Month: October 2021

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Amazon)

Amazon has won a record amount of tax breaks this year as local officials try to lure the online shopping giant to expand its one-day or same-day delivery networks in their areas.

According to data from Good Jobs First, an economic development watchdog based in Washington, DC, Amazon has so far secured about $650 million in sweeteners from local and state governments in 2021, a mixture of grants, tax exemptions, and other incentives. This was likely to be a conservative estimate, the group said, because of the secrecy around some of the deals.

With three months still to go, 2021 already has the largest yearly tally since Good Jobs First began collecting the data in 2000, excluding incentives for non-logistics projects, such as filmmaking and office development, and the more than $750 million package Amazon was awarded in 2019 to build its “second” headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

It may be common for your kids, partner, and coworkers to tune you out, but shouldn’t your virtual assistant be different? Amazon Alexa will now practice a bit more patience with users, thanks to a Tuesday update that makes the service wait longer for a person to finish speaking commands before it stops listening.

As reported by Forbes, the feature is optional. It could certainly come in handy for those who speak slowly or just need more time to process their thoughts. But it’s really intended as an accessibility feature that makes it easier for people with speech impairments to use Amazon’s virtual assistant. Amazon added the new behavior after some customers told the company that “they just need a bit more time before Alexa responds to their requests,” Shehzad Mevawalla, head of Alexa Speech Recognition at Amazon, told Forbes.

Giving people more time to speak with Alexa could make the product more appealing to millions. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders reports that more than 3 million Americans stutter, and almost 7% of Americans have a language impairment of some sort, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

• 

  Nintendo Switch OLED, on sale later this week for $349. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

For all the portable game systems Nintendo has launched, including mid-generation revisions, few have included cutting-edge upgrades to a key element: the screen.

Historically, Nintendo has been in the back of the pack when compared to competitors' screens. The Game Boy's panels suffered heavy ghosting and lacked backlighting, for instance; they were handily surpassed in their time by the likes of the Game Gear and the Lynx. Only now, with no other dedicated handheld console to beat (for at least two months, anyway), has Nintendo offered a screen that made me say "wow."

This screen comes on the Nintendo Switch OLED, a model going on sale later this week. Rumors previously suggested that the Switch OLED would run existing games better, in one way or another, but that didn't pan out (or at least not yet). Instead, this week's new Switch OLED runs existing games on the same Nvidia Tegra X1 chipset. It copies the original portable/docked hybrid concept so well that you can use the new Switch with existing Joy-Cons, TV docks, and carrying cases.

• 

  The new EMMI droid can kill longtime space bounty hunter Samus Aran in one blow. Your job in Metroid Dread is to make sure that doesn't happen. [credit: Nintendo ]

Thanks to one of Nintendo's slowest game-release eras in its modern history, this week's Metroid Dread stands out as arguably the company's biggest new first-party game of 2021.

Most of the Japanese game maker's usual suspects arrived this year as ports or undercooked affairs (sorry, New Pokemon Snap, but you know it's true). This left fans yearning for galactic bounty hunter Samus Aran to redeem Nintendo's weird game-launch calendar. The best thing I can say about Metroid Dread is that it absolutely stands up to that kind of pressure. This is the 2D sequel anyone who's played old-school Metroid could have hoped for.

That doesn't make it a 10/10 game, either for hardened Metroid fans or anyone new to the series. Both sides of that divide will have to make their peace with certain weirdness and concessions. But after decades of so many game makers putting their own stamps on the well-trodden "seek adventure" concept, it's good to see the series that started it all show up with fresh ideas and improvements that'll have you giddily back-and-forthing through a substantial and satisfying 2D world.

Meet me at the ZDR

If you are oblivious to all things Metroid, the newest entry to the series (technically Metroid 5) wastes no time strapping you into a Varia Suit full of obtuse lore. As the announced conclusion to the series's traditional timeline (not the same as the Metroid Prime series, which will continue), Dread opens by recapping years of Samus' adventures against a variety of Very Evil Aliens. Long after their 1986 debut on Famicom, the series's titular monsters have seemingly been wiped from the galaxy, as were an even nastier alien species called X that metroids were originally created to kill. Dread opens with a tip: somehow, a single X survived and was seen on a faraway system known as ZDR. (Try saying that sentence out loud on a first date and see where it gets you.)