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Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress that the money would provide "limited benefit" to Iran as it could only be used for humanitarian trade.

He also confirmed that five Iranians detained in the US would be freed as part of the prisoner exchange deal.

Republicans condemned the transfer.

One senator accused President Joe Biden of paying a "ransom to the world's worst state sponsor of terrorism".

Last month, US officials said four American-Iranian dual nationals had been taken out of Evin prison in Tehran and moved to house arrest.

Three of the prisoners were named by a lawyer as Siamak Namazi, Emad Shargi and Morad Tahbaz, who also has British citizenship. The fourth was not identified, nor was the fifth, who was already under house arrest.

More than 2.2 million litres of wine flowed through the streets of São Lourenço de Bairro in Portugal, after two tanks burst during transport.

The distillery apologised for the incident and said emergency services reacted quickly to prevent the wine from contaminating a river.

A Van Gogh painting stolen from a Dutch museum in March 2020 is back in safe hands after a three-and-a-half-year quest to recover it.

Dutch art detective Arthur Brand said he had been handed the 139-year-old painting in a pillow and an Ikea bag by a man who came to his front door.

"I did this in complete co-ordination with Dutch police and we knew this guy wasn't involved in the theft," he said.

In 2021, a career criminal was jailed for eight years over the incident.

But by then the painting, worth several million euros, had already changed hands.

In this episode of New Gameplay Today, Blake Hester and I show you a glimpse of a different kind of cooking game, Nour: Play With Your Food. Rather than tasking players with cooking a proper dish, developer Terrifying Jellyfish presents a playspace of ingredients, tools like blowtorches and meat tenderizers, and a suite of odd abilities that change gravity, freeze food, and make your culinary ingredients dance — all in the name of playfulness. While levels contain hidden experiences you can unlock by specific interactions, there's hardly a central goal in Nour. Similar to Townscaper, this joyful release is more akin to a toy than a game, and it's so much fun.

YouTube Video

Fortnite Battle Royale’s v26.10 update is now live in-game and it brings with it some returning My Hero Academia items, three new heroes, and a new Shoto Todoroki-inspired item. Alongside Todoroki, Eijiro Kirishima and Mina Ashido are in the Item Shop available for purchase.

Bilkins' Folly popped up on my radar, err, sea charts, earlier this year when developer Webbysoft and Publisher Armor Games Studios announced the PC-only title was actually going to launch on PlayStation and Switch now as well. I watched the console announcement trailer and knew I needed to check this game out – old-school adventure gameplay, a fun and whimsical pixel art style, and pirates, of course. It’s been months since that announcement, but I’ve finally played a few hours of Bilkins' Folly, and that small taste indicates a jolly adventure is on the way when the game releases next month on October 2.

My time with Bilkins' Folly starts hours into the game’s story, so I’ll keep details vague. But I control Percy, a makeshift pirate, and his pup companion, Drayton, who not only loves a good pet but also helps me find treasures buried in the ground and more.

I think it's safe to say that Pharaoh has the most campaign mechanics we have ever seen in this series to date. It's almost dizzying to come to grips with it all, though thankfully, they were introduced to me a little bit at a time. Where to even start? As I took control of Ramesses – not yet known by his royal title Ramesses III, as I had not taken the throne yet – the first thing I noticed was that inhabited locations on the map have been split up into three different levels. We have the major and minor settlements comprising a region that you're used to. But around each of these are slots for outposts, which are sort of like an extra set of building slots, except that they all exist at a distinct physical location that can be quite far from the settlement they're supporting.

But we weren’t just impressed at the audacity of someone going through all the trouble of gathering that many potatoes. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman called the clip “mind-blowing” because all of the potatoes “have physics.” But what does it mean for something to “have physics”? Why is everyone fussing so much about a pile of 20,000 tumbling potatoes in a game about being a cool space explorer?

We spoke to a number of game developers to get their insight on what’s really going on in the potato clip, why more games don’t let players do this kind of thing, and whether or not 20,000 tumbling potatoes really is as impressive as it seems.

A zero-pressure dungeon roguelike that offers some familiar comfort even if it doesn't take full advantage of its Saturday morning cartoon schtick.

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These characters look the part when it comes to the He-Man-inspired pastiche, but otherwise they don't have the same colour when it comes to in-game voice lines or end-of-episode dialogue. Like I say, the focus of the marketing seems to be "relive your childhood!" but the game's moving parts are all focused on making a dungeon-running co-op roguelike that conforms to player expectations. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you quickly forget about the theme and get to pulverizing skellingtons, incinerating bosses, and hoovering up gold.

Alan Wake 2 outfit Remedy Entertainment have "always" felt pressured to make their games longer, creative director Sam Lake has observed in a new interview which also picks apart the differences between the forthcoming midwestern spookalot, out this October, and the 2010 original. Lake added that, Remedy's sense of audience expectations notwithstanding, he himself has difficulty setting aside hours for longer games. "[It's] just struggling with finding time and you know, being interested in a story, wanting to see it through," he said. "So it can even be daunting at times to start playing a game that you know is really, really long."

Welcome to the New Era. Will you fight for peace, or embrace the khaos?

In addition to the full line of slimmer GAMING SLIM NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, MSI has sneaked a couple of other models to its GeForce RTX 40 series lineup, including the MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 2X White and the RTX 4070 Ti VENTUS 2X White. Featuring an all-white design, the VENTUS 2X WHITE features a dual-fan cooler with a white backplate.

The MSI RTX 4070 Ti VENTUS 2X White works at 2,610 MHz Boost clock, which can be further tuned up to 2,625 via MSI Center, while the MSI RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X works at 2,475 MHz Boost clock which can be further pushed up to 2,490 MHz via MSI Center. The rest of the specifications and the design, other than an all-white color scheme, should be the same as on the standard black versions of these graphics cards. Both feature TORX FAN 4.0 with Zero Frozr, copper baseplate with Core Pipes heatpipe design, and reinforced backplate.