#REDSTAR ♪ ♫

Competitively priced and with performance to match Over the last few years, all of the major NAND makers have been in a race to build NAND memory with incredibly high layer counts, and now, these efforts are paying off for SK Hynix. Today, the South Korean memory manufacturer is unleashing its Gold P31 SSDs onto the open consumer market, making SK Hynix the first to sell an SSD with 128-layer NAND. The Gold P31 SSDs come in the form of M.2 NVMe drives operating over the PCIe 3.0 interface, packing capacities of either 500 GB or 1 TB. Both of the drives feature read speeds of up to 3500 MB/s and writes of up to 3200 MB/s, which is in-line with the best PCIe 3.0 based NVMe drives, saturating the PCI-Express bandwidth. SK Hynix says that the quality of the drives should be equal to that of the Samsung 970 Evo, albeit with better value. Stacking the memory dies many layers on top of each other like this enables the NAND makers to cram more data into the same dies, which in the end uses less silicon per GB and reduces production costs, which are benefits that translate on to consumers. Tally that with today's low NAND prices, and SK Hynix has some seriously sharp pricing on these units. Meanwhile, Samsung is working on 160-layer NAND, Intel on 144 layers, and YMTC on 128-layer 3D NAND, but none of them have brought a product to market yet. The 1 TB SK Hynix Gold P31 costs $135 on Amazon, with the 500 GB variant costing $75.

game information: Platforms:PC, Xbox One Developers:Asobo Studio Publishers:Xbox Game Studios Release Date:August 18, 2020 Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most incredible experience I've ever had on a computer. The realism, the depth, the almost limitless replayability – it's like nothing I've ever played before. It does so much to recreate the feeling of actual flight, at a level of accuracy never before seen, that there were times when I came in for a landing at real-life airfields I'd seen during my time in the Air Force where I was simply stunned. These are places I will likely never visit again as a civilian, and yet as I gazed out the window during my final descent into places like Jacobabad, Pakistan or Thumrait, Oman, I was seeing an approximation so close to what I remembered from all those years ago that I actually said out loud, "Holy shit, I remember this." The attention to detail in the plane interiors, rebuilt virtually using laser scans of the real things, manufacturing documents, and CAD drawings, is astonishingly precise. But it's the integration with Microsoft's real-world Bing map services that takes this incredible simulation into a whole new realm of freedom and realism. Granted, there are a few cracks in the picture-perfect facade in some of the more remote areas, and the buildings outside of major cities are built largely with a clever algorithm instead of by human hands, but it's still absolutely wild how complete it seems. If you want to fly over your house, it's there, in Flight Simulator, exactly where it ought to be. It might not look exactly like your house, but it's there. I promise. The base version of Microsoft Flight Simulator comes with 20 planes and 30 hand-crafted airports. That might not seem like a lot of locations, but the remaining 37,000+ of the world’s airports are generated using technology sufficiently advanced that, to my eye, it is indistinguishable from magic. My local airport on the east coast of the United States, for example, is tiny and largely unremarkable, but I was impressed by how close to the mark Flight Simulator came while I was taxiing to park my Cessna. Every building is in the right place, aside from a few of the smaller (less than 10x10') outbuildings. It's quite impressive. If you want to fly over your house, it's there, in Flight Simulator, exactly where it ought to be. The hand-crafted airports, built from scans and real-world blueprints, are even more technically awe-inspiring – I’ve never seen anything close to this level of accuracy in a flight simulation before. What I really like is how developer Asobo Studios expanded the selection of "hand crafted" recreations beyond just the major airports. Sure, major hubs like JFK, Seattle-Tacoma, and Heathrow are lovingly recreated in the base game, but smaller airports are also here. There's even one in South America that's no more than a strip of dirt cutting a swath through the thick rainforest. I wasn't expecting to find such accuracy for these tiny, more challenging destinations, but I loved discovering them. In a similar vein are the airplanes themselves – the level of detail is astounding. I can say from real-world experience the cockpit of the Cessna 172 Skyhawk is perfect. You could snap a screenshot and share it online as a photo and, unless your PC is a complete potato, it would easily fool a lot of people. (I know this because I did exactly that.) Asobo not only flawlessly recreated the look of the interiors and exteriors of the available planes, but the instruments are also fully operational. The Garmin digital instruments appear and function exactly as they do in real life because the developers built emulators for the actual software that runs them into Flight Simulator. This is the first game I've ever played where I downloaded a .PDF manual from a real-world piece of equipment to reference during play – and everything in the manual checks out to the virtual hardware. It excites the absolute nerdiest parts of my core. Cruising Altitude As unbelievably realistic as the flight simulation is, it's also accessible to just about anyone's level of flight experience. You can turn on all the assists and enjoy Flight Simulator in a more arcade-style, or turn them all off and approach a virtual sortie in the same way you’d do the real thing, checklists and all. As someone without a pilot’s license (I was an electrician in the Air Force, not a pilot) my personal preference is playing halfway between the full simulation and the highest assist settings because it still creates a very challenging experience but removes some of the mundane steps from the process, like pre-flight checks, engine start, etc. Better still, since Flight Simulator is coming to Xbox Series X at some as-of-yet-undetermined point in the future, it controls really well with just an Xbox One controller. The elevator controls are a little touchy on some of the planes using the analog stick, but can be adjusted to suit your needs. Overall, I have no complaints about playing with the controller. It still requires keyboard functionality to get the most out of your plane, but there's no immediate need to rush out and buy a flight stick or yoke. That being said, the simulation is much more authentic and enjoyable if you do have access to a dedicated flight controller. I used Thrustmaster's new Airbus A380 flight stick, in addition to my time with the Xbox controller, and it makes flying that much more immersive. Even planes with yokes are better with a flight stick, so if you have the means and if you can actually find one, I recommend picking up a dedicated controller for the full Flight Simulator experience. Just keep in mind it's not a requirement, which is a great feature for those of us who’d rather dabble in flying than make a big hardware investment. The 20 planes and 30 hand-crafted airports in the $60 base version of Microsoft Flight Simulator are already a respectable amount of content. These aircraft run the gamut from highly maneuverable stunt planes like the Aviat Pitts Special S2S biplane, to wide-bodied airliners like the "Queen of the Skies" herself, the Boeing 747-8. However, if you’re hungry for more, the $90 Deluxe Edition adds five more planes and five airports, and the $120 Premium Deluxe Edition adds another five of each, for a total of 30 different aircraft and 40 airports. The variety is excellent, although as an Air Force vet I was a little disappointed that there are no military aircraft. I was holding out hope I'd get to fly a C-130 (my favorite airplane of all), or a C-17. A military trainer like the jet-propelled T-38 would also have been an exciting addition, or even a ViperJet. If you want to fly a jet aircraft the only option right now is a passenger plane, and that's a bit of a bummer – but certainly not a deal breaker. I’m not trying to knock the already impressive selection here, either, I'm just being greedy. With that said, I was perfectly content with the 20 planes included with the base game, and I don't really see the need to upgrade unless you feel you absolutely must get behind the controls of a 787-10 Dreamliner or a Cessna 152 or 172 variant. Aircraft run the gamut from highly maneuverable stunt planes like the Aviat Pitts Special S2S biplane to the Boeing 747-8. Even with medium assists turned on, getting off the ground and back again in one piece requires a lot of planning, careful maneuvering, and tons of practice. There is a built-in "flight school" that puts you in the pilot seat of the Cessna 172, and it’s great. It helped me a lot with terminology, best flight practices, and getting used to handling the aircraft. By the time I finished all the flight lessons, I felt completely confident in my abilities controlling the Cessna and its maneuvers. The other planes operate under the same basic principles, but some of them, particularly the airliners like the A320neo and the 747, require a lot of familiarizing if you even want to attempt a landing without a disaster. I wish there was more aircraft-specific training available for the other planes in the fleet, but there is a pretty smart AI you can hand the controls to at any time during your flight. I was able to learn a lot about the proper approach angle and landing speeds just from watching my AI pilot take over. (I expect YouTube tutorials will become a thriving genre as well.) And besides, if just flying for the sake of flying is your goal, you can always turn on the assists to make it easier. Final Approach All of that gorgeous detail and accurately modeled equipment is on the inside, but the absolute genius of Microsoft Flight Simulator is actually outside the planes, enabled by its Bing Maps integration. Two petabytes (that’s 2,000 terabytes) of satellite and high-altitude photography are available to stream to your computer to accurately represent whatever part of the globe you decide to visit. The effect is absolutely mindblowing: I've flown places I've never been in my life, circling Machu Picchu or barnstorming between the Great Pyramids, and it feels like virtual sightseeing. But I've also flown to places I have visited just to relive the travel experience, and have been thoroughly impressed. More than once I've set off from my local airport and followed real-life roads through the Maine woods and into Quebec, retreading (re-winging?) the route I took last year by car. I've also landed on the tiny dirt airstrips in some of Maine's remote inhabited islands, taking in the familiar scenery from 2,500 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. You can even fly in real-world weather conditions with live air traffic, all of which is adjustable with in-game menus that are easily accessible during flight. If you've ever wanted to take off from an airport in a driving snowstorm at night, you can set the weather and time to your liking. One of my favorite things to do when flying is to adjust the time of day to the "golden hour," early mornings or just before dusk when the sun's rays are at their warmest and most pleasant. It makes for some incredible sights. The limitations of the Bing integration come in two distinct circumstances: if your internet service provider has a data cap, and when the existing aerial photography of an area happens to be low-resolution. In the case of the data cap problem, you can preinstall locations ahead of time, so you load one small chunk of data rather than opening up the data firehose. Asobo seems to be sympathetic to this hazard and offers a setting in the menus to track your data use and set an upper limit so you don't go over your cap. After a few hours of play, including flights over San Francisco and New York City, I only used a few megabytes of data, but multiply that over a few hours a day over the course of a month (and flying over less frequently traveled areas) and it could become concerning. (Also, that comes after you install this 150GB monster of a game!) If you've ever wanted to take off from an airport in a driving snowstorm at night, you can set the weather and time to your liking. The second limitation is with low-resolution maps, which show up in some of the more remote corners of the Earth, but it’s only really noticeable at low-altitudes. Personally, I find the thrill of flying a few feet above the Colorado river more than enough to compensate for the lack of texture details on the walls of the Grand Canyon. Also, since the data is pulled directly from Bing, low-resolution areas will improve as its database of imagery improves over time. At the moment, though, some places do look decidedly… PlayStation 1… when you're up close and personal. Friendly Skies The act of flying and exploring some far-flung corner of the Earth is more than enough to keep me entertained, but Flight Simulator adds some competitive elements, including landing challenges. A rotating selection of remote and challenging airstrips become a place to showcase your landing skills, with scores being assigned to your performance in categories like accuracy on the runway, roll distance, and bounce. It's actually a really fun way to increase your skills, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to land successfully on a mountaintop airfield in France. Will I ever top the leaderboards on these challenges? Well, for now, yeah. I actually have a few of the world's top-scores for some of the landing challenges. Will this trend hold once the game comes out? No. God no. But will I continue trying to improve my scores? My inner competitor demands that I must! Naturally, many of those attempts will end with you damaging or even outright crashing your plane. You might think you're making a last-ditch effort to put your plane on the ground, only to discover (like I did) the landing gear on a heavy like the Airbus A320neo isn't designed for non-tarmac use. For obvious reasons, a crash doesn’t result in a realistic fireball, but rather a black screen and a pop-up window that alerts you to your shameful performance – as if you didn’t already know. It's not just crashes that cause instant failure: taking a plane well beyond its physical limitations, like an over-speed scenario, will also end your flight before you actually hit the ground. I found this out while first trying to do a barrel roll in a 747 and ended up descending too fast. That's not to say you can't do some sick stunts: you absolutely can make that 747 execute a successful barrel roll with a little practice – I did it a LOT, actually. It's just you can't make a plane do more than it could do in real life. You absolutely can make that 747 execute a successful barrel roll with a little practice. Performance wise, Flight Simulator looks great on my PC, which is no slouch but a few years old at this point. I'm running a Core i7-7700K with a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU and 32GB of RAM. Microsoft Flight Simulator set itself to "high" when I initially started up, but I did find myself turning down some of the lighting effects to medium to improve performance. That made it steady, for the most part, except that loading into one of the larger airports near a major city slowed things down to a crawl, particularly when I tried to fly one of the bigger airplanes. However, the stuttering frame rate always mellowed out to a nice, pleasant clip after a few seconds, making for a smooth flight. Where my PC really struggles with Microsoft Flight Simulator, and I suspect this will be a problem for most people, is loading times. Big airports take a long time, sometimes as much four minutes in the case of Chicago O'Hare. Even remote airports with far less going on take at least a minute. I'm certain it's not my PC’s fault, because I installed Microsoft Simulator on a 1TB WD Blue M.2 NVMe SSD, and it’s hard to get a lot faster than that right now. It's not surprising given the staggering amount of data Microsoft Flight Simulator has to load, but it's still impossible to ignore all that time you spend twiddling your thumbs. As frustrating as the loading times can be, once you're into an area it only takes a few seconds to restart if you crash or manually reset your flight. Personally, I didn't mind the wait too much – it represents only a fraction of the total time I spent in the cockpit. It also should be pointed out that, at launch, Flight Simulator doesn’t support VR, but Microsoft says it’s coming in a patch later this year. Just the thought of being able to play Flight Simulator in virtual reality has me seriously considering upgrading to a new headset. As incredible as it looks and feels on just my monitor, I really want to immerse myself in the experience as much as humanly possible. Verdict Microsoft Flight Simulator is legitimately incredible. It's difficult to fully describe how amazing it feels to jump into a plane and have the freedom fly to and from literally any place in the entire world. The base game's 20 included aircraft feel like more than enough for even hardcore aviation enthusiasts, and the ability to adjust the assists to tailor the experience to whatever skill level you desire makes it suitable for anyone looking to fly the friendly skies from the comfort of their home. The real-world mapping data, however, takes Microsoft Flight Simulator from being just an impressive game to the most awe-inspiring simulation I've ever experienced, in spite of its less than stellar load times. Seeing famous landmarks, landing at the world's most recognizable airports, or just touching down in a remote landing strip in South America is mind-bogglingly cool and an absolutely unparalleled way to virtually explore our world. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 Processor: Intel i5-4460 | AMD Ryzen 3 1200 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 770 | AMD Radeon RX 570 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 150 GB available space RECOMMENDED: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 Processor: Intel i5-8400 | AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 | AMD Radeon RX 590 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 150 GB available space

Find out which of these three remote desktop solutions is the best for you or your business Remote desktop software is essential for many businesses and on-the-go individuals who need to access computers that might be in another room or on another continent. There are many different companies that provide this sort of functionality, but the one you choose needs to be fast, secure, reliable, and, of course, affordable. To help you or your business determine which is the best remote desktop software available today, we’ll compare TeamViewer, AnyDesk, and RemotePC. In the course of our assessment, we’ll look at features, performance, ease of use, support, and prici Features All three of these products enable unattended access to a remote computer as if you were sitting in front of it. You’ll be able to easily transfer files between computers and print remotely. Cross-platform support All of the major operating systems are supported by these three products: Windows, Mac, and Linux for desktops, and iOS and Android for mobiles. AnyDesk and TeamViewer also support Chrome OS. Where TeamViewer stands out, though, is that it covers 127 makers of operating systems and devices, both mobile and Internet of Things (IoT). This sets it ahead of all its competitors according to a study conducted by Qualitest, an independent quality assurance company. Collaboration If your business operates in a variety of different locations, then having the ability to collaborate remotely will be important. All three solutions give you the ability to collaborate on documents or presentations in real-time. But RemotePC and TeamViewer offer more features than AnyDesk, with support for text chat, voice and video conferencing, and the ability to record remote sessions. Administration All three provide a web-based management console where you’ll be able to manage users, contacts, and connections. They also provide reporting tools for keeping track of sessions and activities. AnyDesk and TeamViewer support automated mass deployments and custom branding. But TeamViewer goes even further with its own ticketing system and integrations with external helpdesk and CRM platforms. Security When data is being transferred between devices, it’s important that the connections are secure. All three products provide high levels of security with encryption and verified connections. However, TeamViewer has additional features that set it apart, including malware protection, remote data backup, and remote device monitoring for websites, servers, and networks. Conclusion AnyDesk and RemotePC both have extensive feature sets, but in nearly every area, TeamViewer has more features that take it to the next level. Performance Interface and ease of use We found all three desktop apps very easy to use, with all the main functions easy to find. Scaling the screen was also handled well by each, with the images being clear and crisp. Connecting to mobile devices worked equally as well as connecting to other desktop computers. Going the other way though, from mobile to desktop, was a bit different. We found both the RemotePC and AnyDesk mobile apps quite difficult to use. With RemotePC, sometimes we’d highlight text unintentionally. Touch oversensitivity was a problem with both, too. Latency and system resources All three apps performed very well in terms of latency and their use of system resources. During our testing, there was no lag to speak of, mouse tracking was smooth, and clicks initiated actions on the remote device almost instantaneously. We were also impressed by the system resource usage of each of the apps, with less than 10% of total CPU power being used by any of them. Conclusion All three apps performed well in terms of ease of use, latency, image clarity, and system resources. But AnyDesk and RemotePC’s mobile apps were more difficult to use, and for that reason, TeamViewer takes the points in this category. Support All three companies offer technical support by help desk ticket after you fill out a form on their respective websites. For AnyDesk, that is the only means of contacting support. There is a phone number, but it’s for sales inquiries only. RemotePC and TeamViewer also offer limited-hours telephone support, with TeamViewer’s available during local business hours in most countries and RemotePC’s from 6 AM to 11:30 PM (PST). Each company also has a separate section on its website for a knowledge base or FAQs. But RemotePC comes out in front in this department because it’s the only one that also has 24/7 live chat support available. Pricing and plans Single users If you’re a private individual and will only be using a remote desktop solution for personal use, then both AnyDesk and TeamViewer offer their apps for free. If you’re a sole operator or freelancer looking to purchase a single license, AnyDesk has the cheapest plan at $10.99/month, but it only lets you connect to a single device. TeamViewer’s single-user plan is $49/month for three devices. But RemotePC offers the best value with its SOHO plan at $52.12 giving you access to ten computers. Multi-user/Teams AnyDesk has two multi-user plans ranging from $20.99/month to $52.49/month, and both can be used on unlimited devices. RemotePC has plans at $187.12/month for 50 computers and $374.62/month for 100 computers. TeamViewer has the Multi User plan at $99.00/month, with up to 50 users licensed to create a single session, and the For Teams plan at $199.00/month for up to 200 users who can each have three sessions running simultaneously. Conclusion AnyDesk and TeamViewer are both free for personal use, RemotePC has the value for single-user plans, and AnyDesk offers the best prices for multi-user plans with unlimited devices, so overall, AnyDesk edges it slightly in the pricing department. Verdict All three of these remote desktop solutions offer extensive features and were easy to use. AnyDesk came out slightly in front in the pricing department, while RemotePC was the best of the three in terms of support. But even though it wasn’t the cheapest option, TeamViewer offered the most features, and its mobile app was the easiest to use. For medium to large businesses, TeamViewer would be the preferred option due to its extensive list of features aimed at teams and collaboration. For single users or small businesses, AnyDesk and RemotePC were comparable in almost every department, but RemotePC offered better value for money, so it would be the best choice here.

Want this chip in the US? Order from the UK AMD's Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' APUs are quite killer, but unfortunately, AMD has decided to only give the fun to system builders and integrators. If you're in the DIY market, for the most part, you're out of luck. A Small Hurdle to Obtain a Chip You Shouldn't Have But it's not entirely impossible to obtain a chip. We managed to snag a Ryzen 4750G early on for review, and while it's still kind of gray market, Quiet PC from the UK is now shipping the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G, Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G, and the Ryzen 3 Pro 4350G to over 90 countries, including the US. Shipping will run you roughly an additional $40 depending on your location, bringing the total prices for these chips up to $387, $262, and $208, respectively. These are higher prices than they should be, and you'll have to ask yourself whether you're not better off putting the money towards a discrete graphics card instead, but shipping the chips from the UK can be an outcome worth considering if you need some of AMD's new APU goodness.

game information; Developed by: Retro Studios Published by: Nintendo Genre(s): 2DPlatformerAction First Released Feb 28, 2014 plate:Nintendo Switch.Wii U There's something about Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze that's just a little off. Maybe it's the way Donkey Kong doesn't quite land with the firm-footedness you'd expect from a Nintendo platforming mascot. Maybe it's because, despite the introduction of the likes of Dixie Kong and Cranky Kong as playable characters with new abilities, Tropical Freeze's levels see little in the way of new challenges or designs to accommodate them. Or maybe, just maybe, it's because--despite some fun moments--this is one of the least exciting platformers I've played in some time. The problem lies with Tropical Freeze's reluctance to stray too far from the formula of its predecessor--or indeed, many a '90s platformer--without maintaining the same levels of quality, and without adding anything meaningful along the way. When we're spoilt with the likes of Rayman: Legends and Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U, Tropical Freeze feels like a step back in time--and not in the good, retro-chic kind of way. None of its levels are bad, but while its competitors mix up elegant puzzles, platforming challenges, and clever new ideas to great effect, here your journey gets very familiar, very quickly. In the first level, you leap over a few easy platforms, and maybe bash a few baddies on the head. In the next, you might bounce on some sprung platforms to reach some taller ones, or climb some vines to do the same. Later, you might even get a few zip lines loosely slung over some bottomless pits of death. Then the game starts to repeat itself. Sure, the backdrops change, and some jumps become trickier than others, but the mostly unimaginative level design doesn't mix those ideas up in new or interesting ways. No Caption Provided It's all a bit stop and start. Platforms and enemies are laid out in odd ways, making it difficult to establish the sort of smooth, free-flowing rhythm that makes the best 2D platformers such a blast. For instance, you might be leaping across a level, picking up a good rhythm between jumps, before being stopped by a set of collapsing stone walls. In a good platformer like Tropical Freeze's predecessor, those walls would be timed to fall in rhythm with previous jumps and obstacles, letting you zip past them quickly, and make you feel like a platforming pro. But here, no matter how you approach those walls, you're stopped dead in your tracks, making you lose your rhythm. Dixie Kong's ability to make DK float and jump a little higher, Cranky Kong's ability to give DK a bigger bounce, and Diddy Kong's jetpack are nice additions to the formula, but the mundane level design fails to make much of their new powers and offer up a different challenge. Only the levels unlocked by collecting all of the hidden KONG and puzzle pieces do better. Dixie Kong's ability to make DK float and jump a little higher, Cranky Kong's ability to give DK a bigger bounce, and Diddy Kong's jetpack are nice additions to the formula, but the mundane level design fails to make much of their new powers and offer up a different challenge. Only the levels unlocked by collecting all of the hidden KONG and puzzle pieces do better. There are some cheap tricks used along the way too. Thankfully, they're rare, but when they do appear, it's frustrating. Sometimes I'd perform a leap of faith during a particularly tricky section, only to land on an enemy on the other side that had lurked just out of shot. Other times I'd be racing down a zip line, only to find that the visual cues for jumps, like well-placed bananas and coins, were all too easy to miss, causing me to plummet to my death. It's a shame that you can't have the game show you the best path like in Donkey Kong Country Returns; it's very much a process of trial and error when it comes to surviving some of Tropical Freeze's cheaper tricks. Extra lives are plentiful, though, and if you get stuck, you can always purchase more using coins you collect along the way. Tropical Freeze's vehicle sections fare much better than its standard levels, and help to break up some of the more monotonous moments of DK's adventure. Whether it's riding on the back of Rambi the Rhino and carefully guiding him through destructible blocks and rows of enemies, or zipping through the air on the back of a rocket-powered barrel, these sections are fast-paced and nicely challenging too. Trying to keep the barrel afloat long enough to dodge obstacles and collect bananas is a great bit of twitch gaming, as are later sections where you guide a speeding mine cart along some wobbly-looking tracks. Boss battles are similarly good fun, thanks to some interesting-looking characters that aren't your usual three-hits-to-kill type of opponent. A battle against a giant owl has you dodging ice balls and throwing bashed baby owls before you're whisked up in the air to dodge projectiles against a mighty storm. Another has you fighting a trio of bomb-throwing monkeys, ducking, rolling, and jumping across the level to avoid their spinning hammer attacks, while also trying to pick up their bombs and hurl them straight back at them. This is one of the least exciting platformers I've played in some time. Tropical Freeze can get challenging and feel unfair when you're sent back to the beginning of a long, multistage boss battle, just because of a less-than-forgiving checkpoint system. Practice the patterns, though, and you'll make it through alive. Battles are also easier if you grab a friend and indulge in two-player co-op. While the game doesn't make clever use of the additional player, you'll appreciate the extra help during particularly tough bosses: just make sure you've got plenty of extra lives stocked up. If the regular levels were as inventive as the boss battles, then Tropical Freeze would be a surefire hit, or at least a game that demands more of your attention. No matter how much I was looking forward to seeing DK in HD, it's difficult to maintain that enthusiasm when the end product plays it so safe: even the visuals fail to make an impact. They're nice enough, but like the level design, the environments are mostly bland. While you could argue that the visual style is true to the series, I think even traditionalists wouldn't mind something with a little more pizzazz behind it. As it stands, this a sometimes fun but mostly uninspired and unimaginative entry in the Donkey Kong series.

Redesigned clipboard panel will ship with the next Windows 10 update Microsoft may be planning to release Windows 10X in the spring of 2021 but some of the new operating system's features could be coming to Windows 10 sooner than that including a new panel that completely changes how copying and pasting works. As reported by Windows Latest, in Windows 10 Build 20185 the software giant has added a new panel that allows users to insert emojis, GIFs and even content from their clipboards. The new panel also includes several new features to make it easier for users to add content to their messages, documents and emails. In addition to being able to access your most recently used emoji and GIFs as well as search for new ones, the panel includes a feature called “Clipboard history” that displays a list of items that users have recently copied to the clipboard. While there are already clipboard replacements available for Windows, the new panel will offer similar functionality natively and can even be synced across devices. Windows 10 clipboard update The clipboard in Windows 10 already allows users to access their clipboard history at any time by pressing the Windows key and V. Clipboard items can also be shared across Windows 10 devices by going to system settings and choosing “Automatically sync text that I copy” in the clipboard menu under the “Sync across devices” tab. However, clipboard history currently stores a maximum of 25 entries and the oldest items are deleted as new ones appear. The new clipboard history coming to Windows 10 soon not only supports text but also images and HTML content. Users can also delete the history of the clipboard or turn off the feature entirely from the settings menu. If you used Google's keyboard app Gboard before, the new panel in Windows will work in much the same way as GIFs and emojis can be accessed and inserted into your messages or documents very quickly and easily. The new panel is expected to arrive with Windows 10's next feature update although at this time, it is still unknown as to when Microsoft will release it.

Can you beat this robotic air hockey AI? Finding a worthy opponent is the only way to truly develop a skill. What better way to beef up your air hockey game than facing up against a robotic foe? This project, shared by Marasadu on Reddit, features a Raspberry Pi-powered air hockey robot that's seriously good at winning. The air hockey table was designed by a team. It relies on stepper motors to move the opposing striker (the handle you use to move the puck). The entire operation is controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The final build for the table was designed using Fusion 360, 3D design software from Autodesk. Some of the components used were 3D printed. The mainboard for the rig is a Raspberry Pi 4 while the stepper motors were controlled with Arduino Micros. The table also features a touchscreen with a custom interface. You can manually control the robotic opponent with the touchscreen or let it automate turns. There is a camera fitted above the play area to help track the puck in real-time. The team used machine learning to train the robot to implement the best move possible for every turn. If you want to check out this project, you can explore the full post on Reddit and a video breakdown of the project on YouTube. In the meantime, be sure to check back here on Tom's Hardware for more cool Raspberry Pi projects.

game information: Developed by: Studio MDHR Published by: Studio MDHR Genre(s): ActionPlatformer2D First Released :Sep 29, 2017 plate:Macintosh.Nintendo Switch.PC.PlayStation 4.Xbox One Everything you've heard about Cuphead is true. It is a difficult side-scrolling shooter with relentless boss battles that demand rapid-fire actions and reactions. Think for too long, and you won't stand a chance against the game's toughest enemies. Battles may only last three minutes at most, but they feel far longer when you know that you can only absorb three hits before you have to start from scratch. When you are navigating your way around bullets, smaller enemies, and pitfalls, while simultaneously trying to damage your primary target, toppling Cuphead's imposing bosses is both a monumental and rewarding task. But difficult battles only tell half of the story. Cuphead's 1930s cartoon aesthetic is endlessly charming, popping with color and expression unlike anything seen at this scale in a video game before. And now that it's available on Switch, you can get a closer look and admire the artwork in the palm of your hand. The sheer variety of characters and settings yields consistent delight as you go from one stage to the next, with everything bearing the telltale signs of grainy film and rudimentary production techniques. Cel-shading means one thing to a lot of people, but Cuphead truly re-creates the look of hand-drawn cel animation. The characters and bosses that are clearly inspired by cartoon legends like Betty Boop break free from the expected to surprise you with something new. Never mind that Betty's lookalike is a mermaid now; it's the moment her head breaks free from her body and spews caustic skulls that gives you pause. If you can appreciate the unique animation style, you will be doubly impressed when you see what developer Studio MDHR has brought to the table. If its technical execution wasn't enough, MDHR's creativity puts Cuphead in a league of its own. A world map sets the stage for your adventure. As a Cup-thing who gambled with the devil, you now must go around collecting debts from the devil's other acquaintances--the game's bosses. Outside of one-on-one fights, you also have a few opportunities to run and gun through less-imposing platforming stages. These help break up the action and give you a chance to collect coins that can be cashed in for "weapons" and passive buffs. Coins are in short supply and can only be collected once, so farming to gain an advantage is out of the question. These stages don't compare to Cuphead's main attractions, but they add valuable substance nonetheless. The mix of ammunition for your handgun--character fire from their fingers--includes the likes of a spread shot, a charge blast, and a boomerang round. There are six in all, and each comes with a secondary attack that's tied to a meter that fills when you successfully land shots on enemies. You can also earn meter by parrying pink projectiles and enemies, a task that requires you to jump towards an enemy and then tap jump again at just the right moment before impact. These range from a fireball and a ring of damaging gems to a burst of bulky, short-range arrows. Finally, you have a super art, which can only be fired when your entire meter is full, as opposed to spending one section of that meter to fire your weapon's secondary attack. The one catch here is that when your meter is full, you can't perform a secondary attack--you are inconveniently forced to unleash your super art, which isn't always desirable. Given that you are able to equip two weapons at once, the variety of loadouts you can equip before a fight allows for flexibility on your part. While you may benefit by bringing a specific set of arms into some boss battles--say, using tracer rounds to pick off minor enemies swarming overhead--you can still carry whatever you wish into battle so long as you have the confidence and knowledge meet the challenge ahead. Learning the bosses' attack pattern is oftentimes half the battle, and it's typical to run through a fight multiple times until you see everything that might get thrown your way. Every boss fight consists of multiple stages or forms. Bosses will change shape, position, and behavior with each new phase. And within an individual phase, you may see as many as four different attacks, though you aren't always guaranteed to see them all during subsequent fights. When bosses begin to mix multiple attacks at once, the potential for various deadly combos keeps you on your toes no matter how familiar you are with the fight in question. The fear of the unexpected is part of what makes Cuphead such a thrilling game, beyond the frantic moment-to-moment tension. You only have three hit points per stage by default--you gain a fourth if you equip a charm that also weakens your firepower. But when the only question in your head is, "In what order will the boss' attacks appear?" fights take on less-appealing light after the dozenth attempt. It's in these moments you start to identify a few places where Cuphead could do a slightly better job of keeping you informed of your own progress and capabilities. You never can tell exactly how close to death--or a phase change, for that matter--bosses are. At best, you can see a plotline of the battle after death, to loosely gauge your relative progress. In the face of defeat, you may begin to question if you're carrying the right tools for the job. Beyond revisiting old fights, which is more arduous than it should be as you traverse the map slowly and can't fast travel, there isn't a great way to familiarize yourself with new weapons. And there's, unfortunately, no way to tell exactly how much damage one weapon does compared to another. Vague descriptions are all you get. If Cuphead's fights were indeed puzzles with one correct solution, this would be incredibly frustrating. As it stands, there's only a small amount of frustration to be found while fumbling with new weapons and dying in the process. It may sound like a minor thing to praise, but the fact that boss battles reload in one or two seconds is a godsend when it comes to trial-and-error tactics. And no matter how frustrating a boss may be, you can't escape the draw of their expressive animations. Cuphead does support two-player local co-op as well but it's pretty evident that this makes life more difficult for you and your partner. Despite the intricate chaos that you face alone in any given fight, when you add another character and more projectiles on screen, playing with a friend makes it far more difficult to discern your surroundings, and much easier to slip up. You do have a small window of time to revive a fallen comrade by parrying their ghost, but it's a mere few seconds while it floats up to the top of the screen before disappearing for the remainder of the fight. For anyone interested in getting a taste of Cuphead without facing almost-guaranteed defeat, there are simpler versions of every boss that you can fight--but you won't be able to access the final battle unless you beat every standard boss on the normal difficulty. And in reality, you may as well stick with the standard fights as Cuphead is relentless no matter how you play. Cuphead has been a longtime coming, and it's great to see that it lives up to its initial promises across all platforms. It's beautiful to look at, and with a pitch-perfect soundtrack, it flawlessly captures the era its developers so clearly revere. It's also an intense action game that pulls no punches. It could benefit from a few tweaks, and two-player co-op doesn't feel like the valuable addition you might imagine, but Cuphead remains a rare, unique game that truly stands out. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E8400, 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3.0GHz or higher Memory: 3 GB RAM Graphics: Geforce 9600 GT or AMD HD 3870 512MB or higher DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 4 GB available space

An easy-to-use, inexpensive drawing package Creately is a diagram-making app which can either be used as a cloud subscription service or installed as a desktop app on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The software supports more than 40 types of diagram, with a library containing thousands of templates from which to choose. It is designed for collaboration and is aimed at teams working in marketing, product development, engineering, HR, strategy, and education. Thousands of teams are already using it, with Creately claiming to have more than three million users. Plans and Pricing Creately considers its cloud and desktop offerings to be two different products and so has different pricing for each. The cloud service has three plans, starting out with a free plan which is limited to five documents (all of which will be publicly available to the Creately community), one folder, and three collaborators. The paid plans offer the same feature set—unlimited folders and private documents, five collaborators, high resolution exports, and four types of imports and exports—with the Personal plan restricted to a single user and the Team plan starting at three users but going up to 500. The Personal plan costs $5/month (or $49/year if you pay annually). Meanwhile, the Team plan is $15/month or $149/year for three users, then it increases depending on how many users you need. The more users you add, the more the price is discounted, with 500 users costing $750/month ($1.50/user/month) or $7,500/year ($15/user/year). There is no free plan for the desktop product, only the Personal and Team plans, with both being one-off purchases. Personal is $75 and Team starts at $225 for three users, going up to $3,999 for 100 users. Both come with one year of free upgrades and automatic online sync. The Team option also comes with user management. All cloud and desktop products have a 30-day money-back guarantee and are available at discounted rates for education, charities, and open-source projects under the Creately Scholarship scheme. Features The makers of Creately consider speed to be a feature, claiming that you can create any sketch or drawing ‘multiple times faster’ with their product. Flowcharts will auto connect flows and swimlanes, images and custom text can be added to org charts, and wireframes and user interfaces can be created for web and mobile apps. You can create sitemaps with an array of pages, elements and decorative items, unified modeling language (UML), entity relationship, and database diagrams with easy-to-edit standards-compliant shapes, and IT network and datacenter rack diagrams. An extensible library comes pre-po[CENSORED]ted with thousands of shapes for 70 different types of diagram. If a shape or connector you require doesn’t already exist, easy drawing shortcuts can be used to create new ones with a single operation. There are also predefined themes and styles, or you can use the formatting options to bring your content to life. Like many cloud drawing tools, Creately also offers the ability to collaborate with your team regardless of their location, which makes it ideal for remote, distributed teams. Team members can be working on the same document at the same time from any location and can see changes and comments added in real time. Comments can be added to exact points on the documents you’re working on, and the discussions that follow can be threaded. When the document is finished, it can be exported for sharing in multiple formats. Interface and In Use You don’t even need to sign up for an account to use Creately but can dive right in and start creating. Choose to begin with a blank document or select a template from a broad range of categories. After you decide on your template, Creately will offer you an animated ‘tour’ to introduce you to the interface. It’s quick and does a good job of exposing how to get the best out of the app. The left menu of the app has four clickable icons for ‘Home’, ‘Folder’, ‘Images,’ and Shapes.’ Home displays your documents (you will need to create an account if you want to save your documents), while Folder enables you to manage documents. Images enables you to import images into your documents, and Shapes gives you access to shapes that can be dragged onto the main workspace. The right menu of the app presents information about any elements you’ve selected in the workspace and changes depending on what you have selected. There is a tab for Styles, where you can quickly change the color of elements, and a tab for Comments, where you click a button to add a comment and then click where you want to place the comment in the workspace. Support Support is limited to a series of articles and a form for contacting support. The support center presents the articles as if they’re in different categories, but all the links I followed led to pages that were in the same format. The Support Community articles didn’t look any different from the others. The Competition Creately operates in the same space as services like Lucidchart, SmartDraw, Draw.io, and Microsoft Visio. It is closest to Visio in that it offers both monthly cloud subscriptions and a stand-alone app for computers, but has better prices in both categories. Creately, however, doesn’t have as many features or integrations as either Lucidchart or SmartDraw. Final Verdict Creately is an easy-to-use, inexpensive drawing package which should appeal to many. The large library of templates and existing shapes is a real time-saver, and the app’s ease of use means you should be able to produce good results quickly. Advertisement There are a couple of little things which take the gloss off slightly: importing SVGs can sometimes be quite difficult, and the app tends to slow down slightly when using the real-time collaboration features. But these are relatively minor issues and shouldn’t detract from the overall experience too much.

It's like you're really there! Sort of… With many of us working from home, virtual meetings have become the norm. But one challenging aspect of these online meetings led Lorraine Underwood to develop this cool Raspberry Pi project. Frustrated with the inability to look around at her colleagues, she decided to develop a solution with the help of VR! Instead of glancing at corners of the screen, this project lets you actively look around a room through a VR headset. You can see your coworker through a Pi-powered camera rig that sits physically in the room with your coworker. One Raspberry Pi camera setup is needed for each guest. The setup uses a Raspberry Pi to host a webserver. This server allows guests to connect and look around the room. Each Pi is connected to a Pimoroni Pan-Tilt HAT which uses two servo motors to move around. A Raspberry Pi camera provides visual data for the VR headset to display to the wearer. If you don't have a VR headset, you can still move the camera around through the web server by using the arrow buttons. You can check it out live next Tuesday on our next episode of Tom's Hardware's Picast! Lorraine is our special guest and will be joining us for a full demonstration.

game information: Platforms:Xbox One, PlayStation 4 Developers:Electronic Arts Publishers:Electronic Arts Features:Offline Versus Multiplayer, Online Versus Multiplayer Release Date:August 14, 2020 After laying down a clunky but promising foundation with their first UFC game in 2014, EA Vancouver has done a respectable job of iterating and improving on each new entry over the last six years. That tradition continues in EA Sports UFC 4. It focuses on making its many complex systems a little less intimidating for newcomers without ever taking away from the depth of its multi-layered combat, thanks to a new grapple assist system and a much improved career mode that does a better job of teaching the basics of the many facets of mixed martial arts. Some of the larger ambitions of career mode fall a bit flat and the ground game still feels like it could use some work, but all things considered, UFC 4 is a win for MMA fans. Unlike UFC 3, which dramatically revamped the entire striking system, UFC 4 is more about small but necessary adjustments as opposed to grand overhauls. The biggest difference this time around is the clinch game, which no longer just feels like a stand-up version of the ground gameplay. Instead of having to navigate through clinch positions just to get to a spot where you can escape, all you have to do to break a clinch is move away from your opponent. You’ll likely still eat a few shots, but as long as you have room to back up, breaking a clinch is much easier to do. That said, if you get caught in a clinch with your back against the fence, you’ll find yourself in a very tough spot, especially against a fighter that excels there. It’s a smart change, as it makes the clinch game feel like a natural extension of the standup combat rather than its own separate minigame. With this new system you can very organically go from strike to clinch, and from there decide whether you want to attack the head, attack the body, push the opponent up against the cage, or, for some fighters, even go for a standing submission ala Jon Jones vs Lyoto Machida. The clinch game now feels like a natural extension of the standup combat. The other big change this time around is with submissions, which has actually been split into two different types of minigames: one for chokes and one for joint submissions. Both minigames are essentially a race to be the first one to either fill up the submit meter or the escape meter. For chokes, the attacker must fill the submit meter by using the left stick to move a bar around a circle in an attempt to cover the defender's bar. The defender, meanwhile, fills their escape meter automatically as long as they're not covered by the attacker. For joints the concept is basically the same, except you use the triggers to move your respective bar left and right. The big challenge for the defender is that your bar increases in size the more you move, so just wildly spinning the control stick or spamming the shoulder buttons like a wild person doesn’t work. That rewards a more careful, cat and mouse-style mind game when compared to the much more erratic gate submission system of prior games. Another really cool addition is that some fighters that are especially skilled on the ground can even gain opportunities to counter certain submissions with either a slam or even a counter-submission, like a Von Flue choke. Not only is this awesome because it’s very true to the actual UFC experience, but it also balances the risk/reward factor of going for a submission when you’re not in a dominant position somewhat. Finally, EA Vancouver also introduced a grapple assist system for those that might not know their full guards from their half guards, their side controls from their mounts, or their rubber guards from their mouth guards. When using grapple assist, instead of transitioning to specific positions while on the ground, you can just choose to transition based on what it is you want to do. If you want to move to a position that allows you to get up, just keep on pressing up on the right stick until you’re able to get up. If you want to ground and pound, keep on pressing right to eventually transition to a position where you can do some ground and pound. And if you want to do a submission, just hold left and you’ll transition to a position that lets you perform a submission. It’s not ideal, because sometimes you need that extra level of specificity to land better ground and pound or get access to better submissions, but for those who are just picking the game up for the first time, it’s a great shortcut to start having fun without having someone explain to them what all the different positions mean, which ones have submissions, and which ones you can get up from. Of course, there’s also the legacy control scheme along with a new hybrid control scheme that combines the two, allowing you to transition to specific positions with the right stick and use the more general assist transitions with the left stick, which is a nice compromise. The ground game still feels largely unsatisfying in UFC 4. Outside of those big changes and a couple of other small control adjustments, the gameplay in UFC 4 is largely the same, which for the most part is fine. UFC 3 already did a great job of revamping striking, but the ground game still feels largely unsatisfying in UFC 4. Ground and pound strikes still lack impact, despite having dis-proportionally loud sound effects; the guessing game of transitions and transition denials is still incredibly unintuitive without the guide arrows, which are removed in online play regardless of whether you’re playing casually or in ranked; and there’s still no feedback provided to let you know why you failed a transition, leaving you to guess as to whether it was because you were too slow, you hit the wrong direction, your opponent had grapple advantage, or any of the other factors it could be. The Life of a Fighter UFC 4 treats its career mode as an onboarding tool to get new players very quickly up to speed with the basics, and in that way, it’s very successful. After getting your ass kicked in your very first amateur fight, you’re taken under the wing of fictional former UFC fighter, Coach Davis. Davis serves as an extended tutorial that walks you through the various facets of MMA, and importantly, after every lesson you’ll have an amateur fight against an opponent that specializes in that discipline, allowing you to really soak in what he teaches you. After you get through all of your amateur fights, UFC 4’s career mode settles into the familiar groove established in UFC 3’s career mode. You get a fight offer, you choose how to spend your 100 weekly points leading up to it, and then you fight. The best new change this year is in the fighter evolution system that allows you to improve specific moves simply by landing them in a fight or in training. The more you use a move, the better it will get, letting you craft a fighter that truly feels unique to you. Bumping a move up to the next level also awards you with evolution points that you can use to improve your overall stats and add powerful perks that further define your strengths. There’s a lot of stat building and decision making that takes place in between fights, but thankfully it’s all good fun because you really do see the effects of your training paying off. It also helps that the training itself is fun since it’s mostly two-minute sparring matches – even if it’s a little too easy to knock your training partners out cold. Less effective is the emphasis on player choice in the story, which feels a little half-baked. Occasionally throughout your career, you’ll be given opportunities to choose how you respond to certain social media posts from fighters, or how you react to certain events, such as a fighter pulling out of a fight due to injury. The idea is that these decisions create rivalries and storylines between you and other fighters, but because all interactions are handled through short social media posts in a submenu, I never really cared about any of them. There is a gameplay element to it all, in that, if you have a bad relationship with a fighter, you won’t be able to invite them to your gym and learn one of their signature moves, but the trade off is that when you potentially fight down the line, there will be more hype to it. None of that ever really made much of a difference for me though, because there are already so many other fighters to invite to your gym, and the fighters that I did start a beef with early on never resurfaced once I started climbing the ranks. A big historical problem for the UFC series was the huge difficulty spikes once you got into title contention, which thankfully are no longer an issue this time around. You’re able to set your difficulty right from the start, which stays pretty consistent all throughout as long as you’re being diligent about upgrading your fighter, though the moderate difficulty AI seems to not quite understand how to escape from submissions. You are also able choose whether you want to retry a fight, or accept the consequences of the loss and continue on with a blemish on your record, which is a nice choice to have, especially since some of your ultimate “Greatest of All Time” goals are tied to getting consecutive wins. Mixed Martial Modes UFC 4 thankfully removes the sleazy Ultimate Team Mode of prior UFC games, and though it doesn’t replace it with anything nearly as substantial, there are at least a couple of fun new stages that are refreshingly different. There’s a new backyard arena that feels especially fitting for cover athlete Jorge Masvidal, along with a very Bloodsport inspired Kumite arena, complete with over the top sound effects and cheesy music. There’s also a new Blitz Mode that serves as a fun little distraction for online play. In Blitz, the rules are constantly changing every few hours. One ruleset might involve only having one round that lasts for one minute, another might have you playing a best of three game of knockout mode. It’s a cool idea, and one that I wish I got to spend more time with, though unfortunately there just weren’t that many people playing in during the EA Access First Trial period. UFC 4 also introduces Daniel Cormier to the commentary team who does a wonderful job and serves as an excellent replacement for Joe Rogan, even though I could probably do without him and Coach Davis repeating the same line about fighting being chess instead of checkers over and over again. Lastly, while UFC 4 still looks pretty good, it’s a little disappointing to see that so little has changed in the game’s looks over the last six years. While there are a few new animations added into the mix, these are largely the same takedowns, slams, and strikes that we’ve seen before. There’s a little bit more face deformation this time around during slow-mo replays, but knockouts are still lacking a certain magic that the Fight Night series captured a console generation ago. Verdict EA Sports UFC 4 is a largely iterative sequel that tightens up some looser parts, makes a few smart tweaks here and there, and doesn’t rock the boat all that much. And in that sense, it’s a success. The new submission system is a big improvement over prior years, there are some great changes to career mode that make it much more fun to mold a fighter that suits your own playstyle, the new grapple assist system is a great tool to help complete newcomers not feel lost if they get taken down, and as a whole, the fighting system remains incredibly deep. Longstanding problems still remain in the ground game and some dated visuals, but without any competition for the title, EA Sports UFC 4 still remains the king of combat sports.

Android app streaming is coming It looks like one of Windows 10’s best new features – the ability to stream Android apps from a smartphone to a PC and use them as if they were Windows apps – won’t just be exclusive to the newly-announced Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra handsets after all. Microsoft’s own Surface Duo dual-screen device will also be compatible. While Microsoft is still trying to avoid calling the Surface Duo a smartphone, it is a device that runs a modified version of Android – and can make and receive phone calls – so it basically is a smartphone, and it makes sense that Microsoft has now confirmed that it can stream apps to Windows 10 as well. However, for people who were dismayed that the cool app streaming feature is only available on very expensive Samsung phones, the fact it’s coming to Surface Duo as well won’t be too much of a relief, as that too comes with a high price tag – an eye-watering $1,399 (about £1,070, AU$1,960). Your Phone gets better (for some) While the excellent Your Phone app in Windows 10 allows people with most Android smartphones to send and receive text messages, control media and view photos using their PC, the upcoming app streaming support goes even further, allowing people to view and interact with their smartphone’s apps on their Windows 10 device. However, this new feature seems to be exclusive to very expensive phones from Samsung – and now Microsoft. And, while it may come to other smartphones from other manufacturers, as Windows Latest reports, the feature appears to need special drivers in the firmware of a phone, which means the phone maker would have to work closely with Microsoft to enable it – as Samsung clearly has done. So, for anyone hoping Android app features come to non-Samsung phones, as well as affordable handsets, this news is a bit of a mixed bag.

It's all about the talent. Having the right talent doesn't necessarily mean instant success, but it's a good step down the correct path. Nikkei Asian Review recently reported that Chinese chipmakers Quanxin Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (QXIC) and Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (HSMC) have recruited over 100 ex-TSMC engineers and managers since last year. The two government-backed companies are newcomers to the chipmaking game. HSMC and QXIC came into existence in 2017 and 2019, respectively, as pawns in China's push for self-sufficiency. Former TSMC top executives head HSMC and QXIC. One of Nikkei's sources claimed that HSMC offered compensation packages that were simply too attractive to refuse. Remuneration was reportedly two to 2.5 times higher than what the person's annual salary with bonuses at TSMC. HSMC and QXIC are focusing on the 14nm and 12nm manufacturing processes. The aforementioned process nodes are admittedly outdated by TSMC's standard, but they should prove to be quite beneficial for China. HSMC plans to have a $18.4 billion fab up by 2022 to manufacture 14nm chips. Its roadmap eventually leads to 7nm offerings too. TSMC has good reasons to worry about losing its assets, especially when there is a possibility that the chipmaker's trade secrets could illicitly exchange hands in the transition process. TSMC's annual turnover rate is less than 5%. Nevertheless, TSMC has started to take action to protect its intellectual property, such as requesting equipment manufacturers to sign an agreement to not sell TSMC's customized tools to HSMC or QXIC. A previous Nikkei report revealed that Taiwan has lost over 3,000 chip engineers to China. It goes without saying that TSMC was a bit worried when QXIC miraculously opened up a research and development center nearby TSMC's 5nm plant in south Taiwan. QXIC certainly didn't set up shop there for the weather. China has a knack for poaching the right talent and welcomes rival industry veterans with opened arms. The Chinese chipmakers not only throw more money at their prospects, but also offer them the opportunity to grow inside the organization. The problem is that the country currently runs several big chipmaking projects simultaneously, but the talent pool is only so small. The Chinese chipmakers will eventually end up fighting among themselves for the next prospect.

game information: Developed by: Monolith of Minds Published by: Monolith of MindsDeck 13 Genre(s): ActionAdventure First Released: May 28, 2020 plate:Linux.Macintosh.Nintendo Switch.PC Resolutiion constantly implies there’s more going on than you realize. Its strong anti-imperialist messaging pushes you to question the nature of your mission. Its mechanics, including the fact that most enemies fall incapacitated before you kill them, suggests that maybe you should show mercy when given the choice. The concept of scholars studying the world in VR, seeking to understand things without seeing what's in front of them, challenges you to question when knowledge is useful. Walls and signs adorned with intricate symbols and filled with cryptic, interactive elements forces you to consider the possibility that you’ll need to be extremely clever and dig really deep to find the truth. That truth is extremely hard to come by, though. Even after combing the world and finding out how many of the pieces fit, I walked away feeling that Resolutiion’s big philosophical questions stirred my mind. However, its obtuse attempts to manifest them as a deep, mysterious puzzle beneath the game’s surface-level objectives created a gap between the loose, but entertaining Metroid-style action game I played and the intellectually stimulating action-puzzle I could tell was there but had trouble parsing. Resolutiion is a stylish game. Its smooth-moving but highly pixelated art style evokes games like Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery, Below, and Hyper Light Drifter at a glance, but it has its own thrown-together mix of cultural influences that create a unique setting. The backdrop of its world, a post-apocalyptic ruin rebuilding in the shadow of a cyberpunk dystopia, permeates every screen. The landscape blends large swaths of concrete and sand with bright, unnatural skies. Its characters range from Buddhist monk laborers to talking deer and bunnies espousing subversive anti-imperialist rhetoric. Its creatures come with simple, but cheeky and stylish, designs: There’s a desert town under threat from a giant black cat that swims under the nearby sand like a shark, whose cuteness remains hidden until right before it pounces to kill you. In another section, you’re chased by a crudely drawn "naga," whose body--a long line of interconnected balls that looks like it was drawn in MS paint--looks more like a caterpillar than a snake. That's not a condemnation--there’s a strong unified sensibility to the art that helps create the severity of the world, while also injecting a playfulness, that keeps your mind open and your curiosity piqued. These spaces, from fallen skyscrapers to the bottom of the sea to a mysterious “lost” forest where your map doesn’t work, are familiar at their core, though. So much of Resolutiion feels like that--stylish in an interesting way, but familiar. Like so many metoidvania action games, Resolutiion guides you through its world in a linear fashion, gradually opening up new spaces to you as you find new abilities. You will find yourself frequently bumping into areas you can’t access unless you come back later once you’ve acquired the appropriate tool. Many of these are obvious key-and-keyhole pairings, but sometimes the answers may be less obvious. There’s a neat little interaction if you bring the giant sand-shark cat a "treat," for example. Some of these hidden puzzles can be solved with common sense, while others require you to ignore and actively avoid the little bit of instructional guidance you’ve received. Many of them, however, require you to pay close attention to every shred of story told and shown to you. The conversations you have, the world’s design--everything pushes you to ask questions and seek a harder-to-attain hidden truth. These unmarked puzzles, combined with the complete lack of any explanation of how any aspect of the game works, left me constantly in search of meaning in every nook and cranny. So many aspects of this game push you to look beyond what you’re doing and see a bigger picture, so I was constantly looking for subversive paradigm-shifting puzzles. A keen eye and thorough play will help you find some answers--in some cases, it led me to finding new story moments and Easter eggs--but there’s a big gap between recognizing a puzzle and figuring out how to engage with it. Too often, the understanding that there were puzzles I could see, but not approach, led to paranoia. I questioned every action because there’s little indication of when I was making hidden progress or shutting the door on something. This is especially true in combat. Every non-boss enemy enters a wounded state when they’re one hit away from death, so it’s up to you whether or not to kill your opponents or let them live. The mere presence of the concept means every fight ends with a loaded moral question, and the game isn’t shy about pushing you to consider the consequences of your actions. It isn’t exactly clear what impact killing enemies has on the story, so it may or may not be a big deal. Too often, the understanding that there were puzzles I could see, but not approach, led to paranoia. I questioned every action because there’s little indication of when I was making hidden progress or shutting the door on something. While effective as a means of encouraging the player to think outside of the box, the mercy mechanic works better as an intellectual exercise than as a game mechanic. It’s very easy to get stuck in a situation where you cannot fight without killing. When fighting a group, you will almost certainly deliver a few fatal blows by mistake, which makes it hard to get overly precious about it. Like so many elements in the game, it is very clear that it’s happening for a reason, but that reason isn't made clear. It’s even more maddening when you compare the hyper-complex extracurricular puzzles with the extremely simple puzzle-solving and combat of the core experience. Most of the puzzles you must solve are straightforward switch puzzles made to direct your exploration rather than tease your mind. Likewise, Resolutiion’s battles consist of very shallow hack-and-slash combat, spruced up with a small set of skills earned throughout the journey, like an energy gun and a bomb. The basic mechanics feel loose; mashing the slash at enemies over and over is rarely satisfying. In lieu of a dash or dodge, you can simply sprint for a short time, which can lead to you overshooting a target or draining your energy, which you use for every skill except the slash attack. Most enemies you face don’t require a ton of precision or tactical thinking--just slash and slash, then sprint in a quick circle to get away when they attack. There are a couple of exceptions, though. By the back half of the story, set-piece boss encounters at the end of each area offer a few sudden but welcome difficulty spikes that push you to use your full skill set and be mindful of how you set up your attacks and respond to theirs. These bosses are uncommon, though, and don't make up for all the lackluster encounters between them. There are some really cool ideas at the heart of Resolutiion. You can sense the thought and care put into transposing philosophical thought into something that’s both playable and insightful. Unfortunately, the portion of the game that engages with those ideas is far too obscured and distant from the core story most players will see. It is still an interesting visual and, to a point, intellectual piece--wrestling with those ideas and their meaning can be its own reward. It's clear there's more to the experience, but so much of it is so out of reach, which diminishes Resolutiion’s impact. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 7 Processor: 1.0 GHz Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: OpenGL ES 3.0+ Compatible Card Storage: 1 GB available space RECOMMENDED: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 Processor: 2.0 GHz Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: OpenGL ES 3.0+ Compatible Card Storage: 1 GB available space

Is this cheap video editor flexible enough for your needs? Corel’s Windows-only VideoStudio editing software comes in two versions, Ultimate and Pro. The features are mostly similar, with the Ultimate version offering more effects, filters and transitions. But it also has a few features some editors might be tempted by, like creating video masks, split screen templates, a 3D title editor, the ability to handle multi-camera editing with 6 instead of 4 cameras, and a video stabilisation tool. Importing footage Being able to add media to your project is pretty crucial for a video editing application, and VideoStudio does a pretty good job at this. You can bring up an import window to add clips, photos and audio files to your project’s Media Panel, but the most useful way is simply to drag the file you wish to use from wherever you’ve stored it on your hard drive, straight onto your project’s Timeline. In addition to being able to capture video from a webcam or other compatible camera directly into your project, an excellent feature is the ability to record your computer screen via the Capture section. It records your screen at 30fps, and once you’re done, everything is sent to your project’s Media Panel. You’re then free to edit it as you see fit. Editing The main Editing section is where you’ll be spending most of your work. It is divided into four parts: top of the screen are the Viewer Window, the Library Panel (where you can gain access to your media, and any effects you’d like to apply to your video), and the Options Panel (a floating window where you can fine tune various parameters, depending on what is selected in your timeline). Speaking of the Timeline, this is where you add media to your project and build your video. The look of the interface feels clean yet antiquated, like something that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1990s. You can switch the Timeline between two modes: “Storyboard”, where each clip is represented by a large square icon, irrespective of its length. Although good for novices, the other, more traditional mode view should be your go-to choice of interface, the main advantage being that you can work with multiple tracks. The video track is your primary track. You aren’t allowed to have any gaps in it so if you delete a clip, any remaining footage to the right of it will move to the left until the gap created by the deleted clip disappears. This is a good way to build an edit fast. Unfortunately veteran editors will miss some traditional keyboard shortcuts like setting In and Out points or scrolling through the edit via the JKL keys. One thing which takes a while to get used to if you’re used to editing video with other software packages is the fact that the layer concept is reversed. Usually, layers reflect how the real world works: put a piece of paper on top of another and you can no longer see the sheet that’s now under it. Therefore, usually, if you place a video clip on a track above the current one, it will obscure the first clip. In VideoStudio, it’s the opposite: the top track is the main video track, and to place a clip over it you have to add it to the track beneath the main one. It can be confusing, especially at first, but you do eventually get used to it. Something which is quite limiting, especially for a package advertising itself as “Pro” or “Ultimate”, is the inability to properly work with multiple layers of video. The primary layer is essentially it. Yes, you can add a clip to a second layer, but it’s treated as a picture-in-picture overlay, where the clip is shrunk and placed in the corner of the screen. It is possible to increase that overlay’s size so it takes up the whole space, but that’s very convoluted. Worse still, you can’t move clips between the overlay and the primary video layers. As such, we wouldn’t call this editing platform “Pro”. Effects and transitions One feature we quite liked was the ability to alter the speed of a clip by altering its length directly in the timeline simply by holding down the Shift key and dragging its edges. This works very well and allows you to retime a clip to suit the exact duration you need with ease. The Viewer Window has a few good tricks up its sleeves too: you can resize clips, skew them, crop them, and move them around directly from there. There are even Smart Guide Alignments to make it easy to position a clip to the centre, and an aspect ratio button to resize a clip or photo with the click of a menu. These are all useful timesaving tools. Any changes you wish to apply to a clip can be done via the Options Panel. This is where you can apply some colour correction, or change some of the basic parameters like creating a pan & zoom effect across your photo or video. This is also the place to find all the effects you’ve added to a clip - by default you can only add one at a time, but a simple untick will allow you to cram in as many as you fancy. If you work with cameras with fish-eyed lenses, you’ll definitely appreciate the Lens Correction tools. It has presets for a list of GoPro cameras, but VideoStudio also offers you the ability to change the parameters yourself to achieve the perfect result. As for the effects, along with transitions, titles, etc, they can all be found in the Media Panel. If the tool in question includes an animation, its thumbnail will offer you a quick preview of what that will look like. Although this sounds like a great idea, as soon as an effect tab is selected, all presets contained within it will begin their animation, and after a while this can get pretty distracting. Above the Timeline is another set of tools, which offers you specific options such as impressive 3D Text and a Split Screen Template Creator, amongst others. The latter is extremely interesting: rather than working with multiple video tracks, you can split the Viewer Window into sections, pretty much like a page from a graphic novel. You can get pretty creative and once you’re happy with your division, you can just drag your media over the various segments. Sadly we found it buggy at times. Exporting Once you’ve completed your work, it’s time to share it. On top of custom controls, VideoStudio offers you a series of presets for various mobile devices, save it to a DVD or Blu-ray, and even straight to social media sites like YouTube, or Facebook, right from within the interface. This is incredibly convenient. New for 2020 As always, the new 2020 version brings some additional titles and blend modes, and some tools have been improved, such as video masking, but the feature we liked most is called Highlight Reel. It’s a way for VideoStudio to create a short film for you, based on the clips you give it. Those clips can be organised by date, location, even people, and the video can be made to the length of a music file, should you wish. It’s a great way to create something quick without agonising over the details - although you can also fine tune every aspect of the edit, should you want to. It’s pretty much win-win. Final verdict Although VideoStudio may feel antiquated, and its timeline is constraining and works the wrong way round - if you’re used to other similar software - it comes with a number of really good ideas and clever implementations. It isn’t the best video editor out there, but it’s good value for money, despite its limitations.

Intel Xe HP is the cornerstone of the company's data center GPU ambitions, with up to 41 TFLOPS of compute for the 4-tile variant. The Intel Xe HP and Xe HPC are the pinnacle of the company's data center GPU ambitions. At Intel Architecture Day 2020, the company has given us a clear indication of what to expect, and the short answer is that Xe HP delivers up a metric buttload of compute. This is the spiritual successor of Intel's Larrabee initiative, and also succeeds the Xeon Phi product line, with a target set firmly on Nvidia's A100 solution. With exponential increases in the amount of data that needs to be processed, Intel is rolling out the big guns. The Xe HP chips won't be going into consumer graphics cards either; that task has been forked over to the Intel Xe HPG, a GPU targeted at enthusiast gamers that will cut out the HPC (high performance computing) elements and add in ray tracing hardware. Xe HP will use Intel's 10nm SuperFin process, however (actually the next step 10nm Enhanced SuperFin), which is the new name for the "10nm++" node that's being used for the upcoming Tiger Lake CPUs. The Xe graphics architecture (you can read more about it in our Xe LP Graphics overview) was designed to scale from teraflops (i.e., consumer level hardware) all the way to petaflops (i.e. supercomputers), with Intel Xe HP / HPC going after the latter. The base design consists of a single tile, Intel's name for a monolithic GPU focused on vector and matrix compute. We'll get into the specs in a moment, but the important thing is that via EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) for the current generation, and Foveros (die stacking) and Co-EMIB for the future Xe HPC Ponte Vecchio, Intel can scale from a 1-tile implementation up to 4-tile solution. Because of the high-speed interconnects, the 1-tile, 2-tile, and 4-tile solutions all appear as a single GPU instance, just with far more performance in the latter. We've seen several images of Xe HP over the past several months, and now we know precisely what each one represents. The single tile solutions is a pretty big chip in its own right, but it's dwarfed by the 2-tile and 4-tile packages. There have been hints that Xe HP is close to the maximum reticle size for a microprocessor (around 850 mm2), and the 2-tile package doubles down on that, and then the 4-tile doubles down again. The full-fat 4-tile package looks to be in the neighborhood of 60x60 mm — maybe even a bit larger. So what sort of hardware does Intel put inside Xe HP? For starters, each tile appears to have two HBM2e stacks, potentially providing up to 32GB of memory and 820 GBps of bandwidth. We don't have specifics on the clocks or capacities Intel is using for the HBM2e stacks, but at least 16GB total seems likely. Moving to the GPU itself, Intel provided significantly more details. While it hasn't said whether it's the maximum configuration or not, Intel showed a compute demo running on 1-, 2-, and 4-tile implementations, with each tile sporting 512 EUs. This is what we've expected for a while, but it was nice to have that at least confirmed. This is still early drivers and hardware, but we also saw clock speeds of 1300 MHz. The math follows pretty easily from there. Each EU has eight FP/INT ALU pipelines, capable of doing a single FMA (fused multiply add) operation per clock: 8 × 512 × 2 × 1.3 GHz = 10,649.6 GFLOPS That's for a single tile, so multiply that by two or four for the larger solutions. That's a theoretical 42.6 TFLOPS for the 4-tile configuration, and Intel's demonstration at least suggested that the hardware can get pretty close to that figure: 42,280.79 GFLOPS. Of course we have no way to know whether the software was really running those computations or if it was just a faked animation, but we'll leave it at that for now. The Xe HP GPU also has the ability to do FP64 operations, presumably at half the performance of FP32. It also supports INT8 for deep learning applications that don't require the precision of FP32. Based on what we know of the Xe architecture and assuming linear scaling, that means up to 42.6 teraops of INT8 for a single tile, or 170.4 TOPS for the 4-tile version. Not surprisingly, Xe HP doesn't focus solely on standard GPU-type processing clusters. Like Nvidia's V100 and A100 (and Google's TPUs, Tensor Processing Units), Xe HP also includes tensor-style capabilities that should further improve computational performance. Like the A100 and TPU3, Xe HP also supports the bfloat16 format, which offers similar accuracy to FP32 but at twice the performance. Xe HP isn't ready to ship quite yet, and Intel didn't go into deeper details on the tensor computational performance, but it's reasonable to expect even more performance potential than the standard FP ALUs can provide. Whether it will be enough to match Nvidia's A100 remains to be seen, but Intel has exascale ambitions. Given what was revealed today, all Intel needs to do is put together a supercomputing cluster with about 25,000 Xe HP 4-tile nodes and it could get there. And if the tensor processing is eight times as fast as the standard ALUs, maybe Intel can make do with only 3,000 Xe HP nodes in the cluster. Simple! The exascale ambitions don't fall under the Xe HP nomenclature, however. Instead, they're classified as Xe HPC, also codenamed Ponte Vecchio. Previously, Ponte Vecchio was supposed to be Intel's first 7nm part, but now Intel says it will be manufactured using 10nm SuperFin for the base tile, with 10nm Enhanced SuperFin for the Rambo Cache tile. So far so good, but then we get some fuzziness. The compute tile will use "Intel next gen," which presumably means 7nm, or "external" — meaning Samsung or TSMC 7nm most likely. The Xe Link I/O tile is also listed as using external manufacturing. Intel has already demonstrated the ability to use Foveros stacking with externally manufactured silicon, so this can all still come together in time for the 2021 launch of the Aurora supercomputer. Whether it's via 10nm SuperFin or 7nm or some other process, Intel hasn't stepped back from its exascale ambitions.

DH2: WIN congrats @XZoro™

game information: Platforms:PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One Developers:Slightly Mad Studios Publishers:Bandai Namco Games Release Date:August 7, 2020 If ever there was a film franchise perfectly positioned for a modern video game adaptation, it’s Fast & Furious. For a medium so regularly adept at putting us in high-speed pursuits and shoving us through sweeping action sequences, it’s almost baffling that in nearly two decades this series has never spawned a truly top-notch, dedicated tie-in (at least beyond 2015’s small but free Fast & Furious-themed spin-off experience for Forza Horizon 2). Unfortunately, it still hasn’t. Fast & Furious Crossroads is short, shallow, and surprisingly simple, and it’s nothing less than a crashing disappointment in virtually every department. The Fast & Furious film saga’s rise from low-fi Point Break rehash to six-billion-dollar box office brute is the bane of film snobs, but I love it. A high-octane hodgepodge of spy movie madness and telenovela tropes, these films may be dumber than a box of hair but they have oodles of heart – and I am unironically and unequivocally invested in them. I’ve got all the Blu-rays; I’ve got way more of the Hot Wheels than my wife knows about. I assure you; I am all in. I’m telling you this because I need you to know I’m not punching down here. In fact, I was nearly punching the air when Crossroads was finally confirmed after years of rumours. A Fast & Furious game from the talented team behind Need for Speed Shift and Project CARS, and Vin Diesel is involved? On paper that’s a supremely promising combo. But somehow all of that promise resulted in this bland and bafflingly basic game that barely lasts four hours – and that’s including the cutscenes. Not that I especially wanted to keep playing longer than that. Ejecto Seato, Cuz Crossroads pits the Fast family against an ancient group of highway robbers who’ve since transitioned to international terrorism: the Tadakhul. That sounds entirely on-brand for a modern Fast & Furious tale and, for the most part, it works well enough. The vehicle selection is strong, with many plucked directly from the films, although the ones with harpoon guns and gaming routers bolted to their roofs can look a little goofy. Things don’t get off to a particularly promising start, though, and with the opening mission dropping you directly into the action without any introduction, the overly-manufactured VO here between franchise stalwarts Dom and Letty feels like a jury-rigged solution for Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody being off the table for a proper intro. It’s like walking into a movie 10 minutes late. Crossroads quickly pivots to a trio of fresh faces – two ex-Miami street racers and an off-brand Spanish Liam Hemsworth – but despite their efforts, Sonequa Martin-Green and Asia Kate-Dillon’s Vienna and Cam aren’t very compelling characters. Martin-Green’s Vienna is largely written as a slightly crankier Letty and her sliver of backstory is basically left to the campaign’s closing lines of dialogue. Kate-Dillon seems to be having fun chewing the scenery as the non-binary Cam – who fits snugly in the Fast universe, which has been quietly and effortlessly nailing diverse ensembles for nearly 20 years – but they're not given any particularly funny material. It was a welcome respite when Tyrese Gibson’s Roman finally showed up to inject some mild comic relief into proceedings. Tuna, No Crust The handling is clearly tuned for maximum arcade accessibility and there definitely isn’t a shred of simulator about it; cornering is sticky on the front end but almost entirely disconnected at the rear, and pinballing off walls and obstacles carries little punishment. Ultimately I found it twitchy and unsatisfying, and it’s certainly not assisted by the fact the only view available is a far too closely-cropped chase camera that unhelpfully lurches in and out. Crossroads may look like a Need for Speed-style experience spiked with a hefty dose of official Fast & Furious features but it’s really nothing of the sort. There are no open worlds to explore and almost no actual racing to speak of. The single-player campaign is rather a scripted series of completely linear segments of action-driving, so to speak. As such, Crossroads has more in common with, say, SpyHunter than any Need for Speed – or, at least, those obligatory car missions in old James Bond shooters. Most of Crossroads’ missions lack spark or challenge That wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing, but most of Crossroads’ missions lack spark or challenge. The car-on-car combat initially seems to have a pleasant Burnout taste to it but it quickly becomes entirely one-note. There’s a whiff of Bond to the vehicle gadgets, but I never felt like I was aiming for anything; just clicking through button prompts and quick time events. Combat missions often feature the ability to switch between heroes but it’s generally only something you do when Crossroads instructs you to, and only to go through the motions with the required processes; hack the guns, yank the guns off, rinse, repeat. Avoiding an avalanche or fleeing a collapsing mine may sound thrilling, but here you just mash the throttle and bounce your way to a straightforward escape. Dragging what’s basically a high-tech wrecking ball across the deck of an aircraft carrier looks like a hoot, but the path is so forgiving and the task is so simple I didn’t really feel like I’d achieved anything. There are a pair of chapters towards the end that are more dynamic and fleshed-out – the quarry mission pumps up the amount of environmental hazards and the last mission pleasingly dials up the scale of the task at hand to proportions even the film franchise might balk at – but then it’s over. There’s really no reason to go back; the missions play the same way every time. Icons for smashables and jumps throughout each mission seem to hint at some kind of Stuntman-inspired scoring system for encouraging cinematic driving that never materialises. Hit the crates or don’t; Crossroads doesn’t seem to care. Outside of the brief campaign there’s online multiplayer, dubbed Online Ops. These appear to be a nine-player contest between three teams of three – heroes, villains, and cops. However, I can’t say how it works because I can’t start a match; any time I try I appear to be the only person in the world playing it. It’s a problem that so many cars and unlockables are tied to ranking up in Online Ops when I can’t actually play them. Verdict With the petrolhead pedigree of Slightly Mad Studios, I expected far, far better of Fast & Furious Crossroads. There are certainly glimpses of a game that respects the film franchise as much as fans do, with a well-curated vehicle roster, some familiar sequences that riff on the some of the most memorable moments from the movies, and the occasional cheeky wink at the audience, but overall Fast & Furious Crossroads is a short and superficial relic of a previous generation. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 x64 Processor: 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5 3450 or 4.0 GHz AMD FX-8350 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: GTX680 or equivalent DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 50 GB available space RECOMMENDED: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 x64 Processor: Intel i7 8700k or AMD Ryzen 7 2700x Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: NVidia GTX 2080 or AMD Radeon VII DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 50 GB available space

A fully featured product with heavyweight protection, Total Security 2020 should be top of your shortlist. Bitdefender Total Security 2020 full review Bitdefender's Total Security offering has long been an extensive product, and the 2020 update adds more to an already full basket. Here, we bring your our full review of one of the best antivirus packages around. Bitdefender Total Security 2020: Price & Availability Bitdefender Total Security has an RRP of £69.99/$US$89.99, but you'll almost always be able to find it at a much lower price than that. For example, at time of writing you can get a year's subscription for £35/US$44.99 (note that if you decide to renew after one year, you'll be charged £69.99/$89.99 for the second year). That's for up to five devices, including PC, Mac, Android and iOS. If you want to commit to a longer time period, for two years it's £119.99/$149.99, and for three years it's £154.99/$199.99. However, that's still more expensive than setting up a new account each year and paying £35/$44.99. You can buy Total Security 2020 from Bitdefender itself here, or from resellers such as Amazon and Newegg. There's now another option: if you're looking for the ultimate protection, Bitdefender also makes a security router - the Bitdefender Box 2, reviewed - which includes a year's subscription to Total Security 2020. Bitdefender Total Security 2020 Features Protection Being a security suite and not simply antivirus software, you get the full array of protections for your Windows, macOS, iOS and Android devices, plus a password manager, a parental advisor, and a 200MB per day per device VPN, but this is just the start. (Find out more about the VPN and its upgraded version in our Bitdefender Premium VPN review) To help flatten out the learning curve of such a big product, there's an “Auto Pilot” switch on the main interface. When on, which it is by default, Bitdefender uses sensible settings for all modules. It also uses the main panel in the Dashboard to offer advice and guidance for using features that might benefit you, such as turning on the Ransomware protection that's off by default. Along with the usual file and system scans is the dedicated vulnerability scan, which checks your system for outdated software, weak network passwords, and critical Windows updates that need to be applied. There's also a dedicated Wi-Fi scan that checks you're not using weak encryption or authentication protocols. As with an increasing number of AV offerings, there's also a boot time scan, called the Rescue Environment, which runs at next boot up. This scans your system before Windows and any stealth malware has a chance to start up. A Oneclick Optimiser pops up soon after installation to tell you there's disk space to be freed up. The catch to this, though, is that along with temporary files, login cookies also disappear. Fortunately, after analysing what can be deleted, there's a warning to check the items before doing the optimisation. And you can uncheck cookies and other items that you don't want deleting. Previously, the tool didn't warn you about this, so it's good to see that addressed, except it doesn't specifically advise that you might want to keep your cookies so you still need to know what you're doing. Another recommendation from the Auto Pilot the concept of profiles. These kick in automatically when you're watching a movie, or playing a game, for example. The different modes prevent popups, or put off housekeeping events until the software detects that they're appropriate. All you have to do is click the Enable button if you like the sound of it. The anti-spam module allows you to explicitly whitelist friends and blacklist real spammers. You also have the option of automatically banning any spam written with Asian or Cyrillic character sets, and of submitting any unknown samples to the Bitdefender cloud for analysis before opening them. Bitdefender has joined the growing group of domestic AV providers that incorporate so-called “next gen” application behaviour monitoring. If a piece of code does something suspicious, Advanced Threat Defense will block it. There's also a whitelist for programs that inadvertently trip this feature. Allied to this is the Safe Files module, which protects nominated folders from any ransomware designed to run at boot time. So even if you do enable the ransomware protection, you should head into the Safe Files settings and add any folders that you want to protect. And as long as Ransomware Remediation is engaged, it will automatically roll back any changes made by ransomware to your precious files. General browsing is protected by the Online Threat Prevention module. This uses machine learning and a global web site reputation database to judge whether any site to which you surf should be considered malicious. Like the Safe Browsing service used in Chrome and other browsers, this is constantly updated, meaning that you're technically getting global real-time protection. This is also now available in iOS (it was already available on Android). Extra protection on offer with the 2020 version is Microphone Monitor, which lets you see which apps access your device’s microphone and when. New for the 2020 version is Anti-Tracker which blocks data collection from websites. Simply enabling it is not enough, though, because the default is to only apply this protection to Internet Explorer. You have to click on the settings to enable it to work with Chrome and Firefox. For online security, Bitdefender includes its secure Safepay browser. This should be used when entering payment details on web sites, and will pop up to suggest its use as appropriate. You can also enter trusted bookmarks into Safepay, and use them instead of potentially fraudulent ones apparently sent via email from criminals posing as your bank. Mentioned already is the VPN. This isn't actually installed as part of Total Security, but it only takes a click or two. What you get is a cut down version of Bitdefender Premium VPN which is fairly useless for streaming region-locked content, but it will hide your data from prying eyes while using public Wi-Fi. There is a daily data limit, set at 200MB per device per day. Bitdefender Premium VPN has unlimited data, and allows you to select one of about 30 countries for a few pounds or dollars per month. Unfortunately, it isn't a particularly good use of that money: you will find better choices in our roundup of the best VPN services here. A bundled password manager allows you to set up multiple wallets, each protected by its own master password. Simply enter this master password to have Bitdefender securely log you into sites and services. The File Vault module allows you to protect sensitive files with strong encryption. Vaults are mounted as virtual disc drives, with a drive letter you select. You simply drop your files and folders onto the drive, and no one can access them without the drive's password. The Parental Advisor opens a web page at Bitdefender that allows you to silently install the tracking module on your children's mobile devices that are already protected by Bitdefender. Along with tracking location, apps used, sites visited, and calls made, you can also block unknown numbers, and calls where the number is withheld. Usefully, you can impose a bedtime, and set up email alerts when your child attempts to access content you've banned or if they enter a restricted area. Completing this rather comprehensive set of facilities is the file shredder, which securely deletes data. Mobile security The mobile version of Total Security is available on iOS and Android. The Android version takes cues from the desktop dashboard so you can immediately see if anything is amiss. Several useful features are included. For example, Account Privacy allows you to enter an email address and have Bitdefender test it to see if the credentials have been harvested or otherwise leaked online. Web Protection is on by default and protects you from dangerous web pages. Anti-Theft has all the usual features (remote locate, lock, wipe, and scream), and also allows you to automatically take a picture when someone fails to unlock the device three times in a row. You can also configure Bitdefender to send a text to a trusted number if your SIM is replaced. App Lock is another handy feature that makes it necessary to enter a PIN before running selected apps. VPN is also built in, offering that 200MB of free data per day. Verdict Like any antivirus software, Bitdefender's performance does vary from month to month. But its track record is absolutely excellent and the most recent AV-Test results are impressive. Add in all the other protection on offer plus privacy tools ncluding the new anti-track, and Bitdefender Total Security is the gold standard.

Their new thermal compounds are "unbeelievable" Thermaltake have launched the TG-30 and TG-50 thermal compounds that come with an interesting way of applying them to the processor's IHS (integrated heat spreader). The biggest novelty with the TG-30 and TG-50 is that Thermaltake includes a honeycomb-patterned stencil and a small spatula to paint the thermal compound over the IHS. The stencil is compatible with both Intel and AMD processors. The company didn't reveal the thermal compounds' composition and the product page only hints to the presence of some mysterious diamond powder that reportedly helps with thermal conductivity. Thermaltake claims that the TG-30 and TG-50 don't dry up or crack easily either. The rationale behind Thermaltake's idea is that the CPU cooler exerts uniform pressure over the honeycomb droplets so they spread and cover the entire IHS on the processor. Think of it as a simpler version of the credit card method. The only caveat we see with Thermaltake's approach is that you waste a good amount of thermal compound in the application process. Thermaltake sells the TG-30 and TG-50 in 4g syringes. In addition to the stencil and spatula, the brand also includes two alcohol rubs to remove existing thermal compound from your processor or for cleaning the stencil after use. The TG-30 boasts a thermal conductivity of 4.5 W/m-k, while the TG-50 delivers up to 8 W/m-k. Thermaltake sells the TG-30 and TG-50 for $8.99 and $11.99, respectively.

DH1: DH2:

well i vote to DH1 nice rhythm and lyrics

well i vote for DH2 nice rhythm and lyrics

well i vote for DH1 nice rhythm and evry thing this is legendary song

game information Platforms:PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch Developers:Okomotive Publishers:Mixtvision Release Date:May 17, 2018 Some folk say you can’t truly appreciate the highs of life if you haven’t felt the lows. Whether you believe that or not, it’s a lesson Far: Lone Sails takes to heart. It’s full of tense, nerve-wracking scenarios as you struggle to keep your fuel-guzzling/wind-powered hybrid vehicle running smoothly across a long-dead world. But buried between those hardships are beautiful moments of peace that shine brighter for it - the calm times where fair winds let me unfurl my sails and simply glide along to Far: Lone Sails’ incredible soundtrack were some of the most magical I’ve had in a game. At first glance, Far: Lone Sails might remind you of games like Inside and Limbo - a comparison I don’t think is unfair. Its mostly monotone color palette and “scroll from left to right, don’t ask why” structure must’ve been inspired by Playdead’s work. But instead of just having some simple platforming puzzles to solve, here you’re also piloting a large contraption that’s alternately driven by either massive, engine-powered wheels or a set of tattered, collapsable sails. Most of the time you’ll be inside that vessel, hopping around its guts as it trundles through a harsh, seemingly post-apocalyptic world - the cause is never explained, but most of what you're driving across looks like a dried-up ocean. You’ll have to feed fuel barrels into the machine's tank, release pressure that builds up (which will also give you a boost) before it explodes, and put out fires or make simple repairs as things inevitably go wrong. Very little of what you’re doing or why you’re doing it is explicitly told to you, but by the end of the roughly three-hour story you’ll be driving like a pro and probably have a good idea as to why. But this isn’t just a traveling game. Between open stretches of road (often filled with obstacles to overcome or hazards, like weather, to avoid) are occasional blockades in your path. You might come across a gate you’ll need to unlock, forcing you to hop out of your vehicle and search around on foot for exactly how to do that before you can proceed. These discreet levels break up the pace nicely and can occasionally offer some intriguing platforming puzzles to challenge you. During those stops (and often along the way to them) you’ll also be scavenging as much fuel as you possibly can to stow on hooks in your already cramped ship. There’s an enjoyable stress that comes from worrying about how much fuel you have - though it’s a fear that may be slightly scarier in your mind than in reality, since fuel is in safe abundance if you are good about grabbing it frequently and burning it efficiently. That undercuts that tension just a tad toward the end of your journey, and can make the world a little less mysterious on repeat playthroughs. But what’s clever about how Far: Lone Sails silently teaches you how to play is that it starts things off simple - so simple that you won’t even have those signature sails at first. It lets you get you comfortable with the basics of fueling and piloting your ship, then slowly starts adding upgrades and improvements to your vehicle along the way so you can learn them one at a time. That not only introduces complexity as you grow more comfortable with the workings of the machine, it’s also massively rewarding to see it tangibly grow and change as you progress. You rely on this machine as much as it relies on you, and the connection I felt with it by the end was unexpectedly deep. Think about Portal’s fantastic Companion Cube gag: GLaDOS’s jokey narration pushes you toward empathizing with an inanimate object only slightly different from the common ones you see everywhere. There’s a real (if blatantly ridiculous) connection formed, but with a punchline as you unceremoniously throw your new friend into a furnace moments later. It’s funny and memorable, but it’s a connection that’s overtly forced upon you at the end of the day. The connection I created with my ramshackle mobile home in Far: Lone Sails, a different sort of inanimate object, was another kind altogether. There’s no dialogue and barely any text at all on this trip, so your only companion is your bulky machine. It’s all you have, and you have to stay with it in the same way you would your Companion Cube. I kept it fueled, kept it repaired, felt sadness when it broke, and pride when it got upgraded. After all, you rely on it as much as it relies on you. Not to rag on Portal (which is a truly wonderful game) but Far: Lone Sails didn’t need comical voice acting and funny wall art to make me fall in love with my ship. The symbiotic relationship at play (and the isolation that relationship occurs in) was enough to do that without anyone ever speaking a word. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that its round fuel gauge looks like a giant, glowing eye when you zoom out, slowly closing and getting sleepier as the reserve runs low. Seeing that gauge droop can be a great kind of stressful, and that anxiety makes moments where the wind finally picks up and you don’t need to rely on fuel downright euphoric. I could turn the engine off entirely, raise the sails, and just cruise, not worrying about pressure releases or fueling plans. I’d usually hop up onto the roof and zoom out, too, taking in Far: Lone Sail’s gorgeous environments and downright award-worthy music whenever the wind allowed it. It’s hard to describe how much I truly loved the bliss of these moments. Building atmosphere like this is easily Far: Lone Sails’ greatest strength, and it’s the reason I’d recommend everyone play it with headphones. Letting myself get sucked into this world enhanced the experience greatly, and I loved curiously picking up unique little objects from every stop I made. By the end, the bedroom area of my vehicle - a tiny little nook not used for anything beyond added flavor - was overflowing with odds and ends that made my ship feel a little more like home. A radio, a flower, a bell, a blue ball - things no one told me to pick up and might not have any gameplay implications, but I still wanted to keep with me all the same. Being immersed in that world also helped me forgive some of Far: Lone Sails’ clunkier aspects. Hoarding items, even useful fuel barrels and boxes, inevitably makes it frustrating to move around the interior of your vehicle, which is not exactly smooth to begin with. The only way to get between floors is a central elevator that doesn’t behave quite as intuitively as I wished it did, and the fact that the button to brake is positioned just behind the button to boost meant I’d sometimes accidentally hit the latter on the way to the former. These annoyances are almost exclusively present inside the machine itself, which does add a bit of thematic tension: piloting it alone feels appropriately like a struggle. I think the occasional rough edge could have been smoothed out while still making that point, but I was so immersed in the world surrounding those hassles and the journey of my little nameless character and their trusty mechanical steed that I didn’t mind a frustrating elevator ride here and there. Far: Lone Sails is also full of incredible, distinct events that still stick out in my head - each of which often had its own song that can quickly throw me back into the feelings that encounter evoked when I listen to them on Spotify (which I often do). Months after my first playthrough, I still fondly remember hiding my machine from a hailstorm, manually upgrading its wheels, maneuvering it across a lift bridge, and plenty of other epic set pieces that I don’t want to spoil. It’s not a long game, but it’s certainly not a thin one either. Verdict Far: Lone Sails is a gorgeous little game. Like the machine that acts as your stalwart partner the whole way through, it can be clunky at times, but any bumps in the road are easily paved over thanks to some beautiful environments, plenty of exciting encounters, and the absolutely stunning music that accompanies it all. Its full of stressful challenges that made me truly care for the vehicle that carried me through them, and very few games have matched the moments of absolute bliss that come from unfurling my sails and peacefully cruising along with its fleeting fair winds. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7+ (64-bit OS required) Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz, AMD FX 8120 @ 3.1 GHz Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 460 / 650m, AMD Radeon HD6570 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 3 GB available space Additional Notes: Not recommended for Intel HD Graphics cards. RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 7+ (64-bit OS required) Processor: Intel i7 920 @ 2.7 GHz, AMD Phenom II 945 @ 3.0 GHz Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 680, AMD Radeon R9-280X DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 3 GB available space