Take a Break and Watch This: 'Thor' Comic-Con Trailer Leaked

Take a Break and Watch This: 'Sucker Punch' Teaser Trailer

Calvin and Hobbes: Inception

Two More Multiplayer Maps Arrive for 'Battlefield: Bad Company 2' Today

Two new maps were served up today over the free (to retail buyers) VIP service for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. VIP Map Pack No. 5 adds White Pass and Nelson Bay, shown in this here trailer.

White Pass supports Rush Mode; Nelson Bay is for Conquest Mode. The content is free to VIP pass holders, which came free with the full purchase of the game. Otherwise, it costs $15, but it gives you all content - such as the four VIP map packs preceding it.

Send an email to the author of this post at owen@kotaku.com.

How to Pick Your Race in StarCraft 2

Should you play as Terran, Protoss or Zerg in StarCraft II's multiplayer? Good thing there are experts who can break down the options...

StarCraft II player Duban has a great guide over at the official StarCraft II forums that begins with some welcome advice about which army to command.

First, his warning: "you shouldn't pick Terran because they are human, Protoss because they are cool and high tech, or zerg because of their monstrous appetite. Each race has a distinct play-style and/or play-styles unique to their race."

Some excerpts:

Terran

"Terran is an extremely defensive race. The race centers around creating an extremely heavily fortified position in the early game, usually by creating a front door wall with supply depots, barracks, and/or factories. The Terrans than build up a large force unopposed and move out when the time is right. Because Terran strategy is very straightforward and in the process of climbing the tech tree they unlock almost everything Terran is generally considered the "Easy" race.

Zerg

"Zerg gets a large number of extremely mobile units. Speed upgraded Zerglings are lightning fast, mutalisks are fast and flexible, Roaches and infesters can travel while burrowed. The Terran fight in a chokepoint, like near their base, and the Zerg fight in the open ground of the center of the map. The zerg win by out-producing, or out-macroing, their opponent... The zerg is often considered the "hard" race, BUT if you're willing to work with their play-style it can also give great results and be very rewarding at the same time."

Protoss

"The Protoss can put up a strong defense compared to the zerg, but not nearly as tough as the Terrans. The Protoss forces are more mobile than the Terrans but can expect to be outmaneuvered by the Zerg. The Protoss are strong against the zerg in a tight chokepoint, but should fight the Terrans on open ground. They can expand to a new base early, or live off of 1 base for some time...The Protoss doesn't really have a definite weakness, but it doesn't specialize either. Its better than zerg at things zerg is bad at and better than Terran at things Terran is good at."

For more on which race to pick, read D's Guide P1: Picking a Race. Then try D's Guide P2: Basic Rules to live by, D's Guide P3: Dictionary of SC2 terms and D's Guide P4: Build Orders.

Thank you, Duban. StarCraft II novices like me salute you!

Note to readers: Duban's Battle.net page indicates that he plays as Zerg. And is undefeated in league play.

Send an email to Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at stephentotilo@kotaku.com.

Singapore's Weepy StarCraft II Fan

Thousands apparently lined up, but it was the first guy in line who cried after waiting in line over 24 hours. As seen on Geekbot.

StarCraft Recreated with Lego Bricks

AMC's 'Rubicon' takes a brainier approach

By Gary Levin, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Rubicon is crossing over as AMC's newest series, a conspiracy thriller set in New York about a team of dedicated intelligence analysts.

The series, a throwback to the early 1970s era of paranoia-fueled drama (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), centers on the American Policy Institute, a government front charged with sifting through data gathered from intelligence agencies about potential threats.

After a mysterious suicide early in Sunday's premiere (8 ET/PT), Will Travers (James Badge Dale) is promoted to team leader of his unit, which seeks patterns in seemingly mundane details.

But he's also investigating a broader conspiracy that raises questions about his employer and his mission. And Travers is weighed down by the death of his wife and daughter on 9/11. "He had a happy, healthy life. He was a college professor, had a beautiful wife and child, and then — catastrophe," Dale says.

Executive producer Henry Bromell (Homicide, Brotherhood) took over the project from creator Jason Horwitch (The Pentagon Papers) and brought his own background to bear. His dad is a retired 30-year CIA veteran who toted his family around Middle East hotspots. (Bromell wrote a fictional account of his childhood, the 2002 novel Little America.)

Dale co-starred in HBO's The Pacific but is familiar to fans of Fox's just-canceled 24 as Agent Chase Edmunds, who had his shackled hand chopped off to contain a deadly virus in the third season.

"We take our time here," he says during a break between scenes. "We're not blowing things up. The danger here is in the quiet moments, the idea that somebody's watching you at all times."

Rubicon is a cerebral version of the conspiracy thriller. Early episodes are light on chases and gunplay, and instead focus on parsing clues to both API's missions and the wider conspiracy. And like those earlier movies, the series takes a decidedly low-tech approach in which analysts sift through piles of documents.

"We've had some cop shows in which guys sneak around alleys, but never had one about brainy guys who sort through reams of data and try to find patterns," Bromell says. "They're afraid if they screw up, there will be another 9/11, so the burnout rate is high. It's really hard to let your sense of responsibility go."

Dale, Bromell says, is "wonderfully convincing as an intellectual. The character has to be very verbal because he's very smart. On the other hand, by inclination he's not a man of many words."

Rubicon is the third regular series in AMC's renaissance, following Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which it precedes on Sundays. But Bad was developed at FX, while Mad was famously first rejected by HBO; Rubicon is homegrown, dreamed up by the network's programmers.

Resolution to the conspiracy is promised in the first 13 episodes. "By the end of the first season, the viewer will know 90% of what's behind everything, but that's going to flip into something else," Bromell says. "So it's not like it's over."

Says Dale, "There comes a breaking point," a reference to the title, a river in Italy crossed by Julius Caesar that marks a point of no return. "Will makes a decision that affects everything."

As Travers engages in a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers late in the season, he hides out with a neighbor (Annie Parisse) in scenes being filmed here. Dale, who began to question his character's sanity, had to take a few days off, Bromell says: "He was starting to doubt everything in his brain" about the show's plot.

All this surveillance, Dale says, makes him nervous. "I started looking over my shoulder since we started filming."

Starcraft 2's Galaxy Editor is very versatile

World Energy Problems - SOLVED!

Wanted

Our Sun the Size of 1 Pixel

'Burn Notice' Prequel Movie Announced

courtesy of HollywoodReporter.com

A "Burn Notice" prequel movie announcement starring fan-favorite Bruce Campbell was big news at the USA series panel, which kicked things off on the television side at Comic-Con on Thursday in Ballroom 20.

The prequel will be an action-adventure story set before the start of "Burn Notice" that follows Sam on a mission in Latin America. USA and Fox TV Studios will partner on the production, with filming likely to take place in Latin America between "Burn Notice" Seasons 4 and 5.

Moderated by Chris Vance, who played the evil Gilroy on the sexy spy series, the panel, which included Campbell, series creator Matt Nix, exec producer Alfredo Barrios and multihyphenate Tim Matheson, might as well have been the Bruce Campbell show as he continued his streak from last year of paying audience members who complimented him.

On a serious note, Nix and Barrios shared that what the writers put in the script is often played out in the writers room first.

"We roleplay a fair amount in the room," Barrios shared. "And Matt's a master of accents [It was there that] Gilroy became a guy with a British accent."

"We can't really, can you darling?," Nix said in an English accent when discussing how one can or cannot tell when a Brit is gay, ribbing Vance a little in the process.

"If we can act it out in the room, then we can write it," Nix said.

This season, with the addition of series regular Coby Bell, there will be many "more episodes where Sam and Fiona are taking the lead [on the case]," Nix said.

Campbell jumped in, revealing a future dilemma Fiona (played by Gabrielle Anwar) would find herself this year.

"There is an episode where Fiona gets kidnapped," Campbell said. "Never kidnap Fiona. She's a little shit!"

Take a Break and Watch This: "DC Universe Trailer"

Video Games | DC Universe Online | Exclusive Who Do You Trust Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Flashlight app secretly lets you enable iPhone tethering

courtesy of macworld

Handy Light, a newly-available flashlight app for the iPhone, isn’t actually a flashlight app at all—it’s a sneakily disguised tethering utility that lets you share your phone’s Internet connection with your laptop. In other words, it’s an app that’s surely not long for this world.

It’s not surprising that Handy Light managed to trick its way past Apple’s App Store reviewers. To enable tethering, you need to configure an ad-hoc wireless network on your Mac, connect the iPhone to it, tweak some network and proxy settings, launch the app, and then literally tap a coded sequence of flashlight colors. No one could possibly discover the hack by exploring; you need to read detailed step-by-step instructions to get it to work.

Of course, now that the instructions are live, the app surely soon won’t be. Like the $10 NetShare app—which was axed by Apple nearly two years ago, the $1 Handy Light shares your Internet connection without AT&T getting a cent (unless, with all that tethering, you go over your new data cap).

The only question now is when Apple will pull Handy Light from the store, and perhaps whether Steve Jobs will send some heavies to the developer’s house to deliver a knuckle sandwich.

Handy Light requires an iPhone running iOS 4.0 or later, and at least mildly lax moral standards.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

courtesy of unwinnable.com

As you might have already guessed, I love the notion that it was once common practice to have situations in which it becomes impossible to complete a videogame. To add insult to injury, the games in question rarely mentioned that fact to the player, leaving them to lurch around forever in a broken game, not knowing that the only way to succeed was to turn off the game and start from scratch.

Looking back from this current era of narrative-driven gaming, the fact that this was ever considered a good idea boggles my mind. As a simple matter of pleasing the consumer, it is the very definition of counter intuitive. Add the fact that the inner logic of most early text and graphical adventure games was baffling, cruel, and unforgiving at the best of times and it becomes apparent that it was a small miracle that anyone ever finished a videogame in the early 80s. I’m hard pressed to think of any that I beat.

That didn’t stop me from trying, of course. I logged plenty of hours in games like Zork back then (and back last year and, hell, even back last weekend) so maybe there is something to be said for relentless difficulty and the breakdown of reason.

Let’s take a look at the five best unwinnable situations, be they weird, infuriating or just plain amusing.

5. King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
At a certain point in King’s Quest IV, a whale sneezes you out onto a desert island. On that island are the remains of a shipwreck and plenty of sand. What isn’t on the island is any indication that the golden bridle you require to ride the unicorn later in the game is hidden there. There is no mention of the bridle or anything approaching a visual clue.

The only way to get the bridle is to type the command “Look at Ground” while standing on different spots of the island until it appears. Anyone playing the game without a walkthrough is doomed to miss it every time, because no one in their right mind would get to the island and think it was where the magical bridle was hidden.

Thanks Roberta Williams. I really didn’t want to save the kingdom this time anyway.

4. Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places)
If there is one lesson to be learned from Leisure Suit Larry, it is that the only way to survive ten days at sea in a lifeboat is with soda, sunscreen, a sewing kit, some fruit and a wig. Miss one of these items and Larry is doomed, but honestly, they make such an obvious survival kit it’s hard to believe anyone could doubt their importance. I mean, everyone knows that wigs prevent sunstroke and sewing kits double as fishing rods in a pinch, right? Right?

It there is a second lesson to be learned from Leisure Suit Larry, it is that should you have any spinach dip on your person when you get on a lifeboat, make sure to throw it away immediately. Otherwise, it will kill you. Seriously.

3. Zork: The Great Underground Empire
Ah, Zork, the greatest and most vicious example of interactive fiction. I have a special fondness for the Great Underground Empire, despite the fact that it’s authors obviously hate me and never wanted me to play their game in the first place. There are so many ways Zork can kill you or render your quest unwinnable that it hard to not take it personally.

There are more egregious examples, perhaps, but the clove of garlic remains my favorite. Found as part of a sack lunch right in the opening scenes, the game is subtly encouraging you to eat it. If you do, of course, a vampire bat will kill you later in the game. On the other hand, the game is so appreciative of being fed, it’s hard to deny it a snack.

2. King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder
King’s Quest V is Sierra’s monument to sadism in game design. The blue marble cover fills me with loathing like few other games. There are so many ways this game can eff you (not in the endearing, iconic way of Zork – when King’s Quest V effs you, it effs you like a prison sentence), it is hard to pick just one.

When walking to the pie shop (where you can get the delicious dessert from which our logo is derived – for more on that, check out the About section above) a cat will run by chasing a rat. If you don’t throw the boot (found earlier in the desert, but only if you were expressly looking for) at the cat, the rat gets eaten. After that, you may as well restart your game, because if you don’t, you’re just going to die in jail because the only rat in the world that could have helped you escape is in the belly of the cat.

It isn’t that hard to fathom why Sierra doesn’t make games anymore.

1. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
One of the most fiendish and, strangely, beloved of Infocom’s text adventures, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stands as the most unwinnable of videogames, not because of its devious puzzles, or the fact that Infocom actually made t-shirts to sell to those few who could solve them, but because of the sheer ridiculous scale by which the game quickly slips out of the player’s control.

The game begins in the bathroom of Arthur Dent. Said bathroom contains, among other things, a toothbrush and a screwdriver. Should the player leave the room without those items, the very last puzzle, in which a robot needs tools to fix a space ship, is rendered unsolvable.

Why? Because the toothbrush and screwdriver have been vaporized, along with the entire planet Earth, by an intergalactic construction fleet in order to make way for a new space highway.

And that is beautiful.

What American's Are Eating

Google App Inventor

So you wanna make apps for Google Android, but don't know how to program? Here's your solution.

Consumer Reports gives thumbs down to iPhone 4 reception woes

At first, Apple said there was a simple fix for the iPhone 4's reception problems -- hold the phone differently. Then it said it was working on a software fix to make it better.

Now the venerableConsumer Reports says that because of the reception issues, it can't recommend the iPhone.

"Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4's signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that 'mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength'," writes Consumer Reports in a blog post. "The tests also indicate that AT&T's network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4's much-reported signal woes."

The issue: touch the new antennas on the side of the iPhone and the signal can easily get either lost or weakened.

Consumer Reports said it tested three iPhone 4s in the New York area, and compared it to the earlier iPhone 3GS model and the Palm Pre, neither of which had signal loss issues.

Apple initially recommended that consumers buy cases for the iPhone to cover the antenna and shield it from your hands. Consumer Reports also suggests duct tape "may not be pretty, but it works."

Despite its qualms, Consumer Reports still loves the iPhone, saying it has the "sharpest display and best video camera we've seen on any phone," and beats previous models with better battery life.

"But Apple needs to come up with a permanent -- and free -- fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4."

ALSO: Judge OKs iPhone class action against Apple, AT&T
APPLE RESPONSE: Company "surprised" by reception issues

By Jefferson Graham

courtesy of USAToday

Judge applies class action status to lawsuit against Apple, AT&T

The Associated Press reports a federal judge will allow a lawsuit filed against Apple and iPhone wireless carrier AT&T to proceed as a class action.

At issue is Apple's control over what applications can be installed to the iPhone as well as their exclusivity deal with AT&T. The lawsuit alleges actions taken by the two companies is hurting competition, says AP.

The lawsuit also claims the following, from the AP:

"Apple secretly made AT&T its exclusive iPhone partner in the U.S. for five years. Consumers agreed to two-year contracts with the Dallas-based wireless carrier when they purchased their phones, but were in effect locked into a five-year relationship with AT&T."

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to stop Apple from selling iPhones locked into AT&T's network and more freedom for installing software to the smartphone.

Apple did comment to AP, disputing the impact on competition in the market.

ALSO: Consumer Reports won't recommend iPhone 4

By Brett Molina

courtesy of USAtoday

Intelligence: The Evolution of Night Owls

IQs and Zs

Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn't make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late.

A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. In a new paper, Kanazawa replicates the finding and provides a theoretical grounding. Because the nocturnal lifestyle allowed by electricity didn't exist 10,000 years ago, we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts. So those with more of it stay up later. How much later? See below.

Night Lights

Bedtimes and wake-up times for Americans in their 20s by IQ.

Very Dull (IQ <>

Weekday: 11:41 P.M.-7:20 A.M.

Weekend: 12:35 A.M.-10:09 A.M.

Normal (90 <>

Weekday: 12:10 A.M.-7:32 A.M.

Weekend: 1:13 A.M.-10:14 A.M.

Very Bright (IQ > 125)

Weekday: 12:29 A.M.-7:52 A.M.

Weekend: 1:44 A.M.-11:07 A.M.

300 actions a minute? Truly mastering StarCraft

courtesy of ArsTechnica

Many gamers think that with a little more time to practice, with a touch more dedication, they could be competitive at their favorite games. The truth? Those who make money gaming competitively do very little else with their days, nights, and weekends. This video, from the documentary The Hax Life, shows just how intimidating the competition can become.

In StarCraft, your efficiency is described in "APM," or actions per minute. According to this video, you need to be over 300 APM to be competitive. That means in 60 seconds, you need to accomplish over 300 things. To get there you need to learn a level of situation awareness and split-second decision making most gamers will never be able to top.

The gap between how the professionals or wannabe professionals play games, especially in Korea, and how the rest of us enjoy them is much, much wider than many assume.

Further reading

• Korean Gamers Are Faster Than A Speeding Bullet (kotaku.com)

Street Fighter Sneakers Keep It Classy

via Kotaku

Some sneakers based on video games can be tasteful! Others, less so. These Street Fighter Dunks, rumoured to be part of an official collaboration between Capcom and Nike, are thankfully the former.

Resisting the urge to plaster the shoes with character likenesses and tacky logos, the two pairs - based on Chun-Li and Ryu - simply use the colour schemes of two of Street Fighter's most iconic characters.

There's no official confirmation on these from either Nike or Capcom, so don't get your credit cards out just yet, but we have a good feeling these are the real deal.

Nike Street Fighter Pack [N-SB, thanks again Jeremy!

Darth Vader's First Choice for a Mask

What many are Considering The Best Game of E3

'Rage' Stage Walkthrough Part 1

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'Rage' Stage Walkthrough Part 2

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'Star Wars The Old Republic' Multiplayer Demo Featurette

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'Halo: Reach' Space Combat Gameplay

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3 yo Playing 'Mirror's Edge' and 'Portal'