 Hello, everyone. No Roger Chang yet today. Who knows? He may jump in at some point. But we wish Roger and his piano moving well. Hope it all goes well. Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice, Patrick Beja and I were about to do a show. Now, Patrick, I'm going to do this again today. I am going to try to do the screen shares. And we'll just see how well as we discuss things, you're multitasking like a true multitasker. Maybe I will be. Did okay yesterday. Perfect. Okay. All right. Let's get going. As it says on the brand new hoodies at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash store. Are you ready? I was born ready, Tom. So I've heard. All right. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by its audience, not outside organizations. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 6, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt and joining me Patrick Beja. If it's Tuesday, it must be Beja as they say in France. That is a national saying, of course goes back to the Norman days. Yes. So Patrick, welcome. We are going to talk about your picks for video games for the year for the holidays. Kind of a dual like Patrick's picks plus recommendations for stuff you might want to give to your video game friends for a gift. My exact titling for this list is Patrick's wonderful and amazing video game holiday shopping list. I like that. Patrick's would say it again. Patrick's wonderful and amazing video game holiday shopping list. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. So we're going to talk about that in a little bit. But first, we have the European Union approving Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn Tuesday. Microsoft agreed to let LinkedIn rivals operate with Microsoft products and the computer makers opt not to install LinkedIn with Windows. The deals should close in the coming days. So LinkedIn is definitely going to become part of Microsoft. Also, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank told reporters he is committed to investing in US startups. Presumptive President Donald Trump said Son told him he will invest 50 billion dollars in the US and create 50,000 new jobs. So Masayoshi Son cozying up to the next administration. And Bloomberg reports Apple will allow its artificial intelligence researchers to publish researcher papers for the first time. You know, they don't, they don't let them do that. And that's why a lot of people don't think Apple does much AI research. It also is harder for those researchers to get their job done if they're not allowed to publish their results and then discuss them with their peers. There must have been a lot of convincing happening in Tim Cook's office to enable this. But I guess it's necessary for Apple's benefit in the end if they're allowed to do it. Yeah. All right. Now, here are some more top stories. The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday that a patent violator does not have to pay all profits from sales of infringing products if the infringing designs only cover certain components. This voids the $399 million penalty that Samsung was ordered to pay Apple as part of that 2011 patent case. This has been going on for five years. Sends it back to a lower court for further proceedings. So Patrick, the patent wars still having effects much like like minefields in a battlefield after the war is over. Yeah, basically, that's what I was going to say. The patent wars is over in my heart, Tom, but it keeps doing news damage. I mean, yeah, this is actually, it kind of makes sense. That one is understandable. Likely Samsung will still have to pay something, but not the full amount of their profits. Now it's going to be fun to try and determine how I'm guessing that's the thinking how much of the profits are linked to the patent infringing, which again might create a number of appeals and back and forth. And I stopped following it. Definitely. Yeah, this is going to drag on for another couple of years for sure. But it is a precedent setting. I mean, it's the US Supreme Court's highest court in the land. And it says, Hey, you can't just say, Oh, you violated my patent for rounded corners. You owe me all of the profits of your device. You know, if someone if someone infringes you that then you have to come up with a percentage and try to, as you say, do the difficult job of determining, okay, how much did rounded corners benefit their sales, but you don't have to give them a percentage based on the entire sales. All right, Tom, you can relax for one news item and do everything at the same time and multitask and display the news on the hangout as I read. I'm already there, man. I'm already there. Damn it. You were too quick. Google says, starting next year, it will purchase enough renewable energy to power its 13 data centers and all office complexes worldwide. Google has 20 renewable contracts with enough solar and wind power to generate 2.6 gigawatts. Google also is also using machine learning to make data centers more power efficient, claiming it generates 3.5 times more computing power than five years ago, while not increasing electricity usage. Yeah, so it does. First of all, put in perspective that 1.21 gigawatts that was needed for powering our time machine and back to the future. That was a lot of power. You could run 10 data centers and a couple office complexes on that. But I think this is interesting. I mean, obviously, Google is not going to be able to power every light in every data center and complex with renewable power because certain countries require you to buy power from the state and certain areas maybe just can't receive the power that is coming from the contracts that Google has. So what they're doing is a complex system of tradeoffs where they'll feed power back to the grid in the amount that they're taking that isn't renewable. So on balance, it's all renewable and they're doing some things with green credits as well. This is a huge effort. And I think the most interesting part is that Google is doing this because they think it's the right thing to do for the planet. But they are also doing it because they believe it will bring down their costs. This is such a very Google approach to things. If they can create enough of a market for this renewable energy by spending this vast amount of money, then enough other people may join the market and bring down the cost for everyone thus saving Google money in the long run. Yeah, possibly. I choose to look at it as Google doing one good thing. So, you know, but the other the other, I'm saying one good thing as it's the only one, I think sometimes there might be, you know, genuinely positive reasons for doing things like these that go along with beneficial things ultimately, but and both of them. It's not like they're trying to say it's one or the other. They're saying, Yeah, we get both the benefits. I guess I guess there are there are plenty, many companies that don't do this and that could and that just don't make the effort because they are also only thinking about short term benefits. But the other thing that's really interesting is the machine learning aspect of this that is, you know, it's being used everywhere. It seems like machine learning was nowhere two years ago. And now it is even helping Google generate more computing power out of the same amount of energy for their data centers. It's pretty incredible the extent to which machine learning has been used in many different areas recently, or at least we're hearing about it now. Well, yeah, and I think that is another aspect of this that gets overlooked. We think of machine learning as Oh, well, they're going to improve their Google home offering, or they're going to improve search results, they're going to improve their assistant and all those things are absolutely true. But another reason that they might want to continue to open source things like DeepMind, which we heard about recently, is that they then will improve their algorithms by getting people's contributions, which they can then apply to their own data centers and their own internal systems. And again, make things more efficient and save themselves money. It's it's absolutely another reason to do that. IDC released wearables data Monday showing Fitbit stayed on top of the world market share increasing from 21% to just more than 23%. All wearables excluding smartwatches grew 22%. So if you look at this, you realize that that growth is actually behind the curve. They only grew 11% year over year. And the entire area that they're in not counting smartwatches grew 22%. So mixed results for Fitbit, they're doing the best of a declining scenario. The smartwatch segment of wearables fell 52% in Q3. That's bad news for people like Apple who make smartwatches. IDC also reported Monday that Apple Watch sales were 1.1 million in the quarter ending in September. That's down 71% year over year. And you're going to see a lot of headlines saying Tim Cook disputes IDC numbers. He doesn't exactly do that. What he says is, Hey, you're seeing all this bad news about our Apple Watch sales in Q3. Well, guess what? Our Q4 sales are really good. And that of course makes sense because the new Apple Watches have been on sale for this entire quarter now. Tim Cook told Reuters that Apple sold a record number of Apple Watches to consumers in the first week of holiday shopping at the end of November. And Cook said that Q4 is on track to be the best ever for the Apple Watch. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, this this can't be good news for the entire segment. And I don't think it's that amazing news for the Apple Watch either. I mean, maybe it's going to be the best quarter ever. But these numbers can get real fudgy. Like if if the Apple Watch first came out in the middle, you know, at towards the end of a quarter, then it would I can't remember. I don't have the numbers here. Maybe I should have gone and looked them up. But, you know, if it comes out that towards the end of a quarter, then sales for that release period are sort of divided between two quarters. And so it means that this holiday quarter is the first real one where you had a new product that came out. That's it. The Apple Watch was only on sale for a few days in Q3. So almost all of its sales are coming in Q4. There you go. And when it first released, the supply was really constrained, you know, a year and a half ago. So all of this to say, I'll wait for the actual numbers if we ever get them, which we probably want to declare that the Apple Watch is a hit, which is what Tim Cook is sort of trying to give the impression of. Right. Now, I miss spoke earlier and I said Fitbit part of a declining market. I should say that Fitbit's market is not growing as fast as the rest of the non smartwatch wearables. But this does tie into what we were talking about when we were discussing Pebble being acquired by Fitbit, which, by the way, has not been confirmed. That's still a that's still an insider say they're talking about it. So that may not yet happen. If you're you're already in your head thinking Fitbit owns Pebble, hold off on that change that that thought because they haven't actually done it yet. It was just that they were getting close to agreeing on something they haven't. But in that conversation, when we talked about Fitbit and Pebble, we also discussed that it is the fitness trackers that are growing. And this is particularly bad news for Fitbit because Fitbit, while it grew, grew less than the rest of the of the fitness tracker like wearables, the non smartwatch wearables, which still grew 22% in an off holiday quarter. So maybe Fitbit needs Pebble to juice their sales. But I would look at this and say, you know what, wearables are a perfectly legitimate category for someone. It doesn't seem to be Fitbit right now. And maybe they can change that. And it doesn't seem to be Apple either. Yeah, it's again, it's the thing we always say in these when these kinds of news appear, if numbers were making people happy, we would see a lot more of them. And we're not seeing many of them. So yeah, there you go. Instagram announced three new features for managing account interactions. Users can now turn off comments on individual posts, remove followers on private accounts and like comments on posts so they can remove followers on private accounts and the like comments on posts, they can remove both. Yes, exactly. So so two of these are combative, right? You can you can say instead of saying I'm turning off comments for my entire account, you can say, oh, it's just this one thread that's starting to get out of hand. I'm going to turn off comments there. Or it's just this one picture that I'm worried what people are going to say. So I'm going to turn off comments there. Then you can, of course, remove followers on your private account. And if you're a private account, it that would be the kind of thing that's not a select. We always think of celebrities. We think of Instagram. This is not necessarily a celebrity thing. This is an every person thing, which is I used to like this person following me, but we had a falling out. We broke up whatever. I don't want them following me anymore. You can now kick them out. And then the third one is positive. I can go into a comment and encourage the good comments and say, yes, like, good. Give positive feedback to people. Right. It's it's interesting that Instagram, I think I might have described the like thing wrong earlier, but it's interesting that Instagram is being so nimble on everything because they're adding features. They're copying a snap in many ways, you know, and they're giving additional features to curate and manage your feed. And of course, it's it's easy to come back to a conversation about Twitter and the issue they're having, the issues they're having. You know, I'm more and more convinced of the fact that Twitter should look at some of these more nimble social networks, which are much bigger than they are and maybe take a page from them. I was very anyway, this isn't a conversation about Twitter. Instagram, cool, more options, more ways to manage things. And I think that's that's giving users option is the right way of doing this in this case. Yeah. Now, the TechCrunch article did the same thing you did, which is started to point to Twitter. And I feel like, yeah, Instagram's probably like, Hey, can you just give us credit for a minute before you start trashing our competitors? We're very happy with the trash in our competitors, I suppose. I you know, our Instagram and Twitter even competitors, broadly speaking yes, but they do different things. They have had their battles before. I agree that giving these are all three great features. And would I like more control on Twitter about how my how I can use my account? Sure. You don't have the same exact thing, though, you don't have comments in Twitter that you the way you do an Instagram. And I think that's one of the issues for Twitter is it is not a threaded conversation. And every other social platform is for the most part. So they just haven't quite figured out how to crack that without going into saying giving in and saying, fine, let's let's just make Twitter a threaded conversation based on our replies. So, okay, you went to Twitter, so I'm going to keep going. I don't think that's quite what they I wouldn't say that's what they need. I think it was more on the philosophical level. They're very conservative with the product at Twitter. They change it very little for fear that it will that it will change its nature so much that people won't like it anymore. Costolo was and Dorsey hasn't has said he's not but the actions belie that and now they have an entirely new head of product who came from the outside and doesn't even tweet much. So it's hard to say I think a bigger difficulty isn't that Twitter is more conservative is that I don't think we know what their strategy or their vision is for. Well, no, we can see what they're doing with and what they're not. And for the past, you know, two or three years, the product has remained essentially the same with very little tweaks here and there. When some significant issues have hindered it and they haven't been addressed. So I think in that sense, they're not being nimble enough. So anyway, we could do an entire show about about Twitter, but and we will. I'm sure at some point. I I I think it is one of those. I think it's very easy to say Twitter has problems that they don't own up to. I think it's I think it's unfair to Twitter not to ask what makes it different. What makes it slower and what are the things that maybe a lot of people think need to be fixed that don't need to be fixed because it is a different animal. But like you say that's that's an entirely different conversation. And I don't think asking those questions absolves them of responsibility for things that are happening on their platform. So you were trying to end the discussion here and I'll let you. Will you. But I'll just say that I was very firmly in the camp that Twitter was being conservative in a good way. And now I'm starting to think maybe it not so much. So I'm kind of I was on your side and changing my thinking. Very interesting. An update to the Google app now splits information cards into two columns. Personally relevant cards things like your appointments your travel information will go in the upcoming list on the right while a feed on the left will show things like news weather and sports scores. The new feature comes to Android in the U.S. today with other regions and iOS to follow. And if you're in a phone version of this rather than say a tablet you'll just see the ability to choose which column is going to show up in the phone you'll have you'll have one on the left one on the right. So this is something that will work on any screen and it's a way of trying to make those things that we used to call Google now more useful. I like the change but I don't use the Google app. So I don't have much of a you know my opinion. You never use Google now or never or what is no longer called Google now. No not really you know it's the kind of thing that it's the problem with iOS. I'm mainly an iOS user. And if you have to actually large the app there you go exactly. Yeah no I on my my Pixel C I run into it all the time and it works great and I have used it in other cases as well. So I think it could be useful but it is also and to your point if you don't use it all the time and if you don't use Google products for everything it becomes less useful. But if you do I think this this tweak to the interface is quite nice and makes things more readable because when you just want to see where in your calendar appointment is or your travel schedule you don't want to be seeing the sports scores right then I would think. And you know I do use Google products for almost everything and I use Chrome as my main browser. You should switch to Android is what you're saying. Maybe but what I would also like is for basically the Google app cards to appear on my new Chrome tabs. Why is that not maybe it is possible. You can get those cards to appear in your current. All right. So I'll look it up and do that and I'll enjoy the joy of Google in app card forms form cards. According to the I am my mind broke for a second there I'm sorry. Thus showing to you that I might be a robot from Westworld maybe. According to the UK's Entertainment Retail Association digital music downloads generated 2.1 million pounds of sale of sales last week while vinyl records generated 2.4 million pounds. The ERA suspects vinyl sales have jumped as people buy holiday gifts. And of course streaming services have been steadily catalyzing digital downloads for a while. Keep in mind though that vinyl is also more expensive. So those sales figure translate to 120,000 albums compared to 285,000 digital. And also for the gifts digital downloads are indeed a lot more difficult to gift. You have to gift out the whole computer at the same time. It's not sure. You can buy people digital downloads. You can even gift particular downloads directly to them with a lot of services. But it's not the same. I mean, under the tree. It's just not the same, right? You can't give them a thing. And I think that's why a lot of people might want to give vinyl. A lot of people say they want to give vinyl because they want to support the artist. And in fact, this hilarious thing about this BBC story is they claim that many people who said they buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Like they are really just buying them as objects of art to show around. Ian Morris, one of the hosts of text message podcast, tweeted earlier today, tax on hipsters. Sounds good. Yeah, you know, I could I can absolutely see this. I never really thought of it, but I could buy or gift vinyl, even if no one has a player. It's just the item. It's a symbol of something. And it is a piece of art still. And even if you do, unless you're a gigantic hipster, which some people are or, you know, some sound purist of some sort, you might never listen to it anyway, but having the thing does matter. And of course, I misspoke earlier, if you want to give to digital download of some kind, you you don't give to computer, you give to an iPod. I was silly. Yeah. And it turns out that the way that I used to be able to get Google Now cards in the browser doesn't work anymore. Damn it. So maybe there isn't a way to do that. If you know a way to get that Google Now information in the Chrome browser for desktop, email Patrick or email us feedbackadalytechnicio.com. Yeah, I think this is an interesting tweak that people did not expect. I don't think it means that vinyl records are going to take over digital. What it does mean is that people are using streaming services a lot more and digital downloads are on the decline. That's no big surprise to us. I think it means that people do want some kind of physical object associated with the music they love for whatever reason. Maybe it's for personal, maybe it's for for gifts and vinyl has got a retro cool to it, right? It's got a cool sound. And if you do have a record player, it's nice to put on a record and play a record and isn't that interesting. I think that's the kind of thing that might be a passing fancy. I'm not trying to dis you vinyl lovers. I am one myself. I have a huge, huge shelf of vinyl over there. But I went through the period when it was not cool to have that shelf and suddenly it's cool again. And I think those cycles repeat. But I wonder if this means what and maybe it'll just be a new approach to vinyl. But I wonder if this means we're seeing a need for some kind of physical representation of media and could it be applied to video as well? Could there be a, you know, look at box sets that come with toys and cards and special collectors editions. I think you see that there is an appetite for that. Yeah, I think it would be interesting to have, you know, just like the vinyl is now just a sort of engraving of the media, even if you don't necessarily want to use it to read it or listen to it or whatever, including for video, I often feel like I would like to buy a Blu-ray of some movie I enjoyed, but I would never actually watch it on Blu-ray or very rarely, you know, best case scenario, I rip it from here from the Blu-ray and then never get it out of the of the box again. Also, beef in the chat room is saying Merry Christmas. Here's your present. H4 for HVH. Whoa, whoa, don't give it away that everybody will download it. All right. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show dot Reddit dot com. Let's get to Patrick's wonderful and amazing video game holiday shopping list. These are these are your picks for the year and your recommendations for that certain someone on your list who just loves video games. Yeah, basically, I thought it would be fun to go over some of the best and most celebrated games for the year and try to give people who might not be very, very much into video games, but still interested. Maybe ideas for some titles they might enjoy or their loved ones might enjoy. So well, let's start. What what is the big genre? You know, if you're not sure what genre of game the person on your list plays, what's the the guess that's going to be the most likely to be right? So this year was kind of interesting because there were a lot of first person shooters that came out. And it's not, you know, first person shooters have always been in the background and as one of the main genres, possibly even the most important one, but it seems that this year we had a plethora of very successful first person shooters that were all very different in their own way and and quite excellent all of them. So I had to group four of them in that section and then we'll go over maybe some different kinds of games because not everyone likes these ones. For the first one, I have to to make my usual disclaimer, which I used to work for Blizzard Entertainment for a few years. It's been a while, but I still have this connection to them and a deep seed of love for their products in my heart. Of the two disclosures at this point. That's true. One game that is earning a few game of the year awards and that is has been kind of unavoidable is Overwatch, which the interesting aspect of Overwatch is that it is a multiplayer competitive game only. So there is no single player experience. You have to play against other people if you want to play the game. And it has sort of brought the joy of these kinds of games to people who usually thought, well, maybe the competitive games aren't for me. I really don't. I really like a sort of more isolated narration based experience and many people who have tried that one have succumbed to the weird Blizzard magic that they put in their game and have enjoyed anyway, even if they thought it wasn't for them. A lot of the qualities of the game come from their very vibrant and likeable characters and the work they've done on these different characters that are 20 or 22 of them. So if even if you think that it isn't for you because of the nature of the game, I'd encourage you to at least try it because it's convinced a lot of people that thought they wouldn't like it and they enjoyed very much. OK, but for that Scrooge who doesn't like it, what are the first person shooters you got? Well, if you're kind of an old schooler and you remember games at a time when the internet didn't exist, you probably remember fondly Doom, which was one of the first, not the first, but one of the first first person shooters. It's a venerable game that saw a number of sequels. Well, the third one are you saying we should get someone an old game from the 90s? What I'm saying is there was an updated, not an updated version, a sort of spiritual successor in the 2016 version of Doom, which sort of took everything that was awesome about the first one and made it modern and, you know, up to today's standards, not by making it into a game that had nothing in common with the original Doom, but sort of reimagined. How would we make that original Doom today with all of its speed and visceral energy and silliness and violence? And it is a wonderful success. It is one of the best games of the year, for sure. And I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the first one, you know, the original Doom. It will be a fantastic trip down Mary Lane somehow. And that's not all of the first person shooters you have to recommend. You also have two more. Battlefield One will probably be enjoyed by people who like the more realistic type of shooters. Battlefield One is a usually around World War Two. But in this one, they return, they turn back time to World War One. And again, it's one of those games that has sometimes a little bit of a. You know, it's every year they have one or every couple of years, and it's usually a little bit underwhelming this year. Battlefield One has been, again, acclaimed by critically acclaimed by almost every publication there is. Don't be confused, even though it's called Battlefield One, it's not the first one. No, it sort of references World War One. So if you if you like more realistic things, Battlefield One, on the other end of the spectrum, if you like futuristic things, Titanfall Two might be your thing. Titanfall Two has a very solid I'll bet I'll bet a little bit short of single player campaign. Pretty clever, has some really interesting mechanics. But the overall stick of the game is that you're a future warrior who also who can fight as a single person, but can also enter a giant robot mech that you will then control. And these robots are not, you know, the slow moving things. They're super nimble, super fast. And it has sort of this two layers of gameplay that is really enjoyable. They're Titanic and they fall to the surface. Yes. Well, there's actually there is actually a really exciting, exhilarating moment in the gameplay where you you have a timer and you can actually call your Titan when you're in the battlefield, especially in multiplayer mode. And you actually, as you said, the Titan falls down like from orbit and it falls down to the earth and grabs you and puts you inside it. And then you're into the robot. It's very satisfying. Now, a lot of people suck at first person shooter games and don't like them. I don't know any of those people other than myself. But we've got you've got games for every taste. Now, we're going to have to move through these pretty fast because we've got so many of them. But on the opposite end of first person shooters, lots of people want a mobile game. And this mobile games are hard to gift because there aren't that many that you buy anyway. There are so many that are free to play. But if you were to say, hey, you need something to pass the time over the holidays. If you're bored, what mobile game would you pick? Clash Royale. I've often said that Supercell is one of the very few mobile developers that actually has a actual game developers ethics and they make real gameplay based games. And Clash Royale is multiplayer, but it's very easy, very satisfying. The games are short and fun and it's actually pretty strategic. So Clash Royale, definitely look into that. What about the hipster whose walls are filled with vinyl all in the shrink wrap that they've never played and they only will play indie games? What game would you recommend there? So that one is not on mobile yet, at least. It's called Inside. And it's one of that. So I didn't mean to mention, I didn't mean to mention I'm not going to cover every great game. There are many of them that I'm not going to mention because there are too many this year. You know, it don't come at Patrick if he doesn't mention the game you like, just put it in, you know, the subreddit or in Slack or in chat, let other people know about it. Inside is an indie game with an incredible atmosphere, incredible mood. It's a it's ostensibly a simple puzzle game. It's a short experience. It's about 20 bucks and it's going to last for five or six hours. But the storytelling, the emotion, it grips your heart. And it's so simple. It's a boy that runs to the right constantly. But the artistic direction is that's all that happens in the game. Basically, but the way it's depicted, it shows you the world without a word. It's it's amazing game. Give it a try. There's a demo on PC and consoles inside, inside. Now, OK, we've got cousin Jerry playing Clash Royale out in the corner. We have hipster Shelley playing inside. And now all the kids come into the room. What are you going to have them play? Dragon Quest Builders. So Minecraft is sort of a phenomenon everywhere, even more so in Japan. And it's spawned a number of copies. And Dragon Quest is a universe that is fun, very, you know, it's got the art direction of Akira Toriyama, the design, the guy who made Dragon Ball. And so basically Dragon Quest Builders is Minecraft, but with a guiding story line kind of. So it's a little bit and dragons, but it's a little bit easier to follow and get into for maybe for some of us. So I think it might be a nice alternative to Minecraft if you couldn't quite get, understand why Minecraft was fun. NASCAR Debbie just came into the room. She wants a racing game. What do you tell her? Forza Horizon 3 is I think by everyone in everyone's admission, the best, most accessible, fun racing car game you can find it's on Xbox One and PC. Some of them are available on different platforms. I'm sorry, you will have to go and look it up. But Forza Horizon 3 is the best, fun, open world car racing game you can find. It's a phenomenal success. Now, your friend Tom came in, pushing his glasses up his nose and said, I want a strategy game that's as good as civilization. Well, I will ask Tom, how would you be interested in civilization? Six, it's got a lot of the things that you like from the previous. It's basically what Civ 5 should have been. And I think you've played it. So I'm sure you will be a big fan. And I have been playing civilization six. And it is they just I don't know how they do it, but they fine tune it and make it more compelling every time. Yeah. So some people were hesitant on five. I think six. Again, it's one of those games that we have too many games, too many good games this year. There are sixes in that lock. In fact, we didn't even notice Juanita in the corner because she's so stealth. She must want a stealth game. I wonder how you're going to manage the last two of those. This on or two, you know, if you want another game with amazing artistic direction, this on or is definitely down right down your alley. It's also a game developed by a French team, Arcane Studios and this on or one was wonderful. It came out a couple of years ago and it's got such a peculiar world, such a specific universe that you immerse yourself into and gameplay is top notch. Now, it's a specific kind of gameplay. You want to try and you can go and kill everyone in the city to accomplish your objective. But usually you're going to want to use your special powers to stay hidden and move silently through that amazing city. And the second one, which just came out, is just everything. The first one was but better. So it's it's kind of hard to not recommend it. Actually, even if you don't like stealth games. Now, cousin Jerry and NASCAR Debbie are having a fight over the results of the election. One of them was a big Matteo Renzi fan and they're going to settle the differences with a fighting game. What do you give them? So it came out, I believe. Was it in the beginning of the year? Yeah, I can't even remember. It's Street Fighter five. It came out kind of broken in many ways, except the most important one, which was the mechanics of the one versus one game itself, the multiplayer experience, not the solo experience. And they sort of add a lot to the solo experience as well now. So I think it's a very easy game to recommend now. If you've heard bad things about it when it came out in February, I believe, or March, now it's kind of fixed. It's not recovering sales wise, but it doesn't mean it's not a good game. And it's great for pros, maybe a little bit more than beginners, but still easier to recommend. Finally, at the end of the night, everyone's got some eggnog. Everyone's settled down. Now I'll just want to sit in the couch and watch someone play a really good movie like game. So that one is, again, very easy unchartered for. It's not the best game in the series, but it's still absolutely amazing. Naughty Dog, the studio that develops this, it's a PlayStation exclusive. But it is, you know, when you want to have something that is incredible graphics, incredible actions. I mean, in this game, you do things like you see in the most incredible action movies there are and you feel like you're part of them. It's fun. It's engaging the storytelling. It is incredibly well crafted. Some of the best acting you will ever see actual acting in any game or any movie. Really, it's it's a great experience. And again, a very easy one to recommend. Emily Rose from Haven provides one of the voices. My friend, Rob Krakl, worked on the audio for it. So there's a lot to recommend unchartered for. Well, that's fantastic. Thank you, Patrick, for your wonderful and amazing video game holiday shopping list. We will have that in the show. I know it's a DailyTechNewShow.com. Let's get to our messages of the day. Starting with Amber in threatening to be snowy Portland, Oregon, who says a question regarding the Amazon Go. You heard about this, folks, right? The shopping convenience store that Amazon has opened for now, just for employees that lets you check in with your account and then just walk out with whatever you want and it automatically charges you because it uses vision, recognition and machine learning to track you through the store. Well, Amber says, what happens if you have a kid with you? A five-year-old isn't going to have their own phone to scan on entry and you're not going to leave him outside of the store while you run in real quick for that one thing, just something to ponder. And what Amber is politely not saying is, I think a lot of us have known five-year-olds or bitten five-year-olds who have a little bit of sticky fingers and may have tried to walk out with something before. I think I don't understand why she just dismisses the idea of leaving them outside while you're shopping. I think maybe she loves her children, I don't know. Yeah, this is this is an interesting question. I'm guessing they have a solution for it. Maybe it's able to track children along with you and say, oh, well, those two are part of that account. Or maybe they're just going to trust parents to mind their children and make sure they don't they don't walk out with something. But I wonder what the answer to that is. And maybe that's the thing that they're doing this experiment for is trying to figure out all of these issues. Yeah, for sure. And then we had a comment on the blog said when you and Veronica were talking about the quick checkout at the new Amazon concept store, it reminded me that Sam's Club introduced scan and go last week. Now for purchases less than seven hundred fifty dollars, members can scan all items they put in their carts with the scan and go app and pay using the app. As soon as you pay, a bar code shows on the phone, which you then simply show the person at the door. They scan it on your way out. It's not as freewill as the Apple store. It certainly isn't as seamless as what Amazon's doing. But it is pretty convenient. Yeah, we've had the systems like these in France for, I think, 10 years now. They never took off. I don't know why it didn't really. I think it's not as convenient. What we do have now is is self check out. You know, things like where you check the you scan the bar codes yourself. Yeah, you have to. Yeah, we have those two and you have to, you know, put everything in a special place so it can check the weight and make sure you're doing the right thing and all that. Finally, Steve wrote, I enjoyed the discussion on hearables on the last show. It's a topic I have a lot of interest in. Unfortunately, in many cases, insurance doesn't cover the cost of hearing aids. That's where I see a lot of the excitement around hearables. For the past few years, there have been a product category called Personal Sound Amplification Products. You may see it written as PSAPs or PSAPs, which are essentially augmented hearing devices that can't be marketed for people with hearing loss. Recently, there have been two reports looking to build a bridge between PSAPs and hearing aids, one by PCAST and one by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that recommended new options in this space. In fact, there was a bill just put forward about over-the-counter hearing solutions, which the CTA just supported. I'm looking forward to seeing a variety of new options in this space at CES this year. I could geek out on this topic for a while, but wanted to provide a little background for any of the listeners that are interested in this space. I'm personally excited about what affordable options can be available for people with mild hearing loss. I was actually interested in what kind of solutions these could provide for people with no hearing loss, maybe some kind of hearing superpower. Like, was it Super Jamie that had something like that? The Bionic Woman? Is that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was called Super Jamie in French. Oh, really? The Bionic Woman was Super Jamie? I mean, she was Jamie. Her name was Jamie here, but she was the Bionic. In France, it was Super Jamie. And the Bionic Man was the hundred. There was a price conversion. The six million dollar man was what they. So in French, it was the man who was worth three billion. Because it was in France at the time. And I think it was it was a little bit more expensive. That it should have been. That's so funny. So anyway, the VAT on the six million dollar man. The Bionic Man is going to take a special rate of that for that. But yeah, yeah, it could be cool. Thank you, Steve. And thank you, Patrick, for for your shopping list as well as everything. As always, what do you have to tell folks about this week? Sure, you can go if you know, if you were interested in these gaming things, but didn't quite get enough from this. I had to run through all of them relatively quickly. We cover gaming every couple of weeks in a show that tries to basically be a summary of everything you need to know about the gaming world and gaming industry in an hour and a half or so. And that's available at French spin dot com. It's called pixels. And we always have fun doing it. 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