Virtual Boy emulator digs up VR’s embarrassing past
The Virtual Boy is often considered a bit of a failed experiment for Nintendo, but an intriguing collector’s item for gaming enthusiasts. Unfortunately, it’s never been comfortable or enjoyable by any means to actually sit down and play one unless you want to invite eye strain or other physical irritants, until now. One crafty Reddit user has brought the Virtual Boy catalogue to Google Cardboard and the RetroArch emulator.
The-King-of-Spain has detailed instructions on how to follow in his footsteps in the Reddit thread. You’ll need to pick up an Android smartphone, RetroArch emulation software and roms, and Google Cardboard or similar VR headset. From there, you’ll have to alter a few settings, and you’ll be on your way to playing Waterworld or Mario Clash.
This could very well be the optimal way to enjoy Virtual Boy titles, as the games are played via RetroArch in grayscale rather than the classic red and black scheme. The-King-of-Spain himself also confirms that after “about 30 minutes of play time” he hasn’t yet experienced any of the system’s trademark motion sickness. If you’ve ever been curious about the Virtual Boy but didn’t want to subject yourself to physical ailments, this might be the best way to experience it.
Via: The Verge
Source: Reddit
HMV is closing the gap with Amazon in the UK
What a difference three years makes. HMV, a company that was teetering on the edge of closure three and a half years ago, has pushed past Tesco to become the UK’s second biggest entertainment retailer behind Amazon. The company recorded a 2 percent rise in sales of CDs, DVDs and video games in the three months up to April 10th, giving it a 16.9 percent share of its domestic market versus Tesco’s 16.1 percent and Amazon’s 22 percent — its best showing since it re-emerged from administration in January 2013.
Figures shared by Kantar Worldpanel paint a bright picture for brick and mortar retailers, which continue to take back market share from their online counterparts. In the first quarter of 2016, 69.8 percent of entertainment sales were recorded at a high street or grocery store, with physical music and video games the most popular products.
Music has proved vital for HMV. Last year, the company saw vinyl sales reach their highest level in over 20 years and was responsible for selling one in every three CDs and DVDs in the UK in the two weeks leading up to Christmas.
Despite its growth, HMV will be aware that high street spend fell by 2 percent in the last quarter. However, it’s a small dip compared with the 12 percent fall seen by online retailers. With consumers more willing to spend in brick and mortar stores, the upcoming merger between Sainsbury’s and Argos makes a lot of sense. Based on today’s report, a combined entity would hold fourth position or 12.9 percent of the entertainment market, making Tesco its next big target.
Via: The Guardian
Source: Kantar
‘Super Mario’ is coming to ‘Minecraft: Wii U Edition’
Minecraft is available on almost every platform known to man, so when the Wii U version launched last December, most people responded with a shrug. Heck, you couldn’t even use the GamePad for inventory management. To makes the console edition a little more attractive, Nintendo has teamed up with Mojang for some special Mario-themed content. It’ll be available as a free update in May and offer a bundle of character skins, item textures and music ripped from the portly plumber’s world. There will also be a pre-made Super Mario-themed map, just in case your thumbs aren’t up to the challenge of crafting one from scratch.
Nintendo says the new material is inspired by Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. As the player, you can choose to dress up as iconic characters including Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach, or mischievous foes like Bowser and Wario. My personal favourite is Toad in his delightful Treasure Tracker gear. With a flashlight on his bonnet, he seems perfect for some subterranean mining. The house of Mario will also be launching a retail version of Minecraft: Wii U Edition on June 17th, which will cost $29.99 and come with the Super Mario pack on the disc.
Such an addition won’t change the Wii U’s dwindling sales, but looking at the console’s lineup this year — which has little more than Paper Mario and Tokyo Mirage Sessions on it — this could turn out to be a real highlight. Unless Nintendo has some surprises planned for E3, of course.
African mobile game rewarded its top players with a real cow
What did your favorite mobile game give you the last time you topped its leaderboard? In Tunisia, the developers of a game called Bagra, which translates to “cow,” gave its top players a real, living bovine. To win, the couple had to be better than everyone else in a game of keeping a digital herd of cows safe while stealing from others.
According to local website Tuniscope, Digital Mania, the app’s developer, gave the winners a choice between claiming the live cow, donating it to charity and having it butchered for meat. Luckily for Pamela, her new owners decided to claim her alive and whole. We just hope the couple didn’t incur a crippling debt buying in-app items to protect their virtual herd.
Via: Ars Technica, BBC
Source: Tuniscope
Check out some of Studio Ghibli’s ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ in VR
If you ever wanted to explore Howl’s Moving Castle, now’s your chance. That’s assuming you own a virtual reality headset, that is. A scene from it, dubbed “The Meadow,” is available for folks using Oculus Rift and HTC Vive right now. It comes from developer Nick Pittom, who’s previously released interactive scenes based on Ghibli’s other lauded work including My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. “The Meadow” is bundled with other, older interactive scenes from Hayao Miyazaki’s landmark films, and RoadtoVR writes that “the level of detail that each scene captures is really nothing short of astounding.”
If anything, these demos should help while the time away before a sequel to the studio’s 2013 co-venture Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch arrives on PlayStation 4 — whenever that actually releases, of course.
Via: Road to VR
Source: Wear VR
NVIDIA brings in-game photography to the masses with ‘Ansel’
Taking in-game screenshots is great and all, but there’s so much more potential than just grabbing an image of what you see during gameplay. NVIDIA knows this and is addressing the desire for artistic screenshots on PC games with Ansel, a photo mode that’ll work across a plethora of games. The name, of course, is a nod to the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams. It’s a bit like what Dead End Thrills has been doing for ages, and allows you to adjust the angle and have a fully free-form camera. One photo from the stage weighed in at 61,440 pixel width. You can even take 360 degree stereoscopic images in one click.
Oh, right: there’s also support for these stereo images on mobile devices thanks to Google Cardboard. No Cardboard? No problem because you can use a mobile app and move your phone around with a 2D image, with motion tracking. Supported games include The Witness, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Lawbreakers, Paragon and No Man’s Sky.
NVIDIA Ansel enables high-resolution image capture, free-moving camera, image editing, and more – all in-game. pic.twitter.com/6PR421yDSB
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) May 7, 2016
NVIDIA says it can make VR worlds sound and feel real
Tonight at NVIDIA’s event in Texas, the company showed off some new tools that should help developers make VR experiences even more realistic. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said its VR Works suite of APIs is getting a “major” upgrade, with the ability to connect haptic controllers to its Physx physics engine for more realistic feedback, and the “world’s first real time physically modeled acoustic simulator.” As he described it, the audio engine works on top of the optics API to help it match what you can see. “
Using VRWorks, we’ve created VR Funhouse – a new standard in audio, haptic, and physics in VR. pic.twitter.com/yE23l6R7qU
— NVIDIA (@nvidia) May 7, 2016
“When you walk into a hallway, it sounds like a hallway. When you walk into a stadium, it sounds like a stadium,” according to Huang. We haven’t tried it out for ourselves yet, but he showed bits of an NVIDIA VR Funhouse demo (above) that puts all the new abilities together, and it looks very interesting. You can watch the live stream of the event right here, and we’ll post any more announcements (GTX 1080) as they happen.
NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast as Titan X, lands May 27
NVIDIA gave us a taste of its new Pascal architecture with the P100 graphics card last month, which is aimed at servers for heavy duty computing. Now, it’s ready to show off how that technology will be adapted for consumers with its new GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. As you’d expect, it’s fast: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it’s twice as fast as its current performance king , the Titan X, as well as three times as power efficient. Of course, those stats likely only come from certain gaming scenarios, like VR. The 1080 also faster than two GTX 980 cards running together using SLI technology. Like the P100, the 1080 is built with a new 16nm FinFET (a type of 3D transistor) manufacturing process, which makes it more power efficient, on top of just being faster.
The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars [for that],” he said.
NVIDIA is basically positioning the GTX 1080 as the gamer’s dream card. Prior to its unveiling, Huang showed off several new titles like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider running at max settings in a high resolution over 60 frames per second. He later revealed that all of the games were running on the new card, to the delight of the entire crowd.
The Tomb Raider demo made it clear just how fast the 1080 is. When Huang pulled up the GPU’s stats, it was running at 2.1 GHz and the memory was running at 5.5 GHz. That’s faster than any GPU today, except for one of its last generation cards with liquid nitrogen cooling. Most remarkable? The 1080 was just just relying on air cooling. (Of course it was also running at 67 celsius, which is far hotter than I’d like my video card to run.)
Among other new technology, the 1080 offers “simultaneous multi-projection,” which helps games look less distorted for triple monitor setups or ultra-wide 21×9 screens. It also makes the card more efficient at VR rendering (which is far less forgiving about low frame-rates).
The GTX 1080 will be available for $599 on May 27, and you can also snag a special NVIDIA-designed “founders edition” for $699 (which looks like it includes a stylish new cooler). Almost as an afterthought, NVIDIA also revealed that the GTX 1070 is coming on June 10 for $379 (the founders edition will run you $449).
NVIDIA didn’t have too many technical details to share about either card, but it gave out a few stats: The 1080 pumps out 9 teraflops and packs in 8GB of RAM. The 1070, which is also faster than the Titan X, spits out 6.5 teraflops and also has 8GB of RAM. For the smart gamer, it sounds like the GTX 1070 will be a pretty good deal (just like the 970 was).
But of course, NVIDIA won’t be alone with new hardware this year. AMD is expected to debut new cards with its Polaris technology this summer, which will focus on power efficiency as well. It sounds like Polaris is better suited for gaming laptops at the moment, but it could also be a way for AMD to deliver some powerful cards that you can actually afford (think under $300).
(Photo credit: GTX 1080;NVIDIA)
Watch NVIDIA announce some big news tonight at 9pm ET
If you’ve been eagerly awaiting NVIDIA’s next batch of high-end video cards, you might want to tune into its Twitch channel at 9 pm Eastern. The company will be livestreaming an elaborate media event it’s holding in Austin, Texas. While they’re not saying much about what’s being announced (only that there will be “lots” of news), recent rumors suggest that it’ll be the first public unveiling of its new cards, the GTX 1080 and 1070. They’re said to be based on NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture, which debuted on its P100 card last month.
The event also follows a mysterious marketing campaign for something called the “Order of 10,” wherein unmarked packages were sent to several technology media folks (including me) leading them to a website filled with puzzles. It didn’t take long to figure out that the whole thing was an NVIDIA joint, and that it was a not-so-thinly veiled reference of its upcoming 10-series video cards. NVIDIA is also hosting a major media event in Austin this week, so it makes sense for the company to try to make a big news splash.
I’ll be covering the event live from Austin (keep an eye on my Twitter account for updates), and you can also view the whole thing on Twitch below.
Source: Twitch (NVIDIA)
Manus VR gloves add full-arm tracking to the HTC Vive
The Manus VR gloves were already impressive when we got our hands in them at the Game Developers Conference, but their latest feature promises an even more immersive experience. Using the HTC Vive and its motion controllers, the Manus system can track players’ entire arms, bending elbows and all. The controllers strap onto players’ wrists for full-arm positional tracking and the gloves allow them to articulate their fingers in the VR space.
Many VR experiences use the “floating hands” technique, which is effective but not exactly natural-looking (or -feeling). Arm tracking allows developers to take advantage of common movements and accessories, such as blocking a punch or wearing a Pip-Boy — or an Apple Watch, if you’re into more realistic experiences. The Manus team is still experimenting with full-arm tracking on the Vive, but it will be featured in the gloves’ SDK that’s due to launch in June.
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