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A soldier in an icy landscape facing off against two well-armed skeleton enemies while a dragon watches in the background

This metroidvania based on an old Atari 2600 classic had the audacity to release on the same day as Silksong, but it’s a nice break from Hornet’s hell

by admin September 18, 2025

Every week at least a couple of metroidvanias release on Steam, and most remain obscure. Adventure of Samsara, which released on September 4, was more fated to obscurity than most, despite being published by an ascendant Atari. Because September 4 was also the day Silksong released. Few were going to make time for a handsome but orthodox pixel art metroidvania when the joys and indignities of Pharloom beckon.

Except me: I needed a break from Silksong earlier this week, mostly because I was getting my ass kicked, but also because a small detail on the Adventure of Samsara Steam page piqued my interest. This is actually a spiritual sequel of sorts to the 1980 game Adventure, which was probably the most cryptic and sprawling Atari 2600 cart on the market.

Adventure gave me nightmares as a child. Whereas most Atari 2600 games were cheerfully straightforward one-screen arcade games or scrolling shooters, Adventure had designs on being a full-blown, well, adventure, and it displayed some proto-metroidvania qualities to that end.

You explore a same-ish labyrinth as a dot, collecting color-coded keys to unlock color-coded doors, avoiding bats and dragons, and using tools—such as a magnet and a bridge—to solve problems. Its austere blocky graphics are to ASCII what Duplo is to Lego, but there’s a quiet inscrutability to it that freaked me out as a kid (as did Secret Quest, another fairly ambitious Atari 2600 adventure game).

Here’s what the original Adventure looked like (via Retro Games Fan):

Atari 2600: Adventure – YouTube

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After spending around seven hours in Adventure of Samsara, I can confirm that it doesn’t share a hell of a lot in common with its 1980 source material. The closest call-back I can find, the dragons, are coiled in the same way as the old game and similarly color-coded. If you liked Adventure (I highly doubt you ever loved it), then you’re probably not going to feel relief or the frisson of familiarity with this 2025 game. It definitely feels like a case of having a languishing IP fitted to a new game, almost as an afterthought. (Beyond the Ice Palace 2 comes to mind.)

That’s fine (that’s business) but how does Adventure of Samsara stack up as a 2025 exploration platformer? Kinda well, but not brilliantly. As a “Solar Champion” it’s my job to reactivate “a mysterious interdimensional fortress”, which means exploring a big interconnected underground labyrinth full of monsters, traps and those dragons. Along the way I find the usual array of exploration-gratifying power-ups while unlocking shortcuts, save points and fast travel stations.

Image 1 of 5

(Image credit: Atari)(Image credit: Atari)(Image credit: Atari)(Image credit: Atari)(Image credit: Atari)

My Solar Champion is a floaty lil’ fellow (“lil” because Adventure of Samsara feels more zoomed out than most modern platformers) and his actions can’t be canceled. These qualities do not bode well at first, but I did get used to the stiffness of the controls, probably because Samsara isn’t otherwise a very demanding game. My Solar Champion eventually has three weapons—a sword, a bow and a hammer—and the latter two double as traversal and exploration tools, alongside the usual hard-won character upgrades. Yes, there is a double jump.

I was surprised to find that this game kept me up just as late as Silksong has been this past week.

What I like about Adventure of Samsara is its atmosphere. Yes, it blends fantasy and sci-fi in a pretty familiar way, but the retro-futuristic synth soundtrack is evocatively subtle. It clearly has designs on channeling the 1980s, but it does so in a quiet, nearly plaintive way that’s quite at odds with the nowadays suffocating banality of synthwave.

The other thing I liked about Samsara, especially compared to the 30-odd hours I’ve spent in Silksong, is how exploration-forward it is. There are bosses, but they’re not especially hard, and once you’ve beaten them you can look forward to big chunks of just nosing around. At first this exploration is done tentatively, as the combat is pretty rote and repetitive: attack, dash back, attack, dash back. But once my Solar Champion has some crisper moves and more effective weapons, the exploration becomes freewheeling and engaging. I was surprised to find that this game kept me up just as late as Silksong has been this past week.

(Image credit: Atari)

I also came to appreciate the pixel art, which was a bit of an obstacle for me at first. The world is coherent and carefully illustrated, but the enemy sprites kinda look like something you’d see in uh, Siralim. They’re barely animated—they just blob around. But this culminates in Samara having an interesting primitive quality that oddly reminded me of Barbuta from UFO 50.

Will Silksong signal the end of the charming, humble indie metroidvania? Are these games now doomed to be big budget affairs designed to sap mindshare for weeks going and months? What I love about the genre is that the vast majority of its purveyors—the ones making games you find on Steam with less than 50 reviews—feel like the work of joyful hobbyists, a tradition that runs from Cave Story through to stuff like Astalon.

Adventure of Samsara definitely belongs to that tradition, despite having a 40-odd year old IP attached to it. Yes, it has rough edges, but the next time you want to slide into a mysterious, enveloping metroidvania that doesn’t want you to suffer mercilessly, I’d recommend giving it a look. Maybe also check out Zexion.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Strange New Worlds’ Needs to Imagine More for Its Female Characters

by admin September 18, 2025

Star Trek‘s utopian vision for an equal society, especially in terms of gender equality, has always been a complicated aspect of its idealized vision. It’s true that the franchise has a legacy of beloved, nuanced female characters and has championed putting those characters in the spotlight over six decades of storytelling. But it’s equally true that Star Trek‘s often conservative vision of women in leadership roles, as figures of desire, and as beholden to the stories of male characters has sat hand in hand with that feminist progressivism.

There are perhaps, however, few individual seasons of Star Trek from the past 60 years that reflect that dichotomy more than Strange New Worlds‘ recently concluded third.

On paper, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds arguably has one of the largest groups of female characters in its primary cast. Of the current main crew, just four of the show’s central characters are men—Pike, Spock, M’Benga, and this season’s addition of Martin Quinn as the younger Montgomery Scott—in comparison to six women: Una, Uhura, La’an, Ortegas, Chapel, and Pelia. That gap has only grown over the course of the show’s life, with Pelia replacing former chief engineer Hemmer after season one, and even the increased prominence of guest characters like Paul Wesley’s young Jim Kirk has been balanced by an increasingly prominent role for Melanie Scrofano’s Marie Batel (especially this season, as we’ll get into).

Those female characters have also served to facilitate some of Strange New Worlds‘ standout episodes and arcs thus far as well. Uhura’s initial focus as the new perspective aboard the Enterprise in season one flourished across episodes like “Children of the Comet” or in her mentee relationship with Hemmer. La’an’s history with the Gorn played a significant role in Strange New Worlds‘ characterization of the species (for better or worse), and she was given space to process both that and, in episodes like “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow“, her complicated relationship to Khan and the Augments. Una’s revelation of her Illyrian heritage was made a climactic point in the final moments of the show’s first season, leading to a character-defining turn for actress Rebecca Romijn in the season two episode “Ad Astra Per Aspera“.

But, at times, those female characters were also underserved in those first two seasons—a problem exacerbated by season three, rather than wholly created by it. Nurse Chapel’s arc in the first two seasons largely hinged on her will-they-won’t-they relationship with Spock, fizzling out almost immediately after the two were allowed to get together (shortchanging another great female character in Spock’s Vulcan fiancee, T’Pring, played by guest star Gia Sandhu). Ortegas, meanwhile, was regularly criticized for never really getting her own moment to shine in the show, constantly seeking a storyline outside of a perfunctory exploration of her role as the Enterprise helmsperson (a frustration compounded by the fact that the character, a veteran of Discovery‘s Klingon-Federation war, was only ever allowed to be aggressively distrusting of Klingons or other alien species or simply say things like “I fly the ship”).

Unfortunately, of the various factors that led to Strange New Worlds‘ third season failing to come even close to the mark left by seasons one and two—an experimental breadth of tone and genre leading to more misses than swings, an overreliance on connection to Star Trek‘s past, and an ongoing issue of its episodic format increasingly being in friction with the show’s character work, among other things—one that stood out the most was that these prior issues the show had with underserving some of its female characters suddenly began impacting almost all of them.

Across its third season, it has consistently felt like Strange New Worlds has had little idea of where it wanted to take its characters, but especially so with its female ones. Prior arcs like La’an’s traumatic history with the Gorn were dropped or shuffled onto other characters: Ortegas sustains a nearly fatal injury from a Gorn attack in the season’s premiere, setting her up to take on that arc instead, to mixed results—it’s not touched on notably until the penultimate episode of the season, “Terrarium,” in which she’s forced to work with a similarly stranded Gorn pilot, but Erica’s attitude towards hostile species and her own traumatic memory of her injury are almost immediately dropped in the episode with little examination as to why.

Una’s relationship as an Illyrian, a genetically modified humanoid who won legal precedent against Starfleet’s rules against such species being part of the Federation, manifested less as an arc for her and more as a plot device when she essentially became a “magic blood” donor to save Captain Batel’s life.

And then what was continued, or introduced to serve as replacements to those prior character arcs, was almost unified across the majority of the series’ female characters: romantic relationships with men. Almost as soon as she was broken up with Spock, season three introduced Cillian O’Sullivan as Chapel’s new love interest (“new” in that it connected up with her eventual status quo in classic Star Trek) Dr. Korby, with her time in the series largely less about exploring herself and her own agency and more about how her relationship furthered the characters of the men she was romantically involved with. Even more immediately, after Spock’s breakup with Chapel, he was paired with La’an, a move that narratively came out of nowhere and was only largely sold by Christina Chong and Ethan Peck’s chemistry—and again, was more in service to Spock’s character than it was necessarily to La’an or her own agency in the matter.

Even Una and Uhura couldn’t escape this heteronormative focusing either. Uhura was casually paired up with Ortegas’ newly introduced brother Beto (Mynor Lüken) here and there throughout the season, only for their burgeoning relationship to seemingly fizzle out and not be picked up again after the one-two tonal misfires of “What Is Starfleet?” and “Four and a Half Vulcans.” That latter episode, among its many issues, couldn’t even resist also capturing Una in Strange New Worlds‘ obsession with romance, giving her second-most-prominent arc in the season over to an extended gag about a prior, sexually intense relationship with Patton Oswalt’s guest-starring role as the human-obsessed Vulcan Doug.

It’s not even that a romance plotline is inherently a bad thing. The real issue is the fact that Strange New Worlds seemingly only had the idea to do one with the bulk of its female stars this season over giving them any other kind of arc. The only characters that escaped that framing were Pelia, who almost entirely exists as an excuse (a delightful one, at that) for Carol Kane to make one gag after another, and Ortegas, whom the show still struggles to do anything with, romantic or otherwise. And ultimately, all of these romantic arcs have been less about the autonomy of their female halves and instead in service of forwarding the arcs of the men in their lives, further stagnating their characters across the season.

This climaxes and is most obliquely symbolized in the season’s final episode, “New Life and Civilizations,” putting the spotlight on the culmination of Captain Batel and Captain Pike’s romantic relationship. Strange New Worlds had done very little with Batel in its first two seasons outside of her role as Pike’s love interest, outside of endangering her in the Gorn attack that straddled season two’s end and season three’s beginning (season three, again, largely sidelined her for her recovery, focusing on the impact of her situation on Pike instead), but the season three finale placed their relationship at the forefront of the show’s emotional climax. In doing so, it was again less about Batel and who we knew her to be as an individual and more about defining the fact that she was Pike’s girlfriend.

The dramatic thrust of the finale sees Batel confronted with the (largely out of nowhere) revelation that she is the subject of a predestination paradox where she is fated to become a crystallized statue sealing an ancient evil race called the Vezda for all eternity. But instead of centering her own concerns and fears about taking on that mantle—she’d almost literally just been given back her job at Starfleet’s judicial division after a season of fighting to be put back into service—the episode’s emotional throughline becomes almost entirely about Batel ensuring Pike that he’s going to be fine without her (she is almost too keen to essentially sacrifice herself in comparison), leading to an extended dream sequence where she uses her newfound guardian abilities to essentially speedrun Pike through a hypothetical future where they grow old and raise a child together before she is crystallized and, essentially for the series, removed as an ongoing character.

This was, ultimately, Batel’s most prominent appearance in Strange New Worlds, and it not only didn’t really further our understanding of her character, but it was almost entirely framed through the perspective of Pike’s emotional journey and narrative in regard to his own predestined fate.

As Strange New Worlds draws closer and closer to its own conclusion—just 16 episodes of the series remain across its final two seasons, or around two-thirds of one season of a classic Star Trek show—it’s damning that seemingly one of the few ideas it can have for its female characters is defining their arc in relationship to a man. With the time it has left, one of the lessons the series must take to heart is to better explore the wealth of opportunities its breadth of female characters can provide, instead of pigeonholing them into the same arc over and over.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Brendan Carr Isn’t Going to Stop Until Someone Makes Him

by admin September 18, 2025

To Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on free speech, Carr’s threats against ABC appear to be “a pretty clear cut case of jawboning.” Jawboning refers to a type of informal coercion where government officials try to pressure private entities into suppressing or changing speech without using any actual formal legal action. Since jawboning is typically done in letters and private meetings, it rarely leaves a paper trail, making it notoriously difficult to challenge in court.

This Kimmel suspension is a little different, Lakier says. During the podcast appearance, Carr explicitly named his target, threatened regulatory action, and within a matter of hours the companies complied.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that that’s unconstitutional in all circumstances,” says Lakier. “You’re just not allowed to do that. There’s no balancing. There’s no justification. Absolutely no, no way may the government do that.”

Even if Carr’s threats amount to unconstitutional jawboning, though, stopping him could still prove difficult. If ABC sued, it would need to prove coercion—and however a suit went, filing one could risk additional regulatory retaliation down the line. If Kimmel were to sue, there’s no promise that he would get anything out of the suit even if he won, says Lakier, making it less likely for him to pursue legal action in the first place.

“There’s not much there for him except to establish that his rights were violated. But there is a lot of benefit for everyone else,” says Lakier. “This has received so much attention that it would be good if there could be, from now on, some mechanism for more oversight from the courts over what Carr is doing.”

Organizations like the FPF have sought novel means of limiting Carr’s power. In July, the FPF submitted a formal disciplinary complaint to the DC Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel arguing that Carr violated its ethical rules, misrepresenting the law by suggesting the FCC has the ability to regulate editorial viewpoints. Without formal rulings, companies affected by Carr’s threats would be some of the only organizations with grounding to sue. At the same time, they have proven to be some of the least likely groups to pursue legal action over the last eight months.

In a statement on Thursday, House Democratic leadership wrote that Carr had “disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC” and called on him to resign. They said they plan to “make sure the American people learn the truth, even if that requires the relentless unleashing of congressional subpoena power,” but did not outline any tangible ways to rein in Carr’s power.

“People need to get creative,” says Stern. “The old playbook is not built for this moment and the law only exists on paper when you’ve got someone like Brendan Carr in charge of enforcing it.”

This vacuum has left Carr free to push as far as he likes and it has spooked experts over how far this precedent will travel. Established in the 1930s, the FCC was designed to operate as a neutral referee, but years of media consolidation have dramatically limited the number of companies controlling programming over broadcast, cable, and now, streaming networks. Spectrum is a limited resource the FCC controls, giving the agency more direct control over the broadcast companies that rely on it than it has over cable or streaming services. This concentration makes them infinitely easier to pressure, benefitting the Trump administration, Carr, but also whoever might come next.

“If political tides turn, I don’t have confidence that the Democrats won’t also use them in an unconstitutional and improper matter,” says Stern. “[The Trump administration is] really setting up this world where every election cycle, assuming we still have elections in this country, the content of broadcast news might drastically shift depending on which political party controls the censorship office.”

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Epic will let Fortnite creators sell in-game items in latest attempt to compete with Roblox

by admin September 18, 2025

Creators building experiences in Fortnite are getting a new way to earn revenue. Epic says developers will soon have the ability to make and sell in-game items in Fortnite, and earn a cut of the V-Bucks users spend to buy them. Previously, developers only earned money through Fortnite based on the amount of time users spent on their “islands,” the in-game name for third-party experiences creators can offer through Fortnite.

Developers will be able to create their consumable and durable in-game items using soon-to-be-released tools in Unreal Editor for Fortnite and a new “Verse-based API,” according to Epic. The company also plans to be generous with the revenue split its offering, at least at first. Developers “will ordinarily earn 50 percent of the V-Bucks value from sales in their islands,” but from December 2025 through the end of 2026, they’ll get to keep 100 percent.

Epic says its 50 percent cut — notably more than the 30 percent popularized by Apple’s App Store — is to help “contribute to server hosting costs, safety and moderation costs, R&D and other operating expenses” of running Fortnite. It’s also a make-good of sorts, since Epic claims it’s been “investing and operating the business at a loss.”

How much 100 percent or 50 percent of “V-Bucks value” actually equals in real money unfortunately isn’t as simple as converting Fortnite’s digital currency to dollars, though. Epic offers the following explanation for how it calculates V-Bucks value:

To determine the V-Bucks value in US dollars in a given month, we take all customer real-money spending to purchase V-Bucks (converted to US Dollars), subtract platform and store fees (ranging from 12 percent on Epic Games Store to 30 percent on current consoles), and divide it by the total V-Bucks spent by players. Fortnite’s average platform and store fees are currently 26 percent (with specific fees ranging from 12 percent on the Epic Games Store to 30 percent on console platforms). So, 50 percent of V-Bucks value translates to ~37 percent of retail spending, and 100 percent of V-Bucks value translates to ~74 percent.

Alongside the new ability to create in-game items, Epic says Fortnite developers will be able to pay to be featured in a new “Sponsored row” inside Fortnite‘s Discover feed. And to better engage new and returning players, developers are also getting access to new tools for creating community forums and sharing updates on their islands.

All of these changes are in service of further extending Fortnite‘s ability to act as a platform for games and social experiences, rather than just a battle royale game (with racing, rhythm game and LEGO spin-offs). Epic clearly wants Fortnite to be Roblox, and reap the benefits of having an active community of adult and child users creating experiences for its platform. Cultivating that audience has led to all sorts of child safety problems for Roblox, but Epic clearly views the risks to be worth it.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Apple iPhone 17 review: the one to get

by admin September 18, 2025

For a while now, choosing the standard iPhone has meant missing out. It’s not just that you missed out on classic “pro” features like a more powerful processor or a telephoto lens — it’s that you missed out on core make-your-phone better stuff. Stuff like the Dynamic Island or the Action Button or a screen that gets bright enough to read outdoors. Apple has slowly whittled down that list by bringing the most important features over to its standard phone, but the two biggest exclusions have, until now, remained: the always-on display and high-refresh-rate screen.

This year, they’ve finally arrived. And for the first time in a while, choosing the standard iPhone no longer means missing out.

I’ve been testing the iPhone 17 for the past week, and I can say that the addition of these two features has meaningfully improved the experience of using the base iPhone. The iPhone 17 feels faster, easier to use, and more convenient as a result of these upgrades. They’re upgrades so obvious and essential that my only gripe is how long Apple waited to make them standard.

$799

The Good

Always-on-display makes it vastly more useful
High-refresh rate makes using the phone smoother
The cameras are solid
Battery life lasts well through the day
The price isn’t going up
No redesign, but the green is nice

The Bad

Zoom capabilities are weak compared to the Pro
Gets hot during heavy gaming sessions
Apple Intelligence is still somewhere between useless and MIA

In size, resolution, and specs, the iPhone 17’s display is the same as what you’ll find on this year’s Pro. And the most notable thing about the change is that the iPhone 17 finally has an always-on display. The feature works exactly the same as it does on the Pro phones, too. When you set the iPhone 17 down, the screen dims, showing a faint version of your wallpaper, widgets, clock, and notifications. The whole setup is customizable: you can turn it off, change the blur settings, or hide the wallpaper entirely for a cleaner black-and-white look.

Being able to quickly glance at your phone for information is extremely handy and instantly makes the device a whole lot more useful. It was far easier to understand what notifications I had, and manage them on an ongoing basis, because I was able to regularly look over at the phone on my desk and see what had rolled in. I added a calendar widget to keep an eye on upcoming meetings. Even just being able to peek at the current time is a perpetual help.

The sage green iPhone 17 looks great, even if it doesn’t get a new design like the iPhone 17 Pro.

Leaving the always-on display enabled does use marginally more battery, and Apple allows you to turn it off entirely if you’re worried about that or find it distracting. By default, the wallpaper both blurs and dims enough that I never found the screen unduly drawing my attention. Its battery usage was in the low single-digit percentages throughout my time testing the phone. Not enough for me to care about when a single charge got me through one day of heavy usage and into the next afternoon.

What enabled Apple to add this feature was the switch to a variable-refresh-rate display, which Apple brands as ProMotion. When idle, it dips down to as low as 1Hz to conserve battery, then ramps up to 120Hz — twice the maximum refresh rate of the prior model — to present smoother animations when things start moving. If you’ve never used a high refresh rate display before, the difference may not be immediately apparent. But give it a few days, and you’ll get used to how much more fluid fundamental parts of the phone seem to feel, from opening apps to scrolling through a news story. Once you’re used to it, you’ll never want to go back.

That these screen upgrades dramatically improve the iPhone shouldn’t be a big surprise: they’ve both been present on Pro-series iPhones since 2022 and standard in the Android world — including on much cheaper phones — for just as long. They’re the kind of features that a premium device like the iPhone ought to have, and the iPhone 17 is significantly better for their arrival.

There are a few other less noticeable changes to the screen this year. It’s ever-so-slightly bigger (6.3 inches instead of 6.1 inches), owing partly to slimmed-down bezels and partly to the phone being imperceptibly taller. Apple says the screen is more scratch resistant; I didn’t deliberately try to ding up my review unit, so I can’t say how effective it is in practice. The screen also gets brighter, and it now has an anti-glare coating that cuts back reflections. The coating alone isn’t a game changer in terms of visibility, but combined with the screen’s increased brightness, it was easier to read in harsh lighting conditions.

The iPhone 17’s brighter display and anti-glare coating makes it easier to read outdoors.

The other big changes to this year’s phone are to the cameras. The ultrawide camera has been changed from a 12-megapixel sensor to a 48-megapixel sensor that’s supposed to provide more detail, and the selfie camera has a brand new sensor that allows for an assortment of automatic framing tricks to help get you and your friends all in the same photo.

The photos I took with the iPhone 17’s selfie camera weren’t materially better than ones I took with the iPhone 16’s. But the tech inside the camera has seen a major overhaul that changes how you take those photos.

Apple has given the iPhone 17 the same “Center Stage” front camera that it’s put in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro. The phones all use a square image sensor instead of a rectangular one, and they all have a higher resolution than Apple’s prior selfie cameras, 18MP instead of 12MP. These changes allow for two things: they give Apple more flexibility when cropping the frame, and they make the camera more suitable for use in portrait orientation — the way most people are going to take selfies.

When you go to take a photo with the front camera on the iPhone 17, it’ll start punched in and ready to frame up a single person. Have a friend join you, and it’ll automatically expand outward. Add even more people than the portrait shot can fit, and it’ll swap to an even-wider landscape framing, all while the phone remains upright. You can control this manually or let the phone automatically take it away. I found that letting the phone do its thing worked just fine. I wouldn’t say this hugely improved my experience taking selfies — turning the phone sideways isn’t that hard — but on a device made for tens of millions of people, many of whom just want to hold their phone out and see everyone around them, this change makes a whole lot of sense.

Keeping up with notifications is much easier when you can always glance at the display.

The quality story is similar on the ultrawide camera, which is also the same as the Pro’s. Despite the resolution bump, this year’s improvements are modest at best. In side-by-side shots with its predecessor, the iPhone 17’s ultrawide appeared slightly sharper and delivered slightly bolder colors. I was able to get some great photos with it. But in most cases, I had to look closely to see the improvements.

Apple didn’t make any hardware changes to the iPhone 17’s main camera, which has a smaller sensor than the main camera on the iPhone 17 Pro but the same 48MP resolution. It takes nice photos, even if they look slightly less rich to me than what you’d get out of the Pro camera. I occasionally got blown-out highlights in bright daylight and blurry motion in low light. But honestly, in a world of over-processed smartphone photos, I didn’t necessarily mind the imperfections.

1/13Taken in 2x on the main camera.

The biggest distinction between the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro’s camera systems — and perhaps the biggest distinction between the phones overall — is their zoom capabilities. The 17 Pro has a dedicated telephoto lens with a 4x optical zoom. But the 17 only has what Apple bills as 2x “optical quality” zoom, which is just a fancy way of cropping a photo. Pictures still look good at 2x, but they start to look flat and noisy in lower light. And photos at its 10x maximum digital zoom lack the kind of detail you’d get from a proper lens and start to get a bit of that blurry watercolor look. If you don’t take a lot of zoomed-in photos, this omission won’t be a huge deal. But if you struggle to get pics of your cat from across the room, that’s still one reason you may need to go pro.

Beyond the cameras, the iPhone 17 has a number of other small improvements. It has the new A19 processor, starts with double the storage — 256 GB — compared to last year, supports faster wired and wireless charging, and has longer quoted battery life. And in a year where prices seem to be going up everywhere, it still starts at the same $829 unlocked price as its predecessor did.

Perhaps the most obvious thing the iPhone 17 doesn’t get is the flashy new camera bar design seen on the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone Air. Those higher-end models look nice, but so does the sage green iPhone that I’ve been testing, even if it looks basically the same as every iPhone for the past six years. If you’re worried about your phone not looking brand new, then maybe that’s a reason to consider the other models, but I don’t think you’re missing out anything significant here.

Sage green is one of Apple’s best colors in a while.

This is one of the best years in a long time to be looking at the standard iPhone. For the same price as last year, you get twice as much storage, slightly better cameras, and an immensely better screen that makes the phone immediately more useful. Sure, there are still some features reserved for the Pro: a new design, a faster chip, a telephoto lens and larger main camera sensor. But I think there’s an argument to be made that those are features for power users, meant for those who really want more out of their phone.

If you just want a great iPhone, and you don’t want to miss out on anything major, the iPhone 17 is finally that phone.

Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Agree to continue: Apple iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we’re going to start counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

To use any of the iPhone 17 (and iPhone Air) models, you have to agree to:

The iOS terms and conditions, which you can have sent to you by email
Apple’s warranty agreement, which you can have sent to you by email

These agreements are nonnegotiable, and you can’t use the phone at all if you don’t agree to them.

The iPhone also prompts you to set up Apple Cash and Apple Pay at setup, which further means you have to agree to:

The Apple Cash agreement, which specifies that services are actually provided by Green Dot Bank and Apple Payments Inc. and further consists of the following agreements:
The Apple Cash terms and conditions
The electronic communications agreement
The Green Dot Bank privacy policy
Direct payments terms and conditions
Direct payments privacy notice
Apple Payments Inc. license

If you add a credit card to Apple Pay, you have to agree to:

The terms from your credit card provider, which do not have an option to be emailed

Final tally: two mandatory agreements, seven optional agreements for Apple Cash, and one optional agreement for Apple Pay.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Dying Light: The Beast review: Techland’s parkour-filled zombie-stomper heads for the highlands

by admin September 18, 2025

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Alright, I’m just gonna get straight to the point: did you love the first two Dying Light games? You did? Okay, I’ll save you some time – you’re definitely going to enjoy Techland’s latest instalment in its survival zombie game series, Dying Light: The Beast.

Review info

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Release date: September 18, 2025

There’s enough to set The Beast apart from its predecessors, even if it follows the same broad gameplay template and stars returning leading man Kyle Crane, protagonist of the original game and its expansion, The Following.

Things didn’t go so great for Kyle the first time around; in the (now canon) ending of The Following, he ended up betrayed, infected, captured, and used as an unwilling test subject. The viral outbreak has gone worldwide, and 90% of the global population is dead or infected.

More than a full in-universe decade later, he breaks out of a mysterious laboratory, and we’re off to the races once again: time to bash some skulls with improvised melee weapons and parkour your way across the rooftops like a bloodlusted Sébastien Foucan. Dying Light: The Beast isn’t overly concerned with being serious or grounded; we’re here for a little bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, and boy, is it fun.

Worlds apart

The setting might be calmer, but the infected certainly aren’t. (Image credit: Techland)

Considering that Dying Light: The Beast was purportedly originally planned as extra downloadable content (DLC) to Dying Light 2, it sure as hell has a good amount of content in it. Instead of the more urban settings of the first two games, The Beast takes place in the cozy woodland resort town of Castor Woods, nestled in a valley in an alpine landscape.

Well, I say ‘cozy’ – it’s not exactly a pleasant place to be by the time Kyle breaks loose. Hordes of poor infected souls roam the cobbled streets and forest underbrush, deadly mutant variants stalk the night, and a rogue paramilitary group commanded by a villainous oligarch is attempting to seize control of the region. So far, so Dying Light.

Castor Woods is the perfect divergence from Harran and Villedor, the city settings of the first two games. (Image credit: Techland)

But the shift to a more rural setting proves to be exactly the injection of freshness this series needed. The map isn’t particularly large, but it’s big enough to make navigating on foot take a while, and the focus on urban verticality is lessened here. Yes, there are still pylons and watchtowers for Kyle to clamber up, but also more wide-open spaces, divided by trees and thick bushes that make ambushes a constant threat to the unwary explorer. The woodland environments are also beautiful, as is the primary settlement, the Old Town, crumbling in its majesty as nature begins to reclaim it.

Parkour is still alive and well in The Beast. The Old Town is a fantastically dense environment, full of telephone poles and open windows that form a perfect obstacle course when you’re running for your life from an angry Volatile.

But even beyond the built-up areas, there are branches to swing on and rocky cliff faces to climb, and the grappling hook makes a welcome return too, helping you more rapidly circumnavigate your hostile surroundings. Sadly, the glider from Dying Light 2: Stay Human doesn’t make an appearance, but that’s understandable given the less vertical nature of this locale.

Night falls

Keep an eye on the time: once night falls, you’ll need to be extra cautious or seek shelter. (Image credit: Techland)

There’s another significant factor that differentiates The Beast’s setting from the first two games, though it doesn’t become apparent until after sunset. In the first two games, you were never that far from a light source, be it a trashcan fire or the headlights of an abandoned vehicle (or simply bright moonlight). Here, when it gets dark, it gets dark.

When the sun goes down, getting around without using your trusty flashlight is night-impossible – though of course, using it runs the risk of attracting powerful, dangerous zombies called Volatiles, who retain their mechanics from the previous titles. Alerting one immediately triggers a chase, at which point your best option is to sprint full-pelt back to the protective UV lights of the nearest safehouse; Volatiles are fast, aggressive, and very hard to kill without some serious weapon upgrades.

Best Bit

(Image credit: Techland)

The first sunset you see is truly beautiful – but any series fan will already know the terrors that nightfall heralds.

This oppressive darkness, combined with the visceral gore and bleak yet beautiful Alpine ambience, makes The Beast feel a lot more horror-adjacent than previous entries into the series. It’s a welcome shift in tone – not a full swerve into horror since Kyle remains an absolute murder machine, but definitely a darker vibe that I greatly enjoyed as a lifelong lover of the genre.

Narratively, it’s fine. The story is a fairly by-the-numbers adventure, with no huge twists that weren’t so obvious a blind man could see them a mile off. The characters are a rogue’s gallery of familiar tropes – the no-nonsense sheriff, the bespectacled physics geek, the sage old black dude, the cartoonishly evil Baron – and the dialogue is… well, the voice acting is decent, at least.

I don’t mind the predictability of it all, though; the main plot has a schlocky, B-movie feel that is actually fairly endearing. The Beast isn’t interested in telling a fantastically deep and thought-provoking tale; at the end of the day, every cutscene is just a vehicle to deliver Kyle and his huge biceps to the next group of infected or soldiers he has to brutalize.

Old dog, new tricks

Yes, that is an infected soldier bouncing off my front bumper in almost slapstick fashion. Running over zombies is fun! (Image credit: Techland)

Speaking of vehicles, you can drive cars in this one! The lack of vehicles in the second game always seemed odd to me, considering that the first game’s DLC, The Following (which also first explored the idea of a more rural setting), dipped its toe in those waters with the drivable buggy.

In The Beast, you can find abandoned forest ranger cars strewn across the wilderness, which serve as the most effective way to get from A to B outside the more densely-packed areas of Castor Woods. There’s no fast travel here – and I’ll be honest, the map is a little too large for this omission to go unnoticed. Although mowing down hordes of the infected never stops being fun, trekking back and forth from the major safehouses to turn in completed quests and sell off your accumulated loot quickly becomes a chore.

The vehicles, along with the frequent climbing sections and heavier focus on gunfights with human enemies that began in Dying Light: Stay Human, give The Beast a distinct whiff of Far Cry. I’m not complaining, to be clear; I love that series, and the gunplay and stealth elements on offer here work reasonably well.

Every weapon has unique takedown animations, most of which are quite spectacularly gory. (Image credit: Techland)

Really, the combat as a whole is a definite highlight of The Beast: from crunchy melee combat with improvised weapons like hammers and fire axes, to tense stealthy takedowns with Kyle’s trusty bow and arrows, it all feels good. The gore is spectacular – bones crack, limbs are sliced off, heads fly from shoulders in showers of blood. Stunning a group of weak Biters with Kyle’s UV flashlight before unleashing a sweeping heavy attack with a two-handed axe that knocks them all to the ground at once feels great.

There’s a wide range of melee weapons on offer, both craftable and lying around the environment, and while these weapons do degrade with use, they can be repaired multiple times before breaking and will generally last you a long time. Ranged weapons don’t degrade, meaning that you only ever need one grenade launcher or sniper rifle; any extras can be broken down for parts.

The crafting system remains largely as it was in previous games; nothing overly complex, just gather parts and break down unneeded gear, then put it together to make something great at killing stuff. Weapons must be crafted at workbenches in safe zones, but consumables and other single-use gear (like gas grenades or incendiary arrows) can be crafted from the inventory screen or quick-select menu at any time. I was particularly fond of the explosive throwing knives, which stick into enemies before turning them into a fine red mist a few seconds later.

Feeling beastly

Unleashing the beast turns Kyle into a savage zombie-killing monster, but characters hint that there may be some… side effects. (Image credit: Techland)

Another new addition is right there in the title: Kyle’s years of being an unethical bioscience guinea pig have unlocked his weird virus powers, letting him tap into ‘Beast Mode’ (yes, it’s really called that) for a short time after dealing or taking enough damage.

In Beast Mode, you regenerate health constantly, take reduced damage, and forsake your usual arsenal for some meaty infected fists that absolutely demolish all but the strongest foes in seconds. It’s fun, and the game usually auto-spawns a handful of fast-moving zombies whenever you activate it, amping up the intensity of any fight where you decide to use it. Progressing the narrative and defeating certain infected boss enemies grants skill points, which can be spent to gain extra abilities in Beast Mode, like jumping further or barrelling through enemies while sprinting. There’s also a regular skill tree that accumulates points as you level up, which lets you unlock stuff like new parkour-related attacks and weapon crafting blueprints.

Taking down particularly beefy ‘Chimeras’ will earn you points to upgrade your Beast Mode powers. (Image credit: Techland)

The enemies you face in The Beast are a mostly familiar selection for anyone who has played a game with zombies in it before. You’ve got your garden variety Biters, which are slow and weak but dangerous in large numbers, then the faster but more fragile Virals, the armored zombies, zombies who jump, zombies who spit acid for ranged attacks, bloated zombies who explode – you know, typical zombie shooter fare.

There are glimpses of more inspired designs here and there (I really like the returning ‘Goon’ enemy type, a hulking brute with a chunk of concrete and rebar gruesomely fused to its arm), but for the most part, the enemy design is fairly run-of-the-mill.

If I have one significant criticism of the enemies, it’s that they’re a bit too eager with the grapple mechanic. Let an infected get too close, and they’ll grab you, dealing a bit of damage and prompting a quick-time event to shove them away.

Now, this should be relatively easy to avoid, but the devs seem to love hiding Biters behind doorframes and corners to ambush and damage you immediately with no chance of avoiding it. Even sometimes in direct combat, I encountered infected who could seemingly slip past a melee attack mid-swing to interrupt it with the grapple QTE, or grapple me immediately as soon as I escaped from a different enemy grapple. I think there’s a reasonable argument that it’s supposed to be punishing – it can be a death sentence if you’re reckless and allow yourself to be surrounded by a swarm of enemies – but more often than not, it just felt like an annoying roadblock to the otherwise enjoyable melee combat.

Guns out

I quickly became very fond of setting enemies on fire, with arrows, flamethrowers, and Molotov cocktails. (Image credit: Techland)

Thankfully, the overall gameplay challenge feels good outside of my grapple-related woes. I switched between all three different difficulty levels during my playthrough, and found that the highest difficulty provided a stiff challenge perfect for the most masochistic player, while the lowest had me feeling almost immediately overpowered. I played most of the game on medium difficulty, where death was never too far away, but I died more times to misjudged parkour jumps than enemy attacks.

Much like the previous Dying Light games, melee is consistently reliable, while ranged weapons are something of a mixed bag. Early guns are completely feeble against infected enemies, who can shrug off multiple pistol or SMG headshots, and the bow is similarly underpowered until you unlock a skill that lets you deal bonus damage on well-timed shots. But later on, you get access to more powerful weapons like the grenade launcher and the crossbow, which can trivialise many encounters – assuming you can keep them stocked with ammo, which is scarce.

There’s a modest selection of wearable items to track down, with a transmog system so you can always keep Kyle looking his best. (Image credit: Techland)

Although the game doesn’t make you fight human enemies too often, small squads of mercenaries and bandits can be found lurking around Castor Woods, and there are several large-scale gunfights that take place over the course of the main campaign.

These dips into conventional cover-shooter gameplay certainly feel a bit less engaging than facing savage zombie hordes, but thankfully they don’t outstay their welcome – the infected might eat bullets like nobody’s business, but a single headshot is enough to take down most human opponents, so most fights are over quickly provided you have the ammo to spare (which you usually will, because the game is quite generous with placing supplies before large scripted battles).

Squishing bugs

The Beast isn’t quite the prettiest game I’ve ever played, but it’s up there – sometimes I simply had to stop and admire the scenery. (Image credit: Techland)

Playing through the main campaign (with a bit of time spent exploring and completing side-quests) took me just shy of 22 hours, but this was by no means an exhaustive playthrough: I could easily sink another 20 hours into The Beast to complete everything.

There’s a good amount of safehouses to unlock and secrets to uncover, and while the list of sidequests is perhaps a little sparse, they’re more fleshed out than simple fetch quests – you’ll be hunting a particularly dangerous infected in the woods, or clearing out a series of power substations across the map to help a band of survivors.

In terms of performance on PC, I was able to get a good framerate at 1440p Medium settings with my RTX 5070 desktop, and 1080p Low on an RTX 4060 gaming laptop. DLSS resolution upscaling is helpful at higher resolutions, but I found that Nvidia’s frame-generation was rather wonky, creating too much blur in busy scenes to make the improved framerate worth it.

The roof is fully intact, and yet it appears this safehouse has sprung a magical leak. (Image credit: Techland)

There’s also a small amount of visual and physics jank here, which I remember being present in the other Dying Light games; think loot items occasionally falling through the floor or Kyle’s hand distorting weirdly while trying to climb the side of a building. At one point, I found it raining inside one half of an abandoned diner (pictured above). It’s nothing game-breaking and rarely actually intrusive, but I do hope that some early patches help remedy these issues, because otherwise the game runs fine for the most part.

It did occur to me about halfway through my playthrough that The Beast might be coasting on players’ foreknowledge from the previous games – I personally didn’t have any issues with un- or under-explained mechanics, but I would note that a completely fresh player might struggle a bit to understand certain elements of the game, since the tutorials here are pretty bare-bones and have a tendency to either over- or under-explain specific gameplay elements.

Overall, I had a blast with Dying Light: The Beast. It’s not reinventing the wheel: Techland has a solid formula that mixes traditional open-world action sandbox elements with a solid parkour-based movement system and high enemy density, so it’s understandable that The Beast wouldn’t be too much of a deviation from the norm. Still, the new setting is a breath of fresh air, and it still feels fantastic to dropkick a zombie off a roof.

The dynamic weather is surprisingly a highlight of the setting, with heavy rain and wind adding excellently to the immersion. (Image credit: Techland)

Should you play Dying Light: the Beast?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

On the topic of accessibility, we’ve got the usual suite of options I’ve come to expect in any major game: motion sickness reduction, directional audio indicators, and colorblind presets are all present and accounted for, and the subtitles can be customized as well.

How I reviewed Dying Light: The Beast

I spent a while tinkering with the various gameplay, graphical, and accessibility settings in order to get a complete feel for the game, as well as playing through the main campaign at a reasonably fast pace. Of course, I also spent some time checking out the side-quests and just exploring the world, while also being sure to use every new piece of gear I encountered (in case any of them were extremely under- or over-powered – the grenade launcher definitely falls into the latter category).

I played the majority of the game on my gaming PC, with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and Nvidia RTX 5070, using an Asus ROG Strix Scope RX II keyboard and Logitech G502 Lightspeed mouse or a Hyperx Clutch controller. Audio was a combination of the HyperX Cloud Flight S headset and the SteelSeries Arena 9 speakers.

To see how the game would perform on different hardware, I also loaded it up on my RTX 4060 gaming laptop to test out performance on a lower-spec system.

First reviewed September 2025

Dying Light: The Beast : Price Comparison

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Now that I’m done mourning BioWare, these are the RPG developers I’m expecting to carry the torch for the next decade

by admin September 18, 2025

BioWare fans can never agree on which era of the studio was its peak—classic Baldur’s Gate 2, the original Mass Effect, or (correctly) Dragon Age: Origins—but there’s no debating that it was the frontrunner in a golden era for RPGs that influenced at least a decade of other games.

If that sounds like the beginning of a eulogy…yeah. It isn’t technically dead, and there’s a universe where BioWare makes some incredible comeback with Mass Effect 4, but I don’t think it’s this one. After Andromeda, Anthem, and Veilguard, it seems that no matter the talent still left in the studio, EA just isn’t going to give BioWare the time or trust to make the kind of RPGs it originally spearheaded anymore. I’m finally ready to let go.

If you too are mourning the studio’s effective downfall, rest assured that the BioWare-style RPG lives on elsewhere. My colleague Fraser Brown insisted back in 2023 that the BioWare-style RPG was dead and just didn’t know it yet. At the time I almost even agreed, but two years later it feels like we’ve finally arrived breathless at a tough summit to look down into a valley of plenty in the big-budget, story-forward party RPG scene.

(Image credit: Larian)

Larian Studios

Working on: two unannounced things

I know better than to assume anything goes without saying, so I’m saying it: Larian is the number one RPG developer to watch right now for mourning BioWare fans. Its incredible triumph with Baldur’s Gate 3 (our 2023 Game of the Year and current number one in the Top 100 PC games) is a masterclass character-forward RPG sandbox jam-packed with deep strategy and roleplay opportunities that BioWare itself should have been making these 15 years since Dragon Age: Origins.

Despite some rough early years, Larian’s recent backlist is well worth dumping a couple hundred hours into. Divinity: Original Sin and D:OS2 are both excellent, though I wouldn’t say it was doing the full course BioWare RPG until Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian is worth staying excited for in the wake of BG3 because it’s got two new projects on the go now.

Neither are Baldur’s Gate 4, and instead it’s going to “develop our own IPs,” studio head Swen Vincke said. That may mean Divinity: Original Sin 3, which I would not complain about, but likely also means something completely new and original. I only hope they stick to their sword and sorcery chops and don’t fly off into sci-fi territory. Larian scaled up massively to pull off BG3, and not being beholden to a publisher or IP-holding partner means it can take full creative control in bringing that expertise to bear.

(Image credit: Obsidian)

Obsidian Entertainment

Working on: The Outer Worlds 2

Obsidian is living the life I wish BioWare could have had: trucking along as the subsidiary of a major publisher, being trusted to make the singleplayer RPGs that made it popular in the first place, valiantly juggling two original series—one fantasy and one sci-fi—and being the belle of the yearly company showcase. Seriously, this year’s summer Xbox event was very Obsidian-focused.

With Avowed getting compared so often to Skyrim and Obsidian itself loving a trailer gag reminding us that they made Fallout: New Vegas, it’s easy to have missed that their latest RPGs are actually more BioWare than Bethesda. Avowed was a great, party-focused RPG with genuinely impactful narrative choices and roleplaying moments around the campfire that will warm any Origins fan’s heart, and The Outer Worlds 2 is looking promising with its imminent launch too.

Of note is that Avowed’s game director Carrie Patel left Obsidian after over a decade. A bummer, but the fact that Patel came up from a writer on Pillars of Eternity to a narrative lead and then game director suggests that Obsidian’s been able to affirm the importance of storytelling in its RPGs. Here’s hoping it continues to do so wherever it heads after Outer Worlds 2.

(Image credit: Owlcat)

Owlcat Games

Working on: The Expanse: Osiris Reborn

Standing at the precipice where BioWare itself once stood is Owlcat Games. The developer of top-down, party-based RPGs is coming off two Pathfinder games and a Warhammer 40k game and making a big jump into a cinematic sci-fi RPG, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. We’ve consistently praised Owlcat for nailing a setting and The Expanse, with its very popular political space opera book series and also popular TV adaptation, is a hell of a setting to be starting from.

“Your companions are more than just mission assets—they are people with their own scars and loyalties,” Owlcat says. “Over time, your relationships will flourish or deteriorate depending on the choices you make and how you choose to lead.” Between that, your customizable character, and the third-person sci-fi shooter action, Osiris Reborn may not outrun the Mass Effect comparisons. Maybe it shouldn’t try to.

(Image credit: Harebrained)

Harebrained

When it was owned by Paradox, the studio formerly known as Harebrained Schemes gave us a couple of RPGs that were basically “what if classic BioWare had gone turn-based and also cyberpunk” in Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Both had strong parties of companions to butt heads and then bond with, and Dragonfall even borrowed the plot structure of Baldur’s Gate 2.

Unfortunately Paradox pushed the studio out of its comfort zone and the result was the less-impressive Lamplighters League, after which Paradox cut it free. Now independent and just called Harebrained, it’s working on an isometric body-horror RPG set on a space station. It’s called Graft, because it’s about stitching together a new body for yourself by scavenging from others as they fall, which I’m sure is totally not a metaphor for anything. “Form fragile alliances and build them into deeper relationships” says the Steam description, which sounds very BioWare to me.

Nvidia Appeals to Trump With a $5 Billion Intel Stake

by admin September 18, 2025

Nvidia became one of competitor Intel’s largest shareholders on Thursday with a $5 billion stake. The two companies will collaborate to jointly develop PC chips and data centers.

Once the dominant name in chips, Intel had been in a steady decline in recent years as it failed to keep up with peers like Nvidia in the AI race.

The company started its official turnaround strategy last year by ousting its previous CEO Pat Gelsinger, who was eventually replaced by Lip Bu-Tan a few months later.

Last month was a whirlwind for both Bu-Tan and Intel: Trump initially called for the CEO’s immediate resignation, citing “conflicts of interest” due to alleged ties to China. Only a few days of lobbying after, Trump not only walked back his words and called Bu-Tan “a success” but also announced a deal that would have the U.S. government take a 10% stake in Intel.

Announcing the deal on Truth Social, Trump said that the “United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL.”

That investment, it turns out, was the real comeback for Intel. In its effort to become more competitive in the chips space, Intel now has the help of Nvidia, the biggest name in AI chips. The announcement sent Intel’s stock soaring by more than 30%.

There’s likely more in it for Nvidia than just the stake. The deal is well-positioned to put Nvidia in favor with the government, crucial as the company tries to convince Trump to allow it to sell more advanced chips to China.

Nvidia has been on a months-long rollercoaster ride when it comes to its chip sales in China. The company had been selling lower-tech China-special chips to the region under Biden-era export controls. Trump imposed a blanket ban on all sales in April as part of a greater trade escalation between the two countries.

It took Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang a months-long schmoozing effort to get Trump to undo his ban. The effort involved a $500 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, a trip with Trump to the UAE to announce a data center deal, and agreeing to give the government a 15% cut of the company’s revenue coming from chip sales in China.

Since the ban got lifted, Huang has been vocal about his desire to sell a higher-tech chip called B30A to China. It’s not yet certain whether Trump will allow that. Or where China stands on it, either.

Beijing is not happy about getting downgraded Nvidia chips and made that clear on Wednesday when the Financial Times reported that the Chinese government had banned the low-grade RTX Pro 6000D chip in China, one of the two chips that Nvidia is allowed to sell there. Instead of relying on Nvidia chips, Beijing now allegedly has confidence that domestic chip offerings are at par with Nvidia’s China-specific ones.

A Trump-led tech industry

Trump’s influence in tech is undeniable. Only eight months into his presidency, CEOs of major tech companies have shown solidarity with him time and again, from standing front stage at the inauguration to promising billions of dollars of investments and accompanying the President on state visits.

For example, Trump flew to meet with the UK Prime Minister on Tuesday and has been there since. His state visit to the UK included billions of dollars’ worth of UK investment deals announced by American big tech giants Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Salesforce. The trip is not even done yet.

Trump has so far responded in kind, advocating for these tech giants’ interests in diplomatic conversations, sometimes at the risk of disrupting ties with long-term American allies like the EU. The Trump administration has also dropped a third of all investigations into big tech.

The developments have raised some concern as the close ties between these tech CEOs and the Trump administration have been dubbed online as a “tech broligarchy.”

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Auk Mini Review: Start Your Own Seeds, Scandinavian Style

by admin September 18, 2025

In my ongoing quest to put as many of the popular indoor hydroponic garden systems as I can through their paces, I have noticed something irritating.

Many, if not most, of these systems require—or at minimum, strongly suggest—ordering proprietary seed pods, inserts, or capsules from the company itself. You can jury-rig, of course, but usually at your own hassle and failure risk. If you order through the companies, not only can the excess packaging be wasteful, the costs add up quickly (competitor Click & Grow’s pods, for example, are almost $5 each).

When I saw the Auk (pronounced “owk”) and its four little pots of coconut coir advertised on my social media feed, I was immediately intrigued. Finally, an open-system indoor garden where you can grow your own seeds! There’s got to be a catch, I thought. But there isn’t. After testing it for six weeks, I can report that the Auk fully delivers on its promise of “herbs made simple.”

Just the Basics

Although its ads make it seem like a newcomer, Norway-based Auk has actually been in business since 2021. It’s perhaps best known for its original Auk 1 hydroponic garden, which features a more complicated water reservoir, nutrient mixer, and lighting setup that garnered mixed reviews online for inconsistent light cycles and watering. The herb-focused Auk Mini, on the other hand, is not that.

Released in May 2024, it features four oval pots with slotted bottoms that sit atop a 3-liter reservoir. This 17.5 x 8.5 x 14.5-inch base is flanked by two wooden poles, which hold a tension-set full-spectrum light bar. A little wheel on the side indicates the water level, with a red dot indicating when it’s empty.

Courtesy of Auk; Photograph: Kat Merck

Simply fill the pots with the included coconut coir (fibers from the exterior of coconuts), plant your seeds, add squirts of the included nutrients (the bottles say how many on the side), plug in the light bar, and position it 4 inches above the pots to start. That’s it. There’s no pump, and the light bar will stay on for 17.5 hours—hold the button underneath the light for five seconds to set the “sunrise” time. Finish options include oak or walnut, with white or black pots.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

NVIDIA throws Intel a $5 billion lifeline to build PC and data center CPUs

by admin September 18, 2025

NVIDIA has today announced it will invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a new collaboration between the two companies. In a statement, NVIDIA said it would work with its ailing rival to “jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products.”

The partnership will focus on marrying NVIDIA’s class-leading GPU and AI chips with Intel’s ailing x86 CPUs. That includes Intel building “NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs” for integration with the latter company’s AI products.

PC users, meanwhile, should expect to see Intel building and / or selling x86 chips that integrate NVIDIA’s RTX GPU chiplets. It’s not clear if this means the end of Intel’s in-house graphics silicon or if these products will focus on broadening access to NVIDIA’s high-end GPU technology.

The statement includes personal remarks from both NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who says the deal “tightly couples” Intel’s x86 CPUs with NVIDIA’s AI technology. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, meanwhile, says the deal will combine its CPU know-how, its “process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities” with NVIDIA’s.

The partnership is interesting for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact few companies have opted to go with Intel’s foundry business to actually build chips. And that the momentum in the chip space has been pointed away from Intel for several years after several high-profile stumbles.

This breaking news story is developing, please refresh for more information.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

The Good

The Bad

Agree to continue: Apple iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air

Jacob Kastrenakes

Apple

iPhone

Mobile

Reviews

Tech

Worlds apart

Night falls

Old dog, new tricks

Feeling beastly

Guns out

Squishing bugs

Should you play Dying Light: the Beast?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

How I reviewed Dying Light: The Beast

Larian Studios

Obsidian Entertainment

Owlcat Games

Harebrained

See also

A Trump-led tech industry

Just the Basics