Month: February 2018

Enlarge / Alto's Odyssey on an iPhone 7. (credit: Samuel Axon)

2015's Alto's Adventure was a surprise hit. It launched on iOS as a premium game with no microtransactions, and it landed at the top of App Store charts all over the world. It was developed by a Canadian company called Snowman, which had not previously published a game. Its sequel, Alto's Odyssey, launched this week to positive reception once again—the game has a 91 on Metacritic.

On iOS, Adventure has no in-app purchases (IAP) other than a physical gear store that is unrelated to gameplay. On a platform loaded with free-to-play games that aren't actually so free-to-play thanks to complex microtransaction schemes, only a few games achieve the kind of success Adventure has without IAP. Odyssey doesn't have any IAP either, though the Android version of Adventure does.

Ars spoke with three key members of the Snowman team—creative director Ryan Cash, producer Eli Cymet, and designer/developer Jason Medeiros—about what's new in Odyssey, what iOS game development looks like right now, what implementing Metal support for the first time was like, how Android distribution differs, and more.

Enlarge / Neo gets a call on the original Nokia 8110. (credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

The year is 1999. Computer programmer Thomas Anderson sits at his cubicle, contemplating the latest dressing down from his boss. His thoughts are interrupted when a delivery arrives. He rips open the FedEx package to reveal a loose, unboxed phone. The phone rings the second it is out of the package, and Anderson, shocked, stares at it a moment. He presses a button and the phone springs opens with a satisfying "click" noise. Anderson raises the phone to his ear: "Hello?"

"Hello Neo, do you know who this is?"

That phone was the Nokia 8110, which in the 1999 film The Matrix, allows Morpheus' to remotely guide Neo through the office chase scene. After resurrecting the Nokia 3310 "Brick Phone" at last year's Mobile World Congress, this year HMD's updated nostalgia-bait feature phone is the Nokia 8110, AKA the "Banana Phone."

Enlarge (credit: Ted / Flickr)

It would be difficult to overstate how instrumental the horse has been in shaping the world around us today. That’s easy to forget now that most of us get around by other means, but horses were central to human mobility for millennia, and much of our history of warfare and economy depended on that mobility.

But when did horse and human history become intertwined? For a long time, archaeological and genetic evidence has pointed to the steppes of central Asia as the likely site of horse domestication. Remains from the Botai culture in present-day Kazakhstan point to evidence of horse milking and possible riding more than 5,000 years ago.

But a paper in this week’s Science analyzed ancient horse genomes from the region and presents a startling finding: modern horses appear not to be descended from the Botai horses. This means that we still don’t know very much about the history of our crucial relationship got started.

Enlarge / The Impossible Burger IRL. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

A beefy burger without the beef? That is the seemingly impossible promise of the Impossible Burger, a trendy plant-based burger that claims to “bleed,” sear, and taste like the best of the best all-American whoppers—without the environmental impacts of beef production and ethical concerns of meat-eating.

On a cold and dreary Friday, a band of Ars reporters set out to nosh these mythical sandwich beasts for ourselves to see if the impossible had indeed been accomplished.

Before this, all indications were that it had. Since its introduction in 2016, the Impossible Burger has graced the menus of high-end restaurants such as Momofuku Nishi in New York and Jardinière in San Francisco. Investors have forked over more than $250 million to the faux meat’s maker, Impossible Foods. Impossible Burgers are now served in dozens of restaurants across the country. And the company has “ambitious plans to open new production facilities and partner with a ton more restaurants across the United States,” according to its website.