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There’s technology out there that won’t only help you track down your lost or stolen devices – but will give you the ability to provide the police with the exact location of your device (along with pictures of the thief in the case of theft). So when your device gets lost or stolen it’s a major blow to your livelihood – and Prey is here to protect and restore it.

Prey is open source software that gives you a 24/7 tracking and recovering capabilities so you can recover your lost or stolen devices. It keeps track of your laptop, phone and tablet whenever stolen or missing — easily and all in one place. And the VentureBeat Store has it right now for just $49!

Here’s how Prey works…

You install a tiny agent in your PC, Mac, or phone, and that agent silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic.This signal is sent either from the Internet or through an SMS message, and allows you to gather information regarding the device’s location, hardware and network status, and optionally trigger specific actions on it.

Let’s take a look at Prey’s features…

• Sends incredibly accurate location updates.
• Snaps pictures of the thief with the devices built-in camera.
• Tracks which files have been accessed or changed on your system.
• Grab screenshots of what the thief is doing on your computer.
• Tracks which programs the thief has running.

This VentureBeat Store offer is for an annual home plan of Prey, which allows you to cover up to 10 devices. Prey works for Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, and Android, so no matter what devices you’re using, Prey will have you – and your gear – covered.

But this deal won’t be around for long. Get Prey from the VB Store page for only $49 now – and give yourself peace of mind today!

The video game industry has always had strong ties to the world of movies, something highlighted by the growing trend of using live-action trailers to help market games.

While such trailers are not new to the industry, the budgets attached to them are growing ever greater, to the point where some wouldn’t look out of place on a Hollywood showreel.

Michael Boniface, the European managing director of APB Reloaded developer Reloaded Productions, spoke to GamesBeat about the trend toward live-action. “The problem with gameplay footage is that it can be more difficult to convey concepts that live-action can do more easily,” said Boniface, “plus there’s still more interest and pickup from live-action. Like it or not.”

Veteran actor James Cosmo (Highlander, Game of Thrones) stars in the trailer for the game Darksiders II, and he sees the two industries growing ever closer. “The video gaming business is now bigger than the film industry. Big movies and big games are merging and becoming something really fascinating,” Mason said. He feels that, thanks to the anarchic nature of YouTube and the Internet, young filmmakers are able to get their work seen more easily and have the chance to blur the worlds of movies and games in a creative way.

Whatever your take on them, these big-budget efforts look set to stay, so it’s just as well that some publishers are doing them right, as you can see from these 10 cinematic gems.

Metro: Last Light

The trailer for upcoming shooter Metro: Last Light (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) focuses on the emotional and human impact of the world as we know it coming to an end. Filmed in freezing temperatures in Ukraine, with Mark Patton (Prometheus) as the director of photography, it looks every bit as epic as seasoned commercials director Jim Weedon intended.

The brief given to creative agency Ichi was to fire the collective imagination of first-person shooter fans and reintroduce Metro as a must-play title. The exact words from the THQ marketing team were, “Give us something BIG!”

With 4 million YouTube views during its first four days of release, this film ably demonstrates the impact that live-action trailers can have on the market.

Sleeping Dogs

Square Enix stepped in to buy the half-finished True Crime: Hong Kong when Activision decided to scrap it. Reborn as open-world crime game Sleeping Dogs (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360), the marketing team enlisted Goldtooth Creative to help create some buzz with this explosive trailer.

Director Paul Furmiger talks in glowing terms about the creative possibilities offered by such live-action game trailers: “When we started creating trailers for gaming companies we were surprised by how much creative license they gave us. It was a bit like the Wild West. Even for this project, the game’s marketing team should really be commended on taking a chance and allowing us to create a live-action trailer for a video game.”

Darksiders II

James Cosmo stars as the manic priest in THQ’s trailer for the action-adventure game Darksiders II (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U), along with acting as a narrator in the game. He described the production process as “almost as if we were shooting an great big epic movie, but we only shot for two days. The production quality was on a par with anything you’d see on a big feature movie.”

“Trailers are really exciting things,” Cosmo said, “because you only have a certain amount of time to put over an awful lot of information and an awful lot of feeling, so it’s got to have terrific impact.”

Hawken

Gameplay footage of Hawken, an upcoming free-to-play mech shooter from Adhesive Games,  has already impressed with its atmospheric visuals and explosive energy. This live-action trailer — the first in a series of shorts directed by Gears of War art director Jerry O’Flaherty — takes things up another notch, adding a human element to the drama.

O’Flaherty is looking to put names and faces to the mech pilots in Hawken: “Through these characters I wanted to begin to speak to the fiction behind the game, to introduce people to a mythology that is just as interesting and intriguing as [my] first view of Hawken.”

APB Reloaded

When you relaunch a game that was previously a complete disaster, you’d better do it with a bang. GamersFirst certainly accomplished that with this live-action trailer for the free-to-play massively multiplayer online game APB Reloaded. Using YouTube stars Tobuscus, Katers17, SeaNanners, and SMPfilms as featured extras in the production is also an inventive way of helping spread word about the game.

Boniface told GamesBeat: “The live action with SFX was designed to show the game’s incredible customization in a way which was accessible to a more mainstream viewer, without relying on a bewildering array of different character models.”

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This is the third high-profile intrusion the group has claimed in the past month. The group previously broke into Sony’s Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.” The group said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. It seems like LulzSec’s modus operandi involves breaking into insecure networks for the sake of exposing security flaws or in retaliation for political causes. It’s very similar to the same way Anonymous, a loosely-associated group of hackers that originally came from image board 4chan, behaved when it attacked Sony and other sites.

“Bethesda, we broke into your site over two months ago. We’ve had all of your Brink users for weeks. Please fix your junk, thanks!” the group posted on its main Twitter account.

Bethesda Softworks confirmed that a hacker group was able to break into the network and possibly compromise information about the site’s members. The company didn’t indicate whether the hacker group was able to steal information about the site’s members, but said that user names, email addresses and passwords might have been compromised. The group said it did not steal any information from Bethesda Softworks.

“Please find enclosed everything we took, excluding one thing — 200,000+ Brink users. We actually like this company and would like for them to speed up the production of Skyrim, so we’ll give them one less thing to worry about. You’re welcome!” the group said in its official release.

Members of the LulzSec group were able to break into the PBS site several days ago and post a fake story that said rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive. It was the third high-profile hacking attack on a private network in a little more than a month. But now the group has apparently turned its eyes on Sony.

The group has been quick to remind everyone that it is not a part of Anonymous — which regularly takes up political causes and sometimes commits hacks like this for amusement. Those within Anonymous — an amorphous and loosely associated group of hackers that are regulars on message boards like 4chan — typically use the term “lulz” to describe the amusement they get out of hacks like these.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s a strategy that Bethesda Softworks now appears to be applying to the rest of its franchises. The company is changing the direction of its Prey series, which was originally more like a corridor-based first-person shooter (FPS) game that sent players from point A to point B, to be more like its open world games like Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Bethesda Softworks showed off a new demo for Prey 2, the latest game in its Prey series that features players traversing an alien world, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today in Los Angeles, Calif. It looks like it’s the whole universe and vision of Prey with a dash of Fallout and a few extra slivers of Oblivion baked into the package.

Both of those games give players the option to explore a massive, vibrant world and carry role-playing game elements that let players incrementally improve their skills and equipment. And both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were critically acclaimed. Fallout 3 earned a score of 91 out of 100 across 48 reviews and Oblivion earned a score of 94 out of 100 across 90 reviews on review aggregating site Metacritic.

Prey 2 tells the story of Killian Samuels, a U.S. Marshall who was abducted by aliens when his plane got sucked into a vortex that landed him on an alien planet. He was captured by slavers and lost parts of his memory but was able to escape. The player joins Samuels when he has begun making a name for himself as a bounty hunter in the slum alien cities, using the skills he learned as a U.S. Marshall to effectively take down marks.

The game begins with Samuels waking up among the wreckage of his plane on an alien garbage area. The rest of the survivors are dead, so he breaks out his pistol and starts to move toward higher ground. He’s immediately ambushed by alien slavers and has to take cover and start chipping away at the bad guys. It’s a FPS that lets players see the game through Samuels’ eyes and hide from enemy fire with cover.

The game also has a few elements of Mirror’s Edge in that the player can execute some pretty sweet parkour-like moves. Players can vault over pieces of cover, climb up their surroundings and execute an action slide under obstacles and into enemies. They can also shoot enemies while doing any of those parkour-like actions. For example, the player can hang from a ledge and use the vertical building as a piece of cover when they peek over the ledge and open fire with a pistol.

It’s an open-world game like Oblivion or Fallout and takes place on the planet Exodus. That planet always has one side facing the sun and one side in the dark, with the largest city on the border between those two parts. That’s where the game takes place, and it features an “alien noir” art style that harks back to the old detective movies that focus on the gritty parts of cities like Los Angeles, Calif.

Since he’s trapped on an alien world, Samuels has access to a lot of cool alien gadgets that help him as a bounty hunter. He can activate a scanner that automatically turns non-playable characters a certain color — green if they’re harmless, red if they’re hostile and yellow if they might turn around and try to kill you. Enemies that the player is trying to track down and kill or capture are highlighted white and some additional details pop up — such as the reward for the quest or what the mark’s name is.

The whole game is a quest to help Samuels piece together his memory and try to find a way back to Earth. It’s carried out through a series of bounty quests that make Samuels use his abilities to chase down, track or assassinate certain marks. The longer bounty quests reveal more details about Samuels’ surroundings and how he ended up on Exodus, as well as clues to help him get home.

The bounty hunter quests reward the player with money that they can use to buy new equipment and weapons. Guns have upgradeable parts that add new features to each weapon and change the aesthetic look of the weapon. There are also different ammo types for each gun that the player can purchase, although Bethesda wouldn’t get into any additional details about that ammo system.

Like most modern open-world games, players are given the choice to be a nice guy or a complete dick. But it’s really over the top in Prey 2, and it’s fantastic. Sure, you can choose to kill baddies and help out people who are getting kicked to the ground. But players can also walk up behind a guy just minding his own business looking over a railing and kick him right off the ledge.

The consequences for being a jerk in the game are pretty minimal at first because it takes place in a slum-like area where there’s only loose authority. There are robots around the city that will track your movements and keep track of your actions. Those machines will start to open fire on you if you continue randomly killing people or just being a generally terrible person. The more bad actions you take, the worse the repercussions become — to the point of teleporting in reinforcements to take you down.

Prey 2 should come out sometime next year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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