Enlarge/Assassin’s Creed Mirage returned to the earlier games’ focus on stealth assassinations in a historical urban environment.
Ubisoft
Apple has spent the last year trying to convince gamers that they can get a console-like, triple-A experience on the latest iPhones. The newest test of that promise will be Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which now has a release date and pricing information.
Mirage will land on compatible iPhones—the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max—on June 6, according to Ubisoft (though the App Store listing says June 10.) That coincides pretty closely with Apple’s annual developer conference, so we’d expect it to get a shoutout there. Ubisoft’s blog post also says it will come to the iPad Air and iPad Pro models with an M1 chip or later.
The game will be a free download with a 90-minute free trial. After that, you’ll have to pay $50 to keep playing, which is pretty close to what the game costs on PC and consoles. It will support cross-progression, provided you sign into Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft Connect is not exactly beloved by players, but it’s nice to be able to take your saves back and forth between other platforms if you can stomach it.
That cross-progression feature is key because the game launched several months ago on other platforms, so players interested in it probably already have made some progress in the story, if they haven’t finished it already.
Mirage is well over a dozen mainline games into the franchise, but it’s a smaller, more focused game than 2018’s Odyssey or 2020’s Valhalla. While those games expanded the franchise away from its stealth roots to become more of a full-fledged The Witcher 3-like open-world RPG experience, Mirage goes back to the old style of gameplay. It originally started as DLC for Valhalla but was expanded into a full game.
It won’t be the first triple-A game to hit the iPhone 15 and later, though the list has been short so far. A couple of Resident Evil games have made their way to phones (Resident Evil 4‘s remake and Resident Evil Village), and Apple has also managed to get respectable ports of No Man’s Sky, Death Stranding, and Baldur’s Gate 3 to Apple Silicon Macs.
When we tested the Resident Evil titles on the iPhone 15, we found that the graphics and performance were quite respectable—perhaps comparable to what you’d get on a PlayStation 4 Pro, a mid-range gaming laptop, or a Steam Deck—but that the touch controls never seem to cut it, so you’ll want to use a controller. iOS supports the latest PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo controllers, as well as attachable controllers like the Razer Kishi. Mirage will also support those controllers.
Enlarge/ More players have been emerging from this vault lately than have in years.
Samuel Axon
War never changes, but Fallout 76 sure has. The online game that launched to a negative reception with no NPCs but plenty of bugs has mutated in new directions since its 2018 debut. Now it’s finding new life thanks to the wildly popular Fallout TV series that debuted a couple of weeks ago.
In truth, it never died, though it has stayed in decidedly niche territory for the past six years. Developer Bethesda Game Studios has released regular updates fixing (many of) the bugs, adding new ways to play, softening the game’s rough edges, and yes, introducing Fallout 3- or Fallout 4-like, character-driven quest lines with fully voiced NPCs—something many players felt was missing in the early days.
It’s still not for everybody, but for a select few of us who’ve stuck with it, there’s nothing else quite like it.
Like many older online games, it eventually settled into a situation where most of the players were high-level veterans on the PC and PlayStation platforms. (Microsoft’s Game Pass kept a steady trickle of new players coming in on the Xbox.) That’s all changed now, though; thanks to the TV series, the low-level newbies now outnumber the vets. There’s a wide range of players on every server, and the community’s reputation for being unusually welcoming has held strong amid the influx.
If you’re looking to give it a shot, here’s what you need to know.
A weirdly welcoming wasteland
I generally find the communities in most online games off-putting and toxic. I enjoy the gameplay in Overwatch, for example, but a whole buffet of bad actors makes it a poor experience for me a lot of the time.
That’s not the case with Fallout 76. It’s a phenomenon I also observed with No Man’s Sky’s online community: Games that had disastrous launches that drove away the enthusiastic core gamer crowd early on end up having the best communities.
With Fallout 76, the first few weeks were a storm of negativity like no other. But once the folks who were unimpressed calmed down and moved on, the smaller cadre of people who actually liked the game formed a strong bond. The community was small enough that bad behavior could have social consequences, and it turned out that the kinds of people who stick with a game like Fallout 76 tend to be patient and gracious. Who knew?
Enlarge/ These donation boxes give experienced players a chance to give back.
Samuel Axon
For example, there has long been a tradition of experienced players dropping valuable healing items and ammunition by the game’s starting area for newbies to grab. Fallout 76 has strong survival elements, especially at the start, so those gifts make a big difference. This gifting became so common that Bethesda formalized it with a donation box in that starter area. In fact, there are donation boxes scattered all around the game’s map now, and they almost always have stuff in them.
Players will generally be happy to jump on voice chat and talk through the game’s concepts with you or help you defeat difficult enemies. That extends to some communities that talk about the game outside the game, too. (Be sure to look up the subreddit r/fo76FilthyCasuals and its associated Discord; they’re great places to make friends and get advice.)
Time will tell how all that holds as a huge influx of new players shifts the makeup of the community, but so far so good.
The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons “difficult.” Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system’s magnetic connection points. Current Switch Pro Controllers, which do not physically attach to the Switch, should be fully compatible with the Switch 2, according to the report.
Vandal cites several unnamed accessory and peripheral makers who reportedly got to touch the new console inside of an opaque box, which was used to balance design secrecy with the need to provide general knowledge of the unit’s dimensions. According to those sources, the Switch 2 will be “larger than the Switch, although without reaching the size of the Steam Deck.”
Microsoft has made a point of highlighting that the Xbox Series S/X works with all standard Xbox One controllers (not you, Kinect). PS4 owners, meanwhile, had to purchase new DualSense controllers to use on the PS5.
Regarding software, Nintendo has offered only vague answers on whether the upcoming Switch 2 will be compatible with the thousands of games designed for the current Switch generation. However, some reports suggest that developers are already testing this kind of backward compatibility on Nintendo’s upcoming hardware.
Enlarge/ Scale is important, especially when talking about relative console sales.
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it made 31 percent less off Xbox hardware in the first quarter of 2024 (ending in March) than it had the year before, a decrease it says was “driven by lower volume of consoles sold.” And that’s not because the console sold particularly well a year ago, either; Xbox hardware revenue for the first calendar quarter of 2023 was already down 30 percent from the previous year.
Those two data points speak to a console that is struggling to substantially increase its player base during a period that should, historically, be its strongest sales period. But getting wider context on those numbers is a bit difficult because of how Microsoft reports its Xbox sales numbers (i.e., only in terms of quarterly changes in total console hardware revenue). Comparing those annual shifts to the unit sales numbers that Nintendo and Sony report every quarter is not exactly simple.
Context clues
Enlarge/ Significant declines in Xbox hardware revenue for four of the last five quarters stand out relative to competitors’ unit sales.
Kyle Orland
To attempt some direct contextual comparison, we took unit sales numbers for some recent successful Sony and Nintendo consoles and converted them to Microsoft-style year-over-year percentage changes (aligned with the launch date for each console). For this analysis, we skipped over each console’s launch quarter, which contains less than three months of total sales (and often includes a lot of pent-up early adopter demand). We also skipped the first four quarters of a console’s life cycle, which don’t have a year-over-year comparison point from 12 months prior.
This still isn’t a perfect comparison. Unit sales don’t map directly to total hardware revenue due to things like inflation, remainder sales of Xbox One hardware, and price cuts/discounts (though the Xbox Series S/X, PS5, and Switch still have yet to see official price drops). It also doesn’t take into account the baseline sales levels from each console’s first year of sales, making total lifetime sales performance on the Xbox side hard to gauge (though recent data from a Take-Two investment call suggests the Xbox Series S/X has been heavily outsold by the PS5, at this point).
Even with all those caveats, the comparative data trends are pretty clear. At the start of their fourth full year on the market, recent successful consoles have been enjoying a general upswing in their year-over-year sales. Microsoft stands out as a major outlier, making less revenue from Xbox hardware in four of the last five quarters on a year-over-year basis.
Those numbers suggest that the hardware sales rate for the Xbox Series S/X may have already peaked in the last year or two. That would be historically early for a console of this type; previous Ars analyses have shown PlayStation consoles generally see their sales peaks in their fourth or fifth year of life, and Nintendo portables have shown a similar sales trend, historically. The Xbox Series S/X progression, on the other hand, looks more similar to that of the Wii U, which was already deep in a “death spiral” at a similar point in its commercial life.
This is not the end
In the past, console sales trends like these would have been the sign of a hardware maker’s wider struggles to stay afloat in the gaming business. However, in today’s gaming market, Microsoft is in a place where console sales are not strictly required for overall success.
For instance, Microsoft’s total gaming revenue for the latest reported quarter was up 51 percent, thanks in large part to the “net impact from the Activision Blizzard acquisition.” Even before that (very expensive) merger was completed, Microsoft’s total gaming revenue was often partially buoyed by “growth in Game Pass” and strong “software content” sales across PC and other platforms.
Enlarge/ Owning Call of Duty means being one of the biggest PS5 game publishers almost by definition.
So, while the commercial future of Xbox hardware may look a bit uncertain, the future of Microsoft’s overall gaming business is in much less dire straits. That would be true even if Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell by 100 percent.
Enlarge/ The Q*Bert’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Gottlieb
For years now, video game preservationists, librarians, and historians have been arguing for a DMCA exemption that would allow them to legally share emulated versions of their physical game collections with researchers remotely over the Internet. But those preservationists continue to face pushback from industry trade groups, which worry that an exemption would open a legal loophole for “online arcades” that could give members of the public free, legal, and widespread access to copyrighted classic games.
This long-running argument was joined once again earlier this month during livestreamed testimony in front of the Copyright Office, which is considering new DMCA rules as part of its regular triennial process. During that testimony, representatives of the Software Preservation Network and the Library Copyright Alliance defended their proposal for a system of “individualized human review” to help ensure that temporary remote game access would be granted “primarily for the purposes of private study, scholarship, teaching, or research.”
Enlarge/ Lawyer Steve Englund, who represented the ESA at the Copyright Office hearing.
Speaking for the Entertainment Software Association trade group, though, lawyer Steve Englund said the new proposal was “not very much movement” on the part of the proponents and was “at best incomplete.” And when pressed on what would represent “complete” enough protections to satisfy the ESA, Englund balked.
“I don’t think there is at the moment any combination of limitations that ESA members would support to provide remote access,” Englund said. “The preservation organizations want a great deal of discretion to handle very valuable intellectual property. They have yet to… show a willingness on their part in a way that might be comforting to the owners of that IP.”
Getting in the way of research
Research institutions can currently offer remote access to digital copies of works like books, movies, and music due to specific DMCA exemptions issued by the Copyright Office. However, there is no similar exemption that allows for sending temporary digital copies of video games to interested researchers. That means museums like the Strong Museum of Play can only provide access to their extensive game archives if a researcher physically makes the trip to their premises in Rochester, New York.
Enlarge/ Currently, the only way for researchers to access these games in the Strong Museum’s collection is to visit Rochester, New York, in person.
During the recent Copyright Office hearing, industry lawyer Robert Rothstein tried to argue that this amounts to more of a “travel problem” than a legal problem that requires new rule-making. But NYU professor Laine Nooney argued back that the need for travel represents “a significant financial and logistical impediment to doing research.”
For Nooney, getting from New York City to the Strong Museum in Rochester would require a five- to six-hour drive “on a good day,” they said, as well as overnight accommodations for any research that’s going to take more than a small part of one day. Because of this, Nooney has only been able to access the Strong collection twice in her career. For researchers who live farther afield—or for grad students and researchers who might not have as much funding—even a single research visit to the Strong might be out of reach.
“You don’t go there just to play a game for a couple of hours,” Nooney said. “Frankly my colleagues in literary studies or film history have pretty routine and regular access to digitized versions of the things they study… These impediments are real and significant and they do impede research in ways that are not equitable compared to our colleagues in other disciplines.”
During the hearing, lawyer Kendra Albert said the preservationists had proposed the idea of human review of requests for remote access to “strike a compromise” between “concerns of the ESA and the need for flexibility that we’ve emphasized on behalf of preservation institutions.” They compared the proposed system to the one already used to grant access for libraries’ “special collections,” which are not made widely available to all members of the public.
But while preservation institutions may want to provide limited scholarly access, Englund argued that “out in the real world, people want to preserve access in order to play games for fun.” He pointed to public comments made to the Copyright Office from “individual commenters [who] are very interested in playing games recreationally” as evidence that some will want to exploit this kind of system.
Even if an “Ivy League” library would be responsible with a proposed DMCA exemption, Englund worried that less scrupulous organizations might simply provide an online “checkbox” for members of the public who could easily lie about their interest in “scholarly play.” If a human reviewed that checkbox affirmation, it could provide a legal loophole to widespread access to an unlimited online arcade, Englund argued.
Phil Salvador of the Video Game History Foundation said that Englund’s concern about this score was overblown. “Building a video game collection is a specialized skill that most libraries do not have the human labor to do, or the expertise, or the resources, or even the interest,” he said.
Salvador estimated that the number of institutions capable of building a physical collection of historical games is in the “single digits.” And that’s before you account for the significant resources needed to provide remote access to those collections; Rhizome Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied said it costs their organization “thousands of dollars a month” to run the sophisticated cloud-based emulation infrastructure needed for a few hundred users to access their Emulation as a Serviceart archives and gaming retrospectives.
Salvador also made reference to last year’s VGHF study that found a whopping 87 percent of games ever released are out of print, making it difficult for researchers to get access to huge swathes of video game history without institutional help. And the games of most interest to researchers are less likely to have had modern re-releases since they tend to be the “more primitive” early games with “less popular appeal,” Salvador said.
The Copyright Office is expected to rule on the preservation community’s proposed exemption later this year. But for the moment, there is some frustration that the industry has not been at all receptive to the significant compromises the preservation community feels it has made on these potential concerns.
“None of that is ever going to be sufficient to reassure these rights holders that it will not cause harm,” Albert said at the hearing. “If we’re talking about practical realities, I really want to emphasize the fact that proponents have continually proposed compromises that allow preservation institutions to provide the kind of access that is necessary for researchers. It’s not clear to me that it will ever be enough.”
“Early Access” was once a novel, quirky thing, giving a select set of Steam PC games a way to involve enthusiastic fans in pre-alpha-level play-testing and feedback. Now loads of games launch in various forms of Early Access, in a wide variety of readiness. It’s been a boon for games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which came a long way across years of Early Access.
Early Access, and the “Advanced Access” provided for complete games by major publishers for “Deluxe Editions” and the like, has also been a boon to freeloaders. Craven types could play a game for hours and hours, then demand a refund within the standard two hours of play, 14 days after the purchase window of the game’s “official” release. Steam-maker Valve has noticed and, as of Tuesday night, updated its refund policy.
“Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period,” reads the update. In other words: Playtime is playtime now, so if you’ve played more than two hours of a game in any state, you don’t get a refund. That closes at least one way that people could, with time-crunched effort, play and enjoy games for free in either Early or Advanced access.
Not that it’s a complete win for either developers or cautious buyers. Steam refunds are a tricky matter for developers, especially those smaller in size. The two-hour playtime window can give people a decent idea of how a game runs, what it’s like, and whether it’s clicking with a certain player. But some games enter Early Access in very rough shape or have features that later get dropped. Some games pack their most appealing elements into the early game. And some indie games are intended to provide an experience that’s much closer to two hours than 40 or 80, still giving players a faceless way to grab back some cash.
Steam’s approach to refunds remains an imperfect science, full of quirky stories and examples of why it exists. But it has moved toward a more unified and at least understandable policy now.
Enlarge/ The nukes went off in 2077 in Fallout’s universe. The show tells us more about this event than we’ve learned from the games before.
Amazon
It’s been just over a week since the Fallout TV series premiered on Amazon Prime, and one thing’s for sure: It’s a huge hit. You can hardly open a social media app without seeing content about it, the reviews are positive, and the active players for the Fallout games have doubled over the past week.
A few days ago, I shared some spoiler-free impressions of the first three episodes. I loved what I’d seen up to that point—the show seemed faithful to the games, but it was also a great TV show. A specific cocktail of tongue-in-cheek humor, sci-fi campiness, strong themes, great characters, and visceral violence really came together into a fantastic show.
Still, I had some questions at that point: Would the franchise’s penchant for satire and its distinct political and social viewpoint come through? Where was all this headed?
Like a lot of us, I’ve now finished the series. So if you have, too (or if you haven’t but just don’t care about spoilers), it’s time to dive into all eight episodes of season one together.
I’m a long-time Fallout fan, so I’ll focus on how the show ties in with the games, but like the show itself, I aim to make this interesting even for the newbies.
Heavy spoilers for Fallout season one start here, as well as a few spoilers about Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4.
Something for everybody
So was the show as good after eight episodes as it was after three? Absolutely. If anything, the show only got better as it progressed. The more inducted into the world, lore, and characters new viewers became, the more effective the show could be.
There was a lot to set up, after all. Some of us have been playing the games for years, so we knew all about Vault-Tec, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Enclave, the New California Republic, Pip-Boys, gulpers, and ghouls. But if you’re coming into the world fresh, that’s a lot to take on.
I was worried while watching that despite the show’s efforts to introduce new viewers, it might not be good enough, but I’ve been told by multiple people who haven’t played the games that they didn’t have trouble keeping up.
Once the various elements were established, the show was able to hit its stride and start bringing in the aspects of Fallout that weren’t prominent in the opening stretch.
Further, it expertly walked the line to give established fans something to chew on at the same time. The timeline of Fallout lore and stories spans hundreds of years, but the TV show is actually set after all of the games.
Event
Year
Bombs Drop
2077
Fallout 76 (2018)
2102
Fallout (1997)
2161
Fallout 2 (1998)
2241
Fallout 3 (2008)
2277
Fallout New Vegas (2010)
2281
Fallout 4 (2015)
2287
Fallout Season 1 (2024)
2296
That meant the show revealed some things about what happened to certain factions and places that previously appeared in the games. Most notably, Shady Sands is a crater, and the New California Republic—one of the most important factions and one of the strongest governments from the games—no longer exists as we knew it.
That led some fans to speculate that TV series executive producer and game creative director Todd Howard was trying to make the popular New Vegas game (which was not made by his team) non-canon, but in a recent interview, he clarified that both the show and New Vegas are very much canon, noting that the bomb fell on Shady Shands very shortly after the events of that game. The timeline on the show is cutting it close, but a generous interpretation allows it all to line up.
Of course, the show expanded on some elements from the games in ways that could be seen as breaching canon. You could write most of them away as things the games never addressed—like the vials ghouls must consume to avoid going feral or the origin story of gulpers. The games at times implied different things about both of those aspects, but they didn’t necessarily contradict them.
The series also canonized some specific choices that players could make in some prior games. For example, it’s confirmed that the Brotherhood of Steel airship seen in the show is the same one seen in Fallout 4, meaning that the canon outcome for Fallout 4 is obviously not one where that airship was destroyed. (Players of that game had the option of pursuing paths that led to its destruction or not.)
Shady Sands as it’s seen in the show.
Amazon
New Vegas is teased as the next destination.
Amazon
The last moments had a brief tease with what appears to be a Deathclaw skull, too.
Amazon
With minimal exceptions, previous games in the series avoided canonizing outcomes like that by being set decades or even centuries (as well as hundreds or even thousands of miles) apart—such that it wasn’t necessary to reveal what happened in those cases. Since this show is set in a region that is well-documented in prior Fallout titles, that’s not the case here.
The tease that we’re going to New Vegas next season probably means that several multiple-choice outcomes from that game will have to be canonized, too. Is Mr. House still running the show? What happened to Caesar’s Legion? Why does New Vegas look so bombed out compared to how it appeared in the game? We’ll probably find out.
All told, new fans got to explore the world of Fallout for the first time, even as longtime fans got to see where the story has gone since they last played the games. The story hadn’t been moved forward in nine years, since 2018’s Fallout 76 was actually a prequel that took place long before any of the other games in the series.
It took some skillful work to serve both of those audiences without compromising the experience of the other, so kudos to the show’s writers.
Enlarge/ Like the Beach Properties DLC itself, this property looks a bit unfinished and in need of some focus.
Paradox Interactive
Perhaps the first clue that something was not quite right about Beach Properties, the first $10 DLC “expansion” for the already off-kilter city-building sim Cities: Skylines 2, was that it did not contain a real beach house, which one might consider a key beach property. The oversight seemed indicative of a content pack that lacked for content.
C:S2‘s developers and publisher now agree and have published a letter to Cities fans, in which they offer apologies, updates, and refunds. Beach Properties is now a free add-on, individual buyers will be refunded (with details at a FAQ page), and Ultimate Edition owners will receive additional Creator Packs and Radio Stations, since partial refunds are tricky across different game stores.
“We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form. For all this, we are truly sorry,” reads the letter, signed by the CEOs of developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive. “When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable, and it pains us that we’ve now lost the trust of many of you. We want to do better.”
What will happen next, according to the letter, are changes in how the game is improved and how those improvements are communicated. To wit:
A “complete focus on improving the base game and modding tools”
Better community involvement in choosing priorities
Focusing on free patches and updates ahead of paid content
Relatedly pushing “Bridges and Ports” expansion to 2025
Shifting Creator Packs work to independent developers
An “advisory meeting” between a small group of player representatives with significant followings and developer and publisher heads
For those eager to see the game on consoles, despite all this signaling of how far the base PC game might have to go, the letter offers an update. An “upcoming build delivery in April” should show sufficient optimization progress to move ahead, with “a release build targeted for October.” Yet until they can see the real results, no firm release date can be made. The console team will operate separately from the PC team, however, so it should move ahead “without splitting our focus or time.”
Put together, the C:S2 team’s actions, and plan for the way forward, seem like reasonable ways to make sure their work meets with fans’ expectations. There’s a fair amount of positive feedback to the forum post, however self-selecting “Paradox Forum members” may be. I do wonder if there’s a danger of some owners and fans never considering the game to be “good enough” to not react negatively to paid add-ons showing up in the store. It’s a tricky thing, releasing a game that almost inherently demands a swath of future add-ons, packs, and expansions—the original Cities: Skylines had more than 60 add-ons.
In an interview with Ars, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said that “working on new content for the game” was the thing she most looked forward to, “after, of course, we have sorted outstanding issues.” There are seemingly many more months of sorting to go before the fun new stuff arrives.
One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the “Short Stack,” a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console’s internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.
“You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii,” writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub.
Like many space-saving console mods, the Short Stack requires a cut-down version of the original Wii’s PCB, retaining (and occasionally relocating) the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash chip. Power delivery, USB, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and GameCube controller ports were all relocated to separate custom PCBs, which also allowed Smith to add HDMI output and a microSD card slot (the original Wii used a full-size SD card and didn’t support digital video output).
The Short Stack cleverly hides its GameCube controller ports behind a sliding panel on the side.
A headphone jack-to-GameCube dongle preserves GameCube controller compatibility while saving space in the console itself.
The cut-down Wii PCB, featuring the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash.
The Short Stack next to a deck of cards.
Some sacrifices were made in the name of miniaturization. The console’s disc drive is gone, so any games will need to be loaded from a microSD card instead. And the four GameCube controller ports are actually headphone jacks that work over a special adapter. Smith made these headphone-to-GameCube dongles pin-compatible with an earlier mod called the GC Nano, a project that did for the GameCube what the Short Stack does for the Wii.
Smith also designed custom front and rear PCBs for the console to handle things like the power button and the glowing blue light around the Short Stack’s (aesthetic, non-functional) DVD slot. A custom heatsink (Smith uses aluminum, though it can also be made with copper to improve heat transfer at the expense of weight) and a tiny fan keep the console cool.
Nintendo released its own Wii Mini toward the end of the Wii’s life in 2012, but it came with significant compromises: no online connectivity, no GameCube controller ports or game compatibility, and no SD card slot. The Short Stack loses the optical drive for space-saving reasons but otherwise retains all of the features of the original Wii.
Smith says that the Short Stack could probably be as much as 20 to 30 percent smaller without giving up features. But one of the goals of the Short Stack project was to make a scale model of the original Wii, and further shrinkage would make the project “tricky to assemble.”
Enlarge/ For just $199, you could be having as much fun as this paid model.
Meta has announced it’s permanently lowering the price of its aging Quest 2 headset to $199 for a 128GB base model, representing the company’s lowest price yet for a full-featured untethered VR headset.
And the Quest 2 is far from the company’s state-of-the-art headset at this point. Meta launched the surprisingly expensive Quest Pro in late 2022 before dropping that headset’s price from $1,499 to $999 less than five months later. And last year’s launch of the Quest 3 at a $499 starting price brought some significant improvements in resolution, processing power, thickness, and full-color passthrough images over the Quest 2.
But for how long?
Those looking to get the Quest 2 at its new bargain MSRP should keep in mind that Meta may not be planning to support the aging headset for the long haul. Meta is currently winding down support for the original Quest headset, which launched in 2019 and no longer has access to important online features, security updates, and even new apps. The Quest 2 is just 18 months younger than the original Quest, and the new price might represent an effort to clear out defunct stock in favor of newer, more powerful Quest options.
Enlarge/ The Quest 2 (left) has a 40 percent thicker profile than the pancake-optics on the Quest 3 (right).
The Quest 2’s new price is the first time Meta has offered a headset below the “$250 and 250 grams” target former Meta CTO John Carmack once envisioned for a “super cheap, super lightweight headset” that could bring in the mass market (the Quest 2 weighs in at 503 grams). The new price is also stunningly cheap when you consider that, just six or seven years ago, VR-curious consumers could easily end up paying $1,500 or more (in 2024 dollars) for a high-end tethered headset and the “VR-ready” computer needed to power it.
If you’ve waited this long to see what virtual reality gaming is all about, this price drop is the perfect opportunity to indulge your curiosity for a relative pittance. Heck, it might be worth it even if your headset ends up, like mine, a Beat Saber machine most of the time.
In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Wonder producer Takashi Tezuka said it wasn’t that tough to get that kind of creative continuity at Nintendo. “The secret to having a long-tenured staff is that people don’t quit,” he said. “For folks who have been there together for such a long time, it’s easy for us to talk to each other.”
That said, Tezuka added that just getting a bunch of industry veterans together to make a game runs the risk of not “keeping up with the times. Really, for me, I have a great interest in how our newer staff members play, what they play, what they think, and what is appealing to them. I think it’s very interesting the things we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something.”
Young and old
For Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the development team solicited literally thousands of ideas for potential game-changing Wonder Effects and badges from across Nintendo. In doing so, the game was able to incorporate the viewpoints of people with a wide variety of histories and memories of the series, Tezuka told Ars.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder Producer Takashi Tezuka.
Nintendo
Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri.
Nintendo
“Among our staff, there are folks who actually maybe haven’t played some of the [older] game titles we’re talking about,” he said. “So I think there was some familiarization for those folks with some of those titles. And maybe there was some inspiration drawn from those titles that I’m not aware of.”
For a series as long-running as Mario, though, even some of the relatively “younger” development cohort can have a deep history with the series. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri, who joined Nintendo in 1997, recalled playing the original Super Mario Bros. back in elementary school, and being “so moved and awed by the secrets and mysteries I discovered in that game.” The Wonder Effects in Wonder were an explicit attempt to recapture that feeling of being young and discovering new things for the first time, which can be difficult in such an established series.
Mouri also drew some parallels between Yoshi’s Island—where Yoshi could sometimes turn into a vehicle—and Wonder transformation effects that could turn the player into slime or a spiky ball, for instance. “That’s not to say that we drew [direct] inspiration from [Yoshi’s Island] or anything, but I think… providing surprises has always been a theme throughout our philosophy,” he said.
Enlarge/ Photos of iGBA that appeared on the App Store before the app was taken down.
Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple’s rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.
Shortly after iGBA’s launch, some people on social media began noticing that the project appeared to be based on the code for GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high-schoolers (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App Store). Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a “knock-off” of GBA4iOS. “I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it’s now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking),” he wrote.
GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with licensing terms that let anyone “use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences.” But those expansive licensing terms only apply “unless you plan to submit your app to Apple’s App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required.”
Images from the original, circa 2014 version of GBA4iOS.
“To be clear, I’m not pissed at the developer [of iGBA],” Testut added on social media. “I’m pissed that Apple took the time to change the App Store rules to allow emulators and then approved a knock-off of my own app.”
Hurry up and wait
MacRumors reports that Apple cited two sections of its App Store guidelines in removing iGBA: one related to spam (Section 4.3) and one related to copyright (section 5.2). Right now, it’s a bit ambiguous whether the copyright violation refers to the copyright on the emulator source code itself or the emulator’s ability to easily play copyrighted games from Nintendo and others.
As we discussed earlier this month, the wording of Apple’s recent App Store guidelines update makes it unclear if developers can release general-purpose emulators with the ability to play ROMs they don’t control the rights to. Aside from iGBA, a Commodore 64 emulator named Emu64 XL and built off of the open source VICE project was recently launched on the iOS App Store.
Apple has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica. But Testut wrote early Monday morning that “to Apple’s credit, though, once they were aware of the issue, they did take it seriously. So I really don’t believe this was malicious at all — just an unfortunate situation for everyone involved.” Testut added that iGBA maker La Spina “reached out to me via email to personally apologize for the mess. So no hard feelings there.”
But Testut did have some hard feelings regarding Apple’s treatment of AltStore, an alternative marketplace for sideloading iOS apps that he’s trying to launch under the EU’s new regulations. That would provide Testut with a legitimate way to distribute Delta, a “sequel” to GBA4iOS that emulates many classic Nintendo consoles on Apple devices.
“My frustration stemmed entirely from the fact we’ve been ready to launch Delta since last month,” Tetstut wrote on social media. “This whole situation could’ve been avoided if Apple hadn’t delayed approving us until after changing their rules to allow emulators.”
