firehose

By Nathan Grayson on May 30th, 2014 at 12:00 pm.

I do so love indie game development. One second I’m minding my own business, sipping coffee and wondering if trees dream, and the next I stumble across what may well be the next Skyrim, the next colossal, gorgeous first-person fantasy RPG bonanza. Northern Shadow, however, comes with a twist: it’s also a city builder ala Banished. You have a living world to both explore and build a kingdom in. My kingdom for this game. Trailer below. Watch it, because it’s crazy impressive.

Putting the city building menu in the game world? As a little map/board you look at in first-person? And then letting you see buildings you’ve selected rise from the Earth? Ingenious.

Northern Shadow begins with your kingdom (presumably in the north) falling at the hands of some unknown enemy. I’m assuming XCOM soldiers don’t exist in this universe, so it’s up to you to regroup, rebuild, and bring down the baddies.

This game, by conservative estimates, will be FULL OF THINGS. Here are the things:

Your kingdom, your people
Build and improve your own city. Communicate with other kingdoms, negotiate trade agreements and build alliances. Defend your city and your lands.

Classic RPG systems
In combat, depend on your own skills, rather than statistics on your character sheet. Use spells or weapons, you can play the game your way.

Living World
Living economy allows you to see the ripples of your own actions all around the world. Your steward will take care of your city while you are gone.

Explore
Discover worlds both above, and beneath the earth. Find precious mineral veins and other treasures.

I can dig it. Both on paper and in motion, this is an extremely exciting-looking game. Obviously if the world is overly generic or the ambitious fusion of mechanics ends up super clunky, then this one will crash and burn, but I have high hopes. The idea of an underground world, especially, strikes me as quite interesting. Here’s hoping it’s less Dragon Age II caves and more Arx Fatalis.

Northern Shadow will launch in early access alpha form this summer. Not sure how I feel about exploring this kind of world when it’s not complete, but I’m definitely interested in at least briefly checking it out. How about you?

Sam Machkovech

4K has arrived; 4K has a long way to go. The next standard in TV and monitor resolutions has started to trickle into electronics showrooms, hoping to tantalize shoppers into taking a very, very high-res plunge, but the resolution standard doesn't come with much to watch.

Just as 3D TVs and monitors had a tough enough time getting our attention, 4K is still hobbled by a severe lack of content in its 3840×2160 resolution. TV buyers may lose interest once they burn through the limited films and series available on smart sets' download and streaming services. Computer users, however, have had more reasons to tiptoe toward the quadrupling of 1080p—at the very least, to enjoy super-crisp text and details in their regular work and browsing.

Displays as dense as 2880×1800 and 3200×1800 have already landed in our laps, but Toshiba has come out as the first legitimate 4K laptop producer. The P50t Satellite's biggest selling point is its 15.6", 3840x2160 resolution screen—a multi-touch panel, at that—and it's backed with the specs you'd expect from a machine forced to render so many pixels.

The latest in a long line of breezy promotional videos from Google has landed. This time, it was the company's self-driving vehicle project that took centre stage. Although the car's dinky, bubble-like design was mocked by some, its announcement has also been widely understood to signal the fact that autonomous vehicles are now entering the next level of testing and development.

Google's cars will, for now, be limited to trials in the Palo Alto firm's home state of California. So what about driverless transportation in Europe? Is the EU ready to embrace this technology, or is it about to be left in the wake of another American innovation?

At first glance the situation seems a little murky. Both BMW and Daimler AG, which owns Mercedes-Benz, have been working on autonomous vehicle concepts for years, such as BMW's self-driving 5 Series.

If you've got a cheap phone and want a cheap plan to go with it, these are some good places to start looking.

Andrew Cunningham

Most Americans buying cell phones are going to do it through one of the four major carriers, and most of them are going to opt in to a two-year contract when they buy a phone because it feels like a good deal. You'll give me a $600 or $700 phone for $200? What a savings!

What fewer people take the time to add up is that the cost of that two-year contract can range up into the thousands of dollars over the course of two years, easily dwarfing the amount you "saved" by buying a subsidized phone. Remember, if it looks like a carrier is giving you a great deal, it's probably a great deal for the carrier and not for you.

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) can give you another way out, buying access to the big four networks wholesale and then re-selling it to you. It's possible to get the best of both worlds—no expensive long-term contracts or cancellation fees, paired with the speed and coverage you're used to from larger carriers. We'll be looking at pricing first and foremost, but we'll also pay special attention to MVNOs that allow you to bring your own devices, like the $179 Moto G and $129 Moto E we're so enamored of. Those devices are great for the price, and buying one of them to pair with service from an MVNO could save you hundreds of dollars a year.

A little more than a week after popular director Edgar Wright abruptly left the set of Ant-Man, Variety reports that Anchorman director and Funny or Die cofounder Adam McKay will come aboard to take his place. This will be McKay's first foray into the superhero genre after a long line of comedy films.

Wright's vision is likely still in place

Marvel is reportedly determined to have Ant-Man debut on schedule, with the film hitting theaters on July 17th, 2015. Luckily, McKay comes on at a time when pre-production and development are mostly complete, and Wright's original vision is likely already firm. Stars Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas have already been cast for months, with the actors playing younger and older versions of the title character. However, McKay does have the advantage of having worked with Rudd multiple times over the years, having found recent success with Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

Fans were originally excited to see Wright at the helm of Ant-Man, a film he'd been attached to since 2006, after seeing his work on such films as Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. That's no longer the case, and fans now speculate that the director's relationship with Marvel and Disney may have been strained by the end. Wright recently tweeted an image of depressed Buster Keaton holding a Cornetto ice cream cone, a move some observers believe might be a reference to his own Cornetto Trilogy and the creative control Keaton felt he'd lost when he signed up to work for MGM. That tweet has since been deleted, but fellow Marvel director Joss Whedon did tweet a Cornetto of his own to show solidarity.

"Gangnam Style" has become the first YouTube video to break 2 billion views. The music video hit the record late Friday night, 525 days since it accumulated 1 billion all-time views in December 2012. That second billion took three times longer than the first, which was achieved just 159 days from the video's release on July 15th, 2012. The second place video on YouTube is still the music video that : Justin Bieber's "Baby," which has just half the number of views as "Gangnam Style." Any way you look at it, it's an incredible achievement — whether or not you're intoxicated by surging beat and Psy's ludicrous antics.