Embrace the Greatest Warframe Test in the Cinematic Quest The Sacrifice
For the third time, we here at Digital Extremes are embarking on a passionate project in Warframe we call a Cinematic Quest. The Sacrifice, the next in our Cinematic Quest library, continues to explore the burning questions, “Who are the Tenno? What is a Warframe?” and the more recent, “Why did the Lotus leave me?”
In our fifth year of Warframe, we’re taking the necessary time to construct and deliver that passion. We readily admit we’re holding back from telling you too much upfront: We don’t want to spoil anything! But it’s fair to say that The Sacrifice’s storyline will thrust players into numerous situations that will question your past and future. Your main drive is the yearning to understand the disappearance of “Space Mom.” To prepare you for The Sacrifice, let’s take a look back at how we got here.
The first Cinematic Quest, The Second Dream, revealed the Operator, young human-like beings (called the Tenno), who are gifted with extraordinary abilities over Warframes. My personal favorite memory of The Second Dream is a cutscene containing the Stalker, and my most beloved Warframe.
Approximately one year later, The War Within, the next Cinematic Quest, took the premise of The Second Dream and built on it by exploring the synergy of Warframes and Operators. Along with a series of trials designed to challenge the Tenno’s prowess, The War Within delves into the emotionally charged origin of the Grineer Empire rulers (the Twin Queens), the Conclave Master (Teshin), and the truth behind the Zariman Ten-Zero incident. A memorable moment for me will always be the “Golden Maw” encounter.
Upon completing the Chains of Harrow quest, players will find themselves treated to a short yet detrimental Quest. Mixing brief gameplay and cutscenes this bridge-style Quest reveals a mind-bending interaction between Ballas, a high-ranking Orokin prior to the fall of the Orokin Empire, and the Lotus, leading directly into The Sacrifice.
I hope this article has given you a glimmer of insight as you travel through your Warframe journey to get here. To really know it though, you’ve got to play it. How should you prepare yourself, Tenno? My recommendation is to embark upon and complete these quests: The Second Dream, The War Within, Chains of Harrows, and the ApostasyPrologue. Are you prepared for The Sacrifice?
The Nyagu are an alien species enlightened with good intentions, rainbows and sunshine. Upon meeting mankind for the first time, they grant each and every human the power to conjure electricity from their bodies. Think of the possibilities: no more hassle with power outlets or wires if you needed to charge up your smartphone, laptop or Nintendo Switch.
Sadly it didn’t take long for other not so friendly alien species to realise that this has turned humanity into a living power plant. Enslavement and breeding followed suit and in the reality of Iro Hero, humans are nothing more than expendable batteries powering anything from pocket calculators to interstellar spaceships. Yes indeed, it’s The Matrix storyline all over again!
While the plot takes some inspiration from the Wachowskis’ 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the shmup action itself looked elsewhere, to none other than Treasure’s 2001 cult hit (and recent eShop success story) Ikaruga. Instead of black and white, you now deal in red and blue. You can absorb the bullets of the same colour as your ship, but you can only damage enemies if you are firing bullets of their opposite colour. Controls are straightforward: ‘A’ fires your main weapon, ‘R’ switches your ship’s colour, ‘X’ will unleash the ‘Tesla Shock’ (a homing attack that is charged up from enemy bullets and might just save you on a tight spot). If you manage to conquer the first few levels, your ship will also gain the ability to unleash ‘Gravity Ignition’ with ‘Y’, which makes every foe on-screen disappear down a space sinkhole.
While the game is played on a 16:9 full-screen format, the actual action is restricted to a TATE slice in the center of the screen. The game consists of nine challenging (sometimes unfairly so) levels, which isn’t what you’d expect by looking at the game in static images. While the pacing is more of a laid back euro-shmup than that of a Japanese bullet hell, the fact your ship can take a couple of hits before being destroyed and the way enemy formations move through each level means you will eventually make an error. With nothing but three lives to make your way through each long level and defeat the clichéd huge end-of-level boss, this becomes a far trickier proposition.
Apart from the difficulty, some bizarre design decisions do bring the experience down. Our titular Iro (whose portrait is always on the left of the screen) often engages in banter with other characters (with portraits on the right side of the screen) as the uninterrupted action continues. Since there is no voice acting, the only way for you to read the dialogue is to stop looking at your ship and divert your attention to either side of the screen, an often fatal mistake on your life expectancy. Furthermore, and as consequence of this design choice, the game does not support either portable or docked vertical screen display. Add to that the lack of a two-player mode and it is impossible not to feel this one is a bit lacking when stacked up to other currently available shmup offerings on the eShop.
The game does use a very pleasing 2D sprite art – from your enemies to the backgrounds, everything has a lovely 16-bit look even if some of the ship designs are a bit bland and ‘safe’. Some of the hand-drawn imagery used for level intermissions and plot developments are also nice and the game boasts a great soundtrack to accompany the task at hand.
Conclusion
Iro Hero ends up being a competent euro-shmup homage to the dual phase/puzzle shmup gameplay pivoted by Treasure’s Magnum Opus. While some designs choices could be avoided with some proper care while transitioning the game to Switch, what is on offer is solid shmup action for those who are seeking something a new challenge. Hard as nails, often unfairly so until you learn to play with perfect precision, we still consider it worthy of your time.
Place yourself at the heart of the Jurassic franchise and build your own Jurassic World. Bioengineer dinosaurs that think, feel and react intelligently to the world around them and face threats posed by espionage, breakouts and devastating tropical storms in an uncertain world where life always finds a way.
E3 2018: The Last Of Us 2 Adds Exciting Depth To Combat--And To Ellie
Sony debuted gameplay for The Last of Us Part II during its E3 2018 press conference. What Sony and developer Naughty Dog showed is just as gruesome as the previous trailer for the sequel; on top of a man getting eviscerated, we see Ellie perform a number of brutal takedowns and kills. It's definitely a lot to take in all at once, and it's also cinematic--it can be hard to tell what's pure combat and what's a cutscene-like transition.
While at E3 2018, we had a chance to speak to co-directors Anthony Newman and Kurt Margenau about the game. They gave us insight into what exactly we're seeing in the trailer in terms of combat, and as it turns out, much of what looks cinematic--Ellie's perfectly timed dodges and pulling an arrow out of her shoulder--is actually within your control. That looks to be a key component in framing and shaping the intense violence in The Last of Us Part II, as well as something that can add greatly to Ellie as a character.
"In classic Naughty Dog style, we always try to contextualize animations, so the dodge and shoot play away from the arrow is a different animation from when the blade is about to hit her," Newman said when asked about the variety of movements seen in the new gameplay. "There's an extremely complicated system that goes into making each of her dodges."
"Every strike has its own dodge based on the angle, how high it is, different things [like that]," Margenau added. These dodges in particular make certain combat sequences in the trailer look scripted, but the co-directors say that this movement is mapped to a specific button.
We also asked about what looks like a healing mechanic, when Ellie vaults over a store counter and then pulls an arrow out of her shoulder before continuing. But Newman and Margenau said that this is an entirely new mechanic separate from healing. A lot of it has to do with the new bow-and-arrow enemies, which didn't appear in the original Last of Us, and what happens when one of their arrows becomes lodged somewhere on Ellie's body.
"It's not distinctly a healing animation [in the trailer], it's a particular status effect," Newman said. "You'll notice in the lower right, there's a little arrow icon, and it's like you're afflicted with 'arrow-ness.' It disables your listen mode and it totally screws up your aim, so you have to try and find a safe spot to take the arrow out."
This status is specific to arrows. The co-directors did not give other examples of similar mechanics, but they did talk a bit more about the returning listen mode, which the arrow status impacts. "We're looking at ways to refine it... we're always trying to balance against how much information we give the player in a stealth scenario," Margenau said. "We've got some cool ideas to make it more grounded, more realistic."
All of this points to an involved style of combat with more factors to consider than in the original game, and that in turn says a lot about Ellie. Ellie in The Last of Us is young, naive, and learning how to survive; Ellie in Part II is an experienced killer with a lot of anger behind her strikes. Learning about who she's become is one of the most enticing things about The Last of Us Part II, and combat seems to be a huge part of that.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-16-2018, 08:49 AM - Forum: Lounge
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E3 2018: Bethesda Doesn't Have Plans For Battle Royale
E3 2018 has seen a few battle royale-related announcements. During EA's press conference, DICE revealed that Battlefield V will have a battle royale mode, and Nintendo revealed Fortnite on Switch without its original Save the World mode. Bethesda, on the other hand, did not mention anything about battle royale modes for any games during its E3 2018 press conference.
Bethesda did announce DLC for last year's Prey that introduces a new multiplayer mode. Called Typhon Hunter, it pits five Mimic players against one human player. In the spirit of new modes coming to existing Bethesda games, we asked Bethesda Global Senior Vice President Pete Hines whether the publisher had any battle royale plans up its sleeve. Short answer: no.
"We definitely have nothing battle royale-related," Hines said. "We tend never to want to follow anybody else into a space; we didn't go chasing after Facebook gaming when that was the big trend. Just because battle royale is popular doesn't mean it's a good fit for us or our studios."
He continued, "If somebody comes up with a thing that's battle royale or battle royale-esque that they think is unique or different or cool, it's probably something we'd consider, but we tend not to go chasing after trends. We want to be pushing ourselves to offer different experiences and do new things."
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-16-2018, 08:49 AM - Forum: Windows
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Watch the ForzaRC 2018 Series 1 Playoffs live this weekend
This weekend, June 16 – 17, Series 1 of the Forza Racing Championship (ForzaRC) 2018 heads into its final lap with the ForzaRC 2018 Series 1 Playoffs. Broadcast live from Seattle, home of Turn 10 Studios, some of the best drivers from around the world will compete for the title of Series 1 Champion, a $75,000 prize pool and the opportunity to move a step closer to the Forza Racing World Championship 2018 this October.
We’ve got an exciting weekend of racing lined up with competition beginning tomorrow, June 16 at 9 a.m. PDT with the first day of playoffs. Throughout the day, drivers will race their way through the quarterfinals and into the semi-finals, with the field narrowed to just 12 drivers by the end of the day. The playoffs will continue for these drivers on Sunday, June 17 at 11 a.m. PDT as they head into the finals. Tune in all weekend to catch the action live, unlock in-game rewards and influence the day’s races through in-stream voting on our Mixer stream at watch.ForzaRC.com.
In addition to the weekend’s racing competition we’ve got even more excitement lined up for those tuning in:
Celebrating 24 Hours of Le Mans
As many racing fans will know, this week is host to the Automobile Club de l’Ouest’s (ACO), 24 Hours of Le Mans. In celebration, we’ll be putting a spotlight on the famous track during our Series 1 Playoffs. Famed for its raw speed and punishing effects on drivers in the world’s most famous endurance race, Le Mans will prove to be a test for all of the ForzaRC competitors. For those not familiar with the track, we have a special introduction hosted by legendary motorsport broadcaster, ForzaRC guest commentator, and “Voice of Le Mans” John Hindhaugh as well.
Special Guest Panel
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to have a career in esports or to be a professional streamer? How about starting your own streaming or esports career? Tune into our Mixer stream at watch.ForzaRC.com on Sunday, June 17, as special guests Celeste Anderson, Trisha Hershberger, and Steve “SuperGT” Brown join us, live on stage, to speak to these questions and more.
Voting and Rewards
Tune in to the playoffs livestream at watch.forzarc.com and you’ll have the chance to directly impact which cars and tracks are used during the event. Will you choose day or night? Sunshine or rain? The Ford or the Audi? The choice is yours (and the rest of chat) to make!
Anyone tuning in during the livestream at watch.ForzaRC.com will also have the chance to unlock awesome in-game rewards for Forza Motorsport 7. Just log into your account and participate in the in-stream quests to unlock a variety of in-game gear, including the new ForzaRC 2018 Series 1 Playoffs driver suit!
For those tuning in to ForzaRC for the first time and looking to catch up on all the excitement before the playoffs, check out the Series 1 recap on the official ForzaRC YouTube channel.
Participate in ForzaRC 2018
Interested in joining the competition? It’s not too late! Visit ForzaRC.com to register and you’ll be ready to compete when ForzaRC 2018 Series 2 begins on July 9! Not quite ready to compete at the ranked level? No problem, we’ve got activities for drivers of all skill levels in Forza Motorsport 7 with more to come all season long.
Catch every minute of this action-packed event beginning tomorrow, June 16 at 9 a.m. PDT and Sunday, June 17 at 11 a.m. PDT on our Mixer stream at watch.forzarc.com. For more information, head over to ForzaRC.com and follow us on Twitter for the latest news and updates. We hope to see you there!
Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is what the original game should have been an instant classic. We're talking Streets of Rage meets Street Fighter meets Devil May Cry. It's a modern day take on the classic beat 'em up. Play as Shaquille O'Neal learn hundreds of moves and battle techniques, take on thousands of enemies with dozens of cool melee weapons, battle bosses in dynamic arenas, master cool finishing moves and play with your buddies in COOP mode or against each other in player vs player combat.
In Shaq Fu, dozens of unique and varied enemies await which require careful use of tactics. The game also features destructive environments, awesome power ups and a series of well-designed, beautiful levels with interesting progression. This is all tied together by what very well might be the story of the century, a performance worthy of an Oscar, by the Big Diesel, in his battle against a villain for the ages the mysterious Black Star Ninja.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 06-16-2018, 02:27 AM - Forum: Lounge
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E3 2018: How Fallout 76 Intends To Stop People From Being Jerks
During Bethesda's E3 2018 press conference, we learned a lot more about what kind of game Fallout 76 is shaping up to be. In addition to seeing a trailer with gameplay details, we also learned that Fallout 76 is an always-online multiplayer game. You can still play solo, but the other characters you encounter in the game are other human players.
This setup opens Fallout 76 to some issues, though, namely how people will behave toward other players. How do you prevent someone from targeting you and trying to ruin your game? We spoke to Bethesda Senior Vice President about the online nature of Fallout 76 and how Bethesda aims to preempt potential issues.
"When you see a person in the world, they're a real person, and now you have to figure out [what role they play]...maybe they're being super helpful, maybe they're wandering the world as a trader and just trading with people, maybe they're being a bad guy and they're part of a raider group," Hines said. "[We allow] for that sort of tension but with systems in place that keep it from being abusive. So you can't be harassed by somebody who just keeps chasing you around the world and keeps killing you over and over again; the game literally doesn't allow that to happen to you."
He continued, "Death isn't supposed to be a super negative thing. You don't lose your progression, you don't lose all your stuff, somebody can't kill you and then take everything in your inventory [and then you have to] start over."
The question remains how PvP will function exactly, but Hines emphasized that it's not a dog-eat-dog world. "Think of PvP more like issuing a challenge to somebody as opposed to just, 'no matter what I want to do to somebody, I can,'" he explained. "The game only lets that go so far before you can basically say, 'I don't want to participate in this challenge anymore.'"
Hines compared PvP in Fallout 76 to fighting a Deathclaw in Fallout 4. If you attempt to kill a Deathclaw and die, when you respawn, you can either decide to try again or move on and do something else. "That should kind of be how it works for any human person," he said. "They can't keep coming after you, just like that Deathclaw wouldn't come running across the map and keep chasing you."
Hines also emphasized that Bethesda plans to continue supporting and tweaking these systems as time goes on. It remains to be seen how they work, or if intrepid players figure out ways to circumvent the rules in place, but the upcoming (but currently undated) beta is a good time to test how they work.
Fallout 76 is set to release on November 14, 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. For more on Fallout 76, see our roundup of all the Bethesda news.
The Linux operating system includes a plethora of tools, all of which are ready to help you administer your systems. From simple file and directory tools to very complex security commands, there’s not much you can’t do on Linux. And, although regular desktop users may not need to become familiar with these tools at the command line, they’re mandatory for Linux admins. Why? First, you will have to work with a GUI-less Linux server at some point. Second, command-line tools often offer far more power and flexibility than their GUI alternative.
Determining memory usage is a skill you might need should a particular app go rogue and commandeer system memory. When that happens, it’s handy to know you have a variety of tools available to help you troubleshoot. Or, maybe you need to gather information about a Linux swap partition or detailed information about your installed RAM? There are commands for that as well. Let’s dig into the various Linux command-line tools to help you check into system memory usage. These tools aren’t terribly hard to use, and in this article, I’ll show you five different ways to approach the problem.
I’ll be demonstrating on the Ubuntu Server 18.04 platform. You should, however, find all of these commands available on your distribution of choice. Even better, you shouldn’t need to install a single thing (as most of these tools are included).
With that said, let’s get to work.
top
I want to start out with the most obvious tool. Thetop command provides a dynamic, real-time view of a running system. Included in that system summary is the ability to check memory usage on a per-process basis. That’s very important, as you could easily have multiple iterations of the same command consuming different amounts of memory. Although you won’t find this on a headless server, say you’ve opened Chrome and noticed your system slowing down. Issue the top command to see that Chrome has numerous processes running (one per tab – Figure 1).
Chrome isn’t the only app to show multiple processes. You see the Firefox entry in Figure 1? That’s the primary process for Firefox, whereas the Web Content processes are the open tabs. At the top of the output, you’ll see the system statistics. On my machine (a System76 Leopard Extreme), I have a total of 16GB of RAM available, of which just over 10GB is in use. You can then comb through the list and see what percentage of memory each process is using.
One of the things top is very good for is discovering Process ID (PID) numbers of services that might have gotten out of hand. With those PIDs, you can then set about to troubleshoot (or kill) the offending tasks.
If you want to make top a bit more memory-friendly, issue the command top -o %MEM, which will cause top to sort all processes by memory used (Figure 2).
The top command also gives you a real-time update on how much of your swap space is being used.
free
Sometimes, however, top can be a bit much for your needs. You may only need to see the amount of free and used memory on your system. For that, there is the free command. The free command displays:
Total amount of free and used physical memory
Total amount of swap memory in the system
Buffers and caches used by the kernel
From your terminal window, issue the command free. The output of this command is not in real time. Instead, what you’ll get is an instant snapshot of the free and used memory in that moment (Figure 3).
You can, of course, make free a bit more user-friendly by adding the -m option, like so:free -m. This will report the memory usage in MB (Figure 4).
Of course, if your system is even remotely modern, you’ll want to use the -g option (gigabytes), as in free -g.
If you need memory totals, you can add thet option like so: free -mt. This will simply total the amount of memory in columns (Figure 5).
vmstat
Another very handy tool to have at your disposal is vmstat. This particular command is a one-trick pony that reports virtual memory statistics. The vmstat command will report stats on:
Processes
Memory
Paging
Block IO
Traps
Disks
CPU
The best way to issue vmstat is by using the -s switch, like vmstat -s. This will report your stats in a single column (which is so much easier to read than the default report). The vmstatcommand will give you more information than you need (Figure 6), but more is always better (in such cases).
dmidecode
What if you want to find out detailed information about your installed system RAM? For that, you could use the dmidecode command. This particular tool is the DMI table decoder, which dumps a system’s DMI table contents into a human-readable format. If you’re unsure as to what the DMI table is, it’s a means to describe what a system is made of (as well as possible evolutions for a system).
To run the dmidecode command, you do need sudo privileges. So issue the command sudo dmidecode -t 17. The output of the command (Figure 7) can be lengthy, as it displays information for all memory-type devices. So if you don’t have the ability to scroll, you might want to send the output of that command to a file, like so: sudo dmidecode –t 17 > dmi_infoI, or pipe it to the less command, as in sudo dmidecode | less.
/proc/meminfo
You might be asking yourself, “Where do these commands get this information from?”. In some cases, they get it from the /proc/meminfo file. Guess what? You can read that file directly with the commandless /proc/meminfo. By using the lesscommand, you can scroll up and down through that lengthy output to find exactly what you need (Figure 8).
One thing you should know about /proc/meminfo: This is not a real file. Instead /pro/meminfo is a virtual file that contains real-time, dynamic information about the system. In particular, you’ll want to check the values for:
MemTotal
MemFree
MemAvailable
Buffers
Cached
SwapCached
SwapTotal
SwapFree
If you want to get fancy with /proc/meminfo you can use it in conjunction with the egrep command like so: egrep –color ‘Mem|Cache|Swap’ /proc/meminfo. This will produce an easy to read listing of all entries that contain Mem, Cache, and Swap … with a splash of color (Figure 9).
Keep learning
One of the first things you should do is read the manual pages for each of these commands (so man top, man free, man vmstat, man dmidecode). Starting with the man pages for commands is always a great way to learn so much more about how a tool works on Linux.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
E3 2018 News: Everything From The Press Conferences
After a hectic week of reveals and announcements, E3 2018 is finally drawing to a close. But while we may be coming up on the end of this year's expo, the past week has been filled with exciting news. We got to see seven major press conferences in the days leading up to E3, which brought us a ton of reveals, from a new Cyberpunk 2077 trailer to the unveiling of Resident Evil 2 and an extended gameplay sequence from The Last of Us: Part II.
In all, E3 2018 was packed with news, gameplay demos, and trailers, giving us a much clearer look at what lies ahead for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC in the near future. To make it easier to catch up on the announcements from this year's expo, we've put together a roundup of all of the biggest news from each press conference, which you can find below.
