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Mario Kart 8's super-fast 200cc class almost made me puke
It could've been the latent heatstroke setting in from the three days I spent tut-tutting millennials under my breath at Coachella, or the five coffees I'd drunk to sustain some form of consciousness. But when I finished playing a demo of the new 200cc level in Mario Kart 8 with some folks from Nintendo on Monday, my eyes felt looser in their sockets and a barely containable feeling of nausea lingered in my gut for about an hour. It was as if I'd come off a roller coaster -- like one of those daring, metallic serpents from Six Flags or Busch Gardens in the '80s that jolted you just a bit too much and gave the impression you'd nearly avoided whiplash. All of which is to say, 200cc is not for the weak. It is stupid fast and stupid good.
'Mario Kart 8' is about to get absurdly fast
How big of a difference do those extra 50 cubic centimeters in Mario Kart 8 make? Well, Iwata and Co. have a video showing the current fastest/most difficult setting (150cc) side by side with the 200cc level the outfit announced last week. The trip around Piranha Plant Slide starts out slowly enough, but it isn't long before the differences start to show. There's roughly a five second gap between when Mario passes the first eponymous flora on the 200cc speed and 150cc, for instance, and the lead only grows from there. By the end of the lap, the lead is almost 15 seconds. That's quite a bit! Anywho, the video, along with a few others, is just below and the free update hits April 23rd -- see you on Rainbow Road.
Panasonic talks up 2012's hottest fuel cell tech
Alas, here we are, 2008 drawing quickly to a close, and yet we still live in a world where the only viable portable fuel cell system is available exclusively to the US Army (unless you can make due with one lowly watt). Panasonic says we have another four years to wait, planning for a 2012 releasing of device powerful enough to run a notebook yet small enough to fit inside a battery compartment. The company estimates up to 5 hours of power could be had from 50cc of "highly concentrated" methanol, and of course you'd always be just a squirt away from a full charge -- the same sort of promises we've heard again and again about this tech. Four years may seem like a long way off, but it's surely more realistic than the release dates we've seen on some earlier prototypes. Update: A few 200cc, 20-hour prototypes displayed after the break.[Warning: reg required on read link]
