New Xbox Games With Gold For February 2019 Now Available
The month's mid-point has come, which means that the Xbox Games With Gold have cycled over into the next set. February's previous games are still available through the end of the month, while this new batch will be available to download through mid-March.
On Xbox One, Super Bomberman R joins the line-up next to Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, which went up earlier this month. Super Bomberman is an action game that pays homage to the classic series, having you set bombs and traps against friends and foes alike in a maze-like environment. Curse of the Moon is modeled after classic Castlevania games and serves as a prequel to the upcoming Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
Meanwhile, the classic Xbox game Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy has joined the service, replacing Assassin's Creed Rogue. This is an unusual example of an original Xbox game rotating instead of one for Xbox 360, but it's well-regarded among Star Wars fans.
As always these games are free and will be yours to keep as long as you grab them during the promotional period, even if your Gold account expires. Separately, Microsoft offers the subscription-based Game Pass service, which this month adds Crackdown 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and more.
Turns Out Many Characters Shared One Body In Zelda: The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker got off to a rocky start with fans. The ‘Celda’ backlash may seem like a dim and distant memory now, but at the time many fans were furious that their beloved series was being twisted and turned in a way they didn’t agree with. Fancy that, eh?
Fortunately, Nintendo stuck to its guns and Wind Waker’s timeless art style holds up in a way many other games of the era struggle to in these Ultra High Definition times. Even its harshest critics have calmed down a little and come around to its clean and simple animated style.
We got a chance to enjoy the game all over again on Wii U, but Twitter user @JasperRLZ has made an interesting observation regarding the game’s oddball cast that passed us by in the seventeen years since the game’s initial release:
Look closely and you’ll see that many of the game’s characters share identical body models, with only head and clothes textures changing.
It’s not something we’d have ever noticed without having it pointed out, but now it’s the only thing we’ll be able to think about when we next fire up the GameCube classic. It goes so show just how clever and economical Nintendo’s development team was when called upon to save memory on those cute little GameCube discs.
Had you ever noticed this before? Can you think of any other examples of body-swapping (or, more accurately, head-swapping) models in other games? Let us know in the comments below.
Black Future ’88 Brings An Alternate Past To Switch This Year
Coming to Switch and PC later this year, self-described ‘roguelike action shooter’ Black Future ’88 is set in an alternate reality where, it appears, it’s always 1988.
Presumably this is an alternate 1988 after Biff stole the Sports Almanac and gifted it to his past self because things don’t look too rosey. On the positive side, you’ve survived a nuclear event – yay! – but unfortunately it seems that almost everything in the world, robotic or otherwise, is trying to put an end to you.
Your job is to climb procedurally generated towers while avoiding the usual obstacles (lasers, murderous robots and the like) in order to reach the tower’s architect, Duncan – the man responsible for this apocalypse – and give him a taste of justice from a big gun or a beam sword.
If that’s not a tall enough order, it seems you’re suffering from some sort of Crank-like medical condition meaning your heart will explode if you don’t get a move on. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, eh?
With a plethora of weapons, powers, buffs and curses to employ, there’s also local co-op if you fancy bringing a friend along, plus daily challenges enabling you to climb up a global leaderboard if you don’t have any friends, or if they just don’t fancy a jaunt to a deadly neon dystopia. Here are a few more details from the official ‘factsheet’:
It all looks very stylish and we’ll find out more when it releases later this year, barring any cataclysmic events in the real world.
Like the look of this dirty neon shooter? Do you think it’ll have enough to set it apart from the countless other video game dystopias? Let us know with a comment.
Apple rolls out third public beta versions of iOS 12.2, tvOS 12.2
By Malcolm Owen Wednesday, February 20, 2019, 10:24 am PT (01:24 pm ET)
Made available just one day after the developer beta, participants of Apple’s public beta program are now able to update their iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch to a new third beta build of iOS 12.2, and the fourth generation Apple TV and Apple TV 4K to tvOS 12.2.
Four new Animoji are included in the iOS 12.2 beta
The betas are provided to everyone registered to Apple’s Beta Software Program, with the latest build downloadable as an over-the-air update directly to enrolled devices. The contents of the public beta are typically the same as the developer beta that precedes it, in this case one that was issued just one day in advance.
The third beta of iOS 12.2 makes a number of changes to what was seen in the second build, including a redesigned Remote widget in Control Center that makes the buttons at the bottom of the display larger as well as introducing a guide to the trackpad. The About page in Settings has also been rearranged, with the top section including the software version, model name, model number, and serial number of the device along with its set name, bringing the important details together instead of making users search for it elsewhere.
The Wallet app gains an updated UI for recent transactions, as well as a refinement to the Apple Pay Cash card. The News app has a new “Apple News” logo above the date. The update also includes fixes, with the lock screen issue that perpetually showed the battery percentage reverted to show the current date below the time, and the reenabling of Group FaceTime.
AppleInsider, and Apple itself, strongly recommend users don’t install the betas on to “mission-critical” or primary devices, as there is the remote possibility of data loss or other issues. Instead, testers should install betas onto secondary or non-essential devices, and to make sure there are sufficient backups of important data before updating.
Monster Energy Supercross: The Official Videogame 2
All the thrills of the Monster Energy AMA Supercross 2018 Championship. Live the life of a pro, put yourself to the test in the Compound, tackle challenges, manage your events and attract new sponsors to earn fame and unlock new content.
Get ready for an electrifying mix between a bullet hell and a typing game! Dodge bullets while typing exorcisms at the very same time: turn on both sides of your brain and jump into the adventure of Ray Bibbia.
DiRT Rally 2.0 dares you to carve your way through a selection of iconic rally locations from across the globe, in the most powerful off-road vehicles ever made, knowing that the smallest mistake could end your stage. You will need to rely on your instincts with the most immersive and truly focused off-road experience yet, including a new authentic handling model, tyre choice and surface deformation.
Power your rally car through real-life off-road environments in New Zealand, Argentina, Spain, Poland, Australia and the USA, with only your co-driver and instincts to guide you. Race on eight official circuits from the FIA World Rallycross championship, complete with licensed Supercars and support series. Develop your team and cars around race strategies, and progress through a varied selection of Events and Championships in both a single player Career Campaign and a competitive online environment.
Opus Magnum has players creating machines for developing potions and poisons, tinkering with parts and mechanisms to refine perfect alchemical devices.
This machine-building process earned Opus Magnum nominations for Excellence in Design and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize in the 2019 IGF. Gamasutra sat down with Zach Barth and Matthew Burns, developers of this puzzling game of mechanical perfection, to talk about giving players room to find creative solutions, the joy of fiddling with processes, and the beauty of mechanisms in motion.
Designers of Alchemical Machines
So, we are Zach Barth and Matthew Burns. Barth was the lead designer and creative director, and Burns wrote the story and composed the music. We’re speaking jointly on behalf of Zachtronics.
Barth started making games in college, putting them on the internet for free. SpaceChem (2011) was his first commercial game. Burns has worked in games for a while and joined Zachtronics full-time in 2016.
Refining a decades-old concept
Opus Magnum is a refinement of ideas first explored in one of Zach’s early Flash games from over ten years ago, The Bureau of Alchemical Engineering. Both the world and the mechanics are developed from the original ideas in that game.
The tools to create magical machines
The engine itself is built with C#, SDL, and DirectX or OpenGL (depending on the platform). The art was painted in Photoshop and Flash(!) and the music was created in Logic Pro.
Creating a certain beauty of motion in Opus Magnum
Most Zachtronics games are about making machines do things. In each case, there’s a certain limited toolset provided to transform inputs into outputs. This one happens to have a greater focus on physical movement of components using arms, so there’s a lot of circular motion that results in designs reminiscent of clockwork. It was a natural outcome of the design space we were in.
A lot of Zachtronics games are about creating a system that manufactures something. It’s satisfying to watch factories work, and especially so when it’s one of your own design. And the game’s animated GIF export feature helps players share their unique solutions easily.
On developing the components to create varied machines
In general, the idea is to try to create a certain minimum set of tools that create emergent properties when used together and balance them with cost so that players can optimize for that if they like.
Building for creative solutions
We don’t design with specific optimal strategies already in mind — in our experience, as long as the tool set is expressive and the problem is open-ended, we will see creative solutions from players, including optimizations we hadn’t really dreamed of before. There are different metrics to optimize for, such as cost, area, or cycles, and some solutions can be particularly nice-looking, like symmetrical ones.
On how to encourage players to tinker with their machines
One way is through the leaderboards. You finish a puzzle and see your friend completed it in fewer cycles, so you see if maybe you could shave off a few cycles yourself. But some players aren’t interested in the leaderboards, and are more interested in simply challenging themselves on their own terms. We deliberately don’t offer any kind of in-game rewards for optimization, so the players who do are often more intrinsically motivated.
The appeal of alchemy and fantastical science
Our games are usually built around fake interpretations of systems like chemistry or electrical engineering. In this sense, alchemy is no different; it’s another system of knowledge that happens to be a little more undefined than the others. Aside from the alchemy, there aren’t actually a lot of fantastical elements in Opus Magnum! The story is pretty grounded, in fact— it’s about the choices you have to make when you work in the service of greater powers.
Wizards of the Coast shares community-building tips at GDC 2019!
The team at Wizards of the Coast have decades of experience building communities around physical (and now digital) games like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, and they’re coming to the 2019 Game Developers Conference next month to share what they’ve learned!
Specifically, as part of a GDC 2019 GDC Community Management Summit talk on “25 Years of Building Community at Wizards of the Coast” which aims to give you a deeper understanding of how to market your brand for a variety of platforms and how experience in community-building at a local level can be applied to a variety of different purposes in the digital age.
Presented by Wizards’ Aland Failde and Michelle Sutterfield, this is a talk worth seeing because over the past 25 years, Wizards has worked closely with local gaming stores to share knowledge and encourage them to shape/empower their own community. Now the company has translated that same experience into the digital space with online influencers, and this is your chance to see how they succeeded. Don’t miss it!
You can find more details on this talk and many more over on the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler! There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.
The Evoland Series: From Game Jam Project to Worldwide Success
Hello, time traveler! I’m Nicolas, lead game developer at Shiro Games, a French independent studio. We released Evoland and Evoland 2 on PC few years ago and we’re now introducing the Evoland Legendary Edition on Xbox One which includes both titles!
The initial concept of Evoland was imagined during a Game Jam (Ludum Dare #24). The theme of this Game Jam was evolution. We had the idea of creating a game which would evolve through its structure rather than through its content. From there, we worked on building a full game and because a large part of the team is formed by retro-gaming enthusiasts, Evoland‘s core concept is based on nostalgia, and Evoland 2 allowed us to explore more gameplay mechanics and graphic designs. For this game, we created four different eras, the antiquity (old Gameboy style), the past (NES), the Present (SNES), and the Future (N64).
The games are designed to be fun yet challenging adventures! You’ll find everything that made you love old-school adventure/RPG games (turn-based combat, tactical maps, collectibles, etc..) with a deep and interesting story.
Evoland Legendary Edition takes you on an epic adventure through space and time exploring the history of famous video game genres. As you progress through this epic adventure your game will evolve. You may start in a 2D environment, playing a classic “Final Fantasy-like” RPG and see yourself transported to a 3D shoot-them-up or a side scrolling Double Dragon-type of game!
There is a lot of mystery around the main character himself. Pay attention to the little details of the story, you will be able to pick up bits of information from the very first moment of gameplay to the very end, and try to piece together his real story. There are a few interesting views from various players who have crafted possible theories about our hero’s past, which could even be his future in some cyclic interpretations!
We really appreciate you reading this introduction to the Evoland Legendary Edition! We can’t wait for you to be able to experience this epic adventure on Xbox One. We truly hope you’ll love playing the game as much as we loved making it!
