Elemental Kombat

Stuck - Two guys exploring the Dallas airport at night

STUCK from Joe Ayala on Vimeo.

Here's an interview with the creators of the movie.

Vancouver Riot Kiss

Outland

Outland is finally out on the US PSN (came out in EU almost two weeks ago). I had played through the demo and loved it, made it a day 1 purchase for me. The animations are as smooth as butter and the in-game atmosphere is great.
Here's a "behind the scenes with Housemarque":

Star Wars and Portal Art

Star Wars posters by Olly Moss Permalinks: [1], [2], [3] Portal 2 70s-style movie poster Permalinks: [poster], [wallpaper] (created by ShineyBlueShoes on kotaku.com)

Brink vs. Real World (Parkour)

Heat problem in MacBook Pro solved... NOT!

Update at the bottom.

I've had this annoying heat problem with my 15" MBP (it's a "Sandy Bridge" model from August 2007). If there's heavy load on the CPU (for instance when importing/editing/exporting footage in iMovie), the CPU temperature will go up to 100°C and stay there. The fans will then kick in and rev up to 6000 rpm (the maximum), but it doesn't bring the temperature down. (I assume it helps keeping it there, though, otherwise the laptop would probably catch fire)
I've already tried putting the laptop on 4 little plastic-bottle-caps to make the air-flow underneath the laptop easier, but it doesn't make any difference in terms of temperature. The MBP doesn't have fans underneath, so that was kind of expected. But I still like to use this method to keep the extremely hot bottom of the device away from the desk, it can't hurt.

This is really annoying, since a side-effect of the high temperature is that the CPU will clock itself down (thinking it will bring the temperature down). That means that, besides the high temperature (which certainly isn't good for the parts inside) and the noise, I have less CPU power than I normally would, at the time I need it most.

So yesterday I tried running an iMovie-import after taking the battery out (still using the 4 bottle-caps).
And lo and behold: Problem solved!
I could have sworn that I tried this before, but apparently I hadn't.

Without the battery in and with the CPU at full load, the temperature stays just under 60°C. At that temperature, the fans don't even go over 2500 rpm. (barely over idle-mode) If I manually turn the fans into Typhoon-mode (6000 rpm) with smcFanControl, the temperature goes down to under 50°C.

That's incredible, given that usually, with the battery in, my MBP runs at about 60°C (idle, that is).

Update: I noticed a couple of days later that performance was really bad when playing Flash-videos (YouTube HD, etc.). I did some digging and apparently all Apple Laptops automatically clock themselves down if they run on a power adapter without the battery being inserted. (my processor is a 2.2 GHz and it clocks itself down to 800 MHz, I think) There are tools out there that can circumvent this, but I really don't feel like fooling around with this. So back in goes the battery and up goes the temperature. :(

Russian Prison System documentary

Interview with Dylan Cuthbert of Q-Games

The kid who trained with the Masters of Nintendo during a gaming golden age

Portal 2 - Insane Cube Tricks

Happy Samurai

New virus targeting Iran?

Reports of a new virus, "Stars," hitting Iran: son of Stuxnet?

GTA

The humble beginnings of Grand Theft Auto - article on kotaku.com, with a link to this nice photo gallery of GTA art.

Crysis 2 concept art

Crysis 2 concept art

List of free games on Steam

I found this forum post that lists free games available on Steam.

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Here's an article that sums up what happened last month with the whole "Anonymous vs. HBGary"-thing.
Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary, pisses of Anonymous, they teach him a lesson and, in the process, find a lot of juicy material and make it public.

Also:
Article on BoingBoing entitled "How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory"

Gemini Rue

There was an article on Kotaku a couple of days ago about a new point and click adventure game called Gemini Rue. It looks interesting and there's a demo available. I might give it a shot.

The boy who stole Half-Life 2

Eurogamer has an article about Axel Gembe, who stole the Half-Life 2 sourcecode back in 2003:
The boy who stole Half-Life 2
Can't believe that was over 7 years ago already.

Recent games

I found a guy on Craigslist who was/is selling new (sealed) PS3 games for 35 bucks a piece. Must have fallen from a truck, no doubt, but who cares?! Got Gran Turismo 5 and Need for speed - Hot Pursuit from him.
Then, a couple of days later, a guy was selling Mass Effect 2 for 40 $ (new & sealed).
I had planned to get all those games eventually, but wanted to wait until prices had dropped. Little did I know that I'd be able to get them shortly after their launch at those fantastic prices. Craigslist rules for these kinds of things.

After a long, long time, I finally FINISHED a couple of games: Heavy Rain and Bionic Commando: Rearmed. I only saw one ending of Heavy Rain, I'll get back to it later to try and see some of the other endings. It's definitely more of an interactive movie rather than a traditional game. But taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it. BCR was great fun and since I finished it just a couple of days after its sequel came out on PSN, I bought BCR2 right away.

I played Dead Nation a lot in January and am loving it. I eventually got stuck at the cemetary (if you've played the game you probably know which spot I'm talking about) and died over and over again. Lost my motivation for now, I'll get back to it at some point, when I feel like it.
I'd like to try it in co-op mode too, but I have no one to play it with. (Tried it with my friend in Dakar, but it's too laggy)

I dug Demon's Souls out from the shelf and played it for a couple of hours, having only played the tutorial many months ago). The game is incredible. It's old-school, hard as fuck, addicting and beautiful. And I haven't even finished world 1-1! Its successor, Dark Souls, is already in the making.

The making of EVE Online

PCGamer has an article about "The making of EVE Online", an interesting read.