A fun diversion for retro gaming on the Nintendo Switch 2--if you can stand to look at it. Good fun for arcade classics once built. An eight-button layout works for a variety of games. Hurdles to update before use. Limited use outside of select titles.

The explosive growth of multimodal data - spanning text, image, video, spatial, and relational modalities, coupled with the need for real-time semantic search and retrieval over these data - has outpaced the capabilities of existing multimodal and real-time database systems, which either lack efficient ingestion and continuous query capability, or fall short in supporting expressive hybrid analytics. We introduce ARCADE, a real-time data system that efficiently supports high-throughput ingestion and expressive hybrid and continuous query processing across diverse data types. ARCADE introduces unified disk-based secondary index on LSM-based storage for vector, spatial, and text data modalities, a comprehensive cost-based query optimizer for hybrid queries, and an incremental materialized view framework for efficient continuous queries. Built on open-source RocksDB storage and MySQL query engine, ARCADE outperforms leading multimodal data systems by up to 7.4x on read-heavy and 1.4x on write-heavy workloads.

There was a time when certain shops would resemble nightclubs at about midnight: a long queue of excitable people, some of them perhaps too young to be out that late, discussing the excitement that awaits inside. The sight of throngs of gamers looking to get their hands on the latest hardware when the clock strikes 12 is growing increasingly rare. But if you happen to walk by a Smyths toy shop at midnight on 4 June, you may encounter a blast from the past: excitable people, most in their teens or 20s, possibly discussing Mario Kart. They will be waiting to buy the Nintendo Switch 2, the first major games console launch since 2020 and potentially the biggest of all time. What's particularly notable about this launch isn't the queues but just how few there will be.

As we stumble out of our third Japanese arcade and onto the glowing sidewalks of Tokyo's Akihabara ward, I catch eyes with my partner and laugh. In this perfect moment together, we're equally content but exhausted from a day of vigorous gaming. Holding hands as we squat outside on a slender metal railing and chug melon sodas from a nearby vending machine, I promise the next game center will be our last stop in today's marathon. Popular in Japan since the 1970s, video game arcades took a major hit during the coronavirus pandemic. Strict limitations on public gatherings led to businesses shutting down.

It is one of the greatest injustices of video game history that the Sega Saturn is widely considered a failure. The console, which was launched in Japan on 22 November 1994, almost two weeks ahead of the PlayStation, is continually and pejoratively compared to its rival. We hear about how Sony produced a high-end machine laser targeted at producing fast 3D graphics, while Sega's engineers had to add an extra graphics chip to the Saturn at the last minute. We read that Sony's Ken Kutaragi provided creators with a much more user-friendly development system. We know that Sony undercut the price of Sega's machine, using its might as a consumer electronics giant to take the financial hit. All of that is true, but what aren't always mentioned are the vast success of the Japanese Saturn launch, and the extraordinary legacy that Sega's 32-bit machine left behind.

Robot Imitation Learning (IL) is a crucial technique in robot learning, where agents learn by mimicking human demonstrations. However, IL encounters scalability challenges stemming from both non-user-friendly demonstration collection methods and the extensive time required to amass a sufficient number of demonstrations for effective training. In response, we introduce the Augmented Reality for Collection and generAtion of DEmonstrations (ARCADE) framework, designed to scale up demonstration collection for robot manipulation tasks. Our framework combines two key capabilities: 1) it leverages AR to make demonstration collection as simple as users performing daily tasks using their hands, and 2) it enables the automatic generation of additional synthetic demonstrations from a single human-derived demonstration, significantly reducing user effort and time. We assess ARCADE's performance on a real Fetch robot across three robotics tasks: 3-Waypoints-Reach, Push, and Pick-And-Place. Using our framework, we were able to rapidly train a policy using vanilla Behavioral Cloning (BC), a classic IL algorithm, which excelled across these three tasks. We also deploy ARCADE on a real household task, Pouring-Water, achieving an 80% success rate.

The inductees debuted across decades, advancing technologies along the way and expanding not only the number of players, but the ages and interests of those at the controls, Hall of Fame authorities said in revealing the winners. The Hall of Fame recognizes electronic games of all types -- arcade, console, computer, handheld, and mobile. The Class of 2024 was selected by experts from among a field of 12 finalists that also included Elite, Guitar Hero, Metroid, Neopets, Tokimeki Memorial, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and You Don't Know Jack. The honor for Atari's Asteroids comes 45 years after its 1979 debut in arcades, where it was Atari's bestselling coin-operated game. The game's glowing space-themed graphics and sound effects made their way from more than 70,000 arcade units into millions of living rooms when a home version of Asteroids was made available on the Atari 2600.

You can tell a Nintendo game not just from its feel – the satisfying swish of Link's sword in the Zelda games, the weight of Mario's jump – but by its look. They are bright, energetic, characterful. In Splatoon, the game-maker's most recent hit series, the shooter is reimagined as teams of transforming squids splattering arenas in glossy paint. Mario's red cap and blue overalls, originally designed to create a recognisable character with just a few pixels for 1981's arcade hit Donkey Kong, is now a stylistic signature – Nintendo's logo is the same shade of red. When you look into the company's department store outlets in Japan, a dozen colourful characters stare back at you from reams of merch: Animal Crossing cookware, Super Mario gloves, Zelda wallets and ties, Pikmin vases.

In need of a quiet getaway after completing my fourth novel, last week I booked a hotel on the seafront in Paignton, Devon and planned to spend three days wandering about and reading in cafes. As soon as I arrived, however, I saw that there were several arcades on the main street and on the pier. Obviously, I had to visit them all. As a child living in Cheshire in the 1980s, I spent many happy summer days in the arcades along the Golden Mile in Blackpool. These vast cathedrals of leisure, their exterior walls covered in flashing multicoloured light bulbs, were crammed with the video games of the era.

This university management sim is far more entertaining than its genre might make you think, tasking you with keeping your students happy and your school profitable. It is colourful, quirky and packed with personality. You may well have pondered the fate of the humble rollerskate at the height of the Tony Hawk-era skateboarding craze. Ponder no longer: Rollerdrome proves it was simply biding its time, only to return more radical than you could have imagined. Pro Skater meets The Club in this score-based, dystopian deathsport.