Month: October 2020

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  Man, now I want a real-life hover-clown-car RC toy. [credit: Nintendo ]

The toy industry has given us plenty of radio-controlled cars that are modeled after the Mario Kart franchise. But the $100 Mario Kart Life: Home Circuit, announced last month, promises to be the first to integrate such a toy car with an augmented reality camera and attendant Switch game experience.

While we haven't gotten any hands-on time with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit yet, we were able to participate in a recent livestream demo of the RC car/AR app combo ahead of its planned October 16 release. What we saw doesn't quite match up to a full-fledged Mario Kart game, but it looks like it could add a lot of creativity and imaginative play opportunities to the standard RC car experience.

On your mark...

The demo walked us through the Mario Kart Live setup process, which starts off by using the camera on the Kart to scan a QR code found on the free downloadable Switch app (that app won't work at all without the Kart). With that scan, the Kart and Switch are connected directly via Wi-Fi, without the need for any router or live Internet connection.

Enlarge / The company pitches the Air Force as part of its Global Space Transport and Delivery Challenge. (credit: Astra)

This week, the US Air Force convened an event during which American companies were invited to pitch ideas for how they could help the military further its ambitions in space. In turn, the Air Force offered entrepreneurs the potential to connect with government buyers.

More than 800 teams submitted solutions to four different challenges under the AFWERX program, which seeks to foster innovative ideas. These teams include everyone from prime government contractors (such as Lockheed Martin and SpaceX) all the way down to less mainstream groups offering UFO-propulsion-type ideas. Eventually, about 175 teams were invited to present at the EngageSpace event on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

One of those teams was Astra, the California-based launch company seeking to build an ultralow-cost rocket capable of delivering about 25kg to Sun-synchronous orbit. As part of the event, most of the teams did a 10-minute private pitch to a handful of Air Force and Space Force personnel about their solution to a particular problem.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Businesses, governments, and organizations that are hit by crippling ransomware attacks now have a new worry to contend with—big fines from the US Department of Treasury in the event that they pay to recover their data.

Treasury Department officials made that guidance official in an advisory published on Thursday. It warns that payments made to specific entities or to any entity in certain countries—specifically, those with a designated “sanctions nexus”—could subject the payer to financial penalties levied by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC.

The prohibition applies not only to the group that is infected but also to any companies or contractors the hacked group’s security or insurance engages with, including those who provide insurance, digital forensics, and incident response, as well as all financial services that help facilitate or process ransom payments.

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  The Surface Pro X with optional Slim Pen and keyboard. [credit: Microsoft ]

Windows laptops and convertibles running ARM aren't exactly the bulk of the market at this point, but there are several of them there—including Microsoft's own updated Surface Pro X, which was just announced today.

One of the reasons that not every consumer has made the plunge is that running traditional x86 apps on these Windows 10 ARM machines poses significant limitations. Among the biggest: there's no support at all for running 64-bit x86 applications in emulation, only 32-bit.

Today, Microsoft announced in a long-winded blog post that that limitation will soon change, as emulation of 64-bit Windows applications is going into a public-testing phase soon. That addresses one of the biggest complaints about the platform—complaints that have only grown as more popular applications have converted to 64-bit-only as the months have gone by.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Nintendo)

Back in 2018, at the dawn of the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds phenomenon, designer Brendan Greene told Ars Technica that he thought every genre—not just shooters—could potentially benefit from sampling the last-man-standing concept of the battle royale genre. Since then, games like Tetris 99 and Fall Guys have proven how flexible and robust that idea can be across the industry.

Super Mario Bros. 35 (available for free today through March 2021 as part of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription) should be a welcome addition to that collection, mixing the time-tested gameplay of the Mario series with the endless competition of the battle royale genre. Unfortunately, some odd design decisions have made my first day with the game a repetitive, overly simplistic mess, and it doesn't feel like the game will have much staying power.

All hail the Fire Flower

Here are the basics: Super Mario Bros. 35 looks a lot more like Tetris 99 than it does PUBG or Fortnite. (No, 99 Marios aren't dropping from a Koopa airship to find a single Princess Peach.) You and 34 online competitors get your own self-contained instance of levels from the original Super Mario Bros., and everyone plays the classic game simultaneously in isolation, as opposed to 35 Marios jumping around the same playfield. (You can see everyone else's progress in tiny preview windows around the screen, and you'll recognize when they're underground or in a dungeon while you're elsewhere).