Month: February 2022

Enlarge / Tom Holland stars as Indi—er, as Nathan Drake in Columbia Pictures’ Uncharted. (credit: Columbia Pictures)

Imagine a video game sequel that does away with pretty much everything fans liked about the original. There’s less action, uninteresting puzzles, boring environments, plot holes big enough to drive a “Hog Wild” seaplane through, and, perhaps worst of all, dull dialogue. This imaginary game opens with an interminable 80-minute cut scene, only to be followed by an energetic action sequence that recalls the original game’s best moments.

That’s what the first-ever Uncharted film feels like. It’s based on the popular PlayStation-exclusive game series of the same name, and it stars the same main characters. But while it’s reminiscent of the Indiana Jones films that inspired the video games, the movie doesn’t have the same breezy, comical, action-packed magic of that franchise—or of the Uncharted games. How wild that a video game delivers better movie-like thrills than its live-action version.

A brief glimpse of gold

“Professor, what’s another word for pirate treasure?” “Drake, stop asking me that question.” (credit: Columbia Pictures)

The final scene is the only decent part of this movie, so I’ll start there. Like its namesake game series, this week’s theatrical exclusive is all about adventurers surviving fistfights and solving mysteries while searching for an ancient-treasure jackpot. Uncharted‘s booty is a doozy: two stranded, treasure-filled pirate ships, somehow hidden from all satellite and radar imaging or explorers for over 500 years. A villain captures the ships and decides to airlift them via helicopters.

Enlarge (credit: Liteboxer)

The melding of fitness and video games has never been more natural than in the expanding realm of virtual reality.

I’ve been a fan of fitness games since the days of boxing with nunchucks in Wii Sports and the tethered play of All-In-One Sports VR for the Oculus Rift. Now, there’s a totally wireless boxing experience in Liteboxer VR, exclusively on the Meta (née Oculus) Quest 2.

Liteboxer is one of the newest VR games to put the gym and personal trainers right in front of you. It’s a boxing class experience that’s fun, engaging, and challenging, even for an intermediate-level boxer like me. The company is hoping to be the Peloton of boxing, but VR may not be the best place for its software, at least not yet. We took the pre-release version of Liteboxer VR for a spin to see how far we are from real gym experiences in the metaverse.

Enlarge / The Largo di Torre Argentina in Rome contains the Curia of Pompey. New study concludes it was built in 3 phases. (credit: Adam Carr / Wikipedia)

The Curia of Pompey is famous for being the site where Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on the ides of March in 44 BCE. It is of great interest to tourists, historians, and archaeologists alike. After analyzing mortar samples collected from the curia, researchers from Italy and Spain have confirmed an earlier hypothesis that the structure was constructed in three distinct phases, according to a recent paper published in the journal Archaeometry.

In ancient Rome, a curia was a structure where members of the senate would meet. The great Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) built this particular curia as a memorial to his own military achievements. A large theater section contained a temple, a stage, and seating on one end; a large porticus (housing the general’s art and books) surrounded a garden in the middle; and the Curia of Pompey was at the opposite end.

During Julius Caesar’s reign, the Roman senators temporarily met in the Curia of Pompey after their usual Curia on the Comitium burned down in 52 BCE. (Followers of an assassinated tribune named Publius Clodius Pulcher set it on fire while cremating his body.) Caesar’s planned replacement (Curia Julia) was under construction as a replacement meeting site when the ruler met his own brutal demise at the base of the Curia of Pompey. The senators who killed him thought assassination was the only way to preserve the republic, but the murder ultimately led to the republic’s collapse.

Enlarge / After 12 hours, the Tesla CEO deleted the Holocaust joke. (credit: Twitter)

In the early hours of Thursday morning, Elon Musk tweeted a meme that compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with Adolf Hitler.

The tweet, replying to crypto coin enthusiasts, included a photo of Hitler with the phrase “stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau” and “I had a budget,” a reference to the industrialized murder of millions of people by the German regime in extermination camps during the 1940s.

(credit: Twitter)

In the past, Musk has tweeted his support for the “freedom convoy” protests, a right-wing movement funded mostly from the US that has been causing civil unrest in neighboring Canada.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks to members of the media while departing from federal court in New York on Thursday, April 4, 2019. US District Judge Alison Nathan telegraphed her initial thoughts as the SEC and Elon Musk’s lawyers presented their arguments over whether the Tesla Inc. CEO should be held in contempt for tweets the agency says violated an earlier agreement. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A lawyer for Tesla and CEO Elon Musk claimed in a court filing today that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is harassing the car company and Musk to “muzzle” his criticism of the government. The three-page letter from lawyer Alex Spiro to US District Judge Alison Nathan in New York said the SEC is “weaponizing” the 2018 settlement in which Tesla and Musk agreed to pay $20 million each in penalties to resolve the SEC’s complaint that “Musk’s misleading tweets” about taking Tesla private caused the stock price to jump “and led to significant market disruption.”

The settlement also required Tesla to impose controls on Musk’s social media statements. Musk had claimed on Twitter that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 per share, but the SEC said in a lawsuit that “Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source.”

Today’s letter said the SEC “has been weaponizing the consent decree by using it to try to muzzle and harass Mr. Musk and Tesla, while ignoring its Court-ordered duty to remit the $40 million that it continues to hold while Tesla’s shareholders continue to wait. Worst of all, the SEC seems to be targeting Mr. Musk and Tesla for unrelenting investigation largely because Mr. Musk remains an outspoken critic of the government; the SEC’s outsized efforts seem calculated to chill his exercise of First Amendment rights rather than to enforce generally applicable laws in evenhanded fashion.”

The number of physical console game releases continues to decline even as the number of digital console games explodes.

Anyone watching the game industry knows that the console market is quickly shifting away from games sold on physical media and toward the digital download dominance that PC gamers have known for years. But a new exclusive analysis of NPD Game Pulse data conducted by Ars Technica shows the extent of the decline in physical console game production, even as the number of digital console titles continues to explode.

In terms of distinct game titles released in the United States, the raw number of new games available on physical media (i.e. discs or cartridges) declined from 321 in 2018 to just 226 in 2021, a nearly 30 percent decline (games released on multiple consoles are counted as a single title in this measure).

The number of digital games released each year, on the other hand, remained relatively flat from 2018 through 2020. Then, in 2021, that number exploded to nearly 2,200 digital titles, a 64 percent increase from 2020.