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Playing Marvel's Avengers, a living RPG with microtransactions
When Engadget's UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith attended the first-ever gameplay demonstration of Marvel's Avengers at E3, he walked away worried. The level he saw was essentially a tutorial, introducing the basic mechanics of each Avenger. It was unclear how all of the characters -- Black Widow, Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor and Captain America -- would play together, and they each seemed to be overpowered in comparison to the minions that flooded their way on the Golden Gate Bridge. He said the game looked hollow, but he couldn't pinpoint exactly why.
Kids play mechanics for Marvel heroes with the Electro Hero Kit
Not every child wants to be a coder or an engineer, which can make it hard to get them playing with STEM toys if they don't really care about making their own video games or building a cool robot. However, many kids are into role playing and telling stories, which is what Tech Will Save Us' newest set focuses on instead. The Electro Hero Kit asks children to build stuff to help out their favorite Marvel characters, while imparting some basic lessons about electricity in the process.
Marvel joins Madefire's digital comic book collection
Madefire's digital comic book platform is a good way to spice up stories that you may have read countless times, but its catalog has always had a conspicuous gap: namely, there were no Marvel comics. That ends today. Madefire has added Marvel to its collection, giving you the likes of The Avengers, Black Panther and X-Men through its Android, iOS, Windows and TV apps. There's no mention of taking advantage of Madefire's pseudo-3D Motion Book format, but having access is clearly the big deal here. You don't have to switch apps when you're ready to jump from Wonder Woman to Squirrel Girl.
Disney's smart toys combine Avengers, sensors and imagination
Those giant, green Hulk hands in your closet might be cool but their utility doesn't extend much beyond freaking out your cat and making tired "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" jokes. Disney has an idea to remedy that with internet-connected versions of those as well as a pair of Iron Man gauntlets. Wait, smart toys? Yep. As The Wall Street Journal tells it, these Playmation devices will work in concert, via radio frequency and infrared signals, with special action figures as well as other branded apparatus you strap on to your body. Based on what TechCrunch says, these sound an awful lot like a home laser-tag set. Different playthings offer different augmentations (action figures come with new, narrated, playable stories, and you can buy more of the latter via a connected app) but they won't all work together.
He made Tom Cruise 'forget the mouse.' Now it's our turn.
In a way, John Underkoffler's like Hollywood's own Wizard of Oz. He's the man behind the curtain responsible for infusing blockbuster fantasy with real-world tech. He created the futuristic UI in Minority Report, worked on the timeline for Hulk's transformation and found a Soviet fusion reactor to blow up Stark Industries in Iron Man. He also recently received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for his work as an interface designer both in films and in the real world.
Barely Related: Star Wars, Powerpuff Girls and Pokemon Masters
There are still a few E3 stories the soak up around here, but let's take a break from all that for a few moments, shall we? Welcome to Barely Related, a conversational Friday 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.
EVE Evolved: Anatomy of a mining op
When EVE Online was first released in 2003, it was designed as a massive universe of competition and conflict between space-faring megacorporations in the distant future. Players bought into the premise completely and soon set about building their own empires and waging wars with neighbours. Corporations ran regular mining operations for resources to build frigates and cruisers for their members, and some of the larger corps co-operatively mined to build the first ever battleships in the game. The mining op has been a staple activity in the game ever since, providing a way for groups to work together on large manufacturing projects or just make some ISK during their down-time. Mining gets a lot of flak for being one of the most boring and least profitable professions in the game, but that's not exactly true. Solo mining can be a great way to spend your downtime while doing other activities, and it ensures that you're online when something exciting happens like a live event, your wormhole system being invaded, or a titan being tackled by your alliance. Co-operative mining ops also offer the social value of bonding with your corpmates when there's nothing else going on. Some players even run dozens of accounts at the same time to turn this ordinarily placid activity into an intensive profit-making activity focused on efficiency and organisation skills. With mining due to make a resurgence in the summer expansion, this edition of EVE Evolved is dedicated to the humble mining operation. I'll take a look at the various options for mining ships, the different haulers available, and the four different areas you can mine in.
EVE Evolved: Five years of EVE Evolved
About five years ago, on April 27th, 2008, I joined the Massively team and wrote the very first issue of the EVE Evolved column. Five years later, the column is still going strong and delivering its weekly dose of EVE Online to thousands of readers. I used to worry about running out of ideas to write about, but regular game updates and hilarious player shenanigans mean there's always something interesting going on in New Eden. When EVE hits its 10th anniversary in May, this column will have been running for just over half of the game's lifetime. In that time, I've written over 250 in-depth articles, guides, in-game stories and opinion pieces on EVE Online and a few on DUST 514. As usual, I'll be celebrating this anniversary by rounding up this year's column highlights and giving away two 30-day Pilot's License Extensions to two lucky readers. To enter the competition, write a comment explaining which EVE Evolved articles from this year you liked best and what topics you'd like to see covered in the coming year. You will need an active EVE account to claim the prize, so be sure to include your character name in your comment if you want to be in with a chance. If you'd rather not give out your character name or don't have an EVE account but would like to give the game a go, you can sign up a new trial account and use the name of your new character. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look back at the highlights from the column's fifth year!
EVE Evolved: Top ten ganks, scams, heists and events
It's been called "boring," "confusing," and "the world's biggest spreadsheet," but every now and then a story emerges from sci-fi MMO EVE Online and grabs the gaming world's attention. Tales of massive thefts, colossal battles, high-value kills, record-breaking scams, political dirty deals, and controversial player-run events never fail to grip us. Perhaps it's the fact that these events have such huge impacts in the EVE sandbox that captures our imaginations, or maybe we just want to watch with morbid curiosity as a virtual society self-destructs. Whether it's innocent interest in quirky stories or a secret sense of schadenfreude that keeps us glued to EVE's most illicit events, the game continues to deliver them with startling regularity. Most scams, thefts, and high-profile battles will never make the news, instead becoming another forgotten part of EVE's history or just a story for a few friends to reminisce about. But those stories that do reach the news always draw in a huge audience that wouldn't play EVE in a million years but can't get enough of its engrossing stories. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down a list of ten incredible EVE kills, scams, heists, and sandbox events that have made it into the news over the years.
EVE Online $6,000 ship kill may be a hoax
EVE Online player "stewie Zanjoahir" made history yesterday when he reportedly lost a tiny ship with cargo worth over $6,000 US. Now it appears that the value of the kill may not have been accurate or that the kill could even be a hoax. Evidence that the kill may not be authentic surfaced last night as players found that three Hulk blueprints listed on the kill were marked as originals. That would make them priceless items that change hands for over 500 billion ISK each, which would raise the kill's value to a ludicrous 1.71 trillion ISK ($51,685 US). It's believed that many of the original blueprints in the kill were actually cheaper blueprint copies. One possible explanation for the aberration is that there was an error in the EVE API that supplied the original kill data to third-party killboard websites. It's also possible that the kill was marked as API Verified without actually being checked, in which case the kill may have never even happened. An alternative version of the kill valued at only 34 billion ISK ($1,024 US) has also surfaced, but this was manually uploaded and so isn't verified at all. CCP Games posted the kill on its Facebook page and Twitter feed, but didn't officially confirm the kill or its value. We reached CCP for comment, but privacy concerns prevented the company from confirming or denying the kill's authenticity. If this monumental kill turns out to be an error or a hoax, the next-highest value confirmed EVE kill would be Bjoern's Avatar class titan destroyed in March 2011. The titan was kitted out with expensive officer modules and came to a total value of over 128 billion ISK. As the price of PLEX was much lower in 2011, this would have bought 355 PLEX worth a total of $6,212.50 US.
CCP rebalancing EVE mining barges, exhumers
CCP is revamping EVE Online's mining barges and exhumers this summer, and the latest company dev blog features a bit of behind-the-scenes info on how the process is going. In a nutshell, there's a new mining frigate on the way, and current mining frigates will no longer be mining frigates. "The goal here is to allow players to choose a barge that fits their specific play style rather than lead them on a journey from the worst barge to the best one," CCP says. Other changes include reduced skill requirements for both barges and exhumers. This "might not make [mining] any more exciting, but at least miners will have to make some meaningful decisions before they undock," according to the devs. That's just the tip of the iceberg, of course, so head to the official EVE Online website for more.
Co-opinion: Avengers: Battle for Earth
.portal-left { padding: 10px; background: #CCC; margin: 20px 0; min-height: 85px; } .portal-right { padding: 10px; margin: 20px 0; min-height: 85px; } .portal-right img { padding-left: 5px; } .portal-left img { padding-right: 5px; } Mike Schramm: I'm sure at some point in this writeup, we'll probably talk about how Avengers: Battle for Earth is a Kinect game, and that means, like most Kinect games, it works much better in theory ("A fighting game where you control Marvel characters by making moves on Kinect") than it does in actual practice. But I don't want to get to that point yet, because here's the thing: I had a lot of fun playing it. There's something awesome about sticking your hand up in the air and then pushing it forward to make Thor fling electricity from his hammer, or crouching down and then bringing your arms up high to make the Hulk chuck some ground at his opponent. These are iconic characters from my childhood all the way up to the popular movie, and this game portrays them in a really colorful and fun way. Jess Conditt: Let it be known that Mike Schramm makes an impressive (nay, an incredible) Hulk. I wasn't so bad either, I think. Especially for rippling-muscle-challenged people like myself it's wonderful to embody the larger-than-life heroes in Marvel's repetoire, as Mike suggested. I played our multiplayer battle as Venom and Iron Man, two of my personal favorite characters, and they didn't disappoint. Most motions are shared by each character – punch, knee up, arms out and clapped together, etc. – but the resulting moves are different. With the same punching move, Iron Man shoots a beam of light from his palm and Hulk rushes the player, fists-first. It's a powerful feeling to throw a punch "at" your friend and watch his hero respond on-screen.%Gallery-160465%
Marvel Cinematic Universe 10-disc Blu-ray box unveiled, Tesseract and all
Just as the listing on Amazon foretold last month, Marvel and Disney today revealed the case for their 10-disc Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One - Avengers Assembled box set. It features not only a glowing Tesseract cube contained in the S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue containment case, but also six brand-new pieces of art (for each flick - Marvel's The Avengers, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man 1 & 2, The Incredible Hulk) designed to adorn each disc case, Criterion-style. If you're headed to Comic-Con this weekend you'll probably be able to get a look at it yourself, hit the source link for a few more pictures of the case and artwork before deciding whether the current $139 price on Amazon is too much or just low enough to have this sitting on your disc shelf. While you decide between this and the Avengers solo release on the same day, September 25th, don't forget to snag the accompanying iOS second screen app now. %Gallery-160266%
EVE Online reveals ship revamp details, shows off new mining ship
Back in march, EVE Online developer CCP Games announced its ambitious plan to revamp EVE Online's entire range of ships. Dozens of new ships have been added over the game's nine year history, and now developers are reorganising them into specific ship lines that fulfill most distinct roles. A big part of the system is the removal of ship tiers for tech 1 ships, a change that will see all of the currently underused low-tier ships boosted and given new roles. In a new devblog today, CCP released the first concrete details on how that will take place. Miners will be happy to know that all barges will be given a hitpoint increase to make them harder to suicide kill, and that all three mining barges will be specialised to support a particular style of mining. The Covetor and Hulk will have the biggest mining yield but their small cargo holds and poor defenses will limit them to mining ops with haulers on hand. The Retriever and Mackinaw will have smaller yields but huge specialised ore bays, making them better ships for AFK mining and ninja mining. The Procurer and Skiff will have the lowest mining yields but their battleship-sized tank will make it difficult to suicide gank. Finally, a new entry level ORE mining frigate will be released for new players.
Marvel Heroes whips up Avengers movie costumes
If you haven't seen this summer's Avengers movie, you totally should, and if you have, then you might be interested to hear that the upcoming Marvel Heroes is embracing the blockbuster's wardrobe. The superhero MMO will be including the film versions of Thor's, Iron Man's, Black Widow's, Hawkeye's, Hulk's, and Captain America's costumes. The game's devs assured players that the costumes won't just be for eye candy alone but "will also tie in key game systems in fun and unique ways." Marvel Heroes will offer many costume variants based on both the comics and the films, although the devs say that covering all of them might be a task that only a true superhero could accomplish. "Some of those experimental looks didn't exactly stand the test of time," the announcement explains.
EVE Evolved: Hulk hunting in highsec
As it's a sandbox game, a big part of what makes EVE Online special is the interesting things players make and do within the game world that developers didn't anticipate. It's ultimately the players who collectively shape the game world, in extreme cases even overturning some of the developed game mechanics. Most players think of high-security space as a safe place to mine and run missions, with CONCORD police keeping a watchful eye on players and destroying any ship that breaks the law. But in EVE you're never truly safe anywhere but inside a station. With the right ship setup, it's possible to kill a target in the few seconds before the police ships arrive to turn you into a smoking wreck. In 2008, GoonSwarm alliance launched its infamous JihadSwarm campaign aiming to suicide gank every mining barge in high-security space. The imaginary safety bubble that miners had lived in for years burst, and highsec mining temporarily became one of the game's most dangerous professions. When Helicity Boson later kicked off the first Hulkageddon event, pirates competed to see who could destroy the most mining barges, and miners in high-security space were prime targets. Hulkageddon went on to become a regular event, with achievements to be won and billions of ISK in sponsored prizes. Recently, Hulkageddon V took an interesting turn when Goonswarm Federation pledged to keep the event running permanently by paying players 100 million ISK for every 10 tech 2 mining barges they kill. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at Hulkageddon from both sides of the fence, with tips on how to suicide gank mining barges and how to stay safe when mining.
EVE Evolved: Mining returns with Inferno
Inferno is right around the corner, with the Escalation to Inferno patch due to hit in two days on Tuesday, April 24th. The patch prepares EVE Online for the coming PvP apocalypse with titan balance tweaks, a new interactive status effect bar, and two very important changes to the NPC drop tables: Manufacturable tech 1 modules will be removed from NPC drop tables, and Rogue Drone NPCs will have their mineral drops replaced with ISK bounties. These are changes players have been suggesting for years, and together they have the potential to bring back mining as one of the most profitable professions in EVE. If someone asked you where all the minerals come from to build the thousands of ships destroyed in EVE on a daily basis, you might say that you assume most of it comes from mined ore. Mining was originally the biggest source of minerals in the game and one of the most profitable professions, but over the years, that's changed. When level 4 missions added an infinite source of battleship-sized NPCs to high-security space, mission-running quickly overtook mining as the most profitable profession, and bizarrely, as a very good source of minerals. When the drone regions were later released, ratting there also became a huge mineral faucet far in excess of that produced through mining. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the problems faced by mining as a source of minerals and speculate on what will happen to mining as a profession when the Inferno expansion hits.
Hulk smash new Marvel pinball table next year
The Pinball games from Zen Studios -- Pinball FX 2 on XBLA and Marvel Pinball on PSN -- will receive a Hulk table sometime next year. XBLAfans took note of the forum post where Mel Kirk, VP of PR and Marketing for Zen Studios, explicitly announced the angry green goon's forthcoming appearance. "Everything that comes from Marvel next year will be bigger, not necessarily character specific," Kirk told us when we asked about the table. "Hulk will be the main character, but it will be based on something in the Marvel storyline." It would appear Zen Studios' relationship with Marvel is going well. The company launched the original Marvel tables last year, followed by DLC featuring Fantastic Four and Captain America (one of the best tables available), and the "Vengeance and Virtue" tables which came out last week. From what Zen Studios is saying, there's plenty more to come in 2012.
How not to buy an iPhone overseas
It kind of seems like I can't catch a break when it comes to iPhone launches. The first iPhone debuted a little over a year before I left the US and moved to New Zealand. I knew the move was coming, so signing (then breaking) a two-year contract with AT&T didn't make sense. I also wasn't prepared to pay US$599 for a cell phone. "That's more than my PlayStation 3 cost!" I said at the time. (Guess which device I use more often now.) The iPhone 3G launched in New Zealand eight days after I moved here, and the color drained from my face when I saw how much Vodafone was charging for it. Vodafone once again priced the iPhone 3GS well outside the bounds of sanity in 2009, so I had to pass on that model and hold onto the iPhone 3G I'd eventually purchased. A year later, the NZ iPhone 4 launch was an unmitigated disaster, and I had to go through three handsets before I finally got one that worked right. None of that remotely compares to what's transpired as I've tried to get an iPhone 4S into my hands. Caution: First World Problems Ahead. This is going to be a rather long, cranky post about one impatient man trying to buy a smartphone. If that's not your cup of tea, there's plenty of Internet out there beyond this page. Still here? In that case, I hope that if you're reading this and considering a (cough) non-traditional route for your iPhone purchase, you'll think twice and avoid the same frustration I've endured over this long, irritating, and (spoiler) ultimately fruitless odyssey. It came as little surprise to me that Apple delayed the iPhone 4S launch in New Zealand to the third tier of "whenever we get around to it" countries, but I was both surprised and annoyed that unlocked handsets wouldn't be available in the US until November. I'd initially been planning on having a colleague in the States get the handset down here, but I wasn't willing to wait a whole extra month (Warning: Contains Foreshadowing). I ordered an iPhone 4S and Apple TV from Australia instead and had them shipped to a contact of mine in Melbourne; he was someone I'd met in person before, and I decided he was trustworthy enough to act as a go-between. Even though the iPhone 4S turned out to be far more expensive in the Down Under stores compared to its US price, I felt it was worth paying a little extra if it meant I didn't have to wait. I should have known better. Apple delayed shipping iPhone 4S pre-orders to Australia until the day the handset launched. Pre-order customers in many other countries received their iPhones on the day of the 14th, but Australian pre-orders didn't actually leave the Foxconn factory floor until that same day. This meant the handset didn't actually arrive at my Aussie contact's home until early morning of October 18. I was annoyed, but not yet angry. Four days of extra waiting wasn't quite enough to get me turning green and throwing compact cars at unmarked helicopters. Not yet, anyway. But the delays continued. Despite assuring me that he'd ship the handset to New Zealand within a day of receiving it, my Aussie intermediary didn't make his first attempt to ship the iPhone 4S to me until Thursday. His local post shop refused to mail the package because -- wait for it -- the iPhone has a battery in it. Sticking strictly to the absolute letter of mailing regulations means that any device with a non-removable lithium battery can't be shipped internationally via air mail in Australia -- even though that's precisely how it arrived in the country, in precisely the same packaging state. I called Australia Post, and their representative said shipping it shouldn't have been a problem; "We ship iPhones out all the time," were her exact words, but she wasn't able to get the post shop employee to listen to reason. Meanwhile, the last direct communication I'd received from my acquaintance in Australia came the day he received my iPhone. For whatever reason, all subsequent contact over the next four days took place between his wife and mine. I had to call him to find out that despite his wife's assurances she'd ship my iPhone to New Zealand the day after the first attempt, it didn't happen. He got annoyed with me when I told him the continual delays were costing me money -- I can't write up reviews or how-tos on a product I don't own -- and he breezily suggested that he'd mail it out "as soon as I can." His dismissive attitude toward my situation (and the financial peril he was putting me in) is what finally threw me into a Hulk-like rage. Let's just say the next morning I was looking up "drywall repair" on Google and leave it at that. Not one of my prouder moments. By this point I began to suspect he was trying to sell the phone out from under me. The lack of communication from him and continued failures to ship it out only reinforced that fear, especially when I noticed that his wife who was "too busy" to mail my iPhone out had spent several hours a day posting in an online forum they both frequent. Simultaneously impatient and paranoid, I sought assistance on Twitter from any TUAW readers who lived close to the guy. My wife wasn't particularly pleased with this plan, and I knew on an intellectual level that it was a huge and foolhardy risk -- one more inadvisable link in an already rusty chain -- but I was starting to get desperate. At first no one's schedule was open enough to get to his place on the outskirts of Melbourne. The longer my iPhone sat uselessly in his house with neither word from him nor any attempts to ship it out, the more I suspected that I was going to have to consider it stolen and get the police involved. At last, a Melbourne-based reader contacted me on Twitter, and we were able to make some very cloak-and-dagger arrangements to retrieve my gear and finally get it sent out to me. My wife thought I was a harebrained idiot for trusting a stranger with this mission (and she was probably right). But the guy seemed trustworthy enough to me, and at any rate I didn't feel like I had much left to lose. He agreed to send one of his coworkers to pick up my iPhone, and I alerted the guy who'd held my property in his home (by now, for a solid week) that someone was coming to pick it up. Twelve hours went by before I received this response from the man who'd held over a thousand dollars in my property in his home without communicating with me for over a week: You didn't consider asking before giving my address to someone? And no thank you for doing what we have? Very few moments have filled me with rage as palpable as that I felt upon reading that email. I could hear my heart not just beating, but slamming in my ears. It took an almost physical act of will to restrain myself from firing off a volcanic response right away; I wisely held off, because my ad hoc courier hadn't retrieved my items yet. I sat down and blasted Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band from my stereo while I tried to cool down and find a calm center. It didn't work, but at least I got to listen to some good tunes while I waited to see how my own dopey version of Mission: Impossible played out. Just as John Lennon started singing about a lucky man who made the grade, I got a coded message on Twitter: "The bird is in the cage. Repeat. The bird is in the cage." I felt an instant wave of relief, but it didn't last long. I still had to get my iPhone out of the country, and I was depending on a complete stranger to do it. Thankfully my trust in this guy was justified. He told me the iPhone's box was still sealed, and he left it that way. He promised to ship it out on his lunch break the next day. It seemed the ordeal was finally about to come to an end. Except it wasn't. Meanwhile, since my iPhone was finally out of his hands (and I'd had a chance to cool down), I sent my response to the guy who let my iPhone rot in his house for a full week. An excerpt: Here's the bottom line. My items made it from the factory floor in China to your front door in less than four days. That's 4600 kilometres -- over a tenth of the way around the entire planet -- and the shipping was free. You've had five days since your first try at shipping my items to get them to the post shop 2.3 kilometres from your house, and I was happy to pay you $50 for your time and effort. But since you stopped communicating with me and gave neither me nor my wife any specific estimates for when you would ship my items, I finally acted to recover $1,200 in my property that had sat in your home for over a week. Not wanting to waste any more of my altruistic courier's time than I already had, I called ahead to Australia Post to make sure that the post shop he was going to wasn't going to refuse shipping the iPhone the way another one had six days before. The representative I spoke to told me that whoever I'd talked to the preceding Thursday had been blowing smoke -- under no circumstances would Australia Post ship an iPhone, period. Australia's regulations on shipping devices with integrated lithium batteries make it impossible for individual shippers to send such devices internationally. It's ostensibly a rule designed to protect aircraft from fires and explosions resulting from faulty lithium batteries. It's also an idiotic, reactionary rule drafted by complete morons who apparently have no idea how modern technology works. My iPhone was in exactly the same state it had been in when shipped from Hong Kong to Australia -- brand new, never activated, sealed in the box -- so Australia Post's assertion that it was "too dangerous" to ship was ludicrous. I explained to the representative I spoke with that I wasn't trying to get on her case, since she didn't draft the rule, "but make sure it goes up the chain: this is a stupid rule, and the people who came up with it are idiots. It's complete nonsense." I passed that message along on Twitter as well, when the official Australian Post account said the same thing: "We cannot accept lithium batteries for international carriage." My response was less than kind (I'm blaming it on having recently immersed myself in Steve Jobs's biography). I'm aware of the rule. I'm also aware that it's completely moronic, and I will shortly be saying so in a very public forum. TNT had no problem moving an iPhone from Hong Kong to Melbourne. So don't push that 'dangerous goods' BS on me. Millions of travelers fly with iPhones every year. NONE of them explode. Your restrictions are arbitrary and idiotic. I shipped an iPad from the USA with NO issues. Its battery is BIGGER THAN THE ENTIRE IPHONE. Wake up! I turned to an alternative carrier, the one that had brought my iPhone into Australia in the first place. TNT handles virtually all of Apple's international shipping in this part of the world, so it was reasonable to assume TNT had no qualms about shipping such "hazardous materials" as an iPhone battery identical to the ones in carry-ons and passenger pockets worldwide. I was right -- TNT had no problems sending an iPhone internationally -- but they would only ship to a business, not to an individual. It was at this point that I reassessed my options rationally, possibly for the first time since ordering the iPhone in the first place. Fellow iPhone fanatics from New Zealand had been telling me horror stories of week-long delays in NZ Customs, tax and import duties so high they made my teeth chatter, and shipping expenses that seemed astronomically high for an item smaller than a deck of cards. I finally asked myself a question I should have asked weeks earlier: "Is this stupid phone, this product, this thing really worth all of this trouble?" I decided it was not. As the philosopher Rogers once said, "You got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em." After telling my erstwhile courier my intentions, I called Apple and told them to process a return. After I explained the situation (and affirmed the product was still sealed in its box), Apple processed the return without charging any fees whatsoever. Apple agreed to send a TNT rep to my courier's business to pick up the iPhone, and my courier guaranteed to turn it over. On November 1, 18 days after this cavalcade of stupidity began, Apple confirmed that it had received my items and was preparing to process my refund. The end. Though this story doesn't have the happy ending I was looking forward to, and at times tried to wring from it with all the effort I could muster from the other side of the Tasman, it could have been much worse. Putting that much faith in near-strangers when so much is at stake is not something I'm ever likely to do again when the stakes are this high, and I don't recommend anyone else do it, either. If any single link in this chain had broken, I'd have lost not just the iPhone itself but the considerable amount of money (after honest reflection, an insane and downright excessive amount of money) invested in it. In the end I lost almost nothing, except time, worry, and a pile of frustration. Who do I blame for this debacle? Do I blame Apple, for delaying the availability of unlocked iPhones in the States and thereby locking out a much more reliable (and cheaper) source for the handset? Do I blame Apple again for delaying Australian pre-order shipments? Do I blame the guy who held my iPhone in his house for a week, completely failed to communicate with me, and had me three days away from calling the cops to seize my property? Do I blame Australia Post for its Byzantine restrictions and complete failure to service me as a customer in the simplest task in the universe, moving a small item from point A to point B? I could blame any one or all of those entities for this utterly crap situation, which led me to groan "All for nothing, all for nothing" for several minutes immediately after processing the return request with Apple. Ultimately, though, I have no one to blame for this spectacle but myself. I didn't need the iPhone 4S before November. I wanted it before then. I let that frothy desire blind me to the stupidity of my actions virtually every step along the way. I paid several hundred dollars more for the thing than it would have cost if I'd simply waited for the US model instead. I put extraordinarily expensive and highly-in-demand property in the hands of several complete strangers, any one of whom could easily have betrayed me for a very quick and lucrative payout. I made myself and everyone around me suffer for weeks while I bitched and moaned about the stupid iPhone being stuck in limbo. All things considered, I was lucky. Of all possible outcomes, getting a full refund is the best thing I could have hoped for aside from actually having the iPhone arrive safely. Of course, knowing my luck, the iPhone would have been a dud unit anyway, so things probably worked out for the best. If you learn nothing else from my odyssey of idiocy, at least learn this: Don't be as stupid as I was. Try not to get so worked up about some metal/glass widget that you let your reason fly out the window and spend two weeks careening between Hulk-rage and anxiety that makes the characters in a Woody Allen film seem well-adjusted by comparison. The iPhone may be a great tool, the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife on steroids, but it's not even close to being worth what I put myself (and everyone around me) through to get it. I learned that the hard way. I hope you don't have to. Update: It's just been announced that the iPhone 4S will be available in New Zealand on November 11, which makes everything that happened in October seem that much more pointless.
You really should have seen this amazing footage from The Avengers video game
Earlier this year THQ shuttered the Australian studio most likely working on The Avengers: The Video Game, and until now we didn't know how far along the game was, or how awesome it was turning out to be. A freshly leaked video shows The Avengers in a pre-alpha build, highlighting the game's sweet FPS mechanics -- unfortunately THQ has pulled the footage from YouTube, meaning you'll never get to see how amazing this thing was. Your life sucks. Not to rub it in your face, but we saw it and boy, was it good. The video showed the first-person perspectives of Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America, all using unique fighting styles to destroy their enemies -- or get obliterated by them, as was the case against the X-Men and Fantastic Four Super-Skrulls. The art style appeared sophisticated, especially for a pre-alpha build, and it contained just the right amount of superhero violence, including an active input scene where Hulk slowly snapped the neck of a Super-Skrull. Seriously, it's a shame you'll never see this footage. Ever. Unless you see it here. We hope you appreciate it more this way.
