Hasta La Gadget!

The Switch 2 Nintendo Direct has officially come and gone, leaving in its wake some big news about the system and its upcoming games. One of arguably the cutest announcements came courtesy of Kirby Air Riders, a new game from Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai. So, while there’s sadly no new Smash game on the horizon, you can glide around with Kirby and friends. 

Kirby Air Riders comes over two decades after Sakurai designed Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube. Yes, you can now take a moment if reading this has made you feel old. After nearly a minute of build-up, the trailer shows Kirby riding along on the Warp Star machine, through a pleasant looking valley. It ends with the “rs” being dramatically attached to the original Kirby Air Ride title. 

We don’t have an exact release date for Kirby Air Riders yet, but Nintendo says it will be sometime this year. As for the Switch 2, you can pick one up for $450 on June 5, along with new games like Mario Kart World.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/super-smash-bros-directors-kirby-air-riders-will-come-to-the-switch-2-150234970.html?src=rss

Silksong, the long-awaited to sequel to 2017’s Hollow Knight, will arrive later this year, according to a brief sizzle reel Nintendo shared during today’s Switch 2 Direct. In fact, the snippet was so short you might have missed it if you blinked, and featured the same section of gameplay we first saw during the game’s announcement trailer back in 2019. 

Of course this being Silksong we’re talking about, I wouldn’t count on the game’s developer, Team Cherry, sticking to that date until we have the game in our hands. If you recall, back in 2022 there was speculation the game would arrive by June 12, 2023 after Microsoft included it in a Xbox Game Pass trailer and said all the titles featured in said clip would be available within 12 months. Well, June 12, 2023 came and went with no release of Silksong.       

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/hollow-knight-silksong-purportedly-arrives-this-year-144515332.html?src=rss

After months of anticipation and years of speculation, Nintendo is finally spilling all the beans about the Switch 2. In a Nintendo Direct presentation, the company is filling in questions we’ve had about the console since it was first officially revealed in a short teaser this past January.

Switch 2 launch date and pricing

We finally know when the console will be available: June 5, 2025 — but we don’t yet know the price

Switch 2 hardware

The Switch 2 console has the same thickness but has a much larger display — 7.9 inches at a 1080p resolution, versus the 6.2-inch 720p screen on the old console. And it runs at up to 120fps. It is an LCD display, rather than OLED, but it supports HDR at least. 

As expected, the new Joy-Con controllers attach magnetically and have much bigger SL and SR buttons for when you’re playing on a single Joy-Con controller. The sticks are also bigger, and each Joy-Con can be used as a mouse on compatible games. 

The built-in stand looks much better than the ones on older Switch systems, and there are two USB-C ports on the console as well. Nintendo also highlighted 3D audio when using compatible headphones, and the speakers on the console itself should be a lot better as well. The console has 256GB of storage, far surpassing the 32GB on the original model. The Switch 2 dock outputs at up to 4K with compatible games and the dock has a built-in fan to keep things cool when running at higher resolutions.

Switch 2 is using similar game cards to the original Switch, but Nintendo notes that they’re faster; you’ll have to use microSD Express cards for extra storage this time though. Standard microSD ones won’t be compatible with the new hardware.

A new Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller will also be available with the C button to activate GameChat, and it also has GL and GR buttons on the back that you can assign to any specific actions. There’s also a headphone jack, too.

Voice and video chat

The first new feature Nintendo highlighted on its updated Joy-Con controllers was the C button. The C button lets you enter the new GameChat features. You can voice chat while playing using a built-in microphone, even when the console is docked. It’s the first time that a Nintendo system has had voice chat, and you can also share your game screen with friends as you play as well. For example, in Mario Kart this gives you more of a feel like you’re all playing connected to a TV even though you’re remote, because you can see everything that your friends are doing as well. 

And the chat and screen-share features work even if you’re all playing different games, so you can just get a group together to hang out while playing different titles. There’s also a Switch 2 camera that enables video chat that’ll show you on screen while you’re playing. These features will require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, but Nintendo will offer it for free to everyone until March 31, 2026.

Mario Kart World

As expected, we’re finally getting a new entry in the venerable Mario Kart series, Mario Kart World. It looks looks familiar while also showing off some wild new tricks, like skateboard-style grinds on rails and wall jumps. The courses also look much larger and wider than any we’ve ever seen before. For the first time, it looks like there’s an open world connecting all the various courses, and weather and time of day will change.

Nintendo also says that you can go off-course and drive “virtually everywhere.” And fitting those huge tracks, the Grand Prix will have 24 competitors in one race. Overall, it’s a massive update which feels appropriate — the last Mario Kart game arrived way back in 2014 for the Wii U and was updated for the original Switch. It’ll be out the same day as the Switch 2, June 5.

Other games coming to Switch 2

Nintendo ran down a handful of other games coming to the Switch 2, including Eldin Ring: Tarnished Edition, a new title called Drag x Drive that uses the Switch 2 mouse controls in what looks like an extreme wheelchair sporting event, Hades II, Street Fighter 6, Split Fiction, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 +4, Hitman: World of Assassination and Daemon x Machina.

Nintendo is also working on Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, which will be out this winter; it’s being developed in with Koei Techmo games and will have the same combat-focused vibes as other Dynasty Warrior-style titles.

Nintendo Switch 2 edition games

In addition to games expressly designed for the Switch 2, Nintendo will also be releasing “Switch 2 edition” for selected titles, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Those titles will have improved resolutions and frame rates as well as new features that’ll show up in a companion smartphone app. Nintendo didn’t say how much these upgrades would cost yet.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is also getting a Switch 2 edition that adds an additional world to explore, while Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will have both a Switch and Switch 2 edition; the Switch 2 edition can run in 4K at 60fps or up to 120fps at a lower resolution.

This story is developing and being updated as Nintendo releases more information; please refresh for more updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/everything-revealed-at-the-switch-2-nintendo-direct-133105950.html?src=rss

Wikimedia has seen a 50 percent increase in bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content since January 2024, the foundation said in an update. But it’s not because human readers have suddenly developed a voracious appetite for consuming Wikipedia articles and for watching videos or downloading files from Wikimedia Commons. No, the spike in usage came from AI crawlers, or automated programs scraping Wikimedia’s openly licensed images, videos, articles and other files to train generative artificial intelligence models. 

This sudden increase in traffic from bots could slow down access to Wikimedia’s pages and assets, especially during high-interest events. When Jimmy Carter died in December, for instance, people’s heightened interest in the video of his presidential debate with Ronald Reagan caused slow page load times for some users. Wikimedia is equipped to sustain traffic spikes from human readers during such events, and users watching Carter’s video shouldn’t have caused any issues. But “the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs,” Wikimedia said.

The foundation explained that human readers tend to look up specific and often similar topics. For instance, a number of people look up the same thing when it’s trending. Wikimedia creates a cache of a piece of content requested multiple times in the data center closest to the user, enabling it to serve up content faster. But articles and content that haven’t been accessed in a while have to be served from the core data center, which consumes more resources and, hence, costs more money for Wikimedia. Since AI crawlers tend to bulk read pages, they access obscure pages that have to be served from the core data center. 

Wikimedia said that upon a closer look, 65 percent of the resource-consuming traffic it gets is from bots. It’s already causing constant disruption for its Site Reliability team, which has to block the crawlers all the time before they they significantly slow down page access to actual readers. Now, the real problem, as Wikimedia states, is that the “expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement.” A foundation that relies on people’s donations to continue running needs to attract new users and get them to care for its cause. “Our content is free, our infrastructure is not,” the foundation said. Wikimedia is now looking to establish sustainable ways for developers and reusers to access its content in the upcoming fiscal year. It has to, because it sees no sign of AI-related traffic slowing down anytime soon. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/wikipedia-is-struggling-with-voracious-ai-bot-crawlers-121546854.html?src=rss

An Arkansas law requiring social media companies to verify the ages of their users has been struck down by a federal judge who ruled that it was unconstitutional. The decision is a significant victory for the social media companies and digital rights groups that have opposed the law and others like it.

Arkansas became the second state (after Utah) to pass an age verification law for social media in 2023. The Social Media Safety Act required companies to verify the games of users under 18 and get permission from their parents. The law was challenged by NetChoice, a lobbying group representing the tech industry whose membership includes Meta, Snap, X, Reddit and YouTube. NetChoice has also challenged laws restricting social media access in Utah, Texas and California.

In a ruling, Judge Timothy Brooks said that the law, known as Act 689, was overly broad. “Act 689 is a content-based restriction on speech, and it is not targeted to address the harms the State has identified,” Brooks wrote in his decision. “Arkansas takes a hatchet to adults’ and minors’ protected speech alike though the Constitution demands it use a scalpel.” Brooks also highlighted the “unconstitutionally vague” applicability of the law, which seemingly created obligations for some online services, but may have exempted services which had the “predominant or exclusive function [of]… direct messaging” like Snapchat.

“The court confirms what we have been arguing from the start: laws restricting access to protected speech violate the First Amendment,” NetChoice’s Chris Marchese said in a statement. “This ruling protects Americans from having to hand over their IDs or biometric data just to access constitutionally protected speech online.”

It’s not clear if state officials in Arkansas will appeal the ruling. “I respect the court’s decision, and we are evaluating our options,” Arkansas Attorney general Tim Griffin said in a statement.

Even with NetChoice’s latest victory, it seems that age verification laws are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Utah recently passed an age verification requirement for app stores. And a Texas law requiring porn sites to conduct age verification is currently before the Supreme Court.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/arkansas-social-media-age-verification-law-blocked-by-federal-judge-194614568.html?src=rss