Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026 is Feb. 25 Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know Plus, a tactical shooter from the team behind Half-Life remake Black Mesa. Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. A whole bunch of compelling games arrived this week, and Sony dropped some news about more that are on the way to PS5 and other platforms during its State of Play stream on Thursday . For one thing, I didn't have a prequel for, one of my favorite games of the last few years on my bingo card. It's really neat that Motion Twin and Evil Empire -- the studios behind and its expansions, respectively -- are getting to make a proper Castlevania game .

Call of Duty's Vince Zampella was a video games visionary O n Sunday, Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the Call of Duty video game series, died in a car crash in Los Angeles at the age of 55. Though best known for that series of blockbuster military shooters, Zampella touched a huge number of lives - not only the hundreds of people who worked at the game development studios he led under Activision and EA, but the millions of people who played the games that bore his imprint. A lifelong gamer, Zampella had a Pong console as a child, then an Atari 2600 and a Commodore 64. He told IGN in 2016 that his favourite game from childhood was Donkey Kong: "I would spend hours at the arcade playing it." Zampella's first job in the industry was at GameTek in Miami, which specialised in video-game versions of popular US quizshows.

Originally featured as a minigame in Project Gotham, this 80s-style twin-stick shooter was rebuilt as a standalone digital-only release, attracting a huge new fanbase. Fast, frenetic and super stylish, with lovely vector visuals, it was the game that first showed the potential of Xbox Live Arcade. A time-sink of epic proportions The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (screenshot from the 2025 remake) Tens of millions of hours must have been spent in this foundational text of open-world role-playing games - one of the first video games where you really could go where you wanted and do pretty much as you pleased. Riding around Cyrodiil on horseback, taking in its gleaming city and backwater towns, it was so easy to get drawn into unexpected shenanigans that closing the story's threatening hell-gates became a distant second priority. The most addictive version of the classic card game Uno on Xbox 360 Look - don't @ us - Uno was one of most important Xbox 360 games.

Earlier this year, I attended a shooting competition for queer, often trans, very online misfits. Then Charlie Kirk was killed. This isn't the story I set out to write. I was going to talk about a pretty feel-good firearms competition I went to earlier this year, where trans and queer people made up about a quarter of participants and the unofficial rule was you're not allowed to be a bigot. I was going to describe the strange and whimsical mix of subcultures people embraced there--like polyamory and Mad Max cosplay--wrapped up in pro-LGBT and Black Lives Matter patches. Then Charlie Kirk was killed. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should write this story at all. If doing so would put my sources--gun-loving trans people in Trump's America--in danger.

We advance the understanding of robotic intervention in high-risk scenarios by examining their potential to distract and impede a school shooter. To evaluate this concept, we conducted a virtual reality study with 150 university participants role-playing as a school shooter. Within the simulation, an autonomous robot predicted the shooter's movements and positioned itself strategically to interfere and distract. The strategy the robot used to approach the shooter was manipulated -- either moving directly in front of the shooter (aggressive) or maintaining distance (passive) -- and the distraction method, ranging from no additional cues (low), to siren and lights (medium), to siren, lights, and smoke to impair visibility (high). An aggressive, high-distraction robot reduced the number of victims by 46.6% relative to a no-robot control. This outcome underscores both the potential of robotic intervention to enhance safety and the pressing ethical questions surrounding their use in school environments.

Weaponized drones are being tested inside US schools, flying through hallways with the ability to neutralize active shooters in seconds. Equipped with non-lethal pepper spray, powder pellets, and live video feeds, the drones launch from secure charging stations, six per school, when gunfire is detected. Developed by Campus Guardian Angel, the system has already completed trials in Texas and was recently demonstrated in three Florida schools. Permanent installations are scheduled this fall, with full deployment expected by January. The rollout has divided parents, some welcoming the extra layer of protection, while others call it a dystopian nightmare and'an accident waiting to happen.'

Acoem develops gunshot detection systems, consisting of a microphone array and software that detects and locates shooters on the battlefield. The performance of such systems is obviously affected by the acoustic environment in which they are operating: in particular, when mounted on a moving military vehicle, the presence of noise reduces the detection performance of the software. To limit the influence of the acoustic environment, a neural network has been developed. Instead of using a heavy convolutional neural network, a lightweight neural network architecture was chosen to limit the computational resources required to embed the algorithm on as many hardware platforms as possible. Thanks to the combination of a two hidden layer perceptron and appropriate signal processing techniques, the detection rate of impulsive muzzle blast waveforms (the wave coming from the detonation and indicating the position of the shooter) is significantly increased. With a rms value of noise of the same order as the muzzle blast peak amplitude, the detect rate is more than doubled with this denoising processing.

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.

I am 85 hours into Death Stranding 2, an apocalyptic nightmare about Earth becoming infected with death monsters, and I've realised that I'm playing it as a cosy game. For hours at a time, I trundle along the photorealistic landscapes in my pick-up truck, delivering parcels to isolated communities and building new roads. The only reason I complete the main story missions is to open new areas of the map so that I can meet new people and build more roads. I find it blissfully enjoyable. Of course, I am far from alone in playing video games this way.