Tech Boys

Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who's covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget. Please enjoy — and I'll see you next week. If I end up reading one more story about how fantastic Death Stranding 2 is so long as you skip the cutscenes , I’m gonna hurl. At what point during 10 hours of cinematic interstitials do we collectively put the controller down and say, actually, this isn’t a great game? Not because the game parts aren’t any good — they’re pretty fabulous, in fact — but because a significant portion of the experience isn’t actually interactive at all. When does it become more accurate to describe a Hideo Kojima project as a...

Razer is back with a new addition to its Core line of external graphics enclosures. The Razer Core X V2 external graphics enclosure can house recent GPUs from brands including NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon. It uses a single Thunderbolt 5 cable to the host device; in its press materials, Razer claims this tech delivers up to twice the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4. This is true, but Thunderbolt 5 still isn't on the level of a modern desktop GPU connection, being roughly equivalent to 8 lanes of PCIe Gen 3. The Core X V2 s not available yet, but will retail for $350 when it does go on sale some time "soon." An eGPU can beef up the visual power of a gaming laptop or handheld. Razer has had several available over the years, starting with the Core alongside its Blade Stealth model in 2016. It followed up with the Core X in 2018 and the colorful Core X Chroma in 2019. The availability of Thunderbolt 5 ports has renewed interest in this product category since it increases the ...

Xbox's "Stream your own game" feature continues to expand. You can now use your PC to play supported games you own on Xbox. (The games stream from the cloud, not your console.) You'll need to be an Xbox Insider and Game Pass Ultimate subscriber to use it. The PC launch follows the feature's arrival earlier this year on other devices. Already supported were Xbox consoles, TVs, browser-based devices (including mobile) and Meta Quest headsets . The idea is the latest chapter in Microsoft's mission to make Xbox software more device-agnostic. Hop on whatever device is available, and start playing without waiting for installations. That makes sense from a business perspective, given Sony's commanding lead in their two-way console race. It's increasingly more about selling Game Pass subscriptions than fighting a losing hardware battle . CD Projekt Red Microsoft lists over 250 supported games . Standouts include Baldur's Gate 3 , Star Wars Outlaw...

The difference between Prime Day and Black Friday — their roots, anyway — probably isn't a mystery to anyone who has dabbled in online shopping before. Most of us know that Black Friday is the big sale frenzy that happens around Thanksgiving as a precursor to the holidays, and that almost every store you can think of participates. Alternatively, the name "Prime Day" suggests that the event is indeed an Amazon -specific event made up by Amazon for members of its Prime subscription service . The lines between these two shopping holidays also aren't quite as blurred as they are between Black Friday and Cyber Monday , which have become pretty indistinguishable from each other due to 1. being just a few days apart on the calendar, and 2. Black Friday relying just as heavily on online shopping as Cyber Monday does. But back to the question at hand. Most people aren't concerned with these shopping holiday semantics. The people just want to know: Does Prime Day or B...

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is reportedly working on mixed reality goggles, The Information reports . The in-development device is designed to layer digital objects over your view of the real world, and is supposed to compete directly with Meta's upcoming mixed reality products. The goggles are being built by ByteDance's virtual reality startup Pico, the creators of the Pico 4 VR headset . Pico's past products have attempted to match Meta's Quest headsets in terms of features, but these new goggles apparently represent a different approach (albeit one still positioned as an alternative to Meta). Rather than a bulky headset, the goggles are supposed to be small and light, about the size of the Bigscreen Beyond VR headset , which weighs 0.28 pounds. Pico is keeping the device lightweight by offloading most of the computing work to a puck that's connected to the goggles over a wire. Meta's prototype Orion AR glasses used a wireless puck for a similar...

The new Xbox gaming handheld might be even more of a premium product than initially expected. That's the fear emanating from a new leak that originated in a Spanish online Asus marketplace (via Tom's Guide ), anyway. If you type "xbox ally" into the search field, it will actually show supposed prices for both the base ROG Xbox Ally console and the more powerful Xbox Ally X. The "cheaper" one is the equivalent of $699 USD, while the Ally X comes out to around $1,050 after currency conversion. I tried this and can confirm that it still works at the time of publication. Whoops. Credit: Screenshot: Alex Perry Of course, there are some caveats here. One is that this could simply be a technical error on the part of this one specific Spanish Asus store. Perhaps those numbers are just placeholder figures that were never meant to be seen by the public. After all, they haven't appeared anywhere else yet, as far we know. Another is that a leaker named eX...

Meta is going after creators who rip off other users' content as part of a broader effort to fix Facebook's feed. In its latest update , the company laid out new steps it's taking to penalize accounts that lift work from others. In a blog post for creators, Meta says that accounts that "repeatedly" and "improperly" reuse other accounts' text posts, photos or videos will have their pages demonetized "for a period of time." Meta willa also throttle all of their posts, not just the ones with the offending content. The company notes that the change is meant to target "repeated reposting of content from other creators without permission or meaningful enhancements" and not content like reaction videos. Meta has previously taken similar steps to reward original content on Instagram , where the company has actively replaced reposted Reels with the original clip. The company now says it's looking into a similar move on Facebook by a...

Oh hey there! If you're here, it must be time for Wordle . As always, we're serving up our daily hints and tips to help you figure out today's answer. If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for today's Wordle solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you. SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable SEE ALSO: NYT Connections today: Hints and answers for July 14 Where did Wordle come from? Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble , music identification game Heardle , and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once .  Word...

NASA's Parker Solar Probe made history with the closest-ever approach to the sun last December , and we're finally getting a look at some of the images it captured. The space agency released a timelapse of observations made using Parker's Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) while it passed through the sun's corona (the outer atmosphere) on December 25, 2024, revealing up close how solar wind acts soon after it's released. The probe captured these images at just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface. To put that into perspective, a NASA video explains, "If Earth and the sun were one foot apart, Parker Solar Probe was about half an inch from the sun." The probe got an unprecedented view of solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) during the approach, which could be invaluable for our understanding of space weather. "We are witnessing where space weather threats to Earth begin, with our eyes, not just with models," said Nicky Fox, a...

Just a day after the xAI team issued a comprehensive apology and explanation about why its chatbot was spreading antisemitic rhetoric , Tesla updated its software for its cars to include the supposedly fixed Grok. According to Tesla, all new vehicles delivered on or after July 12 will have Grok available in-car. There's no additional subscription cost, but Tesla is limiting Grok's availability to models in the US for now. For older models to run Grok, it requires a Tesla with an AMD processor, the latest software update of 2025.26, and either a stable Wi-Fi connection or Tesla's $9.99 Premium Connectivity subscription. It's worth noting that Grok will simply be an AI chatbot you can ask questions to, but won't be able to interface with the car itself. In other words, Grok can't help you set up directions to your destination, lower the music's volume or control the car's temperature. Instead, it can offer excruciatingly cringe-inducing responses under ...