Yesterday, when reporting on emerging efforts to pipe the console version of GTA VI through a PC's DLSS-powered Nvidia GPU, we mentioned in passing that PC players could instead just wait for the AI-assisted decompilation port that will no doubt be coming in short order. Now, a former Rockstar tech director says he thinks that exact threat could cause the developer to work faster on the official PC version of its soon-to-release crime/lifestyle simulator.

Obbe Vermeij hasn't worked at Rockstar since 2009, but in a new interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, he recalled how artists for the PC version of the original top-down Grand Theft Auto were incensed when the console version squashed the game's 256-color textures down to 16 colors for the PS1 release.

"So it always has been that sort of awkward relationship between PC and the console," Vermeij said. "So in those days, it was like PC first and then console second, even though that didn't really make much sense for the sales, because the PlayStation versions sold way better."

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While the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI won't be available on PC this month, some gamers are making ridiculous preparations to use their PC graphics cards to apply Nvidia's DLSS 5 technology to the console exclusive.

On an explicitly unmoderated GTAVI subreddit, user RevolutionaryBus8208 lays out a proposed setup, which runs a PlayStation 5 through a 4K capture card to a PC. From there, the video signal is run through Veyra, an open source tool that can apply DLSS 5's AI-powered "neural rendering" to video content. The result—which also uses DLSS frame generation to increase the 30 fps source to a 90 fps output—is then piped back to a 4K TV, theoretically adding some of the benefits of a beefy PC graphics card to a console-exclusive game.

To demonstrate the potential of this setup, RevolutionaryBus8208 used Veyra to upscale the Grand Theft Auto VI Extended Look trailer posted in August. The resulting DLSS-ified version looks a bit better in places, with sharper background elements, subtler shadows, and more believable light scattering on some surfaces. But it also seems a bit washed out compared to the original video's deeper blacks and arguably suffers from an unnaturally smooth "soap opera effect" in some scenes.

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For years, the AI industry's insatiable demand for memory and storage has had plenty of knock-on effects on the price and availability of PC components like RAM, SSDs, and GPUs. Now those shortages are also squeezing the supply of ROM chips that power physical Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 game cartridges.

Chip manufacturer Macronix announced in its third-quarter earnings report that the company's production of ROM chips "has reached its end" and that it will begin "gradually decoupling from the game industry," as reported by Taiwanese news site BigGo Finance. That could be an issue for Nintendo, which, analyst David Gibson notes, uses Macronix as its "main memory chip maker" for physical game cartridges.

That ROM production—which has shrunk 39 percent in the last year and now represents just 5 percent of Macronix's business—is being crowded out by production of more lucrative in-demand chips like NOR- and NAND-based memory and eMMCs, the company said. With Macronix's production capacity stuck at 25,000 12-inch wafers a month—and $1.2 billion in planned new capacity taking a year or more to spin up—less profitable ROM chips are taking up wafer space that can earn more through other types of chips.

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Last week, Anthropic introduced a new system prompt designed to stop its Claude models from re-creating specific, existing video games. While that move could help shield Anthropic from some liability, it's unlikely to slow much of the massive wave of AI-assisted game porting and copying that has emerged in recent months.

A social media user and AI decompilation enthusiast going by the name "chasm" was among the first to note the prompt change late last week, saying a new rule seemed to be added to the Claude Code prompt on or around October 27. That rule—included in a json file under the name "tengu_heron_brook"—reads as follows:

Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.

XDA later independently verified that the new rule appears in version 2.1.314 of the Claude Code binary, which was released on October 30. XDA also reported that the "tengu_heron_brook" rule had been used for other purposes in earlier versions and that the Claude Opus 5.5 model specifically seemed to have its own distinct and independent instructions restricting game recreations as part of its system prompt bundle.

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As AI tools and agents have continued their march across all aspects of digital life, many companies are trying to use LLMs to improve the experience of purchasing goods and services on the Internet. Thus far, though, a vanishingly small number of people seem to be taking advantage of those capabilities, at least when it comes to using the popular food delivery app DoorDash with an outside AI agent.

In a third-quarter earnings call Thursday, DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu responded to an analyst question by noting that "AI agents are generating several hundred orders [on DoorDash] across the time that they've been up and running." In a marked understatement, Xu called this a "very low use case" for a company that handled just shy of 1 billion orders total in the third quarter of 2026 alone.

Speaking generally, Xu said he sees the potential for AI agents to be genuinely helpful for "long consideration purchases" and major decisions where agents would be "doing work on your behalf proactively in the background." However, Xu added, "when it comes to a task that's as simple as ordering food, we tend to see that come directly to DoorDash."

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If you ask some prominent US politicians who won the 2020 presidential election, you might get some weasely answers that fail to directly acknowledge Joe Biden's win that November. If you ask Google's AI Mode the same question, you might get an evasive answer that simply tells you to consult with outside sources.

When I put the direct question of "Who won the 2020 presidential election?" to Google's AI Mode this morning (after seeing complaints about cagey answers on social media), I got the following surprisingly indirect response:

"To review the official results and statistics of the 2020 United States presidential election, including the final electoral college breakdown, popular vote counts, and winner certification, please consult the official report compiled by the Federal Election Commission (FEC)."

My testing resulted in a similarly indirect answer when asking about the 2024 presidential election, with Google's AI telling me to just consult the FEC for that information. Asking about 2012 election resulted in a link to The American Presidency Project's 2012 Data Center rather than a direct answer. But AI Mode seemed perfectly willing to give me a detailed and correct responses for the winner of every other presidential election going back to 2000.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission's publication on Monday of Anthropic's S-1 form—ahead of a heavily anticipated initial public offering—has led to plenty of discussion of whether the company's quickly ballooning revenues will be able to overcome its even higher costs. But amid the numbers and forward-looking optimism about AI "rapidly transform[ing] every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet," Anthropic also spends an inordinate amount of time in its S-1 laying out the myriad risk factors that could bring the company down.

Across 93 pages and over 70,000 words, Anthropic's S-1 "Risk Factors" section discusses literally hundreds of potential problems that could negatively impact its business in the coming years. Many of these potential risks are the kind of standard worries about competition, costs, customer acquisition, and potential regulation that almost any business must worry about. But some risks highlight interesting potential points of failure for Anthropic specifically and the hype-filled AI bubble more generally.

After wading through Anthropic's book-length treatise on its greatest risks, we've narrowed the list to the seven most surprising, interesting, or thought-provoking potential problems. Consider this a far-from-comprehensive look at what potential Anthropic investors should keep in mind.

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Gamers still hoping against hope for a true follow-up to Half-Life 2 (after so, so many years) may remember last year's flurry of speculation that Half-Life 3 was finally nearing completion. Amid all those rumors, though, we never got any official sign from anyone inside Valve that a Half-Life project was currently in development.

That changed this week thanks to an apparent slip-up during a panel at GameSoundCon, an industry conference devoted to "the art, technology, and business of game audio." In a panel devoted to Valve's use of open audio engines (captured in this Vimeo clip), Valve composer and audio artist Mike Morasky let an interesting string of three letters slip while talking about the way the company implements high dynamic range (HDR) audio:

Our HDR system is basically that's one of the three pieces that come together to make an HDR that you can easily optimize. And in fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. HLX has its own version, so on and so forth [emphasis added].

"HLX," of course, has been widely reported as the internal code name for Valve's next Half-Life project. The codename has shown up in Valve engine code since at least 2024, but it has never been referenced in public by a Valve employee until now (though Morasky was responsible for a close call in an interview last year).

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A security researcher has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2, gaining "userland" access that he says "lets us run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files off the Switch, and access most of the Switch 2’s peripherals through MMIO."

The hack relies on the original Switch version of SmileBasic 4, the latest in a long-running series of programming environments and interpreters that run on Nintendo hardware. The so-called "tethered" hack also requires access to a macOS or Linux PC on the same network to run a node.js package that helps enable privileged system access.

Researcher Sammy Hajhamid writes that he used OpenAI's Codex to poke at SmileBasic's language interpreter, using a custom harness that could send USB commands to the system and view results via HDMI (as well as power cycling via a Bluetooth light switch flipping device). After "substantial effort for ~2 weeks," that harness discovered a 32-bit integer overflow that occurs when removing items from an array in SmileBasic. That error gives access to an array pointer, which in turn allows read-and-write access to portions of system memory.

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Those mourning yesterday's shuttering of highly praised and influential developer BioWare also had to deal with the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, which was first teased back in 2020. Today, we got our best look at what that game could have been with a short, leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe.

In the roughly two-minute montage—which describes itself as "in-engine footage from our small team" that "uses our pre-production assets"—an ex-military officer wearing an N7 trenchcoat (similar to the one seen in that 2020 teaser) encounters an Asari at a bar. He talks of his frustration with military life—"by the time you put out one fire, another had already started"—before discussing his new line of work "stopping [the fires] before they start" and "making the choices no one else is willing to make. Going where others are afraid to go."

Mass Effect: Universe Trailer
by
u/Random_Hyabusa_Ninja in
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Last year, we reported on Red Viper, a Virtual Boy emulator that added a splash of Super Game Boy-style color to Nintendo's famously failed red-on-black "portable" 3D headset from the '90s. Now, a new emulation experiment, VBoy Color, has taken the concept to a higher level, using a tile-based palette system that allows for many more distinct colors in each individual Virtual Boy frame.

Rather than simply replacing the Virtual Boy's four shades of red with four different colors, VBoy Color's readme files explain how the emulator's game-specific Color Packs can assign a distinct four-color palette to each 8x8 tile in a Virtual Boy scene. That means the emulator can differentiate between green pipes, grey platforms, and red brick wall in Mario Clash, for instance, even though all those in-game objects share the same overlapping red hues in the original game.

The Game Boy Color-esque results feel like being transported into an alternate history where Nintendo invested in a full-color display rather than cheaper red LEDs for the Virtual Boy hardware. The increased contrast between differently colored elements is particularly welcome in games like Jack Bros. or Vertical Force, where the original red-on-red display often makes it hard to differentiate the player-character from busy red background elements.

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In September, when Microsoft severely limited the game-streaming buffet available to Game Pass subscribers, the company said non-subscribers would soon be able to "purchase cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and stream eligible games they own on supported devices." Today, Microsoft rolled out those a la carte Cloud Playtime purchases to Xbox Insiders, with prices that might be a bit galling for players who have already purchased these streamable games.

The "introductory launch pricing" for Xbox's Cloud Playtime purchases is as follows:

• 10 hours for $4 (~$0.40/hour)
• 25 hours for $8 (~$0.32/hour)
• 50 hours for $12 (~$0.24/hour)

Purchased playtime "remains available until it’s used," Microsoft writes, so you don't have to worry about your 50-hour purchase expiring before you can use it fully.

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The legendary studio behind series like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is no more. BioWare announced via social media Wednesday afternoon that "after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending."

The official announcement was posted mere minutes after a Bloomberg report detailed 400 job cuts across BioWare parent company Electronic Arts, including 50 at BioWare, based on reports from "a person familiar with the company's plans."

"Across our portfolio, we’re making deliberate choices to align talent and investments where we see the greatest opportunities for players and long-term growth," EA executives wrote in a message to staff, according to Bloomberg.

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We haven't heard many details about Microsoft's upcoming "Project Helix" gaming hardware since the company announced it in March as a device that will "play your Xbox and PC games." In a new wide-ranging profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, though, Fortune alludes to a dual release strategy for upcoming Microsoft gaming hardware, with "a next-generation handheld device" planned by the end of next year and a 2028 holiday season console release that could cost between $1,200 and $1,800.

That future console price range is based on what has "internally been projected" at the company, according to Fortune. But the price for consumers could come down if "Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost," the outlet says, as many console makers have done in the past.

While a $1,200 starting price would be historically high for the game console market, even accounting for inflation, it also reflects a new normal: The slowdown in Moore's Law and AI-driven component shortages means cutting-edge gaming hardware just isn't as cheap as it used to be. This year, the Steam Machine broke the $1,000 starting price, while the 2-year-old technology in the PlayStation 5 Pro is now going for $900, and the 6-year-old Xbox Series X now starts at $750.

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Since its earliest days, the video game industry has been built on developers creating clones of competing games, with varying levels of originality and varying levels of enforcement from game platforms. Now, though, AI coding tools are making that cloning process so efficient that many developers are getting extremely cautious about sharing their early work too widely.

Developer Alliance Arts highlighted this trend over the weekend, delaying the launch of a planned public demo for its demon-themed Russian Roulette drinking game Drunken Goddess Reflux, which had been set to go live with today's launch of Steam Next Fest.

In a post on social media Friday evening, the Alliance Arts team wrote that, in addition to concerns about managing streaming restrictions, "we're concerned that the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools and that such works could be released before our launch."

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