By John Walker on July 17th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

As RPS drop-out Kieron tweeted the other day, “We are the generation who funded more point and click adventures, and we’ll get what we deserve.” He was expressing frustration at the woeful lack of funding for Satellite Reign (FUND IT!), while seemingly so many adventures are seeing that green, green light. But what of those adventures? For all of last year’s fuss, little has appeared so far – has it been money well spent? Should the Gillens of the world be quieted by the adventure devotees and their wallets? Well, it’s a pleasure to report that from my time with Jane Jensen’s Moebius, in at least one case the answer could well be: yes.

It took me a while to put my finger on what it was that felt different about playing the first couple of chapters of Moebius. The premise is completely daft – an antiques über-expert gets hired by a mysterious man to assess whether a murder victim shares a significant amount in common with any famous person from the last couple of thousand years. The presentation is traditional – fixed backgrounds around which awkwardly animated characters trot, looking at and picking up items for infinite pockets. The voice acting is pleasurably hammy, exaggerated caricatures barking information at each other. Puzzles involve picking up everything and putting it all down in the right places, alongside the game’s own unique observation skills that we’ll get to. So what is it? What about all the traditional point-n-click elements being exactly where you’d expect them to be makes this feel different from its peers?

It’s good!

It was this that was eluding me. I love adventure games, and as such, I’ll put up with an awful lot. It’s testament to how bad so many are that I still find myself mostly complaining in most reviews. It was peculiar to be experiencing all the silly tropes of the genre, but realising I wasn’t fighting against it to have a good time. It was just letting me.

The ludicrously named Malachi Rector is a genius. His photographic memory, combined with an all-encompassing knowledge of seemingly all of history, makes him expert in both antiques and antiquity, and also an arrogant sod. When the utterly ridiculously named secret government agency F.I.S.T. (Future Intelligence Science & Technology) hires him, it’s time to hot-foot it around the world, analysing things with this analysing brain.

So yes, it’s preposterous. He is to history what Gabriel Knight was to ghoulies, although a distinctly less convivial fellow. Rude to just about everyone, he has that arrogance that seemed to work for House, The Mentalist, and the like. But rather than creating that awkward feeling of being forced to control a character you’d rather not be, as plagues so many contemporary adventures, it’s great fun to be Rector. He’s properly smart, rather than just a douchebag.

Rector’s skills include an ability to scan people before speaking to them, picking up aspects of their character from his observations, that then play in the conversations you have. It’s a bit Sherlock Holmes, as you make wildly spurious assumptions about a person based on some grub on their collar, the shape of their eyebrows, or whatever, and are of course exactly correct because the writers wrote it that way. Don’t look for those things, by the way, and the conversations go differently.

He can also more deeply analyse a particular subject, comparing them to the litany of historical figures he stores in his head. So in that first couple of chapters I was off to Venice, hired to learn what I could about a murdered woman, found hanged from a bridge. As I spoke to relatives, explored her house, and generally snooped, I gathered a bunch of facts about her. That she was married at 19, to a man in his 40s. That she was pregnant a year into the marriage. That she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the area. And so on. And then compared these facts to a dozen or so historical women who shared similar properties. In a sort of lifestyle version of Guess Who, you eliminate potential matches until you’ve got it down to just a few possibilities. Is she most like Cleopatra, Livia Drusilla, Countess Marie Walewska, or Gorgo of Sparta? And why is her being like someone from the past a thing anyway? The early section of the game doesn’t explain, but put together with the title, I have my suspicions.

The second section of this early preview build took me to Cairo, and offered a slightly different experience. It was less focused on a tight investigation, and more open, more like a regular adventure. Exploring locations, meeting various dubious characters, winning a game of darts, and trying to figure out who a mysterious blond man might be, were all on my journey to meet a man about a statue. Again, while the puzzles were absolutely contrived, and the circumstances daft, it was the right sort of contrived and daft, and delivered with a deft hand that reminds why Jensen has such a huge reputation (if you pretend Gabriel Knight 3 didn’t happen).

A lot of work needs to be done to smooth things out, removing odd pauses that break the flow, but then this is early alpha code and shouldn’t be representative of the final game at all. And dear God, they have to do something about the character model’s shoulders. However, one feature which I suspect is in there for debugging would be amazing if it could remain – double clicking moves Rector instantly to that spot on the screen, which does nothing for realism, but everything for speeding up that laborious adventuring trudge of having to walk up to everything you look at. Pinkerton Road – leave it in!

What I’ve played is far too little to give an impression on whether the story and concept will hold up. It’s only hinted at it so far, despite lasting a couple of hours, and that bodes well for a nicely crafted arc. It remains to be seen if it can hold itself together, although early impressions suggest it should.

What’s also interestingly hinted at is a possible relationship between Rector and another man in the game. If that is seen through, then not only would it be a massive step forward in terms of having a gay lead in a videogame, but also adds all manner of potential narrative intrigue bearing in mind who he might be. Again, supposition at this point.

It’s a very gratifying experience to play the first of these big-name Kickstarter adventures, and rather than just have a nostalgic experience, be reminded why it was their games were such big deals in the 1990s. Moebius could still unwind into meandering gibberish – there’s clearly the potential for that bearing in mind the metaphysical implications of what it hints at here. But it could just as easily be a really worthwhile adventure game, with no pretentions to be anything else. And that’s what rather a lot of us have been craving.

Submitted by: Unknown

Let it flow, I say.

Consumer broadband connections in the US are almost all "asymmetric" connections—that is, out of the total amount of bandwidth available, more bandwidth is allocated to the "download" direction than to the "upload" direction. This decision made sense 15 years ago when DSL connections were first gaining momentum. The Internet—and specifically the World Wide Web—was far more of a consumption-oriented construct then. People were far more interested in reading or watching content than in putting up their own. We wanted, needed, fast download speeds, and broadband providers jumped at the chance to differentiate themselves from dial-up ISPs by offering fast always-on connections and by using as much of that bandwidth as possible to send data to users.

The story today is very, very different. Download speeds are still important (by some estimates, just a bit under half of all Internet traffic is from people watching Netflix and YouTube videos), but it's become far easier to create content too. The ability to actually share anything that you've created relies on being able to upload that content.

Slow upload speeds are a problem even my mother has commented on—and when my mother starts commenting on a technical issue, that's when I know that it's absolutely a mainstream concern. She enjoys making videos of things she's painted and of new plants in the backyard garden, then uploading those videos to YouTube to share with her friends. But she's stymied by how long it takes to upload her videos, even if they're relatively short. She and my father are trapped by Comcast into an overly expensive residential cable modem plan with a grossly asymmetric download/upload ratio. Explaining the problem to her yielded the common sense observation, "Well, that's just stupid. How am I supposed to share videos if it takes longer to get them to YouTube than it does to film them in the first place?"

Ianqui Doodle

Within the last week, three of the United States’ four major mobile carriers (Sprint sat this one out) all announced, or are rumored to announce, variations on a theme: upgrade your phone faster, for a price.

T-Mobile’s Jump program adds a new $10 fee to the regular monthly cost of a phone as a way to let customers buy new phones at subsidized prices up to twice per year. Similarly, AT&T’s Next program lets users put down an extra five percent of the unsubsidized price of the phone for 12 months and then they can trade up. Verizon’s Edge scheme, as yet unannounced, will likely be something along these lines. (T-Mobile has already started sniping at AT&T: on Tuesday, the former called the latter's new plan a "smokescreen.")

So why is this happening all of a sudden? Put simply, the American mobile market is highly saturated—there are fewer and fewer new customers for these carriers. Only 1.1 million Americans got mobile phones for the first time in the first quarter of 2013—the lowest ever growth for that market. Q1 2012 saw around 1.83 million new additions, which shows a quarter-over-quarter loss of 60 percent this year. Meanwhile, there was a modest quarter-over-quarter gain in prepaid customers.

George Zimmerman Juror B37 Hates Media, Called Trayvon "Boy of Color"

A mere two days after finding George Zimmerman innocent of the murder of Trayvon Martin, juror B37 in the case has signed on with a prominent… Read…

Of the many outrageous things revealed about Juror B37 since she and five other women acquitted George Zimmerman of murder, possibly the most outrageous was that she had already managed to land herself a literary agent for a future book deal.

The as-yet-unidentified Floridian and her "attorney husband" announced through literary agent Sharlene Martin plans to release a tell-all book about "the commitment it takes to serve and be sequestered on a jury in a highly publicized murder trial."

The juror's profiteering rubbed more than a few people the wrong way, but only one of them actually did something about it.

Juror B37: George Zimmerman's “Heart Was in the Right Place”

Media-hating juror B37 from the George Zimmerman trial spoke with Anderson Cooper on Monday night. Among other things, the juror explained to Cooper… Read…

A young woman known for the time being only by her Twitter handles @MoreAndAgain and "Cocky McSwagsalot" launched a Twitter campaign last night, thirty minutes into Juror B37's CNN interview, during which she continued saying outrageous things like George Zimmerman's "heart was in the right place," and race did not play a role in the shooting.

"Hey, @sharelenemartin," tweeted @MoreAndAgain, "please drop juror B37. Do not help the person who let a murderer get away profit from this tragedy."

She quickly followed that up with a Google Doc containing Martin's contact info, and encouraged others to join her protest.

And join they did: As more and more Twitter users implored Martin to change her mind, a Change.org petition that quickly racked up over 1,000 signatures appeared to be the final straw.

Just a few hours after it started, @MoreAndAgain's campaign ended in triumph.

In a private message that has since been made public, Martin said she appreciated the woman's "passion for the death of Trayvon Martin," and has "decided to rescind my offer of representation in the exploration of a book based upon this case."

A short while later Juror B37 also had a "sudden change of heart," and released her own statement saying she "realized that the best direction for me to go is away from writing any sort of book and return instead to my life as it was before."

@MoreAndAgain has published a Storify collecting all of the tweets involved in helping Martin and Juror B37 come to their senses so you can relive the moment again and again and again.

By Nathan Grayson on July 17th, 2013 at 11:00 am.

I was going to begin this post with a lament of “Oh, SimCity,” but then I discovered that Adam had already done that in our most recent piece on the fallen city-building empire. Describes the dismal set of circumstances surrounding the game rather perfectly, though, doesn’t it? Nearly everyone’s agreed that EA’s overly simplified, always-on catastrophe – which is said to be the subject of Syfy’s next disaster flick, SimCitynadovolcanoavodcado – botched its landing, and now it seems that a trio of its own developers agree. Fortunately, instead of leaving games altogether and becoming doctors/lawyers/mathletes like their mothers wanted, former creative director Ocean Quigley, lead architect Andrew Willmott, and lead gameplay engineer Dan Moskowitz have formed an indie studio called Jellygrade. Their first project is – what else? – a simulation.

Quigley broke the news on Twitter, explaining:

“We were lead developers on SimCity, SimCity 4, Spore, and The Sims 2. We love making simulations. We’re making a simulation about the dawn of life on earth; about lava, water, rock and the emergence of the first primordial creatures.”

The new game – which already has some early concept art and renders – is set to lead on iPad, but will hopefully slither onto the dry, highly evolved land of PC “in time“.

Meanwhile, speaking with Polygon, Quigley explained that he left EA in part due to “the blundered launch of something that I had poured so much love and attention into,” but also because he’d been working at big studios for nearly 18 years. He wanted a change of pace, and his next big idea – what with its highly specific focus – didn’t really fit with EA’s M.O.

“This is a little too weird and science nerdy for EA… The geo-physics and biology of the early Earth struck me as a rich and interesting subject for a game. I do like science. I do like knowing what is actually happening in the world and it seems like a rich subject matter.”

“A lot of the ideas that we have about the early emergence of life on Earth were in the early development of Spore but were lost as it became a much more cute game and less a game about physical processes. Those are things that I have been wanting to get back to, to deal with that subject matter.”

Science! Also, come on: the man’s name is Ocean. From it he was born, and forever shall he be destined to simulate its most minute of hyper-complex particle physics. So it was written in The Prophecy.

Hopefully we’ll hear more (especially on the PC front) soon. For now, though, it sounds like the right move for Quigley and co, so best of luck to them.

The Vatican has taken another step in its efforts to embrace social media by offering "indulgences" to followers of Pope Francis' (@Pontifex) Twitter account. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reports that the church will reduce the time Catholics have to spend in purgatory if they follow official Vatican events on TV, radio, and through social media.

One such event is the Catholic World Youth Day, commencing in Rio de Janeiro on July 22nd. The Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican tribunal responsible for issues relating to the forgiveness of sins, will award the privilege to the faithful that follow the event using different forms of media. Pope Francis' followers are not immediately granted an indulgence for tracking the event, with the penitentiary noting that it would hinge on the user having previously confessed and being "truly penitent and contrite." Indulgences are given out when a Catholic performs an action recommended by the church. They're meant to encourage Catholics to lead a pious life, devoting themselves to charity and generally treating others with a Christian spirit.

"Producing authentic spiritual fruit in the hearts of everyone."

"What really counts is that the tweets the Pope sends from Brazil or the photos of the Catholic World Youth Day that go up on Pinterest produce authentic spiritual fruit in the hearts of everyone," said Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the pontifical council for social communication. Alongside its papal Twitter account, the Vatican offers an online news website (and app), a Facebook page, and is currently planning to engage with users on Pinterest.