BigMong

Doorways is apparently “a survival horror game in which nothing is what it seems.” But I am pretty sure that what I just saw in that trailer was pretty scary. If it seems scary, then it is scary. Or perhaps just gross: that bit with the wheel is just unpleasant. Anyway, Doorways is an Argentinian videogame which seems to slot right in to a particular place on the shelf of videogame toe-curling which we’ve enjoyed so much these past years. It also threatens to hold hands with the first-person puzzle genre, as the devs explain: “From simple mind puzzles to timed and agility demanding situations, each level or scene in the game presents to you a different gameplay obstacle to overcome.”

That trailer lies beneath.
(more…)

War. War never changes. It just gets bigger and more convoluted and adds space ships and looks kind of like a giant, twinkling star map spreadsheet. And so, in a year that’s already seen some truly colossal EVE Online battles, the biggest ever just sort of… happened. Admittedly, it was the result of months of conniving and cunning space mischief – as almost everything in the EVE universe is – but it still came as quite a surprise to dirty, non-playing Earth peasants like myself. Numbers so big you can see them from space after the break.

(more…)

Category: Movies/Packs Size: 10.1 g Uploaded: 21:14 23-07-2013

Category: Movies/Packs Size: 33.1 g Uploaded: 07:45 28-07-2013

Polygon are reporting that Gearbox have announced their intention to release HD versions of Homeworld 1 & 2 for PC. We already knew this was a possibility, of course, with their having acquired the license during the IP stripping of THQ earlier this year. No date on in yet, but my bet is early in 2014, to coincide with the next International Homeworld Day. That’s on everyone else’s calendar too, right?

I have just added a yearly reminder to my Google Calendar: July 5th, 2013: Remember the Roomba. That’s the day gaming changed forever. The day that my eyes were opened to the true capabilities of a medium that has so often failed to live up to its promise. I’ve just wiped the Half-Life 3 beta, the only copy it turns out, off my PC to make room for the game I’m about to link to, because not even Valve’s latest and greatest game can live up to it. And, yes, I am procrastinating, because I want to keep it to myself for just a little bit longer. From the makers of Robot Vacuum Simulator 2012, the Citizen Kane of games, I present Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013. The Citizen Kane 3D of games.
(more…)

As predicted, Satellite Reign has appeared on Kickstarter, promising to make the Syndicate-style game we always wanted. Watch these chaps get a million quid in no time. Slick-as-rain pitch video below.
(more…)

Creative Assembly need to tell you something. The Horsham-based developer has been trying to let the world know how large Total War: Rome II is for ages now, showing off its enormous battlefields, the thousands of men rushing around the place, the naval units that lurk offshore. The elephants. Having played the game myself at Rezzed, I can confirm that the wars do appear to be total, stretching from one exquisitely rendered horizon to the other. To communicate and celebrate the game’s grand proportions, another of those massive screenshots has appeared, showing a ruckus down by the Nile. Oh, and the hefty system specs have been confirmed. 35 GB of HD space is probably around a megabyte per elephant.

(more…)

Until recently, if you used the drag-and-drop method to add images to messages in Gmail, it would insert them inline. Now, you can include them as attachments instead. More »

Last night, the Australian Classification Board gave the video game Saints Row IV an NC rating, which means it cannot be legally sold in this country. This is despite the fact that video games now have an R18+ classification in Australia. So is Saints Row IV — a tongue-in-cheek action game — really worse than torture porn movies like Hostel and Saw? Or is the Classification Board still backwards when it comes to classifying games? More »

Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most downloaded TV-show of the spring season 2013.

The achievement comes as no surprise since the show has broken two piracy records in a few weeks, and the high number of unauthorized downloads has been widely covered in the press.

Even before the third season started there was already a lot of talk about Game of Thrones piracy. Interestingly, many of the people connected to the show saw it as a compliment rather than a major threat that needs to be dealt with.

The most outspoken position was taken by David Petrarca, the show’s director, who noted that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. According to the director, pirates are partly responsible for the “cultural buzz” the show needs to thrive and survive.

After the season got underway some critical notes also appeared. The Ambassador of the United States of America to Australia recently complained about the “plain theft” being carried out by Australians.

This was countered by many self-confessed pirates including Timo Vuorensola, director of the Disney movie Iron Sky. The Finnish director told HBO that their legal service “sucks” and promised to download the show from The Pirate Bay instead.

The end result is that the most shared episode of Game of Thrones, the season opening, was downloaded by 5.2 million people all over the world. This dazzling statistic represents a 25 percent increase compared to last year and three times the amount achieved by several of the TV shows further down the top 10.

The increase in viewers wasn’t limited to the pirated channels though. HBO also saw ratings for Game of Thrones increase by roughly a quarter, driving many new customers to their paid subscriptions.

Whether the number of legal viewers would be higher or lower without piracy is hard to measure, but it could go both ways.

Looking at the full list we see that it contains many household names that have done well over the years, such as The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, which are listed in second and third place respectively.

There are also some notable newcomers. In fact, three shows in the list of most pirated shows just completed their first season – Hannibal, Vikings and Arrow. All three achieved between one and two million downloads per episode.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide (estimates per single episode) for the spring season from March up until June 2013, together with the viewer average for TV in the US. The data is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

It is worth nothing that online streaming and cyberlocker downloads are not included since these can’t be measured accurately. The full piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

Most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent, Spring 2013

rank	show	est. downloads	US TV viewers
torrentfreak.com
1	Game of Thrones	5,200,000	5,500,000
2	The Big Bang Theory	2,900,000	20,000,000
3	How I Met Your Mother	2,850,000	10,510,000
4	The Walking Dead	2,700,000	12,420,000
5	Hannibal	2,100,000	4,380,000
6	Vikings	1,900,000	6,210,000
7	Arrow	1,850,000	4,140,000
8	The Vampire Diaries	1,800,000	3,180,000
9	Modern Family	1,750,000	12,520,000
10	Revenge	1,700,000	9,740,000

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated TV-Shows of the Season

I rarely role-play in games. I’d like to believe it’s because I have such a well-defined personality that I simply can’t accept not being myself, but the real reason is that I’m rubbish. I only ever have one well-defined notion of what I want to be: Garrett. Every opportunity to create a character in a game for me means loading up on stealth options, and when I do I don’t really feel the character. I’m just a dude in the dark. But my last Skyrim character was lost to the great platter splatter* of October 2012, and I’m keen to go back the Fus Ro Dah. The question of whether or not I replay as a Garrett lookalike or roll something more adventurous has been answered with this mod that puts Team Fortress 2′s heavy into the dragon’s lair. I can tell I’m not going to be loading up on stealth options with this one.
(more…)

Reinstalling Windows is a good way to fix serious problems with your computer, or just to get a fresh slate. But before you reinstall Windows, you should make a list of programs you currently have installed on your PC so you know what you want to reinstall on the new system.

Click Here to Continue Reading

There are many interesting things you can do with a Raspberry Pi, but this one offers privacy protection from prying eyes. All you need is a Raspberry Pi, a Wi-Fi adaptor and some time. More »

MOVING hologram displays like those featured in Star Wars could soon be available to watch on a laptop.

Code found in Steam points to possible game sharing with other members.

Ever since the raids in January last year, the fate of Megaupload users’ personal files has remained uncertain.

It’s been a frustrating situation for the millions of affected users and one that has taken a turn for the worse today, with the news that one of Megaupload’s main hosting companies has decided to delete all the data they had stored.

Dutch hosting company Leaseweb has informed Kim Dotcom that all 630 servers they rented have been wiped clean. This means that petabytes of data belonging to Megaupload users is now gone for good.

“This is a huge disaster,” Dotcom tells TorrentFreak, explaining that the servers mainly contained files from European users as well as the associated backups.

Leaseweb’s decision has come as a shock to the New Zealand-based entrepreneur, not least because Megaupload has been trying hard to reconnect users with their data. In fact, Dotcom’s lawyers specifically asked the hosting provider not to delete anything until the U.S. court comes to a decision.

“They deleted petabytes of data and did not warn us at all. Our legal team asked them multiple times not to delete the data while the U.S. court is deciding about the rights of our users,” Dotcom says.

“It’s such a betrayal. They could have given us some warning. We could have informed the court that a deletion is imminent. But Leaseweb did not even give us or our users a fair chance.”

Soon after the raid Megaupload’s legal team started to discuss the option of giving back users their uploaded data, but the U.S. refused all suggestions. Megaupload and the U.S. hosting company Carpathia did come to an agreement to hand over the servers, but the Government blocked this plan in court.

“This is what the U.S. government wanted all along. That’s why they seized all of our assets and would not even release funds to pay our hosting partners,” Dotcom now says.

The fate of the data stored at Carpathia is now in the hand of a U.S. judge, who still has to come to a decision. The hosting provider, meanwhile, is paying $9,000 per day out of its own pocket to store them.

“Carpathia has done the right thing and stored Megaupload servers at their own expense. That’s what Leaseweb should have done after making millions of profits from Megaupload,” Dotcom says.

“This was totally unnecessary and evil.”

Dotcom doesn’t know whether Megaupload can or will take steps against Leaseweb. The lawyers are looking into the matter, but Megaupload’s founder is most of all very sad and disappointed.

“All I can say right now is that everyone is very upset. This is the worst day since the raid for me because I was fighting every day to get users their data back. EVERY DAY!” Dotcom concludes.

Update: Leaseweb’s Alex de Joode confirmed that they deleted all Megaupload data stored on their servers. The company says it reached out to Megaupload but received no response. The company then decided to re-provision the servers.

“The storage of the 630 servers – while a relatively small burden – must serve a purpose. During the year we stored the servers and the data, we received no request for access nor any request to retain the data. After a year of nobody showing any interest in the servers and data we considered our options. We did inform MegaUpload about our decision to re-provision the servers.”

“As no response was received, we commenced the re-provisioning of the servers in February 2013. To minimize security risks and maximize the privacy of our clients, it is a standard procedure at LeaseWeb to completely clean servers before they are offered to any new customer.”

“We absolutely regret the setbacks Kim Dotcom has had since MegaUpload was taken offline, but we hope he as an entrepreneur will understand our side of the story and the decisions deliberately taken.”

Source: Leaseweb Wipes All Megaupload User Data, Dotcom Outraged

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could see exactly where your Wi-Fi coverage was hot, cold, and somewhere in between? Stop guesstimating where you might need better Wi-Fi coverage and see exactly where with today’s Wi-Fi heatmap tutorial.

If you or someone you know uses the linked accounts feature in an Outlook.com account, then you definitely need to pay attention to this news. Starting late next month Microsoft will begin the process of unlinking linked accounts as a measure to boost overall account security for Outlook.com users.

Microsoft has outlined the reason for the upcoming change as seen in the following excerpt and it ties in with the recent availability of two-factor authentication. Both measures are focused on helping improve account security. They recommend using the Alias Feature in Outlook.com accounts or setting up regular mail forwarding to manage your mail.

From the Outlook Blog post: We’ve increasingly found that linked accounts are less robust, and less secure than using aliases. With linked accounts, you can sign in to Outlook.com on the web and then switch to any other linked account without entering a password. It’s a handy feature.

Unfortunately, this same feature benefits the bad guys, too. We’ve found that quite often, people who use linked accounts keep their primary account’s security info (including password and proofs) up to date, but don’t lavish as much care on their secondary accounts. It’s easier for a malicious party to compromise one of those secondary accounts, which gives them full access to your primary account.

Civilization V: Brave New World adds a continent-sized piece of content to Civ V, with nine new civilisations, more wonders, trade-routes, ideologies, and an over-hauled cultural victory. Looks like this could be a fairly big deal compared to Gods & Kings, partly thanks to the “world congress” feature intended to facilitate greater diplomatic happenings between nations.

Footage and details below.
(more…)

Seagate has launched a new lineup of hard drives that are specifically engineered for ideal use in NAS systems.

Spike TV got to see Thief (no, just Thief now, branding fans) in motion, too. You can see their encounter with it below, as you refresh yourself with delicious Doritos and Mountain Dew. I am contractually obliged to mention that our kid Adam has already played the game, and you can read about his experiences over here.

(more…)

Well, don’t take that entirely literally. I’m just writing that to get your attention and/or I can’t think of a more accurate way to do it within the character limit. Obviously you can’t build your own Xbox One or PlayStation 4 – they use some custom hardware not available to PC-builders to do their next-generation thing, they’re running bespoke operating systems (and all the horror-DRM that goes with it) and contain it all with in a comparatively small black monolith that sits underneath your TV. Additionally, console games can be made to specific hardware requirements, which can entail a far great degree of optimisation than trying to target a hundred thousand million different PC configs. No matter what the console generation, the PC comparison can never be an exact one. What you can do, though, is build yourself a PC that has a little more grunt under the hood than these apparent future-machines, for pretty much the same amount of money.

To be honest, while hitting the £420 price of an Xbone is eminently possible, I’d recommend you spend just a little more on a games PC than that – it’ll last you longer, there’s more scope for upgrading later, games will look fancier and you won’t have to spend a week trawling price comparison sites. Either way, the idea that a beefy games PC costs thousands of dollars/pounds is an outdated and wildly inaccurate one.
(more…)

Visiting a desktop-only or misconfigured website on your mobile device can be a very frustrating experience. They are not easy to navigate or fail to work properly, leaving you with little to no satisfaction. To encourage websites to adopt good ‘mobile compliant’ practices, Google will be introducing new changes in how websites are ranked when users search on a mobile device.

Two of the most common problems that mobile users face are faulty redirects and smartphone-only errors. The search changes Google has in mind will focus on giving a better ranking to websites that follow good ‘mobile compliant’ practices.

From the blog post: To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.

You can learn more about the upcoming search changes along with making use of embedded help links to improve your website by visiting the blog post linked below.

Over the past few years, there has been mounting concern that the US government could invoke the Patriot Act to collect Australian data for surveillance purposes without permission. However, the extent of these powers is a little hazy: some experts claim that the Act can be enacted on American soil only, while others maintain that any data centre with ties to US companies is fair game. More »

At the start of 2012, New Zealand police embarked on what was almost certainly the most heavy-handed police action ever carried out against someone accused of copyright infringement.

At 06:45 on January 19 it soon became clear something unusual lay ahead.

Officers of the Special Tactics Group, New Zealand’s elite counter-terrorist force, had been sent to detain Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom following allegations in the United States that his company had breached the distribution rights of Hollywood studios.

No one in the household, including several maids and Dotcom’s pregnant wife and children, had any record of violence. Yet police arrived in force, swooped into the sprawling estate in vehicles, on foot, and in helicopters which landed on the forecourt of Dotcom’s house.

Security staff were detained, handcuffed and told to lie on the floor. Other staff, including Dotcom’s personal bodyguard, were placed next to a van containing barking dogs.

In August 2012, dramatic footage of the raid taken from police helicopters was published by New Zealand’s 3Newz. The video evidence showed that accounts from the day were true and overwhelming force had indeed been used.

Just a few moments ago Kim Dotcom released a new video of the raid, this time taken by his own network of internal security cameras. The detailed and clear images further highlight the resources allocated to detain the Megaupload founder and his family.

The raid

The video begins with Chris Dodd making his now-infamous threat to pull funding to President Obama if something isn’t done about online piracy. It then switches to the very next day and an aerial view of the Dotcom mansion as a police helicopter swoops in.

New footage begins when police clad in black are filmed running to the main gate of the property where they confront a security guard. He has his hands thrust behind his back and is walked quickly off camera.

After police vehicles and more officers enter the premises, one is seen moving across the front of the house with a dog on a leash. A car then pulls up in the driveway and an officer emerges, raising a rifle up to his shoulder.

In another section a second staff member is handcuffed while three armed officers walk off camera.

As police vehicles and even more officers pour onto the scene, armed anti-terror police – one with a dog on a leash – are seen trying to access Dotcom’s garages. As can be seen from the image below, at least one is pointing a handgun while the other brandishes a silenced rifle fitted with a scope.

Once access had been gained, police already prepared with tow trucks begin removing Dotcom’s prized car collection, including the pink cadillac in the image below.

But despite all the resources and intelligence used, authorities still managed to mess up the raid. Last year the search warrants used were ruled overbroad and illegal by a High Court judge.

The newly released video ends with what appears to be Dotcom’s preferred conclusion to the police raids. Funny though it is, the similarities between the raid and the final events leading up to the scene in the movie portrayed are quite similar. In fact the entire raid is quite ‘Hollywood’, but perhaps that was the intention all along.

Source: Kim Dotcom Releases New Raid Footage Captured By In-House CCTV

While The Pirate Bay receives most of the headlines in the file-sharing world, another site has built up a massive following.

KickassTorrents, known more recently as simply KAT.ph, has become one of the most loved torrent sites on the Internet. In common with The Pirate Bay, when the site goes down TorrentFreak gets bombarded with emails from users wanting to know what’s going on. Today is such a day.

A couple of hours the ago the site simply disappeared from the Internet with the site’s operators departing with a brief “We have an unexpected maintenance” message on Twitter.

All emails to KAT’s operators are currently bouncing due to what appears to be an issue with their KAT.ph domain. “Destination .PH Domain does not exist or has expired,” is the message we get in return.

As can be seen from the image below, a check for KAT.ph indicates that the site’s DNS is functioning ‘correctly’, except for in Italy and India where it’s null routed and blocked respectively.

However, on closer inspection we can see that instead of pointing to the usual IP addresses associated with the site, currently the KAT.ph domain points to an IP address range associated with DotPH, the official registrar for the Philippines where KickAss registered their domain.

We cannot say with absolute certainty what this means, but it seems likely that KAT may be experiencing issues with DotPH over their domain. It is feasible that the domain has been reclaimed by the registry although on what grounds and for how long is impossible to predict.

In the meantime TorrentFreak has been informed by ProxyBay.me, the operator of the ProxyKat.net site (which still provides access to KickassTorrents), that around 50% of his proxies have begun diverting to a new domain, Kickass.to. Whether this switch is a permanent or temporary measure will probably become apparent in the hours to come.

Finally, as previously reported, a site called TorrentMirrors claims to keep torrent sites alive, even while they’re down. At this moment it appears to be keeping its word.

Update: According to a post by KAT staff member Chew the .ph domain has been seized.

Source: KAT.ph Goes Down Following Domain Issues, Switches to Kickass.to

Planetary Annihilation is Now Available on Steam as an Early Access Title!

Planetary Annihilation brings Real-Time Strategy to a new generation of gamers in a way they've never been seen before - taking large scale real time strategy games from the past to gameplay on a planetary scale!