Enlarge (credit: Google)

Test invites have begun trickling out for Project Stream, Google’s first official take on a dedicated, current-gen gaming platform. As has long been rumored, Google has opted for an online-streaming format (if its current, temporary name wasn’t hint enough), and this week’s test (which included invited members of the press) sees the company serving a modern game to users via the Chrome Web browser.

Though we only have one day (and one game) of testing under our belts, we can already tell that Project Stream is shaping up to be something solid, if not revolutionary. That’s not a bad start for a game-streaming space that’s already pretty well occupied—and will be growing at least one bigger before long.

Heads in the cloud

Game companies have toyed with cloud-powered gaming for some time now, with OnLive having the dubious honor of being first out of the gate (and first out of the industry). Nvidia and Sony continue to serve games this way, so long as users pay a monthly fee and have the right combination of installed app and compatible device.

Nathan Mattise

AUSTIN, Texas—As much as subscription services want you to believe it, not everything can be found on Amazon or Netflix. Want to read Brett Kavanaugh buddy Mark Judge’s old book, for instance (or their now infamous yearbook even)? Curious to watch a bunch of vintage smoking ads? How about perusing the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist literature in the world? There’s one place to turn today, and it’s not Google or any pirate sites you may or may not frequent.

“I’ve got government video of how to wash your hands or prep for nuclear war,” says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. “We could easily make a list of .ppt files in all the websites from .mil, the Military Industrial PowerPoint Complex.”

Diehard Good Omens fans, rejoice, for the first trailer for the long-awaited TV adaptation is finally here, and it captures all the gloriously wacky irreverence that we loved about the original 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett. It’s the story of an angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and a demon Crowley (David Tennant) who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon.

They’ve come to be rather fond of the Earth and all its humans, you see—not to mention the perks that come with it, like sleek electronics and quaint little restaurants where they know your name. The supernatural pair doesn’t really want the Antichrist to bring an end to all of that.

Enlarge (credit: Owen Duffy)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

In 2017, newly founded tabletop studio Plan B Games released Century: Spice Road. A tight, brain-teasing card game, Spice Road cast players as merchants trading spices on the overland route between Europe and Asia, and it combined the mechanical minimalism of hit gem-trading game Splendor with just a hint of Dominion-style deckbuilding.

(credit: Plan B Games)

What was intriguing to many fans, though, was that Spice Road was just the first installment in a planned trilogy. Players would be able to combine it with the future games in the series, mixing them to create a variety of gameplay experiences. Now the second release in the lineup has arrived in the form of Century: Eastern Wonders. But is it a rewarding game in its own right? An engaging add-on to an established hit? Or, is it just a gimmick that sounds great in theory—but doesn’t hold up once it hits the table?

The second season of American Gods, the Starz adaption of Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, has been plagued for months by production turmoil, including the recent sidelining of its replacement show runner. So there’s been some skepticism among fans of the series that season 2 could live up to the darkly haunting tone of the well-received first season. Now we have our first teaser trailer, and honestly, it looks quite promising, even if we mostly just get tantalizing glimpses of the returning cast.

(Mild spoilers for season 1 below)

The central character in American Gods is Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), a recently released convict whose wife, Laura (Emily Browning) is killed in a car crash the day he is supposed to be coming home. Numb with grief, he falls in with the mysterious Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) and becomes his bodyguard. But Mr. Wednesday is not who he seems. He’s actually the ancient Norse god Odin seeking to rally all the remaining Old Gods, who are slowly dying off from peoples’ lack of belief. Their mission: beat back the encroaching influence of all the New Gods so they can survive.

Enlarge / The first officially released image from The Mandalorian. (credit: Lucasfilm)

The first details have been revealed about Lucasfilm’s live-action Star Wars TV series.

We previously knew only that it was coming, that writer/director Jon Favreau (Iron Man, The Jungle Book, Swingers) would executive produce, and that it would eventually air on Disney’s coming streaming video service. This week we learned the title—The Mandalorian—and Jon Favreau has posted the first image, shown above, to Instagram. Some set photos showing a Tatooine-like desert planet had leaked before, but this is the first officially released image.

Favreau also shared some details about the setting and subject of the series on Instagram. Here’s what he posted:

Enlarge / In dry hopping, hops are added during or after the fermentation stage of the brewing process. (credit: Natasha Breen/Getty Images)

Last month, the Quebec-based Le Castor brewing company recalled three different brands of its beer after numerous incidents of exploding bottles. The beer was re-fermenting in the bottle, and the resulting high pressures proved too much for the bottles to withstand.

This is hardly an isolated case. In 2014, a sour fruit beer called Swill was pulled from North American shelves after several bottles exploded. And a Manhattan barback is suing his former employer after a bottle of Corona exploded while he was placing it in an ice bucket (the incident left him permanently blinded in one eye). That wasn’t even the first time a Corona bottle had exploded at the bar. Google “exploding beer bottles” and you’ll get hundreds of results.

The culprit is probably the hops, according to Thomas Shellhammer, a food scientist at Oregon State University and co-author of a recent paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry—specifically, Shellhammer points to the growing popularity of a brewing process known as “dry hopping.” Far from being the chemically inert ingredient brewers have long assumed, hops contain starch enzymes that, under certain conditions, can boost their activity to such a great extent that excessive re-fermentation occurs (“hop-creep”).

Enlarge / The Morton skull collection at the University of Pennsylvania. (credit: Steve Minicola/University of Pennsylvania)

Newly discovered handwritten documentation sheds new light on an ongoing scientific controversy regarding a famous collection of nearly 1,000 skulls amassed by a 19th-century Philadelphia physician. Dubbed the “American Golgotha,” the collection is the work of Samuel Morton, who used them to compare the brain size of different racial groups in the 1830s and 1840s.

Paul Wolff Mitchell, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where the collection is stored, believes his analysis could help settle the often acrimonious debate over whether the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was correct in his assessment of the role of unconscious bias in science, particularly with regard to race. Mitchell concludes that Gould incorrectly accused Dr. Morton of inaccurately measuring the cranial capacity of his skulls but was nonetheless correct with regard to Morton’s implicit racial bias. Mitchell’s findings have just been published in PLOS Biology.

An American Golgotha

Morton is widely considered the father of scientific racism, and his controversial ideas about the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian people provided a handy defense of the continued enslavement of African-Americans in the US just prior to the Civil War. He bolstered those views with a broad analysis of 1,000 skulls he collected from all over, sometimes even scavenged from battlefields and the occasional catacomb. At the time, it was widely believed that skull size, or cranial capacity, was a marker of superior intelligence and advanced cognition.

Enlarge / What’d you find there, Ikaros? (credit: Ubisoft)

At this point, Assassin’s Creed is more of a gaming institution than a simple series. With almost two dozen titles in just over a decade (plus movies, novels, and more), the franchise has developed its own arcs and stories that go well past the events portrayed in its code.

While the series struggled under an accelerated release schedule some years back, Ubisoft’s tentpole franchise is on a more solid pacing again. That means a return to what Assassin’s Creed does best: expounding on and remixing prominent game design ideas and serving them up an aesthetic and conceptual cocktail. Odyssey, much like last year’s Origins, takes ideas from its best contemporaries and reassembles them into a new whole.

Choose your choice

The Assassin’s Creed games are principally founded on the notion that recorded history has just enough gaps to fit in the existence of an unknown, international cabal of elite assassins. Different segments of the series have offered up addendums to the basic conceit, starting with an open world and a flexible parkour system. The Assassin’s Creed franchise has evolved to become a standard-bearer for entire trends in gaming, such as, but certainly not limited to, the so-called “Ubisoft towers.”

Enlarge / Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime poses with the wildly successful Nintendo Switch. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SEATTLE—Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime appeared at Seattle’s Geekwire Summit on Wednesday to speak broadly about the company’s future, and, while the talk didn’t include new product reveals, it proved illuminating about what to expect from the big N in the future.

The short version: Nintendo would rather be defined as an “entertainment” company, not a gaming one.

Fils-Aime says the company currently has three “pieces of business”: a dedicated video game business (“the way most of our consumers interact with us”), a mobile gaming business, and “leveraging our intellectual property (IP) in a variety of ways.” The latter includes previously announced plans for a Universal Studios attraction in Osaka, Japan (still slated to open ahead of Tokyo’s next Olympics hosting run in 2020) and a Super Mario film produced by Illumination Entertainment (Minions, Despicable Me).