I’ve been space trucking since I was a teenager and discovered Elite 2: Frontier and Frontier: First Encounters. Later, it was Freelancer. Somewhere along the line, I lost the love of moving freight through the vacuous unknown. That was, until Star Trucker.

Often, the actual delivery portion of any given space game is optional. There’s usually piracy, combat, maybe mining. There are lots of ways to make a buck in the endless expanse of the universe. Star Trucker, on the other hand, is entirely about trucking through the stars. It’s more than just pressing the pedal down; but all its additional features are in service of your delivery.

Star Trucker (PC [Reviewed], Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Monster and Monster
Publisher: Raw Fury
Released: September 3, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

Star Trucker starts you off broken down at the side of the, er, road. One of the very first things you do is put on a space suit and eject from your cab to patch holes in your truck. More than anything, the biggest challenge you’ll face in the cold expanses of the universe is maintaining your vehicle.

One thing that Star Trucker is not is Euro Truck Simulator 2. While it can be relaxing, you won’t find any room for meditation, as controlling your vehicle isn’t as simple as turning on cruise control and keeping it between the lines (though, there is cruise control if you want it). It leans to strike a balance between realism and fun, which means the physics take into account the zero-G environment. You have to ensure there is air in your cab and that the interior isn’t being overwhelmed by the temperature of the exterior.

Most of the functions of your truck are tied to a battery or UCC. You have to change out the batteries when they deplete and swap out the UCCs when they fry. On top of that, there are air filters that need to be routinely changed. Also, you need to make sure your gas tank is topped up, and the hull isn’t full of holes. It can get stressful, and I bring this up early because I want you to know what Star Trucker is, because it may not be what you’re expecting.

The money you make from the freight you run is probably going to go right back into your truck. Batteries are expensive, and air filters are ridiculous. You won’t be able to just take dangerous jobs, show off your mad skills, amass a pile of wealth, and pile your cab full of supplies. It’s almost unavoidable you’ll always be struggling to keep the gravity on. At least on the recommended difficulty setting.

This is going to be a sticking point for a lot of folks and is likely, to some degree, a balancing issue. While I prefer it when a game keeps you under pressure for its runtime, it could get annoying. Air filters will become the bane of your existence because they cost about as much as a mid-complexity, long-range drive. That’s if you can get them.

Prices on all goods fluctuate as a way of enabling you to run additional commodities and make money on the side. This also affects batteries and air filters. Sometimes, you’ll limp your way into a market and find that air filters are priced up 25% and out of your budget. That’s if you can find them at all, because they’re sometimes just not in stock. In my experience, it’s when you need them most that they’re out of stock.

I had moments where I was swapping in and out of my space suit to make the most of the remaining oxygen-generating power of my life support system. Other times, I had to choose between replacing the gravity core or oxygen. As I mentioned, I prefer it when a game never loses its effectiveness in keeping me under pressure, but it was starting to get frustrating.

Another advantage to its miserly manipulation of commodities is the way it forces you to become intimate with your truck’s functions. You can, for example, shut off the lights inside your cab to preserve power. You can reduce the heat in systems with reasonable temperatures in order to further reduce consumption. Had penny-pinching not been a necessity, I may never have played with the dials on the dashboard.

On the other hand, beyond keeping your truck in running order, there are upgrades and cosmetic options you can buy. However, the cosmetics are so expensive I never bought a single one. And I can’t imagine why. They go up past $10,000. And none are better than the other, so the price range is a real head-scratcher. I never bought a cosmetic. Painting your truck is cheaper and has a more visible effect, so why would I spend good air filter money on a hood ornament?

The upgrades also don’t seem to make a whole lot of measurable difference. Your fuel gauge will predict how many KM (or miles, if you’re into that sort of thing) you’ll get out of your tank, but I noted that I could get 93km on a full tank, and when I upgrade the fuel efficiency, I could get… 93km. I don’t know if that’s an accurate measurement – it’s hard to gauge the distance you’ve traveled in space – but you’d think I’d be able to see the difference.

There’s a main questline to go through, which is a neat addition. There’s a selection of truckers who all want your help and will provide you with upgrades as you proceed. There’s actually a decent amount of diversity in the missions. One has you rip a reactor out of a space colony before it goes critical. Another has you picking up discarded cargo. The story isn’t anything I’d consider special, but it’s more than I would expect from a game about space freight.

My only issue with the story missions is that, while they’re necessary for progression, they don’t provide any monetary reward. You have to take a break from trying to scrape together air filter funds to actually take part of the main quest, because they won’t pay you. You do eventually get items that are necessary to progress further in the game, but these feel like milestones, not rewards. It leaves normal story missions feeling thankless. Screw these other truckers, they can’t even spare an air filter?

I also want to note that all hauling is done through little nodes. You can cruise to a jump gate and then jump through to the next node, complete with an extravagant little hyperdrive process. Some of the areas have suggested highways that you can take for safety purposes. You can go “off-road” if you want, but there are often debris fields. You can avoid the little pieces of space junk with some careful driving, but it’s likely to slow you down. Cleverly, it’s a bit like actual off-road driving.

I know that this is all sounding negative, but I actually really enjoyed Star Trucker. While I ran into some bugs, and maybe the balance isn’t entirely where it should be, I think the team at Monster and Monster did a good job of taking a big, detailed concept and fitting it into a game without much bloat.

Despite that – or maybe because of it – I do have things I wish were included in the game. For example, while the game’s philosophy seems to involve playing as a person instead of just a truck, your person doesn’t have any needs. You don’t have to sleep, despite there being a bed in the cab, and it would have been really useful for passing time on deliveries that needed to be within a specific timeframe. I also would have loved to walk around in space stations and enjoy a delicious space burger in a space diner, but I understand that space dining is a much more massive time investment than it sounds.

I also wish there was more to repair work than just swapping out batteries and air filters. Fixing fuel leaks or replacing the space brakes. I kind of get the feeling that something like that may have been in the design document but they ran out of time to implement it, but that’s just speculation.

As it stands, I thought Star Trucker was a good time. Not an ideal time, and I don’t think it will be everyone’s cup of Space Joe, but I think it does what it sets out to do. The creators had a vision they wanted to achieve, and I think they hit near enough to the mark to call it a success. As long as you know what you’re getting into, it’s a worthwhile experience. It might occasionally grind your gears, but it’s a breath of fresh air with the right filters.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

Apple has pulled back the curtain on its new generation of smart devices: the iPhone 16, Apple Watch Series 10, and updated AirPods.

In a sprawling keynote presentation today, the tech giant unveiled a full suite of new products that will go on sale later this month. These new products will further both their innovation in the smart products market and their commitment to going fully carbon neutral by the end of the decade, while also enhancing users’ health, creativity, and day-to-day tasks. They’ll also incorporate Apple Intelligence after launch, the company’s new machine learning initiative.

Here’s everything Apple unveiled about the iPhone 16 product family, and more:

iPhone 16

As the first iPhone designed from the ground up to work with Apple Intelligence, the iPhone 16 aspires to supercharge your experience.

Its new A18 chip powers machine learning features as small as prioritizing your notifications to systemwide Writing Tools for proofwriting and summarizing text in most apps. Intelligence can also help generate “Memory Movies” from your captures, or generate bespoke new emoji (called “Genmoji”) from your prompts.

Siri will benefit from the enhanced capability as well, with richer language recognition. For instance, if someone recommends a new album to you by text, you can ask Siri to play it on the spot. Intelligence will roll out as a free software update, with the first features available next month in US English; Canadian-localized English will follow in December.

The iPhone 16’s bigger feature is its revised camera and its built-in key. Pressing the tactile Camera Control button can launch the app quickly, or operate the shutter to take a photo or start recording, while the button can also be used like a slider to control certain options, like zoom or depth of field. Later this year it will also work with Intelligence for functions like quickly identifying dog breeds or adding events from a flyer to the calendar.

This generation’s camera system is “like having four lenses in your pocket,” featuring a new 48MP Fusion Camera with two optical-quality lenses in one—a 2x optical-quality Telephoto, and a 12MP UItra Wide. The latter enables macro photography like never before, with autofocus to boot.

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Also enhancing the iPhone 16 experience is its Photographic Styles, which can help users express their creativity and customize photos. These styles surpass filters by applying adjustments to specific colours of a specific style, instead of plastering everything with the same changes. Like many recent iOS camera additions, these styles can be applied or removed after a photo is taken, and now even rendered in live preview.

And, for Apple Vision Pro users, the iPhone 16 can now capture video in Spatial Audio, a feature previously restricted to the iPhone 15 Pro or higher. However, this also has wider applications in Audio Mix, a new sound-isolating feature that can reduce interference from things like high winds.

Some of the gaming functionality enjoyed now on higher iPhone models will make its way down the line to the regular iPhone 16. The A18 chip features an upgraded 16-core Neural Engine, a 6-core CPU, and a 5-core GPU for vast improvements across the board, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The 16 and 16 Plus can handle the AAA games that that 15 Pro was keeping for itself, such as Tencent’s Honor of Kings: World (which will receive an ultra graphics mode in an update next year).

With expanded power comes battery concerns, but Apple has addressed them with advanced power management and a revamped internal design that also promises better heat dissipation. Holding it all together is a latest-generation Ceramic Shield casing that’s 50% tougher than the first generation. The display comes in either 6.1-inch or 6.7-inch, featuring a Super Retina XDR display with OLED technology and the return of the Dynamic Island.

The iPhone 16 starts at $1129 CAD and the iPhone 16 Plus debuts at $1279; both come in five colour options, with either 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage, and will be available September 20.

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iPhone 16 Pro

Incorporating the same features as its little brother, the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max have plenty of new tricks up their own sleeves, powered by the A18 Pro chip.

This chip has been designed for industry-leading computing power with a unique architecture. It features a 16-core Neural Engine, 6-core GPU, and 6-core CPU—amounting to a 17% increase in system memory bandwidth and a 15% increase to processing, while using 20% less power.

On these higher models, Intelligence will be able to respond to verbal requests for photo manipulation, pulling up specified images and applying edits in Darkroom. Siri can offer guidance on edits as well, such as how to adjust background blur.

Apple’s keynote focused on the iPhone 16 Pro’s benefits in audio-visual creation—in fact, the smartphone was used to film and edit The Weeknd’s new music video, as shown in today’s presentation. Musicians can also record something like a guitar riff in Voice Memos, then sing over their own recording, and layer the two tracks seamlessly in-app.

The Pro camera suite is capable of 4K120 recording for incredible slow motion, while Apple’s industry-leading colour grading can be applied frame-by-frame, even after the moment has been recorded.

These top-tier models feature the iPhone’s largest screens and thinnest borders yet; the iPhone 16 Pro measures in at 6.3-inch, and the Pro Max at 6.9-inch.

With four titanium colour schemes and four storage sizes (128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB) to choose from, the iPhone 16 Pro starts at $1449 CAD, and the Pro Max at $1749 CAD. Like its little siblings, both will be available on September 20.

Apple Watch Series 10

The Apple Watch Series 10 will offer the smartwatch titan’s largest display yet. Offering 30% more surface area than the Series 6—enough for an extra line of text—the newest model has more rounded corners and the company’s first-ever wide-angle OLED display that’s 40% brighter from an angle. The goal is to make the Apple Watch more readable at a glance than ever before.

Despite the bigger screen area, the Apple Watch Series 10 is also the company’s thinnest to date. It’s 9.7mm thick, 10% thinner than Series 7, 8, and 9. This has been achieved with further miniaturization advances and a highly sophisticated production method, integrating the antenna into the device’s housing. The incorporated speaker system will not be compromised in the process, though—in fact, it will be able to play media like music or podcasts.

With the new OLED’s power efficiency, a faster refresh rate is possible in always-on mode. This means it can update once a second instead of once a minute, and second hands will animate even when the watch isn’t raised (on select watch faces, like the sleek new Flux model, which fills the screen with colour as the seconds tick by).

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Speaking of power efficiency, the new smartwatch will have incredible charging times: possible of 80% charging within 30 minutes.

The new generation device is swimproof, with a 50-metre water resistance rating, and supports Custom Workouts for swimming. The depth gauge measures down to 6 metres and detects the water temperature when submerged. If you’re headed to the coast for some snorkeling or surfing, the new Tides app can see tidal forecasts for coastlines around the world.

Like the iPhone 16, the new Apple Watch will rely on Intelligence features with a new Apple Silicon S10 chip. This will enable better onboard performance from features like the Translate app or the Smart Stack, a redesigned Photos face, automatic workout detection, and Crash or Fall Detection.

With the Apple Watch Series 10, sleep tracking will now also detect another possible health problem: sleep apnea. Tracking possible Breathing Disturbances like this over time can help with diagnosing this condition, which affects over a billion people worldwide. This functionality will roll out to Series 9 devices as well.

Its new Polished Titanium theme weighs 20% less than the stainless steel Series 9 model, with a mirror-like shine.

Also on sale September 20, the Apple Watch Series 10 will start at $549 CAD and is available for preorder now. watchOS 11 will roll out for Series 6 devices and up starting September 16.

Apple Watch Ultra 2

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 will be available in a new black titanium finish (and a matching Milanese Loop band) alongside the iPhone 16 family on September 20. This new finish doesn’t only look sleek, it features extreme scratch resistance. Meanwhile innovations in the WatchOS 11’s Workout app will help it retain its position as the top smartwatch for sports.

New training load insights will help guide users on when to push or recover during workouts. Swimmers can benefit from automatic stroke detection and interval guidance, while runners and cyclists can make custom routes.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 starts at $1099 CAD and will be available September 20.

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AirPods 4

Apple is updating their line of headphones, perhaps the most popular in the world, to introduce the world’s first end-to-end hearing health experience.

The new AirPods 4 have an updated open-ear design, setting a new bar for fit and comfort that takes users’ unique ear geometry into account. Their acoustic architecture has been updated to get better highs and lows out of your new iPhone 16.

Spatial audio and voice isolation features are being updated to make your everyday use even more intuitive. Siri can now recognize if you nod or shake your head in response to her prompts, for discretion. Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) will power features like the Transparency mode, which can help users stay aware of their environment, or Adaptive Audio, which blends the two modes based on your situation—while Conversation Awareness can detect when you’re talking and lower your media volume temporarily.

The revised case has USB-C and the smallest design in the lineup yet, while still offering 30 hours of battery life. The AirPods Max line will also get USB-C charging capabilities, alongside five new colours.

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AirPods Pro 2 users will be on the forefront of Apple’s hearing health initiatives. This line’s ear tips help provide passive noise reduction, and the Hearing Protection mode is on by default. Apple is offering a Hearing Test feature with AirPods Pro and compatible iPhones or iPads, using a standard clinical approach to provide users a summary and a personalized hearing profile.

Further, AirPods Pro will offer Hearing Aid capability, suitable for people experiencing mild to moderate hearing loss, integrating the personalized test results and making the earbuds into a clinical-grade hearing aid. A user’s profile will automatically be applied to media they use with the device, and offers dynamic adjustments to keep them engaged in their surroundings.

Apple’s AirPods 4 start at $179 CAD, or the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation for $249 CAD; both are available for preorder now ahead of their September 20 release, alongside the iPhone 16 and Apple Watch Series 10. The updated AirPod Max colours launch the same day for $779 CAD.

Meanwhile the AirPods Pro 2 are available now, starting at $329 CAD; their Hearing Aid features “are expected to receive marketing authorization from global health authorities soon, and will be available this fall.”

Gold is an essential currency that you need in Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions to unlock brooms, characters, and a lot more items.

Unlike Winged Keys, earning Gold is not that hard in Quidditch Champions. There are multiple ways to get this common currency in-game and requires you to complete certain challenges.

How to earn Gold fast in Quidditch Champions

There are three ways to get Gold fast in Quidditch Champions:

• Increase Career levels to get fame
• Complete Career Challenges
• Progress through seasonal rewards

Progressing through Career levels increases fame and gets you several rewards out of which Gold is one. Each time you level up, you get 50 Gold which is not a lot but gives a steady flow of this currency simply by playing the game and without involving completing challenges.

Completing Career Challenges is a great way to earn Gold in the game. You can earn a maximum of 750 Gold from them, and unlike Daily and Weekly ones, the Career Challenges are permanent. This means you can play and complete them anytime you feel like. Also, Daily and Weekly Challenges don’t reward you with Gold.

The Season 0 track brims with rewards and grants you a total of 500 Gold when you level up to 50. Here’s the breakdown:

• Level 3: 50 Gold
• Level 12: 50 Gold
• Level 24: 100 Gold
• Level 35: 100 Gold
• Level 41: 200 Gold

While these are the free ways to earn Gold, purchasing the Deluxe Edition of the game will give you an additional 2,000 Gold along with four House Packs.

How to use Gold in Quidditch Champions

After collecting Gold, you can purchase different characters such as Hermione Granger and the Weasley Twins (Fred and George), brooms, headwear, emotes, victory celebrations, wands, and broom trails from the Market.

Hermione Granger and the Weasley Twins appear in bundles where you get these characters and their wands. The Hermione bundle costs 1,650 Gold while the Weasley Twins bundle costs 1,150 Gold.

So, if you are a fan of these characters, getting more Gold makes more sense as this is the only way of getting them in-game, at least at the time of writing in Season 0.