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Category Archives: Terraforming Mars

The Untold Truth Of General Zod – Looper

Posted: June 15, 2022 at 6:22 pm

General Zod has humble origins. His first appearance wasn't even in "Action Comics" or "Superman," the two ongoing titles closely associated with the Man of Steel. Instead, it was in the pages of "Adventure Comics" #283. This was the title to feature the adventures of Superboy, and this issue marks his first encounter with the Phantom Zone. In an instance that would stretch the limits of plausibility if it wasn't occurring in a Silver Age DC story, aPhanton Zone projector falls from the sky and a fluke accident switches on its portal, causing an oblivious Superboy to stumble into the pocket dimension.

In this story, General Zod isn't even introduced as a character Superboy meets in the present. Instead, young Clark sees a flashback to the crime that got Zod locked up in the Phantom Zone in the first place. Turns out the general made an army of robotic duplicates of himself that looked and talked a lot like Bizarro in order to conquer Krypton.Zod almost escapes in "Adventure Comics" #293, thanks to extraterrestrial Brain-Globes mind-controlling the Legion of Super-Heroes. He successfully escapes in "Action Comics" #297, which is also his first appearance in one of the main "Superman" titles. However, instead of Superman, he's defeated by Supergirl in a backup story. Zod and his cronies might have overcome the strength and cunning of Kara Zor-El if only they hadn't decided to double-cross Lex Luthor.

From that point on, Zod frequently escapes the Phantom Zone, but his intentions aren't entirely evil ... only mostly evil. Zod helps Superman in "Action Comics"#549 with his "Zod Squad" in opposition to the murderous Kryptonian enemies the Vrangs. Zod's final appearance prior to being retconned away by "Crisis on Infinite Earths"was in "DC Comics Presents"#97.

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Terraformers Early Access Review One of the Finest Martian Games on Earth – The Workprint

Posted: June 11, 2022 at 1:02 am

Explore Mars, build and develop your cities, manage your resources, and transform the Red Planet into a Green Planet

Developed by Asteroid Lab and published by Goblinz Publishing, Terraformers is an ambitious new 3X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit but no eXterminate!) city builder in the form of a roguelike. Earth is colonizing Mars, and its up to you to ensure that the terraforming proceeds smoothly. In order to do so, you will have to make many critical decisions in managing your resources effectively and keeping your fledgling population happy while progressively increasing the habitability of the harsh, inhospitable planet.

First off, theres an undo button. Most actions other than exploration can be undone. This alone makes me want to give Terraformers a 9/10. Thankfully, the rest of Terraformers is just as indicative of its expert and wonderful design. It has all manner of clean and original art with a refreshing and vibrant style. Its music is beautiful and extremely fitting for this sort of optimistic sci-fi setting, though the logic for BGM selection could be improved. The UI is simple and mostly intuitive, although I would like to dock a point for what it is in its current early access form because it definitely could be better. Even the science of the sci-fi is mostly grounded and based on current tech, which definitely makes Terraformers approachable for space fanatics everywhere. But ultimately, the gameplay itself is deep, thought-evoking, addictive, and wonderfully satisfying, and I find myself glued to the seat until the end of every run.

Terraforming refers to the process in which a planet is made habitable for Earth-based lifeforms. The target planet in Terraformers is our friendly neighborhood red planet Mars, which has been long thought of as the first potential stepping stone for human civilization to become a space-faring species. In comparison to Earth, Mars is desperately lacking a breathable atmosphere, a water cycle, and a consistent livable climate, which are the cornerstones for life flourishing here on Earth. In Terraformers, your four terraforming parameters are temperature, oxygen, ocean level, and atmosphere. As you increase each parameter through their three tiers, the planet becomes more habitable for life, and life can be introduced to those zones that can support them.

Of course, no terraforming process would be complete without introducing life. Terraformers offers three types of lifeforms to be spread on the Martian surface: bacteria, plants, and animals. Bacteria have low requirements to survive and can offer some interesting utility, such as increasing temperature, or even generating resources such as titanium or tritium. Plants also generally provide oxygen or some other small benefits, but otherwise plants and animals are generally there to provide support to your population. All lifeforms also work on a prestige system, wherein the more they are spread, the more support they generate. If you ever wanted a planet just covered in grizzly bears and Arctic pine forests, this is your opportunity.

You are given many tools in order to raise those life-giving parameters and propagate life. Carbon dioxide factories can be built in order to create an atmosphere and increase planetary heat retention. Genetically engineered bacteria can be used to generate oxygen. Martian aquifers can be breached and extracted to contribute to the Martian oceans, which form the foundation of the water cycle. You can even turn to space for your terraforming needs, importing atmosphere or oceans from other nearby celestial bodies. All of these options and more are at your disposal, so long as you have the resources for it.

Naturally, any large scale project requires a considerable amount of resources, but given that were working on a different planet altogether, Martian problems require Martian solutions. Your terraforming efforts will be built on the foundation of resources that are gathered from the surface of the Red Planet.

In Terraformers, you begin with just a single city, a few buildings in your hand, and the resources to build a single mine. You also have the planets surface to yourself, which is covered in all manner of strange Martian features glittering crystal caves, wondrous rock formations, expansive lava tunnels, and dried basins that can be filled with oceans, all waiting to be discovered. Amongst the wonderful is also the mundane necessities of open pit mines for the countless amount of resources needed to fuel development.

While all resources can be found during the course of regular exploration, some resources (food, power, and research) are more regularly generated by buildings in cities, and others (water, nitrates, silicates, titanium, and tritium) are more regularly obtained from mines on the Martian surface. These materials are typically used for buildings within a certain type for example, water or nitrates are commonly found in food production buildings, silicates are typically used for research or high-tech, and titanium is used for all sorts of mundane tech. As you begin mining, you are able to trade those resources with Earth for others that are more urgently needed for your immediate development. For instance, food is used to either expand your population in a city, or to found a new city elsewhere; power is used every turn for exploration, as well as to construct mines.

Your defeat condition revolves around the resource known as support, which is the happiness level of your fledgling Martian population. It is generated by good city design, improving comfort of living, and can also be discovered via exploration, but as time passes, the amount of negative support generated by the population increases, meaning its a constant balancing act spending resources on economic development and support. On higher difficulties, there is a point in the mid-game where you are cruising along the razors edge, always within a few turns of defeat. Victory depends on whether you can pass a critical level of resource generation in that time to firmly establish your support production.

Unlike many other city-building or civilization-sprawling games, Terraformers allows you to develop your cities on both a local scale and a planetary scale.

A city has a limited number of plots for buildings, and those plots are arranged in different patterns for each city. There are ideal patterns to design certain elements of your city for example, housing always has adjacency bonuses for support, and selecting the right buildings for a residential cluster within a certain plot pattern can mean the difference in surviving just one more turn.

As far as planetary development goes, all development occurs on locations that are discovered through exploration. Locations can have specific features, such as terrain for city-building like craters, or high ground that can grant bonus yields to buildings such as solar panels. There is also low ground that will eventually be covered by the rising sea level, but dikes can be constructed to keep them dry. However, a city needs to be expanded to the location in order to utilize it, namely through increasing its population or constructing buildings like bus stations.

This dual layer of city development allows for considerable amount of interesting decision making as you juggle this complex development of a dozen cities per run with expanding your resource generation and trying to achieve the victory conditions.

Each step in the terraforming process is clear, but roguelike RNG forces a considerable amount of decision-making on every turn, and makes every run feel fresh and unique. You will never have two identical cities in a single run, and your developmental path for each run will be wildly different.

To begin with, city development does not occur like other city builder games rather than selecting buildings to construct based on your current technology level, you are able to choose one of several buildings to add to your hand every turn, and can choose to construct any building from your hand at any time. The offered buildings get progressively more advanced, and thus you are able to complete more ambitious projects as time goes on. There is a strict limit to how many cards you can have in your hand at once, which encourages you to play for the now, rather than saving forever for a future that may not come. It may be tempting to pick up a GMO lab to greatly ramp up food production, but if you do not have the adequate science production, that card might take up a precious slot in your hand for many turns, which can severely restrict your options. At the same time, the science resource is used in the building that increases your hand limit, which means youll have to decide between a greatly boosted food production or increasing the chances of obtaining another extremely valuable building the next turn, such a space telescope that can generate a ridiculous amount of science per turn. You will always be barely short of a particular resource, and while waiting to accumulate a sufficient amount, your attention will be ripped away towards another tantalizing new project that will completely derail all your previous plans.

At the start of every run, you are also prompted to select a leader. There are many leaders that each have special active abilities and a special passive ability, and you will be able to perform one action with them per turn. However, you are only able to choose from two randomly selected leaders at a time, and they retire after 10 turns, though their passive ability will remain with you for the rest of the run. Each leader will specialize in a particular area, whether it is resource generation, exploration, population support, or directly improving your terraforming parameters.

While the full release will offer additional game modes such as the highly anticipated endless mode, currently in Early Access, Terraformers offers a selection of victory conditions, and you choose one as an end-goal for your forthcoming run. For instance, you can choose to raise all four terraforming parameters to a certain level, or you can choose to propagate a certain amount of lifeforms. Each run then becomes a race to complete the objective as soon as possible, and you are scored based on your speed and performance. However, the run ends as soon as the objective is complete, which is a bit disappointing for prospective players who are looking to make an entirely green planet.

Currently, Terraformers is playable in an early access build, and additional features and content are planned to be included in the full release. This includes some modern staples such as an in-game wiki and the aforementioned endless mode (which is actually a fully featured custom mode), as well as a new feature known as Technologies, which are played like space projects but only require the science resource.

There is also a roadmap for all the updates up until release, which include a considerable amount of gameplay content and features. The roadmap can be viewed below.

As a lover of roguelike and simulation games, and as a general enthusiast about space and sci-fi, Terraformers has definitely left a considerable impression on me. Its wonderfully addictive gameplay loop is wrapped in an immersive and lovingly crafted package that delivers on all fronts. While its undeniable that it is currently in an unfinished early-access state, the developers communicate frequently with the community and have shown several glimpses into the finished product, which show immense promise. Many of the issues that Ive had with Terraformersare UI-related, but it appears that the UI, among many other aspects of the game, are due for a final layer of polish that will truly propel this game into greatness.

Terraformers was released for Early Access on Steam and GOG on April 21, 2022. There is no set date for full-release, but is expected to be within the next 6 months. Terraformers currently has localization for English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian.

There is a Discord available for the game, where the community can interact with the developers directly to learn more about the game, discuss development, and report issues.

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Bitcoin Mining In The 22nd Century – Bitcoin Magazine

Posted: at 1:02 am

This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine's "Moon Issue." To get a copy, visit our store.

BLOCK HEIGHT: 4,830,001

(c. Year 2100 in old terminology)

Greetings from the deep future! It is block height 4,830,001, and we have just had an interplanetary 23rd halving party. It is the year 2100, or as we now know it, the year 91 AB (After Bitcoin). Luckily for all of you, time travel has been discovered, and I can share the good news with all of you! The first half of the 21st century was beset by financial crises, war, poverty, inequality, environmental destruction and a COVID-19 pandemic, which caused international rolling lockdowns for over a decade, until the collapse of the global fiat economy necessitated a move away from lockdownism, profligate spending and inflation, and a return to monetary and economic, and hence, environmental, sustainability. To start, Ill give you a decade-by-decade look at how we arrived at our halving party.

While the worlds major economies were busy destroying themselves in the 2020s, smart money started migrating to Bitcoin, which created tremendous opportunities for Bitcoin miners, leading to more miners entering the market, increasing competition, and importantly, dramatically increasing innovation. By the end of 2029, every semi-industrial Bitcoin miner in the world was using low-energy cooling technologies, with just one 40-foot container full of immersed and overclocked mining rigs able to provide 5 megawatts (roughly one-third of an exahash) of portable, profit-generating electrical load, anywhere on the planet. By the end of the 2030s, all of the worlds flared gas was piped into Bitcoin containers, and customers were found for all of the worlds curtailed energy. Inflation was going at around 20% a year since the time youre reading this, so the $5.65 Big Mac you ate in 2021 would set you back about $300 in 2039. Luckily for you, bitcoin was worth $5,000,000, and fiat death was only about a decade away at this point. Unfortunately for billions of people on Earth, however, wage inflation was only 2%, and many hundreds of millions of people died due to famine and scarcityinduced conflict and social collapse in impoverished locations waiting for the fiat system to collapse under its own weight in 2050. Anyone who saved some sats during the 2020s and 2030s were themselves saved when economic judgment day arrived.

Further, the 2030s and 2040s saw the Bitcoin mining industry being the go-to buyer of first resort to prove remote nuclear fusion, solar, wind, hydroelectric and geothermal projects. While fusion had famously been 30 years away for a century at that point, thanks to Bitcoin, fusion was finally proven by 2049. Thanks to Bitcoin, a sustainable energy revolution took place, and humanity finally succeeded where international governments and agencies like the United Nations (UN) and World Economic Forum (WEF) failed consistently on their targets for several generations. The end of the 2040s was marked by mega-mergers between the worlds largest publicly listed energy companies, semiconductor design and manufacturing companies, and Bitcoin mining, consumer product and service companies.

In 2050, these quadrillion-dollar mega entities could design and build their own ASICs, mass-manufacture them, mine at large scale with energy they produced, and also offer customers the full suite of Bitcoin hardware, software and financial services. There were around 10 of these international megacorps that served about 80% of the market, with a booming open-source ecosystem of thousands of private, free, decentralized options serving the other 20% of the market. Competition in the Bitcoin mining space at this point was summed up as absolutely cut-throat with profit margins approaching zero, where the only way to remain alive was by competing on either cost or innovation.

With the price of bitcoin in 2050 being around $10,000,000, and now only growing at around 3% per annum due to its maturity and market saturation, silly novelties like physical metals have been completely demonetized. That $300 Big Mac you ate in 2039 was a cool $1,000 now, too. While gold was performing strongly at $10,000 per ounce in 2040, about 10 Big Macs, smart investors were growing impatient still holding gold over bitcoin after missing 1,000,000% upside over the past 30 years. People started becoming offended at being offered jewelry instead of satoshis.

As a result, by 2050, gold, and all other precious metals were selling by the tonne rather than the gram or ounce, which allowed humanity to take advantage of the miracle of gold, silver, platinum and others as building and industrial materials. Previously prohibitively costly technologies and innovations were unlocked due to plummeting material costs. Due to golds specific durability and anti-radiation properties, we could finally look to space. While most people were accustomed to a 10 Gbit/s internet connection in 2050, 1 Mbit/s satellite internet was free and ubiquitous around the world by then.

While the Bitcoin blockchain was now about 3 terabytes in size, the largely Bitcoin-driven revolution in semiconductor manufacturing meant that you could be up and running with your own synced up Bitcoin full node for the cost of a Big Mac. The Bitcoin-driven energy revolution also meant that at-home fusion reactors were now only 30 years away from proving out at this time. The EU, U.S. and China have collapsed, alongside the UN, and there are now 2,000 independent states, that compete for the worlds best talent through responsible policy. War is not possible under a finite monetary system, and world peace has been achieved.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. A hundred years on from JFKs famous speech and several of the worlds free independent states have established bases on the moon. Due to the sheer amount of satellites and relays in space, moon miners were not at a large disadvantage, and all energy not dedicated to terraforming the moon is going toward Bitcoin mining. On Earth, 25% of the worlds energy is dedicated to mining bitcoin, and due to the largely Bitcoin-driven intense competition in the energy markets, regular people effectively had access to very low-cost, if not free, energy. By the end of the 2070s, no one on planet Earth was without energy or electricity, and its all cheap and clean, thanks mainly to Bitcoin. The energy revolution enabled unprecedented opportunities for individual sovereignty and self-sufficiency, and major advancements in 3D printing and materials over the past half a century has made the Star Trek replicator dream one step closer to reality. Who ended up building the roads? Thanks to the Bitcoin monetary stack, micro and nano payments enabled a road network where users can pay competing private road operators for road use, even in per meter traveled increments, and even allow payments between vehicles themselves. This may sound strange but paying a few extra sats for all of your services still ends up being far, far cheaper than suffering through inflation and paying income, sales and land taxes.

The 2080s and 2090s saw a fairer global wealth distribution than that presented by Credit Suisse in its "2021 Global Wealth Report. Back then, the top 1.1% of the population held 45.8% of global wealth, with the next 11.1% holding another 39.1%, and the bottom 55% only owning 1.3%. Now, the top 1% only hold 20% of the wealth, with the bottom 80% holding a far healthier 20%. Although this isnt necessarily equal, this is far more in line with natural power laws (i.e., the 80-20 rule). Indeed, with the ending of the fiat delusion of finite resources, infinite money and the market- and society-distorting practice of mass money printing, humanity was able to return to a more natural path. In the old fiat days, the top 1% could gamble, get bailouts from the government if the bet went sour, and off to the casino they went again. Now, the people who sell or spend their bitcoin know just how difficult they are to earn back. Once its spent, its spent forever. No reprints. Importantly, with terraforming of the moon well underway, and Mars also becoming a tourist destination, the worlds people were culturally ready to usher in a new century of reaching for the stars.

And finally we arrive to now, the year 2100. There are still 10 megacorps that provide 80% of the mining hash rate, products and services, but none of the 10 megacorps that were around in 2050 are still in business. Competition is so fierce that it is unlikely that the current crop of Bitcoin megacorps will survive this century. The worlds wealthy are now mining at home on their own fusion mini-reactors, and at-home mining is generally responsible for 20% of the hash rate. A third of the worlds energy is dedicated to mining, and the worlds grid is emissions free. Of note is that humanity now uses a full 50 times more energy than we did a century ago all clean. Although people generally know what Bitcoin is, there are now so many layers and abstractions, bitcoin is just money to Earth- and moon-bound people. Almost no individuals use baselayer Bitcoin to transact, and very few even use Layer 2 either, with most people using Layer 3 or above for day-to-day activities. Unfortunately though, the speed of light is too slow, and Bitcoins 10-minute block time is too fast, for bitcoin to be an effective money across the entire universe. The Martians have bootstrapped their own local proof-of-work-based monetary system, and a healthy UnEx (universal exchange) Market is forming. Although we still have another 40 years or so before the mining reward ends, the not enough fee revenue risk failed to materialize. Base-layer blocks are full, 24/7, just under a million transactions per day, with each of these million transactions themselves settling hundreds of thousands of other transactions per day on higher layers. While a base-layer transaction costs the equivalent of $1,000 in 2021 money, the total value settled per transaction is closer to $10 million, making the effective fee rate 0.01%.

Some parting advice from deep into the future: Take good care of your keys and hold onto them for dear life. Now it's time for me to head back to the future. I have a lunch date with my grandfather, The Friar himself, at a fighting-fit 114 years old, who's fresh out of hospital with a new set of 3D-printed stem-cell lungs. He's on his second 3D-printed heart, and third 3D-printed liver indeed, HODLing was not easy.

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Sins Of The Black Flamingo Thank FOC It’s Saturday, 4th of June 2022 – Bleeding Cool News

Posted: at 1:02 am

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Thank FOC It's Saturday Planned to coincide and cover the demands of Final Order Cut Off at Diamond Comic Distributorson Monday. And nowLunar Distribution and Penguin Random House on Sunday as well. So here's this week's comics product coming through that may need adjusting as demand slips and slides with the emerging economic bubble. Or somesuch. Traditionally FOC is the date when retailers have a last chance to amend their advance orders for comic books without penalty. A final opportunity for publishers to promote books while orders can still be added. A time for credits to be amends, new covers to be revealed, and a final push given. This is an attempt to sift through them all and find the most relevant items. But no DC this week, they are giving it a miss.

Sign up below, and we'll see what Thank FOC It's Friday brings next week on time possibly.

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Free to grab: Far Cry 4 and more games with Amazon Prime Gaming – guru3d.com

Posted: June 1, 2022 at 8:25 pm

Prime members will get full access to a new lineup of popular games on the Prime Gaming Channel beginning June 1, including Moving Out, Lumines Remastered, Beach Buggy Racing 2: Hot Wheels Edition, BloodRayne 2: Terminal Cut, and Far Cry 4.

You must be an Amazon Prime member to receive free Prime Gaming June 2022 games, however ... these games are still available for free with a trial account.

To obtain all of the games listed above, simply sign up for FREE for Amazon Prime (which includes Prime Gaming, formerly known as Twitch Prime). After the free trial period (which you can cancel at any time), Amazon Prime costs between $2.99 and $12.99 per month, depending on your location. If you intend to "snatch games and terminate the subscription," remember to unsubscribe.

Claim the games from theAmazon Prime Gaming page.

Free to grab: Borderlands 3 free on Epic Games Store - 05/19/2022 06:23 PMThe classic shooter-looter returns with a slew of new weapons and a mayhem-filled adventure! This week, Epic is giving you this PC game for free! It is free till May 26th, 2022....

Free to grab: Prey at Epic Games Store - 05/13/2022 09:17 AMPrey, a sci-fi shooter RPG by Bethesda, is being given away for free by Epic Games for the next week, starting today and running through May 19th, 2022....

Free to grab: Terraforming Mars - 05/06/2022 08:38 AMTerraforming Mars, (digital board game) in which you change Mars into a habitable planet, is being given away for free by Epic Games....

Free to grab: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Steam - 04/27/2022 09:08 AMWolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a World War II first-person multiplayer shooter, is now available for free on Steam....

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The best Memorial Day sales we can find on gadgets, games, and tech gear [Updated] – Ars Technica

Posted: at 8:25 pm

Ars Technica

Update (5/30/22 10:55 am ET): We've updated our roundup of recommended Memorial Day deals for the holiday proper, crossing out expired offers and adding new discounts on Nintendo's Switch Pro Controller, Roomba robot vacuums, Roku streamers, and Xbox Series S bundles, among others.

Original post (5/28/22 2:30 pm ET):It's Memorial Day weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of good tech deals from around the web includes all the best offers we could dig up from this weekend's crop of holiday sales. While Memorial Day promotions generally focus on home goods, appliances, and mattresses more than electronics, we've still found a few gadget deals of note for those who can't wait for more tech-centric sales events like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day.

Beyond that, our roundupincludesseveralongoing deals on PlayStation games and gear, including a rare discount on PlayStation 5 controllers, plus lower-than-usual prices on Bose's highly comfortable QuietComfort 45headphones, Google's Nest Hub smart display and Nest Audio smart speaker, well-reviewed laptops from Lenovo and HP, an excellent LG OLED TV, tons of PC games, and some 4K Blu-rays for a few movies we like. You can peruse our full curated list of Memorial Day deals below.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post throughaffiliate programs.

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Free to grab: Bioshock: The Collection at Epic Games Store – guru3d.com

Posted: at 8:25 pm

BioShock: The Collection includes all of the single-player material from BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite, as well as DLC..

Return to the cities of Rapture and Columbia and experience the award-winning BioShock franchise like never before, beautifully remastered in 1080p. BioShock: The Collection contains all single-player content from BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite, all single-player add-on content, the Columbias Finest pack, and Directors Commentary: Imagining BioShock, featuring Ken Levine and Shawn Robertson.

BioShock is a shooter unlike any youve ever played, loaded with weapons and tactics never seen. Youll have a complete arsenal at your disposal from simple revolvers to grenade launchers and chemical throwers, but youll also be forced to genetically modify your DNA to create an even more deadly weapon: you.

Set approximately 10 years after the events of the original BioShock, the halls of Rapture once again echo with sins of the past. Along the Atlantic coastline, a monster has been snatching little girls and bringing them back to the undersea city of Rapture. Players step into the boots of the most iconic denizen of Rapture, the Big Daddy, as they travel through the decrepit and beautiful fallen city, chasing an unseen foe in search of answers and their own survival.

Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt. The year is 1912. Deep in debt, Booker DeWitt has only one opportunity for a clean slate: rescue Elizabeth, a mysterious girl imprisoned since childhood in the flying city of Columbia.

Head over toEpic Games Storeor navigate to the game in the Epic launcher before June 2nd 2022, add the game to your cart and checkout. Simple as that. After that, the game is yours to keep, and play, forever.

Free to grab: Prey at Epic Games Store - 05/13/2022 09:17 AMPrey, a sci-fi shooter RPG by Bethesda, is being given away for free by Epic Games for the next week, starting today and running through May 19th, 2022....

Free to grab: Terraforming Mars - 05/06/2022 08:38 AMTerraforming Mars, (digital board game) in which you change Mars into a habitable planet, is being given away for free by Epic Games....

Free to grab: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Steam - 04/27/2022 09:08 AMWolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a World War II first-person multiplayer shooter, is now available for free on Steam....

Free to grab: XCOM 2 is free at Epic Games Store - 04/15/2022 09:43 AMFor one week only, Epic Games is giving away free copies of the turn-based strategy game XCOM 2. Get this game from Epic before April 21st and you'll have it for life!...

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Early Memorial Day deal: get 33% off the Terraforming Mars board game – Space.com

Posted: May 25, 2022 at 3:37 am

You can get a third off one of the top space-themed board games on the market, Terraforming Mars ahead of this weekend's Memorial Day celebrations.If you're looking for a space-themed game to play with the family over the long weekend, we'd highly recommend snapping up this deal.

Right now, you can get the Terraforming Mars board game for $46.99 at Amazon (opens in new tab), down from the usual price of $69.95. That's a hefty saving of $22.96. Board games can be an expensive hobby, so we think this a great deal on a fantastic game.

Terraforming Mars is a game that allows players to raise the temperature, expand the ocean coverage and raise the oxygen level so the Red Planet becomes inhabitable for humans. We like this game a lot, so much so that it features prominently in our best space board games guide. It's suitable for 2-5 players and you must work together in the terraforming process, but ultimately you're also competing against each other to achieve the best results.

Set in the 2400s, this epic space board game is suitable for those aged 12 and above and offers them a great blend of entertainment, through playing, working with, and competing against each other as well as educational matter by teaching players what it might actually take to terraform Mars.

There are plenty of expansions too to this game, which are also available on Amazon. Players will compete for the best places to build their cities as well as the best places to put their ocean and greenery tiles. Players will also collect project cards which will see them attempt to introduce plant life, and animals, build cities and establish greenhouse gasses to try and raise the temperature of the planet.

Saving over $20 (opens in new tab) is a pretty big deal, especially on a board game as good as this one. This is definitely a game that has replayability value, so you will get your money's worth when purchasing. The only question that remains is: do you have what it takes to terraform mars? There's only one way to find out.

If you're in the market for more great space-themed deals, be sure to check out our Lego space deals, space board game deals and our telescopes deals guides.

Today's best Terraforming Mars deals

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Todays best deals: iPad Air, recommended board games, and gaming mice – Ars Technica

Posted: May 23, 2022 at 11:46 am

Ars Technica

The time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a handy deal for Apple's newest iPad Air, which is down to $559 at Amazon and Walmart. Outside of a very brief drop to $549 last month, this is the lowest price we've seen for the 10.9-inch tablet, which only launched in March and goes for an MSRP of $600.

Beyond that, we also have deals on a bunch of well-reviewed gaming gear, a soundbar and streamer hybrid from Roku, an entry-level Wacom drawing tablet, various video games, USB-C chargers, SSDs, and more. You can find our full curated list below.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post throughaffiliate programs.

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Todays best deals: iPad Air, recommended board games, and gaming mice - Ars Technica

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Why Is Board Gaming So White And Male? I’m Trying To Figure That Out – Kotaku Australia

Posted: at 11:46 am

Board games have been having a bit of a cultural moment. They experienced a resurgence of popularity at the beginning of the pandemic. A Statista report projected the total overall board game market might reach US$12-billion by 2023.

It makes sense that board games gained popularity during the pandemic. Board games can provide relatively affordable, reusable, home-based entertainment. Scrabble was designed by Alfred Mosher Butts during the Great Depression. Eleanor Abbott created Candy Land after her contracting polio and spending extended time in the hospital during the epidemic in the United States.

I have loved board games my whole life and in the last 10 years spent my time browsing shops for the newest releases, growing increasingly addicted to watching board game channels on YouTube and collecting games a collection which has taken over several rooms in my home.

I regularly noticed that these friendly local game shops were filled with mostly white men, often on their own, wandering the stacks. It made me wonder, why is board gaming so white and male?

As a doctoral student at X University and York University in their joint communication and culture program, I have noticed a lack of contemporary scholarship on board games, as most game scholarship focuses on video games.

To fill this gap, I decided to spend the last four years of my life delving into the industry.

Board gaming, like many other cultural spheres, has been socially shaped and constructed, with products being created for an imagined audience. The imagined audience for board games is, most often, a cis, straight, middle-class able-bodied white man.

The result of this social shaping has been that board gaming spaces have, over time, have become an exclusive preserve for this default, imagined audience. Sometimes, this kind of social shaping, intentionally or not, can create a vicious circle of exclusion for other identities.

As I talked to people in board gaming communities and examined the games themselves, I realized that there were big, systemic social, labour and economic issues that were limiting the wide-spread adoption of board gaming and market growth.

My research argues that one of the key factors facing board gaming is the homogeneity of the current board game design labour pool and limited representation on the products themselves.

I found that 92.6 per cent of the designers of the 400 top-ranked board games on BoardGameGeek were white men.

The cover art images on the boxes of the top-ranked 200 BoardGameGeek ranked games with games such as Gloomhaven (2017),Marvel Champions: The Card Game (2019), Terraforming Mars (2016) and Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (2015) skewed heavily toward white-presenting males. Of the total 1,974 figures analyzed during my board game cover art analyses, white male imagery was predominant.

Images of men and boys represented 76.8 per cent of the human representation on covers, or 647 images in games such as Great Western Trail (2016) and War of the Ring: Second Edition (2012), compared to 23.2 per cent of the images of women and girls, which represented only 195 of the images counted as in games with more gender representation like Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015)

White imagery was found on 82.5 per cent of the images or 528 compared to BIPOC imagery which made up only 17.5 per cent of the images, or 112 total images.

A lack of representation sends a message to potential audiences. But does this lack of representation matter to current board gamers?

I conducted an online survey of 320 respondents in late 2020. In total, 70.7 per cent of respondents shared that they play board games at least once a week. More than half (53.5 per cent) of the sample have been board gaming for 11 years or more.

I tried to get a diverse sample through exhaustive recruitment efforts as I was looking to hear from voices that were not often heard from in other board game surveys.

I got back a set of respondents who were mainly from North America (73.8 per cent). The majority of survey respondents identified as women at 60.4 per cent, including trans women which represented 4.9 per cent. More than a quarter of my survey respondents identified as men at 25.3 per cent and 9.4 per cent identified as non-binary.

Most of the respondents were white (74.9 per cent), while 20.4 percent identified as BIPOC. More than half of the sample (52.8 per cent) identified as being part of the 2SLGBTQiIA+ community.

The survey respondents shared that gender and racial representation did matter to them, in fact it mattered a lot. Respondents agreed or strongly agreed (80.2 per cent) that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable gender representation in games design and 84 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable racial representation in games design.

Another overwhelming majority (83.6 per cent) agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable gender representation in board game artwork. Similarly, 84 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable racial representation in board game artwork.

The current reality? Despite straight white males making up roughly 25 per cent of the U.S. population the U.S. being one of the worlds largest consumer markets and straight white males being an even smaller portion of the global market they currently make up about 80 per cent or more of the representation in board games.

Do these realities the board game industrys persistent focus on a small demographic and its skewed representation on the products toward this small population create the necessary conditions for market growth and expansion of the board game industry?

The answer can only be no.Tanya A Pobuda, PhD Candidate, Graduate/Research Assistant, Communication and Culture, Toronto Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Why Is Board Gaming So White And Male? I'm Trying To Figure That Out - Kotaku Australia

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