Feedback comes across a YouTuber's efforts to build a large language model in Minecraft and is impressed at the scale of it - even if it doesn't quite live up to its promise to blow your mind in spectacular fashion There are few things Feedback appreciates more than a truly committed hobbyist: someone who happily spends months or even years building something that is of no practical use whatsoever, just to be able to look at it or play with it. For those who might be unfamiliar, Minecraft is an open-world game in which everything is made up of cubical blocks. Players dig into the ground to collect cubes of useful minerals, which they can use to build things. For instance, they might build a house so that the monsters that come out at night can't get them. Or they might go big.

I've always written about the intersection of games and real life – that's where the interesting stories are often found – but rarely do I get the opportunity to do so quite so literally as I have this week. Yesterday I visited the Universal Studios theme park in Osaka, where the world of Mario has been reconstructed in the real world. You walk through a green warp pipe and, when you come out the other side, through Princess Peach's castle, you emerge into a primary-coloured, crowded Mario-scape, all green grass, yellow blocks and brown brick, with critters moving back and forth across banks of question-mark blocks and the yawning maw of Bowser's Castle across the way. I've been dying to see this Nintendo theme park since it opened, but I wasn't prepared for how impactful it would be to walk into a physical manifestation of my eight-year-old self's dreams. Super Mario World is constructed in such a way that you can't see the outside world when you're in there, helping you to disappear into the fantasy.

Elon Musk's new AI company, xAI, will release its chatbot to X subscribers who pay $16 per month once it exits beta. A select group of X users started testing Grok, a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT, this weekend. Musk laid out his heady ambitions for xAI earlier this year, saying in July that its intended purpose is, quite literally, "to understand the true nature of the universe." Having said that, Musk says Grok will wield a sense of humor, like this… banter sewn into a guide to making cocaine, which must be funny to someone. Grok's notable feature is its real-time access to information published on X, which Musk claims will be "a massive advantage over other models."

Just five years ago, Nintendo was at a crossroads. The Wii U was languishing well in third place in the console wars and, after considerable pressure, the company was making its first tentative steps into mobile gaming with Miitomo and Super Mario Run. Fast-forward to today: The Switch is likely on the way to becoming the company's best-selling "home console" ever, and seven Switch games have outsold the Wii U console. However, the Switch's online store isn't the easiest to navigate, so this guide aims to help the uninitiated start their journey on the right foot. These are the games you should own -- for now.

A US federal court has sentenced Canadian hacker Doug Bowser to 40 months in prison for his involvement in Switch hacking group Team Xecuter, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. Not to be confused with Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser (or Mario's nemesis, for that matter), Bowser was part of a collective that developed and sold devices people could use to play pirated games on their consoles. The FBI arrested Bowser in 2020. One year later, he agreed to pay $10 million to Nintendo to settle a civil privacy lawsuit and another $4.5 million in restitution to the company. Leading up to today's sentencing announcement, Bowser faced up to 10 years in prison.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Welcome back to Talking Tech. Brett Molina's off today, but I'm being joined by our colleague, Tech column's Marc Saltzman.

The Nintendo Switch console is about to make history, becoming the video game maker's best-selling console ever. But if you want to buy a new Nintendo Switch OLED model to help put it over the top, they are still tough to find. In the U.S., Nintendo sold 314,000 Switch OLED units during the month of October (the console was released Oct. 8), Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser said, citing sales data from The NPD Group. Overall, Nintendo sold 711,000 Nintendo Switch systems during the month. Nintendo sold 3% more Switch units in October 2020, he said.

With the latest and greatest new PlayStation and Xbox consoles in high demand, the video game makers at Nintendo surely must be ready to dump its nearly five-year-old Switch game system, right? Sure, Sony and Microsoft's new systems, released in November 2020, are lusted after and still nearly impossible to find on store shelves. But the Nintendo Switch is not always assured to be in stock, either. The Nintendo Switch has been the top-selling video game console in the U.S. for the past 30 months – yeah, you read that right, the leading unit seller for 2½ years – according to research firm The NPD Group. That surpasses the previous longest streak (21 months) held by the Xbox 360 having from August 2011 through April 2013, according to NPD. 'We need to continue to innovate':How charities are using NFTs as a way to fundraise The Nintendo Switch may not be as powerful as the newer Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles, which play games in 4K and eventually could display 8K games.

Mario may be Nintendo's standard-bearer, but Samus Aran of the "Metroid" games is getting her own chance to headline. And it's the first new story in the series in 19 years to play in 2D, picking up after "Metroid Fusion," released in 2002 for the Game Boy Advance handheld. "Metroid Dread" pays homage to that game with its side-scrolling heritage that goes back to the first installment in the series, "Metroid," from 1986. Samus moves fast and fluidly runs, jumps, slides and climbs through lush landscapes with detailed 2.5D backgrounds. A new power, the Spider Magnet, allows the character to climb walls and stick to ceilings like Spider-Man.

Amazon told Bloomberg that it has canned its Lord of the Rings, developed with the help of China's Leyou, after being "unable to secure terms" to continue its development. However, sources claim that Tencent's recent acquisition of Leyou led to a contract dispute that ultimately killed the project. Amazon Game Studios is struggling to get games out there and keep them on sale. It canceled Breakaway in 2018 after lack of progress, and it dropped Crucible after poor feedback during testing. Another MMO, New World, has faced multiple delays and isn't expected to launch until the end of August. While Amazon remains committed to its Game Studios efforts -- its incoming CEO has stated his support -- they clearly haven't delivered results quickly.