A few weeks ago, we got our very first look at the Phoenix Wright statue by First 4 Figures. The character is modelled on the same one from the 2013 3DS release, Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies. We very much hope you’ve been saving up, as the asking price for Mr. Wright to defend you in court isn’t exactly cheap.

In total, there are three different editions available to pre-order right now until 28th November. Once you’ve put down a reservation, you’ll need to return to the F4F website on 30th November and validate your order. The pricing starts at $229.99 and goes all the way up to $299.99. The higher you go, the more additional goodies you get with your purchase. The figures are estimated to be released in Q4 2019. Below are full details about each edition:

Standard edition – $229.99
The package includes the following:-

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – Phoenix Wright RESIN statue
• Highly detailed base capturing the theme and style from the courtroom in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies
• Authentication Card

Exclusive edition – $229.99
The package includes the following:-

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – Phoenix Wright RESIN statue
• Highly detailed base capturing the theme and style from the courtroom in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies
• Statue comes with TWO interchangeable head sculpts – Normal and the iconic Shouting face
• Authentication Card

Definitive edition – $299.99
The package includes the following:-

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – Phoenix Wright RESIN statue
• Highly detailed base capturing the theme and style from the courtroom in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies
• Additional large base featuring the defense bench
• TWO acrylic speech bubbles, “OBJECTION!” and “TAKE THAT!” from the game
• Statue comes with TWO interchangeable head sculpts – Normal and the iconic Shouting face
• Authentication Card

Product Size:

Statue on either one of the two bases
Height – 13.5 inches (34cm)
Width – 11 inches (28cm)
Depth – 11 inches (28cm)
Total Weight with large base – 7.37kg
Total Weight with small base – 2.3kg

Will you be forking out for Phoenix Wright’s legal services? Tell us below.

Out Run was confirmed as the next game in the Sega AGES line last week and already it’s been revealed it will arrive on the Japanese eShop later this week. Sega announced the 29th November release date via its official Twitter account. The price of the game aligns with existing releases and will set players back 925 yen (approx. £6.30 / $8.30).

Unfortunately, nothing has changed locally – with the game still expected to be released early next year. What makes this just a tiny bit more frustrating is how we’re still waiting on Phantasy Star – which suffered multiple delays – and won’t even be available here until 13th December.

Of course, if you know how, you can always consider picking up Out Run when it arrives on the Japanese eShop. As it’s a racing game, there aren’t any serious language barriers to deal with.

Do you think you can hold out until next year, or do you intend to get behind the wheel as soon as you possible? Tell us below.

Who wrote this code? Why? What changes lead to this function’s current implementation?

These are typical questions that developers (and sometimes lawyers) ask during their work. Most software development projects use version control software (such as Git or Subversion) to track changes and use the “blame” feature of these systems to answer these questions.

Unfortunately, version control systems are only capable of tracking full lines of code. Imagine the following scenario: A simple file is created by developer A; later, it is changed by Developer B, and finally, by Developer C. The following figure depicts the contents of the files after each modification. The source code has been colored according to the developer who introduced it (blue for Developer A, green for Developer B, and red for Developer C; note that Developer B only changed whitespace –including merging some lines).

Blame tracks lines not tokens

If we were to use git to track these changes, and use git-blame with default parameters, its output will show that Developer B and C are mostly responsible for the contents of the file. However, if we were to instruct blame to ignore changes to whitespace, the results would be:

In general, one would expect to always ask blame to ignore whitespace. Unfortunately, this is not always possible (such as the “blame” view of GitHub, which is computed without ignoring whitespace).

Note that, even if we run blame with the ignore-whitespace option, the “blame” is incorrect. First, lines merged or split are not addressed properly by blame (the ignore-whitespace option does not ignore them). Second, lines that were mostly authored by Developer A are now assigned to Developer C because she was the last one to modify them.

If we consider the token as the indivisible unit of source code (i.e., a token cannot be modified, it can only be removed or inserted), then what we really want is to know who is responsible for introducing each token to the source code base. A blame-per-token for the file in our example would look like the figure below. Note how it correctly shows that the only changes made by C to the source code were the replacement of int with long in three places, and that B made no changes to the code:

cregit: improving blame of source code

We created cregit to do exactly this. The goal of cregit is to provide token-level blame for a software system whose history has been recorded using git. The details of cregit’s implementation can be found in this Working Paper (currently under review).

We have empirically evaluated cregit on several mature software systems. In our experiments, we found that blame-per-line tends to be accurate between 70% and 80% of the time. This highly depends on how much the code has been modified. The more modifications to existing code, the less likely that blame-per-line will be accurate. Cregit on the other hand is able to increase this accuracy to 95% (please see the paper mentioned above for details).

For the last two years, we have been running cregit on the source code of the Linux kernel. The results can be found at: https://cregit.linuxsources.org/code/4.19/.

Blame-per-line is easy to implement, just put the blame information to the side; however, blame-per-token is significantly more complex, as its tokens might have different authors and/or commits responsible for them. Hence, we are currently rolling out an improved view of blame-per-token for kernel release 4.19 of Linux (older versions use an old view, and most of the information here does not apply).

cregit views: inspecting who changed what/when

Below is an example of the blame-per-token views of Linux 4.19, specifically for the file audit.c.html.

The top part gives us an overview of who the authors of the file are. The first 50 authors are individually colored. The source code is colored according to the person who last added the token. The right-hand side of the view shows an overview of the “ownership” of the source code.

While hovering over the source code, you will see a box displaying information about how that token got into the source code: the commit id, its author, and its commit timestamp and summary. If you click on the token, this information is enhanced with a link to the email thread that corresponds to the code review of the commit that inserted that token, as shown below:

The views are highly interactive. For example, one can select to highlight a commit (top middle combo box). In this case, all the code is grayed out, except for the tokens that were added by that commit, as shown below.

You can also click on an author’s name, and only that author’s code will be highlighted. For example, in the image below I have highlighted Eric Paris’s contributions.

cregit is also capable of highlighting the age of the code. The sliding bar at the top right allows to narrow the period of interest. Below I have selected to show changes during the last two years (note that the file was last modified in July 17, 2018.

It is also possible to focus on a specific function, which can be selected with the Functions combo box at the top of the source code. In the example below I have selected the function audit_set_failure. The rest of the code has been hidden.

These features can be easily combined. You can select the age of the code by a specific author. And narrow it to a given function!

cregit views: improving the linkage of email code reviews

We are going to keep expanding the information shown in the commit panel. Currently, in addition to the metadata of the commit that is responsible for the token, it provides hyperlinks to the commit patch, and to any email discussions we have been able to find regarding this commit. We are working to match more and more commits.

cregit: where to get it

cregit is open source, and is accessible from https://github.com/cregit/cregit. It is capable of processing C, C++, Java, and go. We can probably add support for perl and python fairly easily. All we need to support a new language is a tokenizer.

cregit’s input is a git repository, and its output is another git repository that tracks the source code by token (see paper for details). From this repository we construct the blame views shown above. If you are interested to have your repository processed with cregit, email me.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge several people for their contributions:

• Bram Adams. Bram and I are the creators of cregit.
• Jason Lim. As part of his coursework at UVic he implemented the new cregit views, which have greatly improved their usefulness.
• Alex Courouble. As part of his master’s at the Poly of Montreal he implemented the matching algorithms of commits to email discussions, based on earlier work of Yujuan Jiang during her PhD.
• Kate Stewart. She has been instrumental to gather user requirements and to evaluate cregit and its views.
• Isabella Ferreira. She is picking up where Alex left and continues to improve the matching of commits to emails.

This article was written by Daniel German (dmg@turingmachine.org) and originally appeared on GitHub.

The kingdom weathers a period of transition, and the time is ripe for a savvy council member to consolidate their power and make a play for the throne. This is the setup of Royal Adviser, which wants to give you the world, wants to provide an occasion of droll social bonding while running a demanding, skilful contest of numbers and wits.

Not for nothing have games like these, now clustered under the big-tent genre of ‘social deduction’, become rather popular in the past few years. They’re a smart hybrid, difficult to design and playtest thoroughly but immensely satisfying when done just right. Which Royal Adviser, does, mostly. Advisedly.

First, a little background on similar games. In social deduction, the game’s goals and stages are bolstered by secret teams, individual win conditions, betrayal mechanics and a voting system. So there’s that tension between the outward facts of the game and the inward truth: who’s a werewolf, who’s a fascist, who’s the hidden baddie, etc. And the meat of the experience comes from guessing individually & arguing publicly what these social secrets are.

So is Royal Adviser any good? The app itself is easy to use, and the game quite nuanced and fairly well-made. It’s loads better than most similar apps and, but at the same time makes a poor showing when compared to the tabletop giants which preceded it.

That’s putting the horse before the cart, though. Forget how it feels, how does Royal Adviser play? Well, everyone starts with a hidden objective, like raising the happiness or military stat of the kingdom past a certain threshold. Each round is split into a series of small, subtle player actions clustered around a big vote. Most actions are private and hidden, subtly adjusting the kingdom stats or peeking ahead at future voting decisions. So most of the game’s conflict revolves around this subtle game of cat-and-mouse.

Just like in Reigns, the overall status and well-being of the kingdom is divided into Happiness, Military, Wealth and Religion. And also like in Reigns, the decisions made by the adviser are by-and-large stat trade-offs, shifting strength from one area to the next while creating pockets of inequality. But while the voting in public and alliances are encouraged, each court member has a different endgame.

To make this vote possible, the players each have an ‘influence’ stat which quantifies the exact degree they can sway the proceedings. My favorite twist, though, is the very powerful, (sometimes self-destructive), j’accuse option. If you believe another player is acting obviously and has thereby revealed what their ultimate goal is, they can declare what agenda another player has. If the guesser is correct, they take half of the target’s influence. In the reverse case, the opposite happens. Most games don’t have such an open-ended nuclear option, never mind put it so readily in the player’s hands. Scorched earth, baby.

90% of the game is subtle, granular and slow-moving. Alliances are proposed and rejected, manipulations raise and lower stats by a single point. It’s a pass-and-play game, so this pace of play means there’s time for snacks and little side talk. Not much, though, because savvy players need to keep track of pretty much everything going on. The small actions add up to patterns which point to specific player strategies and goals. Unlike, say, Avalon, Resistance or Werewolf, the game isn’t broken up into teams of goodies and baddies, red vs. blue. Instead, from the get-go everyone is a rogue agent looking out for number one. In a way this sidesteps the greatest drawback of social deduction games: sometimes they become a very specific, very narrow type of puzzle. Hunt for the outlier, cluster around the normies. It becomes a race to construct a maximally coherent logical account, and people’s testimony, the whole social atmosphere just gets ‘mechanized’ as part of the game’s normal decision space.

Royal Adviser, thanks to its free-for-all format, doesn’t fall prey to this at all. It has individual moments of betrayal and confrontation but in general plays more like a long bout of public policy than an extended village (witch) trial. It reminds me of a more complex Candy Chaser: you win by advancing your agenda in a race against the other players but must balance the need for speed against the need for secrecy. The ‘social’ component is side-lined. No shouting matches based on who wiggled their chair or ‘looks suspiciously’ a fun but loaded phrase which has launched many a dispute.

The game is a little too ponderous for its own good, having stripped out too much of the dynamism and discussion the social brings to pass-and-play. It’s not quite Werewolf and not quite Castles of Burgundy and suffers from being betwixt. The influence-ranking is a nice way of qualifying votes, and it can get redistributed to other players through slander and accusations. Still, this is actually a better game than its digital format allows: the fluency of play and turn turnover (yes, really) obscure some of its best moments.

Really well-made from both a gameplay and app-perspective, the actual experience falls a little short. Add to that the fact that there is no play-vs-AI and no real tutorial and the game’s good points start looking a little inconvenient, even downright shabby. It’s a good game for pregaming main events, like before a movie, meal or some other gathering, and it avails itself well of these opportunities, but the limited functionality and longer playtime make it more suited to online or AI play, both of which do not exist in the game’s current form. Taken on its strengths and merits from a design and game hobbyist perspective, Royal Adviser is stellar. The reality is less intriguing, though still worth a try for its divergent take on social deduction & betrayal-style games.

It might seem strange to say this now, but four or five years ago, the malevolent spirit of Early Access seemed to haunt every corner of the gaming world.

Journalists lamented the never-ending monsoon of unfinished games clogging their spam filters, PR fusillades riddled with typos occasionally erupting into their inboxes; experienced developers eager to test this new model found themselves spattered by the stink of shovelware, deserved or not; and players themselves tuned out by the droves, continually disappointed by quick cash-in after quick cash-in.

“From the PR perspective, back then, if your email said Early Access, it went to its own folder, and that folder was probably the garbage can,” says Stephanie Tinsley Fitzwilliam, founder and chief of Tinsley PR, a marketing firm specializing in games.

“They began inundated with these unfinished games they were supposed to write about, and that’s not fair to them, even as good as the game might end up being. From a PR perspective, you’ve killed your chance by releasing that broken game early.”

Today, Early Access is merely an asterisk on a game’s release schedule, another bullet-point for an player to consider before settling on the “buy” button. For some mammoth genres, the pre-release hype cycle has become almost mandatory: it’s hard to imagine any serious contender to the battle royale or survival thrones skipping that step, especially since Epic Games’ industry-defining Fortnite continues to advertise itself as “Early Access.”

However, though the culture has shifted in favor of devs who try to organically build an audience as they work on the game itself, to hear some tell it, the label still brings a substantial amount of risk. After all, just ask Compulsion Games, the studio behind the hugely-successful first-person truncheon-’em-up, We Happy Few.

The danger of a good trailer

A simple chronicle of the many boundary-shattering events that occurred during the development of We Happy Few is enough to make any game developer sweat. First came the successful Kickstarter, buffeted by a healthy amount of buzz for the game’s anesthetized take on London’s “Swinging Sixties.”

Then came the Early Access release, which rocketed up the Steam charts off the game’s highly-successful marketing campaign, which included an on-stage teaser at Microsoft’s 2016 E3 press conference that set the veins of the internet alight with intrigue and rumor.

As Compulsion’s COO & producer Sam Abbott describes it, he began to see the idea of the game crystalize in the minds of the fans – an idea that diverged in both scope and scale from the game the team was actually making.

“When the game was launched in Early Access, the expectations of what it was were already set in people’s minds,” he says. “It was a very interesting sort of situation, because people looked in isolation at that video and assumed that’s what the game would be, and ignored all the previous streams – which had millions of views at that point – and they ignored all the marketing material that was on the store page. They ignored the store page, the description, dev interviews, our commentary – basically everything that helps paint a picture of the game.”

 

“The first and most interesting thing I can tell to other developers: Your store page is not irrelevant, but it’s a bit irrelevant. If people have an idea in their mind of what your game is, that’s what they’re buying. It’s not the fine print. In fact, it doesn’t matter how big the print is.”

As Abbott recalls, this apparent “window dressing” included a massive Early Access disclaimer that stated that Compulsion hadn’t yet implemented any aspects of the game’s story – instead, they were focusing on its kooky atmosphere and core survival elements, such as hunger and thirst meters.

“A large number of people just ignored that,” he said. “That’s the first and most interesting thing I can tell to other developers: Your store page is not irrelevant, but it’s a bit irrelevant. If people have an idea in their mind of what your game is, that’s what they’re buying. It’s not the fine print. In fact, it doesn’t matter how big the print is.”

As the feedback continued to flow into Compulsion, the studio decided to make a late-game shift – rather than building a tiny, roguelike-flavored survival experience, they chose to instead staff up and make the game that their newfound customers wanted. In Abbott’s mind, this was the key advantage that the open development process of Early Access afforded the studio.

“I think if we hadn’t done Early Access, I don’t think We Happy Few would’ve been as successful,” he says. Of course, not everyone at Compulsion was thrilled with the studio staffing up to construct an indie experience that could compete with the likes of BioShock, instead of the smaller-scale of the original pitch. For Abbott, however, such concerns about clarity and consistency of artistic vision are ultimately less important than building a game that an audience will mass around.

Early Access can earn you useful feedback — but it won’t save you

“Look, I’m a producer,” he says. “I think a lot of talk about vision and that sort of thing is wank. I appreciate that people have ideas in mind, and sometimes they have a very crystal-clear idea of what they want to build, but the truth is that visions change…the game you want to make rarely survives first contact with people. We were able to build out these story locations and story moments and character development. When your game gets bigger, you spend more time with the audience, and you can become more ambitious.”

In order to make that experience possible, however, Compulsion needed money, and a lot of it. As We Happy Few ballooned, so did the studio itself, first through a close partnership with Microsoft – which bore fruit in the form of that highly-prized E3 stage slot – and eventually the newly-forged publishing arm of Gearbox, who provided much of the funds that ultimately allowed Compulsion to reinvest in their idea and scale up to a “retail-quality” title, along with a raft of other investors.

 

“One: do you think your game would benefit from significant, ongoing feedback? And two: do you have financing requirements that might benefit from Early Access?” If the answer is yes to both, then I think you should go for it.”

While Abbott describes both relationships as extremely productive, a retail game almost always carries a premium price tag, and that’s where the controversy began to flood in: when Compulsion made the tough decision to raise the price from $30 to $60. Though Abbott and Co. carefully authored a blog post where they announced the decision, once word of the hike creeped outside the community, the internet ran wild with the news.

“As far as I’m aware, I don’t think anybody has been quite as open about that decision as we were at the time,” Abbott says, with a small sigh. “Every single reason is there, and we’re quite open about a bunch of things that influence decisions once you start getting into the retail market…The community that follows us understood what we were doing, but the people who picked it up on Reddit, or maybe an angry YouTube video, just sorta caught the price rise and didn’t understand we were effectively tripling the size of the game.”

“Judging price is difficult no matter how you look at it, but I think the bigger issue is unless the community is judging your final product, they’re not going to have the right perspective. It’s not something that consumers and gamers are aligned on at all. You’ve got some people who’ll never pay more than $15 for a video game. Obviously, that’s a bit absurd when you think about the time and energy people put into them. The bigger companies have created a lot of monetization systems because certain customers don’t want to pay anymore, even though the costs of development are increasing. All of that is really not to criticize anyone, but to mention that people are in different situations and places all of their lives.”

When push comes to shove, Abbott says that if Compulsion could start all over again on We Happy Few, he’d make all of the same decisions again. Though he thinks Early Access is ultimately here to stay, to him, player communication still remains one of the greatest challenges that the team faced, and he’s still not quite sure how to fix it.

Even though Compulsion published three years’ worth of blog-posts detailing every aspect of the game’s turbulent development, it didn’t do much to stem the tide of angry commenters when word of the increased price hit major gaming subreddits. And though developers might still maintain a stereotype of what an Early Access game looks like, Abbott says that it’s best to keep an open mind.

“People say that Early Access doesn’t help story-based games, and while I think that was a challenge in our situation, it wasn’t for the reasons that people talk about. People say that a story spoiled is a bad story, but in our case, the story wasn’t there, but the setting was. It’s all about managing expectations in that regard, if a big part of your game is missing, then you need to properly communicate that.

“It all goes back to two core points,” Abbott concludes. “One: do you think your game would benefit from significant, ongoing feedback? And two: do you have financing requirements that might benefit from Early Access?” If the answer is yes to both, then I think you should go for it.”

Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokemon: Let’s Go, Eevee! has sold three million copies worldwide in its first week on shelves. 

The news comes straight from The Pokemon Company on Twitter (translated by the good folks at Gematsu), and means Let’s Go is already the fifth best-selling Switch title of all time.

It’s a notable feat when you consider Let’s Go isn’t even a mainline Pokemon release, but rather a casual re-imagining of Pokemon Red and Blue that pulls over mechanics from the Pokemon Go mobile game. 

Despite that apparent handicap, the title also managed to sell over 660,000 units in Japan during in first three days on home soil, helping triple Switch hardware sales in the region.

The biggest weekend of the year is here for Hi-Rez Studios! We just kicked off our annual Hi-Rez Expo, live from DreamHack Atlanta, featuring the world championships for both our mythological MOBA Smite and our fantasy hero shooter Paladins.

I’m thrilled to tell you about our biggest announcements, but first: You can get the new Smite Arena Bundle free on the Microsoft Store for a limited time! With this bundle’s seven gods you’ll be able to turn your foes to stone as Medusa, summon the might of a volcanic eruption as Pele, or resurrect fallen teammates as Khepri, the Dawn Bringer. The bundle also includes eight great skins, all free!

You may be asking, “Why call it the Arena Bundle?” That’s because of Smite’s biggest announcement: An all-new map for the insanely popular 5v5 Arena mode! This fast-paced brawl is a non-stop clash of the gods, with no complications.

And the new Arena map is available in-game right now! The map’s completely redone visuals both look better and improve gameplay clarity. Even better, the new Arena map tells a story of the ongoing battle between Hera, the Greek Queen of the Gods, and Bellona, the Roman Goddess of War… with the occasional rampaging Minotaur to make things interesting.

A new Arena map wasn’t enough for Smite. Prepare to enter a land called Avalon with Smite’s 99th and 100th gods: King Arthur and Merlin. These two legendary heroes from Arthurian mythology will bring an entirely new dimension to the battleground of the gods when they release early next year.

Paladins kicked off HRX by announcing its 40th Champion (and its most ambitious yet): Imani, the Last Warder. Perhaps more than any other Champion, the dragon mage Imani captures the true essence of Paladins: The shooting elements of modern games crossed with the magic of a fantasy world. This stance switcher slings fireballs and ice bolts… and summons a massive dragon, which is just cool.

Imani’s introduction is part of a new direction for Paladins, driven by the game’s fantasy world. Her arrival was foretold by a lore story arc that began back in August. This consistent story, which evolves from month-to-month, will drive a 2019 full of new Champions, maps, and game modes which combine to tell an ongoing tale.

These monthly major updates will also introduce long-requested features like clans, in-game tournaments and persistent lobbies. And Paladins has so much more in store for 2019, I can’t fit it all in this post. Check out our 2019 teaser video to get a taste for what’s in store for Paladins!

Imani won’t drop until Season 2 begins in January, but the beat has already dropped in Paladins with the Remix Battle Pass, which went live on Thursday as part of the 1.8 update. Check it out and get some sweet skins for Strix, Jenos, Seris, and… a Vulpin from an alternate reality named Pepper?

Realm Royale, our fantasy class-based battle royale, entered closed alpha on Xbox One earlier this year. Today, Realm Royale is taking the next step towards release by entering closed beta on Xbox One! Realm Royale closed beta keys are being sent out every day. Sign up for the Realm Royale Closed Beta here!

Both Paladins and Smite made one more major announcement: The introduction of democratically elected player councils. These councils embrace the philosophy of Hi-Rez Studios of player-driven development and will help guide the direction of both Smite and Paladins. Learn more about Paladins’ Assembly of Champions and Smite’s Olympians, and how you can join!

Don’t miss another moment of Hi-Rez Expo. We’re happy to have partnered with Mixer to stream every moment of HRX 2018 and give away some free loot! If you link your Hi-Rez Account to your Microsoft Account and watch either the Smite channel or the Paladins channel, you can get SPL Bellona and Coldsnap Furia free!