Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Screenwriter William Goldman attends a special screening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at Tribeca Film Festival in April 2009. (credit: Joe Kohen/WireImages/Getty Images)

Legendary Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman has died at the age of 87 from colon cancer and pneumonia, The New York Times reports. Goldman won two screenwriting Oscars, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and All the President's Men (1976). But by far his most beloved (and most widely quoted) film across multiple generations is 1987's postmodern fairytale, The Princess Bride.

The man once called "the world's greatest and most famous living screenwriter" by the Guardian actually started out as a novelist, but his early novels got mixed reviews. Discouraged, Goldman agreed to adapt Daniel Keyes' bestselling 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon into a screenplay. He was fired from the project, and even Goldman himself declared it was a "terrible" screenplay. But he learned from the experience and went on to sell his first original screenplay, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for a record (at the time) $400,000.

The rest is Hollywood history. His other screenwriting credits include The Stepford Wives (the 1974 original, not the mediocre 2004 remake), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Chaplin (1992), and Misery (1990). Two of his screenplays are adaptations of his own novels: Marathon Man (1976) and The Princess Bride. Goldman was especially fond of the latter novel, first published in 1973. It was 15 years before Director Rob Reiner managed to bring the story to the silver screen after having long been a fan of the book.

If you had asked us a year ago whether the Nintendo Switch would ever deliver a shooter on par with the online team-questing of Destiny, we would surely have laughed you off. A solid, connected, shooting-filled 3D game for Nintendo's handheld? Go back to Mario Kart, dreamer.

But the past year has seen developers unlock serious power—and reasonable compromises—in impressive Switch ports. Now, one of the industry's best Switch wranglers, Panic Button, has worked its magic on the free-to-play multiplayer shooter WarFrame, out this week on the platform.

Ahead of the launch, we had the opportunity to sit with the combined brain trust behind WarFrame on Switch—a producer at series creator Digital Extremes and the head of Panic Button's porting team—and rap about what they made happen. We also went hands-on with the results and enjoyed the tweaked options laid out, including joystick sensitivity, button mapping, and—a rarity on the Nintendo Switch—a field-of-view slider, which first-person junkies will surely appreciate.

Enlarge (credit: World Meteorological Organization)

Cities often see flash floods get worse as urbanization grows, as a cityscape is an incredibly efficient rainwater collector. The more land you pave, the more rain turns to surface runoff instead of soaking into the ground. If an area is connected by storm sewers, a lot of runoff can quickly come together in the same spot and pile up inconveniently.

A hurricane is no ordinary rainstorm, but the same problem applies. After Hurricane Harvey released an incredible amount of water on Houston last year, every aspect of the storm was dissected by public discussion and scientific studies. Researchers have concluded that climate change very likely played a role in Harvey’s record-setting rainfall, for example.

As for Houston’s rapid growth and development, attention has mostly focused on decisions to allow construction in risky, flood-prone areas. But a new study led by Wei Zhang and Gabriele Villarini of the University of Iowa has identified another impact beyond catching more of the rain with concrete—Houston actually increased the rainfall itself.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

It has been 10 years since HP launched the original Elitebook, and the company continues to improve upon this already stellar business notebook family. This year's Elitebook x360 1030 is the follow-up to last year's model and will replace the 1020 model in the Elitebook lineup.

The new Elitebook has been sprinkled with updates that you'd expect in a convertible that didn't have many major problems: HP stuck a new processor inside, shrank some bezels, made the chassis' footprint smaller and lighter, added an LTE option, and improved the optional Active Pen. There were a few sub-par aspects about the previous model, so HP addressed them in this device, too. However, those improvements, while thoughtful, may not be crucial enough to push current Elitebook users to upgrade.

Look and feel

HP changed little about the Elitebook x360's skeleton—it's still an all-aluminum convertible with a unibody chassis and slick, diamond-cut edges. It now has a 10 percent smaller footprint than the previous model, measuring 15.8mm thick and weighing 2.76 pounds, and the bezels around its 13.3-inch touchscreen are slimmer than ever before. The side bezels are 50percent thinner, and the chin is 39 percent smaller, too.

Enlarge / Agent 47 stalking his prey.

Agent 47, the star of the Hitman series, is a man whose entire being is dedicated to one task. Every skill he has, every quirk of his appearance and personality, all of him exists for this singular reason: to find and kill any target assigned to him. He's the ultimate assassin. And Hitman 2 is the ultimate assassin simulator. Built on the work done on earlier titles by Io Interactive, especially the rebooted Hitman published by Square Enix in 2016, Hitman 2 is a singular destination for all the goofy, sneaky, and violent energy this series carries with it at its best.

It begins unassumingly on a beach with Agent 47 creeping through the tall grass like in any other stealth game. Once you reach the opening mission’s seaside resort home, though, the options spiral wildly. Soon you're hiding in closets, waiting for a target to reach the right location, juggling ideas about chloroform and bad ventilation systems with possible plans involving disguising yourself as a guard, and the nagging idea that, hey, maybe I could just throw her into the ocean…

This opening level is, in microcosm, the entire Hitman 2 experience. More than any other stealth game series, Io Interactive's stealth murder simulator is an ode to options. It’s a vast array of silly and inspired possibilities for causing mayhem, creating distractions, and, finally, slitting a victim's throat. Or blowing them up in their experimental race car. Or getting them to take a swing at an exploding golf ball, as the case may be.