firehose

By Nathan Grayson on August 17th, 2013 at 2:00 pm.

Trawling through Steam Greenlight might often lead to the feeling that you’re trapped in a labyrinth minefield of well-meaning but not necessarily, er, high-quality offerings, but every once in a while it yields a gem of absolutely gleaming promise. Such is the case with beautiful-looking, bonkers-sounding all-terrain (including sky) racer Krautscape. It sees you rocketing around in tightly coiled airplane cars, down a track that grows on the fly at the whim of whomever’s in first place. Given that only a thin sliver of red earth separates you from the sky’s unbreakable gravity lasso, odds are someone’s going to fall. And then? Why, your car unfurls its wings, of course! More cars need wings, I think. Let’s be honest here: that would easily solve most of humanity’s most pressing problems.

Win or lose, this looks like a game where I will be screaming, “WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” pretty much the whole time. I am quite OK with this.

But how’s it work? Magic? Alien bloodomancy? Shakespearean typewriter monkeys? Not quite, but close. It’s more like this:

“Krautscape is an action-packed multi-player racing game where the currently leading player builds the track during the race. The track, as the most important part of any racing game, emerges dynamically during gameplay. This leads to a completely original and unique gaming experience for every race.”

“The chasing players can take shortcuts by flying off the track to overcome obstacles. But the track is needed to score and to get speed – the vehicles don’t have any thrusters to accelerate while flying.”

So flight is more of a safety net with benefits than a game-breaking ascent into the win-o-sphere. That’s a nice balance, if you ask me.

It looks positively brilliant, but obviously, feel and tactility matter a lot here. A racer can have all the cool tricks it wants. If it doesn’t handle well, then everything else is fit for the scrap heap. So we’ll see.

Krautscape will be out late this year. If you’re keen on it, I imagine its developers would very much appreciate it if you chopped off one of your thumbs and handed it to them on Greenlight (symbolically, mind you; RPS does not endorse self-mutilation for the purposes of game promotion).

A virus typically used to steal credit card information has been repurposed to target Instagram, generating fake "likes" and followers, and selling them online. As Reuters reports, these fake "likes" are then sold in batches of 1,000 on online forums, and can fetch surprisingly high prices. According to security firm RSA, 1,000 Instagram followers sell for around $15 online, while 1,000 "likes" selling for $30. The same number of credit card numbers, by comparison, go for as little as $6.

Experts say this price discrepancy reflects the growing value of social media to businesses or individuals who want to promote their brands or products. Buying fake likes is an easy — if ethically nebulous — way to generate false hype around a brand, and companies are clearly willing to pay comparatively high prices for them.

"It's fine for the first 100, but I advise stopping after that."

The malware, known as Zeus, first surfaced in 2007 as a botnet network to steal banking and credit card information, and has infected millions of computers. In its modified form, the virus forces infected users to follow or like specific accounts, or to download other viruses. It's not clear how many people have been targeted by the latest version of Zeus, but experts tell Reuters that it's the first malware created explicitly to generate fake "likes" on social media.

Online marketers say they sometimes advise clients to purchase social media followers to kickstart their campaigns, though relying too heavily on false buzz can soon backfire, making the brand look cheap or spammy. "It's fine to do for the first 100 [followers]," Will Mitchell, an online marketing consultant, told Reuters. "But I always advise stopping after that."

• 450ml milk
• 92g sugar
• 30g cornflour / corn starch
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 large egg yolks (at room temperature)
• 2 tablespoons / 30ml brewed coffee, cooled (I thought about using espresso, here, and then forgot. Next time.)
• 1/2 teaspoon / 2.5ml vanilla extract
• 115g Lindt Excellence 70% chocolate, chopped. (I thought of going up to the 85% for this and forgot about that too. Also, didn’t have any. Next time. Or better still: Valrhona.) …This is a bar and a quarter of the Lindt. Eat the rest, because, hey, you’re doing all this work already: you deserve a reward.)

As per the previous version of the recipe:

1. Heat the milk in a large saucepan until hot but not boiling.

2. Whisk the sugar, cornstarch and salt in a large bowl; then whisk in the egg yolks, coffee and vanilla. Whisk half of the hot milk into the egg mixture until smooth, then gradually whisk the egg mixture into the pan with the remaining milk.

3. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens, 3 to 5 minutes. (If you have a thermometer, the mix should be at least 160F to ensure that the eggs are cooked and you’re not going to kill anybody. Sherlock would be disappointed, but your friends and family won’t be.) Note that this produces an extremely thick and tight custard, very very quickly. Don’t turn your back on this one, and by no means stop whisking during the cooking period or the whole business will burn. Also, turn that heat right down as soon as it starts boiling. You need to keep the cooking process gentle, as the custard’s consistency damn near approaches that of magma as it tightens. 

4. Remove from the heat and whisk in the chocolate until melted. Transfer to a bowl and cool slightly, stirring a few times to prevent a skin from forming. (You might do this over cold water if you like, but just make sure you stir it quite regularly until it hits the just-before-lukewarm stage.)

Now: pour the filling into the crust and spread it carefully right out to the edges and into the flutings. Smooth the top down as well as you can. Then sieve over the top:

• Approximately 2-3 tablespoons of a good unsweetened cocoa

…But we’re not done.

Stick the thing in the fridge and leave it be for at least four hours… (but I would suggest overnight). It firms up better, flattened like this, than the “pie” version did — just the physics of the colloid, I’m guessing. …Once it’s had a while to chill out, we get to the final step of making it pretty.

Find a doily, or cut some pretty designs out of a piece of baking parchment, or whatever. (I used a nonskid table mat that we had around.) Behold:

Place it carefully over the pan and dust the whole business carefully with:

• 2-4 tablespoons icing / confectioner’s sugar

(I used the coffee grinder to make some… it works real well for that.)

And then you get this.

Not perfect, but you get the idea. (BTW, this is better done just before serving time, as otherwise the sugar starts picking up moisture from the air or the tart and going sort of translucent.)

Cut and serve. You could do whipped cream as a topping, but I’d be tempted to use creme fraiche instead, to balance the sweetness of the dessert proper. In the image at the top, Peter used yogurt. (“For that more grown-up flavour,” says the Voice in the Background.)

Enjoy!

It's common to hear people complain that things used to be better in the good old days, but in the case of apples, that might actually be true. Scientists in Japan have detected a long-term trend of deteriorating taste and texture in local apples, which they have associated with a rising average temperature in the areas where the fruit is being grown.

Studying the Fuji and Tsugaru cultivars, Japan's two favorite varieties, the researchers observed lower acid concentration, firmness, and resistance to disease relative to the 1970s. The acid is what gives apples their signature sharp taste, so its reduction might actually be preferable for those with a sweet tooth, but the loss of firmness and increased vulnerability to watercore disorder are undeniably detrimental changes.

Sweeter, softer apples... aren't those called peaches?During the period studied, 1970 to 2010, average air temperatures in the cultivating regions increased by a third of a degree Celsius each decade, which resulted in the apples sprouting and blossoming earlier. The warmer air is also presented as a causative factor for these changes in the apples over time, though the researchers themselves warn that there's a multiplicity of factors that affect the final composition of a fully matured fruit.

By Robert Florence on August 16th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

Emperor, forgive me for what I’m about to write. It’s me, Rab Florence. You know I love Space Hulk. You know I have every edition of the game. You know I am pure.

But it’s three in the morning, and I’ve been playing Space Hulk on PC for six hours, and that’s more than enough. It’s been a painful, heartbreaking six hours, and the thought of a seventh is unbearable. Let me tell you why.

Let’s start by quickly explaining why Space Hulk, in its board game form, is one of the greatest games ever designed. It’s a stripped down, sleek, beautiful thing. One player takes control of a squad of Space Marine Terminators. The other player controls a horde of alien creatures called Genestealers. Each Terminator has Action Points, giving them movement and attacks. You roll for Command Points too, providing extra actions that can be shared across the squad. The Genestealers are more simple beasts – playing the Genestealers is all about moving around outside the Terminators’ line of sight as a little blip token, and choosing the perfect time to reveal how many monsters are attached to that blip. Each mission throws a new scenario at the players, but there is a great deal of comfort to be found in how the game plays with such familiarity from moment to moment. Move – open door – cover corridor – activate overwatch. Move blip – lurk – reveal – ATTACK. Head-to-head, across a table, Space Hulk comes alive in spectacular fashion. It’s like one of those knife-fight in a phone booth deals, except the knives are dice, and the phone booth is a cramped room inside an ancient spaceship. And there is beer on the table, just to the right of all that.

Crucially, the Space Hulk board game feels like a distillation of the very best turn-based strategy mechanics. Just the good stuff. All killer, no filler. So why is this PC game so bad? I mean – how can that even happen?

ACTIVATE NEGATIVE ELEMENT OVERWATCH

Target Detected – Someone made the decision, early in development, to fully animate every Terminator and every Genestealer in the game. Now, okay, it’s a fancy-schmancy PC game, so maybe those animations are expected. But listen – when you start to realistically animate these big heavy Terminator dudes, you are asking the player to sit for a really fucking long time waiting for every command to resolve. All the immediacy of the board game is gone in an instant. When I play Space Hulk on my table, I can move a Terminator three spaces and turn him 90 degrees in one second. In the PC game I have to watch the little fella go THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK for considerably longer than that. I actually couldn’t believe there wasn’t an option to turn the animations off. The recent Nintendo 3DS game “Crimson Shroud” features 3d-rendered miniatures, mounted on little bases, and they look beautiful. They can also be moved as quickly as lifting a miniature and placing it onto another space. There’s no reason why there couldn’t have been something similar here. Space Hulk is an adaptation of a board game after all – would it hurt to give us the option to simplify all that fancy, fussy video game crap?

Target Detected – I know pretty much every Space Hulk mission like the back of my hand. Because I know Space Hulk, I know where the doors are on every map. Someone coming into this game fresh is going to miss doors. I guarantee it. You will move a guy, then a door will open somewhere, and you will say “OH SHIT. I DIDN’T SEE THAT DOOR.” When you miss a door in Space Hulk, you are in big trouble. The cluttered, muddy graphics and the sub-optimal camera angles make doors easy to miss. That’s just not good enough. Basic stuff too. Ugh.

Target Detected – I want blips in my Space Hulk. Not glitches. Let me tell you about something funny that happened to me tonight – by “funny” I mean “not at all funny”. In the first mission of the game, the classic “Suicide Mission”, I found myself opening fire on a group of hungry Genestealers. I took all of them down except one. I spent the next turn readying my Terminators to deal with that lone Genestealer. On the Genestealer turn, that lone Genestealer didn’t move. Weird, right? Not really. I discovered that the Genestealer I was worried about didn’t actually exist. I mean, he was there – he was standing right there – but he didn’t exist. I stared at him for a while, his little animation looping, and wondered if maybe he was one of the dead Genestealers, whose soul had got trapped inside a bad computer game as punishment for his sins. It’s also worth looking out for other “funny” glitches, such as gunfire firing upwards out of the map towards your face, and Terminators walking right off the map into the blackness of fuck knows where. Oh, and missions ending in failure when they shouldn’t. Classic stuff. It’s only a BOARD GAME you are adapting here, fellas. This shouldn’t be so difficult.

Target Detected – Unless I’m some kind of idiot, and I hope I’m not some kind of idiot, the Hotseat Mode might as well not even exist. The idea of sitting and playing against someone at the same PC is great, but – oh, here we go. You know those blips I mentioned? In the board game, the Genestealer player has blips of different values. A blip might be hiding one Genestealer under it, which is bad enough. But it might be hiding three, which is sheer terror. A big part of the game is that tension of not knowing how many Genestealers that blip you can see actually represents. Well, in Hotseat mode, the number of Genestealers attached to a blip is open information. I mean, it says 1 or 3 right there on the fucking thing. I went back and forth with a few people, asking them if they knew how to turn that off. Surely there must be a hotkey that hides it or something? But we were all stumped. We were all mystified. We were all saying “THIS CAN NOT POSSIBLY BE AS STUPID AS THIS WHAT IS GOING ON WHAT YEAR IS THIS IS THIS ON THE VIC-20?”

Target Detected – Okay, in the online multiplayer you can’t see how many Genestealers are under the blips. Hooray! But this multiplayer is only going to work with friends. I played with a few randoms tonight, and one took so long over a turn I went and made a cup of tea, another quit out a few turns in, and the last one made one move and then just stopped playing. I think the games keep running, so that turns can be made hours apart in glorious asynchronous – OH GOD. This is Space Hulk! This is one of the most EXCITING board games ever made. This multiplayer turns it into something akin to those weird play-by-mail games you’d see advertised in old comics.

Okay – give me a moment here. Space Hulk is a board game. You know what I mean? It is a board game. It’s a game that demands your opponent is right there with you, shaking dice. You need to be able to laugh at your opponent’s misfortune, in his face, at the exact moment it happens. You need to be within punching distance. There is a LOT of luck in Space Hulk. To make that luck factor palatable, you need that thrill of throwing the old bones down on the table right in front of your opponent. When you’re playing against some slow, unseen stranger, who isn’t even rolling any dice? Those moments of ill fortune just make you angry. That’s all. Angry. Oh, and an undo button? Really? GO AWAY.

Target Detected – Another thing. Forget about all the shitty parts of this game for a moment. Even the stuff that works okay could have been executed far better. For me, the most thrilling part of Space Hulk is during Overwatch. Let me elaborate.

A Terminator is on Overwatch. A Genestealer turns the corner and starts moving towards that Terminator. He fires at the monster. It’s a miss. It moves closer. He fires again. Another miss! It moves closer. He fires again. ANOTHER miss. It moves even CLOSER! (At this point, playing the board game, the two players are screaming at each other in excitement and fright.) The Terminator fires again. His weapon JAMS. The Genestealer moves CLOSER. OH. MY. GOD.

In this PC adaptation, these moments just happen. You know what I mean? They just play out, and pass you by. There’s no wit or craft shown in how these moments are presented. The music could have changed, maybe. The camera could zoom closer with every miss. Surely something could have been put in there to say – “Hey, this is one of the cool parts of this classic game design! Sit up and pay attention!” Instead it just shows you the mechanics of the thing playing out, like it’s just another phase of the game. Or like, I dunno, like the developers didn’t really care.

And that really sums this scrappy, boring adaptation up. A lack of care. It’s about as bad as it could possibly be. I’ve played through half of the campaign missions, missions that are close to my heart, and I’ve hated every one of them. I stopped at exactly halfway, because the game told me I’d lost a mission I’d just won. And that was the final straw. What an achievement that is, to turn magic into soup. To turn a thing of such celebrated greatness into a thing of such grated celeryness. It sickens me to think that some people will play this game and think that this is what Space Hulk is – a leaden, dated bore. That’s not a Space Hulk I recognise.

Sure, you might still want to buy this expensive disaster purely because it’s Space Hulk.

But this is not Space Hulk.

I will not accept it. I just won’t.