It'll be quite a while before you can help take out the Justice League. As recent reports suggested, Warner Bros. Games and Rocksteady Studios have delayed Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League once again following a brutal reaction to a showcase of the game. Rather than arriving on May 26th, the title now has a release date of February 2nd, 2024. That's yet another delay after Warner Bros. Games pushed back the game from an initial 2022 release window to sometime this spring.

"We have made the tough but necessary decision to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players," a statement on the Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Twitter account reads. "Thank you to our amazing community for the continued support, patience and understanding. There is much more to share in the months ahead and we look forward to seeing you in Metropolis next year."

We got our most in-depth look at the game to date during a PlayStation State of Play in February, but it's fair to say that fans gave the deep dive a poor reception. The live service elements that Rocksteady showed off were the focus of the criticism, with many folks reacting negatively to the always-online requirement (something Arcane is working to nix from Redfall's single-player mode), as well as gating cosmetic items behind microtransactions and a battle pass system.

However, Rocksteady is reportedly using the extra time to polish the game rather than overhaul its live service aspects. The studio will be focusing on ironing out bugs and improving elements it feels aren't quite up to scratch, according to Bloomberg.

Whatever Rocksteady feels as though it needs more time to work on, announcing a delay of eight months only six weeks or so before the game was supposed to drop isn't a great look. That said, WB has the biggest-selling title of the year so far under its belt, which perhaps gives it a bit more flexibility to scuttle off Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League into early 2024. When it does eventually arrive, the co-op action-adventure game will be available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Meta has open-sourced an artificial intelligence project that lets anyone bring their doodles to life. The company hopes that by offering Animated Drawings as an open-source project other developers will be able to create new, richer experiences.

The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team originally released a web-based version of the tool in 2021. It asks users to upload a drawing of a single human-like character or to select a demo figure. If you use your own doodle, you'll see a consent form that asks if Meta can use your drawing to help train its models. You don't need to provide consent to keep using the tool.

Next, you'll need to resize a capture box so it fits snugly around your creation. The tool gives you a pen and eraser to tweak the drawing before adjusting where the joints should be. After all that, you'll see an animated version of your sketch. You can pick from a variety of preset animations from four categories: dance, funny, jumping and walking.

Animated Drawings harnesses object detection models, pose estimation models and image processing-based segmentation methods to capture a digital version of a drawing. It then uses traditional computer graphics techniques to deform and animate the image.

Within a few months of the demo going live, users had granted Meta permission to use more than 1.6 million images for training purposes. Some folks uploaded images of company logos, anime characters, fish and stuffed animals, despite the tool stipulating that only human figures would work.

Along with requests for a more in-depth toolset that includes sound effects and text overlays, the array of images that people uploaded to the tool suggested there was broad interest in more extensive drawing-to-animation experiences. That, in part, led to Meta open sourcing the project with a dataset of around 180,000 drawings. "By releasing the models and code as open source, the project provides a starting point for developers to build on and extend the project, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration within the open source community," Meta wrote in a blog post.

Desta: The Memories Between is officially coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC on April 26th. If you haven’t gotten a chance to play the well-regarded roguelike, it's likely because it was previously tied to Netflix as an exclusive title for its burgeoning gaming platform.

Desta was developed by the company ustwo, which also created the mega-popular mobile title Monument Valley and its sequel. Beyond some slight graphical similarities, however, Desta is its own beast. The title combines a roguelike gameplay style with turn-based mechanics, with plenty of quirky surprises. The story involves a twentysomething returning home after their dad’s death. You help neighbors deal with pressing issues by solving puzzles and, well, playing a whole lot of dodgeball. The dodgeball challenges change from run to run, which is why this title is sometimes compared to games like Hades and Into the Breach.

This is the Dream Team Edition of Desta: The Memories Between, so it includes every content update that came down the pike since the original launch last year. This includes new story scenarios, updated abilities and a range of difficulty settings. You can also play as three new characters, including Alba from Alba: A Wild Adventure, another ustwo title.

Purchasing this game for Switch or PC also nets you a digital soundtrack and a 52-page digital artbook. Both the art style and the music are singled-out as positives in reviews, so these perks are likely to draw in pre-existing players. It costs around $20 to pick up on the Nintendo eShop or the Steam Store. 

“We’ve packed this bundle with so many new abilities, characters, game modes and more – I can’t wait for our community to get their hands on it,” wrote Lead Designer Joel Beardshaw in a press release when the port was officially announced in January.

A studio full of video game veterans is about to release its first big project. Ascendant Studios and EA have confirmed they're releasing the magic first person shooter Immortals of Aveum on July 20th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Windows PCs. You play a new battlemage who's thrust into a never-ending war for control of the world's magic.

This isn't Call of Duty with spells, though, or even a revival of classic fantasy shooters like Heretic. Immortals revolves around a combination system that rewards mixing up different magic types to defeat enemies. You can also draw on magical abilities to create shields or turn the environment against your foes. Ascendant is also promising a narrative-focused experience with an extensive backstory, not to mention recognizable voices like Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever) and Gina Torres (Firefly).

Ascendant is part of a wave of indie studios formed by departing leaders at major game developers. It's helmed by Bret Robbins, the creative director from the original Dead Space, who formed Ascendant in 2018 with Immortals in mind. The team also includes former Telltale Games workers as well as people behind well-known games like Spider-Man and Tomb Raider. Like other well-known exiles, Robbins and crew are effectively trying to regain creative control — even if they're still publishing through major brands.

Researchers have used machine learning to tighten up a previously released image of a black hole. As a result, the portrait of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, over 53 million light years away from Earth, shows a thinner ring of light and matter surrounding its center in a report published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The original images were captured in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio telescopes around Earth that combine to act as a planet-sized super-imaging tool. The initial picture looked like a “fuzzy donut,” as described by NPR, but researchers used a new method called PRIMO to reconstruct a more accurate image. PRIMO is “a novel dictionary-learning-based algorithm” that learns to “recover high-fidelity images even in the presence of sparse coverage” by training on generated simulations of over 30,000 black holes. In other words, it uses machine learning data based on what we know about the universe’s physical laws — and black holes specifically — to produce a better-looking and more accurate shot from the raw data captured in 2017.

Black holes are mysterious and strange regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. They form when dying stars collapse onto themselves under their gravity. As a result, the collapse squeezes the star’s mass into a tiny space. The boundary between the black hole and its surrounding mass is called the event horizon, a point of no return where anything that crosses it (whether light, matter or Matthew McConaughey) won’t be coming back.

“What we really do is we learn the correlations between different parts of the image. And so we do this by analyzing tens of thousands of high-resolution images that are created from simulations,” the astrophysicist and author of the paper Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, told NPR. “If you have an image, the pixels close to any given pixel are not completely uncorrelated. It’s not that each pixel is doing completely independent things.”

The researchers say the new image is consistent with Albert Einstein’s predictions. However, they expect further research in machine learning and telescope hardware to lead to additional revisions. “In 20 years, the image might not be the image I’m showing you today,” said Medeiros. “It might be even better.”

NPR isn't the only public broadcaster to stop tweeting after Twitter applied a "government-funded media" label to its account. PBS has halted its use of the platform too. The organization hasn't posted on its Twitter account since April 8th.

Both PBS and NPR claim the label, which previously read "state-affiliated media," doesn't represent them accurately. Twitter previously reserved such labels for state-run outlets like China's Xinhua News Agency and Russia's RT and Sputnik.

“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” a PBS spokesperson told Variety. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

Federal funding accounts for around 15 percent of public television system revenue, PBS says. The biggest chunk of revenue, 31 percent, comes from donations from individuals. NPR, meanwhile, says federal funding makes up less than one percent of its average annual budget. The broadcaster says it stopped using Twitter in large part to protect its credibility, suggesting the label implies that the government has editorial influence over it. NPR says it's "a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence."

Twitter also applied the label to the BBC's account. That organization also pushed back against the "government-funded media" descriptor. Following an interview that a BBC reporter conducted with Twitter owner Elon Musk this week, the company updated the label to read “publicly funded media,” a more accurate description of the broadcaster's license fee-based budget.

It’s been a long time coming, as it was first announced more than a year ago, but Ubisoft’s premium subscription service has finally arrived on Xbox consoles. Ubisoft+ gives players instant access to a large portion of the company's library, and heavy hitters like Far Cry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising are all in attendance. Ubisoft says subscribers will get day-one access to new releases moving forward. Browse the full list here.

Ubisoft+ has multiple tiers, and it's making the premium option, called Ubisoft+ Multi Access, available to Xbox owners. Once you subscribe, you can play on any platform that offers support. For instance, users can swap back and forth between the Xbox and PC without losing a save state. The service is also available for Amazon Luna, but PlayStation consoles are still out in the cold, though it is coming at some point. If you have a Sony console, you can sign up for a bare-bones version of the service called Ubisoft+ Classics.

Ubisoft+ Multi Access offers more than just the basic versions of games. You get access to any available DLC and various in-game perks. You also get ten percent off any in-game purchases, if you're into that sort of thing.

The service is not yet available worldwide, but it's currently accessible in nearly 100 countries, the United States included. Subscribing to the plan costs $18 each month, and it auto-renews until canceled.

Police have arrested a suspect in the killing of Cash App founder and former Square executive Bob Lee. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin has confirmed to The San Francisco Chronicle that someone is in custody in connection with the April 4th stabbing of the 43-year-old in San Francisco.

This might not have been a mugging or random murder. Mission Localsources claim the suspect is Nima Momeni, the Emeryville-based owner of outsourcing firm Expand IT. Lee reportedly knew Momeni and was a passenger in a car belonging to the suspect, the insiders say. A confrontation supposedly erupted in the car, and may have continued after Lee stepped out.

We've asked the San Francisco Police Department for comment. Lee was most recently the chief product officer of crypto startup MobileCoin. Before his time with Square, he helped create Android's early core library. He was also an investor in tech startups and helped develop the World Health Organization's mobile app during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If accurate, the report would explain why Lee was killed in a section of San Francisco that rarely sees pedestrian traffic in the early morning. It would also make the death a historical rarity. While there are certainly personal feuds in tech, they seldom escalate to violence.

Turning a radio show or any other live broadcast into a podcast isn't quite as simple as uploading the exact same file somewhere else. Downloading an episode from a radio platform, yanking ads, dropping in ad markers, making other edits and uploading it as a podcast typically takes up to an hour, Spotify said. To take some of the sting out of that process, the company has released a tool that can automatically create podcast episodes from existing broadcasts.

Spotify is using tech from Whooshkaa, a company it bought in 2021, to power the tool. Users of Megaphone, Spotify's podcasting platform for businesses, will have access to it. Several publishers are already using Megaphone to convert radio broadcasts into podcasts, including Fox News Audio. The tech can identify existing ad marker locations, and publishers can replace or reposition them before the podcast episode goes live.

According to data from Pew Research that Spotify cited in its announcement, Gen Z folks prefer to get news through digital mediums, such as podcasts. As such, radio publishers could use this kind of tech to reach new audiences without adding too much more to their workload. Spotify says more than half of Gen Z and millennials in the US use the platform, while it has more than 500 million users globally.

For consumers, the tool will likely bring an even wider selection of podcasts to Spotify. It could give YouTubers and Twitch streamers who host live podcasts an easy way to make their discussions available on Spotify too.

Nintendo has shared one last trailer before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on May 12th, and this one is worth watching if you're looking for some insight into the story. The rather lengthy clip showcases not only a large and varied world (including the floating islands above Hyrule), but Link's allies. As Zelda makes clear, "you are not alone." There's even a moment where Link offers a wagon ride.

The plot appears familiar — surprise, you'll have to find Zelda and defeat Ganon. Instead, it's the gameplay mechanics that promise to help Tears of the Kingdom set itself apart from Breath of the Wild. The skyborne islands factor play a large role, of course, but the reliance on fused-together weapons and vehicles is clearer in this new trailer. You can even build a 'robot' to take on Bokoblins that have their own battle platform.

The game is arriving alongside Tears-themed Pro Controller ($75) and Carrying Case ($25) accessories. You can also buy a special edition OLED Switch on April 28th for $350 if you're new to the platform or itching to upgrade from an early-model console. As the hardware and flurry of trailers suggests, Nintendo wants to be sure you're paying attention to the company's most important game of the year.