Tell me if this intro to the first-person video game “INFRA” doesn’t get your adrenaline gushing:
We put you into the shoes of a structural analyst. Nothing more than a quiet desk jockey assigned to survey some routine structural damage.
Quickly though, your mission turns from a mundane trek to a fight for survival. Your tools are simple: the camera around your neck and the wits to navigate a virtual labyrinth of debris.
How you tell your story is your choice, will you have the commitment to finish your duty, or will you ignore all else but the preservation of your own life?
OK, so the premise isn’t as action-packed as swinging across a floating, racist city in “Bioshock Infinite” or no-scoping ultranationalist terrorists in “Modern Warfare 3.” But INFRA has the power of realism on its side. Given the crappy state of a lot of the world’s infrastructure, who can’t relate to the fear of being crushed by an old bridge or barbecued by an exploding gas line?
It was actually America’s dangerously outdated roads and levees that inspired Loiste Interactive’s Oskari Samiola to create “INFRA.” “The idea to make an infrastructure-themed game came after I watched the ‘Crumbling America’ documentary about the U.S.A.’s at-the-collapsing-point infrastructure,” says Samiola, who’s 22 and lives in Finland. “And generally after hearing news about spoiled tap water and seeing roads in poor condition.”
The protagonist is a Finnish engineer who recently got a job in Stalburg, a fictional Baltic metropolis that once was a flourishing mining hub. However, corporate corruption and disrepair has transformed it into a hazardous warren of cracked concrete and rusty metal. Your duty is to document and fix the deficiencies, using nothing but a camera and your handy flashlight. In look and feel it’s sort of like “Half-Life 2,” but instead of killing headcrabs you’re slowly fixing a city.
Excitement comes from escaping collapsing buildings, avoiding hazards like radioactive mushrooms, and preventing disasters—in one instance, by diverting raw sewage to a treatment plant instead of a river. But most of the game’s allure rests in solving puzzles and exploring Stalburg’s antiquated locales, from abandoned factories to flooded tunnels to wooded dams to a “memorial for industry and its victims.”
Players shouldn’t expect to hammer enemies with their flashlight, say, or run over the boss who delays your work orders with a subway-maintenance train. You can’t even throw the batteries you collect from random spots, like a dingy work locker. “No violence,” says Samiola. “Well … the player could maybe kill a rat.”
It’s a risky concept in a first-person gaming field dominated by bloody shooters and slashers, but to believe the gorgeous screenshots and atmospheric trailers it just might work. Samiola and his fellow developers have already gotten the green light from Steam, and plan to sell the game for $25 at an undetermined date.
Have a look at some more settings, and if you want to support “INFRA” head on over to Indiegogo.
by Andrew Liszewski on LEGO, shared by Meg Neal to Gizmodo
Hoping to build the confidence of children living with a missing limb, Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar, of Umeå University in Sweden, has designed a prosthetic arm that’s compatible with Lego so kids can swap its gripping attachment for their own custom creations.
While most people are still trying to wrap their heads around 4K displays (and 8K screens aren't that far off), Samsung is setting up an even more ambitious milestone: It wants to build an 11K mobile display by 2018, reports Korea's Electronic Times....
In an interview with USgamer, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival creative lead Aya Kyogoku was asked if amiibo Festival was conceptualized as a game involving amiibo or if the amiibo integration was added later in the development cycle.
"Initially when the amiibo was announced, there was nothing really said about Animal Crossing amiibos or any plans for that matter," Aya responded. "But as the Animal Crossing team, we were confident that if there was one, it would be really cute... honestly, we just wanted Animal Crossing amiibo. We wanted the company to make Animal Crossing amiibo, so that's why we made a game that works with them."
In the film Jaws, sharks are characterized as mindless eating machines
In truth, they are far from dumb. Great whites are cunning hunters, and their mechanical efficiency is the result of millions of years of evolution. The specifics of how they move and feed are stunning to behold and terrifying to contemplate
A 23-year-old German man has been fined $746 after drugging his girlfriend so he could continue playing video games with his friend. His girlfriend had just came home from a 10-hour shift when he slipped "four or five drops" of some undisclosed drug into her tea, knocking her out till noon the next day and allowing him to carry on playing games.
Wouldn't it just be easier to break up with your girlfriend than to drug her? Though the old saying goes, bros and video games before girlfriends...or something like that.
The rumors circling a Battletoads return came to a head at E3 this year with the announcement of the Rare Replay collection, and Microsoft didn't waste its next tradeshow appearance for a chance to capitalize on the hype. Folks roaming San Diego Comi...
People are afraid of robots. They're uncomfortable with the androids that look too much like humans and may even run screaming from the types which recently competed in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. But what consumers can accept is something cute
Buddy, the new robot companion from Blue Frog Robotics which launched on Indiegogo on Thursday, follows that model
The 22-inch tall white robot features an integrated tablet that's also home to its adorable face. The Android-based, Intel Atom-based tablet (also the hub for Buddy's brains) sits in a rotatable head and can slide back and forth on its cone-shaped body. Buddy rolls around on three wheels— two large ones in the front and a caster-style wheel in the back). Read more...
In spite of her assertions to the contrary, Amazon insists that Imy is a personal friend of an author whose book she tried to review, but the site won’t disclose how it came to this conclusion.
Any Amazon customer is likely aware that the e-tail giant knows a lot about them. That’s how it personalizes product suggestions and customizes the marketing e-mails it sends. But some Amazon users are now finding out that the site knows — or at least it thinks it knows — who your friends are, and is restricting their reviews accordingly.
Blogger Imy Santiago writes of a particularly odd experience with Amazon that resulted after she tried to review an e-book she’d recently read.
“Your review could not be posted to the website in its current form,” stated an automated message from Amazon, saying her review had violated the site’s review guidelines, but without saying where she’d gone wrong.
After another failed attempt to post the review — also denied without giving a specific explanation — Imy wrote to Amazon hoping to get some more details on why her write-up was being blocked.
“We cannot post your Customer Review… to the Amazon website because your account activity indicates that you know the author,” explained the response from the company. “Customer Reviews are meant to give customers unbiased product feedback from fellow shoppers. Because our goal is to provide Customer Reviews that help customers make informed purchase decisions, any reviews that could be viewed as advertising, promotional, or misleading will not be posted.”
According to Imy, Amazon is making an “erroneous and quite presumptuous assessment” in asserting that she knows the author of the book she’s trying to review.
In her appeal to Amazon, she concedes that the independent publishing community is a small one and that she may have had social media interactions with the author, but “knowing of an author online, and personally knowing an author in real life are two different things. By your definition it would mean that bloggers such as myself are being barred from reviewing books they legitimately purchased, which in turn contravenes with the notion that reviews for a verified purchase are highly encouraged.”
Imy says it is “unfair to the authors whose work I love, to be punished for a claim that simply cannot stand. I don’t know any authors on a personal level.”
Her appeal fell on deaf ears, as the response from Amazon simply restated, “We removed your Customer Reviews because you know the author personally.”
As to how the company came to this conclusion, we’ll never know.
“Due to the proprietary nature of our business, we do not provide detailed information on how we determine that accounts are related,” concludes the denial of Imy’s appeal. “We cannot share any further information about our decision and we may not reply to further emails about this issue.”
We’ve written to Amazon for comment on this story and will update if we hear anything back.
The Korean pop group Sistar has a smash hit on their hands with “Shake It.” The YouTube video has racked up over five million views. Congrats on that! Ditto for the Attack on Titan comparisons. Wait. What?
As folks online in South Korea recently pointed out (via the Entasia Forums), one of the group’s dance moves looks like a Titan running in the anime Attack on Titan. Here, compare for yourself:
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Running through villages, devouring humans, singing pop songs. You know, the usual.
To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter@Brian_Ashcraft.
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In this cleverly crafted sci-fi comedy short film about a woman, a man and his quirky one-minute time machine, James gets all too trigger-happy with rewinding back in time while trying to swoon a beautiful woman at a park, all the while unaware of the gruesome consequences of his actions.
by Tom Ley on The Concourse, shared by Alissa Walker to Gizmodo
How are you enjoying #TrueDetectiveSeason2 so far? It’s okay, right? I don’t know, maybe it kind of sucks. Anyway, if you’re like me, you’ve spent a good chunk of the first three episodes being a little confused by the city-corruption storyline. We’ve been told that there are a lot of “deals being done” and a lot of “money changing hands,” but what exactly is going on? Why does the mayor of the Vinci live in a baller-ass mansion? Why is the city manager such a big deal? Is Vinci even a real place? Allow me to explain.
At last, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto that look (slightly) better than brown blobs or pixel art. The probe has delivered a new batch of images from between 7.8 million to 9.2 million miles away, or close enough that ...
If you want your kids to learn something while they're out of school but would rather not ship them to some distant summer camp, Google is about to come to your rescue. It's kicking off the latest edition of its annual Camp Google on July 13th, and t...
It's easy to find computer vision technology that detect objects in photos, but it's still tough to sift through photos... and that's a big challenge for the military, where finding the right picture could mean taking out a target or spotting a terro...
Mighty No. 9 might not even be out the door, but Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune is already looking for your help with a new project -- and this one is considerably more ambitious. His studio has launched crowdfunding for Red Ash, a project that combi...
The International Space Station has had a tough time getting supplies lately between two rocket explosions and an orbital failure, but it's going to get an important lifeline in the near future... hopefully. Russia is about to launch Progress 60, a c...
While most people are still trying to wrap their heads around 4K displays (and 8K screens aren't that far off), Samsung is setting up an even more ambitious milestone: It wants to build an 11K mobile display by 2018, reports Korea's Electronic Times....
The rumors circling a Battletoads return came to a head at E3 this year with the announcement of the Rare Replay collection, and Microsoft didn't waste its next tradeshow appearance for a chance to capitalize on the hype. Folks roaming San Diego Comi...
Any Amazon customer is likely aware that the e-tail giant knows a lot about them. That’s how it personalizes product suggestions and customizes the marketing e-mails it sends. But some Amazon users are now finding out that the site knows — or at least it thinks it knows — who your friends are, and is restricting their reviews accordingly.
At last, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto that look (slightly) better than brown blobs or pixel art. The probe has delivered a new batch of images from between 7.8 million to 9.2 million miles away, or close enough that ...
If you want your kids to learn something while they're out of school but would rather not ship them to some distant summer camp, Google is about to come to your rescue. It's kicking off the latest edition of its annual Camp Google on July 13th, and t...
It's easy to find computer vision technology that detect objects in photos, but it's still tough to sift through photos... and that's a big challenge for the military, where finding the right picture could mean taking out a target or spotting a terro...
Mighty No. 9 might not even be out the door, but Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune is already looking for your help with a new project -- and this one is considerably more ambitious. His studio has launched crowdfunding for Red Ash, a project that combi...
The International Space Station has had a tough time getting supplies lately between two rocket explosions and an orbital failure, but it's going to get an important lifeline in the near future... hopefully. Russia is about to launch Progress 60, a c...
