We’ve just started up a new season for Rock Band 4 Rivals players, making this an opportune time to join a crew and get in on the action. As if that wasn’t enough, for this first week of the season, we’ll be featuring free access to all of the features in the Rivals upgrade, including Rivals mode, the Rockudrama campaign, and the 40+ songs that come with Rivals. So, get in there and check it out.
Rivals Mode – Where the Action is
Rivals is the team-based, competitive online mode that serves as the backbone for the Rock Band 4 Rivals experience. For a quick refresher on how Rivals works, check out this Xbox Wire article from last September.
Participants in Season 11 will feature exclusive rewards, like a collection of track skins that you can use to customize your note highway. This is a relatively new feature in Rock Band 4 and a fun bit of customization that was loudly requested by the Rock Band community.
Check it out – for Free
As mentioned above, we’re hosting a free trial of Rivals mode for the first week of Season 11. For those of you who play Rock Band 4 casually, we urge you to pop in and check it out. There’s a lot of really fun stuff in there! You can play for free with Rock Band 4 from today through to April 24.
Stay Connected
Lastly, Rivals players should check out the updated companion app. It’s a must-have for any Rivals player — it is completely free and links to your Xbox Gamertag to show account gameplay information. You can view weekly challenge data, see your activity feed, manage/moderate crews, and even engage in app-only features such as crew chat. Also, we will be in contact with app users about the ways we can improve the Rock Band 4 Rivals experience moving forward, so be sure to make your voice heard!
Review: Cytus α – A Wonderfully Tight Rhythm Game That Really Sings On Switch
It’s pretty safe to say that we’ve been feeling rather hyped to give Cytus α a try ever since it was first announced for Switch. The game comes from Rayark, a Taiwanese indie developer which has already brought both VOEZ and Deemo to Switch in the last couple of years, following their rhythm-based footsteps right to the pearly gates of Nintendo’s storefront. With two great games like that already under Rayark’s belt, we were hopeful that this latest release would be well worth our time, too. So was it?
Well, in a word: yes. Cytus started life on mobile platforms back in 2012, before eventually making its way to PlayStation Vita the following year. The edition you’ll find on Switch, with the little ‘α’ attached to the name, includes more than 200 songs from the original release and some new ones that have been made specifically for it (you’ll find a decent mix of electronic tracks, pop, trance, and more waiting for you). The game’s publisher, Flyhigh Works, has described it as the “definitive edition” and we can certainly see why.
This small avalanche of tracks is initially presented to you in a single-player story mode. You’ll make your way through chapters, scoring as many points as you can on each song to unlock the next chapter in the list. You’ll also unlock data entries as you go which slowly piece together a story; accompanied by lovely pieces of art, these little snippets share a tale of robots living with human memories and the importance of the music you’re playing, but in all honesty, we usually just wanted to get right back to the action itself.
Speaking of the action, let’s explore the actual gameplay. As you might expect, being a rhythm game, Cytus α tasks you with successfully playing along to music. A black bar bounces between the top and bottom of the screen in time with the beat and pulsating circles begin to appear to represent the notes you need to hit. As the black bar passes through a note, the circle changes in appearance slightly, indicating that now is the time to give it a tap.
It’s a very different approach to input when compared to VOEZ and Deemo, but we have to say that it’s absolutely the best of the three. The notes can appear anywhere on the screen – so nothing like games such as Guitar Hero where different colours consistently reach you at the bottom – and you’ll find yourself attempting a crazy kind of finger ballet as they pop up all around you. Notes have different input requirements – such as a single tap, a longer hold, or sometimes a dragging action which can go in any direction across the screen – and it’s incredibly fun.
These actions can all be performed either by using the touchscreen in handheld mode, or with your Joy-Con should you prefer a traditional controller setup. If you use a controller, notes can be hit by pressing any of the face or directional buttons, and slides can be triggered with the shoulder buttons. We tested both control methods across a variety of songs and, for us at least, the touchscreen option wins hands down. There’s something particularly satisfying about dancing around the screen playing a musical version of whack-a-mole, and we found swapping between standard notes and slides a little too fiddly with a controller.
We actually struggled to get to grips with either mode at first – not realising that the notes were colour coded to let you know the best time to hit them – but as time went on, we really started to get in the zone and ‘feel’ each track. The hit points for each note are also pleasingly accurate and surprisingly forgiving, allowing a decent amount of room for error should you spot a note a little late.
On the easier side of things, you’ll likely find it to be a mostly relaxing experience, and as each and every song in the game comes in both easy and hard flavours, you could choose to play through the entire thing in this way. The harder difficulty is definitely where the most fun can be had in our eyes – tapping and sliding your way around the screen at about 150mph is immensely satisfying when you pull it off – but some of the tracks really aren’t for the faint-hearted. Any songs described as being level 7 or above (the scale ranges from 1 – 9) had us frantically pressing anywhere and everywhere in a desperate attempt to score any points at all. To master the hardest songs, you’ll need to memorise not only the song itself, but the tap, hold, and slide patterns presented to you at frightening speeds.
When you couple that need to learn each song thoroughly with the highscore-chasing nature of any rhythm game, you’ll find that there’s plenty of replayability here. A quick look at your status menu shows you how many songs you’ve cleared on each difficulty, how many times you’ve hit 100% of the notes, and how many times you’ve earned the ‘Million Master’ title for a song (awarded when you hit all of the notes with perfect timing). If you’re crazy enough to attempt getting the Million Master medal for every song, you’re going to be playing this one for a long time.
There’s actually even more of a reason to stick around, too, thanks to an online matchmaking feature. You can decide whether or not you’d like to face opponents online while playing through the story, or you can simply jump into online matches from the main menu at any time. These act like mini battles, where one to three players play through a song and compete in real time. The game runs perfectly well when connected to other users, but we did struggle to find other players for matches at times (this was on the game’s launch day, it should be said).
As you can probably tell, we’re pretty chuffed with the game as a whole, but there’s one little thing holding us back from insisting that everyone and their cat should buy it immediately: the price. Don’t get us wrong, this is an incredibly tight rhythm experience with a good amount of content, but we feel that Rayark has almost shot itself in the foot with its previous releases. Cytus α costs a full $49.99, with both VOEZ and Deemo being available for just a fraction of that price. Cytus is definitely the strongest of the bunch, but when you consider all of the free updates which have arrived in the other titles, boosting their song tallies and leaving Cytus’ online mode as the only real difference, it’s hard to truly recommend this new release over the others.
In terms of gameplay, Cytus is quite possibly the best rhythm game available on Switch. In terms of value for money, the lines are a little more blurred.
Conclusion
Cytus α is a wonderful take on the rhythm genre with a note layout which is really nicely suited to Nintendo Switch. Tapping and sliding your way around the handheld’s touchscreen is an absolute delight when you’re in full flow, and should more and more players start to fill up the online lobby, this could easily be considered one of the best rhythm games on the platform. The full retail asking price is a little hard to swallow when put in direct comparison to other, similar titles, but the quality is there if you don’t mind taking a harder hit to the wallet.
Updated Razor support in Visual Studio Code, now with Blazor support
Daniel
April 18th, 2019
Today we are pleased to announce improved Razor tooling support in Visual Studio Code with the latest C# extension. This latest release includes improved Razor diagnostics and support for tag helpers and Blazor apps.
Get Started
To use this preview of Razor support in Visual Studio Code install the following:
To try out Visual Studio Code with Blazor apps, also install:
dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::3.0.0-preview4-19216-03
What’s new in this release?
Improved diagnostics
We’ve improved the Razor diagnostics in Visual Studio Code for a variety of scenarios, including floating @ characters:
Missing end braces:
And missing end tags in code blocks:
Tag helpers
Tag helper completions are now supported in ASP.NET Core projects:
As well as completions for tag helper attribute names and values:
Blazor
Visual Studio Code now works with Blazor apps too!
You get completions for components and component parameters:
Also data-binding, event handlers and lots of other Blazor goodies!
Limitations and known issues
This is an alpha release of the Razor tooling for Visual Studio Code, so there are a number of limitations and known issues:
Razor editing is currently only supported in ASP.NET Core and Blazor projects (no support for ASP.NET projects)
Limited support for colorization
Note that if you need to disable the Razor tooling:
Open the Visual Studio Code User Settings: File -> Preferences -> Settings
Search for “razor”
Check the “Razor: Disabled” checkbox
Feedback
Please let us know what you think about this latest update to the Razor tooling support in Visual Studio Code by reporting issues in the Razor.VSCode repo. When reporting Razor tooling related issues please use the “Report a Razor Issue” command in Visual Studio Code to capture all of the relevant longs and diagnostic information. Just run the command and then follow the instructions.
Thanks for trying out Razor in Visual Studio Code!
Xbox Hardware Sales Slips As Software, Subscriptions Make Up Gap
Microsoft has released its Q3 earnings, and it suggests the current console generation is slowing down and ready for another refresh. Xbox console sales fell by 33% year-over-year, which the company attributes to a simple decrease in sales volume. In other words, people are simply buying fewer Xbox consoles.
However, the news wasn't too grim for Microsoft. Overall game revenue actually increased by 5% year-over-year, thanks to strong third-party software sales and subscriptions. Xbox Live's monthly active users hit 63 million, up 7% from last year. Altogether the games division raised $2.36 billion in revenue for the quarter, an YOY increase of $112 million.
The Xbox One is more than six years old now, so the decrease in console sales suggests Microsoft is hitting a saturation point. That's when console manufacturers tend to eye a new generation, and Microsoft may start to explain its vision for the next Xbox at E3. In the meantime, it introduced the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, a new SKU of the console that lacks any disc drive and only plays downloaded games.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's competition has gotten first to the gate in starting to explain its plans for the coming generation. PS4 architect Mark Cerny began to outline some details on the next generation of PlayStation, including backwards compatibility, a solid-state drive, and other tech specs. It won't be disc-less, which may set it apart from the next Xbox, but that remains to be seen. Microsoft is planning a streaming service that likely will integrate with its future console plans.
One of the highlights of last month’s Nindies Showcase was the Blaster Master Zero 2 announcement. Right after the presentation, the game was released on the Switch eShop.
If you had somehow forgotten about this follow-up to the 2017 title, now might be the time to check it out. It’s a bigger and better adventure for Jason and his buggy, featuring all-new weapons and boss battles.
The latest update (Version 1.2.2) makes the following improvements and fixes:
A sequence that makes it easier for players to understand how to use the Blast Counter and how to return to GAIA SOPHIA when outside the tank has been added to the starting area of the game.
In addition to fixing the following issues, a bunch of small fixes and stability improvements have been implemented:
An issue that caused the game to crash when the weapon select menu is opened at the exact moment the player dies has been fixed.
An issue that caused the game to crash when “EXIT GAME” is selected from the pause menu after starting the battle against Gathervira has been fixed.
An issue that allowed the player to jump during a cutscene has been fixed.
An issue that allowed the player to return to SOPHIA in side-view mode when the player dies or has a screen transition has been fixed.
An issue that was fixed in Ver.1.2.0 that was supposed to fix an issue with the control settings was insufficient, so additional adjustments have been made for this patch. We apologize for an inconveniences this may have caused.
Various other small fixes have been implemented.
Have you tried out this game yet? Did you play the previous release? Tell us down below.
The classification means a North American release shouldn’t be too far off. The game started out life on the 3DS and the deluxe edition for Switch arrived in Japan last year. Take a look at the descriptive rating below:
Last month, G4F also listed the original outing Professor Layton and the Curious Village for Nintendo Switch. The last time we heard about this classic story-driven puzzle game was when Level-5 ported it cross to Android and iOS devices.
Have you been waiting for Layton’s previous releases to arrive on the Switch? Did you play Mystery Journey on the 3DS? Tell us in the comments.
Set in the beautiful, volcanic scarred high-desert of the Pacific Northwest, Days Gone is an open-world action-adventure game in which you assume the role of Deacon St. John, a Drifter and bounty hunter who would rather risk the dangers of the broken road than live in one of the ?safe? wilderness encampments. The game takes place two years following a global pandemic which has wiped out just about everyone, but transformed millions of others into what survivors call Freakers ? mindless, feral creatures, more animal than human but very much alive and rapidly evolving. Made up of hundreds of individual Freakers, Hordes eat, move and attack together, seemingly as one. Some Hordes roam the highways at night, while others, like the one in the demo, have found a food source that keeps it in a single location. Skills learned in his prior life as an outlaw biker have given Deacon a slight edge in the seemingly never-ending fight to stay alive. But will it be enough? [Bend Studios]
Whispers of a Machine is a Sci-Fi Nordic Noir that tells the story of Vera, a cybernetically augmented detective in a post-AI world, who investigates a string of murders and unravels a dark conflict over forbidden technology.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 04-29-2019, 08:40 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Avengers Endgame: Captain America's Ending Ruins The Movie
It's opening day for Avengers: Endgame, and the latest Marvel movie made good on its name, and it delivered plenty of resolution and closure for the MCU characters, and most of them were actually great. However, one of these endings did not work, and it nearly ruined the entire movie.
Consider this your spoiler warning.
Steve Rogers finished out his tenure as a main line MCU hero by not only wielding Mjolnir and surviving a truly brutal beating by Thanos, he also (apparently) volunteered to be the person to deliver the Infinity Stones back to their respective points in the timeline. You know, to avoid all the branched timelines that the Ancient One warned Bruce Banner about with the help of their handy cosmic infographic. Steve does this completely alone for some reason, which also doesn't make a lot of sense, but we'll let that slide for right now.
The real problem is that Steve doesn't actually succeed at his mission. He gives the Stones back, sure, and returns the Mjolnir he's been using to Asgard, apparently, but then he decides to take a detour and go live a full life with Peggy Carter somewhere in the past. This results in him showing back up in the present not by taking the quantum portal, but by walking (or maybe he took an Uber? Who knows) to a bench about 50 feet to the left of the portal, returning as an old man who has lived an entire life in the blink of the audience's eye.
We even get a little flashback of Steve finally sharing his dance with Peggy back in the '40s (or maybe the '50s, after the war) in what is obviously intended to be a very romantic, fulfilling coda to his story.
Or, maybe it would be, if it worked at all either in terms of Steve's thematic arc throughout his MCU tenure or by the rules that Endgame itself established.
Getting Technical With Time Travel
Let's take a look at Endgame's time travel logic first. As explicitly stated, by Endgame's own rules, you cannot change the present, you can only create new timelines--i.e. If the Infinity Stones weren't placed back in the exact places in the exact moments they were taken from, the MCU would be dealing with a bunch of branching timelines where various characters and entire movies either couldn't exist or would be completely doomed. A few of those branched timelines definitely still exist--an alternate 2014 where Thanos brought his forces to Earth years earlier than he originally did, an alternate 2011 where Loki escaped with the Tesseract after the end of Avengers 1, and so on--but the ones that were taken care of, were handled by Steve. That was his mission.
But in the process of closing off all the potential branches, Steve apparently made a new one. Or, rather, he should have made a new one, but somehow didn't. Steve changed his own past, and the past of Peggy Carter, by being present for those 70 years he originally spent frozen and marrying her--which, for whatever reason, allowed him to still exist as an old man in the main timeline he left--our present.
If Steve had actually created a branched timeline, he wouldn't have been an old man in our present. His reformed existence in the past should have changed events to the point that the movie’s present day would be different not only for Steve but for everyone. We'd be seeing a different timeline all together.
In the interest of mitigating the confusion here (and make no mistake--this is confusing as hell) let's break it down. There are two potential possibilities.
Possibility 1 is that Steve did create an alternate timeline that we just never got to see where he and Peggy were married, possibly went off and were superheroes together, stopped HYDRA from infiltrating SHIELD, rescued Bucky, prevented Howard Stark's assassination, and negated the need for the Avengers entirely. In the process, he erased the entire life that he knew Peggy had without him, including her husband and the kids she had while he was in the ice. Poof, gone.
Then, happy and old, Steve miraculously jumped back to our timeline unassisted, which ought to be impossible, and for no real reason, just in time to pass the shield on to Sam. Seriously, why would he bother coming back at all if he was so confident that the present day world didn't need him anymore? Why leave the timeline he made, especially if it really were so much better? What incentive does he have to go through the trouble?
What About Option 2?
Possibility 2 is that Steve did not create a branched timeline by going back, just lived his life as quietly as possible through the post-war years. That would make him complicit in the knowledge of all the horrific things happening to the people he loves during those years. This would also mean, in order for the timeline not to be fundamentally broken, that our version of Steve would have always been married to Peggy, even if he didn't know it until this exact moment. This not only contradicts the entirety of the Agent Carter TV show and various parts of the MCU up to now (like Steve's meeting with dying Peggy after he dethaws), it also means that Steve would be Sharon Carter's uncle--and, uh, that's pretty gross, even if he didn't know it at the time.
Even discounting the potential for unwitting incest, there are some other major problems here. Remember when Steve said when he sees a situation headed south, he can't turn his back? Remember how Steve's entire origin story revolves around his inability to sit back and let a conflict run its course without him? How he doesn't like bullies no matter where they're from? How he literally submitted himself to a potentially lethal science experiment rather than not fight in a war? How he jumped into German occupied territory without an army backing him up just on the off chance that there was something he could do to help his friend? How he can "do this all day?" Started a war to clear the name of his ex-assassin bestie? Still acted as a hero even while he was an international fugitive?
In what world does Steve Rogers, even a beaten down and jaded Steve Rogers, just sit on his hands and let the future deal with its own problems?
The answer should be none of them.
This doesn't even begin to broach yet another uncomfortable topic. The people who returned from the Snap were very literally dropped into a future when no time had passed for them at all--the miniature version of Steve's experience waking up from the ice back in 2011. But apparently he's totally fine with just bailing on a world experiencing a level of trauma that he is uniquely qualified to help them through.
"He's earned the right to be selfish!" You say? Sure. If anyone deserves a vacation, it's Steve--but that doesn't mean he's going to take one. We've spent the last 8 years learning the ins and outs of this character in the movies, and the last 7 decades learning about him in the comics. Letting things just happen is fundamentally not something he'd do. It's just not. He could retire, pass the shield over to Sam, and take a major step back, but there's no way Steve is ever just going to give up the fight altogether--and this has literally happened in the comics. Steve's even been an old man, but he still doesn't stop participating in superheroic world. It's simply not in his nature to quit--that would be like Tony suddenly deciding not to be an engineer just for the hell of it.
But say the goofy, esoteric time travel logic doesn't matter to you either way--there's still an issue. It has less to do with the mechanics and more to do with Steve's place within the MCU's meta-narrative.
Let's Ignore The Time Travel All Together
For a second, let's just pretend that we don't have almost 100 years of comics to look at and focus exclusively on the 60-some hours of film we've been given. Thematically, Steve is a guy who has lost a lot in these movies. Arguably, that's his most defining quality--he went into the ice 70 years ago, and he thinks a different guy came out--his words, not mine. The motif of being unable to go home again is repeated poignantly again and again and again--and through all of that, through everything, Steve has learned how to keep going. And that's a good thing--or at least, it was a good thing. By moving on, Steve was actually doing exactly what Peggy Carter had hoped for him ("the world has changed, and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes, the best that we can do, is to start over.")
Sure, there are a few beats in Endgame specifically where it looks like he's finally hit his breaking point ("some people move on, but not us"), but that only means he's been beaten down, not taken out. Hell, he even manages to summon up the force of will in the 11th hour to be worthy of wielding Mjolnir, making him only the third character and only mortal in the MCU to do so. That's nothing to scoff at.
Steve may be defined by loss, but the power of his character comes from turning that loss into strength. Sure, he's a super soldier, he's fast and strong and can take a major beating, but his actual superpower is his indomitable will. If there's one thing you can count on in the world, it's that Captain America is not going to give up, even when things are at their absolute worst.
Except for when he does, apparently. Giving Steve a temporal get-out-of-jail-free card may seem like a good idea on the surface, but at the end of the day all it does is recant his entire journey. What's the point of emphasizing the perpetual motion machine that is Steve Rogers--the constant assurance that no matter how dark things get, no matter how much you lose, you can still move forward--if the ultimate reward is getting to do the exact thing he was told he couldn't do; that he spent his life and five movies moving beyond?
Which is to say nothing about the completely squandered pay off for every moment of his solo trilogy. Remember how important his "I'm with you till the end of the line" refrain was with Bucky Barnes? Hopefully you do--there's officially licensed merch with that line printed on it. Fans got it tattooed on their bodies. It comes up a lot, and for good reason. It wasn't exactly subtle as far as big symbolic gestures are concerned and it was a major part of not one, not two, but three individual movies. Funny how now it's more like "I'm with you until the exact moment I decide I don't want to stick around anymore." Funnier still how that line, maybe the most memorable Captain America line of the entire MCU next to "I can do this all day"--another thing that was, apparently, not true--doesn't get a single shout out or call back in a movie that is about 90% shout outs and call backs to memorable MCU moments.
It's cheap, not romantic, and a needlessly dull edge to an otherwise powerful arc. The lesson that ought to be about processing grief and turning toward the future became a carelessly handwaved wink-nod at returning to the past, at which point Steve's journey is no longer about the process of recovery, it's a message about working really hard until you're miraculously presented with a magic bullet to make all your hard work and effort no longer matter.
Which, frankly, sucks.
And, really, none of this is even touching on the fact that Steve and Peggy's soul mate level connection was fostered over the course of, what, like a week back in 1945? Maybe he should have gotten over it. She definitely did. There was a whole TV show about it.
