Nvidia, Intel to co-develop “multiple generations” of chips as part of $5 billion deal

In a major collaboration that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, Nvidia announced today that it was buying a total of $5 billion in Intel stock, giving Intel's competitor ownership of roughly 4 percent of the company. In addition to the investment, the two companies said that they would be co-developing "multiple generations of custom data center and PC products."

"The companies will focus on seamlessly connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink," reads Nvidia's press release, "integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers."

Rather than combining the two companies' technologies, the data center chips will apparently be custom x86 chips that Intel builds to Nvidia's specifications. Nvidia will "integrate [the CPUs] into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer [them] to the market."

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Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

When I was a child, SimCity 2000 felt like a fun, animated set of urban-themed Lego blocks to tinker with. Revisiting the game roughly three decades later, though, I've found the weight of my adult responsibilities tempering my role as god-mayor of a tiny metropolis.

The tough economics of establishing a thriving city barely concerned me as a child. Rather than building up a durable tax base from a slowly growing city of happy citizens, I'd usually type in an infinite money cheat or load up the handy Urban Renewal Kit expansion to build whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, as quickly as possible.

A blank canvas, ready for me to destroy. Credit: Maxis

Thus unleashed, my childhood self would go mad with unchecked power, petulantly turning dials just to see what happened to the citizens in my virtual ant farm. Sometimes I'd try to arrange a repeating grid of fancy arcologies and police stations, trying to create a regimented utopia out of the game's most expensive (and therefore "best") building type. More often, I'd play with the far edges of the simulation, crowding residential areas next to polluting heavy industry or letting entire neighborhoods go without fire protection and waiting to see how long it took for things to fall apart.

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Modder injects AI dialogue into 2002’s Animal Crossing using memory hack

When software engineer Joshua Fonseca recently connected the GameCube simulation classic Animal Crossing to a modern AI language model like the kind that powers ChatGPT, he decided to shake things up. By programming the AI to roleplay as villagers growing aware of their debt situation, and giving them a shared memory to track conversations, Fonseca orchestrated a scenario where the residents began to organize against their raccoon landlord.

In Animal Crossing, Tom Nook runs the town shop and provides home loans (paid out in bells, the in-game currency) that keep players perpetually in debt, which is a core mechanic of the game.

"Predictably, it escalated into an anti-Tom Nook movement," Fonseca wrote in a detailed post documenting his hack that bridges a 2002 game to cloud-based AI without modifying any game code. While Fonseca frames the uprising as a type of emergent phenomenon in his post and a YouTube video, examination of the source code by AI researcher Simon Willison shows that Fonseca specifically instructed the villagers to behave this way and even escalate the unrest over time.

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Over three decades later, Nintendo remembers the Virtual Boy exists

Even as Nintendo has endlessly mined its classic consoles for nostalgic re-releases in recent decades, the company has seemed to completely ignore the existence of the Virtual Boy—its abortive 1990s dip into the world of early virtual reality. That's finally set to change next February with Nintendo's first-ever official re-release of Virtual Boy games—at least for players who invest $100 in a required Virtual Boy-shaped Switch dock (or a cheaper cardboard holder) to make them work.

Virtual Boy – Nintendo Classics will be available for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members on #NintendoSwitch and #NintendoSwitch2 starting Feb 17, 2026! #NintendoDirect pic.twitter.com/VnCO0DiX3S

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) September 12, 2025

Subscribers to Nintendo Switch Online in the US and Canada will soon be able to purchase that $100 dock, which Nintendo says "recreates the form of the original Virtual Boy hardware," or a slender $25 cardboard alternative. Then, starting on February 17, those players will be able to play downloaded Virtual Boy games (included with an Expansion Pack subscription) by inserting a Switch or Switch 2 into one of those retro replicas. The system itself will presumably display those games in a split-screen mode that can be viewed through special lenses to replicate the Virtual Boy's original 384×224 resolution, four-shades-of-red stereoscopic display.

Nintendo's announcement says you'll "need this dedicated accessory" to play Virtual Boy titles through a Switch, suggesting that flat-screen play on a console without one of the custom docks won't be possible. And while "purchase limits apply" to the plastic Virtual Boy replica (which seems likely to be a collectible available only in limited supplies), the cheaper cardboard model seems designed for wider availability.

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Is Hollow Knight: Silksong too hard? Well, it depends on what you mean by “hard.”

For seven years, the discussion around Hollow Knight: Silksong focused on the cult-like levels of devotion among fans patiently waiting for the sequel. Now that Silksong has been available for about a week, though, that discussion has turned decisively toward seemingly endless takes on the game's relative difficulty (or lack thereof). The discussion has gotten so loud that the developers at Team Cherry have vowed to implement a "slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter" in a coming patch.

So is Silksong too difficult for its own good? Or do players just have to "get good" and stop whining?

To help answer those questions, we felt it was a good time to bust out the Ars Difficulty Matrix (ADM), which we first used to analyze Elden Ring's difficulty in 2022. By breaking down the various ways a game can be "difficult," the ADM can more precisely critique the ways Silksong is and is not designed to challenge players, both for good and for ill.

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Accessory maker will pay Nintendo after showing illicit Switch 2 mockups at CES

Nintendo-watchers may remember when little-known accessory-maker Genki showed the world an extremely accurate 3D-printed mockup of the Switch 2 back in January, about a week before Nintendo's own "first look" teaser video and months before the system's wider unveiling. Now, in a newly filed settlement agreement, Genki has agreed to pay Nintendo unspecified damages for "trademark infringement, unfair competition, and false advertising" in connection with that promotional stunt.

The controversy started at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Genki showed off to press and attendees the 3D mockup of the then-unseen Switch 2 sporting the company's accessories. Genki also posted a video showing a detailed mockup of the system from various angles. By April, Genki was promoting a "Genki Direct" livestream focused on "upcoming accessories for Genki Glitch 2" (no that isn't a typo).

Nintendo's lawyers reportedly visited Genki's CES booth once reports of the Switch 2 mockup started going viral. But a Genki representative asserted at the time that the company did not sign an NDA with Nintendo and therefore "has nothing to worry about."

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Switch modder owes Nintendo $2 million after representing himself in court

It has often been said that the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. That truism apparently extends to Switch modders as well, at least in the case of Ryan Daly. The operator of the now-defunct moddedhardware.com (archived) now owes Nintendo $2 million after a recent settlement filed in a Washington state District Court.

The final judgement, which was jointly agreed to by both parties, asserts that Daly knowingly sold devices such as the MIG Switch and MIG Dumper that "are primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing the [technological protection measures, and] have limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent the TPMs." Daly also sold and installed mod chips to get around Switch DRM and "copied and distributed certain copyrighted Nintendo games to his customers," according to the judgment.

Nintendo's lawsuit alleged that the company initially approached Daly about the sale of these devices in March 2024, and that Daly agreed at the time "both verbally and in signed writing" to refrain from further sales. After Daly continued to sell the devices, though, Nintendo took the further step of bringing this lawsuit last June.

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All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity

Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

All at once, then slowly

GitHub user Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project's launch last October. That includes one YouTuber who had purchased and maintained copies of 39 distinct games, even repurchasing some of the upgraded versions Apple sold separately for later iPod models.

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Civilization VII team at Firaxis Games faces layoffs

Firaxis Games, the studio that developed Civilization VII, is undergoing layoffs. The news went public when a former employee took to LinkedIn to announce her unemployment; Game Developer picked the story up, and publisher 2K Games soon confirmed it.

"We can confirm there was a staff reduction today at Firaxis Games, as the studio restructures and optimizes its development process for adaptability, collaboration, and creativity," a spokesperson wrote to multiple news outlets. The company did not confirm the number of people laid off.

The two most recent Firaxis games, 2022's Marvel's Midnight Suns and 2025's Civilization VII, both appeared to launch to lukewarm initial sales and player numbers.

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Dev says Switch 2’s physical Game Cards were too slow for Star Wars Outlaws port

Nintendo's data-free, download-unlocking Game Key Cards have proven popular with game publishers, even as they've drawn ire from many fans of games stored on physical media. Now, though, a developer on Star Wars Outlaws is saying that a technical limitation of the Switch 2's Game Card interface may be driving some publishers away from fully physical game releases on the Switch 2.

Writing in a Bluesky thread discussing the performance of the Outlaws' Switch 2 port [which is only available as a download or Game Key Card], Snowdrop Audio Architect Rob Bantin chimed in to discuss why a full physical release wasn't in the cards for the Switch 2.

"Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for," Bantin wrote. "I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. As it was, we’d build a game around the SSDs of the initial target platforms, and then the Switch 2 came along a while later. In this case, I think our leadership made the right call."

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Hollow Knight: Silksong is breaking Steam, Nintendo’s eShop

An influx of players excited for this morning's launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong are encountering widespread errors purchasing and downloading the game from Steam this morning. Ars Technica writers have encountered errors getting store pages to load, adding the game to an online shopping cart, and checking out once the game is part of the cart.

That aligns with widespread social media complaints and data from DownDetector, which saw a sudden spike of over 11,000 reports of problems with Steam in the minutes following Silksong's 10 am Eastern time release on Steam. The server problems don't seem to be completely stopping everyone, though, as SteamDB currently reports over 100,000 concurrent players for Silksong as of this writing.

Ars also encountered some significant delays and/or outright errors when downloading other games and updates and syncing cloud saves on Steam during this morning's server problems. The Humble Store page for Silksong currently warns North American purchasers that "We have run out of Steam keys for Hollow Knight: Silksong in your region, but more are on their way! As soon as we receive more Steam keys, we will add them to your download page. Sorry about the delay!"

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Over 30 years later, a rare LaserDisc game console gets its first PC emulator

Here in the year 2025, it's not every day that a classic gaming console from the 20th century becomes playable via emulation for the first time. But that's just what happened last week with the release of Ares v146 and its first-of-its-kind support for Mega LD titles designed for the Pioneer LaserActive.

Even retro console superfans would be forgiven for not knowing about the LaserActive, a pricey LaserDisc player released in 1994 alongside swappable hardware modules that could add support for Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 games and controllers. Using those add-ons, you could also play a handful of games specifically designed for the LaserActive format, which combined game data and graphics with up to 60 minutes of full-screen, standard-definition analog video per side.

Mega-LD games (as the Genesis-compatible LaserActive titles were called) were, for the most part, super-sized versions of the types of games you'd find on early CD-ROM console of the era. That means a lot of edutainment titles, branching dungeon crawlers, Dragon's Lair-style animated quick-time event challenges, and rail shooters that overlayed standard Genesis or TG-16 graphics on top of elaborate animated video backgrounds (sometimes complete with filmed actors).

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Battlefield 6 dev apologizes for requiring Secure Boot to power anti-cheat tools

Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren't able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA's anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems.

Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away.

"The fact is I wish we didn't have to do things like Secure Boot," Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. "It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people's PCs can't handle it and they can't play: that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things."

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Today’s game consoles are historically overpriced

Today's video game consoles are hundreds of dollars more expensive than you'd expect based on historic pricing trends. That's according to an Ars Technica analysis of decades of pricing data and price-cut timing across dozens of major US console releases.

The overall direction of this trend has been apparent to industry watchers for a while now. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have failed to cut their console prices in recent years and have instead been increasing the nominal MSRP for many current consoles in the past six months.

If the original Switch followed historic pricing trends, it could be selling for a bargain basement $100 to $150 right now. Credit: Kyle Orland

Even accounting for inflation, some PS5 consoles are more expensive today than they were at launch. Credit: Kyle Orland

Despite cratering Xbox hardware sales, Microsoft has been unwilling to cut prices on Xbox consoles. Credit: Kyle Orland

But when you crunch the numbers, it's pretty incredible just how much today's console prices defy historic expectations, even when you account for higher-than-normal inflation in recent years. If today's consoles were seeing anything like what used to be standard price cuts over time, we could be paying around $200 today for pricey systems like the Switch OLED, PS5 Digital Edition, and Xbox Series S.

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Chris Roberts hopes Squadron 42 will be “almost as big” as GTA VI next year

The single-player Star Citizen spin-off Squadron 42 is slated to finally be in players' hands in 2026, 11 full years after its initial 2015 release target. And after all that time, Cloud Imperium Games CEO Chris Roberts says he's hopeful that the title will be received similarly to another 2026 release that happens to be possibly the most anticipated video game of all time: Grand Theft Auto VI.

A recent report from France's La Presse (translated) suggests that Squadron 42's launch is being timed so that it "won't be overshadowed" by the planned May launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. "We're hoping it'll be almost as big an event," Roberts said in comparing the two upcoming releases in an interview with the French paper. "Other than GTA VI, it's probably the biggest-budget AAA game [of the year]."

That's a pretty bold claim, considering Squadron 42's very public and tumultuous path to a purported "feature complete" status in 2023. But it seems at least somewhat reasonable when you consider that GTA VI's development budget of nearly $1 billion lines up closely with $859 million in crowdfunding currently being reported for Star Citizen as a whole.

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