Month: December 2016

(credit: Elliott Brown)

Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps, about 47.5 million home or business Internet connections provided speeds below that threshold.

Dealing with speeds a bit lower than the broadband standard isn't too horrible, but there are still millions with speeds that just aren't anywhere close to modern. Out of 102.2 million residential and business Internet connections, 22.4 million offered download speeds less than 10Mbps, with 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps. About 25.1 million connections offered at least 10Mbps but less than 25Mbps.

54.7 million households had speeds of at least 25Mbps, with 15.4 million of those at 100Mbps or higher. These are the advertised speeds, not the actual speeds consumers receive. Some customers will end up with slower speeds than what they pay for.

Enlarge / Now I'm freeeeeeeee... free fallin'

Way back in 2010, a full year after it was first announced as a PlayStation 3 game, The Last Guardian creator Fumito Ueda stressed to a Tokyo Game Show press conference audience that the key to the game he envisioned was developing an "emotional attachment" between the game's unnamed boy character and Trico, his three-story tall mythical animal-hybrid companion that combines elements of a bird, a dog, and a horse. Six years later, after finally completing Ueda's oft-delayed opus, I find that the main emotion I feel towards Trico, and the game he inhabits, is frustration.

A beautiful disaster

The Last Guardian plays out as one big joint escort quest, with Trico and the boy working together to escape the extremely intricate ruins of a crumbling tower complex built into the side of a cliff. Before I dig into what frustrated me so much about the game, I'd be remiss not to laud the architectural feat of that digital environment.

Every broken brick, every rusted-over bridge, and every pile of rubble overgrown with weeds makes you feel like you're inhabiting the epilogue of a once-great civilization. It's a world full of ornate symbology and bronze-age-meets-magical-realism technology that's all the stronger for never being even partially explained. You'll feel like you're trespassing on the ghosts of master builders, who placed every last stone with a sense of purpose you'll never fully understand but love examining anyway.

Much like Ueda's Ico and Shadow of the Colossus before it, The Last Guardian also benefits from a painterly use of light, which pokes through holes in the walls to reflect through cavernous halls and oversaturated outdoor scenes with a soft, otherworldly glow. Played on an HDR television on the PlayStation Pro, every scene has a vibrancy and range of visual expressiveness that's hard to equal in modern gaming (Things look pretty good on a standard 1080p television, too). Seeing what new visual splendor lies around the next corner quickly becomes the main impetus to struggle your way through the game's puzzles.

Edited and produced by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

After years of development kits and prototype demos, Oculus finally launched the first consumer version of its Rift VR headset in March. But even as a real product that people could purchase, the first consumer version of the Rift was incomplete when it launched. That's because, unlike competing high-end VR headsets like the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, the Oculus Rift didn't have an integrated method to track your hands in virtual space.

To be sure, you can do plenty of fun things in virtual reality with the kind of standard, handheld, button-based controller that's been guiding games on 2D screens for decades. But when you're confronted with a stereoscopic 3D world that entirely surrounds you, as happens in the Rift headset, your first instinct is to reach out and touch the things in that world. As we noted with disappointment in our initial review of the Rift, without hand-tracking controllers, "this brave new display technology is a strictly 'look, don't touch” affair.'"