It's a colourful resurrection for the ginger beer brand.

Following the death of Pope Francis, the Vatican is preparing to organize a new conclave in less than 20 days. This is how they’ll tamp down on leaks.

The ongoing saga of a Google secure browsing project took yet another turn, with the latest change coming just a few days after the company lost an antitrust lawsuit against the US government. Google this week dropped some features from its Privacy Sandbox initiative, which was initiated in 2019 and aims to reduce the invasiveness of third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. The company said it won’t provide a specific prompt that would allow Chrome users to opt in or out of cookies from third parties. That was a central feature of the project that made it easier for users to secure Chrome experiences. The initial objective of Privacy Sandbox in 2019 was to drop third-party ad cookies for better browser security. That idea was dropped last year amid regulatory concerns. Third-party cookies were reinstated, and Google also said it provides “a new experience in Chrome” for users to be able to adjust their third-party cookie choices. This week Google dropped that idea, saying it wouldn’t roll out the so-called “new experience” — a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies for users to opt in or opt out of cookies from third parties. “Users can continue to choose the best option for themselves in Chrome’s Privacy and Security Settings,” wrote Anthony Chavez, vice president for the Privacy Sandbox initiative, in the blog entry. Chavez wrote that the change came amid changes in the regulatory landscape and browsing experiences. Google last week lost a case against the US, which accused the company of violating antitrust law “by monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets.” Google said it would appeal the ruling. The US Department of Justice originally accused Google of “wielding its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products,” according to a press release in 2023. The Electronic Frontier Foundation last year, in a blog entry, criticized Privacy Sandbox, saying it didn’t eliminate online tracking. Instead, online tracking moved from third-party trackers to Google, which tracks the data from Chrome and shares browsing habits with websites and advertisers. “Despite sounding like a feature that protects your privacy, Privacy Sandbox ultimately protects Google’s advertising business,” EFF wrote. Chavez reaffirmed it won’t deprecate third-party cookies. The company will engage with developers, publishers and advertisers to improve the Privacy Sandbox roadmap. Either way, Google’s reversal of Privacy Sandbox plans still points to the company chasing a closed ecosystem that serves the company’s business interests, said Anand Kashyap, CEO and Founder of Fortanix. Advertisers and media companies will use AI in their own secure systems that can analyze data to deliver targeted advertising on the Internet, Kashyap said. Google is also adding a feature in the third quarter this year that will protect the IP address when in secure mode of Chrome browser. Typically users can be located by capturing and tracking the IP address. The feature will anonymize the IP address, and it will be part of the Incognito mode, which creates a temporary browsing window that deletes browsing data on exit, Google said in a blog post on its Privacy Sandbox website. “The feature will be initially available in certain regions, and we plan to expand the availability over time. IP Protection will launch to Chrome Stable no sooner than July 2025,” Google said on the GitHub page for IP Protection. Chrome’s IP address anonymization feature could be important for enterprise users, said Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “It’s clearly Google trying to enhance the security of Incognito mode and more importantly enhance the privacy of a mode that people assume is inherently private,” Sag said. In terms of privacy, Google’s IP Protection feature could block user IP access for third parties but not for their own services or needs, said Alex Matrosov, CEO of security firm Binarly.io. Google is attempting to adopt a similar approach to Apple’s Private Relay feature, which also hides IP addresses and has posed significant challenges for internet advertisers, including Google itself. “In the modern Internet, the word privacy has really transformed into marketing terminology or something else. It’s a nice feature for the Chrome browser to have, but it raises questions about why it was not implemented before,” Matrosov said.

When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled.   In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in a drug rehab program. Once locked inside, he found himself alone in a room with a convicted criminal. “I didn’t know whether I should be scared,” he recalls.  Since then, he has spent countless hours in such environments in his role as a teacher of philosophy. He’s had “very, very few experiences” where he felt unsafe in prisons over the years, he says. “But that first time you go in, you do feel unsafe. I think that’s what you should feel. That teaches you something about what it feels like for anybody going into prison.” As a lecturer in MIT’s Experimental Study Group (ESG) for more than 40 years, Perlman has guided numerous MIT students through their own versions of that passage through prison doors. He first began teaching in prisons in the 1980s, when he got the idea of bringing his ESG students studying nonviolence into the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk to talk with men serving life sentences. The experience was so compelling that Perlman kept going back, and since the early 2000s he has been offering full courses behind bars.  In 2018, Perlman formalized these efforts by cofounding the Educational Justice Institute (TEJI) at MIT with Carole Cafferty, a former corrections professional. Conceived both to provide college-level education with technology access to incarcerated individuals and to foster empathy and offer a window into the criminal justice system for MIT students, TEJI creates opportunities for the two groups to learn side by side.  “There’s hard data that there’s nothing that works like education to cut recidivism, to change the atmosphere within a prison so prisons become less violent places.” Lee Perlman, PhD ’89 “We believe that there are three fundamental components of education that everybody should have, regardless of their incarceration status: emotional literacy, digital literacy, and financial literacy,” says Cafferty. TEJI offers incarcerated students classes in the humanities, computer science, and business, the credits from which can be applied toward degrees from private universities and community colleges. The emotional literacy component, featuring Perlman’s philosophy courses, is taught in an “inside-out” format, with a mixed group of incarcerated “inside” students and “outside” classmates (from MIT and other universities where TEJI courses are sometimes cross-listed).  “I’ve been really torn throughout my life,” Perlman says, “between this part of me that would like to be a monk and sit in a cave and read books all day long and come out and discuss them with other monks, and this other half of me that wants to do some good in the world, really wants to make a difference.” Behind prison walls, the concepts he relishes discussing—love, authenticity, compassion—have become his tools for doing that good. TEJI also serves as a convener of people from academia and the criminal justice system. Within MIT, it works with the Sloan School of Management, the Music and Theater Arts Section, the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center, and others on courses and special prison-related projects. And by spearheading broader initiatives like the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium and the New England Commission on the Future of Higher Education in Prison, TEJI has helped lay the groundwork for significant shifts in how incarcerated people across the region and beyond prepare to rejoin society. “Lee and I both share the belief that education can and should be a transformative force in the lives of incarcerated people,” Cafferty says. “But we also recognize that the current system doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for that.” Through TEJI, they’re working to create more. Perlman didn’t set out to reform prison education. “There’s never been any plan,” he says. “Before I was an academic I was a political organizer, so I have that political organizer brain. I just look for … where’s the opening you can run through?” Before earning his PhD in political philosophy, Perlman spent eight years making his mark on Maryland’s political scene. At age 28, he came up short by a few hundred votes in a primary for the state senate. In the late 1970s, Perlman says, he was named one of 10 rising stars in Maryland politics by the Baltimore Sun and one of the state’s most feared lobbyists by Baltimore Magazine because he got lawmakers to “do things they’d be perfectly willing to leave alone,” as he puts it, like pass election reform bills. The legislators gave him the nickname Wolfman, “probably just because I had a beard,” he says, “but it kind of grew to mean other things.” Perlman still has the beard. Working in tandem with Cafferty and others, he’s also retained his knack for nudging change forward. Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, and Philip Hutchful, an incarcerated student, take part in the semester’s final meeting of Perlman’s “inside-out” class Nonviolence as a Way of Life at the Boston Pre-Release Center.JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION Cafferty understands, better than most, how difficult that can be in the prison system. She held numerous roles in her 25-year corrections career, ultimately serving as superintendent of the Middlesex Jail and House of Correction, where she oversaw the introduction of the first tablet-based prison literacy program in New England.  “I used to say someday when I write a book, it’s going to be called Swimming Against the Tide,” she says. In a correctional environment, “safety and security come first, always,” she explains. “Programming and education are much further down the list of priorities.” TEJI’s work pushes against a current in public opinion that takes a punitive rather than rehabilitative view of incarceration. Some skeptics see educating people in prison as rewarding bad deeds. “Out in the world I’ve had people say to me, ‘Maybe I should commit a crime so I can get a free college education,’” says Perlman. “My general response is, well, you really have one choice here: Do you want more crime or less crime? There’s hard data that there’s nothing that works like education to cut recidivism, to change the atmosphere within a prison so prisons become less violent places. Also, do you want to spend more or do you want to spend less money on this problem? For every dollar we spend on prison education and similar programs, we save five dollars.” The research to which Perlman refers includes a 2018 RAND study, which found that participants in correctional education programs in the US were 28% less likely to reoffend than their counterparts who did not participate. It’s a powerful number, considering that roughly 500,000 people are released from custody each year. Perlman has such statistics at the ready, as he must. But talk to him for any amount of time and the humanity behind the numbers is what stands out.  “There is a sizable group of people in prison who, if society was doing a better job, would have different lives,” he says, noting that “they’re smart enough and they have character enough” to pull it off: “We can make things happen in prison that will put them on a different path.”  “Most of the people I teach behind bars are people that have had terrible experiences with education and don’t feel themselves to be very capable at all,” he says. So he sometimes opens his class by saying: “Something you probably wouldn’t guess about me is that I failed the 11th grade twice and dropped out of high school. And now I have a PhD from MIT and I’ve been teaching at MIT for 40 years. So you never know where life’s gonna lead you.”  Though Perlman struggled to find his motivation in high school, he “buckled down and learned how much I loved learning,” as he puts it, when his parents sent him to boarding school to finish his diploma. He went on to graduate from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Growing up in Michigan in the 1960s, he’d learned about fair housing issues because his mother was involved with the civil rights movement, and he lived for a time with a Black family that ran a halfway house for teenage girls. By the time he took that first job interviewing incarcerated former drug addicts, he was primed to understand their stories within the context of poverty, discrimination, and other systemic factors. He began volunteering for a group helping people reenter society after incarceration, and as part of his training, he spent a night booked into jail.  “I didn’t experience any ill treatment,” he says, “but I did experience the complete powerlessness you have when you’re a prisoner.” Jocelyn Zhu ’25 took a class with Perlman in the fall of 2023 at the Suffolk County House of Correction, and entering the facility gave her a similar sense of powerlessness.  “We had to put our phones away, and whatever we were told to do we would have to do, and that’s not really an experience that you’re in very often as a student at MIT,” says Zhu. “There was definitely that element of surrender: ‘I’m not in charge of my environment.’” On the flip side, she says, “because you’re in that environment, the only thing you’re doing while you’re there is learning—and really focusing in on the discussion you’re having with other students.” “I call them the ‘philosophical life skills’ classes,” says Perlman, “because there are things in our lives that everybody should sit down and think through as well as they can at some point.” He says that while those classes work fine with just MIT students, being able to go into a prison and talk through the same issues with people who have had very different life experiences adds a richness to the discussion that would be hard to replicate in a typical classroom.  He recalls the first time he broached the topic of forgiveness in a prison setting. Someone serving a life sentence for murder put things in a way Perlman had never considered. He remembers the man saying: “What I did was unforgivable. If somebody said ‘I forgive you for taking my child’s life,’ I wouldn’t even understand what that meant. For me, forgiveness means trying, at least … to regard me as somebody who’s capable of change … giving me the space to show you that I’m not the person who did that anymore.’”  Perlman went home and revised his lecture notes. “I completely reformulated my conception of forgiveness based on that,” he says. “And I tell that story every time I teach the class.” The meeting room at the minimum-­security Boston Pre-Release Center is simply furnished: clusters of wooden tables and chairs, a whiteboard, some vending machines. December’s bare branches are visible through a row of windows that remain closed even on the warmest of days (“Out of Bounds,” warns a sign taped beside them). This afternoon, the room is hosting one of Perlman’s signature classes, Nonviolence as a Way of Life. To close the fall 2024 semester, he has asked his students to creatively recap four months of Thursdays together.  Before long, the students are enmeshed in a good-natured showdown, calling out letters to fill in the blanks in a mystery phrase unfolding on the whiteboard. Someone solves it (“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind”) and scores bonus points for identifying its corresponding unit on the syllabus (Restorative Justice).  “It’s still anybody’s game!” announces the presenting student, Jay Ferran, earning guffaws with his spot-on TV host impression. Ferran and the other men in the room wearing jeans are residents of the Pre-Release Center. They have shared this class all semester with undergrad and grad students from MIT and Harvard (who are prohibited from wearing jeans by the visitor dress code). Before they all part ways, they circle up their chairs one last time. “Humor can be a defense mechanism, but it never felt that way in here,” says Isabel Burney, a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “I really had a good time laughing with you guys.” “I appreciate everyone’s vulnerability,” says Jack Horgen ’26. “I think that takes a lot of grace, strength, and honesty.” “I’d like to thank the outside students for coming in and sharing as well,” says Ferran. “It gives a bit of freedom to interact with students who come from the outside. We want to get on the same level. You give us hope.” After the room has emptied out, Ferran reflects further on finding himself a college student at this stage in his life. Now in his late 40s, he dropped out of high school when he became a father. “I always knew I was smart and had the potential, but I was a follower,” he says.  As Ferran approaches the end of his sentence, he’s hoping to leverage the college credits he’s earned so far into an occupation in counseling and social work. His classmate Philip Hutchful, 35, is aiming for a career in construction management.  Access to education in prison “gives people a second chance at life,” Hutchful says. “It keeps your mind busy, rewires your brain.” MIT undergrads Denisse Romero Cruz ’25, Jack Horgen ’26, and Alor Sahoo ’26 at the final session of Perlman’s Nonviolence as a Way of Life class at the Boston Pre-Release Center. Along with about 45% of the Boston Pre-Release Center’s residents, Ferran and Hutchful are enrolled in the facility’s School of Reentry, which partners with MIT and other local colleges and universities to provide educational opportunities during the final 12 to 18 months of a sentence.  “We have seen a number of culture shifts for our students and their families, such as accountability, flexible thinking, and curiosity,” says the program’s executive director, Lisa Millwood. There are “students who worked hard just so they can proudly be there to support their grandchildren, or students who have made pacts with their teenage children who are struggling in school to stick with it together.” Ferran and Hutchful had previously taken college-level classes through the School of Reentry, but the prospect of studying alongside MIT and Harvard students raised new qualms.  “These kids are super smart—how can I compete with them? I’m going to feel so stupid,” Ferran remembers thinking. “In fact, it wasn’t like that at all.” “We all had our own different types of knowledge,” says Hutchful. Both Ferran and Hutchful say they’ve learned skills that they’ll put to use in their post-release lives, from recognizing manipulation to fostering nonviolent communication. Hutchful especially appreciates the principle that “you need to attack the problem, not the person,” saying, “This class teaches you how to deal with all aspects of people—angry people, impatient people. You’re not being triggered to react.”  Perlman has taught Nonviolence as a Way of Life nearly every semester since TEJI launched. Samuel Tukua ’25 took the class a few years ago. Like Hutchful, he has applied its lessons.  “I wouldn’t be TAing it for the third year now if it didn’t have this incredible impact on my life,” Tukua says.  Meeting incarcerated people did not in itself shift Tukua’s outlook; their stories didn’t surprise him, given his own upbringing in a low-income neighborhood near Atlanta. But watching learners from a range of backgrounds find common ground in big philosophical ideas helped convince him of those ideas’ validity. For example, he started to notice undercurrents of violence in everyday actions and speech.  “It doesn’t matter whether you came from a highly violent background or if you came from a privileged, less violent background,” he says he realized. “That kind of inner violence or that kind of learned treatment exists inside all of us.”  Marisa Gaetz ’20, a fifth-year PhD candidate in math at MIT, has stayed in TEJI’s orbit in the seven years since its founding—first as a student, then as a teaching assistant, and now by helping to run its computer science classes.  Limitations on in-person programming imposed by the covid-19 pandemic led Gaetz and fellow MIT grad student Martin Nisser, SM ’19, PhD ’24, to develop remote computer education classes for incarcerated TEJI students. In 2021, she and Nisser (now an assistant professor at the University of Washington) joined with Emily Harburg, a tech access advocate, to launch Brave Behind Bars, which partners closely with TEJI to teach Intro to Python, web development, and game design in both English and Spanish to incarcerated people across the US and formerly incarcerated students in Colombia and Mexico.  Since many inside students have laptop access only during class time, the remote computer courses typically begin with a 30-minute lecture followed by Zoom breakouts with teaching assistants. A ratio of one TA for every three or four students ensures that “each student feels supported, especially with coding, which can be frustrating if you’re left alone with a bug for too long,” Gaetz says.  Gaetz doesn’t always get to hear how things work out for her students,but she’s learned of encouraging outcomes. One Brave Behind Bars TA who got his start in their classes is now a software engineer. Another group of alums founded Reentry Sisters, an organization for formerly incarcerated women. “They made their own website using the skills that they learned in our class,” Gaetz says. “That was really amazing to see.” Although the pandemic spurred some prisons to expand use of technology, applying those tools to education in a coordinated way requires the kind of bridge-building TEJI has become known for since forming the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium (MPEC) in 2018. “I saw there were a bunch of colleges doing various things in prisons and we weren’t really talking to each other,” says Perlman. TEJI secured funding from the Mellon Foundation and quickly expanded MPEC’s membership to more than 80 educational institutions, corrections organizations, and community-based agencies. Millwood says the School of Reentry has doubled its capacity and program offerings thanks to collaborations developed through MPEC. At the regional level, TEJI teamed up with the New England Board of Higher Education in 2022 to create the New England Commission on the Future of Higher Education in Prison. Its formation was prompted in part by the anticipated increase in demand for high-quality prison education programs thanks to the FAFSA Simplification Act, which as of 2023 reversed a nearly three-decade ban on awarding federal Pell grants to incarcerated people. Participants included leaders from academia and correctional departments as well as formerly incarcerated people. One, Daniel Throop, cochaired a working group called “Career, Workforce, and Employer Connections” just a few months after his release.  “I lived out a reentry while I was on the commission in a way that was very, very powerful,” Throop says. “I was still processing in real time.”  “Most of the people I teach behind bars are people that have had terrible experiences with education and don’t feel themselves to be very capable at all.” Lee Perlman, PhD ’89 During his incarceration in Massachusetts, Throop had revived the long-defunct Norfolk Prison Debating Society, which went head-to-head with university teams including MIT’s. Credits from his classes, including two with Perlman, culminated in a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies magna cum laude from Boston University, which he earned before his release. But he still faced big challenges. “Having a criminal record is still a very, very real hurdle,” Throop says. “I was so excited when those doors of prison finally opened after two decades, only to be greatly discouraged that so many doors of the community remained closed to me.”  Initially, the only employment he could get was loading UPS trucks by day and unloading FedEx trucks by night. He eventually landed a job with the Massachusetts Bail Fund and realized his goal of launching the National Prison Debate League.  “I fortunately had the educational credentials and references and the wherewithal to not give up on myself,” says Throop. “A lot of folks fail with less resources and privilege and ability and support.” The commission’s 2023 report advocates for improved programming and support for incarcerated learners spanning the intake, incarceration, and reentry periods. To help each state implement the recommendations, the New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEPEC) launched in October 2024 with funding from the Ascendium Education Group. Perlman encouraged TEJI alumna Nicole O’Neal, then working at Tufts University, to apply for the position she now holds as a NEPEC project manager.  Like Throop, O’Neal has firsthand experience with the challenges of reentry. Despite the stigma of having served time, having a transcript with credits earned during the period she was incarcerated “proved valuable for both job applications and securing housing,” she says. With the help of a nonprofit called Partakers and “a lot of personal initiative,” she navigated the confusing path to matriculation on Boston University’s campus, taking out student loans so she could finish the bachelor’s degree she’d begun in prison. A master’s followed. “I’ve always known that education was going to be my way out of poverty,” she says. From her vantage point at NEPEC, O’Neal sees how TEJI’s approach can inspire other programs. “What truly sets TEJI apart is the way that it centers students as a whole, as people and not just as learners,” she says. “Having the opportunity to take an MIT course during my incarceration wasn’t just about earning credits—it was about being seen as capable of engaging with the same level of intellectual rigor as students outside. That recognition changed how I saw myself and my future.” On a Zoom call one Wednesday evening in December, Perlman’s inside-out course on Stoicism is wrapping up. Most participants are women incarcerated in Maine. These are among Perlman’s most advanced and long-standing students, thanks to the state’s flexible approach to prison education—Perlman says it’s “maybe the most progressive system in the country,” early to adopt remote learning, experiment with mixed-gender classes, and allow email communication between teachers and students.  The mood is convivial, the banter peppered with quotes from the likes of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. More than one student is crocheting a Christmas gift, hands working busily at the edges of their respective Zoom rectangles.  As the students review what they’ve learned, the conversation turns to the stereotype of Stoicism as a lack of emotion. “I get the feeling the Stoics understood their emotions better than most because they weren’t puppets to their emotions,” says a student named Nicole. “They still feel things—they’re just not governed by it.” Jay Ferran, an incarcerated student at the Boston Pre-Release Center, presents a game to help recap what the class learned over the semester.JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION Jade, who is a year into a 16-month sentence, connects this to her relationship with her 14-month-old son: “I think I would be a bad Stoic in how I love him. That totally governs me.” Perlman, a bit mischievously: “Does anyone want to talk Jade into being a Stoic mother?”  Another classmate, Victoria, quips: “I think you’d like it better when he’s a teenager.” When the laughter dies down, she says more seriously, “I think it’s more about not allowing your emotions to carry you away.” But she adds that it’s hard to do that as a parent.   “Excessive worry is also a hindrance,” Jade concedes. “So how do I become a middle Stoic?” “A middle Stoic would be an Aristotelian, I think,” muses Perlman. When the conversation comes around to amor fati, the Stoic notion of accepting one’s fate, Perlman asks how successful his students have been at this. The group’s sole participant from a men’s facility, Arthur, confesses that he has struggled with this over more than 20 years in prison. But for the last few years, school has brought him new focus. He helps run a space where other residents can study. “I hear you saying you can only love your fate if you have a telos, a purpose,” Perlman says. “I was always teaching people things to survive or get ahead by any means necessary,” Arthur says. “Now it’s positive building blocks.” “Education is my telos, and when I couldn’t access it at first, I had to focus on what was in my control,” says Victoria. “I framed my prison experiences as refusing to be harmed by the harmful process of incarceration. I’m going to use this opportunity for myself … so I can be who I want to be when I leave here.”  Soon after, the video call—and the course—ends. But if Perlman’s former students’ experience is any indication, the ideas their teacher has introduced will continue to percolate. O’Neal, who took Perlman’s Philosophy of Love, is still mulling over an exploration of loyalty in Tristan and Isolde that brought a classmate to tears. She thinks Perlman’s ability to nurture dialogue on sensitive topics begins with his relaxed demeanor—a remarkable quality in the prison environment. “It’s like you’re coming to our house. A lot of [people] show up as guests. Lee shows up like someone who’s been around—you know, and he’s willing to clean up the dishes with you. He just feels at home,” she says. “So he made us feel at home.”  Throop becomes animated when he describes taking Philosophy of the Self and Soul with Perlman and MIT students at MCI-Norfolk in 2016.  “Over those days and weeks, we got to meet and discuss the subject ­matter—walking around the prison yards together, my classmates and I, and then coming back and having these almost indescribable—I’m rarely at a loss for words!—weekly class discussions,” Throop remembers. Perlman “would throw one big question out there, and he would sit back and patiently let us all chop that material up,” he adds. “These discussions were like the highlight of all of our weeks, because we got to have this super-cool exchange of ideas, testing our perspectives … And then these 18-to-20-year-old students who were coming in with a whole different worldview, and being able to have those worldviews collide in a healthy way.”   “We all were having such enriching discussions that the semester flew by,” he says. “You didn’t want school to end.” 

Clara Brenner, MBA ’12, arrived in Cambridge on the lookout for a business partner. She wanted to start her own ­company—and never have to deal with a boss again. She would go it alone if she had to, but she hoped to find someone whose skills would complement her own. It’s a common MBA tale. Many people attend business school with hopes of finding the one. Building that relationship is so important to a company’s foundation that it’s been described in romantic terms: Networking is akin to dating around, and some view settling down with a business partner as a marriage of sorts. Brenner didn’t have to look for long. She met her match—Julie Lein, MBA ’12—soon after arriving at Sloan more than a decade ago. But their first encounter wasn’t exactly auspicious. In fact, their relationship began with an expletive. Lein was sitting at a card table in a hallway in E52, glumly selling tickets to a fashion show featuring work-­appropriate clothes for women—at that time, the marquee event for Sloan’s Women in Management Club, and one that both Lein and Brenner thought was patently absurd.  Lein had no interest in attending, but she wanted to support the club’s mission of boosting women in business. “She looked very miserable,” says Brenner. Lein asked if she wanted to buy a ticket, Brenner recalls, and “I think I said, ‘F*** no.’”  “We both bonded over the fact that this was such a stupid idea,” says Lein. (The fashion show has since been retired, in part thanks to Lein and Brenner’s lobbying.)                              Today, the two run the Urban Innovation Fund, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm that has raised $212 million since 2016 and invested in 64 startups addressing the most pressing problems facing cities. It has supported businesses like Electriphi, a provider of EV charging and fleet management software, which was acquired by one of the biggest names in the auto industry. And it funds companies focused on helping kids learn to code, providing virtual tutoring services, offering financing for affordable housing, and more. The companies in its portfolio have a total value of $5.3 billion, and at least eight have been acquired thus far.                              Though Brenner and Lein hit it off quickly, they weren’t an obvious fit as business partners. Brenner arrived at Sloan after weathering an early career in commercial real estate just after the 2008 financial crash. She hoped to start her own company in that industry. Lein, on the other hand, had worked in political polling and consulting. She initially planned to get an advanced policy degree, until a mentor suggested an MBA. She hoped to start her own political polling firm after graduation.  Ultimately, though, their instant kinship became more important than their subject matter expertise. Brenner, says Lein, is “methodical” and organized, while she “just goes and executes” without overthinking. Their relationship—in business, and still as close friends—is rooted in trust and a commitment to realizing the vision they’ve created together. “We were able to see that … our skills and style were very complementary, and we just were able to do things better and faster together,” says Brenner.  In 2012, the two teamed up to run Sloan’s second Women in Management Conference, which they had helped found the year before. It was then, they say, that they knew they would work together after graduation.  Still, they had trouble agreeing on the type of venture that made the most sense. Their initial talks involved a tug-of-war over whose area of expertise would win—real estate or policy.  But in the summer of 2011, they’d both happened to land internships at companies focused on challenges in cities—companies that would now be called “urban-tech startups,” says Brenner, though that term was not used at the time. The overlap was fortuitous: When they compared notes, they agreed that it made sense to investigate the potential for companies in that emerging space. Lyft was just getting its start, as was Airbnb. After exploring the idea further, the two concluded there was some “there” there. “We felt like all these companies had a lot in common,” says Brenner. “They were solving very interesting community challenges in cities, but in a very scalable, nontraditional way.” They were also working in highly regulated areas that VC firms were often hesitant to touch, even though these companies were attracting significant attention.  To Brenner and Lein, some of that attention was the wrong kind; companies like Uber were making what they saw as obvious missteps that were landing in the news. “No one was helping [these companies] with, like, ‘You should hire a lobbyist’ or ‘You should have a policy team,’” says Brenner. The two saw an opportunity to fund businesses that could make a measurable positive impact on urban life—and to help them navigate regulatory and policy environments as they grew from startups to huge companies.  Upon graduating in 2012, they launched Tumml, an accelerator program for such startups. The name was drawn from the Yiddish word tummler, often used by Brenner’s grandmother to describe someone who inspires others to action.  At the time, Brenner says, “world-­positive investing” was “not cool at all” among funders because it was perceived as yielding lower returns, even though growing numbers of tech companies were touting their efforts to improve society. In another unusual move, the partners structured their startup accelerator as a nonprofit evergreen fund, allowing them to invest in companies continuously without setting a fixed end date. By the end of their third year, they were supporting 38 startups.  Tumml found success by offering money, mentorship, and guidance, but the pair realized that relying solely on fickle philanthropic funding meant the model had a ceiling. To expand their work, they retired Tumml and launched the Urban Innovation Fund in 2016 with $24.5 million in initial investments. While Tumml had offered relatively small checks and support to companies at the earliest stages, UIF would allow Brenner and Lein to supercharge their funding and involvement.  Their focus has remained on startups tackling urban problems in areas such as public health, education, and transportation. The types of companies they look for are those that drive economic vitality in cities, make urban areas more livable, or make cities more sustainable. As Tumml did, UIF provides not just funding but also consistent support in navigating regulatory challenges. “It’s a very, very small subset of companies that can both work on a problem that, at least in our minds, really matters and be an enormous business.” And, like Tumml, UIF has taken on industries or companies that other investors may see as risky. When it was raising its first fund, Lein remembers, they pitched a large institution on its vision, which includes investing in companies that work on climate and energy. The organization, burned by the money it lost when the first cleantech bubble burst, was extremely wary—it wasn’t interested in a fund that emphasized those areas. But Lein and Brenner pressed on. Today, climate tech remains one of the fund’s largest areas, accounting for more than a sixth of its portfolio of 64 companies (see “Urban innovation in action,” at right). In addition to Electriphi, they have invested in Public Grid, a company that gives households access to affordable clean energy, and Optiwatt, an app that helps EV drivers schedule charging at times of day when it is cheaper or cleaner.                              “They took risks in areas, [including] mobility and transportation, where other people might not play because of policy and regulation risk. And they were willing to think about the public-private partnerships and what might be needed,” says Rachel Sheinbein, MBA ’04, SM ’04, a Bay Area–based angel investor who has worked with the Urban Innovation Fund on investments. “They weren’t afraid to take that on.” Lein and Brenner have also invested in health companies like Cleancard, which is working to provide at-home testing for cancers, and startups creating workflow tools, like KarmaSuite, which has built software to help nonprofits track grants.  Meanwhile, they have cast a wide net and built a portfolio rich in companies that happen to be led by entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups: Three-quarters of the companies in UIF’s current portfolio were founded by women or people of color, and nearly 60% include an immigrant on their founding team.   When it comes to selecting companies, Brenner says, they make “very calculated decisions” based in part on regulatory factors that may affect profits. But they’re still looking for the huge returns that drive other investors.  “It’s a very, very small subset of companies that can both work on a problem that, at least in our minds, really matters and be an enormous business,” she says. “Those are really the companies that we’re looking for.” One of the most obvious examples of that winning combination is Electriphi. When Brenner and Lein invested in the company, in 2019, the Biden administration hadn’t mandated the electrification of federal auto fleets, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included financial incentives for clean energy, hadn’t yet been drafted. And California had yet to announce its intention to completely phase out gas-powered cars. “It was not a hot space,” says Brenner. But after meeting with Electriphi’s team, both Brenner and Lein felt there was something there. The partners tracked the startup for months, saw it achieving its goals, and ended up offering it the largest investment, by several orders of magnitude, that their fund had ever made. Less than two years later, Ford acquired it for an undisclosed sum.  “When we were originally talking about Electriphi, a lot of people were like, ‘Eh, it’s going to take too long for fleets to transition, and we don’t want to make a bet at this time,’” Sheinbein recalls. But she says the partners at Urban Innovation Fund were willing to take on an investment that other people were “still a little bit hesitant” about. Sheinbein also invested in the startup.  GABRIELA HASBUN Impact investing has now taken root in the building where Lein and Brenner first met. What was once an often overlooked investing area, says Bill Aulet, SM ’94, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, is now a core element of how Sloan teaches entrepreneurship. Aulet sees Urban Innovation Fund’s social-enterprise investing strategy as very viable in the current market. “Will it outperform cryptocurrency? Not right now,” he says, but he adds that many people want to put their money toward companies with the potential to improve the world.  Lein, who worked as Aulet’s teaching assistant at Sloan for a class now known as Entrepreneurship 101, helped establish the mold at Sloan for a social-impact entrepreneur—that is, someone who sees doing good as a critical objective, not just a marketing strategy. “Entrepreneurs don’t just have to found startups,” says Aulet. “You can also be what we call an entrepreneurship amplifier,” which he defines as “someone who helps entrepreneurship thrive.” When they make investments, VCs tend to prioritize such things as the need for a company’s products and the size of its potential market. Brenner and Lein say they pay the most attention to the team when deciding whether to make a bet: Do they work together well? Are they obsessive about accomplishing their goals? Those who have watched UIF grow say Brenner and Lein’s partnership fits that profile itself.  “I can just tell when a team really respects each other and [each] sees the value in the other one’s brain,” says Sheinbein. For Lein and Brenner, she says, their “mutual respect and admiration for each other” is obvious.  “We went to Sloan, we spent a bunch of money, but we found each other,” says Lein.  “We couldn’t agree on a new urban-tech startup to start,” she adds, so instead, they built an ecosystem of them—all in the name of improving cities for the people who live there. 

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered was finally made official on Tuesday after months of relentless leaks and rumours, and instantly upon its shadow-dropped release, the open world action RPG has oh-so-predictably attracted quite a sizeable audience. As per SteamDB, on its launch day, Oblivion Remastered saw a peak of 182,298 concurrent players on Steam. An Elder Scrolls game enjoying impressive player numbers should come as no surprise, of course, though for a shadow-dropped game, those are particularly high figures. It should be interesting to see how it performs over the coming days. It’s also worth noting that Oblivion Remastered is available through Game Pass and the Windows Store as well, which means its player base on PC is even larger than what its Steam numbers suggest. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is available on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Head on over here for details on some of its many changes and improvements.

Revisiting the Grokking Challenge In recent years, the phenomenon of grokking—where deep learning models exhibit a delayed yet sudden transition from memorization to generalization—has prompted renewed investigation into training dynamics. Initially observed in small algorithmic tasks like modular arithmetic, grokking reveals that models can reach near-perfect training accuracy while validation performance remains poor for a prolonged period. Eventually, and often abruptly, the model begins to generalize. Understanding what governs this transition is important not just for interpretability, but also for optimizing training efficiency in deep networks. Prior studies have highlighted the role of weight decay and regularization. However, the specific influence of optimizers on this process has been underexplored. Investigating Optimizer Effects on Grokking This AI paper from Microsoft examines the impact of optimizer choice on grokking behavior. Specifically, it contrasts the performance of the widely adopted AdamW optimizer with Muon, a newer optimization algorithm that incorporates spectral norm constraints and second-order information. The study investigates whether these features enable Muon to expedite the generalization phase. The experiments span seven algorithmic tasks—primarily modular arithmetic operations and parity classification—using a modern Transformer architecture. Each task is designed to reliably exhibit grokking under appropriate training conditions. The research also includes a comparative analysis of softmax variants (standard softmax, stablemax, and sparsemax) to evaluate whether output normalization plays a secondary role in modulating training dynamics. However, the core investigation centers on the optimizer. Architectural and Optimization Design The underlying model architecture adopts standard Transformer components, implemented in PyTorch. It includes multi-head self-attention, rotary positional embeddings (RoPE), RMS normalization, SiLU activations, and dropout-based regularization. Input tokens—numerical values or operators—are encoded through simple identity embeddings. The key distinction lies in the optimizer behavior: AdamW, a baseline in contemporary deep learning workflows, uses adaptive learning rates with decoupled weight decay. Muon, in contrast, applies orthogonalized gradients, enforces spectral norm constraints to stabilize training, and approximates second-order curvature for more informative updates. These mechanisms are intended to promote broader exploration during optimization, mitigate instability (e.g., “softmax collapse”), and synchronize learning progress across layers. Muon’s ability to regulate update magnitude in accordance with layer dimensions is particularly relevant in avoiding inefficient memorization pathways. Three softmax configurations—Softmax, Stablemax, and Sparsemax—are included to assess whether numerical stability or sparsity of the output distribution influences grokking. This helps ensure that the observed effects stem primarily from optimizer dynamics rather than output activation nuances. Empirical Evaluation and Results The study’s empirical protocol is methodically designed. Each optimizer-softmax-task combination is evaluated across multiple seeds to ensure statistical robustness. Grokking is operationally defined as the first epoch where validation accuracy surpasses 95% following training accuracy stabilization. The results indicate a consistent and statistically significant advantage for Muon. On average, Muon reaches the grokking threshold in 102.89 epochs, compared to 153.09 epochs for AdamW. This difference is not only numerically large but also statistically rigorous (t = 5.0175, p ≈ 6.33e−8). Additionally, Muon demonstrates a tighter distribution of grokking epochs across all conditions, suggesting more predictable training trajectories. All tasks were conducted on NVIDIA H100 GPUs using a unified codebase and standardized configurations. Tasks include modular addition, multiplication, division, exponentiation, GCD, and a 10-bit parity task. Dataset sizes ranged from 1,024 to 9,409 examples, with training-validation splits adjusted per task to maintain consistency. Conclusion The findings provide strong evidence that optimizer geometry significantly influences the emergence of generalization in overparameterized models. By steering the optimization path through second-order-aware updates and spectral norm constraints, Muon appears to facilitate a more direct route toward discovering the underlying data structure, bypassing prolonged overfitting phases. This study underscores the broader need to consider optimization strategy as a first-class factor in neural training design. While prior work emphasized data and regularization, these results suggest that optimizer architecture itself can play a pivotal role in shaping training dynamics. Check out the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. NikhilNikhil is an intern consultant at Marktechpost. He is pursuing an integrated dual degree in Materials at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Nikhil is an AI/ML enthusiast who is always researching applications in fields like biomaterials and biomedical science. With a strong background in Material Science, he is exploring new advancements and creating opportunities to contribute.Nikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/Open-Source TTS Reaches New Heights: Nari Labs Releases Dia, a 1.6B Parameter Model for Real-Time Voice Cloning and Expressive Speech Synthesis on Consumer DeviceNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/Researchers at Physical Intelligence Introduce π-0.5: A New AI Framework for Real-Time Adaptive Intelligence in Physical SystemsNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/Anthropic Releases a Comprehensive Guide to Building Coding Agents with Claude CodeNikhilhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/nikhil0980/ByteDance Releases UI-TARS-1.5: An Open-Source Multimodal AI Agent Built upon a Powerful Vision-Language Model

If there’s one thing Lucasfilm has accomplished with shows like Star Wars: Andor and Star Wars Rebels, it’s in showing us the many heroes and worlds that played a key role in fighting and eventually overthrowing the Empire. We know Yavin-IV and Hoth and Endor from the movies. But what about Lothal and Ferrix? And thanks to the first three episodes of Andor Season 2, there’s another world that’s entered the Star Wars zeitgeist - Ghorman.What is Ghorman, and why is this world so important to the conflict that is the Galactic Civil War? Why does the situation on Ghoman develop into a watershed moment for the Rebel Alliance? Here’s what you need to know about this little-known but surprisingly important corner of the Star Wars universe.Ghorman in Star Wars: AndorStar Wars: Andor first alluded to the planet Ghorman in the Season 1 episode “Narkina 5.” In a meeting between Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera and Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael, Saw references the doomed anti-Imperial group known as the Ghorman Front. To Saw, the Ghorman Front is a cautionary tale when it comes to discussing how best to fight the Empire.Now this world is playing a much more direct role in Season 2. In the premiere episode, we see Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Krennic speaking to a group of assembled ISB agents about a delicate problem involving the planet. He shows them a cheesy documentary reel extolling the virtues of Ghorman’s textile industry. Their silk fabric, harvested from a special breed of spider, is Ghorman’s chief galactic export.The problem, as Krennic explains, is that the Empire is more interested in another of Ghorman’s natural resources. The Emperor himself covets Ghorman’s vast supply of calcite. Krennic claims that this calcite is needed to help the Empire’s research into renewable, unlimited energy. However, given what we know about Krennic from Rogue One, we can probably assume he’s lying. More likely, Krennic needs vast stores of calcite to complete construction of the Death Star. Like Kyber crystal, calcite is one of the limiting factors in Project: Stardust, and one of the reasons completing that terrible battlestation is taking so long.Like Kyber crystal, calcite is one of the limiting factors in Project: Stardust, and one of the reasons completing that terrible battlestation is taking so long.“As Krennic and his underlings discuss, the challenge with calcite is that extracting it in the quantities the Empire needs will likely leave Ghorman a barren, uninhabitable wasteland. That raises concerns about what to do about the native Ghor population. Palpatine’s grip on the galaxy isn’t quite so ironclad that he can just lay waste to an entire world and its people with impunity. That’s precisely why he wants a Death Star in the first place. At that point, there will be no contesting his Empire, no matter what war crimes it commits.Krennic’s solution is to turn public sentiment against Ghorman so that the Empire becomes justified in taking control of the planet and displacing its people. This is a world with a history of anti-Imperial leanings, after all. But while his propaganda ministers believe that this process can be handled through social manipulation alone, Denise Gough’s Dedra Meero understands the reality. The Empire needs to install its own band of radical rebels who can be relied on to further the narrative that Ghorman is a dangerous, lawless place. Only then can the Empire swoop in and claim its calcite under the guise of restoring law and order.All of this looks to be setting up an ongoing storyline in Season 2. No doubt Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor, Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma, and others will be drawn to Ghorman as the political situation deteriorates and this planet becomes a renewed battleground in the Galactic Civil War. Based on what we know about Ghorman already, it’s bound to end in both tragedy and a pivotal moment for the Rebel Alliance. PlayWhat Is the Ghorman Massacre? In short, Andor Season 2 is gearing up to showcase an event known as the Ghorman Massacre. While this event has only been alluded to in Disney-era Star Wars media, it’s actually one of the most important developments leading to the creation of a true, unified Rebel Alliance.The Ghorman Massacre has its roots in the pre-Disney Star Wars Legends universe. In that version of events, set in the year 18 BBY, Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin was the instigating offender. When Tarkin traveled to Ghorman in the midst of a peaceful protest against illegal Imperial taxation, he made the characteristically ruthless choice to land his ship directly on top of the protesters. Hundreds were killed or injured as a result.The Ghorman Massacre quickly came to be seen as a glaring example of Imperial cruelty. It not only sparked public outcry, but it also led Senators like Mon Mothma and Jimmy Smits/Benjamin Bratt’s Bail Organa to begin fomenting and supporting the growing rebel movement. There’s a direct line between the Ghorman Massacre and the formation of the Rebel Alliance.Lucasfilm is taking a somewhat different approach to the Ghorman Massacre in this new Disney era, and with Andor Season 2 in progress, we’re still making sense of the revised timeline. But the basic idea remains the same. The Ghorman Massacre is an incident where the Empire overplays its hand and inspires a renewed wave of rebel backlash. Warning: the remainder of this article contains possible spoilers for upcoming episodes of Andor Season 2!Most of what we know about the Ghorman Massacre in the Disney timeline is established in Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire and other reference books. In this version, the massacre takes place in 2 BBY. Once again, the Empire is guilty of slaughtering innocent protesters on Ghorman, sparking immediate and deep backlash. We also know that the Ghorman Massacre serves as the critical dividing line in Mon Mothma’s political career. Up to that point, Mon is committed to working within the Imperial Senate system to oppose and resist Palpatine’s agenda wherever she can. But after the Ghorman Massacre, Mon finally throws caution to the wind and speaks publicly against the Emperor, labeling him “a lying executioner.” At that point, Mon is considered a traitor to the Empire, forcing her to go into hiding and become the full-time leader of the Rebel Alliance. We’ve actually seen the immediate aftermath of the Ghorman Massacre play out already, thanks to the animated series Star Wars Rebels. In the Season 3 episode “Secret Cargo,” the Spectres rescue Mon and escort her to the Rebel Alliance high command. From there, Mon delivers a speech known as the Declaration of the Rebel Alliance, and the Galactic Civil War officially begins.Rebels shows Mon Mothma in the immediate aftermath of the Ghorman Massacre.How Andor Season 2 Will Flesh Out the Ghorman MassacreRebels may have shown us Mon Mothma’s defection and escape after the tragedy on Ghorman, but Andor looks to finally be telling the full story of the Ghorman Massacre itself and the events that lead to the Empire executing innocent protesters. Creator Tony Gilroy confirmed as much in a recent interview with IGN.“In the five-year period that I have to curate… there's a few canonical incidents that I have to pay attention to, and one of them was always, there's a Ghorman Massacre,” Gilroy tells IGN. “There's some confusion about different Ghorman Massacres. There's a Ghorman Massacre [as revealed in Star Wars: Rebels] that leads Mon Mothma to give a speech in the Senate where she breaks away and she goes to Yavin. So that's on the menu. I have to deal with that.”Gilroy continues, “It's not identified in any canon what it is. We can make it up from scratch. We start to build it. We're going to build another really super-complicated, ornate planet with a language and an economy and all these things, and it's expensive to do that. It has to be over five episodes at least to make that worthwhile. It's a really significant part of our show. That's the construction of it. We want to make it as heartbreaking and dramatic and as essential and important as it can possibly be.”“It's not identified in any canon what it is. We can make it up from scratch. We start to build it."“Again, we know that in the Disney timeline, the Ghorman Massacre takes place in 2 BBY, which is encompassed in the four-year time period being explored by Andor Season 2. As Season 2 unfolds, we’ll probably see the situation on the ground in Ghorman continue to deteriorate, as the Empire manipulates its faux-rebellion and works to build justification for a full planetary takeover. This will no doubt draw the attention of Mon and other Rebel sympathizers. We may also see Cassian himself dispatched to join the rebels on Ghorman, as the world quickly develops into the next Ferrix or Lothal. As much as the various characters are separated across the galaxy in these first three episodes, Ghorman serves as an opportunity to bring them together.At some point, likely during Episodes 7 through 9, we’ll see the crisis on Ghorman coalesce and learn what exactly transpired during the Ghorman Massacre. We’ll see Mon make her final speech to the Imperial Senate, speaking out against Emperor Palpatine and fleeing to the relative safety of the Rebel Alliance. As for Cassian, he’ll only have more cause to despise the Empire as the clock continues to count down to the events of Rogue One and the completion of the Death Star. For more on Star Wars: Andor, check out IGN’s spoiler-free review of Season 2 and see every live-action Star Wars series ranked.Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket byfollowing @jschedeen on BlueSky.

Category: GamesApril 22, 2025 How Capcom’s Remaster of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny Makes a Classic Game Better Mike Nelson, Xbox Wire Editor SummaryWe get nostalgic with a hands-on preview of the upcoming remaster of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny.Director Motohide Eshiro and Producer Kosuke Tanaka share insights into the development of this remaster.Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny launches May 23, 2025, for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S via backwards compatibility. Pre-order today on the Microsoft Store for Xbox. Beyond the demon slaying, sword slicing, and grand adventuring that I was enjoying with the remaster of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny on Xbox, I think what I’m appreciating most is just how faithfully it sticks to its source material, retaining everything that makes the original such a fan-favorite, without losing any of its survival horror charm. This thoroughly remastered version of Onimusha 2 puts you back in the shoes of the samurai Jubei Yagyu, battling the undead warlord Nobunaga Oda and his army of demons. Alongside his companions Oyu, Ekei, Magoichi, and Kotaro Fuma, Jubei’s adventure is now a cleaner, higher-res version of the original, with numerous quality-of-life features developed to make it more accessible to those newer to the series, and refined for those original fans who are looking to take a step back in time. “The game’s unique visual style greatly benefits from an improved HD resolution and 60FPS performance, making the swordplay feel more responsive than ever,” says Director Motohide Eshiro. “Since TV screens have moved onto the widescreen format in the intervening years, we’ve also updated the game’s output to fill a wide display, which zooms the image in, and I think makes the battle scenes feel even more immersive and exciting.” I agree. Swordplay is extremely responsive – I’m able to effectively strike and block, while the battles feel intimate. That’s especially true within temple corridors, as I slash away at an onslaught of demons, trying to master an issen hit (a powerful counterattack), and absorbing the souls of my enemies to gain XP. “A new player picking up this remaster in 2025 should feel the same exhilaration as someone did in 2002,” adds Eshiro. “This meant retaining the game’s core features and charm, while bringing certain elements up to the modern standards gamers expect. We had access to the original game’s assets, and to be honest even in 2002 the original team had made them very high quality. If anything, the standard-definition CRT display technology of the time was holding these assets back from being appreciated in their original quality, so we have used a variety of modern upscaling and uprezzing techniques to bring out all their detail on modern HD displays. This includes the moving video elements of backgrounds, so areas such as flowing rivers look better than ever.” One element that has changed is that you can now choose when to have Jubei transform into an Onimusha, making him invincible with a damage buff for a limited time. Previously this would happen automatically once you’ve acquired enough orbs – another soul-type you can absorb from defeated enemies but appears less frequently. I like this change –being able to save this powerful attack for when I really needed it is incredibly helpful, like when squaring off with a mini-boss or when facing down a particularly tough group of demons. The affinity system has also returned, where certain items you find or purchase can be used as gifts. Jubei can give them to his companions, affecting who will help him during the game and can influence how the story unfolds. This sub-game remains surprisingly fun, as you work to find the best match for each companion, particularly because you can receive helpful items in return, like herbs for healing. “There are also QOL features that, if we had not implemented them, would likely be a cause of frustration for modern gamers,” Eshiro explains further. “Although we love the cutscenes, you now have the option to skip them should you choose, and auto-save has been implemented to allow you to more easily play across multiple sessions. And of course, while you can stick to the so-called ‘tank controls’ of the original if you prefer, the ‘normal’ analogue controls have been added and fine-tuned to make for a very natural and direct gameplay experience.” The sound and music have also been given some significant treatment, utilizing the original uncompressed audio to bring out every detail of the original composer Taro Iwashiro’s music. Eshiro mentions that the sound effects for both cutscenes and gameplay have been remixed in a way that respects the original game while making them feel at home on modern hardware. “Fans of the game’s soundtrack will also be pleased to know that if you pre-order, you can receive the Orchestra Album Selection Pack with beautiful orchestral arrangements of a selection of five tracks from the game,” adds Eshiro. From what I’ve seen and played, which is roughly the first two hours of the game, I think the work put into Onimusha 2‘s remaster is a great example of modern game preservation. All of this comes across as a passion project for the team at Capcom, retaining the look and feel of the world, its characters, and even its classic UI. In talking with Producer Kosuke Tanaka, I learned the team’s approach to the remaster of Onimusha 2 was always intended to faithfully recreate the original gameplay experience as closely as possible; a full remake would have been quite different and wasn’t what they were going for – you can expect those bigger changes in the brand-new Onimusha: Way of the Sword next year. “Capcom has always held the stance that we want players to be able to experience our games as much as possible, and that means bringing them to various hardware platforms as well as remastering and producing compilations of titles that are only playable on defunct platforms,” explains Tanaka. “It’s been great to see how positive the reaction is [to the Onimusha 2 remaster]. It makes me feel the players respect the original game as much as I do.” It has been a long time since a mainline Onimusha game was released and it’s exciting to see this remaster arriving now in the lead up to the new game’s launch in 2026.“We released a remaster of the first Onimusha in 2019, and various circumstances meant that it’s taken until now to follow it up with Onimusha 2,” explains Tanaka. “However, this project has been running alongside the new title, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, so the timing has worked out quite well — players who want a brand new Onimusha have a treat in store.” There’s no shortage of remasters these days on modern consoles, but few have so effectively blended nostalgia with modern enhancements. There’s plenty here for long-time fans and newcomers to appreciate. Even though the game is over two decades old, it’s clear its original formula of samurai survival horror is one that has been able to stand the test of time. “While there are more samurai and swordplay-themed games around today than there were when Onimusha 2 originally came out, I think this game still has a quality whose brilliance hasn’t dulled in the almost 25 years since,” says Eshiro. “The combination of Sengoku-era settings and characters with a dark, demonic fantasy theme and ultra-responsive combat, as well as RPG elements such as the character affinity system, make this a unique experience, so please check it out when the remaster releases on May 23!” Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny launches May 23, 2025, for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S via backwards compatibility. Pre-order today on the Microsoft Store for Xbox. Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny CAPCOM CO., LTD. ☆☆☆☆☆ 2 ★★★★★ $29.99 Pre-order Get the Onimusha 2: Orchestra Album Selection Pack when you pre-order Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny. It includes five tracks selected from the Onimusha 2 Orchestra Album Taro Iwashiro Selection. Immerse yourself in the world of Onimusha 2 in this beautiful orchestral arrangement. Track List: – Truth Of Brave ~Warring mix~ – Truth Of Resolution ~Oyu's Theme~ – Truth Of Edge ~Magoichi's Theme~ – Truth Of Loyalty ~Ekei's Theme~ – Truth Of Desire ~Kotaro's Theme~ *Select Special Features → Gallery → Original Soundtrack to access these tracks from the title-screen menu. Also, get this pack of items to use in-game: – Herb x3 – Medicine x2 – Secret Medicine x1 – Special Magic Liquid x2 – Perfect Medicine x1 – Talisman x1 – Red Soul x10,000 The content will appear after meeting Takajo in the early game. If you have already met Takajo, the content will appear when you select "Load Game". While you can only get this item pack once, you can also get the items in-game. The content listed in the DLC may become available separately at a later date. *This content is also available as part of the Onimusha bundle.(Acquire this bundle before June 30, 2025, to receive a limited-time bonus!) ——————————- Reclaim your destiny. Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny returns with HD graphics and modernised controls to perform issen critical counter attacks and intense swordplay. Play as Jubei Yagyu and make your way through feudal Japan with your allies. This game has additional language support adapted from the original script. Additional features include: – New Gallery mode with over 100 sketches by the game's character designer, Keita Amemiya. – New digital soundtrack selection with all 43 tracks from the original soundtrack of Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny. – Hell mode difficulty. – The Man in Black, Team Oni, and Puzzle Phantom Realm mini games will be available to play at the very beginning. – Auto-save feature and easy weapon switch for improved playability. You can also get a special outfit for Jubei if you have save data from Onimusha: Warlords. To switch Jubei's outfit select Special Features → Jubei's Outfit and select between Normal and Special from the title-screen menu. This will only alter the appearance. Your status will be the same as the armour you equip in-game. ©CAPCOM ONIMUSHA is a trademark and/or registered trademark of CAPCOM CO., LTD and/or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries. Related Stories for “How Capcom’s Remaster of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny Makes a Classic Game Better” Category: ID@XboxVenture Into the Labyrinth of the Demon King Category: ID@XboxTitle: Post Trauma Taxes and Terrifies Xbox Series X|S Players Today Category: GamesThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered Arrives Today The post How Capcom’s Remaster of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny Makes a Classic Game Better appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Not only is the world of Labyrinth of the Demon King uniquely cold, oppressive, and brutal – but it is also a meticulously crafted narrative experience that weaves together elements of classic dungeon crawler titles, action RPGs, and the survival horror genre. In this challenging first-person dungeon-crawler set in a mythical re-interpretation of feudal Japan, you’ll need every resource you can find to overcome the demons that block your path. Prepare yourself to enter into the ubiquitous labyrinth yourself on May 13th, when Labyrinth of the Demon King launches on Xbox Series S|X and Xbox One systems. The world of Athens is weird, highly unusual, and filled with a host of surprises. Along the way, you’ll meet tons of friends (and foes!) as you navigate the world in your own unique way, you’ll decide how you want to interact not only with those you meet, but also the world itself. As the world shifts and you interact with denizens, you’ll begin to flesh out your very own rhapsody. You can meet 16 potential party members, all with tons of depth – the very world will change depending on who you have in your party when. Plus, every single enemy can be fought or befriended! You’ll also find smaller friends and foes to commune with, and find tons of unlockable outfits to deck yourself and your party out with. The world of Labyrinth of the Demon King is brought to life (so to speak, anyway) through its unique “retro-grim” art style. The game’s dark, foreboding world takes inspiration from authentic Japanese folklore and tradition; the developer spent extensive time in Japan studying architecture and history. Inspired by a mixture of mythologized feudal history and supernatural folklore, the setting of Labyrinth is as gorgeous as it is brutal. Venture through sprawling castles, idyllic teahouses, dilapidated bath houses and more as you make your way towards the Demon King himself. As a foot soldier of your former Lord, you must be not only well trained in the art of combat, but on your toes at all times for possible threats Labyrinth of the Demon King features brutal, challenging combat that emphasizes patience, strategy, and diligence. As you explore the labyrinth, you’ll come across a slew of weapons, including an axe, naginata, bow, and more – on top of your trusty katana, of course. Face off against the numerous Yokai of ancient myth that roam the earth, and put your skills to the test. You’ll need to study the moves of each monster you come across. Be assured however, that any victory – no matter how small – is an accomplishment. As the name suggests, the Demon King’s Labyrinth is complex, confusing, and full of twisted nooks and crannies full of monsters, treasure, traps, and sometimes…friends? As you adventure through the Labyrinth, carefully managing your resources, you’ll come across a handful of other denizens; some trekking throughout the lands like yourself and others with more…cautious goals and morals. Be careful who you trust – it could affect your fate! Developed by J.R. Hudepohl with co-development help, porting assistance for Xbox, and publishing by Top Hat Studios, Labyrinth of the Demon King lands on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One May 13. The post Venture Into the Labyrinth of the Demon King appeared first on Xbox Wire.