‘Final Fantasy’ celebrates 30 years of not being very final

On December 18, 1987, developer Square released its first Final Fantasy title to the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicon console. While Hironobu Sakaguchi thought it would be his last video game, the title was a financial success, leading to a continuous stream of sequels released on every gaming platform since then, including a surprising recent foray onto iOS with Final Fantasy XV Pocket . The first Final Fantasy was included on the recent NES Classic , too, if you were lucky enough to grab one before Nintendo discontinued making them. Now the publisher is known as Square Enix , and has since released 14 other main Final Fantasy games, with a host of spin-off games and crossover titles, as well. Games in the series tend to have deep (if confusing) plot lines, turn-based RPG mechanics and small groups of heroes bent on battling great evil while they learn more about each other as people in the process. The publisher is celebrating the title’s 30th anniversary with a ton of commemorative items that it’s been selling all year, including T-shirts, discounted Final Fantasy titles, plush dolls and, yes, even themed ballpoint pens. Whether you’re a long-time fan or just learning about the long-running, ironically-named series, you might enjoy browsing the memorabilia and remembering the first time you played a Final Fantasy title (mine was Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy). Source: Square Enix

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‘Final Fantasy’ celebrates 30 years of not being very final

Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

On September 7th, an extraordinarily powerful radio telescope in Canada has begun listening to the sounds of the universe. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME will help scientists learn more about the history of the cosmos, radio bursts from pulsars and gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime whose existence were finally confirmed by scientists in 2016. CHIME looks like a collection of four 100-meter-long skateboarding halfpipes, but they weren’t made for anybody to skate on. They were built over the past seven years to hear very weak signals from the universe and to gather one terabyte of information per second all day, every day. That means it’s constantly creating and updating a massive 3D map of space. When the 50 Canadian scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) started conceptualizing the project, there was no system that could handle that amount of information. Thanks to advances in video game hardware, the system now exists. Since 1 TB per second is pretty insane, CHIME compresses the info it gathers by a factor of 100, 000 first before saving files on disks. Now that it’s up and working, CHIME is ready to work towards achieving its primary goal: measuring the acceleration of the universe’s expansion. An accurate measurement of the expansion will help scientists figure out what causes it, whether it’s actually the mysterious form of energy that’s believed to be permeating space called ” dark energy ” or something else. By extension, the telescope’s data could one day confirm if dark energy truly exists. University of British Columbia’s Dr. Mark Halpern explains: “With the CHIME telescope we will measure the expansion history of the universe and we expect to further our understanding of the mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion ever faster. This is a fundamental part of physics that we don’t understand and it’s a deep mystery. This is about better understanding how the universe began and what lies ahead.” Source: CHIME

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Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

New ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ site manages the rules so you can just play

Dungeons & Dragons , the quintessential pen-and-paper game, is more popular than ever, thanks to Twitch channels like Geek and Sundry and podcasts like The Adventure Zone . But it’s one thing to listen or watch a presentation crafted by seasoned gamers and another to actually run your own adventure. Players may get frustrated by the hundreds of pages of rules and quit before they’ve even had their first goblin encounter. Wizards of the Coast and social gaming firm Curse aim to fix this with the launch of D&D Beyond , a website and app intended to take care of all the fine print and number crunching, leaving dungeon masters and players free to focus on crafting a good story. While Curse specializes in video game add-ons and communities, D&D Beyond is a different kind of project — a digital companion for a tabletop game. At launch it will mostly consist of a compendium of the rules and world information from D&D ‘s fifth edition, broken down into sections like “spells” and “monsters” that can be either browsed in a list or searched, with plenty of filters to narrow down the exact information required. The current Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide may give you all the information you need to play an adventure, but anyone who’s ever used the books can attest to how hard it is to find anything in them. Many players end up turning to outside wikis and forums to get the information they want instead. Wizards of the Coast has tried over the years to provide some limited online help: Dungeons & Dragons has had digital content since its second edition, and the tools provided for the fourth edition did rather well with players. One thing all of these sites had in common is that they’ve always been meant as a supplement to the game — you still needed to buy the books to play. The eventual goal is for D&D Beyond to completely replace the physical books. That doesn’t mean paper devotees are out of luck — the guides will stay in print as long as there’s demand. But players who prefer to keep everything on their computer or phone will have an official way to do that. While seasoned players will appreciate things like easier-to-access game minutia, it’s newbie adventurers who will benefit the most. For example, character creation has been boiled down to a step-by-step process on the Beyond site that walks you through choosing a race, class and so forth. I used the builder to make an elven ranger and was impressed with how easy it is: After each selection it’ll give you drop-downs for things like expertises and languages, with the weapons and armor you can use clearly marked. When I copied my gnome bard from the game I currently play with friends, it actually showed me a few skill roll bonuses I had missed when I leveled up my character by hand. The sheer complexity of Dungeons & Dragons is what’s made it so hard to build effective digital tools for it, but Project Lead Adam Bradford notes that it’s not the depth that makes it so hard to digitize but the breadth. The game is an open world, ultimately only limited by the imagination of its players. The rules are written as a guide, not a rigid framework for adventurers to operate in. To support freedom of ideas the site allows plenty of manual input, ranging from things as mundane as dice rolls to full-blown homebrew content that can be uploaded to the site’s database. There’s an entire section dedicated to sharing user-generated content where gamers can upvote the best submissions and add anything they find to their “collection.” Even with so much of the game experience being moved online, Curse still envisions people sitting around a table to play Dungeons & Dragons , just with their laptops in front of them. Even if the entire game is run through Beyond, with future iterations of the site keeping track of combat turns, attacks and statuses, players will still need to talk to one another to describe what’s happening. The company also sees the site as a way to make the game more accessible when you’re not playing. When you’re at work or in class you can look at your character, browse for new spells and read backstory anytime you want. By making those little things more accessible during downtime, the actual play sessions can be focused on story, socialization and performance. The idea of Dungeons & Dragons as performance hasn’t always been a prominent part of the brand. Sure, you’re trying to amuse yourself and your friends, but no one was really playing for an audience outside gaming conventions. Now you can watch seasoned players run through campaigns like the Penny Arcade’s Acquisitions Inc. video series. Curse wants to help that phenomenon grow, especially after its sale to Twitch last year. You need a Twitch account to sign up for D&D Beyond, because the company has big plans down the line for integrating D&D campaigns into the streaming site. The idea is that when you set up a stream it’ll be connected to the Beyond page for that particular campaign, displaying relevant infographics on the screen to give viewers a better idea of what’s going on. This will include interactive elements — each player will have her character name displayed, which can be moused over to look at that character sheet — and animations for things like spells or statuses. Games will look a lot more professional, and with most of the rules crunching going on behind the curtain, they will be a lot more entertaining to watch, with an increased emphasis on performance. Features like interactive Twitch streams and the ability to run games completely through the site are big tasks, but Bradford says Curse is in it for the long haul. The first step is to get dungeon master tools up and running later this year, like combat and initiative tracking. There’s been a lot of demand for encounter building — that is, designing battles against monsters and other foes. Encounters form the core of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, with a typical session usually structured around one or two big battles. Wizards of the Coast sells predesigned adventures, but some players prefer something more customized to their group, especially if they have the type of friends who tend to step outside the box. Beyond will let dungeon masters tweak existing monsters and build entirely new ones: As an example Bradford mentioned a Challenge Rating 12 Mind Flayer that had been separated from its colony. It would be weaker, but how would a player modify its stats? Beyond can eliminate the guesswork, even taking into account small things like how carrying certain magical items might affect the creature. Unfortunately, these tools won’t be ready when Beyond comes out in August. Everything introduced in the current beta is what players should expect at launch. That’s the compendium, character builder and spell book, which will be available free of charge to registered users. Nothing needed to play will be locked away behind a paywall. Instead, the premium tiers will have features that make the site more useful, like the ability to store unlimited characters or use homebrew content. The site will also offer a lot of onetime purchases, like guides and special character classes. Dungeon masters who opt into the most expensive Master Tier will be able to share this content with their players with a click. It certainly beats having to carry around a backpack full of source books to every session. Of course, some people like carrying around heavy bags of books and arguing about attack bonuses. Nothing has to change for them. But for players who really care about collaborative storytelling and love performing, D&D Beyond could be the push they need to give tabletop role-playing a try. It makes Dungeons & Dragons less about the math and more about being someone else for a little while.

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New ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ site manages the rules so you can just play

Microsoft’s Rumored CloudBook Could Be Your Next Cheap Computer

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a few weeks, at its education-oriented software and hardware event in New York, Microsoft could unveil a sub-premium laptop — something more robust than a Surface but not as fancy as a Surface Book. And rather than run good old Windows 10, the new product could run something called Windows 10 Cloud, which reportedly will only be able to run apps that you can find in the Windows Store, unless you change a certain preference in Settings. The idea is that this will keep your device more secure. However, that does mean you won’t be able to use certain apps that aren’t in the Store — like Steam — on a Windows 10 Cloud device, such as the rumored CloudBook. Microsoft is going after Google’s Chromebooks that are very popular in the education space — so much so that they are playing an instrumental role in keeping the entire PC shipments up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft’s Rumored CloudBook Could Be Your Next Cheap Computer

“All eras” of Star Wars come together in revealing Battlefront II trailer

EA A new cinematic trailer for the next announced Star Wars video game, Battlefront II , was briefly advertised on an official EA Twitter account before being deleted. As of press time, mirrors of the video still haven’t been taken down. Normally, an all-sizzle, no-gameplay trailer doesn’t constitute a reason to break into your regularly scheduled news feed, but the trailer does hint at new things for the multiplayer-focused series, including an expansion to “all eras” and a possible new-character campaign. The trailer opens by focusing on an unidentified woman, and she shows up at the same time as the climactic moment of Return of the Jedi . We see the woman among a group of apparent Imperial guards—clad in mostly black, helmeted armor with red accents—who look up and see the in-construction Death Star explode. This unnamed woman is the only one without a helmet on, and she looks up at the explosion with astonishment, not anguish. Moments later, a TIE Fighter flies through the busted Death Star’s debris, and then we see the same kind of black-and-red helmet in a TIE Fighter cockpit engaging hyperdrive. Since this was combined with teaser text about “a new soldier’s story,” it’s not crazy to expect a structured campaign as a result, in which players use the new character to complete missions within the game’s multiplayer battlegrounds. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“All eras” of Star Wars come together in revealing Battlefront II trailer

The quest to get a unique SNES CD-ROM prototype working again

Part 1 of Ben Heck’s SNES-CD restoration project (part 2 at the bottom of this post). Since a prototype of the fabled, unreleased SNES-CD (aka the “Nintendo PlayStation”) was first found and disassembled last year, we’ve learned enough about this one-of-a-kind piece of hardware to actually emulate homebrew games as if they were running on its CD-ROM drive. The prototype console itself, though, has never been fully functional—it couldn’t generate sound, the CD-ROM drive wouldn’t spin up, and, after a recent trip to Hong Kong, it actually stopped generating a picture. That’s when the prototype’s owners, Terry and Dan Diebold, went to famed gaming hardware hacker Ben Heck . They want this piece of gaming history up and running again. Heck documented his efforts in a fascinating two-part YouTube series that reveals a lot about the system and what makes it tick. Terry Diebold starts off talking about how he first discovered the prototype SNES while boxing up an estate sale, where it was sold in a lot alongside CDs, cups, saucers, and other knickknacks. After paying $75 for the entire lot, Diebold recalls, “if you break it down to everything I did buy, I probably paid a nickel for it.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The quest to get a unique SNES CD-ROM prototype working again

From MUD to MMOG: The making of RuneScape

When he was a boy, growing up in Nottingham, England, Andrew Gower couldn’t afford to buy all of the video games he wanted to play. Rather than mope, he rallied. A wunderkind programmer, Gower created his own versions of the most popular games, pieced together from clues printed in text and image in the pages of video game magazines. Gower’s take on Lemmings— the 1991 Amiga game that was developed by DMA Design six years before the studio made Grand Theft Auto— was his masterwork. “I was proud of that game,” he says. “It was the first [computer game] I’d made that didn’t look like it had been put together by a kid.” Gower would grow up to become, along with his brothers Paul and Ian, the co-founders of Jagex Games Studio and creators of its flagship title  RuneScape.  It’s one of the longest-running massively-multiplayer online games (MMOG), in which players quest together across the Internet in a fantasy world that, like Facebook, continues to rumble and function even when an individual logs off. Launched in 2001, the earliest version of the game looked rather like a fantasy-themed version of The Sims . Characters were viewed from a divine camera, looking down on the action from an isometric perspective. RuneScape takes place in the world of Gielinor, where gods roam among men. The game eschews a linear storyline, allowing players to set their own goals and objectives. Now in its third iteration (the basic game was superseded by a new version in both 2004 and 2013, each of which upgraded its graphics and overhauled the underlying code base), RuneScape has reached an enviable milestone in the fickle world of MMOs: 15 years old. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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From MUD to MMOG: The making of RuneScape

N64’s ‘GoldenEye 007’ goes modern with Unreal Engine 4

Ah, yes. GoldenEye 007 . One of the classic Nintendo 64 titles and a memorable first-person shooter is certainly a game that I spent a lot of time with. Now we have a glimpse of what the game could look like if it was made with the tools available to developers today. YouTube user Jude Wilson recreated a portion of the Facility Map using Unreal Engine 4 , offering a bit of nostalgia for those of us who are familiar with the title. Wilson isn’t the first to do this, as Mario and Sonic have already been given the UE4 treatment. It’s an interesting take, but don’t take our word for it, go through the level yourself via the video down below. Via: Cinema Blend Source: Jude Wilson (YouTube)

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N64’s ‘GoldenEye 007’ goes modern with Unreal Engine 4

Botched database leaks records for 191 million voters

Did you vote in a US election sometime this century? If so, your personal info may be out in the open. Researcher Chris Vickery has discovered that a badly configured database exposed the voter registration info for 191 million Americans, including addresses, party affiliations and state voter IDs. It’s not clear who originally managed the data, but Vickery and Databreaches.net are reaching out to everyone from online services to Congressional political action committees. The two are also contacting law enforcement in hopes of shutting down the leak, although it’s not certain that officials are taking action. The consequences of this database falling into the wrong hands could be severe, as you might have guessed. Less-than-scrupulous marketers and political campaigns could exploit the data, and criminals could combine it with other info to commit fraud or theft. It’s a particularly big problem for people who need to keep their details secret, such as stalking victims and police. Beyond this, the leak illustrates the need for stricter, consistent security standards around voter data — while states like California and South Dakota have sharp limits on where records go and what they’re used for, other states (including Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado) have no real restrictions. There’s a real possibility that this kind of incident could happen again. [Image credit: Getty Images] Via: CSO , Forbes Source: Databreaches.net

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Botched database leaks records for 191 million voters

Social media led police straight to movie pirates

How can law enforcement agencies track down some of the world’s most (in)famous pirates? The same way that we find out how our school frenemies are doing: stalking them on social media. TorrentFreak has investigated the recent convictions of three of the UK’s biggest file-sharers to learn how exactly they were caught. It turns out that copyright enforcement officials are doing the same sort of armchair-sleuthing that we all do, only that they’ve got a hotline straight to the police. For instance, 22-year-old Reece Baker was more commonly known by his online alias, Baker92. According to the report, his fatal mistake was to include a shout-out to his “baby momzie Ria” in an NFO (info) file. Officials at the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft guessed that Baker92 was a surname/year of birth combination. They then searched Equifax’s credit-rating database to find anyone born in 1992 with that surname and, potentially, a child with a woman named Ria. Similarly, 24-year-old Sahil Rafiq posted torrents under a wide variety of usernames, including memory100, hail_alpha and sohail20. Unfortunately, the sohail20 identity was also used on the customer support website for an online retailer. Rafiq had posted a question concerning his laptop, but signed the piece “Kind Regards, Sahil Rafiq.” With his real name, authorities took very little time in finding his Facebook profile and, from there, were able to alert the police. Facebook was also the petard by which 40-year-old Graeme ‘Reidy’ Reid was hoisted, since he used the same anonymous e-mail account on his profile as he did his piracy. FACT bods simply searched for his Hushmail address and his Facebook page popped up — where he’d obligingly listed his occupation as “encoder.” We’ve not checked, but presumably bank robbers are going to start making similarly honest alternations to their social media pages in the near future. As much as FACT would like you to think twice about sharing illegally-obtained material around the web, there’s another moral here. After all, if enforcement officers were able to find these people with a few well-chosen Google searches, then perhaps the secret is to not be so forthcoming with your personal information. Source: TorrentFreak , FACT

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Social media led police straight to movie pirates