Month: May 2016

Revolutions are tricky. Ostensibly, they are the end result of the frustration and desperation of a group of people. They are upwellings, the last recourse of a downtrodden nation. In practice, though, they’re often among the most brutal sorts of wars. While oppressors stand as the intended targets, the collapse of a reigning social order and the construction of a new one never comes without moral compromise and collateral damage.

Homefront: The Revolution captures the compromised morals dead-on. Given the haphazard execution of the rest of the game, though, I’m not sure that’s intentional.

A muddy revolution

In this guerrilla war, you play as Ethan Brady, a recent recruit for yet another American Revolution. This time, North Korea, not England, is the occupying force. The Revolution opens with a series of brutal scenes that show your chosen band of freedom fighters as bordering on psychopathic.

After being captured by the Korean People’s Army (KPA) while making bombs, you end up finding your way back to the revolutionaries. Under suspicion of espionage, your former band of brothers beats and brutalizes you before threatening to tear into your flesh with knives and torture you for information. Your main tormentor even goes so far as to suggest that you scream so that she’ll get her fill, all without a shred of indicting evidence.

VIDEO: The ZUS cable versus bullets. Video produced and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Attention PR folks: On average, I get about 100 pitch e-mails a day, and most of them get ignored. But this is how you get my attention:

SUBJECT: What do bulletproof vest and our charging cable have in common?

Hello Lee,

We at Nonda have developed an indestructible charging cable.

Introducing the ZUS charging cable built with Kevlar by DuPont with lifetime warranty.

The cable in question comes in USB-C, micro-USB, and Apple Lighting forms. It's also currently the subject of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has massively exceeded its $10,000 funding goal (it’s up to about $157,000 this morning, about $10,000 more than it had yesterday). The standout feature, Nonda PR says, is the set of Kevlar reinforcements that run through the cable’s core, strengthening it and in theory preventing it from tearing or breaking on repeated bending.

If you've ever wondered what Sega was like at the height of its game-making powers, wonder no more. A staff video from the Sega vaults—made in 1996, the same year that the Sony PlayStation would begin to take over the world—has been released by the production company behind it, Green Mill Filmworks. Not only is the video a fascinating behind-the scenes look at game development and game testing, it is also, without doubt, the most '90s thing I've ever seen.

Even excluding the baggy clothes, questionable hair cuts, and horrifying denim, the desks of game testers interviewed—many of whom said they worked up to 90 hours a week squashing bugs—are littered with '90s paraphernalia. My personal favourite, aside from the multiple appearances of the obligatory (for the '90s at least) Jurassic Park merchandise, is the spinning holographic disk that appears 13 minutes in. I had one of those as a kid, and while I still don't quite understand what the appeal was, they were all the rage at school, even over here in the UK.

Of course, there's lots of Sega tech on show too, with testers having access to the Mega Drive (Genesis to our US friends), 32X, Sega CD, Game Gear, Saturn, and even the short-lived Sega Pico, a laptop-like educational system for kids that was powered by Genesis hardware. Each tester was also issued with development cartridges—which you can see being loaded up with memory chips by hand around 18 minutes in—before having to sit and play the game relentlessly, using a VHS recorder (yes really) to record gameplay and identify when and how bugs appeared.

Google looks set to abolish a feature that allows users to navigate to the previous page by hitting the backspace key, after complaints piled up against the option.

However, it would seem that a small number of users will be very unhappy with the planned change.

The subtle tweak can apparently be seen in Chrome 52, which is currently only available as an unstable "Developer" version.

I'm going on my fifth year in this tech reporting game, and Google I/O 2016 is the only time I've been handed sunglasses, sunscreen, and a protective bandana as part of the welcome pack when I registered at an event.

Google's big developer conference this year isn't being held in its normal location at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco—it was moved to the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Google's hometown of Mountain View. The keynote actually happened in the amphitheatre, and the rest of it was spread out into various ticket and concession booths and the sprawling parking lots surrounding the venue.

As a change of scenery, the move outside was actually fairly pleasant. The worst that can be said of the weather is that it was a little hot the first day and a little windy the second day. My appreciation of the beautiful weather and California greenery was tempered somewhat by an intense allergy to blooming plants, but that isn't Google's fault.