Enlarge (credit: Red Hook Studios)

The worst thing you can do when playing Darkest Dungeon 2 is compare it to its beloved 2016 predecessor. Darkest Dungeon was essentially a 2D XCOM , complete with a base that you managed and upgraded over a long campaign.

Darkest Dungeon 2 is decidedly not that. Instead, it’s a roguelite.

Rather than embarking on a long campaign filled with dozens of units to manage and upgrade as you did in the first game, here, you go on one-and-done “runs” with a stable cast of characters. As you play, you collect a meta-currency to unlock new items and upgrade your characters, stats, and stagecoach between runs.

Enlarge / Klaus Teuber, in 2015 at a games festival in Essen, Germany. Teuber created The Settlers of Catan (later just Catan ), along with other award-winning board games. (credit: Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

I was in my early 30s when I first played The Settlers of Catan . I had been at a bar with a small group one freezing winter night in 2012 in Buffalo, New York. One of us, eager to share his recent obsession, declared it was time for the outing's next stage. We went to his barely unpacked new apartment nearby. He pulled the game from a plastic tote, opened it on a wobbly dinette table, and laid out the board, apologizing for the moisture-warped edges. I took a picture (on my HTC Thunderbolt) because, having had a few, I wanted to ensure I'd remember this game with the wooden pieces and weird amount of sheep.

It was an inauspicious start to the rest of my board gaming life. Growing up in the '80s and '90s, then starting my young adult life in the early 2000s, I'd regarded board games as something you do in situations where you can't do anything else: power outages, cabins in the woods, gatherings with people without known shared interests. They weren't really going to be fun , and you wouldn't necessarily play them, but someone would get to be the winner, and time would pass. Catan changed that—for me and for what are now legions of modern board game enthusiasts.

From a German basement to 32 million copies

You may have seen the news this week that Klaus Teuber, the German designer who created The Settlers of Catan ( now just Catan ), died on April 1 at age 70. Teuber developed Die Siedler von Catan in the early 1990s, playing with ideas of Icelandic settlements, tinkering in his basement while working full-time at a dental lab. He'd bring up new iterations for his wife and kids to test every weekend, he told The New Yorker . The breakthrough, he said, was using hexagonal tiles instead of squares.

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Enlarge / An AI-generated image from an #aicinema still series called "Vinyl Vengeance" by Julie Wieland, created using Midjourney. (credit: Julie Wieland / Midjourney )

Since last year, a group of artists have been using an AI image generator called Midjourney to create still photos of films that don't exist. They call the trend "AI cinema." We spoke to one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland, and asked her about her technique, which she calls "synthography," for synthetic photography.

The origins of “AI cinema” as a still image art form

Last year, image synthesis models like DALL-E 2 , Stable Diffusion , and Midjourney began allowing anyone with a text description (called a "prompt") to generate a still image in many different styles. The technique has been controversial among some artists, but other artists have embraced the new tools and run with them.

While anyone with a prompt can make an AI-generated image, it soon became clear that some people possessed a special talent for finessing these new AI tools to produce better content. As with painting or photography, the human creative spark is still necessary to produce notable results consistently.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham/Google)

Google announced today that it would enable WebGPU support in its Chrome browser by default starting in version 113, currently in beta. In development since 2017, WebGPU is a next-generation graphics API that aims to bring the benefits of low-overhead APIs like Microsoft's Direct3D 12, Apple's Metal, and Vulkan to web browsers and other apps.

WebGPU support has been available but off by default in Chrome for a while now, because the API wasn't finalized and things could break from update to update. Google says that Mozilla and Apple will eventually support WebGPU in Firefox and Safari, and browsers like Microsoft Edge and Opera that rely on the Chromium browser engine can presumably choose to switch it on just as Google has.

Chrome 113 supports WebGPU on Windows, macOS, and ChromeOS to start, with "support for other platforms" like Linux and Android "coming later this year." This browser version should roll out to all Chrome users sometime in May.

Enlarge / It was nice while it lasted... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Back in 2020, we reported that emulator developers were using a hole in the Xbox Store's app distribution system to get around Microsoft's longstanding ban on emulators running on Xbox consoles . This week, though, many of the emulators that were distributed through that workaround have stopped working, the apparent victims of a new crackdown by Microsoft.

Xbox emulator makers and users can't say they weren't warned. In the "Gaming and Xbox" section of Microsoft's official Store Policies , section 10.13.10 clearly states that "products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family."

Microsoft's enforcement of this clause has historically focused on removing emulators published as "private" UWP apps to the Xbox Store. Those apps could be distributed to whitelisted users via direct links accessed on the system's Edge browser, getting around the usual approval process for a public store listing.

Star Wars Celebration Day kicked off with the release of an extended teaser for Ahsoka , the latest interconnected series in the Star Wars franchise set to debut this summer on Disney+. Written by Dave Filoni, the series stars Rosario Dawson in the title role.

The Jedi Padawan of Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka was first introduced as a supporting character in 2008's animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the subsequent animated series. The character returned in the sequel series Star Wars Rebels (2014-2018) as a member of the Rebel Alliance, operating under the codename Fulcrum, and made numerous other cameo appearances in the extended Star Wars universe. Dawson's live-action version made her debut in The Mandalorian 's second season. We last saw Ahsoka briefly in The Book of Boba Fett , when she passed on a gift of chain mail to Grogu after warning Mando/Din Djarin that his presence would be a distraction from Grogu's Jedi training. We all know how that turned out: Din and Grogu reunited and went on to share even more adventures in The Mandalorian S3, which will wrap later this month.

The official premise for Ahsoka is short and sweet: "Set after the fall of the Empire, Ahsoka follows the former Jedi knight Ahsoka Tano as she investigates an emerging threat to a vulnerable galaxy." In addition to Dawson, the cast includes Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine Wren, a young Mandalorian warrior, graffiti artist, and former bounty hunter; Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera Syndulla, a former pilot for the Rebellion; Eman Esfandi as Ezra Bridger, a former con artist and thief who trained as a Jedi; and Ray Stevenson as Baylan.

Enlarge / Archaeologists have discovered the first physical evidence of the so-called "gold of honor" ceremony in Ancient Egypt, in which the severed hands of defeated foes were presented to the Pharaoh in exchange for a collar of golden beads. (credit: J. Gresky et al., 2023/CC BY 4.0 )

There is evidence that ancient Egyptian soldiers would sever the right hands of foes and present them to the Pharaoh. That evidence comes in the form of tomb inscriptions of prominent warriors, as well as inscriptions and iconography on temple reliefs. Archaeologists have now discovered the first physical evidence of such a trophy-taking practice, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The severed right hands of 12 individuals were excavated from pits within a courtyard of a 15th Dynasty palace in northeastern Egypt.

The 15th Dynasty (circa 1640-1530 BCE) rulers were known as Hyksos ("rulers of foreign lands"), although they did not control all of Egypt from their seat of power in the city of Avaris—the pharaohs of the 16th and 17th Dynasties ruled from Thebes during the same time period. Historians disagree about whether the Hyksos came to Egypt as invaders or gradually settled in the Nile delta before rising to power. But by the late 17th Dynasty, the Hyksos and the pharaohs were at war, leading to the former's defeat by Ahmose I, who founded the 18th Dynasty.

But the Hyksos nonetheless left their mark on Egyptian culture in the form of certain technological advances and customs, including the practice of presenting the severed right hands of defeated foes in a so-called "gold of honor" ceremony in exchange for a collar of golden beads. Per the authors, the Egyptians seem to have adopted the custom during Ahmose I's reign at the latest, based on a relief showing a pile of hands in his temple in Abydos. Tomb inscriptions and temple reliefs from the 18th to the 20th Dynasties "consistently depict hand counts on the battlefield following major battles," the authors wrote. However, there was no physical evidence of the custom beyond iconographic and literary sources—until now.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of what Sony thinks the next Call of Duty might look like on the PS5 (and definitely not a screenshot from Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360. Nope. No way). (credit: Activision)

Late last month, UK regulators said they no longer believed a proposed Microsoft-owned Activision would bar Call of Duty games from PlayStation platforms, a reversal of earlier preliminary findings . Even if you grant that premise, though, Sony says that it's still worried Microsoft could give PlayStation owners a "degraded" version of new Call of Duty games in an effort to make the Xbox versions look better.

“Simply... making it as good as it could be”

In a newly published response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, Sony says the regulators' recent turnaround is "surprising, unprecedented, and irrational." The company takes specific issue with the regulators' "lifetime value" modeling, which Sony says heavily undervalues what an Xbox-exclusive Call of Duty would be worth to Microsoft.

Beyond those technical concerns, though, Sony says it worries that Microsoft might subtly undermine PlayStation "simply by not making it as good as it could be." That could include small changes to the game's "performance [or] quality of play," but also secondary moves to "raise [Call of Duty's] price [on PlayStation], release the game at a later date, or make it available only on Game Pass." Microsoft would also "have no incentive to make use of the advanced features in PlayStation not found in Xbox," Sony says, an apparent reference to the PS5 controller's advanced haptics and built-in audio capabilities.

Enlarge / Intel GPUs, ultra-wide monitors, and a vague sense that it's time for some gamers to refresh: These are some of the factors that have one report showing industry growth for PC gaming. (credit: Peerapon Boonyakiat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

PC gamers may be concerned about losing their jobs in 2023, but not so much that they can ignore a glut of new GPU and ultra-widescreen monitor options.

That's the elevator-pitch version of Jon Peddie Research's report on PC gaming hardware sales and costs . At a high level, it suggests that while mid-range gaming will see only gradual growth from 2023 through 2025, both entry-level and high-end hardware should see notable upticks through 2025. The market should recover more than $5 billion overall from its 2022 drop-off, with the high end taking $3.92 billion and entry level $2.29 billion.

Reading exactly which bits of PC hardware fit into which segment, and getting more detail on how JPR put these numbers together, costs even more than a 40-series Nvidia card, at $27,500 per year for access. So we're left to wonder which cards, monitors, chips, and other gear fit into entry-, mid-level, and high-end. But JPR does suggest a few factors moving the numbers around: