Month: June 2020

In one of the most unreal data-recovery projects we've ever heard of, a seemingly lost NES game has been unearthed—as archived on a single hard drive backup, spread across 21 5.25-inch floppy disks.

A joint effort led in part by the Video Game History Foundation began earlier this year with a pile of leftover CD-Rs, floppies, computers, and other errata donated by the family of late programmer/designer Chris Oberth. The results, thus far, are one fully functioning game whose code had to be recovered, then compiled, to run on original NES hardware.

Anybody still have their copy of PCTools?

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  Title screen. [credit: VGHF / Chris Oberth ]

The game in question is based on Days of Thunder, a stock-racing film from 1990 starring Tom Cruise. One reason this version got lost in the shuffle is because a tie-in DoT video game came out the same year, as published by Mindscape. Oberth's co-creation, for the same publisher, was dated one year earlier, and it looks quite different. As Frank Cifaldi, VGHF co-director, points out, the unreleased prototype had only been mentioned once by Oberth: in a 2006 interview with the retro-gaming fan newsletter Retrogaming Times.

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  Embossed text, 'cause it's fancy. [credit: Kyle Orland ]

A year ago, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he was "pretty optimistic" about Google's Stadia game-streaming service. The concept of "being able to play our games on any device whatsoever around the world, and to do it with low latency, well that’s very compelling if that can be delivered," he offered in May of 2019.

Now, though, Zelnick has changed his tune a bit. In an interview given during the Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference late last week, Zelnick acknowledges what has been apparent to industry watchers for a while: "The launch of Stadia has been slow," he said. "I think there was some overpromising on what the technology could deliver and some consumer disappointment as a result."

While major publishers like EA and Activision stayed away from Stadia's "Founders" launch last November, Take-Two provided three of the service's highest-profile games in its early months—Red Dead Redemption 2, NBA 2K20, and Borderlands 3. And Zelnick said such Stadia support will continue in the future "as long as the business model makes sense." (Take-Two's PGA Tour 2K21, WWE2K Battlegrounds, and the Mafia series are currently planned for future Stadia release.)

Enlarge / Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook profile that he had been "struggling with how to respond" to Donald Trump’s posts (credit: Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Mark Zuckerberg is facing a backlash from within Facebook after several senior employees publicly criticized the chief executive for refusing to take action over posts by President Donald Trump that Twitter censured last week for “glorifying violence.”

As protests and rioting over the death in police custody of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, spread through several American cities this weekend, Mr. Zuckerberg was forced to defend Facebook’s position as—in his words—“an institution committed to free expression.”

On Friday, Mr. Trump posted on both Facebook and Twitter that he would respond to violent protests with military force, saying: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” But while Twitter slapped a warning on the post and hid it from view, Facebook left the message intact.

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  This image of Dragon docked to the International Space Station was captured by Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner. [credit: Ivan Vagner/Twitter ]

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft made history for the second time on Sunday.

On May 25, 2012, a Cargo Dragon was grabbed by the ISS. It became the first private spacecraft to visit the International Space Station. On Sunday, when Dragonship Endeavour docked with the station 15 minutes ahead of schedule, above the border of China and Mongolia, it became the first private spacecraft to fly crew there (or anywhere in orbit, for that matter).

After the docking, the spacecraft's commander, NASA Astronaut Doug Hurley, was complimentary after he and Bob Behnken spent some time flying Dragon manually. "It flew just about like the sim, so my congratulations to the folks at Hawthorne," he said, referring to SpaceX's headquarters in California, where the astronauts spent many weeks practicing in a flight simulator. "It flew really well, very crisp. We couldn't be happier about the performance of the vehicle."