Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
Say what you want about a massive retail chain releasing an own-brand Tablet, but when that Tablet sells over half a million units in one year, clearly you must be doing something right. But while the Hudl tablet may have been very successful for massive retailer Tesco – enough so that a sequel is planned for later this year, in fact – it hasn’t all been plain sailing.
An unusual glitch that causes the screen to go completely unresponsive in certain situations has caused the store to have to replace a significant number of tablets under warranty. Over the last few weeks, Tesco have been hard at work to discover a cause for this issue; and eventually narrowed it down to a faulty piece of code responsible for managing the screen’s sensors. As a result, it’s rolling out an Android update to fix the issue for any tablets still affected.
Tesco say that some updates have passed Google certification and are already hitting affected Hudls, but it could take up to three weeks for the fix to reach everyone. So if you’re using a Hudl and finding it to stop working every now and then, hold fast – you’ll soon be back to working order without the hassle of a return.
Nordic Games seem to have decided to try an experiment with their Planetary Annihilation game. They’ve decided to offer a proper boxed, hard-copy of the game on Amazon. This is the same version of the game that is currently on Steam Early Access. In other words – this is not the finished game that is being sold here.
The boxed version won’t actually be released until June 20th, but it is open to pre-orders costing £39.99, which is a tenner more than it costs on Steam right now. It will of course be updated like the digital copy, both requiring an Internet connection to receive them. So why is Nordic offering a hard-copy of a game that isn’t finished yet?
We think of it as an alternative to the typical pre-order, where you usually get cosmetic DLCs, skins and stuff like that, instead of actual gameplay,” Nordic said in an interview, adding that they wanted to try out this idea for themselves to see how many people would be interested in buying the boxed game. They’re also including a piece of content exclusive to this version, a playable in-game commander supplied by Uber Entertainment.
Planetary Annihilation is currently in what Nordic have called its ‘gamma’ phase. It is a big update but still not a final version, just a phase in the development as they continue to update the game in the ‘next few months and weeks’. This could mean that picking up the game even a month or two after its release could mean a sizeable download before the game is even playable.
Guess we’ll see how well this experiment will work out for Nordic and their game. What do you think? Is offering what is essentially a ‘beta’ game for full price something you are okay with or do you think ‘Early Access’ is beginning to go too far now?
The rumours about the technical specifications of Watch Dogs have escalated this week, mainly due to a passage on the website of Playstation.com that said “Hack everything as you make your way through Chicago’s underground as you experience Watch Dogs in a way that only PS4 can provide, at 60 frames per second in 1080p,”. However, the passage was then amended recently to remove the last bit, which left everyone wondering how Watch Dogs was really going to run.
Ubisoft have now released the actual statistics, saying that on the Playstation 4 the game will run at 900p and on the Xbox One at 792p. Both games will run at 30fps rather than the 60fps some were hoping for. However this was a choice made, says creative director Jonathan Morin in a blog post, simply because they wanted to focus more on the gameplay than the technicals and also simply because as more open-world game with a lot of dynamic elements higher resolution and framerate would be much harder to keep consistent than for a corridor-based shooter. Even though Watch Dogs was originally supposed to release half a year ago, the time was spent making a better game to play, not simply to look at.
In the same blog post Ubisoft have also outlined the differences between the versions of the game for the next-gen and last-gen consoles. In single-player mode the only difference will be areas containing a few less NPCs in the PS3/Xbox 360 versions without any supposed effect on the core gameplay. However on the multiplayer side, the Decryption competitive multiplayer mode and the ability to free roam with multiple players will not be included for the last-gen versions, which might not sit too well with some gamers still with the older consoles.
Watch Dogs will release for the PS4/ Xbox One/ PS3/ Xbox 360/ PC on May 27th, with the Wii U version being released later on in the year.
When Popcorn Time first hit Windows PCs, Hollywood was a picture of fear and anger. Here was a service designed to find torrents of all kinds of movies past and present; and make pirated copies of movies available for FREE – and worse, they were open-sourcing the project! Hollywood eventually took down the original code and jailed the person responsible – but not before other people grabbed the code and forked it, creating similar software and projects of their own. And now, Popcorn Time is going mobile.
That’s because on the project’s most popular forks, Time4Popcorn, have released an Android app online. Sporting the same look, feel and selection of films as the desktop version, Time4Popcorn’s app is only recommended for those with generous data plans; as it also streams the films from torrents rather than offering them directly. Some elements of the Android interface are still quite low-res compared to the Desktop version and there are UI elements that don’t work yet, plus some films have a noticeable delay before they start playing due to the availability or speed of the torrent process.
Naturally, with movie piracy being a criminal offence, Google were not at all pleased to see the Android app released. While Time4Popcorn apparently submitted the app to the official Google Play store, don’t expect to find it there yourself, as Google removed it on the grounds of “theft of intellectual property”. As a result, it can only be downloaded from Time4Popcorn’s website.
If this hasn’t put you off using the new App, however, there might be an even BIGGER reason to urge consumers to avoid it. The Time4Popcorn app’s functionality is mainly served by a centralised server, which makes it vulnerable both to takedown attempts by legal bodies or angry hackers; as well as opening the potential for malware to be distributed through it. Indeed, some users allege that the app contains malware already – although this does not seem to be the case, as the developers of the app makes its source code public and no dangerous code has been found within. Whatever the case may be, the point is that by utilising this single central server approach – which is also used by the Desktop version – Time4Popcorn offers no safety net and no guarantees as to the availability, safety and security of the service, should anything happen to that server in the future. You use it at your own risk.
Just like on Windows, however, the open-source nature of Popcorn Time means it may only be a matter of time before a second Android version is released; and there’s even been interest in building it for Chromecast. Perhaps this is the sad fact of piracy – it continues to evolve and grow even as it gives the finger to the very organisations by which it harms, yet whom without which it would cease to exist.
