Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Nintendo fans hoping that the ultra-popular Call of Duty series would eventually come to the Switch got an unexpected boost last night. That's when Microsoft's Xbox chief Phil Spencer announced that the company had reached "a 10-year commitment to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo following the merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard King." The announcement comes alongside a similar announcement promising to keep Call of Duty on Steam for the same period of time.

If the "10-year commitment" part of those announcements sounds familiar, it's probably because it's the same length of time Microsoft has reportedly formally offered to keep the Call of Duty franchise on PlayStation consoles. That followed a September offer to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for three additional years, which Sony called inadequate in public statements. But Spencer has gone much further in his public statements, saying in October that Microsoft would continue to ship a PlayStation Call of Duty "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to."

Real ones remember.

The Nintendo announcement is significantly more surprising, though, considering that Call of Duty hasn't appeared on a Nintendo console since Call of Duty Ghosts hit the Wii U in 2013. That game came one year after Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 became a surprise launch title for the ill-fated console.

Enlarge / Stop, drop, and roll!

It’s not a stretch to say that the Diablo series is one of the most influential role-playing game franchises of all time. As one of the early action-focused loot games, it offered a deeply compelling and satisfying take on the classic concept of the dungeon crawl. Its many sequels advanced its foundations of rewarding character growth and addictive loot collection. The Diablo games are still well-loved today, but other titles have picked up the baton and taken the genre in new directions.

So with the upcoming Diablo IV, developer Blizzard is seeking to reinvent the classic action RPG, taking the series’ first steps into a dark open world filled to the brim with gruesome violence. While staying true to the game’s isometric action-RPG and dark fantasy roots, Diablo IV brings a more ambitious and freeform adventure, with many new ways to customize your hero as you adventure across the land.

I was able to play over 12 hours of Diablo IV’s opening act in an early beta preview of the game, which showcased its expansive open world and gave a sample of how much power a budding adventurer can attain. It’s already apparent that Diablo IV is less about providing a series of linear dungeon crawls and more about opening the player to a wider world filled with monsters to fight and loot to collect.

Enlarge / Diesel engines can be modified to burn a diesel-hydrogen mix. (credit: DjelicS)

A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has figured out a way to run a diesel engine on a mix of diesel and hydrogen, dramatically lowering its emissions.

Why do we even need a diesel-hydrogen hybrid engine when there are already many great electric vehicles available? EVs are definitely great for households, but they still don’t match heavy diesel engines’ performance in some contexts, such as mining, long-distance transportation, power generation, and agriculture.

At present, there are 26,000 trains in the US that run on diesel, and there are potentially millions of trucks, generators, and other industry-grade equipment that require diesel to deliver optimum performance. It might take decades for EV technology to replace diesel engines in such industries. While it’s easy for a normal person to sell an old car and buy a new EV, such changes come at a high cost to industries.