Quebec’s Marc-Antoine Liboiron will race against Max Verstappen in F1 22, two new games coming to Apple Arcade.

Quebec virtual F1 racer off to race against Max Verstappen

Last month, I wrote about a virtual car race that Heineken was staging trackside at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve during the Formula 1 Grand Prix du Canada.

Quebec’s Marc-Antoine Liboiron beat four other Canadian gamers in the competition and will be racing against Max Verstappen, who races F1 cars IRL, in an upcoming virtual race later this year.

Congrats, Marc-Antoine!

New games coming to Apple Arcade

One for the adults, one for the kids. Kids go first.

Lego Duplo World is designed for two to five year olds, and presents a number of colourful scenes that they can interact with in the most intuitive way imaginable. In the same way that the Duplo blocks are intended for smaller hands that are learning coordination, so too is this experience created to stimulate developing senses.

Slay the Spire is an interesting blend of dungeon crawling adventure with card-based combat. It comes together in a style of animation that delivers on both experiences, with cards flying across the board as they are played and the consequences of those cards showing on the screen. Available on all other gaming platforms, Slay the Spire is now part of Apple Arcade.

Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, is live, Apple’s shutting down My Photo Stream, and Amazon Prime Day nears.

Threads, from Instagram and Meta, is now available

This, today, from Mark Zuckerberg. His first tweet in more than ten years.

pic.twitter.com/MbMxUWiQgp

— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023

If you’ve got an Instagram account, the Twitter clone is dead easy to set up. Get Threads for Android and iOS

Posts can include:

• text up to 500 characters, including links
• photos
• videos up to five minutes long

The company said in a release that this is the “initial version” and that additionally functionality will be added. That might include different ways to parse your feed, because right now you’ve got no control over the posts you see. You get posts from accounts you follow as well as content recommended by the algorithm.

Also: no hashtags or editing capability. But you can retweet and quote retweet. You can mute words, block profiles, and even hide likes.

And there’s no concern about limited viewing of posts.

Apple’s My Photo Stream service is ending

My Photo Stream was an early cloud-based service from Apple that shared photos you took on your iPhone with your other Apple devices.

What this means is that you’ll need to opt for iCloud storage for photos and videos if you want to share them across your devices. Subscriptions are as cheap as $1 a month for 50 GB, and $10 a month for 2 TB.

Or you can manage them manually.

You may not have been using Apple’s My Photo Stream service, but just in case you should take a few minutes to make sure that if you have photos in there, that you’ve saved them somewhere else so you don’t lose them.

Here’s how to do that.

You’ll want to make sure you’ve disabled My Photo Stream to prevent any new photos or videos from being saved in that soon-to-be-deleted folder.

To do this, on your iPhone or iPad:

• Go to Settings
• Go to Photos
• Turn off “My Photo Stream”
• Turn on “iCloud Photos” if you want to save to your Apple cloud account

Amazon Prime Day begins next Tuesday, July 11

Christmas in July? No, just Amazon Prime Day.

The annual sale at the online retailer runs next Tuesday and Wednesday, July 11 and July 12. Something new this year is the opportunity to get access to exclusive, invite-only deals, like a JBL wireless speaker or a Philips Sonicare toothbrush.

There are always steep discounts on Amazon products, including Amazon Fire TVs, Echo smart speakers and Show devices, Kindles, and Ring doorbells and alarms.

To get the deals you need to be subscribed to Amazon’s Prime club ($10 a month, or $100 a year), which gives you access to free shipping and regular discounts on items, even when it’s not Prime Day. A membership also gives you access to Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Prime Gaming.

You also get free shipping on many items.

The website Camelcamelcamel is a free service that tracks the pricing history of many products listed for sale at Amazon, so you can tell if the price you’re looking at in real time is actually a deal. Keepa is both a website and also provides browser extensions so you can see price history information when you’re actually on the Amazon website.

Both of these services provide the option of creating an account so you can be notified of price drops. Camelcamelcamel makes money as an Amazon referrer and through ads, while Keepa has additional data services you can subscribe to access.

This week on The Shift, Shane Hewitt and I talked about the Bookwalker, Another Fisherman’s Tale, FIFA 23’s Women’s World Cup update, and Simply Spiked Lemonade’s Keep It Real lie-detector can.

Adventures are at the heart of the Bookwalker and Another Fisherman’s Tale, while becoming the best that women’s soccer has to offer is what the latest update to FIFA 23 is all about.

Adventure through the pages of books as the Bookwalker

In The Bookwalker, you become a writer who’s been sentenced to thirty years of writers block. Exactly what you’ve been convicted of isn’t quite clear when you begin the game. As a player, all you really know is that there’s a shadowy underworld that can help you remove the shackles that bind you.

For a price.

As the bookwalker, you are sent into books to retrieve objects that are part of the stories. Because you have the ability to bring objects from the pages into the real world. And solving the puzzles that get in your way sometimes require that you take objects into the books with you.

It’s not all about point-and-click, either. You have to battle various enemies you encounter in the books with turn-based combat.

And along the way you learn more of the bookwalker’s story, and the implications of the rewriting you’re doing on the books you explore.

The Bookwalker was developed by Do My Best Games and published by Tinybuild. It’s available now for PS4, PS5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S and free to Xbox Game Pass subscribers.

FIFA 23 updated with Women’s World Cup with 32 national teams

The Women’s World Cup is less than a month away, and gamers with copies of FIFA 23, developed in Vancouver by EA Sports, can update their edition to include the 32 national teams competing in the tournament.

You can play through your own world cup with group and knockout stages, you can play as your favourite national team player – Christine Sinclair, anyone? Perhaps one of the younger stars like Jordyn Huitema, Janine Beckie, Jessie Fleming, Ashley Lawrence, Kadeisha Buchanan … Canada has a deep bench – or you can create your own player to lead your country to victory.

As it always does, EA Sports ran the tournament through its FIFA 23 simulator and determined that the U.S. will beat Germany in the final match to win the Women’s World Cup.

Fans can come up with their own prediction with an online selector created by the EA Sports team.

The group stage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, hosted by Australia and New Zealand, begins on July 20.

Enter a world of pirate adventure with Another Fisherman’s Tale

Another Fisherman’s Tale is a charming puzzle adventure in virtual reality that has you taking on the guise of a character telling the kinds of tall tales that fishermen are known for.

Developed by Innerspace and published by Vertigo Games, the key mechanic is that you can swap out different objects for your hands. Attach a lobster appendage, for example, and you can cut a rope.

There are multiple levels of meta going on here, and the key to figuring it all out is figuring out how to use your body – and all its parts – to navigate the various environments.

Another Fisherman’s Tale is available now on PSVR2, Meta Quest 2, and Steam VR. The first game in the series, A Fisherman’s Tale (2019) is also coming to PSVR2

The Canada Day long weekend is upon us. Who among us won’t be enjoying frosty beverages while enjoying some relax time?

Simply, the juice brand, has expanded into the adult beverage market with Simply Spiked Lemonade, and to keep people honest about any taste tests has introduced a lie detector in a can.

The Keep It Real Can is built with sensors to measure galvanic skin response and pulse rate, which are two of the key metrics used in polygraph tests.

If you get caught lying while holding a Keep It Real Can, the can will vibrate and a light on the bottom will turn red.

Simply is also asking people to post “honest” reviews of the Spiked Lemonade beverage for a chance to win a $5,000 prize.