Konami today dropped a ton of news about the future of its iconic horror franchise. Aside from confirming that remake of Silent Hill 2, the studio revealed three new games. Townfall comes from Annapurna Interactive and No Code, a Glasgow studio known for strong narrative titles like Observation and Stories Untold. The short teaser for Townfall looks to be the most traditional Silent Hill game of the trio.
Ascension, due out in 2023, is the least game-like installment, but it will feature the influence of J.J. Abrams. It’s an interactive streaming series with the tagline: Face Your Trauma Together. Ascension comes from Abrams’ studio, Bad Robot, and Genvid, a company that produces interactive live shows.
And then there’s Silent Hill f, coming from Ryūkishi07, a creator known for crafting acclaimed visual novels with psychological horror and supernatural mysteries at their core. The teaser for f is incredibly gruesome, featuring a young woman as she’s consumed from the inside-out by the tentacles of a flesh-eating plant. A YouTube description for the teaser says the game is “set in 1960s Japan featuring a beautiful, yet horrifying world.” There’s no word yet on a release date.
Oh, and of course, there’s a new Silent Hill movie, too. Happy Halloween, everyone.
– Mat Smith
The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.
The biggest stories you might have missed
Tesla’s chaotic third quarter saw profits climb but revenue falter
Amazon Prime Video will stream NFL Black Friday games starting in 2023
The bizarre saga of Meta, The Wire and their fight over Indian content moderation
What it’s like to drive a Lucid Air after its first major update
Microsoft wants to build an Xbox-branded mobile game store
The Activision Blizzard merger would play a key role.
A company filing with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has revealed plans to build a “next generation” Xbox store that’s available on mobile devices, not just consoles and PCs. The shop would unsurprisingly lean heavily on content from the proposed Activision Blizzard merger. Call of Duty Mobile and King’s more casual mobile games (think Candy Crush) represent more than half of Activision’s revenue.
The best portable Bluetooth speakers for 2022
There are good options in each price range.
We’ve tested out some of the most popular Bluetooth speakers in different price ranges, focusing a bit more on audio quality and dynamic range, while considering factors like utility and price. Ultimately, there isn’t one best Bluetooth speaker out there, but we’ve found plenty of good options for a range of uses and price points.
James Webb telescope captures Pillars of Creation in unprecedented detail
Featuring lots of young stars.
Researchers have captured their most detailed image yet of the Pillars of Creation, a star-forming nursery in the Eagle Nebula roughly 6,500 light-years away. The near-infrared picture shows even more detail than Hubble’s 2014 snapshot, with an abundance of stars (particularly newborns) – there isn’t even a galaxy in sight. The new stars are the bright red points of light and are estimated to be ‘just’ a few hundred thousand years old.
Meta’s AI translator can interpret unwritten languages
It currently translates between English and Hokkien.
Nearly half of the world’s roughly 7,000 known languages lack a written component. These unwritten languages pose a unique problem for machine learning translation systems, but one that Meta is trying to tackle with its Universal Speech Translator (UST) program. As part of this project, Meta researchers looked at Hokkien, an unwritten language spoken throughout Asia’s diaspora and one of Taiwan’s official languages.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained: “We leveraged Mandarin as an intermediate language to build pseudo-labels, where we first translated English (or Hokkien) speech to Mandarin text, and we then translated to Hokkien (or English) and added it to training data.” Currently, the system allows for someone who speaks Hokkien to converse with someone who speaks English, stiltedly.
Google’s iOS 16 lock screen widgets are now available
Gmail, Maps and other apps are now in closer reach.
Google’s new iOS 16 widgets give you at-a-glance info and shortcuts for some of the company’s core apps. Gmail shows your new message counts, and Maps provides links to your favorite trips (like your commute home). The widgets run the gamut of Google apps, though with diminishing usefulness: Google News shows the latest headlines, while Drive takes you to suggested and starred cloud files. YouTube and YouTube Music also have home screen widgets, so you can jump to your video subscriptions or search for a song on YouTube Music.