Random: Rare Promo Art For Unaired Cartoon Show Features A Metroid Gender-Swap
Occasionally a piece of concept art for a treasured icon of gaming pops up and we all gawp and have a laugh at how off-model the initial sketches looked before the character was established. Even official takes on characters can be vastly different from the versions we know and love today (we all remember the legendarily hilarious US Mega Man box art, after all).
@TanookiKuribo has posted on Twitter the discovery of an auction currently live on ebay featuring some rare promo art related to the ‘Super Mario Bros. Power Hour’, an animated show that never went into production. It seems that the estate of a former employee of DIC (the animation company behind classics such as Inspector Gadget and the Sonic cartoons) has come across four concept images of games that might have featured on the show:
As you can see, Double Dragon, California Games, Castlevania and Metroid would have been part of the (presumably hour-long) show, although the promo art shows a somewhat different interpretation of the sources than we’re used to seeing all these years later. To be fair, Double Dragon’s not too bad, and the California Games image expands on the original box art in a cartoon-y fashion. The other two properties, however, have gone through some changes. Let’s look at the Castlevania one first:
Well, it’s got the Universal monsters in there, although they’ve certainly been given a makeover for the kids. And speaking of kids, we assume the terrified children represent characters from the show rather than a hip ’90s makeover of the Belmonts. The current Netflix show is certainly a more adult take on the source.
Moving on, the Metroid image makes a more significant change to canon:
Yes, it appears Samus has lost her golden locks in this iteration. It seems that the artist never made it to the end of the game – at least not in five hours or under – and went for a different interpretation to the one we’re all accustomed to. If you fancy putting in a bid, there’s another five days on the auction, although you’ll need deep pockets should you want to bag these 8x10s. The description also states that there’s more ‘rare Nintendo DIC items’ to come, so you might want to keep an eye on the seller.
Of course, off-model versions of fan-favourite characters are still easy enough to find these days – you’ve all seen the Sonic movie trailer, right?
Ah, we remember having a good old chuckle whenever that company logo came up at the end of our favourite ‘toons… So, what’s your favourite ‘off-model’ portrayal of a favourite video game character? Let us know with a comment in the usual place.
Set off on an amazing journey through Unknown Fate. Passing seamlessly from the real world into a surreal universe you?ll come across strange characters and unfamiliar artifacts.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-09-2019, 07:24 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Echo developer Ultra Ultra closes down
Newsbrief: The Copenhagen-based developer Ultra Ultra has closed its doors less than two years after releasing its atmospheric sci-fi game Echo.
The team shared the news in a tweet, noting that, while the studio has shut down, the movie based on Echo is still in the works and the game itself will remain up for sale.
“We’re terribly sad to report that Ultra Ultra has ceased to exist,” reads a tweet from the team. “We are grateful to have had the chance to crystallize something truly from the heart.”
Ultra Ultra released Echo for PC and PlayStation 4 in late 2017 and just this January announced that the game would be adapted into a film at the hands of John Wick creator and writer Derek Kolstad. Between development and studio setup, the team spent around three years working on the game, something discussed by Ultra Ultra’s Martin Emborg in an interview following their IGF nomination last year.
Rainbow Six Siege has long had a problem with team-killing, but developer Ubisoft has a new solution going live soon to help alleviate the issue. Reverse friendly fire, as it's called, has been in testing for a while and arrives on public PS4, Xbox One, and PC servers on May 8.
Essentially, the system is designed to punish griefers by dealing the damage to them, rather than the poor teammate being hit. Offenders will get a brief grace period--accidents happen, after all--after which any further damage dealt will be reversed, meaning the innocent player receives no damage and the guilty party will be injured themselves.
The system applies to all primary and secondary weapons, as well as direct hits from most unique Operator gadgets. Some explosive items are exempt--some by design, and some because of a bug Ubisoft says it will fix in a future update.
The developer says the method as it stands "is not our final version of the system," which will continue to be tweaked according to data and player feedback. It has already announced changes to the system coming during Siege's Year 4, Season 2: "We will introduce situations where the system will activate for the whole squad," the company said. "How gadgets will react and behave under Reverse Friendly Fire will also be fine-tuned." Read the full patch notes for reverse friendly fire's current iteration below, via Ubisoft.
Rainbow Six Siege Reverse Friendly Fire Update
When a player abuses the friendly fire mechanic to grief their teammates, this system is activated. We believe that this first version will be a positive step forward in our fight against team killing while maintaining the same intensity and high stakes gameplay that is core to the Rainbow Six Siege experience.
The Y4S1 release of RFF is not our final version of the system. Future iterations and improvements will continue based off data and player feedback.
Community feedback so far has been invaluable and allowed us to make early iterations to the system. For example, RFF can now activate based on total friendly damage. In these cases, there is no validation screen for the offending player's teammates. We are also striving to make it clearer how operators and gadgets will react to this system. We have consolidated some guidelines below for your reference.
Effect Of Reverse Friendly Fire
On Weapons And Thrown Objects
Impacts:
Primary/secondary weapons
Direct hits from thrown unique gadgets
Exothermic-S Torch (Maverick)
SK 4-12 (Buck)
Mounted LMG (Tachanka; regardless of who's using the turret)
M120 CREM (Ash) when the breaching round directly hits someone
KS79 Lifeline (Zofia)
Airjab Launcher (Nomad)
Pest Launcher (Mozzie)
Before RFF activation:
Can cause damage to teammates
Will count towards activating RFF
After RFF activation:
Teammates will not receive damage
Will reverse damage dealt
On Explosives
Impacts:
Generic gadgets (frag grenade, C4, breach charge) that results in an explosion*
Gas Grenade (Smoke)
TAC MKO asphyxiating bolts (Capitão)
M120 CREM (Ash) when the breaching round explodes
Cluster Charge (Fuze)
*Explosive gadgets that do not do damage (i.e. stun grenades, Ying's Candela) will not be affected by RFF in any way
Before RFF activation:
Can cause damage to teammates
Will count towards activating RFF
After RFF activation:
Can cause damage to teammates
Does not reverse damage dealt*
*Explosives currently will continue to damage teammates even under RFF. This is not intended and will be fixed in Season 2.
Exceptions*:
Claymore
Entry Denial Device (Kapkan)
X-Kairos pellets (Hibana)
Exothermic Charge (Thermite)
*These explosives do not trigger RFF. While under RFF, these also do not reverse damage dealt and can continue to damage teammates. This can change in the future with feedback and further game design considerations.
On Drones And Operator Cameras
Impacts:
Evil Eye (Maestro)
Shock Drone (Twitch and Mozzie)
Before RFF activation:
Can cause damage to teammates
Will count towards activating RFF
After RFF activation:
Teammates will not receive damage
Will reverse damage dealt (onto the drone/camera)
More To Come
Further changes for Reverse Friendly Fire will come during Year 4 Season 2. We will introduce situations where the system will activate for the whole squad. How gadgets will react and behave under Reverse Friendly Fire will also be fine-tuned based on data and feedback. We look forward to sharing future developments with you.
We welcome any additional feedback on the Rainbow Six subreddit!
Frane: Dragons’ Odyssey Brings More RPG Action To Switch Tomorrow
In today’s episode of ‘here’s another RPG from Kemco’, we present to you Frane: Dragon’s Odyssey. The game launches on Nintendo Switch tomorrow.
The story follows Kunah, a boy from the fire dragon tribe, as he gets summoned by the god that reigns over the world above. His mission is to bring Escude, a lost girl from the angel clan, back to Vanneth. With his childhood friend, Riel, the daughter of the ice dragon chief, he follows after the missing girl and sets out for the vast world below the clouds.
Featuring all the RPG elements you’ve come to expect, Frane: Dragon’s Odyssey has you facing combat against enemies, gathering items, creating dishes, and giving gifts to your friends to increase their likeability gauges. The press release even hints at some potential romance, should your gifts be particularly liked.
As we mentioned above, the game launches tomorrow and is available from the Switch eShop for $12.99 / £11.69. If you’re quick, you can take advantage of a pre-launch sale giving you 10% off that price.
Do you like the look of this one? Ready for another RPG adventure? Tell us below.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Celebrates Mother’s Day With In-Game Event
Nintendo has revealed the theme for the next Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Spirit event, and this time it’s doubling up as a celebration for Mother’s Day.
Called ‘Mum’s the Word!’, the event will kick off this Friday and lasts for three days as always. The Spirit board will be littered with motherly characters for you to win, and you’ll earn triple the usual SP for adding one to your collection.
If, like us, you happen to live in the UK and are confused about the event being Mother’s Day-themed, worry not. In most places, Mother’s Day is taking place on 12th May (consider this your reminder to pick up a last-minute gift if you celebrate the day).
Are you missing any of these Spirits? Would you rather Smash received a new kind of event to enjoy? Let us know in the usual place.
If you’ve been reading the Community blog, you’ll already know: AskFedora has moved to Discourse! Read on for more information about this exciting platform.
Discourse? Why Discourse?
The new AskFedora is a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse, similar to discussion.fedoraproject.org. However, where discussion.fedoraproject.org is meant for development discussion within the community, AskFedora is meant for end-user troubleshooting.
The Discourse platform focuses on conversations. Not only can you ask questions and receive answers, you can have complete dialogues with others. This is especially fitting since troubleshooting includes lots of bits that are neither questions nor answers. Instead, there are lots of suggestions, ideas, thoughts, comments, musings, none of which necessarily are the one true answer, but all of which are required steps that together lead us to the solution.
Apart from this fresh take on discussions, Discourse comes with a full set of features that make interacting with each other very easy.
This decision was made mainly to combat the spam and security issues previously encountered with the various social media login services.
So, unlike the current Askbot setup where you could login using different social media services, you will need to create a Fedora Account to use the new Discourse based instance. Luckily, creating a Fedora Account is very easy!
Choose a username, enter your name, and a valid e-mail address, a security question.
Do the “captcha” to confirm that you are indeed a human, and confirm that you are older than 13 years of age.
That’s it! You now have a Fedora account.
Get started!
If you are using the platform for the first time, you should start with the “New users! Start here!” category. Here, we’ve put short summaries on how to use the platform effectively. This includes information on how to use Discourse, its many features that make it a great platform, notes on how to ask and respond to queries, subscribing and unsubscribing from categories, and lots more.
For the convenience of the global Fedora community, these summaries are available in all the languages that the community supports. So, please do take a minute to go over these introductory posts.
Discuss, learn, teach, have fun!
Please login, ask and discuss your queries and help each other out. As always, suggestions and feedback are always welcome. You can post these in the “Site feedback” category.
As a last note, please do remember to “be excellent to each other.” The Fedora Code of Conduct applies to all of us!
Acknowledgements
The Fedora community does everything together, so many volunteers joined forces and gave their resources to make this possible. We are most grateful to the Askbot developers who have hosted AskFedora till now, the Discourse team for hosting it now, and all the community members who helped set it up, and everyone that helps keep the Fedora community ticking along!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-09-2019, 05:07 AM - Forum: Windows
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Meet team EasyGlucose, the 2019 Imagine Cup World Champion
The 17th annual Imagine Cup brought together thousands of students from across the globe over eight months of coding, collaboration, and competition. Through hackathons, online semifinals, and in-person Regional Final events, the 2019 competition season all built up to one moment—the World Championship stage live from Microsoft Build. For the first time, our finalist teams pitched their projects to kick off Microsoft’s premier developer conference.
Congratulations to team EasyGlucose from the United States, who took home the 2019 Imagine Cup trophy for his deep learning, low-cost, and non-invasive blood glucose level monitor for diabetics. He won USD100,000, a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, USD50,000 in Azure grants, and ongoing mentoring from M12.
Imagine Cup aims to empower future innovators with the tools and resources to bring their technology solutions to life with Azure. This year’s competition saw many teams developing inspiring and game-changing projects focused on solving key business and societal issues. Teams Caeli from Asia, Finderr from the UK, and EasyGlucose from the USA each won their Regional Final round to advance to the final stage of the competition. They gave a live pitch of their original Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Machine projects encompassing solutions in healthcare and accessibility to a panel of three expert judges at Microsoft Build, who selected the most comprehensive idea.
Watch the show and relive the moment of Team EasyGlucose winning the trophy:
Meet the top 3 teams and recap their journey to the World Championship:
2019 Imagine Cup World Champion: Team EasyGlucose, United States
EasyGlucose is a cloud-powered, non-invasive, and cost-effective method of blood glucose monitoring for diabetic patients. A deep learning computer vision framework using convolutional neural networks developed with Azure Virtual Machines analyzes iris morphological variation in an eye image to predict a patient’s blood glucose level. Recap their journey through the Americas Regional Final.
“I want to make cost-effective and painless blood glucose monitoring to all diabetic patients around the globe, and Imagine Cup enables me not only to share my idea and get invaluable public feedback, but also to obtain funding and keep validating and improving EasyGlucose.” – Bryan, EasyGlucose
2nd place: Team Caeli, India
Caeli is a smart automated anti-pollution and drug delivery mask specifically designed for asthmatic and chronic respiratory patients. It implements breakthrough features and Azure Machine Learning in a portable format to improve the quality of life for respiratory patients living in polluted areas. Recap their journey through the Asia Regional Final.
“Caeli wanted to build something that could help our society in surviving…here in Imagine Cup we found it suitable to showcase the possibilities and draw industry attention towards this global issue.” – Team Caeli
3rd place: Team Finderr, United Kingdom
The team won the Azure Champ Challenge at OxfordHack, which inspired them to submit their project to Imagine Cup. They created an app solution which uses Cognitive Services and Virtual Machines to help make finding lost objects accessible to visually impaired individuals through their phones.Recap their journey through the EMEA Regional Final.
“We’re really, really excited to have the chance to be able to bring our project to fruition to help the visually impaired users.” – Team Finderr
Registration for the 2020 competition is now open. Join over two million student competitors worldwide in creating purpose from your passion and sign up for Imagine Cup today!
LG UltraFine 5K display sold out on online Apple store
By Mikey Campbell Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 04:56 pm PT (07:56 pm ET)
Apple this week appears to have halted sales of the LG UltraFine 5K display, potentially signaling a near future launch for a branded high-resolution monitor expected to launch alongside a new modular Mac Pro.
The LG display is now listed as sold out on Apple.com, while in-store supply is exhausted at many U.S. brick-and-mortar locations.
A similar situation occurred late last year when domestic Apple stores, as well as a few international locales, showed wide unavailability of the 5K display. At the time, however, the monitor could still be ordered for delivery.
The UltraFine 5K stockout follows Apple’s discontinuation of the LG UltraFine 4K display in April. With both LG UltraFine models no longer available from Apple, it can be speculated that the tech giant is readying a successor device for launch.
LG’s UltraFine 4K and 5K displays were introduced in October 2016, designed as part of a collaborative effort with Apple to complement then-new MacBook Pro models.
Apple announced work on a professional-grade standalone monitor in 2017, initially promising release alongside an all-new Mac Pro in 2018. The company later pushed back the Mac debut into 2019, but failed to offer a release timeline for its new monitor, leaving some to believe it would see unveiling at an earlier date.
While Apple has yet to detail hardware specifications, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in February said the device will measure 31.6 inches on the diagonal and house a 6K3K panel boasting “outstanding picture quality thanks to its adoption of the Mini LED-like backlight design.” Kuo in a separate note to investors issued in April predicted Apple to launch the display in the next few months.
Most recently, a report this week claims Apple might preview both the Mac Pro and display at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June. AppleInsider will be covering the event live.
Though the LG UltraFine 5K is no longer available from Apple’s online store, those in the market can still find the display at various retailers like B&H Photo.
