The New York Times added a new daily puzzle game to its library in the form of Digits. GameSpot reports: This collection of math conundrums tasks you with reaching a designated number by using six numbers that you're free to multiply, divide, subtract, or add up to reach the final result, so long as your process doesn't create any fractions or negative numbers.

Currently in beta and only available for this week, there'll be five of these math puzzles to solve every day. These aren't one-and-done puzzles like Wordle, and depending on the path you choose to solve one of these math mysteries, you'll be awarded 1-3 star ratings. If Digits proves to be popular with its readers, the New York Times will then start work on the further development of the game.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server.

At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon's strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It's written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page. The character's name is Doctor "Izmer Trotzky," his character class is "Professor Scientist." They've got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He's carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer. [...]

But what game is it from? Motherboard reached out to game designer Jacqueline Bryk to find out. Bryk is an award-winning designer of roleplaying games who has worked on Kult: Divinity Lost, Changeling: the Lost, Fading Suns: Pax Alexius, and Vampire: the Masquerade. "I strongly suspect this is Call Of Cthulhu," Bryk said when first looking at the sheet. Call of Cthulhu (COC) is an RPG based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft where players attempt to stave off madness while investigating eldritch horrors. "This is a pretty classic Professor build. The sword cane really clinches it for me. I notice he's currently carrying a derringer and a dagger but took no points in firearms or fighting. I'm not sure which edition this is but it seems like the most he could do with his weapons is throw them." "After some research, Bryk concluded that the game is a homebrewed combination of COC and the Fallout tabletop game based on the popular video game franchise," adds Motherboard. "My best guest here is Fallout: Cthulhu the Homebrew," Bryk said, giving the home designed game a name.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie "has now earned the largest global animated opening weekend in box office history," reports the Wrap, with a worldwide five-day launch of $377 million, passing the $358 million record set by Disney's Frozen II on Thanksgiving weekend in 2019." Domestically, "Mario" was projected when it opened in theaters on Wednesday to earn a five-day opening of at least $125 million from 4,343 theaters, and it has shattered that figure with $204.6 million grossed. Both that and its three-day total of $143 million are a studio record for Illumination, with the three-day total being the third highest seen on Easter weekend and second only to the $182 million earned by Pixar's "Incredibles 2" among all animated films. It is also the new animation record holder for Imax with $21.6 million grossed worldwide.

And of course, the film has blasted past every box office opening record for video game adaptations, nearly doubling the three-day domestic record of $72.1 million set by "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" last year and shattering the $210 million global record set by "Warcraft" in 2016. "This weekend's record-breaking debut proves audiences of all ages and demographics will pour into theaters for a hysterically funny and authentic universe expansion of an already iconic franchise," said Universal's domestic distribution president Jim Orr. "Nintendo and Illumination's creative synergy along with Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri's extraordinary leadership created an entertaining juggernaut that will be sure to power up the box office for weeks to come...."

Thanks in large part to "Super Mario Bros.," overall weekend estimates have risen to $194 million, 76% above the same weekend in 2019.

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz believes the industry most affected by generative AI will be videogames. But they're not the only ones, reports the Economist: Games' interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in "Red Dead Redemption 2", a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting ai assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets....

Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries, in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chipmaker to found an AI-gaming startup.

Don't count the big studios out, though. If they can release half a dozen high-quality titles a year instead of a couple, it might chip away at the hit-driven nature of their business, says Josh Chapman of Konvoy, a gaming-focused VC firm. A world of more choice also favours those with big marketing budgets. And the giants may have better answers to the mounting copyright questions around AI. If generative models have to be trained on data to which the developer has the rights, those with big back-catalogues will be better placed than startups

. Trent Kaniuga, an artist who has worked on games like "Fortnite", said last month that several clients had updated their contracts to ban AI-generated art.

It was Magnus Carlsen's last tournament as world champion, reports CNN — and he was eliminated after a "dramatic slip of his mouse" in his online match against Hikaru Nakamura: After drawing their first two games, the duo faced off in an Armageddon clash — similar to regular chess but black has draw odds, meaning that if black draws the game they win, and black starts with less time on the clock than white — to decide who would face Fabiano Caruana in the grand final.

After a tight encounter, the match was heading to its final seconds with very little to separate the two titans of chess.

And it was a moment of unfortunate luck which separated the two when Carlsen's mouse slipped meaning he put his queen onto F6 which allowed it to be taken by Nakamura and seal the victory.

Nakamura — wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "I literally don't care" on the front — celebrated with a fist-bump while five-time world champion Carlsen could be seen exclaiming and grimacing in frustration.
On YouTube Thursday, Nakamura posted a 33-minute video titled "Dear YouTube, This Time Magnus Lost," where he explains every move down to the final queen blunder (which he calls by its YouTube nickname, a "Botez Gambit.")

In the video Nakamura admits he'd missed a possible winning position (by drawing) earlier in the game. But he also believes he would've achieved the same result simply by checking Carlsen endlessly until a draw was declared.

And Chess.com tells the rest of the story. Friday Nakamura went on to win the event's final round, defeating grandmaster Fabiano Caruana in another Armageddon-style showdown after they'd each won three out of six games.

An anonymous reader shares a report: 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. Previously, users who downloaded one of these "hidden" emulator listings before Microsoft's inevitable takedown could run that emulator on an unmodified retail system indefinitely. That is no longer the case; trying to launch downloaded versions of emulators like Xenia or Retrospection on an Xbox console now generates an error saying, "Unable to launch this game or app. The game or app you're trying to launch violates Microsoft Store policy and is not supported."

In an exclusive interview with Variety, legendary video game designer, Nintendo fellow and self-proclaimed "Mario's mom", Shigeru Miyamoto, said: "Mobile apps will not be the primary path of future Mario games." From the report: After two moderately successful but dwindling iOS games, plus another that shuttered after two years, Nintendo is pulling Mario away from the mobile market. Released in 2016, Super Mario Run grossed $60 million in its first year, while 2019's Mario Kart Tour has generated $300 million (compared to Mario Kart 8's $3 billion and counting). Without explanation, Nintendo removed 2019's Dr. Mario World from app markets two years after its release.

"First and foremost, Nintendo's core strategy is a hardware and software integrated gaming experience," said Miyamoto, who played a pivotal role in designing the Wii, among other Nintendo consoles. "The intuitiveness of the control is a part of the gaming experience. When we explored the opportunity of making Mario games for the mobile phone -- which is a more common, generic device -- it was challenging to determine what that game should be. That is why I played the role of director for Super Mario Run, to be able to translate that Nintendo hardware experience into the smart devices."

Elaborating on the merits of Run and Tour, Miyamoto continued, "Having Mario games as mobile apps expands the doorway for far more audience to experience the game, and also expands the Mario gaming experience, where you only need your thumb on one hand." Referencing the innovation of the Super Mario Maker series and Super Mario Odyssey, which Miyamoto called "the ultimate evolution of a Mario adventure game on a typical 3D platformer," the Nintendo exec laid out how the company begins to develop a Mario game: "We try to define what is the gameplay, what is the method, and then define what devices we go on." When asked when fans can expect the next mainline Mario game, Miyamoto chuckled and said: "All I can say is please stay tuned for future Nintendo Directs."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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.

In a newly published response (PDF) 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.

In its own newly filed response (PDF), Microsoft reiterated that it has "no intention to withhold or degrade access to Call of Duty or any other Activision content on PlayStation." That follows on a March filing where Microsoft promised Sony parity on Call of Duty's "release date, content, features, upgrades, quality, and playability." But Sony's response reflects a continued lack of trust in such promises. The company cites detailed analyses from the likes of Digital Foundry in saying that "the technical quality of Modern Warfare II was similar across platforms" in today's market. After a merger, though, Sony argues that "Microsoft would have different incentives because degrading the experience on PlayStation would benefit Xbox, PlayStation's 'closest rival.'" "This kind of 'partial foreclosure' strategy might 'trigger fewer gamer complaints' than full Xbox exclusivity for Call of Duty, Sony says, while also allowing Microsoft to 'still secure revenues from sales of Call of Duty on PlayStation for a transitional period,'" reports Ars. "But Sony says the long-term results of this kind of 'degraded' PlayStation version would be the same as a full PlayStation ban: Call of Duty players abandoning Sony and moving to Microsoft's platforms."

"Such a move would 'seriously damage our reputation,' Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan told the CMA in a recent hearing. 'Our gamers would desert our platform in droves and network effects would exacerbate the problem. Our business would never recover.'"

Savvy Games Group, wholly owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), has agreed to acquire Scopely, a maker of mobile games based in Culver City, California, for $4.9 billion, the companies said on Wednesday. Reuters reports: Scopely, founded in 2011, will become an autonomous operation under the Savvy umbrella, they said in a statement, noting the deal will "strengthen Savvy's global position" and enable Scopely to accelerate growth. Last year, state news agency SPA said Savvy would invest 142 billion riyals ($37.85 billion) in initiatives aimed at making the kingdom a global hub for gaming.

Klaus Teuber, who 28 years ago created The Settlers of Catan, an enduringly popular board game that has spawned college intramural teams and international tournaments, been name-checked on "South Park" and "Parks and Recreation," inspired a novel and sold some 40 million copies worldwide, died on Saturday. He was 70. From a report: Catan GmbH, which publishes and licenses the game, now known simply as Catan, posted news of his death on its website. It said only that he died after a short illness and did not say where. Mr. Teuber was managing a dental lab, a job he found stressful, when he began designing games as a way to unwind. "In the beginning, these games were just for me," he told Forbes in 2016. "I always have stories in my head -- I would read a book, and if I liked it, I wanted to experience it as a game."

That was the origin of his first big success, a game called Barbarossa, which grew out of his admiration for "The Riddle-Master" trilogy, fantasy books written in the 1970s by Patricia A. McKillip. "I was sorry to see it come to an end," he told The New Yorker in 2014, "so I tried to experience this novel in a game." In 1988 that game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in Germany, considered the most prestigious award in the board game world, Germany being particularly enthusiastic about board games. He won that award twice more, in 1990 (for Hoity Toity) and in 1991 (for Wacky Wacky West), before scoring his biggest success with what was known in German as Die Siedler von Catan. In that game, players build settlements in a new land by collecting brick, lumber, wool, ore and grain. Trading with other players is part of the strategy, lending a social element to the game play. In 1995 the game won both the game of the year award and the Deutscher Spiele Preis, the German Games Award. It caught on, first in Germany and then, as editions in other languages became available, all over.

E3 2023 has been called off "after huge gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Ubisoft all said they wouldn't be participating in the event," reports The Verge. From the report: E3 2023 was scheduled for June 13th through 16th with a mix of industry-focused days and days that would be open to the public. But in the lead-up to June, there had been some worrying signs that things might be rocky for E3's revival. According to an email sent to employees and verified by IGN, E3 2023 "simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry." In an email to The Verge, Kyle Marsden-Kish, global VP of gaming at ReedPop, wrote: "This was a difficult decision because of all the effort we and our partners put toward making this event happen, but we had to do what's right for the industry and what's right for E3. We appreciate and understand that interested companies wouldn't have playable demos ready and that resourcing challenges made being at E3 this summer an obstacle they couldn't overcome. For those who did commit to E3 2023, we're sorry we can't put on the showcase you deserve and that you've come to expect from ReedPop's event experiences."

Marsden-Kish suggested the convention could return in subsequent years.

Valve announced today that Steam will require Windows 10 or later on January 1, 2024. The reason? Google Chrome. PC Gamer reports: "The newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows," Valve's typically curt announcement reads. "In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above." January 1, 2024 is the day of doom for Steam on the old Windows versions. "After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows."

Hackaday recently shared some thoughts on "purpose-built" distros: Some examples are Kali for security testing, DragonOS for software-defined radio, or Hannah Montana Linux for certain music fans.

Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.... It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specifically designed to run on the Linux framebuffer with minimal dependencies.
Their report includes video of the distro booting up and playing Doom.

"The entire distribution is placed into a bootable ISO file that can be placed on any bootable drive."

Epic Games' next big plan for the metaverse is to unify all of its disparate asset marketplaces under one brand, Fab. The Verge reports: The new store will include assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Quixel Bridge, Artstation Marketplace, and Sketchfab, and Epic will give creators 88 percent of earnings on the store, like it does for the Epic Games Store. On Fab, you'll be able to get a vast amount of digital assets, including "3D models, materials, sound, VFX, digital humans, and more," Epic says. And the company is positioning it as an open marketplace that will support "all engines, all metaverse-inspired games which support imported content, and the most popular digital content creation packages." In theory, that means you won't need to be an Unreal Engine developer to get value from the store.

Fab is set to launch later this year, though it's available in alpha as a plugin for the new Unreal Editor for Fortnite tools.

How much energy does it take to play Xbox? Microsoft is helping developers find out. At the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the company announced a new toolkit for developers to measure real-time energy consumption from Xbox games. From a report: The toolkit, which Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft calls the first of its kind in the industry, will allow developers using the Xbox platform to monitor real-time energy use of the games they create -- "down to the nearest millisecond," the company noted in a press release. It will also help Microsoft establish a baseline for Xbox games, which could then serve as a benchmark for developers. The company hopes game-makers will also leverage the toolkit to experiment with approaches that reduce energy consumption. Some 60 years after the debut of the world's first video game, the industry has grown into a $214 billion global juggernaut. With that growth comes an increased environmental impact -- but one that can be difficult to quantify with precision, particularly as it varies widely by console, game and system setup.

Valve just announced that Counter-Strike 2, made in Source Engine 2, will be released in Summer 2023. From a report: Accompanying the announcement, Valve also released three videos teasing what to expect in the Counter-Strike's massive and transformative update. Leveling up the World shows off the upgraded maps and overhauls, Moving Beyond Tick Rate announces that tick rate will no longer matter (moving and shooting will be "equally responsive"), and Responsive Smokes details the new "dynamic volumetric" nature of smoke grenades.

On March 27th, Nintendo's eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles will be shut down. With many of the titles being original to those consoles and not available anywhere else, it's left archivists and historians scrambling to preserve them before it's too late. However, those preservation plans get complicated given Nintendo's litigious nature on matters of intellectual property. Techdirt's Timothy Geigner writes: Preventing the gaming public from continuing to buy games that rely on a company-operated backend infrastructure is one thing. After all, Nintendo can do what it wants when it comes to putting its products into commerce. But what really annoyed a ton of people, myself included, was how this would impact archivists and historians, or anyone else interested in preserving video game history and culture. With the impending shutdown, some of those entities are once again expressing concern: "While it's unfortunate that people won't be able to purchase digital 3DS or Wii U games anymore, we understand the business reality that went into this decision,' the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) tweeted when the eShop shutdowns were announced a year ago. 'What we don't understand is what path Nintendo expects its fans to take, should they wish to play these games in the future.'"

Because Nintendo is litigious, utilizes DRM, and the DMCA exists, all of that combines to make it wildly unsafe for museums and archivists to actually retain copies of these games that will shortly no longer be found anywhere else. And, no, the exemptions built into the DMCA for content such as movies and literature simply don't exist for the video game space. [...] So what can be done? Not a whole lot, honestly, but some hobbyists are at least going to make a go of it: "In an effort to address this -- or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible -- YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries. He's now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks."

As part of this effort, The Completionist has said he plans to donate all of this digital media to the VGHF. What they can do with all of that content still remains to be seen. All of the same copyright and DMCA rules still apply, so what access it can grant to researchers, never mind the public, is in question.

Roblox is launching its first set of generative AI game creation tools: Code Assist and Material Generator. Engadget reports: Although neither tool is anywhere close to generating a playable Roblox experience from a text description, Head of Roblox Studio Stef Corazza told an audience at GDC 2023 that they can "help automate basic coding tasks so you can focus on creative work." For now, that means being able to generate useful code snippets and object textures based on short prompts. Roblox's announcement for the tools offers a few examples, generating realistic textures for a "bright red rock canyon" and "stained glass," or producing several lines of functional code that will that make certain objects change color and self-destruct after a player interacts with them.

Code Assist looks promising, but Roblox is careful to state it's imperfect, and may generate "incorrect" or "misleading" information. "It is still up to you to review, test, and determine if the code suggestion is contextually appropriate." Even so, Roblox's Corazza seems confident that this is the first step towards making every user on the platform a creator, suggesting it may only be a few years before these tools can generate fully playable, interactive 3D scenes from a simple prompt.

Netflix has announced that it has 40 games slated for launch this year and has 70 in development with its partners. The company also has 16 games currently being developed by its in-house game studios. Netflix launched games in November 2021 and has released 55 titles since then. From a report: The streaming service says it's committed to building out its games portfolio and will be bringing Ustwo's Monument Valley franchise to its platform, starting with Monument Valley 1 and Monument Valley 2, with more to come. In a briefing with reporters, Ustwo CEO Maria Sayans confirmed that the Netflix versions of the games won't be different than the current available versions, and that they will include all paid in-app purchases.

The streaming service also announced that Mighty Quest: Rogue Palace, a rogue-lite game set in the universe some may remember from The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, will be launching in April 18. The game, which is from Ubisoft, features an improved formula, deepened narrative and upgraded frantic action gameplay. The launch is part of Netflix's partnership with Ubisoft, and is the second of three exclusive games from the developer to be released on Netflix. The first exclusive game, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, launched in January.

The open-source, cross-platform Godot Engine has arrived in the Epic Games store. "Starting today, you can choose to use EGS to download the engine and keep it up to date with every release," writes the company in a blog post. From the release: Epic Games is a long-time supporter of Godot, and thanks to their contributions we have been able to improve our rendering pipeline as well as our built-in scripting language, GDScript -- the fruits of that work are now visible in the newly released Godot 4.0!

The Godot build you can download from EGS is the exact same open source release as on other platforms. Being present on more storefronts opens a new convenient avenue for more users to find the engine and begin their game development journey. You can of course still download Godot Engine from other platforms, or clone its source code from the Git repository and build it yourself. And if you do, you are more than welcome to contribute to Godot's development too!