Developer Rebellion is perhaps best known for the Sniper Elite series, but the UK's studio latest release, Atomfall, is now the developer's "most successful launch" in its 32-year history. Atomfall launched in full on March 27 and reached 1 million players over its first weekend, climbing further to more than 1.5 million so far. The post-apocalyptic survival game was inspired by the real-world Windscale nuclear incident in the 1950s. The game has been referred to by some as "British Fallout.""To have surpassed the 1 million players in such a short space of time speaks volumes for the creativity and dedication of the entire team here at Rebellion," the developer's CEO and co-founder, Jason Kingsley, said in a statement. "Our size and stability mean that we can take risks to create something as different as Atomfall. Happily, that risk is paying off."Continue Reading at GameSpot

Shadow Labyrinth Standard Edition $30 | Releases July 18 Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Best Buy Preorder at Walmart Preorder at Target Shadow Labyrinth Secret Edition $60 | Releases July 18 Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Best Buy Preorder at Walmart Preorder at Target Pac-Man has starred in many different types of games since becoming an arcade legend, but Bandai Namco's upcoming metroidvania might be the weirdest game yet. The iconic hero with an insatiable appetite will star alongside a swordsman in Shadow Labyrinth, an action-oriented side-scroller with a T for Teen ESRB rating. During a Nintendo Direct in March, Bandai Namco announced that Shadow Labyrinth will release on July 18 for Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Preorders are live now for three physical editions, including a limited Secret Edition that comes with multiple collectibles for only $60.Shadow Labyrinth Secret Edition Continue Reading at GameSpot

On paper, a single-player Avengers ensemble game with Captain America, Thor, and Hulk would be all that die-hard fans desire since itd mean they get to play as their favorite characters and indulge in fantastic powers. Thered be obvious balancing requirements to ensure that each character that players swap to is unique and fun to play as, but the unmistakable draw would certainly be how iconic each character isa route Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is boldly declining.

The official website of the anime adaptation of Iro Aida's Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun manga revealed on Sunday that the sequel to the second season of the anime is already in the works, and is set to premiere this July, forming part of the Spring 2025 anime season. The second season of Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun premiered on January 12, with Crunchyroll streaming the new season of the series as it aired in Japan during the Winter 2025 anime season.

By TREVOR HOGGImages courtesy of Arenamedia Pty Ltd. and IFC Films.Along with being surrounded by snail memorabilia, Grace finds herself responsible for an ever-growing population of frisky guinea pigs.Making the most of the global shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot mapped out what would become an Oscar-nominee favorite for Best Animated Feature and an Annecy winner. Memoir of a Snail tells the tale of Grace, a hoarder of snail memorabilia who longs to be reunited with her twin brother Gilbert while experiencing the trials and tribulations of becoming an adult. Previously, Elliot made his feature film directorial debut in 2009 with Mary and Max, but interestingly, the methodology and technology between the two productions have not altered much.The technology has changed, states Adam Elliot, Producer, Director, Production Designer and Writer. Dragonframe is a wonderful tool. The animators love it because they can do all sorts of tricks, and its got all sorts of bells and whistles. I apply many restrictions on my animators and try to get them not to rely on the software too much, animate from intuition and celebrate happy accidents. We have LED lights now, so the stages arent as hot. The globes dont burn out as quickly. Sound editing and design are far more digitized. The sound libraries are bigger. Cameras have gotten higher megapixels, so the resolution is much higher. Having said all that, theyre just tools. We still try to animate in a traditional manner. Everything in front of the camera is done traditionally. We dont do any CGI additions. However, we certainly do cleanup digitally, like removing rigs. All our special effects, like fire, rain and water, are all handmade. The fire is yellow cellophane. We celebrate the old, but we certainly embrace the new.Pinky helps Grace to break out of her shell and experience life.We can say to the audience that you can hold in your hand every prop and character you have just seen. However, there was a lot of post-production to make it look that way! There were roughly 1,500 storyboard panels. Then I drew and designed all of the characters [200], most of the props [5,000 to 7,000] and sets [200]. I drew by hand because I was in lockdown during COVID-19 and had a lot of time!Adam Elliot, Producer, Director, Production Designer and WriterVisual effects have come a long way, allowing for more creative freedom. In the old days, we would use fishing line to have things airborne, and now we can have a big metal rod and the visual effects artists remove that digitally, Elliot notes. Thats about it. Its just cleanup. There is a lot of compositing. For elements like fire, we do it on a piece of glass with the camera looking down, often with a greenscreen background, then we composite that in post. We had 600 visual effects shots in the film, and a lot of money spent on the visual effects, but it was mostly basic stuff. One of the more complex effects was the burning church. Those flames are recycled and layered, Elliot explains. We do one set of flames, then cut, paste and layer them. The claim is that we can say to the audience that you can hold in your hand every prop and character you have just seen. However, there was a lot of post-production to make it look that way! Every shot was storyboarded. There were roughly 1,500 storyboard panels. Then I drew and designed all of the characters [200], most of the props [5,000 to 7,000] and sets[200]. I drew by hand because I was in lockdown during COVID-19 and had a lot of time!Director Adam Elliot works on the adult Grace puppet surrounded by her character designs.The most dynamic character is Pinky, who required a selection of heads.Grace doubles up on Chiko Rolls, inspired by the Chinese spring roll and first sold in Australia in 1951 as the Chicken Roll despite not actually containing chicken.The puppets had to reflect the stages and ages the characters go through, such as Grace having a scar caused by having her cleft palate surgically removed.1,600 storyboards were created by Adam Elliot with each one representing a shot in the film.Compositing was only used where necessary. Most of the skies you see in the film were on set on giant canvases, Elliot remarks. There were only one or two skies or maybe more where we did greenscreen then composited in one of the canvas skies. It is a wonderful tool that now liberates us as stop-motion animators. When I left film school in 1996, I was told I was pursuing a dying art form and that stop motion would be obliterated by CGI. The complete opposite has happened. CGI and digital tools have liberated us. You have to be careful not to get carried away. There is a hybrid look that has gone a bit far, and now with 3D printers, too. Some of these stop-motion films almost look computer-animated because theyre so slick. Were trying to celebrate the lumps and bumps, brushstrokes, and fingerprints on the clay.The design of the characters was based on what Elliot was able to accomplish in his one-room apartment. Adam started making everything out of Apoxie Sculpt, which is this material that sculpts like clay, then goes rock-hard in about an hour, explains Animation Supervisor John Lewis. We had stylized the characters around the fact that they were solid and budgeted around it as well. Creating a characters costume out of real fabric or silicone that can bend is time-consuming and expensive. Adam wanted us to have these rock-hard-solid puppets. Theyre like statues; in some sense, thats easy because it restricts what the puppet can do. Sometimes, when you dont move the head, the ear clunks into the shoulder, and you cant move it where you want it to move, or body movements are stiffer or different than how you might move it otherwise. Adam wrote walking out of the film as a stylistic and budgetary choice. If we did have characters walking full frame where you can see their feet, we would have had to have legs that could bend and pants. Instead, we cropped it with the camera, removed the legs and put a little up-and-down rig underneath, which was a cheap microscope stand. Its about the same size as the puppets legs. We put that on the table and slide the character along; thats how we get dynamic movement.Reflections of the puppet rig appeared in the metal tray containing the pineapple chunks and had to be painted out.Voiceover narrative figures prominently in the storytelling. Every shot is cut into the animatic so it has the piece of narration that goes with it as well as the music ideally. Some of that [narration] is scratch and some of it is filled with the real stuff as we go, Lewis remarks. You will listen to the narration for every shot that is only five to 10 seconds long. You will time your animation out and express your character differently, depending on what the narrator is saying. They play into each other. A rhythm gets established with the animation. Each character will start to lend itself to different expressions and movements. The actors voice is a huge guide for that. As an animator, you find that some things are working and keep doing them. Some things dont work, so you might cut back. Between all the animators, we talk and look at each others work. Slowly, a language of that character will develop. Because Grace doesnt have confidence, shes often got her hands tucked up to her chest, has her arms in and holds herself tightly. I talked to the animators about how much tension was in the character. Gilbert is bolder, so hes more likely to be striking big poses with his arms out. Adam has nuanced rules about how he likes each character to look and move when it comes to the blinks and shapes of their eyelids. Certain things make characters look like Adam Elliot characters.A surreal moment is when Gilbert and Grace appear inside their mothers womb, which serves to emphasize the strong bond that exists between the siblings.Pinky also required a wide variety of mouths.One of the nine stages had an under-camera rig where a camera could swing down onto a glass tabletop. Every time an animator had some downtime, they would go onto that stage and do a bit of effects work, explains Production Manager and VFX Supervisor Braiden Asciak. The fire was orange and yellow cellophane,and the smoke was cottonwood. They would do these effects,sometimes to the shot. Theyd load the shot we had completed into Dragonframe as a reference and animate those effects elements on top of the animation they had already animated prior. It meant that quite a few of the elements we shot were specific to the shot. However, we could reuse certain elements from those other shots. The visual effects team consisted of Asciak, Visual Effects Editor Belinda Fithie, Gemila Iezzi [Post Producer at Soundfirm) and four to five digital artists at Soundfirm. They were simple 2D visual effects, so we didnt need Maya or Houdini. The visual effects artists mostly used Nuke or DaVinci Resolve Fusion [a node-based workflow built into Resolve with 2D and 3D tools].Pinky does her burlesque dance routine.Rather than use fabric, all the costumes were sculpted and painted onto the puppets.The church burning-down sequence was challenging but rewarding. Once we shot all the plates we needed throughout that sequence, we put it into the timeline. Everything was worked out together, Asciak states. How was Gilbert going to move around that church? Then we slowly animated the effects elements. Once we finished production, John Lewis spent several weeks doing as many effects elements as possible. We built an extensive effects library of cellophane fire, and he did two big shots one of Gilbert in the church and did some compositing in Adobe After Effects himself. Then, John did an exterior shotof the church on fire with the huge fire bursting out of the roof. When John left, it was up to me to layer out the rest of that sequence and ensure continuity. I was doing everything in DaVinci Resolve. Some shots have 15 layers of fire, smoke and embers to try to get it right to a level that Adam was happy with, and it looked compositionally right.Creating a sense of peril was critical for the moment Gilbert attempted to rescue a snail in the middle of a busy road. We had a number of cars animated on greenscreen so we could composite those in later, Asciak reveals. But the angle of those plates wasnt matching the shots. Adam wanted the cars going in from the left and out from theright to speed by. You had to match that up with the performance to avoid covering the key moments of a laugh or yell. I spent a good two-to-three weeks trying to time all those cars and each of those shots. Also, we didnt have any sound at that point, so the sound was done to the visual effects work. I felt like we needed to ampup the intensity of that sequence and bolster it with a lot of cars. One way of doing that was [to transition between shots] using side swipes with the light poles, or there was a van that drove by. That was a good way to improve the cutting in the sequence to make it flow and feel chaotic.Preparing for the scene where Grace and Ken get married with Pinky in attendance.Close attention had to be paid to ensure all the rigs were painted out. If there was an element of the shot before the rig appeared, then we wouldnt need a clean plate, Asciak states. But for something like Pinky tap-dancing on a table doing the burlesque, we had to go frame-by-frame and paint out that rig from the mirror. In some cases, its a little sliver of a rig. When shes in the pineapple suit and holding out the plate of pineapple chunks, there is a rig that is like a straight line behind her. If you werent paying attention, you probably wouldnt have noticed, but there was a sliver of a rig, and even the visual effects artists asked, Where is the rig?Exploring the facial expressions of Grace.Exploring the facial expressions of Grace and Gilberts father Percy.Exploring the facial expressions of Pinky with her oversized eyeglasses.Graces bedroom had the most scenes, which were shot chronologically. That set was there for 16 weeks, over half of the shoot period. It goes from being empty to being full of [snail memorabilia], then we return to it being empty. When Grace is sitting in her bed and says she is surrounded by her snail fortress and the camera pulls out, as soon as we finished that shot, we pulled everyone into the kitchen where we had the TV screening room. We watched that shot together for the first time, and it was magical. At that point, we knew we had something on our hands, as we could clearly see the work of the art, animation, lighting and camera departments.The set that had the most scenes was Graces bedroom.

By TREVOR HOGGDenis Villeneuve converses with DP Greig Fraser while making Dune: Part Two. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)In the digital age, where photorealism is achievable virtually and is getting further refined with machine learning, the visual effects industry finds itself being viewed as a double-edged sword. Whenused properly, visual effects are interwoven into a cinematic vision that could not be achieved otherwise and, when deployed badly, an instrument of laziness. This perception has been accentuated by the global depository of human knowledge and ignorance known as the Internet. In the middle of all this is a question of whether there is an actual trend of filmmakers favoring practical effects, or is it simply a marketing ploy taking advantage of public opinion?Having practical elements for actors to interact with is an essential part of the filmmaking process for Denis Villeneuve. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)Like with any new technology, people went a bit overboard with CGI. CGI is powerful, but it can have some limits, states director Denis Villeneuve who has created everything from a talking fishin Maelstrm, a spider in a closet in Enemy, a sandworm ride in Dune: Part Two and a traffic-congested highway in Sicario. Its all about the talents of the artists youre working with. Im not the only one. Many filmmakers realize its a balance, and the more you can capture in-camera, the better. A great visual effects supervisor will tell you the same. The pendulum is going more towards the center, in the right way, between what you can capture in-camera and what you can improve with CGI. If it was up to me, there would be no behind-the-scenes. I feel like you spend years trying to create magic, specifically with CGI, which is so delicate and fragile thatit can quickly look silly. So much work has been done to make it look real that Im always sad when we show behind the curtain. Villeneuve is not entirely against the idea of unmasking the illusion as it helps to inform and inspire the legendary filmmakers of tomorrow. When I was a kid, I read Cinefex and was excitedto know how the movie had been made, but it was a specialized publication. It wasnt wide-open clips that can be seen by millions. It was something that if you were a dedicated nerd who wanted to know about it, you had to dig for the information, but now it is spread all over the place.One of the hardest tasks for MPC was matching digital soldiers with the on-set extras in the battle sequences for Napoleon. (Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures)Having real planes shot grounded the camerawork, which was reflected in visual effects for Top Gun: Maverick. (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures)There is this need for directors or studios to diminish the visual effects departments and put forth, We did it all in camera, notes Bryan Grill, Production VFX Supervisor for Beverly Hills Cop:Axel F, when we all know thats not the case. You put your best foot forward to do stunts and practical effects, but theres always something in there that needs some clean-up or enhancement. It has been this juxtaposition. Youve had superhero movies, which are nothing but visual effects, environments and multi-dimensions. Its overbearing. Then you have the other side, which is traditional filmmaking. Along with Eddie Murphy reprising his role of the quick-witted rogue detective named Axel Foley for the fourth time, an effort was made to recapture the 1980s roots of the franchise. What always stuck with me about the original Beverly Hills Cop was the opening scene where the truck is barreling down, hitting car after car. One of my other favorite movies from thatera was The Blues Brothers, with all of the police cars hitting each other and falling off the bridges. It was a carnage of special effects. Thats what they wanted to bring into this version as well, and they damaged a lot of cars! There were at least 20 more cars that didnt make the edit that got destroyed. The filmmakers went all out to relive and show the next generation of that type of movie.Keeping an open communication with the various departments was critical in achieving a coherent and consistent look for Barbie. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)Allowing enough time for the various crafts, including visual effects, leads to successfully encapsulating the vision of the director, which was the case with Barbie. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)Even when dealing with the artificial-looking environments found in Barbie, practical sets provide a solid foundation for the seamless integration of visual effects. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)There is a trend in the marketing of these films where audiences seem to want to crave an authentic experience, so theyre emphasizing the practical aspects even if most of what youre watching has been digitally replaced in post, remarks Paul Franklin, Senior VFX Supervisor at DNEG. If you think back 30 years when Jurassic Park came out, that film was marketed onthe fact that they had computer-generated dinosaurs in it for the first time. Those of us in the visual effects world who are familiar with that film know that the majority of the dinosaurs that we saw on the screen were Stan Winstons animatronics that were created practically. If that film was being released today, it would be all of this stuff about Stan Winston building these dinosaurs as animatronics. That being said, practical effects aspirations do exist. There are a lot of filmmakers who have seen the success of Interstellar, The Dark Knight movies and recently Oppenheimer,and the way that Christopher Nolan leans into the practical aspect of what he does. Theyre going, Thats an effective way to tellyour story. A lot of filmmakers aspire to that. Whether there are so many of them who can pull it off is a different thing because it turns out to be quite difficult to do that balancing act. I got lucky and worked with Chris for 10 years, and he is a genius filmmaker. Idont know if there is anybody else quite like him. Steven Spielberg in the days when he was making films such as Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park; hes a filmmaker who knew the value of doing things practically, which is why he would always want to work with Stan Winston. You look back at E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it still holds up because they used state-of-the-art animatronics and practical effects at the time.For a good decade or more, there was this ability for visual effects teams to provide directors and producers with shots that were extraordinary in their ability to break some of the traditional filmmaking rules and to move away from some of the things that made cinema look the way it had for the decades before that, notes Ryan Tudhope, Production VFX Supervisor on Top Gun: Maverick.That created a bit of a look and, just like anything, looks comeand go. One thing, if you think about it, over the course of all of filmmaking, is that every single shot of every single movie has one thing in common, which is that it was shot through a camera. Then came along the digital ability to create digital cameras and shots. That freed us up for a long time to be able to do things with those cameras that had never been done before. When I think about it in terms of what Im trying to do, it is to recognize what that camera means to the artform and to honor that by trying to design a shot that appreciates what the camera can do and should do, how itvisualizes the world, and how the audience sees the film or shot or whatever the action might be through that limitation. When you dont respect that, it can be visually stunning and impressive shots, but the audience immediately knows that its not real.In an effort to capture the spirit of the original movie, an actual helicopter was flown for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. (Image courtesy of Netflix)Were trying to have our cake and eat it too, believes Aaron Weintraub, VFX Supervisor at MPC. The highest compliment we can ever be paid is if people have no idea that we did anything thats what we strive for. What we do is stagecraft. Were trying to fool the audience into thinking that something is completely real and was there in front of the camera; they recorded it,and thats what you get to see on the screen. If we have done it correctly, nobody knows. Real-life examples are the starting point. Weintraub explains, Everything that we do is looking at photographs and film footage and trying to replicate how the light and surfaces react. Were nothing without reference of the real world, if the real world and photorealism is our goal. Technology is the means to the end. Every iteration and every step that we take with the technology is something new that the audience may not ever have seen before. Reacting to the newness is part of saying that the technology is driving it, but its a story that were trying to tell that we couldnt do in the past. Reality can provide a sense of spontaneity to animation. Weintraub notes, There are mistakes and happy accidents that can happen when you shoot real stuffthat you might not get otherwise. When we did Guillermo del Toros Pinocchio, which was stop-motion animation, one of the guiding principles of the animation was to try to anticipate all of those weird little accidents that if you were shooting this live-action and put those into the animation. In advance of shooting the stop-motion, the animators would shoot these little videos of their clips to see what would happen.Actual cars were flipped and digitally augmented for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. (Image courtesy of Netflix)Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eddie Murphy prepare for a scene that takes place inside of a helicopter cockpit for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. (Image courtesy of Netflix)Its a stylistic thing. When were talking about the marriage of practical, whats shot on set and where we come into play, either augmenting or completely replacing it in some cases, there is always this desire to maintain this visual characteristic that is inherent in practical shooting, observes Robin Hackl, Co-Founder and Visual Effects Supervisor at Image Engine. Its being art-directed and driven by the DP, lighting director and the director himself, and they have hands on the physicality of thatbeing on set and getting that look. Its always that apprehension almost of committing fully to CG and leaving it to the hands of the visual effects vendors and artists, even things that they are implementing in practical set photography, like virtual sets that give a higher degree of reality to the lighting of the characters. From the feedback that Ive gotten from the people on set, the actors in particular react well to virtual production in the sense that they have something tangible to react to and see, to be part of that little world, which is sometimes hard for them to wrap theirheads around. What is that emotion tied around that environment theyre in? It heightens that. Of course, its not all done that way.The Mandalorian is all over the place, from on-set photography to giant bluescreens and virtual production. The Mandalorian is a good example of aesthetic. The creators wanted to retain asmuch as possible the flavor and vibe of the original Star Wars films. There were a lot of optical effects done back in the early days and stop-motion that was live in-camera, for the most part they triedto shoot everything in-camera the best they could then augment it. Its a real harkening back to that era.Christopher Nolan has been an adamant proponent of in-camera effects, with Batman Begins being one of most grounded superhero movies. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)Practical vehicles such as the Batpod were built for The Dark Knight. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)Its more about having a good dialogue with the people you are working with and making sure that they understand how to get the best out of the tools theyre using, states Glen Pratt, Production VFX Supervisor on Barbie. If Im blunt, its often because bad choices are made. If you allow all the crafts that are involved in filmmaking the time that they say [they need], you get a good result, whether it be building a set, creating pyrotechnic explosions, then equally whatever aspects of visual effects youre adding into that.Open communication is important. Greta Gerwig hadnt done visual effects before, so I sat down early with her and talked through various sets of tools that we have at our disposal. I could tell she was overwhelmed by some of those things. But its honing it down to that is just a step in the process of how we will eventually get to the end result. That comes with experience. The more that you work with bringing visual effects into it, the more well-versed the director becomes with the language. A lot of the time, they dont want to know that level of detail. They only want to know that you have their back and you can do this for them. Barbie Land was an artificial environment, but the same photorealistic principles applied. We captured everything so we could recreate whether it be the actual stages themselves or miniature models, and often we embellished them further on what was there to ground it, make it feel like it belongs in that world and had a cohesive, insistent aesthetic running through it.Visual effects are best when they reflect the filmmaking style, so a stop-motion animation feel was given to the simulations for Guillermo del Toros Pinocchio. (Images courtesy of Netflix)Personally, when the conditions and the type of effect to be achieved allow me to use the practical, I jump at it, remarks Mathieu Dupuis, VFX Supervisor at Rodeo FX. Were fortunate to have a studio at our disposal here at Rodeo FX, and I cant imagine executing some of the large-scale effects on our recent projects without the support of practical effects. Im not just talking about blood splattering on a greenscreen or crowd duplication, which, by the way, is always highly effective. Being able to rebuild scaled-down set pieces [painted green] to capture the precise interaction of, say, glass breaking on a table or to recreate an organic dream effect by filming floating debris in macro within an aquarium allows us to achieve quick, cost-effective results that are both efficient and innovative. Theres also the advantage of avoiding endless discussions with clients by capturing how a flag moves in the wind or how a plate shatters. Theres no need to imagine or convince anyone how these elements would behave because weve captured them in real life. Theres nothing more authentic than reality, right!?Visual effects are best when they reflect the filmmaking style, so a stop-motion animation feel was given to the simulations for Guillermo del Toros Pinocchio. (Images courtesy of Netflix)Its a stylistic thing. When were talking about the marriage of practical, whats shot on set and where we come into play, either augmenting or completely replacing it in some cases, there is always this desire to maintain this visual characteristic that is inherent in practical shooting.Robin Hackl, Co-Founder and Visual Effects Supervisor, Image Engine

A new post in the Nintendo Today app teases the potential functionality of that C button weve all been discussing for months with a very Mii-like sound effect as part of the countdown to Wednesdays Switch 2-focused Nintendo Direct.On the Nintendo Today App, Nintendo released a teaser for the mysterious C button Cartridge Games (@cartridgegames.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T15:20:11.494ZIf you live in a region where its already April 2, you may have seen a short Nintendo Today video specifically promoting the C button. Over the course of seven seconds, were shown a Joy-Con attached to a Nintendo Switch 2 before a quick zoom into the C button. A finger presses the button. The button makes a sound. The sound is a nonsensical mixture of an activation jingle and what sounds like a Mii speaking.Does this mean Miis are back? Maybe! And maybe its a sign Nintendo is launching a Miiverse-like social media platform a fan favorite feature from the Wii U and 3DS era that will be launched with the C button. Listen to the sound above about a million times and get back to us.When Nintendo first revealed the Switch 2 back in January, the new Joy-Cons showcased alongside the device featured a mysterious, unmarked button. Everyone almost immediately assumed this meant the C button was returning after it skipped multiple console generations, speculation that was awarded earlier this week thanks to another Nintendo Today post. Even so, weve remained in the dark as to what the C button actually does.Whether the C button opens a new Miiverse-style chatting app, allows for saving screenshots and video recordings, or just makes a funny noise and nothing else, were almost certain to learn more during tomorrows Switch 2 presentation. Stay tuned!

Pokmon Go is bringing back its battle pass system, called the Go Pass: April, though only to some random players. This originally had its debut during the Go Tour Unova event, and though it functions pretty similarly to the Unova pass, this new one has a few tweaks.If the pass is available to you, youll have from April 1 at 10 a.m. until May 6 at 10 a.m. in your local time to complete it.Below we explain how this early access-ish Pokmon Go Pass works, if its worth buying, and we detail some of the rewards that we can confirm.How does the new Pokmon Go Pass work?First, to reiterate, the Go Pass: April is currently only available as part of a test for some players. From what we can tell, this doesnt seem to be a regional thing people from the same regions have reported having different passes and some have the pass and some dont, via reports on The Silph Road.As for what it features, Niantic stated in their blog that some of the rewards may vary, as the company is testing different options. This includes different encounters, item rewards, and overall ranks. That said, tons of the information out there implies that there is a lot of variance between these different passes.And, as previously mentioned, it broadly works the same way as the Go Tour Unova Pass, with a few differences, though those vary depending on which version of the pass you got, including:Catching Pokmon may reward fewer points (depending on how many ranks your pass has).Hatching eggs may reward more points (depending on how many ranks your pass has).The daily point limit seems to vary from 100-300.Some people may have a pass with only 50 ranks, whereas others have 100 ranks.Some people have a weekly challenge that rewards more points.You will need to check your pass to see the details specific to you, if you have it.Pokmon Go Pass: April rewardsUnfortunately, because the passes vary from player to player, we cant give you a definitive list of the rewards you may have. You should be able to see the rewards for your track in-game on the events screen that Timed Research usually appears in.The only rewards that may be mysteries are the encounters which you can kind of figure out by using the nearby candy rewards. For example, if the nearby rewards give out Machop Candy, then the encounter will very likely be a Machop.You will get a Xerneas encounter for completing the pass (at rank 50 or 100, depending on which one you got) on the free track and a Lucky Trinket on the paid track.If you want more specific details, The Silph Road subreddit has seen people post the 50-rank track and the 100-rank track, though individual players have noted that some rewards do vary (such as some players having Pok Coins as rewards).Is the deluxe Go Pass worth buying?The deluxe version of the Go Pass costs $7.99. Is all this worth it? As usual, the actual, raw coin value of the items makes it worth it (no matter which pass version you got). The more of the pass you complete, the more itll be worth it.My personal opinion is that these rewards seem pretty lackluster. No Super Incubators, no additional Star Pieces, and a seemingly very random assortment of candy and encounters makes it pretty meh from me. You can see a total-tallied list of the premium rewards you have on your pass by opening the shop page for the deluxe pass and scrolling vertically through the list of loot provided. Most of the value here will rely on how you personally value the Lucky Trinket.Again, the Lucky Trinket has no direct value and its value weighs solely on how badly you want to force a Lucky Friend to do a Lucky Trade. If youre really desperate to maybe trade that recently-obtained Gigantamax Charizard to possibly yield better stats, it could be worth it but theres also no guarantee that youll get phenomenal IVs (though the minimum will be a 80% IV Pokmon). The Lucky Trinket itself also expires on May 11 at 11:59 p.m. in your local time, so make sure you use the trinket before then. You dont necessarily have to complete the trade by then, but you need to use the trinket.If youre worried about completing the pass, you can hold off on buying it until you complete it. As long as you buy the pass before May 8 at 10 a.m. in your local time, you will be able to claim any rewards you would have unlocked had you picked up the pass earlier.This is all to say that you control the money you spend. If you just like having daily goals and battle passes, theres nothing wrong with buying the deluxe version to get that!

Google has pushed out a shiny new AI model in the form of Gemini 2.5 Pro, albeit with an experimental label next to itand it's available for free, so you don't need to subscribe to Gemini Advanced to get it. As with many recent AI model releases, the "reasoning" capabilities of the model are said to be the biggest upgrade here.In artificial intelligence terms, reasoning means answers that are more thoroughly worked through. That should produce fewer mistakes, more logical responses, and a better appreciation of "context and nuance" according to Google. This capability for extra "thought" will now come as standard in future Google models.The Pro (Experimental) release is the first variant of Gemini 2.5 to show up, and while the original blog post didn't mention free users, less than a week later we've got an update saying it's available for everyonewith rate limits applied if you're not a Gemini Advanced subscriber (Google hasn't specified what those rate limits are). The new model is available now through the desktop app, and coming soon to mobile. Gemini 2.5 Pro hits new levels in a variety of AI benchmarks. Credit: Google Google points to several benchmark tests that show the prowess of Gemini 2.5 Pro. At the time of writing it tops the LMArena leaderboard, where users give ratings on responses from dozens of AI chatbots. It also scores 18.8 percent on the Humanity's Last Exam testwhich measures human knowledge and reasoningnarrowly edging out rival models from OpenAI and Anthropic.Also of note: the large context window. In simple terms, this is an indicator of how much data the AI model can churn through in one go, and Gemini 2.5 Pro has a context window of one million tokens, with two million "coming soon" according to Google. That compares to a context window of, for example, 200,000 tokens for ChatGPT's o3-mini reasoning model. As tends to be the norm with these AI announcements, there's no mention of copyright infringement as far as training data goes, or increasing energy use. According to MIT researchers, modern-day AI models use a "staggering" amount of electricity and water, and have put us on an "unsustainable path" that needs to change direction quickly.Putting Gemini 2.5 Pro to the testIt can be tricky to quantify improvements from one AI model to the next, which is why benchmarks like LMArena are useful. I lack the expert scientific or programming knowledge needed to really put Gemini 2.5 Pro to the testthough as with the previous model, I was able to create some simple web apps (like an online timer) in minutes.I do know a bit about Charles Dickens' Bleak House, so I set Gemini 2.5 Pro to work on the text. It gave me an accurate summary of the plot, and a clever assessment of the different narrative devices used (which would've really helped me in my study days). It also converted the book into a reasonably well done three-act structure for a movieevidence of it holding a lot in its "mind" at once.The older Gemini 2.0 Flash was able to answer the same Bleak House prompts accurately too, but the responses from Gemini 2.5 Pro were longer, more detailed, less generic, and smarterevidence of that extra "reasoning" being put to work. The Gemini 2.0 Flash model also had to split the movie adaptation into three responses, perhaps due to the sheer amount of text it was trying to process. Google has provided its own example of the capabilities of Gemini 2.5 Pro, showing how a simple endless runner game can be produced from a single prompt. While the demo video showing the code output is sped up, the game does appear to work and be pretty well-designed, which is an impressive end result from a single natural language prompt. There's also a neat web demo of digital fish swimming around.Elsewhere on the web, the new AI model is being extensively tested. Software engineer and independent AI researcher Simon Willison ran several tests covering image creation, audio transcription, and code generation, and came away very much liking what Gemini 2.5 Pro had been able to come up with.The frenetic pace of AI development shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, and we can expect more Gemini 2.5 models to appear in the near future. "As always, we welcome feedback so we can continue to improve Gemini's impressive new abilities at a rapid pace, all with the goal of making our AI more helpful," says Koray Kavukcuoglu, from Google's DeepMind AI lab.

The average website seems to have more ads than content. There's the banner at the top, the square in the sidebar, and in most cases, a few auto-playing video ads thrown in for good measure. Ad blockers can help clean things up, but experts say that installing an ad blocker does more than make the internet less cluttered: They can also help you stay safe online. Ad blockers can protect you from scamsIn a perfect world, outright scammers and cybercriminals would not be able to buy ads from massively profitable search engines. However, we do not live in a perfect world."Criminals have started buying ad space," said Kim Key, senior security analyst for our sister site PCMag who has written an extensively researched list of the best ad blockers. "That means that some ads may infect your device with malware when you interact with them, or may contain links to malicious websites."A version of this is ads designed to mimic legitimate companies in search results, a problem common enough that in 2022, the FBI put out a statement recommending the use of ad blockers."Cyber criminals purchase advertisements that appear within internet search results using a domain that is similar to an actual business or service," the statement said. "When a user searches for that business or service, these advertisements appear at the very top of search results with minimum distinction between an advertisement and an actual search result."The report mentions that not all ads are scams (good?) but that installing an ad blocker is one way to protect yourself from being sucked into these scams in the first place.(Some) ad blockers can protect your privacyI don't think I need to tell you that online advertising is invasivewe've all noticed ads following us around the internet. Spend time researching shoes on Amazon and ads about the shoes you've looked at will pop up everywhere you go. It can feel creepy.Ad blockers can protect you from this, but there's a caveat: Some ad blockers prevent you from seeing ads without blocking the tracking. "If your ad blocker doesn't block trackers, but just blocks ads, it doesn't protect your privacy," said William Budington, a senior staff technologist on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Public Interest Team.Janet Vertesi, associate professor of sociology at Princeton University who publishes extensive work on human computer interaction, told me this is a reason she herself doesn't use an ad blocker. "Some ad blockers make you think you have privacy because you're not seeing ads, but you don't know if the sites are taking your data," she said.Having said that, there are options out there specifically built to block tracking. Privacy Badger, built by the EFF, wasn't made to block adsonly trackingbut Budington told me it ends up blocking most ads anyway. "The reason why there's such conflation of ad blockers and tracker blockers is that the vast majority of ads online are also trackers," he said.Vertesi told me that this distinctionblocking tracking versus blocking adsmight be behind Google's recent ad blocker changes in Chrome."What made uBlock Origin such a great ad blocker is it was blocking both coming out and going in," she said. "Chrome is a Google Product. Google is in the data-gathering business. Of course they don't want you to use uBlock Origin."Which is all to say: Ad blockers can protect your privacy, but only if you're using the right one.Drawbacks to using ad blockersHaving said all that, there are reasons you might not want to use an ad blocker. Supporting the things you read, for one thing."Some content creators rely on ads for revenue, so as a supporter, you may not always want to block all of the ads," Key said. "I recommend trying an extension like Adblock Plus in this instance, because it allows you to allow some ads while blocking others."And some ad blockers themselves introduce privacy problems."I recommend reading the ad-blocking extension's privacy policy before installing it," Key said. "Make sure you know what types of data the ad blocker collects from your browser, and how the company plans to store and use your personal information."There's also an argument to be made that using an ad blocker makes it hard to notice when you're being tracked."I don't use an ad blocker because I am monitoring what they think they know about me," Vertesi said. "They're like the canary in the coal mine. I want to see those shoes following me around the internetI need to know if my guard was let down."