The AI arms race is heating up. Adobe is bringing its generative art tool, Firefly, to Google Bard. This will allow Google’s experimental chatbot to generate images based on user prompts, much like OpenAI’s Dall-E tool. 

Adobe Firefly’s beta launched in March. Aside from being your typical text-to-image generator, it allows users to edit images on the fly. Also coming to Bard is Adobe Express, a free photo editing software that’s popular among mobile users because it comes with pre-made design templates you can use to make social posts.

This means that you can generate an image from text with Google Bard, then edit and save it in one place. According to the press release, Firefly will become the “premier generative AI partner for Bard, powering and highlighting text-to…

Panos Panay, chief product officer at Microsoft, is leaving after almost 20 years. Executive vice president Rajesh Jha told employees on Monday in an internal memo.

“After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft. Panos has had an incredible impact on our products and culture and the broader devices ecosystem,” Jha also mentioned that Panos will be helping with the transition as the company will “double down on our strategy” moving forward.

Panay’s role will be between Mikhail Parakhin and Yusef Mehdi. Mehdi will lead the Windows and Surface businesses, while Parakhin will form a new “Windows and Web Experiences Team.”

Panay joined Microsoft in 2004, starting as a program manager before rising the ranks, eventually leading t…

With just over three weeks to go before the Fallout TV series hits the airwaves, Amazon has dropped a two-minute clip from the show in which Vault dweller Lucy finds herself caught up in a sticky situation between a gun-slinging ghoul and the Brotherhood of Steel.

The scene opens with the Ghoul—capitalization courtesy of Amazon—playing rough with a couple elderly citizens of a local shantytown. Vault dweller Lucy, played by Ella Purnell and presumably imbued with the spirit of “do good in the world,” intervenes, only to discover that she’s woefully unprepared for the moment. Hey, the Wasteland is a rough place. Luckily for her, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel swoops in to save the day, although whether he’ll make things better or worse is left untold.

While …

Remnant 2 players will now find it easier to customize their characters and will have more freedom to experiment with builds thanks to changes made in yesterday’s patch.

An increased trait cap, increases to the Scrap currency income, and a tweak to the Orb of Undoing are pretty major changes that’ll make it easier not only to build interesting characters but to tweak how you play mid-playthrough. The change to the Orb of  Undoing in particular is a big tweak: The item that resets all your spent trait points can now be used infinitely.

Developers Gunfire Games made a statement on these Quality of Life changes alongside the patch notes on its website:

“While we still have quite a few things we are working on regarding Traits and long-term grinding (for those that wi…

The community of happy creators who love Bethesda’s recent games for the settlement-building is off to the races in Starfield, thrilled to create a vast variety of ships of their own design—and their favorites of others’ designs. Let’s get in there and see some of the best I’ve seen, shall we? We’ll see stuff from Firefly, Star Wars, Mass Effect, Aliens, Prometheus, and the ever-beloved Expanse.

“She’s torn up plenty, but she’ll fly true.” from r/Starfield

My attempt at making Serenity from Firefly from r/Starfield

There are also, of course, plenty of people building perhaps one of the most iconic single spaceships in sci-fi history: The Millenium Falcon. They’re seeing various levels of …

It’s no secret that Minecraft’s enduring success has been in part thanks to the dedication of its modding community. All this time though, mods have largely been the territory of Minecraft Java, the version of the game available only on PC. As of today, the cross-platform version Minecraft Bedrock has launched “add-ons” through its in-game marketplace which, yes, are essentially also mods, free and paid.

If you’re doing a double-take because you thought Minecraft already had “add-ons,” you’re not wrong. That’s how it had been referring to community-made additions for Bedrock already. It seems the term is now being reserved for add-ons which can be added to existing worlds, and which can be combined or removed at will, rather than being tied to a world pre-made for the mod in the w…

I’ve been having a great time in Nightdive’s System Shock⁠—it’s been one of those “actually having trouble putting it down” games for me. It’s technically impressive too, with great performance and a lightweight install for an Unreal Engine 4 game, but I’ve definitely encountered a few glitches in my playtime.

And every single one I can remember has been taken care of in the game’s first patch since launching on May 30. The biggest was a nearly progress-blocking bug in the Maintenance level’s cyberspace section: it would slow to a crawl and eventually crash toward the end, and just last night I managed to muddle through by rushing past its final enemies. The game still crashed shortly after exiting, but I got that sweet autosave meaning I didn’t have to run it…

I need a gaming mouse. Not just any gaming mouse, you understand. Sitting next to me as we speak are two of the little squeakers, and they are both what I’d call fine. Due to a recent house move in which half my stuff mysteriously did not seem to make it the full 60 miles between my old abode and the new I have misplaced my trusty old Logitech MX Master, and am now left with two budget options that are perfectly acceptable yet completely uninteresting. I have a hankering for something wireless, something premium, something that I’ll truly enjoy using for the next few years, and I’ve narrowed it down to two: the Logitech G502 Lightspeed and the Razer Basilisk Ultimate.

In the US right now these two titans of gaming mouse excellence are at a heavy discount, with the Logitech G502 do…

Counter-Strike 2 seems to have got off to a solid start, but a few weeks after launch Valve has announced some big decisions. These will only affect a small number of players, but even so this is a real line in the sand that reflects the developer’s ambition to develop this game for a decade or more.

“Counter-Strike 2 represents the largest technical leap in CS history,” says a Valve statement, “and our goal is to continue to develop Counter-Strike for years to come. As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS.”

Sorry Apple fans: you’re out. This may seem a rather hard-headed decision but, as Valve goes on to explain, …

Solve today’s Wordle your way with our extensive range of helpful hints and daily clues, or improve your game in general with our guides and archives. Don’t worry if you’re one guess away from Wordle oblivion and just need the answer in a hurry—the answer to the February 6 (597) puzzle is just below.

Well, that was different. It turns out I had the right letters in the right order… the only problem was they were in exactly the wrong place. I should’ve taken a step back and really thought about the options I had, but I chose to waste a few guesses blundering about instead.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, February 6

The answer to today’s Wordle is nice and simple, so try not to overthink it. If you finished a race behind eighth p…

Friends, here is my story: Coming home to the UK from Summer Game Fest, hungry and heatstruck, I arrived at one of Los Angeles International Airport’s many food and coffee stands. Blearily, I ordered a latte and some kind of egg salad sandwich composed mostly of bread. The cashier told me that this humble repast would somehow be $21, in violation both of the social contract and mankind’s covenant with the Lord God.

Being an assertive and self-confident type, I said absolutely nothing and meekly paid up. But I shouldn’t have, because if I still had that $21 I could have bought the entire Dragon Age trilogy—base games and all the DLC—twice over in the currently ongoing Dragon Age Steam sale. In place of a thin film of egg smeared on a loaf of wholewheat and a latte that …

Friends, here is my story: Coming home to the UK from Summer Game Fest, hungry and heatstruck, I arrived at one of Los Angeles International Airport’s many food and coffee stands. Blearily, I ordered a latte and some kind of egg salad sandwich composed mostly of bread. The cashier told me that this humble repast would somehow be $21, in violation both of the social contract and mankind’s covenant with the Lord God.

Being an assertive and self-confident type, I said absolutely nothing and meekly paid up. But I shouldn’t have, because if I still had that $21 I could have bought the entire Dragon Age trilogy—base games and all the DLC—twice over in the currently ongoing Dragon Age Steam sale. In place of a thin film of egg smeared on a loaf of wholewheat and a latte that …

We’ve all had that experience in XCOM where you’re so determined to get yourself out of an impossible situation that you just keep reloading your save and trying different approaches as your soldiers die over and over. Now imagine that instead of that just being an embarrassing memory, it’s the basis for a whole new approach to the genre. 

In Every Day We Fight, just shown off at the PC Gaming Show 2024, you take charge of a group of civilians caught in an alien invasion Groundhog Day. Thanks to some strange sci-fi tech tech, every time your untrained fighters die, they wake up back at the start of the day, ready to go again.

Battles are turn-based, but you’ll also be exploring in real time, and the time loop structure gives it a roguelike flavour. As you make your way …