Recruit an unconventional team of operatives and deploy them on missions unlike any other in the galaxy far, far away in Star Wars Zero Company! The newly announced single-player turn-based tactics game, developed by Bit Reactor in collaboration with Respawn Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games, will share the first details about the game currently in development with attendees at Star Wars Celebration Japan. Here's your exclusive first look at Star Wars Zero Company and just a few members of the elite squad under your command. The upcoming turn-based tactics game puts you in command during the Clone Wars.

Bit Reactor Developer Panel featuring Respawn Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games
Join Bit Reactor, along with Respawn Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games, for a first look at a new Star Wars turn-based tactics game. Tune into the Star Wars Celebration on April 19, Live on the Galaxy Stage—4:30PM - 5:30PM—for a first look at STAR WARS Zero Company, a single-player turn-based tactics game coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Many hardcore fans of the Roccat brand will lament last year's absorption of designs/IPs into the Turtle Beach product portfolio. Five years earlier, the German PC gaming accessory maker was acquired by the larger North American organization—at the time, mouse enthusiasts expressed worries regarding a sudden cut-off of popular models. The long-running Kone series was a main topic of conversation. Pleasingly, Roccat's engineering department continued to deliver new designs and refreshes of old favorites well into the early 2020s. The Kone Pure Air and Pure SEL were the team's last models to emerge under the banner of Roccat, prior to 2024's full Turtle Beach takeover. Confusingly, this somewhat unfaithful Kone design was only made available to a South Korean customer base.

Kone Pure models—in wireless (Air) and wired (SEL) forms—eventually trickled out to wider global market regions, albeit with Turtle Beach logos printed on their outer shells and packaging. A lukewarm reception from the gaming mouse community prompted further speculation—would the Kone lineage end in 2024? Chinese gaming mouse manufacturers have often "brazenly" cloned the designs of many Western-developed models. Loyal fans and brand purists would normally decry the emergence of a throwback to classic Roccat Pure times, but KYSONA's recently unveiled rendition is being celebrated. Their Uranus Pro wireless gaming mouse offering has gained traction in the West, thanks to a prominent YouTuber's recommendation and positive feedback from owners of early import units. KYSONA is hardly a big name, but they are involved in the contract manufacturing of peripherals for "visible" brands—including AJAZZ, Attack Shark, and DELUX.

The gaming industry is about to get massively disrupted. Instead of using game engines to power games, we are now witnessing an entirely new and crazy concept. A startup specializing in designing ASICs specifically for Transformer architecture, the foundation behind generative AI models like GPT/Claude/Stable Diffusion, has showcased a demo in partnership with Decart of a Minecraft clone being entirely generated and operated by AI instead of the traditional game engine. While we use AI to create images and videos based on specific descriptions and output pretty realistic content, having an AI model spit out an entire playable game is something different. Oasis is the first playable, real-time, real-time, open-world AI model that takes users' input and generates real-time gameplay, including physics, game rules, and graphics.

An interesting thing to point out is the hardware that powers this setup. Using a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, this 500-million parameter Oasis model can run at 720p resolution at 20 generated frames per second. Due to limitations of accelerators like NVIDIA's H100/B200, gameplay at 4K is almost impossible. However, Etched has its own accelerator called Sohu, which is specialized in accelerating transformer architectures. Eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs can power five Oasis models to five users, while the eight Sohu cards are capable of serving 65 Oasis runs to 65 users. This is more than a 10x increase in inference capability compared to NVIDIA's hardware on a single-use case alone. The accelerator is designed to run much larger models like future 100 billion-parameter generative AI video game models that can output 4K 30 FPS, all thanks to 144 GB of HBM3E memory, yielding 1,152 GB in eight-accelerator server configuration.

Science fiction is coming to life with eternity.ac, a new startup offering personal digital cloning where anyone can challenge the boundaries of physical limitations with an affordable artificial intelligence that looks, talks, and converses just like you. The new venture empowers individuals to preserve their unique appearance, thoughts, experiences, and memories with a simple 3-step clone creation process.

The innovation opens up a new spectrum of meaningful AI uses, such as allowing future generations to interact with loved ones, enabling fans and followers to engage with their favorite public figures, and helping people understand the viewpoints and experiences of others. Once created, people can interact with the clone via written chat or through vocal conversations.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components, today announced two new solid-state drive (SSD) related products. The first, the SSD & Hard Disk Drive Cloning Kit, enables users to easily duplicate and transfer data between drives. The kit, which includes a cable and software, is ideal for users upgrading from traditional hard disk drives (HDD) to faster, more rugged Corsair SSDs. In addition, the company announced the Corsair SSD Toolbox, a free software utility which enables users to configure, optimize and monitor their Corsair SSDs.

The SSD & Hard Disk Drive Cloning Kit enables users to move data between a hard drive and SSD by simply selecting the source drive and destination drives and then clicking a button. Designed for users migrating their data to newly installed SSDs, the kit includes data migration software, a USB-to-SATA cable, and Quick Start Guide. The cable supports USB 3.0 and 2.0 delivering transfer rates up to 180 MB/s with USB 3.0 ports, 4 times faster than USB 2.0.

Japanese company AREA announced this nifty new gadget that can help you set up a quick external storage solution, or clone SATA drives in a jiffy. Called the AREA Mr. Clone 3.0, the device is a small box measuring 72 x 48 x 10 mm, with two sets of standard SATA interfaces (data + power) attached on its two longer sides, to which SATA drives (hard drives and SSDs in 3.5", 2.5", and 1.8" form-factors) can be simply plugged in. The device takes in an AC power input (includes a DC power supply to power connected drives and itself), it can connect to a host system using USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface.

Even without a host PC connected to it, the device can be used to clone hard drives. It will come handy when cloning drives for medium-large deployments, or moving from a slower HDD to a faster SSD. The device has its own control panel to manage and track progress of the cloning process. The SATA interfaces support SATA 6 Gb/s specification. Apart from a self-sufficient drive cloning tool, it can be used as a drive dock, connecting SATA drives (up to 6 Gb/s speed) to the host PC over fast USB 3.0 interface. Poised to release in May 2012, the AREA Mr. Clone 3.0 will be priced at 4,280 JPY, or US $55.