Sunday, September 30, 2018

Musk settles—out as Tesla chairman, owes $20 million in penalties

Tesla is outgrowing Elon Musk

Root is a terrific—and fully asymmetric—woodland wargame

FBI: We can’t listen to Facebook Messenger voice calls. Judge: Tough luck

This arcade is really vintage: Visiting San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique

Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly Office apps for Windows

Cloudflare gets into registrar business with wholesale domains and free privacy

Nintendo reveals it invented “Bowsette” before the Internet did

This month's major Nintendo Direct video presentation included a reveal of another New Super Mario Bros. game—a Switch port of its last Wii U installment—with one curious twist. It includes a few new playable characters, and one of those, Toadette, can don a crown power-up and turn into a Toadette-Peach hybrid dubbed Peachette.

Fans didn't take long to imagine what might happen if other Mario series characters put that same crown on and transformed into Princess Peach hybrids, particularly Bowser. Thus, Bowsette was born in a wild flurry of detailed fan art (and we thank NintendoLife for this SFW gallery of examples). But as Nintendo itself revealed on Friday, fans' creation wasn't all that original... as Nintendo had already toyed with the idea itself.

A new official book from Nintendo, titled The Art of Super Mario Odyssey, premiered in Japan this week and offers a deep dive into concept art for the colorful 2017 game. On Friday, one of the book's buyers noticed a comic-styled storyboard within the book and posted the discovery on Twitter, as shown above. This hints at an idea that didn't make it into the final game: that Odyssey's primary gimmick, which allows Mario to become other creatures by hitting them with his "Cappy" hat, would also be used by Bowser.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

https://arstechnica.com

Hidden fees that raise price of broadband would be banned by proposed law

Forza Horizon 4 is the best open-world driving game you can buy

Microsoft

After six years spanning three previous installments across two consoles, it's fair to say the Forza Horizon franchise is well established. This concept should sound familiar by now: an open-world driving game you can play solo or online, with a traveling music festival in the background. It's the work of Playground Games, built on the bones of the Forza game engine developed by Turn 10 for the even longer-running Forza Motorsport series. So far, the Horizon festival has visited Colorado, the Mediterranean, and Australia. And in Forza Horizon 4, it's Britain's turn.

If the developers at Playground were lazy, they could have just dusted off the last game and built a new map for it, replacing Down Under with the land soon to be known as Brexitopia. But the past two years have involved more than just building a new map. There's new online functionality with up to 72 players in a session. In addition to dynamic weather and days that turn into nights, now there are seasonal transitions, each of which brings new challenges for you to complete. There is a complete and welcome absence of loot boxes or microtransactions—something that will no doubt come as welcome news. And we even get a guest appearance from at least one other blockbuster game franchise.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

https://arstechnica.com

Life Is Strange 2, episode 1 review: New setting, same heart

50 million Facebook accounts breached by access-token-harvesting attack

International Energy Agency predicts wind will dominate Europe’s grid by 2027

Microsoft killing off the old Skype client… for real this time

Boeing/Saab joint T-X design wins Air Force’s jet trainer competition

Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post : Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 202...