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It's baffling that a classic like Ikaruga went through Greenlight to get approved for a proper release on Steam, but it's over and done with. The people can have their Ikaruga. Eventually.

Other standouts include FOTONICA, Fortress Forever, Neverending Nightmares, Tiny Barbarian DX, and TowerClimb. I've been rooting for that last one for a long time now. Very pleased to see it get enough traction.

The full list of newly-greenlit titles is over here. Any others we should be mindful of?

The Sun, the bastion of quality newspaper journalism and good taste, has printed a small, yet to me, totally hilarious blunder. A section of an article about artificial implants and limbs has a picture of a cybernetic replacement eye developed by Sarif Industries.

Problem is, the eye in question was a piece of concept art for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Sarif Industries is just a fictional corporation. Palm, meet face. Eidos Montreal's reaction on its Tumblr was pretty funny too.

It's got me thinking if there's anyway we can prank papers that have, let's say, a poor record on fact checking? Could we convince the Daily Mail that Saddam Hussein was developing a nuke-carrying mech called a Metal Gear? Maybe we can tip off the Telegraph that there's a company that can let you re-live your ancestor's memories through a device known as The Animus. The possibilities are surely endless.   

British Newspaper Mistakes Deus Ex For Real Life [Kotaku] [Image source]

No Goblin, the indie studio founded by former Harmonix and Twisted Pixel designer Dan Teasdale, is developing Roundabout, a game where players must maneuver a chauffeur's limo across busy city streets to deliver precious cargo to its intended destination. Thankfully, there's a catch: The limo is constantly spinning.

Set in 1977, Roundabout stars Georgio Manos as the world's first "revolving chauffeur." Manos spins his limo through twisted streets littered with obstacles and pedestrians to complete important tasks, such as "deliver kittens to orphans." Somehow there's a romance narrative within the game, too, "told in revolutionary 'full motion video,'" No Goblin says.

Roundabout is due out in 2014 for PC and consoles. It's available now for a pre-order price of $10 (normally $15), and that includes a digital art book and the soundtrack. Roundabout has also put its foot in the revolving indie door of Steam Greenlight.

Roundabout, the spinning 70s limo game from ex-Harmonix designer originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cellar Door Games continued its Rogue Legacy by bringing it to Mac and Linux this week, where it's available now via Steam. The "rogue-lite" that stars successions of heroes, each one differently debilitated, is also on the way to PS3, PS4, and Vita next year.

Rogue Legacy is SteamPlay-enabled, so those who purchased the PC version have access to the Mac and Linux variants, and a single $15 purchase grants access to all three. Cellar Door says it'll bring the new versions to other distributors "a little later."

Rogue Legacy out now on Mac, Linux originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 17 Oct 2013 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A lot of us have fond memories of Mutant League Football as kids, but that nostalgia wasn't enough to raise the recent Kickstarter project above the rather ambitious goal of $750,000. In an update given after the campaign was over, the developers noted that they "weren't going to give up," and will "keep fighting to get this game to market."

The next order of business is to give out prizes that were promised during the campaign, then they'll gather some surveys and revise a new plan for the game -- from there, they'll figure out where to take the franchise. If they can't get funding, my guess is they'll go solely for iOS with controller support.

Mutant League Football [Kickstarter via Joystiq]

Interplay-developed Boogerman will reach its 20th anniversary next year, and to celebrate, its original creators are looking to develop a new game, funded by Kickstarter.

Like the original Sega Genesis, Mega Drive and SNES game, Boogerman 20th Anniversary will have players guiding Snotty Ragsdale through nasty platforming levels like pus palace, the naval caverns and the mucus mountains. Developers Mike Stragey and Chris Tremmel, who have since worked at a number of studios such as Activision, EA and WayForward, say the game will be a brand new HD experience with new mechanics and levels like swimming and minecart-riding. Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country 64 composer Grant Kirkhope will create the game's soundtrack as well.

Boogerman 20th Anniversary is estimated to arrive in November 2014 for PC, Mac, PS4, Vita and Wii U. The developer is looking to raise $375,000 by November 20 in order to bring the project to life, and has a Greenlight page set up to gain community approval for release on Steam.

Boogerman wants to celebrate his 20th anniversary with a new pick and flick platformer originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 17 Oct 2013 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is Now Available on Steam!

• Assume the roles of five different characters, each in a unique environment
  
• Challenging dilemmas dealing with powerfully charged emotional issues
  
• Provocative psychological and adult-oriented themes
  
• Based on Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", on the ten most reprinted stories in the English language
  
• Full digitized speech with over 40 different characters and state of the art animation
  
• Harlan Ellison as the voice of the insane master computer, AM.
  

FIVE DAMNED SOULS: Buried deep within the center of the earth, trapped in the bowels of an insane computer for the past hundred and nine years. Gorrister the suicidal loner, Benny the mutilated brute, Ellen the hysterical phobic, Nimdok the secretive sadist, Ted the cynical paranoid.

ONE CHALLENGE: The adventure plunges you into the tortured and hidden past of the five humans. Delve into their darkest fears. Outwit the Master Computer AM in a game of psychological warfare. Distrubing, compelling. An adventure you won't easily forget !!

Insurance companies often get grief for what's not covered in a typical policy. But a standard homeowner's policy — often known as an HO-3 — does have clauses that cover you in ways you may not expect. And even if you aren't covered under a standard policy, you may learn that there are endorsements tied to your policy that offer extra coverage you didn't realize you had. (See also: Don't Let Your Bank Pick Your Homeowners Insurance)

It's important to review your homeowner's insurance policy carefully to see what applies to you. but you may be surprised to know that these seven things are covered under many standard policies or as part of low-cost endorsements that are often routinely included.

1. Spoiled Food

A typical policy will cover the loss of up to $500 in food if your freezer or refrigerator stops working due to a power outage.

2. Tombstones

If a grave marker of a loved one is damaged, the insurance company will pay for repairs, usually up to $5,000. It's important to note that grave markers must be established as your "personal property" for them to be covered. (In essence, you're covered if you are the one who bought the plot.) So that's something to keep in mind when burying a loved one.

3. Dog Bites

If your dog bites someone and causes injury, most policies will cover that person's medical expenses, even if the bite didn't happen on your property. Most policies also cover medical expenses for other injuries in which an insured person is at fault, and will pay for legal expenses if you are sued. (Check your policy to be sure of limits to this liability coverage.)

4. Kids and Their Stuff at College

Under most policies, the "insured" includes anyone in your household as well as anyone under 24 who is attending college full time. However, policies aren't crystal clear on whether this applies only to students living in dorm, so it may also be wise to get low-cost renters insurance if they are living off campus. (See also: Why You Should Get Renters Insurance)

5. Volcanic Eruptions

This may not be relevant to you unless you live in Hawaii, but it's nice to know that if lava is flowing toward your house, you're covered. Keep in mind, however, that most standard policies will not cover loss due to earthquakes or tremors. (See also: How to Financially Prepare for a Natural Disaster)

6. Identity Theft

It can be distressing to learn that someone has stolen your personal information, and cases of identify theft can cost victims thousands of dollars, not to mention the time and stress of dealing with law enforcement, attorneys, and financial institutions to get your case resolved. Thankfully, many homeowner's policies will reimburse you for expenses you incur when working to resolve an identity theft case. This could include attorney's fees, travel costs, and even lost wages if you have to miss work. Some policies will even cover things like babysitting and elder care if you need them while you resolve the identity theft case. (See also: How to Deal With Identity Theft)

Note: In many cases, identity theft coverage is not part of the standard HO-3, but a special endorsement. But such endorsements are often routinely included without homeowners even knowing it. Check your policy.

7. Some Flood Damage

Typically, if your house floods, you're out of luck, unless you purchase flood insurance. However, many policies do have endorsements that cover flood damage in some instances. I recently saved thousands of dollars in repairs when I learned that my policy actually did cover repairs resulting from a failed sump pump. Check your policy to see if it includes such a provision.

8. Your Bike, Even 3,000 Miles From Home

Most policies include "off premises" coverage for your personal property. (It's the same clause that covers your child's property when she's away at college.) One Wise Bread IT staffer discovered the value of this when his very pricey touring bicycle was stolen midway through his cross-country bike tour — all the way on the other side of the continent. He called his agent, and soon he had the funds to replace the bike and continue pedaling.

In addition to protecting your property from theft or loss, off premises coverage offers liability protection, too. That means if you shank a drive through the picture window of the house edging the fairway, your insurer picks up the tab. Amounts vary based on your total coverage amounts, so check your policy for the details. 

Anything surprising in your homeowner's insurance?

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Radiation is serious—especially in Japan. With the country still dealing with a nuclear disaster, people need to protect themselves.

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You have not truly experienced Rick Astley until you've heard him in the original Klingon. Klingon torture used to be very unsubtle. In embracing the Rick Roll, they are adding a devious new element of mental warfare to the game, and slowly trying to drive us puny humans mad. Click ahead if you dare...because there's a terrifying bonus video after the jump as well. Continue reading "FINALLY! "Never Gonna Give You Up" in Klingon" >

Australian band The Paper Kites turned the music video for their single "Young" into an experiment in art, photography and human faces

The band teamed up with production company Oh Yeah Wow and photographer Oli Sansom to create the video, using more than 350 people and 4,000 images to develop the final results

To create the seamless stop-motion effects, the photography team had to pose each person for several minutes, making sure each subject's face would be perfectly aligned with the last.

"We gave instructions like 'chin up a little, turn your head to your right a millimeter, now sway your body a fraction to your left' and hoped that people could comprehend," Oh Yeah Wow's Darcy Prendergast told My Modern Met Read more...

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Fans of the hit AMC series The Walking Dead got an extra treat during the show’s season premiere on Sunday in the form of a technology tie-in from Microsoft.

During one commercial break, the company unveiled a follow-up to its zombie-centric commercial from earlier this year as a way to promote several Microsoft products in one shot.

The scene starts out with a fan of The Walking Dead unpacking boxes at a new house, while communicating with his girlfriend via a Windows 8 tablet.

We won’t spoil what happens next (see the video above), but the spot also manages to squeeze in product shots of both Skype and the Nokia Lumia 1020. Read more...

More about Microsoft, Windows 8, Tech, Apps Software, and Dev Design

Sid Meier's Civilization V: Scrambled Continents Map Pack, all new content for Sid Meier's Civilization® V is Now Available on Steam

The Scrambled Continents map pack includes real geographic locations with special scripts that produce randomized interiors each time a new game begins. While the familiar outline of the continent’s geography stays constant, the inner heart of the world changes each time you play for endless replayability on countless plausible worlds. Maps include Africa, Eastern Asia, North and South America, Western Europe, the Middle East, a thawed Antarctica, new scripted maps for Small Continents and Oceania, plus one map including all of Earth’s continents.

Unless it's open source from Oracle, of course

Oracle has popped out a white paper that may well turn some heads, because it contains robust criticism of open source software.…

play it in google translates free proxy and fuck off at work without getting blocked, WIN/WIN

p.s. cancer and aids still not cured

Image: Gabriel L. Hamer

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Veterinary epidemiologist Tony Goldberg came back from a trip to Uganda to study chimpanzees and how the diseases they carry may jump to another species like humans, when he felt an itch in his nose.

Did Goldberg unwittingly brough home a parasite? Only one way to find out, as Lizzie Wade of Science Now reports:

Goldberg quickly gathered the necessary supplies—a pair of forceps, a flashlight, and a mirror—and steeled his resolve. Using the mirror to steer his hand, he poked the instrument into his irritated nostril, latched onto a suspicious lump, and quickly yanked it out, careful not to snag any nose hairs in the process. There it was: an adolescent tick. At that point, Goldberg knew, it had likely been living in his nostril for several days.

Goldberg's nostril tick is nothing to sneeze at: after sequencing its DNA, Goldberg realized that it could be a whole new species of tick.

So, next time your booger wriggles, you know what it is!

Oh, and how did it feel to have a nostril tick? Goldberg said that on the whole, the experience is "not pleasant but not as bad as you might think.")

What happens when you apply the over-the-top seriousness from that Need for Speed movie trailer to Mario Kart? Magic. Thanks, GamesRadar.

(YouTube link)

The live show called Saturday Night (later known as Saturday Night Live) premiered on October 11th, 1975. A few days before that, Lorne Michaels took all seven Not Ready for Primetime Players to the Tomarrow with Tom Snyder to introduce them. For the vantage point of 38 years later, it's hard to imagine that no one had ever heard of these seven people.

Snyder: "What should we look for in your show?"

Michaels: "Anxiety."

Ah, memories. Even when I didn't make it home by 11:30 on a Saturday night, I managed to watch the show wherever I was at the time. But that one time we kept Neilsen diaries, I made sure to watch at home and log it. Open Culture tells us about the beginning of the show, complete with audition on video and a classic sketch by Gilda Radner. -via mental_floss

Nothing is ever as tranquil as it seems. This image is pretty and has lots of fun, trippy colors. But all of that variation is being produced by gas, dust and other matter as whole galaxies fall into a supermassive black hole. Created from Hubble data, the image shows the cosmic tug-of-war going on in the Perseus Cluster of Galaxies 230 million light years away.

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Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer and the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are. You can follow him on Twitter here.

There are three kinds of articles that regularly get written about Nintendo.

The first article says Nintendo’s hardware business is doomed and talks about how impossible it is becoming for the company to survive in the modern world. The reasons for the doom are several (a few years ago it was the encroachment of HD, now it’s the rise of mobile). Either way, its author says, there’s no room for Nintendo in the New Order of Devices. It better start making games for other platforms.

The second article is similar, but rather than focus on devices, it laments the state of the company’s games. How long, the author asks, can Nintendo get away with pumping out sequels and rehashes year after year? How much life do those old tired characters have? Mario will surely die any day now. It needs some new games or else.

The third article, including this one, says that only a fool bets against Nintendo. Nintendo, it says, is different. Because it is.

This week we saw two pieces of evidence that show Nintendo’s still got its groove. The first was the news that the release of an HD’d version of The Wind Waker caused sales of the Wii U to rise by nearly 700 percent in the U.K. And the second was the release of the 2DS. It’s very cheap and I reckon it’s going to sell well.

Nintendo is uniquely positioned. There are a few companies that attract legions of fans who live or die with its successes or failures (Blizzard and Valve for instance) and equally few that have the financial muscle to make games machines. Only Nintendo has both. In the games industry it’s the one platform maker whose strategy is to make machines that fit the kind of games it wants to make. It trusts that the market will buy in.

Nintendo isn’t trying to be a platform business in the way that most tech companies are. It doesn’t tend to aim for the cutting edge or be too bothered about how much extra functionality is included in its platforms. It doesn’t seek to impress through power. Instead its consoles and handless are frequently plasticky and cheap rather than svelte and expensive. However they’re usually innovative, and fans love them for it.

Another key difference is Nintendo’s games. While game reviewers have always bemoaned the slow pace at which Mario, Kirby, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid and a bunch of other games actually develop, these franchises continue to find an audience. Almost every game developer I know buys a Nintendo system despite themselves because they want to play one of those new releases. A recent example is Animal Crossing: New Leaf which, over the summer, filled my Twitter feed. Everybody had something to say about the comings and goings of Tom Nook.

At the same time “The Nintendo Difference” is somewhat divisive. The company’s games can be chalk and cheese and its platforms often don’t show the same breadth of content as others and its third-party dealings have always been a bit iffy. In some ways its marketing story boxes the company in. While it has had some huge hits in the last decade, most notably the Wii, it has done so at a cost. A lot of true fans felt that the company had turned its back on them in search of the casual gaming dollar, and so when it came time to buy into the sequel they paused. But that doesn’t mean they’d gone for good.

The reason this formula keeps working is that Nintendo understands franchises. The games business likes to act like the movie business sometimes (see David Cage’s Beyond: Two Souls) but really it’s more like the comics industry. Games journalists may like to think there should be an overall narrative to the medium where new faces are supposed to replace the old, like Hollywood, but historically that’s not supportable.

Rather than find a ton of new faces, the industry keeps updating old faces year after year, just as comic companies do with their characters. And, again just like comics, fans respond with undying loyalty. The plain fact is people buy Zelda after Zelda after Zelda.

Ultimately the Nintendo difference is about patience. Because the company has zillions of true fans it is not in a position where it has to rush. It may come across as dorky, and its products may fail to find market fit on first release. Yet over time it wends its way through those issues and finds the right game and price point to make its platforms attractive.

It sits, waits, evaluates and patiently prods until it gets to where it wants to be. It relies on the quality of its software product to eventually persuade people to come around. It takes the time to make its games right. It knows that the physical quality of its hardware is not a deal breaker. And even when it diverges from what the fans believe in, Nintendo has the patience to win them back.

And that’s why Nintendo survives and usually thrives. In the short term it’s obvious that it has some issues to deal with, and in the medium term yes there are threats. Mobile gaming is a big deal. Yet as long as Nintendo continues to satisfy those fans who’ll go out and buy whole game systems just to get their hands on rehashed versions of The Wind Waker, Nintendo’s going to be okay.

Although we’ll have to wait to discover what innovations Google’s secret “X lab” holds for the future, the company does have at least one bleeding-edge venture it wants to unveil to the public right now. In partnership with NASA, Google has embarked on a project to use a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer to tackle some of our biggest computational problems.

And because visuals often help explain complex concepts, Google has posted a short documentary explaining what quantum computing is, and how it plans to use the technology to make new discoveries. Read more...

More about Google, Video, Computing, Youtube, and Tech

Eiji Aonuma discusses hand-holding in Zelda: A Link Between Worlds originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 13 Oct 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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