Month: August 2021

The Amiga classic Lemmings turns 30 this year. To celebrate, current license holder Exient (who acquired the property from Sony) is producing a documentary titled Lemmings 30th: Can You Dig It?, which follows the series from its European PC origins to its current mobile iterations.

Even though it has been ported to a seemingly infinite number of consoles in the US, Lemmings is deeply British. It’s a game about guiding blue-robed, green-haired critters to an exit before they accidentally kill themselves along the way.

The game's dry humor and puzzle design eschewed the typical '90s American-style action/arcade platforming for something less reflex-intensive, helping Lemmings become a hometown favorite. “If you visit Dundee, where Lemmings was originally created for the Amiga by DMA Design, there’s even a park with three little monuments to the Lemmings characters,” Exient Creative Marketing Manager Jamie Wotton told Ars. “Quite clearly—and hopefully the documentary will show this—the franchise has a special place in British culture.”

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  Aloy rides again in Horizon Forbidden West, coming to PS5 and PS4 consoles in February 2022. [credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Guerrilla Games ]

After receiving a lengthy gameplay reveal in May of this year, the upcoming PlayStation-exclusive sequel Horizon Forbidden West went into hiding in terms of previews and hype. Today, the game's developers at Guerrilla confirmed a major reason for that silence: the game isn't actually ready for its teased "2021" release window.

The news of the game's delay—and a (possible) firm release date of February 18, 2022—came from its director, Mathijs de Jonge, as part of Wednesday's Gamescom 2021 Opening Night presentation. While he claims that the sequel had reached a "major milestone" shortly after its May gameplay reveal, he then offered familiar-sounding caveats about the challenges of video game development during a pandemic—and didn't clarify whether the upcoming game was yet feature-complete.

The Wednesday news was met with neither new gameplay footage nor any clarification of how Horizon Forbidden West, launching on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 next year, will scale between two generations of consoles. Instead, de Jonge took the opportunity to announce that a patch is now live on PS5 to bring the franchise's first PS4 game, Horizon Zero Dawn, up to a 60 fps refresh rate.

Enlarge / Anglo American and First Mode, among others, are converting a Komatsu 930E truck like this one to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells and batteries rather than diesel engines. (credit: Anglo American)

At first glance, an open-pit platinum mine in South Africa and the Baja 1000 off-road race don't have much in common other than an excess of dust. But both are going to be test sites for hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, chosen by a company called First Mode, in order to stress-test the technology.

"We've been finding the not-low-hanging fruit problems in decarbonization, and those are the hard-to-operate places. Your environment is harsh, it's dusty, it's thermally driven to an extreme," said Chris Voorhees, president of First Mode.

"While it might seem counterintuitive, there's interesting crossovers with the Baja part. Getting the fuel cells to operate in an environment where your boundary conditions aren't as controlled is, for us, essential at being able to map the technology to some of these applications that are mobile, big, dirty, and operating in places that it actually took us a while to get the internal combustion engine to do a really good job," Voorhees explained.

Enlarge / The Internet is unfortunately packed full of criminals seeking to steal sexual (or sexualizable) images from privately held cloud backup accounts. (credit: 1905HKN via Getty Images / Jim Salter)

The LA Times reported this week that Los Angeles man Hao Kuo "David" Chi pled guilty to four federal felonies related to his efforts to steal and share online nude images of young women. Chi collected more than 620,000 private photos and 9,000 videos from an undetermined number of victims across the US, most of whom were young and female.

"At least 306" victims

Chi's plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Tampa, Florida, acknowledged "at least 306" victims. This number may be considerably smaller than the true total, since the FBI found that about 4,700 out of 500,000 emails in two of Chi's Gmail accounts—backupagenticloud and applebackupicloud at Gmail—contained iCloud credentials that Chi tricked his victims into providing.

According to Chi, he selected roughly 200 of these victims based on online requests. Chi marketed his iCloud break-in "services" under the nom de guerre icloudripper4you. His "customers" would identify an iCloud account for attack, after which Chi would use his sketchily named Gmail accounts to contact the victim, impersonating an Apple service representative.

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  Release date confirmed.

The news is official: Halo Infinite will launch on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows 10 PCs on Wednesday, December 8.

Up until today, the long-anticipated game's release date had been pegged to a vague "Holiday 2021" window, but the firm release date slipped out via a Microsoft Store update, meant to be confirmed as part of Gamescom's Opening Night 2021 video presentation, which will begin airing shortly after this article goes live. Soon after the store listing slip-up, The Verge cited "a source familiar with Microsoft's plans" to confirm that the release date was accurate.

[Update, 2:35 p.m. ET: Halo Infinite team lead Joseph Staten confirmed the release date as part of the aforementioned video presentation, now pictured in the above gallery. That presentation also included a peek at a new Xbox Elite Series 2 gamepad and a new Xbox Series X console design, both modeled after Halo and Master Chief iconography.]

Enlarge / Nirvana's Nevermind album cover. (credit: DGC Records)

Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind is widely credited with bringing alternative and grunge rock into the mainstream, but now it's in the news for another reason. Spencer Elden, the adult who was the baby depicted swimming naked on the album's cover, has filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the photo violated various federal child pornography laws.

The suit, posted here in its entirety, names (among others) DGC Records and its parent companies; Courtney Love and the estate of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain; then-band members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl; and Chad Channing, a drummer who had left Nirvana the year before Nevermind was released but whose work on the album has been credited in later reissues. The suit is seeking "the actual damages [Spencer] has [sustained], or liquidated damages in the amount of $150,000, and the cost of the action."

According to Spencer's father, Rick Elden, the family was paid $200 to throw 4-month-old Spencer into a pool for "half a second" so he could be shot by photographer Kirk Weddle (also named in the suit). The dollar bill on the fish-hook was added after the fact; the suit claims that the baby is grabbing for the dollar bill "like a sex worker," which together with the exposed penis forms the basis of the suit's claim that the image is "sexually explicit."