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Nintendo finally announced the Switch with an OLED screen that comes out in October, but right now, GameStop is hosting a big one-day discount on two must-have Switch games: Super Mario Odyssey and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Each game is going for $35 (usually $60) for the physical or digital versions, and if you have the means, I suggest getting both. Super Mario Odyssey is the latest (delightful) installment in the long-running Mario 3D platforming franchise, while Fire Emblem: Three Houses has strategic, turn-based battles interspersed with team- and friend-building elements you’d usually find in a Persona game.

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If you’re looking for more Switch games, Best Buy has a selection of discounted titles (physical, not digital) that cost $45 each, down from $60. This includes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, New Pokémon Snap, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury.

Microsoft’s Surface Duo keeps falling in price. Woot is hosting the best deal — by far — right now on the AT&T-locked version of the two-screened device in new condition. The base model with 128GB of storage costs just $410, while doubling the storage space bumps the price up to $510. It still might be a little ridiculous to invest in this phone since Microsoft hasn’t delivered any major updates recently, but at least you won’t have to pay as much as early adopters did to try it out.

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Last week’s excellent deal on the Dell G15 Ryzen Edition for $1,078 (usually $1,458) is still happening. You can head over to Dell to get this deal on a capable but affordable gaming laptop that has a 15.6-inch 1080p display with a 165Hz refresh rate, with AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H processor, and Nvidia’s RTX 3060 graphics chip. It has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage (both of which can be upgraded after purchase). One caveat, though, is that shipping is currently scheduled for early August.

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The OnePlus 9 has received its first big price cut. Usually $729, it’s $649 now. As my colleague Allison Johnson wrote yesterday, you won’t be missing much by not opting for the more expensive 9 Pro. The 9 and 9 Pro share the same processor, a 120Hz refresh rate display, and a great 50-megapixel ultrawide camera, though, the 9 has slower wireless charging, and a plastic build instead of aluminum. The OnePlus 9 can work via 4G and 5G on Verizon and T-Mobile, but just 4G with AT&T’s network.

At Nintendo’s 81st annual general meeting of shareholders, a Q&A section allowed those present to ask all kinds of business-related questions. One, however, was so obvious I cannot believe it hasn’t been asked before: someone simply wanted to know what everyone’s favourite video games were.

Those asked included President Shuntaro Furukawa, senior executive officer Ko Shiota, Senior Managing Executive Officer Shinya Takahashi, senior executive officer Satoru Shibata and legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto.

You’ll find their responses below. Don’t go expecting much that will shock you—there’s a lot of “well I made old Nintendo games so those” kinda replies—but Miyamoto’s in particular is pretty cool.

Furukawa: Super Mario Bros. was released when I was in junior high school, so I was right in the middle of the Famicom (NES) generation. Even today, in my private time, I play various games, both from Nintendo and from other companies. I play most of our own first-party titles, but recently I’ve been playing a lot of the Hanafuda card game in Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics.

Shiota: Like Mr. Furukawa, I was part of the Famicom generation and grew up with the NES and SNES. I’m in charge of hardware now, but I’ve tinkered with hardware and been interested in how things work ever since. That probably explains why I gravitate to games like our recent product Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which I play with my kids.

Takahashi: I’m in charge of all our first-party software, so it’s hard to choose one game over another. But the first game I was involved with when I joined Nintendo was Yuyuki for the Family Computer Disk System. It’s a lesser-known adventure game, but it left an impression on me as the first title I was involved with.

Shibata: I like adventure games, and I just recently cleared Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind for Nintendo Switch. Back in the day, I really loved playing Shin Onigashima for the Family Computer Disk System. I’m in charge of the Licensing Division, which serves as a contact point for software publishers, and they also have many adventure games that I enjoy.

Miyamoto: I basically tend to play the games I created myself, so I haven’t been influenced much by the games of other companies. That said, the first game that influenced me when I started the job of game development was Pac-Man, and from a design perspective, I think TETRIS is wonderful. I’m currently hooked on Pokémon GO. This game, which I’m playing with my wife, is a dream come true of playing a game with my whole family. I’ve been enjoying Pokémon GO with my wife and neighborhood friends for some two years now. The average person playing Pokémon GO in Japan is probably around 60 years old (laughs).

I would pay a lot of money to see a series where Miyamoto (the host) walks around his neighbourhood playing Pokémon Go, chatting with friends about love, life and game design. Like Nintendo’s own version of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, just with leisurely strolls instead of cars, and Pokémon Go instead of coffee.

Just so you can see what some of the more unfamiliar games mentioned above look like, here’s Shin Onigashima:

And here’s Yuyuki:

 

via Reddit

It seems like there’s a monopoly game for just about every franchise nowadays, but one theme we haven’t seen yet is Animal Crossing. Or so we thought…

Over on the Animal Crossing subreddit, user calysunflower has been posting photos of Animal Crossing: New Horizons Monopoly. If this is the real deal, we must admit, it looks a bit sad – you get four avatars, tokens, and a lot of cardboard. Some villagers would have been nice.

There’s no official announcement from Hasbro just yet, but a few online retailers have started to list the product – which suggests we’ll be hearing more soon. What do you think of this yourself? Leave a comment down below.

After last month’s update was halted the day after its release, Nintendo has now Version 12.1.0 of the Switch system firmware.

This seems to be a minor patch – at least on face value. It allows Switch users to now delete old data for software, to make it easier to download newer data, and as usual, there are some general system stability improvements.

Here are the full patch notes, courtesy of Nintendo’s official support page:

Ver. 12.1.0 (Released July 5, 2021)

Added the following system functionality:

• If there is not enough space remaining on the system memory (internal storage) or microSD card when downloading game software update data, you can now delete old data for that software, enabling you to download the new data.
  • When deleting the old data, you won’t be able to play the game until the new data has finished downloading.

General system stability improvements have been made to enhance the user’s experience.

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Nintendo dataminer OatmealDome has shared some additional information about the latest update via Twitter:

“[Switch Firmware Update] 12.1.0 is out…Internally, every part of the OS was updated. Not sure which ones have real changes.

“It does appear Nintendo has introduced a new encryption master key (homebrewers: key 0B) in this update. Unfortunately, this might be blocking @ylws8bot from reading the update data since it doesn’t know the new encryption key, so more detailed analysis will have to wait.”

If we hear anything else about this latest update, we’ll let you know. Have you downloaded the latest Switch firmware update yet? Notice anything else? Leave a comment down below.

A security researcher and his iPhone’s wifi have gotten strangely familiar with Murphy’s law in the past few weeks. Based on his experience, we now know about yet another cursed wifi network that we must avoid. But this time, your iPhone doesn’t even have to connect to the network to mess up.

Back in June, security researcher Carl Schou found that when he joined the network “%p%s%s%s%s%n”, his iPhone permanently disabled its wifi functionality. Luckily, this was fixed by resetting all network settings, which erased the villainous wifi name from his phone’s memory. You would think that would have been the end of connecting to networks with weird and fishy sounding names, but you are not Schou.

On Sunday, he decided to try his luck again by investigating a public wifi network named “%secretclub%power”. According to Schou, just having an iOS device in the vicinity of a wifi network with this name can permanently disable its wifi functionality.

“You can permanently disable any iOS device’s WiFI by hosting a public WiFi named %secretclub%power,” he wrote on Twitter. “Resetting network settings is not guaranteed to restore functionality.”

Schou apparently struggled to find his way out of this one and get his wifi functionality back. He said he reset network settings multiple times, forced restarted his iPhone, and even contacted Apple’s device security team. The researcher eventually got some help from Twitter, which advised him to manually edit an iPhone backup to remove malicious entries from the known networks plist files.

Gizmodo hasn’t tried this fix, so if you happen to find yourself in this situation, proceed with caution. It’s not clear what exactly is causing this bug, but some believe the percent sign and the characters following it could be mistaken for a string format specifier, or a variable or command used in coding languages. When processed by the phone, it apparently leads to problems.

We’ve all had a hard couple of months (and then some) and the last thing we need is trolls setting up public wifi networks with “%secretclub%power” to make our wifi go away. Until Apple fixes these bugs in a future update that will hopefully arrive sooner than later, it might be a smart idea to avoid public wifi networks altogether, and only rely on your iOS device’s mobile data when you’re away from a wifi network you know is safe.

While not fully rolled out just yet, Google is at work on implementing a new Android container on Chrome OS that takes more cues from the work that was done on the Linux Crostini container for Chromebooks than the current ARC++ container we’ve had since 2016. Dubbed ARCVM, this new container is already on the road to hitting over 100 current Chromebooks and is here on a handful that we have in the office right now. Overall, ARCVM will make for a more-stable, more-advanced Android app experience on Chrome OS. As I wrote during Google I/O this year:

In a push to make Android apps on Chromebooks better, the team is not just pushing Android 11 via a new VM container (ARCVM), but they are continuing to provide developers the tools they need to make better experiences across larger screens, take advantage of multiple input methods (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen) and optimize apps for both x86 and ARM binaries. As Google continues to make the app building experience more and more seamless, we sincerely hope that more awesome Android app experiences will follow.

A small but meaningful surprise with ARCVM

While I’m excited to see Android apps get more stable and provide better, more-native experiences on Chromebooks, I was surprised today when I realized that there’s a feature built into ARCVM right now that brings a return to something I’ve sorely missed in Android apps on my Chromebook for a long time: parallel operation.

For a short time in the past, Android apps could be set to run in parallel and not pause when put in the background. It was great for things like Google Analytics, small games or messaging services that you wanted to keep running on the side. For example, I loved having Google Analytics open up in the corner of my screen so I could monitor real-time traffic here on Chrome Unboxed at a glance. Once Android apps on Chromebooks lost the ability to actually run when not in focus, it became pointless to do this. As soon as I clicked out of the Google Analytics window, everything paused and real-time data wasn’t viewable until I clicked the window again.

For now, ARCVM fixes this long-standing issue with Android apps on Chromebooks. Just a few days ago I opened up Analytics and went to write an article and I noticed the real-time numbers continued moving in the background. I continued testing other apps and to my delight, every Android app I kept open continued running whether I was focused on it or not. While this probably isn’t great for battery life, I think Chrome OS should give users the benefit of the doubt and let us simply close the windows on apps we don’t plan on using.

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I argued this before and I’ll say it again: I understand pausing background apps on a small screen where you can’t see all your open applications at a quick glance, but I don’t see the benefit on a full-blown desktop environment. As a Chromebook user, I expect my windows to keep doing what they do even when I’m not clicked into them. After all, that’s what all my open tabs and web apps do and I’m just fine shutting down the ones I’m not using at the time. Since I can more easily see my open applications on a desktop environment, it’s far less likely that I’ll have rogue apps running down my battery without knowing it.

With this in place, Android apps easily become a lot more valuable to a person like myself. Whether its a messaging app, an analytic tool, or a media playback service, I like knowing that a window of any size or any origin will stay in the posture of doing its job whether I’m paying it attention or not. I’m unsure if Google meant to make it this way, but I’m very hopeful it stays around and becomes part of the general Android experience from this point out.