GTA III Storms Onto Mobile Devices, Lavished With Praise
Rockstar Games today released Grand Theft Auto's controversial 3D debut on the App Store and Android Marketplace in celebration of the game's ten-year anniversary.
Essentially defining the sandbox genre, GTA III reaped huge praise at launch, despite the subsequent controversy it provoked from mainstream news outlets and the general public. Here was a game in which players could car-jack ordinary members of the public, commit atrocious acts of violence and have unsolicited sex with prostitutes – far from the delights of other games from that year; Pikmin, Sonic Adventure 2, Ico.
Ideas for Metal Gear Solid 5 revealed by Kojima
Kojima has spoken in a rather detailed interview about the development story behind the recently re-announced project Metal Gear Rising: Revengence, and his ideas for the next major milestone in the stealth combat series.
"Metal Gear Solid 4 wrapped up in 2008, and the dev team took post-project time off right after that. But, of course, we were in a situation where we had to start planning for MGS5. So I started coming up with several ideas," he says, beginning this exploration behind-the-scenes of Kojima Productions.
Humble Indie Bundle 4 released in time for Christmas
Gamers are a tricky bunch to buy for around Christmas. Now, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Battlefield might be totally different properties to you and I, but try telling that to your nan. She has the unenviable task of picking out this year's must-have from a shelf full of has-been shooters and copy-cat clones. No wonder you end up with the wrong game under the tree. Oh, and when they do get it right, it's most probably for the wrong console. Try again next year.
Siri steps into the rap game, laying down lyrics to Notorious B.I.G
We've seen many Siri protocol hacks that have innovated and pushed the concept of voice control further beyond what Apple currently allows the software to do. But not even we could envision that robotic voice making for a pretty sweet rapper.
Cheater banned from Modern Warfare 3 for 5000 days
So when Infinity Ward talked about the new banning system taking a firmer grasp on the likes of cheating and boosting, we never expected it to be this severe.
By this, we mean what is essentially made clear in the title, one player has been banned for 5000 days (what Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling calls a 'permaban') for the aforementioned cheating and boosting. To put this in a different context, this is 13.68 years.
HP rebranding proposition explained in pictures and video
Three years have passed since Moving Brands were hired by HP to redesign the brand imagery through a radical overhaul, and rediscover the identity of the company through improved visual output.
This is the first time we've been able to see the complete proposition in public, and it's quite a transformation. The company have departed from the circlular design and opted instead for a pretty minimalist four-line motif; but they haven't rid themselves of the slant in the lettering.
New Apple Intern shows ideas for Notification Centre tweaks
University of Georgia student Jan-Michael Cart has posted a video demonstrating his ideas for tweaking the UI, particularly around Notification Centre in iOS5, adding some rather worthwhile implementations that have managed to get him hired as a UI/UX Design Intern at Apple.
Facebook fights suicide over live chat. Samaritans see this as the next stage
Facebook has partnered up with the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to introduce a way to give users the option to speak to a crisis counselor over the service's live chat implementation.
The program opened today, with counselors online 24 hours a day ready to talk to anyone who is expressing suicidal thoughts.
Sony Unveils PlayStation Vita's UK Tour
Sony is set to bring playable PlayStation Vita demo units to UK cities ahead of the handheld's launch on February 22, the company has reported. Like Nintendo's 'Believe Your Eyes' 3DS tour before it, Sony is bringing 'Vita Rooms' to Glasgow, Birmingham and London throughout January and February 2012 – kicking off at 63 Deansgate in Manchester from Friday 13th to Wednesday 18th January.
MIT builds a Camera that shoots at the speed of light
The MIT media lab researchers have created a camera which captures at a shutter speed of one trillion frames per second, meaning it can actually record the travelling of photons of light between points.
The team hit the breakthrough taking a picture of a laser beam as it passed through a fizzy drink bottle, using a sophisticated system with a modified Streak Tube to intensify the photons and a pretty beasty-sized camera. The footage that was captured required multiple hundreds of takes of the same experiment, creating quite a beautiful stop motion film of multiple beams of light reflecting through the bottle, collecting in the cap and dispersing.
Google offers a glimpse of Japan's tsunami devastation
Back in July of this year, Google announced its intention to “digitally archive” panoramic images of areas of North-Eastern Japan in an attempt to bring home to billions all over the globe the tremendous size and scale of, and devastation caused by, the March 11 tsunami that tore through eastern coastal regions following the country's most powerful earthquake since records began.
Comic Sans Project fights for typographical justice
So, haters of Comic Sans. Those who express anger at the 90s Microsoft typography. Those who are deeply aggrivated by the presence of an aesthetically failed version of comic book text. You have tried to extinguish the metaphorical flame os the sans serif font of the comical variety with your site of protest; but a movement is upon us that could change all of that.
The MorpHex spherical robot crawls; but doesn't quite roll...yet
Norwegian engineer Kåre Halvorsen has developed the MorpHex robot sphere prototype that reminds us somewhat of a Metroid morph ball mixed with the design ethic of a Portal turret.
The robot has six retracting legs that allow for dancing and some rather fluid, sort of artistic movement that reminds you of the swelling and fading waves of a stock screensaver on your computer. However, as the spherical shape would initially have you presuming, it doesn't roll yet.
Megaupload promotional music video gets pulled
It's kind of surreal to see the likes of Kanye West, Mary J. Blidge, Will.I.Am and Kim Kardashian performing in a promotional music video for file sharing site Megaupload; but that's exactly what's happened, which was faced with an immediate removal by Universal Music Group.
Codemasters Reveals DiRT Showdown
Codemasters is developing a spin-off destruction-based racing game based on the DiRT series, as exclusively revealed by Gamespot today.
For many, and us included, DiRT started life as a welcome return for the Colin McRae rally games of generations past. It was a game that relied not on the rough-and-tumble of competitive racing (although there was a fair bit of it) and instead was focused on shaving tenths of seconds off rally stage splits and maintaining the careful concentration associated with listening to your co-pilot.
Twitter gets a convicted man off Death Row
"Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken... We each define the great line." This is the Underoath-influenced tweet that a juror made during a case, which may result in a convicted murderer escaping death row, since the communication caused the Supreme Court to overturn the decision.
DARPA invests $13.4 million in thermal cameras for smartphones
As the US military request thermal vision for every soldier, they needed a better option than the current thermal, extremely low resolution yet rather pricey pocket thermal cameras they have currently. The new idea to get there is by giving Raytheon $13.4 million to miniaturize the IR imagers to the point that it fits in the likes of PDAs and smartphones.
Graphics researchers discover the secret behind rainbows
What started as a research project into improving the amount of finite detail that goes into CGI film and video game backgrounds, turned into a discovery about the physics of rainbows and how they are formed.
Play Xbox 360 and PS3 games on Google Chrome
Google has successfully realised its ambitions to develop a complex browser technology that allows 'heavy duty' apps – such as Xbox 360 and PS3 games – to be run in-browser on Google Chrome.
All possible through Google's Native Client, which Google professes makes porting to Chrome relatively simple, Supergiant Games earlier today released its charming indie hit, Bastion, onto the Chrome Web Store.