In 2004, we had Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, remakes of the original Pokémon titles Red and Green. Then in 2010 (2009 for Japan) followed Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, remakes of the original Gold and Silver. While both had their own reasons for existing – FireRed and LeafGreen were to introduce Kanto Pokémon into Gen III games after all the previous games were rendered incompatible with the GBA due to hardware changes; while HeartGold and SoulSilver did the same for Gen IV due to the removal of the GBA slot for the DSi and 3DS, though fan demand was also obviously a factor – to many people’s eyes, a trend was emerging; and barely a few months into the release of HeartGold and SoulSilver, many people were speculating whether Nintendo would reboot the next games in the timeline – Ruby and Sapphire – with a DS or 3DS remake.

The logic was sound – with both Johto and Kanto getting their appearance updated to modern standards, Hoenn was now the only region NOT to have its own redesign. Many speculated we’d hear news of such a remake some time after Black and White – following the “two generations later” trend of the previous games – but instead, after two Black and White sequels, Generation V ended with not a whisper. Then came X and Y and the start of Generation VI; and suddenly people noticed teasers in the game that reignited the belief. 14 berries only obtainable from other regions? A backpacker who talked about a region that isn’t any of the known ones (even though this included Hoenn)?

It all added up to something; and now finally, Nintendo has delivered. Strangely timed to coincide with their annual earnings call and pre-dating E3 (itself subject to many speculations of its own) by many weeks, Nintendo this week revealed it is to launch two new Pokémon Titles, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, worldwide this year.

At first, all we had to go on was the names of the games and some tentative box art, revealed in a short trailer; nothing of the game itself was shown. However, as of today, that’s changed. The first trailer showing actual footage from the game was posted on Pokémon’s official Youtube channel this morning. Strangely silent apart from dubbed-over sound effects which the trailer makes clear aren’t from the game, the Trailer appears to show Groudon and Kyogre activating their respective abilities – though whether these are cutscenes, or actual in-battle animations is unclear.

The trailer’s subtext also confirms that these titles will be 2D with “some areas in 3D”; this combined with the visual style of Groudon and Kyogre shown seems to suggest these games are built upon the same visual engine as X & Y.

While the new Trailer answers a few questions about the game so far, much else remains to be seen. First of all, is it ACTUALLY Hoenn? Many assume so, but the first Trailer talked about “a whole new World”; and what about that Backpacker saying he didn’t come from Hoenn? Plus, we still haven’t seen any game play. E3, anyone? Let’s just say, the next few months just got very interesting…

“We are making a new Unreal Tournament”. Seven words that will make many a gamer either punch the air with excitement or give them cringing reminders of just how much the more recent entries sucked and hopes this won’t be another of those. Epic Games’ community manager Stacey ‘Flak’ Conley used those very seven words to confirm the company’s plan to build what they’re already describing as their “next-gen competitive shooter”, which is planned for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

However, this time the game is taking a whole new approach, with a different business model and more focus on the Community. The Unreal series of games have maintained a long tradition of mod support, which is partially responsible for its enduring reputation; and now, the company wants to involve its loyal community from the beginning, letting them contribute ideas from the very first line of code, using forums and Twitch streams to keep in touch. As for modding itself, Players will be able to make maps, weapons, and near total-conversions to add into the game even if they can’t get them into the main code.

“Unreal Tournament is the perfect kind of game to do this with,” project lead Steve Polge said. “It’s always had a very open community.”

To facilitate the distribution of mods in the new game, the new Unreal Tournament will feature a marketplace from which they can all be downloaded. Modders will have the option to make their mods available for free or at a price, letting mod authors get recompensed directly for their work for the first time. The biggest news however is that Epic Games won’t be following suit and using the marketplace to implement micro-transactions into the game. In fact, the company don’t plan to make money from the game directly at all if reports are to be believed – not only is the new Unreal Tournament going to be free to play, but all Epic Games-published extra content will be offered freely as well!

The studio warned that the game will take many months to be playable, and will start off with a focus on standard Deathmatch only. Other series-standard modes like Capture the Flag and Onslaught will be added over time. Not that long-term series fans shouldn’t be used to waiting: The last major title in the Unreal series of shoot-em-ups was seven years ago, when Unreal Tournament III hit stores in 2007 releasing on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

While you may never see mix tapes or bands releasing their latest albums on cassette any more, the humble Cassette Tape still has a relatively quiet life serving as backup devices for industries with huge amounts of data to keep safe, but no immediate need to get to it later. This is because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data – and now, Sony have invented a whole new method of storing data to tape which just made it even better.

Due to be discussed at today’s International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, Sony’s new method uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. This lets the crystals pack together closer than any previous method to record to tape, reducing wasted space and increasing capacity within a smaller area.

Combine this with the small size of the crystals – just 7.7 nanometres on average – and the results are astonishing: the new tape can hold an eye-popping 148 GB per square inch, or the equivalent of three full-size Blu-Ray disks. Over a 60-minute tape, that equates to 185 TB of data.

But don’t expect to be using this tape to store your huge music collection any time soon – for one thing, you’ll probably find yourself rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape for DAYS. One of the reasons cassette tapes are mostly used for storing data that isn’t intended to be regularly accessed, is because tape is a linear storage method. Files are stored one after the other; so to retrieve a single file, the entire tape has to be ran through until the specific file needed is found. This process is likely to be thousands of times slower with the new tape’s huge level of storage – but that’s hardly a concern for the long-term, industrial-sized data backup performed by the world’s largest data centres, where storing data is paramount but very little is expected to be regularly accessed later. Sony also isn’t saying when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but assuming it’s only a matter of building the hardware and marketing it, then it’s just a matter of time…

Nintendo are always a wild card when it comes to making appearances at E3. Most years, the company does not make a physical presence, instead releasing a special “Nintendo Direct” video detailing their plans for the year, which is broadcast during their segment of the show. This, they say, is a cost-cutting measure; as why come to the show to show off anything if you have nothing physical to talk about and a pre-recorded segment can do the exact same job? Therefore, usually when the company makes a physical appearance, chances are they have something big coming out for which only a physical demonstration can do proper justice.

A rumour earlier this month suggested that once again, Nintendo would forego a physical presence this year and rely on a Nintendo Direct instead. But earlier this week, a new rumour called that into question, when various sources each made similar claims that Nintendo was working on a new Hardware project and was considering a physical E3 appearance to show it off.

Though the company revealed in its most recent financial briefing that they were currently working on new Hardware, Chief excutive Satoru Iwata clarified this would be for a new ‘Quality of Life’ platform, seemingly implying they were not working on a new console or handheld successor to the existing Wii U or 3DS. He additionally stated Nintendo would reveal the system before the end of the current financial year – which opens a window between now and March 2015. However, little of this device is known.

While many gaming journalists originally ignored the new E3 Hardware Reveal rumour, some flipped on this position when the widely respected media outlet VideoGamer claimed it had heard from a third-party source that the speculation was true. VideoGamer linked the rumour to previous speculation about Nintendo planning a new hardware line, “Nintendo Fusion” – which we ourselves reported on several months ago – stating that similar technical specifications were once again quoted.

However, it now appears the original rumour was correct; as despite the above evidence suggesting Nintendo COULD have hardware to show off this year and the repeated rumours of E3 reveal plans, representatives from Nintendo contacted various members of the gaming press to state that there were no plans to make any such reveal in E3 – stating that they neither planned to reveal any new Hardware, nor any re-iteration of any existing platform. Nintendo have confirmed there is to be no physical presence at E3 at all, with the platform holder again hold a special Nintendo Direct on Tuesday, June 10 to share “further detail on the gaming experiences on the way for Nintendo platforms in 2014 and beyond”.

While we may now know Nintendo is not planning to be at E3 and will do a Nintendo Direct for it once again, the rumours remain interesting. Is Nintendo’s own admission of a planned hardware reveal next year actually a gaming device, or something health-related but nothing to do with gaming? Do the leaked Tech Specs mean anything at all, or are they a figment of someone’s imagination? Stay tuned to Sanitarium.FM and hear the latest as it’s discovered!

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

…And with that, HELLO WORLD! covered the screen in an endless loop. It’s easy to overlook the simplicity of BASIC – an acronym of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, as well as an apt description of what the language aimed to be – but that’s what made it a revolution in computing.

On May 1, 1964 at 4am, the first ever BASIC program was tested and a revolution in computing breathed to life for the first time. Designed at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, BASIC was a completely new programming language designed to allow people who did not understand, or had no desire to learn the extremely scientific and mathematically-based programming languages that powered computers of the era, a simpler way to do things with their computer. Originally designed to be used for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System to perform math-based tasks more easily (it’s said the first program was simply PRINT 2 + 2, asking the computer to work out what 2 + 2 was, although this is disputed), the language grew over the next year and became a simple solution to do all kinds of tasks.

While based on languages such as FORTRAN II and ALGOL 60, BASIC’s new approach made it much more straightforward for anyone to make a computer do things. You just wrote a number and an instruction for each thing you wanted the computer to do; and the computer would run down the list in numerical order. The instructions were based on simple English terms – PRINT for example put text on the screen; GOTO 10 would skip or go back to whatever instruction started with the number 10 – and it was possible to ask users questions, set variables and use IF…THEN to perform different things based on different criteria. Dartmouth released its version of BASIC for free for people to modify or build their own systems to use it with; and soon enough a version of BASIC was running on any computer device released even up to several decades following it; and with it a whole new generation of programmers sprung up, some of which even built their own versions of BASIC to add abilities beyond what became known as Dartmouth BASIC had planned.

The legacy of BASIC is simply hard to ignore. Its influence still remains today in programming languages such as Microsoft’s Visual Basic and in software like OpenOffice; while so many more modern languages owe many of their own foibles to standards from way back then – for example, if BASIC didn’t define variables simply by putting $ before a word, would PHP use variables in a similar way many decades later? So now, at the 50th Anniversary of its humble beginnings, lets all raise a glass for BASIC – the programming language that made computers simpler.