Three years after becoming the newest branch of the US Armed Forces, the Space Force has an official song. Titled “Semper Supra” (or “Always Above,” if you’re not a fan of Latin), the tune made its debut on Tuesday at the 2022 Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland. Now, before I say anything else about it, I think it’s best you hear the song for yourself.

If you ask me, it’s jauntier than I expected, particularly for a song that is supposed to embody a 21st-century military branch. According to Chief of Space Operations John Raymond, the Space Force wanted a song that “spoke to our Guardians” – and, no, he’s not talking about Destiny 2 players.

The eight lines of lyrics you hear were the result of “years of research and revisions.” Former service and US Air Force Band member James Teachenor wrote "Semper Supra" with General Raymond’s help. "The song was a long work in progress because I wanted it to encompass all the capabilities that the Space Force offers and its vision," Teachenor said. Once the two settled on the song’s lyrics, they recruited Sean Nelson of the US Coast Guard Band to create an arrangement, with the USCG Band providing the instrumentation. 

If you ask us, the final product sounds a bit too similar too to other Armed Forces tunes like “The Army Goes Rolling Along.” Personally, I think the Space Force should have gone down a prog rock route and made the song sound, you know, spacey. 

EA's Motive Studio is putting the finishing touches on its solid-looking Dead Space remake, but it's already looking ahead to other projects. EA announced that Motive has teamed up with Marvel to make an Iron Man game.

Although the title is in early development, the company has teased out a few details. It will be a single-player, third-person, action-adventure game with an original story. The idea is that you'll be able to "feel what it’s like to truly play as Iron Man," EA claimed in a statement.

The Motive team working on the project will be led by Olivier Proulx, who was a senior producer on last year's surprisingly great Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Proulx also worked on the single-player side of Marvel's Avengers and so won't be a stranger to Iron Man. “We have a great opportunity to create a new and unique story that we can call our own. Marvel is encouraging us to create something fresh,” Proulx said.

EA said the Iron Man game marks the beginning of its partnership with Marvel as it's the first of several titles they'll make together. Rumors suggest one of those is a Black Panther game.

Portal 3 may never happen, but at least we've got a new way to experience the original teleporting puzzle shooter. Today during his GTC keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced Portal with RTX, a mod that adds support for real-time ray tracing and DLSS 3. Judging from the the short trailer, it looks like the Portal we all know and love, except now the lighting around portals bleeds into their surroundings, and just about every surface is deliciously reflective. 

Similar to what we saw with Minecraft RTX, Portal's ray tracing mod adds a tremendous amount of depth to a very familiar game. And thanks to DLSS 3, the latest version of NVIDIA's super sampling technology, it also performs smoothly with plenty of RTX bells and whistles turned on. This footage likely came from the obscenely powerful RTX 4090, but it'll be interesting to see how well Portal with RTX performs on NVIDIA's older 2000-series cards. Current Portal owners will be able to play the RTX mod in November.  

NVIDIA

Huang says the company developed the RTX mod inside of its Omniverse environment. To take that concept further, NVIDIA is also launching RTX Remix, an application that will let you capture existing game scenes and tweak their objects and environments with high resolution textures and realistic lighting. The company's AI tools can automatically give materials "physically accurate" properties—a ceiling in Morrowind, for example, becomes reflective after going through RTX Remix. You'll be able to export remixed scenes as mods, and other players will be able to play them through the RTX renderer. 

Blizzard plans to invite some of its most dedicated fans to play Diablo IV in the coming weeks. The studio shared details about its upcoming end game closed beta test on Monday. Using “specific gameplay data,” Blizzard will select players who have recently spent “significant” time with the post-story experiences found in Diablo II: Resurrected and Diablo III. If you feel that describes you, you can let the studio know you’re interested in participating in the beta by ensuring the “News and Special Offers from Battle.net” option is enabled on your account by October 11th. Once that’s done, look for an email from Blizzard in your inbox for an invite. 

Once the beta arrives, it will be available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 and PS4, with support for crossplay and cross-progression between platforms supported. If you don’t get into this round of testing, Blizzard notes public testing will begin early next year.

The upcoming beta will focus on Diablo IV’s endgame experience for a couple of reasons. Blizzard says it doesn’t want to spoil the game’s story before release. The decision is also a reflection of the way a lot of players enjoy Diablo games. “For many, the end game is their favorite aspect of Diablo — we want to ensure it feels satisfying, and with no shortage of challenging variety to experience across many, many demon-slaying gaming sessions,” the studio said, adding feedback from participants will play a critical part in polishing the experience. One thing you should not expect is to hear from those playing the closed beta. Blizzard said the event would be “confidential,” a not-so-subtle allusion to the fact footage from Diablo IVleaked over the weekend.

CD Projekt Red has managed to catch lightning in a bottle twice. With nearly 80,000 concurrent Steam players at the moment, Cyberpunk 2077 is enjoying a resurgence in popularity. While it’s a far cry from the more than one million people that played the game on PC following its troubled launch, it’s still more interest than the game has seen in more than a year.

You don’t have to look far to find a reason for the spike. On September 13th, the game’s anime spinoff, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, premiered on Netflix to critical acclaim, earning praise for its story, worldbuilding and animation. The series has one of the highest audience scores for a Netflix production. And after watching Edgerunners, many people are giving Cyberpunk 2077 a second chance or picking it up for the first time.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because a similar situation played out after the debut of The Witcher. In 2019, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, thanks to the popularity of its Netflix counterpart, was briefly more popular than it was after its 2015 release. It will be interesting to see if Cyberpunk 2077 can maintain its current momentum. At least on PC and current-generation consoles, the RPG is a different game than it was in 2020. Cyberpunk 2077’s recent 1.5 and 1.6 updates addressed many of the lingering bugs and stability issues that plagued the game at launch. CD Projekt Red also recently released official modding tools and announced that Phantom Liberty, the game’s first major expansion, would arrive in 2023.

Kiwi Farms, a forum that's long been accused of fostering targeted online and real-world harassment campaigns, says that someone hacked its proxy service and website. As noted by cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont, it told users in a Telegram message that all avatars had been changed to the logo of another website (said to be another purported "free speech" forum) and that "each node on the forum index was deleted one at a time."

While Kiwi Farms apparently has backups and none of the forum data has been permanently deleted, users' personal information may have been compromised. Founder Joshua Moon told users to assume that their email and password information has been obtained, as well as the IP address of any device they've used to access Kiwi Farms in the last month.

"I do not know for sure if any user information was leaked. In my access logs, they attempted to download all user records at once," Moon wrote in a statement on the Kiwi Farms website. "This caused an error and no output was returned. I shut everything off soon after. If they scraped information through some other mechanism, I cannot say with any confidence either way."

The hacker is said to have used an injected script to gather data from users' systems. Moon said they accessed his admin account as a result of this method. Moon added that he would restore the site from a backup, but noted that the process (as well as reviewing Kiwi Farms' security procedures) would take some time. However, he noted on Telegram today that he had to leave for a week to deal with a family emergency.

Earlier this month, Kiwi Farms was effectively forced off of the open web following an effort to take down the forum. Streamer and political commentator Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, a prominent target of a harassment campaign that allegedly stemmed from the website, started the movement to bring down Kiwi Farms. While Moon was later able to bring the forum back online through other means.

Cloudflare, a DDoS protection company, kicked Kiwi Farms off its service due to a significant increase in targeted threats originating on the site. That seems to have played a role in this weekend's hack. "Cloudflare not only provided DDoS protection, they also accounted for many popular exploits like this," Moon wrote. 

A massive trove of footage from the next installment in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series has leaked online. On early Sunday morning, a hacker who goes by teapotuberhacker uploaded 90 videos from a test build of Grand Theft Auto VI to GTAForums. Since PCGamer spotted the post, the clips have proliferated across YouTube and social media, and as of the writing of this article, they're still viewable.

In line with reporting Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier published in July, the footage shows two playable protagonists. One of them is a female character named Lucia, who we see robbing a restaurant in one of the clips. In a separate video, you can see the other playable character riding the “Vice City Metro,” pointing to the fact that GTA VI will take place in a fictionalized version of Miami. According to Schreier, the leaked footage is legitimate.

“Not that there was much doubt, but I’ve confirmed with Rockstar sources that this weekend’s massive Grand Theft Auto VI leak is indeed real. The footage is early and unfinished, of course,” he tweeted. “This is one of the biggest leaks in video game history and a nightmare for Rockstar Games.”

Adding intrigue to an already interesting story, teapotuberhacker claims they’re also responsible for the recent Uber hack. They said they obtained the test build after gaining access to a Rockstar employee’s Slack account and may upload additional data online, including source code and assets from GTA V and GTA VI, as well as the test build itself. It’s unclear how old this version of the game is. Rockstar has reportedly been working on GTA VI since 2014. In July, Schreier reported the studio was at least another two years away from releasing the game to the public.

Grand Theft Auto series publisher Take-Two Interactive did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.

Genshin Impact is one of the biggest gaming success stories of the last few years. Fans will have another way to enjoy the world of Teyvat at some point, as developer miHoYo has teamed up with animation studio Ufotable to create an anime based on the free-to-play action RPG.

Ufotable has worked on several other game-related projects. God Eater and Tales of Zestiria the X are both based on Bandai Namco properties, for instance. A concept trailer (which was spotted by IGN) offers a peek at the art style Ufotable will employ this time around. As you might expect, the studio doesn't seem to veer too far away from the look of the game.

If anything, it's a little surprising that it took this long for an official Genshin Impact anime announcement. The developers took inspiration from anime in the first place and the game has long seemed primed for an adaptation.

Several other notable games have been turned into animated series in recent years. Cyberpunk 2077 spinoff Cyberpunk: Edgerunners hit Netflix just this week, while Arcane (which is based on League of Legends), became the first animated streaming series to win an Emmy earlier this month.

It's not clear when or where fans will be able to watch the Genshin Impact anime. However, given that the trailer is only showing off the concept and it refers to the Ufotable collaboration as a long-term project, it might be quite a while before the first season debuts.

The Genshin Impact anime reveal came as miHoYo offered a look at version 3.1 of the game, which will arrive on September 28th. The update will expand the new region of Sumeru and help to continue the game's core story. It will introduce King Deshret’s Mausoleum, dungeons, new Archon Quests, more weapons, three playable characters, two fresh bosses and more. Meanwhile, miHoYo will add a permanent card game mode in version 3.3.

The long-teased Blade Runner sequel series is real. Variety has confirmed Amazon has ordered production of Blade Runner 2099 for Prime Video. Original movie director Ridley Scott will serve as an executive producer alongside Silka Luisa (Halo and Shining Girls), who will also be the showrunner. The premise of 2099 isn't yet clear beyond its setting 50 years after Blade Runner 2049, but Amazon's global TV head Vernon Sanders claimed the follow-up would preserve the "intellect, themes, and spirit" of the movies.

The cast hasn't been set at this stage, although it's doubtful you'll see familiar names given events in past movies and the timeline of the show. Amazon also hasn't said when it expects to release the series.

The project could still be one of Amazon's more ambitious shows to date. The company has been ramping up the production values of Prime Video productions in recent years, and that appears to have paid off — the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power reportedly cost $465 million to make, and set a Prime viewing record upon its debut. It wouldn't be surprising if Amazon committed to a major investment (if not necessarily as large) for a recognizable franchise like Blade Runner, particularly with Scott involved.

Flickr is adding a new virtual photography category to help users find and categorize images they capture in their favorite video games. Previously, the platform only offered three content categories: photos, illustration and art, and screenshots. The company notes the third and final one didn’t quite meet the needs of one of its fastest-growing communities, which is why it’s making the change.

“By putting your work into one of these categories, you can use filters to limit your search results by interest,” Flickr explains in a blog post spotted by PetaPixel. “For instance, virtual photographers will be able to filter by ‘virtual photography’ while conducting site-wide searches if they only want to see that kind of work, while avoiding real-world photography or other art and illustration.”

The addition is an acknowledgment of just how popular virtual photography has become. We’re at the point where most games either ship with a photo mode at launch or the feature is added after release. Many developers have also started to frequently share the best captures from their communities. For instance, Hideo Kojima retweets Death Stranding photo mode images almost every week, as do studios like CD Projekt Red and Guerrilla Games.