Author: Jack Slater

  • Ex-Theme Hospital Developers Making New Theme Hospital

    If I said “Two Point Hospital” out-loud you might think I was discussing some asinine venture-funded startup designed to revolutionize the medical experience for anyone wealthy enough to afford it. Thank goodness, Sega and Two Point Studios are just making a new hospital management game using developers who have worked on Theme Hospital before. EA…

  • Waking Up to An Incoming Ballistic Missile

    Saturday, yesterday, my wife ran into the house a few minutes after 8 AM  and shook me awake with the news that a ballistic missile was incoming towards our home. She had received the alert via the emergency system on every smartphone. We didn’t know why my phone hadn’t sounded the alarm (my wife says…

  • Vive Pro Announced at CES Without a Price & A Disgraceful Anniversary for Valve

    HTC announced a Vive Pro with higher resolution goggles than their original SteamVR virtual reality headset, built-in headphones (they were previously available separately), a more comfortable strap, a second camera and microphone are now built into the headset, and an official wireless module that is sold separately. The resolution is the biggest thing here. The…

  • Bruce Dawson’s Xbox 360 Prefetch Bug

    Bruce Dawson once worked for Microsoft where he found a bug in the Xbox 360 that he was reminded of by the Spectre and Meltdown exploits: A game developer who was using this function reported weird crashes – heap corruption crashes, but the heap structures in the memory dumps looked normal. After staring at the…

  • Meltdown & Spectre: Update Everything

    There are two big computer vulnerabilities that were announced recently, Spectre and Meltdown attacks. These are significant because they affect almost every desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, and game console. Almost anything with a processor can be exploited to give attackers passwords and whatever other private information is on a device. The attacks work because of…