Despite being one of the top-selling PlayStation Network games last month, sales of Darkstalkers Resurrection were not enough for the game to be considered successful, according to Capcom U.S. senior vice president Christian Svensson.
Responding to fan questions in a forum post on Capcom-Unity, Svennson said the fighting game compilation was not high enough on that most-played list, although it was the seventh-highest. Svensson wrote that Capcom is currently "working on promotions" and other plans to "improve the situation," although he considers Darkstalkers Resurrection to be the best executed of Capcom's fighting game digital re-releases.
"We've not given up," he wrote. "But I'm disappointed in the opening sales response relative to any other fighting title we've put out on the same platforms given the frequency and urgency of requests we've had here over the last several years and the quality of the execution. It is the most fully featured and probably best project of this type we've done.
"And before people jump to the wrong conclusions, I'm not blaming fans who did buy it and supported the brand," he added. "I'm very thankful for those guys (thank you, to all of you). I'm more disappointed by my misread of the information in this particular case."
Earlier this week Svensson posted on Capcom-Unity that the company would likely release less digital versions of its older fighting titles, or stop altogether. He noted that sales of each title have dropped off with each new release, and that the "novelty of such projects" is likely winding down.
Darkstalkers Resurrection — a compilation of fighting titles Darkstalkers, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge and Darkstalkers 3 — launched through PSN and Xbox Live Arcade in March. The title adds online play and several other new features to the games, including the ability to upload replay videos to YouTube and an in-depth tutorial mode.
Scribblenauts Unlimited is one of Amazon's "Digital Games Deals of the Week," available for download on PC for $8.99. Strangely, the "week" for this deal started today, so you have through April 17 to pick it up. Just don't get Starbucks for two days and you've properly saved up.
If making an infinite universe of objects and then tweaking them isn't enough stuff for you, you can also get ... American Pickers, the hidden object game based on the History Channel show about antique shopping.
Google has added a new way to control what happens to your account when you stop using it — most likely because you're no longer around. A new Inactive Account Manager, available in Google's settings, allows you to set a timeout period for your account. If you go three months to a year without signing in, Google will first notify a selected phone number or alternate email address. After that, it will let you add up to ten contacts, who will be notified with a custom-written email and optionally given access to data from any or all Google services. As a last step, Google can also delete your account once any contacts have been notified.
In a blog post, Google detailed how to plan for your "digital afterlife." It's not the first company to deal with what happens to data when you die, or to implement a kind of dead man's switch. Even if they have a policy in place, sites like Facebook must deal with how to adapt a running flow of information into a static memorial. But up until now, Google has relied on "authorized representatives" of the deceased to submit applications if they want access to a Gmail or other Google account. With the Inactive Account Manager, it's creating the online equivalent of a living will.
A British mapping company named Streetmap is suing Google in U.K. court for what it called "cynical manipulation of search results," that made its site harder to find in Google searches. A Google spokesman told Bloomberg he hadn't seen the Streetmap complaint, and declined to comment further. It's the second such complaint the search giant has faced from British courts this year.
The suit comes on the heels of an antitrust probe conducted by the European Union into whether Google is using its Search service to actively promote its other products, spurred by a similar suit from British shopping-comparison site Foundem. EU commissioners have said that ultimate goal of the probe will be to secure "legally binding commitments" that their search results are unbiased. A similar probe in the U.S. found no evidence the company's actions were harmful to consumers.
PAPA, the Professional & Amateur Pinball Association, will broadcast parts of its championship tournaments on GeekGamer.tv today through Sunday, April 14, according to a post on the association's official website.
The 2012 Tournament Circuit Final, which is comprised of Tournament Circuit leaders and event winners determined over a year of play, began today, April 11, and started streaming at 9:30 a.m. ET on GeekGamer.tv. The top player will receive the title of PAPA Circuit Player of the Year.
In Pinburgh 2013, a concurrent tournament open to those who registered, competitors are guaranteed two full days of match play regardless of their skill level. On Saturday, each will be assigned into one of four divisions based on their performance. Sunday will see the Pinburgh 2013 finals and a double elimination consolation tournament for those who didn't make it into the finals. At 9 a.m. on Sunday, PAPA will stream the finals of the Pinburgh 2013 tournament live on GeekGamer.tv.
The tournaments are being held at PAPA World Headquarters, a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in the greater Pittsburgh area. This year's prize package includes $60,000, with $7,500 earmarked for the first place winner in the highest ranked division. You can check out the results as they happen on PAPA's official current standings page.
He also accused both of "obstreperous and cantankerous conduct."
Apple and Google's ongoing, multi-venue, litigation war over mobile patents has "no end" in sight, according to a US district court judge in Miami, Florida, who excoriated both companies for using their lawsuits as "business strategy," in an order issued yesterday. "The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end," wrote Judge Robert Scola. "That is not a proper use of this court." He also accused both of "obstreperous and cantankerous conduct."
"obstreperous and cantankerous conduct."
The judge's order requires both companies to work together to narrow the scope of this particular dispute from over 180 separate claims involving 12 patents, within four months, by August 5, 2013. If they can't do that, the case will be put on hold. Prior to being acquired by Google, Motorola Mobility first launched one case against Apple in Florida in 2010 and filed another one in January 2012, accusing Apple of infringing on Motorola technology with the iPhone 4S and iCloud. The cases have since been combined into one.
Still, the same judge, Robert Scola, was presiding over both of the cases, and he's not happy about the fact that the combined case has become so complicated. As Scola wrote in his order this week: "Without a hint of irony, the parties now ask the court to mop up a mess they made by holding a hearing to reduce the size and complexity of the case. The court declines the invitation." We'll know in four months or sooner whether or not the companies can clean up after themselves.
Following up with EA about the closure of EA Mobile Montreal, we've received the following statement from the company.
"EA is sharpening its focus to provide games for new platforms and mobile. In some cases, this involves reducing team sizes as we evolve into a more efficient organization," the company told Joystiq. "These are difficult decisions to let go of good people who have made important contributions to EA, and whenever possible we retrain or relocate employees to new roles. Streamlining our operations will help ensure EA is bringing the best next-generation games to players around the world."
We continue to work on finding out the extent of today's impact, but we believe we have a better grip on today's layoffs at EA Mobile Montreal. Our understanding is that 60 to 70 permanent employees were let go, along with over 100 people working under EA's contract system. These are mostly quality assurance testers. We're told by one source, "If you walk through the office all you see is a bunch of already cleared out desks, and people cleaning out their desks."
These layoffs and closures were expected in the wake of former CEO John Riccitiello's resignation last month. In his departure letter to the company, Riccitiello wrote, "My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year. It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable."
If you're a member of an affected team, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll continue to work on this story and update as new information comes in.
John Harris, one of Oregon's first craft brewers , the man who formulated beers such as Mirror Pond Pale Ale and others, left Full Sail Brewing last year to strike out on his own. After what seems a long quiet spell, during which he was busy lining up investors, he's just leased a building at 805 N. Cook St. near Fremont and Mississippi Avenue --- and, as it turns out, you can see it --- and learn the new name of his brewpub --- on Sunday April 28...
Web maps have come a long way. Improved data, cleaner design, better performance, and more intuitive controls have made web maps a ubiquitous and critical component of many apps. They’ve also become one of the mobile space’s most successful transplants as more and more apps are powered by location-aware devices. The core web map UI paradigm itself—a continuous, pannable, zoomable surface—has even spread beyond mapping to interfaces everywhere.
Despite all this, we’ve barely begun to work web maps into our design practice. We create icon fonts, responsive grids, CSS frameworks, progressive enhancement strategies, and even new design processes. We tear down old solutions and build new ones, and even take an extra second to share battle stories in prose and in person. Yet nearly five years since Paul Smith’s article, “Take Control of Your Maps,” web maps are still a blind spot for most designers.
Have you ever taken apart a map? Worked with a map as a critical part of your design? Developed tricks, hacks, workarounds, or progressive enhancements for maps?
This article is a long overdue companion to Paul’s piece. Where he goes on a whirlwind survey of the web mapping stack at 10,000 feet, we’re going to walk through a single design process and implement a modern-day web map. By walking this path, I hope to begin making maps part of the collective conversation we have as designers.
Opinionated about open
Paul makes a strong case for why you might want to use open mapping tools instead of the established incumbent. I won’t retread his reasons here, but I would like to expand on his last: Open tools are the ones we hack best.
There is nothing mysterious about web maps. Take any spatial plane, split it up into discrete tiles, position them in the DOM, and add event handlers for panning and zooming. The basic formula can be applied to Portland, Mars, or Super Mario Land. It works for displaying large street maps, but nothing stops us from tinkering with it to explore galleries of art, create fictional game worlds, learn human anatomy, or simply navigate a web page. Open tools bare the guts of this mechanism to us, allowing us to see a wider range of possibilities.
The mechanics of web maps are not limited to street maps.
We should know the conditions under which map images are loaded and destroyed; we should argue whether map tiles are best positioned with CSS transforms or not; and we should care whether vector elements are drawn with SVG or Canvas. Open tools let us know and experiment with these working details of our maps. If you wouldn’t have it any other way with your HTML5, CSS, or JavaScript libraries, then you shouldn’t settle for less when it comes to maps.
In short, we’ll be working with a fully open mapping stack. MapBox, where I work, has pulled together several open source libraries into a single API that we publish under mapbox.js. Other open mapping libraries that are worth your time include Leaflet and D3.js.
Starting out
I’m a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. Between the recent Hollywood movies starring Robert Downey Jr. and the BBC’s contemporary series, I’m hooked. But as someone who has never been to London, I know I’m missing the richness of place and setting that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meant to be read into his short stories.
A typical approach would be to embed a web map with pins of various locations alongside one of the Sherlock stories. With this approach the map becomes an appendix—a dispensable element that plays little part in Doyle’s storytelling. Instead, we’re going to expand the role of our map, integrating it fully into the narrative. It will set the stage, provide pace, and affect the mood of our story.
A tale of places
To establish a baseline for our tale, I restructured The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans to be told around places. I picked eight key locations from the original text, pulled out the essential details of the mystery, and framed them out with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
A Sherlock Holmes story in text only. View Demo 1.
The story is broken up into section elements for each key location. A small amount of JavaScript implements a scrolling flow that highlights a single section at a time.
Our page is not responsive yet, but it contains scaffolding to guard against bad choices that could thwart us. The main text column is fluid at 33.33% and pins to a min-width: 320px. If our content and design flow reasonably within these constraints, we’re in good shape.
Next, we’ll get started mapping. Initially we’ll work on our map separately from our story page to focus on learning key elements of a new technology.
Maps are data
The mapping equivalent of our abridged Sherlock story is a dataset of eight geographic points. GeoJSON, a format for describing geographic data in JSON, is the perfect starting point for capturing this data:
Each object in our JSON array has a geometry—data that describe where this object is in space—and properties—freeform data of our own choosing to describe what this object is. Now that we have this data, we can create a very basic map.
Note that the coordinates are a pair of latitude and longitude degrees. In the year 2013, it is still not possible to find a consistent order for these values across mapping APIs. Some use lat,lon to meet our expectations from grade-school geography. Others use lon,lat to match x,y coordinate order: horizontal, then vertical.
We’re using mapbox.js as our core open source mapping library. Each map is best understood as the key parameters passed into mapbox.map():
A DOM element container
One or more Photoshop-like layers that position tiles or markers
Event handlers that bind user input to actions, like dragging to panning
Our map has two layers. Our tile layer is made up of 256x256 square images generated from a custom map on MapBox. Our spots layer is made up of pin markers generated from the GeoJSON data above.
This is a good start for our code, but nowhere near our initial goal of using a map to tell our Sherlock Holmes story.
Beyond location
According to our first map, the eight items in our GeoJSON dataset are just places, not settings in a story full of intrigue and mystery. From a visual standpoint, pins anonymize our places and express them as nothing more than locations.
To overcome this, we can use illustrations for each location—some showing settings, others showing key plot elements. Now our audience can see right away that there is more to each location than its position in space. As a canvas for these, I’ve created another map with a custom style that blends seamlessly with the images.
Illustrations and a custom style help our map become part of the storytelling. View Demo 3, and then read the diff.
The main change here is that we define a custom factory function for our markers layer. The job of the factory function is to take each GeoJSON object and convert it to a DOM element—an a, div, img, or whatever—that the layer will then position on the map.
Here we generate divs and switch from using a title attribute in our GeoJSON to an id. This provides us with useful CSS classes for displaying illustrations with our custom markers.
Bringing it all together
Now it’s time to combine our story with our map. By using the scroll events from before, we can coordinate sections of the story with places on the map, crafting a unified experience.
As the user reads each section, the map pans to a new location. View Demo 4, then read the diff.
The bridge between the story and the map is a revamped setActive() function. Previously it only set an active class on a particular section based on scrolling position. Now it also finds the active marker, sets an active class, and eases the map to the marker’s location.
Map animation uses the easey library in the mapbox.js API, which implements animations and tweening between geographic locations. The API is dead simple—we pass it the lon,lat of the marker we want to animate to, and it handles the rest.
We disable all event handlers on our map by passing an empty array into mapbox.map(). Now the map can only be affected by the scrolling position. If users wanted to deviate from the storyline or explore London freeform, we could reintroduce event handlers—but in this case, less is more.
Displaying our fullscreen map together with text presents an interesting challenge: our map viewport should be offset to the right to account for our story on the left. The solution I’m using here is to expand our map viewport off canvas purely using CSS. You could use JavaScript, but as we’ll see later, a CSS-only approach gives us elegant ways to reapply and adjust this technique on mobile devices.
At this stage, our map and story complement each other nicely. Our map adds spatial context, visual intrigue, and an interesting temporal element as it eases between long and short distances.
Maps in responsive design
The tiled, continuous spatial plane represented by web maps is naturally well-suited to responsive design. Web maps handle different viewport sizes easily by showing a bit more or a bit less map. For our site, we adjust the layout of other elements slightly to fit smaller viewports.
Tweaking layout with web maps. View Demo 5, then read the diff.
With less screen real estate, we hide non-active text sections and pin the active text to the top of the screen.
We use the bottom half of the screen for our map and use media queries to adjust the map’s center point to be three-fourths the height of the screen, using another version of our trick from Demo 4.
With a modest amount of planning and minimal adjustments, our Sherlock story is ready to be read on the go.
Solve your own case
If you’ve been following the code between these steps, you’ve probably noticed at least one or two things I haven’t covered, like the parameters of ease.optimal(), or how tooltips picked up on the title attribute of our GeoJSON data. The devil’s in the details, so post to this GitHub repository, where you will find the code and the design.
You should also check out:
The MapBox site, which includes an overview of tiling and basic web map concepts, and MapBox.js docs and code examples.
Leaflet, another powerful open source mapping library.
D3.js, a library for powering data-driven documents that has a broad range of applications, including mapping.
This example shows just one path to integrating web maps into your designs. Don’t stick to it. Break it apart. Make it your own. Do things that might be completely genius or utterly stupid. Even if they don’t work out, you’ll be taking ownership of maps as a designer—and owning something is the only way we’ll improve on it.
"Suddenly, the Pantone brand is everywhere. Overuse? Maybe. But, as they say, if you can’t beat ‘em… so, over a few beers, we decided to add to the products on offer. Ladies and gentlemen, for him and for her, we present underpantones (and, of course, pantytones)! If we had our way it’s what every well-dressed designer would be wearing."
What if Battlestar Galactica was less about the genocide and more about the wacky roommates aboard the old ship? Imagine the fun, the games, the hook ups! Behold: BSG retooled with the Friends introduction. And it kind of works. Really well, in fact.
A government source told Reuters that every country with whom Britain enjoys “normal” diplomatic relations was being invited to Wednesday’s funeral, but Thatcher’s family had objected to Fernandez attending.
“It’s about adhering to her family’s wishes,” the source said. A government spokesman said Argentina’s ambassador to Britain would be invited, and that was in keeping with protocol.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper, without citing its sources, reported that Thatcher’s children Mark and Carol said they felt it would be “inappropriate” for anyone from Argentina to be there after government officials floated the idea.
Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman brushed off the apparent snub.
“It does not matter to me to be invited to a place where I don’t want to go,” he told a local radio station. “It is another provocation. The woman died, let the family mourn her in peace”.
Description, from the Wisconsin Historical Society: “View from behind of a young woman wearing a t-shirt with the title Dungeon Mistress printed on the back while she plays an adventure game on a computer. In the background is a blackboard.”
Portland is less nerdy than Atlanta but more nerdy than Seattle, according to the real estate blog Movoto. … The Rose City came in first in comic book and game stores, and second in LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), the blog says. Portland came in third for proximity of Renaissance Fairs.
itwbennett writes "OpenStack is calling shenanigans on companies that call their services OpenStack but aren't truly interoperable. (HP, Rackspace, we're looking at you.) Josh McKenty, CTO of Piston and an OpenStack Foundation board member said that the board has 're-fired up' the interoperability working group, and though he admits it will take some time before the hammer falls, he called out HP and Rackspace as two offenders: 'Neither of their public clouds could be called OpenStack under current interoperability guidelines,' he said. For their part, HP has denied the claims, while Rackspace said in a blog post that it is on track for interoperability by the end of the year."
JAGGED ALLIANCE! JAGGED ALLIANCE! JAGGED ALLIANCE! JAGGED ALLIANCE! It’s no good. I just don’t have Alec’s endurance when it comes to repeating words for any length of time. I do have a remarkable degree of stamina when it comes to dancing though and I plan to spend the next five minutes doing the Snoopy dance in celebration of the fact that Full Control, who are currently working on a promising adaptation of Space Hulk, are moving on to a new turn-based Jagged Alliance game when they’re finished with the gene stealing. Thomas Hentschel Lund, the studio’s CEO, had this to say:
It is one of the 3 games besides X-Com and Fallout that really defined the entire genre and is part of our DNA…We are honored and excited to have been the confidence given by bitComposer to give the series a fresh new take whilst staying true to the core mechanics.
Perhaps we are related because it’s part of my DNA too. Let’s hope the next family reunion is full of jubilation rather than the usual recriminations and disapproval.
bitComposer, in handing over development responsibilities to Full Control, sent these words to the world’s press:
We have been keeping an eye on Full Control for the last couple of years and have been suitably impressed with their take on turn-based tactical gaming and in particular their awesome work in bringing the classic Space Hulk franchise back to life…We are excited to learn more about their plans for the franchise.
As are we all, I’m sure. It’s definitely going to be fully turn-based and the press release even includes a few words of regret concerning Back in Action:
Jagged Alliance was first released in 1994 and is still counted as one the best turn based strategy games of its time. After the release of Jagged Alliance 2 in 1999 the series slipped back into the cold war and received a reboot in 2010 with Jagged Alliance – Back in Action, which received mixed reactions from the community and press after its departure from turn-based action gameplay.
"I've seen sites go stale while twitter accounts abound with interesting links. It's a damn shame because most of the links on Twitter just disappear into the torrent of snark and animated GIFs."
I used to be against the idea of a linked list such as the one pioneered by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and later also successfully applied by writers like Jim Dalrymple and Shawn Blanc. It almost felt like “stealing” pageviews from other authors when I could have just sent a quick tweet. The tweet perfectly fulfilled the two points I mentioned above: it allowed readers to easily click through and I didn’t have to greatly expound upon a topic just to make a link look right on MacStories.
I've never understood the aversion to link-posts. That's the connective tissue of the internet. It drives Google ranking. It tells people what you care about.
There seems to be some kind of link-fatigue though. I've seen sites go stale while twitter accounts abound with interesting links. It's a damn shame because most of the links on Twitter just disappear into the torrent of snark and animated GIFs.
Hugo Teso has been a licensed commercial pilot for over a decade, but has been working in IT for a while now. He has now combined his two interests and exposed the sorry state of security of aviation computer systems and communication protocols.
Want to understand why Mexican cartels are awash in cheap Colombian cocaine? The decline and fall of Colombia’s drug gangs, once the undisputed masters of the illicit drug trade, help explain it.
By rejecting patent applications, developing countries have kept down the costs of much-needed medications. Can they continue to do so without harming efforts to develop new drugs?
Hungry, a YouTube channel all about cooking, released a clever video showing two pranksters who travel around town and ask random strangers if they can take a photo of their food and post it on Instagram.
What would you do if a complete stranger asked to Instagram your food?
It seems silly to invest so much into Swapnote when there’s an imminent Miiverse 3DS release, but this update is free so I can’t complain. New features introduced:
Take photos and record sounds you want to attach to your letters from within the software. You can still add them from the SD Card.
Attach photos and sounds when you reply to letters.
Choose a different ink colour for each page.
Filter letters by sender in the letter list.
There are a few more additions too, like being able to mark up to 30 notes at a time for deletion. Now if only there was a way to download more than 20 notes at a time — that’s what kept me from even opening the app in months. Well, that and the probability of those waiting notes reading like the one above posted by Fidel.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has started a movement called Adjunct Action and will be meeting this weekend in Boston with adjuncts from more than 20 area campuses to talk about raising standards for adjunct professors.
The man, whom police have not identified, had apparently been in financial trouble and demanded his power, cable television and cell phone service be restored, Ritter said.
Property records show the home in Suwanee, about 35 miles northeast of Atlanta, is owned by Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, and a Freddie Mac spokesman confirmed to WSB-TV that the property was in foreclosure.
