Join the Aftercharge Closed Beta on Xbox One 12/14 – 12/16!
This week we’re excited to invite all Xbox Insiders on Xbox One to participate in the Aftercharge Closed Beta! There’s limited space available for this Closed Beta, so please follow the steps under HOW TO PARTICIPATE to join in now.
Aftercharge is a 3 vs 3 competitive game pitting invisible robots against an invincible security squad in high-octane tactical skirmishes. Six glowing structures called extractor are at the center of the gameplay and serve as the objective for both teams.
The robots have to coordinate their attacks, create distractions and sneak around to destroy them. The enforcers on the other hand have to cover as much ground as possible and use their abilities wisely to spot the attackers and stop them before they can destroy all of the extractors.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
1. On your Xbox One console, sign in and launch the Xbox Insider Hub app (or install the Xbox Insider Hub app from the Store first if necessary). 2. From the main landing page, navigate to Insider content > Games > Aftercharge. 3. Select Join. 4. Wait for the registration to complete (Pending will disappear) to be redirected to the Store and install Aftercharge!
NOTE: Space is limited for the Aftercharge Closed Beta, and will be offered on a first-come first-served basis.
Submit feedback, suggestions, and issues you encounter via Report a problem (hold down the Xbox button on the controller and select Report a problem from the power menu).
Random: Man Uses Disguised NES Zapper To Rob A Bank
The NES Zapper was a cool little piece of kit back in the day, allowing gaming fans to use a realistic peripheral to enhance their experiences in titles like Duck Hunt, Wild Gunman, and more. As always, though, someone out there has to go and ruin the fun, with one man being caught using the accessory in a shocking criminal offence.
The earliest NES Zapper models, originally released back in 1984, were almost entirely grey to fit alongside the NES’ colour schemes. Soon after, Nintendo completely changed the design to include bright orange sections, realising that the simplistic grey models could potentially be mistaken for real weapons if they were taken outside. Of course, wrapping the toy in dark tape sadly negates this bright colouring, and that is exactly what happened in this particular case.
The NES Zapper’s usual appearance
The taped-up weapon was used by a man in Hermosillo, Mexico to rob a bank, with the accessory’s usually-bright colouring being almost entirely hidden from view. Bank workers reportedly described the man to local police who, after mounting an operation to find the culprit, managed to track him down and arrest him. The man in question is thought to have potentially been involved in up to 15 other crimes.
Now Available on Steam Early Access – ATLAS, 17% off!
ATLAS is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 17% off!*
ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!
Ashen is a 3rd person, action RPG about forging relationships. You are a lone wanderer in a sunless land. The only light to be had sputters from an age-old lantern at your side. There is a rumble in the distance, and then a light. Through leaking eyes you make out a peak on the horizon, choking the land in a cloud of ash. Nothing ever shone so bright. The first dawn turns to dusk and finally recedes into familiar blackness. A GAME BY AURORA44. This is the tale of a bygone world. Choose a path and hold on to those you trust. Players can choose to guide those they trust to their camp, encouraging them to rest at the fire and perhaps remain. Together, you might just stand a chance.
Is Bumblebee A Transformers Reboot? Timeline And Ending Explained
While Bumblebee may not have a proper post credits sequence, it does tack on an extra little bit of story before the credits actually roll, rounding out the plot and setting up for sequels--maybe? Bumblebee's stinger (pun intended) doesn't have a lot of meat to it, but it does start treading some strangely murky water when you actually look at it in the scope of the whole live action Transformers franchise, which Bumblebee appears to have rebooted--emphasis on "appears to."
Needless to say, spoilers to follow--not just from Bumblebee, but from whole swaths of the Transformers franchise.
Bumblebee highlights the first major Earth-based interaction of Bumblebee the Autobot, and a human girl named Charlie who finds him as a VW Beetle in a junkyard. The whole story is set in the 1980s, not long after the "fall" of Cybertron to the Decepticon army. Charlie and Bee are chased around Earth for a while by two new Decepticons, Shatter and Dropkick, as well as John Cena, before eventually saving the day and--tragically--going their separate ways. Charlie gets a new car--a refurbished classic Camaro she and her late dad had been working on--and Bee, having effectively blown his VW Bug cover, takes a new alternate form of a black and yellow modern Camaro.
Then, following their bittersweet goodbye, we see Bee rendezvousing with a recently arrived Optimus Prime, who hopefully directs his attention to the sky where around seven Cybertronian crafts can be seen entering the atmosphere. It's all very obviously working to set up the next movie in the sequence--though it seems to simultaneously be working to slot itself into the groundwork laid by the first Michael Bay movie back in 2007. It was that first movie in which Bumblebee chose a modern Camaro as his alt-mode, after all, and the place where the whole idea of Bee using his radio to talk was first introduced. If this movie does anything, it's provide Bee a worthy origin story expressly for that 2007 debut, filling in all the gaps that any fan would ever want filled as charmingly as possible.
However, filling those gaps and answering those questions also creates new ones. The Bay arm of the Transformers franchise began getting seriously off the rails with its own history right off the bat by establishing the presence of the "AllSpark" (a mythological Cybertronian artifact) on Earth as early as the 1800s in the first film. Later, in the most recent installment of the Bay movies, Transformers: The Last Knight, it was implied that Cybertronians had reached Earth back in the days of Arthurian legend. Prior to that, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen raised the idea that Cybertronians had been aware of Earth since antiquity and even been involved in the rise of Ancient Egypt.
But Bumblebee gives us a look at not only the fall of Cybertron itself--happening, apparently, in relative real time to the mid '80s on Earth--but also explicitly tells us that this moment was actually the first time Optimus Prime had ever scanned for or sent anyone to Earth at all, making Bumblebee the first Cybertronian to set foot on the planet. This later seems to be supported by the arrival of the movie's main antagonists, Decepticons Dropkick and Shatter, who make the whole "first contact" schtick an ongoing gag.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that future installments in the post-Bumblebee Transformers franchise are going to have to work from the ground up. Everything regarding the timeline is just vague enough that, with a little narrative hopscotching, it's possible to slot stories into the mix that justify the temporal strangeness. After all, if we're to assume that the AllSpark just hasn't been "activated" yet in the '80s, it's completely possible than the Transformers arrived on the planet and were none the wiser, left, and then came back when it was. The characters that would, in theory, be duplicates of robots who have already shown up in the Bay movies--like Starscream and Ravage--could easily just be seen here in older alt-modes or less advanced forms. There's no real limit to the amount of hand waving that can happen in a universe like this.
Or, more likely, future Transformers movies are just going to cherry pick exactly what they want from the established canon and easily forego the rest. Bumblebee may not represent a direct, hard reboot of the entire franchise, but it's certainly a major departure in tone and direction--while it may be making a vague attempt to at least loosely hold things together, it's absolutely not beholden to weave the entire shared universe into one cohesive thing. And to be honest, that's probably for the best.
Nomada Studio “Thrilled” GRIS Is Already Turning A Profit
The visually stunning puzzle-platform game GRIS launched earlier this month. We praised it for being an absolute masterpiece and awarded it nine out of ten stars. If it wasn’t already on your radar, it should be, as it’s got to the point where it is now being referenced alongside some of the best indie titles of 2018.
Nomada Studio – the Barcelona-based team behind the game – recently posted a message on Twitter revealing the title had been positively-received in the launch week and was already turning a profit:
Although no exact sales figures were revealed, we’re guessing this is another game that’s likely to become a sales success on the Switch. For the uninformed, the title tells the story of a hopeful young girl lost in her own world, dealing with a painful experience in her life. It’s further described as an emotionally-driven narrative. Below is the launch trailer:
Have you played GRIS yet? Was this on your wish list before it was released? Tell us below.
Video: Sonic Mania Adventures Animation Returns For A Holiday Special
One of the DLC highlights this year was the add-on content for the 2017 release Sonic Mania. The Plus version of the game added new characters, an encore mode and four-player split-screen.
As we begin to reflect on all the wonderful games released over the past year, the official Sonic The Hedgehog YouTube Channel has uploaded a new Sonic Mania Adventures episode. Part six is a holiday special, celebrating the spirit of giving and features Eggman, Metal Sonic, Amy and a brief cameo from Sonic.
Above is the full episode and below is the synopsis along with a message from the Sega team:
Metal Sonic and Eggman crash into the jungle after being defeated. Broken, abandoned and alone as seasons pass and the skies turn cold, a surprise appearance may change Metal Sonic’s fate forever.
We were so excited to work on this bonus holiday short of Sonic Mania Adventures for you all – a little something to celebrate the spirit of giving, and the kindness that can warm even the coldest of hearts.
Happy Holidays, from all of us at SEGA!
What did you think of the latest animated Sonic short? Leave a comment below.
Xenko 3.1 beta has just been released. This is the first major point release since the Xenko project went open source this summer. The primary focus of this beta is reorganizing Xenko to make it play nicely with the NuGet distribution system, although this refactoring has some very cool side effects. Now you are able to use individual components of Xenko on their own. For example, if you wanted to use the Xenko graphics library on it’s own, you can, independent of the rest of the Xenko game engine. This release also moves towards Xenko using .NET standard.
Details of the release from the Xenko blog:
Xenko was always a big proponent of NuGet: since first version, Xenko was distributed as a NuGet package.
However, due to limitations (hello packages.config and project.json!), we were leveraging NuGet more as a distribution medium than proper NuGet packages: Xenko 3.0 is still a monolithic single package and it would not work out of the box when referenced from Visual Studio without using Xenko Launcher and Game Studio.
Xenko 3.0 paved the way by making Xenko compatible with the new project system (game projects were referencing Xenko using a PackageReference).
Today, Xenko 3.1 brings Xenko as a set of smaller NuGet package, each containing one assembly, with proper dependencies:
As a result, it is now possible to create a game project that references only the packages you want. Here are a few examples of “core” packages:
Xenko.Engine: allows you to use core engine runtime (including its dependencies)
Xenko.Core.Assets.CompilerApp: compile assets at build time
Xenko.Core.Mathematics or Xenko.Graphics: yes, if you want to make a custom project only using Xenko mathematics or graphics API without the full Xenko engine, you can!
Xenko.Core.Assets, Xenko.Presentation or Xenko.Quantum: all those piece of tech being used to build Xenko tooling are also available for reuse in other projects. Nothing prevents you from generating assets on the fly too!
Then, various parts of the engine are distributed as optional packages:
Xenko.Physics
Xenko.Particles
Xenko.UI
Xenko.SpriteStudio
Xenko.Video
If you don’t reference those packages, they won’t be packaged with your game either. In many situations, it results in a smaller packaged game and improved startup time.
In addition to the above changes, you can take a look at the commit log on GitHub for other aspects that made it into the 3.1 release.
Linus Torvalds unleashed kernel 4.20, dubbed Shy Crocodile, on the world this past Sunday. There was speculation whether Torvalds would make the jump from 4.19 to 5.0, as he did when he skipped 3.20 and went with 4.0 instead. In the end, he stuck with 4.20, and 5.0 will probably be the number of the next kernel after this one.
Apart from all that, probably the largest will-he-won’t-he debate revolved around STIBP. STIBP stands for Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors, and that mouthful is a preventive measure against the Spectre/Meltdown bugs. When STIBP was tried out during the 4.19 cycle, developers ended up removing it because it was found to have a negative impact on system performance, slowing down execution of some processes up to 50%. The matter was the subject of a long discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list, with some developers like Andi Kleen arguing that the patch should be reverted entirely. Torvalds, however, pointed out there was a mid-way solution: “[W]e default to something that doesn’t kill performance. Warn once about it, and let the crazy people say «I’d rather take a 50% performance hit than worry about a theoretical issue»“.
After much work, STIBP is back in 4.20, but with performance improvements and allowing processes to choose whether they need to use it or not, because, as it turns out, many don’t.
What the hug?
On what should be a lighter note, but will probably spark outrage anyway (because reasons), Jarkko Sakkinen has taken on himself the thankless job of writing a patch that will cleanse the source code comments of swear words. Instead of just nuking them, the patch changes f-bombs for “hugs”. Hence, expressions become “Get the hug out!”, which implies you have your own personal cache of hugs and you are required to extract and spend one; and “Hug off!”, which must be some kind of endurance event.
Before anybody gets all hot under the collar, it is worth noting that, (a) Sakkinen’s solution is hilarious; and (b) no more reasons should be necessary, but here’s one anyway: such colorful language probably shouldn’t be in code that is easily readable by everyone and that is deployed all over the world to millions of people and businesses. Better reserve cussing for audiences which are more appreciative of the genre, namely Twitter followers and such.
More things to look forward to in Linux 4.20
The open-source NVIDIA Nouveau driver has now got initial HDMI 2.0 support. HDMI 2.0 is what you are going to need to watch movies or play games on 4K displays at 60FPS, since it affords a much larger bandwidth than the currently more common HDMI 1.4 protocol.
Chinese sysadmins will be happy to know that Linux 4.20 supports Hygon Dhyana CPUs. These CPU’s are based on AMD’s Zen microarchitecture and are the result of an AMD-Chinese joint venture that aims to bring domestic x86 chips to data centers.
In more playful news, Linux 4.20 supports the Xbox’s S Controller’s rumbling (meaning it vibrates for added excitement (?) during game play), and there is a working driver for Apple’s Magic Trackpad.
