Fatality
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NTSB blames Uber’s 'inadequate safety culture' for self-driving fatality
The NTSB has lambasted Uber's "inadequate safety culture" and "lack of risk assessment mechanisms" before its self-driving fatality. In March 2018, an autonomous 2017 Volvo XC90 struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg as she crossed the street in Tempe, Arizona. Officials have also assigned blame to the safety driver, who at the time was watching The Voice on her smartphone. NTSB chair Robert L. Sumwalt said "the collision was the last link in a long chain of actions and decisions made by an organization that unfortunately did not make safety the top priority."
Uber self-driving car involved in fatal crash couldn't detect jaywalkers
Uber's self-driving car that struck and killed a pedestrian in March 2018 had serious software flaws, including the inability to recognize jaywalkers, according to the NTSB. The US safety agency said that Uber's software failed to recognize the 49-year-old victim, Elaine Herzberg, as a pedestrian crossing the street. It didn't calculate that it could potentially collide with her until 1.2 seconds before impact, at which point it was too late to brake.
NTSB says Tesla's Autopilot was active during fatal Model 3 crash
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report that Tesla's Autopilot system was active at the time of a fatal Model 3 crash in Delray Beach, Florida. Data showed the car's driver, who died in the March 1st incident, activated Autopilot around 10 seconds before the collision. In the approximately eight seconds before the Tesla crashed into a semi truck, the car didn't detect the driver's hands on the wheel.
How B-movies influenced 'Mortal Kombat 11' fatalities
Mortal Kombat fatalities are legendary for their gruesomeness. The finishing moves are physics-defying ballets of blood and shattered bone, and in Mortal Kombat 11, they're just as ridiculous as ever. D'vorah vomits acid-covered larvae down an enemy's throat before they're ripped apart from the inside by a giant corpse bug; Geras traps an opponent in a wall of sand and rips them in half lengthwise with a single hard tug; Cassie Cage kicks people so hard in the crotch that their skeletons fly right out of their bodies; Baraka rips off an enemy's face in two layers, stabs their brain and then eats it like a shish kebab.
Tesla under investigation after first Autopilot-related death
The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) is investigating a collision that occurred when a Tesla Model S in Autopilot mode crashed into a tractor trailer resulting in the death of the driver. This is the first fatality linked to the automaker's vehicles while in the semi-autonomous driving mode.
Apple investigating claim Chinese woman was electrocuted by her iPhone
Apple released a statement on Sunday that confirmed it was working with Chinese authorities in a case where a woman was allegedly electrocuted by her iPhone. Apple said, We are deeply saddened to learn of this tragic incident and offer our condolences to the Ma family. We will fully investigate and cooperate with authorities in this matter. According to Chinese news authority Xinhua, 23-year-old Ma Ailun was electrocuted when she answered her iPhone while it was charging. Police confirm that the young woman died from electrocution. A report in The Wall Street Journal quotes an officer from the local Public Safety Bureau who said, "Her neck had an obvious electronic injury." This unnamed officer added that they have not verified whether the phone, the charger or some other factor contributed to her death. The story hit Chinese microblog Sina Weibo over the weekend and has gone viral in the Asian country. [Via The Wall Street Journal]
Man with bionic arms dies after car crash
Otto Bock's mind-controlled bionic arms let Austria's Christian Kandlbauer work, play and even drive, but it seems the latter passion may have lead to the 22-year-old's untimely demise. Two days after a road accident where the young man's specially-modified Subaru crashed into a tree, Kandlbauer was pronounced brain-dead and taken off life support late last week. It's not known whether the prosthetic arms themselves had anything to do with the crash -- one was found ripped from his body at the scene -- but both he and his vehicle were cleared to drive by local authorities after passing a number of tests. Honestly, it's a tragedy for science and humanity either way.
Segway Inc. owner rides over cliff to his death
UK businessman Jimi Heselden, the man who believed in the Segway so much that he went ahead and bought the company, has died after reportedly driving a ruggedized version of the scooter off a cliff and into a river. He was found early on Sunday morning in the River Wharfe, having earlier been touring his estate in the personal transporter. The cause of the accident is not yet known. Mr. Heselden was 62 years old and, true to our geeky hearts, generated his fortune by coming up with an innovative design for wire cage walls that has since become standard equipment for NATO, American, and British forces. Our thoughts are with the good gent's family, and please, behave yourselves in comments. [Thanks, David]
Some stuff is too violent even for MadWorld
We're sure we don't have to tell you how violent MadWorld is. But, what you may not know is that some of the over-the-top violence originally conceptualized was a bit too violent for the game disc that's not been spinning in your Wii for the last few months. Past the break, you'll find a deleted finishing move, one we must warn you is one of the most violent things you will ever see. We know the majority of MadWorld is tongue-in-cheek, but this is like tongue-in-meat-grinder-while-being-stabbed kind of gruesome. Don't say we didn't warn you! [Via Sega Nerds]
Age of Conan: mostly armless
Damion Schubert, a long-time game developer, runs a personal website called Zen of Design, where he tackles any number of issues in MMO design. Sometimes, though, he just throws out random bits of goodness like this Age of Conan experience: Tonight in Age of Conan, someone jumped me while i was doing something else, then proceeded to perform a fatality on me. It was one I hadn't seen before, and it involved him chopping off my arms, then chopping off my head. Which is cool and all, but after I respawned, I didn't have any arms. It was a purely visual bug - I could still fight and quest and whatnot. Still, I spent the next hour trying to find out which animations looked goofiest with stubs cut off at the elbow (dancing is good, stealth is better). Unfortunately, it was only an error on my screen, which meant that me screaming 'It's only a flesh wound!' in town probably made little sense to those who passed by.Given how new Age of Conan is, bugs and glitches like this are likely to keep turning up. Has anything similar, or funnier, happened to you in Age of Conan?
Midway 'modifying fatalities' for MK vs. DC
When Midway announced that DC characters were splicing worlds with Mortal Kombat for a T-rated fighting game, we prepared our eulogy for the fatality, a staple of the MK universe that seemed to run against the DC philosophy. Not so fast, says MK series creator Ed Boon, who hints that the violent sendoffs will still be there, albeit in a tamer fashion.In an interview with GameTap, Boon notes that the developer never explicitly stated fatalities were going away. "We did acknowledge that we won't be able to do the same kinds of outrageous moves, like tearing someone's head off and the spine being attached to it," he says, adding, "My response is that, no, we're modifying fatalities. But I have every intention to keep finishers."What's left is to define, then, the nature of the fatality. Are they inherently ultra-violent? So far that answer's been yes, with the extreme alternatives being Friendships and Babalities. For now, we'll just have to wait for the screenshots to show us some kind of finisher that satiates our blood-thirsty desires. After the break, a collection of fatalities from the series.
Hands-on with Age of Conan's Dark Templar class
The Consumer Electronics Show has hit Las Vegas in full force. The Massively team is here to roam the corridors of shiny, shiny, shiny gadgetry and ignore it all to to focus entirely on the content that is important to you. And that would be the shininess of Age of Conan. Funcom is on hand with live connections to their AoC beta servers and two classes available for demo play. Before diving in, you should check out Michael Zenke's hands-on post he wrote for our mother site, Joystiq. It explains how combat works. Then come back here to read about my experiences with the Dark Templar. And a little later, I'll have another post detailing my Barbarian play.Video of Dark Templar gameplay and Talent descriptions after the jump!%Gallery-13299%
Massively's massive giveaways: Ideazon Z-Board winners!
More and more winners are replying to those ever-crucial emails, and the results are rolling in! That's right, we have the names of the winners from the two Age of Conan giveaways we did for our launch! For those of you who missed out, these two lucky winners have each landed their very own Ideazon Z-Board gaming keyboards! (Well, we couldn't very well give out copies of the game yet.) So to end the suspense, we'd like to send out massive congrats to Twoworms and Excelsior for being the two lucky winners of the Ideazon Z-Boards! When they bring out the Age of Conan keypads, be sure to let us know how those work, eh? We suspect the extra edge in those fatality moves will be handy to have. Again, if you haven't white-listed emails from massively.com and weblogsinc.com (that means put it in your "not spam" filter) then be sure to do so! We hate to have anyone miss out on a prize because they didn't reply in time.
Test your might online this November
We haven't been this excited about Mortal Kombat since the first time Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 came out, and we've never had any reason to be excited about a portable Kombat. But this is just too cool. Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon told IGN that a version of the classic fighting game will be coming to the DS-- with online play. Attention, developers: this is how you do a port on the DS.It'll also include Puzzle Kombat, the Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo clone found in Mortal Kombat Deception, which will also be playable online. The game will be out in November, and we look forward to eviscerating all of you at Game Night.In the game, we mean. We aren't planning to come to your houses and eviscerate any of you. We wouldn't even know how.
Totally visceral presentation of Mortal Kombat fatalities
What's more brutal than seeing gruesome fatalities performed before your eyes, while blood and bone spill all around and the hopeless fake cries of voice actors echo in your head? A list of moves in the PDF format. Those with weak stomachs should look away from the rawness. While this isn't as MORTAL KOMBAAAAAAAAAAT as, say, screenshots or video would be, we admit that we were pretty curious about how the moves in Mortal Kombat Armageddon were going to be pulled off (not curious enough to buy it, but certainly curious enough to read a thing on the Internet.) We knew waggling would be involved, but it's cool to learn what the specific waggles will be.This totally reminds us of downloading Mortal Kombat FAQs from Compuserve and leaving them to print from our dot-matrix printer overnight. Sometimes we'd wake up in the morning only to find that our pet dinosaur had shredded all the pages, forcing us to start over.[Via Joystiq]
PREPARE YOURSELF for new Mortal Kombat Armageddon screens
Is it okay to get nostalgic about Mortal Kombat? We know the series isn't that old, and, in fact, still exists. But, for example, we can't help but reference the old "PREPARE YOURSELF" slogan from the 1993 print ads when we're talking about any MK game. We miss the old games, and it took the new one to put us in that state.Looking at the big, empty environments of the new Wii version of Mortal Kombat Armageddon makes us long for the detail-filled stages of the old games, and the sort-of-plain character models remind us of how amusingly hokey the digitized sprites used to be. Those were the days, when we didn't need fancy polygons to enjoy virtually ripping some dude's spine out. We had Claymation bosses and we liked it. It was a simpler time-- a TOASTY!! time.Screens, with obligatory Wii-gesture diagrams, after the break.
Mortal Kombat coming to the DS
We would call this the series that just won't die ... but, as Nintendo fanboys, we're actually surrounded by those far older. Yes, yet another installment of MK is coming to the DS, courtesy of Midway; rather predictably, we know almost nothing about it. The only comment given: "it [won't be] a direct port of a previous title, it [won't] be a brand-new game either."This leaves the only remaining option: indirect port. It involves a wormhole and superstring theory. Our best guess? A port of an SNES or Playstation version of Mortal Kombat, complete with OMGawesome stylus control and a couple new characters thrown in for good measure. Meh.
Today's hottest game video: Wii fatality
It was only a matter of time. We bow our heads in a moment of silence for the first Nintendo Wii fatality. Is this a wakeup call to the industry? DO YOU HEAR THE CALL? Seriously, they joke on the site that Fox News will see this and think its real. We're pretty sure that somewhere, somehow, someone is already believing it. Wait for the backlash to hit, probably spearheaded by everyone's favorite political gamehater, He Who Shall Not Be Named. In fact, let's declare a moratorium on him in the news, unless something spectacular happens, for all of 2007. Check out the video after the jump, and use your Wiis carefully out there, folks.
PS3 crime spree, part V: Suspected PS3 thief killed by deputy
We thought we'd seen it all when it came to PS3 absurdity: profiteering (to be expected), shooting (wha?), and general crime and assault (dudes, please chill out), but we're deeply saddened now that we've gotten word of the first PS3-related fatality. On Friday, a sheriff's deputy in New Hanover County, North Carolina (that's the deep southeastern corner of the state) shot and killed Peyton Strickland, an 18-year-old University of North Carolina Wilmington student who was suspected of armed robbery of two PS3s. To be fair, we don't have all the facts in, so it's not clear exactly why gunshots were even necessary. Here's what we do know, thanks to a report from the local newspaper, the Wilmington Star-News: on that fateful night, Strickland was to be served a search warrant; he and his roommate, Mike Rhoton (pictured at left) were "playing a PlayStation video game" (we're guessing that means a PS3, given that the article later mentions "Tiger Woods PGA Tour" specifically), when there was a knock at the door. Strickland went to answer it, but before he could, officers banged the door down, pinned Rhoton to the floor, fired "four or five shots," and Strickland was dead. Adding to the confusion and tragedy of this whole situation, Rhoton later added that Strickland "may have been holding a PlayStation controller in his hand" when he went to answer the door, and that his roommate apparently had three unloaded guns in his bedroom at the time, which may have led to the officers' aggressive tactics. The officers and deputies are currently under investigation by the county District Attorney and the State Bureau of Investigation. [Photo by Paul Stephen, courtesy of Wilmington Star-News]
