Street Fighter 6 gets a new demo that’s available now on PlayStation

Image: Capcom

Street Fighter 6 comes out in a little over a month, but if you want to get warmed up before the game’s full release, you can check out a new demo on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 right now. If you’re on Xbox Series X / S or PC, the demo will be available on April 26th.

As part of the demo, you’ll be able to try out part of the game’s World Tour single-player mode, and build a custom avatar for World Tour that can be transferred to the full game at launch. (Well, as long you end up playing the full game on the same platform.)

Capcom revealed the demo as part of Thursday’s Street Fighter 6 Showcase, which was chock-full of new details about the game. Here’s just a few:

• There will be four characters added in the game’s first year:...

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This is the F-150 Lightning fire that made Ford pause production

Image: CNBC

A new video obtained by CNBC gives us a first look at the fire that engulfed a set of Ford F-150 Lightnings in a Dearborn, Michigan, holding lot earlier this year. This heavily edited version of the video shows police arriving on the scene as smoke billows from a group of electric trucks tucked in the back of the lot.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up,” one police officer says during the video. “The smoke is clear as day.” In February, Ford suspended production the production of and recalled some of its Ford F-150 Lightnings after one of the vehicles caught fire while charging and spread to two neighboring trucks. Ford eventually traced the cause of the fire to a “rare” issue affecting the vehicle’s battery, which is made by South Korean...

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Twitter says LeBron James and other celebs are paying for verification even though they aren’t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter’s blue check apocalypse is here, and some celebrities still have verified badges even though they aren’t paying for it.

LeBron James has perhaps been the most famous hater of paid verification on Twitter, insisting that, like Martin Lawrence’s TV show character, “I ain’t paying the $5.” But if you check his profile right now, he still has a verified badge. If you hover over the badge, it says that “this account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” But we contacted James’ media advisor, Adam Mendelsohn, who confirmed that James hasn’t paid the $8 monthly fee.

Many other NBA players, like Stephen Curry, Zion Williamson, and Ja Morant, appeared to have lost their blue checks on...

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Surprise! There’s a third Diablo IV beta coming

Image: Blizzard

Wouldya look at that, Diablo IV is getting one more beta before launch. During today’s D4 livestream event, the developers announced that they’ll be holding a third beta.

Join the #DiabloIV Server Slam weekend 5.12.23

⚔️ Reach lvl 20

Beat Ashava

Claim the unique Cry of Ashava Mount Trophy pic.twitter.com/V99eZi61HA

— Diablo (@Diablo) April 20, 2023

Dubbed the “Server Slam,” the open beta will take place May 12th–14th and is designed to have as many players log in as possible to test server durability in preparation for the live game launch in June. As with the other events, progress made during previous betas will not carry over to this one, nor will progress here carry over to the live game. The level cap is still 20, the beta...

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PlayStation acquires Firewalk Studios, which is building an ‘original AAA multiplayer game’

Image: PlayStation

Sony is acquiring Firewalk Studios from ProbablyMonsters to help build an “original AAA multiplayer game” for PlayStation 5 and PC, Sony announced on Thursday. Sony has been investing heavily in multiplayer games recently, acquiring Destiny maker Bungie and Jade Raymond-led Haven Interactive Studios last year, and it revealed in February 2022 that it’s planning to release more than 10 live service games before March 2026.

We don’t know much about the new game just yet, but Sony’s head of PlayStation Studios, Hermen Hulst, noted in a PlayStation blog post that “we continue to be impressed by the team’s ambitions to build a modern multiplayer game that connects players in new and innovative ways.” In a press release, he added, “I think...

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The EV tax credit: all the cars, rules, and updates

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge

Looking for an electric vehicle that qualifies for the $7,500 tax credit? I hope you’re up on your IRS code.

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Here are the best Apple Watch deals right now

The Apple Watch Series 8 isn’t a massive step up from the prior model, but it does offer a few new features. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

In September, Apple launched its latest batch of smartwatches, introducing the first-ever Ultra ($799) alongside the Series 8 ($399) and a new Apple Watch SE ($249). Each wearable has its own pros and cons associated with it, but the introduction of the high-end Ultra also means there are now more Apple Watch models on the market before than ever before — and a lot more deals to be had.

But with all of those options, which one should you pick? Generally speaking, you want to buy the newest watch you can afford so that it continues to receive software updates from Apple. The latest update, watchOS 9, launched on the Apple Watch Series 4 and newer models in September, though no one can say with certainty whether the Series 4 will get the...

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The best Sonos speakers to buy right now

Sonos has a speaker for practically every price point. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Sonos has an ever-growing lineup, and after you’ve bought your first speaker, you’ll likely want to put one in every room.

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The Game Awards anniversary concert will have music from Hades, Elden Ring, and more

Image: The Game Awards

Geoff Keighley’s putting on a show. I don’t mean E3 killing Summer Game Fest, but an actual music concert celebrating 10 years of The Game Awards. The announcement doesn’t include a Coachella-style lineup of acts like a typical concert announcement would; rather, it’s a listing of game music you’ll hear during the performance.

There are 12 games that’ll be featured during the concert, including past game of the year winners like The Last of Us and a smattering of music from the most popular or most anticipated games to come like Final Fantasy XVI and Starfield. You can also expect to hear the musical stylings of Hades, Elden Ring, and God of War, of course, but the concert also features music from gaming-adjacent media like the League of...

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Pocket City 2 is a mobile SimCity but better

Classic city-building with a fun, interactive twist. | Image: Codebrew Games

Did you play SimCity on a floppy disk? Are you uncomfortable with the “theft” part of Grand Theft Auto but you love running around and playing mini-games? Did you quit checking Twitter and suddenly find yourself looking for things to do on your phone?

Boy, do I have a game recommendation for you. I’d like to introduce you to my newest guilty pleasure: Pocket City 2.

I’m actually not a big mobile gamer. And despite semi-regularly spending $7 on a single cup of coffee, I’m pretty stingy when it comes to paying for apps. But when I read the description of everything you could do in Pocket City 2, I couldn’t pay for it fast enough. I have not regretted this $5 purchase since.

It’s a mobile city-building game of the classic SimCity genre:...

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Twitter’s blue check apocalypse is here, and this is the full story

Chief Twit Elon Musk has chosen 4/20 as the date to purge the blue checkmarks. We’ll see what happens!

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Twitter begins removing blue checkmarks from all legacy users

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images

Twitter has begun removing blue checkmarks en masse from legacy verified accounts, fulfilling one of owner Elon Musk’s long-stated plans for the social media network.

The change is apparent on Twitter accounts for several Verge writers and other journalists like LA Times reporter Matt Pearce, with the verification logos occasionally disappearing and reappearing between page reloads.

Image: Twitter

Two different browser sessions, one Twitter profile.. Which one is the real Matt Pearce?

Historically, the aim of Twitter’s verification system was to ensure that accounts from notable individuals and organizations who freely contributed content to the social media platform were actually being run by those...

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Proton launches an end-to-end encrypted password manager

Image: Proton

Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, has announced the launch of a new password manager: Proton Pass. While the service will eventually become free for everyone to use, it’s currently only available as a beta to Proton’s Lifetime and Visionary users for now.

As is the case with Proton’s other products, Proton Pass uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE) that’s supposed to keep your personal information away from prying eyes, including third parties and Proton itself. In addition to letting you store your usernames, passwords, and notes, you can also add any randomly generated email aliases that you can use as a replacement for your real address.

Today we're launching the Proton Pass beta.

With Pass, we're applying our privacy and...

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Family of F1 legend Michael Schumacher plans legal action over fake AI interview

Michael Schumacher pictured in the pits of the Autodromo Nazionale circuit on September 10th, 2010. | Image: Fred Dufour / AFP via Getty Images

The family of Formula 1 racing legend Michael Schumacher is preparing to take legal action against Die Aktuelle, a German tabloid magazine, for publishing an AI-generated “interview” with the star. The publication ran a front cover spread earlier this week promising an exclusive with Schumacher, accompanied by a tag referring to the piece as “the first interview” since the F1 star suffered a serious brain injury during a skiing accident in December 2013.

“No meager, nebulous half-sentences from friends,” reads the translated text on the magazine cover. “But answers from him! By Michael Schumacher, 54!” A strapline calling the interview “deceptively real” is the only indication on the cover that the piece wasn’t authentic. Die Aktuelle,...

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Google’s big AI push will combine Brain and DeepMind into one team

Image: Google

DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company acquired by Alphabet in 2014, is merging with Google’s Brain team to form Google DeepMind. In a post shared by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he says the combined groups will “significantly accelerate our progress in AI.”

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will serve as the CEO of Google DeepMind, where Pichai says he will “lead the development of our most capable and responsible general AI systems.” Meanwhile, Jeff Dean, Google’s former senior vice president of Google Research and Health who co-founded the Brain team, will take on the role of Google Research and Google DeepMind’s chief scientist.

Working with all our fantastic colleagues across Google, we have an opportunity to build AI...

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Lucid is now delivering its blacked-out ‘stealth’ Air sedans to customers

Lucid Air black on black on black. | Image: Lucid

Lucid is now delivering new Air electric sedans for customers who ordered them with the dark-trimmed “Stealth Appearance” package. The option was first made available to order last year, which includes changes on “up to 35 components” that give the Air black gloss and satin graphite accents. And when paired with infinite black paint, you can even get a nearly murdered-out look.

The first Lucid Air deliveries with Stealth Appearance are happening at the automaker’s Costa Mesa service center in Orange County, California. Lucid states it will deliver more throughout the country in the coming weeks. Lucid’s Q1 2023 customer deliveries are up 290 percent year over year at 1,406, and that comes after lackluster production numbers from last...

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Disney Plus is getting five Spider-Man movies

Image: Disney

Five Spider-Man movies, including the full Tobey Maguire-led trilogy, are coming to Disney Plus very soon, Disney announced on Thursday. Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, and The Amazing Spider-Man all hit the streaming service tomorrow, April 21st. Spider-Man: Homecoming and a _Spider-Man-_adjacent movie, Venom, will be available on May 12th.

It will be great to have these Spider-Man movies on Disney Plus. Since Sony Pictures owns the film rights to Spider-Man, the movies have so far been available on different streaming services, which was a huge pain, especially when the vast majority of Marvel movies are already on Disney Plus.

You may have noticed that the list is missing a few Spider-Man movies, however. Still absent are The...

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You can snag a first-gen Apple Watch SE for just $149 right now

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

When the original Apple Watch SE came out in 2020, it represented the sweet spot in Apple’s smartwatch lineup. It was faster than what was then Apple’s entry-level flagship, the Series 3, but also cheaper than the newest models. And while it’s certainly beginning to show its age, you can pick it up at Walmart in the 40mm GPS configuration for $149 ($130 off) or in the larger 44mm variant for $179 ($130 off).

Apple’s smartwatch lineup has changed pretty substantially since 2020, especially with the introduction of the new Ultra model, but the first-gen Apple Watch SE can still make for a solid entry-level pick if you’ve never owned a smartwatch (or if you want something inexpensive to hand to the kid).

The SE shares some features found...

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How to make your HomePod alert you when your smoke alarms go off

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

If a smoke alarm sounds and no one is around to hear it, how effective is it? Sound Recognition, which is a brand new feature on all Apple HomePod smart speakers, can help. Sound Recognition will send an alert to your phone when the speaker hears a smoke or CO alarm. You can then check in through the Home app and hear what’s going on wherever you are.

The Sound Recognition alert opens two-way communication with your HomePod and your iPhone.

This valuable safety feature is free and easy to enable. If you already own one or more HomePods, it’s a cheaper option than investing in smart smoke alarms, which will also send alerts when they go off but regularly cost three to four times more than non-connected alarms.

The S...

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How to upgrade to the new Apple Home architecture

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Apple’s new HomeKit architecture is a ground-up, under-the-hood rebuild of the company’s Apple Home smart home platform. Apple says it “will improve the performance and reliability of the accessories in your home.” First announced at WWDC, this new foundation for Apple’s smart home is part of the company’s support of the smart home standard Matter.

Following a false start late last year, when the option to upgrade to the new architecture was released with iOS 16.2 but was quickly pulled following multiple user complaints, Apple is trying again. With iOS 16.4, which released this month, users can once again choose to enable the new Home architecture.

However, upgrading is entirely optional. And if you use an iPad as your main Apple Home...

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Your PC may weep at Immortals of Aveum’s minimum system requirements

Forspoken was supposed to be the next-gen technological gaming showcase, but EA’s Immortals of Aveum may have it beat in the “your PC need not apply” realm. Today, the company’s revealing the system requirements for Ascendant Studios’ “Call of Duty but with magic,” and they blow past anything a developer’s ever dared ask for.

The minimum spec is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super or better or an AMD 5700 XT, paired with a Core i7-9700 or Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB of dual-channel RAM, and with an SSD “strongly recommended” to play the game. That’s at a mere 1080p resolution, low to medium spec.

Based on the GPU requirements alone, it’s likely that under 9 percent of today’s gaming PCs will even qualify, based on the latest Steam hardware survey....

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T-Mobile’s pricey new plan gets you a new phone every two years

T-Mobile is adding a plan designed for frequent phone upgraders. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile has announced another rate plan today: Go5G Plus, which guarantees two-year device payment plans and that existing customers will get the same new phone promotions as new customers. It takes the place of Magenta Max as the carrier’s most expensive plan to the tune of $90 per month with autopay for a single line.

The company is announcing the new plan and a couple of other promotions in an aggressive bid for new customers and is doing so on 4/20 because the company intends to “smoke the competition.” That’s some real “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy.

Go5G Plus includes everything Magenta Max offers, like unlimited premium data, Netflix, and Apple TV Plus, and adds a few more things on top in addition to the phone upgrade...

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BuzzFeed News is being shut down

Photo by Bennett Raglin / Getty Images for BuzzFeed Inc.

BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news arm of BuzzFeed.com, is being shut down, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced to staff on Thursday. The shutdown is happening as part of a new wave of layoffs at the company that will reduce the company’s workforce by about 15 percent.

“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” Peretti wrote in a memo to staff the company shared with The Verge. Peretti said they would focus on HuffPost, which it acquired in 2020, as the company’s news brand because the publication is “profitable with a loyal direct front page audience.” Both HuffPost and BuzzFeed plan to open “a...

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Imgur is banning porn and purging old anonymous uploads

Imgur founder Alan Schaaf at Web Summit 2018. | Photo by Diarmuid Greene /Web Summit via Getty Images

Popular image hosting platform Imgur is done with hosting pornography. In a blog post published this week, the company says it has a new terms of service coming into effect on May 15th and that, as a result, it’ll be removing “nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content” from its platform as well as “old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account.”

“You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms,” Imgur wrote in its blog post. “Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.”

The blog post doesn’t offer much detail about how Imgur is defining “old, unused, and inactive content.” Depending on the definition, this could cover a huge portion...

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Earth Day 2023: green or greenwashed?

Climate activists wearing masks of company CEOs including LVMH’s Bernard Arnault (2nd L) Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (C), Microsoft founder Bill Gates (2ndR) and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson (R) on April 13th, 2023. | Photo by John MacDougall / AFP via Getty Images

Brands love making big promises around Earth Day, and a lot of them are BS.

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Can ActivityPub save the internet?

Illustration by Hugo Herrera for The Verge

The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.

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Coffee Talk is just as warm and cozy in its sequel

Image: Toge Productions

The original Coffee Talk was a game about, well, coffee and talking. Set in an alternate version of Seattle, one where harpies, elves, vampires, and werewolves were as common as humans, it put players in the role of a barista at a late-night cafe. You had regulars who would chat about their problems, ask for their favorite drinks, and you mostly listened and offered advice. The sequel — dubbed Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly — doesn’t change much. And that’s exactly what makes it so endearing.

The second episode picks up a few years after the original (you’ll definitely want to play the first before the sequel) and takes place in the same coffee shop in the same perpetually raining version of Seattle. The game is structured as a series...

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SpaceX’s Starship successfully takes off before bursting into flames

Screenshot: SpaceX

SpaceX’s integrated Starship spacecraft successfully took off from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday but didn’t manage to fully complete its test flight. The spacecraft spun out of control before bursting into a ball of flames about four minutes into its flight, cutting the test short.

In a statement on Twitter, SpaceX said, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.” During today’s 90-minute test flight, Starship was supposed to reach an altitude of about 150 miles during a journey around the globe before splashing down into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. SpaceX scrubbed its first test flight attempt on April 17th due to a “frozen” pressurant valve.

GIF: Tristan Cooper...

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Adobe Illustrator’s new AI feature instantly switches the color palette of vector graphics

Image: Adobe

Adobe is launching a new feature for its Illustrator graphic design software that allows users to quickly adjust the color scheme of vector-based images through generative AI. Users can upload their own Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files to Illustrator’s Vector Recoloring tool to generate different colors and palette variations within seconds, either by typing out a text description or selecting from a list of sample prompts.

Illustrator Vector Recoloring — which Adobe claims is the first-ever generative AI-powered vector recoloring tool to hit the market — is being introduced as the next phase of Adobe Firefly, a suite of creative generative AI models that the company recently released into public beta. The Vector Recoloring feature...

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Acer’s getting into SFF gaming with the 4090-wielding Predator Orion X

Image: Acer

For years, Acer’s definition of a “compact juggernaut” still took up 18 liters of space — and still looked like a traditional tower PC. But today, the company’s announcing a low-slung SFF gaming desktop that fits the most powerful PC gaming parts into an unusual 15.4-liter chassis.

The Acer Predator Orion X doesn’t look like any desktop the company’s sold before, and not just because the company’s backing away from its “this literal alien will eat you” vibe in favor of something a little more Evangelion. It’s also because the PC has three distinct zones for each of its major component clusters, with items accessible by pulling those “Zone 02,” “Zone 03,” and “Zone 01” lever-latches you can see on the front.

Image: Acer...

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