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The Nintendo Direct livestream on Thursday brought some unexpected news for Tamagotchi fans: the Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop game series of the early 2000s is being resurrected with a new entry, Tamagotchi Plaza. But it seems the announcement trailer left out the best part. As spotted by Tama-Palace, Bandai Namco says on the game’s official website that Tamagotchi Plaza will be compatible with the Tamagotchi Uni. Players will be able to link their Uni devices to the game to access special perks — kind of like how the beloved, defunct TamaTown worked. Tamagotchi Plaza comes out on June 27.

In Tamagotchi Plaza, players will act as shopkeepers and help get the town ready for the big Tamagotchi festival. Some shops will include the option for local two-player. As for connecting your Uni, Bandai says:

Tamagotchi Plaza features a linkage function with the Tamagotchi Uni. For the first time, players can connect with the latest toy model, the Tamagotchi Uni. By linking the Tamagotchi Uni, they will gain access to exclusive items, special events, and unique conversations not available in the base game, while supplies last.

Considering the Tamagotchi Uni is nearing two years old now, anything that will inject some newness into the experience is welcome. For anyone who grew bored of the Uni and has been neglecting it, Tamagotchi Plaza seems like a pretty compelling reason to dust it off and get playing again. Of course, you don’t need a Uni device to play; it has enough appeal on its own as a super cozy game that’ll tug at franchise fans’ nostalgia. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/the-new-tamagotchi-game-for-nintendo-switch-will-connect-with-tamagotchi-uni-160639100.html?src=rss 

Back in 2022, Sony hired Garrett Fredley to join its then newly formed Preservation team, which has been working to find and save documentation of PlayStation’s 30-year history since then. Now, Fredley spoke at Game Developers Conference to give an update about his team’s efforts. In his Game File newsletter, Stephen Totilo has shared the details about Fredley’s talk. Apparently, the team formed what it’s calling the PlayStation Studios Vault to store everything it could find about Sony’s game-making history. 

The Vault now houses game builds, source code and source art, but it has all kinds of other files, as well. Fredley explained that it was created to preserve “everything that is ever related to a project you can possibly find: from documentation to audio assets, to prototype information, anything under the sun, even cultural artifacts.” If it’s adjacent to a PlayStation studio game, the team will store it in the Vault — even photos of developer teams that made the game. Currently, the oldest item in the team’s collection has a 1994 timestamp and was from the tactical RPG Arc the Lad. The latest files include every customer-facing PS5 build of every PlayStation Studios game, as well as every debug, testing, alpha, beta and milestone releases. It has over 1,000 builds saved.

At the moment, the Vault has two main servers located in Las Vegas, Nevada and Liverpool, England, which store 650 terabytes of data, or around 200 million files. That’s almost double the 350 terabytes of data Fredley said the team gathered during another one of his talks last year. He expects to quickly go over the 1 petabyte of cloud server storage data the team’s current setup can handle, especially since more and more games are being developed. 

The preservation team uses tools to help its work, including a robot called Vaultron that can read thousands of discs to find files. But it still hasn’t been easy, since most studios don’t exactly store their files in a way that makes them understandable and accessible decades from now. Going forward, Fredley and his team will have to solve a few problems that they’re expecting to pop up. They’ll need to have good indexing tools, for instance, and figure out a way to maintain the ability to use the files they collect.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sony-has-been-backing-up-its-ps5-game-builds-as-part-of-a-preservation-effort-150025423.html?src=rss 

The reviews train rolls on at Engadget. We’ve had another busy couple of weeks, and more new devices are arriving for testing every day. For now, catch up on our in-depth analysis of the new base-model iPad, Nothing Phone 3a duo, some incredible sounding headphones and more. 

iPad (2025) with A16

Apple has been busy updating several devices over the past few weeks, including the “regular” iPad. The company’s entry-level tablet now has an A16 chip that offers plenty of power for most people. The iPad Air is still a better option if you can afford to spend more, according to buying advice senior reporter Jeff Dunn. “But for $250 less than the latest Air, the iPad (A16) does well to meet most iPad users where they live,” he writes. “It’s not the most delightful iPad, but it’s good enough for the masses.” 

Nothing Phone 3a and 3a Pro

The Nothing Phone 3a is much more than an update to the 2a when you consider the company opted to debut a new Pro model alongside it. There are concerns about a limited warranty in the US, but the 3a is a great budget device and the Pro has better-than-midrange cameras. “It’s really hard to criticize Nothing for any of the component choices, and if you’re willing to take a risk on the company’s limited US warranty and want something unique, these are the phones to buy,” senior reporter Igor Bonifacic explains.

Noble Audio FoKus Apollo

$649 is a lot to pay for a pair of wireless headphones. But if you’re searching for the absolute best available sound quality, perhaps money is no object. Noble Audio’s FoKus Apollo has a unique driver setup that offers a more expansive and detailed soundstage than the competition and long battery life, but that’s about it. “For me, to pay $649 I expect more in terms of features,” I argue. “The first item would be better ANC performance, but I don’t feel like spatial audio support and wear detection are too much to ask.”

Assassin’s Creed Shadows and a cheap tablet battle

Contributing reporter Kris Holt spent some time with the new Assassin’s Creed title and came away with some mixed feelings on the game. “Assassin’s Creed Shadows has impressive technical work, great performances and an expansive, well-drawn story but it’s unfortunately weighed down by some frustrating decisions and antiquated gameplay systems,” he writes. “Still, I’m eager to keep exploring.”

In addition to reviewing the latest iPad, Jeff also pit the Amazon Fire HD 8 against Walmart Onn 8 in a battle of the sub-$100 tablets. After a few weeks with the matchup, his biggest takeaway is you should probably just try to spend a little more on a new tablet. “Get an iPad, buy an older refurbished one if you have to, pay even a little bit extra for a more powerful tablet from Samsung, Lenovo or another name brand — it shouldn’t really matter,” he says. “It’ll run better, both today and into the future.”

Upcoming reviews

The busy reviews season continues for the team at Engadget. Coming up next, we’ve got the Pixel 9a, ASUS ROG Flow Z13 and AMD Ryzen 9950X3D. I’ll also be taking a look at the Weber Smoque smart grill and Audio-Technica’s ATH-CKS50TW2 earbuds. Spring is also the time we typically see a lot of the devices that were announced at CES go on sale, especially home theater gear, so look for some of those items to appear soon as well. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-review-recap-ipad-nothing-phone-3a-assassins-creed-shadows-and-more-130057384.html?src=rss 

Lenovo has the honor of releasing the first SteamOS handhelds not made by Valve, and it looks like you won’t have to wait long to get them. Legion Go S handhelds with SteamOS ship May 25, according to a new Best Buy listing spotted by The Verge, but go for at least $50 more than the original $499.99 price Lenovo promised.

The Legion Go S powered by SteamOS now starts at $549.99, which gets you an 8-inch, 120Hz OLED display, comfortable controls, a fingerprint reader / touchpad, 16GB of RAM and the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip. If you’re willing to pay $749.99, you can get the same package, but with the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which originally appeared on the Legion Go, and 32GB of RAM.

Perhaps more important than the specs, both handhelds come pre-loaded with SteamOS, which means they should be as easy to setup and use as the Steam Deck, and be able to play the vast majority of games thanks to Valve’s Proton compatibility software.

Lenovo already released its first Windows 11 version of the Legion Go S back in February for $730. We found it expensive and a bit hampered by Windows in our review, but otherwise solid. At the time, a SteamOS version for $500 seemed like a promising alternative. But for $50 extra, some of that shine has come off, particularly when you can get the already excellent Steam Deck OLED for the same price. 

It’ll take a full review to suss out how different SteamOS makes the Legion Go S, whether paired with the Ryzen Z2 Go or the more powerful Ryzen Z1 Extreme. At the very least, it’s nice to have more SteamOS devices in the wild.

The Legion Go S powered by SteamOS is available to pre-order now for $549.99, and will ship on May 25. The Ryzen Z1 Extreme model ships on the same date for $749.99. Lenovo is also offering a version of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme Legion Go S with Windows 11 for $829.99, too.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/lenovo-legion-go-s-with-steamos-will-land-may-25-for-50-more-than-expected-213820420.html?src=rss 

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has purchased X, according to a post shared by Musk. Besides their similar names and owner, the companies are already connected through xAI’s chatbot Grok, which is integrated into X.

X was acquired by xAI through an all-stock transaction. “The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt),” Musk writes. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined.” The companies plan on combining “data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” using X’s reach as a social platform to spread “xAI’s advanced AI capability.” The post offers little detail beyond that, but the motivations could be as financial as they are practical.

X, then Twitter, was acquired by Musk in 2022 for $43 billion. xAI, like many leading AI companies, has been raising money as often and as quickly as possible. Combining the two companies, besides the fuzzy potential benefits social media posts could have for training AI, helps ease some of the debt that Musk took on taking Twitter private. The billionaire pulled a similar stunt in 2016 with Tesla, when the car maker merged with SolarCity for $2.6 billion. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/xai-elon-musks-ai-company-just-purchased-x-elon-musks-social-media-company-221503759.html?src=rss 

YouTube is testing turning off notifications from channels viewers don’t engage with in attempt to tame the number of notifications they receive. The video platform says the test will specifically impact viewers who’ve chosen to receive “All” notifications from a channel.

During the experiment, notifications will still appear in the notification inbox, but “viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel despite having been sent recent push notifications will not receive push notifications,” YouTube says. The goal is to get viewers to not disable notifications entirely just because they’ve received too many.

Many YouTube creators specifically ask people to subscribe and enable notifications so they know when a new video has been uploaded. The problem is, when you agree to receive “All” notifications, you’ll also get pestered about things that aren’t new uploads. There are ways to manage your notifications, but YouTube claims it’s common for people to disable them at the app-level once they get annoyed (impacting every channel they’re subscribed to), rather than try and tweak things. For a creator who wants to maximize the number of people that watch their videos, not being able to rely on push notifications to grab subscribers’ attention is a problem.

YouTube deciding that some viewers shouldn’t receive notifications from a given channel seems like an extreme solution, though. The company describes this test as “small,” but it certainly feels like there could be a more nuanced way to weed out the push notifications people don’t need.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/youtube-may-mute-notifications-from-channels-you-dont-watch-202802028.html?src=rss