How To Remove All The Junk Carriers Added To Your iPhone

Products Apple will announce this year

• iPad 5 w/ thinner mini-like design, iPad mini 2

• iPhone 5S

• iPhone cheap (plastic)

• Apple watch

• iOS 7 and OS X 10.9, Apple’s first major releases with Jony Ive leading software design

• Apple TV SDK?

• Mac Pro replacement

• the usual refreshed iPods and Macs

and still $aapl falls

Two strategy games on Kickstarter worth considering

Death Inc. is a real time strategy game by former Media Molecule (Little Big Planet) guys. Unlike every other PC RTS, there’s no click and drag to select, right click to move system. Instead the player uses mouse gestures to “paint” paths for units on the map.

At the Gates is a turn based strategy from Jon Shafer, the designer of Civilization 5. In his Civ 5 postmortem Shafer explains what went wrong in his Civ 5 design and how At the Gates will be different. It’s a smaller, more focused game than Civilization, but there are some interesting new systems. The map’s art and utility change as seasons and years pass. Units need a supply chain to back them up. You can’t leave your army on an arctic island for a thousand years like in Civ.

I’ve recently backed three new strategy games on Kickstarter (these two and Planetary Annihilation). These are good times for what was a stagnant genre.

Bullet points on Destiny

Here’s the concept art Bungie released, the game’s web site, and YouTube channel.

Notes from the official “ViDoc”:

• They tease the web and mobile social messaging/news interface before the actual gameplay.
• “You’re story begins at this moment of great adventure and peril. You are a guardian of the city, a soldier able to wield some of the Traveler’s incredible power. If you can find a way to save the city, to reclaim all that we have lost, you will become legend…” sounds like your stereotypical MMO setup.
• “A bold new action game set in a living world”. Eurogamer’s writeup says players will be exploring “a persistent world complete with a dynamic day/night cycle and weather effects”.
• Only 15 seconds of in-game footage. No gunplay, just some dudes running and a couple environment shots.
• “The ultimate adventure that unfolds over the next ten years”. Ambitious promise. World of Warcraft is only 9 years old.

Notes on Jeff Gerstmann’s experience at Bungie’s office

• Online only. Makes sense since it’s an MMO. Presumably you can do missions by yourself, but strangers and/or friends can show up at any time. No subscription, it’ll be $60. There could be more unnanounced forms of monetization. Ben Kuchera makes a good point: if this goes well it may be the catalyst for all big games going online only.
• Bungie skirted around MMO terminology while explaining many MMO-esque elements: character creation, persistent world, online-only play, worlds composed of repeated assets pieced together in new ways. They repeatedly used of the word “dungeon” and one guy even said “raid”.
• The social space at the city under the sphere will be in third person. Players exit the city in groups to do missions in first person around the solar system. Earth’s moon, Venus, and Mars are mentioned. Sounds like more planets and locations will be added over the years.
• Bungie only announced Destiny for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. They really stressed that their strength is “console shooters”. It will obviously run on next-gen consoles (it’s a 10-year game and the release date is December 31, 2013 after new consoles are released), but maybe not PC or Mac. Gerstmann thinks it’s a safe bet it’ll expand beyond current and next-gen consoles over the course of its lifespan, but Bungie co-founder Jason Jones’ statement to Destructoid has me worried.
• Media day felt like something was pulled. Bungie employees were surprised when Gerstmann said he hadn’t really seen the game. Maybe they’re holding stuff back for the upcoming Playstation event.
• Destiny will in probably not be one “living world” across all platforms. Each system will have an instance. So Destiny for PS3 is separate from Destiny for PS4 is separate from Destiny for Xbox 360 is separate from Destiny for next Xbox. This allows the game to look and perform differently (larger player counts) on next-gen systems. And it makes a PC release feel a little more plausible since the control gap between players using mice and keyboards and those using controllers won’t be an issue.

All this high-level talk is interesting but ultimately disappointing. Everyone wanted to see the game.

https://twitter.com/patrickklepek/status/303221140703297536 https://twitter.com/AdamSessler/status/303219718452543488

You can already pre-order Destiny for 360 and PS3 at the standard $60 price.