The ninth mainline Resident Evil is trying to split the difference between the series’ action-heavy entries and the stress-inducing hide-and-seek episodes. During a four-hour playthrough of some early parts of Resident Evil Requiem, I spent time with both of the two main characters, Grace and series mainstay Leon. They offer distinctly different playstyles, talents, strengths, and weaknesses. While it isn’t an entirely new premise for the survival horror series (in the original, playing as Chris Redfield offered more challenge than playing as Jill Valentine) it’s never been this pronounced. 

I started playing as Leon, entering a medical facility he seemed to have been invited to. With a cavernous main hall, it feels like yet another iconic Resident Evil hub, immediately reminding me of Raccoon City’s Police Precinct and even the original’s cavernous manor. Wings to explore? Check. Suspiciously quiet and empty central area that will almost definitely get overrun by zombies at some point? Probably.

Both Grace and Leon’s parts can be played in either third- or first-person perspective, though Leon’s segments seem better suited to the third-person view, since there’s just a lot more shooting. Grace’s segments were tense and demanded my full attention, more akin to Resident Evil 7. During this early part of the game, there is a lot of hiding, plenty of ammo conservation and a lot more learning from dumb mistakes. The parts of the game I played with Leon reminded me more of Resident Evil 4 (or 5 or 6 – but let’s gloss over those).

Once you take control of him, Leon is immediately attacked and has to fend off roughly 15 infected doctors, nurses and patients. It’s a significant tone shift from Grace skulking around the facility, hiding behind plants and sometimes just hoping for the best. 

Capcom

Leon, fortunately, arrives with several weapons, including a new melee option, a hatchet. Using this, he can make targeted attacks to lop off limbs and aim at the head to deliver more damage. At least on these basic zombies, I found relentless slashing more effective than more targeted efforts – I’m sure future enemies will demand more… nuanced approaches. A later enemy must be decapitated to kill it. 

After a set number of swings, you will need to retreat and sharpen the blade, which adds to the jeopardy while not disrupting the chaos. The hatchet can even be used to parry attacks – if you get the timing down. 

Leon even gets to wield a chainsaw during this initial encounter, but only after claiming it from one particularly industrious zombie that seemed to find it inside a hospital. It was crucial to both disarm this zombie and grab the chainsaw before another corpse could take a turn on it. However, just because the chainsaw gets dropped doesn’t mean it’s turned off. I suffered significant damage when I repeatedly rushed into the spinning power tool. 

The zombies in Requiem are also a little more nuanced compared to previous games – if a zombie can have nuance. While nearly all of the zombies will attack you on sight, they can be distracted or delayed based on the person they were before they turned. For example, the chef zombie (a hardy, bigger zombie than the ones you’ve come across until that point) will only chase you around his kitchen. Step out into the corridor and he’ll leave you alone. Elsewhere, a zombie (attached to an IV, cute) has his eyes bandaged and will react aggressively to any noise. I used this to my advantage, hurling an empty bottle at another zombie who stood nearby. The IV zombie killed him immediately. Another time, a senior exec who’s been turned is firing an employee of his… by killing them, moaning “You’re fired” as he does so. This little vignette gave me enough time to dim the lights and hide when he left his office. 

In Requiem, players are expected to exploit individual zombie behaviors to outmaneuver them. It’s also a welcome dose of humor to the survival horror series, reminding me a little of the camp moments in Dead Rising, another zombie-centric Capcom series. 

Leon doesn’t have to strategize quite as much, arriving with a particularly powerful handgun, the Requiem, that he eventually passes over to Grace. This is capable of stopping pretty much (but not all) enemies you come across, although it initially comes with only a single bullet, so you really have to make it count. 

During a set-piece battle against a towering, swollen former patient, I got to test Requiem’s action-horror controls under pressure. Leon finds a shotgun and has to flank (and outrun) his “hungry” attacker. The environment in the rafters of the building is designed so it’s easy to figure out where you need to go and how to stop the giant zombie from cornering you. Ammo, at least during this fight, was scattered around, which was a relief after struggling to find bullets during Grace’s segment.

Despite the lack of traditional weapons, Grace eventually finds a blood injector (and its companion blood analysis system). These turn into Requiem’s crafting system. Powered by literal buckets and puddles of blood (you have to draw up infected blood from certain parts of the environment and enemies), samples can be combined with scraps, herbs and more to create high-powered first-aid shots, injectable explosive blood, ammunition and a lot of other things. Analysing different blood types (and solving some light puzzles) adds further crafting options. 

Capcom

During the preview, the infected blood injector was exclusively for Grace’s use. It’ll be intriguing if only one character gets to benefit from the crafting system, although Capcom teased customizable weapons for Leon, which might better suit his playstyle. Grace might also be handicapped by the typewriter save system popularized in the first few RE games. This could mean you’ll only be able to save if you have an ink ribbon on you, a very stressful part of inventory management early on in the series — she really can’t catch a break. However, it appears to be adjustable in difficulty settings. 

According to Capcom’s Resident Evil showcase last week, infected blood will apparently play a strong role in Requiem, touching on both Leon’s past (he’s apparently suffering from a mystery ailment) and the circumstances surrounding the death of Grace’s mother. And it wouldn’t be a Resident Evil game with mystery, buckets of blood, and a pulpy villain. Capcom has primed another fascinating villain with Requiem’s Dr. Gideon, a former Umbrella virologist who was seemingly written for an actor to go full camp baddie – if the doctor’s hooded snakeskin trenchcoat wasn’t a giveaway. 

Resident Evil Requiem will be released on February 27, 2026 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/resident-evil-requiem-preview-150000849.html?src=rss

The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of AI and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests. From a report: British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% — the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley. The research surveyed companies using AI for at least a year across five industries: consumer staples and retail, real estate, transport, healthcare equipment and cars.

It found that British businesses reported an average 11.5% increase in productivity aided by AI. US businesses reported similar gains, but created more jobs than they cut. It suggests UK workers are being hit particularly hard by the rise of AI, as higher costs and taxes also weigh on the job market. Unemployment is at a four-year high, as rises in the minimum wage and employer national insurance contributions squeeze hiring.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU has launched a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s xAI following a public outcry over how its Grok chatbot spread sexualized images of women and children.

The billionaire entrepreneur has come under scrutiny from regulators around the world this month after people began using Grok to generate deepfakes of people without consent. The images were posted on the X social network as well as the separate Grok app, both of which are run by xAI.

The probe, announced on Monday under the EU’s Digital Services Act, will assess if xAI tried to mitigate the risks of deploying Grok’s tools on X and the proliferation of content that “may amount to child sexual abuse material.”

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Duolingo, no matter how you feel about it, accomplishes one thing: It makes practicing a skill every day easy. The application focuses on language, but it also offers math, music, and even chess lessons if you dig around a bit. There are many other subjects worth learning, though, and many ways you can use gamification to learn new skills and generally improve your life. Here are five I found:

Learn geography with Globo

Credit: Justin Pot

I love traveling and learning about the world, but I’ll admit there are some regions I don’t know well. Globo is an iOS and Android app that quizzes you on flags, capitals, and more, all while teaching you trivia along the way. There are courses for all the continents, if you want to focus on a specific region, or you can take the combined global course and work your way through the whole planet.

I’ve been playing with this for about a week and enjoying it for the most part. I like the way questions I answered wrong show up in future quizzes. It does feel like I’m going to run out of content fairly quickly, which is disappointing, but given that the application is free with no in-app subscriptions, I think it’s worth checking out.

Learn art history with Learn Art

Credit: Normand Martin

Learn Art is a free iPhone and iPad application by developer Normand Martin. With it, you’ll find a slideshow of classic art from European history. To learn the history of the piece, tap the screen. You can also take an interactive quiz on art history.

I’m going to be honest: Art history is very much not my subject. In playing with this for a couple days, though, I find myself able to identify more artists than I did before, and if nothing else, it’s nice to have access to high resolution scans of so many classic works of art right on my iPad. If you’re at all curious about art history, I’d say give it a spin. The app is free but there is an in-game currency you can earn either by answering questions correctly or spending money. In my testing this wasn’t too much of a burden.

Learn instruments with Yousician

Credit: Justin Pot

I’ve been meaning to get back into playing guitar for a while, so I’ve been testing various apps. Yousician seems like a great starting point, assuming in-person instruction isn’t an option. This application uses the microphone on your device so you can use a real instrument to learn actual songs. The guitar version, which I tried for a few days, combines video instruction with Guitar-Hero style practice sessions. There’s even a backing track during the early lessons, which might help anyone who’d prefer to play along to an actual song. This makes the early stages of learning an instrument, which can be a drag, feel fun.

There are also courses for piano, ukulele, bass, and singing. If you want to get a feel for it, there is a limited free version, but you might need to tap the “X” on the prompt to enter your credit card number if you don’t want to pay. Plans start at $7.49 per month.

Learn typing with TypingClub

Credit: Justin Pot

Wish your typing was faster, or more accurate? The free website TypingClub is perfect for this. It offers touch typing lessons starting from the very basics with tests to work your way up. Lessons unlock as you go. If the early lessons are too easy for you, you can always take a test to earn a higher placement.

Memorize anything with Anki’s flash cards

Credit: Justin Pot

I didn’t grow up in the U.S., meaning I didn’t learn the state capitols and locations as a kid. At one point I was tired of not knowing where anything is, so I downloaded Anki. This is an open source application for every platform that makes it easy to learn using flash cards. The system is all about self accountability: You report how easily you were able to come up with the right answer. The system is set up to keep exposing you to the things you find hard. You can design your own decks, if you want, or you can use any of the thousands of decks offered on the website. I, having mastered U.S. states, am moving on to learning the Mexican ones. I’m sure there’s something you’re interested in memorizing, too.

The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content.

Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, recently scrapped a title after players accused its trailer of containing AI-generated graphics. Goonswarm Games, the developer behind the canceled project, subsequently shut down entirely and cited six years of lost work alongside what it described as a flood of threats and accusations.

Sandfall Interactive’s “Obscur: Expedition 33” had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none. Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3, faced immediate backlash after CEO Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that the company was using generative AI to “explore ideas” for an upcoming release. Vincke later clarified on X that artists use AI only for reference images the way they would use “art books or Google,” and Larian executives eventually stated on Reddit that AI would play no role in final artwork.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Europe is probing Elon Musk’s X for failing to take action to prevent the spread of AI-generated sexually explicit images including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), regulators said in a press release. The European Commission’s investigation could result in “further enforcement steps” against X, not long after it levied a $140 million fine against the platform.

“Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA [Digital Services Act], or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service,” said the Commission’s executive VP, Henna Virkkunen in a statement.

The EU said that it will assess whether X took measures to reduce risks around the dissemination of illegal content when it deployed Grok onto the platform. Those risks include manipulated sexually explicit images including content that may amount to CSAM. “These risks seem to have materialized, exposing citizens in the EU to serious harm,” the Commission stated.

On top of the new inquiry, the EC is also expanding its 2023 investigation of X over its recommendation algorithm and tools used to prevent the spread of illicit content.

The investigation is coming at a delicate time for Europe, which is already in the Trump administration’s crosshairs over its scrutiny of American tech companies. And the EU would also be going up against Musk, who is the owner and has the biggest megaphone on X. After X was hit with a 120 million euro ($140 million fine) for breaching Europe’s Digital Services Act, Musk called the EU “the fourth Reich” and said in a post on X that it should be “abolished.”

In response to the inquiry, X reiterated previous comments it has made about Grok. “We remain committed to making X a safe platform for everyone and continue to have zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, nonconsensual nudity and unwanted sexual content,” a spokesperson told The New York Times.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-eu-is-investigating-grok-and-x-over-potentially-illegal-deepfakes-134506678.html?src=rss

This week, young people are looking at the recent past through rose-colored glasses, living their best lives by filming harmless classroom pranks, and, hopefully, protecting their futures by not swallowing too many chia seeds or roasting themselves with heating pads.

What does 2016 nostalgia mean?

A few weeks ago, I posted about the online trend of millennial optimism which was focused on the years around 2010, but things have gone further: Young people are nostalgic specifically for 2016. This probably sounds bizarre to you. 2016 saw the deaths of Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, and Prince, and levels of political and social upheaval many of us had never experienced, leading many to regard 2016 as the worst year ever (little did we know).

So why are younger people nostalgic for it? First, because if you were a young person, the edges of societal breakdown weren’t really on your radar. 2016 was the year of Pokemon Go, Snapchat, and the bottle-flipping trend. You were watching this awesome new show called Stranger Things and hanging out with your friends, on an internet that didn’t feel like an algorithm-driven hellscape. Nostalgia is a personal thing; if you’re a young adult in 2026, 2016 is your childhood, and things went so far south afterwards with the pandemic and the continued erosion of “normal” civic life that 2016 would understandably feel like the last normal year. Coming of age during a collapse is not a picnic, and I don’t begrudge anyone a little nostalgia; look at the world we left them. But don’t take my word for it. Check out some of the 2.2 million nostalgia videos on TikTok’s #2016 to draw your own conclusions.

Viral videos of the week: absurdist classroom pranks

I don’t think there’s a name for the kind of viral videos I’m featuring this week, so I’m calling them “absurdist classroom pranks.” They’re videos where kids/teens in a school do something absurd but harmless, while trying to keep themselves from cracking up. These documents of good-hearted acts of stealth rebellion are both hilarious and youth-affirming. Like this Instagram reel from @avamonpere with five million views of a couple dudes meticulously arranging a charcuterie board in the middle of a lecture:

View this post on Instagram

Or the ongoing series “bringing random items to school,” in which Instagram’s @eli6666k and his boys do just what the title says: pull the weirdest things they can from their backpacks, while trying to keep from laughing. I wasn’t even able to do it while watching. Here’s a couple:

View this post on Instagram

View this post on Instagram

But check out the source. The series is ongoing so there’s more to come.

Dangers from the internet

In part 4,034 of my 36,321 part series, we have a trio of things that people online are doing that no one should actually do in real life, ever.

• The fire challenge: A Chicago-area mom offers a warning on behalf of her badly burned daughter: Do not participate in a “a viral social media trend” called “The Fire Challenge”; that is, covering your hands with rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer and setting them on fire. This is a tragic story, but like most media reports of injuries from online challenges, I can’t actually find any evidence of any videos like this on social media, so People calling it a “viral social media trend” seems inaccurate. Maybe those videos are out there, but they’re hardly viral or a trend. There’s a “tiktokfirechallenge” hashtag, with 34 videos, none of which depict anything dangerous. While #firechallenge contains some videos warning against the fire challenge, but none that show it actually happening.

• Do not eat too many chia seeds: Chia seeds are a whole thing with young people. They make “chia water,” mix ’em up with apples and make “pudding,” and make super gross AI videos about the supposed health benefits of just raw-dogging a handful of seeds. That last one is a problem. Chia seeds are a good source of fiber, but according to nutritionists, you shouldn’t eat them without soaking them in liquid first. They absorb fluids, and eating raw seeds could result in intestinal blockage and choking.

• Toasted skin syndrome: This one unlocked a phobia I never knew I had: If you routinely use a heating pad on its highest setting, you can literally slow roast your own flesh. It’s called toasted skin syndrome or “erythema ab igne” in medical parlance, and it’s caused by long-term exposure to personal heat sources like heating pads, electric blankets, space heaters, or even a laptop on your thighs. TikTok user @teezubal raised awareness by posting a video of her friend’s alarmingly mottled back flesh that has been viewed over 50 million times in a week. Her friend insists, “it’s fine, I promise” but it’s not fine. Milder cases can take months to resolve, and if you keep it up, the discolored flesh can supposedly stay like that forever. The solution: If you use a heating pad, keep it set to “low.”

It’s that time of year where a great pair of headphones double as earmuffs and a current sale will ensure you get a great quality — and good looking — option. One of our favorite wireless headphones for 2026 is available for 35 percent off. 

Amazon is offering the first-generation Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth Headphones for $279, down from $429. Since coming out last April, they’ve become our choice for best noise-canceling wireless headphones. Notably, the sale is only available in the headphone’s nice limited edition Deep Plum model. 

We gave the Bose QuietComfort Ultra headphones an 86 in our review, thanks, in part, to their incredible active-noise cancellation (ANC) — an industry-lead Bose has held for years. They also offers improved audio, producing a warmer and clearer sound than other Bose headphones. Plus, they live up to their name, remaining comfortable even after hours and hours thanks to cushioning inside the headband and earpads. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-bose-quietcomfort-ultra-headphones-are-35-percent-off-130020033.html?src=rss