Meet DeepCube, an artificially intelligent system that’s as good at playing the Rubik’s Cube as the best human master solvers. Incredibly, the system learned to dominate the classic 3D puzzle in just 44 hours and without any human intervention.
Earlier this week, Nintendo delighted Fortnite fans by announcing that the game, which might just be the most popular game being played right now, was coming to the Switch immediately. Even better, Switch players would be able to compete with PC and Xbox players, too—instant digital distribution and multiplayer open…
Valve, the company behind the Steam platform that has achieved a near-monopoly on PC game sales, issued a blog post on Wednesday clarifying its content policies after it removed a mass shooting-themed game titled Active Shooter from its store in late May. According to Valve’s Erik Johnson, from now on the company will…
Apple’s World Wide Developer conference kicked off on Monday and among the refinements that we’re seeing for iOS is increased support for augmented reality. A brand new ARKit is dropping and along with it some impressive apps and features could make mixed reality more than just a novelty.
Aside from whatever motion-control tech Nintendo has tried to push, game controllers haven’t actually changed much over the last 15 years. And for a lot of people, that’s been a good thing, as it makes transferring years of hand-eye coordination from one console to another pretty seamless.
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly round up of the best toys we’ve seen all week. This time we’ve got a bumper bunch of Jurassic Park merchandise (and some Jurassic-adjacent attempts too), rocking toys that boldly go, and perhaps the world’s most absurdly articulated action figure cape ever seen. Check them out!
Hail Satan! Or the deity of your choice. The demonic followers of Dungeons & Dragons have whole pantheons of dark divinities to champion, of course.
Steven Spielberg is the director of very profitable movie and shameless gamer nostalgia cash-in Ready Player One, which is mostly set in virtual reality. While doing an international press tour for the movie, he also allegedly told Japanese news agency Kyodo that his favorite VR experience was playing Mario... on, uh,…
If your wallet serves as more of a toolbox than a place to stash a few bucks, alongside a flat-pack knife and credit card-sized multi-tools, you can also slip in this super tiny, 3D-printed chess set. Compared to playing rock-paper-scissors, it’s a far more civilized way to make important decisions.
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly roundup of shiny toys and merch we desperately wish we had the money to waste on. This week is getting a bit life-sized, with a giant Star Wars trooper, a slightly less giant (but still life-sized) baby Groot, and a cool look at Thor’s new Infinity War weapon. Check it out!
The original Game Boy was the first device to push my fascination with gadgets to an obsession. I saved for months to buy one, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite gaming platforms. That explains why, despite every gadget I use having an alarm clock built-in, I now prefer waking up to this adorable Game Boy…
A Bluetooth-connected foam ball packed with sensors and a battery you need to charge sounds like one of Silicon Valley’s worst ideas. Haven’t balls been adequately entertaining kids for centuries already? But it only took one toss of Play Impossible’s Gameball for me to understand why a ball upgraded with…
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, which after a post-Toy Fair break, is back and ready to tempt your wallet with all sorts of lavish toys and collectibles. This week, we’ve got a very special Lego minifigure, almost comically deadly darts, and a Jabba worthy of any great Hutt’s display cabinet. Come take a look!
You can complain about The Phantom Menace all you want, but the podrace scene remains one of the best visual spectacles in all the Star Wars movies. It spawned some wonderful toys too, but nothing that comes close to Alexis Dos Santos’ Lego Mindstorms-powered tabletop pod racing game.
It’s all but impossible to reach the end of the Harry Potter books or movies without secretly pining for a wand of your own, but it’s probably best for humanity that we’re not all flailing magical sticks around. The next best thing would be JAKKS Pacific’s new interactive Wizard Training Wands that make it feel like…
Oh Miitomo, it seems like it was just yesterday when you arrived on phones as Nintendo’s first mobile app, bringing a tiny bit of that Mario joy and magic to the small screen. But after less than three years on the market, Nintendo is killing off the Miitomo app in just a few months on May 9th.
Harry Potter has always had a weird relationship with video games, from the traditional movie tie-ins to the Lego series. But now that the franchise has mostly stepped aside for the prequel era in Fantastic Beasts, you’d think we’d start seeing more games connected to Newt instead of Harry and friends—but the latest …
The first look at the Tomb Raider reboot gave us plenty of tomb-raiding action, with a lot of it inspired by the 2013 video game reboot of Lara Croft’s escapades. The latest trailer shows us a lot of what’s been added to the film beyond the inspiration of the game series—and it’s pretty much all about the legacy of…
Authorities have charged 25-year-old Los Angeles man Tyler Barriss with manslaughter for allegedly placing a hoax call that led to a Wichita, Kansas police officer shooting and killing an innocent man, the L.A. Times reported.
HQ Trivia, the alarmingly popular trivia app which increasingly threatens to take over our reality, has been iOS-only since its mid-October launch. The result has been that 12 times a week, iPhone owners have been swarmed by everyone else trying to get a slice of that sweet, addictive trivia.