Month: April 2023

Enlarge / The Super Tilt Bro. cartridge contains Wi-Fi hardware for online gaming using Nintendo's 1985 NES console. (credit: Sylvain Gadrat)

In the heyday of the NES, if you didn't have a human nearby to play games with, you were out of luck for multiplayer gaming. But thanks to a new NES cartridge inspired by Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo's 8-bit console, you'll be able to play a new homebrew game with anyone on the Internet.

On Wednesday, Super Tilt Bro. reached its Kickstarter funding goal within 48 hours of its launch. Its NES cartridge, developed by Paris-based independent developer Sylvain Gadrat and published by Broke Studio, will include a Wi-Fi chipset and antenna that lets it connect to the Internet for one-on-one online play.

As Gadrat tells the story on the Super Tilt Bro. website, the game's history began in 2016 when Gadrat rediscovered his old NES console in a storeroom and became fascinated with the 8-bit processor that powered it. His interest led to an ambitious project: porting Super Smash Bros. to the NES. Over time, the project evolved, and by 2018, Gadrat released the first version of Super Tilt Bro. as a homebrew game developed entirely in assembly language.

Enlarge / An exploded view of Magna's driver monitoring system built into a rearview mirror. (credit: Magna)

Distracted driving continues to be a problem in the US. One solution to the problem might look something like a new rearview mirror made by the automotive supplier Magna. At first glance, it looks like any other auto-dimming rearview mirror, but it cleverly incorporates a driver-monitoring system, or DMS. It solves a common problem with dash-mounted DMSes, and it's self-contained, so it's mounted in the same way a regular rearview mirror attaches to a car.

Magna gave Ars a demo of the DMS on Wednesday as the company was visiting Washington, DC, for National Distracted Driving Month. That's an awareness thing, not a call to engage in more of it, although newly released crash statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show a national trend headed in the wrong direction. More than 3,500 people were killed by distracted driving in 2021, a 12 percent increase over the year before.

Distracted driving encompasses many things—eating, shaving, and applying makeup all count. But technology shoulders a large share of the blame. Between smartphones and infotainment systems, drivers are overloaded with information, and the consequences can be as gory as a Max Headroom episode.

Enlarge / If the Xbox 360 could handle Call of Duty 2, then the Switch could handle a scaled-down modern CoD port, right? (credit: Activision)

Since their surprise December announcement of a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles, Microsoft and Activision have expressed confidence that the Switch hardware can handle their popular shooter series. But that confidence didn't convince the UK government, which says that it has "seen no evidence to suggest that [Nintendo] consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD that is similar to those in Xbox and PlayStation in terms of quality of gameplay and content."

That blunt assessment is just a minor part of the Competition and Markets Authority's sprawling, 418-page final report on Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase. That report blocked the proposed merger over concerns surrounding the cloud gaming market, but when it comes to judging Microsoft's console competition, the government body clearly considers the Switch in a class by itself.

"Overall, the evidence shows that the product characteristics of Nintendo Switch are significantly different from those of Xbox and PlayStation, including its technical specifications, capability to host graphically intensive games and prices," the CMA writes. "Xbox and PlayStation are more similar in this respect."