Nuclear Monster

  • Let’s be honest. Ace Combat Assault Horizon was awful. Ace Combat is best when it is a goofy self-serious exploration of flying silly jets in the sky and menus that have cyberpunk military noises and briefing voiceover guy telling you about Oscetia’s latest invasion along with the inevitable pretend surprise at whatever the latest gigantic airship is that you have to shoot down. Also there is usually a ground base that you can literally fly your jet fighter through to blow up. Assault Horizon had almost none of this and felt like it was trying to be more like a Call of Duty spinoff than an actual Ace Combat.

    Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown looks like a return to the ridiculous Ace Combats of yore, and for that I am excited for when it comes out later this year on Steam for Windows and various consoles.

  • The AirPods box.

    There were a few things that I’ve noticed since I posted a review of Apple’s AirPods back in December, so here’s a quick update.

    1. The range is ridiculous. I can leave my iPhone downstairs and the AirPods carry on delivering audio to my ears.
    2. The sound the AirPods make to let you know they’re running low on battery is kind of surprising because it isn’t accompanied by anything onscreen to let you know what’s going on. Midcall I kept hearing the sound and trying to figure out what it was until finally the AirPod I had in turned off. Switching to the other AirPod is easy, and it’s a mistake you should only make once, but it seems boneheaded to not let people know what’s happening when they look at the device that their AirPods are connected to.
    3. There are a few tiny issues with the case. It’s too loud when it snaps shut. There’s an audible clicking sound when you close it and although it’s fine in many situations in a few it is absolutely not fine. These headphones are slick as hell but waking up a sleeping baby when you switch out one AirPod for the other and shut the case isn’t. You might think you could more gently close the case to prevent this, you can’t unless you have both hands free.
    4. The same goes for the charging status light inside the case. Way too bright in some situations without an ambient light sensor to detect that it should dim.
    5. As an incredible bargain compared to other truly wireless earbuds it feels a little like nitpicking, but, why does Apple include a charging cable without a wall adapter? These cost $159. Include the darn wall adapter.
    6. AirPods are very comfortable. I can forget if they are in or not. A few times I’ve gone to listen to them and wasn’t able to tell if I had them in or not without checking the charging case or my ear.

    Finally, there are silent firmware updates for the AirPods when they’re in their charging case and near an iOS device. There are a few issues I’ve had that might be fixed by this firmware but it is impossible to tell since there are no release notes. Of course these are tiny computers so getting updated software isn’t completely unexpected, but it sure would be nice to know what is changing when we skip through a few versions very quickly. This update went from 3.3.1 to 3.5.1.

    I’m still very onboard with our wireless future, there are far cheaper bluetooth headset options with better battery life, and some have better sound quality, but none are as smooth and they’re the best for calling our senators.

  • Rock Paper Shotgun’s Alec Meer interviewed Microsoft’s Kevin Gammill about the upcoming Game Mode in Windows 10:

    Kevin Gammill: With the Creator’s Update and Game Mode right now, we’re primarily focused on biasing the game versus the rest of the operating system, from a GPU and CPU perspective. So for some of the other system resources, we can get into a roadmap discussion on the next call, but really right now Game Mode is about biasing the game from a GPU perspective so it gets more of the cycles if it’s in the foreground, and from a CPU perspective both biasing to get more CPU cycles as well as avoiding what I’ll call thread contention for the game.

    …

    At any time a user can call up the Game Bar and enable Game Mode for any title or game they would like. That’s kind of option one. And then at the same time we will have what we call kind of an approved list or whitelist of games that we feel super-comfortable about and we want to enable out of the gate.

    …

    Kind of the way I look at it is that any increase is a benefit, without question. Even it’s as low as, say, a 2% increase in framerate, if you’re running a hundred frames per second, I will take those extra two frames per second without question.

    This is a strategy for getting gamers to switch to Windows 10 and use the built-in game bar overlay for a possible 2% increase in framerate, or a slightly more stable framerate overall. A framerate increase at all is very unlikely, because driver developers at Nvidia and AMD are already very focused on that. I wish the interview addressed the system rebooting in the middle of a game for updates, because that is a real problem for people playing games on Windows today.

  • Wolf3d alt right

    Ryan “icculus” Gordon has released Wolfenstein 3-D: Alt-Right Edition, it’s a in-browser version of Wolfenstein 3D where you can punch nazis like modern-day heroes punching real-life Nazi, Richard Spencer. Click here to go play. Ryan warns that it probably won’t work on phones, and points out the itch.io hosted Nazi Punching game jam for anyone who wants to make their own Nazi punching extravaganza.

  • Danny O’Dwyer‘s noclip has a 2nd documentary series out, this time it’s going to hell with id Software’s DOOM.