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Johnny Depp’s wife, Amber Heard, and their dogs have been in hot water with the Australian government. The actress was charged with illegally bringing the couple’s two Yorkshire terriers into the country and producing false documents after Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce accused Depp of smuggling the pairs’ pooches in on his private jet. His ultimatum: get the dogs out, or we’ll euthanize them. While it may seem that Joyce is being a bit “I’ll get you and your little dogs too” a la the Wicked Witch of the West, he’s actually quite justified in his hard-nosed approach. The Depps’ dogs aren’t Toto, Australia definitely isn’t Kansas, and the land called Oz has had a major problem with unwanted visitors.

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Bungie is ending the era of Gjallarhorn. For months, this one rocket launcher has encapsulated everything great and terrible about Destiny: elusive, powerful, a massive boon to anyone that gets it and a glaring weak spot for anyone without. That’s going to end with patch 2.0, coming out ahead of The Taken King. And it’s not just Gjallahorn. Bungie is also weakening Icebreaker, Thorn, Blackhammer, The Last Word and Hawkmoon, along with a host of other changes to weapon tuning throughout the game. It’s a nerf-fest all around, and it points to an unpleasant game tuning strategy that’s characterized this game for a long time: the player finds and advantage in the game, Bungie removes it, lather, rinse, repeat. This is not the only way to tune a game.

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A reporter who wrote about the new GoPro4 Session created the headline the GoPro should have. Why that headline worked.

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Google’s YouTube Music Key is the next major streaming music service to hit the market. Will people pay for something they can get now for free?

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I am a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering. This collectible card game by Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast has been around nearly as long as I have. So when Hasbro offered to send me a review copy of Magic: The Gathering – Arena of the Planeswalkers ($29.99), I thought it was my lucky day.
However, Magic: The Gathering it ain’t. I encountered a significant learning curve that my years of play experience did little to alleviate. This is a game for people who are serious about board games—people who aren’t swayed by lots of little pieces or 20 pages of rules. I recently tested out the game with some friends, and this is how it went for us.
First Look
The box is on the larger side when it comes to board games—about 15 inches long—and is packed to the brim. It came with four hexagonal-gridded boards that fit together, 11 dice, dozens of tiny red damage counters, five plastic player avatars (AKA “planeswalkers”), and two groups of “squad” avatars—which serve as armies—for each player. The avatars were split into five colors—white, blue, black, red and green—just like in Magic: The Gathering. Unlike in Magic, there’s no creative deck building. You have to devote yourself to just one color and stick with it.
Of course, the heart of the game lies in the cards that came with all this, 12 enchantment spells, two creature spells, and one planeswalker card per color. I’m certain this sounds like gibberish if you haven’t played the card game, hence the enormous rule tome. We learned that the object of the game is to use our planeswalkers and squads to outmaneuver opponents for tactical advantages in key locations in the play area. “Be the last Planeswalker standing to win!” the game suggests.
The Setup
Acquiring my husband and two of our friends—who love Magic: The Gathering as much as I do—was the easy part. Keeping everyone entertained long enough to through the 20-page rulebook was more difficult. I found that plying everyone with alcohol was a fitting solution.
I was already on my second drink of the evening before we had the board set up, after a full 45 minutes of reading the rules and setting up the pieces. We each selected a planeswalker avatar to lead our plastic squads around the hexagonal spaces on the board. “Wait, so this is Warhammer?” my husband quipped, referring the extremely complex table-top game, in which hardcore players move miniatures around an arena and talk battle tactics.

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Bethesda has causally wandered into massive mobile success with the E3 release of Fallout Shelter, their Fallout 4 preview companion game that has players building and managing their own vault. It rocketed up the Apple iOS charts after it was announced on stage at E3, and now we have some quantifiable numbers about how much it’s made Bethesda since.

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Many scientists have anecdotes about working long hours, but these should be True Lab Stories, not career advice. What really matters is not the time that’s put in but the results that come out.

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