Gallery: The costumes and sights of PAX East 2017

Amid the surprisingly cold weather and lingering ice surrounding Boston's PAX East last weekend, one could see how the tenor of the show has changed over the years. At PAX East 2012, games from independent developers were relegated to a single Indie Megabooth, dwarfed by the big-name competition surrounding it. While that booth returned for 2017, the rest of the PAX show floor now seems like an outgrowth of the same idea. Dozens of indie developers outright purchased their own small tables to show off single games, while larger indie publishers like Tiny Build and Devolver Digital continue to host massive booths that rival their big-budget competitors.

Those major publishers were still at PAX East, of course, but they seemed to have less impact this year. Bethesda showed off the first playable demo of Quake Champions ahead of its upcoming beta test, and the game felt like an extension of their recent, successful Doom remake. Nintendo drew long lines for gamers eager to try out the Switch, even though many attendees already had the system in tow to make the other long lines at the show more bearable. All in all, though, the big boys seem to be ceding space at the show to tiny upstarts eager to reach their potential audience directly.

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The many futures of VR, as seen at the Game Developers Conference

At last year's Game Developers Conference, which took place in the immediate wake of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift releases, we took some time to highlight all the virtual reality gimmicks that had already taken over the show floor. One year later, this year's GDC was somehow even more dominated by VR talk and tech.

Everywhere you looked on this year's GDC show floor, there were companies showing off their own specific ideas of how to improve a consumer VR market that's still going through plenty of growing pains. There were headsets that offered improved resolution, wireless headsets that tracked movement with built-in cameras, and still other headsets that connected to backpack-mounted laptops. There were the gloves that let you bend your fingers in VR and cameras that let you track your hands without holding anything at all.

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With latest update, No Man’s Sky is an amazing photography tool

Hello Games

Back when No Man's Sky was first released last year, we noted how a focus on photography could help highlight the game's beautiful procedural worlds. Now, the team at Hello Games has released a newly revamped Photo Mode as part of the game's latest update. The results can be strikingly beautiful, as you can see from the above images shared by Hello Games.

This isn't technically the first time people have been able to take photos of No Man's Sky scenes. Users could dive into the menus to remove the user interface in the PC version since launch, and they could easily take photos with Steam's screenshot tool. Hello Games also added a basic Photo Mode to the PS4 version in November's Version 1.1 Foundation update. Many of the best shots from the game have been collected by curators like @NoMansPics for months now.

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This could be why the Switch’s left Joy-Con has so many connection problems

Spawn Wave's video shows how simply soldering on a piece of wire as an improved antenna seems to completely alleviate the Switch's Joy-Con connection issues.

If there's one major complaint that has been consistent across almost all the initial reviews of the Nintendo Switch (including ours), it has been the way that the left Joy-Con seems to have trouble maintaining a consistent wireless Bluetooth connection at certain distances. Now that the system is out, a YouTube hacker has opened up the controllers and discovered a design issue that seems to be causing the problem, and he even came up with a fix.

Spawn Wave Media's Joy-Con teardown video goes into significant detail identifying the various parts of both Switch controllers. The key bit, though, starts around the 20-minute mark, where the left Joy-Con gets opened up and the hacker says he's "not seeing any real antenna on this board." That's a bit of a surprise, since the right Joy-Con, opened earlier in the video, featured a dedicated antenna connected to the board via a small cable along the inside edge of the controller (where the tips of your fingers grip the controller). Then again, the right Joy-Con is laid out differently from its sibling (with the analog stick and face buttons essentially flipped) and sports an IR sensor on the bottom, so there is some potential reason for the change.

A bit more inspection shows the left Joy-Con does sport a Bluetooth antenna that's built into the circuit board itself, running up the top outside edge of the controller. That's right next to where the controller usually rests in your palm, which could cause your hand to block the Bluetooth signal quite easily. And while Spawn Wave notes that the PS4 has a similar on-board Bluetooth antenna design, the Switch's left Joy-Con antenna differs by "sitting next to a piece of metal" holding the circuitry for the Joy-Con's analog stick, possibly causing more interference.

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Upon further review: The Nintendo Switch’s lackluster online features

When we first reviewed the Nintendo Switch hardware last week, we noted that our evaluation was partially incomplete. That's because all of the system's online capabilities (plus a few other features) were only activated by a "Day One" downloadable update. We've now had a chance to download and play around with that update over the weekend, so consider this a quick addendum to last week's review.

Region-free shopping

Getting online with the Switch means linking one of the eight local user accounts on the system to an online-focused Nintendo Account. That process is different from the old Nintendo Network ID account you may have used to log in to previous Nintendo consoles, but you can at least merge the accounts to transfer any outstanding eShop balances from one to the other.

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Oculus slashes price of Oculus Rift with Touch controllers by 25%

SAN FRANCISCO—The entry price for Oculus' high-end VR hardware just came down significantly. In a presentation at the Epic Games keynote at the Game Developers Conference this morning (and in an accompanying blog post), Oculus announced that its Rift headset is now available bundled with its hand-tracking Touch controllers for $598, down from the previous $798 MSRP.

Oculus also lowered the price of both pieces of hardware individually. The Rift headset is down from $599 to $499, while the price for a set of two Touch controllers as a standalone accessory is down from $199 to $99. While the bundle comes with two tracking sensors to keep track of the headset and controllers, extra sensors that can help enable room-scale tracking now cost $59, down from $79.

On stage at GDC, Oculus co-founder and PC VR head Brendan Iribe said that the price drop comes thanks to "great volume" for the hardware and work by the operations team to drive down the cost of components. "From the beginning, our goal has been to get the best VR into as many hands as possible," Iribe said. "Lowering the barrier of entry and making it more affordable for everyone to enter the world of VR" is part of that goal. Iribe also noted that there are now more than 100 Touch-enabled games available on Oculus' online storefront and over 350 Rift-enabled games in total.

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Nintendo Switch review: Meet the Game Boy Entertainment System

(video link)

Since the release of the Game Boy in 1989, there has been a pretty fundamental split between playing games on a TV-based console and playing games on a portable system. Aside from pricey experiments like the Turbo Express, playing on the go meant making significant and understandable sacrifices in graphical and computational power (and, often, controls) compared to contemporary home consoles.

With the Switch, Nintendo seems to be betting that the continued drum beat of Moore's Law and miniaturization has made that dichotomy moot. The Switch is an attempt to drag the portable gaming market kicking and screaming to a point where it's literally indistinguishable from the experience you'd get playing on a 1080p HDTV. Nintendo is betting that a system that fits in a diminutive tablet form factor is now powerful enough to feel acceptably modern when you throw it into an included dock and blow it up to full size on your living room wall.

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Nintendo Switch impressions: Out of the box and into our hands

We've had the Nintendo Switch here in Ars' orbiting HQ for a few days now, and while we're still working on a more thorough review ahead of launch, we're now able to share some initial impressions of the final retail system to add to our hands-on time from last month.

So far, testing out the Switch has exclusively meant playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the only one of nine confirmed launch games we have our hands on as of yet. Any significant non-gaming or online functions are tied to a "Day One" system update that likely won't be available in time for pre-launch reviews. Further thoughts on the experience of motion controlled games (like 1-2-Switch), or games that support individual Joy-Cons held horizontally (like Super Bomberman R) will also have to wait.

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