There's a new lander on Mars and that's awesome. Boy is it ever WRUP time.
The Perseverance rover has landed on Mars and already sent back some really cool images of it's surroundings. It landed in an ancient lake bed to start a search for signs that life may have ever existed on Mars. Perseverance carries a little coring drill, among many other instruments, to take soil and rock samples that will be launched back to Earth once it has its fill. That's never been done before from Mars and it could be pretty damn enlightening in ways we don't know yet. The rover also carried a helicopter drone to the Martian surface that will attempt to fly around and send back areal photos and complete a multitude of other tasks. That's also never been done before and we don't even know for sure if it'll work, but the little drone has powered up so we'll see soon enough.
Blizzard has released a Diablo 2 remaster teaser and I have to say that it looks great. I wonder how Blizz will rake players over the coals this time. You know that's going to happen. Aside from potential negatives it seems like it should be a fairly cool remaster. Overhauls galore. Sadly, this means that Diablo 4 is still far enough away that Blizz can release a fully remastered twenty year old title in the same universe without fear of losing sales to those would hold off for the newest addition. Diablo 2 had and still has a gigantic fan base. I played a ton of it back in the day, myself and though I know it'll be a mistake, I'll probably buy and play it again here.
Nvidia has announced a separation between mining GPU's and Gaming GPU's with special, "Unhackable" Vbios that essentially make gaming GPU's useless for crypto miners. The Vbios settings are locked and will cut the hash rate by 50% while under mining loads. Could be a good solution to shortages and scalping I guess, but I don't doubt that it's just a manner of time before a custom Vbios is written to disable that "unhackable" hash rate reduction and custom drivers are written to keep NV from pushing back with updates. Also, good luck to anyone out there still looking for GPU's.
What's the plan this weekend?
AJ: Grid, Pokemon: Shield, and Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4.
Yoda: Red Dead Online was 5 bucks on Steam the other day and I figured why not. So I'll prolly check that out
Tru: I've been replaying (and will actually finish) Control on PS5. I was playing at the 60fps but I bumped over to the 30fps with Raytracing. The game always had an issue with windows. I know this sounds odd but the game takes place in an endless office. If you can't see what is an opening because your character has no reflection in glass it makes trying to navigate annoying. Well with the graphics boost on PS5 you now see reflections in glass. Super helpful.I also picked up Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury for the Nintendo Switch. It was a Valentines Day gift for the wife (part of it, don't worry I got her more) so we might start playing that.
Scroo: More of the same for me. Deep Rock Galactic and SnowRunner.