Month: June 2021

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  Rainbow Six Siege meets Left 4 Dead in this new three-player co-op gun game, coming September 16 to PC and most consoles.

On Saturday, Ubisoft joined the E3-timed announcement fray with its latest Ubisoft Forward video presentation, complete with a mix of familiar and brand-new game announcements.

The showcase kicked off with Rainbow Six: Extraction, a three-player co-op battling game that drops an alien invasion on top of Tom Clancy's tactical-combat universe. (Did I miss that particular subgenre of Clancy books? No matter.) The game will launch on PC and most consoles on September 16.

A meaty gameplay preview video showed a three-player squad moving through one of the game's combat levels, which will combine bespoke architecture with random alien placements—and Ubisoft's reps hinted to the aliens being able to create walls, gates, and restrictions to randomly redefine your descent into each level's belly.  The resulting gameplay resembles Left 4 Dead, with a mix of weak and superpowered aliens (dubbed "Archies") potentially splitting squads up as they battle and survive.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by the return of Microsoft's annual "Deals Unlocked" sale, which brings discounts on a number of Xbox and PC games at both the Microsoft Store and a handful of outside retailers. The promotion kicked off earlier this week, ahead of Microsoft's E3 2021 conference on June 13, and runs through June 17.

Much like we did with Sony's PlayStation summer sale last month, we've combed through all 554 offers advertised in Xbox's sale to find the most attention-grabbing, actual deals of the bunch. You can find the full list of them below. In general, most of the discounts here aren't the absolute lowest we've tracked, but there are still plenty of worthwhile games priced lower than we typically see throughout the year.

Among the highlights are Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Gears 5 both marked down to $10; the excellent 2D platformers Ori and the Will of the Wisps and Ori and the Blind Forest bundled together for $17; the first notable discount we've seen on the Xbox version of MLB The Show 21; the Ultimate Edition of our 2019 game of the year Control available for $16; and various older yet worthwhile titles priced below $10, including Titanfall 2, The Witcher 3, Sleeping Dogs, Hellblade, and more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these games are also available as part of an Xbox Game Pass subscription; as part of the sale, Microsoft is still pushing the aggressive "three months for $1" promotion for new subscribers that we highlighted last month.

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  New Maps interface. [credit: Apple ]

As Apple's annual WWDC conference wraps up, we have a whole week of developer sessions and press briefings to look back on, plus a bunch of bullet points on Apple's various feature pages to sort through.

The result? There are a bunch of interesting features coming to iPhones in iOS 15 that Apple didn't highlight during its public-facing keynote event on Monday.

We're not going to list them all, as there are far too many little changes in the upcoming software updates. If you want to review the complete list, Apple has published detailed feature pages on its site.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Humanity is struggling to contain two compounding crises: skyrocketing global temperatures and plummeting biodiversity. But people tend to tackle each problem on its own, for instance by deploying green energies and carbon-eating machines while roping off ecosystems to preserve them. But in a new report, 50 scientists from around the world argue that treating each crisis in isolation means missing out on two-fer solutions that resolve both. Humanity can't solve one without also solving the other.

The report is the product of a four-day virtual workshop attended by researchers of all stripes and is a collaboration between the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In light of the Paris Agreement, it’s meant to provide guidance on how campaigns that address biodiversity might also address climate change, and vice versa.

The plain-language report should prove to be hugely influential not only among governmental policymakers and conservation groups, but also among corporations, says Betsy Beymer-Farris, a sustainability scientist at the University of Kentucky, who wasn’t involved in the report but did peer review it. “It's hard for companies or even nation states to really distill academic literature,” Beymer-Farris says. The report both lays out the climate and biodiversity science and the social science of how to effect change with the help of the people who actually rely on the land for farming and grazing. “I definitely got excited when I reviewed the report,” Beymer-Farris adds. “I thought: OK, this is definitely different from what I've seen before because it's a conscious and serious engagement with a more equitable and just way forward.”