Month: October 2016

Enlarge / One of LDR's websites, cashforiphones.com, is still around as of this writing and is still quoting high resale values for phones.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued a Nevada-based company called Laptop & Desktop Repair LLC (LDR) for allegedly bilking thousands of customers out of millions of dollars in promised funds for the resale of their smartphones.

LDR operated dozens of websites that promised customers high returns for their smartphones and tablets using an instant quote generator. The customers, believing that this website would pay the highest price for their used gadget, sent their phones to LDR. Once LDR received the gadget, it would offer the customer a “revised quote” that was often only three to ten percent of the original quoted price.

Customers only had three to five days to dispute the revised quote, the FTC’s complaint claimed.

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Some games play like clockwork, others like treacle. Give players the right set of cogs and they're empowered to play the game as they see fit. Treacle games are the opposite—they're a constant, sticky battle against the mechanical systems, and, well, I've probably laboured this metaphor long enough. The point is that Dishonored 2, like its predecessor, is game of slick, interlocking mechanics that make it incredibly rewarding to play. Want to take on a room full of henchman head on with a pair of pistols? Go for it. Want to sneak around the outside, clamber across rooftops, and take enemies by surprise with a well-timed possession? You can do that too.

And it wasn't just the fantastical powers you could play with that made Dishonored so special, but rather how those powers combined with smart level design. There may have been hints at paths to take a through a level, but they were never forced them on players. Dishonored 2 continues this clever combination. I had a brief but enjoyable hands-on set in a mansion built on an actual clockwork foundation that could be spun and twisted to change the building in all manner of weird and wonderful ways.

This is the fourth mission in the game, with the goal being to take advantage of highly malleable infrastructure to put an end to experiments being carried out by Kirin Jindosh—a man of Leonardo Da Vinci-like invention and Patrick Bateman-like sadism—and rescue scientist Anton Sokolov, who returns from the first game.