Through two seasons, the most dominant criticism of Netflix’s Stranger Things series has been that the show perhaps over-relies on nostalgia (and under-relies on things like original story or true stakes). But with its season teasers, the show seems to playfully lean into this. Last year’s season two trailer brought viewers hero kids in Ghostbuster uniforms and ample amounts of Dragon’s Lair, and, for season three, the team has focused on another staple of 1980s American culture: the mall.

Bookstores! Old corporate logos! Whatever these people were thinking with those pants, that hair, and all the bright color! Made to lovingly look like an ad found on some old bootleg VHS, the new teaser delivers tons of style, though admittedly little substance. We learn Hawkins will be even more “Small town, USA” with the arrival of a mega-mall. We get a glimpse of Steve slinging ice cream with a likely soon-to-be-familiar co-worker (whom you can read a little about via casting news here). And… well, that’s about it.

Noticeably absent from this new teaser is any firm indication of timing for S3, although the ad says this new mall will arrive “next summer,” which could indicate a bit of a delay for fans. The first teasers for S2 infamously showed up during the 2017 Super Bowl, giving fans about a 10-month heads up before the Halloween-ish premiere. Ten months from now would put Stranger Things S3 around mid-May 2019. That would roughly mirror the summer-release timing of S1, though again, there’s no firm word from Netflix on S3’s release date just yet. The company’s online media center lacks any S3 press materials, but the writers’ room has tweeted about post-production being in progress.

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Over the last few years, the failed biomedical startup Theranos has become synonymous with some of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley. Through a combination of hubris, mendacity, and paranoid secrecy, the company fooled investors and the press into thinking it had created a nearly magical medical tricorder, earning a “unicorn” valuation of $9 billion before the whole endeavor was revealed to be smoke and mirrors.

Much ink has been spilled documenting Theranos’ rise and then fall—but the most important work has arguably been that of Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. And Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, his recent book on the subject, is as good a retelling of that tale as any we could hope for. So good, in fact, that I devoured it in a single sitting.

The man who made it happen

More than anyone else, Carreyrou deserves credit for pulling the wool from so many credulous eyes regarding Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. Outlets like Fortune and Wired were writing hagiographic puff pieces about this precocious college dropout and her plan to save the world; Carreyrou was pointing out inconvenient facts, like the company’s inability to accurately conduct most of the hundreds of blood tests it claimed to have revolutionized. He credits pathologist Adam Clapper—who wrote the now-defunct Pathology Blawg—for tipping him off that something wasn’t entirely right.

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Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Altiplano—or, as it is affectionately known ‘round these parts, “the llama game”—displays a hobby in rude creative health. As you’d expect from noted German designer Reiner Stockhausen, the game is a formidable packet of innovative interlocking systems, confidently presented, and (once you wrap your head around the strategy) a tough but engrossing mental challenge.

This might look, on the surface, like a game for kids. Its mascot is, after all a goofy, boggle-eyed llama alpaca (llama?) with a pronounced underbite; the animal also appears as an elaborate in-game standee denoting the first player. The bold colors and vibrant illustrations, however, belie a game of real depth and complexity—perhaps a bit too much complexity for some.

Enlarge / Want Aliens: Colonial Marines to better resemble this ‘shopped image? Just remove one letter! (credit: Gearbox / Sega)

History may never be kind to Aliens: Colonial Marines, but the present tense isn’t looking so good for the lawsuit– and complaint-ridden Gearbox game, either. This week brought to our attention one of the weirdest coding typos we’ve ever seen in a game—which has apparently been hidden inside of A:CM‘s PC version since its 2013 launch.

The first-person shooter returned to gaming’s zeitgeist this week thanks to a 90-percent discount at gaming site Fanatical, which brings its asking price down to $3. (Buying the PC version outright from Steam currently costs the full $30 price.) This sale led one fan to plead with members of the popular gaming forum ResetERA to consider the game as a decent cheap-fun option, especially due to a 712MB fan-made patch at moddb.com that addresses many of the game’s graphical and gameplay glitches.

Tether vs. teather

Upon researching this patch, ResetERA readers noticed something in the moddb.com notes that somehow escaped the gaming community at large in October 2017: the discovery of a one-letter typo in A:CM‘s INI files. As moddb.com user jamesdickinson963 pointed out last year, the game’s “PecanEngine.ini” file references a “tether” system in assigning AI commands to the series’ infamous monsters (which I’ll call “xenomorphs” for brevity’s sake, even though that term isn’t necessarily the right one). However, one of its two mentions of the term “tether” is misspelled as “teather.”

Enlarge / Joss Whedon, courtesy of HBO. (credit: HBO)

Joss Whedon, the creator of acclaimed TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, has been announced as showrunner for a new HBO series titled The Nevers.

The Friday announcement confirms Whedon as “executive producer, showrunner, writer, and director” for his first-ever non-network TV series, following his RECENT executive producer and co-creator duties on the ongoing series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. HBO describes the show as “an epic science-fiction drama about a gang of Victorian women who find themselves with unusual abilities,” and its statement makes no bones about Whedon’s legacy by claiming it “follows in the footsteps of Buffy.”

HBO did not announce a release window, actors, or other principal members of the cast and crew.

Since a simple method for unlocking most Switch hardware was revealed back in March, much of the hacking community has been focused on developing homebrew software/emulators for the system. But a small community of Super Mario Odyssey fans has been using their expanded Switch access to modify the game with new costumes, gameplay features, and even entirely new levels.

The modifications started a few months ago with simple save file edits that let players overflow the game’s coin counter or unlock all the game’s costumes, including some costumes that have yet to be officially released. From there, hackers started to figure out how to make cosmetic edits to in-game files, leading to mods that replace the power moons with old-school power stars or give Mario a Sonic the Hedgehog outfit, for instance. And why listen to that boring Mario music when you can replace it with “Despacito” (or watch a “Despacito” music video on a screen in Snow Kingdom)?

It wasn’t long before the hackers were digging into the game code to modify the way Super Mario Odyssey plays, too. Hacker Simon Aarons created a mod that lets players run with super speed and “moon jump” to otherwise impossible heights. Others have made mods that let Mario breathe indefinitely underwater or play as Bowser in unintended areas of the game.

Enlarge / Replacing that memory gibberish with a carefully crafted memory card file lets you load arbitrary NES games through Animal Crossing. (credit: Nintendo)

Fans of the early-2000s era GameCube version of the original Animal Crossing likely remember the game including a handful of emulated NES titles that could be played by obtaining in-game items for your house. What players back then didn’t know is that the NES emulator in Animal Crossing can also be used to play any generic NES ROM stored on a GameCube memory card.

Security researcher James Chambers discovered the previously unused and undocumented feature buried in the original Animal Crossing game code and detailed his methodology and findings in a technically oriented Medium post this week.

The key to opening Animal Crossing‘s NES emulator is the game’s generic “NES console” item. Usually, this item simply tells players who try to use it that “I want to play my NES, but I don’t have any software” (separate in-game items are used to play the NES ROMs that are included on the Animal Crossing disc).

Enlarge / Hummingbird is just one of many unlockable, playable characters. (credit: Humble Hearts)

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. We all feel it at one time or another, and it often seems nothing gets butts in the proverbial seats as reliably as the promise of remembering everything as it was, when you didn’t know any better and assumed the world was a simpler place. Maybe that’s why so many corporations and creators use it as a crutch for storytelling.

When you overuse nostalgia, though, it stinks of the laser-focused cynicism that launched Ernest Cline’s career. But there’s a happy medium. You can use reverence for the classics to launch into something entirely different—paying homage to the past without simply replicating it whole-cloth.

Never Stop Sneakin’, the stealth-comedy game from developer Humble Hearts, does just that. Anyone who has ever played one of the first three Metal Gear Solid games will immediately recognize Never Stop’s inspiration. The chunkiest of 3D graphics obviously mime the original PlayStation, a style that’s still a rarity in a sea of indie games leaning on pixel art. Its starting protagonist, Agent Hummingbird, is a stylistic mix of Solid Snake’s gruff masculinity and Raiden’s skinny-and-sultry gait. Even the game’s crooning theme song is an overt recreation of the iconic Snake Eater theme—itself a callback to early James Bond tunes.

Developer Humble Hearts clearly appreciates some tactical espionage action. But Never Stop Sneakin’ isn’t a direct riff on Konami’s once-flagship series. You stealth around enemies and take down a variety of wacky bosses, sure, but the action is extremely minimalist. You can play an entire level with a single finger: either a thumb on the control stick or a digit dragged across a touch screen. That makes it a perfect fit for the Nintendo Switch, where I’ve been playing the score-based sneak-em-up.

Enlarge / L E G I T (credit: Ubisoft)

Over the years, Ubisoft has quietly and steadily built itself a reputation for supporting its games tremendously after launch. Those efforts usually pay off; most Ubisoft games released in the past few years are meaningfully bigger and better than they were at launch.

But what those games typically have (and The Crew 2 lacks) are solid foundations. Instead, the new open-world racing game feels so light on features, personality, and fundamentally enjoyable activities that I’d swear it’s an Early Access game—aside from the telltale graphical polish that comes with a big budget. It’s enough to make me wonder if the publisher is abusing its own “it gets better” model. Because this game still feels like it needs to be finished.

If you played the beta of The Crew 2, you’ve basically seen what there is to see. The “story” in particular mostly burns itself out in the first five minutes. You’re a nameless racer (both literally and figuratively) who is looking to make a name for yourself. That means teaming up with a fictional GoPro knockoff company to accumulate social media followers—The Crew 2’s in-world name for experience points. And… that’s it.

The minimalist plotting is quite the change from the first game’s tale of a brother seeking revenge against a nationwide gang. Whereas The Crew’s plot was intolerably bad—akin to a USA channel original movie you might catch late at night—The Crew 2 manages to be intolerable without even attempting anything. Disembodied and poorly acted voices occasionally spout juvenile philosophy about the freedom of freestyle racing or something equally hollow. It’s just enough to make me wish the game didn’t have dialogue at all.

Enlarge / Billy Dee Williams attends the Premiere Of Disney Pictures and Lucasfilm’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. (credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Reports have begun to trickle in about exactly which characters and actors to expect in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode IX, with some reports proving firmer than others. This week brings one of the most confident reports on the production yet: Billy Dee Williams, one of the series’ biggest original actors, is set to return for his first series film appearance since 1983.

The Hollywood Reporter cites “sources” familiar with the film’s production to confirm that Williams will reprise the role of Lando Calrissian in Episode IX. THR was unable to otherwise confirm any details about Calrissian’s role in the upcoming film, and Lucasfilm has not yet acknowledged the report with its own confirmation.

This report follows a late-June announcement from the Saskatchewan Entertainment Expo to issue the bad news that Williams would not appear as had been previously scheduled, which immediately set tongues wagging across the Star Wars fan-osphere.