Something for the Weekend – 14/10/23

Like A Dragon Gaiden gives you access to the Infinite Wealth demo, and after playing through it, the Yakuza sicko in me is feasting like never before.

Nothing is more versatile than the timeless greats of the role-playing genre. RPGs transport us to different worlds, giving us the chance to explore and shape a journey on our own terms.

Ledger is launching the second season of its gamified educational platform in The Sandbox virtual world with the aim of expanding crypto knowledge in the metaverse.

MAUI, Hawaii—Let's start with a great big caveat: This is not your conventional benchmark testing story, at least as PCMag usually does them. We attended Qualcomm's 2023 Snapdragon Summit last week, and were regaled with session after session detailing advances in on-device AI, Qualcomm's ubiquitous Snapdragon smartphone chips, news around new cross-device info sharing and synchronicity. But most of all there is "Oryon": the company’s next-generation CPU core silicon that will scale from laptops (where it will make its first appearance in the company’s Snapdragon X Elite processor next year) eventually to smartphones, automotive applications, and more.

It’s been another miserable week weather-wise, and things haven’t been very cheery in the gaming industry either. This week saw a number of upcoming games being delayed, and the big release of Cities Skylines 2 was marred by performance issues.

MAUI, Hawaii—At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2023, PCMag sat down with two of the company’s senior leaders for a conversation around the star attraction of the first day’s keynote: Snapdragon X Elite, the first PC-compute iteration of the company’s new Snapdragon X family of mobile processors. Qualcomm has made some bold performance and efficiency claims around X Elite. They stand in stark contrast to the relative paucity of Snapdragon laptop-processor design wins to date (compared with Qualcomm's commanding position in smartphone chips). Many of the initial claims throw down the gauntlet to today’s big-three laptop chip makers (AMD, Apple, and Intel).

Fallout's co-creator has revealed where they'd like the post-apocalyptic series to head next.

The overarching theme of this year’s GamesBeat Next conference is “Playing the Edge” — in other words, the technologies, innovations and initiatives sitting at the edge of the gaming industry that have potential to become industry game-changers. User-generated content is one of the areas with the most promise, says Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat. He spoke with Nicola Sebastiani, chief content officer at The Sandbox, during a special preview session for the conference, about how developers can power brands and creators with immersive experiences and tools.

MAUI—Qualcomm says its newest Snapdragon Sound technology will bring premium audio experiences to the next generation of mobile headphones.

All it took was the bang of a hammer – and Tord Reklev is £70,000 (NZ$147,000) richer. Not a bad profit for selling a single Pokémon card.

The Apple Vision Pro launch is said to happen in early 2024, but it will not be easy for customers to acquire one as the device is said to be available through an appointment system only. Also, the company has been extremely mum on the product, which only means that the average person does not know what they will be getting for their hard-earned $3,499, and that may be why Apple has selected a few retail employees to undergo a secret training event prior to the release of the AR headset.

Big, bad Babet has been battering the British Isles this week with wind and rain, which has made the decision to stay indoors and play games or watch sports, movies or Deep Space 9 clips on YouTube this weekend quite easy. That, and there’s a bunch of fantastic games that have come out this week, including Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 and plenty more.