Ravaging villages, pilfering gold: Hoard comes to PC today
If there's one thing that Hoard makes clear, it's that dragons are jerks. Big mean jerks who will burn down a village and kidnap a princess just to get their claws on some gold. The debut title from Big Sandwich Games, Hoard blends the gameplay of classic arcade games with the structure of a board game. The result is a unique and addictive experience that, while lacking a little in variety, will help unleash your inner, fire-breathing jerk.The game was released on the PlayStation Network last November, but comes to Steam today for the sale price of $7.50, with four-packs available for $27 if you'd like to get your friends into the game for some co-op or multiplayer. The game also supports Steamworks, so one purchase will get the game on your PC and Mac systems. Here's what we thought of the game.
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3DS photography takes off, but you're on your own to share images
We found the cameras included in the 3DS hardware to be of poor quality in our review, but the fact they allow you to take and view 3D images is proving attractive to many. You can now download and view pictures tourists have taken of the Disney resorts with their 3DS systems, and another enterprising gamer has converted screenshots from well-known video games so they can be viewed on the 3DS in glasses-free 3D. Of course, Nintendo itself offers no way to share 3D images, limiting the social possibilities for 3D photography.3D images are saved to your 3DS in the .mpo file format, and Inside the Magic has instructions on its download page to help you move those files to your 3DS for easy viewing. This is where the addition of the SD card slot in the 3DS comes in handy. Indeed, the process is both simple and fast if you have an SD card reader on your computer, but the fact that external websites have to explain the process and host the images themselves shows just how little Nintendo cared about leveraging this particular selling point.
By taking existing images and converting them to 3D, people are bypassing the poor 3DS cameras while taking advantage of that neat screen. We can also understand Nintendo being gun-shy about gamers being able to upload pictures with no oversight—we can only imagine the 3D dong pictures that would be available within seconds of such an ability going live—but what about between players who have exchanged friend codes? It's neat to see what people are doing in 3D, but it would be even cooler if I could snap a fun picture in 3D and fire it off to a friend who also had the system so she could take a look.
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Sony CEO tips Apple built-in camera plans, iPhone 5 delay possible?
In an on-stage interview at Carnegie Hall with Walt Mossberg, Sony CEO Howard Stringer appears to have confirmed an earlier rumor that an upcoming iPhone 5 will have an 8MP digital camera with a sensor made by Sony. Stringer made a number of somewhat cryptic comments to Mossberg about Apple, at one point commenting on the irony of Sony making "the best camera" for Apple devices. As part of this same comment, he apparently also mentioned Sony's camera sensor factory in Sendai was shut down due to the earthquake, confirming a detail that we reported last week. 9to5mac.com, which was at the event, puts some of the pieces together and suggests that the factory shutdown might mean a delay for the iPhone 5.
Of course, predicting a launch delay for the iPhone 5 based on these remarks is a stretch, given that the only thing he really revealed was that a damaged Sony factory in Sendai is supposed to supply the company's "best" camera sensor to Apple. But given the other rumors to this effect, it seems a relatively modest stretch, though a stretch nonetheless.
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It could be worse: data caps around the world
Here at Ars we spend a lot of time writing about data caps—those ceilings on how much broadband data you can use before your ISP taps you on the shoulder and tells you it's time to pay more. Depending on where you live, these can range from "inconvenient" to "ruinous." For instance, consider the Middle East's Kingdom of Bahrain."My capacity refreshes on the 1st of each month and is depleted by the 12th," writes one Internet user there. "At that point my connection falls to 256Kbps (or if I choose, can maintain the same speed for 1 BD [US$2.65]) a GB."
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Google settles over Buzz, but who gets the cash?
Here's a strange twist to Google's efforts to repair the damage from its awkward initial attempt to launch a social media network. The privacy group that filed a key complaint against Google Buzz with the Federal Trade Commission now protests that it was left out of the $8.5 million common fund class action settlement to which Google has agreed, along with seven other relevant privacy groups. Read the comments on this post
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The secret history of Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 2’s long, strange trip to the top of the charts in 1988 began with a prototype video game that failed miserably.The 8-bit classic, which became a massive hit for the Nintendo Entertainment System, grew out of a mock-up of a vertically scrolling, two-player, cooperative-action game, Super Mario Bros. 2 director Kensuke Tanabe told Wired.com in an interview at this year’s Game Developers Conference.
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Educational building blocks: how Minecraft is used in classrooms
With its open-ended nature and robust creation tools, Minecraft has been used to create some amazing things. And as one teacher learned, those very same elements that make the game so compelling also make it a great educational tool. Around two months ago, Joel Levin, a computer teacher at Manhattan's Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, decided to start using the game to teach an entire unit to his first- and second-grade students. The lessons took place almost entirely in the world of Minecraft. And it was a huge hit.Ars spoke with Levin about what a lesson in Minecraft looks like and why the game is such a good teaching tool.
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Weird Science finds bottomonium "particularly attractive"
I suppose this means there must be an uponium, too: Somewhere along my development into someone who pretends to know physics, I became aware that a particle formed from one of the heavier than usual quarks had an odd name. The pairing of a charm and its less charming anti-charm has been given the name "charmonium." What I'd neglected to appreciate is the fact that this naming convention is generic. Any quark paired with its antiquark falls under the heading of "quarkonium," which has rather unfortunate consequences when applied to the bottom quark, as seen in the opening sentences of a preprint physics paper: "Heavy quarkonium spectroscopy (the study of heavy quark-antiquark bound states, such as bottomonium (b/anti-b)) has long been regarded as an ideal laboratory for the investigation of the interaction which governs the structure of quarkonia, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Bottomonium is particularly attractive because of the very rich array of bound states below the open-flavor threshold." I have no idea what an "open-flavor threshold" might involve, but I will undoubtedly remember the "bottomonium is particularly attractive" bit.
This probably shouldn't have made it past the Institutional Review Board: IRBs exist to protect potential research subjects from experiments that might be harmful or a general waste of time. It seemed they weren't paying attention when these experiments came up for review, given the experiments involved "having people who recently experienced an unwanted break-up view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected" while stuffed inside an MRI tube. Further condemnation for the approach comes from the findings: several areas of the brain that are involved in processing physical pain became active when dealing with the emotional hangover of being dumped.
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