Pocketpair, the company behind last year's viral game Palworld, has a new venture: publishing indie games. Its first project, scheduled for release later this year, will be an as-yet-unnamed horror game from Surgent Studios, the developer behind 2024's Tales of Kenzera: Zau. Palworld, jokingly referred to as "Pokémon with guns," was a breakout success last year, drawing in more than 25 million players in its first few months. The company's step into publishing comes at a turbulent time for video games, especially smaller studios; last year, Among Us developer Innersloth announced its own move into publishing to help push projects forward. Pocketpair's Palworld success, it seems, is allowing it to do the same.

You've seen the Game awards nominations. Our own Guardian games of the year list is still a wee while away, but while you're waiting – with bated breath, I'm sure – here's an appetiser: Pushing Buttons' alternative awards. Need to recover your hearts while adventuring through a bunch of eerie rifts that are tearing Hyrule apart? Simply conjure a bed out of thin air, make sure you're out of enemy reach and have a wee nap. Need to make your way across a bridgeable gap?

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing the company behind the game, which fans dubbed "Pokémon with guns," for patent infringement. Palworld, colloquially known to fans as " Pokémon with guns," is in hot water. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced Thursday that they've filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Tokyo against Pocketpair, the company behind the game, claiming "infringes multiple patent rights." In, players catch creatures by weakening them and trapping them in Pal Spheres, similar to Poké Balls. Fans have also pointed out numerous similarities in design between Pals and Pokémon.

Palworld "infringes multiple patent rights", Nintendo and The Pokémon Company said in statements posted on their websites. "This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages". Palworld has become a major hit, with more than 25 million players within a month of its release. Pocketpair's website describes the game as seamlessly integrating "elements of battle, monster-capturing, training, and base building." Players, known as "pal-tamers", travel around a large map battling human foes and creatures known as "pals" which can be captured and recruited.

A Chinese game called Black Myth: Wukong has been the biggest hit of the summer, selling 10m copies in just three days, according to its developer Game Science, with over 1 million people playing it every day on games marketplace Steam. China's homegrown games industry is absolutely massive, but concentrated almost entirely on mobile phones: this is the country's first successful blockbuster console and PC game, which makes it very interesting in itself. It's also a massively successful single-player game arriving on the back of a few high-profile multiplayer flops, which suggests there is still more of a market for this kind of adventure than video game execs like to believe. But Wukong has been grabbing headlines for other reasons, too. Back in November, IGN put together a report compiling crude, vulgar public comments from a number of Game Science staff, some of whom are very well-known in China's games industry.

The trade-off between expressiveness and interpretability remains a core challenge when building human-centric predictive models for classification and decision-making. While symbolic rules offer interpretability, they often lack expressiveness, whereas neural networks excel in performance but are known for being black boxes. In this paper, we show a combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and symbolic programs can bridge this gap. In the proposed LLM-based Symbolic Programs (LSPs), the pretrained LLM with natural language prompts provides a massive set of interpretable modules that can transform raw input into natural language concepts. Symbolic programs then integrate these modules into an interpretable decision rule. To train LSPs, we develop a divide-and-conquer approach to incrementally build the program from scratch, where the learning process of each step is guided by LLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of LSPs in extracting interpretable and accurate knowledge from data, we introduce IL-Bench, a collection of diverse tasks, including both synthetic and real-world scenarios across different modalities. Empirical results demonstrate LSP's superior performance compared to traditional neurosymbolic programs and vanilla automatic prompt tuning methods. Moreover, as the knowledge learned by LSP is a combination of natural language descriptions and symbolic rules, it is easily transferable to humans (interpretable), and other LLMs, and generalizes well to out-of-distribution samples.

The biggest story of the year so far in games has been Palworld, the "Pokémon-with-guns" early access game that broke and rebroke concurrent player records on PC. It's showing a few signs of being unsustainable, as those player numbers have dropped off in recent weeks and the developers reveal the eye-watering cost of keeping servers online for so many people (almost 6m a year), but it's still in with a shot of being 2024's biggest game in terms of pure revenue. There's something a little unsavoury about Palworld that has other developers and critics wrinkling their noses. It's not just the ick of turning guns on creatures that are, unlike Minecraft's blocky animals, designed to look cute. Its character designs are so close to Pokémon's that it has sparked allegations of plagiarism, with some 3D models of the game's creatures aligning improbably closely with those from recent Pokémon games.

The first thing you need to know about Palworld, a new video game developed and published by the Japanese studio Pocketpair, is that it is ludicrously popular. According to data scraped from Steam, a digital storefront for PC games, Palworld became the second game ever after 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to breach 2 million concurrent players last week. Palworld arrived on Jan. 19, so that growth laps some of the most commercially solvent franchises in the industry--the server concentrations of Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto V can eat their hearts out. All this is to say that Pocketpair has a genuine phenomenon on its hands: Palworld, much like Fortnite or Minecraft before it, is poised to dominate the corridors of elementary schools for the rest of 2024, for better or worse. This is unfortunate news for me, and, really, anyone else who cares about the virtues of interactive entertainment, because Palworld's appeal is totally inscrutable.

The Mac turned 40, putting Apple's longest-running product squarely in middle age. But like someone who sees the back half of their life approaching and gets in marathon-runner shape, the Mac is in the strongest place it's been for decades. While (its own) smartphones have chipped and undercut PC revenues for Apple, it follows years of growth and a major milestone for personal computers: the introduction of Apple Silicon. But before all that, let us take you on a journey through Macintosh, Macs, MacBooks and more, with Nathan Ingraham… who has also turned 40. Google's latest Pixel phone update adds new AI tools and a working thermometer You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox.

The new year has barely begun but it seems we already have 2024's biggest game – and it's not a multi-million dollar sci-fi extravaganza set in a vast universe created by a gigantic publisher. It's a survival adventure released by a small company in Japan, which had only previously released one game. It's called Palworld, and it's being accurately described as "Pokémon with guns". And if that sounds horrible to you, it seems you are very much alone. Within three days of its release on 18 January, it had sold 5m copies.