The company behind Roomba robovacs told investors earlier this week that revenue was substantially down and it's struggling to pay its debts. Amazon was briefly tapped to acquire the robot company iRobot, but the threat of a European Commission investigation led to the retailer terminating the deal -- apparently happy enough to pay off the 94 million termination fee. That, however, isn't enough to tackle the 200 million loan iRobot took out to survive long enough for Amazon to come to the rescue. It's extra rough when the company announced, just the week before, a bunch of new models, including a new Roomba that can compact debris and dust, so it only needs to be emptied every few weeks. At the same time, rival robot vacuum cleaners are getting more versatile, more complicated and more intriguing.

Sony has used AI to imbue a PlayStation character with the ability to converse with a player, The Verge reports. A source shared a since-deleted video with the publication featuring an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West. Engadget viewed the video before it was pulled. In the demo, Aloy can hold a conversation with voice prompts during gameplay, and respond to questions with a synthesized voice and facial movements. It starts with a delay from Aloy, after being asked how they are, followed by the character stating they are "managing alright, just dealing with a sore throat," a weird aside.

The worst thing about video games is also the best thing: their addictiveness. When you find the right one? The rest of the world can go to hell. That helped me as a child: I could use them to escape the more painful parts of growing up. You didn't have to worry about Stephen Gibson battering you on the way home from school in Chuckie Egg.

It's easy to get lost in the gorgeous open world of "Horizon Forbidden West," the highly anticipated sequel to Guerrilla Games' 2017 post-apocalyptic RPG "Horizon Zero Dawn." Exploration is revamped with protagonist Aloy's new arsenal of gadgets, letting her glide across valleys and swim through sunken cities. The weapons, the map, the enemies -- everything feels scaled up. The writing and characters are captivating, particularly Aloy's new crew, a mix of new faces and allies from the first game. Though the plot goes a bit off the rails, leaning more into science fiction this time around, Guerrilla Games' masterful world-building comes together in an endearing tale of hope and human tenacity -- no easy feat in a series with such a bleak premise.

Aloy surveys a vista from'Horizon Forbidden West.' Sony Interactive Entertainment hide caption Aloy surveys a vista from'Horizon Forbidden West.' Horizon Forbidden West returns to a post-apocalypse brimming with wondrous scenery, bestial robots, and scrappy civilizations that arose a thousand years after ecological catastrophe. It's topped my most-anticipated games list for years -- and I know I'm not alone in saying that its predecessor, Horizon Zero Dawn, is one of my favorite games of all time. Yet, I had some trepidation when I finally got my hands on the game. I didn't have to worry; Horizon Forbidden West surpassed my incredibly lofty expectations. I adored getting to know this outcast who grew up shunned by her tribe. Her driving motivation in exploring the mysteries of the world around her was very internal -- sure, she wants to uncover the secrets of what happened to the Old Ones and their ancient technology, but this journey is much more personal for her.

When Guerrilla Games revealed that Horizon Forbidden West would have underwater gameplay, I was not excited. I was in the minority with this feeling, but I have a ridiculous, lifelong fear of large things in deep bodies of water, and games in these settings genuinely freak me out. However, Forbidden West has won me over, thalassophobia and all. The underwater environments are terrifying and filled with gigantic robot monsters, but they're also beautiful and rich, inviting Aloy to explore new layers of her world. From the submerged ruins of Las Vegas to a volcanic hot spring buried under a mountain, swimming is shockingly one of my favorite activities in Forbidden West.

For a big-budget blockbuster game, Horizon Forbidden West is extremely weird. It is a detailed science-fiction story about a red-haired outcast warrior, the tribes that inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years in the future, and a bunch of robot dinosaurs. It's a tangle of different ideas and complicated systems that only reluctantly interact with each other. It's also a damn good time, and especially on PlayStation 5, a stunning example of just how good video games can look in 2022. You kind of get used to its beauty while you're playing, but I found that whenever I returned to the game after making a cup of tea I was newly struck by whatever awesome scene was frozen on the pause screen: Aloy mid-roll away from a murderous mechanical hippo, or standing in the foreground in her war paint with an extraordinary view of mountains and snow behind.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. The premise of the 2017 video game Horizon: Zero Dawn might sound a little silly to the uninitiated: It's the story of a teenage girl Aloy, an outcast with no parents in a post-apocalyptic world filled with giant robotic dinosaurs known as "machines," which are terrorizing the tribal populace.

In the COVID era, computational biology is having a heyday – and machine learning is playing a massive role. With billions upon billions of compounds to search through for any given therapeutic application, strictly brute-force simulations are wildly unfeasible, necessitating more artificially intelligent methods of whittling down the options. Now, researchers from IRB Barcelona's Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology lab have developed a deep learning method that predicts the biological activity of any given molecule – even in the absence of experimental data. The researchers, led by Patrick Aloy, are applying deep machine learning to a massive dataset: the Chemical Checker, which provides processed, harmonized, and integrated bioactivity data on 800,000 small molecules and is also produced by the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology lab. In total, any given molecule has 25 bioactivity "spaces," but for most molecules, data on only a few are known – if that.

Last year, we got two new consoles, and … some new games? Regardless, players on all platforms need new things to play--especially now. Luckily, there are plenty of fresh titles on the way. A new Overwatch, a new Halo, and League of Legends is finally coming to phones and consoles. OK, so maybe not everything we're hoping for will actually see the light of day in this calendar year, but we have hopes.