By Stephany Nunneley,
Thursday, 6 June 2019 14:06 GMT
Nintendo has solidified its plans for E3 2019 and provided additional information on games playable on the show floor.
E3 2019 attendees will be able to play Switch titles Pokemon Sword and Shield, Luigi’s Mansion 3, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, in addition to various others on the show floor.
This pretty much confirms we’ll hear more about these games during the E3 Nintendo Direct.
As previously stated, on June 11 Nintendo will host its Nintendo Direct presentation, followed by Nintendo Treehouse: Live presentations throughout the week. Those interested in indies should tune in for Treehouse: Live on Thursday, June 13.
Subscribe to the VG247 newsletterGet all the best bits of VG247 delivered to your inbox every Friday!
Alongside news and announcements Nintendo will host multiple game tournaments.
Those unable to attend E3 2019 can head to a participating Best Buy for early access events. Available at 80 locations, on Wednesday, June 12, and from noon-5 pm local time on Saturday, June 15, you can demo Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. Hit up the link to see if your location is listed.
Finally, the company will host a Nintendo eShop Sale. You’ll be able to save some coin on select digital 3DS and Switch games June 11-18. The full list of discounted games will be available here.
Nintendo Direct will begin at 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 5pm UK, 6pm CEST on June 6. The presentation will focus entirely on software and games scheduled to release in 2019.
E3 2019 is upon us, so be sure to bookmark our full E3 2019 schedule for easy access.
That means there's still a chance the new Animal Crossing -- which is tentatively scheduled for 2019 at the moment -- will make an appearance at the show. We could also see Astral Chain, a fantasy-action game from Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames, and Super Mario Maker 2, which comes out just a couple of weeks after the show. Heck, maybe we'll get a release date for Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo's next smartphone game, too.
I wrote recently about my iPhone X falling victim to a swollen battery, and Apple lending me an iPhone 8 while my own phone was repaired or replaced.
Yesterday was my first chance to get to the Regent Street store to pick up my phone and return the loaner. Given the extent of the damage, I wasn’t expecting a repair to be possible but, impressively, it was. Apple told me it had been fixed, and checking the serial number confirmed it.
The iPhone 8 is a very nice phone …
NordVPN
As I said last time, the screen differences seem to me to be overplayed.
So, in a couple of days of use, which of the differences has really stood out? I’ll start with one difference that really hasn’t: OLED versus LCD displays. To be honest, I think this has been massively overblown. Apple’s LCD screens have always been excellent, and the iPhone 8 one is no exception. There hasn’t been a single moment when I’ve looked at the iPhone 8 screen and missed the iPhone X one – or even noticed any difference at all.
I mentioned two differences I noticed right away: a small one and a big one. The small one was the second rear camera, while the big one was Face ID.
There is one iPhone X feature I miss massively – and that’s Face ID. To me, the difference is night-and-day. Somewhat for unlocking the phone. Swiping up on the iPhone X can be done very casually, and Face ID unlocks instantly; having to position a thumb on the Touch ID button feels clunkier in comparison.
But much more for apps. I use Face ID with my banking apps, for example, and on the iPhone X I just open the app, briefly see the Face ID unlock confirmation and I’m in. It’s absolutely seamless, and the feeling is as if there’s no security step at all.
Tap to Wake
But it turned out there was another really small-sounding difference that I missed way more than I expected: Tap to Wake. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to switch on the iPhone 8 by tapping the screen.
Of course, Tap to Wake needs Face ID anyway, but it was the combination I missed rather than just Face ID itself.
Another thing was storage. While it initially looked like I was only using 56GB, that turned out not to be the case. Once I started re-downloading my offline Spotify tracks, the 64GB storage of the loaner was soon full. (I use Apple Music as my primary music service, and Spotify for tango music – the latter has a much better selection, and it stops tango messing up my Apple Music recommendations.)
Diagnostics check on loaner
Interestingly, Apple carried out the same, thorough diagnostics check on the loaner phone I returned as it did on my own phone. I guess partly to ensure there’s no hidden damage, but I suspect it’s also to stop people swapping out a loaner with a counterfeit phone, or replacing genuine internal parts with third-party ones.
I didn’t mind the time it took, as I was in any case waiting for my own phone to restore on the store Wi-Fi, but it’s interesting that Apple sees this step as a necessary precaution.
One feature request
The repair meant that I needed to restore my phone twice from iCloud backup: once to the loaner phone, and again when mine was returned. In both cases, I was heading out straight afterwards, so restoring from iTunes wasn’t practical.
An iCloud restore is, of course, quite slow. There’s the initial part of the process, where you see only a progress bar and can’t use the phone for anything else, and then it becomes usable as it continues to redownload your installed apps. That side of things can take a long time.
In theory, an iCloud restore allows you to prioritize the apps you want downloaded first: you just tap on them. In practice, however, this doesn’t work well – it continues to simultaneously download multiple apps, and on slow wifi that can be annoyingly slow.
I needed fairly immediate access to Facebook Messenger to send a message (Messenger is the new email for many people …), but had to wait a frustratingly long time to get it. What I’d like is the option to maybe long-press an app and have iCloud pause everything else in order to download only that app, resuming the rest of the restore once it’s done.
It's around three weeks since Microsoft first urged Windows users to patch their systems against the BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) vulnerability. Concerned that not enough people were taking notice, the company then issued a further warning stressing the importance of installing a patch.
Now the NSA has got involved, joining Microsoft in begging users to secure their Windows XP and Windows 7 computers. The agency says that is "concerned that malicious cyber actors will use the vulnerability in ransomware and exploit kits containing other known exploits, increasing capabilities against other unpatched systems".
See also:
Both Microsoft and the NSA warn that the exploit is "wormable", and both are eager to avoid a repeat of the WannaCry worm that affected systems around the globe back in 2017. The NSA's warning urges people to "patch Remote Desktop Services on legacy versions of Windows" -- specifically Windows 7, Windows XP, Server 2003 and 2008.
The agency echoes the concerns of the Windows-maker, saying "although Microsoft has issued a patch, potentially millions of machines are still vulnerable".
It goes on to say:
This is the type of vulnerability that malicious cyber actors frequently exploit through the use of software code that specifically targets the vulnerability. For example, the vulnerability could be exploited to conduct denial of service attacks. It is likely only a matter of time before remote exploitation code is widely available for this vulnerability. NSA is concerned that malicious cyber actors will use the vulnerability in ransomware and exploit kits containing other known exploits, increasing capabilities against other unpatched systems.
NSA urges everyone to invest the time and resources to know your network and run supported operating systems with the latest patches. Please refer to our advisory for additional information. This is critical not just for NSA's protection of National Security Systems but for all networks.
In its security advisory, the NSA also provides tips that people can follow to secure their systems:
Block TCP Port 3389 at your firewalls, especially any perimeter firewalls exposed to the internet. This port is used in RDP protocol and will block attempts to establish a connection.
Enable Network Level Authentication. This security improvement requires attackers to have valid credentials to perform remote code authentication.
Disable remote Desktop Services if they are not required. Disabling unused and unneeded services helps reduce exposure to security vulnerabilities overall and is a best practice even without the BlueKeep threat.
Two years after their original introduction, Google is updating its SOS Alerts with more real-time information about areas affected by natural disasters, and new navigation warnings in Google Maps to help route you around danger. The changes will also show you more detailed visual information about earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, with a visual overlay to show the impacted areas.
For hurricanes, Google will attempt to forecast their route, and will display a crisis notification card in Google Maps if you’re near an affected area. Flood forecasts will show an overlay on a map of affected areas, along with information about severity. Finally, earthquakes will also get a crisis card, which will show you its epicenter, magnitude, and areas affected.
Google’s SOS Alerts are a way to provide essential information quickly in the event of a natural disaster. If you search for a relevant term, then Google will surface a summary of relevant news, emergency phone numbers, safety tips, and Twitter updates. In the most serious cases, Google will send out a push alert to users in the affected area.
The new visual SOS Alerts will be rolling out to users in the coming weeks, but supported platforms and regions vary between the different natural disasters.
The Google Maps navigation warnings and earthquake indicators will both be available globally. Earthquakes will be visible on Android, iOS, desktop, and the mobile web, while the navigation warnings will be on iOS and Android only. Meanwhile, flood visualizations will be supported on Android, desktop, and the mobile web, but they’ll only be available in India where the risk of drowning in a flood is particularly high. Finally, hurricane visual forecasts will be available across all platforms in the US, Mexico, Caribbean, Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea.
It’s long been rumored that Apple may be doing away with its 3D Touch feature with the upcoming iPhones, and now it seems the rumors have been confirmed, only that it’s not iPhone specific — it’ll be removed with an iOS update.
Sources report that a beta version of iOS 13 is now being tested by developers, and it has become apparent to them that the 3D Touch feature has indeed been removed. The removal seems to have been a long time coming: 3D Touch had encountered adoption issues ever since its launch. As older iPhones — any model prior to the iPhone 6S — did not have a force-sensitive layer on its screens, app developers were reluctant to incorporate the feature into their apps for consistency purposes, encountering the problem that they’d have to find an alternate solution for older models using the same app.
However, it still seems that 3D Touch won’t be wiped from all Apple devices just yet. The Apple Watch also uses the force-sensitive feature but isn’t faced with the same issue iPhones had, since all models of the Watch support the feature — even its very first generation. Because of that, there’s yet to be any suggestion that Apple would be removing the feature from its wrist devices as well.
Fortnite fans can download update 9.20, following a short delay.
The latest Fortnite update is accompanied by a period of downtime on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android.
Fortnite server maintenance is expected to run from 9am UK time until 11am UK time.
In the meantime, fans can download the new update from Epic Games.
According to the patch notes, the big new addition is the Storm Flip item.
It's described as a thrown item that explodes on impact to create a sphere-shaped zone. It will create a safe zone when it overlaps the storm, or a storm zone if it's thrown within the safe zone.
There's also a Sword Fight LTM, plus news about the Undo Purchase button, which can be used when buying select items.
The only bad news from update 9.20 is that Epic Games has vaulted Hunting Rifles.
Check out the full list of update 9.20 patch notes below...
WEAPONS + ITEMS
Storm Flip
• Thrown item that explodes on impact and creates a sphere-shaped zone.
• Where the sphere overlaps the storm, it will create a safe zone.
• Where the sphere overlaps a safe zone, it will create a storm zone.
• The Storm Flip deals the same damage as the current storm.
• The zone lasts for 20 seconds before dissipating.
• Available in Epic Rarity.
• Can be found from Floor Loot, Chests, and Vending Machines.
• Drops in stacks of 1.
• Max stack of 1.
Vaulted
Hunting Rifle all variants
While we value the variety of longer range sniping options, the Hunting Rifle has become somewhat outclassed by the Infantry Rifle after it was changed to hitscan. In addition, there are a few Sniper Rifle options available and we feel it doesn’t currently fill a necessary role in the item lineup.
Loot Carrier
• Reduced sniper package availability from 12.5% to 8.45%
• Reduced explosive package availability from 12.5% to 7.04%
• The chances of getting high-powered, rare items from Supply Drones was higher than felt appropriate, so we’ve reduced their availability slightly
Mounted turret
• Overheat now takes 20% longer.
• The Mounted Turret’s usage has decreased over time. By slightly increasing time before Overheat, the goal is to help increase its risk/reward.
• Increased max charge time on Boom Bow from 1s to 1.25s
• The Boom Bow is a bit stronger than we’d like. This adjustment should reduce frequency between shots, making misses riskier. We’d like to evaluate the impact of this change before making any additional adjustments, and it’s possible that more tweaks will be necessary if this doesn’t have the desired effect.
• The Slipstream’s audio, pink ring, and spinning blades turn off when disabled during the fifth phase of the Storm.
• Players revived from a Reboot Van will lose invulnerability upon shooting or building.
• Air Vents are now more forgiving in order to prevent fall damage when players jump on them from high places.
Fortnite Storm Flip item (Image: EPIC GAMES)
Bug Fixes
• Fixed an issue in which weapons that previously had no ammo would be unable to be automatically reloaded.
• Fixed an issue where players would take fall damage after exiting a Baller quickly rolling downhill.
• Aim assist can no longer be used to fire at players using a Shadow Bomb.
• Fixed an issue where players could damage teammates who were disconnected from the match.
• Fixed an issue where the Flying Disc Toy would get caught on Ballers in mid-air.
• Fixed an issue where Slipstream audio and visual FX would continue to occur after the player exits.
• Fixed an issue where Air Vents’ sound and visual effects occurred more than once.
• Fixed an issue in which Driftboards were unable to exit Slipstreams.
• Exiting a vehicle that had entered a Slipstream no longer causes players to skydive.
• Vending Machines no longer become unusable when a player using one gets eliminated.
• The Flint-Knock Pistol is now consistently able to knock targets and the shooter the correct distance.
• Dynamite audio no longer gets stuck on a loop during replays.
• The lava bounce visual effect no longer persists if a Baller bounces from lava to water.
LIMITED TIME MODE ROTATION:
SWORD FIGHT
• Treasure chest contain Epic or better weapons as well as the occasional Infinity Blade! Fight your opponents to find out who is worthy of the Blade… and who is not.
GAMEPLAY
• Auto Swap Material option was removed and is always on.
• Removing the option allowed us to optimize Auto-Swap behavior, primarily reducing rare cases in which materials did not swap properly.
• Increased duration for how long elimination credit can be granted to the last damager.
• Fall damage from 15s to 60s
• Self-elimination from 15s to 60s
• Storm elimination from 5s to 60s
• Added support for foot controller devices to the Accessibility options.
• Adjusted Invert Aircraft Controls setting info to better describe the option.
Bug Fixes
• Gamepad custom build controls now consistently allow players to turbo build when using the ‘Place’ action while simultaneously having the ‘Stair,’ ‘Wall,’ ‘Roof,’ or ‘Floor’ action bound.
• Players outside closed enemy structures can no longer build inside them.
• Fixed an issue in which the destruction of a building could be interrupted by reconnecting it to its base.
• Fixed an issue in which players would hang in the air if they disconnected during the bus drop phase.
• Certain Fortbytes requiring a specific cosmetic item now correctly unlock for players who have it equipped.
AUDIO
• Updated reload sounds for weapons to be mono instead of stereo. This will help with spatialization improvements for weapon swap sounds.
Bug Fixes
• The storm damage sound effect no longer ends prematurely.
GENERAL
• Banner Icons- Updated from 256×256 to 512×512
• Standard Type – 31 large graphic types updated
• Battle Royale – 17 large graphic types updated
• Console players can now access language options through the Settings menu.
• Players can now choose a setting on the “Account” tab to opt out of player surveys.
• Updated main menu lobby to be the same as the Battle Royale lobby.
• We made some initial polish adjustments to the new lobby with a plan to iterate over time and update the theme across the front-end.
Bug Fixes
• Fixed videos not looping on PS4.
• The question mark icon in the Settings menu now fully fills in the box.
Fortnite Hunting Rifles have been vaulted (Image: EPIC GAMES)
UI
• We’ve added the ability to Undo a new purchase to the Fortnite Store!
• Immediately after you make a new purchase you will be able to Undo this item purchase for a limited time as long as you stay on the purchase screen.
• After you Undo a purchase, there will be a cooldown on using Undo on that same item, but you will be able to Undo any other new purchases!
• If you choose to Undo a purchase, the ownership of that item will be revoked and you will be granted back the appropriate V-Bucks.
• Undo will follow the same eligibility requirements as Return Requests.
• What can Undo be used on?
• Items available for purchase with V-Bucks in the Item Shop
• Emotes
• Gliders
• Harvesting Tools
• Back Bling
• Outfits
• Wraps
• Music
• What can Undo not be used on?
• Limited Time Offers in the Store such as Lava Legends Pack, Frozen Legends Pack, and The Laguna Pack
• V-Bucks
• Gifting
• Battle Pass
• Battle Pass Tiers
• Founder’s Pack
• Founder’s Pack Upgrades
• Loot Llamas (Save the World)
• Event and Weekly Items (Save the World)
• Players in your squad now have a stronger visual highlight when actively speaking.
• We no longer display Active Voice Indicators in-game for players that are in your squad.
• We adjusted this to retain the improved visibility of speaking players that Active Voice Indicators provide while making it easier for you to immediately get contextual information (e.g. health and shield status) for the person speaking.
