Enlarge / Someone had better warn that snowsuit-clad guard about the "outdated" content he's about to walk into... (credit: Konami)

Gamers of a certain age may find it hard to accept that the Metal Gear Solid series will be celebrating its 25th anniversary next month. And publisher Konami is apparently worried that the game's age may be starting to show for some modern audiences.

As noted by GamesRadar , the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection re-release warns players that the games in the collection contain "expressions and themes which may be considered outdated." The disclaimer notes that the games are presented "without alteration" to preserve the "historical context" and the "creator's original vision," but still urges that "player discretion is advised."

While the disclaimer doesn't go into specifics of the "outdated" content in the games, it's not hard to come up with examples that might hit a little differently in the context of the 2020s (warning: vague spoilers for Metal Gear series plot points until the next heading). Metal Gear Solid 2 , in particular, features discussion of some heavy incest themes between a major character and their step-family, for instance. That game also features a scene in which a character grabs another by the crotch to confirm their sex.

Charles Martinet will no longer serve as the voice of Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi, Nintendo announced via tweet today . The announcement ends Martinet's three-decadeslong career in one of the most iconic vocal roles in video games.

Martinet will be "moving into the brand-new role of Mario Ambassador," Nintendo writes, a role that will see him "continue to travel the world sharing the joy of Mario and interacting with you all!" Nintendo didn't provide a reason for the transition, but the company promised a video message featuring Martinet and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto "at a future date" that might have more details.

"My new Adventure begins! You are all Numba One in my heart!" Martinet said in his own retweet of the news .

Enlarge / Roblox helps support sites like RBLXWild in letting minors gamble using their Robux balances, according to a new lawsuit.

A new proposed class-action lawsuit (as noticed by Bloomberg Law ) accuses user-generated "metaverse" company Roblox of profiting from and helping to power third-party websites that use the platform's Robux currency for unregulated gambling activities. In doing so, the lawsuit says Roblox is effectively "work[ing] with and facilitat[ing] the Gambling Website Defendants... to offer illegal gambling opportunities to minor users."

The three gambling website companies named in the lawsuit—Satozuki, Studs Entertainment, and RBLXWild Entertainment—allow users to connect a Roblox account and convert an existing balance of Robux virtual currency into credits on the gambling site. Those credits act like virtual casino chips that can be used for simple wagers on those sites, ranging from Blackjack to "coin flip" games.

If a player wins, they can transfer their winnings back to the Roblox platform in the form of Robux. The gambling sites use fake purchases of worthless "dummy items" to facilitate these Robux transfers, according to the lawsuit, and Roblox takes a 30 percent transaction fee both when players "cash in" and "cash out" from the gambling sites. If the player loses, the transferred Robux are retained by the gambling website through a "stock" account on the Roblox platform.

Artist interpretation of the creatures talking about your mom on Xbox Live last night. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

This week, Microsoft is rolling out a newly standardized strike-based system laying out tiered enforcement plans for violations of the existing Xbox Community Standards . The intent, Microsoft says, is to give players "clarity into how their behavior impacts their experience." But the system's time-based "eight strikes and you're out" system and the relative severity of certain sample infractions are already drawing perplexed comments from some corners.

As outlined in a Tuesday post on Xbox Wire , the new strike enforcement program will impose more stringent penalties for successive infractions, a system Microsoft says is modeled after "demerit strikes used in driver’s license systems in many countries." Successive strikes will lead to suspensions from Xbox Live for one day to a maximum of 365 days, according to the following scale:

• 1 strike: 1-day suspension
• 2 strikes: 1-day suspension
• 3 strikes: 3-day suspension
• 4 strikes: 7-day suspension
• 5 strikes: 14-day suspension
• 6 strikes: 21-day suspension
• 7 strikes: 60-day suspension
• 8 strikes: 365-day suspension

Not all potential infractions are treated equally under this rubric, though; Microsoft notes that the number of strikes per enforcement action can "range in severity based on inappropriate activity" and are "based on the severity of [the user's] actions." While Microsoft hasn't published a complete list of how many strikes are associated with each different type of infraction, a sample "User Journey" graphic in the blog post includes a list of the following "examples of strikes added for each type of action."

Enlarge (credit: Savusia Konstantin | Getty Images )

Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt to trick them into downloading apps, malware, or submitting personal details in exchange for nonexistent rewards in Fortnite and Roblox .

For more than three years, security researcher Zach Edwards has been tracking these website hijackings and scams. He says the activity can be linked back to the activities of affiliate users of one advertising company. The US-registered company acts as a service that sends web traffic to a range of online advertisers, allowing individuals to sign up and use its systems. However, on any given day, Edwards, a senior manager of threat insights at Human Security , uncovers scores of .gov, .org, and .edu domains being compromised.

“This group is what I would consider to be the number one group at bulk compromising infrastructure across the Internet and hosting scams on it and other types of exploits,” Edwards says. The scale of the website compromises—which are ongoing—and the public nature of the scams makes them stand out, the researcher says.

Enlarge / If I click the "I/O Events" in the upper-left corner, maybe some of the frozen processes with a little hourglass will unfreeze. But how soon? Before the other deep-red processes die? I can't work under these conditions! (credit: Pier-Luc Brault)

I spent nearly 20 minutes this morning trying to be a good operating system, but you know what? People expect too much of their computers.

I worked hard to rotate processes through CPU slots, I was speedy to respond to I/O requests, and I didn't even let memory pages get written to disk. But the user—some jerk that I'm guessing keeps 32 shopping tabs open during work—kept rage-quitting as processes slid in attrition from bright green to red to "red with a frozen face emoji." It made me want to get four more cores or potentially just kill a process out of spite. If they were a writer, like me, I'd kill the sandboxed tab with their blog editor open. Learn to focus, scribe!

You're the OS! is a browser game that combines stress, higher-level computer design appreciation, and panic-clicking exercise. Creator Pier-Luc Brault says specifically that the game "has not been created with education in mind," but it might introduce people to principles like process scheduling and memory swapping—"as long as it is made clear that it is not an exact depiction." Brault, a computer science teacher himself, writes that they may use the game to teach about cores, RAM shortages, and the like.

Enlarge / Netflix's growing games division wants to be available as many places as possible, so now it's rolling out tests of TV and browser-based games (at least on Mac and PC). (credit: Netflix)

Having quietly released a phone-based TV game controller for iOS devices last week, Netflix has both made their ambition for streaming subscription gaming official—as well as expanding it to PCs and Macs through the web.

In a blog post today , Mike Verdu, vice president for games at Netflix, states that the streaming content company is rolling out " a limited beta test to a small number of members in Canada and the UK on select TVs starting today, and on PCs and Macs through Netflix.com on supported browsers in the next few weeks."

The first two games available on bigger-than-mobile screens are the visual novel-esque adventure game Oxenfree 2, from Netflix-owned Night School Studio, and Molehew's Mining Adventure, described as a "gem-mining arcade game."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

The Supreme Court Wednesday ruled that a federal judge's injunction against Apple would not be allowed to take effect immediately, rather than waiting for Apple's own Supreme Court appeal. That means Fortnite- maker Epic Games and other developers in Apple's App Store will still be barred from pointing customers to outside purchase points to avoid Apple's commission.

Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency petitions for California and other states, turned down Epic's request, as seen on the case's Supreme Court page (and initially reported by Reuters , among others). Epic's application stems from a complex series of rulings related to Epic's initial 2020 lawsuit . Apple had largely won in decisions from a district court in 2022 , and then the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in April . Those decisions found that Apple's policies that iOS apps only be available through its App Store, and those apps only use its own in-app payment systems, did not violate antitrust rules.

The 9th Circuit court did, however, affirm a lower-court decision that there was anti-steering language in Apple's developer agreement. Prohibiting developers from pointing to outside purchase methods violated California's Unfair Competition Law, the courts ruled. The 9th Circuit allowed an injunction prohibiting Apple from enforcing its anti-steering language to remain in place but put a stay on it until a potential Apple appeal to the Supreme Court had run its course.

Enlarge / There are some energies you should not tap for sorcery, something both Hogwarts students and Hogwarts Legacy installs running under Linux should know. (credit: Warner Bros. Games)

Linux gaming's march toward being a real, actual thing has taken serious strides lately , due in large part to Valve's Proton-powered Steam Play efforts . Being Linux, there are still some quirks to figure out. One of them involves games trying to make use of Intel's upscaling tools.

Intel's ARC series GPUs are interesting , in many senses of the word. They offer the best implementation of Intel's image reconstruction system, XeSS, similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR. XeSS, like its counterparts, utilizes machine learning to fill in the pixel gaps on anti-aliased objects and scenes. The results are sometimes clear, sometimes a bit fuzzy if you pay close attention. In our review of Intel's A770 and A750 GPUs in late 2022, we noted that cross-compatibility between all three systems could be in the works.

That kind of easy-swap function is not the case when a game is running on a customized version of the WINE Windows-on-Linux, translating Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan and prodding to see whether it, too, can make use of Intel's graphics boost. As noted by Phoronix , Intel developers contributing to the open source Mesa graphics project added the ability to hide an Intel GPU from the Vulkan Linux driver.