Month: December 2016

Virgin Galactic

It has been a long road back from a fatal 2014 accident for Virgin Galactic, the splashy spaceship company founded by Sir Richard Branson to bring the masses into space. After its VSS Enterprise crashed into the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing vehicle co-pilot Michael Alsbury, the company has had to redesign some key safety systems and rebuild its spacecraft. It revealed the VSS Unity in February.

Since then Virgin Galactic has completed a series of ground tests and mating to the "mothership" aircraft, Eve. Following captive carry tests in September, the company performed its first glide test on Saturday, when VSS Unity was released at an altitude of about 15km. The spacecraft reached a velocity of mach 0.6 during its 10-minute descent back to the ground in California. It then made a safe landing at test facilities in Mojave.

The Last of Us, one of the finest story-driven games of a generation, is getting a sequel.

Revealed during Sony's PlayStation Experience event in Anaheim, California, The Last of Us: Part 2 is set five years after the events of The Last of Us, and stars an angry 19-year-old Ellie. Joel, the lead from the first game, makes a return too.

Few other details were revealed—the trailer, which shows Ellie playing a guitar surrounded by zombie bodies, was intended for E3 2017—but developer Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann revealed that voice actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson will be reprising their roles as Joel and Ellie. In a panel session at PSX, Druckmann also hinted at the broader theme of the sequel, saying: "In the first game, the theme was the love between these two characters... this story's the counter of that. It's about hate."

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There are worse places to be stuck in a car than on the sun-cooked roads of Lucis. "Picturesque" doesn’t cover the symbiotic qualities of these mountains, great lakes, and patchwork fields. Small wonder that one member of your entourage, comprised of Noctis, the heir to Lucis' throne, and his three friends and bodyguards, will routinely request you stop the car so he can take a photograph.

It's the eve of the prince's wedding and, rather than slosh drunkenly around some coastal town, he and his buddies have taken to the open road in their preposterously sleek and muscular car, the Regalia. It’s a curious choice of vehicle for a series defined by its fable-like airships and fantastical giant chicken mounts, but in time it makes sense. This is a contemporary-set Final Fantasy, complete with sat-navs, mobile phones and motels. What better way to conjure the sojourner spirit of the series in the modern day than via the conceit of a road trip?

Not that you have much freedom to drive anywhere you please. The Regalia must stick to the roads in Final Fantasy XV—the latest in a very long line of role-playing games that stretches back to the Nintendo NES—and while it's possible to take the wheel yourself, the simplistic controls mean that you're more likely to hand over driver duties to Ignis, the most mature member of the group, and sit back to enjoy the views instead.

The open road

If the setting is plainly exquisite then the company is more of an acquired taste. There's sensible Ignis, who cooks meals for the group each time you set up camp for the night, and whose bother and worry soon starts to grate. There’s hothead Gladio, whose tantrums can weary (even if, at times, they provide him with an advantage in battle). And there’s Prompto, who yelps and tugs like an excitable puppy. As the four bond not only via freelance monster-battling missions, picked up, rather confusingly, from the owners of the various cafes dotted around Lucis, but also in their often affecting moments of vulnerability (quiet moments of male bonding snatched on a motel roof, and so on) a sense of pleasing and enriching camaraderie develops.

Could this be the home for BUDD-e? (credit: Volkswagen)

On Monday, Volkswagen Group used the TechCrunch Disrupt meeting in London to announce a new company, Moia. It joins the group's 12 automotive brands but isn't necessarily going to make cars; VW says that Moia is a response to the future of transportation and that buzzword du jour, "mobility."

Even though not everyone will still own a car in the future, "MOIA can help make everyone a customer of our company in some way or another,” Matthias Müller, CEO of VW Group, said. At first that means ride-sharing, and VW has already invested $300 million in a ridesharing platform called Gett (used by London's black taxis, among others). But eventually the plan is for Moia-owned vehicles—electric and autonomous, we assume—to be the ones summoned via app. Autocar speculates that this could be the eventual use for VW's BUDD-e concept car, which would be co-branded with Moia.

This looks like a smart move for VW Group, switching the topic as it does from the ongoing scandal of cheating emissions tests. Most of its rivals have already thrown down a mobility flag; GM and Maven, Daimler-Benz and Car2Go, BMW and ReachNow, and that's before we see autonomous car services from Ford and Tesla. Now VW can try to do the same with a name that's not covered in a layer of soot and particulates.