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Recommended Reading: The secrets behind 'Madden's' player ratings
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. How Madden Ratings are Made by Neil Paine FiveThirtyEight If you've ever played a Madden title, at some point, you've questioned how player ratings are compiled. Heck, players are even critical of their own scores. Well, the stats experts over at FiveThirtyEight dive deep on the matter, offering a load of background information and a method for compiling and grading your own abilities... or lack thereof.
What's on your HDTV: Oscars, 'Sneakers' and 'Game of Thrones'
This week the other big awards show comes home, as we find out the winners of the 2015 Academy Awards but there's much more to see. Birdman is up for several trophies and it arrives on Blu-ray this week, but we're equally looking forward to season four of Game of Thrones, the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself. Of course, Sneakers finally getting a Blu-ray disc release in the US (nearly eight years after it shipped on HD-DVD, and it's only available at Best Buy for now), is a big one, and The Interview is wrapping up its release tour at long last. For gamers there's Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, plus PS4 exclusives The Order: 1886 and Resogun: Defenders. this week we have the series finales of Two and a Half Men and The Mentalist, series premiere of The Odd Couple, season premiere of Vikings, and a season finale for Downton Abbey. Look after the break to check out each day's highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).
Barely Related: Star Wars puts Harrison Ford in the hospital
So that was E3. The week was wild for everyone at Joystiq, but now it's time to take a step back and look at some news that isn't within the confines of the gaming industry. Cheers! Welcome to Barely Related, a conversational Friday Saturday column that presents the non-gaming news stories that we, the Joystiq staff, have been talking about over the past week. And no, we're not stopping our focus on industry and gaming news. Think of this as your casual weekly recap of interesting (and mostly geeky) news, presented just in time to fill your brain with things to discuss at all of those weekend shindigs. Grab a fresh drink, lean back in your armchair, and get ready to talk nerdy with us.
Custom Droid X ROMs starting to break loose, eFuse be damned
Despite Motorola's best intentions to the contrary, the Droid X has been making steady progress toward viable custom ROMs, first with root access, then with a recovery method... and now, at long last, we're starting to get the first few glimpses at legit cooked firmware. The two options we're seeing so far are Sapphire -- originally designed for the Droid of old -- and a so-called "FlyX" ROM from longtime contributor Birdman. In both cases, the benefits of eschewing Motorola's standard builds are pretty obvious: you get Froyo, root, and a host of apps and capabilities preferred by the superuser crowd like surcharge-free mobile hotspot access. The process is a little involved to get these bad boys installed at this point, but with time, we're willing to bet it becomes a pretty painless endeavor. Follow the break for a quick video of Sapphire booting into stock Froyo on the X -- a tantalizing sight, indeed. [Thanks, Clift]
Tony Hawk: RIDE feets-on
Want to humble a videogame journalist? Ask him if he skates and, if he answers with a modest "a little bit," proceed to make him lose his balance and stumble off of your toy skateboard controller. That was the scene seen again and again at Activision's thumping booth on the E3 show floor, and we took our turn to get humiliated on the company's plastic deck, the feature piece of this October's Tony Hawk Ride. It's fun, it's hard, and it's a surprisingly (and somewhat embarrassingly) good work-out.
Habbo crests 100 million avatar milestone
One hundred million. 100 million. 100,000,000. No matter how you look at it, it's an extraordinarily large number. It's the number of colors most women are capable of seeing. It's the number of websites that existed in 2006. It's a song by the rapper Birdman. It's also, rather incidentally, the number of avatars created to date in the simple and spectacularly successful Habbo Hotel.Naturally, that doesn't correlate to 100 million users (Habbo usually clocks in at about 8 million a month), but it's still a testament to the power of a simple virtual world aimed at an extremely active demographic. The lucky sap who created the actual 100 millionth avatar was awarded one of those fancy new Macbook Airs, as well as a slew of in-game goodies like a specially designed room, in-game currency, and rare items. Here's hoping they see 100 million more!
Do you really want to feel them: Harvey Birdman screens
Okay, we admit that these screens of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law depict the PS2 version, but we can guarantee with near certainty that the Wii version is going to look exactly the same, with different button icons on the screen. You can already see how readily the interface will adapt to the Wiimote's pointer, and, on a more basic level, how the Birdman plotlines will adapt to a Phoenix Wright-like courtroom adventure game.Somehow, art that looks like terrible Flash on TV looks so vibrant and fresh as a video game. Maybe it's the total absence of bald space marines.%Gallery-7527%[Via Capcom USA Blog]
Amateur pilot demolishes homebrew plane, dubs attempt "partly successful"
C'mon folks, it shouldn't take an aeronautical engineer to figure out that flying an aircraft isn't exactly a cakewalk, and as we've seen time and time again, "amateur pilots" just aren't likely to land in a safe fashion. China's Li Xianfeng has become the latest daredevil to risk life and limb to satisfy his "lifelong dream" of flying, but he wasn't fortunate enough to complete "perfect landing" addendum. His self-built aluminum-framed plane was demolished after he spent a whopping 120-seconds "hovering about 50-feet above the ground," as his pilot instruction manuals clearly didn't provide the kind of in-depth training one would expect at, say, flight school. Amazingly, Li somehow felt that his hospitalizing crash was "partly successful," and he even spoke of his desire to try it once more when his current wounds healed. We'd respectfully advise a virtual flight next time, Mr. Xianfeng.[Via Fark]
