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'The Stanley Parable' rewards you for not playing in five years
If you played The Stanley Parable when it came out on October 17th, 2013, and haven't picked it up since, you have just unlocked a brand new achievement. Today is the first day -- five years after the launch of the game -- that the "Go Outside" achievement is attainable.
Apple celebrates 5 years of the App Store
The App Store is about to turn 5 years old, and Apple is kicking off a new promotion to celebrate this milestone. Earlier today, we noticed the prices on several popular apps dropped to free and thought Apple has something up its sleeve. Now that sale has been made official with a new "5 Years of the App Store" promotional page in the iTunes App Store. Apple's latest sale features "five landmark games and five groundbreaking apps" that defined the App Store over the past several years. The list of apps now available for free include: iOS Apps Barefoot World Atlas [iOS Universal; Category: Reference; Now free, down from $4.99] Barefoot World Atlas is a magical interactive 3D globe that invites children to explore the regions and countries of the world, discovering hundreds of fascinating features and immersing themselves in the rich wonders of our planet. Over [iOS Universal; Category: Photography & Video; Now free, down from $1.99] Add beautiful text and artwork to your photos and share them on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. Day One (Journal/Diary) [iOS Universal; Category: Lifestyle; Now free, down from $4.99] A new way to journal. Enter your memories, ideas, events and photos to have them synced to your iPhone and iPad using iCloud or Dropbox. Traktor DJ for iPhone [iPhone; Category: Music; Now free, down from $4.99] The world's #1 pro DJ software brings high-impact DJing to iPhone. Touch your tracks and create stunning mixes in seconds. How To Cook Everything [iOS Universal; Category: Food & Drink; Now free, down from $9.99] This first-of-its-kind app of the bestselling cookbook How to Cook Everything from New York Times columnist Mark Bittman has 2,000 recipes, 400 how-to illustrations and a host of features that appeal to cooks on the go. iOS Games Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP [iOS Universal; Category: Games; Now free, down from $4.99] Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is an exploratory action adventure with an emphasis on audiovisual style. Traverse a mythic little realm, use a sword to do battle and evoke sworcery to solve mystical musical mysteries. Badland [iOS Universal; Category: Games; Now free, down from $3.99] Badland is an award-winning atmospheric sidescrolling action-adventure platformer taking place in a gorgeous forest full of various inhabitants, trees and flowers. Where's My Water? [iOS Universal; Category: Games; Now free, down from $0.99] Help Swampy by guiding water to his broken shower. Each level is a challenging physics-based puzzle with amazing life-like mechanics. Infinity Blade II [iOS Universal; Category: Games; Now free, down from $6.99] The continuing journey of young Siris unfolds as you delve deeper into the world of the Deathless tyrants and their legion of Titans. Can you unlock all the mysteries and successfully wield the power of the Infinity Blade in this timeless swordplay adventure of champions and villains? Tiny Wings [iPhone; Category: Games; Now free, down from $0.99] You have always dreamed of flying, but your wings are tiny. Luckily the world is full of beautiful hills. Use the hills as jumps -- slide down, flap your wings and fly.
The Xbox 360 turns five years old... in a purely theoretical sense
Show of hands: how many of you bought an Xbox 360 in its first month or so of release, five long years ago? Alright, now how many of you still use that same Xbox regularly, with zero RRoDs getting in your way? Yeah, we thought so. The Xbox 360 has been an astounding success for Microsoft and for gamers, a particularly strong feat when you consider that it was Sony's race to lose going into this console generation. Still, when you talk Xbox history, it's hard not to see that huge red smudge on an otherwise stellar record. In hindsight, perhaps it was wise for Microsoft to do such a stellar job of taking the console online, beyond all the obvious reasons: the overheating hunk of plastic and silicon in our entertainment center didn't really mean much anymore, sentiments-wise. Instead it was our Gamertags and Gamerscores and cutesy Avatars that really mattered, the true "heart" of our console. We can't even count how many Xboxes we churned through in the past five years, with only Microsoft's most recent attempt finally solving some of the machine's egregious noise issues, but most of us stuck with the Xbox all the way through because that's where our friends were. Cute trick, Microsoft, but let's pick a slightly less expensive way to fail for the next generation, alright? Oh, and happy birthday Xbox; we'll meet you at 8pm with the pizza and the wine and the Black Ops... you just bring the sexy. Want to re-live a bit of the launch day insanity? Check out this little trip down Engadget memory lane: Live Xbox 360 shot! Engadget's live coverage of the Xbox 360 launch Xbox 360 hands-on preview Unpacking the Xbox 360 Xbox 360 gutted! Engadget Podcast 053 - 11.22.2005 Xbox 360 backward-compatibility list (1.0) released Boy, didn't we look young and naive back then? The world was our oyster. There were so many Halos yet to come.
AT&T's original deal on iPhone was for five years
It's what we thought... until the Wall Street Journal told us we were wrong. It's what USA Today originally reported, although nobody else was ever able to confirm it... until now. Nilay Patel at Engadget has unearthed some 2008 filings in a 2007 class-action lawsuit that clarify the matter: the AT&T/Apple deal for exclusive domestic service on the iPhone, which has caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth, was originally set for a five-year term. That would put the earliest appearance of a Verizon iPhone into the summer of 2012 -- assuming that there wasn't any reason for one or the other party to break off the agreement. Those disclosures are a couple of years old now, and the circumstances may have changed a bit (exclusivity may have been extended since then), but at least there's some grounding for what the original half-decade setup was intended to be. Even though recent analyst musings led to the surmise that the iPad's bargain data plans, which are delivered sans contract, might have been a carrot in extending AT&T's hold on the iPhone for a few more months, it's not at all clear that an extension would have been necessary to lock in sales through the end of this year.
