Month: September 2016

Schilling poses with the Collector's Edition of 38 Studios' sole release, Kingdoms of Amalur.

The long, winding saga of baseball star Curt Schilling's massive business failure in the video game industry may finally be reaching its end. As The Associated Press reports, Schilling and other former executives at 38 Studios have agreed to pay $2.5 million to the state of Rhode Island to settle outstanding claims of defrauding the state out of $75 million in loans.

The case dates back to 2012, shortly after 38 Studios laid off all of its 379 staffers and declared bankruptcy. Though 38's first game, Kingdoms of Amalur, sold a respectable 1.3 million copies in its first 90 days, the company's financial resources were reportedly drained by work on an ambitious RPG project, codenamed Copernicus, which never saw the light of day (save for this teaser trailer released just before the company's bankruptcy).

The Rhode Island government floated $75 million in bonds to provide loan guarantees that convinced 38 Studios to move from its base in Massachusetts. After the bankruptcy, though, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation argued in its lawsuit that the company had used false financial projections and misleading statements to obscure the fact that the company was "destined to fail according to 38 Studios’ own financial projections."

Enlarge / fruits and vegetables. (credit: USDA)

Adolescent behavior is notoriously difficult to change because teens are very sensitive to anything they perceive as a threat to their autonomy. And, as many parents know, many problematic behaviors come about because teens aren’t particularly motivated by thinking about long-term consequences. Combine those two, and you get teens doing stupid things—and not being willing to listen when that's pointed out to them.

Among other things, these attitudes make it hard to convince teens to eat healthily. However, a recent study published in PNAS demonstrates that it’s possible to use teens’ social values to motivate them to adopt a better diet. The approach makes sense, considering that teens are known to place a high value on their social environments.

The study in question tapped into teens’ tendency to develop social justice goals during their adolescent years—they often do this as a reaction to authority figures whom they perceive as unjust. The researchers designed an intervention presented as an exposé of manipulative food industry marketing. In other words, they showed the teens how high-calorie/low-nutritional value foods are misleadingly marketed as healthy options. They also educated teens about the consequences of food industry manipulations for poor people and young children, who are often tricked into eating the unhealthiest foods. The intervention framed healthy eating as a way of “sticking it to the man.”

Break it down far enough, and every fighting game is essentially an over-complicated, fast-paced game of rock-paper-scissors. Low jab beats uppercut. Jump kick beats low jab. Uppercut beats jump kick. Air block beats uppercut. Air throw beats air block. And on and on, in dozens of different permutations based on the specific characters and positioning involved, repeated hundreds of time with split-second timing in a single match.

Based on some time with the closed alpha test this weekend, Ubisoft's For Honor is definitely a fighting game in this same tradition. While the final game looks like it will have some of the trappings of a Dynasty Warriors-style epic brawler—including countless cannon fodder enemies to mow down with your weapons—the alpha test focuses on online duels with human opponents. The fast-paced punches and kicks of most modern fighting games may have been replaced with slower weapon swings, and the game is missing genre standards like, um, a jump button. Still, the basic rock-paper-scissors battle of feints and reactions is still there beneath the incredibly detailed environments and intricately armored warriors.

Compared to the high-energy, frame-perfect world of the typical modern fighting game, For Honor's battles seem to play out in slow motion. Even the fastest attacks are telegraphed with a relatively lengthy weapon wind-up animation of a half-second or so (no, I didn't use a stopwatch). That gives the opposing player time to flick the right stick to the right, left, or upward to block the direction the attack is coming from with a satisfying clang. There's even a handy semicircle overlay, which clearly shows the direction of the opponent's stance, and it flashes red to give even more warning when an attack is coming.