Stranger Things: What could happen next as the show's finale looms? Spoiler warning: This contains some details about what has happened in the show so far, but does not reveal anything about the final four episodes. A Christmas feast may be around the corner, or perhaps another chocolate (no strawberry creams, thanks), but for fans of Stranger Things, another gift is waiting to be consumed. The grand finale of Netflix's hugely popular sci-fi fantasy horror series, which also showcases some questionable 80s fashion choices, is looming. Fans last saw the inhabitants of Hawkins in a perilous place as season five opened, with Demogorgons running rampant, along with the monstrous Vecna.

Nintendo made a slew of announcements during its latest Direct event, including details on a new Resident Evil game, a Ditto-centric Pokémon title, and more details on . Nintendo's Switch and Switch 2 release calendars are bulking up. During a packed Nintendo Direct livestream on Friday, the company announced on-sale dates for several games as well as the return of the Virtual Boy, the proto VR headset Nintendo originally launched in the mid-1990s. One of the biggest of Friday's announcements was that of the release date for the sequel to Supergiant's wildly popular . The long-awaited new game,, will also finally launch December 4 for Switch and Switch 2. The news comes ahead of the upcoming holiday season, which will be the Switch 2's first since its launch this summer.

Mario is returning to the big screen. Following the massive success of, which made more than $1.3 billion worldwide in 2023, animation studio Illumination and Nintendo are releasing a sequel,, in April 2026. Nintendo dropped a teaser trailer during its Direct presentation on Friday. The teaser doesn't offer much about the movie, which takes its name from the 2007 platformer.Mario dozes in a field before title credits appear, that's about it. But the trailer still signifies that Nintendo will continue to churn out films aimed at turning Mario into a megafranchise .

Video Games The Buzziest Video Game of the Year Is Here. Sometimes, in our modern world where every Goliath wants to be seen as a David, where the middle class is evaporating and the working class is crushed and the wealthy play victim, the little guy still manages to win. Sometimes the little guy even wins big. And then sometimes the little guy wins, in a manner that destabilizes a flailing industry, upends media coverage, and incites multiple minor culture wars. That's how it went for Ari Gibson and William Pellen, a pair of Australian game developers known collectively as Team Cherry, who last week released the only video game that every gamer is talking about right now: .

If you are in Cologne this week, you will find the place overtaken by cheerful nerds, as Gamescom, the world's biggest gaming event, descends upon the city once again. Over 300,000 people are expected to visit the Koelnmesse to play upcoming games and enjoy each other's company, to the extent that it's possible to enjoy anyone's company in a giant crowded convention hall with woefully insufficient food options. The event began, as is now tradition, with a showcase of games (pdf) whose publishers could afford the hundreds of thousands of euros necessary to show a trailer on an official livestream. As ever, I am here to spare you from watching a full two hours of trailers and pick out the most interesting stuff. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was the big opener: our reporter Alyssa Mercante got a full introduction to its futuristic military paranoia, which you can read about later this week.

Corey Feldman discusses his movie "The Birthday," which wrapped in 2004. "The Goonies" star Corey Feldman is concerned that the rise of artificial intelligence could ruin the "magic" of Hollywood filmmaking. In a new interview with Fox News Digital, the entertainer talked about his decades of being part of the film industry and what he thinks of it today compared to how it was when he was starring in beloved 80s classics like "Goonies," "The Lost Boys" and "The Burbs." When asked if he believes modern Hollywood can still conjure up the same "magic" that led to the creation of these iconic films, he said he wasn't so sure. "Well, I share the opinion that there is a lot of the magic that's been lost because of A.I., because of CGI, because of, you know, these things kind of taking over from the good stories, the great characters that we draw, the great writing," Feldman said.

At least it shows its symptoms clearly: inflammation and swelling. In the first film, Gemma (Allison Williams), a robotics engineer, becomes the guardian to her orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), and tests a new invention, the titular A.I.-powered robot-doll, on her. Cady grows attached to the responsive doll, which is programmed to protect the child and takes to the mission with a mechanical perfection, slaughtering anyone who expresses hostility--and does so with snarky pride in her absolute power. At its core, though, "M3GAN" (like the sequel, directed by Gerard Johnstone) is a family melodrama centered on Gemma's struggles with parenting and Cady's need to bond--plus the robot's quick embrace of human cruelty. The film's failures are painful because its setup is fruitful.

Graph-based recommendation systems use higher-order user and item embeddings for next-item predictions. Dynamically adding collaborative signals from neighbors helps to use similar users' preferences during learning. While item-item correlations and their impact on recommendations have been studied, the efficacy of temporal item sequences for recommendations is much less explored. In this paper, we examine temporal item sequence (sequel-aware) embeddings along with higher-order user embeddings and show that sequel-aware Graph Neural Networks have better (or comparable) recommendation performance than graph-based recommendation systems that do not consider sequel information. Extensive empirical results comparing Heterogeneous Sequel-aware Graph Neural Networks (HSAL-GNNs) to other algorithms for sequential learning (such as transformers, graph neural networks, auto-encoders) are presented on three synthetic and three real-world datasets. Our results indicate that the incorporation of sequence information from items greatly enhances recommendations.

By pretty much every objective measure, HBO's adaptation of the hit postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us has been a roaring success. Never before has a video game narrative been molded into Emmy nominations and such warm reception among respectable critics, industry darlings, and people who have no idea what the term "one-shotting" means. You'd think that the devotees who first fell in love with the game back when it was originally released in 2013 would be toasting the cultural ascendance of their favorite medium--and especially how the story's complicated morality has impacted those who've never picked up a controller. And yet, for as long as the show has been on television, its most dogmatic fans have been caught up in a controversy of much inferior consequence: Specifically, they're furious that Bella Ramsey doesn't look much like Ellie. On the most basic level, this observation is correct.

For months now I have been in the thrall of Pokémon Trading Card Pocket. It's a devilishly slick blend of card-collecting and pared-down battling that has had me obediently opening the app on my phone at least twice a day since it launched. The virtual cards are beautifully done; the rare art cards especially, with their pastoral scenes of Pokémon in their natural habitats. I have spent many hours on the battles, too, honing decks and chasing win streaks to earn myself victory emblems. I got most of my friends into it, anticipating the day when its makers at DeNa would finally enable trading so I could fill the last couple of holes in my collection.