Donald Trump pulled out of another mainstream interview Thursday–this time nixing a sit-down with NBC News.

The interview, CNN reported, would be in Philadelphia with NBC News' senior business correspondent, Christine Romans. CNN’s Brian Stelter said one source suggested that it had only been “postponed.”

It was the second time in a week that he had canceled a scheduled appearance outside the conservative news sphere, CNN’s Reliable Sources reported Thursday. He had canceled an in-studio appearance on the CNBC flagship show, Squawk Box, which was due on Friday.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.

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You remember Lucas Pope, right? He who casually dropped two of the most influential puzzle games ever then got distracted by yellow cranks for six years, occasionally popping up to drop a demake of Papers Please? Well, Pope has ceased hogging that crank, for now at least, and just released Haloween-y adventure game Moida Mansion. It’s on Itch here, and it’s completely free to play in your browser.

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Remedy's Alan Wake 2 has now "recouped most of its development and marketing expenses", CEO Tero Virtala has announced in a business review for January-September 2024. Speaking as somebody who would quite like there to be more Alan Wake games - or at least, moderately weird and pretty decent blockbuster singleplayer horror games - I am both pleased by this news and a little troubled that Remedy's eldritch forest fable (which came out in October 2023) has yet to break even.

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Like a plague doctor delicately administering another handful of leeches, Ice Pick Lodge have shared a bit more about the recently announced Pathologic 3, explaining how their plans for the cult epidemic-battling series have progressed since the release of Pathologic 2.

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BioWare currently has no plans for Dragon Age: The Veilguard expansions, according to reports. Instead the studio will support the fantasy RPG with smaller updates and otherwise turn their full attention towards Mass Effect 5.

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SCENE. A Video Game Website At Sunrise.

Enter A Reader Of News

A Reader Of News I wonder whither there be'est any new PC games on sale this week, perchance?

Enter A News Editor, With Alarums And Excursions

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I didn’t get much further in the extremely popular beta for the haute-couture-asaurus action of Monster Hunter Wilds than perfecting the exact orange-to-white ratio of my cat. Not because I wasn’t having fun, but because I immediately started looking up GPU prices after playing for ten minutes. As such, I didn’t spend enough time with the combat to get a proper feel for it. Cultural osmosis has once again allowed me to form an uneducated take, however, and I’m getting the sense there’s been some mixed reactions re: bonk quality. According to a clip shared on X by user Blue Stigma, there's a good reason for those misgivings. It's all about frames, you see.

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The mystery surrounding Deadlock, Valve’s work-in-progress MOBA shooter, has largely evaporated. Its freely extendable invite system is about as effective at controlling player headcount as a disinterested football steward, meaning pretty much anyone with a clued-in Steam friend can get in and start poking around its secrets. And yet, being a lane-pushing wizard fighter in the Dota 2 vein, it’s already a vast tangle of interplaying abilities, items, strats, and often unspoken rules, of the kind that even experienced gankists will take hundreds of hours to learn. It’s been too much for poor Brendy, at any rate.

Still, Brendy is but one man. What if we had but four men, working in tandem to crush lanes and flatten Patrons just as Gabe intended? To find out if Deadlock is indeed more comprehensible as a team sport, Graham, Ed, Ollie, and James joined forces, promptly getting fucked up yet emerging from the warlock hospital with a deeper understanding of its workings. Or, at least, if anyone would keep playing.

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Twitch have introduced a new "Politics and Sensitive Social Issues" label for streams that "focus" on topics like "elections, civic integrity, and war or military conflict". As with the streaming giant's existing labels for M-rated material, sexual themes or depictions of gambling, the idea is that viewers can filter out such streams in advance by altering their settings.

Advertisers, similarly, can "make better choices about the content they want to advertise next to" - in other words, pull their ads from a whole swathe of material if they don't want to be associated with anything controversial. Twitch's hope is that "the labels will allow advertisers to have more context to inform which types of streams they show their ads alongside, which we expect to increase brands’ confidence in running ads on Twitch, and could bring new advertisers to our service."

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To say that Factorio: Space Age throws out the rulebook is an understatement. It'd be more fitting to say it's somehow automated the whole process: an inserter plucked out the rulebook from my brain and deposited it in hot magma, while a new rulebook was churned out in a nearby machine and plopped into my brain from the other side - only for that to be immediately plucked out and incinerated as well. With each new planet and each new phase, Space Age reinvents itself. I'm battling hyperbole here, but ah hell, I admit defeat. Factorio: Space Age is a masterpiece, the final form of perhaps the most well-crafted building game I'll ever play.

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Hori's latest addition to its controller lineup, the "Horipad Wireless for Steam," is now available for preorder on Amazon. After already releasing in Japan at the end of October, now the gamepad is coming to the US.

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I've spent quite a lot of today trying to figure out why, exactly, some of the monsters in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta looked like bundles of copulating pyramids slathered in crocodile gravy. Nic clued me in on this reddit thread earlier, which cites unnamed Chinese players who've allegedly data-mined the beta's monster models, and learned that they are extremely large, encompassing hundreds of thousands of polygons.

If every monster in Monster Hunter Wilds were that fancy all of the time, your computer would become a volcano. As such, the game resorts to loading-on-demand systems to ensure that you only see those gorgeous details when the monsters are close by and, as the case may be, angrily sitting on you. When they're further afield, the flourishes fall away to free up memory and processing power. The popular Redditor explanation for the presence of monsters that look like Henry Moore sculpture is basically that the LOD systems are being forgetful, and neglecting to load the additional polygons at proximity.

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We’re still a week away from Blizzard’s Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct next Wednesday the 13th of November, but art from an apparent remaster of 1995 real time strategy game Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness has leaked online, via Xibbly user Stiven. It’s a thin one, as far as leaks go, but does show what looks to be cover, logo art, and a Battle.net icon. Thanks for the spot, Percy Coswald Gamer.

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Steam's built-in game recording feature has been usable in beta since the summer, but it has now been properly launched for every user, following a client update to Steam yesterday. It's basically another method of capturing funny ragdoll glitches and posting them on the "lol-games-are-dumb" channel of your friend's Discord. Or for posting that flukey knife throw in Call Of Duty to Twitter, as if you really meant to kill the man from across the map all along. Or saving a clip for your personal records, like the footage of that time you yeeted an innocent citizen off the 50-foot wall of a castle town in Dragon's Dogma 2. We all do that, right? Right?

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Halo Infinite recently received a big update in the form of Delta Arena, a playlist that features recreations of Halo 2's most popular maps and a special third-person mode. The true highlight, though, is yet to come. And that's through an entirely different Halo game: The Master Chief Collection. Soon enough, you'll be able to play Halo 2's lost E3 demo on it, thanks to some lovely modders.

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Calling a game ‘no frills’ or ‘no nonsense’ is always a back-handed compliment, because it sounds like you're saying it's a bit straightforward and simple. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying here. Acts Of Blood feels like a spiffy PS2 action brawler; a slightly tighter old Yakuza game, or a stripped-back Sifu. It’s snacky and a bit janky, but it’s also great coffee break fodder, assuming you want to spend your break breaking a selection of heavy objects over the crumbly skulls of ne’er-do-wells. I mean, they might have done some things well, I don’t know them. But they aren’t doing any well to my character in the game, so violence it is.

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When I was a competitive long-distance runner at school, breath control was paramount. We were never really taught this, mind. It was an art you picked up through practice: how to breathe before the race, saturating your blood with O2 without dizzying yourself; when to permit the shorter, emergency breaths and when to apply restraint; when to deepen your inhales and charge yourself up for an attack on a hill.

And then, how to organise your body around your breath, straightening your posture to expand your lungs without tipping back too far and squandering muscle power; how to breath in time with your stride and the movement of your shoulders, so as to firm up your momentum and shave a miraculous-feeling minute off your finishing time. All this, plus various daft psychological war gambits of my own devising. When overtaking or being overtaken, I used to seal my lips shut on that side and breath through the other corner of my mouth, to make it look like I was hardly out of breath at all.

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Take-Two Interactive have sold their publishing label Private Division to an unnamed party, along with five of Private Division's "live and unreleased titles". The GTA 6 publisher have also finally confirmed that they have shut down OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome devs Roll7 together with Kerbal Space Program 2 creators Intercept Games, months after performing mass layoffs at both studios.

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Back in the mists of 2021, No Man's Sky revealed its very own Normandy SR1 space frigate. "The Normandy in No Man's Sky?" you cry. "Why, that's a Mass Effect vessel. Some mistake here surely?" 1) My name's not Shirley, and 2) Indeed it is a Mass Effect ship, but HelloGames struck a time-limited deal with BioWare to create a version for their own space sim.

"Blast, if only I'd noticed this at the time and acquired one," you mourn. "Ah, so many years I have wasted." Be of good cheer, my friend, for No Man's Sky has a Normandy once again, just in time for the latest N7 Day of assorted Mass Effect celebrations. For the next two weeks, you'll be able to get a-hold of it by way of a revised version of 2021's Beachhead Expedition. Tray-tray, away!

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Life simulation game Inzoi will launch on PC via Steam early access on 28th March 2025, publishers Krafton have announced. Billed as a potential Sims 4 usurper, and equipped with syrupy Unreal Engine 5 visuals, it was originally slated for launch this year.

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Could tower defence be the ultimate "it's Friday and I am here in body only" genre? I haven't really thought about it before, but Rift Riff's effusively laidback crowd control has me pondering those optimal moments in any tower defender when the incoming horde hits the flamer-MG triangle just right, and you can settle back comfortably into the role of clockwatcher.

Rift Riff encourages this behaviour by being nice to look at. Created by a trio of developers including Hidden Folks designer Adriaan de Jongh, it's a world of spacey, sun-carved mountains, forests and monoliths. The towers resemble the sacred architecture of Monument Valley, and the colour scheme and general ambience remind me of Cocoon. There's a demo, if you fancy it.

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Amplitude Studios, developers of many a game with "Endless" in the name, have split with publisher Sega to become independent again, with ownership of the studio reverting to its original founders and "other members of the team". The developers say everyone is parting "on good terms" and that the last eight years of getting published under Sega has been "amazing". But there are other businessy reasons, of course. Namely, Sega have been trying to trim down their European studios for the past year, and Amplitude is just the latest bunch of devs affected by that.

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"The cool thing about bombs is that you can hide them in anything," is probably my favourite Oppenheimer quote of all time, and in the case of Ian Hitman, it does raise an important question: with so many everyday objects equal to the rubber duck in its unthreatening aura, yet more inconspicuous, why choose to put an explosive in this one?

The simplest answer is that’s it’s a recurring bit of levity, a holdover easter egg, elevated to the status of key mission item in Hitman: Codename 47 before being given pride of place as an explosive in the World Of Assassination games. But to ascribe such unassuming purpose to the duck is to ignore its revelatory power. We must go deeper.

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for a little while already, what with me giving its multiplayer largely a thumbs up. Still, it's an ever-evolving thing and Activision have announced the game's first seasonal drop. It's a hefty one with a lot of additions, so I'll try my best to break down the good stuff. TLDR: there's some new maps for multiplayer and zombies, new modes, and a few extra bits. I'm mildly excited for more. More in this case is good.

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Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics Of War developers Proxy Studios have just released Zephon, a new 4X strategy game set in a manky, post-apocalyptic world. It's got hexagonal maps, flesh trees, gangly Evangelion-grade giants, "otherworldly hymns of decay", nuclear bombs, and a player-led "blend of magic and cyberpunk" that extends from the city architecture to the research component. All of which is my cup of giblets. Here's the launch trailer.

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Good news, everyone: I'm off work all this week. I know, I know - a whole seven days with zero Edwin bullshit. What a prospect. Allow yourself a moment to savour the idea. I'm so thrilled for you! The Maw, sadly, does not understand the concept of "time off". Its hunger is as constant as the tide, as unrelenting as my retreating hairline. So before I disappear into a beam of sunshine, here's this week's list of new PC game releases.

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Update:

The RPS 100 is our list of the best games to play on PC. It encompasses the full breadth and width of PC gaming stretching back to 1873, but focuses solely on those games that remain great to play today. It's updated yearly by our crack team of writers, and the first half of the 2024 edition is live now.

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"A lot of puzzle games can leave you staring at the same static screen for ages, but here, I’m always pushing you forward," says Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit. For a decade now, Brown has been releasing accessible deep dives on game design for his popular YouTube channel, like "How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves" and "The Two Types of Random in Game Design." This week, he’s releasing his own for the first time.

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Great God Grove is, in a word, bonkers. I’ve stopped a small community from completing a blood ritual, played the role of matchmaker to a group of lonely hearts that involved organising a date with god, and plastered a statue with paint as part of a revolutionary movement to uplift the power of art. My time with GGG has been a pick n’ mix of colourful escapades, and together with its story of godly woes, striking art style, vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing puppet work, I’m now a die-hard LimboLane devotee.

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"Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed". As reported by Polygon, that's an argument put forth by a new lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by two Californian players of The Crew. They're suing the company in a proposed class action lawsuit over shutting down the racing game's servers, rendering it unplayable.

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"Where’s my Neo-Volkite pistol, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2?" was my perhaps slightly ungrateful reaction upon booting the action game up after the previous patch. "I didn’t even know what a Neo-Volkite pistol was until five minutes ago, but now this whole game is trash until I get one!." As promised in the roadmap, the last big update added a whole new Operations map, complete with a gargantuan new pseudo-boss in the form of a hierophant bio-titan. It did not, however, give me my beloved pistol. It’s fine. It’s in now, along with a few, less Neo-Volkite updates to other weapons.

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A grand jury has formally charged a 22-year-old man with capital murder and rape in the death of Nabra Hassanen, who was killed on her walk back to a Virginia mosque.

The Fairfax County Circuit Court indicted Darwin Martinez-Torres of Sterling, Virginia, on Monday on four counts of capital murder for killing Nabra, who was with friends while they had a meal before Ramadan services. Dozens of people had gathered outside the courthouse today, chanting “Justice for Nabra.”

Virginia law has specific conditions for pursuing the death penalty, but the Associated Press reported that the grand jury’s indictment described in graphic detail how Nabra’s killing was grounds for a death penalty against Martinez-Torres. The indictment appears to acknowledge for the first time that the 17-year-old Muslim teen was raped. Under state law, the combination of a rape charge with a premeditated murder charge means the death penalty can be pursued.

Police have said that Martinez-Torres, who is an undocumented immigrant, got into a confrontation on June 18 with a group of teens walking back to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society after grabbing a late meal. He is accused of returning later and beating Nabra with a baseball bat. Police said Nabra’s body was later discovered in a pond. A search warrant affidavit revealed that Martinez-Torres admitted to killing Nabra and had led authorities to where he dumped her body, AP reported.

Nabra’s parents and Muslim advocates have said that Nabra’s death was motivated by hate, but police has said that they will not treat the killing as a hate crime. Instead, police have said it was a road rage incident.

“The reason this guy he hit my daughter is because she’s Muslim,” Nabra’s father Mahmoud Hassanen told WAMU. “Why [didn’t he] hit the boy who bothered him?”

Nabra’s father added that he hoped for the death penalty, while her mother said she wanted Martinez-Torres to serve life in prison.

“I just want people to remember her, and don’t forget her,” Mahmoud told WAMU. “I think nobody can forget her too, for what she did in her life.”

A preliminary hearing for Martinez-Torres reportedly turned emotional on Friday, with Nabra’s parents both shouting at the suspect in court. Nabra’s mother Sawsan Gazzar apparently threw a shoe at Martinez-Torres during the proceedings.

READ MORE: D.C. memorial for slain Muslim teen was set on fire, officials say

The post Man accused of killing Muslim teen indicted on capital murder charges appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A 61-year-old San Antonio man pleaded guilty to two federal charges in the human smuggling incident that led to the deaths of 10 undocumented immigrants this summer.

James Matthew Bradley Jr., who appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge Monday, pleaded guilty to “one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death and one count of transporting aliens resulting in death,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.

The office added that Bradley’s “admission of guilt” meant he packed dozens of unauthorized immigrants into a tractor-trailer for financial gain, adding that the suspect confirmed that details from court documents were “factually correct.”

On July 23, San Antonio Police Department officers responded to a call from a Walmart employee shortly past midnight. Once officers arrived, they found 39 immigrants at the scene. Of those carried in the tractor-trailer, eight were found dead in the rear of the trailer, while two died later at nearby hospitals, the statement said.

Survivors of the incident said there was no air conditioning in the overheated trailer and had to take turns to breath through a hole in the back of the truck for air. Bradley also initially told investigators that he was unaware of the immigrants in the trailer until he had stopped at the Walmart in San Antonio for bathroom break.

The attorney’s office also said Bradley faces up to life in prison with the charges and that he is scheduled to be sentenced in January 2018. Immigrants said there were up to 200 people transported on the trailer and that different fees were quoted to them for the ride north from the U.S.-Mexico border, the statement added.

Jason Buch of San Antonio Express-News told the NewsHour earlier this year that Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, reported an uptick of immigrants using tractor-trailers to get pass checkpoints at the border.

“People are usually going on to major metropolitan areas or regions of the country that employ a lot of immigrant laborers, so, areas with large agriculture industries or construction booms,” Buch said.

The NewsHour’s John Yang learned more about the July human smuggling case and immigration politics from Jason Buch of San Antonio Express News.

Shane M. Folden, special agent in charge of homeland security investigations in San Antonio, said in the statement that the proceeding “helps to close the door on one of the conspirators responsible for causing the tragic loss of life and wreaking havoc on those who survived this horrific incident.”

“This case is a glaring reminder that alien smugglers are driven by greed and have little regard for the health and well-being of their human cargo, which can prove to be a deadly combination,” he added.

Bradley’s co-defendant Pedro Silva Segura was also indicted last month with faces two counts of conspiracy and two counts of transporting undocumented immigrants resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy.

Segura, 47, is an undocumented immigrant who resides in Laredo, Texas.

The post San Antonio truck driver pleads guilty in fatal human smuggling case appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has torpedoed the UK's economic recovery with her tax-and-spend Budget but Ed Miliband is the one who worries me.

October marked the "biggest" sales month for supermarkets in the UK so far despite food price hikes.

Martin Lewis has warned Tesco customers of a piece of small print that could see £18m worth of Clubcard points wasted.

If we want to terraform the Red Planet to make it better able to host microbial life, tiny rods of iron and aluminium may be the answer

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft had so many problems during its first crewed launch to the International Space Station that NASA officials aren’t sure whether it will be able to bring its crew back home as planned

Astronomers have been spotting strange banana-shaped galaxies and the evidence seems to indicate that filaments of dark matter make them take this shape

On 19 and 20 August, the JUICE mission will make the first ever attempt to get a gravitational boost from both Earth and the moon on its way to Jupiter

Researchers recently found a possible reservoir of liquid water more than 11 kilometres below Mars's surface – the latest in a long series of potential water discoveries on the Red Planet, hinting at its temperate past

Space exploration has long been a staple of sci-fi films and TV, yet most play fast and loose with the laws of physics, and scientific fact often couldn't be further from the truth

Mars rocks that were blasted off the surface of the Red Planet millions of years ago have been traced back to craters where they originated, which could transform our understanding of Mars’s volcanism and evolution

Lightning strikes near Earth give rise to electromagnetic waves called “whistlers” that can carry energy high enough above our planet to pose a risk to satellites and astronauts

After a star explodes, the resulting supernova remnant collapses in on itself and could begin the cycle again, creating generations of stars enriched with heavy elements

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Astronomers have identified patterns within the motion of stars stretching across the Milky Way, hinting at the presence of a vast wave

The Milky Way may be home to strange black holes from the first moments of the universe, and the best candidates are the three closest black holes to Earth

Brown dwarfs could be hiding dark matter inside their cores – if they are, there would be signs that could help us track it down