Games

Back in March, Ars wrote about PhD student Michael Cook and his artificial intelligence machine called Angelina. Angelina was special because she was creating games from scratch with little help from her human counterparts. By dividing the concept of a computer game up into three defined “species,” or sub-tasks—maps, layouts, and rulesets—Cook and his compatriots at Imperial College in London helped their system auto-generate some simple platformer games.

This month we discuss two new CPUs, Intel's Core i7-3970X and AMD's Athlon II X4 651K, neither of which gamers are going to get particularly excited about. We also discuss the disappearance of the Pentium G2120, along with a handful of price changes.

If you don’t have the time to research benchmarks, or if you don’t feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right processor for your next gaming machine, fear not. We at Tom’s Hardware have come to your aid with a simple list of the best gaming CPUs offered for the money.

After receiving over 60,000 beta applications since last week, Valve has begun sending out the first wave of invites for the Steam for Linux beta today.

Most Halo fans (myself included) were nervous when they found out another company was taking up the mantle of telling Master Chief’s story—a story many thought closed. But after 343 Industries' excellent handling of Halo: Anniversary, I was cautiously optimistic for Halo 4, and that optimism paid off with some pretty awesome dividends.

Linux gamers are used to being afterthoughts when it comes to most major game releases, but Valve seems set to change that soon. The company announced a pending beta test for a long-awaited Linux version of its popular Steam distribution service. Valve is seeking to fill 1,000 spots for the closed beta through a Web survey for existing Steam users, asking them to detail their gaming system and experience with Linux.

One day after laying off five percent of its workforce, Zynga announced it sustained a quarterly loss of more than $52 million. Despite the sub-optimal Q3 2012 numbers, the company’s relatively high revenue figures (over $316 million) exceeded analysts’ low expectations (in the neighborhood of $300 million). But overall, the company lost $160 million in the first nine months of 2012.

Hackers could have a new means of accessing your computer through a browser command which utilizes Valve's software distribution system Steam. When your browser accesses a URL that begins with the command "steam://", it will prompt your copy of steam to launch and perform some operation. Usually, such an operation would be to launch a game, or install or uninstall software.

One of the best things about the many Android-powered eReaders on the market today is that they are very hackable. Android as the background operating system allows users to unlock the devices and install all manner of apps that the manufacturer probably never intended. One of those hackable eReaders is the Nook Simple Touch.

Minecraft is a sandbox-type game where you gather materials and use them to create things, which is about as understated a description as "the sun is a big bright light in the sky." The poster child for indie gaming success, Minecraft began as a basement coding project by hat-wearing Swede Markus Persson in 2010; it has since become a bona fide phenomenon.

 The developers at ArenaNet have posted a new status update for players of Guild Wars 2, informing players about their acknowledgement of the account security problem and the recent rash of hacks that have seen many players lose their game accounts.

According to the studio, hackers have acquired “lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.” The breach, says ArenaNet, comes not from the game itself but from external sources.