The remake hopes to have "3D models of every unique design this land has to offer".
Super Nintendo World - the new theme park about to open at Universal Studios Japan - is being recreated in Minecraft.
Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan is still scheduled to open on 4th February, but visitor numbers will, naturally, be limited upon opening to avoid crowds and advance registration is mandatory.
Thanks to Dippy22, however, Nintendo fans who also happen to be Minecraft players can live vicariously through their painstakingly recreation based on plans and photos of the new theme park. The 1:1 remake is apparently 45 per cent complete and the screenshots show off an incredibly faithful homage which hopes to have "3D models of every unique design this land has to offer" (thanks, PCGN).
"I've just started this new undertaking and any experienced help would be welcomed," Dippy adds.
There's still some debate over whether the next Asus gaming phone will be called the ROG Phone 4 or the ROG Phone 5, but whatever the moniker, the device has now shown up in a Chinese regulatory filing – complete with pictures showing it off from all sides.
The documents published by TENAA give us our best look yet at what we're going to call the ROG Phone 5 for now (partly because you can actually see a number 5 written on the back of the handset).
It also looks as though we're getting a dot matrix display on the back of the Asus ROG Phone 5, similar to the one on the Lightning Armor case for the ROG Phone 3. These newly leaked images show the Asus ROG logo, but we're assuming that can be customized.
Apart from that embellishment on the back, not much seems to have changed in terms of the appearance of the ROG Phone compared to the 2020 edition. The SIM card slot looks to have a red cover, but that might be an exclusive for this particular edition of the phone, which seems to have been produced in partnership with Tencent Games.
Asus Rog phone 5 listed on TENAA certification.◾6.78 inches Amoled display◾6000mAh Battery (dual-cell, 3000×2)◾Android 11 pic.twitter.com/NjTjk8AzKOJanuary 30, 2021
The pictures line up neatly with some live shots we recently saw of the upcoming handset. It looks as though there could well be a customizable LED lighting strip to go along with the dot matrix array, all ready to give the phone a truly eye-catching aesthetic.
We've also seen a set of benchmarks appear online that we think are linked to the Asus ROG Phone 5, showing off its credentials in terms of power and performance. The phone should come carrying the Snapdragon 888 chip, the flagship chip of choice for top-end Android handsets this year.
Other bits of information we can glean from this regulatory filing include a 6.78-inch AMOLED display, Android 11 on board, and a hefty 6,000 mAh battery – that should be enough to provide plenty of juice for gaming sessions, and matches the capacity that was offered on the Asus ROG Phone 3.
As for that leap over the 4 straight to the 5, which is looking more and more likely, it's all because the number 4 is considered unlucky in China and Taiwan – and that's not something that Asus would want to get in the way of any potential sales.
With movie theaters still closed in most places, the home theater experience is more important than ever. A spiffy Atmos surround sound system can take your viewing experience to the next level, but maybe you don't want to run wires or have speakers permanently installed around your room. Well, that happens to be the niche JBL is targeting with the JBL Bar 9.1. It's an Atmos-enabled soundbar with a whopping 820W of power and detachable satellite speakers that you can place around the room when you need them. It also has full integration with Google's Chromecast platform, so you can manage it from the Home app. While the audio experience is great, the price is not. JBL wants a cool grand for the Bar 9.1, which is more than most people should pay for the convenience.
Design, hardware, what's in the box
The Bar 9.1 looks like your average soundbar with its gray casing and various speaker grilles, but it's a big boy at almost 35 inches wide. The top and sides are metal, but the bottom and back are plastic. Around back, you've got your ports including power, USB, optical, ethernet, and two HDMI ports (ARC audio and 4K HDR passthrough). The 10-inch subwoofer is very physically plain, but it is big. Ideally, you want the sub at least a few feet away from the soundbar, which may not be possible in smaller spaces.
There's no real display on the soundbar—all it has is a "dot-matrix" panel on the front that can show you a few characters at a time. This makes fumbling with settings pretty annoying, usually requiring you to hold one or more buttons on the remote and then wait for messages to scroll across. The soundbar does have a few physical control on the top surface, but they're all replicated on the remote. The remote, too, is very understated. There are only a few buttons, so again, you'll want to keep the manual handy to look up the button combos you'll need to change settings.
You can choose to set up the Bar 9.1 with cables and call it a day. However, it also has Wi-Fi connectivity, and to use that, you'll need the Google Home app. This is how you get the bar connected to your WiFi and how the bar keeps its firmware updated. Once it's added to your account, it appears in the Home app like any other Chromecast-enabled speaker. You can add it to speaker groups and play to it from any local device. There's also Bluetooth and Air Play 2 support if you're not in Google's home ecosystem.
The satellite speakers attach magnetically to the ends of the bar to charge, and they're on there very securely. If you didn't know about the removable satellites, you'd probably never know they come off. When disconnected, the satellites will sync wirelessly with the rest of the system. I've had no connectivity issues during my testing, either. The satellites are supposed to offer 10 hours of playback, and that seems roughly accurate based on my time with the Bar 9.1. It's probably a bit less, but you should have no trouble watching a few movies back-to-back without docking the speakers.
This is a $1,000 audio system, so you'd expect a few extras in the box. There's the remote, soundbar, satellite speakers, and subwoofer, of course. There are also power cables, an HDMI cable, and a wall mounting kit. Be careful if you decide to go that route; the soundbar with speakers attached weighs more than 10 pounds.
Audio and features
While the Bar 9.1 has "9.1" right in its name, it's actually what's known as a 5.1.4 setup. The "best" Atmos systems have overhead speakers, which you don't get with the Bar 9.1. However, the soundbar can bounce sound off the ceiling to create a more immersive experience. You'll have to calibrate the speakers to your room, which is one of those things that requires an esoteric combination of button presses. Because of this speaker setup, the Atmos "height" channel is weak compared to systems with dedicated overhead speakers. If you've never had an Atmos setup at home, though, you'll probably still be impressed.
Luckily, that's the only negative thing I have to say about the audio quality. Everything from movies to concerts sound amazing on the JBL Bar 9.1. On default settings, the soundbar has powerful but not overwhelming bass, crisp highs, and nice, rich mids. Even with the bass cranked all the way up, it's intense but not overwhelming for the rest of the audio. This is hands-down the best sound system in my house.
The Bar 9.1 supports both optical and HDMI connection options, but you should go the HDMI route if at all possible. Optical only supports DTS and Dolby Digital, and even then you might suffer from bandwidth issues. HDMI has Atmos, DTS:X, and even more advanced lossless formats like DTS-HD Master Audio. One thing to note here: you can only use the HDMI audio option if your TV has an ARC or eARC HDMI. If not, you'll have to use optical, which doesn't support all the fancy Atmos things. If your TV's other HDMI ports use an older spec, you might have to use the soundbar's HDMI-in port to get 4K content from other sources. This describes my TV, so I'm very pleased to see 4K HDR passthrough support.
Should you buy it?
JBL Bar 9.1
8/10
Maybe, but only if you're a nerd for high-quality audio—and not so nerdy that you'd install a full Atmos system. The JBL Bar 9.1 offers excellent audio in a compact, attractive package. You don't have to install speakers or run cables, and it supports every audio format under the sun (over HDMI). I also appreciate that the satellites can remain docked with the soundbar most of the time. It's easy to grab the speakers and set them around the room when I'm watching something with high-quality audio, and the rest of the time they're out of the way. I'm also happy to have Google Home integration with the Bar 9.1 because, again, it's the best speaker setup in my house.
The only hardware issue I'm seeing is the lack of a display. Even a rudimentary menu system would be easier than using button combos on the remote and the simple dot-matrix display. That's not a major issue, but the price is. The JBL Bar 9.1 is sticking very close to its $1,000 MSRP, even after months of availability.
Buy it if...
You want high-end audio for your home entertainment system but don't want to install a bunch of speakers.
You don't mind spending a lot on a good sound system.
Don't buy it if...
Your TV's built-in speakers or a cheaper soundbar sound good enough to you.
You're so into audio tech that the mediocre Atmos support will ruin the experience.
Anyone with a hotmail.com or hotmail.co.uk email address was automatically switched to Microsoft Outlook back in 2013. Since then, it's been impossible to set-up a new Hotmail email address – with everyone pushed to the new Outlook branding instead. However, despite the change taking place almost a decade ago, a number of users have suddenly reported receiving messages from Microsoft warning that their ageing Hotmail inboxes are over their storage limit.
Worse still, for those who want to keep their message history intact, the only option is to pay a subscription fee to upgrade their Outlook inbox to add extra online storage capacity.
Since the reshuffle of Microsoft's email offering, it has imposed a 15GB storage limit on free Outlook accounts. Anyone who wants more space on its servers will need to pay £59.99 a year subscription to upgrade to Microsoft's Office 365 service. Of course, Office 365 isn't just about storage – it also lets you use some of the most popular Microsoft Office applications online and on your smartphone, iPad, and PC.
However, the latest warning message is causing outrage with Hotmail users as they've seemingly never been alerted to this limit until now – with many allowed to go well over the 15GB limit for years without repercussion. It's unclear why these users were missed in the initial switch to Outlook, or whether this is part of a new push by Microsoft to move loyal users to Office 365 after turning a blind eye for some time.
Some users are even being told that they now can't send or receive any new messages until they delete older emails or pay the premium.
Social media platforms, such as Twitter, are full of people who have suddenly received the alert with many baffled by how they've been allowed to go over the limit in the first place and why the rules appear to have suddenly changed. Speaking on social media, one Outlook user said: "I know what I will be doing today, going through 250,000+ emails on my @outlook account after "receiving" this warning from you! Thank you for letting me know about it after I've used 40GB out of the 15GB capacity!"
Another user added: "#Outlook's started telling me I'm using 27GB or 15GB and can't send or receive emails till I sort it. Is this something new? #microsoft"
And one Outlook fan vented: "I've had my #Outlook account from @Microsoft @Outlook for more than 20 years - when it was still #Hotmail. I signed in today to find they've suddenly implemented a 15GB e-mail account limit unless you go #Premium. Way to show your longtime users what you really think of them..."
It's unclear exactly why these users are being told they are over their limit despite many having had no such warnings in the past. Express.co.uk has contacted Microsoft to find out why the alerts have suddenly appeared and will update this story when we hear back.
Those who don't want to delete swathes of messages may find the only option is to sign up to 365. Along with getting access to apps including Word, Excel and Powerpoint, 365 also gives users a 50GB limit on their email storage.
There's also advanced email security, an ad-free interface, message encryption and removal of dangerous attachments. Microsoft 365 costs £59.99 for a personal plan or £79.99 per year for the family option.
It has always struck me as strange that when we think of the cars whose appearance we like, especially if we’re deciding whether to buy one or not, it’s always the exterior we find ourselves considering. Why? I guess it’s because, consciously or not, we’re keen to project the right image of ourselves. But the truth is that once our cars are bought, we spend hardly any time looking at them, whereas we literally live in their interiors, whose design by comparison we barely think through at all.
Yet interior design has undergone a revolution over the past generation. Time was when interiors were scarcely styled at all, at least from the point of view of the driving environment. Instruments were placed wherever was easy and a dashboard created around them. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, a certain sense of ergonomic cohesion was gradually introduced, but it wasn’t until this century that mainstream manufacturers started thinking as hard about the look of their cars within as without.
And with good reason. First, an interior is far harder to design, because unlike an exterior which is just a relatively simple shape, an interior contains a whole host of competing interests, from dials and switches to the dashboard and infotainment system, all arguing over the same small amount of space.
But as journeys have lengthened yet traffic slowed and we’ve spent more and more time looking at our interiors, merely making it functional was never going to be enough. It had to offer a pleasant place to sit and while away all that time. Not least because of the quality of the items with which we now fill out homes, be they sleek music systems, flatscreen televisions or smart and minimalist phones. It simply won’t wash any longer to leave that kind of environment and go and sit in the motoring equivalent of student digs.
There’s one more consideration: so much of a car’s exterior is now governed by the legislative rulebook that it’s becoming ever harder to create genuinely beautiful and distinctive exteriors, hence all those jelly-mould crossover SUVs we have these days. But there remains far more scope for creative expression on the inside, so that’s where car manufacturers keen on carving an identity for themselves are increasingly concentrating.
But so too is that job getting harder. Interiors aren’t exempt from the forces of law, but that’s really only where the problems start. There’s now so much stuff that we expect to find in our cabins that packaging it all within the legislative framework is becoming an increasingly fraught business.
Remember when you would get into your car and every single thing you needed to do, from adjusting the treble on your stereo to turning down the heating a touch, could be accomplished with a single action: the turn of a knob or the flick of a dial? Things are rarely so easy today. We live in an era where function follows form at a deferential distance, so the price paid for a nice, clean-looking fascia with the minimum number of controls is that even some quite fundamental functions require you to go rummaging around in endless menus to locate them.
Say you want to turn off the stability control in Volkswagen’s new Golf GTI. You would like to just press a button and see a little light appear on the dash, but these days that would be far too easy. First you must find the vehicle settings menu on the glossy touchscreen in front of you. Once you’ve done that, you need to keep swiping until you find the page concerning the brakes. Yes, the brakes. Only then do you get to tell the car you would like to turn off the ESC. Does it do it? Of course not. It first tells you this is a bad idea that it doesn’t recommend and insists you confirm your wilful recklessness before it will grudgingly do as you ask.
So what are the most important priorities of a car interior? To me, job one is visibility. If you can’t see out properly, you’re unlikely ever to be truly comfortable – and that’s becoming increasingly difficult, because car manufacturers make ever-thicker A- and B-pillars to help their cars’ crash performance, apparently without considering how much more likely it is that their cars will crash as a result. And there’s no excuse: even two-seat mid-engined supercars can feel like goldfish bowls if properly designed, as anyone who has sat in a McLaren will tell you.
But in many important regards, interiors have progressed beyond all recognition. When I started doing this job in the late 1980s, many cars weren’t even symmetrical, meaning the driving position could be radically different depending on whether the car you drove was left-or right-hand drive. Pedals nowhere near where your feet naturally fell were common, as were seats that weren’t actually directly in front of the steering wheel. Steering wheels that adjusted in any direction at all were the exception, not the norm they are today. I may be critical of the latest Golf’s subsystems, but the way the car presents its primary controls to the driver – pedals, steering wheel and gearlever – is impeccable.
One important area in which we seem to be regressing, however, is the design of the instrument pack, or IP, as it’s known in the trade. Some might raise an eyebrow at this, knowing how beautiful those ultra-high-definition screens that are rapidly replacing conventional clocks can look. And I agree: some are excellent. But others aren’t, and I’ll cite BMW as an example only because there was a time when its IPs were without doubt the best in the world. But, having tried to get used to its new design philosophy, where the electronic needles only sweep through a limited arc right around the outside of the IP cluster, I recently climbed into an M2 that still uses the old tech and found myself wondering what on earth was so wrong with BMW’s simple, circular dials that it had to change. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
But automotive interior design must at times feel like a thankless task. The customer wants more of everything: more gadgets, more information, more entertainment (don’t get me started on apps), yet they also demand presentation as clean as it is on their smartphones. The only difference is this: it doesn’t matter how much time you spend looking at your smartphone at home, but it matters a very great deal how much time you spend looking at your smart screen in the car you’re driving. And yes, voice recognition and even gesture control can help, but they’re at best useful extras, not complete solutions in themselves.
As ever, then, the best interiors are those that strike the correct compromise between ease of use and appearance. It’s tempting to say that everything should have its own, separate, one-touch control, but that would lead to an interior plastered with buttons that could be completely confusing too. Alternatively, a car with no buttons or similar controls might look stunning but, in reality, would likely be difficult and time-consuming to operate.
With each new car I drive today, I now configure its control systems the way I want them to be before I set off, which may add between five and 10 minutes to my journey. And I know that if I stop even for five minutes to grab a sandwich, half the systems I’ve disabled will have turned themselves back on again by the time I’ve got back on board. The car will have taken itself out of Dynamic driving mode, turned its stability control fully on again and reactivated its hateful lane-keeping assistance function. So I have to do it all over again. This has little to do with the manufacturer trying to stop you having a crash and almost everything to do with removing grounds for you to sue them if you do.
For me, and because I’m old, I would give up all the gadgets and swanky screens in favour of interiors with a limited number of clearly labelled, logically arranged switches. Twenty years ago, that was simply common sense. Today, it sounds like a revolution. Which is why it’s never going to happen.
What should happen next?
How do we resolve the conflicting interests of the demand for more content and the desire for cleaner cockpits? Truly intelligent voice recognition has a role to play, but I’m increasingly minded to think that the only way to create the space we need on the dash for comprehensive yet easily understood and accessed functionality and information is to migrate the dials onto the screen.
The information on current head-up displays duplicates what’s already shown in the IP. There’s no longer space for such redundancy; if the data I need is on the screen, I never look for it anywhere else, because that’s where my eyes are already pointing. So ditch conventional instruments, project all their data on the screen and use the space you save to create a driving environment that’s as easy to operate as it is attractive.
The best and worst interiors
Honda E: Wall-to-wall digital screens, including monitors for the video cameras that supplant wing mirrors, could be the ultimate form-over-function folly. But in the simple little Honda, it’s all easy to understand and works really well.
Mazda MX-5 (ND): Has beautifully legible analogue instruments with chunky, easily operated switchgear for all major functions, with less important operations accessed via a simple controller and a clear screen. There’s very little not to like here.
Aston Martin DB9: Some will look askance at this choice, because the DB9’s cabin was truly beautiful, but few who have actually driven one. With illegible instruments, tiny buttons and the worst sat-nav on record, it proved beyond doubt that just because it looks right, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be right.
Mercedes-Benz G-Class: Probably the best blend of tradition and tech. It has a beautifully clear screen with plenty of customisation opportunities yet is very simple and intuitive to operate through the uncomplicated Comand controller.
Lancia Trevi: If you’re one of those poor souls who has a phobia of holes, look away now. If you thought the exterior of the Trevi saloon was ugly, it was nothing compared with the interior whose pockmarked dashboard appeared to have caught the bubonic plague.
BMW 7 Series (E65): To say that BMW’s iDrive system had a troubled childhood is a gross understatement. Twenty years ago, a single controller that moved in eight directions to control all ancillary operations was a recipe for absolute ergonomic disaster, and the E65 7 Series duly delivered exactly that.
It has always struck me as strange that when we think of the cars whose appearance we like, especially if we’re deciding whether to buy one or not, it’s always the exterior we find ourselves considering. Why? I guess it’s because, consciously or not, we’re keen to project the right image of ourselves. But the truth is that once our cars are bought, we spend hardly any time looking at them, whereas we literally live in their interiors, whose design by comparison we barely think through at all.
Yet interior design has undergone a revolution over the past generation. Time was when interiors were scarcely styled at all, at least from the point of view of the driving environment. Instruments were placed wherever was easy and a dashboard created around them. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, a certain sense of ergonomic cohesion was gradually introduced, but it wasn’t until this century that mainstream manufacturers started thinking as hard about the look of their cars within as without.
And with good reason. First, an interior is far harder to design, because unlike an exterior which is just a relatively simple shape, an interior contains a whole host of competing interests, from dials and switches to the dashboard and infotainment system, all arguing over the same small amount of space.
But as journeys have lengthened yet traffic slowed and we’ve spent more and more time looking at our interiors, merely making it functional was never going to be enough. It had to offer a pleasant place to sit and while away all that time. Not least because of the quality of the items with which we now fill out homes, be they sleek music systems, flatscreen televisions or smart and minimalist phones. It simply won’t wash any longer to leave that kind of environment and go and sit in the motoring equivalent of student digs.
There’s one more consideration: so much of a car’s exterior is now governed by the legislative rulebook that it’s becoming ever harder to create genuinely beautiful and distinctive exteriors, hence all those jelly-mould crossover SUVs we have these days. But there remains far more scope for creative expression on the inside, so that’s where car manufacturers keen on carving an identity for themselves are increasingly concentrating.
But so too is that job getting harder. Interiors aren’t exempt from the forces of law, but that’s really only where the problems start. There’s now so much stuff that we expect to find in our cabins that packaging it all within the legislative framework is becoming an increasingly fraught business.
Remember when you would get into your car and every single thing you needed to do, from adjusting the treble on your stereo to turning down the heating a touch, could be accomplished with a single action: the turn of a knob or the flick of a dial? Things are rarely so easy today. We live in an era where function follows form at a deferential distance, so the price paid for a nice, clean-looking fascia with the minimum number of controls is that even some quite fundamental functions require you to go rummaging around in endless menus to locate them.
Say you want to turn off the stability control in Volkswagen’s new Golf GTI. You would like to just press a button and see a little light appear on the dash, but these days that would be far too easy. First you must find the vehicle settings menu on the glossy touchscreen in front of you. Once you’ve done that, you need to keep swiping until you find the page concerning the brakes. Yes, the brakes. Only then do you get to tell the car you would like to turn off the ESC. Does it do it? Of course not. It first tells you this is a bad idea that it doesn’t recommend and insists you confirm your wilful recklessness before it will grudgingly do as you ask.
So what are the most important priorities of a car interior? To me, job one is visibility. If you can’t see out properly, you’re unlikely ever to be truly comfortable – and that’s becoming increasingly difficult, because car manufacturers make ever-thicker A- and B-pillars to help their cars’ crash performance, apparently without considering how much more likely it is that their cars will crash as a result. And there’s no excuse: even two-seat mid-engined supercars can feel like goldfish bowls if properly designed, as anyone who has sat in a McLaren will tell you.
But in many important regards, interiors have progressed beyond all recognition. When I started doing this job in the late 1980s, many cars weren’t even symmetrical, meaning the driving position could be radically different depending on whether the car you drove was left-or right-hand drive. Pedals nowhere near where your feet naturally fell were common, as were seats that weren’t actually directly in front of the steering wheel. Steering wheels that adjusted in any direction at all were the exception, not the norm they are today. I may be critical of the latest Golf’s subsystems, but the way the car presents its primary controls to the driver – pedals, steering wheel and gearlever – is impeccable.
One important area in which we seem to be regressing, however, is the design of the instrument pack, or IP, as it’s known in the trade. Some might raise an eyebrow at this, knowing how beautiful those ultra-high-definition screens that are rapidly replacing conventional clocks can look. And I agree: some are excellent. But others aren’t, and I’ll cite BMW as an example only because there was a time when its IPs were without doubt the best in the world. But, having tried to get used to its new design philosophy, where the electronic needles only sweep through a limited arc right around the outside of the IP cluster, I recently climbed into an M2 that still uses the old tech and found myself wondering what on earth was so wrong with BMW’s simple, circular dials that it had to change. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
But automotive interior design must at times feel like a thankless task. The customer wants more of everything: more gadgets, more information, more entertainment (don’t get me started on apps), yet they also demand presentation as clean as it is on their smartphones. The only difference is this: it doesn’t matter how much time you spend looking at your smartphone at home, but it matters a very great deal how much time you spend looking at your smart screen in the car you’re driving. And yes, voice recognition and even gesture control can help, but they’re at best useful extras, not complete solutions in themselves.
As ever, then, the best interiors are those that strike the correct compromise between ease of use and appearance. It’s tempting to say that everything should have its own, separate, one-touch control, but that would lead to an interior plastered with buttons that could be completely confusing too. Alternatively, a car with no buttons or similar controls might look stunning but, in reality, would likely be difficult and time-consuming to operate.
With each new car I drive today, I now configure its control systems the way I want them to be before I set off, which may add between five and 10 minutes to my journey. And I know that if I stop even for five minutes to grab a sandwich, half the systems I’ve disabled will have turned themselves back on again by the time I’ve got back on board. The car will have taken itself out of Dynamic driving mode, turned its stability control fully on again and reactivated its hateful lane-keeping assistance function. So I have to do it all over again. This has little to do with the manufacturer trying to stop you having a crash and almost everything to do with removing grounds for you to sue them if you do.
For me, and because I’m old, I would give up all the gadgets and swanky screens in favour of interiors with a limited number of clearly labelled, logically arranged switches. Twenty years ago, that was simply common sense. Today, it sounds like a revolution. Which is why it’s never going to happen.
What should happen next?
How do we resolve the conflicting interests of the demand for more content and the desire for cleaner cockpits? Truly intelligent voice recognition has a role to play, but I’m increasingly minded to think that the only way to create the space we need on the dash for comprehensive yet easily understood and accessed functionality and information is to migrate the dials onto the screen.
The information on current head-up displays duplicates what’s already shown in the IP. There’s no longer space for such redundancy; if the data I need is on the screen, I never look for it anywhere else, because that’s where my eyes are already pointing. So ditch conventional instruments, project all their data on the screen and use the space you save to create a driving environment that’s as easy to operate as it is attractive.
The best and worst interiors
Honda E: Wall-to-wall digital screens, including monitors for the video cameras that supplant wing mirrors, could be the ultimate form-over-function folly. But in the simple little Honda, it’s all easy to understand and works really well.
Mazda MX-5 (ND): Has beautifully legible analogue instruments with chunky, easily operated switchgear for all major functions, with less important operations accessed via a simple controller and a clear screen. There’s very little not to like here.
Aston Martin DB9: Some will look askance at this choice, because the DB9’s cabin was truly beautiful, but few who have actually driven one. With illegible instruments, tiny buttons and the worst sat-nav on record, it proved beyond doubt that just because it looks right, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be right.
Mercedes-Benz G-Class: Probably the best blend of tradition and tech. It has a beautifully clear screen with plenty of customisation opportunities yet is very simple and intuitive to operate through the uncomplicated Comand controller.
Lancia Trevi: If you’re one of those poor souls who has a phobia of holes, look away now. If you thought the exterior of the Trevi saloon was ugly, it was nothing compared with the interior whose pockmarked dashboard appeared to have caught the bubonic plague.
BMW 7 Series (E65): To say that BMW’s iDrive system had a troubled childhood is a gross understatement. Twenty years ago, a single controller that moved in eight directions to control all ancillary operations was a recipe for absolute ergonomic disaster, and the E65 7 Series duly delivered exactly that.
It has always struck me as strange that when we think of the cars whose appearance we like, especially if we’re deciding whether to buy one or not, it’s always the exterior we find ourselves considering. Why? I guess it’s because, consciously or not, we’re keen to project the right image of ourselves. But the truth is that once our cars are bought, we spend hardly any time looking at them, whereas we literally live in their interiors, whose design by comparison we barely think through at all.
Yet interior design has undergone a revolution over the past generation. Time was when interiors were scarcely styled at all, at least from the point of view of the driving environment. Instruments were placed wherever was easy and a dashboard created around them. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, a certain sense of ergonomic cohesion was gradually introduced, but it wasn’t until this century that mainstream manufacturers started thinking as hard about the look of their cars within as without.
And with good reason. First, an interior is far harder to design, because unlike an exterior which is just a relatively simple shape, an interior contains a whole host of competing interests, from dials and switches to the dashboard and infotainment system, all arguing over the same small amount of space.
But as journeys have lengthened yet traffic slowed and we’ve spent more and more time looking at our interiors, merely making it functional was never going to be enough. It had to offer a pleasant place to sit and while away all that time. Not least because of the quality of the items with which we now fill out homes, be they sleek music systems, flatscreen televisions or smart and minimalist phones. It simply won’t wash any longer to leave that kind of environment and go and sit in the motoring equivalent of student digs.
There’s one more consideration: so much of a car’s exterior is now governed by the legislative rulebook that it’s becoming ever harder to create genuinely beautiful and distinctive exteriors, hence all those jelly-mould crossover SUVs we have these days. But there remains far more scope for creative expression on the inside, so that’s where car manufacturers keen on carving an identity for themselves are increasingly concentrating.
But so too is that job getting harder. Interiors aren’t exempt from the forces of law, but that’s really only where the problems start. There’s now so much stuff that we expect to find in our cabins that packaging it all within the legislative framework is becoming an increasingly fraught business.
Remember when you would get into your car and every single thing you needed to do, from adjusting the treble on your stereo to turning down the heating a touch, could be accomplished with a single action: the turn of a knob or the flick of a dial? Things are rarely so easy today. We live in an era where function follows form at a deferential distance, so the price paid for a nice, clean-looking fascia with the minimum number of controls is that even some quite fundamental functions require you to go rummaging around in endless menus to locate them.
Say you want to turn off the stability control in Volkswagen’s new Golf GTI. You would like to just press a button and see a little light appear on the dash, but these days that would be far too easy. First you must find the vehicle settings menu on the glossy touchscreen in front of you. Once you’ve done that, you need to keep swiping until you find the page concerning the brakes. Yes, the brakes. Only then do you get to tell the car you would like to turn off the ESC. Does it do it? Of course not. It first tells you this is a bad idea that it doesn’t recommend and insists you confirm your wilful recklessness before it will grudgingly do as you ask.
So what are the most important priorities of a car interior? To me, job one is visibility. If you can’t see out properly, you’re unlikely ever to be truly comfortable – and that’s becoming increasingly difficult, because car manufacturers make ever-thicker A- and B-pillars to help their cars’ crash performance, apparently without considering how much more likely it is that their cars will crash as a result. And there’s no excuse: even two-seat mid-engined supercars can feel like goldfish bowls if properly designed, as anyone who has sat in a McLaren will tell you.
But in many important regards, interiors have progressed beyond all recognition. When I started doing this job in the late 1980s, many cars weren’t even symmetrical, meaning the driving position could be radically different depending on whether the car you drove was left-or right-hand drive. Pedals nowhere near where your feet naturally fell were common, as were seats that weren’t actually directly in front of the steering wheel. Steering wheels that adjusted in any direction at all were the exception, not the norm they are today. I may be critical of the latest Golf’s subsystems, but the way the car presents its primary controls to the driver – pedals, steering wheel and gearlever – is impeccable.
One important area in which we seem to be regressing, however, is the design of the instrument pack, or IP, as it’s known in the trade. Some might raise an eyebrow at this, knowing how beautiful those ultra-high-definition screens that are rapidly replacing conventional clocks can look. And I agree: some are excellent. But others aren’t, and I’ll cite BMW as an example only because there was a time when its IPs were without doubt the best in the world. But, having tried to get used to its new design philosophy, where the electronic needles only sweep through a limited arc right around the outside of the IP cluster, I recently climbed into an M2 that still uses the old tech and found myself wondering what on earth was so wrong with BMW’s simple, circular dials that it had to change. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
But automotive interior design must at times feel like a thankless task. The customer wants more of everything: more gadgets, more information, more entertainment (don’t get me started on apps), yet they also demand presentation as clean as it is on their smartphones. The only difference is this: it doesn’t matter how much time you spend looking at your smartphone at home, but it matters a very great deal how much time you spend looking at your smart screen in the car you’re driving. And yes, voice recognition and even gesture control can help, but they’re at best useful extras, not complete solutions in themselves.
As ever, then, the best interiors are those that strike the correct compromise between ease of use and appearance. It’s tempting to say that everything should have its own, separate, one-touch control, but that would lead to an interior plastered with buttons that could be completely confusing too. Alternatively, a car with no buttons or similar controls might look stunning but, in reality, would likely be difficult and time-consuming to operate.
With each new car I drive today, I now configure its control systems the way I want them to be before I set off, which may add between five and 10 minutes to my journey. And I know that if I stop even for five minutes to grab a sandwich, half the systems I’ve disabled will have turned themselves back on again by the time I’ve got back on board. The car will have taken itself out of Dynamic driving mode, turned its stability control fully on again and reactivated its hateful lane-keeping assistance function. So I have to do it all over again. This has little to do with the manufacturer trying to stop you having a crash and almost everything to do with removing grounds for you to sue them if you do.
For me, and because I’m old, I would give up all the gadgets and swanky screens in favour of interiors with a limited number of clearly labelled, logically arranged switches. Twenty years ago, that was simply common sense. Today, it sounds like a revolution. Which is why it’s never going to happen.
What should happen next?
How do we resolve the conflicting interests of the demand for more content and the desire for cleaner cockpits? Truly intelligent voice recognition has a role to play, but I’m increasingly minded to think that the only way to create the space we need on the dash for comprehensive yet easily understood and accessed functionality and information is to migrate the dials onto the screen.
The information on current head-up displays duplicates what’s already shown in the IP. There’s no longer space for such redundancy; if the data I need is on the screen, I never look for it anywhere else, because that’s where my eyes are already pointing. So ditch conventional instruments, project all their data on the screen and use the space you save to create a driving environment that’s as easy to operate as it is attractive.
The best and worst interiors
Honda E: Wall-to-wall digital screens, including monitors for the video cameras that supplant wing mirrors, could be the ultimate form-over-function folly. But in the simple little Honda, it’s all easy to understand and works really well.
Mazda MX-5 (ND): Has beautifully legible analogue instruments with chunky, easily operated switchgear for all major functions, with less important operations accessed via a simple controller and a clear screen. There’s very little not to like here.
Aston Martin DB9: Some will look askance at this choice, because the DB9’s cabin was truly beautiful, but few who have actually driven one. With illegible instruments, tiny buttons and the worst sat-nav on record, it proved beyond doubt that just because it looks right, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be right.
Mercedes-Benz G-Class: Probably the best blend of tradition and tech. It has a beautifully clear screen with plenty of customisation opportunities yet is very simple and intuitive to operate through the uncomplicated Comand controller.
Lancia Trevi: If you’re one of those poor souls who has a phobia of holes, look away now. If you thought the exterior of the Trevi saloon was ugly, it was nothing compared with the interior whose pockmarked dashboard appeared to have caught the bubonic plague.
BMW 7 Series (E65): To say that BMW’s iDrive system had a troubled childhood is a gross understatement. Twenty years ago, a single controller that moved in eight directions to control all ancillary operations was a recipe for absolute ergonomic disaster, and the E65 7 Series duly delivered exactly that.
Here's the round-up, courtesy of Nintendo Everything. It's worth pointing out that the resolution of Bowser's Fury in docked mode may possibly be higher than 720p (the source doesn't clarify docked and handheld differences).
While the above details are enough to get an idea of how this upcoming Switch release will perform, once again - the resolution of Bowser's Fury in docked mode isn't fully confirmed just yet. If it was a bit higher though, it would be more than welcome.
What do you think of the above information? Tell us down below.
That's right, January is already over. We're a full month into 2021, and things have started fairly quietly — but looking forward, there's plenty to be excited about. February and March have a few notable releases for both PlayStation 5 and PS4, so whether you've made the jump yet or not, you can look forward to some cool games. Below, we'll be going through all the great games coming in the next couple of months.
Please note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.
The world can't seem to get enough of Persona 5, so why not spin it out into a musou game too? Persona 5 Strikers borrows combat from games like Dynasty Warriors, merging the hack and slash real-time action with more strategic, turn-based elements to create something original. If you want more from the series but don't mind switching gameplay styles, this should serve you well.
Ubisoft hasn't touched the Prince of Persia franchise for ages, but it's finally bringing it back with a remake of the original. Delayed to March, this is a full recreation of The Sands of Time, and will hopefully be a fantastic trip down memory lane. We've seen little of this project yet, but the original is a classic — this has the potential to be great.
Returnal is the latest game from Housemarque, a Finnish studio that specialises in slick and addictive arcade action. This time, it's turned its collective hand to a rogue-lite formula. In this game, you'll fight hordes of alien lifeforms in randomly generated areas while piecing together the story of Selene. This is sure to be frantic fun on PS5 — we can't wait to take it for a spin.
More Upcoming PS5 and PS4 Games for February and March 2021
What PS5 and PS4 games are you planning to buy in the next few weeks? Tell us in the comments section below.
Rare's cancelled Xbox Live Arcade remaster of its seminal N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 has been revealed in its entirety with a two-hour playthrough video.
The video below, published on the YouTube channel of GoldenEye 007 content creator Graslu00 (via GoldenEye Dossier), shows the full game played on the OO Agent difficulty in 4k resolution and 60 frames-per-second, with 30 minutes of multiplayer at the end. The footage shows GoldenEye 007 XBLA running on an emulator to achieve the higher resolution.
In 2007 Microsoft-owned Rare developed an HD remaster of its N64 classic to be released on XBLA, but copyright disputes saw the project shuttered. Before this video, only 30 minutes of footage of the game had been released. Now we see the game in all its glory - from its iconic opening Dam level to its final bonus level Egyptian - all with an acceptable framerate!
In a tweet, Graslu00 insisted this gameplay is not related to any recent leak. Rather, builds of the game were obtained years ago from PartnerNet, a sandbox version of Xbox Live available only to dev kit owners. According to Graslu00, a build of the game will be released at some point in 2021.
While the XBLA remaster never saw the light of day, we did eventually get a full remake on the Wii with the identically-titled GoldenEye 007 in 2010. This version, developed by Eurocom and published by Activision, was later given an HD port on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as GoldenEye 007: Reloaded in 2011.
There was absolute bedlam at one Tokyo retailer overnight, as fresh stock of the under-supplied PlayStation 5 arrived. Since releasing last November, Sony’s new console has been borderline impossible to find all around the world, but Japan has been on the particularly short end of the stick, with hardware sales falling behind even the Nintendo Wii U launch-aligned.
Kotaku reports, however, that the Yodobashi Camera electronics megastore in Akihabara sold a bunch of new systems today – and all hell broke loose. We don’t even need to describe the scenes, because you can see them for yourself, courtesy of the video embedded below:
Ultimately, things got so bad that the police were called and sales of the system were halted. So, what happened? Well, obviously, as already pointed out, stock is slim. But this was compounded by the fact that the Akihabara branch of Yodobashi Camera in question doesn’t require the use of the retailer’s black credit card to purchase hardware – a regulation implemented to help thwart scalpers.
In addition, the store gave out numbered tickets on a first come, first served basis to potential purchasers. In the past it’s offered raffles, where those who have their number called are then given the opportunity to buy a system. Obviously, all of these circumstances contributed to the scenes you see above.
It’s worth noting that this all occurred at a time when the Japanese government has implemented a state of emergency due to the ongoing pandemic, and Tokyo is unsurprisingly the worst affected city in the country.
If you’ve been searching for a PS5 these past months – convinced that the solution to the ennui of lockdown life lies in next-gen gaming – it’s likely that you’ve also made a new, hated enemy: retail bots.
For many, attempts to buy the console have followed the same sad pattern. A store, like Argos, Currys PC World or GAME, announces it has new stock. Customers descend on the site – more than 160,000 at once, in the case of Currys – crashing it. When the virtual dust settles, the consoles are gone. Almost instantly, hundreds begin to appear on eBay for double the price. The culprits? Scalpers and their weapon of choice – retail bots. And the pandemic has created an ideal hunting ground.
There are three kinds of bots at work, explains Thomas Platt, head of ecommerce at Netacea, a cybersecurity company. The first, and most notorious, is called an AIO bot, or all-in-one bot. These move at an inhuman rate, scanning hundreds of websites every second to check if the PS5 is in stock. The instant an item drops the bot will buy it and checkout, faster than a human could ever type their details. These bots, explains Platt, will have multiple accounts loaded with multiple credit cards, so they can pick up large quantities of PS5s.
The two other common types of bot are similar – one will check to see if an item becomes available then send the bot’s owner a text or notification; the other lets you pay a fee to get a checkout slot. “Or they're pausing and holding that stock in rotation until they sell it,” says Platt. “That’s something we saw a lot in the ticket industry a while ago, and we see a lot in the airline industry, where you might hold the item, put it up for retail on another site, and as soon as you get a bid on it, you automatically purchase it.”
Scalping bots aren’t new. Online ticket scalping was outlawed in the UK in 2018, and “sneakerbots” drive a secondary retail market for rare trainers worth $2 billion. It’s been typical to see bots target big shopping events like Black Friday. Before the pandemic, they were growing in popularity as a result of the retail industry’s increasing reliance on hype and limited stocks. “We are seeing more and more hard sales recently, with limited stock,” says Benjamin Fabre, CTO of DataDome, a cybersecurity company.
But the pandemic has kicked these bots into overdrive, and it’s not just the result of more aggressive sales events and shopping being pushed online (you can’t, obviously, have a retail bot camp out in front of your local GAME store). Damaged supply chains have limited the stock of usually plentiful items, creating scarcity, and scarcity is what scalpers prey on. “We used to see niche groups of people targeting niche groups of things,” says Platt. "And now what we realise is they can target things that aren't so niche, and they can make a lot of money. And that's that's the real switch for us.”
From gym equipment to hot tubs to Magic the Gathering trading cards, the net has widened for these groups, which have grown into huge communities. “It's spreading across the board,” says Jason Kent at Cequence Security, a cybersecurity software company. “The guys that worked on buying the most desirable shoes have realised that they can spread their knowledge, ability and concepts to whatever.”
Data provided by Netacea showed that a botnet which used 300 compromised machines made one million attempts to buy PS5s over six hours, and that “cook communities” of would-be scalpers can reach up to 20,000 people. When Google searches for PS5 spike, so do those for scalper bots.
Scalpers are aware of this change, too. PC Gamer spoke to numerous scalpers who reported that their business had taken off since the pandemic began, while bot sellers like Carnage Bot have taken to Twitter to brag about picking up more than 2,000 PS5s. The people behind Carnage Bot did not respond to a request for comment.
If these figures are true, explains Platt, this represents around a £1 million worth of investment, with profits likely double that. “Before this was a small niche community,” says Platt. “It wasn't something being advertised on Facebook saying, ‘hey you can make £200 a month by buying what we tell you to buy.’ That's the real shift. These have turned into commercial businesses, with marketing plans, with investment, with budget, getting as much PR coverage as we are.”
Not only do these businesses have huge buying power, buying and selling stock all around the world, they sell on their bots to amateurs. These can be worth up to $27,500, and often sell out, says Platt. Casual users of bots have grown accordingly. “They'll buy two or three pairs of shoes, recover their money, get their shoes, and they're done,” says Kent.
So should we be stopping scalpers? From the perspective of a seller, scalping is a disaster, explains Fabre. It damages the brand, overloading websites that cannot handle volumes of bot traffic, infuriating customers who cannot buy products for reasonable prices, and generating fraud – bot creators often use fraudulent credit cards.
Retailers have different options for stopping scalping. They can be smarter with their launch, for instance, not informing customers weeks in advance and giving scalpers time to set up their bots. They can hire third party security firms to check pre orders manually or place security filters in front of their sites. Or they can come up with novel workarounds: Currys put the price of the Xbox Series X up to £2,000, then handed out vouchers for £2,005, in an attempt to confuse bots. (Several retailers were contacted for comment but did not respond in time for publication, or declined to comment.)
Government legislation has been mooted. At the end of last year Douglas Chapman, the MP for Dunfermline and West Fife, brought forward a motion at Westminster to prevent unfair scalping in the games console and computer marketplace. Officials at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport are reportedly discussing this issue with the trade association for the video games industry.
“We proposed examining the principles behind Secondary Selling of Tickets legislation drafted to tackle unfair ticket touting as a possible route to prevent scalping,” says Chapman. “Given that experts in the cyber industry now predict the issue of scalping to grow across other important goods and services this year, we are looking at presenting a Bill in Parliament on this matter so that we can further explore legislative options to protect consumers from this unfair practice."
This chimes with most people’s perception – retail bots aren’t fair. “It is not even or equal for anyone,” says Platt. “And that's why the government should be pushing legislation, like they did with ticketing.”
