Month: July 2016

This Imgur post of a Holocaust Museum scene within Pokémon Go, which has since been taken down by its original poster, may have been faked, but its cultural impact has already been slammed by museum representatives. (credit: Imgur)

Pokémon Go's stratospheric launch last week is the stuff of social-scientist dreams, in terms of seeing how millions of people are using a semi-social, map-based smartphone game with little precedent. The results have ranged from adorable to troubling, and while some restaurants and shops are advertising that they welcome Pokémon Go players, other locations are not. In particular, a social-media flare-up highlighted one of the more extreme examples of the app's fallout: when users descend upon a culturally sensitive landmark while wielding a camera- and GPS-powered app.

On Tuesday, representatives for Washington, DC's Holocaust Museum issued a statement to the Washington Post asking visitors to put Pokémon Go away. "Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism," communication director Andrew Hollinger told the Post.

The statement came following a rash of players who visited the museum with the app turned on, attracted by the fact that the Holocaust Museum counts as a "Pokéstop" and can therefore be seeded with the game's "beacon" items to attract a higher number of the game's collectible Pokémon characters. Since the game also includes a camera function, which projects 3D Pokemon characters into real-world scenes, one image began circulating online of a Koffing Pokémon—as in, a gaseous, poisonous smoke monster—floating inside the museum.

This all-seeing eye mocks Necropolis' players throughout their randomly generated dungeon delves. (credit: Harebrained Schemes)

On paper, the pitch for dungeon-delving video game Necropolis sounds pretty off-putting: a roguelike, permadeath-loaded spin on Dark Souls, in which friends can inadvertently kill each other when they team up in co-op. Specifically, its off-putting nature is two-fold. If you're not a hardcore gamer, that sentence is gobbledygook, but if you are a hardcore gamer, you'll look at that pitch with appropriate trepidation. You can't just slam all of those words together and get a fun, functional game... can you?

The bad news is that a single session of Necropolis won't answer those doubts. Harebrained Schemes' first foray into the roguelike genre relies on a few too many random-content-generation tropes that don't all lend themselves well to an action-RPG that revolves around giant dungeons, heavy swords, and surprise monster attacks.

The worse news comes if you let Necropolis infect your brain in a "just one more" capacity. If you give the game enough of a chance, you'll uncover just enough systems that do work to make the dedication worth the pain. But perhaps only barely.

It has been a full two-and-a-half years now since we first saw the game-playing TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot) take full control of a Super Mario World cartridge. In that time, you would think we would have gotten tired of seeing the machine mangle classic games using nothing but data sent through the controller ports on actual gaming hardware.

Then last week's Summer Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon came along, and on Saturday, TASBot showed off its newfound ability to beat Super Mario Bros. 3 in less than a second (the marathon run had some padding, so it's actually visible to the audience). Our jaws were on the floor once again. There must be some sort of trick. How in the world is this possible?

Exploiting a decades-old hardware bug

The graphical glitches here are a result of some bits of memory that SMB3 fails to initialize at the beginning of the game.

TASBot's newest bit of game-breaking magic relies on the vagaries of the NES' DPCM (differential pulse code modulation) sound channel. This one-bit data stream was used to play extremely basic audio samples in select games, including Super Mario Bros. 3.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is grilled by GOP lawmakers during a Tuesday hearing. (credit: House Judiciary Committee feed)

Republican lawmakers grilled Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Tuesday over why she chose not to prosecute Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for sending classified data through her private e-mail server when she was secretary of state.

But the Obama appointee refused to answer, saying it would be "inappropriate" to respond to lawmakers' repeated questions.

"While I understand that this investigation has generated significant public interest, as attorney general, it would be inappropriate for me to comment further on the underlying facts of the investigation or the legal basis for the team’s recommendation,” Lynch told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice.

Tesla's Model X SUV. Our brief drive in one leads us to believe it could be the best driving SUV on the market.

6 more images in gallery

It has been a rough couple of weeks for Tesla. Until now, the electric vehicle maker has been a media doyenne, wowing us with EVs that are credible alternatives to the traditional combustion-powered car or SUV—even attractive finally to some drivers for whom not being able to go on a cross-country road trip at a moment's notice is a deal-breaker.

It all started at the end of June, when Tesla revealed in a blog post that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had begun an investigation into the company's Autopilot system following a fatal crash in Florida in May. Since then, the Detroit Free Press has reported on another pair of Tesla crashes—a Model X SUV that rolled over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on July 1, followed by another Model X crash that took place on July 10—calling into doubt the safety of Autopilot. Unlike the May crash, neither of the subsequent incidents involved fatalities.

Tesla has said that it does not have data to support Autopilot being a factor in the July 1 crash, telling the Detroit Free Press in a statement that "We received an automated alert from this vehicle on July 1 indicating air bag deployment, but logs containing detailed information on the state of the vehicle controls at the time of the collision were never received. This is consistent with damage of the severity reported in the press, which can cause the antenna to fail."

The seedy world of video game gambling has recently been thrust into the spotlight after the revelation that a pair of successful YouTubers were promoting a gambling site, CSGOLotto, that they happened to own. They failed to disclose their relationship with the site, instead acting as if they merely stumbled across it.

That story has attracted a lot of attention to the massive world of game-related betting, and it has gotten players and critics riled up about the state of the third-party sites that promote and maintain those bets. But while those kinds of dubious-looking sites are easy to malign, the issue of kid-friendly gambling, and its rampant promotion, has reached a point where the problem can't be resolved if we don't assign blame to the game and online marketplace developer at the heart of everything: Valve Software.

Hats and skins, the chips of the online gambling world

Valve's two biggest games at the moment, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, enjoy unabashed popularity among gaming's bettors. Gambling sites routinely sponsor tournaments and streams, making the phenomenon hard to avoid if you have any interest in e-sports. Most gambling is of the straightforward "bet on who will win a professional game" type, though not all; CSGOLotto, for example, creates pools of in-game items that one person wins in a randomized draw.