Star Wars: Zero Company will feature a varied roster of characters as part of the main squad, including a Mandalorian, Jedi Padawan, and an astromech droid--but for the main protagonist of Hawks, players will be free to customize that operative. Speaking to GameSpot, Bit Reactor creative director Greg Foertsch revealed that players will have a selection of options to help fine-tune the look of Hawks, ranging from gender and voice through to their species in the Star Wars galaxy."You can live through that character however you want," Foertsch said. "If you want to change the species, you can. If you want to change their voice, you can."The driving theme behind Hawks will be their origin story as a former Republic officer and how they're forced to assemble a motley crew to take on a dangerous adversary while the Clone Wars rage on in the background. While Hawks has been designed to have just enough of a personality for players to imprint themselves on, Zero Company's roster of "authored characters" will all have their own distinct backstories and personalities that players will discover as they progress through the game. One of these allies is Tell, a Jedi Padawan on a quest to finish her fallen master's final mission, and there'll also be some friction between the rest of the crew due to natural rivalries and animosity.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Fishing is one of five core skills in Stardew Valley that your farmer can level up by catching fish. Catching every fish out there in the Valley is a key requirement for achieving true game perfection. If you’re working towards that goal, you’ll often find yourself hunting down a specific fish, like Ice Pips.

Star Wars Zero Company, which one might colloquially refer to as “the XCOM Star Wars game,” got a full reveal today at a panel at Star Wars Celebration Japan. As for why one might refer to the game in that way, it’s because Greg Foertsch — the CEO and Creative Director of Bit Reactor, which is the studio making the game — previously worked on multiple major turn-based games at Firaxis, including the XCOM franchise. “Our vision for Star Wars Zero Company is grounded in gameplay design pillars that weave in the immersive Star Wars galaxy with engaging turn-based tactics gameplay,” said Foertsch, according to a press release sent to Polygon. “It’s our aim to deliver a game with an original Star Wars story from the Clone Wars era that has meaningful outcomes from player choices, and deep turn-based tactical combat with an approachable and cinematic presentation.” The protagonist of this single-player game is a character named Hawks, a former Republic officer who must command “an unconventional outfit of professionals for hire hailing from across the galaxy.” This ragtag squad is the titular Zero Company; its members must “set aside their differences to overcome nearly impossible odds and take on an emerging threat that will consume the galaxy if left unchecked.” The game’s structure, as described in the press release, sounds refreshingly similar to the XCOM games: “Players will embark on a campaign of tactical operations and investigations across the galaxy. Between missions, they will develop a base of operations and gather intelligence through a network of informants to stay one step ahead of Zero Company’s adversaries. Players will have the freedom to create and customize their own squad of recruited operators while getting to know a cast of newly authored Star Wars characters.“ The best part of all that, at least according to this author, is the “newly authored Star Wars characters” aspect. I’d be fine if no recognizable Star Wars mainstays showed up in this, and instead we got to play through a wholly original side story. Andor, for example, is full of totally new characters and stories told within the wider universe of Star Wars, and that’s one of the many things that feels so fresh about it. One can only hope Zero Company takes a page out of that same book. We’ll have to wait a while to find out, though, as Zero Company doesn’t yet have a release date, and its release window is simply 2026. The game, which Bit Reactor is developing in collaboration with Respawn Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games, will be released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.

A known data breach affecting a major insurance administrator may have compromised the personal information of nearly twice as many people as previously reported. A May 2024 cyberattack on Landmark Admin is believed to include at least 1.6 million people's data, according to an updated filing with the Maine attorney general's office. Landmark Admin is a Texas-based third-party administrator (TPA) for life insurance and annuity companies like Liberty Bankers Life and American Benefit Life, which offer policies nationwide. A TPA offers insurers support with accounting, regulatory reporting, reinsurance, and IT. That means that while you may not ever have dealt directly with Landmark Admin, your information could still have been leaked. What happened with Landmark AdminLandmark Admin suffered a security breach on May 13, 2024, when suspicious activity was detected on the company's networks. It was originally reported in October 2024 that the breach exposed the data of just over 806,00 individuals, but the company now believes that at least 1,613,773 people—and possibly more—may have been impacted. The compromised information varies by individual may include the following: Full nameHome addressSocial Security numberTax identification numberDriver's license numberState-issued identification cardPassport numberFinancial account numberMedical informationDate of birthHealth insurance policy numberLife and annuity policy informationWhat affected consumers can do As always, you can't retroactively protect leaked information, but you can (and should) continue to follow security best practices when it comes to your browsing, communication, and financial habits to mitigate the risk of identity theft. Review activity on your banking and credit accounts and check your credit report regularly. You can also freeze your credit, place a fraud alert on your file, and lock down your Social Security number. To avoid falling victim to common phishing tactics, never click links or download attachments in emails or messages, don't engage with unknown callers, and go directly to websites by typing in URLs (rather than relying on search results). If you've been impacted by the Landmark Admin breach specifically, you're eligible for 12 months of credit monitoring and identity protection services through IDX, which includes a $1,000,000 insurance reimbursement policy and ID theft recovery services. Landmark is currently notifying consumers and has a help line at 844-428-5109 that is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m ET Monday through Friday to address concerns.

Blue Prince is an incredible puzzle game. Set in a lonely mansion with impossible architecture, it’s layered in mysteries, conspiracies and family drama. The mansion, Mt. Holly, officially has 45 rooms, but in order to collect your inheritance, you have to find the 46th. Every day you’re given a set number of steps, and you have to literally build the manor (and the game) as you go, drawing from a pool of floorplans to create a new layout with each run. This is the foundation, but it goes so much deeper: When I previewed Blue Prince in December 2024, I couldn’t have imagined its complexity. It’s not a game you can fully understand in a few runs; it takes 10 hours to realize what its core puzzles even are, and even longer to then piece their solutions together, room by room, step by step. It’s a slow, supremely satisfying burn. The puzzles in Blue Prince are cavernous and surprising, and it’s thrilling to interact with the game’s mechanics and items. Not to mention, it’s all absolutely gorgeous. Dogubomb Though Blue Prince isn’t marketed as a cooperative experience and it doesn’t have any kind of multiplayer input, it naturally lends itself to co-op play. Mechanics matter less than the concepts on-screen, and it’s useful to have one person on controls and another on a notepad, jotting down clues and tracking progress. Plus, one of the best ways to get unstuck in a game like this is to talk things through, and this naturally happens when you’re playing together. Blue Prince is just a really intricate puzzle, after all, and we’ve been doing those things in group settings for ages. This is a true of many single-player puzzle games — their common theme being that they’re secretly couch co-op experiences. You could say all games are local co-op if you try hard enough, but only in puzzle games can a bystander play along without ever touching a controller, directing the action and providing critical breakthroughs simply by paying attention. You’re not going to have the same level of impact watching your friend play Assassin’s Creed, you know? Dogubomb Blue Prince is only the latest example of an undercover couch co-op puzzle game. My partner and I have happily played a handful of similar games together in recent years, and it’s gotten to the point that I now breeze right past the “single-player” descriptor on most puzzle titles. Here’s a shortlist of my household’s favorites: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes The Talos Principle 2 The Sexy Brutale The Rise of the Golden Idol Return of the Obra Dinn The Witness Viewfinder Storyteller All of these games are officially single-player, but they’re as good, if not even better, when played with a loved one. On my couch, we’ve also enjoyed actual local co-op puzzlers like Escape Academy, so if your relationship can survive those games, it should be able to handle Lorelei, Talos or Blue Prince with ease. While we’re waxing poetic about the intricacies of video game sub-genres (OK fine, just one of us is), Blue Prince falls into another one of my favorite categories, which I affectionately call “anti-GameFAQs puzzle games.” These are designed to be impossible to capture in a traditional walkthrough guide, and while the category isn’t large, it includes some of the best titles of this generation, like Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. These lean so heavily on the thing that makes video games unique as a media product — player autonomy — that they feel like a hostile attack on step-by-step explainers, and I absolutely love that. (These games also tend to remind me of House of Leaves, which could be another sub-genre on its own, but I’ll stop here. For now.) Playing Blue Prince with my partner in 2025 reminds me of the specific lazy afternoon in the summer of 2008 when some friends and I discovered Braid on Xbox Live Arcade. We spent hours playing from my buddy’s dingy couch, passing the controller around, pointing at the screen and yelling out strategies, and just marveling at that little time-shifting toxic dude. Shared experiences like this generate a specific kind of warmth, and a great puzzle game can produce these moments over and over again. Even if it’s technically single-player.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/every-puzzle-game-is-a-couch-co-op-game-actually-163024595.html?src=rss

Hulu has announced all the titles leaving the platform in May 2025 – and there's a surprising amount of documentaries in here.

With music streaming, users have gotten used to being at the mercy of algorithms. But French music streamer Deezer is making it easier for its subscribers to make the algorithm work for them. The company unveiled an update to its mobile experience that doubles down on its emphasis on personalization and sharing to set it apart from larger competitors like Spotify and Apple Music.  “The new features we’re introducing today give users more control over their algorithm, greater flexibility to personalize their experience, and easy ways to share content with their friends, even beyond Deezer,” CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release. Rolling out over the next two months, the update includes enhancements to Deezer’s Flow feature, more options for interface personalization, a monthly Spotify Wrapped-style listening roundup called “My Deezer Month,” and a universal sharing function to share songs with users on other music platforms. With Flow, listeners can set certain songs as favorites and ban others, effectively steering the algorithm in the direction they choose. From there, they can even tune in to specific “moods,” like “chill,” “sad,” or “party.”  The app’s interface can be personalized as well. Deezer had previously rolled out a personalized homepage to a subset of users, but now all subscribers will have the ability to decide what they see featured on their Favorites page, making it easier to navigate to their preferred tracks, playlists, and albums. Users can further customize the way the app looks with photos and stickers for their playlist covers. For fans of Spotify’s annual Wrapped feature, My Deezer Month ups the ante with more frequency, providing a monthly breakdown of users’ listening habits delivered in highly shareable form. This feature builds on the strong engagement growth the platform said it saw in 2024 for its annual wrap-up, My Deezer Year. Alongside its full-year earnings in March, Deezer said engagement and social media shares of the feature were up 27% and 75% year over year, respectively, in 2024. But what fun would these features be if you couldn’t share them? The app’s Shaker feature has long allowed users to make playlists with users across platforms; now they can also share tracks with users on different platforms thanks to Deezer’s unique universal sharing link.  The company has stepped up efforts to stand out in a competitive streaming landscape with both users and artists. In 2023, Deezer was one of the first platforms to adopt what it calls an “artist-centric” payment model that set a minimum number of monthly streams a song needs before it can start earning royalties (Spotify followed suit with a similar policy later that year).  It has also invested in AI tools, including AI-powered playlists and a tool for identifying AI-generated songs, which Deezer says make up roughly 18% of all songs submitted to streaming platforms. So far Deezer is also the only music streaming service to sign the Statement on AI Training that promises not to allow its music data to train AI models. “Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption,” Aurélien Hérault, Deezer’s chief innovation officer, said in a press release. “But we need to approach the development with responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters while maintaining transparency for the fans.”

As anticipation builds for the release of Bethesda and id Software’s Doom: The Dark Ages, Xbox has unveiled a new line of limited-edition accessories that are sure to get any Slayer’s heart pounding. Leading the charge are two stunning, Doom-themed controllers designed to immerse you even further in the medieval-futuristic gorefest. If you like your controllers to match the game you’re playing or you just want something that’s cooler than your normal controllers, then it’s something to look forward to. Designer: Microsoft For the purists and the armor enthusiasts, the standard Xbox Wireless Controller gets a demonic makeover. Inspired by the Doom Slayer’s iconic armor, the Xbox Wireless Controller – Doom: The Dark Ages Limited Edition features a striking matte green finish accented by silver 3D helmet spike designs. Orange details and insignias from Doom: The Dark Ages complete the look, while the ABXY buttons are replaced with symbols from the game’s Sentinel alphabet, adding an extra layer of authenticity. Beyond its menacing aesthetics, this controller functions just like a standard Xbox Wireless Controller, offering seamless compatibility with Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows PCs (via Bluetooth or USB-C), and cloud gaming services. As a bloody good bonus, each purchase includes a DLC code for the Doom Slayer Executioner skin in Doom: The Dark Ages, letting you customize your in-game appearance. This limited edition controller is slated for release on April 30th and is priced at $79.99 USD or £74.99 GBP. For those who demand the very best in performance and customization, the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 is also receiving a Doom-inspired treatment. This premium controller boasts a more sinister red and black color scheme, with transparent red sections allowing you to glimpse the internal components. The iconic Doom Slayer’s insignia takes center stage, proudly displayed in the middle of the controller. As a Microsoft Store exclusive launching on April 25th, this Elite controller offers the same high-end features players have come to expect, including customizable thumbsticks, adjustable triggers, and a suite of button mapping options. While pricing details specific to this edition are still emerging, expect it to be in line with the standard Elite Series 2 controller. The Doom-themed love doesn’t stop at controllers. Xbox is also releasing a limited-edition Xbox Series X Console Wrap – Doom: The Dark Ages Limited Edition. This wrap allows you to emblazon your console with the mark of the Slayer, featuring artwork that complements the controller designs. This is available exclusively through the Microsoft Store for a limited time, priced at £49.99 GBP. Remember to remove the wrap before handling the console! For eager fans, pre-orders for both the standard and Elite Doom: The Dark Ages controllers, as well as the console wrap, are already live at various retailers, including the Microsoft Store and Amazon. With Doom: The Dark Ages set to launch on May 15th, these accessories are the perfect way to prepare for the demonic onslaught and showcase your Slayer pride. The post Xbox unleashes Doom-themed controllers for upcoming new Doom game first appeared on Yanko Design.

Relive the automotive ads that captured our dreams.

Plus: A US judge rules against police cell phone “tower dumps,” China names alleged NSA agents it says were involved in cyberattacks, and Customs and Border Protection reveals its social media spying tools.