Nuclear Monster

  • Watching the Xbox press briefing this morning. Here’s what got announced:

    • Stop saying IP. Holy crap that terminology is dumb.
    • Halo 5 has 12 v 12 multiplayer that looks like battlefield and what looks like 4 player co-op.
    • Something new from the folks behind Metroid Prime but it was just a trailer instead of gameplay footage. Robots and power spheres in the desert called ReCore.
    • Xbox One, like the 360, will have limited backwards compatibility with some Xbox 360 games. There’s a list of 100 games that’ll be available later this year. People on the invite-only dashboard preview program can get access to some of them today. More games will be added later on until Microsoft stops caring and they have already put the onus on developers/publishers to approve their games for backwards compatibility during the conference.
    • Fallout 4 mods will work on the Xbox One at no cost. Fallout 4 comes out this November.
    • Xbox One Elite controller, it’s customizable, changeable parts, paddles and extra buttons on the back.
    • Electronic Arts’ Access Vault garbage having more games available. Access Vault is EA’s subscription thing ($5/month) where you get early access to games via download.
    • Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2.
    • An advertisement for a new Ford car preceded a Forza Motorsport 6 reel.
    • Dark Souls III. Early 2016.
    • Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: The Division beta this December exclusively for Xbox.
    • Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Vegas 1 & 2 backwards compatibility this December. They’re free if you buy The Division. I loved Vegas 1 & 2.
    • Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Seige comes out October 15th.
    • Tacoma from Fullbright looks awesome. Timed exclusive for Xbox and Windows. No specific date but out in 2016.
    • Ashen, not Ashens.
    • Beyond Eyes, Summer 2015. It’s a third person game.
    • Cuphead, 2D platformer that looks like the original Mickey Mouse and old Betty Boop cartoons. Exclusive. 2016.
    • Unfinished games come to Xbox with Game Preview. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Steam’s Early Access. Each game will have some kind of free trial version. The Long Dark, Sheltered, Elite: Dangerous, DayZ are the first announced games for it. All are already on Steam. Elite: Dangerous and The Long Dark will be available later today.
    • Rise of the Tomb Raider, end of the year. Xbox exclusive. Pre-order now to commit your money before you know if it’s any good or not.
    • The rumored Rare game collection is real. RC Pro-Am, Solar JetmanKiller-Instinct, Battletoads, Blast Corps, 30 games total. $30. It’s called Rare Reply and it’ll be out August 4th. Battletoads still sucks. No Goldeneye, no Donkey Kong Country, of course.
    • Sea of Thieves from Rare, exclusive multiplayer Pirate adventuring.
    • Fable Legends. Free2play for Windows and Xbox.
    • A bunch of VR stuff. They’re working with Valve VR as well as Oculus to display games in 2d in both headsets when streamed from an Xbox One to Windows. Mixed-reality with Microsoft’s Hololens.
    • Apparently Mojang is pronounced Mo-yang. What.
    • Hololens will work with Minecraft. It’s 2D and displayed wherever as long as you have a Hololens device. Or it can be displayed on a physical table and it’s augmented reality-ified. Nifty.
    • Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. August 25th. Xbox One version of the first Gears. 1-week public beta starts today.
    • New Gears of War. Looks good. Dark. Seems less bro-ver-the-top. It’s just called Gears 4. Late 2016.
    • There’s a new Xbox One UI coming.
    • I just got an e-mail from the Elite: Dangerous developer, Frontier, encouraging me to buy Elite for the Xbox One with a £5 gift code for the Elite store if I do. I don’t really see any reason why I would do that when I  have it on my computer and can display that on my TV with a long HDMI cable and a wireless controller. Or a Steam Link. Or a Steam Machine.
    • No Call of Duty at this event, no mention of Xbox on the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 banner outside the E3 building.

    That’s it.

  • Alan Joyce:

    This summer, we’ll launch YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website to keep you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you, with videos, live streams, and the biggest community of gamers on the web–all in one place.

    YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From “Asteroids” to “Zelda,” more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.

    Keeping up with these games and channels is now super easy, too. Add a game to your collection for quick access whenever you want to check up on the latest videos. Subscribe to a channel, and you’ll get a notification as soon as they start a live stream. Uncover new favorites with recommendations based on the games and channels you love. And when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing “call” will show you “Call of Duty” and not “Call Me Maybe.”

     Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.

    A sub-site specific to games with custom search isn’t going to solve everything wrong with using YouTube for game streaming and pre-recorded videos but the other changes are very important. Scheduling a live event ahead of time makes sense for developers and publishers live streaming but doesn’t always work for people like me who would rather build up an audience of subscribers who get notified when I go live.

    The most important change YouTube could make is to recognize that I’m in a game and more intelligently handle copyright notices. Video games are full of copyrighted music, and without legal advisement it is difficult to navigate YouTube’s current copyright notice system. To be fair, YouTube is more intelligently handling that problem than Twitch’s policy of just muting the audio for the portion of the video where the copyrighted music is present. I’m still terrified that my YouTube account will get shut down if I dispute the copyright notices with a claim of fair use, which is the only way to get some videos to be viewable again in the United States.

  • The Xbox One controller is getting an update. It’ll have a 3.5mm headset jack and better bumpers. More importantly, Microsoft is finally going to release the wireless dongle for computers to accept connections from XBone controllers. Previously you could connect it with a USB cable, it’ll be good to stop using the one from my Steam Controller.

    I’ve got the wireless dingus for 360 controllers to connect to PC, but those adapters are not as easy to find anymore and the newer XBone controller is superior to the aging 360 pads in most ways. Hopefully this also puts an end to the days of people trying to use 360 play-n-charge kits to connect their gamepads to a computer. That never worked because the play-n-charge kit delivered power without a data signal.

    There’s no release date yet for the Xbox Wireless Adapter for Windows other than “this fall.” It’ll cost $25 when it is released or $80 in a bundle with the updated controller.

    The new controller will be available on it’s own much sooner, on June 16th for $60, to coincide with a new version of the Xbox One that includes a 1 terabyte hard drive at $400. That’s $50 more than the 500 gigabyte Xbox One. The hard drive will still not be user-replacable on either version of the console because Microsoft:

    1. Doesn’t trust their users to swap hard drives
    2. They don’t understand the value of designing that functionality
    3. They want to give people a reason to buy new consoles.

    Pick one. Any way you look at the hard drive situation on the Xbox, it’s insulting to users.

    You could take this to mean that Microsoft just wants to be ready in case Valve’s Steam Controller gains more of a foothold. You might be right, but I don’t take that this latest push from Microsoft to mean much. They’ve pretended to care about Windows gaming before.

  • I loved DICE’s Mirror’s Edge and rated it highly. It was different from so many other first-person games in that the focus was on running and movement instead of combat.

    The only real failures in the first game were when the game forced you into combat and a not-so-great story. The sequel to Mirror’s Edge was first announced in 2013 and DICE’s Sara Jansson finally gave it a name today:

    Mirror’s Edge has always had a special place in the hearts of all of us at DICE. The first game had a lot of promise. It was unlike anything else in terms of the gameplay and style – it had a unique soul. But as much as we loved that game, we knew it could be more. So that’s what we have set out to do as we introduce Mirror’s Edge to a new generation.

    The team has spent a lot of time re-evaluating every aspect of the game and making it a new experience. This is not a sequel, this is not Mirror’s Edge 2. We have landed on a vision that honors the first game – pushing the boundaries of first person movement and diving deeper into the story behind our heroine Faith – but also brings a lot of great new, interesting gameplay and features to the experience for our players.

    So on behalf on the entire team here at DICE, we can’t wait to show you what we have been pouring our heart and soul into. We can’t wait to introduce you to Mirror’s Edgeâ„¢ Catalyst.

  • Richard Mitton on Terry A. Davis’ TempleOS:

    TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. It’s sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640×480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from schizophrenia, and has a tendency to appear on various programming forums with a burst of strange, paranoid, and often racist comments. He is frequently banned from most forums.

    This combination of TempleOS’s amateurish approach and Terry’s unfortunate outbursts have resulted in TempleOS being often regarded as something to be mocked, ignored, or forgotten. Many people have done some or all of those things, and it’s understandable why.

    This article reminded me of Robert Ashley’s awesome A Life Well Wasted podcast, but more specifically the episode where he speaks with Nick “Ulillillia” Smith. Like Terry Davis’ and his TempleOS, Nick Smith does what he loves and dismisses nearly every modern convention or standard and just does his own thing.

    In 2007 when I first watched Nick Smith’s now famous 5 secrets of level 2 in Bubsy 3d video it was way too easy to laugh at him for his tone of voice and attachment to a completely obscure game. Today there are people making bank on videos about the most obscure  games and Smith was just ahead of the game.