Enlarge / It's a good thing this kid is too young to bet on Skee-Ball, because his dad is getting beat . (credit: Getty Images)

Anyone who's been to a Dave & Buster's location in recent years knows the arcade's heavy reliance on so-called redemption games makes the experience more like an ersatz casino than the quarter-munching video game halls of the '70s and '80s . On the vast majority of D&B games, you end up wagering money (in the form of gameplay chips) to win virtual tickets that can be traded for trinkets at the rewards counter.

Now, the massive arcade chain has announced that players will soon be able to use the D&B app to directly wager on the results of arcade games through "real-money contests." The arcade giant, which has over 200 locations across North America, is partnering with "gamification layer" platform Lucra on a system that will let D&B Rewards members "digitally compete with each other, earn rewards, and unlock exclusive perks while competing with friends at Dave & Buster’s," according to Tuesday's announcement .

Neither Lucra nor Dave & Buster's has responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica, so we're still missing extremely basic information, like what games will support app-based wagering, minimum and maximum bet sizes, or what kinds of fees might be involved. CNBC's report on the announcement suggests the system will be launching "in the next few months" to players 18 and older across 44 states (and specifically mention Skee-Ball and Hot Shots Basketball competitions). Lucra's webpage simply says the integration will "provide... social connectivity and friendly competition," suggesting you'll probably face off against friends playing in the same location.

Enlarge / Assassin's Creed Mirage returned to the earlier games' focus on stealth assassinations in a historical urban environment. (credit: Ubisoft)

Apple has spent the last year trying to convince gamers that they can get a console-like, triple-A experience on the latest iPhones. The newest test of that promise will be Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage , which now has a release date and pricing information.

Mirage will land on compatible iPhones—the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max—on June 6, according to Ubisoft (though the App Store listing says June 10.) That coincides pretty closely with Apple's annual developer conference, so we'd expect it to get a shoutout there. Ubisoft's blog post also says it will come to the iPad Air and iPad Pro models with an M1 chip or later.

The game will be a free download with a 90-minute free trial. After that, you'll have to pay $50 to keep playing, which is pretty close to what the game costs on PC and consoles. It will support cross-progression, provided you sign into Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft Connect is not exactly beloved by players, but it's nice to be able to take your saves back and forth between other platforms if you can stomach it.

Enlarge / CXC Simulations needed to come up with something special for Norwegian Cruise Lines, so it built an off-road racing simulator. (credit: CXC Simulations)

Racing simulators keep evolving as graphics get more and more realistic while physical motion systems innovate new ways to mimic the sensation of driving a real race car. The task of rendering the controlled environment of a well-known racing circuit makes most modern sims a bit easier to understand, and the physical footprints of screens, seats, VR goggles, and motion systems continue to shrink. But now, leading developer CXC Simulations has unveiled a massive sim that offers a more embodied experience of off-road racing. The project began in partnership with Norwegian Cruise Line, but CXC will now sell the Motion Pro Truck to the general public, albeit at a starting price of $600,000.

I visited CXC's headquarters in Los Angeles to learn more about how the wild physicality of high-speed off-roading translates to sim racing. After all, the company's most popular Motion Pro II sim setup typically features a compact racing seat, steering wheel, and pedals atop a small base platform, with the choice of one or three screens or a set of VR goggles. The Motion Pro II has proved popular since founder Chris Considine originally launched CXC out of his garage in 2007, to the point that his company now works with professional racing teams, enthusiasts, federal government agencies, the military, and law enforcement agencies on six continents.

I tested CXC's Motion Pro II, which is equipped with three 55-inch screens, and Considine loaded me into a Radical SR8 racecar at the Watkins Glen circuit. The realistic pedals and steering wheel feedback, as well as subtle tilting at the seat of my pants and seatbelts that tightened under hard braking, all contributed to a fun experience. And as someone who typically suffers from motion sickness, I never felt any nausea creeping in—while appreciating how much the wraparound triple screens contributed to a sense of speed that other single-screen sims entirely lack.

A mock-up posted by MobaPad provides one vision of how magnetically attached Switch 2 Joy-Cons might look (credit: MobaPad )

Thus far, Nintendo has offered only vague hints regarding whether or not the upcoming Switch 2 will run games and software designed for the current Switch. Now, an obscure Chinese peripheral maker is reporting that the new console will indeed work with existing physical Switch game cards and digital Switch game downloads.

The new report comes from MobaPad , a little-known creator of Switch controllers and carrying cases based in Shenzen, China. In a Sunday morning blog post , the company says it is "in the process of developing the next-generation console controller" for the Switch 2 and has "acquired a lot of first-hand information" about the console as a result (MobaPad shared similar insights days earlier on Chinese video site Bilibili and briefly on its English Facebook page ).

Chief among MobaPad's purported revelations is that "the cartridge slot of the Switch 2 will support backward compatibility with physical Switch game cartridges, ensuring compatibility with players' existing game libraries, including digital versions." Game cards designed specifically for the Switch 2, on the other hand, "may not be compatible with the first-generation console," suggesting there may be a physical change preventing Switch 2 game cards from being accidentally inserted into an older Switch console.

Enlarge / More players have been emerging from this vault lately than have in years. (credit: Samuel Axon)

War never changes , but Fallout 76 sure has. The online game that launched to a negative reception with no NPCs but plenty of bugs has mutated in new directions since its 2018 debut. Now it’s finding new life thanks to the wildly popular Fallout TV series that debuted a couple of weeks ago.

In truth, it never died, though it has stayed in decidedly niche territory for the past six years. Developer Bethesda Game Studios has released regular updates fixing (many of) the bugs, adding new ways to play, softening the game’s rough edges, and yes, introducing Fallout 3- or Fallout 4 -like, character-driven quest lines with fully voiced NPCs—something many players felt was missing in the early days.

It’s still not for everybody, but for a select few of us who’ve stuck with it, there’s nothing else quite like it.

Enlarge / Scale is important, especially when talking about relative console sales. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it made 31 percent less off Xbox hardware in the first quarter of 2024 (ending in March) than it had the year before, a decrease it says was "driven by lower volume of consoles sold." And that's not because the console sold particularly well a year ago, either; Xbox hardware revenue for the first calendar quarter of 2023 was already down 30 percent from the previous year.

Those two data points speak to a console that is struggling to substantially increase its player base during a period that should, historically, be its strongest sales period. But getting wider context on those numbers is a bit difficult because of how Microsoft reports its Xbox sales numbers (i.e., only in terms of quarterly changes in total console hardware revenue). Comparing those annual shifts to the unit sales numbers that Nintendo and Sony report every quarter is not exactly simple.

Context clues

Significant declines in Xbox hardware revenue for four of the last five quarters stand out relative to competitors' unit sales. (credit: Kyle Orland)

To attempt some direct contextual comparison, we took unit sales numbers for some recent successful Sony and Nintendo consoles and converted them to Microsoft-style year-over-year percentage changes (aligned with the launch date for each console). For this analysis, we skipped over each console's launch quarter, which contains less than three months of total sales (and often includes a lot of pent-up early adopter demand). We also skipped the first four quarters of a console's life cycle, which don't have a year-over-year comparison point from 12 months prior.

Enlarge / The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2

The iconic slide-in "click" of the Switch Joy-Cons may be replaced with a magnetic attachment mechanism in the Switch 2, according to a report from Spanish-language gaming news site Vandal .

The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons "difficult." Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system's magnetic connection points. Current Switch Pro Controllers, which do not physically attach to the Switch, should be fully compatible with the Switch 2, according to the report.

Vandal cites several unnamed accessory and peripheral makers who reportedly got to touch the new console inside of an opaque box, which was used to balance design secrecy with the need to provide general knowledge of the unit's dimensions. According to those sources, the Switch 2 will be "larger than the Switch, although without reaching the size of the Steam Deck."

Enlarge / The Q*Bert's so bright, I gotta wear shades. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Gottlieb)

For years now, video game preservationists, librarians, and historians have been arguing for a DMCA exemption that would allow them to legally share emulated versions of their physical game collections with researchers remotely over the Internet. But those preservationists continue to face pushback from industry trade groups, who worry that an exemption would open a legal loophole for "online arcades" that could give members of the public free, legal, and widespread access to copyrighted classic games.

This long-running argument was joined once again earlier this month during livestreamed testimony in front of the Copyright Office, which is considering new DMCA rules as part of its regular triennial process . During that testimony, representatives for the Software Preservation Network and the Library Copyright Alliance defended their proposal for a system of "individualized human review" to help ensure that temporary remote game access would be granted "primarily for the purposes of private study, scholarship, teaching, or research."

Enlarge / "5ario" here won't be on the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop for long. (credit: Steam / LmaoSPW )

The popular long-running Source-engine physics sandbox Garry's Mod has begun to take down Nintendo-related items from the game's Steam Workshop page, following an apparent takedown request from Nintendo.

In a Steam Community news post , mod creator Garry Newman writes that some items have already been taken down as part of an "ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through." Indeed, combing through the over 1.8 million Garry's Mod Steam Workshop add-ons to find all of Nintendo's copyrighted content is sure to be a significant task. A simple search for Pokemon Thursday morning turns up nearly 3,000 seemingly copyright-infringing results on its own.

"If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo-related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot," Newman jokes in the announcement post.