Disco Elysium, one of the best releases of 2019 and 2021, finally has a dedicated photo mode, but it’s not like the one you find in most games. Announced this week, the game’s new Collage Mode grants players full access to all the characters, environments and props found within the RPG. As you might imagine, you can use that power to pose your favorite NPCs in “a range of silly and sensible poses.” You’re then free to add filters and change the time of day to alter the mood of your capture.

But most interesting of all, Collage Mode gives you the freedom to write your own dialogue for Disco Elysium, and make it look like it came directly from the game. “Fabricate completely new dramas from unforgivable punch-ups to fruity yet forbidden kisses,” developer ZA/UM Studio suggests. “Corroborate your fan fiction with screenshots directly from the game.” Disco Elysium fan fiction will never be the same.

As Eurogamer notes, Collage Mode arrives amid an ongoing public dispute between ZA/UM and a handful of the studio’s former employees. The disagreement dates back to 2022 when three members of the Disco Elysium team – Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere and Aleksander Rostov – said they were fired from their jobs following the studio’s takeover by a pair of Estonian businessmen in 2021. Kurvitz and Rostov went on to accuse ZA/UM’s new owners of fraudulently obtaining control of the company. On Tuesday, ZA/UM published a press release announcing the legal proceedings Kurvitz and Rostov had brought against it had been resolved after a court dropped the case. The two later told Eurogamer the announcement was "wrong and misleading in several respects," and that they would continue pursuing other legal options against their former employer.

Trombone Champ is a blast to watch, but a beast to play even compared to some other rhythm games — you try nailing a slide during the "William Tell Overture." Thankfully, developer Holy Wow Studios is putting the game within reach of more players. It's introducing an "Autotoot" option that takes away the need to press buttons. If you have hand mobility issues, you'll have a better chance of squonking your way to an S rank. Your score is halved to prevent leaderboard cheating, but you can advance the story.

The update is also more streamer-friendly, with icons warning when a tune might be muted on services like Twitch. It's faster to restart a track when your performance goes askew, and you'll see your character in the points screen.

Trombone Champ quickly became a viral sensation after its debut last September. Anyone who's familiar with Guitar Hero or Rock Band will grasp the basic mechanics, but the laugh-'til-you-cry hilarity of playing trombone over classic pieces can't be overstated — this is one of those precious games where messing up is almost more entertaining than a perfect score. And that's before you throw in unofficial songs that put brass where it clearly doesn't belong.

Autotoot is also part of a larger trend of improving accessibility in games. Titles like The Last of Us now make accommodations for a wide range of mobility, hearing and vision abilities. Input devices like Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller and Sony's Project Leonardo are also making many games viable for people who can't use conventional gamepads.

A new group of Phantom Thieves will be stealing hearts in Tokyo. Black Wings Game Studio, the developer owned by Chinese company Perfect World Games, has unveiled a new mobile game set in the Persona 5 universe. The previous spinoffs of the title, Persona 5 Strikers and Dancing in Starlight, feature the original gang, but this one comes with a brand new cast of characters. While it wasn't created by Atlus itself, Persona: Phantom of the Night (or Persona 5: The Phantom X, shortened as P5X) had SEGA's blessing. It was also developed under the supervision of P-Studio, the team behind the mainline Persona games. 

So far, its trailers show us a red-haired protagonist who's juggling high school life and Metaverse thievery, a brown-haired girl reminiscent of P4's Chie and a talking owl who, like Morgana, can transform into a getaway vehicle. The developer has also released character artwork for another female character with long black hair and another for Igor's new assistant in the Velvet Room. 

According to the game's announcement, franchise character designer Shigenori Soejima created the game's protagonist and exclusive Persona. And if you watch the trailer below, you'll see that Black Wings was able to capture the look and feel of the original Persona 5 game quite well. It uses the same gameplay and battle effects, and it features the same victory close-ups, as well as the popular P5 battle soundtrack Wake Up, Get up, Get Out There.

Unlike the original Persona 5 game, P5X will be free to play, which means it will have in-app purchases. It will be available to beta testers on Android, iOS and Windows (as a port) starting on March 29th, but only in China. The developer has yet to announce if it will be released outside the region. 

Nearly two decades before Facebook and others were talking about the metaverse, Second Life was letting millions of users partake in virtual worlds. Now, all this time later, developer Linden Labs has announced that it's developing a mobile version of the game, Ars Technica has reported. A beta version is expected to launch later this year. 

In a YouTube video posted to Second Life's community forum, the publisher detailed some details about the mobile app. It's being built using Unity, mainly so it'll be easy to build and distribute the game on both iOS and Android phones/tablets. It also shows some footage of characters and environments, and how Linden Labs will try to make it as much like the desktop game as possible. 

Facebook has struggled to get the metaverse off the ground, but over 73 million accounts have been created for Second Life to date, and the number of active users hit 900,000 during the pandemic — 17 years after the game launched. Typical virtual events include "live music performances, shopping fairs, fan fiction conventions, book and poetry readings, academic lectures, fashion shows, and art exhibitions," the company told Vice in 2020. 

Linden Labs had been working on a VR version of the game called Sansar, but ended up stopping development and selling off the rights in 2020. The company said it did so to become "cash-positive," while noting that VR headset adoption didn't come as fast as it hoped. To that end, a pivot to mobile makes sense, but it remains to be seen if people will still be interested in Second Life after all this time. 

If you take pride in people bookmarking your social media posts, Twitter is ready to feed your ego. The social network has added a bookmark counter to its iOS app. Similar to the counts for likes, quotes and retweets, you'll know just how many people saved a given tweet for later reference. The company hasn't mentioned when the feature might come to Android or the web.

Twitter stresses that bookmarks are still private. Users may know if their tweets are popular, but they won't know just who bookmarked a given post.

This counter isn't just useful for bragging rights, of course. If you're a creator or run a company's Twitter account, the tally could show whether or not followers find your posts useful. That, in turn, may help you refine content to reach a wider audience.

The addition comes after a handful of upgrades to Twitter, such as alerts about community misinformation notes. However, the service has lately been dominated by concerns about a string of outages and a paywall for text-based two-factor authentication. However useful the bookmark counter may be, it's not going to garner as much attention as it might have in the past.

The following episode discusses Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode Five, “Imposters.”

Efficient storytelling is not a strength you can traditionally attribute to Star Trek: Picard, which has often felt padded. Each of its three seasons have felt like one or two made-for-TV-movies' worth of story stretched thin to ten near-hour long episodes. Nowhere is this more evident than in this season’s fifth episode, where five minutes of plot is expanded to a full episode. Here, Team Picard learns that Starfleet has been infiltrated by super-Changelings before teaming up with Team Worffi. Oh, and Beverley, who has been in relatively close contact with him for most of his life, has finally noticed that Something Is Up With Her Son. But even that fairly slender advance in the plot has to take a back seat to the main centerpiece of the episode: The moment when Picard stands face-to-face with [CHARACTER].

The power of [CHARACTER’S] return is all held in the moment that they step into camera focus, such is the extent of the surprise. After all, there are textual and meta-textual reasons why you wouldn’t expect to see them popping up in any Star Trek, let alone this one. For a start, their plot was done after they – for right or wrong reasons – betrayed the Enterprise crew in [TNG EPISODE]. And, of course, [ACTOR] had been expected to make the transition to Deep Space Nine, but turned the role down. In fact, esteemed Trek wiki Memory Alpha suggested they were even offered a role in Voyager, either as a regular or as a guest star, and similarly turned it down. If there’s any person who you’d think was never coming back to any Star Trek, it would be [ACTOR]. And not even I, much as you keep telling me I’m a cynical hater expressing these opinions to milk your hate-clicks, was immune to the initial flush of emotion seeing them in a Starfleet uniform again.

Unfortunately, the main confrontation between Picard and [CHARACTER] is dulled by both the needlessness of it all, and its execution. The pair talk about their “faith” in “institutions” or the lack of such, and why this is or is not a good thing, but I don’t feel any of this. Part of it is the streaming era-Trek problem of telling us things rather than showing, so we have these gestures toward a grander theme that are never properly explored on screen. But it’s also because many of these themes were already well-explored on Deep Space Nine, even if the execution there was always a little hamfisted. After all, while there was every sense that we should side with the Maquis – don't forget that they were the little people tossed aside by the grand machinations of empires with no care of the lives that were directly impacted. But this is Star Trek, and so whatever the problem, whatever the grand conundrum at hand, the answer is pretty much always Starfleet.

Picard’s obsession with continuity for the sake of itself does little more than remind us of older, better Treks. I might as well add, because it’s been on my mind for years at this point, that there’s a YouTube clip from the DS9 episode “For The Uniform” describing Sisko as a “badass.” Specifically because he carries through a threat to sterilize a planet to inflict petty revenge on Commander Eddington, who he felt betrayed Starfleet to go support the Maquis. This is the Star Trek problem in a nutshell: Sisko’s in the wrong here, but the show can never quite allow us to stop sympathizing with our hero because he’s our hero. Picard, this year, has behaved pretty illogically, and recklessly, and yet because he’s our hero too, the show can’t quite question his actions in anything more than a single line of sassy dialog from Riker.

I don’t consider myself pharisaical in my approach to continuity, and I do think that it can be a benefit to storytelling rather than a burden. But Picard’s use of golden-era Trek deep cuts often takes me out of the show as I wonder how this tracks in any way logically. Picard himself even says as much, asking how in the hell [CHARACTER] wound up back in a Starfleet uniform. She explains the “arduous” process taken to get back into the fleet, but I couldn’t help but interrogate this further. Imagine if a mid-level officer in the US Navy put a major aircraft carrier in any degree of jeopardy to cover their own defection to an (ostensibly) enemy terror group? Do you think any military organization worth its salt would allow that same person to serve in active, regular duty again? And if anyone says “but Tom Paris…” bear in mind that he was a) a Nepo Baby, b) Wasn’t with the Maquis for very long and c) Wasn’t expected to serve once he’d done his time assisting Voyager during its short trip into the badlands. 

And then [Character] dies in a set-up to implicate the Titan, and you wonder if death will be doled out so cheaply in the rest of the series. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had whole seasons of Picard structured around saying farewell to long-running characters.

There’s not much to say about this week’s b and c-stories because they feel so derivative and shallow. Worf and Raffi’s plan to smoke out the villains with a fake-out sniper that’s instantly foiled feels pulled from an early-noughties thriller. The fact it was counter-foiled by a fake-out death on Worf’s part felt thin too, there’s no way you’d bring back Michael Dorn just to off him so cheaply. And on a similar theme, Jack is yet another streaming-era Trek character with the Jason Bourne disease; troubled by visions of a secret past that keeps going into a phaser-fu fugue state whenever placed in danger. A storyline so stale it was already covered with mold when this very series did it with Dahj and Soji in its first season. I haven’t seen any episode after the next one, so I genuinely don’t know how this particular plotline is going to resolve itself. But I’ve seen those threads on Reddit, and if it’s true, I’m really going to sigh myself in two if we’re doing this same stuff yet-a-bloody-gain.

Speaking as a parent, if my kid coughs more than twice in their sleep in quick succession, I’ll just stick my head into their bedroom door to check if they’re okay. If I was the chief medical officer on a starship that spent more than a decade at the far reaches of known space investigating weird stuff, I reckon I might have a tricorder or two at hand. And if my kid stopped being able to sleep, was troubled with dangerous visions and his eyes started to glow red in moments of emotional or physical turmoil, I reckon I wouldn’t keep it to myself until he reached adulthood. In fact, I might even have thought to take them to a hospital or biobed myself just, you know, to be on the safe side. Just a thought, Beverley.

Baidu, China's search engine giant, has unveiled its answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT service. It's the latest version of the company's ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) Bot that it has been developing over the past decade and was first launched back in 2019. In a press event, Baidu CEO Robin Li said this version of ERNIE Bot has capabilities close to GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI's large language model released just a couple of days ago. 

The chatbot apparently has 550 billion facts in its knowledge graph, but they're mostly focused on the Chinese market. So while it will be able to list Chinese idioms for you, it may not be able to answer as many questions for certain subjects outside the region. ERNIE Bot has the capability to answer a user with audio responses in different Chinese dialects, though, and it can also generate images and videos out of Chinese text.

During its demo at the event, the chatbot was able to summarize a Chinese sci-fi novel and give suggestions on how to continue writing the book if it were to be expanded. It was also able to name the actors in its film adaptation, compare their heights and conclude who was taller between the two of them. In another demo, it was able to suggest names for a high-tech service company catering to small and mid-size enterprise, write slogans for it and even generate a newsletter with a specified word count.

Li said that 650 companies have already signed up to use ERNIE Bot's technology, but he also admitted that it's not ready for a public debut. Baidu has merely unveiled it early due to market demand brought about by ChatGPT's meteoric rise in popularity. For now, the Chinese tech giant will only grant access to those who've already received invites, though more companies can apply for the ability to embed the chatbot into their products via Baidu's cloud platform.

When we learned that a BlackBerry movie was in the works last year, we had no idea it would be something close to a comedy. But judging from the the trailer released today, it's aiming to be a far lighter story than other recent films about tech, like The Social Network and Steve Jobs. The BlackBerry movie stars Jay Baruchel (How to Train Your Dragon, Goon) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEOs of the Canadian firm Research in Motion. They're not exactly household names, but they both played a huge role in the history of mobile communications. Without the BlackBerry's success, the iPhone may have never happened.

Judging from the trailer, the film will cover everything from the origins of BlackBerry as a crazy idea between a few college students (director Matt Johnson also co-stars as RIM co-founder Douglas Fregin), to its ignominious end as it failed to keep up with the iPhone and Android smartphones. It's a classic innovator's dilemma tale: RIM revolutionized the way we communicated by tapping into early cellular networks, but it failed to see the potential of touchscreen smartphones that didn't need physical keyboards.

BlackBerry is based on the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, which was written by Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. 

LinkedIn is the latest platform to hop on the generative AI bandwagon. The company is adding AI-powered “writing suggestions” and job descriptions to its service as it looks for new ways to infuse AI into its platform.

The writing suggestions are meant to make it easier to fill out key profile fields that LinkedIn says can otherwise feel “daunting” to complete: the “about” and “headline” sections near the top of each profile. Now, with the new “enhance” tool, LinkedIn Premium subscribers can generate descriptions based on their experience.

The company says the tool, which uses the same OpenAI models that power ChatGPT, is meant to preserve “your unique voice and style” and will draw from your job experience and skills, as well as LinkedIn’s own “insights” into what makes a good profile. In an example of a completed “about” section provided by LinkedIn, the tool generated a first-person summary of an individual’s job experience that reads almost like the beginning of a cover letter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn also says it’s starting to test AI-written job descriptions. In those cases, hiring managers will simply need to fill out the job title, company name and a few other basic details, and LinkedIn will create a detailed draft of a relevant job description.

Of note, the company is positioning its AI writing features as more of a starting point than a final product. In both cases, LinkedIn says that users should review and edit the AI-generated text to check for accuracy. But the company says that both could be a major time saver for members who want to offload some of the more tedious writing tasks associated with LinkedIn.

These writing tools aren’t LinkedIn’s first foray into generative AI. The company also recently introduced “collaborative articles,” which rely on a combination of AI-written text as well as contributions from individual LinkedIn “experts.” Elsewhere, the company is also adding new online courses dedicated to generative AI-related topics.

When Microsoft and OpenAI announced their renewed partnership in January, the two companies also revealed that Bing search would soon boast AI-enhanced lookup capabilities. Little did we know at the time, that Bing search has been powered for the past five weeks, not by the existing then-state-of-the-art GPT-3.5 model but by its even more robust successor, GPT-4.

Microsoft envisions Bing — and really Google is doing much the same with Bard — serving as a pseudo-gatekeeper to the rest of internet's information, not unlike what AOL's early America Online service once did. Rather than direct users to other websites where they can find the information and context they seek on their own, these companies are looking to have generative AI systems (Bard and Bing) automatically summarize and display that information without ever leaving the branded search page. Any additional relevant context that the user might have stumbled across during their independent research will similarly be deigned by the algorithm. Users can give GPT-4 a spin — and experience our new, algorithmically-dictated reality firsthand — by signing up for the Bing Preview waitlist.