Month: November 2017

Say goodbye to all of your favorite MxM characters, like... uh... that one dude from City of Heroes, and... er... frog-person. (credit: NCSoft)

Korean game studio NCSoft took an hours-before-Thanksgiving moment to announce bad news for fans of its most recent game, Master X Master: the free-to-play (F2P) game, which only launched five months ago, is already about to go dark.

The company's official announcement, sent to all its players on Wednesday, blamed the online game's closure on "fail[ing] to connect with players." (That's a short way to sum up complaints from avid users about lag, long queues between matches, and issues with monetization and content grinding.) For those players who waited until August 30 to spend real money on the game, they will receive full refunds on any MxM-related purchases within 14 days. For everyone else, the real-money store has been shut down effective immediately, with all players receiving a glut of in-game coins to purchase and unlock all the game's content before it shuts down on January 31.

MxM launched on June 21 as another entry in the MOBA genre (which you may know via games like Dota 2 and League of Legends), along with a few single-player "PvE" modes that range from repetitive, Diablo-like slogs to quick-and-dirty mini-games. MxM's full cast included "all-star" characters from NCSoft's gaming catalog, but it also confusingly launched with a bunch of brand-new characters. Otherwise, it played largely like other popular MOBA games with few differentiating factors.

Enlarge / The IBM PC XT 5160, the origin of the x86 BIOS. (credit: Veradrive)

Speaking at UEFI Plugfest, a hardware interoperability testing event held by the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Forum earlier this month, Intel announced that by 2020 it was going to phase out the last remaining relics of the PC BIOS by 2020, marking the full transition to UEFI firmware.

The BIOS ("Basic Input/Output System") is a small piece of code embedded into a PC's motherboard that handles the basic initialization and booting of hardware. It's the BIOS that first probes your hardware, counts how much RAM you have installed, performs cursory checking of the hardware's health, and complains if your keyboard is unplugged; when it's finished doing its thing, it kicks off the process to actually load and run the operating system. When the operating system is running, the BIOS offers some basic system services, such as receiving keyboard input and reading and writing to the screen and the disk.

The BIOS was an essential element of IBM's first PC, the Personal Computer XT, in 1983. Companies wanting to build systems compatible with the PC XT had to build systems with a compatible BIOS, offering the same range of system services to software. If they could do this, software built for the XT would run seamlessly on their machines. Firmware company Phoenix reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS and offered it to third parties, enabling companies such as Compaq to build and sell PC clones: computers compatible with the PC XT but not including IBM's own BIOS.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai at The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research on May 5, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

Net neutrality rules are popular with Americans who use the Internet. When the Federal Communications Commission deliberated on possible net neutrality rules in 2014 and 2015, millions of comments poured in to support strict regulation of Internet service providers.

Public opinion helped push the FCC to adopt rules that prevent ISPs from blocking or throttling Internet content and from charging websites or other online services for priority treatment on the network.

Public opinion hasn't changed much in the two-plus years that the rules have been on the books. The cable lobby surveyed registered voters this year and found that most of them continue to support bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Multiple polls have found that net neutrality rules are popular with both Democratic and Republican voters.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it would create a "portal to enable people on Facebook to learn which of the Internet Research Agency Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts they may have liked or followed between January 2015 and August 2017."

The Internet Research Agency (which the New York Times Magazine extensively profiled in 2014) is believed to be a pro-Kremlin troll farm that helped create false politically themed pages.

"This tool will be available for use by the end of the year in the Facebook Help Center," Facebook continued.

Enlarge / Miguel and his "spirit guide" Dante cross the flower petal bridge into the Land of the Dead on Día de Muertos. (credit: Pixar/Disney)

Like Pixar's greatest films, such as Toy Story, Up, and Inside Out, the Thanksgiving weekend treat Coco is a gorgeously rendered fantasy about the good and bad (but mostly good) of family life. Set in small-town Mexico on Día de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, it's both a color-saturated homage to this ancient Mexican tradition and a loving portrait of a family learning to accept the perspective of a new generation.

The story revolves around 12-year-old Miguel, who spends every day after school helping with the family shoe-making business. There's just one problem in Miguel's life. All he really wants to do is become a mariachi, singing and playing guitar like the 1940s musical star Ernesto de la Cruz. But his family hates music, going all the way back to his great-great-grandmother Imelda. She founded the family shoe business to support her daughter after her husband abandoned them to become a musician. When Miguel's abuelita—Imelda's granddaughter—discovers Miguel's guitar, she smashes it. Miguel can't take it anymore, and he flees home in tears.

Racing through the streets just as Día de Muertos celebrations are just getting started, Miguel makes a few iffy choices and winds up transported to the Land of the Dead. Followed by his adorable street dog friend Dante over a bridge made of orange flower petals, Miguel finds himself in a glowing, multi-layered city of gondolas and neon rainbow-furred flying animals. Ghosts who look exactly like Día de Muertos skeletons are everywhere, their bony faces vivid and emotionally expressive. There are a lot of satirical touches, too, like when the dead line up at Disneyland-like gates to get in and out of the Land of the Dead. It's a sumptuous and funny visual sequence that will fill even a cynic's heart with wonder.

Enlarge / In Belgium, this is similar to a loot box. (credit: Yuki Shimazu)

Belgium's Gaming Commission has ruled that loot boxes—in-game purchases where what you receive is randomized and only known once you open the box—are gambling. The country's minister of justice, Koen Geens, has said that he wants to see them banned Europe-wide, reports PC Gamer (and, in Dutch, VTM Nieuws).

Amid outcry over the use of loot boxes in Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront 2, the Belgian Gaming Commission decided last week to look into the issue, with Commission Director Peter Naessens specifically saying that the combination of paying money and receiving something "dependent on chance" prompted the investigation. Rather swiftly, it seems, the Commission has made its decision.

In October, the US' Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rejected calls to classify loot boxes as gambling. It told Kotaku that since players receive some reward from opening the loot box—even if it's useless or unwanted—that it's not gambling. As such, loot box games will receive neither ESRB's "Real Gambling" nor "Simulated Gambling" labels, the former of which automatically gives a game an "Adults Only" rating. Many retailers refuse to sell A-O games, so giving every title that uses loot boxes such a rating would likely be harmful to their sales.

Enlarge (credit: GEMSA)

A federal judge in California has ruled in favor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation after the organization was recently sued over its "Stupid Patent of the Month" blog posts. As a result, the advocacy group is not required to remove a recent post simply because an Australian patent entity (often called "trolls") doesn’t like it.

The case began back in April 2017 when EFF countersued an Australian company that it previously dubbed as a "classic patent troll" in a June 2016 blog post entitled: "Stupid Patent of the Month: Storage Cabinets on a Computer."

In 2016, that company, Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. (GEMSA), managed to get an Australian court to order EFF to remove its post—but EFF did not comply. In January 2017, Pasha Mehr, an attorney representing GEMSA, further demanded that the article be removed and that EFF pay $750,000. EFF still left the post up and then sued regarding the Australian court's injunction.

Enlarge / Exercises that help you to quickly pick out details seem to have the biggest effect on dementia. (credit: Flickr user City Lights)

Dementia strikes many people as they age, and there's currently not much we can do about it. It would be nice to think that there could be a fix to stave it off, like a computer game or something that could do more than help you improve at that computer game. Well now, for the first time, it seems like there may be.

The Advanced Cognitive Training in Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study was a randomized controlled trial in which thousands of healthy seniors got different kinds of cognitive training and had their cognition monitored over ten years. Importantly, the trial was registered at its outset at ClinicalTrials.gov, so even if all of the results were negative (and therefore not likely to be published in an academic journal) they would still be on record and accessible.

After five years, all of the results were in fact negative. But after ten years, one of the interventions reduced dementia risk by about 30 percent.