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The Long Dark Enters Its Final Week on Kickstarter with Gameplay Footage

I’ve mentioned the rookie effort of the newly founded Hinterland Studios before on the blog. The team of industry veterans formerly of Volition, BioWare, Ubisoft Montreal, Relic and Riot Games has come together to work on first-person survival game The Long Dark.

The game has now entered its final week of fundraising on Kickstarter and the team at Hinterland has finally released their first piece of gameplay footage to drum up support for their campaign.

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Tags: Hinterland, Indie, Kickstarter, The Long Dark

BlackBerry Courting More Buyers Including Google

Oct 8

Posted by Steve Murray

Declaring that BlackBerry had been sold to Fairfax Financial Holdings for $4.7 billion might have been a bit premature. A report from Reuters says that BlackBerry’s sale is far from finalized and the beleaguered smartphone manufacturer is talking to more interested parties about a sale including SAP, Cisco Systems and Google.

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Tags: BlackBerry, Business, RIM

The Hobbit Trilogy Costs Over $500 Million

Oct 7

Posted by Steve Murray

Just when you thought that big Hollywood productions couldn’t get more expensive, Peter Jackson and his trilogy of movies based on JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit set the bar higher.

According to financial documents filed in New Zealand, The Hobbit movies have cost Warner Bros. over $561 million through March 31st.

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Posted in TV/Movies

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Tags: Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, Warner Bros

Haven: Lost and Found Review

Oct 7

Posted by Steve Murray

Last week on Haven, we moved one step closer to the band getting back together. This week, Audrey has to escape the Barn or disappear into the aether. Meanwhile, Nathan is dealing with missing children and Duke and Jen continue their adventures to find Audrey from their side of reality. It sets up as just another episode of Haven but those last ten minutes made the setup worth it.

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Posted in TV/Movie Reviews

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Tags: Haven, Review, Stephen King, Syfy

Geek Links of the Week

Oct 4

Posted by Steve Murray

A new study shows that piracy may not harm the entertainment industry as much as you’d have them believe. In fact, the researchers believe that there are some benefits from piracy. [Torrent Freak]

Science magazine played what might be a smart or dirty trick on smaller publications depending on your perspective. They sent out a fake and obviously flawed study to show the dangers of open-source scientific journals that don’t review the studies they publish. [National Geographic]

A report on internet freedom suggests that it’s on the decline in the majority of the 60 countries surveyed. [RT]

Amazon is working on their own microconsole at the moment and are going out to find devs to make games for it. That’s quite a bit different than what I recall Ouya doing. [Gamasutra]

There a lot of popular comic book characters but not all of those characters debuted in the pages of a comic, including some very big characters in some universes. [Newsarama]

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SC2 Player Celebrates Too Early, Costs Himself the Game

South Korean Protoss player Dear thought he had his GSTL Season 2 match against Symbol won after forcing Symbol’s zerg army to retreat. To celebrate, he busted out what are called “manner nexuses” which are Protoss buildings built to show off how much money the winning player had in reserve in defeating his opponent. It’s considered bad mannered in StarCraft 2

The only problem was that not only was Symbol not defeated but his army supply outnumbered Dear’s by nearly two-to-one when the manner nexuses were dropped. And with most of Dear’s money dropped into a show-off move, the result was inevitable.

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Posted on October 4, 2013 | Video

Violence in Games: When the Agenda Dictates the News

Oct 4

Posted by Steve Murray

What sounds like a headline that’s likely to get more attention and make a news organization more money: “Father Fails to Secure Firearms, Leaves Them for 9-Year-Old to Play With” or “Video Game to Blame for Boy Bringing Gun to School?” Clearly, it’s the latter. The former would be more accurate if all you were interested in was reporting the facts and just the facts but facts don’t make money.

And that’s the problem with coverage of recent news coverage of anything that’s even tangentially related to video games. Whether it’s a kid bringing a gun to school, a mugging in Britain or a mass shooting at a military installation, the media isn’t interested in reporting the news but in creating a story that’s much more exciting than just the facts.

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Posted in Games, Long Read

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Tags: Games, Media, Video Games, Violence, WPLongForm

FAA Panel Recommends Lighter Electronics Restrictions on Flights

Oct 3

Posted by Steve Murray

Seven years ago, a TV show examined whether signals from cell phones actually interfered with critical equipment on airplanes. They found that there was no truth to the belief that a cell phone signal could cause an airplane to crash. You may have heard of that show. It’s called Mythbusters.

Fast forward to this week when an FAA advisory panel finally saw this episode of Mythbusters and recommended that restrictions on the use of personal electronic devices should be reduced. It’s not a total victory but it’s a start.

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Tags: Airplanes, Cell Phones, FAA

EA Planning to Only Allow Visual Mods in SimCity

Oct 3

Posted by Steve Murray

SimCity 4 has long had a healthy modding community. The game might be ten years old but modders were still making new content for the game into this year, even with the release of this year’s SimCity. This is thanks in part to a fairly open attitude toward modding by Maxis.

However, EA isn’t planning to be as open to full-scale modding when it comes to SimCity 2013. The first draft of their user-generated content (modding) guidelines are going to put some tight limits on what modders can do.

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Tags: DRM, EA, Maxis, Modding, SimCity

Valve Files for Half-Life 3 Trademark

Oct 2

Posted by Steve Murray

Well, we knew that Half-Life 3 was going to come out eventually. It really is a case of not if but when it gets officially announced and released. Based on a recently discovered European trademark application, it looks like we could be seeing some of Half-Life 3 inside the next five years.