Star of Providence is like a retro game I would have loved as a kid. But the roguelike bullet hell shooter is also a modern twin-stick shooter, and the melding of the two eras results in a fun, fast, and challenging experience.
In Star, you control a ship and explore randomly generated dungeons. As you navigate room by room â similar to an old-school Legend of Zelda game â youâll pick up powerful weapons to fight the many enemies youâll stumble across in your dungeon crawling.
The weapons are a delight, filling your screen with bullets and lasers. Sometimes, youâll get cool effects like the ability for your bullets to phase through one side of the screen and appear on the other. But enemies can also spew out huge amounts of bullets, and that means many rooms turn into chaos as you weave through attack patterns to line up a perfect shot. The gameâs narrow aspect ratio makes rooms feel pretty small, too (though I appreciate how it adds to the retro vibe).
Starâs controls are tight, so it always feels like you can thread the needle to escape danger. A useful dash can get you out of rough spots. And you can deploy bombs to clear bullets from a room, but they can take …
When youâre starting a new sports league, or really a new anything, youâre always praying for your first viral moment.
For TGL, a new golf league hoping to reinvent the game for a new era and a new audience, that moment came before the first season ever started. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf worldâs biggest name and both a player and co-founder in the upstart league, showed up to a not-quite-finished SoFi Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where all TGL matches would soon be held. He stood near the center of the stadium, on a football field-sized slab of turf, and started hitting balls into the 53-foot-high simulator screen.Â
The next part seems to make TGL producer Jeff Neubarth laugh every time he tells it. He recounts it to me, months later, standing in almost the exact same spot. Neubarth points up to a tiny camera, barely visible five stories up atop that huge screen. âThatâs camera 91,â he says. âI pointed it out to Tiger, and I said, âItâd be cool if you hit it.â He said, âsure,â dropped the ball, and hit it. First shot.â
The video of the ball flying upward and whacking the camera made the rounds on social media, before most people even knew …
Samsung’s flagship soundbar, the HW-Q990D, is being rendered useless for some owners after a faulty firmware update that the company rolled out this week. The sheer number of reports on Samsung’s community forums, Reddit, and AVSForum confirm that something has gone very wrong with the premium Dolby Atmos system in recent days. The issue isn’t limited to any specific region, with customers in the United States, Austria, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries all sharing in the frustration.
Customers say the soundbar has gone unresponsive and that none of the usual factory reset methods are working; affected units are also inaccessible via Samsung’s SmartThings app. The device powers on, but appears to freeze on the TV eARC input — with no sound output to speak of.
The culprit seems to be the latest firmware release, which is version 1020.7. Many Q990Ds are set to automatically install new updates, which has led to widespread complaints about the bad software over the last several days. If you’ve got a Samsung soundbar, it might be wise to disable automatic updates for the time being until this situation has cleared up. There are scattered reports of the same bug impacting other Samsung models like the HW-Q800D and HW-S801D, but the bulk of complaints pertain to the Q990D. It’s one of the most well-reviewed soundbars on the market, so this is an unfortunate development.
The Verge has reached out to Samsung for comment. Apparently some customers have already been instructed to send in their Q990D hardware for repair. That seems like a worst case scenario, so hopefully Samsung will have an easier, at-home solution once it realizes the scope of this problem. Can the malfunction be resolved with another firmware update in the coming days? Stay tuned.
Google is rolling out a Find My Device app feature update that shows a map of your friends and the family members who share their location with you, 9to5Google reports. The new feature was announced in the Android March feature update last week and is now available for more users.
There’s already a way for friends and family to see each other’s shared locations in Google Maps. Now, the Android Find My Device app does double duty, making it easier to find both things and people in one place. The map also shows the locations of friends who share from Google Maps on iOS.
In the app on Android, you can tap the new People tab to show the locations of any contacts that are sharing their location with you. You can also switch to a tab that shows who you’re sharing your location with and gives you options such as changing the duration you share your location with someone.
Google’s interface is now more reminiscent of Apple’s Find My app, which features a similar split-screen UI with a map on top and devices or people on the bottom, depending whether you’re viewing items or people.
The Trump administration is embarking on a massive university speech crackdown, starting with Columbia University, where itâs demanding external control of entire departments and punishment for student activists. Its first test case, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student with a green card, offers a hint of whatâs to come: a state of intentional chaos that undermines free speech and due process rights. Thus far, Columbia appears to be complying with the administrationâs demands, even as its students gear up to fight back.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents raided Columbia Universityâs campus on Thursday night, looking for students in two residential buildings, according to a university-wide email sent by Columbiaâs interim president Katrina Armstrong. At a press conference on Friday, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is investigating whether student protesters at Columbia violated federal terrorism laws and that it would prosecute âany person engaging in material support of terrorism.â Hours before the raids, Columbia received a joint letter from three government agencies demanding that it punish student protesters; empower âin …
The video, originally shared with The Verge by a tipster and later pulled off YouTube by a copyright enforcement company that counts Sony PlayStation as a client, was of an internal prototype — not necessarily something that’s in production for actual games. Burch says Horizon developer Guerilla proactively confirmed to her that it is not actively in development. Nor did it use her voice or facial data, Guerilla claimed.
But Burch says having seen the demo, she is worried, and not just about her own career. “I feel worried about this art form,” she says. You can watch her video immediately below, or scroll down for a transcript.
Hi. Let’s talk about AI Aloy. I saw the tech demo earlier this week. Guerilla reached out to me to let me know that the demo didn’t reflect anything that was actively in development. They didn’t use any of my performance for the demo, so none of my facial or voice data. And Guerilla owns Aloy as a character.
So all that said, I feel worried. And not worried about Guerilla specifically or Horizon or my performance or my career specifically, even. I feel worried about this art form. Game performance as an art form.
We are currently on strike. SAG-AFTRA is on strike against video games because of AI. Because this technology exists, because we know that game companies want to use it, we’re asking for protections.
So currently what we’re fighting for is that you have to get our consent before you make an AI version of us in any form. You have to compensate us fairly and you have to tell us how you’re using this AI double.
And I feel worried not because the technology exists. Not even because game companies want to use it. Because of course they do. They always want to use technological advancements.
I just imagine a video like this coming out that does have someone’s performance attached to it. That does have someone’s voice or face or movement. And the possibility that if we lose this fight, that person would have no recourse.
They wouldn’t have any protections. Any way to fight back. And that possibility… it makes me so sad. It hurts my heart. It scares me.
I love this industry and this art form so much and I want there to be a new generation of actors. I want there to be so many more incredible game performances.
I want to be able to continue, to do this job, and if we don’t win, then that future is really compromised.
In a slightly longer TikTok version of the video, which we’ve embedded above to replace the original Instagram copy, Burch adds that “I’m genuinely not trying to put any game company specifically on blast, certainly not Guerilla. The technology isn’t the problem. Game companies wanting to use the technology is not the problem. The problem is we’re currently on strike, and the bargaining group will not agree to give us common sense protections.”
It’s unusual for performers who have such a close relationship with game companies to speak out like this, but we’re also in an unusual moment: as she points out, video game actors are on strike right now, specifically because of AI, and the very idea that a company like Sony is explicitly building and demonstrating ways to potentially replace actors like Burch is exactly what the striking workers fear.
In addition to starring in Horizon Zero Dawn, Burch has had minor roles in other Sony games including The Last of Us Part II and Spider-Man, but is otherwise best known for playing Chloe Price in the Life Is Strange games, Tiny Tina in Borderlands, and from the live-action D&D roleplaying series Critical Role and Apple TV Plus’s Mythic Quest, where she also serves as a writer.
Update, March 14th:Swapped Instagram video for Burch’s longer uncut TikTok video and added its additional context.
It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflixâs latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon StÃ¥lenhagâs much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the filmâs leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop.Â
While you can kind of see where some of the money went, itâs exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated âmoviesâ littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.
Set in an alternate history where Walt Disneyâs invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby …
OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”
The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.
In its comment, Open claims that allowing AI companies to access copyrighted content would help the US “avoid forfeiting” its lead in AI to China, while calling out the rise of DeepSeek.
“There’s little doubt that the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] AI developers will enjoy unfettered access to data — including copyrighted data — that will improve their models,” OpenAI writes. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.”
Google, unsurprisingly, agrees. The company’s response similarly states that copyright, privacy, and patents policies “can impede appropriate access to data necessary for training leading models.” It adds that fair use policies, along with text and data mining exceptions, have been “critical” to training AI on publicly available data.
“These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also submitted a proposal – but it doesn’t mention anything about copyrights. Instead, it asks the US government to develop a system to assess an AI model’s national security risks and to strengthen export controls on AI chips. Like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic also suggests that the US bolster its energy infrastructure to support the growth of AI.
Anthropic is one of the worldâs leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAIâs ChatGPT.
According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesnât plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. âI hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,â Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. âBut I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now.â
Instead, Krieger says Anthropic is focused on two things: building the best models; and what he calls âvertical experiences that unlock agents.â The first of these is Claude Code, Anthropicâs AI coding tool that Krieger says amassed 100,000 users within its first week of availability. He says there are more of these so-called agents for specific use cases coming this year and that Anthropic is working on âsmaller, cheaper modelsâ for developers. (And, yes, there are future versions of its biggest and most capable model, Opus, coming at some point, too.)
Krieger made his name as the cofounder of Instagram and then the news aggregati …
Amazon is discontinuing a feature that allowed users of some of its Echo smart speakers to choose not to send their voice recordings to the cloud. According to an email the company sent to users that was posted on Reddit, it will disable the feature that allowed select Echos to process Alexa requests locally on the device on March 28th, 2025.
The move appears to be connected to the launch of its generative AI-powered Alexa Plus, slated for later this month (March 28th, perhaps?). The email states, “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”
Amazon confirmed the change in an email to The Verge. Spokesperson Lauren Raemhild provided the following statement: “The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing. We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of tools and controls, including the option to not save their voice recordings at all. We’ll continue learning from customer feedback and building privacy features on their behalf.”
As she states, you’ll still be able to have Amazon delete voice recordings after they’ve been sent to the cloud. If you have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option turned on, it will default to the “Don’t save recordings” setting on March 28th. This means your recordings will be sent to and processed in the cloud and then deleted after Alexa deals with the request.
If you haven’t heard of this option, it’s not a surprise. Local processing of voice recordings was only available on three Echo devices – Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 – and only for customers in the U.S. with devices set to English.
Still, it’s a shame the option is going away, as it was a feature many would have liked to see expanded to more devices, not taken away, especially for smart home users who may only use the voice assistant to turn their lights on or adjust their thermostat. But it seems Alexa’s future, and to be fair, most of its past, is all about the cloud.
In recent weeks, Apple has been unable to escape headlines about its slow progress with everything having to do with Siri and artificial intelligence. The company has officially delayed features first promised last June intended to modernize Siri and give Apple a much-needed boost in the AI race. We still don’t know when those Apple Intelligence capabilities will arrive, and if a recent all-hands meeting is anything to go by, neither does Apple itself.
Bloomberg has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an “ugly” situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple’s decisions and Siri’s still-lackluster reputation. He also said it’s not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that’s the company’s current target, but “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he told employees.
“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, according to Bloomberg’s report. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.”
The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple’s Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what’s currently on a user’s screen — even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they’ve all been punted to a TBD date. They were held back in part due to quality issues “that resulted in them not working properly up to a third of the time,” according to Mark Gurman.
Apple has not publicly commented on the situation beyond last week’s statement, when it said the advanced Siri capabilities were “taking longer than expected.” But Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking “intense personal accountability” for a predicament that’s drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation.
“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” Walker said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.” He praised the team for its “incredibly impressive” work so far. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse,” he said of the delayed features.
So soon after Specter Divide, a multiplayer shooter developed by Mountaintop Studios, announced its pending shut down which will take its studio with it, is yet another live-service game going offline. Today, Star Wars: Hunters developer Zynga announced the game will be sunset on October 1st.
Hunters is a class-based arena shooter featuring original characters (or at least they seem original, who knows with folks named Babu Frik running around) from throughout the Star Wars universe. It had a soft launch in select countries in 2021, but didn’t get a global launch on mobile and the Nintendo Switch until June 2024. This means that the game officially lived a scant 16 months before it inevitably goes offline. That short time though is downright luxurious considering Specter Divide lasted roughly six months before it will shut down sometime in the next 30 days.
The developers do have some parting gifts for players before the galaxy winks out on Star Wars: Hunters, though. The current season will be extended an additional three weeks and the game will still release a new hero April 15th. Then the developers will keep the ranked leaderboards running until the game shuts down in October.
On Friday, Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, upped his investigations into Big Tech by sending subpoenas to 16 major tech companies, asking whether the federal government had pressured them into using artificial intelligence to “censor lawful speech” – a new front in his long-running quest to prove the tech industry is out to silence conservatives.
In letters accompanying the subpoenas, Jordan asked the companies – Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI – to preserve all documents between them and the Biden-Harris administration that showed “how and to what extent the executive branch coerced or colluded with artificial intelligence (AI) companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech.” The core of their claim: algorithms could be used to discriminate against right wingers not just online, but in any everyday use case for AI, from hiring practices to generative content.
Citing a report filed last December, in which the committee found several alleged examples of Biden officials “pressuring private companies to ‘advance equity,’ stop ‘algorithmic discrimination,’ and ‘mitigate the production of harmful and biased outputs,’” Jordan demanded they produce any and all emails with a third party, government or otherwise, between January 2020 and January 2025, “referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of the content, input, or output of an AI model, training dataset, algorithm, system, or product.”
The subpoenas are the latest move in the GOP’s long-running and innumerable investigations into whether tech companies were suppressing right-wing ideology on their platforms, and narrowed in on potential interference from the Biden administration over the past several years. But this inquiry is particularly vast: its broad request for any document that ever discussed AI content restrictions over the past five years, as well as its targeting of software companies that are not media platforms, such as Adobe, Nvidia and Palantir, represents the party’s escalation against the industry.
The new M4-powered MacBook Air only hit stores on March 12, but it’s already on sale. You can pick up the 13-inch entry-level configuration with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $949 ($50 off) at Amazon (at checkout) and Best Buy if you’re a My Best Buy Plus and My Best Buy Total member. The 15-inch base model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is also on sale for $1,049 ($50 off) at Amazon and Best Buy for My Best Buy Plus or Total members.
Even at full price, Apple’s new entry-level laptop offers a lot of value. It’s cheaper yet more capable than its predecessor, offering faster performance courtesy of Apple’s latest M4 chip. It also boasts double the base RAM at 16GB along with the MacBook Pro’s 12MP Center Stage webcam, which is sharper and offers a wider field of view. The M4 chip also allows you to connect two external monitors with the lid still open.
There’s a new skylight blue option, but otherwise the new Air shares the same thin and sleek design as its predecessor, along with all-day battery life and Wi-Fi 6E support. There are some tiny differences if you move up to the larger display, but not much. The 15-inch model continues to offer a six-speaker system over the 13-inch model’s four speakers, for example.
Google is finally moving on from Google Assistant.
The company will be upgrading “more” users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months,” according to a blog post. The classic Google Assistant “will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores” at some point “later this year.” (9to5Googlereports that phones running Android 9 or earlier and without at least 2GB of RAM will still be able to use the classic Assistant.)
“Additionally, we’ll be upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches, to Gemini,” Google says. “We’re also bringing a new experience, powered by Gemini, to home devices like speakers, displays and TVs.”
The company says it will share more details “in the next few months.” (I would guess that Google will announce information around that new experience at Google I/O in May.) In the meantime, “Google Assistant will continue to operate on these devices,” according to Google.
Google initially launched Google Assistant in 2016. Now, though, Gemini has become the catch-all branding for many of Google’s AI and assistant-like efforts, so it’s not too surprising that the company is officially retiring Google Assistant.
Update, March 14th: Added details from 9to5Google.
Google releases a lot of products, but it shuts down a lot of them, too. Some didn’t deserve to be discontinued (we pine for the days of Reader and Inbox), and some probably weren’t long for this world from the start. (What was Google Wave supposed to be, anyway?) The company actually used to shut down products with quarterly “spring cleanings,” but now, it just does so whenever it’s time for another product to be put out to pasture.
Follow along here for all our coverage of everything Google sends to the graveyard.
Reddit is going rolling out a feature that lets you hide an ad from your feed for “at least a year,” the company says in a post spotted by Ars Technica.
When the update is available to you, you’ll be able to see the “Hide” option for “any ads that appear in feeds, such as your home or subreddit feed,” Reddit says.
The option looks like an eye with a line through it, as shown in a screenshot. When an ad becomes visible again after you hide it, you can re-hide it if you’d like, according to the company.
Reddit says it’s rolling out the update this week that ads the feature and that it will “gradually become available across iOS, Android, and www.reddit.com over the next several weeks.”
Last year, Reddit added filters that let users limit ads from “sensitive” categories like alcohol, dating, gambling, and politics and activism.
A federal judge has once again blocked California’s landmark online child safety law from taking effect. In a ruling on Thursday, US District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a preliminary injunction in favor of NetChoice, saying the technology trade group’s claims that the law violates the First Amendment would likely succeed.
The law, called the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022 and covered online platforms “likely” to be accessed by children. Along with restricting the use of dark patterns, the law would require these platforms to estimate the age of users and apply specific privacy settings for children. NetChoice argued that its requirements are too vague, as it asked platforms to make “subjective” decisions about content and could have a chilling effect on free speech.
Judge Labson Freeman previously blocked CAADCA in 2023, a ruling the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld last year. As noted by Courthouse News, the ruling later returned to Judge Labson Freeman to make a decision on the remaining parts of the law. NetChoice said this decision will block the “entirety” of CAADCA.
“Even if the Court were to accept that the Act advances a compelling State interest in protecting the privacy and well-being of children, the State has not shown that the CAADCA is narrowly tailored to serve that interest,” Judge Labson Freeman writes. “The Act applies to all online content likely to be accessed by consumers under the age of 18, and imposes significant burdens on the providers of that content.”
NetChoice, which represents companies like Meta, Netflix, X, and Amazon, has won severalrequests to block child safety laws in states across the US. It recently sued to block Maryland’s Kids Code law, which would prevent kids from accessing inappropriate content online.
“While protecting children online is a goal we all share, California’s Speech Code is a trojan horse for censoring constitutionally protected but politically disfavored speech,” Chris Marchese, NetChoice’s director of litigation, said in a press release. “This decision puts other states on notice that censorship regimes masquerading as ‘privacy protections’ will not survive judicial review.”
When I saw iRobotâs latest robot vacuums announced this week, my first thought was, âThese donât look like Roombas; they look like midrange models from Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame.â Of course, as the original robot vacuum manufacturer, iRobotâs products likely inspired the design of most of its competitors. But Roombas have always had a uniqueness that sets them apart from the crowd.
With these new models, the company is capitulating to the homogeneity of the current crop of vacuums, sacrificing many of its signature features and moving from high-end to middle-of-the-road in a quest to recapture a bigger slice of the market.
Long known for its innovation in home robotics, iRobot is marketing its new line as âbreakthrough new products.â But the only notable innovation Iâve seen so far is an onboard dust compacting bin. The rest is largely a reheat of every midrange robot vacuum on the market today.
Then, a day after launching eight new robot vacuums â the biggest product launch in its history â iRobot warned that it was in such dire financial straits that it could shut down in 12 months. Suddenly, it all became clear.
Vampire Survivors isn’t just a bullet hell survival game where you maneuver around simple 8-bit stages and kill thousands of monstrous enemies — it’s also a juggernaut of an indie title that blew up in popularity enough to even get the green light on a TV show spinoff.
First launched on Steam in December 2021 under Early Access, the game had a meteoric rise in 2022, becoming one of the consistently most played games on Valve’s Steam Deck and winning the BAFTA Award for Best Game (yes, it beat Elden Ring).
Several of us here at The Verge are fully Vampire-pilled, obsessively playing it each time a new content update or DLC drops. There’s just something so satisfying about those gem pickup sounds.
Check out our ongoing coverage of the unstoppable indie.
