Kalakshar US

I’ve been finding myself consistently impressed by the experiences developers have managed to cram into the Playdate. It’s not that I expected little of the handheld and its potential offerings when I first impulsively pre-ordered it way back when, but I guess I didn’t really know what to expect beyond the crank-focused games Panic first teased ahead of its release, which seemed geared toward short bursts of play. Over the past few months, I’ve played lots of those and thoroughly enjoyed them, but I’ve also spent hours solving puzzles and exploring intricate maps in games with a surprising amount of substance. Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll, which recently came to the Playdate Catalog, may be one of the best yet.

Created by developer bumbleborn, Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll is a metroidvania, but don’t let that scare you off if combat isn’t your thing; it’s non-violent, putting the emphasis instead on tricky platforming, puzzles and finding your way around sprawling caverns. The map feels huge for a Playdate game — there over 250 rooms spread between its four levels, according to the developer.

In Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll, a sickness known as the Blight threatened to wipe out all life, forcing the inhabitants of three kingdoms to escape underground. Humans live on the bottom-most level, in a kingdom called Bottomrock. As the child protagonist of the game, you’re on a mission to deliver a scroll to The Archives, requiring you journey through the somewhat perilous Kingdoms Three. It’s a world that holds a lot of secrets, and you’ll have to interact with certain elements of the environment in unexpected ways in order to move forward or access seemingly inaccessible items.

But there’s a kind of haunting sereneness to it all, even with its challenging moments. The music sets just the right atmosphere, and visually, Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll is stunning. The artwork is so crisp down to the tiniest details, and I just love the style of it all. Larger characters especially — like the frog prince whose belly you can bounce on — really come to life. Between the music, the art, the lore and just the overall vibes, Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll completely drew me in. If there’s one Playdate game you should pick up right now, it’s this.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/echo-the-oracles-scroll-is-a-must-play-combatless-metroidvania-for-playdate-022534825.html?src=rss 

As spotted by a Reddit user this weekend, Panic is now selling a macaroni yellow charging brick to go with the yellow cable that comes with the distinctively yellow Playdate. Say yellow again. The good news for anyone who wants a complete set of matching accessories is that it’s only $5 — the bad news is that shipping costs almost double that at its cheapest, so it’s kind of hard to justify buying on its own.

Also note that the 10W power adapter has a USB-A connection so it’ll work with your existing Playdate charging cable, but it’s otherwise kind of behind the times considering the general shift toward the USB-C connection. At the moment, Panic is only selling a version that’s compatible with the 2-prong plug type that’s standard in North America and Japan. It goes without saying that absolutely no one needs this — our Playdates have been charging just fine without it so far — but if you’re already on the site getting a pizza case now that they’re back in stock, then sure, go wild.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/you-can-now-get-a-yellow-charging-brick-for-5-to-match-your-playdates-cable-220316721.html?src=rss 

Apple is being sued by victims of child sexual abuse over its failure to follow through with plans to scan iCloud for child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), The New York Times reports. In 2021, Apple announced it was working on a tool to detect CSAM that would flag images showing such abuse and notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But the company was hit with immediate backlash over the privacy implications of the technology, and ultimately abandoned the plan.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Saturday in Northern California, is seeking damages upwards of $1.2 billion dollars for a potential group of 2,680 victims, according to NYT. It claims that, after Apple showed off its planned child safety tools, the company “failed to implement those designs or take any measures to detect and limit” CSAM on its devices, leading to the victims’ harm as the images continued to circulate. Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment.

In a statement to The New York Times about the lawsuit, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we are committed to fighting the ways predators put children at risk. We are urgently and actively innovating to combat these crimes without compromising the security and privacy of all our users.” The lawsuit comes just a few months after Apple was accused of underreporting CSAM by the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-sued-for-failing-to-implement-tools-that-would-detect-csam-in-icloud-202940984.html?src=rss 

On Saturday, a new image generator called Aurora became available for some Grok users, many of whom shared the tool’s results on X touting their photorealism. But as of Sunday afternoon, Aurora appears to be gone. While it briefly showed up as an option in Grok’s model selection menu as “Grok 2 + Aurora (beta),” it’s since been replaced with “Grok 2 + Flux (beta).” It looks like Aurora may have gone public before it was meant to. In a tweet replying to one user who shared images of Tesla’s Cybertruck created with Aurora, Elon Musk said, “This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast.”

It comes a few days after X made Grok 2 free to use, albeit with limitations for non-paying users. Grok’s previous image generator has been called out for lacking certain restrictions around the types of content it can produce, like offensive images of politicians and celebrities, and Aurora seems pretty much in line with what we’ve seen already in that regard. TechCrunch played around with Aurora for a bit before it was taken down and found it didn’t reject a prompt to create “an image of a bloodied [Donald] Trump.” 

That’s in addition to examples shared on X of it generating images of public figures and copyrighted characters — including numerous images of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, as well as an image of Luigi and Mickey Mouse in a boxing match. But, it wouldn’t produce nudes, according to TechCrunch, so that’s something.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/x-adds-then-quickly-removes-groks-new-aurora-image-generator-181917002.html?src=rss