Compulsion Games is back with a new project called South of Midnight, a third-person action adventure set in an original world of magic, monsters and giant, blues-playing skeletons. The game's debut trailer is a cinematic snippet introducing the protagonist, a young woman named Hazel, as she attempts to reason with an immortal specter on a dark dock. Hazel is hunting a monster — or, it's hunting her, as the trailer goes on to show — and she can wield bright threads of magic. 

South of Midnight is in development for Xbox Series X/S and PC, including a Steam release, and it'll come to Game Pass on launch day — whenever that may be.

South of Midnight is set in a fictional town in the southern United States and the game is infused with magical realism. It's a Southern Gothic love letter of sorts, creative director David Sears said on Xbox Wire.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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Ubisoft's long-awaited open world Star Wars game will arrive in 2024. The publisher announced Star Wars Outlaws on Sunday during Microsoft's Xbox and Starfield Direct showcase with a cinematic trailer that introduces fans to the game's Han Solo-like protagonist, Key Vess. Ubisoft is billing Outlaws as the first-ever open world Star Wars game — though it's worth noting many past games in the franchise, including the recently released Jedi: Survivor, feature open world elements. Ubisoft first teased Outlaws in 2021, noting at the time that Massive Entertainment, the studio behind The Division 2, was creating the game inside of its in-house Snowdrop engine. The publisher promised to share gameplay footage from Outlaws during its Ubisoft Forward showcase on June 12th. Ubisoft will release Star Wars: Outlaws on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.   

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

It's been three years since we learned that a Fable reboot was in the works and we got our first glimpse at the game in action during the Xbox Games Showcase at Summer Game Fest. The clip opened with the unmistakable face and voice of Richard Ayoade. His character Dave (a vegetable enthusiast) complains about so-called heroes who take out bandits and slay legendary beasts. 

As Dave rambles on, he gets up to investigate something and we learn that he's a giant. He comes nose to face with one of those heroes before they get into a fight.

The trailer includes some gameplay snippets and it suggests there'll be an offbeat tone to Fable, which is being made by Playground Games. There's no release date as yet, but the action RPG will be available on Xbox Series X/S and PC. Of course, it'll be on Game Pass.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

More platform instability could be in Twitter’s near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.

If Twitter can’t migrate the system to its own servers before the end of the month, Platformer suggests a shutdown would greatly impact the company’s ability to combat spam and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Before Saturday, Smyte had been already showing signs of strain, following Elon Musk’s deep cuts to Twitter’s workforce. In December, Musk reportedly asked Twitter’s trust and safety team why the automated system hadn’t caught a Twitter Blue user who had been impersonating him to pump a crypto scam. The team told Musk the system had been unstable for a week, crashing “at least once a day.”

Platform instability has been a hallmark of Twitter 2.0. In February, many of the platform’s core features went down on more than one occasion. More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had trouble announcing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination after Twitter Spaces could not handle the influx of people who wanted to listen to the broadcast. If Twitter is in fact planning to stiff Google, it wouldn’t be the first time the company has ghosted on a contract. At the end of last year, California Property Trust, the owner of the building that houses Twitter headquarters, sued the company for failing to pay rent.

Get ready for some announcements, trailers, demos and an in-depth look at the upcoming RPG Starfield, as the Xbox Games Showcase at Summer Game Fest is nearly upon us. With E3 dead in the water, this is likely the year’s biggest event for jaw-dropping reveals. The festivities begin at 1:00 PM ET and there are plenty of ways to watch live. Microsoft is hosting its own YouTube stream and Twitch feed for the event and multiple streams are available via the festival itself.

So what can you expect to see this year? Microsoft says the stream will focus on both exclusive first-party and third-party Xbox releases, so it’s anybody’s guess. Rumors swirl that iconic Xbox franchise Fable will be making an appearance in some form, along with DLC for Hi-Fi Rush and a 60FPS mode for beleaguered vampire shooter Redfall. Also, expect updates on Forza Motorsport, Hellblade 2, Avowed and more.

However, Aaron Greenberg, the VP of Xbox Games Marketing, recently told fans on Twitter to come in with an “open mind” and “enjoy the ride”, suggesting that folks should temper expectations. After the presentation, Bethesda takes over for an indepth look at long-delayed space adventure Starfield before its September launch.

The show should run around two hours, with 90 minutes dedicated to the presentation and the remaining 30 minutes given over to Starfield. Of course, Engadget has staffers on location to report on the biggest reveals and announcements, so keep the site open for updates.

You get free stuff, you get free travel, you get the nifty cool title of "brand ambassador," what's not to love about being an internet influencer? There's the consequences, for one. Not even just the warranted consequences of your actual actions, mind you, but also those arriving unbidden based on the perception of your actions by your audience — and those can be two markedly different things bearing entirely disparate social costs. In her new book, Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers, Stephanie McNeal takes an unflinching look at the interplay between the public personas and private lives of three of the internet's most influential lifestyle bloggers: Caitlin Covington, Mirna Valerio, and Shannon Bird. 

Equal parts fascinating and disquieting — like a slow-motion car crash where everybody's really, really good looking — Swipe up for More explores the people and personalities behind the product placement. In the excerpt below, mommy blogger Shannon Bird recounts the internet's response to her 911 call asking a local cop to make a midnight milk run for her hungry baby.   

Portfolio

Excerpted from Swipe Up for More!: Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers by Stephanie McNeal, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Stephanie McNeal, 2023.

On January 28, 2020, Shannon and her kids were home alone. Dallin was on a work trip. Her youngest child, London, was only six weeks old and her son Brooklyn had recently broken his leg. That night, she found herself unable to produce any breast milk. She was taking medication that made her supply decline. When she realized she had no formula or saved breast milk, she grew desperate to feed her hungry baby but didn’t want to rouse all her kids to bring them to the store with her. After calling some friends and neighbors, around two a.m. she called 911.

She knew the officer who responded. When we were wandering the neighborhood on my “Mormon blogger tour,” we even saw him driving by. According to Shannon, the police officer usually posts up on their street and stays there all night waiting for a call. It’s kind of funny, she says, because there’s not much going on in Alpine, so he spends many nights just chilling. Shannon often chats with him when she goes to get her mail.

So, when she began to rack her brain for who may be up at two in the morning, she immediately thought of the police officer.

“It didn’t even faze me in a way,” she said. “I was like, ‘I know who’s awake!’”

The officer came through for her, buying baby formula and delivering it to her house in the middle of the night. Shannon was grateful to him and decided to share the saga on her Instagram Story.

In Shannon’s mind, the story was both her typical, Sandler-esque goofy fare (silly her, ending up in this situation) and also a feel-good story about a nice cop doing good in her community. She never expected the story to go viral. However, it was catnip for local news stations like KSL in Utah. (Local news loves a “good cop doing a good deed” story, which is controversial, to say the least.)

The story then spread like wildfire. Shannon was featured on CNN (“As a mother of five young children, Shannon Bird said she considers herself somewhat of a pro at the baby-raising game,” the story reads) and outlets as far away as Chicago and the UK.

At first, the attention from the media was kind of cool. Shannon described it as a “whirlwind,” ticking off all the shows that contacted her and excitedly telling me she got a free trip to New York to do interviews. She had producers “pounding on [her] door” asking her for exclusives. For a minute, everyone seemed to want to talk to her.

Then came the backlash. Online, Shannon was painted as the epitome of a clueless white woman, using her privilege to call upon law enforcement as her personal errand boy. Many questioned how a mother of color would have been treated by police in this situation (probably very differently). People called Shannon a neglectful mother, pathetic, and an attention seeker, and accused her of perpetrating a publicity stunt.

In retrospect, Shannon says she didn’t really think about the implications of what she was posting. In her mind, she wasn’t taking resources away from her larger community. She figured her local cops likely were not out responding to a crime in the middle of the night.

“I was like, ‘Wait, you’re the ones bringing race into this, I didn’t think it was a racist thing at all.’ That’s just because I really am color-blind I didn’t know my white privilege, I guess,” she said.

This decision to post about the cop and the formula has had a profound impact on every aspect of Shannon’s life since and has radically changed her perspective on both her life and her career as an influencer. It’s constantly on her mind. Even two years later, in January 2022 when I visited her, she brought up her 911 call within the first ten minutes of my arrival and referred to it constantly afterward.

The most serious and devastating impact it had on the Bird family was the real-world one. Shortly after the incident went viral, Shannon started getting more hate than she had ever before online. Then, things started to show up at her house. Her mailbox filled up with empty formula cans, though she had no idea how anyone had found her address to send them to.

Shannon wondered if the strange missives were coming from haters online or people in her community. She grew worried. Did everyone in her neighborhood know about the formula thing? What about the other parents at her kids’ school? Everywhere she looked she felt judged. More than ever, Shannon felt like the walls of Alpine were closing in on her.

Then, she said, Child and Family Services showed up at her house. Someone had called in a tip that the Bird children were in danger, and the agency needed to do a full investigation to clear the charges. Her kids had to be interviewed. Shannon was relieved when the officers seemed to be confused as to why they had been called to the Birds.

“You live in a seven-thousand-square-foot house,” she said they told her. “Your kids are eating takeout sushi right now. Like, what are they talking about?”

While she can make little jokes about it occasionally, Shannon was extremely traumatized by the DCFS visit. Dallin, on the other hand, is so easygoing that she said he was never really concerned when DCFS came, calling the whole saga “ridiculous.”

That’s his attitude to most things Shannon posts online, including the formula saga. When I asked him if online criticism ever bothered him, he shook his head with a laugh. Even he doesn’t really understand how he’s able to not let it bother him.

“You know, I just don’t care,” he said.

Sure, he may wish she didn’t post every single thing that comes into her head, but he long ago made his peace with the fact that he can’t control what Shannon wants to do. He is capable of tuning out the opinions of strangers, “You have to get to a point where, like, it’s funny. It’s funny to you,” he told me. “If you really, really care, then you can’t do this,” he said.

After arriving on PC in the fall of 2021, Unpacking is finally heading to mobile devices. Developer Witch Beam Games revealed today during the Wholesome Direct showcase that it plans to release its breakout game on phones and tablets later this year. The studio didn’t say exactly when the title would arrive on mobile devices, nor if it plans to release Unpacking on both iOS and Android, but judging from the trailer it shared, Apple devices are a lock.

Notably, the announcement comes after Unpacking Master, a nearly identical copy of Unpacking that featured ads and in-app microtransactions, briefly topped the App Store charts at the start of last year before it was pulled by Apple. The incident highlighted the difficulty small studios have in preventing copycat developers from stealing their work. If you’re the impatient type, Unpacking is currently available to play on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PlayStation.

Canon has long been synonymous with traditional photography, but the company could be preparing to take a more definitive step into the world of virtual reality. At the Photo Next 2023 show in Japan, the company showed off a prototype convertible camera. The unnamed device features a nifty folding mechanism that allows it to capture both 360-degree video and 180-degree 3D content. As a handful of websites, including PetaPixel and DIY Photography, have noted, the prototype bears more than a passing resemblance to the Insta360 EVO, which also makes use of a folding mechanism to offer 180-degree 3D capture. According to Pronews, Canon did not share any details on specs, pricing or availability.

Canon has previously only dabbled with virtual reality. In 2021, for instance, the company released a dual fisheye lens for its RF mirrorless camera system. The camera Canon teased at Photo Next features the company’s V branding, which it typically reserves for consumer-facing products. That would suggest Canon could be ready to take VR more seriously. While the company has sometimes been slow to embrace new technologies, Canon’s usual slow pace could work in its favor this time around. Consumer VR has been slow to take off, but with Apple’s recent entry into the space, the camera manufacturer could be ideally positioned to take advantage of growing interest in the format once the market is more mature.

One of the biggest reveals from a generally muted SGF showcase was gameplay footage from Mortal Kombat 1. Technically the 12th mainline game restarts the entire universe. Liu Kang, once mortal, is now a fully-fledged god of fire, and he’s rerolled the realm.

This means fan favorites like Sub Zero and Scorpion are back, but now, they’re siblings. The development team has decided to shake up the plot and reinvent characters for this 2023 reboot. Alongside this new world and character dynamics, MK1 also introduces a new feature to fights in the form of Kameos. After choosing a character, you’re able to select a guest fighter to back you up during the fight. Summonable by a single button (R1 on PlayStation), you can combine it with back and forward inputs to trigger multiple different moves. There are also Kameo throws and fatalities, all-in-all adding more versatility and flexibility in fights. Want to make sure you can block a character’s jump attacks? Get Jax on deck so he can suplex them to the floor. Need to match a projectile-flinging character? Summon Sonya.

We got to play with four different characters (and a trio of ‘Kameo’ assistants), trying out several different combinations and trying to see all the Kameo fatalities we could. Engadget’s Brandon Quintana is a long-standing MK fan. He lays out why the game delivers on what he wanted – while thrashing me in the process. Mortal Kombat 1 will launch this September 19th, 2023 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

The Pixel 8 and 8 Pro could feature some notable camera upgrades. Writing for Android Authority, leaker Kamila Wojciechowska, who has a solid record when it comes to Pixel leaks, says Google's next pair of high-end phones will feature Samsung ISOCELL GN2 sensors. That's the same sensor found on the Galaxy S22 and S23. More notably, it's a significant upgrade over the ISOCELL GN1 Google has used since the Pixel 6. The GN2 is physically larger and capable of capturing 35 percent more light than its predecessor, making it a better low-light performer. It also supports more modern features, including 8K/30 fps video capture and Staggered HDR. Google could use the latter to reduce ghosting in HDR images.

According to Wojciechowska, both the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro will come with the GN2. However, Google's flagship will also reportedly pack a few exclusive upgrades. The Pixel 8 Pro will feature a new time-of-flight sensor that should improve autofocus performance and, more significantly, a more modern sensor for its ultra-wide camera. Google reportedly plans to use the 64-megapixel Sony IMX787, the same sensor that powers the Pixel 7a's primary camera, to replace the Pixel 7 Pro's aging 12-megapixel IMX386. The former is almost twice the size of its predecessor and should produce much better images. Wojciechowska notes the version of the Pixel 8 Pro Google is currently testing doesn't come with a macro mode, though they suggest that doesn't mean the final version won't ship with that feature. The Pixel 8 will continue to use the IMX386 but may offer a lens with a wider field of view for those who want to capture more of a scene at once. Wojciechowska says the selfie and telephoto cameras on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are unchanged from those on the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. Lastly, they note the Pixel 8 Pro's rumored thermometer sensor won't be used for photography.

Naturally, Google also has software upgrades planned. The company will reportedly update its camera app to allow Pixel users to decide how strong the bokeh effect is when using the "Cinematic" video mode. Additionally, a new "Adaptive torch" feature may dynamically adjust the output of a phone's flash module to prevent it from overexposing images.

Considering Google has had a history of sticking with the same camera sensor for multiple Pixel generations, it's encouraging to learn the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro could feature new, more capable camera hardware. Google has done a lot with its computational software, but there are only so many visual enhancements you can squeeze out of a camera sensor without going for a bigger one.