Explore the secrets of a mysterious fallen temple and put your Templar faith to the test in Dark Devotion, where no sacrifice is too great in praise of your God.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 04-29-2019, 02:23 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Pokemon Go Adding More Legendaries Through May And June's Field Research
A new month is just around the corner, which means Niantic will soon be rolling out a new set of Field Research tasks for Pokemon Go. The tasks are scheduled to begin appearing next Wednesday, May 1, at 1 PM PT / 4 PM ET, and they'll be available through the end of June. What's more, they'll give you another chance to catch a couple of fan-favorite Legendary Pokemon.
Each time you achieve a Research Breakthrough during the next two months, you'll be rewarded with an encounter with one of four possible Legendaries: Ho-Oh, Lugia, Latios, or Latias. Both Ho-Oh and Lugia were previously available through Research Breakthroughs, but this marks the first time you'll be able to encounter the Eon Pokemon this way, which is helpful if you missed out on their recent Raid events.
As usual, you'll be able to receive the new Field Research tasks by spinning the Photo Disc at Poke Stops. You can complete as many Field Research tasks as you'd like daily, but you'll only earn a stamp for the first one you finish per day. You'll need to collect a total of seven stamps to achieve a Research Breakthrough and encounter the Legendaries.
Additionally, you'll be able to hatch new Pokemon from Eggs beginning this week. The Gen 4 Pokemon Turtwig, Chimchar, Piplup, and Bonsly may appear from 2 km Eggs, while Cubone, Combee, Buizel, Glameow, Bronzor, Skorupi, and Croagunk may hatch from 5 km Eggs. Finally, 10 km Eggs may produce Mawile, Absol, Shinx, Cranidos, Shieldon, and Riolu. You can read more details on the Pokemon Go website.
Also on the way in May is a new Pokemon Go Community Day. This time, the event will take place on Sunday, May 19, and the featured Pokemon will be Torchic, one of the three starters from the series' Gen 3 games, Ruby and Sapphire. You'll also be able to earn triple the usual amount of Stardust for every Pokemon you catch during the event.
In the meantime, you have another opportunity to catch Shiny Meltan, as the special Mythical Pokemon is appearing again from now until May 5. If you're unsure of how to find one, check out our guide on how to catch Meltan. This is also your last chance to capture Origin Forme Giratina; the Legendary is scheduled to leave Raid Battles on April 29.
Random: Experience The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild With PlayStation VR
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild might have only received its Nintendo Labo VR compatibility update yesterday, but virtual reality enthusiasts have already discovered how to get it working with the PlayStation VR headset.
This method means you don’t need to own Labo VR and you won’t need to use Nintendo’s cardboard setup to try out the new update for Zelda on Switch. The more expensive headset pays off as well – with the image quality slightly sharper on the device’s OLED display. It’s all thanks to the HDMI ports and PSVR Cinema Mode. ResetEra user PopsMaellard explained it in the following post:
One “HDMI TV” should still output from the PSVR box to the TV. The “HDMI PS4” input on the breakout box should be empty/unplugged. USB still plugged into the PS4, PS4 turned on.
On the front of the breakout box, the PSVR proprietary cable should be plugged in. The HDMI part of this split cable should be plugged into the switch.
Finally, still on the front of the breakout box, the HDMI Out (that was previously for the headset) should be plugged into the TV.
If you’re still a bit confused, below is GameXplain’s step-by-step video guide:
Do you happen to own all of the necessary equipment to try this out? How has your Zelda VR experience been so far? Tell us below.
Editorial: Will Apple’s 1990’s ‘Golden Age’ collapse repeat itself?
Once, long ago, Apple Computer, Inc. commissioned a new headquarters in Northern California just as it began losing its position as a leader in personal computing tech in the early ’90s. Could history repeat itself in our modern era?
1 Infinite Loop (top) was the first of Apple’s three largest California campuses
History repeats, always with a twist
As Apple more recently embarked upon its massive second modern expansion at Apple Park, pundits crafted a narrative claiming the company was fated to suffer from an ‘arrogant construction hubris’ and ultimately fail.
There’s certainly no sign of that supposed “Curse of the Edifice Complex” today, a few years later as Apple expands even further beyond Apple Park with surrounding buildings–including its monumentally lavish Visitors Center in Cupertino–and the nearby third facility known as Wolfe Campus.
The tech media’s future outlook for Apple appears to have always been pretty wrong. The same kind of handwringing that hung over Apple Park during its construction did not occur over thirty years ago when the company was completing its first major campus back in 1993, just prior to a period of actual uncertainty and upheaval that really did result in a dour Beleaguerment Era for the Mac maker.
To better understand some of the reasons why pundit advice and prognostication are so frequently misguided, take a look at the Old Apple during its first major campus project–in the context of what was happening at the company in contrast to what outsiders imagined was occurring based on a superficial understanding of the market–and consider what’s different this time around.
Apple’s 1990s “Golden Age” campus
Apple’s first major campus project in Northern California, known as 1 Infinite Loop, had just finishing completion in 1993 at the tail end of what at the time had been commonly called Apple’s Golden Age: the pinnacle of its then highly-regarded Macintosh business that was just approaching its ten year anniversary–not unlike today’s iPhone.
The Macintosh-centric Apple had pioneered the development of advanced concepts including QuickTime digital video editing, voice synthesis and recognition, ultra-fast desktop computer hardware, new hyperlinked worlds with explorable nodes of virtual reality, and the promise of a new generation of mobile Newton personal digital assistant tablets.
Across the ’80s, Apple had achieved a pattern of distantly outperforming the collective mainstream of commodity copycat cloners in the industry by seeking to achieve something much greater than just incremental hardware advancement. While almost entirely forgotten after its fall in the mid-’90s, Apple was commonly described at the time as having entered a Golden Age, a period of time where everything it delivered was impressive and exciting and desirable.
The new headquarters of 1 Infinite Loop reflected that Golden Age optimism while figuratively planting a nostalgic homage to representations of how it got there in its campus Sculpture Garden, a feature depicting cartoonish, low-resolution Mac icons sprouting from the lawn. The Apple of the early 90s could easily be mistaken for today’s Google.
Apple’s Golden Age meltdown
Anyone who lived through the 1990s, however, will no doubt recall a different descriptive phrase attached to the company. By the mid- to late-’90s it was virtually impossible to read anything about “Apple Computer, Inc.” without a specific introductory adjective that was, at the same time, wistful, disparaging, infantilizing and dismissive. The company was, and always was, referred to as the beleaguered Apple Computer.
Despite suffering the consequences of both internal issues of its own making and outside problems beyond its control, Apple wasn’t so much branded as being incompetent or victimized as it was just Beleaguered, as if it were inherently fated to always be chained to a hopeless dream and unachievable utopia that the company could envision and articulate but not instantiate in a viable, sustainable, commercially significant form.
But Apple’s problems weren’t really a romantic curse. There were solid, rational reasons why the company began drifting sideways, even if much of the media lacked any understanding of this–or even knew that things were headed in a bad direction at all.
Across the ’90s, Apple had defined airy visions of the future. Those included its Knowledge Navigator demonstration of a voice-based assistant concept and the nearly magical Newton Message Pad tablet, both championed by Apple’s late-80s CEO John Sculley.
The company actually defined the outer realms of possibility in computers by developing software powerful enough to anticipate the needs of non-technical artists with its intuitive Mac user interface. It then promised to allow them to author multimedia with QuickTime, the first non-linear digital video editing platform for personal computers. That futurist technology appeared for Macs at a time when commodity PCs were still struggling to play back simple audio.
Apple developed non-linear video editing for Macs before PCs could reliably play back audio
Apple promised to usher in the same kind of future-forward upgrades for advanced page layout and printing with QuickDraw GX; for 3D graphics with QuickDraw 3D; for sophisticated local document search with V-Twin; for advanced OS and User Interface development with Copland and Gershwin; for non-proprietary files with the document-based OpenDoc, and for tools to create and explore virtual reality worlds with QuickTime VR.
The company also delivered major hardware-based Mac upgrades enabling advanced AudioVisual capabilities using Digital Signal Processors from AT&T and later RISC-based PowerPC chips in its partnerships with IBM and Motorola. This allowed Apple’s computers to digitally ingest, edit and output video from a camcorder and to play or record CD quality audio right out of the box long before PCs could do either.
However, as the ’90s dragged on Apple’s consistent inability to actually deliver upon what it was promising at a price mainstream users would pay set it up for real-world failure. At the same time, the Mac maker began running into intense competition from generic DOS PCs.
Apple had been struggling with its own development plans for Copland, its modern new Mac operating system. It was still fighting to finish its Newton OS tablet software. And it had grown increasingly distracted with a series of other moonshots and side projects–including the Mac-based Pippin games console–that various teams of engineers were inventing within their personal fiefdoms inside Apple’s Advanced Technology Group and other think-tank silos funded by the revenues from the Mac’s Golden Age.
Newton and Pippin, harbingers of today’s side-project moonshots
Apple wasn’t just fudging things internally. It had also embarked upon three large-scale, ultimately ill-fated joint efforts with Motorola and IBM to design PowerPC chips, to develop a new next-generation cross-platform OS known as Taligent, and to build multimedia tools development tools at Kaleida Labs.
It had also launched a separate new mobile processor architecture for its Newton Message Pad, known as ARM, with partners Acorn and VLSI. There was a lot going on outside of Apple’s core Mac business, but none of it was making enough money to sustain itself.
Across the company’s first five years at 1 Infinite Loop, Apple appeared to be caught in the vortex of a swirling drain, losing its customers and market share to cheaper commodity PC makers while being forced to frantically delay and ultimately cancel failed initiatives such as QuickDraw GX and OpenDoc after they had wasted the time and resources of its third-party developers.
After a period of constant beleaguerment that seemed to last for a generation (but really only stretched from 1994 to 1998, shorter than either Microsoft’s Windows-Zune mobile meltdown a decade later, or Google’s increasingly bleak implosion of hardware attempts from Motorola to Nest to Nexus and Pixel today, two decades later), Apple began to emerge anew under the returned leadership of Steve Jobs, who slashed away failed experiments and underperforming business segments to focus on ones that customers would want and could afford and which could sustain Apple itself.
Could an Apple again fumble its Golden Age?
Today’s Apple under Tim Cook is wildly different from the Apple of the early ’90s. In part, that’s because much of the executive team —including Cook–experienced first hand the results of the lack of curation and focus that nearly doomed Apple in the mid-’90s as they began working to salvage the company under Jobs in the late ’90s. Jobs recruited Cook to Apple in 1998, at a time when many still dismissed the company as an unredeemable failure.
Other companies, including Microsoft, had only watched from afar as the Old Apple began rolling on its side. That allowed Microsoft’s executives to blissfully preside over a series of ill-considered and poorly planned and managed projects like the Zune music player, the KIN initiative aimed at building a new kind of phone from scratch targeting the youth demographic, and the ambitious but poorly conceived and implemented Surface RT project to make PCs lighter, thinner and more mobile using ARM chips that couldn’t run existing Windows software.
Microsoft’s Newton
Beyond those internal failings–which included Microsoft’s own Copland-like struggles with Vista, Windows 8, Windows Mobile and Windows 10–the company also engaged in dramatically bad partnerships and acquisitions. It spent $15 billion buying Nokia and aQuantive, with nothing remaining to show for either one apart from layoffs and losses.
Everyone one of those missteps was worse than Apple’s fall in the mid-’90s. Microsoft had enjoyed a much more resplendent Golden Age than the Old Apple had, but then lost its key market position and relevance as the world shifted to mobile devices. For Microsoft, there was no return of its founder Bill Gates to put the company’s old business back together again.
Following Microsoft, another Golden Age meltdown in tech
Microsoft wasn’t the only company to fail to learn anything from Apple’s mid-’90s brush with death: Google today has similarly spent billions on far-off ideas that failed to materialize as real businesses. Like Microsoft, Google also spent $15 billion to acquire two massive businesses, Motorola and Nest, then failed to do anything very productive with them as it fired thousands of workers and eventually sold off much of the remaining assets to China at a massive discount.
Google similarly had grandiose ideas about the future of computing but failed to deliver much more than a copy of Apple’s original work. Many of the novel parts of Android were removed and replaced with ideas taken from iOS. Chrome OS was initially envisioned as a PC web-based netbook but is now trying to morph into an iPad-like touchscreen tablet.
Even Google’s far off future “Fuchsia” OS strategy is abstractly named after a color, which not so subtly calls to mind the Blue and Pink cards Apple used while trying to lay out some deliverables for its Copland releases. Google has now been struggling to find a significant customer for Chrome OS a decade after it was outlined as a strategy in 2009. That’s reminiscent of Apple’s nebulous Newton strategy under early ’90s CEO John Sculley and Microsoft’s Tablet PC initiatives under Gates in the 2000s.
Rather than describing the failure of Chrome OS to find any traction anywhere apart from the very small, very unprofitable K-12 as being a Newton or Tablet PC type failure, today’s tech journalists have portraying Google’s struggling netbook as a problem for Apple, even though shipments of Chromebooks have had a minor impact on Apple’s U.S. sales in K12 and no real impact at all on iPads among consumers, the enterprise, and in massive new emerging markets including China.
In parallel, Google’s self-branded hardware efforts have been a mess despite double-digit billions in acquisitions and investment. Google’s Nexus offered low-priced devices that sold in disappointing quantities, much like Apple’s own ill-fated attempt at low-end Performa Macs from 1992-1997. Google’s subsequent Pixel products offered premium-priced devices that sold in disappointing quantities, much like Apple’s Newton and fancy vanity projects like the company’s Twentieth Anniversary Mac.
Google’s Newton
Google is also today pursuing a dual OS strategy involving two entirely different architectures (JavaVM-based Android and its web-based ChromeOS), not dissimilar to Apple’s Mac-Newton rift, or the problems Microsoft slogged through with DOS/Win95 vs NT, and again with the kernel disparity of Windows for PCs and Windows Mobile.
Three samples of failure exposed to varying amounts of criticism
For Apple, Microsoft and Google, launching a series of wild, unrestrained moonshots while having multiple, competing platforms all vying for attention in the same space while not actually selling much of anything turned out to be a really bad strategy with terrible results. But our science experiment subjects here also show the effects of outside stimulus.
The tech media initially cheered all on three because they didn’t seem to realize that making news is not the same as making money. Once reporters discovered that a decade of moonshots and wild, unrestrained spending without sustainable sales was actually a big problem, they turned on Apple and reviled it.
There has been less criticism of Microsoft despite its massive loss of control over the future of technology, and very little of Google at all. A lack of criticism results in a lack of course-correction. Relentless criticism of Apple has greatly improved the trajectory of the company, as demonstrated by its fixes for iCloud, Maps, and the App Store in response to media castigation. Apple has also materially changed the direction of Siri.
Tepid assurances by the media that Microsoft could reassume its monopoly control over mobile devices and take back tablets by simply copying elements of Apple’s strategy cooed the company to sleep. Today Microsoft has zero phone business and its tablet and PC sales are a low-profit busywork distraction that haven’t grown across many years of trying, not unlike Performa Macs of the 90s or Google’s more recent Nexus and Pixels.
Apple’s non-golden age
Today, Apple is focused on fewer products that sell in massive quantities at sustainable profits. The company’s software updates have achievable, short-term goals, rather than charting out far out future dreams or trying to deliver grandiose notions such as a voice-first ambient computing or an advertising-based social surveillance network that people may not even want once they see what it really means.
Apple’s modern developer APIs are generally stable enough to rely upon, rather than being promises that don’t ever fully materialize that are then thrown out once the focus changes. Yet Apple isn’t praised as sitting on a Golden Age today. It’s generally ridiculed by the media for not pursuing ambitiously entertaining public stories and moonshot ideas.
Apple today is defined by solid products customers can buy, not grandiouse vaporware the media can write about
Rather than declaring Apple’s wildly successful recent history as a Golden Age, pundits have been giving their lethal applause to Microsoft and Google. But those fun moonshots to nowhere–including blood sugar monitoring contacts that don’t actually exist, its Andy Rubin robot initiatives that had little real commercial value, its stabs at social networking that nobody cared about and its radical efforts to shift society and industry–from Wallet to Glass to Project ARA to Tango–have been an unbroken series of expensive projects that never went anywhere.
Across the 2000s and early 2010s, Apple far exceeded the accomplishments of its previous Golden Age of the late 80s and early 90s. And did so while being severely constrained operationally in its corporate office space.
The new Millennium Apple, under Jobs, focused on a flexible, new eye-catching material he made more valuable than gold as he and his hand-selected team turned Apple around, as the next segment will examine tomorrow.
For decades, Wizards of the Coast has connected people around the world through play and imagination, with core games that have defined their genres – Magic: The Gathering® and Dungeons & Dragons®. We want to offer more ways to connect and play as the company grows. And that’s where you come in.
WHAT IS THIS ROLE ALL ABOUT? The Magic: The Gathering Arena team is looking for an experienced engineer to help manage and lead a team of engineers who build and maintain scalable cloud services that will support vast legions of players. In close collaboration with designers, artists, and other engineers, you’ll be one of the main drivers of designs and decisions within the team.
A DAY IN THE LIFE AS A LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Directly manages and supervises a team of software developers
Designs and implements solutions for Magic: The Gathering Arena in alignment with architectural designs and program needs.
Provide consultation on complex projects as a top level contributor/specialist.
Communicate and iterate on technical designs and decisions with the team.
Problem Solving
Must be able to work across the entire project while providing guidance to your reports
Grasps issues quickly and makes educated, critical judgments in the absence of complete information
Understands the technical challenges that arise from developing online games on multiple platforms
Must be able to work with a variety of other departments to create technical requirements
Communicates well and does not hesitate to initiate dialog with the relevant stakeholders
Must be able to plan and develop technical roadmaps, technical documentation and help determine priorities
WHAT YOU’LL BRING
Experience Creating and Casting these Spells:
10+ years software design experience
5-8 years of experience developing online, scalable, high performance applications and components
5-8 years of experience creating and shipping games
3+ years of experience managing software development teams
Strong coding, debugging and problem solving
Strong communication and collaboration
Experience developing and supporting a live game service
Knowledge, Abilities and Characteristics of the Ideal Wizard:
Experience building software solutions using AWS Technologies
Experience with MongoDB or other NoSQL data storage technologies
Experience with scalable distributed systems
Experience with process level concurrency
Working knowledge of containers and orchestration
Sound knowledge of software engineering, software engineering methodologies, and the impact of early decisions on later development stages of software projects
Experienced and skilled at leading and coaching talented software developers
Ability to conduct effective requirements gathering and analysis
Ability to work effectively with diverse groups of people in various roles
Willingness to help troubleshoot and resolve technical problems as they arise
Unity development and mobile development are a plus
We are an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.
The above is intended to describe the general content of and the requirements for satisfactory performance in this position. It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of the duties, responsibilities, or requirements of the position.
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.
How did a PC classic get reborn as a multiplatform “enhanced edition”? Founding BioWare developer Trent Oster takes us behind the scenes of the development of the Baldur’s Gate remake, and all of its complications.
I’m Trent Oster, President of Beamdog / Overhaul Games. We’re here to talk about the development of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. BG: EE (as we like to call it) launched on PC on November 28th and on iPad on December 8th to great fan interest, rocketing to the number 2 spot on iTunes in the U.S. and number 1 in many other App Stores around the world.
Our initial plans were to launch all platforms as close to each other as possible; in retrospect, this was very naive, given the size of our team and the volume of work required. We’re working steadily now to build versions for the remaining platforms and to roll out concurrent versions so cross-platform multiplayer can be a reality. We’ve had great success on the PC and iPad, with great sales and positive feedback from the fans. We’re very anxious to roll the remaining platforms out as fast as we can.
From the trenches, the development of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition was an interesting journey. We had early moments of exuberance as we played the first tablet version and proved our theory that Baldur’s Gate did indeed kick ass on tablets. We had great moments of insight when we brought people from the modding community in and shared work-in-progress versions with them. We had moments of despair, such as the lost source art and subsequent sacrifices to salvage the deal. We had moments of great distress, such as when we negotiated the September-to-November contract extension for the game. Every day that we had to wait for approval of the new deal terms so we could tell the fans was like torture. We worked incredibly hard to come to terms quickly, but until we had sign-off we couldn’t announce the schedule slip.
We had some great moments as a team, such as the first time we saw the new UI scheme in the game and the first time Sam’s new music played in an area. It has been a great journey for us and we’ve formed a strong core team of thirteen people who are capable of some great works. Along the way we had the opportunity to work with some great talents such as Mark Meer, John Gallagher, and Sam Hulick. We’ve had the opportunity to leverage all the great work from the original title as we try to build something better, something familiar, yet improved. In short, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition was a challenge, but we’ve all come out of the development with some sanity remaining and a great understanding of the game, the engine technology and what makes Baldur’s Gate the legend it is.
1. Fans and Community
Early on we knew one of the key elements to succeeding with the Enhanced Edition of the game was to bring in as many people from the modding and fan communities as possible. By working with them and listening to them, we could make the right changes and try to improve the game to better meet their needs. Our first few attempts were crude — an invite-only Reddit, some direct e-mails — but things rapidly turned around with the launch of the official message boards where we could speak directly with the modders and fans and listen to their concerns.
We shared new content with them as early as possible and acted on their feedback to make the game a better experience for users and a better platform for modding. We did this through hosting a long-running private beta. We would push a new build out to the beta group, have them poke it and respond with suggestions and feedback.
Our core community firmed up quite quickly, with a number of key people stepping forward with well thought-out criticism and thoughtful solutions. We read all the feedback, but we prioritized responding to the in-depth feedback and the community quickly oriented around that model, understanding we give the attention to those who put in the effort. The private beta was composed of hand-recruited community members from this active thoughtful group. We will be forever grateful to all the people on the forums for all the effort they contributed on our journey to make a better Baldur’s Gate.
Grip Gets Updated with Four New Tracks and One New Team Mode
Hey, Xbox racers!
We’ve had a blast with Grip: Combat Racing on Xbox One. Since launch we’ve listened to fans through the Grip Garage club, plus our Wednesday afternoon online sessions, and have continued to support players through a series of updates as we fine-tune and optimize the racing experience!
One of the areas we’ve seen players have a lot of fun in is the arenas. Here it’s full on PvP action with modes like Deathmatch! A few months back, players told us they wanted team modes for the arenas and for classic races… they also told us they wanted a bunch of all new tracks. We heard you and set about bringing in some classic Red vs Blue action, along with creating some of our most outrageous track designs to date! Launching today, as a free update for all players, we’re thrilled to bring the team modes into Grip, alongside four new tracks!
Team Modes
Team Racing & Team Deathmatch
Players can now join either red or blue teams to battle it out in any racing mode. This includes Classic Race, Ultimate, Elimination, Deathmatch and Speed Demon! The team with the highest points wins!
New Tracks
Mindbender (Haze reverse) (Orbital Prime) (City)
A highly modified version of Haze reverse. Key sections include a massive jump, tricky S turn and twisting sewer section!
Naptha Valley (Jahtra) (Desert)
Quite possibly the most rollercoaster-y track of all. Set in a resource mining center, key sections include a mineral deposit cave, large stepped curves of terrain and an indoor facility.
Hive Horizon (Orbital Prime) (City)
A beautiful, sunset soaked, gravity defying city district. Key sections include an affluent block of corporate structures, a big ceiling ride to floor jump and an ascending spiral road!
Spin Cycle (Liddo5) (Forest)
Players wanted more tunnels, and this track was designed to let ‘em dig deep! Key sections include an open area with beautiful autumn visuals, tunnel turns perfect for barrel rolls, glass tunnels and an obstacle ridden turn to the finish!
We’ve also released new ‘glowing’ garage packs and based on your feedback, raised the level cap! We’re really excited for players to get a grip (pun intended!) of the new content, and although we’re not revealing exactly what is next in the pipeline, know that we have something big on the horizon for the next content drop…
Grip started out as the passion project between two guys: myself, a home renovator in Canada, and Rob, a veteran 90s games developer who worked on Rollcage (might have heard of it). Robert retired to an island with no thoughts of development, and I was up on roofs doing my thing. But through our mutually shared love of old combat racers, we starting brainstorming what a modern version of Rollcage would be like on today’s consoles. After a plethora of emails and Skype calls between us, we worked with a group of very talented developers and artists along with an incredibly supportive publisher (big ups to Wired Productions!) to put out one of the best combat racers of this era. We are humbled by our amazingly dedicated community and are really excited for what is coming to Grip in the future!
Grip: Combat Racing is available now for Xbox One on the Microsoft Store. It is also currently available for all Xbox Game Pass members.
Days Gone Review Roundup -- Here's What Critics Are Saying
Years after its debut, Days Gone is finally available. The open world zombie game puts you in the shoes of Deacon St. John, a rough-and-tumble biker turned mercenary after the world went to hell. You'll take on Freakers (aka zombies) and factions of brutal survivors in an expansive open-world adventure.
Though the game boasts high production values, reviews have been mixed. The adventure itself is often said to be dull or middling, and many critics agree the story fails to do anything interesting with its conflicted hero. This is reflected in GameSpot's own review.
"I did a lot of things in Days Gone," said Kallie Plagge. "I burned every single Freaker nest; I cleared every ambush camp; I maxed out my bike; I took out a few optional hordes just because. Like Deacon with Sarah, I kept going because I hoped to find something, to follow a thread to a possibly fascinating or satisfying or impactful conclusion. But at the end of it all, I'd only gotten scraps."
Many other outlets have published their Days Gone reviews as well. We've gathered a sampling of them below to give a view from around the industry. For an even broader overview, check out GameSpot's sister site Metacritic.
Game: Days Gone
Platforms: PS4
Developer: Sony Bend
Release date: April 26
Price: $60 / £50 / $100 AUD
GameSpot -- 5/10
"Deacon also has a policy where he doesn't kill unarmed women, which does not affect the story in any way and goes completely unexamined. There's no introspection here; Deacon is selfish, and it's simply boring that the game is uncritical of him." -- Kallie Plagge [Full review]
PlayStation Lifestyle -- 9/10
"Days Gone checks all the boxes of a proverbial PlayStation exclusive, but never feels like it’s stepping on anyone else’s toes. Despite the games, film, and TV that you can easily draw comparisons too, Days Gone handles it all in such a way that it has its own unique identity. The more I played it, the more I loved it, until finally finishing the long journey and not wanting the adventure to end. Sam Witwer is brilliant as Deacon St. John, and his journey of survival, humanity, and self-discovery through a deadly world via motorcycle is a memorable one that shouldn’t be missed." -- Chandler Wood [Full review]
Attack of the Fanboy -- 8/10
"Days Gone is by no means perfect, but if you're willing to put up with some shortcomings the reward is one of the best open-world zombie apocalypse games to date." -- William Schwartz [Full review]
Game Informer -- 7.75/10
"Days Gone has good gameplay foundations. The scarcity of supplies and ever-present threat of zombies put me on edge as much as it gave me options to escape by the skin of my teeth. But the inability to fully deliver on either the story or open world fronts makes it a title of both possibilities and limitations." -- Matthew Kato [Full review]
USGamer -- 3.5/5
"The zombie apocalypse is well-trodden territory and the open-world spin of Days Gone can only differentiate it so much. There's a strong narrative focus, but Deacon St. John doesn't carry that weight as deftly as he could. There are highlights and fun tools available within, but the game doesn't push those forward initially, leaving the players to deal with some tedium first. Days Gone is a great foundation for something better though, so hopefully Bend gets the chance to improve upon it." -- Mike Williams [Full review]
IGN -- 6.5/10
"Days Gone feels bloated, like a movie that goes on for an hour longer than it needs to or should’ve. It’s messy and confused, but peppered with genuinely thrilling encounters with rampaging hordes of zombies and occasionally breathless firefights. There’s a good game in here somewhere, but it’s buried in a meandering storyline, repetitive missions, and just too much obligatory stuff to do without an eye on the smaller details that could have given it much more character. Some fine tuning and editing could have removed the tedium and celebrated what makes this game unique and interesting, but Days Gone rides strictly down the middle of the dusty road and never finds its rhythm." -- Lucy O'Brien [Full review]
Destructoid -- 6/10
"Days Gone ups the open world survival ante but doesn't have enough cash to pay for the rest of the rounds of betting, making it one of the weirdest AAA releases in recent memory. If enough people buy it, its stronger moments will likely be immortalized in YouTube videos for years to come. Yet, most people will probably remember it as the open world zombie game that didn't bring much mechanically to the table. With some tweaks to the pacing, it could have reconciled its warm, frank look at humanity and been something special." -- Chris Carter [Full review]
Slant -- 1.5/5
"Days Gone is the apotheosis of the more-is-more philosophy: more bars to fill, more gates to progress, more hours of playtime, more zombies per square inch because “more” is supposed to fill the hole where some semblance of meaning ought to be, bridging the gap between one mind-numbing mission template and the next. It’s the purest example yet of the video game as mere content to be consumed, down to the very fact that each storyline you’re supposed to be emotionally invested in is marked with a completion percentage. Days Gone is a void." -- Steven Scaife [Full review]
Variety -- No Score
"There is a living, breathing undercurrent of ambition undeniable in the scale and intricacy of developer Bend Studio’s creation. And you can tell the effort here is to apply to a naturally tense open-world survival structure the kind of high-impact narrative one would expect from a linearly-funneled action game. But the result is one of the best examples of why that can’t work, and of the damage such an effort can have on otherwise solid foundations. With the game’s pacing ground to dust in service of open world largess, expansiveness, and narrative potential, the core of “Days Gone” is buried too deep for even a zombified resurrection." -- Trevor Ruben [Full review]
Hands On: Super Mario Odyssey VR – A Non-Essential But Pleasant Return Trip
After losing our lunch with Breath of the Wild‘s VR mode update, we entered the Cap Kingdom in Super Mario Odyssey with a sense of trepidation, as well as a slight headache. We’d been excited to explore Hyrule with the Labo VR Goggles and it was disappointing to have our latent fears concerning the Switch’s limited VR prowess confirmed.
Happily, then, it was most pleasant to discover that Mario’s tailor-made mini-missions are far better suited to prolonged play sessions. The bite-sized nature of these trips to the Cap, Seaside and Luncheon Kingdoms means you won’t be spending very long with the Goggles held to your face, but even so, you’re unlikely to experience dizziness or pain in your temples either.
Once you’ve downloaded the update you can access the VR levels from the main menu. Starting in the Cap Kingdom, the camera is rooted to a fixed point in the middle of the level from which you control the plumber and guide him to close-by treble clefs. Collecting the notes that appear after touching them reveals a musical instrument to deliver to one of three musicians milling around.
That’s it. You shouldn’t go in expecting much – you’ll visit three kingdoms in total but the whole thing will probably take you 15 minutes, if that. However, that’s 15 fresh minutes in the delightful world of Super Mario Odyssey, and compared to the migraine that is the Breath of the Wild VR update, this is a lovely little treat.
Having the camera stuck in the same spot means Mario can move pretty far away – far enough that you’ll be able to count the pixels in his cap – but fortunately hitting ‘L’ or ‘R’ zooms to give a better view of distant detail. If you lose sight of Mario at any time, clicking the right stick will snap the camera round to frame him in the centre again, otherwise an onscreen indicator points you in the right direction. Get too far away and you’ll be plucked up and delivered back to the play field. Slingshots exist which fling you to other small areas of the level and there are a handful of secreted coins to discover, but you won’t be staying anywhere very long.
Even if you don’t own the requisite Labo kit to enjoy the VR, you can still play using the console’s gyroscope. You might lose that feeling of immersion, but you’ll gain a massive increase in resolution and it plays just fine outside of VR, too.
Once you’ve found the musicians in the three kingdoms it’s off to the concert with you for another encore of Odyssey’s signature song. We remember ‘Jump Up, Super Star!’ bringing a tear to the eye the first time we heard it, although it doesn’t quite have the same effect the 562nd time. Pauline takes centre stage, of course, and you still have control over Mario. Jumping on Pauline’s head causes her to stop singing, which we found hilarious for some reason.
Also viewable in stereoscopic 3D are the opening and closing cutscenes. Presented in ‘Theater’ mode, you can’t move your head and it feels almost identical to watching cutscenes on a 3DS. A nice extra, but hardly scintillating.
The patented Nintendo ‘take a break’ advice screens are present and correct which is a tad irritating when the whole mode is so slight, but Super Mario’s Odyssey’s micro-brand of VR is very pleasant indeed, especially coming after the disappointing implementation in Zelda. It’s a fluffy, throwaway thing, but cute nonetheless, and the fact that its also available without VR means there’s no reason not to give it a try. We wouldn’t buy Labo VR just to play this update, but the cumulative value of this and the Labo VR Kit itself (specifically the Starter Kit + Blaster) makes Switch’s VR experience worth investigating if you are at all curious. On the strength of this, we’d be up for seeing more VR novelty updates for other Nintendo games – a blaster-based on-rails update for Splatoon 2, for example, wouldn’t go amiss.
How did you find Super Mario Odyssey’s VR update? What other games could benefit from a little Labo VR seasoning? As always, let us know below.
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