firehose

A military simulation video game designed by China's Giant Network Technology Co. in partnership with the the People's Liberation Army — the military arm of the Community Party of China — allows Chinese soldiers to fight Japanese troops and defend the much-disputed ownership of the Diaoyu Islands, the Washington Post reports.

Glorious Mission Online — a first-person shooter described as China's Call of Duty equivalent — was first released in 2011 and was originally designed to train Chinese soldiers. In an update coming soon to the game, the developers have added a level that allows players to "reclaim and defend" the Diaoyu Islands, a collection of vacant but heavily disputed islands between China and Japan.

Players fought a "flood of attacks from Japanese invaders" in a 1937-themed map.

The addition of the level adds fuel to an already heated dispute between the two countries. The Diaoyu Islands (also known as the Senkaku islands in Japan) are a group of uninhabited islands controlled by Japan in the East China sea. However, Japan's sovereignty over the islands has been disputed by China, which claims that it discovered and controlled the islands from the 14th century. Japan controlled the islands from 1895 until its surrender at the end of World War II, at which point control was in the hands of the U.S. In 1972, the islands reverted to Japanese control under the Okinawa Reversion Treaty between the U.S. and Japan.

The update that contains the level will be released on Aug. 1. According to the South China Morning Post, players will be able to fight against Japanese opponents on island maps, use new weapons and outfits and also fly in the Liaoning — he first aircraft carrier commissioned for the People's Liberation Army. In a press release (in Chinese) from the game's official website, the developers say that "players will fight side by side with the People's Liberation Army and use their weapons to tell the Japanese that 'Japan must return our stolen territory!'" The 'Defend Diaoyu Islands' scenario, as the map is called, is also listed as a highlight of the update.

The South China Morning Post reports that Glorious Mission Online was originally sponsored by the People's Liberation Army as a virtual simulator to train soldiers. 'Defend Diaoyu Islands' is not the first level to feature anti-Japan sentiments. In an earlier update called 'The Chinese Dream,' players fought a "flood of attacks from Japanese invaders" in a 1937-themed map.

By Cara Ellison on July 25th, 2013 at 4:00 pm.

The so-called ‘Electronic Arts’ company has reported very strong sales as it announced preliminary financial results for its first fiscal quarter. And “digital games and services” are outstripping “brick and mortar sales”, with Apple iOS titles like The Simpsons: Tapped Out making a crapload of money for EA. Well if you are a games company trying to sell bricks and mortar to people then obviously the Apple products are going to sell better, silly. Can we have more Bullfrog games you amateurs.

I feel a lot like I should be wearing a pant suit like CJ from the West Wing when I say these words, and it makes me feel very important, so bear with me whilst I preen myself.

According to the lovely Mike Rose at Gamasutra, EA COO Peter Moore said, “Our quarter was notable for the high percentage of revenue attributable to digital games and services… To that end, Apple was EA’s biggest retail partner measured by sales, and that, is a first.”

It is with sadness and much regret that I tell you now that the PC is dead. Apple is now our overlord.

This new information on the way sales are going are strongly directing changes in EA’s investments. EA president Frank Gibeau said, “There’s still a very active gaming business on Facebook and in the social channels, and we do participate there with several franchises and services. But our emphasis and focus over the next several years is going to be on mobile and HD consoles.”

But as you can see from the graphs below, the PC is still a significant earner for EA, so let’s hope whilst they are looking at the pretty shiny Apple shinies they don’t forget that we are over here getting annoyed at their DRM like proper people.

Here are some charts so you can chart yourselves.

Usually at this point in the press briefing I’d take questions from the floor, but today I’ll be asking some maths questions to test your ability to read those charts properly, thereby judging your suitability to be in the RPS community.

How many official members of RPS are there, including columnists? You there at the back.

Okay that was easy. How many cups of tea does Jim drink a day? How many times do I forget to put a ‘more’ tag on my copy each day?

How many swears does Adam say at tiny men each day? Approximately? And how many words can John type a minute?

Last one: by how many inches does Nathan’s magnificent curl-headed mop grow overnight?

Get ‘em wrong you are ejected from the press room. Thank you everyone, that will be all.

(Thanks Gamasutra. Thamasutra.)

A Guerrila Games profiling tool shows how six of the PS4's eight CPU cores have their cycles allocated for various functions.

Digital Foundry

Since its public debut in February, Sony has made a lot of hay out of the 8GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM that will be available in a unified architecture on the PlayStation 4. But a new report suggests that game developers will generally only have access to 4.5GB of that RAM, with the rest taken up by the underlying OS.

The folks over at Digital Foundry cite "current PlayStation 4 documentation shown to Digital Foundry by a well-placed development source" in detailing the RAM breakdown. The numbers aren't set in stone, though. Digital Foundry reports that developers can take back as much as 1GB of "flexible memory" from the OS when it's available. However, taking back this memory isn't as simple as flipping a switch; it's complicated enough that only first-party games may be able to do it at first, according to the report.

For some context, the Xbox One devotes a comparable 3GB of its 8GB of RAM to the system software, according to reports, and the Wii U uses a full half of its 2GB of RAM for the OS. On PCs, Windows 8 needs 1GB of RAM, while OS X Mountain Lion requires 2GB of memory, according to official specs.

By Nathan Grayson on July 26th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Ever had one of those days where it feels like the whole world’s out to get you? Like you just can’t win? Like you are a magnet whose polarity is perfectly calibrated to attract gigantic, writhing jerkswarms who will stop at nothing to steal everything you love? Congratulations: you might be Super Crate Box and LUFTRAUSERS (among many, many other things) developer Vlambeer. Between countless clones and a recent theft of what basically amounted to their entire company during E3, the two-man team has been plagued by a string of bad luck so crushing that you’d think it was a giant joke.

So Rami Ismail and JW Nijman laugh at it. They laugh and count their blessings.

I am behind-the-scenes of Vlambeer. The scene: a convention booth. Me: worming around in its red-tinted inner workings. That, by my estimate, is about as “behind-the-scenes” as one can get. Rami Ismail has two things: a laptop and a bottle of Totally Not Coca-Cola. Sure, he’s surrounded by wires and the ugly backsides of demo machines, but it’s a pretty humble setup. This is not the frigid heart of an Activision or EA. It’s not a place for the thief who fancies himself a Robin Hood. And yet, Vlambeer’s been rocked by multiple instances of high-profile thievery. It really doesn’t make much sense, and both Ismail and Nijman are well aware of that.

“We always have bizarre bad luck, I think, in terms of random stuff happening,” Ismail says, grim yet truthful. “It’s sort of like a joke, isn’t it? Vlambeer’s stuff gets stolen, whether it’s our game ideas or our games or my bag. Our stuff gets stolen.”

“All of our games get cloned, pretty much. Yeti Hunter didn’t get cloned. That’s something.”

Vlambeer’s hardly the only game developer to watch in horror as its babies go through the Replicatron, but every single time? That’s just ridiculous. It’s the sort of thing that’d make a lesser creator want to pack up shop and go home. Call it quits once and for all. Burn down the stand and never look back. It’s not like Vlambeer hasn’t considered it, either.

“We didn’t work for almost half a year [after Radical Fishing got cloned], and half a year in a company that makes a project in three months is a lot of time,” Ismail points out. “We nearly went out of business. The only reason we didn’t is because we have an amazing army of fans who love the stuff we do and care about what we do. If we hadn’t had people telling us, ‘We’re behind you, and when Ridiculous Fishing comes out it’s going to be amazing, so hang on there,’ we would have given up. I’m 100 percent sure we would have given up. We had that conversation twice.”

“That was the reality for six to eight months. I don’t want to go through that. I don’t want anybody to go through that. I don’t know what it did for us. I don’t know whether it was good for us. The talks we did got us some attention, the talks about cloning. So the way we responded to the clone got us some attention. But as for the clone itself, I would not wish that on anybody.”

But why? What makes Vlambeer’s vlambrand of arcade-y action so appealing to those with sticky fingers and consciences that look like shriveled up slabs of dead skin? It can’t just be luck, after all. Where there’s rhyme, there’s reason.

“I think our games are easy to replicate,” Ismail suggests, features settling into a thoughtful, obviously familiar position. “That makes it sound like we just make simple games, but they’re simple to play. The thing is, making something that simple is a lot of work. I think it’s easy to look at our games and say, ‘Well, this makes total sense. We’ll copy that and release it and make money.’ Vlambeer has enough popularity that people know if we release something, it’s probably going to be interesting.”

“I wonder if there are companies just looking for our next thing. It’s quite an amusing thought, that there might be somebody somewhere interested in our next big announcement that way.”

It is, then, a strangely inevitable part of the process for Ismail and Nijman. But when you face something day-in and day-out, you eventually get a sense for what makes it tick – the whirring, whining nuts and bolts. And from there, you can dissect it, make it yours. Blatant thievery may never help Vlambeer, but gone are the days when it dragged the duo so far down that they weren’t sure if they’d ever get back up again.

“What we’ve learned is that, at first, your first response is to be more secretive about what you do,” Ismail explains, almost lecturing. “You just keep it closer to your chest and don’t show anybody. We’ve learned to do the complete opposite thing and just be as open as possible and make sure that everyone knows this is our project. If anybody tries something like that, they get the largest possible backlash.”

“With the LUFTRAUSERS clone, the interesting thing that happened is that it just got taken down. It was just gone. I think the industry and consumer opinion and the general opinion of clones has gone down. It’s such a different world from when Ridiculous Fishing got cloned. Back then, people were saying, ‘That’s just part of video games. You should accept it.’ And we said, ‘No, this is not okay. We don’t want this shit in our industry. We’re not going to take it.’ That’s a great shift.”

Ismail doesn’t think Vlambeer’s the only company to benefit from that shift, either. His trials and tribulations might’ve only made up a couple dominoes in the chain, but he’s exceedingly happy with the end result.

“After Ridiculous Fishing got cloned, the debate got started,” he says. “Then you had a few really big cases. You had the Nimblebit case and Sprite Fox and Zynga. Suddenly it was the big issue, the one that everybody talked about. I think that changed things. If you clone a game now, you better be damn sure you can do it without being implicated, because if you are, people are going to hate you.”

“I think that’s good. We don’t need laws for this. We don’t want laws for this. We don’t want laws saying, ‘You can’t copy video games,’ because that’s just going to get used against creative development like in the mobile phone market, where you can’t release a mobile phone around the edges because Samsung and Apple hold all the patents for the user interface. It’s completely stupid. So it’s good that this is self-regulating. It’s good that people are saying, ‘We’re not going to buy this shit if you stole it from somebody else. We’ll just buy the original.’ That was all we could hope for when Ridiculous Fishing got cloned.”

As far as these things go, it’s a rather happy ending. Sure, clones are still a big problem, but at least things seem to be headed in a good direction. And for Vlambeer that’s especially good news, seeing as Ismail and Nijman derive their powers not from the sun, capes, or easily snipped hair (though their locks are uniquely magnificent), but rather happiness. Hope. Love of life.

“It’s been amazing,” enthuses Ismail, suddenly looking five years younger. “We finally found the energy. After Ridiculous Fishing launched, we finally found that energy that made Vlambeer fun. We started working on new stuff again. We’ve got like four things in the pipeline at the moment. We’re working on Super Crate Box for Ouya, which is coming really soon. I haven’t really slept yet today. We’re doing an update for Super Crate Box on iOS. We’re doing an update for Ridiculous Fishing on iOS. We’re releasing LUFTRAUSERS on five platforms simultaneously.”

“And we have a new project that we haven’t really talked about yet. We’re excited to not be telling people about it, because the people who have been following Vlambeer probably know what it’s going to be. We’ve talked about it in the past a bit. The people that haven’t been paying attention to us have no clue. So it’s this nice wink at the fans. We’re going to live stream all of the development on that.”

It’s really kind of insane, when you think about it. Vlambeer is two people. Two. But when they’re on, they’re on. And when they’re not? Well, it’s all about moderation. That and many rapidly draining bottles of Totally Not Coca-Cola.

“We might not sound like the healthiest people,” Ismail admits. “Vlambeer has been called the unhealthiest gaming company somebody has ever seen, and an infinite game jam. I can see how people would think that. At points in our history, that has definitely been true. But it’s that we care a lot about everything we do. We had to figure out that we need to take care of ourselves if we want to be able to do all that. In the past two and a half years we’ve found a balance where we can work ourselves to the point where we’re really tired, but not beyond that. We have a little bit of restraint.”

“Vlambeer is a lot about me and JW being happy. I think we pay a lot of attention to ourselves being happy. Our games sort of come from that mindset. They’re fun, interesting, weird, silly, all sorts of things, but we can’t make those if we’re not having fun. If you’re having fun at your job, you never have to go to work, I guess. Isn’t that the saying? I guess that’s true.”

And while Vlambeer’s slow march into the screaming eye of oblivion might sound like the result of an understaffed operation, Ismail and Nijman actually view it as the opposite. If you truly want to do things your way, the smaller the better. Sometimes (read: most of the time) that means off-the-wall game ideas that eventually come to fruition. Other times, it means taking a much-needed – and, by most standards, very long – rest.

“I think Vlambeer works because we can take stupid risks,” Ismail laughs. “If JW decides he doesn’t want to work for three months, and I decide I don’t want to work for three months, we can just suspend the company for three months at a minimal cost. We just need to make sure that we don’t die, which is not that expensive.”

He further points out that it’s not just him and Nijman, either. Many Vlambeer games have been collaborations with third parties, with various personalities sowing seeds all across different projects. Still though, it ultimately comes back to Ismail and Nijman – a partnership that, somewhat unsurprisingly, emerged from a pretty darn unlucky situation itself.

“What happened is, [JW and I] met each other going to school, and we instantly hated each other with a passion. The only reason we ended up working together was because the only thing we hated more than each other was the school itself. Shared enemies, that’s a good way to start talking.”

But somehow, it worked out. Before long, Ismail and Nijman dropped out of school to work on games like Radical Fishing and a prototype that would eventually go on to become Super Crate Box. And they fought each other every step of the way, which is pretty much their version of happily ever after.

“JW grew into a person who can really rapidly iterate on an idea,” Ismail says. “He can start with an idea and say, ‘No, that’s shit, let’s try again, half an hour. I learned this, so I’ll apply that.’ He’ll keep going like that. I come from the complete opposite side, where you sit down for a project and work on it for two years and then get that out there to people who want to play that. So we came from completely opposite philosophies of game development. That clash between us, that’s what Vlambeer is.”

“Me and JW will fight about something, and then we’ll say, ‘Oh, this is a solution. We’ll go in that direction.’ We don’t know where that is, but we’ll just go that way and see where it ends up. That’s the fun part. We don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s why we have games about airplanes and games about fishing and games about hunting yetis and games about smashing crates. We don’t know why these games happened. We know that if you play them, you will know that it’s Vlambeer. It’s just that, if you look at our games now, you won’t be able to tell what our next game is, because we don’t know either. There’s no formula or set idea of what we’re going to do. We just… Whatever. Video games.”

Vlambeer, then, is a developer founded on ups and downs. Constant strife. Difference. But somewhere in the center of the maelstrom, there is calm – or at least a brief glimmer of agreement. Ismail and I emerge from the red-as-a-heartbeat booth background and into the dim convention lights. Sure enough, he and Nijman immediately get to arguing about a potential feature for an upcoming unannounced game. But they part ways trading lighthearted jabs and chuckling, comfortable and collected among their own self-made chaos.

It’s hardly the sort of attitude you’d expect to see from two guys who – just a few weeks earlier – had “pretty much their entire company” stolen right out of a backpack at E3. But then, when you seem to relish, in a way, making your own bad luck, you kind of just learn to roll with whatever else life throws at you.

“I have a program set up on our server, so every time our computer logs in, it connects,” Ismail explains, also noting that everything on its was completely backed-up beforehand. “It just hasn’t pinged back. So I’m assuming that they opened the laptop, wiped it, and sold it.”

“Our stuff gets stolen. It’s something you have to deal with at some point. But on the other hand, if you look at how Vlambeer has been going, I don’t think we can complain at all. We’ve had the most amazing two and a half years that any game development company could wish for. It’s a lot of hard work and there’s a lot of setbacks like these, but in the end, the feeling I have with Vlambeer is always a really positive one. We still don’t know where Vlambeer is taking us either. We’re just having fun and seeing what happens.”

Note: Yes, there are many unlucky game developers in the world – for instance, Project Zomboid‘s own The Indie Stone. The title is not meant to be taken literally. Everything is relative, etc, etc, etc.

A handful of devices can fight easily over whose stream gets on the Chromecast.

Casey Johnston

If you are still broadcasting your Wi-Fi network without a password, here is another reason to lock it down: there is nothing to prevent any nearby compatible device from hijacking your Chromecast and displaying whatever the interloper pleases. Since Chrome tabs are broadcastable, this means porn, nyancat, Two Girls One Cup, and oh so much more can be put through to a Chromecast.

We’ve struggled a bit to come up with a description of how exactly the Chromecast accepts video—it’s not streaming, at least when it comes to YouTube or Netflix, but it’s not independent playback either, as with Chrome tabs. Either way, at the inception point, the Chromecast is told by another device to play something via a compatible app, and the Chromecast picks it up and does so.

We’ve been experimenting a bit with our Chromecast and found that when we try to interrupt video from one device with another, the Chromecast hardly even blinks and just pushes the newly played video over the old one. If we try to push a broadcasted Chrome tab to the Chromecast when something else is playing, the browser does pop up an alert, but if we push a YouTube video from a Nexus 7 to the Chromecast, the Chromecast kicks off the Chrome tab with no warning on either side.

By Cara Ellison on July 26th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

I am always counting my cubs. Ever since we left the sett, I have been looking behind me and counting my cubs. One, two, three, four… and a sudden panic that I have lost one, until he bounds up from whatever turnip he was investigating to join us. A sudden flash of anger happens in me. ‘You had me so worried,’ I want to say to him. ‘Never stray from us again. You never know what might happen.’ And then I worry that when I was young, I might have made my mother feel this way, and I feel ashamed because at the time I didn’t care.

Shelter, you are turning me into a mother, and until now I have not had one maternal feeling in my body.

That brilliant feeling of freedom unleashed as we bound out of the darkness of the sett and into the bright light of day; me and the cubs, we are so excited. The only things I have to do today are growl, walk, run, and pull turnips and carrots from their little nesting holes so I can feed my cubs, who follow me wherever I go, and if they don’t I growl. As I scurry through the Japanese fronds of grass and through frothing white flowers, the cubs are worrying at some apple tree. They fade to grey when they are hungry and tired, so when I knock apples from trees for them I have to pick them up and feed the ones that need it most, or they will…

There’s that twinge again, when I see the faster, browner ones steal the food first, and the little grey one was too slow. I feel like I have failed. Next fox I see, I mentally promise myself, it will go to you, little one. I’m sorry I didn’t pick it up and give it to you, I should have known you were too slow. We’ll be okay. There is plenty of food in this vast forest, and we’re going exploring today. Look how beautiful it is! Look how the hedges and tall grass are waving at us, and the pale light is shining over the fallen oak trees…

I have decided to name my badger Ripley. There is something I always cruelly bring up to friends who are pregnant: the story of my fear of pregnancy, I say, always begins with my childhood memories of watching Alien when I was small. To me, the chestburster scene represents everything I fear about becoming pregnant. A small parasite growing in my body, feeding from my energy. Something that I ultimately can’t sustain. And then, when it is born, it will ruin me. They always laugh and tell me that they had the same fears, but that I would get over it. One friend told me that Aliens is the more important film. Because of Newt. She was right. I have to watch Aliens again.

So my badger is named after the second incarnation of Ripley. And as I sit quietly in this bush, right now, my heart thuds against my chest because I can’t see where my cubs are around me, and there is a bird high in the sky who wants to swoop down and eat them. I can’t count them, when we are hiding. I just have to trust that they are there. I have to trust they won’t run out into the street -

The field. I have to trust that they won’t run out into the field.

This moment here becomes the most tense of your journey in Shelter. It is this moment, where you are waiting in safety for your cubs to get to you, and you know there is a bird of prey up there, screeching and threatening to fly away with them, that you are the most scared. The dreadnaught flies overhead, its curling black shadows draping over your young and you are paralysed. You count them and urge them to you, you will yourself into a little badger magnet. You growl a few times to have them come to you. Come on, you think. Come on. You can make it.

It is night time now, and I have survived with all five. But this only makes it worse. They are a lot of mouths to feed, and now…

Now there are wolf growls, and my cubs squeak and run on ahead of me and I panic like crazy, growling for them to come back but they won’t – I learn to follow them, run up to them. Everything is horrible. The tall bamboo fronds seem jagged and unfriendly, like monsters by the water.

Leaves linger in my vision like little minnows, settling in the air, but I am trying to catch frogs by the stream without losing sight of my cubs. In order to catch frogs you must rush them and then bite, but the rush leaves your cubs behind, vulnerable outside of your vision, so I am afraid to do it. But they are getting hungry, and we have to get out of here. I have to feed them. I wander on, to see if there are turnips. Now I am running, to find food.

But one of my cubs falls out of my vision. There is a growl, a screech!

Now silence. I cry out at my monitor, and a feeling of intense sadness falls around me as only four cubs run up to my side. I feel numb as I carry on, and I wonder if I will get over it.

The situation only gets worse. Frogs are the only food we have found, and my catching them constantly has my cubs fall out of sight.

Agony, as another cub is lost to a silent black growl in the night. I feel huge loss, somehow, at the fact that a little badger graphic has disappeared. What a silly thing, I tell myself. What a silly thing.

Day breaks again, and we are in a bright forest. I run about with joy again: look cubs look! Look how many foxes are here!

One of my cubs is taken by a sprawling-winged bird. We hide in grasses for the rest of the day.

Later we come to a huge river, and I notice somehow that my cubs have gotten much bigger lately. Only two of them now, I think, and they are almost my size. Feeding two of them is so much easier, I think –

And I stop myself.

We have to cross the river here, and the rain is lashing down on us, swelling the riverbanks and making huge waves course down strong rapids. I dip my toes into the water to test it, and am almost swept away. I get it, I think. I have to get them across, somehow.

I time it so that we run across together, just after the last wave went. We make it, and I feel such triumph I run past about twenty turnips in celebration, even though the cubs are jumping up and down like fleas all over them. “Hahahaha we made it!” I yell at them, even though they are computer badgers. They are still busy with some turnips.

I lose one to river rapids soon after. I look at my remaining cub and promise myself nothing will happen to him. But now, the forest is on fire.

Great jagged flames crackle in our ears, it suddenly flares in front of us, coming towards us, almost taunting us to get close as if it were a matador. I am very afraid but we move forward, trying to find paths before it creeps up and consumes us. At least my cub is big now, stronger, faster, and we keep close as we run. We will find a way out.

Eventually, we run out onto a plain where the fire can’t touch us. The shuddering fear of being inches away from walls of fire recedes, and we run out into tall grass again, happy.

Something happens, I can’t make out what, and I slow. I can’t walk as well, between tall grasses now, and suddenly I see something. A shadow on the ground. The curly black wisps in wing formation. I look behind me at my cub and he’s fine, just running away to the grass.

But I am hit, and I slow. I’m not going to make it to the grass.

But Newt’s fine. But Newt’s fine, I think. I watch Newt trot away, his tail disappearing in the fronds.

Yes, I think. Yes. This game is any good. It is good. It is good. Yes, I think. Yes.

Shelter was recently Greenlit.