Month: July 2016

Recently I watched The Pagemaster, a movie from the 1990s that I hadn't seen since I was 12 years old. It starred Macaulay Culkin, who was then riding on a wave of publicity following his success as Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. As a kid, I loved The Pagemaster, watching it in those spare time moments between playing Command & Conquer and trying in vain to be the next Jurgen Klinsmann. Unfortunately, as is usually the case when revisiting something from your youth: The Pagemaster is not as good as I remembered it.

So too is Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival, a modern version of a classic top-down football game that's built for speed and tactics over the flashy visuals of something like FIFA. Or at least, that's what they (developer Dino Dini) want you to think. In a very real sense, Kick Off Revival is even harder to swallow than a modern viewing of The Pagemaster, developed as it has been without any concessions at all to the modern gaming audience. Hugely questionable visual tweaks and glitches aside, Kick Off Revival plays almost exactly like the original 1989 Amiga and Atari Kick Off game.

Dino Dini's staunch dedication to recreating Kick Off's original play style can be either be seen as an act of supreme naivety, or one of narcissism as he makes an ill-fated attempt to suggest that his 27-year-old design has a place amongst modern football offerings. Both could well be true.

Ars Technica tests Tabletop Simulator VR. Edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

You may have spent your youth dreaming of a future with flying cars, two-way video wristwatches, and robotic overlords, but my earliest high-tech dreams went in a different direction. Since I first hatched from my nerd egg, I have hoped for a fully functional, long-distance version of Dungeons & Dragons—one in which friends from all over the world can gather in a single, virtual hub, be bossed around by a game-running "dungeon master," and dork out with dice rolls and detailed mini-figurines.

That game's handlers, Wizards of the Coast, have resisted the modern era for far too long, leaving open-source developers to fill the gap with a mix of webcams and simple character-sheet interfaces. But now we're in the virtual reality era, which seems ripe for something a little cooler. Enter the delightfully weird sandbox experience that is Tabletop Simulator VR.

Blizzard has always taken an uncompromising attitude towards cheats in its games; it has already issued lifetime bans to thousands of players caught using hacks within weeks of the release of its new shooter Overwatch—even if they make new accounts or buy new copies of the game—and now it's going after the company that makes those cheats possible.

Blizzard has filed a lawsuit in California against Bossland GMBH, the German company behind Watchover Tyrant, a programme which allows all sorts of unpleasant and unsporting cheating shenanigans. Those include a radar that shows where enemies are, and aiming assistance. Bossland has made cheat programmes for most of Blizzard's other games, and the American firm is accusing its longtime rival of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.

Blizzard's suit reads:

Valentina Palladino

The Sony Xperia X Performance.

13 more images in gallery

Sony is switching gears when it comes to smartphones and that shift is embodied in the new X line of handsets. There's the Xperia XA Ultra, a "selfie" smartphone with a 16-megapixel front-facing camera, the middle-of-the-road Xperia X equipped with a Snapdragon 650 processor, and then there's the Xperia X Performance. This device is the "flagship" of sorts for the new line, sporting a 5-inch FHD display, a Snapdragon 820 processor, and 3GB of RAM.

New letter aside, some of these X phones pick up right where the Z series left off, which means that in some ways they feel just a step behind the rest of the competition. The X Performance's biggest problem isn't that it's a bad phone but that it's a $700 phone that often feels inferior to $400 phones.

Look and feel

All of Sony's new Xperia X smartphones look quite similar, and the Xperia X Performance looks nearly identical to the standard Xperia X. Thanks to a better processor and a larger battery, the X Performance is just about a millimeter thicker and a few grams heavier than the Xperia X. While the lower-powered handset resembles a more rigid iPhone 6s, the X Performance emphasizes its blockiness with the additional thickness and weight.