Month: September 2016

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Virtual reality aficionados that want to add hand-tracking to the Oculus Rift may have to pay a pretty penny for the privilege. That's based on a report from Engadget's Nick Summers, who stopped by his local GAME retail outlet and saw a banner advertisement selling Oculus Touch controllers for a recommended retail price of £189.99.

Using current exchange rates, that would correspond to a roughly $250 price for the controllers in the US. But the $599 Oculus Rift headset itself currently retails for £549 in the UK, following a seemingly Brexit-induced price hike in August. That international pricing ratio would suggest a price closer to $200 for the US version of the Touch controllers.

Enlarge / Elon Musk prepares to testify at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, March 5, 2014. (credit: Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Elon Musk will deliver this year’s most anticipated aerospace speech on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico. The talk, “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” marks a singular moment for the man who has upended the global launch industry during the last five years and will now finally peel away some of the layers of his grand vision to colonize Mars—and possibly other places in the Solar System.

It was mooted in some aerospace circles that Musk might change the focus of his much-advertised speech at the IAC meeting after the loss of a Falcon 9 rocket earlier this month (the second), the cause of which remains unknown to the public. And while Ars has learned that substantial changes have been made to Musk’s speech, its central theme will remain how to address the challenges of creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars. Indeed, SpaceX recently added a livestream of the talk to its site, complete with a photo of Mars. Clearly, Musk and his company are pressing ahead with their Mars ambitions even as the very difficult, real-world work of assessing an Earth-bound rocket failure continues.

After the speech it seems likely that details about Musk’s much-hyped architecture for Mars exploration—the big spacecraft known variously as the Mars Colonial Transporter or Interplanetary Transport System and rocket, the BFR—will capture the most attention. Everyone wants to see these vehicles, which undoubtedly will ooze magnificence. But at Ars we’ll be watching for something much more prosaic, namely, who pays for all this?

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There are many ways to interpret the beautiful game. Some teams prefer to keep the ball on the turf. Others prefer to launch it into the air. Defending deep in your own half is an option, as is pushing up the pitch towards the opposition. And do you play physically, or cerebrally? As long as you play by the rules, in football, there is no right or wrong approach.

PES 2017 continues this tradition. Barcelona, Manchester United, Juventus, and Paris-Saint Germain all play very differently in real life, and that's ably represented in PES. Football is a simple game made complex through myriad approaches it offers players, teams, and mangers. No other game comes as close to replicating those intricacies with a pair of analogue sticks as PES does.

Simply put, PES 2017 is the finest football game ever made.