New Gadgets

I'm interested with the Kuri home assistance gadget. It's cool and the kids will surely love them. Well, it acts as a reliever for their nannies. Kuri is an amazing roaming security camera with a personality.

If you had to hazard a guess, how many times do you think you’ve punched in the Konami code in your lifetime? You know how it goes. Many of us have this down by heart: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. From the first time it showed up in Gradius in 1986 (top), to more recent cameos in games as diverse as Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Metal Gear Solid, GTA V, and even League of Legends, it’s become the least secret “secret code” there ever was. The Konami code is like a Pulp Fiction reference, or that horrible arrow in the FedEx logo. Once you’ve seen it, you see it everywhere.

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Nintendo broke the hearts of many retro gaming fans last week when it announced the NES Classic Edition had been discontinued. It came as quite a shock, because not only was the NES Classic Edition extremely popular, it was in extraordinarily short supply constantly since it was launched late last year. Many people who wanted one were unable to find it, unless they wanted to pay huge markups to third-party sellers. A new report from Eurogamer claims discontinuing the NES Classic Edition was done with the intention of replacing it. The company is allegedly working on a “SNES Classic Edition.”

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Once upon a time, if you wanted to play multiplayer on a game console, you had to do it with a common television and multiple controllers. This worked plenty well, if you had the right setup — I spent more than a few nights at college slugging it out against friends in Mario Kart — but local multiplayer on a common screen has been superseded by remote multiplayer across multiple consoles in many titles.

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German car maker Daimler announced that they would cooperate with their Chinese partner Beijing Automotive Group to establish an electric car battery plant in China.

With an investment scale of EUR655 million, which is about USD740 million, this plant will not only make electric car batteries, but also will produce Mercedes-Benz battery-powered cars.

Hubertus Troska, board member of Daimler, said in a statement that by 2025, China would account for a large share of electric car sales of Mercedes-Benz. Therefore, localized manufacturing would be the key to the success of their electric car portfolio.

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When Atari announced it was getting back into the gaming hardware business, the move was met with a great deal of skepticism. After all, the original Atari went bankrupt in 2013 and little exists of that company except its brand name. Furthermore, unlike Nintendo, Atari has licensed its game library to multiple other platforms over the years. Classic compilations of games, including Atari titles, have been available for a very long time.

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AMD beat Wall Street’s expectations in Q2 2017, courtesy of strong demand for Ryzen and Epyc (desktop and server) CPUs. This was a significant quarter for AMD, because it marked the first quarter of full availability for the Ryzen CPU family.

Revenue was $1.22 billion, up 19 percent from Q2 2016 and 1.24x from Q1 2017. Gross margin of 33 percent was down 1 percent compared with Q1 2017, but up 2 percent year over year. AMD turned an operating income profit of $25M, compared with a $9M loss last year. While the company still turned in a net loss for the quarter, it slashed the size of that loss dramatically, from $69M in Q2 2016 and $73M in Q1.

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After months of waiting and speculation, AMD has finally taken the lid off its RX Vega series, its clock speeds, capabilities, and pricing. All of these characteristics have been hotly debated of late, with readers asking for (and making predictions about) how it would compare with Nvidia’s year-old Pascal GPUs like the 1070 and 1080.

We now have some preliminary answers to some of those questions, but by no means the entire picture. So here’s how this is going to work: If you want a “regular” GPU, you’ll be able to buy the Vega 56 (56 active CUs) for $399. If you want the full Vega 64 chip (the air-cooled variant) you’ll be able to buy that for $499. I will admit to being reasonably right in one regard — I predicted that a 1.7GHz base clock for RX Vega made good sense if Vega FE was a 1.6GHz chip. The actual boost clock on the water-cooled version of RX Vega is 1677MHz.

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If you love the world of Fallout, but don’t want to wait for Bethesda to release another installment, Fantasy Flight has a new board game available that might suit your fancy. Dubbed simply Fallout, it’s based on the worlds of Fallout 3 and 4, as well as their downloadable content packs. The Capital Wasteland (FO3), The Pitt (Pittsburgh, FO3 DLC), The Commonwealth (FO4) and Far Harbor (FO4 DLC) are all included and the board game is designed to support single or multiple players.

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When Mass Effect Andromeda launched, the game racked up very mixed reviews. We’ve written about the game’s launch issues and the behind-the-scenes reason why things went wrong throughout its development cycle. BioWare always had a very tough act to follow, especially given that the sequel to the original ME trilogy was going to kick off adventure in a whole new galaxy, with new races and characters, and, for the first time in three games, a new protagonist. The game took fire for poor animations and image quality overall, but the bigger flaw, storywise, was that it wasn’t particularly good. That’s not to say nobody liked it, by any means, but Mass Effect 3 had an 89 rating from critics and a 5.6 rating from fans, with the latter likely due to the ending in particular. Mass Effect Andromeda doesn’t even hit that level, with a 72 from critics and a 5.0 from fans. (Both were a sharp decline from ME2, with its 94 / 8.8 rating).

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