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April 16, 20255 min readFive Key Climate and Space Projects Are on Trump’s Chopping BlockLeaked budget documents indicate that key NASA and NOAA research projects, such as crucial climate research and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, are at risk of being defunded in 2026Severe mothership shaped thunderstorm races across Kansas, USA. john finney photography/Getty ImagesPreliminary copies of some of the US government’s spending plans suggest that President Donald Trump’s administration intends to slash climate and space science across some US agencies.At risk is research that would develop next-generation climate models, track the planet’s changing oceans and explore the Solar System. NASA’s science budget for the fiscal year 2026 would be cut nearly in half, to US$3.9 billion. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors Earth’s climate and makes weather forecasts, would have its 2026 budget cut by 27%, to $4.5 billion. The leaked documents containing this information were sent by the White House to federal agencies last week; they were reported by other media outlets and obtained by Nature.Although the proposed cuts aren’t final, they have alarmed scientists and science advocates alike. “We’re talking about a wholesale dismantling of NASA’s scientific fleet and the pipeline of future missions,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, a non-profit space organization in Pasadena, California. “Trump’s budget plan for NOAA is both outrageous and dangerous,” says a statement released by Zoe Lofgren, a member of the US House of Representatives from California, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. “This budget will leave NOAA hollowed out.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“No final funding decisions have been made,” says Alexandra McCandless, a spokesperson for the US Office of Management and Budget. The proposed cuts come as Trump’s team has tried to downsize the US government markedly, firing federal workers en masse and axing programmes, purportedly in the name of government efficiency.Here, Nature looks at some of the programmes and projects that, according to the documents, are on the chopping block.Crucial climate scienceNOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which funds numerous scientific endeavours, including climate modelling, cloud monitoring and hurricane forecasting, would be slashed by 74%, to $171 million. OAR is the agency’s main research arm, with 11 laboratories and 16 cooperative institutes that collaborate with scientists at various universities; the budget proposal would defund any of them that work on climate, weather or the ocean. The draft budget also appears to terminate funding for “Regional Climate Data and Information”, a $50 million programme to help communities with climate science, such as tracking droughts and heat waves. In total, the cuts would eliminate OAR as an independent office and disperse its remaining activities to other parts of NOAA. For many scientists, it’s a sign that the Trump administration is planning to turn its back on research that is needed to help understand long-term climate and environmental effects. “This is a huge threat to research at NOAA, but also to the safety and economic security of the American public,” says Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator for research at NOAA.A next-generation space telescopeThe Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, iconic for their views of the cosmos, won’t last forever. And now, their successor could be in trouble. The $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is nearing completion at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, but Trump’s preliminary proposal would cancel all funding for it, as well as for many other Goddard projects. During his first term as president in 2017–21, Trump, a Republican, tried repeatedly to eliminate funding for the Roman telescope, but was blocked by the US Congress in each case. The same could happen this time: “I will fight tooth and nail against these cuts,” said Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland, whose district includes the Goddard centre and who is the ranking member of the congressional spending committee that oversees NASA.An artist’s concept of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, now called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterEarth-observing satellitesTrump’s proposals would cancel next-generation Earth-observing satellites at both NASA and NOAA. At NASA, the Earth-science budget would be cut in half, to just over $1 billion; that would almost certainly derail efforts to launch a fleet of new satellites to monitor factors crucial to weather and climate forecasting, including aerosols, clouds and sea-level rise. At NOAA, preliminary plans call for the cancellation of a programme to build and launch new weather satellites in geostationary orbits, which is a backbone of US weather-forecasting efforts. Trump would also remove climate instruments on future weather satellites, and end the long-standing agreement through which NASA launches NOAA’s weather satellites.Missions to VenusAmong the proposed cuts at NASA are two missions to the planet Venus, which was last visited by a NASA spacecraft in 1989. The DAVINCI mission would send a probe into the thick Venusian atmosphere, and the VERITAS mission would map the planet’s surface and interior using radar and other technologies. Planetary scientists have welcomed these long-overdue contributions to studying Earth’s nearest neighbour, which holds clues to the early evolution of the Solar System and has tantalizing, perhaps life-friendly chemistry in its clouds. Both missions are targeted for a launch in 2031 and are meant to cost less than $500 million each. But delays have contributed to mounting expenses; DAVINCI could cost $1.2 billion or more, according to one estimate.Space-traffic control systemSpace analysts say that the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit is growing rapidly and that a system for coordinating information about their positions is needed to avoid dangerous collisions. In 2018, the first Trump administration took steps towards establishing a civilian office for space-traffic control, moving much of the work away from the military. Now, the second Trump administration seems poised to shift the work to an unspecified entity outside the government, and to pare down the budget for the office that runs it from $65 million to $10 million.It’s unclear whether all of these proposed cuts, for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October, will happen.Whenever a US president releases a budget proposal, it signals their priorities. Congress, which has the ultimate say on spending, typically adjusts the president’s proposed budget to reflect its own preferences, and then passes final spending legislation. During Trump’s first term, Congress sometimes rejected his requests to cut science funding drastically. But this year, the first of Trump’s second administration, norms are being upended as the president’s team slashes billions of dollars in federal grants, defying Congress’s funding mandates. Republican lawmakers are also falling in line with Trump’s priorities more than they have done in the past.Trump might not need to wait for a fiscal 2026 budget to be approved to move forward with his plans. In an unusual move, when the Republican-controlled Congress enacted the final 2025 spending bill last month, it granted the Trump administration considerable leeway in how it spends the remaining budget for the current fiscal year, which runs until September. That bill contained top-line budget numbers for agencies, but lacked most of the detailed instructions that normally tell agencies which programmes they should put the money toward. For this reason, some scientists say that there is nothing to stop the Trump administration from halting funds for climate research and other programmes once the official spending plan for 2025 is finalized later this month.“They can do a lot of damage in the remainder of fiscal 2025,” says Waleed Abdalati, who leads the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a partnership between NOAA and the University of Colorado Boulder. “And they would be within their rights, because Congress ceded that authority.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 14, 2025.

Inside Muse, Microsoft's gen-AI game tool everyone hates - what's really going on and why is it being marketed at Xbox fans? If Muse isn't creating games, then what is it creating - and how should we respond? Image credit: id Software / Eurogamer Feature by Chris Tapsell Deputy Editor Published on April 16, 2025 Earlier this month, Microsoft set loose upon the world a new, publicly-available demo of its video game-focused generative AI model, Muse. As far as demos go, it was a significant one: a playable, browser-based "AI rendition" of legendary first-person shooter Quake 2. But rather than landing as, say, an impressive demonstration of Microsoft's bounding progress in artificial intelligence, the Quake 2 "Copilot gaming experience" was widely slammed by the gaming public as, amongst many other things, "shit". The criticism has been more or less universal, ranging from members of the public describing it as "absolutely fucking disgusting" and "like horrible Nyquil-induced sleep paralysis", to a Forbes "review" of the game that called it "an abomination". Members of the games press condemned reporting in The Verge, which ran the headline "Microsoft has created an AI-generated version of Quake", as overly credulous, labelling any similar coverage as "unpaid PR work". Will Smith, a tech blogger, offered a more measured response but still concluded that it is ultimately "a gimmick. It's interactive video, and yeah, I guess that's impressive, but it doesn't capture the magic of interlocking systems that still makes playing Quake 2 fun in 2025, despite the fact that it's almost 30 years old and dates to the earliest days of 3D graphics." All of this comes just a couple of weeks after Microsoft's initial reveal of Muse itself, which that time featured non-interactive but similarly murky footage based on Ninja Theory's Bleeding Edge - and which received a similarly heated response. That first unveiling also came with further issues of its own. Reactions zeroed in on the notion of Muse being used for "gameplay ideation" in particular, as well as Xbox chief Phil Spencer's seemingly outlandish claim, in an accompanying video, that Muse could "radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future," making older games compatible with "any device". There is intense scepticism towards what Muse AI does, what it could do, and whether it could ever be useful for anything. It was a messy reveal. At the time, we clarified - with the help of AI expert Dr Michael Cook - that Muse very much was not "creating games". As Cook laid out in his blog, the research paper Microsoft had published in Nature alongside the reveal of this model "is not really about 'generating gameplay' or 'ideas'," but is instead, "about these researchers thinking about the implications of how people will work with these tools." But that didn't mean there weren't plenty of limitations and concerns. On Spencer's comments on preservation, for instance, Cook noted: "I could ask my friend's five-year-old son to draw a crayon picture of what he thinks the ending cutscene of Final Fantasy 8 looks like and that would still count as game preservation of a certain sort." All in all, it leads to what is on the surface an utterly bizarre situation. Microsoft, one of the world's wealthiest businesses, is committing presumably vast sums of money towards the work of its Muse AI research team. The research team features a number of experts, such as Dr Sam Devlin and research lead Dr Katja Hofmann, that are well-known and widely cited in their field. And the early results of this research are something that almost everyone in the industry seems to totally despise. There is intense scepticism towards what Muse AI does, what it could do, and whether it could ever be useful for anything. But what is actually going on? Can the research team behind it offer more credible answers? And how, exactly, ought we react to all of it? What is Muse? To help understand, I spoke to two of the people who have been at the heart of the conversation around Muse since its reveal: Drs Mike Cook and Katja Hofmann. Cook is a senior lecturer in computer science at King's College London and specialises in artificial intelligence, specifically computational creativity, automated game design, and design and analysis of generative software. We've covered his work on Eurogamer a few times over the years, including an AI program he built, ANGELINA, which was capable of creating video games of its own back in 2013, and his quest to see if it could win a game jam the following year. He talks with the soft directness of a fast-moving lecturer who doesn't mind if you really can't keep up with the source material, as long as you're at least willing to keep trying. Speaking to me after the first Muse reveal, but before the second featuring Quake 2, I asked Cook to explain what was going on in the Bleeding Edge examples we were first given. "I suppose you could think of it as: if you showed ChatGPT a screenshot of a video game, and then you said, "Could you show me a video of what would happen if there was an enemy here", and it generates a video showing you the player playing from that screenshot, but with an enemy on the screen," he says. That's a "very clumsy" summary, he adds, "but basically that's what they're trying to do." Bleeding Edge failed to find an audience, but it's played a large part in the Muse project at Microsoft. | Image credit: Ninja Theory / Xbox A key point to emphasise here is, as Cook says, that "it's generating images. It's not generating code or anything like that." It's a series of images forming a video, and that video is what's known as being "conditioned", in AI research terms. "It's conditioned on inputs," Cook explains, in the same way that an image generation tool such as Midjourney "is image generation conditioned by text." If you tell an AI image generator you want an image of a cat, for instance, "it generates an image and then it looks at the text and it's like, this can't be any image; it has to be an image of a cat." With Muse, that conditioning is "on not just the video of people playing the game, but actually the buttons they were pressing." This means that when we talk about the 'playable' models, such as this latest version of Muse, and Google's similarly controversial Genie, "it is doing video generation, but you can also say "Generate the next frame of the video if the jump button was being pressed," and it will take that into account when it generates the next frame." The key point here is that this all remains fundamentally predictive, in the same way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are ultimately predicting sequences of words based on your text prompts. Muse is a model that generates simulated video footage of the video game it's been trained on, and simulates interactivity with that footage I put the same explain-this-to-me-like-the-layperson-I-am question to Hofmann, who is senior principal researcher and the lead of Microsoft's game intelligence research team. Softly spoken, with a slight German accent, Hofmann is a precise talker, measuring words in her combination of seasoned public spokesperson familiar with the conference trail, and excitable research grad who still believes in the work. "In simple terms," she says, the first model "shows we can train an AI simulation of an existing video game. So that means if we train a model on the game visuals and the control actions, we learn a model that is then able to simulate this." So, she continues, "you create a small, playable scene, that's only backed then at inference time by the model," inference time being the duration it takes for the model to process new, unseen data and make predictions on it. In the "real time" version of this model, then, this actually "allows players to connect the controller and play within the imagination - or play within the model." In even more simple terms, think of it like this: Muse is a model that generates simulated video footage of the video game it's been trained on, and simulates interactivity with that footage by predicting what your button presses would cause that video footage to do, and then replicating those. So if, for example, all of the Bleeding Edge footage used as training data shows that when players push the right analogue stick upwards in Bleeding Edge, the camera looks upwards, then when "playing the model", pushing the analogue stick upwards likewise causes the simulated video feed to tilt upwards towards the sky. Is Muse generating video games? All this notion of "playing" Muse raises one particularly important question: is Muse generating video games? The emphatic answer from both Hofmann and Cook is, essentially: no. For Cook, there's a question about whether it's even accurate to describe Muse, and similar models such as Genie or Oasis, as "playable" at all. "On YouTube you can watch panoramic video and turn your head around, but that's not "playable" video. That's just a video that has some interaction with it." At the same time, he says, "if you think about those streaming services where you were playing at home and your keyboard inputs were being sent to a server," such as say, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna or the doomed Google Stadia, "your computer was just showing you video. And the video was kind of conditioned on keyboard inputs." It's best to think of it instead as "video of a 3D world, but the 3D world doesn't really exist." Whether that does or doesn't disqualify it from actually being a game is up for debate. As Cook himself says, "it gets a bit philosophical at some point." (An example of a natural follow-on question that's either fascinating or incredibly boring to you, depending on your persuasion: does a video game world defined by fixed code "exist"? Does it exist on your hardware more than a streamed one from a server? Or, as in Muse's case, a very murky, inconsistent one conjured on the spot from no code at all?) This is Quake 2 as created by Muse. It clearly suffers in comparison to the original game, but is that really the point? | Image credit: Microsoft During our initial conversation, Hofmann extended an invitation to visit the Microsoft AI research team's offices in Cambridge in order to try out a demo of Muse in person. There, she elaborated further on this notion of playing the model, rather than its attempt at recreating a game. "We're trying not to refer to it as a game, because it is not a game," Hofmann tells me during the in-person demo, which this time takes place after the reveal of the Quake 2 simulation. "We're thinking of "playing the model", so that exploratory kind of interaction of figuring out: What are the limitations? Where does it break? What doesn't work, what works?" To Hofmann, it's a process she feels is "fascinating," albeit joking that said fascination might be reserved for a very specific subset of researchers who share her enthusiasm. In fact to Hofmann, testing the boundaries of where the model breaks is in many ways part of the point of publishing the Quake 2 demo, and indeed creating it in the first place. She compares it to other, non-interactive generative AI favourably in that sense, in that with attempting to replicate video games you can simply find the flaws much faster. "If you interact with a chatbot, you never get that immediate experience of: I can essentially see where data is missing, or where it's making mistakes. Here, because we're so wired for 3D interaction and visual interaction, we get that immediate experience of: you can literally debug the model by going in and playing within this environment," she says. "And to me, that is the key fascinating aspect of what we're able to show here." Having "played the model" myself both via the online, browser-based Quake 2 Copilot demo and again in person, via an Xbox controller connected to Hofmann's laptop, this notion does have an element of truth to it. I played an updated version of the Bleeding Edge-based simulation alongside the Quake 2 one - both based on WHAMM (note the second M), which is the more recent version that makes the Quake 2 demo possible - and also tested out the drag-and-drop functionality of adding interactable items, jump pads, and enemies in real time. Quake 2 was remastered recently. This handy footage serves as a good comparison for what the game ought to be like to play.Watch on YouTube It's worth making very clear up front that both of them are, as video games, utterly terrible, for all the many reasons already detailed at length and with far more satisfying bite elsewhere than I could ever conjure: they're fuzzy, laggy, nightmarish non-places, chugging along at nine frames per second, crucially without much in the way of consistent internal logic, let alone meaning or intent. They are, by every measure of playability, unplayable. However, treated as a kind of meta-game, where the challenge isn't within the game but in just attempting to successfully play it at all, there is something at least novel and interesting here. In one moment of quasi-Quake 2, for instance, I found myself stuck in a dark, underwater secret area with no apparent way out, not helped by the vagueness and inconsistency of the visuals and controls. Then I realised I could "play the model" to escape, effectively gaming its 0.9 second memory by looking at a dark wall for a moment, then turning back around to discover the world had totally changed and a route was now clear. These are, in their own ways, the kinds of consistent rules we need to make something a game, learned in the same way we learn any other mechanic or moment of internal game logic: if I do X, Y happens. That, technically, is a video game. And arguably an interesting one, if only given its novelty and context, much the same way as an out-there art gallery installation can be when you're only interacting with it once or twice. But also still not a particularly good one. That also ties into the natural follow-on question here, which asks what the actual point of this model is, and what its uses might or might not eventually be. "Gameplay ideation", preservation, or something else: who and what is Muse for? If the question of whether or not Muse's synthetic creations are video games seems a tad murky, this next one's about as clear as mud. Who, or what, is Muse actually for? Again, this question rapidly takes on a philosophical form as soon as you begin to prod at it, but before we get to the real chin-stroking it makes sense to run through the proposed uses that've already been suggested so far. One of the prominent, and most easy to dismiss, is this notion of preservation touted by Phil Spencer. Hofmann, it's worth noting, was on that slightly odd, video call-style reveal video with Spencer when he raised this as a possibility. I asked her whether she felt that was a genuinely feasible use for Muse, now or at any point in the future. "What I see at this point in time is that we're having so many conversations on what could be the potential branch-out points into real applications," she said, "and game preservation has been one of them that multiple people have brought up. And one that Phil, for example, was particularly excited about." The famous Halo 2 E3 demo has actually been preserved and is playable on PC. If Muse is ever capable of doing similar, it's many years away. | Image credit: Microsoft However, she continued, "I see this as one of the capabilities of not something that is, in any full form, feasible today. I like to ground it in: what's feasible today is I can create a simulation of a level in a game, that gives you a sense of playing a version of that game, that is not exactly like the real game." "My sense is that over the next decade, this technology will mature," she added, noting that she felt it "perfectly feasible" to believe it could eventually be "a very general way" of preserving a video game in some form. "I'm certain it won't be the only one. But I see that. I do see it as something that could be exciting to explore along with other application areas." Cook is unequivocal here, meanwhile. "Think about your favourite game, and think about the footage of it that's on YouTube," he said. "If we were going to learn the game based on that footage, what stuff isn't seen very often? What stuff is maybe not seen at all? Maybe there's secrets no one's ever found. Bugs, glitches. "And also on maybe a stupider kind of level - but still important to think about - is things like when dataminers find cut content from Elden Ring. Or how if you look in very old games, you can find comments in the codebase from developers who are working at 4:00am and writing messages in the code. That stuff obviously can't be locked, can't be recovered, because the computer can't see it." An analogy he offers here: "The Globe Theatre that I walk past is not the real Globe Theatre. It's still useful that we built it. But it would be great if we also had the original." Hypothetically, he adds, even if this method got "99 percent of the way there, ultimately it isn't the same as actually recording the code base, for a million and one reasons." The next suggestion here feels like less a piece of executive ad-libbing, and more a central to Microsoft's core pitch for Muse: "gameplay ideation" - a rather corporate term for, essentially, thinking up stuff you can do in a game. Muse is explicitly being touted as a potential tool for helping with this, but crucially, and as we've already clarified, it's not coming up with ideas or inventing gameplay itself in any way. "There are philosophical questions around: can models be creative?" Hofmann said, when I asked her to clarify. "And I'm quite firmly on the side that they are not. I've seen a lot of confusion around that in the literature. But by framing Muse as: it is a simulation of an existing video game, I think that quite firmly emphasises that the model in itself is not creative." "I can't tell you specifically which innovation is going to come after the other, but it's basically opened up this huge, huge space… I cannot see the end of how far we're going to be able to get with that." What the research team was instead aiming to achieve, after conversations with developers internally at Microsoft, "was exactly to tease out the model capabilities that could unlock human creativity." In other words, the team is attempting to figure out how models like this, if they were to become faster, more efficient, more accurate and so on, might be useful to human developers in the future. In this case, it comes back to the initial demonstration of Muse with Bleeding Edge, where you could drag and drop something into the game - a jump pad, an explosive barrel, an enemy - and then quickly see how that plays out. Is that actually feasible as a method of seriously prototyping game ideas, and even if it was, would it actually be helpful? With the first question, Hofmann describes the output of the current version of the model as "not-fully-working" and for now only an example of "signs of life", but despite plenty of scepticism from the watching public, her confidence in its ability to improve seems ironclad. That confidence is based on what Hofmann believes to be genuine discoveries in how these models can operate, she explains, such as gaining an understanding of "how we can curate data to craft - or to train - models that capture those structural relationships in the data." By "structural relationships", she adds, what she specifically means is "the understanding of how this model is able to translate an image into numbers, and then learn how those numbers relate to each other." In the simplest possible terms, Hofmann feels the team has learned how being specific with training data in certain ways can give you much more reliable outputs, and with less data required. That newfound understanding has "opened up this really big space around how specifically curated data sets and multi-modal models interact with each other, and the kinds of structures they're able to learn." When does that potential become actual, usable reality for some kind of developer-friendly jump pad-testing tool? There's "a lot of runway", she says, though "I can't give you a timeline. I can't tell you specifically which innovation is going to come after the other, but it's basically opened up this huge, huge space… I cannot see the end of how far we're going to be able to get with that." Xbox has actually done more for preservation than most platform holders, with some great results on Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles.Watch on YouTube Whether or not this might actually be useful to developers is another issue, however. Cook, for his part, is sceptical again, suggesting more immediately helpful (and efficient) avenues for this kind of tool might be found in quickly adding a splash of a game's visuals and other details to standard whiteboxing, or adding new forms of immediate, quickfire automatic playtesting that don't currently exist. "Human playtesters exist," he says, "but there are some techniques that require you to have an automatic playtester." Nevertheless, Cook is keen to praise Microsoft for having actually sought input from real game developers, something that Hofmann also repeatedly points to. "One of my favourite things about the paper is that they actually sat down with developers and talked to them," Cook says, "and often they talked of developers that were already very positive about the technology - but they still actually said to them: What would a workflow that looks useful for you be? I thought that was really important and we need more of that stuff." One other, important question comes up here, when it comes to the practical implementation of this kind of hypothetical tool. How could a developer use Muse to simulate adding a new mechanic to an in-development game, when doing so currently requires training Muse on, as in Bleeding Edge's case, about 7000 hours of the already-finished game's footage? Hofmann argues the team has indeed thought of this, and it came up in the conversations the research team had with developers. "We look at: assume a scenario where let's say someone has built out a first level of a new game that they're working on - how little data might they need to train a model like this?" The team is "nowhere near the full version of making that real," she said, "but we now know that we can get away with as little as about 50 hours of gameplay from a given game level to create a really nice, consistent representation in that." The very fact that there is so much uncertainty over possible uses for Muse, however, leads on to yet another, regularly posed query. Isn't this all being done back to front? Finding solutions before problems - and the problem with doing research in public "A solution looking for a problem" is a criticism regularly levied at all kinds of AI ventures, particularly generative AI ones. In many cases it feels entirely justified. AI-generated video and images, such as those produced by Midjourney and Sora, have thus far failed to find any real purpose beyond generating low-effort memes, objectionable propaganda and disinformation, or unanimous criticism whenever used in relation to a video game. Generative text, such as ChatGPT, has fared better in terms of gaining weekly users, which have landed in the hundreds of millions, but poorly in terms of actually making any money from that (the vast majority of those users use it for free, and using it costs OpenAI a huge amount of money). Text-based gen-AI's main uses seem to remain helping Instagram influencers and spammers to rapidly fill out inessential image captions to game the algorithm, meanwhile, or disrupting more trustworthy Google search results with such valuable advice as eating rocks for good health. Naturally, that same criticism was levied again at Muse after its reveal of the Quake 2 demo. Sos Sosowski, an indie developer, issued one of the most widely-shared putdowns on BlueSky with exactly this. "That's very on-track with [the] AI trend," he wrote. "A solution looking for a problem. It's yet another in a series of "reveals" that is bug-ridden and broken." AI, when used in media or video games, is generally pushed back on heavily by fans and consumers. The trailer for Ark Aquatica found this out in March. | Image credit: Snail In talking to Cook and Hofmann, who both work in very different areas of AI-based academic research, I was particularly curious about this. How does the actual timeline of research unfold here? Whose idea was Muse? How did it begin, or change over time? And is it normal to do things this way round, in the academic world, in researching technology first and worry about finding a use for it later? "What used to happen at Microsoft Research Cambridge - I used to know someone who worked there," Cook says, "and they used to joke that they felt like Microsoft didn't know they existed, and in a good way. Because they didn't ask what they were doing with their money, and so the researchers there would just do whatever they were interested in and had a great time doing it." The one exception to that? "The Xbox team that was there - and I think over time, there's been more scrutiny on what the AI teams are doing." He has a few suggestions as to how this initial research might have come to be. Sometimes, he explains, "ideas like this are born out of a single researcher or a hackathon day, or a conversation over coffee." Likewise, "it might have been born out of something more specific," like say, if there's a large data source that's already available. "So it's like: listen, we've got 400,000 hours of people playing this game, there must be something we can do with it." I put the same question to Hoffman, who for her part offered a detailed explanation which seems to quite closely echo some of Cook's best guesses. "Microsoft Research is quite unique, I would say, in that it's a very bottom-up research organisation," she explains. "Our remit is to drive innovation, to drive the start of the art in our respective areas." In practical terms that means combining their research into machine learning with, for instance, "leveraging the rich data that we can in many cases responsibly obtain in video games, where we might be able to get to a scale or a variety that might be very, very difficult to collect in any other application area." That'll be the readily-available data theory, then, and in this case that's down to the End User License Agreement (EULA) that all players agree to when playing games on Xbox. Under that often-ignored agreement, Xbox was able to gather the video data of, for instance, Bleeding Edge gameplay that it used to train its model. This combination of the research area and the available data then melds with the "luxury" of Microsoft being a large, multidisciplinary company. That grants the research team the "opportunity of engaging with the rest of the company and seeing what's on people's minds," as Hofmann puts it, "and so we have those regular conversations with people in the gaming space to understand what limitations, what challenges they're facing. Where do they see things going?" The research team itself then decides, "within the team", how to direct its research. In this case, Hofmann says the notion of something to help with "ideation" was one that came more or less directly from conversations with developers. "Many of them felt that because game development is so expensive, and prototyping is expensive, everyone who mentioned it felt like they did not have the luxury of doing enough ideation and prototyping - which they felt limited the creativity of what ultimately got built," she explained. There were in fact "multiple points" during the project where the team almost stopped work on it, with any further progress "in the balance" As for the specific timeline, Hofmann says the research team started discussions with Ninja Theory as far back as 2018, when Microsoft first purchased the developer, in part because the two are simply both based in Cambridge. The team looked at various options, "very much with an open-ended, exploration point of view - so there was never an expectation that any of the things that we do would actually be put into the games." Ninja Theory then offered the gameplay data the studio had collected under the Bleeding Edge EULA to the research team in 2020, the data was anonymised and imported, and the research carried on from there. The specifics of what the team actually chose to do with this data, meanwhile, wasn't fully settled on until the autumn of 2022, when Hofmann returned from maternity leave to a world where LLMs such as ChatGPT had begun to grow in use and public awareness. "The world had changed in AI," she says, "in the sense of, suddenly, the broad population knew what language models were and what they could do… and so we within the team took that step back and said, well, how does that impact our work? What are the next frontiers that we can explore?" Ultimately, they decided, "Well, we know what works for language, wouldn't it be amazing to figure out what happens when we train on a large amount of actual human gameplay data?" Notably, Muse is actually one of two research projects being worked on in parallel by the team. The group, of around 10 to 15 researchers, can usually accommodate around "one to three" projects at a time, Hofmann said, with Muse a "sustained effort over the better part of two years," and more than half the team involved for much of that time. There were in fact "multiple points" during the project where the team almost stopped work on it, with any further progress "in the balance" until the "huge public response" to the paper that was published in Nature back in late February allowed the team to continue. To come back to that core question of whether it's standard practice to work this way round, Hofmann's answer was clear: first that, yes, it is indeed normal. And second, in her view, that her research team actually placed more emphasis on practical uses than most research of this nature normally would. "In terms of the research process, it's very common to be purely curiosity driven," she said. "And in many ways, I see our project as an example of not doing it this way - which is ironic, because a lot of people don't see that. We started from technical curiosity, but as soon as we saw signs of life - of this is what it's able to do - we put together that interdisciplinary team. We did the user research to understand what the capabilities would be, how this ultimately enabled specific use cases, and then we were especially focusing on ideation and early prototyping. If the technology is still in such an early stage, why show it to the public now? While Hofmann is clear about the order in which the research has unfolded, and the level to which developers have been consulted along the way, the elephant in the room is Microsoft itself. Microsoft is one of the world's largest publicly-traded companies, and one which happens to be in an arms race with other, AI-focused tech competitors, as each attempts to justify - and find a way to ultimately profit - from their investments. OpenAI notably lost $5bn last year and is projected to lose double that in 2025, and triple in 2026. In late February it was revealed that Microsoft had backed out of new datacentre leases with a power capacity equivalent to the entire operational IT load of London, potentially signalling a lack of demand to meet its previously planned generative-AI supply. There is, obviously, an incentive for Microsoft to reveal new, exciting things that can be done with generative AI as early as possible. As Cook puts it, while Muse "has some really interesting qualities to it" and there are "things in there that could be useful for developers," those things aren't really the focus of how the research was presented by Microsoft in the first place. "A lot of the positioning does seem to be: positioning yourself as a company that uses AI and that invests in AI and that is on top of AI advances. It does seem to be a shareholders thing." The Muse reveal on Xbox Wire suggested that people who play video games should care, but it caused a backlash and offered little in the way of concrete benefits to look forward to. | Image credit: Xbox To Cook, the way Muse has been presented in general is a concern. To him, "there's a difference between what the researchers were trying to achieve, and how Microsoft presented it - and in this case, I thought it was very stark. I really felt like they were kind of hung out to dry in some ways." I put this to Hofmann - both the question of why this was being revealed to the public so early, given its "not-fully-working" nature, as Hofmann herself put it, and of whether she felt the team had struggled to communicate what their research actually was. "I think there's as many opinions and drivers of this as we have people in the team, and potentially a lot more," Hofmann laughed, on the topic of going public early. "Part of it comes from the academic research community. Within academic research, there is a drive and incentive and realisation that it's important to be as open as possible," she explains. "A lot of research does not get into the hands of people where they can try something this quickly… we said, 'Okay: there is something here that even has that possibility; a lot of research is not very accessible by definition; so here is something that could be accessible. Let's put it out.'" At the same time, Hofmann agrees it would be "largely accurate" to say there's been some difficulty in properly communicating what Muse is all about. "Our learnings are very much around: how do we explain what's happening here, what the technical capability is? How do we make that very clear? And with anything we explain, we'll never be able to reach everyone, but I'm certainly looking at the social media activity and I'm taking notes of, okay, here's where the confusion is." Hofmann maintains, however, that even though there's still "a lot of confusion around what it actually is and what is the purpose, and a lot of debate around that," there has been positive feedback for the team. "Interestingly, everyone who commented on the technical achievement called it impressive, or [were] even more hyperbolic. So on the technical level I'm really satisfied, because people appreciate the achievement, which is fantastic." "We're very explicit - trying to be very explicit - that this is a technical demo where we intend to show what is becoming possible, and how the field is moving." That said, Hofmann concedes that the downside of going this early is the impact on the conversation. "It's not something that happens that commonly, even in an age where AI research does move quickly and people do push out an archive white paper or a video demonstration," she says. Typically, when researchers publish something usable, such as an app, members of the public "expect a certain level of product polish, and we're between those. The technology is not ready. We're very explicit - trying to be very explicit - that this is a technical demo where we intend to show what is becoming possible, and how the field is moving." The goal for that, she says, is to at least "give people that background" to be able to then compare progress down the line. "I'm hoping that ultimately, all those steps will lead to both us understanding how to communicate this more clearly, and then also to the public having built up some of that understanding that helps them interpret what's going on there." The many ethical concerns, from energy consumption to advanced robotics For all the big questions and elephants-in-the-room we've worked through so far, there is one more cluster to go that is without doubt the biggest: the many questions of ethics. As anyone loosely familiar with AI, particularly generative AI, will already know, there are a number of ethical issues that very justifiably arise with each discussion. The first of those is the matter of plagiarism - or intellectual property rights - which in the case of Muse is slightly easier to put aside. Microsoft owns Bleeding Edge developer Ninja Theory and also Quake 2, via Zenimax, and under the EULA therefore has rights to the gameplay footage used as training data here. (That said, there are of course ethical questions about whether it's right for Microsoft, or any entity, to impose EULAs which collect user data at will on anyone wanting to play their games. And indeed about whether it's right for Microsoft to own such a large share of the games industry today - but these are questions for another time.) More applicable here is the second essential question with generative AI ethics, which is the environmental impact from the sheer amount of energy used to both train the model, and then to use it in practice. The use of AI impacts people inside and outside of the video game industry, but its affect on the world we live in is potentially catastrophic. "The energy cost is, I would say, more than you would want for an actual player-facing experience," Hofmann said regarding the Quake 2 demo, when I asked her about this. That public demo uses Nvidia H100 GPUs for the inference, which Hofmann describes as "very similar to an LLM, or a chat bot," in terms of energy cost, and similarly for the training process as well. "What's making me optimistic about where we can push this is, one, the insights from those last two months around how little data, how little training, and how small a model we could get away with," she adds, which she claims is "nowhere near the end" right now. "We haven't really optimised this for inference cost, for example, or for more efficient training." "I can't tell you when, but I'm confident this will run on a consumer GPU, or an NPU [neural processing unit] on a mobile phone," she says, giving a rough estimate of "less than two years" until that's possible in terms of inference cost. As for training cost, "the more we learn about how to do this data efficiently, the more we pave the way to something that is truly democratising access to this." I asked Hofmann if she knew the specific numbers involved in terms of current energy cost, either to train or to "play" the model, to which she directed me to Microsoft PR. Microsoft PR told us they did not have anything additional to share beyond what had been published via the company's blog. As far as broader ethical concerns go, this is far from the last of it. Cook, for instance, suggests one less-cited worry with 3D video game gen-AI more broadly: "It feels like it's sort of a long play for moving toward robotics," he says. "Obviously a lot of these researchers are interested in this stuff for their own sake," he notes, but large tech companies - including those beyond Microsoft, such as Alphabet and Meta - are at least partially looking into AI as it corresponds to video games specifically, he says, because "these projects have two features: they work on video data; and they need to have some model of the world when an action is taken. And these two things are also really important for robots." He qualifies this, adding, "I know the Muse team, they're interested in games, they're really excited by this stuff. But I think one of the reasons why we're seeing big tech companies invest more in this kind of game-modelling stuff, and why they often talk about it as "worlds" and things like that, is because games have always been a research platform for other purposes." Less speculatively, there's the more immediate fact that, as Cook puts it, "for lots of the proposals for tools that are powered by AI, their use case seems to be that they would reduce employment. There doesn't seem to be a way around this." Coupled with a growing concern that video game bosses may be implementing AI in their workplaces with a mixture of ignorance and artlessness - one recent report based on a handful of accounts quoted anonymous developers, with one describing it as "an overwhelmingly negative and demoralising force" - there is plenty of reason for those concerns. All combined, it makes for an almighty mixture of ethical, philosophical, scientific and financial questions - which perhaps is to be expected, given the broader state of AI and the public's natural response to it right now. All those issues are only heightened and complicated by this practice of essentially performing scientific research in front of a live audience, be that out of the pure idealism of accessibility or, I can't help but suspect, the business incentive to do so. "So with generative AI, the question should just be: do we want this? We don't have to do anything. We don't even have to make games if we don't want to. Sometimes we forget that we do have this power." For Hofmann, it remains a project that, at least to her, is as personally worthwhile as it is anything else. Her hope is that regardless of the ultimate use case, the research may "add to the wealth and breadth of interactive experiences that are available to us," be that through adding these dream-like (or maybe more accurately for the foreseeable: somewhat nightmarish) elements of an AI-generated game simulation directly, as some kind of additional medium for artistic expression, or in just helping developers think up something else entirely. "I love video games; I recently got back into Quake 2," she laughs, "I played Cocoon recently… I don't even define myself as a gamer, but there aren't enough games to satisfy the time I would like to spend playing." For her, she concludes, "if people are able to use this to create something that is meaningful to them, and there are people who enjoy it - if I could play a role in that, I'd be happy." A fellow researcher, I get the sense that Cook remains sympathetic to Hofmann and her team, even if the goals and natures of their research are notably different. I ask him somewhat bluntly, towards the end of our conversation, if he feels people are right in reacting so viscerally to what Microsoft revealed, even with all the communication mishaps, the well-meaning intentions, and the public learning-on-the-fly in mind. "I think it's justified for a number of reasons," he says. "One of the reasons is just simply that people are so burned out and hurt by all of the things that are happening in the space, that I think there's just a general sense of anger and despair. And I think that's completely understandable." The industry has, of course, been going through a prolonged period of unprecedented layoffs and general uncertainty. The people staying in the industry after all this, as Cook puts it, "they're doing it because they truly love it and they want to do it, and so seeing this creative practice that they love treated in a sort of disrespectful way, it hurts them as well. It's not just about the morals or the ethics or anything like that. This is a thing they care about." When it comes to this practice of doing science in public, and how these findings are presented, he adds, "I see that there's a responsibility. The public are not stupid, but they can only work with the information they're given, and often they're given really bad information." "And so we have to think that going with these gut reactions makes sense right now; it's all we've got to work with. And then hopefully over time, in the future, we can slightly start to build trust again and figure out the bits of AI that we want to keep and that we like." A final, forgotten question for Cook is also the most important. "Not even: does it make games better; but do people want it? And they don't have to want it - technology is rejected all the time, for all sorts of reasons," he says. "So with generative AI, the question should just be: do we want this? We don't have to do anything. We don't even have to make games if we don't want to. Sometimes we forget that we do have this power; we can just not have something if we don't want to. And so players should think more about: what do they really want from the future of games? Because they can want anything. They don't just have to want the things that they see in tech demos, at E3. They can build whatever future industry they want."

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here Contents hide The First Descendant Season 2 Episode 2 has been a lot of fun so far with the arrival of Serena. We still have over a month to wait until Season 3 arrives in June, and this is when TFD will literally become unplayable on PS4 and Xbox One consoles. While we’re eager for what Nexon have planned for S3, right now we are on the cusp of getting an exciting new Ultimate. Here you will find the release date and time countdown for when Ultimate Blair will come out in The First Descendant, and you will also find details about his powerful new modules. The First Descendant Ultimate Blair release date The release date for Ultimate Blair in The First Descendant is April 17th. This has been confirmed by Nexon on the game’s official X account. Ultimates are more powerful versions of existing TFD characters in the game, and they are a lot of fun. Ultimate Feyna was massively loved at the time of her release thanks to her incredible new skins, and the same was true of Ultimate Sharen at the time of her awakening. Image credit: Nexon When does Ultimate Blair come out in The First Descendant? The release time for when Ultimate Blair will come out in The First Descendant is 3:30 AM PT/6:30AM ET/11:30 AM BST on April 17th. All the above launch hours are confirmed as part of Nexon’s maintenance schedule for update 1.2.14. According to the schedule, maintenance for the update will begin at 10PM PT on April 16th, as well as 1AM ET/6AM BST on April 17th. Maintenance should then end at the hours listed above. While Nexon have outlined their schedule, there is always the possibility of last-minute delays and issues. Make sure to follow the game’s official X account for consistent communications from the developer. The First Descendant Ultimate Blair release time US 3:30AM PT on Thursday, April 17th 6:30AM ET on Thursday, April 17th TFD Ultimate Blair release time UK 11:30AM BST on Thursday, April 17th Image credit: @FirstDescendant on X Countdown Below is a countdown to when the new TFD update will come out: New TFD skins There will be new skins for Ultimate Blair when the TFD update drops. The main skin is a very stylish portrayal of the character that includes him coated in a stylish leather jacket comprised of black and gold, all while wearing a gold mask that is reminiscent of a smoking skull. The other skin is full head-to-toe red armor that makes the fire breather resemble a dragon. Both outfits look fantastic, and we’re definitely looking forward to rocking them in-game. Image credit: @FirstDescendant on X TFD exclusive modules Below are the exclusive modules for Ultimate Blair in The First Descendant as summarised on Reddit: Killer Recipe: Buffs Blair’s passive and has brought about changes to his skill 1, 2 and 4. Skill 1 – Spicy Meatball – Fires a meatball towards enemies and explodes on contact inflicting Burn. Skill 2 – Temperature Check – MP Heal dependent on Chef’s Touch Skill 3 – So far appears to be a fireball where it could be a straight fire ball or fanned. The devs did not discuss skill 3 during the dev live. Skill 4 – Deadly Feast – Aims at an enemy and fires Chef’s Touch using crosshairs to designate a target and the fire button to release. Cannot be used without Chef’s Touch. Activate skill 1, Spicy Meatball, to apply Chef’s Touch and then activate Skill 3. Next Level Arson Skill 1 – Merciless Arson – Creates flame zones as you move. Will synergize well with weapons will movement speed cores. Skill 2 – MP Heal Skill 3 – Hot Delivery – Change from straight flame to fan shaped flame. Activate skill 1 and skill 3 to wreak havoc. Skill 4 – (Possibly) Truly Deadly Cuisine devs did not discuss skill 4 during the dev live. For more The First Descendant, we have a guide to the best skills and loadout for Viessa, along with the best skills, gear, and mods for the hugely popular Bunny. We also have a guide for Freyna along with fundamental tips for beginners. The First Descendant Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X Genre(s): Action, Adventure, RPG 5 VideoGamer Related Topics The First Descendant Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share

Fifteen-thousand square-feet. Five acres. Eighteen major rooms. Ten indoor fireplaces. Thirty-plus designers. The numbers associated with the Pasadena Showcase House of Design 2025 are impressive. But it’s another statistic that reminds us how the Showcase House’s 60th edition is startlingly different from any other since the event’s inception in 1965: Four participating design professionals lost their own homes in the recent LA fires.The Bauer Estate & Garden. If the impact of recent events is palpable, the spirit of mutual support and resilience is strong, too. Take the Empty House Party, for instance, another beloved tradition spearheaded by the Pasadena Showcase House for the Arts organization. Over the course of its history, the volunteer-run nonprofit has raised more than $26 million for local arts programs. Following the launch party’s initial postponement (it was originally set for January 10), a sold-out crowd of 500 guests filed through the 1928 Bauer Estate and Gardens in San Marino on January 31, sharply aware of the nearby Eaton Fire’s damages while buzzing with anticipation for the forthcoming transformation.Now, the Monterey Colonial Revival-style estate and its sprawling garden—originally the product of celebrated architect Reginald Davis Johnson and landscape designer Katherine Bashford, respectively—is ready for its refresh reveal. More than 30,000 visitors are expected to tour the estate’s latest iteration when the property opens to the public April 20 through May 18. Before then, take a look back: Only two families have owned the manse in its entire history, and AD featured the 1992 renovation undertaken by legendary TV writer and producer (and Pasadena native) Stephen J. Cannell and his wife, Marcia.Luckily, the latest renovation is in good hands. Program veterans and Showcase House interior design advisors Jennifer Bevan and Samantha Williams estimate that approximately half of this year’s featured talents are returning participants. Meanwhile, the inclusion of first-time industry creatives like Directory member Alexandra Azat of Plaster & Patina, Kirsten Blazek of A1000xBetter, Julia Chasman Design, Gardzen Studio, Noelle Djokovich of Gex Designs, Eva Hughes of Black House Beige, Julie Pforzheimer and Shannon Chi of PforziesChi Designs, and Beatriz Rose Design signals an exciting evolution."I’m seeing a lot of English influence in this house," says Williams, whose jaunty blue-and-white plan enlivens the sun-soaked octagonal morning room. "Little touches that used to be old-fashioned are coming back into fashion." Designers are all-in on wallpapered ceilings, fabric lampshades, Forbes & Lomax switches, or sink skirts. Beatriz Rose’s garden room and art studio supports her case, with Crapper British plumbing fixtures, antiques sourced from Lee Stanton and Pointers, and accessories from Nickey Kehoe, plus handmade treasures from LA makers Studio Melt and ceramic artists Raina Lee and Victoria Morris. "I imagined a room that would bring the gardens inside, encouraging activities like watercoloring and potting, with a color palette inspired by Beatrix Potter’s illustrations," Rose shares.Julia Chasman—a former movie producer who brings a sharp, whimsical eye for curated vintage—turns her talents to the intimate downstairs library tucked off the corridor refresh by Kira Halter. While she doesn't specifically mention the term, Chasman’s installation is squarely at home in the rising intentional-clutter trend. Zak+Fox wallpapers peek from the back panels of the built-in, curio-stocked bookcases, while new Delft tiles by Petra Palumbo surround the mantle’s retro-inspired millwork. Chairs sourced at the Round Top Antiques Fair pull up to a petite vintage gaming table she found at the Pasadena Antique Center, and a mohair-wrapped loveseat by Serena & Lily sits nearby. The ceiling, embellished with geometric patterned grasscloth wallpaper by Peter Dunham, caps the layered scheme. "I feel like I have a good balance," she says about the mix of brand new versus pre-loved goods.While homing in on opportunities to update and reimagine, designers have also demonstrated an understanding and respect for existing character-defining features worth keeping. In the galley that leads to Rachel Duarte's kitchen and family room, Pforzheimer and Chi retained the quality cabinetry and stained wooden countertops, above which hangs a dazzling sculptural branch light installation by David Wiseman, another notable Pasadena-raised talent. Back in the garden room area, Rose tapped master woodworker Nathaniel Brawley Hill to restore both the existing cabinetry and the 1920s salvaged door panels she found at Pasadena Architectural Salvage, which Board and Block then installed. Djokovich opted to remove the flower room’s tiles, but preexisting open shelves mounted on curved brackets and cabinetry now present differently—the designer combined these elements with dark stone countertops, textured lattice work, and other details in the jewel box-like space. In the downstairs ladies' powder room, Bevan styled objects on original shelving framed by lattice-paneled doors. Her entire vignette is complemented by a lavish landscape mural from Gracie.As for color, the blues, greens, and browns that anchor this year's Showcase House palette from Dunn-Edwards Paint suit Azat just fine. “I always lean into a warm brown color scheme. My wedding was brown,” says the designer, who has documented the loss of her own Altadena home with an inspiring optimism. When faced with the daunting task of taking on the sizable upstairs primary suite, Azat's former career as an event producer served her well. The self-enclosed area encompasses a bedroom, sun room, sitting area, and luxurious bathroom—Azat outfitted the latter with honey-hued onyx trim and Sophie Lou Jacobsen’s Flora sconces for In Common With. Then, she wrapped the magnificent standalone dressing room in an equestrian-themed wallpaper mural. Because the bedroom "felt like a big rectangle, and overwhelming," Azat delineated the space with a border below the cove ceiling and a medallion for the Noguchi lantern. "The art [from Jack Rutberg] is insane," she says, pointing to abstract expressionist works by Hans Burkhardt, and Goya prints that deviate from typically soothing bedroom visual fare. "It's very meaningful."Brown tones are also on view in the teen boy’s suite by longtime Showcase House designers Albert Janz and Sherry Stein of Henry Johnstone & Co., while the lush Art Nouveau world of Alphonse Mucha inspires designer Gwen Sukeena's hand-painted floral motifs in the young lady's suite nearby. Accessed from the main residence down the driveway stands Blazek's carriage house, a contemporary interpretation of an historical cottage awash in warm neutrals and blush tones, with Arhaus furnishings, Armadillo rugs, surfaces from local favorite Mission Tile West, Zak+Fox goods, and art curated by the Art Wolf.Carmine Sabatella offers a fitting coda for touring the interiors before venturing outside to the boutiques and restaurants. The gentleman's retreat and study includes a hidden whiskey bar, along with a tribute to the home's former resident: a projection of Stephen J. Cannell Productions's iconic credit end card.Step inside the Pasadena Showcase House of Design 2025The Butterfly Garden. The Bauer Parterre Potager by Coastal Homestead. The Entry by Halter Home. The Formal Dining Room by The Art of Room Design. Morning Room by Samantha Williams Interior Design. The Kitchen Great Room by Rachel Duarte Design Studio. The Grand Living Room by Peltier Interiors. The Flower Room by Gex Designs. The Butler's Pantry by PforziesChi Designs. The Bauer Lounge by Denise Bosley Interiors. The Library by Julia Chasman Design. Upstairs Gallery Hall by Halter Home. The Teen Boy's Bedroom by Henry Johnstone & Co. The Teen Boys Bath by Henry Johnstone & Co. The Gentleman's Study by Carmine's Design & Decor. The Ladies' Powder Room by Jennifer Bevan Interiors. The Young Lady's Suite by Sukeena Design Studio. The Purse Room by Meredith Green Designs. Bathroom in the Primary Suite by Plaster & Patina. The Primary Suite by Plaster & Patina. The Primary Suite by Plaster & Patina. The Mens Powder Room by Black House Beige. The Guest Suite by Billman Designs. Meet You Poolside by McKinnon and Harris. Modern Cottage Staircase by Rebecca J Hansen. The Carriage House by A1000xBetter. Another view of The Carriage House by A1000xBetter. The Garden Studio & Washroom by Beatriz Rose Design. The Bauer Parterre Potager by Coastal Homestead The Zen Garden by GardZen Studio.

Signal messages discussing sensitive U.S. military plans were not on CIA director John Ratcliffe's phone when the CIA reviewed them, the CIA's Chief Data Officer has said.In a court document submitted Monday as part of a lawsuit between nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight and White House officials, Hurley V. Blankenship said that when the CIA reviewed a sensitive Signal group chat on March 31, days after news broke that a journalist had been erroneously added to it, "substantive messages" were not present and instead the chat showed only its group name and administrative settings.Newsweek contacted Ratcliffe for comment via website form outside of normal office hours on Tuesday.Why It MattersAdministration officials allegedly discussed U.S. military plans in Yemen on a Signal chat group on March 24 that included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.Officials on the chat group faced bipartisan criticism including the lawsuit, which alleged breaches of the Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by conducting government business on a platform which erases communications.Federal Judge James Boasberg, the chief U.S. district judge in Washington, on March 27 ordered Ratcliffe—along with other members of the group chat Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—to preserve all messages from March 11 to 15 in the chat group. John Ratcliffe, testifies before a Select Subcommittee hearing on the Coronavirus Pandemic investigation of the origins of COVID-19, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. John Ratcliffe, testifies before a Select Subcommittee hearing on the Coronavirus Pandemic investigation of the origins of COVID-19, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta What To KnowIn a declaration, Blankenship wrote: "I understand that the Director's personal Signal account was reviewed and a screenshot of the Signal Chat at issue was captured from the Director's account on 31 March 2025, and transferred to Agency records systems the same day."He added that the screenshot "reflects the information available at the time the screenshot was captured" which did "not include substantive messages from the Signal chat."Instead, it had the group chat name "Houthi PC Small Group, and reflects administrative notifications from 26 March and 28 Match relating to changes in participant's administrative settings in this group chat, such as profile names and message settings."What People Are SayingAttorney General Pam Bondi commented on the Signal leak last Thursday, telling reporters: "It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released. And what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission. Our world is now safer because of that mission."White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on March 26: "The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT 'war plans.' This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin."What Happens NextTrump previously said he asked National Security adviser Michael Waltz to look into potential security issues with Signal.It remains to be seen whether Congress will open an investigation into the security breach and whether the lawsuit results in any substantive action.

You. Do you crave more Nintendo Directness than you've already had this month? Do you want to learn more about Mario Kart World? Well, big Ninty has confirmed hoe long the special MKW Direct it pencilled in during the Switch 2 Direct will run for. You can also watch it right here. Hey, it's not like you'll have anything better to do on a Thursday than watch Mario and Luigi show off their latest attempt to run each other of the road, because only one brother can remain. Watch on YouTube You'll be able to tune into this Mario Kart World Direct via the video above on April 17, 2025. It's set to kick off at 2PM BST, which is 6AM PT, 9AM ET, and 3PM CEST. Just press play at that time wherever you are and boom, racing action with Toad, Daisy, and all the other characters who're riding their coat-tails if we're being honest. It'll run for "roughly 15 minutes" - about the length of a Grand Prix - and tell you a bunch more stuff about the game on Switch 2. Will the entire chat be screaming 'DROP THE PRICE', like they were during the Treehouse livestreams the other week? To see this content please enable targeting cookies. We'll have to see, but Mario Kart World's price tag has definitely been a part of all that controversy, though it certainly hasn't been the lone source of ire. The console itself, the Switch 2 Welcome Tour, and most recently the Switch 2 edition of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have all caught flak from fans due to Nintendo's pricing decisions. In other recent Nintendo news, a leaker has claimed that Switch 2 pre-orders in the US and Canada could be back on soon, after Ninty delayed them so it could see how those pesky tariffs played out.

Image: Nintendo LifeReady for some savings? Nintendo has kicked off an all-new 'Partner Spotlight' sale on the North American eShop, bringing discounts to thousands of titles until 27th April at 11:59pm PT. To help you see the best of the best, we've assembled the following list highlighting every game in the sale that we scored a 9/10 or higher. The games are accompanied by their sale price in USD, and we've presented things alphabetically so you can track down a select title at a glance. There's a fair amount of crossover with the European 'Save & Play' sale in here, but, as its name suggests, there are no first-party offerings to be found.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube808kWatch on YouTube If you want to pick up some eShop credit before diving in, we've got you covered. You'll find all credit options in the links below: Buy Nintendo eShop Credit USACANUKEURJPN Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin... 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (Switch) Publisher: Atlus / Developer: VanillawareRelease Date: 12th Apr 2022 (USA) / 12th Apr 2022 (UK/EU) $14.99 (-75%) 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is a wonderful achievement for dynamic storytelling, as it puts forth a compelling and multifaceted narrative that’ll keep you guessing right up until the very end. This excellent story, combined with enjoyable combat portions, a striking art style, and some top-notch voice acting make for an experience that you won’t want to miss out on. It’s the kind of game that’ll have you wishing that you could play it again for the first time, just so all its best elements could be new again. Please note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information. Abzu (Switch eShop) Publisher: 505 Games / Developer: Giant SquidRelease Date: 29th Nov 2018 (USA) / 29th Nov 2018 (UK/EU) $4.99 (-75%) Abzû is certainly a standout release on the eShop, offering up an experience that breaks from the norm of goal-based gaming in favour of something that’s more focused on simply existing in a world and enjoying all its little intricacies. Those of you who appreciate casual adventures like taking a walk in a forest will be sure to enjoy what Abzû has to offer, as the dreamlike visuals, entrancing orchestral score, and deliberately sedate pace do a fantastic job of drawing the player into this alien world. Abzû isn't a game about winning, but about the journey (no pun intended) you take getting there. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown Deluxe Edition (Switch) Publisher: Bandai Namco / Developer: Project AcesRelease Date: 11th Jul 2024 (USA) / 11th Jul 2024 (UK/EU) $35.99 (-40%) Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is the absolute pinnacle of the series and despite coming to Switch over five years after other platforms, this 'impossible' Switch conversion does very little to degrade the experience. Long-time franchise players and military aviation enthusiasts will be overwhelmed by the fan service at every turn, from craters on the ground to airplanes, liveries, callsigns, and emblems shouting out to previous entries. We understand the genre is uniquely niche, but if this is your first foray into the franchise, this conversion is a perfect gateway into this rich, revered series. You get tons of content and an epic single-player campaign wrapped up in triple-A presentation that delivers the most comprehensive portable experience ever from Project Aces. Alien: Isolation (Switch eShop) Publisher: SEGA / Developer: Creative AssemblyRelease Date: 5th Dec 2019 (USA) / 5th Dec 2019 (UK/EU) $14.99 (-25%) Alien: Isolation is a survival horror masterpiece and straight-up one of the very best horror video games ever released. It's a nerve-wracking affair — a slow, methodical game of cat and mouse against a brilliantly clever recreation of one of cinema's most infamous killers — but if you're up to the task you'll find one of the most satisfying gameplay experiences in the genre; a brilliant and beautiful homage to one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time. Feral Interactive has done a stellar job with this Switch port and the excellent motion controls and inclusion of all previously-released DLC only go to sweeten the deal. This is essential stuff for survival horror fans. Archvale (Switch eShop) Publisher: Humble Games / Developer: Idoz & PhopsRelease Date: 2nd Dec 2021 (USA) / 2nd Dec 2021 (UK/EU) $7.49 (-50%) Archvale is a triumphant bullet-hell/RPG genre mashup. Although you could argue its similarity to one or two recent releases, it trumps the competition with incredibly slick combat, simple and satisfying progression, and varied environments and enemies. The difficulty ramps up heavily as you progress to the later levels, so the inability to change difficulty on-the-fly may prove a bit of an issue for some players. Push through, however, and you’ll find Archvale to be one of the most satisfying twin-stick games available right now. Astral Ascent (Switch eShop) Publisher: MP2 Games / Developer: Hibernian WorkshopRelease Date: 14th Nov 2023 (USA) / 14th Nov 2023 (UK/EU) $12.49 (-50%) Astral Ascent is a prime example of a game that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Its strong character design, hi-bit visuals, tight combat, memorable bosses, and broad build variety have all featured in games you’ve probably played before—there’s nothing ‘new’ here. But to write it off as just 'another one of those' in a crowded genre would be to miss out on one of the most delightful and surprising releases of 2023. Astral Ascent is comfortably one of the best roguelites available on the Switch. Don't miss it. Axiom Verge (Switch eShop) Publisher: Thomas Happ Games / Developer: Thomas Happ GamesRelease Date: 5th Oct 2017 (USA) / 5th Oct 2017 (UK/EU) $4.99 (-75%) Axiom Verge on Switch is truly an outstanding port of an outstanding game, no more and no less. We would strongly urge those of you who missed this game on other platforms to pick it up here; this is the full Axiom Verge experience and it's available in a format that supports both handheld and home play. For those of you who have played it before on other platforms, it’s ultimately a question of just how much you love this game. This is the exact same, excellent game that you’ve played before, so whether or not you want to buy it again is personal choice. Regardless of which side you fall on, Axiom Verge is a fantastic example of how to do a Metroidvania right. And if you fancy even more, Axiom Verge 2 is also on sale for $9.99 (-50%). Balatro (Switch eShop) Publisher: PlayStack / Developer: LocalThunkRelease Date: 20th Feb 2024 (USA) / 20th Feb 2024 (UK/EU) $12.74 (-15%) Balatro is a roguelike for gamers who don't like roguelikes... and then everybody else on top of that. It utterly nails what it sets out to do, providing an instantly accessible, satisfying, and addictive gameplay loop that anybody can grasp. It's an immensely enjoyable experience from the start, but as you get deeper in, there's really nothing else quite like it. Utterly sublime. Beyond Galaxyland (Switch eShop) Publisher: United Label / Developer: Sam EnrightRelease Date: 24th Sep 2024 (USA) / 24th Sep 2024 (UK/EU) $10.49 (-42%) Beyond Galaxyland is a well-written, artistically diverse space adventure which mixes several different flavours of RPG with puzzling and semi-open exploration. The story is filled with well-rounded characters and emotional narrative payoffs and, as much as Enright's galactic adventure is a collection of stylistic and mechanical homages, it doesn't feel like a patchwork of fan service. For all its influences and adherence to specific genre execution, Doug’s journey through multiple worlds is still very much its own thing. BioShock: The Collection (Switch) Publisher: 2K Games / Developer: 2K GamesRelease Date: 29th May 2020 (USA) / 29th May 2020 (UK/EU) $9.99 (-80%) BioShock: The Collection combines three excellent, iconic games and all their DLC into one convincing package. Stable performance, engrossing narratives, fun gameplay, and lots of content make this one an easy recommendation, even if these releases show their age from time to time. If you’re looking for a series of strong single-player shooters to pick up for your Switch, it’s tough to go wrong here. Blazing Chrome (Switch eShop) Publisher: The Arcade Crew / Developer: JoyMasherRelease Date: 11th Jul 2019 (USA) / 11th Jul 2019 (UK/EU) $5.09 (-70%) For those longing for a time when side-scrolling shooters ruled the roost, Blazing Chrome is exactly what you're looking for. Perfect for short sessions, its slick gameplay and old-school art direction make for an astonishingly fun game full of explosions, epic set pieces and spectacular boss battles. Its brutal difficulty may not be for everyone, but if you're up for the challenge, then get ready for one of the most accomplished 2D action titles in years. Botany Manor (Switch eShop) Publisher: Whitethorn Games / Developer: Balloon StudiosRelease Date: 9th Apr 2024 (USA) / 9th Apr 2024 (UK/EU) $19.99 (-20%) It looks like The Witness and it plays a bit like StreetPass Garden, but Botany Manor blooms into something that's not only entirely its own, but also something quite special. Don't let its cosy aesthetics fool you — Botany Manor is packed with nicely challenging, well-designed puzzles, and isn't afraid to tackle heavy subjects, too. Braid: Anniversary Edition (Switch eShop) Publisher: Number None / Developer: Number NoneRelease Date: 14th May 2024 (USA) / 14th May 2024 (UK/EU) $8.99 (-55%) Braid remains a landmark equally for indie game development and puzzle platformers. The time control mechanics are mind-bendingly satisfying to play with and the puzzles are wickedly inventive. This Anniversary Edition is an exquisite expression of the original concept, with everything spruced up to perfection. And, even on top of that, it includes interactive creators’ commentary that sets a high watermark for in-game analysis and represents a new key text for anyone interested in how games are made. In short: this package is an all-timer. Card Shark (Switch eShop) Publisher: Devolver Digital / Developer: NerialRelease Date: 2nd Jun 2022 (USA) / 2nd Jun 2022 (UK/EU) $6.99 (-65%) Card Shark is the kind of game that at first blush seems like it just won’t work. Lots of dialogue bookended by brief, simplistic minigame sequences seems like it would make for an experience that would lose its luster quickly, yet we couldn’t put it down. Witty writing, high-stakes gameplay, and a gorgeous art style all come together here to make for a game that’s well-executed and unique in its appeal. If you’re looking to try something awesome that notably bucks most modern gaming trends, Card Shark is absolutely something we’d recommend, well worth your time and money. Castlevania Dominus Collection (Switch eShop) Publisher: Konami / Developer: KonamiRelease Date: 27th Aug 2024 (USA) / 27th Aug 2024 (UK/EU) $19.99 (-20%) Castlevania Dominus Collection is quite possibly the best compilation that Konami and M2 have produced to date. It presents three exceptional DS games that easily stand the test of time and provide just as much enjoyment now as they did back in the 2000s. Not only that, but the impossible has seemingly been achieved with the remarkable addition of Haunted Castle Revisited. Included as a fun little bonus, this revamped take on a reviled arcade curio is fantastic, and while it can't compete with the very best 'classic' games in the franchise, it's the closest we've gotten to a brand new Castlevania in years. An exquisite package. For more Castlevania, this sale also includes the Castlevania Advance Collection for $9.99 (-50%). Catherine: Full Body (Switch) Publisher: SEGA / Developer: Studio ZeroRelease Date: 7th Jul 2020 (USA) / 7th Jul 2020 (UK/EU) $9.99 (-80%) Catherine: Full Body is a fantastic revamp of a bonafide cult classic. With an excellent new character and several new endings slickly inserted into an already highly entertaining narrative – not to mention a slew of fun new modes – this is the definitive version of an outstanding game. If you've never played Catherine before then you're in for an absolute treat, and if you have, we'd say there's enough new content here to make it worth diving in all over again. Contra Anniversary Collection (Switch eShop) Publisher: Konami / Developer: KonamiRelease Date: 11th Jun 2019 (USA) / 11th Jun 2019 (UK/EU) $3.99 (-80%) While it’s a shame that there are fewer games here than in other Konami collections – we’d have loved to have seen NES title Contra Force or the now-extinct WiiWare title Contra ReBirth – the ones included in the Contra Anniversary Collection are universally brilliant. The 8-bit and 16-bit Contra games are among the finest examples of the run ‘n gun genre, and to have almost all of them included in a single release and emulated flawlessly is an absolute treat. Whether you’re a fan of the series or a curious onlooker who’s always wanted to see what the fuss was all about, this is essential. Core Keeper (Switch) Publisher: Fireshine Games / Developer: PugstormRelease Date: 17th Sep 2024 (USA) / 17th Sep 2024 (UK/EU) $13.39 (-33%) Core Keeper is a wonderfully engaging and mysterious survival sandbox that is tough to put down once it gets its hooks in you. An expertly judged progression curve, tons of secrets and unlockables, and excellent presentation all come together to make this one an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a great new survival game. If you’ve had your fill of stalwarts like Minecraft or Terraria and are looking for the next great game to scratch that itch, look no further. Crawl (Switch eShop) Publisher: Powerhoof / Developer: PowerhoofRelease Date: 19th Dec 2017 (USA) / 19th Dec 2017 (UK/EU) $2.99 (-80%) We really like Crawl, and we’d bet our collected stash of gold and wrath you will, too. A dungeon-crawling hack-and-slash affair with roguelike elements, one player is the hero trying to get through a dungeon and the others play as monster-controlling ghosts attempting to kill said hero and take their place. It's an everyone-for-themselves free-for-all, yet there are opportunities for frantic 3v1 co-operative play — a necessity when all the non-hero ghost characters must take joint control of bosses the hero faces. It’s great fun in single-player thanks to some aggressive AI, but that consistent danger takes on a new dimension when you and three of your friends are jostling for XP and that all-important killing blow. Competitive couchplay doesn’t get much better than this on Switch. Crimzon Clover - World EXplosion (Switch eShop) Publisher: DEGICA / Developer: YotsubaneRelease Date: 29th Oct 2020 (USA) / 29th Oct 2020 (UK/EU) $11.99 (-40%) While Crimzon Clover does owe a tremendous debt to many arcade shooters through the 1990s and 2000s, it's clear that Yotsubane has a great love and understanding of them. It’s not only a homage (look at the default high score table for some familiar initials) but also brings some mechanical brilliance that makes it stand out against most of its doujin shoot-em-up peers, and enough to hang with the genre greats. It’s flashy, it’s exciting, it’s addictive, and it’s an essential purchase for genre fans.

The ultimate founder summit returns — now bigger than ever! Formerly TechCrunch Early Stage, TC All Stage is bringing together founders and VCs from every stage, not just early stage. We’re thrilled to unveil the full breakout session lineup at TC All Stage. Packed with scaling pioneers and top-tier VCs, these sessions are designed for founders and startups at every stage — covering everything from fundraising strategies to scaling operations. Join 1,200+ founders and VCs on July 15 in Boston to navigate the startup landscape together.​ Stay tuned for the full list of interactive roundtable sessions — coming soon on the agenda page! Curious who’s leading the breakouts? Head to the speaker page to get to know all our speakers. Reserve your ticket now to guarantee access to a day of insights, connections, and inspiration. Register now to save up to $210 on your ticket. Foundation Stage Just getting started on your startup journey? The Foundation Stage is your launchpad — packed with practical skills to help you build and grow from day one. All the Ways You Don’t Realize VCs Are Evaluating Your Company at Pre-Seed Charles Hudson, Founder and Managing Partner, Precursor ​​This is an important topic, especially for pre-seed founders, because much of company evaluation is about the founder and the idea — there isn’t a lot of data to work with yet! One key point to highlight is that your choice of co-founder is critical. If it seems like you’re not the best match, many VCs will use that as a proxy for your ability to hire strong talent. Additionally, there are numerous traps that founders fall into that indicate to VCs they’ve not learned how to run a fundraising process, so it’s essential to do your homework in advance. Image Credits:Haje Kamps/TechCrunch MVP in the Age of AI: When to Bot and When to Not Chris Gardner, Partner, Underscore VC In an era where AI tools are revolutionizing how founders build software and prototypes, understanding both the opportunities and limitations is crucial for success. Join us to discover how AI is turbocharging MVP (minimum viable product) development and where some founders get it wrong by letting the robots do all the thinking. Learn the art of combining AI superpowers with irreplaceable human skills — nobody wants marketing copy that sounds like it was written by a very enthusiastic toaster! This session is perfect for founders navigating the wild world of building products in the age of AI. The TAM Myth: How the Best Startups Reshape Markets Jahanvi Sardana, Partner, Index Ventures This session will dive into critical elements of assessing total addressable market (TAM). Jahanvi Sardana, partner at Index Ventures, will explore how the best startups don’t just size markets — they create them. Through case studies from high-growth companies like Datadog, Adyen, Wiz, Shopify, and Airbnb, she will examine how they identified emerging trends, removed friction, and expanded their TAM beyond initial expectations. A must-attend for founders looking to build companies that define the future of their industries. Crafting the Perfect VC Pitch: Luck Meets Strategy Tiffany Luck, Partner, NEA Join Tiffany Luck from NEA as she unveils the art of pitching to venture capitalists. In this dynamic session, you’ll learn how to effectively convey your passion and vision, streamline your presentation to spotlight the elements that excite investors, and avoid common pitfalls that derail pitches. Tiffany will share insider tips on what VCs truly value, empowering you to tell your story with clarity and impact. Walk away with actionable strategies to captivate investors and secure the funding you need to propel your startup forward. So You Think You Can Pitch? Please join us for “So You Think You Can Pitch,” where three promising early-stage startups will have four minutes to wow a panel of judges, who will then provide feedback.  Scale Stage Ready to level up? The Scale Stage offers growth-stage founders actionable insights to take their startups to the next level. The New Rules of Growth-Stage Fundraising: How to Win at Raising a Series C & Beyond Cathy Gao, Partner, Sapphire Ventures After two years of decline, growth-stage fundraising is heating up again — driven largely by the surge of generative AI adoption. For most founders, breaking through the noise and securing top-tier investors is harder than ever. Cathy Gao from Sapphire Ventures will share what it really takes to raise a successful Series C+ in today’s competitive environment. Whether you’re scaling a breakout AI company or navigating the new fundraising landscape, this session will give you the insights to sharpen your pitch and maximize your fundraising outcomes.  The Operator’s Playbook for Building and Scaling Sustainable Companies Jon McNeill, CEO and Co-Founder, DVx Ventures Most startups chase product-market fit but ignore a scalable go-to-market strategy, leading to premature scaling and failure. Jon McNeill, former president of Tesla, COO of Lyft, and CEO and co-founder of hatch platform DVx Partners, suggests breaking the traditional VC mold by validating both before accelerating growth. The next wave of disruptive companies should be operator-driven and built for profitability and impact from day one. Jon will share successful cases where this method is already transforming transportation, electrification, and AI. Image Credits:World Business Forum Mo Jomaa, Partner, Capital G From market considerations to unit economics, sales and marketing strategies, and executive hiring, it’s never too early to think critically about how to build a business with the potential for an eventual public debut. Gain insights from Mo Jomaa, a partner at Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, and investor in Databricks, Armis, Cribl, Grafana, and more, to learn what kinds of metrics growth-stage investors look for and how those metrics translate into eventual public market readiness. Discover actionable advice, whether an IPO is a year or a decade away. Level up your skills, fuel your vision, and save $210 This July 15, SoWa Power Station in Boston will be the center of the startup universe. Get the insights you need to launch, scale, or take your startup public — right alongside 1,200+ founders and VCs. Prices rise soon — save up to $210 now. Even better savings with group passes. Looking to elevate your brand? Secure an exhibit table and get in front of 1,200+ attendees. It’s the perfect platform to showcase your company and build meaningful connections. Image Credits:Halo Creative Don’t miss out on the best deals for TechCrunch events Subscribe to the TechCrunch Events newsletter for early access to special deals and the latest event news.

Breakdown & Showreels The Invisible Art by Framestore By Vincent Frei - 16/04/2025 The Invisible Art series continues with acclaimed directors Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and Paul King (Paddington). Hear them reflect on their collaboration with Framestore and how they craft cinematic worlds beyond the lens! WANT TO KNOW MORE?Framestore: Dedicated page about Directing The Invisible Art on Framestore website. © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025