After almost seven years, Nintendo has won a patent case that involved the original Wii. On Tuesday, the company announced that a federal court in Dallas ruled in its favor against iLife Technologies, overturning an earlier 2017 decision that would have forced Nintendo to pay out $10.1 million in damages. Engadget reports: The original suit, which was brought against Nintendo of America in 2013, alleged that the company used iLife's technology to create the Wii's motion-sensing controller. The patent that was at the center of the case described a technology designed to detect when a person falls and monitor babies for symptoms of sudden infant death syndrome. iLife had initially sought $144 million in total damages and an injunction against Nintendo. In this latest ruling, however, the court decided that iLife's claim wasn't specific enough.

With Half-Life: Alyx launching in March 2020, Valve is offering gamers the opportunity to play every Half-Life game on Steam for free. "This is basically a two-month-long trial; you won't get to keep these games," notes The Verge. "Every game is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS (though all of these games are 32-bit apps, which means they don't work on macOS 10.15 Catalina)." From the report: This promotion includes the original Half-Life (the Source version of the game with added physics to make it feel more modern to play, not the beautiful remaster Black Mesa) and its expansions, Half-Life: Blue Shift and Half-Life: Opposing Force. Also available for free is Half-Life 2 and its two episodic expansions. (According to Valve, Half-Life: Alyx takes place before the events of Half-Life 2.) Valve's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, its tech demo for HDR lightning, isn't included in this promotion. You can view all the Half-Life games on Steam and start downloading them here.

MojoKid writes: Today AMD launched its latest midrange graphics card based on the company's all new Navi architecture. The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT slots in under $300 ($279 MSRP) and is based on the same Navi 10 GPU as AMD's current high-end Radeon RX 5700 series cards. AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT is outfitted with 36 compute units, with a total of 2,304 stream processors and is essentially a Radeon 5700 spec GPU with 2GB less GDDR 6 memory (6GB total) and a narrower 192-bit interface, versus Radeon RX 5700's 8GB, 256-bit config. HotHardware took a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT around the benchmark track and this card has a BIOS switch on-board that toggles between performance and silent/quiet modes. In performance mode, the card has a 160W power target, 14Gbps memory data rate, a Boost Clock of 1,750MHz and a Game Clock of 1,615MHz. In silent/quiet mode, things are a bit more tame with a 135W power target, 12Gbps memory, and 1,620 MHz/1,460MHz Boost and Game Clocks, respectively. In the gaming benchmarks, the new Radeon RX 5600 XT is generally faster than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 overall, with the exception of a few titles that are more NVIDIA-optimized and in VR. Though it lacks the capability for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the new AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT weighs in $20-30 less than NVIDIA's closest competitor and offers similar if not better performance.

Claire Murdoch, mental health director of England's National Health Service (NHS), has reignited the loot box controversy with a report claiming they push young people into "under the radar" gambling. PC Gamer reports: "Frankly no company should be setting kids up for addiction by teaching them to gamble on the content of these loot boxes", she said. "No firm should sell to children loot box games with this element of chance, so yes those sales should end." Loot boxes aren't currently regulated by England's Gambling Commission because their contents can't be monetized. The report calls this a "loophole" because, "Despite this, third party websites selling gaming accounts and rare items are commonplace and easy to find on places such as eBay across the internet."

Murdoch called on game publishers to ban games whose loot boxes encourage children to gamble, as well as to introduce spending limits, tell players the odds of receiving each item before they buy a loot box, and "Support parents by increasing their awareness on the risks of in-game spending." As for what those risks are, the report says, "Investigations have found numerous cases of children spending money without their parents' knowledge, including a 16-year-old paying 2,000 British Pounds on a basketball game and a 15-year-old losing 1,000 British Pounds in a shooting game."

A PS5 leak posted on 4Chan, which was later reposted on Reddit, spills a bunch of information on the PlayStation 5 reveal event which is expected to take place in February. According to the leak, the PS5 will be unveiled on February 5 at a PlayStation Meeting event for the media. "The console design, controller, UI/home screen, certain features, console specs, talk from third parties/indie publishers, as well as announcements for PS5 exclusives will be shown," says the leaker.

The leak says the PS5 will support backwards compatibility with games from all 5 PlayStation platforms; PS4 accessories will be compatible on the new console as well; and the specs will rival Microsoft's Xbox Series X console. Furthermore, it states that the PS5 will launch worldwide in October 2020, priced at $499 in the U.S. It'll also be launched with several exclusive titles. You can read the full list of details here.

The NPD group has rounded up sales stats for the last month, but with the flip from 2019 to 2020 it is also listing some of the best sellers over the last ten years. From a report: Grand Theft Auto V is the best selling game across all platforms and outlets tracked from 2010 through the end of 2019, but otherwise the top ten is dominated by the Call of Duty series, with Red Dead Redemption at number 7 and Minecraft at number 10 as the only other titles.

1. Grand Theft Auto V
2. Call of Duty: Black Ops
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops II
4. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Google said today that it's on track to bring more than 120 games to its cloud gaming service Stadia in 2020 and is planning to offer more than 10 Stadia-exclusive games for the first half of the year. From a report: That would be a pretty massive jump from the 26 games and one exclusive that are currently available, and all in a little more than a year after the service's launch, if those projections hold true. Previously, Google had only explicitly confirmed four games for 2020, so this news was much needed to let early adopters know there are a lot more games on the way. Google also announced other updates rolling out to Stadia over the next three months, including 4K gaming on the web, support for more Android phones (it's currently only available on Google's Pixels), wireless gameplay on the web through the Stadia controller (you currently have to plug in a cable), and "further [Google] Assistant functionality" when playing Stadia through a browser. We're asking Google for more details -- and we're particularly curious whether any of the new exclusive games are the kind that are only possible with the power of the cloud. The company said in October that it's building out a few first-party studios to eventually make that a reality.

The source code for acclaimed 2D puzzle platformer VVVVVV has been released by creator Terry Cavanagh to celebrate the title's 10th anniversary. Gamasutra reports: Breaking to news in a blog post, Cavanagh explained the code fro both the desktop and mobile versions of the game can now be grabbed over on Github, and confessed that "even by the standard of self taught indie devs, it's kind of a mess." The desktop code is the version that was ported to C++ by Simon Roth back in 2011 and later updated and maintained by Ethan Lee, while the mobile code is written in Actionscript for Adobe AIR and is based on the original v1.0 flash version of the game.

Microsoft announced that the upcoming Xbox Series X won't launch with exclusive games for at least a year. Instead, any new title playable on the Series X will also be playable on older Xbox One consoles. IGN reports: "As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, sort of like PC, will play up and down that family of devices," said Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty in a recent interview with MCV. "We want to make sure that if someone invests in Xbox between now and [Series X] that they feel that they made a good investment and that we're committed to them with content."

What this means is that Xbox will still have console exclusives on Xbox and PC, but they won't be limited to just the Series X. Upcoming games for the next-gen Microsoft console will also be playable on the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. This is somewhat of a departure for next-gen hardware. While there are cross-gen games that are usually released within the first two years of a console launch, there are also next-gene exclusive games that are released to incentivize the early adoption of new hardware. But Microsoft seems to be avoiding that strategy with the Series X.

A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation's largest labor unions -- and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California -- aims to organize video game studios and tech offices to form or join a union. The Los Angeles Times reports: The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE for short) is a new project of the Communications Workers of America aimed specifically at unionizing video game and tech companies. It grew out of conversations between the CWA and Game Workers Unite, a grass-roots organization that sprang up in 2018 to push for wall-to-wall unionization of the $43-billion video game industry, alongside conversations with organizers across the larger tech industry.

The union declined to specify how much money it was putting behind the new effort, but has put two organizers on payroll to lead the push with support from dozens of CWA staff members across the country. One of the new staffers, Wes McEnany, comes from a more traditional labor organizing career with Boston-area unions and the labor-backed campaign for a $15 minimum wage. CWA also hired Emma Kinema, who co-founded Game Workers Unite and organized the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the group. The dedicated staff and national ambition set the CODE project apart from other efforts to organize tech workers, such as the United Steelworkers-backed Pittsburgh Assn. of Tech Professionals, which successfully unionized Google subcontractors in September. The organizers behind the new effort see the push for better working conditions and corporate ethics as one and the same. "The new project charts a path away from organizing video game workers along the Hollywood craft union model," the report adds. "SAG-AFTRA has represented video game voice actors for years, and called a strike in 2017 over pay and royalty structures. But CWA largely follows the industrial union model, which organizes entire companies at once rather than splitting workers who perform different jobs into specialized unions."

Slashdot reader sziring, who first brought the story to our attention, has raised the following questions/concerns: "If unions win out, will open source suffer? If a newly minted tech union worker wants to contribute time towards an open-source project will they be able to? Isn't rule one typically avoiding free work at all costs? I'm not debating if they should unionize but trying to understand the possible rippler effects if more coders fall under a union umbrella."

On January 6, 2001, Bill Gates and The Rock debuted the original Xbox, calling it "the most electrifying" games console on the market. GameRevolution reports: The surreal image of The Rock standing alongside Gates, telling the billionaire "it doesn't matter what you think, Bill," was certainly a unique way to debut the console. We're glad Microsoft opted for this unusual route, though, because if it hadn't we wouldn't have video footage of The Rock discussing symmetric multiprocessing.

The original Xbox released on November 15, 2001. [It debuted with a 32-bit 733 MHz, custom Intel Pentium III Coppermine-based processor, 133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front-side bus (FSB) with a 1.06 GB/s bandwidth, and 64 MB unified DDR SDRAM, with a 6.4 GB/s bandwidth, of which 1.06 GB/s is used by the CPU and 5.34 GB/s is shared by the rest of the system, according to Wikipedia.] Its high manufacturing cost would wind up costing Microsoft a lot of money, with the company losing $4 billion on the console. It would also fall short of its predicted 50 million sales, with Microsoft only shifting 24 million units by the end of its life cycle. For comparison, the Xbox One X, which debuted on November 7, 2017, featured a SoC which incorporates a 2.3 GHz octa-core CPU, and Radeon GPU with 40 Compute Units clocked at 1172 MHz, generating 6 teraflops of graphical computing performance. It also includes 12GB of GDDR5 RAM with 9 GB allocated to games. Microsoft's next-generation Series X console is expected to deliver "four times the processing power of Xbox One X," although technical specs have yet to be announced.

The Verge has been investigating Samsung's "artificial human" project Neon, which seems to be about creating realistic human avatars: A tweet from the project's lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this -- although they don't give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is. The lead of Neon, computer-human interaction researcher Paranav Mistry, tweeted this image, apparently showing one of the project's avatars. Mistry says the company's "Core R3" technology can now "autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialog (even in Hindi), completely different from the original captured data...."

In a recent interview, Mistry made clear he thinks "digital humans" will be a major technology in the 2020s... "While films may disrupt our sense of reality, 'virtual humans' or 'digital humans' will be reality. A digital human could extend its role to become a part of our everyday lives: a virtual news anchor, virtual receptionist, or even an AI-generated film star."
Reddit users also found the URLs for videos in the source code on Neon's home page -- and though the videos have since been removed, some of the footage has been archived and analyzed on YouTube.

Many users have taken to the Lutris Forums to report that EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V. "Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V for Linux, this week I was using lutris-4.21, I was having fun when my anti-cheat, FairFight, blew me out of the game, so I was banned," writes one user. "As I was not using any cheating, I think the anti-cheat considered dxvk or the table layer that used at the time as cheating..." Another user said the "same problem" happened to them, and they "got banned on tuesday for cheating."

While some users await a response from EA, others have received an email confirming the action that was taken on their account. "... After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account," the email states.

We've seen this happen on multiple occasions with Blizzard, but they eventually fixed the problem the first time. In a comment on Hacker News, user jchw writes: "Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It's often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They're invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet's DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have studied its use under constraints like those encountered in the game industry. That's presumably why Ubisoft La Forge, game developer Ubisoft's eponymous prototyping space, proposed in a recent paper an algorithm that's able to handle discrete, continuous video game actions in a "principled" and predictable way. They set it loose on a "commercial game" (likely The Crew or The Crew 2, though neither is explicitly mentioned) and report that it's competitive with state-of-the-art benchmark tasks.

"Reinforcement Learning applications in video games have recently seen massive advances coming from the research community, with agents trained to play Atari games from pixels or to be competitive with the best players in the world in complicated imperfect information games," wrote the coauthors of a paper describing the work. "These systems have comparatively seen little use within the video game industry, and we believe lack of accessibility to be a major reason behind this. Indeed, really impressive results ... are produced by large research groups with computational resources well beyond what is typically available within video game studios." The Ubisoft team, then, sought to devise a reinforcement learning approach that'd address common challenges in video game development. They note that data sample collection tends to be a lot slower generally, and that there exist time budget constraints over the runtime performance of agents.

An anonymous reader quotes The Hustle: Once the most highly coveted game developer -- a hit-maker with the Midas touch -- he had been immortalized as the man who created E.T., the "worst" video game in history. But Howard Scott Warshaw's story, like that of Atari, is a parable about corporate greed and the dangers of prioritizing quantity over quality... His first game, Yars' Revenge -- a story about mutated houseflies under siege -- took him 7 months to develop, and went through another 5 months of rigorous play-testing. When it hit the shelves in May of 1982, it became Atari's biggest 2600 game of all time, selling more than 1m copies.

The success of this game netted Warshaw a high-profile follow-up assignment: the video game adaptation of the Steven Speilberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Released in November of 1982 after 10 months of development, this, too, was a 1m-copy seller. Warshaw soon became known as the game designer with the golden touch -- and his success earned him rockstar status. According to press reports, he purportedly pulled in $1m a year and was "hounded for autographs by a devoted cult following of teenagers."

But in mid-1982, Atari had also begun to shift its business strategy in the games department. In its earlier days, Atari gave programmers ample time (5-10 months) to create and develop innovative games. But that window closed when the company realized that the real road to riches was in licensing the rights to films.... The typical game took 1k hours' worth of work over 6 months. Warshaw had less than 36 hours to come up with a concept [for his E.T. game] to present to Hollywood's hottest director. Worse yet, he had just 5 weeks to finish the game... Warshaw's only option was to create a small, simple, replayable game -- something with few moving parts that he could implement quickly. Less than 2 days later, he was standing in a conference room in Burbank, pitching his design to Spielberg: The player would guide E.T. through a landscape filled with pits, and collect pieces of a phone while evading FBI agents.

"He just looked at me and said, 'Can't you just do something like Pac-Man?'" recalls Warshaw. "But eventually, he approved it."
Warshaw then put in 500 hours over the next 5 weeks, "doing everything he could to make something halfway decent in the time he was given," the site reports.

"Unfortunately for Warshaw, the flop of E.T. coincided with a much graver event: The video game crash of 1983. A flood of low-quality, hastily created games, coupled with the rise of the personal computer, led to a moment of reckoning: In the 2 years following the release of E.T., the video game industry saw its revenue fall from $3.2B to just $100m -- a 97% decline..."

Warshaw gave up programming and became a real estate broker, and then a psychotherapist, the article concludes. "But true insiders knew that E.T. was merely a symptom -- not the cause -- of the crash."

Prorammer Rick Brewster has worked at both Microsoft and Facebook. But this Christmas on Twitter he shared the story of his long-lost videogame creation "that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunken cat -- finally found its way home on Christmas Eve."

An anonymous reader quotes Kotaku: Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that's expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer...

"I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it," Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.

Apparently, that's not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.
"Apparently breaking & entering is a 'serious felony' and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe," Brewster remembered on Twitter on Christmas Day.

He believes that back in 1994 his cousin must've uploaded the videogame to a BBS, since it's now ended up in the old game collection "Frostbyte" at the Internet Archive. Which means that you, too, can now play 12-year-old Rick Brewster's long-lost amateur videogame using Archive.org's online DOSbox emulator.

Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. From a report: Games -- particularly video games -- provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI techniques. More recently, San Francisco research firm OpenAI detailed Procgen Benchmark, a set of 16 virtual worlds that measure how quickly models learn generalizable skills. The next frontier might be Mega Man, if an international team of researchers have their way. In a newly published paper [PDF] on the preprint server Arxiv.org, they propose EvoMan, a game-playing competition based on the eight boss fights in Capcom's cult classic Mega Man 2. As they describe it, competitors' goal is to train an AI agent to defeat every enemy and evaluate their performances by common metrics.

Why Mega Man 2? The paper's coauthors assert that few other environments test an AI's ability to win against a single enemy, or how well an AI generalizes to win matches against waves of enemies or coevolves to create increasingly difficult enemies. To this end, in EvoMan, an AI-controlled Mega Man -- a robot equipped with a powerful arm cannon -- must beat eight so-called Robot Masters equipped with different weapons. Every time a Robot Master is defeated, the agent acquires its weapon, making it easier to defeat the bosses who remain. As proposed, EvoMan challenge entrants would train their agents on any four enemies and measure how well their learned strategy scales up to a whole set of enemies. The agents would be expected to learn how to identify and react to general patterns like avoiding being shot or shooting at the direction of the enemy, and to deplete an enemy's health from 100 energy points to 0 by the end of each match.

theodp writes: Over at Polygon, games journalist Colin Campbell remembers the late Silas Warner in The Man Who Made Wolfenstein. Before Doom, there was Warner's Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984), which counted id Software's legendary John Carmack and John Romero as fans. After completing his degree in Physics at Indiana University, Warner found work at IU installing a new system called PLATO, which he used to fork John Daleske's Empire (1973), which is sometimes credited as being the first multiplayer shooting game. Ultima creator Richard Garriott called Warner's Escape (1978) a major inspiration that "changed my life." Warner's Robotwar (manual, pdf) also did double-duty as a stealth learn-to-program tutorial. Sadly, Warner was plagued with bad health and passed away at age 54 without receiving the proper credit or rewards he was due.

FPS (first-person shooter) games have been a staple in the video game industry ever since the explosion of Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Since then, the genre has been evolving with graphical upgrades, huge budgets, and an eSports ecosystem. But what about its core, the shooting mechanics? How have we progressed on that front? Why do some guns feel like it's the real thing, while others feel like toys?

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gaming his primary mode of recreation. "It has a social function in my life, and an intellectual function," Kay says in Episode 392 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've now written a book about it, so I guess it has a professional, editorial function. It's a huge part of my life." Kay wrote the book together with Joan Moriarty, who works full-time at the Snakes & Lattes board game cafe in Toronto. The concept of a board game cafe may be unfamiliar to many, but Kay believes that Snakes & Lattes is an important institution.

"I'm not sure if it's still the biggest board game cafe in North America, but I think it might be the oldest single-purpose urban board game cafe," he says. "And the Snakes & Lattes business model became a model for people creating board game cafes in other cities." The rise of such cafes is a testament to the growing popularity of board games. Sales quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, and the annual Gen Con convention now attracts over 70,000 attendees, Kay among them. He enjoys the laid back atmosphere among the mostly quiet, bookish gamers. "Introverts are actually usually very careful about their social interactions, because they know that if there's conflict that emerges, they won't know how to manage it," he says. "So as a result there's a heightened sense of politeness and consideration at these places."