2025-03-10 06:41:15
Death Stranding’s sequel continues to look absolutely bonkers. The upcoming game — known as Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — got a fresh trailer and a long-awaited release date of June 26th during a presentation at SXSW.
The PlayStation 5 exclusive will cost $69.99 and is available for pre-order starting on March 17th. Those who buy the Digital Deluxe Edition ($79.99) or Collector’s Edition ($229.99) get early access starting on June 24th.
Hideo Kojima presented the 10-minute trailer, which opens on two characters — one is Neil, who is played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli — arguing with each other. Following that, there’s plenty of Sam (Norman Reedus) navigating the wastes with his BB and his cargo, facing bad weather, an avalanche, and the series’ signature horrific monsters. The game has a lot of star power, with the trailer highlighting characters like Fragile (Léa Seydoux), Tarman (George Miller), Higgs (Troy Baker), Tomorrow (Elle Fanning), Dollamn (Fatih Akin), Rainy (Shioli Kutsuna), The President (Alastair Duncan), Lucy (Alissa Jung), Heartman (Nicholas Winding Refn), and Doctor (Debra Wilson).
Near the end, the trailer shows Neil donning a bandana that, as IGN notes, is very reminiscent of Solid Snake, the lead character of Kojima’s famed Metal Gear Solid series. The shot is creepy, with quick flashes showing his face dirty, bloody, or replaced with a skull.
Kojima also announced “The Strands of Harmony World Tour,” a Death Stranding concert tour that will visit 19 cities and feature the music of Death Stranding, performed by a live orchestra and singers. That begins on November 8th, 2025, in Sydney, Australia.
First announced in 2022, On the Beach is a direct sequel to 2019’s Death Stranding, a game that saw Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima branch out with a new studio. The original’s success led to a director’s cut, multiple ports, and an upcoming live-action film made in partnership with A24.
The studio is also working on a pair of other projects, with the Xbox horror game OD, which stars Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer, and an “action espionage” codenamed PHYSINT.
2025-03-10 06:07:22
Reports are cropping up today that second-generation Chromecasts and music-streaming Chromecast Audio devices are failing, displaying an error on the device they’re trying to cast from that seems to imply the streamers may no longer be supported, reports 9to5Google.
Text from screenshots of the error posted to Reddit reads, “Untrusted device” and continues, saying the device “couldn’t be verified. This could be caused by outdated device firmware.” Understandably, people are concerned that Google has decided to send the streaming pucks, both quite old now, to the Google graveyard.
As 9to5Google points out, the company hasn’t said it is deprecating the two, as it did for the original Chromecast in 2023. At least one member of the Chromecast community says they have reached out to Google support and were told that the company is aware of the issue and is awaiting a fix. Google didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.
Google discontinued the Chromecast line in August last year but said that it was still offering “continued software and security updates to the latest devices.” If we are approaching the end of the line for the two devices being affected today, it would be a small bummer, especially when it comes to the Chromecast Audio. There are better alternatives to it these days, but none, I’d say, with quite as much charm as Google’s little vinyl record-shaped music streamer.
2025-03-10 05:08:43
Apple is expected to release its thinnest phone yet later this year with the iPhone 17 Air. Rumors have held that the phone will be thinner than the 6.9mm iPhone 6 was, but recent leaks give us a better idea than we’ve had before of what to expect.
Rumors of the iPhone 17 Air’s dimensions have ranged over the last several months, but a recent one from leaker Ice Universe puts it at just 5.5mm thick, something that Ming-Chi Kuo predicted in January. Another analyst, Jeff Pu, said before that it would be more like 6mm.
But where Kuo said the phone will have a 6.6-inch screen, Ice Universe says it’ll actually be 6.9 inches like the iPhone 17 Pro Max — they say both phones will have the same “length, width, screen size, and bezel” as the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Later, they posted a video showing an apparent render of the device.
On Friday, YouTuber iDeviceHelp posted a video in collaboration with leaker Majin Bu, who published similar-looking renders last month. iDeviceHelp claims to be showing mockups of the standard, Pro Max, and Air models “based on internal documents.” The video lingers on the edge of the phone at moments, and I was immediately struck by how much seeing it reminded me of looking edge-on at the 5.1mm 13-inch M4 iPad Pro, the one Apple device thinner than this is rumored to be.
It’s hard not to also notice the Google Pixel-like camera bar stretching left-to-right on the back of iDeviceHelp’s mockups of the iPhone 17 Air and Pro Max. It’s unclear whether the bar is functional or just Apple trying out some new aesthetic, but I welcome it all the same, if for no other reason than my iPhone 15 Pro is so dang floppy when laying on its back on my desk. iDeviceHelp demonstrated with the 17 Pro Max mockup that the bar seems to help there. But in both cases, the rear cameras themselves still stick up out of the bar, so it may not be perfect. Oh well, maybe next year.
As for the rest of the design, these renders and mockups appear to show it with buttons in all the same places as current iPhones (not counting the iPhone 16E, which lacks the Camera Control button), along with a USB-C port and speaker holes on the bottom. The phone is also expected to have a Dynamic Island and Face ID on the front. We won’t likely know for sure how close the renders are until September, when Apple typically reveals its latest batch of flagship iPhones.
2025-03-10 02:25:47
The PS5 version of Forza Horizon 5 will require you to link a Microsoft account to your PlayStation Network account in order to play the game, according to a FAQ on the game’s official website.
The FAQ says that players will be prompted to link the two the first time they load the game. And if you unlink later, you “will be constrained to relinking to only that specific and originally linked” Microsoft account.
The requirement stings given that there’s no cross-platform saving, so the progress you make in the PS5 version isn’t reflected in the Xbox version. It’s the same situation for the Steam version, as the FAQ points out. As the page also notes, Horizon 5 players will need a PlayStation Plus subscription to access the game’s multiplayer feature, and there are “no plans for a disc release.”
When Forza Horizon 5 releases on the PS5 on April 29th, it will be the latest Xbox exclusive to make the leap to Sony’s console, joining games like Sea of Thieves, which also requires you to link a Microsoft account before you can play.
Gamers haven’t been keen on required account linking when Sony has done it in the past. The company actually removed a requirement for you to sign in with your PSN account for some PC versions of some games, including Helldivers 2 and, more recently, God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.
2025-03-10 00:30:03
Big players, including Microsoft, with Copilot, Google, with Gemini, and OpenAI, with GPT-4o, are making AI chatbot technology previously restricted to test labs more accessible to the general public.
How do these large language model (LLM) programs work? OpenAI’s GPT-3 told us that AI uses “a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language” and that these programs analyze “the statistical properties of the language” to “make educated guesses based on the words you’ve typed previously.”
Or, in the words of James Vincent, a human person: “These AI tools are vast autocomplete systems, trained to predict which word follows the next in any given sentence. As such, they have no hard-coded database of ‘facts’ to draw on — just the ability to write plausible-sounding statements. This means they have a tendency to present false information as truth since whether a given sentence sounds plausible does not guarantee its factuality.”
But there are so many more pieces to the AI landscape that are coming into play (and so many name changes — remember when we were talking about Bing and Bard before those tools were rebranded?), but you can be sure to see it all unfold here on The Verge.
2025-03-10 00:05:45
President Donald Trump kicked off the first day of his presidency by signing a flurry of executive actions, including halting enforcement of the TikTok ban and rolling back the Biden administration’s artificial intelligence order.
Having already run the country once before, Trump entered the presidency with the goal of hitting the ground running, having already selected nominees and chairs for key agencies that oversee tech. This time, Trump has the backing of many tech billionaires who attended his inauguration and showed up at his home in Mar-a-Lago.
Read on below as we keep track of all the ways Trump is leaving his mark on tech in his first 100 days in office.
