Author: Sam Machkovech

This is the SFW version of the spin-off's card selection.

Board game smash hit Codenames has earned countless accolades and awards since its 2015 launch due to its ease of play, surprising depth, and family friendliness. The game revolves around giant packs of words, which means a simple "add some more words" offshoot or expansion was inevitable, but the game's first official follow-up wastes no time erasing the phrase "family friendly" from the recommendation list.

Codenames: Deep Undercover began appearing at Target shops in late July, and this week it finally officially launched at more Targets (and will, for now, remain an exclusive at the US big-box chain) for $20. The 200-card set only differs from the core game in one key aspect: dirty words. Players split into two teams, and they're each led by a "spymaster" who must help his or her teammates figure out which face-up words on a table belong to their team—and must do so with one-word clues, which makes the clue-giving process pretty tricky.

But while the original game's word list mostly consisted of neutral words and proper nouns, C:DU takes the blue route, consisting mostly of sexual words (squirt, vibrator), slurs (bitch, slut), and double entendres (clam, pickle). The game also comes with Codenames' first official set of blank cards, on which players can write their own vulgar or gross words of choice, along with more stylized versions of its "bystander" cards.

Master Chief awaits you on the Xbox One S' disc drive mount. (credit: iFixit)

Ars' review of the latest Xbox hardware revision, the Xbox One S, took a long look at the console's updated exterior (along with its 4K- and HDR-related upgrades). To get to know its guts, however, we turn to the teardown experts at iFixit, who went on a warranty-voiding dive on Wednesday to find out how Microsoft shrank the system a full 42 percent.

In doing so, the site's teardown team confirmed the myriad parts making up the full system, and as expected, we're getting the kind of change in parts vendors and component sizes we expected from a three-years-later hardware revision. For starters, iFixit shows off the Xbox One S' updated, shrunken power supply, which is now fanless, embedded in the system, and wedged nicely alongside the updated cooling rig—a custom-molded 120mm fan, an aluminum heat sink, and a copper heat pipe set.

The launch edition's 2TB hard drive can also be seen, and in good news, its interface has been upgraded from SATA II to SATA III. Our testing didn't reveal any particular drive-speed boosts as a result of this, which is probably because the included Seagate drive runs at 5400 RPM (with a 32MB cache), but we'll be curious to see whether the system's loading times are boosted when a solid state drive is hooked into that SATA III interface; if the Xbox One S' SATA controller is rated for SATA III, the difference could be noticeable. Anybody who tests this, however, risks voiding Xbox's hardware warranty.

Crazy 3D dragon, courtesy of Tilt Brush.

Every virtual-reality tester at Ars Technica has a favorite app on either the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, especially when it comes to introducing newbies to the format. For my money, Audioshield is the most breathtaking for musically inclined users (and our own Lee Hutchinson might agree), but that rhythm-action game can be too stressful and movement-heavy for casual testing.

Now, I have a new feather in my VR-demo cap: Tilt Brush's new "Audio Reactor" mode. This update, which was added to the HTC Vive's best-known paint-sculpting app for free on Tuesday, lets VR creators add PC audio sensitivity to any of the app's strokes of paint. Certain Tilt Brush creations now react to the rhythm and dynamics of whatever song is being played on your VR computer. This means different types of paint strokes will glimmer or animate in time with the music.

Enabling Audio Reactor's music feature is a little clunky right now since Tilt Brush has neither its own dedicated MP3 interface nor a convenient YouTube search tool. Currently, you'll need to alt-tab out of Tilt Brush, turn on your music-playing interface of choice, and make sure it's playing on Windows' "default playback device" before switching back to your VR window. Thankfully, Steam includes a music-playing interface in its VR "chaperone" system, but it's a bit inelegant since it requires going into Steam's menus.

What boosts does the Xbox One S hide? According to Digital Foundry, quite a few. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The Xbox One S is out, and our review discusses at length some of the system's major changes, including a total visual refresh and a test of its 4K content. Turns out we missed one thing: the system launched with an unadvertised boost to some older games' visuals!

The frame rate-analysis wizards at Eurogamer's Digital Foundry confirmed the good news after testing older Xbox One games. Many titles won't seen any boost at all—which is what we found in cursory testing of 15 games, both for the normal system and for its backwards-compatibility library. However, if an older game runs on Xbox One S using either unlocked frame rates (meaning, not tied to v-sync) or dynamic resolution (meaning, it can scale down from 1080p on the fly to improve performance), players might see the a boost by as much as nine frames per second.

That maximum boost was measured in Project CARS, a graphics-intensive driving sim whose rain-soaked racetrack variants can bring frame rates hurtling downward on the normal Xbox One. Other games that enjoyed noticeable boosts included a remaster of Capcom's Resident Evil 5 and the latest game in the Hitman series.

(credit: Sam Machkovech)

What was going on in the Microsoft Devices Group during the Xbox One's design phase? The 2013 console launched in a hideous state—and I mean that from a purely aesthetic angle. (We could go on about its other launch issues.) The system's staggering size and VCR-like design left a lot to be desired, and the result was an entertainment-center eyesore that was somehow larger than 2005's Xbox 360.

Microsoft had made handsome hardware before, particularly the XB1's predecessor, the svelte and curvy Xbox 360 S. The company's hardware side has since redeemed itself with the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. Plus, the Xbox One is nearing its third birthday, which is the usual timeframe for a sales-boosting hardware redesign. Sure enough, the Xbox One S has arrived in time to redeem the Xbox division's reputation.

Having seen the updated system design in person at this summer's E3 conference, we at Ars already knew the Xbox One S would be an improvement by default. Now that I've tested the system for a few days ahead of its August 2 launch in the US, I can safely level-up that compliment and confirm that it's Microsoft's best-looking console yet. The One S is exactly the kind of sleek consumer box that gets second glances and compliments while tucked beneath your TV screen of choice (or placed alongside it after attaching an included vertical stand).

Alden Ehrenreich, who will play Han Solo in at least one upcoming film, appears at the Star Wars Celebration 2016 in London, England. (credit: Getty Images / Ben A. Pruchnie)

The nebulous cloud of upcoming Star Wars content is hard to keep up with. There's the official trilogy, this winter's Rogue One spin-off film, and a ton of still-in-production, big-budget video games starting off the list. This cache also includes a new film featuring a much younger Han Solo than the one fans met in the original Star Wars.

Actually, scratch that. We might be getting an entire Han Solo trilogy as well.

That's the buzz, at any rate, suggested by a New York Daily News story that broke on Monday. Actor Alden Ehrenreich, the 26-year-old who's been tapped to lead the still-unnamed Han Solo film, has signed a three-film contract with Disney. The point of the contract, according to the Daily News, is to lock the actor down should the first Han Solo film "strike gold at the box office."

The opening screen. It's real. (credit: Hello Games)

Some people cannot wait another minute to play No Man's Sky, the upcoming PS4/PC space-exploration game whose gargantuan, open-ended galaxy contains 18 quintillion planets. (That's 18 followed by 18 zeros.) One lucky man managed to get his hands on a copy on Friday, a week and a half ahead of its official August 9 launch. Whether his brag about paying $1,300 for an advance copy on eBay is true, his stream of the game's opening sequence, which has since been taken offline, is wholly legitimate.

Reddit user "Daymeeuhn" posted videos to DailyMotion on Friday containing the PS4 version's opening sequence and a full 24 minutes of first-planet gameplay. If you're the kind of No Man's Sky enthusiast who wants zero spoilers, you should tune out right now.

Spoilers ahead

"Sean Murray, if you're watching, I'm an asshole, I'm sorry," Daymeeuhn says as he begins his stream of the full, retail game. After a brief star-screensaver visual sequence, overlaid with the No Man's Sky text logo, the player wakes on a planet named "Fljodal Nientv." This isn't the game's "default" planet; instead, every player's game starts on a unique rock in Sky's massive galaxy, and it's highly likely no other player on Earth will ever discover Fljodal Nientv. No opening sequence or explainer plays out, beyond a robotic voice alerting players that they have crash landed.

This PlayStation VR promotional pamphlet page spells out some surprising room-space requirements for the system. (credit: Imgur)

As Sony approaches the October launch of its first major virtual reality product, PlayStation VR, the company has begun to publish more info about its system. On Friday, advertising pamphlets revealed a previously unknown aspect: its space requirements.

The amount of suggested minimum space may surprise some players. The pamphlet image, posted anonymously on Imgur and found by Polygon, suggests that players dedicate 9.8' of depth and 6.2' of width to their PSVR play area. This includes a two-foot dead zone directly in front of a single PlayStation Camera, which must be set up for tracking purposes, and a few more feet back to position a chair so that players can look and wave arms all around their play space.

The pamphlet also makes clear that players cannot play very far from the camera. PSVR requires a specific just-close-enough sweet spot to track the system's headset, Move wands, and DualShock 4 controllers. Ideally, players will place a chair in that PSVR zone, as the pamphlet suggests players "remain seated whenever possible." If a particular game asks players to stand up, that may require a repositioning of the PS Camera to track full body height.

The Snowden-tanglement of Hollywood has begun in earnest, and that's not just a coy reference to Oliver Stone's upcoming, eponymous film. The worlds of hacking, digital transparency, and bombastic espionage are all coming together whenever possible these days. And in terms of how computer savvy is employed on-screen, we've seen the good (Mr. Robot) and the bad (Spectre).

Get ready for the ugly. Jason Bourne, the fifth film in the series, hits theaters this weekend with a few very good things going for it, including a few gargantuan action sequences and some stellar lead performances from Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, and Vincent Cassel. But someone at Universal clearly wanted its globe-trotting, CIA-loaded thriller to hit a bunch of cultural-relevance bullet points, and the results are some of the most embarrassing technological shoe-horning you'll see in a film this year.

Go ahead, set your laptop on fire

Matt Damon's Bourne hasn't become a hacker since his last turn as the secret super-agent in 2007. In fact, he has checked out from anything resembling duty, instead turning to a life of... boxing to the death. (Really.) We find Bourne on the Grecian-Albanian border, busing from one bloody, bare-knuckled brawl to the next, and the only thing that interrupts his new, wholly unexplained career detour is a visit from an old CIA comrade, Nicky Parsons (played once more by Julia Stiles).

Valve has now released its second piece of software for the HTC Vive virtual reality system: a free spectator hub for its hugely popular online-battling game Dota 2. While the Wednesday release isn't a game per se, my brief test with the surprise-launched VR experience proves that this may very well be a game-changer for the system, and maybe even for e-sports.

The Dota 2 VR Hub got its first tease as early as this April, shortly before the Vive hardware saw its commercial launch, but word about the app dried up shortly afterward. And unlike other functions added to Dota 2, including a switchover to the Source 2 engine and Vulkan API support, this VR hub didn't launch in a separate "test" branch or with any major "beta" indication. The mode requires a roughly 300MB installation, which can be toggled in the "DLC" list in the game's Steam "Library" section.

What's it like inside? Quite honestly, Dota 2 VR Hub is a total trip.