Ashlee Lhamon's "Caesura" is io9's featured Lightspeed Magazine story for October.

Tabletop board games and video games typically offer ways to reduce their difficulty. But getting and keeping a group together for game nights, across different schedules and experience levels? That can be fiendishly hard. That, more than anything, is what Sunderfolk wants to make easier. At its core, it’s a turn-based tactical RPG with well-worn hero classes and mechanics familiar to fans of crunchy tabletop games and CRPGs. But this upcoming game from Secret Door, led by Blizzard veteran and tabletop aficionado Chris Sigaty, wants to bring more people into the game-night fold. By fusing Jackbox-like accessibility with tabletop mechanics and letting the game do all the hard work, Sunderfolk aims to reduce learning curves, eliminate setup, and encourage game nights with friends. Also, you use your phone as a controller, connected to one "big screen," local or remote. But it makes sense, and it worked, at least in the two hours I got to play Sunderfolk. The phone (or tablet) is both a controller and a replacement for all the cards, tokens, and other ephemera a tabletop player would have in front of them. And it allows for quick setup of couch co-op or screencasted play. Sunderfolk is a game that can make use of the QR-code-scanning, Discord-arranging skills many of us learned during the pandemic. Read full article

Intel is finally addressing how hot and power-hungry its desktop CPUs have become. Intel’s new flagship Core Ultra 200S series of processors, arriving on October 24th, are focused on performance per watt to run cooler and more efficiently than the previous 14th Gen chips. Codenamed Arrow Lake S, these are also Intel’s first enthusiast desktop CPUs with a built-in NPU, or a neural processing unit, for accelerating AI tasks. “Arrow Lake will deliver Intel’s best performance for enthusiasts in desktop and mobile,” says Josh Newman, general manager and VP of product marketing client computing. “It will deliver that performance at significantly lower power levels than previous generations of Intel enthusiast products, and Arrow Lake is also...

Lexus is launching a new LX SUV with a “rugged” hybrid engine that’s capable of surviving some watery excursions. The LX 700h is equipped with a 3.5L V6 twin-turbo hybrid system with a waterproof battery and a divider that helps prevent water ingress to the engine, and a waterproof AC inverter that provides up to 2,400 watts of external power supply. If water gets into the system, you’ll be alerted on the new 12.3-inch full LCD meter screen. Lexus says its newly designed parallel hybrid system integrates a motor generator with a clutch positioned in between the engine and transmission. The setup lets it maximize torque output and maintain full-time 4WD, which is good for efficiency. It’s also the automaker’s first system that includes...

Update, October 10th: Registration is full for Nintendo’s playtest. Our original story follows. Do you want to be one of the 10,000 people who participate in Nintendo’s mysterious new “Playtest Program” for Nintendo Switch Online? If you meet the criteria, you can apply for the playtest from the “To application page” link on Nintendo’s website starting today at 11AM ET / 8AM PT. Applications will stay open until October 15th at 10:59AM ET, though Nintendo says it will stop taking applications early if it reaches capacity. I imagine you’ll be up against a legion of hopefuls, but if you want to throw your hat in the ring, here’s what you need to know. Perhaps most importantly, is the fact that only people with an active Nintendo Switch...

A pro-Palestinian group has compromised the login information for the world’s biggest digital archive and launched a sustained DDoS attack against the site.

Another classic Star Wars game is getting the updated re-release treatment, with some changes to its anachronistic take on the prequel-era Jedi.

Can AI actually change our love-hate relationship with our tools?