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Max Payne 3 contest promises a less dangerous trip from NYC to Brazil
Max Payne 3 sees the titular protagonist trading the cold concrete of New York City for the tropical heat of São Paulo, Brazil. You too can make such a migration: Rockstar is running a promotion granting one lucky individual quite the vacation, starting in NYC and eventually concluding in Brazil. And you won't even have to shoot anybody!If you're chosen, you'll get to play a pre-release build of Max Payne 3 in New York, then fly down to Sao Paulo, where you'll get to stay in a swank hotel for a few days and attend the Sonar São Paulo music festival. And when you go home, you'll get a custom Max Payne 3 Xbox 360 console, one year of Xbox Live Gold and 1,400 MS Points to spend.Interested parties can either sign up for Rockstar's Social Club and enter there, or you they can like Rockstar's Facebook page.
Rockstar devs check out the black market in Sao Paulo for Max Payne 3 [update]
Max Payne 3 is set in the slums and high-rolling cities of São Paulo, Brazil. To truly get a feel for the land and its society, Rockstar developers and researchers traveled to the heart of the city to study its law-enforcement branches, its extensive weapons collection and to track down local casting, the Rockstar newswire reads. São Paulo has become infamous for its favelas, gang violence and illegal trafficking, perhaps because it's all set against such a lush, photogenic landscape. It appears the Rockstar team watched a few documentaries that take advantage of Brazil's dark beauty, as it's able to name-drop such titles as Favela Rising and Bus 174. So, we're sure the devs were completely prepared for the reality of São Paulo's slums. Update: As many of you pointed out, Favela Rising and Bus 174 are both set in Rio de Janiero, and Brazil is home to many non-violent, wonderful people and places. Rockstar is setting a scene that scare-based media and PBS has been harping on for years, probably because shooting people in an innocent, beautiful environment just doesn't feel right to the developers. Or they wanted a free trip to Brazil.
Teen archer launches cellphone-laced arrows into Brazilian jail
Sometimes we sit around at Engadget HQ and do informal, anonymous surveys of our favorite gadgets of all time. Cell phones are unsurprisingly always at the top of the list. But the bow and arrow always comes in a close second -- call us closet traditionalists. Anyway, seems like a gang in Sao Paulo trained a 17-year-old to shoot arrows with cell phones strapped to the tips over a prison wall to communications-starved inmates. Apparently the misguided teen got at least four phones in before he fired one at a cop's back. Whoops! Still, dang. We much prefer this practicality of this old-new mashup to, say, steampunk flash drives. [Image credit: Robert van der Steeg's flickr]
The Virtual Whirl: A brief history of Second Life, the middle years
This week, we cover the second installment of our summarized history of Second Life and Linden Lab (or check out part one, if you missed it). From 2005, there's an impossible amount of material to cover, but there are some interesting stories lurking among it all. Join us as we work our way through some of the interesting highlights from 2005, 2006 and 2007.
Inner World launches a new magazine for Second Life
The creators of the new Inner World magazine have let us know that they've got their inaugural edition out, and it's 92 pages of pretty, served up by Issuu. The Inner World magazine appears to be the brainchild of Jussara Correa, of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Available in Portuguese or (slightly uncertainly-formed) English, the magazine has a lot going for it with a panoply of advertising-supported Art, places and stories from Second Life. There's a smattering of mature content (that's 'boobies' for those of you who probably shouldn't be taking a look), so take care about when and where you choose to idly flip through the mag. The Issuu viewer that it runs on top of requires flash and javascript and is happiest under Windows (other platforms may have a less than ideal viewing experience with the layout), but nevertheless seems to be an attractive alternative to PDF-formatted online magazines and tabloids. It's colorful, pretty and doesn't represent a lot of heavy reading. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
Telefnica and Philips testing no-glasses-necessary 3D IPTV, got ???18,000 we can borrow?
São Paulo, Brazil stand up, you're first in line for auto-stereoscopic (read: no glasses) 3D IPTV broadcasts courtesy of Telefónica/TVA and, we assume, that swank WOWvx-powered 1080p 52-inch Philips 3D HDTV promised to hit shelves by year end. Fortunately it now has a price, unfortunately, that price is €18,000 and requires you live in the Jardins neighborhood, hooked up to its fiber network in order to have the capacity to suck down all that 3D. Consumer accessibility is pegged at "inside three or four years", so you start saving, the SMPTE will figure out how to make it all work, and we'll sit back and remember how awesome Captain EO was that one time at Epcot Center. Everyone has to do their part.
AMD announces 6- and 12-core Opterons
AMD may be busy sorting out issues with its quad-core Phenoms and hard at work on "completely different" chip architectures, but that isn't stopping the company from aggressively updating its roadmap, announcing today plans for 6- and 12-core server-grade Opterons. Both the new 6-core chip, codenamed Sao Paulo, and the 12-core unit, codenamed Magny-Cours, are based on a brand-new platform called "Maranello," and slotting in to replace the planned 8-core Barcelona chip, which appears to have been canceled. According to AMD, 12-core chips are easier to manufacture, so it's going to skip over 8-core chips and go straight to the good stuff. That must be news to Intel, which is planning on shipping 8-core Nehalem chips later this year, and will probably then hold the coveted "number-of-cores" crown until AMD releases the 12-core chips in 2010. There's no word on whether any of these chips can make these processor roadmaps comprehensible or even chronological, but we can dream, can't we?[Via TG Daily]
