Sometimes, it’s hard to justify taking a leap into a brand new, massive video game as an investment of your time and money. Open-World games can often easily justify their costs so long as players are able to click with them on a base level. These are some of the best Open-World games with Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews to help make the decision to pick them up a bit easier.

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva on Blu-ray $16.22 (was $25) | Restocked on June 30 See at Amazon See at Crunchyroll With a new Professor Layton game on the way, now is a great time to get reacquainted with the crime-solving sleuth. You can do just that with Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, which finally released on Blu-ray in North America on May 27. Amazon sold out of full-priced copies at launch, but the animated film is back in stock as of June 30. Best of all, it's on sale for only $16 (was $25) at Amazon and Crunchyroll.The original DVD release is out of print and tends to be sold for high prices, so fans should snag the Blu-ray while they can. Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva on Blu-ray $16.22 (was $25) | Restocked on June 30 The new Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva Blu-ray includes both the original Japanese language track and its English dub. That includes Christopher Robin Miller as Professor Layton--a role that he first took up with the original Nintendo games--and several other familiar voices from the games.While the film has been available on streaming platforms before, this is the first time that it has received a Blu-ray release in the US. Along with the 100-minute film, you'll get the original trailers as extras. See at Amazon See at Crunchyroll For those unfamiliar, Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva is the first animated feature based on the popular detective series. "Shortly after taking the young Luke under his wing, the world-famous Professor Layton finds himself humming along to the tune of an age-old mystery," the official plot synopsis for the film reads. "When an old student calls upon the professor for help, his investigation leads him to a night at the opera. But what starts off as a riveting night of song is quickly transposed into a game of eternal life or death. Can Layton and Luke solve this deadly puzzle in time? Or is a devious dissonance lying in wait?"Continue Reading at GameSpot

Shortly after the release of the Backyard Baseball '97 remaster in October 2024, Playground Productions and Mega Cat Studios revealed that Backyard Baseball '01 will be one of the next remastered titles. Now, the game has been set for a release date in early July, and Playground Productions has confirmed that 28 out of 31 MLB players from the original Backyard Baseball '01 will return for the remaster. The announcement didn't specify which of the three MLB players didn't lend their names and younger likenesses to Backyard Baseball '01's remaster. But some of the confirmed returning players include Cal Ripken, Jr., Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, and Derek Jeter.In partnership with Major League Baseball, Backyard Baseball '01 will feature logos from MLB's professional teams in addition to the players representing the league. Like the earlier Backyard sports remasters, Backyard Baseball '01 will recreate the classic gameplay for touch and modern PC controls.Continue Reading at GameSpot

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Sandfall Interactive’s smash-hit debut game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, is still making waves across the game industry, and its momentum shows no signs of slowing. As a French love letter to the JRPG genre, this action-infused turn-based title has impressed many with its customizable and potentially execution-heavy gameplay, stunning visuals and music, and heart-wrenching story. It doesn't hurt that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 represents a rare AA success story predicated on sustainable development practices, a trait that is becoming increasingly more desirable as layoffs continue to hit the industry.

Bloodborne Complete Edition Guide (Hardcover) $45.50 (was $60) or $34.12 if eligible for 25% coupon See at Amazon The 744-page Bloodborne Complete Edition Guide is on sale for $45.50 at Amazon. Published last fall by Future Press, the official guidebook rarely is discounted by more than a few bucks. The 25% price cut is already a terrific deal, but shoppers in the Midwest and potentially elsewhere can score an additional 25% discount. With that factored in, you'll only pay $34.12--nearly 50% off the book's $60 MSRP. Click the coupon box under the price to get the extra discount at checkout. If you don't see a coupon box to click, the offer isn't available in your region.The Complete Edition is roughly 200 pages longer than the 2017 Collector's Edition Guide. This is because the Complete Edition also includes The Old Hunters expansion, which received its own 224-page physical guide in 2015. Along with everything you need to 100% the base game and DLC, the guide includes concept art, a deep dive into the lore of Yharnam, an interview with director Hidetaka Miyazaki, and a reference index for in-game lore.You could use some of the money you're saving to pick up Bloodborne's official art book, which is on sale for $32 (was $45) at Amazon. If you already own the art book, check out the upcoming Deluxe Edition of Bloodborne's first graphic novel for $25.Continue Reading at GameSpot

The company says its generative AI animation tool is being used by AAA studios, including Quantic Dream.

NVIDIA was today named an Autonomous Grand Challenge winner at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, held this week in Nashville, Tennessee. The announcement was made at the Embodied Intelligence for Autonomous Systems on the Horizon Workshop. This marks the second consecutive year that NVIDIA’s topped the leaderboard in the End-to-End Driving at Scale category and the third year in a row winning an Autonomous Grand Challenge award at CVPR. The theme of this year’s challenge was “Towards Generalizable Embodied Systems” — based on NAVSIM v2, a data-driven, nonreactive autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation framework. The challenge offered researchers the opportunity to explore ways to handle unexpected situations, beyond using only real-world human driving data, to accelerate the development of smarter, safer AVs. Generating Safe and Adaptive Driving Trajectories Participants of the challenge were tasked with generating driving trajectories from multi-sensor data in a semi-reactive simulation, where the ego vehicle’s plan is fixed at the start, but background traffic changes dynamically. Submissions were evaluated using the Extended Predictive Driver Model Score, which measures safety, comfort, compliance and generalization across real-world and synthetic scenarios — pushing the boundaries of robust and generalizable autonomous driving research. The NVIDIA AV Applied Research Team’s key innovation was the Generalized Trajectory Scoring (GTRS) method, which generates a variety of trajectories and progressively filters out the best one. GTRS model architecture showing a unified system for generating and scoring diverse driving trajectories using diffusion- and vocabulary-based trajectories. GTRS introduces a combination of coarse sets of trajectories covering a wide range of situations and fine-grained trajectories for safety-critical situations, created using a diffusion policy conditioned on the environment. GTRS then uses a transformer decoder distilled from perception-dependent metrics, focusing on safety, comfort and traffic rule compliance. This decoder progressively filters out the most promising trajectory candidates by capturing subtle but critical differences between similar trajectories. This system has proved to generalize well to a wide range of scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks and enabling robust, adaptive trajectory selection in diverse and challenging driving conditions. NVIDIA Automotive Research at CVPR  More than 60 NVIDIA papers were accepted for CVPR 2025, spanning automotive, healthcare, robotics and more. In automotive, NVIDIA researchers are advancing physical AI with innovation in perception, planning and data generation. This year, three NVIDIA papers were nominated for the Best Paper Award: FoundationStereo, Zero-Shot Monocular Scene Flow and Difix3D+. The NVIDIA papers listed below showcase breakthroughs in stereo depth estimation, monocular motion understanding, 3D reconstruction, closed-loop planning, vision-language modeling and generative simulation — all critical to building safer, more generalizable AVs: Diffusion Renderer: Neural Inverse and Forward Rendering With Video Diffusion Models (Read more in this blog.) FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching (Best Paper nominee) Zero-Shot Monocular Scene Flow Estimation in the Wild (Best Paper nominee) Difix3D+: Improving 3D Reconstructions With Single-Step Diffusion Models (Best Paper nominee) 3DGUT: Enabling Distorted Cameras and Secondary Rays in Gaussian Splatting Closed-Loop Supervised Fine-Tuning of Tokenized Traffic Models Zero-Shot 4D Lidar Panoptic Segmentation NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models RADIO Amplified: Improved Baselines for Agglomerative Vision Foundation Models OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving With Counterfactual Reasoning Explore automotive workshops and tutorials at CVPR, including: Workshop on Data-Driven Autonomous Driving Simulation, featuring Marco Pavone, senior director of AV research at NVIDIA, and Sanja Fidler, vice president of AI research at NVIDIA Workshop on Autonomous Driving, featuring Laura Leal-Taixe, senior research manager at NVIDIA Workshop on Open-World 3D Scene Understanding with Foundation Models, featuring Leal-Taixe Safe Artificial Intelligence for All Domains, featuring Jose Alvarez, director of AV applied research at NVIDIA Workshop on Foundation Models for V2X-Based Cooperative Autonomous Driving, featuring Pavone and Leal-Taixe Workshop on Multi-Agent Embodied Intelligent Systems Meet Generative AI Era, featuring Pavone LatinX in CV Workshop, featuring Leal-Taixe Workshop on Exploring the Next Generation of Data, featuring Alvarez Full-Stack, GPU-Based Acceleration of Deep Learning and Foundation Models, led by NVIDIA Continuous Data Cycle via Foundation Models, led by NVIDIA Distillation of Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving, led by NVIDIA Explore the NVIDIA research papers to be presented at CVPR and watch the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Learn more about NVIDIA Research, a global team of hundreds of scientists and engineers focused on topics including AI, computer graphics, computer vision, self-driving cars and robotics. The featured image above shows how an autonomous vehicle adapts its trajectory to navigate an urban environment with dynamic traffic using the GTRS model.

A really cool parkour game is being delisted from Steam on June 30, but you still have a chance to grab it for dirt cheap. Supermoves: World of Parkour is on sale right now for just $0.79 ahead of its removal next week.Despite being a blast to play, Supermoves has had a bit of a tragic life following its release last year. Based on both critical and Steam review response, Supermoves is a blast, combining Mirror's Edge-inspired freerunning with some cool multiplayer modes. However, the game did not sell particularly well, and developer Makea Games was forced to shut down back in April. Tomi Toikka, the founder and former CEO of Makea Games, stated that he has been in negotiations to try to retain control over the Supermoves IP, but to no avail. As he shared in a final update announcing the delisting, Makea's financing structure apparently prohibits any path for Toikka to keep the game on sale. He wrote, "After shutting down Makea Games, I had hoped I could salvage the game IP to be preserved in another game company, so players could still play the game they own online, and maybe it could see a resurgence in new players one day. But sometimes the cost of doing business is losing something you love."Continue Reading at GameSpot

If you're craving some FPS gaming this summer, you'll want to check out Humble's latest bundle deal, the 2K Classic Trilogies Mafia X Bioshock Game Bundle. The deal lets you grab each mainline entry in the BioShock and Mafia series on PC for just $18. Like other Humble Bundle deals, the company donates a portion of proceeds to charity--in this case, the bundle supports Covenant House, which provides food, shelter, immediate crisis care, and ongoing services to homeless and trafficked young people. You can also adjust the revenue split between Humble, 2K, and Covenant House before checkout. See bundle at Humble Humble's 2K Classic Trilogies Mafia X Bioshock Game Bundle offers a tiered payment option, and the more you pay, the more games you get.If you only want the Bioshock series, you can grab the base $10 tier that includes the Remastered Editions of BioShock 1 and 2, alongside the original BioShock Infinite. The enhanced editions of Bioshock 1 and 2 included in this bundle offer improved graphics and UI, with support for up to 4K resolutions. It's also worth noting that the version of Bioshock Infinite included in the bundle does not include the Season Pass DLC content, and must be purchased separately.Continue Reading at GameSpot