Enlarge/ Oobah Butler in The Great Amazon Heist. (credit: Courtesy of Channel 4)
The drink had all the hallmarks of a beverage sensation. Striking design, bold font, and the punchy name Release. But inside, each bottle was filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.
That didn’t stop Amazon from listing it for sale, though. Release even attained No. 1 bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category. It was created by Oobah Butler for a new documentary, The Great Amazon Heist, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK today.
Butler is a journalist, presenter, and renowned puller of stunts—he’s probably most famous for turning his shed in a London garden into the number one ranked restaurant on Tripadvisor. The Great Amazon Heist begins with him infiltrating an Amazon distribution center in Coventry with a hidden camera and speaking to workers who complain of foot and back pain, potentially dangerous working conditions, and near-constant surveillance. Butler spends his first day unloading a baking-hot truck with no working fan or air conditioning.
We are cruising through October, heading straight toward the cold of winter. Thankfully, the weather doesn’t hate us yet, and instead is filled with a nice crispness that makes me want to at least consider opening a window while I stay inside and play video games. Maybe I’ll just run out for my daily pumpkin spice…
Mario has been stomping Goombas, smashing blocks and running from left to right for damn near 40 years. How is Nintendo supposed to keep its classic side scroller feeling fresh after all this time? First, you shift the location to a brand new kingdom. Next, you introduce a bunch of new enemies and power-ups. But what really pushes things over the top is the introduction of a new mechanic that turns everything you think you know about Mario games on its head. What you get is Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a game that dazzles and delights while living up to its name in a variety of ways.
Warning: This review includes some light spoilers, including the number of worlds and descriptions of some hidden levels.
The game starts simply enough with Mario and crew (Luigi, Peach, Toad, Yoshi, Nabbit and, for the first time, Daisy) visiting Prince Florian of the Flower Kingdom. But then Bowser barges in and steals a Wonder Flower, which somehow allows him to merge with Prince Florian’s castle to create a floating mecha fortress of doom. From there, your job is to collect Wonder Seeds (this game’s version of stars and shines) as you help the Florians restore order to their troubled land.
Screenshot by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Right away, this has some subtle but important implications for the rest of the game. The first is that you immediately Wonder Flowers have wild and unpredictable effects. The second is that, because you’re not simply recusing a princess trapped in a castle, the whole Flower Kingdom is working with you to take down Bowser. Sometimes that means you might be rescuing some trapped miners. But other times the Florians are the ones helping Mario (who also has a new voice actor for the first time) by rebuilding a bridge or donating a Wonder Seed at the beginning of a new world. The friendly little flowers scattered across each level will even shout words of encouragement or funny quips as you run by. But the impressive part is that, even in a relatively straightforward platformer like this, there’s a sense of community that makes this world feel more lived in than a lot of epic RPGs.
You’ll find a number of familiar baddies along with some new foes across an incredible range of environments and levels. Wonder features six main worlds each with a distinctive theme. But within those, you’ll still run into reimaingined haunted houses, pirate ships, underwater stages and more. One twist for this game is the addition of badges, which are earned by completing specific levels and some may even be required to find secrets or reveal alternate exits. Some allow you to jump farther or float, while others make extra coins appear. There are even protective badges, like the one that automatically saves you if you fall into lava or poison. It’s a mechanic that feels inspired by recent roguelikes, such as Hades, and it does a great job of adding customizability and replayability.
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to hear Piranha Plants serenade you?
Screenshot by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
However, the biggest twist in the game is the Wonder Flowers themselves. In addition to the one Bowser stole, there’s also one hidden in almost every stage. And if you find it, you better be prepared for the unexpected. Touching them transports you to an alternate dimension where the rules of the Marioverse have been completely rewritten. In one level Super Stars rain down from the sky, while in another you might be transformed into a giant slime. You may also run into Wonder Flowers which converts the game from a side scroller into a top-down 2D maze or suddenly find yourself the target in a shooting gallery.
Almost every flower is different and the possibilities are seemingly endless. In a recent volume of Nintendo’s Ask the Developer, I learned that the team had a wall of sticky notes with over 2,000 ideas, and after playing Wonder, I believe it. Wonder Flowers feel like they add an extra half a level to every stage – they’re a delicious dessert on top of an already bountiful meal.
Toad ain’t scared of some stormy skies.
Screenshot by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Even without the aid of a Wonder Flower, the sheer variety of level types is impressive. Alongside classic stages that are capped off by grabbing a flag, there are also races, badge challenges, puzzle levels and more. There are KO Arenas that let you pick your power-up of choice (Fire Flower, Elephant Suit, Bubble Mushroom or the Drill Hat) before taking down waves of enemies, while Break Time levels provide quick 30-second bursts of excitement. You’ll never be bored, even if you want a change from standard platform jumping.
I also have to say that this might be the best Mario and friends have ever looked, and that includes recent 3D titles like Odyssey. There is just so much detail packed into every level and character. From the determined face Mario makes when he runs around, to the little flames that sprout from your feet every time you jump.
Wonder’s map is also surprinsgly engaging. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure if the ability to freely roam around added all that much. But as I progressed, I found a number of secret nooks and crannies that wouldn’t have fit if the game was locked to a handful of paths. And with Wonder Flowers giving Nintendo the freedom to mix and match mechanics and enemies, there’s just so much to see.
Don’t let Wiggler beat you.
Screenshot by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Nintendo even managed to address a gripe I had about the pacing of previous 2D Marios. Since they’re meant for both experienced gamers and children who might be new to the franchise, they often locked more challenging levels behind the story’s completion. This meant the beginning of the game could be a slog as you rushed through easier levels to get to the more challenging bits. But with the addition of difficulty ratings and hidden paths that lead to 5-star levels long before you finish the game, there isn’t the same rush to get to the “good stuff.” And I should say that 4 and particularly 5-star levels are balanced just right. Completing one feels like a rewarding challenge, without crossing over into punishing.
I do have some very minor complaints about things like mummy enemies (pulling their wraps feels a bit tedious) and I fear the Elephant Suit might be a bit overpowered in comparison to the Drill Hat. The 5-star levels and rhythm stages are also so good I wish there were more of them, I just can’t get enough. And I’m slightly disappointed the adorable penguins from the movie didn’t make an appearance somewhere in Wonder’s ice levels.
Have you ever seen a Boo this big?
Screenshot by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
But as a whole, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a marvelous game. Its art and animations have a level of polish that’s practically unmatched by rival titles, and the addition of Wonder Seeds subverts your expectations and keeps this 40-year franchise feeling new and innovative. In a lot of ways, Wonder reminds me of my favorite 2D Mario game ever: Super Mario World. While I wish it didn’t take more than 10 years for Nintendo to create a proper sequel to its last mainline platformer, if that’s what it takes to get a game like this, I’m happy to sit and wonder what’s next for Mario.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/super-mario-bros-wonder-review-the-joy-of-pure-imagination-141108387.html?src=rss
Geany 2.0 arrives with new filetypes and other refinements. Geany is regarded as one of the best Python IDEs for Linux. It is an open-source, lightweight IDE based on the GTK3 toolkit.
Buckeye, Arizona, is eyeing ‘crazy’ ideas to keep growing, including piping water hundreds of miles uphill from Mexico. From a report: Arizona, stressed by years of drought, has declared its housebuilding boom will have to be curbed due to a lack of water but one of its fastest-growing cities is refusing to give up its relentless march into the desert — even if it requires constructing a pipeline that would bring water across the border from Mexico. The population of Buckeye, located 35 miles west of Phoenix, has doubled over the past decade to just under 120,000 and it is now priming itself to eventually become one of the largest cities in the US west. The city’s boundaries are vast — covering an area stretching out into the Sonoran Desert that would encompass two New York Cities — and so are its ambitions.
Buckeye expects to one day contain as many as 1.5 million people, rivaling or even surpassing Phoenix — the sixth largest city in the US that uses roughly 2bn gallons of water a day — by sprawling out the tendrils of suburbia, with its neat lawns, snaking roads and large homes, into the baking desert. Arizona’s challenging water situation appears a major barrier to such hopes, however. In June, the state announced that new uses of its groundwater have essentially hit a limit, placing restrictions on house building, just a few months after the state lost a fifth of its water allocation from the ailing Colorado River.
There isn’t enough water beneath Buckeye to support homes not already being built, Arizona’s water department has said. But the city is embarking upon an extraordinary scramble to find water from other sources — by recycling it, purchasing it or importing it — to maintain the sort of hurtling growth that continues to propel the US west even in an era of climate crisis. “Personally, my view is that we are still full steam ahead,” said Eric Orsborn, Buckeye’s ebullient mayor. Orsborn said he understands the state has to be “really careful” with water resources but that the city is exploring “options to keep us going and allow us to continue to grow at the rate that we want to grow.”
Get another new look at Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. Hear a song from the Bollywood take on Archie Comics. A new featurette goes behind the scenes on the Hunger Games prequel. Plus, more footage from Poor Things, and when to expect the return of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Spoilers, away!
From the earliest days of cinema history, cartoons were never just for kids, and it’s important not to confuse the medium with a genre. Animation has produced movies that are charming, romantic, harrowing, musical, magical, dystopian, funny…and pretty much every other adjective you might use to describe a story that…
Karol Herbst at Red Hat who leads development on Mesa’s Rust-written OpenCL “Rusticl” driver presented to share the progress made over the course of the year on this modern alternative to Gallium3D’s Clover as well as some of the work still being pursued by this open-source OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers…
Slack says it is shutting down its SlackStatus account on X, which alerted users of incidents and outages on the platform, Thursday night. The office messaging platform will move its incident status alerts to its website.
You can get a lifetime subscription to the popular language learning app Babbel on sale for $149.97 right now (reg. $599) through October 23. Babbel offers personalized language courses across 14 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Indonesian, Norwegian,…
iOS 17 is now with us, and it comes with a range of upgrades, tweaks, and improvements—including new ways to share your whereabouts with other people. Whether you’re meeting friends in town or keeping an eye on the kids at school, you’ve now got more options for doing it on the iPhone.
Spider-Man 2 quickly gives you an overwhelming arsenal of skills and abilities to start playing with and upgrade. And then there’s Spider-Man’s quintet of gadgets, most of which prove extremely useful throughout the game. But when it comes to the gadgets, one of them is definitely worth prioritizing for upgrades above…
Pricing on solid state drives (SSDs) has fallen so precipitously over the past couple of years that it’s easy to forget how volatile the market can be. We’re about to be reminded, according to TrendForce, which says client SSDs are on track to shoot up anywhere from 8-13% by the end of the year. The guidance comes amid an anticipated rise
Enlarge/ My original US-8-150W shortly before being replaced. Don’t judge my zip-tie mounting job—it held for eight years! (credit: Lee Hutchinson)
This morning, I’d like to pour one out for a truly awesome piece of gear that did everything I asked of it without complaint and died before its time: my Unifi 8-port POE switch, model US-8-150W. Farewell, dear switch. You were a real one, and a lightning strike took you from us too soon.
I picked up this switch back in January of 2016, when I was ramping up my quest to replace my shaky home Wi-Fi with something a little more enterprise-y. The results were, on the whole, positive (you can read about how that quest turned out in this piece right here, which contains much reflection on the consequences—good and bad—of going overboard on home networking), and this little 8-port switch proved to be a major enabler of the design I settled on.
Why? Well, it’s a nice enough device—having 802.3af/at and also Ubiquiti’s 24-volt passive PoE option made it universally compatible with just about anything I wanted to hook up to it. But the key feature was the two SFP slots, which technically make this a 10-port switch. I have a detached garage, and I wanted to hook up some PoE-powered security cameras out there, along with an additional wireless access point. The simplest solution would have been to run Ethernet between the house and the garage, but that’s not actually a simple solution at all—running Ethernet underground between two buildings can be electrically problematic unless it’s done by professionals with professional tools, and I am definitely not a professional. A couple of estimates from local companies told me that trenching conduit between my house and the garage was going to cost several hundred dollars, which was more than I wanted to spend.
The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us).
Eureka has also taught quadruped, dexterous hands, cobot arms and other robots to open drawers, use scissors, catch balls and nearly 30 different tasks. According to NVIDIA Research, the AI agent’s trial and error-based reward programs are 80 percent more effective than those written by human experts. This shift meant the robots’ performance also improved by over 50 percent. Eureka also self-evaluates based on training results, instructing changes in reward functions as it sees fit.
NVIDIA Research has published a library of its Eureka algorithms, encouraging others to try them out on NVIDIA Isaac Gym, the organization’s “physics simulation reference application for reinforcement learning research.”
The idea of robots teaching robots is seeing increased interest and success. A May 2023 paper published in the Transactions on Machine Learning Research journal presented a new system called SKILL (Shared Knowledge Lifelong Learning), which allowed AI systems to learn 102 different skills, including diagnosing diseases from chest X-rays and identifying species of flowers. The AIs shared their knowledge — acting as teachers in a way — with each other over a communication network and were able to master each of the 102 skills. Researchers at schools like MIT and the University of Bristol have also had success, specifically in using AI to teach robots how to manipulate objects.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nvidias-latest-ai-model-helps-robots-perform-pen-spinning-tricks-as-well-as-humans-130004608.html?src=rss
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dropped claims against two Ripple Labs executives in its lawsuit alleging the blockchain company violated U.S. securities law, according to a court filing in New York on Thursday. The agency said in court papers it is dropping claims that Ripple Chief Executive Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen aided and abetted sales of the cryptocurrency XRP which a judge has found amounted to unregistered sales of securities.
In its December 2020 lawsuit, the SEC accused Ripple of illegally raising more than $1.3 billion in an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan granted Ripple a partial win in the case in July, finding that sales of XRP on public exchanges were not unregistered securities offerings. Torres subsequently rejected a request by the SEC to appeal that ruling. She also ruled partly in the SEC’s favor, saying the agency had shown the company’s $728.9 million of XRP sales to hedge funds and other sophisticated buyers had violated the law.
Garlinghouse and Larsen, who have harshly criticized the SEC throughout the case, issued lengthy statements accusing the agency of a political agenda to, in Larsen’s words, “suffocate crypto in America.” “Instead of looking for the criminals stealing customer funds on offshore exchanges that were courting political favor, the SEC went after the good guys,” Garlinghouse said, an apparent reference to Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX. The agency said in its papers that the next step in the case is for both sides to present to the judge on what the appropriate penalty is for Ripple.
There certainly have been a lot of Pokémon cards in 2023. A year that began with Sword & Shield’s (SWSH) climactic celebration, Crown Zenith, has since featured four mainline sets from Scarlet & Violet, another celebration set with the enormous Pokémon 151, various reprint specials like McDonald’s, new cards for…
