Far Cry Primal review: Kings of the Stone Age

In the modern games industry, once a publisher has a hit and follows it up with a successful sequel, all thoughts of risk and reward go out of the window. For that marks the point at which a new “franchise” is established, and we all know what those are like: annual cash-cows that would never dare to alienate any fans by trying anything controversial.

But discerning gamers get bored of unimaginative franchises, and a lukewarm reception for Far Cry 4 – fuelled by a sense that it was too similar to Far Cry 3, despite both being bloomin’ brilliant games – must have triggered some serious thought at Ubisoft. So the French publisher deserves enormous credit for rebooting the franchise with the brave curveball that is Far Cry Primal.

Far Cry Primal review: First-person fighter

Far Cry games have always been open-world first-person shooters, right? Well, not any more. Since Primal is set in 10,000BC, in the Stone Age, there’s no way that it could have been a shooter.

The setting has dictated that guns, vehicles, explosives and gadgets are absent – along with recognisable language. But the curious – and perhaps most impressive – aspect of Primal is that it feels unmistakably like a Far Cry game.

The new setting proves utterly compelling – those who derived the most joy from Far Cry games by simply bimbling around its map, exploring and hunting in a deliciously aimless manner will absolutely love Primal. Its game-world is fabulous to behold and utterly believable, and it’s packed with obscure places to explore and resources to sniff out.

Far Cry Primal review: Primitive story

Which should not imply that it falls down story-wise: Primal has a fully realised story which is way better than you imagine it would be, given that it is enacted by some pretty primitive humans.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft invented an entire language for the game, which is augmented by the characters’ body-language, so you have to pay attention to the subtitles in the cut-scenes. The story does feel a bit disjointed, though, in comparison with past Far Cry games – and there’s no epic villain to the level of Pagan Min from Far Cry 4 (one of the best badguys of recent video game times). 

READ: Far Cry 4 review

In Primal you play Takkar, a member of the Wenja tribe, who loses his hunting partners to a sabretooth tiger-attack, and stumbles upon a Wenja woman called Sayla, who introduces him to a nicely appointed cave which is in the perfect position at which to establish a village.

However, the nearby Udam tribe – who are strong and particularly savage – must be beaten first. Sayla has heard talk of other Wenja with specific skills – one a shaman, another a hunter, a third a fighter and a fourth a “thinker” (who turns out to be comic relief, since he is a total idiot).

So, as you set out to find them, and encounter random events, side-missions and settlements which you can claim for the Wenja, you acquire quite an arsenal and an impressive set of skills.

Ubisoft

Far Cry Primal review: The Taming of the… lion?

Chief among which is the ability to tame wild animals, which then fight at your side. The shaman is the key to your awakening as a beast-master – and the scenes in which he features are very reminiscent of the psychedelic mushroom-tripping ones from Far Cry 3. The shaman makes you drink disgusting liquid from an animal skull, which induces visions – in the first, you chase an owl, before taming it. Later visions are completely outré – in one, you have to shoot the moon with flaming arrows until it shatters.

Your first animal compatriot, the owl, you can fly around as a sort of airborne scout, seeing through its eyes, tagging enemies and even attacking them when you level it up. Which is pretty cool but, in practice, the owl proves to be the most superfluous element of your arsenal. Far more useful are the beasts you can tame before pointing them at enemies which they will then attack. You start off with a wolf, but as you level-up, you acquire the ability to tame the likes of bears and sabretooth tigers, and even to ride woolly mammoths.

It’s vital to tame the right animal: when you reach the harder story missions, in which you’re pretty much taking on whole villages full of savage fighters single-handed, you need a beast which is both durable and has a fearsome attack. It’s a good idea to do the Bloodfang missions, in which you hunt particularly fearsome examples of breeds such as a sabretooth tiger and a great bear. You then get to spawn Bloodfangs which pack an extra punch.

Ubisoft

Far Cry Primal review: Weapon work-arounds

The weaponry in Far Cry Primal may be primitive, but it’s pretty effective, especially since everything can be upgraded. You get a variety of both single and double-handed clubs, plus various bows, spears and a sling.

There are even grenades of a sort: bags of bees which keep enemies occupied while you bash them. And you can chuck stone shards which, when upgraded, can send enemies berserk so they attack each other.

There’s one gadget which turns out to be a key item: a grapple. One feature of Primal is the way in which, after playing it for a while, you learn to read the terrain, which is cold and mountainous in the north, where the Udam tribe live, and more foresty in the south, where you find the Izila. You can only grapple to designated points, but the grapple helps you move across mountainous terrain in a much more direct manner.

On-the-fly crafting is also a key element of the bigger battles, and it’s really handy to unlock the skill which lets you heal yourself while running.

Ubisoft

Far Cry Primal review: Two Tribes

The two tribes you fight are also interesting. The Udam, frankly, are pretty Neanderthal – they hunt mammoth for flesh, which distresses the vegetarian Wenja. But you can identify more with the Izila, who are slimmer in build, paint themselves blue and have mastered fire. They are pretty hostile, but more sophisticated than the Udam.

Verdict

One possible criticism of Far Cry Primal is that it lacks good baddies, which its predecessors featured – Far Cry 4’s Pagan Min would have graced a Hollywood film. Batari, leader of the Izila, is pretty great in Primal though: she’s surprisingly attractive for a half-crazed savage, but Takkar only encounters her occasionally, and there’s no sense of an arch-villain who you must take down, which is a break from previous iterations of Far Cry.

But if you can cope with that, you will find Far Cry Primal to be a real treat. Simply immersing yourself in its Stone Age world – and fighting for the survival of both yourself and your tribe – proves to be an intensely enjoyable experience, perhaps because despite the alien nature of the setting, it rings startlingly true.

Developer Ubisoft Montreal has performed wonders in terms of providing a new and fresh gameplay experience which is still recognisably and fundamentally a Far Cry game. What better place to hide from the dreariness and venality of the modern world, with its Brexit debates, out-of-touch politicians, bearded hipsters, fat-cat bankers and property developers, than the altogether less complicated and unsullied Stone Age?

These are the new Guess Connect watches and they are amazing

Fashion brand Guess first announced its entry to the world of smartwatches at CES 2015. The Guess Connect took its design cues from the Guess Rigor watch but added smart functionality from Martian.

It prioritised being a good-looking, stylish watch with the smarts being a secondary function built into the the watch and its design, rather than the watch being designed around the smarts. This worked and worked well.

The Guess Connect arrived in two sizes – 41mm and 45mm – and it came in a variety of finishes including a blue and rose gold option and a black and gold option. It’s about to get a whole lot more exciting for the Guess Connect though.

The company has not only announced a couple of new colour editions for Spring, but there will be more styles and a new design added before the end of the year including a leopard print design. Yes, really. It’s totally awesome too. 

In addition to the new colours and styles of the original Guess Connect, the company is also planning to launch an entirely new model with a range of new designs. It will again be powered by Martian, although Guess is looking at new partners for the future too. It said it wanted to have a bit of fun with the partnership it already has first though and fun it definitely is having.

The new Guess Connect gets rids of the small notifying display that sits across the bottom of the watch face on the original Connect and puts and LED notifying light within the watch housing instead. It means the new Connect won’t give you as much information as the current model, meaning a lot less than the likes of Android Wear and Apple, but that in turn means a Guess watch that looks, well, like a Guess Watch. And that for some people is far more exciting than what the text message you just recieved says.

The new model allows users to customise seven colour alerts for VIP contacts. It features the tapping of the glass feature to recall alerts, like the current Guess Connect does, and it also has the custom vibration function of the original device too. Guess is adding fitness tracking to the new Connect too though, with step counting, sleep tracking and calorie counting all on board.

The new Guess Connect will come with a seven-day battery life and it will be compatible with iOS and Android. It is also splash resistant.

Guess told us it hopes to offer around 20 different Connect styles before the end of the year. We saw a few of them at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and some of them are absolutely amazing so we have put them all in a gallery for you to see just how fabulous wearing a smartwatch can be.

If you want to read more about how the Guess Connect works, you can read our full review here. We will be reviewing the new Connect when it launches in November too.

For now though, click here to see what style smartwatch you could be wearing before the end of the year. 

Planet Earth II is coming to the BBC and it will be in 4K

The BBC has announced that it is currently filming a sequel to its most successful nature documentary series, Planet Earth.

Due to air later this year, the cunningly titled Planet Earth II will once again be narrated by Sir David Attenborough, but this time it will be shot entirely in 4K Ultra HD.

“A decade on from Sir David Attenborough’s Planet Earth, this new series promises to be an extraordinary experience for our audience,” said Charlotte Moore, controller of TV channels and iPlayer at the Beeb.

“Filmed over three years across the globe with all the very latest technology, the series uncovers stories about the natural world we have simply never been able to witness before.”

READ: You can go on a VR journey with Sir David Attenborough and a giant dinosaur here

The six-part series will again focus of the wild diversity of nature on our planet. This time though, more technology is available to the production team to get even closer to the action than ever before.

Drones, remote recording and camera stabilisation techniques that were not available when the original series was made have been used. However, the fact that all the footage will be in Ultra HD is a major leap forward.

Whether this means the BBC plans to launch a 4K service later this year, through broadcast or iPlayer, or if it will first release a 4K Blu-ray of the series is yet to be revealed.

Ricoh embraces 4K Ultra HD recording with WG-M2 action cam

Ricoh has finally followed up its rugged action camera with a new model that ups the ante in video recording. Perhaps the last one-and-a-half years wait has been worthwhile, as the Ricoh WG-M2 has 4K video recording.

The camera is ultra-rugged and waterproof down to 20 metres, so can be taken on diving trips. It is shock resistant for drops of up to 2 metres, and can still work in temperatures down to -10C.

It has an ultra-wide angle lens, that shoots approximately 204-degrees, but can also be restricted through a narrow mode, to shoot at a viewing angle of 151-degrees.

The WG-M2 can record 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160) footage at 30 frames per second. Full HD video can be captured at 60fps for smoother action.

It has high bit rate capture of 100Mbps.

There are other recording modes you can use, including time lapse – shooting in fast forward at 30, 60 or 150 times the normal speed. There is also an endless recording mode, which automatically captures video files at five, 10 or 25 minute intervals.

A 1.5-inch LCD monitor on the camera can be used to compose shots, and it can also be connected wirelessly to a smartphone or tablet, with dedicated apps available for iOS and Android.

The Ricoh WG-M2 will be available at the end of March for £269.99.

Garmin Vivoactive HR preview: The complete training solution

Garmin has unleashed a new version of its popular and impressive Vivoactive called Vivoactive HR because, you guessed it, this one records heart rate.

The Vivoactive HR uses a wrist worn, light-based heart rate monitor to track beats per minute for a more complete training partner.

This new addition to the Garmin line-up means a GPS enabled, heart rate toting, smartwatch that’s able to offer notifications from a connected phone. It pretty much does it all.

So is it worth the £210 price? We went hands-on to find out.

Garmin Vivoactive HR: Design, build and display

There’s no denying it, for something that crams in so much tech the Garmin Vivoacative HR is certainly discreet. The comfortable rubber band, which comes in varying colour options, is designed to be comfortable and able to withstand the rigours of sweaty training, but while still looking good.

The main screen-toting unit blends into the strap for a seamless fit. It certainly looks sporty rather than premium but it’s good looking and compact enough so that it could be worn day and night with no worries.

The display is high resolution, colour and built for easy viewing in sunlight. The pictures really don’t do it justice. It’s impressively clear for something that must be built to save a lot of battery life.

Pocket-lint

Garmin Vivoactive HR: Smart training sensors

The Vivoactive HR does it all. Not only is it an activity tracker for things like daily steps, calories and sleep but it’s also a fully functioning GPS sports watch.

According to Garmin the Vivoactive HR is able to offer a full eight days of battery life on a charge with activity tracking using heart rate monitoring and smart notifications enabled. When it comes to tracking sport using GPS that will drop to 13 hours of use. Considering the size of the unit this isn’t too bad at all and should be enough for all but the most extreme of ultra athletes.

Thanks to motion sensors, GPS and heart rate monitoring the Vivoactive HR can fully track the likes of running, cycling, swimming plus golfing and even skiing or paddle boarding. Thanks to a barometric alitmeter it’ll track altitude too, ideal for skiing and snowboarding then. And should you be training indoor, at the gym, the accelerometer will take car of measure your metrics there.

Pocket-lint

Garmin Vivoactive HR: Connectivity and software

As a day to day watch the Vivoactive HR is small enough to slip under a sleeve without any hassle. Despite the form it’s crammed full of functions beyond activity and sports tracking. For a start you can control your music on a connected smartphone using the wearable.

When connected to a smartphone notifications will be pushed through to the watch for the likes of calls, messages, social media alert and emails. This will come up on the screen and will also give you a nudge using a vibration. This also means it can be used as an alarm without making a noise, ideal when waking up next to someone.

For those with a Virb camera the Vivoactive HR can control that also. And should you misplace your phone there’s a Find My Phone function too.

While the screen on the device isn’t massive all your data is automatically uploaded to Garmin Connect meaning it can be viewed via the app or online from anywhere. Some people find Connect a little messy but all your data is there and once you get the hang of it you can see it at a glance for easy tracking of goals.

For golfers the inbuilt system is impressive offering a digital scorecard, pin pointer, yardage to layups, general yardage and shot distance measurements.

Connect IQ is Garmin’s app store which has plenty of extras to offer specific tools as well as fun new screens. Plus there’s the promise of new software coming in the future. 

Pocket-lint

First Impressions

The Garmin Vivoactive HR really is a one-stop shop for all things tracking and notification related.

The design might be basic and built for the rugged but that’s both charming and functional. It’s made for wearing everyday without discomfort, simple.

We’re still amazed this much tech, and such a good battery life, can be crammed into such a compact wearable. When you consider this is just a little more than £200 it really does make for a very attractive all rounder indeed.

The Science Behind the Superheroes: Can Superpowers be Created?

If we take the 1984 classic Marvel Super Heroes RPG, also known as the ‘FASERIP system’, at its word, there are five categories of superhero:

●Altered Humans
●High-Tech Wonders
●Mutants
●Robots
●Aliens

When it comes to real life superpowers you may be thinking that this list is restricted to the realm of make believe, but just how close are we to making at least some of these reality? If we take Moore’s law into consideration, we begin to see that we may well have the computing power to tackle two of these (High-Tech Wonders, Robots) sooner than we think. Couple that with the huge advances being made in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and the lines between fantasy and reality become even more blurred.

The Altered Human

As for ‘Altered Humans’, surely that is one area that we wouldn’t tamper with even if we could, right? The massive breakthroughs we have been seeing in the field of genetics, and those that are yet to come (especially in light of UK scientists now being permitted to genetically alter human embryos), we may yet be on the verge of something amazing. While we may not see the likes of Wolverine and his Adamantium bones, Superman and his ability to defy physics or the rapid healing of Deadpool, there may be hope in the form of ‘quantum tunnelling’.

Quantum biology is an area of science that the physicist Jim Al Khalili say is responsible for many of nature’s great success stories, with quantum tunnelling being the most remarkable. This process, it has been shown, is responsible for the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs – a process that was previously unexplained. Khalili thinks that this process can also be applied to humans, in time, allowing for the rapid regeneration of tissue.

Martial arts have been elevating humans to almost superhero status for some time (Jackie Chan, and his seemingly impossible feats, being just one example), centuries even. There is a large psychological aspect to martial arts too, which has not gone unnoticed in the US military. Buddhist mindfulness techniques can be very helpful in a combat situation, for example, if the troops are able to stay dead calm in a stressful situation. How far has the research gotten? If it hasn’t produced ice cold killers, it won’t have been through lack of trying.

High-Tech Wonders

As mentioned, Moore’s law dictates that certain technological advances are almost a forgone conclusion, but there is a downside: What may well be cutting edge today, will almost certainly be obsolete in ten years – if not sooner. As a ‘stark’ example of this, we would only need to place the Million Dollar Man next to any of the Iron Man suits.

Where are the extremely cool exoskeletons from Iron Man? As easy as Tony Stark makes it look, these kinds of creations are incredibly difficult to pull off, and right now there is just one working prototype. This DARPA effort is a far cry from the red and gold Stark brainchild, but it does offer a glimpse into a very exciting future!

That said, power will always be an issue. If a modern smartphone struggles to last a day, how on earth is a gadget covered suit of armour going to get through breakfast? Tony Stark uses, what appears to be, a Tokamak reactor. While this is a real thing, kind of (the very first is being built in France, with a predicted completion date of 2019), it also weighs in at over 5 thousand tonnes… So, not very practical for a suit of armour then. And will we ever see a Millennium Falcon?

Robots

Bypassing the human part of the machinery can simplify things a great deal, but there is that one niggling little problem: who’s controlling it? Artificial Intelligence has been a dream of many scientists for a long time, but are we finally on the cusp of something huge? DeepMind, of Google fame, is able to ‘teach’ itself how to play games simply by playing them and figuring it out. As linked to above, this creation was able to beat a Go champion, five times in a row, something no other AI system has ever been able to do even once.

The interesting, or terrifying, thing about DeepMind is that not even Google are absolutely sure of how it is able to teach itself in the way that it does. You may have heard of Watson, the IBM supercomputer. This machine was able to excel at games only after being ‘taught’ how to play by human programming. DeepMind, and others like it, are something altogether different.

For the first time, a SkyNet scenario does not seem quite so far fetched – although the robot bodies to go with that are still a very long way away, it would seem, so we may not be seeing The Vision for quite some time yet.

Small steps

Scientifically created superpowers are still in a distant future, but as we can see here there have been some tantalizing first steps over the past year or so and still more to come this year. A slightly scary AI that can teach itself, embryo modification, quantum tunnelling and military exoskeletons to name but a few.

Given the choice, and the range of exciting possibilities just waiting around the corner, would you be a hero… Or a villain?

Instant man-made blood vessels could speed up drug discovery

Man-made tissues and organs are useful tools for scientists seeking to understand and potentially fix the human body. One area in which they could have a significant impact is drug discovery, allowing researchers to test therapies in living models prior to animal and human trials. A group of biomedical engineers at Duke University are particularly interested in this use case, leading them to develop a new technique for creating working blood vessels in the lab. And what previous methods took six to eight weeks to achieve, the researchers have managed to condense into a matter of hours.

Taking inspiration from prior research in lab-grown tracheas, the engineers compress tissue cells in a collagen gel to create artificial arteries in only a few minutes. Three hours later, the vessels are formed to the point of being strong enough to carry fluid; and after a week of maturation, they don’t just look like blood vessels — with multiple layers including an outer sleeve of muscle — they behave like them too.

In the presence of chemical triggers, the lab-grown vessels constrict and dilate in the same way real ones do, and they also respond to treatment in an induced inflammation model. It’s extremely important the artificial mimics the natural, of course, and another team at Duke has achieved this result in man-made skeletal muscle already. The lab-grown blood vessels aren’t absolutely identical to the real thing, though: For one, they are only about one tenth of the size.

But miniaturization has its benefits. It’s partly the reason these blood vessels can be generated in such a short amount of time, and they could potentially be used to create small-scale organs for research purposes. On their own, they could play a part in the study and treatment of coronary diseases, but in the more immediate future, they show promise in early stage drug screening, where the main line of questioning is “will this compound be toxic to humans?”

Any research in man-made blood vessels is important to the wider scientific community, too. While it’s possible to grow all kinds of human tissue in the lab, the complex vascular networks that traverse our fragile meatsacks are essential for functional (and transplantable) organs.

Via: Gizmodo, Medgadget

Source: Duke University, Nature Scientific Reports

Go’s world champ expects Google AI to lose its big match

Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence might have beaten a Go champion last month, but you shouldn’t expect a repeat victory… at least, not according to its next opponent. World champ Lee Sedol tells the Associated Press that he not only expects to beat Google’s AlphaGo AI next month, but to clean house — he’s predicting a 5-0 win, or at worst 4-1. That’s some tough talk, especially given that many hadn’t anticipated any AI beating a Go expert this year. The game’s reliance on complexity and intuitive action makes it much harder for computers to play than relatively straightforward games like chess.

Lee isn’t being immodest, mind you. He reckons that DeepMind is only slightly less skilled than he is, and he won’t be surprised if the technology cleans his clock within a couple of years. In other words, Lee is well aware that AI progresses quickly — a seemingly insurmountable challenge can be trivially easy given enough code tweaks and training.

Source: AP (Yahoo)

Oral-B’s new smart toothbrush tracks movement with your phone

Oral-B debuted its Smart Series of connected toothbrushes last year, and at Mobile World Congress 2016, the company announced a new model. The Oral-B Genius touts Position Detection tech that uses motion sensors and your phone’s camera to track your oral hygiene. Those bells and whistles keep tabs on location, pressure and brushing time to offer feedback on how well you’re cleaning your teeth. All of those details come to you through the companion app on your trusty handset. In fact, there’s a holder that comes with the high-tech toothbrush so you can put your phone on the mirror in front of you while brush.

Pressure sensors ensure that you’re not applying too much force when brushing, a habit that could cause more harm than good. If you do get a bit heavy-handed, the Genius will adjust its speed and pulsation to compensate. The app will also let you know when you’ve covered each section of your mouth adequately (it takes about 30 seconds for each, by the way). There’s no word on pricing just yet, but the Oral-B Genius is set to go on sale in select areas in July.

Via: SlashGear

Source: Oral-B

Instagram series creates visuals for David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’

David Bowie released his final album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday just two days before he passed away. He gave InstaMiniSeries access to the songs ahead of the release to transform the tunes into a miniseries of “visual interpretations” for the social channel. The 16-episode Unbound series “takes the audience on a journey of evocative images inspired by the moods suggested in the album’s music, lyrics and artwork,” according to an InstaMiniSeries post. Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson and actress Patricia Clarkson star in Unbound, which debuts this Thursday at 8PM with new episodes following on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for a few weeks. For brief teaser of what you can expect, check out the clip down below.

A video posted by InstaMiniSeries (@instaminiseries) on Feb 22, 2016 at 2:50am PST

Update: This post originally stated that Instagram created the Unbound series when it fact it is the work of the InstaMiniSeries, a company that creates episodic content for the social network. Instagram confirmed to us that it’s not involved with the project.

Via: Fact Magazine

Source: DavidBowie.com