Being an indie developer, DrinkBox Studios has the freedom to make unusual choices. After finishing Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, the team got together and tossed out ideas. This horizontal leadership structure brought out some interesting concepts and the most compelling one came from an animator. The theme he put forward was a game based on Mexican folklore and luchadores.
?Homesickness was the genesis of the game,? said developer Chris McQuinn. His studio is based in Toronto.
The result is Guacamelee!, a 2D Metroidvania style adventure, starring Juan Aguacate (That?s John Avocado in Spanish.). He?s an agave farmer who is murdered after trying to save his town and El Presidente?s daughter from Calaca, the king of the underworld. Juan is shot dead and his spirit descends to the World of the Dead. It?s there that his spirit sees a magical mask, and once he dons it, he becomes a powerful luchador.
The differences between the living world and the dead world.
Juan now has the ability to fight the monsters from the underworld and that?s a useful power to have when the king of the underworld is trying to start the apocalypse by merging the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead together. Furthermore, that duality of the worlds plays a central role in the gameplay.
The luchador can jump between both lands and he?ll need to do that to get through obstacles. The constant flipping is a mechanic that?s reminiscent of Ikagura. Juan will leap through portals taking him to the Land of the Dead where things are slightly different and he can do a wall jump and exit through a second portal and to another platform. From a casual perspective, it looks complicated, and DrinkBox admits that it will take time for players to adjust.
Some enemies will have shields and Juan will have to execute a super move that?s the same color as the barrier.
Like other Metroidvania games, Juan will gain abilities and that will open up new parts of the world. The aforementioned wall jump is taught to him by Huay Chivo, a goat man who is the closest thing our hero has to a mentor. The luchador will eventually be able to switch between the two worlds at will. When it comes to combat, Juan does have several super moves, but he can?t spam them out. It takes up stamina and players will have to use his special attacks judiciously to either give them a boost to another platform or fighting certain enemies who are weak to certain moves.
What separates Guacamelee! from other adventures though is its unique take and visual style. There aren?t many games based on Mexican folklore, and playing it, you learn to appreciate DrinkBox?s colorful art. The huge Alebrije is delightful eye candy while villains like Xtabay are unlike anything players have seen in the past. In a fun twist, the developer?s do give a nod to classic games. There are statues that look like Chozo?s from Metroid and a boss battle that resembles a the fight between Mario and Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Old-school gamers will get a kick out of that.
The Alebrije is one of the more gorgeous creatures that players will run into in the world.
Lastly, there are some advances in the genre. A second local player will be able to join the fun. Tostada appears near the beginning of the game, and she?ll be a huge help to Juan when he gets trapped in arenas where they must defeat several waves of enemies. The drawback is that having a second person makes the platforming more difficult. The other interesting feature is the PlayStation Vita support that puts the world map on the touchscreen. Instead of pausing the game to look at where to go, players can just glance down and see their destination.
From what I saw at GDC 2013, Guacamelee! is one of the more promising games from an indie developer. It?s scheduled for release this spring on the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita.
Images courtesy of Sony
Want to know what Gieson Cacho is playing? Follow him on Twitter.
'I enjoy doing old stuff,' singer Kim Deal tells MTV News before Wednesday night's show in Newport, Kentucky. By Gil Kaufman, with additional reporting by James Montgomery
The Breeders' Kim Deal Photo: Tim Mosenfelder/ Getty Images
Android launchers cross our desks everysooften but only a handful catch our eye. Action Launcher Pro is the latest to strike our fancy thanks to its quick and compact widget solution dubbed Shutters. With the freshly added feature, users can open up widgets by simply giving app icons a vertical swipe. Version 1.5 also packs a number of improvements, including support for 10-inch tablets and increased stability. Devices running Android 4.0.3 or newer will be able to take the launcher for a spin, but Shutters is a Jelly Bean-only affair thanks to API limitations. Head past the break to catch the software in action, or click the second source link to pick it up for $3.99.
Mar 26 (Reuters) - Leading money winners on the 2013 PGATour on Monday (U.S. unless stated): 1. Tiger Woods $3,787,600 2. Brandt Snedeker $2,859,920 3. Matt Kuchar $2,154,500 4. Steve Stricker $1,820,000 5. Phil Mickelson $1,650,260 6. Hunter Mahan $1,553,965 7. John Merrick $1,343,514 8. Dustin Johnson $1,330,507 9. Russell Henley $1,313,280 10. Kevin Streelman $1,310,343 11. Keegan Bradley $1,274,593 12. Charles Howell III $1,256,373 13. Michael Thompson $1,254,669 14. Brian Gay $1,171,721 15. Justin Rose $1,155,550 16. Jason Day $1,115,565 17. Chris Kirk $1,097,053 18. ...
Mar. 28, 2013 ? Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost neverperfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Zhigong Song, Vasilii I. Artyukhov, Boris I. Yakobson, Zhiping Xu. Pseudo Hall?Petch Strength Reduction in Polycrystalline Graphene. Nano Letters, 2013; : 130325121321001 DOI: 10.1021/nl400542n
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
From left, D'Amore-McKim School of Business students Jed Baker, '14, Stefanie Raiola, '13, Madeline Lutkewitte, '14, Lauren Davis, '13, Elliott Poppel, '13, Joe Haniak, '14, Pat Repko, '14, team coach Raymond Kinnunen, associate professor in the International Business and Strategy Group, and Jake Wainwright, '14, members of the Northeastern University Huntington Management Consulting, an organization that helps prepare students for business leadership. Photo by Brooks Canaday.
In short order, Hunt?ington Man?age?ment Con?sulting can ana?lyze a company?s cor?po?rate struc?ture and busi?ness plan, iden?ti?fying prob?lems and crafting strate?gies to help busi?nesses and non?profit orga?ni?za?tions achieve suc?cess. It?s the kind of work for which a com?pany might pay thou?sands upon thou?sands of?dollars.
But HMC doesn?t charge a fee; in fact, it?s not even a busi?ness. Rather, it?s an under?grad?uate club com?prising some of Northeastern?s top busi?ness stu?dents who gain real-??world experience through intercollegiate case competitions. To prac?tice for the competitions?in which they rou?tinely place among the top busi?ness schools in the country?students work with alumni ven?tures, pro?viding free analysis and con?sul?ta?tion in exchange for the oppor?tu?nity to hone their?skills.
Bob San?sone, an alumnus in the insur?ance industry, has asked for feed?back on his forth?coming non?profit orga?ni?za?tion, Sneakers to Beakers, a Boston-??based after-??school pro?gram com?bining sports and STEM edu?ca?tion. ?As a North?eastern grad?uate, I was blown away,? he said. ?I think it?s impor?tant to sur?round your?self with people who are smarter than you, and that?s def?i?nitely what I was able to do here. This world is still new to me, so I was glad to get this pro?fes?sional feedback.?
The con?sulting team prac?tices under the same con?di?tions of a formal com?pe?ti?tion. For example, Stack?driver, a cloud com?puting com?pany cofounded by alumnus Dan Belcher, would present its case on Thursday evening. The team then works on the case until Sunday, when it reports its findings.
?The cases we work on are real,? said club adviser Ray?mond Kin?nunen, an asso?ciate pro?fessor of inter?na?tional busi?ness and strategy in the D?Amore-McKim School of Busi?ness whom stu?dents call ?Coach K.? ?We dig deep into these com?pa?nies, looking at what they seek to accom?plish and how they operate, which is per?haps the best way to learn about business.?
Each club member has received a per?sonal invi?ta?tion to try out for the team, according to Kin?nunen, and many go on to work for some of the world?s largest com?pa?nies in busi?ness or?finance.
Elliott Poppel, a senior busi?ness major, has been part of the con?sulting club for two years and has already accepted a posi?tion with a ven?ture cap?ital firm in Palo Alto,?Calif.
?This has been huge for me,? said Poppel, who credits his expe?ri?ence in the club with pro?viding him with the analysis tools to land his first pro?fes?sional job. ?I?ve def?i?nitely learned a lot at North?eastern and in my other classes, but I don?t think I?ve learned nearly as much in every?thing else com?bined as I did here. It?s like being on co-??op, but you have to do a dif?ferent job every?week.?
Researchers discover primary role of the olivocochlear efferent systemPublic release date: 27-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mary Leach Mary_Leach@meei.harvard.edu Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary
Light shed on the natural mechanism that protects ears from hearing loss
New research from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology may have discovered a key piece in the puzzle of how hearing works by identifying the role of the olivocochlear efferent system in protecting ears from hearing loss. The findings could eventually lead to screening tests to determine who is most susceptible to hearing loss. Their paper is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Until recently, it was common knowledge that exposure to a noisy environment (concert, iPod, mechanical tools, firearm, etc.), could lead to permanent or temporary hearing loss. Most audiologists would assess the damage caused by this type of exposure by measuring hearing thresholds, the lowest level at which one starts to detect/sense a sound at a particular frequency (pitch). Drs. Sharon Kujawa and Charles Liberman, both researchers at Mass. Eye and Ear, showed in 2009 that noise exposures leading to a temporary hearing loss in mice (when hearing thresholds return to what they were before exposure) in fact can be associated with cochlear neuropathy, a situation in which, despite having a normal threshold, a portion of auditory nerve fibers is missing).
The inner ear, the organ that converts sounds into messages that will be conveyed to and decoded by the brain, receives in turn fibers from the central nervous system. Those fibers are known as the olivocochlear efferent system. Up to now, the involvement of this efferent system in the protection from acoustic injury although clearly demonstrated has been a matter of debate because all the previous experiments were probing its protective effects following noise exposures very unlikely to be found in nature.
Stephane Maison, Ph.D., investigator at the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory at Mass. Eye and Ear and lead author, explains. "Humans are currently exposed to the type of noise used in those experiments but it's hard to conceive that some vertebrates, thousands of years ago, were submitted to stimuli similar to those delivered by speakers. So many researchers believed that the protective effects of the efferent system were an epiphenomenon not its true function."
Instead of using loud noise exposures evoking a change in hearing threshold, we used a moderate noise exposure at a level similar to those found in restaurants, conferences, malls, and also in nature (some frogs emit vocalizations at similar or higher levels) and instead of looking at thresholds, we looked for signs of cochlear neuropathy, Dr. Maison continued.
The researchers demonstrated that such moderate exposure lead to cochlear neuropathy (loss of auditory nerve fibers), which causes difficulty to hear in noisy environments.
"This is tremendously important because all of us are submitted to such acoustic environments and it takes a lot of auditory nerve fiber loss before it gets to be detected by simply measuring thresholds as it's done when preforming an audiogram," Dr. Maison said. "The second important discovery is that, in mice where the efferent system has been surgically removed, cochlear neuropathy is tremendously exacerbated. That second piece proves that the efferent system does play a very important role in protecting the ear from cochlear neuropathy and we may have found its main function."
The researchers say they are excited about this discovery because the strength of the efferent system can be recorded non-invasively in humans and a non-invasive assay to record the efferent system strength has already been developed and shows that one is able to predict vulnerability to acoustic injury (Maison and Liberman, Predicting vulnerability to acoustic injury with a noninvasive assay of olivocochlear reflex strength, Journal of Neuroscience, 20:4701-4707, 2000).
"One could envision applying this assay or a modified version of it to human populations to screen for individuals most at risk in noise environments," Dr. Maison concluded.
###
This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication disorders (Grants RO1 DC 0188 and P30 DC 05209).
A full list of authors and affiliations and full acknowledgement of all contributors is available in the pdf of the paper, "Efferent Feedback Minimizes Cochlear Neuropathy from Moderate Noise Exposure."
About Massachusetts Eye and Ear
Mass. Eye and Ear clinicians and scientists are driven by a mission to find cures for blindness, deafness and diseases of the head and neck. After uniting with Schepens Eye Research Institute in 2011, Mass. Eye and Ear in Boston became the world's largest vision and hearing research center, offering hope and healing to patients everywhere through discovery and innovation. Mass. Eye and Ear is home to the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories, the largest collection of basic hearing laboratories. Mass. Eye and Ear is a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital and trains future medical leaders in ophthalmology and otolaryngology, through residency as well as clinical and research fellowships. Internationally acclaimed since its founding in 1824, Mass. Eye and Ear employs full-time, board-certified physicians who offer high-quality and affordable specialty care that ranges from the routine to the very complex. U.S. News & World Report's "Best Hospitals Survey" has consistently ranked the Mass. Eye and Ear Departments of Otolaryngology and Ophthalmology as top five in the nation.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Researchers discover primary role of the olivocochlear efferent systemPublic release date: 27-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mary Leach Mary_Leach@meei.harvard.edu Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary
Light shed on the natural mechanism that protects ears from hearing loss
New research from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology may have discovered a key piece in the puzzle of how hearing works by identifying the role of the olivocochlear efferent system in protecting ears from hearing loss. The findings could eventually lead to screening tests to determine who is most susceptible to hearing loss. Their paper is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Until recently, it was common knowledge that exposure to a noisy environment (concert, iPod, mechanical tools, firearm, etc.), could lead to permanent or temporary hearing loss. Most audiologists would assess the damage caused by this type of exposure by measuring hearing thresholds, the lowest level at which one starts to detect/sense a sound at a particular frequency (pitch). Drs. Sharon Kujawa and Charles Liberman, both researchers at Mass. Eye and Ear, showed in 2009 that noise exposures leading to a temporary hearing loss in mice (when hearing thresholds return to what they were before exposure) in fact can be associated with cochlear neuropathy, a situation in which, despite having a normal threshold, a portion of auditory nerve fibers is missing).
The inner ear, the organ that converts sounds into messages that will be conveyed to and decoded by the brain, receives in turn fibers from the central nervous system. Those fibers are known as the olivocochlear efferent system. Up to now, the involvement of this efferent system in the protection from acoustic injury although clearly demonstrated has been a matter of debate because all the previous experiments were probing its protective effects following noise exposures very unlikely to be found in nature.
Stephane Maison, Ph.D., investigator at the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory at Mass. Eye and Ear and lead author, explains. "Humans are currently exposed to the type of noise used in those experiments but it's hard to conceive that some vertebrates, thousands of years ago, were submitted to stimuli similar to those delivered by speakers. So many researchers believed that the protective effects of the efferent system were an epiphenomenon not its true function."
Instead of using loud noise exposures evoking a change in hearing threshold, we used a moderate noise exposure at a level similar to those found in restaurants, conferences, malls, and also in nature (some frogs emit vocalizations at similar or higher levels) and instead of looking at thresholds, we looked for signs of cochlear neuropathy, Dr. Maison continued.
The researchers demonstrated that such moderate exposure lead to cochlear neuropathy (loss of auditory nerve fibers), which causes difficulty to hear in noisy environments.
"This is tremendously important because all of us are submitted to such acoustic environments and it takes a lot of auditory nerve fiber loss before it gets to be detected by simply measuring thresholds as it's done when preforming an audiogram," Dr. Maison said. "The second important discovery is that, in mice where the efferent system has been surgically removed, cochlear neuropathy is tremendously exacerbated. That second piece proves that the efferent system does play a very important role in protecting the ear from cochlear neuropathy and we may have found its main function."
The researchers say they are excited about this discovery because the strength of the efferent system can be recorded non-invasively in humans and a non-invasive assay to record the efferent system strength has already been developed and shows that one is able to predict vulnerability to acoustic injury (Maison and Liberman, Predicting vulnerability to acoustic injury with a noninvasive assay of olivocochlear reflex strength, Journal of Neuroscience, 20:4701-4707, 2000).
"One could envision applying this assay or a modified version of it to human populations to screen for individuals most at risk in noise environments," Dr. Maison concluded.
###
This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication disorders (Grants RO1 DC 0188 and P30 DC 05209).
A full list of authors and affiliations and full acknowledgement of all contributors is available in the pdf of the paper, "Efferent Feedback Minimizes Cochlear Neuropathy from Moderate Noise Exposure."
About Massachusetts Eye and Ear
Mass. Eye and Ear clinicians and scientists are driven by a mission to find cures for blindness, deafness and diseases of the head and neck. After uniting with Schepens Eye Research Institute in 2011, Mass. Eye and Ear in Boston became the world's largest vision and hearing research center, offering hope and healing to patients everywhere through discovery and innovation. Mass. Eye and Ear is home to the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories, the largest collection of basic hearing laboratories. Mass. Eye and Ear is a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital and trains future medical leaders in ophthalmology and otolaryngology, through residency as well as clinical and research fellowships. Internationally acclaimed since its founding in 1824, Mass. Eye and Ear employs full-time, board-certified physicians who offer high-quality and affordable specialty care that ranges from the routine to the very complex. U.S. News & World Report's "Best Hospitals Survey" has consistently ranked the Mass. Eye and Ear Departments of Otolaryngology and Ophthalmology as top five in the nation.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uKxx-52x-3Rxp1pJPVC0FdZ2_GI53qR8t51meZHOamij5-SHre5bu_RYiqLP6K66BnTyFjK-GS02xXbld3g9HEEhAkdG1J0l-W1Xkvqa0=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 27-Mar-2013
Share ]