Video game fans and big, blockbuster releases have had an uneasy relationship in recent years. As so-called triple-A games get more expensive to make, the publishers behind them are accused of taking fewer risks and failing to try new things. But highly anticipated new release Crimson Desert asks a different question - what if a big-budget, graphically advanced game tried to do absolutely everything? The ambitious action-adventure's been compared to a buffet, presenting players with a smorgasbord of ideas, gameplay styles and quests to gorge on. While some have praised it as a feast, others have found it overstuffed, with some undercooked morsels behind the impressive presentation.

US rapper Afroman has defeated seven sheriff's deputies in a court case after they sued him for releasing songs and videos that mocked them and a raid they carried out on his home. The officers broke down the musician's door in 2022 as part of a drug and kidnapping investigation, but the raid didn't lead to any charges. Afroman, best known for his 2000 hit Because I Got High, responded by using home security footage in viral videos that ridiculed the deputies. His video for the song Lemon Pound Cake was inspired by a deputy apparently eyeing a cake in his kitchen, while another video attributed personal and sexual transgressions to the officers. They sued him for defamation, but a jury has sided with the colourful rapper after a three-day trial. Afroman yelled outside the Ohio court, surrounded by supporters, in a clip posted on social media after the verdict.

Amazon's Alexa has had an AI upgrade. Now she's got more to say Amazon's Echo smart speaker - more commonly known as Alexa - is getting an AI-powered upgrade which will roll out across the UK. Alexa+ turns the digital assistant into a more chatty device which Amazon says will be able to follow threads and be more proactive in its responses. There has been criticism the Echo has stagnated since its launch in 2016, while AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have become much easier to communicate with. It will be interesting to see how users react to this - we expect this could be polarising, with some enjoying the more relaxed, familiar interactions while others may find it disconcerting, said Jessica Miller, head of data insights at FDM/CCS Insight. UK consumers will notice an immediate difference, she added.

Humour and science fiction may not seem obvious bedfellows but a history of cinema will tell you different. Think Spaceballs, Mars Attacks! and Everything Everwhere All At Once to name but a few. And now Ryan Gosling is hopping on board. The 45-year-old is both the lead actor and producer of Project Hail Mary, a space adventure film based on the 2021 Andy Weir novel of the same name. While Gosling has showcased his comedy chops in films such as Barbie and Nice Guys, he tells the BBC he's always struggled as an actor because I would want to bring humour to something but has found opportunities to be funny limited with some projects.

Sony removes 135,000 'deepfakes' of its artists' music Music giant Sony Music says it has requested the removal of more than 135,000 songs by fraudsters impersonating its artists on streaming services. The so-called deepfakes were created using generative AI, and targeted some of the company's biggest acts, who include Beyoncé, Queen and Harry Styles In the worst cases, [the deepfakes] potentially damage a release campaign or tarnish the reputation of an artist, said Dennis Kooker, president of Sony's global digital business. The company says the number of songs generated in this fashion is only increasing as artificial intelligence technology becomes cheaper and easier to access. It believes the 135,000 tracks it has discovered to date represents just a percentage of the total uploaded to streaming services. Since last March alone, it has identified some 60,000 songs falsely purporting to feature artists from their roster.

Computer says no. Are AI interviews making it harder to get a job? It's brutal, says Bhuvana Chilukuri - a third-year business student who has applied for more than 100 jobs and has been rejected for every one. There are moments where I applied and I got a rejection less than two minutes later, which is really horrible, says the 20-year-old. She is convinced that very few, if any, of her applications are ever seen by a human as firms are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to hire new staff. The first step is AI screening your CV.

A US physicist and a Canadian computer scientist have won this year's Turing Award for their invention of a form of seemingly unbreakable encryption. Charles H Bennett and Gilles Brassard's work, which dates back to 1984, is known as quantum cryptography and has redefined secure communication and computing, the award's body said. Scientists believe their work will be central to electronic communications in a world that depends heavily on data-sharing, but which for years has been trying to develop more powerful quantum computers. The Turing Award, named after the mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, is known as the Nobel Prize of computing. It comes with a $1m (£800,000) prize.

We have listened, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Wednesday, saying the government no longer favours that approach. However, the government's position is now unclear, saying it no longer has a preferred option for what to do next. Kendall said the government had engaged extensively with people in the creative and AI industries. It is attempting to balance the interests of the two sectors by giving creatives control how their work is used, while recognising AI models need to be trained on work such as writing, music and video. In a report published on Wednesday, the government said there was no consensus on how these objectives should be achieved.

'I've applied for 500 jobs in two months since graduating' You have to work 10 times harder to work for a role that 10 years ago you could have got very easily straight out of university, says 22-year-old business management graduate Charlotte Briggs. Within two months she had applied for 500 roles. It's quite upsetting because I've worked really hard for the last three years to achieve a 2:1 just to be rejected for not having experience. Although her job search sounds extreme, it may not be that unusual. According to latest ONS figures, 22.5% of people aged 16 to 24 cannot find work, putting London as the UK region with the second highest rate of youth unemployment.

Higgs Boson breakthrough was UK triumph, but British physics faces'catastrophic' cuts When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm in October 2013, the world was watching. Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century earlier, had predicted the existence of a particle believed to hold the cosmos together - the Higgs boson. The announcement, broadcast live from Sweden, was what many scientists had hoped for since a year earlier, when experiments at CERN had finally confirmed Higgs's theory by discovering the Higgs boson - hailed as one of the biggest discoveries in a generation. At the time Higgs, who has since passed away, said in a statement: I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research. Blue-sky research asks questions to understand the universe, rather than design new products.