Enlarge / I wish I had more games installed for iPad-on-the-couch photo purposes, but I just don't keep that many games on my drive at once! (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Nvidia's GameStream had one job, the one in its name: stream games from the Nvidia graphics card inside your PC to the Nvidia Shield hooked up to your TV (or, back in the day, a Shield tablet ). It did this job fairly well, making setup simple and optimizing games with some custom stream-smoothing. Now Nvidia is removing GameStream from Shield devices —but an even better DIY game-streaming solution is already available. Let's take a look at it and talk to the developers about why and how they made it.

Nvidia is done with local streaming

Nvidia says a Shield update arriving this month will make it so "the GameStream feature will no longer be available in app." If you try to skip the Shield update, GameStream will still stop working at some point (and possibly be removed from the GeForce Experience app in Windows). In the meantime, trying to dodge that update means not using GeForce Now , one of Nvidia's recommended replacements, on your Shield and missing out on all the other update fixes and features that arrive with system updates.

If you're a Shield owner, like I am, this stinks. Shield devices have merits of their own , receiving the longest and most consistent stream of updates of any Android/Google TV device ever released. They're still perfectly functional as stream boxes (and even more appealing if Google lands an NFL package ). But a big benefit of having both a Shield and a GeForce graphics card will soon be shunted.

Enlarge / Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez star as Elgin (a bard) and Holga (a barbarian) in D&D: Honor Among Thieves . (credit: Paramount Pictures)

Of all the films due for release this spring, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was one of my most anticipated premieres, solely on the strength of those killer trailers. The film does not disappoint. It's a fresh, good-humored, energetic, and vastly entertaining fantasy/action/comedy, boasting a stellar cast and solid emotional core that serves as a worthy homage to the famous RPG that inspired it.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Honor Among Thieves is set in the hugely popular Forgotten Realms campaign setting. The film's official premise is short and sweet: "A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

This year's edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has been canceled. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and show promoter ReedPop announced late Thursday that the planned June event—which was set to be the first in-person E3 since 2019—"did not garner the sustained interest necessary” from major publishers and potential attendees to justify a massive convention.

At this point, the cancellation of the 2023 show wasn't a huge surprise. All three major console makers had already confirmed that they wouldn't be attending, and major publishers Ubisoft and Sega publicly abandoned the show more recently. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz , ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis cited economic headwinds, digital marketing opportunities, and COVID-related game development timeline changes as reasons the companies backed out.

But the decades-long decline of E3 was also apparent well before this year's problems—and even well before COVID forced the cancellation of the 2020 show (and every show in subsequent years). Part of me will miss the glitz and spectacle of the 15 E3s I've attended since 2004. But a larger part recognizes that E3 is a show that was built for a very different game industry and which has utterly failed to change with the times.

Enlarge / The crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , a film with many references to Starfleet Academy. (credit: Paramount)

There's officially another Star Trek series on the way, and this time it's one we've been hearing rumors about since 2018: Starfleet Academy .

Announced today in a press release and reported by Deadline , the CBS Studios-produced series will follow a group of teenage Starfleet Academy students as they come of age while enduring rigorous training for future interstellar missions.

The central characters will reportedly have to navigate friendships, rivalries, and romances as they face a new enemy that threatens the Federation.

Enlarge / You've got the brains, I've got the looks... let's make lots of money. (credit: Apple TV+)

Henk Rogers, the man most directly responsible for bringing Tetris to the West, helped set expectations at an early press screening of Apple TV's Tetris movie, which premieres on the streaming service Friday. "It's not a documentary," Rogers said of a film that casts him as a fearless hero working to extract the game from the grip of a brutal, dying '80s Soviet bureaucracy. "Don't expect to see that this is exactly how it happened."

Instead, Rogers said, expect a movie that "got the feeling across, the feeling of being in Moscow for the first time, breaking the law."

All this is immediately apparent if you've read books like The Tetris Effect or Tetris: The Games People Play , which lay out the actual history of the game's long journey outside Russia with much more care and detail. Alternatively, you could hunt down a 2004 BBC documentary that also provides a more direct account of the real drama surrounding Tetris ' complicated Soviet-era licensing drama.

Enlarge / Slam that bash pad!

Rumor had it that there was this fighting video game, like Karate Champ , except the harder you hit the buttons, the stronger your attacks were. It was also said that if you hit a button hard enough, you could knock out your opponent with one hit! Certain people were supposedly seen climbing on and jumping up and down on the buttons of the machine in the hope of making a killing strike.

As a child of the '80s who loved video games, this game intrigued me.

I soon discovered that the game was called Street Fighter ( SF1 ), and it was made by a company called Capcom. In my local arcade, it consisted of a large, curvy cabinet with two sets of controls to accommodate two players at once. Each player had a start button, an eight-way joystick, and two large pressure-sensitive rubber buttons. This cabinet is now often called the "deluxe" or "crescent" cab, and the pressure-sensitive buttons are often called "bash pads" or "pneumatic buttons." It looked totally rad.

Enlarge / Graduate student W. Walker Smith converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. His personal favorites are helium and zinc. (credit: W. Walker Smith and Alain Barker)

We're all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, might sound like? W. Walker Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, combined his twin passions of chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audio-visual instrument to communicate the concepts of chemical spectroscopy.

Smith presented his data sonification project—which essentially transforms the visible spectra of the elements of the periodic table into sound—at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis, Indiana. Smith even featured audio clips of some of the elements, along with "compositions" featuring larger molecules, during a performance of his "The Sound of Molecules" show.

As an undergraduate, "I [earned] a dual degree in music composition and chemistry, so I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music," Smith said during a media briefing . "Eventually, I stumbled across the visible spectra of the elements and I was overwhelmed by how beautiful and different they all look. I thought it would be really cool to turn those visible spectra, those beautiful images, into sound."

PC Shaders go brrrrr
by u/chrysillium in thelastofus

Naughty Dog says it is "actively investigating multiple issues" as complaints about graphical and performance issues continue to flood in following the PC release of The Last of Us: Part 1 on Tuesday.

The thousands of reviews on Steam —67 percent of which are negative, as of this writing—tell the tale of players facing massive problems simply playing the game they purchased. There is an overwhelming number of complaints about everything from frequent crashes and extreme loading times to "severe stuttering" during basic gameplay. Even with some positive reviews on the site supportive of the game's underlying console versions, others complain that the PC edition is currently "stuttering, crashing, and unplayable."

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

PC gamers sticking with old versions of Windows may finally need to upgrade if they want to keep playing the games in their Steam libraries. Valve announced this week that it will stop supporting Steam on Windows 7 and Windows 8 on January 1, 2024. "After that date," the company's brief announcement reads , "the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows."

That timeline is still fairly generous to users of the 14- and 11-year-old operating systems, given that Microsoft ended all support for both of them back in January of 2023 . GPU makers like Nvidia and AMD also stopped supporting their latest GPUs in Windows 7 or Windows 8 quite a while ago.

This move will affect a vanishingly small but persistent number of Steam users. According to Valve's own survey data for February of 2023 , the 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 account for a little less than two percent of all Steam usage. This is almost nothing next to Windows 10 and Windows 11 (nearly 95 percent), but all macOS versions combined account for only 2.37 percent, and all Linux versions combined (including the Steam Deck) add up to just 1.27 percent.