If you have kids, you know what Bluey is. For everyone else, it’s an Australian cartoon about a nuclear family of talking dogs who live in a giant bungalow and love to play silly games. It’s cute and clever, and several years after becoming a global phenomenon, it’s at long-last getting a video game adaptation.

Outright Games announced multiplayer puzzle game Bluey: The Videogame in partnership with BBC Studios on September 19, and revealed that it’s coming to PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC on November 17. Up to four players can choose from Bluey, Bingo, Mum (Chile), and Dad (Bandit) t and participate in playable episodes by completing a range of minigames to unlock new costumes, stickers, locations. It sounds like standard kids’ game fair, with the advantage of looking exactly like the beloved show and starring its same voice talent.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s how the developers describe the game:

Bluey: The Videogame has been designed with flexibility in mind, allowing fans to engage with the game and explore it at their own pace with the ability to jump between story quests, activities, and exploration at any time. Variable difficulty features have been included that allow the game to be accessible and fun for both preschool and older fans including UI on/off toggle, simple written on-screen instructions and full voice-over. Players will be able to utilize physics-based mechanics to manipulate objects, interact with the world around them, add additional challenges to mini-games, and support free-play in the sandbox.

Bluey has three seasons so far, all of them currently airing on Disney Plus with some additional episodes on the way and a fourth season set to air sometime in the future. The show practically pulsates with “hard relate” vibes for a parent, which is the key to making it entertaining for grownups as much as young kids. Although for me it’s always conjured an unlikely but potent mix of guilt and aspiration.

Being a parent is exhausting. Remember the book The Giving Tree? The titular tree gives everything to a child for nothing in return. It quite literally gets chopped up into wood in the end. Hard relate. But Bluey’s dad Bandit always pushes through, laughing, messing around, and indulging the kids in absurdly specific pretend games and scenarios. Some millennial gamers want to be strong and stoic like Kratos. I just want to have the patience and imagination of Bluey’s dad.

Maybe Bluey: The Videogame will teach me how. I can’t wait to give it a try.

Pre-order Bluey: The Videogame: Best Buy | GameStop

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The Google Pixel 8 appears to feature an AI-powered photo editing option that lets you completely change peoples’ faces. A reliable leak from mobile tech reporter and leaker Kamila Wojciechowska to phone site 91mobiles revealed the feature, which is like using Cyberpunk 2077’s fleet of customizable facial expressions in photo mode, except it’s real life, and it’s more terrifying.

In the leaked trailer for the Pixel 8, which is expected to launch with the Pixel 8 Pro on October 4, a narrator lists off a number of camera options. “Engineered by Google, with AI controlled by you,” they say. The Pixel 8 can do what we now gluttonously expect of most smartphones—night vision, microscopic zoom—but it seems to add the rarer ability to edit photos with AI directly in its camera app.

“Swap this,” the narrator says while we look at a little boy grimacing. Suddenly, he’s smiling. And a man checking out his feet is now staring directly into the camera, also smiling. Another boy—this one making the kind of overextended, open mouth grin kids make when they’re allowed a whole Snickers bar—becomes more decorous after the ad’s phone user clicks a small, alternate grin from three possible options. “Nice,” says the narrator. “Photos made perfect with a tap.”

From the trailer, it looks like the Pixel 8’s photo editor also uses AI to remove unwanted objects and completely exchange entire sections of a photo, like a gray sky the ad’s user ditches for a prettier sunset.

“It’ll make you wonder, ‘can a phone be made of magic?’” says the narrator, “Nope. It’s AI.”

The ad doesn’t get into specifics about how AI photo editing works, or the extent to which it does; Kotaku reached out to Google for comment. Other modern smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and Pixel 8 predecessor, the Pixel 7, also use AI to touch-up or modify photos, including one S23 Ultra feature that gave toothless babies an unnatural row of chompers.

Historically, people have always made representations of reality more attractive than life itself, commissioning portraits without their blackened teeth and scraping at their albumen prints to reveal smooth skin. But the Pixel 8’s proposed feature makes me pause. It looks more spotless than the S23 Ultra’s graceless shot at AI, and the photos we take now are usually shared to about a million strangers, not only a few friends with access to our Victorian albums.

Reposing Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West’s adjustable photo mode feels okay—she’s not real. She can’t decide what she wants. I worry, though, that the Pixel 8’s AI editing could encourage us to think of ourselves that same way.

Rampant gambler, content-stealer, and little stinker xQc—aka superstar Twitch and Kick streamer Félix Lengyel—is in trouble again. The content creator has been posting video “reactions” to war footage since the most recent inflammation of the Israel-Hamas war in early October. People online are disturbed, but Lengyel doesn’t mind, since he’s still making so much money.

“when I think about what scumfuck degenerate content parasites look like,” the YouTuber Noodle wrote on Twitter, “I don’t think I could possibly create parody more on the nose than this.”

Lengyel responded to Noodle’s criticism with a picture of his stacks of cash. When YouTuber Kwite weighed in and told Lengyel that his “soul remains empty,” Lengyel replied, “Your bank account relates,” alongside a photo of a glittering, diamond-encrusted watch.

“Everybody got so mad,” Lengyel said in a recent stream about the Twitter backlash. “They think that this is about war, this is about this, everybody’s just victimizing and whatever.”

But “I came to a topic that I had no education on,” Lengyel said. “People say, ‘you have a responsibility with your platform to know about this,’ whatever. I was like, ‘Okay, let’s learn about this.’”

Lengyel’s reactions to the ongoing Palestinian genocide are sometimes neutral (“xQc Learns About Gaza”), sometimes bumbling (“Learning About The Israel-Palestine Conflict So You Don’t Have To”), and always absurd in the context of his other streams and videos (“TIKTOKS THAT MAKE YOU DIE LAUGHING!,” “Some of these TikToks made me laugh out loud,” “TIKTOKS THAT MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD!”).

“As I already explained,” Lengyel continued to say in his recent stream, “this was not about, like, war and death, it was about, just, dumbass behavior regardless of what the context is.”

That sums it up. We don’t need to siphon malformed geopolitical opinions from xQc, a 27-year-old Overwatch player with a bedroom full of, as he said once, “crusted-up liquid,” although his massive online following bleakly makes him one of the most influential people in the world. We should reevaluate. We’re probably better than this.