#nst

Concept art of the Boeing 733-197 landing.

Date: January 21, 1971

"Hand of God"

Can you see the shape of a hand in this new X-ray image?

The hand might look like an X-ray from the doctor's office, but it is actually a cloud of material ejected from a star that exploded.

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has imaged the structure in high-energy X-rays for the first time, shown in blue.

Metroid Prime Hunters

Back in the late 1990s, the Nintendo 64 was the console to have for multiplayer first-person shooters. Much of this had to do with the four controller ports built into every system, as well as the presence of games like GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, and even a few lesser quality titles like Turok. Alas, Nintendo was never able to carry that momentum forward to the next generation on the GameCube, where its crown was quickly stolen by Microsoft’s Xbox and the immensely popular Halo. They tried again with Metroid, implementing a split-screen competitive multiplayer mode in Metroid Prime 2, but this failed to catch on.

Even though the GameCube generation ended up being a wash for competitive FPS games, the Nintendo DS was in the portable space where it didn’t have much competition. The Game Boy Advance had a few first-person shooters, like ports of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, but these were mostly just novelties as opposed to games the audience took seriously. The DS meanwhile could handle 3D roughly on the level of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, as well as wireless network transmissions, so it was more suitable for a multiplayer first-person shooter than its predecessor. And thus, Metroid Prime Hunters was born.