Eurogamer

An unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. has sold for $660,000, smashing the world record for a video game sale. The previous record was $114,000 for another sealed copy of Super Mario Bros.

The copy of the NES classic sold on Friday at Heritage Auctions in Dallas. It is the finest known copy of the oldest sealed hangtab Super Mario Bros.

The game was labelled "Super Mario Bros. - Wata 9.6 A+ Sealed [Hangtab, 1 Code, Mid-Production], NES Nintendo 1985 USA".

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Resident Evil Village has a photo mode, new footage has confirmed.

IGN published our first look at the promising horror game running on a PlayStation 4 Pro, and in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen we see you can press the Options button for skip / photo mode (Resident Evil 7 does not have either feature). The cutscene in question stars Lady Dimitrescu.

Unless you've been living under a rock this year you'll know the internet is... enjoying Resident Evil Village's extremely tall vampire lady.

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Square Enix has shown off Final Fantasy 14 running on a PlayStation 5 for the first time.

Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki Yoshida revealed 16 minutes of footage of the PS5 version during Square Enix's latest Letter from the Producer livestream (thanks, Gematsu).

You can check the footage out in the video below (skip to the one hour and 19 minutes mark):

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Outriders has launched big, although tech issues are hampering its release.

People Can Fly's looter shooter hit over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, where it is currently the top-selling game at £49.99.

As a point of comparison, Square Enix's high-profile flop Marvel's The Avengers hit a peak concurrent player count of 28,145 on Steam when it launched in September. It's currently averaging 1000 concurrent players over the last 30 days.

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Call of Duty: Warzone's enormous mid-season update was hotly-anticipated by fans, but unfortunately it has suffered from a number of serious issues since launch.

Shockingly, the long-standing invisibility bug, which has plagued Warzone for months now, returned with the update. This awful bug, which allows entire squads to turn invisible during a match, was linked to this week's return of the mini-gun variant of the helicopter. In response, Warzone developer Raven Software pulled the mini-gun chopper entirely from the game to investigate.

This is not the first time this has happened. Attack helicopters hit Warzone in December but were quickly pulled because they were used as part of an exploit that made players invisible. Nearly four months later, the attack helicopters returned to Warzone and, again, were quickly pulled because of the same exploit.

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New research has "robustly verified" a link between loot boxes and problem gambling.

Researchers at the universities of Plymouth and Wolverhampton said loot boxes "are structurally and psychologically akin to gambling".

It also found that large numbers of children are opening loot boxes.

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Platinum Games just released an Apple Arcade-exclusive called World of Demons.

World of Demons is an action game, which comes as no surprise given Platinum is the developer of some of the best action games in the business, such as Bayonetta and NieR:Automata. The trailer is below:

This one's set in a fantastical world full of yokai - a class of supernatural monsters and spirits from Japanese folklore. (Ewan Wilson wrote a fascinating article for Eurogamer about the yōkai in From Software's Sekiro, which is well worth a read if you want to know more.)

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Warner Bros. has delayed Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga again.

Developer TT Games said it needed more time to make Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which was due out spring 2021 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, "the biggest and best ever Lego game."

The Skywalker Saga was first revealed at E3 2019 and was initially expected to come out in late 2020, but in August it was delayed to spring 2021. It is an all-new retelling of all nine films, with the goal of being the definitive Lego Star Wars game.

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PlayStation Studios' MLB The Show 21 launches on Xbox Game Pass day one, Microsoft has announced.

MLB The Show 21 is the first PlayStation Studios game to launch on Xbox Game Pass. The deal also means PlayStation owners have to pay £60 for the Sony-developed MLB The Show 21, while Xbox owners can get it as part of their Game Pass subscription when it comes out on 20th April.

If you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you can get MLB The Show 21 on your Android phone via the cloud.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: loops, museums, and difficult cities.

I really like the buttons. I can almost feel them, like I'm pressing in some scraping stone button in a dingy temple somewhere, and that dingy temple is probably role-playing games from the 80s. I love how retro it feels. I also love Loop Hero's different take on an RPG, and how it's not an RPG really, but more of a kind of reverse tower defence game, where you're trying to attract more danger, rather than less, so you can chop through it and get more loot.

I like the rather simple amnesiac story that surrounds it, because it compliments and explains the set-up without getting in the way. I find it neat, literally - neat like a math's problem. And when you step back a bit, I suppose that's what Loop Hero is. It's like an equation you're forever balancing on the fly. You adjust your numbers in order that they produce more favourable equations than your enemies', swapping equipment and weapons, and placing tiles, depending on what comes in.

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A minute's silence. A toast to the departed. Let's remember the greatest of us: Mario.

I wasn't sure they'd go through with it, but Nintendo really did kill Mario this week. Super Mario 3D All-Stars for Nintendo Switch is no longer for sale digitally, and no new physical stock will be distributed. We knew this was coming. Nintendo had signalled as much. But why is it happening?

That's the question we ask on this week's Eurogamer News Cast. Join news editor Tom Phillips, reporter Emma Kent and me as we attempt to make sense of Nintendo's controversial decision in the video below.

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Reyner Banham once spoke about the architectural properties of crisps. I would love to have been there. This week I am re-reading his thrilling book on Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and I'm looking through twenty-year-old magazines.

I'm reading Banham again because his generous and perceptive take on LA always feels like comfort reading. In March 2021, just opening the book seems to bring the warmed-concrete spaciousness of that city, with its standing freeway pillars and playful flow between urban and wilderness, into the saggy darkness of the lockdown home.

And I'm looking through old mags because Banham sent me back to GTA 5 and then GTA 5 sent me back to a Wipeout Fusion print ad, a double-page spread, once seen and never forgotten, in which London has been chosen as a site for the development of a multi-gajillion pound anti-grav racing track, and the citizens are not happy about it.

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Outriders is suffering launch day login issues as a raft of problems have emerged.

People Can Fly's looter shooter launched today across PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S as well as straight into Xbox Game Pass and Google Stadia, and it is struggling to cope with the influx of players.

I've spent some time this evening stuck on the initial authentication screen, which has prevented me from playing at all. Eventually, you're presented with an "Internet Connection Error" message that lets you know you failed to connect to the Outriders servers. There's nothing to do after this point but try again.

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Elite Dangerous is currently in the throes of alpha testing its new Odyssey expansion, with pre-order players now able to put a limited version of the experience through its paces. Some of Odyssey's new features have proven more contentious than others at this early juncture, and Frontier has now moved to address some of its biggest pain points - including Odyssey's tortuous AI-piloted Apex Interstellar taxi service.

Apex Interstellar is chiefly intended to provide players who're enthusiastic about Odyssey's on-foot combat but less so about space flight with a means of getting round the galaxy without needing to pilot a ship of their own. It's an entirely reasonable idea in principle, but the reality is an excruciating bore, leaving players stuck in the passenger seat with nothing to do for many - often many, many, many - minutes at a time.

It's doubtful anyone would actively choose to use Odyssey's space taxis in their current guise (least of all those seeking instant gratification thrills), but their rubbishness is exacerbated by the fact taxis are the only way to get around in the current alpha phase, leading to considerable criticism over the last few days.

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It's April Fools' Day, and aside from being a living nightmare for journalists around the world, it's also an opportunity for game developers to put out some very silly stuff. This year it seems PUBG Corp has taken up the gauntlet, releasing an arcade-style minigame for PUBG where you fight chickens. And it's called POBG (short for Playeromnomnom's Battlegrounds) - although that doesn't exactly solve the debate on how to pronounce the acronym. I'm going with pob-guh.

The minigame can be accessed through PUBG's main menu, where it appears as a little arcade cabinet. POBG is based on a pixel art version of PUBG maps (inspired by the work of artist Alexey "Gas13" Garkushin). Having played it for a couple of levels, I have to say, it's a surprisingly high-quality April fool. Players must shoot their way through "rooms" full of chickens, who parachute from the sky and immediately start firing semi-automatics in your general direction. (The choice of chickens is a reference to what happens when you win a regular PUBG game, which gives you the famous message "winner winner chicken dinner".) You can pick up ammo, health and different weapons along the way, and find cover behind various crates and pieces of debris. Once you've cleared a stage, you can also acquire various bonus abilities to help you collect some chicken dinners.

We've been massively enthusiastic about Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 in the past - Vicarious Visions revamped and modernised a brilliant game for PC, PS4 and Xbox One consoles while retaining the core genius of its original incarnations. It's one of John Linneman's top games of 2020 and I'm happy to report that the next generation update for the game is highly impressive - though the upgrade process itself could be better, and if you've already bought it, Activision wants more of your money for the latest rendition of the code. The good news is that the upgrades themselves are excellent - at least in our experience.

With that said, it seems that some users have had issues and we're not entirely sure why, as we didn't encounter any problems with the game during testing. Maybe the fact that we were given specific Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 review codes allowed us to side-step some of the problems others are facing - no upgrade was needed, no existing code was sat on our hard drives - but the fact is that the game just worked with no problems in the time we spent with it. Your mileage may vary of course, but fingers crossed that any outstanding issues will be resolved sooner rather than later because whether you're gaming on PS5, Series X or Series S, the improvements are palpable.

Stonks man is now in Fortnite.

The CGI creation - a cross between Jeff Bezos and a crash test dummy - is known online for his presence on memes to do with the stock market.

His popularity has only risen further this year - like the soaring stonks he illustrates - because of last month's GameStop stock market shenanigans.

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Microsoft has signed a contract with the US Army, worth up to $21.88bn, to deliver 120,000 custom Hololens augmented reality headsets.

The deal comes after a previous $480m contract in 2018 to develop prototype versions for the army, CNBC News reported. The IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmented System) concept used the headset's display to show map and thermal imaging systems, as well as the aim for a weapon.

That agreement was criticised by Microsoft employees in an open letter, in which staff said they "did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used". These concerns were dismissed by Microsoft boss CEO Satya Nadella, and the contract went ahead.

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Call of Duty: Warzone appears to finally be getting its much-anticipated map change, but the news seems to have arrived a little earlier than intended: leaked footage of the map is currently circulating online, and Activision is battling to contain it.

The leak was first shared by Twitter account On Thin Ice, showing footage of a work-in-progress TV advert for the new map. According to VGC's sources, the new map is due to arrive in a live event on 22nd April, with nuclear warheads blowing up current-day Verdansk. Although the original video has been removed, multiple mirrors have popped up across social media, showing what appears to be an 80s-themed overhaul of Verdansk rather than an all-new location. It includes changes to various points of interest - adding an under-construction stadium and replacing the dam with a bridge - and generally giving Verdansk more of an '80s look.

While there's been no official confirmation from Activision, the publisher has been cracking down on the leak: at least one video has been taken down from YouTube, and news site Charlie Intel says it has received a DMCA notice from Activision.

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After rinsing the generous dollop of content that was the Outriders demo, I was left with a question: soldier on when the game comes out, or leave it there?

"I see potential in Outriders' endgame...," I wrote in March. "But it's just so... old-school, I'm not sure I'll be able to suffer it long enough to get to that point."

Yesterday, after downloading the full game on PlayStation 5 and picking up my Devastator where she left off at the end of the demo, I ventured forth from the brown sludge of Rift Town to see if Outriders got more interesting.

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Last year, Control developer Remedy announced it had signed a two-project publishing deal with Epic Games, and then re-introduced its fan favourite hero Alan Wake via Control's excellent second expansion, which wove the story of both games together as part of Remedy's wider narrative universe.

Was Wake being teed up to tease a full sequel to his Xbox 360 cult hit? After Epic's publishing deal was announced - for a big "AAA multiplatform game already in pre-production" and a "new, smaller-scale project set in the same franchise" - fans' hopes were high that Wake would also appear in one of these games.

Now, chatty but reliable Venturebeat journalist Jeff Grubb has announced via his Twitch he had heard "Alan Wake 2" was one of Remedy's Epic-funded projects.

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Maybe it's simply a case of being careful of what you wish for. Balan Wonderworld is a curious time capsule, a 3D platformer that's full of the exuberance, colour and straight-up weirdness of a beloved and bygone period frequently yearned for, and all from the very people that helped define that same era. Imagine the team behind Sonic Adventure had a crack at their own Mario Odyssey, that late 90s exuberance finding itself into a maximalist journey that throws a hundred different ideas at the player, and you've pretty much got Balan Wonderworld down pat. If you've an honest recollection of how Sonic Adventure played, you'll also have a pretty good idea of how horrifying, fascinating, frustrating and occasionally brilliant this can be.

Balan Wonderworld marks the grand return of Yuji Naka (an impeccably stylish dev, I was lucky enough to meet him once and was impressed how his socks, tie and pocket square all matched, a fact that might have been unremarkable were they not all a searingly bright orange). Here the Sonic the Hedgehog programmer is reunited with the designer of Sega's mascot Naoto Ohshima - a man who can also boast Nights into Dreams, Burning Rangers, and perhaps most appropriately this time out Blinx: The Time Sweeper on his CV. The two are together for the first time since 1998's Sonic Adventure, a pairing that promises a certain type of game that Balan Wonderworld certainly delivers on.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City has been delayed by two months, to 24th November.

Sony's Resident Evil film reboot was previously set to arrive on 3rd September, but according to Variety has now been pushed back to avoid Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Welcome to Racoon City will adapt elements from the first two Resident Evil games, so you get a bit of old school mansion exploration with Chris and Jill, plus downtown cop drama with Leon and Claire.

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Amazon has punched the price of Persona 5 Royal edition - one of the best JRPGs released in recent years - all the way down to £25, with prices matched on the PSN Store for the Deluxe Edition!

That probably leaves most of you that picked up the standard edition of Persona 5 for free on PlayStation Plus wondering what bang for your buck you're getting with the Royal edition of the game.

Royal is essentially the definitive version of Persona 5 that makes a lot of improvements on the base game. You won't have to spend as much time raising your social stats, as Royal introduces plenty of new features to speed up the process, including playing video games and studying at the library. This makes it possible to max out your social stats in a single playthrough if you're wise with your time. Not only that, but the digital PS Store version is the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a set of cosmetics for the character Kasumi.

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Wise-cracking anthropomorphic crime-fighting duo Sam & Max will be making their VR debut on Oculus Quest this June in developer HappyGiant's brand-new adventure outing Sam & Max: This Time It's Virtual, with releases on Steam, Viveport Infinity, and PSVR to follow.

Sam & Max: This Time It's Virtual is the first entirely new video game outing for the Freelance Police since Telltale's third season of Sam & Max adventures, The Devil's Playhouse, in 2010. It sees the dubious dog and bunny duo indulging in appropriately outlandish VR-enabled mini-games as they explore Cap'n Aquabear's rotting theme park.

"Even multimedia evil-slappers like Sam & Max could use a hand," explains HappyGiant of its new VR endeavour, "and this time they're using the incomprehensible magic of virtual reality to invite the player into their off-kilter world for a furious day of monster-slaying, obstacle courses, responsibly discharged firearms, and, of course, saving the entire freaking world."

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Developer Ion Lands is returning to the neon-drenched streets of its gorgeous Blade Runner-esque delivery thriller Cloudpunk in a new "sequel-sized" DLC, City of Ghosts.

City of Ghosts introduces a second, fully voiced campaign that serves as a direct sequel to the the main game, once again following protagonist Rania as she zips around the striking open-world metropolis of Nivalis in her trusty flying HOVA. Canine companion Camus is also along for the ride, but this time Rani is joined by a second hero - deadbeat gambler Hayse - with players switching between the pair's interlinking stories as City of Ghosts unfolds.

"As Rania attracts the unwelcome attention of the massive delivery corporation Curzona," explains Ion Lands, "she must also evade a secret society of AI worshipping zealots. Her night gets even worse when the Debt Corps finally track her down, and Rania finds herself trying to outrun her past as well as a homicidal, chimeric cyborg. Meanwhile, drunken gambler Hayse tries to clear his debt before morning, but with an appetite for self-destruction and a bumbling CorpSec android for company, the odds aren't in his favour."

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Sony has announced April 2021's PlayStation Plus titles, all of which will be available to download from 6th April to 3rd May.

First up, Oddworld: Soulstorm, which as we knew already will launch on 6th April directly into PlayStation Plus.

Soulstorm is the second chapter in Abe's quintology (Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty, a full HD remake of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, is considered the first game in the quintology). You reprise the role of Abe the Mudokon, the accidental hero turned leader of a growing revolution.

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A selection of Microsoft's backwards compatible Xbox and Xbox 360 catalogue is now available to stream via xCloud.

Banjo-Kazooie, Fable 2, Gears of War 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are among the first 16 back compat games you can stream to Android phones.

Three of these - Jetpac Refuelled, Viva Piñata, and Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise - have also had touch controls enabled.

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Ratchet & Clank is now playable in 60 FPS on PlayStation 5, developer Insomniac Games has announced - a little earlier than scheduled.

Insomniac had previously promised a 60 FPS update for the game in April. Its release now means you can try it out tonight while the 2016 platformer is still available to play for free via Sony's Play at Home initiative.

The Play at Home promotion runs until tomorrow, 1st April, at 4am UK time.

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Nintendo has finally made the Animal Crossing Sanrio amiibo cards available to pre-order from its official UK site.

In anticipation of high demand, Nintendo is limiting orders to one pack per household. The price is £4.99 and if you're interested, you should act fast - these probably will not last long.

To be fair, one pack should be all you need. The pack's included cards let you summon six villagers (Chai, Chelsea, Étoile, Marty, Rilla and Toby) and unlock a list of themed furniture, including a set of Hello Kitty items.

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Twin Breaker studio Lillymo Games has had to abandon its plans to release a project for PlayStation Vita in the wake of Sony's confirmation it will shutter the handheld's online store on 27th August.

The game is still at least six months from release - and so will simply not have time to launch before Sony closes the Vita store in August, following similar closures of the PS3 and PSP stores on 2nd July.

Lillymo Games posted on Twitter of discovering the news at the same time as it was revealed publicly:

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I'm delighted to announce that Felisha Dela Cruz has joined the team as a comments moderator.

Felisha is part of our parent company RELX's marketing department that is based in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and is moderating comments on Eurogamer as well as our sister sites Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247 and Dicebreaker.

So, a little bit about Felisha. I asked her about her interests and here's what she had to say:

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It's only been six weeks since the arrival of No Man's Sky's pet-themed Companions update, but already developer Hello Games is back with more, this time introducing seasonal, galaxy spanning Expeditions and accompanying rewards.

Launching today on all platforms, No Man's Sky's Expeditions update is intended to give players a new way to experience the ceaselessly expanding space sim, with each new Expedition depositing players - armed with a "wild and varied" collection of technology, customisations, ships, and weapons - onto the same planet.

An accompanying Expedition chart plots a course across the galaxy, which players are then encouraged to follow, completing challenges (known as Milestones) along the way.

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Call of Duty: Warzone added a potentially powerful new killstreak with this morning's huge update.

Bombardment is obtained from the freshly-unlocked Containment Monitor stations found across the map.

This new killstreak is listed in the Containment Monitor station menu under the Containment Protocol category, and requires a key to unlock. This lets you call in a missile barrage over areas affected by the zombie outbreak.

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The delightfully unusual detective role-playing game Disco Elysium is finally on console. The Final Cut version of the game arrived yesterday on PlayStation machines (4 and 5), the App Store, Stadia and PC (a free update if you already own the base game), and there's an Xbox version due to follow this summer.

I've been playing it on PlayStation 5, and generally it works well. I haven't noticed the frame-rate issues I've seen reported elsewhere, so presumably they really have been fixed. But I have come across the object interaction bug, which sometimes doesn't register your interactions, or doesn't quite trigger them. Pressing the button again usually rectifies the issue, so it's sometimes annoying but rarely more. Loading times seem fine on PS5, though I wonder what they're like on PS4, and I haven't seen any other bugs, though I'm only early in the game (code arrived late).

But the most notable new addition is full voice acting. Disco Elysium is a wordy game and only patches of it were voiced originally, meaning most of the time you were reading a text box on the right-hand side of the screen. And though the words were (and are) delightful - Disco Elysium has an outrageous sense of humour, and a lovely way of voicing thoughts that really ought to stay in your head - the sheer amount of them could be wearying. This also made the game somewhat quiet and still, as it waited for you to read and catch up. But the addition of audible voices has a powerful effect on this.

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CD Projekt's big online Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer portion will no longer be launched as a standalone release.

The developer announced the change yesterday in a conference call held following the company's big strategy update, where it briefed investors on how it will continue both Cyberpunk and Witcher franchises over the next few years.

Yesterday's strategy update vaguely mentioned "reconsidered" multiplayer plans for Cyberpunk 2077, which CD Projekt boss Adam Kiciński was then asked to clarify.

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In 2016, the computer scientist Andrew Ng compared worrying about superintelligent AI to worrying about overpopulation on Mars. We haven't even landed on the planet, he said, so why on Earth should we start freaking out? Modern AI can pull some snazzy tricks, sure, but it's a zillion miles away from presenting an existential threat to humanity.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that it fails to take into account just how long it might take us to solve what AI researchers call "the alignment problem", and what onlookers like me call "some pretty freaky shit". There are a lot of ideas I'm going to have to zoom through to explain why, but the key points are: Superintelligent AI could emerge very quickly if we ever design an AI that's good at designing AI, the product of such a recursive intelligence explosion may well have goals that don't align with our own, and there's little reason to think it would let us flick the off switch.

As people like philosopher Nick Bostrom are fond of saying, the concern isn't malevolence - it's competence. He's the one who came up with that thought experiment about an AI that sets about turning the entire universe into paperclips, a fantasy which you can and should live out through this free online click 'em up. A particularly spicy part of the apocalyptic meatball is that by giving an AI almost literally any goal, we'd likely also be inadvertently giving it certain instrumental goals, like maximising its own computing power or removing any agent that might get in its way.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has new maps this morning, four months after Activision left the game behind to focus on Black Ops Cold War and Warzone.

After downloading this morning's mammoth mid-season two update, Modern Warfare fans were surprised to see the Killhouse map added to Multiplayer alongside the new Killhouse 24/7 playlist.

Killhouse originally appeared in Infinity Ward's ground-breaking Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and it was spotted in the files of 2019's Modern Warfare back in February 2020.

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Europa Universalis 4, Paradox Interactive's dizzyingly rich grand strategy game, will be getting its 17th major expansion, titled Leviathan, on 27th April.

Leviathan is focussed on offering new ways to succeed beyond endless expansion and warmongering, introducing a range of new diplomatic and economic options to meet that goal. "Build a force of diplomats," explains Paradox by way of example, "and use your flattery as a weapon against others. Or draw wealth and power from the remote regions of your realm to construct a metropolis to be the engine of your economy."

One of Leviathan's most significant additions is the ability for diplomats to proactively gain Favours with a nation (previously they were accrued over time), which can then be used to perform useful diplomatic functions - such as abandoning an alliance, or having a nation return a core province - without having to declare war.

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This year's Summer Games Done Quick charity speedrunning event will run from 4th-11th July, organisers have announced, and will once again be an online-only affair.

In years gone by, Games Done Quick has taken the form of a ticketed real-world event, with its various speedrunning showcases being streamed online to tease charitable donations from viewers unable to attend in person. However, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic necessitated a change of plan in 2020, and those precautions will remain in place for this year's Summer Games Done Quick "in order to ensure the continued safety of the participants".

With dates now set and a format confirmed, speedrunner submissions for this year's Summer Games Done Quick will open shortly. Those looking to participate have from tomorrow, 31st March, until 11th April to present their game submissions via the Games Done Quick website.

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