Author: Kyle Orland

Some of this could be yours if you enter our sweepstakes!

We're once again coming up on the season of giving, and here at Ars, we’d like to give some stuff to you while you give to some deserving charities. That’s right—it’s the 2015 edition of our annual Charity Drive.

Since 2007, we've been actively encouraging readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our annual charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year as always, we're giving some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it (ethically), and we don't want it clogging up our offices anyway, so it’s yours to win.

This year's swag pile is yet another big one. We have more than 100 prizes amounting to more than $8,000 in value, including laptops, game consoles, headsets, collector's edition games, rare limited-edition items, clothing, and other cool collectibles. In 2014, Ars readers raised over $25,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of over $166,000 since 2007. This year, we're hoping to break the 2012 record of more than $28,000 in donations, and we can do it if readers really dig deep.

After 20 years, developers will finally be able to ape this Ridge Racer screen.

Back in 1995, Namco threw in a playable, miniature version of the arcade classic Galaxian to keep players amused during the lengthy loading times for PlayStation launch title Ridge Racer. In the decades since, other developers have largely been prevented from copying the idea of minigames on loading screens. That's because of a broad US patent Namco got for games that prevent "unnecessary wastage of time... by first loading the smaller, auxiliary game program code into the games machine, before the main-game program code is loaded, then loading the main-game program code while the auxiliary game is running."

Some games, like FIFA and Bayonetta, have managed to skirt that patent by including load-screen minigames that are simply smaller versions of the full game rather than "auxiliary" games as mentioned in the patent. Still, for the most part, developers have been forced to use those unskippable load times to display concept art or in-game statistics rather than playable diversions.

The dark era of dull loading screens may finally be coming to an end, though, because the 20-year term on Namco's 1995 patent expired last week. To celebrate, a number of indie developers are getting together for a Loading Screen Game Jam, devoted to "creating interactive loading screens... and defiling the patent that held back game design for so many years!"

Better fix those technical problems before you land...

An inordinate amount of our recent Just Cause 3 review had to focus on the significant technical problems in the PC build of the game rather than the physics-based mayhem the title is designed for. We weren't alone in noting that these technical problems get in the way of what should be an effortlessly enjoyable experience.

The developers at Avalanche Studios and publisher Square Enix have heard those concerns loud and clear, but they say they'll "need a little bit of time" to roll out a patch that fixes the problems. As the developers write in a recent post on the game's Steam info page:

We know that some of you are encountering some technical issues—we’re looking into them all and we’re fully committed to providing you the best possible experience.

We know you’re going to want specific information on when a patch will land and what will be fixed—we would love to give you that information, and we will as soon as we have it. But right now, a little over one day since we launched, we have huge numbers of players in our enormous game world and we’re monitoring all the data coming in.

We need a little bit of time to recreate some of these issues and build fixes. Rest assured though—we are fully committed to making Just Cause 3 as awesome as possible. We already know loads of people are having a blast with the game but we’ll do all we can to make sure everyone is laughing and smiling as they play.

We could point out that it would be nice if the developers had been able to recreate and fix these widespread problems before the game was actually released. But that's not the gaming world we live in anymore; like it or not, "launch now, fix later" is becoming the de facto standard for many of the biggest games from big publishers.

Fig. 1: Even used DK2 units demand a premium price on resale sites like eBay.

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From the minute you buy most gadgets, you can expect their market value to go down as time and technology quickly make them obsolete. That hasn't been the case with Oculus' second Rift development kit (DK2). Instead, the opposite has happened; on auction sites like eBay, new and used DK2 units routinely resell for hundreds of dollars more than their original $350 asking price. Unopened DK2 units have sold for as much as $1,200 there in recent days.

Gathering up the data for the most recent successfully completed DK2 eBay auctions (we looked at about 80 new units and 50 used ones, just to keep the data collection manageable) shows just how much of a premium the hardware demands well over a year after it was first made available. The median eBay purchaser has to spend $786 for a new, unused Rift these days or a $565 median for a used unit.

Kyle Orland

I'm thinking about making this my permanent look...

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For years now, there's been a lot of digital ink spilled over the risk of looking unintentionally silly while isolated in a virtual reality headset and how that lack of "cool" will affect the use of the resurgent technology (VR Subway Guy notwithstanding). If you want to look intentionally silly while wearing a VR headset, though, it's hard to do better than wearing a Samsung Gear VR headset without the phone or faceplate attached. As the above gallery shows, the result is an instant bug-eyed monster look that we've been told evokes everything from the Mars Attacks! aliens to Disney's bobble fairies to a Thumb Wars thumb to Bubbles from the Trailer Park Boys.

Using the Gear VR as a pair of googly-eyed goggles isn't a new phenomenon. The picture that inspired this collection came from the header image for a Gizmodo review of the Gear VR Innovator Edition that ran almost a year ago (but which we just stumbled upon recently). A few other reviewers had a similar idea around the same time, apparently. Somehow, this look failed to become a widespread meme at the time.

Enlarge / A shot of the PS4's main processor, courtesy of a teardown from Wired. (credit: Wired)

In terms of raw power, console hardware doesn't really change over time; the PS4 you buy today will essentially have the same pixel-pushing components as one you buy in 2020. But through software updates, the current generation of game consoles is managing to give developers access to more of that raw hardware power as time goes on.

Sony's PlayStation 4 is the latest beneficiary of this trend. The system's eight-core CPU used to devote two entire cores to managing the underlying operating system, leaving just six available for developers to use for games. So it was a bit surprising when the release notes for a recent version of FMOD Studio's middleware platform noted that the API had "added FMOD_THREAD_CORE6 to allow access to the newly unlocked 7th core."

Digital Foundry confirmed with its development sources that Sony has indeed unlocked a seventh CPU core for direct access by developers. Those same sources suggest that the core may still be partly used for system-related tasks at points, so it's not exactly a one-sixth improvement in available CPU time. Still, every little bit helps when trying to process complex scenes or bits of game logic.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always carried a strong undertone about the threat of nuclear proliferation. Metal Gear Solid V is taking that message to a new level by integrating an in-game metagame that will unlock a new story cutscene once all players have disarmed their in-game nuclear arsenals.

Nuclear weapons are a powerful force in MGSV's Forward Operating Base side-game, which lets players build up a personal army and arsenal that can be used to invade and plunder fellow players online. The nuclear bombs act as deterrents to invasion from other players, unless the invading force also has a nuclear weapon or has achieved Hero status through tireless do-gooding.

The nature of that in-game arms race led to tens of thousands of in-game nukes being deployed across the game's servers as of November 1, according to Konami's official count. But players also have reason to try to reverse that trend. As Konami recently officially announced, a "secret nuclear disarmament event" will be triggered for all players only when "All nuclear weapons on the regional server corresponding to your console or platform must have been dismantled. In other words, the amount of nukes on your platform's server must be equal to 0."