Month: January 2021

Fans of real time strategy games can pick up Bomber Crew, a game about managing the inner workings of a World War 2 bomber, for free by subscribing to the Humble Bundle newsletter. The offer is only around for the next three days, so players will need to act quickly if they want to grab this freebie.

Visit Humble Bundle’s official website, click on the banner on top, create an account, and enter your email in order to receive a copy of Bomber Crew. This offer will end on January 17, 2021 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET.

Bomber Crew puts you in charge of various crews flying missions at the height of World War 2. You’ll act as their invisible leader, giving engineers, gunners, and other crewmate’s orders. The graphics may look charming, but there is a real challenge hidden behind Bomber Crew’s colorful visuals.

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A notoriously tricky “ultra-shortcut” in Mario Kart Wii has been performed by a human, after years of attempts. The shortcut is on the final track, Rainbow Road, and though players have known about its theoretical existence for almost five years, no one has been able to pull it off.

As noted on Reddit, streamer @ArthuurrrP is the first person to have performed the shortcut. You can see it in the streamed video below: The racer stops and turns their kart just after the starting line, then rides the railing and hops over to a piece of the track, bypassing most of Rainbow Road and going straight to the finish line. Total lap time: 22.5 seconds. Doing this successfully is said to have taken thousands of hours.

This is one of the “ultra-shortcuts” in Mario Kart Wii, and a 2018 video from Summoning Salt explains what makes it so rare and tricky. Mario Kart Wii uses a series of checkpoints to load in and make sure you’ve finished the entire track in sequence, so if you find a shortcut, you need to trip those markers or it won’t count your progress. This particular shortcut was discovered in March 2016, and had been recreated with bots, but there wasn’t yet a record of a person actually performing it.

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2014’s Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt action movie Edge of Tomorrow–or, Live Die Repeat as it was rebranded–was a critical success and as a result, fans have been calling for a sequel. Director Doug Liman has now provided an update on how it’s coming along.

He told Collider that, if indeed a sequel is made, he would want it to be a smaller-scale movie. Sequels often go for bigger action and more explosions, but Liman said this pales in comparison to giving Cruise and Blunt more screen time because they are such great actors.

“I’ve always been interested in the idea of a sequel being more character-driven than the first film, because that’s not how things are normally done,” he said. “That’s been my approach when developing the sequel and because Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt are such phenomenal actors. I get sometimes the sequel just has to have more firepower or more explosions but no visual effect is going to top what you’re going to get from a great scene performed by Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.”

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Developer Respawn Entertainment has rolled out a new patch for Apex Legends on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S that stabilizes the game.

The patch comes after numerous players reported errors while playing the game on all platforms. Specifically, players were getting caught in infinite loops that freeze the game or the game would crash entirely. Respawn said that while it couldn’t replicate whatever’s causing the hiccups, the new patch “improves stability and (hopefully) fixes the freezing issues.”

In addition to trying to address technical issues on the server side, the latest patch for Apex Legends fixes a variety of other problems. This includes issues with Fight Night event skins like Haute Drop and Gold Standard getting in the way of the reticle when aiming down sights, errors with selecting the Steam Friends list, and other problems related to clubs and text chat.

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When it comes to gaming hardware, ‘big’ is the description that most often applies, whether it’s the original Xbox or the latest Nvidia RTX 3090 card. High-fidelity gaming takes a lot of horsepower, which often means you’ll also be dealing with large hardware. But Intel is trying to change our minds at CES 2021 with its next set of laptop processors, enabling gaming on the thinnest and lightest laptops yet.

Intel hopes to do this with its 11th-gen Tiger Lake-H CPUs and Intel’s own Xe graphics tech. Intel has three chips on the way that will make up this segment of its market: The Core i7-11375H Special Edition, i7-11370H, and i5-11300H. These are four-core, eight-thread CPUs that each draw 28-35W of power, compared to 35-45W for the 10th-gen laptop processors. The four-core count is a reduction from the previous generation’s six-core models, which Intel says was necessary to fit the chip into the same space.

These chips are built on Intel’s Tiger Lake H35 10nm architecture, which means that they support Thunderbolt 4 connectivity, Intel’s Xe graphics architecture, Wi-Fi 6/6E, PCIe Gen 4, and Resizable BAR. If you follow PC tech, you may have come across this with AMD’s Smart Access Memory. Similarly, Resizable BAR allows the CPU to allocate an optimal amount of video memory instead of having to do it in smaller 256MB chunks. That lets the CPU and discrete GPU move data around more quickly, which translates to better graphics performance and loading times. Nvidia recently announced its plans to support Resizable BAR, too. The Core i7-11375H SE also features Intel Turbo Boost 3.0, which lets the CPU shoot up to 5GHz frequency on a single core.

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YouTuber and “hardware hacker” Mike Choi has combined an exercise bicycle, Mario Kart 8, and the Ring Fit Adventure controller to create a fantastic way to get in shape. The Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit, as he calls it, lets you control your favorite Mushroom Kingdom character by pedaling, squeezing, and working your butt off.

“This kit allows you to control your kart by pedaling on the Bike-Con and steering and using items with the Ring-Con,” Choi said in a tweet. “This is a fully-functional concept product that I developed myself.”

Choi uploaded a video to YouTube and Twitter where he can be seen huffing and puffing as he showcases his home brew creation. The “full-body exercise experience” gets extra difficult when he picks up a golden mushroom and has to squeeze the Ring Fit controller every time he wants a boost. “Even when you lose in the game,” Choi said in the video. “You’re winning at exercise.”

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Activision Blizzard has announced that its holiday charity campaign was very successful, with its employees collectively giving more than $1.6 million to thousands of charities.

In December, Activision Blizzard kicked off the Holiday Giving Initiative, which gave every employee $200 to donate to a charity of their choice. More than 8,000 employees took advantage of the offer, donating to more than 3,200 charities and raising $1.6 million.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick and COO Daniel Alegre released a statement on the initiative:

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A rare Batman comic has sold for $2.2 million, beating the previous record for the highest-priced Batman comic sold at auction of all time. The near-mint Batman #1 was first published in 1940, and survived those decades with almost unheard-of quality.

THR reports that the comic was sold as part of a Heritage Auction event on comics and comic book art. This Batman comic was published a year after the character’s debut in Detective Comics #27. Aside from being the first title issue for Batman, it also introduced iconic characters like the Joker and Catwoman.

The comic received a 9.4 on the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC) scale. On that scale, a 9.4 is described as “a very well-preserved collectible with minor wear and small manufacturing or handling defects.” This comic in particular is said to have been preserved so well that its pages are still white.

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