Category: Uncategorised

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.

(credit: Wonderlane)

After a thorough evaluation of 57 scientific reviews that encompassed 176 studies on 68 illnesses, a panel of health experts has once again concluded that homeopathy is at best a placebo (when it's not being potentially harmful).

Homeopathy, which one of the panel members referred to as a “therapeutic dead-end,” is based on the idea that “like cures like” (a questionable proposition to start with). Thus, its practitioners claim that if you take a substance that causes a sickness or similar symptoms of a sickness, then dilute it—to the point where the result is plain water—you create a cure. There's no mechanism that can possibly explain this, but some tout the idea that water has memory that can retain therapeutic information after dilution has removed every last molecule of the “healing” substance.

These are centuries-old ideas, and we now know they defy basic knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology. Accordingly, they've long been dismissed by the vast majority of modern scientists and physicians. All that hasn’t stopped homeopathy believers. In 2007, about 3.3 million Americans spent $2.9 billion on the industry. In the UK, the National Health Service picks up a $5.74 million (£4 million) check for two homeopathic hospitals and various water treatments.