There is a lot of attention on young men and toxic masculinity at the moment. The devastating Netflix drama Adolescence, about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a girl after being radicalised by the online manosphere, has drawn attention to the problem through the sheer force of its brilliant writing and a blistering lead performance from teenager Owen Cooper. Recently, former England football manager Gareth Southgate gave a speech about the state of boyhood in the UK, specifically about how young men, lacking moral mentors, are turning to gambling and video gaming, thereby disconnecting from society and immersing themselves in predominantly male online communities where misogyny and racism are often rife. There has been some kickback in the gaming press to the idea that games have provided a less-than-ideal environment for boys, but even those of us who have played and enjoyed games all our lives need to face up to the fact that gaming forums, message boards, streaming platforms and social media groups are awash with disturbing hate speech and violent rhetoric. Honestly, we have known this for a while.

I have played many Assassin's Creed games over the years, but I've rarely loved them. Ubisoft's historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin's Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.

It's unlikely that the fate of a company as large as Ubisoft will hinge on the success of one tentpole single-player game. But the company cannot afford another major error anytime soon after the likes of Star Wars: Outlaws and XDefiant failed to set the world alight. Ubisoft desperately needs a big hit (and for the Rainbow Six Siege X overhaul to go well). The good news for the company is that Assassin's Creed Shadows is poised to deliver on that. On the surface, it's exactly what you'd expect: a massive Assassin's Creed game that takes dozens of hours to beat. There's so much to do beyond the core story, given all the missions and sidequests that the game constantly points you towards.

Japan, 1581: Iga province is burning down around you. You watch on, injured and helpless as the Oda Nobunaga - the warlord responsible for numerous civil wars and the eventual unification of the country - smirks from a nearby hill. You draw your katana, the blade shining in the flickering light of the flames. This is Assassin's Creed: Shadows – part exciting ninja game, part history lesson. It's an odd combination but it comes together in a sprawling historical-fiction adventure full of discovery and deception.

Since 2007 the Assassin's Creed series has allowed players to hack, slash and sneak their way through a range of historical settings. And the latest instalment, Shadows, creeping on to PS5, Xbox and PC from Thursday, grants fans' long-held wish for an adventure set in feudal Japan. It mixes the stealth gameplay of the recent Assassin's Creed Mirage with the combat-focused approach of mega-hit Valhalla and throws ninjas into the mix. But it's being seen by many as a make-or-break title for French publisher Ubisoft, one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. After a lacklustre 2024, there's a lot of hope that the twice-delayed Shadows will replicate the sales of previous games in the Assassin's Creed series.

Warner Bros Discovery recently shut down a trio of game studios, including the well-regarded Monolith Productions. This has put one of the coolest game mechanics of the 2010s in limbo. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's excellent Nemesis system is locked behind a patent owned by Warner Bros all the way until 2036, according to reporting by Eurogamer. The Nemesis system was featured in both 2014's Shadow of Mordor and the follow-up Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Simply put, it's a gameplay mechanic in which enemies remember previous encounters with the protagonist.

Assassin's Creed maker confirms leaked game footage is real 38 minutes agoTom RichardsonBBC NewsbeatUbisoftAssassin's Creed Shadows is seen as a pivotal release for Ubisoft The makers of Assassin's Creed Shadows - the forthcoming entry in one of video gaming's biggest franchises - have confirmed footage leaked online is real. Some players managed to get their hands on the game - due to be released on 20 March - ahead of its official release. Developer Ubisoft said gameplay videos shared online "did not represent the final quality of the game". In a statement posted online, the company said it was "still working on patches" and urged fans not to share spoilers. Shadows will be the first Assassin's Creed instalment set in Japan - something fans have long been asking for.

Readers will delight in the gradual reveal of both the technology within the story and the dramatic history between many of those involved with the creation and evolution of that technology. Tom, a screenwriter, works with Harry, the genius inventor of the world's most popular AI (artificial intelligence) app, to create a simulation that will nudge people toward acting morally. This virtual world consists of multiple layers, each focusing on a different psychological alignment depending on the needs of the person using the program. A lower level, much like Hell, exposes people to horrors and cruelty, while some upper levels focus on order and happiness. The project becomes more complex when they upload the entire consciousness of people, creating virtual immortality.

Learning robot manipulation policies through reinforcement learning (RL) with only sparse rewards is still considered a largely unsolved problem. Although learning with human demonstrations can make the training process more sample efficient, the demonstrations are often expensive to obtain, and their benefits heavily depend on the expertise of the demonstrators. In this paper we propose a novel approach for learning complex robot manipulation tasks with self-learned demonstrations. We note that a robot manipulation task can be interpreted, from the object's perspective, as a locomotion task. In a virtual world, the object might be able to learn how to move from its initial position to the final target position on its own, without being manipulated. Although objects cannot move on their own in the real world, a policy to achieve object locomotion can be learned through physically-realistic simulators, which are nowadays widely available and routinely adopted to train RL systems. The resulting object-level trajectories are called Simulated Locomotion Demonstrations (SLD). The SLDs are then leveraged to learn the robot manipulation policy through deep RL using only sparse rewards. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed approach on 13 tasks of increasing complexity, and demonstrate that our framework can result in faster learning rates and achieve higher success rate compared to alternative algorithms. We demonstrate that SLDs are especially beneficial for complex tasks like multi-object stacking and non-rigid object manipulation.

Erin Hawley doesn't care if she wins or loses, but with adaptive controllers, she and so many other disabled gamers are able to play the game. Gaming has been a huge part of Erin Hawley's life since she started playing Atari as a little girl. When the Keyport, New Jersey-based, 35-year-old digital content producer for the Easterseals charity gets off work, she gets right on her computer or Xbox and often keeps going until it's time for bed. Hawley is a fan of shooter titles such as "Overwatch" and "Half-Life," but she'll play adventure games, puzzles, almost anything. She's also a regular on the Amazon-owned Twitch live streaming platform.