Another year, another dueling release from the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises. With their latest entries, the two games find themselves striking out on drastically different paths.
Another year, another dueling release from the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises. It has become an annual affair for these two rivaling rhythm games to flood store shelves over the holidays with their plastic-instrument-driven rock simulators.
And since Guitar Hero officially jumped onto the full-band bandwagon last year with Guitar Hero: World Tour, the games have been basically indistinguishable, save for the song choices.
That all changes now. With their latest entries, the two games find themselves striking out on drastically different paths.
The Beatles: Rock Band is grown-up, highly polished, and almost worshipful in its treatment of the source material--if you fail out of a song, the crowd doesn't even boo the band. Guitar Hero 5 is loose, eclectic and oh-so-irreverent: Icons Johnny Cash and Kurt Cobain are unlockable characters in the game who can be digitally resurrected and puppeteered into singing Bon Jovi songs.
These attitudes carry on through the two games. The Beatles: Rock Band is by far the most polished game the music-miming genre has ever seen--with all the slickness of a track that's been remastered a dozen times over the past 40 years.
In some ways, this makes it the superior game. The in-game animations are particularly gorgeous. Music games' background videos of on-stage bands often feel obligatory and slapped together. Not here. The CG movies are polished and realistic, and the Beatles' late-era songs (the ones made after they gave up touring and became a studio band) are particularly awesome, with on-stage footage replaced by psychedelic dreamscapes custom-made to match each song. We've got Ringo leading a procession of band mates through the bottom of the ocean ("Octopus's Garden"), and Lennon rocking out through a blitz of red Soviet imagery ("Back in the USSR"). For some players, these videos alone will be worth the game's steep price of admission.
But The Beatles: Rock Band has a fatal flaw--the limited range of sound. I recently had a group of friends over to help me test out the game, full-band-style. Less than an hour into the game, they were begging to play Guitar Hero 5. The problem, as one friend put it: "The Beatles just don't rock." And, with a few exceptions, (like "Helter Skelter" and "Taxman") he's right. Beatles songs are unlikely to motivate karaoke mimers into David Lee Roth-like jump kicks and theatrics. They are great songs, melodic songs, and songs that have accumulated decades of rip-offs and memories. But they are unlikely to motivate anybody to jump on the couch.
So which game is the better pick? That all comes down to an age-old question: Are you a Beatles person, or a Rolling Stones person? Do you prefer John and Paul's harmonies, or Mick's feedback-filled strut? If you're a Beatlemaniac, the pick is obvious. But if you like your music games with a bit more edge, Guitar Hero 5 may be the better pick.
Google's Project Wing has the ambition of using drones as delivery bots. But to do it, the machines need a beacon that can indicate its position, allowing other drones to make earlier corrections to avoid collisions. As Air & Space Magazine writes, Google's drone delivery could be helping real life pilots drive down the cost of their own transponders. Way, way down.
By 2020, all planes in the United States will be required to have an automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system on board, a system that transmits the location information of the craft constantly and automatically. But the current systems are quite expensive, anywhere from $4,000 to $7,000. This is a big cost for amateur pilots, and one that's none-too-popular in the community. But by throwing its titanic weight behind a drone delivery program to take on Amazon, Google stands to drive the cost of those transponders way, way down, saving private pilots a small fortune in the meantime.
There is a catch though. While drones and airplanes are going to need to share the sky eventually, ADS-B might be the way to go. As Air & Space also points out, it could flood the frequencies of radio used by the aviation industry, creating interference problems. The crowded frequencies would reduce the operational distance of the technology, and could cause it to work only once flying objects are already too close for comfort. So while Google's drone army may solve one problem, it could very well create another. One that will have to be worked out if the skies of the future can reach a modicum of safety.
Text size, especially in emagazines, is one of the biggest complaints about Apple's baby tablet. Here's what to do about it.
What's more, most don't allow you to zoom in on them the way you can with websites or PDFs. (Though, to toot the PM horn: Our tablet apps are designed to be legible on both 7- and 10-inch devices; the typeface is big enough for 7-inch tablets but small enough so as not to look outrageous on larger screens.) The solution lies in the iPad's Accessibility settings, where you can turn on zoom. A double tap with three fingers zooms in; keep your fingers on the screen after the second tap and slide up or down to adjust how magnified the image is.
Though magazines on Android tablets generally allow zoomingunlike those on an iPad with Accessibility turned offyou may want to turn on overall zooming abilities to let you magnify, say, a home-screen image. Turn on magnification in the Accessibility settings. Zoom in by triple-tapping with one finger, and adjust the magnification by pinching with two fingers.
While you're at it, you might want to make all text on your tablet bigger. On both iOS and Android devices, head to Accessibility to change the overall system type size to something that doesn't require a monocle. Keep in mind this won't affect type size in most magazines because they are technically image files, not text.
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