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'Humanity' will hit PS Plus when it arrives on May 16th
PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers will soon be able to check out puzzle platformer 'Humanity' at no extra cost.
'Humanity' was the most interesting game at Sony's State of Play, and you can play a demo today (updated)
The studio behind 'Rez' is finally launching its next game, 'Humanity,' in May.
'Humanity' is a PS4 game about the strangeness of crowds
You'll be glad to hear that the PS4 will get at least one more truly oddball game (besides Wattam) during its lifetime. THA and Tetsuya Mizuguchi's studio Enhance have announced Humanity, a game for PS4 and PSVR that imagines how aliens would simulate human group behavior -- that is, without any real context. It sounds strange, and it certainly looks that way between the floating streams of people and the Totally Accurate Battle Simulator-style fights between thousands of virtual beings. It's not even clear how you play at this stage.
Why humans must band together to fight the tyranny of tech
It might seem like there's no winning against Facebook and Google, tech companies whose reach and influence are now practically inescapable. Facebook's inability to police its own platform led to widespread misinformation ahead of the 2016 election. Google still can't keep YouTube safe for kids. Meanwhile we're addicted to our phones and social networks, even if they make us miserable. So where do we go from here? Douglas Rushkoff, the renowned media theorist who's popularized concepts like viral media, suggests one way: Banding together and fighting for our collective humanity.
Tinder gets a lo-fi makeover in 'Millennial Swipe Simulator 2015'
If you've been using Tinder for long enough chances are that you've opened the app in the morning with some rather surprising matches. Brainlessly swiping right on whoever fits the bill for you in the hopes that they'll do the same and you'll potentially have a love connection is part of the experience. It's this sort of activity the web-based Millennial Swipe Sim 2015 aims to replicate. In the "game" you have to keep swiping (regardless of direction) to keep your boredom meter from filling lest you die. Seriously. Funnily enough, developer Will Herring (a Buzzfeed creative director and former GamePro (R.I.P.) editor) managed sneaking some of the app's quirks in. Like people in group photos and the same profiles that keep popping up repeatedly, for example. What's missing though are wedding shots from the altar or church steps and profiles consisting entirely of photos of one's children. Maybe in the next update?
Flameseeker Chronicles: Who watches Guild Wars 2's watchknights?
A few weeks ago, I covered a few possibilities for the direction of the Guild Wars 2 patch that was known at the time as The Queen's Speech, now revealed to actually be Clockwork Chaos. The majority of it didn't pan out, which is to be expected when engaging in wild mass guessing; I'll be a little disappointed if ArenaNet has really decided to retcon the hints it previously set up around the Great Collapse, but we know that the Crown Pavilion Arena will probably be revisited at some point and there's always a chance for things to go wrong in lots of different ways. The plus side is that Scarlet Briar is exactly the kind of villain GW2 has been hurting for, and her presence on the playing field is opening up all kinds of potential directions for the plot. Behind the cut are spoilers for this chapter of the living story as well as Scott McGough's short story What Scarlet Saw. Join me in the depths of hopeless nerditude and let's discuss the new lore elements this release has introduced!
Max Planck Institute sequences genome of Siberian girl from 80,000 years ago, smashes DNA barriers
We've known little of the genetic sequences of our precursors, despite having found many examples of their remains: the requirement for two strands in traditional DNA sequencing isn't much help when we're usually thankful to get just one. The Max Planck Institute has devised a new, single-strand technique that may very well fill in the complete picture. Binding specific molecules to a strand, so enzymes can copy the sequence, has let researchers make at least one pass over 99.9 percent of the genome of a Siberian girl from roughly 80,000 years ago -- giving science the most complete genetic picture of any human ancestor to date, all from the one bone you see above. The gene map tells us that the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl was part of a splinter population known as the Denisovans that sat in between Neanderthals and ourselves, having forked the family tree hundreds of thousands of years before today. It also shows that there's a small trace of Denisovans and their Neanderthal roots in modern East Asia, which we would never have known just by staring at fossils. Future discoveries could take years to leave an impact, but MPI may have just opened the floodgates of knowledge for our collective history.
