Author: seo

Over 18 months after the release of the first Mac powered by the M1 chip, Microsoft has released a version of Microsoft Teams that is optimized for Apple Silicon. While the Apple Silicon version of Microsoft Teams is not publicly available to Teams users yet, you can download it via the company’s website.

Microsoft has not publicly announced this version of Teams for macOS, but the file was discovered on the company’s website this week. When you download and install the app, you can see that Teams is now a “Universal” app. This means it is optimized for Macs with both Intel and Apple Silicon.

As a refresher, Macs powered by Apple Silicon can run three different types of applications:

• iPhone and iPad apps on the Mac through the Mac App Store
• Apps that run through Rosetta 2 translation, which allows users to run apps made for Intel Macs on Apple Silicon, with apps sometimes performing better in Rosetta with M1 than they did with Intel, Apple says
• Universal apps are apps built for Apple Silicon and Intel processors and are downloadable from the Mac App Store or from the web.

Up until this week, Microsoft Teams for macOS would run as an Intel application on Apple Silicon Macs, using Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation technology. The lack of an Apple Silicon version of Teams has led to a number of complaints from Teams users over the last year and a half.

This version of Teams appears to be a beta, which means it is not necessarily perfectly stable and could come with bugs and performance issues. Nonetheless, it should bring noticeable improvements to performance on Apple Silicon machines.

Microsoft releases new public preview versions of its applications on a weekly basis. The next version is expected to be officially released tomorrow, April 26.

If you’re a Microsoft Teams user with an Apple Silicon Mac, you can download this beta version of the app from Microsoft’s website.

Last year, Apple announced a handful of changes coming to the App Store in response to a class-action lawsuit from US developers. In addition, the company had unveiled a Small Developer Assistance Fund, which would pay out between $250 to $30,000 to developers making under $1 million per year in the App Store. Now, this assistance submission request for small developers is due by May 20.

The news was announced on Apple’s Developer page. Here’s what the company wrote:

Last year, Apple announced a $100 million fund to assist US small developers. Eligible developers have until May 20, 2022 to submit a request to an independent administrator to receive payment

The fund is open to all developers based in the United States who:

• Sold paid apps or in-app purchases (including subscriptions) through the App Store between June 4, 2015 and April 26, 2021; and
• Earned proceeds equal to or less than $1 million through the US storefront in each calendar year in which they had a developer account between 2015 to 2021.

Here’s what the company said when it announced the Small Developer Assistance Fund in August:

The Small Developer Assistance Fund created as part of the settlement will benefit over 99% of U.S. iOS developers, whose proceeds from app and in-app digital product sales through all associated accounts were less than $1 million per calendar year during the period from June 4, 2015 to Apr. 26, 2021. These developers can claim sums from the fund ranging between minimums of $250 to $30,000, based on their historic participation in the App Store ecosystem.

You can learn more about how to submit a request here.

Pokémon Go’s May 2022 Community Day will feature Alolan Geodude, developer Niantic announced Monday, giving fans of the Alolan form Rock Pokémon their own day to shine. Alolan Geodude Community Day will take place on Saturday, May 21, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time. Niantic shortened the Community Day window in April, from six hours to three, with Mudkip’s classic event.

Alolan Geodude Community Day will offer the following bonuses:

• Alolan Golem with the Fast Attack Rollout can be learned when evolving an Alolan Graveler
• 3× catch Stardust, 2× catch Candy, 3-hour Lure Module duration, and 3-hour Incense duration
• 2× chance to get Geodude Candy XL from catching Alolan Geodude
• One extra Special Trade during the event, or up to two hours afterward
• 50% less Stardust required for trades made during the event, or up to two hours afterward

Expect Alolan Geodude to appear shiny at boosted rates. Niantic will also sell a Community Day-exclusive Special Research story, “A Rocky Road,” which costs $1. New to May’s Community Day is the option for players to gift that Special Research story ticket to a friend.

Alolan Geodude is the third Alola-region Pokémon to be featured in a Pokémon Go Community Day as part of the game’s current Season of Alola. Stufful, the Flailing Pokémon, was featured in this past weekend’s Community Day for April. Strangely, unlike February’s Community Day featuring Sandshrew, it appears Niantic is only featuring the Alolan form of the Rock Pokémon. The original Geodude form from Kanto has not been featured in a Community Day to date.

Diablo Immortal is coming to PC, Blizzard announced early Monday morning. Alongside the announcement, the studio revealed a host of changes for the PC version, such as controller support, UI scaling, and cross-progression. But it also revealed why the PC edition of Diablo Immortal exists: to combat emulation.

In a blog post, Blizzard speaks a bit about going back and forth on wanting Diablo Immortal on PC at all. “On one hand, we felt that we wouldn’t be doing the title justice by releasing a game originally designed for mobile on PC,” Blizzard said, “on the other hand, we wanted to make sure the game reached as many players as possible—especially our most dedicated PC fans.” But, Blizzard explained, “the deciding factor was that we knew many of you would attempt to play this game through an emulator, thus leading us towards building a better experience.”

Not only should this lead to a more curated experience — with UI and controls specifically tailored for PC — but players won’t need to circumvent the studio just to get their pre-Diablo 4 fix. It’s a Blizzard that clearly learned from the fan-made “Classic” World of Warcraft servers of many years ago, which led it to create World of Warcraft: Classic internally.

Blizzard’s candid answer about emulation is a far cry from the oft-memed “Do you guys not have phones?” from Immortal’s 2018 reveal. And with the studio’s extended apology at the start of its reveal stream for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight last week, we’re trending toward a more open Blizzard than we’ve seen in some time.

Until players get their hands on Diablo Immortal (especially the new PC beta), it’s impossible to say how Diablo’s latest title will land with hardcore fans. But if 2018’s Diablo Immortal BlizzCon announcement was the height of Blizzard hubris, Monday’s announcement may give players faith that — at least in terms of game development — that Blizzard is listening again.

“Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day,” would sing The Mamas & The Papas – if you are able to check lyrics for songs using Apple Music. Some are experiencing downtime for Apple Music. Not only that, the App Store is also facing an outage this Monday, as 9to5Mac reported earlier today that privacy labels are now missing from apps.

According to Apple System Status page, there are currently two issues on its products. All users are being affected by a problem with the App Store. 9to5Mac was able to confirm two of them: the app crashing and/or without showing privacy labels for apps, while the other issue is with Apple Music.

Apple has acknowledged these issues since 8:41 a.m. PDT, although 9to5Mac readers have had an unreliable experience with Apple Music and the App Store from even earlier.

Some users can’t access Apple Music, share or download songs, and even share lyrics, as you can see in the screenshot below.

For the App Store, it seems Apple is already working on a fix, as you can read more about it here.

Last time Apple faced a big outage was last month, when up to 26 services were down. 9to5Mac will update this story once Apple fixes these issues.

Are you experiencing downtime with Apple Music and the App Store? Share your thoughts down in the comments section.

I was an hour into Dune when Spice Wars , came out. It made me nostalgic for old Westwood Dune games. The bright jewel tones and awkward vibes were a funny translation of [*******************************************************************************************************************************************************] David Lynch’s original Dune. The original Dune‘s vibrant jewel tones and awkward vibes made for an amusing translation of the 1984 David Lynch film adaptation. Dune II is widely considered the godfather of modern real-time strategy games, but it was also delightfully weird, and had a banging score by Frank Klepacki. 2001’s Emperor: Battle for Dune had great cutscenes starring Michael Dorn and Mike McShane, which elevated its delightfully gawky UI and visuals into a memorable part of early full-motion video game history.

These games didn’t really dig deep into the real-world ugliness of Dune, because playing up the franchise’s weirdness, especially using the idiosyncrasies of old-school graphics, helped to soften Arrakis into a fantastical escape. Spice Wars — at least in its current early access state — breaks away from this stylish legacy to make an uncomplicated 4X real-time strategy game with uneven results.

Generally speaking, Dune is a psychotic space parable full of god-worms, interstellar drugs, and neo-feudal brutality. Paul Atreides is the most well-known character. He rises as a mesianic icon to become a ruler and then creates eons upon eons in tyranny. While many (including myself) consider Dune a cherished part of their youth, it doesn’t mean Herbert’s work is immune to a higher standard of criticism. For starters, Dune is often used as a lazy validation of alt-right viewpoints, sort of like fascists’ love of Warhammer 40k. With its story set around a coveted exotic resource — the spice melange, which powers interstellar travel — the Dune world seems a natural fit for a resource-mining game. But it also means replicating the same tedious structures and systems that define 4X games, driving the imperative to literally explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

There’s also a whole lot of orientalism inherent in Dune. Critic Roxana Hadadi pointed out that the latest film’s Fremen have been flattened into generic brown people, divorced from their roots in MENA and Islamic culture. “Dune has always been about more than just the desert, but Villeneuve’s Part One can’t see past the sand,” she wrote for Vulture. Spice Wars seems to take a similarly flat approach, though it wouldn’t be a better solution to put brown people (as opposed to mostly white developers) in charge of pigeonholing themselves into a predetermined setting. Dune’s science fiction novel is important, but it ultimately tells the story of a white man about his feelings on what was most important: ecological issues, religion, and oil fifdoms. MENA and Muslim writers have other stories to tell beyond this western framework. Dune is a complex story with a lot to offer. It’s not surprising that the narrative of Dune was rewritten in an unironic colonial genre. A 4X Dune game in 2022 that follows a rote formula just isn’t that exciting, especially when it doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

Spice Wars‘ main factions are House Atreides, House Harkonnen, the Smugglers, and the Fremen. Many other Dune games included a narrative or concept that characterized your actions as serving the Empire. Spice Wars is straight to business. You can either start growing spice or you will die. Every so often you’re presented with Landsraad business — the congress of Great Houses where House Atreides, ostensibly the house of velvet-gloved “diplomacy,” thrives. The idea is to amass as much Hegemony as possible — 30,000 is the standard mark — while paying the Imperial spice tax, voting on strategic resolutions, and fending off your neighbors.

4X games have fixed win conditions — for instance, Civilization games have scientific, cultural, diplomatic, and military victories that depend on the methods you use to hit certain criteria. Civ players who don’t want to fight can use insidious forms of cultural imperialism (music, art, and so on) to get a culture victory. There don’t seem to be direct parallels to these types of scenarios in Spice Wars, but it does have an espionage system that could potentially lead to a win. (I didn’t have the chance to find out.) It feels a little undercooked right now — each agent can have special traits (like “Psychologist”) but these didn’t seem to have a major effect. The difficulty of different spy operations, such as resource theft or weakening enemies units did not seem to have an impact. There are other win conditions than the Hegemony victory or the complete map being taken over. You can also hire nomadic water vendors to help spread propaganda, though that will still reward you with Hegemony.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

For my first foray into Arrakis, I chose the Smugglers, led by Esmar Tuek. The voice acting for some of the units is comically jarring — I recognized the desire to emulate the breathy tones of the Dune II voiceover lady, but my thopter pilot’s slight slurring just doesn’t work. The Smugglers’ abilities skew towards subterfuge and black market manipulation, and I ended up ditching them in search of a more immediately gratifying approach. Esmar Tuek, who has always been somewhat in line with the Atreides but offers little friction against them, is not someone that I would have chosen to lead a major faction. The Fremen and their tanksy Fedaykin units were my favorite, and I enjoyed a more predictable experience with them than with the Atreides. There was lots of Harkonnen aggression as well as many more village rebellions that the Fremen.

Again, this is minor, but the voice acting, and small grammatical missteps (“Fremens” and “stuffs”), are all over the place, including some real out-of-pocket written dialogue where Baron Harkonnen talks about seeing your troops “roaming before [his] yard.” Ornithopter autopiloting also flatlines after a certain point — you have to repeatedly nudge them to investigate points of interest, and they don’t seem to act when new ones spawn over time. It would be possible to make the informational trade windows more legible (particularly since other factions have trade proposals on a strict timer). The UI also doesn’t display key currency or resource numbers. If you don’t monitor units or villages and keep an eye on process wheels, it can be difficult to track “days”. (The time bar is set to the Dune AG calendar year system — “After Guild” — which is unintuitively difficult to read.) Although the game is still in its early access phase, there are many things that could be fixed.

Right now, Spice Wars offers no real narrative dressing tackling why you’re on Arrakis in the first place — possibly because it assumes you’re coming in hot from the films, or books, and don’t need exposition. Perhaps Shiro Games plans to add a contextual intro movie or the like, to set the tone for the campaigns (even Dune II’s intro had a few seconds of the Emperor to establish the imperial mandate). It won’t immediately be obvious to laypeople why the Empire is crushing down on the planet. The game just starts.

It is also puzzling how the Fremen, an indigenous people with no canonical interest or knowledge of space politics, must appease their oppressors by using the same language as their colonizers and adopting the same acquisitive attitude that has taken over their planet. It is difficult to imagine playing with Fremen, as it means you have to work within the same colonial designs systems that House Atreides or House Harkonnen. This includes having the burden of paying Imperial taxes, and even voting in Landsraad in limited capacities. It’s not immersion at all, it is a fundamental misinterpretation of the Fremen’s existence.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

Dune is an infinite well of eccentricities, and every new project set in its universe has the exciting potential to get weird with the source material. Spice Wars leaves out all the creative possibilities to discover the most compelling aspects of the Dune universe. For every rote portrayal of an ambitious Great House which seeks spice and glory, we’re deprived of something new — perhaps a rogue branch of the Bene Gesserit, or an end-game scenario where the Fremen gain insurrectional abilities. This isn’t just a matter of reimagining win conditions, balancing the development (technology) trees, or improving faction characterization — it goes back to the wider, messier problem of how the developers approached the finer points of Dune.

I’m sure some of these issues can be solved with patches and DLC, and I hope that Shiro will continue to deepen mid- and late-game gameplay. Visually, the mid-00s cartoonish vibe sort of works — the environments and desert palettes are quite lovely, and I’m a fan of the easy zoom/scroll features on the map. It’s always fun to watch invaders get deleted by a sandstorm (or a sandworm). But on a wider thematic level, it’s difficult to imagine that the final product will be drastically different when it leaves early access, and it’s unreasonable to expect Spice Wars to get too experimental within the conventions of the 4X genre — most strategy fans are drawn to these kinds of games for the heady rush of conquest, with all its attendant struggles. (Tell me you enjoy losing at Civ, and I’ll call you a liar.) My main problem is that Spice Wars doesn’t seem to really understand why it’s a Dune game or what makes Dune settings so compelling.

Anyway, who plays 4X games for nuance? I’m here to watch Arrakis burn.

Dune: Spice Wars will be released in early access on April 26 on Windows PC. The game was played on Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Shiro Games and Funcom. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.