NVIDIA this month is unifying its GeForce NOW service across all platforms that it supports, extending the latest iteration of the service for PCs and Macs to include NVIDIA's SHIELD TV consoles. From now on, all 225 games supported by the game streaming service will also run on the Android TV STB.
The gaming industry's wet dream: no physical media, no downloaded games - just streaming.
Twitch, the leading live streaming platform where people play games, make crafts, and showcase their day-to-day lives, attracts over two million broadcasters every month. The number grows each year, thanks in part to how easy it has become to live stream, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube also increasingly encourage people to share and watch live stories. With the push of a button on your game console or phone, you can share whatever you’re doing at that exact moment with friends and strangers alike. The rise of popular (and profitable) influencers on platforms like YouTube and Twitch has also made the idea of being an online influencer aspirational. Some parents note that their children pretend to unbox toys to a nonexistent audience, and teachers report that their students often say they want to pursue YouTubing as a career. But when seemingly everyone wants to record footage or live stream, who ends up watching the content?
Starting a career on platforms like Twitch often means spending some time broadcasting to absolutely no one. Discoverability is an issue: when you log into Twitch, the most visible people are those who already have a large following. While there are tools to find lesser-known streamers, most people starting out without built-in audiences from other platforms or supportive friends and family end up staring at a big, fat zero on their viewership counter. This lonely live stream purgatory can last anywhere from a few days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, depending on your luck. According to people who have gone through it, lacking an audience is one of the most demoralizing things you can experience online.
This story feels so sad. Building and maintaining an audience is really hard, especially when you're dependent on platforms like YouTube and Twitch who can pull the rug out from underneath you at any time.
In what feels like The Games Story Of The Year, during the Steam summer sale the much reviled Gearbox title Aliens: Colonial Marines was marked down to a stupidly low three dollars. A modder happened to notice that in the INI file for the game, there is a single typo that is - get this - responsible for many of the awful AI choices that the xenomorphs make in the game... Like running directly at you on their hind legs instead of crawling on the walls and using ducts to surprise you. A once horribly broken game is now... Functioning? Thanks to a single letter? Sure. That's about at 2018 as a games industry story can get.
This is amazing.
Fans of the early-2000s era GameCube version of the original Animal Crossing likely remember the game including a handful of emulated NES titles that could be played by obtaining in-game items for your house. What players back then didn't know is that the NES emulator in Animal Crossing can also be used to play any generic NES ROM stored on a GameCube memory card.
One has to wonder if there's any code from open source emulators in there.
The collectability of Nintendo's "classic mini" consoles cannot be overstated. Even after restocking the NES Classic Edition's original limited supply this year, the company has barely been able to keep up with demand for both its NES- and SNES-flavored dips back into the nostalgia pool, in the West or elsewhere.
But if you thought those systems were limited and coveted enough, you ain't seen nothing. This week, Nintendo went one further by releasing a special-colored, new-games version of one of these systems, designed and marketed specifically for fans of Japanese Shonen Jump manga series like Dragon Ball, Captain Tsubasa, and Fist of the North Star.
Shortly before Amazon Japan sold out of its allocation on Sunday morning, we slammed down $87 USD and placed an order to see what the Shonen Jump 50th Anniversary Famicom Classic Mini was all about. We quickly learned that this official Nintendo product is far from a slapdash release with a logo painted on.
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
Eventually, I decided to write a minimalist Game Boy interpreting emulator, without support for custom mappers or sound, (and probably many inaccuracies). I called the project Cinoop.
Cinoop is written in C and is open source. It can be run on Windows, DS, GameCube, 3DS, Linux based OSes, PSP, and PS4.
The week-long Summer Games Done Quick gaming marathon concluded on Saturday after raising $2.1 million for charity. That may very well lead outsiders to ask: What kind of gaming event can raise so much money for a global nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders?
Fans of the Games Done Quick organization, which runs two charity marathons a year, might answer that question by pointing to a slew of "speedruns" - attempts to beat a video game as quickly as possible - for classic and modern titles alike. Or they might start shouting a bunch of inside jokes and catch phrases, which are abundant at such a tight-knit, community-driven gathering of some of gaming's biggest nerds.
Either way, while the event has since concluded, its most impressive and silliest moments live on thanks to a complete YouTube video dump. Hours upon hours of speedruns, both quick and lengthy, live on at the Games Done Quick channel. So we thought we'd take this American holiday opportunity to help outsiders catch up on the craziness with a few of our favorite full-game clips.
I always look forward to the two GDQ events every year, and I usually plan my weeks off in such a way that I don't have to work during them. This year's SGDQ was another great experience, and thanks to the wonders of VOD dumps, I can now go back and watch all the runs I missed.
When Microsoft took to the Game Developers Conference in 2000 to drum up interest in the original Xbox, it used a prototype console that was, basically, a giant X.
This prototype was used for the hardware reveal at GDC by ex-Microsoft boss Bill Gates and head of the Xbox project Seamus Blackley. Microsoft took this unit to trade shows and events such as GDC to help give developers an idea of what they've be working with and present demonstrations to press, despite it not offering the power the retail unit would.
According to Dean Takahashi's book Opening the Xbox, each prototype unit cost $18,000 to manufacture because they were milled out of a solid block of aluminium. In a recent tweet, Seamus Blackley, one of the key players in Microsoft's Xbox, said the prototype was a working unit.
Interesting little bit of Xbox history.
Over the past few months, the wildest rumors in video game industry circles haven't involved the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Two. The most interesting chatter has centered on a tech company that's been quietly making moves to tackle video games in a big way: Google, the conglomerate that operates our email, our internet browsers, and much more.
We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.
Cracking the gaming market is hard. Over the past few decades, only two companies succeeded in entering the gaming market: first Sony, then Microsoft. Virtually all other attempts either flopped hard, or started lukewarm only to quickly peter out. Hence, I have a lot of reservations about Google's supposed plans here, especially since they seem to involve streaming. Even streaming on my local LAN using PS4 Remote Play, while passable, is clearly not even remotely as good as the "real thing".
We definitely need more concrete information.
A while back I was going through Dolphin's issues page out of sheer boredom.
I don’t know anything about coding to fix any of this stuff, but I do like to test really old issues sometimes to see if the hundreds of changes made over the years has produced any change or potentially even fixed some of the issues. After a few pages, I eventually came across issue 726 - Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.
This is a great story about a very obscure and technical bug in the Dolphin GameCube emulator.
Better start saving up for that PlayStation 5, Xbox Two, or Nintendo Swatch (that last follow-up name idea is a freebie, by the way). That generation of consoles might be the last one ever, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. After that, he predicts cheap local boxes could provide easier access to ever-evolving high-end gaming streamed to the masses from cloud-based servers.
I think that's a little optimistic, but the trend is clear.
"The issue is, isn't going to remove The Witcher or Grand Theft Auto or anything like that from Steam ," says Rasmussen. "We're the smallest kind of demographic without any kind of lobbying power. We can't influence Valve to leave us alone." While we still don't (and may never) know exactly why Steam sent and then retracted those takedown notices, it has left many visual novel creators even less confident about what sexual content is acceptable on the platform, and more concerned that their work will unexpectedly be categorized as pornography. That's going to hurt visual novel developers the most, but it's going to make things worse for the vitality and diversity of gaming at large, too.
Being Dutch, America's obsession with trying to curtail nudity, sex, and pornography, all the while allowing the most grotesque forms of brutal violence without so much as batting an eye, will never cease to amaze me. Steam is filled to the brim with overly violent video games with the most realistic rendering of gore, yet it's the cartoon-style content with boobs everybody seems to stumble over.
It's just sex. Nobody's going to get scarred for life from seeing naked women and men, so stop obsessing over it, slap an 18+ label on it, and be done with it.
The Atari VCS, the new gaming console from Atari, has been launched as an Indiegogo campaign with preorders available today, with a shipping date set for early 2019.
Along with the launch, the company has also revealed the technical specs of the console, which include 32GB of internal storage, 4GB of RAM, and AMD's Bristol Ridge A1 CPU and Radeon R7 GPU.
That's certainly not a bad set of specifications, but one has to wonder just how much third party interest there is to go around. Still, even without a ton of original games, this machine is basically a very nicely designed Linux machine, which in an of itself makes it a really tempting product. That being said - it's a crowdfunding project, so take all the warnings that comes with that into account.
Game companies now lean heavily on loot boxes to monetize their products. Legislators around the world are threatening to impose regulations on the boxes, claiming that they're gambling. Industry groups, however, insist that the boxes are not.
I play games that are funded with loot boxes. My favorite game of all time, Dota 2, is funded almost exclusively through loot boxes. Regulations that tightly restrict or absolutely prohibit loot boxes will definitely hurt the gaming industry and will hurt, perhaps even fatally, games I love. There will definitely be economic harm, and games companies will have to figure something out to fill the monetary gap. It's no surprise that game companies are defending the practice.
But here's the thing: loot boxes are gambling. The essential features of the transaction match those of gambling, the reward pathways and addiction mechanisms are those of gambling, and playing dumb about it, as the industry is currently doing, is a bad look.
I wholeheartedly agree. Loot boxes in gaming lead to real addictions and all its associated problems, and while I'm never a fan of outright bans - I'm Dutch, after all - I do think we need to have an honest and open discussion about protecting especially younger and more vulnerable people from the effects of gambling.
Valve's game streaming service Steam Link won't be coming to iOS today, despite a successful Android beta launch earlier this month. According to the official Steam Database Twitter account, Apple rejected the Steam Link app over apparent "business conflicts with app guidelines". Steam Link was first announced for mobile back in March, and the app functions as a remote desktop so users can access their Steam library of PC games from a mobile device and stream them directly for touchscreen play or for use with a Bluetooth controller.
It's not exactly clear at the moment what the "business conflict" here is, and whether it has anything to do with Apple's somewhat contentious 30 percent App Store fee for all purchases, in-app or otherwise. It may perhaps be due to the fact that Steam Link allows an iOS user to access another app store, namely Steam, within Apple's tightly controlled ecosystem. Apple was not immediately available for comment.
If that really is the reason Apple banned the application, they should ban every single remote desktop application.
Behold the Philips CD-i! It’s got Mario! Zelda! Movies on CD! Uh… interactive encyclopedias! What could go wrong? Apparently, everything.
Born out of the same aborted efforts to create a CD-based console for Nintendo that would eventually produce the Sony Playstation, the CD-i was an ambitious attempt to create a multi-purpose home entertainment console. However, instead of kickstarting the trend of CD-based gaming, the CD-i turned into one of the great failures of the video game industry, reportedly costing Philips near a billion dollars by the time it was discontinued.
Nonetheless, it did end up fostering some amazingly idiosyncratic (and widely reviled) pieces of video game history.
Since I'm Dutch and have lived in The Netherlands my whole life, I feel like the CD-i is a much greater part of my memory than of people in other countries. Philips is a Dutch company, after all, and I vaguely recall the CD-i being hyped into the stratosphere over here. I wanted one when the hype started, but I never did even see one in real life.
PlayStation 4 is entering the final phase of its life cycle, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John (Tsuyoshi) Kodera said at Sony Investor Relations Day 2018 in Tokyo today.
The platform first launched in North America and Europe in November 2013, followed by Japan in February 2014. It has shipped 79 million units as of March 31, 2018.
Didn't I just buy a PS4 Pro? Am I the only one to whom this seems... A little premature?
The operative word is "adaptive". XAC's potential truly begins with its back-side strip. There, you'll find a whopping 19 ports, all 3.5mm jacks. No, this isn't a giant middle finger to the headphone-jack haters at Apple and Google. Rather, these ports see Microsoft connecting with, and loudly celebrating, what has long been an open secret in the world of gaming peripherals: the community of add-on devices designed for limited-mobility gamers.
Oversized buttons, finger switches, blowing tubes, foot pedals, and other specialized inputs have long been built for gamers who can't hold onto or efficiently use average controllers (gamepads, keyboards, mice). Recent speeches from company heads like CEO Satya Nadella and Xbox chief Phil Spencer have paid lip service to "inclusivity" in computing and gaming, but this device, the XAC, aims to do the trick by connecting niche add-ons to standard Microsoft hardware.
This is a hugely important device for gamers with limited mobility. Nothing but praise for Microsoft for developing a device like this.
This is just a slightly modified version of the standard DOSBOX emulator. I have just hacked in my own shader which emulates some aspects of old CRT monitors, as I prefer to play emulated games with such a filter, and the built-in dosbox filters are not to my taste. I made this because I wanted it myself, but since I have it I thought I'd share it. There's probably lots of things which could be done better, but it's good enough for my needs right now, so leaving it like this for now.
Not a major news item, obviously, and just one among countless contributions to open source that pass by unnoticed every day, but every now and then, it seems only prudent to highlight one.
Downgrade prevention has been a cat-and-mouse game between consumers and companies since the inception of remote updates. The Nintendo Switch adopts a worrisome-strategy of preventing firmware downgrades by permanently modifying your device every time it updates. While this isn’t a new concept (the Xbox 360 was doing it back in 2007), it is part of a greater effort to prevent end users from modifying their devices to their liking.
The Nintendo Switch use an Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC, which comes with a fuse driver. This allows it to programmatically blow fuses - permanently modifying the device, making it impossible to revert to a previous state.
Despite being used in an anti-consumer manner, the technology is fascinating.