OptiShot2 is a fun golf sim that also improves your game

If you have creeping doubts about your golf game, there’s a $500 sim that lets you swing real clubs in your house. Yep, your pets and furniture will need to make way for the OptiShot2, which gives you online play, simulated championship courses and instant practice feedback. You hook it up to a Mac or PC, download the software and swing away. The infrared sensors accurately track your swing while the simulated courses and online competition add a gaming-like fun factor. But $500 is a lot of money for a video game and sensor, so I want more than just fun; I also want to get better. Luckily, the OptiShot delivers both of those things.

If you can’t golf, you’re going to suck at OptiShot’s sim. That’s because you take full-blooded hacks at a ball with a real driver, iron or putter, and not a gamepad or mouse as with, say, EA’s PGA Tour series. The swinging mat has two strips of 16 infrared sensors that detect when your club zips through the ball before, during and after contact. It measures your clubhead speed to within plus or minus 2 MPH, and the face angle and swing path to within 1.5 and 1.9 degrees, respectively. The sim then figures out the distance your ball would travel in real life and whether it’d hook, slice or go straight.

If you can play a little, it’s stupidly fun. I used a BenQ 1080p projector and high-end PC, with all the realism settings cranked. The graphics aren’t quite as good as World Golf Tour or other top-notch golf games, but they’re definitely good enough, and anyway, it’s not meant to be a video game per se. Rather, it makes boring practice more entertaining by making you care about each swing — if you fluff a shot, you’ll get beat by an online rival or shoot a bad score.

To kick things off, you install the OptiShot2 software on your PC or Mac, download the courses and plug in the hardware. The company recommends a minimum 8.5-foot-high ceiling, though you may need more than that — if you’re tall and want to swing a driver, a 10-foot or higher ceiling might be required. You can optionally calibrate your clubs and tell the system’s auto-caddy which one to hand you for a given distance. To pretend you’re Bubba Watson, you can cheat the settings so that the ball flies much farther than it would in real life.

Once you take a hack with or without a ball, its digital counterpart will accurately slice into the rough or power down the fairway. You can fine-tune the settings for more wind, higher rough difficulty or faster greens, to name a few options. From there, just play the course as you would in real life, hitting drivers, irons, chips and putts.

The system does a good job of measuring your swing, with a few exceptions. I compared it against a Zepp swing analyzer, and it matched the swing speed and clubface angle closely. As with the Zepp, I was hitting drives about 250-260 yards, and deserved any slices or hooks it gave me. That feedback forced me to make the necessary adjustments to avoid spraying the ball all over the digital links. When I did go to play on a real course, I found that extra concentration helpful — on a driving range, it’s too easy to just turn your brain off, since there’s nothing to play for.

The OptiShot2 picks up center, toe or heel contact, but not “fat” or thin shots. That’s because it can’t measure the height of your club above the sensor, so a real-life “topped” shot might look just fine on the sim. It also means chipping isn’t very realistic, as face contact is critical on such shots. The simulated putting was reasonably accurate, however, according to a comparison I made with the 3Bays GSA Putt. In any case, the OptiShot2 can’t help your putting or chipping much — those two disciplines have to be practiced on a real green. Having them work consistently makes the game more fun, though, especially with head-to-head play.

If you want a more realistic playing experience, it’s doable — for a price. A sum of $300 will get you an octagonal mat, raising your feet slightly and giving them more grip than, say, your hardwood floor. There’s also a $110 hitting net that you can bang real golf balls into for extra feel (and danger), along with plastic tees and foam balls.

You can set up online games and invite up to four friends for stroke or match play (offline games are also possible). This is just as amusing as it sounds, although you’re trusting your pals not to fudge the settings. You can play on 15 included courses, or buy extra “Platinum” tracks at $30 bucks a pop. Amusingly, the company added a knockoff Augusta National course called “Sweet Magnolia” in time for the Masters. In fact, many of the courses are clones of real-life championship layouts with the names changed for copyright reasons.

On my first simulated OptiShot2 game I failed to break 100 and I’m a 14-handicap, so that was embarrassing. But that’s just the point: By accurately tracking your swing, the system forces you to bear down and play better. After shaking off a bit of rust and grooving a better motion, things started looking up and after about 15 games, I shot a 75 at “Sweet Magnolia.”

Then came the acid test: a real golf course. I played my first real round of the year and lo, I actually scored decently. So, the OptiShot succeeds on two counts for me — it’s super fun, and it helped my full swing by forcing me to practice better. It can’t help your short game much, but the chipping and putting simulations are good enough to keep it fun. My only reservation is the price: a full setup, including the octagonal mat, net and a few courses runs nearly $1,000, the same price as a membership at my local club. But if you’re a golf nut with means, it’ll give you a fun way to practice so that when you hit the links for real, you’ll be ready.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

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Channel 4 creates its own video game publishing arm

Channel 4 is gearing up to launch its own video game publisher. The UK broadcaster has commissioned mobile games before, but they’ve often been specific projects that relate to its most popular programming. Now, it wants to offer additional support to the indie developer community. Channel 4 will continue to fund a smattering of games, but its new “All 4 Games” brand will offer broader games development, marketing and promotional support. So even if Channel 4 isn’t funding the title, the idea is that its guidance and experience will justify a small cut of developers’ revenues. That includes publishing games on all of the major app stores, as well as promoting them through its new All 4 video streaming service. What’s not clear, however, is the exact cut Channel 4 will be taking from the games. The mobile space is brutal, especially now that the free-to-play model is so prevalent, so the broadcaster will need to prove its services represent good value.

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Via: gamesindustry.biz

Source: Channel 4

You can now use a phone to securely log in to Steam

Steam’s mobile apps desperately need a redesign, but they’re competent enough if you just want to buy a few games and see what your friends are up to. To keep your account secure, Valve currently offers two-factor authentication on desktop via “Steam Guard,” which sends a unique code via email. Now, it wants to offer players the option of receiving that code through the Steam app instead. The feature is called “Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator” and it’s live now for a selection of Android beta testers. If you want in, you’ll need to join this Steam group and hope Valve takes a fancy to your username. Once selected, you should see the new “Get Steam Guard codes from my phone” option inside the app. Otherwise, you’ll just have to hang tight — Valve can be a tad slow to update its mobile apps, but eventually this security feature should be available to everyone.

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Source: Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator

Retro-futuristic stealth game ‘Invisible, Inc.’ hits Steam in May

Step back in time — to the future! Invisible, Inc. is a tactical espionage game set in a futuristic, corporate-controlled world where hacking is as cool as 1950s-style fedoras and trench coats. It launches on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux on May 12th, Klei Entertainment announced in a shiny new trailer today. Klei is the studio behind excellently quirky games like Don’t Starve and Mark of the Ninja, meaning Invisible, Inc. is on track to be a superb experience. An in-progress version of the game has been available via Steam Early Access since last year, but now the full thing will be up for grabs, no bug reporting required. It’s also headed to PlayStation 4, though that release date is still up in the air. Get a taste of Invisible, Inc.‘s stylish, stealthy exploits in the new trailer below.

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Source: @klei

The beautiful cyberpunk game that turned two brothers into developers

Tim and Adrien Soret, brothers from Paris, were quietly developing a Studio Ghibli-inspired dark fantasy game when the Cyberpunk Jam digitally rolled into town in early 2014. They took a break from their existing development schedule to build a completely new experience, a pixelated, neon-infused, sci-fi homage to some of their favorite childhood titles — Another World, Flashback and Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. They were new to game development and unknown on the indie scene, but in six days they coded, animated and designed their entry, The Last Night, and then threw it online for voting. They didn’t expect much.

“When we discovered that we won out of 265 games, we were totally stunned,” older brother Tim Soret says.

Journalists, fans and other developers began reaching out to the brothers, praising their work in the Cyberpunk Jam and asking for more. It was an “insane amount of attention,” Soret recalls:

“Finally, as artists, our lives started to make sense. It felt like we hit the right spot, that we were in the right place, that we did the right thing, that finally we were doing something to actually please people rather than annoying them with advertisings, like I did in my previous career.”

They decided to pause the fantasy game and build The Last Night into a full cinematic platformer, a style of game that emphasizes exploration and experimentation in a living, breathing, 2D environment. This is the type of game the brothers were waiting for, a new kind of side-scroller built with all of the power and ease provided by modern technology.

“As a creator, everything you have in mind, you can make it now, with almost no technical limitation,” Soret says. “That’s why we want to bring back this genre from the grave. The pleasure of a real 2D adventure, but without the slow pace of point-and-click, without the hassle of point-based combats of RPGs, without the levels designed as platforming puzzles. Just real adventures, full of in-game storytelling, of action, of exploration, where you’re in direct control of your character at all times.”

There are no good or bad choices. Just like real life, there are just choices. And there are consequences.

The Last Night is gorgeous. Artistically, it draws inspiration from Blade Runner, with high-stacked cities packed with bright lights and roaming, flying authority figures. It stars a man with a gun, a bounty hunter-type character faced with a series of life-altering decisions. The game diverges depending on the choices each player makes over a series of connected nights, each one starting and ending in the hero’s apartment. Choose one action on night three and it impacts the events of night six or seven, Soret says. This means there is definitely more than one ending in The Last Night.

“There are no good or bad choices,” Soret says. “Just like real life, there are just choices. And there are consequences. And you’re not always in control of what happens. The goal for us is to make a story that will bear different meanings depending on your actions. This is how we want to explore under different lights the themes of the game, like the melancholy of modern life.”

For the Cyberpunk Jam, the Soret brothers used an art style they thought was simple to implement: lean, pixelated characters with long, thin limbs, similar in style to Gods Will Be Watching or Sword & Sworcery. They didn’t even like that character design — and they still don’t — but they did what they had to in order to finish the jam. Spindly legs are easier to animate, it turns out.

The final version of The Last Night features pixelated characters with more realistic proportions and movements. The brothers even recorded themselves doing certain moves in real life so they could transfer those natural movements to the game. It’s higher-quality content all around, Soret says.

Making these decisions — scrapping one art style for another, pausing one game to jump on the momentum of another, entering the Cyberpunk Jam in the first place — is made easier for Tim and Adrien since they share a history and were raised the same way. This is the main advantage of working with a brother, “someone who is exactly like you,” Tim Soret says.

“We miss the same games; we share the same idea of the ideal game,” he says. “When we work on the same piece of art, we know that we can trust the other in terms of vision and art direction. The worst part is that, obviously, we suffer from the same weaknesses. One example is that we’re not extremely organized and we suck at estimating and managing our time (the classic artist curse).”

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To counteract their shared weaknesses, the Soret brothers are working with writer and producer Danny Wadeson and a coder from MIT, Kamran Khan. “We bring our unique vision and our creativity, while they bring stability, planning, scheduling and motivation,” Soret says.

Together, the brothers Soret and friends plan to build the immersive, cinematic, 2D platformer of their childhood dreams. The Last Night is on track to launch in 2016 for PS4, PC and Mac from their studio, Odd Tales, with a Kickstarter planned for early this year.

“We want to deliver what people really want, because we feel we’re the only ones who can do it,” Soret says. “We saw the remake of Flashback or Oddworld, and we feel it’s far from what cinematic platformers could be today. So when you have a unique vision and you feel you have the power to do it in your hands, it would be terrible to not do it. We feel it’s our duty.”

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