By Jason Snell

October 18, 2016 11:27 AM PT

Go Play: Really Bad Chess

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I have been playing chess since I was a kid. But I’m terrible at it, so I rarely play anymore. This past week, though, I’ve been really enjoying Zach Gage’s Really Bad Chess, an iOS game that puts a clever spin on Chess by seeding the board with a totally random collection of pieces.

What if you had three queens and four knights? What if you had eight bishops? All of these crazy scenarios can occur in Really Bad Chess. And it makes the game different. If you know how to play chess, your knowledge will come in handy—but you will find yourself confronting problems radically different from the ones you’d find in a normal game.

Really Bad Chess comes with a few different ways to play. There’s a Ranked mode that lets you play increasingly difficult boards—you start with a huge power advantage over your computer opponent, and the advantage slowly shifts until you’re trying to defend while underpowered. There are daily and weekly challenges, where you compete with other players to perform the best on a single board configuration.

This is a surprisingly fun game that’s worth a download and the $2.99 in-app purchase to turn off ads and unlock the full game. (If you become addicted, Gage sells packs of 100 move undos for 99 cents each. It’s nickel-and-diming, App Store style, but of the gentlest variety.)

Whether you’re a veteran chess player or just a frustrated fraud like me, Really Bad Chess will rekindle the fun of the game.

By Dan Moren

October 18, 2016 6:22 AM PT

Rockstar Games officially announces Red Dead Redemption 2

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2
Coming Fall 2017#RDR2https://t.co/ZacUJ48wvE pic.twitter.com/lffZvn42pR

— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) October 18, 2016

After a couple days of teasing Twitter followers with mysterious images, Rockstar Games has officially announced what everyone had come to expect: Red Dead Redemption 2, a sequel to its hit Western-themed title from way back in 2010 (which shall forever be known among my friends as “Grand Theft Horse”). A trailer is scheduled to launch this Thursday.

Details are so far sparse, though the announcement confirms that the new game follows in the footsteps of the original in being “an epic tale of life in America’s unforgiving heartland.” The first RDR game was…unforgiving, to say the least, in its portrayal of the dying days of the Wild West, and it earned Game of the Year accolades from several publications. Personally, it remains one of my favorite video game experiences to date–I spent countless hours just enjoying riding a horse through the scenery.¹

Rockstar also says the new game will feature “a brand new online multiplayer experience,” which will likely be music to the ears of those who played the original, which featured a somewhat limited and lackluster multiplayer experience that contrasted sharply with the single-player world. Certainly, the art so far used for RDR2, which features seven characters against a blood red backdrop, seems to point towards an experience that’s about a team–it’s hard not to draw a direct line to The Magnificent Seven. It’s worth noting, though, that none of the characters depicted in the initial image are women; Rockstar doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to the portrayal of women in its games. None of its popular Grand Theft Auto series have let you play as women, and its portrayal of female NPCs has often been reductive.

In an era where many franchises seem to pump out sequel after uninspired sequel every couple years, it’s kind of refreshing to see a company take its time–especially when it has such a tough act to follow. By the time RDR2 debuts in fall of next year, it’ll have been around seven years since the original game came out. Rockstar is known for taking time to develop its titles, and with a world as big and sprawling as RDR2 is likely to have, that’s important.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

October 14, 2016 1:21 PM PT

Wish List: New Mac Alert Sounds

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

There used to be a Mac add-on called SoundMaster that let you wire different sound effects to different system functions. A sound for emptying the trash, a sound for shutting down, a sound for starting up—you name it, it could play it. And SoundMaster came with a bunch of sounds, including one that’s simply a guy’s voice saying the word “Beep.”

Along with the redesign of iOS 7, Apple lavished some attention on the ringtones and text tones in iOS, adding dozens of new ones and relegating the original sounds to classic status. It strikes me that the Mac could use a bit of an audio upgrade, too. Its alert sounds and sound effects haven’t changed in ages.

The Mac comes with 14 built-in alert sounds, all available from the Sound Effects tab of the Sound preference pane. One of them, Sosumi, dates from System 7. Three more—Glass, Purr, and Submarine—date from Mac OS 9. Six others (Basso, Frog, Funk, Ping, Pop, Tink) are from the earliest days of OS X. The newest ones seem to be Blow, Bottle, Hero, and Morse—and they’ve been around since at least Snow Leopard in 2009¹.

These alerts don’t just show up as system beeps. They also appear in other places, such as alert sounds when you’re reminded of calendar events. And they’re just so stale.

What I’m saying is, the Mac’s in need of an audio upgrade. Alert sounds aren’t the same as ringtones (ringtones can be very long), but wouldn’t it be nice if my Mac had access to the 40 alert tones Apple has hidden away at /​System/​Library/​PrivateFrameworks/​ToneLibrary.framework/​Versions/​A/​Resources/​AlertTones ? Why keep the Mac so bland, with only 14 dusty sound effects, when there are 40 new ones already on my Mac, but hidden away and not linked properly to the rest of the system?

In the meantime, I encourage you to customize your Mac’s alert sound. Any AIFF or WAV file dropped into ~/Library/Sounds will appear in all the same places as all of the default alert sounds, including Calendar and the Sound preference pane. (Don’t make them too long, though.)

In that folder on my Mac is a sound file I’ve had since the early ’90s. It’s that SoundMaster sound (since converted into an AIFF) of the guy saying “Beep.” It helps make my Mac—all of them, in an unbroken chain from the spring of 1990 to the present day—feel like home.

One of the most fun things about the Mac is the ability to personalize it. Maybe it’s time for Apple to give macOS users a little more audio variety.

[Thanks to Stephen Hackett for digging out a couple of old Macs to check on the provenance of old alert sounds.]

By Dan Moren

October 13, 2016 11:37 AM PT

With Echo Spatial Perception, two Echoes finally are better than one

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

When I first got my Echo Dot, I commented that I had to change the wake word from “Alexa,” which I was using with the full-size Echo, to “Echo,” because otherwise, the two would race to answer my query. Sometimes they’d respond in sync, but sometimes they’d be slightly offset, which would be maddening. My conclusion?

It would be nice if the two Echo units could somehow work together to improve the microphone coverage in my house and then route replies to a chosen device–kind of like running multiple Wi-Fi base stations on the same network–but that’s probably a ways off. I have a pretty small apartment, which makes it feasible to have just one Echo, but for those who have a house, the Dot could be a nice ancillary device if there’s someplace outside of your existing Echo’s coverage.

“A ways off” turned out to be only about six months. Amazon today began rolling out the Echo Spatial Perception (ESP) feature that it first announced alongside the second-generation Echo Dot; as soon as I saw this morning that the feature was live, I changed my Dot’s wake word back to “Alexa” so I could try it out.

In short, it’s just as good as I’d hoped.

Standing in my living room, I can see both the full-size Echo in my kitchen and the Dot in my office. So I tried a variety of simple queries, such as asking about the weather, the date, the time, and so on. In every case, both of the Echoes lit up when I made a request, but only one ended up responding. Moving closer to one made it much more likely that it would be the one to answer.

My immediate response was that Apple needs a similar feature on Siri–especially if they ever implement Hey Siri on other devices like the Apple TV or Macs. My iPhone and its paired Apple Watch seem to do okay with not both triggering Siri at the same time, though you can sometimes confuse them. (I also had a couple times in my quick tests where neither of them responded.)

The ESP feature makes it a lot more plausible to have multiple Echoes in the same house, but I can think of a couple ways it could be improved. For example, I pretty much never want to play music on the tinny speaker in the Echo Dot, so it would be great if there were option to, say, always have music start playing on the full size Echo, even if the Dot is the one responding. Or if there were simply a way to address each device: “Alexa, play NPR in the kitchen,” for example. Some of that capability may be possible with the upcoming Sonos integration that Amazon has previewed, but hopefully it will be available for multiple Echoes too.

Right now, though, I’m mostly happy not to have to remember whether to say “Alexa” or “Echo” based on which room I’m in. My life with robots just got a little bit easier.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

October 12, 2016 6:48 AM PT

Amazon launches Music Unlimited service, including Echo-only plan

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

As rumored, Amazon is throwing its hat into the music streaming fray with a new $10/month streaming plan dubbed Music Unlimited.

With so many music services already on the market, what’s Amazon bringing to the table? The key attraction seem to be its attempt to undercut competitors’ pricing: if you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can pay a discounted rate of just $8 per month to add Music Unlimited to your account–it goes down further if you pay the yearly fee of $79. (A $15/month or $149/year six-person family plan is in the offing for later this year.)

Moreover, Amazon has also–again as predicted–launched a version of the service that’s available only on the Echo. For $4 a month, you can stream music via Amazon’s device–if you have more than one, it’s only available on one at a time–and only via the Echo. The major attraction there seems to be the many voice commands one can use to interact with the service via Alexa, which let you play songs by specifying lyrics or ask for the latest song by an artist.

Prime Music, the music streaming option that was included with Amazon Prime subscriptions, will stick around, but it has a much smaller catalog than the new offering: only two million compared to the “tens of millions” that Amazon cites for Music Unlimited. The company doesn’t seem to be aiming for the same music-exclusives market as Apple, but it is working with some artists to offer commentary on some of their albums.

As an Echo user, I find myself intrigued by the Echo-only plan. I’m not sure if it make sense or not yet–given that I don’t currently subscribe to any music plans, it seems like the $8-per-month Prime option might actually be a better deal. But then there’s a question if Music Unlimited will work as well with the rest of my devices–Macs, iOS devices, a Sonos–as something like, say, Apple Music. Perhaps that’s the streaming music market in a nutshell: a lot of options, none of them obviously superior.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]