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Today’s Wordle answer for Monday, March 24

Take a look at our hint for the March 24 (1374) game if you’d like to get the Wordle of the day off to a flying start—enough help to start things off on the right foot, while still leaving the best bits up to you. We’ve got general tips to make sure every row after builds upon that opening line, and today’s answer ready to go just in case you need it.

I’m pretty sure I set a record for the number of times someone can be almost right in a Wordle today. With three green letters on the board every new guess felt like it could have been a winner, but instead it only served up another pair of greys. It took until the last row to find Monday’s answer, and even then I feel like I only managed it because I ran out of alphabet.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, March 24

This is something measured in degrees, but it’s neither hot nor cold. It could also refer to a fresh approach or new direction too.

Is there a double letter in Wordle today?

No, there is not a double letter in today’s puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you’ve got the basics, it’s much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there’s nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path:

A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels.
Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There’s no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don’t need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares.

Today’s Wordle answer

Wordle answer

(Image credit: Future)

What is today’s Wordle answer?

Here’s your first win of the week. The answer to the March 24 (1374) Wordle is ANGLE.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today’s Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

March 23: DOPEY
March 22: AMBLE
March 21: NUDGE
March 20: BASTE
March 19: SPARK
March 18: TIMER
March 17: LASSO
March 16: STAMP
March 15: LADLE
March 14: PIECE

Learn more about Wordle

Today's Wordle being played on a phone

(Image credit: Nurphoto via Getty)

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you’ll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You’ll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you’re wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you’ll see which ones you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.

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Dune: Awakening promises us a breath of fresh air, skipping early access for a full launch with no monthly subscription in May

Dune: Awakening is only a couple months away from release, and its dev team just gave us a few new reasons to get excited, including a promise of free updates and no monthly subscription. This weekend, Funcom posted a video on Steam sharing more details on Dune: Awakening, which will open for pre-orders on Monday.

Joel Bylos, Dune: Awakening Creative Director, outlined the highlights, stating, “The key things that you need to know about Dune: Awakening’s launch are that it will not launch in early access and it will not have a monthly subscription. It will receive regular free updates, including new content, new features, and quality-of-life improvements.”

Dune: Awakening — Business Model & Post-Launch Plans Explained – YouTube

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We’ll see how the release goes, but the promise is that when Dune: Awakening finally awakens on May 20th, it will be a complete game at launch⁠—what a novel idea. While developer Funcom will release paid DLCs, available individually or in a season pass, those will all be optional, meaning players won’t hit a paywall before finishing the main story.

The skipping of an early access phase sets Awakening apart from other survival games, but it’s also billed itself as an MMO, which makes forgoing a monthly subscription almost as surprising.

The current Steam page for Dune: Awakening gives us a hint at the game’s price, as well, advertising pre-orders starting at $49.99. That’s refreshingly tame in an age of PC games launching at $60 or $70, maybe with a “Digital Deluxe Edition” that forces us to pay extra for core content, like the infamous Jabba the Hutt mission in Star Wars Outlaws.

In addition to Dune: Awakening’s business model and DLC plans, Funcom also unveiled the minimum and recommended system requirements:

Minimum

Windows 10 or newer
Intel Core i5-7400 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) or AMD Radeon 5600XT (6GB)
16MB of RAM*
60GB of storage

*This is as written on Awakening’s Steam store page at the time of writing, but is literally impossible. Unless it’s the best-optimized game that has or will ever be made, assume 16GB of RAM.

Dune: Awakening already impressed us in early previews, where its unique approach to the survival genre was on display. PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens praised Awakening for how it balanced survival mechanics with exploration and combat, noting, “Even in my brief time with the game, my increases in power felt steady and meaningful. By the end, when I was whipping across the desert on a sandbike and headshotting enemies with an Atreides rifle, I felt like Lisan al Gaib himself.”

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Another round of Baldur’s Gate 3 unearthing reveals Minthara can end up living in a sewer, an unused beach ending, and more

BG3’s Endgame Secrets And Cut Content Explained – YouTube BG3's Endgame Secrets And Cut Content Explained - YouTube

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YouTube Baldur’s Gate 3 expert SlimX, who brought to our attention developer secrets like the offscreen “asylum” where plot-critical NPCs hide, is back with another chunky set of secrets and cut content from our favorite fantasy RPG/wiki deep dive subject. This time he’s highlighting the endgame, finding things we’d never have seen otherwise in the game’s finale and epilogue.

For instance, the fact that Minthara can end up serving the Absolute in a sewer. Most players either kill or recruit the drow dommy-mommy in act 1, but if you don’t—and then don’t recruit her the second time you meet her in act 2—she hooks up with a squad of bad dudes in the Upper City Sewers.

Which sewer is that? Probably one you didn’t see, because it’s beneath the courtyard you have to fight through on your way to the High Hall and the netherbrain at the end of act 3. Completionists can find a way beneath the streets and bash up some cultists and a death knight there, and perhaps find Minthara among them.

Unless she’s a zombie. One other uncommon outcome for Minthara if you don’t recruit her is that she can become undead and be lumped in with a bunch of other zombies in the mind flayer colony beneath Moonrise Towers in act 2. Things really don’t go great for Minthara if you don’t pick her up.

That’s just one of the many oddities SlimX has uncovered in this latest video. There’s also the unused beach where the ending could have taken place—a nice mirror to the beach the story began on 90 hours or so earlier—and Mephistopheles’ vault, which would have provided a home for the Orphic Hammer in a version of events where it wasn’t in Raphael’s House of Hope.

All these mysteries and more are revealed in SlimX’s video above. He also has delightful video rabbitholes explaining Shadowheart’s hidden Nightsong score, Gale’s similar hidden points system, and what happens if you spear Nightsong but spare Isobel.

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An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy

First reported by TheGamer, a Steam listing for a game called Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution has been pulled from the storefront by the developer after players discovered malware being distributed as a “demo” from the dev’s official website. Though the site had a link on Steam, the malware was not distributed through Steam itself like last month’s PirateFi fiasco.

The case against developer Sierra Six seems almost airtight, but someone purporting to be one of the developers has surfaced on Reddit to claim that they were set up, and that their domain was hijacked before they had the chance to secure it.

Game listed on steam has a ‘demo’ that is a virus. from r/pcgaming

Occam’s Razor would have Sierra Six as a bad actor attempting further social engineering, but it’s not impossible that it actually is caught up in some kind of Philip K. Dickian nightmare of digital impersonation.

Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution first popped up on Steam at the end of December last year, and was removed from the storefront on March 20 according to SteamDB. This was not a Valve moderation decision: The changelog for Sniper shows the message “app_retired_publisher_request.” This is in contrast to the Web3 game PirateFi, which was removed from Steam by Valve last month.

On March 16, user Feral_Wasp called out Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution in a post on the PC gaming subreddit. Feral_Wasp pointed out that the Steam page contained a link to the developer’s website and a supposed demo of the game, with scuttlebut being that the “demo” was actually malware.

Heading of — (Image credit: Sierra Six Studios)

You can still see this thanks to the WayBack Machine: Sierra Six’s username on Steam is sierrasix.dev, and the “Official Website” widget on the page links to the domain “sierrasix.dev.”

User meatbent3 decided to pound the pavement and get the skinny on this “demo,” which appears to have been an absurdly malicious and sophisticated “infostealer” virus that would launch a multipronged assault on your PC when run. Here’s the breakdown:

It had a file structure that superficially resembled a Unity game, but was not a game.
The demo contained a .exe to run admin privilege programs via command line.
It opened a browser, potentially to hijack cookies.
The program ran network traffic analysis and interception tools, as well as a number of difficult-to-detect programs with its command line admin privileges.
It also created a malicious startup task to run every time the PC would boot.

Meatbent3 characterized it as a “new and clever” example of malware, and advised anyone who ran the program to “remove the files it created and change every password for every account you have.” Commenters in the thread also make reference to a “sierrasixstudiosdev” GitHub account that hosted the malware and which has since been taken down.

Sierra Six has purged much of the Steam discussions section for Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution, but it still has a developer statement up that, at first glance, appears almost comically audacious, an instance of real brass balls, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” absurdity I can’t help but admire.

“To avoid scams and potential issues, please ensure you download the game only from the official Steam page and disregard any other sources,” the statement reads. “If you come across suspicious links or offers related to our game, please report them and stay cautious.” The punchline, of course, is that the malware at the center of the controversy comes from a domain Sierra Six itself linked to, that is also its developer/publisher name on Steam.

I thought this was open and shut, but there’s one final wrinkle to the story: Sierra Six says it was set up. I don’t know if I buy the explanation, but it raises enough questions that I don’t want to commit to grave dancing on Sierra Six as thwarted and humiliated scammers.

An account with the name AndrewPillDev responded to Feral_Wasp’s post on March 19, one day before Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution was retired for ~~good~~ now. Andrew claims to speak on behalf of Sierra Six, and offers explanations for the malware being linked from the Steam page, the removal of Steam discussion posts about the malware, and the fact that this account was only created that very day.

(Image credit: User AndrewPillDev on Reddit)

Andrew claims that he found out about the malware via Polish news sites, and that English is not his first language. To hear him tell it, the team simply did not register the sierrasixstudios.dev domain in a timely fashion, putting it on the Steam page as a placeholder before they fleshed it out. He alleges that a malicious third party used this as a vector of attack. Here’s some of his other defenses:

A typo on the store page? An honest mistake from a small team that doesn’t speak English as a first language.
The generic appearance of the game and alleged use of screenshots from other games? Andrew shared footage he claims was from an in-progress level viewed with Unity dev tools.
Deleting discussion posts on Steam? A perhaps-misguided reaction to the waves of hostile comments.
His own account only having been made that day? “I want to add that I have never used Reddit before, so I’m not entirely sure if this message will reach everyone in the thread.”

I truly do not know what to make of this. It would be such an elaborate scheme, framing a no-name developer on Steam in order to steal information from a few dozen players enticed enough to check out its official website instead of just wishlisting.

For the footage, it’s interesting, but also liable to have been somehow faked, manufactured, or otherwise sourced from somewhere else and taken out of context. Andrew does not address the GitHub page, which is still a troubling dimension of this story, and it honestly beggars belief that an indie game developer could claim, with a straight face, to have never used Reddit before.

But what if? Why would a hacker feel the need to keep up appearances through further social engineering like this post if the jig is already up? The stakes are already so low, the potatoes so small, and there are far easier ways to make money at other people’s expense on the internet: I recommend pumping and dumping your own crypto shitcoin. For “Andrew” to be a hacker or even just an anarchic prankster stretches credulity almost as much as the story he tells.

If it is true, it’s some real A Scanner Darkly stuff, a saga of digital impersonation and reputation-destroying total war that would be maddening to live through. People on the other side of the world have turned against you, proffering compelling evidence that you are a huckster and a criminal, and you have no recourse to prove your innocence, your protestations to the contrary⁠—in a second language, no less⁠—falling on deaf ears.

But, and I’m sorry if you are who you say you are, Andrew, Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution simply does not look like a good game, real or fake. It’s the stuff of generic milsim-adjacent tacticool shooting, aesthetically bland and promising an experience along the lines of “We have Sniper Elite at home.” If Sniper: Phantom’s Resolution was real, it was the perfect victim to be framed as a fake game.

“Be careful clicking on external links from Steam” appears to be one of few concrete takeaways here, with “be sure to secure your small business’ web domain before you say it’s yours” potentially being a second.

As with so many games industry stories, I’m reminded of the ending to the Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading:

“What did we learn, Palmer?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I don’t fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.”

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This upcoming Korean tactical shooter features ‘situational awareness AI’ that reminds me of the uber-smart clones from Monolith’s FEAR

It doesn’t take much to get me thinking about Monolith’s classic FPS FEAR, but it’s barely left my thoughts since Warner Bros’ baffling decision to shut down the veteran studio, which also created games like No One Lives Forever and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Yet it’s Monolith’s 2005 shooter that is my favourite of its games, mainly thanks to its landmark AI design. Its army of clones was eerily capable of outflanking and outfoxing you as you battled through the game’s office complexes and research labs.

Hence, any game that strives to create genuinely smart-seeming enemies is likely to grab my attention, which is why this unassuming development video of a Korean tactical shooter caught my eye. Project TH (short for ‘Project Two Hearts’) is a third-person stealth-action game with shades of Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. But it was a recent overview of the game’s enemy navigation and movement systems that got me thinking about Monolith’s classic FPS.

“In Project TH, the AI system is designed to actively utilize environmental structures to apply continuous pressure on the player,” explains developer EVR Studio in the video’s description. “To achieve this, we have integrated situational awareness AI with dynamic navigation, allowing the AI to employ tactical movement strategies rather than simply pursuing the player along linear paths.”

Going further, EVR points out that “Instead of following a predetermined route, the AI dynamically recalculates its path in real time, tracking the player’s movement and selecting the most effective tactical maneuvers”. Such manoeuvres include some familiar abilities like vaulting over ledges and opening doors, but the AI can also apparently enter structures from windows and drop down from higher leges. You can see an example of the latter about a minute into the video, when an enemy soldier drops down right in front of the player and immediately tries to engage them in melee combat.

But it’s more the general movements of the AI, rather than anything specific, that bring to mind FEAR’s slow-motion gunfights. The way enemies move to encircle the player, pressing from different directions in a cold and measured fashion. This is particularly clear at the end of the video, where two enemies enter a room from a door and a window almost simultaneously, while a third climbs a stack of boxes to reach the same level as the player.

“The AI prioritizes environment-driven movement, ensuring that it does not simply chase but rather applies tactical pressure by leveraging the game world effectively,” EVR Studio points out. “Through real-time path recalculations and dynamic navigation systems, AI agents can intelligently flank, intercept, and adapt to the player’s movements, making every combat encounter unpredictable and intense.”

Not everything is the same, of course. This is a different style of game, a third-person cover shooter rather than an FPS, which means it has a more deliberate, less frantic pace. But the way it all moves gives me that same sense of being in a room with enemies trying not just to outgun you, but outthink you.

There’s no word on when Project TH will be released. Despite being around for a few years, it still seems to be heavily in development. But it’s now officially on my radar, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on how it progresses.

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The specter of a GTA 6 delay haunts the games industry: ‘Some companies are going to tank’ if they guess wrong, says analyst

The near future plans of many game studios depend on whether or not Grand Theft Auto 6 actually releases this year, and making the wrong guess could be disastrous for some of them, says Ben Porter, director of consulting at games industry intelligence firm Newzoo.

“If you’re a game company who’s holding its breath waiting for GTA 6 to get out, and then it gets delayed by three, four, five, six months, what do you do?” said Porter in an interview with PC Gamer at GDC 2025 this week. “You either have to be able to launch into that big black hole that’s been left open now, or you have to extend your run rate by an additional six months—I’m certain some companies are going to tank as a result of that, right?”

GTA 6 is currently scheduled to launch on consoles this fall (PC is still TBD, annoyingly), but it’s so common for games to be delayed that it’s easy to imagine it being pushed into 2026. Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed, Starfield was delayed, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was delayed—big games get delayed, a lot.

It’s also common for studios to time their releases to avoid big competitors that are likely to hog the limelight, and there isn’t a bigger hog than a new GTA. Even very niche games might want to get out of the way, picking release dates in spring or summer 2026.

But if GTA 6 is itself delayed to spring or summer 2026, those developers could end up having to push their release dates even further out. A setback like that could be disastrous for a studio whose finances are already fragile, and given the number of closures we’ve seen in recent years, financial fragility doesn’t seem rare.

On the other hand, a last-minute GTA 6 delay would be a big opportunity for anyone who can fill the space with a game that tides over disappointed GTA fans. There’s a lot of money riding on what Rockstar decides to do before the year ends, and not just for Rockstar.

Everybody that we’re talking to, they’re ships trying to move out of the way of this big iceberg that is GTA 6.
Ben Porter, Newzoo

One possible clue about the likelihood of a GTA 6 delay is the Borderlands 4 release date: September 23, 2025. Why would Take-Two, which owns both Borderlands 4 and Grand Theft Auto 6, put them in competition with each other this fall? Does the Borderlands 4 release date mean that GTA 6 is likely to be delayed?

It’s a sensible guess, but I wouldn’t want money riding on it. Porter says there’s hope that the games industry as a whole could get a boost from GTA 6’s release—which if nothing else will probably get a lot of people to upgrade their consoles—but he doubts that industry execs are going to be all smiles this fall, whatever happens.

“You do hear a lot of people who are saying that GTA 6 is going to rejuvenate the market,” said Porter. “And I think that there’s an element of truth to that, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily going to be universally uplifting.

“It will certainly have an effect. It will put eyes back on the games market from investors and things like that. But everybody that we’re talking to, they’re ships trying to move out of the way of this big iceberg that is GTA 6. Everybody’s trying to pull their game forward, push their game back—their strategy is to get out of the way. So if that’s what everybody’s behavior is, then how do you believe that this is going to rejuvenate the games industry?”

Porter gave a talk at GDC about Newzoo’s latest industry report, which among other things estimates that PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, and that there are 908 million of us.

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Nvidia CEO sets sights on making ‘several hundred billion’ dollars worth of electronics in the USA over the next four years, increasing the chance of your next GPU being made in America

In the wake of tariffs set by the Trump administration and new factories in the US from world-leading chip foundry TSMC, Nvidia’s CEO says it aims to produce “several hundred billion” dollars worth of electronics in the US in the next four years. That means there’s a growing chance your next GPU will be made in America.

According to a Financial Times interview with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia will “procure, over the course of the next four years, probably half a trillion dollars worth of electronics in total”. Of that total sum, Huang says “We can easily see ourselves manufacturing several hundred billion of it here in the US.”

It was revealed this week that Nvidia is now making chips in the USA. We don’t yet have specifics on the type or quantity of chips but the announcement is a further declaration of Nvidia’s shift from Taiwan-based manufacturing to closer to home (in theory, as the chips still have a long way to go around the world until they’re in a functioning graphics card).

In a move that might help Nvidia get on the Trump administration’s good side, Nvidia is also seemingly pretty happy with the administration’s recent moves to deregulate AI. Just this week, the official White House website shared a quote from Huang saying “Having the support of an administration who cares about the success of this industry and not allowing energy to be an obstacle is a phenomenal result for AI in the U.S.”

President Trump’s tariffs are an ongoing proponent of his plan to push for more manufacturing in the US. Effectively, a 25% tariff on Chinese goods will make them more expensive for the consumer to buy, and less worthwhile to import. The logic is that this will incentivize in-country manufacturing.

This has pushed many companies to adapt, in order to continue supplying to America. Some graphics card manufacturers have moved their production of actual cards out of China as a result.

Huang tells Financial Times “At this point, we know that we can manufacture in the US, we have a sufficiently diversified supply chain.”

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. logo atop a building at the Hsinchu Science Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023. TSMC is scheduled to release earnings results on Oct. 19.

(Image credit: An Rong Xu/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Nvidia is not the only major computing manufacturer to show increased investment in US production after threats of tariffs. Just earlier this month, TSMC and Trump announced a $100 billion investment into the US, with the intent to make three new factories. It is not yet clear if this is different from the $65 billion TSMC has already announced, which it had earmarked for building fabs in the US, some of which came from President Biden’s CHIPS Act.

TSMC is the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer and designer and doesn’t just work with Nvidia. AMD and Intel, among many others, utilise it, with the former even said to be making some Ryzen chips in the US. Based out of Taiwan, its Taiwanese fabs are currently developing the most advanced node processes for chips. Despite continued investment in America, a spokesperson for Taiwan’s president’s office clarified, “The most advanced processes will remain in Taiwan.”

Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, which can be found in RTX 50-series cards, uses a custom 4 nm node process, which is a spin on a slightly older process from TSMC. The same is true of Nvidia’s current AI chips. Whereas the likes of the Apple M4 chip use a newer 3 nm process. Effectively, the smaller the process, the higher the transistor density, and the more efficient a chip can be.

Nvidia has rarely been on the cutting edge of the latest process, however, which means TSMC keeping the most advanced processes in Taiwan may not substantially affect its plans if it were to focus on more US production. Still, if it had wanted 3 nm chips, it wouldn’t have been able to get those in the US. At least not from TSMC. Perhaps it could tap Intel for its cutting-edge 18A node once that’s up and running.

TSMC fabs in the US are due to update to the 3 nm process in 2027, which could be soon enough for the RTX 60-series, though it will not be on the cutting edge by that time.

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GOG’s version of Silent Hill 4 has been updated with missing content from the original console game

March 2025 | GOG PRESERVATION PROGRAM additions – YouTube

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Silent Hill 4: The Room may not be my favorite Silent Hill, but it’s far from the worst and it occupies an important place in the series—it’s the last one Team Silent worked on. So it’s always been a shame the PC version is incomplete, missing stuff that was in the PlayStation 2 version.

Until now, that is. As part of GOG’s Preservation Program, the version of Silent Hill 4 that it’s selling has been updated to include all those missing bits.

What makes Silent Hill 4 unique is that, in between the thoroughly traditional third-person survival horror cult investigation and weird nurse-bashing, you get to hang out in your apartment in first-person. It’s a break from all that ammo-hoarding tension—until the point where it’s not.

Your apartment eventually becomes haunted and a series of spooky scenes play out. While this was true of the PC version as well, for some reason seven whole hauntings that our PS2 friends enjoyed weren’t there. We missed out on the wall of haunted dolls, the water tap leaking blood, the crying shadow child, and more. I know, you feel robbed as well. How dare they take away our sobbing cupboard infant.

As well as restoring all the missing hauntings, which were in the game’s code but not enabled for some reason, the GOG version is now more stable and won’t bug out if you alt-tab away to take a break from the ghostly visitations. It’s also got improved modern controller support, so you’ll be able to use your DualSense, vibration is working, and you can unplug one controller and plug in another mid-game without issue.

As previously announced, FEAR Platinum has also joined the GOG Preservation Program, alongside games like Fallout 2, Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption, Ultima 1–8, Jagged Alliance 2, and the early games in the Tomb Raider series. Silent Hill 4: The Room is currently 30% off on GOG.

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Nightdive’s remaster of System Shock 2, the peak of immersive sims, finally has a release date

System Shock 2 Remaster Release Date Trailer – Future Games Show Spring Showcase 2025 – YouTube

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Here’s my confession: I think I prefer System Shock 2 to Deus Ex. Not that I don’t love JC Denton like a son, mind you, it’s just that SS2’s creepy hallways and pitch-perfect antagonists have taken root in my heart forever.

So I gotta be honest, of all the whizzbang announcements spilling out of the Future Games Show, the one I’m most excited about is Nightdive’s KEX Engine redo—the System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, which just got shown off during the show. It’s coming out on June 26 this year on Steam and GOG, a brisk six years after it was originally announced.

If you’re not familiar, SS2 is on the Mt Rushmore of immersive sims, and is a direct antecedent of the BioShock games (but it’s better). You’re a hapless schmuck trapped on a spaceship filled with mutated horrors and have to get the hell off of it through the judicious application of implants and skill points. Also, hitting psychic monkeys with a wrench.

The SS2 remaster has touched “every aspect of the game,” says Nightdive, and will feature “unknowable horrors, in high definition,” which is a very good press release bullet point, fair play. On PC, that means 4K resolutions and 144 fps, plus ultra-widescreen support for those of you playing on a kitchen door you’ve turned sideways.

We’ve also got achievements, gamepad support (blasphemy to some, incredibly great news for me personally), and full mod support, with “the ability to implement community-made missions at launch.”

Which is all I need as someone who really just wants a pretty, easy-to-run version of SS2 I can fire up and play on my TV, but the mad lads at Nightdive have also gone and resurrected the original game’s co-op mode, meaning you can play through the game with a pal on any other platform. Unfortunately, I don’t have friends, so you’ll have to figure out how that all works for yourself.

I’m eager to get my hands on this one. Nightdive did a great job with the remake of System Shock 1, even if I found it a little too conservative, but that same conservatism is exactly what I want from a remaster. If I get an SS2 that looks how I remember it (Ie. better than it actually did in the ’90s) and plays easily, I’ll be a very happy man.

Now, all rise for the national anthem.

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Meet Luna, the new AI robot dog who teaches itself using a digital nervous system and software ‘that allows any machine to learn like humans and animals do’

Revolutionary AI: Luna the Robot Dog Learns on Its Own | AI15 – YouTube

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Move over Spot—aka the Boston Dynamics robot dog doing things like guard Pompei—a new robot dog is in town to make us awwww in fear. Reuters reports the new dog on the block is developed by Swedish start up IntuiCell. The company claims its pup, called Luna, can learn just like a real boy, thanks to its functional digital nervous system.

Most of the robots entertaining us with handstands or traumatising us with fur suits, at the moment are trained by machine learning techniques. This usually requires a tonne of data, and relies on AI to compute through the variables and essentially work through algorithms to sort through uncountable variations and find what works. It often requires some pretraining—like Nvidia is doing for its GR00T N1—or at least a lot of parameter setting, and is a very computational way of doing things.

Luna is going about things a different way. The team at IntuiCell are trying to give their robot dog the ability to feel what works, as opposed to thinking it, for its development. This physical, agentic AI, means Luna should be able to figure out how to do things, instead of being specifically programmed for a task.

“What we have built is the first software that allows any machine to learn like humans and animals do,” says IntuiCell CEO and co-founder Viktor Luthman. “There’s no pre training, no offline simulations and no billion-dollar data centre in the background, but there’s a nervous system that allows the machine to learn.”

Right now Luna is just getting started and has just learned to stand; walking is the next big step. Rather than use a massive dataset to teach Luna, IntuiCell intends to hire a dog trainer to help teach Luna to walk. You can get a look at Luna doing its best in the video above. I wonder what kind of treats they’re going to use to reward this metal mutt. Though, we may well end up seeing a robotic flesh-fido down the line.

Luna’s attempts at standing are fairly compared to that of a baby animal, and visually it doesn’t look far off. Though the big difference for Luna, other than the burden of life, is it’s the first of its kind. There are no parents to help teach it, nor any deep embedded DNA understanding of the world. It’s just Luna, and the sensitive nervous system IntuiCell has given it to help navigate the world.

So with future iterations, there’s little doubt this tech will only get better. The goal here is to have robots that learn independently of large networks and instead can rely on themselves and the environment. This means that if Luna comes up against a brand new task, it should have a chance of figuring out a solution itself.

“The next step is exploring humanoid robotics, exploring autonomous robotics in unpredictable environments such as space exploration, deep sea exploration, or disaster response,” Luthman said.

We could see a future where human-like robots can train themselves to navigate wild environments like the surface of Mars, and hopefully pave the way for humans in their discoveries. I just hope the researchers make sure to treat Luna right and give it lots of pets so that sensory system can learn to put off resenting its creators… for a little while, at least.

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Meet Luna, the new AI robot dog who teaches itself using a digital nervous system and software ‘that allows any machine to learn like humans and animals do’

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