‘Quantum Break’ is a legitimate reason to buy an Xbox One

Almost three years after the Xbox One’s debut, it’s getting its biggest and arguably first real exclusive. Quantum Break won’t be available on other consoles, it isn’t a sequel, nor is it multiplayer-only. It’s the latest game from Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind the Max Payne and Alan Wake franchises. And it couldn’t come at a better time for Microsoft, either: In a matter of weeks PlayStation 4 owners will have Ratchet and Clank and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, and Wii U owners get Star Fox Zero. If Xbox One didn’t have an exclusive of its own right now, it’d be the odd console out.

Good thing, then, that it’s Remedy’s best game yet and the Xbox One finally has a AAA showcase for what it’s capable of.

Let’s take a step back, though. Until now, Xbox One exclusives generally haven’t been worth writing home about. The few new, but boring, titles like Ryse: Son of Rome and sequels including Forza Motorsport 5 and Dead Rising 3, didn’t do much to move the needle. Especially not after Microsoft’s numerous PR missteps leading up to the Xbox One’s release.

‘Quantum Break’ is developer Remedy’s best game yet.

A majority of the Xbox One’s “originals” have been bigger, prettier versions of games you’ve played before. Whether they’re sequels like Forza Horizon 2 and Halo 5: Guardians or HD-revamps like Gears of War: Ultimate Edition or Rare Replay Collection, there isn’t much that’s entirely new on the system. Games you can’t play on any other console have been few and far between. Titanfall had a surprisingly decent version of its multiplayer-only mech battles on Xbox 360, for example.

Sunset Overdrive is a wildly colorful and inventive shooter — and a true exclusive — blending punk rock, parkour and a cartoony art style that didn’t fare well among fans at all. Even though it hails from well-regarded developer Insomniac Games, three months after its 2014 release it still hadn’t cracked the NPD’s top ten selling games.

Which brings us to back to Quantum Break, Xbox One’s stand-out exclusive. At its core, it’s a cover-based, third-person shooter that’s exclusively single-player. The game centers around time travel, which isn’t just a plot device; it bleeds into combat and platforming puzzles, as well. Because protagonist Jack Joyce (played by a digital version of X-Men’s Shawn Ashmore, above) came in contact with a time machine before everything went pear-shaped, he’s witness to glitches in the space-time continuum and can manipulate time as he sees fit.

Sometimes the glitches are small. There’s no way to get inside a swimming pool facility early on in the game, but alongside the building near its dumpster there’s a strange teal cloud. Walking near it causes the camera distort and pulls everything out of focus. Paint and metal particles dance off the shed covering the dumpster, hovering above the surface briefly before settling back in place. It looks really cool.

This is where I had to rewind time so someone from the past could pull the dumpster out of its shed and erect a scaffold to finish a graffiti mural — all depicted using time-lapse photography. But the rewind is finite and I had to make it to the pool’s roof before the temporary glimpse at the past ran out and everything returned to its original place.

The swimming pool time-lapse, in action.

The more severe glitches, dubbed “stutters,” are even more impressive. They show massive-scale destruction in still frame, except you’re able to freely walk around in them. Later in the game, a shipping barge crashes into a bridge filled with traffic. Time stops at the moment of impact, just as chaos takes over.

The whole set piece feels like trying to navigate a painting by M.C. Escher. That is, if the noted surrealist painted with destroyed vehicles, frozen bullet tracers and swarms of floating traffic cones. Given the scene’s complexity in terms of how much carnage surrounds you, the absolutely surreal architecture and visual effects at play here, it would’ve likely caused the Xbox 360’s 11-year-old hardware to melt.

Remedy’s eye for the dramatic doesn’t stop there, though. This is the studio that popularized slow-motion Matrix-style gunfights in video games with 2001’s noir-inspired Max Payne, after all. Time manipulation plays a key role in combat as well and keeps it from feeling rote. There are only a handful of time-manipulation powers, but they’re all incredibly well-designed.

Hitting a distant enemy with a time-slow bubble like the one pictured below, for example, serves double-duty: Anything caught inside it freezes in place, but the coolest wrinkle here is that any bullets fired into it will explode once the time-slow bursts, dropping any enemies caught in its blast radius. Time and again, when I caught an explosive container in that lethal bubble, the resulting fireworks show always made me smile like an idiot. There’s a really neat variation on Max Payne’s shoot-dodge move, too, where you can quickly dash past an enemy and pump a few rounds into them in slow-mo before they can counterattack.

The game’s time machine isn’t like Doc Brown’s DeLorean from Back to the Future that can jump to any point in the past or fast-forward 30 years. Instead, Quantum Break’s is rooted in the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. Long story short, you can’t use it to go back and kill Hitler because it would fundamentally alter the course of history and the resulting future that led to the time machine’s creation. Time operates on a closed cycle, and major changes to history would create paradoxes. And sometimes, in your efforts to prevent something from happening, you’ll inadvertently cause it to happen — multiple paths, same outcome.

This isn’t just a convenient tool used to simplify game mechanics, though. It’s an integral part of Quantum Break’s story about trying to fix your mistakes, only to wind up right back where you started. Choices made at key points change how certain elements of the plot play out, but the game’s final moments largely remain the same.

Quantum Break could exist on other platforms, but no one could have made it except Remedy, a studio that hasn’t published a game on a non-Microsoft console in more than 12 years. The game’s episodic narrative structure comes from Alan Wake, but it has much better pacing. Then there’s the cinematic presentation and manipulation of time that leave Max Payne’s iconic slow-motion combat in the dust.

‘Quantum Break’ could exist on other platforms, but no one could have made it except Remedy.

The surprisingly well-done live-action TV episodes that fill out the branching narrative are something brand new, not just for Remedy, but video games as whole. Combined, this forms an experience unlike anything I’ve played before. Quantum Break is the culmination of everything the studio has been working toward for more than a decade and the developers aren’t afraid to flaunt it.

Console exclusives exist to showcase the strengths of each individual platform, and up to this point the Xbox One really hasn’t had one. But Quantum Break changes that. After more than two years, the system finally has its first killer app.

Facebook is being used to sell weapons in the Middle East

Facebook’s social network reaches billions of people around the world, but its tools aren’t always used with the best intentions. The New York Times reports that Facebook Groups are being used to sell weapons in the Middle East. The sales violate Facebook’s policy for selling goods on the site of course, but that’s not stopping folks in Libya, Syria, Iraq and other countries from posting weapons commonly used by terrorists and militants for sale.

The good news is Facebook is cracking down on the groups, shutting down six of the seven pages NYT alerted the company to within a day. The one that remains is a group that only posted photos and discussed weapons, but didn’t allow sales on the page. Armament Research Services published a report this month on online weapons sales in Libya, documenting several cases where the sale of missiles, heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, rockets were negotiated through Facebook Groups. While the use of social media to discuss sales is relatively new to Libya, it’s also being used in other countries that have been ravaged by conflict — places like Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Facebook’s regular addition of features like the ability to send money through Messenger provides a way for sellers to easily collect payments. The company updated its policies earlier this year to specifically forbid the sale of firearms or other weapons or using the site to broker such deals. “Since we were offering features like that, we thought we wanted to make clear that this is not a site that wants to facilitate the private sales of firearms,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy, told The New York Times.

Weapons provided to allies in Iraq and items similar to those distributed to Syrian rebels by the US have surfaced on the pages for sale, including machine guns and anti-tank missile systems. The groups are also being used by militia to find other military supplies like bullet-proof plates, infrared cameras and uniforms. However, using Facebook to sell any of those items that aren’t considered weapons isn’t against the social network’s policies.

Source: New York Times

Outlook for iOS and Android syncs calendar info from other apps

Ever since it acquired Sunrise, the popular social calendar app, Microsoft’s been bringing more of its features to the Outlook mobile apps. To that end, Outlook for iOS and Android can now sync with Evernote, Facebook and Wunderlist, which will let users get information from those third-party services directly on their inbox. This includes events, notes and tasks, making it easier for you to stay on top of scheduled meetings, reminders and other things that help with productivity. Microsoft says integration with these apps is just the start, hinting at support for others in the future.

Source: Microsoft

Apple Seeds First iOS 9.3.2 Beta to Public Beta Testers

Apple today released the first beta of an upcoming iOS 9.3.2 update for public beta testers, just a day after seeding the first iOS 9.3.2 beta to developers. iOS 9.3.2 comes just over two weeks after the public release of iOS 9.3 and a week after the release of iOS 9.3.1, a followup bug fix update.

Beta testers who have signed up for Apple’s beta testing program will receive the iOS 9.3 update over-the-air after installing the proper certificate on their iOS device.

Those who want to be a part of Apple’s beta testing program can sign up to participate through the beta testing website, which gives users access to both iOS and OS X betas.

iOS 9.3.2, as a minor 9.x.x update, focuses primarily on performance improvements and under-the-hood bug fixes to address issues that have been discovered since the release of iOS 9.3. We don’t know all of the fixes that will be included, but one issue with lagginess when activating Quick Actions in landscape mode on an iPhone 6s has been fixed.

No other outward-facing changes or immediately apparent bug fixes were discovered in the first beta of iOS 9.3.2.

Related Roundup: iOS 9
Discuss this article in our forums

Apple Releases First OS X 10.11.5 El Capitan Beta to Public Beta Testers

Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming OS X 10.11.5 beta to public beta testers, just a day after releasing the first OS X 10.11.5 beta to developers and two weeks after releasing OS X 10.11.4, the fourth update to the OS X 10.11 operating system.

The new beta is available through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store for those who are enrolled in Apple’s beta testing program. Those wishing to join the program can sign up on Apple’s beta testing website.

Most of the updates to OS X 10.11 have been minor in scale, and OS X 10.11.5 is no exception. The update appears to focus on under-the-hood bug fixes, security enhancements, and performance improvements with no obvious outward-facing changes.

Related Roundup: OS X El Capitan
Tag: OS X 10.11.5
Discuss this article in our forums

Apple’s Swift Programming Language May Be Adopted by Google for Android

Google is considering making Apple’s Swift programming language a “first class” language for Android, reports The Next Web. Executives from Google, Facebook, and Uber reportedly attended a meeting to discuss Swift in December, around the time that Apple officially made Swift an open source language.

Google’s Android operating system currently supports Java as its first-class language, and sources say Swift is not meant to replace Java, at least initially. While the ongoing litigation with Oracle is likely cause for concern, sources say Google considers Swift to have a broader “upside” than Java.

As outlined by The Next Web, adopting Swift would be a major undertaking for Google, due to the need to create a runtime for Swift and incorporate it into APIs and SDKs, many of which would need to be rewritten, but it is something that Google could do. A Swift-based Android operating system would be a boon for developers, who could create native apps for both platforms. Swift is a well-liked programming language because it’s simple to learn, easy to work with, and fast.

Along with Google, Facebook and Uber are also said to be considering making Swift “more central” to their operations. At Facebook, employees are already working with Swift internally, though how deeply remains in question, and at Uber, it is not clear if work on a transition to Swift has begun.

Switching over to Swift would be a long process for Google that could span multiple months or years due to the need to rewrite Android services, apps, and APIs, so it is not likely to be adopted in the near future, and Android support is integral, says The Next Web, for the deep integration that Facebook and Uber want to adopt.

Apple first announced Swift in June of 2014 and expanded on it with Swift 2 in June of 2015. In December, the programming language was made open source.
Discuss this article in our forums

Shadow Quest: a step above other mobile RPG’s [Review]

Shadow Quest

1 of 6

Town Resources

Campaign map

Attack!

Character screen

Inventory

Dungeon crawling

Overview –

Shadow Quest RPG sets itself apart from other mobile RPG’s by making character positioning relevant. It also has a new take on dungeon crawling that I have not seen employed on mobile devices.

Author: Magicindie

Price: Free to download (In-App Purchases)

Highlights

• Attacks based on unit position
• Turn based gameplay
• On par graphics
• high power consumption

Setup –

Setup is simple; install the game from Google Play and launch the app ( which does not support Google Play Games). The first time you launch the app you are greeted with a few short sentences of storytelling; tap the screen to get through these screens. You are then thrust immediately into battle and given a tutorial of the battle system.

Impression –

Considering the first 30 seconds of gameplay consists of battle mechanics we should start there. Shadow Quest takes your classic mobile RPG’s turn-based button smashing and refines it by making character placement relevant. In the introduction, it shows you how to drag characters to the front, back, left, and right of the battlefield. This mechanic quickly becomes relevant as you realize that the players on the sides can only attack enemies on their side, the character in the front is the most vulnerable, and characters perform a special attack when stationed in the back.

The dungeon-crawling mechanic is also something that I find unique. Your character begins with 50 stamina and each level has a set amount of squares that must be searched. Tapping on a square removes it from play, exposing what is underneath, and costs one stamina. Stamina can be regained by waiting for the timer to give you more or you can refill an empty stamina counter by spending 50 gems.

Gems are your in-game currency; they can be used for things like crafting items, reviving your party, purchasing blessings, and purchasing more powerful characters. They also make up the entirety of the game’s in-app purchases.

The graphics are on par with many of the top quality mobile RPG’s demonstrating clean lines, fabulous artwork, attack animations, and blocky but appropriate enemy movements. Couple that with a soundtrack that sets a perfect mood for dungeon crawling and you have a recipe for hours of unrelenting gameplay.

The single major drawback is the power drain I experienced. My Galaxy S6 was losing 1% of battery ever two minutes, which is not the worst battery drain I have experienced playing a mobile game but is not conducive to playing for extended periods. This is a common theme with most mobile RPG’s, and with flagship phones like the Nexus 6P and Galaxy S7 Edge having much larger batteries this may not be as much of an issue for some of you.

Likes:

• Raising the bar on turn-based combat
• Unique dungeon-crawling mechanic

Dislikes:

• Moderate battery drain

Conclusion –

I have to admit, I have never found a mobile RPG that was able to keep my attention for more than an hour. When I installed Shadow Quest, I played it all day. If you are a mobile RPG fan I highly recommend giving this a download; if you are not yet a fan, give this one a download and see if it is able to change your mind.

Infernal Innovations Universal Magnetic Phone Mount: review

A while back I reviewed a CD player mounted magnetic phone mount made by Infernal Innovations. I really liked the mount but realized that there were some pretty severe limitations to it. The main one being that not all vehicles have a CD player mounted high enough to keep your phone at eye level. Now I’m looking at their universal mount for windshields and dashes.

Infernal Innovations Universal Magnetic Phone Mount overview

This particular mount is suction based. As such it can be mounted to the windshield or your dash. Although if you’re going to mount it to your dash, you may need the included adhesive disc if the area is not smooth enough.

The suction system is pretty unique. It uses a sticky gel material that covers the edges of the suction cup. This material ensures that you don’t loose suction.

Above the base is a reversible magnetic mount with a pivoting head that houses four powerful magnets covered by a thin layer of rubber.

Included with the mount are two metal plates backed with adhesive. These can be attached to the outside of your phone or case or inside your phone case. This is what is used to stick your phone to the magnetic head.

Infernal Innovations Universal Magnetic Phone Mount setup

Setting up the mount is fairly easy, but there are lots of options. If you are going to use the mount on the windshield then you are already halfway there.

If you are going to use the mount on the dash, then you’ll need to either find a fairly smooth part of the dash to use or you’ll need to use the adhesive disc. If you use the adhesive disc then you’ll first need to clean the area with a non-oily cleanser. Then remove the protective plastic from the disc and stick it to the dash.

Whether you use the adhesive disc or not, you’ll need to stick the mount to the desired area with the lever in the upward position. When the mount is placed in the desired area, then depress the lever to create a strong suction to the surface.

Now you’ll need to decide on where to adhere the metal plate. If you have a phone with NFC or wireless charging, then you won’t want to place the plate covering the coils. Since most phones with these technologies place the coils in the middle of the phone and your camera is typically at the top of the phone, you’ll want to adhere the plate to the bottom of the phone.

Beyond the vertical placement of the metal plate, you’ll also want to consider on which surface do you want to adhere the metal plate.

Your options are on the phone itself, inside your phone case, or outside your phone case. Because I have a Zerolemon extended battery, I chose to mount it on the outside of my phone case.

Now you’re ready to use your phone with the mount. Just line the metal plate up with the magnetic disc and viola! you’re done.

Infernal Innovations Universal Magnetic Phone Mount usage

I used this mount in my 1989 Ford F-150. I only mention that, because it’s an old truck and it’s not the best at absorbing bumps and road vibrations. If anything, this is the perfect vehicle to test a magnetic mount, because if it holds in my truck, then it’ll hold in your vehicle too.

I mentioned earlier that I have a Zerolemon extended battery on my phone. This adds lots of weight and strains the magnetic hold. To further complicate things I had the plate mounted to the bottom of my phone so that it wouldn’t interfere with the wireless charging and NFC coils. Even in this configuration, the magnetic mount had more than enough grip to hold it in a portrait position on bumpy roads in my truck. Since most of my apps work in a portrait orientation. This wasn’t a problem.

When placed in a landscape position, the bumps proved too much for the magnets to hold it still. With each bump, the phone would point more and more to towards the ground. When I used the mount on my desk it was able to hold that position but it became unstable when I applied my touch to the screen.

I suspect that if the plate was placed in the middle of the phone or if I wasn’t using this monstrous Zerolemon battery, then it would have worked wonderfully in either orientation even on bumpy roads.

The suction cup on this mount is amazing. I’ve left it adhered to my windshield for over a month and it never lost any suction.

The only flaw that I found was that pivot joint didn’t hold the weight of my phone in landscape mode. I was able to fix this by placing a thin piece of cardboard inside the joint. It was then able to stay in place just fine.

4.2 out of 5 stars

Overall, this is a great option for mounting your phone in the car. Because of its magnetic head and metal plate, it’s the easiest phone mount I’ve ever used.

Amazon currently has it on sale for $20 and for that price it’s definitely worth checking out.

Outlook on Android adds Facebook, Evernote and Wunderlist support for calendar events

Microsoft is adding support for third-party apps to its calendar feature in Outlook for Android. The feature is launching with the ability to add content from apps like Facebook, Evernote and Wunderlist to an Outlook calendar.

Microsoft says:

With Calendar Apps, you can connect your apps—Wunderlist, Facebook and Evernote to start with—to see all your tasks, events and notes from your digital life in one place: your Outlook calendar. By connecting your calendar with a wide range of services, Outlook will be able to provide you with a far better view of your day, week and months ahead.

The Facebook app for Outlook will let users see any event they have been invited to in the calendar, along with Facebook friends’ birthdays. The Evernote app can place notes and to-do lists made in the app in the Outlook calendar, and the Wunderlist app also allows its to-do lists to show up in the calendar as well. More Outlook calendar apps are in the works, including support for Skype for Business, OneNote and more.

Why you might want to encrypt the SD card on your Galaxy S7

Encrypting the SD card on your new Galaxy S7 is easy to do, but you need to know the details before you do it.

Everyone is happy that Samsung has brought expandable storage back to the Galaxy S7 series. Things aren’t perfect — plenty still prefer how SD cards worked with KitKat on their Galaxy phones — but for the average user who just wants to store music, movies, photos and other documents on their removable card, it’s a workable solution. It’s also something that Google and Samsung will continue to work on, keeping things secure and consistent while still being expandable.

Something a lot of people don’t think about, though, is encrypting the removable storage on their Galaxy S7. Encryption is all over the tech news because of recent events between the FBI and Apple, and we can take a few minutes and make sure everyone knows what options are available and how things work when it comes to protecting the data on your SD card.

What exactly is encryption?

Encryption is a means of taking data and wrapping it up in a layer that can’t be opened without the proper credentials. There are plenty of ways it can be done, and it’s one of those things that has experts working on improving every day. There are also other experts working every day to try and break it.

Encryption is all about making it prohibitively time consuming to access your data.

In simple terms, when you lock something with an encryption method, the only way to access it is with the key. Any encryption can be broken by someone with the right tools, the right knowledge and a lot of time and processing power. The goal is to make an encryption method strong enough so that it’s not practical to try and break it. When it takes the bad guys 10 years on the most powerful computer to get through, you’ve taken away any incentive to brute-force a way in.

That’s why how you apply and use the keys to get in is important. There’s no sense making the encryption strong enough to deter an attack when you make it easy to get to the keys. On Android, the key isn’t your device password, but your device password grants access to the method to get the key.

Using hardware inside your phone, a 128-bit key is created and stored and the only way anything has access to this key is when it’s granted by the system. You give this access when you install (trust) an application then sign in or unlock your phone with a password. You can read all the technical documentation in the Android developer documentation, and Tamoghna Chowdhury gives an excellent breakdown at Stack Exchange for further explanation.

Why should (or shouldn’t) I encrypt my SD card?

This is easy to answer. If you don’t want someone who isn’t you, but has access to your phone, to be able to pull the SD card and put it in another computer to see what’s on it, you need to encrypt it. Head into your GS7’s settings and find the Lock screen and security menu to do it.

Outside of the phone you originally used to encrypt your card, your only option to ever reuse the card is to erase it and start fresh.

But encrypting an SD card also has a drawback — you can’t ever read the contents in another device. That means if you break your phone while the SD card was encrypted, everything on it is gone. Because of the way encryption works, even using the same password on a different phone of the same model doesn’t give you access — the actual key is that random number stored in the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) in the phone.

Outside of the phone you originally used to encrypt your card, your only option to ever use the card again is to erase it and start fresh. If you’re storing things like confidential business documents on your SD card, this is a good thing. If you’re using the card to keep memories from your camera, this isn’t such a good thing. You’ll need to decide if what you store on the card is important enough to lose forever if it falls out of your hands, or important enough that you don’t want to lose it when or if your phone breaks.

My solution? I only store photos and a few (very few) videos on my SD card. I just grabbed an old slow one I had lying around until a great 200GB card goes back on sale. I do encrypt the SD card in my T-Mobile Galaxy S7 edge. But (and this is important) I also make a practice of backing up anything I can’t replace, like photos or videos of family and friends, online or locally on my computer. I do both — Google Photos for pictures and YouTube for videos, as well as periodically backing up everything at full resolution and quality on my own physical network storage. I’m not keeping anything really confidential on my SD card, but I still don’t want someone rifling through pictures of my wife or my grandkids. Call me old fashioned.

You’ll need to think and decide for yourself whether or not to encrypt your SD card. There is no wrong answer.

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge

• Galaxy S7 review
• Galaxy S7 edge review
• Galaxy S7 edge with Exynos: A Canadian perspective
• Here are all four Galaxy S7 colors
• Details on the Galaxy S7’s camera
• The SD card is back on the GS7
• Join our Galaxy S7 forums

AT&T Sprint T-Mobile Verizon