Y U no Microsoft?

Well, were a few Microsoft related updates, but following the commands of the almighty apple overlord, Microsoft as a whole has refrained for the first time to have a presentation in the CES. Fear not though, since Microsoft is holding its own conventions, where they will allow you to touch their new devices and make you feel super extra special.

Where is that projection coming from !?
and where can I get that sweet as FRO BRO?

Kinect however, promises to turn your room into a disco/projection room. Seems Microsoft didn’t think you had bought enough peripherals from them, so the new kinect is equipped with a dedicated processor that improves its accuracy, and is less taxing on your machine… but the main hook here, is that when paired with a projector, it scans your room and extends the field of view by projecting the rest of the world in your walls . Only videos were shown of this, and to be honest, I cant see it as anything other than another rather impractical gimmick.

Nvidia only does everything.

Our good old green graphics card giant is wanting to make a splash in the console business it seems. Not only did they showcase the Tegra 4 chip, the most powerful in its class, with the ridiculous amount of 72 Graphical processing units; but they also surprised/puzzled with the unveiling of the SHIELD project (no, nothing to do with the avengers initiative). This handheld however is a bit of a mutant, it runs on android, can output HD video, and it’s equipped with an unfolding 5 inch 720p multi-touch screen, the new tegra 4 chip, and a big, bulky body/controller that looks like a miniature Xbox but with buttons placed like a Dual Shock. It can also stream pc games through a wireless network with supposedly little to no input lag.

so now you know what happens when you allow your Xbox controller, a 3DS, a PSVita, and iPad to have an unsupervised playdate.

4k my heart

Remember the good old days of 1080p? how you saved your pretty penny to buy your Full HD 50 inch LCD display? well TOO BAD because it’s not big enough anymore!
and everyone is doing it! In 3D!
But are we? many countries are still very much in transition to even define HD standards, and we have a new hardware change incoming? Seems like we need to consider the technical/economic/functional ramifications of this change before we can really have any use for it.

Just check the numbers:
A bluray disc can store around 50 GBs, which is roughly the length of a high quality compressed movie in 1080p.
A 4K movie would the very least use up 150GBs, But how do you distribute that amount? Sure, there are upcoming new codecs and you can cram more into a bluray disk, but it is still a behemoth.
The other downside is that there really isn’t many devices or media produced in this format, so for now, it is little more than a wildly expensive huge movie picture frame.

A thumb flash drive?

Ok don’t look at us like that. It’s not only a flash drive…
It’s a Kingston 512 Gigabytes – 1 Terabyte flash drive! ranging from $1800.- to $???.- in a conveniently misplaceable package. YAY! Imagine all the data you can lose!

Yeah, it’s rather bulky, but still impressive witchcraft when you think that 2.5GB of data used to look like that.

It’s A box, not THE box

Piston is the name of the first announced “steam box” and it comes in several flavors, starting at $999, which oddly only seems to include an integrated graphics card. Lets be clear here, we are probably gonna be seeing many Steam enabled boxes in the near future (BRO, it’s just a small pc where you can install steam), but according to Valve, who is actually developing the official Steam-box, the baby won’t be reaching players anytime soon (probably launching with the next Half Life episode).

It seems we are taking the “box” aspect quite seriously.

One interesting thing, is that we are seeing a trend in the “hardcorization” of mobile and a mobilization of hardcore… What will happen when the ouyas, the Pistons and the many surely incoming miniconsoles collide?
I also wonder what will happen with player habits and game concepts now that the medium is allowing all sorts of games to be played in all sorts of different platforms. I fear free to play will hijack the status-quo, but I digress… who knows.

The rift comes closer

Ah, the promies of virtual reality, remember the virtual boy? How can one forget. But the occulus rift, which already had a successful kickstarter is promising to actually fulfill all our VR dreams.

I’m sure you wouldn’t look dorky at all wearing one of these babies…

Sure, it’s not quite finished yet, but the double 720p screens and eerily accurate head tracking make me extremely hopeful.

Seems mobile is not so mobile

Following up from before, A lot of brands came up with some impressive albeit slightly unusable devices:
Razer’s Edge tablet has some astounding specs, but only supports ONE HOUR of gaming.
Don’t get me wrong this thing is a beast, but is it really mobile for any good reason?

Panasonic unveiled a prototype 20 inch 4k Windows 8 tablet. Really? Shouldn’t we be calling this a table?

That’s a handy… um…. device you’re holding there sir…
talk about trying to compensate for something.

Maybe this is a proof of concept more than anything else.. but it makes you wonder.. why would you ever want a device like this?

So what do you think? Did we miss anything interesting?

Game Freak will be releasing two new pokemon games in October this year. This release will be worldwide, a first for the series, given it usually takes a few months to release translated versions.

The most prominent aspect of the new games are the new perspectives, a welcome change from the top down format that has been used since it’s inception.

Of course, with a new game comes new pokemon. So far five have been revealed, the three starters, and two legendaries, likely version exclusive. Footage in the game shows previous generation pokémon, so there’s likely some connectivity with older games.

-Charles

But good old Riot are at it again, with some seemingly amateurish decisions made regarding the second season’s World Championship played live in the Nokia Centre in Los Angeles over the weekend.

CLG EU and World Elite encountered a crash ten minutes into their first match, followed up with a connection issue one hour into their third, as CLG EU were considered to be on the cusp of victory. As one article pointed out;  “analysts agree that the re-matches have already skewed the outcome by giving both teams an extended and consequence-free look at each others playstyle.”

More controversy exploded with Azubu Frost’s victory over American juggernauts Team Solo Mid (TSM),the latter being pinned as the hope for a North American victory. In a move that many in the community struggled to understand, team ‘mini-maps’ were placed over the teams positions on the stage, and uproar ensued over accusations of team members looking at the enemies positions over their shoulders during the games.

Lead referee at the event, ‘RiotTiza’ has been the only member of Riot Games to comment on the above controversy

“We keep a constant watch on all the players on stage at all times. We have cameras as well as live people walking onto stage to keep tabs in everything. All players are told that they need to remain sitting, facing forward, and with headphones on at all times, including during pauses. I can personally confirm that no WE player looked at the minimap at any point during the match.”

Riot Games are yet to formally address the community outside of RiotTiza’s comments, but this thread at the general discussion board seems to be home to the debate.

EDIT: Riot Games have announced that CLG EU and World Elite will have re-scheduled games TBD
UPDATE: RedBeard, the “VP of esports” over at Riot Games has issued this statement!

- Editor

I’ve been following it for a while, and I just recently got an invite to the closed beta. Which as the developers say, is noticeably still undergoing many changes. But even as unfinished as it evidently is, I can safely say Firefall is an extremely fun addition to the online community.

The world is vast and vivid. And the design is fantastic.

The first thing to notice is that the game looks great, there is tonnes of personality in the world and the characters, although right now there is not much to introduce you to the actual events that have led to the action in the game. As with other MMOs, you get thrown straight into character creation, and while the personality of the characters (seems like a hybrid between gears of war and Borderlands), the classes and the variety of customisation options is far from weak, the game is currently not quite up to par with other games we’ve seen lately like Tera or GW2. However all of this could change greatly on release since they are regularly updating the options.

The class archetypes seem to fall into familiar places, there is a heavy damage Assault unit, The Dreadnaught: your average Brick shithouse, Strong and Heavy. A more swift and agile sniper / scout Recon class, a somewhat strategic /crowd control and support Engineer class, and a heavier support / healing class, the Biotech.

I know I’m the ultimate badass, the UI though, has a little explaining to do.

Right from the get-go, influences of this game become evident, and that’s not a bad thing. The striking pseudo cell-shaded graphic style, again reminds me of Borderlands but in a cleaner more outworldish way, with even sharper and more coherent overall aesthetics. Also with the inclusion of Jetpack boots as a standard on all characters a la Tribes, movement and combat make you feel awesome (although sometimes not quite as responsive as it should be) allowing you to hover around and drop punishment on your foes (or just visit a quest giver).

After a few quests it becomes evident that you’re gonna have to be smart with your abilities and your use of the jetpack to survive in the wilderness. Enemies are aggressive, fast and do heavy damage if you are not paying attention. And for once, night-time is actually a threat. You need to turn your flashlight on, and stay out of deep water, or you’ll be lost in the dark and dead.

From what I gather, the story re-tells the old fable of space mercenaries in a foreign planet enforcing a rather necessary terraforming/colonization programme, while the evil buglike native wildlife tries to make them dinner, but it is not currently explained in the beta. A lot of the plot surrounds the necessity of mining minerals from the planet with “Thumpers”, some form of sonic drills that extract minerals from the depths. Needless to say, the aliens are annoyed by this rude procedures, so they come out in hordes to teach you some manners.
This whole premise is hardly new, but it gets the job done, gives you a motive to run around, analyzing terrain, fixing water pumps, defending mining stations, recharging colony shields and resupplying depots (among others). At the end of the day, what we all want is to kill space bugs, and there’s plenty of that.

So you scan the terrain, call a thumper.. and shoot anything that moves.

But for all that shooting, we need bigger guns, and tighter mech suits, so the game takes care of that as well! Although I’ve only scratched the surface, there seems to be an extremely deep multiple tiered Battlegear weapon/armor/skill customisation system. With the EXP you get from quests and exploration, you can get unlock different upgrades made by different mercenary companies ? that expectedly have various effects. And you can also purchase various things and craft with materials mined. You can also Unlock other classes for your same character, having up to 3 different specific build slots available for free.
However, a lot of the customization seems to be tied to the old microtransaction trick (mainly aesthetic upgrades), so you might have to pay to get your character to look / play as you always dreamed.

I hear that a lot of the focus of the game is in PVP, which makes sense as a fps, and to boost popularity with competitiveness. I haven’t tried it yet, but  it would probably work well with the overall game mechanics…  so I can imagine it being a highlight of the game   (just put jetpacks on anything and its 10x awesomer)

Pajama Jetpacks… a dream come true.

At this point its hard to judge Firefall harshly considering there are clear ongoing improvements, but I did find some issues in a few areas that hopefully won’t crawl into the final release.
Graphically, although the game looks fantastic, it failed to perform properly, a clear framerate stutter endured throughout all graphical settings, even lowering the graphic quality, in fact it seemed to improve slightly on higher settings, which seems odd.
Also, although the quest system does get rid of some of the tedious need to backtrack to the quest giver and has some nicely voice acted sequences with pretty character portraits, it’s structure does little to improve the tried and tiresome fetch quest structure. I probably wouldn’t even notice this if I hadn’t been playing GuildWars 2, but this traditional system seems outdated and static by comparison.
Additionally, there is very little in the way of introducing the players to any aspect of the game, beyond a basic minimal initial tutorial, in the current state, there is close to no guidance into the diverse and somewhat complex systems of the game. What is worse, often interfaces, although stylish, make understanding even less intuitive.

The map is informative and stylish, but far less intuitive than it should.

An issue that I had that may be harder to tackle, was the complexity of the vertical navigation. It took me a while to understand where some vendors and upgrade stations were in the map, and often the amount of small icons and details tend to clump up unrecognizably.

Less frequently, the necessity of ammo in the gun, although obviously understandable often became a bore, especially when I was just about to finish a quest and I had to backtrack to a supply station to get ammo just to kill one other enemy to finish the quest. This added to the somewhat erratic lagging and twitching enemy behavior (causing me to spend more ammo than desired because the enemy inexplicably strafed a few dozen meters), and the unreliable character movement that sometimes gets stuck on unnoticed objects in the ground, made questing less enjoyable than it could have been.

In any case, Firefall seems to be improving steadily, and many issues have been fixed during my play period. There are many genuinely interesting ideas in the game, and it is overall quite fun to play. Hopefully we can see all the kinks ironed out by release.

The first is the Dinobot Destructor pack. As you might guess, it’s all focused on the Dinobots. Essentially it’s a pack of customisation options for your multiplayer character.

Infiltrator: gives you the Slug body type, giving you the alternate mode of a Triceratops
Destroyer: Gives you the Snarl body type and the alt mode of a Stegosaurus
Titan: Gives you the Grimlock body type, and the t-rex alt mode. Overall coolest alt-mode.
Scientist: gives you the Swoop body type and the pterodactyl body type.

Swoop was given to people that pre-ordered the game from Play.com.

The second DLC pack, Ultimate Fury gives you Gen. 1 Optimus Prime, the jeep Hound, and the Insecticons, who made an appearance in the single-player campaign. It also gives you some options for the single-player campaign, to help change it up if you’ve already blazed through it, such as Bruticus being in his Gen. 2 coloration (really bright camoflage), and Megatron in his classic gun mode.

-Charles

Sources: Siebertron

While this may bring the tech demo from E3 to mind, this reports states that the title will utilise the same graphical style as Skyward Sword, and not the ultra realistic Twilight Princess-esque graphics.

The game will also be taking full advantage of the gamepad controller.

At this stage, though it is only a rumor, the article’s source has made preidctions in the past regarding the Wii U that have proved to have been correct.

I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground on this, what say you?

-Charles

Source:
http://wiiudaily.com/2012/09/wii-u-zelda-game-coming-2014/
Image credits:  http://halfemptyenergytank.com/2011/12/21/finally-a-official-timeline-for-the-legend-of-zelda/#more-2343

Nothing seems very new here, but Lunar Software is betting that less is more: Permadeath, Deadzone aiming, no HUD, no health bars or points system… Just you hiding and surviving an unknown evil to uncover the truth of what happened in the base.

The game is Unreal 3 based too, so you don’t need a monster pc to make it look  quite nice.
Routine promises a trully terrifying experience, coming next year to PC.
B.-

Over the last few years we have seen the rise of several Defence of the Ancients (DotA) like games released, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and the upcoming Dota 2, have all become household names for competitive gamers.

Amongst these big titles which are quite similar in some ways, comes Hi-Rez Studios SMITE. SMITE has a very simple premise: Its anther DotA style game played from the third person instead of the top-down perspective. The shift in camera angle at first doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the zoomed in camera, which is locked to the player at all times, has some very interesting impacts on the game play. While the game still has lots of room for improvement, as it is currently in its beta phase, it is already shaping up to deliver something new and interesting for fans of the genre.

The game will feel instantly familiar to you if you play, or have played any of the previously mentioned titles. Two teams are pitted off against each other and each teams end game goal is to destroy the opposing teams temple guardian, who appears in the form of a giant Minotaur. On top of fighting the opposing enemy, there are continually spawning NPC’s and powerful defensive towers that have to be destroyed. Each player controls a unique character, who starts of relatively weak, with towers and minions being able to make short work of you, but as the game progress you grow stronger by levelling up skills and purchasing items – sound familiar? Like most DotA style games, SMITE has an emphasis on teamwork and slowly builds up to moving and fighting as a full team.

In SMITE the players characters take the form of various different deities, currently drawing from Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Chinese and Hindu faiths. So far there is 30 planned Gods leading up to the games official release, these range from Anubis, the jackal-headed God of The Dead, to Sun Wukong, a mischievous monkey who is self-proclaimed as The Great Sage Equalling Heaven. The developers have done an amazing job making each character feel unique, and at making the specific skills and styles feel like they match the corresponding God. One of the best examples is Ra, upon playing him you instantly feel like a God of the Sun, firing out beams of searing heat and blinding light from afar to slay your foes.

Developing your character each match, is much the same as the other games in the genre. You level up, assign skill points and buy items to make your chosen God stronger. In SMITE every God has four abilities and a passive skill, throughout the duration of a match you will level up all the way to a maximum of 20 levels which allows you to assign five points to each of your abilities, with only your ultimate ability having level requirements for placing points in it. You will earn gold buy slaying NPC’s and enemy players, this gold is used to buy items to making your character stronger, there is a wide variety of items available, and if you are a League of Legends player you will instantly find some very familiar items as SMITE has drawn heavily from the games range of itemisation.

That’s not that say that SMITE doesn’t have its own unique items, there are plenty of interesting items for you to play around with. The game also incorporates a type of levelling system for items, all items can be upgraded two more times after buying the starting version, and most items upon reaching their finally level gain a unique passive. So for example, you may purchase an item that starts off at level one with 15 Physical Damage, then the rank two version will be 30 Physical Damage and 15% Critical Strike Chance, then the rank three version will be 50 Physical Damage, 20% Critical Strike Chance and 50% Critical Strike Damage.

Another major aspect of the items in SMITE is not only knowing what you need to build, but learning how to counter enemies, so if you see someone with lots of Magic Damage it would be a smart idea to get an item that gives you Magic Protection. Also an interesting addition to the shop is the ability to purchase extra abilities for a match, these ability work similar to Summoner Spells in League of Legends, they have long cooldowns between uses but can tip the scale of fights in your teams favour.

If you have played any other DotA style game before then you will know that it can be overwhelming having so many ability and item choices to choose from when you are just trying to learn the game, SMITE has taken this in too account and has included an option that automatically purchases recommended items and assigns skill points for you, while this option isn’t the most ideal since games are always different, it is very helpful and will keep it easy for new players.

-Email author Matthew Plumb, or follow on Twitter.

The internet went into overdrive today as it was discovered that the trademark for Sony’s long in development The Last Guardian has become abandoned. This news developed when it was discovered that the status update on Trademarkia for the title was changed to ‘Abandoned – No Statement of Use Filed.’

The Last Guardian was originally announced all the way back in 2009, and ever since its announcement has been continually pushed back and delayed. Fears arose at the end of last year that the game had been cancelled when the games Executive Producer, Yoshifusa Hayama, and the games creator, Fumito Ueda, left Sony.

These fears were further fuelled when The Last Guardian was surprisingly absent from this years E3 event, but Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida, assured worried fans that the game was still in development and was ‘making progress.’

Sony has yet to issue an official statement about the trademark, but as soon as anything is learnt we will update this article to keep you informed, so make sure to keep checking back and leave your comments below, letting us know what you think this could mean for the future of The Last Guardian.

UPDATE: Sony Worldwide Studios chief, Shuhei Yoshida has assured that “The team is still working on it very hard, there are certain technical issues they’ve been working on,” he explained. “That’s the period of time when the game, looking from the outside, doesn’t seem to be making much progress. But internally there is a lot of work going into creating the title.” Teaches the community not to go chasing tabloid rumors.

-Email author Matthew Plumb, or follow on Twitter.

The State of Rhode Island is now in control of 38 Studios’ intellectual property, including Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and its MMORPG spin-off, codenamed Project Copernicus. The state is also planning on seizing all the companies computer equipment to keep the IP intact as possible for the eventual resale.

38 Studios’ was aided in its relocation from Massachusetts to Rhode Island last year, with the state loaning the company $75 million in state bonds. Failure to make payment on the loans early this year saw the company fall into bankruptcy, as a result the company was forced to offer its assets up for sale, including patents, software, property and the rights to its IP.

The State of Rhode Island was swift to take control of these assets, claiming in court that they wanted to stop a bankruptcy trustee from selling assets, such as computers, individually as such a move would irreparably damage the states efforts to keep 38 Studio’s IP intact for the upcoming resale.

So far no studios have shown a serious interest in purchasing the IP rights for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, there was rumours back in March of this year that EA was considering purchasing the studio to continue the Kingdom of Amalur franchise and that they were interested in producing a sequel. Unfortunately, a source within Reckoning’s development team revealed that EA had passed on doing just that not long after the rumours emerged.

[Source: Gamasutra]

-Email author Matthew Plumb, or follow on Twitter.