I wish I’d known this sooner. Oh, and the video is hilarious too.
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The first of many.
I’ll call these “rapid reviews” because I didn’t actually finish either game, so I can’t fairly call them full reviews. I did not play them from beginning to end, I played them from beginning to whenever I got bored as hell.
As mentioned previously, I have an XBox 360 now. However, I can’t afford to keep myself stocked up on new games, so Gamefly is my source of gaming sustenance. It is very unfortunate that I didn’t enjoy my first two games, because Gamefly’s turnaround time is garbage when compared to Netflix. It takes Gamefly roughly a week to get me a new game, whereas Netflix takes about half of that. I suppose that’s what happens when the closest distribution center to Milwaukee, Wisconsin is in Pennsylvania, I guess. It’s still cheaper than renting games from a brick store in the end. …Anyway, that’s a completely irrelevant tangent. On to the reviews.
Roughly a month ago I decided to do something crazy and buy myself an XBox 360. This turned out to be a horrible mistake financially, but such is the curse of hindsight. Or the lack of being able to tell the future, one of those. There isn’t much I can do about it though, so no reason whining. So I have a 360 now, and this is the first console I’ve ever purchased for myself. I was rather spoiled on consoles as a kid, they were always my big gifts around the holidays. I’ve had an NES, the old brick Game Boy, a Sega Genesis (as well as a 32x and a Nomad), a SNES, a Sega Saturn, a Playstation, a Playstation 2, and that was the end of my console legacy. I got my first computer during the PS2 era, and that killed any drive I may have had to buy other consoles. I think StarCraft singlehandedly made me a PC gamer.
So why did I slip back into my console gaming ways for a 360? One word: BayonettaBayonetta reviews
. I was slowly coming to realize there was a void in my heart that the PC couldn’t sufficiently fill. I needed to play an action game and I needed to play one bad. Back when my PS2 was still my favorite toy, I put countless hours into the Devil May CryDevil May Cry reviews
series and the God of WarGod Of War reviews games, not to mention Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors of various flavors. I could play shooters and RTSes and RPGs all I wanted on the PC, but I couldn’t play the really badass high-impact action games I used to love so much. There was something missing from my life, and I just happened to realize it just before Bayonetta‘s release date. It had to be mine. So it was!
TEDTED reviews 2010 took place this past weekend, February 10th through the 13th. Very few of the talks are online right now, but a number of them have already sparked conversation around the ‘net regardless. While the mosquito death laser was cool and has some awesome potential when it comes to dealing with the spread of malaria, the talk I’ve embedded above held me in its grasp much more firmly.
It’s a talk given by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of Seadragon) on behalf of Microsoft. The topic is augmented reality maps. In particular, he talks about it in the context of what Bing Maps are capable of, but the topic can really be applied to any sort of virtual map. Our level of technology has reached the point where we can not only map the entire world completely with 3D rendering with enough time and effort, but we can use those maps together with still images, streaming video, and all of that sort of thing to give the big picture, so to speak. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the ‘street view’ feature on the big popular virtual maps, Bing and Google. This goes a step farther.
Continuing my new trend of regurgitating badass science finds across the net, I bring you the following article from Wired. An excerpt:
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”
Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:
“Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.”
The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”
Head on over to Wired to read the full article, it’s pretty awesome. It’s sound like fascinating work, but also dangerous. The ethical debates that come out of it are likely to be intense, since it invokes the whole “playing god” issue. As an atheist, that’s not really a concern to me.
Whether or not we should create life is not even a question. If we can, we should. The question is what kind of life should it be, what will be its purpose, and are we doing it for the right reason? Considering DARPA is heading up the project, philanthropy is probably not on their priority list here.
I’m not saying nothing good comes out of the military, because that’s just not true. Much of what they do has made the world better, and a lot of it is simply out of necessity. All I’m sayin’ is that it’s pretty unlikely they’re developing ageless organisms purely for science, medicine and the betterment of mankind. It might trickle down that way like all technologies do (including one we’re particularly familiar with) but the initial project? Unlikely.
It’s also worth noting that we’re not looking at a lot of money here, in science terms. This is a bare few millions, which is definitely not enough money to go off breeding a super race or anything. We’re most likely looking at basic tissues or micro organisms.
Regardless, it’s something that is both fascinating and frightening. The fact that we, in the near future, may have the ability to design and create life that is essentially ageless is an intimidating thought.
[Source]