World of Tanks: Blitz Review

Price: Free to Play
Developer: Wargaming.net
Publisher: Wargaming.net
Platform: iOS

It’s too hot and sunny to sit indoors playing computer games, so let’s discuss a computer game you can play outdoors instead. I was somewhat sceptical upon hearing about World of Tanks: Blitz. Firstly because it takes a highly regarded PC game and adapts it for mobile devices, which last time we checked works about as well as using a potted cactus for a shoehorn. Furthermore, Wargaming.net’s last game, World of Warplanes, felt distinctly lacking compared to the mighty World of Tanks.

Yet World of Warplanes didn’t work because the arcade nature of Wargaming.net’s titles stripped away too much of what makes aerial combat interesting, while Dungeon Keeper failed because its sole concern was torturing as much money out of its players as possible rather than finding the best way to rework the game for mobile. Blitz avoids both of these potential pitfalls, and is an unlikely but nonetheless rather splendid game for your pocket twitter-checking machine.

Structurally, Blitz is very similar to the PC version of World of Tanks. Fourteen players divided into two teams battle it out in an armoured game of king of the hill. Victory is achieved either by capturing and holding a point at the centre of the map, or by simply obliterating all the other tanks on the opposing team. Destroying enemy tanks and winning matches earns you experience points and in-game currency, which you can use to research better tanks or upgrade your current one.

If you so choose, you can pay real money for these upgrades, but you’re not obliged to, and there are no underhand tactics like forcing you to wait for projects to be completed unless you pay to resolve them. Blitz uses the same F2P model as all of Wargaming’s other titles, providing an abundance of purchasable tanks and upgrades, and featuring several tiers of experience progress depending on whether you play for free or chuck a few of your hard-earned squids at your monitor. My only gripe is it pesters you about upgrading to a “premium account” every time the game is launched. Stop it, Blitz, I’ll be ready for that in my own time.

Regarding the game itself, it’s surprising how well World of Tanks suits mobile, and a lot of it comes down to how the tanks work. These lumbering machines take time to move, aim and fire, which is actually ideal for playing a shooter on a small screen with imprecise controls. It doesn’t require you to react with lightning reflexes like games such as Counter Strike or Tribes: Ascend do. It deliberately plays at a slower, more thoughtful pace, which is a very good thing.

This isn’t to say Blitz’ theme compensates for poor controls. Wargaming have clearly thought about this as well. You move the tanks by manipulating a virtual analogue stick using your left thumb, and control the camera, turret, and firing with your right. It’s responsive and easy to learn, although the controls inevitably sacrifice a certain amount of screen space, which on a phone is already fairly limited. For the most part, however, it navigates the delicate balance of being able to see the game and being able to control it well enough.

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Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group has announced that his organisation will sue over the government’s rushed Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has announced that it intends to take the UK government to court over the passing of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill under the guise of a national emergency.

Created in secret by a cross-party special interest group, DRIP is a response to a European Court of Justice ruling that made the government’s requirements for ISPs and other communications providers to store and provide access to data on their customers illegal. It was introduced as an emergency bill earlier this month, and passed by a landslide majority in a debate on the 15th of July attended by fewer than 10 per cent of MPs.

Its critics claim the bill, which includes provisions excluding MPs and Lords from the same monitoring as the proletariat, was inadequately debated, devised in secret and rushed through Parliament under a false claim of life-saving emergency. Claims by MPs who voted and argued for the bill that it introduces no new powers have been rubbished, and the 49 MPs who voted against DRIP are understandably displeased.

ORG, a UK-based privacy campaign group, has stated that it intends to fight the matter. ‘The courts will have the final say on whether DRIP breaches human rights. And no matter what David Cameron believes, the UK has international obligations. The European Convention of Human Rights, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and our own Human Rights Act all exist to defend are rights and are where we will be able to challenge DRIP. And that’s what we will do,‘ the ORG’s Jim Killock claimed in a post on the matter. ‘We’re already meeting with lawyers and taking Counsel’s advice to work out the best way to take the Government to court. We will work every other group who is willing to help. But a major legal battle like this is going to be tough.‘

The DRIP bill, now the DRIP Act, has been passed by Parliament and given royal assent – meaning such a legal challenge is the only thing standing between what its critics call a snoopers’ charter and law.

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This image, leaked by @evleaks, claims to represent the design of Nvidia’s upcoming Shield Android-powered gaming tablet.

The successor to Nvidia’s Project Shield hand-held console has been leaked ahead of launch, and it may prove a disappointment for some: it’s a fairly textbook Android-powered tablet.

Rumours that Nvidia was planning a tablet-based successor to its Shield hand-held have been circling for months, and were seemingly confirmed recently when just such a device appeared on the Federal Communication Commission website. Now, the first image purporting to show the device has been leaked by noted industry insider @evleaks.

The image shows a compact tablet featuring what appears to be a pair of front-facing stereo speakers. It’s a similar layout to that used by the HTC One family, suggesting that Nvidia may have partnered with HTC on the device’s production. Prior leaks had suggested that the tablet will feature a 7.9″ display of at least 1,920×1,080 resolution and the ability to stream games content from a laptop or desktop with a recent Nvidia GeForce graphics chip.

Internally, the tablet is claimed to feature Nvidia’s latest Tegra K1 system-on-chip processor. This is the first in the Tegra family to feature the same graphics technology as the company’s desktop and laptop products, packing 192 Kepler CUDA cores alongside four ARM Cortex-A15 general-purpose processors. That power is tamed by the inclusion of a fifth ‘Shadow Core,’ a low-power ARM Cortex-A9 chip which takes over during idle periods and allows the bulk of the SoC to switch off entirely.

Nvidia has not commented on the accuracy of the leak, but has been dropping hints that it has something to launch in the near future with a pre-Christmas 2014 unveiling seemingly guaranteed.

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Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has announced that the company is to cut 18,000 jobs – nearly 15 per cent of its workforce – in the coming twelve months.

Microsoft has announced major job cuts at the company with 18,000 staff to be made redundant in the next year, as well as the closure of its Xbox Entertainment Studio and the cessation of all non-Windows mobile activity by its Nokia division.

Following rumours of cuts to come, Microsoft has confirmed that it plans to cut 18,000 jobs over the next twelve months – the largest round of cuts in the company’s history, and a massive 14.4 per cent of its overall headcount. The bulk of these, some 12,500 positions, will come from the company’s recently-acquired Nokia mobile arm and represents half the division’s staff.

The cuts were announced by chief executive Satya Nadella in an all-staff memo in which he described the ”difficult steps‘ the company would have to take. ‘We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months,‘ the memo reads. ‘It’s important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we are adding roles in certain other strategic areas. My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible. We will offer severance to all employees impacted by these changes, as well as job transition help in many locations, and everyone can expect to be treated with the respect they deserve for their contributions to this company.‘

With half the former Nokia staff being shown the door, there’s perhaps little surprise in the news that the division’s non-Windows products are being cancelled. Microsoft has confirmed that the Android-based Nokia X and the Symbian-based Asha and Series 40 featurephone families will all be discontinued in the coming months. A bigger surprise is the closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios, the company’s original-content arm, although it is expected to be permitted to finish the documentary on the excavation of the Atari dump in New Mexico first.

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SilverStone DS380 Review

Manufacturer: SilverStone
UK price (as reviewed): £116.99 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $159.99 {ex TAX)

If there’s one case company that’s not afraid to try something new in the pursuit of better designs it’s SilverStone. We’ve seen some radical shifts in cooling arrangements as well as general case design and many cases have topped our cooling charts too. Today, though, we’re looking at something that brings something other than advanced cooling to the table.

The DS380 is SilverStone’s take on a combination of a NAS enclosure and mini-ITX gaming case. It’s fairly unassuming on the outside, with a pain black powder-coated exterior. There’s only a power button externally – no other buttons or switches and even this is an extension, as the main front panel is hidden behind a lockable front door.

SilverStone has taken the interesting approach of using externally-fitted dust filters for all the fan mounts. Thankfully, these fit very well indeed and look as if they’re part of the case with a similar colour and finish, though this has probably added to the cost of the case. The front logo is detached out of the box and the strip can be fitted if you so wish, although we found it didn’t quite sit completely flush.

Construction is primarily of steel, so this small case weighs in at a hefty 7kg. It’s very well-made, but in an old-fashioned sort of way. If you like those typical steel cases that could probably survive a drop off the Empire State Building then you’ll like the DS380 but it’s not a modern case, if you know what we mean.

The showpiece of the DS380 is its hot-swap drive mounts, which occupies the majority of the interior, yet there’s also room for sizable graphics cards too. There are eight SATA/SAS-compatible drive mounts that are both 2.5in and 3.5in compatible. However, there’s no 5.25in bay as a result – this is a case that’s been built to maximise the number of drive bays and we’re pretty sure that eight 3.5in mounts is more than any other mini-ITX case out there too.

The front door is equipped with a lock with two keys provided, and reveals the main front panel with power and reset buttons, two USB 3 ports plus minijacks. The hot swap drive mounts are easily accessible from here without removing the side panel so they’re easy to reach but secure behind the front door.

The rear of the case reveals it’s fairly humble contruction – bare grey steel and a black exterior, although interestingly you can see that SilverStone has opted to mount the mini-ITX motherboard on its head too. More on the interior over the page

Specifications

• Dimensions (mm) 260 x 369 x 195 (W x D x H)
• Material Steel, plastic
• Available colours Black
• Weight 7kg
• Front panel Power, 2 x USB 3, stereo, microphone
• Drive bays8 x internal 3.5in/2.5in, 4 x 2.5in
• Form factor(s) Mini-ITX
• Cooling 1 x 120mm rear fan mount (fan included), 2 x 120mm side fan mounts (fans included),
• CPU cooler clearance 57mm
• Maximum graphics card length 279mm with 111mm width restriction
• Extras Hot swap drive bays, removable dust filters

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The Phanteks Enthoo Luxe includes plenty of cooling potential, modder-friendly features, multi-colour lighting and a sand-blasted finish.

Phanteks has announced the launch of the Enthoo Luxe, a more compact alternative to the Enthoo Primo which it claims doesn’t scrimp on features or quality.

Although smaller than the Primo, the Enthoo Luxe is still a full-tower chassis with room for ATX and EATX motherboards. Launching in black and white, the aluminium faceplates feature a matte sand-blasted finish and hide multi-colour ambient lighting strips, which carry through from the top to the front of the case along both sides with user-controllable ten-colour switching. The case’s front-panel IO includes two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and analogue connectivity for headphones and microphone.

The case includes room for up to eight expansion slots, three externally-accessible 5.25″ drives, six 3.5″ storage drives split across two three-drive cages or eight 2.5″ with two sitting on Drop-N-Lock SSD brackets outside said cages. As standard, the Enthoo Luxe includes a 200mm front intake fan and two PH-F140SP outtake fans, along with top, front and bottom dust filters. Phanteks claims the case includes room for liquid-cooling radiators in various places, with space for a 240mm radiator in the front, 420mm in the top, 140 in the rear and/or 240mm at the bottom.

To better appeal to modders, the Enthoo Luxe uses screws instead of rivets in much of its construction, allowing for the removal of the top, optical drive and hard drive panels. A split-window design takes up on side panel, with no word yet as to whether a solid alternative will be made available. Overall, the case measures 235mm by 560mm by 550mm, and will include a five-year warranty. Bundled extras include a thermal- and noise-isolating cover for the power supply and a PWM control hub for fans.

Overclockers has become the first company to open pre-orders for the Enthoo Primo, priced at £119.99 in white and £129.98 in black, with additional 1m and 2m LED strips available for £13.99 and £16.99 respectively.

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Microsoft has finished rolling out a 10PB upgrade to its Azure cloud platform that significantly boosts the storage capacities available to all OneDrive users.

Microsoft has announced that it is boosting the storage space available to its OneDrive users, effective immediately, as high as 1TB, even as it fights to keep its foreign data centres safe from US intrusion.

The company telegraphed plans to increase the storage capacity available to users on its OneDrive service last month, and today has sent the new figures live. Both existing accounts and new sign-ups can benefit from a boost to 15GB of free storage from the previous 7GB limit, while prices for additional storage have dropped to £1.99 for 100GB and £3.99 for 200GB – cheap, but an unfortunately literal symbol-translation of the $1.99 and $3.99 storage tiers available to US customers.

The biggest bonus comes for users who pay for a subscription to Office 365, Microsoft’s browser-based and cloud-powered productivity suite. For the standard fee of £7.99 a month, users will see their storage space boost from 20GB to a whopping 1TB. The upgrade applies to all accounts, including Office 365 for Business users, who jump from 25GB to the new 1TB tier.

While the company has been slowly rolling out the increases since its announcement last month, the new space is available to all from today thanks to the company’s addition of a claimed 10 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity to its Azure cloud platform.

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EA has announced that all owners with copies of The Sims 2 in their Origin libraries will receive a free upgrade to the Ultimate Edition, as the company ends support for the ten-year-old title.

Electronic Arts (EA) has announced that it is upgrading all owners of The Sims 2 to the game’s Ultimate Collection edition, ahead of its cessation of support for the title.

The follow-up to The Sims, the company’s first in what has turned into a long-running and massively successful doll’s house simulation franchise, The Sims 2 launched in 2004 and has had no fewer than eight expansion packs and a raft of ‘Stuff Packs’. Those who had long abandoned the title may be surprised to hear that, despite the last of these add-ons being launched in 2008, The Sims 2 was still an officially-supported EA title receiving continuous updates to address flaws and bugs.

Its ten-year reign is now coming to an end, however. EA has confirmed that from this day forward no more patches will be released for The Sims 2. There is light at the end of the tunnel, however: those who would prefer to stick with what they know than upgrade to a later game in the franchise will be pleased to hear that they can receive a free upgrade to The Sims 2 Ultimate Edition, a new bundling of the title that includes all previously released downloadable content.

The offer is available to anyone who has The Sims 2 in their Origin library. Those who have physical editions of the game that are not registered in Origin are advised to contact EA’s customer support as soon as possible to ensure that they too receive the free upgrade.

Details of the offer are available on the official EA website.

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This continued until around 2005, with FEAR being the last game I can recall with truly memorable AI. Then something changed, and after that nothing changed. Stealth AI has patrolled the same pathways for years, shooter AI crouched behind a wall circa 2006 and decided to make a home there, and when was the last time you played a game that involved the AI learning anything?

Until very recently this was more or less the sum of my position. Game AI has stagnated. This is bad. We need to do something. Yet I’ve been reading a little more about the subject lately, and looking into a couple of interesting projects, and this has resulted in my altering my stance. Now I’m unsure what video game AI is at all. What’s more, I think my own dilemma is not altogether dissimilar from the problems the games industry is encountering.

The problem begins with the very meaning of the term “AI”. When I think of an AI, I picture an android, or a sentient computer like GLaDOS (which, ironically as a game AI is about as intelligent as a shoe). Aside from the fact that they’re both created using computers, a technological AI bears little in common with a game AI. The ultimate goal of technological AI is to give it an equal level of sentient intelligence as a human being. Game AI only needs to appear as intelligent as the game in question requires it to, and it can do this by any means necessary, be it through scripting, pathfinding, or more emergent techniques.

Immediately this conflation of concept causes problems. When criticising games it is tempting to judge AI based on its intelligence. But it’s very easy to make a game AI super-humanly intelligent, and in most cases that isn’t going to make the game better. Ideally, what you want in the majority of games, certainly games like shooters or strategy games, is for the AI to be humanly stupid. It needs to be capable of making clever decisions and reasonable mistakes.

But hang on, isn’t that also the goal of technological AI, which we just said was completely different from game AI?

No, the goal of technological AI is sentience. It can be as smart as we dare make it, but regardless of the level of intelligence, the AI needs to be capable of reacting to and coping with any given environment. Game AI, on the other hand, only needs to act human within the confines of the game, which by comparison is a far less demanding task. So an FPS needs its AI to shoot at the player, but not hit them with pinpoint accuracy every time. Other important capabilities are navigation of the map, use of cover, and possibly some tactical decision making, such as flanking and covering fire. It doesn’t need to be capable of empathy, or making moral choices, or even feeling anything. This is very different from a game like The Sims, where the AI’s ability to demonstrate and respond to physical needs and emotional moods are vital components of the game.

Hence, it appears to be the limitations imposed by gaming genres which defines the difference between game AI and technological AI. The goals of video game AI are smaller, more specific, which is why it seems to be such a broad church with no real direction.

Only, maybe it shouldn’t be. Perhaps the reason we don’t see game AI developing as we would like is because genre is defining AI development when AI development should be defining genre. Maybe, for video game AI to really progress, a unified approach is necessary.

To understand this, let’s consider another area of game development which has made huge leaps in the last ten years – graphics. Historically, graphics development has been driven by the ultimate goal of photo-realism. Now, regardless of whether or not you think photo-realism is a valid target to shoot toward or not, the universal desire of mainstream publishers to push further toward this objective has resulted in a rapid advancement in games’ ability to render convincing environments, characters, and so on. It never really mattered what kinds of games were being made, it was just assumed that players would want their games to have better graphics.

AI, on the other hand, has never really received the same attention, never been pushed forward for its own sake. Instead its development has always been based on the needs of individual games. This is a shame, because when individual developers have experimented with new AI techniques, the consequences can be enormous. The entire stealth genre exists because Looking Glass Studios took the two default AI behaviours of “passive” and “aggressive” and sandwiched between them a third state of “alert”, where the AI searches for the players presence but it’s actively aware of their location.

Now you might be tempted to point to a game like Far Cry as an example of more recent evolutions of AI behaviour. But ultimately all these games do is combine different types of AI scripts that have existed for years. If we’re to see radical changes in terms of the games we play, we need to explore new or at the very least rarely used types of AI. Either way, AI needs to be at the forefront of the developer’s mind.

The good news is, there are a couple of games on the horizon which are prioritising AI. The first is Simon Roth’s Maia, which tasks you with building and maintaining a colony on a hostile alien planet. Inspired by the classic Bullfrog management games, particularly Dungeon Keeper, Maia features autonomous colonists whose actions you can only indirectly manipulate rather than directly control. In addition, Roth plans for Maia to have a far more granular AI simulation than its inspiration. Colonists will have different moods and emotional states which are affected by their environment and can affect their behaviour.

The second game in question is Clockwork Empires, which like Maia is a colony simulator, except set in colonial America. Again, it feature autonomous colonists who you cannot control directly, but it’s approach to that autonomy is slightly different. Colonists have different personality traits which affect their behaviour with other colonists. They can also exchange ideas and preserve memories. The ultimate extension of this is that, if you leave your colonists with too little to do, they can become bored and will develop an interest in the occult, which can lead to them unleashing some ungodly terror onto the colony, leading to its destruction. But this system can also express itself in other, smaller ways, how colonists react in battle, how they cope with loss, so on and so forth.

Both games are still heavily in development, so it’ll be some time before we see whether they can deliver on their promises. But in theory at least, both Maia and Clockwork Empires lean toward emergent AI that is rarely used in games, where the AI can “learn” through player response to its actions. The Creature in Black and White is the most famous example of this, and why, despite its problems, I have an enduring fondness for that game. But there are other prospects for this AI as well. A typical example would be an XCOM-style game where, instead of controlling your soldiers’ actions directly, you train them in certain tactics before a battle, and then send them out to fight autonomously.

Although the more experimental approaches of Maia and Clockwork Empires are exciting, they don’t represent a unified push in AI development. Both games are still creating specific AI for specific games, it’s just that AI is very much the primary system in those games rather than a secondary or tertiary consideration.

What’s more, the importance of AI is only going to grow in the coming years, certainly as a focus of mainstream developers. As tech like VR headsets make games more immersive, while huge open worlds and pretty visuals become more and more commonplace, it will be those studios that can keep that level of immersion consistent using convincing AI behaviours which will garner the most attention. Eventually, game AI will have to stop cheating, and learn to cope with the worlds developers create.

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This image of the House of Commons, shared by Paul Bernal on Twitter, shows how few MPs turned up to debate the DRIP bill before it passed a vote under an ‘emergency’ timetable.

The divisive Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (DRIP) has been passed by a landslide majority vote in the House of Commons, despite only a handful of MPs turning up for the debate.

Rushed through as an ‘emergency’ bill by a cross-party special interest group, DRIP is designed to address a European Court of Justice ruling made back in April that makes the government mandated data retention carried out by UK ISPs illegal. Under DRIP, modifications are made such that the retention – still ongoing despite the ECJ ruling – is made legal once more.

Its critics, however, claim it offers the government far broader powers, and has been pushed through during a cabinet reshuffle and under the claim of emergency requirements in order to stifle legitimate debate. Tom Watson MP described the bill, which was arranged in closed meetings by a cross-party interest group, as a ‘stitch-up, stating last week that ‘regardless of where you stand on the decision of the European Court of Justice, can you honestly say that you want a key decision about how your personal data is stored to be made by a stitch up behind closed doors and clouded in secrecy? None of your MPs have even read this legislation, let alone been able to scrutinise it.‘

A debate on the bill took place in the House of Commons last night, but only a tiny fraction of the 500-plus members attended. Even so, its critics were able to tease some additional information out regarding the bill, including the fact that MPs and Lords will be given special exemptions that prevent their communications from being monitored under DRIP – exemptions that will not be granted to the proletariat.

Despite campaigns against it, the DRIP bill passed following claims by the Home Secretary Theresa May that ‘if we delay we face the appalling prospect police operations will go dark, that trails will go cold, that terrorist plots will go undetected; if that happens, innocent lives may be lost.‘ 436 MPs voted for the accelerated ‘emergency’ timescale that would see the bill passed in a single day, while 49 voted for a lengthier debate; when the bill was read, it was passed with a government margin of 416 votes – meaning DRIP will now enter law as an official act.

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