Assassin's Creed Rogue review: The best Assassin's Creed you'll never need to play

I talked a lot of trash about Assassin's Creed: Unity this year. On release it was buggy and broken, sure, but it also just wasn't much fun. Protagonist Arno was just a bland retread of series-favorite Ezio, the story managed to make even the French Revolution feel sort of boring, the overhauled free-running was too sticky and cumbersome, and I just overall felt it lacked the panache of the previous year's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

There was another Assassin's Creed game this year though—Assassin's Creed Rogue, originally released for last-gen consoles and then recently brought over to PC. Knowing how I felt about Unity, this should be a pretty good endorsement for Rogue:

Most of what's left is the legendary ship battles.

Black Flag Pt. II

Assassin's Creed Rogue is the best Assassin's Creed game that you're probably never going to play.

This is basically the second time Ubisoft has done this. With the exception of the first game, Ubisoft seems to want to position the Assassin's Creed series as a chain of trilogies. We had the Assassin's Creed II/Brotherhood/Revelations arc, wherein the first game was good, the second was great, and then Revelations was basically an inessential coda for long-time fans to say farewell to Ezio.

Well Rogue is the Revelations of the Assassin's Creed III era. In other words, it takes the best parts of Assassin's Creed III (which isn't much) and mashes it up with the best parts of Black Flag. In other, other words, it's Black Flag 1.5.

And I loved Black Flag, so that's fine with me.

The story takes place during the Seven Years War/French and Indian War, which spanned from 1754-1763. That puts Rogue right between Black Flag's piracy and ACIII's American Revolution. Rogue takes advantage of this by pulling in characters from both of the previous games, giving some closure to Black Flag characters like Adewale and some backstory to ACIII characters like Achilles and Haytham Kenway.

It's a fascinating structure, although it's hampered by the fact that...well, Assassin's Creed III wasn't that good. It's somewhat hard to care about the backstory of characters you didn't necessarily care about to begin with.

Still, it's oddly heartwarming to see some familiar faces in a series that seems content with ditching its entire cast every year. Over the course of the game you're hit with cameo after cameo from an extensive B-tier cast that plays foil to the new protagonist, Shay Patrick Cormac.

I don't know why Cormac's story was wasted on Rogue. Here's a guy who was brought up in the Assassins, turned traitor, and went to work for the Templars killing off his old friends. That's a hell of a set-up, shedding more light on the relationship between the two factions than possibly any game in the series thus far and providing all sorts of opportunities for moral ambiguity. It's certainly more interesting than Unity's story.

And yet it's given short shrift in Rogue, as a "budget" title. Rather than the dozen or so chapters of a normal Assassin's Creed game, Cormac is given a scant six chapters of story to cover both his upbringing in the Assassins, his turn, and then the whole rest of the game.

It's too fast. Cormac isn't given nearly enough character development to handle all that weight, nor are the other characters given enough time for you to learn to care about them. It's probably good that you'll recognize most of the characters from previous Assassin's Creed games because otherwise they'd just be nameless caricatures. Adewale, for instance, has probably two dozen lines in the entire game. That's not enough to do anything meaningful.

I'm left with the impression that Rogue is the most ambitious Assassin's Creed story—in terms of character, in terms of information on the two factions, in terms of First Civilization lore—but it just never clicks. There's a guy working for Abstergo Industries in the modern-day part of the game who continually tells you that Shay Cormac is "the most important Assassin to ever live" or something along those lines, but at the end of the day...why? Because he killed some other Assassins?

Told you so. (Click to expand and read subtitles)

I don't know. I just don't buy it, and that's a shame because I think in a full-fledged game Cormac could be that important. He just got screwed by playing B-side to Unity this year.

On the other hand, it plays like Black Flag: sail your ship around, listen to pirate shanties, discover little coastal towns, dig for treasure, beat people up in bars, blow up other ships. Rather than one large Caribbean map, the sailing section of the game is now split between the River Valley (a part of New York that looks strangely like a retextured Caribbean) and the North Atlantic up by Halifax (which also looks strangely similar to the Caribbean, albeit with snow and icebergs).

There's also a third, fairly large New York City/Manhattan map repurposed from Assassin's Creed III. This map plays more like traditional Assassin's Creed, with you running around and unlocking zones. It's also the most boring of the areas, because there's surprisingly little character to such a large city area. And the game seems aware of this, rarely bringing you back to Manhattan.

In fact, the game is generally terrible about making you explore. Because the story is so condensed, missions only touch on a handful of locations. Your only impetus to go and discover the rest of the map is "I want to."

And I mean, I did want to. I went to every location. I collected 100 percent of all the collectibles, because I really love sailing around. But Rogue never feels as tight or well-designed as Black Flag. There's a lot of space here, between the three maps, and very little reason to engage with any of it.

Bottom line

Play Rogue if you want more Black Flag. Play Rogue if you want to learn about the complex relationship between the Assassins and Templars. Play Rogue if you hated Unity and want a better Assassin's Creed experience this year.

Those are the three cases I can think of where you might end up playing this game. Is it essential? Absolutely not. But there's a decent game here, and my only real regret is you can tell there's the potential for a much better game if only the developers were given more to work with.

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US gains in mobile patents as IBM passes Samsung

The U.S. widened its lead in mobile patents last year and IBM took the top spot in new patents granted in that space, according to a report this week that analyzed data from both the U.S. and Europe.

While the number of mobile patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) jumped by 17 percent between 2013 and 2014, the total fell by 4 percent at the European Patent Office (EPO), according to Chetan Sharma Consulting. The U.S. continued to gain on Europe as the place where mobile inventions are devised, a trend driven by software development in Silicon Valley and Americans' heavy use of mobile data, the report said.

The mobile boom is a big part of U.S. innovation right now. Fully 26 percent of all patents issued by the USPTO last year were for mobile technologies, while only about one in 10 patents issued in Europe fell into that category, the report said.

The growing U.S. lead in mobile innovation comes as the cellular industry starts to define its next major set of standards, called 5G. The earlier 2G, 3G and 4G standards took shape when Europe played a stronger role in mobile, but the U.S. started to come into its own in the middle of the last decade, according to Sharma. Now European industry and government are trying to work together to make sure they aren't left behind in 5G development.

While South Korea's Samsung has the world's biggest mobile patent portfolio, IBM is getting more patents granted now: It surpassed Samsung to take the top spot for 2014. Qualcomm came in third place, followed by Microsoft and Google. About half of the top 50 companies winning mobile patents over the past few years are based in the U.S., the report said.

Also in 2014, Apple entered the top 10 for mobile patents issued during the year. It had the eighth-most patents granted. But Apple still doesn't have one of the ten biggest portfolios.

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Amazon Echo gains new features days ahead of price hike

This week's biggest Amazon-related story has got to be the introduction of the Wi-Fi-enabled Dash Button, an Internet of Things-fueled spin on the way people order groceries and other home-use products. Mind you, however, it's not the only connected-home experiment the company is undertaking with select Amazon Prime members as willing guinea pigs.

There's also the Echo cloud-enabled interactive speaker, which the e-tailing titan began selling on an invite-only basis back in November and which is about to get costlier. According to a recent update to Echo's official page, Prime subscribers have until April 7 to request an invite for the chance to snag the Siri-in-device-form at the current introductory price of $99. If you fail to act in time, you will have to cough up twice as much.

Why this matters: That's quite a bargain, considering how many users think that Echo acquits itself rather well as a voice-activated Internet-connected speaker if not as a virtual assistant. And it's only going to get better, with an SDK (software development kit) on its way and third-party apps not far off . More importantly, the SDK could lead to the Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi-enabled device finally becoming the smart home's voice and ears—something many, including us, would like to see.

The company added support for Pandora music streaming in January and a recent update has made it even better. Now Echo users no longer need a smartphone or tablet to fire up their favorite Pandora station. They can instead direct Echo's on-board voice assistant Alexa to play it for them. (You can ask Alexa to either play a station for a particular genre, or create one for your favorite artist or band.)

Echo has also gained the ability to rattle off Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer information, including scores and game schedule. This functionality was previously limited to the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.

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Instagram gives Apple Watch developers a hand

With the Apple Watch set for release on April 24, third-party application developers are rushing to write extensions that can run on the device. Now Instagram is sharing some code it wrote for its own app to help others.

The Facebook-owned company has posted a set of Objective C code that provides a way for an application to use complex data structures, which could facilitate feature-rich apps for the tiny device.

"We're really excited to be one of the first apps on the platform, and were able to build some solutions that we think will help other people build their apps more quickly and easily," Instagram engineer Ryan Nystrom wrote in an emailed statement. "We've been able to build on open-source technology at Instagram, so it's exciting for us to contribute, too."

Instagram's Watch app can display items from a user's Instagram photo feed and lets the user "Like" other photos and leave emoji comments.

Apple has published a preliminary framework for programmatically manipulating the Watch, though the company warns that some commands may change before the final release.

The Instagram code is different from Apple's standard software in how it deals with multi-dimensional data, or a single piece of data with multiple items within it. Instagram says it provides an easier way to do things like using that data to populate multiple choices in a hierarchical menu.

Instagram is not alone in rushing to build apps for the watch, many of which will probably serve as extensions of iPhone and iPad apps. Evernote, City Mapper, real estate listing service Redfin, Salesforce, and the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper all are preparing Watch apps.

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Open-source Windows? The unthinkable is already happening, says Microsoft

However unlikely a future in which Microsoft makes Windows open source may sound, Microsoft has already taken considerable strides in that direction.

But instead of allowing developers to make changes to Windows and other products, it's Microsoft's fingers at the keyboard.

According to Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, a future that includes an open-source Windows could happen. "It's definitely possible," Russinovich reportedly told an audience at the ChefCon conference in Santa Clara this week. "It's a new Microsoft."

"Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software—open versus not-open versus services—has happened," Russinovich added.

Microsoft

Mark Russinovich

Why this matters: Saturday marks Microsoft's 40th anniversary. Just a few years ago, such a statement by Russinovich would have been anathema to Microsoft—and if Bill Gates were still at the CEO's desk, it might have resulted in a letter of termination. But this is the new Microsoft, forced into a spirit of cooperation and collaboration by increasing pressure on the PC and on its business model. This is still pie-in-the-sky stuff—but science fiction can become reality. Just ask Dick Tracy's watch.

You can't just toss away $4 billion per quarter

An open-source Windows would be unlikely in the near term, however. That would require Microsoft to expose its reams of code to public view, theoretically allowing developers to create their own proprietary, incompatible forks of Windows. That's an absolute example, of course—Microsoft could decide to open the code to certain components within the OS—perhaps what will turn into the "legacy" browser, Internet Explorer. But open-sourcing Windows—and perhaps make it free to use—would also require Microsoft to give up a large chunk of the $4 billion or so a quarter it collectively receives from Windows, Windows Phone, and Office licenses.

As Wired points out, Microsoft has agreed to provide OEMs a free copy of Windows for devices with displays under 8 inches. And it's far more open to running open-source products on top of its Azure cloud services than it was.

Microsoft listens to and responds to community suggestions.

Community directed, Microsoft written

But it's worth pointing out, from a consumer perspective, how much more willing Microsoft is to let its customers guide its direction—and actually dictate features.

Virtually all consumer-facing services that Microsoft offers include a way for users to suggest ideas. Sites like the Xbox Suggestion Box, OneDrive Suggestion Box, and the Windows 10 Suggestion Box (now replaced by the Insider app inside the technical previews of Windows 10) provide an avenue for direct feedback from consumers to suggest improvements and feature requests for Microsoft products.

The company listens. Cases in point: A surprising number of users clamored for Persian calendars in Windows 10—and Microsoft delivered. Microsoft's monthly updates to the Xbox One often include and highlight community suggestions. Heck, when has Microsoft allowed consumers to beta-test a new operating system as it develops it?

Thousands of users wanted Persian calendar support in Windows 10. It's in there.

A group of dedicated developers could undoubtedly add their own improvements to the Windows products. (Stardock and others have built a business on that idea, with their own versions of the Windows Start menu.) And it's also true that Microsoft doesn't or can't respond to all requests; the most popular Xbox One request, for example, is for Microsoft to build in backward compatibility to the Xbox 360 and its stable of games. 

Right now, Microsoft has built its business on Windows, Office, and its enterprise products. But as Microsoft moves more toward a "devices and services" world, it's possible that Windows will become less important, even as those services become more prominent.

"Microsoft's revenue increasingly comes from the compute services rather than licensing software, and by selling a wide collection of related services such as Office 365, OneDrive, Bing, etc.," said Al Gillen, a vice president with IDC. "So would it make sense to open-source Windows in, maybe, 10 years? Quite possibly."

Additional reporting by Katherine Noyes of the IDG News Service.

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US gains in mobile patents as IBM passes Samsung

The U.S. widened its lead in mobile patents last year and IBM took the top spot in new patents granted in that space, according to a report this week that analyzed data from both the U.S. and Europe.

While the number of mobile patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) jumped by 17 percent between 2013 and 2014, the total fell by 4 percent at the European Patent Office (EPO), according to Chetan Sharma Consulting. The U.S. continued to gain on Europe as the place where mobile inventions are devised, a trend driven by software development in Silicon Valley and Americans' heavy use of mobile data, the report said.

The mobile boom is a big part of U.S. innovation right now. Fully 26 percent of all patents issued by the USPTO last year were for mobile technologies, while only about one in 10 patents issued in Europe fell into that category, the report said.

The growing U.S. lead in mobile innovation comes as the cellular industry starts to define its next major set of standards, called 5G. The earlier 2G, 3G and 4G standards took shape when Europe played a stronger role in mobile, but the U.S. started to come into its own in the middle of the last decade, according to Sharma. Now European industry and government are trying to work together to make sure they aren't left behind in 5G development.

While South Korea's Samsung has the world's biggest mobile patent portfolio, IBM is getting more patents granted now: It surpassed Samsung to take the top spot for 2014. Qualcomm came in third place, followed by Microsoft and Google. About half of the top 50 companies winning mobile patents over the past few years are based in the U.S., the report said.

Also in 2014, Apple entered the top 10 for mobile patents issued during the year. It had the eighth-most patents granted. But Apple still doesn't have one of the ten biggest portfolios.

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Confusion but hope as U.S. faces mobile payment revolution

In just under six months, a behind-the-scenes switch in the payments industry will change the way U.S. consumers shop and could bring wider acceptance for Apple Pay and its competitors.

Beginning in October, liability for transactions with fraudulent credit and debit cards will shift from the card companies to retailers, if the retailers haven't invested in terminals that don't accept chip-based cards. The chip cards are already being sent from banks to customers, and some stores have them in place, but much is still up in the air.

At this week's Transact 15 expo in San Francisco, a gathering of companies in the electronic payments industry, everyone has questions and there are few answers. Could the shift be delayed, will banks mandate PIN numbers instead of signatures for purchases with the new cards, and will cybercriminals just shift their attention online?

The switch to chip-based cards happened a decade ago in many European countries and is now common around the world, but the U.S., with its complex financial and retail system, has lagged. No one had wanted to put the investment into new cards and new terminals.

The Target transition

And then Target happened.

The breach of Target's payment system last year, which exposed the card numbers of tens of millions of consumers, is credited by many as the final push the industry needed to finally make the switch.

The new chip cards add a digital signature to transactions that lets the payment network know that the card being presented is the official one and not a fake—magnetic stripes don't have this ability and have proved vulnerable to copying.

But to accept the cards, retailers have to upgrade their payment terminals.

The largest retailers in the nation are already well prepared, said Rod Hometh, senior vice president of strategic development at Ingenico, a credit card machine retailer. They've been preparing for the last two years and even large regional retailers are expected to be ready at or near the deadline, he said, but most small businesses are well behind.

Pain at small businesses

This is partly due to cost and partly to lack of awareness of the shift.

With a small handheld terminal costing about the same as a smartphone, upgrading can cost thousands of dollars for small businesses, and there are many such businesses in the county.

Of the 6 million retail terminals in the U.S., a million of them account for 95 percent of all transactions. Small retailers make up the remaining 5 million terminals.

Some retailers are taking the opportunity to upgrade their entire systems to benefit from new technology and software that has been introduced in recent years, said Kevin Colaco, innovation mentor at Retail Cloud, a California start-up that offers a free point-of-sale system with premium add-ons.

An advantage of this approach is that the new terminals also include readers for NFC [near-field communication] systems like Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Samsung Pay.

For consumers eager to adopt mobile payments, the switch could bring wider acceptance. But the new cards are also expected to bring some confusion. In most countries, chip cards also ushered in an era where PINs, rather than signatures, are used to verify a transaction. Many banks and retailers are expected to stick with signatures, but some automated terminals such as gas pumps might start requiring PINs.

With six months to go, card issuers appear resolute on the October 1 deadline and most people involved agree that a further delay would cause a loss of faith in the switchover.

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Cloud gaming pioneer OnLive sold to Sony, will cease operations April 30

Cloud gaming service OnLive said Wednesday that Sony has bought many of its assets, and the company will wind down operations on April 30. (Full disclosure: I began subscribing to OnLive late last year.)

Users will continue to have access to OnLive's services until April 30, including the OnLive Game Service, OnLive Desktop and SL Go, and the company's Second Life browser. After today, no further subscription renewals will be charged for any of these services, the company said. Users whose subscriptions renewed on or after March 28 will be refunded. 

Why this matters: Onlive's subscribers are losing a unique service that had no real competition—perhaps for good reason. At its inception, OnLive was a pioneer: Network-based computers like Citrix had existed for some time, but no one had adapted the same principles to gaming. Users, armed with either a microconsole or basic PC, could tap into OnLive's network of servers and render a high-end game at maximum settings without the need to invest in a high-end PC. 

OnLive

OnLive allowed subscribers to buy games elsewhere and play them using OnLive's servers.

OnLive's magic relied on allowing its users to play those games without latency issues, as the information was passed back and forth between the player and the OnLive servers. But the business model apparently wasn't sustainable. In 2012, OnLive unexpectedly imploded, as founder Steve Perlman unexpectedly sold and restructured the company.

In March 2014, OnLive was reborn. Although Perlman was no longer with the company, the revamped OnLive kept many of its features: the cloud gaming technology, now tied in with Valve's Steam service, and the PlayPack, the library of 250 or so older games that was available to users to play for a monthly fee.

When OnLive underwent its restructuring in 2012, employees said that OnLive had drastically underestimated the number of servers it needs, versus the number it actually used. It's possible the same situation occurred, again.

Now, OnLive's assets will join Gaikai, the OnLive cloud gaming rival that Sony bought in 2012. Gaikia is widely believed to be powering the Sony PlayStation Plus service, which allows owners of the Sony PlayStation 4 to play older PS3 games via the cloud.

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LIFX adds a more affordable white bulb to its smart lighting lineup

The battle for control of the emerging smart lighting market is heating up, with new products coming in thick and fast from companies big and small. Yesterday Dutch lighting behemoth Philips announced the Hue Go—a portable version of its now iconic Hue connected LED bulb—and Aussie smart-lighting startup LIFX Labs follows suit with a new product of its own.

The company, which pioneered Wi-Fi-enabled color-changing LED bulbs in 2012, has finally gotten around to adding a white-light-only bulb to its portfolio. It's called the LIFX White 800 and is the company's cheapest offering yet at $40 each. Being Wi-Fi-enabled, like its color-changing predecessors, means it requires no hub.

The timing of the announcement is just a touch off, though. It comes just a day after Philips slashed the price of its own white-light-only offering, the Hue Lux, by a third to $20 a pop. Granted, the ZigBee-enabled Lux is useless without the Hue bridge, but getting one is cheaper now that Philips has also lowered the price of its two-bulb-and-a-hub starter kit from $100 to $80.

LIFX

LIFX bulbs connect to your Wi-Fi network, so they don't require a hub for control. But if you're deploying a lot of them, they're still more expensive than Philips Hue bulbs that do require a hub.

Put differently, the Hue Lux is the cheaper option if you need more than two bulbs, with the savings adding up as you scale up. That's true even if you buy the White 800 in packs of five or ten.

But is Hue Lux the better bulb? Not necessarily. A quick look at their respective specs suggests the White 800 has a slight advantage: At 890 lumens (equivalent to a 60W incandescent), it is a good 140 lumens brighter than the Lux. Further, the company claims the White 800 is the first bulb in the entry-level segment to feature a "choice between rich warm to cool white lights all in one bulb." The official product page, however, makes no mention of the exact color temperatures. A spec sheet gets more specific, listing the bulb's color-temperature as ranging from 2700- to 6500K.

Why this matters: Entry-level smart bulbs like the White 800 should please those who desperately want in on the home automation action, but find most other connected-home devices either too expensive or too intimidating for their liking. In fact, they should please anyone and everyone who just can't wait for the smart-home party to get started in earnest. Confused? Let us explain.

Over the last couple of years, we've often heard smart bulbs being described as a potential Trojan horse for the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon. Bulbs, the argument goes, trump most other home devices and appliances in this regard due to their almost unparalleled ubiquity and indispensability. And since we're already in the middle of a global transition from incandescent bulbs to more efficient LED lighting, many will be tempted to go whole hog and get smart bulbs. But for that to happen on a large enough scale, smart bulbs must become more affordable.

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Securifi’s Almond 2015 and Almond+ routers pull double duty as connected-home hubs

A year introducing  the Almond—the world's first touchscreen wireless router—Securifi decided to go one better by adding home-automation features to its follow-up product. It turned to Kickstarter, where many deemed the idea of a router/connected-home hub good enough to pour more than $850,000 into the effort. But even the staunchest believers must have had their faith tested when an undercooked device showed up in July, 2014, more than nine months behind schedule.

The home-automation functionality was nowhere to be seen at launch and, as is apparent from the many frustrated comments on the product's Kickstarter page, the whole experience was riddled with bugs. The company has been working hard to remedy those shortcomings.

While a firmware update released in February gave the Z-Wave- and Zigbee-enabled Almond+ its missing home-automation chops, a fresh update that Securifi rolled out Tuesday includes a new and improved user interface. The company also recently introduced a lower-cost model—the Almond 2015—that is slightly less powerful and loses the Z-Wave connectivity, but costs $100 less than Securifi's flagship.

Securifi

The Almond 2015 is a 2x2 802.11n router with  an integrated ZigBee radio. 

Securifi's press release touts just how easy it is to create automation rules with the new UI, likening it to building something with Lego blocks. Since these rules run locally, you don't have to worry about your connected home suddenly becoming dumb the instant you lose access to the Internet. It also means that both Almond routers can deliver response times that their cloud-based automation rivals can only dream of.

Securifi boasts of its routers' ability to create conditional rules that can be more complex than "if this happens, do that." You'll need to have the appropriate sensors and devices for these rules to work, of course, but the examples the company provided are compelling:

• When the mailbox is opened, turn the kitchen light on, set the color to yellow, and ring the door-chime.
• If it's hotter than 100F between 1- and 5PM, water the lawn for 5 minutes and close the shades
• Set the bedroom light to 20% at 7AM: after 2 minutes set it to 40%: after another 2 minutes set it to 60%; after another 2 minutes set it to 80%

Securifi

The more powerful Almond+ is a 3x3 802.11ac router with both ZigBee and Z-Wave radios. 

The Almond+ and its newer sibling, the Almond 2015, are available from Amazon for $199 and $99, respectively, prices that reflect limited-time discounts on each router. The company is also giving away one of its Peanut smart plugs with each purchase.

Why this matters: Some believe the days of dedicated smart-home hubs are numbered. They depend on a router anyway, so why not include their features in a router. If that reasoning wins the day, and Securifi's Almond series perform well as both hubs and routers, they'll be ahead of their time.

We have both the Almond 2015 and the Almond+ in hand now, so we should be able to answer those questions soon.

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