Latest news with #SpaceInvaders
New York Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
The retro console you never knew you needed just went on sale
Discover startups, services, products and more from our partner StackCommerce. New York Post edits this content, and may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. TL;DR: This retro console comes with 70,000+ games pre-loaded, and it just went on sale. With all the bad stuff going on in the world right now, I was really wishing I could transport myself back in time. Unfortunately, I'm not Marty McFly and I can't find a time machine, so I had to find another way. I stumbled upon the Kinhank Super Console X2 Pro, a retro-inspired game console loaded with all the classics and even some new-age favorites. This gaming system has all the best parts of an old-school console with the blessings of modern technology. It comes with more than 70,000 games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Counter-Strike with 60+ pre-loaded emulators. Advertisement It supports multiplayer mode so you can even share the enjoyment with your family and friends. When you get tired of gaming—if that's even possible—you can use it to stream your favorite shows through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Turn on some Seinfeld, Full House, or Beverly Hills 90210 to keep the nostalgia going, or choose a new Netflix classic like Squid Games or Stranger Things. The bundle includes everything you need to get started and get gaming. It's a true plug-and-play experience—just like the days before you had to create accounts or download everything from the cloud. It even comes with 2 controllers, but it's compatible with a bunch of others. Plug in your old analog joysticks or grab your tried-and-true Bluetooth controller. You can keep living in the glory days and reminisce on when 3D was the coolest thing to happen since sliced bread by downloading an additional 20,000 3D games at no cost. But seriously—what happened to 3D? Whether you want to re-live the glory days and escape reality or just play some old favorites, you can snag this gaming and streaming console for just $89.97 (reg. $159.99) while supplies last. You even get free shipping—the reverse of those 'just pay shipping and handling' infomercials you used to love. Now, if only there was a way to bring back Scooby Doo Fruit Snacks… Sale ends June 1 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Don't miss your chance for a reunion with Pac-Man. StackSocial prices subject to change.
Digital Trends
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
My latest Steam Deck obsession is a tactical spin on Space Invaders
There are few games that feel truly timeless to me, but Space Invaders ranks high on that list. Anytime I play it, I still find that I can sink my teeth into it more than most modern games 10,000 times its size. It's simple, but I find that there's hidden depth in its strategy. What's the most efficient way to clear waves? How do you manage columns of aliens once they start getting closer? Every game is a battle in which every shot counts. StarVaders understands that idea and takes it to a logical evolution. The new indie game is another in a long line of genre hybrids that smashes a roguelike, deck-builder, and shoot-em-up together. I rolled my eyes when I first heard the description, but after a week of toying around with it, I'm hooked. StarVaders takes the feeling I get when playing Space Invaders and successfully puts it into a turn-based tactics format that has me constantly starting one more run. The premise here is familiar: Aliens have come to Earth! Shocking, I know. It's up to a squad of mech pilots to fight them off. It's a simple setup, but there's some surprising depth to where it all goes. At the end of each run, I hear a bit of cryptic dialogue that peels back what exactly happened more and more. I haven't seen enough of it yet to know exactly what's going on, but it adds some narrative intrigue to an already sticky roguelike hook. Recommended Videos Gameplay is the focus here and I'm finding even more depth there with each run. StarVaders plays like a cross between Into the Breach and Space Invaders. In each level, I'm placed on a grid-based board. I'm at the bottom and different alien ships drop in from the top. They come closer to the bottom with each passing turn. If they get into the bottom three rows before I can squash them, they add a tick to my doom meter. When I accumulate five doom, my run ends. To take down the ships before that happens, I need to play cards. My deck is divided between attacks and movement, and each one costs a bit of heat. Each turn, I must move and shoot to manage the board, all while remembering the unique properties of every alien. I might need to shoot one twice to break its shield first or deal with bugs that move twice as many spaces on a turn. A successful round is a juggling act where I need to make sure I'm not wasting a single action. It's very much like Into the Breach in that sense, playing on that game's Chess-like approach combat. The more I play, the more depth I find in that hook. Following in the footsteps of games like Monster Train, I have a chance to buff my deck and gain passive relics between rounds. I can upgrade cards occasionally too, letting me turn basic cards into essential tools. For instance, I can make it so a basic movement ends with me shooting a bullet upwards, or making it so a quick shot will gain a repeat status effect if it kills an enemy. It takes me a bit to get the hang of every status effect and what they all mean, but my runs become much more efficient once I do. With the right cards, I can clear out a full board of enemies with only a few well-played cards. There's a lot of smart risk that goes into that strategy too. Each turn, I only have three heat to work with. Once I hit that limit, I'm in danger of overheating. That means that I can play one more card, but it will be burned and made unusable until the next round. Similarly, there's also some risk taking when it comes to evading enemy attacks. On each turn, I can see red spaces that my foes will hit once my turn ends. I can spend movement cards to get to safety, or I can intentionally take the hit. If I do, I'll add a junk card into my deck which I'll have to spend heat to purge if I don't want to keep it in my draw. There are a lot of cases where that risk is worth it so long as I have a good handle on my deck and what it can do. I'm still early in my playthrough, but I've found a wealth of deckbuilding strategies to toy around with as I weigh those risks. Some of my builds have been based around intentionally purging cards from my hand to get extra heat. I've built others around laying bombs all over the board and shooting to detonate them. There are several characters to unlock across three classes, each of which has their own specific skills, and I unlock new cards each time I level up in a meta progression system. With more difficulties still to unlock and story to see, StarVaders is a game I know I'll return to a lot this year. It feels like I can pick up a little more strategy with each run, and that's what really makes it feel like a game built in the spirit of Space Invaders even more than its aliens. StarVaders is available now on PC.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Space Invaders on your wrist: the glory years of Casio video game watches
Over the last couple of weeks I have been tidying our attic, and while the general aim has been to prevent its contents from collapsing through the ceiling, I have a side-mission. My most valued possession when I was twelve was a Casio GD-8 Car Race watch – a digital timepiece that included a built-in racing game on its tiny monochrome LCD display. Two big buttons on the front let you steer left and right to avoid incoming vehicles and your aim was to stay alive as long as possible. I lost count of the number of times it was confiscated by teachers at my school. I used to lend it to the hardest boys in the year, thereby guaranteeing me protection against bullies. As a socially inept nerd, this was invaluable to my survival. I'm pretty sure I still have the watch somewhere, and my determination to find it has been augmented by a recent discovery: these things are valuable now. Casio started making digital watches in the mid-1970s, using technology it had developed in the calculator market to compete on price, but as the decade drew to a close, the market became saturated and the company started to explore new ways to entice buyers. Speaking to Polygon in 2015, Yuichi Masuda, senior executive managing officer and Casio board member, explained, 'Casio went back to its original thinking when it first entered the watch market; that is, 'a watch is not a mere tool to tell the time.' We started talking about a multifunction [approach], time display plus other things, such as telephone number memory and music alarms.' At the time, Taito's arcade game Space Invaders was a phenomenon in Japan. And so in 1981 Casio launched the CA-90/CA-901, a chunky calculator watch that included a sort of space shoot-'em-up but with numbers rather than alien spaceships advancing down the screen. 'We wanted to create a new lifestyle of enjoying the game anywhere at any time,' said Masuda. But wasn't Casio also inspired by Nintendo's Game & Watch series? After all, this iconic range of handheld electronic games started in 1980 with the juggling and catching sim Ball, and its success led to a vast array of titles, including the famed two-screen Donkey Kong that inspired the Nintendo DS. Shinji Saito, general manager and chief producer at the product planning department of Casio's timepiece business unit, says not. 'In 1980, the year before Casio launched the CA-90, Casio launched the MG-880, a game calculator that allowed users to enjoy digital invaders. Nintendo's Game & Watch was also launched in 1980,' he says. 'In developing the CA-90, Casio utilised the development assets of its MG-880 game calculator, but the starting point for the idea was Casio's development philosophy of creating a new culture using light, thin, short and low-power technology. We were not inspired by Nintendo's Game & Watch.' Indeed, Casio was developing a wide array of innovative features at the time including databanks, thermometers and pulse checkers. 'Their entire watch range in the 80s was huge,' says watch enthusiast Andy Bagley. 'I have been collecting for years and even now I will still come across a model I haven't seen before; there were many hundreds. I only recently discovered Casio made a range of touch screen watches in the 80s – way ahead of their time!' Whatever the case, the CA-90 was such a success that it inspired a period of rampant creativity in the Casio R&D department. Between 1980 and 1985 the company produced dozens of different game watches – an incredible feat considering the limitations of LCD displays at the time, which couldn't produce computer graphics or animation and simply relied on matrices of pre-set shapes that would switch on and off to suggest movement. There were several different racing games, there were shoot-'em-ups such as Heli-Fighter and Zoomnzap, and there were very rudimentary platformers including Jungle Star, where you play a Tarzan character leaping out of the way of rampaging panthers, and Hungry Mouse, where you are the mouse leaping over incoming cats. Some were more eccentric. Aero Batics was a stunt flying game, while Hustle Monira had you helping a dinosaur catch falling acorns (as opposed to Egg Panic where you caught … falling eggs). There were even rudimentary football and golf sims. As with Nintendo's Game & Watch titles they were often merely visual variations on very simple game design concepts. But at the time, they felt like science fiction. Of course, Casio wasn't the only tech company producing game watches in the 1980s. The US firm Nelsonic managed to get a Nintendo license and made watches with games based on Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, while Seiko had its Alba range of game watches throughout the 1980s, including the catchily named Y822-4000, which featured a baseball sim. The most aesthetically wild were from veteran electronic toy firm Tiger, which spent the spent the early 90s crafting gigantically chunky LCD game watches based on film licenses and arcade games such as Double Dragon and Altered Beast. Eventually however, technology and tastes moved on. After the high profile launch of the Game Boy in 1989, Nintendo swiftly cornered the portable gaming market. The game watch era was all but over. Now, there is a thriving collectors' scene. 'They are incredibly sought after and very expensive,' says Bagley. 'A downside is that they were actually not that well made in comparison to say the all-stainless-steel Marlins, meaning there are not many survivors, hence rarity is an issue. In perfect condition the rarest, most collectible game watches will fetch many hundreds all the way up to £1,000.' For Bagley and other collectors, these watches are nostalgic treasures, recalling an era when kids were disrupting classes not with social media alerts, but hourly digital watch bleeps, and when one publication was absolutely unmissable: 'Anyone like me who liked Casios in the 80s will no doubt remember the Argos catalogue,' he says. 'It was my personal reference manual for the latest available models; I eagerly rushed to the watch section every time a new catalogue came out to check out the latest innovations.' The watch industry retains its interest in the classic video game scene. In 2022, Timex launched a limited edition range of Space Invaders watches featuring sounds from the game, and earlier this year Casio produced a similarly limited collection of gorgeous Pac-Man watches, sending old fans like myself scurrying to the pre-order section of its website. If you were a slightly nerdy kid in the 1980s these things were your smartphone, your Apple Watch, your grasp at playground cachet. That's why I want to find my Car Race watch; it's not really about the potential monetary value – it's the one thing that really connects me to my 12-year-old self. For all that's been lost along the way, we still have games in common.
Epoch Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr.: Grandfather of Video Games
Space Invaders! Pong! Computer Space! Those are some of the video games that people might consider being the first video games produced. Those three, released in 1978, 1972 and 1971, respectively, however, are relatively late in the creation of the first video game. In fact, the first was actually patented in 1948, though it has somewhat been lost to history. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. (1910–2009) was born in Greenville, South Carolina, to an insurance broker and a concert pianist. As a teenager, he became interested in radio technology, even building his own crystal radio sets, which were primitive radio signal receivers. Goldsmith grew up and began his career during what is considered the Golden Age of Physics. His passion for technology and physics led him to attend Furman University in his hometown of Greenville, where he earned his bachelor's degree in physics in 1931. He then earned his doctorate in physics from Cornell University in 1936. A Beneficial Relationship Two pages from "The Story of Television - DuMont Network," 1953, featuring an early television set and "the man who made it work," Allen B. Du Mont. Internet Archive. The Media Stash While Goldsmith was working on his doctorate, he contacted Allen B. Du Mont, a leading inventor and scientist, who had risen to prominence for his work on the cathode ray tube (CRT) for televisions. When Goldsmith purchased a cathode ray tube from Du Mont, it launched a lasting friendship and, eventually, a working relationship between the two. When Goldsmith completed his education at Cornell, Du Mont hired him as the director of research and development (R&D) for Du Mont Laboratories in Passaic, New Jersey. The company grew and sold a half interest to Paramount Pictures Corp. in 1938 in order to raise capital. By the following year, the company became the first to market home-based television sets. That same year, Du Mont Laboratories displayed their TV set at the New York World's Fair. However, with the outbreak of war in Europe, which began shortly after the start of the World's Fair, all production soon focused on creating oscillographs and conducting radar research. Time for Gaming Related Stories 5/27/2023 4/6/2024 Two men conducting electrical testing on a cathode-ray tube, circa whose time at Du Mont spanned into the 1960s, was, After the war ended, Du Mont Laboratories returned to producing TVs, and, In December 1947, Goldsmith and Mann submitted their patent application. They Gaming, TV, and Professorship The duo received a patent for their 'Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device' in December the following year. There were many roadblocks to producing the 'Amusement Device,' including cost, which kept it from being developed and mass produced. Patent for "The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device." Public Domain Thompson, however, continued his very successful career, which included helping establish the TV visual standards with the Federal Communications Commission when he chaired the Synchronization Panel of the National Television System Committee (SPNTSC), and helping establish broadcast facilities for the new Du Mont Television Network. One facility was named after his initials, WTTG, which became the first television broadcasting station in Washington. The WTTG station continues to this day, now more commonly known as FOX 5 DC. In 1966, Thompson returned to his alma mater to become professor of physics, retiring as professor emeritus in 1975. He was a fellow with the Radio Club of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Along with chairing the SPNTSC, he also chaired the Radio Manufacturers Association Committee on Cathode-Ray Tubes during World War II, which set standards for radio manufacturing. It is interesting that the prediction about Thompson and Mann's 'Amusement Device' becoming 'more spectacular, and the interest therein both from the player's and the observer's standpoint can be increased' would become a reality. Although Thompson is rarely given credit for the video game breakthrough, he was indeed the first to create such a device that would eventually result in what is now a multibillion dollar industry, earning him the nickname of the Grandfather of Video Games. A Du Mont RA-101 "Custom": The wooden frame around the screen was probably added later instead of the original, as seen at the Early Television Museum. What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to
Forbes
19-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
The Rise And Rise Of Reinforcement Learning: AI's Quiet Revolution
A quiet revolution is reshaping artificial intelligence, and it's not the flashy one grabbing headlines. While chatbots and image generators dazzle, reinforcement learning, a method refined in academia over the past two decades, is powering the next generation of AI breakthroughs. Imagine a child learning to ride a bike: no manual, just trial, error, and the joy of balance. That's reinforcement learning, which is an algorithm that explores, adjusts, and learns from feedback, akin to an Easter egg hunt guided by 'warmer' or 'colder' hints. This approach isn't just changing how machines learn; it's redefining what intelligence means. To grasp Reinforcement Learning's s ascent, let's first look at the two pillars of traditional machine learning: Both methods shine in their domains, and are used in combination yet they falter where data is scarce or goals are vague. That's where Reinforcement Learning can help. Reinforcement learning learns by doing, guided only by rewards or penalties from its environment. It's less about following a script and more about figuring things out. In 2015, Nature published a paper where Google researchers demonstrated how a reinforcement learning trained 'agent' mastered Atari games using just screen pixels and the scoreboard. Through countless trials, it learned to win at Space Invaders, Q*bert, Crazy Climber and dozens of other games often with moves that stunned human players. A year later, research also published in Nature, Google used similar techniques to topple the world's Go champion, which was a milestone once thought to be decades away. Reinforcement Learning thrives where explicit instructions don't exist. It doesn't need a mountain of labeled data but instead just a goal and a way to measure success. Reinforcement Learning edge lies in its efficiency and ingenuity: While OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, remains a private company, NVIDIA has become the public face of the generative AI boom. This chipmaker's value surged from $200 billion to over $2 trillion in just two years. Many believed its advanced hardware, like that produced by NVIDIA, was essential for the massive data centers powering AI solutions from giants like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft. NVIDIA's relationship with ChatGPT has been compared to the iconic "Wintel" partnership between Intel and Microsoft during the rise of Windows. However in January 2025, DeepSeek, unveiled a new Large Language Model trained using Reinforcement Learning . This model rivals ChatGPT's performance while requiring significantly less computational power. The announcement impacted NVIDIA heavily, causing its stock to drop more than 10% and temporarily erasing over $500 billion in value. Investors began to see that advanced AI might not always depend on such resource-intensive hardware. DeepSeek's research quickly gained traction. Their paper, 'DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning,' has been cited over 500 times, making it the most referenced reinforcement learning study of 2025. The work highlights how reinforcement learning can achieve high performance without relying on excessive computing resources. Reinforcement Learning's story isn't just technical but also philosophical. Its trial-and-error mimics human learning, prompting big questions. If machines can replicate this, what defines intelligence? If they spot patterns we can't, what might we learn about our world? Andrew Ng, an AI luminary and educator, touched on this in a chat with Toby Walsh at UNSW Sydney. Reflecting on his 2002 PhD thesis, Ng said, 'My PhD thesis was on reinforcement learning… and my team worked on a robot.' His early bets are paying off today. Reinforcement Learning's potential is vast: think more efficient energy grids, tailored education, or smarter robotics. But its autonomy demands caution and careful thought about the incentives used to train the models. An agent tasked with easing traffic might reroute cars through quiet streets, trade efficiency for disruption. Transparency and ethics will be key. Done right, though, Reinforcement Learning could usher in an era where machines don't just mimic us but they illuminate new paths forward. Reinforcement Learning isn't a footnote in AI's story, it's a pivot. The hunt for smarter, leaner intelligence is on, and reinforcement learning is leading the charge.
