The video game industry loves to tout figures: record-breaking sales numbers, astonishing revenue growth, dazzling quantities of concurrent players. It makes sense that the people who make and play games love numbers: They're proof that someone is winning. We have a new incredible number from the world of video games: In spite of an alarming price tag, it took only four days for the Nintendo Switch 2 to become the fastest-selling home video game console of all time, with 3.5 million units sold over the weekend following its June 5 release. This is tremendous business, enough for investors to take note and consider Nintendo a safe haven in a moment of extreme economic volatility. This kind of success is typically a point of pride to proponents of the video game industry, hard data proving the medium's significance to any doubters.

Nintendo fans across the US are breathing a sigh of relief as they tear apart the boxes housing their new Nintendo Switch 2 video game consoles. On-again, off-again trade tariffs implemented by Donald Trump, which precipitated pre-order delays from Nintendo, made the 5June release date of the highly coveted hardware feel more like a hope than a certainty. A potential price hike up from 450 loomed over launch day, but would-be buyers' fears did not come to fruition. The Japanese console maker managed to luckily launch its device squarely within a 90-day tariff pause issued by the president. If tariffs on countries like India and Japan return to the levels proposed during Trump's "Liberation Day" speech at the start of April, however, experts say Nintendo will have to limber up for yet another delicate trade policy dance.

While President Donald Trump has revealed a tariff exemption for some electronics, video game consoles are not thought to be among them. Christopher Dring, who writes about the gaming industry in The Game Business newsletter, said while Sony did not directly mention tariffs in its decision, their "knock-on effect" could have an impact on pricing worldwide. "The US is the biggest market for video game consoles, and rather than simply increase prices there, it's possible the likes of PlayStation could increase pricing globally in an effort to protect, as best they can, the US market," he told the BBC. "Ultimately, the era when game consoles went down in price over time is certainly over." The price increase comes as Nintendo's launch of its rival Switch 2 console was marred by the impact of US tariffs on markets worldwide.

In a desperate attempt to shun western technology, President Vladimir Putin has ordered the creation of a new Russian video game console. Now, as a Russian chief admits it won't be as good as the Xbox or the PS5, commentators have flocked to social media to mock the upcoming machine, dubbing it the'Putindo 64'. On Reddit, someone posted: 'The Putindo is gonna be a wild collectors item in a few decades.' Another user posted'I only hyev tetris' in a reference to the famous puzzle video game created in 1985 by Russia's Alexey Pajitnov. Another said: 'what is going on with russian government, why are they trying to develop a console when they are fighting at the front.'

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The Charlotte Hornets may have misunderstood the purpose of the season of giving. The team came under fire this week after someone on social media claimed a young fan involved with an on-court skit during Monday night's game against the Philadelphia 76ers was tricked out of receiving a new video game console. Charlotte Hornets guard LaMelo Ball, right, shoots over Philadelphia 76ers forward KJ Martin Jr., left, during the first half in Charlotte, N.C., Monday, Dec. 16, 2024.

To answer this question, we first need to understand that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool that bases its responses on the database that we provide to it. Otherwise, it has no source to draw an answer from by itself. As we know, the information available on the internet today is inmense, and we need to have a certain degree of discernment to distinguish what is true from the false. Additionally, we should also consider that there are "half-truths", perspectives, beliefs, etc. that could make different statements true. For example, a sensationalist news headline like "Teen declares he will kill everyone for a video game console" may lead the reader to believe something entirely different from what the article describes later: "The teen is participating in a video game tournament where the character must kill their alien opponents within the game, and if successful, he will break the record and win a video game console."

Procedural planning aims to implement complex high-level goals by decomposition into sequential simpler low-level steps. Although procedural planning is a basic skill set for humans in daily life, it remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs) that lack a deep understanding of the cause-effect relations in procedures. Previous methods require manual exemplars to acquire procedural planning knowledge from LLMs in the zero-shot setting. However, such elicited pre-trained knowledge in LLMs induces spurious correlations between goals and steps, which impair the model generalization to unseen tasks. In contrast, this paper proposes a neuro-symbolic procedural PLANner (PLAN) that elicits procedural planning knowledge from the LLMs with commonsense-infused prompting. To mitigate spurious goal-step correlations, we use symbolic program executors on the latent procedural representations to formalize prompts from commonsense knowledge bases as a causal intervention toward the Structural Causal Model. Both automatic and human evaluations on WikiHow and RobotHow show the superiority of PLAN on procedural planning without further training or manual exemplars.

The weaker yen has triggered price hikes on electronics from iPhones to refrigerators across Japan this year, with one glaring exception: the video game console. Sony Group, Microsoft and Nintendo have held fast to a 100-yen-to-the-dollar conversion rate that today sees their consoles as much as $100 cheaper in Japan than elsewhere in the world. No company wants to be first to break the unwritten rule against raising prices after a console's release, for fear of losing players and game developers to rivals, and all three believe they can recoup any losses through international software sales. But that may be changing. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

It's no secret one of the hottest tech gifts is a video game console. No matter what you retailer you visit, it's likely product pages for Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X all feature a similar message: sold out. But some consumers have been lucky enough to snag a new video game console, whether through that well-timed Twitter follow, or a determined internet search testing your ability to quickly tap refresh on your browser. If you bought a new video game console for your kids, don't start wrapping just yet. You want to make sure it's set up and ready so they can enjoy it right out of the box.

Microsoft's Xbox video game console celebrates an important milestone this month. On Monday, the Xbox marks its 20th anniversary since launching in 2001. Fans of the console likely recall then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates appearing on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with a rising star in the WWE, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (maybe you've heard of him). On Monday, Microsoft commemorated the anniversary with a special live stream. There are also several items available for purchase to honor the anniversary, including this special Gucci bundle for $10,000.