Author: Sam Machkovech

It's not a Rebel ship, swear!

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LOS ANGELES—Up until this week, the space-exploration video game No Man’s Sky has existed mostly as a promise of infinite possibility. Years of teaser videos and excitable ramblings from lead designer Sean Murray have hinted at a game that looks beautiful and seems incredibly big—but which might not add up as a game. You get into a spaceship, and you fly from one procedurally generated planet to the next. And then… what?

On Tuesday, Murray and the rest of the Hello Games design team brought their game’s near-final build to a trippy Los Angeles studio space, intent on answering that very question. They were forthcoming with more gameplay and more details than ever before—including the announcement of a June 21st release date on both PlayStation 4 and Windows PCs—and they even handed controllers to us to explore the game however we saw fit.

Yet while our combined hour of chaperoned demos and free-to-roam gameplay was illustrative, it was also frustratingly distant. The more we learn about this game, the more questions we have.

Once you've bent time, you can unload a bunch of bullets into a time void, which will all launch into a foe as soon as the time-bend vanishes.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Nearly 15 years ago, Remedy Entertainment released the hard-boiled action classic Max Payne to PC gamers, a game that received endless kudos for both its stress on story and its bullet-time action twists. After that, however, Remedy didn't do so much. Max Payne 2 came and went two years later, followed by a grueling wait for Alan Wake, whose take on horror was remarkably narrative-heavy (and, consequently, not so active).

The studio's next franchise, Quantum Break, has been hidden remarkably well since its 2013 reveal as an Xbox One game—meaning, it hasn't had an iota of its gameplay spoiled up until today, a mere five weeks ahead of its retail launch. Microsoft and Remedy made up for this information-starving by granting a pool of critics unfettered access to the game's first three hours at a San Francisco press event last week, which was enough time to make clear that this is definitely another Remedy-like game. Quantum Break focuses heavily on narrative while giving players some very noticeable, time-shifting twists to work with during battle scenes.

But while the game's hero has some flashy, cool-looking powers to play with, Quantum Break's stress on narrative elements already stood out as the bigger deal in this action-adventure game—mostly for worse.

SAN FRANCISCO—Xbox’s spring press showcase could have begun in any number of ways, but Xbox chief Phil Spencer just had to get something off his chest. In a bizarre move, the head of Microsoft's gaming efforts devoted a good chunk of the event’s 30-minute state-of-the-union speech to an Internet tiff he got himself into the prior week.

The issue began in early February when Microsoft announced that its big Spring 2016 game, Quantum Break, would launch simultaneously on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs in April. Some fans cried foul, pointing to prior promises that QB would be an "Xbox One-exclusive" game—never mind that the new PC version didn't impact the Xbox One release at all.

Spencer took to Twitter to respond to someone who said he'd canceled his pre-order over the news, leading to the hilarious fact that Spencer repeatedly addressed someone who goes by the handle @The_CrapGamer. And while Spencer seemed to understand that some Xbox owners were wary of Microsoft "erod[ing] some of the exclusivity that [they] feel like [they] have on Xbox," his immediate response to that was to spell out a future in which Xbox could possibly stop being a hardware line and start being a service.

(credit: Steam)

Virtual reality content is inherently difficult to advertise, especially when its targeted hardware doesn't exist in the wild. You might show a full-screen 2D simulation of what a headset-wearer might see, or you might use goofy-looking footage of people wearing monstrous, face-covering hardware, but neither of those are great at simulating the VR feeling.

VR-game screenshots are even worse, which the creators of VR music-rhythm game Audioshield conceded while trying to promote its upcoming title last month. I gushed at length about how fun the game was, but the screens that creator Dylan Fitterer provided me didn't match my words. Really, they were garbage.

On Monday, the day of the HTC Vive's retail pre-order kick-off, Fitterer finally made a preview video worthy of the Audioshield hype—and I imagine more VR content creators will start to copy Fitterer's impressive mixed-footage approach for future previews. In this trailer, a 2D camera has been set up behind the silhouetted player, while Audioshield's content—an endless barrage of colored orbs dropping from the sky—appears in the shot as if the player was actually standing inside this virtual world. Helping the effect is the additional rendering of the game's colored, handheld shields, which appear in the game as if you're holding them.

The Facebook signature wall in question is much bigger than this one, by the way. (credit: Matteo Artizzu)

Facebook may require real names to post on the social network's so-called "walls," but for the company's own real-life equivalent, that does not appear to be the case. As a result, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly posted a private company-wide memo condemning a particular wave of anonymous activity on its "signature wall."

According to a Gizmodo report, Zuckerberg took issue on Wednesday with someone crossing out part of the phrase "Black Lives Matter"—which was written on the company's giant, dry-erase wall next to other staffers' and guests' signatures and drawings—and changing it to read "all lives matter." The Zuckerberg memo alleged that this had happened multiple times to the Facebook signature wall, and he called out the anonymous activity: "Despite my clear communication at Q&A last week that this was unacceptable... this has happened again."

The New York Times' recent guide to smartphone battery life tweaks included an animated GIF teaching readers how to enable third-party ad-blocking software within iOS 9. This image was taken from the GIF. (credit: The New York Times)

The New York Times inadvertently found itself on both sides of the media world's ongoing ad-blocking conversation this week when a public statement by its CEO was countered by an article about smartphone battery life.

On one side of the argument stood CEO Mark Thompson, who spoke against the practice on Tuesday during a keynote discussion at New York's Social Media Week—and suggested possibly banning Times access for users who employ ad-blocking software. Adweek reported on that conversation, which saw Thompson say that his paper's content should be valued "like it's HBO rather than a broadcast network" and that "trying to use and get the benefit of the Times' journalism without making any contribution to how it's paid is not good."

Yet the Times followed those statements on Wednesday with a feature-length guide in its technology section titled "Tips and Myths About Extending Smartphone Battery Life." The guide, which is advertised as "part of a series of creative collaborations with The Wirecutter," covers topics such as downloading media instead of streaming it and keeping a phone's automatic brightness setting enabled, and it also dismisses battery-related myths. Most interestingly—at least in light of Thompson's statements—is its unqualified recommendation to "block power-sucking ads."

Yesssss Renegade Ops! For free! (credit: Sega)

In an attempt to remind PC gamers about its gaming back catalog of the past few years, Sega's PR team launched a campaign called "Make War, Not Love" last week. While this giveaway centered around free DLC for a trio of PC games, the campaign garnered more attention for its wholesale giveaways of unrelated Sega games that simply required showing up and submitting an e-mail address.

The campaign concluded on Saturday with its primary, popularity-contest portion swinging in the direction of Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II. Players of that game will receive free DLC in the near future. Anyone else can currently show up to the site and sign up for a Steam code which, upon redemption, will grant full access to a trio of freebies: Viking: Battle for Asgard, Gunstar Heroes, and Renegade Ops.

Two of those count among the greatest co-op blasting games of all time—at least, in this humble author's opinion. 2011's Renegade Ops is a delightful, twin-stick retread of the '80s action game Jackal, as it asks two players to drive suped-up, gun-mounted four-by-fours and blow up archetypal terrorists. Meanwhile, 1993's Gunstar Heroes needs little introduction for any Mega Drive or Genesis owner, but if you've never played it, this frenetic, side-scrolling shooter really put game studio Treasure on the map, which was formed by ex-Konami staffers to make some of the craziest video games of the '90s.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (left) and police chief Kathleen O’Toole (third from left) stand with Seattle city neighborhood leaders at an October 2015 press conference. (credit: Nextdoor)

SEATTLE—On Wednesday, the Seattle Police Department tried its hand at an online question-and-answer session to hear feedback from its citizens, and the department chose a burgeoning online platform to host its first-ever online "town hall": NextDoor.com.

Users can only access NextDoor forums—a service that is used nationwide—based on their verified address. That makes neighborhood-specific pages semi-private groups, but there's also content that's marked for broader, city-wide access. The city's town hall meeting fell into the latter category.

Unlike a real-life police town hall, however, the Q&A session had additional restrictions. Only NextDoor users who could confirm their address could listen. More problematic was the fact that the proceeding was subject to NextDoor's terms of service, which blocks users from publicly reposting any content from the site. A Seattle reporter found this out the hard way when she was warned by—and then banned from—the site for reposting questions posed to SPD Chief Kathleen O'Toole, and her responses.

(credit: Sam Machkovech)

Like other party-friendly card games in recent memory, Spyfall hinges pretty largely on the group of people you play it with. In this game's case, that's thanks to a stress on both deception and theatrics. Everybody has to invent both questions and answers, all while keeping pivotal details close to their chest, to figure out their half of an asymmetrical mystery.

But unlike other popular party games, Spyfall hinges nearly as much on how you encounter it. The game first grew to prominence in the United States as a print-and-play game—and also came in the form of a pretty handy HTML5-powered app—before finally seeing "official" release in the United States by Cryptozoic Games late last year.

The boxed version that Americans got doesn't stray far from the one sold throughout the world, based on the Ukrainian original by designer Alexandr Ushan and complete with its original artwork. Its adherence to the original presentation is pretty much the only bad part of the game.

Time to start photoshopping at least one new face on the old box art now that we have a release date and a new star in Ryan Gosling. (credit: Warner Bros.)

Though principal filming of Blade Runner 2 has not yet begun, producing company Alcon Entertainment has already locked down the sequel's release date: January 12, 2018.

Deadline Hollywood announced the news Thursday with a roundup of everything else we currently know about the upcoming film's production. The film will be directed by Denis Villeneuve (who made 2015 thriller Sicario) and co-written by the original film's co-writer Hampton Fancher, based on a story he previously worked up with Ridley Scott. (Scott has indicated in interviews that his work on Prometheus 2 will prohibit him from contributing any further to the Blade Runner sequel.)

The lead acting gig is Ryan Gosling's, but we've yet to find any good "hey girl" meme images about Gosling's Blade Runner 2 role. (Might we suggest: "Hey girl, you're a benefit and you're my problem.") The studio has already confirmed that Blade Runner 2 will take place "decades" after the original film—which means Harrison Ford's real-life aging should match what we see in his reprisal of Rick Deckard, which was announced in February 2015.