Why won’t The Callisto Protocol just let me fight zombies?

Image: Krafton The world is full of mediocre video games, but occasionally there’s a game that makes me actually mad. It’s usually something I have high hopes for — a particularly creative idea or a genre I wish more developers were experimenting with. It’s often something whose priorities seem painfully and dramatically misplaced. The Callisto Protocol — a survival horror game released last week — is both.
The Callisto Protocol’s design was spearheaded

Garmin’s unassuming tacker is daintier than most smartwatches, but is that really such a bad thing? | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge As an avid runner, I understand the appeal of tracking fitness metrics. That said, in recent weeks, I’ve also grown annoyed with the onslaught of notifications I receive on my wrist via my Apple Watch Series 7, which I find to be incredibly distracting. Thankfully, if you’re like me, Garmin’s back-to-basics Lily 2 is on sale at

How the “Add to Chromebook” badge looks like on websites. | Image: Google Google is making a new “Add to Chromebook” badge that’s designed to make it easier for ChromeOS users to find and install progressive web apps (PWAs) and Android apps. The badge links directly to the web app you’re looking to install or to the Google Play Store (if it’s an Android app), 9to5Google reports.
In a Google I/O session video about ChromeOS, the presenter says many people

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images A Wisconsin software engineer was arrested on Monday for allegedly creating and distributing thousands of AI-generated images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).Court documents describe Steven Anderegg as “extremely technologically savvy,” with a background in computer science and “decades of experience in software engineering.” Anderegg, 42, is accused of sending AI-generated images of naked minors t

Image: Linaro With Microsoft’s new Surfaces leading a wave of Copilot Plus PCs powered by Arm chips that could reshape our expectations of Windows laptops, you might be wondering: do they game?
We’d already seen a few examples, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control — but at Build, Microsoft and Qualcomm just revealed a new website with far more examples. WorksOnWoA.com has apparently already tested 1,481 games on the Surface Laptop and other devices with Arm-based Snapdragon X

The wireless Yale Keypad Touch provides fingerprint and key code access for the new Yale Approach lock and several August smart locks. | Image: Yale August makes excellent smart locks, but careful observers may have noticed that the company hasn’t released any new hardware in four years. Owners of August locks may be relieved to know that a new wireless keypad finally brings them the option of fingerprint unlocking.
The Yale Keypad Touch is a fingerprint-enabled wireless keypad for Yale an

A chunky electric spoon for your chunky low-sodium foods. | Image: Kirin If you’re cutting salt out of your diet, either for medical reasons or just trying to be healthy, low-sodium foods can be a letdown. But don’t despair — Japanese company Kirin claims to have a solution in its Electric Salt Spoon, which uses electrodes to electrify your tongue to give you a little salty shock.The idea, as Reuters puts it, is that it passes a small electric current to “concentrate sodi

Image: Square Enix I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately... like, should I go back and replay the Kingdom Hearts series or not? Fortunately, Square Enix has made this decision trivial with the announcement that it’s releasing the series on Steam on June 13th. To celebrate, and perhaps destabilize an entire generation of adults for whom the first Kingdom Hearts trailer was a transformative experience (aka, me), a trailer was released with a brand-new recording of Hikaru Utada&r

Recall, one of Windows’ new AI features, on a Surface Laptop. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft’s new Windows on Arm push is a milestone moment. It’s taken nearly five years to get to the point where the software maker is confident it has the upper hand over the MacBook Air on performance, battery life, and app compatibility.
But behind the scenes, Microsoft has been working on something even bigger. While Microsoft has spent years working toward an Arm transition

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is adding a new Advanced Paste feature to PowerToys for Windows 11 that can convert your clipboard content on the fly with the power of AI. The new feature can help people speed up their workflows by doing things like copying code in one language and pasting it in another, although its best tricks require OpenAI API credits.
Advanced Paste is included in PowerToys version 0.81 and, once enabled, can be activated with a special key command: Windows Key + Shift +

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2024. | Screenshot: YouTube Microsoft had a lot to say about Windows and AI — and a little to say about custom emoji — during the Build 2024 keynote. The company, like just about everyone else in the industry, is charging hard at cramming AI into every nook and cranny it can find. That means Copilot watching your screen to help you play Minecraft or giving you AI agent co-workers.
The whole event was over two hours long, but you can catch the high

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge You can already beam your flat Windows desktop and its VR games onto your Meta Quest headset — but what if Windows could send HoloLens-like 3D apps and digital objects to the headset, too?At Build, Microsoft has just announced “Windows Volumetric Apps on Meta Quest,” a way to “extend Windows apps into 3D space.”Details are slim, but the company showed off a digital exploded 3D view of an Xbox controller from the perspective o

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is working on adding multimodal inputs to its Grok chatbot, according to public developer documents. What this means is that, soon, users may be able to upload photos to Grok and receive text-based answers.
In the developer documents, a sample Python script demonstrates how developers can use the xAI software development kit library to generate a response based on both text and images. This script reads a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Here’s one more way to stay on top of your favorite programming projects: have them sync to the same File Explorer you already use to navigate your hard drive in Windows.At Build, Microsoft now says it’s adding native version control to File Explorer by integrating systems like Git, letting you see new changes and comments directly from the app. Image: Microsoft
Here’s a cropped and zoomed version of the provided screenshot so you can get

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft launched a range of Copilot Plus PCs yesterday that includes new AI features built directly into Windows 11. Behind the scenes, the company now has more than 40 AI models running on Windows 11 thanks to a new Windows Copilot Runtime that will also allow developers to use these models for their apps.
At Microsoft Build today, the company is providing a lot more details about exactly how this Windows Copilot Runtime works. The runtime includes a library

The stylish Sonos Ace come in black and white. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge At long last, the eagerly anticipated Sonos Ace have arrived. On Tuesday, the company announced that its first pair of wireless headphones will be available on June 5th. Even better, you can already preorder them ahead of launch for $449.
We’re still testing the Sonos Ace, but in our limited time playing around with them during a recent demo session, we came away impressed. The plush noise-canceling headphone

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images Like parent company Disney, Pixar is now laying off employees as part of Bob Iger’s big plan to get the company’s spending under control.
According to Variety, Deadline, and The Hollywood Reporter, Pixar is laying off 175 staffers — 14 percent of its workforce — as it shifts its focus back to projects meant for theatrical rather than streaming releases. These layoffs come months after Disney began dismissing employees by the thousan

Illustration: The Verge Google only just rolled out AI summaries in search results — and now they’re getting ads. In an update on Tuesday, Google says it will soon start testing search and shopping ads within AI overviews for users in the US.
In the example shared by Google, the search engine’s AI overview lists a response to the question: “how do I get wrinkles out of clothes?” Beneath the AI-generated suggestions, there’s a new “Sponsored” sectio

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge It seems no industry is safe from consolidation, and the latest target is gaming media. IGN Entertainment has acquired the website portfolio of UK publisher Gamer Network, which operates a number of beloved games-focused publications. That list includes Gamesindustry.biz, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, and the tabletop site Dicebreaker. The network also holds shares in sites like Nintendo Life and Digital Foundry.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Game

The Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows in a transparent shell; most if not all units will be black. | Image: Qualcomm Excited for an era of long-lasting powerful Windows laptops with Arm chips and 45 TOPS for AI but would rather pay less and plug into the wall? Qualcomm has just revealed a Mac Mini-esque box that’s ostensibly just for developers.The new $899.99 “Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows” houses the most powerful of Qualcomm’s lineup of Snapdragon X Elite chips — t

Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop could be the most impressive laptop the company has ever made. It has a modern chassis with thin display bezels and a new Arm-based CPU that might just give Apple laptops a run for their money when it comes to performance. That’s no mean feat, considering Apple’s striking lead since 2020, but we won’t know how it compares until we get a Surface Laptop in hand. That didn’t stop me from diving deep on their specs to see

Image: The Verge Microsoft will soon allow businesses and developers to build AI-powered Copilots that can work like virtual employees and perform tasks automatically. Instead of Copilot sitting idle waiting for queries, it will be able to do things like monitor email inboxes and automate a series of tasks or data entry that employees normally have to do manually.
It’s a big change in the behavior of Copilot in what the industry commonly calls AI agents, or the ability for chatbots to inte

Microsoft is adding custom emoji to Teams. | Image: The Verge Microsoft is adding a new feature to its Teams communications platform that enables users to upload their own custom emoji to use in reactions and messages. Announced during its Build developer conference on Tuesday, Microsoft says the new custom emoji will be available to try next month via the Teams public preview, with the goal of helping Teams users collaborate and express themselves “more creatively and authentically.&rdquo

Image: The Verge Microsoft Edge will soon offer real-time video translation on sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Coursera, and more. As part of this year’s Build event, Microsoft announced that the new AI-powered feature will be able to translate spoken content through both dubbing and subtitles live as you’re watching it.
So far, the feature supports the translation of Spanish into English as well as the translation of English to German, Hindi, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. In addition

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft announced a new version of its small language model, Phi-3, which can look at images and tell you what’s in them.
Phi-3-vision is a multimodal model — aka it can read both text and images — and is best used on mobile devices. Microsoft says Phi-3-vision, now available on preview, is a 4.2 billion parameter model (parameters refer to how complex a model is and how much of its training it understands) that can do general visual reasoning tasks li