Category: GADGET

I didn’t set out to play  when I picked up my this weekend. I was actually looking for something else, but lazily searched only half of the correct title and found myself staring at jump rope STAR! at the top of the results instead. Curious — in part because “Hot Rope Jump” was one of my favorite minigames in Mario Party 2 back in the day — I clicked on it, and was greeted by pictures that look like something I’d tape to my refrigerator if given by a 5-year-old. It was kind of a “say no more” moment; I purchased it immediately.

As you’d expect from the title, jump rope STAR! is a jump rope game for Playdate. It offers a few different modes for solo and co-op play, the latter involving two players sharing one device. I haven’t run into many multiplayer games for Playdate, so that alone is pretty cool. The game was made by Chris Corciega (Soinksters Games), but the art was “designed by a talented 5-year old,” Maya. And it is adorable. As you try to set new high scores, you use the crank to control the swing of a jump rope held by a bipedal bunny and a… striped pig (?). Okay I’m not entirely sure what the second character is, but those two are swinging the rope, and the goal is to do so in time with the little stick-figure girl’s jumps so you don’t trip her up.

Her timing isn’t always consistent and she speeds up as you progress, so it starts to get pretty tricky after a minute or so. But, achieving perfect swings will earn you points in the Star Meter that’s on the side of the screen, and once it’s filled, you can use that power to temporarily slow down time and get more swings in while the girl is in the air. In the other modes, things get a little more complicated. Playing with a friend in the two-player catch mode, for example, one of you will have to press buttons to move the girl around so she can catch falling stars while the other person swings the rope. (Very hard to do on your own, I discovered).

It’s a simple but fun little game, made even better by the fact that you can involve someone else in the silliness. Both adults and children would be able to enjoy it, and there is a kid mode for a more forgiving style of play if you don’t want family game night to get too competitive. This strikes me as another one of those perfectly Playdate games — the kind that just seems like a natural fit for the device, and to try to get them to understand its charm.

If you subscribe to Amazon Prime or Prime Video and are looking to expand your streaming horizons, Amazon has a deal for you. Prime subscribers can get a bundled subscription to the ad-free version of Max and Starz for just $21 per month, $7 off the bundle’s normal $28 per month price.

Max has a solid back catalog of classic Hollywood films programmed by Turner Classic Movies, original films and TV shows from HBO, and cartoons from Cartoon Network, on top of a chaotic collection of reality TV programming from HGTV, Food Network, and more. If you were thinking of checking out The White Lotus  when the show returns in February or the second season of The Last of Us in April, this bundle is a pretty good reason to hop on the Max bandwagon.

Amazon

This deal gets you the ad-free version of Max and Starz for $7 less than their normal price through Amazon Prime Video.

$21/month at Amazon

Starz has a less must-see original programming when compared to Max or Prime Video — outside of the ever-popular Outlander — but it’s a great streaming service if you’re looking to watch movies that recently left theaters.

You’re able to get this bundle deal even if you don’t currently have a Prime subscription. You can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime to enjoy the bundle at $21 per month, and just add on an extra $15 a month once your trial is up. Prime Video itself has an interesting library worth combing through, too. Including a recent adaptation of Fallout if shows based on video games are what floats your boat.

Because this deal is through Prime Video, you’ll have to access Max and Starz as Prime Video Channels rather than through their individual streaming apps, but it’s a small annoyance for an otherwise solid deal.

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The filmmakers behind The Brutalist, a likely Oscar contender currently being distributed by A24, used AI to alter actor’s dialogue and create images used in the film’s epilogue, the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó shared in an interview with RedShark News.

The epic drama follows a fictional Hungarian architect (as played by Adrien Brody) who struggles to make art under the fickle system of American capitalism (and the weirdos that run it). To make Brody and his costar Felicity Jones’ Hungarian pronunciation as accurate as possible, Jancsó says the production used AI from a company called Respeecher to alter the actor’s speech.

Respeecher was able to adjust the actor’s vocals to make them match a native Hungarian speaker’s pronunciation, though Jancsó says the process didn’t do anything you couldn’t achieve with traditional dialogue editing. “You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process, otherwise we’d still be in post.”

Generative AI was also used to help create architectural drawings used near the end of the film, according to Jancsó. Both decisions were made because of the budgetary constraints the production was under. The Brutalist is an over three-hour film with multiple stars, period-appropriate costuming, and elaborate sets, that was reportedly made for less than $10 million.

A little over a year after multiple Hollywood unions went on strike over the possibility of studios using AI to replace workers, it’s still highly controversial to use the tech, let alone be open about it. But the problem is undeniably complicated when there are so many different ways AI can be used. “The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft,” Brady Corbet, the director of The Brutalist, told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement.

Respeecher was previously used to create new Darth Vader dialogue for Disney+’s Obi-Wan-Kenobi, and this likely won’t be the last time similar tools are used to cut costs. Making movies requires a lot of resources, and while companies are trying to get AI to catch on, using AI tools will likely remain a viable options to save time and money.

The Federal Aviation Administration is ordering SpaceX to conduct a mishap investigation into what caused the company’s Starship rocket to explode mid-flight on January 16. Until the FAA approves SpaceX’s investigation reported, the company won’t be allowed to proceed with future Starship missions.

SpaceX’s launch seemed to be going as planned prior to the explosion. Starship successfully made it off the launch pad and SpaceX was even able to catch the ship’s boosters. But then, only eight and a half minutes after taking off, the Starship spacecraft exploded, according to SpaceX’s post-launch blog post. In response to the sudden explosion, the FAA activated a “Debris Response Area” and slowed or diverted nearby flights to prevent further accidents, severely delaying flights from multiple airlines, according to CNBC.

The FAA’s statement says that no one was injured by the falling debris but that its working “to confirm reports of public property damage on Turks and Caicos.” The mishap investigation SpaceX performs will have to determine not only what caused the explosion, but also what corrective actions the company needs to take to prevent it from happening again. “Initial data indicates a fire developed in the aft section of the ship,” SpaceX says.

This isn’t the first time Starship has met an explosive end. Multiple Starship launches have ended with either SpaceX’s boosters, the Starship spacecraft or both exploding. The company does appear to be getting better at catching and reusing its Super Heavy boosters, however. The successful catch that preceded the January 16 explosion is only the second time SpaceX has pulled it off. Its first successful Super Heavy catch was in October 2024.

Sonos is continuing to clean house as the company recovers from the hits it took following a mobile app redesign last year. Just a day after CEO Patrick Spence the company, chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin is also leaving. He will act as an advisor to interim CEO Tom Conrad during the leadership transition before fully exiting Sonos.

Conrad Sonos employees about the latest leadership change in a company-wide email today. The CPO role is being made redundant, with Sonos’ product team reporting directly to Conrad for the time being.

Sonos has been in a tailspin since releasing a mobile app update in May that contained many bugs and was missing key features. The company’s financial results took a dive, and it laid off about in August. Sonos has made several efforts to keep customers of its to recover from the app launch, and the decision to replace top leadership seems like the latest move to win back public trust in the business.

Amazon is shutting down its Try Before You Buy Prime program at the end of January. The move, first reported by , was announced with a notice at the top of the Prime Try Before You Buy page, which puts its last day in effect as January 31. The service has been available to members since 2018, when it was . With it, you could choose up to six items to try on, and send back whatever you didn’t want within a week for free. You’d only be charged for the items you decided to keep, and you could pick from select clothes, shoes, jewelry and accessories.

In a statement to , an Amazon spokesperson said, “Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we’re phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025.” If you’re someone who still makes use of this service, better get those last orders in quick.

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PUBG: Battlegrounds will add non-player characters powered by NVIDIA ACE generative AI. These PUBG Allies are being dubbed Co-Playable Characters, and they can have real-time conversations with a player about what’s happening in a match. They can also adapt their strategies and gameplay to work with the player’s style. Krafton, the battle royale’s publisher, demoed this technology at CES 2025.

“We will continue to innovate user experiences by integrating CPC into our games and aim to establish it as a benchmark for the gaming industry,” said Kangwook Lee, head of Krafton’s deep learning division. Krafton will also publish upcoming life simulator inZOI, and had a CES demo of a CPC in that game as well.

NVIDIA its generative AI tech, the Avatar Cloud Engine, during a keynote at Computex 2023. The ACE generative AI is also present in the multiplayer title Mecha BREAK, which at Gamescom last year. The Krafton games are using on-device small language models built with NVIDIA ACE. The publisher did not specify in its press release when it will start rolling out CPCs.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has a daunting task ahead of him at CES 2025 in Las Vegas: Outlining a 2025 gameplan that can somehow one-up his spectacular 2024. Consider that the chip giant’s stock price finished last year up 178 percent, and its market cap of more than $3.5 trillion dollars — with a T — is currently second only to Apple. That’s thanks to the fact that the ongoing AI revolution is powered largely by NVIDIA processors, which is raking in billions on its hardware even as its customers stay firmly in the red.

What to expect at NVIDIA’s CES 2025 press conference

In addition to plenty of AI-centric partnerships and services, NVIDIA had a PC gamer-friendly slate of announcements at its CES 2024 press conference, with new RTX 40 Super GPU cards and upgrades to its GeForce Now game streaming platform.

For 2025, look for the inevitable sequels, with rumors suggesting a blazing fast RTX 5090 for starters. Of course, Wall Street will be more focused on the details Huang will undoubtedly share on the status of NVIDIA’s AI hardware. We’re likely to hear more news on the company’s Blackwell AI chips, which should begin shipping in greater volume this year after first entering the market in late 2024.

NVIDIA’s CES 2025 livestream

You can watch NVIDIA’s CES presser as it happens right here, and catch Engadget’s real-time live blog commentary as well. Huang will be taking the stage at the Mandalay Bay on Monday, January 8 at 9:30PM ET.

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When Samsung unveiled the world’s first 27-inch 4K gaming OLED monitor on Thursday, Engadget’s Igor Bonifacic predicted that other vendors would soon follow suit. (After all, Samsung is also the biggest supplier of OLED gaming monitor panels.) Sure enough, MSI followed suit the same day at CES 2025 with two monitors with familiar specs: a 27-inch 4K QD-OLED display and a 27-inch QD-OLED one with a crazy-smooth 500Hz refresh rate.

First up: the 27-inch 4K QD-OLED one, marketed to perfection as the… MPG 272URX QD-OLED. (Sure, why not!) MSI is differentiating its monitor as the first one to combine that panel with DisplayPort 2.1a, which can provide a better combination of resolution and frame rates. Like Samsung’s equivalent (the G81SF), it has a 240Hz refresh rate and should look nice and crisp at 166 PPI.

MSI says this panel “significantly reduces color fringing,” which should help with the poor text clarity too often customary of QD-OLED screens. As my colleague Igor points out, this could be an ideal do-it-all monitor for gaming, work or anything else you can throw at it.

It supports NVIDIA’s G-SYNC tech, so smooth gameplay won’t likely be a concern. The MPG 272URX QD-OLED even took home a CES 2025 Innovation Award.

The 27-inch QHD QD-OLED model also has a catchy and memorable name: the MPG 272QR QD-OLED X50. (Yes!) MSI is marketing this monitor to “all the mainstream gamers out there,” likely due to its lower (2,560 x 1,440) resolution. It also uses DisplayPort 2.1a and (like Samsung’s) can have a 0.03ms gray-to-gray pixel response time. It received VESA ClearMR 21000 certification, so motion blur shouldn’t be an issue when enjoying its blistering 500Hz refresh rate.

MSI hasn’t yet shared pricing or release date info for either model.