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Capcom’s veteran game director reveals how one of the year’s best games was made – and why successful game design need not be a crunch momentIn 2002, veteran Capcom game director Hideaki Itsuno – then working on a pitch for an original action-RPG that later turned into Dragon’s Dogma – was called upon to get an ailing Devil May Cry 2 out of the door. It sold decently, in the end, but was widely regarded as a critical flop. “When it finished up, they all realised they could have done better,” explains Devil May Cry producer Matt Walker (and Itsuno’s translator for this interview). “So he and others at Capcom said, we’re going to take all of our collective knowledge on how to make a good fighting game, a good action game, and put everything we can into making Devil May Cry 3.“And if this isn’t received well, if this doesn’t sell well, that’s it. We’ll just have to quit Capcom, and do something else.” Continue reading...

Richard Snape says drivers should be able to exchange a depleted battery for a fully charged one at a service station. Plus Adrian Townsend questions the wisdom of recommending a new Oxford-to-Cambridge motorwayI think the National Infrastructure Commission is on the wrong track (Letters, 1 June). The disadvantage of current electrically powered vehicles is the integral battery system, leading to vehicle down time, decreasing effectiveness, replacement costs and recharging practicalities. Far better to use a battery replacement system whereby a standard size and configuration is adopted and vehicles are designed to allow exchange. You buy the vehicle, not the battery. Standardising would bring benefits of scale to battery manufacturers, leading to reduced cost and better competition, and passes on the long-term ownership issues from the individual to organisations better equipped to manage them. Fossil fuel suppliers should view themselves as energy suppliers and use their capabilities and resources to rapidly redevelop service stations to support such systems.The customer would call into a service station when required and select the grade of battery they want. The depleted battery would be automatically exchanged for a fully charged one and the customer would pay for the difference in charged states plus a rental charge to cover the outlay, maintenance and replacement costs for the supplier. The first step is to standardise the battery configuration. Come on, guys, get on with it!

From Star Wars and Marvel-themed juggernauts to village life sims and monster hunts, these are the games we’re most interested in at next week’s E3 in Los Angeles Continue reading...

Despite years of tough policing, Oakland couldn’t get a handle on gun crime. Was the solution a community-based approach?

Gun homicides nationwide have barely declined, but in one region of America they are down 30%. In a year-long series, the Guardian investigates the initiatives that are saving lives in an area scarred by rising inequality and gentrification

Congress to investigate whether giant tech firms are guilty of ‘anti-competitive conduct’ as markets see tech stocks plummetCongress is launching a bipartisan investigation into digital markets and the tech industry, looking into giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon for “competition problems” and “anti-competitive conduct”.“The open internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online,” House judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a statement. “But there is growing evidence that a handful of gatekeepers have come to capture control over key arteries of online commerce, content, and communications.” Continue reading...

Follow the launch of Apple’s latest products as they are announced

The iTunes app is dead, your iPhone will be faster and the $5,999 Mac Pro becomes firm’s most expensive computerApple has announced that the iPhone is going to get faster with iOS 13, the iTunes app is dead on the Mac with the new macOS 10.15 Catalina, and the iPad is getting its own operating system.On stage at the firm’s annual developer conference in San Jose McEnery Convention Center, California, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook unveiled the next versions of iOS, iPad OS, watchOS, macOS and the long-awaited Mac Pro, which becomes Apple’s most expensive computer yet. Continue reading...

Demonstrators cover bodies with stickers to ensure nipples on display are ‘male’, in line with Facebook policySome were hairy. Some were pointy. Some were dark brown, some a pale pink. But the hundreds of nipples on display in front of Facebook’s New York City headquarters on Sunday were technically “male”, despite some being on female protesters.More than 100 people lay nude on the sidewalk to call for a change to the company’s censorship policies. The action, called #wethenipple, was organized by the artist Spencer Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship. Continue reading...

Next PM could overturn decision to let Chinese firm supply non-core 5G kitMike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has ramped up the pressure over the use of Huawei technology in 5G networks hours before Donald Trump was expected to demand that the UK rethinks its plan to do business with the Chinese company.The US president is due to meet Theresa May in Downing Street on Tuesday. There is growing speculation that her successor as prime minister could overturn her decision on Huawei. Continue reading...

Governments and police must take crime on the internet seriously. It is where we all live nowAbout half of all property crime in the developed world now takes place online. When so much of our lives, and almost all of our money, have been digitised, this is not surprising – but it has some surprising consequences. For one thing, the decline in reported property crimes trumpeted by successive British governments between 2005 and 2015 turns out to have been an illusion. Because banks were not required to report fraud to the police after 2005, they often didn’t. It would have made both banks and police look bad to have all that crime known and nothing done about it. The cost of the resulting ignorance was paid by the rest of government, and by the public, too, deprived of accurate and reliable knowledge. Since then, the total number of property crimes reported has risen from about 6m to 11m a year as the figures have taken computerised crime into account.The indirect costs to society are very much higher than the hundreds of millions that individuals lose. One example is the proliferation of plagiarism software online, which developed an entire industry in poor, English-speaking countries like Kenya, serving idle or ignorant students in England and North America. The effort required by schools and universities to guard against such fraud has been considerable, and its cost entirely disproportionate to the gains made by the perpetrators. Continue reading...

An image of a Syrian refugee using virtual reality to help researchers design a shelter has been chosen as the winner of the 2019 national science photography competition organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The competition attracted 169 entries from EPSRC-funded researchers Continue reading...

A couple of years ago, Hussein Kesvani started receiving anti-Islam messages from a Twitter account called True Brit. A few months later, he travelled to meet the man behind the account. Jordan Erica Webber chats to him about what that was like, as well as his new book Follow Me, Akhi, which looks at how the newest generation of British Muslims are growing up in the digital age. Continue reading...

Baltimore this month joined Atlanta, San Diego and Newark in the list of US cities hit by ransomware attacks as the cyber intrusions are expected to continue“We won’t talk more, all we know is MONEY! Hurry up!”This was the ransom note that confronted Baltimore officials on 7 May when hackers crippled government computers with a virus, taking the systems hostage. The ongoing cyber-attack has halted real estate transactions and shut down websites for processing water bills and other services. Continue reading...

Google confirmed that YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services were affected by sporadic outagesUsers of YouTube, Snapchat and some Google services are seeing errors or slow performance due to high levels of network congestion in the eastern United States.YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services are affected, but Google said it believed it had identified the cause of the congestion and expected normal service to resume shortly. Continue reading...

Tim Cook will announce separate apps for music, TV and podcasts, according to reportsIt was once heralded as a possible saviour of the music industry in the digital age, famously annoyed fans by forcing a U2 album on them, and its 20,699-word terms and conditions have even inspired a graphic novel, but now Apple is to replace its iTunes download service.According to a report by Bloomberg, the tech company will announce that three separate apps for music, TV and podcasts will supersede iTunes, as Apple seeks to reposition itself as an entertainment service rather than a hardware company powered by products such as the iPhone. Continue reading...

London Stadium

A tale of two 12th-century French children confronting an ever more malevolent and verminous world casts a beguiling spellA Plague Tale: Innocence opens on a scene of idyllic playfulness: a teenage girl, Amicia, walking her dog through an autumnal forest in 12th-century France, bumping apples from tall trees using pebbles hurled from a homemade slingshot. If this is the “innocence” of the game’s title, it plays but a fleeting cameo role in the drama. Before the day is out, Amicia’s dog is dead – ripped apart by a thrashing mass of rabid vermin – along with her former life of privilege as a French noble, ripped apart by soldiers of the inquisition, thugs acting on behalf of an equally corrupt church.Amicia and her younger brother Hugo, a boy who suffers from a blood disease and has spent his days in jaundiced confinement, escape the family estate and begin to pick their way through a countryside turned hostile. This is, then, a story of innocence versus experience, of children versus the ruined world of adults, with all its plagues, both physical and ideological. Continue reading...

Will robots be the answer to labour shortages on farms? Our pick of the best planting, weeding and harvesting machinesLast week a startup based at Plymouth University unveiled the world’s first raspberry-picking robot. The machine can pick about 25,000 berries a day, which is 10,000 more than a human during an eight-hour shift. Raspberries are particularly challenging for machines to harvest because the robots have to identify ripe fruit and handle the soft berries without damaging them. The firm intends to lease the robots to farmers at a rate that would undercut the cost of employing human fruit pickers. Continue reading...

Don’t expect the Chinese government to roll over in the fight against the tech giantUntil recently, the only thing the average citizen could have told you about Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, was that s/he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to pronounce it (it’s “hwa-wei” btw, according to Wikipedia). And then, suddenly, this unpronounceable company seemed to be all over the news. Now it’s at the centre of a burgeoning geopolitical row. How did that happen?I blame the Australians, who have a government only marginally less dysfunctional than our own. According to a Reuters report, in early 2018 they asked their top spooks a question: “With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?” The spooks came back with a sombre assessment: the offensive potential of 5G was so great, they reported, that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country’s critical infrastructure could be seriously sabotaged. Continue reading...

As motorists slowly make the switch to electric cars, the multi-award winning Jaguar I-Pace proves that the future of motoring is different, but equally thrillingJaguar I-Pace

I love the idea of higher connection speeds – but should I wait until there’s more choice?Every week a Guardian Money reader submits a question, and it’s up to you to help him or her out – a selection of the best answers will appear in next Saturday’s paper.5G has been launched in the UK this week. I love the idea of higher connection speeds and I live in one of the areas where the new network operates. It is not cheap, however. So should I sign up now and buy a 5G phone or should I wait until there are more options on the market? Continue reading...

Failure to tip, a refusal to chat … even where you sit could influence how drivers rate you and under a new policy could see you bannedWill your Uber rating be docked if youdon’t tip? What side of the car should you sit on? Small talk or silence?Since Uber first began to allow users to check their ratings on the app in 2017, riders have harbored growing anxiety about how many stars their behavior in the back seat will earn them. Continue reading...

Consumer version of BBM will cease but app aimed at businesses will continueBBM, or BlackBerry Messenger, the encrypted messaging service that introduced many to the joys of mobile chat – and was blamed for the 2011 London riots – is finally shutting down on Friday.The Indonesian company that owns the service, announced its plans in April, giving users a month to migrate. Continue reading...

Fantastic screen, the fastest performance, a good camera and brilliant software in a massive phone that still undercuts the competitionThe OnePlus 7 Pro is the firm’s largest, most expensive and most premium phone yet. While not that cheap, it still undercuts the competition by some margin, while offering sheer speed and a stunning notchless display that even its most expensive rivals can’t touch.Starting at £649, the OnePlus 7 Pro is £150 more expensive than last year’s 6T or its 2019 refresh the 7 (non-Pro). It’s also significantly bigger. Continue reading...

Plan for cameras to track students in Lockport’s schools called ‘unprecedented invasion of privacy’ and ‘colossal waste of money’A school district in western New York is launching a first-of-its-kind facial recognition system, generating new privacy concerns about the powerful but controversial technology.The Lockport city school district is beginning implementation of the Aegis facial recognition system this week, officials said, with the technology expected to be fully up and running in time for the new school year in September. Continue reading...

Company said it now had 93 million customers who are active on a monthly basis, 33% higher than the same period last yearUber lost more than $1bn in the first three months of the year, the ride-sharing company announced on Thursday.Releasing its first quarterly report since it became a public company, Uber said it now had 93 million customers who are active on a monthly basis, 33% higher than the same period last year. The company’s revenues were $3.1bn for the three months, 20% higher but slower than the 25% annual growth Uber recorded in the prior quarter. Continue reading...

House speaker says ‘I can take it’ after site keeps doctored video up, but criticizes their role in spread of false informationHouse speaker Nancy Pelosi has strongly criticised Facebook for failing to tackle misinformation after the social media network refused to take down a video that had been doctored to make her appear drunk or ill.Pelosi, the highest ranking woman in Congress, is the most senior US politician to have accused Facebook of “wittingly” allowing the spread of misinformation promoted by Russia during the 2016 US election. Continue reading...

Brazilian landmarks’ entries were edited to push firm’s promotional photos higher in Google search resultsClothing firm The North Face has been accused of digital vandalism after an ad agency surreptitiously inserted the company’s products into Wikipedia articles about Brazilian mountains.In April, the ad agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, filled Wikipedia entries of Brazilian landmarks with professional shots featuring the brand, with the intention of causing Google to display the same images in the top few search results. Continue reading...

Band argue that game ‘is attempting to trade off on Iron Maiden’s notoriety’ and is confusing customersIron Maiden are suing video game company 3D Realms over the game Ion Maiden, which they describe as an “incredibly blatant” infringement on their trademark.The lawsuit, which demands $2m (£1.58m) in damages, argues that the game’s title will cause “confusion among consumers”, “is nearly identical to the Iron Maiden trademark in appearance, sound and overall commercial impression”, and “is attempting to trade off on Iron Maiden’s notoriety”. Continue reading...

More than 130 residents at a Brooklyn apartment complex oppose plan to use the cameras, whose use, experts say, is quietly expanding in cities

GCHQ ‘ghost protocol’ would seriously undermine user security and trust, says letterA GCHQ proposal that would enable eavesdropping on encrypted chat services has been condemned as a “serious threat” to digital security and human rights.In an open letter signed by more than 50 companies, civil society organisations and security experts – including Apple, WhatsApp, Liberty and Privacy International – GCHQ was called on to abandon its so-called “ghost protocol”, and instead focus on “protecting privacy rights, cybersecurity, public confidence, and transparency”. Continue reading...

Support for regulation grows as 78% express concern over harmful experiencesBritish people are increasingly fearful of the risks posed by the internet, prompting greater support for more regulation following recent headlines about the theft of personal data and abusive online behaviour.Research by the media regulator Ofcom found 78% of Britons expressed unprompted concerns about potentially harmful online experiences, a substantial rise from the previous year. Continue reading...

Benefits should be great enough to outweigh any public distrust, says ethics reportFacial recognition software should only be used by police if they can prove it will not introduce gender or racial bias to operations, an ethics panel has said.A report by the London policing ethics panel, which was set up to advise City Hall, concluded that while there were “important ethical issues to be addressed” in the use of the controversial technology, they did not justify not using it at all. Continue reading...

PC; Blue Manchu/Humble Bundle

Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellites ‘have no public consensus and may impair view of the cosmos’Mega constellations of human-made satellites could soon blight the view of the night sky, astronomers warned following the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink probes last week.The first 60 of an intended 12,000 satellites were successfully blasted into orbit on Thursday by Musk’s company, SpaceX, which plans to use them to beam internet communication from space down to Earth. Continue reading...

Kingdom targeted satirist Ghanem Almasarir with Israeli malware, letter of claim alleges

Despite a well-documented gender imbalance within the tech industry, a recent survey suggests that when it comes to VR, women are starting to take up leadership roles in greater numbersWhen the Arab spring uprising began in 2010, film-maker Tamara Shogaolu was living in Egypt. As she travelled around the country collecting oral histories of people’s experiences, she realised the role virtual reality (VR) could play in showcasing these stories. Her VR documentary, Another Dream, debuted at the Tribeca film festival in April. It follows an Egyptian lesbian couple who, facing the post-revolution backlash against LGBT people, escape the country to seek asylum in the Netherlands.“When you’re listening to someone’s voice, to be physically present in their memories is so interesting,” explains Shogaolu. During the production, the characters would describe their feeling of difference as people of colour in majority-white spaces. And it was a feeling familiar to Shogaolu herself, as a black woman working in the male-dominated and white-majority world of tech. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Documents reveal rushed encryption legislation allows police to compel wifi providers to turn over information about usersPeople accessing the internet at McDonald’s and Westfield in Australia could be targeted for surveillance by police under new encryption legislation, according to the home affairs department.A briefing by the department, obtained under freedom of information, reveals that police can use new powers to compel a broad range of companies including social media giants, device manufacturers, telcos, retailers and providers of free wifi to provide information on users. Continue reading...

Social media cannot ensure they only publish truths. But what about deliberate falsehoods designed to damage?Are social media companies responsible for the lies their users tell? Both the obvious answers, “yes” and “no”, are clearly wrong. Complete responsibility is a bad idea, and impossible in practice: even in China, the home of the largest and most sophisticated censorship apparatus on the web, the internet is expected to slow down markedly in the coming weeks under the burden of combing through it to ensure that no references to the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre are published. And, as the Chinese example shows, there are also considerable difficulties that arise when any one organisation can decide what counts as truth or falsehood. Yet it can’t be right, either, to say that social media companies have no responsibility to exercise the powers they have to remove obnoxious material from their servers. Videos of murder, child abuse and other horrors are routinely and rightly removed. It will be objected that these are horrible precisely because they are not lies – they record things that really happened. But that doesn’t stand up. It is no defence, either in British law, or in any moral sense, to say that a video of atrocity is faked. If it works as propaganda for jihadis, or for child abusers, it will be censored and its originators punished if that’s possible.The platforms have been much more reluctant to act against lies which promote causes which are not in themselves criminal, however despicable. Google and Facebook are both advertising businesses, the biggest that the world has ever seen, and they depend on their ability to attract and to retain viewers. So the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones were tolerated for many years. So were the 9/11 truthers, the anti-vaxxers, and, on Twitter, Donald Trump’s campaign to suggest that Obama had been born abroad. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber and Graihagh Jackson team up for the latest instalment of Science with Everything to look at the history and potential future of weather forecasting Continue reading...

Spending too much time at home or in the office is confusing our bodies, which are telling us to get out moreAs a species we need to get out more. Humans now spend so much time indoors that many of us are cultivating a variety of serious health complaints, and for some they could be fatal. It is not so much that outdoor time is inherently good; more that our bodies are built to anticipate it and the way we live now is confusing to our systems. Nearly two decades ago a study published in Nature magazine concluded that the average American spent 93% of their time indoors. And that was before tablets and smartphones.In trying to cope with the shaded, sedentary world we have made, our bodies wage war on what should be harmless antigens; they fail to make bones strong enough to support our weight; even our eyes struggle to focus without the help of lenses. This incremental creep across the threshold to the great indoors began tens of thousands of years ago when the first settled communities emerged. Continue reading...

Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workersQuivering and hesitant, like a spoon-wielding toddler trying to eat soup without spilling it, the world’s first raspberry-picking robot is attempting to harvest one of the fruits.After sizing it up for an age, the robot plucks the fruit with its gripping arm and gingerly deposits it into a waiting punnet. The whole process takes about a minute for a single berry. Continue reading...

It’s now the largest free urban motorsport festival in the UK and this year’s event in Coventry should prove to be spectacular – especially if you love CitroënMotofest

A mysterious column of smoke fills the London sky, in this stylish and funny tale about a journalist on the rocksAs Will Wiles demonstrated in his first novel, 2012’s Care of Wooden Floors, a stain is never just a stain. That novel was a Kafkaesque farce, set in an unnamed post-Soviet principality in which an accidental wine-spill provoked a full-blown existential crisis. The narrator of Wiles’s third novel appears no less neurotic and persecuted; though in this case it is a mysterious column of smoke that seems to be following him around.Jack Bick, a feature writer for an east London-based lifestyle magazine, finds himself staring idly out of the window during an editorial meeting when he notices a mysterious new landmark has appeared: “A column of black smoke arose from the ill-defined, low-rise muddle of the horizon city. Further out than the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs, it nevertheless bested them in height and weight, appearing as the most solid structure in sight.” Continue reading...

All you need to know about the next generation mobile phone networkAfter years of hype, the switch will be flicked on the UK’s first 5G network on 30 May. Network operator EE, part of BT, will be first out of the blocks. According to telecoms and phone firms the benefits of 5G are obvious – but what exactly is it, how can you get it and how much is it going to cost? Continue reading...

Footage of House speaker deliberately slowed down to make her appear drunk or ill

Digital artist Dan Hett explores the Dreamiverse, a galaxy of games, music, art and ideas created by players in a limitless virtual art studioAs a digital artist and experimental games designer, I was one of the first in line to dive into Dreams – a PlayStation 4 game that aims to give everyone the ability to unlock the potential artist within – when the developer Media Molecule opened up limited early access in April. From the breadth of its artistic toolset to the community of creators it is enabling, Dreams feels like the start of a genuine revolution in accessible, creative play. The promise was that Dreams would represent a space where almost anything is possible, and Media Molecule has somehow got closer than I ever imagined.Dreams is hard to sum up succinctly, but it sits somewhere at the intersection of art studio, game engine and vibrant creative community hub. Almost the first thing new players see is a fun video of the development staff, smiling together in their office and holding up handmade “Welcome” signs. This warmth permeates the rest of game, the friendly tone and slightly squishy visual style helping make the work of creation less intimidating. In my real-life work, I favour simple and efficient tools such as Processing, Pico 8 and Twine over sprawling complex packages, and the tools available in Dreams replicate them surprisingly well. Continue reading...