Enlarge / Detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) investigates a missing persons case while haunted by his past. (credit: YouTube/HBO)

We’d almost forgotten about HBO’s uneven crime anthology series True Detective. It had a fantastic first season, only to hemorrhage viewers with the abysmally dreary, disappointing second season. But now the series is coming back for season 3, and if the new trailer is any indication, it’s a welcome return to form.

The brainchild of former lit professor and novelist Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective has always fostered a very literary, philosophical tone, and, shall we say, unhurried pacing. When it works, it’s brilliant. Season 1 was set in the Louisiana Bayou, as Detective Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and his partner Detective Martin “Marty” Hart (Woody Harrelson) tracked down a twisted serial killer with a fondness for leaving weird twig sculptures in the woods.

The spooky setting and strong chemistry between the lead actors pretty much ensured its success with viewers and critics alike. It was well-plotted to reel the viewer in, and the dialogue between McConaughey and Harrelson yielded some much-needed comic relief. (Only McConaughey could pull off those long, drawling abstract ruminations without everyone wanting to strangle him, his partner included.)

Enlarge (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Announcements of a brand-new, smartphone-only Diablo and a remastered WarCraft 3 headlined a news-filled BlizzCon keynote presentation on Friday. The talk focused on games across Blizzard Entertainment’s portfolio—along with a huge freebie from its corporate siblings at Bungie.

Starting today, that developer’s Destiny 2 is now free to claim on Windows 10 PCs. Anyone who logs into Battle.net on or before November 18 can claim the game’s vanilla version at this site and keep it for free. (Should you create an entirely new Battle.net account on or after November 2, you’ll need to attach SMS authentication to your account to claim that copy—presumably to prevent a slew of spam accounts claiming free Destiny 2 accounts.) That version includes quite a bit of content that can be played with all other owners of the PC version, though at this point, it’s effectively an elaborate demo for the game’s more recent expansion packs.

Diablo Immortal‘s control scheme on smartphone.

Blizzard’s previous promises of “multiple Diablo projects” bore fruit during the keynote with the announcement of Diablo Immortal, a “full-fledged action-RPG you can play everywhere with everyone.” This game, set between the events of Diablo II and Diablo III, is credited to developer NetEase Games, a company that primarily handles online game management of Blizzard’s classic series in China on top of also making its own titles. Reveal footage of the game confirmed a pretty busy interface of touchscreen buttons that mobile players will use to manage abilities and items. That interface, seen above, may look bonkers to Diablo’s PC faithful, but it looks somewhat reserved compared to mega-popular mobile games like PUBG and Fortnite.

Enlarge / HBO is none too pleased about President Trump’s Friday tweet. (credit: HBO)

Friday morning, President Trump used Twitter to issue a rare kind of foreign-policy announcement: a slogan lifted from a pop-culture meme, repurposed to vaguely suggest future political action. And it drew criticism from one significant party: HBO, who cited its “trademark” in disapproving of the president’s choice of message delivery.

That response came as a result of Trump using both a Game of Thrones-styled typeface (including its crossed-O design) and a co-opting of that series’ popular “Winter is coming” motto. Trump’s version twists the phrase to announce, “sanctions are coming,” which is an apparent call to reinstate economic sanctions against Iran that had been lifted in a landmark 2015 deal made by an international coalition.

When we asked HBO for comment, the company offered a one-sentence statement: “We were not aware of this messaging and would prefer our trademark not be misappropriated for political purposes.”

Enlarge (credit: Randy Adams)

Venerable photo sharing site Flickr has announced that from January 8, 2019, free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos or videos. Any content above that limit will be deleted, starting February 5, 2019, beginning with the oldest images first. To go beyond the 1,000 item limit, you’ll have to pay $50/year for Flickr Pro.

Created in 2004, Flickr was bought by Yahoo in 2005. The original model was that free accounts were limited to 200 pictures, with payment required to go beyond this limit. During Yahoo’s ownership, free Flickr accounts were made more and more capable, with the biggest change coming in 2013, when free accounts were given 1TB of total space. Yahoo was bought by Verizon in 2017, and in April of this year, Flickr was sold to SmugMug, another photo hosting site.

Flickr’s new owners say that the change is being made to better concentrate on what Flickr should be: a community for photographers to store, showcase, and talk about their work. Expanding storage to 1TB for free accounts brought in the wrong kind of users—not people who loved photography, but rather people attracted by a large bitbucket they could dump files into.

Enlarge / Jumpman, circa 1981, before the Segale-inspired renaming to “Mario”

Mario Segale, the Seattle real estate and construction business owner who inspired the name for Nintendo’s famous mascot, passed away on October 27 according to reports from The Seattle Times and The Auburn Reporter. He was 84 years old.

Segale owned the business park housing Nintendo’s American arcade operation in the early ’80s, when the company was busy converting thousands of disused Radarscope cabinets to play Donkey Kong. At the time, Nintendo of America President Minoru Arakawa and other executives were trying to come up with an Americanized name for the game’s player avatar, who was still referred to as “Jumpman” at that point (a name that appears on early Donkey Kong cabinet art).

As the story goes, when Segale came to Arakawa to demand payment for a late rent bill, inspiration struck.

If you’re interested in a review of Diablo III: Eternal Edition for the Nintendo Switch, here’s a quick one. The new version, out on Friday for $59.99, is still Diablo III. The game’s existing versions on PC and console are nearly identical to this new Switch port, and that’s great news.

Over the past few years, Blizzard climbed quite the corpse-laden mountain to get this dungeon-crawling game past its troubled 2012 launch. The worst we could say last year, upon the launch of a $15 DLC expansion, was that the core of Diablo III had already improved tremendously for all existing players—and thus rendered the paid Necromancer pack a bit moot.

So on Nintendo Switch, everything about Diablo III, from its basic loot-driven combat to its expansive, “seasons”-driven endgame, is the same. (Every DLC add-on and free patch from the console and PC versions arrives here intact.) Yet, it’s also born anew on this platform. Diablo III truly is the ultimate kind of game to work on Nintendo’s hybrid console. It works as well for satisfying, quick-burst combat as it does marathon bed-battle sessions.

Enlarge / A giant Tetris board illuminating the windows of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality in 2016. Playing Tetris provides a useful distraction during anxious waiting periods. (credit: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)

There’s nothing worse than waiting to hear potentially upsetting news, whether it’s a bad medical diagnosis or learning if you got into your top college choice. These kinds of stressful periods can produce intense anxiety. Playing Tetris might be the perfect coping mechanism, according to a new study in the journal Emotion.

There have been a number of scientific studies involving Tetris, one of the most popular computer games in the world, in which players flip falling colored blocks every which way in order to neatly stack them into rows. For instance, a 2009 study found that one’s brain activity becomes more efficient the longer one plays Tetris. The more proficient a player becomes, the less glucose the brain consumes for energy to fuel cognition.

That same year, a research group at Oxford University reported that playing Tetris could reduce the impact of viewing traumatic scenes, perhaps because the game disrupts retention of painful memories. That makes it a promising treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. It is such an effective distraction that it can help reduce cravings in dieters and addicts seeking to kick the habit. After prolonged play, images of the Tetris combinations will linger in the brain (the so-called “Tetris effect”), although this will happen with any repeated images or scenarios (solitaire, jigsaw puzzles, and so forth). It even inspired a new Playstation game, The Tetris Effect.

Fans of the quirky 2014 New Zealand “mockmentary” What We Do in the Shadows rejoice, for FX has dropped the first teasers for its much-anticipated TV adaptation. The half-hour comedy looks to preserve the same deadpan humor and worldweary tone that made the original film an instant cult classic.

Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement wrote, directed, and starred in the horror-comedy, playing vampire roommates Vladislav (Clement) and Viago (Waititi) in Wellington, New Zealand. Given their nocturnal nature, they and their vampire friends haven’t adapted to modern life particularly well, and their mishaps as they struggle to navigate the mundane trivialities of daily life in the 21st century are the source of much of the film’s deadpan humor. What We Do in the Shadows garnered a solid cult following after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, ultimately earning $6.9 million—a decent showing given its modest $1.6 million budget.

Combine that success with Waititi’s impressive directorial turn at the helm of Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, and it’s no surprise that TV networks came calling. Along with a rumored big-screen sequel about the werewolf gang introduced in the film (“We’re werewolves, not swearwolves”), the guys are well on their way to creating their own cinematic universe with two spinoff series.

Enlarge / Can’t afford a Switch? Mario has a suggestion for you… (credit: Nintendo of America)

In the age of the Nintendo Switch, the company’s older 3DS handheld tends to get the short end of the stick in terms of press and player attention. But Nintendo has maintained that it’s not going to abandon the dedicated portable, which showed surprisingly resilient sales as recently as this January.

In a recent financial briefing, Nintendo recommitted to keep selling and supporting the 3DS, and the company explained why the eight-year-old system continues to have a place next to the Switch.

Nintendo 3DS is set apart from Nintendo Switch by its characteristics as a handheld game system that is lightweight, price-friendly, and highly portable. Affordability is the strong point that positions Nintendo 3DS in a niche clearly separate from Nintendo Switch. In the grand scheme of things, Nintendo 3DS has a prominent position as the product that can be served as the first contact between Nintendo and many of its consumers, and for this reason we will keep the business going.

Keeping the 3DS around as a form of “entry-level” Nintendo hardware makes a lot of sense. The New 2DS XL now retails for just $150—half the price of a new Switch—and that’s with a copy of Mario Kart 7 bundled. And until major Nintendo franchises like Pokemon and Metroid come to the Switch, the 3DS represents the best way to enjoy them in relatively modern forms.

Enlarge / An article about Sony’s and Nintendo’s console fortunes seems a good excuse to run a photo of their decades-old failed console collaboration. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

As 2017 came to a close, Nintendo was busy reveling in Switch sales that were exceeding expectations while Sony’s PlayStation 4 was showing signs that its strong sales had peaked. Leading into the all important 2018 holiday season, the companies’ comparative console war outlooks seem to have changed a bit.

Let’s start with Nintendo, which recently announced worldwide shipments of 3.2 million Switch systems in the July through September quarter. The good news is, that’s up slightly from the 2.93 million sold in the same period a year ago. The bad news is that slight increase doesn’t put Nintendo on track to meet its long-standing projection for 20 million Switch units sold during the fiscal year (which ends in March 2019). Overall, Nintendo’s quarterly profits and revenues both came in significantly below analyst estimates as well, though both were up from a year prior.

A strong holiday season could give Nintendo the boost it needs to hit that target, of course. But Nintendo’s next two months feature only a couple of major first-party titles—November’s Pokémon: Let’s Go and December’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate—alongside a laundry list of third-party ports and downloadable indie games.