It’s officially the second half of 2026, which is going to be all about Grand Theft Auto 6. Until then, Sony has a new selection of games coming to PS Plus in July that includes Avatar: Frontier of Pandora, Dying Light and a couple of classic PlayStation 2 games.

PS Plus, which is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, offers a large, constantly expanding library of games. Subscribers can choose from the Essential, Extra and Premium tiers, each with unique perks and benefits. Starting at $11 a month, the plans give subscribers access to games and rewards, and each month, all subscribers can play a handful of new games at no additional charge. 

If you’re a PlayStation Plus Extra or Premium subscriber, you can grab these games starting July 21.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora came out in 2023, a year after Avatar: The Way of Water released in theaters. Developed by Massive Entertainment – a division of Ubisoft – the open-world action-adventure puts players in the role of a Na’vi raised by the Resources Development Administration, or RDA, before returning to defend Pandora. Set in the previously unseen Western Frontier, the game emphasizes exploration, aerial traversal on an ikran and combat using both traditional Na’vi weapons and human firearms. While its gameplay shares many similarities with the Far Cry series, its lush environments and faithful recreation of Pandora earned praise from critics.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Rise of the Ronin

Team Ninja went a different direction than its usual Ninja Gaiden style with 2024’s Rise of the Ronin. Set during Japan’s turbulent Bakumatsu period in the late 19th century, the open-world action RPG lets players shape the story by siding with competing political factions. Combat combines fast-paced swordplay with firearms and other period weapons with the challenging gameplay the studio is known for. Its blend of historical events, exploration and player-driven choices helped distinguish it from Team Ninja’s previous action games.

Rise of the Ronin is now available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite puts players in the role of a firefighter responding to emergencies across a large fictional city in the American Midwest. Whether playing solo with AI teammates or cooperatively with up to three friends, players battle dynamic fires, rescue civilians and use authentic firefighting equipment to contain increasingly dangerous blazes. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, the game features real-time fire, smoke and heat simulation designed to create a more realistic firefighting experience.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind is a true nostalgia bomb of a game. The side-scrolling beat-’em-up reimagines the classic 1990s TV series with pixel art visuals, cooperative multiplayer and familiar villains, including a robotic version of Rita Repulsa. Players battle through stages inspired by the show before piloting Dinozords and the Megazord in 3D action sequences that break up the traditional brawler gameplay.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 28.

Dying Light

It’s been more than a decade since Dying Light was released, but it’s still a title that gamers fawn over. Players explore the zombie-infested city of Harran using a fast-paced parkour system that makes traversing rooftops as important as combat. Scavenging for supplies, crafting weapons and surviving a dynamic day-night cycle keep the tension high as more dangerous infected emerge after dark. Its fluid movement and intense survival mechanics helped make it one of the most acclaimed zombie games of its generation.

Dying Light will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector builds on its predecessor by sending players across a lawless star system as an escaped android searching for freedom. Rather than focusing on traditional combat, the game emphasizes dialogue, dice-based skill checks and resource management as players assemble a crew and take on dangerous contracts. Its choice-driven storytelling and tabletop-inspired mechanics make every decision feel meaningful, with multiple paths that shape how the story unfolds.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 28.

Snow Bros. Wonderland

Snow Bros. Wonderland revives the long-running arcade franchise with a fresh 3D isometric look while staying true to its classic action-platforming roots. Players freeze enemies into snowballs before kicking them across each stage to defeat other foes and rack up combos. Cooperative play, colorful environments and larger-than-life boss battles help modernize the series without losing the charm that made the original games fan favorites.

Snow Bros. Wonderland will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 28.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy was first released for the PS2 in 2004 and had a mix of interesting physics gameplay that was a big trend in gaming at the time. Players control Nick Scryer, a secret agent who combines traditional gunplay with psychic abilities like telekinesis, mind control and pyrokinesis to take down enemies. The game’s physics-based powers encouraged creative problem-solving and helped it stand out from other action shooters of its era, earning it a cult following years after its release.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy will be available for PS Plus Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Indigo Prophecy

Before it made a name for itself with the games Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, developer Quantic Dream first experimented with making the point-and-click adventure gameplay style a bit more action-oriented with Indigo Prophecy. The supernatural thriller follows several interconnected characters as they investigate a string of mysterious murders while uncovering a conspiracy that threatens humanity. Its cinematic presentation, branching narrative and quick-time events helped lay the foundation for the studio’s later interactive dramas.

Indigo Prophecy will be available for PS Plus Premium subscribers starting July 21.

PlayStation Plus subscriptions start at $10 a month

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For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service. You can also check out other games on PlayStation Plus and games on Xbox Game Pass.

Oscar Gonzalez

Contributing writer

Oscar Gonzalez is a Texas native who covered video games, conspiracy theories, misinformation and cryptocurrency.

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Apple has quietly increased the price of Apple Music in the US, with individual subscriptions now costing $11.99 per month instead of $10.99.

The change also affects Family and Student plans. In addition, several Apple One bundles are impacted. The price rise comes almost four years after Apple last increased Apple Music subscription fees in October 2022.

The biggest jump is for the Apple Music Family plan, which now costs $19.99 per month, up from $16.99. The Student plan has also increased by $1, bringing the monthly fee to $6.99.

Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned, the agency confirmed to multiple news outlets.

He was appointed just three months ago after the last appointee, Collin Burns, left in less than a week, The Washington Post reported at the time. Burns was reportedly “pushed out” of the job in April because he previously worked for Anthropic and the Trump administration had been battling with the company, sources told the Post.

No reason was given for Fall’s departure. Prior to leading CAISI, Fall was the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and had been the acting director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. He worked in the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) prior to that.

Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, whose title at the time was White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks stepped down in March.

CAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the primary organization for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models as well as assessing cybersecurity risks. Yet it was not the agency at the center of the most recent model-risk brouhaha.

That occurred in June when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an obscure export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models from the market. The ban was lifted by the end of the month, when Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said he was satisfied with Anthropic’s safety plans.

Earlier this month, the White House also signed an executive order for a new AI safety oversight program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination. A host of federal organizations were named as part of the program, including the Commerce Department and Department of Homeland Security. But, as CNBC pointed out, CAISI was not among the federal organizations mentioned.

Meanwhile, after Anthropic’s models were freed from the ban, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis began calling for the creation of an independent, industry-run standards body to regulate frontier AI modeled after FINRA — the same sort of mission that CAISI was formed to tackle.

Fall’s resignation also follows this weekend’s handwringing over Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s new version of its open model Kimi, which performed competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration was weighing efforts to somehow ban Chinese open models, Axios reported. This sparked immediate debate and outrage over the weekend, including from Sacks, who argued that regulations shouldn’t be used as a protectionism strategy for U.S. proprietary AI labs.

While CAISI has released a few reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it hasn’t talked much about its processes for testing. (Open weight means these models can be publicly downloaded and run locally, but its training code and datasets are not available). Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to both the DoC and NIST about how its LLM evaluations work and has not received a response.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

We all know that Google and other big players pick and choose what information people see, but we sometimes overlook it outside of the search and social media space. [Lauren Leek] decided to take a look at how Google Maps picks winners and losers in the restaurant scene in London.

Building a machine learning model to determine a new restaurant recommendation (as one does), [Leek] uncovered interesting, and perhaps concerning, elements of how Google Maps ranks restaurants. Broken down by relevance, proximity, and prominence, many new restaurants face the issue of not drawing traffic without reviews and vice-versa causing a vicious cycle. Relevance and proximity are fairly straightforward, but what goes into “prominence?”

[Leek] found that “it is not just what people think of a place – it is how often people interact with it, talk about it, and already recognise it.” This leads to chains and high foot traffic areas awash in reviews while more out-of-the-way places find it more difficult to draw traffic. Some of this is expected and would be happening even when word of mouth was the primary way to find out where to eat, but as with many things, the algorithm amplifies this, along with the undisclosed paid placement of restaurants in Maps results.

While still in its infancy, [Leek] built a public dashboard where people can sort restaurants in the city. The machine learning algorithm is designed to identify places that are hidden gems that punch above their Google Maps weight and may make you look like the trendy one (if you live in London).

Zooming out further, [Leek] found larger clusters that revealed restaurant “diversity, in other words, is not just about taste. It is about where families settled, which high streets remained affordable long enough for a second generation to open businesses, and which parts of the city experienced displacement before culinary ecosystems could mature.”

If you want to step outside the algorithm mayhem, how about a good old-fashioned Web Ring? We’ve also addressed what’s an AI versus an algorithm, and Cory Doctorow advised us on how to reverse course on the current wave of enshittification.

Adobe is a popular brand when it comes to all things creative, including AI content generation and editing. With its newly improved Firefly tool, Adobe has taken AI content generation a step further with realistic, real-time outputs.

In addition to being highly accurate, Firefly is also one of the most affordable tools on the market today. But is it the best AI video editor for your needs? Read on to find out. In this article, we’ve put Firefly to the test, examining its features, pricing, ease of use, and overall value for money.

off prem

Single datacenter and just three services taken down by ‘upstream’ power problem, while the rest of a zone and region kept humming

Google Cloud last week experienced an outage that analysts say demonstrates that not all promises of cloudy resilience are created equal.

Google’s incident report explained that three services – the VMware Engine (GCVE), NetApp Volumes, and Bare Metal Solutions (BMS) – experienced a 15-hour outage due to a cooling failure in its europe-west4-a zone.

The report includes the following detail: “The datacenter serving europe-west4-a for GCVE, BMS, and NetApp has experienced a power failure, which subsequently caused a cooling failure.”

The important detail there is that Google uses a discrete datacenter for those three services.

Another notable element of the incident report is the admission that “An electrical fault occurred on the utility grid upstream of the datacenter, disrupting the electrical distribution gear and cooling equipment.”

Google hasn’t explained how an upstream failure caused that disruption but did say it “proactively turned down workloads in order to protect customer data from any risks posed by running infrastructure in a high temperature environment.”

Whenever your correspondent talks to hyperscalers or datacenter operators about how they ensure resilience, they tell me about their use of multiple redundant pieces of energy infrastructure, plus on-site generation capabilities that can keep a datacenter powered for days if necessary.

We’ve asked Google if it had generators or other energy sources at this site, and if so, why it nonetheless had to turn down workloads. We’ve not received a response at the time of writing. Google told us its incident analysis “is currently ongoing” and promised to follow up once it is available.

Hidden dependencies

We also asked Google if it advertises the fact that some of its services are tied to a single datacenter, a matter of interest because like other hyperscalers it divides its cloud into “regions” that typically comprise multiple “zones” spread across a city or other locale. Like its hyperscale peers, Google recommends placing workloads across different zones and regions to ensure resilience. Yet this incident shows some services can be tied to a single datacenter in a zone – and that those single datacenters can experience problems while the rest of the zone keeps working.

Analysts told The Register the outage shows organizations need to dig into clouds’ promises of resilience.

“The real issue is transparency: customers are generally told to use multiple zones and regions for resilience but are rarely given visibility into whether a particular managed service has a single-datacenter dependency within a zone,” said Biswajeet Mahapatra, principal analyst at Forrester. “As a result, many organizations assume the cloud abstraction provides more facility-level redundancy than may actually exist for specialized services.”

“The underlying architecture is not necessarily unusual,” he added. “AWS, Azure, and Google all operate services that rely on dedicated hardware, storage platforms, or tightly coupled infrastructure that may not be distributed across multiple facilities in the same way as core compute and storage services.”

Gartner Director Analyst Adrian Wong reminded The Register of the 2023 outage at Google Cloud’s europe-west9-a region, the cause of which was a water leak that Google said “originated in a non-Google portion of the facility.”

Google uses a tool called “Spanner” to replicate data across zones, but in the flooded zone Google’s Spanner configuration didn’t work once one building became unavailable.

“It is very hard to figure out how an individual region is architected,” Wong said. “Our customers are often surprised by that,” he added.

The incident report for last week’s outage includes an apology.

“We know how much you rely on Google Cloud, and we regret the impact on your productivity,” the document states, before promising a final incident report will detail “preventative actions.”

But as this incident shows, knowing how Google plans to avoid future incidents of this sort won’t arm customers with the knowledge to understand if those mitigations will address hidden design issues that can reduce resilience. ®