There's more to being a Hobbit than fleeing for your life and trying to survive increasingly hostile environments. This is why Wētā Workshop invites you to a taste of adventure that's a little more… wholesome. I had a cozy chat with Stephen Lambert, Tales of the Shire: A Lord of The Rings Game creative director, to dig a bit deeper into why this particular Hobbit hole will feel like a home away from home when it launches on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam—July 29.

How would you describe the main pillars of gameplay in Tales of the Shire?
Stephen Lambert: So much of the game is about community. We've got four main areas that we focus on while living your idyllic life as a Hobbit: how you spend your time cooking, gardening, fishing, and doing peaceful activities. The other aspect is exploring by water, so looking around the environment and discovering little secret moments and lovely little glades and areas to hang out within the world. And then there are obviously the tales within the community. So getting to meet new people and help them along their journeys.

New worlds await in the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog racing game—Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds—introducing a unique gameplay mechanic transporting the iconic characters from the Sonic and Sega universes into new dimensions. The newest entry to the Sonic Racing series is a Sonic game, driving game, and action game all-in-one that will offer an exciting racing experience across several modes, worlds, and more! Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is coming to PC and current generation consoles soon. Sega is sharing details on what players can expect to see in the game.

Travel Rings
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds introduces Travel Rings, a new gameplay mechanic making each race feel surprising and fresh. Travel Rings bring dramatic changes to races, transporting players from one world to a completely new location. The lead racer gets to choose the CrossWorld that all players will be transported to on the second lap, allowing the environments to come alive with various track changes. Each CrossWorld offers a theme park-like experience with surprises around every turn, including large monsters, engaging obstacles, and tracks filled with beautiful scenery.

Every choice we made when developing Outcast - A New Beginning had, at its core, one motivation: freedom. It was important to us not to limit where players could go at any point; instead, we gave them the tools to navigate the detailed open world we've spent the last few years crafting. We're incredibly proud of Outcast's world and want players to share its richness with us. As players set out across Adelpha, we want to reward them for their curiosity and sense of adventure. Whether it's blitzing through an invader base and unlocking a new weapon module, zipping through gliding challenges to earn jetpack upgrades, or simply taking in the sights, we've strived to make every second spent on the planet of Adelpha feel meaningful to players.

Traveling in style
Knowing that players would be spending a lot of time in Cutter Slade's boots, it was important to us that it felt fun to maneuver him through the world. Open-world games often ask players to cross great distances, and it's our job as developers to ensure that you always feel invigorated by navigating the wilds of Adelpha. When designing how Cutter moved through the world, we didn't want to gatekeep fun traversal abilities for later in the game. From early in Outcast - A New Beginning, you can take advantage of Adelpha's teetering precipices and deep valleys with your gliding suit, swooping across the alien landscape.

Earlier on in April keen-eyed users of macOS uncovered the presence of a strange document hidden deep within Apple's operating system directories. It turns out that this Easter egg was a digital copy of the original Bitcoin whitepaper, it is speculated that Apple engineers have been running a long term prank by stashing the manifesto inside of every released version of macOS since 2018 - which indicates that Mojave was the starting point. According to yesterday's 9to5Mac-published article the cryptocurrency whitepaper (said to be authored by mysterious figure Satoshi Nakamoto) has been removed from the latest macOS Ventura build - 13.4 beta 3 (made available to developers).

The initial discovery of the manifesto received significant press coverage, and it seems that Apple has chosen to send in the cleanup crew at some point in the weeks since then. The file was sat alongside miscellaneous assets in a folder relating to an Image Capture application. The internal tool "VirtualScanner.app" has also been removed from the latest macOS beta build. The 9to5Mac piece posits that Apple's engineers never intended to include the prototype image and document scanner app in any finalized operating system releases - hence the burying of the program's assets deep inside system files.