A very limited-edition PS1-themed PlayStation 5

It's Friday, December 08, 2023.

This one-of-a-kind PS5 console was customized with the PS1’s retro gray finish, and classic quad-color PS logo. Even the DualSense controller was given a late-90s makeover, with a cute plug cover for the PS5’s front USB-C port to mimic the first-ever PlayStation’s controller.

No, this won’t go on sale. It’s a farewell gift for SIE (Sony Interactive Entertainment) President and CEO Jim Ryan, who is retiring in March 2024. At a thank-you party this week, the outgoing PlayStation boss was honored by many industry legends, including the “father of PlayStation” Ken Kutaragi, Gran Turismo’s Kazunori Yamauchi, Team Asobi’s Nicolas Doucet and, of course, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida.

It was a gaming-heavy 24 hours, actually. This year’s Game Awards barraged us with new trailers and game news. Surprise, free DLC, an RPG set on an entirely procedurally generated world and a... Blade game?

— Mat Smith

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Meta’s Threads is getting searchable hashtags that aren’t quite hashtags

The company is trying to prevent “engagement hacking.”

Meta’s latest update for Threads brings the long-awaited ability to search for topics, with tags. Although the feature is under the familiar # symbol, Threads’ tags are slightly different to hashtags. Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained Threads tags can contain spaces and special characters, and can only use a single tag per post, so choose wisely.

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The makers of No Man’s Sky will simulate a whole planet for Light No Fire

Hello Games’ new title is an Earth-sized multiplayer RPG sandbox.

TGA

UK indie studio Hello Games has announced its next game, Light No Fire, which will bring the procedural generation of No Man’s Sky to an entire planet on an incredibly detailed scale. It will combine open-world exploration with multiplayer community building, set on a planet the size of Earth, apparently. Light No Fire has been in development for five years by about a dozen developers at Hello Games, but there’s no release window yet.

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Google admits it staged a Gemini AI demo video

There was no voice interaction, nor did the demo happen in real time

Google

As Google scales up its AI battle with OpenAI and ChatGPT, the company has now admitted one demo, shown in the video “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI,” was edited to speed up the results. The interactions, too, weren’t based on voice but text input.

The demo used “still image frames from the footage and prompting via text,” rather than having Gemini respond to — or even predict — a drawing or change of objects on the table in real time. It’s all a little less impressive and comes when Google’s most cutting-edge AI models don’t differ hugely from OpenAI’s latest GPT tricks.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 is available on Xbox Series X/S

The official Game of the Year is finally on Microsoft consoles.

Developer and publisher Larian Studios had pledged to release the Xbox version of this year’s Game of the Year by… the end of the year and said it would reveal the exact date at The Game Awards. True to its word, Larian announced the Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 is out right now.

The delay was due to a technical problem with the Series S, and the inability to make the game’s split-screen feature on the lower-powered console. However, Larian said it had a solution to support split-screen on Series X, but not Series S, and had permission to do so from Xbox bosses.

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