Valve didn't wait long to hold its second Steam Next Fest. The Vergereports the games extravaganza (formerly the Steam Game Festival) is now slated to take place October 1st through October 7th. You'll see a range of upcoming games, including livestreams and chats, but the highlight may be the demos. Most notably, IGNsays you'll get to try No Man's Sky creator Hello Games' Steam release of The Last Campfire.
Other game demos will include Ludomotion's Unexplored 2, The Artistocrats' Starship Troopers — Terran Command and Andrew Shouldice's action adventure Tunic.
Steam Next Fest, like Summer Game Fest and other virtual events, is a substitute for real-world gaming conferences and expos that can't happen due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This gives independent creators an opportunity to promote and refine games that might otherwise get little attention compared to blockbuster titles. It also helps Valve, of course — you may be more likely to buy these games and otherwise view Steam as a go-to source for indie releases.
If you've been following tech news at all this week, you've likely read some of WSJ's reporting already. However, the entire series of articles is worth a look as it shows how much Facebook knows about unequal policy enforcement, how toxic Instagram can be for teen girls, the power of its algorithm, illegal activity and, perhaps most stunningly, how activists drowned out Mark Zuckerberg's own push for COVID-19 vaccines.
Concussions will never be prevented by simply wearing a helmet for contact sports, so doctors and researchers must explore other methods for minimizing lasting effects. With the Q-Collar, a $200 band that is worn around the back of the neck, Q30 hopes to limit brain trauma in athletes by slowing blood flow to the internal jugular vein.
We've come a long way since the Rumble Pack for Nintendo 64. The Ringer explores the role of haptic feedback in gaming through the lens of Sony's DualSense for PS5, pondering what the future of gaming may hold.
Grimore of Souls, the latest entry in the long-running Castlevania series of games, is now available as an Apple Arcade exclusive. While it’s not a new game per se, it’s one that most Castlevania fans haven’t had a chance to play yet. Series publisher Konami first announced the game back in 2018 before releasing it only in Canada in 2019 and then subsequently delisting it from the App Store.
Grimoire of Souls has something for Castlevania fans of all stripes. It features art and music from series veterans Ayami Kojima and Michiru Yamane. What’s more, you can play through the game using five different playable characters, including franchise favorites Simon Belmont, Shanoa and Alucard. There’s also support for co-op if you want to play with friends. You can download Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls on iOS, iPadOS, macOS and tvOS. An individual Apple Arcade subscription costs $5 per month.
Facebook has handed over virtual reality illustration and animation tool Quill to Iñigo Quilez, the developer who created the app. Quilez has formed a company called Smoothstep and rebranded the tool as Quill by Smoothstep, which is now on the Oculus Store.
The original Quill app will be removed from the Oculus Store on October 18th. It'll still work for those who downloaded it, but Oculus won't support the app any longer. Users will need to manually upload creators to Oculus Media Studio manually rather than through Quill as well.
Facebook says Quill content shared on Oculus Media Studio or Oculus TV will still be available on Oculus for now. The Quill Theater app will remain on the store — it will be renamed as VR Animation Player next month. The Oculus team also noted that Smoothstep has open sourced both Quill Theater’s IMM immersive content distribution file format (IMM) and an IMM player.
Quilez built the first version of Quill during a 2015 hackathon to aid production on Oculus Story Studio's VR short, Dear Angelica. The film was the first to be hand-painted completely inside of a VR environment. Other filmmakers have adopted Quill, with works createdusing the tool being screened at major film festivals such as Sundance and Venice.
Some major companies are expected to enter or push deeper into the VR and mixed reality space in the coming years, such as Apple and Sony. As such, developers of VR creation tools such as Quill have a big opportunity for growth in the medium term.
Netflix has locked down several high-profile creators to TV and movie deals over the last few years, including Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, David Fincher and Game of Thrones duo David Benioff and Dan Weiss. The latest talent to join Netflix's stable is Dan Levy, the star and co-creator of Schitt's Creek who won four Emmys for the hit Canadian sitcom last year.
Levy's first Netflix project is a romantic comedy movie that he'll write, produce, direct and star in, according to Variety. He can't work on any shows for Netflix until his TV deal with Disney studio ABC Signature expires next summer.
Netflix played an important role in Levy's rise to stardom after it started streaming Schitt's Creek in 2017. “Netflix offered Schitt’s Creek a second home at just the right time and opened the doors to a whole new audience for us,” Levy said in a statement. “Watching the show thrive there has only enhanced my excitement about continuing to tell specific, meaningful stories with them in both TV and feature film.”
Levy has some other projects in the works elsewhere, including through his ABC deal. Hulu ordered a pilot last month for an animated comedy called Standing By from Levy and fellow Schitt’s Creek writer Ally Pankiw.
Ken Block's Hoonigan Industries has built a fully functional Warthog vehicle, and the team is showing us the process it went through in a new series on YouTube. While it's far from the first life—size version ever made of Halo's famous armored vehicle, this one actually works — it even debuted at the world premiere of the movie Free Guy, which stars Ryan Reynolds, a bank teller who discovers he's but an NPC in an open-world game.
The Hoonigan team created its real life Warthog using a custom rock crawler chassis. As Autoblog notes, it doesn't have a mounted gun, but it undeniably looks like the Warthog with its chunky body, futuristic shape, curved windshield and enormous tires. Even its interior is a replica of its virtual counterpart, and the team also made sure it has a four-wheel steering system. To power the beast, the team took a Ford V8 engine and added two turbos to it, giving it a 1,060 horsepower capacity.
The Warthog appears across games in the Halo franchise as a driveable military vehicle, and the Hoonigan team built a replica of it to promote the upcoming Halo Infinite game that's launching in December. Hoonigan, the brainchild of rally driver Ken Block who was also behind The Gymkhana Files, will upload new episodes showing how the Warthog was built every week until October 14th. You can watch the first one below:
Netflix is continuing to experiment with storytelling formats. Filming is underway on a heist thriller series called Jigsaw (which has nothing to do with the Saw movies, as best I can tell). Although it won't be an interactive project like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, it's a non-linear show. According to The Hollywood Reporter, you can watch the first seven episodes in any order leading up to the finale, similar to Paramount+ series Interrogation.
Jigsaw is loosely based on a real story in which $70 billion in Wall Street bearer bonds were at risk due to flood waters caused by Hurricane Sandy. The story spans 25 years, from decades before the heist to a year afterward.
The show has a solid cast, with Giancarlo Esposito, Paz Vega, Rufus Sewell and Jai Courtney among those involved. Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian star Esposito will play a veteran thief who can't stay away from a life of crime. Vega, meanwhile, plays an attorney who goes above and beyond to protect those close to her.
Ridley Scott is among the executive producers of the series, which was created by showrunner Erica Garcia. There's no release date for Jigsaw just yet, but it's maybe worth keeping an eye out for so you can put the puzzle pieces together when it arrives.
Facebook has announced a new policy that allows it to take out networks of accounts engaging in “coordinated social harm.” The company said the change could help the platform fight harmful behavior it wouldn’t otherwise be able to fully address under its existing rules.
Unlike “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which is Facebook’s policy for dealing with harm that comes from networks of fake accounts, coordinated social harm gives the company a framework to address harmful actions from legitimate accounts. During a call with reporters, the company’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said the policy is necessary because bad actors are increasingly trying to “blur the lines” between authentic and inauthentic behavior.
“We are seeing groups that pose a risk of significant social harm, that also engage in violations on our platform, but don't necessarily rise to the level for either of those where we’d enforce against for inauthenticity under CIB [coordinated inauthentic behavior] or under our dangerous organizations policy,” Gleicher said. “So this protocol is designed to capture these groups that are sort of in between spaces.”
Gleicher added that the new protocols could help Facebook address networks of accounts spreading anti-vaccine misinformation or groups trying to organize political violence. In announcing the change, Facebook said it took down a small network of accounts in Germany that were linked to the “Querdenken” movement, which has spread conspiracy theories about the country COVID-19 restrictions and has been “linked to off-platform violence.”
Facebook said it could take “a range of actions” in enforcing its new rules around coordinated social harm. That could include banning accounts — as it did with the “Querdenken” movement — or throttling their reach to prevent content from spreading as widely.
The issue of how to handle groups that break Facebook’s rules in a coordinated way has been a difficult one for the company, which up until now has primarily focused on taking down networks that rely on fake accounts to manipulate its platform. The issue came up earlier this year following the January 6th insurrection as Facebook investigated the “Stop the Steal” movement. According to an internal report obtained by BuzzFeed News, Facebook employees suggested its existing policies weren’t equipped to handle “inherently harmful” coordination by legitimate accounts, which prevented it from realizing “Stop the Steal” was a “cohesive movement” until it was too late.
During a press call, Gleicher said that the “work on this policy started well before January 6th.” But he added that the company’s work against high-profile groups had informed their decision making. “If you think about our enforcement against QAnon-related actors, if you think about our enforcement against ‘Stop the Steal,’ if you think about our enforcement against other groups — we learned from all of them.”
Boss is certainly no stranger to the world of guitar synths. In fact, Roland and Boss have been at the forefront of guitar synths and MIDI controllers since the '70s. After launching the absolutely epic SY-1000 in 2019, then cramming a bunch of synth sounds into an actual guitar Eurus earlier this year, Boss is going a little more traditional with the SY-200.
The SY-200 isn't quite as big as the 1000, which is basically a pedalboard in and of itself. But it's definitely larger and more comprehensive than the compact Boss pedals you're probably familiar with, like the SY-1 synth. The 200 has 171 different sounds spread across 12 different categories and can be played without the need for a special pickup.
Each voice has three parameters that you can customize, which pales in comparison to the full on programable synth inside the SY-1000, but it's definitely a lot more approachable and pedalboard-friendly. You've everything from ripping leads, to warm pads, to delicate bell tones at your disposal. (Though, the Boss demo video above is real heavy on traditional guitar shredding.) Oh, and it's fully polyphonic, which we've come to expect from Boss synth pedals, but it's still worth calling out.
There's two foot switches for giving you some control over live variation while playing, but you can also connect an expression pedal, or control parameters and program changes via MIDI. You've got 128 preset slots for saving and recalling your favorite sounds. And last, but definitely not least, there are send and return jacks for blending in other effects in parallel with your synth sounds.
The Boss SY-200 will be available for $300 in January alongside Boss' new IR-based amp and cab simulator, the IR-200, which will retail for $400.
This post contains light spoilers for season two, episode six of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’
In last week’s episode, Lower Decks wrapped up the first half of its second season by addressing some leftover plot threads from season one, namely Rutherford’s memory loss and the fallout between Mariner and Boimler. With those issues out of the way the series is free to move forward. But first, this week’s “The Spy Humongous” takes some time to look at an average day onboard the USS Cerritos. It’s not quite the TNG classic “Data's Day,” but it’s close enough for fans of smaller, more intimate Trek stories.
There’s no strict division between A-plot and B-plot this time, with both upper and lower decks crew starring in four loosely connected stories. The bridge crew is attempting to negotiate a ceasefire with the Pakleds, while the ensigns have been assigned to “artifact reclamation duty,” which is a fancy way of saying “clearing out weird space junk.” Boimler is thrilled, but he gets pulled away by a group of career-driven “redshirts” who think his time on the USS Titan makes him prime command material. And Ransom ends up babysitting a Pakled defector/tourist/spy. It’s a grab bag of jokes and Star Trek lore, sure to please any long-time Trekkie.
CBS
However, it’s still remarkably newcomer friendly, in that it doesn’t require too much background to understand the basic plot, while also illustrating the show’s core concept as a show about the nuts and bolts of Starfleet. If this were a live-action show it would be what’s called a “bottle episode,” one shot on a limited budget using pre-built sets and the regular cast. Even on the one exotic locale we’re shown — Pakled Planet — we never actually go inside any buildings. It’s an interesting contrast to last week’s expansive tour of Starbase 25.
In live action programming, bottle episodes exist because a show blew through its guest star or special effects budget on a big important story, and “An Embarrassment of Dooplers” would fit that bill. But as I pointed out last week, Lower Decks is not limited by what a set designer can build or how much makeup an actor will wear or how long would it take to render a sentient gaseous anomaly on a green screen. The animators can draw whatever needs to be drawn. So there’s no reason to follow the trope of a bottle episode except that… they want to.
CBS
Lower Decks has made no secret that it’s essentially a giant love letter to Star Trek. What was initially predicted to be “Family Guy in space,” ended up treating the franchise with a lot of respect, and was packed full of jokes for the fandom to discuss and catalog in places like Reddit and Trek wiki Memory Alpha. But this week’s adventure illustrates that attention to Star Trek tropes and backstory can go beyond showcasing little-seen alien species or getting justice for murdered characters.
It’s also about the love of how Star Trek tells its stories, with a strong emphasis on the personal aspect. Here we get to see Freeman, Mariner and the others simply do their jobs. We know they’re not going to die, especially not mid-season, so it’s really about seeing how they handle adversity and ultimately, what made them Starfleet material in the first place.
