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Theres yet another Nintendo Direct coming our way, which is the third in less than a month. This one is entirely focused on the upcoming Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World. It starts at 9AM ET and should last around 15 minutes. Its livestreaming on Nintendos YouTube page, but mega-fans can also open up that recently-launched Nintendo Today! app to follow along. We are embedding the YouTube link, so feel free to keep this tab open. We have no idea what information Nintendo is going to spring on us as part of this Direct presentation. The company has already released a ton of info about Mario Kart World. Its an open-world racer that can accommodate 24 plays at the same time. However, there are still a couple of unknowns. Most of these involve the open-world aspect. Are there any rewards for exploration? Are there secret tracks that can only be unlocked by finding them? Can the same be said for unlockable characters? Again, we dont know, but hope springs eternal. Theres also the $80 elephant in the room. The exorbitant retail price of Mario Kart World has sent many fans into a tailspin. Thats a whole lot of money, and Nintendo only recently-released its first-ever $70 game. Theres a minuscule chance that the company will throw us a bone and knock $10 off the asking price, but this is highly unlikely given current economic uncertainty. At the very least, we could get some new data regarding the preorder date for US customers. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/heres-how-to-watch-the-mario-kart-focused-nintendo-direct-184825796.html?src=rss
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Microsoft just announced that Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One owners can now stream select games they own directly from the console. This feature is exclusive to Game Pass Ultimate members. Whats the point of this? Its intended to save both time and hard drive space. Gamers can jump right in immediately, without having to download and install a giant file. It doesnt work with every game. As of this writing, there are over 100 titles that enable this feature. They include standouts like Assassins Creed Shadows, Animal Well, Baldurs Gate 3 and Hogwarts Legacy, among others. Xbox All you have to do is peruse your library and look for the cloud icon accompanying a game. Playable titles can also be filtered in search. The Store app even displays this icon, allowing you to start playing as soon as you hand over some digital cash. Xbox players could already do this on devices outside of an official console. Throughout the past few months, the feature has been popping up on select smart TVs, Amazon Fire TVs and Meta Quest VR headsets. It also works on browser-supported devices like PCs, tablets and smartphones. A beta test for Xbox consoles started in December. Microsoft also just announced that backward compatible games from the Xbox and Xbox 360 will now be streamable via remote play across all supported devices. That significantly increases the library of available titles. Its worth noting that the company has removed remote play from the official Xbox app on mobile, but it still works via browsers.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-users-can-now-stream-games-they-own-on-their-consoles-173739687.html?src=rss
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Bloober Team has provided a first proper look at gameplay for its latest project, Cronos: The New Dawn, after a brief tease at the end of the initial reveal in October. The trailer has a very Dead Space-like feel, which shouldn't be too surprising given that this is a third-person survival horror game, but that's hardly a bad thing. There appear to be some other influences at play here, and there's one particular feature that seems quite terrifying. The game takes place across two time periods, a decayed post-apocalyptic future and 1980s-era Poland. As a Traveller, you're sent back in time to rescue certain people before they die in an apocalypse. To do that, you'll need to battle creatures known as Orphans, which Bloober describes as "twisted, body-horror monstrosities born from humanitys darkest nightmares." But you'll need to be sure to burn the bodies of fallen monsters. If you don't, that can spell a whole heap of trouble. Living Orphans can absorb the bodies of their fallen ilk. This so-called Merging evolves the creatures. They become fast, stronger and tougher to take down, and they gain new abilities to boot. So yeah, you'll want to torch any Orphans that you take out. There's a lot going on elsewhere in the trailer. Along with Dead Space, the action and visuals evoke games like The Last of Us Part 2 (if you know, you know), Returnal, Bioshock and Control not least because of the shifting, fractured Brutalist architecture. The creature designs are reminiscent of those in last year's Silent Hill 2 remake, a game that Bloober Team just happens to be behind. Those aren't criticisms in any way. There's nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from others and fashioning them into something new. Cronos: The New Dawn is looking pretty compelling, and it's already got a spot on my wishlist. Cronos: The New Dawn is slated to arrive later this year. It's coming to Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cronos-the-new-dawn-seems-to-smush-dead-space-and-control-together-in-a-good-way-172611962.html?src=rss
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X DMs may soon be kaput. On Tuesday, a company software engineer posted on the platform that "the whole entire DM's will be gone soon." But the former Twitter isn't getting rid of messaging; the company is said to be replacing it with a full-fledged chatting system called XChat. X Software Engineer Zach Warunek replied to another user who asked whether XChat would replace message requests. "No, not like request messages but like the whole entire DM's will be gone soon," the engineer replied. Engadget contacted Warunek to ask about a timeframe for the feature, and we'll update this article if we hear back. No, not like request messages but like the whole entire DMs will be gone soon Zach Warunek (@ZachWarunek) April 16, 2025 These aren't the first rumors we've seen about XChat. Early this year, the X account @xDaily posted a screenshot showing an XChat icon instead of Messages in the platform's sidebar. In February, owner Elon Musk wrote that, within a few months, he would discontinue his phone number and only use X for texts and calls. Then, @swak_12 (via Android Headlines) posted screenshots this month showing a PIN verification screen (similar to secure messaging apps like Signal) for XChat. Yet another alleged leak posted on Wednesday by @P4mui includes more screenshots and a list of XChat features, including fully encrypted end-to-end messaging, file transfers and the ability to unread messages and delete individual ones for all users. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-may-soon-replace-dms-with-its-upcoming-chat-platform-171006540.html?src=rss
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A mere two days after announcing GPT-4.1, OpenAI is releasing not one but two new models. The company today announced the public availability of o3 and o4-mini. Of the former, OpenAI says o3 is its most advanced reasoning model yet, with it showing "strong performance" in coding, math and science tasks. As for o4-mini, OpenAI is billing it as a lower cost alternative that still delivers "impressive results" across those same fields. More notably, both models offer novel capabilities not found in OpenAI's past systems. For first time, the company's reasoning models can use and combine all of the tools available in ChatGPT, including web browsing and image generation. The company says this capability allows o3 and o4-mini solve challenging, multi-step problems more effectively, and "take real steps toward acting independently." At the same time, o3 and o4-mini can not just see images, but also interpret and "think" about them in a way that significantly extends their visual processing capabilities. For instance, you can upload images of whiteboards, diagrams or sketches even poor quality ones and the new models will understand them. They can also adjust the images as part of how they reason. "The combined power of state-of-the-art reasoning with full tool access translates into significantly stronger performance across academic benchmarks and real-world tasks, setting a new standard in both intelligence and usefulness," says OpenAI. Separately, OpenAI is releasing a new coding agent ( la Claude Code) named Codex CLI. It's designed to give developers a minimal interface they can use to link OpenAI's models with their local code. Out of the box, it works with o3 and o4-mini, with support for GPT-4.1 on the way. Today's announcement comes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company was changing course on the roadmap he detailed in February. At the time, Altman indicated OpenAI would not release o3, which the company first previewed late last year, as a standalone product. However, at the start of April, he announced a "change of plans," noting OpenAI was moving forward with the release of o3 and o4-mini. "There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the most exciting one is that we are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally though," he wrote on X. "We also found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything. and we want to make sure we have enough capacity to support what we expect to be unprecedented demand." That means the streamlining Altman promised in February will likely need to wait until at least the release of GPT-5, which he said would arrive sometime in the next "few months." In the meantime, ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team users can begin using o3 and o4-mini starting today. Sometime in the next few weeks, OpenAI will bring online o3-pro, an even more powerful version of its flagship reasoning model, and make it available to Pro subscribers. For the time being, those users can continue to use o1-pro. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openais-new-o3-and-o4-mini-models-are-all-about-thinking-with-images-170043465.html?src=rss
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