A 225 km2 open world post-soviet state and one of the areas hit by a new and presently unknown infection which has wiped out most of the world's population. You are one of the few who have survived and now you must search this new wasteland in order to fight for your life against what is left of the indigenous population, now infected with the disease.
Go Solo, team up with friends or take on the world as you choose your path in this brutal and chilling landscape using whatever means you stumble upon to survive.
Nintendo Announces Splatoon 2’s Final Splatfest, Chaos Vs. Order
If you watched the live stream of the Splatoon 2 World Championship 2019, you probably saw the Japanese team, known as the “GG BOYZ”, defend their title and out-splat teams from the United States, Europe and Australia/New Zealand.
After the championship trophy had been awarded, Nintendo announced what we had all feared was coming. The final Splatoon 2 Splatfest. This event is being referred to as the “Splatocalypse” and will start on 18th July and run for 72 hours.
You’ll have to side with either chaos (Pearl) or order (Marina) in this ultimate battle. To celebrate the grand finale, a new Shifty Station stage will be added to the final Splatfest. All of the 23 other Splatfest-specific stages will be making a return as well. Here’s some more information from the PR about how it will work:
The 23 previous stages will surface in a constantly…shifting rotation for the first 48 hours, with the new stage making its debut for the final 24-hour period. Special in-game gear will also be distributed in honor of this Splatfest via players’ Nintendo Switch news feed.
As noted, you’ll be able to score some special gear via Nintendo Switch news feed, so don’t forget to redeem it while you can.
Later on, in July, an update (Version 5.0.0) will add Turf War (Splatfest) to the modes players can select in Private Battle. This new mode will allow players to enjoy Turf War on 24 stages at nighttime, including the new Shifty Station stage.
Will you be participating in the Splatoon 2 Splafest finale? Who will you be siding with? Tell us down in the comments.
Apple’s Screen Time for macOS Catalina is a tool, not a nanny
Screen Time on the Mac will prevent you over-using social media and it will encourage you to step away from your Mac. Yet it’s still up to you whether or how much you let it help you.
We do have one elderly relative who hates Screen Time because, she thinks, it’s telling her to use her iPad more. For everyone else, though, it’s a genuinely useful reminder of just how long we’re spending on our iOS devices —and now also on the Mac. As of macOS Catalina, Screen Time has come to the Mac and it’s ready to help you get a better work/life balance.
That’s the stated benefit and it does come after years of Apple being blamed for everybody having their noses in an iPhone and losing the ability to speak. Only, you’re an adult and what’s more, your Mac may be how you earn your living. So if you are not a fan of Screen Time on iOS, you don’t have to pay it any attention on the Mac either.
The main Screen Time screen in System Preferences (in Dark Mode)
However, there is more to it than just Apple waggling a finger at you for using the Mac for sixteen hours a day. Instead, it’s Apple telling you what you were doing for those sixteen hours — and that can be useful.
The time is right
Screen Time on macOS Catalina is a pane in System Preferences. Go to that whenever you like, or when prompted by weekly notifications, and you will see an overall total of the time you spent on your Mac.
Optionally, it can show you the amount of time you spent on all your Apple devices. However, that has to be switched on at each device. On iPhone and iPad, go to System Preferences, tap on Screen Time, scroll to the bottom of the list and make sure Share Across Devices is turned on.
Back on the Mac, the Screen Time preference pane shows you how that total time was divided across categories of work.
The categories are Productivity, Social Networking, and Entertainment.
They’re rather enormously broad categories, but they do cover everything you could be doing on your Mac.
They’re also not the final say on whether you’ve been naughty spending all your time on entertainment or nice spending all your time in productivity. Beneath the total time and the category division, Screen Time on the Mac shows you which apps you’ve been using and for how long.
That’s where this gets useful. And this is where you get more informed details about how you spend your time. If your Mac says you’ve been using Xcode for 60 hours this week, you know that this is all productivity because that app is solely for developing software. If you spent those 60 hours in a Sudoku app, you only have yourself to blame.
The time is not right
You can also argue, for instance, that if all your time was spent in Microsoft Word then you can’t be so certain which category that was in. You can reasonably assume that you need an aspirin, but there is no way to say you spent one hour on your marketing report for work and thirty on your novel.
Choose how much time you allow yourself in certain categories of apps. Or click through to nominate specific apps.
It’s more than curiosity, too. If you’re billing a client for that marketing report, you need to know how much time you spent on it. And if you’re not, if you’re instead billing them for some overall job, your need to know how long you spent is even greater. The time you spent on it could make the difference between this job being economic for you or not.
The time you spent on it should make a difference to how long you tell future clients that similar jobs are going to take you.
If you need this information for work, you tend to need more than Apple offers with Screen Time. In which case you could look at Timing, an app for specifically built for tracking your time on the Mac in great detail.
Timing provides seriously useful detail, such as not just saying you spent half an hour every day in Mail, but which message threads you were following.
Where Screen Time for the Mac wins, though, is in what you can do with the information you get —or rather, what it can get your Mac to do. Being Apple’s own solution, Screen Time is part of the macOS system, and it can use this deep-rooted access to your benefit.
So you can set limits on how long you use your Mac for certain things. You can limit your use of Twitter to five minutes per day, for instance.
Regardless of other settings, you can still have it so that the Mail must get through.
You do that by going into App Limits and clicking the plus sign. You can then just tick the box next to Social Networking and limited your use of any app in that category, or you could click the disclosure triangle next to it and pick specific apps.
When you’ve done that, or you’re a parent and you’ve done it to your children’s MacBook Air, then that’s it. You get your five minutes in the Twitter app and not one minute more —except that you do get one minute more.
When you’re notified that the time is up, there is now an option to grant you another minute. That lets you save your work or log out, whatever last action you have to take today, and then that’s it until tomorrow.
Another sort of limit
There is only so much Apple can do, though, and only so much use that Screen Time can genuinely be in the fight against our worst habits.
For instance, you could dutifully tell Screen Time for Mac that you can only use the Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn apps for one minute per day —and then just go use each of those services in Safari instead.
Apple wants to help you walk away from your Mac —and the pressures we’re all under to work 24 hours per day.
Still, there is also Downtime. This lets you say that you are not going to use anything at all on your Mac between, for example, 5pm today and 9am tomorrow.
Again, you can punch a hole through this Downtime wall and tell it that, yes, you want everything to be made unavailable, except Mail and Safari and Facebook and Twitter and Slack.
It’s not Apple’s job to teach us how to use our time, but Apple is giving us more and better tools to help us make these decisions.
A modern take on classic sandbox action. Framed for your father?s murder, you?ll need to do whatever it takes to unveil the real culprit. Tackle thrilling missions for the criminal underworld ? just don?t let the cops track you down! Set in the deep south of the 80s, American Fugitive is a love-letter to the classic movies and games of old.
Cyberpunk 2077's Release Date Announced At Xbox E3 2019 Conference
Cyberpunk 2077, the ambitious new RPG from The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, finally has a release date. During Microsoft's Xbox E3 press conference, we learned that Cyberpunk will launch on April 16, 2020. The game is releasing on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
The news came following the reveal that none other than John Wick actor Keanu Reeves will have a role in the Polish developer's new game. Reeves himself appeared on stage and was the one to announce Cyberpunk 2077's release date, which is really pretty perfect. He'll be playing a character known as Johnny Silverhand, who's described as a "legendary rockerboy."
Cyberpunk 2077 was announced many years ago, so it has been a long time coming to finally learn its release date today. The 2020 date is fitting, given the game is based Mike Pondsmith's tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020.
Following a leak earlier in the day, CD Projekt Red also confirmed Cyberpunk 2077's Collector's edition. Inside a cool-looking box, you'll get a 10-inch statue of V, the game's main character, along with a steelbook, art book, and more.
Divinity: Original Sin developer Larian Studios is behind Baldur’s Gate 3
Larian Studios, the developer behind the Divinity: Original Sin games, is working on the next game in Wizards of the Coast’s Baldur’s Gate series.
The studio had lightly implied as much on Twitter in the days leading up to today’s Google Stadia stream, and both Baldur’s Gate 3 and its development team were among the reveals during today’s Stadia event.
During the stream, Larian CEO Swen Vincke shared that he had previously tried to pitch Wizards of the Coast on putting them at the helm of a new Baldur’s Gate game years ago, but the company originally turned them down.
“When we were released Divinity: Original Sin 1, I tried approaching Wizards of the Coast, trying to tell them that we should be the ones making Baldur’s Gate 3,” said Vinke. “They didn’t necessarily believe me back then. But then we started making Divinity: Original Sin 2 and then at some point they just reached out to me and said ‘well you’re the guy that wanted to make Baldur’s Gate 3. Do you still want to make Baldur’s Gate 3?’”
“And that got the conversation rolling. And before you knew it, we were constructing story,” said Vincke.
The game is set to launch for both Google Stadia and PC, and comes nearly 20 years after BioWare released its predecessor Baldur’s Gate 2.
The award-winning RPG comes to PC! Eight travelers. Eight adventures. Eight roles to play. Embark on an epic journey across the vast and wondrous world of Orsterra and discover the captivating stories of each of the eight travelers.
Based in beautiful Kyoto, Japan, in what started out as a sparse event in something close to a gymnasium, Bit Summit has rapidly become the second-largest independent games showcase in the country, just behind the grand spectacle that is Tokyo Game Show.
Now situated in central Kyoto’s Miyakomesse event centre, this year’s event – titled Bit Summit 7 Spirits – overperformed for yet another year, with record levels of attendance, veteran guest stars of the game industry, a wide range of incredible games and live performances by top quality musical talent.
Nintendo Life got to check out this year’s event to bring you some of the best highlights. Sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
Nintendo, as Bit Summit’s Platinum sponsor this year, had a very cheerful cafe theme for its Indie World Cafe booth, sporting long tables and vibrant walls reminiscent of cosy coffee houses. Some of the games on show this time around included the delightfully absurd Untitled Goose Game by House House, that naturally attracted a lot of attention for its farmer-harassing goose and its particularly trolly game mechanics.
The brilliantly addicting rogue-like Slay the Spire by Mega Crit was also on show at the event, just before its June 6th release date, mixing card battling with often brutal defeats against all manner of bizarre enemies in a constantly-changing tower. You can check out our review here.
Among some of the more interesting titles to play, particularly in the Devolver area, was a demo for the DLC update to The Messenger, entitled Picnic Panic. While no release dates were forthcoming, the developers assured us that the announcement would be “soon”. Make of that what you will.
With over 100 games on display this year, deciding what to play made walking around the event a challenging experience. One of the more popular titles for event-goers was Heave Ho by Le Cartel, another Devolver-published title. Up to four players can “hang out together” as each dangles, grapples and swings their way across numerous misshapen environments. Think of Tarzan, where you’re nothing but a head with arms and your friends are the ropes, and maybe you’ll get the gist. While Heave Ho has no set release date yet, expect it fairly soon with an approximate date for summer 2019.
Of the non-exclusive Nintendo titles spread out across the event hall, there were a few other stand-out titles that caught a lot of interest. Chrono Sword, developed by South Korean studio 21c Ducks co.,Ltd is a mix of old skool Diablo and Dark Souls, providing some kinetic isometric action with excellent sound design and pixel animation.
For those horror fans out there, World of Horror by panstasz, a solo Polish developer, garnered a lot of attention for its monochromatic, Junji Ito-inspired art style and atmosphere. Part adventure, part point-and-click, World of Horror is a game made to fascinate and disturb in equal measure, but is one to look out for if you’re after something a little grittier for your Switch.
While much of the event is about seeing and playing the games, attendees got the chance to hear from some of the big names behind the games, and with Bit Summit being a more up close and personal experience, many of these figures in gaming were there walking the floor, often inviting interaction with attendees.
During the two-day event, a mix of both international and local gaming talent sat down for Q&A sessions as well as directed talks on development subjects of their choice. Atsushi Inaba, studio head of PlatinumGames, spoke on ‘Training the Next Generation of Disruptive Creators’, a running theme with indie developers.
Fans of Ninja Gaiden III and Captain Tsubasa III would have been no doubt delighted to see Kaori Nakabai on stage, speaking about her work as the composer for those particular games alongside Keiji Yamagishi, composer for Ninja Gaiden, Captain Tsubasa and Tecmo Bowl.
Kouji Igarashi of Castlevania fame spent some time on stage with his talk ‘A Bloody, Bloodstained Development’, talking on the issues that arose with his game Bloodstained and addressing the somewhat prickly response of fans to its previous state, and the massive turnaround to make it the hotly-anticipated title it is today.
Bit Summit just wouldn’t be the same without accompanying entertainment of the more musical variety, and this year was no exception, with two acts worthy of note. Doseone, a prolific rapper, producer and artist in his own right, has provided music for numerous games over the years, including Enter the Gungeon, Nuclear Throne, Gang Beasts and Nidhogg 2. Performing on stage throughout the two-day event, Doesone added some heavier yet equally impressive chip-tune mashups for attendees to rock out to.
On the Sunday, local Kyoto-based rock band Nice Legs performed original music for the event, while dressed as trees. It was apparently Tree Summit for them. While they clearly didn’t get the memo as to what the showcase was actually about, the music was still highly vibrant and entertaining, with some slick guitar riffs and melodic vocals. Nice Legs recently had a song in the Toejam & Earl telethon and can be regularly found hanging around Kyoto’s indie game dev scene.
While the event may have only lasted for two days, the attendance already beat last year’s with a total headcount of 17,048. While that may not seem much for a game event, Bit Summit has already proven to be a strong contender for game developers to showcase their games in a more friendlier, more intimate setting compared to its Tokyo-based mega event Tokyo Game Show.
As this year’s event was unfortunately quite close to E3, the organisers of Bit Summit have made the decision to already announce the dates for next year’s 8th showing, guaranteeing a much bigger and better weekend for games.
Bit Summit 8 will open its doors again at Miyakomesse, Kyoto on May 9th & 10th, 2020. Should you find yourself in Kyoto during that time and are looking for something to do in between getting your photo taken by the old Nintendo building and checking out the tori gates where Star Fox was first conceived, why not visit the show and see what it’s all about?
XSEED Games Cops Backlash Online For Not Crediting Former Employee
XSEED Games is currently under fire for not crediting former members of staff. This is all tied to its policy to only acknowledge its current members of staff.
According to Eurogamer, the US company which specialises in the translation of Japanese games has been attacked on social media, after former localisation producer Brittany Avery revealed on Twitter how her name had been removed from the credits of the PlayStation 4 title The Legends of Heroes: Trails ofCold Steel and quite possibly the sequel as well.
XSEED felt obliged to issue its own statement via Twitter, explaining how it appreciated the hard work of everyone who had contributed, but the company policy was to only credit current members of staff. The tweet further explained how the company has never credited staff members for individual roles or when an employee has departed prior to a game’s release.
Unsurprisingly, there was a huge backlash to this response – with many replies to this message demanding the company change its policy immediately and patch in updated credits acknowledging all staff members (current and former) who had worked on these game projects. This has also reignited debates about unionisation for video game developers.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time this sort of incident has happened within the industry before and it probably won’t be the last.
