‘No More Heroes 3’ heads to PlayStation, Xbox and PC this fall

After debuting exclusively on Nintendo Switch last year, No More Heroes 3 is coming to PC and home consoles. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, publisher XSeed Games said on Friday it plans to release Suda 51’s latest project on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC sometime this fall. The new versions will feature improved high-definition visuals, better framerates and faster loading times, according to the company. That’s good news considering the Switch version sometimes struggles with performance issues.

Travis Touchdown’s latest misadventure sees the master assassin tasked with fighting off an alien invasion of Earth. XSeed has yet to announce pricing for the new versions, but it looks like fans can look forward to the company offering limited-edition physical copies of the game that come bundled with a handful of extra goodies, including a soundtrack with cover art that references Akira. XSeed will share more information about the digital release later.

China cracks down on livestreaming of ‘unauthorized’ games

China has signaled it will begin actively enforcing regulation that forbids the livestreaming of unauthorized games. Per Reuters, the country’s National Radio and Television Administration said on Friday all internet platforms are “strictly forbidden” …

Recommended Reading: The rise and fall of Pebble

Success and failure at Pebble

Eric Migicovsky, Medium

The founder of Pebble, one of the hottest products ever to hit Kickstarter, reflects on why the startup failed during the 10-year anniversary of its crowdfunding launch. “We succeeded at inventing the smartwatch and an entirely new product category,” he writes. “But in the end, we failed to create a sustainable, profitable business.”

The Goodman experiment

Alan Siegel, The Ringer

Bob Odenkirk and the folks who created Saul Goodman offer an oral history on how the character eventually got his own show even though it wasn’t intended to work out that way. “Not long after Saul made his debut midway through Season 2 of Breaking Bad, it became very apparent that he was more than just comic relief,” Siegel explains.

Mark Zuckerberg’s augmented reality

Alex Heath, The Verge

The Verge offers a detailed look at Meta’s AR roadmap, including info on a number of different augmented reality glasses models the company is working on. 

China’s record-breaking astronauts are back on Earth after six months in orbit

Chinese astronauts — or taikonauts, as the country calls them — Zhai Zhigang, Ye Guangfu and Wang Yaping have returned to Earth after spending 183 days in space. That’s the country’s longest crewed mission to date so far, with the taikonauts spending those six months aboard Tianhe, the living module of China’s Tiangong space station. As Space notes, Wang Yaping was also the first female taikonaut to live aboard Tianhe and the first Chinese woman to go on a spacewalk. 

The taikonauts were part of the Shenzhou-13 mission, which is the second of four crewed missions and the fifth out of the eleven overall missions China intends to launch to finish building its space station by the end of the year. They did two spacewalks and performed 20 science experiments while in orbit. The team also manually controlled the Tianhe module for a docking experiment with an unmanned cargo spacecraft. 

China, which isn’t an ISS partner, launched Tianhe to low Earth orbit in April 2021 and quickly followed that up with several more launches in an effort to meet its space station’s 2022 construction deadline. The country sent the first crewed mission to its fledgling station in June last year, and the three taikonauts involved spent three months in Tianhe testing systems and conducting spacewalks. In June, China is expected to launch its next crewed mission, the Shenzhou-14, with three taikonauts onboard who’ll also spend six months in orbit.

Scammy Mac apps force users to pay for subscription

Back in 2021, The Washington Postreported that around two percent of the 1,000 highest-grossing apps in the Apple App Store were some form of scam. Turns out the Mac App Store also isn’t immune to shady developers. As The Verge reports, a developer named Kosta Eleftheriou has shed light on questionable apps listed on the Mac App Store, which use pop-ups that make it difficult to exit unless you pay their subscription fees. Eleftheriou had also previously identified a number of scam apps for iOS that made it through Apple’s review process.

The developer started looking into the situation after a Twitter user named Edoardo Vacchi posted about an app called My Metronome that disables the Quit option until you pay for a subscription. (Apple made it easier to report scam apps on iOS 15, but Vacchi said there was no way to report My Metronome on Mac.) Eleftheriou confirmed Vacchi’s claim and pointed The Verge to other applications exhibiting the same behavior. Mac and iOS developer Jeff Johnson did some digging of his own and found that the developer behind My Metronome, Music Paradise LLC, is registered at the same address in Russia as another developer named Groove Vibes. 

The Verge downloaded apps by both Music Paradise and Groove Vibes and found that while some of them had appropriate ways to quit, others disabled the quit option and Mac’s force quit keys. It’s still possible to exit the applications without paying, but the links to close their pop-ups look like they were deliberately designed to be hard to find. 

Apple prides itself in having a rigorous review process for the App Store — Tim Cook even said during an Epic trial last year that the store would be a “toxic mess” without it. Shady and fraudulent apps are still slipping through despite the measures taken by the tech giant, though, and it may even be earning from them. According to that 2021 report from The Post, the scam apps it found may have defrauded users out of an estimated $48 million, including Apple’s commission. The My Metronome app is no longer available for us when we checked, but it’s unclear if it was Apple itself that removed it. We asked the tech giant for a comment and will update this post if we hear back. 

Twitter 啟動「毒藥丸」來避免被 Musk 惡意收購

Elon Musk 在前天宣佈出價 430 億美元，想把 Twitter 收入囊中，但究竟此舉對現有的股東是否有利，Twitter 還需要時間討論與表決。為了避免在這當中 Musk 以收購零散股份的方式，繞過董事會達成實質的收購（即惡意收購），Twitter 董事會已經先一步啟動了所謂的「毒藥丸」策略來自保。…

Meta 預告將推出網頁版的 Horizon Worlds

前在 Horizon World 上販賣數位商品的創作者要被 Meta 抽去 47.5% 的營收，並且引發了廣泛的批評。作為回應，CTO Andrew Bosworth 預告了未來將推出「網頁版」的 Horizon Worlds，由於不透過 VR 頭戴裝置，因此只會抽取相對較「合理」的 Horizon Worlds 平台服務費 25%。…

DuckDuckGo reportedly removes search results for major pirate websites (updated)

DuckDuckGo’s crackdown on dodgy content now supposedly extends to digital bootleggers. TorrentFreak has claimed the search engine no longer lists results for some major pirate websites, including The Pirate Bay, 1337x and Fmovies — look for anything from their domains and you’ll come up empty-handed, according to TF. Streaming and stream-ripping sites like Flixtor and 2conv also produce no results using these methods, while other pirate outlets (such as RarBG) may only turn up one result instead of the hundreds of thousands you see elsewhere.

The site for the video download tool YouTube-dl also produces no results despite recent defenses of its legality. While the RIAA has portrayed YouTube-dl as a piracy tool, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GitHub and others found that it doesn’t rip DRM-protected material.

We’ve asked DuckDuckGo for comment. As TorrentFreak says, though, liability for copyright violations might be an issue. The company removed pirate “bangs” (shortcuts for pirate sites) as far back as 2018, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are already downranking piracy-related results. A move like this could protect DuckDuckGo against costly copyright battles.

Update 4/18 8:15AM ET: DuckDuckGo tells Engadget that The Pirate Bay and Youtube-dl were never removed from search results if you looked for them by name or web address, and that there have been problems with the “site:” queries used for these and other searches. Others frequently change domains and may not always be easy to find. These pages should now turn up in results, DDG said. We’ve updated our story accordingly.

Microsoft reportedly wants to sell ad space in free-to-play Xbox games

You might not be thrilled with in-game advertising, but you might soon see more of it. Insidersources (sub. required) claim Microsoft is developing a program to help marketers place ads in free-to-play Xbox games. Companies could buy from an ad inventory to secure space on virtual billboards. It’s not clear if this would extend to character skins or video rolls, but Microsoft is apparently crafting a “private marketplace” to limit ads to brands that won’t disrupt gameplay.

Microsoft is reportedly still pinpointing ad technology firms that would build the catalog and cooperate on placement. The debut might not take long, though, as the program could launch by the third quarter (that is, summer).

The company declined to confirm or deny the plans. In a statement to Insider, a spokesperson said Microsoft was constantly striving to “improve the experience” for developers and players but didn’t have “anything further to share.”

The program could rankle gamers worried about ads for real-world products finding their way into fictional universes. However, the focus on free-to-play titles might prove crucial. This could help developers make money from free games without leaning too heavily on paid content like skins and season passes. That, in turn, might persuade creators to make Xbox-centric games rather than building for the PlayStation or Switch.