Shotgun Cop Man is a strange platformer. You play as a square man with a round, bald head who's chasing Satan to arrest him. At the beginning of each of the game's nine worlds, Satan gives you the middle finger. And you don't just use guns for fighting, but for traversal as well.

You start each world with two guns: a rapid-fire but weak pistol and a more powerful shotgun that only has three blasts. When you're on the ground, your ammo constantly refills, meaning you essentially have infinite ammo. But when you're in the air, if you run out of bullets, you won't get a refill until you touch the ground.

This all matters because there's no jump button. That means you get into the air by shooting your guns: the pistol lets you hover, while the shot

Residents near Boca Chica Beach in Texas have voted to become a city called Starbase. | Photo by GABRIEL CARDENAS/AFP via Getty Images

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South Texas voters mostly employed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have approved a measure to incorporate as Starbase, a new city in Texas’ Cameron County near the company’s Boca Chica Beach launch site on the Gulf of Mexico. The final tally was 212–6 in support of the measure, reports The Associated Press.

The election took place following a petition that had gained enough

You are a negro bunny bound for greatness in the New World, as if the old were simply a mistake. You can't stop thinking about Sylvia Wynter and something like New World natives; you stall, with everyone else, rather than negotiate a true critique of the present, rather than pause Final Fantasy XIV as ordered by necessity and place your twin boys in the bath.

No, the little fuckers berate each other and bash plastic dinosaurs against wood drawers, the floor, and on too many occasions, each other's faces; a waterlogged mosasaur with a missing fin lay wrecked beside the tub. You understand that, unlike NPCs, the children will die if left unattended, which you've had waking dreams about since the moment they were born, boring ones mostly, for seven years

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 81, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy Finally Feels Like Summer Week to at least everyone who lives near me, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about tech bro group chats and the history of ChatGPTand The Rest is History, wondering if maybe I should [

Janet Jackson was too much for some Windows laptops.

Longtime Verge readers might recall the unusual story of how the music video for a Janet Jackson song, “Rhythm Nation,” could cause certain Windows laptops to crash just by being around when it’s playing. Now, in a blog post spotted by PCWorld, Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has revealed that a filter created to deal with the problem stuck around until “at least Windows 7.”

For those not familiar: in 2022, Chen wrote a pair [of posts](https://dev

The Trump administration has released a proposal to cut about a quarter of NASA’s 2026 budget, slashing both International Space Station crew sizes and the amount of research done there. At the same time, it sets up new funding that would likely benefit Elon Musk’s SpaceX by prioritizing human missions to Mars, and refocuses on “beating China back to the Moon.”

The suggested cuts are part of President Trump’s budget proposal for next year. It would slash $508 million from the ISS, cutting its crew size and focusing its “reduced research capacity … on efforts critical to the Moon and Mars exploration programs.” It also cuts $2.265 billion from space science missions, and includes terminating things like the Mars Sample Return missi

Sam Altman and Elon Musk aren't just competing in the AI race; they both have ambitions to build Silicon Valley's holy grail: an "everything" super app encompassing finance, social media, gaming, and more.

Earlier this week, I got a peek at Altman's plan from a cavernous event space on the northern edge of San Francisco. He was not there as the CEO of OpenAI, but as the co-founder and chairman of Tools for Humanity, the parent company of a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin that's now available in the US. Worldcoin is distributed to people who scan their eyes at one of the startup's orbs, which are rolling out in retail stores across America. At the same tim

Apple is planning to shuffle its iPhone release schedule next year as it releases the first foldable iPhone to make things more manageable, reports The Information. The plan is for the foldable to come out with the iPhone 18 Pro and “Air” models, while the standard iPhone 18 gets shunted back to the spring of 2027, releasing alongside an iPhone 16E follow-up, according to the outlet.

With the slimmer model in the lineup and a foldable expected in 2026, The Information says Apple needs to shuffle things around to keep a ballooning six-iPhone lineup manageable. As for what the foldab

Polygon, The Verge's former sister site dedicated to covering gaming and entertainment, is now owned by Valnet, a company that owns more than 27 different brands covering gaming, entertainment, sports, travel, and more. The transition is, let's say, ongoing: a day after the acquisition, the site still said it was a Vox Media property, and the site's coverage continued more or less uninterrupted.

But Valnet has indeed acquired Polygon, so to learn more about the deal, why the company acquired it, and the future of the site, I got on the phone with Valnet's head of mergers and acquisitions, Rony Arzoumanian.

Polygon is a "triple-A gaming brand" that Valnet has been of "high interest" for "some time," Arzoumanian said. Valnet's gaming portfolio also inclu

While we all wait to find out what effect the upcoming — well, maybe upcoming — tariffs will have on prices, many of us are making mental lists of some of the items we might need that, hopefully, won’t demand a bank loan to be affordable. Last year, we asked the staff members here at The Verge whether they had any favorite items that cost $50 or less. This year, because things are getting more expensive, we thought about upping the limit to $75, but it turns out that our staff has a good instinct for finding great, low-cost tech gadgets, cooking gear, tool kits, and other items that not only don’t

A little over three Gs for capital-G Gamers.

The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is a gaming laptop, and it sure looks like one. It's an inch thick, weighs 5.5 pounds, and is awash in RGB lighting, stylized text, and curved plastic.

This Aorus Master offers powerful hardware and a lovely high-res, high-refresh OLED display. It's the first of several laptops we're reviewing with the GeForce RTX 5080, Nvidia's second-fastest laptop graphics card of this generation. At $3,100, it's actually a few hundred dollars less than similarly powerful models from Razer, Lenovo, and Asus, and over a thousand dollars less than laptops

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivers remarks to the press during a meeting with UK Defense Secretary John Healey at the Pentagon on March 6th, 2025, in Arlington, Virginia.

The Pentagon Inspector General is expanding an inquiry into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s questionable Signal group chats. According to the Wall Street Journal, the investigation is now also looking into a second chat, as well as exactly how classified information was transferred from a secure government computer onto Hegseth’s account on his personal devices.

Beyond the “Houthi

Leica has confirmed price increases for both the US and Canada starting this week. | Image: Leica

Price increases on electronics as a result of President Trump’s global tariffs are starting to be felt outside the US, as a Canadian camera shop recently discovered. As a result of how Leica imports its products into North America, a store in Calgary, Alberta, was recently notified by the camera maker that it would be increasing dealer pricing by seven percent starting on May 1st, 2025, in both the US and Canada, [according to PetaPixel](https://petapixel.com/2025/04/30/leica-

Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that [Google has an illegal monopoly in search](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-s

Google is notifying parents using its Family Link parental controls via email that their kids will soon be able to access Gemini AI Apps on their monitored Android devices, The New York Times reports.

The company says kids will be able to use Gemini to do things like help them with homework or read them stories. Like its Workplace for Education accounts, Google says children’s data will not be used to train AI. Still, in the email, Google warns parents that “Gemini can make mistakes,” and kids “may encounter content you don’t want them to see.”

Besides sillie

The de minimis exception, which has allowed businesses to import low-value goods without duties from China and Hong Kong, has expired as of 12:01AM ET today as part of President Trump’s executive order signed last month.

Many businesses in the US rely on the de minimis loophole. Any package valued under $800 — including electronics, toys, and clothing from companies like Shein — can come to the US duty-free under the exception, leaving the products super-cheap for buyers. In 2024, about 1.4 billion packages entering the US claimed exemption from duties under de min

One of World’s orbs. | Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

On the evening of April 30th, the hottest ticket in San Francisco was a buzzy crypto startup's coming-out party at a warehouse-like complex on the northern edge of the city. It had all the makings of an event you'd only find near Silicon Valley: Anderson Paak, champagne, and a bunch of eye-scanning orbs.

Onstage, Sam Altman and co-founder Alex Blania announced that the cryptocurrency Worldcoin is coming to the US for the first time, along with a bevy of orbs. The idea is straight out of science fiction. It may be too far-fetched to work, but given Altman's involvement, it's something worth paying attention to.

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Part of a failed Soviet spacecraft that’s been circling Earth for the last 53 years is about to come crashing down. The Kosmos 482 probe launched by the USSR in 1972 was intended to collect data from the surface of Venus, but was marooned in orbit following a malfunction in its upper-stage rocket booster.

Kosmos 482 broke apart following the launch. While some parts re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in the 1980s, the remaining pieces, which include the 1,091-pound (495 kilograms) lander, measuring about three feet, have been slowly descending and are now expected to plummet around May 10th, [according to Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek](https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosm

It's not really a secret that the advertising industry is about to get upended by AI - one reason big platform companies like Google and Meta have been so deeply invested in photo and video generation is because they know the first heavy users of those tools will be advertisers on their platforms. But no one's ever really just come right out and said it - until today, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with *Stratechery'*s Ben Thompson and basically said his plan was to more or less eliminate the entire advertising ecosystem, from creative on down. Here's the quote - Zuck was talking about how A

TikTok has been ordered to pay €530 million (around $600 million) for sending European users’ data to servers in China, a breach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). TikTok has six months to bring its data processing into compliance, pending any possible appeal.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) found that TikTok violated GDPR laws because it couldn’t guarantee that data transferred to China would be protected to a standard equivalent to the EU’s. The court singled out China’s anti-terrorism and counterespionage laws as potential risks that Chinese authoritie