Not many creators have the brazen audacity to slap their name in the actual titles of the things they create. John Lennon didn’t call his 1971 album, “John Lennon’s Imagine." Mrs. Dalloway isn’t called "Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway." James Cameron has so far managed to keep his name out of all his movie titles.
But a lot of Sid Meier’s games flash the words "Sid Meier" right there in the title. Most famously: the Sid Meier’s Civilization series, which has sold more than 33 million units over the past 25 years. The most recent is 2010’s Sid Meier’s Civilization 5. It’s one of the greatest strategy games ever made.
I meet Meier in a Las Vegas hotel room and press reception area. He’s just finished a DICE panel on the 25th anniversary of Civ, where he sat on stage with four of the designers who’d worked with him on the strategy series, both when it was developed by MicroProse and then by his own company, Firaxis. They jawed agreeably about the games they’d made. They didn’t say much more than that they’d enjoyed the work and they were proud of their achievements. It was like watching a bunch of dudes talking about an excellent fishing trip.
"I guess I think of that Sid Meier as another person."
These days, Meier rarely gives interviews. I’ve been trying to bag him for years, mainly because I’m an outright Civ fanatic, but also because he’s one of the world’s most influential and successful game developers in the world.
In the interview, he seems wary and cautious. I’d guess that talking to the press is not one of his favorite activities. He’s friendly enough, and he laughs now and then, but he’s shy and self-effacing. Once the interview gets going, it’s clear he doesn’t like to talk about himself. He mostly replies with short answers, and more often than not, he finds a way to give credit to others for his games’ various innovations.
He lives in the town of Cockeysville, Maryland. He goes to church on Sundays. When the organist is on vacation or unwell, he deputizes. During our interview, he’s wearing a Firaxis t-shirt, like he’s working a booth or handing out leaflets at a recruitment fair.
For some reason he reminds me of the sort of fellow you might see working at The Home Depot, quietly and efficiently making sure the lumber aisle is ship-shape, always ready with a smile and a useful word about the moisture content of Grade 2 oak.
And yet, Sid Meier is a master storyteller, an inspiration for untold millions of plans and ambitions in the minds of his players. He is a curator of a particular view of history. He alchemizes the dead events of the past into something alive, something that people feel they can control. He is a creator of worlds.

A name on a box
When I ask him about this issue of having his name in his game titles, he’s almost apologetic.
"I guess I think of that Sid Meier as another person," he says. "It’s another person that I run into occasionally at places like this here. It’s not a … I don’t identify too much with that person."
Putting Sid Meier in the titles was just something that happened a long time ago, he explains. It was never his idea. Because the early games were successful, no one thought to change the formula.
"It’s great that it’s applied to a group of games that I’m proud of, that I’ve had a part in making. But it’s not … that wasn’t the goal. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, some day I’ll get my name on a bunch of games and then I’ll be happy.’"
Now he’s comfortable with the fame, such as it is. People occasionally recognize him and they want to talk about how much they enjoy his games.
"They come and say, ‘I’m playing this game with my son and daughter and we’re having fun.’ I hear about the fun experiences people have had. There’s a sense of a connection. We share something. We share this knowledge. We have something in common even though we’ve never met before."

How it all began
The idea of placing Meier’s name on games came from his old business partner Bill Stealey. The two men had worked together at General Instruments in the early 1980s. They decided to launch a company, MicroProse, to sell flight simulations for the burgeoning home computer market. Stealey, a loquacious, outgoing fellow, handled the company’s business and marketing efforts. Meier coded most of the games.
Games like Spitfire Ace, Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle proved popular. The Meier name came to be associated with good military simulations. Later in the 1980s, the company expanded into systems simulations, including a game about piracy in the Caribbean during the 17th Century. Concerned that this style of game was a significant departure for the brand, Stealey suggested adding Meier’s name to the game’s title, in order to get his fans on board.

Sid Meier’s Pirates came out in 1987 and was an instant success. It blended action with strategy, including diplomatic relationships between competing nations as well as cities, which traded and grew.
Stealey likes to tell a story that the idea to put Meier’s name on the game came from the late comedian Robin Williams. The men had met at a dinner function, and Williams was a fan. I ask Meier if this story is true.
"I don’t remember it that way. But I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened," he says. "I remember saying to Bill, ‘I want to work on this pirate game, I think it would be cool.’ He was kinda like, ‘Well, OK, but we’ll put your name on it so that people who played your simulation games will know it’s the same person and it won’t come totally out of left field from MicroProse.’"
In 1990, Meier began work on a new game that would simulate human history from ancient times through to the modern era. Civilization was partly inspired by an Avalon Hill board game of the same name. MicroProse paid Avalon Hill a licensing fee, but in practical terms, the two games are very different.
Meier created the game alongside Bruce Shelley, who later went on the create the Age of Empires series. Civilization is a turn-based game in which the player takes control of a single settler who builds a city, which then produces more settlers, military units and buildings. The player explores a map, builds more cities, conquers AI cities and creates an empire. In essence, all the game’s sequels follow this pattern, though with ever-additional layers of complexity and depth.
Based on the success of Sid Meier’s Pirates, Stealey decided to retain Meier’s name in the title. This would also set the game apart from Avalon Hill’s product. Sid Meier’s Civilization was a smash hit. By the time a sequel came out in 1996, the game had sold 850,000 copies.
Meier was not the lead designer on any of the sequels, which were handled by various developers including Brian Reynolds, Soren Johnson and Jon Shafer. But he was always part of the development effort and his name continued to be used in the title, as well as the console version Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution and spin-offs like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and more recently, Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth.

A repeatable formula, with flaws
Throughout the series’ evolution, MicroProse and then Firaxis — the company founded by Meier in 1996 — has played with the formula. Design innovations have been introduced to deepen its appeal and improve its adherence to the world it simulates.
Civ 2 switched from an overhead view to an isometric layout. It also introduced leadership councils, multimedia portrayals of great buildings and the concept of the player having a "reputation" among AI opponents.
In Civ 3 (2001), culture takes a central role, mitigating against the military focus of previous games. A city can expand its borders by investing in cultural buildings and achievements. Civ 4 (2005) opened itself up to modders and introduced the concept of religion, which confers some infrastructure advantages.
But Civ 5 probably took the biggest leap of all, introducing a one-unit-per-tile hexagon-based combat scheme. In previous games, military attacks could be launched by loading multiple units on top of one another, then selecting the best one for any particular challenge. With hexagons, which could carry only one land-based military unit each, players had to manage military campaigns more carefully.
At the time, this was a controversial decision. Some players wanted the old system to remain. "Any change is controversial," says Meier. "I considered hexes, actually, for Civ I, but that would have been considered so geeky and nerdy that our fear was people would reject the game. It would feel like it was a board game.
"But we developed a confidence in our players. We could change things and it still would be fun. The world was ready for one unit per tile and hexes, perhaps. Some people liked it and some people thought it was not the way they imagined Civ."

Civ 5 spawned two expansions, which significantly improved the experience. Last year, publisher Take-Two announced that the game had sold more than 6 million copies. It is consistently one of the most-played games on Steam.
Although it holds a 90 percent rating on Metacritic, Civ 5 is not without its faults. Most infamously, the AI opponents (like George Washington, Boudicca and Genghis Khan) often behave in ways that seem idiosyncratic or downright insane, even though they have carefully calibrated traits.
Over the years, Meier and his designers have toiled to simplify their user interfaces and to render complicated ideas like "culture" and "religion" into gameplay devices that make sense. It’s no small undertaking. But the quasi-human opponents that players face have never seemed anything other than ‘bots, lacking complexity or subtlety.
"It’s a tough problem. It’s a difficult problem," says Meier. "A certain part of you expects an AI to act like a rational player. But another part of you expects the AI to make your game as fun as possible. Those are competing objectives sometimes. How do you resolve the conflict?
"It has to be about the game and not the person whose name is on it."
"We understand why food leads to people. We understand why resources lead to units. We understand why science leads to technology. But we don’t really understand how people work, how to program that. The math of people. It’s a rough approximation. It’s one of the areas that has evolved, but there’s still room for growth there."
The designers balance the player’s need for seemingly rational opponents against their own duty to create a game that offers satisfaction. "You spend probably 90 percent of your time managing your civilization and your military and everything else and 10 percent of your time interacting with other leaders, the diplomacy part. You don’t want that 10 percent of your time to be more important to the outcome than the other 90 percent. That’s another part of what makes it a problem. That all goes into trying to find the best solution."
Another problem is that the game’s win-states generally favor military combat and aggressive expansion. This isn’t so much a game about civilization as it is about empire. It’s difficult to win the game with a peaceful civilization that is wholly dedicated to culture and science. It could be argued that there are no real world civilizations featured in the game that eschewed military might, but still, this experience is a fantasy.
"It depends how you define winning," says Meier. "You’re welcome to define winning any way you want. If you can survive with just four cities, you can say, ‘I declare victory.’ But what the game defines as winning may not match your play style exactly. That’s not easy. A game like Civilization, you’re going to expect progress, growth, building hugeness. Being better, that will be rewarded. But you’re welcome to define your own wins."

Subsumed into a loop
Every time someone begins a new game of Civilization, it’s different from the last. In the real world, geography shapes culture. In Civilization 5, it dictates direction. The player must make use of available resources to ensure a high birth rate, a happy populace and a useful citizenry.
Like its predecessors, Civilization 5 presents a series of decisions. Shall I build a granary to speed the growth of my city, or ought I create an archer to defend myself against a possible attack? These decisions stack upon one another and they manifest themselves, literally, in the world that the player creates.
Games can be as short as a few hours or as long as an entire day. Players often report being subsumed into a loop, playing into the early hours, not merely because the game is fun in that moment, but because it tantalizes with the prospect of a prize generally lacking in our lives: power.
"Our role as designers is to kind of fade into the background."
The Civilization series of games are peerless when it comes to creating an illusion that what the player does really matters. The player doesn’t merely become the civilization he or she creates; the civilization is a reflection of the player. Playing Civilization 5 is an exercise in vanity.
"It’s a nice escape from real life," says Meier. "In a sense, when you’re playing you feel like you’re not just playing a game. You might be learning something or understanding the world a little better. You’re not just wasting your time playing some game.
"Engaging your imagination is the key. If we can draw you out of your real life and into this imaginary place, that’s when a game starts to work. You’re thinking as if you’re in the game and not just playing. I think Civ does that by almost forcing you to think about a lot of different things and making those decisions.
"People remember the big incidents. They have memories of the time they had this great big battle and finally captured that city, or Gandhi nuked them or whatever. Those moments are as vivid in your memory as your first day of school, perhaps, or whatever other things remain in your memory."
Finally, I ask him if he ever regrets having his name attached to the series, if it’s ever been a burden to him to be a name on a box.
"I’m comfortable with it," he says. "I think the Civs would have done just as well once the Civ name established itself. Maybe it helped with the first one or two. When it was kind of getting going, it might have helped to know who the designer behind it was.
He says that, although it’s fun to celebrate anniversaries and hang out with old friends, he’s more interested in what comes next.
"I don’t want to take that as a sense that I’ve done all I need to do," he says. "If I were to embrace that Sid Meier, I would need to have a big sign with my name on it or something. Our role as designers is to kind of fade into the background and let you express your ideas and strategies and personality in the game. I think that it has to be about the game and not the person whose name is on it." 

Oh yeah, he’s thinking he’s back John Wick succeeded largely because of its stylish “gun fu" action sequences, in which the title character, a retired hitman played by Keanu Reeves, shoots up New York City on a quest for revenge. You might assume that a stuntman took Reeves’ place in filming some of the more complicated gunfights, but this training video proves that Reeves can certainly handle himself when it comes to firearms.
The 37-second video features Reeves at a training ground with Taran Tactical Innovations, a Simi Valley, California-based gun manufacturer, doing target practice with multiple weapons. It’s like a Call of Duty level come to life: Reeves runs around the field swapping between an assault rifle and a semiautomatic pistol, and then picks up a semiautomatic shotgun.
On Facebook, Taran Tactical posted the brief clip with the title "Taran training with ‘The One’" — a reference to The Matrix films. On YouTube, the video is simply titled "Keanu shredding."
Production on John Wick: Chapter Two, the sequel to John Wick, began last October; footage of Reeves on set leaked online in November. The film is set for release Feb. 10, 2017.
"The firearms action alone will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen," said Taran Tactical in a Facebook comment. "So much of it is revolutionary stuff that we gun owners have known of for years, but never made it to the big screen."

The game will keep on truckin’ Spintires, the offroad Soviet vehicle game that found popularity upon its 2014 release, has returned to Steam after a major bug forced it off the platform. An update for the game is now available that fixes a bug that caused the game to crash, developer Oovee Game Studios announced in a community post.
Earlier this week, the publisher removed the game from sale due to widespread reports that frequent crashes prevented players from advancing past the first load screen. A full statement explaining the cause of the bug is forthcoming, Oovee said.
“In the next few days we will release a full and frank statement regarding the cause of the problem and how we plan to avoid this happening again, as well as details of the next update we have been working on since the start of 2016 which we plan to start testing next week," the developer said in the announcement of the fix.
The publisher first acknowledged the bug earlier this week on its own forums — as well as allegations that the bug was caused by the lead programmer himself, Pavel Zagrebelnyj.
Future updates in the works
"We are aware of recent press speculation relating to sabotage of the Spintires game by the lead developer Pavel," the studio wrote in a post on its customer support forum. "We wish to express our displeasure at this speculation and totally refute these and other recent allegations."
These allegations stem from comments made by the lead developer earlier this year. In a February interview with Eurogamer, Zagrebelnyj said that Oovee has not properly compensated him for his work. "I haven’t had a meaningful communication with Oovee for many months (maybe a year)," he told the site.
Yet according to Oovee’s forum post, the lead programmer helped with this week’s hot fix. The studio also said it plans to work with Zagrebelnyj on future updates.
Oovee IT manager Tony Fellas refuted the programmer’s claims in a statement to Eurogamer, saying that the company had fulfilled its contracts with the lead developer.
Yet the studio did admit that it’s had accounting and other financial problems, which have contributed to the long development cycle of Spintires. Oovee said a sequel to the game was in the works last year, but little else has been announced on that front since.
Rumors of a strained relationship between Zagrebelnyj and Oovee first circulated a year ago, which Oovee spoke out against, claiming communication problems between the parties had been "settled."
For more on Spintires, check out our overview below.

“It’s a tactical role-playing game, turn-based, party-movement dungeon crawler. But all of your actions are the cards." Labyrinth began its life as a pen-and-paper game.
Every Wednesday, tiny developer Free Range Games hosts a game night. The team members, along with friends and family, gather at the studio to play stuff — board games, card games, video games, whatever.
One night several years ago, creative director Bradley Fulton brought in his own game. He’d been designing it in his free time for a few months and wanted to test it out and, simultaneously, pitch it to the company’s CEO, Chris Scholz, as a potential future project.
"I didn’t really know anything about collectible card games until Brad brought in Labyrinth," Scholz says. "He brought it in, and we played it. And by the end, we were all like, ‘Fuck, this is awesome.’"
Labyrinth quickly became Free Range’s biggest and most ambitious project.

A unique take on card games
Labyrinth is a strange game, a blend of various ideas and influences that has never been seen in quite the same form. The easiest way to discuss it — the thing that Scholz and Fulton fall back on over and over again — is by referring to the games it’s borrowing many of its ideas from.
"What we’re doing with Labyrinth is a marriage between Hearthstone and Dungeons & Dragons," Scholz says. "It’s a tactical role-playing game, turn-based, party-movement dungeon crawler. But all of your actions are the cards. You want to swing your sword? You want to buff your dude? You want to throw a fireball? Those are all cards."
Though openly inspired by Hearthstone, Labyrinth sets itself apart in dozens of ways, some small and some huge. Most notably, you control a party of three heroes in each match rather than just one. And each of those heroes are, themselves, cards that you can find in packs. They are the game’s version of legendaries — extremely rare and powerful cards that are supposed to be the most exciting to open up.
Free Range plans to have 16 total heroes in Labyrinth when it launches, but players will begin with only four, one representing each of the game’s core disciplines: warfare, wizardry, faith and skullduggery. Fulton compares disciplines to the various colors in Magic: The Gathering, but also to traditional RPG roles like tank, healer and damage dealer.
Labyrinth’s most unique elements are found in the way that it embraces the role-playing side of things. Once you’ve chosen your three heroes and made individual decks for each one (30 cards, with up to three copies of each individual card), you enter a labyrinth. Within a labyrinth you can choose between three monsters to battle, and once you’re in a battle, the perspective shifts in an unexpected way.
Labyrinth isn’t presented as cards on a playing field. It’s presented as a third-person, turn-based dungeon crawler. Those heroes may be "legendaries" that you pull from packs of cards, but within the game they are full 3D representations of heroes, as are the bosses and the dungeon itself.
Oh, and those dungeons and bosses? They’re designed by other players.
"Labyrinth is actually an asynchronous multiplayer game."
"The game is actually an asynchronous multiplayer game where you pre-set up your defensive deck," Scholz explains. "I come in, and I raid you. So it’s kind of got a Dungeon Keeper-y vibe too. Then you’ll get a text, or next time you log on you’ll get a message, and a replay of what happened. Then you’ll be able to go in and tweak your dungeon. The better you do, the more loot you get. The better you raid, the more loot you get."
As players open new packs and grow their collection, they’ll discover cards devoted to giving their hero abilities alongside cards for bosses and dungeon traps. The two systems will be essentially separate but interconnected. Each player-created labyrinth will consist of five total encounters, only three of which need to be conquered by an enemy player in order for them to win the biggest amount of rewards.
"It’s not like Clash of Clans," Fulton cautions. "They’re not stealing from your gold reserves. You’re just losing rank, and the higher your rank, the better your rewards."
This design, where players don’t necessarily lose anything even if their personal labyrinth is conquered, is something Scholz considers very important.
"Ultimately, I find the ranking system in Hearthstone really frustrating," he says. "With win streaks, statistically you’re going to lose more than 50 percent of the time. You get on a nine-game losing streak, and the beatdown gets really painful. The nice thing with Labyrinth is that it’s a multistage battle. We’re really going to set the rewards where the sweet spot will be if the opponent wins the first battle but doesn’t win the second."
Essentially, Scholz and Fulton believe they can create a system where even if you don’t go all the way, you leave satisfied both by your performance and the rewards you receive. Meanwhile, the dungeon’s owner will also be rewarded because you didn’t quite succeed. Fulton compares it to tournament-level Hearthstone, where players engage in a best-of-three series rather than a single one-on-one match that can come down to luck as much as strategy.
"I find the ranking system in Hearthstone really frustrating"
Labyrinth also deviates from games like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering in how it handles resources, which is to say that it mostly gets rid of them. Other card games generally have a resource, like mana, that grows either over each successive turn or as you play cards to grow it. In Labyrinth, the only cost associated with cards is time.
Each action card in a hero’s hand has a number in the upper left corner. That number tells you how many turns it will take until the hero can act again. If you start your game with a card that has a massive, nine-turn cost, you’re free to play it your first turn if you think it’s the best choice.
"The icon in the upper left corner looks like a stopwatch," says Fulton, pointing. "That’s because it’s the number of ticks — we call them ticks, like a ticking clock — that’s the number of ticks it will cost. She’ll play it now and get the effect now, but it’s essentially a cooldown before she can act again."
Beyond ticks, Free Range has designed plenty of other interesting effects for cards to have. For example, a channeled ability will keep your hero busy for an extended number of turns, but will cause an effect on the board for each of those turns. A card with wind-up has an extra-powerful ability, but it won’t go off until after the number of ticks required.
Between things like the 3D dungeon, the asynchronous play and the tick system, Free Range is confident that it has something unique and cool, that Labyrinth is more than just a retread of other established card games. Now it needs to prove that to the community.

Getting money
After deciding to embrace Labyrinth and creating a core set of mechanics for the game it was happy with, Free Range faced a difficult next step: finding funding.
"Early on, we did an angel investor round to help us get to where we’re at now," Scholz says. The developer invited a group largely consisting of people who had been involved in game development for a long time. They had the investors play the initial pen-and-paper version of the game with them.
The eventual investors included luminaries like the old head of now-defunct studio Neversoft and one of the earliest members of Riot Games. Scholz is particularly proud of that last one.
"We told this guy from Riot Games all about our vision," Scholz says. "He called me three days later and said, ‘I can’t stop thinking about this game. I have to be a part of it. I haven’t felt this way since League of Legends.’"
Next, Free Range decided it needed help on the design side. Fulton had a great base to work from, but Scholz knew very little about collectible card games and wanted help ensuring the game was balanced and fun. For this, the developer turned to a company well-regarded for its work on digital card games: Stone Blade Entertainment.
"I haven’t felt this way since League of Legends"
Stone Blade is known for its physical/digital hybrid deck-building game, Ascension, as well as a more traditional digital-only card game, Solforge. Free Range helped Stone Blade redesign Solforge’s user interface, and the business relationship blossomed from there.
"It was an obvious marriage," says Scholz. "We want to be in this space, and we’re great technically. They bring a crazy high level of design chops. They’ve been coming to us. We’re doing crazy iteration on the cards with them and on metagame issues. It’s a really close partnership."
With the Stone Blade partnership solidified and early builds of Labyrinth coming along nicely, Free Range launched a Kickstarter for the project late last year. It inched just past its asking amount of $150,000, giving the studio the money to push toward an early access release.
And now, that early access release is almost here.

Finding a community
The build of Labyrinth that Free Range presents has "pre-alpha" tagged across it, but Scholz and Fulton say they’re pleased with where it is. It looks good, runs well and has a surprisingly elegant and easy-to-read user interface, given the complexity of the underlying game. It’s ready, the team believes, for players to test things out for themselves.
Free Range isn’t jumping into that process without data to back it up, either. It has held a number of Twitch contests, providing certain excited members of the growing community interested in Labyrinth with brief stretches of access. One contest granted access for three days. Scholz says one of the players in that contest played for 40 hours across those three days.
"A game like this, we’ve got to get a community," he says. "It’s going to be so community-driven. We want people in early, even though that’s kind of scary, because the game’s not done. But we want them in early so that they feel ownership and can give us feedback and really help make this game huge."
To begin the process of building that community, Labyrinth will launch into early access this coming Monday, March 7. It will initially cost $10, but the game will eventually switch over to free-to-play. Free Range is promising to provide "a huge value" to the people who pay that $10, including giving extra packs, once the business model changes.
The end plan is a model that, Scholz says, Hearthstone players will find "very familiar."
"A game like this, we’ve got to get a community."
"Everything is accessible through free play," Fulton says. "You’ll have daily quests to complete to give you a bonus both on offense and defense. You’ll be able to craft cards and disenchant cards to use them to craft other cards."
Free Range is approaching Labyrinth as the biggest project it’s ever done, which for the team means thinking about it very much in the long term. Scholz says Fulton’s initial pitch to him included praising Magic: The Gathering, a game that’s been around for over 20 years and is more popular now than it’s ever been.
"Let’s make a game that people want to play for decades," Fulton told him.
For now, that means even at this early stage, Free Range has written up a five-year plan for Labyrinth. This includes new content, tournaments, grand visions of esports, even potential for a virtual reality version of the game. But the first major roadblock will be simply explaining the current game, as it exists now, to potential players.
"We keep calling it a collectible card game, but this is not really a collectible card game," Scholz says. "This is a new category of games. It’s a tactical RPG meets CCG. We don’t know what to call it, but we keep having these moments like, ‘How has this game not been made already?’"
Labyrinth will launch in early access on March 7. It will go free-to-play later this year and head out of early access later. The initial version of the game will be available for Mac and Windows PC via Steam, but mobile versions are also in the works. Free Range also says it has spoken to other platform holders, such as Sony and Microsoft, and console versions are entirely within the realm of possibility.

Did Konami finally catch wind? Shadow Moses, a fan-developed remake of Metal Gear Solid in Unreal Engine 4, has been canceled. Its developer announced on the game’s Facebook page that it would cease production “for reasons beyond our control."
The developer declined to elaborate further. Just last month, a short video on the Shadow Moses Facebook page hinted that a "huge announcement" would be coming on March 14.
The Shadow Moses team revealed the high-definition remake of Metal Gear Solid in October 2015. The gaming community caught wind of the project when the developer released a teaser trailer in January, showing off iconic locations from the 1998 PlayStation game.

After the video racked up more than 100,000 views, lead developer Airam Hernandez clarified on Facebook that Konami owns the rights to the Metal Gear Solid franchise and thus Shadow Moses would require the company’s blessing "sooner or later."
Whether Konami is behind Shadow Moses’ sudden cancelation is not yet known. We’ve reached out to both the Shadow Moses team and Konami for comment and will update when we receive it.

Tim Sweeney remains unconvinced, but is open to hearing more Microsoft has responded to a blistering op-ed from Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney, refuting his accusations that Microsoft is seeking to monopolize software development and distribution on Windows 10.
In the opinion piece, which The Guardian published today, Sweeney focused on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative that is part of Windows 10. He lambasted UWP as a “closed platform-within-a-platform," calling it Microsoft’s "first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce."
Microsoft’s UWP is designed to allow software developers to write a single application that can run on a wide variety of Windows 10 devices, from smartphones and tablets all the way up to computers and the Xbox One. Sweeney supports the idea of UWP, but vehemently disagrees with what he sees as Microsoft’s efforts to unfairly prioritize UWP and the Windows Store in favor of competing marketplaces such as Steam and GOG.com. The concern, Sweeney said, is that Microsoft will eventually make UWP the required standard, forcing developers to distribute their software in the store rather than directly to customers through the web or through other marketplaces.

Must Read

Epic co-founder: Microsoft is plotting to monopolize game making on Windows 10

Microsoft denied Sweeney’s accusations in a statement to The Guardian.
"The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store," said Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows at Microsoft. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox — with whom Sweeney discussed UWP over the past 18 months — echoed those comments on Twitter.
Gallo also refuted Sweeney’s claim that Microsoft makes it difficult to "sideload" UWP apps — that is, to download and install UWP apps outside of the Windows Store. That had been the case at the launch of Windows 10 in July 2015, when users had to dig down into the system settings to enable sideloading. But Gallo said that the November update to Windows 10 "enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no required."
Spencer’s tweet linked to a blog post from Gallo published last week, in which Gallo provided further details on Microsoft’s efforts to facilitate porting apps from other programming languages and platforms to UWP. The company recently acquired Xamarin, which will give UWP developers the ability to build apps with native experience for Windows, Android and iOS. Sweeney characterized Microsoft’s response as promising, but he still has concerns.
"I like the sound of this, and look forward to thorough technical details on UWP’s planned openness at //build," said Sweeney on Twitter, referring to Microsoft’s annual developer conference. Build 2016 will take place from March 30 through April 1 in San Francisco. In additional tweets, Sweeney discussed his remaining reservations about UWP, such as whether Microsoft will provide "sensible means" for Windows 10 users to download and install UWP apps from the web.
For more thoughts from Sweeney, be sure to check out our interview with him on the Newsworthy podcast.

The creators of seminal adventure puzzle games Myst and Riven are returning to the genre with a spiritual successor called Obduction. The game is coming to Mac and Windows PC this summer, and is the subject of a new teaser trailer released this week by developer Cyan.
Obduction’s teaser focuses on the adventure game’s varied environments and hints at its story. Here’s the official description of its story, straight from Cyan:

You’ve been abducted from your cozy existence and added into an alien landscape with a stereotypical, Kansas farmhouse with a white picket fence. But the farmhouse is just the first building in a rather bizarre little town that borders the road – curious structures that beg questions rather than provide answers. And adding to the curiosity, you stumble upon a strange, kluged kiosk that reassuredly welcomes you to “Hunrath".

Cyan promises player freedom and "heavy choices … with substantial consequences."
For more on Obduction, which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, read Polygon’s interview with the developers.

Thanks, Obama Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman and the rest of the Mythbusters team are preparing to say their final goodbye to fans, but first, it was someone else’s turn to say thanks.
President Obama recently recorded a goodbye message for Mythbusters squad, thanking them for the years they spent dedicated to advancing the public’s knowledge on everything related to science, math and engineering. He added that without them, there would be an entire generation of children who may never have been inspired to go into a STEM related career.

Savage and Hyneman announced in October that after 14 seasons and over 200 episodes, this would be their last. Since their time on the air, the Mythbusters team has proven that the moon landing was real — uh, d’uh — and that after the Titanic had sunk, Jack simply wouldn’t have fit on the door Rose used to survive.
The final Mythbusters episode airs March 5 at 8 p.m. ET on Discovery.

Is this an official job application? What could possibly be better than the official Ghostbusters trailer Sony released yesterday for its upcoming reboot?
According to public opinion, it just might be this fan-edited trailer, actually.
Much shorter than the original and spliced with choppier cuts, this trailer — edited by YouTube user Bevan Bell — isn’t as in-depth as the two-minute version Sony released. Many are arguing, however, that the tone of the new trailer is much closer to the original film.
Sony’s trailer came under scorn from some people on Twitter, with more than a few calling out the video for being eerily similar to the trailer for Adam Sandler’s flop, Pixels.
Ghostbusters, directed by Paul Feig and stars Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, will open in theaters July 15.

The supervillain gets a starring role Sony Pictures will develop a film based on Spider-Man villain Venom, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The spinoff is not connected to the upcoming Spider-Man film that the studio is co-producing with Marvel.
Dante Harper, who wrote a draft of Edge of Tomorrow, will serve as screenwriter. There is no director attached to the project yet, but longtime Spider-Man producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach are involved with the Venom film.
A movie based on Venom was in the works at Sony several years ago, following the symbiote’s appearance in Spider-Man 3. Marvel Entertainment was set to produce the film, which was first announced in 2007 with Gary Ross as the director. Ross later left the project, and director Josh Trank (2015’s Fantastic Four) expressed interest in taking over.
Last year Sony placed several planned films in the Spider-Man franchise on hold, including a third Amazing Spider-Man movie as well as a spinoff based on the Sinister Six. Sony also abandoned Venom, which now had Alex Kurtzman signed on to direct, at that time.
Sony is producing a new Spider-Man movie with Marvel that will debut in 2017. It will be a reboot of the film franchise and star Tom Holland as a high school-aged version of the character, who will make his cinematic debut in Captain America: Civil War this May. Spider-Man will hold a small but pivotal role in the Captain America film.