Friday, 24 July 2015

Bad Dream: Series

Bad Dream: Series

Do you sleepwalk? I don’t. At least, not very often. One night, however, I woke up in my Grandma’s old fl at, trying to unlock the front door with what was, possibly, my dad’s right slipper. I blame falling asleep with the heater on in a small space. It was actually pretty scary, so if you do sleepwalk, you have my sympathies. Bad Dream Series is this exact experience in short, loosely sequential, adventure games, providing confusion and horror through simple line drawings on yellowing paper.

Apple to adopt ad-blocking in iOS 9?

Apple to adopt ad-blocking in iOS 9?

Is this the death of ads on the world wide web?

At Apple’s recent WWDC conference in San Francisco, the company introduced something massive. Instead of announcing it on stage, however, the revelation was hidden away in the developer notes of the iOS version of Safari 9.0. The controversial new feature is an inbuilt ‘Content Blocker’ pathway, which will allow third-party ad-blocking-apps to bind to Safari and potentially prevent any ad script from running anywhere on the entire web.

Killer Instinct: Season 2

Killer Instinct: Season 2

Xbox One’s premier fighting game continues to grow

At last! The final character has been released and the second ‘season’ of Xbox One’s headline fighting game has been brought to a close. It’s been a pretty good year for Killer Instinct, despite a rocky start with Season 1 developer Double Helix Games leaving the series to make something for Amazon and being replaced by Iron Galaxy, which was best known for porting other games. Turns out, it’s actually pretty damn good at making its own, too. Season 2’s new characters make for one of the most interesting lineups of all the current fighting games and, thanks to a big injection of prize money from Iron Galaxy, Killer Instinct is one of the featured games at EVO 2015 – the world’s biggest fighting-game tournament. Not a bad year at all.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

Tom Clancy’s The Division

Hands-on impressions from New York City’s most godforsaken zone (no, not the discount rack at Macy’s...)

Deep in the heart of The Division’s plague-ravaged imagining of Manhattan, just north of Times Square, lies an area dubbed ‘The Dark Zone’. If the Big Apple’s gone rotten, then this fenced-off area is its rancid core – the area where the pandemic first took hold, and where concentrations of the virus are at  its highest. According to the game’s fiction, before society crumbled, the Dark Zone was quarantined off in a futile attempt to contain the virus’ spread.

Where Now For Windows 7? (And Why Windows XP Is Still Hanging On Too)

Where Now For Windows 7

David Crookes looks at Microsoft's plans for Windows 7 now that its latest operating is available

Microsoft's release of Windows 10 is just days away. It is the successor to the ill-fated Windows 8 and 8.1 operating systems and it has, in the upgrade process, skipped an entire number, as many of you will know. The company has kept quiet over the reason why it has done this, leading to speculation that it's because the number 9 is unlucky in Japan or that it's to do with an issue surrounding software checking for Windows 95 or 98. But the effect has been to put some distance between the new and old. The only problem is the old could so easily linger and bite Microsoft on the bum.