Month: March 2020

Roguelike games have grown in popularity over the 40 years the genre has existed, even though they implement ideas that might seem anathema to popular gaming: extreme randomness, ASCII graphics, permadeath, enormous complexity, and more. Yet these days, you can just about sneeze and hit something that's at least been influenced by roguelikes.

And so, in the spirit of game genre histories past—we've done real-time strategy, city builders, first-person shooters, simulation games, graphic adventures, kart racers, and open-world games—let's take a look back at how we got here and what it all means. We'll tour the roguelike evolutionary tree, starting from Rogue itself and progressing all the way to modern games with "roguelike elements."

But first, let's try to answer one key question.

Enlarge / S/PDIF connections like this one that have worked since the Xbox 360 won't be compatible with the upcoming Xbox Series X.

The Xbox Series X will be missing the optical S/PDIF audio output that was present on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 hardware lines.

The digital audio port was visible on images of a prototype casing for the Xbox Series X that leaked in January. That port was missing from some (but not all) of the updated images of the Series X shown in promotional materials Microsoft released earlier this week.

Windows Central and IGN's Ryan McCaffrey have now confirmed with Microsoft that the S/PDIF output will indeed be absent from retail Series X units.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla, says that his companies could help fill the gap in the event of a ventilator shortage. (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As with previous epidemics that attack the lungs, one of the biggest worries about COVID-19 is that we simply won't have enough ventilators to treat critically ill patients. It's a valid concern, based on reports from Italy. The US government has confirmed that the nation has a stockpile of more than 10,000 ventilators, but President Trump also recently told Twitter that it should be the states' responsibility to buy these vital life-saving devices.

Over the past few days, there have been growing calls to mobilize advanced manufacturing industries to meet this need, and on Wednesday night, Elon Musk replied to a fan on twitter that his companies "will make ventilators if there is a shortage."

We will make ventilators if there is a shortage

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2020

However, the rocket and electric car billionaire also used the social media platform to downplay the seriousness of the situation, despite increasingly scary predictions from public health experts that appear to have woken the US government from its complacency.