New Square Enix CEO dunks on the teachers who told him to stop playing games- ‘They would be very surprised!’-
There’s been some confusion over the leadership of Square Enix recently, with the company announcing that its president and CEO of 10 years, Yosuke Matsuda, would be handing over both roles to Takashi Kiryu… and then business continuing as normal. It appears the handover period is now complete, however, with Kiryu taking to the stage at the Final Fantasy 16 pre-launch celebration to announce his appointment, and instantly win the hearts and minds of Square Enix fans.
Kiryu appeared after the latest trailer for Final Fantasy 16, and immediately began milking the applause for the game, encouraging the crowd’s cheers. Then he launched into a remarkable reminiscence about his childhood, his own connection to Square Enix’s games, and sleeping in class because you can’t stop playing games.
“Welcome to this celebration for Final Fantasy 16,” said Kiryu. “We thank you for being a part of our show, but when I say our show I mean all this is your show. Ou…
Blood Bowl 3 debuts seasonal ‘blood pass’, gives away Lizardmen team for free-
Despite multiple delays, Blood Bowl 3 launched in a rough state. Like more than one recent live-service game, it went on sale with basic features missing and significant bugs, yet the cosmetics shop was working and well-stocked. Cyanide Studio is giving away the first season pass free to make up for it, which means if you log in now you can claim the “blood pass” and unlock the Lizardmen team. Future season passes will cost 1,000 warpstone, and players on the free track will only be able to unlock each season’s team by making it to maximum level.
Fortunately, you can earn experience points toward those levels in singleplayer as well as multiplayer matches. The amount of points earned is affected by how many turns a match lasts as a way of encouraging players to keep going rather than conceding early. A match that ends in the first few turns can earn less than 100 xp, while ones that last the full 16 turns seem to be worth around 800 or 900 points. It costs 1,000 xp to make it …
New anti-AI tool ‘poisons’ generative models to protect artwork from unauthorized robo-Rembrandts-
A new tool from researchers at the University of Chicago promises to protect art from being hoovered up by AI models and used for training without permission by “poisoning” image data.
Known as Nightshade, the tool tweaks digital image data in ways that are claimed to be invisible to the human eye but cause all kinds of borkage for generative training models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.
The technique, known as data poisoning, claims to introduce “unexpected behaviors into machine learning models at training time.” The University of Chicago team claim their research paper shows such poisoning attacks can be “surprisingly” successful.
Apparently, the poison samples images look “visually identical” to benign images. It’s claimed the Nightshade poison samples are “optimized for potency” and can corrupt an Stable Diffusion SDXL prompt in fewer than 100 poison samples.
The specifics of how the technology works isn’t entirely clear, but involve…
System Shock was originally pitched as Sonic the Hedgehog in space-
System Shock served as the inspiration for countless games, from fellow immersive sims like Deus Ex, to direct spiritual successors like Bioshock. Even Dead Space was initially conceived as System Shock 3. But according to a new report, System Shock’s own origins are stranger than you could possibly imagine.
Published by Rock Paper Shotgun, the report tells the story of the game’s creation through the voices of the game’s developers. And during his recollection, designer Austin Grossman states that the game’s initial inspiration was none other than Sonic the Hedgehog.
“The first reference I heard to the System Shock project was somebody saying ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna do Sonic the Hedgehog, but it’s in space,” Grossman says. “That was the original concept. I don’t know whose concept that was, or why that sounded like a super good idea to them.”
It’s a truly bizarre origin story, one which the game’s executive producer, Warren Spector, struggles to recall. “I have no m…