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Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. Its been a very busy week of fun game releases (next week will be too!), so lets get into some of them after a quick reflection on gaming while traveling.I love my Steam Deck. I really truly do. Its a fantastic machine. And yet when I brought it with me on a five-week trip over the holidays, I used it for barely an hour the entire time. That doesnt really justify the space and weight it takes up in my bag. The same holds true for my Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation Portal. Ill be leaving them all at home next time. Ill take a small controller (probably OhSnap's MCON) so I can play the odd game on my laptop or phone. Ill bring my Playdate as well. I adore that little yellow console, and I havent spent nearly enough time using it. I have a lot of neat-looking indie games to catch up on there (Diora looks particularly interesting). Im more likely to play something on a flight if its on a device I can pull out from my pocket. I just wish Panic had put a backlight in the Playdate. New releasesMassive Monster and publisher Devolver Digital gave Cult of the Lamb fans a whole bunch of reasons to jump back into the game this week with the arrival of the Woolhaven expansion. You'll need to get close to the end of the base game (though you don't need to beat the final boss) before you can experience what the DLC has to offer. It includes weather effects, a new mountain area with a pair of fresh dungeons, a ranching system (which allows you to raise animals as pets or for food) and much more.Folks who dig Cult of the Lamb seem to get really into the game. After a few years of free updates from Massive Monster, Woolhaven is a major expansion that's similar in scope to the base game, so it should keep fans busy for quite a while if they want to try everything. The DLC is out now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One. It costs $17 if you already have the base game.Inkle, the studio behind Overboard! and the wonderful A Highland Song is back with TR-49, a puzzle game with a World War II computer at its core. Over five decades, an array of books, letters and journals were fed into the machine as part of an effort to "crack the code of reality." But now you're tasked with finding and destroying one specific book before a timer runs out.It all seems rather mysterious. To give you a sense of what's going on here, Inkle says it drew inspiration from narrative deduction games like The Roottrees are Dead, The Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story, as well as audio dramas. I can't see myself having the time or patience to figure out the enigma of this particular machine (I imagine many players will need a notebook for this one), but I'm intrigued enough to at least watch a Let's Play at some point. You can experience this mystery for yourself on Steam (normally $7, but there's a 10 percent launch discount until January 28).Another week, another Metroidvania, but MIO: Memories in Orbit has a more striking art style than most. This game from Douze Diximes and publisher Focus Entertainment debuted to positive reviews this week. After the AI caretakers on a forgotten spaceship stop working, you'll have to help the robot MIO explore the spacecraft "to revive its lost memories" and save it from doom. Naturally, you'll discover some new abilities along the way, including a grappling hook and air gliding.MIO: Memories in Orbit is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store for $20 (with a 10 percent launch discount on some platforms). You can also check it out via Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.Perfect Tides: Station to Station
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In Big Tech's never-ending quest to increase AI adoption, Google has unveiled a meme generator. The new Google Photos feature, Me Meme, lets you create personalized memes starring a synthetic version of you.Google describes Me Meme as "a simple way to explore with your photos and create content that's ready to share with friends and family." You can choose from a variety of templates or "upload your own funny picture" to use in their place.The feature isn't live for everyone yet, so you may not yet have access to it. (A Google representative told TechCrunch that the feature will roll out to Android and iOS users over the coming weeks.) But once it arrives, you can use it in the Google Photos app by tapping Create (at the bottom of the screen), then Me Meme. It will then ask you to choose a template and add a reference photo. Theres an option to regenerate it if you dont like the result.Google says Me Meme works best with well-lit, focused and front-facing portrait photos. "This feature is still experimental, so generated images may not perfectly match the original photo," the company warns.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-photos-can-now-turn-you-into-a-meme-213930935.html?src=rss
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Meta is being sued by Solos, a rival smart glasses maker, for infringing on its patents, Bloomberg reports. Solos is seeking "multiple billions of dollars" in damages and an injunction that could prevent Meta from selling its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses as part of the lawsuit.Solos claims that Meta's Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer Gen 1 smart glasses violate multiple patents covering "core technologies in the field of smart eyewear." While less well known than Meta and its partner EssilorLuxottica, Solos sells multiple pairs of glasses with similar features to what Meta offers. For example, the company's AirGo A5 glasses lets you control music playback and automatically translate speech into different languages, and integrates ChatGPT for answering questions and searching the web.Beyond the product similarities, Solos claims that Meta was able to copy its patents because Oakley (an EssilorLuxottica subsidiary) and Meta employees had insights into the company's products and road map. Solos says that in 2015, Oakley employees were introduced to the company's smart glasses tech, and were even given a pair of Solos glasses for testing in 2019. Solos also says that a MIT Sloan Fellow who researched the company's products and later became a product manager at Meta, brought knowledge of the company to her role. According to the logic of Solos' lawsuit, by the time Meta and EssilorLuxottica were selling their own smart glasses, "both sides had accumulated years of direct, senior-level and increasingly detailed knowledge of Solos' smart glasses technology."Engadget has asked both Meta and EssilorLuxottica to comment on Solos' claims. We'll update this article if we hear back.While fewer people own Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses than use Instagram, Meta considers the wearable one of its few hardware success stories. The company is so convinced it can make smart glasses happen that it recently restructured its Reality Labs division to focus on AI hardware like smart glasses and hopefully build on its success. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/a-rival-smart-glasses-company-is-suing-meta-over-its-ray-ban-products-205000997.html?src=rss
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