Recommended Reading: Can Apple avoid a fate similar to IBM?
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you’ll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.
Apple Won’t Always Rule. Just Look at IBM.
by Jeff Sommer
The New York Times
Apple’s growth is staggering. It’s also unsustainable… just ask IBM. The folks in Cupertino may still have room to expand the company’s reach, but there are some signs that the ceiling may be approaching. Of course, IBM, a company that was once on top, is doing great work, but its market cap is estimated to be less than a quarter of Apple’s.
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Young Guru is the Most Influential Man in Hip-Hop You’ve Never Heard Of Chances are you’ve never heard of Young Guru, but that’s a name you should know. In addition to being Jay Z’s sound engineer for 16 years, he influences some of hip-hop’s biggest names, and folks in Silicon Valley, too. |
Ten Years to Midnight Jon Bois, the SB Nation writer responsible for “Breaking Madden,” resurrected the NBA 2K15 version of his video game hackery this week. During the process, he sought to destroy the NBA with a hoard of 99-rated 7-foot-tall immortals. |
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A Founder of Secret, the Anonymous Social App, is Shutting it Down By now, you’ve probably read our report about the end of Secret. The New York Times’ Mike Isaac offers more info on the matter, including the perils of growing and maintaining an anonymous user base. |
The Toxicity and Empathy of Social Media, in Videogame Form This piece examines the profound power of social media in the game Killing Time at Lightspeed, and what we can learn from that title’s take on online social interaction. |
[Image credit: Apic/Getty Images]
Control the ‘GTA V’ cellphone with an iPhone, Arduino and a hack
Grand Theft Auto V has a few mobile apps of its own, but one enterprising modder has taken the idea to its natural conclusion: an application that lets you control the in-game cellphone with an iPhone. With the application you can scroll through text messages on-screen, peep your current list of objectives and, among other things, even control the in-game phone’s camera. The YouTube video’s description (spotted by former Joystiq’r Dave Hinkle) does’t offer much by way of details other than it’s running on an Arduino Leonardo with an Ethernet shield connected to a PC, sadly.
And whether or not the app’s creator will release this to the public isn’t exactly clear at this point, either. Perhaps if you ask nicely enough in the video’s comments section that could happen. If anything, it looks a whole lot more practical than grinding in an app to train protagonist Franklin’s dog. Maybe best of all? You likely don’t have to worry about remembering your Rockstar Social Club password to use it.
Holy schnikies, this dude made an app for his real-life phone that controls the GTA V in-game phone. Brilliant! https://t.co/1fTO1gNA8O
– Dave Hinkle (@davehinkle) May 1, 2015
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Mobile
New game from ‘Banjo-Kazooie’ team fully funded in 40 minutes
All that the team at Playtonic Games had to say was, “It’s a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie,” and their project probably would have reached its £175,000 funding goal on Kickstarter. But Playtonic — a studio composed of former Rare developers — instead revealed gameplay videos, pretty 3D screenshots, a colorful world and a few songs from their new game, and then they promised it was a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie. That said, Yooka-Laylee blasted past its Kickstarter goal in less than 40 minutes and the numbers just keep on climbing. Andy Robinson, Playtonic’s writer and only non-Rare veteran, calls the quick success “incredible.”
“Since we first discussed this project at the beginning of the year the response has been amazing,” Robinson says. “The fans are what convinced us to go bigger and launch this Kickstarter, and now together we’ll hopefully birth not just an amazing modern platform game, but convince other developers that this is a genre the public are very much interested in.”
Yooka-Laylee (yes, like the tiny guitar) is a 3D platformer starring Yooka, a bipedal lizard-like dude, and Laylee, a purple “wisecracking lady-bat.” They have unique abilities, such as Yooka’s tongue-grapple and Laylee’s tactical sonar blast, and together these best buds explore five worlds filled with weird characters and feisty bosses. Also, one of the abilities is a “giant fart bubble.” Playtonic knows the way to its players’ hearts.
Much of our footage, though representative of our goals, will likely be unrecognizable compared to the final product — in a very good way.
Yooka-Laylee is in development for PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U, with a goal to launch on some of these platforms by October 2016. Playtonic planned ahead with its Kickstarter, listing stretch goals through £1 million that include the addition of more levels, extra bosses, new modes and, lastly, a simultaneous day-one release on Xbox One, PS4 and Wii U.
Everything on the Kickstarter page was created in just three months, a feat that Robinson largely attributes to the team’s experience. Still, this is only the beginning.
“It’s worth highlighting that what you’ve seen so far is still very early,” Robinson says. “We focused on nailing the characters and tone of Yooka-Laylee the best we could in the time that we had. But beyond that, much of our footage, though representative of our goals, will likely be unrecognizable compared to the final product — in a very good way.”
A tearful tech demo from the studio behind ‘Final Fantasy’
Square Enix, the studio responsible for the famously pretty Final Fantasy series, routinely creates tech demos for the latest and greatest gaming systems, and this week it added one more to that repertoire. During Microsoft’s BUILD dev conference, Square Enix showed off a real-time DirectX 12 tech demo called WITCH: Chapter 0 [cry]. True to its name, this demo includes a crying woman — Agni from previous Square Enix tech demos — and all of the wonky facial animations that come with such an activity. WITCH features 63 million polygons per scene, “six to 12 times more” than what was possible with DirectX 11, Microsoft says. Check out the real-time demo below and note that while the animations certainly are pretty, there isn’t much going on in these scenes in terms of AI or NPC population.
Filed under: Gaming, HD, Microsoft, NVIDIA
Source: Nvidia
‘Street Fighter’ pros hardly even look at their character
Do something enough and it becomes second nature: muscle memory and instinct kicks in. But does that hold for the high-twitch dynamics of pro gaming-level Street Fighter 4? Japanese gaming site 4Gamer rigged up a gaming PC with SteelSeries’ Sentry Gaming Eye Tracker, watching the gaze of Street Fighter pro-gamer Sako as he indulged in a few rounds. Rather than focus on his own player, or the opponent, his view typically rests somewhere between the two; the pro-gamer likely be trying to gauge incoming attacks and connect distance for their own. As the Japanese site notes, it wasn’t exactly a high stakes bout, but the video suggests, at least, that it’s not where your character is, but where it’s going that’s important. Which is also this editor’s life philosophy, coincidentally. See where the pros are looking, right after the break.
Filed under: Gaming
Via: Geek.com
Source: 4Gamer (Japanese)
Xbox 360 update makes the digital transition easier
It turns out that support for bigger external hard drives isn’t all that the latest Xbox 360 preview’s packing. The surprise features aren’t huge by any means but they’re pretty self explanatory and as of now should make using the console a bit easier, regardless. Let’s dig in. First up we have a view for recent purchases followed by a password reset function, network statistics information and the ability to see your Microsoft account balance right from the system dashboard. Like I said, nothing earth-shattering on a piece-by-piece basis, but taken as a whole they offer a pretty clear explanation for why Redmond is updating the console in the first place: making it easier to go from discs to downloadable gaming. As a reminder, Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb says that if you have any other feature suggestions for the almost decade-old console be sure to hit the Xbox feedback website.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
Source: Major Nelson
Sony kills its head-mounted video display to go all-in on VR
For those with long-ish memories, Sony’s HMZ series of head-mounted displays were a very rudimentary way to catch movies on a “750-inch screen.” Of course, strapping one to your face wasn’t a very social way to spend an evening, so you can understand that the device’s appeal was a bit limited. So limited, in fact, that the company is now sending the project down the Shinano river on a longboat piled high with firewood. According to Japanese news outfit AV Watch, Sony bosses have decided to devote all of its resources to improving Morpheus, the PlayStation-branded virtual reality headset, as well as the company’s take on Google Glass.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Wearables, HD, Sony
Source: AV Watch
Microsoft bought ‘Minecraft’ because it’s perfect for HoloLens
Microsoft surprised many when it announced it had acquired Mojang, maker of the hit game Minecraft for $2.5 billion. What could a company specializing in operating systems and business software possibly want with a sandbox game primarily enjoyed by children? The game’s creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, certainly had something to do with it, but Microsoft had something else in its arsenal that was also perfectly suited: HoloLens.
“Let’s have a game that, in fact, will fundamentally help us change new categories,” Nadella told the New York Times in an interview. “HoloLens was very much in the works then, and we knew it.” Already, we’ve had a taste of what Microsoft might be planning with the game. In our brief time with HoloLens, we played Holobuilder, a game inspired by Minecraft that let us build a virtual world in the demonstration room and blow a (virtual) hole in the wall. During HoloLens’ surprise January unveiling, Microsoft included Minecraft in its demonstration video, hinting that the game would be the perfect showcase for the capabilities of its upcoming headset.
Obviously, Microsoft isn’t new to gaming, but with rivals moving into different categories like virtual reality, the company has taken a different approach with HoloLens. Headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR work by tricking your eyes, but Microsoft’s hoping that holograms, or more specifically augmented reality, will wow consumers by overlaying digital objects on a real world canvas. It’s already received a lot of publicity, but Nadella knows that he has his work cut out: “I don’t want to overhype it like Google Glass and say this is the next,” he said. “I want us to be deliberate about what it is.”
Filed under: Gaming, HD, Microsoft
Source: New York Times
Xbox One game streaming on Windows 10 is a killer app
With the release of Windows 10, Sony won’t be the only company to offer game streaming from its consoles. Today we finally got our hands on Windows 10’s Xbox One game streaming feature, which lets you bring your entire Xbox gaming experience to any PC running the new OS. And even in its early state, it looks like it will satisfy even the most demanding gamers. Microsoft made a risky bet by demoing the feature with Sunset Overdrive, a fast-paced game where you’d notice the slightest hint of slowdown. And as you can see in the video below, it’s virtually indistinguishable from the native Xbox One experience while running on a Surface Pro 3.
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Windows 10 streamed Sunset Overdrive at its full resolution, and there weren’t any major issues or delatys. Having spent dozens of hours with the game on my Xbox One, I didn’t notice much of a difference playing it streamed. All of its acrobatic maneuvers and twitch-heavy gunplay felt as responsive as ever. Best of all, you don’t need any crazy hardware to stream games with Windows 10. The demo was running on a fairly typical Intel Core i5 system, and it can run on even slower computers if they have some form of H.264 encoding (because the stream is coming over as a video file). Naturally, your Xbox One gets locked down when you’re streaming something, since it’s still doing the heavy lifting.
So far, Windows 10’s game streaming only works with an Xbox One on your local network. But according to Kevin Unangst, senior director of marketing for Microsoft Studios, the company could eventually implement remote play. That’s something Sony already offers with the PlayStation 4 (and 3, to a lesser extent) over its Vita handheld and some Android devices. But for many people, streaming a game on a PC they already own sounds a lot more useful than having to buy a separate device.
Turn your home into a haunted house with AR game ‘Night Terrors’
You’re home alone. It’s the dead of night and all of the lights are off; you creep down the hallway with one hand dragging along the wall, your phone serving as a makeshift flashlight. You hear a young girl’s voice whisper from the bedroom in front of you and the hair on the back of your neck stands up straight. You pause. Your heart pounds. A dull ringing assaults your ears. You creep forward, holding the phone higher, when suddenly — a high-pitched shriek as your phone’s light starts rapidly flashing and a deformed, undead monster barrels down the hallway directly toward you. You drop your phone. Game over.
That’s basically the premise of Night Terrors, an in-development, augmented reality game for mobile devices that maps out the entirety of your house and fills it with terrifying creatures, turning a home into a real-life survival-horror game. It’s currently looking for $70,000 on Indiegogo — developers say they’ve already created a system that understands spatial elements such as walls and complex floorplans, and they’re using physical special effects rather than CGI. It sounds like an innovative and truly horrifying project, even as its narrative plays off of an overused gaming conceit: Save the girl and be the hero. That’s so close to being cliche, it’s scary.
Source: Night Terrors on Indiegogo
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