Month: September 2016

Enlarge / Assembling new islands from stone fragments is the way to move forward in Dragon Quest VII. (credit: Square Enix)

It’s hard to be a Dragon Quest fan in the English-speaking world. The series is phenomenally popular in Japan, but outside of its homeland its audience is definitely of the dedicated-but-small variety.

This means that getting DQ games localized is always a crapshoot. The series enjoyed a US revival in the mid-'00s when Dragon Quest VIII was released for the PlayStation 2, which was followed by a series of Nintendo DS remakes of IV, V, and VI (it was the first time either of the latter two had been released in English). That rush of games capped off in 2009 with the generally excellent Nintendo DS-exclusive Dragon Quest IX, but so far this decade English releases have been few and far between.

Case in point, Dragon Quest VII (officially subtitled Fragments of the Forgotten Past). It’s a 3DS remake of a 100-plus-hour PlayStation JRPG that was wildly popular in Japan but mostly overlooked in the US, due in part to the fact that it was a primitive-looking retro-style game that came out on the PlayStation just as the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 generation was really heating up. The Japanese 3DS remake came out in 2013, but the game’s gargantuan script and its small Western fanbase meant that we didn’t hear anything official about a localization until earlier this year.

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Warning: the bottom of this post includes graphic images. 

It's no surprise that Samsung is facing what appears to be its first lawsuit after its recall of the Galaxy Note 7. What is surprising is that the exploding phone in question is actually the (non-recalled) Galaxy S7 Edge—and that the harm to the plaintiff appears staggering.

On May 30, construction worker Daniel Ramirez was working at a site in Akron, Ohio, when he heard a strange noise coming from his pocket, which contained the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge he'd bought just two months earlier. "It was like a high-pitched whistling noise," Ramirez's attorney, Mike Morgan, said in an interview with Ars. "After that there was an explosion, like a loud bang."

A muffler and catalytic converter, ripe for stealing. (credit: noricum)

Thieves in some cities in the US have been stealing catalytic converters at an alarming rate. Why? Because the converters—which contain small amounts of valuable metals like platinum, palladium, or rhodium—command a good price as scrap metal, with some converters selling for as much as $640 on the black market (PDF).

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) released these statistics last week, showing that catalytic converter thefts are more common than one might think, with 25,394 such thefts in the US since 2008. Just last year there were 3,986 catalytic converter thefts, making it the second-highest year for such thefts. 2014 saw the most thefts, clocking in at 4,370. The NICB also notes that its numbers might be low, because the organization can only count the number of thefts that have involved the car owner’s insurance provider.

Catalytic converters are required on vehicles sold after 1975, as they mitigate the pollutants and other emissions that the car gives off when it’s running. Without a catalytic converter, your car won’t pass a smog test.

Enlarge / The iPhone 7, the iPhone 7 Plus, and the things these phones hath wrought. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Up until now, every one of Apple’s iPhone hardware updates has been additive. New iPhones do all the stuff that the old ones could do, plus some new stuff. Moving to bigger screens and swapping the 30-pin connector for the Lightning connector have caused a little pain for developers and users (respectively), but even those more disruptive updates were fundamentally giving you more of something than last year’s offering.

It made iPhone upgrades generally pretty easy to recommend. If your phone was two or three years old and wearing out, there’s a new phone waiting for you that will be better than what you have. Even small-screened phone die-hards eventually got the iPhone SE.

Broadly speaking, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus still give you more: more speed, better camera, better screens, faster LTE, more battery life, more water-resistant. Year-over-year, it’s a respectable update. And compared to an aging iPhone 6 or 5S it’s a big jump forward. There’s just one thing missing. You know what we’re talking about, right?