Month: January 2016

Natsume made 2,800% more on this cartridge by waiting 23 years to sell it.

These days, it's not uncommon to see unopened, "factory sealed" copies of games from decades-past selling on eBay for huge markups over the original price they demanded on the shelves of Funcoland or Babbage's. Usually, though, those mint condition games are being resold by forward-thinking collectors looking to make a profit. But at least one storied game publisher is currently getting in on the act, making some decent profits by clearing out sealed copies of classic games that have been sitting around its office shelves for decades.

To be sure, the bulk of Natsume's business still comes from the niche games it continues to publish for the Wii U, 3DS, and PlayStation Vita. But the Japanese publisher's eBay store has recently started to include brand new copies of older games from Natsume's back catalog, plucked directly from the company's office closets.

Natsume's collection of sellable legacy titles boasts a lot of forgettable, low-cost "classics" such as Reel Fishing on the Wii and Math Play for the DS. But it also has quite a few well-regarded games that are relatively hard to find in factory-sealed condition today, including SNES action games Pocky & Rocky, epic RPG Lufia II, and farming simulator Harvest Moon 64.

X's new logo. (credit: Re/Code)

A report from Recode gives us a nice update on the goings-on inside of Google X—Google/Alphabet's moonshot division—and the group has a new name and a new logo. It dropped the "Google" and is just "X" now, and you can the division's big yellow X logo above.

In The Google Tracker, we wondered if all the Alphabet companies with "Google" branding would end up getting renamed, and Google X is merely the latest division to drop "Google" once it left Google. We've also seen Google Ventures turn into "GV" (yes, just the letters), and Google Life Sciences become "Verily." The remaining non-Google products that use the "Google" name are Google Capital, Google Fiber, and Google Self Driving Cars.

The report says X is "sharpening its focus" and "framing itself as Alphabet’s incubator." X remains Alphabet's moonshot factory—it's there to evaluate ideas, build working solutions, and spin the projects out into Alphabet companies. The report says a new group inside X, called the "Foundry" is "creating tighter criteria" on when these projects get to live or die.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (far right) with CIA director John Brennan (center) and FBI director James Comey (left) before Congress last year. Clapper and Brennan have both now been targeted by hackers calling themselves "Crackas With Attitude". (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The same individual or group claiming to be behind a recent breach of the personal e-mail account of CIA Director John Brennan now claims to be behind the hijacking of the accounts of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed to Motherboard that Clapper was targeted and that the case has been forwarded to law enforcement.

Someone going by the moniker "Cracka," claiming to be with a group of "teenage hackers" called "Crackas With Attitude," told Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchiarai that he had gained access to Clapper's Verizon FiOS account and changed the settings for his phone service to forward all calls to the Free Palestine Movement. Cracka also claimed to have gained access to Clapper's personal e-mail account and his wife's Yahoo account.

In October, Crackas With Attitude claimed responsibility for hacking CIA Director Brennan's personal e-mail account and gaining access to a number of work-related documents he had sent through it—including his application for a security clearance and credentials. The group also apparently gained access to a number of government web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person's arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records. The group published a spreadsheet of personal contact details for over 2,000 government officials. The Twitter account used to post the information was suspended shortly afterward.

(credit: ©2016 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Yefim Kligerman)

The latest Magic expansion set, Oath of the Gatewatch (OGW), will be released on January 22. OGW is the follow-up to Battle for Zendikar, continuing the story of Zendikar with a smaller set of 180 cards, including a new buddy for the Eldrazi titan Ulamog: Kozilek, the Great Distortion. Here he is in all his many-tentacled glory:

Kozilek, the Big Bad of this Magic expansion. (credit: ©2016 Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA & other countries. Illustration by Aleksi Briclot)

Ahead of the official OGW release there's also a bunch of prerelease events on January 16 and 17—this coming weekend—at your local game shop. If you haven't played Magic in a while, or you just want a taste of the new set before buying a box of cards (or two), the mega-casual prerelease events (which cost about £20/$30) are the perfect opportunity to dip your toes in.

And now, without further ado, read on for our review of Oath of the Gatewatch. We've been playing it for the past week, so we have lots to say about the themes and mechanics of the new set, as well as some thoughts on how some new cards might factor into Constructed formats.