With the Switch 2 launch days away, analysts and consumers are watching to see how well Nintendo can follow-up the best selling home console in its history. Judging from the pain of trying to secure a Switch 2 pre-order, it seems like Nintendo has nothing to worry about - at least at launch.

Down the line, however, concerns about tariffs, a steadily rising cost of living, and a saturated market might cast a shadow on the Switch 2. The Verge talked to analysts, journalists, and normal video game playing people to put the Switch 2 launch in perspective. The key takeaway? While the console will assuredly have another blockbuster debut, its future looks much less certain.

The Wii U gets brought up a lot in the conversation surrounding the Switch 2, as it's the most famous example of a Nintendo failure. "The Wii U, with its confusing controller-screen gimmick, sluggish user interface, and lack of a great Custom Robo game, was one of Nintendo's worst flops," GameFile author Stephen Totilo explained in an email to The Verge.

It sold less than 14 million units, a dramatic drop from the Wii, which sold over 100 million. And while Nintendo expects to sell one million more Switch 2 units …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Alright, we get it. Y'all are excited about Slate. We thought the little Slate Truck was cool, but based on the number of clicks and comments on our Slate Auto articles so far, you'd like to know more. Many of you wrote in with questions and more than a few people raised some doubts.

So, we wanted to address as many of those as we could. Here's your one-stop shop for Slate answers based on your questions - plus a few of our own.

What are the Slate's full specs, and how does it compare to a Ford Maverick or F-150?

The Slate is clearly a vehicle built for everyday utility, and while it'll make for a handy machine for hauling a lot of things, big towing and heavy cargo were clearly not a top priority. Here are the key specs, compared against the four-wheel drive hybrid Ford Maverick with the 2.5-liter engine and a Ford F-150 4×2 with a 2.7-liter EcoBoost V6.

It's worth noting that these Ford numbers vary widely based on configurati …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A lot of games have been released for the Playdate since it launched in 2022, as a quick browse of itch.io or the Catalog shop will attest. But still, there's something unique about the handheld's seasonal format, which just kicked off its second iteration. When it first launched, the Playdate came with 24 games from notable indie developers that were steadily released on a weekly cadence, making a perfect introduction to the little yellow device and its crank. Now, a few years later, we finally have season 2, and it's off to a solid start - and it even includes a bizarre mystery.

The new season runs for the next six weeks and totals a dozen games, two of which will drop each week. The entire collection will run you $39. To start, we have a pair of very different games. Fulcrum Defender, from FTL: Faster Than Light developer Subset Games, is sort of like a modern take on Asteroids. You control a little ship in the middle and fire guns at little squares flying toward you. The twist is that you use the crank to rotate the ship around and aim your shots. There's also something of a roguelike element, where you steadily unlock random upgrades like new weapons or a larger spread for y …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Twitch is announcing a bunch of updates at TwitchCon Europe, including the ability to host a vertical livestream and an open beta test that lets creators stream at a higher quality.

The rollout of vertical streams should make livestreams easier to watch in portrait mode on your phone. Down the line, streamers won't be forced to pick between vertical or horizontal streams; instead, Twitch will let streamers offer their streams in a dual format.

"This allows us to better optimize the viewing experience for a device and how a viewer is using that device," Twitch says in a blog post. "Viewers watching on desktop will still see landscape Viewers on mobile will see your vertical layout if they hold the phone vertically, or landscape if they rotate their phone horizontally."

The company will start testing the feature with a small amount of channels this summer and expand it later this year.

Twitch is also rolling out an open beta of "2k streaming" (which lets creators stream at 1440p) that will be available to all Twitch partners and affiliates. "Upgrading to 2k (1440p) streaming offers a noticeable step up from 1080p streaming, with richer detail, improved clarity, and better perfor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Thanks to the legal discovery process, Google's antitrust trial with the Department of Justice has provided a fascinating glimpse into the future of ChatGPT.

An internal OpenAI strategy document titled "ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy" describes the company's aspiration to build an "AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet." Although the document is heavily redacted in parts, it reveals that OpenAI aims for ChatGPT to soon develop into much more than a chatbot.

"In the first half of next year, we'll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do," reads the document from late 2024. "The timing is right. Models like 02 and 03 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT's ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task."

The document goes on to describe a "super assistant" as "an intelligent entity with T-shape …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A group of young people — as young as 7 and as old as 25 — are suing the Trump administration to stop its assault on renewable energy and climate action. 

Executive orders President Donald Trump signed to promote fossil fuels amount to an “unconstitutional” overreach of power, they allege in a complaint filed Thursday at a US District Court in Montana. The 22 plaintiffs also claim that by increasing pollution and denying climate science, the president’s actions violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty.

It’s the latest high-profile case brought against governments by youth concerned about how fossil fuel pollution and climate change poses risks to their health and ability to thrive as they grow up. 

Two brothers, aged 11 and 7 and named “J.K.” and “N.K.” in the suit, “were born into climate change-induced smoke seasons that did not exist for older generations and which compromise their health,” the complaint says. 

They grew up mostly in Montana but now live in Southern California, and the suit says wildfire smoke has encroached on their lives from state to state. J.K. was born with an abnormal mass of lung tissue and “experienced nosebleeds, sore throats, headaches, tiredness, coughing, trouble breathing, and eye irritation from wildfire smoke,” according to the suit. N.K. has “frequent” upper respiratory infections that have led to emergency room visits. They’ve both missed school days and camp because of feeling sick from smoke and soot in the air from wildfires, it says.

Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels trap heat, and rising temperatures have contributed to longer fire seasons in the western US. With hotter, drier conditions, the area burned by forest fires in the western US doubled between 1984 and 2015. 

“Every additional ton of [greenhouse gas] pollution and increment of heat Defendants cause will cause J.K. and N.K. more days of poor air quality, more smoke, and thus, more harm to their lives, health, and safety,” the complaint adds.

In recent years, scientists have been trying to better understand the long-term health impact of wildfire smoke, which previously hadn’t been studied as thoroughly as pollution from other sources thought to be more consistent problems, like factories and highways. Now, chronic exposure to wildfire smoke is a growing concern. Wildfire smoke is considered a neurotoxin estimated to be more harmful than other common air pollutants, but its effects on the body can vary depending on what kinds of materials burn and how chemicals released by the fire interact with other substances in the atmosphere. 

After campaigning on a promise to “drill, baby, drill” and accepting more than $75 million in contributions from oil and gas interests, Trump signed executive orders on his first day in office declaring a purported “national energy emergency,” directing federal agencies to “unleash” domestic fossil fuel production and promote the use of gas-powered vehicles over EVs. He signed another executive order to “reinvigorat[e]” the coal industry in April. Coal releases more planet-heating pollution when burned than other fossil fuels and has struggled to compete with cheaper sources of electricity.

The plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief to block implementation of those executive orders and to declare them unconstitutional. They also claim that Trump lacks the authority to erode environmental protections passed by Congress under the Clean Air Act. The administration’s efforts to impede scientific research and remove climate information from federal websites amounts to “censorship” and denies plaintiffs access to resources they might otherwise be able to use to minimize risks they face from climate change, the suit alleges.

In response to the lawsuit, White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers said in an email to The Verge, “The American people are more concerned with the future generations’ economic and national security, which is why they elected President Trump in a landslide victory to restore America’s energy dominance. Future generations should not have to foot the bill of the lefts’ radical climate agenda.” 

The plaintiffs, who hail from Montana, Oregon, Hawai‘i, California, and Florida, are represented by the nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust, which has also represented young people in similar climate cases. A federal appellate court dismissed another case that youth filed against the Obama administration in 2015 over fossil fuel pollution causing climate change, and the US Supreme Court ended that legal battle this year when it declined to hear an appeal.

But there have also been some wins. A group of youth reached a settlement last year with the state of Hawai‘i and its Department of Transportation that commits them to a plan to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 2045. J.K. and N.K. were also plaintiffs in a climate suit filed against the state of Montana. Last year, Montana’s Supreme Court upheld a district judge ruling affirming their right to a clean and healthy environment and rejecting policies that had barred officials from considering the consequences of climate change when permitting new energy projects.

Grindr has always excelled at helping its users find folks looking to spend some quality time together, but the hookup app is looking to speed up the “looking?” process even more with its latest feature.

Today, Grindr announced that Right Now, its social media-like live feed feature, is rolling out to all of the platform’s users following a pilot test in select markets. Unlike Grindr’s traditional grid that shows you an array of other users’ profiles based on how far away they are, Right Now functions a bit more like X / Twitter and displays a stream of recent posts that can include both text and photos. 

Right Now posts disappear from the live feed after an hour, and while they don’t have to be used for hookup purposes, posters can hit a toggle specifying whether they’re looking to host (read: have someone over for fun.) At launch, Grindr says users in certain locations “will receive a number of free hour-long Right Now sessions per week (refreshed every Friday)” meaning that the feed will only be accessible in hour-long windows. Down the line, the company also plans to make more sessions available to purchase.

In a press release about the new feature, Grindr’s chief product officer, AJ Balance, explained that Right Now was designed to help people “find exactly what they want, when they want it – without the guesswork.”

“We built this intention-based feature based on feedback from our community so they can connect with like-minded people without wasting time on mismatched expectations,” Balance said. “The response to our initial March launch was so strong we accelerated the global rollout ahead of schedule because it’s clear people want this… well, right now.”

Grindr is not the first app of its kind to introduce functionality clearly inspired by social media platforms. Sniffies, a more cruising-focused Grindr competitor that doesn’t require signing up for an account and allows users to post sexually explicit photos on their public profiles, has had a feature similar to Right Now for some time. But Right Now’s widespread launch is the latest phase of Grindr’s larger plan to roll out a series of new features — many of which are powered by generative artificial intelligence — meant to boost revenue and make users see the app as “the Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket™.” 

Previously, Grindr introduced A-List, a tool that uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 model and Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock to summarize chats with the intention of helping users rekindle “meaningful past connections” and pursue “high-potential matches.” Bloomberg reports the same platform is now underpinning Grindr’s Wingman, a generative AI assistant that can draft chat responses for users who can’t think of things to say for themselves, provide sex tips, and give suggestions about places that might make for good dates. Some of Grindr’s AI features are free to try, but for continued access to them, the company requires users to sign up for its monthly subscription plans.

All of the features are part of Grindr’s effort to bring in more money and staunch the financial bleeding that came following its initial public offering in 2022. As Platformer reported last year, Grindr’s stock price plummeted by 70 percent following its SPAC, and the company has been scrambling to establish new revenue streams amid employee unionization efforts and internal concerns that Grindr “was losing its progressive culture.”

At the Wall Street Journal‘s Future of Everything conference this week, Grindr’s CEO George Arison spoke about how AI has changed his own productivity, and his desire for the company to start thinking about how the technology can be more deeply integrated into its services.

“For all the new things that we build, I want them to be built as if we are an AI-native startup,” Arison said. “If you’re going to do marketing for this, great; start thinking with AI first and then go to people because that’s how I think companies are going to be built moving forward and that’s what we should be doing as a business as well.”

Elon Musk appeared alongside President Trump for a press conference in the Oval Office Friday, perhaps for the last time, with a noticeable black eye that he says he got from his young son.

"I said, 'Go ahead, punch me in the face.' And he did," he said.

Musk is emerging from his five-month stint as head of DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, with more than just a shiner. His company, Tesla, is hemorrhaging market share in key countries around the globe and recorded its first year-over-year quarterly sales decrease in almost five years. His reputation has plummeted, with a majority of US residents saying they dislike him. And his claims to have saved the government a trillion dollars by slashing "waste, fraud and abuse" seem to have mostly been a failure. One researcher tied Musk's elimination of humanitarian aid funding to 300,000 deaths overseas, mostly children.

Musk has been feeling the blows, too. Sources in the Trump administration told Reuters that the billionaire has been "exhausted and exasperated," especially by the blowback against his companies. Tesla's board reportedly initiated a search for a replacement CEO, a claim the directors have denied.

But in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is adding text formatting to its Windows Notepad app. The significant Notepad update is available for Canary and Dev Channel testers on Windows 11, and introduces bold and italic styling, alongside hyperlinks and even Markdown support.

The addition of text formatting in Notepad means there’s now a formatting toolbar at the top of the app, alongside the existing File, Edit, and View options. The toolbar includes access to bold, italic, and hyperlink options, but it also includes support for lists and headings.

“The experience supports Markdown style input and files for users who prefer to work directly with the lightweight markup language,” explains Dave Grochocki, principal product manager lead for Microsoft’s Windows inbox apps. “You can switch between formatted Markdown and Markdown syntax views in the view menu or by selecting the toggle button in the status bar at the bottom of the window.”

Since Notepad is usually used with plain text, you can also easily clear all formatting from the formatting toolbar or from the edit menu in the app. If you’re not a fan of the lightweight formatting options, you can also fully disable this new support in the Notepad app settings.

This formatting addition to Notepad comes just a week after Microsoft started testing a new feature in the app that can generate text for you using AI. The new Write feature in Notepad can be used to “quickly draft text based on your prompt,” and alongside these formatting options Notepad is starting to look a lot more like Microsoft Word.

Like I wrote in my Notepad newsletter earlier this week, it’s amazing that Microsoft barely touched Notepad for decades, and now it’s gone from basic log file reader to writing messages itself. A lot of Notepad’s new features have arrived since Microsoft decided to remove WordPad from Windows, after nearly 30 years.

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen has signed a bill that cracks down on social platforms’ features that could keep kids online for longer. Under the Age-Appropriate Online Design Code Act (LB504), major platforms must let users choose to see a chronological feed, rather than one provided by a recommendation algorithm, which experts have found could negatively affect children’s mental health and development. 

In addition to pausing potentially disruptive notifications at nighttime and during school days, platforms must offer users the option to voluntarily limit how much time they spend on the services. Online services are required to let users limit certain categories of content from getting recommended, too.

The law also places several limitations on user tracking and requires platforms to apply strict privacy settings to users identified as minors by default. These settings allow platforms to only collect the “minimum” amount of data from young users, block targeted advertising, and limit the use of dark patterns.

Though California and Maryland have passed similar laws, NetChoice is fighting them in court over claims they violate the First Amendment. NetChoice is a technology trade group that includes Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit, X, Snap, and other tech giants. In February, NetChoice sued Maryland to block its Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, while a judge sided with NetChoice in a ruling that blocked California’s version of the rule in March.

Amy Bos, NetChoice’s director of state and federal affairs, wrote in a letter to Governor Pillen that Nebraska’s design code law could impose age verification requirements “on most websites available to Nebraska users, including news sites, popular blogs, and certain online retailers,” potentially posing a security risk. Bos also argues that tracking requirements conflict with existing requirements under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). NetChoice similarly believes that Nebraska’s design code law violates the First Amendment, though this particular bill doesn’t include limits on the types of content children can access.

States that have more recently introduced design code laws have overhauled the legislation in an attempt to harden it against potential lawsuits from such trade groups and companies. Nebraska’s design code law goes into effect on January 1st, 2026. Companies that violate the law could face an up to $50,000 fine for each violation starting July 1st, 2026.

The over 300 quality assurance workers of the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA union have reached a tentative contract agreement with Microsoft. It is the first contract agreement at Microsoft since the concerted effort to unionize the video game industry began roughly four years ago.

“This is a monumental victory for all current video game workers and for those that come after,” said Page Branson, a senior QA tester at ZeniMax, in the press release announcing the agreement. A ratification vote for the contract will take place in late June.

The union, organized by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), was formed in 2023 and was voluntarily recognized by Microsoft as a part of the company’s labor neutrality agreement with the CWA. In the two years since, the union and Microsoft engaged in contract negotiations that precipitated a one-day strike to protest return to office and outsourcing policies and, in April, a strike authorization vote.

The contract details offer up a glimpse of what workers across the industry are fighting for and what they can win. According to CWA’s press release, the contract guarantees wage increases — a big deal considering QA workers are some of the lowest-paid workers in the industry. The contract will also include protections against arbitrary dismissal, as well as crediting guidelines — another big deal, as there are numerous ways a person who worked on a video game can get left off its credits. 

While the industry’s organization efforts are ongoing, there’s been a surge in activity over the last four years. Workers at Raven Software, which was then a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard before its acquisition by Microsoft, organized the first video game union at a AAA publisher in 2022. That win kicked off a series of other high-profile unionization efforts across the industry but concentrated primarily within Microsoft — ostensibly to take advantage of the labor neutrality agreement that states that Microsoft will voluntarily recognize union efforts within the company. With ZeniMax workers finally winning a contract agreement at Microsoft, the industry has another first — one that will set a precedent for future negotiations.

Taylor Swift now owns “all of the music I’ve ever made,” she says in a letter posted on her website on Friday. Swift has purchased the masters of her first six albums back from Shamrock Capital, which owned them after entertainment executive Scooter Braun sold them to the company.

“All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy,” Swift says. “I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me.”

Swift says she was able to buy back the music because of the support for her re-recorded Taylor’s Versions albums and for The Eras Tour concerts. She also now owns her music videos, concert films, album art and photography, and unreleased songs. “I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now,” Swift says.

Braun took ownership of the masters when he acquired The Big Machine Label Group in 2019, which Swift at the time called her “worst case scenario.” Swift said that “for years” she had “asked” and “pleaded” for “a chance to own my work,” but Big Machine said that she could “earn” one album back for each new one she completed.

Braun sold the masters to Shamrock Capital in 2020 for around $360 million, which is “relatively close” to what Swift paid to buy them back, Billboard reports.

“I am happy for her,” Braun says in a statement.

Update, May 30th: Added statement from Scooter Braun.

A lot of Polygon’s staff was laid off following Vox Media’s sale of the publication to Valnet, but two of its former guides writers are launching their own guides-focused website: Big Friendly Guide, which you can find at bigfriendly.guide. Ryan Gilliam and Jeffrey Parkin founded and are co-owners of the site.

Guides make Gilliam “feel like I’m helping someone enjoy something that’s very important to me and I know is important to them,” he tells The Verge. “And so when I lost the opportunity to do that at my usual 9-to-5, I wanted to continue it.”

“I hate sounding immodest or bragging, but what Ryan and I got really good at was helping people play video games,” Parkin says. Their work on guides helps people have fun with games, he adds — and assists with things like getting a giant horse in Zelda.

Big Friendly Guide will make most of its content available for free, and the guides themselves won’t be paywalled. But Gilliam and Parkin will also be opening a Patreon for the site as a way for people to support the work, which will also give people access to a Discord. There will be a weekly podcast that’s free for everyone and a monthly subscriber-only podcast where Gilliam and Parkin will discuss their coverage plans.

There will be ads on the site to start. “For now, at least, we’ll run ads to keep the lights on,” according to the site’s About Us page.) But the focus is more on building a community that trusts Gilliam and Parkin’s work and pays to support it. In addition to working on guides for games that interest them, Gilliam and Parkin want the community to make suggestions for guides that they can consider and respond to.

The release of Big Friendly Guide is just the latest outlet from Polygon staffers: former editor-in-chief Chris Plante launched the Post Games podcast and former curation editor Pete Volk launched the PV Guide newsletter. The new outlets follow the rise of other indie gaming publications like Aftermath and Game File.

With Big Friendly Guide, Gilliam and Parkin have modest expectations. “We’re not looking to build a brand and sell it or anything,” Parkin says. “I don’t think either of us want to get particularly rich. We want to keep doing this. That’s really what it comes down to.”

Elon Musk may have understated the “small amount” of ketamine that he said he was using in a Don Lemon interview last year, according to sources for The New York Times. The publication reports that around the time Musk endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential run last year, the Tesla CEO told people that he was taking so much ketamine that it was affecting his bladder, a side effect associated with chronic use. “It is unclear” whether this extended to his four-month stint running DOGE, according to the Times.

The Times reports that, based on interviews with more than a dozen people who’ve known or worked with Musk and private messages seen by the publication, “…some people who knew him worried about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children.”

The Times cites sources familiar with Musk’s consumption who said he was sometimes using ketamine daily and mixing it with a cocktail of other unspecified drugs. Daily consumption would greatly surpass the prescribed treatments that Musk told Lemon he was taking once every two weeks to treat depression. While government contractors like SpaceX are obligated to administer random drug tests to employees, including Elon, people close to this process told The Times that Musk received advanced warning about when they would occur.

A January 2024 report in The Wall Street Journal cited sources saying Musk “used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter.” Sources cited by the Journal also said that “some Tesla board members over the years have talked among themselves about their concerns over Musk’s alleged drug use,” and that drugs have “been a thorny topic for directors at Musk’s companies because some of them are his close friends, and attend parties and travel with him.”

Riot Games is planning to switch Valorant, its popular first-person tactical hero shooter, over to Unreal Engine 5 in July. The engine upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 is part of a number of new changes coming to the shooter over the coming months, including a replay system in September.

Valorant has been running on Unreal Engine 4 since a beta of the game originally released in 2020, and Riot Games has been using Unreal 4 for more than 10 years to build the game. The upgrade to Unreal 5 will arrive with patch 11.02 at the end of July, and Riot is promising it shouldn’t disrupt gameplay.

The game’s overall look and feel should be similar, and Riot says the engine upgrade will improve framerate performance and make patch downloads faster in the future. It’ll be interesting to see what else this engine upgrade unlocks, particularly whether Riot will improve character models and animations in the future. Valorant players that log in while patch 11.02 is live will get a special gun buddy to commemorate the upgrade.

The second big upgrade coming to Valorant later this year is the long-requested replay system. It will arrive on PC first with patch 11.06 in September, followed by a release on console later this year. The replay system will let you analyze recently played competitive games at launch, and Riot is looking at adding more modes later.

The replay system should help players report cheating or bad player behavior in Valorant, and Riot is also adding multi-factor authentication to the game to help with smurfing in the competitive modes — where higher ranked players log into accounts to boost them. You’ll also soon be able to report accounts that are abusing rank or matchmaking.

Valorant’s upcoming 11.0 patch later this month will also add a new map to the game, and it will be available in the competitive mode on day one. During the initial patch cycle of two weeks, rank rating (RR) losses on this new map will be cut by 50 percent while Valorant players get used to playing this new map.

The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO's new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you've spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, "universal basic compute," and how humanity is a "biological bootloader" for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead's CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you're part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they're going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class.

Especially in this moment where we've all been able to watch some of the world's richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie's depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn't work as satire. But each of Mountainhead's lead performances is i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

All microSD cards look pretty much the same, but when it comes to buying the right one for your Nintendo Switch 2, only microSD Express cards will work for storing and playing games. The microSD card you used in your original Switch or Switch Lite will offer limited functionality with Nintendo's new handheld, as it will only let you view screenshots or video clips you captured previously - that's it.

That's because Nintendo opted for a significantly faster spec in its new handheld console, which boasts an advertised 4.4x improvement in terms of transfer speeds over the microSD cards you might already have lying around. That improvement is signified by a small, easy-to-miss "EX" emblem etched onto the front of the card.

What's harder to miss is how much more expensive Express cards are, with some costing more than $50 for just 256GB of storage. The Switch 2 supports microSD Express cards up to 2TB in size, although 1TB is the largest capacity widely available (that's an overstatement, as many are sold out currently), with some cards selling for up to $200 a pop. Phew. I suppose it makes sense that they're pricier since they're classified as bonafide PCIe NVMe SSDs by the SD Assoc …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Elden Ring Nightreign just launched, delivering a multiplayer-focused, roguelike-meets-Soulslike experience, and it’s already discounted. Grab it for Steam or Xbox from Newegg at 15 percent off by entering the offer code XVSAVE at checkout. This lets you get it on either platform for $33.99. We previously saw the game discounted by an additional $2 pre-launch, but this is currently the best price available.

Nightreign seems like more of everything that was already great about Elden Ring, plus the ability to squad up with up to three players to cooperatively take on treacherous enemies and bosses. The game utilizes procedural generation to alter some of the base game’s locales. So, don’t let familiarity get to your head to the point that you’re trying to take this adventure on alone (I’m talking to you, let me solo her); both its difficulty and tuning weren’t exactly made with solo players in mind. That said, our Ash Parrish is having a blast playing it that way.

Other great deals for your Friday

• Since there’s now a newer Blink Video Doorbell, Amazon is slashing the cost of the last-gen Blink Video Doorbell to just $29.99 (from $59.99). Sure, it doesn’t have some of the new models’ most appealing features, like person detection, higher video resolution (1440p versus 1080p), or a wider field-of-view, but it’s still worth considering if you’re trying to save money. It uses two AA batteries instead of three in the new model. And, if you want longer battery life, plus the ability to sync extra Blink devices at home, you can opt for the $34.99 Blink Video Doorbell bundle that includes the Sync Module 2. Not bad for a measly $5 extra.

• For avid fans of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 who can’t get enough backstory, the latest Humble bundle goes deep into both worlds with a slate of Dark Horse Comics titles. For $24, you can get 25 comics and graphic novels, including nine volumes of The Witcher, The Witcher: Ronin manga, eight volumes of Cyberpunk 2077, plus multiple art books. One of the most fascinating inclusions is a 1993 comic of The Witcher, which has the first-ever visual representation of Geralt of Rivia. Proceeds from your purchase will go to Special Effect, a UK-based charity that gives to gamers with disabilities.

• If you plan to buy a bunch of Switch 2 games and accessories, welcome to the club. Also, consider getting a paid My Best Buy Plus membership beforehand (it costs $49.99 per year), as you’ll get $20 back for every $150 you spend. You can get up to five $20 promotional certificates on games and accessories. In other words, the membership will pay for itself pretty quickly.

There's a running theory in tech circles that says, basically, AI is the new UI. Not long from now, some people argue, you simply won't need a homescreen full of app icons or a traditional web browser or really anything other than an interface to an AI assistant and agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. Is that the actual future, absurd AI boosterism, or something in between? Who knows! But the ranks of the AI believers seem to grow every day.

Apple, however, appears poised to go… a different way. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss some of the rumors surrounding WWDC, including the possibility of a huge redesign and a new naming scheme for all of Apple's software. It's all eminently reasonable, if slightly confusing. But is it a coat of paint on an old idea, when what Apple actually needs to do is ship the better Siri it has promised for so long? We have many thoughts. (Oh, and a party speaker update.)

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After the Apple talk, we turn to some of the other tech news of the week, including Nilay's Decoder interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Couple that with some new …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in March, we brought you an exclusive look into how Chevrolet's engineers tuned and tweaked, sculpted and simulated to turn the eighth-generation Corvette into a 233-mph missile, the 1,064-horsepower ZR1. But while I'm a racing simulator fan through and through, there's nothing like driving a real car on a real track, and this past week it was time to do exactly that.

That track, the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, is as real as it gets. Host of the Formula One United States Grand Prix since 2012, it's three and a half miles of sinuous asphalt with enough turns to see just how well those engineers sorted the car's handling, plus a long back straight just perfect for letting that big motor really sing.

Staying stuck

COTA is also the perfect place to test out the ZR1's downforce, something that wasn't so much of a factor leading up to the car's record-breaking 233-mph run. More downforce means more grip, which is always nice, but it usually comes with the penalty of aerodynamic drag.

That's one reason why there's actually two different ZR1s. First is the base model, with just the (relatively) petite spoiler on the back of the trunk l …

Read the full story at The Verge.