If you’re looking for a new game for your NES in 2019, or perhaps just looking for a cool, new 8-bit adventure game, Orange Island could well be worth investigating.

Being developed by former Sega designer, Ted Sterchi, the game will have players exploring an island while swapping between five different playable characters who have their own unique magical abilities. The island contains plenty of secrets and hidden ancient relics just itching to be found.

It’s currently generating funds on Kickstarter, where it has already managed to smash its original goal. This means that a digital PC release is already in the bag, but stretch goals could see a release on NES (yes, a physical cartridge for the decades-old system) and also Switch. It only needs another £2,000-or-so to reach the NES stretch goal at the time of writing, so we’d say that one’s definitely likely.

If you want to learn more and potentially pledge your support to the project, you can check out the game’s full Kickstarter page right here.

Do you like the look of this one? Do you hope it manages to get a release on Nintendo’s systems? Tell us below.

Ryan can list the first 151 Pokémon all in order off by heart – a feat he calls his ‘party trick’ despite being such an introvert that he’d never be found anywhere near a party. He’d much rather just have a night in with Mario Kart and a pizza, and we can’t say we blame him.

Pokémon fans around the world have been dreaming about a vast open-world 3D entry in the series for far too long now. Just imagine an adventure in the style of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or even similar to the Level-5 title, Yo-Kai Watch 4.

Returning to reality, Game Freak doesn’t intend to get too ahead of itself. That’s why it prefers to “implement new things fairly gradually” – to satisfy some fan requests – rather than add a bunch of different ideas into a new Pokémon game until it no longer resembles an authentic pocket monster experience. This is all according to the Sword and Shield director Shigeru Ohmori, when he was asked about the new generation camera, during the same interview with Metro’s GameCentral:

“I think that’s fair to say. When we try to make big changes in the series we want to do it a bit more gradually. Every time we make a new game we want to change up the formula and do new things but if you do too much all at once then it feels like it might not be a Pokémon game. So we try to implement new things fairly gradually, to try and satisfy some of the requests from fans to try out new things, and if it goes well we would incorporate that in the future.

The new “Wild Area” in Pokémon Sword and Shield was used as an example of one of these gradual changes:

“So yeah, I think you could say that the Wild Area is our answer to some of the requests for a more open area, and we’ll continue to do new things gradually, as we progress with the series.”

Ohmori added how during the “conceptual phase” of each Pokémon game, the team thinks about the more extreme changes it could possibly make to the series, but often these ideas don’t make the cut:

“We of course, in the conceptual phase, we think of a lot of more, possibly, radical changes that we might want to try out. But a lot of them are just ideas at the time and we end up not incorporating them.”

He finished this segment of the interview by explaining how Game Freak is often “inspired by the current gaming environment” and is regularly thinking about what fans could be anticipating:

“it really just comes back to what we think Pokémon fans are really looking forward to trying and, for example, real-time combat – we’ve thought about that before but we just keep coming back, at least for these games, to the turn-based system that is what fans of Pokémon enjoy more.”

What are your thoughts about Game Freak’s slow and steady approach when it comes to implementing new things? What would you like to see added or changed in the Pokémon series? Tell us below.

Our customers continue to use the Azure Data Box family to move massive amounts of data into Azure. One of the regular requests that we receive is for a larger capacity option that retains the simplicity, security, and speed of the original Data Box. Last year at Ignite, we announced a new addition to the Data Box family that did just that – a preview of the petabyte-scale Data Box Heavy

With thanks to those customers who provided feedback during the preview phase, I’m excited to announce that Azure Data Box Heavy has reached general availability in the US and EU!

How Data Box Heavy works

In many ways, Data Box Heavy is just like the original Data Box. You can order Data Box Heavy directly from the Azure portal, and copy data to Data Box Heavy using standard files or object protocols. Data is automatically secured on the appliance using AES 256-bit encryption. After your data is transferred to Azure, the appliance is wiped clean according to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

But Data Box Heavy is also designed for a much larger scale than the original Data Box. Data Box Heavy’s one petabyte of raw capacity and multiple 40 Gbps connectors mean that a datacenter’s worth of data can be moved into Azure in just a few weeks.

Expanded regional availability

We’re also expanding regional availability for Data Box and Data Box Disk.

Sign up today

Here’s how you can get started with Data Box Heavy:

We’ll be at Microsoft Inspire again this year, so stop by our booth to say hello to the team!

“Linux Piter” Conference in Russia, St.Petersburg, October 4-5, 2019

The registration and call for papers for biggest Linux conference in Russia, Linux Piter is now open at https://linuxpiter.com/en

The conference gathers many key Linux people from all around the world. In the past we had Lennart Pottering (Red Hat), Christoph Hellwig, Stephen Hemminger (Microsoft), Monty Widenius (MariaDB Corporation AB), Bero Rosenkränzer (OpenMandriva), Rafael J. Wysocki (Intel) and many others joining the event.

Conference will take place October 4^th and 5^th  in St. Petersburg.  The added benefit for attending it is an opportunity to see Russia’s most beautiful city.

The main conference language is English. We have two tracks, one presented in English and simultaneously interpreted to Russian and another one – presented in Russian and interpreted to English.

To submit a paper for the conference, please visit https://linuxpiter.com/en/speaker

To register as an attendee, please visit https://linuxpiter.com/en/registration#form

Here you can find videos from the last Linux Piter conferences:

https://www.youtube.com/linuxpiter