The rumors were true, Konami is remaking Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. On Wednesday, Sony shared a cinematic trailer for the upcoming game during its PlayStation Showcase. The teaser didn't offer any gameplay footage, but it did show protagonist Naked Snake before the events that transform him into Big Boss. No word yet if Hideo Kojima is involved in the project. Kojima famously had a very public split from Konami after the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The "coming to PS5" card at the end of the trailer makes clear the game will be a multiplatform release. Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater does not have a release date.

Separately, Konami announced Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, a collection that will bring together Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in the fall of 2023. Konami released the original Snake Eater on PlayStation 2 in the fall of 2004. One year later, the company released an expanded version of the game, known as Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. That version of the game added a third-person camera to the game and the first iteration of Metal Gear Online.      

Big changes are coming to the Peloton app. As of today, the software offers three different standalone subscription tiers. To start, there’s a new free option, with no credit card required, that comes with access to more than 50 classes – though live workouts are off the table. It joins Peloton’s existing service, which will be known as App One. For $13 per month, App One grants you access to nine of Peloton’s 16 “modalities,” meaning you can watch the company’s pilates, yoga and outdoor running classes. However, the tier limits you to just three equipment-based cycling, treadmill and rowing classes per month, with scenic and lanebreak variants excluded. For unlimited access to those, you will need to pay for Peloton’s new App+ subscription, which costs $24 per month.

Effectively, the change means those who used the Peloton App to enjoy the company’s cycling and treadmill on their non-Peloton equipment will need to pay more to keep doing that. If you’re a current annual subscriber, you will continue to have access to all of the classes Peloton offers through its app until your membership renews. At that point, you will need to decide if you want to upgrade to the App+. Even with today’s change, it’s worth noting the Peloton App won’t replace the company’s equipment subscription, which will you will still need to access its classes on your Bike, Tread or Row machine.

Separately, Peloton is adding tutorials for strength training. The company says the app’s new “Gym” component features “self-paced, whiteboard-style” classes for those who prefer exercising outside of their home. The service will be available in the coming days, with the new App+ tier launching in the US, Canada, Australia, German and UK.

Beginning later this year, Phoenix area residents and visitors will be able to hail Waymo taxis through Uber, thanks to a new “multi-year” partnership the two companies announced on Tuesday. The pact will see a “set number” of Waymo vehicles made available to Uber users for rides and deliveries. The announcement comes after Waymo recently doubled its Phoneix service area to 180 square miles. Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna told The Verge the robotaxis the company is making available to Uber users wouldn’t be exclusive to the platform. Phoenix residents can continue to turn to the Waymo One if they want an autonomous ride somewhere.

“We’re excited to offer another way for people to experience the enjoyable and life-saving benefits of full autonomy,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Uber has long been a leader in human-operated ridesharing, and the pairing of our pioneering technology and all-electric fleet with their customer network provides Waymo with an opportunity to reach even more people.”

Notably, the partnership sees two companies that were once rivals coming closer together. In 2017, Waymo parent company Alphabet sued Uber for stealing trade secrets. At the center of that legal battle was Otto, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski. In 2018, Uber settled with Alphabet four days after the case went to trial. As for Levandowski, he was later charged and convicted of stealing materials from his previous employer. On the last day of his administration, former President Donald Trump pardoned Levandowski.

Tuesday’s announcement only alludes to that history, noting Waymo and Uber “have in their own ways each revolutionized access to mobility.” That’s not surprising. In 2018, The Information reported Uber, following its settlement with Waymo, was open to collaborating with the company. Last year, the two partnered to work together on autonomous trucking.

If you’ve been anywhere near a gaming forum recently, you’ve probably seen something about the state of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on PC. Even in a year that has seen some abysmal PC releases – I’m looking at you, The Last of Us Part 1 — the latest from Respawn Entertainment stands out.

Performance is the big issue everyone is talking about, and it’s easy to see why. If you want to watch a deep dive into the game’s technical woes, check out some of the recent videos Digital Foundry and Daniel Owen have uploaded to their YouTube channels. However, the short version is Jedi: Survivor has all the issues that have plagued many a recent poor PC port.

Each time you launch the game, it puts you through a shader pre-compilation process that, frustratingly, doesn’t prevent stuttering. Jedi: Survivor also suffers from traversal hitching, meaning your frame rate will drop when you enter a new location. Annoyingly, these were issues that were present and never addressed in Jedi: Fallen Order. And unfortunately, there’s no amount of hardware that can fix those problems in Jedi: Survivor.

I’m playing the game on a PC with an AMD Ryzen 5600x and NVIDIA RTX 3070. My system is not bleeding edge but it’s also not a toaster. The thing is, there’s no combination of settings that leads to Jedi: Survivor producing a consistent frame rate due to how the game makes use of your system’s processor and available VRAM. Even players with RTX 4090 GPUs reported poor framerates at launch.

Adding to the performance issues is Jedi: Survivor’s status as an AMD-sponsored title. The game supports AMD’s FSR upscaling technology, but not DLSS and XESS. While it’s true you can use FSR with NVIDIA and Intel GPUs, Jedi: Survivor’s implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Even set to the “Quality” setting, the tech introduces distracting artifacts that take away from the game’s otherwise compelling presentation. FSR also does little to nothing to improve your framerate since the game is so CPU limited.

And then you have Jedi: Survivor’s settings menu. In short, the game features one of the least helpful settings menus I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s not properly coded for mouse navigation; none of the graphical options come with an explanation of what they do; and the game doesn’t even offer a hint of what kind of performance impact you can expect from tweaking specific settings. But the worst offender is Jedi: Survivor’s ray tracing options – or should I say, option, singular. Unlike nearly every other modern PC release, Jedi: Survivor bundles all of its RT features into a single toggle, meaning you can’t use less expensive ones like ray-traced ambient occlusion on their own.

What makes all these issues so frustrating is that things don’t have to be this way. In 2023, it’s not a secret what makes a great PC port, and there are plenty of examples studios can look to for inspiration. For instance, having played God of War 2018 on PlayStation 4 Pro, PS5 and PC, I think there’s an easy argument to be made that the PC version is the definitive way to play that game. In the case of Respawn, the studio doesn’t even need to look that far for an example of how to build a great PC port. In 2016, it released Titanfall 2: to this day, one of the best games you can play on PC.

EA had been somewhat dismissive of player complaints, suggesting that only a “percentage” of PC players are experiencing performance issues, and that some of those issues are due to people using high-end CPUs with Windows 10. In any case, EA said Respawn was doing its best to fix the game.

Sure enough, on the Monday after Jedi: Survivor’s Friday release, Respawn released a patch that promised performance improvements. I found the update increased my average frame rates but did nothing to address the game’s stuttering. The latest patch, released partway through last week, was supposed to address that issue, but I find the game will still slow down when I enter new areas. Respawn has promised additional updates are on the way that will supposedly further improve performance.

So how did we get here, and, who, if anyone, is to blame for the state of PC ports in 2023? Those are questions I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few days. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

From a technical standpoint, there’s a reason PC ports were more competent during the eighth generation of consoles than at almost any other time in the past: it was easy. Or, at least, easier. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One saw the switch to x86 processors that were effectively less-powerful versions of what PC gamers had in their towers. It was also one of the longest generations in recent memory. It’s only in the last year or so that we’ve seen publishers like EA abandon cross-gen releases in favor of current-gen exclusives. On PC, that stability meant you could get away with using your components for longer. I bought an Intel Core i5 6600K in 2015 and only upgraded in 2021 after Red Dead Redemption 2 was too much for that processor’s four-thread architecture.

With the transition to PS5 and Xbox Series X, more care and attention needs to be given to PC ports. Current consoles are laser-focused on gaming, and don’t need to run Windows in the background. Then there’s the fact that, for the first time in a long while, the average gaming PC isn’t as powerful as a current-gen console. If you don’t believe me, look at Steam’s most recent hardware survey. The most popular GPU is the nearly four-year-old GTX 1650. Moreover, six- and four-core processors make up the majority of CPUs in use by Steam players, with eight-core ones represented in less than 20 percent of all systems. Put all this together and it becomes obvious that lazy ports just won’t cut it anymore.

As more current-gen games are released and those titles take advantage of everything the PS5 and Xbox Series X have to offer, I think we’re going to see more shoddy PC ports.

But a technological shift is only one part of it. Publishers are not blameless in this. Two of the worst PC ports released this year, Jedi: Survivor and The Last of Us Part 1, were pushed back to give their developers more time for polish. In the case of Jedi: Survivor, Respawn specifically called out the game’s performance as one of the reasons for the delay. EA decided against further delaying the game, knowing full well the state of the product it was about to release. In fact, EA even warned fans the game was coming in hot, tweeting two days before Jedi: Survivor’s release that a day one patch was the first of many updates it had planned. The publisher said future patches would fix bugs, improve performance and add more accessibility features.

Unfortunately, it is now business as usual for publishers to release an unfinished game and promise to fix it later. And for the most part, they’re rewarded for doing so, because there’s nothing the gaming community loves more than a good redemption story. Think of a game like No Man’s Sky or, better yet, EA’s own Star Wars: Battlefront II and Battlefield 4. All three were poorly received at release, but after months and years of hard work from the studios that created them, they’re now highly regarded.

I wish I could say things will get better soon, but in the short term, I don’t think we’ll see many improvements. It’s not impossible for a studio to release a technically competent PC port, but it takes time, resources and a publisher willing to make a game’s PC fanbase a priority. A fundamental change in how game publishers do business is needed, and that will take time.

Meta could turn to Magic Leap for help to stay ahead of Apple and other new entrants in the soon-to-be crowded AR space. According to the Financial Times, the two companies are in talks to sign a multi-year IP licensing and manufacturing pact. Details on the negotiations are few, but according to the outlet’s sources, a potential partnership is not expected to produce a jointly developed headset. Instead, a deal could see Magic Leap provide Meta with access to some of its optical tech. The partnership could also see the startup assist with manufacturing Meta devices, thereby allowing the tech giant to produce more of its VR headsets domestically at a time when there’s more pressure for US companies to lessen their dependence on China.

Meta did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request. Magic Leap told the Financial Times partnerships were becoming a “significant line of business and growing opportunity for Magic Leap.” Additionally, in a blog post titled “What’s Next for Magic Leap,” CEO Peggy Johnson said late last year the company had “received an incredible amount of interest from across the industry to license our IP and utilize our patented manufacturing process to produce optics for others seeking to launch their own mixed-reality technology.”

The timing of the report is notable for a couple of reasons. Meta is under pressure from investors to show something for all the money it has spent pursuing CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of computing. The company does not expect to make a profit from all of its metaverse projects for another few years. At the same time, it is burning about $10 billion annually on its Reality Labs division. Separately, Apple is widely expected to enter the AR headset market next month when the company holds its WWDC developer conference.

In less than two hours, private space firm Axiom Space is set to launch its second all-civilian flight. At approximately 5:37PM ET, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to carry the four-person crew, including former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, to the International Space Station. You can watch the mission as it unfolds from the Kennedy Space Center starting at 5PM ET. NASA will stream the launch on its website and YouTube channel. You can also watch the flight on Axiom Space’s website and right here.

Ax-2 is the follow up to Axiom Space’s first private space flight, which successfully carried a crew of civilian astronauts to the ISS last year. In addition to Whitson, the crew of Axiom Mission 2 is made up of entrepreneur John Shoffner and Saudi astronauts Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. After the Ax-2 team arrives at the ISS early Monday morning, they will spend the next eight days assisting the space station's crew with a handful of experiments. Axiom Space plans to fly another mission to the ISS later this year.

China’s cybersecurity regulator has banned Chinese firms from buying chips from US memory manufacturer Micron Technology. Per Reuters, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said Sunday it found that the company’s products pose “significant security risks” to critical Chinese information infrastructure, including state-owned banks and telecom operators. The ban comes after China announced a review of Micron imports in late March in a move that was seen at the time as retaliation for sanctions Washington has imposed on Chinese chipmakers in recent years.

Idaho-based Micron is the largest memory manufacturer in the US. The Chinese market accounts for about 10 percent of the firm’s annual revenue, though the majority of companies importing Micron products into China are manufacturers making devices for sale in other parts of the world. According to The Wall Street Journal, the CAC’s ban does not apply to non-Chinese firms in China. “We are evaluating the conclusion and assessing our next steps,” Micron told the outlet. “We look forward to continuing to engage in discussions with Chinese authorities.” The CAC did not say what Micron products would be affected by the ban, nor did it share details on what security concerns it had with the company's chips.

The ban is the latest development in an escalating feud over semiconductor technology between the US and China. In recent months, the Biden administration has moved to restrict its rival's access to advanced chipmaking equipment. In January, US, Dutch and Japanese officials agreed to tighten export controls on lithography machines from ASL, Nikon and Tokyo Electron. As The Journal notes, China has been trying to find ways to hit back at the US. Micron was an easy target given that most Chinese companies can turn to suppliers like South Korea’s SK Hynix to make up for any shortfall left by a ban.

With its long-awaited System Shock remake slated to arrive later this month, Nightdive Studios has shared a first look at System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition. The game doesn’t have a release date yet, but those who pre-order System Shock will get a copy of the remaster at no extra cost when it’s released by publisher Prime Matter.

On Friday, Nightdive said System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition features updated cinematics, textures, character and weapon models. The developer also partnered with Systemshock.org so that it could integrate the best community-made patches and mods into the remaster. Thanks to the fact Nightdive brought the game’s original source code over to its in-house engine KEX engine, System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition will be available on current generation consoles. Judging from the teaser trailer, the studio did a commendable job of preserving System Shock 2’s art style and atmosphere while increasing the quality of the game’s assets. Here's hoping Nightdive can avoid a repeat of Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition.

If you missed the chance to purchase the Apple Watch Series 8 at $329 earlier this year, Amazon is once again selling the 41mm model for that price. With that 18 percent discount, the Series 8 is $70 off its usual $399 starting price. What's more, Amazon has also cut the price of the 45mm model. It too is $70 off, meaning you can get that variant of the Series 8 for $359.

Although the Series 8 is only a modest upgrade over the Series 7, it’s still one of the best smartwatches you can buy. The Series 8 is fast and features a handy always-on display. It also sports robust app support and tight integration with Apple’s broader ecosystem. New to the Series 8 is a crash detection feature that can alert first responders in case of an emergency. It’s also the first wearable from Apple to feature a temperature sensor that can assist with ovulation tracking.

Of course, the Series 8 isn’t for everyone. For one, you can’t use the wearable with an Android phone. It’s also worth pointing out that the Apple Watch SE offers many of the same core features as the Series 8 but costs significantly less, especially when it’s sale like it is right now on Amazon. Alongside the Series 8, the retailer has discounted the SE. The 40mm model is 12 percent off or $30 off from its regular $249 price. You can also get the 44mm model for $30 off.

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A software update Hewlett-Packard released earlier this month for its OfficeJet printers is causing some of those devices to become unusable. Since about the second week of May, the HP support forums have been rife with complaints of OfficeJet printers bricking after they automatically installed the company’s most recent firmware update.

After downloading the faulty software, the built-in touchscreen on an affected printer will display a blue screen with the error code 83C0000B. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way for someone to fix a printer broken in this way on their own, partly because factory resetting an HP OfficeJet requires interacting with the printer’s touchscreen display. For the moment, HP customers report the only solution to the problem is to send a broken printer back to the company for service.

Among the affected printers are OfficeJet 902x models, including the Pro 9022e, Pro 9025e, Pro 9020e All-in-One and Pro 9025e All-in-One variants. If you own an OfficeJet printer, for the time being, your best bet is to disconnect your printer from the internet so that it doesn’t automatically download the buggy update.

On Saturday, HP acknowledged the issue and told Bleeping Computer it was working on a fix. “Our teams are working diligently to address the blue screen error affecting a limited number of HP OfficeJet Pro 9020e printers,” the company said. “We are recommending customers experiencing the error to contact our customer support team for assistance: https://support.hp.com.”

This isn’t the first time one of HP’s recent software updates has created a headache for its customers. In March, the company appeared to double down on its unpopular ”dynamic security” policy and began rolling out a security update that saw more of its printers not work with third-party ink cartridges.