In case you haven’t been keeping up with the life of rapper Meek Mill, he’s had a tough go of it over the last six months or so. After Meek accused Drake of using a ghostwriter on hit songs last summer, the Canadian rapper’s musical response coined the phrases “trigger phrases turned to Twitter fingers,” “is that a world tour or your girl’s tour?” and left Mill as the subject of endless jokes and memes. Now that Meek has sparked another beef, this time with 50 Cent, his unenviable situation has been captured by a videogame, Meeky Mill (warning: language). Produced by musician/indie game developer Richie Branson, it’s a side-scroller platformer/endless runner where Meek dodges L bombs and missiles tossed by his rivals.
You can download and play it on PC or Mac, or just watch the trailer for a better idea. This might not be the next Flappy Bird or Crossy Road, but if this is your preferred genre then the soundtrack (a remix featuring 50 Cent and Drake) is definitely an upgrade. You can win by collecting enough coins to rack up $1 million, but like ending Meek Mill’s current losing streak, that is easier said than done. Unfortunately, there is not an option to send bottles to Charlamagne or the city of Flint, MI, which hurts its realism.
Digital Domain, the visual effects studios that brought you feature films like the Transformers series, the X-Men series, Iron Man 3 and Her, has announced that it’s acquiring an 85 percent stake in Hong Kong’s Post Production Company Limited and its parent company for HK$135 million (about US$17.3 million), in order to make a big push in virtual reality. This is obviously a big deal for both parties: Post Production has been involved in many major Chinese movies, TV ads, music videos and even a cooking show hosted by the company’s founder, Nicholas Tse, who also happens to be a local pop artist and actor. Digital Domain CEO Daniel Seah put it best by calling Post Production “the Digital Domain of China,” and he added that Tse will stay on to run that part of the business.
The acquisition is probably a timely rescue for Tse’s Post Production. Back in September, the company had to reduce its workforce in Hong Kong to focus on its more lucrative business in Mainland China, according to Apple Daily. But that’s not to say Digital Domain is in its best form just yet, as its CEO admitted that his company has yet to become profitable since it was bought out of bankruptcy in July 2013.
To reassure us, Seah said he’s received sufficient funding to keep things going for a while, and he’s confident that with major brands like Google, Sony, Samsung, HTC, LeEco and more driving the VR market, it’ll convert to good business for Digital Domain. Not to mention that HTC’s Peter Chou is also the Chairman of Digital Domain, though oddly enough, there were no Vive headsets at the event; only Samsung units were used to show off Digital Domain’s VR demos like the Nike Hypervenom IIad (this was my favorite), a Conan 360 clip and a David Haye boxing match.
Following the acquisition, the two companies will be bringing Hong Kong’s famous cartoon pig, McDull, to the VR world. On the other end of the spectrum, though, VR porn is still a definite no-go zone for them, according to Managing Director Rich Flier.
As evidenced by the Samsung Gear VR demo units and the cardboard VR headsets given out at the event, the smartphone is currently the key to driving VR adoption rate, which is critical to content providers like Digital Domain. But this does mean downgrading the content’s quality to suit the common hardware, as opposed to limiting consumers to the expensive dedicated devices like the Vive or the PlayStation VR. Speaking of the experience on smartphone-based VR headsets, COO Amit Chopra said that while it should still please users in developing markets, he agreed that there’s plenty of room for improvement. “[Right now] it’s probably more of a 40 to 45 out of 100, but I think within one year you’ll see us getting to the 60s and 70s. There’s still a lot more to do, but the technology has to catch up.”
Google’s plan to scrub Google+ requirements just went one step further. Sometime this year, Google Play Games will no longer require a Google+ account to function — you can just use a basic Google account to start playing. You won’t get nagging permissions requests, and the new approach will sign you in for every game you have rather than one at a time. That should make life much easier, especially if you didn’t want personal details linked to your game sessions.
The transition shouldn’t create any problems for you unless a game goes out of its way to use specific Google+ features (which, let’s face it, isn’t likely). One thing’s for sure: at this rate, Google+ is quickly being reduced to just a social network, rather than the seemingly inescapable catch-all internet service it was originally meant to be.
We’re still a few weeks out from Super Bowl 50, but we’ve already been blessed with one of the most absurd — and amazing — ads of the season. To commemorate the franchise’s 20th anniversary, The Pokemon Company shelled out millions of dollars to create a Super Bowl ad that’ll run at the beginning of the game’s third quarter. Go ahead, take a moment to wrap your head around that one. We’ll be waiting.
Today saw the release of the ad’s extended cut — created by an LA-based agency called Omelet — and it does a damned fine job burying the lede. For the first forty seconds, you’ll see a diverse crew of young people inspired to dream big and work hard (which in this case involves playing speed chess and getting psyched for a football game). Better still, these scenes are accompanied by the same punchy, aggressive drumline percussion that seems to wind up in every other high-minded sports apparel ad during Super Bowl season. The only real hint that you’re watching something a little different is a sign above a locker room door that proclaims “LIKE NO ONE EVER WAS,” a nod to the old-school theme song you’re probably already humming now. And after all that? A guy steps into stadium, Pokeball in hand, staring down a Gyarados, a Magneton, a Charizard and a Mega Lucario. Things just got real.
While it would’ve been nice to have another core series game to go celebrate this milestone, you’ll at least have another chance to play through the classics. Nintendo confirmed that Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow will land in the eShop on February 27, just a few weeks after one animal-themed team triumphs over another in a grand show of sportsball acumen.
Google is going all-in on virtual reality hardware, if a few recent job postings are anything to go by. Road to VR spotted a handful of consumer-focused VR jobs up for grabs at Google, including a Hardware Engineering Technical Lead Manager, Consumer Hardware and a PCB Layout Engineer, Consumer Hardware. Both of these titles at one point ended with “Virtual Reality,” though Google has since replaced that phrase with the more vague, “Consumer Hardware.”
The Lead Manager position includes the following description: “Our consumer hardware team is working on revolutionizing how people interact with their hardware and looking for engineers to make that a reality. We want to open new ways to interact with devices and create a natural, seamless interface the world’s information.”
Job listings do not always point to a full-blown business plan, but Google has already demonstrated a vested interest in VR. The company launched its Cardboard initiative in 2014 and it has a mysterious partnership with augmented-reality company Magic Leap. Google recently picked up some new VR talent, too: Former Vine boss Jason Toff just left Twitter to join Google and work on VR. Plus, this is Google — cutting-edge technology is kind of its thing.
The decision to leave Vine was hard. I love the team, am so proud of what we’ve done and know there are incredible things ahead for them.
Street Fighter IV was a textbook case of how to breathe new life into an aging franchise. Led by Capcom’s enthusiastic and passionate Yoshinori Ono, the 2008 release was designed to be a spiritual successor to Street Fighter II, the classic ’90s game that practically defined the genre. But Street Fighter IV was far more than just a retro retread: The game was updated with 3D models and a host of new moves, play styles and robust competitive options, including a comprehensive online battle system. It brought the Street Fighter series back into the public mind in a big way and also gave Capcom a perfect title that let the company participate in the growing eSports world.
That’s a lot for one game to pull off — and it also make the stakes for a sequel pretty high. After a total reinvention of the series, what do you do for an encore? Luckily, Ono is particularly well-suited to continue guiding the franchise. He’s finally almost ready to show off his work — Street Fighter V will launch on February 16th. A passionate Street Fighter fan who basically joined Capcom for a chance to work on the series, Ono believes that there’s plenty this new game can do to improve the experience for all players, whether they’re competing in tournaments or just trying the series for the first time.
[Note: All of Ono’s responses came via his translator and Capcom associate producer Brian Oliveira, and the interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.]
Street Fighter IV was a big leap forward over the games that came before it. Graphically, it improved so much that it was obvious what was new. But now, a lot of those changes aren’t as immediately apparent to more casual players. How do you explain to them why Street Fighter V is worth their money?
Yoshimori Ono: As you said, there isn’t a huge graphical leap, but there have been some improvements in terms of how everything looks. When we were making Street Fighter IV, we were working very hard to take these classic 2D pixels and convert them into a very beautiful 3D model. With Street Fighter IV — and our art director in the past might get a little mad at me for saying this — I don’t think we did the most perfect job at doing that. I think we’ve been able to make some improvements in that regard with Street Fighter V.
Also in Street Fighter IV, sometimes the motion didn’t look as smooth [as we’d like] because the consoles weren’t as powerful in terms of handling motion and processing all of that information. This time around, the motion looks very, very smooth, and that’s just because the console’s power has increased.
On the other hand, there’s some stuff that’s happening on the back end, specifically talking about the network experience. We’re working very hard to make a stress-free online experience that everyone can enjoy, and we’ve also been able to bring together the PS4 and PC community. We feel, with the way we’re handling online network play, people can enjoy it very seamlessly and have a very stress-free, awesome online experience so they can play this game for hours on end.
How does Capcom think about eSports? Specifically, when developing Street Fighter V, how important was thinking about that competitive community?
The quick answer is we really thought about it a lot. We’ve got the Capcom Cup and the Capcom Pro Tour; we have this top-level player pool who are very much into this and their livelihoods depend on it. We’ve developed this really nice system that’s in place right now in terms of an eSports infrastructure.
However, with Street Fighter V, we’re really considering eSports in that we really wanted to reset the community. We want to reset the entire game so that we can reset the playing field and let lots of new people jump in and start competing. Of course, we want everybody from the previous generation to join, but we want to create an environment where everyone can start fresh and be very welcoming to new players as well. We feel that’s really important in terms of building [Street Fighter] out as an eSport.
My goal is to really make Street Fighter as an eSport [more] mainstream. When you look back just two years ago, in 2014, we had the Capcom Cup right here at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, and just recently we had the Capcom Cup 2015 take place at the PlayStation Experience Event. We teamed up with Sony to do that, and we had a $500,000 prize pool there. In comparison with some of the bigger eSports titles out there, this may be like a quarter of what League of Legends is doing in terms of the prize pool. But in comparison with other console games, there’s really no one else doing what we’re doing right now. As a company, what we want to do is keep this pace, keep that momentum going as we proceed forward into the eSports realm.
“You can look at [competitive] ‘Street Fighter’ [matches] like baseball. Yes, there’s Major League Baseball, but there are also neighborhood baseball leagues where people can get together and play on the weekends.”
For players who aren’t at this level of competitive gameplay, how do you make sure the game is still fun for them and encourage them to go online and keep them from getting their butts kicked by more experienced players — or even just provide a good single-player experience? How do you balance those goals?
With Street Fighter V, there will be a tutorial for beginners in there that teaches the very basic stuff. From there, people can go into the [arcade mode] and play the character stories and immerse themselves in the world of Street Fighter V.
After that, they might feel like “OK, I want to test the waters in terms of online matches. Like you said, there might be some concern about getting your butt whipped the first time you go online. But this time, we built a league system where you have to have a certain level win rate and a certain amount of points built up to proceed to the next league. We’re basically segregating people between leagues so you’re only playing with people in the same league to help balance out the win rates.
Looking toward the future — it’s not going to happen this year, but we’re looking into creating tournaments geared more toward the casual player. In Asia, we’ve already started something where we’re going to have college students compete with each other; that’s one of the things we’re doing. We also have plans — it’s still in the planning phase — but we’re talking about maybe a parent/child tournament where the parent and their kid enter together.
You can look at [competitive] Street Fighter [matches] like baseball. Yes, there’s Major League Baseball, but there are also neighborhood baseball leagues where people can get together and play on the weekends. We’d like to create an environment for Street Fighter where people can do that at a casual level and get together and just play.
“With ‘Street Fighter IV,’ we had a huge turnout of old-school players who came back, and we also gained an entire new generation of players.”
In that same vein, the Street Fighter games have always felt like games that you can just pick up and play and get the basics quickly, but mastering it is a major challenge and takes a lot of commitment. As you go forward and make new games, how do you add new gameplay features without complicating that “pick up and play” mentality?
With Street Fighter IV, we had a lot of people come back to the series. I can’t say that we did a very extensive analysis of who came back to the game who used to play Street Fighter II, but I can say we had a huge turnout of old-school players who came back, and we also gained an entire new generation of players.
However, when looking at Street Fighter V and examining who didn’t join the Street Fighter scene with Street Fighter IV, we realized it was people who weren’t necessarily able to do what they wanted to do with their characters in terms of actual physical execution of the game’s moves. With Street Fighter V, we’ve added a thing called input leniency — moves just come out a little easier than you might expect. A lot of the higher-level, hardcore players might wonder, “Is this OK?” And yes, we think it’s fine. Those guys are going to figure out how to use it to their advantage.
The whole idea there is just so people have a feel-good experience with the game. We want people to feel like they have full control over what’s going on and make things a little easier for them. Even if you’re getting beat up left and right — that might happen, but even despite that, at least you’re able to do a really cool move in the game relatively easily. Yes, we do have input leniency now, but we just want to make the game feel good, and it’s a good way to bring in as many people as possible. We’re trying to make the game feel awesome so players have a very good, comfortable experience playing Street Fighter.
Were you surprised at how many people really wanted a single-player story mode? [Ed. note: Street Fighter V will feature a story mode for the first time — you can get the details on it here.]
I don’t know the exact number of people who are actually asking for this, but I can say that after we announced the game, left and right when I was meeting with press and media, they’d be asking, “What are you going to do with the story mode?” And then my Facebook and Twitter accounts were getting bombarded with people asking me what’s going on with the story. Honestly, I was expecting people to ask about new battle mechanics, but really the main voice was asking, “What’s going on with the story?”
Street Fighter is almost approaching its 30th year, and I’ve been working on the brand for a very long time, and so … I reached this point where I had two feelings in terms of the story. One, it’s like there’s some regret for not maybe paying a little more attention to this in the past. But the second feeling is, “Wow, this many people are really interested in the story content!” It’s a mixed bag of feelings.
Also, just giving a little more background to how all this went down — Matt [Dahlgren, Capcom director of brand marketing and eSports] and the Capcom USA team have been pestering me for a long time, saying, “We really need this story content!” And now those folks can say, “See, I told you!” And now I have to say to them, “Yes, you were right!” But they seem pretty pleased with how the story expansion is turning out, so I’m pretty confident that, once this finally is released in June, the story content that fans have been longing for will finally be delivered.
Mighty No. 9, the crowdfunded game from Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune, has been delayed for a third time. The long-awaited title has become the poster-child for how not to run a Kickstarter campaign. In a note to backers announcing the latest setback, Inafune doesn’t give a firm date for release, but says he expects it “to realistically be in spring 2016.”
Funded on Kickstarter back in September 2013, Mighty No. 9 raised $3,845,710 on the promise of a spiritual successor to Mega Man, and an April 2015 ship date. Many backers have complained about the manner of the delays’ announcements just as much as the wait itself. It wasn’t until the end of April 2015 — when the game was supposed to be released — that the team pushed the release date back to September 15th. Then, in August, it delayed it again, all the way to Q1 2016, later clarifying a February release. Which brings us up to today, again, mere weeks from the launch date it gave. And yet another delay.
Inafune, as in August, pins the delay on issues with the game’s multiplayer mode, which was added when the Kickstarter campaign reached one of its stretch goals. In the note, he says “this is all a result of miscalculations on the part of us, the development staff … for that we are sincerely sorry.” He adds that ‘”we have no excuses for disappointing our fans and especially our backers once more. We want to take this chance to express our sincerest apologies to everyone who has looked forward to the release.”
Like him or hate him, Donald Rumsfeld has been a jack of all trades — and apparently, that now includes mobile games. The veteran politician has teamed up with programmers to release Churchill Solitaire, an iOS game based on the card game that Winston Churchill supposedly played to sharpen his strategic thought processes. Rumsfeld was strictly a creative director (he’s not exactly a coder by trade), but his influence is everywhere. Reflections on Churchill’s life appear while you’re playing, and even the pricing mirrors Rumsfeld’s values — while the base game is free, hints and retries cost money (“there are damn few undos in life,” he says).
The title isn’t going to make you rethink your views on Rumsfeld, but it might be worth a go if you’re not averse to efforts with his name attached. It’s not only considerably tougher than regular solitaire, but requires the kind of long-term thinking that’s not always present in card games. A careless decision early on can ruin your chances of winning much later. Our only major question right now: where’s the Android version?
I knew I was on solid ground. I knew that no matter if I misstepped, I wouldn’t fall hundreds of feet, plummeting to my death in some CG-Egyptian ruin. And yet, I was shaky, desperately reaching out for a handhold to steady myself, unable to calmly place one foot in front of the other as I attempted to cross a chasm bridged by a collection of meager wooden beams.
“Don’t look down!” my partner shouted from closely behind me, a tall, bald woman not unlike Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien3, with solid birthing hips and a gruff voice that belied her exterior. We’d met only minutes before when ‘she’ was a physical he in the real world, an older, white-haired gentleman of 6’3″ who happened to be wandering through Sundance’s New Frontier exhibit just when I needed a second player to join me in Real Virtuality: Immersive Explorers.
Together, we’d located magical crystals and traveled through time to soar through a futuristic city on a hovercraft, explore ruins by torchlight and overcome treacherous obstacles — all within the darkened confines of the exhibit space.
“It’s basically a full body VR immersion system,” says Sylvain Chagué, co-founder and technology director of Artanim, the Swiss motion capture research institute behind Real Virtuality. “It’s a two-player experience. You are completely immersed in the virtual world. You can see your own body. You can see the other one. You can collaborate together … pass objects from one to another and things like that.”
To pull off this convincing sense of virtual co-op play, Chagué and his partner Caecilia Charbonnier, Artanim’s research director, eschewed the ready-made, room-scale tracking solution provided by HTC’s Vive VR platform and opted instead to build a custom solution. Using 12 Vicon infrared cameras spaced throughout the room, the duo is able to track the small sensors dotted across the Oculus Rift headset, and on the player’s hands and feet; as well as physical objects, like the torch and crystals. A lightweight, hard plastic backpack, also covered in sensors and worn by either player, carries a battery-powered computer that communicates wirelessly, so that you can freely roam in the space without fear of getting tangled in wires.
Artanim’s Sylvain Chagué (at left) and Caecilia Charbonnier
“You basically have two things,” says Chagué of Artanim’s hybrid solution. “You have some data on the Oculus which is very fast data, but doesn’t have position information and it drifts over time. But it’s very low latency. And on the other side, you have the motion capture data which is very accurate, but has slightly more latency. So we combined the two kinds of data by fusing them in order to have both a low latency system and an accurate one.”
The result is a shapeshifting virtual playground that plays on your fear of heights (and spiders) and conforms to the space you and the other player are wandering in. It’s an experience Chagué likens to being in the ‘holodeck’ from Star Trek and for good reason: Artanim has plans to commercialize Real Virtuality by installing it in theme parks across the world.
“The plan is to have almost 100 or 200 square meters (approximately 1,000 or 2,000-plus square feet) so that you have really full spaces to play with,” says Charbonnier. “Of course, the first interest will be for entertainment — theme park attraction. We have a lot of interest for this. … We just started a collaboration with different institutions, for instance the Futuroscope, which is one of the technological parks in France. But some other players in Russia and Qatar, as well.”
You might not know his name, but if you’ve played a game from BioWare in the past seventeen years chances are pretty high that writer David Gaider had a hand in it. Specifically, the Dragon Age series of fantasy role-playing games. The news comes by way of Gaider himself, announcing on Twitter that Friday was in fact, his last day at the studio. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” the Dragon Age: Inquisition lead writer tells Gamasutra. “The parting is amicable, and I know my current (and as yet unannounced) project will carry on and be awesome.”
Gaider marks the latest high-profile departure from the studio following co-founders Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk exiting the video game industry altogether in 2012. Last year, Mass Effect 3 director Casey Hudson left the RPG-house and joined Microsoft as creative director where he’s now working on HoloLens and Xbox games.
Well…that’s that. I now literally cannot get back into the building. Cue sad Hulk theme music as I walk away.
If you’ll remember, Gaider’s been a prominent voice about the role inclusiveness plays in video games and has spoken on multiple panels regarding that very subject. You could even call it his legacy. In addition to writing for video games, he’s also published a few novels in the Dragon Age universe.
You might not know his name, but if you’ve played a game from BioWare in the past seventeen years chances are pretty high that writer 
AIVAnet 