There’s something really appealing about retro tech but it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is. Or maybe that’s it. You can press the chunky buttons, place a record on a turntable, hold your favorite media in your hands and feel the satisfying click of a flip phone snapping shut.

For others, the appeal might be the colorful designs that seemed to have so much more personality than the shiny black rectangles we all own now. Or maybe it's actually owning media rather than feeling like you’re constantly renting it. Whatever the reason, it’s clear plenty of people love retro tech.

However, it’s easy to romanticize a return to older tech, like the idea of listening to a Walkman on the train, taking blurry photos with an old camera or spending a lazy afternoon playing a Game Boy. But how much of the actual experience are you prepared to put up with?

Because using that Walkman also means carrying round tapes, replacing batteries and rewinding songs. The camera might need an obscure memory card and a cable you haven't seen since 2004. And your beautiful old flip phone probably isn't going to help when you're lost and need Google Maps.

I'm personally all for bringing a little retro tech back into our lives. I've got some myself. But there's a big difference between wanting the aesthetic and being willing to embrace the inconvenience.

Although, for some people, the inconvenience is also part of the experience. At a time when everything is quick, easy and frictionless it can be nice to feel like things are slower and require a little more effort.

So, before you start bidding on vintage gadgets on eBay, take our quiz to find out how much retro tech you can realistically handle. We'll test your patience, willingness to tinker and tolerance for doing things the old-fashioned way, then recommend some retro gadgets to match. Because I strongly suspect many of us might miss the way tech used to look and feel but we maybe don’t miss the way it used to work quite as much.

OpenAI recently introduced GPT-6, a new model of ChatGPT. You've probably heard about a lot of its new features but one that I don't think has had nearly enough attention, especially considering how much fun you can have with it, is Intelligent UI.

It allows ChatGPT to generate interactive experiences directly within a conversation. OpenAI explains: “With Intelligent UI, responses can include graphics, tappable buttons, forms, charts, and interactive experiences you can use directly in your conversation.”

What's interesting is there isn’t a single format. Which means, depending on what you ask, ChatGPT might create an interactive diagram, a calculator, a mood board, a map or even a little gaming console.

There are some genuinely useful applications here, from making complicated subjects easier to understand to building simple tools on the spot. But I was particularly interested in something a little less practical — games.

ChatGPT can now create games you can actually play within the chat window. And while there are all sorts of possibilities for educational games, quizzes and entirely new creations, I wanted to see what would happen if I asked it to recreate some old favorites.

So I started with five classic games, including Snake, Pong and Tetris. I gave ChatGPT simple prompts to see how faithfully it could recreate them. I then asked it to reinvent each game with new aesthetics, unexpected gameplay mechanics and a few deliberately chaotic twists. Think Snake in a neon cyberpunk world and Tetris with rules that change every time you clear a line.

Here's what happened when I put ChatGPT's new game-making abilities to the test.

Snake gets a neon makeover

The prompt: "Create a playable version of the classic Snake game directly inside this conversation."

ChatGPT got the basics right straight away. The game was instantly recognizable, with responsive controls and even a slider to adjust the speed. It looked good and, importantly, it was actually fun to play for a couple of games.

I then asked it to give Snake a neon cyberpunk makeover, complete with moving obstacles, special power-ups and a speed increase every five points. Say hello to Neon Snake.

There was one small hiccup. Instead of creating the new game directly in the chat window, ChatGPT initially gave me the code. Which wasn't much use when the whole point was to play it there and then.

I tried another prompt asking it if it could make it directly playable in the conversation and that worked. The results of that experiment were fun. The neon aesthetic looked good, everything was color-coded and the new mechanics gave the classic (and, let’s be honest, sometimes boring) game an extra layer of challenge.

Tetris gets new rules

The prompt: "Create a playable game inspired by Tetris directly inside this conversation."

This one worked really well from the start. I’d just assumed it would be a bit buggy and glitchy because there’s so much going on compared to Snake, but the controls were intuitive and responsive, and the classic block-stacking mechanic was all there.

But what if Tetris changed the rules every time you cleared a line? That was the idea behind my follow-up prompt.

I asked ChatGPT to introduce unexpected twists, which could include rotating the board to adding unusual block shapes or special powers that could destroy part of the grid.

And it delivered. The changing rules introduced a fun element of unpredictability to a game that's usually all about getting into a rhythm. I also came away thinking about how much further you could take this. There are so many opportunities to experiment with different rules, challenges and power-ups.

Space Invaders becomes a First Contact situation

The prompt: "Build me a fully playable retro arcade game inspired by Space Invaders"

Again, ChatGPT recreated the classic arcade experience surprisingly well. It looked and played like the original, with straightforward controls and all the fun of shooting at waves of approaching aliens.

But I wanted to see whether it could do something a bit more imaginative than adding extra enemies or making everything move faster. So I asked it to introduce a choice: what if I could defend Earth by fighting the aliens or negotiating with them?

I wanted waves of pixel-art enemies, but also decisions between rounds that could unlock weapons, stop an invasion or make the next attack more dangerous.

ChatGPT called its reinvention First Contact, which I loved. Up until this point it was calling most of the games "chaos" or "chaotic" so this felt more inventive.

It was a fun way to introduce a new dimension to a familiar game. But did it work well? I don't know, I couldn't ever make it past the first level. This experiment really suffered with my poor alien-fighting abilities.

Haunted Pac-Man

The prompt: "Create a fully interactive retro maze game inspired by Pac-Man that I can play directly inside this ChatGPT conversation."

This was easily my favorite of the five, but I have always adored Pac-Man. ChatGPT's first attempt was a fun, responsive maze game with the familiar mechanics of moving around, collecting things and trying to avoid enemies. Bonus points for the fact it renamed it Maze Muncher.

For the reinvention, I decided to lean into Halloween. I asked it to turn the game into a haunted 1980s arcade, with me playing a little ghost hunter instead of Pac-Man.

I also wanted the maze itself to change. Every ten orbs collected would trigger a surprise, like shifting walls, new passages or an extra ghost. And I asked for temporary power-ups that would let me chase the ghosts for a change.

ChatGPT handled this well but didn't wait until I'd collected orbs. It was super fast-paced and there were new ghosts, secret passages and changing mechanics from the start. It was quick, easy to control and genuinely fun to play.

Pong reinvented

The prompt: Build me a fully playable version of Pong inside this conversation.

Pong might be the simplest game of the bunch, but ChatGPT made a really solid version. The controls were easy, the aesthetics were nice and it even offered easy, normal and hard difficulty settings.

I decided to ruin that simplicity and asked ChatGPT to create a more chaotic version where every point triggered a random modifier. The ball could split in two, the paddles could shrink, gravity could change or an obstacle could appear in the middle of the court.

The result definitely delivered on the chaos. The familiar back-and-forth gameplay was still there, but the changing rules made each rally a little less predictable. It was also a reminder of how much fun you can have with a simple idea. You don't need to reinvent every part of a game to make it entertaining.

I was genuinely impressed with how well all five games worked, especially considering how simple my original prompts were.

Yes, there were a few hiccups along the way, like ChatGPT deciding to give me code instead of a playable game a couple of times. But overall, the controls were responsive, the games looked good and the reinventions were more imaginative than I expected.

What I enjoyed most was how easy it was to experiment. You could take a game you already know, change the aesthetic, introduce an unexpected mechanic or come up with something completely ridiculous and see what ChatGPT made of it.

I can imagine this being a fun way to waste half an hour, especially if you loved these games growing up. Although, after all this experimenting, I do feel like I should remind you that the originals are still out there, and they're well worth revisiting too.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Images 2.5 last week, bringing all sorts of impressive upgrades to the way it generates images. The company says the latest model will bring us “sharper details, faster generation, more precise editing, and better tools for creating and sharing.”

We’ve already identified the new features of ChatGPT Images 2.5 you’ll actually use, like Sketch for turning quick drawings into polished images, templates for things like posters and better editing tools.

But it’s not all good news. We’re still a little disappointed by the presence of telltale noise patterns in some of its creations. TechRadar writer Eric Hal Schwartz described the problem well: “Everything gets a gritty, sandy look, and nothing looks clean for some reason.”

What I’m most interested in isn’t necessarily how good ChatGPT’s new image capabilities are, but whether they can realistically pass as genuine photos.

Is this real or AI?

I’ve written before about how I love to comb through the r/isthisAI subreddit, where people post suspicious images and ask everyone else to help them work out whether they’re real.

It’s fascinating but also concerning when you see the number of scams, fake viral posts and completely fabricated people that are now floating around online.

So yes, ChatGPT Images has improved. But has it reached the point where AI images are becoming genuinely different to distinguish from real ones?

The jury’s still out. I think we’ll need a bit of time to experiment ourselves and for r/isthisAI to fill up with new images.

But in the meantime, I’ve been interested in the way Redditors have responded to the new image capabilities. Especially one thread about asking ChatGPT to make the most realistic human image possible.

The Redditor who started the thread shared the resulting image of a young woman. And, at least at first glance, there’s very little about her that screams AI to me.

Can you actually tell which photos are AI now?

I decided to experiment with ChatGPT Images myself, especially with prompts like the Reddit thread in which I tried to get the chatbot to make the most realistic-looking images.

To make the comparison feel as fair as possible, I went through photos from my own travels this summer and picked some I was happy to share. I then asked ChatGPT to create extremely realistic images with similar subjects, settings and compositions.

For some, that meant asking for a realistic photograph of a blonde woman. For others, I recreated the kinds of ordinary travel photos sitting in my camera roll, which was meals in restaurants, boats in harbors and scenes from walks.

Importantly, I wasn’t trying to make spectacular AI art, I really wanted the opposite. Images that were boringly believable.

Take the quiz below to see if you can guess which are the real photos of my travels this summer and which are ChatGPT-generated.

Is that gritty, sandy look still enough to give the AI ones away? Can you focus less on the faces and spot strange details in the backgrounds? Or have we reached the point where your first instinct simply isn’t reliable anymore?

Take the quiz and tell me how you get on in the comments below.