S ome snippets of video game dialogue, like classic movie quotes, are immediately recognisable to a swathe of fans. From Street Fighter's "hadouken!" to Call of Duty's "remember, no Russian" to BioShock's "would you kindly?", there are phrases so creepy, clever or cool they have slipped imperceptibly into the gaming lexicon, ensuring that whenever they're memed on social media, almost everyone gets the reference. But there are also odd little phrases, sometimes from obscure games, that stick with us for seemingly no reason. I recall most of the vocal barks from the second world war strategy game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, even though I haven't played it for 20 years. Why is it that I'll lose my headphones, wallet and phone on a daily basis, but I have absolute recall when it comes to the utterances of burly soldier Samuel Brooklyn?

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across diverse reasoning and generation tasks, and are increasingly deployed as agents in dynamic environments such as code generation and recommendation systems. However, many real-world applications, such as high-frequency trading and real-time competitive gaming, require decisions under strict latency constraints, where faster responses directly translate into higher rewards. Despite the importance of this latency quality trade off, it remains underexplored in the context of LLM based agents. In this work, we present the first systematic study of this trade off in real time decision making tasks. To support our investigation, we introduce two new benchmarks: HFTBench, a high frequency trading simulation, and StreetFighter, a competitive gaming platform. Our analysis reveals that optimal latency quality balance varies by task, and that sacrificing quality for lower latency can significantly enhance downstream performance. To address this, we propose FPX, an adaptive framework that dynamically selects model size and quantization level based on real time demands. Our method achieves the best performance on both benchmarks, improving win rate by up to 80% in Street Fighter and boosting daily yield by up to 26.52% in trading, underscoring the need for latency aware evaluation and deployment strategies for LLM based agents. These results demonstrate the critical importance of latency aware evaluation and deployment strategies for real world LLM based agents. Our benchmarks are available at Latency Sensitive Benchmarks.

Staple 1990s yoof TV show The Word has just finished with a raucous live performance by some up-and-coming grunge band and now it's time to play video games. In the decade of the original PlayStation and the Sega Saturn, there was no online multiplayer – if you wanted to compete against human beings, you did it in your living room with friends, and anyone else you found in the pub at closing time. It had to be something accessible, something competitive, something that allowed two or even four people to play at once. It needed to have short rounds, because everyone wanted to play. Invariably that would mean one of two options: a footie sim or a fighting game.

It's been almost 30 years since the original Tekken burst into arcades to face off against Sega's Virtua Fighter and kickstart a decade-long battle for 3D fighting supremacy. Arriving on PlayStation, the game's smooth, detailed 3D visuals, arresting characters and accessible four-button control system brought a new generation of fans to the fighting game genre, and subsequent instalments have built on those solid credentials, although not always with the same impact. While Tekken 7 was subtle step forward rewarding committed players, Tekken 8 feels like the first iteration in a long while to truly up its ambitions and entice newcomers. The result is a thrillingly vibrant video game. For the uninitiated, Tekken 8 is the latest in a series of fighting games by arcade legend Namco, in which a group of gloriously ostentatious warriors compete to win the King of Iron Fist tournament in one-on-one battles in an enclosed arena. Players fight against successively tougher computer-controlled opponents in Arcade and Story modes or against each other in local or online Versus bouts.

Sony has released two ultra-high-end Walkman MP3 players aimed squarely at audiophiles -- and no-one else. The headliner, the $3,700 NW-WM1ZM2 (pictured left), combines an S-Master HX digital amp with "fine-tuned" capacitors, thick Kimber Kable (to link the amp to the headphone jack) and a 99.99 percent pure gold-plated, oxygen-free copper chassis. It'll have 256GB of expandable storage. A lower-cost model, the $1,400 NW-WM1AM2 (shown right), offers similar functionality to the ZM2, but in an aluminum alloy body with'just' a low-resistance oxygen-free copper cable. You'll also have to make do with 128GB of expandable space. Both Walkman models are available now.

Last weekend @devdevcharlie posted a gesture tracking machine learning demo to enhance the Street Fighter experience. The DIY version of the project starts by building a gesture tracking device using some simple hardware. The tutorial uses the accelerometer to capture body movement for a training data set. Instead of tracking all movement, the button was used to start recording during relevant motion. Once gesture data for a punch, uppercut and hadoken were captured it was cleaned for use in a TensorFlow.js

It was not an auspicious beginning. The first video game featuring hand-to-hand combat hit arcades in 1976: Sega's boxing sim Heavyweight Champ, starred two chunky monochrome pugilists in striped underpants. Players controlled the action by putting their hands in plastic boxing gloves and making thrusting movements. Heavyweight Champ bombed, and so did its rivals. Atari's 1977 arcade game Boxer would have used two analogue handles as controllers, but it was never released because in-house testers of the prototype cabinet kept wrenching off the handles.

The first Super Smash Bros. game launched on the N64 almost 20 years ago and became an instant classic. Every main Nintendo console since has brought a new entry to the series, but the inevitable iteration on the Switch hasn't been announced. Tomorrow, gamers will get the next best thing: Brawlout, the 2D fighter heavily inspired by the Smash Bros. franchise. But will reaching Nintendo's console first let Brawlout win fans' hearts? The indie game has plenty to attract players itching for a polished 2D brawler.

Sonic the Hedgehog - the spiky blue hero who has spent his life fighting Doctor Robotnik - is making his way to the big screen. The computer game character will move from SEGA consoles to film with a mix of CGI and live action techniques, according to the Hollywood Reporter. But will the move from the gamer's chair to the cinema seat pay off for Sonic and friends? We take a look at some of the other gaming giants that have become blockbusters - and whether they have been a success. The famous fighting game made its way out of the arcades and into live action when one of the action genre's biggest stars took on the role.