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In a surprising blog post Monday morning, Microsoft announced that Lionhead Studios, known in recent years for the Fable franchise, is being shut down. Development is being halted on the long-planned cross-platform multiplayer title Fable Legends. Danish studio Press Play, which was behind Max: The Curse of Brotherhood, is being closed as well.

"These have been tough decisions and we have not made them lightly, nor are they a reflection on these development teams—we are incredibly fortunate to have the talent, creativity and commitment of the people at these studios," Microsoft Studios Europe General Manager Hanno Lemke wrote. "We have nothing but heart-felt thanks for the members of Lionhead and Press Play for their contributions to Xbox and gaming. We are committed to working closely with those affected by today’s news to find them new opportunities at Xbox, or partnering with the broader development community to help place them in jobs elsewhere in the games industry should they desire."

Lionhead was founded in 1996 by Peter Molyneux—at the time well-known for PC classics like Populous and Magic Carpet—along with Games Workshop's Steve Jackson and veterans from Molyneux's former Bullfrog Studios. After making a name for itself with the ambitious Black & White series of god games and original Xbox RPG Fable, Lionhead was scooped up by Microsoft in 2006. A series of Fable follow-ups followed (including an ill-fated Kinect-powered spin-off), before Molyneux left the studio in 2012 to start 22cans (which has been mired in some controversy of late).

There are times when the horror video game genre still feels like it's in its infancy, a clichéd mix of jump scares, shambling horrors, and gore-soaked scenery that should have long been buried. Sure, we all love the bloody dogs that leapt headfirst through a window in Resident Evil, and how we were forced to dive into a closet to hide from Silent Hill 2's ever-disturbing Pyramid Head, but the world has moved on. People have moved on. Isn't time the horror genre did too?

That's not say there haven't been some horror classics of late—the terrifying P.T. demo and the, uh, "quirky" Deadly Premonition spring to mind—but horror games that continue to disturb once the end credits role are a rarity, not a standard. First-person adventure The Town of Light takes a brave, if under-realised, stab at presenting a fresh examination of what constitutes horror. The demons, zombies, and severed limbs so beloved of horror games—which are so overused as to have lost all impact—are discarded in favour of showing the grisly abuse, torture, and subjugation human beings are capable of inflicting on one another.

After all, we know the likes of brain-dead zombies and demonic horrors aren't real (right?). But human beings? They're something we can all be afraid of.

(credit: NOAA NESDIS Environmental Visualization Laboratory)

As the pace of warming has shot up, politicians have responded in part by casting doubt on the global temperature data. They've argued we should ignore surface datasets and pay attention to satellite measurements of the upper atmosphere, which just happen to show a little less warming in recent years. The work that goes into maintaining all of these datasets is pretty complex—enough so that we recently dedicated about 5,000 words to the subject.

One of the people we talked to for that story was Carl Mears, who helps run one of the major satellite datasets of upper air temperatures. Mears explained the calibrations and corrections that go into that dataset and frankly discussed the uncertainties surrounding it. Overall, he felt that the uncertainties of the satellites' data were greater than those for surface datasets like those run by NASA and the UK Met Office.

Building on analysis of that uncertainty, Mears and his colleague Frank Wentz have published a paper describing an update to their dataset—one that ends up increasing the warming trend significantly.

This is the same feeling all those Blue Apron customers get, right? (credit: Jason Plautz)

Update: It's Thanksgiving in the US, meaning most Ars staffers are working on mashed potatoes and only mashed potatoes today. With folks off for the holiday, we're resurfacing this culinary classic from the archives—a look at a true evening of entomological entertaining. This story first ran in May 2016, and it appears unchanged below.

The boxes at my door were plastered with red drawings of bugs and the blunt warning: “Live Insects.” I could hear audible scratching and shuffling—and even what I thought was an errant “chirp”—as I placed them on my kitchen counter.

I slowly opened the first lid. Out poked two antennae, followed by the head of a cricket. I lifted the lid higher and saw dozens of them hopping around. Inside the second box, a thousand mealworms wriggled over an egg crate.

(credit: Shutterstock)

Google has responded to European Union data watchdogs by expanding its right-to-be-forgotten rules to apply to its search websites across the globe.

In 2014, search engines were ordered by Europe's top court to scrub certain listings on their indexes. Google—which commands roughly 90 percent of the search market in the EU—claimed at the time that such measures amounted to censorship of the Internet.

However, the landmark European Court of Justice ruling in fact stated that search engines were required to remove links that are old, out of date or irrelevant, and—most significantly of all—not found to be in the public interest.