Overnight, Ubisoft released three new trailers for South Park: The Stick of Truth. And... that's all you really need to know, actually. Let's dig in!
First, we have a TV spot. Perfect for increasing hype levels. Oh, and before you check, there are actually no new videos on the website. That reminder is just there for the TV folk.
In this trailer, we get to see a mysterious plague claim a hall monitor.
And finally, an old friend returns:
Not long now! The Stick of Truth, Obsidian's South Park RPG, hits PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in just a month; March 4 in North America, March 6 in Australia, and March 7 in Europe.
Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.
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All you have to do is follow Sir Patrick Stewart's Twitter to see he's always ready for some fun. So it's only slightly shocking to see him dressed as China's latest moon rover, which was also the topic of last night's Daily Show.
Watch Patrick Stewart's segment below, or head over to The Daily Show to check out the entire clip.
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OMG, the vs mode is enough to get me to buy this game as soon as I get a 3DS. Kirby has always been the best fighter in SSB, and a fighting game where everyone can, nay, MUST play as Kirby is the best thing to happen to video games since Zelda went 3D.
Fear the pink puffball!
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The newest Kirby game, Kirby Triple Star Deluxe came out on the Nintendo 3DS in Japan earlier this month, and its story mode is only the tip of the iceberg in what it has to offer.
There are tons of additions to Kirby’s classic gameplay. We've already looked at Kirby's new copy abilities, but that's just the beginning. Triple Deluxe comes with an up to four player versus mode, two unlockable battle arenas, a version of the game where you play as King Dedede (and fight against a new final boss) and even a rhythm mini-game where King Dedede must bounce from drum to drum—collecting coins in time with the beat.
To see what this all looks like in action, check out the video above.
Kirby: Triple Deluxe was released on January 11, 2014, in Japan for the Nintendo 3DS. It is scheduled for a Western release sometime in 2014.
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
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I know, I know. It's only February. We still have months to go. But this prank is good. Damn good.
And best of all? It's from early last month, so other pranksters will have a good year to try to top it. They'll need it.
The prank appeared on Japanese television special Dokkiri Award ("dokkiri" or ドッキリ means "being surprised") and features comedian Toshiaki Kasuga and, well, just watch:
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In a radio interview, Kasuga said he was at the base of Mt. Fuji for work early the next morning. The night before was cold, and to stay warm, he got drunk with the crew and crashed in the cabin.
Then, he said he woken up by the fireworks going off under the bed. He thought about getting up, but the bed was rocked 50 meters into the cold air. According to Kasuga, he was strapped into the bed while he was sleeping, so he couldn't move. Safety first!
Thankfully, the comedian made it through the prank safe and sound.
To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
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Now that YouTuber Game Dave and his army of young, free-spelling youngsters have weighed in on the console war, it's time to tackle a tougher issue — are video games bad for you?
Yes. Also, no. Maybe?
I'd giggle at the hysterical spelling errors of children under 10, but some of these look an awful lot like my posts before (and sometimes after) I hit the spellchecker.
Instead I mourn the fact that eight-year-old Marie counts eating things you never ate before as a negative. What are we teaching our children?
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Two-dimensional thinking in space navigation has a venerable tradition. The classic science fiction RPG Traveller famously and unashamedly uses a two-dimensional star map, completely ignoring the third dimension in the relationships between stars. This was later justified in that the star maps represent navigable hyperspace "jump routes", with hyper-distances between stars happening to fall into a two-dimensional geometry that only partly reflects the real three-dimensional relationships between them. Essentially the hyper-distance between stars is measured along a projection of the real-space route onto the Galactic plane.
The one big advantage of this convention is that you can easily draw a map on a sheet of paper, rather than needing a rotating 3D model or some sort of holographic display.
And, as Captan Kirk once showed to his advantage, even geniuses sometimes forget that space has an up and a down.
In fairness, the Overbieber would probably be better than the government we've got now.
Thanks, Obama.
Hello good people! I hope this day finds you well. Please, enjoy this comic strip, and if you enjoyed it, share it with a friend or an acquaintance or your pastor.
Sorry I don't share these more; I try to pick out the best of the best.
Author : Eric Spery
The starship’s Captain stood in the causeway between the dining module and the guest berths. As he stared at the observation port, one of the guests came through from the berths.
The captain knew every passenger he carried on the two month run between Sol and Betelgeuse. This passenger was an old retired military officer from Terra. Just a few years older than himself.
He stopped and stood beside the Captain and stared through the glass at the tapestry of unmoving stars.
“They’re so much more beautiful here,” he said with a slight trace of an accent that the Captain couldn’t place.
“What are?”
“The stars. I’ve never been outside the Earth’s atmosphere. I’ve spent my adult life in cold foxholes looking up at the twinkling stars through the smoke of battle, praying I would live long enough to see the stars again the next night. Praying some day I might leave for good. Leave for the stars and never return.”
“Are they everything you hoped for, sir?”
“They are, Captain. I thank you for taking me on my last journey. To stars that no longer twinkle.”
The old soldier solemnly shook the Captain’s hand and then continued on towards the dining module.
After the portal closed, the Captain turned back to the observation port. How long had it been since he’d noticed the
stars outside? The only thing he saw anymore was his own reflection: old, tired and ready to go home. Hoping to never look again at stars that didn’t twinkle. To go home and never return.
Personhood, Lauren Zuniga's 2012 performance at the Urbana Poetry Slam, is a powerful piece about choice, social justice, reproductive rights, and rape [TW]. Set against the backdrop of Rick Santorum's remarks on rape (calling pregnancies arising from rape a "gift from God"), the performance tries to bridge the gap between Zuniga's life and beliefs and her conservative grandfather's staunch opposition to choice on abortion.
Charlotte, who is seven, wrote this devastating letter to the Lego company over the way that girl characters and boy characters are handled in its increasingly gendered toys: "All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks."
She calls on Lego "to make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!"
That's a pretty unassailable request. Thank you, Charlotte, for putting it so well.
I don’t need an excuse to draw the guys from Mythbusters.
Hey! You know what? There’s still time to join Patreon this month and support SFAM! You guys have been amazing so far, Patreon has really turned things around and is making it possible for me to continue working.
If you’d like to see another two guaranteed comics per month, sign up to become a patron today and help us meet our next milestone!
I’m still gathering info for Patreon reward distribution; if you haven’t answered my message requesting your preferences, please do so soon or I’ll have to make a wildly inaccurate guess. Hoping to start getting these out next week.
Speaking of rewards, the Goats Kickstarter rewards are ALMOST done. I have two more pages I need to draw and then we can print the mini, which is the last thing keeping us from starting to ship rewards. I know it’s been a super-long wait but it’s almost over, I swear it. Please don’t lynch me quite yet.
Here's a "Mind Blown" GIF to add to your collection: The trailer for Neil deGrasse Tyson's redux of Carl Sagan's Cosmos dropped today. You can see it here. But the GIF above is really all you need, isn't it? It is. Yes, it is.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has picked up where Carl Sagan ended, and his newly rebooted Cosmos series look pretty astounding, as you can see in this trailer … Read…
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I didn't skip school a lot—hardly at all, now that I think about it. After watching this Australian PSA, I am really glad about that.
Now, there's a chance that "Set Yourself Free" could be a fake advert, given that filmmakers
Henry Inglis and Aaron McCann are a pair of comedians. The Learn for Life website mentioned on the YouTube page doesn't have anything at all by way of education-focused propaganda, either. Think of it this way, then: if this is a joke, you don't have to feel bad about laughing. If it isn't, then we're all horrible people.
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Back in October, a federal jury found Bank of America liable for a Countrywide Financial program that deliberately sold piles of worthless loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the housing bubble went kaflooey. At the time, prosecutors had only sought $864 million in penalties, but now the Justice Dept. claims that number should be $2.1 billion.
The subject of the government’s lawsuit was a former Countrywide program dubbed the High Speed Swim Lane (better known as the “Hustle”), which removed many of the existing roadblocks and safety checks of the loan underwriting process in order to approve as many home loans as possible in a short period of time. The DOJ alleged that Countrywide’s motive for the Hustle was to issue these loans then quickly sell them off to Fannie and Freddie without disclosing that some of the mortgages weren’t worth their value in Monopoly money, let alone U.S. currency.
The original estimate of $864 million presented by the feds was an estimate of actual losses taken by Fannie and Freddie on these toxic loans. But then the judge in the case asked the DOJ to think about its penalty request not in terms of loss, but in terms of Countrywide’s ill-gotten gains.
Reuters reports that during the trial, the DOJ’s evidence showed the Countrywide only made a profit of $165.2 million from these loans, but the number presented in yesterday’s court filing bases the $2.1 billion number on the failed lender’s gross gains rather than the net.
The DOJ, which has not exactly been bullish about seeking maximum penalties from the nation’s largest banks and its executives, is asking the court for the higher amount “punish defendants for their culpability and bad faith, and to deter financial institutions and their executives who would engage in similar fraudulent mortgage schemes.”
Bank of America continues to deny its liability in this matter, saying the Hustle was over and done with before it swooped in to save the collapsing Countrywide — a move that has already cost BofA at least $40 billion in penalties, settlements, loan adjustments, and legal fees. The bank has previously said it would consider appealing the jury’s finding.
In their nomination letter, Baard Vegar Solhjell and Snorre Valen, who hail from the Socialist Left party, said Snowden's revelations "contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order." Nominations — which are generally secret but sometimes announced by those submitting the paperwork — must be filed by Feb. 1. Snowden likely has dozens of competitors, so there's no guarantee he'll get anywhere. Still, it'd be ironic if Snowden and Obama each wound up winning the same honor just a handful of years apart.
A Kansas man who answered a lesbian couple’s Craigslist ad seeking a sperm donation is responsible for paying child support, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports.
A judge made the final ruling on the case this week.
In 2010, Angela Bauer and her partner Jennifer Schreiner wrote a Craigslist ad that read: “We are foster and adoptive parents, and now we desire to share a pregnancy and birth together.”
William Marotta answered the ad, and according to the Daily Dot, he and the couple signed a contract stating he was under no obligation to support the child financially over the course of its lifetime.
But District Court Judge Mary Mattivi ruled William Marotta is the child’s legal father and as result, he would be required to pay child support.
So then how come he has to pay up?
Both parties involved failed to complete all of the necessary steps required for a legal sperm donation, like using a licensed physician for the artificial insemination procedure.
Judge Mattvi writes,
Kansas law is clear that a ‛donor of semen provided to a licensed physician for use in artificial insemination of a woman other than the donor’s wife is treated in law as if he were not the birth father of a child thereby conceived, unless agreed to in writing by the donor and the woman. In this case, quite simply, the parties failed to conform to the statutory requirements of the Kansas Parentage Act in not enlisting a licensed physician at some point in the artificial insemination process, and the parties’ self-designation of (Marotta) as a sperm donor is insufficient to relieve (Marotta) of parental rights and responsibilities.
Both Bauer and Schreiner have opposed the state’s attempts to require Marotta to pay child support.
“This was a wonderful opportunity with a guy with an admirable, giving character who wanted nothing more than to help us have a child,” Bauer told the Capital Journal. “I feel like the state of Kansas has made a mess out of the situation.”
Helluva collection. I wouldn't mind spending a day or two just looking through those old magazines, maybe pop in that FFII prototype.
These days it can feel like half the internet is made up of video game reviews. That wasn't always the case—after the video-game crash of the 1980s, there were so few video game publications that one of the most important games of all time was barely reviewed at all.
In the video above, cat-owning video-game historian
Frank Cifaldi (last seen trying to run down the actual release date of Super Mario Bros.) takes us through his massive collection of late-20th century video game publications. At around the 3:45 mark, he shares the first and only English-language review of Super Mario Bros. from publication Computer Entertainer / Video Game Update. I like that the reviewer mentions the fact that you can pause the game. Features!
The clip was produced as a promotional short for Outerlands, a new documentary series from a bunch of the people previously behind The 1UP Show. They're
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Last October, the Justice Department made a seemingly cosmetic change to its procedures related to NSA surveillance: requiring prosecutors to tell defendants when the evidence against them originated with a warrantless wiretap (remember that the NSA made a practice of handing warrantless wiretapping data over to the DEA and other agencies, who would then request a warrant in order to create a plausible, public source of evidence).
But that change made all the difference. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't sue the government over warrantless wiretapping unless you had direct evidence that you'd been spied on. The catch? The only way to get evidence that you'd been spied on was to sue the government, which you couldn't do without evidence.
The first defendant to be notified that the case against him was built on warrantless wiretaps is an Uzbek human rights activist who lives in Colorado, named Jamshid Muhtorov. Under the new rules, Muhtorov now has the evidence he needs to challenge the government's program of warrantless surveillance -- and that's just what he's doing. The ACLU has taken his case, and have filed a motion [PDF] challenging the evidence against him.
A win for Muhtorov would be a win for America, and for everyone who believes that you can't fight crime while ignoring the law.
Muhtorov and his counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a new motion against the government in his pending criminal case. In his 69-page brief, he argues that the “fruits of the [FISA AA] surveillance” be suppressed on the grounds that his Fourth Amendment rights, protecting against unreasonable search and seizure, were violated.
"The FISA Amendments Act affords the government virtually unfettered access to the international phone calls and e-mails of US citizens and residents,” ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement. “We’ve learned over the last few months that the NSA has implemented the law in the broadest possible way and that the rules that supposedly protect the privacy of innocent people are weak and riddled with exceptions. Surveillance conducted under this statute is unconstitutional, and the fruits of this surveillance must be suppressed."
The NSA isn't collecting records, it isn't the FBI, the data it collects isn't relevant, and there is no specific investigation. It's pretty amazing that there are still people (including Obama) insisting that the program is legal.
Believe it or not, he's not even being that glib here. Section 215 is pretty clear on all of those things. It's just for the FBI, and allows them to get records relevant to a specific investigation. Yet, the program is run by the NSA, which collects the data, instead of the FBI. It is not collecting "records" as intended by the law, and most of those records are irrelevant, and none of this is tied to any particular investigation. I'm reminded of the joke that the Holy Roman Empire wasn't actually holy, Roman or an empire.
When the law includes four basic conditions, and basically all four of them are not met, the program is beyond illegal. It's just a farce. It's kind of amazing that President Obama and other NSA defenders are still arguing that the program is perfectly fine.
EVE Online will erect a memorial to the 21-hour, all-out space battle that spanned Monday and Tuesday, commemorating the loss of 75 Titans—the largest ship in the spacefaring MMO. The total damage done may translate to more than $300,000 in real money, but it is the loss of the Titans that defines the Battle of B-R5RB.
To put it in perspective, the previous record for most Titans lost in a battle was 12, which had happened twice. "The winning side alone had lost more Titans that in any battle seen before," CCP writes in this official recap of the battle and its aftermath. "The losing side had lost more Titans than anyone had previously thought possible."
Why are Titans such a big deal, aside from being, well, big? They "take thousands of man hours to produce, take months to train to fly, and are capable of fitting massive doomsday weapons that obliterate lesser ships with a single volley." The defeat of a Titan is a major event in an EVE battle, and a significant setback to the alliance that loses one. In this case, Clusterfuck Coalition and its Russian Coalition allies lost 16 and won. The N3 Coalition and Pandemic Legion lost 59.
Thus the plans for "Titanomachy." Work already has begun on the memorial by CCP designers using Titan wreck models introduced in the game's most recent update. Titanomachy "will be placed around the seventh planet in the B-R5RB solar system and be 'off grid' from the station. Thereafter, any player who plays EVE can make the dangerous pilgrimage there and marvel at the scope of destruction."
The attention given to the size of the battle and the financial losses incurred have almost obscured a key detail about any battle: who the hell won. In this case, CFC and the Russian Coalition prevailed decisively, massive payback for the stinging defeat N3 and Pandemic handed them a little more than a week ago.
The battle raged for so long it was stopped by daily server maintenance downtime, but by then Pandemic and N3 were limping out of the system in retreat.
In sum, 7,548 different characters involved with the two coalitions participated in the battle. Fifty-five different player alliances were fighting under one of the larger banners. Let's not forget the losses of other huge capital ships, like 13 Supercarriers and 370 Dreadnaughts. The Doomsday lasers that the Titans carry were fired 775 times. CCP says that accounts for 24 percent of all Doomsday firings in the past two years in the game.
And the final bill: 11 Trillion ISK (EVE's currency) in damage and losses. According to some conversion sites, the value of the ships lost is between $300,000 and $330,000.
"The lost momentum in the Southern conflict due to the B-R fight is a far greater loss than the ISK assets," writes Elise Randolph, a Pandemic Legion fleet commander. "Because try as you might, you cannot buy swagger."
Loads more details, statistics and images at CCP's writeup below.
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The crime-fighting legal eagles at the Department of Justice approved the settlement last week. Remember, though, if you are suspected of laundering money or selling drugs, the DoJ will take your house away and put you in jail for the rest of your life. Nice to be "too big to jail." Still, deferring multimillion-dollar bonuses has gotta hurt, huh?
HSBC's struggles with its correspondent banking controls have been a long-standing issue for the bank. A 2010 OCC order flagged the issue as the bank's primary anti-money laundering problem and said HSBC had failed to properly police some high-risk cash transactions of its affiliates.
HSBC operates hundreds of affiliates around the world and its US arm acts as the gateway into the U.S. financial system for this network by processing US dollar-denominated payments.
A US Senate report released in mid-2012 said HSBC failed to assess the money laundering risks associated with affiliates before opening correspondent accounts for them.
The interaction between HSBC's US arm and HSBC affiliates around the world continues to be a concern for the OCC, the sources said. In response, the bank has begun advising units that those that fail to implement full anti-money laundering regimes could have their correspondent accounts closed, one of the sources said.
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