Month: February 2024

Enlarge / A scene from One Piece, one of the animes that Funimation has distributed. (credit: Zoro/YouTube)

Sony is making an effort to appease customers who will lose their entire Funimation digital libraries when the anime streaming service merges into Crunchyroll. Currently, though, the company's plan for giving disappointed customers "an appropriate value" for their erased digital copies isn't very accessible or clear.

Earlier this month, Sony-owned Funimation announced that customers' digital libraries would be unavailable starting on April 2. At that time, Funimation accounts will become Crunchyroll accounts. Sony acquired Crunchyroll in 2021, so some sort of merging of the services was expected. However, less expected was customers' lost access to online copies of beloved anime that they acquired through digital codes provided in purchased Funimation DVDs or Blu-rays. Funimation for years claimed that customers would be able to stream these copies “forever, but there are some restrictions.”

Rahul Purini, Crunchyroll's president, explained the decision while speaking to The Verge's latest Decoder podcast, noting that the feature was incorporated into the Funimation platform.

Enlarge / A battle between Ragnar Lothbrok and Oda Nobunaga was unlikely to occur, given the roughly 700 years between their existences. But Age of Empires is a limitless canvas. (credit: World's Edge)

Real-time strategy (RTS) games aren't getting many new titles or mainstream attention these days, but that need not be a problem. Age of Empires 2, one of the best games in the genre—and some would say of all time, period—continues to be playable on modern systems and is even getting new expansions.

Victors and Vanquished, an expansion for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, arrives March 14. It adds 19 scenarios to the base game, allowing you to play as, among others, Oda Nobunaga, Charlemagne, and Ragnar Lothbrok. The campaigns are inspired by the deep community around Age of Empires but spiffed up with voice acting, music, bug fixes, and "quality of life improvements." Some new mechanics show up in the scenarios, including population migration, political decisions, assassinations, and more. It's $13 on launch day, works with Xbox Game Pass on PC (where AoE2: DE is included), and it's on sale for preorder at about $11 until launch.

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  Oda Nobunaga's realm in Victors and Vanquished. [credit: World's Edge ]

Developer World's Edge Studios has offered up five expansions for AoE2:DE since its 2019 release, including the Return of Rome DLC in 2023 that shuttled in the civilizations from the original Age of Empires. A big chunk of their inspiration comes from the community. And a huge chunk of that big chunk is Filthydelphia, who had been turning out campaigns like "Kings of West Africa" and "Francis Drake on the Spanish Main" for years. Beyond the maps and army configurations, many of the campaigns contain narrative pieces. "City of Peace" involves a young woman murdered in Madinat al-Salaam, and you, the vizier, must find her murderer. Community scenarios like these make up 14 of the expansion's 19 scenarios.

Enlarge / NASA's LRO found Odysseus on the Moon. (credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)

Time is running out for the historic Odysseus lander that made a soft touchdown on the Moon last Thursday evening.

In an update posted on Monday morning, the company that built the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said, "[W]e believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning." This is because the lander, which is tipped over on its side, will only be able to collect solar energy for a limited period of time.

Originally, the company had hoped to operate its privately developed lunar lander on the surface for a week or longer. But now, that will no longer be possible due to the limited ability of Odysseus to gather solar energy and remain powered on. As the Sun dips closer to the horizon, and with the two-week-long lunar night coming, the spacecraft will, effectively, freeze to death.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of my face when I realized people are still creating new gaming fansites in 2024.

It has never been easier to share your thoughts online. Anyone with a smartphone is mere seconds away from spinning up a new account on any number of popular social media platforms and screaming their opinions into the void. Then your casual, tossed-off thoughts are served up to The Algorithm, which decides whether it's briefly pushed in front of the gathered masses or almost instantly forgotten to the ephemeral tide of the endless scroll.

So there's something intensely charming about Final Fantasy VIII is the Best (FF8itB), a new highly personal fanblog focused on the red-headed stepchild of Square's early 3D RPG output. After a single weekend, the site is already an incredibly entertaining mess that evokes the best parts of a largely defunct and much more personal era of the Internet.

Final Fantasy VIII? Really?

Over the years, Final Fantasy VIII has developed a pretty bad reputation among the community of hardcore Japanese-RPG fans. It's not hard to find detailed, borderline-irate takedowns of everything from the game's cheesy storyline to its overcomplicated junction system to a hidden enemy auto-leveling mechanic that makes it hard to feel truly powerful.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is already testing Windows 11 24H2, this fall's big new Windows release. The company has already demonstrated a few new features, like 80Gbps USB4 support and Sudo for Windows, and the new version could also give a significant refresh to the Windows installer for the first time since the Windows Vista days.

But there's one big update you might not notice at all. Late last week, Microsoft released "servicing updates" with no new features to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Canary channels. The updates were "designed to test [Microsoft's] servicing pipeline for Windows 11." It's pretty common for Insiders to get these kinds of updates-that-exist-only-to-test-the-update-process, but the twist here is that PCs with Virtualization Based Security (VBS) enabled could apply the update without rebooting.

Sources speaking to Windows Central say this isn't a fluke—Microsoft reportedly intends to use a Windows Server feature called hotpatching to deliver more Windows 11 security updates without requiring a reboot, making it easier to stay up to date without disrupting whatever you're doing. You'll still need to reboot "every few months"—Microsoft's documentation says a reboot is needed roughly once every three months, though it can happen more often than that for unanticipated zero-day patches and others that can't be fixed via hotpatching. The Arm versions of Windows 11 also won't get the feature for another year or so, according to Windows Central.

Enlarge / The Energizer Hard Case P28K. (credit: Avenir Telecom)

Four years ago, Avenir Telecom made headlines with an "Energizer"-branded phone that sported a massive 18,000 mAh battery. This year, the company is back at Mobile World Congress with another pocket-busting brick phone with an even bigger battery: 28,000 mAh.

The phone is called the Energizer Hard Case P28K. Avenir Telecom doesn't seem to have a webpage or press release about it, and there is only one official picture, but The Verge saw the phone at the show. Avenir is not reaching these massive battery sizes through any kind of magic; the old 18,000 mAh phone was 18 mm thick, and this 28,000 mAh phone is a whopping 27.8 mm thick. That's more than three iPhones stacked on top of each other. It's more like a battery bank with a phone attached to it. Actually, there's a good chance this is a row of 18-mm-thick 18,650 batteries, plus normal 9-mm-thick smartphone hardware on top. The 570 g weight makes it more than three times the weight of an iPhone, too.

The Energizer battery brand is not well-known for working with phones, but Avenir Telecom licenses the brand and pumps out all sorts of weird niche phones under the name. Lately, it has been making dumbphones. This one is a ruggedized IP69 smartphone with big rubber bumpers. On top of that giant battery, you'll find a pretty crusty budget phone. The display is a 6.78-inch 1080p LCD. The SoC is a MediaTek MT6789, aka the Helio G99—that's a 6 nm, eight-core SoC with two cortex A76 CPUs and six A55 CPUs, and it's 4G-only. You'd be hard-pressed to find a slower chip shipping in new phones. It also has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, Android 14, and 33 W charging.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

After failing for almost a decade to convince Apple to ditch Google and set Bing as Safari's default search engine, Microsoft quietly changed tactics and offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, unsealed court documents showed Friday, confirming a Bloomberg report from last year.

According to Google's post-trial brief filed in the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, Microsoft in 2018 dangled perhaps its best offer to Apple: Either "sell Bing to Apple or enter into a joint venture regarding Bing."

Microsoft seemingly hoped it could tempt Apple into partnering up by promising Bing's search quality had drastically improved, but the proposed deal didn't make it past the conversation stage. Apple rejected the 2018 offer after concluding "that Bing’s search quality had failed to improve and that little credence should be given to Microsoft’s representation of improved quality," Google's brief said.