Enlarge / Starting on February 28, Steam Deck will finally leave Valve's hands and (possibly) land in yours. (credit: Aurich Lawson | DC)

After delaying Steam Deck's launch to a vague "February 2022" window, Valve has returned to keep its promise. Today, the company confirmed the date its portable, gaming-centric PC will begin shipping to some preorder customers.

Valve listed two key dates in its Wednesday announcement. The first date: Steam Deck will begin shipping February 28. This applies to customers who got their $5 preorder payments in at the earliest possible time, i.e., the first few minutes after the clock struck 1 pm EST on July 16.

Customers have a chance of being part of this shipment window if their order has an official Steam shipping estimate of "Q1 2022," which they can check by loading the Deck store page while logged into Steam.

Enlarge / Pokémon Legends: Arceus is as close as we've ever gotten to an open-world Pokémon game. (credit: Nintendo)

Last year's by-the-numbers Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes did even less than most Pokémon games to spruce up and modernize the series' decades-old formula. That's understandable for a remake of a 2006 Nintendo DS game, but the games were still disappointing follow-ups to the more adventurous Sword and Shield.

The good news is that if you've been waiting for Game Freak to really shake up Pokémon's gameplay without totally burning it to the ground and starting from scratch, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the game you've been waiting for. Part Pokémon and part Breath of the Wild, Legends takes the free-roaming "Wild Area" concept from Sword and Shield and updates the series' catching and battling mechanics to match.

That's not to say it's a perfect fusion of those disparate elements. Its mission-based structure gets pretty fetch quest-y, it leans heavily on an over-familiar roster of existing Pokémon, and the aging Switch hardware sometimes struggles to make it look good, especially when docked. But despite those problems, the whole package works together surprisingly well, and it makes the Pokémon feel fresher than it has in quite a while.

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  EVGA's entry-level Nvidia RTX 3050, priced at $249. [credit: EVGA / Nvidia ]

Until something changes, we will assume the worst about the supply and demand curves of the current graphics card market. The most pessimistic sign of things to come, sadly, comes from GPU manufacturers themselves, as both Nvidia and AMD have begun pricing new products a bit more in line with market realities.

January has already seen some woeful GPU launches. The mildly tweaked RTX 3080, now with 12GB of VRAM instead of 10GB, arrived earlier this month at an MSRP of roughly $1,200—a whopping 42 percent jump over the highly reviewed launch model's suggested price. On the other side of the price spectrum, last week's AMD RX 6500XT, at an MSRP of $199, has proven quite underwhelming thus far in reviews. Between its 64-bit memory interface, its 4GB of VRAM, and its penalties for PCIe 3.0 systems, the card's performance pales even in comparison to the $199 RX 5500XT... which launched in 2019.

The RTX 3050's specs are dramatically cut down from RTX siblings—and they're even ho-hum compared to the likes of 2016's GTX 1070. (credit: Nvidia)

Not wanting to be left out of the latest low-end headlines, Nvidia arrives this week with the RTX 3050, which continues the longtime GPU manufacturer practice of repurposing "binned" GPUs. The card's $249 MSRP is the lowest yet in the RTX desktop series, below the $329 MSRP attached to the nearly one-year-old RTX 3060 but above the $229 MSRP of 2019's GTX 1660 Super. I get the feeling that this GPU is the monkey's paw proposition PC gamers get when we scream things like, "Please produce more graphics cards!"

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Archaeologists working in Oman's Qumayrah Valley recently unearthed a rare artifact: a stone board game dating back some 4,000 years. The board features grid-like markings (possibly indicating fields) and holes for cups. It was found at a site near the village of Ayn Bani Saidah.

The excavation is part of an ongoing project to study the Iron and Bronze Age settlements in the Qumayrah Valley. The dig is a collaboration between Sultan al Bakri, director general of antiquities at the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism in Oman, and Piotr Bielinski of the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. The area is one of the least-studied regions of the country, but the archaeological finds thus far indicate that the Qumayrah Valley was likely part of a major trade route between several Arab cities.

There is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. The board just discovered at the Omani site might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game or Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was simply replaced in popularity by backgammon).

Enlarge / Neil Young performs on stage at Barclaycard Presents British Summer Time at Hyde Park on July 12, 2019, in London, England. (credit: Jo Hale | Getty Images)

Neil Young has threatened to remove his music from Spotify because he believes the streaming company enables podcaster Joe Rogan to spread “fake information” about vaccines.

In an email to his record label, Warner Records, Young said Spotify “has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform.”

“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Enlarge / Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Yes, the colon comes after the "Jedi." (credit: EA)

EA and Lucasfilm Games have jointly announced that three new Star Wars games are in development at Respawn, the studio that developed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Among those three planned games is a sequel to Fallen Order, which was a story-driven, Souls-like melee combat action and exploration game. The other two games include a first-person shooter and a strategy game, but EA's press release did not provide details about those titles beyond their respective genres.

The first-person shooter will be led by a former producer for the Star Wars: Battlefront franchise of online shooters set in the Star Wars universe. The strategy game will be produced by Respawn, but its lead developer will be Bit Reactor. Bit Reactor is a new studio formed in part by developers who previously worked on the recent entries in the XCOM franchise.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Wordle players trying to avoid foreknowledge of tomorrow's puzzle solution. (credit: Adam Drobiec / EyeEm)

If you're one of the many, many people hooked on Wordle—and especially if you're someone who likes to share your spoiler-free results publicly each day—we have a word of warning for you. There are people who are determined to spoil your good time by shoving tomorrow's Wordle answer in your face.

The spoiler Twitter account Wordlinator was one of the most prominent trolls on the scene, describing itself as "sent from the future to terminate wordle bragging." @Wordlinator would reply to seemingly random Wordle-results tweets with impolite messages designed to "teach you a lesson" by including the answer to the next day's game (as archived here).

It’s not hard

Wordlinator and its ilk take advantage of Wordle's less-than-secure Javascript coding, which lists the answer to all 2,315 of the game's five-letter puzzles in daily order in a plaintext array buried in publicly viewable files referenced in the webpage's source code.

Enlarge / Steam Deck's head is in the clouds—and thanks to Dynamic Cloud Sync, that's a good thing. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

As Valve's first portable PC, the Steam Deck, approaches its estimated February launch, the back-end work surrounding its translation of third-party PC games to a Switch-like form factor has ramped up considerably. While we expected to see the Steam ecosystem get updates for things like improved Linux support and Deck-compatible store flags, a surprise Monday announcement confirmed a cool feature that nobody had necessarily expected: a major change to Steam's support for save files in the cloud.

Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on the Steam platform, and it's a first for any gaming ecosystem currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a use case that has been teased in advertisements for the system: play your favorite PC game on the go via Steam Deck, then resume that same game later on your full-fledged home PC. That concept sounds well and good, but in practice, it requires the logistical step of making sure your game is saved, then having that save uploaded to the cloud. The idea of taking a moment to tap through menus, saving, quitting, and watching your device upload a save to the cloud isn't necessarily compatible with the pick-up-and-go nature of a portable console.

In a statement at its official Steam Community site, Valve all but calls out Nintendo Switch by name in addressing this issue:

Enlarge / Scenes like this could soon grace your Windows PC. (credit: Kenix/Harbour Masters)

Back in November, the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team announced that it had completed its months-long project of decompiling The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time's ROM into fully human-readable C code. Now, a group building on that work says it is nearing the release of a fully moddable PC port of the game.

The Harbour Masters coding team (which shares some members with but is separate from the Zelda RET project) says its porting effort is currently about 90 percent complete. The project will hopefully be ready for release as a public repository by late February, lead developer Kenix told Ars Technica. But while the massive undertaking of decompiling the game provides a good base, getting from C code to a fully functional PC version of Nintendo's 1998 classic isn't simply a matter of telling a compiler to "build for PC."

Actors and assets

When the Harbour Masters began to work in earnest on the PC port in December, Kenix said they "started by removing all of the actors [e.g., interactive objects like enemies, signposts, and bombable walls] and a lot of the game's systems to simplify the build process and what needs to be changed to get it to load." Those actors and systems were slowly added back once other problems with asset loading had been handled. "This gave us great results after only a few hours of work due to what we learned on the 'minibuild,'" Kenix said.

Enlarge / Anne Frank in 1940. A new book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, by Rosemary Sullivan, claims that a retired FBI special agent and a team of investigators have solved the mystery of who betrayed the Frank family to the Nazis. (credit: Public domain)

Former FBI special agent Vincent Pankoke was looking forward to a relaxing retirement hanging out at the beach when he left the agency. Instead, he was drawn into solving a famous cold case: the question of who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, leading to their arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Only the father, Otto Frank, survived. To find his own answer to that question, Pankoke assembled his own crack team of dogged investigators. They spent five years poring over every bit of pertinent material, setting up an extensive online database, and developing an AI program to help them sift through it all and find new connections.

While admitting that the case is circumstantial and some reasonable doubt remains, Pankoke et al. believe the most likely culprit is a man named Arnold van den Bergh, a local Jewish leader who may have handed over lists of addresses where fellow Jews were hiding to the Nazis in order to protect his own family. The Pankoke team's story was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes earlier this week (see video at end of post), and is covered in detail in a new book by Rosemary Sullivan, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.

Millions of people have read The Diary of Anne Frank since it was first published posthumously in 1947. It's been translated into 70 languages and inspired a theatrical play and subsequent Oscar-winning 1959 film, featuring Millie Perkins in the title role. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, but the family fled the country and settled in Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler came to power. They didn't flee quite far enough: the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began in May1940 and eventually forced the Franks (and many other Jews) into hiding.

Enlarge / A court order has led to a longtime Roblox player being banned from the popular game. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Roblox | Shark Fin Studios)

A lawsuit filed by the Roblox Corporation, the operator of one of the most popular online games in the West, concluded last week with a rare order from a US District Court—that a defendant must be permanently banned from an online video game and its associated services.

The dubious honor goes to Benjamin Robert Simon, better known to the Roblox community as Ruben Sim, who had previously received an IP-based Roblox ban after allegedly violating the game's terms of service. Simon operates a Roblox gameplay and criticism YouTube channel, which currently has 849,000 subscribers.

$150,000, not $1.6 million

The judgment, which came as a stipulated order agreed upon by both the plaintiff and defendant, also requires Simon to pay $150,000 to Roblox. Exactly how that number breaks down based on the suit's allegations is unclear, but the original suit says that Simon posted a threat in October 2021 that apparently targeted that year's Roblox Developers Conference. The tweet included a threatening statement without a clear indication of either satire or comedy and said, "San Francisco Police are currently searching for notorious Islamic Extremist [name redacted]. If you see this individual at RDC please call 911 immediately." The post included a hyperlink to a video titled "SOMEONE BLOW UP ROBLOX NOW," which had been deleted from YouTube in 2015 but was temporarily re-uploaded, and that video (now once again offline) included direct threats to the Roblox Corporation.

Enlarge / Sam Zeloof completed this homemade computer chip with 1,200 transistors, seen under a magnifying glass, in August 2021. (credit: Sam Kang)

In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new details about its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will make a new generation of powerful processors studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved alone in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.

With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. “Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer,” he says.

It has been a long, pandemic-fueled wait, but the second season of Star Trek: Picard is almost here, and we now have an official trailer. In addition to seeing Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) encounter his mischievous former frenemy, Q (John de Lancie), fans' hearts will warm to see the retired Starfleet captain reunite with Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), the El-Aurian bar hostess from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As I wrote in my review last year, the series is set 20 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis. The first season opened with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) having retired to the family vineyard. His bucolic existence was interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious woman named Dahj (Isa Briones) who pleaded for his help. Alas, Picard failed to save her. She was killed in front of him by Romulan assassins belonging to a radical sect known as the Zhat Vash, who is dedicated to eradicating all artificial life forms. Picard discovered that Dahj was actually a synthetic—technically Data's "daughter"—and she had a twin sister, Soji, who was also in danger.

Resolved to save Soji, Picard asked Starfleet for a ship, but he had been gone a long time, and his entreaties were rebuffed. Never one to admit defeat, Picard amassed his own scrappy crew over the next few episodes for his unauthorized rescue mission. The crew included Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera), a skilled thief and pilot of the ship La Sirena; Raffi (Michelle Hurd), a former Starfleet intelligence officer and recovering addict; Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill); and a Romulan refugee, Elnor (Evan Evagora).

Enlarge / The Steam Deck, from Valve. (credit: Valve)

Back in October, Valve laid out the specific review guidelines that a Steam game would have to follow to earn an optional "Deck Verified" badge on its Steam Store page. Now, the results of the first of those verification reviews are starting to leak out, and they're showing some minor input and interface issues across a handful of games running on Steam Deck.

While the Deck Verified badges have yet to show up on the Steam Store itself, the metadata surrounding the program is already being added to the Steam backend for some titles ahead of the Steam Deck's planned launch next month, as picked up by services like SteamDB. Of the 86 games with verification review results so far, 41 have at least one issue preventing them from receiving a full "Verified" badge.

First, the good news: Almost all of those un-verified games are still rated as "Playable" under Steam's guidelines. Only five reviewed games so far have received the dreaded Steam Deck "Unsupported" badge from Valve. Four are virtual reality games, which fail for the simple listed reason that "Steam Deck Does Not Support VR Games." The fifth, Persona 4 Golden, seems to fail because in-game videos use a problematic Windows Media Player codec that could be difficult to implement through Steam Deck's Linux Proton compatibility layer. "Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck," the game's metadata says.

Enlarge / Striking employees demand the reinstatement of Raven Software QA contractors who were let go in December. (credit: A Better ABK)

The members of Activision Blizzard subsidiary Raven Software's quality assurance department are seeking voluntary recognition of their union, a first for workers at a major American video game publisher.

The newly formed Game Workers Alliance union is asking Activision to recognize its right to represent the 34 QA testers at the studio, which works primarily on the Call of Duty series. The union has formed with the help of the Communication Workers of America—which has for years been publicly working to organize the game industry through its Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE)—and A Better ABK Workers Alliance, which is working to organize the much broader group of over 9,500 Activision employees.

(Ars Technica writers are members of the NewsGuild of New York, a subsidiary of the CWA.)

Enlarge / The Fraggles are back, clap, clap. And they're a blast to watch again, clap, clap. (credit: Jim Henson Company / Apple TV+)

The video-streaming world has long suffered from content fragmentation, and modern-day Muppet access is no exception. If you want to revel in all things Jim Henson, you'll need subscriptions to no less than three streamers: Disney+ (which has the most Henson films and series), HBO Max (which has a lock on Sesame Street), and Apple TV+. In a fairer cosmos, a unified Henson+ service would let fans feast upon the entire Muppet-verse like giddy Cookie Monsters. Alas.

Those streaming services don't just divvy up classic Muppet content, either. They each feature brand-new series from the Jim Henson Company, either with newly invented characters or old favorites reliving their glory days. Keeping up with all that content has been tricky, but we at Ars have done our best, always with the hope that one of the new properties will deliver a good-enough mix of nostalgia, production values, and freshness.

This week, Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock nails that exact combination and breathes new life into the formerly HBO-exclusive universe.

Enlarge / A small selection of the characters that may not be appearing on PlayStation in the long term.

In the wake of Microsoft's announcement that it intends to acquire Activision, it has been fun to gawk at the big numbers and speculate about the fate of rich CEOs, among other business implications. But for many PlayStation owners, there's only one question that matters: Will I need to buy an Xbox or PC to continue playing Activision franchises in the future?

Microsoft's acquisition, which could be finalized as early as July 1, could threaten PlayStation owners' access to everything from Diablo and Overwatch to Spyro and Tony Hawk. Even Crash Bandicoot, which used to be synonymous with the PlayStation brand, would be a Microsoft property after the deal closes.

And then there's Call of Duty, the annual first-person shooter mega-franchise that's particularly hard to imagine not being a part of the PlayStation universe anymore. Call of Duty games continue to be some of the PlayStation's bestsellers year after year, so a Microsoft acquisition could leave a big gap in the PlayStation catalog. Sony also declared that PlayStation was "the new home of Call of Duty" back in 2015, hyping up early access to betas and map packs for PlayStation owners, and Call of Duty's official esports home shifted over to PlayStation that same year.

Enlarge / Rhys Darby stars as gentleman pirate Stede Bennett in the upcoming HBO Max comedy series Our Flag Means Death. (credit: YouTube/HBO Max)

It's no secret that Ars staffers are big Taika Waititi fans. He always brings his distinctly quirky sensibility to his projects, from What We Do in the Shadows, Wellington Paranormal, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, to JoJo Rabbit, Reservation Dogs, and Thor: Ragnarok. After filming wrapped on Thor: Love and Thunder last year, Waititi somehow found time to develop a new period comedy series for HBO Max.

It's called Our Flag Means Death, and HBO just dropped the first teaser. The series is about an aristocrat who abandons his comfy life to become a "gentleman pirate." Even better: the main character, Stede Bonnet (played by Rhys Darby) is based on a real person who sailed with the infamous 18th-century pirate Blackbeard (played by Waititi in the series).

The real Stede Bonnet was born on the island of Barbados in 1688 to a wealthy English family and inherited a 400-acre estate when his father died in 1694. By some accounts, he was a bookish sort, and his early life was unremarkable. He married, fathered three sons and a daughter, and briefly served in the military as a major, although there is no record that he engaged in active combat.

Amazon has been hyping its Lord of the Rings TV series for a while now, but details have been scarce. That changed a bit this week, as Amazon finally announced the name of the series and released its first teaser video.

The name of the series is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

The title is a mouthful (and maybe redundant), but it ties in with the time period in which the show is set. Amazon has previously said the series is set in the Second Age, the era preceding the events depicted in author J.R.R. Tolkien's most famous books (The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

Enlarge / Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. (credit: Flickr / Bobby Kotick)

Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report accusing Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick of widespread mismanagement surrounding the sexual assault and discrimination allegations and lawsuits embroiling the company. Now, new reports suggest that the aftershocks of that November reporting were key to bringing Microsoft and Activision together for an industry-changing $68.7 billion acquisition deal, first announced Monday.

That timeline is according to behind-the-scenes reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, both of which suggest the deal came together quickly in the two months following the Journal's November report on Kotick.

According to "a person familiar with the matter" cited by Bloomberg, Microsoft initially reached out in part to offer support and address "concerns about the treatment of women at Activision" after that report. But Microsoft also wanted "to ensure that if Kotick and the board were willing to sell the company, Microsoft would be well positioned to make an offer," as Bloomberg put it.