Month: February 2020

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  Dragon versus nautiloid, round one. [credit: Larian Studios ]

Larian Studios, the game maker behind the Divinity: Original Sin series, kicked off this weekend's PAX East expo with an eagerly awaited look at their next massive RPG: Baldur's Gate 3. This sequel to the acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons video game series, which was created by BioWare and left idle for over a decade, is already in a fully playable pre-alpha state, and an hour-long gameplay demo revealed what we can expect when the new game's "early access" version launches on PCs "in a couple of months."

In short: the Baldur's Gate games you know and love appear to have been delicately treated in their handover to Larian, with upgrades befitting the span of time since BG2 launched in 2001. This is a modern game, in terms of 3D environments, dialogue, motion capture, and quality-of-life tweaks, but it's also built on top of existing tabletop rulesets—and hearkens back to the era just before D&D 5E, when miniatures and tactical movement still reigned supreme.

The PAX East reveal event included footage of the game's epic, pre-rendered opening movie. As a jaded games critic in 2020, I rarely type that kind of sentence in earnest, but the footage's visual storytelling—about an evil force inflicting creepy eyeball-sucking worms onto a series of heroes to power a town-destroying Nautiloid, which is then chased off by heroes riding fire-breathing dragons through a portal into an icy tundra—is some of the most killer stuff I've seen attached to an RPG since, honestly, 2007's Lost Odyssey. After this opening cinematic, players learn that they've successfully captured and killed said Nautiloid, all while teleporting it (and ourselves) to a region roughly 200 miles east of the Baldur's Gate location in D&D's Forgotten Realms universe.

Enlarge / A video still showing a rendering of an Exploration Upper Stage in flight. (credit: NASA)

NASA is close to finalizing a plan to land humans on the Moon in 2024 and is expected to publicly discuss it next month. While the space agency has not released its revised strategy publicly, a recently updated "mission manifest" for the Space Launch System rocket may provide some clues about the new Artemis Program.

According to a planning document circulated at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center this week, titled "Moon 2024 Mission Manifest," the space agency has set target launch dates for its first 10 Artemis Moon missions. In doing so, the agency has shaken up the order of launches and emphasized the use of NASA's Space Launch System in the lunar return.

The document confirms an earlier report that the first Artemis mission to test SLS rocket will take place no earlier than April 2021. It also adds an additional Artemis mission in the run-up to the first human landing at the South Pole in late 2024:

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook's F8 summit in 2018. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Facebook is canceling its massive F8 developers' conference over fears of COVID-19. The conference had been scheduled to begin on May 5 in San Jose, California.

"F8 is an incredibly important event for Facebook, and it's one of our favorite ways to celebrate all of you from around the world—but we need to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees, and everyone who helps put F8 on," wrote Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's director of developer platforms.

Facebook will attempt to compensate for the closure of the main event with "locally hosted events, videos, and live streamed content," Papamiltiadis said.

A visual artist inadvertently reawakens a monster from a Chicago urban legend in the first trailer for Candyman. Co-written by Jordan Peele and director Nia DaCosta (best known for her 2019 film Little Woods), it's technically another sequel to the 1992 film that inspired it rather than a straight-up remake. In fact, it looks to be following the trend of such recent projects as Watchmen and Cobra Kai: honoring the prior storyline(s) while bringing them firmly into the present day.

(Spoilers for original film below.)

Based on the Clive Barker short story "The Forbidden," the original 1992 Candyman starred Virginia Madsen as a Chicago graduate student in sociology whose thesis deals with urban legends. She hears about a series of murders in the Cabrini-Green public housing project. The killer is rumored to be the ghost of a late 19th-century artist named Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) who was lynched because he fathered an illegitimate child with a white woman. The mob cut off his right hand and smeared him with honey to attract bees to sting him before scattering his ashes over what is now the project's grounds.

Enlarge / Surely everyone in the world could trust these guys with 100% of their personal data, right? (credit: InciteInc.com (WarnerMedia))

Delos Destinations—the company behind Westworld, Shogunworld, and other living theme parks—is optimistic about US lawmakers' ability to eventually agree on and enact some kind of sweeping privacy regulation. That day will come, HBO's fictional company tells us, in 2039: 19 years from today.

Email users who subscribed to Westworld updates from Delos Destinations may have received a message today about the Privacy Act of 2039 and its projected impact on Delos experiences.

"As you may have heard," the email from "Delos" begins, "US Congress has just passed the Privacy Act of 2039, which will be effective starting today. You will begin to see the impact of this legislation roll out over the coming weeks." The missive continues:

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  The Raspberry Pi 4. [credit: Raspberry Pi ]

The Raspberry Pi 4 is approaching its first birthday in a few months, but it's already getting an upgrade: more memory. The Raspberry Pi launched in June 2019 with 1GB of RAM for $35, 2GB of RAM for $45, and 4GB of RAM for $55, but today the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that the 2GB model is getting a permanent price drop to $35.

The rest of the specs are the same as always: a Broadcom BCM2711 SoC with four 1.5GHz Cortex A72 CPU cores, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3 ports, two USB 2 ports, a headphone/composite video jack, and two micro-HDMI ports capable of powering two 4K monitors.

Interestingly, the foundation says the 1GB version of Pi 4 is sticking around and "will remain available to industrial and commercial customers, at a list price of $35." If you were using fleets of these things for some industry project before, you can still get the old version and not change anything. For everyone else, you probably want the version with more memory. The new pricing seems to already be active at most of the recommended Pi resellers.

Enlarge / UC Davis Medical Center, where the patient with a COVID-19 infection of unknown origin is being treated. (credit: UC Davis)

A Northern California resident has contracted the new coronavirus despite having no known exposure through travel or obvious contact to an infected person—a first for the US.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the case late Wednesday, saying that “It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19,” meaning that the virus may be moving through members of the general US public undetected.

“It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected,” the agency said.