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The Macallan distillery opens up for 4D virtual reality tours
Not everyone has the means to travel to Scotland and visit their favorite distillery a la Ron Swanson. To help connoisseurs live out their dreams of traipsing through its facilities, The Macallan has created the Macallan Distillery Experience. VRFocus describes it as a "4D multi-sensory" group tour that guides folks through the company's process for making its Single Malt spirit. Along the way you'll explore the Scottish distillery an the estate it resides on, learning about the outfit's history along the way. Visitors will step into a "15x15x15 cube-like projection structure" with 360-degree videos beamed to the installation's walls.
We gave Anchorman 2: Scotchy Scotch Toss a month to see if a movie tie-in game could grow on you.
Movie tie-ins are highly profitable, but notoriously terrible. Gamers want a chance to play with their favorite characters, but developers often rush a product to meet a film or TV show's release date. Despite being burned time and time again, consumers keep buying these games. Given the history of movie tie-in games, with the exception of Aladdin for the Sega Genesis, I approached Anchorman 2: Scotchy Scotch Toss with a notable sense of dread. But there was one other factor I worried might bias me as a reviewer. The promotional onslaught surrounding the release of Anchorman 2 had created such a storm of annoying white noise that giving the game a fair shake seemed unlikely at the time. So I set out to play Anchorman 2: Scotchy Scotch Toss for a month. In that time, I'd take note of any improvements that were made via updates and see if this silly movie tie-in could grow on me. Scotchy Scotch Toss is a simple reworking of the popular game Paper Toss, only with a extra sassy dose of Will Ferrell. Players attempt to toss ice cubes into Ron Burgundy's ever-present scotch glass. As you play, Burgundy will mock and cheer for you depending on how cold you keep his liquid joy. As you score points, you earn coins that allow you to buy new things to throw, like fire ice that sets the room aflame or hand grenades. Thankfully, you are not required to pay any extra money to buy power ups. It's easy enough to just raise money through gameplay. These power ups don't really effect the game play, but they provide a nice visual accompaniment to the drunken berating of Burgundy. The physics engine is as exaggerated as the movies, meaning even when tossing ice in a Winnebago, the winds create a learning curve. Of course, you won't have to worry about your friends comparing their scores to yours as there is no social component to the game. Even after updates that brought power ups to the game, Scotchy Scotch Toss doesn't have high scores or online leaderboards that track your progress. When you go to the ice bucket menu to select what kind of object you'll throw, the game will show you your all-time best streak and how much ice you've sunk in total, but there is no high score. You build a score during the game, and it's frustrating to not be able to keep track of it. The steady stream of humor mixed with quick game play in Scotchy Scotch Toss makes for a fun diversion. Some levels have secondary targets for you hit and there are hundreds of lines of dialog for your listening pleasure. You even get a soundboard of all the quips for your listening pleasure. In the month since its launch, Anchorman 2: Scotchy Scotch Toss has been updated into a perfectly serviceable diversion. Unlike many quick cash-in apps, the game has been continuously improved since launch, even though the movie supporting has been out for more than a month. They keep making subtle improvements to gameplay and they're not soaking players for in-app purchases. How much you'll actually enjoy Anchorman 2 in the long run will depend on your fandom for Ferrell's series. But after a month of playing the title, it has grown on me. The one liners are sharp, setting a jazz club on fire with ice cubes is a blast and when you're stuck waiting in line for someone to figure out their sub, Anchorman provides a nice distraction. If you're looking for a new, inexpensive time killer, Scotchy Scotch Toss is there to serve up two fingers' worth of diversion. My mind isn't changed on movie tie-ins, but I'm a fan of this serving of Scotch.
Whiskey byproducts turned into biofuel, scientists prove they have a sense of humor
Did you know that gasoline was originally considered a waste byproduct of kerosene production? Seriously, people would take crude oil, refine the kerosene out of it, and dump the rest. Working along similar lines of harnessing what had heretofore been considered useless, researchers at Edinburgh Napier University have come up with a way to turn leftovers from whiskey distillation into a biofuel. Using the spent grains (or "graff") and liquid from the copper stills (called "pot ale"), they've been able to produce biobutanol -- a fuel that's 30 percent more efficient than ethanol and, importantly, compatible with gasoline-fired vehicles without the need for engine mods. We honestly had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't the beginning of April, but the university says its next stop is taking this thing to market. More power to them.
The Queue: Shoo map, don't bother me
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today's introduction video is something... special. Since people got a kick out of what I liked to call the Worst Video Ever, I figured I'd let you all see another misadventure is moviemaking from Sunday morning. One of my early attempts at recording the Love is in the Air boss went poorly, to say the least. Alternate title to the above video: When Addons Attack Jaena Vashj asked... "I was leveling my death knight in Dragonblight the other day and notice Ysera in the Emerald Dragonshrine. Didn't think much of her till I got closer and I noticed she was on top on this statue of a figure, what is this thing and why is it so special to Ysera?"
Visionmill cranks out HD IPTV channel, more to come?
While the mega-corporations are making this whole HD IPTV thing look easy, it's hard out here for an entrepreneur trying to launch his own gig. Rob Draper, an internationally acclaimed cinematographer, envisions IPTV as the future of television delivery, primarily because advertisers can focus their marketing to select channels / websites rather than just blasting ads out to everyone as they do now, theoretically wasting resources on folks who will shun their offerings anyway. After a failed attempt to make Visionmill, his own IPTV service, "a source of programming for TV food channels" and to turn Camden, Maine a "TV production hotspot," he branched out on his own and created SingleMalt.tv, which is dubbed the "world's first internet TV channel devoted to single malt Scotch whiskey." More important, however, is the fact that everything on the site is shot and delivered in crisp 720p, and while it may be hard to convince Mr. Draper to venture somewhere other than the beautiful hillsides of Scotland to set up shop, there could be more channels in the future as his startup blossoms -- but for now, we can all raise our glasses to 720p over the 'net, eh?
