Review: Vegetable Cracker | https://buff.ly/2Z189aH | @WitWGARA, #nerdy, #News, #OurMischief, #snack, #WitWGARA, OurMischief, Taquitos.net Snack Reviews, WitWGARA | ⠀
⠀
These wheat-based snacks had very unusual shapes, as they were cut into rectangles, the…
https://ift.tt/30WKbOi
July 24, 2019 at 03:30PM
We've already seen incredible examples of what people can make in Dreams, the new PlayStation 4 game by LittleBigPlanet studio Media Molecule. Someone remade Final Fantasy 7 for goodness sake! Dreams' editor is a very powerful tool. Just imagine what a whole, experienced team could do with it...
Snap! Media Molecule has imagined the same thing and gone one step further, advertising for outsourced, contracted, small-team help to make content for Dreams.
"Content creators: Teams" the MM jobs board reads.
Tony’s Chocolonely, a company on a mission to make all chocolate worldwide 100% slave free, has launched two new flavours.
Wrapped in bright pink, Tony’s first white chocolate bar, White Raspberry Popping Candy is made with fully traceable cocoa butter, freeze-dried raspberries and a “generous scoop” of popping candy.
And in yellow wrapping, 32% Milk Chocolate Honey Almond Nougat – the first time Tony’s has used nougat.
The new bars can be found now at New Seasons, Whole Foods, Stop and Shop, Natural Grocers and many other stores nationwide and online at Amazon and tonyschocolonely.com with an RRP $5.49 per bar.
The post Tony’s Chocolonely launches two new flavours appeared first on Sweets & Savoury Snacks World.
Cadbury has launched its 30% less sugar Dairy Milk bars in response to consumer demand for a greater variety of healthier confectionery options.
According to the company, over a third of shoppers are actively cutting down their sugar consumption, which it says has offered the brand additional opportunities to expand its present series of confectionery.
The new bars will be available in an 85g tablet and 35g single bar, Cadbury Dairy Milk 30% Less Sugar contains no artificial sweeteners. The company’s experts have replaced the sugar with fibre in a way that reduces the sugar while staying true to the texture and taste profile of Cadbury Dairy Milk.
Katrina Davison, brand manager for Cadbury Dairy Milk at Mondelēz International, said: “Our teams have worked for years and conducted extensive testing on the new recipe so we’re confident shoppers looking to reduce their sugar intake will love new Cadbury Dairy Milk 30% Less Sugar.
“The bars are a new addition, not an alternative to the wider range and so should be ranged among the rest of the Cadbury Dairy Milk portfolio. Retailers should stock up now to ensure they’re making the most of this exciting new lower-sugar addition.”
The post Cadbury launches reduced sugar Dairy Milk appeared first on Sweets & Savoury Snacks World.
Snacking company pladis, continues to drive growth in sweet and savoury ‘swavoury’ snacking with the launch of Flipz Salted Caramel.
With its latest launch, pladis has taken the familiar salty and sweet pretzel snack and enrobed it in a salted caramel coating.
This launch will drive further growth for the Flipz brand in the UK, particularly amongst the one in six consumers who are interested in savoury snacks with chocolate. Furthermore, it will appeal to younger consumers and families looking for a tasty and unique sharing snack.
“We were confident British snackers would welcome the ‘swavoury’ snacking trend when we launched American favourite, Flipz, here last year, and, looking at its sales to-date, they certainly have,” says Sarah Horowitz, director of new ventures at pladis UK&I.
“With sales of £12.3m RSV in its first year on shelves, and 2.1million households buying in, consumers have clearly taken to the brand – and now we’re bringing them another delicious flavour combination.
“Flipz Salted Caramel offers a moreish, sweet and savoury taste with a delicious, on-trend salted caramel twist. It is an absolute must-stock for retailers looking to unlock the £1.2 billion opportunity that the snacking category presents – and we believe Flipz Salted Caramel will be the sweet treat that families and friends alike will be reaching for during days out, nights in and everything in-between.
The post Flipz launches salted caramel variant appeared first on Sweets & Savoury Snacks World.
Epic Games might have exclusively secured Tetris Effect - the best game of 2018, if you ask Eurogamer (which I don't think you ever do, actually) - as an Epic Games Store PC exclusive, but it seems there's no shrugging off archrival Steam completely, as Tetris Effect requires SteamVR.
It doesn't matter if you're using an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset, you'll still need SteamVR in order to play. Epic confirmed this in a short statement to DSOgaming. "Tetris Effect VR does require SteamVR, both on HTC Vive and Oculus," the company said. The Epic Games Store Tetris Effect FAQ echoes this.
Note, however, this does not mean Tetris Effect requires you to log into Steam to play. SteamVR is a separate piece of software, a link-layer between Steam's OpenVR API and you, the player. And if you're not playing in virtual reality, none of this applies at all.
It's good news for all you Mario Maker course designers out there, as the game will now let you upload 64 courses rather than just 32.
You can find the notification about the increase in the "News" tab while in game, which looks just like this.
At the beginning of the month, Nintendo announced over 2 million courses have been uploaded already, and considering how successful Mario Maker 2's release has been, it can't be long now until that figure doubles too.
Nintendo is having a rough week. If you haven't heard already, the company had a class action lawsuit filed against it after concerns about Joy-Con drift.
Joy-Con drift on your Nintendo Switch is when your movement in a game begins to "drift", regardless of whether or not you're pointing the joystick in that direction. The company hasn't officially admitted there's anything wrong, but reports from all over the internet show it to be a pretty widespread problem for Switch owners.
Now, according to a report on Vice, Nintendo has told its customer service representatives to stop charging customers who are sending their Joy-Cons in for repair, and to issue refunds to anyone who's paid for previous repairs.
Eurogamer.net: July 18, 2019 - I’ve tried Lust, now I’m doing War: exploring Godhood | https://buff.ly/2O1TN9a | @WitWGARA, #GamersUnite, #gaming, #indiewatch, #nerdy, #News, #OurMischief, #WitWGARA, Eurogamer.net, gaming, I’ve tried Lust, nerdy, News, n…
https://ift.tt/2YanZPb
July 23, 2019 at 01:00PM
DARGON Caught a #Pikachu with a hat! In @pokemongoapp!
https://ift.tt/2SxXP7B
July 23, 2019 at 11:51AM
After two Super launches in early July, today Nvidia completes the trio with the release of the RTX 2080 Super. The 2060 Super and 2070 Super have more-or-less replaced the original RTX 2070 and 2080 respectively, so does the 2080 Super challenge the next card in Nvidia's stack, the almighty 2080 Ti? In a word, no - but the new card does maintain a conservative performance advantage over the original 2080 while costing $100 less than the RTX 2080 Founders Edition that debuted in 2018. That should make the 2080 Super the obvious number two graphics card on the market, ahead of the original RTX 2080 and AMD's Radeon 7, but how close is the race?
As with the earlier Super cards, the 2080 Super's improved horsepower is provided by upgrades to a few key specifications. For starters, the 2080 Super is the first fully-enabled TU104 GPU with all 3072 CUDA cores to be launched into the consumer space, an increase of 128 CUDA cores over the standard RTX 2080 - which provides a small improvement to compute, aided by a small increase to boost clock. Its memory data rate has been raised from 14Gbps to 15.5Gbps too, providing a corresponding boost in memory bandwidth from 448GB/s to 496GB/s - and in our testing, that's only the beginning of the memory bandwidth increase that's possible with this card. All of these changes are reflected in a moderately higher TDP for the 2080 Super, which is rated at 250W compared to the 215W of the original 2080.
Despite the higher power usage, there are only cosmetic design changes between the RTX 2080 FE and the RTX 2080 Super FE cards. The new model has a reflective finish between its two axial fans and a green 'Super' wordmark plastered on, but it uses the same two-slot design as its predecessors and feels just as reassuringly solid in the hand. The port report also remains unchanged, with six-pin and eight-pin supplementary power connectors and an identical I/O quintet: three DisplayPort, one HDMI port and one USB-C VirtualLink port. We didn't expect changes here - except maybe the inclusion of a spoiler or some flame decals - but it's good to confirm everything is present and correct.
For Grand Theft Auto Online diehards, there is nothing more infamous than the Vinewood Casino. A rumoured playable location since players first got their hands on the game in 2013, I remember parking my busted Sultan on Mirror Park Boulevard and seeing the 'Opening Soon' banner for the first time - a beacon of hope back then for an ambitious multiplayer game that hadn't quite found its feet.
Since its inclusion, gumshoed players (myself included) have obsessed over this eerily quiet corner of Los Santos, searching for clues behind the scenes and lobbying Rockstar to put together a grand opening. Alas, much like that decaying lot you see each time you return to your hometown - nothing changed.
That was true until 6th June this year, when something extraordinary happened. During a routine weekly update, the once-legendary banner vanished, a selection of props changed location, and every corner of GTA fandom on the internet erupted in tandem.
After weeks of buildup, the villainous Team Rocket have finally touched down in Pokémon Go.
Reports of their entrance began trickling in after 9pm UK time last night, as the first sightings of "invaded" PokéStops began. These Stops - which appear blackened and glitched - reveal a waiting Rocket grunt when approached.
Engage with the Rocket gang member and you'll be taken into a PVE battle against three of their Pokémon. If you win, you'll then get to catch a Shadow Pokémon the grunt has left behind.
Going back a few centuries in Britain, a popular way to achieve a similar effect was to simply hire a random person to live on your property, with their job generally being to cease bathing or grooming in any way and otherwise spend their days sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing but looking like a stereotypical hermit, all for the enjoyment of guests.
While it isn’t fully clear exactly how the idea of the so-called Ornamental Hermit came about, author of The Hermit in the Garden, Dr. Gordon Campbell of the University of Leicester speculates, “The idea of keeping an ornamental hermit probably began in Tivoli to the east of Rome when the Emperor Hadrian had a villa. In his Villa, he had a little pond and in the middle of the pond, he had a little house for one where… he could retreat from the horrors of running the Roman Empire.”
What does any of this have to do with 18th century Britain? In the 16th century, the villa was excavated and this little villa was discovered. Pope Pius IV then decided he too should have a similar little building in the Vatican gardens to use as a retreat. This was subsequently built, called the Casina Pio IV, helping to set the idea in popular landscape architecture.
This finally brings us to the 18th century. Around this time, famed landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who designed nearly 200 parks, some of which are still around today, strongly pushed for getting rid of elaborately perfect, artificial looking gardens, and instead chose to design parks that looked as if the landscaping of the region was completely natural. Of course, everything was nonetheless still carefully planned out, with paths, streams, artificial lakes, and other landscaping carefully done to create an area that looked like something out of a classic painting.
As for structures, these included things like elaborate stone bridges and models of ancient temples, but also often including something much simpler- a hermitage style retreat. These could be proper buildings, but more commonly were things like hobbit-hole type underground homes. They also sometimes were made of stone, occasionally carefully constructed such that existing tree roots would appear to have grown around the stone, with moss placed to grow on it as well. Adding macabre elements was also common, such as using bones of animals as decoration, or even in some cases as floor or wall material.
Inside these structures would generally be placed various items like human skulls, books, hour glasses, etc. In the early going, some estate owners would actually use these structures as a retreat for themselves, to reconnect with nature and relax. But, eventually, somebody got the bright idea to take it a step further.
Instead of making it look like a hermit lived in the structure or using it as a retreat themselves, the estate owners started hiring actual people to live in their hermitages. These individuals would often be asked to dress like a stereotypical druid, though what the druids actually wore isn’t precisely known. As noted, they would also sometimes be asked to grow long beards, allow their hair, toenails, and beard to grow indefinitely, etc. etc.
As you might imagine, finding someone interested in wiling away their years sitting around in squalor, and in some cases strictly forbidden from venturing into the outside world, wasn’t exactly an easy thing, despite the fact that some land owners were offering a princely sum for an individual willing to do it.
For example, at Painshill Park, Charles Hamilton offered £700 (about a £1.2 million today) to anyone willing to live for seven years in the hermitage constructed in his garden. The specific ad Hamilton placed seeking such a hermit stated the person hired:
shall be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for timepiece, water for his beverage, and food from the house. He must wear a camlet robe, and never, under any circumstances, must he cut his hair, beard, or nails, stray beyond the limits of Mr. Hamilton’s grounds, or exchange one word with the servant.
Unfortunately for Hamilton, after a mere few weeks of service, his first hired hermit was found hanging out at a nearby pub rather than sitting around contemplating his life.
In another case, one John Timbs of Lancashire offered 50 pounds per year to anyone willing to live in his underground hermitage. Not without creature comforts, however, this particular hobbit-hole apparently included a chamber organ, a bath, unlimited books of the hermit’s request, and high quality food from Timbs’ own table. Again, as was common, an interested applicant would have to agree not to cut “his hair, beard, toe-nails, or fingernails” for the duration.
In yet another case, the advert noted,
Wanted- Ornamental hermit to occupy natural cave dwelling under waterfall for seven years. The successful candidate shall be provided with Bible, water, spectacles, camlet robe, hourglass, and food from the house. No hair- nail, or beard trimming permitted. Sum offered 600 pounds.
There are also a few known instances of people attempting to volunteer their services as an Ornamental hermits, such as this ad that appeared in the January 11, 1810 edition of the London Courier:
A young man, who wishes to retire from the world and live as a hermit, in some convenient spot in England, is willing to engage with any nobleman or gentleman who may be desirous of having one. Any letter addressed to S. Laurence (post paid), to be left at Mr. Otton’s No. 6 Coleman Lane, Plymouth, mentioning what gratuity will be given, and all other particulars, will be duly attended.
When a particular property owner could not find a suitable candidate, they often resorted to placing dummies or occasionally fully fledged automatons in the hermitages. For example, in the mid-18th century on Sir Samuel Hellier’s Wodehouse estate’s 18 acre gardens, he had a mechanical hermit constructed apparently capable of some form of human-like movement when manipulated by a hidden servant.
As for what the flesh and blood ornamental hermits would get up to, this varied based on the requirements of their benefactors. Some seem to have wished them to sit around and do nothing, speaking to no one, as in the aforementioned case of Charles Hamilton. Others only cared that they look the part, and otherwise when guests weren’t around were free to socialize with other servants, take the occasional bath in the main house, etc. Still others would ask their hermits to entertain guests with poetry of their own making or otherwise impart the wisdom they were supposed to have acquired through spending their days mostly in solitude.
In at least one case, naturalist Gilbert White actually convinced his own brother, a minister by the name of Henry, to take up the post for a time on his estate in 1763, apparently much to the excitement of his various guests. For example, consider this account by one Catharine Battie upon meeting Henry,
in the middle of tea we had a visit from the old Hermit his appearance made me start he sat some with us & then went away after tea we went in to the Woods return’d to the Hermitage to see it by Lamp light it look’d sweetly indeed. Never shall I forget the happiness of this day …
While this might seem an awful lot of excitement for meeting a quasi-homeless person, it should be remembered that this wasn’t that far away from a time when walking was literally the world’s most popular spectator sport. And we’re not talking racing someone or walking around and seeing the sites. No- crowds of thousands would gather simply to watch someone walk around quite normally in circles for sometimes days on end, such as in 1809 when one Captain Robert Barclay Allardice famously walked 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours.
Going back to hermits, occasionally a given land owner would strike gold and find someone actually interested in living as a hermit. Arguably the two most famous of these being Stephen Duck and Father Francis.
As for Stephen, he was a poet who accepted a position as a resident hermit at Richmond Park, owned by King George II’s wife, Queen Caroline. His hermitage was described in 1735 editions of The Gentleman’s Magazine,
A subterranean building is by Her Majesty’s order carrying on in the Royal Gardens at Richmond which is to be called Merlin’s Cave adorned with Astronomical figures and characters. The figures Her Majesty has ordered for Merlin’s cave were placed there… 1. Merlin at a table with conjuring books and mathematical instruments, taken from the head of Mr Ernest, page to the Prince of Wales. 2. King Henry VIII’s Queen, and 3. Queen Elizabeth who came to Merlin for knowledge, the former from the face of Mrs Margaret Purcell and the latter from Miss Paget’s. 4. Minerva from Mrs Poyntz’s 5. Merlin’s secretary from Mr Kemp’s one of His Royal Highness the Duke’s gardeners. 6. A witch, from a tradesman’s wife at Richmond….
Her Majesty has ordered also a choice collection of English books to be placed therein; and appointed Mr Stephen Duck to be Cave and Library Keeper and his wife Necessary Woman there.
As for the outside, they state it was made of a
heap of stones, thrown into a very artful disorder, and curiously embellished with moss and shrubs, to represent rude nature. But I was strangely surpris’d to find the entrance of it barr’d with a range of costly gilt rails, which not only seemed to show an absurdity of taste, but created in me a melancholy reflection that luxury had found its way even into the Hermit’s Cell.
Fully embracing the role, Duck apparently grew a lengthy beard and otherwise spent his time reading books from the queen’s library, writing poetry, and talking with the many hundreds of people each year who would seek him out at the elaborate hermitage. Unfortunately for Stephen, he ultimately had enough and decided in 1756 to kill himself by jumping into the River Thames and failing to bother to surface.
As for Father Francis, he lived in a cave at Hawkstone Park, belonging to one Sir Richard Hill. Francis spent his time contemplating life and attending to people who would come visit him to seek advice from him. Those wishing to see Father Francis, would, to quote a 1784 account,
pull a bell, and gain admittance. The hermit is generally in a sitting posture, with a table before him, on which is a skull, the emblem of mortality, an hour-glass, a book and a pair of spectacles. The venerable bare-footed Father, whose name is Francis (if awake) always rises up at the approach of strangers. He seems about 90 years of age, yet has all his sense to admiration. He is tolerably conversant, and far from being unpolite.
When Francis died after 14 years of service, a suitable replacement couldn’t be found, so he was replaced by an automaton, with it noted by one visitor who saw the fake hermit:
The face is natural enough, the figure stiff and not well managed. The effect would be infinitely better if the door were placed at the angle of the wall and not opposite you. The passenger would then come upon St. [sic] Francis by surprise, whereas the ringing of the bell and door opening into a building quite dark within renders the effect less natural.
How the movement in this case was achieved was apparently to have a hidden worker manipulate the automaton each time someone entered to cause it to stand up. At that point, the worker would then manipulate the mouth using a string, while reading out various lines of poetry.
All good things must come to an end, however, and by the early 19th century, having an ornamental hermit on your estate was already falling out of fashion.
But let us never forget that the human drive to one-up our fellow denizens on our journey to the grave is so strong that for a brief period in history people actually took to, essentially, hiring a random squatter to come hang out on their property, just so they could show off the unkempt individual to guests.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
Bonus Facts:
Sir Charles Isham was also a key figure in the spreading of the gnome, when he introduced gnomes to the United Kingdom by bringing 21 of the terracotta figures home with him from a trip to Germany around 1847 and placed them in the garden of his home. (Amazingly, one of those original gnomes is still around. Lampy, as the statue is called, is on display at Isham’s home, Lamport Hall.)
On a related note, besides just sticking the Gnomes in a garden, another modern Gnome “tradition” has recently popped up- Gnome-napping. Essentially, you steal someone’s garden gnome, then take it on a trip or other sort of adventure while taking lots of pictures of what the gnome’s been up to on its journey and send them back to the owner. If you choose, when you’re done, you return the gnome to where it started. This practice seems to have started in the 1980s in Australia, but saw a huge upswing in popularity thanks to the 5 time Academy Award nominated 2001 film Amelie where this is depicted.
The post The Curious Case of Real Life Ornamental Garden Hermits appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Just shy of five months after the reveal of Overwatch's 30th hero, medic Baptiste, Blizzard is ready to do it all over again, with a first look at hero 31 - "eccentric astrophysicist" Sigma.
It was clear something was afoot this weekend, when the official Overwatch Twitter account posted a strange video in which game director Jeff Kaplan was seemingly sucked into a black hole. A haunting piano ditty and many mysterious equations ensued.
That, we now know, was all a pre-amble for hero 31's official unveiling, with Blizzard having now released a two-minute origin story for Sigma. It's certainly not the most conventional reveal, with the narrative, such as it is, hopping back and forth through time to convey Sigma's fragile mental state - a result of a disastrous experiment to harness the power of a black hole.
Eurogamer.net: July 09, 2019 at 02:59AM - N64 dino hunter Turok… | https://buff.ly/2G4PnIb | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀
⠀
Eurogamer.net: July 09, 2019 at 02:59AM - N64 dino hunter Turok returning as a cute 2D game | … https://buff.ly/2GabcpI
https://ift.tt/32IZWKu
July 22, 2019 at 03:00PM
US lawyers have filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo after concerns around the issue of Joy-Con drift.
It's a case which has been bubbling away for some weeks now while a growing number of fans have aired their grievances online - all claiming their Joy-Con controllers have begun misbehaving.
The lawsuit was finally filed last Friday via the United States District Court in Washington by the law offices of Chimicles, Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith (CSK&D).
The post Opportunity for Indie Games Developers at devcom 2019 enhanced Indie Expo appeared first on IND13.
Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is the follow-up to Playtonic's platforming debut, and it's looking very lovely indeed.
If you missed its reveal during the busy E3 period, this is the long-awaited sequel to the original Yooka-Laylee - but it comes with a bit of a twist.
Instead of the 3D platforming areas a bit (okay, a lot) like Banjo-Kazooie, this is Playtonic's take on the side-scrolling levels of Donkey Kong Country.
It's fair to say that PlatinumGames has mastered the art of the action game - but what if this talented studio were to expand in new directions? The phenomenal Nier: Automata offered a glimpse with its RPG trimmings, while the cancelled Scalebound seemed to aim even higher. Clearly Platinum is eager to push new boundaries, which is why it shouldn't be a surprise that Astral Chain is anything but simple.
If you've seen the trailers, however, it might not be entirely clear what sort of game we're dealing with here. Indeed, when I had a chance to sit down with Astral Chain last week, I really had no idea what to expect. I knew there would be action but everything else was up in the air. As I left the demo station, I couldn't help but consider the most ridiculous of comparisons. Yes, there's plenty of Platinum-style action within but everything else suggests some sort of unholy fusion between Deus Ex, Batman and The Legend of Zelda. Perhaps that's a stretching it but stay with me - there's a lot going on here.
It starts off simple enough. Players are dropped in the centre of the last human city - The Ark - as it falls under attack by a mysterious enemy known as the Chimera. These creatures are basically harvesting humanity, dragging people into an alternate dimension of sorts. To engage this new foe, a Police force known as Neuron was created - a team of elite fighters who command warriors known as Legion and... OK, maybe it's not that simple after all.
Headspun is a British indie game looking to revive the FMV genre by placing the player in the brain of a recently awoken coma patient - and it's launching on PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Mac on 28th August.
Players will take on the role of Ted the conscious voice in the head of Theo Kavinsky, a man who has no memory of the accident or events leading up to his coma. As Ted you'll work to discover what happened and put Theo's life back on track, all the while dealing with Teddy - Theo's subconscious voice who doesn't always agree with Ted.
The game is being made by Superstring, a British microstudio run by Jamin Smith, and features footage filmed in a working hospice in Surrey.
Lando Norris and Max Verstappen - arguably two of F1's hottest properties - have just wrapped up a pretty major achievement together, the two working as part of the joint Team Redline/Pure Racing Team effort to win iRacing's 24 Hours of Spa event.
The two were joined by sim racing veterans Max Benecke and Max Wenig and found themselves in the top split where they dominated proceedings, though that's not to say their race was without drama. With the race well into its final hour, Verstappen had a 'technical' issue - with his brake pedal falling off of his home rig - meaning that Lando Norris had to step in to stroke the Audi R8 LMS GT3 home. Despite the late hiccough, Team Redline PRT finished nearly 30 seconds up the road from its nearest competitor.
Norris and Verstappen are no strangers to the world of sim racing. Norris is a regular who also frequently streams his sessions on his own Twitch channel, while back in 2015 Max Verstappen pulled off an audacious move around the outside of Blanchimont in that year's Belgian Grand Prix - a move he'd practiced previously in iRacing before making it stick in the real world.
Two years to the day since it first released, Splatoon 2 wrapped up its final Splatfest over the weekend - with Chaos winning out over Order as Pearl mobilised her forces to beat her Off the Hook bandmate Marina.
It marks an end of sorts to Splatoon 2's official post-release support, which has boasted a regular stream of new maps, modes and weapons - and of course plenty of Splatfests, which have settled age-old rivalries such as that between mayo and ketchup (mayo being the winner, of course) and salty or sweet (the answer's salty, you dolt).
There's one final update coming to Splatoon 2 later this month - which will bring it to version 5.0 - which will allow players to host their own Splatfests, giving players the option to tailor ink colours and giving access to the previously time-limited Shifty Station maps.
The second part of Kingdom Hearts: VR Experience is rolling out to PSVR on 24th July, 2019.
The update brings the ability to use motion controllers in "some new, yet familiar, worlds like Olympus Coliseum", and enable players to "immerse [themselves] in the world of Kingdom Hearts like never before".
Just like its predecessor, this VR update is free and brings a number of experiences missing from the first VR sample, including Hercules' Olympus Coliseum. It's not clear what - nor how many - areas are included, but PlayStation says the latest instalment will enable you to "relive unforgettable moments" from the game (thanks, Engadget).
Yes, there's going to be a bathtub scene in The Witcher Netflix series.
Whilst showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich wouldn't be drawn on who, exactly, will be taking a soak - or who they might be accompanied by - she did confirm to io9 that "there's a bathtub".
"There is a bathtub this season," Hissrich said. "I won't tell you who's in the bathtub, but there's a bathtub."
Just months after Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime stepped away from the World of Warcraft developer, fellow co-founded Frank Pearce has revealed he too is also stepping down.
"After more than 28 years, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce is hanging up his armor - thank you for everything, Frank, and best wishes for the future!" Blizzard announced on its social media channels, linking to a full goodbye statement from Pearce and J. Allen Brack, who succeeded Morhaime as president.
"The time has come for me to step away from Blizzard and pass the torch to the next generation of leaders," Pearce wrote in the post.
Where do bodies begin in video games, and where do they end? You might point to the body of a game's protagonist, but if a player's body isn't so much a body as an expression of your agency, it seems reductive to stop at the perceptible limits of a single character model. In the medieval horror game A Plague Tale: Innocence, the player's range of action and awareness is distributed across the bodies of several characters (together with the phantom onlooker that is the third-person camera) - big sister Amicia, a gang of teenage runaways and the sickly young Hugo, who must be guarded like an Achilles heel. Where exactly are you, the intelligence directing the simulation, in this shifting equation, and what does that bode for concepts of minds and bodies at large? To play such games may not feel like reading a treatise, but it's to participate in a thought experiment about the lines we draw between the categories of consciousness, flesh and world.
Games in general are useful platforms for the systematising and testing out of philosophical precepts, and there are projects that engage with this potential more earnestly. Another recent example is No Code's existential thriller Observation, which casts you as a space station AI suddenly encumbered with a self, and struggling to feel at home in a form that spans CCTV networks, heads-up displays and robot drones. The game I want to talk about today is a less likely work of philosophising - Square Enix's Final Fantasy 15, which, it transpires, owes rather a lot to traditions of scholarly inquiry that date back centuries. That's according to Youichiro Miyake, lead AI researcher at the publisher's Advanced Technology Division, who I sat down with at Reboot Develop Blue this spring.
Final Fantasy 15 is yet another JRPG about a dour princeling, Noctis, but you'll probably remember it most fondly for your three bodyguards - snippy Ignis, beefy Gladiolus and the ever-buoyant Prompto. As in A Plague Tale, these "side" characters are in theory distinct personalities, but they function almost as stray appendages, loosely organised reflections of the player's will. During exploration the trio form a loose-knit perimeter, Prompto unable to resist galloping ahead, which occasionally makes it unclear who is following who. During battle, your accomplices fight by themselves but synch up with the player in organic ways, inviting you to perform team attacks and peeling off to help out should you take a tumble. Enter a storied area, such as the opening gas station hub, and they'll fan out, both to give you some peace and direct your attention towards objects of interest. You can delegate to them, ordering Ignis to take the wheel of your swanky muscle car, the Regalia, or asking one of your counterparts to make the call on a dialogue response. Prompto also serves as a kind of involuntary recall function, snapping pictures of your exploits and offering them to you later for preservation.
Eurogamer.net: July 11, 2019 at 04:00AM - Does Journey’s PC port deliver the definitive experience? | https://buff.ly/2S9RoHS | @WitWGARA, #GamersUnite, #gaming, #indiewatch, #nerdy, #News, #OurMischief, #WitWGARA, Does Journey’s PC port deliver the defi…
https://ift.tt/2XQw2Fs
July 20, 2019 at 06:30PM
The dust has settled on Fortnite's big season finale, which saw the game's much-hyped monster versus mecha face-off finally taking place. The two titans battled to the death - there could be only one winner.
Spoilers lie below.
As zero hour struck on the various countdown clocks around the map, the monster rose from the sea with Polar Peak's castle still on its back. Its target was the power of Fortnite's infamous Vault, hidden under Loot Lake.
Being locked in a room never sounds terribly fun. Let alone paying for the privilege. Despite this, there's currently a huge spate of experiences designed to test your ability to find keys hidden in some skeleton's chest cavity: escape rooms.
The only times I can remember being locked in a room occurred when I was young, and my dad put a bolt on the top of the door of my room when I flat-out refused to stay in there when I was being punished. It feels odd to think of locking a kid in a room now; it seems like a different time, or a horror movie plot device. We've moved on from smacking, and parents don't even bother to cook Brussels sprouts any more, perhaps because the only way you can get adults to contemplate putting them in their mouths is if there is almost as much thick cut bacon as there is, er, Brussels. Or if they're those chocolate ones they sometimes have at M&S cash registers over Xmas.
I digress.
Eurogamer.net: July 11, 2019 at 03:40AM - Don’t expect Switch Pro this year, Nintendo says | https://buff.ly/32nOd3M | @WitWGARA, #GamersUnite, #gaming, #indiewatch, #nerdy, #News, #OurMischief, #WitWGARA, Don’t expect Switch Pro this year, Eurogamer.net…
https://ift.tt/2xXxxT6
July 19, 2019 at 03:00PM
Perhaps the most discussed aspect of Teamfight Tactics' design is the way it dishes out items. A match of Riot's League of Legends-themed auto chess game includes a number of PVE rounds, each designed to give players items or gold.
This system adds randomness to the game - something Riot believes strongly in - but it's felt players who get lots of items early on have an advantage over those who do not.
Only now, though, are players finding out that the game will give players a leg up later on if you don't get items early on.
