Elon Musk told investors this month that his startup xAI is planning to build a supercomputer by the fall of 2025 that would power a future, smarter iteration of its Grok chatbot, The Information reports. This supercomputer, which Musk reportedly referred to as a “gigafactory of compute,” would rely on tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs and cost billions of dollars to build. Musk has previously said the third version of Grok will require at least 100,000 of the chips — a fivefold increase over the 20,000 GPUs said to be in use for training Grok 2.0.

According to The Information, Musk also told investors in the presentation that the planned GPU cluster would be at least four times the size of anything used today by xAI competitors. Grok is currently in version 1.5, which was released in April, and is now touted to process visual information like photographs and diagrams as well as text. X earlier this month started rolling out AI-generated news summaries powered by Grok for premium users.

Resident Evil 6 has sold surprisingly well on the Nintendo Switch since it was ported to the console in 2019, despite it being almost universally panned by fans of the series. As spotted by Nintendo Life, RE6 just got added to Capcom’s Platinum Titles list, meaning it’s crossed the threshold of one million units sold. It sits at number 117 on the list, with a million downloads for the Switch (but not any other platforms).

RE6 stands out as a convoluted action game next to the titles that came before it, marking a dramatic shift away from survival horror. It has a lot going on, but not so much of the things people actually love about Resident Evil games. It’s gained some defenders over the years, though, I’ll give it that. Capcom brought Resident Evil 6 to the Switch in October 2019 and bundled it with RE4 and RE5 in the Resident Evil Triple Pack that was released around the same time, which surely helped its sales. 

Is it blasphemous to call a survival horror game “cozy”? Maybe so, but while thinking back on my playthrough of Crow Country, the word popped into my mind more than a few times.

From the jump, there's no question about Crow Country’s PlayStation 1 influences, which its creators at SFB Games have been upfront about: it is very intentionally the creepy-cute child of Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Final Fantasy VII. The game, which was released on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox X/S on May 9, just about checks all the boxes for survival horror, but it takes a gentler approach to the genre, making it feel more like a test of mental endurance against some all-consuming bleakness than a constant fight for your life. (A Hard Mode, however, is apparently on the way).

You play as Mara Forest, who must painstakingly make her way through an abandoned amusement park in the year 1990 to find its elusive and evidently corrupt owner, Edward Crow. Resources, like ammo and health kits, must be scavenged. Skinless monstrosities may emerge from the shadows at any turn to grab at you and puzzles of varying complexity promise to stall your progress. There is an ensemble of characters who — including the protagonist — each seem to have questionable motives.

It’s a familiar formula paired with a familiar style of character design paired with a familiar unsettling atmosphere, yet Crow Country manages not to feel like it’s being propped up by nods to its predecessors. With more of an emphasis on mood and mystery than violence (and some humor sprinkled throughout), it’s just unique enough to stand on its own as a distinct work. The entire experience has this air of reflectiveness to it, and I think the developers describe it perfectly in their own synopsis of what Crow Country offers: “a beautiful, uncanny blend of tension and tranquility.”

The nostalgia did indeed hit me like a truck as I took my cautious first steps around the eponymous Crow Country theme park as Mara. Naturally, she walks at a snail’s pace and comes to a full stop whenever firing a weapon. Her running speed is fine, though, and you have 360-degree control of the camera angle, so it doesn’t weigh you down entirely with PS1-era limitations (a blessing).

I was prepared to be frustrated for the duration of the game by the stop-to-shoot bit, but I got over it once I realized the monsters are also slow as hell. Well, most of them. You can run right by them in almost every situation if you want to. That made killing a choice rather than a necessity, and immediately dialed down the sense of urgency I’d gone into my first enemy encounter with. This is not at all a bad thing. With the stakes lowered, I treated those fleshy monstrosities like target practice and picked them off mostly for the fun of it. That, along with the gradual realization that there weren’t going to be jumpscares every 5 seconds, sucked me into a much cozier experience than I was expecting.

Without anxiety fueling my every decision, I was able to take my time to pick through all the nooks and crannies of the amusement park, making sure to stop and read every notebook or piece of paper and examine every object on the ground or hanging on the walls. I could focus completely on the puzzles before me, some of which were really challenging. I even had to bust out a pen and paper at one point. It also wasn’t very difficult to stay stocked up on necessities like ammunition, health kits and poison antidotes, which could be found randomly all over the park and at vending machines, where they’d sometimes regenerate so I could return for more later.

The soundtrack by Ockeroid (which just got its own separate digital release) is eerily soothing, and helped to create an atmosphere that fully engrossed me. Crow Country’s save mechanism leans fully into the game’s contemplative ambiance, too: you can find respite at different sources of fire, which Mara will stare into before reciting a wistful thought about hope and dread in the face of uncertainty. I played Crow Country on a Steam Deck, snuggled up with my cats on a gray, stormy day, and I can’t think of a better way to take it all in.

SFB Games

In typical survival horror form, the environment gets increasingly hostile as you advance in the game; creatures start showing up in heavier numbers, a faster one joins the mix, it starts raining, it gets darker, someone shoots at you from the shadows. But any real heaviness in Crow County is balanced by just the right amount of playfulness. The characters are often so unserious, going back and forth with irreverent dialogue. And you cannot ignore the goofy crow-themed objects that are all over the place — you rely on some of them for resources and insight.

Initially, Crow Country hints that there’s more to Mara than we’re being told but makes no explanation as to who she is or why she’s really in this abandoned theme park. Nor does it explain early on why that park is filled with writhing abominations and conspicuously prevalent references to the number 2106. Those mysteries served to hook me, and keep me progressing deeper as things unfolded. The ending tied everything together in a way that felt really satisfying.

It’s short but not too short, taking in the ballpark of 5 to 10 hours to complete depending how thorough (or slow to figure out puzzles) you are, and has a lot of replay value. This game is full of secrets that aren’t vital to the plot but can make your life a little easier — there is even a map showing you where they are, if you can find it — and these add another layer of challenge to the overall scavenger hunt. The upcoming Hard Mode could also make revisiting it even more interesting. The game currently gives you the option to play in Survival Horror mode (the version I played), or Exploration Mode, in which “you will not be attacked.”

I missed a couple secrets on my first playthrough, so my main goals for the next run are to find the rest of those and hit 100 percent of the achievements. I’m also curious to find out how different choices in my interactions with other characters could affect how the story plays out. In the end, I found myself moved by Crow Country for reasons that had almost nothing to do with nostalgia.

The first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule still hasn’t launched more than two weeks after its originally scheduled liftoff date, and as of right now, there’s no telling when it will. In a statement emailed to members of the press late on Tuesday, NASA announced it was calling off the launch attempt set for May 25. Starliner’s maiden crew mission has already been rescheduled multiple times, but in this instance, NASA hasn’t set a new launch date. “NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward,” the agency said in its statement, per SpaceNews.

The first attempt at the beginning of the month was scrubbed due to the discovery of a faulty oxygen relief valve on the ULA Atlas V rocket carrying Starliner. Engineers replaced the valve and Starliner was slated to fly later that week, but that attempt was postponed, too. On May 14, NASA revealed that engineers were working to resolve a helium leak in the spacecraft’s propulsion system. In an update a few days later, NASA said the leak was “stable and would not pose a risk at that level during the flight.” A new targeted launch date was set at that time and ultimately rescheduled once more, but it seems the problems are ongoing.

“The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy,” the agency said in the latest update, according to SpaceNews. “There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed.” Delays have defined Starliner’s development up until this point, but since two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — will be on board for this mission, the stakes are especially high; now isn't the time to start cutting corners.

The new 13-inch M4 iPad Pro is really, really thin. That’s inevitably going to make certain aspects of repairing the device even more difficult, which iFixit confirmed in a teardown published this weekend. But it does shine in one area — when it comes to replacing the battery, Apple made some seriously helpful changes.

“For the first time in an iPad Pro, we’re able to remove the battery immediately after removing the screen,” Teardown Tech Shahram Mokhtari wrote in a blog post. Mokhtari notes that “immediately is relative,” as there are still some screws and brackets to remove before the battery can be taken out, and the video documenting the process shows it takes a bit of work to get to the pull tabs beneath the batteries, but the new setup still shaves hours off the process compared to earlier models.

“The fact that you can remove the battery without having to remove every major component inside this device is still a huge win for repairability,” Mokhtari says in the video. “It’s a massive improvement over the previous generation.” Everything else, on the other hand, is going to be pretty tricky to repair without causing damage. “From the daughterboard to the speakers and coax cables, we found a whole bunch of stuff that’s glued down because there just isn’t enough space for screws.”

And, the teardown shows the new Apple Pencil Pro is a repairability nightmare. Mokhtari — who got cut by the Pencil while trying to get to its insides — called it “a disposable piece of crap once the battery dies.”

OpenAI reportedly made exiting employees choose between keeping their vested equity and being able to speak out against the company. According to Vox, which viewed the document in question, employees could “lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars” if they didn’t sign a nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreement, thanks to a provision in the off-boarding papers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed in a tweet on Saturday evening that such a provision did exist, but said “we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity, nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement (or don't agree to a non-disparagement agreement).”

An OpenAI spokesperson echoed this in a statement to Vox, and Altman said the company “was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so.” But as Vox notes in its report, at least one former OpenAI employee has spoken publicly about sacrificing equity by declining to sign an NDA upon leaving. Daniel Kokotajlo recently posted on an online forum that this decision led to the loss of equity likely amounting to “about 85 percent of my family's net worth at least.”

In Altman’s response, the CEO apologized and said he was “embarrassed” after finding out about the provision, which he claims he was previously unaware of. “[T]here was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication,” he wrote on X. “this is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have [sic].” In addition to acknowledging that the company is changing the exit paperwork, Altman went on to say, “[I]f any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we'll fix that too.”

All of this comes after two more high-profile resignations from OpenAI this week. OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced on Wednesday that he was leaving the company, and was followed soon after by Jan Leike, who was a team leader on OpenAI’s now-dissolved “Superalignment” AI safety team.

Blue Origin is back in the space tourism game. Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company successfully flew six paying customers to the edge of space and back this morning, breaking its nearly two-year-long hiatus from crewed missions. This was Blue Origin’s seventh trip with humans on board. The mission — a quick jaunt to cross the Kármán line, or the boundary of space, about 62 miles above Earth — lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas shortly after 10:30AM ET.

The six people inside the New Shepard crew capsule included Ed Dwight, a former Air Force Captain who was the first Black astronaut candidate when he was picked for the training program in 1961. He went through training but ultimately wasn’t selected for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, and never made it to space until now. Also on board were Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller and Gopi Thotakura. The crew safely landed back on the ground about 10 minutes after launch. 

Video game horses tend to play a fairly uncomplicated role, at least in mainstream titles. Like semi-sentient meat bicycles, they often exist as little more than a way to make the player travel faster, jump farther or occasionally defy the laws of physics. With the exception of Red Dead Redemption 2, an outlier beloved for its equine verisimilitude and breadth of riding-related activities, horses in video games are generally emotionless props, notorious for janky animations and unnatural anatomy.

That’s fine for most players’ needs, but for those who are drawn to certain games in part because they have horses, there's a lot to be desired. Especially since the alternatives — dedicated horse games — haven’t proven to be much better. The genre is plagued with shoddy graphics, unoriginal storylines and drawn-out, repetitive caretaking tasks like hoof-picking. While horse games of the aughts, like the Barbie Horse Adventures series, sparked a lasting interest in the niche for a lot of young gamers, we’ve yet to really see what their maturation can look like for the now-adults still chasing that high.

The biggest actual horse game today, the decade-old MMORPG Star Stable Online, is distinctly tween-girl-coded. Suffice it to say, there’s a hole in the market as big as a Clydesdale. But some extremely passionate developers are trying to change that.

Alice Ruppert, who runs The Mane Quest — the go-to blog for all things relating to horse games — has cultivated a community of “horse-interested gamers and game-interested equestrians” over the last five years by churning out news, reviews, analyses and wishful editorials covering the latest developments in the genre. As a lifelong equestrian who also has a professional background in game design, she’s become an authoritative voice at the intersection of these two worlds.

The way Ruppert sees it, dedicated horse games have long been stuck in place. Budgets for new titles over the years were kept tiny based on the assumption that these games would only land with a very small niche of gamers, namely young girls. Limited resources resulted in the creation of subpar games, with “basic mistakes of game design and usability,” causing those games to be poorly received. Bad sales and negative reviews ensured future projects wouldn’t be given bigger budgets, and the cycle repeats.

There’s been a shift more recently, she says, “as the game development space is getting democratized and more people start trying to make games.” That has introduced a host of new issues, like “very amateur teams launching really big projects… and not being able to deliver,” Ruppert said, but she thinks that's “a better problem to have than just nobody making any games at all.”

After Ruppert panned Aesir Interactive’s Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship (Ostwind in its original German, based on a movie), the studio got in touch and later brought her on as a consultant and eventually creative producer for its 2022 title, Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch. The game is far from perfect, Ruppert admits, but despite joining the project at a pretty late stage, she says she was able to make some contributions toward creating an experience that could be appreciated by people who actually know and love horses.

Aesir Interactive

That included helping to correct funky details that might not have registered to a non-equestrian but would stick out like a sore thumb to anyone in that world — like a bizarre transition when changing a horse’s leading leg in a canter. “Whenever I spotted something that was wrong, I was like, okay no, we need to fix this because the horse game crowd is going to care,” she says.

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is an open world adventure game where players can explore on horseback, tame wild horses, breed and train horses, and maintain their own ranch. It takes a realistic approach to breeding and genetics, and the horses each have unique personality traits. The team crowdsourced horse names, too, so the game’s automatic name generator spits out the names of community members’ real horses.

Still, the game drew some harsh criticism after its release, and the reviews overall have been mixed, with common complaints of game-crashing bugs and a world that feels empty. (The team released a final patch for the game in April devoted entirely to bug fixes.) It has its fans, though, and if there’s one thing players seem to agree on, it’s that the horses and the riding mechanics look great.

Aesir also announced last month that it’s releasing a remastered version of Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship. The revamped game includes improvements like “replacing those horse animations that I’ve been complaining about for the past five years,” wrote Ruppert — who has separated from the studio — in a blog post. It’s slated for release in June.

As more and more efforts from the horse games community pop up, “The really promising developments are going to come when either those amateur projects learn and grow into something better, or when more experienced indie devs start picking [them] up,” Ruppert says.

One such example she points to is The Ranch of Rivershine, a horse game developed and published by Canadian studio Cozy Bee Games that’s currently in Early Access. The studio, founded by developer Éloïse Laroche, focuses on cozy games (think Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing), as the name would suggest, and already had a handful of highly rated titles under its belt before putting out The Ranch of Rivershine. That includes Capybara Spa and the baking sim Lemon Cake.

While it may not be “the horse game to end all horse games,” Ruppert says, “I do think it does a lot of things really well.” The Ranch of Rivershine takes a format Cozy Bee Games has shown it excels in, and applied horses. It isn’t groundbreaking — players are tasked with building up their own ranch, where they can breed, take care of and train horses — but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. There are trail rides, cross country competitions, villagers to interact with, auctions and lots of pretty horses. Unlike many of its peers, The Ranch of Rivershine has mostly positive reviews.

Rockstar Games

To this day, Red Dead Redemption 2 stands widely accepted as the best horse game out there despite it not technically being a horse game. Red Dead Online has drawn hordes of equestrian-minded players over the last few years for organized in-game meetups, trail rides, horse shows and other horse-centered activities. The horses themselves, though they’re not without flaws, are far more lifelike than others heretofore have achieved. And the game places importance on actually bonding with them.

It’s so good, it’s become a pain point for projects that have emerged in its wake. AAA games like Red Dead Redemption 2 set a bar that is “almost impossible for an indie game studio to reach, which puts a lot of pressure on creators,” says Jonna Östergren, a 3D animator working with the Hungary-based developer Mindev Games on Unbridled: That Horse Game. Nevertheless, they’re aiming high.

Engadget caught up with the Mindev team recently over a Discord group chat. “I have loved horses for as long as I can remember,” Östergren says, they’ve “been a big part of my life.” So have video games, and in 2017, she started learning how to make them using tools like Unity and Blender. Östergren by chance connected with Jasmin Blazeuski, the founder of Mindev, years later while working on her own horse game that had hit a dead end. “I had big aspirations but I was alone and I was trying to learn all the things, from coding to animation. It was a lot,” Östergren said.

After talking with Blazeuski, “I offered to help them make some 3D models if they needed it. One thing led to another and I became a much bigger part of the team than I had first imagined.”

Unbridled’s creators envision the game as one that allows the player a lot of freedom. “You decide how you want to play and manage your stables,” Blazeuski said. “If you want to make money over competitions, breeding horses or farming — it is all up to you.” They’re striving for realism, in terms of the horses’ physical appearances but beyond that, too. “I have never had a horse game with a simple yet so cute detail such as horses looking outside the stable. Casual, real things horses do, we want them all in the game.”

The emotional elements are crucial. Even in games where horses are the main subject, they often “lack personality and liveliness,” Östergren said. “They are not really their own being with their own mind… That is something that I would love to change in our game. Not making the horse a nuisance that never does what you want it to do, but to make it so that your horse feels alive in the world that you are in as your character.”

The team, also including 3D artist and longtime equestrian, Sara Wermuth, points to childhood games like Horse Illustrated: Championship Season, Riding Champion: Legacy of Rosemond Hill, Pippa Funnell: Ranch Rescue, My Horse Friends, and Pony Girl (1 and 2) as sources of inspiration. Only Unbridled’s programmer, Amon Ahmad, comes from outside the world of horses and horse games, and had to watch “a lot of gameplays from different horse games” to get up to speed.

Between the old and new games, “I noticed that nothing has actually ever changed, apart from the graphics or the style,” Ahmad said. “New functions, new gameplays, new ideas in general are missing.” The team aims to avoid those trappings with Unbridled, which is being built meticulously using the Unreal Engine.

Mindev Games

Horse games have a tendency toward tedious and repetitive tasks or mini-games, which can be detrimental “no matter how much detail and love was put into it,” Östergren said. They don’t want to go down that road. And Unbridled will have unique systems for dressage and jumping to give players a challenge, without predetermined points that will guarantee a well-executed jump, according to Ahmad. Instead, players will have to train their horses and develop a feel for the timing.

But making a game of this scope that is fun, engaging and realistic can be a slow process, not to mention an expensive one. The team’s recent Kickstarter campaign failed to reach its funding goal, and it’s relying on avenues like Patreon for financial support to see the project through. An update posted in February noted that half of the team has picked up part-time jobs to bring in additional income.

The animation alone is a huge undertaking. The complexity of horses’ bone structure, all the bending points, plus “getting the gaits right and all those little details of movement is very difficult [to do] by hand,” Blazeuski said. But, “we will take our time to perfect everything.”

Unbridled: That Horse Game has been in a closed beta since November, allowing the developers to get direct feedback from the community, but the team estimates it’ll be a few years yet before the full release.

Astride, another horse game being developed by a small team with big ambitions, is setting itself apart with its focus on Nordic horse breeds, like the Norwegian Fjord Horse and the Norwegian Dole, as well as gaited breeds like the Icelandic Horse. The studio behind it, Raidho Games, was formed in 2021 after Maja Nygjelten (CEO and concept artist) and Mathilde Kvernland (Community Manager and 3D artist) decided to get serious about their idea to create the horse game they’d always been in search of.

Raidho Games

They put word out on a Norwegian Facebook group for gamers and ultimately expanded the team to five people, including fellow equestrian Tirna Kristine Mellum, who joined as a 3D artist and Project Manager. Using their combined experience with horses in real life to guide the process, Mellum said, “We are hoping to have a horse game where the horses feel like horses.”

“We know what to look for in references” to provide their animator, Marius Mobæk Strømmevold, so the horses’ gaits and other movements look true to life, Nygjelten said. “I think that's very important, to [not] take a random animation from YouTube” but instead provide him with references that they’re confident show the proper result.

The main focus of the game at launch, which is somewhat scaled down from the original vision, will be on breeding horses in the fictional Scandinavian town of Eldheim and training them to compete. “Most [horse games] have show jumping as the first feature, including us… [but] I think we will stand out a lot with the breeding and everything,” Nygjelten says. “We have very realistic horse genetics,” according to Mellum, and that will initially be what the game leans into most.

The early gameplay is centered around the stable and interactions in the Eldheim community rather than grand adventures. It’s being designed to be an online multiplayer game, so players will also be able to meet up with friends. Down the line, the plan is to implement more complex storylines and quests to keep building out the experience.

The project has had some successful funding efforts, including a Kickstarter campaign in spring 2022, but it’s also suffered delays. An Early Access version of the game was released behind schedule last June to very mixed reviews. But, the team emphasizes, it’s still a work in progress.

“Astride still has some years left of development,” says Nygjelten, “The game will continue to grow every single day, and it will probably be very different in a year.”

It might be a good time to finally upgrade your iPhone if you’ve been hanging onto an older model — according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple will be offering a little more than usual for some trade-ins starting next week in the US and Canada. The company itself hasn’t said anything about the promotion, but according to Gurman, it’ll be offered in-store to customers who’ll be using the credit toward any model in the iPhone 15 lineup. This will reportedly be in effect starting this Monday and last until June 3.

Apple lists trade-in values on its website for all iPhone models going back to the iPhone 7. Something that old currently goes for something in the ballpark of $50, while a more recent model like the year-and-a-half-old iPhone 14 Pro Max has an estimated trade-in value of up to $630. Of course, the online estimates aren’t always what you end up getting, but it gives you an idea. Since Apple hasn’t said anything about a temporary value boost, it’s unclear by how much these numbers may go up.

A full trailer just dropped for the upcoming animated show based on the popular game Dead Cells, and it looks like the creators have made a few unexpected choices. For one, the Beheaded can apparently talk. 

Dead Cells: Immortalis is being produced by Bobbypills, the studio behind the game’s animated trailers, and the French streaming service, Animation Digital Network. Along with the trailer, the series now has a release date: June 19. It’ll come out in French first, with English subtitles, before getting an English-language release later this year, according to Dead Cells developer Motion Twin.

The trailer shows a different animation style than we saw in the teaser that came out last year when the series was first announced. As hinted back then, the main character — who the show introduces now as “The Chosen One” — takes on the purple-flame-headed Bobby design. He’s accompanied by a character named Laurie Esposito, Guardian of the Truth. There’s an overall silliness to the trailer, too, so while it looks like there will be plenty of action, don’t expect the show to take itself too seriously.