Star Fox Switch 2 preview: Making fond memories more modern

Surely, I wasn’t the only one to raise an eyebrow at Fox McCloud and his crew’s new look. Looking something like the Fantastic Mr Fox thrown in a tumble dryer, Fox’s frizzy rebrand took me by surprise, especially after his highly stylised turn in the recent Super Mario Galaxy Movie. But sometime during my hour playing Star Fox, the Switch 2 remake of Lylat Wars (or Star Fox 64, its much less cool name in the US), I saw the furry light.

Fox’s more animalistic appearance leans further into the absurdity of a wild beast piloting a sci-fi jet fighter on a galaxy-saving mission against a mad monkey scientist. As melodramatic as Star Fox frames itself, with new cinematic cutscenes fleshing out the conflicts between characters, it is still a deeply unserious game, and it’s all the more fun for it.

Star Fox looks snazzy, which is to be expected; it’s running on beefier hardware with a new lease on life. It also feels smoother, barrel rolling towards a more modern vibe than its comparatively rudimentary predecessors.

Why we’re getting yet another remake of a series that has never quite taken off is beyond me, but the brief preview of the Switch 2 version hints at one of Fox’s stronger adventures. (Speaking of adventures, I’m there the second Star Fox Adventures appears on Nintendo Switch Online).

Do that roly-poly manoeuvre

To say that this is the best a Star Fox game has ever looked would be stating the bleeding obvious. Most of your time is spent viewed from behind the famous Arwing spaceship. And what a view it is. How does that saying go again? Hate to see you go, but love to watch you fly away in a fictional space vessel? It needs work, but you get the gist.

What I mean to say is that everything looks spectacular. Lasers shoot through the sky with more dazzle, explosions hit hard, and the smouldering death spin of an enemy ship as it plummets to its fiery doom is oh-so-satisfying.

Star Fox doesn’t go for extreme realism, though. It still shows a strong sense of style and vibrancy, not reducing everything to a flat yellow-tinged colour grade. There’s more interplay between light and darkness, like how the bright Corneria draws you in with its lush greens and choppy waters, while the contrast of Meteo’s dark vastness of space makes the dogfights really pop.

But, in exchange for fidelity, readability takes a hit. In Meteo, the boss’ glowing weak points aren’t as prominent, making it tricky to tell where you should aim. As a returning player, muscle memory kicked in, but newer players noticeably struggled, firing haphazardly at impervious points.

It may look obvious in a screenshot, but in motion, being hounded by projectiles, enemy weak points aren’t as obvious. Image: Nintendo.

The handful of cutscenes I saw looked slick. It’s nice seeing the Star Fox case interact more in these sections, as opposed to little chat boxes during missions.

Non-interactive story sections also show a changing of the guard at Nintendo. Shigeru Miyamoto was infamously against injecting too much story into the company’s early games, but times have changed.

Star Fox depicts a bit more dramatic tension, albeit playing to familiar story beats. I’m not expecting Fox to openly explore the complex trauma of losing his father to the antagonist he seeks to overthrow, but I’m open to being surprised. I don’t expect Nintendo to portray the furry protagonist hitting the bottle to cope, let’s put it that way.

Taking to the skies in Star Fox multiplayer

I played a lot of Lylat Wars multiplayer back in the day. Probably more than I played the single-player mode, now that I think of it. The perks of living in a cul-de-sac neighboured by similar-aged kids who loved gaming!

With Star Fox, multiplayer has a bit more variety than the standard deathmatch fare. Battle Mode adds a bit more structure, providing objectives in four-versus-four matches that combine cooperation and competitiveness. As part of the preview, I only played a couple of rounds in Corneria, which saw teams face off to end rounds with the highest score.

Shooting down bot-controlled minions accrued some points, while taking down other players netted a higher score. Most of the points came from capturing objectives that would appear several times a match.

Image: Nintendo.

Taking the form of a tight circle, these objectives quickly became hotspots of laser fire and explosions as both teams attempted to claim the area for a huge chunk of points. Like the dying stages of a Battle Royale game, it was a hectic convergence of players vying for a small bit of territory.

Eliminations were important, but not nearly as much as controlling portions of the map. The moments between capturing points still counted and could prove the difference in close matches. However, like trading jabs in the boxing ring, it’s mainly to soften up your foes for the knockout blow when a circle appears.

Levelling the playing field

Skill is important, as was evident in the gap between series veterans and newcomers. But strategy comes in handy, too. Power-ups littered around the map can equalise a lop-sided encounter. Ranging from bombs to homing missiles, these pick-ups shred through Arwings like wet paper when used well.

Yes, the GameChat functionality was as deliriously fun as I imagined. Image: Nintendo.

After getting shot down several times in quick succession, I lucked upon a power-up that conjured a massive laser with the destructive power of the Death Star. Unwieldy and slow to aim, the laser’s overwhelming force made up for any trickiness. After a brief moment of panic, I steered it towards an oncoming pilot; within seconds, they were ash. Two more fighters followed them, cursing the dickhead wielding the giant energy beam of death.

I’ll happily admit: it felt pretty good — I won MVP of the match in a losing effort, after all. If The Grade Cricketer has taught me anything over the years, it’s that the ultimate feat in competition is starring with the bat when your team loses badly.

Image: Cat Jahne.

As much as I think I’ll enjoy revisiting the single-player when Star Fox launches on 25 June, it’s these multiplayer moments I’m most looking forward to. It made me feel like a kid again, gleefully shooting down my friends while playing as funny anthropomorphic mavericks.

Chris Button attended a preview event in Melbourne as a guest of Nintendo.

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Intel is finally ready to take on handheld gaming with the Arc G3

Just before Computex 2026 kicked off, Intel announced a new chip that could drastically shake up the handheld gaming landscape. Dubbed the Intel Arc G3 series, the combined CPU and GPU system-on-a-chip (SoC) builds on the brand’s Panther Lake laptop chips in a bid to topple AMD’s ubiquitous presence in the most popular portable gaming devices.

Separated into two variants, the Arc G3 and the Arc G3 Extreme, Intel claims the SoCs power up to 42 per cent more frames on average across many of the biggest games than AMD’s Ryzen Z2 Extreme chipset, which is found in devices like the ROG Xbox Ally X. That comparison specifically applies to the latest MSI Claw 8 handheld running an Arc G3 Extreme at 35W, playing games in 1080p with upscaling enabled.

Handheld gaming PCs will start showing this logo. Image: Intel.

Intel Arc G3 focuses on power efficiency

But one of the biggest frustrations among handheld gamers is limited battery life. When cranking the wattage up to play more demanding games, you’d be lucky to get two hours before needing a power outlet.

Intel reckons it has power efficiency figured out. The company’s internal data suggests that devices running an Arc G3 only require half the power of a Ryzen Z2 chip to produce roughly the same, if not higher, performance levels. With the help of upscaling, Intel claims that handhelds using its gaming SoC can run smoothly at 17W, whereas competing systems need 35W.

It’s worth noting that AMD’s Ryzen Z2 chips are more than a year old now. Still, Intel’s latest foray into gaming proves how much can change in the space of 12 months. As is often the case with processors, pushing top-end performance is a focus, but doing more with less power demand is usually the top priority with chip makers.

3D games, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, won’t need to draw as much power to produce the same performance. Image: Chris Button.

Many of these efficiencies come from how Intel’s new SoC handles power, with less fluctuation between the CPU and GPU demands. With Intel’s ‘Endurance Gaming’ mode enabled, which reduces power consumption and sets frame limits, Forza Horizon 6 could run on a handheld for nearly six hours at 30fps, the company claimed. Older, less demanding games, like Team Fortress 2, could last up to nearly 12 hours.

Other gains stem from improved software as part of Intel’s XeSS 3 platform. This includes standard upscaling, which renders an image at a lower quality before using AI to bring it up to the target resolution. Then there’s also what Intel calls ‘Multi-Frame Generation’, which produces additional frames to create a smoother look. It’s more of an acquired taste, as it can create some visual artifacts, but it’s not as noticeable on the smaller screen of a handheld device.

Is Intel ready to make a bigger gaming push?

While AMD has dominated the handheld gaming PC market so far, Intel already has some supporters on board. Among the first devices to use Arc G3 chips are the Acer Predator Atlas 8, MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, and OneXPlayer.

I played each of the upcoming handhelds during a pre-Computex briefing, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight looked a treat. It looked sharp, ran smoothly, and I could have easily passed a few hours had my schedule permitted.

If I could’ve spent the whole afternoon playing Lego Batman, I would’ve. Image: Chris Button.

But I was keen to quiz Intel about what the Arc G3 meant for its future in gaming. Traditionally, AMD has had a stranglehold on console processors, including those found in PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch 2 runs on a custom Nvidia chip.

Tom Peterson, an Intel Fellow in the company’s architecture, graphics and software division, agreed that Intel was interested in being more active in the gaming space.

“The market is starting to mature, and it’s becoming more and more interesting,” Peterson said. “While this generation we think is going to be somewhat constrained because of DRAM pricing primarily, over time, this is a fruitful area for us to expand.”

As for why it’s taken Intel a while to dip its toe into making dedicated gaming chips, he explained that developing the technology isn’t an overnight process.

Image: Chris Button.

“It takes almost, I don’t want to say decades, but it takes a long time to build a new platform,” Peterson said. “And in this case, it’s mostly about the software, the thermal design, and making all that beautiful, so we’re building technologies over time that make it a really tractable product.”

Peterson acknowledged there was “some hesitation” among brands over the current high prices of handheld gaming PCs, largely caused by the global memory shortage, but was confident that the form factor would stick around in the long run.

“I think there’s also broad interest because we all sort of recognise this as a viable platform, and you don’t want to miss out,” he said. “So maybe moderate investments in the first couple of generations while you wait for things to sort of normalise on pricing.”

Chris attended Computex 2026 in Taipei as a guest of Intel.

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Sleek OLED ROG Xbox Ally X20 kicks off limited edition range

Looking back on its 20-year history, Asus’ Republic of Gamers brand celebrated the anniversary with an avalanche of limited-edition devices, including its first OLED handheld gaming PC: the ROG Xbox Ally X20.

Announced at a flashy Taiwan event alongside Grand Theft Auto V star Ned Luke, the ROG Xbox Ally X20 comes as part of a bundle with the brand’s XREAL R1 Edition 20 AR glasses, which provide the equivalent of a 171-inch screen.

Judging by the audience’s reaction, the revamped Xbox Ally was the star of the show. Made with a transparent black casing with gold highlights, it’s a striking design. But the handheld’s upgrade wasn’t a mere cosmetic refresh.

Kris Huang reveals the ROG Xbox Ally X20 (left), while Ned Luke, Huang, Jonney Shih, and Whitson Gordon with the Edition 20 range (right). Images: Chris Button.

A beefed-up version of last year’s ROG Xbox Ally X, the X20 edition expands the display from seven inches to 7.4 inches. Along with the bigger size, it uses ROG’s Nebula HDR OLED technology, instead of the IPS used by previous models.

Its internals remain largely the same, including the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, but ROG tweaked the cooling system to accommodate the OLED technology. On the outside, the D-pad can swivel to support four-directional and eight-directional inputs for different kinds of games.

ROG also equipped the Xbox Ally X20 with new TMR joysticks, which it claims are more precise than Hall effect technology. These new sticks are meant to be more durable, smoother, and remove the dreaded dilemma of stick drift over time.

ROG didn’t confirm any pricing or how limited the Xbox Ally X20’s supply will be. Judging by the Xbox Ally X’s recent price increase, which costs $1,799 in Australia, the special edition OLED model won’t be cheap.

ROG Xbox Ally X20 is just the tip of the iceberg

When the ROG Xbox Ally launched late last year, it impressed as a powerful bit of portable gaming kit. One of the most powerful handheld gaming devices on the market, its main weakness was the slightly disjointed Windows 11 software integration. Since then, multiple updates have vastly improved the user experience, particularly when docked to an external display.

There were a lot of 20th anniversary devices announced at ROG’s press event overnight. Denoted by the ‘Edition 20’ branding, the limited edition range included all manner of PC peripherals, like mice, keyboards, and even an RTX 5090 GPU with an OLED display that curves around its edges.

Extremely extra, but extremely cool, the 20th anniversary motherboard turned heads. Image: Chris Button.

Arguably the coolest Edition 20 drop was the ROG Crosshair X870E motherboard. Designed to pay homage to the first device made under the ROG banner 20 years ago, it brandishes copper heatsinks, up to nine M.2 slots, and a dual 6.67-inch AMOLED screen that pairs with ROG’s Edition 20 RTX 5090.

Where it all began: the original ROG Crosshair motherboard. Image: Chris Button.

A lot of what ROG showed highlighted a ‘because we can’ approach to product design. The Edition 20 range isn’t for the masses, but goodness, it all looked incredibly stylish.

Chris attended Computex 2026 in Taipei as a guest of Intel.

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Could Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip upend Windows PCs?

Aside from powering AI data centres and gaming hardware around the world, Nvidia is about to enter the world of PC chips with the RTX Spark.

Announced by the company’s leather jacket-laden CEO Jensen Huang at Computex 2026, the RTX Spark is a new Arm-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) that will power a series of upcoming Windows laptop and desktop PCs. Described by Nvidia as a “superchip”, the SoC comes up against silicon from the likes of Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm.

Equipped with a 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU made in collaboration with MediaTek, and an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and the company’s fifth-gen Tensor Cores, the RTX Spark comes with some big claims.

According to Mark Aevermann, Nvidia’s senior director of product management, it’s “the most efficient PC chip ever built”. Nvidia hasn’t provided any benchmarks or comparison data yet, but is confident that PCs running Spark will outpace competing devices when the first wave of PCs launches in spring.

Via its integrated GPU, the RTX Spark reportedly reaches similar graphics performance to an RTX 5070 laptop graphics card. Nvidia claims it can play big-budget games at 1440p running at “over 100 frames per second” when paired with other technologies, including the upscaling DLSS.

But, with Nvidia being heavily in the AI business, it says the new chipset is built to be a “personal AI computer”. Supporting up to 128GB of unified memory, PCs running on RTX Spark are meant to power the latest local AI models and technologies. Already, over 100 Windows apps with AI integrations are on board, including Adobe, Blender, and CapCut.

What desktop and laptop PCs will use RTX Spark?

Most of the major PC brands have committed support for Nvidia’s chipset. Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and Microsoft already have devices on the way, with Acer and Gigabyte also waiting in the wings.

To begin with, RTX Spark laptops will come in 14-inch and 16-inch variants, along with designs as slim as 14mm featuring OLED displays. Nvidia hasn’t confirmed other specs, including battery life, instead choosing to focus on its lofty aim of shaking up the PC market.

Considering Nvidia’s astronomical value as a company, selling the hardware that powers many of the world’s AI data centres, it seems well-positioned to sidestep into consumer PCs. Whether it succeeds will likely depend on how much its laptops cost, and how well they compete with existing silicon heavy-hitters.

Chris attended Computex 2026 in Taipei as a guest of Intel.

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Slimmer Oura Ring 5 is a big upgrade for a small device

Wearing an Oura Ring is certainly a commitment to having a large ring on your finger, as well as to keeping it charged. In return, you get a wealth of health information, which, in the world of modern healthcare and exercise, is becoming more appealing each year.

The new Oura Ring 5 will make the statement a little less obvious than the previous model; it is now 40 per cent smaller, making it more attractive to those with smaller hands. 6.09mm wide and 2.28mm thick, it’s noticeably slimmer than the 7.9mm and 2.88mm measurements of Oura Ring 4. It also has improved sensors, better scratch resistance and a week-long battery life.

There’s also an optional charging case for the Oura Ring 5 to make it easier to keep the ring active on the go. Software improvements and new features also come to the Oura platform, like helping you locate a lost ring and live-tracking workouts directly from your phone.

New insights are also available for women with Oura Rings from gen 3 onwards, like data specific to menopause, as well as help women undergoing a hormonal birth control program. Oura says the menopause insights are designed in collaboration with its clinical and science teams. It asks structured questions across categories like sleep, mood, cognition, and daily functioning, helping wearers understand how strongly they feel that perimenopause is affecting their daily lives.

Oura’s new hormonal birth control feature, included with the brand’s $10 monthly subscription service, adapts cycle Insights for women using pills, patches, IUDs, implants, and other hormonal treatments, offering insight into how contraception may influence their unique baseline over time.

The Oura 5 will be available in Australia from 4 June, with preorders already open at $799 in a choice of six colours and sizes 6 to 13.

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How Homey provides one dashboard to automate your home

Six months ago, I started down the path of creating a smart home where I can control everything from lights and cameras to garage doors and blinds. I then started taking this a step further with automations. An automation I have, for example, in my family room is to shut the blinds and turn the lights on at sunset.

There is, however, one key issue when trying to automate a home. That is, you end up with smart products from different brands, each with its own app. This makes it difficult to have, for example, a security camera that detects movement and triggers all the outside lights around a house to switch on.

My first attempt at overcoming this challenge was to use Google Home and, subsequently, Amazon Alexa smart home functionality to provide cross-brand control. This works and not only gives you voice control but also limited app control. Being a ‘Gadget Guy’, I wanted more.

Then I learned about an open-source solution called Home Assistant, which offers everything you could possibly want. If something isn’t possible yet, chances are someone is already building a solution and adding to its open-source capabilities. This flexibility and possibility, however, come at a cost: a home assistant can be difficult to set up for the non-technical, and unlike a branded product you buy, there is no care and no responsibility, so if something does not work or functionality stops, you are on your own.

Getting smart homely with Homey

My next port of call has been a gadget I only recently learned about called Homey Pro. This is a product you can buy, and not only is it a brand, but it is also one that the international appliance brand LG liked so much that it bought the company.

Homey Pro. Image: Angus Jones.

A Homey Pro is a smart home platform where everything runs locally, and there is no cloud subscription. You can buy a Homey Pro for $699, a physical device you run in your home. You can try Homey via a free cloud service (Homey Cloud), which will support up to five devices. Beyond this, you pay approximately $5 a month to connect more devices. Note that the cloud version cannot connect directly to devices unless you buy an optional $120 bridge.

The Homey Pro supports all the smart wireless technologies, including Wi-Fi, Z-Wave Plus, Bluetooth, Zigbee, 433 MHz, infrared, Thread and Matter, enabling compatibility with over 50,000 popular smart devices and services. You will find official and community apps that you can run on your Homey to connect to and interact with your smart devices. By ‘official’, I mean that brands like Philips, with its Hue smart lights ecosystem, have endorsed the app. Meanwhile, a community app is one that someone has created for a brand that has yet to be officially endorsed.

Screenshot: Angus Jones.

How does the Homey Pro work?

To set up the Homey Pro, you add apps, connect your devices, and then start to create customisable dashboards and automations. Some of the things you can have on a dashboard include a weather forecast, a live feed from a camera of your front yard, a button to turn off all the lights in your house, a measurement of how much power you are consuming from the grid, etc.

An automation, or, as Homey calls it, a ‘Flow’, lets you set different parameters, like ‘when’, ‘and’, and ‘then’ conditions. For example, when the sun sets, and you are home, then the automation shuts the blinds, turns the lights on, and turns on the TV. There is also an Advanced Flow that lets you visually map out the logic like a flowchart, making your automations even more powerful.

Advanced Flows. Image: Homey.

The Homey Pro also works with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Siri Shortcuts, further providing whole-home integration. Beyond controlling devices, the Homey Pro can also present insights such as temperature graphs, rain aggregates, or historical power usage.

As a user, I am a long way away from creating advanced flows and am still at the basic level. The setup of all your devices, which in my case I have a lot of, takes time, and then the setup of flows, etc. But once you have them set up, you can be confident you can back up your configurations and have the support of a brand.

I am enjoying tinkering with it all, and my only disappointment so far is that the way I measure my solar, via a Refoss voltage clamp, does not appear in the built-in energy graphs. I am confident there is a solution, but I have just not found it yet.

If you have gone down the smart home path and found it does not do what you thought it would, the Homey Pro might just be the answer. It brings together all your separate smart home devices and lets you control them from a single central interface, without being too technical to set up.

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Better multi-storey Wi-Fi performance promised with Archer 8 router

Wi-Fi 8 may not yet be officially certified, but TP-Link is getting a head start by teasing the Archer 8 router series, along with a range of Wi-Fi 8 devices set to launch later this year.

It’s not the first time TP-Link has gotten ahead of official certification: it was one of the first brands to launch Wi-Fi 7 routers, eventually leading to the first router certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance for the then-emerging standard.

While Wi-Fi 7 introduced various speed gains, Wi-Fi 8, shorthand for the in-development IEEE 802.11bn standard, is said to focus on reliability and keeping up with the increasing number of internet-connected household devices. It’s the main message behind TP-Link’s push to release one of the first consumer Wi-Fi 8 routers with the new Archer.

“Wi-Fi has always been sold on peak speed, but that is not what households experience day to day,” said Neville Wang, Managing Director, TP-Link Australia and New Zealand. “What people actually notice is the dropout in the back bedroom, the lag when the whole family is on at once, the video call that freezes when someone else hits a stream.”

According to Wang, the Archer 8 is “a meaningful step forward” for household connectivity, based on the company’s lab testing.

What is Wi-Fi 8 meant to improve?

Multi-storey dwellings appear set to be among the major beneficiaries of the latest technology. Compared to Wi-Fi 7, TP-Link claims that its Wi-Fi 8 technology provides up to 30 per cent better signal performance for single device connections across multiple floors, and as much as 20 per cent improvements for multi-device connections.

Other cited improvements range from higher throughput and more stable speeds at longer distances, to better performance in high-interference scenarios.

A lot of the reasoning behind the reported gains is highly technical, including better signal modulation, improvements to router antenna design, and various AI-based optimisations.

For most people, though, the most important thing is whether Wi-Fi 8 delivers on its promises in the real world, outside of lab testing.

Australian early adopters of the technology will get to find out later in the year, when TP-Link plans to launch the Archer 8. The networking company also has plans to upgrade its entire range with Wi-Fi 8 versions, including Deco, Roam, and extender devices.

Although scant on specifics for now, like ports and exact speeds, TP-Link’s Archer 8 announcement signals that consumer-level Wi-Fi 8 technology isn’t far away.

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