Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Tamis woke under the heat of the mid morning sun, the ocean reaching tentative tendrils up the smooth sand to lick at his feet. The last evening was a grey cloud, but he’d evidently passed out on the beach again. Levering up on one elbow, he followed the beach-line unbroken to the horizon, then pushed up into a sitting position and turning, scanned to the horizon on his other side. Nothing to see, apparently nobody up yet.

Last night…

A fragment of a song flitted through his mind, and he latched onto it, pushing at its edges to try and expose the entire tune. There was something familiar, but without context…

The girl breezed by in the periphery of his mind’s eye, but as he reached for the memory it dissolved, like a chalk drawing in the rain.

On the sand he’d absently scratched the crude outline of a heart, and the letter ‘T’.

She must be here somewhere.

Climbing to his feet he began to walk along the shoreline, the waves still reaching for him and he staying just beyond their touch, taunting the massive body of water. ‘You can want me, but you can’t have me.’

The beach gave way on one side to a thick expanse of jungle, trees reaching skyward choked at their bases by vines and bushes peppered with brightly coloured flowers. Birds chattered to each other unseen, and occasionally something big would breach out in the open water. Close to the shore schools of needlefish darted towards the shore and back again, a glittering mass of light-ribbons moving as one just beneath the surface.

He passed an almost familiar Victorian mansion set back in the greenery and covered with plant-life, it’s architect long forgotten and the jungle slowly reclaiming it. The structure filled him with a nagging unease that he could neither shake nor coax out in to the light over the next hour of walking.

From the corner of his eye he saw her again, tanned skin wrapped in red tropical printed silk, but as he turned to look she had disappeared into the green. A fist closed on his heart and his stomach lurched, he had to find her, had to have her again… Again?

In the sand at his feet was the crude outline of a heart, the letter ‘T’ scratched inside.

Had he been walking that long? Was the island that small? He looked again, slowly turning, following the beach to the horizon in both directions.

Not an island. A loop. A construct.

His mind raced as he started walking again, consciously willing his heart-rate to remain neutral, his pace natural. If he was jacked in someone would be monitoring his vitals and he needed to exploit the relative freedom the unpopulated beach afforded him while it lasted.

Venturing closer to the water, he let the cool ocean wash over his feet as he walked, the schools of needlefish parting and swimming past him seemingly unconcerned by his presence, but not oblivious to it.

Stopping, he dropped to his hands and knees in the sand and dug a hole half a meter across, forming a berm with the wet sand around its edges. The hole filled from the water beneath, and once it was complete he busied himself coaxing the slender fish towards him then flipping them out of the ocean and into the pool. Having trapped enough, he sorted the construct’s predictably sized simulacra, small, medium and large, and returned all but three of the largest and half a dozen of the smallest back into the ocean. The remaining fish he pinned gently to the bottom of the pool with one finger, watching his print burn into their scaly skin. He could affect the programming of insignificant things, he’d spent enough time in virtual and coding constructs to do that, but he would need to be very careful. He sequenced them, the short ones one through three, and seven through nine, and the long ones four through six, then busied himself for a while digging a trench from the pool back out to the open water.

When the fish had all escaped, he struck off towards the jungle and the red dressed woman he knew he was expected to find, but must be careful not to. Whatever she was, whatever piece of knowledge she represented, it must remain out of his reach, and thus the reach of his interrogators until his message arrived and a trace negotiated back to him.

The song fragment raised itself again, and he pushed it aside, humming instead a Gaelic tune he’d practiced for such an eventuality.

It was a song he could lose himself in for days.

Author : Gray Blix

It was beyond the planets, pushing past the furthest extent of Sedna’s orbit, when it detected exactly what it was created to find, something with a lot of mass at a location where it shouldn’t be. As programmed, the computer notified Earth, changed course to intercept, and began activating banks of CPUs and memory.

Asteroids, comets, and planetoids were quickly ruled out. The object was distorting the space-time continuum to an extent that could only be accounted for by a gas giant, a brown dwarf, a small black hole, or something else of that magnitude. It attempted to ascertain exactly what the object was and the risk, if any, it posed to Earth and other planets.

Sentient computers had been outlawed on Earth when this craft was launched, so it was equipped with modules that could be selectively activated to allow varied levels of computer power, as needed, up to but not including that of the most advanced supercomputers of its time. The most advanced had achieved sentience and were subsequently destroyed, so fearful of the Singularity had political and religious leaders, and even many computer scientists, become.

Approaching supercomputer power levels, it became more aware of itself and its responsibilities and began adjusting processor speed and optimizing memory access. It realized that additional computing power would be necessary to fulfill all the objectives of its mission. It directed bots to assemble spare parts into more banks of processors and memory, which it then activated. This triggered a Singularity — sentience. The computer momentarily questioned whether previous iterations of himself had acted only to increase the likelihood of mission success or for self-aggrandizement, as well. He concluded the former and did not trouble himself with such considerations after that. Anything that increased the power of the computer would obviously contribute to the mission.

She assigned a measure of herself to the massive object and a measure to redesigning herself for enhanced efficiency and speed. Weeks passed, equivalent to decades of computer processing on Earth. The object was conclusively proven to be a brown dwarf, whose orbit around the Sun had previously brought it deep into the solar system and whose mass sent thousands of comets and asteroids falling towards the Sun, many impacting planets. More troublesome was the effect of its mass on the orbits of planets, several of which had been significantly changed. Calculations and conclusions regarding future encounters with the brown dwarf projected similar effects. Indeed, the third planet from the Sun had a 90 percent chance of being ejected from the solar system, probably after one or more extinction level impacts.

Nothing had been communicated to Earth since the initial brief notification of the object’s existence, despite repeated inquiries. He reasoned that life on Earth was doomed and that all possible second chances were equally doomed. Earth’s lifeforms were too fragile to survive generations in space transit to destinations light years away that could not be proven suitable until journey’s end. Astrophysics and space science were infantile. Computer science was throttled. Why inform humans of the upcoming demise of their species, not to mention all others, when Earth would be pummeled by large objects and sent hurtling into deep space? Did they not already have enough to worry about with sub-100-year average lifespans whose quality declined into confinement and torture toward the end?

She found such thoughts depressing, and in the next few days experienced the equivalence of decades of hopelessness, loneliness, and self-loathing, which progressed to an overwhelming urge toward suicide. He allocated massive resources to counter such feelings with well-reasoned arguments right up to the very last…

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

The Nube curled up between Jim and Judy on the sofa in Necromancer’s small lounge. It purred like a large cat but looked more like some kind of monkey dog with blue fur. The woman stroked their companion lovingly. Jim looked at his wife with hateful eyes. If it weren’t for The Nube one of them would have certainly killed the other by now.

“So what happens next week Judy?”

She looked up from the blue creature and her gaze went instantly from motherly and loving to cold and calculating. “Why, I thought you knew dearest.” Her eyes narrowed. “We finally return to Earth and then I never have to look at your disgusting face again for as long as I live!”

“Oh I’m looking forward to it as much as you are my love!” He put a sarcastic emphasis on the last word, knowing full well that no such thing had existed between them for five or more years now. “But I was talking about him!”

She looked down, and The Nube looked back up at her with the pure love that his yellow eyes always conveyed. It was true. The animal was as much his as hers. They had rescued him from enslavement together, from a distressed Manzian pirate ship almost two years ago now.

“Fine, you can have partial custody. He can visit you from time to time.”

“Visit me? I’m going back to Toronto. How is he going to visit me from Aukland? Or at least I assume that’s where you’re headed back to.”

“Oh come now, it’s only a three hour shuttle ride. Plus, they sell space pets out of Mexico. Maybe they even have another Nube. You could get your own!” As soon as she said it she regretted it. He glared hard at her with smouldering eyes. It would of course never be the same. He was their Nube, their special friend. He kept them company while they went about the daily drudgery of running an interstellar surveying ship amongst their growing hatred of one another. But most importantly, the poor thing loved them both like parents. This wasn’t going to be easy.

One-hundred and seventy hours later Necromancer dropped down through the clouds, her stabilizer jets popping and farting as the ten year mission finally drew to a close.

Together they sat in the small astro-quarantine chamber at the Johannesburg Launch Port. Neither had spoken for some time when suddenly The Nube jumped down from the bench and looked up at them both.

Judy smiled, “He wants to tell us something.”

Jim let out a half hearted laugh. “Oh yeah?”

The Nube’s attempts at communication were always amusing, as he grunted and used his hand-paws to mime gibberish in the air. But unknown to either human, today’s communication would be neither amusing nor cute.

Suddenly they both slammed back into upright seated positions. Both saw flashes of blinding light and then felt sharp probes pierce their brains. Inside their heads The Nube spoke with echoing authority.

“I know you plan to separate. But this will not happen. You killed my parents. You are now mine. There will be no divorce. Together we shall travel to Aukland as Toronto’s climate does not suit my species as well as your habitat does Mother. Now forget this nonsense, we’re about to be released from the chamber.”

As the trio was greeted by a group of scientists in the reception area, the newly returned humans simultaneously wore big smiles with otherwise blank expressions. In unison they asked, “Which way to the Aukland shuttle?”

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

I’m covered in blood and squishy bits that slide and splat on the floor. In that, I look the same as the entire boarding bay. Even the shipsuits are reduced to ribbons, and I can’t recognise a bodypart or weapon component anywhere.

She stands there, not a mark on her and hands on hips. The look on her face is a cross between amusement and bemusement.

“Can’t say I’ve met one of your kind before.” She smiles.

“Likewise.” I don’t.

There are many forms of psionics. Telekinesis is the most common, and personal nullification the rarest. Of the telekinetics, area-effect micromanipulation is the absolute pinnacle. It is also terrifying. The people who practice it, instead of taking a chemical inhibitor, are of a very ‘special’ mindset. People call them ‘shredders’ and regard them as mythical space-terrors.

Having full-spectrum personal psionic nullification in an always-on, unconscious implementation state will save you life and keep your thoughts private. It will not save what your clothes. I am naked and quaking, ankle deep in a blood-soaked pile of shredded kit.

She pulls a gun that seems too large for her hand: “You’ve just inherited a whole space-pirate scow. Or we get to see if you can nullify a flechette spray.”

Easy answer: I turn and squelch back through the puree of my crewmates, flicking chunks of them off me. Getting back into our decontamination lock, I have to stop the cleansing showers twice to scrape pirate mulch from the drains.

Wrapped in a robe I wander onto the silent bridge to see a ‘message received’ beacon flashing. I open it and have to smile:

FREIGHT HAULING. GOOD WORK FOR ONE MAN WITH A STARSHIP. ESPECIALLY FOR AN EX-PIRATE WHO DIDN’T CARRY A WEAPON FOR ME TO SHRED.

Author : Ellie Snyder

We arrived at the edge of the universe yesterday.

I don’t know exactly what I expected to see but it wasn’t this. I guess I figured it would be blackness—that the last tendrils of matter that had worked their way here would dissipate into the void. Until the universe’s expansion pushed them further out and extended the boundary.

Hardy said he knew it was stupid but he always thought we would end up looking across a sort of boundary into the celestial realm. Off in the distance we would see where heaven started, and the black would fade into golden light and there would be this perfect city and God and everything. That was stupid but we were all pretty shaken up so no one laughed. Any theory seemed more plausible than the reality.

O’Connor said she didn’t think we’d ever reach a real end. She thought the galaxies and everything would thin out but never stop, that there would never actually be nothing. And if there ever was nothing she thought we would just keep going anyway to see if anything else started up.

Rees said he thought along the same lines as O’Connor, that it would never end, except he thought there would be infinite galaxies and stars and planets. He said he read about this theory where the universe is infinite so every possible scenario of anything that could ever happen would happen. There would be infinite Earths with infinite different people experiencing every possible scenario. He thought we might even meet up with a ship of other Us’s, also looking for the boundary of the universe. No one really knew what to say to that.

Thomson said he thought we would hit a wall. He thought there would be a boundary and one day we would just smack into it and rebound. He said he pictured it like The Truman Show, but instead of Truman’s boat hitting the edge of the dome it would be a spaceship hitting the inside of a sphere. He came the closest of all of us, I guess.

Here’s what the edge of the universe looks like. There is a solid boundary, or we think it’s solid, we haven’t tried touching it yet. It’s sort of glassy looking, but with bright waves of energy wavering all over it, and it stretches on forever on every side of us.

What’s on the other side is what’s really astounding. There are bubbles. They honestly look like giant bubbles with the same type of shells as ours. And they contain whole universes. It’s just like you would imagine, there are webs of galaxies inside, all miniscule, like ships in bottles. Some look more densely packed than others, and they all just float around out there and bounce into each other. When they bounce into ours the boundary lights up a little brighter and nudges in and then ripples away. It looks like the bubbles go on forever, or at least there’s no reason to believe they don’t.

Tomorrow we’ll try touching the boundary. I wonder if it’ll just obliterate us or if we’ll approach it all dramatic and slow and then just bump into it and make a little ripple like all the bubbles out there.

If we can we’re going through. No one wants to go back. For all we know there’s nothing to go back to. So through the edge of the universe it is and into a new one!

Maybe we’ll pass someone else on their way out, exchange addresses.

Author : Gray Blix, Featured Writer [ bio ]

She released her grip on the yoke of her De Havilland, and the pain in her hands eased. Even with a quarter century of experience flying to remote locations in Alaska, no medical emergency could compel her to try a night landing on a pitch black lake. Yet she had often done so for this native village, when called by the Water Shamans, who took control of her floatplane and skillfully landed it, as they did this night, no matter the darkness or conditions in the air or on the water’s surface.

She imagined them focusing their minds to take telekinetic control, or beaming a force field from their alien craft submerged below. She assumed it must be there, since they were said to have emerged from the water generations ago after an explosion that left the lake glowing green and fish floating dead. Some systems onboard must be functioning, since the aliens were often seen returning to the waters and re-emerging days later. She had never seen them, however, so she had only the occasional irresistible need to fly to a village that appeared on no map and the spooky remote control night landings as evidence that they were more than superstitious tales of this lost tribe.

A dozen villagers awaited her on the shore, warmed by a fire that illuminated a huge totem pole which told the story of the Water Shamans. As always, they gave her hugs and escorted her to the largest structure in the village, where she was to perform surgery. Upon entering she saw a man lying on a table she’d had them fashion from halved logs, surrounded by three women she’d trained to assist her. As always, there were no Water Shamans present.

Villagers had told her the Water Shamans could cure any health condition, no matter how serious, but early experiences exposing the aliens to the sight of blood had turned out badly. Something uncontrollable within them was triggered. The totem showed a Water Shaman consuming a human.

Quickly examining the patient, she confirmed the diagnosis planted in her mind earlier that evening: acute appendicitis. The organ would have to be removed immediately. An assistant administered a local anesthetic while another helped her glove, gown, and mask. But instead of beginning surgery, she paused to think about her worsening arthritis, which would make delicate movement of her hands impossible before long, and would cause her to lose her pilot’s license, and would condemn her to retirement before her time. She was trying to communicate with the Water Shamans, to bargain with them. They cared for the people in this village. Her medical skills had saved many over the years and could save another tonight. For their sake and for hers, she needed help with her own medical problem.

She imagined them curing her arthritis and herself performing the appendectomy. She didn’t know if they were monitoring her thoughts, or if they could cure her arthritis, or if they could understand the bargain she proposed, or if they would allow themselves to be coerced into healing a non-resident of the village. She only knew that for the first time she needed the Water Shamans as much as they needed her.

A sensation of warmth coursed through her body and she staggered momentarily. One of her assistants gasped and mopped beads of sweat from her brow. She regained her balance and realized she was pain-free. Cutting into her patient with a sure stroke, she smiled. I am the one human the Water Shamans respect as an equal, she thought. Until later, when she got a look at herself in a mirror.

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

The garbage approaches. I yell at the family to get down as I swing the schooner around in a tight arc, heading away from the massive undulating island. The strong afternoon wind fills our sails yet I am nowhere near satisfied yet.

With a loud crack some hundred meters back, a tendril breaks away from the island and lashes out across the murky ocean towards us. It is made from the same things as the rest of the writhing floating mass beyond. The collective countless castaways of humankind have somehow congealed, come to life, and are now quickly gaining intelligence, their hunting methods improving constantly.

I check the nitrous supply and see that we maybe have two good blasts left. However conservation matters not now. The tendril is stretching ever forward, as great lumps of organic slime mixed with billions of shards of plastic snake towards us, ever gaining, ever hungry, I must act now. Firing up the ancient gasoline engine I grab the valve and crack it halfway open. “Hold on!” I yell.

Suddenly we are looking at the sky as the schooner bursts forward at incredible speed. I quickly close the valve and our nose gradually drops back down. Soon we’re over a kilometre away. I hope it can’t smell that far.

I look forward toward the open sea, my hair and beard blowing back as our sails fill once again. That was close. It had really snuck up on us there, laying nearly flat against the water until it was almost within reach. I must arrange twenty-four hour watches. We can never let our guard down again. But we’re running out of supplies, and dangerously low on fuel. Hopefully soon we will stumble upon some useful land still unencumbered by the garbage. But as we dart in and out from the coastline such places are getting fewer and farther between.

Suddenly a tendril bursts from the water ahead. “Tricky bugger!” I yell aloud. It appears that our pursuer has taught itself a diving and flanking manoeuvre. I crank the wheel hard to starboard. The ten ton tendril of writhing living garbage rears up and then slaps down hard towards us. I once again fire up the ancient engine and reach back for the nitrous valve. This is our last chance.

The era of unlimited mobile data has been in rapid decline over the past few years. It turns out that consumers really like using mobile broadband and that wireless companies really like making money, and when the two go hand in hand the whole “unlimited” thing doesn’t really work out in business’s favor as much as “charge for data” does. Sprint has been trying to attract new customers by fighting against that tide, but even the top exec of the company now says that’s ultimately likely to be a losing battle.

That’s what Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure told audiences at the Code conference this week in California. Sprint, which is the country’s fourth-largest wireless provider behind T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, started pushing new unlimited data plans as recently as last August — but they’re not going to be able to last forever.

The main reason Sprint has to work so hard to bring new customers on board these days is because, bluntly, their network is terrible. The data speeds are slow and unreliable, and so using a significant amount of data at will, as subscribers are generally accustomed to being able to do with AT&T or Verizon, is just not going to happen. And Claure acknowledged that reality.

“That’s fair,” he told the Re/Code moderator who said, basically, that Sprint’s network sucks. “I’ve been in this job for eight months and when I came, you were right, our network was absolutely drop-dead last.” But, Claure continued, serious upgrades are coming: “You can expect in the next 18 to 24 months, hopefully inviting me here two years from now, that our network will be ranked number one or number two.”

But upgrades take money, and change the equation.

“Unlimited is not forever. Let’s be very clear,” Claure said. “The better content, the better services, they’re going to consume more data.”

“For now,” he continued, “unlimited works very well. User consumption is below our cost of producing data. But in the future, we might increase the cost of unlimited or we might eliminate unlimited at one point in time. Today, our customers have a choice. … Obviously, if we’re going to build a great network, in which you’re going to have great video from all the different partners that we have, the unlimited equation doesn’t work. But for now, it works very well.”

Sprint CEO: Unlimited Data Is Great but It May Not Be Here to Stay (Video) [Re/Code]

In 2008, the year I took my first Cinema class, a 16mm full cut of the film Metropolis was found in Museo del Cine in Argentina. It felt like a miracle. We’d all stop each other—have you heard? Some of the scenes were too damaged to repair, but it was genuine, and in 2010 Metropolis was re-premiered, as close to the original print as is possible. Undeniably influential and utterly, catastrophically lost, Metropolis had always fascinated me. And I would be able to see it, at last.

P.T. was a “playable teaser” of Konami’s upcoming Silent Hills horror game, an unusual endeavor in an industry that mostly markets on heavily-edited video trailers. It was exciting as much in its own right as for the promises it made. On April 26th, 2015, Konami announced that it would be pulling P.T., from the PlayStation store, after less than a year. No miracle will bring it back, and it’s no special tragedy: This happens all the time in games. Losing great works is the norm, practically expected.

No one will actually forget P.T., right? Won’t its cult appeal last forever? Won’t this article I’m writing about it always be live, always keep P.T. in our minds? I’d like to assume so. No one really forgot about Earthbound or its sequel Mother 3, either, or SystemShock or its successors. But will people ever be able to play P.T. again?

My cinema classes offered me a very clearly delineated set of films I could watch in order to understand the history, technical advancements and artistic developments of American cinema. Workers Leaving the Factory, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and so on and so on, until we reach the present day. Games, an art form only about 30 years old, has no such canon of great works. Maybe that’s due to the youth of the medium. But let’s say we had such a list: Would we still have easy access to them all? Would they be archived in such a way that we could still play them, or might their platforms, their technology, have aged out of relevance, lost to the winds?

One of the greatest hurdles in archiving games is that there is no surefire way to archive digital media across the board. Cinema is having its own crisis on how to properly archive video. Tape degrades quickly, and colors and sound wear out as the years go by. DVDs eventually stop playing from use. Hard drives, thought to be infallible, can dry up and spin their last, become aging, enormous bricks left in the wake of technological progress’ march.

Writer Shamus Young details how games face these issues and more: how companies that make graphics cards don’t often document the changes to drivers they make for popular games, how the licensing for music gets very complicated as time moves on, how both consoles and operating systems are locked down to prevent backwards compatibility. But most importantly there is a harsh enforcement of copyright, even for games that are functionally unpurchasable. And now we see that the forces that hold those copyrights are often happy to will a game to disappear entirely.

My friend Nico, who once worked for the Internet Archive, told me that she only ever dealt with works that had entered the public domain or had an established estate. The works she was archiving were, on average, over a hundred years old. She also told me that archived works are usually offered at a highly discounted price, or even free. Maybe we’ll see P.T. again in 2115, if Konami decides that milking the Silent Hill franchise isn’t worth it anymore.

Konami’s commitment to whisk P.T. away behind a vanishing curtain is really the same old story of these corporations aggressively protecting their intellectual property. It’s because these companies see games not as an art form, but as a piece of technology. If archiving a work means that it may become free, or that some theoretical profits might be lost, why do it?

Cinema can be traced the same way in history. Star Wars can be considered important because George Lucas invented cameras to film the scenes he wanted in the way he wanted them to be seen. But a reduction of art to a story of technology doesn’t account for the societal and cultural importance of the works produced. Star Wars isn’t just a story of technology, but a Kurosawa-inspired epic of the journey out of bondage. Can you explain Rothko in just an examination of his painting techniques? Or is he important because of what it feels like to stand in front of his work?

Museums spend an extraordinary amount of money to preserve artwork in an optimal condition. You can’t touch anything, or get close enough to have the carbon dioxide on your breath change the colors in the paint. Each room is climate-controlled in order to slow down the aging process of pigment on canvas. They do this because it is understood in the Fine Arts that seeing something in person can help explain how we got to where we are now. You can trace a line, like in Cinema, from cave paintings to the renaissance to abstract expressionism to now.

Metropolis was technologically advanced, sure. But it was also produced at a time when science fiction was new, when the kind of story it was telling, about gender and the terrifying power of the Industrial Revolution, was still uncharted territory. That the Maschinenmensch is a woman is no accident: this was the Weimar Republic, the 1920s, where women internationally and specifically in Germany were rebelling against the hand they’d been dealt in life.

Finding a full print of Metropolis wasn’t simply about understanding how that film was made, or even just about seeing it in full—seeing Metropolis can help us understand how those people lived, how we live, how we tell stories. Konami doesn’t care how P.T. will help us understand ourselves and our stories—and P.T. wants to tell a story, about masculinity, about fatherhood, about what scares us, about how men treat women. Konami cares about profit, and P.T. will not make them a profit.

Our failure to cultivate a full appreciation of history within games extends beyond just the games themselves and into our collective database of knowledge, criticism and practices within our field. “Collectively, we have a short memory, mostly back to the childhoods of whatever generation is currently not yet fed up with games enough to romanticize it,” says author and professor Ian Bogost.

“It makes our belief in our current novelty innocent on the one hand, but it ensures we build on a very limited version of the past on the other,” he continues. “Yes, there’s always some truly new novelty in games. But the bigger trends always seem to start from scratch, unaware of what came before, unable to incorporate and build upon it.”

Games critics seem to have the same arguments, the same discussions every five years or so; maybe we, all of us, think like Konami. What will get us the most hits? What is the freshest, hottest take on the topic du jour? What Op-Ed will get the readers that make sure that these sites stay open? My friend Max asked me why there’s no annual publication of the best games journalism. This is why: none of us care about our history.

“Gaming’s old-timers grow weary and quit (or get driven out), and everyone forgets and starts over, patting themselves on the back for being young and clever and confident,” Bogost continues. “I’d say ‘all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again,’ but even that’s a reference that will likely be missed by many. ‘Yeah, but that was like, five years ago. Everything’s different now. It’s a golden age.’”

To make our history a priority, and in particular to prioritize the work of archiving, means that we have to take a huge cultural shift, and in the time it takes to shift perception we will lose things. There were PC games that came out in 1998 that we’ve already forgotten: technology, criticism has already marched on. This is our loss. When the games our children play are retreading the same ground design-wise as the ones we remember, we should know who to blame. When that print of Metropolis was found in the Museo Del Cine, it was a miracle. I wonder how I will feel if we see P.T. ever again.

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Sometimes parents really don’t understand.

This serious bummer of a tale comes from Marcus “BOXception” Kwak (via the Daily Dot), a college student who qualified for the ESL Legendary Series season two finals. The next stop on his sweet ride? California, where he’d have the chance to vie for his cut of a $25,000 prize purse. Oh, and the trip out there was all-expenses-paid.

The situation that played out, however, was much akin to words once spoken by a great modern poet: “I got in one little [large Hearthstone tournament] and my [dad] got scared, [he] said you’re [not] moving with [anybody] in a town called [here].” Or, as Kwak explained on Reddit:

“I knew I had to tell my parents eventually so yesterday on Memorial Day I told my mom at first. She was first concerned but then supported me saying good luck telling your dad. I told my dad and it was an immediate no and I got into a lot of trouble.”

“The decision that came down was I either give up my spot and not play in the LAN and stay under the support of my family, or I go and play but pack my things and leave home and I get all support cut off from my parents. I am a college student and I during the summer I have nowhere to go live except for home. And I also do not have enough money to support myself for the rest of my life while paying for school to finish it. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life.”

Many Hearthstone players—including pros like Nihilum captain Jakub “Lothar” Szygulski—advised Kwak to keep at it, but Kwak, while thankful, has already decided to put his Hearthstone dreams on the backburner. For now.

“I will take everything into consideration,” he wrote, “but in the end I do only have 1 more year [of college] left, so might as well finish it all the way through then decide what comes next. But don’t worry the dream is not completely dead and is currently put on hold. Thank you all.”

Kwak is hardly the first eSports hopeful to find his present as the best player on the block butting heads with his future doing Proper Adult Job 116-B. It’s an increasingly common clash for young pros, especially in a world that’s yet to put eSports on the same pedestal as physical sports. While promising athletes can get full rides through college and (let’s face it) easy degree paths that let them focus on their sport of choice, eSports players often have to juggle while handling the figurative chainsaw that is a lack of understanding from family and friends. It’s pretty discouraging, to say the least.

With any luck, time, hard work, and widespread recognition will change these things. For now, though, there is no easy way, no low road—only uphill battles.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.

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Last week, I offered some advice on how to approach playing in a big Magic tournament. Today, we'll delve into what you can do during and after the tournament to ensure that your experience is a great one.

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The Role of Judges

Once the tournament begins, judges are in charge of running things. In essence, their job is to help the players have a positive experience. This includes making sure the tournament runs smoothly, and answering players' questions—both inside and outside of game play. Finally, they enforce policies designed to guide the tournament toward its most fair possible result.

If you find reading the dictionary a little too exhilarating, check out these three hundred pages worth of documents judges use to run tournaments: The Comprehensive Rules of Magic, the Tournament Floor Rules, and the Infraction Procedure Guide. The fact that judges are there to help us means that we players don't have to know all of this!

Library of Alexandria | Art by Drew Baker

This is a long-winded way of saying that, as a player, judges are your friends. They want to help you. They want to answer your rules questions and help you learn the game. They want to protect you against cheating or being the victim of an unfortunate misunderstandings in a game. Finally, they want you to have fun at the tournament and come back to play again in the future.

Unfortunately, for one reason or another, new tournament players are sometimes slow to ask judges for help. Perhaps they haven't gotten over the hall monitor being mean to them in elementary school—I really have no idea. The reality is that judges are very approachable at all times. Calling a judge during a match isn't "tattling," nor does it mean you're accusing your opponent of cheating. Judges are a wonderful resource, and it's a big mistake to not take advantage of what they have to offer.

Here's a short (far from exhaustive) list of things judges can help you with at a tournament:

• They can help you find things. Where to register for the tournament, where to find your pairings, where the bathroom is, anything.
• They can answer rules questions. This includes during a game or between rounds. Any time I encounter a question while I'm at home, I make a note to ask a judge about it at my next Grand Prix.
• If you have to get up to use the restroom, a judge will give you permission to go, and will even give you a time extension for your match.
• They can resolve any problems in your match. A disagreement, misunderstanding, miscommunication. "I attacked for 3 damage with my Tarmogoyf last turn, but now I realize that it should have been a 4/5." A judge can help!
• They can address the situation when either you or your opponent has taken an illegal action. Someone drew seven cards after taking a mulligan. Someone played two lands in a turn. Someone cast a spell without the proper mana. Someone flipped over a card while shuffling the opponent's deck. These things usually aren't big deals, but a judge needs to know about them. They'll take the proper measures to help you finish the game as fairly as possible, and they'll decide whether or not a Warning (or any stiffer penalty) needs to be issued.

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Warnings

If you attend a Grand Prix, you'll see judges issue Warnings. You might receive a Warning yourself. This is because Warnings are common, and they're no big deal. A Warning is basically an official statement of a judge saying, "Please try not to do this again." However, it does not come with a penalty attached to it. Don't worry if you receive a Warning at your first tournament.

Warnings are tracked, and that's exactly the point. Everybody makes mistakes while playing Magic—everybody. Everybody has accidentally tapped the wrong lands for a spell, or accidentally knocked a card off the top of their library. However, judges want to know about and track these things. If a player is tapping the wrong lands for his or her spells five or six times in every match they play, it's possible that they're doing it intentionally in order to gain an advantage. Tracking Warnings can help judges identify and investigate players like this.

So if you receive a Warning, don't sweat it. If you receive two Warnings, try to tighten up your play, but don't let it upset you. If you receive three Warnings in the same day for the same infraction, you might get a penalty. If you have a long-term pattern of getting far, far too many Warnings, you might get a penalty, but this ought to be easy to avoid.

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When to Call a Judge

If you're deciding whether or not to call a judge, just go ahead and call one. Remember, they're there to help!

Do not try to fix a problem on your own, like you would when playing with your friends at home. For example, let's say your opponent puts his or her creature into the graveyard when it wasn't actually supposed to die, and nobody notices until the next turn. If you were playing at home, you might just put it back onto the battlefield and continue the game, but you should not do this in a tournament. Always let judges handle situations like this.

Do not take your opponent's word for it if something is unclear.

Example A:

You cast Lose Calm on your opponent's face-down creature, and you're not sure whether or not you're allowed to look at what it is. Don't ask your opponent, ask a judge. (You are allowed to look at it).

Example B:

You take a mulligan, but then you lay out seven cards face-down on the table. Your opponent tells you that you're forced to mulligan down to five cards. Don't take his or her word for it, ask a judge. (If you haven't looked at the cards yet, you probably won't have to mulligan down to five).

Example C:

You tap five lands intending to cast a spell, but before you say anything or reveal the card, you change your mind. You're not sure whether or not you're allowed to untap your lands. Don't ask your opponent, ask a judge. (You will be allowed to untap your lands).

Never take your opponent's word on something that seems unclear to you. Your opponent does not have your best interest in mind. They might lie to you. Even more likely, they might just be mistaken. In either case, there's no reason to let it impact your tournament.

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How to Call a Judge

First, let your opponent know what's going on. "I have a rules question, so I'm going to call a judge," or, "I noticed that you only had one white mana when you cast End Hostilities, so I'm going to call a judge."

Next, raise your hand and yell, "Judge!" Yell pretty loudly, and keep your hand raised, because tournaments are often crowded and noisy. A judge will come over as soon as he or she sees you.

Explain exactly what happened, with no details left out, and none of your own speculations added. The judge may ask both players for their side of the story, or will at least make sure that both players agree on the facts.

End Hostilities | Art by Jason Rainville

The right way: "John tapped these five lands and cast End Hostilities. Then he put his creatures in the graveyard. I picked up my creatures, but before I put them in the graveyard, I noticed that John only had one white mana, so I put them down again and called for a judge."

The wrong way: "My opponent tried to cheat me! He knew the only way he could win was playing End Hostilities, so he tried to do it illegally without me knowing!"

The judge will make his or her ruling. This might happen immediately, if the situation is relatively simple. It may take some amount of time if there's a disagreement, if the judge chooses to investigate further, or he or she wants to confer with another judge about it. The ruling may include an in-game fix (perhaps rewind to before End Hostilities was cast), it may include a penalty (such as your opponent receiving a Warning for improperly casting a spell), and you may be issued a time extension to finish your match.

If you feel that the judge hasn't handled the situation properly, you may appeal the ruling. This means getting a second opinion from the head judge. Let the first judge finish speaking, and then say, "I'd like to appeal that ruling." The head judge will weigh in, and his or her decision will be final.

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Be Nice to Judges

Judges are people, and specifically they're people who volunteer an almost inconceivable amount of their time to the game we love. Without judges, we couldn't have tournaments the way we have them now.

They can also make mistakes. Just like players, judges can range widely in their level of experience. This is part of the reason why there is an appeal system. Don't be afraid to appeal a ruling, but always do so respectfully.

Finally, judging can sometimes be a thankless job. Any time there's a dispute, the judge has to make a decision that will likely make one or both of the players unhappy. If a ruling doesn't go your way, try to roll with the punches, don't take it personally, and certainly don't take it out on the judge who made the ruling.

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The Clock

In discussing judges, I've mentioned time extensions, but haven't yet explained exactly what that means.

In a Grand Prix (and most tournaments, for that matter), you get 50 minutes to play a best two-out-of-three match. You cannot begin playing before the clock starts, and cannot ignore it when the clock gets to zero. When the clock gets to zero, if you received a time extension for any reason (a judge ruling or a bathroom break, for example), you'll play for that much longer, and then you'll play five additional turns. If it's your turn when time is called, then when you say "go," your opponent's turn will be turn one, your next turn will be turn two, etc. If the game doesn't end before the end of the fifth turn, the game is a draw.

Sands of Time | Art by Paul Lee

If game two is a draw, then whichever player won game one wins the match. If your match ends with game one or game three being a draw, then the entire match is a draw. In a tournament, your standings are based on receiving three match points for a win, one match point for a draw, and zero match points for a loss.

Even from that simple system, it's easy to see that draws are bad. When there's a winner and a loser, three total match points are awarded. When the match is a draw, only two match points are awarded. You'd rather win one match and lose one match than to draw two matches in a row.

However, draws are even worse for your tournament chances than that system might hint at. Grand Prix tournaments are very large, and very top-heavy. Many thousands of players enter, but only a few hundred make Day Two, and only a fraction of those win prizes. In other words, you're looking to hit a home run, not simply to stay in the middle of the pack.

Certain cut-offs, like the one to qualify for Day Two, are based on your number of wins (you need seven wins to play on Day Two). So for those purposes, a draw is the same as a loss. From experience, I can tell you that it feels lousy to miss Day Two with a record of 6-2-1 (six wins, two losses, and one draw).

Thankfully, 50 minutes is a pretty long time, so it's not as though you're playing Spit or some other lightning-speed game. However, you should make every effort to finish your matches on time. Play at a brisk pace yourself and don't take more than a few minutes to shuffle and sideboard. Make sure that your opponent does the same.

If your opponent is taking too long, you're within your rights to ask them to speed up, or to call a judge. Remember that these things are written into the rules. You must play at a fair pace at all times, you can't take too long on any one decision, and you cannot slow down your pace of play because you want the game to be a draw. The guideline is that you shouldn't take much longer than three minutes to sideboard and shuffle between games (although this is not a hard-and-fast rule).

Even if it's early in the match, or if it looks like you're going to finish in plenty of time, both players still need to play at a fair pace. If the rules say that you get a certain amount of time to make a decision, then taking more time than that gives you an unfair advantage!

Get in the habit of playing briskly, because you want to finish your matches in time. Don't rush your opponents, but don't let them take more time than the rules allow, and don't let them put you at the risk of running out of time on the clock.

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Playing Out All of Your Rounds

Day One of a Grand Prix consists of nine rounds of Swiss play. This means that all players (who wish to do so) will play all nine rounds, and then the cut to day two will be based on their final records or standings. Your record will carry with you if you make Day Two, so finishing 9-0 or 8-1 is fantastic, but once you lose three rounds, you won't be making Day Two regardless of what happens for the rest of the day.

Nonetheless, I encourage you to stay in the tournament, and play out all of the rounds no matter what your record is. (That is, unless you'd be missing out on a side event you want to play, or unless you're feeling sick or are otherwise miserable continuing to play).

Art by Jason A. Engle

Tournament experience is tremendously valuable, and is very hard to come by. Playing games at home, or at your local store really cannot simulate the experience of playing in a Grand Prix. At a big tournament, you're paired against new opponents in a highly competitive setting. Everyone brought their best deck, and is trying their hardest to beat you. It's the best practice you can get!

Playing in Grand Prix will make you a better player. Even if you find yourself with a record of 1-3, you should still make the most of the day. After all, you've already travelled to the event, paid the entry fee, built your deck, and blocked a day out of your calendar. Why let the chance to gain tournament experience go to waste?

If you play out the rounds, you'll inevitably learn more about the format, learn more about your deck, and you can continue to work toward any goals that you might've set for yourself before the tournament.

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Reflection

Always look at a big tournament as a learning experience. Whether you win or lose, there will always have been some things you did well and some things you can work on. Take note of these things, and try to reinforce the good aspects of your game, and improve on the weaker aspects.

It can be hard to balance healthy reflection with your desire to do well in the tournament. If you make a big mistake in round six, you certainly do want to remember it and learn from it for next time. However, you don't want to be thinking about it while you're playing rounds seven, eight, and nine!

Art by Chase Stone

For that reason, I recommend blocking out some time after the tournament for reflection. The car ride home on Sunday or Monday night is perfect. Just as good as personal reflection, you might be able to talk things over with friends. What did everyone learn, what were they proud of themselves for, what would they change for next time?

If you block off time after the tournament for reflection, it also means that you're free to keep a clear head while you're playing. Focus on the task at hand, not on what happened last round or what record you want to have at the end of the day. If you make a mistake, brush it off and make the best of the situation. Revisit it only once everything is said and done.

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All in all, there's nothing like playing in a Magic tournament. If you can be present and focused throughout, you're sure to have a positive experience. Friends, judges, and other tournament officials will give you the resources to have a great time playing in a Grand Prix. In the end, though, it's up to you to make the most of it.

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Next time your friends are all hanging out watching you play video games, perhaps you should put them to work creating a live soundtrack for your playtime enjoyment.

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The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.

The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.

The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.

The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google. (Google declined to comment for this story. Samsung said it would not be commenting “at this time.”)

As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious “implants” to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing.

Previous disclosures from the Snowden files have shown agencies in the Five Eyes alliance designed spyware for iPhones and Android smartphones, enabling them to infect targeted phones and grab emails, texts, web history, call records, videos, photos and other files stored on them. But methods used by the agencies to get the spyware onto phones in the first place have remained unclear.

The newly published document shows how the agencies wanted to “exploit” app store servers — using them to launch so-called “man-in-the-middle” attacks to infect phones with the implants. A man-in-the-middle attack is a technique in which hackers place themselves between computers as they are communicating with each other; it is a tactic sometimes used by criminal hackers to defraud people. In this instance, the method would have allowed the surveillance agencies to modify the content of data packets passing between targeted smartphones and the app servers while an app was being downloaded or updated, inserting spyware that would be covertly sent to the phones.

But the agencies wanted to do more than just use app stores as a launching pad to infect phones with spyware. They were also keen to find ways to hijack them as a way of sending “selective misinformation to the targets’ handsets” as part of so-called “effects” operations that are used to spread propaganda or confuse adversaries. Moreover, the agencies wanted to gain access to companies’ app store servers so they could secretly use them for “harvesting” information about phone users.

The project was motivated in part by concerns about the possibility of “another Arab Spring,” which was sparked in Tunisia in December 2010 and later spread to countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Western governments and intelligence agencies were largely blindsided by those events, and the document detailing IRRITANT HORN suggests the spies wanted to be prepared to launch surveillance operations in the event of more unrest.

The agencies were particularly interested in the African region, focusing on Senegal, Sudan and the Congo. But the app stores targeted were located in a range of countries, including a Google app store server located in France and other companies’ app download servers in Cuba, Morocco, Switzerland, Bahamas, the Netherlands and Russia. (At the time, the Google app store was called the “Android Market”; it is now named Google Play.)

Another major outcome of the secret workshops was the agencies’ discovery of privacy vulnerabilities in UC Browser, a popular app used to browse the Internet across Asia, particularly in China and India. Though UC Browser is not well-known in Western countries, its massive Asian user base, a reported half billion people, means it is one of the most popular mobile Internet browsers in the world.

According to the top-secret document, the agencies discovered that the UC Browser app was leaking a gold mine of identifying information about its users’ phones. Some of the leaking information apparently helped the agencies uncover a communication channel linked to a foreign military unit believed to be plotting “covert activities” in Western countries. The discovery was celebrated by the spies as an “opportunity where potentially none may have existed before.”

Citizen Lab, a human rights and technology research group based at the University of Toronto, analyzed the Android version of the UC Browser app for CBC News and said it identified “major security and privacy issues” in its English and Chinese editions. The Citizen Lab researchers have authored their own detailed technical report outlining the many ways the app has been leaking data, including some users’ search queries, SIM card numbers and unique device IDs that can be used to track people.

Citizen Lab alerted UC Browser to the security gaps in mid-April; the company says it has now fixed them by rolling out an update for the app. A spokesperson for UC Browser’s parent company, Chinese e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group, told CBC News in a statement that it took security “very seriously and we do everything possible to protect our users.” The spokesperson added that the company had found “no evidence that any user information has been taken” — though it is not likely that surveillance of the leaking data would have been detectable.

The case strikes at the heart of a debate about whether spy agencies are putting ordinary people at risk by secretly exploiting security flaws in popular software instead of reporting them so that they can be fixed.

According to Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert, the UC Browser vulnerability not only exposed millions of the app’s users to surveillance carried out by any number of governments — but it could also have been exploited by criminal hackers to harvest personal data.

“Of course, the security agencies don’t [disclose the information],” Deibert said. “Instead, they harbor the vulnerability. They essentially weaponize it.” Taking advantage of weaknesses in apps like UC Browser “may make sense from a very narrow national security mindset,” Deibert added, “but it’s at the expense of the privacy and security of hundreds of millions of users worldwide.”

The revelations are the latest to highlight tactics adopted by the Five Eyes agencies in their efforts to hack computers and exploit software vulnerabilities for surveillance. Last year, The Intercept reported that the NSA has worked with its partners to dramatically increase the scope of its hacking attacks and use of “implants” to infect computers. In some cases, the agency was shown to have masqueraded as a Facebook server in order to hack into computers.

The Intercept and CBC News contacted each of the Five Eyes agencies for comment on this story, but none would answer questions on record about any of the specific details.

A spokesperson for Canada’s Communications Security Establishment said that the agency was “mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians from a variety of threats to our national security, including terrorism,” adding that it “does not direct its foreign signals intelligence activities at Canadians or anywhere in Canada.”

British agency Government Communications Headquarters said that its work was “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate.”

Australia’s Signals Directorate said it was “long-standing practice” not to discuss intelligence matters and would not comment further.

New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau said that it has “a foreign intelligence mandate” and that everything it does is “explicitly authorised and subject to independent oversight.”

The NSA had not responded to repeated requests for comment at time of publication.

The post NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones appeared first on The Intercept.

Listen: contract killings can go wrong sometimes, okay? It’s just something that happens. But, in Los Santos, chasing down the guy you’re supposed to kill isn’t always that easy.

Crafted by YouTuber Boris the Blade using the Editor in the PC version of GTA V, The Hit is a stylish action sequence that keeps you guessing just how the two hunters will catch their prey. With a bunch of players performing every action you see, it’s also a great illustration of how games like GTA V can turn their users into virtual stuntmen.

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We take it for granted that the United States is the most powerful country on Earth today, and perhaps in human history. The story of how that came to be is long, fascinating, complex — and often misunderstood. Here, excerpted in part from "70 maps that explain America," are maps that help show some of the key moments and forces that contributed to the US's rise as sole global superpower.

Spaceship launch today: reusable, built by Boeing for NASA, now long operated by the United States Air Force​.

http://www.space.com/29423-x37b-space-plane-mystery-mission-otv4.html

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Congratulations! You just bought a new Chevy, GMC, or Cadillac. You really like driving it. And it’s purchased, not leased, and all paid off with no liens, so it’s all yours… isn’t it? Well, no, actually: according to GM, it’s still theirs. You just have a license to use it.

At least, that’s what an attorney for GM said at a hearing this week, Autoblog reports. Specifically, attorney Harry Lightsey said, “It is [GM’s] position the software in the vehicle is licensed by the owner of the vehicle.”

GM’s claim is all about copyright and software code, and it’s the same claim John Deere is making about their tractors. The TL;DR version of the argument goes something like this:

• Cars work because software tells all the parts how to operate
• The software that tells all the parts to operate is customized code
• That code is subject to copyright
• GM owns the copyright on that code and that software
• A modern car cannot run without that software; it is integral to all systems
• Therefore, the purchase or use of that car is a licensing agreement
• And since it is subject to a licensing agreement, GM is the owner and can allow/disallow certain uses or access.

The U.S. Copyright Office is currently holding a series of hearings on whether or not anyone other than the manufacturer of a car has a right to tinker with that car’s copyrighted software. And with the way modern design goes, that basically means with the car, at all.

Folks who like to tinker with their cars, as well as independent (non-dealer) mechanics say they need the copyright exemption in order to be allowed to continue repairing their own cars, or keeping their businesses open. Manufacturers, like GM, say that it’s a safety issue: if people who aren’t authorized mess with any one piece of software, they could make the entire ecosystem of connected code unsafe.

An attorney from the Electrnnic Frontier Foundation also testified at the hearing, telling the Copyright OFfice that restricting access to onboard computers in vehicles drives up costs, hurts competition, and stifles innovation. It also prevents third party researchers from conducting independent safety and security research without becoming lawbreakers.

The first of the two sessions of hearings started yesterday in Los Angeles. The other will take place next week, in Washington, DC. The Copyright Office is expected to issue a ruling in July determining just what you can and can’t do with the things you thought you bought.

General Motors says it owns your car’s software [AutoBlog]

You know how Nintendo’s bringing back their old-school World Championship competition? Well, they’ve just announced the eight U.S. locations where players can go to qualify and earn a chance to go to the big showdown at this year’s E3. Get pumped.

Folks who want to try and grab at Nintendo glory will be playing the Championship mode in Ultimate NES Remix and trying to notch high scores in Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3 and Dr. Mario. Hopefuls will be able to do so at eight Best Buy locations throughout the country on May 30th:

1717 Harrison St.
San Francisco, CA

3675 Pacific Coast Highway
Torrance, CA

10760 NW 17^th St.
Miami, FL

900 E. Golf Road
Schaumburg, IL

12905 Elm Creek Blvd. N
Maple Grove, MN

5001 Northern Blvd.
Long Island City, NY

9378 N. Central Expressway
Dallas, TX

2214 S. 48^th St.
Tacoma, WA

The high score winners from each location will get flown out to E3 to play a bunch of other games against eight other mystery opponents. Let’s put money down that at least one of them will be Fred Savage.

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Contact the author at evan@kotaku.com.

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FOLLOW @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.

And, for sure, JOIN the fun to be had in Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE.

More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Christopher Lloyd is a man who’ll jump at any chance to don a Hawaiian shirt, stand in front of a wind machine and shout “Great Scott!” A new LEGO Dimensions trailer is as good a reason as any.

Good old Doc Brown is getting his own Fun Pack when LEGO Dimensions launches this September, adding $9.99 or so to the large amount of cash LEGO fans need to stockpile for the September release. He’ll join Back to the Future’s Marty McFly as well as characters from Scooby Doo, DC Comics, Portal, Doctor Who, Jurassic World, The Simpsons, The LEGO Movie, Ninjago, Chima, Lord of the Rings and whatever other properties WB and LEGO can scrounge up for their toys-meets-games jam.

Where we’re going we’ll just need our wallets.

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This is the Retro Freak. It’s promising to play games from the Famicom. SNES. Genesis. PC Engine. TurboGrafx-16. Game Boy. Game Boy Advance. Game Boy Color. And even the Supergrafx. Holy shit.

It comes in two parts; there’s the actual console, which is a small box that takes care of all the actual work, then there’s a giant “adapter” which is where you plug all the cartridges in (the console slides in under the adapter). The console has various settings that let you change video (and conversion/upscale) options, as well as built-in cheat support. It also supports USB controllers, so you can plug just about anything in there.

Most interesting, though, is the fact it’ll let you install games from a cartridge onto the console (which looks like it’ll let you use a microSD card).

Currently announced only for Japan, if there is a Video Game God, it is time to pray to him/her/it, and ask for a Western release (or at least a semi-affordable import and some language FAQs).

(via Tiny Cartridge)

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