Tag: TechTips

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web is headlined by more of a PSA than an outright discount: if you’ve been interested in buying one of Microsoft’s latest game consoles, the Xbox Series X or Series S, it looks like you may finally be able to do so without having to rush to beat scalpers or keep a constant eye on stock trackers.

The more powerful Series X, for one, has been in stock at Walmart for most of the past couple of weeks. There’s no discount from Microsoft’s $499 MSRP and you’ll need to log into a free Walmart account to checkout, but the process of actually obtaining the Series X now appears to be far more stable than it has been for the past year and a half, during which time the console has typically either sold out within minutes or not been available at all.

If Walmart’s supply runs out, Microsoft itself has the Series X in stock as well, albeit in bundle form. This package includes the console, a second controller (one comes in the box), and one of a handful of games. The cheapest game option is the Ars-recommended Assassin’s Creed Valhalla for $24, though the selection also includes the newly acclaimed RPG Elden Ring at full price. If you planned on picking up an extra gamepad and one of the available games anyway, this isn’t the most egregious bundle we’ve seen in recent months.

Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin is photographed in October, 2018, after the launch failure of a Soyuz-FG rocket. (credit: Alexei Filippov/TASS via Getty Images)

For a few weeks now, the chief of Russia’s spaceflight activities has said that the United States and its Western allies must end sanctions on his country by March 31, or face the consequences when it comes to partnering on the International Space Station.

After those sanctions remained in place at the end of March, the director general of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, vowed to issue a response on April 2. True to his word, he did so early on Saturday morning. His full Twitter thread can be found here, but it is fairly simple to summarize: More bluster, more threats, but likely little change.

In his new missive, Rogozin is still demanding “complete and unconditional” end of the Western sanctions, and he is still threatening to end partnership on the International Space Station. Specifically, Rogozin said Roscosmos will soon send “specific proposals” to complete its cooperation on the space station to the Russian government.

Enlarge / The raw power of a new Mortal Kombat cabinet was hard to contain…

David L. Craddock’s Long Live Mortal Kombat goes behind the scenes to reveal untold stories from the making of the first four Mortal Kombat games and explores how the franchise impacted popular culture. In this excerpt from the book, two of MK‘s arcade legends meet for the first time and learn a new technique that propels them to the top of the food chain in their local arcades.

Nitin Bhutani was bored. It was the fall of 1992, and he was hanging out with friends between classes where he attended college in Long Island, New York. The group had two hours to kill. Bhutani proposed they go to the student rec center and play some of the pinball and arcade games there. Brown-skinned with dark, slicked-back hair, he looked for any excuse to get away from classrooms and play games. Truth be told, though, he was lukewarm toward his own suggestion. He and his boys had played the rec center’s handful of coin-operated amusements to death. But it was either hit buttons or hit the books, so they moseyed over to the rec center.

To Bhutani’s surprise, a new cabinet stood among the ranks of games he had conquered. He watched the attract mode. When the game’s title flashed across the screen, something about it—the intentional misspelling, the golden lettering set against a red backdrop—caught his eye. A few other guys stepped up to play. One of them finished the match by firing a bolt of lightning at the other character that blasted his head apart in a spray of blood. Holy shit, he thought. “It just showed up one day. I see this game where people are chopping heads off and am like, ‘Oh my god. I gotta play this,'” he recalls.