0 Comentários
0 Compartilhamentos
100 Visualizações
Diretório
Diretório
-
Faça Login para curtir, compartilhar e comentar!
-
WWW.FORBES.COMGoogle’s New Gmail Decision—What 3 Billion Users Must Do NowMust-have upgrade or privacy nightmare—you decide.0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 98 Visualizações
-
WWW.DIGITALTRENDS.COMRusty Rabbit review: wacky new platformer could have used a tune-upRusty Rabbit MSRP $20.00 Score Details “Rusty Rabbit needed a tune-up, but there's still some treasure to find in its scraps.” Pros Wacky worldbuilding Surprisingly sharp satire Great drilling concept Cons Movement feels off Weak combat Dull level design Table of Contents Table of Contents A rabbit’s world Surface-level platforming Some games are finely-tuned sports cars. Others are total lemons. Rusty Rabbit is neither; it’s a pile of scraps. Recommended Videos See, scrap ain’t good or bad. That’s what the gruff, yet furry hero of NetEase’s 2D platformer believes, anyways. It’s neutral metal whose value entirely depends on how it’s put together and the skill of the mechanic behind the wrench. If you wheel it into some hack’s garage, you could end up behind the wheel of a rust bucket. Give it to someone who knows what they’re doing and, well, that’s a whole other story. Scrap is unrealized potential, just waiting for the right person to assemble it all into something special. Related Rusty Rabbit doesn’t quite make it out of the junkyard, but all the right pieces are there. It has an inventive world full of junk-loving rabbit, a heartfelt story about parenting, and a central adventure hook that wipes the dust off of Drill Dozer. It’s all just let down by a faulty engine, as its core movement, crafting hook, and combat are all in need of a tune-up from a capable mechanic. Based on a story concept from Gen Urobuchi, Rusty Rabbit is set in a dystopian future in which humanity has long disappeared from Earth. In their absence, rabbits have inherited the world and have evolved to believe they are the planet’s dominant species. They have interpreted the trash and remnants left behind by humans to bend to that narrative, believing that Peter Rabbit is, in fact, the word of God. Religious institutions have arisen, archeology has become a cult, and roving gangs of junksters scour the Smokestack Mountain for precious metals. It’s a fantastic elevator pitch that makes Rusty Rabbit easy to fall in love with on sight, especially once you lay eyes on its fuzzy, grumpy rabbits. Chief among them is Stamp, a middle-aged auto mechanic who likes to live among the junk more than his fellow bunnies. The loner finds himself on a quest to find his long-lost daughter, who has seemingly left behind a trail of data logs in Smokestack Mountain. It all sounds silly at first, but the story has some unexpected heft to it. For one, it’s a story of a parent who has struggled to understand his kid’s world, creating a generational division between them. It’s legitimately moving at times and feels like the product of real parents putting their own insecurities into a deceptively cute video game. It’s a biting work of atheistic satire … More surprising is how Rusty Rabbit deconstructs religion in the context of its own world where the Bible is quite literally a made up storybook taken too literally. It takes religious institutions to task for using unprovable text to build a foundation for a new world order. In one level, I learn that archelogy has been mutated into a religion all its own, where zealots try to claim biomes as holy sites by pointing to a piece of trash they’ve uncovered and interpreted as an object of God. It’s a biting work of atheistic satire that’s often hilarious. Sometimes Rusty Rabbit transcends its wacky elevator pitch, but other times it’s just stuck feeling like a one-note bit. For instance, the funniest meta-joke in the entire game is that Stamp is voiced by Takaya Kuroda in Japanese and Yong Yea in English, Kazuma Kiryu’s respective voice actors in the Like a Dragon series. It’s inspired stunt casting that immediately communicates exactly the kind of guy Stamp is. The buck stops there (at least in the English dub), as Yea delivers every line in an aching slow drawl that gives the adventure’s dialogue-heavy opening a grueling pace. The rest of the voice cast suffers the same problem, dragging out every line read past the point of funny novelty. NetEase Tonal troubles like that persist throughout the entire game, as its presentation is all across the board. It aims to be an unexpectedly mature game wearing a fuzzy pelt, but it doesn’t fully commit to the bit. Sure, the rabbits drop some light cuss words here and there, but it still feels like a kid’s game with preschool music that sounds like it crawled out of a Rugrats episode. The contrast isn’t stark enough to take Rusty Rabbit into full-on Adult Swim irreverence, nor is it suitable as a kid’s game. It’s stuck in the same awkward teenage phase that Detective Pikachu Returns found itself in a few years ago, struggling to tell a story for anxious parents or their angsty children. That imbalance extends to Rusty Rabbit‘s gameplay loops, which seem similarly unsure of themselves. It’s a great premise in theory. Rusty Rabbit is a 2D action-platformer that plays a bit like Drill Dozer. Rusty hops into his trusty mech and hops into biomes filled with dirt blocks and crates he can dig through to find stray scrap, which he can then take back to his home in town to craft new weapons and mech upgrades. It’s a sound idea that takes the satisfying hook of Mr. Driller or Steamworld Dig and spreads it into a more traditional platformer, with levels filled with secrets to unearth. That sturdy idea never quite finds the right structure to support it. It has Metroidvania DNA with traces of gear gated secrets, but the whole thing plays out in fairly linear fashion that doesn’t leave too much flexibility to poke around. It’s also tries to drop a stat-focused RPG on top of that, where Stamp levels up by drilling through blocks and enemies and uses the salvage he’s found to make new, stat-heavy weapons like axes and hammers. I found that I barely needed to engage with that crafting system outside of general weapon upgrades, saving me the hassle of hunting around for extra parts. It wants you to do that, though, as there’s a sort of procedurally generated dungeon to explore back home that’s meant to give players a place to grind for dozens of bolts and screws. That’s where Rusty Rabbit feels most in its element as a roguelike filled with risk-taking exploration, but none of those pieces here click together neatly. The act of moving just feels off, which is the last thing you want from a platformer. What’s worse is that Rusty Rabbit struggles as a straight platformer due to frustrating movement. Stamp’s bot is stiff, unable to maneuver much once I’m in the air. He clings onto nearby walls when he gets close to them, but that magnetism is over tuned. When I’m trying to platform around biomes, I often find myself catching the lip of an edge and getting awkwardly stuck there for a moment before sliding down as I run out of stamina. If you don’t land perfectly flat on a platform, good luck trying to wall jump your way to safety. Falling too far stuns Stamp for a while, kneecapping his ability to maneuver quickly. A missed jump usually results in a good 20 seconds of waiting for the status to clear until players unlock some skill nodes that can reduce the timer. The act of moving just feels off, which is the last thing you want from a platformer. Those mobility issues hurt its already thin combat, too. Stamp can drill, shoot, or slash his way through rust beasts in one-button combat, but enemies have loose hit boxes that often leave weapons passing right through them. When I try to slash an enemy while grounded, Rusty inches forward ever so slightly each time, eventually pushing me into my foe and damaging the mech. Stopping my attack combo to back up a bit, or just jumping my enemy to dodge, means fumbling with clumsy movement that I don’t have much control over. In generic boss fights against giant machines (like tractors that have been mistaken for giraffes), I just wound up eating some damage during my attack combo and topping myself off with healing items rather than slowly resetting my position and dragging the fight out any longer than I had to. NetEase I’d be a little more lenient if there were some clever platforming ideas here that made good use of the core drilling hook, but Rusty Rabbit rarely breaks below the surface. Most biomes just have me drilling my way through paths to find a keycard, unlocking a gate, doing that again a few times, fighting a boss, and moving on. It half-heartedly introduces some spatial reasoning puzzles, like heavy blocks that fall once I dig out the space under them, but it doesn’t change up its exploration much until its final levels. All of that left me frustrated early on, feeling like I’d gotten behind the wheel of a shiny car with a sputtering engine, but I kept digging. And the more I dug, the more I found scraps in the heap that felt salvageable. I got more invested in the world as I went and felt a genuine connection to Rusty as shed more of his stubborn tendencies and accepted how out of touch he was with his kid. He learns that cars aren’t the only thing that need tuning up. We’re all piles of scrap capable of becoming something more so long as we take the care and effort to fix ourselves up. I hope that developer Nitro Plus can take that advice to heart and use it to tighten the screws here, whether that’s in some post-launch tinkering or a sequel rebuilt from the ground up. Treasure only becomes trash once you decide to throw it away. Rusty Rabbit was tested on Nintendo Switch OLED. Editors’ Recommendations0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 93 Visualizações
-
WWW.BUSINESSINSIDER.COMIt's easier than ever for businesses to jack up pricesThis story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? If you feel like you have no idea what anything's supposed to cost anymore, you're not alone. The pandemic and subsequent bout of inflation sent prices all over the place, and now we're facing down whatever is going on with tariffs at any given moment. Unfortunately, our collective state of sticker "Huh?" is likely to get worse. Thanks to a whipsawing economic landscape and the magic of technology, prices can change faster than ever — the price you see in the morning may not be the same that same afternoon. Maybe that new price tag is the result of changing supply and demand dynamics. Maybe it's tariffs. Maybe it's corporate funny business. The unfunny part is that it's impossible for many consumers to know.You might remember the brief dustup around Wendy's and dynamic pricing last year. Its CEO said on an earnings call that the company was going to test out price variations and AI-enabled menu changes, and the internet did a little bit of a freakout. The episode was a sign of the times: Rapid-fire price changes are everywhere. Thanks to digital price tags, QR codes, and the shift to online shopping, it's easier than ever for companies to move prices at the drop of a hat. The pandemic helped firms get more agile at reacting to shocks to the system. Instability represents a prime opportunity to make adjustments, including to a business' benefit."Given this really uncertain, volatile environment, if you're a company who's been thinking of doing dynamic pricing, it could be a good opportunity," said Z. John Zhang, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business who studies pricing strategies and targeting. "This could be a good occasion, a good excuse, an alibi for them to move in that direction."It used to be the case that dynamic pricing — meaning the price of something moving up or down based on market conditions — was largely reserved for flights, hotels, and Ubers. Consumers didn't love the idea their airfare in July was going to run them double what it would in February, but they got it — thus are the rules of supply and demand. But variable pricing is creeping across the economy, including places where it feels a little less understandable. Now, we're in a super-dynamic environment, given the uncertainty emanating from the White House and the global economy. In turn, it's a moment for a super-dynamic approach to prices.Volatility is always a part of business, but now we're facing a "trifecta of volatility," said Craig Zawada, chief visionary officer at Pros Holdings, a price optimization company. First, costs are changing quickly — in the past, a company might negotiate once or twice a year with a supplier, but now they're having to review their agreements all the time. Second, competitive fluctuations are happening. Businesses in the same industry tend to have similar inputs, but not always. If the guy next door imports from China and you don't, you've got an advantage, but if you see them increase their asking price, do you bump yours up a little anyway? Third, consumer demand is shifting, and not always in ways that are obvious or predictable or even bad. In times of economic precarity, sales of items such as lipstick and mini bottles of alcohol tend to go up. We're in a super-dynamic environment, given the uncertainty emanating from the White House and the global economy. In turn, it's a moment for a super-dynamic approach to prices. "All of those dynamics, in this volatile environment, if you're thinking about it as a business, how do you thrive? How do you do better? You need to understand all of those things," Zawada said. "That's where technology comes in. It's much easier now to have visibility on costs, see the reactions to the market, and then respond with prices."Customers recognize how volatile things are and may expect price changes. The willingness to accept these adjustments makes it easier for businesses to do some resets and expand their margins in competitive areas to get more breathing room. This is the type of margin-padding some companies did during this more recent episode of inflation. And if customers reject the increases, businesses can see that, too.Shikha Jain, the lead partner for consumer and retail for North America at Simon-Kucher, a business consultancy, said that determining the price of a good is a lot more than just picking a number."What does it do for consumer demand? How do we balance acquisition and retention? What does that mean for our internal balance sheet and cash flow in terms of our P&L," or profits and losses, she said, "and what does it mean from a competition and market landscape standpoint?"She pointed out that companies have gotten better at figuring all of this out in recent years, especially in the wake of a pandemic that was wildly disruptive to supply chains and consumer behavior across the globe. "We haven't had a stable environment in a long time," she said. Related stories Consumers do not like dynamic pricing, even if it sometimes works to their benefit. Happy hour is dynamic pricing, as are early-bird specials, last-minute flight deals, and flash sales. But to many people, costs constantly moving up and down feels manipulative. They're suspicious it's going to actually work in their favor.It's also the case that dynamic pricing isn't really designed to handle what's happening now. It's usually about supply and demand — that Saturday night taxi being a much hotter commodity than the same one on a Sunday at 2 p.m. — not about whether the president of the United States will jack up the price of everything coming out of China."This is a completely different situation, where you are looking to government policy and how that could change very quickly and how you would change your prices in response," said Eric Greenleaf, a marketing professor at NYU's Stern School of Business who researches pricing.Businesses that sell online can change prices quickly, or just ride the wave of the Amazon algorithm. Some supermarkets and big box stores, such as Walmart, now have digital price stickers that can be adjusted in real time. Consumers are likely to be somewhat understanding that companies aren't having a good time with tariff-by-tweet. One risk businesses face in using slick dynamic pricing tactics, however, is that customers may view it as a little too slick. To blunt any backlash, they may want to pass the buck a bit. So the next time you go to the grocery store to pick up your favorite coffee brand, and it seems pricier than you remember, maybe there's a little asterisk next to the price tag that reads, "*This price increase was brought to you by President Trump, not me." Whereas tariffs can change rather quickly, consumer optimism takes longer to recover. "There'll be a lot of firms, and this is easier online, where they can literally say: 'Here's what we wanted to charge you. Here's the tariff. Here's the total price that you're paying,'" Greenleaf said. "Of course, that will probably upset the Trump administration, but businesses want to make clear that they're not profiting off of this."It's not that different from restaurants slapping on egg surcharges earlier this year. Were wholesale eggs more expensive? Yes. Was it easy for customers to wonder whether they were justifiably 50-cents-an-egg-at-Waffle House more expensive? Also yes. But Zhang, from Wharton, said a tariff surcharge may be a better way to go for businesses than plugging tariffs into whatever pricing algorithm. They can take it off once the tariffs go away, and it's easier to calculate than whatever incremental adjustment happens across the supply chain. Plus, he said, "You can just blame Trump."Not knowing who's to blame is, of course, part of the problem from a consumer perspective. And just because tariffs go away and companies cool it on all the price changes doesn't mean the sour taste it's left in people's mouths will fade so fast."Whereas tariffs can change rather quickly, consumer optimism takes longer to recover," Greenleaf said.Consumers are exhausted. The past five years have been filled with upheaval, and the chaos feels unrelenting. It's understandable people just want their shampoo to cost whatever it costs, no games. But the economy is increasingly gamified, including on pricing, whether or not people want to play.Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy. Thanks for signing up! Look out for your first newsletter with today's big story in your inbox soon. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. Related stories0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 83 Visualizações
-
WWW.NATURE.COMLeaf absorption contributes to accumulation of microplastics in plantsNature, Published online: 09 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08831-4Absorption and accumulation of atmospheric microplastics by plant leaves occurs widely in the environment.0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 89 Visualizações
-
WWW.LIVESCIENCE.COMWhy do we get a 'second wind' of energy at the end of the day?That second wave of energy is a normal part of the human circadian rhythm, but lifestyle factors also play a role.0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 86 Visualizações
-
V.REDD.ITDon’t ask me how i did it, i just did it, it was hardsubmitted by /u/BuffBaby_3D [link] [comments]0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 98 Visualizações
-
X.COMRT Tesla AI: Giga Texas production now uses FSD Unsupervised to deliver cars from end of line to the outbound logistics lot. Over 50,000 driverless mi...RT Tesla AIGiga Texas production now uses FSD Unsupervised to deliver cars from end of line to the outbound logistics lot. Over 50,000 driverless miles have been accrued between California and Texas factories so far0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 94 Visualizações
-
0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 114 Visualizações
-
WWW.GADGETS360.COMOppo K13 5G India Launch Set for April 21, Teased to Feature Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 SoC, 7,000mAh BatteryOppo K13 5G will launch in India next week, the Chinese smartphone brand announced on Monday. The new K series phone will be introduced in India first, ahead of its global release. It is confirmed to be available for purchase on Flipkart. The phone is teased to ship in two colour options with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset. It will pack a 7,000mAh battery with 80W charging support. The Oppo K13 5G will offer an AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 50-megapixel rear camera unit.In an X post made on Monday, Oppo announced that the K13 5G will be launched in India on April 21. It is confirmed to be available in Icy Purple and Prism Black colour options and will be priced under Rs. 20,000 in the country. The new model will debut in India first, ahead of its global launch.Oppo K13 5G SpecificationsFlipkart has also created a dedicated microsite on its website teasing the specifications of the Oppo K13 5G. It will get a 6.66-inch full-HD+ (1,080x2,400 pixels) AMOLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, 1200 nits peak brigntess and 100 percent coverage of DCI-P3 colour gamut. It is confirmed to run on the 4nm Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset alongside the Adreno A810 GPU, LPDDR4X RAM, and UFS 3.1 storage. The phone is said to deliver an AnTuTu score of over 7,90,000.The Oppo K13 5G will offer an AI-backed 50-megapixel rear camera unit. It will ship with Android 15-based ColorOS 15 and pack a 7,000mAh battery with 80W fast charging support. The battery is claimed to deliver up to 49.4 hours of calling time, up to 10.3 hours of gaming time and a maximum of 32.7 hours of music playback time on a single charge. The bundled charger is said to fill the battery from zero to 62 percent in 30 minutes.Oppo will offer a 6,000mm sq graphite sheet and 5,700mm sq large vapour cooling chamber in the Oppo K13 5G for thermal management. It will get an IP65 rating for dust and splash resistance and come with a five-year fluency certification from the TL Certification Center. The phone will also an IR blaster and dual stereo speakers on board. It is confirmed to include Snapdragon Elite Gaming features and Oppo's AI Trinity Engine. The handset will get an in-display fingerprint sensor for authentication.Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Further reading: Oppo K13 5G, Oppo K13 5G Price in India, Oppo K13 5G Specifications, Oppo Nithya P Nair Nithya P Nair is a journalist with more than five years of experience in digital journalism. She specialises in business and technology beats. A foodie at heart, Nithya loves exploring new places (read cuisines) and sneaking in Malayalam movie dialogues to spice up conversations. More0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos 98 Visualizações