The Game Awards delivered. While the games I thought deserved to win did so (Astro Bot! Balatro! Metaphor!), we got some wildcard trailers, like an entirely new game from Last of Us studio Naughty Dog. takes place thousands of years in the future, and it stars bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun, played by Chilling Adventures of Sabrina actor Tati Gabrielle. Note: This is the first game from Naughty Dog since 2005 that isn’t Uncharted or Last of Us .
There was also, many years on, another Witcher game. will feature Ciri kicking magical ass, but there’s no gameplay footage yet. Elsewhere, Virtua Fighter is getting a revival (part of Sega’s push to mine and relaunch its biggest hits) and a new brawler game from the makers of the Like A Dragon series.
Capcom too taps its gaming past, reviving the wolf god and its magical ink strokes nearly two decades after the original, with the original game’s director, Hideki Kamiya, still at the helm.
And we have a new co-op game from the studio behind It Takes Two. Split Fiction is a co-op adventure where players leap between sci-fi and fantasy worlds. There is also a new sci-fi game from the creator of The Last Guardian, an co-op spin-off and, well, for even more.
— Mat Smith
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The biggest tech stories you missed
YouTube and Instagram are likely to benefit the most.
With a TikTok ban in the United States looking more and more likely, a new report from Pew Research on teen social media use underscores just how influential the app is among its youngest users. It’s one of the most-used social media services by teens, with 57 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds scrolling TikTok every single day, according to the report.
TikTok is running out of options to avoid the ban in the United States. The company lost its initial legal challenge to a law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell the app or face a total ban in the country. TikTok has asked the courts for a temporary delay to the law, which is currently scheduled to take effect January 19.
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Although it isn’t perfect.
Adobe has a new experimental tool for removing window reflections from photos. Originally announced at Adobe Max 2023 as Project See Through, the Reflection Removal tool is now available to preview in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Bridge if you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber. The tool uses AI to isolate two separate images: the reflection and whatever is on the other side of the window or reflective material. Adobe says the Reflection Removal tool can’t handle “reflections from windows that are small or far away” or reflections of “wine glasses, car bodies or clouds reflected in a lake.”
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