German Bionic, the robot exoskeleton startup behind the lightweight Apogee exosuit, just revealed the Apogee+, a hardware refresh intended to service health care workers. The powered exoskeleton allows nurses and other health care professionals to have greater access to patients, particularly the elderly and the infirm. The company hopes to decrease the “immense levels of stress endured” by these medical professionals.

To that end, the Apogee+ is designed as a “personal lift assistant,” providing active assistance while walking, lifting and arranging patients for treatments and sanitary procedures like showers. The robo-suit offers nearly 70 pounds of back relief per lift and includes integrated grips for getting a stable hold on things and for repositioning patients.

Just like its sibling exoskeleton, the Apogee+ is small and lightweight, so it can be worn by a variety of people in a diverse array of environments. It’s also waterproof, which should help when bathing patients, and dust-proof, which should help when, uh, working in rundown medical facilities straight out of a Stephen King novel.

Most German Bionic products, like the powerful Cray X, are designed for industrial settings, but the Apogee+ is made for health clinics, so it features a softer form factor with light “patient-friendly” colors. The suit’s unibody exterior is designed for an easy disinfection process, so germs and bacteria won’t accumulate. This is obviously quite essential in healthcare environments.

German Bionic touts recent data celebrating the efficacy of exoskeleton wearable products in the healthcare space, saying that it “offers flexible and reliable support to nursing staff.” The Apogee+ is rolling out across North America now, so it’s already available for purchase by health care entities. If you want to try it for yourself, book a passage to Germany in November. The company’s offering in-person demos at global medical trade show Medica on November 13. These exoskeletons cost $9,900 or $299 per month forr bulk purchasers. 

The Call of Duty franchise continues its Fortnite-ification by announcing the latest playable character will be Tomb Raider star Lara Croft. The fictional grave robber will appear in Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare II, joining recent real-life playable characters like Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Durant and various characters from the Prime Video show The Boys, among others.

Publisher Activision hasn’t announced details as to how you get Lara Croft on your side, though it’s likely you’ll have to purchase some sort of bundle to access the renowned ruins ruiner. For instance, Minaj was available as part of the $10 season 5 battle pack. There will also likely be Croft-related items, skins and weapons for sale, though her signature dual-wielded pistols should be part of the initial buy-in.

Additionally, the publisher hasn’t announced when Croft would officially debut as a battle-tested combatant. There’s a mid-season update coming for season 5, which would be as good a place as any to introduce the treasure hunter. Engadget reached out to Activision for clarification regarding pricing and availability.

In related news, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare IIIis rapidly approaching, hitting consoles in November. As for Croft, the last mainline Tomb Raider game was 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Developer Crystal Dynamics, along with Amazon, announced in December that a new game is on the way and that it'll be a “single-player, narrative-driven adventure” built using unreal Engine 5. Amazon is also making a Tomb Raider TV show, though who knows when that’ll premiere.

The US Department of Justice just sued SpaceX, alleging that the company engaged in discriminatory hiring practices against refugees and asylum seekers. The suit says that these practices occurred between 2018 and 2022 and that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that export control laws limited it to hiring US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

The DOJ began its investigation in 2020 when the department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section received complaints of employee discrimination. Kristen Clarke, Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement that the “investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status” going on to say that this amounted to a “ban” regardless of their qualifications. This is a violation of federal law.

The investigation also found that “SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged” these people from seeking employment with the company.

The DOJ lawsuit seeks damages and back pay for “asylees and refugees who were deterred or denied employment at SpaceX.” It also seeks civil penalties and hiring policy changes from the company. The Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) even alleges that SpaceX ignored a subpoena related to the suit in 2021, forcing the DOJ to request a judge order the company to comply with document requests.

The IER opened this probe in 2020 after claimant Fabian Hutter alleged discrimination after losing a spot at SpaceX when asked about his citizenship status during a job interview. It's requesting other alleged victims to come forward and contact the department, particularly if they were discouraged from applying to SpaceX due to citizenship concerns.

Is this the only Elon Musk-led company facing legal troubles regarding hiring practices and employee treatment? Of course not! The self-proclaimed “Technoking of Tesla” faced penalties when a federal court found that Musk made unlawful threats surrounding employee compensation and unions. There’s also a suit making its way through the New York courts that alleges Musk and Tesla fired workers “in retaliation for union activity.” 

Another big suit alleged a racist work environment at Tesla, which was recently settled for just over $3 million. Employees recently sued Twitter/X after Musk-led mass layoffs. The list goes on and on for the man who used to repeatedly state that he simply wants to save the world. Nowadays, he spends most of his time issuing controversial posts on X and being investigated for building literal glass houses using Tesla company funds.

Has there ever been a game like No Man’s Sky? It was dead on arrival when it launched seven years ago, but developer Hello Games has methodically updated the title, adding new features, steadily increasing its popularity and eventually surpassing the lofty expectations for the game’s original release. To that end, there’s already been three fairly beefy updates this year alone, but get ready for a fourth. The developer just dropped No Man’s Sky: Echos to commemorate the seventh anniversary of everyone’s favorite space sim.

The update brings some nifty new gameplay elements, like a race of sentient robots that promise “rich, new story content” and the ability to create your own robot avatar for battles and resource collection. Count on plenty of robot-centric missions and all kinds of affiliated resources to collect and use for building projects.

Space combat also gets an overhaul here, with an emphasis on “huge space battles” with pirate freighters. With Echos, freighters are able square up against other freighters for the first time, leading to some truly nasty and epic space-based encounters. There’s also new mechanics for defending fleets from pirates.

Those are the two big highlights, but the update doesn’t stop there. Players can now find and trade scrap weapons, including the just-released Atlas weapon. There’s also a new holographic museum that lets you display your favorite discoveries in your base for other players to visit.

Beyond gameplay elements, Echos fixes bugs and improves “rendering quality, stability and performance.” PSVR2 players get a graphics boost via foveated rendering and Switch players get anti-aliasing for crisper visuals in both handheld and docked mode.

Of course, there’s likely a reason Hello Games is releasing this update now, at the end of August. No Man’s Sky has never really had any competition in the “fly around the universe and goof around” genre, but Bethesda’s Starfield launches on September 6.

Razer is releasing an Xbox Edition of its popular Kishi V2 mobile gaming controller. The device is available in two SKUs, for iPhone and Android phones, and brings plenty of Xbox-centric features into the mix. For instance, the controllers boast iconic Xbox branding and a white color-way to tie it all together.

The Xbox integration isn’t just cosmetic. There’s updated companion software to make the most out of brand collaboration, including full integration with Game Pass and new haptics that correlate to AAA Xbox titles. That gives these controllers cross-compatibility with hundreds of games available via the platform and the magic of cloud streaming. Razer says this refresh has been optimized to ensure lag-free gaming and the various inputs have been enhanced for improved control and precision. There’s also a dedicated Xbox button for powering on the controller and for initiating Game Pass.

The exterior has been switched up for improved ergonomics during those lengthy Game Pass sessions. The analog bumper triggers are more pronounced and the whole thing has a soft feel that should make it rest easy in the hands during use.

Of course, you aren’t tied to Xbox games here. This is still a standard Kishi Pro controller that’s powered by the Razer Nexus app, so you can play PC games, smartphone titles and more. To that end, there’s a virtual controller mode that lets you map out buttons to match a specific game.

Razer’s Kishi controllers have been a big hit for the company, starting with an Android model and eventually including an iPhone version. This newest release accompanies a broader launch for the Kishi V2 Pro model, that features a headphone jack and the aforementioned haptics. The Pro controller isn't new, exactly, but it used to be exclusively tied to the Razer Edge gaming handheld device. Now you can buy it standalone in this Xbox format or via plainer options. 

Don’t tell anyone, but the Nintendo Switch emulation scene has been thriving pretty much since day one, due to an early hardware vulnerability. It’s relatively simple to pirate Switch titles and play them on PCs, portable consoles like the Steam Deck and even lower-powered Android phones. This is a problem for the big N, and it’s addressing it by partnering up with cybersecurity company Irdeto and its anti-tampering software suite Denuvo.

Denuvo is one of the more popular software suites to minimize tampering and associated emulation. This is a middleware that developers pay for and integrate into the actual game code, thus making it much harder to emulate on other devices. The tools are common with PC titles but, until now, were unavailable for Switch developers.

Though Denuvo is useful beyond the prevention of emulation, that seems to be the primary intent here, with Irdeto touting a new dev portal called the Nintendo Switch Emulation Protection program. The company calls it a “revolutionary technology to protect games launching on Nintendo Switch from piracy.” It also notes that Switch piracy hurts PC sales as well, as the games pirated from Nintendo’s console are playable on PC, bypassing Steam, Epic and other official online retailers.

Now, this might be good news for Switch devs, but Denuvo has a spotty track record, despite boasting that it has protected more than 1,000 games from emulation. This is DRM software, plain and simple, so it’s known to slow down performance when installed, leading some publishers to actually remove the middleware post-launch. Additionally, there’s been some high-priority misfires with the software, with hackers cracking Middle-Earth: Shadow of War in less than a day, and that’s with Denuvo installed. It’s also known for being quite expensive, likely putting the software out of reach for smaller studios and development teams.

The Nintendo Switch is over six years old, with a successor expected in the nearish future. In other words, why did this take so long? Nobody knows. Like it or not, the developers portal goes live this week.

If there’s one thing we can count on as a species is that people will figure out ways to squeeze ads into every single thing we look at. Case in point? TikTok is integrating ads into search results, so you’ll get branded content every time you look for a hashtag, a specific user or anything else. These ads are pulled from sponsored videos hosted on the platform and exist as a way to “further power brand discovery.”

Some users may find this annoying, but the announcement makes it clear that ads will be relevant to the search query and will be clearly labeled as a sponsored post. Ads will also likely be culled from your interests as represented by prior search queries and all of your various actions on the social media platform. In other words, the algorithm will do what the algorithm already does, but in a new location.

Clicking on a sponsored post will not interrupt your search, which is nice. The ad mirrors the in-feed experience and allows users to continue scrolling through the search results, whether you click on an ad or not. There’s likely to be no shortage of advertisers as TikTok says the feature is automatically enabled for pre-existing merchants. In other words, advertisers have to opt-out of appearing alongside search results.

Having an ad-free search bar was fun while it lasted, but this move has been a long time coming. It was something of an inevitability, as competitors like Instagram started doing the same thing earlier this year. It’s worth noting that ads already appear in the regular TikTok feed, nestled between videos posted by folks you actually follow. Don Draper’s search-bar fever dream is rolling out now to global TikTok users.

It’s that time of year again. The annual Gamescom trade fair opens its doors today, but you don’t have to be in Germany to participate in the reveals and updates. All of the good stuff is being streamed live, beginning with the opening night event, hosted by Game Awards guru and former Spike TV personality Geoff Keighley. For those of us far from Europe, the event starts streaming at 2PM ET. Watch it right here.

So what can we expect from the stream? We don’t have to wonder, as Keighley took to Twitter/X and dropped a laundry list of titles that’ll receive the spotlight during the event. Expect trailers or updates on forthcoming titles like Alan Wake 2, Sonic Superstars, Tekken 8, Mortal Kombat 1 and more. You can also expect some information on upcoming DLC content, like Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.

Of course, these high-profile gaming conferences are all about generating buzz, so there should be a surprise or two, beyond the titles mentioned by Keighley. For instance, last year’s opening night showcase dropped a new trailer and opened up pre-release orders for Dead Island 2. That title had been stuck in development hell for a decade, so nobody expected that kind of info-dump at Gamescom. 

Gamescom 2023 extends far beyond the opening night. There are more events and streams throughout the week, though many are intended for folks involved in the development side of things, via the affiliated Devcom sibling event. Gamescom is the world’s largest gaming trade fair, measured by exhibition space and the number of visitors.

Two of the standout indie hits of the past few years are Cult of the Lamb and Don’t Starve Together. Now, the pair of critically-acclaimed darlings are teaming up for a new game mode, unique in-game items and even some character cameos. This crossover impacts both games, though each receives different perks.

The biggest draw here is a brand-new game mode for Cult of the Lamb that’s directly inspired by Don’t Starve Together. The appropriately-named Penitence Mode ups the stress factor by giving your lamb protagonist the same mortal needs as your cute and poop-obsessed followers. In other words, you have to eat and shelter yourself, in addition to providing for your cult. You are given the same options as the criticality-acclaimed traditional game, so you can eat meat and veggies, or go at it Yellowjackets style (cannibalism.)

The games also now share some items to create a unique look, so you’ll be able to unlock decorations in Cult of the Lamb from Don’t Starve, like pig heads on sticks, and vice-versa. Look for new chest skins, tabernacle decorations and more.

Finally, there’s some characters making their way through a “crossover portal.” Webber, from Don’t Starve’s Reign of Giants DLC, is now an unlockable cult member, complete with a new “never hungry” trait so you can save that grassy gruel for someone that actually needs it. Additionally, Don’t Starve’s lamb-like ewelet critter/pets are getting even, uh, lamb-ier, thanks to clothing and design options inspired by the other game.

The update is available now for PlayStation and Xbox consoles. The developers also note that a major content update is coming soon to Cult of the Lamb and that Don’t Starve Together will continue to receive more content in its ongoing From Beyond story arc.

Sega Sammy has completed its purchase of Angry Birds developer Rovio, officially plunking down a cool $776 million to acquire the company. The deal was first floated back in April, but both companies had to jump through some finalization and regulatory hoops. Sega’s hoping the purchase will give them a stronger foothold in the mobile space, despite the golden days of Angry Birds fandom passing almost 15 years ago.

However, Rovio is not just the one IP. Beyond Angry Birds and its many spinoff games, the company is known for the match-three puzzler Sugar Blast and the narrative mystery title Small Town Murders. Okay, those aren’t exactly high-profile IPs, but Sega gets something beyond recognizable franchise titles with this purchase. It gets a ready-made infrastructure for developing, publishing and advertising mobile games. This means it can hit the ground running when making mobile titles based on its own IPs, like Sonic, Samba de Amigo, Persona, Football Manager and others. There’s also hundreds of older games just waiting for mobile ports.

Back in April, CEO Haruki Satomi said that “the mobile gaming market has especially high potential, and it has been Sega's long-term goal to accelerate its expansion in this field.”

Beyond Sega’s pre-existing franchises, the company will likely continue with more Angry Birds mobile games. Despite losing some of that late 2000s luster, Angry Birds is still a fairly hot commodity, with related movies, TV shows and even a bizarre restaurant in New York City. Maybe pairing up those annoyed avians with a certain blue hedgehog will bring the one-time mobile smash back into the collective consciousness. Now, who’s up for flinging Knuckles into a bunch of pigs?