Cord-cutters might already know about Plex, a media server that lets you stream your videos to a variety of devices. Between now and November 27, you can get a 25% discount on a lifetime Plex Pass, bringing it down to $89.99. To get it, visit the site and click the Go Premium button. Then enter promo code SURVIVETHESEASON at checkout.
See the Deal – $89.99 with promo code SURVIVETHESEASON (was $119.99)
Plex Pass Features
The free version of Plex offers a lot of functionality on its own, including letting you stream your digital media (movies, music, photos, etc.) to any device with a Plex app. That includes phones, tablets, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X, and Series S.
The premium Plex Pass is mostly geared towards people who want more flexibility with their local over-the-air broadcast TV. With a Plex Pass, antenna, and tuner, you can record any local channel in your area to watch back later. It works exactly like a DVR, so you can set recording schedules and pause, fast-forward, and rewind whatever you record, be it sports, news, primetime TV, or Jeopardy (rest well, Trebek).
You can also watch live broadcast TV from any device with a Plex app, including your phone, tablet, laptop, etc. That gives you a lot of flexibility, since watching broadcast TV typically requires, you know, a TV.
A handful of other features are also included with Plex Pass, including automatic camera upload to your Plex Media Server, early access to new Plex features, timed lyrics when listening to compatible songs, photo albums, and more.
Plex Pass typically costs $4.99 for a month, $39.99 for a year, or $119.99 for a lifetime pass. This deal brings the lifetime pass down 25%, which is a pretty sweet deal for anyone looking for an OTA DVR solution.
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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
Nintendo is discontinuing online services for the original Super Mario Maker on Wii U, the company has announced. Players will no longer be able to upload courses in the game or access the Super Mario Maker Bookmark website as of March 31, 2021.
Ahead of these features’ shutdown, Nintendo is delisting Super Mario Maker from the Wii U eShop. You will no longer be able to purchase a digital copy of the game through the system’s storefront as of January 12, 2021.
Although players will no longer be able to share new courses in the game next year, Nintendo says they will still be able to play courses that were previously uploaded. Anyone who has already purchased the game digitally on the system will also be able to redownload it even after it is delisted from the eShop.
The original Super Mario Maker was first released for Wii U in 2015. The game was later ported to 3DS the following year, although that version notably lacked the ability to share courses online. A sequel, Super Mario Maker 2, released for Nintendo Switch in 2019. Nintendo clarifies that Mario Maker 2 will not be impacted by the aforementioned shutdown.
Although Nintendo is sunsetting the original Mario Maker, you can pick up its sequel at a good price this week if you haven’t already. Super Mario Maker 2 is one of many first-party Switch games getting a nice discount at various retailers as part of their Black Friday 2020 sales.
The body composition of two, tiny, bat-like dinosaurs made them more likely to be fallers than fliers, to paraphrase Littlefoot. Yi qi and Ambopteryx longibrachium used their wings to glide – just not all that successfully, according to a new study in the journal iScience.
Dr. T. Alexander Dececchi, a paleontologist at Mount Marty University, and the other researchers utilized a technique called laser-stimulated fluorescence on the remains of a Yi to get information about soft tissue and bone configurations. They used the details to reconstruct how the dinosaur’s membrane and its supporting styliform bone may have looked and functioned. For the Ambopteryx, the team applied the results to create a similar model. Then they tried to figure out if these two types of dinosaurs were fliers, gliders, or neither.
Mathematical models let Dececchi and the others plug in different sizes for the dinosaurs’ weight and wingspan, as well as try various wing shapes and muscle configuration. Based on their findings, they conclude that neither species was likely able to take off from the ground. While they have plausible ranges of body and wing size for gliding, they were probably pretty mediocre at it.
Compared to other animals that glide with the greatest of ease, the dinosaurs would need to be faster and leap from higher points to stay in flight. That makes it harder to land safely.
“If you’re going to be flying fast into a tree, it increases the chance you’re going to hurt yourself when you crash,” Dececchi told Popular Science. That inelegance, paired with legs not well-suited for running, could’ve contributed to these dinosaurs’ downfall, as better fliers, like Archaeopteryx, started competing for resources.
If Yi and Ambopteryx hadn’t gone extinct, they may have evolved to become better fliers. Pterosaurs started off clumsy but improved over millions of years. That’s according to a new study, published in Nature, from the University of Reading. Dr. Chris Venditti and the team used fossil remains of pterosaurs and metabolic rates of birds to estimate how far the reptiles could fly or glide before needing to stop.
Pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs, but they did overlap with some of them. The winged lizards — what many of us grew up calling pterodactyls — are a group of around 200 known species. They started flying millions of years before birds and bats. Their membranous wings are more similar to bats and Yi and Ambopteryx than they are to birds.
Around 230 million years ago, the pterosaurs resembled the bat-like dinosaurs Yi and Ambopteryx. “They may have been climbing up trees and flying from one trunk to another, but not flying very long distances and not very agile in their flight,” Venditti told The Guardian.
With no other competitors in the sky, however, pterosaurs had time to work on these issues, and “pterosaur flight efficiency improved by 50% over the period from 230 million years ago to their extinction 66 million years ago,” according to Michael J. Benton, a professor of vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Bristol, who worked on the study.
The two studies together each shed light on the evolution of flight, even if the pterosaurs ended up more successful for longer than the flying dinosaurs.
“I think people assume that flying magically bursts onto the scene, but there’s a big energetic hill to overcome in order to fly,” said Venditti of the pterosaurs.
Even as animals did gain the ability to fly, not all of them were as successful and there’s not necessarily a straight line you can draw between one extinct species and today’s birds. Professor Hans Larsson of McGill University’s Redpath Museum, who worked on the study of Yi and Ambopteryx, told the CBC that paleontologists are confident that birds are modern dinosaurs. “What this new study brings in, though, is that it’s not a clearcut, single trajectory going into birds,” he said.
Sony has revealed the free games PlayStation Plus members will get in December, and they include an explosion-filled AAA open-world game along with a competitive shooter and a strategy game. Your bases are certainly covered next month, and if you didn’t have a chance to grab Bugsnax on PS5, you haven’t missed your chance yet. A year-long membership to PlayStation Plus is only $33 right now, as well, which is nearly half-off its standard price. The games below will be available beginning December 1, and November’s games are still available now.
Just Cause 4 is the latest open-world action-adventure game from Avalanche Studios, plunging longtime hero Rico into a South American country often subjected to horrible storms and even tornadoes. As with the series’ previous games, you can destroy nearly anything and create some truly mind-bending situations via your gadgets.
Also free is Rocket Arena, a 3-on-3 competitive shooter that features several different heroes and an emphasis on dodging and precision shooting. The game received little fanfare when it released earlier this year, but critic Alessandro Barbosa found some fun with its rocket jumps and different abilities in our Rocket Arena review.
The last new free game for December is Worms Rumble, which hasn’t even officially released yet. The latest game in the classic strategy series, it’s also the first game to feature real-time combat. Up to 32 players can battle it out online, and the game even supports cross-play multiplayer if your friends are on other platforms.
There’s clearly a lot to explore throughout Cyberpunk 2077’s vision of the dystopian Night City, but much like its shiny towers and skyscrapers, CD Projekt Red’s new sci-fi adventure has some deep foundations.
With more than 30 years of lore behind it, there’s a lot to catch up on -whether you’re a total newcomer to the Cyberpunk Universe or a tabletop veteran looking for a refresh. Here’s a (relatively) brief history of the Cyberpunk world before 2077.
Even though 2077 is set 50 years from now, the Cyberpunk universe really gets its start in the late 1980s – this is where the world’s timeline starts to deviate from our own.
Coming out of the Reagan administration, the world starts unraveling as the US government as it was known falls to a secret coup by the heads of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the DEA. Colloquially known as The Gang of Four, this shadow government went full-bore on the whole “profits over people” thing, which would ultimately lead to a complete collapse of the United States as we know it.
The soon-to-be-former superpower becomes almost immediately bogged down by an alleged “War on Drugs and Communism” in South America that was little more than a thinly-veiled resource grab at Chile and Bolivia’s lithium reserves. What the Gang doesn’t tell the public is that they also engineered and released plagues to kill off the cocaine and opium production of worldwide cartels – something the European megacorps secretly sponsoring the cartels doesn’t take too kindly too. This becomes a continuously-escalating conflict across the western hemisphere culminating with a Colombian cartel setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan in 1993.
The next year, the world experiences a full-scale economic meltdown after it was revealed the US had been manipulating the global markets to launder money earned in illegal arms sales. By the late ‘90s, this one-two punch of war and recession – along with several epidemics and natural disasters, including a 10.5ML earthquake that sent more than 30% of Los Angeles into the Pacific Ocean – had left the country in shambles. One in four people are homeless and most cities have been abandoned, leading to the rise of mobile communes known as Nomads – as well as the augment-addicted boostergangs. Several states, like California and Texas, secede to become “Free States” as the Constitution is suspended and Martial Law is declared nationwide.
The rest of the world fares a little better through the end of the 20th century, though not necessarily by much. Several Asian/Pacific nations – particularly China, Korea, and Japan – remain fairly stable along with the European Union (known as “Unified Europe” in-fiction), resulting in the Eurodollar (€$ or “eddie”) emerging as the ranking global currency. South America recovers from the US’s failed imperialist takeover, though the Russian government becomes openly kleptocratic, disease and food shortages crop up all over the planet, and most of the Middle East is turned into a glassy radioactive wasteland by a small-scale nuclear war.
Of course, nobody cleans up better in the wake of global disasters than multinational corporations. With governments large and small on the verge of collapse, many were left with no one to turn to for aid aside from the megacorps, who were all too happy to help in return for even more power and influence. By the early 2000s, corporations were operating at the scale of first-world nations, with just as much (if not more) control over the world’s governments and resources. The heaviest hitters were the energy conglomerate PetroChem and their Soviet counterpart SovOil, bio-engineering firm BioTechnica, arms manufacturer MiliTech and, of course, the “it only does everything but mostly private military contracting” grandaddy megacorp, Arasaka – though there were plenty of smaller fish in the sea as well.
That’s not to say the millennial era was all bad. The central African nations unite and develop a highly successful space program, establishing far and away the most spaceports and strongest hold on earth-orbit territory (though that is after some violent conflicts with other space stations and the lunar colonies). A new, more efficient renewable fuel source called CHOOH² is developed (that’s not a chemical formula, just something BioTechnica’s marketing team thought sounded good) and effectively replaces gasoline within a few years, and while the staggering amount of wounded vets returning to the US from the South American wars of the early 90s was tragic, it catapulted technological innovations in prosthetics and biomechanical integration to new heights, resulting in the development of cyberware that becomes so ubiquitous throughout the 2010s and ‘20s.
However, along with cyberware naturally came cyberwarfare, and cybercrime, and plenty of other morally ambiguous uses for such revolutionary technology. In a world where kibble has become a mainstream food product, it’s no wonder that so many took to life on the fringes of society, whether it’s to feed themselves or whatever their vice of choice may be. Life on the edge soon became mainstream, a default life many simply fell into. These cybered-up hellraisers for hire – whether street kids or corporate wannabes – eventually became known as Edgerunners or, more commonly, cyberpunks.
Throughout all this, Night City emerged as one of the few cities able to survive the collapse and the turmoil that followed, even though it saw its share of troubles, too. Originally founded as Coronado City in 1994 – and subsequently renamed after its architect Richard Night was assassinated in a power grab by either the megacorps or the mafia (it’s still unknown which) – the city didn’t see any sort of real stability until the early 2010s. After years of open war in the streets between corporate security forces and the mob, the organized crime syndicates finally called it quits. While it was still a dangerous place, and some of its districts – like the half-developed Pacifica – never fully recovered, it began to feel more like a city and less like a warzone… or a few years, at least.
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WARNING
This is where we get into more serious spoiler territory, so if you wanna go into 2077 totally green, you’d best turn back now.
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2013: The Soulkiller
In 2013, unironically-named rockstar and cyberpunk Johnny Silverhand – a veteran of the Central American wars of the 90s who opted to replace the arm he lost with a chrome-plated one – is leaving a gig with his girlfriend Alt when they’re jumped by a corporate hit squad. They leave Johnny for dead and kidnap Alt, dragging her back to Arasaka HQ. As it turns out, the megacorp isn’t particularly satisfied with being one of (if not the) biggest multinational corporation in history; its founder Saburo Arasaka and his son, the CEO Kei, have their sights set on, well, basically world domination. And what Johnny didn’t know about his new flame is that Alt was a really extraordinary Netrunner – a hacker – who had designed a legendary bit of malware known as Soulkiller.
It was originally built to transfer a person’s consciousness into a cloned body, but the program had been weaponized – not just as a means to fry a target’s brain, but as a way to imprison and torture souls digitally. It was both one of the most vile and heinous innovations of the modern era, and also the key to immortality – though Arasaka had kidnapped Alt to focus on the former rather than the latter.
Meanwhile, Silverhand survives and gets together a rescue team, setting up an impromptu show outside Arasaka and inciting the gathered crowd into a riot as a means of getting inside. At the same time, Alt reprograms and jumps inside Soulkiller to make her own escape, but the two plans collide in the worst way possible:
Johnny and his crew blast their way into Arasaka, inadvertently cutting off Alt’s retreat back to the real world when they destroy a command console and sever the bridge back to meatspace. Thinking her dead, they make their escape, leaving a disembodied Alt trapped floating in cyberspace.
2021: The Fourth Corporate War
As the name implies, there’d been three previous wars between competing megacorps prior to the 2020s – when a company operates with the GDP and military strength of a small country, the fight over market dominance is bound to get ugly – but these were all petty squabbles compared to the Fourth Corporate War.
It started innocently enough – at least, as innocently as it could when factoring assassination into corporate espionage – as a competitive hostile takeover by rival oceanic shipping firms in 2021. However, as things escalated each side hired one of the two biggest PMCs – Arasaka and MiliTech – who’d been itching for an excuse to duke it out for years themselves.
Before too long, the war had ravaged the planet and pushed most countries to their breaking points. Almost all trans-global shipping had been shut down, the orbital colonies had declared independence to avoid of the conflict – by way of hurling multi-ton rocks at earth from orbit – and the entire Net was wiped out when Arasaka’s assassination of renowned hacker Rache Bartmoss released a virus that infected nearly 80% of the network, crippling corporate and governmental entities alike.
2023: The Fall of Night City
Night City ended up being ground zero for the end of the war. As a free city in a free state, both MiliTech and Arasaka had strongholds in the city, and without a national government to hold them accountable the city was a hotbed of continuous fighting between the two. Finally, in August of 2023, it all came to a head when a small-scale nuclear device went off at Arasaka’s headquarters in the city center.
The specifics of what actually happened in the hours leading up to what would become known as the Night City Holocaust are hazy – and by hazy I mean there’s a chance that 2077 retcons what happened in the tabletop adventures… but we’re going to assume those books are mostly gospel, especially since the original creators partnered with CDPR and just released a new one. There was never an official ruling on who triggered the bomb – the two leading theories are that MiliTech got overly bloodthirsty or that Arasaka nuked their own HQ to protect their corporate secrets, but – as you might expect – the real story is nowhere near that simple.
The “real” Arasaka complex actually had two towers joined by skybridges, but you get the idea.
Even though the US government didn’t formally nationalize MiliTech after the Night City bomb, in reality, the feds joined forces with the PMC just beforehand. Apparently, Arasaka had managed to lock down the Alt’s digital consciousness and used her to build a new version of the Soulkiller – something neither MiliTech or Uncle Sam could really let slide. A unified command assembled a black ops team headed by the legendary mercenary Morgan Blackhand consisting of another merc named Rogue, a journalist by the name of Thompson (who still writes for The Night City Inquirer in 2077), a netrunner codenamed Spider, and – you guessed it – Johnny Silverhand, who was all too eager to both avenge Alt and attempt another rescue mission. The objectives were simple enough: get in, rescue Alt, eliminate the Soulkiller and drop a tactical nuke in the basement to destroy Arasaka’s corporate databases.
Of course, this being Cyberpunk, nothing goes according to plan. Despite getting in and making it to the Soulkiller lab relatively unscathed, everything goes to hell when Arasaka’s favorite cybergoon Adam Smasher shows up and pumps a bunch of lead into Johnny Silverhand. Spider tries to download his brain using some sort of data slug given to her by Alt – we assume this is the biochip that V eventually steals in 2077 – but fails to back up his consciousness as her equipment is destroyed in the firefight. The team manages to burn out Soulkiller, but can’t save Alt from (once again) remaining trapped in the collapsing data net.
By the time the bomb goes off, it’s unclear who beyond Thompson, Rogue, and Spider are left standing – though we get a good look at Adam Smasher alive functioning and well in 2077 – though Kei Arasaka (Saburo’s favored son and CEO of the company) is allegedly killed as well. It’s also still unclear who was actually responsible for the bomb going off before it reached the basement.
The blast itself wasn’t big enough to destroy the city, but thousands were killed as the Arasaka towers and most of the city center was destroyed, and the filled bay it was all built on flooded a bunch of the inner city. In the aftermath, the MiliTech-backed US government stepped in with a force Arasaka effectively couldn’t match, and the Japanese government soon convinced the PMC to cease operations. Finally, under threat of nuclear retaliation against their Tokyo HQ, Arasaka was effectively banished from conducting any business in North America.
2024 – 2070: Reconstruction and Reunification
Much like iconic eras of the 20th century such as “The Summer of Love” or “The Great Depression,” the years immediately following the fourth corporate war are remembered as “The Time of the Red” due to a mix of debris and radioactive fallout circulating through the atmosphere turning the sky a violent shade of red that didn’t fully dissipate for nearly a decade.
The Fourth Corporate War had shattered nearly every cultural norm that had come to prominence since the 1980s. The global balance of power shifts away from corporations and back to national governments, with laws being put in place to demand at least some semblance of accountability in the face of any corporate malfeasance. Ultimately this just means that they have to be more discreet about their illegal operations, but it loosens the vice grip many corporate entities once had over most of the world’s population.
With much of its industrial and commercial infrastructure destroyed or crippled, the world experienced something of a technological recession. As countries focused on rebuilding, the production and development of cyberware wouldn’t reach the levels it was at in 2020 for nearly 30 years. This may have been quicker if the Net were still around to share information, but after Bartmoss’s DataKrash it was so overloaded with rogue AIs and self-aware viruses that it was effectively written off as a digital wasteland. As the Net was eventually rebuilt via a series of local, national, and/or corporate hubs – though nowhere near as ubiquitous as it had been – the cybersecurity agency Netwatch developed The Blackwall – a digital barrier cordoning off the remnants of the Old Net from the new.
Amid all this, Night City – along with several others that had been abandoned during or after The Collapse – rebuilt itself, thanks mostly to Nomad supply chains and corporate philanthropy (aiding in reconstruction efforts was the best option for the old megacorps to regain the trust they’d lost in the wars). The “New United States” – which was really just the east coast and some inland states, with most of the central and western territories remaining independent from the government in Washington, D.C., which – failed to provide any meaningful aid, instead trying to leverage offers of assistance against the free states’ hesitancy to rejoin the union.
This “Reunification” effort by the NUSA government eventually escalated as what remained of the former superpower declared war on the independent territories in 2069. Night City found itself wedged in the middle as Southern California rejoined the States and the northern Free State refused – though managed to avoid being drawn into the fight thanks to the help of an unlikely ally: Arasaka.
The security giant had been covertly assisting many of the Free States’ resistance, but when its private military became directly involved it instantly made the Feds back down – they knew they couldn’t afford a large-scale conflict or risk another global crisis. In 2070, a treaty between the remaining free states and the NUSA was signed, and Night City was designated an “international free city,” exempt from the laws of both the New US Government and the Free State of NorCal – to the immense delight of megacorps everywhere, not least of all Arasaka, who wasted no time setting up their new American HQ right on top of the ruins of the old one.
And that pretty much brings you up to speed. The monitors may have changed from CRT to LCD, but Night City is once again a good old-fashioned hive of corporate greed and violent crime. Sure there are still plenty of questions left unanswered, like exactly who grabbed up Johnny’s digital consciousness when the towers fell, and what happened to Arasaka’s real area-denial nuke – because they definitely had one down there – or, at the very least, has kibble released any new flavors in the last 50 years?
Paramount Pictures has revealed a first look at the live-action/CG adaptation of Clifford the Big Red Dog, which is scheduled to open in theaters on November 5, 2021.
The official Clifford movie Twitter account let the big, red dog off his leash on Wednesday, as they posted a teaser for the “live-action” movie adaptation of Norman Bridwell’s Scholastic book series. The short video pans a line-up of different dogs until it finally reaches the titular red-furred canine, who towers high above the other pint-sized pooches. Check out the official teaser below:
“This holiday season, we’re thankful for the pets whose love got us through the year,” the voiceover says before teasing the movie’s heart-warming adventure. “But next year, get ready to love even bigger.”
In the movie, middle-schooler Emily Elizabeth (Darby Camp) meets a magical animal rescuer (John Cleese) who gifts her a little, red puppy, she never anticipated waking up to find a giant ten-foot hound in her small New York City apartment. While her single mom (Sienna Guillory) is away on business, Emily and her fun but impulsive uncle Casey (Jack Whitehall) set out on an adventure in the Big Apple.
Clifford the Big Red Dog is being directed by Walt Becker from a script written by Jay Scherick, David Ronn, and Blaise Hemingway. Becker’s previous credits include Wild Hogs, Old Dogs, and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, which was the fourth installment in that live-action/CG franchise. The movie grossed $234 million worldwide against a $90 million budget despite generally negative reviews.
Over the years, live-action/CG hybrid adaptations have become increasingly popular, though they have been executed to varying degrees of success. Famously, Sonic the Hedgehog was redesigned following fan backlash amid the release of the movie’s original poster and trailer. That decision ultimately paid off, as the Blue Blur ended up winning the box office race against man’s best CGI friend in Call of the Wild.
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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.
Comcast is planning to introduce a new data cap on Xfinity Internet plans starting next year in northeastern states that previously did not have a cap. After the move is implemented, customers will be billed an extra fee for every 50GB above the cap they use in a given month.
Cord Cutters News reports that the changes will apply in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, and West Virginia. Those states did not have a data cap before, due to their area competition with Verizon Fios. The cap will be set at 1.2TB, and the policy will begin on January 1, 2021.
During January and February, the company will give credit for any overage charges to help get customers accustomed to the new cap. After that point, customers will be charged $10 for additional 50GB blocks, up to a total of $100.
Comcast has said that only about 5% of its customers use this amount of data. It offered some stats about how much that data equates to–500 hours of HD video and 34,000 hours of online games–but that doesn’t take into account the sometimes large download sizes of current video games and patches. If you download lots of games in a given month, you may need to watch your cap more closely.
Comcast has responded to criticism through its social media with a tweet saying the new changes are “based on a principle of fairness.”
Hey Paul. This data plan is based on a principle of fairness. Those who use more Internet data, pay more. And those who use less Internet data, pay less.
Hey Comcast, of the “5%” of customers this will affect – how many of them are already paying for higher speed internet? I know I am paying a premium for speed so why do I need to pay even more for the data? What’s the point of increased speed if my data is capped?
If you want to operate like a public utility, you need to be regulated like one.
It’s not about fairness, it’s about greed, plain & simple. Your own CEO has even commented about your infrastructure being more than capable of handling large amounts of traffic.
Clifford The Big Red Dog has delighted young readers for decades in his famous book series, but now Clifford and Emily Elizabeth will be jumping to the big screen next year. The movie’s first teaser premiered today that shows Clifford in all his ten-foot tall glory.
The movie adaptation will follow the story of Emily Elizabeth (played by actress Darby Camp from Big Little Lies) and how she came into adopting Clifford. The film will also star John Cleese, comedian Jack Whitehall, and Sienna Guillory.
Since it’s a year away, there’s not a lot of the movie shown in the teaser itself. It’s unknown at present time if he’ll have a human voice or of some kind; in the original PBS animated program, Clifford was voiced by late comic actor John Ritter.
Directed by Walt Becker (Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip), Clifford The Big Red Dog hits theaters on November 5, 2021.
Razer is upgrading its wired Xbox controller for next-gen. The Wolverine V2, an update of the 2017 Wolverine TE, goes well beyond adding the new Xbox Series X controller’s signature share button. It has a new look, a new shape, and an updated version of the tactile switches that give its buttons a unique, clicky feel. It’s still wired, aiming to minimize lag or missed inputs you might encounter via a wireless connection. It also drops one of its key features, a pair of rear paddles, and costs slightly less as a result. (The Wolverine V2 is $99.99, vs $119.99 for the Wolverine TE). Though it isn’t quite as feature-rich as it once was, the Wolverine V2 feels like a step forward for the design.
The Wolverine V2 is a stylish controller. The sides of the face are highlighted with Razer green piping. (Maybe it’s Xbox green? Take your pick, I guess). The handles are coated with thick, noticeably-textured rubberized grips. Like other Xbox gamepads, it looks somewhat squat, thanks to its long face and shorter handles, but the positions of the view and menu buttons, flared up on either side of the Xbox button, create more negative space on the face, which make the controller look bigger and bulkier.
Then again, at 6.31 x 4.5 x 2.25 inches (WDH), it is both wider and longer than the standard Xbox Series X gamepad. Despite being bigger, the Wolverine V2 is actually just a bit lighter than the Series X controller: Just 275 grams versus the Xbox gamepad’s 287 grams. For ergonomics’ sake, a wider controller is generally a good thing, assuming the buttons are all well-placed – you pull your arms together less, which reduces long-term strain on your shoulders and back.
In general, the Wolverine V2 feels comfortable to use for long stretches. It features what Razer calls an “L-shaped” grip, where the handles slant backward to fit comfortably in your hands. The grip, which was updated for the V2, guides the controller into a hand position where your thumbs can reach the analog sticks and your pointer fingers can reach all six of the top buttons without overextending.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about the extra buttons on the Wolverine V2. There are 21 buttons on the controller. (That includes the D-Pad, but not the directional functions of the analog sticks). That’s three more than the standard Series X/S gamepad. On the front, just below the share button, is an identically shaped button with a circle on it, which allows you to shift the game/chat audio mix. On top, there are two programmable “multi-function” buttons – M1 and M2 for short – which sit next to the left and right trigger, respectively. As the name suggests, you can set these to replace most of the buttons on the controller, in case you’d rather tap them with your pointer instead of your thumb.
This is technically a step back from the Wolverine TE, which had four “M” buttons; the same ones on the V2, plus two rear paddles on the back of the controller. Given how well the controller fits in-hand, I don’t really miss the paddles. Then again, I generally use them to supplement my controls, so I tend to think of them as extra buttons, rather than an ergonomic replacement for the face buttons: To those players, it may feel like a bigger loss.
Many of the standard buttons come with upgrades as well. The face buttons and D-Pad feature Razer’s “mecha-tactile” buttons, which function similarly to the mechanical switches they put in their keyboards. The mechanical switches give the buttons a pleasant click, which you can both hear and feel when you tap them. According to Razer, the mechanical buttons also actuate earlier than standard controller buttons. I can’t say that a quicker action has improved my game, but I really appreciate how each press feels.
On the back, there are a pair of trigger stop switches, which dramatically reduce the travel of the trigger, making it easier to tap and release them very quickly. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the locks: I prefer the longer, more comfortable trigger press. The shorter one feels, ironically, like pulling a locked door. Even though the input goes through, it feels like my finger’s stopped short. That said, competitive players will appreciate the ability to tap quickly with less uptime.
Lastly, we should talk about the Wolverine V2’s most polarizing feature, the cord. It’s a three-meter rubber cable with a break-away connector near the USB end. The cable was long enough for me to reach from a TV to my couch across the room without any hassle. That said, it’s worth noting that the Series X/S’ proprietary wireless connection added “Dynamic Latency Input,” which reduces lag and missed inputs. Though I haven’t noticed a significant change in my first few weeks with the Series X, it may make the wired connection here less of a necessity for competitive play.
Razer Wolverine V2 – Software
The Wolverine V2 has a limited capacity for customization on console and gaming PC, which you can access through the Razer Controller Setup for Xbox app. Through the app, you can customize four buttons – M1 and M2, the two added “multi-function” buttons, as well as the “view” and “menu” buttons. You can swap these to replicate most of the other inputs on the controller, but not every one.
You can also set a “sensitivity clutch,” which you can hold to temporarily shift the sensitivity of one or both analog sticks to enable quicker or more sensitive controls. Think of it as a controller-friendly version of the DPI-shifting “sniper” button on many gaming mice, including Razer’s own Basilisk line.
Even though the clutch is a nice extra touch for competitive players, the customization feels limited. Without the ability to change the full range of inputs, there’s only so much you can really do. The customization isn’t really “remapping,” but letting you choose between using the clutch and offloading a couple of inputs from the controller’s face to the top. For a console controller, any amount of customization is a boon but, given that Razer took the time to make an app, there’s certainly room for a wider range of options.
Razer Wolverine V2 – Gaming
The Wolverine V2’s comfortable and clicky buttons make for a really comfortable gaming experience. I didn’t develop any cramping or hand fatigue through several multi-hour sessions. I played through the entire Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War campaign in two sessions, about three hours apiece. The Wolverine V2 allowed for the snappy, precise shooting I aim for when playing Call of Duty from start to finish.
As with previous Wolverine gamepads, the mechanical buttons and d-pad are the signature feature. In Mortal Kombat 11, having a tactile click in the d-pad lets you know when you hit a direction, which is crucial for quickly knocking out specials, combos, and finishers. Across the board, it improves any game that relies on the face buttons, especially ones like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, which sometimes require quick, rapid tapping.
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