YouTube wants to be your one-stop shop for live E3 game videos
If you’ve ever followed the Electronic Entertainment Expo (aka E3) closely, you know that there are a lot of events taking place in a short space of time: press conferences, live booth presentations and legions of game premieres. How in the world are you supposed to watch it all? We’ll be on the ground, of course, but YouTube wants to help as well. It’s launching an E3 2015 hub that will stream “all” the big press conferences (such as Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft), the Nintendo World Championships, loads of booth events and first-time “let’s play” sessions. YouTube might not have the same lock on live game steaming that Twitch does, but it could get a lot of your attention when E3 kicks off in mid-June.
[Image credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]
Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Sony, Microsoft, Google, Nintendo
Source: YouTube Official Blog
‘Lego Dimensions’ has the toys, but ‘Disney Infinity’ is a better game
The toys came to life, and it was cool when they did. Almost four years after Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure let kids place action figures on an NFC device to make them playable in a grand adventure game, what seemed like a goofy idea turned out to be a great one. There’s something undeniably wonderful about seeing your toy come alive. That idea is also an absolute gold mine. The Skylanders series broke $2 billion in 2014, just weeks after Disney Infinity became its first major competitor. Now Warner Bros. is releasing Lego Dimensions, a massive mash-up of different pop culture icons rendered as little toys to use in one of Traveller’s Tales popular Lego game series.
That’s a lot of toys vying for space and attention. After playing both the new Disney Infinity game, Star Wars: Twilight of the Republic, and Lego Dimensions, one thing is abundantly clear: The toys-to-life competition is now rooted in who can make the best game because the toys aren’t changing. By that measure, Disney is doing impressive work while Lego Dimensions demonstrates just how limiting the toys-to-life tech can be.
Lego Dimensions nails the feel of its characters’ worlds.
Consider Lego Dimensions. Particularly since this will be the first toys-to-life game with figures and vehicles that can literally be pulled apart and reassembled, it should be a fundamentally different beast than its competitors. Speaking at a pre-E3 event, Traveller’s Tales co-founder Jon Burton said that this was the game his studio had been building toward for 10 years, ever since it made the hit Lego Star Wars. Just like The Lego Movie — whose co-starring couple Batman and Wyldstyle join Lord of the Rings‘ Gandaflf as the game’s pack-in figures — Dimensions is a grand mix of pop icons. The Doctor from Doctor Who mingles with Marty McFly and Homer Simpson. Provided you have the toys, you can make Ghostbuster Peter Venkman drive Doc Emmett Brown’s DeLorean alongside Scooby-Doo and the robots from Portal.
Lego Dimensions still feels like a game from eight years ago when you actually play it.
Just like in the movie, it’s fun just to see these faces mingle. It helps that the game itself oozes with high production values. A stage where Scooby-Doo’s meddling kid friends try to break into a haunted house is accompanied by scratchy jazz and audio hiss-soaked dialogue that sounds like it was ripped right from the show in 1969. Like Scoob’s perfectly animated floppy walk, though, the audio is all new, just like the rebuildable toys you can place on a glowing platform to make them appear in the game. The toys feel good too. Batman’s Batmobile and the DeLorean are stubby, but accurate recreations that have three alternate forms you have to use to solve puzzles in the game. The game even shows you how to change them with an on-screen manual that looks like it just fell out of a fresh box of the bricks.
For all the polish and charm of its icons, though, Lego Dimensions still feels like a game from eight years ago when you actually play it. In a demo stage like Oz’s Yellow Brick Road and a new world that acts as a hub between all these characters’ realms, Dimensions is indistinguishable from every other Traveller’s Tales Lego game. The characters still trundle along at a cozy pace, collecting bricks and putting things together on screen that you hold a button to assemble.
Dimensions’ vehicles have three shapes for you to build. Your original won’t appear in game.
They try to incorporate the physicality of the toys, but it ultimately just feels like the game is slowing down. If the Wicked Witch puts Batman in a tractor beam, you can free him by moving the figure on the platform sensor, but in a game like 2010’s Lego Harry Potter you could get the same effect by just switching to another character. When you need to break a special box to free an item inside, you have to rebuild the Batmobile into a noise-powered drill, but in Lego Batman 2, you could solve an identical puzzle by just switching to Robin in a quick menu and using his demolitions costume.
The toy platform can’t even sense when you rebuild the vehicles into your own creation. Unless it fits one of the preset modes, the blocks won’t register on the screen. What the game is actually detecting is the NFC base the figures and vehicles are plugged into. Lego Dimensions toys can be mixed and matched to your heart’s content, but the game isn’t built around that quality. If you or your family goes into the game wanting a new style of toys-to-life game based around the mutability of Lego, this isn’t that. It’s more like very expensive fan fiction built using a nearly decade-old video game.
Like them or not, the Star Wars prequels make for fun fights.
By contrast, Disney Infinity is doing something truly invigorating with its new game playsets coming out later this year. There are no efforts to spruce up the toys themselves with what it’s calling Disney Infinity 3.0; just adding more and more of the characters Disney has spent billions on acquiring or creating in the past decade. Most notable among the new crop are George Lucas’ endlessly warring space soldiers and wizards. The little plastic Yoda and Anakin Skywalker you can make fight through the Clone Wars in Star Wars: Twilight of the Republic are appealingly rounded and cartoony, as with all the Disney Infinity toys. They are not nearly as inherently fun as Lego Dimensions’ little yellow brick people, which feel wonderfully distinctive even if they aren’t used to great effect in the game.
Disney is building a video game Exquisite Corpse, finding multiple styles of play to suit its panoply of characters.
Forget the toys, though: Disney’s strength is the games themselves. Twilight of the Republic was very simple in the demo on hand at Disney’s pre-E3 event, but no less fun because of it. Running through fields of gun-toting droids on Geonosis — that’s the planet of bugs from Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones if you forgot — you slice them up with lightsabers and force powers. Obi-wan Kenobi feels smooth, favoring defensive posturing, while Anakin Skywalker attacks with heavy blows and his apprentice, Ahsoka, feels speedy. Making them pull off slick aerial attacks with a PS4 controller is easy to grasp while also looking extremely stylish.
That the sci-fi sword fighting feels and looks so good isn’t terribly surprising considering who made it. Ninja Theory, the same studio behind such excellent combat games as DmC: Devil May Cry, is the studio making Twilight of the Republic. Not all of it, though. The podracing sequence in there is actually made partly by Sumo Digital, the development house behind the mighty fine Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. This is all using the core Disney Infinity 3.0 technology made by Avalanche Software, who created the original Infinity and makes the open-world Toy Box mode that lets you mix and match Disney characters in an original adventure.
Anakin Skywalker is still bitter about the nickname “Annie.”
What’s remarkable about Infinity is Disney’s recognition that no game development studio is a true jack-of-all-trades. The original Infinity‘s combat wasn’t so hot, so Disney brought in Ninja Theory to overhaul it in 2.0, which in turn led to its making Star Wars. And 3.0 needed racing in both Star Wars and the Toy Box, so it brought in another specialist with Sumo Digital. In order to make the best possible game it can, Disney is building a video game Exquisite Corpse, finding multiple styles of play to suit its panoply of characters.
The toys don’t need to change, and it would be difficult to force them to. Of course Lego Dimensions can’t just automatically sense the bizarre thing you’ve just made out of old Batmobile parts because it would require every little Lego piece to have an NFC chip in it. Is the game damned because it doesn’t harness the full creative opportunity of its new toys? Certainly not. What burns about Lego Dimensions is that beneath all the new toys and old faces is the same Lego fans have already played. Disney Infinity is exciting because the company has demonstrated that whether or not its latest game is full of brand-new or fondly remembered faces, it’s going to come up with a new way to play with them.
[Image credits: Disney (Star Wars); WBIE (Lego Dimensions)]
Microsoft buys another popular Android app, Wunderlist – report
Microsoft looks set to continue its quest to own your productivity change with the acquisition of 6Wunderkinder, the developers behind the very popular Wunderlist to-do application. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal is worth between $100 and $200 million and would increase Microsoft’s standing in the mobile productivity world.
The real question is what Microsoft intends to do with its new acquisition, which has between 5 and 10 million installs on Google Play and a rating of 4.4 out of 5 from over 180,000 ratings. The company could take the approach it did with its acquisition of Acompli, which was rebranded to Outlook for Android and iOS and released as part of the free Microsoft Office suite.
Another of Microsoft’s recent acquisitions – the New York-based startup behind the Sunrise mobile calendar application – has not yet been integrated with the company’s mobile apps and the WSJ state a person familiar to the deal suggests that the three acquisitions will become part of an integration of Microsoft’s productivity tools, with an emphasis on mobile applications.
The acquisition of Wunderlist – along with Acompli and Sunrise – suggests that Microsoft’s future is very much in mobile applications. The question remains however, whether Microsoft plan to bring the Wunderlist features to its desktop suite of applications as part of Windows 10 at a later date.
Microsoft WiFi could be another reason to get Office 365
Although Microsoft already offers millions of WiFi access points around the world through Skype, it appears the company has bigger plans for its wireless internet service. If a new (barebones) website is to be believed, the Skype branding could be dropped in favor of a new platform called Microsoft WiFi. According to the site, the service will increase the number of hotspots from around 2 million to 10 million and make them available to Office 365 Enterprise subscribers and those who have bought a Surface 2 or Microsoft’s Work & Play Bundle.
Although the website has yet to officially launch, Microsoft has already provided an interactive map detailing where million of its access points are located. Boingo, Xfinity WiFi and Gowex hotspots are prominent in the US, while access points from BT and The Cloud are available in the UK. There’s no word on how you pay for Microsoft WiFi, or whether you need to given that Skype minutes are already included in other Office 365 packages, but the company is continuing to take a multi-platform approach with its apps. It’ll support Windows, Mac, Android and iOS, automatically connecting you to a pre-vetted WiFi hotspot when you’re in range, regardless of who operates it.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft WiFi
Microsoft buys the company behind to-do app Wunderlist
Microsoft’s quest to conquer the mobile productivity app world by acquiring it is still underway, it seems. A Wall Street Journal source claims that the folks in Redmond have bought 6Wunderkinder, better known as the creator of the to-do app Wunderlist. Neither company is commenting on the scoop at the moment, but the deal is reportedly worth between $100 million to $200 million. The question, of course, is what Microsoft will do with its new prize. The company turned Acompli into the new versions of Outlook for Android and iOS, but it hasn’t done much yet with Sunrise’s calendar app. Given how handy to-do lists can be when paired with email and schedules, our money’s on Outlook and similar apps eventually doing a better job of juggling your daily tasks.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software, Mobile, Microsoft
Source: Wall Street Journal
Wunderlist developer, 6Wunderkinder, acquired by Microsoft
Microsoft’s strategy to support multiple platforms with various services continues today with the acquisition of 6Wunderkinder, the developer responsible for to-do list app Wunderlist. Microsoft had to spend somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in order to successfully acquire Wunderlist and its developer.
As part of the deal, the developer’s offices located in Berlin will continue to be called home. The 6Wunderkinder team, however, will be reporting back to the folks in Microsoft’s headquarters in the United States.
The company has completed acquisitions of three productivity services since the end of 2014. To build up Outlook for mobile devices, Microsoft spent around $200 million for Acompli. Sunrise Calendar was then absorbed by Microsoft for $100 million in February. And now it has Wunderlist to act as the go-to to-do list for users.
Select Microsoft apps and services are already pre-installed on a myriad of Android phones and tablets.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Come comment on this article: Wunderlist developer, 6Wunderkinder, acquired by Microsoft
Xbox One ‘Independent Developers Pack’ revealed with new controller
It’s not E3 yet, but Microsoft has taken the wraps off of this limited edition “Independent Developers Pack” Xbox One, in Australia of all places. Besides packing download tokens for five ID@Xbox (Hand of Fate, Threes!, #IDARB, The Jackbox Party Pack, and Never Alone) and DLC add-ons for two others (Warframe, Smite beta) it also has the new Xbox One controller with integrated headphone jack that we’ve been expecting. In Australia, the bundle is priced the same as any other Kinectless XB1 pack, at $499AU. There’s no word on a launch for the US or anywhere else, but with the big gaming conference just a couple of weeks away, we should hear more soon.
Update: It looks like Microsoft removed the reference to a new controller from its store page, but we have a picture of the listing as it originally appeared after the break. That detail may not have been intended to leak this early, but we’ll check to see if there’s any other information.
Introducing the ID@Xbox console bundle – 7 great indie games in one pack. http://t.co/RB5Vf0GMmG @iocat @ID_Xbox pic.twitter.com/ggQLFpyVaJ
– Jeremy Hinton (@AusXbox) June 2, 2015
Filed under: Gaming, HD, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft Store Australia
Why ‘Rock Band 4’ got the gang back together
Walking onto the roof of the Shangri La Hotel in Santa Monica, California, I was nervous and curious to see Rock Band 4. After all it had been five years since Rock Band 3. Would it still feel good? Is this really the right time to bring back Harmonix’s brilliant karaoke video game, with its comfy plastic instruments and catalog of songs? After playing it and then talking with Greg LoPiccolo, one of the creators of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, my fears were laid to rest. Under a thick smear of sweet rock and roll, of course.
Rock Band 4 feels familiar in all the best ways, with low-impact, welcome changes that just feel right. The instruments, mostly indistinguishable from Rock Band 3‘s drums and guitar, still feel approachable and toy-like, well-suited to the game’s cartoony musicians. Barring one intriguing new feature that we’re not allowed to talk about just yet, the other changes are goofy fun. Take the new intros: The screen prompts you to yell, “Hello, Boston!” Are you ready to rock?” Unless you do your best Steven Tyler at an ’80s Aerosmith concert, the whole shebang won’t start. It also feels great to seamlessly put together a playlist. If you finish a song and want to keep going, one player picks the next jam from a list and others vote, selecting from categories like “play a song from 1991.”
While the game still felt just right in my hands, I still wanted to know why Harmonix decided that right now was the time to bring it back. LoPiccolo expounded on that subject and more.
The last time we spoke was in March of 2013, just before Harmonix delivered the very last weekly downloadable update for Rock Band 3. My very first question for you then was, “Is the plan to bring Rock Band back in five years, otherwise known as the perfect window to hit the nostalgia market?” You said to me, “Well… we’ll see!” You sounded like a man with a plan. Now here’s Rock Band 4. Was this always the plan to bring Rock Band 4 out within a few years?
No. I can’t in good conscience say this was always the plan. It was way more improvisational.
What was the plan, then?
We didn’t ever want Rock Band to fade away. We love it! We love working on it; we love watching people have fun with it. It exceeded beyond our wildest expectations when it came out, but a lot of things have to line up if you’re going to drop seven or eight figures on developing a video game, you know? One of the things I think was true was that after the eighth-gen consoles came out, our usual sweet spot isn’t in year one. That’s when Halo and the hardcore games come out. Our thinking was, let’s wait to let these consoles establish themselves and then see what we got. Then we dipped our toe in the water and people got excited, so let’s do it!
Speaking of the survey Harmonix put out earlier this year asking what people want from a new Rock Band. What surprised you about people’s response?
I don’t know if we were surprised so much as it confirmed what we hoped was true. It confirmed that people actually still cared about Rock Band. Yeah, people still want to play this game and they were very specific about what they cared about being in it. Like, DLC should carry over! People don’t want to have to buy their songs again; they don’t want to have to buy their instruments again if they still have them. So we took that stuff seriously and worked on a plan to carry all that stuff forward. Which was a lot of work.
I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on the business end, but I know that licensing these songs has always been the biggest hurdle. Has anything changed in the past five years since Rock Band 3 to make your lives easier?
Not really. We occupy this weird little corner of that ecosystem. The thing that makes us unique, where those streaming issues aren’t really relevant, is that we need track masters to craft our gameplay. You don’t stream masters. Someone’s got to go down to the basement, blow the dust off them and transfer them to us. That’s still true: We still hand build our gameplay from the original master recordings.
Has there been any change in how you produce a song or did you just go back to the old process because it works?
Well, we’ve had to change our authoring format for our new features. We have our freestyle vocal feature which means that the game needs to know what key you’re singing in at any given time. If you sing on hard or expert difficulty, you don’t have to stick to the authored notes. You can sing any chord and as long as it’s in tune with the song, you can score on that. That didn’t exist in the old songs so we had to redo that and go back to retrofit it into the old songs as well.
In April, I got to sit down with Guitar Hero Live and we discussed their turnaround time for getting a song into their game. The way they explained their pipeline was that if there’s a hit single making the rounds on YouTube, they can turn it around in a day and have it online. Have you changed your process at all to satisfy a faster pace?
Most of the material our players care about isn’t necessarily from last month; it’s from 10 years ago!
As far as I can tell, that’s not what’s driving our audience. New songs are always coming, but most of the material our players care about isn’t necessarily from last month; it’s from 10 years ago! Or 30 years ago! So we want to continue to add stuff to our catalog that’s current, and Rock Band 4 will have current songs, but it’s all about the catalog, having this huge library of material. We have 2,000-plus songs at this point. That’s awesome and that’s something we’re really proud of. We’ve made this huge effort to cover the breadth of rock history as best we can, across styles and decades.
Literally every person I talked to at Harmonix who worked on Rock Band told me that they had the same regret: That they never got Led Zeppelin. So tell me: Zeppelin?
I have no comment at this time!
That’s my favorite answer.
We would still like Zeppelin. Clearly. But I have nothing to tell you.
Mad Catz is helping publish Rock Band 4. How did that happen?
We worked with them on Rock Band 3 so our relationship does go back a ways. They made the Mustang guitar for us as well as the keyboard and did a terrific job. So when we got in touch with them about the idea of bringing back Rock Band 4, they were into it and they were an ideal partner for us.
We would still like Zeppelin. Clearly.
Was there ever a point that you weren’t going to call this Rock Band 4? Slapping a number on a popular video game series carries a lot of weight. It can push away new players unfamiliar with a series, but it also lets your most diehard fans know that this is the real deal, a full-on sequel.
There was a little bit of back and forth about that but everything else just seemed too gimmicky. Rock Band Reunion! That’s stupid. At the end we didn’t even argue about it. It’s Rock Band 4.
Nikkei reports that next Nintendo console could be running Android
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
style=”display:block”
data-ad-client=”ca-pub-8150504804865896″
data-ad-slot=”8461248232″
data-ad-format=”auto”>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();
If I said that it were possible that the next Nintendo console could be running Android, I wouldn’t be surprised if you called me sacrilegious. Unusually, that is exactly the news that has dropped today according to Japanese financial paper, Nikkei, who claims that not only will the games giant develop games for Android, but also build hardware that will run Google’s operating system. This would be a huge change in direction for Nintendo who has up till now relied on their own proprietary hardware and software to power its video game consoles.
There are pros and cons for Nintendo if this does turn out to be true – an Android based console would definitely make Nintendo relevant again in a console war that is increasingly only about Sony and Microsoft. On the other hand, current Android games are hardly console-ready – a handful could pass for low budget games while others were console games 5+ years ago. Either way, it’s a tantalizing possibility, and we hope we find out more about this possible Nintendo-Android console sooner rather than later. E3 2015 here we come!
What do you think about a Nintendo console running Android? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
The post Nikkei reports that next Nintendo console could be running Android appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
Windows 10 launches on July 29th, here’s how to get in line
Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 is coming on July 29th, and you don’t even need to get out of your chair to get a spot in the upgrade line. Take a gander at your Notification Area in the Taskbar and you should find a Windows icon that, when clicked, reveals a shiny new Windows 10 upgrade panel. It’s currently being rolled out to select users, since plenty of you have emailed in screenshots, but we’ve yet to see it ourselves. As before, users will have a year to climb onto the Free Windows 10 bandwagon, but once they do, they’ll get free security upgrades for the life of the device.
[Thanks, Dan S]
Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft
AIVAnet 