As kids, I'm pretty sure when we imagined future headlines this is pretty much exactly what we had in mind.

http://arstechnica.com/information-techn...et-access/

And this is what it looks like on ABF's computer today.

I kid, of course.

I know he uses Firefox. : p

In recent years, the HD remake (not to be confused with a real remake) has become very popular. We've seen such HD remakes of Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear, and Banjo Kazooie. In all those cases, the switch to wide screen was fairly easy to accomplish. Since everything's rendered in real time, simply extending the viewing area does the job just fine. There are some cases (such as cut scenes) where trouble can come up (Silent Hill HD, I'm looking at you), but generally it works well.

Not so much for two HD rereleases I recently picked up. I'm talking about Resident Evil Rebirth (PS4 version) and Grim Fandango (PC version). Two already great games with some minor visual enhancements, but notably they both are defaulted to wide screen. That's the biggest problem. Both of these games use entirely pre-rendered backgrounds. As a result, there's no way to "extend the viewing area" because those pre-rendered assets were never designed with that in mind. So, they did the only thing they could, they stretched out the 4:3 image to fit a wide screen ratio. All those graphical enhancements, but with an ugly stretched out image. It's clear they put it that way purely because new gamers might not accept an "update" with "those black bars".

Now the good news is I'm not really mad at all. I'm just saying it doesn't work, and clearly the developers agreed. They've put in an option in both of these remakes to switch the game to it's intended 4:3 (with all the other visual enhancements intact), and I'm certainly glad of that. My main reason for this is to say that going forward, remakes of games with prerendered backgrounds all need to have this option. These two shouldn't be lone exceptions.

More expensive.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/30/9072645...crate-soon

Yay? I mean, I don't fault Nintendo for selling merchandise. That's fine. I fault Nintendo for pretending this is somehow a "loyalty reward" when it's just something you pay for. Also, I'm not at all interested in "subscribing" for completely random stuff I may not even want.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/18/8997591...box-one-pc

I'm convinced SOME part of the development process took place in an American studio. My evidence is LOOK AT IT. Everything about the concept and the art style screams "this was made by Cartoon Network".

They're now making shorts for Disney.













They've still got it!

Google's Deep Dream is a project to run images through a recognition AI and then portray how that AI "sees" the images.



It's dogs all the way down...

Certainly one of the top holy grails of the industry...

http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/3/8889237/...ay-Station

Apparently 200 prototypes of this thing were made, but all were ordered destroyed when the deal fell through... but a maintenance guy kept one, and his son just posted pictures of it. There's no power cord, so until we see that proof I'll be at least a bit skeptical, but the article above adds a lot more credibility to the story than just the initial pictures (also in that article) do. Presuming it is real, I wonder what's on the cart and the CD...