news.buyenne.com

Enlarge / The running deck of a Peloton Tread treadmill during CES 2018 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 11, 2018. (credit: Getty | Ethan Miller)

Interactive fitness company Peloton has agreed to recall two treadmills nearly two months after the company reported that a 6-year-old child died after being pulled under one of the devices.

Peloton has received at least 72 reports of adults, children, pets and/or objects getting dragged under their Tread+ treadmill. In those incidents, 29 children suffered injuries, which included second- and third-degree abrasions, broken bones, and lacerations, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission noted.

In February, a father reported to the CPSC that his 3-year-old son was pulled under a Tread+ and trapped. When the father discovered his son and was able to free him, the toddler was pulseless and not breathing, according to the report. Fortunately, the boy was resuscitated, but he “now has significant brain injury.” The boy had tread marks on his back matching the slats of the Tread+, as well as a neck injury, and petechiae (small blood spots) on his face, presumably from blood flow being cut off.

• 

  Returnaling, over and over, to remember the things we shot. [credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Housemarque ]

It's not too surprising that a game like Returnal would have some hidden cheat codes allowing players to lighten the game's punishing difficulty. But the method—which requires players to plug a USB keyboard into their PS5—for entering those newly discovered "debug mode" codes has some wondering if developer Housemarque intended for them to be accessible in the final product.

YouTuber TheRandomizer was among the first to publicize the cheats, posting a video showing a Returnal player dropping new weapons at will and teleporting to previous locations in the middle of play. A Reddit thread goes into more detail on the keyboard combinations required to get the codes to work, including warnings for certain situations where they may permanently ruin a run.

Developers traditionally use "debug modes" during a game's development to test specific in-game situations without having to go through the sometimes arduous process of setting them up. There's a long history of games that make extant debug modes accessible to players on the final released version, sometimes through hidden codes, sometimes through external cheat devices, and sometimes through an on-screen "debug console" that lets players type complex commands directly.

Enlarge / Screenshot from the Starlink order page, with the street address blotted out. (credit: SpaceX Starlink)

SpaceX has received more than 500,000 orders for Starlink broadband service, the company said yesterday.

"'To date, over half a million people have placed an order or put down a deposit for Starlink,' SpaceX operations engineer Siva Bharadvaj said during the launch webcast of its 26th Starlink mission," CNBC reported.

SpaceX opened preorders for Starlink satellite service in February and is serving at least 10,000 users in its beta in the US and overseas combined. The preorders required a $99 deposit for service that would be available in the second half of this year. The 500,000 total orders presumably include both US residents and people in other countries; we asked SpaceX for more details and will update this article if we get a response.

• 

  In the world of Resident Evil Village, you'll meet all sorts of colorful characters interested in having you for dinner. (All images in this article were captured directly on a PlayStation 5 console.) [credit: Capcom ]

2017's Resident Evil 7 was one of the greatest gaming comeback stories of all time. After the series lost its way over the years with unwieldy blockbuster aspirations, Capcom's horror team wiped the slate clean and scaled everything down to a creepier, tighter, personality-driven scope.

The resulting 2017 game is still a series highlight—which is likely why Capcom hasn't yet let go just yet. Its direct sequel, this week's Resident Evil Village, earns serious "direct sequel" stripes. The same protagonist returns to contend with zombies, monsters, and creeping dread. His tribulations are once again framed within a first-person perspective, and they're once again controlled by a certain set of moves and weapon types.

Sequels like this sometimes turn out well—ain't broke, you know the rest—but that's often because the game maker in question uses lessons learned from the prior game to make something bigger, badder, and crazier, or executes concepts that couldn't quite fit into the first attempt. RE Village is not that sequel. The more I think about its elements, the more I'm left wondering what got cut, changed, or compressed to get this game out the door, because it largely fails to surpass RE7's scope.