Author Archives: Cheyenne MacDonald

Echoes of the Emergent, a hauntingly beautiful Playdate exclusive, sold me on visual novels

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Somehow in all these years, I’ve never gotten into visual novels, despite being a person who loves both reading and video games. The idea has always intrigued me in some way, but I’ve never really felt compelled to actually pick one up. That changed when I first saw the announcement for Echoes of the Emergent a few months ago. Described as “a personal journey through a shattered post-apocalyptic world,” all it took was a glimpse of Echoes of the Emergent’s gritty aesthetic and melancholic atmosphere to get me to preorder it. And now that I’ve finally gotten around to playing (reading? experiencing?) it, I’m kind of blown away.

Echoes of the Emergent is a Playdate-exclusive title from RNG Party Games, the same team that made Bloom. It opens with its main character, Ayumi, on a tense scavenging trip to find any food she can in a ruined city. She’s alone, afraid and increasingly concerned about her dwindling resources. As the story progresses, it bounces between Ayumi’s bleak new reality and flashbacks to a time when things were normal. Her panicked efforts to stay alive, to keep going, are interwoven with memories of her family and friends — some of them happy, some painful. And there’s a cat.

A still from Echoes of the Emergent showing a girl (viewed from behind) looking out at dilapidated buildings. The text reads: It was all gone
RNG Party Games

The narrative is illustrated with haunting backgrounds of Ayumi’s dilapidated surroundings, and these move ever so slightly to create a really unsettling effect. If you press the down arrow on the D-pad, you can collapse the text box to get a full view of the backgrounds. It takes a few hours to get through the entire story, but it’s definitely worth carving out some time for. You can save your place by pressing ‘B’ to pull up the menu.

Echoes of the Emergent is the kind of experience that will stick with you for a little while even after it’s over. It’s available on the Playdate Catalog for $8, but you can also get it — and its captivating soundtrack — on itch.io.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/echoes-of-the-emergent-a-hauntingly-beautiful-playdate-exclusive-sold-me-on-visual-novels-222033336.html?src=rss

Boeing and NASA engineers have wrapped up ground tests on the Starliner thruster

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Engineers from Boeing and NASA have spent much of the last month running ground tests on a Starliner Reaction Control System (RCS) thruster to get a better idea of what went wrong during the active Starliner’s flight in early June, and they finally wrapped up this past week. In its latest update, Boeing said the teams were able to replicate the thrust degradation Starliner experienced and are now reviewing all the data. But the date of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return is still uncertain — NASA and Boeing said only that they’ll be making the trip “in the coming weeks.”

In the tests at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, the teams simulated the conditions from Starliner’s recent flight, putting the control system thruster “through one of the most stressing launch-to-docking firing sequences with over 1,000 pulses to simulate CFT [Crew Flight Test] conditions,” according to Boeing. They also tested undocking and deorbit burn scenarios, which Starliner will experience on its way home. After collecting terabytes of data from those tests, the teams ran additional, more aggressive tests to “see if we could more closely simulate the higher thermal conditions the thrusters experienced in-flight,” said Dan Niedermaier, Boeing’s engineer for the thruster testing.

The engineers are in the process of doing “engine tear downs and inspections” NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, Steve Stich, said on Thursday. Following their analyses, NASA says there will be an Agency Flight Test Readiness Review to determine whether Starliner is in good shape to bring the astronauts back. NASA and Boeing said they will release more information in a conference in the coming days.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/boeing-and-nasa-engineers-have-wrapped-up-ground-tests-on-the-starliner-thruster-180027494.html?src=rss

NASA’s Curiosity rover accidentally uncovered pure sulfur crystals on Mars

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NASA scientists say pure sulfur has been found on Mars for the first time after the Curiosity rover inadvertently uncovered a cluster of yellow crystals when it drove over a rock. And it looks like the area is filled with it. It’s an unexpected discovery — while minerals containing sulfur have been observed on the Red Planet, elemental sulfur on its own has never been seen there before. “It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven’t associated with the history of this location,” according to NASA.

Curiosity cracked open the rock on May 30 while driving in a region known as the Gediz Vallis channel, where similar rocks were seen all around. The channel is thought to have been carved by water and debris flows long ago. “Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.” 

A rock run over and cracked by the Curiosity rover revealing yellow sulfur crystals
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

After spotting the yellow crystals, the team later used a camera on Curiosity’s robotic arm to take a closer look. The rover then took a sample from a different rock nearby, as the pieces of the rock it had smashed were too brittle for drilling. Curiosity is equipped with instruments that allow it to analyze the composition of rocks and soil, and NASA says its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) confirmed it had found elemental sulfur.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasas-curiosity-rover-accidentally-uncovered-pure-sulfur-crystals-on-mars-211340580.html?src=rss

Outage caused by CrowdStrike’s disastrous update affected 8.5 million devices

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The global outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike on Friday affected some 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft said in a blog post. The update triggered a blue screen of death, bringing systems used by hospitals, airlines, banks and other major services temporarily to a standstill. Only machines running Windows were affected.

While the issue was mostly resolved by Friday afternoon, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are still dealing with the fallout. In the blog post on Saturday, Microsoft’s VP of Enterprise and OS Security, David Weston, wrote that the company is working with CrowdStrike to “develop a scalable solution that will help Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure accelerate a fix for CrowdStrike’s faulty update.” Microsoft has also called in help from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

CrowdStrike said in its own blog post on Saturday that the update — a sensor configuration update — “was designed to target newly observed, malicious named pipes being used by common C2 frameworks in cyberattacks.” Unfortunately, for devices running Windows 7.11 and above that use CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, it instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash.” The total number of devices affected worked out to be “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” according to Weston.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/outage-caused-by-crowdstrikes-disastrous-update-affected-85-million-devices-192703245.html?src=rss

Rivian opens its first Charging Outpost, a crunchy not-gas station near Yosemite

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Rivian just opened its first EV charging rest stop 24 miles outside of Yosemite National Park, complete with bathrooms, a lounge with a small library, a water refill station, free coffee and (not free) “make your own” trail mix. Only Rivian owners will be able to make use of the five DC fast chargers at the Rivian Yosemite Charging Outpost, but the other amenities are open to anyone.

The Charging Outpost is located in Groveland, California near the park’s west entrance and takes the place of an abandoned gas station. The shop area will be open from 7AM to 7PM, while the bathrooms and chargers will be available 24/7. It’s the first time Rivian has ventured into this kind of infrastructure, building on its growing network of regular charging sites — several of which are situated near Yosemite. The EV maker has 58 Waypoint charging sites, which support any electric vehicle that uses the standard J1772 plug, around the Yosemite Valley, and a Rivian-only Adventure charging site near the park’s east entrance.

Rivian says it has plans for more Charging Outposts “around national parks and other high-traffic areas across the country.” The first such building was designed with the intention of keeping waste to a minimum, and its retaining wall was made using materials from the old parking lot and sidewalk. It’s fitted with solar panels and has a passive cooling design that’s meant to reduce the need for AC or heating.

Beyond Charging Outposts, Rivian plans to eventually have over 3,500 of its Adventure Network DC fast chargers available in 600 sites across the US and Canada, on top of roughly 10,000 Level 2 chargers that will be open to the public.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rivian-opens-its-first-charging-outpost-a-crunchy-not-gas-station-near-yosemite-152039298.html?src=rss

What to read this weekend: The Light Eaters, Paranoid Gardens and I Was a Teenage Slasher

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Recent releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

The cover for the book I Was a Teenage Slasher

Stephen Graham Jones is something of an expert on slashers. The author has tackled the genre in a slew of his novels (most notably in the Indian Lake Trilogy, with its slasher-movie-obsessed main character) and has an ongoing column in Fangoria dedicated to its impact, so it’s not really a surprise to see he’s churned out another entry for the canon. But this time around, we’re getting a different perspective: the slasher’s point of view.

I Was a Teenage Slasher is the fictional memoir of Tolly Driver, who in 1989 reluctantly became Lamesa, Texas’ very own Michael Meyers at the age of 17 — a transformation that’s seemingly driven by powers beyond Tolly’s control. It takes the classic slasher formula and injects a whole lot of heart.

The cover for the book The Light Eaters

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth was released in the spring, but it just popped onto my radar and I was immediately drawn in by both the premise and Schlanger’s easy-to-digest writing style. The Light Eaters explores the long-debated concept of plant “intelligence” through conversations with scientists and deep dives into the complex processes that underlie plants’ survival.

There’s a fair amount of anthropomorphizing, but The Light Eaters provides a really fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of plants that’s accessible to non-scientists and at the very least could inspire you to look at the natural world a little differently.

The cover for issue 1 of Paranoid Gardens

The digital first issue of Paranoid Gardens, a new six-issue series from Gerard Way and Shaun Simon, dropped this week and it’s wonderfully bizarre. We’re introduced right away to Loo, a nurse with memory loss and a tragic (but as yet unexplained) backstory who works at a care facility for aliens and paranormal beings. And it’s not just the patients that are out of the ordinary — there’s something unusual about the building itself, too. Drama quickly unfolds, and Loo “must fight her way through corrupt staff members, powerful theme park cults, and her own personal demons and trauma” to understand her role in all of it “and discover what secrets the gardens hold.”

Paranoid Gardens is written by Way (yes, of My Chemical Romance fame but also The Umbrella Academy) and Simon (The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, written with Way), and features art by Chris Weston, colors by Dave Stewart and letters by Nate Piekos.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-to-read-this-week-the-light-eaters-paranoid-gardens-and-i-was-a-teenage-slasher-133012961.html?src=rss

Laser Sphere uses Playdate’s crank to control a space laser, and I’m having a blast

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The horde is relentless. Every time I naively get overconfident in the timing of my laser sweeps and think I finally have the advantage over my enemies, the next wave comes in tenfold just to put me back in my place. I flatten them, they come back stronger and overtake me, and our little dance starts all over again.

In Laser Sphere, a Playdate game made by Pulp creator Shaun Inman, it’s just you and your prone-to-overheating space laser against the world. From the game’s description:

The lights in the sky are fading. A massive shell around an ailing star is the last bastion of a civilization witness to a cosmic extinction level event. But at the edge of the gloom lurks a horde driven mad by darkness, bent on snuffing out the last of the light.

Your job is to defend the Sphere from the incoming attackers, using the crank to control the direction of the laser beam and ‘A’ to fire. You can hold ‘A’ for a continuous blast of the laser, but this is a time-limited action — after a few seconds, your laser will overheat and be unusable until it cools down, leaving you completely vulnerable. To prevent that, you can instead shoot in short bursts to conserve power. But when tiny, high-speed enemies are coming at you in droves, good luck trying to snipe them each individually. When all else fails, you can deploy a bomb to take out a large number of enemies at once.

A gameplay still fro Laser Sphere
Shaun Inman

There are ways to improve the Sphere that'll give you a better shot at holding off the swarm. After destroying the ships, you can collect their materials and use the currency from this at the end of each level to purchase upgrades and make repairs. One add-on will reduce the laser’s cooldown time, while another fortifies your shield.

Thanks to the overheating/cooldown element, every decision feels high-stakes, and Laser Sphere as a result is an extremely engaging little action game. (The music by Mike Freuden is pretty solid too). There are enemies of different sizes, each type moving at a different speed, and you really have to stay on your toes to make sure you’re making the best use of your laser for whichever threat is most pressing at the moment. Otherwise, you’ll end up without a weapon when a couple dozen attackers are right on top of you. You can get Laser Sphere on the Playdate Catalog for $6.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/laser-sphere-uses-playdates-crank-to-control-a-space-laser-and-im-having-a-blast-223109297.html?src=rss

There’s finally a retro PC emulator on the App Store

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The retro PC game emulator UTM SE is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro, marking the first time Apple has allowed a PC emulator for iOS onto its marketplace, per The Verge. UTM SE will let you run classic PC games, but you’ll first need to either download a pre-built virtual machine — several of which UTM offers for free on its website — or you can create your own from scratch.

Apple previously rejected UTM SE, but the team behind the app shared on X that it was able to move forward with a “JIT-less build” thanks to the help of another developer, so it could comply with Apple’s restrictions. The developers also said UTM SE would soon hit the alternative app marketplace AltStore PAL as well, which would open it up to users in the EU. “Shoutouts to AltStore team for their help and to Apple for reconsidering their policy,” the UTM team posted.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/theres-finally-a-pc-emulator-on-the-app-store-175320490.html?src=rss

The Hatch Restore 2 smart sleep clock drops to a record low for Prime Day

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Getting into a good sleep routine can make a world of difference in your day-to-day life, and smart clocks like the Hatch Restore 2 are designed to help you achieve that. The popular sleep device, which allows for customized bedtime and wake-up routines, is deeply discounted on Amazon right now in an early Prime Day deal, bringing the price down to $145 from its usual cost of $200. The clock comes in three neutral colors — Latte, Putty and Slate — all of which are covered by the 28 percent price cut.

Hatch Restore 2 has features to help put you to sleep, and wake you gently in the morning. To get the absolute most out of it, you’ll also need to subscribe to Hatch+ for $5/month, but the system is still usable with limitations if you don’t want yet another subscription in your life. In our review, we found it to be genuinely helpful for winding down at night and starting the day off on the right note, but you may need to play around with the settings over the course of a few days to figure out what works best for you.

Hatch Restore 2 has audio segments to help you relax at night, like a 25-minute narration called “Train of Thought” in which a train conductor talks you through her ticket collections and interactions with passengers, and tells you train facts. Engadget’s reviewer Amy Skorheim said the audio became “more effective at putting me to sleep than popping a melatonin.” Restore 2 also offers ambient sounds like naturescapes, white and pink noise, and the sound of cars passing by.

In the morning, a sunlight light will start to shine before your alarm goes off to help gently wake you up. You can assign rotating routines to start your day off differently each morning. “The Reset,” for example, will play affirmations. The Hatch Restore 2 gets sleep routines right, but it’s definitely pricey for what it offers, so take advantage of that $55 discount while it’s still available.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Amazon Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-hatch-restore-2-smart-sleep-clock-drops-to-a-record-low-for-prime-day-150049284.html?src=rss

iPad support has arrived for the Nintendo emulator Delta with its latest update

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Good news for anyone who’s been waiting for a better way to run the Delta game emulator on an iPad — with version 1.6, which is available now, iPad support is here. The latest update is a major one, not only bringing a version of the emulator that’s optimized for iPad, but also seamless switching between iPhone and iPad, some improvements to DS compatibility, new skins and menu button gestures, and a new logo. (Delta had to scrap its old logo after Adobe threatened to sue over similarities to its signature ‘A’).

The Delta version 1.6 update is live on both the App Store and the AltStore PAL. It comes barely three months after Delta creator Riley Testut promised iPad support was on the way, and will allow for both full screen play and multiple windows using Stage Manager and Split View. Before you run and download it, though, take note of the devs’ warnings about DS games: “This update is incompatible with existing DS save states. Please save normally in-game before updating to avoid losing progress.” The Delta team has also created a new app, Delta Legacy, to help users migrate their save states. Instructions for the process are on the Delta website.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ipad-support-has-arrived-for-the-nintendo-emulator-delta-with-its-latest-update-213509165.html?src=rss