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While most of us whiled away the many days of pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020 binge-watching Netflix and baking our own bread for some reason, acclaimed anime screenwriter Gen Urobochi (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass) went ahead and built his own video game. That game, a rough demo that featured a rabbit in a mechanical suit blasting his way through piles of junk in a post-apocalyptic world, would eventually serve as the jumping off point for Rusty Rabbit, the new 2.5D Metroidvania from developer Nitro Plus announced this week at Tokyo Game Show.

This Metroidvania with roguelike elements takes place thousands of years after humanity has abandoned the Earth, and rabbits have taken over. Stamp, the long-eared main character, spends his days piloting his mech suit ‘Junkster’ through the giant ruins of a giant space elevator in search of valuable scrap. When one day he stumbles upon clues to the whereabouts of his missing daughter on an abandoned ‘D-Tam’ computer terminal, it sends Stamp on a search for more of these computer terminals buried throughout Rusty Rabbit’s Metroidvania-style maze. All the while battling enemies and hunting for treasures, then subsequently making return trips to his base camp at the surface in order to upgrade his suit.

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These new drivers don't promise much by way of specifics. Though Nvidia does say they provide "the best gaming experience for the latest new games supporting DLSS 3.5 technology and DLSS Ray Reconstruction including Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty."

That's probably reason enough to go out and download this driver package. Cyberpunk is chocked full of the latest graphics features, including Ray Reconstruction. Our Dave has been playing around with Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077 ahead of time, and he's quite smitten with it already.

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Build A Rocket Boy, the studio founded by former Rockstar exec Leslie Benzies, has announced plans for an imminent PC closed alpha test of its ambitious-looking game creation platform Everywhere.

This closed alpha will be accessible to players who sign up for an account at Everywhere.game.

A new trailer for Everywhere, released today, shows some of the biomes you can explore and play around with in the game, as well as some swooping camera pans through its Ready Player One-style hub. There's also a glimpse at some of the types of mini-games you can build and a brief look at the game's editor mode, which lets you tweak creations you've made on the fly.

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Yolanda Fraser is back near a ragged chain-link fence, blinking through tears as she tidies up flowers and ribbons and a pinwheel twirls in the breeze at a makeshift roadside memorial in a small Montana town.

This is where the badly decomposed body of her granddaughter Kaysera Stops Pretty Places was found a few days after the 18-year-old went missing from a Native American reservation border town.

Four years later, there are still no answers about how the Native American teenager was killed. No named suspects. No arrests.

Fraser’s grief is a common tale among Native Americans whose loved ones went missing, and she’s turned her fight for justice into a leading role with other families working to highlight missing and slain Indigenous peoples’ cases across the U.S. Despite some early success from a new U.S. government program aimed at the problem, most cases remain unsolved and federal officials have closed more than 300 potential cases due to jurisdictional conflicts and other issues.

• At least 7,178,000 Medicaid enrollees have been disenrolled as of September 20, 2023, based on the most current data from 48 states and the District of Columbia

• There is wide variation in disenrollment rates across reporting states, ranging from 69% in Texas to 14% in Maine and Oregon.

In his first interview since he was acquitted over the weekend in a historic impeachment trial, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) lashed out at the Biden administration and the Lone Star State’s House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) over his impeachment and trial.
“So you think that the effort to remove you from office really came from the Biden administration?” commentator Tucker Carlson asked Paxton in the interview, posted to the platform X.
“I really do,” Paxton said, adding that he thinks “that’s where it was instigated.”
The attorney general alleged that the impeachment was a way to get him “out of the way” after he filed lawsuits against the administration.
Paxton, who had been suspended from his post since the Texas House voted to impeach him earlier this year, was acquitted by a jury of state senators over the weekend on all 16 articles of impeachment he faced.

Here's one major change coming down the road: Long-term support (LTS) for Linux kernels is being reduced from six to two years.

Currently, there are six LTS Linux kernels -- 6.1, 5.15, 5.10, 5.4, 4.19, and 4.14. Under the process to date, 4.14 would roll off in January 2024, and another kernel would be added. Going forward, though, when the 4.14 kernel and the next two drop off, they won't be replaced.

Why? Simple, Corbet explained: "There's really no point to maintaining it for that long because people are not using them." I agree. While I'm sure someone out there is still running 4.14 in a production Linux system, there can't be many of them.

Another reason, and a far bigger problem than simply maintaining LTS, according to Corbet, is that Linux code maintainers are burning out. It's not that developers are a problem. The last few Linux releases have involved an average of more than 2,000 programmers -- including about 200 new developers coming on board -- working on each release. However, the maintainers -- the people who check the code to see if it fits and works properly -- are another matter.

Ohio’s Supreme Court late Tuesday ruled that much of the GOP-controlled state ballot board’s language to describe a November question about abortion is accurate, dealing a blow to the abortion rights groups that challenged the board’s description.

The sharply divided court said only one element of the description is misleading and must be rewritten. The justices ruled that all other elements that were challenged, including the substitution of “unborn child” for “fetus,” can remain.

In November, Ohioans will vote on a citizen-initiated amendment that would create a constitutional right to reproductive freedom in the state, which would protect decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing a pregnancy, miscarriage care and abortion up to the point of fetal viability.

The Ohio Ballot Board is tasked with writing the actual words of statewide ballot measures. The wording is supposed to be fair and nonpartisan, without attempts to mislead or deceive voters.

Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, the coalition supporting the amendment, sued the board after it adopted wording drafted by the Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose that the coalition said was “a naked attempt to prejudice voters against the Amendment.”

LaRose, who is running in the GOP primary to challenge Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) next year, has publicly opposed the amendment.

But the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the phrase “unborn child” solicits the board’s “ethical judgment or personal view.”

Some time into figuring out Fantastic Haven's UI and menu options, I received a notification that a gryphon—who I'd so nicely made a little patch of grassland for—had gone rogue. Tabbing back to my settlement, I watched the little rascal sprint for my quarantine building and smack it before my helpful golems came along to calm the poor blighter down.

These charming little vignettes give the creatures of Fantastic Haven a whole lot of personality, even if they're only in your enclosures for a short period of time. Fantastic Haven is a Fantasy Management builder—meaning you'll be making adjustments to your clinic for wondrous beasts from a top-down view, plonking down buildings, assigning your wizards to tasks, navigating a research tree, that sort of thing.

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Looking to dust off Cyberpunk 2077 for the new 2.0 update? If you want the game looking, and running, like Johnny Silverhand's Porsche 911 Turbo, you should enable one of the game's many available upscaling technologies. You have a few to choose from: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS.

You can take your pick of the lot with a modern GeForce graphics card installed in your PC, though I would stick with Nvidia's own DLSS. Cyberpunk 2077 has become the poster child for new DLSS versions, including DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, and it looks real good. But those with AMD or Intel cards, or older Nvidia GPUs, don't have that option available to them.

(OP: Article has some comparison shots with sliders)

After a draining day's reportage upon the thoroughly alien doings of vast corporate publishers, I like nothing better than to flee, blabbing and weeping, into the arms of a micro-RPG. Scumhead's Franzen - released a few days ago on Steam and Itch - has a couple of big draws, straight off the bat. Firstly and least importantly, it's free, which it really shouldn't be. Secondly and more significantly, it's one of those rare RPG miniatures that is both richly imagined and snappy, with a busy and befuddling world in which you have immediate clear motivations that escalate rapidly and breed Dire Implications. It also looks like a 16-bit Pathologic, so consider me firmly on board.

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