Football Manager 2019 is Now Available on Steam!

Simulation gaming perfected. Create your unique footballing story by taking charge of the club you love. Complete control of this stunningly realistic game world is yours – every decision in your hands, or yours to delegate. Your call, your way, your story. Everything you’ve ever dreamed of!

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Skip Ahead will begin receiving the latest 19H1 Xbox One system update (rs_xbox_dev_flight.181022.1900). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 19H1 system update.  This build has the same features as 1811 plus more to be announced over the coming months!

New Features:

Family Settings

• We have added a new setting that lights up the features that allow a non-adult account with no parent to accrue a parent on console.

 Mouse & Keyboard Support

• We have enabled mouse support in the build.  Please check out the Quest in the Xbox Insider Hub to experience mouse and keyboard support in Warframe.

 Search Enhancements

• The search function has been enhanced across the console and will now return responses from the Xbox Assist application for example to help with help, support and troubleshooting.  Please check out the Quest in the Xbox Insider Hub to help us gather feedback.

Fixes:

Accounts

• We have fixed the issue in which Child accounts could not login on the console.

 Audio

• We made a change to the workload scheduling of Mixer and Audio to reduce audio glitching issues. Let us know if there are any regressions in Game DVR or Mixer audio.

 Media remote

• The IR remote audio controls (volume up/down and mute functions) on the media remote are now working.

 My Games and Apps

• We have fixed the issue in which game and app updates were not automatically downloading and installing.

 Notifications

• We have fixed an issue with users being prompted and spammed by a “Welcome to Game Pass” notification.

 Power

• We have fixed issues in which the console is fully powering off when it is placed into Instant On mode.

 System

• Addressed the system Out of Box Experience to set the features of Dolby Vision, Variable Refresh rate and low latency modes when enabling 4k mode.
• Stability fixes in this build.

Known Issues:

Avatars

• It can take up to 10 seconds to view an Avatar on the profile screen after creating a new Avatar.

 Profile Color

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

Great news for speed demons! Rising Star Games, in partnership with UK-based independent game developer Supergonk, are bringing the co-op arcade racer Trailblazers to the Switch eShop on 15th November after a short delay.

The game features an innovative on-track game mechanic. Racing in teams of up to three-versus-three, players are able to paint the track Splatoon-style as they race, capturing key areas to alter the all-important racing line. Six-player online is also included.

That’s not all! The Switch version will also feature an exclusive character: the overbearing space frog father of Boo – Boo’s Dad! (no, not that Boo!)

It all sounds quite promising. Check out the trailer above and let us know if you plan to pick this up later in the month with a comment below.

– Fixed a longstanding bug that caused units to attack more slowly than expected at certain attack speeds.
– Fixing a bug that caused Morphling to not gain stats when leveling up while morphed.
– Fixed a bug that allowed the Silence from Riki’s Smoke Screen to be applied to units with Spell Immunity.
– Fixed a bug that caused Monkey King to become disabled when Feared during Primal Spring channeling.
– Fixed post-game scoreboard text not clipping correctly with long strings.

The first snapshot for 1.14 “Village & Pillage” is here, and oh boy, it’s a big one! With new items, new blocks, new mobs, new blocks, new enchantments, new blocks, new mechanics, even more new blocks, new commands, and not to forget all the new blocks – we’re pretty confident there’s something for everyone in this snapshot!

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

• Added Bamboo Blocks into the game
• Added Bamboo Jungles in the world
• Rewrote the book & quill editing to be more intuitive
• Added Crossbows!
• Added lots of new decorative blocks!
• Added new dyes and flowers!
• Added some community suggestions
• Updated the credits list
• Added in-game buttons for reporting bugs or giving feedback
• Added Illager Beast
• Added Loom into the game
• Special banner patterns can now be crafted into a new item, Banner Patterns
• We’re now using the new textures!
• Added pandas!
• Added Pillagers
• Added suspicious stew – hmmmm!

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!

We’ve been celebrating ID@Xbox’s incredible milestone of releasing 1,000 games through the program and as a special treat, we wanted to share a handful of sneaky in-game Easter eggs you might have missed hidden within your favorite games through the ID@Xbox program. Take a peek below and let us know if you have a favorite Easter egg of your own!

Cuphead – Try to spot the original 12 Street Fighter II characters when battling Ribby and the Croaks!

“The Ribby and Croaks fight is one giant homage to our love of fighting games. Throughout the battle, there’s a visual reference to each of the original 12 Street Fighter II characters. From the top, Ribby and Croaks’ gi colors reference Ryu and Ken. Croaks’ flaming fire flies represent Dhalsim’s yoga fire while Ribby’s spinning hand attack is from E. Honda and the flying boxing gloves are from Balrog.  In phase two, Ribby claps sonic booms like Guile while Croaks’ spinning is a nod to Zangief’s lariat. When the frogs combine, Ribby rolls into Croaks like Blanka to start phase three. As the slot machine, the snake, tiger, and bull icons denote Vega, Sagat, and M.Bison, while the spiked drums resemble Chun Li’s bracelets.”

– Maja Moldenhauer, StudioMDHR

SpeedRunners & No Time to Explain – Can you guess what crossover ties both of these games together?

“There is a fun crossover Easter egg between No Time to Explain and SpeedRunners. The Shark Boss from No Time to Explain has a ship called “SS Royale” in the background. This is the same ship name as in the SpeedRunners level “SS Royale” that takes place on a ship!”

– Alex Nichiporchik, tinyBuild 

Human: Fall Flat – Have you discovered the secret hidden in the Aztec ruins?

“There are countless ways to traverse the weird and wonderful dreamscapes of Human: Fall Flat. Each level’s physics-based puzzles can be solved any way you see fit, and with up to eight players flailing across a level together, you’re bound to come across some of the game’s hidden gems!

One of Human: Fall Flat’s most challenging secrets can be found in the Aztec level, a labyrinth of swinging platforms and perilous walkways reserved only for the most seasoned of Bobs. Once you’ve made your way across the level’s first platform and into the Aztec ruins, ignore the huge opening teasing you forward and turn around. Climb up the cage behind you and use the box above it to access a narrow grass path. Carefully climb to its peak and your reward will be a literal nest of colorful Easter eggs! Pretty clever, huh? Good luck, fellow humans!”

– Jack Gosling, Curve Digital

In case you missed it – we shared some of the Xbox team’s favorite ID@Xbox memories earlier this week, as well as favorite moments shared by our friends across the industry. What’s your favorite ID@Xbox moment? Give us a Tweet and let us know!

Communication is a large part of who we are as human beings, and today, technology has allowed us to communicate in new ways and to audiences much larger and wider than ever before. That technology has assumed single-language speech, which — quite often — does not reflect the way people naturally speak. India, like many other parts of the world, is multilingual on a societal level with most people speaking two or more languages. I speak Bengali, English, and Hindi, as do a lot of my friends and colleagues. When we talk, we move fluidly between these languages without much thought.

This mixing of words and phrases is referred to as code-mixing or code-switching, and from it, we’ve gained such combinations as Hinglish and Spanglish. More than half of the world’s population speaks two or more languages, so with as many people potentially code-switching, creating technology that can process it is important in not only creating useful translation and speech recognition tools, but also in building engaging user interface. Microsoft is progressing on that front in exciting ways.

In Project Mélange, we at Microsoft Research India have been building technologies for processing code-mixed speech and text. Through large-scale computational studies, we are also exploring some fascinating linguistic and behavioral questions around code-mixing, such as why and when people code-mix, that are helping us build technology people can relate to. At the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), my colleagues and I have the opportunity to share some of our recent research with our paper “Word Embeddings for Code-Mixed Language Processing.”

A data shortage in code-mixed language

Word embeddings — multidimensional vector representation where words similar in meaning or used in similar context are closer to each other — are learnt using deep learning from large language corpora and are valuable in solving a variety of natural language processing tasks using neural techniques. For processing code-mixed language — say, Hinglish — one would ideally need an embedding of words from both Hindi and English in the same space. There are standard methods for obtaining multilingual word embeddings; however, these techniques typically try to map translation equivalents from the two languages (e.g., school and vidyalay) close to each other. This helps in cross-lingual transfer of models. For instance, a sentiment analysis system trained for English can be appropriately transferred to work for Hindi using multilingual embeddings. But it’s not ideal for code-mixed language processing. While school and vidyalay are translation equivalents, in Hinglish, school is far more commonly used than vidyalay; also, these words are used in slightly different contexts. Further, there are grammatical constraints on code-mixing that disallow certain types of direct word substitutions, most notably for verbs in Hinglish. For processing code-mixed language, the word embeddings should ideally be learnt from a corpus of code-mixed text.

It is difficult to estimate the amount of code-mixing that happens in the world. One good proxy is the code-mixing patterns on social media. Approximately 3.5 percent of the tweets on Twitter are code-mixed. The above pie charts show the distribution of monolingual and code-mixed, or code-switched (cs), tweets in seven major European languages: Dutch (nl), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), and Turkish (tr).

The chart above shows the distributions of monolingual and code-mixed tweets for 12 major cities in Europe and the Americas that were found to have very large or very small fractions of code-mixed tweets, represented in the larger pies by the missing white wedge. The smaller pies show the top two code-mixed language pairs, the size being proportionate to their usage. The Microsoft Research India team found that code-mixing is more prevalent in cities where English is not the major language used to tweet.

Even though code-mixing is extremely common in multilingual societies, it happens in casual speech and rarely in text, so we’re limited in the amount of text data available for code-mixed language. What little we do have is from informal speech conversations, such as interactions on social media, where people write almost exactly how they speak. To address this challenge, we developed a technique to generate natural-looking code-mixed data from monolingual text data. Our method is based on a linguistic model known as the equivalence constraint theory of code-mixing, which imposes several syntactic constraints on code-mixing. In building the Spanglish corpus, for example, we used Bing Microsoft Translator to first translate an English sentence into Spanish. Then we aligned the words, identifying which English word corresponded to the Spanish word, and in a process called parsing identified in the sentences the phrases and how they’re related. Then using the equivalence constraint theory, we systematically generated all possible valid Spanglish versions of the input English sentence. A small number of the generated sentences were randomly sampled based on certain criteria that indicated how close they were to natural Spanglish data, and these sentences comprise our artificial Spanglish corpus. Since there is no dearth of monolingual English and Spanish sentences, using this fully automated technique, we can generate as large a Spanglish corpus as we want.

Solving NLP tasks with an artificially generated corpus

Through experiments on parts-of-speech tagging and sentiment classification, we showed that word embeddings learnt from the artificially generated Spanglish corpus were more effective in solving these NLP tasks for code-mixed language than the standard cross-lingual embedding techniques.

The linguistic theory–based generation of code-mixed text has applications beyond word embeddings. For instance, in one of our previous studies published earlier this year, we showed that this technique helps us in learning better language models that can help us build better speech recognition systems for code-mixed speech. We are exploring its application in machine translation to improve the accuracy of mixed-language requests. And imagine a multilingual chatbot that can code-mix depending on who you are, the context of the conversation, and what topic is being discussed, and switch in a natural and appropriate way. That would be true engagement.

As Nick mentioned last week, The Weekender is dead. Long live the Weekender! Or rather, long live whatever will rise to take it’s place. He’s not leaving us, and we still want to let you know what deals crop up, what new games are out etc… it’s just that we may change-up how we do that.

For starters, I’m going to be handling a lot more of it myself which will free up Nick to work on bigger and better things. We’re going to be trying out a new monthly column, and I imagine he will return to reviewing & feature work as well. His first entry of the new column will drop on Friday, November 30th.

For the sake of easing the transition, I’ve put together a weekend gaming guide myself this week along the lines you’re used to. This will probably start changing over time as we figure out how best to deal with the various elements that made Out Now/The Weekender so valuable.

What We’ve Been Up to

As far as the week goes, we kicked things off with our belated review of Stardew Valley, and then followed up with an even more belated review of colourful puzzler ELOH. Yesterday we put up a guide to some quality free games on iOS, and C&C Rivals’ release date was revealed.

What do we have coming up? Well our writers are hard at work, and over the next week (or so), you may see the following:

• Reviews of Element RTS & Love Letter.
• An in-depth look at C&C Rivals.
• Another round of updates to key guides (although I’ll try not to do as many, as soon).

We’re also interested in looking at some of the games below, but those articles are unlikely to be turned around in time for next week.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming…

Out Now

For now, unless otherwise stated, assume that we haven’t managed to get any hands-on time with these games. As we transition to this new world order it will take a while before I can start testing out games as Nick did. Thank you for your patience.

Old School Runescape (iOS Universal & Android) – Full review planned!

One of the headline releases for this week – this classic version of iconic MMORPG Runescape has made the jump to mobile. I remember playing this game back in the early early days, before World of Warcraft came out (Runescape was first launched in 2001, WoW dropped in ’04). ‘Old School’ Runescape is based on an older version of the game from 2007 which was released in 2013 as a stand-alone experience.

It’s a free-to-play game with a subscription option (check the store page for details on what you get), and the development is entirely community driven. For new content to be added to the game, it needs to pass a 75% vote. This mobile port also has cross-platform enabled, so you can play it on any device. Unlike a lot of MMO/RPGs, there’s no central narrative – it’s a wholly sandbox environment, with both PvE and PvP content. And FAQ with more details can be found here.

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Football Manager 2019 Touch (iPad & Android)
Football Manager 2019 Mobile (iOS Universal & Android)

Football Manager’s annual release is upon us, and this time it’s come with a slight name change. I’m not sure what the significance is in not having the year at the end, but I’m sure it was super-important.

As a reminder, FM Touch is a streamlined version of the PC game that only works on tablets, where-as FM Mobile is a bespoke game, offering a slim-downed version of Football Manager to account for the fact that it also works on phones. We reviewed FM Touch 2018 a couple of months ago, and changes in the 2019 version include new tactical styles, the inclusion of the German Bundesliga and a new UI interface

New features in FM 19 Mobile include the introduction of licensed kits, new leagues from Russian and China and similar UI enhancements. We’ll get you a review of at least one of these as soon as we can.

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Farabel (iOS Universal & Android) – Full review planned!

Another one for the review pile, Farabel is a turn-based strategy game where players start at the end of the story, at maximum power. As you progress through the campaign, you jump back in time and you and your get weaker and weaker as you try and fight to save your city.

It’s an interesting twist on the typical design of a strategy game campaign, and I wish I’d been able to give you some hands-on thoughts. Other features include a challenge mode, a ‘classic’ mode that has you build an army via a points-buy system and see what you can do with it and a ‘defence’ mode.

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Squids Odyssey (iOS Universal & Android)

Something different to round-off our new releases – it’s another premium turn-based strategy game, but one with a colourful and unique aesthetic. Squids Odyssey has you building a team of heroic squids to take on crabs and other pesky crustaceans across 90+ missions and a variety of classes and squad combinations.

I’m afraid all we can provide is the trailer, but this might be an interesting break from the usual turn-based tactics games we get… although, you’ve got to really like sea creatures, I guess. We might take a look at this one ourselves at some point.

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Updates

Pocket City (Review) (iOS Universal & Android)

One of our favourite releases of the year, Pocket City has received a major content update that includes a larger map option for new cities (inc. sandbox), some UI improvements on the new iPhone XS, XS Max & XR and a new ‘Zoo’ structure, to name but a few things. It’s always great to have an excuse to jump in to an excellent game.

Stardew Valley (Review) (iOS Universal)

The seminal farming/rpg sim has had a string of mobile updates since it’s release last week, the latest of which including some stability fixes for mine levels, and control improvements for fishing. Anyone using an iPhone XR will also now have the correct resolution displaying.

A lot of the updates deal with minor bug-fixing and QoL improvements but keep an eye out for the major overhaul coming to the game’s control schemes on mobile. The developers have confirmed these are in the works, but we don’t know when they’ll land. We do know some of the details though, as this updated wiki page highlights. A lot of options there!

Sales

Zombie Rogue (Review) (iOS Universal & Android) – $1.99

We weren’t a fan of this one, but plenty of people came out in its defence in the comments so it’s worth highlighting that this has been discounted. Zombie-themed survival horror with a twist.

Heroes of Steel RPG Elite (iOS Universal & Android) – $1.99

One of the Trese Brother’s games, Heroes of Steel is a turn-based fantasy RPG that takes you through a winding, epic adventure as you try to protect the last remnants of humanity. Like most Trese games, there’s a free version you can try, but the premium game is now discounted to just a couple of bucks. Please note, you can’t transfer save game data between the free and premium versions.

Reiner Knizia’s Modern Art: The Card Game (iOS Universal) – $0.99

Another Knizia game, we’ve not actually taken a look at this one before, but it’s only a dollar if anyone wants to speculate. It’s described as a card game of management and valuation. You must drive up the prices of your favourite artworks, holding out for the best price.

Age of Rivals (Review) (iOS Universal & Android) – $1.99

A PT favourite, Age of Rivals is discount again to only a couple of bucks. It’s been cheaper but not since June 2017 and that seems like a one-off so far. This is still a fair price for an excellent strategy boardgame.

Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know I the comments!

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Introducing the Nerf Fortnite AR-L! Motorized blasting action to create your own NERF Fortnite battles! (Link in bio for more info)

A post shared by Nerf (@nerf) on Oct 25, 2018 at 7:00am PDT