Author: Trafficblast

Whether a $499 smartphone can qualify as “budget-friendly” is up for debate. But after extensive testing, what’s not up for debate is that the Google Pixel 4a 5G is the absolute best budget smartphone you can find in the price range. A 3,800mAh battery, a better-than-decent camera, a sleek design, and a powerful processor help catapult the Pixel over most of its competitors.

In fact, it’s got most of the same features as the $699 Pixel 5, though they diverge in several small but meaningful ways. It’s not water-resistant, it doesn’t have wireless charging, the battery is a tad smaller, and its display is 0.2 inches larger. It also sports a polycarbonate body, while the Pixel 5’s is aluminum. Despite the weird official naming, the Google Pixel 4a 5G is a totally different – and much better – phone than the Pixel 4a. The 4a is physically smaller, with a smaller battery, a slower processor, and (obviously) doesn’t have access to 5G.

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Google Pixel 4a 5G – Design and Features

It might sound a bit hyperbolic, but the Pixel 4a 5G is one of the best feeling phones I’ve ever held. The size is perfect for my hands. At 2.9 x 0.3 x 6.1 inches (W x D x H), it’s on the larger side – a full half-inch taller than the iPhone 11 Pro. But the Pixel 4a 5G can hide its size behind a weirdly sleek plastic frame, one that makes it feel sturdy, relatively high-quality, and much grippier than something like the aforementioned iPhone.

While that plastic body feels less premium than an iPhone and less sleek than the glossy plastic on other Android phones, I still really enjoyed its feel. A plastic phone comes with a sense of freedom. This isn’t a phone you’ll cover in a case. You’ll drop it, and it will (hopefully) be fine. And despite the polycarbonate body, the craftsmanship in the Pixel 4a 5G is undeniable.

It’s as subtle as could be, with a matte black body with minimal branding  –  just a grey Google “G” on the back. If you prefer a colorful phone, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Like the Model T, it comes in one color: black. On the back, you’ll find a fingerprint scanner and a square camera bump that houses the same 12.2 MP dual-pixel camera and 16MP ultra-wide camera as the Pixel 5. There’s just a single flourish of personality in the design: a white button on the side. (The non-5G version of the 4a comes in a more spritely baby blue color, accompanied by an awkward macaroni-and-cheese orange button).

The front is equally sparse, with a medium bezel and a minuscule hole-punch front-facing camera. (Hilariously, that hole-punch is in precisely the right spot to completely obscure the countdown timers on ads in several freemium games I played.) The top is equipped with the not-quite-dead 3.5mm headphone jack; the bottom, a USB-C port, and stereo speakers (which are recessed in strangely large gaps near the port).

Inside the phone, you’ll find a respectable Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G, 6GBs of RAM, and a 3800 mAh battery that can keep the 6.2” OLED up-and-running for an advertised 48 hours.

Of course, the star of the show is the 5G cellular capabilities, and this is where your mileage will seriously vary.

While 5G will drastically increase your internet bandwidth, it’s anyone’s guess if you’ll even have it. Despite being on AT&T and firmly in the company’s 5G coverage map, I was only able to receive a “5Ge” connection – which is, put simply, marketing fluff that encompasses most of AT&T’s LTE network. Even so, I was able to receive 175mbps down and 58.5mbps upload speeds. That was more than fast enough for Stadia, GamePass, and more, but less than a tenth of what AT&T’s reported theoretical peak of 2Gbps. If I didn’t get a chance to see real 5G in the Bay Area, I suspect 5G is still more scattered than advertised.

Finally, inside the box, there’s a USB-C to USB-C cord and – being this is Google, not Apple – an 18W USB-C charger.

Google Pixel 4a 5G – Performance and Gaming

The Pixel 4a is powered by Qualcomm’s powerful (but not most powerful) processor, the Snapdragon 765G. Not going the flagship route helps keep the Pixel 4a’s price down, but it also prevents the phone from rocking the buttery refresh rates you may have seen on other devices (Pixel 5 included).

Fortunately, the refresh rate limitation was one of the only areas I noticed sub-flagship performance, but I did notice it. Especially after testing the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, an even cheaper phone with the same processor and a 90hz refresh rate. Still, the Pixel was perfectly capable of playing every game I threw at it, from Call of Duty: Mobile to Asphalt 9 to Elder Scrolls: Blades. Surprisingly, the phone never got hot, not even after an hour of graphically-intensive races in Asphalt 9. Even when I was charging the phone simultaneously, it held up admirably.

The phone’s 3800 mAh battery also performed well, only draining 5% in 15 minutes of playtime across games and services. This held no matter which intensive Android games I tried. I also experienced the same 5% drop while streaming Doom Eternal on Stadia.

And on that note, if you can find a reliable 5G connection (or even 5GE), you can stream games almost flawlessly. I tested Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming for literal hours, and my experience was as close to flawless over the network as I’ve ever experienced. (And again, I was on AT&T’s supercharged LTE network, not real-deal 5G.) In fact, for whatever reason, I had more issues over my much-faster WiFi than I did over cellular data. But bill-payers beware: if you have a data cap, streaming will help you find it quickly. In five minutes of Stadia, we’ve burned through more than a gig of data, and an hour spent 10GBs of bandwidth.

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Google Pixel 4a 5G – Camera

The Pixel 4a has the same camera system as the Pixel 5, which includes a 12.2-megapixel main and a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera. Between the two, you can take shots at .6x, 1x, and 2x zoom.

These cameras take sharp photos. Individual strands of hair were clear even when zoomed in. The camera system is perfectly fast, as well. Unfortunately, in many images, the saturation was entirely out of control, casting sunset portraits in an unrealistic orange glow while tinting the grass an almost-alien hue of green.

Meanwhile, the selfie camera couldn’t make my quarantine hair look good, but did take decent photos, especially when utilizing the face-smoothing portrait mode. In low-light, the portrait mode substantially reduced noise but smoothed my face enough to make me look almost like a videogame character.

To test Night Sight, Google’s low-light feature, I took a variety of photos in varying degrees of gloom, including some too dark situations. That kind of lighting is never going to yield tack-sharp images, but I was extremely impressed with the results, nonetheless. You have to hold the Pixel steady while your sensor lets more light in, but Google seems better at compensating for movement than Apple. Several of the photos I took looked almost entirely lit if a bit soft.

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Google Pixel 4a 5G – Purchasing Guide

The Google Pixel 4a 5G is available for $499 at Amazon, Best Buy, and direct from Google.

Netflix has announced that Shadow and Bone, a new original series, will premiere globally on the streamer in April 2021.

Based on Leigh Bardugo’s worldwide bestselling Grishaverse novels, the series will explore a world that is cleaved in two by a massive barrier of perpetual darkness, where unnatural creatures feast on human flesh, and a young soldier uncovers a power that might finally unite her country, though it may take more than magic to survive, as dangerous forces start to plot against her.

Jessie Mei Li will star as Alina Starkov, the central protagonist, alongside Archie Renaux as Malyen Oretsev, Freddy Carter as Kaz Brekker, Amita Suman as Inej, Kit Young as Jesper Fahey, and Ben Barnes who will portray General Kirigan in the upcoming series, which is coming from Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment, together with Eric Heisserer, Leigh Bardugo, Pouya Shahbazian, and Lee Toland Krieger.

You and I are going to change the world. Shadow and Bone is coming April 2021, only on Netflix. pic.twitter.com/5Z8cONCdJD

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) December 17, 2020

The eight-episode series will combine the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology, both of which exist in the same universe, but take place across different timelines, meaning that fans of the fantasy book series’ will be able to witness the two stories come together to form a new cohesive narrative, with “certain characters meeting certain other characters” from the two different timelines.

“We’ve taken the stories of Shadow and Bone and the characters of Six of Crows and we’ve brought them together in what I think will be a really unexpected way,” Bardugo said of the upcoming Shadow and Bone series. “Eric [Heisserer] and our writers’ room and our directors have built something entirely new that still somehow stays true to the characters and to the heart of the stories.

“Eric took two fantasy series — with powers and creatures and horrors and heists — and molded them into this cohesive, incredible thing. I don’t think I could’ve been more lucky in the person that we found to hand the keys over to. It wasn’t just the keys to a book or one series, it was a whole world I had been working on for the better part of my career.”

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Bardugo, the bestselling author of the two fantasy book series’ on which the Netflix series is based, also explained why she thinks the show will appeal to both longtime fans of the books as well as brand new viewers, saying that audiences are going to “encounter a world that feels fully realized” yet unlike “any place they’ve been before.”

“When I was on set, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in that world longer,” she said. “When you start an endeavor like this, you don’t know what’s going to happen. To have your expectations surpassed, to see magic on top of magic, and to see things come to life in a way that is bigger and more beautiful than you ever could have hoped, it’s impossible to fathom.”

Over the years, Netflix has garnered a reputation for spending enormous amounts of money to secure original streaming content for its platform in a bid to stay ahead of its competitors in the increasingly crowded streaming landscape. In fact, it was projected earlier this year that Netflix would be spending $17.3 billion on new content for 2020, up from $15.3 billion last year.

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For more on Netflix’s entertainment offerings, check out everything that is new to the platform this month.

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

The fifth anniversary of Kojima Productions had very little to say about its future this week, but the studio isn’t done with its debut game Death Stranding just yet.

Death Stranding has crossed over with other games in the past, such as a promotional Half-Life: Alyx campaign that added a Headcrab and the Gravity Glove to Hideo Kojima’s postal-apocalypse game, but the next PC-exclusive collaboration will see it team up with Cyberpunk 2077 for a free and large content update.

Death Stranding will receive six new missions that feature characters and lore from Cyberpunk 2077 and a new hacking ability that allows players to stop MULE sensor poles from activating, stun enemy machines, and short circuit enemy vehicles.

There’ll also be a few themed cosmetic items, such as a Reverse Trike vehicle with improved jumping power, a silver hand gauntlet modeled after Johnny Silverhand’s robotic arm, and new holograms including a SAMURAI symbol signboard or an Atlas Trauma Team vehicle hologram. All that, and Silverhand’s iconic sunglasses.

The Cyberpunk 2077 crossover isn’t too surprising, as Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima has a cameo in the CD Projekt Red game. Death Stranding also happens to be 50% off right now on Steam, if you feel like taking a plunge into Kojima’s mad hiking odyssey. Alternatively, the Cyberpunk 2077 content will also be available in the Epic Games Store version of Death Stranding.

Yesterday, it was something of a whirlwind for both Devotion studio Red Candle Games and GOG owner CD Projekt. First, Red Candle Games announced that Devotion–previously un-released on Steam because of controversies regarding a certain Chinese politician–would finally come back via GOG, but it only took a few hours before GOG reversed that decision. However, Red Candle Games isn’t giving up.

In a post on Twitter, Red Candle Games acknowledged GOG’s decision to not release the game and said it was “willing to understand and respect it,” but it also said it would not be giving up yet. There’s certainly not a drought of online game platforms in 2020, with Epic Games Store seeming like the most obvious choice after trying both Steam and GOG. However, the Chinese conglomerate Tencent does also own a piece of Epic Games.

CD Projekt’s decision to pull the game before it launched was odd given how quickly it seemed to have happened. The company said it received “many messages from gamers” regarding Devotion, resulting in its removal, but given the political controversy surrounding its original removal from Steam, there may be more to it. There is little divisive about the game other than one piece of art, and when the game was first announced to release on GOG, reactions were almost universally positive.

Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt’s other main source of stress right now, with a rough launch, even on PC, that has reportedly resulted in studio executives losing up to $1 billion in stock. After initially suggesting those on consoles request refunds from Microsoft and Sony, developer CD Projekt Red said it didn’t have a special system in place to make this happen and even stopped recommending PS4 players request refunds. The game will be coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S with native versions, likely in 2021.

Nintendo’s most recent Indie World showcase was a big one, and while we were busy watching it, an exciting new game dropped on the system. Dicey Dungeons, the latest game from VVVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanaugh, is now available on the Nintendo Switch.

In Dicey Dungeons, players choose from numerous playable dice characters, all of which have unique abilities. As you move between the nodes of each level, you’ll come up against various enemies. Combat is based on dice rolls, with Yahtzee-like rules: you can play a rolled number on a corresponding attack, or you can re-roll dice several times to try and get numbers that better suit your abilities. As you go, you can power up and re-spec your dice, and if you die you need to start over.

The game costs $15 on Switch, with a 10% discount currently active for launch.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a bug in the game right now that does not let you increase animation speed again after decreasing it–this will be patched, but there’s also a workaround available for the problem right now.

Dicey Dungeons received a 7/10 in GameSpot’s review. “Dicey Dungeons is a charming and often rewarding game, as long as you learn to accept that sometimes the dice won’t roll your way,” the review states.

Call of Duty: Warzone is never gonna let you down. New songs, including Rick Astley’s classic Never Gonna Give You Up, have been added to the game as vehicle tracks.

One of the most exciting things you can do in Warzone is hop in a vehicle and soar through Verdansk while blasting the horn. Players can customize what sound they make when they honk their car horns–those options now include the infamous rickrolling song. They better hope that someone isn’t hiding on a nearby rooftop with an RPG.

If you don’t know what it means to get Rickrolled, this link should be a good explainer.

Flight of the Valkyries had been one of the more popular songs to hear blasting from trucks and humvees as you explore Verdansk, but Never Gonna Give You Up may take the throne once players have had time to use it in-game. Other songs included in the 80’s Hits vehicle tracks include I Ran by Flock of Seagulls and Shout by Tears For Fears.

The new tracks were added as a part of Warzone’s newest update that integrates the battle royale with Black Ops Cold War. A ton of new content was added, including a number of issues that Treyarch, Activision, and Raven Software need to iron out. A new, smaller map called Rebirth Island was also included. Full patch notes for the update can be found right here.

Bravely Default II has received a second–and final–demo, allowing players interested in the RPG sequel to check it out ahead of the Switch title’s 2021 release. The demo is available now on the Eshop through the game’s store page.

The Bravely Default II final demo features the game’s four main characters some way into their adventure, meaning that many of the systems introduced early in the game are available to demo players from the start. Jobs and Abilities can be used and swapped, for instance.

Players who download the demo ahead of the game’s launch will also be able to nab 100 My Nintendo Platinum Points, which can be redeemed for rewards through the My Nintendo portal.

The demo weighs in at 3.3GB. The game releases on February 26, 2021, and is available to preorder now.

Bravely Default II is, somewhat confusingly, the third game in the Bravely series. The original Bravely Default on 3DS was followed by a direct sequel, Bravely Second. This Switch game has a new cast of characters and setting, though.

Developer Spry Fox has announced Cozy Grove, a new game set on a haunted island that’s giving off some serious Animal Crossing vibes. But whether or not this game has taken inspiration from Nintendo’s massive series, Cozy Grove’s big difference is that the island is swarming with ghosts.

The game, which is coming to Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in the first half of 2021, casts players as a “Spirit Scout”. It’s up to them to seek out the ghosts of the island and help them, building up a camp and crafting new materials as you go.

You’ll also be able to go fishing, as the trailer below shows.

Spry Grove’s earlier games include Road Not Taken and the Alphabear series.

The game’s website promises that all the spirits you meet with have unique storylines, and that the game will last for 40+ hours if you really take your time getting to know everyone.

There is, of course, one ghost in Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Wisp, who appears at night sometimes and rewards you for gathering up his spirit. It looks like the quests offered by Cozy Grove’s ghosts will be more extensive, though.

Big Pixel Studios, the developer behind the popular Rick & Morty mobile RPG spin-off Pocket Mortys, is shutting down. The studio, which was bought by Adult Swim in mid-2018 after making the Pokemon-like adventure, will be shuttered at the end of 2020, leaving is employees out of work.

According to a report from Gamesindustry.biz, around 40 people are affected by this closure.

Developer Laurie James announced the news on Twitter, saying that the team’s next game won’t be released. “Some hella good people here, who made something proper cool,” he said. “Unfortunately you’ll never get to play it, because capitalism.”

In a statement to Gamesindustry.biz, an Adult Swim spokesperson said that this decision was made “as part of WarnerMedia’s larger transformation,” and that the games based on their IP “will continue to be a priority” going forward.

Pocket Mortys has continued to receive updates, but it’s unclear if this will remain the case going forward.