Technology

Nier: Automata, the mind-bending roleplaying game from legendary Japanese director Yoko Taro, has one last magnificent secret, discovered nearly four years after the game’s release. The secret, a cheat code you can input in the game’s intro sequence to skip to the very end of the game, was unearthed by modder Lance McDonald, who said he spent hundreds of hours reverse-engineering Nier: Automata to come across this ultra-rare find. For those interested, the cheat is a relatively simple button sequence you must input while positioning main character 2B between a set of barrels during the game’s very first boss fight, something no player would think to do unless they dug deep into the game’s code. Without spoiling much about the game’s rather unorthodox storytelling structure, this cheat will...

PayPal-owned banking app Venmo is launching a check cashing feature for both its Android and iOS apps for “eligible” users in the US, the company announced Monday. Cash a Check will allow users to snap a photo of a check and deposit it into a Venmo account. The review process that makes the funds available should only take a few seconds, but in some cases may take up to an hour, the company says. Fees will apply to most check deposits, but Venmo is waiving the fees for deposits of stimulus checks for a limited time. Its usual fees, according to PayPal’s terms of service, will include a 5 percent check cashing fee for hand-signed payroll and government checks for a minimum fee of $5 and 1 percent fees on payroll or government checks with pre-printed signatures. To use Cash a Check, a Venmo ...

Samsung’s upcoming true wireless earbuds, the Galaxy Buds Pro, have leaked again in a hands on video from YouTuber Digital Slang. As well as confirming the earbuds’ specs, and giving us an idea of how they look in the real word, the video also delivers some first impressions on how they perform. The YouTuber said he obtained the unannounced earbuds via a seller on Facebook, where SamMobile has reported others have also been selling them. Echoing previous reports, Digital Slang says that the earbuds have a dust and water resistance rating of IPX7, support wireless charging, and feature active noise-cancellation. There’s also a transparency mode which allows the wearer to hear what’s going on around them while wearing the earbuds. According to Digital Slang, the earbuds’ transparency mode is...

More than 14 ViacomCBS networks, including Nickelodeon, BET, MTV, and Comedy Central are coming to Hulu with Live TV, the company announced today. Hulu is not announcing a price hike with the new additions at this time. This marks the first time that many of ViacomCBS’s networks are being made available to Hulu with Live TV subscribers. Other networks that come with the package include Paramount Network, VH1, CMT, Nick Jr., TV Land, BET Her, MTV2, NickToons, TeenNick, and MTV Classic. The multiyear expanded deal also ensures that Hulu with Live TV customers can retain access to CBS Sports Network, Pop TV, Smithsonian Channel, The CW, and Showtime. “Hulu continues to be a great partner, and this agreement ensures that Hulu + Live TV subscribers are now able to enjoy the full breadth of our ...

For the first time in what feels like ages, the entertainment I looked forward to most was a handful of monthly comic books about the X-Men. Week after week this fall — a time absolutely lousy with great books, movies, TV, and video games — what I really wanted most was to pour over words and pictures about Marvel Comics’ deep roster of mutants, and a story about them unlike any I’ve seen before. It can’t be understated how bold and interesting X-Men comics are right now. Following a soft reboot in the twin 2019 miniseries written by Jonathan Hickman with art by R.B. Silva and Pepe Larraz, House of X and Powers of X (the best place to start reading), the mutants of the Marvel Universe have banded together to form the mutant nation of Krakoa. They have decided they are tired waiting for hum...

Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon 480 5G, the company’s latest 5G-capable processor and the first in its Snapdragon 4-series of chips which power budget Android devices that tend to be far cheaper than most of Qualcomm’s 5G efforts to date. The news of a 4-series chip with 5G was originally teased at IFA 2020, but today’s announcement marks the first real details for the new processor. The Snapdragon 480 features an integrated Snapdragon X51 modem with support for both mmWave and sub-6GHz networks. The addition of 5G to the 4-series could be one of the biggest factors yet in making the next-generation networking standard more accessible to users around the world. Right now, most 5G phones tend to cost upward of $500 — the technology is generally limited to mid-tier and flags...

LG Display’s latest prototype is a 48-inch flexible OLED panel that can be bent for gaming or flattened for watching TV. The company has shown off similar bendable TV prototypes before, like when it demonstrated a 65-inch TV meant for use inside planes that could bend into a curve for passengers to watch movies. This model, which is being shown off at this year’s virtual CES, features LG Display’s Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO) technology, which vibrates the screen to produce audio. The 48-inch TV could potentially offer the immersive benefits of a curved screen while gaming without forcing you to live with a curved screen’s many downsides when you just want to watch TV. You can briefly see the panel in action at the 19 second mark in LG Display’s video below. [embedded content] In terms of sp...

This past week, the US government made the single biggest, most impactful set of changes to drone law we’ve yet seen — ruling that almost every drone in US airspace will need to broadcast their locations, as well as the location of their pilots, in order to “address safety, national security, and law enforcement concerns regarding the further integration of these aircraft into the airspace of the United States”. Google (technically, Alphabet) isn’t too happy about those new rules, as it turns out. The company’s drone delivery subsidiary Wing wrote a somewhat fearmongering post (via Reuters) titled “Broadcast-Only Remote Identification of Drones May Have Unintended Consequences for American Consumers,” which argues that the FAA’s decision to have drones broadcast their location might let ob...

Failed mobile-first streaming service Quibi is in advanced discussions to sell the rights to its content library to Roku, according to The Wall Street Journal. The report doesn’t indicate a potential price for the acquisition, and notes that the two parties may not reach a deal. If it were to happen, the deal could give the Roku Channel exclusive access to Quibi’s slate of programming. None of Quibi’s shows ever really took off, but Roku may feel that the content would stand a better chance when available on the best-selling streaming devices in the US. Quibi announced it was shutting down back in October, just six months after its much-hyped launch. The service was headed by former HP CEO Meg Whitman and former Disney chairman and movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who managed to raise al...

In my opinion, Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t quite the disaster some have suggested. The game is fun. The bugs are fun! The bugs that really, really weren’t fun have been patched. Refunds were made widely available, and despite that refund option, the game sold 13 million copies in just two weeks. But publisher CD Projekt still has a broken reputation to fix and an investor lawsuit to fight, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in the headline you might have read today: that we’re all getting free DLC for the game in early 2021. It’s possible! And it’s totally what this official website promises. But that promise may be out of date. As Engadget points out, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that this promise may have been live on the internet the same day the game launched — before the outcry...

Tesla fell just shy of hitting CEO Elon Musk’s goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles in 2020, the company announced Saturday, having shipped a record 499,550 throughout the year — or 99.91 percent. Tesla said the final tally could vary by as much as 0.5 percent, though, so it’s possible that it will eclipse the 500,000 mark by the time it reveals the ultimate figures in its full year results, due out at the end of January. Either way, that’s more than double what the next-largest sellers of electric vehicles did in 2020, like China’s BYD or Germany’s Volkswagen. And it’s a remarkable recovery for Tesla considering the impact the coronavirus pandemic had on its operations during the first half of the year. While Tesla said in January 2020 that it expected to “comfortably exceed” Musk’s goal o...

The developer of Amphetamine, an app that prevents Macs from going into sleep mode, says Apple told him it violated App Store guidelines, even though it’s been in the App Store since 2014, and has nothing to do with drug use. Not long after The Verge reached out to Apple for comment on Saturday however, the company reversed its decision, and the app will be able to stay up with its current name and logo. William C. Gustafson said in January 1st posts on Reddit and Github that Apple had informed him he had two weeks to “remove all references to the word ‘amphetamine’ and remove the pill from the icon.” If he failed to do so, Gustafson wrote, Apple said it would remove the app from the App Store on January 12th. The logo features a cartoon image of a pill. Gustafson told The Verge he got a c...