Your faves clockwise from top left: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2 and ARC Raiders. Your faves clockwise from top left: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2 and ARC Raiders. Once again, we are approaching the cherished time of year between Christmas and New Year when we might actually have the time to play some video games. I hope Santa brought you something new to play, instead of taking one look at all the unplayed games in your Steam library and putting you straight on the naughty list. Over the past few weeks you have been sending in your favourite games of the year.

How generative AI in Arc Raiders started a scrap over the gaming industry's future Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? A rc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines - and each other. Can you trust the other raider you've spotted on your way back to humanity's safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you've just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I've talked to about this game.

As robots increasingly operate in dynamic human-centric environments, improving their ability to detect, explain, and recover from action-related issues becomes crucial. Traditional model-based and data-driven techniques lack adaptability, while more flexible generative AI methods struggle with grounding extracted information to real-world constraints. We introduce RAIDER, a novel agent that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with grounded tools for adaptable and efficient issue detection and explanation. Using a unique "Ground, Ask& Answer, Issue" procedure, RAIDER dynamically generates context-aware precondition questions and selects appropriate tools for resolution, achieving targeted information gathering. Our results within a simulated household environment surpass methods relying on predefined models, full scene descriptions, or standalone trained models. Additionally, RAIDER's explanations enhance recovery success, including cases requiring human interaction. Its modular architecture, featuring self-correction mechanisms, enables straightforward adaptation to diverse scenarios, as demonstrated in a real-world human-assistive task. This showcases RAIDER's potential as a versatile agentic AI solution for robotic issue detection and explanation, while addressing the problem of grounding generative AI for its effective application in embodied agents. Project website: https://raider-llmagent.github.io/

Let's cut to the chase. The chaos of Black Friday sales is here, and for the last week, we've been detangling the best deals on some of the best tech. We've got guides for specific categories, like cameras, Apple gear, gaming and more, but we've also pulled together 50(ish) of the best discounts right here. Disney Hulu bundle one-year subscription is 36 (that's 96 off, but it's the ad-supported flavor) I already own four of those picks, so I'm regretting this Friday morning. Get this delivered daily direct to your inbox. Canada's Competition Bureau sues to break up Google's ad business A post-apocalyptic world of humans in primitive-style garb battling giant dinosaur-like robots: We've definitely seen this before.

It's the spring of 1977, and George Lucas is petrified. Having just wrapped work on his third feature film, Star Wars, he retreats to Hawaii, unable to face the early reviews. Yet as he frets in a five-star resort, Lucas bumps into another Hollywood hideaway – Steven Spielberg. The hero's moniker certainly benefited from some finessing, and the action-packed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) raked in 354m at the box office. Yet as great as Indy's influence was on cinema, it might have had an even bigger one on video games.

The MSI Raider 18 HX boasts a humongous screen as well as all the ports you could imagine, but the windy roar of the fans combined with the high price tag may deter some folks. Sometimes you just want to game on a truly "all-in-one" powerful laptop. And it doesn't matter how heavy it is, how loud it is, or even how long that laptop's battery lasts. So long as you can throw anything at it and get a beautiful glorious gaming experience, that's all that matters. And for those instances, the MSI Raider 18 HX is here to help you decimate… especially your wallet! The MSI Raider is first and foremost a gaming laptop and that means by standard laptops it has many flaws. Typing on it isn't great, the fans are loud, battery life is short, and it's so heavy that calling it a laptop is almost a joke. But because it's a gaming laptop, a lot of those flaws are "given" and what really matters is what it can do under the heavy load of AAA games and that's where it shines. Let's rip one band-aid off right now.

On Sunday, 22 January 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. With the exception of a few aging Raiders' fans, what we all remember better from that evening 40 years ago was one advertisement that set the tone for a techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century. The ad showed an auditorium full of zombie-like figures watching a projection of an elderly leader who resembled the Emperor from 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which had been engaging in a massive labor uprising against the Soviet-controlled communist state) twirls a hammer and throws it through the screen framing the leader's face, just as armored police rush in to try to stop her. The ad explicitly invoked George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

History is not exactly littered with glittering Indiana Jones video games. The beautiful LucasArts adventure, The Fate of Atlantis; the pretty good Lego games; the decent Emporer's Tomb; the presentable SNES side-scroller, Greatest Adventures … There have been good games, but few classics that transcend the brand like, say, Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe that's about to change. During Microsoft's latest Developer Direct online event, streamed on Thursday evening, we saw a 12-minute preview of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a globe-trotting first-person adventure, set between Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Last Crusade. The project was revealed three years ago, but this is the first footage we've seen, and it's promising stuff. It has Nazis, it has a whip, it has Dr Jones in deserts, in tombs and arguing with Denholm Elliott in fusty college buildings; and it has a story involving a stolen artefact that is somehow linked to an international network of ancient monuments all of which align with a circle spanning the world.

This week, the panel begins by examining the final Indiana Jones crusade (probably), Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny. Finally, the trio considers Turner Classic Movies and the fate of the beloved TV network. In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, the panel dives into the reliably controversial Agnes Callard's latest piece, "The Case Against Travel." Dana: "The Joy of Traveling Solo" -- Inspired by this week's Slate Plus segment, Dana endorses writer Andre Acimen's piece in Town & Country about the joys of being in a new place alone. Julia: Raiders of the Lost Ark Story Conference Transcript -- Over five days in January 1978, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan came together to brainstorm what would later become the Raiders of the Lost Ark screenplay.

In 1979, when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas signed with Paramount Pictures to develop a film series based on classic Hollywood adventure serials, the deal they struck was to make five separate movies. The first, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was released in the summer of 1981 and became that year's top-grossing movie, beating even the long-anticipated Superman II and remaining on screens in some cities for more than a year. By 1984, it was Raiders' sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that had become the year's most anticipated movie, banking that year's biggest opening weekend, and the third entry in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, became not only the highest-grossing movie of 1989 but the top-earning Indiana Jones movie yet. Given that track record, and viewed from the perspective of our own IP-crazed times, it seems inconceivable that Spielberg and Lucas decided not to move forward immediately with a fourth Indiana Jones picture (though Lucas did go on to produce a spinoff TV series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles). Lucas' idea, a riff on the 1950s sci-fi films that would have been contemporaneous with a middle-aged Indy, was to introduce extraterrestrial beings into the previously earthbound Raiders universe.