suggest, and in practice, it actually left me feeling meditative. Baby Steps is a serious silly game.

Baby Steps is being published by Devolver Digital, and it’s due to hit PS5 and PC via Steam later this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/baby-steps-preview-serious-gameplay-in-a-silly-walking-sim-150008737.html?src=rss

Many Americans have been in a “vibecession” for a few years now, feeling economically squeezed despite all traditional indicators – inflation, the jobs report, manufacturing – mostly saying otherwise.

But with economic uncertainty growing yet again as consumer sentiment and confidence retreats, people are becoming more and more concerned that an actual recession may be on the horizon.

While economists continue to monitor traditional indicators, internet users have been making their own observations about the economy based on the state of culture.

These so-called #RecessionIndicators range from observations based on current events, such as wearing workwear everywhere or DoorDash linking with Klarna for payment plans on food, to just plain humorous – like debating on whether or not to take the rest of the liquor with you after a hang out. 

Theories that link economics and culture are not new: note the lipstick effect, the hemline index or the newer recession pop phenomenon. The economy can have a big effect on culture and the way we consume it – and vice versa.

“Culture has a really powerful impact on society and the economy,” said Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor at the University of Southern California, Price, and author of several books at the intersection of culture and the economy. “It’s very hard to pin down and pinpoint, but we know it to be true.”

Some cultural economic indicators have long been debunked, such as the hemline index, which emerged during the Great Depression and stated that women’s skirt lengths rise and fall with economic booms and busts, respectively. Or the movie index, which stated that people packed theaters for escapism during downturns — thanks to the rise of streaming and lingering effects of the pandemic, theaters are off to a bad start this year. 

But others, like the lipstick index and men’s underwear index, still hold true. (The men’s underwear index, popularized by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in the 2000s, states that men’s underwear sales drop during recessions, as men are willing to wait a bit longer to buy new ones in times of economic stress.) 

“Consumer items like fashion goods have always been used by economists to make a point,” said Lorynn Divita, a professor of apparel design and merchandising at Baylor University. “It takes an abstract economic concept that some people might have problems visualizing, and it uses a tangible good that we all have experience with to make the concept relatable.”

Take the lipstick index, which suggests that during economic downturns, people forgo more expensive products for small luxuries like lipstick. It was first coined by then-Estee Lauder chairman Leonard Lauder during the recession of 2001.

Divita said the lipstick index is merely an example of the substitution effect, or when the demand for a product changes because its price changes compared to other products. 

“…But rather than talking about the substitution effect, which might seem kind of intangible to people, if you talk about the lipstick effect and how people will switch from large indulgences to small indulgences during times of economic duress, it suddenly makes a lot more sense,” said Divita.

The lipstick effect did not hold true during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were wearing masks and switched to other small luxuries like mascara or nail polish. But the principle remained the same. 

“There’s always a disruptor in there,” said Divita.

The economy can also influence culture in general, as shown by the recession pop phenomenon. The sudden uptick in hyper-pop-ish dance music – Charli XCX’s “Brat” album, for example – is reminding listeners of similar songs made during and following the 2008 recession, such as Kesha’s “TikTok” or the Black Eyed Peas’ creative output.

Based on his research, Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist at Berklee College of Music, said he speculates that music is split into two groups during times of economic stress: social commentary or escapism.

“So you could say, ‘Times are hard, so let’s sing about that,’ or ‘Times are hard, so what the hell, let’s party,’” said Bennett.

Of course, this partying serves as a convenient distraction from worrying about, say, the price of eggs, or groceries in general. 

While the term is linked to the economy, Bennett said it also serves as a way for people to be nostalgic about the music of their youth.

“Maybe in 2035, we’ll talk about COVID pop,” said Bennett.

Though #RecessionIndicators like recession pop are often in good fun, fears about the economy can sometimes serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy as people adjust their spending habits accordingly.

“When the market gets jittery, it’s kind of a recursive loop. It’s the same with consumers,” said Currid-Halkett. “When people get a sense of things, that there’s going to be a downturn, their behavior changes. Now is that true of everyone? Is it long standing? That remains to be seen. But I think that’s just human psychology.”

Those who are enrolled in the Android Auto testing program can now check out new features as part of the 14.1 beta, including support for a few games. As things stand, four Android games are available on compatible vehicle displays — Candy Crush Soda Saga, Angry Birds 2, Farm Heroes Saga (another match-three game) and Beach Buggy Racing. They could help you pass the time when, say, you're waiting for your EV to charge or to pick up your kids from school.

According to 9to5Google, which tried out the feature, you need to have the games installed on your phone to play them on your car's screen. They'll also only be accessible while the vehicle is parked. The publication noted that, when you get ready to move the car, the game will close right away. Until you park again, you can't tap on a game to reopen it. In addition, 9to5Google was unable to actually play Angry Birds 2 — the app got stuck on an "internet required" screen — though Beach Buggy Racing appeared to run well enough.

Also part of this beta is a fullscreen mode for apps. To back out from that, you may need to swipe down from the top of the display. This gesture reveals an Exit button.

Google announced Android game support in the latest Android Auto beta as part of its latest feature drop for Pixel devices. As The Verge points out, however, cars with Google built in already allow users to play a broader range of games while the vehicle is parked. As such, this appears to be a case of Google trying to give Android Auto more feature parity with cars that have Google built in. Still, it is not yet clear if or when Google plans to bring Android gaming and fullscreen support to the stable track of Android Auto.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/beta-test-brings-candy-crush-soda-saga-and-angry-birds-2-to-android-auto-143021332.html?src=rss

​Mortgage applications at Bank of America jumped 80% between January and March. Some of that is seasonality with the spring home-buying season kicking off, but not all.

Typically the bank sees about a 60% increase in applications this time of year. In January, mortgage rates were hovering around 7%. By March, they’d come down closer to 6.5%.

Allen Seelenbinder at Bank of America said in this market even that small of a dip can make a difference. 

“The slight change in interest rates and also the slight increase in housing inventory,” Seelenbinder said, adding that both helped drive up mortgage applications recently.

Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com said it’s too early to say whether that’s a good sign for the housing market with other recent data being mixed. Pending home sales, for example, are down almost 4% compared to a year ago.

“Mortgage applications are up, but pending home sales are down,” Hale said. “That might suggest that more buyers in the market today are using mortgages as opposed to cash buyers.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean more people are buying homes. Chris Mayer at Columbia Business School said there’s not much to indicate the market is really picking up.  

“Overall the spring selling market is kind of a bit slower than people kind of hoped it would be,” he said.

Some of that is perennial affordability issues, but Mayer also said some of it is uncertainty.

“The nervousness in the economy, the nervousness about policy, there’s some of that that is hitting the housing market,” he said.

With headlines about car prices, and other goods, potentially spiking soon, Mayer said people may be wondering if now is the moment to buy a home.

This week, we learned that even government officials are addicted to their group chats — except with the Trump administration those chats include war plans and potentially classified information. In this episode, we dive into the sheer recklessness and stupidity of Signalgate. And speaking of reckless, we also discuss 23andMe's bankruptcy and the privacy concerns around selling off customer DNA data.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

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Topics

• Signalgate: What happened, who was involved, and how to safely add someone to a Signal group chat – 0:48

• 23andMe files for bankruptcy, customers are urged to delete their sensitive data – 21:25

• Canon’s PowerShot V1 and R50 V cameras go all in on vlogging – 27:21

• Apple announces WWDC dates, updates Airpods Max, and dodges fines in the EU – 32:52

• How did Napster sell for $207 million in 2025? – 45:32

• Around Engadget – 48:44

• Working On – 55:22

• Pop Culture picks – 57:56

Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/engadget-podcast-signalgate-and-the-collapse-of-23andme-121504641.html?src=rss

When Sally Brown finds herself with food scraps and no available compost pile, she takes matters into her own hands.

“I’ll surreptitiously put it outside,” said Brown, a research professor and soil scientist at the University of Washington.

“Compost is a way to effectively feed your soil,“ she said. “When I go someplace where there’s no composting, I get very upset.”

Brown does that because organic material exposed to oxygen — you know, decomposing in a compost pile or surreptitiously tossed behind a bush — creates CO2. But organic material rotting in landfills creates methane, which has a much larger climate impact than CO2. “So getting stuff that rots out of landfills is a very cheap way to quickly reduce carbon emissions,” said Brown. 

At least, in theory. 

Landfills account for roughly 14% of all U.S. methane emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This means that that slice of the emissions pie could get way smaller if we were better at closing the gap between organic waste producers — households and businesses — and compost users. 

The problem is that most of us don’t live near farms that can readily use the lawn trimmings or avocado skins produced in our homes. That’s where companies like Agromin come in. 

Agromin is one of the largest organics recyclers in California. Bill Camarillo, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said his company handles about 1.2 million tons of organic waste per year but hopes to make that 10 million tons over the next decade. “I’m on a 10 million ton march,” he said. 

In a receiving yard in Santa Paula, California, about an hour from Los Angeles, trucks carrying green waste collected from households and businesses dump material onto large piles. “But as you can see, this material hasn’t been cleaned yet,” said Camarillio.

Agromin employees work to clean plastic garbage out of green waste. (Maria Hollenhorst/Marketplace)

A couple of employees were pulling plastic bags and other noncompostable garbage out by hand. Once that’s done, the waste gets pushed into a grinder to create more surface area, which helps speed the decomposition process. 

Roughly 80% of Agromin’s revenue comes from something called tipping fees. Cities and private companies that haul waste pay Agromin about $60 per ton to accept the organic material their trucks collect. 

Camarillo said the other 20% of the company’s revenue comes from turning that waste into mulch or soil additives that farmers, landscapers and individual gardeners can buy. “It’s kind of like a vitamin we put back in the ground that’s alive,” he said. 

The material here is mostly yard and farm waste; there were piles of rotting lemons discarded from a nearby grove. 

After cleaning and grinding that material down, Agromin moves it to an adjacent yard for “finishing. “And you’ll notice a distinct difference in odor,” Camarillo said. “Not that this is bad — smells like money to me — but if you go to the other side, it smells very earthy.”

Bill Camarillo, founder and CEO of Agromin, at one of his company’s compost centers in Santa Paula, California. (Maria Hollenhorst/Marketplace)

Decomposition naturally raises the temperature enough to kill pathogens. The entire process — from the time the material hits the ground to being ready for application on a farm — takes at least 45 days. “Then, it’s off in a truck going to a ranch somewhere,” Camarillo said. 

One factor driving this industry forward is a California law known as SB 1383, which requires cities to divert more organics from landfills and purchase a certain amount of finished compost based on the number of residents in their communities. It’s meant to pull on both the supply and demand sides of the compost market.

That law has helped Agromin grow its business as a compost broker for jurisdictions trying to comply. 

“So, I’ll just take a city of Ventura as an example,” Camarillo said. “They called me three years ago and said, ‘What am I supposed to do with 8,000 tons of compost?’”

For some jurisdictions, Agromin helps identify ways to use that material, such as on parklands or in city landscaping. For others, they find farmers and other end-users willing to accept the compost.

A field of avocado plants grow in mounds of Agromin’s compost. (Maria Hollenhorst/Marketplace)

“We partner with a farmer under a direct service provider agreement, where the farmer agrees to accept the compost from the city that the city buys and will pay for the delivery and the spreading so the city only has to buy the compost,” Camarillo said. 

One thing that helps reduce that costs is putting compost facilities closer to compost users. The Santa Paula facility is actually on farmland owned by a company called Limoneira, which grows citrus and avocados. 

“This is where we are applying all the stuff that comes from Agromin,” said Edgar Gutierrez, Limoneira’s director of farming operations, in a field of avocado plants sitting on mounds of mulchy compost. 

There are visible reminders that the compost there once came from a landscaping operation or someone’s green bin, like a piece of blue plastic or a chunk of a wooden shipping pallet. But mostly, it just looks like dirt. 

“It’s basically giving life to that soil,” said Gutierez. Eventually, that soil will grow avocados — the skins of which we mostly throw away. 

Avocado plants growing from mounds of compost — called berms — provided by Agromin. (Maria Hollenhorst/Marketplace)

Instagram has rolled out an update for Reels that will let users go through more of them more quickly. As TechCrunch has reported, the app now allows users to play Reels at 2x the speed by long-pressing on the right or the left edge of the screen. They'd simply have to release it if they'd like to resume watching at normal speed. Some users have had access to the feature for a while now, while others used to have it until Instagram removed it from their accounts, likely because the app was only testing it out. Now, an Instagram rep has told CNET that it's rolling out to everyone. We previously didn't have the feature and can confirm that we've gained access to it within the past few hours. 

The representative said that the option has been highly requested by the app's users. Being able to fast-forward Reels has become somewhat of a necessity for a lot of people today, seeing as Instagram's short-form videos are no longer limited to 15 seconds in length like they used to be. Reels can now be as long as three minutes, and there are signs indicating that the app could allow uploads as long as 10 minutes. We wouldn't be surprised if Instagram started allowing Reels that long in the future. Instagram and TikTok have had history of adopting new features previously unveiled by the other, and TikTok allows videos recorded within its app to be 10 minutes long. In fact, TikTok has had the option to watch videos at twice the speed for a while now, which is even more necessary for the app, since its users can upload videos up to an hour in length. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/instagram-will-let-you-watch-reels-at-twice-the-speed-120047663.html?src=rss

The US will append a 25 percent tariff on top of any existing tariffs on all cars produced outside its borders. Additional fees will be imposed on imported components too like engines, transmissions, powertrains and electrical components. There’s a number of carve outs for US-based companies, as well as those sourcing gear from Mexico and Canada. But the move has been taken under the guise of “protecting” America’s car industry from imports.

Of course, hefty tariffs are no guarantee consumers will flock to buy American if other brands are pricier. We’ve been here before: The ’70s oil shock meant bulky and inefficient American cars were suddenly money pits. That made light and efficient Japanese cars far more attractive to buyers who didn’t want to go broke at the gas pump. And that was despite a tariff regime that, as PBS reported in 2017, was equivalent to a 60 percent levy. Before 1980, Chrysler, GM and Ford were kings — now they muscle with Toyota, Honda and Hyundai for a slice of the pie.

Given the new administration’s work to undermine the EV transition, it’s likely we’ll see a big pivot back to gas-powered vehicles. Especially as the one EV company likely to benefit from such a move has potentially diminished its reputation in the eyes of some buyers. The end result, however, may likely erode any sort of advantage the US auto industry has, allowing China the chance to race ahead in the rest of the world.

— Dan Cooper

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The biggest tech stories you missed

• The Pentagon warns government officials that Signal is being targeted by Russian hackers
  I’m not sure why we should worry, it’s not as if government officials are secretly using Signal to agree war plans, are they?! Sorry… what’s that?

• The minimalist Light Phone III is officially available for purchase
  It offers private GPS for folks who don’t want Google tracking their movements.

• No Man’s Sky now lets players dig up planets to look for ancient alien skeletons
  Better charge up that Terrain Manipulator.

• A new MEMS tweeter for wireless earbuds doesn’t require an amplifier
  Better sound in a smaller package is always welcome.

• Utah just became the first state in the country to pass an age verification law for app stores
  Nobody involved in this law has ever put their thumb on a TouchID sensor to allow an app to download because their kid hasn’t shut up about something for three hours.

iPad (2025) with A16 review: No Apple Intelligence, no problem Plus, it’s cheap. Jeff Dunn for Engadget

Engadget’s Jeff Dunn has put the new 2025 base-model iPad through its paces, and it comes with no surprises. The new slate gets a faster chip, A16, and 2GB more ram than its immediate predecessor. Naturally, compared to the pricier iPads, its performance isn’t going to pull up too many trees, but you’re not using a base model iPad for intensive work. Plus, it’s not going to get any Apple Intelligence features, which I’ll take any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Continue Reading.

Canon goes all in on vlogging with the PowerShot V1 compact and R50 V mirrorless cameras It’s a tank parked on Sony’s lawn. Steve Dent for Engadget

Canon has announced two new compact mirrorless cameras for the vlogging crowd, the R50V Mirrorless and PowerShot V1 Compact. Both are attempts to muscle in on Sony’s turf in the videography space, boasting 4K video (1080p as a webcam), fancy autofocus tricks and a fully articulating display (at the expense of an electronic viewfinder). Engadget’s Steve Dent will review them in due course, but it’s hard to wonder if the vlogging space really needs yet more entrants, especially right now.

Continue Reading.

Block reportedly lays off almost 1,000 employees It has more than 10,000 staff members.

Block, Jack Dorsey’s payments company which owns Square and Cash App, has laid off 931 workers. The outfit denies the move is to cut costs, saying it’s to improve efficiency and flatten the organization by eliminating managers. As much as I’m sad for those folks who have lost their jobs, I’m staggered that 931 workers is only around eight percent of its workforce.

When the tedious bores moaned Twitter was overstaffed, I knew they were talking out of their backsides. After all, a global social network needs bodies to keep the site running, engage with advertisers and moderate such a sprawling platform. And while most financial institutions need plenty of qualified folks to comply with financial laws — not that Block has a stellar record in that area — 10,000 people to run Square and Cash App seems like a lot.

Continue Reading.

Robinhood is moving into banking services with luxury perks and same-day cash delivery I’m sure Gamestop buyers would love to bank with Robinhood.

This fall, Robinhood will offer banking services to users with a Gold subscription, with all the usual perks banks throw at customers. That includes checking and savings accounts, money transfers to more than 100 countries and same-day cash deliveries to your door. You can even get your own wealth-management service, for all of the vast riches you’ve got left over once you’ve paid your rent, your car loan and bought six eggs from your local corner store.

Continue Reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-will-the-us-imported-car-tariffs-work-112509770.html?src=rss

If your Wi-Fi signal is struggling to reach every corner of your home, a signal booster — also known as a Wi-Fi extender — might be the fix you need. Whether you're dealing with annoying dead zones, buffering video calls or laggy gaming sessions, the right Wi-Fi extender can help expand coverage and improve connectivity without forcing you to move your router.

There are different types of Wi-Fi extenders to choose from. Some models use external antennas to push the signal farther, while others, like mesh extenders, create a seamless, whole-home network. If you're simply looking to extend coverage into a specific room, a Wi-Fi repeater can do the job — but it may cut your bandwidth in half. More advanced extenders, however, can help maintain strong speeds and reliability throughout your home.

We've rounded up the best Wi-Fi extenders to suit different needs, whether you're looking for an affordable fix or a high-performance upgrade.

Table of contents

• Best Wi-Fi extender for 2025

• How do Wi-Fi extenders work?

• What to look for in a Wi-Fi extender

• Wi-Fi extender FAQs

Best Wi-Fi extender for 2025

How do Wi-Fi extenders work?

These handy wireless devices do exactly what their name suggests: extend your Wi-Fi network so it covers more areas of your home. Most wireless extenders plug into an AC outlet and connect to your existing router so they can then rebroadcast it to spots that your router alone may not cover well. As a rule of thumb, you’ll get the best results by placing the extender half way between your router and the dead zone you’re trying to fix.

One important thing to note about Wi-Fi range extenders (also sometimes called “repeaters”) is that most of them actually create a new Wi-Fi network when rebroadcasting your existing one. That network will have a new name (it’ll often be your default network’s name with an EXT appended at the end, unless you change it) and that means you’ll have to connect to different networks when in different parts of your home. While that’s a small tradeoff in return for improved coverage, some will be more inconvenienced than others.

If you’d rather have one, much larger network in your home, you’re better off upgrading to mesh networking systems. Mesh systems come with a main router and access points that, by default, create one large Wi-Fi system that should be accessible throughout your whole home. They tend to be the best Wi-Fi routers you can get, but that also translates to more expensive, and possibly more complicated, devices. Mesh Wi-Fi systems are, by far, more costly than a simple extender, plus you may have to work with your ISP to get your home’s existing network working on your new router.

What to look for in a Wi-Fi extender Speed

Extenders today can support single, dual or tri-band Wi-Fi, and they will tell you the maximum speeds they support on all of their available bands. For example, one dual-band device might support 600Mbps speeds over its 2.4GHz band and up to 1300Mbps over its 5GHz band, for a combined maximum speed of 1900Mbps. For the best performance, you’ll want to go with a Wi-Fi extender that has the highest speeds possible (and those, as you might expect, tend to cost more). Some extenders even support Wi-Fi 7, giving you the latest in wireless technology for higher bandwidth, faster speeds and lower latency.

However, it’s important to remember that Wi-Fi extenders are not true “signal boosters” since they are not designed to increase speeds across your home. In fact, you may find that the extender’s network is slower than your router’s. Instead, extenders are designed to increase the strong Wi-Fi coverage throughout your home, making them ideal for filling in dead zones. Some mesh extenders can help create a more seamless network, reducing the drop in speed and improving connectivity in larger spaces.

Range, and number of supported devices

With the name of the gaming being coverage area, taking note of a device’s range is important. Depending on the size of your home and property, you may only need up to 1,200 square feet of coverage. But those with larger homes will want to spring for an extender that can support upwards of 2,000+ square feet of coverage.

Similarly, those with lots of gadgets will want an extender that can handle them all at once. If you spend most of your time on your phone or laptop and maybe have your smart TV online for a few hours of Netflix each day, you could get by with a more limited extender. Smart home aficionados and tech lovers should invest in one that won’t buckle under the pressure of a few dozen connected devices. This is especially important if you plan on linking all of the devices in a certain part of your home to your Wi-Fi range extender’s network, rather than directly to your existing router. Some models with external antennas can improve performance by providing stronger, more directional signal coverage.

Design

There isn’t a ton of innovation when it comes to design in the Wi-Fi extender space. Most of the ones you’ll find today are rounded rectangles roughly the size of your hand that plug into a standard wall outlet. They usually have a few indicator lights that will show you when the extender is connected, how strong its signal strength is and when there’s a problem, and some will even have moveable external antennas that companies claim provide even better Wi-Fi signal. Generally, they are pretty simple to install and get connected, but if you’re struggling with how to set up your Wi-Fi extender, there are plenty of YouTube videos you can check out.

Aside from that, there are the scant few standalone Wi-Fi extenders that sit on an end table or a desk, and those look pretty similar to regular ol’ routers. But make no mistake, anything labeled as an extender or a “Wi-Fi repeater” will need an anchor router in order for it to work.

Another convenient feature you’ll find on most Wi-Fi extenders is an extra Ethernet port (or a few). This allows you to use the extender as a Wi-Fi access point if you connect it to your existing router, or an adapter to provide devices like TVs, smart home hubs or game consoles a hardwired connection to the internet. Unsurprisingly, this wired connection usually provides you with the fastest speeds possible, so you may want to use it for your most crucial devices.

Wi-Fi extender FAQs What's the difference between a wifi booster and extender?

Nowadays, there’s really no difference between a Wi-Fi booster and Wi-Fi extender - they’re just different names for the same thing. Previously, however, Wi-Fi boosters were devices that received signals from wireless routers, broadcasting them to another network. This essentially extends the range of the signal. Wi-Fi extenders expand the coverage within your home’s Wi-Fi network, but often you will see extenders described as boosters.

Is a Wi-Fi extender better than a mesh router?

Mesh routers, or mesh Wi-Fi systems, use multiple devices (or nodes) across your home to create a larger home network. Essentially, you have multiple routers around your home with these systems, and that will hopefully provide the best coverage possible. Wi-Fi extenders, on the other hand, are usually just one device that extends your existing Wi-Fi signal, and they often require you to switch networks when connecting. Wi-Fi extenders are more affordable, though, and are great if you’re traveling or need a Wi-Fi signal in harder-to-reach areas. However, a mesh router can offer a better long-term solution to upgrade your entire home’s Wi-Fi.

Should I use multiple Wi-Fi extenders?

Some people may need to use multiple Wi-Fi extenders, for instance, if your home is large or has dead zones in different areas. But if you do use multiple Wi-Fi extenders, there’s a chance of interference. You may also need to manually connect to the extenders separately, which isn’t always convenient.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/best-wifi-extender-130021313.html?src=rss

In 2024, there were more than 65,000 train thefts in the U.S., which is a 40% increase from the year before.

It’s perhaps a surprising number when, in the American imagination, train heists seem to belong in previous centuries. However, not only do they clearly still happen, all that cargo theft accounts for somewhere between $15 and $35 billion in annual losses.

So what is going on?

Malia Wollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about where this resurgence in theft is coming from, and who ends up responsible for the losses. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kai Ryssdal: You think “train heist,” and you think guys in masks and six shooters and horses and all of that. That is not this.

Malia Wollan: That is not this. Modern-day train thieves are a whole different thing. There’s no guns. There are bolt cutters and mechanized saws and deserts.

Ryssdal: How does it work?

Wollan: Yeah, so there are a couple different ways it works. The sort of most extreme version is thieves actually go out into more remote parts of California and Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and they cut the air compression brake hoses that run between train cars, which forces an emergency stop. And then they cut the locks off the containers, they unload what they want, and trucks come pick it up and they drive away. But oftentimes a conductor or an engineer doesn’t even know a heist is happening. I mean, some of these occur when a train is stopped to let another train pass, and basically it’s happening three miles back. They have no idea until, you know, maybe another train passes and calls the train police dispatcher and says there’s theft underway.

Ryssdal: You know, we’ve all seen freight trains, and they look, to the layperson’s eye, you know, basically indistinguishable. But you talk about this guy in this piece who spent time figuring out what the symbology means and how to decode what’s inside and figuring out, like, what cars he ought to hit and to maximize his take.

Wollan: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, people can do a lot of research online, and there’s also a lot of cases where there is insider information, either from warehouses or from the port or from train yards. I heard stories of very specifically targeted crews, like there are crews who only go for tires. Apparently, there’s a good resale market. There are crews that only hit train cars that carry new cars, and they go inside and they take all the catalytic converters out of new cars, and then they leave.

Ryssdal: They’re specialized labor, right? I mean, that’s what they’re doing. Cargo is insured, as you point out, and security is not something that these companies are interested in investing in.

Wollan: Yeah, you know, it’s complicated. I think shipping is very cheap, and people all on the supply chain are reticent to make it expensive. And just the sheer volume of stuff going on the rails, you know, at a certain level, people are, I think, willing to take some level of risk. But, that said, there are a lot of different types of law enforcement working on this issue, including, you know, companies like Nike have their own loss prevention and asset recovery teams that go out and do detective work to try and get the stuff back.

Ryssdal: The catch, of course, is that you’ve got the railroads, you’ve got the companies who own or are shipping the cargo, you’ve got police bureaucracies involved. So it’s a little bit tragedy of the commons, right? It’s this thing that’s happening that there’s no one person who’s, like, responsible.

Wollan: Yeah, that’s true to some degree. A fair amount of this work falls to local law enforcement. It’s like rural Sheriff departments, so, you know, they don’t necessarily have the resources to put a lot into this. And also, the train companies, the rail industry, has changed a lot in the last decade or so. They’ve cut 30% of employees and they’ve made longer and longer trains, so there are also fewer people looking after longer and longer trains.

Ryssdal: And then, you know, not to bring it all home to the consumer, but we’re the ones paying the high prices because, or higher prices because all these, you know, Nikes, for instance, are getting stolen.

Wollan: Yeah, that’s right. And in the case of rail, you know, shippers don’t have a ton of options. It’s essentially a duopoly. On the West Coast, there’s just BNSF and Union Pacific. So it’s not as though, you know, you hear one rail company’s having issues with theft, you have a bunch of options of where you can go. There’s just two companies.

Ryssdal: And we should point out here, shipping by rail is so much cheaper than shipping by truck, right?

Wollan: It’s cheaper and it’s also fewer emissions, so there are definitely reasons to want to ship by rail, but, to be clear, this is definitely happening in the trucking industry as well. So cargo theft, writ large, has increased quite dramatically.

In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the federal government paused student debt payments. When they restarted more than three years later, the government told delinquent borrowers that missed payments wouldn’t impact credit scores until fall of 2024. Now the reckoning has arrived. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a new report out this week estimating that more than 9 million delinquent borrowers could soon see a hit to their credit scores.

Dustin Gibson has received letters from his student loan servicer over the past year, but he hasn’t really looked at them too hard. 

“I’m an avoider by nature,” said Gibson, who is a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University.

He’d been dutifully making payments toward his $185,000 in student debt, then stopped during the pandemic-era pause. And he hasn’t started making payments again.

“I mean, we’re 43, and we finally felt like we could breathe,” he said. “The car is being repaid off in three months, we can, like finally, begin to tackle some of the credit card debt.”

Gibson also said it’s unclear to him what’s happening at the federal level with the public service loan forgiveness program he’s enrolled in. And he doesn’t mind if his credit gets dinged.

But Constantine Yannelis, a professor of financial economics at the University of Cambridge, is concerned about all delinquent borrowers.

“This could lead to lifetime consequences, right? Because if people have damaged credit scores, it’ll be harder to do things like buy a home,” he said.

Yannelis said that could affect how much wealth they accumulate in the long term.

“So they may have less money in retirement, and we could be seeing the echoes of this problem for decades to come,” he said.

Which would hurt not just them, but the overall economy.

Even people who make payments on their student loans are having to sacrifice elsewhere, like DJ Anthony Gaffield.

He was helping his family after they lost their home in the Altadena wildfires in California, but Gaffield has institutional student loans dues.

“Then I was like, oh, shoot, I can’t pay my family anymore, just because you know you got to pay this monthly or pay this quarterly, until it’s absolved,” said Gaffield.

He’s also had to ask his landlord to let him delay paying rent.

To say that a lot is happening in and to the U.S. economy feels like an understatement. And just as people are having a hard time keeping up with the happenings, the actual economic data is too.

So where can economists, or even regular people, turn to understand the facts and the trends when the economy seems like it’s being pulled in 1,000 different directions?

Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Yale Budget Lab, co-authored a piece in Harvard Business Review titled “The Economic Data You Need to Make Decisions Through Volatility.” She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about the “alternative” data she’s tracking to discern the patterns in the chaos. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kai Ryssdal: Let’s do a level-set here for a minute and have you tell me what you were looking at to gauge this economy, say, three months ago.

Martha Gimbel: Three months ago I was looking at the very standard set of economic data, right? So the monthly jobs report, what we were seeing on the [gross domestic product] side, throw in some inflation measurements there. But it was a lot of the standard data that you get a news alert about on your phone.

Ryssdal: And now I read in this paper that you did with some colleagues that’s in the Harvard Business Review and also your social media feeds, you say, “To be honest, it feels increasingly like early COVID. Not because the economy is going to shut down, but, given the pace of events, we need to look at data we don’t normally rely on to understand this economy.” What are you going to look at now?

Gimbel: So some of it is data that comes out from the government, but just comes out more frequently. So, weekly unemployment insurance claims — that gives us a quicker sense of how things are pivoting. But this is also a time where we need to think a little bit about alternative data sets, like data from private-sector companies. So for instance, Indeed, where I used to work, just put out data on how federal employees are responding to DOGE. I want to emphasize that private-sector data is not a substitute for public-sector data, but it does move faster. And so at a time where you’re trying to figure out if the economy is at a turning point, it can be useful to look at some of these alternative data sets that just move more quickly.

Ryssdal: We should say here, though, that there is government data that is disappearing from government websites. There are not unfounded questions about the future reliability of government data as it serves the political needs of the administration. Where are you on the trusting-maybe-have-some-doubt scale right now?

Gimbel: So I’m trusting government data until I don’t. There’s currently no sign that the data that’s been coming out about the economy from the government has been futzed with in any way. And frankly, if it were, I think we would know both because of the way that it comes out it would be easy for economists on the outside to tell, and also because, frankly, the career staff would throw a fit and we would find out from them. That being said, years ago, I spent a lot of time yelling at people whenever anyone tried to question government statistics and saying, “This is paranoia. This is a conspiracy theory,” and now it’s a real question. And just to take a step back, I don’t think people in the United States realize how strong our national statistics apparatus is. Economists in France, Germany, Australia, those countries would kill for the data infrastructure that we have here that helps us better understand our country, and our economy, and design better policy off of that.

Ryssdal: So, let’s talk about some of the things you are watching, and I assume will continue to watch as, as they serve your needs. And there’s a list of them in this paper that you all wrote. Here’s one: daily Treasury statement non-interest government spending. So should I stop doing the numbers every day and instead we should figure out the music for whatever it would be for the daily Treasury statement non-interest government spending segment, right?

Gimbel: Well, I mean, for now, the music would just be kind of toddling along, but, you know, that’s one that looks at the amount of spending the government is doing. But I think that’s particularly important given the conversations around DOGE and the questions around is a pullback in government spending going to slow down the economy? And what you’ve seen right now is there really isn’t any sign in the aggregate that the government is stopping spending in any kind of substantive way.

Ryssdal: Take off your economist hat for a second and put on your regular person hat. If I’m just trying to get by in my life and I’m watching all the chaos in the news, and, you know, price levels are still elevated and I’m a little worried about uncertainty, what should the layperson be looking at to have some sense of what this economy is all about?

Gimbel: I don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of being good at talking to normal people, but, you know, I think this is a moment where it’s really important not to confuse emotions for facts, right? Emotions are running really, really high, and it is easy to feel like the economy is going to crash because things feel so uncertain. But if you look at the data, that is just not yet what it is showing. And so it is very important to distinguish the vibes from the facts on the ground.

Estimating the GDP of this entire economy — which now stands just shy of $29.2 trillion — is a work in progress. 

The Bureau of Economic Analysis just gave us its mostly final estimate: the economy grew at 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024.

That number tells a story of where the economy was headed coming into this year. That story has taken a turn.

2024 was kind of the end of the post-pandemic party. Not a hangover — just, the party kind of died. No more pent up demand; government stimulus mostly done. 

“And that massive wave of growth that sort of peaked in 2023 with over 3% GDP growth had kind of slowed to about 2.5% in 2024,” said Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist for UBS. 

At the beginning of this year, it looked like 2025 was also going to be all about a gradual slowdown. But now the slowdown is looking a little less gradual. Pingle took his estimate of growth this year down from 2% to closer to 1.5%.

“You are reaching the point where the tariff actions are becoming less of an inflation concern and more of a longer-term growth risk concern,” said Brett Ryan, senior U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. “The uncertainty alone is going to drag on growth.”

Businesses hold off on decisions when they don’t know what’s happening, and consumers spend less when they’re anxious. When economic growth slows down to about 1%, the economy reaches a tipping point, said Pingle.

“If you get down below, say, 1% GDP growth, you start to put yourself in a position of job gains turning negative, and then, all of a sudden, the labor market is actually contracting,” said Pingle. 

But Pingle doesn’t think we’ll get there this year. Neither does Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute. 

“It’s very hard to make the U.S. consumer stop spending. There are a lot of consumer consumption categories that are kind of very stable, especially more on the services part,” said Levanon. 

Uncertainty and tariffs may slow the economy, but he said they don’t look like they’ll be enough to stop it.

We got an early look at the balance of trade Thursday morning. Imports in February were more or less flat after surging in January, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, exports picked up. 

All in all, the trade deficit shrank a little from the previous month. But that gap between imports and exports is just about the widest it’s ever been.

President Donald Trump has demonized the trade deficit. And he’s argued that tariffs can help boost American exports and narrow the trade gap. But the thing is, that negative trade balance also has an upside.

Think about the United States as one big household that really loves going out and buying imported goods. To pay for those goods, the household has a of couple options.

“One option is you can export to pay for your imports. The other option is that you can borrow to pay for your imports,” said Robert Johnson, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame.

He said the United States simply can’t export enough products to pay for all of those imports. We just don’t make enough stuff that the rest of the world is buying.

But we do have financial assets that foreign investors want to buy. Think stocks, mortgage-backed securities, Treasury securities — as in government debt.

“As a result, foreigners want to pour money into the United States, in safe assets in the United States. And that has made it very easy for us to borrow from abroad,” said Johnson.

It’s not like the same foreign manufacturers that are selling us goods are turning around and buying U.S. Treasurys.

But George Pearkes, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group, said at the national level, foreign demand for U.S. government debt and other financial assets allows us to import more than we export.

“There is no other way to make that work,” Pearkes said. “If you’re going to spend more than you earn, then you have to, have to, have to either be increasing debt or decreasing assets.”

What this means is that the trade deficit and foreign investment in the U.S. are two sides of the same coin.

Let’s say the U.S. could magically figure out how to eliminate the trade deficit by making exports catch up with imports.

Emily Blanchard, a professor at Dartmouth College, said the tradeoff would be less foreign investment.

“That means we lose a critical source of lending,” said Blanchard.

She also said boosting exports would require an increase in capital investment. And those resources couldn’t go to other parts of the economy — building bridges, educating kids, coming up with innovation.

If you drive a car in Los Angeles, sitting in traffic is just a part of life. Though the city once touted a burgeoning railway system, cars have dominated since the opening of the Arroyo Seco Parkway in 1940.

But sitting in standstill traffic isn’t the only concern for drivers in LA. There’s also the time and money spent.

“You’ve got gas and just routine maintenance but also repairs [and] parking tickets. But the thing that people really forget about is paying to park. Parking is what really sucks,” said Eric Brightwell, a car-free Angeleno.

According to AAA, the average owner of a new car in Los Angeles spends $12,297 a year or $1,024.71 monthly on related expenses.

For years, Brightwell has relied on walking, cycling and public transit to navigate the City of Angels. And while it has added time to his commute, it hasn’t shrunk the scope of his activities.

“I made a map of all the places I can get to within a 10-minute walk, a 15-minute bike ride or a one-seat bus ride,” Brightwell said. “And there’s, like, 400 places on the map.“

But his commitment to a carless life has not stirred disdain for those who love their vehicles. It’s not a purity test, said Brightwell. It just means he doesn’t own a car.

“I just went to the Petersen Automotive Museum the other day to see the low riders,” said Brightwell. “In 100 years, hopefully there will still be beautiful cars in museums, just not on the streets.”

And Brightwell still uses a car from time to time. One reason he lives in LA is access to the mountains that border parts of the city. But when he wants to hit the trail, he goes with a friend who drives.

“I don’t think I’ll ever own another car,” Brightwell said. “It gets less and less likely as transit gets better.”

There's a lot in the world to be angry about today. So, why not do like we did in the '90s and channel that aggression into beating the living hell out of bad guys in a delightfully loud and over-the-top arcade game? Marvel Cosmic Invasion takes characters like Spider-Man, Captain America and Wolverine and gives them a beat-'em-up that looks straight out of a grunge-era cabinet.

If this sounds like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, that's no coincidence. Marvel Cosmic Invasion is not only cut from the same cloth; it's from the same team (developer Tribute Games and publisher Dotemu). The idea is to recreate the look, sound and feel of side-scrolling '90s button-mashers like X-Men, The Simpsons and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with modern touches.

Tribute Games / Dotemu

Like Shredder's Revenge, it exploits the advantages of modern graphical engines without betraying its muses' old-school pixel art. Appropriately, the characters' visual style is inspired by 90s-era Marvel comics.

You'll choose a team of two superheroes and can tag between them mid-fight. At launch, you can play as Captain America, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Storm, Phyla-Vell, Venom and Nova. The developers are mum about which characters we might see in the future, but it's hard to imagine Marvel stalwarts like Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther, Hulk and Black Widow not swooping in at some point.

Tribute Games / Dotemu

Its story sounds as extravagant as you'd want from a '90s-inspired Marvel beat-'em-up. "The immortal Super Villain Annihilus has launched an unprecedented attack across the galaxy, threatening all life as we know it," the description reads. "Fighters both Earth-born and cosmic must now join forces in a star-spanning adventure against the deadly Annihilation Wave. Brawl through the streets of New York City all the way to the depths of the Negative Zone to foil Annihilus' vow to spread death across the cosmos."

You can play with up to four players, local or online. (And it supports crossplay!)

Marvel Cosmic Invasion will be available for PC, Switch, PS5 / PS4 and Xbox. There's no word yet on pricing or an exact release date, but Dotemu says it will arrive later this year. In the meantime, you can check out the announcement trailer below.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/marvel-cosmic-invasion-is-a-90s-style-beat-em-up-in-the-mold-of-shredders-revenge-191110625.html?src=rss

In the final days of our pre-Switch 2 world, Nintendo is trying to rethink how sharing games works. The biggest announcement from the company's latest Direct was its upcoming Virtual Game Cards feature, a new approach to sharing digital games that improves on the company's current system, but still carries limitations that keep it from feeling truly modern.

Virtual Game Cards attempt to make digital games as easy to share as physical ones. That starts with the company visually representing games as "cards" and using the language of loading and ejecting them, and extends to how simple they are to share. Two Switch consoles logged into your Nintendo Account can share any digital game just by "ejecting" it from one and "loading" it on another. The only catch is that the consoles need to be connected over local wireless (as in, be physically near each other) when the trade happens, and be able to access the internet to download the game and run it for the first time.

You can similarly share a Virtual Game Card with anyone in the same Nintendo Account family group for two weeks, after which the game automatically returns. In both cases, saves for each game stay on the console where the game was played, making it simple to share the Virtual Game Card again and keep playing.

In comparison to Nintendo's current system, which requires defining a Switch console as "primary" and able to be used offline and other devices as a "secondary" and needing an internet connection to play shared games, Virtual Game Cards are a meaningful improvement. If you're a parent trying to share games with your kids or a super-fan with multiple Switches (something Nintendo no doubt wants to encourage), Virtual Game Cards have basically solved the problem — or at least made it much easier to manage and understand. The company isn't exactly leading the pack here, though.

If I own a game on PlayStation, I can download it on my Playstation 4 and PlayStation 5, and play on either console, without needing to go through the rigamarole of ejecting virtual cards. The same goes for Steam games. Valve even goes further and lets the vast majority of games be shared and played on accounts connected to the same Steam Family, without your computers needing to be near each other when you "hand-off" games.

People are highly sensitive to any kind of DRM. Just ask Xbox, which had big plans to change how loaning games work when the Xbox One was announced, but had to dramatically backtrack after basically everyone complained. 

Nintendo isn't pulling an Xbox, per se, but it is pitching something adjacent. Virtual Game Cards are inarguably better than how things work now, but they require an internet connection and they still limit how many people can play a game at once. Nintendo came up with a better mental model for sharing games, but not necessarily a better way to do it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendos-digital-switch-game-sharing-plan-could-be-so-much-simpler-190353732.html?src=rss

Shadow Labyrinth, an utterly bonkers riff on Pac-Man and sidescrolling Metroidvania games, will hit digital store shelves on July 18. It’ll be available for Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The game casts players as Swordsman No. 8 as he befriends a yellow orb called Puck. For the gaming historians out there, Puck-Man was the original name for Pac-Man. The gameplay involves switching from the classic sword-wielding hero to Puck, with the latter able to crawl on walls and (surprise) gobble up yellow dots. There’s also a third form, a mecha construct called Gaia.

The gameplay looks frenetic and fairly violent, which seems like an odd choice for everyone’s favorite perpetually hungry orb. Bandai Namco is making the game, however, and it made the very first Pac-Man all of those decades ago. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. In any event, it’s not as if developers haven’t experimented with Pac-Man in the past. The famished fiend has been featured in racing games, platformers, endless runners, puzzlers and more. What’s one more genre to add to the mix?

Shadow Labyrinth will be available in the original version and as a Digital Deluxe edition. That one comes with a digital artbook and the soundtrack.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/shadow-labyrinth-the-edgy-pac-man-metroidvania-arrives-on-july-18-185011811.html?src=rss

Ubisoft is continuing its efforts to course-correct after several challenging years. Today, the video game company announced that it will launch a subsidiary centered around three of its most familiar franchises: Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. The as-yet-unnamed subsidiary will fold in the teams working on those three series, including Ubisoft studios in Montréal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona and Sofia.

This new business will receive an investment of €1.16 billion (roughly $1.25 billion) from its longstanding partner Tencent, granting the conglomerate a minority ownership stake. Following the transaction, Ubisoft will narrow focus to its other franchises, such as The Division and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon.

"Today Ubisoft is opening a new chapter in its history," CEO and Co-Founder Yves Guillemot said. "As we accelerate the company’s transformation, this is a foundational step in changing Ubisoft’s operating model that will enable us to be both agile and ambitious."

Ubisoft has been cutting costs and jobs over the past several months after several of its new projects flopped. There have been hints for a while that the company's leaders were interested in either finding a buyer or exploring a joint venture with Tencent to help reverse its fortunes. It's encouraging that the recent Assassin's Creed: Shadows has already reached 3 million players, but Ubisoft will probably need a few more wins to fully stabilize.

There is some extra good news in the announcement. The description of the new subsidiary does specify that "it will drive further increases in quality of narrative solo experiences." So while we can expect to also see multiplayer and free-to-play offerings from the Ubisoft umbrella, they aren't giving up on single-player games.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/ubisoft-spins-out-subsidiary-with-a-billion-dollar-investment-from-tencent-183516992.html?src=rss

Meta has spent the last few years remaking Facebook’s main feed into a “discovery engine” that primarily serves up recommended content from pages, groups and accounts users don’t already follow. But while the company has said the change is necessary to compete with TikTok, it’s also frustrated Facebook users who miss seeing posts from people they actually know.

Now, Meta is trying to remedy this with a revamped “Friends” section of the app that will only show posts and content related to your Facebook friends. The company says the update is the first of many meant to bring “OG” features back into the 21-year-old social network.

With the update, the “Friends” tab of the Facebook app that used to only be for friend requests will now be home to a feed exclusively made up of content related to your friends. This includes feed and Story posts, as well as Reels, birthdays, friend requests and “people you may know suggestions.”

While Meta is spinning the change as a part of a larger push to make Facebook feel more “social,” it’s not the first time the company has offered dedicated feeds for “friend only” content. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg showed off dedicated “friends” feed in 2022 amid the company’s push to bring more recommendations to users’ “home” feeds. That feed, which surfaces posts from friends in reverse chronological order, is still available, though it’s somewhat buried in the app.

It’s not clear what else Meta has in store for other “OG” Facebook features that could play on nostalgia for the 21-year-old social network. (Facebook’s once infamous “poke” feature already had a brief resurgence last year.) But it’s apparently a priority for Zuckerberg.

“I actually think that there's this whole opportunity that I think is going to be pretty fun to to go after and build which is just to kind of go one-by-one and build up a a bunch of these things that used to be these joyful experiences that people had as part of Facebook that just kind of don't exist on the internet today,” Zuckerberg said in a podcast appearance promoting the change.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-decides-content-from-your-actual-friends-is-an-og-facebook-feature-180803853.html?src=rss