Welcome to the first installment of the UF Newsletter!
The UF newsletter will cover several stories in current events, tech, games, and other topics that UF members and staff enjoy. Our plan is to release this bi-weekly with links and information to cool stories, free games, releases, or other cool content. The end goal is to create a useful and informative newsletter where UF members can quickly gather cool info (and free stuff) on their favorite topics.
Currently, our plans are to host the following columns
- Game Releases and Game News by @MadBrax!
- iOS and the State of Jailbreaking by @Exerra!
- Anime Reviews by @Tiddie!
- Inside @DooT’s Curious Brazilian Brain
Let’s get started!
Game Releases and Game News by @MadBrax
New Announcements:
- Animal Crossing: New Horizions Summer Update Wave 1 | Announced June 25th
- NEW Pokemon Snap | Announced June 17th
- New Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC Fighter - Min Min (From ARMS) [Switch] | Announced June 22nd
- Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time! [PS4, Xbox One] | Announced June 21st
- PlayStation 5 Design and Games Reveal Event | Held June 11th
- Resident Evil 8: Village [PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X] | Announced June 11th
- Apex Legends coming to Nintendo Switch this fall | Announced June 18th
- Skate 4 announced as officialy in development | Announced June 18th
- Apex Legends launching on Steam and getting Cross-Platform Play | Announced June 18th
- Star Wars: Squadrons [PS4, PC, Xbox One, VR] | Announced June 18th
- Mixer officially shuts down and the service merges with Facebook Gaming | Announced June 22nd.
Hot Releases:
- The Last of Us: Part 2 [PS4] | Released June 19th
- Fortnite - Chapter 2 Season 3 [PC, Xbox One, PS4, Android/iOS, Switch] | Released June 17th
- Minecraft 1.16: The Nether Update [Windows 10, Android/iOS, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, VR] | Released June 23rd
- Pokemon: Sword and Shield Expansion Pass Part 1 - Isle of Armor [Switch] | Released June 17th
Free Game Giveaways and Weekends:
- AER Memories of Old - EGS | Free to Keep from June 25th to July 2nd
- Stranger Things 3: The Game - EGS | Free to Keep from June 25th to July 2nd
- Conan: Exiles - EGS | Free to Keep from July 2nd to July 9th
- Hue - EGS | Free to Keep from July 2nd to July 9th
Some words from @MadBrax:
The Last of Us 2 has finally released to mixed reception from fans, but with glowing reviews from Critics and reviewers. It’s currently being titled as a Metacritic MUST-PLAY, but is being review bombed due to it’s backlash from leaks.
Now for some news that Minecraft fans have been waiting for! Minecraft 1.16: The Nether Update, is available now on all platforms where you can play Minecraft! It released this past Wednesday and features new biomes, blocks, mobs and more! Jump into the new update today! We’ve also released a brand new UNDERFORUMS Minecraft 1.16 bedrock server! Please enjoy! You can find the IP address in the #mine channel in the Discord!
Have you been playing Minecraft: Dungeons? I have! And for those of you excited about future content, I have some awesome news! Minecraft: Dungeons DLC 1 - Jungle Awakens launches on July 1st, right alongside a free content update! The free update contains a brand new Temple to explore and loot and the DLC contains 3 brand new campain levels, complete with brand new jungle themed items! Pick the Hero Pass up for $10 to get this new content on launch day!
Something interesting stated by Nintendo on June 22nd, is that they will be stepping away from the mobile game market due to, “Underwhelming Financial Performance,” from their mobile outings (Mario Kart Tour, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem: Heros, ect.) and will instead be focusing on releases for Nintendo Switch, as following the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo’s Revenue went to their highest in the last 10-12 years. Whether or not this means games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will stop recieving support soon or not is unclear, but it does mean that devlopment efforts for Nintendo’s AAA console releases should be boosted by the development teams moving over to those projects.
The 17th was an extremely eventful day for Pokemon Fans! Many new games and updates were revealed in the first of 2,
Pokemon Presents, presentations. Probably the most exciting of the small 10 minute show would be, NEW Pokemon Snap.
New Pokemon Snap is the long awaited sequel to the beloved Pokemon Snap released over 20 years ago on the N64. While that was the largest announcement of the show, we also got the announcement of Mega Evolution coming to Pokemon GO (Which yes, is still around and doing suprisingly well!), as well as the launch of Part 1 of Pokemon: Sword and Shield’s Expansion Pass which launched right after the show. The was a few other small announcements during the show, but nothing worth noting
here.
And for the final news of today, we have an update coming to Animal Crossing: New Horizons next month, with more to come in early August! Next months update launches on July 3rd, featuring new Summer themed events, new creatures to collect and donate and the biggest feature of the update, Swimming and diving! Jump in on the 3rd to see everything new!
iOS and the State of Jailbreaking by @Exerra
Welcome to my little corner of the newspaper. Here I will talk about Jailbreak and iOS news.
Let’s start with the big event of WWDC. Some of the stuff in iOS 14 is:
- App Library with intelligent drawers, and subsequently the ability to hide pages
- Widgets with customizable size
- Global PiP
- New, smaller Siri
- Translation app for small conversations abroad! Currently supports 11 languages
- Messages app changes. This includes the ability to mention people in groups, mention-only notifs, being able to pin messages to the top)
- App clips, aka small applications which can be run with NFC and QR codes. 2 of the demos in WWDC were the ability to pay for Parking tickets and to buy a drawing your friend sent you on Etsy.
- Guides in maps
- Maps EV Routing
- Cycling directions in Maps
- New Memoji
- …and the most expensive new feature: Car keys. It works over NFC and will support the new 2021 BMW 5 Series car. The aim is to be able to unlock and start the car only with your phone, similarly how Apple Pay works. You can also share a car’s keys with another person, meaning that you can give somebody your car with a bit of peace of mind knowing that you can revoke their key on the go. This feature will also be on iOS 13.
Alright, now let’s look into the Jailbreak side.
Sadly, Checkra1n, a semi-tethered jailbreak is confirmed NOT to work on iOS 14.
Some of the stuff in r/Jailbreak:
- [Paid Release] betterAlarm - A beautiful timer and alarm screen (Chariz)
- [Paid Release] Titan - Automatic picture in picture with Activator support. Now available on Chariz! (Editors note: iOS 14 will have that already, so if you’re looking to upgrade to iOS 14, don’t waste your money)
- [Free Release] rEkT– | Inspired by rEkT (will distort the capitalization of all visible text on your iPhone)
- [Paid Release] Glow (Always On Display)
- [Upcoming] Announcing Triton - The Call UI you’ve been waiting for! Built with SwiftUI.
- [Upcoming] Aurore - Wake up to your favorite music - Redesigned iOS alarms
- [Free Release] Attention - blur your device upon inactivity
- [Free Release] Mitsuha Forever - An Audio Visualizer based off of Mitsuha Infinity (Editors note: Be careful, this tweak has been worked on and released by many different devs. All of them end up not working. At the time of writing I have not yet tried this tweak)
- [UPDATE] AppSync Unified 80.0 ó Now with iOS 13.6 support!
With love from Exerra. <3
Anime Reviews by @Tiddie!
Tiddie didn't submit anything yet for this newsletter, so go yell at him! :|
Inside @DooT’s Strange Brazilian Brain
(Yes, this is literally what DooT submitted.)
Thanks for taking the time to read the first installment of the UF Newsletter! A huge thanks from me to all the staff members who were willing to bring this to life. To all our members: Our community grows stronger each day because of you!
If you are interested in joining the newsletter team with a unique column/topic of your choice, shoot me a message!
See you in 2 weeks. <3