Looking forward to playing XCOM 2 from the couch? Well now you can, but there’s a bit of a catch. Firaxis today announced early access for the Steam Controller, with a set of native features that are unique to the Steam gamepad offering.
In a new post on the Steam Controller page, Valve developer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais explained the details of how the controller would actually work. There are three main features that are enabled with native controller support, mostly centered around changing the control scheme and settings of the controller based on the current state of the game.
These feature are just part of the first move toward supporting the Steam Controller. Firaxis and Valve are both interested in feedback from the community in shaping future integration and support. As part of that effort, Valve is offering a 40-percent discount on the Steam Controller when purchased with XCOM 2, for a total price of $90 for both. Anyone who pre-ordered the game can take advantage of the discount by buying the Steam Controller separately.
The Steam Controller is more of a mouse and keyboard replacement than a gamepad. The large touchpads are the perfect platform for selecting abilities, customizing characters, and zooming around the battlefield without a lot of excessive D-Pad or joystick use.
While early adopters of Valve’s first-party gamepad option will be stoked to find their new toy will have native XCOM 2 support, this move is likely to irk some users. Over the last few years, the Xbox 360 controller has become a standard gamepad option for PC gamers. No word on whether XCOM 2 will support the Xbox 360 controller in the future, but this collaboration could help push more gamers towards the Steam option.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?