So how do you categorize a beast like gaming on the PC? With decades of titles to pluck from (and the first port of call for most indie titles, too), there's so much to choose from. Gaming on your PC adds the benefits of (nearly always flawless) backward compatibility and console-beating graphical performance -- if you've got the coin for it. The whole idea of what a PC is and where you can play it is shifting, too, with the rise of handheld "consolized" PCs like the Steam Deck. We've tried to be broad with our recommendations here on purpose – there are so many great games out there for your PC, consider these some starting points.

Singapore is well known for its tough laws (and penalties for flouting them). Now it has a new ally in the fight against chewing gum, littering and bigger misdemeanors. The country has started testing a robot named Xavier. Over the next three weeks, Xavier robots will monitor the crowds of Singapore's Toa Payoh Central to look for what the nation's authorities describe as "undesirable social behaviors" -- including any group of people. The country's current COVID-19 safety measure forbids congregations of more than five people. To gauge the crowds, Xavier models have cameras that create 360-degree views.

Were you ready to be underwhelmed? Microsoft really didn't have all that much to reveal, it seemed, despite the 90-minute run time. The problem with Xbox's show was that it was so heavy on developer interviews. Wringing the gaming news towel dry, Psychonauts 2 got a new launch trailer, and we got a better look at the Xbox-bound version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and some shiny vehicles for Forza Horizon 5. I guess we go back to playing Hades on our Xboxes for now. Last year, Peloton introduced its new lower-cost Peloton Tread to the market, which was around $1,800 cheaper than the original Tread ($4,295).

Buying an ultrawide monitor for your PC is the most dramatic choice you can make short of purchasing a full-sized HDTV and slapping it on your desktop. Ultrawides are massive monitors that will dominate your desk and may even require a re-think of your existing office or gaming setup. Yet there's good reason to make an ultrawide your next monitor. If you just want a quick recommendation, here it is: yes! Buy an ultrawide monitor. An ultrawide monitor makes multitasking more comfortable and enhances your gaming experience with an immersive field of view.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding video games ever made. Microsoft Flight Simulator on consoles both rides the clouds and is powered by them. Today the company confirmed that Flight Simulator's console release is driven in part by Microsoft's potent Azure servers, which can stream the massive 2.5 petabytes of Flight Sim data from the servers directly to console hardware. "The Series X is a super-powerful console and we're also using the Microsoft tech stack in an interesting way. Microsoft Flight Simulator releases on Xbox Series X/S consoles on July 27, 2021. Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding video games ever made. Microsoft Flight Simulator on consoles both rides the clouds and is powered by them. Today the company confirmed that Flight Simulator's console release is driven in part by Microsoft's potent Azure servers, which can stream the massive 2.5 petabytes of Flight Sim data from the servers directly to console hardware. "The Series X is a super-powerful console and we're also using the Microsoft tech stack in an interesting way.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding video games ever made. It pushes today's highest-end PCs to their limits. So how did Microsoft get it running on Xbox Series X/S hardware? It borrowed power from the cloud. Microsoft Flight Simulator on consoles both rides the clouds and is powered by them.

There are some wild stats about Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the sim, all 117 million lakes in the world are rendered in their appropriate places. Each plane has more than 1,000 points that respond to a variety of conditions at any given time, including wind, atmosphere and player input. Developers pushed 2.5 petabytes of Bing Maps satellite photo data through Azure's machine learning systems to construct the sim's world. In a chat with Engadget at CES 2021, Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann said developers basically build the planet every 72 hours, procedurally planting somewhere in the realm of 2 trillion trees and creating 2 billion buildings in that timeframe alone.

There's a woman in my social media feed who has spent the past week flying around the world in an Airbus A320. The degree of enviousness with which I look at her photos of skylines and mountains is well past being impolite. She's playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, the latest video game to capture the public's imagination as a kind of Covid-19 era balm. This is a game that uses Bing maps satellite data to create a one-to-one scale replica of the entire planet, ready for players to explore now that the pleasures of physical travel have been temporarily relinquished by most of us. Like Animal Crossing before it, which allowed a newly locked-down world to escape to an idyllic, pleasantly sociable tropical island, Flight Simulator is the perfect game for the moment.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a triumph, one that fully captures the meditative experience of soaring through the clouds. But to bring the game to life, Microsoft and developer Asobo Studio needed more than an upgraded graphics engine to make its planes look more realistic. They needed a way to let you believably fly anywhere on the planet, with true-to-life topography and 3D models for almost everything you see, something that's especially difficult in dense cities. A task like that would be practically impossible to accomplish by hand. But it's the sort of large-scale data processing that Microsoft's Azure AI was built for.

Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator entry doesn't do anything small. It's a title that comes on 10 DVDs and allows you to explore the world in almost its entirety. It turns out that scale even extends to its accidental inclusions. Flight Simulator users recently found an unusual landmark: a 212-story monolith towering over an otherwise nondescript suburb in Melbourne, Australia. In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne's North like a suburban Australian version of Half-Life 2's Citadel, and I am -all for it- pic.twitter.com/6AH4xgIAWg