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Devolver Digital puts out a lot of good games and its looking to spread that magic around to licensed content. The company just announced a sub-label called Big Fan Games that will specialize in developing indie titles based on pre-existing IPs. Devolver describes Big Fan Games as a brand new label giving developers license to create original game adaptations using the worlds and characters of iconic film, television, and comic properties. To that end, the team is staffed with industry veterans who have worked with companies like Disney and Dark Horse Comics. Announcement time.Today we launch Big Fan ( @BigFanPresents ) - a brand new label giving developers license to create original game adaptations using the worlds and characters of iconic film, television, and comic properties. pic.twitter.com/A6h3IGOk3p Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) October 1, 2024 The label already has a few games in its library, all of them based on pre-existing IPs. These titles include Reigns: Game of Thrones, Hellboy Web of Wyrd and John Wick Hex. These games were already released before being moved to the new label. For instance, Reigns: Game of Thrones came out six years ago, but back then it was published by Devolver. John Wick Hex came out in 2019 and Hellboy Web of Wyrd hit digital store shelves last year. Todays announcement doesnt bring any new games, but the company website currently features a big coming soon tab, though its currently empty. We should expect some reveals in the near future. Big Fan Games wrote in a press release that its goal is to nurture fun and inventive games that stand on their own, rather than serving as marketing tie-ins for other media launches. Licensed games have been hit and miss since the dawn of modern gaming. For every DuckTales, theres a Superman 64. Recent releases, however, have been well-received. Respawns Star Wars games were bona-fide hits, as was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredders Revenge. While we dont know what Devolver and Big Fan Games are cooking up, we do know of some upcoming licensed games. MachineGames will release Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on December 9 and Arkane Lyon is busy working on a game based on Marvels Blade. I personally think its pretty great that Big Fan Games will give indie developers a chance to work on licensed properties. To that end, the company encourages developers to reach out with ideas for a licensed game. "Have a favorite game youve always dreamed of rebooting or a cult classic film or book you'd love to see adapted into a game? Wed love to hear from you," the studio writes on its website. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/devolver-has-a-new-publishing-label-for-licensed-indie-games-183352439.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Ooni's pizza ovens are popular choices for baking restaurant-quality pies at home. In fact, the Karu 16 is my top pick for a multi-fuel option in our best pizza ovens guide. That model is spacious, accommodating 16-inch pizzas and allowing you to bake and roast thanks to the extra vertical space. The Karu 16 has been around for a while now, so Ooni has taken the opportunity to give it a big overhaul while keeping the price the same. The new Karu 2 Pro maintains many of the great design elements from the Karu 16, but adds some key upgrades to improve upon an already winning formula. First, the digital display for the Karu 2 Pro got a big upgrade. The black and white panel is gone, replaced by Ooni's Digital Temperature Hub that looks similar to what's on the Koda 2 Max. This piece of tech not only gives you a clear indication of oven and food temps (via a wired probe), but it will send those stats to your phone via Bluetooth. To help you adjust temperature of the oven, there's a new air intake lever on the back of the Karu 2 Pro near the fire box. This gives you another place to coax the air flow besides the one that's on the exhaust chimney, allowing you to run the oven as low as 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Lastly, the door of this new model has more glass and less framing, giving you a clearer view of what's going on inside without having to open the oven. Of course, this is an Ooni product, so there are certain things you can bank on. Primarily, there's the fact that the Karu 2 Pro can hit 950 degrees Fahrenheit in 15 minutes. At those temps, you can cook a Neapolitan-style pizza in about a minute or easily sear a steak with a grill pan. The powder-coated, carbon steel exterior helps keep heat in while protecting the Karu 2 Pro, and folding legs provide easy transport. And since this is a multi-fuel oven, you have the option of attaching a gas burner when you don't want to use wood or charcoal (additional purchase required). The Karu 2 Pro is listed as "coming soon" on Ooni's website for $799, the same price as the Karu 16 when it arrived. No word on preorders or an on-sale date, but you can sign up via the link below to be notified when the oven is up for purchase. What's more, the Karu 16 is currently available for $649, but it will soon be retired. The Karu 12G and Karu 12 will remain in the company's multi-fuel lineup. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/oonis-karu-2-pro-pizza-oven-has-app-connectivity-and-a-bigger-window-174519402.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Its wild to think the reMarkable 2 debuted in March 2020, a time now more famous for other reasons. A lot has changed in the four-plus years since, and now its time for its successor, the reMarkable Paper Pro. The third-generation, distraction-free writing slate gets a color e-paper display as well as a raft of other equally notable improvements. That includes a bigger screen, faster internals and an active stylus for a more paper-and-pen-like experience. But this much more tech comes at a higher price, so lets answer the question: Is it worth it? reMarkable is the standard bearer for devices straddling the gap between the analog and digital. Its an e-paper slate with a stylus (and optional keyboard) that lets you read, write and edit your own documents and PDFs. The focus is on giving you a tool thatll act like paper and pen or a word processor rather than anything more fully-featured. That way, you can focus on whatever youre doing without the distractions a full computer, tablet or phone offers. If there was a way to make medium tech sound not like an insult, Im sure reMarkable would wear it proudly. Hardware The new reMarkable Paper Pro measures 196.6 x 274.1 x 5.1mm, making it roughly an inch taller and a quarter-inch wider than its predecessor, the reMarkable 2 (188 x 246 x 4.7mm). But it doesnt feel that much bigger, thanks to plenty of effort made to shrink the bezels around the display. And the left band (the chin when using the device in landscape mode) has been eliminated altogether here. All of that room has been made to accommodate the Paper Pros headline feature: an 11.8-inch Canvas Color screen. I prefer tablets that have a slightly more austere design than where the industry has been for the last few years. The reMarkable 2 was one of many slates aping the then-current iPads rounded off corners and sides that never felt right. The Paper Pro is a delightful correction, with sharper lines and squarer corners that gives the device some much-needed visual rigidity. The edge band is also inlaid with grooves that, designer Mats Solberg explained, has two useful benefits beyond looking good. First, it evokes the idea youre holding a sheaf of paper in your hand, and second, it adds some grip to a device thats surprisingly thin. The inside of the Paper Pro has been given a thorough upgrade as well, with a new 1.8GHz Cortex A53 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. This is underpowered compared to any smartphone from the last decade, but dont forget the reMarkable doesnt need that much grunt. Its still a big leap ahead of the rM2, which was packing a 1.2GHz dual-core chip with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. The batterys a lot beefier, too, leaping up from the 3,000mAh of the rM2 to 5,030mAh here. It needs to be, given this is also the first reMarkable with a backlight, making it the first model you can use in dark rooms without a lot of grief. Daniel Cooper for Engadget To be clear, the new size and the switch from a passive stylus to an active one means none of your existing reMarkable accessories are compatible with Paper Pro. The accessory connector is on the backplate rather than the edge, and the new stylus is magnetically charged. So when youre pricing one of these up, bear in mind that youll need a whole new set of extras, too. In use As soon as you turn on the Paper Pro, youll notice the leap in performance compared to its predecessor. At the risk of damning this thing with faint praise; If the reMarkable 2 felt like a fancy ereader, then this feels more like a slow tablet. The faster internals and display mean the experience is a lot more responsive and snappy, with far less delay between action and result. There are even little animations during the setup process and unlocking the device with a six-digit code feels like youre unlocking a phone. The Paper Pro uses a modified version of E Inks Gallery 3 technology called Canvas Color. Each pixel in the display holds a series of particles: White, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. These can be combined to make eight solid colors (Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, White and Black) or, with dithering, up to 20,000 different shades therein. The analogy the company uses is in the CMYK inks found in most printers and newspaper presses. Daniel Cooper for Engadget The end result is a display with visible, if muted, color reproduction with some limitations youll need to work around. If youre making handwritten amendments to a document, youll need blue, cyan, magenta or red. Because yellow, green, gray and cyan are irritatingly faint when you write with a thin nib on existing text. The inverse is true for highlighting, where the gentler colors are better. Theres no big difference in readability between the Paper Pro (229 ppi) compared to its predecessor (226 ppi). But I cant quite shake the nagging feeling that the smaller, older device has sharper text when Im looking at it. Your mileage may vary. Because of how much new tech has been crammed inside the Paper Pro, youll find scrolling speeds are much faster. When I used the reMarkable 2, I felt I could see its processes taking place in real time. You know, Identify input, process input, send command to screen, refresh screen, with a notable delay. Here, any lag feels more like a result of the e-paper displays natural limitations and slow refresh rate rather than slow processing speed. Plenty of work has been done by the reMarkable team to reduce the latency between the pen and the display. Even after the addition of the color screen, which necessitated some compromise, the input lag was cut from 22ms on the rM2 to 12ms here. Similarly, theres no lag when youre typing as there could sometimes be when you were using the older slate. If theres one thing Im still not sure about, its that when writing in color, the text doesnt initially render in the color youve chosen. Your first blast of scrawling pops up in gray and its only after the screen refreshes that it reloads in the correct color. Daniel Cooper for Engadget Theres one other thing that I want to draw attention to, and its a subtle thing but well worth pointing at. A lot of time and effort has gone into ensuring that handwritten notes and highlights can work seamlessly with text inputs. For instance, if Im typing something and feel the need to highlight, underline or draw a ring around the word with the pen, I can. If I then have to go back and amend that text later, its easy enough to expect the handwritten additions to become unmoored from the text. But reMarkable has done the hard work to ensure that it all remains in place its a subtle piece of engineering, but one I deeply appreciate. Backlight Paper Pro is the first reMarkable with a backlight, and its inclusion here is very much better late than never. Ive often enjoyed writing notes with the reMarkable 2, but found it frustrating that its unusable in darker environments. That both the slate and the new Type Folio are now backlit activated by tapping the top right corner of the screen means thats no longer an issue. The light emitted from both is in my experience gentle rather than eye-searing, even when I pushed everything to maximum. Fundamentally, youll be able to use this in a dark room or on an airplane with the cabin lights dimmed without any stress or eye strain. Marker Like its predecessors, the Paper Pro comes with a choice of stylus. What separates the Marker and Marker Plus is that the latter, as before, has an active surface on top, allowing you to use it as an eraser. Make an error, and all you have to do is flip it over to get rid of your boo-boo, whereas with the Marker youll need to select the erase tool from the menu. Daniel Cooper for Engadget But while you might not notice much of a difference at first blush, plenty has changed on the inside. The older reMarkable styluses were passive, enabling you to use a number of compatible third-party styli in their place. This time around, both versions are active full of technology to help orient the pen and communicate with the tablet for faster processing. It connects magnetically to the right hand side, wirelessly charging from the slate like the Apple Pencil. Ironically, a lot of effort has gone into ensuring that, despite the raft of changes between this model and its predecessor, youll struggle to notice the difference. Ive seen some folks saying that the new Marker has a harder tip and that as the display is rougher, its less fun to use. Im not sure my experience matches that, and every time I compare the two, I feel like its more or less the same. As for the Markers battery life, no matter how hard I tried, I couldnt get this thing to run out of juice under what Id describe as normal use. An hour or two a day for more than a week and I never managed to run the stylus flat hell, I barely got the Paper Pros battery to half in that time. Type Folio reMarkable has launched a new Type Folio for the Paper Pro, which is about 1.1 inches wider and deeper than its predecessor. That extra space affords you a palm rest and a bigger margin around the outside of the keyboard, but nothing too dramatic in terms of changes to the keys. You do now get an Escape key, which exits a document and goes back to the homepage. Theres also a new Icon Toggle, which when activated will remove the icons from the screen to further reduce distractions. Daniel Cooper for Engadget Now, Im a big fan of the old Type Folio, finding that it made the right compromises for a travel keyboard. Its main keys were properly sized and spaced so my muscle memory carried over from my regular keyboard to this one and back again. The compromises, like the half-height function row and narrow non-character keys, were the right ones to make. Given the Paper Pros bigger size, its Type Folio can spread those extra keys out a little further to give the whole thing room to breathe. Its better than it was before, but what we had before was no slouch. Price and availability The reMarkable Paper Pro is available to order today, priced at $579 with the standard Marker and $629 if you want the Marker Plus. You can add a case from $89, but a full leather version will set you back $179. If you want to add the Type Folio, which Id say is a key way of making the reMarkable truly useful, youll need to pay an additional $229. The company has, however, decided to keep the reMarkable 2 around as a lower-cost option, selling it for $379 with a standard Marker. Given the reMarkable 2 has topped our e-ink tablet buyers guide for several years, its still a solid choice if the Paper Pro is too rich for your blood. The competition There are a decent number of e-paper tablets floating around the market right now, with the majority of them offering monochrome screens. In our e-ink tablet Buyers Guide, we named the reMarkable 2 the best option for most people. If youre looking for a slate with a color display, your options are the Paper Pro, or the Kobo Libra Color and the elegantly named Onyx Book Tablet Not Air 3 C. Kobos device is much more portable than the Paper Pro, but thats because the Kobo is primarily designed to be an ereader. Its smaller seven-inch screen is squarely in ereader territory, and while theres a notebooks feature that allows you to write freehand as much as you want, its never going to be able to compete with the Paper Pros 11.8-inch screen on that front. The Libra Color will be a better option for those who primarily want to take notes in and mark up ebooks Kobos library is nearly as robust as Amazons Kindle library, and you can digitally mark up any book you buy from Kobo without restriction. Onyxs Boox Note Air 3 C is more akin to the Paper Pro in size, but its decidedly not suitable if you want to work in a more distraction-free environment. The Note Air 3 C, like most other Boox devices, are full Android tablets with E Ink screens, so nothings stopping you from going online or even attempting to watch a YouTube video. Even if distractions arent an issue for you, the Paper Pros streamlined interface makes it much easier to use for both newbies and those familiar with these devices. Boox devices will appeal more to tinkerers and the most tech-savvy among us because there are a lot of settings you can play around with to make a device like the Note Air 3 C as capable as you need it to be. The Paper Pro keeps things relatively simple, making it more approachable overall. Wrap-up Daniel Cooper for Engadget Look, you just know that there are some folks wholl look at the Paper Pros price and spec list, compare that to a base-model iPad and laugh themselves into a coma. The point is that this isnt a generic tablet but a device thats been consciously designed to do fewer things better. So, were going to judge this thing on and by its own merits, rather than as a typical tablet. Im a big fan of reMarkables devices because they offer a way for me to focus in a way that my ADHD brain struggles to do otherwise. If Im feeling overwhelmed and need to eliminate distractions, then stealing myself away with a device like this really can help. Theres no easy way for me to swipe away from my work to check Reddit or YouTube, helping me stay on track. And given how popular these devices are, Im sure Im not the only person who feels this way. If, however, youd still like to dip a toe into this water but dont want to spend that much, then there is good news. reMarkable is keeping the 2 around as an entry-level unit, priced at $379 with the standard marker and because for all of the good things the Paper Pro does, none diminish the long list of good qualities the reMarkable 2 has. On one hand, you have a device thats whip-fast, eminently capable at the things that it can do and now has a bigger screen that renders colors. On the other, I cannot pretend that its not a pricey piece of kit, especially when you bundle in the Type Folio. Naturally, if your budget can stretch to that sort of cash and you really do need a way to work without distractions, I think its worth it.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/remarkable-paper-pro-review-writing-in-color-is-nice-but-itll-cost-you-173024590.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
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