Author: Ars Staff

As soon as I saw optional star ratings being given for my performance on each mission in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, I was dubious about the campaign's length. The addition sent a small, clear signal: "Here's a thin excuse to play again on a higher difficulty." I'm not normally one to fetishize a game's length, as has been recorded on this very site numerous times. In the case of a Homeworld game, however, length can be a critical factor.

That’s truer than ever with Deserts of Kharak, because this new standalone game is actually a prequel to Homeworld, the original seminal space fleet strategy sim that Relic released back in 1999 (not to be confused with the recently Remastered re-release). That game began with the lost Hiigarans taking their first fledgling steps into space after millennia of grounding. Deserts of Kharak, as the name implies, takes place during their planetside exile. Here, tanks and mobile railguns take the place of interceptors and bombers, though the latter pair does make an in-atmosphere appearance here and there.

Homeworld, on-world

While the environment and style of strategy has changed, quite a lot of what makes Homeworld recognizable still remains. The music still swells with drums, strings, and the Armenian duduk (I'll admit I had to Google that last one). The technology is still flat, broad, and lifeless in a familiar way, just as the Battlestar Galactica reboot aped as much of the series' sense of style.

What carries over mechanically is... well, the way things carry over. Resources, vehicles, upgrades, and other elements developed in one mission can still be carried over to the next. The same goes for any losses that you incur, which makes every skirmish matter. Every loss—every second spent micromanaging conflict and harvesting—weaves a story of desperation.

Ars is constantly trying to better understand our diverse audience: what you like, what you do, and what you want from us. Today, we’ve partnered with TE Connectivity to conduct a survey about upcoming technology growth areas. The survey has a focus on engineering topics and concerns, but anyone can take it. Fans of STEM should definitely dive in. The survey itself will take two to five minutes.

As with all of our surveys, we consider your responses to be private. You do not have to give your e-mail address or other personally identifiable information in the survey if you don’t want to (though there is a small cash sweepstakes for people who don’t mind providing that information), and the survey results will only be analyzed in aggregate.

The survey is for anyone who reads Ars or has an interest in the future of engineering. If you’re interested in helping us out and telling us a bit about what upcoming engineering and tech excites you, click here to get started.

I've noticed a trend lately. Rather than replacing a router when it literally stops working, I've needed to act earlier—swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area. (Note, I am duly thankful for this problem.) As the latest example, a whole bunch of Netgear ProSafe 318G routers failed me for the last time as small businesses have upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable).

Yes, coax—not fiber. Even coax has proved too much for the old ProSafe series. These devices didn't just fail to keep up, they fell flat on their faces. Frequently, the old routers dropped speed test results from 9mbps with the old connection to 3mbps or less with the 50mbps connection. Obviously, that doesn't fly.

These days, the answer increasingly seems to be wireless routers. These tend to be long on slick-looking plastic and brightly colored Web interfaces but short on technical features and reliability. What's a mercenary sysadmin to do? Well, at its core, anything with two physical network interfaces can be a router. And today, there are lots and lots of relatively fast, inexpensive, and (super important!) fully solid-state generic boxes out there.

No video game genre divides and unifies us like the kart racer. For every Mario Kart there are a dozen by-the-numbers cash-ins, and even that hallowed series receives regular criticism as too derivative. But while we all breathe a collective sigh of disappointment with each kid-friendly license that predictably goes the generic kart-racing route, it's hard not to get excited by that rare entry that feels fresh and new.

A great kart racer is a joyous thing. It's accessible yet deep, fun yet primed for oh-so-serious competition between friends, and full of colorful, wacky charm. It is a game for everyone. So in keeping with the spirit of the genre—and as the latest edition in our gaming genre history series that includes city builders, graphic adventures, and simulation games—it's time to ride through the ups and downs of kart racing.

(Before we start, a quick note: I've omitted go-kart racing sims such as Open Kart and Michael Schumacher Racing World Kart because they are essentially conventional racing games and not what we normally think of as kart racers.)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a great deal on Amazon Prime to share. In honor of Amazon's series Mozart in the Jungle winning a Golden Globe, the company has discounted its one-year Prime memberships by 26 percent for new users. That means anyone signing up for Amazon Prime for the first time can do so for just $73, down from the service's normal $99 price. In addition to free two-day shipping, Amazon Prime gives you access to all of the website's streamed shows, ad-free music screaming, special sales and deals, and more. So if you've been thinking about jumping on the Prime bandwagon, now's the time to do so.

In addition to savings on Amazon Prime, we have a number of gaming, laptop, and tablet deals below as well.

Featured

Today is Wikipedia's 15^th anniversary. The digital, collaborative encyclopedia has grown quickly and today boasts articles in hundreds of languages. Those articles are managed by 80,000 volunteers who make 15,000 edits an hour according to the site's own statistics.

Over its lifespan Wikipedia has naturally encountered its share of problems: teachers loathe it because it gives lazy students a chance to cut and paste, bias sneaks (or barges) into all manner of topics (as you might expect from a crowd-sourced fact book), and controversy is part of its behind-the-scenes culture. But from the time the site launched in 2001 to today, we've spent an endless amount of time with it. We've learned one thing for sure—Wikipedia remains a good way to get a quick summary on just about any topic you can think of. Thankfully it's also a great way to find references to more reliable sources on said topic.

To celebrate its latest milestone internally, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the launch of a new Wikimedia Endowment which will be used to support Wikipedia's continued growth. The foundation says it hopes to raise more than $100 million over the next 10 years.

The latest Magic expansion set, Oath of the Gatewatch (OGW), will be released on January 22. OGW is the follow-up to Battle for Zendikar, continuing the story of Zendikar with a smaller set of 180 cards, including a new buddy for the Eldrazi titan Ulamog: Kozilek, the Great Distortion. Here he is in all his many-tentacled glory:

Ahead of the official OGW release there's also a bunch of prerelease events on January 16 and 17—this coming weekend—at your local game shop. If you haven't played Magic in a while, or you just want a taste of the new set before buying a box of cards (or two), the mega-casual prerelease events (which cost about £20/$30) are the perfect opportunity to dip your toes in.

And now, without further ado, read on for our review of Oath of the Gatewatch. We've been playing it for the past week, so we have lots to say about the themes and mechanics of the new set, as well as some thoughts on how some new cards might factor into Constructed formats.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of new deals to start 2016 off right! One of the highlights is a sale on Dell's newest UltraSharp monitors, but it won't last long. For one day only, you can get Dell's 32-inch 4K UltraSharp IPS monitor with 99.5 percent Adobe RGB coverage for just $1,349, down hundreds of dollars from its original price of $1,799. Dell also has price drops on other high-quality monitors. This sale ends tomorrow, so don't wait to snatch up the monitor that could carry you through the rest of the new year.

As usual, we have a number of laptop, desktop, smartphone, and accessories deals below.

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In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the absolute lowest strata of the community is occupied by cheaters. No matter the game, we all know the pain of going up against an obvious cheater: that person who makes the lives of other players a misery, and griefs them just for kicks. This isn't like being at the whim of some hacker who shows off by messing with the game—you're at the mercy of the weasels who bought or subscribed to their script to "win."

It is that shared hatred of cheaters that Valve taps into with Overwatch, its new crowdsourced anti-cheating tool. Overwatch, which lets experienced players like myself ban other players, works so well because we know what it's like to be on the receiving end of a wall-hacking charlatan. We know that a competitive match of CS:GO is on average a 45-minute commitment, and we know that abandoning it will result in punishment from teammates and game alike. We know that if we can keep CS:GO free of cheaters, the game—and the community—will be all the better for it.

The Overwatch

As the competitive first-person-shooter (it had over nine million unique players last month) CS:GO naturally attracts cheaters. Valve's solution is a simple one: let the players police themselves. The Overwatch gives "qualified" players—those that that have fulfilled certain criteria, such as a minimum rank and a minimum number of games—to take on the ultimate counter-terrorist role and strike the ban-hammer down on those that see through walls, or auto-aim their way to a string of unbelievable headshots. Putting the power to rid the game of cheaters in the hands of those who, by and large, are competitive-minded and thus inclined to hate those that break the rules, has proven to be a smart decision, even if it didn't always seem like it.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

What do we do on the Ars Orbiting HQ to while away the lonely holiday hours? Play board games, of course. And the last 18 months were high-water marks for the hobby, throwing out innovative, beautiful titles on a near-monthly basis.

Here, we've rounded up a few of our favorites from 2015 (with a few late 2014 titles sneaking in for good measure). These are the new games that we most enjoyed this year—and we hope you'll find something new to try, too.