Technologies

Hot Wheels’ iPhone and PlayStation Mixed-Reality RC Racing Game Races In Your Home

The AR-enhanced RC car game, by the makers of Mario Kart Live, lets you shrink down and race around your living room. We played it.

A few years ago, Nintendo’s real-life-meets-video-game Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit turned my pandemic home into a theme park race course for my kids. Mario Kart Live’s RC cars need a Nintendo Switch to work, but now Mattel and Hot Wheels have made a whole new RC car mixed reality game experience made by Mario Kart Live’s developer, Velan. Hot Wheels Drift Rally, arriving March 14 for $130, is an RC car video game that races around your real world. And just like Mario Kart Live, it’s a lot of fun.

You need a Switch to play Mario Kart Live, but Hot Wheels Drift Rally works with iPhones, iPads and the PlayStation 4 and 5. It can cross-play between them, either locally or with others online.

I played with Drift Rally for about an hour in New York. The concept is similar to Mario Kart Live: A camera-enabled RC car streams its point of view to your TV or Apple device. From there, you drive the car and see the real world augmented with all sorts of video game special effects and a glowing race track.

The twist with Drift Rally is that the car itself, a sort of futuristic compact race car called the «Chameleon Car,» can transform in-game into 140 different Hot Wheels cars. It works weirdly well. Even though the physical car drives around your home the same way, in-game you see a different car appear, along with different driving physics and speeds.

Much like Mario Kart Live, the camera-equipped car works along with four included gates that form marker waypoints for your real-world race track. These get dropped down anywhere, and then the car drives through them and anywhere else to «paint» a track. Once that’s done, augmented reality effects sprout up all around, along with virtual race car opponents, to make a race experience that’s in your actual home.

The experience, zooming through your real world and floor-level obstacles as if you’ve been shrunken down to toy size, feels like a car-based version of drone racing. Drift Rally’s mix of TV via PlayStation or iPhone/iPad controls flexes the experience out around your home in a similar way that the Switch’s Mario Kart Live could work on-Switch or with the TV dock.

Drift Rally has some key improvements over Mario Kart Live: it can work at larger and smaller scales. By also connecting with Wi-Fi networks instead of just your iPhone, iPad or PlayStation, the cars can work across larger home spaces: I drove my car all through a four-room apartment while sitting on a sofa, watching my race car zip under beds and around kitchen cabinets. Besides the race modes, there are also stunt modes that could be set up without all the big race gates, meaning you could possibly play around in a smaller corner of your home more easily. Still, these cars are big; much bigger than your everyday Hot Wheels car. They’re roughly the size of the Mario Kart Live cars, and run for about 2 hours on a charge.

Drift Rally works with up to four car racers at once in the same room, or has split-screen multiplayer with one real car and everyone else driving virtual ones that can collide with the RC car on the race track. But, like Mario Kart Live, the cars aren’t meant to be used outdoors unless they’re on a flat driveway. (They’re not made to handle debris, dirt and water.)

At $130 — or $150 for a «deluxe» version that also comes with an actual collector’s Hot Wheels car — this game is more expensive than Mario Kart Live, which cost $100 at launch. But if you don’t have a Nintendo Switch and want to try to shrink yourself down into a mixed-reality RC racing game, this looks like your best bet.

Technologies

The Most Exciting Video Game Rumors and Leaks Ahead of 2026

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, Dec. 17

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Dec. 17.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Nod (off)
Answer: DOZE

5A clue: Naval submarine in W.W. II
Answer: UBOAT

7A clue: Tricky thing to do on a busy highway
Answer: MERGE

8A clue: Heat-resistant glassware for cooking
Answer: PYREX

9A clue: Put into groups
Answer: SORT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Break up with
Answer: DUMP

2D clue: Falls in line, so to speak
Answer: OBEYS

3D clue: Legendary vigilante who cuts a «Z» with his sword
Answer: ZORRO

4D clue: Rarin’ to go
Answer: EAGER

6D clue: Common reminder for an upcoming appointment
Answer: TEXT

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Technologies

You Can Watch an Exclusive Avatar: Fire and Ash Scene on TikTok Right Now

Disney and TikTok partner on an immersive content hub for James Cameron’s latest movie about the alien Na’vi.

If you’re not quite ready to head to the theater to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash, an exclusive scene preview might sell you on the visual spectacle. As part of a new collaboration with the social media giant, Disney is posting snippets of its new movie to its TikTok account.

This scene isn’t part of any trailer and won’t be posted to other social media accounts, making TikTok the only place you can view it — unless you buy a movie ticket. A first look at the new movie’s scenes isn’t the only Avatar-related bonus on the social media platform right now, either. TikTok has partnered with the house of mouse to bring an entire «immersive content hub» to the app.

A special section of TikTok includes quizzes and educational videos that explore the alien world of Pandora shown off in the movies. On TikTok, you can take a personality quiz to find out what Na’vi clan you most closely align with and unlock a special profile picture border to use on your account.

Science and fiction blend together with a series of videos from real doctors who explain the basis for some of Avatar’s world-building. If you want to learn about exoplanets or how realistic the anatomy of the movie’s alien animals is, these videos will feed your brain while still providing entertainment value.

Perhaps the most enticing part of Disney’s latest social media collaboration is the opportunity for fans to win prizes and trips. TikTok creators who make edits with the #TikTokAvatarContest hashtag are entered into a competition to win Avatar merchandise. The biggest winners will be able to take a trip to visual effects studio Wētā Workshop in New Zealand or visit Avatar director James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment Studio in Los Angeles.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third installment in director Cameron’s cinematic passion project. While the first Avatar movie was released in 2009, Cameron didn’t release another entry in the franchise until 2022. In total, there is a five-movie arc planned for the indigo alien Na’vi on the moon of Pandora.

The Avatar movies are known for pushing the boundaries of CGI visual effects in cinema. They are also historically big winners at the box office: the original Avatar is the highest-grossing film of all time, earning $2.9 billion across its theatrical releases. Its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, is the third-highest-grossing film of all time, trailing Avengers: Endgame. You can stream those movies on Disney Plus.

It remains to be seen whether Avatar: Fire and Ash will financially live up to its predecessors. The film currently has mixed reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.