Daily Gaming News – 4/11/2012 (With bonus reading!)

November 4, 2012

Eep! Looks like it’s my turn to do the gaming news. Luckily, I shotgunned the Sunday slot for this feature, and, as everybody knows, no video game news happens on Sundays!

As such, I’ve added a couple of longer articles on broader technology that appeared in places throughout the week.

But first, the news!

  • NEWS: Nintendo have announced the specs for the Wii U’s touchscreen controller browser. As expected, the browser is based on Netfront, which is the embedded engine that powers Nintendo’s DS and Wii browsers, as well as Sony’s PSP browser. The good news is that this is a modern, HTML5-capable browser with support for the vast majority of HTML capabilities. The bad news is that there’s no plugin support, so no Adobe Flash (well, that’s not too bad, I guess) or other plugins. It also won’t allow you to save images or other files, so it’s pretty much a pure browsing experience. Still, impressive for what it’s running on.
  • NEWS: Former Gamestop Vice President Christopher Olivera has pleaded guilty to embezzling almost US$2 million from the company. He did this by sending cash to a fake person at a fake PR company, billing Gamestop for the work never completed. Olivera faces up to US$250,000 in fines, and 20 years in prison.
  • NEWS: Forza Horizon is getting its second car pack this week. The Bondurant Car Pack goes hand-in-hand with the Bondurant Challenges that will be available for the entire month of November. The pack drops on November 6.

The Sunday Reader

Just in case you’re bored of video games, and looking for something more interesting to read, here’s some stuff from around the web…

  • First up, Mars Curiosity takes a selfie.
  • While we’re on the space front, Ars Technica had two fantastic articles about life inside one of NASA’s mission control centres at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas (better known to most people as the Houston in “Houston, we have a problem”.) The first article follows Sy Lebergot through a refurbished control room, and Lebergot, who was in the room for several major events in the Apollo program, including the oxygen tank failure in Apollo 13, explains in great detail how things worked during these missions.
  • The second article breaks down the functionality of each individual station, so if you’ve ever looked at images or footage of these control rooms and wondered exactly what everyone in there does, then definitely check this out.
  • Finally, what happens when you give a thousand Ethiopian children that can’t even read a bunch of tablets without any instructions or guidance whatsoever? They teach themselves English and hack the tablet to enable camera functionality in just five months. Kids are awesome.