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working

Call of Duty Black Ops 7, Borderlands 4, and Ghost of Yotei

Modder turns Lego Game Boy into real working handheld

by admin October 2, 2025

The Lego Game Boy set was officially released on October 1, 2025, but one modder has already gone further than Lego and Nintendo. Australian creator Natalie the Nerd has turned the brick-built handheld into a functioning console.

Lego first announced the 421-piece Game Boy replica at San Diego Comic-Con in July, with preorders opening the same month.

The set, priced at $59.99, includes swappable cartridges styled after Super Mario Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, along with lenticular screens that simulate motion. While the buttons press and the cartridges slot in, Lego confirmed the model was never intended to play games.

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Now, one modder has managed to turn the sought-after Lego set into a playable device straight out of the ’90s.

Modder makes Lego Game Boy play actual games

Instead of using an emulator or Raspberry Pi, she designed and built a custom circuit board with genuine Game Boy chips, small enough to fit inside the Lego shell.

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The biggest change is that the screen is backlit, making it a lot easier to see while playing a game on it.

The build plays real cartridges, supports working buttons, and charges via USB-C with a rechargeable battery. She told The Verge she had to remove a few bricks to fit in the smallest available display kit, and is currently working on mounting the buttons to a 3D-printed Lego-compatible piece.

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The project is still in progress, but Natalie confirmed she plans to release the design once it’s finalized. Already known in the modding scene for aftermarket Game Boy components, she said the Lego version will eventually join her shared circuit board projects.

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October 2, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Having resurrected The Crew, devs behind fan revival project are now working on a big mod to restore the racer to “greatness”

by admin September 28, 2025

Earlier this month, fan-made revival project The Crew Unlimited, brought Ubisoft’s decommissioned racer The Crew back to life in server emulated PC form. Now, its devs have put out an update outlining a couple of things they’re working on to try and take things to the next level.

This looks to be the first time the group have been able to catch their breath since releasing The Crew Unlimited on September 15th, having had to work flat out on fixes for teething issues in the immediate aftermath. Some of those problems stemmed from some players having acquired broken versions of The Crew’s game files from “shady sources”, with TCU’s devs saying they aren’t responsible for the server emulator not working in these cases.

That brings us to the ‘post-launch recap and what’s next’ post The Crew Unlimited lead Whammy put up on the project’s Patreon page late yesterday. “The reception has been quite overwhelming,” they wrote to kick off. “We’re extremely grateful for all the support we’ve received, it really means a lot to us. The amount of people who were eagerly awaiting the return of this decade old game really says a lot about how much this game means to people.”

Getting down to brass tacks, Whammy wrote that the team’s current focus is getting some more “important fixes” for their creation’s launcher and server out of the door, with the former also set for an interface rework. In the long-term, there are two larger initiatives they’ve got in the works, with one being a beefy overhaul mod and the other being a revamp of the project’s website that’ll integrate it with the game’s resurrected online multiplayer.

Starting with the mod, which the modders are collaborating with other Crew community members on, it’s “a collection of essential and lore-friendly fixes, improvements and content restorations”. The goal is to bring The Crew back “to a level of greatness it once had, while retaining all the new DLC content and features”, as The Crew Unlimited’s creators aren’t fans of the “abysmal state” Ubisoft left the racer in once its last updates rolled out. The group seem to particularly dislike the effect 2015’s Wild Run update had.

The second addition the works is dubbed “TCU Net 2.0”, and will be a revamp of The Crew Unlimited’s current website that’ll introduce a system of online features linked to the project’s in-game online experience. For instance, you’ll be able access the likes of “user profiles, scores, friends, posts, [and] rewards”. It sounds quite Rockstar Social Club-ish in principle at least, so it’ll be interesting to see if the modders can pull it off.

“As you can see, we have quite ambitious goals,” Whammy concluded. “But with enough time and your support, we believe we can achieve them.” Given the achievement that just getting their server emulator up and running likely was, it’s cool to see the team continue to aim high. The question remains as to whether The Crew Unlimited might face some lawyerly action from Ubisoft at some point, if the publisher believes it has a case, but all appears quiet on that front thus far.

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September 28, 2025 0 comments

Robotic arm sorting items into four boxes

Gaming Gear

China Outpaces Rest of World in Working Robots

by admin September 28, 2025

There are an estimated 4,664,000 working industrial robots in the world, according to the International Federation of Robotics. More than two million of them are in China. And don’t count on anyone catching up soon. According to the report, the country installed nearly 300,000 new robots last year, and was responsible for 54% of all robotic deployments across the globe in 2024. For comparison’s sake, the United States managed about one-tenth that figure, adding 34,000 industrial bots during the same time frame.

China’s robot boom coincides with the country taking on the role of a global manufacturing leader. According to the New York Times, China now holds just under one-third of all global manufacturing output, up from just 6% of the pie at the turn of the 21st century. That makes China’s current output bigger than the combined manufacturing power of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.

That gap seems likely to continue to widen. While China’s robotic installations increased year-over-year by about 7%, according to the International Federation of Robotics, the next-biggest robo-reliant nations all saw their total installations dip. Japan declined by 4%, the US dropped by 9%, South Korea slumped by 3%, and Germany slipped by 5%.

The IFR doesn’t see China’s automation adoption stopping any time soon, either. It projects the country will see an average of 10% growth annually through 2028, driven primarily by the introduction of industrial robotics into new markets. China’s biggest areas of growth in the last year included food and beverage, rubber and plastic, and textile production, whereas the United States continues to see robotics primarily applied to more traditional manufacturing fields like automotives.

Interestingly, while China’s robotics domination does appear driven in part by new technological developments like artificial intelligence, the country isn’t that into humanoid robots compared to other industrial forces. The New York Times attributed that to the fact that it’s difficult to build a humanoid bot entirely within the Chinese supply chain, where domestically made sensors and semiconductors can be harder to come by. Meanwhile, companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics keep promising humanoid industrial workers that’ll likely carry a steep price tag.

Maybe the biggest enabler of China’s robot boom, though, appears to be human labor. According to the Times, the country has produced a large workforce of skilled electricians and programmers who can install and maintain robots. America is slowly catching up on that front, with the employment of electricians booming—though there remains a massive programmer shortage unlikely to be eased by the fact that the Trump administration’s new, boosted fee for H1-B visa applicants will keep skilled labor overseas.

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September 28, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Dying Light: The Beast developers are working on fixes for broken day-night cycles and indoor rain

by admin September 22, 2025

Techland’s Dying Light: The Beast launched last week and is, sources say, “a good Dying Light game, and a fine open-world zombie game in general, full of crunchy combat and simple but satisfying number-go-up loops”. Being a new videogame, it also has some bugs. The most dramatic of these appear to be problems with its day/night cycle and weather system.

On the one hand, you’ve got rain falling inside buildings. I quite like this one, myself. I grew up with 3D first-person games that had slightly magic precipitation. I used to enjoy wobbling back and forth in entrances, trying to coax the weather into following me in-doors. I actually feel slightly dissatisfied when I play one of those fancy modern shooters in which water bounces off corrugated metal roofing as it should.

On the other hand, Techland say they’ve identified some problems with the day-night cycle, inasmuch as it sometimes stops cycling. This seems more urgent, because Dying Light: The Beast is a very different game in the dark. You’ll have to worry about Volatile zombos who are both resilient and inconveniently athletic, capable of chasing you all over the scenery while making frightful gargling noises in your ear. A few Redditors report encountering Volatiles in blazing sunlight. Others say they can’t seem to progress their worlds beyond mid-morning, which doesn’t seem quite as harrowing.

Techland are working on a PC hotfix for these things, but say they need to take their time testing the patch, because these particular issues aren’t that frequent and they don’t want to screw up anything else. “We already have a fix prepared, but because this bug only appears in rare situations, it takes a lot of extra testing,” reads a post on Steam from yesterday. “We’ll continue these tests over the weekend and most of Monday, and if no new occurrences of this issue appear, we’ll release the hotfix to players right away on PC. This is our goal.

“If, however, we still spot any occurrences of the bug, we might need to go back, adjust the fix, and then re-test it again,” the developers caution. “Thank you for your patience. We know these issues are frustrating to those who experience them, and we’re doing everything we can to deliver a stable solution as soon as possible.”

As is tradition, Techland’s promises have met with an avalanche of comments telling them that they’re prioritising the wrong fixes. Some people are mad about the frame rate, others complain about getting stuck in falling animations and quests not progressing. It doesn’t seem like there are any catastrophic problems with the current PC build, but I’m keen to hear your thoughts, as ever. As for myself, I’ve played about three hours of Dying Light: The Beast, including 30 minutes of preview time, and I think that’s probably enough for me. I like scampering over roofs but I just can’t be arsed re-killing zombies any more.

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September 22, 2025 0 comments

A screenshot from James Channel's video turning an Xbox Original portable

Product Reviews

YouTuber makes a ‘portable monstrosity’ Xbox using a handsaw, hot glue, and eight disk drives: ‘It’s working. It’s actually working!’

by admin September 22, 2025

I Made an Original Xbox Portable – YouTube

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It’s not often I find myself chuckling at DIY projects, but YouTuber James Channel got a hearty one from me the second he announced the portable Xbox he created by sawing one in half, slapping controllers on the side and hot-glueing a screen on top is capable of a whopping 9 minutes and forty seconds of battery life.

As spotted by Hackaday, the half-hour-long video of the YouTuber making a ‘portable’ Xbox Original is sort of like the lovechild of a mad scientist, a teacher, and a stream of consciousness. After grabbing an Xbox that isn’t working, James figures out that the DVD drive is flagging a hard drive issue, and fixes the DVD drive by replacing a tiny failing resistor with four separate, much bigger resistors, then hot-glueing them down.

This is subsequently followed by smacking the top of the Xbox until the disk tray comes out. Then, after fixing the original Xbox, James takes it apart again and starts throwing the bits of plastic he doesn’t need on the floor.

Taking apart this plastic is important to get the central motherboard and necessary components as small as possible, and he replaces the big unwieldy hard drive with a CompactFlash drive, saving a little more space. James tears apart an old iPod portable video dock to slap the speakers and screen onto his new handheld Xbox, and saws Xbox controllers in half to attach them to the side.

That’s the kind of video this is: one that demonstrates a depth of highly technical knowledge about engineering, thrown together with a handsaw, new transistors, and a glue gun. It’s all very chaotic in a way that sort of makes me want to try it myself.

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(Image credit: James Channel on YouTube)(Image credit: James Channel on YouTube)(Image credit: James Channel on YouTube)

After a three-week hiatus in the middle of the video, “because it was very mean to me and wouldn’t work properly”, James takes one last swing at finishing off the portable, and discovers that seven of the eight Xbox drives he bought to fix the device weren’t working, and that the IDE connector he had fitted didn’t work. “Other than the disk drive, it was almost all my fault.”

The final product is a “portable monstrosity” (according to the video’s description), with an open disk drive, sawed-off controllers glued to a motherboard, and it’s all held down with duct tape. The Xbox logo snapped off in the build, but it’s happily glued onto the final product with no downsides except perhaps a deep sigh from Phil Spencer.

So, if you want to play just under 10 minutes of Halo on the train while strangers stare at you (presumably admiring the glorious handheld you’re rocking), all you need is a hot glue gun, a handsaw, an old Xbox, an iPod video player, electronic tools, and seven or eight Xbox disk drives. Or you could just boot up the Steam Deck.

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September 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Here’s a game where you have to end parallel worlds that only takes 10 minutes to beat for “busy working adults”

by admin September 18, 2025

There is nothing inherently awful in a game being obscenely long, in fact it can be quite pleasurable to get to know a digital world so intimately. The issue is that I am an “adult” who has to “work” to pay my “bills” and “taxes,” so I don’t always have time for such things. How some of you manage to fit in multiple playthroughs of Persona games will always be an enigma to me. But, as I sit here in my despair, along comes 34EVERLAST, a game designed to be beaten in “as little as 10 minutes,” expressly designed for “busy working adults.”

34EVERLAST, according to its Steam page description, is an action puzzle game about the world ending, which I’m going to be incredibly real with you all for the moment, sounds like a very heavy topic for a game where you can beat it in 10 minutes. However! The way you apparently survive this is by ending the “‘worlds that refuse to die’ that are parallel to this world.” Not any lighter or smaller a concept, potentially compelling though.

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Gameplay works twofold. In the first instance, it’s a 3D action game, looking a little bit PlatinumGamesy in nature. You run, fall, and fight through various worlds on the brink of collapse, with what looks like some visual novel stroke manga elements mixed in for the story. There are also some puzzle elements, though how these manifest isn’t quite as clear.

As condensed as it is, conceptually I quite like some of the design choices it claims to make. The Steam page says that if you make it rain in one world, a desert in another might turn into a forest. You can die in boss fights on purpose too, to potentially “gain an advantage against another.” A smally, flashy package, yet one that, if successful, may have a good bit of substance to it.

While I am intrigued by the concept, it does also raise a bigger, perhaps more personally existential question about life. What are the reasons that we have so little time for hobbies we so greatly enjoy? I could probably name a few, but that’d be going into feature territory. I somewhat hope 34EVERLAST takes such a question into consideration in its story, rather than the 10 minute thing just being a bit of a gimmick.

There’s no exact release date for 34EVERLAST just yet, but it was confirmed by publisher Playism that it’s due out sometime in 2026. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions

by admin September 15, 2025

More than 200 contractors who worked on evaluating and improving Google’s AI products have been laid off without warning in at least two rounds of layoffs last month. The move comes amid an ongoing fight over pay and working conditions, according to workers who spoke to WIRED.

In the past few years, Google has outsourced its AI rating work—which includes evaluating, editing, or rewriting the Gemini chatbot’s response to make it sound more human and “intelligent”—to thousands of contractors employed by Hitachi-owned GlobalLogic and other outsourcing companies. Most raters working at GlobalLogic are based in the US and deal with English-language content. Just as content moderators help purge and classify content on social media, these workers use their expertise, skill, and judgment to teach chatbots and other AI products, including Google’s search summaries feature called AI Overviews—the right responses on a wide range of subjects. Workers allege that the latest cuts come amid attempts to quash their protests over issues including pay and job insecurity.

These workers, who often are hired because of their specialist knowledge, had to have either a master’s or a PhD to join the super rater program, and typically include writers, teachers, and people from creative fields.

“I was just cut off,” says Andrew Lauzon, who received an email with the news of his termination on August 15. “I asked for a reason, and they said ramp-down on the project—whatever that means.” He joined GlobalLogic in March 2024, where his work ranged from rating AI outputs to coming up with a variety of prompts to feed into the model.

Lauzon says this move by the company shows the precarity of such content moderation jobs. He alleges that GlobalLogic started regularly laying off its workers this year. “How are we supposed to feel secure in this employment when we know that we could go at any moment?” he added.

Workers still at the company claim they are increasingly concerned that they are being set up to replace themselves. According to internal documents viewed by WIRED, GlobalLogic seems to be using these human raters to train the Google AI system that could automatically rate the responses, with the aim of replacing them with AI.

At the same time, the company is also finding ways to get rid of current employees as it continues to hire new workers. In July, GlobalLogic made it mandatory for its workers in Austin, Texas, to return to office, according to a notice seen by WIRED. This has directly impacted several workers who either cannot afford to travel to the office due to financial constraints or cannot go to work due to disabilities or caregiving responsibilities.

Despite handling work they describe as skilled and high-stakes, eight workers who spoke to WIRED say they are being underpaid and suffer from lack of job security and unfavorable working conditions. These alleged conditions have impacted worker morale and challenged the ability for people to execute their jobs well, sources say. Some contractors attempted to unionize earlier this year but say those efforts were quashed. Now they allege that the company has retaliated against them. Two workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were unfairly fired, one due to bringing up wage transparency issues, and the other for advocating for himself and his coworkers.

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September 15, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Balatro’s 1.1 update won’t come out this year, so developer Localthunk can keep working at a healthy pace

by admin September 13, 2025

Balatro’s free 1.1 update won’t release in 2025 as originally planned, developer Localthunk has announced. There’s no new release date, but they say the update’ll arrive when they’ve been able to complete it, while continuing to work at a healthy pace.

This update was first announced by publishers Playstack in August last year, with Localthunk subsequently revealing in a chat with Bloomberg that it’ll feature, among other stuff, some new jokers and a revamp of the Matador card. The latter dishes out a cash boost whenever you play a hand that triggers a boss blind’s ability.

In a blog post about the decision to delay the update, Localthunk wrote that it all comes down to wanting to ensure they keep on taking care of their health and desire to keep on developing the roguelike deckbuilder in the way they work, as you can read below:

The truth is that I probably shouldn’t have announced any date for the 1.1 update at all. I’m a hobbyist developer at heart and I love to tinker. If you read my blog post about the Balatro timeline, you’ll know that since the game went public in the summer of 2023 I have become all too familiar with the crunch and stress that inherently come with professional game development. The struggles of pre-launch are detailed in that blog post, but unfortunately it didn’t stop at launch. Immediately after Balatro 1.0 came out in February 2024 I dove right in to a big balance patch (1.0.1), then into the mobile port of the game right after, and by the time the mobile version came out in late 2024 I was well and truly burned out.

I took a break from everything to do with the game for a few months until the start of 2025 when I very slowly eased myself back into the work. However, I chose to only work on the game like I did when the project began, as a hobbyist (a few hours per day, and not always on the 1.1 update), and it turns out that it’s a lot slower than working in crunch mode 12 hours per day like I was around launch.

So, they now plan to keep on working at that slower cadence. “Balatro 1.1 will still come out, of that I am certain, but the new timeline is going to be it’s done when it’s done,” the developer explained, “It will be a free update for everyone on all platforms when it’s ready, and it’ll probably need some adjustments when it’s out there in the world (like 1.0 did), but that won’t be this year.”

I’m glad to see Localthunk putting their health and happiness above all else. After all, given that Balatro’s well-earned (not just because it led Edwin to have to write about boobs) and rampant popularity isn’t going to evaporate into nothingness anytime soon, there’s no sense in trying to rush 1.1 out. Folks will still be here for it further down the line, and ready to whip out their decks the moment it drops.

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September 13, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

GOG wants to revive more classic Japanese games on PC: ‘Working with Japanese partners often requires demonstrating both technical capability and cultural understanding’

by admin September 12, 2025

They may not officially be called Good Old Games any more, but GOG still sells plenty of games that are both old and good alongside new releases like Hollow Knight: Silksong. Speaking to Automaton, senior PR rep Piotr Gnyp emphasized that by saying, “GOG has been doing this for well over a decade, and we’re constantly reaching out to secure iconic games. Sometimes, it takes years. Diablo came to GOG after almost a decade of conversations. Preservation often means knocking on the same doors again and again, hearing ‘no’ most of the time, until one day, it’s finally a ‘yes.'”

That paid off with GOG eventually getting to re-release a handful of Japanese games that were difficult to get hold of in the west like Silent Hill 4: The Room, some of the early Metal Gears, and the OG Castlevanias and Contras. Capcom eventually agreed to let GOG re-release Dino Crisis and the first three Resident Evils, though it took “time, persistence, and trust-building,” Gnyp says. A re-release of Breath of Fire 4 earlier this year was one of the stand-outs of GOG’s preservation initiative launched in late 2024.

“Working with Japanese partners often requires demonstrating both technical capability and cultural understanding. In this case, Capcom treated these launches as full new releases, so we followed a complete QA and certification process, just like we would for a brand-new game.”

Gnyp went on to say that, while sometimes a game’s creators or an external partner is involved at this stage, “in most cases, it’s GOG handling the porting and compatibility work.” Games in the GOG Preservation Program get some extra care and attention, whether they’re packaged with fan-made mods or otherwise altered to run on modern operating systems, have controller support, and generally embrace the modern world.

“Our internal tech team analyzes each game,” Gnyp said, “builds custom wrappers or tools when needed, and thoroughly tests the result. That’s how we make sure the experience is authentic but also practical for today’s players.”

Not every game that makes it to GOG gets to be preserved forever. The first two Warcraft games were pulled by Blizzard, as were Adult Swim games like Westerado and Fist Puncher. Sometimes GOG has to remove a game from sale when it’s delisted for a rights issue and sometimes it’s because the publisher wants to sell it on their own storefront, but recently there’s been a more censorious group trying to get games removed from sale. GOG responded by giving 13 horny games away for free.

“At GOG,” Gnyp said, “as a platform devoted to Good Old Games and videogame preservation, we see it as a game preservation issue. Every year, many games are disappearing, for various reasons. Every game that disappears from distribution is potentially lost to game preservation efforts. It is particularly worrying when games are potentially vanishing due to external pressure.”

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September 12, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Team Cherry is “working to improve” Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Chinese translation following player complaints

by admin September 9, 2025

Team Cherry said it is “working to improve” the simplified Chinese translation of Hollow Knight: Silksong.

While the highly anticipated sequel holds a Mostly Positive score on Steam, tens of thousands of Chinese players have left negative reviews, criticizing the Chinese localization for its lack of nuance and accuracy.

On X/Twitter, Team Cherry’s Matthew Griffin thanked players for their “feedback and support,” and said work on the translation would be ongoing “over the coming weeks.”

“To our Chinese speaking fans: We appreciate you letting us know about quality issues with the current Simplified Chinese translation of Hollow Knight: Silksong,” Griffin wrote.

“We’ll be working to improve the translation over the coming weeks. Thanks for your feedback and support.”

So far, just 38% of players who have left a review of the simplified Chinese version of the Silksong have left a positive review. Overall, the game sits at a Mostly Positive rating.

Hollow Knight: Silksong reached over half a million concurrent players a day after its release on September 4, 2025.

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September 9, 2025 0 comments