Playdate: We’re livestreaming ‘Alien: Isolation’ on Xbox One!
Welcome, ladygeeks and gentlenerds, to the new era of gaming. The one where you get to watch, and comment, as other people livestream gameplay from next-gen consoles. Because games! They’re fun!
My first experience with Alien: Isolation was in virtual reality at E3 2014, where I was stabbed in the chest (virtually) by said alien. What I’m playing today is the same game — Alien: Isolation — sans Oculus Rift headset. Bummer? Kind of, but we’re told that the game’s pretty good even without virtual reality integration. Joystiq EIC Ludwig Kietzmann calls it, “a trauma machine masquerading as a video game” in his (positive!) review. So, with all that said, please join me below as I try my best not to get murdered by a Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation.
[For the record, I’m playing Alien: Isolation on an Xbox One, using a retail copy (disc) provided by Sega. I’m streaming the game over wired internet using an Elgato Game Capture HD. All that to say, “This game will likely look prettier and run more smoothly on your home equipment. Streaming conditions vary!”]
And now, the stream:
http://www.twitch.tv/engadget/embed
http://www.twitch.tv/engadget/chat?popout=
Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Sony, Microsoft
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Watch the start screens for nearly every Game Boy title ever made
Up for a long nostalgia trip? You’re in for a treat. NicksplosionFX has posted a video showing the start screens for almost every original Game Boy title ever made, ranging from 4 in 1 Funpak to Zoop. Each opener only lasts a matter of seconds, but the sheer volume of games amounts to 2 hours, 42 minutes of monochrome animations and chiptunes — watch it all and you’re bound to find something that evokes your childhood. It’s thankfully in alphabetical order, so you can quickly scrub through if you’re just trying to find that one game you always played after school.
Source: NicksplosionFX (YouTube)
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This year’s ‘Call of Duty’ on PS3 and 360 comes with a free new-gen upgrade
Activision is taking a page out of its own book and throwing Call of Duty fans that haven’t yet upgraded to new consoles a bone. That’s right, if you pick up a digital copy of this year’s Advanced Warfare for either the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, you’ll get a free upgrade to a new-gen copy within the same console family. That means PlayStation 3 begets a PlayStation 4 download and Xbox 360 in turn unlocks an Xbox One version. What’s more, each console will retain its respective license and you’ll still be able to play online with your buddies on new and old boxes (with frickin’ lasers!) after you do the deed. The offer expires at the end of next March, and like with Destiny before it, premium content like season passes will carry over too. Sounds like a pretty great deal unless, of course, you were planning to pick up one of those special edition Xbox Ones.
Thinking of getting a new console? Upgrade your copy of #AdvancedWarfare for free. Details: http://t.co/zy4oBcHT1J pic.twitter.com/35RmYPV9kT
– Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) October 7, 2014
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Via: (2)
Source: Call of Duty (1)
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Kinect for Windows can track individual finger movements
Microsoft’s new Kinect sensor is a lot of things, but absurdly accurate isn’t one of them. To that end, Redmond’ Research division is showing off some recent advancements its made with Handpose — a way to fully track finger movement with its do-all gizmo in a variety of conditions. The video we’ve embedded below shows off the $150 PC peripheral analyzing and capturing intricate finger and hand movements seemingly pretty easily both from close-range and further back. Changes in lighting don’t affect the fidelity either, as the tracking is all performed by the Kinect’s depth sensor, not its camera. As Kotaku notes, however, this looks very much like something that’ll be used for applications outside of gaming, rather than as a boost for your Dance Central skills. We’d like to imagine that its extra accuracy would probably come in handy in the operating room.
Filed under: Desktops, Cameras, Gaming, Home Entertainment, Peripherals, HD, Microsoft
Via: Kotaku
Source: Microsoft Research (YouTube)
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Point-and-click classic ‘Myst’ is getting a TV show and a new tie-in game
Need a shot of early-’90s nostalgia? The classic PC adventure game Myst is getting a TV adaptation. The game’s creators at Cyan Worlds have signed a deal with Legendary TV and Digital Media (a branch of the film production company) and the show will apparently bring a tie-in game to go along with it, according to Deadline. The companion game sounds very much like it’d be appearing on tablets, considering Legendary cites a statistic that 70 percent of slate owners use their device while watching TV “at least several times” per week, something Cyan sees as a way to expand its interactive narrative. Variety points out that Legendary has yet to decide whether the show will be a traditional broadcast program or if it’ll be a digital project (its movie based on the Dead Rising series is a Crackle exclusive).
This won’t be the production house’s first dalliance with gaming either: it’s been working on movies based on Mass Effect and Warcraft for awhile. It’s worth noting that neither of those have actually seen the light of day yet despite being in the works for what seems like forever — when the Myst project could actually surface is any Stranger’s guess.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Tablets, HD
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Tube TVs, VCRs and magnets give ‘Alien: Isolation’ its signature look
From Halo to Dead Space and countless titles in between, the influence of the Alien franchise can be felt just about just about everywhere in video games. But hardly any of the releases starring the titular onyx xenomorphs actually capture aspects of what made Ridley Scott’s beloved 1979 sci-fi flick so special — a feeling that somewhere in space this could all actually happen. To do that, the team behind Alien: Isolation (out today for PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One) had an altogether different plan of attack: a retro lo-fi aesthetic that limited them to not having any technology in the game couldn’t have existed on-set in 1979. Achieving that took some creativity on the part of developer Creative Assembly, though. “Lo-fi didn’t necessarily mean crappy,” creative lead Alistair Hope tells us. “It’s just that it’s more of a stamp in time and an approach. We’re doing sci-fi set in the future, but there’s no sense that the crew on the Nostromo should be looking for a massive sci-fi gun… It’s a disillusioned view of the future.”
That approach means everything from futzing with 20th Century Fox’s archives of sound effects from the original film, getting Sigourney Weaver back in the sound booth to rerecord Ellen Ripley’s audio log that closes the movie and beating up analog video equipment to get the look and feel of the game’s UI just right.
A 1970s-model Sony standard definition CRT television
Even with the wealth of sounds that 20th Century Fox provided access to — including original foley recordings with sound designers shouting out take numbers — the team still needed to create new material. “It’s a movie that’s 117 minutes long and we needed to generate hours and hours of new content,” Hope says. That lead to another creative challenge: how do you match the source material’s motifs and feel without betraying the feel of the 35-year-old film? One way is using an ARP Pro/DGX analog synth from the 1970s to help create new sound effects. Another is to record the imperceptible audio generated by electromagnetic waves from old TV screens and other electronics and to layer them into the game’s soundscapes.
A bit more low fidelity tech: VHS tapes
Creative Assembly took parts of the game like the inventory selection menu and the scan-line-laden loading screens, transferred them to VHS tapes and played them back on SD tube TVs with “goldfish bowl” screens. Then, they recorded them and imported the footage back into their development workflow. “While we were filming them, we were crushing the cables and putting magnets around the TV to make it glitch and cause interference,” Hope says. Those mangled assets are what gives the game its visual texture and what Hope refers to as a physical quality to the imagery. In the end, the effect resembles something along the lines of the schlocky found-footage horror flick V/H/S. “It wasn’t quite what we were getting with the digital approach. When it’s digital, it can quite often feel very cold and there was kind of a warmth to the frame in the original movie.”
That warmth wasn’t without a few casualties, though. “We managed to kill quite a bit of equipment doing that,” Hope says, laughing. “I think we broke two VCRs and at least two TVs – [it was] for a good cause.”
[Image credits: Carbon Arc / Flickr; DG Jones / Flickr]
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
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PlayStation Now game streaming reaches PS TV and Vita on October 14th
If you’re planning to snag a PlayStation TV with game streaming in mind, you’ll be glad to hear that it will be ready to go on day one. Sony has posted an FAQ confirming that the PlayStation Now beta will be available on the PS TV (and the PS VIta) in North America on October 14th, the same day that the mini console hits store shelves. As with the Now tests on bigger PlayStations, you’ll have the option of renting 150-plus PS3 games with multiplayer support and cloud-based saves. Whether or not you’re bent on using Now from the start, the FAQ is a handy primer for all the less-than-obvious things the PS TV can do — it’s worth a trip to the source link if you’re at all curious.
Via: Joystiq
Source: PlayStation Blog
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‘NBA 2K15’s’ face scanning creates frightening players
NBA 2K15 arrived today, and with it comes a face-scanning feature that allows you to create a player based on your appearance. Well, as you might expect, the results are… interesting. The folks over at SB Nation compiled a few of the most awesomely terrible creations, and they’re quite scary. Of course, I’m interested to see what this means for the return of “NBA Y2K” in a few weeks. Looking to avoid transforming yourself into some sort of goblin? Here are a few tips for a proper scan. If only you could opt for EA’s rig for a bit more accuracy.
Hey @NBA2K this face scan is pretty busted. How’s my face look @LD2K @Ronnie2K lol. pic.twitter.com/IN6w4dVMPr
– Sang Frais (@SangFrais) October 7, 2014
Source: SB Nation
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NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture brings desktop-class performance and improved battery life to notebooks
Read through NVIDIA’s Maxwell desktop GPU announcement, and you might think you were looking at a feature set designed for laptops: lower power consumption, new anti-aliasing technology and a downsampling feature that can force any monitor to display 4K content. It sounds almost like a dream feature set for a portable gaming machine and, well NVIDIA agrees — today it’s officially launching the GeForce GTX 980M and 970M GPUs.
If you didn’t read up on the company’s flagship GPU announcement, let us break it down for you: NVIDIA’s Maxwell GPUs are all about power efficiency with a hint of overkill graphics performance on the side. This is a combination of lower performance per watt, and implementing new technologies like Multi-Frame Sample Anti-Aliasing, the aforementioned technology that promises to boost performance by as much as 30-percent with no visual concessions. NVIDIA says it’s also made significant gains with its BatteryBoost feature, which limits in-game framerates and balances system performance to boost on-battery play time by 20 to 30-percent.
As for that side of performance, well, not only do the new GPUs promise to perform better without being plugged into a wall outlet, but Maxwell’s new Dynamic Super Resolution (NVIDIA’s branded and optimized downsampling solution) is designed to put 4K-quality content on lower resolution screens. It’s kind of like lying to your computer’s monitor: the game is rendering itself at a 4K resolution and is filtered down to your laptop’s native 1080p display.
NVIDIA’s new chips (and new GPU features) will be available in NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M and 970M-equipped laptops, starting today. Machines rocking the new hardware can be had from all the usual suspects: MSI’s GT72 and GS60 will have it, for instance, as well as the ASUS G751, Gigabyte Aorus X7 and the Clevo P150 (which will likely be rebranded under Origin PC or Maingear flags). How do these machines perform in practice? We’ll let you know as soon as one crosses our review desk.
Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, NVIDIA
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‘Super Smash Bros.’ coming to Wii U on November 21st
The launch of a new Super Smash Bros. game for the first time in six years on 3DS was great news, but it left us wondering: when the heck is it coming to Wii U? Luckily, Nintendo has quickly answered that question. It’ll arrive to the big console on November 21st in North America for $59.99, and in the UK on December 5th for £39.99 (see the new game trailer below). Being Nintendo, there’s more, of course. You’ll be able to pick up a set of 12 Amiibo figures for $12.99 (with six more coming by December) and even use a GameCube to control your Wii U too, thanks to a $19.99 adapter. In fact, if you want the whole shebang — GameCube, Super Smash Bros. and the adapter — Nintendo’s also offering the complete bundle for $100.
Source: Nintendo
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