Month: March 2016

(credit: Dan Adelman)

While Microsoft might have hoped that its free-to-play PC version of Forza would grab headlines, its press showcase in San Francisco was far more notable for Xbox chief Phil Spencer's strong hint that the Xbox One's hardware will be upgraded.

After neglecting the PC gaming market for several years, it sounds like Microsoft may now go much further than merely throwing the likes of Quantum Break and Gears of War onto the platform. Microsoft may be trying to apply the whole concept of PC gaming—that is, extremely wide backwards compatibility along with various hardware configurations—onto the appliance-like console market.

"Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger," Spencer said. "When you look at the console space, I believe we will see more hardware innovation in the console space than we've ever seen. You'll actually see us come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible because we have a Universal Windows Application running on top of the Universal Windows Platform."

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Kanye West, after reportedly considering legal action against The Pirate Bay for facilitating mass piracy of his new album The Life of Pablo, has seemingly been caught trying to pirate some music software from The Pirate Bay.

Early Wednesday morning, Kanye tweeted a photo that showed him listening to Sufjan Stevens on YouTube. If you look closely at Kanye's browser tabs, however, you can see that prior to watching the video he was researching—and possibly attempting to download—some advanced wavetable synthesiser software called Serum.

Deadmau5, music producer and co-founder of Xfer Records, which makes Serum, was not amused by Kanye's actions. "What the fuck @kanyewest ... Can't afford serum? Dick," he tweeted. A few minutes later he followed up with this zinger: "Let's start a Kickstarter to help @kanyewest afford a copy of Serum."

NASA/Bill Ingalls

The Soyuz spacecraft, under its main parachute, nears a cloud layer above the Kazahkstan steppe.

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Scott Kelly returned from space Tuesday night, landing on a cold, barren Asiatic steppe. And he couldn't have seemed more pleased with himself—or even with the weather, which featured a cool wind and temperatures in the 20s. "The air feels great out here," Kelly told NASA officials, who were helicoptered to the landing site to meet him.

Shortly after being extracted from the spacecraft, Kelly told his flight surgeon, Dr. Steve Gilmore, that the experience was "not much different than it was five years ago," when he spent six months on the International Space Station.

After a few minutes, Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov were moved to a medical tent where they underwent several tests, such as measurements of their vision, balance, muscle tone, strength, nimbleness of their fingers, and so forth. They then took a helicopter flight back to Dzhezkazgan, in Kazakhstan.