Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of mirror-image Internet data transfers, Motorola’s prototype physical augmentations, and a whole bunch of Xbox One heehawing.

This week in Xbox One: Scandals, rumours, unverifiable sources, and a whole lot of hyperbole

Xbox One will be region locked, “Similar to the movie and music industry, games must meet country-specific regulatory guidelines before they are cleared for sale,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We will continue to work with our partners to follow these guidelines with Xbox One.” It is unclear whether or not the PS4 will be region locked.

The Federal Data Protection Commissioner in Germany Peter Schaar has publically stated that he personally considers the Xbox One a “monitoring device,” which “continuously records all sorts of personal information…[including] reaction rates, my learning or emotional states. They are then processed on an external server, and possible even passed on to third parties. Whether they will ever be deleted, the person can not influence.” While it is hoped that this is merely a hyperbolic overreaction, there is currently very little factual information available. (Translation provided by Google Translate)

Microsoft have added 30,000 servers to Xbox Live, which will be used to improve graphical and gameplay performance for Xbox One titles. GPU- and CPU-heavy tasks that aren’t bound by latency (such as cloth or water rendering) can be sent off to the server farm, pre-calculated, and then applied to the scene by the console. According to GM of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms at Microsoft, Matt Booty, the Xbox One server cloud will provide three virtual devices for “every Xbox One available in your living room.” Developers will need to manage how their titles make use of this remote grunt. This means that games may look better when the console is online, though Booty notes that if the Internet drops out mid-session, “the game is going to have to intelligently handle that.”

TweakTown has posted a specs comparison between the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and just for kicks, the Xbox 360. It seems that the PS4 has the lead when it comes to pure theoretical performance, but if the mere fact of the current console generation’s continued performance—eight years after its inception—is anything to go by, what really matters is the dedication to each platform shown by the developers. The Xbox 360 is far less capable than the PS3 on paper, and yet still performs admirably despite its aged and inferior interior.

Microsoft may well get a little more than a taste of pre-owned Xbox One game sales. According to a report over at MCV, retailers that wish to sell pre-owned Xbox One games will need to agree to certain terms and conditions, and hand over almost the entire trade-in price to Microsoft. Unconfirmed reports from ConsoleDeals.co.uk claim that retailers will get to keep less than 10% of the trade-in price, which is apparently £35. It should be noted that since this report was published, Microsoft’s Major Nelson has officially, albeit unsatisfyingly responded, “The ability to trade in and resell games is important to gamers and to Xbox. Xbox One is designed to support the trade in and resale of games. Reports about our policies for trade in and resale are inaccurate and incomplete. We will disclose more information in the near future.”

Microsoft have filed for a patent to use Kinect 2 to enable ‘visual DRM’, or “content distribution regulation by viewing user.” After reports from unverified “industry sources,” Microsoft have officially responded, “Microsoft regularly applies for and receives patents as part of its business practice; not all patents applied for or received will be incorporated into a Microsoft product.”

Speaking of patents, Microsoft have also filed for a patent covering the ability to mete out sweet, sweet achievements and Gamerscore points for watching television.

(Thanks Stefan!)

Motorola show off prototype physical augmentations at D11

Motorola have developed two “wearable” technologies which may stretch the definition of the term, somewhat. The closest product to the definition is a prototype electronic tattoo which includes “an antenna and a couple of circuits,” that the Google-owned electronics manufacturer hopes to use as a proximity-based authenticator. Former DARPA head, and now SVP for advanced technology and projects at Motorola, Regina Dugan, was sporting the tattoo on her arm during her presentation at the D11 conference. The second, and slightly crazier prototype is a pill that includes a chip which, when swallowed, is powered by your stomach acid and transmits an 18-bit signal, effectively turning your entire person into an “authentication token.” Dugan called the technology “vitamin authentication.” According to Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside, the pill has been approved by the FDA.

Noise-cancelling the Internet could be the key to higher speeds and greater reliability

Noise-cancelling headphones work by using a microphone to capture external low-frequency sound waves, such as the low rumble of a plane’s engines, and playing those sound waves exactly as they’re heard through the headphones. The trick is in inverting the noise to its phase conjugate, putting the sound waves 180 degrees out of phase with the intruding waves, thus effectively cancelling out the noise altogether. Researchers have discovered that a similar method could be used to reduce noise in fibre optic communications, thus increasing the speed of those transmissions, and making them more reliable. Lead researcher Xiang Liu and his associates found that sending original data along with its phase conjugate made filtering out noise a simple matter, without having to add expensive and complicated monitoring systems to the existing Internet infrastructure. The team was able to reliably send data at 400Gbps over a distance of 12,800 kilometres. The reduction in errors increases bandwidth by reducing the need to resent failed packets.

Google rolling out new Gmail Inbox, introduces tabs

Before tabbed browsing was a thing, the Internet was a much darker place. Whether you were a casual or advanced user, the introduction of tabs to our web browsing experience changed it for the better. Well, now Google hope to do the same thing to Gmail with the new Gmail Inbox. The new Gmail Inbox utilises five tabs which essentially ‘pre-sort’ your email into their respective categories: Primary, Social, Promotions, and Updates. Users can drag and drop messages into tabs to move them around, and manually set specific senders to always appear in a certain tab. Starred messages from any tab will also appear in the Primary tab. Users can choose which of the tabs they wish to use with their inbox, or opt to turn them all off and continue unabated. The new paradigm is set to gradually roll out to desktop, Gmail for Android 4.0+, and Gmail for iPhone and iPad in the coming weeks, as is Google’s wont for the release of new features.

When the bullets are flying thick and fast like swarms of flies with knives, I don’t like being out there by myself. I want a brotatoe at my side. Not only do the odds of being killed by a knife-fly go from 100% to 50% (maybe 25% if the brotatoe in question is really into potatoes, fried ones) but there may come a time when I would prefer not to stab-tackle a madman strapped with bombs through a plate glass window and would instead like Frank Woods to do it for me.

Many such brotatoes have similarly saved my ass with their badass, but after much ado about eating chips and thinking, I have realised my fave brotatoe is not a bro at all, but a sister.

“Sistatoe” does not have the same tremendous ring to it, but then Jack is kind of a boy. I can count the number of times I left the Normandy without her on no hands. Bald head-bump, let’s ride. Many brotatoes sprouted to mind during the making of this featurette, and maybe they say too much about the company I tend to keep: I was never without Sten in Dragon Age (his way of life intrigued and challenged me), or Isabela in Dragon Age II (her way of life really intrigued me).

Whiskey Rose hung out all the way across New Vegas (anyone who drinks so much even cannibals are wary of her is someone I can relate to), and even though he was kind of a gross old guy, props to Jericho for embodying the conscience of the post-apocalypse. Sometimes you need a gross old guy to… tell you… what to do. OK.

But Jack is like all my favourite people IRL. Moody, emo, detached. These are not qualities most people desire in another person but to me they suggest other things. An empathy for that kind of stuff springs from realising nobody is like that by default, and I really like stories about intergalactic drug abuse and group sex. I’d hang out downstairs in engineering for hours, man, until it got weird and she didn’t want to tell me the sordid details anymore in favour of leaning on her knees in a cool way. God, what a woman. I took her everywhere.

It got to the point where the sound of her Eviscerator (suits her, huh?) going off in a Krogan’s balls became soothing and I would relax and sigh, “Ahh.” I wouldn’t have stood through minutes of confusing childhood psychosis and anomalous weather on Pragia for just anyone. It’s a strange thing when a video game can render people you know and j’adore so familiarly and show them how to use guns.

And so my favourite brotatoe is a bald girl with excessive Force powers and impractical bras, and not a bro at all: Jack. Just Jack. Good gal. Help me think of a new term for her. Some kind of riff on “sister,” maybe. Sisterectomy? Uh. We didn’t get down, if you’re wondering. Seriously, it was platonic. It was. It would’ve been uncomfortable, like, try to think of your best mate like that. Yeah I know right? You feel strange.

I’d like to thank steve_rogers42 for the term “brotatoe.”

You know what I love? Games where I don’t have to save the world. Or the universe. Or the country. I love games where the stakes are something more personal and mundane. Games that have a story that just has me deal with one person’s problems as they go about their life. Rather than being uneventful or boring, it is these stories that I feel most emotionally attached to.

The vast majority of mainstream games are about saving a large, indefinite number of people from some fundamental, massive evil. Either I have to save the planet from some evil intergalactic force, or I have to save America from evil communists, or I have to save the entire universe from some god-like evil being. Sometimes this is a direct story event—a timer is counting down until the nuclear missiles are launched. Often, it is more indirect — let the bad guy get away with this stolen technology and it will mean a new world order!

Undeniably, there are plenty of great games in this save-the-world archetype. But it’s just so… easy. Want to make your audience care about a story? Tell them everybody is going to die. It’s the lazy way out.

The problem with it, for me, is it often becomes abstract. Individual characters and their personal stories are overshadowed by large, abstract, depersonalised objects like ‘Earth’ or ‘The Universe’ or ‘America’. The stakes aren’t bigger, they are just more abstract. You can only care about the planet blowing up so much.

Instead, I love those games that focus on the personal stories. The stories that most of the world won’t even notice, but which might mean life-or-death for the individuals at the center of it. Even though the stakes in these games might be more mundane, the face they are more personal helps me to be more emotionally evolved in the story.

It’s something that has always attracted me to Rockstar’s games. I love how Grand Theft Auto IV is just about this one guy in a massive city that couldn’t care less about him or his woes. Nothing Niko Bellic does, no matter how absurd or bombastic, ever puts the entire city at risk, never drastically effects Liberty City. Life in the city just keeps going, with or without him.

Even as Max Payne 3 progresses and secret conspiracies are revealed, the story and who it effects is still contained to a knowable region and group of people. With Max, I go through all the ridiculous, over-the-top action I might with any other videogame character, but instead of saving the entire world, I’m just trying to save a few people and kill a few others.

I was not a big fan of LA Noire’s gameplay. But even still, I became engaged enough with the story to see it through to the end, simply because it was so contained. There were characters I could attach to and empathise with. I was able to tolerate the gameplay that wasn’t really for me because there was something personal for me to become emotionally attached to in the story. I wasn’t just going through the motions to save the world like I do in so many games. I was doing something that was meaningful for a few people.

And that’s why I love not saving the world. Each of these games have a story with knowable, human characters with knowable, human problems. I find it much easier to connect with and empathise with one person than I do with ‘the entire world’. Raising the stakes to a save-the-world level can create amazing set pieces for a game, to be sure, but it can also lose those characters that allow us to connect with a story in the first place. Sometimes it is just so refreshing to just be driving around a town solving a murder. It’s more mundane, but it is also more personal.

The writing was always on the wall: the minute you start abusing your own fans, whatever respect, whatever favours you had courted up to that point, begins to disappear very quickly.

That was the situation Greg “IdrA” Fields found himself in recently after describing fans on the TeamLiquid forums as “a bunch of *****”, and that he was “paid” to treat fans as such. Before the sun had set, Evil Geniuses booted the American Zerg, an iconic player on their roster for the last three years, out the door.

EG CEO Alex Garfield put it very simply. “There’s a very big difference between a player being disrespectful to an opponent in a ladder match, and a player being disrespectful to the entire community of people who, via their own enthusiasm and passion for the entertainment product he creates, actually make his profession possible,” Garfield posted on TeamLiquid.

But Fields’ termination was merely the final act for a long-running series of mental complications, which ranged from videos of Fields abusing opponents to him throwing away games unnecessarily. EG even hired a sports psychologist to address the issues, although Fields revealed he only met with the therapist once, she didn’t really have any interest in eSports and that no progress was made.

Fields was a troubled individual. Even in his Brood War days, he was a moody, disconsolate character, traits that were highlighted even more after his switch to StarCraft 2. He didn’t like the game as much as its predecessor, and didn’t respect it nor the people who played.

EG, the behemoth that it is, could not help their once-bright star through the issues. Perhaps what Fields needed was an actual psychologist, one better trained to help him with his anger. Instead of focusing on the performance, maybe the money was better spent treating what troubled Fields as a human.

But I digress. Discussing the mental anguish and the many trials and tribulations of one of the StarCraft community’s most popular, and polarising, characters is not the point of this week’s column

What I find more interesting is where Fields goes from here. He’s already announced his intention to take a backseat from competitive gaming, although he’s continued to stream in the interim. His severance from EG will certainly help: the pro-gaming team have generously decided to pay his rent for an entire year.

I still remember cheering on EG’s Canadian Counter-Strike team almost a decade ago. The film that covered some of that team’s journey was called About Average, an apt description for the team’s international standing. And yet EG is now wealthy enough to be able to afford an extravagance others could only dream of. How times have changed.

Fields reportedly turned down a scholarship in theoretical physics when he moved to South Korea to join the eSTRO pro-gaming team. That career path is undoubtedly gone now, although several years of study may alter the equation somewhat.

It’s a problem faced by pro-gamers all over the world. Dreams of playing in The International, the League of Legends Championship Series, the Global StarCraft 2 League and more prestigious, global tournaments entrance gamers from a very young age.

Despite the guffaws from some, it is legitimately possible to earn a living from pro-gaming. The bigger problem is that there’s no support network for former players, and the drop off from a lucrative contract with a major team to the dole queue is difficult.

What do you do when gaming has been the sole focus of your life? The skills aren’t translatable in a way that opens doors; sure, there are plenty of lessons to be learned about dealing with pressure, decision-making, working in a team environment, coping with difficult situations and so on. But they don’t equate to a degree, a diploma, or something that can sit proudly on a resume.

The mental stresses faced by Fields are not insignificant, and they should be discussed at length to help others face their own demons. But they pale in comparison to the abyss that gamers years from now will be diving head-first into.

Header image courtesy MLG.

Who wanta some Wang? I was hoping, just maybe, that iconic line would make it into the just-announced reboot of Shadow Warrior.

It did not. Instead, we were treated to an artsy video with butterflies and classical music that had no relation whatsoever to the original. What a waste.

Last fortnight, I looked at the class action lawsuit over Aliens: Colonial Marines.  Before release, such a big deal was made out of “staying true to the Aliens universe”. Yeah, well. We all know how that turned out.

Clearly, staying true to the spirit of an IP is hard… really hard. Some developers do manage, such as Firaxis’ excellent remake of XCOM. But most will fail miserably, like Aliens: Colonial Marines. It’s time then, to look at what actually ensures these remakes and IP games are actually true to the franchise.

An interested licensor with commercial trademarks is the strongest protection

Trademarks are the strongest level of protection, providing the best way to ensure something stays true to the source.

Games Workshop is notorious for its trademarks, owning everything about Warhammer and every way to mangle “space marines” in the Queen’s English (for the original DOS-version of Space Hulk, they even had Jervis Johnson do the voiceovers).

These trademarks give Games Workshop a lot of control over where and how each trademark is used. While it doesn’t quite explain why Dawn of War 2 ended up as Necromunda in Space, for the most part Games Workshop is both rabid and successful at ensuring its trademarks are used to represent its current revision of the Warhammer universes (and I do mean revision).

When an interested company like Games Workshop does grant permission, their will is enforced by extra bureaucracy during the game’s development. Typically, they will have say in the various development milestones. If a game does not stay true to the source material, the licensor (i.e. Games Workshop) has the power to put it on hold until it does, lest the permissions be revoked.

Gun names are iffy

Earlier this month, EA decided it would no longer seek permission for using the names of guns. Up to this point, publishers have almost universally sought permission from manufacturers to use the real names of guns.

However, licensing of guns is uncertain. This was shown when Colt sued Bushmaster (a rival manufacturer) over the use of the “M4” name. Despite Colt owning the M4 name, and being the actual inventor of the gun, Bushmaster was allowed to keep using the name. It’s for this reason that EA would be going forward with its decision. Gun names just aren’t as protected as assumed ever since Goldeneye 64 renamed the Walther PPK to the PP7.

The first issue is that there is a difference between the gun’s trademark and the military’s designation. For example, the Barrett M82 is the rifle’s trademarked commercial name. M107 is the military designation and is not trademarked. Similarly, even though Colt owns the M4 trademark, the military designation is very close—M4A1.

The second issue is that such widespread use of the M4 has led to the M4A1 (the not trademark) being shortened into the slang term M4 (the trademark) to describe a carbine. When this happens, a trademark is in danger of becoming generic and losing its protection, as happened with M4.

I can’t say for certain whether EA will get away with it, but gun manufacturers won’t be happy. In some cases, licensing fees for guns could approach many thousands of dollars, even as much as five to ten percent of a game’s retail sales.

There’s also the issue that these licensing agreements have in the past given gun manufacturers some creative control over games. Under Barrett’s licensing agreements, for example, you can’t put the M82 in the hands of the non-American bad guys. But with EA leading the way, now we might see all manner of modern-day commies wielding high-powered sniper rifles.

So what happened with Colonial Marines?

So erm… if IP owners can have such control over the direction of a game, what did happen with Colonial Marines? As we’ve heard before, no one bothered to check up on how it was going. Gearbox was too busy with Borderlands, while Sega seemed out of the loop entirely.

This shows an important flipside to licensing. Usually, licensing is maligned, for completely opposite reasons. Movie licensed games are often bad because of the tight deadlines imposed on the game, or the license takes too much money away from the game’s development.

In the case of Aliens: Colonial Marines, however, the problems came from no oversight at all being applied by the owner of the IP. I was unable to find out who this is, but they had a great chance to ensure the game was up to scratch, by writing milestone agreements and checkups into the licensing agreement.

They didn’t, however, and what we got was the final result of their neglect—treating the Aliens IP as an asset to be flogged off rather than ensuring the proper creative development. They, along with Gearbox, and Sega, are to blame for what happened. In the balance of everything, all franchises should be so lucky to have the Emperor’s lawyers dictating the correct way to pronounce speesh marines.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the wholesale price of the GTX 780, 3D printed food, and bomb-loving bees.

GeForce GTX 780 early US pricing revealed

TechPowerUp is reporting that US distributor SYNNEX is offering Nvidia’s upcoming GeForce GTX 780 to retailers for US$644.44. After margins are applied by retailers, TPU estimate that the card could be priced anywhere between US$650-700. Once we apply the Australia Tax, it would be safe to guess that the price could end up being more like $750-800 for Australian consumers. The screenshot of the distributor’s site included in the report confirms specifications: CUDA core count of 2,304, 3GB of memory, GPU Boost 2.0 technology, and a very similar design to the GTX TITAN.

Could 3D printed food end world hunger at the cost of world taste?

Last week we saw burgers grown in labs, this week we have 3D printed food. Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor’s vision is to see every kitchen equipped with a 3D printer, with which the people of the Earth construct for themselves fully customised and nutritionally-appropriate meals, layer by layer. Contractor’s system is based on the RepRap 3D printer, and uses a series of cartridges filled with powders and oils to build meals that are perfectly appropriate to the consumer’s dietary requirements, whether they be elderly, pregnant, sick, or incredibly fit. The powders act as the basic building blocks of food, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, Omega 3, and Calcium, building blocks that we traditionally consume by finding palatable meats and vegetables that contain them.

As the system delivers these building blocks in powder form, palatability is less of a concern, meaning that they could be harvested from algae, grass, seeds, and even insects. The powders have a shelf life of 30 years, which means that Contractor’s system would eliminate food waste if universally used, thanks to the fact that each cartridge would be returned to the store only once it was completely spent. NASA has provided Contractor’s company with a $125,000 grant to build a prototype.

Green screens required to bring Arrested Development cast together for season 4

Netflix announced in January that it would be bringing season 4 of Arrested Development to the service in May 2013. Given the years since season 3, the extremely busy cast has moved on to other projects, and is subsequently very difficult to assemble. To remedy this for the production of Season 4, creator Mitch Hurwitz said in an interview with Rolling Stone that episodes were shot out of order, and that “half of the stuff is on green screen.” For example, a particular conversation between Michael (Jason Bateman) and Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) was filmed separately over the course of four months, with each actor filming their portion of the conversation in front of a green screen. The entire ensemble was able to come together for a single two-day shoot, however. Here’s hoping that the production difficulties necessary to bring together one of television’s most hilariously dysfunctional families only adds to their performance.

The ‘paperless scanner’ makes scanning feel like the future

The combination of two cameras, a small projector, and some clever software is all it has taken for Japan’s technology giant, Fujitsu, to create a digital scanner which allows the user to take snapshots of physical media with little more than the touch of a finger. The user is able to draw a bounding box with their finger around the desired image or block of text on the page, and the device captures it and makes it available for digital manipulation. While this doesn’t differ wildly from the capabilities of a more traditional scanner, the interface is undeniably future-y, with its fanciful projected scanning line, and digital reproduced content flying off the page.

How honeybees learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University in Croatia is working on a method for training the common honeybee to seek out unexploded land mines. Despite the fact that the Balkan wars are long since finished, it is estimated that as many as 90,000 land mines are still randomly dotted around 1200sqkm of Croatian territory. Since the beginning of the Balkan war in 1991, more than 2500 people have died from land mine explosions. Professor Kezic’s theory for the training of the bees is founded in their incredibly fine sense of smell. Honeybees are capable of sniffing out and identifying a wide range of odorants.

In order to harness this, Professor Kezic’s team began introducing TNT particles to captive bees’ food, in the hope that the bees would begin to associate the smell of explosives with their next meal. This was tested by setting up multiple feeding points, some of which were laced with TNT, and letting the bees choose where to feed. More often than not, the bees chose the sugar water seasoned with explosives. The next hurdle for the team to face, according to Kezic, is that while the training of a single bee is relatively simple, “training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.”

I like to laugh because life is a dynamic experience and it can’t rain all the time. Nor can a man or woman or transgender individual laugh constantly either, because you would edge closer and closer to insanity in the eyes of everyone around you, especially if you were, IDK, at the vet putting the family dog to sleep forever. While I favour giggling over glowering, there are times and places whence a lad such as I need court the grim of drawing breath (please forgive me, I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire right now and I can’t stop talking like a halberd).

Most films, anime, and books I like are really serious and brutal, or really serious and foreign, or really serious and arthouse, and you get the picture: They’re really serious. I went to see the third Hangover movie last night and only laughed when I myself did a squeaky fart and the row of perfumed media professionals behind me chittered excitedly trying to work out if it had been what they knew in their hearts that it was. Subsequently, most games I like are also really serious.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy shooters so much. There’s a po-faced sincerity to them that I can really grind on even though sometimes it’s so po-faced it is actually funny. That’s kind of the point: Humour in the face of incredible adversity – oft accidental or incidental – is a VIP. It is the only kind of laughter I will allow into the gamecave during kill time. The Duke Nukems have to wait outside, they’re trying too hard. Please bear witness to this personal highlight:

Now whether that is amusing or not is fairly subjective, I suppose, but it is the candid way in which Jensen articulates the way this woman’s beloved daughter has perished that has made me laugh for one, maybe two weeks. I wake up laughing about it. I know right, you don’t want this life. It is so insensitive and inappropriate it’s glorious.

It might well be the exact kind of thing that happens in that exact situation, were a weary detective answering the queries of a forlorn mother in reality. I absolutely would not laugh at that. No way in hell. I wouldn’t even feel the impulse. That’s horrible, I’m not a 100% monster unless you fail to deliver unto me the Seven Kingdoms that are rightfully mine, dear sister, and wake the drago-

But I’ve realised that these instances in my serious gaming time have shone somewhat of a light over just how ridiculous it can be to be alive. Free from the actuality of bad things going down, there is mirth there that would never be uncovered otherwise. The tragic comedies of Shakesy wished they had have been video games, for their hopeless mission is one now accomplished – tripped over, even – by video games every hour on the hour.

Were it that some might accuse me of cresting a fine lens too close to the sun that lights to entertain and little else, I would opine they have taught me something about myself and the art of coping.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of Windows 8.1, Nintendo’s method of monetising fan videos, and the $325,000 burger that you probably wouldn’t want to eat.

Windows 8.1 is nigh, free, and feature-filled

The previously-named “Windows Blue” update for Windows 8 has been officially dubbed Windows 8.1, and will be released for free. According to a recent Microsoft press release, a public preview of Windows 8.1 will be made available via the Windows Store on June 26, to coincide with the 2013 Build conference in San Francisco. The major difference between Windows 8.1 and past service packs is that 8.1 will include a slew of unannounced new features and visual changes, the likes of which are traditionally reserved for major revisions.

In fact, Microsoft have been careful to avoid referring to Windows 8.1 as a “service pack” at all, further shoring up the fact that Windows 8 and the latest revision of Office are signs of a Microsoft that has finally learned that their decrepit licencing model won’t last, and that something needed to change in order to keep consumers buying into their latest and greatest releases.

Nintendo will forcibly add advertisements to amateur Let’s Play videos

The concept of the Let’s Play (LP) has been around for quite a while: lengthy videos of gameplay that are narrated by the player, which give viewers some deep insights into the featured game. As time has gone on these videos have become an incredibly valuable tool for gamers, as they show a lot of detail without being caged or focused by PR. It seems that Nintendo has finally come to this realisation itself, and reacted swiftly and harshly. Automated takedowns were issued by the venerable purveyor of family-focused games, which caused popular LP’er Zack Scott to complain loudly on Facebook about the situation, saying “It jeopardizes my channel’s copyright standing and the livelihood of all LPers”.

After his post was reported by GameFront, Nintendo responded officially stating that the blocks would stop, but that ads would be added to the videos, “For most fan videos this will not result in any changes, however, for those videos featuring Nintendo-owned content, such as images or audio of a certain length, adverts will now appear at the beginning, next to, or at the end of the clips. We continually want our fans to enjoy sharing Nintendo content on YouTube, and that is why, unlike other entertainment companies, we have chosen not to block people using our intellectual property.”

Google I/O 2013 heralds major new features for many Google products

Google’s annual I/O conference has rolled around again, and this year they have announced a set of new features and UI revisions for a large number of their products. As well as updated UIs for Google Plus, Google Music, and Google Play, the Mountain View crew has added All Access, a $9.99 per-month subscription service to Google Play that provides access to the entire Google Play music library in a fashion similar to Spotify and rdio; a new service called Hangouts which aims to unify all Google-based communications systems into a single platform for use on PC, and your mobile devices; “hot wording” replaces Google’s voice search, now all that is required to search with voice is to say “Hey Google…” at Chrome, and it should respond by performing a search based on what you say next.

A lot more was announced, the details of which can be found at this handy round-up at The Verge.

Eric Schmidt says ‘Don’t be evil’ was the “stupidest rule ever”

In more Google news, executive chairman Eric Schmidt has told National Public Radio that Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ rule is “the stupidest rule ever,” though the his reasoning isn’t as controversial as it sounds. More of a motto than a rule, ‘don’t be evil’ was designed to allow and remind staff to speak up when something that was potentially “evil” was being discussed at Google. According to Schmidt, the rule is stupid because the definition of evil is quite broad, “there’s no book about evil, except maybe, you know, the Bible or something.” This has apparently caused problems in the past, and he cites an example: “What happens is, I’m sitting in this meeting, and we’re having this debate about an advertising product. And one of the engineers pounds his fists on the table and says, that’s evil. And then the whole conversation stops, everyone goes into conniptions, and eventually we stopped the project. So it did work.”

It is also difficult for a large-scale business to avoid doing any evil whatsoever, as many common business practices could be easily classified as at least a ‘little bit evil’, such as dodging taxes by putting offices in countries like Bermuda to avoid millions of dollars’ worth of taxes each year. When NPR asked Schmidt whether he could “flip a switch on [his] office computer and read [our] emails,” Schmidt replied “Yes, and I would lose my job and be sued to death.” But would anyone even find out? “Someone would find out, trust me,” says Schmidt.

The $325,000 in-vitro burger

Do you like burgers? Are you worried about the impact your carnivorous tendencies are having on the world around you? Well, Dr. Mark Post of the Maastricht University in the Netherlands has come up with a method for obtaining meat that could one day have a positive impact on the world livestock industry. This might appeal to your conscience, but what about your appetite? Dr. Post’s method involves taking stem cells from the necks of cows obtained from slaughterhouses, and causing these precursor cells to transform into cells specific to muscle that is good for eating.

The process is adapted from that which tissue engineers use to grow tissue and organs for use in medical research and procedures. Reading into the procedure even a little bit was enough to turn this writer’s stomach, but if the idea of eating 20,000 strips of lab-cultured meat, grown in foetal calf serum, and packed into a US$325,000 burger patty which “tastes reasonably good” sounds good to you, go check out the New York Times explainer piece.

Have you ever taken a particular interest in a game that is, at base, really not that good and in fact pretty awful? I know some of you have, you Alpha Protocol-loving goons (AMBLE TOWARDS MY PERSON, BROTHERS). The reasons for this are strange but powerful, like whatever passes for Tyrion’s sex appeal. Something beyond the dodgy mechanics and screaming imperfection calls to your gamer’s soul, or maybe even beyond that too. There is a unique setting at play, or characters that speak louder than what follows before and after them, or a particular sheen of fantasy rarely – if ever – explored by the “brown” and “military” status quo.

All three of those things apply to one of my most enduring and troubled romances in vidya. You see, I love Clive Barker’s Jericho.

It is a titanic cleft of anus where many crumbs gather, and I love it. It treats me like the ass it is, and still I love it. I would do anything for it, even buy it for $12. This Jericho thing is overwrought to the point of already broken. If you’ve never played it, well, it’s a squad-based FPS and it has no idea what it’s doing. Your squaddies — of which there are six at the start of things, six! — are all dumb as hell and their favourite thing is getting killed by all the unusually tough black slime otakus around every bend and fork.

Your favourite thing, by extension, is to forget about trying to save their dumb lives with orders so limited – and spread across two sub-teams, no less – they could never manage this much bad AI in the first place. Basically, it’s Clive Barker’s Mystical Medic Simulator. Eventually you’re the only one left standing, ala a very early and ridiculously difficult scenario involving possessed pillboxes and, again, no idea. Then you have to do something. Die, most like.

I’m not really sure how much Clive Barker himself had to do with its construction, but it’s a severely meta apparition of my enjoyment of his authorial work too. Man, this guy is overwrought, just like this game. At times his writing is so flowery and flawed it really is almost unbearable. But I’ve read Cabal (or Nightbreed in movie form) about ten times. Why? Wasn’t sure, just loved it, but have an idea: What a great place it has created. Jericho creates a great place, explored by great characters of which you are an intrinsic part: a motley crew of supernatural X-Men who live clandestine and lethal lives, each with their own hang-ups and attitudes.

Sometimes I just wanna stand there looking at ‘em, poking at ‘em until they say something like, “Stop poking at me or I’ll fillet your pancreas.” Heaven. Church is my kinda lady.

Sticking with a game that’s bad is different to sticking with a movie or book. It has to really be doing something right not just to keep you there, but keep you wanting to be there. A bad game is actively annoying to the point of real frustration; you can’t sail through the pillbox bit like you would a cheesewheel moment of dialogue. In fact it took me hours and I’m still not sure how I beat it. Luck, maybe. That is atrocious game design – but weirdly, would it be maybe less tantalising if it wasn’t awful? I’m still hanging out in this abusive relationship. Guilty pleasures feel good.

You know what I love? Rough games. The games that have a personality bigger than their budget. The games that are by no means ‘perfect’ but which are full of great ideas. The games that, instead of being polished to a fine sheen, still have some jagged edges and, consequentially, a unique shape and a personal feel.

It has really only been in the last five years or so that rough games have even stood out. Before the current generation of consoles, there was a whole spectrum of quality and budget among videogames, from multi-gazillion dollar triple-A to shovelware to everything in between. But as production costs rose, the middle-ware became increasingly locked out of the game. Either you were a perfectly polished studio blockbuster, or some little indie game. There was little room left for anything in-between.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the middle-ware has maybe always still been there, but just became completely dwarfed by the omniscient presence and marketing of the big games.

Indeed, my favourite rough games of the past few years have been those games I play long after they came out. The games I’m most likely to play when they are are new are those with the biggest marketing budget when they first come out. Quite simply, those the games I’m inevitably most aware of. A year later, I think maybe I should try out those other games I heard of at the time but then quickly fell off the radar. Almost without fail, these games are far more interesting. I’m impressed by the their ideas and the goals they aim for, even it the implementation is imperfect.

Sega’s Binary Domain is perhaps the best example. In this Japanese cover shooter, the controls are janky to the extent that it is almost impossible to aim at a head. At first, it just feels like another goofily translated Japanese game, but as it progresses you realise it is splendidly written and full of fascinating, confronting ideas. A conversation system at first feels like an arbitrary window-dressing until, towards the end of the game, the way you have used it greatly affects how the story plays out. In battle, shooting different limbs off the enemy robots makes them act in all kinds of delightful and amusing ways. The characters are as individual and memorably as they are cringeworthy stereotypes. By the story’s end, the game has communicated more thoughtful and challenging themes than all the Bioshock games combined.

Or Dragon’s Dogma, which Im just now catching up on. At first it just felt like a poor man’s Dark Souls. Combat was button-mashy, and all my weapons float about ten pixels away from my character’s body. Everyone speaks like Englishmen from the 1500s mocking Englishmen from the 1300s. But the game has incredibly deep systems and gives you all the time in the world to explore them without forcing you in any one direction. The ‘pawn’ system is inspired, allowing you to take a friend’s NPC with you on a mission who has already done that mission before with another player, and thus is able to give you extra support. Night time in the wild feels oppressive in a way that I’ve only ever felt in Minecraft or DayZ.

Both these games lack the polish of a Crysis or a Tomb Raider, but each is better for it. It’s not that I enjoy Binary Domain or Dragon’s Dogma in spite of their flaws, but I love them because of their imperfections. The clunkiness of Binary Domain and the floating weapons of Dragon’s Dogma each add a particular character, a particular flavour, to that game. Each says to me that this is a game punching above its weight, more interested in trying out interesting ideas than being perfectly polished. On each game, the grubby fingerprints of someone who made it is still visible.

And that’s why I love rough games. They have a personality in their rough edges. These aren’t perfectly polished and sterile consumer products. These are creative works as beautifully imperfect as the people who made them.

Our very scathing review of the Binary Domain PC port can be found here.

If BioWare had shown Kelly in the trailers for the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC, I’d be pissed — because they completely left her out of the final product. I’m still pissed, but I’d be even more pissed if they had my hopes up.

A (somewhat) similar issue occurred with Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game was possibly the worst game ever made (in 2013). Our own review called it “an embarrassment that should never have been released”.

This was particularly cutting because the work in progress demonstration trailer had previously showed a far better game. Some gamers were so riled up that they launched a class action lawsuit against Sega and Gearbox for false advertising.

Opinion around the interwebs has been divided. While most players support the lawsuit, some just aren’t sure whether it has a chance of succeeding. Today, we’ll be looking at whether the Aliens: Colonial Marines pre-release demonstration trailer was false advertising enough to give grounds for a lawsuit.

Is it advertising?

First up, we need to get away from the idea that there is actually a distinction between a game demonstration and an advertisement. In Australia, false advertising standards are broad, and apply to everything a business does. The ACCC writes:

“The ‘do not mislead’ principle applies to all commercial dealings. It is not only advertising that can potentially mislead. The principle covers any kind of commercial dealing—for example, selling presentations, product descriptions, packaging, contract terms, negotiating, representations—where a message is sent that creates or is likely to create the wrong idea or wrong impression on the part of the recipient.”

Under Australian law, a demonstration at a convention could indeed be capable of being illegally misleading. But whether such a finding actually leads to a penalty, or simply a slap on the wrist, is really a question of what damage was actually caused to the buyers. Under American law, this question is even more relevant: the demonstration needs to have misled the buyer to the extent they made a mistaken purchase.

Therefore, our next step is to consider what part the demonstration played in convincing people to buy the game.

The hype problem

False advertising is usually cut and dry. You write on the packaging of a breakfast snack that it contains essential vitamins and minerals, when in actuality it contains radioactive ooze. Or (more commonly) the snack contains so little vitamins that they give no dietary value. In both cases, the customer was enticed to make a purchase by a benefit that didn’t exist.

Games introduce a thorny issue because so much of what convinces people to buy is not traditional advertising. It’s hype. Games are heralded by a deluge of previews, gameplay demonstration trailers, teasers, viral marketing, developer interviews, and convention showings.

All these are important for at least creating awareness in the gaming press. This exposure builds up until people are convinced that the game is worth buying. Without the pre-release demonstration trailer, Aliens: Colonial Marines would have had much less exposure, and therefore, less sales.

This was recognised, at least, when in response to the Colonial Marines controversy, Sega was ordered to put “work in progress” notices more prominently on its demonstration materials. Therefore, there is clearly “a” problem. But whether this means gamers are entitled to damages also depends on whether the demonstration actually misled them to lose money.

The pre-order problem

The key moment for deciding this case is the point at which gamers handed over money, and what led them to do so. Aside from Kickstarter (which has its own problems with this), gaming is perhaps the only industry that lets you buy something before it even exists.

In the comments on one of our news articles, an example was given of a concept car demonstration. However, no one hands over money based on seeing a concept car at a show. Advertisements are there to entice a person to enter the showroom and take a test drive. False advertising cannot occur at the concept car stage, because this is not accepted to be reliable.

In contrast, many people do buy games based on pre-order hype. This was certainly the case with Colonial Marines. The problem was exacerbated by Gearbox not keeping its pre-release gameplay footage current after they knew they had a serious problem.

Although this has not really been tested in a court, these issues make the gaming hype roughly equivalent to more traditional advertising. Arguably, the gamers that were enticed to pre-order based on this footage (even if they should have waited for reviews) are entitled to some compensation.

The vertical slice problem

Gearbox’s comment on the lawsuit is quite… angry.

“Attempting to wring a class action lawsuit out of a demonstration is beyond meritless,” was their response. “We continue to support the game, and will defend the rights of entertainers to share their works-in-progress without fear of frivolous litigation.”

Ouch. The problem with this attitude is that the trailer does not appear to be a true work in progress. Given the sheer quality difference between the trailer and the final game, it’s clear that the trailer was a “vertical slice”: a marketing creation filled with custom textures, animation, sounds, and sequences that were never intended to go into the final game at all.

These slices divert resources from the actual game, because their sole purpose is to invent something pretty that can be used to drive hype. Possibly, if the developers had spent the time on the actual game instead of their marketing creation, the game wouldn’t have been such a disaster.

That is really a separate legal issue and one more suited to an epic battle between Gearbox and Sega. However, it does come back to the point of false advertising laws. False advertising is prohibited because marketing is not meant to cover the flaws of a product so brazenly: consumers are entitled to make purchases based on true merits. When a vertical slice has such a huge difference with the final game, this is exactly the kind of thing that false advertising laws are trying to stop.

As such, on principle the lawsuit is worth bringing — at least as a test case. There are interesting issues about whether hype can be advertising, and whether these laws can extend this far.

But even these aside, the point worth proving is that developers should not spend half their budget on marketing hype in an attempt to secure pre-orders.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the monstrous Haswell overclock, the realities of the quantum internet, and the door lock that automatically responds to your iPhone.

Intel’s upcoming Haswell processors could be scary fast

Due to launch to consumers in June, Intel’s first Haswell-based processor, the i7-4770K, has reportedly already been ravaged by an enterprising overclocker. Using a mysteriously obtained engineering sample of the chip, “rtiueuiurei” managed a staggering 7012.65 MHz, with a base clock of 91.07 MHz, multiplier of 77.0x, and horrifying 2.56V core voltage. It is worth noting that the source site ocaholic mentioned that it is possible that CPU-Z could have misreported the voltage due to “bugs related the [sic] CPU-Z’s voltage reading,” citing the fact that the same 22nm process transistors found in Ivy Bridge processors begin to fail at a voltage of 2.00 (thanks to PalZer0 for sending this in).

Somebody builds an automated Xbox Disc Changer out of Lego

This is exactly the kind of completely unnecessary and complicated contraption that Lego Mindstorms was meant to produce. YouTube user zwenkka has built an immense, slow, and rickety automated disc carousel and changer for Xbox 360, using three Lego NXT bricks, around 3000 lego parts, and a series of sensors and motors. The array is governed by the NXT bricks, simple embedded programmable computers which use the Mindstorms NXT software to send commands to actuators and retrieve readings from sensors, and is controlled via Bluetooth from an app that previously existed in the Google Play store.

Given how much time must have been spent in putting the system together and troubleshooting the precise placement of each of the system components, not to mention the ponderously slow 42 seconds each successful disc change requires, it could be difficult to glean why someone would go to so much effort to produce such an impractical contraption. The perhaps self-evident answer likely lies in the same delight we get from watching Rube Goldberg machines complete their circuit, or from seeing the last domino in a run topple: we do it because we’re the only species on the planet clever enough to be frivolous with complexity, and damn us if we’re not proud of that fact.

The Delta Six Controller: An Arduino-based, open-source gun controller

As children, light-gun games were like some sort of magic, and as such sat atop birthday and Christmas lists until parents caved and made the purchase. Since then, the dream of reducing abstraction by actually putting a gun into the player’s hand for games deeper than mere shooting galleries, has been a pipe-dream. It seems that a new Kickstarter may have the answers we seek in the Delta Six controller for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

This open-source, Arduino-based controller uses a combination of motion sensors, gyro sensors, and buttons to translate player’s actions with the device into inputs that can be used to control many modern shooters that already exist on the market, without removing the player from the experience by mapping in-game actions to arbitrary buttons on a controller or keyboard. The Delta Six allows the player to reload by hitting the bottom of the clip, aim by raising the scope to their eyeline, and even hold their breath for sniping by pressing the rifle butt into their shoulder. Imagine combining the Delta Six with an Oculus Rift and the Omni treadmill from a couple of weeks ago!

The Kickstarter pitch video goes into more detail but be warned, it doesn’t shy away from hyperbole.

Quantum internet isn’t a dream, in fact it already exists

Quantum internet may sound like science fiction, but it seems that not only is it possible, it has existed in active use for two and a half years at Los Alamos National Labs. By harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics, quantum internet purportedly allows for utterly secure network communication. In quantum mechanics the act of measuring a quantum object, a photon for instance, always changes it. Quantum internet, then, secures data packets by causing them to become corrupted by the simple act of observing them. The primary disadvantage is that normally this kind of communication occurs via a point-to-point connection over a single length of fibre, where even attempting to pass the message onto another point irrevocably changes it.

Los Alamos National Labs solved the problem by implementing a hub-and-spoke network. Technology Review goes into more detail on how the system works in practice: “Their approach is to create a quantum network based around a hub and spoke-type network. All messages get routed from any point in the network to another via this central hub… The idea is that messages to the hub rely on the usual level of quantum security. However, once at the hub, they are converted to conventional classical bits and then reconverted into quantum bits to be sent on the second leg of their journey. So as long as the hub is secure, then the network should also be secure.”

The Kwikset Kevo door lock makes your iPhone the key to your home

Security-conscious people are quite well aware of the fact that their smartphone represents a serious security risk. It holds all of their contacts, email, private messages, logged-in apps, and password lockers within its small, easily-misplaced frame. All that stands between their data and a malcontent hoping to gain access to their private information is—at best—a 4-digit pin code. Well, home security company Kwikset have produced the Kevo door lock, which adds the physical security of your home to the perhaps overlong list of responsibilities placed upon the chamfered shoulders of your iPhone 5.

With a Kevo lock installed, all that is required for entry is the simple act of approaching your door with your smartphone in your pocket. Using a combination of Bluetooth and location services, the lock senses your approach and unlocks the door without requiring physical interaction from the user. Those without iPhones are also able to use the device through the purchase of a Kevo Fob. The lock itself runs on two AA batteries, which Kwikset claim will last for around a year. Fear not, if the batteries die the lock can also be disengaged with a traditional key, like a peasant may have done back in the Stone Age.

For a long time I thought tall poppy syndrome was a uniquely Australian construct, or that we at least suffered from it to a far greater degree than other nation or culture. We are, after all, the only human cattle on earth raised from penal colony stock: if one prisoner were to escape, the rest would be beaten. So the fear of those looking to liberate themselves, shall we say, from the safe average might be hardwired into our ‘Straya.

Nowadays we aren’t getting around the yard in balls and chains, so it translates to: Rampant success = You’ll keep, mate. Maybe we’re more globally influential than we thought. Shame it’s not in terms of Vegemite or servo stick-ups with bananas.

A panicked editor from a reputable gaming publication came to me yesterday and said, “Toby. You like Call of Duty, right? I need someone to write an article on Black Ops II.” At this I could only fondly reminisce over a billion hours spent toasting nooblets on Black Ops, after which I cut my CoD cord and haven’t reattached it since. I was just over it and felt, “Self, if you wanna pen missives complaining about the unenviable status quo as purveyed by this clone machine business model, you can’t be a part of it.”

So I stopped literally putting my money where my convictions were. I have no idea what CoD is doing right now, and I don’t care. Neither did this editor. Neither did the multitude of staff members he’d asked to write this thing before he turned to more mercenary options like myself. Who is actually playing Call of Duty?

Evidently, lots and lots of people. I’d reference some statistic about how much this thing still sells but the zeroes stretch off very far into the horizon and it hurts your eyes to look at it. Lots and lots of people, but seemingly very few within the industry (and its close followers) itself, where it draws incredible ire for continuing to exist and, I guess, prosper, against the hopes and dreams of these men and women.

It has become somewhat the Nickelback of video games, sometimes hated for reasons as baseless as every game of Domination I have ever played. Frequently it’s derided because it’s there, because it’s always there, and because it keeps guaranteeing it’ll be there again soon regardless of what it actually is. It’s at the point where it doesn’t even have to try anymore. I remember looking at the back of a box for Black Ops II and it just had about three images with three dot-point exclamations, only one of which came from a publication: “A Must Have!” Then, attributed to nobody at all, “The Best-Selling Xbox 360 Franchise of All-Time Returns!” and “The Biggest Game of 2012!”

It’s created an interesting and cyclical schism: Those who must write about it might abhor it but must do so because a large percentage of those who read what they write are assumed to love it. If a game is so incredibly popular on paper but has a notable dearth of actual correspondents the least bit interested in investigating it, it is now Nickelback. Or Justin Bieber.

CoD is pop music, I realised. It will keep selling records because it’s more or less social currency on the playground by now and it doesn’t matter what gets said, by itself or other selves. If it was an artist on Twitter it’d have millions of fans illiterately defending its honour, and would exclaim upon a visit to the house of Anne Frank, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have played Call of Duty.”

“Maybe,” I hoped after the editor had left, punching walls, “We can just follow CoD around now and write about all the things it does and says in its public and private life and this will suffice as coverage.” It really only had one song anyway. Plenty of people still digging this one song; enough so that it could just put its face on a lunchbox? Cheque please.

With Metro: Last Light due out shortly, I’ve been playing some Metro 2033 to refresh my memory when it comes both to Artyom’s story and the mechanics of the game. Before anyone chimes in to say that Metro isn’t an RPG — yes, thankyou. I already know that. I’m using the game as an illustration of something that I wished RPGs did, and that’s give currency some kind of real meaning within the game.

In the vast majority of RPGs, gold (or rupees, or whatever currency is accepted in that particular world or realm), functions much like a de-facto extra statistic, and one that is simultaneously the most powerful and most meaningless in game, enabling players to buy the most powerful weapons, armour and abilities available whilst also being fairly easy to obtain either through questing or via farming. This empty currency, whilst effecting the balance of the game, really has little impact on the player when it comes to the decision whether or not to spend said currency.

This adherence to an artificial and meaningless currency is not a new phenomenon. It was relatively easy in the early Gold Box D&D games to amass enough money that you needn’t worry about it running out, and even beloved genre classics like Planescape: Torment fell into a similar trap with players being able to quickly amass a fortune they could never spend, even after buying the most powerful spells and weapons available in the game.

Whilst there’s nothing overtly wrong with this approach to in game currencies, the more games I play the more frustrating I find it. Without having any significant meaning to the player outside of being something to collect and use to for upgrades, artificial currencies, for me at least, are starting to feel somewhat divorced from the rest of the game and the world as a whole.

This is where Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light come in. In those games, the currency of the land used for buying new weapons and gear is the very ammunition you need for said weapons. It’s a simple but clever system that forces the player to think about every purchase, making them seem far more weighty and meaningful in the long run.

The upcoming, New Zealand-made ARPG, Path of Exile takes a similar path (geddit). The game features a number of different crafting materials that allow players to upgrade items, improve skill gems, enchant desirable objects, respec points in your passive skill tree and generally make life in Wraeclast a little easier. These crafting materials also serve as the currency in game, both for the AI shops in each quest hubs and for inter-player barters. Every time the player makes a purchase or barters for an item they are forced to weigh up the value of the item compared to the value of the crafting material, weighing up the pros of an immediate character upgrade against perhaps needing that crafting material somewhere down the line.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an artificial and all-but-meaningless currency, and in some ways I can see the appeal of amassing huge wealth in game and being able to spend said wealth with impunity — but I see more appeal in the opposite approach. Much like in the real world, I find a purchase has more meaning and is more satisfying if I’ve had to work and save for it or otherwise sacrifice. Without simply aping the mechanics of the games I’ve mentioned I’m not entirely sure how to go about making gaming currencies more meaningful, but I’m sure there are some bright sparks out there who can find a way.

Gamers are a suspicious lot. They don’t trust developers to look after their interests, and they trust publishers even less. But one party they do put stock in are the administrators and organisations which run competitions and events on their behalf.

That bond of trust was severely damaged this week after a member of the eSports Entertainment Association discovered that the software required to play in the organisation’s pick-up games and tournaments doubled as a bitcoin miner.

The scandal broke late this week when a forum user published a log on Pastebin that outlined a number of connections from his computer to a bitcoin server in Czechoslovakia.

ESEA owner Eric Thunberg replied with the perfect example of how not to respond to a crisis: by belittling users for uncovering the mistake, refusing to apologise and telling unhappy users to contact him so he could “attempt to buy back your love”.

To his detriment, Thunberg claimed that the bitcoin process within the ESEA client — which the community pays US$7 a month each to access — was only operational for 48 hours, had only mined the equivalent of US$280 and that all proceeds would be reinvested into the community. No acknowledgement was given to the fact that the software functioned as malware for that period, although Thunberg did admit that the idea of introducing bitcoin mining code to the client was discussed as a potential joke for April Fools.

As you’d expect, Thunberg was later forced to change his tune.

He publicly revealed that the code had running since April the 14th, far longer than the 48 hours initially stated. Over this time, ESEA users unknowingly helped the company mine just over 29 bitcoins, equivalent to just over US$3700.

Cue the pitchforks.

One forum user even encouraged others to join a class-action lawsuit. “Two weeks ago my Radeon HD4890 a $300+ card when I got it, fried with no explanation while I wasn’t using my computer,” wrote Tumn1s. “I kept smelling something burning coming from my computer and it took me a while to figure out that my expensive video card was overheating.”

After all and sundry were well and truly blanketed in the proverbial, ESEA co-founder Craig Levine, owner of the league’s parent company, stepped in with a statement denying any knowledge of the incident but promising to investigate and make amends.

That sentiment was followed by an official ESEA statement, which blamed one “unauthorised individual” for “acting on his own … to access our community through our company’s resources”. To make amends, the entire proceeds earned from the code will be donated to the American Cancer Society, along with an equal amount of money from the company’s own pocket. The prize pool for the 14th season of the league would also be raised by the same figure.

Admirable, but insufficient. Firstly, there was a clear line of communication between Thunberg and Sean Hunczak, the coder behind the ESEA client. Thunberg admitted as much in his first response to the fiasco by saying that he told the senior programmer that he “shouldn’t be lazy and run the miner in a separate process”.

If only one person was responsible for the drama, he certainly didn’t keep mum. More depressing is the indication that no one will be fired for the incident, and that Levine felt the need to not reveal the name of the person responsible.

ESEA’s reputation will be irreparably damaged. But the major problem here is not so much that the community’s trust in ESEA will be undermined, but that its faith in third-party programs like the ESEA client, which doubled as an industry leader for anti-cheat software will be undermined.

This is bad, because, frankly, there’s little competition. ESEA completely dominates the North American scene, in a similar vein to TeamLiquid’s status for StarCraft outside of South Korea. To paraphrase one user, even if gamers were disgusted by the whole affair, resigning from ESEA leagues and events was easier said than done. Competitors don’t have the reach, infrastructure or funding base that ESEA has built.

The entire debacle highlights a systemic lack of proper process within eSports. Having organisations profit from an event while maintaining responsibility for its integrity is not an unreasonable premise. The industry is not large enough to support a global association that could sustain the employment of independent administrators, as is the case with FIFA or the Association of Tennis Professionals.

Another view is that gamers were effectively punished for their compliance and blissful ignorance. As ESEA’s own statement admits, gamers have been swindled before by those who claim to have their best interests at heart. But until players get a clearer picture of what happens to the money they give eSports organisations, what information those companies collect and how both are used, scandals like this will continue to unfold.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of NVIDIA’s GTX 780, the man who took a year off from the Internet, and Virgin Galactic’s plan for relatively affordable commercial space travel.

Nvidia’s GTX 780 is probably going to be really expensive

The upcoming Nvidia GTX 780 is due for release in the US this month, and while it is iterative on the Kepler design, it includes some new features and optimisations that promise to make it a serious contender in the market.

Despite its basis in existing architecture, Swedish graphics card aficionados SweClockers have reported sources claiming that the GTX 780 may well be significantly more expensive than the opening price of the GTX 680, and could well end up being priced akin to the GTX Titan at around US$1000.

Through the Google Glass: Explorer Edition units reviewed

Google Glass Explorer Edition headsets are now in the wild, and various forms of review and hands-on impressions pieces are appearing all over the place.

The prevailing response seems to be positive, but also hopeful that future revisions will make good on the promise of this early prototype. By most accounts, the experience of actually using Glass’ refractive display is really exciting. Google have released a one-minute video that shows how the home interface works, and how basic functionality is performed via the touch panel on the right arm of the device.

Skype shedding local installations in favour of a browser-based plugin

Microsoft are trialling a browser-based Skype plugin, which allows users to make Skype calls from within an Outlook.com inbox, removing the necessity for the locally installed application. Those for whom Skype and other VoIP/video calling services were to spell an end of our reliance on phone providers, should find the release of a browser-based plugin interesting. The reason that Skype and its ilk haven’t become the first port of call for world communication is a lack of ubiquity — the mobile phone system is already incredibly well established, and integrated into most of our lives.

Skype remains something that needs to be organised in advance via “hey can I call you on Skype?” where SMSs and phone calls simply work. If Microsoft are to achieve ubiquity, they need Skype to be an easier alternative to pulling out your phone. The browser plugin is currently being rolled out in the UK, and should see release in Australia sometime between September and November 2013.

Paul Miller returns to the Internet after a year

One year ago, Paul Miller of The Verge decided that he wanted to see who he could be without the Internet. He felt that the Internet could be the reason for his procrastination habits, the restriction of his creativity, and perhaps even a significant factor of his self-confidence and depression issues.

Well, a full year later he has returned and has captured his experience in text and video. The article is really interesting, as it helps to address and deflect some of the vilification that the Internet receives. The experiment has helped Paul to come to the conclusion that the Internet is a one-stop-shop for many of our bad habits, habits that people are perfectly capable of fulfilling to the same or even a greater extent when disconnected, despite the inconvenience of not having them piped directly to our lap, pocket, or desktop.

Virgin Galactic hope to make space travel affordable to everyone

In a recent interview, Sir Richard Branson spoke with a strange mix of care and candour to Engadget’s Michael Gorman about their plans for consumer space travel, and the realities of making the practice commercially viable and more than mere dream fulfilment. Sir Richard was careful to avoid forecasting pricing for commercial flights in the future, but he is confident that the current price of US$250,000 will come down.

“[Our first thousand customers will] help us effectively fund the program. They’re the people who can afford to pay it, and we’re enormously appreciative of their support,” said Branson. “By the time you get to an age where you want to go to space, you’ll be able to afford it.”

As well as the exorbitantly priced initial 1000 flights, Virgin Galactic also plan to subsidise prices by offering a comprehensive satellite delivery service to businesses that wish to launch low-orbit satellites relatively cheaply and quickly. “We’re also going to be able to put more satellites in space in one month — three and a half thousand satellites in one month — than have been put up in the last 10 years,” Branson claimed. Virgin Galactic plan to be capable of launching low-orbit satellites within 24 hours instead of the current period of one year, which Sir Branson believes will be “transformative.”

I’m fascinated by the moral quandaries as often posed by games now. More specifically, the bad choice. I always bet on black. Always.

I love to cringe, but it’s more about: How far is this game gonna let me go? Really? It’s a game, surely it won’t be that far. Nasty surprises all. So far I’ve managed to put myself in some stupidly uncomfortable places. I worked negligently hard to get Heavy Rain’s worst ending. It was worth it. That has got to be the most depressing and confronting finale of your own devising I’ve ever seen go down in gameland.

I don’t want to spoil it but Ethan, y’know, he doesn’t find that kid. No one does. And Ethan, he can’t live with that.

What I find surprising is that most if not every single gamefriend I’ve talked to about this never bets on black. Ever. They want to be heroes when they could be heroes, declaring “The end justifies the means,” in a Clint Eastwood rasp as I do. Because why wouldn’t you? Where else can you purge the terrible reality of living that collects in your soul over time, safely and in the comfort of a mad bag of Dorries, maybe a delicious bubbling beverage that looks like fizzy piss?

Only vidya, mate. This is my philosophy: I’m basically the Joker. In reality, I’m just happy to cop his fashion sense (and, post-spritzer, his mannerisms). Online, let us burn everything.

But I’m a pretender to the charred bone-throne. I reveal myself as a fundamentally harmless sloth creature by the fact I never go out of my way to do the wrong thing in games. I never create it. It’s always a click of the choice’s doomcore button. Commander Toberd, do you wish to annihilate this entire race of pe- YES I DO LOL. In a recent conversation with a fellow gamebeast, I posited the question, as I love to: “Brah-dog, what is the worst thing you’ve ever done in a game?”

Now he stroked his chin-scruff and, interestingly, answered in terms of himself when let roam free, not via the oft black/white decision-making most of us default to considering. He went:

“Grand Theft Auto IV. Yeah. I was playing that. I picked up a hooker, like always. Took her for a ride, know what I’m sayin’? Hey, hey? Yeah you do, you’re Toby. I just wanted to talk that day, though. I wanted to talk, and then drive that car off a bridge into the sea, with her still in the passenger seat, wondering what the hell was happening, wondering about the child back home at the projects she was working so hard to support, and now she’d picked up this madman, just another john, so she thought, right an-“

And we stop there. I turned away then, thoroughly disgusted. “You’re a monster,” I cried, and ran… back to my chair, where I sit just across from him. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” he said.

That day I realised: I am actually quite boring, and will probably one day have a white picket fence and an illegitimate son that I call “champ”.

You know what I love? Acting. I love games that encourage me to treat the world like a stage and my playable character like a role to perform. I love not using my character as a mere tool to do what I want to do, but doing what I think my character would do.

When a game makes me feel like I should act out the role of the character, it gets me out of the mindset that I should play in the ‘perfect’ or ‘most efficient’ way, and instead makes me feel like I should play in the way that best strengthens my own version of the story.

Not many games are able to make me play like this. Most playable characters, even the most well-rounded ones, are designed in a way so that by just doing what I want to do, they act how they should act. An easy example: Master Chief is a superhuman cyborg soldier because that is exactly how the player of Halo is going to act within the game’s mechanics.

But some characters have a broader spectrum of ability and ways to be enacted that encourage me to perform them in certain ways.

This is probably most explicit in role-playing games like Skyrim that allow the player to heavily customise the character to be how they want them to be. My wood elf assassin that I take with me through every Elder Scrolls game has a clear skillset and ideological leaning. I make certain choices in those games based on not what I would do, but on what I believe that character would do.

But in these games, the character is still someone I created nearly from scratch. The games I find really interesting are those that give me an already well-rounded character, but one with just that little bit left open for me to decide how they would act.

The game that has most recently got me thinking about this is the latest Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is clearly her own character with a long history that has been developing for decades before I even press the ‘New Game’ button. In the most recent game, the story and mechanics are clearly trying to convey a sense of gritty survival against all odds. There is a desperation in Lara’s movements, in the way she moves around each battlefield.

For the opening hours of the game, the only weapons I had were the bow and the pistol. It created this tension where I would get confident with the bow, stealthily taking down enemies without being seen. But then I would screw up—like the novice that Lara is. Then I would change to the loud, messy, imprecise pistol, blasting away frantically in a panic. At first I would carefully aim for headshots, as I would in any shooter, but it just felt wrong. I didn’t feel like in this story that the character Lara Croft would carefully, calmly aim for the head. So instead I would perform her how I think the character would act: being scared, wasting ammo.

Later in the game, I obtained a machine gun. In the next room, time slows down as I am asked to gun down about seven men with my new tool. It felt so wrong. The machine gun was too powerful. It was out of character with the way I wanted to enact Lara as a character in this story. So I put the machine gun aside, and refused to use it ever again, forcing myself to stick to the bow and the pistol (and, later in the game, the loud, messy shotgun).

The game gave me the Lara Croft that the designers thought would fit the story, much like the script writer of a film or theatre play already has ideas for a character before the actor comes along. But then, like any actor, I brought with me my own ideas of how this character should be acted. When I entered the world — when I got on the stage — I brought my own ideas to the story. By choosing what weapons my Lara Croft would use, I created my own performance.

And that’s why I love acting in a game. It’s not about finishing the game as efficiently or perfectly as possible. It is about letting a story pick you up and carry you along so that you care about nothing other than participating in that story. Tomb Raider lets me feel that. The story might be fairly cliché and typical, but by being able to perform Lara Croft the way I want the character to be acted, that cliché and typical story feels just a little bit more personal, and a little bit more meaningful. Like something I helped to bring to life.

From the debacle that was 38 Studios, to the sadness of THQ’s closure, studios and publishers go bankrupt all the time. Much-loved gaming franchises linger in limbo as their publishers just… run out of money.

These games face an uncertain future. Homeworld has been in the dark for years, and only recently was picked up by Gearbox. Dawn of War currently lacks a developer, and is at the whims of Games Workshop and Sega working out a deal. Monkey Island is now in the hands of Disney, and frankly I hold no hope for ever seeing the series again.

The only chance these games have is if a new publisher comes along and “buys the IP”. We see these words on gaming websites often. But what does “buying the IP” involve, anyway?

Fire sales in bankruptcy

Once a publisher admits they can’t pay the bills, they’ll file for bankruptcy. This means comparing what they have, to what they owe. 38 Studios ended up with debts of $150 million, compared to $22 million worth of assets and… $336 in petty cash.

Bankrupt publishers are obliged to reduce their debts above all else, so will look around for buyers for the few assets they have left. But publishers must act fast. IP in bankruptcy loses value quickly—as fast as 10% a month. This leads to fire sales where publishers try to sell everything they have, as fast as they can.

The most critical action for a publisher to take here is to value its gaming IP, and thus help find a buyer.

Valuing the IP

IP, of course, stands for intellectual property. In its most generic form, it is the rights to develop and sell a game. These rights mostly consist of the copyright in the game code, and the trademark in the game name. Owning both of these allows a publisher to both develop and sell a game.

Websites usually talk about just the IP as rights to development new games. Like, for example, “We want to see a new Homeworld”. Or, “We want to see another Mass Effect DLC that doesn’t completely shaft Kelly”. However, most of what publishers acquire when they “buy the IP” is the rights to old games. Much of what THQ sold off, for example, were old games that probably only sell for $5 each, if you can find them at all.

If a publisher can manage to sell off its IP, then there is a chance that a game franchise may be resurrected. However, some franchises are forever locked to their creators.

Some IP cannot be sold

EA Sports, Richard Garriot, and Creative Assembly all have something in common: no one would buy their games if made by anyone else. I can’t imagine Total War being made by anyone other than Creative Assembly, nor can I imagine an Ultima without Lord British. I don’t even know the individual games under the EA Sports line, but I mostly assume they’re the same with a different celebrity every single year.

When games are so associated with who created them, then the value of the individual IP can be quite low, as the marketing of these games depends on the name of the original publisher or developer. If another publisher was to pick up the EA Sports line, and brand it, as say, Ubisoft Sports, then I’m not sure if anyone would buy it.

Despite this, the value of these types of gaming franchises is high to the original creators. Lord British has made almost an entire career out of Ultima. But if the games ever get separated from their creator, they can tank quite badly.

Bankruptcy can breathe new life into a franchise

A publisher’s bankruptcy isn’t all bad, however. Sadly, many publishers have a thing for acquiring gaming properties and just doing nothing with them. This is most often caused by competition and conflict between IPs.

Disney bought LucasArts in 2012, and so acquired Monkey Island. However, Disney also owns Pirates of the Caribbean, which is where all its recent piratey-themed gaming efforts have gone. While the original creator of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, is looking to license the series from Disney, it’s quite possible that it will stay locked away in a dusty vault.

Homeworld is another example, yet a more hopeful one. In the eyes of many, Homeworld was one of the best RTS’ ever released. Homeworld 2 was released in 2003, but under THQ, saw no real movement since. Relic was, presumably, occupied with another RTS—Dawn of War. And this is of course, despite the fact that Homeworld was a much better game (You’re fired. –Ed). The two were in competition, and due to Games Workshop’s name and clout, Dawn of War was the more profitable game, so Homeworld got left by the wayside.

However, as Gearbox’s recent acquisition of Homeworld  after THQ’s bankruptcy shows, there may be hope yet. Sometimes a bankruptcy is good for shaking up the market and putting IPs in the hands of publishers who might have an incentive to develop them. Let’s just hope Gearbox does something with it.

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of reality TV on Mars, a 360 degree treadmill, and a mech for kids.

Fitness comes at a price – Virtuix Omni Treadmill: the immersive way to get fit while gaming

Many of us have a love/hate relationship with the sedentary lifestyle that gaming more often than not produces in its subscribers. A number of games and peripherals have been released to try to combat this, but they come with their own problems. Some of them just aren’t much fun, some require a level of full-body dexterity that many players find intimidating, and a lot of them try to map completely extraneous body movements to inputs that are much more suited to buttons on a mouse, keyboard, or controller. These apparent concessions to movement-based controls take us out of the game, and ultimately lead us to prefer our normal, relatively lazy control methods. Well, Virtuix, a company that specialises in omni-directional treadmills, has come up with a method that they hope will finally pair immersion with physical control inputs.

By using their Virtuix Omni treadmill in conjunction with an Oculus Rift and a hand-held weapon-like controller, they believe that players can fully immerse themselves into first-person shooters, without the need for incredibly complicated and expensive display methods. The Verge reports that the Omni treadmill uses a slick, sloped surface that the user slides down as they step rather than more traditional rollers or belts, and that the device also supports jumping. Virtuix are planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign soon, and are aiming for a price of $400-$600 USD.

Hard disk price-per-gigabyte has finally returned to pre-Thailand flood levels

After floods in 2011 caused hard disk manufacturers to slow production and increase prices in order to stay afloat (ahem), it was predicted that prices wouldn’t return to pre-flood per-gigabyte levels until 2014.

Well, a detailed report over at ExtremeTech shows that not only have hard disk prices per-gigabyte already declined and stabilised, but the same is almost true for SSD prices as well. The report also notes that the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot for SSD capacity has shifted from 64GB to the far more tenable 256GB, and that shipments of 512GB+ SSDs have almost doubled since September. We can infer from this that manufacturers are finally “adding capacity and driving up storage volume after a prolonged price decrease,” which is only good news for those looking to finally, affordably upgrade to an SSD after putting up with the sluggishness involved in using HDDs for primary storage.

The Cyclops: the pilotable mech to help your children crush their enemies

Almost a year after Suidobashi Heavy Industries announced their $1.35 million Kuratas mech, an unlikely competitor, food processing machinery manufacturer Sakakibara Kikai, has released a mobile, pilotable faux-death machine designed for kids! The Cyclops is a battery-powered mech, with two moveable arms, a steel claw, and a drill-like spinning cone, clearly designed to make make-believe mincemeat out of kindergarten nemeses.

It’s difficult to understand why a parent would want to spend $20,000 on a kid’s toy that could cause damage severe enough to warrant nasty phone calls from friends’ parents, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is the coolest thing in the world.

Also produced by Sakakibara Kikai, the LANDWALKER.

Reality television meets space travel – Mars One to send human settlers to Mars

Ever wanted to just get away? Hop a midnight train to anywhere? How does a one-way ticket to Mars strike you? Mars One is a private space project which plans to send a group of intrepid humans to live out the rest of their natural lives on the surface of Mars by the year 2023. The Mars One project was put together by Bas Lansdorp, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands, who earnestly believes that the goal of human settlement of Mars is not only possible, but is possible using technology that already exists today. It seems that at least some portion of the project is centred around reality television, which will be used to partially fund the mission. “This is not ‘Big Brother Goes to Mars.’

It’s important this is treated as a very serious project,” Lansdorp told the New York Times in March. “Mars One will enable people to watch and be involved… the stories we tell around it will make it financially possible,” he said. The tentative schedule for the project would see supplies reaching Mars in 2016, and settlers in 2023. A second group of settlers would be due to arrive in 2025.

Your money is at your fingertips: Biometric payments via fingerprint

One of the primary problems that alternative payment systems like near field scanning or Commonwealth Bank’s Kaching system, is that in order for them to become a widely accepted method of payment, they require enough of their customers to have access to phones with near field chips in them, or one of those big fat and expensive Kaching iCarte iPhone cases. Barcelona-based commerce company Paytouch have developed a system to make fast purchasing ubiquitous with their fingerprint-based biometric payment terminal.

Users simply tie their credit card details to their fingerprints via a Paytouch account, and benefits are obvious: consumers no longer need to carry around cards that can be lost or stolen, businesses encourage impulse buying by reducing the time necessary in processing transactions, and Paytouch receive a commission for each purchase made via their system. Making biometrics an option for two-factor authentication is a really great idea, as long as fingerprints are the only ID needed to use the system. At some stage, someone will find a way to defeat the system’s security. When a credit card is compromised, you cancel it and order another. Replacing fingers isn’t quite as simple a task. Paytouch plan to expand their service further throughout Europe and into the US within the next year or so.

Header image courtesy The Verge.

Sometimes when you do anything a lot you can start to get jaded and everything seemingly sucks. Say, writing about games. How’s that for a first world problem? “I play games and earn money for it. This is awful.” It’s like anything, though. If you ate bacon all day every day you would hate bacon. OK that is a fallacy but maybe you know what I’m getting at: Sometimes, I need some random awesome game to come along and remind me why I really, really love games.

Lately that’s been Dragon’s Dogma. Can’t remember the last time a game kept me up ‘til 5am. How bad is that cold grey light of early morning that whispers, “Loser!” on the wind?

Now, Dragon’s Dogma is an RPG. Shooters and RPGs are my neck-and-neck love interest as far as vidya is concerned. Now I don’t smoke weed like all you guys, but I do like to combine strange ingredients and see what I come up with at odd hours. I got to thinking, “I would like more guns in my RPGs, I would.” I’m actually not much for fantasy settings, really. I usually just put up with them because they seem to be the go-to, and that’s fine. But every time I’m having at a troublesome goblin with my enchanted potato hammer, my triggerlegs are itching.

So obviously, there is Borderlands. S’okay I guess. Then there is Fallout 1, 2, 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. First cabs (up on blocks) off the rank in my mind. I have loved these games very hard already, multiple times, from multiple angles. Same goes for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I have unhealthily loved that game, multiple times, suspended from the ceiling and in the throes of Japanese rope bonda… anyhooha, mayhap we need turn to the orient for guidance in this grave matter of guns and grinding. These examples aren’t straddling as much RPG as I want straddled. Then I chanced upon Resonance of Fate in a store the other day.

It is JRPG that’s all about the guns. It’s so into guns that if you attempted to remove guns from its hardcore JRPG equation (and it is hard, it’s a bastard, it’s loving me hard instead, from multiple angles and with whi- err), you wouldn’t have Resonance of Fate. You’d just have cool leather and J-pop homoeroticism. Likewise my beloved Valkyria Chronicles. How could I forget you, boobums? An SRPG, sure, but same thing to me.

Every time Largo misses with his rocket-stick during the infamous Chapter 7 battle is a dagger to my heart. We are definitely aiming, or trying to. Excellent. Then the flashbacks start and I remember Front Mission 3. My Wanzer was pink and always died. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines! Parasite Eve! The Wild Arms series, surely. Shadowrun if I’m feeling gamey in front of the emulator one day.

And the moral of this cool story (bro) is that if you pointedly do not get stoned and then set about playing mental Tetris with all your ill-fitting secular desires, you will tear open a rift to gaming heaven in your too-much-free-time continuum.

Editor’s Note: I promise this is the last time I’ll let Toby write about JRPGs on the site.

Following on from my last column, in which I looked at some of the most interesting looking RPGs on Kickstarter at the time, I thought I’d take a look at some of the most interesting Indie RPGs that are either in development or have been recently released. I’m a huge fan of the epic AAA-RPG and all the attendant production values and sense of scale that are usually attached to them, but there’s a special something that a small and dedicated team of true believers can bring to the table.

Indie RPGs might lack the polish of some of their higher budgeted brethren, but many of them are packed with some unique style, substance and character that would often be deemed too risky for a big budget title.

Card Hunter

Jon Chey may be a name familiar to some of you — you see, along with Ken Levine and Robert Fermier, Chey was one of the co-founders of Irrational Games. After leaving Irrational, Chey set up a new studio called Blue Manchu, and Card Hunter is their first game. Card Hunter is a hybrid of CCG (Collectible Card Game) and old school tabletop RPG, with cards taking the place of both gear and dice rolls.

What gear a character in the player’s party can equip determines what cards they have in their hand, and what cards they have determines what attacks and moves they can make. It’s honestly one of my most anticipated games of the year -  I can’t wait to get some hands on time.

MORE INFO: Official Site

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

I’d never heard of this game until I received an email from the devs the very day I started writing this column and I’m more than a little disappointed in my ignorance. Van Helsing has been getting some great press for its fast paced ARPG combat and lovely art, but what interests me most is the clever sounding combat system. Each skill in the Van Helsing skill tree has three “PowerUps” – skill modifiers that can be used to add special effects to a skill when they are charged with Rage, one of the resources in the game.

A full rage bar can charge all three PowerUps, ensuring that the next time the skill is used it has all the additional effects, but players can also choose where the rage goes, so players could choose to charge a single PowerUp three times (for triple the effectiveness) or charge one PowerUp twice (to make it doubly effective) and another PowerUp once. It all sounds a little fiddly but if the controls are well designed it could well make for a very robust and challenging combat system.

MORE INFO: Official Site

Claustrophobia: The Downward Struggle

I love roguelikes. There’s something very primal about making your way through a procedurally-generated dungeon, knowing that any mistake can be your last thanks to the ever-present spectre of permanent death. Claustrophobia: The Downward Struggle is a graphical roguelike by Indie Forge with a rather sweet sounding set of features. There’s the random generation as you would expect from such a title, but Claustrophobia also boasts crafting, multiple levels of difficulty and a combat system that gives every character six abilities bound to the QWERTY keys for easy and quick access.

The Q and W skills are determined by your chosen weapon, E and R by your character and T and Y by your chosen profession. There’s no word of a plot, but honestly, who really needs a plot when you’re killing your way through infinitely replayable dungeons?

MORE INFO: Official Site

Sully: A Very Serious RPG

Ben McGraw, AKA “Ben Grue” describes his new Final Fantasy-inspired RPG rather succinctly.  “Sully: A Very Serious RPG is the 80′s summer romcom of RPGs.  I’m not saying I have John Cusack in my game, but if John Cusack were going to be in any RPG, it’d be mine. It’s mainly focused around two teenagers, Crystal and Darin, and what happens the last summer they have together before Crystal goes to college at the prestigious Magi Tech.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m totally down for John Hughes Movie: The Game, but then again I’m old enough to have seen The Breakfast Club at the cinema. Anyway, mechanically, Sully is described as a mix of Valkyrie Profile, Final Fantasy and Super Mario RPG, combining the full frame animation and real time battle interaction as being similar to Valkyrie Profile and Super Mario RPG respectively, and the general combat being a Final Fantasy inspired turn based and menu driven affair.

MORE INFO: Official Site

It’s always a good day when I get to talk to Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender, Australia’s and Queensland’s most recognised professional gamer around the world. He was in good spirits the morning after the Heart of the Swarm launch, albeit a very tired spirit: Pender only slept a few hours that night, having gotten up early for a live cross to ABC News 24 that morning.

Blizzard had kindly stocked the conference room with drinks and jelly beans, so everything was ripe for a nice little chat. And considering you don’t see gamers on national television a great deal, I decided to ask what it was like dealing with the media these days.

GON: You did the interview with the ABC; basically almost as long as I’ve been around, you’ve been representing Australia playing WarCraft and so on. How’s it like, how’s the media relationship changed especially when StarCraft has been such a big part of it?

Andrew Pender: It’s definitely getting a whole lot more professional. There is just so many more people interested in it, so many more companies interested in covering it. I’ve been on TV twice in the last two days! It’s taken off a lot more since WarCraft 3 days at the very least.

GON: Technologically it’s grown a lot. Back in the day it wasn’t quite as easy to play in international competitions, and one of the interesting things is when you were sort of on the rise the big competition was something like the World Cyber Games. I remember you going over to Germany and playing in things like that and WCG was the main interest for media here locally, but now as a competition it’s faded away. How do you feel about that; that was a big thing for you, always representing Australia?

Andrew Pender: Yeah it’s disappointing that its faded away so much but I guess the tournament stuff is a bit outdated, the format and all that sort of stuff it really never changed. It’s a shame, it was like the centrepiece, the tournament you would want to go to and win because it was just like The Olympics, but there’s just so many other tournaments which have taken its place now. There’s constantly international tournaments for different brands and there is no real main one I guess except for maybe the Blizzard run one. But it’s a shame that WCG has fallen off.

GON: Do you find it a bit draining that there is so much to play in these days?

Andrew Pender: Yeah absolutely. I guess it’s a good and a bad thing it’s good to constantly be working towards something, travelling and getting exposure and all that but, yeah, there is just so many tournaments to attend that you gotta really pick them. I think these days you can’t go to all of them.

GON: And it’s not just being able to play in the ones overseas; the number locally has actually grown quite substantially. Do you plan ahead, like you have a calendar and you work out “this is the hours I am going to practice, I have this tournament coming up” ?

Andrew Pender: I always definitely base the level of practice on when a tournament is, what it is and I kind of definitely chose my tournaments so they’re not too close together. It’s probably the worst thing having like a tournament back to back or a week apart; you don’t really get practice for the other one and you get tired and you obviously just play bad in the second one. I think it’s very important these days to plan ahead, because it does take a lot of planning coming into these tournaments for both the players and just practice in general.

GON: Do you have to change your sleeping schedule a lot to accommodate playing in tournaments for different timezones?

Andrew Pender: Yeah, especially if you’re travelling to like Europe or something, it’s very brutal from Australia.

GON: Especially the Poland trip. (Pender played in IEM Katowice earlier this year.)

Andrew Pender: Yeah believe me, I suffer greatly from jet-lag. I’m probably one of the worst sleepers out there when it comes to [professional gamers]. It’s something that I really need to get better at, either by finding some awesome sleeping tablets or something. It’s a big factor for everyone who pretty much travels.

GON: Have you spoken to a lot of the other up-and-coming Australian players like MaFia and PiG and Tgun and given them advice on how to deal with travelling overseas and playing at big events? Have they come and asked you for advice?

Andrew Pender: They very rarely go to international events to be honest. Not that they can’t go but I don’t know sometimes they just choose not to. They never really ask much advice about it but I am always happy to like tell them what I think, or what they should do, or like how they should practice, or what to expect. But they kind of keep to themselves and have their own kind of ideals about it, as most of us do: we are all very solo players.

GON: Do you think that’s a bit of a mistake that they don’t travel internationally as much as they could?

Andrew Pender: Its gotta align with their goals. It depends what their plan is, if they really want to be international players, if they want to take it to the next level, if they don’t think they can, if they don’t have enough confidence. I’m not sure but I definitely think they should try to go as to as many tournaments as possible, and we don’t get that many opportunities in Australia especially if we don’t have a sponsor that can pay for it, so I think it’s important. I think they should be trying a lot harder.

GON: Do you think it would be better in their position to go to an international tournament and risk a really bad result as opposed to just staying home and just picking one out and just betting everything on that?

Andrew Pender: I think experience is very helpful in an international tournament. It’s something that I have a great deal of, coming from WarCraft 3 and being travelled a lot. I came into StarCraft II very prepared for international tournaments or tournaments in general: I don’t get nervous, I understand what I have to do, I understand when it comes to travelling what it’s going to be like, and I know how to network and all this kind of stuff that’s very, very helpful.

I think going to as many [events] as you can, even if you are going to bomb out … if you are practicing very hard there is a good chance you won’t bomb out, so it’s all about preparation too I guess, but they should be going to every single one.

GON: You mention networking. How important is that for a professional gamer these days? Because the scene is so much wider than it used to be five years ago.

Andrew Pender: I think it’s incredibly important. There is so many people you can talk to when you go to like a MLG or something, there is so many sponsors that just wanna have a beer and chat. If you are chatting to them and they like you, you have a contact, you have a Skype contact, you have a business card, you can talk to them down the track if you want to get your team sponsored or if you just wanna know something. It’s incredibly easy to do: you’ve just got to talk to them. None of these guys are really bad people and they’re very open to chatting to players, especially players that have travelled from somewhere far away.

I think it’s essential to be honest especially for Australians because we’re coming from not much. We have a very small scene here, though its growing. We have a small amount of sponsors here but that’s growing too and I think it’s really important to try and get your name out there, whichever way you can.

GON: The scene is quite big but the environment has changed too now, especially with Heart of the Swarm. How do you feel about the changes and the new toys?

Andrew Pender: It makes the game very more dynamic, a lot more interesting. It really gets the Wings of Liberty, kind of, staleness away cause some match-ups were just getting a bit bland and they weren’t really changing anymore. But the new units kind of directly fix those problems; they were kind of introduced as these counters to certain strategies that made the game like really stale.

GON: There’s always been that sort of dichotomy too between match-ups. You have Protoss versus Zerg which is almost more a WarCraft 3 style kind of match up in that the focus is more centralised on one big singular battle. Where as you have Terran versus Zerg where there’s much more adrenaline, there is more focus everywhere. There is multi-prong attacks, there’s drops and there is kind of that constant battle for control. So which one do you prefer and how sort of has it changed in a way from a Zerg perspective? Is it something you know you’re more comfortable with now, looking at the changes in Heart of the Swarm, or is it more something you know that is going to be more of a challenge?

Andrew Pender: I think Zerg vs Terran is pretty similar to Wings of Liberty and, and that is kind my preferred game play style where it’s like very fast paced, very demanding but fun. Zerg vs Protoss in Wings was just yeah as you said, was just fighting a death ball or like trying to stop the death ball being formed in general. I think it’s kind of changed a little bit in Heart of the Swarm though it is a bit early [to tell].

Vipers, for instance, are good great at picking, picking apart death balls and Swarm Hosts are good at pushing before death balls form. It’s still kind of the same deal with Protoss though; they still gotta make a death ball or they don’t really have much other option and they do have the units to make a good death ball  in Heart of the Swarm, like Void Rays being incredibly strong these days. I think we will just have to wait and see what happens if it’s going to get more dynamic than that — I really hope it does.

GON: As a Zerg player, does the recall mechanic kind of bother you? That has the potential to really sort of change the focus of fights.

Andrew Pender: It’s, a very, it’s a very tricky thing to play against. I think we are gonna see it utilized a great deal more in the future. I mean, it does have its flaws, like they can’t attack or do anything for a few seconds when they warp out and when they warp in, so it’s not as bad as it could be but we will have to wait and see.

GON: In terms of the new units, which ones have you been thinking about the most in terms of strategies? What do you look at and go, “OK, this is something I’m going to build around”.

Andrew Pender: To be honest, both of them are very interesting to me, for my race anyway. From the moment I saw a Viper could cast abduct, I was like, “I want that unit in my army every time.”

GON: (laughing)

Andrew Pender: It’s the kind of unit that I love, it’s got such a cool ability, it looks great, it makes for really exciting games, it’s micro-based, it’s very accurate and fast so it feels like it’s right up my alley.

That’s my favourite kind of unit but the Swarm Host is also like a very cool pushing unit, it can really add something to your army, some free fodder that is pretty much desired for Zerg because it’s when you’re going up against like Colossus or something you really need something in front and if it’s going to be Hydras then it’s terrible. So I think the Swarm Host has its place, though I haven’t really gave it as much nearly as much thought as Vipers, but I definitely plan to use them a lot.

GON: Do you feel you have to take more risks as a player now?

Andrew Pender: More risks you mean with the new units?

GON: Yeah with the new units and just in general, because of the changes that the other races have gotten in terms of power and the timing of when the units come into effect as well.

Andrew Pender: Mmmm.

GON: So for example the Viper and the Swarm Host you don’t get them where as you get the Widow Mine a lot sooner.

Andrew Pender: Yeah, yeah. Well there’s a lot more risks I guess. I guess it’s just more about trying to understand it as fast as possible, like, what is this Widow Mine capable of — is it gonna kill me if it drops right now? You have to understand these situations as a Zerg player and you gotta really be prepared for it as best as you can, though there are still, for instance, the six queen Wings of Liberty strategy opening for Zerg [which is] still effective against everything. You can still do some similar things like that to counteract so there’s not that many risks involved; you can still play pretty safe but it’s kind of understanding where it’s gonna lead.

GON: How do you think the rest of the Australian contingent will do throughout Heart of the Swarm, because we have such a large Zerg army?

Andrew Pender: (laughing) Yeah it’s gonna be interesting because Zerg is not really the flavour of the month anymore, it’s kinda changed with the balance changes in Heart of the Swarm. Hopefully more Terrans pop up, for instance, and hopefully our current Terran players start to flourish a bit more cause it would be nice if the scene had more of a balanced race distribution.

GON: Be nice to see some Protoss.

Andrew Pender (at the same time): I dunno, Protoss.

GON: (laughs)

Andrew Pender: Protoss isn’t very fun, but yeah I really hope that they do flourish. I hope some Zergs at least drop off or decide to change race because it would make, it would make it a lot easier for me [since Zerg vs Zerg] isn’t always the most fun.

GON: That’s an interesting thing too in Australia we essentially have two matchups because we don’t have any high level Protoss players. Is that something from a career perspective that will make your life a lot easier in the next year?

Andrew Pender: I guess it makes it easier for the local tournaments but not so easy for international tournaments: if you’ve got no one to really focus on for that race you [don’t] really have any requirement to prepare for it. Maybe like some tournaments here you only need to prepare for [Zerg vs Zerg] so you’re like, “Great he’s good at [Zerg vs Zerg]”. Then you go to an international tournament and get schooled by like a Korean Terran and its like “well this is pointless”.

I do look to international tournaments beyond local though. I do think it’s really important to win local tournaments but unless it’s something like Blizzcon, for instance, I don’t wanna like rack my head over it compared to like an IEM or something.

GON: Where do you get your inspiration when you are looking for solutions? Do you keep grinding at the ladder and just try little adjustments, or do you look at the big tournaments, watch GSL, copy that and then start working from there?

Andrew Pender: It kinda varies. It really depends on what I see [and] what clicks. It’s either if I’m like grinding out games, I have like my own little quirky style going and this really works against this kinda style [so] I kinda go with that or I see something in GSL and I take that onboard and I kinda make it my own and do whatever adjustments I need to do to it. So it’s kinda inspiration from everywhere I’ve just gotta find it and it kind of just works with me just like that.

I don’t really like sit there and like write a hypothesis and think about it for hours or something, but I feel it’s kind of an epiphany more than anything if I’m coming up against something.

Thanks to Andrew for taking the time to chat with us!

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the possibility of Windows 8.1 allowing users to boot straight to the desktop, Apple’s warranty assessment guidelines, and the Google Glass technical specifications.

Windows 8.1 may allow users to boot to desktop, skipping Start Screen

For many, the move to Windows 8’s Start Screen has been a major stumbling block, a dark portent signalling Microsoft’s apparently inevitable departure from desktop computing, or something. Well, it seems that all is not lost, aside from perhaps some prematurely jumped-to conclusions. MicrosoftPortal (via WinBeta translation) reportedly broke open twinui.dll in a leaked copy of Windows 8.1 and found code referencing suppression of the Start Screen.

As can be seen in the above screenshot, the ‘twinui-CanSuppressStartScreen’ attribute has been added which at least implies that the Start Screen could be bypassed in favour of the desktop. Whether or not this is true for the final release of Windows 8.1 remains to be seen.

Tech specs of Google’s tech-specs revealed

Now that the first Google Glass units have begun winging their way to developers in the Explorer program, Google have released details on the technical specifications of the product, and the ecosystem that will support it. Glass’ specs (pun intended) are quite close to those of Google’s own Galaxy Nexus, with 12GB of usable memory, Bluetooth and 802.11b/g wifi, a battery that is good for “one full day of typical use,” and a 5MP camera for stills and 720p video. It diverges from the Galaxy Nexus, however with the Bone Conduction Transducer for personal audio, which rests on the Mastoid Process behind your ear and transmits sound to the user’s inner ear by vibrating against the bone.

Some may note the absence of processor details from Google’s Glass tech specs page, which raises questions about Glass’ raw grunt. As it turns out, the point is moot. Very little is actually processed on the device; Glass is designed to be a client for external systems, be they the phone to which the headwear is paired, or external web services.

Vast amount of digital evidence available on Boston bombing is “both a challenge and an opportunity”

In a recent interview over at The Verge, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis is both grateful and daunted by the amount of digital evidence available from members of the public in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings. “We intend to go through every frame,” he says, “This is the most complex crime scene we’ve ever had to deal with.” The crime scene covers about 12 city blocks, most of which is openly accessible to the public. Special Agent Richard DesLauriers of the FBI’s Boston Division agrees, “We are processing all the digital photographic evidence we can,” and asks that “the public continue submitting whatever they have to police.” This digital evidence is then analysed by experts such as the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA) in Indianapolis.

In the wake of the riots that occurred after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup finals to the Boston Bruins, Vancouver police received over 5,000 hours of video footage from the public. LEVA then tasked 52 analysts to process the footage, whom in 14 days identified 15,000 criminal acts perpetrated by 300 rioters.

$200 modified DVD drive used to analyse blood for disease, replaces $30,000 predecessor

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have, with little more than some simple changes, turned a regular DVD drive into a $200 blood analysis machine that can complete HIV blood test analysis in just a few minutes, rather than the traditional several days required of the $30,000 specialised tool used to date. ExtremeTech details the necessary changes in their report, which boil down to a replacement light sensor capable of reading blood samples, semi-translucent discs designed to hold the samples, and software that allows the device to communicate with a computer and its operator.

The researchers responsible for the technology hope that the relatively low-cost device will one day be critical in decreasing the spread of HIV in developing countries.

Detailed descriptions of Apple’s MacBook and iPhone warranty assessment guidelines (with acronyms!)

An anonymous reader has provided Tested.com with a detailed outline of Apple’s warranty assessment guidelines for the analysis of MacBooks and iPhones sent in for replacement, including the tools and imagery they and their colleagues use to determine whether or not a fault is covered. The suite of tests employed by Apple Certified Macintosh Technicians (ACMTs) in testing MacBook products consists of four primary analyses: Dent assessment with the Dent Inspection Tool (DIT), inspection of the internal Liquid Contact Indicators (LCIs), and two sets of software diagnostics, the Apple Service Toolkit (AST), and the Apple Service Diagnostic (ASD).

The DIT is a small piece of metal with a rounded 90 degree curve, and a small spike on one side. This tool is lined up against the edges and corners of the MacBook casing to check for egregious dents or misalignment, and the spike is inserted into dents to determine their depth. LCIs are visually inspected to see whether or not they have turned pink after having had direct contact with a liquid. The AST is a simple diagnostic tool to be run in front of the customer which simply checks for the presence of each component in the system, while the ASD is the low-level detailed diagnostic tool for use during off-site assessment. For iPhones, the devices undergo the same LCI assessment, and are then compared to Apple’s Visual/Mechanical Inspection Guide, a series of photos that detail the types of damage that are and are not covered by Apple’s one year warranty.

A lot has been said of survival horror’s horrible lack of survival, some of which has come from me on those rare* nights I lose hope and hurl whiskey bottles at my gaming machines. I grew up on this stuff. The first Resident Evil was a big deal for me. When someone told me Capcom had scanned a real dead human eye for the zombo on the promo boards I thought, “Cool.” Silent Hill, too, really got to me in a way I’d never experienced.

Both these franchises kind of suck now, but it’s not franchise loyalty that makes me sad and drunk: it’s the death of fear in gaming.

I always, always wondered why there wasn’t more in the way of first-person survival horror. Bits and pieces here and there. The closest I think I’ve come to nodding along on that front was Condemned, but it was missing something. You were too safe.

The essence of being scared is vulnerability in a strange land. There are plenty of strange lands in gaming, but gaming’s status quo also demands of the medium itself a certain power trip that runs counter to freaking the crap out. That’s why Irrational call Dead Space “action horror” now.

Outlast does not look like action horror. It looks like survival horror the way I’ve always wanted. I’ve been obsessing over it ever since I stumbled over it this week. I had to stumble over it, ‘cos no one’s really talking about it. Why would they? It’s not an EA presents deal and is, in fact, being put together by an entirely new and untested studio called Red Barrels.

Maybe “untested” isn’t that fair: Red Barrels do count alumni from the likes of Ubisoft (hmmm…) and Naughty Dog (hmmm!), so that’s reason enough to start caring in my necronomicon. On paper, it’s a first-person horrorthon where instead of a gun you’re only armed with the night vision of a battery-deprived video camera, made by guys and gals who know games. Reads good.

Then I saw it in action.

Awww yeah. Best thing: It’s a PC-first production and yeah, that does mean that there trailer is actually running in realtime. Highly scripted for sure, but there’s some more gameplay footage out of PAX East that gives you a firmer idea of just why I’m so firm over this right now. I mean, the fact Red Barrels are being so transparent about everything is awesome enough.

The setting might be cliché as hell (“long-abandoned home for the mentally ill”), but I get the feeling Outlast will eventually take Amnesia-like descents into madness and that, friends, is something that has never properly been expanded on until it is naught but a new sub-genre of annualised FPS. For shame. Kind of. Don’t read that last part, corporate people who’ve run out of ideas. I don’t want to handle one firearm in this game. Not one. Guns are the antithesis to my fever dreams. It’s all about the Blair Witch vision, and I pray: Please don’t suck, obscure but promising herald of good scary times.

*Frequent