Electronic Sports League bans the same drugs as the Olympics

Sorry everybody but you can’t get high and play CounterStrike anymore, at least not in the Electronic Sports League. The fledgling pro gaming league announced on Reddit Wednesday that it is adopting the World Anti-Doping Agency’s list of banned substances for its players. The league had announced it would ban performance enhancing drugs from competition after a team revealed that its members had consumed Adderall prior to a match in March to enhance their ability to focus.

“Our main goal is and always will be to maintain the fair play spirit and the integrity of our competitions,” an ESL rep wrote in a Reddit post, “and we’re confident that the anti-doping policy is an important improvement that will help us advance as a sport.”

The banned list includes everything from anabolic steroids and HGH to cocaine and cannabis — seriously, it reads like a pharmacy’s inventory report. There are differing levels of enforcement, however. Weed, for example, cannot be consumed “from the start of the first day until the end of the last day of competition” but is acceptable when you’re not competing while coke, steroids and focus-enhancers like Adderall are banned at all times. Exceptions will be made if competitors have a valid prescription for whatever they’re taking. The league will randomly test competitors and the penalties for rolling dirty range from fines to a maximum 2-year ban from the league.

[Image Credit: Getty Images]

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Via:
Polygon

Source:
Reddit

Tags: doping, drugs, ElectronicSportsLeague, ESL, gaming, pro, testing, WADA, WorldAntiDopingAgency

Indie games are vast, varied and very 80s in this Megabooth trailer

There is no single definition of an “indie” video game. “Indie” doesn’t mean free, cheap, mobile, 8-bit, 3D, platformer, shooter or any other thing. Thanks to the recent, rapid evolution of game-making technologies, more people than ever are able to craft and sell their own video games with help from friends and without involving a large publisher. That’s what “indie” means — independent, but not alone.

The development community has plenty of avenues for people to gather and support one another, and one of the largest such organizations is the Indie Megabooth. Every year since 2012, the Megabooth has set up stalls at PAX East and PAX Prime showing off a selection of stellar independent games. It started with 16 games in 2012, took a trip around the globe in 2014, and will now boast a lineup of more than 70 games at this year’s PAX Prime from August 28th to 31st. The list includes beautiful digital board game Armello, intense Xbox One game Below, gorgeous space shooter Galak-Z, poetic point-and-click That Dragon, Cancer, wacky competitive game Gang Beasts (shown above), and tons more.

• Armello – League of Geeks
• Awesomenauts – Ronimo Games
• Barkley 2 – Tales of Game’s
• BELOW – Capybara Games
• Butt Sniffin Pugs – SpaceBeagles
• Captain Forever Remix – Pixelsaurus Games & Future Crayon
• Chasm – Discord Games, Inc.
• D4 – PLAYISM
• Darknet – E McNeill
• Death Road to Canada – Rocketcat LLC
• Distance – Refract
• Due Process – Giant Enemy Crab
• Eco – Strange Loop Games Inc
• Galak-Z – 17-BIT
• Gang Beasts – Boneloaf
• Hyper Light Drifter – Heart Machine
• Infinifactory – Zachtronics
• Kathy Rain – Clifftop Games
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes – Steel Crate Games, Inc.
• La-Mulana 2 – PLAYISM
• Ladykiller in a Bind – Love Conquers All Games
• Mini Metro – Dinosaur Polo Club
• Moon Hunters – Kitfox Games
• Mushroom 11 – Untame
• Nova Blitz – Dragon Foundry
• playsets. – the playsets team, llc
• Rising Thunder – Radiant Entertainment
• Shoot Shoot Mega Pack – Jon Remedios
• Sometimes Always Monsters – Vagabond Dog
• Stonehearth – Radiant Entertainment
• That Dragon, Cancer – Numinous Games
• The Magic Circle – Question LLC
• The Westport Independent – Double Zero One Zero
• Through the Woods – Antagonist
• To Leave – Freaky Creations
• Tumblestone – The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild
• Ultimate Chicken Horse – Clever Endeavour Games
• Universe Sandbox ² – Giant Army
• Viking Squad – Slick Entertainment Inc
• Wattam – Funomena
• XING: The Land Beyond – White Lotus Interactive
• YIIK: A Postmodern RPG – Ackk Studios

Plus, check out the accompanying Minibooth and the rest of Indie Megabooth’s plans for PAX East right here.

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Indie Megabooth

Tags: hdpostcross, Indie, IndieMegabooth, megabooth, PAX, PaxPrime

The PS Vita of Steam Machines arrives in 2016 for $299

The Steam Machine invasion is happening this fall. But while these computers are said to be more powerful than traditional consoles, such as the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, none of them are exactly portable. Smach Zero’s device, however, is. Formerly known as Steamboy, the handheld system runs Valve’s SteamOS and features a 5-inch, 720p screen, 32GB of onboard storage (plus an SD card slot), 4GB RAM, HDMI-out and configurable gamepads. In terms of connectivity, you’ll find Bluetooth, WiFi and, on the Pro model, 4G for true on-the-go gaming. Smach Zero is also promising access to over 1,000 Steam games at launch, but we’ll have to wait and see if that turns out to be true. According to the manufacturer, it will be available during Q4 of 2016 starting at $299. If you’d like to pre-order it, you can do so on November 10th — the same day as other Steam Machines are launching.

Back in June, Smach Zero said the handheld would be powered by AMD’s G-Series system-on-chip (Steppe Eagle) with Jaguar-based CPU and GCN-based Radeon graphics, which should be good enough to play through SteamOS titles like BioShock Infinite, Civilization V, Half-Life 2 and many more.

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Via:
Polygon

Source:
Smach Zero

Tags: hdpostcross, Smach Zero, SmachZero, Steam Machine, Steam Machines, Steamboy, SteamMachine, SteamMachines, Valve

Spy on a vampiric slumber party in the browser port of ‘Night Trap’

There’s a Night Trap fan group on Facebook. This isn’t too surprising, considering Night Trap‘s storied past in the video game industry and its unabashed, nostalgic charm. It’s a full-motion video game (FMV) — meaning it stars real people, just like a live-action movie — released in 1992 for the Sega CD and later ported to Sega 32X, 3DO, MS-DOS and Mac OS. Night Trap follows a group of young women at a slumber party that turns deadly when vampiric creatures show up, looking to feast on the girls’ blood. Players, viewing the party via hidden cameras, attempt to trap the evil beasties and save the girls. For this unconventional premise, Night Trap holds a permanent seat in video game history alongside Doom and Mortal Kombat: These titles were partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB rating system, following a series of congressional hearings on “violent” video games in the early 1990s. Concerned groups accused Night Trap of encouraging kidnapping and featuring ultra-violent content, although compared with many modern, award-winning games, it’s a truly tame experience.

So, of course there’s a Night Trap fan group on Facebook. It’s precisely this Facebook group that Dave Voyles, a technical evangelist at Microsoft, turned to when he was seeking inspiration for his next programming project a few weeks back. Now, Voyles is knee-deep in Night Trap‘s code, reworking it to run in any browser for a new generation of fans to enjoy.

Voyles promises to keep the code open source as he works on Night Trap, noting, “I learned from others keeping their code open source and well-documented, so it’s only fair that I pass it on.” He hasn’t secured permission from the owners of the Night Trap license, but he says that if they ever ask him to stop, he will. “My goal for this is to learn and teach others,” he says.

We interviewed Voyles via email, and that chat has been edited for content and clarity below.

How did you get started on this project?

During lunch a few weeks ago, I wanted to see if I could quickly prototype something, so I thought I would challenge myself and try to re-create an old game in the browser. I got the idea from Phil Cobley, a fellow member of the Night Trap group on Facebook, after I saw him put together some screenshots of what it might look like on a 3DS.

What’s your personal history with Night Trap? Is it an all-time favorite of yours?

I absolutely love this game. Sure, the acting is cheesy, but it was the first time I really had an opportunity to interact with a film. If you look at it as a “game,” then sure, the gameplay certainly isn’t top-notch. If you look at it as a film where you can control the outcome, I think you’re getting a great experience.

I own two copies on the Sega CD, but once the 3DO came out, I immediately bought a copy for that, considering the footage is far cleaner. It’s in my top five games, largely because of how different it was from anything else at that time. Also, because it is technically impressive.

What makes Night Trap worthy of the effort of porting it to HTML5?

There are a few things:

1. The browser can finally handle it. Even a few years ago, this wasn’t possible in the browser. I do a lot of game and web development, and wanted to showcase what the browser can actually do. With this, I can dynamically adjust the quality of the video, based on your device speed and internet connection. It’s also platform-agnostic.
2. It’s a game with a lot of history. Filmed in 1987 and released in 1992, there are a number of gamers growing up today who have never played this out-of-print game, nonetheless even heard of it. Night Trap is a large reason why we have the ESRB rating today, so this is kind of my way of bringing the past back to the limelight for the next generation of gamers.
3. It’s a challenge. The fact that Digital Pictures was able to develop this in 1992 with, as far as I could find, only one programmer, is amazing. The programming language they had to use back then (68K Assembly) is far more difficult than what we had today, so I wanted to see if it was actually possible to completely rewrite something written in another language, without seeing any of the code.

What’s the most difficult aspect of the Night Trap port?

The most time-consuming part of this is ripping all of the videos from the original disc (I’m using the Sega CD 32X version), then creating an outline with all of the underlying information for each of the 160 clips. I started to piece together the first 30; then the fan community at the Night Trap Facebook group filled in the rest! I have a bit about that here, along with a screenshot of what the data looks like.

From there, I needed to figure out how to architect the game. Without being able to see any of the source, this was difficult. Which clips fit together? What happens if someone catches an Auger (vampire)? What happens if they miss one? On top of that, there are so many edge cases that I needed to account for. For example, what if a gamer is viewing a room where nothing is happening, then it’s the correct time for the clip to play? How do I keep track of those events for every room and every second?

It took me a day or so of prototyping, but I finally have it down. This was all written in JavaScript, which, despite being a terrible language for so many reasons, is also one of the most versatile, as it works everywhere that a modern browser is available.

Is FMV due for a comeback any time soon?

I’ve felt that FMV has been due for a comeback since it went out the window in the late ’90s, but I understand why many people don’t see it as something practical. Still, the gaming landscape has changed so drastically over the last few years, especially with the advent of mobile gaming, so who knows? You see companies like Konami, who are traditionally known for their AAA productions and arcade games, finally leaving that market for social games on mobile platforms.

Who says the tide can’t change to favor FMV? Especially today, where we see more and more older games getting ported to mobile. Sherlock Holmes (which also appeared on the Sega CD and 3DO) is one of the most recent titles I’ve seen.

Images Credit: Dave Voyles

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Tags: browser, davevoyles, fmv, FullMotionVideo, hdpostcross, interview, nighttrap, port, Retro

Challenge friends to real-life wizard duels with ‘Maguss’

Harry Potter‘s brand of magic may not exist in the real world, but smartphone applications, electrical engineering and plastic wands sure do. Maguss uses all of these things, plus a badge that acts as a motion-sensing receiver, to bring wizard duels to the physical world. Maguss is on Kickstarter right now, seeking $66,191 to create and ship a kit allowing wannabe wizards to challenge friends to duels in-person and online. Players cast spells by waving the wand in specific motions — in-person, the motion is picked up by the enemy’s badge and smartphone app. Online, players conduct spells at their own badge and the motions are transferred to the rival wizard’s app. In either scenario, whoever has the best wandwork wins.

Maguss starts with this simple premise, but the Kickstarter campaign features stretch goals offering a more robust game system. At $120,000, Maguss will add a “complex game mode” inspired by RPGs where players can uniquely level up, join factions, earn a spot on the ranking boards and embark on quests. At $180,000, the Maguss team promises to add GPS tracking and an interactive map to the game, meaning players would be able to find and challenge nearby people to duels. But, for now, the team needs $66,000 to make the standard Maguss magic happen.

Say it with us, Muggles: Accio Maguss!

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Via:
Refinery29

Source:
Kickstarter

Tags: app, HarryPotter, hdpostcross, kickstarter, magic, maguss, wand