Get a different Humble Bundle every day for the next two weeks
Your average Humble Bundle is a fortnightly affair. Starting today, however, there’s going to be a fresh bundle every 24 hours for a period of two weeks, which ought to add up to some decent savings for gamers. If you’ve never partaken in one of these bundles before, then it’s pretty simple: You visit the site to see what’s on offer, choose how much (or how little) you want to pay, decide how much of that money you want to allocate to a charity, and then it’s time download, install and play (or add to your Steam library, if you choose). If you head over there today you can get Saints Row: The Third, Dead Island, and Metro 2033 along with six other titles if your willing to pay more than the average (which was $6.23 as of this writing). And remember to check the Humble Bundle site daily, or subscribe to their newsletter, to find out what’s on offer over the coming days — we have no idea what tomorrow shall bring.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Humble Bundle
Play: Steam games on the cheap thanks to daily Humble Bundles
Your average Humble Bundle is a fortnightly affair. Starting today, however, there’s going to be a fresh bundle every 24 hours for a period of two weeks, which ought to add up to some decent savings for Steam gamers. If you’ve never partaken in one of these bundles before, then it’s pretty simple: You visit the site to see what’s on offer, choose how much (or how little) you want to pay for a bundle, decide how much of that money you want to allocate to a charity, and then look on in a contented stupor while the new titles magically weave their way into your Steam library. If you head over there today, you can get all the titles listed after the break for $9 (or around £6 in UK money), or even less if you leave out one of the more mediocre titles, Dead Island: Riptide.
- Metro 2033 — The atmospheric, post-apocalyptic, Russian-accented FPS whose graphics have been used to benchmark umpteen graphics cards. (Interestingly, Metro’s developer has had to move its HQ to Malta to avoid the Ukraine unrest.)
- Saints Row: The Third with full DLC — It’s a bit like GTA, but with all of the boring bits taken out and a load of explicit, juvenile (and, in some countries, banned) humor swapped in.
- Sacred 2 Gold – Monster-hackin’, werewolf-slashin’, didn’t-copy-everything-out-of-LOTR-pretendin’
- Risen 2 — A dark, piratical RPG from 2012, slightly let down by over-simplistic combat.
- Also in the complete bundle: Dead Island, Dead Island: Riptide, Saints Row 2, Risen and Sacred Citadel.
And remember to check the Humble Bundle site daily, or subscribe to their newsletter, to find out what’s on offer over the coming days — we have no idea what tomorrow shall bring.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Humble Bundle
Sony will give your PlayStation controller a free World Cup makeover
Major sporting events serve as the perfect time for brands to thrust their latest wares in fans’ faces. With only weeks until the start of the 2014 World Cup, Sony is maximising its marketing opportunities as one of only six official FIFA Partners by offering PS3 and PS4 owners the opportunity to give their DualShock controllers a World Cup makeover. Sony will set up Customisation Stations in three UK cities where teams of graffiti artists will adorn the controllers with owners’ favourite players, teams and squad numbers completely free of charge. To take advantage of the offer, make your way to the PlayStation Customisation Stations situated in the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham on May 24th, Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester on May 31st or Westfield Stratford City in London on either the 7th or 8th June. All you’ll need is your PlayStation controller and an idea of what you want done with it.
Via: Pocket-lint
Oculus Rift user transplants his whole body into VR using three Kinects
So, not every indie developer abandoned Oculus VR after the Facebook take-over. 3D video expert Oliver Kreylos is one of those who stuck around, and we’re mighty glad he did. Check out his three-way-Kinect-plus-Rift setup in the video below and you’ll be glad too — even if the second video, showing the wearer’s POV (and intended solely for other Rift owners) makes you wretch a couple of times. Video feeds from the three Kinects are merged to create a relatively solid 3D rendition of Kreylos as he moves about inside a VR environment. The merged feed is then sent to the Oculus so that he can look around at everything inside that environment, including his own body. Kreylos says that even though his limbs were a bit fuzzy during the experiment, due to the relatively low resolution of the cameras, the system’s low latency allowed his brain to believe that the body parts really belonged to him, to the point where it felt natural to try to reach out and touch non-existent objects. And bear in mind: All of this was achieved using first-gen Kinects, rather than the much more powerful version that is (usually) supplied with the Xbox One, so there’s already plenty of scope for improvement.
Filed under: Gaming, Wearables, Science
Via: Kotaku
Source: Doc-OK
Watch Dogs won’t hit 1080p on either PlayStation 4 or Xbox One
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are both plenty powerful, but so far, many third-party games have ended up running better on Sony’s console. That trend apparently continues later this month with Ubisoft’s upcoming cyberpunk hackathon, Watch Dogs. The PS4 may have the upper hand in terms of native resolution as Joystiq noticed, but the game will run at 30fps (the gold standard for open-world games) on both platforms and neither will sport 1080p natively according to publisher Ubisoft. This is contrary to what a PlayStation.com listing said before it vanished over the weekend. The adventures of Aiden Pearce will run at 900p for Sony fans, while Xbox One owners will see 792p on their flat-screens. Because both consoles will upscale the game and output it to your display’s native resolution, it’s a difference you might only notice if both versions are running side-by-side. If you’ll remember, Assassin’s Creed 4 shipped on the PS4 at 900p as well, and received an update to hit full HD after the game launched — we’ll be watching to see if that happens here, too.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Sony, Microsoft
Via: Joystiq
Source: UbiBlog
Xbox One without Kinect is great for consumers, terrible for Kinect game developers
Sure, a $100 price drop on the Xbox One is great for us. First things first, it’s less money to fork over for a new game console. Second, no Kinect, which means no all-seeing eye judging our tawdry lifestyle. But what if you’re a Kinect game developer? What if you’re, say, a member of the studio with the most successful third-party game franchise for Kinect, and you’re in the middle of making an exclusive Disney game for it?
Oh, great. Super great.
– johntdrake (@johntdrake) May 13, 2014
Yup, that about sums it up. And that’s exactly how Harmonix director of publishing and PR John Drake put it just moments after Microsoft made its announcement this morning. Harmonix publicist Nick Chester followed up with the (slightly) more positive, “Now Kinect designers have to work extra hard to innovate and make solid software. Good thing we were already doing that!” Yikes! There’s also an official, far less exciting statement.
Harmonix issued the following, more finessed statement:
“As avid gamers, we’re excited for fans to have more choices out there. As game makers, this platform change doesn’t affect our strategy – it reinforces that we must continue to focus on building innovative, compelling and well-designed motion experiences to motivate consumers to buy our games. We believe that tightly-crafted motion games can be great, genre-defining interactive experiences, as we’ve proven with the Dance Central franchise on Kinect for Xbox 360, and we’re eager to prove it again with Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved this fall on both Xbox One and Xbox 360.”
Filed under: Cameras, Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD, Microsoft
Google’s voice-activated Spell Up game hones your speling skills
We’ve seen charming and freaky in Google’s games, but the search giant has a nobler aim with its latest experiment: improving your English skills. Spell Up is a mishmash of a spelling bee, Wheel of Fortune and Jumble, with voice recognition thrown in for good measure. You can launch it in any Chrome browser on a desktop, Android or iOS device, though you can only use a keyboard on an iPhone or iPad. Once you’re in, you’ll be able select a difficulty level and build a tower of words, until a wrong move crashes the whole thing down. It worked great for me on Android, but using it on my desktop was a F-A-I-L for some reason, as letters like ‘G’ and ‘S” couldn’t be recognized. Perhaps you’ll have better luck, though — you can try it here.
Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Google
Source: Google
The Xbox One price drop isn’t just to boost sales, says Microsoft
This morning, less than a year after Microsoft unveiled its Xbox One, the game console’s price dropped from $500 to $400. How’s Microsoft making up for the price difference? By removing Kinect, of course. The camera/microphone peripheral introduced halfway through Xbox 360′s life cycle was a standard in every Xbox One sold since launch last November, but no longer. As of this June, a second option will exist on retailer shelves. A less expensive option. And Xbox marketing lead Yusuf Mehdi is all about that option:
“We have 80-plus million Xbox 360 users today who want an Xbox One, and many of them tell us, ‘For me, it’s an affordability issue. I’m gonna get there, it’s just a question of time. If you make it more affordable, then I’ll upgrade faster.’ So this is an opportunity to really make it easier for them to get there at their pace.”
Of course, providing that option is in the interest of spurring sales. The issue isn’t that Xbox One consoles aren’t selling, it’s that they’re not selling as fast as Sony’s PlayStation 4. Currently, Xbox One is a couple million units behind PlayStation 4, and it’s impossible to cite those numbers without considering today’s news as directly attributable. Mehdi doesn’t agree.
“For us, it has not really been about that,” he told us in a brief interview this afternoon. First, it’s about that aforementioned choice. Second, the folks at Xbox feel as though, at this point, they’ve completed their goal of “defining a next-generation console.” As such, moving on makes sense (to Microsoft, anyway).
The Xbox One is designed around voice control. You turn it on with your voice. You open games and browse Netflix and everything else, all through voice. For anyone who’s tried navigating Xbox One without Kinect, you already know the sad truth: it’s a mess. Microsoft is thankfully aware of this issue, and is working on a fix. “We do want to find ways to give you some of those shortcuts and make some of the things that we have with Kinect easier with the controller,” Mehdi said. “You can expect to see us do a bunch of things over the coming months to make the experience easier and easier, even if you don’t have a Kinect.”
The changes aren’t coming before E3, but not far after. “We’re still kind of working through that,” he said.
So, beyond pricing, what else inspired the price drop? Kinect voice localization “was not a factor,” Mehdi said, but the upcoming launch of Xbox One in China certainly seems a likely culprit in the removal of Kinect. At very least, it’s a major technical hurdle “You have to develop a local voice model for each country. That takes a bunch of time to get there,” he said. Should the Xbox One show up in new territories without Kinect, you’ll have to forgive the lack of surprise on our faces.
Filed under: Cameras, Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD, Microsoft
Microsoft lowers Xbox One price to $400 without Kinect
Is the $500 asking price of Xbox One too rich for your blood? Turns out you’re not alone, and Microsoft’s responding: the price of the Xbox One is dropping to $400, and the company’s dropping Kinect from the box as well. Starting June 9th, the Xbox One will be sold in a second bundle sans Kinect (a standalone version of Xbox One’s Kinect will be available “this fall,” should you wish to add one later on). It’s not clear if the $500 model that currently exists will continue to exist after June 9th, though it is clear why Microsoft made today’s move: sales numbers. Though the Xbox One is doing well at around 5 million units, it’s lagging behind Sony’s PlayStation 4 to the tune of several million units.
“There’s a lot about Kinect that I really love,” Xbox head Phil Spencer says in a video released alongside the news. “We’ve also heard from people that they just like to play games with a controller in their hand.” Spencer and co. are painting today’s news as a response to consumers — the blog post is titled, “Delivering More Choices for Fans,” even — but it’s hard to see it as anything other than a straight business decision. Microsoft’s initial coming out for Xbox One was held up by three pillars, one of which was going “all-in” on Kinect. Today’s news rolls back that pillar.
It’s not a question of people using Kinect, apparently. Microsoft says that over 80 percent of Xbox One owners are “actively” using Kinect. The other 20 percent are assuredly stewing in anger over saying “Xbox On” six or seven times without it working.
Today’s news is the latest walkback from Microsoft’s initial vision for the Xbox One, unveiled last May in a day-long Redmond, Wash. event. The price cut is just one of two major announcements from Microsoft’s Xbox division today: the long-running Xbox Live service is taking a variety of services out from behind its paywall (known as an Xbox Live “Gold Membership”), making them free to all Xbox One and 360 users.
Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and other services now open to all on Xbox One, Xbox 360
In a move that bucks the standard set by Microsoft itself back in 2005, both the Xbox One and Xbox 360 will drop the requirement for an Xbox Live paid membership to access services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. Microsoft announced this morning that it would be streamlining its offerings and bringing its prices and structure more inline with those offered by Sony. That means not only cheaper hardware, but also abandoning the need to have an Xbox Live Gold subscription for access to apps and streaming media. It’s a move that certainly makes sense given that sales of the Xbox One are several million units behind the Play Station 4.
Until now, if you’ve wanted to watch Netflix on your Xbox you’ve needed to cough up for Live as well. That’s another $5 a month (at least) for the privilege of enjoying your existing subscriptions — something that never really sat well with many consumers. Reducing the total cost of ownership is one of the key ways to suck in new users. To compliment its efforts on the media front, Microsoft is also bringing Games with Gold and Deals with Gold to the Xbox One in early June. That means free games every month and steep discounts on titles like Ryse: Son of Rome. Now that the playing field seems a little more level (at least in terms of cost) the next-gen console wars will boil down to just a few things: exclusive games, additional functionality and marketing.
Wanna know the full breakdown? Microsoft’s made this handy chart to help out:
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