F1 enthusiasts know the excitement surrounding the annual release of the officially licensed games. Luckily, F1 25, developed by Codemasters in Birmingham, continues this tradition. Players can look forward to the return of the story mode, Brake Points, enhancements in My Team, the ever-popular career mode, and an intriguing partnership with F1: Film. Perhaps the most exciting feature is the option to race three tracks in reverse direction alongside the standard layout.
F1 25 feels like a culmination of prior advancements. For instance, last year’s F1 24 introduced a new physics model that underwent refinement post-launch; it is now fully optimized for improved car handling and tire wear, complemented by stunning graphics, as Codemasters transitions to this year’s advanced console.
Stunning graphics… F1 25. Photo: Electronic Arts
This advancement allows the company to explore fantasy elements that diverge from reality. One notable feature is the narrative surrounding the fictional Conor sports team, which unfolds across 15 chapters filled with engaging soap opera-style storylines and varied racing actions.
At its core, the beloved career mode, My Team, has upped the management aspect by placing you in the role of a new team owner, which has garnered considerable focus from Codemasters. This installment requires you to select one of your two hired drivers to stay in the corporate lane, making strategic driving choices more impactful than ever. In a similar vein, new parts must be assigned to specific drivers, enhancing the authenticity and realism of the gameplay, as emphasized by Codemasters.
As always, you can take your skills online, challenge opponents under varied standards, and engage in split-screen play with friends. A new addition, the Challenge Career mode, allows for timed scenarios offline, enabling players to compete globally on leaderboards. While this feature aims at pushing you beyond your comfort zone, its benefits will only be fully realized post-launch. Notably, scenarios from F1: Film will be available as post-release episodes, giving players an opportunity to experience the thrill of driving a Formula One car, as portrayed by Brad Pitt in his role as a fictional racer.
For fans of Formula One, there’s an exciting opportunity to experience the Red Bull Ring, Silverstone, Zandvoort, and Austria in reverse, with modifications made to accommodate new pit lanes. This reversal adds a completely fresh and engaging twist to the racing experience.
With real-world regulations evolving and significantly impacting car performance, Formula One appears to be at the pinnacle of its era, and F1 25 beautifully exemplifies this, blending a captivating mix of nail-biting realism with fantastical elements. F1 25? The peak of F1.
IImagine a new racing video game. Whatever you imagined, What the Car? is not. While the world of racing games prides itself on cutting edge game engines and perfectly simulated motor engines that make the speedometer feel real and the driving experience more and more detailed and realistic, this is the opposite: this car literally drives around on foot.
Described as “a silly adventure full of races, laughs, and surprises,” What the Car? puts you in the shoes of a car with legs, sprinting and climbing one ridiculous obstacle after another to reach the finish line. “No one on the team owns or even likes cars,” says Tim Garbos, the game's creative director at Copenhagen studio Triband.
“That may seem wrong when you're making a car game, but it allowed us to naively misunderstand a lot of things about cars.”
Not only can this car walk around on two legs, it can also play foosball. It can even chop vegetables. Though it's technically a racing game, it's best thought of as a collection of mindless mini-games. Each of the hundreds of levels has a different challenge to reach the goal, whether that be a paraglider, a football or becoming an accordion to cross a crevasse.
Madcap…what car? Photo: Triband
Naturally, this not-so-racing game isn’t inspired by Forza, Gran Turismo, or even Mario Kart. Instead, the Triband team cites the adventures of The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario 64, with flashes of Katamari Damacy amid the chaos (cars have extra legs and roll around the track like balls). “The ever-changing format of the game is great when it takes inspiration from anything,” Garbos adds.
A version of the game was first released on Apple Arcade last year, where it won a Dice award for best mobile game. The PC version has been enhanced and will continue to receive monthly updates. Another addition is a full level creator, allowing users to build and share their own bizarre worlds. Garbos hopes that the levels will be approached in an appropriately nonsensical style: “People will create totally awful levels and force their friends to play them.”
The studio has previous experience pumping up humor with baseball bat-wielding cult hits “What the Golf?” and “What the Bat?” “As a studio, we’re big on the comedy game, and when we create a joke, we start by setting expectations by giving you a mundane backdrop, and then we subvert those expectations by doing something different,” Garbos explains.
As other successful parody games like Goat Simulator have shown, there’s an art to making something beautiful and silly. So how exactly does Triband strike that balance? “We focus on realism, car fans, and completely ignoring real vehicles while still providing a great overall experience. Sometimes you just need to give your car bigger legs, or make it fly or swim, and we make that happen…” [but] It has to be silly and funny, but it also has to work as a game. It has to be something you want to play for hours. It takes time and commitment.
“The comedy genre is under-represented in video games” … What the Car? Photo: Triband
Games are good at comedy, especially physical comedy. Think Octodad, Gang Beasts, Untitled Goose Game, and any game where characters comically glitch into the scenery. What the Car? joins the recently released Thank Goodness You’re Here! and the upcoming Baby Steps as games actively trying to make us laugh this year.
“I think the genre of comedy is underrated in video games compared to, say, television,” says Gerbos. “We take comedy pretty seriously. If you want to make someone laugh, it has to start with you. If it feels funny or silly, then you’re on the right track… Personally, I love showing this game to people and seeing their eyes light up at the jokes and trying to hide their little laughs. That’s why I make video games.”
We can’t help but wonder what kind of absurdist tri-band treatment we’ll get into next. “We’re just getting started,” Garbos teases. “We’re thinking about making parody games of common, well-known things, like newspapers.”
SOpa (Spanish for “soup”) is a game about a young boy who goes to get potatoes for his grandma and finds himself lost in a magical world at the back of the pantry. “It feels like the pantry is getting longer and longer,” explains creative director Juan Castañeda. “And as he tries to grab a bag of potatoes, he's drawn into another world of fantasy and magical realism. He goes on different adventures and meets different characters, but at the end of the day, he's just trying to get potatoes for grandma's soup.”
As video game quests go, this is surprisingly mundane — not unlike rescuing a princess trapped in a castle or saving a land in peril — but you soon discover there's more to it than just the lost potato. “There's another layer to the story, and that's what the game is really about,” says Castañeda. “Every time you return to the kitchen, things change in unexpected ways, and with each adventure you pick up hints about a mysterious traveler who passed these paths long ago.”
An ancient mystery lies behind your initial quest to find cooking ingredients, and as the game progresses, elements of magical realism come to the forefront, making it “a little hard to know what's fantasy and what's reality,” Castaneda said.
Sopa is being developed by StudioBando, a team of around a dozen developers working remotely across countries including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and the US, who have previously worked on mobile titles. Super Best Ghost Game “Sopa will be the studio's first release for consoles and PC, but Castañeda hails from Colombia, the birthplace of magical realist author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and he says that Marquez's novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, were a major influence on Sopa.
“He's a kind of national treasure, a national hero,” Castañeda said, noting that Márquez's presence can be seen throughout the country. “We grew up hearing his stories, we grew up reading his books. It's something that is deeply ingrained in the heart of every Colombian.”
Colombia also has deep roots in Sopa. Castañeda says the game is based on his grandmother's house in a rural Colombian town swallowed up by a growing city. “It was a traditional colonial house with a big garden,” he says, recalling the place always bustling thanks to his grandmother's 15 children. “Some of them had their own children, and the house was always bustling,” he recalls. “Every room was always full.”
Photography: StudioBanda
In contrast, Sopa offers a quieter experience, at least at first. The young protagonist, Miho, is bored hanging out watching TV at her grandmother's house and reluctantly gets up to help prepare soup. The show he's watching, The Voltage Templars, is a homage to the Power Rangers that Castañeda remembers as a child, just one of the many American and Japanese shows that flooded Colombian television.
“There wasn't much Colombian media at the time, other than radio,” he says. “As a kid, I wanted foreign frozen yogurt, I wanted to watch American shows, I wanted to read foreign books, and I ignored a lot of the really beautiful and special things around me.” Miho's reunion with her own culture forms the basis of Sopa, as she dives into a world steeped in Latin American traditions. “Through these adventures, you pick up the pieces of these traditions and learn to appreciate them.”
Sopa appears to be part of a trend, alongside games like 2023 award-winning Venba, about reconnecting with cultural traditions through cooking, and Indonesian hit A Space for the Unbound, as creators increasingly depict cultures outside the U.S., Europe, and Japan that have traditionally dominated video games. “Maybe people all over the world are feeling the same way I am, and telling personal stories about their place,” Castaneda says.
Photography: StudioBanda
Besides Garcia Marquez, Castañeda said The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Pinocchio, and especially the Pixar film Coco were major influences on Sopa. Though the idea was born about 10 years ago, the game's development has been ongoing for about five years, starting with studio co-founders Castañeda, Holt, and co-writer Nelson Guevara. “We all basically went back home to finish the game and keep costs down,” Castañeda said.
“It's not like we had a ton of money saved up from previous successes. It was a really humble start and quite tough. It was very hard to get support for a long time.” He pitched the game to publishers but was rejected one after the other, with companies unwilling to believe the team could realise their ambitions or doubting that there was a market for it.
Photography: StudioBanda
Meanwhile, Castañeda says he received plenty of support from his peers in the gaming industry. “For a long time, no one was willing to back the project and help us make it, but personally, I had a lot of supporters and people with beliefs in the gaming industry who helped us get the project out there.” The big breakthrough came at a meeting with Microsoft. “We pitched the game, but it wasn't even a video call, it was just audio, so I had no idea what they thought,” Castañeda recalls. “Then, a week later, in the middle of the night, I got an email saying they liked the project and wanted to back it.
“I remember calling my teammates in tears to tell them the news, because that day I had been talking to my advisors and I was like, 'Was I just stupid? The Earth is showing us that we shouldn't make this game. Nothing is happening to us.' And then that same night I got the news that they were going to help us out with an initial investment.”
That was last fall, in the midst of a tumultuous time in the games industry, with frequent layoffs and studio closures, “everything crashing and burning around us and just being scared,” Castaneda says. Perhaps Sopa is not just a game about reconnecting with Latin American traditions, but also a game about tenacity and, above all, hope.
AI program Sora generated this video featuring an android based on text prompts
Sora/OpenAI
OpenAI has announced a program called Sora, a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence system that can turn text descriptions into photo-realistic videos. This video generation model has added to excitement over advances in AI technology, along with growing concerns about how synthetic deepfake videos will exacerbate misinformation and disinformation during a critical election year around the world. I am.
Sora AI models can currently create videos up to 60 seconds using text instructions alone or a combination of text and images. One demonstration video begins with a text prompt describing a “stylish woman walking down a Tokyo street filled with warmly glowing neon lights and animated city signs.” Other examples include more fantastical scenarios such as dogs frolicking in the snow, vehicles driving down the road, and sharks swimming through the air between city skyscrapers.
“Like other technologies in generative AI, there is no reason to believe that text-to-video conversion will not continue to advance rapidly. We are increasingly approaching a time when it will be difficult to tell the fake from the real.” Honey Farid at the University of California, Berkeley. “Combining this technology with AI-powered voice cloning could open up entirely new ground in terms of creating deepfakes of things people say and do that they have never actually done.”
Sora is based on some of OpenAI's existing technologies, including the image generator DALL-E and the GPT large language model. Although his text-to-video AI models lag somewhat behind other technologies in terms of realism and accessibility, Sora's demonstrations are “orders of magnitude more believable and cartoon-like” than previous ones. “It's less sticky,” he said. Rachel TobackHe is the co-founder of SocialProof Security, a white hat hacking organization focused on social engineering.
To achieve this higher level of realism, Sora combines two different AI approaches. The first is a diffusion model similar to those used in AI image generators such as DALL-E. These models learn to gradually transform randomized image pixels into a consistent image. The second of his AI techniques is called “Transformer Architecture” and is used to contextualize and stitch together continuous data. For example, large-scale language models use transformer architectures to assemble words into commonly understandable sentences. In this case, OpenAI split the video clip into visual “space-time patches” that Sora's transformer architecture could process.
Sora's video still contains many mistakes, such as a walking person's left and right feet swapping positions, a chair floating randomly in the air, and a chewed cookie magically leaving no bite marks. contained. still, jim fanThe senior research scientist at NVIDIA praised Sora on social media platform X as a “data-driven physics engine” that can simulate the world.
The fact that Sola's video still exhibits some strange glitches when depicting complex scenes with lots of movement suggests that such deepfake videos are still detectable for now. There is, he says. Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University. But he also warned that in the long term, “we need to find other ways to adapt as a society.”
OpenAI has been holding off on making Sora publicly available while it conducts “red team” exercises in which experts attempt to break safeguards in AI models to assess Sora's potential for abuse. An OpenAI spokesperson said the select group currently testing Sora are “experts in areas such as misinformation, hateful content, and bias.”
This test is very important. Because synthetic videos allow malicious actors to generate fake footage, for example, to harass someone or sway a political election. Misinformation and disinformation fueled by AI-generated deepfakes ranks as a major concern For leaders as well as in academia, business, government, and other fields. For AI experts.
“Sora is fully capable of creating videos that have the potential to deceive the public,” Tobac said. “Videos don't have to be perfect to be trustworthy, as many people still don't understand that videos can be manipulated as easily as photos.”
Toback said AI companies will need to work with social media networks and governments to combat the massive misinformation and disinformation that could arise after Sora is released to the public. Defenses could include implementing unique identifiers, or “watermarks,” for AI-generated content.
When asked if OpenAI has plans to make Sora more widely available in 2024, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company “will make Sora more widely available in OpenAI's products.” We are taking important safety measures.” For example, the company already uses automated processes aimed at preventing commercial AI models from producing extreme violence, sexual content, hateful images, and depictions of real politicians and celebrities. .With more people than ever before Participate in elections this yearthese safety measures are extremely important.
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