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PLAY #35 is out now! And it’s that time of year again! Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth leads our huge Games Of 2024 feature, where we dig into your next favourite PlayStation games. From heavy hitters like Tekken 8 to newer favourites like Crow Country, we’ve got plenty of games to get on your radar nice and early. Read on for a peek at what’s in store!

AI Roundup: Several notable developments took place in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) today, December 11. US chipmaker Nvidia announced that it will support the development of AI as well as digital infrastructure in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani said the company is developing its proprietary AI model. In a new development, scholars and leaders have MIT have released a white paper on AI governance.

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This article is written in partnership with MicroProse.

Conglomerate Tata Group plans to build one of India's biggest iPhone assembly plants, tapping Apple Inc.'s ambitions to increase manufacturing in the South Asian country.

French consumer appliances brand Thomson is set to dazzle Indian consumers with incredible discounts and offers on its entire range of smart TVs during the Flipkart Big Year End Sale, running from December 9th to 16th, with early access starting from December 8th at midnight. The Thomson TVs discounts make them remarkably affordable, with prices starting as low as Rs. 5999. The brand has recently unveiled a new lineup, including the 43-inch QLED, 43-inch FA series TVs with Realtek processor, and the 55-inch Google TV with a 4K display.

Despite not winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards last night, which may or may not be controversial depending on which side you were on, The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom remains one of the best games of 2023 by a country mile. The game expanded everything in the previous title and added new gameplay elements that redefined what it meant to be Link. Some people spent hundreds of hours in the games simply wandering around, building things with the Ultrahand, doing side quests, and more. But there’s a little sour note that the game’s producer wishes to note.

Video games are fast becoming one of Australia's most recognizable exports. In recent years, a stream of titles born down under have found commercial success and critical acclaim on the global stage. Cult of the Lamb. Untitled Goose Game. Stray Gods. Heavenly Bodies. Hollow Knight. The Artful Escape. Gubbins. Unpacking. The list goes on and on.

Those with an active Game Pass Ultimate subscription can now purchase the Deluxe Edition of Immortals of Aveum for only $7.99.

At TGA 2023, Nexon announced the release window for its free-to-play cooperative looter shooter, The First Descendant. The game will be released in Summer 2024 on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. The news was accompanied by a cinematic trailer featuring characters Valby and Viessa, as well as a new mysterious face.

The next Team Ninja game has locked in a fairly competitive release date. Its next action game Rise of the Ronin arrives on March 22, 2024.

As an enjoyer of PC games, the only thing that could possibly be better than a Steam Deck OLED is a free Steam Deck OLED. Or maybe money to buy all my wishlisted games. The Game Awards 2023 is offering up a chance to get Valve’s new handheld via a giveaway that starts tonight.

All the buzz around Grand Theft Auto 6’s official reveal made it the most-viewed non-music video on YouTube in the first 24 hours after publish, according to Guinness World Records.

Nintendo is canceling several Japanese events due to threats, the company announced in a news release Thursday. Nintendo did not share details, except that the threats were “persistently” targeting Nintendo employees, event staff, and spectators. Nintendo Live 2024, scheduled to be held Jan. 20 to 21 at Tokyo Big Sight in Japan, has been canceled entirely, while the Splatoon Koshien 2023 finals, Splatoon 3 world championship, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe finals, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe championships have all been postponed until the company can “ensure the safety of our customers.”

AI Roundup: Several notable developments took place in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) today, December 7. The EU's AI Act could exclude AI models that have an open-source license, according to a leaked compromise proposal seen by Reuters. In the US, despite AI implementation in drive-thru services by chains like Checkers and Carl's Jr., human involvement in fulfilling orders persists, accounting for over 70% of customer interactions in locations like the Philippines. On the other hand, Neverinstall introduced its Windows Cloud PC, aiming to challenge established Desktop-As-A-Service providers with AI integration and CloudLink for an advanced cloud-computing experience.

Wordle 901 answer for December 7: The historic 900th puzzle just passed yesterday. It is insane to think about the run Wordle has had. Wordle was created by Josh Wardle in 2021 for his friends and family but it quickly became viral. In December 2021, NYT acquired the game. And then the popularity just skyrocketed. From people across different countries, celebrities, and even renowned personalities like US VP Kamala Harris and Indian Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor have spoken about their liking towards the game. As we move towards the big 1000, make sure you do not lose your winning streak at such an important junction. Make sure to use the Wordle hints and clues, if you get stuck. And if they aren't enough, you can always jump to the bottom to check the solution.

I'm typically sceptical of trailer scrubbers—and there are a hell of a lot of them with Grand Theft Auto 6. Can't blame them, obviously, it's been 10 whole years since we last got a GTA game. 

Google Gemini was unveiled by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and the company's AI research division DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis yesterday, December 6. Leaving PaLM-2 behind, it has now become the largest large language model released by the company so far. With its size, it also gains new capabilities. Being a multimodal AI model, its highest variant, Gemini Ultra, is capable of responding with text, images, videos, and audio, pushing the boundaries of what a general-purpose foundation model can do. So, if you have been wondering about the features and use cases of Gemini AI, then check them below.

Twitch will officially be closing down services in South Korea at the beginning of next year due to high operating costs. 

Jodie Foster doesn't think her True Detective and The Silence of the Lambs characters have anything in common – but the show isn't shying away from comparisons.

NVIDIA's China-Exclusive GeForce RTX 4090 D Gaming GPU might not offer overclocking support while shipping with cut-down specifications.

It is no secret that Apple is working towards reducing its dependence on China for the production of its various devices, including iPhones. In recent years, Apple has shifted its focus towards India and wants to expand its partnership by planning to produce the iPhone 16 battery in India. Suppliers in India have been told to upscale their production for the same. China is Apple's massive production and supply chain country, but India is taking away a lot of their business away. The shift is happening due to the many risk factors that were exposed by the COVID-19 years. Know what Apple is planning for its new generation of iPhone.

As part of the Day of the Devs Digital Showcase, SFB Games, the developers behind Snipperclips and the upcoming Crow Country, has revealed that their 2019 detective hit Tangle Tower is getting a sequel called The Mermaid’s Tongue. It’s set to release on PC in 2024, but has a demo available today.

Despite being one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world, Twitch has more than its share of problems. Recently, the company announced 180 employees were being laid off, and now it’s having to cease operations in Korea.

Twitch has announced it will end operations in South Korea at the end of February 2024, and blamed the high cost of operating in the country.

Twitch will be ceasing operations in South Korea due to the “prohibitively expensive” operational cost of running the streaming platform in the country, CEO Dan Clancy said Tuesday. According to the blog post, Twitch will stop service in Korea on Feb. 27, exiting a country known for being a global center of gaming and esports.

Google introduced Gemini 1.0 back at Google I/O 2023, and today, the company has finally launched it in three sizes. It is going to start rolling out to Bard. The company shared a lot of details about how the new model is going to work, and there are some really impressive details that they have shared.

Twitch has announced it's pulling its service from South Korea in less than three months, citing high operation costs as the reason why.

Twitch is shutting down its business in Korea and claims that operating in the region has become "prohibitively expensive."

Squid Game: The Challenge is coming back for another season.

2K has announced Civilization: Eras & Allies, a standalone free-to-play mobile 4X social strategy game.

Blade star Mahershala Ali has provided a promising update on his upcoming vampire hunter movie – and suggested that production is due to kick back off pretty soon. 

Twitch has made the surprise announcement that they are pulling their business out of Korea.

Streaming platform Twitch is departing South Korea.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 D GPU is on track for its China launch in the coming year and we get to learn some more specs from leaker, MEGAsizeGPU.

Twitch has announced that it will end its service in South Korea in February.

Twitch has revealed that it will be shutting down completely in Korea in 2024, claiming that the business has been operating in the country at a significant loss.

Xbox has launched its latest ID@Xbox demo event, offering players a chance to try out demos of new and upcoming indie games.

Nearly four and a half years after it began, One Piece’s Wano Country Arc has finished. The story is moving on to a new island, and One Piece itself is in a whole new world. In those four years, I personally have gone from One Piece curious to One Piece die-hard to professional One Piece pundit. And yet, when the new promotional image for the upcoming Egghead Arc graces my screen in January, it will be the first time ever that I will not be greeted by Monkey D. Luffy grinning in a well-worn kimono.

Nintendo has been making some moves to broaden its IP further. We have various video games and consoles. However, it wasn’t long ago that Nintendo saw the release of their Super Mario Bros animated film. Likewise, Nintendo even brought their IPs to life through the Universal Theme Parks. Select theme parks have a Nintendo world attached to them, giving fans of their beloved Mario franchise a chance to dive into the world. Filled with themed merchandise and rides, it has been a big hit. But we know that the Nintendo World will soon get an expansion, giving fans a chance to step into the world of Donkey Kong Country. 

Players in Japan are steeling themselves for battles and captivating stories. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Northern War is officially launching in Japan tomorrow. It’s out for pre-downloads today, so get your hands on the game from the Play Store.

Loot boxes are still here with us in 2023, and some countries are finally catching up with regulation.

DK is moving in right next door to Super Nintendo World.

Universal Studios has announced that Super Nintendo World Japan will be opening its Donkey Kong Country area in spring 2024.

Nintendo and Universal's partnership has been a fruitful one. Universal Studios Japan's version of Super Nintendo World kicked it all off in late 2020 and early 2021 with a magical experience for Nintendo fans (learn more about our experience here), then in February 2023, Universal Studios Hollywood's Super Nintendo World opened its doors (see our photo tour of that version here). The collaboration to this point culminated shortly after that with the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which garnered strong fan reactions and grossed more than $1 billion at the box office.

Nintendo and Universal Studios Japan have debuted the first look at the Super Nintendo World theme park’s upcoming Donkey Kong expansion.

True Detective is almost back, and it seems like this time around the show is all-in on the supernatural undercurrents of season 1. A new trailer for True Detective: Night Country was released on Monday that shows off the show’s central case, and hints at the spooky forces that could be at work behind all the blood and murder. The show returns to HBO on Jan. 14.

In case you missed it, a little-known developer called Rockstar finally revealed that its first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 would be dropping on December 5. With little more than a graphic with warm sunset tones, palm trees, and the words «Trailer 1, December 5, 9 AM ET,» the developer set fans into an absolute frenzy.

Nvidia's penchant for redesigning its GPUs to get around US export restrictions has seemingly been directly called out by the US Commerce Secretary, with a warning that when such redesigns are created «I'm going to control it the very next day.»

At the 2023 Comic Con Experience in São Paulo, Microsoft CEO Phil Spencer fielded questions about Xbox and its latest titles while revealing some interesting information about the current state of the gaming industry.

AMD has inaugurated the company's largest global R&D center in India, as part of its $400 million investment in the country over five years.

Following his comments to a Brazilian magazine about the recent price increase of the Xbox Series S console in the LATAM country, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was interviewed yesterday on the CCXP main stage and revealed a new player count milestone for Starfield.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has backed the company's decision to Xbox price hike in Brazil, claiming that it was necessary to uphold business in the region.

Even on a Saturday, the artificial intelligence space continues to be a hub of activity. On December 2, we witnessed multiple big announcements and callouts for safety in AI. In the first news, President Droupadi Murmu said that while the use of AI was making people's lives easier, its misuse to create deepfakes poses a threat to society. In other news, researchers have created an AI-powered laser camera capable of remotely detecting a person's heartbeat and identifying indicators of potential cardiovascular ailments. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.

India is being hailed globally to for having become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the South Pole of the moon. During his visit to India, Bill Nelson, the Administrator of NASA, congratulated India for accomplishing a feat that no other nation has achieved through the Chandrayaan-3 mission. He acknowledged India's significant contribution to lunar exploration, emphasizing the nation's success where others have faced challenges.

India's space ambitions are reaching new heights. From working on multiple space missions to International collaborations, the country is uplifting its global status in the field of space exploration. Recently, Victor Joseph, the associate scientific secretary of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) while delivering his speech at the Bengaluru Tech Summit (BTS-2023), explained what the Indian space agency is doing at the moment regarding placing an Indian man on the Moon as well as the status of the Gaganyaan mission.

The Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials are here and the first episode, The Star Beast, more than lived up to expectations with David Tennant and Catherine Tate reuniting for new adventures in the Tardis. Episode 2, Wild Blue Yonder, will see the pair flung across time and space, finding themselves materializing on a seemingly abandoned spaceship. 

Over five years after a copyright dispute regarding PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and the mobile game Knives Out, Krafton and NetEase have reached a settlement on the matter. 

The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) has today published the 2023 World Digital Competitiveness Ranking (WDCR), in which India ranks 49th among 64 economies. According to IMD's study, India has made significant in terms of cybersecurity knowledge but lacks on fronts like technology and future readiness. IMD's World Digital Competitiveness Ranking offers insights into how various nations are navigating digital transformation in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). 

You could call it the summer that Saudi Arabia swallowed sports. On June 6th, news broke that Saudi-backed LIV Golf was merging with the Professional Golfers’ Association, funded to the tune of over a billion dollars by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). In soccer, the world’s most popular and lucrative sport, the kingdom has brought global superstars such as Karim Benzema, Neymar, and Jordan Henderson to the desert to play their trade, laboring not only under the region’s sweltering heat but virulent criticisms of sportswashing. For established institutions, it was a summer of humbling disruption in which they had perhaps quietly sensed, for they would never admit it, the dawning of a new world order. 

Popular artificial intelligence (AI) image generator, Stable Diffusion, perpetuates harmful racial and gendered stereotypes, US scientists have found.

Microsoft’s gaming division is seeking continued growth, and to do that, it is eyeing the mobile gaming market. As Bloomberg reports, Xbox is talking with partners to create a mobile gaming store.

In some great news for fans, Krafton's most popular game, Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) has won a prestigious title in the country during the Google Play's Best of 2023 Awards. While the game has suffered a lot due to a ban over security concerns, the game has finally climbed to the top position in the gaming industry and proved to be the best in the race in India. Krafton announced that BGMI and its Valor: Empires have made it to the list of Google Play's Best of 2023 Awards in India. Learn more about the award-winning game here.

India's space agency ISRO is exploring joint collaborations with Boeing Co., Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin LLC and Voyager Space Holdings Inc., as an official visit by the head of NASA highlights the growing level of cooperation between the US and India in outer space. 

Some people think that story-driven games are dying. If that’s the case, then no one told the developers of these upcoming titles!

Not many games have a story like Indika, a game about a 19th century Russian Orthodox nun journeying to the centre of her soul with an «unusual, horn-headed companion.» Drawing inspiration from Dostoevsky and Bulgakov and dripping with dark humour, Indika tells a tale of religion and authority, madness and belief. But also, not many games have a story like Indika, whose developer Odd Meter left Russia when the country invaded Ukraine in February last year. Calling the invasion an «insane crime» perpetrated to «satisfy the ambitions of an elderly, weak-minded dwarf,» game director and studio founder Dmitry Svetlow decided to up and move Indika's development—and the company behind it—out of Moscow to neighbouring Kazakhstan, even moving the «entire recording studio by truck.» And both of those stories make it, for me, one of the most fascinating games to grace this year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted.

Jujutsu Kaisen Phantom Parade’s revenue has just come in – and it’s pretty impressive. From the looks of it, the recent gacha game has reached around $10,000,000 within the first 7 days of release.

Someone in China created thousands of fake social media accounts designed to appear to be from Americans and used them to spread polarizing political content in an apparent effort to divide the U.S. ahead of next year's elections, Meta said Thursday.

STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World was recently interviewed by the Chinese website GamerSky. Among various questions, the development team commented on the current Q1 2024 launch window.

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GSC Game World has confirmed that they are working on 60FPS for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl on Xbox Series X.

Back in October, the US Department of Commerce introduced a number ofexport restrictions for a variety of Nvidia's products to countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. It was mostly the AI monster chips that took the brunt of the ban but the GeForce RTX 4090 was also included, which invariably resulted in RTX 4090 price increases and hoarding of the top Ada graphics card. However, it now looks like Nvidia will be releasing an RTX 4090 D, specifically for China, that will be exempt from the restriction.

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Google Play best of 2023 awards: Google Play, the official app marketplace for Android smartphones, smartwatches, and tablets, has announced its annual awards for the best apps and games. The entire list has been divided into several categories as well as Users' Choice awards. These awards are listed for the US, but they are also curated locally for your country. For India, the best app of 2023 is Level SuperMind, the meditation app by YouTuber and influencer Ranveer Allahbadia, whereas the Users' Choice winner is THAP: Your Happiness Gym, a self-care app for mental health. Below, we have shared the best apps and games for both the US and India. Let us take a closer look.

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who runs the semiconductor industry's most valuable company, said the US is as much as 20 years away from breaking its dependence on overseas chipmaking.

Ever since the adventures of Ash and Pikachu came to a close last year in Japan and earlier this year in the West, many were curious about what would happen next for the anime side of the Pokemon franchise. The answer came quickly, as Pokemon Horizons was unveiled to the world, and the first batch of episodes came out in Japan to a positive reception. The anime will completely reset things regarding characters, setting, and more, and while Japan has already gotten its first taste of what the anime will be like, the US and other countries have had to wait for a bit.

NVIDIA is bringing the flagship gaming back to China with the soon-to-launch GeForce RTX 4090 D GPU which fully complies with US export policies.

Cross Blitz is a very good deckbuilding game that not only has the roguelike mode you’d expect, but also a story mode to progress through as well. The stories are heartfelt and enjoyable and tell the tales of different heroes as they journey across a brutal battle-filled world with stunning graphics and some very good writing.

For some Americans, Korean dramas came out of nowhere. Between 2019 and 2021, viewership numbers for TV series produced in South Korea went up a staggering 200% in the U.S. When Squid Game hit Netflix in September 2021, one in four Americans watched it. It wasn’t just a K-drama hit; it became the streamer’s most-watched series of all time.

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