Starting toward the end of 2018, Epic Games started giving away free developer content from the Unreal Engine marketplace, free for that month. This May is no exception, with several new assets available for free during the month, as well as a couple more assets now available indefinitely free.
Be sure to “purchase” the assets from the marketplace before April 1, 2019 to get them for free. If you are interested in a hands-on video with a particular asset, please let me know and I will see what I can do.
Located in the heart of the Mile-End, iLLOGIKA is an independent studio of 60 people. It is the ideal environment for those looking for a friendly team, the ability to work on a variety of projects and tools, flexible schedules and the opportunity to take part in the development of a growing studio.
Benefits
Flexible schedule, possibility of reduced hours, strict policy limiting overtime;
Holidays for the annual closure in December, holidays banks (paid, sick, mobile, unpaid);
Training policy for the entire team;
Possibility to work on personal projects;
Hack week and game jam during working hours;
Group Insurance, Employee Assistance Program, Online Health Platform;
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.
Get Over Here! Mortal Kombat 11 Available Now on Xbox One
Mortal Kombat 11 battles its way to Xbox One today culminating in nearly 25 years’ worth of lore, combat, and brutality. NetherRealm Studios (Mortal Kombat X, Injustice 2) returns once again as the award-winning developer for Mortal Kombat 11, bringing with them decades of fighting game creation experience to this newest entry of this historic franchise.
All your favorite characters return like Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Baraka, Sonya Blade, Raiden, in addition to new characters making their mark on the series, like Geras, a powerful and loyal servant of Kronika who can manipulate time. Each fighter also comes with her or his own unique abilities and series-signature fatalities to deliver perhaps the largest and most diverse cast of combatants in the game’s rich history.
And if these characters don’t happen to be to your liking, the robust and all-new character variation system gives you nearly infinite customization options. You’ll be able to change everything from skins to gear to special abilities as well as your intro, taunts, and brutalities – all of which can be unlocked through Mortal Kombat 11 gameplay.
Wrapping all of these features and fighters together is a new cinematic story mode that continues the events of Mortal Kombat X, featuring characters both past and present in a time-bending adventure that sets Raiden against Kronika, the Keeper of Time who created existence at the dawn of history.
With a slew of new character customization features, a new cinematic story mode, and featuring vicious one-on-one fighting gameplay the series has come to be known for, Mortal Kombat 11 is one of the biggest Xbox One games of the year and is not to be missed. Get it today on the Microsoft Store.
Avengers: Endgame Is Now 10th Biggest Movie In History
Avengers: Endgame has been in theatres for less than a week, and it's already one of biggest box office successes in the history of cinema. It's now made an astonishing $1.342 billion worldwide, which makes it the 10th biggest movie ever.
It edged out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ($1.341 billion) to take the No. 10 spot. Endgame will surely continue to make lots more money as its run in theatres continues, so it'll be interesting to see where it lands when all is said and done.
The No. 1 biggest box office smash worldwide is Avatar, which made $2.78 billion. You can see the full Top 10 list below, as compiled by Box Office Mojo.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has raised the bonus threshold for Avengers actors. Years ago, actors would receive bonuses when a Marvel movie passed $500 million; it was later raised to $700 million, and now bonuses aren't paid until Avengers movies hit $1.5 billion. Endgame will surely reach that amount, which the actors should be happy about.
Video: 13 Amazing New Games Coming To The Nintendo Switch In The Month Of May
When he’s not paying off a loan to Tom Nook, Liam likes to report on the latest Nintendo news and admire his library of video games. His favourite Nintendo character used to be a guitar-playing dog, but nowadays he prefers to hang out with Judd the cat.
Random: Rocket League On Switch Gets A New HOME Menu Icon
The new icon…
In the past, there have been a lot of conversations about ugly-looking Switch HOME Menu icons. Arguably the biggest offender was Snake Pass in 2017. The game icon was perfectly fine until one day it was changed to resemble something that looked more like a mobile app. Months later it was restored to its original state.
While there was nothing particularly wrong with the Rocket League icon in the first place, the game’s developer and publisher Psyonix has decided to give it a slight makeover. As you can see above, the logo has been reduced in size and there are now three cars underneath it. For the sake of comparison, here’s the original one:
And the old one…
Apart from the new icon, Version 1.62 makes a couple of changes and updates to the game’s audio and also resolves a number of bugs. For the full patch notes, click here.
What do you think of the new icon for Rocket League? Tell us in the comments.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-01-2019, 11:19 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
The Verge: How Microsoft learned from the past to redesign its future
One room at Microsoft’s headquarters represents everything that’s changed about its design philosophy. Inside, there are four rows of tables. In the first row is everything the company makes that’s already in stores. In the second is the next-generation of products, and in the third and fourth are the really conceptual things that Microsoft wants to try to make in the future. “If you spend enough time in this room, you see the gaps, certain light bulbs go off,” says Ralf Groene, head of Microsoft’s hardware design.
These days, Microsoft is all about looking at the big picture — not just where one product needs to go, but how an entire ecosystem of products needs to ship, evolve, and work together over the coming years. While products in the past might have been developed in secret by separate teams, and ended up looking and feeling disparate because of it, Microsoft has scrapped that approach recently. It’s now adopted a philosophy called “open design” that’s about sharing ideas across the company, integrating products, and failing faster. The hope is that it will lead to a better combination of hardware and software that looks like it came from one company and is better for it, too.
This isn’t just about improving Microsoft’s visual design, though. It’s a much deeper change meant to modernize how Microsoft ships software and competes with far more nimble startups that can aggressively go after the many businesses it’s traditionally controlled. A lot is at stake in a technology industry that’s moving faster every year.
I’ve heard and read many stories about how Microsoft’s culture has changed in recent years and how product teams are working more closely together. It’s such a vast shift at Microsoft that I wanted to see for myself how the company is doing things differently now. So I spent three days at the company’s Redmond, Washington-based headquarters earlier this month, speaking to designers and engineers, sitting in illustration planning meetings, and talking to the leaders involved in this new design approach.
One thing is clear from my visit: Microsoft has truly learned from its messy mistakes of the past. But reshaping a 44-year-old company to focus on redesigning its future isn’t going to be easy.
Every Thursday, Microsoft’s Surface, Windows, and app teams get together to discuss what they’re working on. During one of these many meetings in a sunny conference room at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ, designers sat around debating how playful Microsoft should be with its designs. What’s the tone of voice? What’s the visual representation of the personality of the product? Ultimately, how should Microsoft’s voice be expressed in the form of illustrations and design?
The meeting was attended by more than a dozen employees in person, representing products like OneNote, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. Everyone critiqued each other’s designs, offering opinions and ways to work to Microsoft’s color palette, illustration principles, and general voice to create products in a coherent way. This may sound like a totally normal meeting at most companies. At Microsoft, it would have been unimaginable just 10 years ago.
For its most recent design system, Fluent design, Microsoft is pulling ideas from across the company and keeping everyone in sync with an internal catalog of shared principles and guidelines. Designers can log in to see others’ work through mock-ups, concepts, and designs that have shipped to the public. “That was the first base layer step of democratizing design at Microsoft,” says Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft.
The approach emerged out of one of Microsoft’s biggest failures: Windows Phone. For its launch, Microsoft brought together the company’s Windows, Office, and hardware teams to create a radical new “Metro” design language that made its operating system look modern. Windows Phone as a platform may have flopped, but its design really pushed Apple and Google to make better mobile operating systems.
“I think what we learned, at least on phone, is that to have a great design system, it cannot just be for one product,” says Albert Shum, head of design for Windows. “It’s how do you actually scale it out to hundreds of products serving millions of customers, in some ways, billions of customers?”
Fluent has really taken Microsoft back to the basics of design, with a much bigger focus on simplicity. Instead of bold typography and edge-to-edge content, Fluent focuses on subtle elements like light, depth, motion, and material. We’ve seen it appear in Windows with hints of motion and blur effects. It’s also appeared in Office and on the web across services like OneDrive, Office Online, and Outlook. Microsoft is gradually making Fluent the centerpiece for how the company thinks about design.
It’s a design that needs to scale across a multitude of products, and some that are used by more than a billion people across the world. Microsoft’s designers have to consider whether they’re creating art and illustrations for students, workers, or general consumers, and how those designs will be interpreted in different locations. There’s a lot to cover, and each piece of software design also has to adhere to the style of the operating systems from Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others that power the many hardware devices that run Microsoft’s software.
In one of Microsoft’s hardware workshops, I spotted an unreleased Surface Mini sitting on a hinge designer’s shelf. When I joke with Groene, the hardware design chief, about how he forgot to get his team to hide the Surface Mini, he’s more interested in discussing what comes next. “We’re a software company, and being able to design better software through hardware is always the stuff that inspires us,” he says.
Surface hinge designers work on what’s next.
Under its new workflow, Microsoft also has designers working on seemingly disparate hardware across the company. I spoke to Chris Kujawski, an Xbox industrial designer, who told me the company’s changes mean there are more opportunities for designers now, and jobs feel less stale because designers can now work more freely together. That means someone responsible for the design of the Xbox Adaptive Controller is now working on the new Xbox console and designing a new Surface.
Xbox and Surface hardware might not look the same, but the teams responsible for its design are sitting next to each other at Microsoft now. Kait Schoeck, an industrial designer who worked on the Surface Book, says this new way of working means she’s “constantly doing new stuff” and “constantly learning something new” from fellow designers.
All of this hardware needs software to power it, though, and Microsoft doesn’t think of these as separate processes. “We always think of hardware as a stage for software,” Groene says. “Sometimes the stage can also influence the performance of the software, so there’s the back and forth of both of these elements.”
If you think back to the original Surface RT tablet, which launched alongside Windows 8, the software (Windows RT) was really far behind the hardware and it showed through incomplete apps and laggy performance. “We were intensely focusing on the hardware while the software was being developed at the same time … without really the time to influence each other too much,” Groene says. The aim for any future Surface hardware is never to make the mistake of the Surface RT situation again, and ensure the software is keeping up.
Part of Microsoft’s fluent design team.
The speed of competitors has also had a massive impact on Microsoft. The company started building Surface hardware after seeing Apple’s runaway success with the MacBook Air and iPad, while Google’s regular software updates to Chrome and Android played a role in inspiring Windows 10’s nonstop iteration.
But it’s not just fellow tech giants that have given Microsoft cause for concern. There are now thousands of startups that compete for parts of its business, from Office to cloud services to Outlook.
The software landscape has changed dramatically since Microsoft first organized its workflow. Back in the day, it’d ship a new version of Windows every few years. Software, hardware, and design teams were siloed, and that didn’t make a huge difference — design was minimal, and competitors were limited.
Internally, Microsoft’s teams also used to battle against each other. “You’ve all seen the picture of all the groups pointing guns at each other at Microsoft. Certainly there’s a little bit of that,” a Windows Phone product manager told The Vergenearly seven years ago. Microsoft used to have a reputation for siloed teams that were run by bosses who would compete with other teams to make the most popular product. Co-founder Bill Gates famously held product reviews where he’d kill years of work in a single meeting, and this encouraged these fiefdoms even more as teams battled for Gates’ attention.
But over the past decade, things have changed a lot. Competitors like Google and Apple have built competing products to Microsoft — good ones. Office, a $35 billion per year business that Microsoft still dominates, is now fiercely contested by Google’s G Suite services, tools like Facebook’s Workplace, and many others.
Meanwhile, smaller startups have nipped at mere pieces of Microsoft’s huge businesses, often to great success. Dropbox and Slack were able to innovate in ways that Microsoft was slow to react to, and the company has found itself playing catch-up. Slack is now valued at $7.1 billion, and it has more than 30 million customers paying for its service. Dropbox is now a public company, and it’s valued at around $10 billion.
Some of those threats are ancillary to Microsoft’s core businesses, but some are not. As platforms outside Microsoft’s control, like iOS and Android, increasingly consume more of people’s time, Microsoft needs to make apps that compete on the merits. It’s no longer making the default software for a dominant platform within its control, it’s fighting for market share in a crowded marketplace where the app that gets it just right can take off overnight and draw users from a legacy business. Microsoft has even acquired apps like Accompli to make its leading Outlook app for the iPhone and avoid falling behind.
Microsoft’s hardware designers.
Later in the design meeting, illustrators debated the addition of a turtle. They’re thinking about using a turtle to help illustrate a slow connectivity page in Microsoft Teams, but first, some decisions had to be made: Should it animate slowly? Should it wear a sweatband? Will its meaning be clear across every country?
More input can lead to sharper, more inclusive work. But it can also bog a company down as it tries to please and incorporate everyone involved. I witnessed this during the design meeting when everyone was discussing an animated profile image. All of the designers were focused on how the image animated, but I just sat there, silently wondering why the profile image wasn’t properly center-aligned. It’s a massive challenge for a company as big as Microsoft to open its design process and grow from it, without slowing down or missing the basics.
For Microsoft, revising how it approaches design is also about revising how it develops products. Increasingly, the company has been happy to fail fast and test things to speed up development times: that’s meant more rapid prototyping, learning to lean on open-source communities, and shifting the core of its software business.
Microsoft’s old approach was to write every line of code. Modern startups, Friedman says, write around 5 percent of their code, relying on open-source tools for the rest. “There’s all this great open-source stuff that other companies build and that we build that we’re starting to share with each other more openly,” says Friedman. “For us, it’s just about embracing open source in design and engineering.”
Microsoft has also created a new way to prototype future products, both hardware and software, that cuts the time to build a prototype from hours or days to minutes. It started as a tool to test changes to Office on the web before Microsoft designers refactored the code to make it open source and started prototyping things like the company’s new Microsoft Search interface, an emerging way to power search results across Office, Windows, and more.
The prototype tool is essentially a web version of Windows and Office where designers can tweak the look and feel of things instantly. Windows, Office, and Microsoft Edge designers are all now using this tool to test changes to products. “It’s enabling us to envision new hardware, hardware without screens, hardware with screens, all sorts of different stuff to find out if there’s actual human value there before we go invest in making an actual product,” Friedman says.
Product makers are also using this new prototype tool to get a better idea of what software changes will be needed for hardware in the future. Thanks to this new prototype tool, Microsoft’s hardware designers can now try and conceptualize future hardware with or without displays. Some of that future hardware might involve dual screens or even devices with foldable displays. Microsoft has been working to support this type of hardware, but it’s clearly waiting for the right opportunity to launch anything radically different.
Investing in products, whether they’re hardware or software, used to involve big bets for Microsoft that didn’t always work out. “Back when we used to ship software, client software, every two to three years, we had to imagine what was going to happen two years from now in the industry and be right about a solution,” Friedman says. “That’s really tricky because the industry keeps moving faster and faster.”
Teams within Microsoft are now supposed to work in a series of shorter sprints to prototype or complete designs. Instead of everyone working toward a particular date months or years down the line, a simplistic version of the work is built, and then extras are added on top.
Think of this more agile approach like making a very basic pizza, then adding more fancy toppings each time. The value of a project, or lack thereof, is seen much sooner and well before it’s even finished. Microsoft’s “open design” philosophy applies that same set of design rules across the entire company and allows a design piece built for one product to easily be incorporated into another. Every product doesn’t need its own chat bubble or search bar. Instead, common design elements are like the toppings. They are centralized and reused.
A designer works on a new illustration.
This new focus on speed and the embrace of open source has changed the way Microsoft thinks about how products come to market. “I think our new cultural philosophy is around actually trying things… and if they fail, and we cut them, then that’s awesome learning that we then apply to the next thing,” says Friedman. “More and more people at Microsoft are being rewarded for trying things, learning and then applying learnings forward. Because what we’re investing in is a culture of growth.”
If this new approach to design at Microsoft works, then the company should be well-positioned to respond to software and hardware changes in the years ahead. But nothing like this is ever easy. For a company as big as Microsoft, this sounds like a multiyear change, and there’s no guarantee it will be successful. Microsoft has spent $7.5 billion to acquire GitHub and allow its own developers to share and collaborate even closer. The challenge now is to really make everyone buy into this new approach and completely overhaul Microsoft’s internal culture.
Microsoft’s embrace of open source, its switch to Chromium for its Edge browser, and this new open design give clear hints at how the company is redesigning its future. “I would hope that everyone can build parts of the Microsoft experience 10 years from now. I would hope that product names go away entirely in the future,” explains Friedman.
Inside Microsoft’s hardware workshop.
Beyond open source and Windows, Microsoft’s future design story looks increasingly inclusive and about listening to the humans who actually use its products. We’ve seen this recently with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and we’re starting to see Surface move into more personal areas like headphones. It’s an approach we first saw with the Windows feedback program, and now the company is increasingly looking to the voice of its customers to influence its design decisions.
This customer voice should hopefully mean better hardware and software, but Microsoft’s centralized design does mean the company could be setting itself up to fail. A unified design raises the stakes. If one thing fails, everything fails. But if Microsoft is truly listening to its customers, then this new agile approach should allow the company to fix things quickly.
Microsoft has clearly learned from its past, and this new design shift is a smart bet for its future. The challenge now is to combine all of Microsoft’s ideas from its more than 100,000 employees into a single design that scales to look and feel coherent to the billion people who use products like Office or Windows.
The challenge is also to not be too early to new products or too late, which is a delicate balance that will prevent Microsoft from launching things and killing them off within months. Otherwise, if this open design doesn’t really work out, we could be looking at well-designed hardware and software that reminds us of what could have been.
Parental control apps clap back at Apple statement on MDM technology
Parental control and screen time monitoring apps are fighting back against Apple’s decision to strike the titles from the App Store over alleged security risks, saying in separate blog posts that the tech giant’s reasoning is flawed and its statement on the matter misleading.
One of the apps banned from distribution, OurPact, argued for its reinstatement in a post to Medium on Tuesday. As noted by CNET, which spotted the entry, OurPact also calls for Apple to allow parental control apps access to device management APIs.
Last week, a New York Times report highlighted Apple’s targeted removal of popular apps created to help users cut down on device usage or monitor their children’s screen time. Over the past year, the company pulled apps, sometimes without adequately notifying developers, or forced the removal of features that left titles stripped of key functionality.
Developers interviewed as part of the report implied the crackdown was prompted by Apple’s release of a competing iOS feature called Screen Time which debuted in iOS 12 and includes a number of tools designed to encourage iPhone and iPad owners to spend less time on their devices. Screen Time also incorporates parental control features similar or identical to those offered by the now banned apps.
Responding to fallout from The Times article, Apple over the weekend issued a statement in an attempt to explain the app removals. According to Apple, the apps in question used “highly invasive” Mobile Device Management (MDM) technology to accomplish their advertised tasks and thus posed a risk to user privacy and security.
MDM allows wide access to device functions and potentially sensitive data, Apple said. The technology was designed for use in large-scale enterprise device deployments, not public-facing apps available on the App Store. As such, integration of MDM by screen monitoring and parental control apps was a violation of the company’s App Store guidelines.
OurPact disagrees. In its blog post, the developer attempts to undermine Apple’s statement by comparing it with official Apple support documentation on MDM technology. A point-by-point rebuttal suggests properly vetted MDM apps pose little to no risk to end users, even those offered through public channels.
“Unfortunately, Apple’s statement is misleading and prevents a constructive conversation around the future of parental controls on iOS,” the company said. “We want to take the opportunity to set the record straight about MDM for our loyal users and the many families looking for solutions to guide healthy digital habits. Our hope is that Apple will work with developers in this space so that families continue to have a wide selection of parental controls to choose from.”
OurPact also includes a detailed timeline of events leading up to its dismissal from the App Store, noting four years of submission approvals before an abrupt removal in October 2018 “without any prior communication.”
OurPact suggests Apple provide developers with open APIs if it “truly believes that parents should have tools to manage their children’s device usage, and are committed to providing a competitive, innovative app ecosystem.” The call for appropriate screen time monitoring and device management tools was echoed by other app makers mentioned in the original NYT report.
As noted by MacRumors on Wednesday, the co-founders of Kidslox and Qustodio in separate Medium posts asked Apple to release the APIs it used to create the iOS Screen Time feature.
Kidslox and Qustodio last week filed a joint complaint with the European Union’s anti-competition office on allegations that Apple’s forced changes had a negative impact on Kidslox’s business.
Halo: Master Chief Collection's PC Delay Explained
Microsoft had originally planned to release the first beta test for Halo: The Master Chief Collection's PC version in April, but that's no longer happening. Now, developer 343 Industries has explained why the delay was necessary.
Right up top it's important to note that the PC version is being made by Splash Damage and Ruffian Games with the support for 343. "Great progress" has been made toward launching the first beta test, or "flight," for Halo: Reach, but it's just not completely ready yet.
"There are still a number of items to work through before we feel we're ready for the first public flight," 343 said. "While flights are obviously work-in-progress builds, they do require a certain level of polish and functionality to ensure that players can have a successful, enjoyable session and that the team is able to get the data they need to validate the flight."
343's own "Pro Team" are currently testing Halo: MCC for PC with the specific focus of considering how the game feels with mouse and keyboard controls. These tests are happening as the technical work continues on the development side.
In regards to what's specifically holding up the first beta test, 343 said it's finalizing the process of the technical ability for Steam users to acquire the flight. "This also includes being able to add specific content in a build while cleanly removing content that isn't needed (this helps keep the overall build size down and keep players focused on the specific areas/activities tied to the goals for the flight)," 343 said.
Additionally, work is being done on Halo: MCC for PC in the areas of security, the PC-specific UI, and telemetry.
A work-in-progress look at Halo: MCC's PC UI
You can sign up for the free Halo Insider program for a chance to get into the beta tests. The tests will start small before expanding to additional users over time.
The full Halo Waypoint blog post offers a ridiculously in-depth breakdown of how 343, Splash Damage, and Ruffian are going about trying to make Halo: MCC for PC a "best-in-class PC shooter."
Halo: MCC begins its release on PC with Halo: Reach (which is also coming to Xbox One) before continuing in chronological order thereafter--Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo 4. Splash Damage senior producer George Wright said many of the challenges in bringing Halo: MCC to PC is the scale and age of the individual games. Not only that, but the games are made with multiple different engines, some of which are not specific to Halo. Not only that, but the engines have different programming styles.
"Each game was also developed for a very specific set of hardware and software requirements, and we need to harmonize the games so that they’re performant on contemporary PC setups, and then start adding the features that players have come to know on PC," Wright said. "A lot of the tools used to build each title no longer exist, so we need to reconstruct, and repair these systems to make them function correctly. The games were built using older development techniques, so it’s been an interesting challenge for a lot of us used to modern AAA development to go back to the old ways--a bit like the difference between building a skyscraper and restoring the Sistine Chapel."
Wright added that development is "going well," noting that Halo: Reach is already playable. "However, we have a very high bar for where the game needs to be, so have a lot more work to do before it's ready to ship," he said.
Overall, 343 stressed that bringing Halo: MCC to PC is not just a simple copy/paste job--not by a long shot.
"Some out there may think it's 'just a lot of copy and paste' to get things to work but making games at the quality level players expect is most definitely not that simple," 343 said. "A project can have hundreds, or even thousands, of people working towards one central goal: creating fun! It is a beautiful and unique process that each studio handles with finesse and flair that helps create a unique brand of magic."
While all this work is going on, Microsoft also continues to work on the next mainline Halo game, Halo Infinite, which is coming to PC and Xbox One. That game is being made by a separate team at 343 Industries. The game is expected to be shown off during Microsoft's E3 2019 briefing in June.
Review: Picross S3 – More Of The Same, But We’re Not Complaining
There are three constants in this world, it seems – Death, Taxes, and Picross sequels. Nintendo’s long-running puzzle franchise has now seen a whopping 33 entries and shows no signs of stopping, even though little has changed in the core gameplay of the main entries. But perhaps that’s the primary strength of Picross; there’s no shortage of potential nonogram puzzles one could create in the numbered grids that each game is packed with, and this is the rare sort of game that just about anyone can play. As the latest in this long lineage of puzzle games, Picross S3 is exactly the kind of game that you expect it to be – featuring hundreds of challenging nonogram puzzles that are sure to take dozens of hours to clear in their entirety – but, rather surprisingly, it also has a few surprises to set it apart from its predecessors.
For those of you who haven’t picked up one of the many predecessors, Picross puzzles are deduction challenges that could best be described as something of a cross between Minesweeper and Sudoku. Each puzzle consists of a neat grid laid out with a series of numbers affixed to its rows and columns, and these numbers tell you exactly how many squares in that row or column need to be coloured in.
Now, you can’t fill in just any square in that row or column, so the puzzle is an ongoing battle of cross-referencing different sets of numbers with each other to find overlaps, gradually processing different sections of the puzzle and eliminating possibilities until you arrive at a pixelated picture of some sort. It may sound about as fun as balancing a chequebook or doing maths homework, but there’s a dangerously addictive quality to that dopamine rush you get upon completing each puzzle and thinking “Ohhhhhhh” when you finally realize what exactly it was that you were crafting so meticulously for all this time. This is the sort of game that you sit down to play for just a few minutes only to find yourself sitting in the same position an hour later wondering where the time went.
By now, Jupiter Corporation has gotten its tutorial creation down to a science, creating an impressively approachable experience that scales perfectly according to a player’s skill level. A wealth of (skippable) tutorials are available that do an impressive job of communicating the finer points of Picross puzzles to new players, and the presence of several dozen 5×5 and 10×10 puzzles for each puzzle type ensure that new players are given plenty of time to walk before they feel ready to run. And for those that still struggle when taking on one of the intimidating 20×20, they can use a variety of assist features that – to some degree – have the game solving itself for you.
At the outset of every puzzle, a “Hint Roulette” can be used that randomly completes one row and one column of the puzzle, giving you a solid place to start going forward. During the puzzle, you can also have it set so that there are glowing blue numbers next to any row or column in which you can currently make progress, and you can even have the game directly correct you if you happen to make a mistake in filling in a square. Those that are feeling a bit more masochistic can turn all (or just some) of these features off if they so choose, making for an experience that’s truly as difficult or as breezy as you want.
It’s rather impressive, too, how much mileage Jupiter has managed to get out of this relatively basic ruleset, as there are now four distinct puzzle types to tackle. On top of the 150 standard puzzles, there’s a “Mega Picross” mode that remixes each those 150 and reimagines them with a new, more complex ruleset in which the numbers next to the grid can apply to two adjacent rows or columns. Then there’s the “Clip Picross” mode in which you complete five monstrous puzzles in a piecemeal fashion, each one being comprised of a series of smaller puzzles. You gradually unlock these smaller puzzles by completing certain puzzles in the Standard and Mega mode, so finishing each of these Clip Picross puzzles proves to be one of the most satisfying, long-term feats in Picross S3.
New to Picross S3, then, is the fourth type of puzzle which is aptly called “Color Picross”. Whereas each of the other modes sees you simply filling in all the squares with one colour, Color Picross puzzles see you usually using three or four colours at a time. It may seem like a relatively small change, but this proves to make an enormous difference in how each puzzle is solved, easily making these the most complicated and challenging puzzles the series has offered to date. It’s no longer a simple binary matter of whether or not that particular square should be filled in, the question now also extends to which colour that square should be filled in with, if at all. Once again, the tutorials do a great job of communicating the rules, but it definitely takes quite a few tries before you can finally wrap your head around what these puzzles ask of you. Once it clicks, these Color Picross puzzles prove to be the most rewarding that Picross S3 has to offer; completing each one creates feels like an accomplishment in a special new way that the other, one colour puzzles just can’t touch.
From a presentation perspective, Picross S3 sticks to the minimalist, futuristic look that has served the last several entries in the series so well. Each puzzle is well-drawn in terms of the spritework, though the quality does notably improve as the resolution of the image is raised; this obviously goes without saying, but a mushroom drawn in a 5×5 grid simply requires more imagination to ‘see’ than something drawn in 20×20, simply due to the high pixel count. Aside from that, the ‘diamond’ aesthetic that defines the soft backgrounds and bold text is pleasing to the eye, perfectly fitting the kind of vibe that a relaxing puzzle game should go for. To match all this, the soundtrack similarly has a pleasing and subtle tone to it, though we were a bit surprised at the slightly higher ambition present here. Rather than simply focusing on jazzy muzak, this soundtrack branches out a little into chiptune and folk; nothing groundbreaking, but the uptick in variety is welcome given how long you’ll be spending with some of these puzzles.
This being a Picross game, replayability is all but guaranteed, but it also hinges on just how enamoured you are with the core concept of the puzzle-solving. There are several hundred puzzles on offer here, spread out across four different modes, which should take you several hours to complete if you’re just going for completion. Then, of course, there’s a star offered for each puzzle if you can manage to clear it without using any assist features, which is sure to significantly bump up the playtime if you choose to go for that ‘100%’. On top of all this, you can also have a friend join in for some local co-op, opening the door to some light competition as the game tracks how many squares each player has filled.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, you probably already know if you’re going to pick up this game or not; Picross S3 hasn’t changed much from its predecessor and the same will likely be said about the inevitable Picross S4. That being said, we especially enjoyed the introduction of the Color Picross mode here, as it notably builds on the foundation of Picross in interesting and challenging ways, bringing something new to the arguably stale formula. Picross S3 is easily the best entry in the series on the Switch and it’s one that we can easily recommend to both fans and newcomers alike. Naturally, those of you that have played the previous games will want to take a minute to ask yourself if you’re down for another few hundred Picross puzzles, but this represents the most bang for your buck in this Switch sub-series yet and stands as an excellent example of how to do a puzzle game right.
