Stuff UK September 2021

welcome

You’ll notice that the handsome chap you’ve seen gracing this page for the past 30-ish issues of Stuff magazine has been replaced with me, usually seen behind the scenes of the Stuff website munching on tangerines and rolling my eyes at insignificant smartphone upgrades. I promise this issue will not have you doing any of that. What it might have you doing is improving your home cinema setup. Yes, it’s a hassle; yes, it’s costly (or not necessarily – see p38); but the one certainty we can cling to is that no town sheriff will banish TV watching, unless you’re aged 10-16 and haven’t done your homework. So invest in the best and, with our help, fill your mind with the good stuff. That also goes for music streaming. Have you ever…

breadth of the wild

COMING SOON WARIOWARE: GET IT TOGETHER! The WarioWare series has always been one of Ninty’s strangest offerings, and it’s about time the Switch got involved. In this new entry, Mario’s rival is trapped in his own game, and you have to take on over 200 micro-games to get him out. 10 Sept METROID DREAD There’s still no sign of the highly anticipated (to put it lightly) Metroid Prime 4, but Nintendo is tiding fans over with a new 2D entry for Samus Aran, which sees the bounty hunter hunted by creepy robots in a dangerous alien world. This one’s out the same day as the Switch OLED. 8 Oct MARIO PARTY SUPERSTARS A new Mario Party game for the festive season is always a winner, and the latest entry is actually a best-of. Superstars brings back five boards…

nord don’t slow me down

Everybody knows the story of Goldilocks: a hardened young offender breaks into a house to feed her porridge addiction and, after trying three bowls of oats, finds the one that’s neither too hot nor too cold and gobbles it all up, before celebrating her crime with a nap. OnePlus’s Nord range is the perfect porridge of the smartphone world: not too pricey, not too underpowered, but just right… and the Nord 2 might be the most ‘just right’ yet. Behind the 6.43in 90Hz AMOLED display there’s a MediaTek Dimensity 1200 processor and a 4500mAh battery, powering – among other things – an AI-assisted triple camera with optical image stabilisation. That trio of lenses – 50MP main, 8MP ultrawide and 2MP mono – should have almost every snapping situation covered, while the onboard…

your silent bass

Active noise-cancelling silences all kinds of unwanted racket – the drone of a plane cabin, Gavin’s office chit-chat, next door’s grim taste in music – but it’s been such a long time coming on B&O true wireless buds that we suspect the Beoplay EQ’s ANC is only there to block out the deafening chorus of requests for it. These IP54-rated buds come with a dedicated DSP chip for the ANC, with six mics that adjust the level of noise-killing automatically. Combined with the snug fit offered by the silicone tips, that should make sure your ears are spared from all but the most invasive babble. The 6.8mm drivers inside have been tuned by B&O’s engineers to deliver the kind of top-notch performance the Danish brand is known for, while the Qi-compatible aluminium…

givin’ the vlog a boon

Looking for the perfect tool to kickstart your career as a lifestyle vlogger? Already had your teeth bleached to a shade slightly brighter than the sun? Then Sony’s ZV-E10 wants a word in your ear. The firm’s first interchangeable-lens camera designed specifically for vlogging, it offers many of the features found on the excellent ZV-1 (like that cute windscreen for its three-capsule mic and support for livestreaming via USB) but with one major addition: support for the ever-increasing range of E-mount lenses. The ZV-E10’s 24.2MP APS-C sensor captures 8-bit 4K video at up to 30fps and Full HD at up to 120fps (all the better for buttery-smooth slo-mo), with Sony’s celebrated real-time eye-tracking AF ensuring faces both human and animal always stay sharp. The swivelly screen flips forward to aid self-shooting, and both…

pocketful of steams

from £349 / steamdeck.com Valve’s beefy PC handheld looks suspiciously like your Switch, but should Nintendo be worried about its OLED party being crashed? Quite the power The Steam Deck might be ‘only’ a portable machine, but it’s designed to run the graphics-intense AAA games you normally play on your PC without breaking a sweat. To achieve this, Valve partnered with AMD to create a custom chip that employs a Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU, alongside 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of NVMe SSD storage. We’re not looking at a console anywhere near as powerful as the PS5 or XSX, but the Switch can consider itself crushed in terms of raw specs. Ding dong, the Switch is dead Comparisons to the Switch are inevitable – and valid, because ultimately that…