Described as a “new and exciting smartphone game”, the product will be released this fiscal year (so by March 2020) and will be based on the Pokémon franchise.
As you can see in the image captured above, more details – including its release date – will be released at a later time.
Could this be something which ties into Pokémon Sword and Shield? Will it be free-to-play, or a paid experience? So many questions! Hopefully we’ll find out soon enough.
Until then, why not let us know what you hope the game might be in the comments below?
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-11-2019, 08:25 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Tetris 99 Adds Paid DLC That Introduces Offline Modes
The popular free-to-play Nintendo Switch game Tetris 99 is expanding. A new paid DLC, Big Block, is available today, and it adds multiple offline modes and more.
The $10 Big Block DLC adds the following modes:
CPU Battle -- Lets you play offline against 98 CPU opponents.
Marathon -- Clear as many lines as you can.
The #Tetris99 Big Block DLC is available on Nintendo eShop for $9.99 and adds offline modes! Battle 98 bots in CPU Battle, and survive in Marathon mode to clear the most lines possible! Stay tuned for more on additional upcoming game modes. https://t.co/t6cp0KnJLTpic.twitter.com/VKvai3xRCe
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) May 10, 2019
These modes are playable offline, and that's notable because the main Tetris 99 experience is an online-only game. It also means that you no longer need to have a Nintendo Switch Online membership to play Tetris 99 (if you buy the $10 DLC).
Nintendo also announced more details on the next Maximum Cup online event for Tetris 99. Maximus Cup 3 begins May 17, and just like the previous ones, you get points for the matches you play regardless of how you finish. Those who get 100 points or more will receive a new theme modeled after the original Game Boy. The event runs until May 19 at 11:59 PM PT.
Nintendo teased that it will announce even more new modes for Tetris 99 at a later date.
Tetris 99 has been very successful. Just this week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa talked about how the game has "helped maintain Nintendo Switch engagement" and also get more people to sign up for Nintendo Switch Online.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 05-11-2019, 08:25 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Devs reflect on the privacy risks surrounding how games subtly collect data
“I was capturing all this data and then analyzing it later, and it honestly felt like you were spying on someone.”
– Silent Hill: Shattered Memories dev Sam Barlow talks about how the game altered encounters based on behavior and an in-game personality evaluation.
Polygon has published a story exploring potential privacy concerns surrounding data collection both in and relating to video games. The full story talks with a number of developers and data experts on the kind of information collected by those in both games and adjacent industries, and points out some of the risks surrounding exactly how personal and identifiable some of that data can be in the wrong hands.
Many game developers interviewed for the story, such as some of the minds behind Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Fallout: New Vegas, go as far to say that they’d have to reexamine some of the choice-driven mechanics of their games if they were to release the same kind of thing in the modern day. Others talk about the surprising and unintentionally invasive information they learned about the people playing their games.
Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer tells Polygon that the team always has conversations about data security. Even though the data collected by games seems harmless on its own, he points out that when combined with broader profiles of a person “it can really be used in ways that go far beyond what it appears to be on its face.”
“If we were doing any telemetrics now, I would be cautious about the information from games being used and collected,” Sawyer tells Polygon. “One of the things I’d be very concerned about in a game like New Vegas is […] we allow players to make choices that are really dark and bleak.”
In these cases and the others mentioned in the full story, the data is collected with the goals of better understanding certain moments and behaviors in-game, rather than to form external profiles about the people playing games. But, as some of the experts speaking to Polygon point out, intent doesn’t mean that the data won’t be used for other purposes, especially as both games and players become more and more connected online.
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.
Borderlands 3: Hands-on with the Most Borderlands Game Yet
The skyline is decorated with massive buildings and neon lights. Vehicles that look like giant rings roll through darkened city streets. One thing’s for sure: We’re not on Pandora anymore. This is Meridian, on the planet Promethea, and it is one of many new locations in Borderlands 3.
The first two primary games in the Borderlands series were set on the scorched and barren surface of the planet Pandora, with players cast as treasure-seeking Vault Hunters. While Borderlands 3 begins on the same planet’s surface, it soon blasts off for new horizons, with a host of new planets to explore — and a billion possible weapon combinations with which to blow those new locations all to hell. I recently spent about 90 minutes playing Borderlands 3; here’s what I learned.
A New Cast of Characters
The hands-on event focused on the single-player campaign, which Creative Director Paul Sage estimated would take at least 30 hours to complete. Players choose one of four characters, each of which has three action skills to unlock and equip, and a whole host of augmentations to offer buffs, special attacks, and elemental damage options.
To sketch in the story, we know that Lilith from Borderlands recruits the player to hunt down a new cult called the Children of the Vault. The CoV, as they’re often called, have a map to hidden vault locations across the galaxy. Lilith wants you to track them all down to smash the CoV recruitment campaign. The upshot is that you get to score a massive load of loot along the way.
Playing as Amara, a Siren, I was dropped into the outskirts of Meridian and told to find the Atlas organization. As in previous games in the series, exploration isn’t exactly the point — waypoints are clearly marked, and are goals stated in a way that is impossible to miss. The idea, ironically for a treasure-happy Vault Hunter, isn’t to feel like a genius for finding some hidden trinket; it’s all about staying alive.
Even More Borderlands Than Before
So, about that. At this point, Borderlands 3 looks like a terrific example of a game that has been energized without changing the core dynamics. The action is still all about shooting a wide variety of guns, with wildly varied behaviors and effects, depending on which in-game company manufactured each one. (More on the guns in a moment.)
In previous games in the series, players were typically Earthbound. (Or, uh, Pandorabound?) This installment features new actions, such as sliding and mantling, which are old hat for other shooters, and which emphasize the option for vertical movement. Or, to put it another way, there’s more climbing than ever before. But just as exploration isn’t the point of the game, breaking new ground isn’t what developer Gearbox Software is here to do. Instead, there’s a clear emphasis on making something that is more Borderlands than ever before.
Old Feels New Again
My Borderlands skills are rusty, and 90 minutes was hardly enough time to master the new game, but moving through these environments, which are well-designed arenas with multiple vertical levels and plenty of cover, was fluid and oddly even graceful.
There’s more interaction with the world, too. Even my relatively short run through Meridian and its outskirts highlighted that these maps have more stuff to destroy, starting with the cover enemies (and players) hide behind. Barrels can be knocked around and thrown — which, given the action skill powers of several players, especially the melee-focused Amara, should be a constant part of combat — and environmental options to deal out damage, such as pools of oil and broken pipes that cascade fountains of radioactive material.
Even with some new movement options, Borderlands 3 relies on strength of its weaponry. In that respect, it probably has nothing to worry about. One thing I noticed immediately is that a lot of the cheap, lousy guns of the first two games are gone. Even the basic weapon loot is usable in a pinch.
There are some aiming assists enabled for all players. Rather than making the game too easy, they ensure that you can do all the running, jumping, and sliding about that you want and not have to practice for 20 hours just to be able to hit an enemy. The aiming systems add to a sense of fluidity, and that’s a pretty good feeling. And the guns made by Atlas have tracking tags which, when attached to targets, will attract smart bullets that will curve around cover to deal damage.
Silly and Chaotic Fun
There’s already been a good deal of talk about the evolved Tediore weapons, and for good reason. They’re the bizarro idea that really set Borderlands 3 apart. Previously, you could throw a Tediore-made gun away and it would act like a grenade. Now these guns have a wide variety of unusual effects. One might set up as a turret when thrown — which is a lot more useful than weird, especially if you’re not playing a character who has a skill to place turrets — while another will bounce through the battlefield, firing of its own accord. Silly? A little bit. Chaotic and fun? Very.
Other guns have alt firing modes, and I got a lot of mileage out of a Dahl SMG that could flip between fire and radiation elemental damage. There are probably some enemies which can resist both, but I didn’t find them in this session. As a fan of nailing mobs with elemental damage, then moving on to new targets while the old ones are withered beneath flames, that SMG immediately became a reliable favorite. Also nice was the Hyperion shotgun that deploys a solid shield when I aimed down the barrel sights, thereby allowing me to act like a tank for brief sprints towards enemy mobs.
I hadn’t been on the surface of Promethea long before I got to drive one of those big single-wheel vehicles — a Cyclone — through the streets of Meridian. It seems like driving mechanics have changed the least. You’ll still push forward with the left stick and steer with the right. But the collision detection seemed a lot more forgiving than in previous games, and the Cyclone, at least, can turn on a dime.
More Details Yet to Come
Because my gameplay session was entirely a solo affair, I didn’t get to see some of the most-anticipated features of Borderlands 3. An on-stage demo controlled by developers showed the instanced loot system in action, which will allow players of different levels to play together and receive their own individual loot rewards, but I didn’t get to experience it.
My playthrough also gave only a hint of the depths of the skill tree. I could see all of Amara’s locked skill options but was only able to access a few. And while I got to begin looking at a couple side missions, there wasn’t enough time to delve into that aspect of the single-player story.
There’s a lot more to be revealed about Borderlands 3, starting with whatever Gearbox has planned for the multiplayer game, and stretching into all the new bosses, surprise NPC appearances, and literally millions and millions of guns. We’ll know more at E3, and the stream of new information will keep flowing until Borderlands 3 arrives on September 13.
Borderlands 3 launches on Xbox One September 13 and is available for pre-order today on the Microsoft Store. Click here for pre-order details.
Digital Foundry Finds Mortal Kombat 11 Also Using Switch’s ‘Boost Mode’
It seems that NetherRealm is one of the first third-party studios to have taken advantage of Switch’s ‘boost mode’, according to our friends over at Digital Foundry. The behind-the-scenes mode, which released with the console’s latest firmware update, enables developers to take advantage of increased clock speeds to improve game performance in several ways.
At launch Nintendo limited the console’s docked CPU speed to 1020MHz and the GPU to 768MHz. These figures were both substantially below the performance found in Nvidia Shield Android TV, which uses the same Tegra X1 processor as the Switch. In handheld mode, however, the GPU was further slashed to 40-50% of that figure (between 307.2 and 384MHz). While this conservative clock speed helps prevent your Switch from cooking itself into a mess of melted plastic and electronics, it presents developers with some very stringent limitations.
Richard Leadbetter from Digital Foundry has used his tools and considerable nous to test the machine and its supposed new ‘boost’ mode and has confirmed these improvements with hard data. As we reported last month, temporary CPU clock increases to 1785MHz are helping in certain circumstances (loading screens in Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, for example) and it appears that Mortal Kombat 11 is benefiting from GPU speed increases along with Nintendo’s games, too. The video explains everything in detail:
In handheld mode all the mentioned titles benefit from a GPU jump from 384MHz to 460MHz helping to reduce the impact of dynamic resolution scaling, among other things. Interestingly, the GPU clock also seems to change dynamically in some situations – a six-minute section of DOOM saw the clock speed change no less than 28 times.
If you’re at all interested in the nitty-gritty, we highly recommend you watch the whole video for a detailed breakdown and check out more of Digital Foundry’s videos. Their forensic work on consoles both retro and modern is fascinating if you’ve got a head for numbers and an interest in the challenges that face developers across all platforms. In the meantime, it seems a little more wiggle room for developers is expanding the potential of your favourite handheld hybrid console – everyone’s a winner.
Have you noticed an improvement in any of these titles? Is the forest in Breath of the Wild a little less stuttery? Let us know below.
Panic Button Studio Head Adam Creighton Steps Down, Moving On To Something New
Studio head of Panic Button, Adam Creighton, has revealed that he has stepped down from his role at the company and is “moving on to something new”.
Panic Button has become something of a fan-favourite name amongst Nintendo Switch owners as of late, largely thanks to its porting efforts with games like DOOM, Wolfenstein, Warframe, and more. Creighton shared the news in a tweet yesterday:
“No details yet, but excited to share I’m moving on to something new! I’m proud of my contribution to Panic Button’s success, grateful to the team that helped make that happen, and looking forward to this next phase of working with great games and people in the industry.”
As you can see for yourself, Creighton’s new job hasn’t been detailed just yet; his LinkedIn page notes that he started somewhere new this month but the important bits are hidden with temporary ‘TBA’ markers.
Interestingly, though, folks on Reddit have started to speculate that he could well end up at Retro Studios, makers of Metroid Prime 4. While that might initially seem like quite the leap, it’s worth noting that both Retro and Panic Button are located in the same city – Austin, Texas – and Retro recently posted a whole new wave of job listings.
With the success Creighton has enjoyed working with Switch, wouldn’t it make sense for him to be snapped up by an adored subsidiary of Nintendo? Hmm.
We’ll keep an eye out for any more announcements in the coming weeks.
LudoNarraCon is a digital convention celebrating narrative video games hosted on Steam, aiming to create a platform to showcase and celebrate interesting and innovative narrative games.
Enjoy panels, demos and a sale with discounts of up to 85% during this weekend!
All panels will be live from 10am-4pm Pacific time, with exhibitors streaming live on their games’ store pages from 10am – 1pm Pacific Time.
All streams will then repeat on loop through May 13 at 11pm Pacific Time. as part of this week’s Weekend Deal*!
So I noticed the other day that lately we’ve been pretty much only doing reviews, guide refreshes and then The Weekender lately – sorry about that. Trying to keep up with the game releases can sometimes take up a lot of manpower and budget, and I’m trying to take more care as to what features and guides we roll-out. I still believe in things like our ‘Best Games’ guides, but we’re at the point now where the usual suspects are covered.
Plus, reviews are still incredibly popular and our reviews indices get a lot of attention year-round, so we can’t neglect the library no matter how many rogue-like card games that aren’t Slay the Spire release. But still, if you have anything specific you want us to take a look at, I’m always open to suggestions!
Meanwhile, in the world of mobile gaming…
Out Now
Shards of Infinity (iOS & Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!
The headliner for this week is the digital adaptation of Shards of Infinity. This is a new deck-building card-game that’s the spiritual successor to Ascension. It’s not Playdek who’s brought this game to mobile though, but Temple Gate Games.
We’re working on a dedicated review for the mobile version, but if you want some initial impressions on how it plays PT-regular Matt Thrower actually did a write up for our sister website Strategy Gamer based on the game’s Early Access period on Steam.
Morels (also known as Fungi in the table-top world) was a fun and friendly two-player card game where you had to try and score the most victory points by cooking up the best meal possible with ingredients found on the forest floor. Despite being a competent digital experience, it had limited replay value… until now!
Foray is an expansion that can be purchased via IAP that adds 13 new types of cards that include items, weather and characters:
Weather cards (Rainstorm and Forest Fire) can decimate existing forests or spring up new ones, Items (Map, Shiitake Log) grant power with proper timing, Events (Farmers Market, Eureka!) enable big plays, Characters (Thief, Farm Girl, Eccentric, Chef, Morchella) allow you to interact with the forest and your opponent(s) in new ways, and new mushrooms (Lion’s Mane, Panther Cap) expand your foraging options in the ever beckoning forest.
Hopefully this breathes a new lease of life into the game!
We quite enjoyed The Quest when we reviewed it, although we haven’t been that great at keeping up with the expansions released since then. There have been 11 stand-alone adventures released for the game since, including three titled ‘Heroes of Lukomoreye’.
Like the others, the fourth Hero of Lukomorye adventure can be played as stand-alone experience of unlocked for your main The Quest app.
Ironhide have released the Frozen Nightmare update for Kingdom Rush: Vengeance. A new enemy in the form of the Ice Queen has appeared, with all new snow-covered maps and a new army that must be defeated. I’d tell you more, but I can’t find a change-log to save my life so you’ll just have to find it out for yourselves.
Feral Interactive have pulled off some great ports of Rome: Total War’s various iterations. The Barbarian Invasion expansion was ported to iPads in 2017 and now, two years later, its finally gone Universal. At no extra cost the game has been updated and players can download the game on their phone, with cloud sync on saves.
Further to that, Feral announced that the android version will be available in June.
Sales
Looking at the games currently on sale, seems like only iOS users get anything half-decent on the cheap this week:
While Unreal Engine doesn’t provide C# support out of the box, it does provide an exceptional plugin system, so it was only a matter of time until C# plugins arrived. Today we are looking at the open source USharp extension, which is based on the MonoUE plugin project. Using this plugin, UE4 gains C# functionality with the following features:
Write C# using UObject exposed types (AActor, AGameMode, UActorComponent, etc). Define new UObject types and inherit existing ones. Exposed C# types can then be used in (or extended by) Blueprint.
Dynamically switch between .NET Framework, .NET Core and Mono for an improved debugging / runtime experience without having to reopen the editor
Supports Windows, Mac and Linux
There are however some downsides:
This project depends on a lot of PInvoked functions which could potentially behave differently on different C++ compilers. This project may not work on some target platforms.
Like mono-ue this project depends on lots of generated code and IL weaving. It probably isn’t the best for performance and there is a huge amount of generated code everywhere.
The weaved IL currently seems to break edit-and-continue debugging (issue with cecil?)
There is currently too much marshaling on structs / collections (list, map, set). Marshaling needs to be redesigned to avoid copies of entire collections / structs on trivial calls between C# / native code. Additionally marshaling of delegates needs to be redesigned (various issues such as being referenced as a copy of the delegate).
If you are interested in checking out USharp, you can find the installation instructions here. One potential problem to be aware of, the project creator doesn’t seem to have attached a license to the code repository! While this code is not production ready, if you intend to use it in any capacity, I would make sure the license is suitable. See the results of the plugin in action in the video below.
