Category: News

Travel company Carnival announced this week that it’s launching a new suite of mobile games aimed at entertaining guests on its various cruise lines, either via in-person interactions (pictured) or good ol’ gambling.

What’s really interesting here is how these mobile casino games will work: they’ll be freely available as PlayOcean Everywhere, a four-in-one mobile game (poker, roulette, bingo, and slots) that are played for fun with in-game currency — while the player is on land.

But when the player is out in international waters — on a Carnival cruise, for example — a second game app, PlayOcean Casino, can be used to play the games while gambling with real money.

However, it appears as though Carnival intends for players to be aboard a Carnival ship in order to make the switch, a notable (and presumably vital) requirement given how strict and varied gambling laws can be in different places around the world. 

Carnival also plans to release a bunch of other “in-person interactive experiences” (everything from a bar crawl/poker mashup to a scavenger hunt) which can only be played aboard select cruise ships, often with the aid of a mobile device.

“Nobody knows what they want, and everybody wants something different.”

– Razer’s Chris Mitchell, speaking to Kotaku about the process of designing video game controllers.

These days most people play console games with something that looks, at least vaguely, like a gamepad. Two sticks, maybe a directional pad, some face buttons, and some shoulder triggers.

So how do you improve on that? 

That’s one of the core questions of a new Kotaku feature on video game controllers, which includes comments from folks at Microsoft as well as video game peripheral makers Scuf and Razer.

It’s an interesting read, not least because there’s a few parallels between how manufacturers fine-tune new gamepad designs and how developers figure out what works (or what doesn’t) about new games.

“Nobody knows what they want, and everybody wants something different…it’s just a lot of iteration,” Razer’s Chris Mitchell told Kotaku. “A lot of people will not be able to sit there and say, the reason it’s not comfortable is because the curvature of this has to be rounder, or whatever it is, right? They sit there and say, ah, ‘This is not comfortable.’ Or, ‘I don’t like this.'”

Sounds a bit like the playtesting process for games, which often challenges devs to take feedback from playtesters (like “this part isn’t fun”) and try to interpret what, if anything, should be done to address their issues.

The article doesn’t delve too deep into the development process for new controller prototypes, though it does touch on the topic of controller patents and suggest that gamepad makers take a lot of cues from the way elite players in games like Call of Duty use their controllers.  They also evidently take cues from each other.

“Competition is so very very useful,” said Mitchell. “Because everyone is experimenting with new things, and then we see what is well-received, what isn’t well-received, and that makes it into every controller like half a year or a year later. And then we keep going.”

The full article touches on everything from the value of paddles (on a gamepad) to the history of the saxophone, and is well worth a read over on Kotaku.

“[Super Mario Kart] is not like in the recent Mario Karts where you can be trolled by blue shells and be successively hit by 11 opponents. The fact that we still discover new strategies and beat the World Records on a weekly basis makes it really attractive.”

– Super Mario Kart world champ Julien “ScouB” Holmière, speaking to Polygon.

What makes a game like Super Mario Kart timeless?

According to devoted player Sami Cetin, at least part of it has to do with the fact that the 1992 SNES racer doesn’t have a blue shell, which first debuted in Mario Kart 64 and has since inspired much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Cetin has been played Super Mario Kart competitively for decades, going so far as to establish a website dedicated to tracking Super Mario Kart time trial world records (in 1998!) that has since inspired an annual Super Mario Kart World Championship to see who’s the fastest of them all.

Cetin himself won in 2012, and in a new Polygon feature he and current world champ Julien Holmière explain why players continue to find new depths to this 25-year-old game.  

“Being a top player in [Super Mario Kart] requires a huge effort, because there are so many techniques to familiarize yourself with,” Holmière told Polygon. “The handling is much harder than on the recent Mario Karts. When you first play Super Mario Kart you will barely go full speed and barely stay on the track.”

The World Championship isn’t just about racing, either; it requires would-be champions to compete in a variety of game modes, including head-to-head Battle Mode. 

“It all ties in together,” Cetin explained. “A good racer can be a better racer if they have mastered Time Trials; otherwise if their opponent gets out of sight then they [will] have to rely on powerful weapons which may have a very low probability. Similarly, a tactical racer can cause problems for a Time Trial player, providing they are not too much slower. It is a game of chess in a way when playing competitively.”

To read more about how the Super Mario Kart competitive scene works, and what it means to those who participate, you can (and should) read the full article over on Polygon.

Any devs still holding out hope of an invite to Steam Dev Days this year should probably pack it in, as Valve’s Tom Giardino noted on Twitter this weekend that there won’t be one in 2017 — and 2018 isn’t looking good, either.

It’s something devs should know about, but not at all unusual; after launching Dev Days in 2014, Valve took a pass on 2015 because, according to a company representative, it didn’t make sense in a year when Valve didn’t debut a bunch of new tech.

In 2016, the year the HTC Vive and other VR headsets made their commercial debut, Valve decided to revive its Steam developer conference with a special focus on VR.

While there won’t be a similar event this year, curious devs can of course still go back and watch Dev Days talks from 2014 and 2016, which feature speakers like Michael Abrash (when he was still at Valve), Tim Sweeney, and a number of other notable game industry types. 

Sega-owned game company Atlus Co. confirmed today that it attempted to get the Patreon for the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 taken down by invoking its rights to Persona 5 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

What’s especially interesting here is how wide Atlus aimed with its DMCA takedown attempt, shooting not so much to stop people from talking about or emulating Persona 5 on PC but to stop anyone from financially supporting (via Patreon, at least) the RPCS3 emulation group at all.

The company appears to have been only partially successful; in a statement posted today on Reddit, a representative of the RPCS3 dev team claims that on Saturday Patreon (but not the dev team) received notice that Atlus had filed a DMCA takedown against the RPCS3 Patreon page.

Notably, Patreon reportedly pushed back, stating that they believed the emulation group’s work fell under fair use and that the emulator itself did not infringe on any of Atlus’ copyrights. Atlus reportedly retorted that the RPCS3 website gave specific instructions on how “circumvent our DRM protections” by dumping copies of PS3 games so they can be played on an emulator. As of now, the RPCS3 Patreon page is still up but all mention of Persona 5 have been removed from both it and the RPCS3 website.

“In discussion with the very helpful people over at Patreon we have decided to proceed with caution,” the respresentative added. “Per the request of Patreon, we removed every single reference to Persona 5 on the Patreon page itself and rpcs3.net. This seems to have resolved the situation.”

Atlus has a track record of being touchy about the notion of people seeing Persona 5 without paying for it, blocking it from being shared via the PS4’s social features and setting limits (backed up by threat of contentID strikes) earlier this year on how much of the game YouTubers and streamers may show.