Competitions, eh? Remember those? Man, if only we had some free codes to giveaway so we could do another o- OH WAIT. We’ve teamed up with Wave Light Games in order to bring you a free giveaway. We have ten iOS codes for their recently released tactical RPG Shieldwall Chronicles, and all you need to do is go to the widget below to register.

Competition closes at 10 AM GMT on Monday, March 11th and we’ll email the codes out to the winners from there.

In our review, Richard praised the game’s depth of choice amongst its character classes, as well as its adherence to old school strategy RPG design… even if things could get a bit grindy at times. Whether it’s better than PT favourite Demon’s Rise remains to be seen, but if you’re a fan of the developer’s work this is definitely worth checking out for more of the same.

The reason we launched our review and the giveaway today specifically is that Wave Light have just updated Shieldwall Chronicles to Version 1.03. The update includes a new playable character class, the Centaur (pictured above), a new cavalry-focused game mechanic, 20+ new magic items and several bug fixes and improvements. So, if you want to nab yourself a free copy, look at the widget below and may the odds ever be in your favour!

Shieldwall Chronicles Giveaway

Toge Productions’ fantasy RPG Azure Saga: Pathfinder Deluxe Edition is headed to Nintendo Switch later this month, and pre-orders have now gone live on the eShop.

The game sees players join the adventure of Synch, a young scientist on a quest to find his lost father. You’ll be exploring a foreign planet in 2.5D isometric landscapes, as you can spot in the trailer above, and venturing into dungeons and solving puzzles to unlock new areas. The whole thing looks rather lovely to us.

There are also mini-games to enjoy inside some of these dungeons, such as fishing, but you’ll also stumble across a healthy number of enemies that will try to stop you from goofing off. Battles are said to be JRPG-like in style, with turn-based combat helping you to gain EXP and items.

Game Features:
– A world with a classic storyline that will delight both veterans and new RPG fans, infused with highly detailed 2D illustrations
– Traditional Turn-Based RPG Gameplay inspired by the classic JRPG of the 90s
– Strategize and configure your characters’ gear and jewels in to enhance their maximum potential.
– Unite, mix, and match your characters’ skills to discover powerful abilities, each with their special effects
– Classic old school adventure with tons of puzzles and secrets to discover

The game launches on Switch on 21st March for $9.99 / £8.09, but pre-ordering it will get you 15% off.

Might you give this one a go later this month? Do you like what you see? Share your thoughts with us in that inviting-looking comment box below.

In my job I chat a lot with both school leaders and IT admins about how they can simplify the management of their devices, making it faster and easier for their end users (usually students, teachers and admin staff) to get started and complete the work they need to do on a device.

Unlike many corporate environments, schools have a very high number of “shared devices” in operation, where students of different year levels require access on the same device and, in some scenarios, even teachers need to log into the same device and access different apps and security settings. In the next two blog posts I’m going to go a bit deeper into how schools can approach this challenge with modern deployment practices, leveraging cloud identity in AzureAD, easier enrollment of devices using Microsoft Autopilot and finally a couple of tweaks for a faster user sign-in experience using Microsoft Intune as the Mobile Device Management (MDM) tool.

Overview:

As this blog post will be a little longer (and more technical) I’m going to give you a break down of what is to come so you can skip to the important sections relevant to you:

• Part One:
  
  • Identity – why use a cloud identity?
  • Why use AutoPilot?
  • Configuring Autopilot
  • Enrolling your device
• Part Two:
  
  • Intune vs Intune for Education
  • What are CSP?
  • Building a custom CSP Policy
  • Using LOB App Deployment in Intune

Now it’s worth stating at this stage that I am not an IT administrator by profession. Whilst I’m probably more technical than many, I’ve got the following working through a combination of relying on the detailed guides in the Microsoft Docs and awesome technical colleagues who have shared some of their expertise with me. Additionally, like you, I read a bunch of blogs to see how people have done this in the past. This blog is a small contribution to the community who like to learn from other’s experiences. If you’re reading this and are more technical than me and see some improvements or corrections in what I’ve done – I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

With that said, let’s get started!

Identity – why use a cloud identity?

It’s amazing how many conversations I’ve been having around cloud identities recently as school leaders are starting to understand they need to be able to simplify user access to key resources via Single Sign On (SSO), and open up both cloud/internet solutions as well as traditional on-premise hosted solutions. There are plenty of confusing diagrams out there trying to explain what this is about – the following is the simplest I could find:

Essentially, the above is showing two scenarios:

1. The user may sign into an “on-premise” identity platform (on the left), in this case Active Directory (still incredibly common in schools) which, through the use of a tool called AzureAD Connect can automatically sign into a cloud identity as well, in this case Azure Active Directory (AzureAD or even AAD).
2. Alternatively, the user may sign directly into a cloud service (on the right) using their AzureAD credentials. In fact, if their device is managed by the school, it may even be joined to AzureAD only.

Why does this matter? As an example, I was talking with a school recently where teachers were required to use up to four different usernames/passwords to access their key platforms such as signing into a computer, accessing their email, accessing their Student Management System (SMS) and accessing their cloud collaboration suite (Office365 in this case). Simplifying this through a single cloud identity saves time and frustration for everyone! It also improves security as people are more likely to choose a secure password if they only have one to remember.

Additionally, schools are increasingly wanting to sign into third party cloud apps with the same credentials – this blog post I wrote shows a school accessing eight different solutions with just their AzureAD identity.

The key point is: identity matters. If your school does not have a cloud identity of some sort, you’re going to be inherently limited in what you can do.

As the focus of this blog is primarily around AutoPilot, I’m not going to go deep into Identity – some useful background reading I would share is earlier blog posts I’ve written around:

For the purposes of this blog, if you’re wanting to use AutoPilot then your Office365 Tenant must have either the AzureAD P1 or P2 plans – see the differences here. With many schools opting for the M365 A3 Suite, this includes AzureAD P1:

Azure Active Directory Premium P1. In addition to the Free and Basic features, P1 also lets your hybrid users access both on-premises and cloud resources. It also supports advanced administration, such as dynamic groups, self-service group management, Microsoft Identity Manager (an on-premises identity and access management suite) and cloud write-back capabilities, which allow self-service password reset for your on-premises users.

To proceed with AutoPilot you need your users in AzureAD (and licensed with P1 or P2) so if you’ve not got that far, best to stop and sort before continuing on (if you want help with this, check out School Data Sync which can automatically add users from your Student Information System).

Why use AutoPilot?

It’s always a good question to ask, and before answering if you’re brand new to AutoPilot then it’s worth watching the video at the top of this blog post and then getting into the official AutoPilot Documentation here. If you’re coming from an Apple device management world and are familiar with the Device Enrollment Program (DEP) then the concepts of AutoPilot will be very familiar for you.

Windows Autopilot is a collection of technologies used to set up and pre-configure new devices, getting them ready for productive use. You can also use Windows Autopilot to reset, re-purpose and recover devices.
This solution enables an IT department to achieve the above with little to no infrastructure to manage, with a process that’s easy and simple.

Windows Autopilot is designed to simplify all parts of the life cycle of Windows devices, for both IT and end users, from initial deployment through the eventual end of life. Leveraging cloud-based services, it can reduce the overall costs for deploying, managing, and retiring devices by reducing the amount of time that IT needs to spend on these processes and the amount of infrastructure that they need to maintain, while ensuring ease of use for all types of end users.

Back to the why use it…..

• Devices become enrolled / locked to your organisation. If a user (authorised or not) resets the Win10 OS back to factory settings, as soon as it connects to the internet again it will register back to your organisation, making it largely useless to anyone if it was stolen.
• Speeds up and simplifies the Win10 setup process – you can optionally skip quite a few of the steps you normally need to undertake in Win10 e.g. requiring the user to agree to the EULA, choosing their privacy settings, configure whether the user will be an Administrator or a Standard user, and depending on deployment mode, can even skip keyboard preferences.
• Devices can be assigned to specific users, meaning when they turn it on for the first time, connect to the internet they’re greeted by name as part of their organisation.
• AutoPilot Reset allows an IT Admin to remotely reset the device, returning it to the original state, but keeping it joined to AzureAD and enrolled into Intune for management – think of this like a “spring clean” at the beginning of the school year or new Term.

In short, AutoPilot is designed to make your life easier!

Configuring Autopilot

For my demo and testing, I’m using an Acer B117 laptop, something that is available in the NZ Education Right Device Campaign, a low cost, low spec Win10 device with 4GB RAM and options around 64/128GB SSD storage. One of the beauties of AutoPilot is that supported OEM devices can send the unique Hardware Identifier (HWID) to the purchasing organisation / school in advance of receiving the devices, allowing for the configuration of the entire environment in advance of even receiving the hardware.

An obvious upside for this would be the ability to ‘drop ship’ devices to remote employees directly from purchase, without the need for IT Admins to even site the device.

In my case, I needed to manually extract the HWID from the Acer laptop, which can easily be accomplished with some basic PowerShell (run as local Administrator):

md c:HWID Set-Location

c:HWID Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Install-Script -Name Get-WindowsAutoPilotInfo

Get-WindowsAutoPilotInfo.ps1 -OutputFile AutoPilotHWID.csv

With the HWID obtained, the process to complete the configuration of AutoPilot is easily followed by these step by step instructions here, but largely consist of the following steps:

1. Add your devices (HWID) into Intune
2. Create an AutoPilot Device Group (tells Intune which devices in your organisation should be managed by AutoPilot). Note you can do both static and dynamic rules for adding devices here.
3. Create an AutoPilot Deployment Profile – this is the configuration settings you want to choose and allows you to skip a number of the standard Win10 decisions that need to be made when a device is being set up for the first time.
4. Assign an AutoPilot Deployment Profile to a Device Group – this matches what you’ve created in Step 2 with Step 3
5. Assign a user to a specific AutoPilot Device – this optional step allows you to match a user in your organisation with a specific device. The net result of this is the first time the user turns on the computer and connects it to the internet their name and email address is pre-populated in the setup process, meaning they only need to confirm their password during the setup – very cool!

The documentation I’ve linked to is pretty clear – it took me about thirty minutes to follow along and set the above up the first time I ran it.

Enrolling Your Device

Now the fun really beings. With the configuration completed, you can take your brand new ‘out of the box’ device and enroll it using AutoPilot for a truly streamlined, managed experience.

I took some photos of the experience using my phone camera (photo quality is average) and anyone that has ever set up Windows 10 will be familiar with this process:

At this point, the device settings and applications are installed (or possibly still coming down over the internet) but the device is ready for us.

The end user had minimal choices and actions required of them:

1. Choose their country
2. Choose their keyboard
3. Connect to the internet (this could even be their home WiFi)
4. Enter their organisation password (Office365)

My Thoughts

Modern deployment relies on the cloud for identity and provisioning of devices – there are no on-premise servers in the above model. This allows for fast, flexible and lower cost management of devices – something that appeals to education institutes where every dollar counts!

Whilst I’ve gone through the configuration pretty quickly above, along with a high level ‘rationale’ of why you’d want to do this, the next post will go a bit deeper into when to use Intune vs Intune for Education, and a couple of tweaks to make your devices run even faster at sign in and have key applications appear instantly whenever a new user signs in. I’ll likely post this in the next week or so.

Daniel

Blazor 0.9.0 is now available! This release updates Blazor with the Razor Components improvements in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 3.

New Razor Component improvements now available to Blazor apps:

• Improved event handling
• Forms & validation

Checkout the ASP.NET Core 3.0 Preview 3 announcement for details on these improvements. See also the Blazor 0.9.0 release notes for additional details.

Note: The Blazor templates have not been updated to use the new .razor file extension for Razor Components in this release. This update will be done in a future release.

Get Blazor 0.9.0

To get started with Blazor 0.9.0 install the following:

1. .NET Core 3.0 Preview 3 SDK (3.0.100-preview3-010431)
2. Visual Studio 2019 (Preview 4 or later) with the ASP.NET and web development workload selected.
3. The latest Blazor extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

4. The Blazor templates on the command-line:

   dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::0.9.0-preview3-19154-02
   

You can find getting started instructions, docs, and tutorials for Blazor at https://blazor.net.

Upgrade to Blazor 0.9.0

To upgrade your existing Blazor apps to Blazor 0.9.0 first make sure you’ve installed the prerequisites listed above.

To upgrade a Blazor 0.8.0 project to 0.9.0:

• Update the Blazor packages and .NET CLI tool references to 0.9.0-preview3-19154-02.
• Update the remaining Microsoft.AspNetCore.* packages to 3.0.0-preview3-19153-02.
• Remove any usage of JSRuntime.Current and instead use dependency injection to get the current IJSRuntime instance and pass it through to where it is needed.

Give feedback

We hope you enjoy this latest preview release of Blazor. As with previous releases, your feedback is important to us. If you run into issues or have questions while trying out Blazor, file issues on GitHub. You can also chat with us and the Blazor community on Gitter if you get stuck or to share how Blazor is working for you. After you’ve tried out Blazor for a while please let us know what you think by taking our in-product survey. Click the survey link shown on the app home page when running one of the Blazor project templates:

Thanks for trying out Blazor!

Daniel Roth

Principal Program Manager, ASP.NET

Follow Daniel   

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Waking up as a powerful vampire is a well-worn video game territory. So are relentlessly replayable roguelikes. Somehow, Kyle Barrett, developer of Ever Knight, has found a way to make both of these staples feel fresh and inviting with Immortal Rogue.

As the titular character, you spend your waking moments reaping civilization of its blood, one century at a time. As you haunt populations for consecutive centuries, you can play a large role in how society develops. Choosing to hunt social elites or rabble rousers may determine if humans progress into the stars, or revert back to barbarism. I wish this narrative device felt more substantial.

Conceptually, being a hidden figure that has secretly been altering human history from the shadows for years is great. But it never feels like an interesting story is being told, outside of the small info dumps that set up each new engagement. The choices you make regarding who to hunt don’t change each encounter substantially. At most, instead of just killing everyone, you kill everyone and especially one person in particular. Occasionally, you’ll be able to turn that special somebody, and add them to your coven.

The consequences of the decision can be significant, though. Moving forward or backward in advancement could mean that your next set of enemies could go from mostly wielding swords or bats, to being Terminators with laser guns. Enemies hit harder and harder – and there are more and more of them – the longer you survive. The more advanced the society, the more frequently you’ll find that the monsters that spawn to greet you can absolutely decimate you from distance. Some legible way of knowing how your decision will affect the movement of civilization would have been welcome here.

This is especially something I wish I had when I died and had to spend the next hundred years resting. Time moves on without you, so dramatic progress could be made before you’re ready to hunt again. The beginning of your run could be right smack in the middle of a robot uprising, meaning guns galore. After hours of play, I’ve found my way around this little difficulty bubble. But in the beginning, I found it to be overwhelming.

The nuts and bolts of playing the Immortal Rogue are simple, familiar, and satisfying. Swipes, taps, and holds encompass all of the inputs you’ll need to make mincemeat out of the well-armed general public. Light and heavy attacks strike with a that feel good stickiness, with just enough space before and after attacks to feel like you can zip out of harm’s way.

There is also a pretty diverse set of weapons you can acquire that all feel unique. Even though you pick them up at random, they tend of be era appropriate. Sometimes you’ll pick up a cowboy six-shooter, other times a katana. They all seem to have a place in a strategy, or can be the kind of run-defining things worth building a strategy around.

The irony is that even though much of the game rewards aggression – all of your movement is in dashes, light attack chains get up close and lock enemies down, etc. – I had much more successful runs when I got a ranged weapon and just shot hordes of enemies from a distance. It’s not a complete imbalance, as the hordes can become untenable once you reach year 900. But some of the dirty tricks that Immortal Rogue plays on you, whether intentionally or not, might have you thinking conservatively.

The way enemies spawn often feels like there is no rhyme or reason to it. They sort of just show up from off screen, or from underground, or from thin air to come kill you. Sections of the map you’ve already covered might sometimes hide a random group of baddies that triggered at some point when you weren’t watching. The environments themselves can obscure enemies under them that you might not know are there unless you see a bullet careen towards you from behind a rock, or you just felt the need to dash behind a tall building. Not exactly game-breaking, but annoying.

I have had bugs that got me stuck on pieces of a map, unable to dodge away from what would shortly become an aggressive and devastating onslaught of enemy fire. They don’t happen often, but when they do happen to sabotage a run, you can’t help but feel frustrated. Ditto to the inconsistent responsiveness of the controls. Touch controls are hard to make work perfectly, and the design is intuitive, but the end result isn’t always. Slides and holds get confused all the time for me. You learn to work around it, but it can be a lot of work.

But man, Immortal Rogue is hard to put down. It has that perfect blend of small investment interactions and frantic, engrossing action that always convinces you to go one more time after a death. Mixing the perks you pick at the end of each level with all the gear and enhancements you can buy or inherit through your coven helps you produced strategies and builds that you can see working usually immediately. When I focus on one or two build ideas, it’s almost always rewarding to see them come to fruition.

So, despite its setbacks, Immortal Rogue seems to accomplish everything good about the popular roguelike genre on one of the platforms where they are a dime a dozen. It even makes the concept of playing as a powerful vampire something that at least feels new and different on its surface, even if it fails to do much with it. A gratifying, one-handed action game on mobile as sound as this one should absolutely not be overlooked by anyone seeking the next great single-player experience.

I must confess, although I often wax poetic about the old ways of the Linux desktop, I much prefer my distributions to help make my daily workflow as efficient as possible. Because of that, my taste in Linux desktop distributions veers very far toward the modern side of things. I want a distribution that integrates apps seamlessly, gives me notifications, looks great, and makes it easy to work with certain services that I use.

However, every so often it’s nice to dip my toes back into those old-school waters and remind myself why I fell in love with Linux in the first place. That’s precisely what MiyoLinux did for me recently. This lightweight distribution is based on Devuan and makes use of the i3 Tiling Window Manager.

Why is it important that MiyoLinux is based on Devuan? Because that means it doesn’t use systemd. There are many within the Linux community who’d be happy to make the switch to an old-school Linux distribution that opts out of systemd. If that’s you, MiyoLinux might just charm you into submission.

But don’t think MiyoLinux is going to be as easy to get up and running as, say, Ubuntu Linux, Elementary OS, or Linux Mint. Although it’s not nearly as challenging as Arch or Gentoo, MiyoLinux does approach installation and basic usage a bit differently. Let’s take a look at how this particular distro handles things.

Installation

The installation GUI of MiyoLinux is pretty basic. The first thing you’ll notice is that you are presented with a good amount of notes, regarding the usage of the MiyoLinux desktop. If you happen to be testing MiyoLinux via VirtualBox, you’ll wind up having to deal with the frustration of not being able to resize the window (Figure 1), as the Guest Additions cannot be installed. This also means mouse integration cannot be enabled during the installation, so you’ll have to tab through the windows and use your keyboard cursor keys and Enter key to make selections.

Once you click the Install MiyoLinux button, you’ll be prompted to continue using either ‘su” or sudo. Click the use sudo button to continue with the installation.

The next screen of importance is the Installation Options window (Figure 2), where you can select various options for MiyoLinux (such as encryption, file system labels, disable automatic login, etc.).

The MiyoLinux installation does not include an automatic partition tool. Instead, you’ll be prompted to run either cfdisk or GParted (Figure 3). If you don’t know your way around cfdisk, select GParted and make use of the GUI tool.

With your disk partitioned (Figure 4), you’ll be required to take care of the following steps:

• Configure the GRUB bootloader.

• Select the filesystem for the bootloader.

• Configure time zone and locales.

• Configure keyboard, keyboard language, and keyboard layout.

• Okay the installation.

Once, you’ve okay’d the installation, all packages will be installed and you will then be prompted to install the bootloader. Following that, you’ll be prompted to configure the following:

• Hostname.

• User (Figure 5).

• Root password.

With the above completed, reboot and log into your new MiyoLinux installation.

Usage

Once you’ve logged into the MiyoLinux desktop, you’ll find things get a bit less-than-user-friendly. This is by design. You won’t find any sort of mouse menu available anywhere on the desktop. Instead you use keyboard shortcuts to open the different types of menus. The Alt+m key combination will open the PMenu, which is what one would consider a fairly standard desktop mouse menu (Figure 6).

The Alt+d key combination will open the dmenu, a search tool at the top of the desktop, where you can scroll through (using the cursor keys) or search for an app you want to launch (Figure 7).

Installing Apps

If you open the PMenu, click System > Synaptic Package Manager. From within that tool you can search for any app you want to install. However, if you find Synaptic doesn’t want to start from the PMenu, open the dmenu, search for terminal, and (once the terminal opens), issue the command sudo synaptic. That will get the package manager open, where you can start installing any applications you want (Figure 8).

Of course, you can always install applications from the command line. MiyoLinux depends upon the Apt package manager, so installing applications is as easy as:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice -y

Once installed, you can start the new package from either the PMenu or dmenu tools.

MiyoLinux Accessories

If you find you need a bit more from the MiyoLinux desktop, type the keyboard combination Alt+Ctrl+a to open the MiyoLinux Accessories tool (Figure 9). From this tool you can configure a number of options for the desktop.

All other necessary keyboard shortcuts are listed on the default desktop wallpaper. Make sure to put those shortcuts to memory, as you won’t get very far in the i3 desktop without them.

A Nice Nod to Old-School Linux

If you’re itching to throw it back to a time when Linux offered you a bit of challenge to your daily grind, MiyoLinux might be just the operating system for you. It’s a lightweight operating system that makes good use of a minimal set of tools. Anyone who likes their distributions to be less modern and more streamlined will love this take on the Linux desktop. However, if you prefer your desktop with the standard bells and whistles, found on modern distributions, you’ll probably find MiyoLinux nothing more than a fun distraction from the standard fare.

A couple of years ago, Demon’s Rise 2 was Pocket Tactics’ RPG Game of the Year: a hex-based fantasy RPG laser-focused on complex tactical gameplay. Now, Wave Light has released the Shieldwall Chronicles: a hex-based fantasy RPG laser-focused on complex tactical gameplay. How does this new entry compare to such an illustrious predecessor?

Like Demon’s Rise, Shieldwall is an extremely crunchy game. Your standard attack calculation figures in the character’s skill minus distance, evasion, and cover, and then subtracts armor from your damage if you get a hit. Then the target may get a chance at a counterattack of the same complexity. With buffs and special attacks, you’re looking at a lot of calculations for each move. All this math can result in frustrating situations where two characters with piles of health can’t hit each other at all or can only plink off single health points at a time, dragging out the battles.

Luckily, you can play in ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ mode and slide the difficulty of each mission up and down on the fly. Complex mode makes you use action points for everything, including moving and making attacks, while simple mode gives each character a set number of attacks and movement distance. In simple mode, you only need to be concerned about whether you have enough action points for the special ability you want to use, or if you should save them for the next round. These abilities are mostly determined by your characters class and level. 

The characters come with both male and female models. Happily, the two models are statistically identical but visually totally unique designs, giving your team a lot of flair. Character animations are varied and give your characters and their individual moves some personality, even though they occasionally bug out and send them moonwalking across the tavern floor. Spell and damage effects are also well-done, especially the satisfying sprays of blood that accompany a direct hit and the molten fireball effects. Although the game runs on phones, it’s definitely meant for tablet-sized devices.

Each of the fifteen character types has its own set of special abilities. It takes some time to learn what they are all capable of, but eventually you’ll get some interesting tactical choices to make, even in simple mode.  Back off and heal? Buff your attack and go for the kill? Which character best supports the others? Some specials are equivalent to more advanced attacks. Others are buffs or debuffs that can make the difference between your attacks bouncing off armor or scoring a critical hit. Magical items and gear also sometimes provide special abilities including bonus attacks. You’ll pick up one for free after each level and between missions, you can freely buy from a massive selection of loot.

You also need to be concerned with your units’ morale, which provides some realistic reactions to various battlefield situations, leading to panic if your units are surrounded or see their comrade fall. The consequences of panic are actually a bit too light, since it just removes the unit’s ability to use special moves. I’d rather see something like XCOM where the AI takes over control of a panicked character. This can still lead to a failure spiral, if you suddenly desperately need your cleric to calm down and heal. 

Maps have a lot of variety, including cramped indoor hallways, urban streets and squares, and wide outdoor spaces. The terrain makes a big difference in strategy, especially the many opportunities to take full or half cover. Cover makes a huge difference in reducing your chances of getting hit, making careful flanking moves a vital strategy and ranged units in good cover particularly deadly.

The storyline is well-written enough, but it doesn’t stray from fantasy adventure tropes. This is a little disappointing considering the Demon’s Rise series had you leading a party of devil-worshipers. In Shieldwall, you head a generic mercenary company that gradually gets pulled into to a larger conflict. There are a few choices to be made, but they are more of the “turn left” or “turn right” variety than critical dilemmas, mostly seeming to affect the next map you’ll be fighting on. Your characters don’t really have an individual impact on the story, and any one that drops during a mission will be right as rain during the next one. Mission failure just means trying again, and you can freely swap units to try a different strategy. The storyline is simply something to hang the tactical game on and provide an excuse for all the swords and arrows. It is very, very long, though: at least 40 hours.

If you’re already a fan of Wave Light’s Demon’s Rise series, Shieldwall Chronicles is more of the same but with a somewhat less interesting setting and slightly more complex gameplay. New players who are after some RPG tactics with lots of math will also love this game.

© 2019 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries.

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PST today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta Ring will begin receiving the latest 1904 Xbox One system update (19h1_release_xbox_dev_1904.190224-1940). Read on for more about the new features, fixes and known issues in the latest 1904 system update.

New Features:

A complete feature list for 1904 is published here https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/02/21/new-features-rolling-out-to-xbox-insiders-this-spring/

This build contains the new Voice command features to please test.

Voice Skills

• New Alexa Voice skills are available today for flighting. Please try the new “Alexa, Pair controller” and “Alexa, Eject disc” voice commands and let us know what you think.

Fixes:

Messaging

• We have resolved the issue that some users were report unable to send/receive messages.
• Users are now warned when viewing a group conversation with someone they blocked.

System

• Localization fixes.

Known Issues:

Achievements

• We are aware that Achievements lists are not being displayed correctly while in a game.

Audio

• We are aware of issues of No Audio heard from Non-Spatial Audio games when using Dolby Atmos for Home Theater with the LG SJ9 soundbar.

Blu-Ray

• We are investigating some reports that the Blu-ray player doesn’t support HDR when playing HDR10 & Dolby Vision disc with “Enable Dolby Vision” turned on in settings.

Disney Adventures

• We are tracking an issue that this title is crashing on launch.

Game Pass Mobile App

• Issue/Impact – After pushing a remote installation of a game from the Game Pass mobile app, customers will not see progress of the installation on in the mobile app and may not receive install notifications.  The game will still successfully install if there is sufficient available space on the console.
• Affected audience – must be in 1904 preview, must be a GP subscriber, must be using the GP mobile app, must be pushing game installations from the app.
• Workarounds – None.  A fix is coming in the next version of the mobile app in March.  Customers interested in getting early access to the fix can download the Game Pass Beta app.

Home

• We are aware that the clock/time is missing from home and the dashboard.
• We are tracking that notifications are not displaying on the console (such as achievement toasts).

Party Chat

• We are investigating that users cannot join party chat.  Workaround : We have found that a reboot of the console resolves.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

System

• We are tracking an issue in which the Console locks up when accessing guide after playing a title or app.

Space Engineers is Leaving Early Access, is available as a Free Weekend and is 20% off!*

Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets. Players build space ships, space stations, planetary outposts of various sizes and uses, pilot ships and travel through space to explore planets and gather resources to survive. Featuring both creative and survival modes, there is no limit to what can be built, utilized and explored.

*Offer ends March 7 at 10AM Pacific Time