GOG originally stood for "Good Old Games," and the online store wants to better match the expectations associated with that name. It's launching a revival that will do more to highlight and support classic game releases. The initiative will not only apply a "Good Old Game" tag to retro hits in the catalog, but will include a 'new' game: a version of Legend's 1999-vintage The Wheel of Time (timely given the Amazon series) that runs on modern hardware.
The Unreal Engine-based fantasy shooter won't offer stunning visuals, but Nightdive Studios' refresh lets it run on newer operating systems (Windows 7 and up) and support high-resolution displays. The premise remains the same: you play an Aes Sedai (magic-wielding woman) who uncovers a sinister plot decades before the timeline of Robert Jordan's novels. You'll also find deathmatch and capture-the-flag multiplayer modes, although Wheel of Time wasn't exactly a staple of the online gaming scene when new.
There's a strong competitive incentive for GOG to shift its attention to classic games — this could help it stand out compared to heavyweights like Steam and the Epic Games Store, many of which focus on the latest releases. The initiative could be useful for game preservation efforts, though. If nothing else, it could be helpful if you've been waiting decades to revisit a favorite.
Peloton continues to take steps beyond cardio exercise with Guide, a set-top camera ($295) that brings strength training to the lineup. It’s joined by a new all-inclusive $39 monthly subscription (with a $24 introductory offer) which adds movement-tracking strength and core-focused classes to the array of Yoga and bodyweight workouts that already exist in Peloton’s $12 per-month digital service.
The Guide unit itself looks a lot like the Facebook Portal TV or your old Xbox Kinect. It’s got a versatile magnetic mount that can be placed on a flat surface, or folded out to latch around your TV’s bezel, which should make it easy enough to position where it can capture your workouts. It uses a wide-angle 12-megapixel camera, which is enough pixels to deliver a 4K video stream of yourself. It can be plugged into any HDMI port, and comes with Peloton’s recently launched heart rate monitor and a remote to navigate the menus and adjust your TV volume.
Typically, your video feed will be on-screen alongside the Peloton trainer, so you can track and adjust your form as necessary. But you can minimize yourself so it’s easier to see the trainer’s movements, if you prefer.
When you start a Movement Tracker-supported workout (they’re tagged with Peloton’s water drop icon to make them easier to find), you’ll see a wealth of information on what that particular workout will cover, both when it comes to muscles targeted and exercises involved. Peloton is trying to bridge a gap here between regular gym-goers and those of us that don’t know the difference between a hammer curl and a bicep curl. (To be honest, they’re only slightly different.)
You can preview the exercises, including a quick video animation of the movement, and even see which muscle groups will be feeling the burn. I found a lot of it unnecessary, but it largely stayed out of the way – which was what I wanted. I know how to do a plank, thanks.
We’ll be taking a deeper dive into the Guide soon, but let’s get into the crucial part of Peloton’s new addition, that tracking. With a single camera, and no LIDAR or Infrared it does a great job of framing you during your workout and tracking your movement across the space.
Mat Smith/ Engadget
The major selling point of the Guide is that it’s checking your form for you. Now, I might have been over-optimistic in hoping for tougher love from the Guide. I’ve done a few HIIT (high-intensity interval training) workout classes, both in-person and through pandemic-era Zoom calls, and I fondly remember the trainer telling me to raise my hips or retract my shoulder blades more when they would catch me slacking. The Guide only polices your movement in the broadest sense to make sure you’re following the instructor. It won’t tell you what you’re doing wrong – or how to fix it.
However, compared to a group workout with a human coach, Peloton’s tracking system is always watching you, not the others in the class. When live classes arrive in the coming months, this might all work a little better – interactions with the coaches is what a lot of Peloton devotees swear by. Perhaps this could eventually offer the best of both, with human interactions and advice combined with the Guide’s more constant vigilance.
As you follow the exercises, the Movement Tracker icon will fill up. Once I’d fulfilled the movement obligations, I’d hear a ‘ping’ as I transitioned to the next exercise. I ran through three different classes, and apparently my form was correct enough 19 out of 20 times. (It's not a perfect score because I wanted to take a few photos during a press-up set, okay?) That felt kinda good. I’ve never considered myself a gym person, but I’ve had various stints of exercise booms. Finally, I seemed very ahead of the crowd that Peloton seems to be pitching this device at. To be honest, I wanted heavier weights and harder workouts during my demo.
The Peloton Guide is another device trying to introduce a connected camera into your home, which carries its own privacy concerns. You might be able to take some solace in the fact that Peloton says nothing gets uploaded because the processing is all done on-device. Plus there’s a cover you can slide over the camera lens, and mic mute switches on the back. But as Wired noted, there is a somewhat concerning section in the terms and conditions where Peloton says it may use your biometric data (including facial scans) in the future. This could be as innocuous as identifying separate users in the same household, or something else entirely.
The company is considering adding the option to share your tracking data to speed up improvements and squish bugs, like those data-sharing requests you get with voice assistants. On that note, Peloton has added a basic voice assistant, in beta, to the Guide, ensuring you can pause, cancel or otherwise control your workout when the included remote isn’t nearby, or one of your kids is having a meltdown during your Core workout. It’s not the most attentive assistant, however, and I would have to bark my commands and increasingly unhinged volumes in order to get it to work.
I appreciate the depth of data and customization Peloton has crammed into the Guide. During a workout, the backing track was a little too loud for me, and despite having only a passing knowledge of Peloton’s software, I was able to find an audio mix option, mid-workout, and increase the levels of the instructor’s voice. This attention to detail is rarely found in fitness videos and software. My time with the Guide was brief, but Peloton will need to ensure the Guide offers enough to warrant the initial outlay and even more expensive subscription. Can it convince existing Peloton subscribers to pay more?
Over 50 gig workers have been killed on the job in the United States since 2017, according to a report released today by Gig Workers Rising. Of that figure, nearly two-thirds (34 deaths) occurred this year and in 2021, which may indicate a worrying upward trend. And often, the companies they contracted for do little to compensate their surviving relatives.
“Based on publicly available data more people are getting killed doing gig work each year. App corporations are not doing enough to protect the workers who make their apps run,” wrote a spokesperson for Gig Workers Rising in a message.
The report compiled the 50+ incidents from public documents like news stories, social media, fundraising platforms, police reports, court cases and a database maintained by The Markup of ride-hail driver carjackings. It excludes other kinds of at-work deaths such as "fatal traffic accidents or other causes of injury." And as Gig Workers Rising freely points out, the report is not comprehensive and the "true number is likely to be much greater as gig corporations don’t regularly disclose the number of homicides that occur for people working using their app."
Among the kinds of incidents that were included in the report were fatal carjackings, armed robberies or hate crimes. In many instances, drivers were killed by their own passengers. This includes the cases of Christina Spicuzza, a 38-year old from Pittsburgh and Abdul Rauf Khan, a 71-year old from Springfield, Virginia, who were both the victims of fatal carjacking incidents. The Wall Street Journalreported that many gig workers have quit due to a spike in violent crimes last year.
In many of the cases, the families of the victims were not compensated, according to the report. This is due to the same loophole that precludes most gig workers from receiving guaranteed minimum wage, employee-sponsored healthcare or other job benefits: their status as supposedly independent contractors.
Engadget reached out to a number of gig platforms to ask about their on-the-job insurance policies and will update once we hear back. A number of companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash have implemented safety measures like 24/7 law enforcement support teams and discrete emergency assistance buttons.
“Since day one, we’ve built safety into every part of the Lyft experience. We are committed to doing everything we can to help protect drivers from crime, and will continue to take action and invest in technology, policies and partnerships to make Lyft as safe as it can be," wrote a Lyft spokesperson in a statement.
DoorDash spokesperson Julian Crowley said the company’s occupational accident insurance covers homicides, and provides survivor payments of up to $150,000 for eligible dependents.
“We were the first national delivery platform to offer occupational accident insurers to Dashers at no cost to them, and with no opt-in or application required, which can support them if they’re injured while providing a delivery on our platform,” wrote Crowley.
While the laws regarding worker death benefits vary greatly from state to state, at minimum they often provide some amount of money for funeral expenses; in New York state, surviving family members are entitled to "two-thirds of the deceased worker's average weekly wage for the 52 weeks prior to the accident." In California, a stipulation in Proposition 22 requires gig companies to provide workers with accidental death insurance.
“My sister lost her life over a Lyft trip that totaled to be 15 dollars and really only totaled that because it wasn’t stopped at the time of arrival but more so after her death," said Alyssa Lewis, whose sister Isabella was killed while on the job last year. "Fifteen dollars that she couldn’t even take with her when losing her life for it.”
Canada may soon echo Australia in making internet companies pay news publishers to use their content. CBC Newsreports Canada's ruling Liberal Party has introduced legislation requiring that Facebook, Google and other online firms compensate news outlets for either reproducing or easing access to content. The money would help foster the "sustainability" of Canadian news, according to the government.
Companies that don't pay publishers would be subject to binding arbitration led by Canada's telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC will also decide which news sources qualify for compensation.
Officials saw this as a matter of necessity. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez claimed the news industry was "in crisis" and that publishers couldn't rely on ad revenue like they had in the past. This merely addressed a "market imbalance," he said.
We've asked Google and Facebook parent Meta for comment. In the past, they've maintained that publishers benefited from the traffic driven to their websites through search results and social media posts. They've also threatened to disable services rather than pay publishers, although Google ultimately caved in Australia and struck deals to avoid an arbitration battle. In a statement to CBC News, Google said it was "carefully reviewing" the legislation and "fully support[ed]" access to news.
The legislation may well pass. Although the Liberals don't have a majority in Canada's House of Commons, they recently reached an agreement with the New Democratic Party to advance bills reflecting shared interests. Whether or not it works as promised is another concern. As University of Ottawa internet research chair Michael Geist warned, there's a concern that the CRTC's role will lead to just a "handful" of major companies profiting at the expense of smaller outfits. If so, it might not prevent further damage to the country's news industry.
Ubisoft says Ghost Recon Breakpointwill no longer receive content updates, leaving the tactical shooter essentially frozen in time. In the last few months, the developers added a mode called Operation Motherland and a bunch of items. In all, Ubisoft released 11 content updates for Breakpoint. The publisher will keep the servers for both that game and its predecessor Ghost Recon Wildlands online for the foreseeable future.
Hey Ghosts, we have an important message we would like to share with you all 👇 pic.twitter.com/kYeyVWVtgi
Breakpoint wasn’t well received when it was released in October 2019. Ubisoft swiftly went into damage control mode to resolve some of the bugs and stability issues in the weeks after release. However, the game's perhaps best known these days for being home to Ubisoft’s first rollout of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
In December, the publisher announced plans to add NFTs (though it calls them "Digits") to its games through the Quartz platform. The news didn't go over well with players or employees, many of whom cited concerns about the environmental impact of NFTs and accused Ubisoft of trying to milk more money from consumers.
Breakpoint was the first target of the NFT project. Ubisoft gave away Digits to players, including gun skins with small, barely noticeable serial numbers. Players didn't exactly flock to buy them on secondary markets, though. An Ubisoft executive claimed in January that players could benefit from having a secondary market for in-game items, "but they don't get it for now."
"Thank you to all Ghost Recon Breakpoint players who claimed their first Digits," a message on the Quartz site reads. "You own a piece of the game and have left your mark in its history. As the last Digit for Ghost Recon Breakpoint was released on 3/17/2022, stay tuned for more updates with features to the platform and future drops coming with other games!"
Bringing development on Breakpoint to an end at this point isn't a massive surprise. It wasn't exactly designed to last as a live service title for many years, and Ubisoft is well-known for churning out sequels to its core franchises.
Still, the move will severely diminish the perceived value of Breakpoint's NFTs. It's unlikely that interest in Breakpoint will increase in the future, which will make it more difficult for Digits owners to sell them. Holders of the NFT items won't be able to transfer them to other titles either, leaving them in possession of in-game goods with little real-world value.
Even though Breakpoint is on life support, the Ghost Recon brand isn't going away anytime soon. In October, Ubisoft announced a free-to-play battle royale title called Ghost Recon Frontline.
Finally, I’m benefitting from the world’s seemingly-endless appetite for nostalgia for the good ol’ days. 25 years after Theme Hospital was released, and four years after Two Point Hospital, its remake spiritual successor made its debut, we’re getting a true sequel.
Two Point Campus takes players back to the world of Two Point County, this time tasked with building a chain of new universities in plots adjacent to the previously-dysfunctional hospitals you’ve finished renovating.
I recently played through an early build of the first two levels of the game. Freshleigh Meadows is a cut-down tutorial stage, while the Rome-inspired Piazza Lanatra is the second area players can expect to access. With the release date pushed back to August 9th, I get the sense that the title isn’t yet as polished as the developers might have hoped. This is, at least in part, attributed to the fact that much of it was created remotely while staffers were locked down at home.
I’d only recently (re)completed Two Point Hospital and found that I could breeze through these early levels on instinct alone. At first blush, you might feel that Campus is a little too similar to its predecessor for it to be deemed a standalone sequel. Much has been pulled over wholesale from the previous title, albeit with some graphical polishing. The team clearly felt that if it wasn’t broken, there was little point in trying to fix it, at least as far as I’ve played so far.
The most notable difference is that Two Point wanted to address the most common complaint made by players of Hospital – that they didn’t enjoy the layout puzzles. In both Theme Hospital and Two Point Hospital, you’re given intentionally problematic floor plans for you to build your facility on. That’s part of the core mechanic, forcing you to optimize your layouts for both a speedy patient journey and to make the best use of the space allowed. That weird dogleg building too small for an X-Ray room? It’s your mission to try and fill it with something, that’s the point.
With Two Point Campus, it’s not anymore, since you can now pay money to amend the boundaries of your building and even move the entrances. You can claim, or return, land back to your garden space depending on your need on each level. The point of having weird building layouts that wasted acres of potentially-useful space was part of the game’s playful sadism. I’d complain more about those darn kids needing things to be easier, but I’m coming around to it.
Two Point / Sega
And you’re no longer solving for efficiency anymore, but also aesthetics. The outdoor spaces can be filled with trees, pathways, flora and concession stands, amongst other things. Your obligation isn’t just to educate people, but also to ensure that your students are learning in a pleasant environment.
Financial management is less of a key factor in Campus, because success is now tied to how well your students do. That means watching underperforming students who you’ll need to send to private tuition, or expelling ones who aren’t up to scratch. You’ll also have to set up events for people to meet each other, both socially and romantically. You can buy romantic trinkets for the campus, like love seats, to encourage meet-cutes on your watch. I don’t know if I’m a fan; it feels like the wrong sort of subject for a light-hearted business simulation game to be tackling.
Universities are also a lot less of a gold mine for zany jokes compared to a cartoonish hospital. Sure, there are still menu gags and amusing radio commentary, but there are just less things to poke fun at in a campus setting. The weirdest thing I’ve seen so far is trainee chefs cooking a burger the size of an SUV in a slightly bigger skillet. It’s a far cry from unscrewing a lightbulb sticking out of someone’s neck when they’re suffering from “lightheadedness.”
Campus’ sense of scale has shifted fairly significantly, too, and Hospital players may find the bigger rooms are more of a challenge. While you could build a serviceable clinic out of just 3x3-sized rooms, the default area in Campus is closer to 5x5. There’s a lot more stuff to cram into each room, too, with a more maximalist sense of design compared to the last game. I suspect it’s because of those Hospital players min-maxing their hospitalsuites with impractical objects.
Two Point / Sega
Mercifully, you can now build bathrooms on a 2x1 plot, so any spare room in lobbies all over your campus can now be put to use.
Even as a loud-and-proud fan, I’m mature enough to admit that the titles wear out their welcome after a while. Hospital, while brilliant, essentially asked you to play the same set of gameplay loops across its 15 levels. Yes, the scale got bigger, as did the obstacles, but by the time I reached the final level, the toughest challenge was maintaining my interest.
It’s something that Two Point does seem to be aware of, carefully ensuring that you can’t blow through its new game with the same speedy ruthlessness. Part of this is down to the three “year” cycle the game employs for your entrants to get their degree. The other is a greater focus on actively managing your campus beyond squeezing every penny from its walls.
Early on in Piazza Lantara, I ran out of cash – which often meant restarting a level in Hospital. But here, you can simply wait, burning off a year of some kids’ education in order to recoup the losses without ever needing to take out a loan. (Two Point could never, ever, run away from the satirical point that nothing is more important than guarding your bottom line in whatever privatized industry you’re running.)
If there’s one thing I wish, deep down, the developers had devoted more time to, it’s the game’s frustrating intangibles. There are many instances when you need to improve your hygiene rating, for instance, and have to plaster every wall with hand sanitizer stations and trash cans. But because one too many staff members are “unhygienic”, you’ll never get there unless you start sacking folks.
Two Point / Sega
It’s one of the game’s problems that are often most reliably solved by visiting a Reddit thread, since the solutions are often buried beyond a casual player’s ability to find them. I also wish the UI was less fussy when it came to duplicating rooms with duplicated items on the walls. Having to manually delete internal windows, for instance, seems to be harder this time around than it was in Hospital. (And another: Why can’t I put a sanitizer dispenser over a trash can, since they don’t occupy the same space?)
But none of those issues, annoying as they are, won’t stop me from eagerly snagging Campus on the day it’s launched. I sank eight hours into just those early levels, while suffering from COVID-19, because it’s as addictive as its predecessor. I feel like there’ll be the usual period of my life when it swallows every waking minute that I’m not doing anything else. While Two Point Campus is very much the same game as its predecessor, it’s still very welcome.
Two Point Campus will debut on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch on August 9th, 2022.
Pinterest has a history of banning content it sees as harmful before other online platforms, and that approach is now extending to climate change issues. The social site is rolling out a policy that bans climate misinformation, including climate change denial, false claims about solutions to climate change, misrepresentations of scientific data and "harmful" bogus statements on natural disasters and other extreme weather. It'll likely disappear if it contradicts the well-supported scientific consensus, in other words.
An update to Pinterest's ad guidelines also "explicitly" bans marketing material that promotes climate change misinformation and conspiracy theories. The policies were built with the help of expert groups that include the Climate Disinformation Coalition and Conscious Advertising Network.
The company claims to be the first major internet platform with "clearly defined" policies barring false climate change claims for both content and ads. That's true to at least some degree. Facebook mainly labels misinformation and reduces its spread, while Twitter aimed to "pre-bunk" falsehoods during COP26 but stopped short of banning them. YouTube, meanwhile, doesn't let climate change deniers monetize videos.
The timing is apt, at least. A just-released UN report indicates the world has three years to level CO2 emissions if it wants to avoid environmental catastrophes, and that those emissions must drop by a quarter by 2030. Pinterest isn't basing its stricter policies on that report, but it clearly shares the view that a unified public stance based on accurate information is necessary to limit global warming.
Since 1972, the Technics SL-1200 has been a go-to for DJs in search of a durable and dependable turntable for spinning vinyl. And in honor of its 50th anniversary, Panasonic will release the SL-1200M7L, a new limited edition version of the MK7, its most recent revision of the deck. The company will offer the M7L in seven colors – black, red, blue, white, green, yellow and beige – with each featuring a handful of nice touches. All seven colorways come with an anodized tone arm and slipmat with a gold-colored Technics logo. Each one also comes with an engraved serial number so true aficionados can know you spent $1,100 to buy your turntable.
Panasonic plans to only sell 12,000 units of the SL-1200M7L. And if it has caught your eye, you’ll need to act fast. When the company released the limited-edition SL-1210GAE, at the time one of the few ways to buy an SL-1200 in black, it sold out almost immediately. Among the retailers that will carry the SL-1200M7L include B&H, Guitar Center, Turntable Lab and Stokyo. You can pre-order the turntable tomorrow, with orders scheduled to ship out in July.
Uber is planning to add travel booking via flights, trains and more in the UK this year to expand its ride-hailing business, The Financial Times has reported. The new service is designed to provide a "seamless door-to-door experience," so that you can book your flight, train and Uber all on the same app. To do so, the company will integrate its software with airlines, inter-city bus and rail operators (include Eurostar Channel Tunnel tips) and car rental companies, according to CNBC.
The UK is one of the company's largest markets outside the US, so the expansion is a big step. "You have been able to book rides, bikes, boat services and scooters on the Uber app for a number of years, so adding trains and coaches is a natural progression," said Uber UK general manager Jamie Heywood. "Later this year we plan to incorporate flights, and in the future hotels, by integrating leading partners into the Uber app to create a seamless door-to-door travel experience."
This "super app" strategy isn't new, as CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he wanted Uber to be the "Amazon of transportation," when he first joined the company. Prior to the pandemic, around 15 percent of Uber trips were higher-margin rides to or from airports. "With COVID behind us, with this big push into new modes of transport, we want to signal that this is a very important growth lever for us over the coming years," Heywood said.
It's not yet clear to what extent Uber will compete directly with other travel booking services, but Khosrowshahi was CEO at Expedia before coming to Uber. The company might have a leg up on rivals in that it could also offer a ride from airport to hotel, essentially owning the whole process.
Uber recently announced that it would let New York City users book Yellow Cab taxis directly through its app, with passengers paying around the same as they would for an Uber X ride. The company also plans to offer a similar service in San Francisco. It's not clear yet, though, when or if Uber will offer its expanded travel booking service in the US.
Google will be violating South Korean law if it pushes through with its plan to remove apps linking out to external payment methods, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said in a new legal guidance. Last year, the country passed a law that requires major app stores to accept alternative payment methods, and Google readily agreed to comply: It allowed developers to offer an alternative in-app billing system to live alongside its own. The tech giant still collects a cut for payments made through that alternative billing system, though, and it's only 4 percent lower than the commission the company collects for payments made through its own system.
If the typical service fee for a purchase is 15 percent, then Google collects 11 percent instead. For ebooks, it collects a 6 percent commission instead of 10. Korean developers weren't happy, and as The Register and The Wall Street Journal report, they responded by linking out to third-party payment systems in order to avoid paying Google's fees. The tech giant had already blocked them from being able to update their apps, and it warned them that their apps will be removed from the Play Store if they continue to offer external links by June 1st.
An association of developers in Korea brought the situation to KCC, asking the commission to clarify whether Google's actions comply with the law. See, the new law is rather vaguely worded and doesn't explicitly state if outlinking is legal or not. Based on the commission's legal guidance, the KCC sees external links to outside payment systems as perfectly OK and that Google is violating the law by restricting updates and deleting apps that offer them.
The KCC can conduct preliminary status inspections to identify specific violations if Google removes apps linking out to external payment methods as planned. If it finds that the company truly has violated the law, then it can slap Google with a fine equivalent to up to 2 percent of its app store revenue in the country. A company spokesperson told The Journal that Google is reviewing the guidance and that it will work with local app developers to expand users' choice.
Google recently launched a pilot program that allows participating developers like Spotify to offer their own payment method. They have to offer their own payment systems in-app, however, alongside Google Play's. As for Apple, it recently started allowing "reader" apps such as Netflix and Spotify to link to their own websites for payment as part of a settlement with the Japan Fair Trade Commission.
