Last week, German techwear firm Acronym released a new version of its iconic J1A-GT jacket, one based on Hideo Kojima’s PS4 game Death Stranding. Like most Acronym gear, the jacket was both rare and expensive: it sold out almost immediately, despite a price tag of just under $2,000. But in another seemingly unconnected corner of…
The Final Fantasy VII remake does more than retell a familiar story from a classic roleplaying game. If you’re planning to play it, you shouldn’t read any further. But if you’ve finished the final chapter, you’ll know that its ending diverges pretty sharply from the original story — not only changing the game’s canon but…
Intel NUC 9 Extreme Intel’s latest NUC computer takes on the small form factor gaming PC world For the past few years, some of the most exciting developments in the PC gaming world have been around small form factor PCs. These compact machines are a fraction of the size of traditional gaming PC towers, but…
We got both the announcement and the embargo lift for OnePlus’ new top-tier smartphones yesterday. Here’s my review of the OnePlus 8 Pro and here is Jon Porter’s review of the OnePlus 8 — both with video. These phones are interesting for slightly different — but related — reasons. OnePlus has always positioned itself as…
Trying to describe Quibi’s essence to people is difficult. There are shows where food explodes in chefs’ faces, series about flipping murder homes, and Chrissy Teigen presiding over a small claims court. Quibi’s best content operates on the belief that “the more ludicrous, the better,” but that’s easier to show than tell. Or it would…
Sometimes it takes years of criticism to get a company to do the right thing. Every once in a while, it can happen overnight. Wednesday night was such a night. After a series of investigative reports, blog posts, and Twitter threads examining Zoom’s design practices and security features, CEO Eric S. Yuan said the company…
Screen recording is helpful for a number of things, from creating a tutorial to grabbing a clip to post on Twitter to share with friends. On Windows 10, you can capture a video of your screen by using the built-in Xbox Game Bar. The Xbox Game Bar was designed to record clips of video games,…
For the first time in a month, I had somewhere to be on a Saturday night. It was a mini-music festival where emo fans and electronic music aficionados gathered, staring up at a handcrafted house that loomed over a massive stage. But first, I had to stand in a lengthy queue with a bunch of…
Almost every single major professional sports league across the globe is on indefinite hiatus due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. There’s no NBA, no Champions League, no Olympic Games. But an unlikely option has started to fill that void for viewers: competitive video games. For years, esports leagues have tried to emulate traditional sports…
Asus and AMD have put Intel on notice In their early years, gaming laptops were meant to be desktop replacements. The first Razer Blade, released in 2011, was almost seven pounds; the 2012 Blade was 6.6. Battery life was a laughing matter. (The 2017 Zephyrus had just over two hours.) Gaming laptops were bulky and…
Add a keyboard and trackpad to an iPad or iPad Air The $149 Logitech Combo Touch is the case I’ve spent years waiting for — well, not this exact case, but the idea of a combination keyboard and touchpad that might turn my iPad into a laptop replacement. If you’ve been intrigued by Apple’s new…
In my sixth week of self-isolation, my favorite pastime has become judging the homes of celebrities over grainy Zoom calls and low-quality Instagram live streams. The more trouble they seem to have, moving cameras around and finding a perfect spot to film, the better. Julia Louis-Dreyfus confessing to Jimmy Kimmel that she wanted to film…
Netflix is one of the rare companies benefiting from the global pandemic, which has kept billions of people at home with nothing to do but stream. But the question is how long can it last? Although much of Netflix’s recent boom didn’t start until mid-March, when more people were forced to stay home to help…
Thanks to the Morning Brew for recommending us as an “Essential” read. Here’s hoping all of you who signed up over the weekend find The Interface a useful guide to tech, democracy, and the pandemic. Facebook is a publicly traded company that mostly operates in rational and predictable ways. Facebook is also a collection of…
If you’re finding that background noise is disrupting voice or video calls made from your computer, then a new piece of software from Nvidia might help (provided you have the necessary hardware to run it). Released earlier this month, RTX Voice uses the hardware found in Nvidia’s RTX GPUs to process your incoming and outgoing…
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge Dell improves upon an already winning formula Every time a new XPS 13 comes out, the question is always the same: is it still the best Windows thin-and-light laptop? I’ll spare you the suspense here: the answer is yes. If there’s one thing Dell is great at, it’s…
Last week, as coronavirus marched around the world, a growing number of governments began to explore the use of our cellphone data to monitor the outbreak. Using location data, Israel sent alerts to citizens believed to have been exposed to the virus ordering them to self-quarantine. In England, authorities analyzed anonymized data from telecom provider…
Sitting in my room on a self-isolated morning, I’m immersed in a small alternate reality that lives in my phone. On the small, glowing screen, I’m not a writer, but a young architect preparing for the job interview of a lifetime. Looking through my phone like a next-gen viewfinder, I take in my digital surroundings…
Even without a second screen, LG’s latest phone offers a lot LG is planning a major refresh for its next mainstream smartphone, but before getting there, the company decided to release another entry in its spec-heavy V-series, the V60 ThinQ. With advanced manual camera controls, a hi-fi headphone jack, and top-end specs, these phones have…
Sitting in my room on a self-isolated morning, I’m immersed in a small alternate reality that lives in my phone. On the small, glowing screen, I’m not a writer, but a young architect preparing for the job interview of a lifetime. Looking through my phone like a next-gen viewfinder, I take in my digital surroundings…
A few years ago, Facebook became aware that Russia kept posting misinformation all over the network. The misinformation was designed to rile people up and make them share with their friends, and because people are generally pretty easy to rile up, Russia’s strategy was very successful. Some prominent political scientists believe that the country’s election…
Konami had planned to release its mini TurboGrafx-16, PC Engine, and CoreGrafx consoles last week, but the production schedule has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic around the world. I managed to get my hands on a PC Engine Mini here in Japan, though, so here’s a quick look at it ahead of the TurboGrafx-16…
I keep writing about live-streaming like it’s accessible and easy to do — which it’s not. It’s actually quite difficult to get started. Sorry! My bad. I didn’t mean to lead you astray. If you’re still Twitch-curious, I have a gift for you: a guide for how to get started. Before I dive in, I’ll…
Making a video game is much less daunting than it might seem. While you likely aren’t going to go from having no experience to making the next Grand Theft Auto, it has actually never been easier to get started making games. Game development tools and resources have become increasingly accessible to the average person, even…
Sony has finally unveiled its PlayStation 5 specs today, and there are some surprisingly big differences between the PS5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. Both consoles are still arriving at the end of the year, and we’re now starting to get a better idea of what both Microsoft and Sony have prioritized for next-gen games.…
Slack was designed to be a place for co-workers to collaborate productively, but now, it’s been converted into a turnip forum. Tom Riley, a customer service employee at fintech startup Curve, participates regularly in his company’s growing Animal Crossing: New Horizons turnip channel on Slack, which has 34 people in it this week. It’s become…
A near-perfect city bike with innovative ‘Click & Roll’ accessory system What makes the perfect electric city bike? That depends on who you ask and where they live. For Europeans, a bicycle is often the primary mode of transportation in relatively flat, bike-friendly cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Berlin. We ride our bikes everywhere —…
It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend. Often, when I’m not sure what I want to play, I go…
I’m writing this story under self-quarantine for novel coronavirus exposure. I’ve been sequestered for over a week while the city outside my apartment has become America’s COVID-19 epicenter: 13,000 known cases and 125 deaths so far. The governor has ordered six feet of space between all residents in public, and my days are punctuated with…
Well, it happened: you’re stuck inside because of the novel coronavirus pandemic that is raging just outside of your door. If you’re lucky, and you’re a white-collar worker, you’re now doing your job — which, let’s be honest, is mostly email anyway — from home. If you’re in an industry that’s more susceptible to the…
As of Friday, I’ll have been self-isolating at home for 30 days. Thanks to quick action on the part of city officials to lock the city down, San Francisco is seeing great success in containing the spread of COVID-19. Within weeks, talk will turn to how we go about re-opening cities to public life —…
Animal Crossing has always been a slow burn. It’s not the kind of game you marathon for hours at a time. Instead, its joys reveal themselves over days, weeks, and months. It’s a quirk of the premise: Animal Crossing is a laid-back life simulator that takes place in real time, forcing you to wait for…
Since late March, President Donald Trump has been promoting the antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for the novel coronavirus. Among other things, he’s described “strong, powerful signs” that the drugs work and called them potentially “one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine.” That will be fantastic if it proves true,…
VENN, otherwise known as the Video Game and Entertainment News Network, wants to succeed where G4TV failed by launching a television channel entirely dedicated to gaming that appeals to both hardcore esports fans and people with a casual interest in video games. The network plans to offer a constant schedule of highly produced shows that…
Riot’s new video game, Valorant, is both a breath of fresh air and completely unoriginal at the same time. The first-person shooter opened its closed beta on Tuesday to gargantuan Twitch viewership, thanks in part to Riot’s deal with the platform that let popular streamers gift access keys to its beta while they played the…
Today is Tuesday. Yesterday was Monday. It has gotten confusing. My colleague Chaim Gartenberg made a Twitter account that can help. Otherwise, if you live in Cleveland, just watch your local news. The biggest news yesterday was Quibi’s launch. We have a full slate of coverage, from the stake setting to the CEO profile to…
I didn’t lose my breath until I started to make my way back down. Everything at the top was peaceful, if not a little anticlimactic. It was off-season, so there were no tents set up. The only thing elevated above the barren plain was a hulking, misshapen rock, bearing a weather-beaten banner with worn writing…
Today, let’s talk about some of the front-line workers at Facebook and Google working on the pandemic: the content moderators who keep the site running day in and day out. Like most stories about content moderators, it’s a tale about difficult tradeoffs. And actions taken over the past few days by Facebook and YouTube will…
Not much is going as planned for Meg Whitman. For instance, there’s a pandemic on. When I first spoke to her for this profile in December, the new coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan already, but no one in the US was yet the wiser. In January, when Whitman gave the CES keynote about her startup,…
Quibi was never supposed to compete with Netflix or Disney Plus. The novelty was shortform video for people as they waited for coffee or the bus. The space Quibi intended to seize was the lost minutes in the day — the ones big streamers aren’t competing for. But the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Quibi’s plans…
Last week, we talked about the case for the government using location data gleaned from our smartphones to manage the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Taiwan, Israel, and England have all been using location data in various ways to understand the spread of the disease and, in some cases, enforce orders requiring citizens to isolate…
Twitch is difficult to describe, to understand, and to start using. It is also incredibly rewarding once you get the hang of it, which is the way these things tend to go: the harder it is to get into something, the more you’ll like your mastery of it. I’ve been writing about Twitch and its…
[Ed. note: Today’s newsletter and column was written and distributed before Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan published his 1,300-word plan to address the security and privacy issues related to the company’s unprecedented consumer growth. What follows is unedited because email is forever.] Just in time for one backlash against the technology industry to end —…
Twitch is bigger than it’s ever been before. The site’s viewership increased a full 31 percent between March 8th and March 22nd, growing to 43 million hours watched from 33 million hours, according to data from StreamElements and Arsenal.gg. There’s also been a concurrent growth in streamers joining the platform: musicians joined en masse after…