A ‘Pokemon’ glitch could corrupt your ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’ saves
Enjoying Pokemon Sun and/or Moon? You aren’t alone. But as a heads up, for now, it looks like you shouldn’t save in the post-game Battle Tree location or pretty much any Pokemon Center in the game, according to Polygon. Folks online are saying that doing so can corrupt your save file, and that means all the work you’ve done to evolve Litten into an Incineroar will be for naught. We’ve reached out to The Pokemon Company about a fix for this and will update this post should more information arrive. In the meantime, you’ll just have to break the habit of saving after you’ve healed your party members at a Pokemon Center.
Via: Polygon
Source: Reddit, Styxiedust (Twitter)
‘The Walking Dead’ season three lands on December 20th
Telltale’s The Walking Dead is back. Season three, A New Frontier, is set to premiere worldwide on December 20th across PC, PlayStation 4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, iOS and Android. Keep in mind that this is the first of five total episodes, the rest of which are set to hit throughout 2017. For Xbox One and PS4, the complete game, including access to all episodes as they come out, will be available as a boxed product starting on February 7th.
A New Frontier begins four years after the zombie outbreak first struck and introduces Javier, a young man searching for his family in the ruins of society. He runs into series star Clementine, who’s now older, wiser and tougher than ever, and their fates are entwined from this moment on. Telltale promises it’s a story “where every choice you make could be your last.” As usual, of course.
We’ve seen a teaser for season three featuring Clementine, Javier and one zombie who’s unlucky enough to cross their path. The first full look at A New Frontier will be during The Game Awards on the evening of December 1st.
A New Frontier follows two full (and, frankly, fabulous) Walking Dead seasons, the 400 Days DLC and the Michonne miniseries. There’s a ton of emotional baggage heading into the third season, but at least there’s one glimmer of hope: Clementine is still alive. For now.
Xbox One games stream to your Oculus Rift on December 12th
You can already stream Xbox One games to your PC. But what if you’d rather not make it patently obvious that you’re playing Gears of War? You’re in luck. Microsoft and Oculus are launching an app that, as promised, will let you send Xbox One games to an Oculus Rift headset attached to a Windows 10 PC. The software, which arrives December 12th, won’t magically turn your favorite titles into virtual reality experiences. Instead, you’re getting a Netflix-style virtual screen. This is more for private gameplay (say, to prevent your kids from seeing gore) or giving yourself a larger screen than you can fit in your den.
The app will be free, although this clearly isn’t the cheapest way to play Xbox One games away from your TV: on top of the Xbox One, you’ll need a fast PC and a Rift. Still, this might beat having to sit in front of your monitor the entire time… or having to awkwardly explain an ultra-violent game to your little ones.
Via: The Verge
Source: Xbox Wire
The biggest ‘Minecraft’ console update of 2016 lands in December
The final Minecraft: Console Edition update of the year is also its largest. The Holiday Update will land in late December, bringing the Elytra (wings that allow players to glide), Amplified Terrain, End Cities, the Dragon’s Breath potion ingredient and more features to PlayStation 4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Vita and Wii U. This means that the console versions will be nearly on par with the PC edition, Microsoft promises.
The Holiday Update polishes the UI and includes new mobs, items, blocks and status effects. Players will find the Elytra in The End, Minecraft’s third and final dimension. The End itself will be updated with End Cities, End Ships, Chorus Plants, Chorus Flowers and Purpur blocks, among other features. There are also new enemies, including Shulkers, which hide near Purpur blocks and fire homing missiles at encroaching players. The Dragon’s Breath ingredient allows players to create Lingering Potions — just throw one of these suckers on the ground to leave some status effects behind for enemies or friends to find.
Developer Mojang is giving players a sneak peak at the update today, meaning there will be more surprise features when it actually goes live in late December. The Holiday Update is free for anyone who owns Minecraft: Console Edition. The Windows 10 and Pocket editions of Minecraft recently saw updates that brought those versions nearly on par with the original Java version as well. Plus, Minecraft is scheduled to hit Apple TV before the end of the year. Happy holidays, indeed.
Source: Mojang
‘Resident Evil 7’ $180 edition comes with a tiny haunted house
After scaring our socks off at Gamescom, Capcom has now revealed Resident Evil 7’s collector’s edition — and it’s not for the faint hearted… or the financially minded.
Costing a wallet-worrying $180, this special collector’s edition will net you six unique items, including your very own mansion. An ornately detailed eight-inch model, this replica of the game’s plantation mansion has its own speakers and LEDs, doubling as an incredibly creepy music box.
It may only be eight inches, but in this economy $180 for a mansion is nothing to be sniffed at.
This special edition will also include an exclusive metal case, a suitably grimy-looking VHS box, a bloody finger-shaped USB stick, an exclusive lithograph and lastly a creepy note. Well, they can’t all be winners, can they?
While Resident Evil 7 will be heading to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on January 24th, this collector’s edition will only be available on consoles.
Classic ‘Ninja Gaiden’ scores earn a deluxe remaster next year
Say what you will about the trend of gaming soundtracks being released on vinyl (I’ve already chimed in), but the upside is that the business move can expose classic tracks to a new audience. Take the brutally difficult Ninja Gaiden, for example. The game originally came out in 1988, so there’s an entire generation of folks who have likely never heard the lauded chiptunes before. The same team responsible for last year’s Street Fighter II vinyl edition, Brave Wave, is at the helm for a remastered version of composer Keiji Yamagishi’s first-ever score, according to The Verge.
Ninja Gaiden: The Definitive Soundtrack includes music from the first three games, spread across two volumes. What’s more, they’ll contain music from the console and the arcade versions. Neither price nor pre-order date has been announced, but if you don’t own a turntable don’t fret: the soundtracks will be offered as digital releases and on CD. You can preview how it sounds just below.
Via: The Verge
Source: Brave Wave
‘Uncharted 4’ adds a survival mode with a few twists
Gears of War 4 won’t have a monopoly on co-op survival modes this holiday, apparently. Naughty Dog is introducing an Uncharted 4: Survival mode that will arrive in mid-December. As with its Xbox rival, Uncharted will have you facing 50 waves of AI enemies as you build up defenses, rank up your character and coordinate with teammates. Don’t call it an outright clone of Gears’ Horde mode, however, as it periodically throws a monkey wrench into the works.
Some waves will have objectives you need to complete, such as collecting treasures or defeating specific enemies. Also, you’ll occasionally run into modifiers that prevent you from relying on the same tactics every round. You may have to use only melee weapons, for example, or limit yourself to head shots. And while you will face the mercenaries that dominate the conventional story, Survival adds plenty of supernatural opponents.
This won’t be a radical break from the Co-Op Arena mode you saw in the second and third Uncharted games, but it should inject new life into a title that’s already on some critics’ short lists. It might impact Sony’s bottom line, too. If Uncharted 4 has an answer to one of GOW4’s best-known modes, you might be tempted to pick up a PS4 Slim bundle when you were otherwise set on an Xbox One S.
Source: PlayStation Blog
The MacBook Pro Touch Bar plays ‘Doom’ because of course it does
Doom is the rice of the video game world. It’s a staple of the industry and it works with everything, running flawlessly on ATMs, printers, pianos, calculators, e-readers, chainsaws and even on a terminal within Doom itself. This week, Facebook iOS engineer Adam Bell got Doom running on one more unlikely appliance: the Touch Bar of the latest MacBook Pro.
Playing the original Doom on a MacBook Pro isn’t impressive in and of itself, but squeezing those monstrous pixels onto the 2170 x 60 resolution Touch Bar is a notable accomplishment (even if the bar is basically a thin, elongated Apple Watch). Bell showed off his handiwork in a YouTube video published on Sunday, complete with classic sound effects, music and all.
Bell also configured the Touch Bar to display the Doom HUD, featuring health, ammo, weapons and other in-game stats at the top of the MacBook Pro keyboard, ostensibly while the game itself runs on the main screen.
Side note, as ridiculous (ly amazing) as Doom is running on the Touch Bar is… the HUD is equally great pic.twitter.com/RFwq7nJ7ae
— Adam Bell (@b3ll) November 20, 2016
Bethesda and developer id Software released a big Doom reboot this year and it’s just as gloriously gory as the series’ pixelated roots. It features multiple nods to the original game, including a level editor with classic assets. It’s nominated in multiple Game Awards categories, including Game of the Year.
Via: The Verge
Source: @b3ll
Microsoft hints at what you’ll need to run Windows 10 VR headsets
There’s still much we don’t know about Microsoft’s plan to deliver virtual reality in Windows 10. At this point, we’ve heard it’ll start with $299 headsets from a variety of PC manufacturers, and support for the Windows Holographic VR platform will arrive in in the Windows 10 Creators Update next year. There’s plenty left up in the air beyond that (we’ll likely hear more during an event next month). For now, we’ve got a sense of minimum PC requirements to run VR experiences, The Verge reports.
According to the “Windows Holographic First Run” application, which is available in the most recent Windows Insider test builds, the VR platform will need at the minimum 4GB of RAM, a DirectX 12 graphics card, USB 3.0 support and four CPU cores. If you’ve got a dual-core CPU with hyper threading (which appears as four different cores in Windows), you’ll probably be safe as well.
Of course, Microsoft’s final specs will likely include more detail about the actual CPU speed and GPU hardware you’ll need, but for now these requirements make it clear Windows Holographic should run on mid-range computers. It’s also unclear what sort of VR experiences these specs will get you — they likely won’t be enough to run Eve Valkyrie well.
In comparison, both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive require a quad-core Intel Core i5 4590 or faster processor, 4GB of RAM, USB 3.0 and either an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 video card. Oculus also just rolled out a new feature that’ll let its VR headset run well on even slower hardware. Based on what we’ve heard from Microsoft, it seems like the company is trying to make VR more accessible than the Oculus Rift and Vive. That starts with cheaper headsets, but hopefully its final PC specs will come in much cheaper than the competition as well.
Source: The Verge
UK education expert dismisses ‘Minecraft’ as a ‘gimmick’
After offering teachers early access to Minecraft: Education Edition this summer, Microsoft’s classroom-friendly version of the immensely popular sandbox game was formally launched at the beginning of November. Not everyone is keen on Minecraft being used as a teaching tool, though, and ahead of Microsoft’s UK launch event tomorrow, behavior expert for the government’s Department for Education Tom Bennett has voiced his skepticism to The Times. “I am not a fan of Minecraft in lessons. This smacks to me of another gimmick which will get in the way of children actually learning,” Bennett said.
“Removing these gimmicky aspects of education is one of the biggest tasks facing us as teachers. We need to drain the swamp of gimmicks,” he continued, mimicking some recent rhetoric from US President-elect Trump.
“I would say to teachers: ‘Do you need to use this game or is there something that is cheaper and better – like books?’ By offering a game and a gimmicky way of learning a subject, you run a real risk of children focusing on the wrong thing.”
It’s quite the damning opinion from a high-profile government advisor, but Bennett isn’t alone in his views. Some argue that Minecraft can be a distracting classroom environment despite a teacher’s best intentions, or that by adding structure to an inherently free game world, kids are more likely to tune out of the message.
On the other side of the fence, educators have been using Minecraft and talking up its value as a learning tool for several years now. Minecraft: Education Edition originally began life as MinecraftEdu, a custom version of the game being developed by TeacherGaming since 2011, before Microsoft took the reins in January this year. In addition to kids learning things like spatial awareness and problem-solving skills passively, the general idea is the sandbox world offers a collaborative and immerse classroom environment that students engage with better than a whiteboard.
Teachers are able to play god in the game world, and Minecraft has been used to help teach everything from coding to maths, art, social studies, geography and geology, history and other subjects that can benefit from an interactive visual aid. A teacher community has also developed around Minecraft, with educators discussing, collaborating on and sharing lesson plan resources online.
Games have traditionally been seen as entertainment, and playing them thought of as a leisurely activity, so it’s no real surprise that some are against their presence in classrooms. And with the benefits of using the medium to teach hard to quantify, it’s understandable that Bennett and those who share the opinion it’s merely a gimmick might need some extra convincing.
Via: gameindustry.biz
Source: The Times (paywalled)
AIVAnet 