Technologies

Marvel Rivals’ Sharknado Team-Up Ability Cements the Game’s Fun Direction

This is a wacky, wild superhero game at its core — and superheroes aren’t perfectly balanced.

In Marvel Rivals Season 2.5, team-up abilities are going full camp. Keep your head down, because the sharknado is coming to gobble you up — and resistance is futile.

The Season 2 balance patch was the first one to make wide-reaching changes to the game’s iconic team-up abilities, and the midseason patch is about to arrive with a similar shakeup. Gone are the days of the Punisher’s infinite ammo and Spider-Man’s symbiote one-shot combo.

Now, Jeff the Shark can combine his ultimate ability with Storm’s tornado as a nod to one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen — and the little land shark can also team up with Venom to heal nearby teammates through symbiotic tendrils. Yes, that evil shark is getting two new team-up abilities in a single patch. It’s the type of lopsided favoritism that keeps me up at night.

These team-ups are fun ideas, but based on the team compositions I see in Diamond and above, I’d venture to guess they won’t get much playtime in highly competitive matches — even with these cooperative boosts, Jeff just doesn’t compete with more effective strategists. Instead, I think these gimmicks are here because what seems like publisher NetEase’s real No. 1 priority is providing different outlets for players to let loose as their favorite superheroes.

Maintaining the Marvel power fantasy

Marvel Rivals is first and foremost a game about stepping into the shoes of some of the most popular superheroes in the world. Comic books are a great storytelling medium — but they’re also a visual spectacle that will just as often fall back on the «rule of cool.»

It wouldn’t feel right playing as Wolverine if you didn’t have access to the iconic Fastball Special, where he’s picked up and tossed like a football by Colossus (or in Rivals, by Hulk or Thing). Giving up your autonomy to another player rarely goes well, and it’s not like the ability is all that useful — unless you’re one of the best players in the world with Rocket Raccoon’s rocket boots — but it’s an integral part of Wolverine’s combat style.

The same principle applies to Captain America and the Winter Soldier. These characters have known each other for nearly a century. They grew up together in Brooklyn. They’re going to combine their combat styles in a special move.

Is the reverberating slam between Bucky’s metal arm and Steve’s vibranium shield all that great? Not really, because Bucky likely has to be out of position to make use of it. But it’s extremely cool to use and makes players feel like they’re more fully embodying these characters.

That brings us to what will surely be the game’s most infamous combo. The Jeff-nado started out as a Marvel Rivals community joke, and now it’s going to be a real team-up. How often will Storm and Jeff realistically combine their ultimate abilities? I can’t imagine seeing it in many games, but the interaction exists for Jeff players that want to ride the lightning, and that is quite simply cool.

NetEase has designed a game where not every team-up ability should be expected to reshape the entire meta, and I think that’s a great thing. What matters to the developers is that you’re able to enjoy experiencing gameplay for Marvel heroes that isn’t replicated elsewhere.

Each update provides clarity on Marvel Rivals’ competitive mode

If imaginative power fantasy is NetEase’s No. 1 priority, that means the competitive balance of Marvel Rivals takes a backseat. And that’s OK — there are folks who argue that the incessant changes, nerfs and reworks to Overwatch characters have made them less fun over the years, especially oddballs like Sombra and Mercy that are very different from their original incarnations.

Counter to what a game community’s sweatiest players might say, a game is fine when it’s unbalanced. It’s fun to have abilities that aren’t as useful as others, but are super bombastic and flashy. It’s OK to have characters that just won’t make the cut in higher levels of play. There have long been signs that Marvel Rivals is not being designed as a hyper-competitive game — there don’t seem to be Overwatch League-level ambitions at work here.

Marvel Rivals’ competitive system has been criticized since launch, with many players reaching ranks as high as grandmaster with a sub-50% win rate. The rank distribution is extremely generous compared with other games (like Overwatch), and many players who actively play competitive matches will gravitate toward the top.

The recent introduction of Chrono Shield Cards has made it even easier to escape the lower skill brackets, and games in the middle ranks like Platinum and Diamond sometimes feel like a coin flip depending on how skilled the players that queue into the game are. The skill gap between players in each rank is far too wide, and that seems to be how the system is intended to function.

But that relaxed vision for the game may not last, as it seems like NetEase wants to have its cake and eat it too. The Marvel Rivals Ignite 2025 tournament is being backed with a smooth $3 million prize pool. Funky team-ups and a more casual ranked ladder are one thing, but that’s serious money, and it signals that NetEase wants players to get serious about winning.

Marvel Rivals is moving in two distinct directions at once. The actual patches lead me to believe that the developers want this game to be fun first, balancing it around unique hero ability interactions and lower-ranked casual play that the presumed majority of players will experience. The tournament money and the player culture are heavier stuff, and there are a lot of people who want to compete to be the best in Marvel Rivals.

Trying to split the difference will lead the game down a path that ends in an identity crisis. It happened to Overwatch before, and Marvel Rivals isn’t immune to falling into the same traps. If the Jeff-nado is any indication of things to come, I hope the devs at NetEase stick to their guns and keep balancing the game around the Marvel power fantasy rather than prioritize competitive balance for high-tier tournament players and One Above All-ranked streamers.

Technologies

I Used to Tell People Wi-Fi 7 Routers Were a Waste of Money. CNET’s Lab Data Just Proved Me Wrong

Technologies

My Camera Test: Comparing the $499 Pixel 10A With the Galaxy S25 FE, Motorola Edge

The Pixel 10A’s cameras are similar to those on the 9A, but it still performs quite well compared to other phones in its price range.

Google’s $499 Pixel 10A uses nearly the same cameras as last year’s Pixel 9A, but I wanted to see how its photos directly match up to its midrange Android rivals: the $650 Samsung Galaxy S25 FE and the $550 Motorola Edge.

I traveled with all three phones around St. Petersburg, Florida, checking how flexible each was in different environments, from bright outdoor settings to an indoor coffee shop and an evening brewery. All three environments can be challenging for the small image sensors on each phone.

While I find the cameras on all three phones to have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the setting, I’m quite impressed with how the Pixel 10A keeps up. In my tests, the photos include lots of detail, even though certain settings appear to involve a lot of processing to improve them.

Wide and telephoto cameras

Starting with photos taken on the sidewalk in downtown St. Petersburg, I notice that all three phones handle bright sunlight slightly differently, especially how it’s depicted on the street.

For the Pixel 10A, the sun provides a slight exposure mark over the Bay First sign at the top of the frame, but it remains fairly cordoned off to focus on the rest of the streetscape. Zooming in, you can see the Century 21 location, but the street is captured in the most detail, with the phone’s camera maintaining its natural gray color.

For both the Galaxy S25 FE and the Motorola Edge, the sun has a more pronounced effect on the rest of the image. The pavement’s color is notably brighter. I also find both the S25 FE and the Edge have slightly more clarity on the business signs on the Bay First building, including the aforementioned Century 21 logo.

Since the S25 FE and the Edge each include a telephoto camera that supports 3x optical zoom, I took a photo at that zoom with each phone. The Pixel 10A uses digital zoom on the phone’s 48-megapixel wide camera, but a lot of the scene’s detail remains preserved.

The Pixel’s zoom photo provides a clear view of the 7th St N sign, the trees and the plants. However, if you look further back at the next intersection, you’ll notice that the 7th St S sign and the Colony Grill are much harder to see. It’s those smaller details that are captured by the S25 FE and the Edge, both aided by telephoto cameras, making them more visible.

Of the three zoom photo examples, I feel like the S25 FE has the best color reproduction while also retaining details like the signs further back. Even though the photo was taken with the S25 FE’s 8-megapixel telephoto camera rather than its 50-megapixel wide camera, the colors remain complementary when comparing the 1x to the 3x. Meanwhile, the Edge’s 10-megapixel telephoto camera looks quite a bit different from the 50-megapixel wide camera — the whole image has a more yellowish hue.

Ultrawide cameras

Moving inside the Southern Grounds coffee shop, I decided to use the ultrawide cameras to capture my sausage, egg and cheese on toast. The three photos came out wildly different.

The Pixel 10A’s 13-megapixel ultrawide and S25 FE’s 12-megapixel ultrawide have a more balanced set of colors and details, in my opinion. The wheat toast appears lighter in the Pixel’s photo than in the darker hues captured by both the S25 FE and the Edge.

When zooming into my notebook, however, the Pixel and S25 FE captured more of the page markings, details that blur together more in the photo taken by the Edge. While the Edge’s 50-megapixel ultrawide camera is a higher-spec number, I noticed it had a harder time distinguishing toast levels, giving more of it a darker look. If I hadn’t eaten it myself, I’d have thought it was burned based on the Edge’s photo.

Night photography

Moving over to a nighttime setting, I used the three phones to take photos outside of 3 Daughters Brewing. I felt like all three did a decent job at producing the colors of the building, but they differ in how they handle light sources.

Both the Pixel and the S25 FE tone back the glare produced by the various lighting fixtures. Meanwhile, the Edge’s photos show noticeable streaks that dominate the sky. When inspecting the photos more closely, I find that the Galaxy captured a sharper view of the furniture, like in the Connect 4 set next to the blue chairs in the center of the frame. The same details are visible in the Pixel’s and the Edge’s depictions of the scene, but they appear smudgy by comparison.

This type of scene needs to take advantage of a phone’s processing power in order to iron out visibility issues, and I do find that the Edge appears to come up short here in this regard, with a lot of noticeable image noise.

Selfies

Each phone takes selfies with noticeable differences in style and color choices. For this test example, I’m in a well-lit daytime room with natural light from a window. The 12-megapixel front-facing camera on Google’s Pixel 10A brightened up my face as if there was a light in front of me, and captured a decent amount of the details of my hair and face.

The front-facing camera on Samsung’s Galaxy S25 FE shows a noticeably darker color tone, but it still captures a similar shade of orange on the wall behind me. Of the three photos, I felt like the S25 captures the most details, including strands of hair, and defaulted to a closer crop than the other two.

The photos taken by the 50-megapixel selfie camera on the Motorola Edge feel a bit smoothed out. The orange color on the wall is noticeably different from the Pixel and the S25 FE, though it does capture a lot of my face details, from hair strands to the fabric textures on my shirt.

The $499 Pixel 10A camera keeps up and, in some cases, exceeds the detail captured by the slightly more expensive $550 Motorola Edge and $650 Galaxy S25 FE. I’m quite impressed by how the Pixel camera handles colors and low-light environments, but the phone’s processing work sometimes makes scenes appear brighter than they are in real life.

The Galaxy S25 FE is no slouch either, with a third telephoto lens for capturing more detail farther away. While I did find the Motorola Edge to struggle in low light, it is one of the lowest-cost phone options currently available for someone who must have a 3x optical telephoto camera.

But if you can live without the telephoto lens, the Pixel 10A’s low cost and photography abilities will likely be a good fit for most people.

Google’s Pixel 10A Looks Stylish for a Low-Cost Flagship Phone

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for March 14 #741

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 14, No. 741.

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

Does today’s date seem memorable to you? If so, today’s NYT Strands puzzle might be easy. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: A math teacher’s favorite dessert.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: 3.14

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

RITE, SPIT, TIPS, STAT, STATE, GIVE, RUST, FINE, LAZE, SURE, PEAL

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

VENT, CRUST, FRUIT, EDGES, GLAZE, FILLING, LATTICE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is HAPPYPIDAY. To find it, start with the H that’s six rows down and three to the right from the upper-left corner, and make — well, a pie shape.