The early 2000s were filled with multiple releases that tried to capitalize on the craze for open-world games. The arrival and success of Grand Theft Auto III was incredibly influential on everything, causing some franchises to shift towards an open-world format and licensed games to do the same. One of the more popular open-world clones from this era was The Simpsons: Hit & Run on PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Xbox. It blended the iconic humor and locations of the ongoing show with an open-world setting that players can roam around in freely.

When you have a Windows 11 PC, keeping it in tip-top shape is important. Performance degradation is a real problem as you start to pile more and more data onto the computer, so there are steps you should take to ensure it keeps performing its best.

Whenever planning a new PC build, no single component has as many variables to consider as the motherboard. That's always been true, but it's even more so nowadays, when PCIe lane allocation can be split between PCIe slots, M.2 NVMe slots, and sometimes SATA ports.

Rohit Prasad, Amazon's SVP of AGI. 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.Amazon's AI chief has a message for the model benchmark obsessives: Stop looking at the leaderboards."I want real-world utility. None of these benchmarks are real," Rohit Prasad, Amazon's SVP of AGI, told me ahead of today's announcements at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. "The only way to do real benchmarking is if everyone conforms to the same training data and the evals are completely held out. That's not what's happening. The evals are frankly getting noisy, and they're not showing the real power …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the biggest surprises of Cyber Monday was the excellent discount we saw on the Nintendo Switch 2 Mario Kart World console bundle, which dropped in price by $50. We expected the price to return to normal once the shopping holiday ended, but — surprise, surprise — it’s still going strong. Several major retailers are offering the gaming bundle for $449.99 ($50 off), including Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. Since it’s a high-demand item, Walmart and Best Buy require that you add the bundle to your cart before seeing the discounted price. In the case of Walmart, you must create an account in order to go through the checkout process.Nintendo Switch 2Where to Buy: $499.99 $449 at Amazon (Mario Kart World bundle) $499.99 $449.99 at Walmart (Mario Kart World bundle) $499.99 $449 at Best Buy (Mario Kart World bundle)The current promo effectively gets you a free digital copy of Mario Kart World, which typically retails for $79.99 on its own. Given that tariff-induced price hikes have recently made consoles like the original Switch, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5 to become more expensive, this deal is a welcome reprieve. However, we don’t anticipate it sticking around, so if you or someone you know is on the hunt for the Switch 2, now’s the time to pick one up.The Nintendo Switch 2 offers a nice upgrade over the original, with an expansive 7.9-inch 1080p LCD screen, magnetic Joy-Con controllers, and improved performance. It can play most original Switch games, and the system’s library of must-play titles continues to grow, with big releases like Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart World, Kirby Air Riders, and the forthcoming Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.Read our Nintendo Switch 2 review.Update, December 2nd, 2:48PM ET: Added the Best Buy discount. The retailers listed above have wavered on offering this deal, but for now, it’s back on.

Indiegogo is planning to launch a new “Express Crowdfunding” campaign format that lets creators ship things while the campaign is on-going instead of forcing creators to wait until the campaign is over.Indiegogo spokesperson Maciej Kuc tells The Verge that the change was spurred by Indiegogo’s recent move to the infrastructure from its new owner, board game crowdfunding company Gamefound:Switching to an entirely new technology is always a major challenge. The technology Indiegogo is currently working on was originally created for Gamefound – a slightly more “typical” crowdfunding platform. Its core assumption was that creators run a campaign to raise funds in order to bring a product to life. The technology expected that at least two weeks would pass between the crowdfunding campaign and the pledge manager phase – the moment when orders are finalized, new ones are added, and shipping addresses are collected.One prominent example of the current system’s delays, which was reported on by Android Authority, was Ayaneo’s campaign for its new Pocket AIR Mini retro gaming handheld. Ayaneo originally planned to begin shipping the handheld by the end of November, but because of “platform policy requirements,” the company says it can’t collect addresses for shipping until December 5th. Specifically, Ayaneo says it can’t request to move the campaign into the Pledge Manager phase, where shipping addresses are collected, until December 2nd, and that request takes approximately three days to be reviewed. Shipments will now begin “around” December 10th, according to Ayaneo.Indiegogo’s new Express Crowdfunding format “should be available” in early February, Kuc says. 

Though HBO Max was very proud to announce that it would be the first platform to stream Mad Men in 4K, the show's new rollout has been an absolute mess.When HBO Max subscribers fired up the app yesterday hoping to see Don Draper and company in glorious 4K, many were dismayed to see that some of the steamer's new 4K Mad Men episodes are filled with unusual errors. A number of episodes, including "5G" and "Red in the Face," are listed on HBO Max with incorrect titles. But the more glaring issue is the way that the infamous vomiting scene from "Red in the Face" now includes a clear shot of a production crewmember who is not supposed to be vis …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’ve been short on storage on your PC, the latest Helldivers 2 beta update might help. The developers said Tuesday they’ve managed to cut down the PC file size for Helldivers 2 by about 85 percent, freeing up enough space for at least one or two more large games. In a post on the game’s Steam page, the developers explained that they’ve been working on slimming down the game while also adding new content:“The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB.”The reduction in file size should have a “minimal” impact on load times, “seconds at most,” the developers said. The original file size was significantly larger because the developers were duplicating game asset data to improve load times on mechanical HDDs, which they estimate about 11 percent of Helldivers 2 players are currently using. However, as the post on the update explains, the developers now know that load times in Helldivers 2 are mainly due to level generation, not loading game assets, so duplicating asset data was offering minimal benefit and impacting a small percentage of players (while making the file size larger for everyone). Anyone with the PC version of Helldivers 2 can opt in for the technical public beta on Steam to get the “slim” version of the game, which will eventually become the default version after the developers iron out any remaining issues that come up in beta testing.

The Roborock Saros 10 is one of the best Cyber Monday deals still lingering around. | Photo: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Black Friday and Cyber Monday brought some of the best deals of the year on robot vacuums. One of the handful of great discounts remaining is on the Roborock Saros 10, which we recently crowned the runner-up in our buying guide to the best robovac you can buy. This robovac and mop hybrid is still costly at $1,099.99 ($500 off) at Amazon and directly from Roborock, but it’s the biggest discount yet, and it might be worth the cost for you.Roborock Saros 10Where to Buy: $1599.99 $1099.99 at Amazon $1599.99 $1099.99 at RoborockThe Saros 10 is powerful, boasting a whopping 22,000Pa of suction. In our tests, its Duo Divide brush did an excellent job sucking up dried oatmeal, Cheerios, and other pesky debris. It was particularly impressive at removing pet hair from high-pile rugs. Even after a couple of months of testing, we still didn’t see any hair tangled in the brush.It’s versatile, too. It can lift itself 10mm to give it a better shot at crossing tall room thresholds, and thanks to a retractable lidar tower, it can even slide under furniture as low as 8cm. And it manages all of that without getting tripped up by obstacles. I wish I could say the same for myself.The Saros 10 also offers an impressive vibrating mop, which comes with a flat pad that scrubs effectively without getting stuck in things like rug tassels. What’s nice is that robot can lift its mop pads out of the way to keep carpets dry while it vacuums. Rounding things out, the robovac also supports the Matter smart home standard for interoperability with different platforms. Also, it features a responsive built-in voice assistant, so all you need to say is “Rocky, clean here,” and it’ll get to work.

“BG3 players exploit children,” reads a Google AI-generated headline. | Image: Google Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one - but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka "swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear," and that's where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.They're not all bad. For example, "Origami model wins prize" and "Hyundai, Kia gain share" seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as …Read the full story at The Verge.

A Raspberry Pi 5 might look like a simple little board, but it can transform an entire home network into something faster, safer, and far easier to manage. I discovered this when I set out to consolidate my DNS, VPN, and monitoring tools into a single low-power machine. The surprising part was that it did not take expensive hardware or complicated systems to pull it off. What I ended up with was a reliable, centralized, and quiet automation hub that made my daily internet experience noticeably smoother.

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers that covers the political intrigue and power struggles between Big Tech and Big Government. Subscribe here for a weekly dispatch of tech oligarchs fighting regular oligarchs.Prior to last week, only highly specialized political insiders knew the extent of David Sacks' influence in the Trump White House: tech policy hawks, lobbyists, reporters, and right-wing operatives infuriated that the billionaire venture capitalist was turning Donald Trump toward artificial intelligence and against the interests of the MAGA base. A deeply reported New York Times article published on Sun …Read the full story at The Verge.