Star Trek: More Details and Teaser Trailer

The new Star Trek game, under development by Digital Extremes (whose previous titles include Dark Sector, The Darkness II, and Bioshock II) is set to drop in Q1 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. By now, you’ve probably all heard about the game’s focus on the co-op gameplay between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Set in the canon of JJ Abrams 2009 Star Trek reboot, the game will feature 23rd century tech, galactic exploration, and vastly different play styles for Kirk and Spock.
With a story written by BAFTA award winner and God of War writer Marianne Krawcyzk through collaboration with the writer and producers of the 2009 Star Trek movie, the title certainly has a lot of promise. At this point, those of us who enjoyed Abrams’ Star Trek, and have been waiting for a decent game based on the property are both excited for the game and thoroughly sick of hearing about it, because we just want to play it. Well, to tide you over until we hear something new about the game, (or they decide to release it early, badum-tish), here is its latest teaser trailer:

Top 5 Video Game Characters In Need of Some Deodorant

Top 5 Video Game Characters In Need of Some Deodorant

These super heroes do alot of work, we just imagine that they wud also appreciate some good deodrant

5. Niko Bellic (Grand Theft Auto IV)
Without a doubt Niko Bellic stinks. He comes fresh off the boat from God-knows-what Eastern European country and he's anything but fresh. Chock up a Liberty City Minute (a 30 hour playthrough) and Niko could easily send all of those ladies you've got buzzing your cell phone running. I don't care if you're wearing that nice new suit from Perseus. Niko might look good, but there's no way this guy is smelling anything but nasty.

4. Chell (Portal and Portal 2)
Ladies aren't going to catch any breaks on this either. Chell might be the heroine in a futuristic lab where robots can't smell her, but it's a good thing you can't smell Portal's physics-defying protagonist either. When Chell wakes up in the original Portal, we have no idea where she's been. You don't think all that running around, jumping, and almost getting baked like a cake would make a girl stinky? Never mind that she's been laying in bed for hundreds of years in the beginning of Portal 2.

3. Ezio Auditore da Firenze (Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood)
Sure, Ezio gets laid all the time and has an entire harem of Italian courtesans ready to distract those inept guards at any time, but none of that matters. Ezio stunk! Climbing up all those walls, running around on rooftops and diving into the Venice waterways and random piles of hay is a sure fire way to work up a stinky sweat. The only reason the games don't call Ezio out for it is because everyone in 16th century Italy stunk pretty bad in the first place.

2. Nathan Drake (Uncharted)
Yes, it's true, Drake still manages to catch his share of ladies. It helps that the guy has to be loaded after so many huge heists. As another game character traipsing about in European sewer systems, there's no way he's smelling fresh and/or clean though. I can understand Drake's lifestyle, but even Indiana Jones had time to wash up at the beginning of each of his movies. I guess the fact that Drake still bags so many females is testament to how good looking he is.

1. Mario (Super Mario Bros)
Could it have ended any other way? Mario Mario obviously stinks. First of all, he's a plumber. Have you ever met a clean-smelling plumber? No. They're up to their elbows in your poop all of the time. If you need further proof that Mario could thin paint with his odor, here's a rapid fire list of why Mario stinks up the Mushroom Kingdom:
-He's been wearing the same clothes for over 20 years.
-He'll go from outside in the heat and sunshine, to underwater, to a stinky dungeon cave filled with reptiles.
-He still hasn't gotten with the Princess despite rescuing her countless times
-The sheer volume of sporting activities alone would imbue the man with a stink no shower, mushroom, or superstar could possibly wipe away.

James Bond Hitting Consoles Again This Year in 007 Legends

The British spy who never dies will be getting a new console game later this year. James Bond‘s new adventure, titled 007 Legends, will not actually be directly tied with Skyfall, the new movie scheduled to be released this fall. Instead, publisher Activision has announced that the game will be a collection of Bond’s “most iconic and intense undercover missions.”
Developed by Eurocom, (developer of 007: Nightfire, GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, and the 2010 Wii remake of GoldenEye: 007), the game’s single-player campaign will feature missions from six Bond movies, including Skyfall. It will also see the return of the MI6 Ops Missions mode from GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, four-player split-screen multiplayer,  and competitive online modes. 007 Legends is set to drop this autumn on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Flashback trojan reportedly controls half a million Macs and counting

Flashback trojan reportedly controls half a million Macs and counting

Variations of the Flashback trojan have reportedly infected more than half a million Macs around the globe, according to Russian antivirus company Dr. Web. The company made an announcement on Wednesday—first in Russian and later in English—about the growing Mac botnet, first claiming 550,000 infected Macs. Later in the day, however, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan posted to Twitter that the count had gone up to 600,000, with 274 bots even checking in from Cupertino, CA, where Apple's headquarters are located.
We have been covering the Mac Flashback trojan since 2011, but the most recent variant from earlier this week targeted an unpatched Java vulnerability within Mac OS X. That is, it was unpatched (at the time) by Apple—Oracle had released a fix for the vulnerability in February of this year, but Apple didn't send out a fix until earlier this week, after news began to spread about the latest Flashback variant.
According to Dr. Web, the 57 percent of the infected Macs are located in the US and 20 percent are in Canada. Like older versions of the malware, the latest Flashback variant searches an infected Mac for a number of antivirus applications before generating a list of botnet control servers and beginning the process of checking in with them. Now that the fix for the Java vulnerability is out, however, there's no excuse not to update—the malware installs itself after you visit a compromised or malicious webpage, so if you're on the Internet, you're potentially at risk.
If you think one of your machines may be infected, F-Secure has instructions on how to use the Terminal to find out.

This machine is clean

FBI, stumped by pimp's Android pattern lock, serves warrant on Google

FBI, stumped by pimp's Android pattern lock, serves warrant on Google

The FBI can't get into a pimp's Android phone—so it wants Google to hand over the keys.
In addition to accessing the phone, agents also want Google to turn over e-mail searches, Web searches, GPS tracking data, websites visited, and text messages. A federal judge has agreed. Hopefully, digital devices can make life hard out there for a pimp—but the case also reminds us just how much data smartphones generate on even innocuous users.

Pimpin' Hoes Daily

In 2005, San Diego's Dante Dears was sentenced to state prison for founding and running a group called "Pimpin' Hoes Daily" (PHD). The name wasn't braggadocio; it was mere description. Before Dears pled guilty in the middle of his 2005 trial, one minor female testified how Dears had recruited her out of a homeless shelter.
"He told me he was going to help take care of me and be there for me," she told the court. "He told me what to do and how to do it and said we would make money that way... I was tired of living on the streets."
Her $500 a night went straight to Dears, though, who "took care of her" in his own special way. As San Diego's Union Tribune reported, Dears found out the woman had spoken to a man who wanted to help her get off the streets. So Dears "beat her up in the back seat of his Cadillac and then forced her to get into the car's trunk, she testified. While in the trunk, she was driven from East Main Street in El Cajon to Hotel Circle in Mission Valley, she testified."
A local TV channel noted that the girl, only 15 at the time, was released in Hotel Circle, "bleeding and bruised." She left prostitution after the experience and went back to her mother.
Dears went to prison. When he got out in 2009, he quickly violated his parole on three separate occasions and went back to jail for a year and half. Upon his release in May 2011, an FBI informant says he saw Dears return to his old activities. Shackled with a GPS monitor, Dears had to stay off the streets, but he was allegedly able to continue his "telephone pimping" with the help of a Samsung Android phone.
On June 10, 2011, the FBI source met with Dears in his apartment in Chula Vista for nearly three hours. During that time, he watched Dears "taking several telephone calls where he discussed the night's prostitution activities. He also sent multiple text messages throughout the evening. Shortly after sending a message, a woman would arrive at the apartment and give Dears money.”
The FBI put the target under physical surveillance and observed him one night using the phone “frequently for a period of nearly 6 hours”—despite the fact that he had denied even owning a cell phone for months to his parole agent.
Confronted with the evidence, Dears said the phone belonged to his sister. He eventually turned it over to the state parole agent, but the FBI says Dears refused to unlock the device. (Dears had signed a waiver to his Fourth Amendment right search rights, so his home and property could be legally searched at any time without a court order. His parole conditions prevented him from doing anything to hide or lock digital files.)

The keys to the kingdom

The FBI, which didn't have the right to search the phone without a warrant, obtained one on February 13, 2012. They took the phone from the parole agent and sent it off to an FBI Regional Computer Forensics Lab in Southern California. There, technicians “attempted to gain access to the contents of the memory of the cellular telephone in question, but were unable to do so,” said the FBI. They were defeated by, of all things, Android's “pattern lock”—not always notable for its high security.
Technicians apparently mis-entered the pattern enough times to lock the phone, which could only be unlocked using the phone owner's Google account credentials. But Dears wasn't cooperating, and the FBI didn't have his credentials. So it was back to a judge with a new warrant application, filed on March 9, 2012. That application, which was apparently supposed to be sealed, was instead made public and was located today by security researcher Chris Soghoian.
In it, the FBI asks for a warrant to be served on Google. It wants to know:

• The subscriber's name, address, Social Security number, account login and password
• “All e-mail and personal contact list information on file for cellular telephone”
• The times and duration of every webpage visited
• All text messages sent and received from the phone, including photo and video messages
• Any e-mail addresses or instant messenger accounts used on the phone
• “Verbal and/or written instructions for overriding the ‘pattern lock’ installed on the” phone
• All search terms, Internet history, and GPS data that Google has stored for the phone

Soghoian wonders about the legality of accessing a still-operational cell phone. "Given that an unlocked smartphone will continue to receive text messages and new emails (transmitted after the device was first seized), one could reasonably argue that the government should have to obtain a wiretap order in order to unlock the phone," he argues.
But a US Magistrate Judge disagreed and granted the warrant the same day it was filed. Google has not yet responded to our questions about whether it routinely supplies law enforcement with the information necessary to unlock Android phones.
Update: Google has provided us a general statement: "Like all law-abiding companies, we comply with valid legal process. Whenever we receive a request we make sure it meets both the letter and spirit of the law before complying. If we believe a request is overly broad, we will seek to narrow it."

PlayStation 4

The successor to the PlayStation 3, apparently codenamed "Orbis," will use an AMD x86 processor with an AMD "Southern Islands" GPU, according to rumors emerging last week. Xbox 360's replacement, purported to be named "Durango", is also rumored to use an AMD GPU—either a Southern Islands variant or an equivalent to a Radeon HD 6670—this time paired with a PowerPC CPU.
Though these rumors are thoroughly unconfirmed at the moment, they're all well within the realm of plausibility. But if they prove true, the Orbis and Durango will be decidedly mid-range at launch when compared to top-of-the-line PC hardware. The Xbox 360, launched November 2005, and the PlayStation 3, launched November 2006, were both cutting-edge systems at their release. Their capabilities were unmatched by PCs of the time. If these rumors are to be believed, the eighth console generation won't be a repeat of the seventh.

The stupendous seventh generation

The Xbox 360's Xenon processor, a three-core six-thread PowerPC unit running at 3.2 GHz, had a theoretical peak number crunching throughput of 115 gigaflops. A contemporary Pentium 4 at 3 GHz had a theoretical peak of around 12 gigaflops when the system launched. The PlayStation 3 was in a similar situation; its Cell CPU, jointly developed by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony, had a theoretical throughput of 230 gigaflops. Contemporary Core 2 Duos were topping out at 24 gigaflops at the time—and cost many hundreds of dollars to boot.
The GPUs found in these systems were not quite so impressive compared to those available in desktop systems at launch, but they were still high-end. Xbox 360's Xenos was built by ATI, falling somewhere between the capabilities of its R520 (sold as the Radeon X1800 series, released in October 2005), and its R600 (retailed as the Radeon 2900 series, released in May 2007). The PlayStation 3's Reality Synthesizer was designed by NVIDIA, as a slightly cut-down G71 (marketed as the GeForce 7900 series, released in mid-2006).
In short, the (theoretical) CPU performance of the current generation consoles was out of this world when they launched. Their GPUs went toe-to-toe with discrete cards costing as much as the consoles themselves.

The (potentially) unexceptional eighth generation

The Southern Islands GPU, shipping in the HD 7970, has been on sale for three months already. With neither next-generation console likely to hit the market until 2013 (and probably late 2013 at that), Southern Islands will be the best part of two years old when those systems finally hit. Southern Islands is a fast and powerful GPU, but it's already lost the top performance spot, displaced by NVIDIA's brand new GTX 680. It'll be falling further behind with the launch next year of AMD's Sea Islands GPU architecture. If the next-generation Xbox really does use a Radeon HD 6670 part, it'll be even less impressive.
Estimates of CPU performance are harder to make, given the dearth of information about these consoles. Being realistic, we can't expect any great leaps for the CPU either. If AMD could produce processors that were competitive with or superior to current shipping x86 processors, it would be doing so. Unfortunately for AMD, its newest Bulldozer architecture hasn't reached the performance levels the company originally announced. The next-generation PlayStation CPU could be a Bulldozer derivative, or it might be based on the company's low-power Bobcat design. In either case, it's unlikely to boast the kind of remarkable theoretical performance that the Cell claimed relative to its contemporaries.
Seventh-generation consoles leapfrogged the top-level PC performance of the time. The systems were enormously powerful, and enormously expensive to build. Both Microsoft and Sony sold them at a considerable loss for their first few years on the market. Thanks to these subsidies, they offered phenomenal value for the gamers' dollar, affording gaming experiences that would be prohibitively expensive for PC gamers to mimic at launch. If the current architecture rumors prove to be true, eighth-generation consoles aren't going to pull off the same feat. They'll be a substantial step up from current console hardware, sure. But they likely won't be able to offer the same wow-factor the seventh generation did.
If Sony and Microsoft have indeed slowed down their console hardware arms race, building for more modest specifications instead, then this could be good news for everybody—except perhaps console gamers.

The cutting edge has lost its point

Cutting-edge hardware is expensive to produce. While Microsoft could probably stomach another round of massively subsidized gaming hardware, Sony probably can't. Subsidized hardware is a risky proposition. More modest systems, selling perhaps at break-even at launch, are much more palatable to shareholders and beancounters alike. Nintendo and Apple have both demonstrated that selling hardware profitably can be done successfully. This is certainly the more sustainable model for the long-term health of the industry.
Cutting-edge hardware is also, arguably, pointless for a new console. While PC gamers can always slap on a huge 2560×1600 or 2560×1440 monitor—something that taxes even dual high-end video cards these days—consoles are for the most part limited to the 1920×1080 at 60 Hz that HDTV sets allow for. 3D sets, which ideally need 120 frame per second inputs, do raise the bar somewhat, but speccing the GPU for this niche audience would be a foolhardy endeavor. It would make the GPU more expensive for 100 percent of customers, with benefits seen only by a handful.
Contemporary CPUs are already overkill for many games. Developers have struggled to exploit the large numbers of hardware threads that processor designs now support. Even a good-looking and moderately physics-rich game such as Battlefield 3 rarely demands more than three cores of a current Intel Sandy Bridge processor. There are games that can take more advantage of multiple cores, but they're the exception, not the rule. As long as the CPU is at least adequate, the GPU is probably the best place to invest money.

In Battlefield 3 a modern multicore hyperthreaded processor will only need two or three cores, even with the GPU working hard.

With a 1080p60 graphical upper limit and recognition of the complexities of multithreaded programming, there isn't a compelling case for building hardware that's streets ahead of what we have today.

Media machines

Keeping the hardware inexpensive is also important for another reason. Modern consoles aren't just used for games. Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers spend more hours per month watching streaming TV than they do playing games. This is a burgeoning market that greatly expands the appeal of games consoles—console gaming is still a niche activity; watching TV isn't.
Streaming media has mainstream appeal in a way that games won't achieve for another decade or two. It's an audience worth going after, but it changes the economics of console hardware development substantially. The game consoles can be subsidized and sold at a loss because each game also includes a cut for Sony or Microsoft. As long as gamers buy a handful of games, the money can be recouped. Boxes used predominantly for streaming media don't provide access to that same revenue stream.
Microsoft does still make money from some streaming media users, since many services are locked behind its Xbox LIVE Gold paywall. But with competition from other set-top boxes with comparable streaming capabilities and no monthly cost, it's not clear if this is sustainable. To accommodate, selling the hardware can't incur losses—which means it can't include expensive, high-end components.

Good news for developers

The more conventional system architecture would be good news for developers. The current Cell architecture in the PlayStation 3 has proven difficult for developers to make the most of. Its design—a single PowerPC core with eight simple but fast vector cores (of which six are usable by third-party developers)—is quirky. The Xbox 360, with its three identical cores and six hardware threads, and the PC are both easier to use and understand.
This is not to say that the next generation PlayStation will necessarily be identical in design to a PC (though that has been tried before, with the original Xbox). Sony and AMD might have a few custom tricks up their respective sleeves. AMD's plan is to produce highly-integrated systems-on-chips, and the company has said that it's keen to include additional processing units in these designs. It's easy to envisage a custom-produced design that combines perhaps 2 or 4 CPU Bulldozer or Bobcat threads and a Southern Islands GPU—both "standard" AMD parts—with, for example, a high-speed memory unit, or a dedicated vector processing unit similar to those found in the Cell processor.
A conventional design means developers can take full advantage of the hardware much earlier in its lifecycle. As a rule of thumb, games released later in a console's life look better than those released earlier. Early in the console's life, developers don't yet know the best way to wring out every last bit of performance from the system. The more unusual and complex the architecture, the longer it takes to understand how best to use it.
While the hardware companies might not like it, developers like systems that aren't strange outliers. Most major games from major publishers are not exclusive to any one platform. Huge franchises like Call of Duty are cross-platform titles, released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. As a result, these games tend to be developed based on the lowest common denominator. A PlayStation 3 might be particularly good at a particular task (a fancy graphical effect, say), but if the Xbox 360 and PC aren't equally adept at that same task, cross-platform developers will have no option but to ignore the PlayStation 3's aptitude, or spend a lot of development time tuning a version specifically for the system.
This might mean platform exclusives don't have any special capabilities to take advantage of, but with platform exclusives normally negotiated according to studio ownership or cash payments—rather than the nature of the hardware in question—the impact of this is likely minimal.

An AMD victory

If AMD has scored the GPU design win for the next Xbox, and both the CPU and GPU designs for the next PlayStation, this is enormously good news for the company. It will provide a steady stream of income for many years to come.
It might also help the company undermine NVIDIA's attempts to court game developers. NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" promotional program sees NVIDIA work with developers to some extent to help market or develop their games. In theory, TWIMTBP games are developed on and developed (or at least, optimized) for NVIDIA hardware. In practice, the extent varies; some games are developed on NVIDIA hardware with NVIDIA offering advice with performance tuning. For others, the branding is applied only after development has been completed, purely so that publishers can take advantage of NVIDIA's marketing and promotional dollars.
At a minimum the games should run reliably on the company's hardware; it may or may not contain additional tuning to ensure optimal performance on it.
With both next-generation consoles using Southern Islands, it's inevitable that games for these consoles will be developed on, and developed for, AMD GPUs as their first priority. NVIDIA will still have a role to play, as its GPUs will continue to be found in PCs. But with consoles taking the lion's share of the market for most games, optimization for NVIDIA is unlikely to ever rival that for AMD.

What about the gamers?

While bad news for NVIDIA, it's probably worse news still for another demographic: current PlayStation 3 owners. The radical shift in architecture, from Cell with NVIDIA graphics to x86 with AMD graphics, means that the next generation PlayStation is unlikely to offer backwards compatibility with existing titles (rumors are already pointing towards Sony removing this feature, in fact). Emulating Cell on the CPU will be impossible, as the CPU simply won't be fast enough.
Sony could potentially integrate a Cell processor into the new system. The company did a similar thing with the PlayStation 3; initial models included the PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine for backward compatibility. Then Sony dropped the chip as a cost-saving measure in 2007. Adding hardware purely for backwards compatibility is hard to justify on a cost basis: the older games have limited appeal to new buyers, and even existing PS3 owners could continue to use their old hardware. There's an outside chance the GPU could be roped in to allow Cell emulation, or that a vector co-processor could be integrated into the CPU. But in all likelihood, the next PlayStation will break from Sony's backwards compatibility trend.
Console gamers of all kinds may also be disappointed the new machines won't be as tremendous a leap over current systems as past systems have been. Consoles have already been eclipsed by PCs—with a result that games like Battlefield 3 offer PC players larger maps with more players than the consoles can cope with—and it looks like that will still be the case come the eighth generation.
If current rumors are to be believed, the next generation of Sony and Microsoft consoles will gain performance parity with PCs, but not much more. Consoles will still have their advantages—the range of peripherals, the plug-and-play simplicity, the reduced maintenance, the low up-front cost—but they won't be able to offer best-in-class gaming, even at their debut. For that, only a PC will do.

PS Vita Gravity Rush originally intended for PS3

Idea to switch platform for first-party action game came from Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida.

While PlayStation Vita gamers in Japan and Southeast Asia are currently playing the Japanese and Chinese versions of Gravity Rush--an action adventure title from Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama--the game was originally meant to be released for the PlayStation 3.
Not much was known about this until a recent Famitsu piece as part of the magazine's coverage on the PS Vita Game Conference held in Japan on March 28.

Gravity Rush was originally conceived for the PS3 before the Vita came into the picture.

According to the article, the switch from the PS3 to the PS Vita occurred around 2009. At the time, the system's past nickname from the Gravity Rush development team was "New Portable Game Machine." The game's actual development started in summer 2008.
Makoto Isomine, a member of the Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Studio internal development division, said that the idea for the switch came from SCE's president Shuhei Yoshida. During 2009, the team conducted basic research on the platform while working on the game's design.
Originally, there were just two programmers working on the Vita version before the team count expanded to more than 15 programmers. The small team had to pull off double duty with working on Gravity Rush as well as showing off the Vita's special capabilities. During that time of development, the PS Vita's hardware wasn't fully ready, so the team had to move development on the PC.
Lead programmer Yu Yokokawa shared that it was rare for first-party teams at Sony to develop in a Windows environment. Yokokawa said that developing on a PC environment was beneficial in the end, as it was easy to immediately test out the game and design without the need of development kits.
The concept movie created by the team in 2008 can be seen here. For more information on Gravity Rush, check out GameSpot's preview.

PS Vita, Mass Effect 3 can't lift March sales, says analyst

Wedbush Securities' Michael Pachter predicts hardware and software drop during March; expects PS Vita recorded 125,000 sales during month.

March was another tough month at retail, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter. Despite the recent launch of the PlayStation Vita and BioWare's Mass  Effect 3, the industry watcher predicts that US retail software and hardware sales fell during the month.

Mass Effect 3 didn't pull March out of the red, says Pachter.

Pachter anticipates that the NPD Group, which will distribute its official March industry data this week, will report retail software sales dropping for the fourth month running. He anticipates software revenues to come in at $565 million for March 2012, a 23 percent drop from the year prior.
Pachter said he doesn't expect the industry to record positive software growth until May, which sees the release of a trio of much-anticipated games like Diablo III, Max Payne 3, and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
As for hardware, Pachter anticipates that total March 2012 unit sales plummeted 32 percent from the year prior. The analyst attributed the downturn partly to the high-profile Nintendo 3DS launch during March 2011. Specifically, Pachter envisions that the PS Vita--which went on sale in February--notched 125,000 units in March, a figure described as "meaningfully below our expectations."
"We believe the PS Vita is unlikely to match its February unit sales figure in the near future as the buzz caused by its release dies down, and TV commercials become more infrequent," Pachter said.
As for when hardware sales will bounce back, Pachter said it won't happen until price cuts arrive.
"We expect hardware sales to rebound once price cuts are implemented, but expect a recurrence of the dip next holiday, partially buffered by some modest contribution from the introduction of the PS Vita in February and the Wii U later this year."

Need For Speed: The Run

 

 

The Good

• Diverse assortment of cars that handle well  
• Gorgeous, varied courses modeled on real locations  
• A good number of race types keeps events enjoyable.

The Bad

• Lengthy load times sap sense of momentum  
• Quick-time events and mob chases aren't enjoyable  
• Frustrating limitations on returning to the cross-country race.

There's a whole lot of America between San Francisco and New York City. Need for Speed: The Run's greatest achievement is the way it sometimes captures the thrill of hitting the open road and experiencing the varied beauty of the American landscape, from the mountains and the prairies to the small towns and skyscrapers. Unfortunately, issues arise that sap some of the momentum from your cross-country trek, but The Run spends enough time doing what it does best to remain an enjoyable journey.

If you drive fast and stick to the freeways, your trip through New Jersey should be blissfully ab-free.

You play as Jack Rourke, a racer who has gotten in way over his head with the mob. His friend Sam promises an end to his problems if he can win a cross-country street race and the huge payout that comes with victory. Sadly, The Run's attempts to make you care about Jack's plight fall flat. The talents of actors Sean Faris and Christina Hendricks as Jack and Sam are wasted; their voices emanate from character models with mouths that move oddly and faces that express no emotion. What's more, the story doesn't even make sense. Certain rivals whom you pass early in the race show up again when you're in the home stretch. Thankfully, after an early cutscene that sets up the premise, the game wastes little time with its flimsy storytelling and lets you focus on driving.
The cars in The Run feel good to drive. The wide range of vehicles on offer includes sports cars that respond tightly to your every command and muscle cars that are tough to tame, but regardless of what you're driving, racing in The Run is about balancing speed with control. Sure, you've got highways on which you can gun the throttle and cruise at top speed, but more often than not, you're on stretches of road with some tricky turns. Using your brakes effectively, maintaining a smart racing line, and speedily exiting the turns is crucial to maintaining a good time, and it feels great to put these powerful cars through their paces.
Unfortunately, you may sometimes find yourself in the wrong car for the job. With a few story-related exceptions, Jack can only change cars at gas stations, and in some stretches, these are few and far between. As a result, you may get into a muscle car to power through a stretch of highway, only to wind up facing a particularly twisty road that the muscle car is not ideal for in the next event. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that there's no easy way to return to an earlier event that offered a gas station and choose a different car. If there's no gas station in your current event, you're stuck, and must make do with what you're driving.

Welcome to the illicit world of illegal cornfield racing!

Jack's got to make the entire drive from San Francisco to New York, but of course, you're only responsible for driving a few hundred miles of that journey. The Run keeps the pressure on in each event by requiring you to meet one of a few objectives. On some stretches of road, you need to pass a certain number of other racers before reaching the finish line. In other events--called battle races--you also need to pass opponents, but here, you need to face them one at a time, getting ahead of one before a timer reaches zero and then moving on to the next. And some events are checkpoint races; just you against the clock. Many events are challenging tests of your driving talents, and it's a thrill to pass a checkpoint in the nick of time or slingshot past an opponent in the final stretch of a race.
It's not just the cars themselves that make driving in The Run enjoyable. It's also the places you go. Starting in San Francisco, your path takes you through Yosemite National Park, the Rocky Mountains, downtown Chicago, and plenty of other locations. The roads in The Run aren't entirely faithful to the real roads that inspired them, but they admirably evoke the beauty one might witness on a scenic trip across the United States. From driving in the Las Vegas dusk to speeding across the rolling Nebraska plains, the varied surroundings for your travels convey the feeling that you're covering a lot of ground, and part of the fun lies in seeing what richly detailed natural or urban landscape you'll be driving in next.

You need to contend with more than just your aggressive fellow racers as you travel through these beautiful settings. In some events, police try to stop you by doing brake checks and setting up roadblocks. You can hear their chatter, though, and see upcoming roadblocks on your mini map, so while it's fun to trade paint with these officers, they don't pose much of a threat. Then there are environmental hazards, such as an avalanche that occurs as you're heading down a mountain. Like the cops, these events aren't likely to cause you much trouble, but they make for an impressive spectacle.

It's a good thing that damage in The Run is purely cosmetic

Unfortunately, as exciting as the racing can be, it's too often interrupted. When you wreck or go too far off the road, you're automatically reset to the last checkpoint you passed, and these resets can take several seconds. It's especially frustrating when these interruptions occur after your car goes ever so slightly off the asphalt. In some places, you can go off road without penalty; in others, even a slight deviation from the course immediately triggers a reset. These interruptions, coupled with the long load times that occur before races and for resets, sap some of the speed from a game that's all about forward momentum.
Other interruptions come in the form of The Run's much-publicized on-foot sequences. These extended quick-time events make up a small part of the game, which is good because they're not much fun. There are also a few sections of The Run where you need to worry more about avoiding gunfire from mafia cars and helicopters than racing effectively. These attempts to bring some Hollywood excitement to The Run backfire; it's just not enjoyable to constantly swerve to avoid the attacks of your mob pursuers.
Your total clocked, competitive time driving coast to coast will probably be a little more than two hours, though that doesn't factor in checkpoint resets and events you fail and need to redo. The Autolog system tries to fuel the fires of competition by constantly showing you how you're stacking up against your friends. But unfortunately, the game doesn't make returning to the cross-country race a welcoming experience. You can't jump to individual events; rather, you need to replay entire stages, which are collections of anywhere from four to seven events. This means you also need to replay any on-foot sequences and rewatch any cut scenes that occur in that stage. It's enough to make the prospect of hitting the road again a lot less attractive. You can also put your skills to the test by trying to earn medals in a series of single-player challenges that you unlock as you make your way across the country, and success here can unlock new cars for you to use on the cross-country run itself.

Screens like this are The Run's way of trying to get you to care about its characters.

Racing online against human opponents is more exciting than revisiting the single-player experience. Online races are divided into playlists that are centered on things like urban-street racing and muscle-car battles, so you can easily jump right into the kind of action you want, though you're locked out of a few playlists until you complete a certain number of multiplayer objectives on other playlists. These objectives include things like completing three passes using nitrous and placing fifth or better in three races, and it doesn't take long to open up all of the playlists. Flaws do mar the experience--your opponents' cars sometimes teleport around the road a bit or appear to fly through the air unrealistically--but it's nonetheless satisfying to leave human players in your dust.
It's frustrating, though, that whether you're playing solo or multiplayer, distracting text constantly appears onscreen to inform you that you just earned 30 experience points for drifting or 50 XPs for cleanly passing an opponent. Early on, you unlock driver abilities like nitrous and drafting with XPs, but once that's out of the way, most of the rewards you earn are just new icons and backgrounds for your Autolog profile. This makes the XP system seem entirely unnecessary, nothing more than a hollow way for the game to try to keep you playing.

Will video game police ever learn how to set up effective roadblocks?

It's a shame that The Run doesn't deliver more fully on the potential of its premise. It's bogged down by unnecessary quick-time events and annoying mob chases, a halfhearted attempt to tell a story, and frustrating interruptions to your racing. In spite of these burdens, the game frequently makes you feel like you're tearing across the varied terrain of this vast and majestic country. There are enough of these good moments--moments when you put the pedal to the metal on a desert straightaway or nail a hairpin turn on a twisty mountain road--to make this a road trip worth taking.