In today's first quarter financial results announcement Activision revealed at more than 30 million Skylanders toys had been sold as of March 31. That's enough toys to feed 30 million plastic-eating children a day for an entire... day.
As a PC gamer that enjoys getting my hands on the latest hardware, the most exciting feature of MSi's new GT70 laptop should be the 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU or its ridiculously speedy storage solution, a combination of a 7,200RPM 750GB hard drive and a pair of Samsung 64GB solid state drives.
But neither of those impressive features is quite as engaging as that damn illuminated SteelSeries keyboard.
Oh don't worry, I'll discuss power and performance, but what's the first thing that catches your eye when you look at the article atop this review? After the orange circle. No, no, below the screen. Above the trackpad.
That's right, it's the multicolored glow of the keyboard, a shining beacon in a darkened room, calling me to come and play. It's completely customizable as well, with three illuminated sections that can change hue, turn on and off, breath, or roll in a constant wave.
It's not just the pretty colors. Each pressed key delivers a satisfying mechanical click, something I crave in a gaming laptop like a dying man craves... not dying. Look, my analogy skills might need work, but I know typing.
Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system...
Joining the keyboard on the exterior of the GT70 is a pair of Dynaudio speakers, a mainstay of MSI's machines, providing sound a step above that of your average portable gaming rig. Between the speakers is a touch panel, giving easy access to several important controls, including the MSI Turbo Drive Engine (more on that in a bit) and the Cooler Boost button, which sends the unit's fan into noisy overdrive.
It also bears noting that one of the few issues I had with the previous MSi laptop I tested, the single-piece trackpad button, has been taken care of. The GT70 sports two buttons below an incredibly responsive pad, and while I still prefer an external mouse I don't hate it nearly as much as other finger-based navigation options.
At 16.9 by 2.2 by 11.3 inches and a weight of 8.3 pounds, the GT70 is a meaty machine that's looking to relegate your PC to the dusty corner of your closet. Its 17.3 inch anti-glare 1920x1080 LCD panel communicates vibrant color as readily as any standalone monitor, with an expansive viewing angle insuring you won't need to constantly adjust the tilt to get your view just right.
To be a true desktop replacement, however, a laptop needs to provide power on par with a moderately high-powered gaming rig, and the GT70 isn't quite there.
It's certainly got the data access speed. Its super RAID design — a laptop first — ties together a pair of 64GB Samsung solid state drives with a standard 720GB hard disk to generate access speeds of up to 900 megabytes per second. While the unit I reviewed was configured incorrectly and only allowed for speeds of up to 600MB/s, the difference between this configuration and anything else I've used was still quite noticeable.
It's got the network technology as well, incorporating Killer Gaming's Bigfoot Gaming LAN technology to detect when games are accessing the network, giving them priority over other online applications. This supposedly results in reduced latency, giving players of online games an edge on the competition. I don't know, I still died quite a lot in Battlefield 3. Apparently the technology can't fix suck.
Indeed Battlefield 3 marks one of the only shortfalls of the GT70. With its integrated NVIDIA Geforce GTX 670M with 3GB of GDDR5, I figured it would perform a bit better than it did in Battlefield 3, but in campaign mode on Ultra settings I only managed to swing 24-25 frames per second. Pressing the MSI Turbo Drive Engine button brought the frame rate up to 25-26. That's on par with the Razer Blade, the expensive gaming laptop everyone laughed at because it was so underpowered.
That doesn't mean the MSi GT70 isn't a powerhouse of a machine; it just means all of that power can't help it run Battlefield 3 on Ultra. It performed quite well on lower settings, and less intense games (like Tera, for instance) gave it no trouble whatsoever.
For $1,999 (in the reviewed configuration), the MSi GT70 delivers one sturdy piece of computing hardware, packed with power, bristling with ports, and ready to gently nudge your space-hog PC into the desk-side garbage can. What it may lack in gaming power it more than makes up for in cutting-edge technology, construction, and overall design. MSi makes good laptops.
And SteelSeries makes wonderful laptop keyboards. Did I mention the keyboard?
On second thought, shooting a harpoon at this PC casing would probably definitely absolutely tear through the plastic it's made out of. But that doesn't take away from just how incredible it looks sitting atop computer tables.IMPERIAL AT-AT [Asphiax via Engadget]
You Have to Win the Game, it tells me—it's right there in the title!—but I just can't. At least, not yet. I've tried, and with more hours to play maybe I could. But I have to admit that on first blush, this retro platformer stumped me more than once, which is awesome.
You Have to Win The Game is intentionally framed in a very 1980s aesthetic (although actually, we had our sixteen-color monitor until 1994). From the curved TV frame to every beep and pixel, the game is meant to evoke an era of side-scrollers long gone by. To evoke, yes, and to reflect, but not to clone.
From the existence of a tutorial (in an extremely streamlined, single-screen format) to witty room names, You Have to Win... reflects a modern sensibility that expects players to have been around this block before. We know how we expect this all to work: you run, you jump, you collect stuff, and you avoid spikes and water. The game expects you to get the jokes (one room full of snakes is called "Obvious Movie Quote") and roll with it. You're also on your own for figuring out which surfaces are solid and when.
One key aspect of the side-scrolling platformer is absent, however: the scrolling. Rooms in You Have to Win... are connected and contiguous, but each stands alone. On the plus side, freedom to go either to the right or to the left is unrestricted (certain environmental considerations or puzzles aside), and backtracking or trying alternate routes is not only possible but necessary. On the minus side, occasional movements off-screen, in any of the four available directions, are indeed a leap of faith: you need to hope that you'll be landing somewhere that's not likely to kill you.
But nothing in this carefully-assembled cavern is accidental. If you can't see where you're leaping, it's meant to be a risk. Checkpoints are visible and carefully placed, so that even the most frustrating of puzzles won't send you sprawling back to the beginning.
And yet sometimes, going back to the beginning is the best way to play. You can't run out of lives; despite being one of Mario's third cousins, You Have to Win... doesn't share that particular kind of cruelty. But after a certain amount of exploration, if you find yourself well and truly stuck, starting fresh from the top with foreknowledge of some rooms that await can be exactly the balm you need.
In the end, You Have to Win the Game reached deep down to touch a forgotten corner of my soul that hasn't had a workout in many, many years. Dimly, I began to remember how games felt in the late 1980s and very early 1990s, and that sense of doom-colored, dogged exploration is exactly what You Have to Win... hopes to invoke.
You Have to Win the Game is available as a free download (Windows only) from the developer's site.
Stare closely at the prototype title screen of 0x10c, the new game from Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft. You might need to adjust your brightness settings.
You'll see a most unusual option. Play the game solo. Play the game in multiplayer. But what in the world is "hyperplayer"?
I asked Notch and if I hear back, I'll let you know.
Otherwise, consider that 0x10c is a sci-fi game so ambitious that it simulates a 16-bit computer that you can then program from within the game. It's also deep in development, and Notch likes to have fun. So...anything's possible here.
I do like the term, though. I hope it sticks.
Six years ago, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton set out to reignite programming in schools with a cheap, compact computing platform. Despite targeting students, his foundation's $35 computer captured the imaginations of tinkers worldwide, resulting in overwhelming demand. Interest was so high, that distributors Premier Farnell and RS buckled under the strain of preorders in February. The former outfit later said demand was 20 times greater than its supply, with orders hitting 700 a second at one point.
When the first 10,000 devices shipped in mid-April, the organization graciously sent us a sample for coverage. Along with a hands-on review of the Pi, today we'll be covering basic steps for setting up the computer and other elemental post-installation tasks to get you up and running with applications. In other words, this should serve as a starting point no matter what you want to do with your Raspberry Pi.
We received a Model B ($35), which is powered by a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC that includes a 700MHz ARM1176JZF-S CPU core, 256MB of RAM and a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 that supports 1080p at 30FPS as well as H.264 and MPEG-4 high-profile decoding for smooth Blu-ray playback. Connectivity includes two USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI, RCA video, an SD card slot, a 3.5mm audio jack and two rows of 13 General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins for further expansion.
The Model A ($25, to be released at a later date) ships without Ethernet and has a single USB port. Both models measure 85.60mm x 53.98mm x 17mm, although the SD card and connectors overlap the PCB board edges. Besides the Raspberry Pi itself, you'll also need various other items before you can configure and use the device:
As indicated, the Raspberry Pi uses an SD card for storage. Both of distributors sell preloaded SD cards, but they're easy enough to make yourself if you have a spare card laying around. Currently you can use the Unix tool "dd" to perform the task, or for those using Windows, "Win32DiskImager." We assume you're on Windows or you probably wouldn't need this guide. Before we get started, download the latest Debian Squeeze image and Win32DiskImager. Insert the SD card into your PC if you haven't yet.
Extract both archives and start the imaging tool by double clicking Win32DiskImager.exe. It should find your SD card as the application starts and display it in the top right hand corner of the window. Click on the folder icon, then navigate to and select the Debian ISO you extracted. Double check that the correct drive letter is selected, then click on "write" to load the image. This'll take upwards of five minutes.
Once the process is finished, a popup will notify you that the write was successful. Close the box, exit the application, unmount the SD card from your PC and attach it to the Raspberry Pi. Assuming everything went well, you're ready to fire the device up. The first time the computer boots from the SD card it will automatically configure itself. It will then reboot and load up once again to the login screen.
The default username for Debian is pi and the password is raspberry. You can then load the LXDE desktop environment by entering startx. A few moments later, the desktop will load up as below:
Applications can be found by clicking the icon on the far left of the toolbar, similar to the Start menu in Windows. Creating a user account and updating the OS in Windows is pretty straightforward, but the steps are different in Linux. To create a user account, click on the menu, open the Accessories folder and select LXTerminal. In the terminal window, type sudo adduser username and press enter. For example:
Debian will create the user and prompt you to set a password, as well as other personal information. Fill in the applicable fields and type y to confirm the information is correct. The result looks like this:
With your account created, we can add it to the sudoers list. This will let you issue commands as an administrator. Working in the same terminal window, enter the command sudo leafpad /etc/sudoers.
Leafpad will load the Sudoers file. Under the heading "# User Privilege specification" add the following text, username ALL=(ALL) ALL for the new username exactly as it is displayed for the user pi:
Select File and Save, then close Leafpad to finish. Now you've created an account and given it the ability to perform administrative tasks as sudo, which is needed for updates and new packages or applications.
Unlike Windows, Debian is traditionally updated from the terminal. To check for and install updates, you can use the following command: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade as seen below:
Similarly, you can install supported packages through the terminal with sudo apt-get install packagename. Debian has various packages pre-installed, ranging from the web browser, Midori, to a music player as well as programming and educational applications. Popular packages are also available if you need more than the stock software. We may cover some of these programs in future guides.
As is the case with Linux in general, wireless can be a bit patchy with the Raspberry Pi. If you want to use wireless, the organization has information on its Wiki regarding USB Wi-Fi hardware. Wireless niggles aside, USB external hard disks and flash media will automatically mount when inserted in Debian and full read/write support for NTFS is also included, in case you need to access a Windows-based drive.
Considering its price, the Raspberry Pi is quite remarkable. It's obviously no powerhouse, but $35 gets you a system capable of office work, light image editing, browsing, programming, emailing and so on. The Pi's versatility makes it suitable for various dedicated roles too, such as a torrent box downloading through external USB or network drives, or as an XMBC-based HTPC, which we might cover eventually.
It's easy to lose track of the Pi in-between other regular-sized devices.
Although there are many obvious uses for the Raspberry Pi, the platform's open nature means your imagination is the limit. It'll be interesting to see what the community cooks up in the coming months. We'll be watching and posting our own how-to guides when time comes.
Republished with permission from:
Lee Kaelin is news editor at TechSpot. TechSpot is a computer technology publication serving PC enthusiasts, gamers and IT pros since 1998.
Portal 2: 4-bit binary adder [YouTube via Reddit]
Since En Masse Entertainment's massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing game Tera officially launched last week I've taken nearly a hundred screenshots.
Of myself.
What can I say? Korean developer Bluehole, armed with Unreal Engine 3 technology, has created some damn fine-looking characters. While I for some odd reason prefer the androgyny of the male high elf, each of the game's seven races has its charms, from the powerful builds of the warrior Aman to the adorable potbellies of the animal Popori. Sure, the Elin look like little girls, but at least for the North American release they made sure they weren't wearing only panties.
So while I've done plenty besides stare at my pink-haired alter ego for the past week, his appearance figured heavily into everything else. I'd focus on quests that provided clothing rewards that suited his developing sense of style. I invested heavily in clothing dye, spending in-game currency for a temporary (24 hour) splash of color.
The developers seem aware of the game's potential for fashion obsession, allowing players to purchase clothing style templates so they can remodel their more powerful equipment into something more eye-pleasing. Last week I spent a substantial amount of gold making sure Back the Sorcerer looked as good as he played.
Why is that important? Other than eliciting comments that stroke my MMOego, Back has to match the gorgeous scenery that I stumble upon every time I turn the corner in The Exiled Realm of Arborea. Even now, nearly two weeks and 43 levels in, vistas like the swirling maelstrom give me pause (and cause me to hit the print screen button).
Propelling me through these glorious vistas are a series of quests that, while largely run-of-the-mill kill X number of Y enemies affairs, allow me to exercise the action combat that I've already raved about on several occasions.
As my level increases, so does the challenge, though that challenge really depends on how you play the game. You can, if you wish, stand still and take damage, ending each fight with a sliver of health and having to use potions or bandages to get back into battle. Or you can take advantage of the tools provided, freezing enemies in place, leaping backwards, and continuing casting from afar. It's more involved, sure, but it's also entertaining enough to keep me grabbing the next set of tasks and soldiering (sorcerering?) on.
Things aren't completely rosy and wonderful in the world of Tera. Out of the game's eight classes only the Lancer is a viable tank, with updates to the more mobile Warrior on the way to assuage dungeoneering parties desperate for a meat shield. Strictly level-tiered equipment means players might have a hard time of it if they don't pick up a set of level 42 gear from the Broker as soon as they break the level mark.
But for the most part I'm still loving my time in Tera. In fact I've not been this eager to log into an MMO every spare moment I can get in years. It's a little scary.
We'll see how I feel after another week of play goes by. I've still got alts to level, crafting to master, and some 17 more levels before I win.
![We Hear The New Family Guy Game Will Have A Level Called 'Mass Erect' [UPDATE]](http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17m43ocx99iaxjpg/original.jpg "We Hear The New Family Guy Game Will Have A Level Called 'Mass Erect' [UPDATE]")
Activision's new Family Guy game will feature a parody Mass Effect level called "Mass Erect," according to a source with ties to the game.
Update: In a statement to Kotaku, sent after their original statement and after the publication of this story, Activision said none of this content will appear in Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse. The details and photos we saw may have been part of an earlier version of the game.
I haven't seen Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse, which was revealed (through a leak) last week and confirmed a couple of days ago. So take these details with a grain of salt. But I was contacted by someone who had screenshots of a Scooby-Doo spoof allegedly from the game and offered up some other details as well.
For one, the source said, you'll get to pick from different Family Guy characters and use them to shoot down mini-bosses like a vampire version of actor and recurring Family Guy fixture James Woods. The source says there's a giant monkey boss. And the aforementioned Scooby-Doo spoof in which you can visit the Murder Machine, a send-up of the cartoon series' iconic Mystery Machine van.
"When you got too close to the vehicle there was weed coming out and your vision and the music got all blurry and distorted," the source told me.
I've seen (super-blurry and distorted) pictures of the Scooby-Doo parody, although I have not been able to verify that it will be in the final version of Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse. When asked for comment, an Activision representative told Kotaku: "We haven't released any game details at this time, but we'll have more info for you soon."
Who are these people we follow on Twitter? I'm not referring to the celebrities or the joke accounts. We don't care about those people that much, right?
But who are these people who have the names of our friends?
I don't recognize many of them. One of these people seems funnier than the friend with whom he shares the same name. Another has the name as my friend but not the discretion. You might see a person on Twitter with my name. He's more of a shill than I think I am, always going on about the stories published on the website he runs.
Who are these other people who have the names of people who, in the real world, I like? They're the same people, of course, but different. In the Twitter world, so many of these nice people are grumps, mutterers or other species of insufferable.
What has Twitter done to the people we know? Or is it just showing what these people were like all along?
As a reporter and as a creature of the second decade of the 21st century, I keep Twitter open on a computer screen or on my phone for many hours of my day. Through Twitter I witness an avalanche of short ideas, bits of news, and, from time to time, THINGS THAT MUST BE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS.
I know that most of what passes through my Twitter feed has no great significance on my life or my work, but I'm afraid to turn this faucet off. I'm afraid I'll miss something. I'm worried I won't see the news or a reply to something I've said. If I were to shut down Twitter, I would also miss something I wasn't privy to in the years before I joined Twitter. I would miss the thing I now experience daily in 140-character murmurs: the incidental buzzings of people I know, or who I think I know, or who I think I want to know-but maybe no longer do.
I don't know if I've come to know the people I follow on Twitter better than I do the people I see in real life, but I know that I know the people I follow on Twitter differently. I know them in a way that I wouldn't if I only saw them for a drink or dinner. And the people with whom I do sometimes see over a drink or dinner? I experience them strangely on Twitter. They are, some of them, practically different people than the ones I thought I knew. I've struggled to account for this difference.
I've oscillated between thinking that Twitter obscures or illuminates the real people whom I thought I knew. I've debated whether to flee from Twitter and to not have it distort (or clarify) the identities of the people I follow. But I've decided to stay on, because I've become convinced that Twitter is, for all its faults, something that is good for the way we know each other. I dare say it is improving human relations.
Twitter is, like much of online communication, a performance. Tweets are our transmissions to our audience. With each Tweet we turn our head from the stage to address the crowd while the drama plays on. We make a remark about what is happening. The rest of the players remain unaware of our wit. Who cares what the players think or no? We have fans to impress.
Twitter is the way to complain about a bad taxi driver without him knowing it. Twitter is the way to grumble about some new law, some bad TV show or some loudmouth on the bus. Where once we might fear our complaints would only find air or hostility, we can now assume they reach sympathetic ears, or, more accurately, eyes.
Twitter is, to give it one more metaphor, the box seat that the old guys in the Muppets sat in. It's let many of us be Statler and Waldorf. There is a show going on around us, and we have something clever to say about it.
I am, as I've said already, more of a shill than a complainer on Twitter. I'm a positive guy in 140 characters, most of the time. I'm slow to attack though quick to defend. If I complain, I complain with a joke, which is what many Twitter users do. We've all learned, possibly from the stand-up comedians who first joked about air travel, the art of complaint as entertainment. And on Twitter that's what we do, turning an aggravation—some momentary deficit of happiness in our life—into the profit of the re-Tweet. Where once was only instant loss in life's stumbles, now there is the almost-as-instant gain of the applause from our audience as we report the gaffe. We benefit from the chortle or the other affirmation that we've skewered our prickly life back and skewered it well.
Perhaps Twitter has made us complain more, essentially given us a currency and therefore an incentive to kvetch. Perhaps, too, it's made me more of a shill for my website. Perhaps, more positively, it's also brought more of me to the people who follow me, delivering more of my thoughts about politics or about boxing or about the person I can't believe they just hired to write Superman comics, (but not about how bad the C train is because we don't get cellphone service underground and therefore the urge to whine passes before I'm above ground).
I'm just not sure I'm really me on Twitter. I wonder about who the people I follow on Twitter really are and I am unsure how well I've come to know them one Tweet at a time.
I had a theory I've overturned. The theory was that on Twitter we role-play. We professional-wrestle as outsized characters of who we really are. We strut for the crowd. But meet us in person and we're kinder, more nuanced, more realistic. We complain less in real life.
The overturned version which is now my new theory: over drinks, over dinner, during the small talk that follows the smiling and shaking of hands, we role-play. In real life we prattle about things we don't most want to discuss. We subdue our real reactions so as not to agitate the person in front of us or the people beside them. We keep our most honest self to ourselves, because, otherwise, what gain is there in telling the taxi driver that he's a terrible taxi driver? We fake it in real life. But on Twitter we are more real. We shoot from safe distance from our rhetorical unmanned drones. We are more honest at range, where we feel safe from retaliation.
We use Twitter as a new way to express thinking, closer to real-time, without revision or worry. We give the world access to the comic-book thought balloons above our head and let anyone who so desires to read them. We essentially invite people to know us more intimately and more consistently, from minute to minute than most people have ever known the people who live miles away from them.
On Twitter we talk and assume people are waiting to hear. When we follow dozens of people, we see so much chatter. We're given access to batches of internal monologues. What, then, of the amount of negativity among them?
This is the unsavory revelation: follow a bunch of people regularly on Twitter and you'll likely be exposed to ever more complaining, more snark, more unhappiness. Meet with these same people in real life and you'll likely hear fewer complaints. The same people will be more pleasant, but perhaps only because they're paradoxically more distant from us when we see them in person. They're no longer visible to us at the granular level. I'm reminded of images of human skin under a microscope. I'm reminded how the beautiful when paid closer attention to can appear so unpleasant.
Should I despair that Twitter has collated the thoughts of the people who I most want to hear from into a clamor I'd rather not experience?
If only I had the courage to shut off communication, though I'd risk missing the next important thing they might say.
Maybe I can change these people and their messages? Where would my intervention begin? "Can you complain less?" "Can you?" "Maybe you could?" "Can you stop yelling, you stop ranting and you stop making mountains out of life's speedbumps?" If I were to not ask such things, what else could be the process of my complaint? Twitter allows us the passive un-follow, the equivalent of walking out of the movie theater while the feature is still playing. It's likely to have as much effect on the person we followed as on the director of that film.
This is the more important question to ask about the din of complaining I experience from the people who I've chosen to follow: why would I turn away from it at all, if Twitter is my means for knowing the people I follow better? Do I want to be friends with characters or do I want to be friends with people whose thoughts I know? Do we actually want to know our friends less? Is that the position I really want to take?
Thanks to Twitter, I now know of more of the world's burned toast and inept cashiers, just as I now know of more mortar rounds lobbed by murderous regimes. I now know how life's troubles have made this group of people—who I've chosen to be an audience to—feel. I know more of what makes them smile and more of what makes them frown. That they frown so much disorients me. Yes, I know they complain in part to entertain. But they really are uncomfortable more than I thought they'd be.
I don't think it's all performance. They were not turned into jerks or boors by Twitter. Nor were they jerks or boors or shills or whatever else all along. But the latter is, I now believe, closer to the truth. Twitter does illuminate.
We are aware of more of life's thorns thanks to our Twitter feed; we are now more aware of who is scratched, who bleeds and how often. We are reminded of discomfort more frequently. We have a choice to un-follow or to accept this buzzing in the background of our life. I'm choosing the latter. It seems more right to want to know than to want to ignore.
And yet what should our response be to all this negativity? It may be, I submit, to report in 140 characters not just the ruts but the verdant valleys, not just our hard climbs but the gorgeous heights. It might be to Tweet about the wind at our back and the taxi driver who actually knew the address we mentioned and whose foot pressed the accelerator smoothly. In witnessing more negativity through Twitter we might gain empathy, and from empathy, I believe, kindness and a desire to be positive eventually comes more naturally.
Twitter may be the new mumbling under one's breath. It may be the new complaining and the new thinking out loud. I think it's also the new understanding of the thoughts and the reactions of the people in whose lives we are the audience. It doesn't change our friends; it just changes how we know them, often awkwardly these days as we see the spill of their gut reactions. But I think it will ultimately help us know each other better. It will be something that is good for us.