Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Simon Ridgway/BBC)

This is a post-UK broadcast review of Doctor Who: Smile. River Song always warned the Doctor against spoilers, so be sure to watch the episode first. Doctor Who broadcasts on Saturdays at 7:20pm UK time on BBC One, and 9pm EDT on BBC America.

Emojis aren't only the future of language for us doomed Earthlings, but we're also the only poor saps throughout the universe who use them. This is one of many things that the Doctor's ace new companion Bill Potts learns from her intergalactic tutor in Smile, the second installment of series 10 of Doctor Who.

While Nardole (Matt Lucas) is left back at base grumpily guarding the mysterious vault in the bowels of the university and making a brew (NB: for our American readers, that's a cup of tea), Bill (Pearl Mackie) tells the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) that she wants to travel to the future. "Why?" he asks. "I wanna see if it's happy," she says.

Enlarge (credit: Owen Duffy)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

On first inspection, Cry Havoc looks like any number of similarly grim and gritty science fiction board games. It comes with a stash of plastic soldiers, robots, and aliens, and its artwork paints a world in tones of mud, fire, and gun metal. If you’re expecting a quick fix of hectic, dice-chucking combat, though, you’re going to be disappointed, because the game offers a much more thoughtful take on the concept of planetary conquest.

(credit: Portal Games)

Cry Havoc hands players command of rival factions competing to colonise a newly discovered world. Playing as aggressive and expansionist humans, merciless and powerful machines, or elusive and enigmatic aliens known as the Pilgrims, you’ll attempt to claim victory by seizing control of territories and exploiting them for their resources (in the form of shiny plastic crystals).

(credit: Phera Laster / Flickr)

Excessive intake of sugar has been linked to a huge variety of health problems, many of them a consequence of the obesity that's also linked to excessive sugar. That's led many people to switch to drinks with artificial sweeteners that aren't metabolized by the body. A new study is now suggesting that these sweeteners are associated with their own health risks, namely stroke and dementia. But the study doesn't get into causality, and there's enough oddities in the data to suggest that it's not time to purge your fridge just yet.

The study, run by a collaboration of Boston-based researchers, relied on a cohort of individuals that had been recruited starting in 1971. On average, every four years since, the participants have completed follow-up surveys and had their health checked out. Over 5,000 people are in this cohort, and they provide a rich source of epidemiological data.

The authors started out intending to look at whether sugar-rich drinks increased the risk of strokes and dementia. So they eliminated a lot of people from this cohort because they'd previously experienced these or related issues. That reduced the study population considerably: under 3,000 for stroke, and under 1,500 for dementia.

Enlarge / You have to admire the engineers at Dodge; they managed to get the company to sign off on a car with 840hp and only one seat. Meet the Dodge Demon (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—There has been much to see at this year's New York International Auto Show. Ford had a new hybrid police car. Cadillac brought its new race car—unbeaten in 2017—and a new semi-autonomous system that uses head-tracking to know if the driver is paying attention. Range Rover added a fourth SUV to its line-up, and Genesis showed us a rather attractive fuel cell concept. And Honda is finally bringing a proper Civic Type R to these shores. Elsewhere in our coverage we chose our picks of the show, but there were a few more vehicles that caught our eye after two days of walking the floors of the Javits Center.

Enlarge / The new Audi R8 LMS GT4 car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—Audi Sport is to Audi what M is to BMW or AMG to Mercedes—the tuning arm, the skunk works where cars go to lose weight, gain power and find extra speed for the track. The US is a big market for Audi Sport, and the brand had several models on display at this year's New York International Auto Show. There was the TT-RS and the brand new RS5 Coupe, but for us the real star of its stand was a new racing car, the R8 LMS GT4.

Audi Sport customer racing is separate from the factory backed efforts in DTM and the now-shuttered World Endurance Championship program, and you can actually buy these cars to run yourself. The new GT4 car fits into a gap between the RS3 LMS—a front-wheel drive touring car—and the R8 LMS GT3. That car has been a sales hit; more than 200 R8 GT3s have found homes thus far, and it's racked up quite a lot of wins (including a memorable race in Macau where one GT3 finished the race upside down). But GT3 racing is getting expensive—the cars cost upwards of $400,000, and that's before you factor in spares or the cost of running in a series.

Enlarge / There. All better, Nintendo Switch. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

With the Nintendo Switch's newness starting to fade, interest in the new console has begun to shift toward its upcoming wave of "bigger" games. These include a gussied-up Mario Kart 8, the brand-new fighting series Arms, and a new Splatoon game that is finally looking more like a sequel than a last-gen port. But something interesting is quietly bubbling within the world of Switch games—though, sadly, I don't mean Nintendo's catalog of classic Virtual Console games.

What's bubbling up is just about as good, however: frequently updated games. And in one case, those updates have transformed at least one major Switch game from "maybe try" to "must buy."

Patchwork

Nintendo spoke at length at a late-February event about how its Nintendo Switch platform will make certain development tasks easier for game makers. The participating "Nindies" game makers on hand echoed that statement. At the time, they mostly spoke about the ease of translating games from other platforms, whether through a major engine like Unity and Unreal or through their own custom-built engines.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Not many companies try to do what Garmin does with the Fenix line of fitness watches. While Apple and Google have their own general-purpose smartwatches priced around $300 (neither of which comes close to the Fenix's tracking abilities), Garmin and a handful of other companies make super-expensive fitness watches that are meant for the most active among us.

The new $599 Fenix 5S is one of the models in the new Fenix 5 line that promises premium design and style. It also has the most advanced tracking abilities—with onboard GPS, GLONASS, barometer, altimeter, heart rate monitor, and other sensors—and it delivers a full smartwatch experience with Garmin's own UI, widgets, notifications, and app store. No matter how you look at it, $600 is a lot to spend on a fitness tracker. But if money is no object and you need the most capable tracker you can get, the 5S may be for you.

Enlarge / Data! Pew-pew! (credit: Aurich / Getty / Konami)

Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months.

No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales. This "restatement" of the US game industry's true size helps highlight just how much the game industry at large has transitioned from a business based on physical goods to one dominated by digital downloads and online purchases.