The following article includes significant spoilers for All Those Who Wander.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has never been ashamed to tip its hat to the stories it’s riffing upon, some more obviously than others. This week’s episode, All Those Who Wander, might as well just have been called “Screw it, we’re just going to do Aliens.” Thankfully, it’s so good that you won’t have time to care about the xeroxing from James Cameron’s 1986 original. This is the best episode of Strange New Worlds yet, raising the bar, and the stakes, for next week’s finale.

We start with the welcome and now familiar sight of the Enterprise crew hanging out around Pike’s captain’s table. It’s such a delight to see the crew spending time together and having fun, as the show puts in the hours to show that these people generally like each other. Ensign Duke gets a promotion, while cadets Chia and Uhura are given a send off as they end their tour of duty on the Enterprise. But the levity is punctured, first by Uhura still not sure if Starfleet is right for her, and second by an ominous message from headquarters. A Federation starship has gone missing while surveying an unstable planet, and Pike needs to go looking for it.

But the Enterprise already has an urgent mission to deliver power supplies to starbase K7, so Pike decides to handle a rescue mission with shuttlecraft. Dr. M’Benga, Chapel, La’an, Spock, Hemmer, Lt. Kirk and Duke, as well as cadets Uhura and Chia join him. Number One and Ortegas, meanwhile, take the ship on its original course, meaning this is the fifth or sixth episode this series where Number One has barely featured. Perhaps Rebecca Romijn negotiated far fewer filming days each week given her higher profile than the rest of the cast.

When the shuttles reach the planet, landing in the shadow of the crashed USS Peregrine, it’s not long before the episode switches into high horror. Corpses litter the ground, and the ship itself is covered in the sort of bloodstain made when someone’s trying in vain to cling to the ground while being dragged away. And despite the fact that this is another episode shot mostly on the standing Enterprise sets, clever lighting and direction make them feel altogether more like the sinister LV-426 from Aliens.

Then there’s Newt Oriana, a young girl who has learned to survive previous Gorn attacks by going partly feral. This episode, much more than the flat Memento Mori, is designed to rehabilitate the Gorn from the comedy rubber suit seen in the ‘60s and the awkward CG from the early '00s. Now, they’re the Trek version of the eponymous Xenomorph, complete with acid bile, quadrupedal motion and body horror reproductive process. Worth mentioning that this ain’t the sort of episode you can watch with your kids, especially not when the blue-shirted Cadet Chia succumbs to a chestburster.

Marni Grossman / Paramount+

It helps, too, that the Gorn are rarely glimpsed properly, despite some excellent creature design, the shadows are always a better way to experience a villain like this. The episode’s conclusion sees the crew taking an Alien3-style chase through corridors as they lure the Gorn to a trap. Choosing to shoot from the Gorn’s perspective helps amplify the sense of dread and tension, too, since our crew is being stalked from all corners.

But the best moments are when the crew, trapped in sickbay, start to feel the screws turning on them. La’an starts berating Oriana, the child that she sees so much of herself in before Dr. M’Benga snaps at her to leave his daughter… his patient alone. Lt. Kirk, meanwhile, starts lashing out at Spock for his lack of empathy, not long before Spock lets out his own emotions in order to entrap the Gorn. And, best of all, this all feels entirely earned and in character as we’ve gotten to see how these people got these particular scars. Finally, the promise of emotional continuity comes good as we start to see the Enterprise crew almost break under pressure.

Of course, we have to offer additional praise for Hemmer, who once again gets paired with Uhura for some grace notes. The fact that even Uhura has given them a compound name (Hemura!) speaks to how delightful it is to watch the pair interact. And when Hemmer reveals that the blob of alien spit he received earlier in the episode means he’s loaded with Gorn eggs too, it’s a massive blow. I feel like Hemmer was already a figure we’d fallen in love with, and his departure hurts, even if he gets a graceful, Alien3-esque swan dive death for a sendoff. Give Bruce Horak his own spin-off, or something, please. 

(I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed that Duke, Chia and Hemmer’s death means we’ve had a Yellow, Blue and Red-shirt demise in a single episode. Hacky standups will need to look for a better punchline to their Star Trek jokes in the future.)

Also, I feel like I’ve been neglectful in not offering enough praise for this cast, and especially Jess Bush. Bush often has to sell a whole bunch of stuff in her limited screen time and does so with ease. Here, as in The Serene Squall, she shows Chapel adapting to survive against a threat, and sells it so well.

The episode ends with plenty of fallout, Uhura decides to stay on board after Hemmer’s valediction encourages her to put down roots. La’an takes a leave of absence to try and reunite Oriana with her family, and Spock’s emotional outburst has left him scarred. Pike, meanwhile, must be headed for trouble given how freely he treats his life knowing that his future is already set in stone But again, all of this feels earned in a way that prior episodes haven’t quite achieved, and I’m excited to see how we land in the finale from here.

Sony has revealed the three games that all PlayStation Plus subscribers can snap up in July. They are Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, Man of Medan and Arcadegeddon — a notable leaker once again got all three games spot on.

Crash Bandicoot 4 arrived in 2020 and was the first new mainline Crash game in 12 years. It was pegged as a direct sequel to the original PlayStation 1 trilogy — meaning that it ignored all the PS2 games. Both the PlayStation 4 and PS5 versions will be available, with the latter supporting features like the DualSense controller's adaptive triggers and haptic feedback.

Man of Medan is the first title in Supermassive's Dark Pictures Anthology series. It's an interactive horror game in which your choices determine whether characters live or die. However, we felt it didn't hold up as strongly as the studio's previous game, Until Dawn. Man of Medan is hitting PS Plus just after the arrival of Supermassive's latest game, The Quarry.

Arcadegeddon, meanwhile, is a multiplayer shooter from Illfonic that has both co-operative and player vs. player modes. You'll search for loot and unlock abilities as you take on the evil Fun Fun Co. megacorp, which is using an arcade for real-world weapons testing.

This is the first time Sony has refreshed the games on the lowest tier of the new-look PS Plus since it revamped the service. The company said it will continue to offer Essential tier users a couple of games a month that they'll have access to as long as they remain subscribers. Sony will also update the Extra and Premium lineups in the middle of each month.

Crash 4, Man of Medan and Arcadegeddon will be available to claim on July 5th. Until then, you can still add the current batch of PS Plus Essential titles — God of War (2018), Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl — to your library.

It's a busy spell for Blizzard, with Diablo Immortal, Overwatch 2 and mobile game Warcraft Arclight Rumble all arriving this year. The studio has another major release lined up in the form of World of Warcraft expansion Dragonflight, which is expected to arrive by the end of 2022. To help get WoW expansions out on time and ensure they meet the bar in terms of quality, Blizzard bought Spellbreak studio Proletariat to bolster its ranks of developers, as GamesBeat reports.

The news comes one day after Proletariat announced it will shut down Spellbreak early next year. The free-to-play game is an intriguing take on the battle royale genre, with players using magical powers instead of guns. The game never took off, though. It had an average player count of 166 on Steam over the last month. Apex Legends, on the other hand, has more than a thousand times as many players at any given time on Steam alone.

More than 100 developers from Proletariat will now be focused on World of Warcraft, though the studio has been working with Blizzard since last month. The Boston-based studio also plans to expand its team.

WoW general manager John Hight has spoken of the difficulties his team has had in hiring to deliver content updates to players more quickly (the publicturmoil at the studio over the last year might have played a role in that). Bringing Proletariat on board should help.

“A big part of caring for our teams is making sure we have the resources to produce experiences our communities will love while giving our teams space to explore even more creative opportunities within their projects,' Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra said. "Proletariat is a perfect fit for supporting Blizzard’s mission in bringing high-quality content to our players more often.”

Activision Blizzard is itself in the process of being bought by Microsoft for $68.7 billion. Given the ongoing labor and workplace culture issues at the company, there's a bit of irony in Blizzard snapping up a studio called Proletariat.

Facebook is experimenting with a new audio feature for Groups. The company is testing audio channels, which will bring Discord-like voice chats to Groups, Facebook shared in a blog post.

Facebook has already had audio features for Groups with rooms. But unlike that feature, which is meant for one-time audio chats, audio channels are dedicated spaces where group members can speak with each other at any time, much like Discord.

The change is one of several updates the social network is testing. The company is also experimenting with other types of “channels,” essentially sub-groups within each Facebook Group, where members can discuss specific topics. There are community chat channels, which organize group message threads around topics relevant to a given group; as well as community feed channels, which are topic-based spaces within the group.

Facebook is also testing a new sidebar that will make all users’ Groups more prominent in its app (and have dedicated shortcuts for creating new channels). For now, all of these features are tests that will only be available to a small subset of users, but the company intends to roll out the changes more broadly over time.

The updates come as Facebook is eyeing bigger changes for its main app. The company is working on a broader redesign that would reorient users’ feeds around AI-driven recommendations more than their existing social graphs. At the same time, the new sidebar is meant to ensure that Groups remain prominent and easily accessible once the app’s main feed changes.

When Return to Monkey Island arrives later this year, players will finally discover the secret of Monkey Island. That’s the pitch series creator Ron Gilbert made in the game’s newest trailer, which premiered today during Nintendo’s latest Direct showcase. “My name is Guybrush Threepwood, and this is a story about the time I finally found the secret of Monkey Island,” voice actor Dominic Armato declares at the start of the clip.

As you might imagine, the trailer is full of allusions to past Monkey Island games, including some of the series’ best gags. At one point, Guybrush drifts to the floor of the Caribbean, a sign pointing to Monkey Island and noting it’s only a six-minute walk away. Good thing our hero can hold his breath for 10 minutes. 

Many fan-favorite characters also make an appearance in the clip. Among others, I spotted used ship salesman and garish dresser Stan S. Stanman locked in the brig of LeChuck’s ship. Coincidently, you can chat to Stan on Return to Monkey Island’s updated website where he explains he’s in jail for “marketing-related crimes” that may have involved selling non-fungible items.

If you missed the news in April, Return to Monkey Island marks the, well, return of Ron Gilbert to the series he created back in the late ‘80s. Gilbert wrote and directed The Secret of Monkey Island, and went to work on the second game before leaving LucasArts in 1992. Fellow Monkey Island veteran Dave Grossman is also working on the new game, which will take place after the first two games. On consoles, Return to Monkey Island will arrive first on Nintendo Switch.   

A few months ago, Valve announced that both of its excellent Portal games were coming to the Nintendo Switch, but we didn't know when. Today's Nintendo Direct presentation cleared that up. Portal Companion Collection will arrive on the Switch later today for $19.99. The collection includes both the original Portal from 2007 as well as the more expansive, story-driven Portal 2 from 2011. Whether you missed these games the first time out or just want to replay a pair of classics, this collection sounds like a good way to return to one of the most intriguing worlds Valve ever created.

While the original Portal was strictly a single-player experience, Portal 2 has a split-screen co-op experience; you can also pay this mode with a friend online as well. And while these games originated on the PC, Valve also released Portal 2 for the PlayStation 3 — and if I recall, the game's controls mapped to a controller very well. Given that the Portal series is more puzzle-based than traditional first-person games, you shouldn't have any problems navigating the world with a pair of Joy-Con controllers. 

GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 is one of those games that will forever be held up as a milestone in the art. It wasn’t the first FPS on a console, or even the first FPS on the Nintendo 64, but it was unquestionably the best. And the most influential. GoldenEye 007 inspired the development of Half-Life and reportedly prompted the creation of the Medal of Honor series. It also holds very fond memories for everyone of a certain age who would hunch over someone’s 14-inch bedroom TV to play the local deathmatch for hours at a time.

Its success, and legacy, means it’s one of a handful of titles that would merit a feature-length making-of documentary. Drew Roller’s GoldenEra tries to encompass everything about the title, from its genesis as a small project at Rare’s rural farmland campus to the monster it became. In one way, the story of GoldenEye 007 mirrors that of Citizen Kane – created by neophytes so unaware of what would be achieved, they went on to break new ground in the process. And while many of the team would go on to make some pretty good games, nothing would come close to their debut in terms of impact and acclaim.

GoldenEra has been able to get many of the original team on the record, including David Doak, Karl Hilton, Brett Jones, Duncan Botwood and Steve Ellis. Their testimony is supplemented by a number of journalists and talking heads from across the games industry that helps bulk out the gaps. After all, Rare (then working in partnership with Nintendo, now owned by Microsoft) has always been more secretive about what it does than other studios. And so there do seem to be missing chunks of testimony that would have helped paint a richer, fuller picture here.

And if there’s a problem with the film, it’s that it’s a lot harder to make the drama compelling given that software design is relatively staid. Not to mention that the impact a game has has to be measured in different ways to, for instance, a movie or album. After all, you can fairly clearly spot the examples of pop phenomenons, since they often swallow the culture around them for weeks or months at a time. Our relationship with video games is often a lot more personal, beyond the usual visual cues of people queuing up to buy the title on release day.

This is, perhaps, where GoldenEra starts to feel a little saggy, since it tries to cover the breadth of GoldenEye 007’s fallout without much depth. This means that the back third essentially becomes a series of five minute segments covering Perfect Dark, Free Radical Design and Timesplitters, GoldenEye fan films, the modding community that have kept the title alive and what happened to Rare. There’s even a little detail about the proposed remake of GoldenEye 007, as well as plenty of snark handed out to the subsequent James Bond games that are all, universally, not very good. But as much as you or I might take issue with the scattershot approach, it’s one way of folding in all of the many and varied ends to this particular story.

GoldenEra is available to rent or buy today on a number of on-demand platforms, including Google Play, Prime Video, Apple TV and Sky in the UK. There is no news, yet, on when the film will be made available in the US.

The Metaverse, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions it, will be a fully immersive virtual experience that rivals reality, at least from the waist up. But the visuals are only part of the overall Metaverse experience.

“Getting spatial audio right is key to delivering a realistic sense of presence in the metaverse,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Friday blog post. “If you're at a concert, or just talking with friends around a virtual table, a realistic sense of where sound is coming from makes you feel like you're actually there.”

That concert, the blog post notes, will sound very different if performed in a full-sized concert hall than in a middle school auditorium on account of the differences between their physical spaces and acoustics. As such, Meta’s AI and Reality Lab (MAIR, formerly FAIR) is collaborating with researchers from UT Austin to develop a trio of open source audio “understanding tasks” that will help developers build more immersive AR and VR experiences with more lifelike audio.

The first is MAIR’s Visual Acoustic Matching model, which can adapt a sample audio clip to any given environment using just a picture of the space. Want to hear what the NY Philharmonic would sound like inside San Francisco’s Boom Boom Room? Now you can. Previous simulation models were able to recreate a room’s acoustics based on its layout — but only if the precise geometry and material properties were already known — or from audio sampled within the space, neither of which produced particularly accurate results.

MAIR’s solution is the Visual Acoustic Matching model, called AViTAR, which “learns acoustic matching from in-the-wild web videos, despite their lack of acoustically mismatched audio and unlabeled data,” according to the post.

“One future use case we are interested in involves reliving past memories,” Zuckerberg wrote, betting on nostalgia. “Imagine being able to put on a pair of AR glasses and see an object with the option to play a memory associated with it, such as picking up a tutu and seeing a hologram of your child’s ballet recital. The audio strips away reverberation and makes the memory sound just like the time you experienced it, sitting in your exact seat in the audience.”

MAIR’s Visually-Informed Dereverberation mode (VIDA), on the other hand, will strip the echoey effect from playing an instrument in a large, open space like a subway station or cathedral. You’ll hear just the violin, not the reverberation of it bouncing off distant surfaces. Specifically, it “learns to remove reverberation based on both the observed sounds and the visual stream, which reveals cues about room geometry, materials, and speaker locations,” the post explained. This technology could be used to more effectively isolate vocals and spoken commands, making them easier for both humans and machines to understand.

VisualVoice does the same as VIDA but for voices. It uses both visual and audio cues to learn how to separate voices from background noises during its self-supervised training sessions. Meta anticipates this model getting a lot of work in the machine understanding applications and to improve accessibility. Think, more accurate subtitles, Siri understanding your request even when the room isn't dead silent or having the acoustics in a virtual chat room shift as people speaking move around the digital room. Again, just ignore the lack of legs.

“We envision a future where people can put on AR glasses and relive a holographic memory that looks and sounds the exact way they experienced it from their vantage point, or feel immersed by not just the graphics but also the sounds as they play games in a virtual world,” Zuckerberg wrote, noting that AViTAR and VIDA can only apply their tasks to the one picture they were trained for and will need a lot more development before public release. “These models are bringing us even closer to the multimodal, immersive experiences we want to build in the future.”

EA's Codemasters is making F1 2022 audio more realistic with an improved driver modes plus updates that make broadcast and car sounds more authentic, it revealed in its latest Developer Deep Dive video. It also unveiled its first licensed soundtrack with 33 songs from artists like Charli XCX, Hozier and Marshmellow. 

This year Formula 1 introduced all new cars that rely on floor tunnels to generate downforce and allow for tighter racing, along with all-new engines and more. F1 2022 is on top of those changes not just with the physics and visuals but also the sounds. To that end, the game has introduced all-new engine bundles based on the real vehicle sounds to give you the feeling of sitting in real Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes and other Formula 1 vehicles. 

"In a game like F1 22 the cars are the star so we want them to sound as authentic as possible. We record the actual cars every season and it's important that we recreate the authenticity of the engines," said audio director Brad Porter. "Players use the sound of the engine to drive the car so it's important to get that across as accurately as possible." 

That also includes touches like recording audio using the real headsets from team race engineers and simulating how things would sound to a driver inside a helmet. The developers also used mics that are very close to what announcers use in order accurately simulate the broadcast audio. 

That allowed the team to enhance the different sound modes available, including both Driver mode and Broadcast mode. The latter mode is designed to sound as close as possible to what you'd here on TV, Porter explained. It also enhanced the Cinematic mode to make it "larger than life" with "bespoke" touches like enhanced engine sounds, crowd noise and more. They've also added new settings to let players play with the mix of sounds more than ever.

Other new touches include the addition of Natalie Pinkham as a co-commentator, new recordings of all the announcers and authentic sounds from pit lane, garage and paddocks. Another big change is the addition of licensed music like you'll find in other EA games, letting players choose between 33 songs from artists ranging from Charli XCX to Deadmaus to Diplo. "It is an accelerative soundtrack experience, designed to strap the player into the cockpit and driven by the unrivalled energy of the new era of Formula 1," the development team said. 

Twitter is giving you the power to switch closed captions on or off on your mobile device. The social network has started rolling out a closed caption toggle to everyone on Android and iOS, a couple of months after it started testing the feature. So long as a video posted on the platform has available subtitles, you'll see a CC button at its top right portion — simply tap it to turn subtitles off or on. 

It's a great addition for accessibility purposes, seeing as it allows you to show captions whenever you want. In the past, you'll only see the CC button on the web and for subtitles on mobile if your sound is turned off. Further, captions automatically disappear when you expand a video, since doing so enables sound playback. A few years ago, you even had to go to accessibility settings to switch on closed captioning if you want to see subtitles for your videos at all. That said, the feature does have a limitation: The button will only show up for a video if a caption has been provided for it. 

Twitter introduced automatically generated captions for videos back in December, which is unrelated to this particular feature, according to a spokesperson who talked to The Verge. They will, however, only show up on muted videos unless you choose the option to see them at all times through the website's accessibility settings page. There's also no way to report inaccurate automated captions at the moment.