The whole of 2019 may not be looking so hot coming off the disastrous year that was/is 2018, but at least there’s video games to distract us from everything else.

We dusted off our telescopes and looked over the video games we expect to see in 2019, compiling a list of the most titillating titles that we think will most capture our hearts and attentions in the next 12 or so months. 

There’s sequels of beloved series, there’s peaceful creations for when life’s too hard, there’s intriguing horror games, there’s insightful-looking indie games, and there’s even some action games for when you just need to let off some steam and kill bad guys.

Please enjoy our most anticipated games of 2019:

10. Devil May Cry 5

Sometimes you just want to style on some demons, and Devil May Cry 5 has your back. The hack-and-slash franchise returns in March to tear a whole bunch of bad guys a whole bunch of new ones with the help of Dante, Nero, and a new character named V. The cathartic, chaotic combat of Devil May Cry looks like it’s going to be as fun as ever with a much-appreciated visual upgrade.

Expected release date: March 8, 2019

9. The Sinking City

You had me at weird-looking kraken thing. Melding 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and film noir, The Sinking City is bound to be one of 2019’s more surreal gameplay experiences. Uncovering the truth behind the supernatural plague terrorizing the city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, you play as a private investigator. Loosely based on the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, this game is gonna be one wild (and wet) mind-bender. 

Expected release date: March 21, 2019

8. The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan

Have no fear, Until Dawn fans—more spooks are finally heading our way. Announced this past summer, The Dark Pictures anthology will take Supermassive Games deeper into the horror realm with a series of terrifying installments. The first? Man of Medan, a nautical thriller following the horror experienced by a group of curious divers who meddle with a ghostly wreckage site. Yes. Please. More. Thank you. 

Expected release date: TBD in 2019

7. In the Valley of Gods

From the brilliant minds that brought us Firewatch, In the Valley of Gods looks like Tomb Raider, but with a killer soundtrack and y’know… emotional depth. Gods‘ chronicles the adventures of Rashida and Zora as they explore Egypt and attempt to navigate their tricky working relationship. While relatively little is known about the release, if it’s anything like Firewatch, then we’re in for a pretty big treat. 

Expected release date: TBD in 2019

6. Animal Crossing

If there’s one thing we all need in 2019, it’s a nice, quiet, pleasant game where everyone is your friend, loans are interest-free, and nobody has a weapon. Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Switch sounds like the perfect antidote for everything that’s been going wrong in recent years, and being able to sink into a tranquil little village full of kind animal neighbors and ample fishing. This game couldn’t be coming at a better time.

Expected release date: TBD in 2019

5. Afterparty

If you haven’t played Night School Studio’s Oxenfree, you go do that right now. You’re back? Cool! Now, get hype as hell (literally) for the completely bonkers escapade that will be Afterparty. Milo and Lola, recently-deceased college buddies, awake to find themselves slumming it with Hades. But when they discover that if they can outdrink Satan they’ll be resurrected back on Earth, its bottoms up. A perfect blend of silly and stylish, Afterparty is one indie release we are dying to try.

Expected release date: TBD in 2019

4. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

From the creators of Dark Souls comes Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a refreshing take from the masters of the action RPG that adds acrobatics and more demanding swordplay to the genre. While Dark Souls kept us grounded as we trudged through endless misery and desolation, Sekiro sends us flying through the air in more open, inviting environments. 

Expected release date: March 22, 2019

3. Anthem

Anthem is a very pretty game that blends fluid mobility with classic sci-fi combat as players fly around a lush planet with their powered armor (Javelins) and take on all manner of enemies. It’s kind of like Bioware’s take on Destiny, but it looks like it doesn’t lean quite so heavily on MMO tropes.

Expected release date: February 22, 2019

2. Kingdom Hearts III

The massive Kingdom Hearts franchise is finally tackling its next installment. Surrounded by dozens of Disney and Pixar characters, our hero Sora will take on another perilous journey at the start of next year. There’s a lot to discuss here (and we’re desperately trying to replay everything before this release hits) so stay tuned for lots of discussion come January. We’re pumped.

Expected release date: January 25, 2019

1. Resident Evil 2

Resident Evil 2 is returning to life. The beloved-yet-terrifying 1998 action horror game is making its glorious comeback in January, sending us back into Racoon City as Leon, the most handsome and brave cop to ever take on a horde of zombies. The remake gives us the over-the-shoulder approach of Resident Evil 4 but built on the gorgeous airtight engine that gave us Resident Evil 7, which honestly sounds like the perfect combination.

Expected release date: January 25, 2019

Honorable mention: Death Stranding

First revealed in 2016, we still don’t know when Death Stranding is coming out. Maybe it’ll be 2019. Maybe it’ll be later. But oh wow do we want to see this game, even if it’s just to learn what it’s actually about and how it plays. It is so enticingly mysterious and exciting-looking and with such a cool cast and aesthetic it is looking like it’ll make a little video game history when it finally comes out. Hopefully soon.

Good news, Tesla owners: Supercharger coverage in Europe will be 100% sometime next year, Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday. 

“From Ireland to Kiev, from Norway to Turkey,” he said, specifying (in subsequent tweets) that Greece and Romania will be included as well. 

Currently, the Supercharger network in Europe is solid in some places, such as Germany, Norway and the UK, spotty in others, such as Poland and Italy, and non-existent in several European countries, including Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Tesla’s map of Superchargers in Europe displays numerous “coming soon” markers, but it’s nice to get a slightly more precise estimate on when the coverage will extend to all of Europe. 

Answering one Twitter user’s inquiry about Africa, Musk simply said “2020,” though he didn’t specify what kind of coverage that means, exactly. 

Musk also said the company is “dramatically increasing” Superchargers within cities, as well as “working with landlords to add home charging to apartment buildings,” which should help out Tesla owners who live in rented apartments.  

Tesla’s Supercharger network has expanded tremendously in the last couple of years. The number currently stands at 11,583 stations across the globe, though that’s still far from the company’s self imposed goal of having 18,000 chargers before the end of 2018. 

Image: John Lamparski/WireImage/Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images/mashable composite

He may be a best-selling author, but the majority of Stephen King’s tweets aren’t about books. They’re about politics.

Trump, more specifically. Although the horror master does tweet about a whole range of things — everything from truly terrifying photos of his dog Molly to his idea for a new type of car — the current President is the most frequently recurring topic on King’s timeline.

He has been for a while now, in fact, and 2018 was absolutely no exception. From the politically analytical to the no-holds-barred blunt, here are some of Stephen King’s most brutal Trump Twitter burns of the past year…

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We wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were more where these came from in 2019…

The Honor View 20 had a bit of an odd launch. In early December, Huawei teased the phone as its first phone with a hole punch display, revealing some, but not all of its specs. 

Then, the company launched the Huawei Nova 4, which is a 6.4-inch smartphone with a hole punch display that comes in two main variants: One with a triple rear camera setup and a 48-megapixel sensor, and the other with a dual, 20-megapixel rear camera. 

Now, the Honor View 20 is officially out, and even though it’s a different sub-brand, it sits somewhere in between the two Nova 4 variants. 

The Honor View 20 has a 6.4-inch LCD screen, a Huawei Kirin 980 chip, a 48-megapixel rear camera coupled with a 3D TOF sensor, a 25-megapixel selfie camera, 6/8GB of RAM and 128/256GB of storage, a fingerprint scanner on the back and a 4,000mAh battery. 

The main differences between this phone and the more powerful Nova 4 version are: A slightly more powerful processor, a bigger battery, but one less camera on the back. In terms of design, the phones are nearly identical on the front, but the View 20 has a horizontally laid-out camera setup on the back, in contrast to the Nova 4’s vertical cameras. The secondary sensor on the View 20 is used to capture depth and can be used to create “3D” photos or create three-dimensional avatars of people.  

There are also a few design details that make the View 20 a bit different from other phones. First is the use of nanolithography technology to create an “invisible nano texture” on the phone’s body, that results in a gleaming V-shape gradient on the phone’s back. There’s also a Honor View 20 Moschino-branded variant if you’re into that sort of thing. 

Software-wise, the View 20 will come with Android Pie coupled with the latest version of Huawei’s EMUI. 

The Honor View 20 is available in China in red, blue and black, for the starting price of 2,999 CNY or $436. The maxed-out, 8GB/256GB model costs 3,999 CNY or $582. A global launch will follow on January 22 in Paris. 

Image: studioEAST/Getty Images

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber and feel left out by the plethora of Spotify Wrapped ‘year in review’ posts, there’s a workaround for you.

You can use an app called Music Year In Review, developed by music social network NoiseHub, which puts together a snapshot of your listening habits this year, as spotted by TechCrunch.

Unlike Wrapped, which compiles your top 100 Spotify songs of the year in a playlist, calculates how many total minutes you streamed, and collates the number of new artists you discovered, the Apple Music workaround is undeniably simpler.

Using Music Year In Review, you can generate a card showing how long you’ve spent listening to your favourite artist, your top genre/artist/song, and your top five songs and artists on Apple’s streaming service.

That’s about it, but you can share these stats in a social media-friendly image direct to Instagram or Twitter.

If the data doesn’t go deep enough for you, there are alternative apps in snd.wave and Play Time, which offer up more detail about your listening habits, albeit without the pretty card format that Music Year In Review offers.

All this points to Apple Music needing its very own native ‘year in review’ feature, which, given how widely shared Spotify’s Wrapped has been, seems like a no-brainer.

Image: Saeed Adyani / Netflix

Spoiler alert: this post contains some spoilers for the movie Bird Box.

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Netflix’s new horror movie Bird Box has been receiving some decent critical reception since its release on Friday, but despite some of its faults, viewers can’t stop talking about the movie.

Specifically, people are enamored with the monster of Bird Box, if you can even call it a monster.

While many horror movies explain what it is that’s haunting the protagonists, Bird Box keeps its threat pretty mysterious all the way through the end of the movie. There are some ideas presented as to what exactly is happening on Earth, but it’s never made completely clear.

First, a quick overview of the movie: Bird Box seems to be like a mix between A Quiet Place, The Happening, and Cloverfield. There’s a planet-level threat that’s causing mass suicides, and the only way to not be affected by it is to visually block yourself off from the outside world. And nobody really knows why it’s happening. Maybe it’s a weird illness. Maybe it’s demons. Maybe it’s some otherworldly threat.

Whatever it is, it has people talking online. Some people are asking questions about how the movie’s threat actually affects people and why some people are affected differently.

Some viewers want more explanation as to how the world of Bird Box got like that in the first place.

To help with these questions, some people have tried to break down Bird Box with thorough explainers, like this YouTube video that digs into the movie’s themes and monsters.

Bird Box, similar to movies like Cloverfield and Inception, inspires discussion thanks to its vague and mysterious elements.

Of course, not all the online discussion around this movie revolves around constructive dissections of the lore and threat of the movie. Bird Box is also a great target for jokes and memes.

Some people joked about how the characters acted in the movie.

Many took aim at the namesake of the movie, the birds in the box.

It may not be the best horror movie of 2018, but Bird Box has certainly inspired a lot of conversation and comments online.

It’s with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Eddie the otter, who went viral for dunking balls and jerking off. 

“His hoops skills earned him worldwide fame throughout his golden years, but age finally caught up to Eddie,” a press release from the Oregon Zoo stated. “At nearly 21, Eddie was considered one of the oldest — and most talented — sea otters on the planet.” 

Humanely euthanized on Thursday morning due to age-related declining health, Eddie is remembered for delighting zoo visitors with two sensational acts: slam-dunking and autofellating. 

Orphaned as a pup, Eddie was rescued in 1998 and taken into rehabilitation at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deemed him “non-releasable,” he found a permanent home at the Oregon Zoo in 2000. But he didn’t reach fame until later in life, when a video of him playing basketball to ease his arthritic elbows went viral. 

At his prime, Eddie skillfully slam-dunked the ball through the hoop, occasionally adding a victorious underwater flip for the camera.

The multitalented otter was also known for his creative self-pleasuring skills. His arthritis clearly didn’t hold him back, because in another video Eddie was caught literally sucking his own dick. 

“Male sea otters seldom live past 15 years, so Eddie was among the very oldest of his kind,” Amy Cutting, who oversees the Oregon Zoo’s marine life said in the release. “He was quite feisty as a young otter, and we still saw that spirit come through during his later years.” 

Mourners took to Twitter to remember Eddie.

Rest in peace, Eddie. The world lost a great one this week. 

Image: Pascal Deloche / Getty Images

Apple may no longer be sharing , but it’s being more transparent than ever when it comes to reporting the data requests the company receives.

The , released on Thursday, covers the first six months of 2018. The report details all the data requests Apple received from January through June of this year from governments around the world. Previously as , Apple’s transparency report this year comes with a that helps breakdown the data visually.

In total, Apple received 32,342 data requests — a 9 percent rise from the last reporting period — from nearly 50 countries in the first half of 2018. These governmental requests sought data access form 163,823 devices. Apple complied with 25,829, or 80 percent, of these requests. Apple explains that these device requests cover identifiers such as an Apple product’s serial number.

Most device data requests received by Apple were from Germany. The country issued 13,704 data requests, 42 percent of the total number of queries, covering 26,160 devices. The United States came in with the second most requests, a total of 4,570 requests spanning 14,911 devices. Apple complied with 3,697, or 81 percent, of the data requests made by the U.S.

The report breaks out interesting details behind some of these stats. For example, a high number of requests from Germany and South Korea were due to stolen device investigations. Many of the requests from China are were also due to insurance fraud investigations.

In addition to device requests, a total of 4,177 account requests for 40,641 devices were made from countries around the world. This number is up 25 percent from the previous period. These account requests are based on information such as a user’s Apple ID or email address, according to Apple. These queries may also include a request for the content data, such as photos, email, or contacts, connected with the account.

While the U.S. made the most account requests with 2,397 requests covering 16,416 accounts, the jump in the overall number is due to a rise in data requests from China. China sought data on 19,908 accounts with just 33 requests. Most of the requests from China were involving fraud investigations. The U.S. requests were also due to extortion and suspected unauthorized account access/phishing investigations.

The Cupertino-based tech giant has been publishing its biannual transparency report . Along with its new website, there was another to the report. Apple is now separating National Security Letters and FISA request info in its transparency report. The company has previously combined the two since it first reported them in 2014.

Apple received 0 to 499 National Security Letter requests on 1,000 to 1,499 accounts. The company only provides a range in number of requests as required by law. There is also a legally required six-month reporting delay on FISA requests. Apple will include that data in its transparency report after Dec. 31.

The Pacers have made history, hiring Kelly Krauskopf as the first female assistant general manger of the NBA. The MLB already has two women assistant GMs.

Krauskopf previously served as president and general manager of WNBA’s Indiana Fever for 17 years. 

We already know Facebook will do pretty much whatever it wants with your data, but a lawsuit shows the lengths it will go to in defending that approach.

On Monday, the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Center for Democracy & Technology, and Illinois Public Interest Research Group, filed what’s known as a “friend of the court brief.”  The brief takes a stance against what appears to be an argument Facebook is advancing in court that would weaken a strong biometric data privacy law. 

Three Illinois plaintiffs are suing Facebook in a class-action suit, stating Facebook did not comply with an Illinois law that requires informed and written consent for the collection of biometric data — in Facebook’s case, facial recognition. A federal judge gave the case the go ahead in April.

To defend itself, Facebook is reportedly arguing that the plaintiffs don’t have the right to sue at all, because they haven’t proved that they’ve suffered damages.

But the ACLU et. al say that this argument is not only inconsistent with the law — it also renders it unenforceable and, therefore, toothless.

“Adopting the defendant’s reading of BIPA would effectively gut the statute’s primary purpose and leave people without meaningful recourse in a world of rapidly advancing technology and proliferating uses of biometric information,” the brief reads.

In 2008, Illinois passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The idea of the law is that biometric information in particular is so sensitive that it needs its own class of extra strong legal protection. Biometric data is sensitive because, unlike a password, you can’t change your face or your fingerprint; once it’s compromised, it’s compromised.

So BIPA states that users have to give companies collecting biometric information written, informed consent. That means they have to affirmatively agree to the collection of data, and they have to know what it’s being used for, the scope of the data, and who has access to it.

Then came 2010, when Facebook rolls out suggested tagging. When people were still, ya know, making Facebook albums, Facebook introduced the option to make tagging easier by “suggesting” who to tag. That means it used facial-recognition technology to pair photos with identities. Most crucially here, the feature was “opt-out” only.

In 2017, Facebook gave users the ability to opt out completely of having their faces recognized, and earlier this year Facebook began automatically notifying users when a picture of them had been uploaded to Facebook, giving them the option to tag themselves.

Facebook is reportedly trying many tacts to rebut the suit. It’s challenging the nature of consent, what even constitutes biometric data, and more. But the portion of their argument that the ACLU et. al. are opposing now concerns the ability of BIPA to actually be enforceable.

Typically, in a lawsuit, plaintiffs have to prove damages or that they have suffered (financially, emotionally, or otherwise) as a result of the defendants’ actions. The nature of suffering is what’s on the table now.

The Amicus Brief argues that the collection of biometric data without informed, written consent is a violation of the law. It states that the act of collecting the data is the damage done; not “some additional harm.”

If Facebook wins the damages argument, the brief says it would set a dangerous precedent, arguing that citizens need to have a legally enforceable way to prevent against the unlawful collection of data, not just misuse of data once it’s collected. And, most importantly, the brief says that that is what the law already does, and that Facebook’s reading would fundamentally change the purpose of the law. 

Facebook has taken pains to urge users to review their privacy permissions, though the calls for proactive check-ups took on renewed vigor after this year’s data scandals, and coinciding with the European Union’s adoption of its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).