Author: Kyle Orland

After struggling for over a year to make Evolve work as a traditional, paid title, the developers at Turtle Rock are making a radical shift to a free-to-play model with Evolve: Stage 2. The game is entering beta today on the PC and possibly coming to consoles in the future.

"Making Evolve free on PC is going to be a process that takes time and a lot of hard work, but we believe in Evolve and we believe in you, our players and want to do what’s best for both," Turtle Rock wrote in a blog post late last night.

So far, Turtle Rock hasn't announced how it plans to make money off the new, free version of Evolve. According to an extensive Turtle Rock interview with Game Informer, everything in the game will be unlockable via "silver keys" earned during play. As of now, those keys cannot be purchased for actual money.

If you have been reading any gaming news today, you've probably stumbled on one of dozens of articles headlined by the "fact" that sales of the Xbox 360 version of Red Dead Redemption are "up over 6,000 percent" at Amazon. The apparent cause: Rockstar confirming Tuesday that the game would be backward compatible with the Xbox One starting on Friday, July 8.

These two pieces of news are being taken together as evidence that the Xbox One's backward compatibility feature is immensely popular and that untold hordes of Xbox One owners (who apparently don't own a copy of the game for a last-generation system) have been clamoring for a chance to play Rockstar's 2010 Western classic. When you dig into the story a bit, though, the numbers aren't so clear cut.

First, you have to realize that Amazon's much-cited "Movers and Shakers" rankings, which are the source of all of these stories, don't actually measure sales increases directly. The big, green numbers that the media is quick to hype actually measure the relative increase in sales ranking position, which doesn't correlate directly to actual unit sales levels.

For years now, some gamers have complained the touchscreen's lack of physical buttons and control sticks has made it less than ideal for many types of traditional games. In that time, countless accessory makers have tried to solve this problem with a variety of physical smartphone controllers that have filled a small niche in the mobile gaming marketplace at best.

Now, Nintendo is raising the possibility of creating its own, physical controller for smartphones. In response to a question about the feasibility of making "action games" for smartphones during a recent investor's meeting Q&A session, Nintendo General Manager of Entertainment Planning and Development Shinya Takahashi noted that "physical controllers for smart device applications are available in the market and it is possible that we may also develop something new by ourselves [emphasis added]."

In practically the same breath, though, Takahashi suggested that Nintendo could "look at whether action games are really not impossible (without a physical controller for smart device applications) to create and how we can make it happen to create such a game." In other words, trying to making an action game that works on a touchscreen might be easier than trying to force an external controller on smartphone gamers.

If you were reading Ars about a decade ago, you may remember our extensive coverage of the baffling architecture behind the PlayStation 3's unique Cell processor. Many developers reportedly encountered difficulties trying to program for it effectively. If you haven't read all that, let Ars' Jon Stokes sum it up for you: "...the PlayStation 3 was all about more: more hype, and more programming headaches."

Today, we can add another posthumous log to that already burning fire of developer ire for the PlayStation 3 and the Cell architecture. Polyphony Digital CEO and Gran Turismo series lead Kazunori Yamauchi told IGN this week that working on the PS3 "was really a nightmare for us."

After addressing the slumping sales for the two PS3 editions of the Gran Turismo series, Yamauchi was quick to blame Sony's hardware for at least part of the series' development problems. "The conditions for GT6 were really against us, mainly because the PlayStation 3 hardware was a very difficult piece of hardware to develop for, and it caused our development team a lot of stress," he said.

Usually, when a new game console is nine months away from launch, the console maker has already softened the ground for the upcoming debut with trade show announcements, hints at exclusive games, and at least some public discussion of its technical specifications. Yet Nintendo's NX is currently nine months away from launch (if the company's current March 2017 launch roadmap is to be believed), and we still know next to nothing about "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept" that was first mentioned publicly roughly 15 months ago.

That state of affairs has left us flailing at wild, patent-based guesses about the console's design and grasping at extremely small crumbs of concrete information when they rarely appear.

Nintendo does at least have a public excuse for keeping details of the NX so secret for so long. Speaking at a Japanese investor meeting this week (as translated by Twitter user Cheesemeister), legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto said the company is "worried about imitators" if it shows off the console's new ideas too early. Miyamoto also talked about protecting those new ideas in a recent interview with the AP. "In terms of NX, there's an idea that we're working on. That's why we can't share anything at this point... If it was just a matter of following advancements in technology, things would be coming out a lot quicker."

The SteamVR-powered Vive headset is the most exciting thing that struggling handset maker HTC has had going for its brand in years. HTC seems to realize this, at some level, because it's now separating its virtual reality business into a wholly-owned subsidiary. The new HTC Vive Tech Corporation will be somewhat separated from the struggles facing the rest of HTC's business.

In a statement provided to The Verge, HTC called the new subsidiary "a vehicle for developing strategic alliances to help build the global VR ecosystem." But it's not hard to see the move as a way to create space between HTC's blossoming VR interests and a headset manufacturing business that has posted historic losses, been forced to lay off thousands, and hit a ten-year stock market low in recent years.

The Vive sold roughly 25,000 to 30,000 units in its first month on sale earlier this year, according to an Ars Technica Steam Gauge analysis. At an $800 asking price for each unit, that represents a significant infusion of new revenue for the company. Now, that revenue can be managed free from the troubles affecting the rest of the company.

The excellent The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters exposed the wider world to the strange subculture of classic video game high score competitions in 2007. Now that the ensuing quest for ever higher and higher Donkey Kong scores looks like it's coming to an end, it's the perfect time for a new documentary focused on an even stranger sub-niche: players who spend days "marathoning" classic arcade games for high scores. In other words, it's the perfect time for Man vs. Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler.

Man vs. Snake (currently available for download and in an extremely limited theatrical run) includes a number of amusingly candid quotes along the lines of "What the fuck is Nibbler?" You'd be forgiven if you were thinking the same thing; the 1982 release's mix of Pac-Man and Snake gameplay failed to impact the arcade marketplace at the time, and it wasn't a massive seller for jukebox manufacturer Rock-Ola, either. But the game did catch the eye of Tim McVey, who became the first person ever confirmed to score 1 billion points on any video game in early 1984, winning himself a Nibbler arcade cabinet in the process.

McVey's feat was only possible because Nibbler is part of a certain subset of classic arcade games that are amenable to marathoning. Because the game continues to give extra lives at regular intervals (and because the game's speed and endlessly repeating mazes stop getting harder at an early point), the only thing limiting a skilled player's score is their ability to stay awake and focused at the machine for hours at a time. While a Donkey Kong high score run only takes three or fours hours to complete, getting a top score on Nibbler can easily take 40 hours or more of mind-numbing repetition (save for occasional breaks where the player trades a few extra lives for a few moments of rest).

Xbox users who purchased training videos through the Xbox Fitness app probably thought they were buying a workout program they'd be able to use regularly for the life of the Xbox One, at the very least. Instead, those videos will soon be completely unavailable to those who paid for them up front, according to a "sunset" plan announced by Microsoft yesterday evening.

Xbox Fitness launched alongside the console in late 2013 as a unique, Kinect-powered health app, using the 3D camera to evaluate users' form as they followed along with on-screen streaming video trainers. The app provided 30 basic routines for free with an Xbox Live Gold account, but that subscriber benefit will end on December 15.

Xbox Fitness also included numerous branded training programs that cost real money up front, from $60/£40 P90X routines to Jillian Michaels videos that could run $12 each. That paid content is no longer available for purchase as of yesterday. Those who purchased it previously will be able to use it for just over one more year before the app becomes completely unavailable for download or use on July 1, 2017.

See 3DNES' conversions in action in our video review. (video link)

A few months ago, we took note of 3DNES, a surprising new emulator that automatically adds depth to the flat, blocky pixels of classic Nintendo Entertainment System games. The Web-based beta version of the emulator from March is getting a full release as a $30, downloadable Windows executable later today via itch.io.

Ars Technica got exclusive access to the near final version of that standalone emulator earlier this month. Our time testing 3DNES reveals a promising new direction for classic game emulation, but there are still many rough edges.

Hey, kids! Put away those boring old history books. There's a new way to learn about geopolitical conflict. It's a video game!

*Record scratch sound effect*

That's right, it's CivilizationEDU, the new education-focused version of the hit simulation series that will make learning fun! This isn't your daddy's old "Oh no, I died of dysentery" educational gaming, either! Starting next year, The Games for Change Conference and GlassLab Inc. will partner with 2K Games to "provide students with the opportunity to think critically and create historical events, consider and evaluate the geographical ramifications of their economic and technological decisions, and to engage in systems thinking and experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology, political and socioeconomic development."