Technology

One of the best cartridges you’ll ever hear that you never heard of and it comes from a land down under!

If you think about it, a lot of video games over the past few decades have included luck-based minigames with wagering, so the distance between video games and casino games have never really been that far apart. Some games take this even further by including actual interactive casinos within the game world, or make casino games more useful than a downtime distraction.

In this article, we’re going to look at five popular video games that also included traditional casino and card games.

The Sims 3

Sims 3 players can purchase the Lucky Simoleon Casino DLC, which not only adds an entire casino with blackjack and slot machines, it also adds a Gambling skill that will level up as your sim plays.

By Alain Ghiai

CEO of GlobeX Data Ltd.

Not a day seems to go by without reading about the latest cyberattack.  With the holiday season upon us, the stakes grow higher as digital criminals exploit the increase of e-commerce activity from consumers.

Zoe Quinn is no stranger to controversy. One might even argue her entire career has been built on the house-of-cards foundation of accusations of sexism and abuse, setting her up as a heroic overcomer in the male-dominated industries of video games and comic books.

But Internet controversy turned to real life consequences barely two weeks ago when Quinn took to Twitter to make public accusations against former fellow game designer, Alec Holowka, claiming sexual abuse and false imprisonment. The immediate fallout for Holowka -- the loss of his career and the shattered public perception -- drove a man who already suffered from emotional troubles to take his own life.

#MeToo had been successfully weaponized--and the weapon was deadly.

The landscape of opinion is a shifting mass of quicksand these days. The Internet, once a bastion of free speech -- and all the ugliness that comes with that -- has undergone a transformation to rein in opinions, protecting the eyes and ears of the many from anything that might be deemed offensive by the few.

It began with politics. When the deplatforming of Alex Jones and his InfoWars site occurred, the 1st Amendment let out an "oof" of having been punched in the stomach. No one heard it over all the cheering, however, and the social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter were emboldened to continue their pogrom against information and opinion.

The idea was to stifle politics with which the social media overseers disagreed. The inherent problem with that is this: everything is political. And so we find ourselves at a point where a comic book review website (not this one, yet) loses its presence on Facebook.

As with prior years, 2018 was a wide-open field of new electronic and online games, and our readers let us know their favorites. Of particular interest this year was the inclusion of some old-school games given new twists -- tabletop and board games, which, while never excluded before, made their presence known well enough that we can safely say that rolling dice and drawing cards is going to continue to be as much of a favorite pastime as pressing buttons.

Goliath Games proves you don't have to have a completely original concept to introduce an interesting and playable toy. Sometimes, all you need to do is take something that's been around a while--and put a new spin on it.

Granted, it's not the first time someone has set out to renew interest in the basic toy that uses centripetal and centrifugal force (see, it's science!) to entertain children. There have been different takes through the years on the flying disc and the hula hoop.

Of course, this time we are talking about that most primal spinner, The Top!

No, not this classic supervillain from The Flash. The toy you spin and watch. Then spin again and watch again.

It's actually a lot more fun that it sounds.

It’s something everyone worries about, even if only a little, when putting all your information into some online form: Will my data be kept secure? Who is going to see this other than myself and the agent on the other end? Can I trust this website?

For the most part, with trusted entities, that answer is yes. Barring the occasional intrusion from bad actors working outside the network of a company, you can usually trust that your information won't be mishandled. (Sold to other companies, sure, or even made available to the government -- but that's a story for another day, right Mr. Zuckerberg?) 

So it was a bit alarming when a comic book artist began posting on his social media account the screenshots of personal communiques between Kickstarter and Richard C. Meyer, aka YouTube personality and pariah Diversity & Comics.

Back in 1998 gamers were being introduced to the true power of graphical technology. Dedicated graphics cards were the talk of the industry, and their ability to massively improve graphics the stuff of legend. A race arose among video game developers to create the best looking games, and PC gamers scrambled to afford a graphics card.

Many games at the time made use of accelerated graphics, but one game stood apart for delivering a next level gaming experience. Unreal. Created by Epic Games and released in 1998 the game made use of the most advanced graphics technology available, blowing minds with coloured and volumetric lighting. It was an incredible sight in 1998, so much so that many could scarcely believe their eyes.

Social networking has become the new form of communication. We live online; constantly entangled with the web as we go through daily life. It’s on nearly every pc and smartphone/device. Social networking is not just a way to stay in contact with family and friends, it’s become a platform to see and be seen. 

Users build a social presence online, that presence is the deeply echoed mirror of how we like to be perceived. All social networking has done, is set standards for clicks and groups that you as a person aspire to be apart of. So, social networking is a platform that is a part of our daily lives in various ways. We aspire to different standards and keep up to date with the latest news and trends around the globe. 

Atari has been through many ups and downs. The company will hopefully be able to pull itself up and join the ranks of popular console video gaming.

So here's my childhood: Get up. Watch cartoons. Play. Go to school. Watch after school cartoons. Play. Go to bed, safe in the assurance that when I grew up, I woudln't have to work because we'd have jetpacks, flying cars, cooked food on demand, and robots.

Now that I've left 50 in the taillights, and ponder the weight the advent of microwaves and Uber Eats has put on me, I finally get one more step closer to the future that I was promised in comic books and LOST IN SPACE.

The robots are here!

Yes, they've been here for a while, I suppose. But for the most part, consumer-obtainable robots have been pretty much RC cars with special effects.

Technically, "Air Force One" is the designation for any airplane that carries the President of the United States -- although when we hear the phrase, it is generally in reference to one of  two specially modified Boeing 747 jumbo jets. Even when the Presidents began flying, the designation went from Guess Where II and Sacred Cow (both with FDR), Independence (with Truman) and Columbine I and II (for Eisenhower) before it finally settled, sixty-five years ago, on the Air Force One call sign.

Now Robert F. Dorr and Nicholas A. Veronico have compiled not just a photographic historical retrospective of the various plans that have filled the role, but also a unique collection of anecdotes surrounding the evolution of the planes, missions they have flown, and other various methods of air travel for Presidents.

Dynavector of Australia, the acclaimed maker of many things phono from the land down-under (differing from Dynavector of Japan, who only make phono cartridges; Dynavector of Australia only makes electronics) and imported into the states by Dynavector USA, has just released its newest version of the wonderful P75 phono stage, of which I own the MKII version.

Now, to my knowledge, they are not ones to release new or updated things all that often, so when I was told about this new updated version, and urged by that proprietor of all things wonderfully stereo, Charlie Schnyder of Stereo Haven, I just had to audition it.

While my MKII, and all the the versions before the MKIV, were highly musical and engaging phono stages, not only for the money but regardless of cost, the new version here I am pleased to say takes music to the next level. But I will get that in a minute...

From Forbes:

Nintendo announced today that the Switch had broken 10 million sales. An astonishing number, given the Wii U before it, analyst projections being much lower, and the holiday season still to come. The Switch has been a hardware success story only equaled by Nintendo’s software success stories between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey both released this year.

To put that sales figure in context, I wanted to go back and see how it stacked up to other current and former consoles. As it turns out, it’s among some of the best in recent memory, as you might expect.

As a bonafide vinyl junkie and dyed in the wool stereophile, I have seen my fair share of gizmos, tricks, and gadgets come down the pike that promise to “remove veils from the listening experience” and “open up new windows in the recordings.” While some did work to a degree, many were a bunch of hooey. Some only delivered a minute portion of what they promised. So to say I have become jaded about such things would be a fair cop.

Now, as a vinylphile, I will be the first to stand on the soap box to state you have to keep your stylus clean if you want to maintain your records and continue to get the best out of your cartridge, which in turn will continue to give you listening enjoyment.

I am reminded by dialog spoken by King Osric (Max Von Sydow) in the movie “Conan The Barbarian.”

When King Osric needed Conan to rescue his daughter from Thulsa Doom, upon dumping out a bag full of jewels and offering them to take all they wanted, he says,

“ There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

So it is with me in my audiophile time of life, where what matters most to me now is not high power, not large heavy pieces of equipment, not stacks of individual components, nor even high and flighty names. While I freely admit all those “jewels and gold” did, at one time, matter to me; I have had Krell, Audio Research, Martin Logan, Duntech, Focal, Oracle, SME, Koetsu, Convergent …the list goes on and on.