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If you have never heard of Team Fortress Two here is your chance to play! Before we get into anything complicated, there are some basics you should know.
If you have never heard of Team Fortress Two here is your chance to play! Before we get into anything complicated, there are some basics you should know.
Ivy League schools aren't just places for people to row and sip their drinks out of glasses normal people would never use (i.e. snifters). They also the place for trolling on a grand scale. Just take a look at these Trolls de la Resistance!
Originally made as portable convenience locks, padlocks are known for their cheap, simplistic and relatively secure design. Their construction is made up of a body, shackle and locking mechanism, with the shackle typically assuming a "U" shape to be easily linked to things like fences and chains.
National Ignition Facility
Watch out Instagram, there's a new free, sociable photography filter app that hit the iTunes App Store recently, and it just might be some good competition. It's called PicYou and might sound familiar to some of you photo sharing fiends out there. That's because it's been a successful web-based alternative to Instagram for about six months now.
Looking for last-minute Christmas gifts? Give the gift of mobile gaming! Electronic Arts (EA) and Gameloft are having their annual holiday sales just in time for Christmas. If you've got a gamer on your shopping list with an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, a mobile game will make the perfect last minute present. Games that are usually anywhere from $2 to $10 are now on sale for just $0.99, and there's lots to choose from.
I can't believe it, but I've actually read about dozens of people getting their iTouch, iPhone, or iPad stuck in a bricked recovery loop and then going out to buy a new one. This is overly unnecessary. When it gets stuck in the recovery loop, some people mistake themselves by thinking that it is impossible to get the device back into DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode. Getting the device back into DFU mode would at least allow us to jailbreak the device, essentially bringing it back from its ...
What happens when a struggling writer cannot finish the screenplay to her second film? She writes a book.
Who says bourbon can't be a ladies' liquor? Next time you're hosting a dinner party, pick up a mix of berries at your local grocery store. The delicious fruit will highlight the earthy flavors of your favorite bourbon whiskey, resulting in a wonderfully tart and smooth aperitif for your guests. In the below recipe, I opted for Wild Turkey 81 proof.
To the displeasure of many loyal Firefox users, Mozilla has been deploying what seems like a new marketing strategy to "catch up" to Google Chrome. I have no idea if this is because the version number is higher than theirs, but it is downright annoying. It's not all complaints, though. Firefox has done an amazing job at completely revamping its source code and redesigning all of its engines, making it a more than worthy competitor to Chrome. However, we are displeased with Firefox because eve...
Stan Parker StanDP~"Avid PC Enthusiast Since 1982..."
Electronic Arts (EA) and Hasbro have always been a little slow at adapting Scrabble for the cyber culture. They failed to beat Scrabulous to the Facebook market by a whole year, but managed to save face by targeting the mobile market, specifically iPhone and iPod touch, making Scrabble one of the very first mobile apps in the iTunes App Store.
We've covered Glitch before, the oddball indie social MMO involving the minds behind Flickr, Katamari Damacy, and Game Neverending. Yesterday, the game officially left Beta and entered general release. Anyone can create an account and start playing for free, although there are freemium elements in the form of real money purchasable clothing items.
On October 7th, the IndieCade Conference will open its doors to some of the most innovative minds in the independent gaming industry. The three day event located in Culver City, California includes presentations by notable indie designers, workshops, galleries, and mixers. On the following day, however, the IndieCade Festival begins. Unlike the conference, the festival includes events targeted at gamers and the general public. While a $15 wristband will grant you access to keynotes, events, a...
Like the recent XSS 0day exploit found in the Mac and Windows versions of Skype, a similar one has been found in the Skype app for iPhone. The vulnerability allows an attacker to send a message that contains malicious JavaScript code in the "Name" parameter. This code can steal your phonebook, crash the app, and potentially do a lot worse. The URI scheme is improperly identified for the web-kit browser. Instead of going to a blank browser page, it defaults to "file://". The code could steal a...
By now you may have heard that the Diablo 3 Friends and Family beta testing has begun. Diablo III is the next highly anticipated addition in the Diablo trilogy, and is the sequel to Diablo 2, originally published all the way back in 2000. The game is the product of Blizzard Entertainment, a company well known for its very successful Warcraft and Starcraft franchises. Like the other Blizzard series, Diablo III will be exclusively for PCs at launch. Console players can rejoice as the lead proje...
You may not do it in public, and you might not admit to it among your friends, but you do it. We all do it... sing. We sing when we're alone in our cars, at home when no one's listening, and when we've had a little too much to drink and don't care anymore, all inhibitions aside. We love to croon and belt out lyrics to our favorite songs because it makes us feel good, no matter how good or how awful we are, or how well we know the words. Well... now you can at least be proud of one of those th...
It's only been ten years? Where has all of the time gone? When RuneScape came out in January of 2001, the world was a different place. There were no such thing as Xboxes, normal gamers didn't care about the number of cores on a processor, and the World Trade Center Towers dominated the Lower Manhattan skyline.
The Australian government has a dysfunctional history with video games. Any regular Yahtzee Croshaw follower can attest to that. The Parliament has established a series of unfortuante regulations that make games both highly taxed and overregulated in price. Bringing any goods all the way to an island in the bottom of the world is expensive to begin with, and new games in Australia can tip the scales at $80 or more.
Minecraft might still be in development, but that doesn't mean a creative guy like Notch doesn't have time for other projects. A few months ago he and his company Mojang announced their second game, a digital collectible trading card affair called Scrolls. A simple title (perhaps too generic if anything), but it's not the name of an extant game, and it's appropriate given the visual style and card-based gameplay of the game itself.
Hard drive space is one of the cheapest things you can add to your computer. But people take it for granted, thus game developers have given up any efforts in keeping games compact. With all of its expansion packs, World of Warcraft takes up more than 60 GB of hard drive space, and almost any AAA game consumes a gig or two.
There's still about eight months before the final chapter in the Mass Effect series comes out, but some trigger happy fans are already building replica costumes and prop weapons to celebrate the upcoming release. BioWare themselves recently commissioned some of these projects, which were shown at their booth at Comic-Con 2011 a couple weeks ago in San Diego. One of these projects was the armor that turian Garrus Vakarian sports in Mass Effect 3, by Kommissar Props. But even more impressive wa...
Fatherhood is difficult, especially when you're an octopus. That is the moral of the 2011 IGF Student Showcase winner Octodad, available for free from its website. This hilarious little title was created by a team of interactive media students at DePaul University in Chicago, and is the latest in a stream of successful indie games to come out of collegiate video game design programs. In fact, it's so successful that a sequel is in the works.
Localizing a game is a task many do not fully understand. Not only do localizers have to translate the games they work on into a different language, but they have to translate it into a different culture as well. Oftentimes art assets, plot elements, and menu systems are changed to suit regional sensitivities. Japanese media tends to have their common drunkard characters removed or censored in American versions, for example.
Google started culling Google+ accounts. There are two main targets: businesses and those who are using pseudonyms. For businesses, Google is promising to provide their own version of Facebook Pages, which will be released later this year. For those who use pseudonyms, they aren't so lucky. According to Google+'s community standards, users must "use the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you". The purpose of this rule is ostensibly to discourage spammers and people from set...
With Microsoft's release of the Kinect SDK, things seem to have slowed down a bit in the world of Kinect development. Have developers exhausted the uses of Kinect already? No way! Four researchers at Cornell University have created an AI-based system on the Kinect that can recognize what you're doing, and maybe even who is doing it.
Six months ago, 1.3 million registered users of Gawker Media had their passwords compromised when the site was hacked by Gnosis. The passwords were encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made publicly available for all to see. Just three weeks ago, Sony Pictures was hacked by LulzSec, with 1 million passwords taken and 40,000 made publicly available. Comparing the two data sets, Troy Hunt found 88 accounts on both sites that used the same email address, and of those accounts, 67% use...
Focusing has always been a problem with photographers, and even with today's digital cameras it's not easy. The most obvious problem is trying to accurately focus on the subject before exposure. Next, you have to choose the correct aperture size in relation to the depth of field, and make sure you're using the correct exposure. Then there's lens aberrations, where a certain ray of light does not converge to a single focal point in the desired image, resulting in some light leaking away from t...
Xe Systems, the Private-Defense-Contractor-Formerly-Known-As-Blackwater, has been busy attempting to re-brand themselves. They have a new name, several new sub-names, and have at least titularly shifted their focus to training rather than mercenary work. Controversial founder Erik Prince is no longer with the company, which is now owned by a large investment consortium.
The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T.) has provided three different energetic and passionate methods for voicing support for Ai Weiwei, the famous Chinese artist and activist who has been detained without known reason by the Chinese government since March 31st.
ARGs have taken the concept of video games to some odd and wonderful real-world places. Socks, Inc. might not be the first ARG, and LittleBigPlanet might have defined the sock-puppet-based game archetype, but it is the first game to combine ARG and sock puppet elements into one package.
One of the biggest advantages iOS has over Android as a mobile platform is how readily and fully it has embraced mobile gaming. There are over 200,000 games available in the Apple store, compared to approximately 100,000 in the Android Marketplace. As an Android-using gamer, this has always bothered me.
This article describes the very basics of compiling a program on Linux. It is targeted at the absolute beginner. Sometimes beginners search for programs on the web for their Linux systems, and is faced with the reality that they have to compile the program themselves, either because there exists no binary for their architecture, or the author of the program just doesn't release any binaries at all, but only sources.
In a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory, character Sheldon Cooper designed a highly complicated three-person game of chess, with an odd-shaped nonagon board and two new pieces—serpent and old woman. Seemingly pioneering, in truth, three-player chess has been around since the early-1700s, with many different variations, most of which retain the basic game structure and sixteen pieces that each player controls.
Shoot-em-up games, or shmups, consist of lone or small groups of players shooting at and being shot at by hordes of colorful enemies. The genre is thought to have peaked in the mid-'90s, but recent games in the indie world may be saying otherwise. Geometry Wars and other twin-stick games kicked off the trend, but newbies Trouble Witches NEO, Outland and just-released Gatling Gears have brought some much needed originality into the modern shmup scene—making it something worth exploring again. ...
After stumbling across an interesting article by Hanne Blank—(apparent) hobbyist chef and widely known activist on the issues of weight, bisexuality, and sexuality—I've become even more fascinated by kitchen shortcuts. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold's recently released Modernist Cuisine also spurred a similar interest, particularly after reading a WSJ piece in which Myhrvold attests —by law of science, of course— that a ¼-inch-thick sheet of steel is more than adequate in place of an ex...
With the globally rampant use of such social networking platforms as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, the issue of privacy has become a prevalent concern for many. And for good reason—there's the violation of Facebook employing user names in ads, the Etsy slip-up, and of course, the everyman act of recklessly sharing too much information via common social media outlets: a night of drinking results in morning after embarrassment, or worst case scenario, sloppy Facebook posts and tweets resul...
NASA just released this beautiful image of what's leftover from a supernova explosion. The red cloud is expanding cosmic debris, the blue is a blast wave of electrons, and the stripes at the edge tell of a high energy burst of x-rays that may be bound for earth. This image was enhanced—Photoshopped—so that scientists can have an easier time interpreting the picture and so that the public can have an easier time appreciating the beauty of nature.
When the iPad 2 was released earlier this month, as to be expected there was a whole lotta buzz. And for good reason—while the the newest version shares the same price tag as the old, it boasts some significant new features. In case you missed it, here's a quick overview:
Traders are in a frenzy of instant messaging all day long. The best ones, at least. A recent study says the best traders are the ones that IM the most and the least successful traders were the ones that IM the least. So, it seems like if you can find a way to jump on the bandwagon, you can beat the odds, too. But, what's their secret? Are they passing around insider information?