Sometimes games are too fun. Sometimes you want a game that's not very fun at all. Sometimes you want a game where one mistake can lead you to lose a ton of progress with no way to reload a save, and no way to get back up again quickly. You just have to redo everything you've already done until you're back to where you were, and then you may just fall back down again.

Halloween season is a great time to revisit games in the horror genre to get into the spirit of the holiday. It's the best time during autumn, when some of the darkest and creepiest beings become the focus of every form of entertainment. Whether you're a fan of survival horror games or any title with monsters and ghouls that show up to the party, there are tons of great games to play during Halloween. But it's not always a good idea to play some games with the lights off, sitting in the dark of your house with the screen on. Anyone that is easily frightened by horror-related experiences would be terrified by how some games go out of their way to scare players.

Nowadays, many are concerned about tracking several aspects of their workout routines, and services like Strava and Garmin come in handy. However, while these services provide the necessary push to track our activities, they also come with trade-offs. They store your data on their servers. Plus, they often require recurring subscriptions to continue enjoying premium services, and in the end, you may not even have full control over your training history.

I've wanted to come clean for years, because I lumped productivity apps into the same category as corporate team-building exercises. They were a well-intentioned, over-engineered hassle that got in the way of actual work. Mind maps were the worst offenders, and I thought of them as glorified flowcharts consultants throw on whiteboards to justify their $500-per-hour fee. Sure, I used small flowcharts as an extension of analog note-taking in college, but it still felt like a convoluted, arts-and-crafts way to visualize a simple bulleted list.

The PC building landscape has changed a lot in the past decade. What used to be common sense for PC enthusiasts in the mid-2010s often doesn’t hold up anymore, but that's not because those habits were necessarily incorrect. The hardware world has evolved continually, and many of these old "best practices" are either unnecessary, or just plain counterproductive for today's builds.

It's dusk, and bugs are chirping all around me. I'm wandering through the middle of a big, virtual swamp toward the sound of thumping bass off in the distance. There isn't much else nearby - some trees, a couple of other players. It's mostly just me and the sound emanating from a large wooden structure strung up with lights sitting farther out into the swamp.When I finally arrive, it rises above me: the official clubhouse of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. I make for the door to head inside. Except I find I can't get access; even though the lights are on in the house, the doors don't actually open. There's nothing to do.These were my first ste …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's gotten to the point where I just assume I have access to the internet at all times. When a power outage hits and I'm on my laptop, I figure that I can just get on YouTube and watch some videos while I wait for my router to come back, and then I realise how silly I'm being.

Recommending FTL: Faster Than Light is an easy task. After all, it's one of the best roguelikes out there, which helped shape the genre for future titles and did some really incredible things that still keep people hooked to this day.

It's been a long time since I started using a NAS at home, and until recently, my needs were handled by a succession of Synology devices. The operating system felt like a desktop environment, so the learning curve felt lower, and once I upgraded to a better CPU, could handle self-hosted apps with ease. But then, features I relied on in DSM, Synology's OS, started to disappear, others changed names, and the company moved towards locking its hardware down further.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.Sam Altman has tapped Mikhail Shapiro, an award-winning biomolecular engineer, to join the Merge Labs brain-computer interface startup he's set to announce soon with co-founder Alex Blania.While Shapiro's official title is unclear, sources say he will be part of Merge's founding team and has been positioned as a key leader in talks with investors. Those talks are ongoing, but Merge expects to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from OpenAI and others, as The Financial Times earlier reported.S …Read the full story at The Verge.

Earlier this week, Jon Prosser, who is being sued by Apple for allegedly stealing trade secrets, told The Verge that he has been “in active communications with Apple since the beginning stages of this case.” But Apple, in a new filing on Thursday that was reported on by MacRumors, said that while Prosser has “publicly acknowledged” Apple’s complaint, he “has not indicated whether he will file a response to it or, if so, by when.”Prosser didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge. Apple sued Prosser, who posted videos earlier this year showing off features that would debut in iOS 26 ahead of their official announcement, and another defendant, Michael Ramacciotti, in July. The company alleged that Prosser and Ramacciotti had “a coordinated scheme to break into an Apple development iPhone, steal Apple’s trade secrets, and profit from the theft.”A clerk already entered a default against Prosser last week, which means he hasn’t responded to the lawsuit and that the case can move forward. In Thursday’s filing, Apple said it “intends to file a default judgment seeking damages and an injunction against him.”Thursday’s filing also includes statements from Ramacciotti. While Ramacciotti “admits to” providing information about iOS 26 to Prosser, “no underlying plan, conspiracy, or scheme was formed” between them, Ramacciotti said. He also claimed that he “had no intent to monetize this information when he contacted Mr. Prosser, nor was there any arrangement at the time the information was conveyed that he would be compensation [sic].”Apple and Ramacciotti have also “informally discussed settlement,” according to the filing.

While building is usually the way to go if you want to really get hands on with your PC, buying something pre-built isn't such a bad idea either, especially if you're looking to get something right out of the box that just works. Plus, you get the added benefit of having all the parts and labor covered under warranty, just in case something does go wrong.