Amazon is suing the Consumer Product Safety Commission over its decision to hold the company legally responsible for faulty products on its platform, The Associated Pressreports. Amazon’s suit demands that the shipping giant be considered a “third-party logistics provider” instead of a distributor and also calls the CPSC “unconstitutionally constructed.”
The origins of the legal fight can be traced back to 2021, when the CPSC sued Amazon to force it to recall faulty carbon monoxide detectors, unsafe hair dryers and flammable children’s sleepwear. At the time, Amazon had already taken some steps to address the issue, like informing customers who purchased the products that they were hazardous and offering store credit, but the CPSC wanted the company to go further.
The CPSC move to classify Amazon as a distributor in 2024 made the company responsible for issuing recalls and refunds for products sold through its Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program. FBA lets sellers send their products to Amazon warehouses, where Amazon then handles picking, packing and shipping those products to customers, along with things like customer service and returns. Amazon takes issue with its classification as a distributor because it doesn’t own or make the faulty products the CPSC is concerned with — it sees itself as more of a hands-on FedEx.
Besides wanting to be reclassified and not held responsible for issuing more refunds, Amazon also has problems with the CPSC itself. The CPSC’s commissioners are appointed by the President, approved by the Senate and serve for seven years, unless they’re removed for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Amazon feels the commission’s relative invulnerability is unconstitutional and makes them “judge, jury, and prosecutor” in proceedings.
Amazon’s made similar claims about the National Labor Review Board, the organization in charge of protecting workers’ right to unionize. The timing of these complaints is key. The Trump administration is not particularly interested in maintaining any government organization empowered to regulate business, and it seems likely it will side with Amazon in disempowering the CPSC, one way or another.
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There’s a good chance that if you’ve picked up a manga graphic novel, it was a paperback version. After all, they’re very affordable, and their pocket-friendly design makes them easy to carry around. But recently, we’ve also seen various manga publishers offer deluxe editions of some of the biggest manga properties around. Typically, these deluxe editions follow a similar format of reprinting each manga on an oversized page format and binding them inside a faux leather hardcover package alongside a selection of exclusive extra content.
So far, only a handful of manga series have been adapted into this format by the likes of Kodansha and Dark Horse Comics, but we’ve rounded up those that are available in the list below. We’ll also update this list as more manga titles get the deluxe edition treatment.
The max level cap in Assassin’s Creed Shadowsis so high you might not even need to worry about it.
In general, your level determines the equipment you can use, the in addition to the rating of your base stats, like health. The weapons and armor you find — plus the enemies you run into — will scale in level alongside Naoe and Yasuke. Thankfully, at least the two share experience points and level progress, so you only need to keep track of one experience meter!
Here’s what the max level cap is in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and a rundown on what we learned during our playtime regarding leveling up.
What is the max level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
The max level cap in Assassin’s Creed Shadows appears to be 60, based on how Forge upgrades work at your Hideout.
You can upgrade rooms at your Hideout. As described in the game, when your Forge is upgraded to its highest rank, it allows you to upgrade weapons and armor to level 60, indicating that’s the highest level in the game. This number tracks contextually with how much of the game we’ve played so far, as of this writing, and is aligned with other players who’ve reported a similar max level.
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
Getting to level 60 is no small feat, though. After 62 hours, we’ve finished the main story, completed a bunch of optional activities (like Lost Pages and Kuji-kiri), and still only reached level 50. As a result, it stands to reason it’d take you a considerable amount of time to reach level 50. At this point, the regions have scaled to level 46, and equipment at level 51 and level 52 has started to appear.
By level 50, it takes around 18,000 experience points to level up. Naoe’s flat stats are 945 Health and 492 Attack Damage, while Yasuke’s are 2,211 Health and 985 Attack Damage. Moreover, equipped with a gear set and weapons around this level, Naoe reaches 3,947 Health and 1,969 Attack Damage, while Yasuke gets 9,104 Health and 3,784 Attack Damage.
Image: Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon
So far, we’ve earned 294 mastery points, but this is also the result of a focus on clearing castles. Each castle features a number of Samurai Daisho; you’ll get one mastery points for every Samurai Daisho you assassinate. Because of that, the numbers may vary depending on how much time you spend clearing castles.
Completing castles is great for leveling up, though, since they generally give you a lot of experience (and, as a bonus, reward you with rare gear). But the biggest source of experience in the game is hunting all of the targets in one single board of your Objectives menu. Doing so involves completing a final quest. In the end, you may earn around 10,000 experience points.
But if you want some quick missions to complete and earn a little bit of experience, you should consider taking advantage of Contracts and Anomalies — not just for experience, but for bonus materials and mon as well.
I have nothing but respect for a Steam update that promises gameplay details then quickly melts into an impressionistic tone poem about fighting the moon. Really though, what else does Skate Story need to say? We’ve already known how lovely it looks since not-E3 of 2022, then we found out even more about it from a demo last year. Do you want to miss out on the action of a game that made Brendy use words like “abstract rhythmodivinity” and Graham use words like “popeye’s elbow”. Of course you don’t. Here’s the new trailer.
Today, we hosted the 15th annual Microsoft Ability Summit, with over 20,000 attendees from 164 countries coming together virtually to discuss the future of AI and accessibility. Microsoft has a long-standing commitment to investing in accessibility, grounded in our business model and going back over three decades from the earliest accessibility features in Windows 95 and continuing today with new hardware and software functionalities powered by AI. We are innovating faster than ever before and people with disabilities continue to lead the way.
Accessibility is a fundamental right for people with disabilities and makes technology easier for everyone. We see this reflected in how customers are using Microsoft technologies around the world. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is unlocking workplace productivity like never before, more than 10 million people use Edge each month to have the web Read Aloud, over 1 million people use Immersive Reader to make webpages easier to read and partners like Tobii Dynavox and Special Olympics are bringing AI to people with disabilities globally. And these are just some of the highlights of what we shared today!
Here’s a quick summary of the new accessibility products, features and programs announced at the 2025 Ability Summit.
What’s new in 2025?
We announced that the Xbox Adaptive Joystick is now available for purchase exclusively at Microsoft Store. With more than 429 million players with disabilities worldwide, we know each player has unique needs and preferences for how they choose to play. The Xbox Adaptive Joystick is a singular, wired controller primarily designed to meet the needs of players with limited mobility. Its versatility helps players seamlessly incorporate it into their existing gaming setups. Built with the Gaming and Disability community who inform the development of Xbox products from the beginning. The joystick joins our family of adaptive accessories including the mouse, pen, adaptive kit and Xbox Adaptive Controller. For more details visit Xbox Support.
And all our Microsoft hardware comes in packaging designed to be accessible and sustainable. No more plastic clamshells! To help others with accessible packaging, today at the Summit, the Packaging and Content Team at Microsoft published its Accessible Packaging Design Guide, which offers practical guidelines, best practices and strategies to create accessible packaging and foster a trusted customer experience.
At the Summit, Microsoft teams and partners also shared ways they are working to further advance accessibility through technology:
Tobii Dynavox is integrating Microsoft Neural Voice, a capability of Azure AI Speech, into their assistive communication solutions. This AI-powered feature gives more personal options for individuals who use assistive communication devices using eye gaze. Neural Voices are available in over 50 languages within their apps TD Talk and TD Phone.
Microsoft Teams will improve for those using Sign Language View. Later this year, Teams will be able to identify when someone is using sign language and feature them prominently as a speaker in the meeting. These video customizations are part of our ongoing product development to help deliver clear and accessible communication for everyone.
Copilot is powering neurodiverse talent. Recently, an EY study found that Copilot helped 76% of neurodiverse employees perform better at work by enhancing communication, memory recall and focus. At the Summit, we shared how new simple features like Team Reflow and PowerPoint Designer are helping people do their work. See four early adopters of Copilot in New York share their stories.
YouTube Video
AI comes to Narrator. Rich image descriptions powered by AI will be coming to Narrator in Windows Insider Preview this spring and Azure AI Foundry announced new UI improvements to reduce cognitive load.
Over 5 million learners around the world have participated in our Accessibility Skilling program and we’re grateful to our partners including Teach Access, Computacenter UK and the City of New York. The free, virtual training includes the latest on AI and is available for organizations to use in their learning management systems.
Speech recognition improved up to 60%. The Speech Accessibility Project, led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, unlocked a breakthrough improving accuracy gains for non-standard speech, and the Azure platform team demonstrated how developers can leverage GitHub Copilot to write accessible code.
Special Olympics shared how Copilot has been a game-changing training companion for their coaches and athletes with intellectual and development disabilities for the Special Olympics World Winter Games in Turin, Italy.
All this progress is possible because of the people who design technology with accessibility in mind. In this way, technology benefits everyone, creating a more productive and efficient workplace. It is beautiful to see that reflected in this profile of Dave Dame, Senior Director of Accessibility and Human Factors at Microsoft, where he shared how accessible technology helps him thrive as a leader.
Onward
For over 30 years, Microsoft has focused on accessibility in our products. Accessibility makes our tools and technologies easier for everyone and accelerates innovation for the world. From the introduction of Sticky Keys and speech recognition in Windows 95 to Seeing AI in 2016 and beyond, accessibility innovations have benefited people in ways we designed for and ways we could have never expected. Just think about how closed captions are now invaluable for everyone watching videos and calls.
AI has the potential to create significant advancements across every sector of our economy and society. We will continue to be grounded and responsible in our approach as we work to get the latest technology to the people who can benefit from it the most.
Whether this is your first or fifteenth Ability Summit, thank you for joining and we hope you picked up a new feature, skill or nugget that helps you, your community or your organization get the most out of technology. All content will be available to watch after the event.
As generative AI capabilities expand, NVIDIA is equipping developers with the tools to seamlessly integrate AI into creative projects, applications and games to unlock groundbreaking experiences on NVIDIA RTX AI PCs and workstations.
At the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference this week, NVIDIA introduced the NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell series, a new generation of workstation and server GPUs built for complex AI-driven workloads, technical computing and high-performance graphics.
Alongside the new hardware, NVIDIA announced a suite of AI-powered tools, libraries and software development kits designed to accelerate AI development on PCs and workstations. With NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries for data science, developers can significantly accelerate data processing and machine learning tasks, enabling faster exploratory data analysis, feature engineering and model development with zero code changes. And with NVIDIA NIM microservices, developers can more seamlessly build AI assistants, productivity plug-ins and advanced content-creation workflows with peak performance.
AI at the Speed of NIM With RTX PRO Series GPUs
The RTX PRO Blackwell series is built to handle the most demanding AI-driven workflows, powering applications like AI agents, simulation, extended reality, 3D design and high-end visual effects. Whether for designing and engineering complex systems or creating sophisticated and immersive content, RTX PRO GPUs deliver the performance, efficiency and scalability professionals need.
The new lineup includes:
Desktop GPUs: NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition, NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell, NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell and NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell
Laptop GPUs: NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell, NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, NVIDIA RTX PRO 3000 Blackwell, NVIDIA RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell, NVIDIA RTX PRO 1000 Blackwell and NVIDIA RTX PRO 500 Blackwell Laptop GPUs
Data center GPU: NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition
As AI and data science evolve, the ability to rapidly process and analyze massive datasets will become a key differentiator to enable breakthroughs across industries.
NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries, built on CUDA, is a collection of libraries that deliver dramatically higher performance compared with CPU-only alternatives. With cuML 25.02 — now available in open beta — data scientists and researchers can accelerate scikit-learn, UMAP and HDBSCAN algorithms with zero code changes, unlocking new levels of performance and efficiency in machine learning tasks. This release extends the zero-code-change acceleration paradigm established by cuDF-pandas for DataFrame operations to machine learning, reducing iterations from hours to seconds.
Optimized AI software unlocks even greater possibilities. NVIDIA NIM microservices are prepackaged, high-performance AI models optimized across NVIDIA GPUs, from RTX-powered PCs and workstations to the cloud. Developers can use NIM microservices to build AI-powered app assistants, productivity tools and content-creation workflows that seamlessly integrate with RTX PRO GPUs. This makes AI more accessible and powerful than ever.
NIM microservices integrate top community and NVIDIA-built models, spanning capabilities and modalities important for PC and workstation use cases, including large language models (LLMs), images, speech and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Announced at the CES trade show in January, NVIDIA AI Blueprints are advanced AI reference workflows built on NVIDIA NIM. With AI Blueprints, developers can create podcasts from PDF documents, generate stunning 4K images controlled and guided by 3D scenes, and incorporate digital humans into AI-powered use cases.
Coming soon to build.nvidia.com, the blueprints are extensible and provide everything needed to build and customize them for different use cases. These resources include source code, sample data, a demo application and documentation.
From cutting-edge hardware to optimized AI models and reference workflows, the RTX PRO series is redefining AI-powered computing — enabling professionals to push the limits of creativity, productivity and innovation. Learn about all the GTC announcements and the RTX PRO Blackwell series GPUs for laptops and workstations.
Create NIMble AI Chatbots With ChatRTX
AI-powered chatbots are changing how people interact with their content.
ChatRTX is a demo app that personalizes a LLM connected to a user’s content, whether documents, notes, images or other data. Using RAG, the NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM library and RTX acceleration, a user can query a custom chatbot to get contextually relevant answers. And because it all runs locally on Windows RTX PCs or RTX PRO workstations, they get fast and private results.
Today, the latest version of ChatRTX introduces support for NVIDIA NIM microservices, giving users access to new foundational models. NIM is expected to soon be available in additional top AI ecosystem apps. Download ChatRTX today.
Game On
Half-Life 2 owners can now download a free Half-Life 2 RTX demo from Steam, built with RTX Remix and featuring the latest neural rendering enhancements. RTX Remix supports a host of AI tools, including NVIDIA DLSS 4, RTX Neural Radiance Cache and the new community-published AI model PBRFusion 3, which upscales textures and generates high-quality normal, roughness and height maps for physically based materials.
The March NVIDIA Studio Driver is also now available for download, supporting recent app updates including last week’s RTX Remix launch. For automatic Studio Driver notifications, download the NVIDIA app.
In addition, NVIDIA RTX Kit, a suite of neural rendering technologies for game developers, is receiving major updates with Unreal Engine 5 support for the RTX Mega Geometry and RTX Hair features.
Learn more about the NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs by watching a replay of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote and register to attend sessions from NVIDIA and industry leaders at the show, which runs through March 21.
At this year’s GDC event, Nvidia showed off an updated version of its Zorah demo from the GeForce RTX 50-series launch, with changes including controls that allowed one to view the scenes to see features such as RTX Mega Geometry in full action. In a panel discussion about the demo and everything neural rendering, Nvidia confirmed one thing that we all suspected but also one thing that might surprise you—Zorah is 100% ray tracing and it’s faster this way than if it used rasterization.
For as long as I’ve been messing around with 3D graphics (almost 30 years), I’ve loved seeing GPU vendors release a cool standalone demo to showcase new rendering tricks or some fancy hardware feature. Over the years, they’ve somewhat fallen by the wayside, replaced by games as the best choice for showing off your new graphics card.
This isn’t to say that Nvidia’s Zorah demo isn’t visually impressive—it’s absolutely stunning when seen in real-time on a big OLED monitor—but the days of demos massively shifting the goalposts of what rendering can achieve are long gone. Zorah’s problem isn’t that it’s bad, it’s just that the nearest reference points to it (e.g. games that use path tracing) are equally as impressive.
Nvidia held a panel discussion at GDC 2025 to discuss its recent advances in GPU technology and graphics rendering, and one of the panellists dropped a little snippet that made me pay a lot more attention to what was being said (hey, I was jet lagged to heck). John Spitzer, Nvidia’s VP of developer and performance technology, was enthusing about the Zorah demo:
“There’s no rasterization going on at all. This is all ray traced, including the primary rays. The amazing part is that it’s actually faster than rasterizing them, so it’s not done because it’s kind of cool to say that in the demo. It’s actually, in this case, the right thing to do.”
Given that Zorah is a showcase of Nvidia’s full suite of RTX neural rendering technologies, as well as RTX Mega Geometry, the fact that it’s a fully ray-traced demo makes total sense. However, the fact that it’s faster than making the same scene via traditional techniques perhaps marks the point that we now have the hardware to be able to fully abandon traditional rasterization.
Well, not yet, as Zorah isn’t the speediest of demos, even on an RTX 5090, and it needs every performance trick that RTX neural rendering, RTX Mega Geometry, and DLSS 4 can bring to the table. That said, it does show the benefits that AI offers for rendering and while we’ve been familiar with it just being used for upscaling and frame generation, over the coming years we’ll see it being leveraged increasingly more to do fancier graphics at playable frame rates.
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And it does all of this through the power of approximation. RTX Neural Materials, for example, takes the long, complex shaders for hugely detailed materials, and uses a small neural network that represents how light interacts with the material to produce a result that’s a good approximation of the original thing, except it does it all much faster. Much like how AI can be used to interpolate an entire frame, it can now be used to interpolate a specific shader.
RTX Neural Radiance Cache does a similar thing by applying a neural network to the result of a few rays bouncing once or twice in a scene and then inferring what the end result of hundreds or thousands of bounces would be like.
Of course, as with all approximations, all of this AI rendering stuff isn’t perfect and arguably may never be, but neither are the rasterization techniques that we’re all familiar with. It just needs to be good enough that you can’t tell while gaming.
Having a fully path-traced scene running at a playable frame rate is only possible because of AI’s strength at approximating stuff that follows set algorithms and physical laws.
And it’s not just Nvidia that’s going down this road: AMD and Intel didn’t add matrix cores to their GPUs just for upscaling or frame gen. Rendering has always been a game of approximation, of course, so all of this is just an evolution of how we turn glowing dots on a screen into worlds that make us believe it’s real.
Like it or not, AI really is the future of graphics.
The first trailer for Materialists has finally arrived, and it looks like an ode to classic rom-coms of the ’90s and ’00s.
Written and directed by Past Lives helmer Celine Song, the movie follows matchmaker Lucy, played by Madame Web star Dakota Johnson, whose services are highly sought after by New York City’s elites. However, her expertise isn’t as easily translated to her own love life when she finds herself torn between her perfect match and her less-than-perfect ex.
We see her interacting with both, played by Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal, in the first trailer. The steamy clip harks back to classic rom-coms of years past as Lucy is pulled between two men. “Lucy M., the eternal bachelorette,” she’s called by one of her pals before she reveals she’s responsible for nine marriages – but will she find her own match by the movie’s conclusion?
The cast also includes The Umbrella Academy’s Marin Ireland, Succession’s Zoë Winters, and The Gilded Age’s Louise Jacobson in supporting roles.
Song’s debut feature film, the romantic drama Past Lives, was nominated for Best Picture at last year’s Academy Awards, and Song was also up for Best Director. The film starred Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung who reunite after 20 years after losing touch once Nora’s family immigrates from South Korea to Canada.
The Materialists is set to arrive in theaters on June 13. While we wait, check out our guide to this year’s other best upcoming movies and 2025 movie release dates.
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Fortnite’s roster of streamers who have skins in the item shop just got a little bigger with the addition of Cody “Clix” Conrod, who, at 19 years old, will be one of the youngest people ever to have a Fortnite skin based on them. Along with the new Clix skin, there will be a full slate of Clix-related cosmetics and, in a first for this sort of thing, a Clix-themed remix of an existing skin.
Clix, for those who aren’t familiar, made a name for himself by earning a spot in the Fortnite World Cup in 2019 when he was just 14 years old. And while he continues to compete at the highest levels, he’s also become a popular streamer and personality, which is how he’s landed his very own Fortnite skin.
Clix’s slate of cosmetics will include a single skin that comes with two distinctive styles based on a meme you probably know even if he’s new to you–one in which he’s sporting a t-shirt and pajama pants, and another in which he’s wearing a suit and tie. In addition to the skin, Clix’s set includes two back blings, two emotes, a wrap, and a pickaxe.
Me at my aunt’s wedding vs. me when the Fortnite item shop resets.
Gallery
There’s also a new Clix-themed version of the Sparkplug skin called Sparx. Everything listed here will be sold in the item shop starting March 22, both individually (including the back blings) and as part of one large bundle that includes all of it.
As is customary for this sort of thing, Fortnite will offer players the chance to unlock the whole set of cosmetics for free by participating in the Clix Icon Cup, a battle royale trios (builds only) tournament taking place on March 21–those in the top tier of performers for each region will earn the full bundle. But in an unusual move, there’s also a consolation prize for those who just miss out: the next-best tier of performers will get the Sparx outflit. Anyone who earns at least 8 points in the tournament will get a spray.
Clix will become the person born most recently to have a Fortnite skin, dethroning The Kid Laroi, who was also 19 when he got a skin in 2023. But here’s a fun fact: Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf got his Fortnite skin when he was 18, making him the youngest to ever earn that honor.
10. Katamari Damacy 9. Undertale 8. Fallout: New Vegas 7. Super Mario World 6. The Curse of Monkey Island 5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 4. Halo 2 3. Final Fantasy X 2. Bloodborne 1. Civilization VI
You can go to Sanderson’s original blog post to read a few of his thoughts on each game, but we have a few thoughts on this list (and how it ties into his work) that you won’t get from Brandon himself.
Before we even get into the individual games, one thing that stands out right away is just how diverse it is. There’s practically a game for every genre in here — 4X strategy, first-person shooters, action games, RPGs, and even Katamari — which, it’s fair to say, is a genre unto itself. No one would have expected Sanderson’s list to stay beholden to his chosen literary genres of fantasy and science fiction, but it’s fun to image the ways that games like Undertale or Super Mario World have seeped into his work.
There are, of course, a few entries on this list that seem a lot more related to his literary work, and even a few that help explain his worlds and writing. Games like Bloodborne and Breath of the Wild seem like natural companions for Sanderson’s fantasy worlds and work, fraternal twins tied together by the thoroughness of vision in their settings and the sense of adventure and experimental challenge they offer players. Meanwhile, games like Curse of Monkey Island and Fallout: New Vegas seem like perfect indicators of Sanderson’s sense of humor and the kind of irreverence he occasionally brings to his books as well.
But the real skeleton keys to his work on this list are Final Fantasy X and Civilization VI. Anyone who’s read Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives series and encountered the way he blends together dozens of cultures and countries in its world should recognize the fact that it comes from someone who’s clearly spent hundreds of hours in Civilization, pushing the borders of their country’s influence through trade, culture, or simple warfare. Meanwhile, the blog post mentions that Sanderson is a lifelong fan of the Final Fantasy series, and it’s clearly shaped the way he views magic in his written worlds. It would take hundreds of pages to fully unpack the relationship between his Cosmere and the worlds of Final Fantasy, but for now, it’s enough to know that X is his favorite entry.
Sanderson has never been particularly private about the art he loves, or the ways it’s influenced his writing. But with this list of favorite games as a starting point, let’s hope he delves more into how these games have influenced him sometime in the future.
