PvZ: Battle for Neighborville’s First 2020 Festival is Snow Joke
Discover the Snow Day Festival event and what’s coming up in PvZ: Battle for Neighborville.
The future is now, Neighborvillians! It’s 2020 and, while we all assumed that robots would have taken over the world by now, the only artificial intelligence running rampant these days are those pesky zombies. So, grab your friends and juice up those electric roller skates as the battle for brainz rages on in Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville!
With a new year here, fresh as a downy blanket
of just-fallen snow, crisp as a frozen leaf of iceberg lettuce, orange as a
fledgling rubber construction cone straight off the Z-Tech factory line, we’re
bringing you a brand-new festival event to match: Snow Day.
Wander Giddy Park where the frosty snowdrifts
are beginning to thaw. Work your way through the Snow Day Prize Map, using
Prize Bulbs, and score epic hats, Victory Slabs, Punchers, emojis and more.
Pick up chase items as you go, like the Cowmooflage Commander costume for Foot
Soldier at the mid-way point, Legendary Millennium Dragon costume for
Snapdragon at 100% completion, and the Snapdragon Legendary Century Dragon
costume when you take a single path to the end of the map.
How do you earn Prize Bulbs? Get them by earning XP as you play any mode. You can also complete daily and character challenges to earn more. Once you’ve picked up your Prize Bulbs, access the Snow Day Prize Map by visiting Wing-Ding to the right of the multiplayer portal.
Curious what the rest of 2020 will bring? We’ve consulted Rose, our time-traveling enchantress from another era (who also smells fantastic, btw), and she’s uncovered a mystical glimpse into your future! Here’s what’s coming up over the next three months:
Rose also told us what will happen over the next 300 years, but we’ll save that prediction for another time. For now, enjoy Snow Day and be sure to stick around for more news from PvZ: Battle for Neighborville as the decade proceeds.
Join the visual arts team at Heart Machine to apply your wide range of skills and ambitious creative spirit to the production of Solar Ask Kingdom (and beyond!). We are looking for people with a broad skillset to make contributions to both combat and narrative experiences.
Requirements
A strong demo reel that demonstrates expert knowledge of fundamental animation principles and acting skills
Work closely with design and engineering to take gameplay concepts from pre-visualization to polish pass
Embrace character development, establishing choreography, and nailing the timing of each move with the Creative Director
Be actively involved in the design and integration of character and prop animations into the game engine, monitoring and troubleshooting any technical issues that might arise
High level of proficiency in Maya
Work well in a creative, team-oriented environment, exhibiting excellent communication, time-management, and organizational skills. Be able to reach across multiple disciplines to gather feedback and address cross-functional issue
Possess the drive and talent needed to produce and implement the highest quality work
Penchant for practical innovation and the ability to bring new ideas to the table
Passion for video games
Preferred Experience
Significant contribution to a released game or animation project
Some knowledge of crafting interactive storytelling and/or minigames is useful
Basic modeling skills and knowledge of rigging and Python a plus
Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.
Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-10-2020, 08:39 AM - Forum: Lounge
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The number of Steam releases remained relatively flat from 2018 to 2019
Newsbrief: While past years have shown a rise in the number of games hitting Steam, the jump from 2018 to 2019 was significantly less dramatic than years past.
According to data from third-party tracker SteamSpy spotted by Kotaku, 2019 yielded around 8,400 new releases on Steam, only a small increase from 2018’s 8,195 releases. Previous years often saw increases in the thousands–2017, for instance, saw 6,322 releases while 2016 yielded 4,400 new titles–making this latest addition a bit of an anomaly.
That Kotaku writeup on the shift dives a bit deeper into why things look to have leveled out somewhat, and talks with SteamSpy founder (and current Epic Games Store publishing strategy director) Sergey Galyonkin to explore what factors might impact the data pulled from Steam. Though, as an added caveat, Niko Partners’ Daniel Ahmad points out on Twitter that SteamSpy’s data itself has been known to fluctuate as time goes on, which makes an exact read on Steam trends a bit more difficult to gauge.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-10-2020, 08:39 AM - Forum: Lounge
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New Mob Psycho 100 Turn-Based RPG Now Out
Crunchyroll Games has announced that Mob Psycho 100: Psychic Battle--a turn-based RPG mobile game based on the popular anime series--is out today. Psychic Battle joins Crunchyroll Games' expanding library of anime-based titles, which includes bubble shooter Bungo Stray Dogs: Tales of the Lost, gacha RPG Grand Summoners, and puzzle game RWBY: Crystal Match. The game is available for both iOS and Android devices.
In Psychic Battle, you explore the world of Mob Psycho 100--specifically the locations from the first two seasons of the anime. Your journey will see you meet characters from the Mob Psycho 100 universe, many of whom are voiced by their original voice actors. Each character possesses unique attacks, special skills, and passive abilities, allowing you to curate your ideal team for fighting in PvE and PvP battles. Outside of battling, you can participate in weekend fishing competitions and care for an in-game pet.
Mob Psycho 100 was one of the breakout anime hits of 2016, winning fanfare with its easy-to-love titular hero, compelling character development, and colorful sense of style in its opening sequence and supernatural battles. The anime sees Shigeo Kageyama, nicknamed Mob, attempting to live a normal high school life when he's secretly one of the most powerful espers in the world. He's so strong that he has to keep his emotions in check or risk losing control of his psychic powers.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-09-2020, 08:50 PM - Forum: Windows
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Empowering retailers for the future of digital commerce
Of all industries, retail is undergoing one of the most significant digital transformations. Various forms of computing are rapidly becoming embedded in every aspect of retail, from corner stores to the world’s largest retailers. Revenue from digital commerce is growing five times faster than from in-store sources, and global digital commerce sales now comprise 16.4 percent of total retail sales.
At the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference next week in New York, Microsoft will unveil our latest solutions to empower retailers all over the world to take advantage of this transformation. Central to these announcements will be our new vision for digital commerce and the toolkit that enables it. Our goal is to be a technology ally to the retail industry, to help retailers thrive — with more relevant and optimized e-commerce experiences, enhanced shopper-level personalization and expanded monetization opportunities. Today, we are announcing two new Microsoft solutions for retailers that do precisely that: Microsoft PromoteIQ and Microsoft Bing for Commerce.
Introducing Microsoft PromoteIQ
One of our key offerings for retailers is the Microsoft PromoteIQ commerce marketing platform. This is the next step in our journey of evolving our digital commerce offerings since announcing the acquisition of PromoteIQ in August 2019. Using Microsoft PromoteIQ, retailers can now dramatically increase revenue from their digital vendor marketing programs, while remaining fully in control of monetization and engaging brand partners.
Commerce marketing is a highly effective way for retailers to create powerful new high-margin revenue streams that can fund innovation elsewhere in their businesses, as well as provide brands with a powerful toolkit to market their products to shoppers. But competing for brand dollars with other marketing solutions can be daunting. Microsoft PromoteIQ helps make it easy by delivering an end-to-end commerce marketing platform with enterprise-grade capabilities to manage and scale vendor-funded digital marketing — whether on-site or off-site. The platform includes an extensive analytics suite to deliver audience insights and help brands understand incremental sales lift. It also includes integration with Microsoft Advertising, which opens up a powerful new source of incremental demand for retailers. With Microsoft PromoteIQ, a retailer remains fully in control and is finally able to turn commerce marketing into an essential growth engine for their business, funding new capabilities and innovations while strengthening their partnership with vendors and brands.
The Home Depot did just that. The world’s largest home improvement retailer needed to maximize the 170M monthly visits to homedepot.com, the fifth-largest ecommerce site in the U.S. They partnered with PromoteIQ to integrate a commerce marketing platform to manage and scale vendor-funded digital marketing efforts. Since the program launched in early 2019, customer engagement has increased by 35 percent and promoted products have seen double-digit growth compared to 2018. Numbers tell an important piece of the story, but it’s also great to see that the customer and vendor relationships are now stronger than ever. Customers are presented with relevant advertising for products they may need for their home improvement projects, and even may see content for complementary projects like décor to complete their room. Vendor partners now have enhanced marketing controls to drive better conversion, increase visibility, and learn from real-time performance insights.
Microsoft PromoteIQ offers great solutions to help retailers — and brands as well. For brands, the Microsoft PromoteIQ platform provides a robust offering for comprehensively managing advertising campaigns with key retailer partners, across campaign management, targeting, optimization and analytics.
At NRF we’ll showcase customer examples and show the Microsoft PromoteIQ platform. If you are interested in learning more about the Microsoft PromoteIQ commerce marketing platform, please visit www.promoteiq.com.
Introducing Microsoft Bing for Commerce
Another important introduction for retailers is our new solution for an essential enabler of digital commerce: product search. Today’s shoppers expect convenience, to the point that 80 percent of them will abandon a site that produces poor search results. Microsoft Bing for Commerce is an intelligent search, personalization and product recommendation solution that helps gives retailers the power to meet today’s shopper expectations and grow revenue, thanks to more relevant and customized results that drive conversions.
Retailers can now leverage the power of Bing intelligence and Microsoft AI to searches on their websites, applying insights from millions of shoppers around the world. This puts advanced query understanding into the hands of retailers — helping to decipher the natural human language of shoppers on their sites and create a shorter path between shoppers and the product they’re seeking.
Microsoft Bing for Commerce includes product recommendations that are relevant and personalized, as well as visual search innovation that helps satisfy emerging shopping behavior. Microsoft Bing for Commerce offers all of these intuitive capabilities on PC and mobile and does this with Microsoft’s dedicated approach to privacy and data compliance.
Microsoft Bing for Commerce is now available in public preview for large retailers as a stand-alone offering and will soon be available as a part of Dynamics 365 Commerce. More information is available at www.microsoft.com/bing/commerce.
It’s a time of unprecedented growth and transformation for the retail industry. We’re excited to see our partners and customers grow their businesses by taking advantage of the opportunities in digital commerce.
If you are at NRF next week, please visit us at the Microsoft booth on Level 3, #4051.
Pokemon Home finally has a release window. During today's Pokemon Direct presentation, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company revealed that the new cloud storage service will launch sometime in February 2020.
Pokemon Home was first announced last June, although few details were shared at the time. The Pokemon Bank-like service will be released for Switch and smartphones and allows you to store monsters you've captured in Pokemon Go, Pokemon Let's Go, and Pokemon Sword and Shield to the cloud. You can also transfer Pokemon from Bank on 3DS to Home and then import them into Sword and Shield, provided the Pokemon appear in the Galar Pokedex. That includes the old, returning Pokemon who are being added to the games as part of the upcoming expansion pass; they just need to be in the Isle of Armor or Crown Tundra Pokedexes.
Today's Pokemon Direct brought many other announcements; you can catch up on some of the news below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-09-2020, 01:37 PM - Forum: Windows
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‘Disinformation on steroids’: Latest Tech Talk explores new cyberthreats
Threat intelligence is often spoken about as being a key pillar of cybersecurity. But what is it and why is it so important?
In our latest #TechTalk, John Lambert, Distinguished Engineer and General Manager of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), explains how, while all organizations work to manage their security risks in cyberspace, these risks become threats when combined with malicious intent. The goal of threat intelligence is to give organizations context and awareness about the online threats they face and to help them prioritize their responses.
Cybersecurity threats reflect the geopolitical contests, competitions and conflicts occurring in the world, John explains. This means that many organizations face threats from adversaries seeking to cause financial, reputational, or even geopolitical damage. Microsoft studies the most significant threat actors in order to understand the techniques they use, and to build defensive measures into the services offered to customers. Every month Microsoft blocks around five billion attacks – including malware attacks and phishing emails, as well as more targeted threats – by tracking and limiting the actors behind them.
John also discusses how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which can be taught to detect and respond to cyberattacks, is speeding and scaling up Microsoft’s defensive efforts. However, he also warns of the new cyber-challenges that the same technology can bring, particularly in relation to the manipulation of image and speech patterns to spread disinformation via ‘deep fakes’.
In order to respond to the growth and sophistication of cyberthreats, John argues that organizations facing common threat actors need to work together far more proactively and share information to be able to anticipate and defend against common threats. At the same time, individuals can help protect themselves more thoroughly by better managing their passwords and credentials.
Feature: Game Of The Decade Staff Picks – Dark Souls
Following on from our reader-voted Top 50 Games of the Decade, Nintendo Life staff members will be picking their personal favourite Nintendo games between the years 2010-2019. Today, Damien tries his hardest to remember where the nearest bonfire is before he runs into another angry skeleton…
Games are supposed to be fun, entertaining and – within reason – moderately challenging, so I’m not entirely sure why I fell so badly for FromSoftware’s brutal and almost sadistic Dark Souls when it launched back in 2011. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found that my tolerance for difficult video games has all but evaporated – there are too many other distractions in my life to contend with titles that require superhuman reflexes, extreme memorisation and saint-like reserves of patience, if you ask me – but Dark Souls, for some inexplicable reason, proved to be the exception.
I’d dabbled in the almost fatally obtuse and convoluted Demon’s Souls a couple of years previously, drawn in by its Berserk-like grim fantasy aesthetic and haunting atmosphere, but it was, if anything, too daunting; there were moments – such as the utterly terrifying Tower of Latria – which almost proved too much for my feeble resolve, especially in the total absence of the ability to save your progress mid-level. I trudged on nonetheless, respecting the game’s rewarding mechanics but utterly down-beaten by its stern, gleefully harsh gameplay.
Dark Souls, however, would ensnare me totally. Full disclosure: I played it on Xbox 360 on release (it would have been rather hard for me to obtain the Switch version in 2011, after all), and it consumed every moment of my waking life. I played it prior to shifting into my full-time position on this site, but I happened to be working with someone else who had bought it at the exact same time.
“Come and ‘ave a go if you think you’re… oh.”
We’d convene on our coffee breaks to discuss progress in hushed, reverent tones; one day, I’d be able to offer advice on how to defeat a tricky boss, whereas the following day it would be my co-worker who had overtaken me and had tips to share. This back-and-forth exchange went on for weeks. Dark Souls deliberately left a lot for players to discover on their own – hence the brilliant in-game messaging system, where players leave helpful (or not) notes for fellow adventurers, warning them of traps or pointing out safe routes – and having someone else to bounce tactics off of was a real boon, especially during those early days when online guides weren’t quite as expansive as they could be.
I think a lot of the best video games are based around a very clear ‘risk and reward’ mechanic; the thrill of putting hours of progress on the line and knowing you could lose everything, but then overcoming the odds to emerge victorious… that, in my opinion, is one of the best feelings you can get from a game, and the Dark Souls series nails it perfectly. The flip side, of course, is that you’ll fail just as often, if not more. However, while Dark Souls is undeniably brutal, the fault always lies with you, the player. You failed because you didn’t react in time to repel an incoming blow; you didn’t look for the tell-tale sign that an enemy was about to strike; you didn’t prepare properly for a tough battle. It might delight in rubbing your face in the dirt, but Dark Souls is never truly ‘unfair’ – you just need to make sure you even the odds as much as possible, and take your time.
The other big reason I absolutely adore Dark Souls – and FromSoftware’s other titles – is the fact that the lore behind the action is so fully-formed and dense; even the smallest, most inconsequential item in the game is blessed with a lengthy backstory, filling in gaps and building a unique and foreboding world that arguably rivals the best the fantasy genre has to offer. I fully admit I was totally enraptured by Lordran and its many varied locations and inhabitants; I wanted to know everything about every environment and every character. The thing that makes this grand narrative so incredible is that much is left up to the player when it comes to joining the dots and fitting all of the plot strands together – if, indeed, they actually do fit together in the first place.
That’s one big club
When Dark Souls was confirmed for Switch, I literally leapt for joy. I didn’t need an excuse to play through the game again, even if its punishing nature did bring back some bad memories (Blighttown, I’m looking at you); if only I’d had the ability to take the game with me on the road back in 2011, my progress – and that of my intrepid co-worker – would have been much more swift, and perhaps a little more collaborative, too.
I hope now that Bandai Namco will find some means of getting the oft-overlooked sequel onto Nintendo’s console, and perhaps even move mountains to bring Dark Souls III to the system. Being able to play the entire trilogy on the move would be a revelation for me personally, and I’m ready to admit that while my time is precious, I’d be more than willing to put my body (and mind) on the line once more to experience these absolutely incredible games.
While a great many games have had an impact on me during the past decade, few stick in the mind quite as strongly as Dark Souls – and that’s why it’s effortlessly the best game I’ve played during the past 10 years.
Pokemon Go: January 2020 Community Day's Featured Pokemon Revealed
Pokemon Go's first Community Day of 2020 is set for Sunday, January 19, and now we know what Pokemon you'll be able to catch during the event. Niantic has announced that Piplup, the Water-type penguin from Diamond and Pearl, will be the featured Pokemon for January's Community Day.
Throughout the event, Piplup will appear in the wild much more often than normal, making this a good opportunity to stock up on Piplup Candy. You'll also have your first chance to catch a Shiny Piplup in Pokemon Go, and the Pokemon will learn a special event-exclusive move if you can evolve it into its final form, Empoleon, up to two hours after the Community Day ends. This month's event move has not yet been revealed, but previous starter Pokemon were able to learn Hydro Cannon during their respective Community Days.
On top of increased Piplup spawns, a few other bonuses will be available during January's Community Day. As usual, any Lure Modules you use during the event will remain active for three hours, rather than the usual 30 minutes. Pokemon eggs will also hatch at a quarter of the distance they normally take. You can read more details about January's Community Day on the official Pokemon website.
Like previous Community Days, January's event will run for three hours, but it will take place at different times depending on which hemisphere you live in. For players in the Northern Hemisphere, the event will run from 11 AM-2 PM local time; in the Southern Hemisphere, the Community Day takes place from 3-6 PM local time.
Posted by: AbbottRoger - 01-09-2020, 05:31 AM - Forum: Lounge
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