MLB and Disney pick up ‘League of Legends’ streaming rights
BAMTech, the Major League Baseball- and Disney-owned streaming tech company, has signed a deal with Riot Games for the rights to League of Legends tournaments.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the agreement calls for BAMTech to “pay a minimum $300 million through 2023” to Riot Games. In return, it’ll get the exclusive rights to “stream and monetize” the company’s popular multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA).
BAMTech plans to launch a League of Legends streaming service with apps for smartphones, PCs and “other devices,” and will also handle distribution on existing streaming portals like Twitch and YouTube Gaming. The deal goes a way to explaining the rumor that ESPN was set to invest hundreds of millions to pick up the game’s broadcast rights. While the deal appears to be about streaming, rather than broadcasting, ESPN is owned by Disney.
League of Legends is a giant in the world of eSports, with individual tournaments watched by tens of millions worldwide. Its popularity has led to Riot Games (which makes no other video games) bringing in over $1 billion in revenues per year. BAMTech and Riot will aim to make (even more) money on the deal through advertising and sponsorship, which the streaming company will oversee.
The deal is akin to videogame publishing, in so much as the $300 million is an advance, rather than a direct payment. Initial revenue generated will go to BAMTech, in order to cover its investment, but The Wall Street Journal says that takings beyond that will be shared with Riot Games at an unspecified rate.
BAMTech, previously part of Major League Baseball’s MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), was spun out into its own company earlier this year. MLBAM still owns a majority share in the company, Disney acquired around a third in a $1 billion deal and the National Hockey League also has a stake.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
The Morning After: Friday December 16, 2016
Hey, it’s Friday!
The weekend is almost here. We have luxury EVs, a gaming laptop that’s ready for VR, and Nintendo’s patent sketches tell us all about its incoming Switch console.
Busy day in the Oval Office
It’s safe to leave bad reviews again
President Barack Obama signed several new laws on Thursday, and a couple are relevant to your internet interests. One of them banned the use of ticket-buying bots nationwide, so maybe you have a chance at those Taylor Swift seats after all. Meanwhile, the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 is meant to keep businesses from punishing customers that leave negative reviews. Oh, and also his press secretary suggested Vladimir Putin personally authorized the hacking of DNC officials email accounts.
XBMC connect
Put some Plex in your Kodi
Why choose just one media center setup? Plex and Kodi already share roots in XBMC, and now you can use them together to display all of your media. The Plex add-on for Kodi is currently in testing and available to PlexPass subscribers before it rolls out for everyone.
They just had to press the turbo button
Microsoft says Xbox One downloads are speeding up by as much as 80 percent
Depending on your connection, your next download from Xbox Live could go a lot faster. The latest system update claims that, for gamers with high-speed connections of over 100Mbps, downloads will be up to 80 percent faster, while those with slower connections could see a boost of up to 40 percent. Game installs, patches and expansions have resulted in a lot of waiting around for updates during this console generation, so anything to make that faster is a welcome addition.
That’s more than we’ve seen from Faraday Future
Going for a ride in Lucid’s luxurious Air EV
Forget the affordable Model 3, this new EV company plans to debut a $100,000 set of wheels in 2018. The Lucid Air has a lot of Tesla-like dreams (large touchscreen displays, self-driving features) but it’s not production ready yet. Roberto Baldwin’s ride in a prototype lasted just long enough to appreciate the leather accents — and the exposed wiring.
Your portable VR machine
Review: ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS gaming laptop
Most laptop buyers are looking for something to type a few papers on, but if you also desire some graphically-intensive gaming then you’ll need a bit more oomph. That’s where the Strix comes in. It has enough power to feed your VR headset, without a ridiculous pricetag or too much weight. You will give up something in battery life, and its orange highlights won’t be to everyone’s taste, but some compromises are worth making.
There goes your excuse for getting in a random stranger’s car
Uber Beacon guides you to the right ride
In order to help riders pick out their driver’s grey sedan or SUV, Uber is testing out a system of colored lights called Beacon. Similar to Lyft’s Dashboard, it attaches to the driver’s windshield and displays whatever color you choose in the app. Beacons are currently lighting up in Miami, Denver and Nashville.
But wait, there’s more…
- Instagram’s growth is accelerating, and now it’s up to 600 million users
- Nintendo Switch patent filing hints at potential for VR
- FCC chairman Tom Wheeler announced he plans to step down on January 20th, 2017
- 21st Century Fox is buying UK’s Sky for $14.6 billion
Nintendo sold 196,000 NES Classic Editions in November
The NES Classic Edition has become a tough gift to find during this holiday season. Cheers to those who’ve already located one (or two), but according to industry tracker NPD, Nintendo sold 196,000 pieces of nostalgia-bait to US customers between its launch and the end of November. Compare that to Media-Create’s numbers, which showed Japanese sales of the Classic Mini Famicom surpassed 261k units in just one week. Clearly, the demand is there, but the question is if Nintendo will be able to make enough of the systems available before the holiday rush is over. (If it follows this up with an SNES Classic Edition, we’ll probably be lining up all over again.)
In non-NES news, the NPD report showed that, as expected, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is back atop the sales heap. According to analyst Sam Naji, it was pushed there by the PS4 Slim / Uncharted 4 bundle that accounted for 30 percent of all hardware units sold. Overall, however, even with the Xbox One S, PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro all on shelves, customers spent 35 percent less on videogame hardware than they did in 2015. Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon managed to outsell the series previous best-selling combo (White and Black) by eight percent.
Source: VentureBeat
‘Battlezone’ Classic Mode fulfills the promise of ’80s VR
It’s been 36 years since Atari released Battlezone and effectively created the first-person shooter in the process. The game’s immersive periscope viewer and vector graphics influenced decades of game design and provided arcade goers with an early glimpse of what a virtual reality world could look like. While we’ve argued here that Battlezone’s PSVR reboot is the ultimate fan service and a great first leap into VR gaming, it was still missing one key thing: the old-school, glowing green cathode-ray tube vibe of the original. That’ll change next week, when Rebellion Studios adds a free Classic Mode update as their “faithful homage” to the title that arguably started it all.
According to Rebellion Studios lead programmer Richard May, making something new feel retro is more complicated than it sounds and “recreating the glowing green lines using our modern in-house engine required some workarounds.” The controls, on the other hand, were a little simpler to rebuild since the team had already built out the two-track control system of the original arcade cabinets. And one more thing that’s not changing: you still can’t get any closer to that danged volcano in the distance.
In addition to Classic Mode, the free Battlezone update also adds new missions, levels and a game codex. The whole thing rolls out on December 20th.
Source: PlayStation Blog
Xbox One update boosts download speeds up to 80 percent
A big part of current-gen gaming we just have to live with is spending time we could be playing waiting for things to download. Microsoft is looking to ease that burden with an update to Xbox One. With the latest version of the console’s operating system, the company says it increased download speeds 80 percent if you’re internet connection is faster than 100Mbps. If you’re on a slower connection that’s less than 100Mbps, the update should still boost game and app downloads by 40 percent.
Of course, Microsoft warns that exact figures will vary based on your home configuration and your ISP. Download speeds will also be slower when you’re playing a game as Xbox One prioritizes that action over any background activity. Speaking of background downloads, this update optimizes that process to withstand any intermittent connection issues.
Additional updates include a firmware refresh for the Xbox One wireless controller and tweaks that should make streaming music in the background more reliable across different apps. There are also the usual “general performance and stability improvements” where further details aren’t provided. To grab the update, head to Settings on the console and select “Console info & updates” from the System menu.
Source: Xbox Support
The mysterious existential dread of Krillbite’s ‘Mosaic’
Adrian Husby and Martin Kvale have been working together since 2011, when they were finishing up their bachelor’s degrees in Norway. That’s when they began conceptualizing Among the Sleep, a surreal first-person horror game that puts players in the shoes of a toddler, waddling around a suburban house at night as stranger and stranger things creep through the floorboards. With their studio Krillbite, they released Among the Sleep in 2014. It was a hit, selling well across PCs and consoles and garnering a handful of awards.
Today, Husby and Kvale are hard at work on their new project, Mosaic. It’s a mysterious, atmospheric game that retains Krillbite’s trademark creepy vibe. They only want to tease Mosaic for now; they don’t want to give too much away before its expected release on PC and PlayStation 4 in late 2017. As they attempt to describe Mosaic while maintaining its mystery, Husby and Kvale play off each other as old friends do.
“It’s like Brazil has a baby with Every Day the Same Dream and World of Goo,” Kvale says.
Husby adds, “With some driblets of Kentucky Route Zero.”
“Like sprinkles,” Kvale says with a laugh. “It definitely has a lot of inspiration from that game as well; it’s a beautiful game.”
“We draw from a lot of places, definitely,” Husby concludes.
It’s clear that Mosaic is very different than Among the Sleep, but it still feels like a Krillbite game. In its first teaser trailer, Mosaic is bleak and highly stylized, featuring a man with thin, spindly limbs trapped in a monotonous nine-to-five cycle: He brushes his teeth, travels to work alongside crowds of people in suits staring at their phones, and goes home. He does it again. And again. The repetition is cut with scenes of strange technological intervention: A server clicks on, seemingly controlling the movement of the working-class horde. In a flash, the protagonist’s head turns into a fish. We see him sinking into a deep body of water.
Even if the game’s story line remains mysterious, its focus is obvious. This is a dystopian nightmare, a commentary on the monotony of modern life and the life-sucking pull of technology.
“We live our everyday lives in a very systematic manner,” Husby says. “So we go through, to and from these jobs to serve this continuous loop of income and spending, and all that stuff. That’s at the very core of this experience. And of course, how that affects our lives. How does it feel to live in a city where everything’s just automatic and systematic and cold? Inhuman, somehow.”
Kvale jumps in, “And how much a system like that could hurt your daily life and a city’s well-being, kind of.”
“I think I’d rather call it an adventure game than a horror game,” Husby adds.
Kvale offers, “Dystopian point-and-click.”
They both agree on this final description but with a few caveats. Mosaic isn’t a traditional point-and-click adventure game. It has puzzle elements, but they’re not presented in an expected way, Husby says. Plus, the narrative is extremely experimental.
“It’s fragmented and weird,” Husby says. “So there’s a bunch of unchartered territory that makes it hard to describe.”
Mosaic draws from Husby and Kvale’s experience as independent game developers in Norway. The art is blue-tinged and desaturated, drawing from the long, dark winters in their home country. And the story itself — the mobs of people rushing to work every day, eyes glued to their phones — stems from Husby’s feelings of displacement in a busy city. The Krillbite team works hard, but it doesn’t conform to the standard nine-to-five lifestyle.
“When you live a very alternative life, I guess, but you’re still living in the same environment as this, you go to and from your job and you definitely feel like an outcast somehow,” Husby says. “Standing in the tube in the morning, looking around, it’s people on auto-pilot … If we’re able to capture that, that’s proof we’ve come a long way.”
Phones play a big part in Mosaic’s story. The world is filled with people wearing the same suits, going to the same jobs, staring at the same screens. This obsession with technology is a central theme, and there’s even a playable mini-game inside the main character’s phone. It’s a simple, microtransaction-style mobile game that, for now, Krillbite is calling Bleep Bloop. Players will be able to mess around with Bleep Bloop for as long as they want while they’re playing Mosaic; it’s a game within a game about the dangers of technology addiction.
“It becomes fairly meta fairly quickly,” Husby says.
That’s all Husby and Kvale will say about Mosaic for now. They want to maintain the game’s mystery while still intriguing potential players, which is one reason they released the teaser trailer so far ahead of their expected launch window. One thing they learned from Among the Sleep was how important it was to hear from fans, to feel the anticipation around their game.
Husby and Kvale at least want to make it clear that Mosaic is just as creepy, fantastical and surreal as Among the Sleep, but it’s presented in a very different package. Among the Sleep was more survival horror while Mosaic is filled with existential dread.
“This is more, think of your own life and go cry in the corner,” Kvale says. Husby nods in agreement.
Nintendo Switch patent filing hints at potential for VR
Nintendo might have some big surprises in store when it sheds more light on the Switch game console in January. NeoGAF forum member Rösti has noticed a slew of just-published patent applications for the hybrid system, and one of them hints that the Switch might have virtual reality support. Effectively, it would turn the Switch into a larger-than-usual Daydream View or Gear VR — you’d slot it into a headset and use the console’s detachable controllers to play. Suddenly, Nintendo’s misgivings over VR seem like temporary roadblocks.
There’s no guarantee that Nintendo will have a VR headset ready and waiting for the March launch, or at all. This is just a patent application, and even fully granted patents don’t necessarily translate to shipping products. Nintendo may just be patenting the concept so that a rival console maker can’t implement the concept themselves. With that said, this is an extremely straightforward and logical idea — it wouldn’t be hard to add a basic VR experience to the Switch. Our only misgivings are over the display quality and processing power: if the Switch isn’t using at least a 1080p display and a reasonably quick CPU, its take on VR may be underwhelming.
Via: NeoGAF
Source: USPTO
ASUS’ ROG Strix GL502VS is a mid-range (and VR-ready) gaming laptop
The idea of a “gaming laptop” usually brings to mind one of two images: an oversize laptop with enough power to rival a desktop machine, or a shockingly thin (and expensive) notebook that punches above its weight. Somewhere in between you’ll find 15-inch systems like the ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS, a gaming laptop small and light enough to lug around, yet thick enough to house the sort of powerful internals you’d need to play just about any game you want. Though it’s not a premium machine by any means, the Strix strikes a nice balance between power and portability.
Design
Spotting a gaming laptop in a crowded coffee shop is easy — just look for the loudest, most garish machine in the room. Indeed, ASUS’ Strix wouldn’t take long to find: The laptop’s otherwise subdued chassis is adorned with glowing neon orange highlights. Colorful touches against a dark frame are a common design trope in gaming notebooks, but the Strix’s obnoxiously bright shade of orange is the ultimate “look at me” color, with accents everywhere from the speaker grilles, logos, WASD keycaps, and keyboard lettering to the touchpad. It’s also the machine’s only visual flair; apart from the dim red hue of the Strix’s air vent, the rest of the chassis is a study in black plastic and straight lines.
The Strix lacks the premium feel of an aluminum milled machine, but the trade-off is worth it: The plastic chassis makes this relatively light for a midsize gaming laptop, weighing in at just over five pounds. It doesn’t feel cheap for the sake of the material either — a brushed plastic palm rest mimics the look and feel of the single aluminum plate adorning the lid. It’s a handsome machine, and a fairly portable one too. All told, its 1.18-inch-thick frame is just thin enough to comfortably fit my backpack’s laptop sleeve.
Those thick edges leave plenty of room for connectivity too, including three USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card reader, Ethernet and outputs for HDMI and Mini DisplayPort. Worried the next generation of peripherals will leave you in the dust? Don’t. The Strix also has a single USB Type-C connector. Not bad.
Keyboard and trackpad
You could use the Strix’s keyboard to write home, but you wouldn’t. It’s nothing special. That isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with it; the Strix’s well-spaced keys offer 1.6mm of travel and land with a firm but not hard stop. It’s a perfectly serviceable keyboard with little to add to the experience apart from a dark red backlight. In fact, the only thing that sets it apart from any other is an ASUS standard: The company has replaced the ten-key pad’s Num Lock toggle with a dedicated button for calling up its ROG Gaming Center software (more on that later).
It’s mostly a harmless change, but vigorous typists may accidentally find themselves launching ASUS’ gaming suite when they mean to strike the backspace key. Well, I did anyway. The keyboard at least has standard “gaming keyboard” features, including a set of colored WASD keycaps (draped in the same obnoxious orange as the rest of the laptop’s highlights) and anti-ghosting support for up to 30 simultaneous key presses.
The trackpad, on the other hand, can be a bit flighty. The large, smooth mousing surface works fine for basic cursor manipulation, but I found it unreliable when it came to multi-touch gestures. On more than one occasion, the surface misread two-finger scrolling as a zoom pinch. At least once, too, it misinterpreted my attempt to pinch the zoom back to normal as a scroll. Most of the time, it reads either gesture just fine, but these are the kind of issues that have long given Windows touchpads a bad reputation. Combined with the pad’s stiff buttons, this trackpad feels like a step backward.
Display and audio
The display here has everything you could ask for from a gaming laptop: a non-reflective screen with wide viewing angles, deep contrast and bright, beautiful colors. In fact, ASUS says the Strix’s panel covers 98 percent of Adobe’s RGB color space and 100 percent of the sRGB standard. That’s great for gamers, but even better for folks using the machine to do video editing or Photoshop work.
Laptop audio is almost never remarkable, but the Strix’s speakers are somewhat notable. Instead of flanking the keyboard, like on most laptops, the Strix’s speakers live on either side of the touchpad. It’s sort of clever: The speakers’ already clear sound pops just a little more by dint of being closer to the user. It’s nice. Beyond that trick, however, the audio seems to be on par with that of other gaming laptops: clear, but not particularly deep. As always, a good equalizer goes a long way; turning off the ROG Gaming Center’s audio enhancements leaves the machine sounding a bit dull.
The Strix also comes equipped with a trio of microphones designed to filter out ambient sounds, but the array failed in my recording tests to remove noise from a fan on the other end of my house or even the sound of passing traffic. There may be three laptop microphones in this gaming rig, but at the end of the day they’re still just laptop microphones.
Performance and battery life
| ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS (2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ , NVIDIA GTX 1070 620) | 5,132 | 6,757 | E15,335 / P13,985 | 25,976 | 2.14 GB/s / 1.2 GB/s |
| HP Spectre x360 (2016, 2.7GHz Core i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,515 | 4,354 | E2,656 / P1,720 / X444 | 3,743 | 1.76 GB/s / 579 MB/s |
| Lenovo Yoga 910 (2.7GHz Core i7-7500U, 8GB, Intel HD 620) | 5,822 | 4,108 |
E2,927 / P1,651 / X438 |
3,869 | 1.59 GB/s / 313 MB/s |
| Razer Blade (Fall 2016) (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,462 | 3,889 | E3,022 / P1,768 | 4,008 | 1.05 GB/s / 281 MB/s |
| Razer Blade (Fall 2016) + Razer Core (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, NVIDIA GTX 1080) | 5,415 | 4,335 | E11,513 / P11,490 | 16,763 | 1.05 GB/s / 281 MB/s |
| ASUS ZenBook 3 (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,448 | 3,911 | E2,791 / P1,560 | 3,013 | 1.67 GB/s / 1.44 GB/s |
| HP Spectre 13 (2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, Intel HD 520) | 5,046 | 3,747 | E2,790 / P1,630 / X375 | 3,810 | 1.61 GB/s / 307 MB/s |
| Dell XPS 13 (2.3GHz Core i5-6200U, Intel Graphics 520) | 4,954 | 3,499 | E2,610 / P1,531 | 3,335 | 1.6GB/s / 307 MB/s |
| Razer Blade Stealth (2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, Intel HD 520) | 5,131 | 3,445 | E2,788 / P1,599 / X426 | 3,442 | 1.5 GB/s / 307 MB/s |
So how do you make up for a gaming laptop’s gaudy orange highlights and the disappointment of a mediocre touchpad? By overshadowing them with high-end internals and excellent gaming performance. With a 2.6GHz Intel i7-6700HQ CPU (3.5GHz with Turbo boost), 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage on top of a 256GB SSD boot drive, the Strix handled my workload with aplomb. Still, we don’t buy gaming laptops to manage cloud documents, chat applications, music players and Photoshop; we buy them to play games. So how’d ASUS’ kit do? Just fine, thank you.
The Strix’s NVIDIA GeForce 1070 GPU didn’t completely shrug off my PC game library, but it certainly kept pace with it. Games like TitanFall 2, Just Cause 3, Hitman and Battlefield 1 all maintained solid frame rates of 60 to 90 fps on their highest graphic settings, though Battlefield 1 could occasionally drop into the high 40s on busier multiplayer maps. More demanding titles like The Witcher 3 and Watch Dogs 2 dipped just below the 60-fps threshold on “Ultra” settings, but could be coaxed above it with a few tweaks. All told, there wasn’t a single game in my library the Strix couldn’t comfortably play at its highest settings. Well, at least not until you put those games in virtual reality.
That’s right, we’re living in a new era of gaming laptops — an age when any machine worth its salt will bear a “VR Ready” sticker. The Strix is the first of this breed to land on Engadget’s review desk. With a score of 6,135 in VRMark’s “Orange Room” benchmark (and 1,640 in the more intensive “Blue Room” experience), the GL502VS is indeed a VR-capable gaming PC. It can run pretty much everything available in today’s consumer virtual reality market. It can’t, however, play all those VR games at their highest fidelity.
The laptop can run most virtual reality titles at their default settings, but configuring games like Raw Data and Serious Sam VR on Ultra can give the Strix serious pause. Pushing these games to the max turned their virtual landscapes into laggy, stuttering realities, resulting in the kind of head-tracking delays and low frame rates that can lead to nausea and VR headaches.
Fortunately, you’d really have to go out of your way to get a bad experience: Few VR games offer configurable graphics for this very reason, and everything I ran on the Strix played beautifully on default settings. That’s more than good enough for the first generation of PC VR games, but you also shouldn’t consider the machine future-proof by any means. Still, it’s good enough for now. Keep your virtual worlds tuned for performance, and not visual fidelity, and you’ll be happy.
Battery life
ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS
3:03
Surface Book with Performance Base (2016)
16:15
Surface Book (Core i5, integrated graphics)
13:54 / 3:20 (tablet only)
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, no Touch Bar)
11:42
HP Spectre x360 (13-inch, 2015)
11:34
Surface Book (Core i7, discrete graphics)
11:31 / 3:02 (tablet only)
Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, 2015)
11:23
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (15-inch)
11:00
iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 2015)
10:47
HP Spectre x360 15t
10:17
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, Touch Bar)
9:55
ASUS ZenBook 3
9:45
Apple MacBook (2016)
8:45
Samsung Notebook 9
8:16
Microsoft Surface Pro 4
7:15
HP Spectre 13
7:07
Razer Blade Stealth (Spring 2016)
5:48
Razer Blade Stealth (Fall 2016)
5:36
Dell XPS 15 (2016)
5:25 (7:40 with the mobile charger)
Gaming laptops rarely get good battery life, and the GL502VS is no exception. In Engadget’s standard battery test (where we loop an HD video at fixed brightness until exhaustion), the Strix barely lasted three hours. Sadly, that’s barely below par for the majority of larger gaming laptops, but still: It’s disappointing. When competitors like Alienware, Razer and HP can make high-performance rigs that last between six and eight hours, three is just underwhelming. ASUS can, and probably should, do better.
Software
As the years go on, manufacturer pack-in software has become less and less necessary. Most laptop builders have done away with branded update tools, display managers and audio filters. ASUS hasn’t, but its software suites get slimmer year by year. In the past, ASUS’ ROG Gaming Center application served as a hub for half a dozen purpose-built programs for adjusting the audio equalizer, tweaking screen settings and configuring keyboard macros. Now all of that is simply integrated into the main application. Unfortunately, that app is unintuitive and messy and doesn’t even do much.
The ROG Gaming Center will let you adjust the color temperature of your screen (including normal, vivid, manual and “eye care” modes); choose from five audio presets; and disable the Windows key. But that’s about it. There’s an “advanced tuning” button as well as a system resource monitor, but these features just replicate the functions of the built-in Windows Task Manager. Being able to tweak screen and audio presets in one place is nice, but it’s not useful enough to warrant a dedicated keyboard button. If only the software suite included a key mapper — at least then the laptop’s ROG button might be able to do something useful.
The Strix does pack in one more standard ASUS gaming application: the Gamefirst network manager. This program isn’t necessary, but it is sort of neat, offering users an overview of their PC’s internet activity. Want to know what programs are using the most bandwidth, or prioritize Steam over Chrome for downloads? You can do that here.
Configuration options and the competition
My $1,700 review unit came with the maximum specifications ASUS offers for its Strix laptops: an Intel Core i7-6700HQ 2.6GHz CPU (3.6GHz with Turbo Boost), 16GB of RAM, 1TB of onboard storage with a 256GB SSD boot drive, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics chip. Downgrading the GPU on that machine to NVIDIA’s GTX 1060M will save you $200.
To cut the price by another $120 and change, be prepared to give up the “VR Ready” sticker, cut the solid-state storage in half and settle for last year’s GTX 970M GPU. Finally, bottom-dollar buyers can find a $1,200 model with the same CPU and RAM as our review unit, sans solid-state drive and paired with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX970M graphics card. ASUS says additional configurations exist too, but they vary from one country to another.
Not sure this is the right 15-inch gaming rig for you? You have plenty of other options: Dell’s Alienware 15 comes in an array of VR-Ready configurations between $1,350 and $1,750, with plenty of RAM, fast processors and NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics chips — but you’ll need to shell out $2,150 for the top model if you want to match the Strix’s GTX 1070. MSI’s GT652VR Dominator is a close match to our review laptop as well, but it’ll cost you $100 more and leave you with half the RAM.
If you don’t mind having a slightly larger screen, the best bang-for-your-buck alternative might be HP’s 17-inch Omen, which can be configured with the same processor and GPU as the Strix for only $1,500. The trade-off: It ships with only 512GB of storage.
Wrap-up
ASUS’ Republic of Gamers brand has a strong pedigree for reasonably priced, powerful gaming laptops, and the GL502VS Strix is exactly that: a mid-range gaming rig that can handle just about anything you might throw at it, even virtual reality. Some garish flourishes, subpar battery life and a disappointing trackpad keep it from being a truly excellent machine, but for those looking to split the difference between the category’s large, overpowered gaming rigs and its expensive ultraportables, the Strix is a solid choice.
‘Super Mario Run’ is now available
Finally, there’s a Mario game on smartphones. As promised, Nintendo has released Super Mario Run today, giving iPhone and iPad users a new way to run, leap and spin through the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s an auto-runner, meaning the portly plumber will jog, hop and vault over obstacles automatically. You tap the screen to jump, leaping across gaps and goombas to collect colorful coins. It sounds simple, but there’s a surprising amount of complexity to the platforming. Like Rayman Jungle Run, timing is essential to unlock contextual moves, such as rolls and wall jumps.
The game has a one-time fee of $9.99. Nintendo is keen to avoid the free-to-play mechanics that plague so many smartphone games, focusing instead on quality and traditional replayability. The levels are challenging enough, tasking players to collect coins of increasing difficulty. With plenty of stages and worlds to explore, they should keep you preoccupied for hours. There’s also Kingdom Builder, a basic village design mini-game, and Toad Rally, an aysnchronous multiplayer mode that emphasises style over brute-force level completion. The three modes feed into one another too, unlocking one-time “rally tickets,” enemy score multipliers and more.
It’s not all rosy, however. Nintendo has been criticised for demanding an always active internet connection. (The company says it’s to stop piracy.) If you’re the type of person that likes to game on their morning commute, or has to ration a modest data cap each month, this could be a deal-breaker. Regardless, it’s a landmark moment for the company and it’s beloved mustachioed mascot. Miitomo was an interesting experiment, sure, but it pales in comparison to the potential of Super Mario Run. This is a true platformer, albeit one with limited controls, that could make a ton of money and improve Nintendo’s standing in the public conscience.
Source: Super Mario Run (iOS)
Twitch takes on YouTube and Facebook Live with ‘IRL’
Twitch wants vloggers to leave YouTube and Facebook Live behind. The Amazon-owned video streaming site is launching a new “IRL” section that will allow allow streamers to share their experiences at events, on trips abroad or even just to document their day-to-day lives. Videos can either be live streamed or uploaded for on-demand viewing, and from next year users will also be able to use their smartphone cameras to broadcast through the Twitch mobile app.
To date, Twitch has mostly focused on live content relating to video games. This isn’t the first step it’s taken to remove itself from that niche, but it’s certainly the most significant. Previously capitalizing on its community’s love of cosplay, the site launched the gaming-inspired arts and crafts category, Twitch Creative, before testing more mainstream waters with its social eating channel. Twitch has also been slowly adding uploaded videos to its repertoire over the past year, although that feature remains in beta.
Adding the ability to upload vlogs is a clear attempt to steal some of YouTube’s market. YouTube has been pushing its gaming-specific service hard over the past year, and recently beat Twitch to 4K streaming.
Mobile broadcasting is also a big deal for Twitch. After the success of Facebook Live and Periscope, the company is playing catch up a little, but it’s also ensuring that successful streamers on the platform keep all of their content inside Twitch.
With these markets already cornered by Facebook and YouTube respectively, though, enticing non-gamers to start using the platform may prove difficult.
Aaron Souppouris contributed to this article.
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