An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A trio of researchers from Monash University and Deakin University has found that teaching children to play chess can reduce their aversion to risk. In their paper published in Journal of Development Economics, Asad Islam, Wang-Sheng Lee and Aaron Nicholas describe studying the impact of learning chess on 400 children in the U.K. The researchers found that most of the children experienced a decrease in risk aversion in a variety of game playing scenarios. They also noticed that playing chess also led to better math scores for some of the students and improvements in logic or rational thinking.

The researchers note that the game of chess is very well suited to building confidence in risk taking when there is reason to believe it might improve an outcome. In contrast, students also learned to avoid taking risks haphazardly, finding that such risks rarely lead to a positive outcome. They [...] line between good and poor risk-taking is especially evident in chess, which means that the more a person plays, the sharper their skills become. The researchers also found that the skills learned during chess playing appeared to be long lasting -- most of the children retained their decrease in risk aversion a full year after the end of their participation in the study. The researchers [...] did not find any evidence of changes in other cognitive skills, such as improvements in grades other than math or general creativity.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
Some tips from the article:

• If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....)

• Conifer lets you run a legacy browser with Flash support on a remote machine, insulating you from any security issues...

• The Internet Archive has made thousands of Flash games and animations playable online in modern web browsers through emulation, so you can play the Helicopter Game or watch Peanut Butter Jelly Time in their original forms.

• Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension...

• Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper.

But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."

An anonymous reader writes: So on New Year's Eve, the "jam" rock band Phish re-broadcast their legendary 1995 performance on New Year's Eve -- while playing a game of chess against the audience. (Just as they'd done in 1995 -- although during that tour they'd made two just moves during each show.) In a video promoting this year's event, a chess "historian" remembers "No single band in the '90s was playing better chess against their audience" and shares an alleged conspiracy theory that they were being coached by Garry Kasparov. And yet, "Midway through the second of two nights at Madison Square Garden, the audience takes Phish's queen" -- and the band resigned.

This had left their ongoing audience-versus-band match with a score (one game apiece). So 25 years later, for New Year's Eve, Phish finally staged the great re-match.

"However, just as it was time to begin the game (and as the show kicked off with opener "Punch You In The Eye"), Chess.com, the popular chess site hosting the online game, crashed," reports JamBands.com.
Thinking quickly, the band announced on Twitter that "We're making a quick pivot, 2020 style, to live chess mode. We will be using a moderator from Chess.com who will take feedback on the move within the chat and then complete the audience move."

JamBands.com explains how the long-awaited match finally culminated: In between sets, the broadcast cut to a live zoom call between all four band members, during which they discussed their next moves in the game and chatted. At various points, Gordon and Anastasio picked up guitars, and Gordon had a surreal projection of a chess board floating behind him at times. During the first break, McConnell referenced the technical difficulties. "I'm sorry this didn't work out to plan, but nothing this year did," he said with a laugh.

During the break between the second and third sets, the shenanigans increased, with drummer Jon Fishman following through on an off-hand promise to shave his head. (At first, the other three band members didn't even notice.) Ultimately, the band defeated the audience... Down to just their king, queen and a few pawns, the audience resigned as the band was up a pawn and still had a rook and queen on the board...

Phish raised funds for a charity during the broadcast. "For this final webcast of the year, our beneficiary will be none other than The WaterWheel Foundation itself," the band wrote prior to the stream. "Since 1997, the band and their fans have collaborated on a nationwide charitable endeavor by raising funds and donating the proceeds across the country. This year alone, collectively we have raised and donated nearly $750,000 to 27 different nonprofits during the Dinner And A Movie series. Join us in continuing to support those in need...."
You can watch the entire four-and-a-half-hour webcast on YouTube.

"The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn," writes BBS history blogger Josh Renaud. "You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: 'Thou seest rippling waters...'"

He's describing the beginning of a 27-year-old game that he'd been searching for since 2013. Slashdot reader Kirkman14 why the game is so special — and so rare: Thieves' Guild is a BBS door game for the Atari ST that came out in 1993. [A "door" connected the software running the dial-up Bulletin Board system to an external application.] What made Thieves' Guild unique was its graphical front-end client, which features dozens of eye-popping pixel art vignettes, along with simple animated sprites, sampled speech, and sound effects.

As a BBS door game (strike 1) for the Atari ST (strike 2), not many people played this game or saw its front-end in the 90s. But it's worth re-discovering.

The game was created by Paul Witte and Herb Flower who teamed up again in the early 2000s to produce the MMORPG "Linkrealms."

The Pascal source code for several versions of Thieves' Guild, including an unreleased 1995 port for PC BBSes, has been rescued and published on GitHub.

How-To Geek has discovered three of the world's most popular web browsers contain Easter Eggs: It seems like every browser has a hidden game these days. Chrome has a dinosaur game, Edge has surfing, and Firefox has . . . unicorn pong? Yep, you read that right — here's how to play it.

First, open Firefox. Click the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines) at the upper right, and then click "Customize." On the "Customize Firefox" tab, you'll see a list of interface elements to configure the toolbar. Click and drag all the toolbar items except "Flexible Space" into the "Overflow Menu" on the right.

Click the Unicorn button that appears at the bottom of the window....
There's screenshots in the article illustrating all of the steps — and the result.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Guinness World Records has reinstated a number of classic video game world records held by Billy Mitchell. The move comes just over two years after Mitchell's records were expunged following an investigation by Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard, which partners with Guinness to adjudicate video game records. That investigation found that recordings of some of Mitchell's record performances on Donkey Kong were not achieved on legitimate arcade hardware, based on extensive video analysis that showed signs of emulator use. Twin Galaxies has not changed its position on Mitchell's records, resulting in a split between the two record-tracking organizations. Guinness now once again recognizes Mitchell as the first player to achieve a perfect Pac-Man score of 3,333,360 points in 1999 and the first player to reach 1 million points in Donkey Kong in 2005. "It's been a long time coming," Mitchell said in an interview with Ars Technica. Twin Galaxies owner and CEO Jace Hall sent this meme as an image, which he said could serve as his quote on the matter.

Mitchell has since released a fuller video statement, "where he says he first got in touch with Guinness last September," adds Ars. "Mitchell uses the opportunity to praise Guinness' reputation and says it was 'very refreshing dealing with them' as they conducted their own investigation."

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: A 16-year-old Iranian chess prodigy has upended the chess world by beating World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in the final of the Banter Blitz Cup. Alireza Firouzja defeated the Norwegian 8.5-7.5 in the final of the online quickfire knockout contest -- where players must comment verbally on their moves, and their opponents, during the game -- to claim the $14,000 prize...

After 7 months and 131 matches, the series of three-minute games involving 128 contestants ended in a final between the world champion since 2013 and the rising superstar...

The Iranian is the second-youngest player to reach the 2700 Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) rating -- the rankings that govern international chess competition... Firouzja initially rose to fame when he came in second to Carlsen in the Moscow World Blitz in December.
The speed chess tournament saw Firouzja "best 132 players in a knock-out style tournament that included 109 grand masters going head to head," reports News.com.au.

"Despite living in France since he was eight-years-old when his family fled from Iran, Firouzja has elected to compete as a stateless competitor that doesn't represent any country."

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like "the Bongcloud." One YouTube commenter calls it "a revolution in the history of chess."

Slate documents the antics in an article titled "DrDrunkenstein's Reign of Terror." "DrDrunkenstein" is one of many aliases Magnus Carlsen has played under during the past two years, when he went on a killing spree across the speed chess tournaments of the internet. Since winter 2017, Carlsen has taken to livestreaming his games on a variety of platforms, which has provided a surprisingly entertaining window into the mind of an all-time great.

Lichess.org is a free, ad-less web platform for chess players, a favorite in the online chess community... Carlsen appeared incognito as "DannyTheDonkey" and won, donating his small prize money back to the website. Carlsen's first showing as DrDrunkenstein was in Lichess' second Titled Arena the following month... Carlsen streamed the games on Twitch, where he lived up to his username, pounding Coronas while bantering in Norwegian with his friends. Chess fans were astonished. There's something hypnotizing about watching a guy known as "the Mozart of chess" — a player who is quantifiably better than Bobby Fischer — taking a big gulp of beer, announcing his position as "completely winning," then singing along to Dr. Dre saying "motherfuck the police" while coasting into another quick checkmate...

In an interview with a Norwegian newspaper in October, Carlsen admits he quit drinking for his health. "I wouldn't say I was an alcoholic exactly," he said, "but I found out this year, if I'm going to travel and play a lot... I need to prioritize differently...." On the eve of his world championship defense, Carlsen appeared in the next tournament as "manwithavan," playing a large chunk of his games on a phone from a minivan, where the touch screen presented a massive handicap. He again earned the adoration of spectators, this time for riskily walking his king into the center of the board against one of the most dangerous players in the tournament. He came in third... As DrNykterstein, he alternated between two ways of wasting his early, important opening moves. Sometimes, he'd take his queen on a four-move tour of the board before swapping her home square with the king's, letting his opponent develop their pieces while he showboated... Other times, he'd fidget his knights back and forth from their starting squares, offering his challenger a six-move time advantage. In this tournament he filled with gags, he came in first again...

One of the sweetest benefits of watching these matches is enjoying Carlsen's dry, self-deprecating sense of humor — something no chess prodigy has any right to have.
In December, Magnus also reached the #1 spot, beating seven million other players, on a fantasy football table.

An anonymous reader quotes The Wrap: "Sonic the Hedgehog" is giving Paramount its best box office news in over a year, with a currently 3-day opening weekend of $55 million to become the best opening weekend ever for a video game adaptation... The delayed release of this film prompted by an intense rejection of Sonic's initial design is turning out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. Moved from last November to this extended Presidents' Day weekend, "Sonic" is standing out in the movie marketplace as a popular family offering with no major competition currently in theaters and none coming until Pixar's "Onward" arrives in three weeks.

Audience reception, driven by both families and hardcore Sonic fans, has been very strong with an A on CinemaScore, 4/5 on Postrak, and 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Even critics have been fairly positive with a 65% Rotten Tomatoes score... If this weekend's estimates hold, "Sonic" will have an opening weekend that's more than double any of Paramount's 2019 films, including the $29 million opening of "Terminator: Dark Fate." In fact, it has the highest opening weekend for the studio since "Mission: Impossible — Fallout," which opened to $61.2 million in July 2018.
The Wrap's article also includes a list ranking "all 46 videogame movies" from best to worst. They rank 2001's "Tomb Raider" just ahead of 2018's "Tomb Raider" (at #14 and #15, respectively), and also remember several forgotten early-1990s films based on videogames (including "Street Fighter," "Mortal Kombat" and "Super Mario Bros.")

Id software has released a new trailer for their upcoming Doom sequel set on a demon-infested planet Earth in the year 2151. And GameSpot has uploaded a 10-minute clip of gameplay while Collider released 15 minutes.

Collider writes: Doom Eternal takes everything that was gloriously batshit about Doom 2016, throws it in a Lamborghini full of Slayer albums and catapults it into the sun. This game is out of its goddamn mind in the best possible way, and I literally cannot wait to get my hands on the full version... The Fortress of Doom is massive. I wasn't able to access every area, and could only guess at the function of some of the areas I did see. One section had the original Doom Marine costume on display in a glass case, and the game's director, Hugo Martin confirmed that the skin is an unlockable. Moreover, he indicated that there are several unlockable player skins in the game, including one he was clearly excited about but couldn't reveal, saying that it was still in the licensing approval stage...

Doom Eternal, like its predecessor, is a fast game, pitting you against hordes of powerful enemies that force you to constantly be on the move and quick-swapping weapons to inflict maximum damage while avoiding death. You have a few tools at your disposal to earn guaranteed life, ammo, and armor, which are the over-the-top glory kills, the terrifying chainsaw, and the brand-new flame belcher respectively. Glory kills are special instant-death maneuvers you can unleash on enemies after staggering them, and the addition of a retractable arm blade has heightened the graphic absurdity of them to such a degree that I was giggling like an idiot every time I pulled one off.

I spent the next three hours murdering my way across three massive levels that were incredibly varied in terms of design, beginning in a blasted post-apocalyptic city, then moving to a vast overgrown temple, and finally ending up in a heavily-fortified arctic base... Each stage had a completely different feel -- the city was very ground-based, with dark subway tunnels and skeletal office buildings. The temple was spread out across what felt like miles, with an unexpected amount of verticality and traversal thanks to the new climbing mechanic. Yep, Doom Guy can now cling to certain walls, as well as swing from poles to extend his jump and gain access to distant ledges. The climbing controls are a bit funky, like Spider-Man with a rotator cuff injury, but the traversal puzzles are fun and satisfying, and allow for some truly massive environments...

Martin promised that players will continue to be introduced to new enemies and environments right up until the end of the 22+ hour campaign. He describes Doom Eternal as a thinking person's action game, and that the team's goal was to create a combat puzzle worth your time.
DOOM Eternal is scheduled to be released on March 20th.

An anonymous reader quotes The Hustle: Once the most highly coveted game developer -- a hit-maker with the Midas touch -- he had been immortalized as the man who created E.T., the "worst" video game in history. But Howard Scott Warshaw's story, like that of Atari, is a parable about corporate greed and the dangers of prioritizing quantity over quality... His first game, Yars' Revenge -- a story about mutated houseflies under siege -- took him 7 months to develop, and went through another 5 months of rigorous play-testing. When it hit the shelves in May of 1982, it became Atari's biggest 2600 game of all time, selling more than 1m copies.

The success of this game netted Warshaw a high-profile follow-up assignment: the video game adaptation of the Steven Speilberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Released in November of 1982 after 10 months of development, this, too, was a 1m-copy seller. Warshaw soon became known as the game designer with the golden touch -- and his success earned him rockstar status. According to press reports, he purportedly pulled in $1m a year and was "hounded for autographs by a devoted cult following of teenagers."

But in mid-1982, Atari had also begun to shift its business strategy in the games department. In its earlier days, Atari gave programmers ample time (5-10 months) to create and develop innovative games. But that window closed when the company realized that the real road to riches was in licensing the rights to films.... The typical game took 1k hours' worth of work over 6 months. Warshaw had less than 36 hours to come up with a concept [for his E.T. game] to present to Hollywood's hottest director. Worse yet, he had just 5 weeks to finish the game... Warshaw's only option was to create a small, simple, replayable game -- something with few moving parts that he could implement quickly. Less than 2 days later, he was standing in a conference room in Burbank, pitching his design to Spielberg: The player would guide E.T. through a landscape filled with pits, and collect pieces of a phone while evading FBI agents.

"He just looked at me and said, 'Can't you just do something like Pac-Man?'" recalls Warshaw. "But eventually, he approved it."
Warshaw then put in 500 hours over the next 5 weeks, "doing everything he could to make something halfway decent in the time he was given," the site reports.

"Unfortunately for Warshaw, the flop of E.T. coincided with a much graver event: The video game crash of 1983. A flood of low-quality, hastily created games, coupled with the rise of the personal computer, led to a moment of reckoning: In the 2 years following the release of E.T., the video game industry saw its revenue fall from $3.2B to just $100m -- a 97% decline..."

Warshaw gave up programming and became a real estate broker, and then a psychotherapist, the article concludes. "But true insiders knew that E.T. was merely a symptom -- not the cause -- of the crash."

Prorammer Rick Brewster has worked at both Microsoft and Facebook. But this Christmas on Twitter he shared the story of his long-lost videogame creation "that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunken cat -- finally found its way home on Christmas Eve."

An anonymous reader quotes Kotaku: Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that's expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer...

"I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it," Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.

Apparently, that's not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.
"Apparently breaking & entering is a 'serious felony' and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe," Brewster remembered on Twitter on Christmas Day.

He believes that back in 1994 his cousin must've uploaded the videogame to a BBS, since it's now ended up in the old game collection "Frostbyte" at the Internet Archive. Which means that you, too, can now play 12-year-old Rick Brewster's long-lost amateur videogame using Archive.org's online DOSbox emulator.

An anonymous reader writes: Billy Mitchell is the intense videogamer made famous in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong. Last month he threatened to sue both the Guinness Book of World Records and the videogame record-keepers at Twin Galaxies for defamation after they revoked an entire lifetime's worth of videogame high scores. An online discussion had argued that videotapes of three of Mitchell's performances suggested they'd been achieved using a MAME emulator -- but the organization revoked all of Mitchell's high scores (including his uncontested perfect game of Pac-Man in 1999).

Last week Twin Galaxies finally posted their response to Mitchell's lawsuit. "It is not necessary to hire lawyers and threaten Twin Galaxies out of the blue to get it to review and consider relevant new evidence -- all anyone has to do is simply reach out and directly request an opportunity to present the information...

"There will be no retraction or reinstatement. It should be noted that Twin Galaxies is under no obligation to maintain Mr. Mitchell's scores in its database. He has no divine right to be part of the Twin Galaxies community either. Twin Galaxies has unlimited authority to maintain the integrity of its score database." They also write that any lawsuit will be considered a strategic lawsuit against public participation and countered accordingly, followed by a second suit over malicious prosecution. "Please advise Mr. Mitchell to tread lightly, and choose wisely."

Last week a massive new 16,000-word profile of Mitchell pointed out that after his records were revoked, Mitchell had actually webcast himself playing Donkey Kong on Twitch, "obtaining scores equal to those that had been disputed, broadcast live from public venues.... Mitchell had proven he could earn those scores now. But he hadn't outlined a clear defense to prove he'd achieved them at the time of the original submissions."

CNBC reports that a popular Twitch poker star has been accused of cheating: Stones Gambling Hall in Sacramento, California says it will not livestream poker games pending an investigation into cheating allegations made against one of the game's players, Mike Postle... The original accusations were made by Veronica Brill, another poker player who has played with Postle on "Stones Live." Since then, others have come forward with similar complaints. Brill has no specific accusation of what Postle is doing and even admits that she can't be sure he is cheating. So why does she think he is cheating? His results are too good, according to Brill. She said (and several professional pokers players who talked to CNBC, agreed) no one could do as well as he has, for as long as he has, on these livestreamed games...

It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."

Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.

"Billy Mitchell, the former Donkey Kong and Pac-Man high-score champion made famous in the 2007 film The King of Kong, has threatened legal action against the sanctioning bodies who threw out all of Mitchell's high scores in April 2018 after finding that two were illegitimate," reports Polygon. This week, lawyers for Mitchell sent a letter to Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records demanding that both "retract their claims against Billy Mitchell" and restore the scores to their world record leaderboards, where Mitchell had been a fixture since the early 1980s... The letter to Twin Galaxies alleges that it defamed Mitchell, both in its findings and in later posts to their website.

In banning Mitchell, Twin Galaxies also vacated records that were not in question, and banned Mitchell from further participation in their leaderboards. One of Mitchell's records thrown out was a "perfect score" in Pac-Man (reaching the maximum number of points available in its 255 levels). Mitchell's attorneys say Twin Galaxies implied that score was tainted by cheating, too.

Guinness, say the lawyers, cited that disqualification in its 2019 Gamers Edition compilation of records in saying that Mitchell's "submitted scores were obtained while using [the emulator] MAME," which the attorneys take to mean as applying to all of Mitchell's scores, from 1982 to present day. They say that is factually incorrect and also impossible, as MAME was created in 1997...

The letter also alleges that Twin Galaxies "did not provide Billy Mitchell fair opportunity to provide evidence to prove his innocence," and that "specific evidence was accepted, while evidence of equal stature was rejected."
A 156-page package summarizing Mitchell's defense has been posted in Reddit's videogame speedrunning forum. It argues that the documentary's makers actually have filmed footage in which a videotaped high-score attempt at Funspot Arcade is clearly announced to be "not a score submission. This is for entertainment purposes only." And while the film-makers show that score being submitted, "this was only acting done for the movie...the scoreboard shown by the movie was forged.... Actually, in the King of Kong movie, the tape I hand Doris Self is a WWE Wrestling tape, not my 1,047,200 performance... The movie's portrayal that I submitted this performance is fictitious."

Mitchell's documents say that that score was submitted later -- without his permission -- by a referee for Twin Galaxies, arguing that the footage suffers from a compromised chain of custody. The documents even include emails written by the owner of the web site fuckbillymitchell.com "saying he has a 'master plan' to take Billy Mitchell down," along with statements from two separate witnesses who say that man had even at one point asked for help in how to fake footage of a videogame.

"I find the current accusation of Mitchell too close to exactly what Richard planned in 2009 to be overlooked."

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Doom, there's now mobile versions in the Google Play Store, reports Android Police, "and since this is a 25th-anniversary release, it includes the fourth expansion Thy Flesh Consumed. It's the complete package folks, and it's finally available on Android as an official release."

And in addition, three Doom re-releases are now available for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, reports the Verge -- though there was one little glitch: Bethesda says it'll get rid of the strange requirement that players must log into an online account before they play the newly re-released versions of Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3, which went live yesterday. Players quickly criticized Bethesda for the seemingly ridiculous limitation -- the first of these games was released more than 25 years ago, at a time when there was obviously no internet requirement. The online login will be made optional in a coming update, Bethesda said today.
The re-releases were part of QuakeCon 2019, reports IGN, noting that Bethesda also showcased Doom Eternal's multiplayer, "revealing new details about the unique 1v2 Battle Mode."

Forbes hails the re-releases as "id Software's fast-paced, ultra-violent...classic shooters," adding that "It appears the re-releases are actually Unity remakes, though whether much has changed beyond resolution support remains to be seen." But they may also have some other minor differences, Engadget reports: There have been a few other complaints as well, such as the addition of copy protection, graphical changes (such as filtering that softens those 1993-era graphics) and apparent music tempo slowdowns on the Switch. That's not including the removal of downloads for the old PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. It's not a fiasco, but these clearly weren't the straightforward ports some were expecting.

It was the best-selling game of June, with IGN calling it "the most accessible game design tool ever created, and that core is just one part of a greater whole..."

Since its launch three weeks ago, fans have already built over 2 million custom stages, NPR notes -- but the real news is that Super Mario Maker 2 finally represents a shift in Nintendo's attitude towards its fan community: It's Nintendo's reliance on the creative spirit of these dedicated players that makes the Super Mario Maker series such a quietly radical property within the Nintendo canon... By loosening its grip on a beloved property and tossing the keys to the player community, Nintendo feeds into the fan-obsessive tendencies they've previously refused. With the Super Mario Maker series, Nintendo acknowledges the history of competitive speedrunning, tournament play, and even the masochistic fan games that have made their games visible and interesting in an entirely different way. It's the rare Nintendo game that is depending on those players, creators, and spectators to keep it alive. Super Mario Maker 2 has only been out for a few weeks, but already we've seen how the game's deceptively complex course editor has led to the community making some astounding levels...

Nintendo has always been old-school in the way they rely on offline experiences, downplaying the kind of online communities that other developers prioritize. Ironically, it is that indifference that has made fan communities formed around Nintendo games feel singular and special -- they're smaller, more intimate, and regulated by the players themselves. With the Super Mario Maker franchise, Nintendo finally acknowledges the power and influence of its most obsessive fans -- by creating something that couldn't thrive without them.
IGN argues that "it's astonishing how incredibly well it's all held together in one cohesive package... It does nearly everything better than its already excellent predecessor, introducing some incredible new ideas, level styles, building items, and so much more - all while maintaining the charm of Mario games we know and love."

And Slashdot reader omfglearntoplay writes "If you like old games from the 1980s, this is your game."

The 1978 arcade game Space Invader will become a major motion picture, reports Engadget. "The writer behind the 'Mortal Kombat' reboot is involved."

Deadline reports: It will take work fleshing this into a full-fledged alien-invasion movie, but the title is certainly a brand. In the game, a series of blocky aliens descended from the top of the screen to the bottom, and players basically blasted them until their thumbs cramped, or the invaders succeeded in overwhelming the slow-triggered defender of earth.
"Nothing surprises me any more," adds the headline at Io9. Once, I would be surprised and bemused by the things Hollywood tries to turn into major franchises in 2019. I might observe how the truth now matches what we used to make up as parody. But, look, Battleship is a real movie and Rihanna was in it and that was seven years ago... Since the arcade game is entirely devoid of plot, except for the riveting narrative of shooting up until your thumbs cramp, it'll probably be some entirely original plot about alien invaders, maybe something Independence Day-esque, with some inevitable cute nods to the original thrown in... [W]e'll keep you posted as long as you keep putting quarters into the machine.
Yahoo Movies UK calls the news "apparent proof that Hollywood will literally make a movie out of anything... Also in the pipeline is a live-action outing for Sonic the Hedgehog, which was delayed earlier this year so that Paramount could redesign the character following a fan backlash."

I'm still waiting for a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster based on Pong.

harrymcc writes: Jay Adelson, the cofounder of Digg, has a new, deeply personal startup: Scorbit. It aims to connect existing pinball machines to the internet, giving them networked leaderboards, compatibility with smartphone apps, and other newfangled features. But Scorbit faces a major competitor in Stern, the pinball giant whose new Spike platform is attempting to introduce similar functionality. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman reports on the dueling systems and the general pinball resurgence now underway.
The COO of a pinball parts supplier tells Fast Company that "People are just saturated with the internet. They don't want to look at screens anymore for entertainment, but they want to be entertained, so they want something physical. Pinball ticks all the boxes there."

Long-time Slashdot reader cshamis tipped us off to this story in HotHardware: It is official, folks -- Retro Games is releasing a full-size retro reboot of the original Commodore 64, called TheC64, on December 5...

Of course, modern amenities abound for this reboot. TheC64 can connect to any modern TV via HDMI, to deliver "crisp 720p HD visuals" at 60Hz (USA) or 50Hz (Europe). It also comes with an updated joystick featuring 8 buttons, micro switches, and USB connectivity. It bears a passing resemblance to the original, but with additional bells and whistles. TheC64 will arrive with 64 games preinstalled, including titles such as California Games, Destroyer, Impossible Mission (1 and 2), Monty on the Run, Speedball 2, and many others... [P]layers will be able to add more games from a USB memory stick (not included).

The original Commodore 64 is widely considered the best-selling single-model PC of all time. Estimates have sales pegged at somewhere between 10-17 million units.