Author: Isabella Quinn

Sega has confirmed a collaboration with DC on a series of Sonic the Hedgehog comics that will see the blue blur teaming up with the Justice League.
Earlier this week for Batman Day, the Sonic the Hedgehog social media account teased the collaboration, but at today’s Sonic Central live stream further details were revealed.
The comics will see mash-ups like Shadow as Batman, Sonic as The Flash (naturally), and Knuckles as Superman, beginning as a series of comics in March 2025 written by Sonic writer Ian Flynn.

Sonic Central – September 24th, 2024

…

Doom has been ported to dozens of devices, but it’s never been playable quite like this.

Google researchers have now generated an AI version of the retro first-person shooter classic entirely via neural network, based on ingested video clips of gameplay.

It’s a milestone, if a grim one, recorded in a paper published this week entitled “Diffusion models are real-time game engines” (thanks, VentureBeat). This documents how a small team from Google were able to “interactively simulate” a version of Doom, with only a “slightly better than random chance” of humans being able to tell the difference.

Humans are still (currently) required to play Doom first, to provide the video clips of gameplay that are then fed into GameNGen, the research team’s game engine which is “powered entirely by a neural model”. It’s the same principle as the now-commonplace ability for AI to learn from and then generate static images, based on ingesting huge amouts of dubiously-sourced data online.

GameNGen then produces sequential frames based on its learnings of ‘watching’ that gameplay, which are then output at 20fps with a visual quality “comparable to the original”. Here…