Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-20-2018, 12:04 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Here's A Killer Deal For Xbox One Owners, Even If You Don't Like Racing Games
If you have an Xbox One, you'll want to take a look at this deal. Between now and September 30, you can get a year's subscription to Xbox Game Pass, plus copies of Forza Horizon 3 and Forza Motorsport 7 to keep, for $99. Considering a 12-month Game Pass subscription alone normally costs $120, that's a seriously great deal even if you're not into racing games. You can get the deal here.
But for those who are into racing games, you'll also be able to play Forza Horizon 4 for free when it launches on October 2. That's because it's a Microsoft-published game, and all first-party games are included in Xbox Game Pass at launch.
Xbox Game Pass gives you access to over 100 Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One games. All you have to do is peruse the Game Pass catalog and download whatever games you want to play. You can play them for as long as you have a current membership (or until they leave the Game Pass catalog). If you want to purchase any game from the library so you have it forever, you'll get a 20% discount off its normal price. You also get 10% off any DLC for titles in the Game Pass library.
It's a pretty great selection of games, too. It has Xbox One exclusives like Sea of Thieves, State of Decay 2, Halo 5, Gears of War 4, and Quantum Break. It also has lots of major third-party games, including Fallout 4, The Division, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Doom, Hitman, and many more.
If you want access to a wide selection of quality Xbox games, subscribing to Game Pass is a terrific deal even at its normal full price. This deal trims $20 off the regular price and throws in two phenomenal racing games for good measure. You can't go wrong with this deal.
The talk was inspired by this article, in which Rikki examined some ways that writing can “spark joy” and improve your career in unexpected ways. Full disclosure: I have known Rikki for a long time. We worked at the same company for many years, raised our children together, and remain close friends.
Write and learn
As Rikki noted in the talk description, “even if you don’t consider yourself to be ‘a writer,’ you should consider writing about your open source contributions, project, or community.” Writing can be a great way to share knowledge and engage others in your work, but it has personal benefits as well. It can help you meet new people, learn new skills, and improve your communication style.
I find that writing often clarifies for me what I don’t know about a particular topic. The process highlights gaps in my understanding and motivates me to fill in those gaps through further research, reading, and asking questions.
“Writing about what you don’t know can be much harder and more time consuming, but also much more fulfilling and help your career. I’ve found that writing about what I don’t know helps me learn, because I have to research it and understand it well enough to explain it,” Rikki said.
Writing about what you’ve just learned can be valuable to other learners as well. In her blog, Julia Evans often writes about learning new technical skills. She has a friendly, approachable style along with the ability to break down topics into bite-sized pieces. In her posts, Evans takes readers through her learning process, identifying what was and was not helpful to her along the way, essentially clearing a path for her readers and removing obstacles for those new to the topic.
Communicate more clearly
Writing can help you practice thinking and speaking more precisely, especially if you’re writing (or speaking) for an international audience. In this article, for example, Isabel Drost-Fromm provides tips for removing ambiguity for non-native English speakers. Writing can also help you organize your thoughts before a presentation, whether you’re speaking at a conference or to your team.
“The process of writing the articles helps me organize my talks and slides, and it was a great way to provide ‘notes’ for conference attendees, while sharing the topic with a larger international audience that wasn’t at the event in person,” Rikki stated.
If you’re interested in writing, I encourage you to do it. I highly recommend the articles mentioned here as a way to get started thinking about the story you have to tell. Unfortunately, our discussion at Open Source Summit was not recorded, but I hope we can do another talk in the future and share more ideas.
Check out the schedule of talks for Open Source Summit Europe and sign up to receive updates:
Relive the glory days of cooperative arcade games with the Capcom Beat ?Em Up Bundle. This comprehensive collection includes seven classic games, each with various multiplayer options, online capabilities and detailed galleries.
Marvel To Make New TV Shows Starring Loki, Scarlet Witch, And More - Report
Disney's new streaming service will include brand-new TV shows based on "beloved superheroes" who haven't received their own movies. That's according to a report from Variety, whose sources said there will be shows for Loki and Scarlet Witch, both of whom have appeared in numerous Marvel films, but haven't had their own movies as of yet.
Intriguingly, Variety reports that Disney is looking for the movie actors to play the same roles in the TV shows, instead of going for a different cast. That means Tom Hiddleston is lined up to play Loki and Elizabeth Olsen tapped to play Scarlet Witch.
Each show will be 6-8 episodes and be made using a sizable budget, according to the report. They will be produced by Marvel Studios, and studio boss Kevin Feige is reportedly going to have a "hands-on" role in them.
Another important note from the report is that the new shows will focus on "second-tier" MCU characters, not topline ones like Captain America and Iron Man who have previously have their own movies. No story details for the new shows were referenced in the report. You can read Variety's full story here.
Disney's upcoming streaming service is poised to be a rival of sorts to Netflix. It is reportedly due to launch at the end of 2019; details on subscription pricing has yet be announced.
The rumoured new superhero shows join the previously confirmed Season 7 for Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the Disney streaming service. What's more, there will be a live-action Star Wars series on the new service, which will be set seven years after Return of the Jedi.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-19-2018, 11:17 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
The Prices Of Pokemon Cards Are Making It Difficult To Play
I lay restlessly in bed a few nights ago thinking about something I presume many people who have just turned 30 think about: Pokemon cards. I wasn't counting Mareep to lull myself into a slumber, nor was I dreaming of sliding down the freakishly long neck of an Alolan Exeggutor (not tonight, at least). No, I was thinking about how bloody expensive the Pokemon Trading Card Game is, and this made me unreasonably upset at roughly 1 in the morning.
For a lot of people, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is something they remember fondly from school. Opening booster packs of 10 randomised cards, comparing shinies with mates, and making ill-advised trading decisions based on the playground economics of each card's perceived worth. But for many, including myself, it's so much more than that. It's one of the best online and offline card games on the market, with the added bonus of fuzzy nostalgia in pocket-sized monster form.
A few years ago I got back into Pokemon cards. It was oddly fulfilling about being able to spend adult money on something I could rarely afford as a scruffy 11-year-old in secondary school. I quickly started playing and competing, thanks to the support of my local Pokemon League and the friendly bunch of players who turned up each Saturday morning. Building decks and taking my best Pokemon cards into an intense one-on-one battle was far more exciting than anything I had experienced in the video games. I was hooked.
Something you learn about very quickly in the world of Pokemon cards is the meta. Certain decks of 60 cards are just better than others, so if you want to be competitive you need to have one of those decks. It seems simple, but herein lies the inherent problem with The Pokemon Trading Card Game: the best decks have the best cards, and the best cards are often rare (or even ultra rare), which makes pulling them randomly from booster packs extremely unlikely and uneconomical. So unless you're funded by Team Rocket or you can convince someone to trade their very good cards for your not-so-good ones, the next logical step is to find someone selling the cards you need on eBay or through a collectible card seller online. But of course the rare, powerful cards are in high demand and have a premium price tag attached to them.
What I'm describing will of course sound familiar to anyone who has played any trading or collectible card game. To a certain extent it's just the nature of the beast, but other card games offer alternatives to you hemorrhaging cash just to keep up with the meta. Magic the Gathering, for example, widely supports multiple formats for veterans and newcomers on any budget, with limited formats like Draft and Sealed levelling the playing field, and a much larger player base to support this. Hearthstone, the popular online collectible card game from Blizzard, lets you break down unwanted cards so you can craft those you need. Pokemon, on the other hand, is effectively pay or lose.
In 2012 a card called Darkrai-EX came along, at the height of my love and obsession for Pokemon cards. The deck winning all the local tournaments had four of these cards, and it was available as part of the Dark Explorers expansion, so obviously I needed it. I decided to take the plunge and drop £80 on a box of 36 Dark Explorers booster packs. After feverishly unwrapping them in what was, to be fair, a pretty cathartic pack-cracking binge, I couldn't believe what had happened: after all that money spent, I hadn't pulled a single Darkrai-EX, and I needed four. The card was selling for £40 a pop on eBay, so that was it. I packed it all in and I headed for the greener pastures of the "Living Card Games" by Fantasy Flight Games, which did away with randomised boosters and offered a more constructed experience with games like Android: Netrunner and A Game of Thrones: The Card Game.
This brings us back to me, years later, an adult, laying in bed thinking about Pokemon cards. The 2018 Pokemon World Championships have just taken place in Nashville, Tennessee. There, the best TCG players in the world get together and put their decks to the ultimate test. First place takes home a massive $25,000, so the pressure is on to pick the right deck and pilot it to victory. Of course, I'm playing Pokemon cards again. Nothing has since matched the gameplay experience for me so I couldn't stay away for long, but this time I'm determined to do it on a budget. I jump out of bed, switch on my computer, and begin to pore over the winning deck lists fresh from Nashville to see if I could afford any of them.
In the Masters Division a Zoroark / Garbodor deck carved a path to a first place victory. I looked up how much it would cost to buy these cards online and, at the time of writing, this deck would cost a whopping £237.40 ($305) to build. Second place went to a Malamar deck, another staple in the format, which carries a price tag of £145.52 ($187). In at third was a Zygarde / Lycanroc deck to the tune of £168.70 ($217), and finishing in fourth we have a deck using the recently released Rayquaza-GX from the Celestial Storm expansion. This one would cost £213.40 ($274) to build with cards purchased from online sellers, and as it happens similar Rayquaza decks also filled in three more spots in the top 10 at 5th, 7th and 10th.
You can see the picture I'm painting here, but at this point I want to stress that merely owning an expensive meta deck doesn't guarantee victory. It takes a lot of skill, and hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice to play at the level seen at the Pokemon World Championships. To reduce the game simply to the cost of a deck would be a discredit to the incredibly talented, passionate, dedicated, kind, and friendly people who make up the TCG community.
The problem I'm facing, though, is that decks like Zoroark make up a huge percentage of what is currently played not just on the world stage but in local tournaments too. Zoroark decks alone made up nearly 30% of competitive play in the last season, so it's hard to ignore the fact that expensive decks do win games, whether that's at the highest level in tournaments, or friendly local games. Nearly every competitive deck includes multiple copies of the meta staple Tapu Lele-GX, which currently costs about £30 ($38) for one copy.
It's no surprise, then, that pack-opening videos are so popular on YouTube, with people (likely a lot of young children) living vicariously through those who can afford to buy endless booster packs and share the treasures within for the viewer at home. There's even an eight hour long video where an eye-watering $24,000 worth of Pokemon Sun & Moon boosters are opened up for over one million viewers.
At this point it seems to be widely accepted that this is just the cost of playing Pokemon cards. If you don't have the cash to front for the best cards, then you won't have the best chance when it comes to competing. Apply this to video games and the equivalent might be having to pay for better weapons in Call of Duty or Overwatch putting character abilities in loot boxes. There is already a lot of controversy surrounding loot boxes and "pay to win" content in video games as it is, but trading card game manufacturers aren't held to the same level of scrutiny.
So what's the solution? Am I doomed to weak budget decks or playing with printed proxies? Surely there is a way to lower the entry price for a competitive deck below £200, and below £100 or even £50 while we're at it. After all, one deck won't last you long, with new expansions releasing every few months and an ever-changing meta that sees new cards and strategies appearing like wild Zubat in a dark cave.
Booster packs will never go away, they have been a part of the Pokemon Trading Card Game since the beginning, and to be fair a lot of people do love them. But for the competitive scene, I want competitive cards to be more accessible with cheaper reprints for those not able to fork out hundreds. Granted there have been some already, and the must-have Tapu Lele-GX will be included in an upcoming boxset--but at $50 and well after the card initially hit the metagame in May 2017, it's too little too late. Theme Decks are often a starting point for new players, so it's good to see recent releases include a handful of staple uncommon cards to help kickstart a competitive collection, but there's room for improvement. I would like to see The Pokemon Company make these cards easier to get ahold of and make powerful GX cards more frequent in booster packs, rather than the measly four or five you might be lucky enough to get in a full box of 36 boosters at the moment.
This will surely lead to a healthier meta, happier players, and more of them at that. I love the Pokemon Trading Card Game, but the thought of not being able to play because of my budget is literally keeping me up at night. I have a full time job and I can't keep up with the cost of Pokemon cards.
In my mind Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering has the best mentality when it comes to cards, their availability, and their pricing structure: "I wanted to see the cards collectible in the sense of stamps, where you go to the post office and buy some stamps you don't expect them to be immediately worth $10 when you spent $2, but over time, they can be special."
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-19-2018, 05:02 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Hearthstone Changes Include New Classic Cards And Easier On-Ramp
Blizzard has announced several changes coming to its digital CCG Hearthstone soon. These include some new cards, changes to ranked mode to make it easier for new players to come aboard, the return of the Welcome Bundle, and more.
First off, the studio is adding four new Classic cards next month. The Classic set is one of only two constants that remain in Standard circulation all the time, along with Basic cards, while all expansion cards rotate out. Some Classic cards have been rotated out of Standard for balance reasons, but Blizzard says it wants all of the classes to continue having a roughly equal number of cards. To make up the gap for ones removed, it's introducing these new ones:
Another big change is coming to Ranked play. Currently, Ranking goes from 25 to 1, followed by Legend ranks, with lower numbers signifying a higher skill level. But Blizzard says that even at Rank 25, the level of competition can be intimidating for new players. As a result, it will be introducing 25 new ranks, so players will start at rank 50. Ranks 50-26 will be exclusively for new players, and players won't be able to lose stars in the process, so they can just slowly progress through the ranks as they get their feet wet and earn some special rewards along the way. There will be an option to skip these ranks entirely, just in case you're a veteran making a new account.
Also for the sake of new players, Blizzard is revising the Welcome Bundle. It will offer 10 Classic card packs, but the random Class Legendary is being swapped for one of the six Legendary dragons from the Classic set. Those could be Alexstrasza, Deathwing, Malygos, Nozdormu, Onyxia, and Ysera. Several of those are still used in competitive standard play, so it's a strong set to choose between. A special Days of the Frozen Throne event is set to release a specially priced bundle tomorrow as well.
In news that may disappoint some fans, though, the announcement also reveals that the planned in-game tournament feature has been put on hold. "Ultimately, we were forced to conclude that we needed to think about how and where we want to improve Hearthstone’s overall social experience before we can tackle adding a satisfying and robust implementation of In-game Tournaments that all players can enjoy," it says.
Finally, the Hallow's End event will kick off on October 17 with a special Tavern Brawl, and come alongside a new Paladin hero for purchase, Sir Annoy-O. The blog also welcomes feedback about Wild play, the current Standard meta, and even particular points of interest like the prominence of Giggling Inventor since the launch of The Boomsday Project.
Considering the massive popularity of real-time strategy on PCs, where StarCraft was the first game to gain such a following as to become a legitimate profession, it’s a bit surprising that there are so few successful mobile RTS in the same vein. That combination of speed, precision, and strategy can be a heady brew, and one that’s hard to distil to a handheld screen. Although you can find a lot of options in our most recent Best Of feature, Front Armies is one game that won’t be joining the list.
At first glance, the game is attractive. The graphics are literally iconic. Each unit and building is represented by a front-facing (thus the title?) non-animated graphic. This is an unusual choice, but not one I’m wholly opposed to, especially since it makes identifying units easy at a distance. That’s a smart choice for a mobile RTS, which too often crowd the screen with tiny little soldiers made of a handful of pixels. There’s also less need for a minimap, since you can zoom in and out in a flash.
Likewise, the gameplay is utterly archetypal of an RTS. Minerals are collected and spent on new stuff, with power plants limiting the amount you can build and causing major slowdowns if you run out of power. There are production buildings for land, sea, and air units. Your basic units are a fast but weak buggy, a tough tank, and fragile but powerful artillery. Build a handful of buildings and you can get a few ships similar to the land units, as well as weak and quick flyers. At the top of the tech tree is a ballistic missile that blows a big crater in your opponent’s base in a very satisfying way.
There’s fog-of-war, but it only has one level, so once you reveal your opponent’s base, you get to continue to see all of their plans (or lack thereof) until you muster your forces to crush them.
Control is pretty intuitive. Everything is handled with single taps to select, move, and attack. Buttons on the side let you select all units on the screen, or order construction of buildings or production of units. To select multiple units, you tap and hold to let an expanding circle encompass the group you want. That’s okay, if a bit slow, as long as you’re basically dealing with two groups at a distance. What’s really missing is the ability to select all units of one type, which makes separating groups in your army a chore.
It’s basic, but, in some ways, this is a game that I think people have been asking for. It has familiar RTS gameplay, with visuals that are attractive but simple enough to play well on a phone. Should be, if not a grand slam, at least a hit.
Unfortunately, Front Armies is missing the most important element of any game: somebody to play with.
There is no online play or matchmaking included in the game, so if you want to play multiplayer, you’re stuck with LAN play. That leaves campaign mode or skirmishes against a computer player. Unfortunately, the AI for your own units and your opponents’ is terribly primitive.
Your units are suicidal, rushing to get as close as possible to the enemy they are ordered to attack rather than waiting at a sensible distance. Thus, without careful maneuvering, your artillery and flyers are useless. They are easily separated from their group, taking bizarre looping paths to destinations. They also easily get boxed in if someone else is going the opposite direction. They sometimes don’t react to nearby enemies until they are taking fire.
The opponent AI is no better. The computers build their bases haphazardly, overproducing structures they don’t need which often block in their own units. They underproduce armies and throw them at you with no apparent strategy. Sometimes one or two units will trickle down from their base to spend themselves on your defensive wall. It’s easy to draw their armies into a trap. If you care to spend the time, you can plink away at their defenses from a distance with artillery without drawing a response. But making use of speed or distance abilities in your units requires a lot of handholding. So why bother when you can easily make tanks twice as fast as your opponent and tank rush them before anyone hits the second level of the tech tree?
I tried a 2v2 team game with an AI teammate and found myself taking over all the responsibility for attack and defense for both of us—which wasn’t even hard. There is only one level of AI competence, so the best way to challenge yourself is just to play against three or more at once.
The campaign makes up for this by stacking the deck against you. You get set scenarios with preplaced waves and groups of enemies to wipe out on maps built like corridors. It does a good job teaching you the basics, but sometimes you don’t do what the game expects and get backed into an unwinnable corner.
If, at some point in the future, Front Armies adds some decent AI, it will be a solid recommendation for a mobile RTS. It’s not innovative, but there’s nothing wrong with the core gameplay and a lot to like. But, without an opponent, there’s just nothing to play.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-19-2018, 01:09 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Less than 2 years in, VR game I Expect You To Die surpasses $3M revenue
Newsbrief: Schell Games’ I Expect You To Die has officially brought in $3 million since its late 2016 launch, with the majority of that sum being earned in the last year alone.
The game debuted on Oculus Rift in December 2016, later coming to PlayStation VR and HTC Vive. Schell Games announced in August 2017 that I Expect You To Die had generated over $1 million in revenue, meaning that at least $2 million of what the developer is celebrating today came in during the last year.
The team behind I Expect You To Die has spoken at length about the development of the game in the past as well, including a Level Design Deep Dive on Gamasutra earlier this year that explored building VR puzzle levels on a budget.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-19-2018, 01:09 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Assassin’s Creed for Switch adopts pay-as-you-play pricing in Japan
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is coming to the Switch in Japan as a “Cloud Edition”, although there’s no word yet if the game will be released in a similar format globally.
Announced during yesterday’s Nintendo Direct, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will launch on the Switch October 5, granting players two years worth of access for ¥8400 (~$75). Players may also choose to pay a daily rate of ¥730 (~$6.50).
This isn’t the first time a game has been published through cloud streaming, as Capcom brought Resident Evil 7: Biohazard to the Switch earlier this year using a similar model.
For Resident Evil, players need to download a 45MB base game application before streaming the rest of the title from the cloud, and it can be assumed that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will follow suit.
