The Fascinating Origins of Everyday Foods (Part 1) |… |……… | https://buff.ly/2TpLlRY | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀
⠀
The Fascinating Origins of Everyday Foods (Part 1) |… |…… | https://buff.ly/2SSgEoy | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀… https://buff.ly/2u6wy4k
https://ift.tt/2tEZwZb
January 25, 2020 at 06:30PM
Major #changes to #ourmischief and @WitWGARA soon! https://t.co/u2ci2hLg6C
https://ift.tt/2GknfQW
January 25, 2020 at 02:35PM
Want to see Haohmaru versus Mitsurugi in Soulcalibur 6? Of course you do.
Samurai Shodown star Haohmaru is the second of four planned DLC characters that form Soulcalibur 6's second season, and in the trailer below we see him go up against Soulcalibur samurai Mitsurugi. Is the game big enough for the both of them?
There's plenty of big ticket sword swiping, as you'd expect, and we're treated to flashy moves from the guest character. Sparks certainly fly.
The Duelyst servers shut down permanently in February 2020, developer Counterplay Games has announced.
The squad-based tactical role-playing collectible card game hybrid goes dark on 27th February 2020.
"Saying goodbye to any game is never easy, and it's always hardest when you love the game as much as we all love Duelyst," reads a post on the Duelyst website.
Psyonix has decided to end support for the Mac and Linux versions of Rocket League, saying both platforms combined represent a tiny percentage of its active player base.
After a final patch in March, online functionality will be deactivated for the macOS and Linux versions of the game, which means Mac and Linux players won't be able to play online multiplayer or access the in-game store. Offline features including local matches and splitscreen play will still be accessible.
In a post on the Rocket League subreddit, Psyonix community chief Devin Connors said the company couldn't justify the time and resources it would take to keep the game updated on Mac and Linux after it updates its Windows version from 32-bit to 64-bit, and to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9 later this year.
Part one of Ark: Survival Evolved's two-part Genesis expansion, which was due to launch this month following a release date delay back in December, will now arrive on 25th February, according to its developer Wildcard Studios.
Genesis, which was first unveiled back in August last year, effectively forms Ark's second season pass, and will ultimately deliver the game's fourth and fifth paid expansions - following on from previous offerings Scorched Earth, Aberration, and Extinction.
Announcing Genesis' second delay on the Ark website, Wildcard wrote, "We're extremely sorry to push it back an extra month, but as we have been heads-down with the rest of the team polishing, balancing and putting the final pieces together, we really felt that the extra wait will be worth it both for the quality of the base game and the ambitious new expansion."
Eurogamer.net: January 15, 2020 - Someone should make a game about: Day traders | https://buff.ly/2tZJ4T6 | @WitWGARA, #GamersUnite, #gaming, #indiewatch, #nerdy, #News, #OurMischief, #WitWGARA, Eurogamer.net, gaming, nerdy, News, OurMischief, Someone sh…
https://ift.tt/37pqC5d
January 24, 2020 at 03:00PM
There is currently a very spooky pulsating object on Frictional Games' website - and judging by the page name, I think it's safe to say this is about a new game. But what is that thing? An eyeball, frogspawn? Who knows.
The studio, known for its utterly terrifying horror games Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA, apparently began the ARG at the end of December - and fans are in the midst of unravelling the mystery.
For those unfamiliar, ARG means alternate reality game, normally taking the form of a treasure hunt across the internet to hop between clues and solve a puzzle. Transmedia storytelling, if you want to be fancy - and one famous example includes the I Love Bees ARG used to market Halo 2.
Five of the Best is a weekly series about the parts of games we overlook. We've discussed a diverse bunch: crowds, hubs, potions, mountains, hands... They're the things we take for granted while we play but then, years later, find lodged in our brains. It's only then we begin to appreciate how important they were. So let's celebrate them.
Today...
Character creators! How long do you spend in them? Do you pick a premade face and just breeze through? Do you pick a template, tinker a bit and then settle? Or do you adjust absolutely everything, take all evening and it still doesn't look right? I feel your pain.
Who would've ever thought that a cutesy massively multiplayer Pokémon-style adventure game would be so popular? Literally no one could have predicted this. Nope. Nobody.
Well, the interest in Temtem has already been so high that the game's servers were struggling to keep up with demand. A problem they've since fixed. And now, fully realising that I may be adding to their burden, I'm here to show you where you can get a decent deal on the early access hit.
If you head over to Green Man Gaming you can get Temtem for £22.95. All you need to do is add the game to your cart, enter the code 'UPCOMING18' at the checkout and you'll save 18 per cent off the normal price.
Remember when the very first Sonic the Hedgehog film trailer emerged, and it was rather unexpectedly set to Gangsta's Paradise? We've now moved on to slightly more up-to-date rap, as the official movie song is a collaboration between Wiz Khalifa, Ty Dolla $ign, Lil Yachty & Sueco the Child. Sure.
You can watch the music video for Speed Me Up below, which features lyrics such as "ladies love my speed" and "leave my knuckles, attack me for my finance". To be fair, the chorus is surprisingly catchy, and will probably be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
Something a little less fun, however, is the recent news regarding the studio behind Sonic's redesign. After the internet mocked the first trailer for Sonic's (frankly bizarre) original look, Paramount Pictures and Sega announced it would delay the movie to re-do the visual effects, and much of the work for this was done by Moving Picture Company's Vancouver branch. This resulted in a much-improved design: but the studio was then closed down just before Christmas, with owner Technicolor citing "more attractive opportunities in other locations" as the reason (via Vancouver Sun). Having to fix that mess then losing your job sure is... something.
Temtem reminds me of being eight years old and playing Pokémon Yellow for the first time. I already knew a lot about Pokémon, like the various evolution trees, but when it came to the mechanics of the game, namely managing the stats for each of my chosen creatures, I was a novice. I learned by catching one of every Pokémon I encountered and, in turn, taking them into battle, until I had the type chart permanently ingrained in my brain. My love for the Pokémon franchise was born out of the excitement of purely not knowing what I was doing - and of how rewarding it felt when I had built a party strong enough to defeat the Elite Four.
Years of playing Pokémon has slowly dissolved that feeling to the point that I've had to ban myself from using particular Pokémon, because I know them too well (sorry Lapras.) Playing Temtem, a new PC game with some very familiar ideas, for the first time this week allowed me to embrace that feeling of unknowing once again. I experimented with a range of Temtem, beginning what I hope will be a balanced team, and explored every area carefully to ensure that I didn't miss anything important. As I played, however, I couldn't stop thinking about how similar this game is to the mainline Pokémon series.
Temtem is never going to escape being compared to Pokémon, because it is, in many ways, a clone of a Pokémon game. From the opening minutes, in which you leave your hometown to begin a grand adventure, to testing the abilities of your Temtems at the first dojo, it's very clear where the developers drew their inspiration from. You even have a rival who appears every so often to insult you. The fact is that Pokémon is no longer part of a genre about collecting and training magical beasts. It has, instead, become its own genre. Temtem can easily be described as a clone, but it's also currently carving out its own place within this genre. It's introducing its own ideas, while bringing a fresh perspective to the staples created by the Pokémon franchise.
The Double-A Team is a feature series honouring the unpretentious, mid-budget, gimmicky commercial action games that no-one seems to make any more.
You can catch up with all of our Double-A Team pieces in our handy, spangly archive.
Recore's special thing is very special, if you ask me. This is a game about shooting robots, each of which holds a sort of glowing orb as their core. Shoot them enough and you get to extract the core - pull out the heart - while they're still alive. Loot and a finishing move in a single go! And the extraction! The Extraction is pretty wonderful.
Eurogamer.net: January 13, 2020 at 03:15PM - Sony to skip E3 for second year running | https://buff.ly/2tXBmbQ | @WitWGARA, #GamersUnite, #gaming, #indiewatch, #nerdy, #News, #OurMischief, #WitWGARA, Eurogamer.net, gaming, nerdy, News, OurMischief, Sony …
https://ift.tt/2NVoOJo
January 23, 2020 at 07:30PM
EA has begun removing its Tetris games from mobile storefronts, and it all seems connected to another official Tetris game which has arrived in their place.
As of 21st April, EA will be retiring its Tetris mobile catalogue for good, meaning players have until then to play and use up any in-game items they may have acquired. An update post to explain this is still viewable on the App Store - but Tetris 2011 and Tetris Blitz have both now vanished entirely from the Google Play store.
That's a real shame for those who spent money on EA's games, and it all seems linked to another company - N3twork - which today released a new officially-licensed Tetris game of its own. It's called, well, Tetris - and is available for free on both iOS and Android. It looks like a very traditional version with some nice backgrounds... and ads, unfortunately, unless you're willing to stump up £4.99.
World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth has come to an end in story terms with a cinematic that's more than a let down, and it riffs heavily on the end of Lord of the Rings - perhaps too heavily.
Quick background: the Alliance and Horde ended up coming together (making all that fuss about Sylvanas a bit meaningless) to fight a greater, other-world threat (a plot Blizzard has repeated a lot over the years). The greater, other-world threat this time is Lovecraftian nightmare N'Zoth - one of Warcraft's Old Gods. N'Zoth's arrival in the world of Azeroth was a cool moment for Warcraft lore nerds like me - this was the first time we'd seen the Old God in the flesh, so to speak.
This week, Blizzard released a new raid called Ny'alotha, The Waking City, and players cleared it in a bid to get new loot and see one of World of Warcraft's traditional story-ending in-game cutscenes. N'Zoth's arrival in Azeroth was a momentous moment. Surely the payoff would do it justice.
Anyone who's into the competitive side of Mortal Kombat 11 will know of the scourge of Geras.
This time-wielding monster is one of the most powerful characters in the game - some say overpowered - and a lot of that has to do with his speed, huge damage, throw loops and easy to trigger Krushing Blows. He's been nerfed a few times since Mortal Kombat 11 came out in April 2019, but most players agree these had little impact on his power.
The latest Mortal Kombat 11 balance patch tries once again to nerf Geras. Some of his moves have added startup frames, effectively slowing his down. His Matter Of Time combo - perhaps his best - (Towards + Back Punch, Front Punch, Back Punch) now has 25 startup frames (up from 20) and recovers three frames slower, which makes it less effective. His Time Splash (Jump Down + Back Punch) now has 5 less frames of blockstun, which should make it more risky as a meaty.
Given the ferocity of competition in the genre, this probably doesn't come as much of a surprise: but another battle royale has bitten the dust, and this time it's Housemarque's Stormdivers.
In a 25th anniversary post, the Finnish developer (known for arcade titles Nex Machina, Resogun and Super Stardust) explained it's now working on its "most ambitious and biggest game to date", and as a result, all other projects are being put on hold. It seems the unannounced title has been in progress for some time - three years, in fact - and has a team of nearly 80 people working on it.
"It is great that the whole company can come together to deliver this game, which will define the next evolution of Housemarque," says the post.
It’s a Wonderful Life [Part 1] | https://buff.ly/2s6t9S7… | https://buff.ly/36JRaO0 | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀
⠀
It’s a Wonderful Life [Part 1] | https://buff.ly/2s6t9S7 |… | https://buff.ly/36dNwMh | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀… https://buff.ly/380sssO
https://ift.tt/2sPjIah
January 22, 2020 at 03:30PM
When the Resident Evil 3 remake was first announced back in December, there was no word of the Collector's Edition making its way out of the US. However, it's now been confirmed that the Resident Evil 3 Collector's Edition will now be available exclusively at Game in the UK.
The rather bulky £215 special edition comes in a very familiar item box from the series. You won't find stacks of herbs, crank handles, valves and other discarded keys in this one, though. Instead, there's a copy of Resident Evil 3 with lenticular packaging, a Jill Valentine statue, a two-disc soundtrack CD, artbook and reversible poster.
This version sold out extremely quickly in the US, so if you want a copy for yourself I suggest you don't shamble.
Hellblade and Enslaved developer Ninja Theory has yet another new game in the works - Project: Mara.
Announced in a brief blog post today, the game is described as an "experimental title that explores new ways of storytelling". It will be a "real-world and grounded representation of mental terror", as opposed to Hellblade's historical fantasy setting.
And that's pretty much all the information we have on the project, one of four now in the works at the Microsoft-owned studio.
The city of Liverpool has been chosen to host the UK's first Pokémon Go Safari Zone.
Tickets for the three-day event, to be held 17-19th April 2020, will go on sale on 31st January priced £12 (or £18 early access which grants two extra hours).
The northern UK city was chosen following a submission to #NianticLive2020, a scheme which encouraged city officials and local governments to apply to host a Niantic event this year. And for a city known for its Beatles - well, it's fitting choice for a franchise founded on bug collecting.
Mortal Kombat Kollection Online has resurfaced.
As spotted by Gematsu, PEGI has an entry for Mortal Kombat Kollection Online, due out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, with a release date of 21st January 2020 and an 18-rating, as you'd expect.
Obviously that release date is incorrect, but everything else looks legit. Here's the official blurb:
Life is Strange's popular graphic novel spin-off will return in April for a new season.
Titled as Life is Strange: Partners in Time, it'll continue the comic book adventures of Max, Chloe and Rachel begun last year.
The dozen issues released so far offer up a continuation of the original Life is Strange's "Bae" ending, with plenty of timey-wimey storytelling that roped in fan-favourite Rachel Amber, as seen in Life is Strange: Before the Storm.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has come a long way. From Steam early access phenomenon to popularising the battle royale genre, PUBG has enjoyed millions of players across multiple platforms.
On PC, though, PUBG's peak appears behind it. It has an astonishing all-time peak of 3.2m concurrent players on Steam, but that was achieved two years ago, in January 2018. Nowadays, PUBG peaks in the 600,000s.
This is not to say PUBG is done and dusted. It remains a massive game on Steam, the third-most popular game on Valve's platform, in fact, behind only Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. And the developers of PUBG continue to update the game in a bid to keep its playerbase interested and active. Recently, we heard about the experimental Bluehole mode, a way of playing the game that forces "circle squatters" to keep moving. The latest development is a brand new map called Karakin that has something that sounds very much like Bluehole Mode, but with a twist. It's called the Black Zone, and it levels buildings. The idea is it keeps players on edge, discourages camping and gets everyone moving - all across one of the game's smallest maps.
It looks like the Christmas returns are starting to take up a little too much room at Amazon HQ, because the company is discounting thousands of Amazon UK Warehouse items today. You can get 20 per cent off the already reduced price for a selection of used items in good to like new condition, bringing some extremely good deals on hot ticket items like games consoles, 4K TVs and PC hardware.
If there's something specific you're after, click here and search in the box at the top of the screen to find items covered by the promotion. You'll see the 20 per cent off when you get to the checkout stage.
We've found a range of great deals on used hardware that won't last long, so if you're interested in our selections read on!
How many times will Mewtwo threaten the world of Pokémon? At least once more, as the CGI remake of Pokémon: The First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back will be available on Netflix next month.
Having made its debut in Japan last year, this is the first English-language version of Mewtwo Strikes Back: Evolution, and it releases as a Netflix Original on 27th February. Take a pika the trailer below to see what you can expect - although personally, I still prefer the weirdly detailed CGI of the Detective Pikachu critters.
The original version of Pokémon The First Movie was, as the name suggests, the first film for the franchise - and was released in Japan in July 1998. It was something of a success, grossing $164m (£125m) worldwide and sparking a further 23 animated Pokémon films.
EA Sports has released a significant 2.8GB update for FIFA 20 that tackles a couple of the game's burning issues: dribbling and shooting.
Title Update 10, now live across PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, increases the responsiveness of dribbling when not using any dribbling modifiers or skill moves for players that have an average rating of 80 or higher between the attributes of dribbling, agility and balance.
The idea is the effectiveness of this improvement will scale based on the average rating, with the least improvement felt at 80, and the most improvement felt at 99. The upshot is dribbling masters should feel a lot responsive post-patch.
Hang on - how come that care package isn't dropping?
As shared yesterday by user Chuzeeee on r/ApexLore, a UFO has been spotted in the sky above World's Edge, and it's anyone's guess as to what it actually is. Get out your tin foil hats, it's time for a bunch of community conspiracy theories.
Judging by the footage and screenshots shared, the object has three lights and appears to be stationary, prompting guesses it could be a spaceship of some kind. Like any good UFO sighting, some doubted the veracity of the image, claiming it could be nothing more than a glitched care package. To disprove this, dataminer Shrugtal has posted an image of the UFO and a care package next to each other in the sky: the UFO has a smaller blue hue, while the care package burns a bright orange. And, of course, there's been multiple reported sightings.
New images of the Xbox Series X's casing have appeared online, giving us our strongest indication yet of what kind of input and output ports are found on the rear of the machine. The legacy HDMI input from the TVTVTVTV era is gone, replaced with a rather more mundane arrangement of USB ports, Toslink, Ethernet and a curious non-identified mystery port.
The images first surfaced on NeoGAF, with acknowledgement that this is the real deal coming via Thurrott's Brad Samms - a site and an author well known for deeply embedded sources within Microsoft. Adding a little extra weight to the validity of this source is that a Twitter user - amusingly - claimed the machine on his Microsoft accont via the clearly visible serial number.
With all of this in mind, the likelihood is that this is a genuine look at an Xbox Series X casing from new angles as opposed to an elaborately fake render or 3D printing. We see further air intakes (though not quite as large as I imagined) along with a standard figure-eight power input, Ethernet input and dual USB 'SuperSpeed' ports, Toslink audio and an HDMI 2.1 output. There's also a Kensington lock too, for the security-conscious amongst us.
Last year, Pokémon Go introduced Research Days: limited-time in-game events similar to Community Days which rewarded you with Pokémon for completing tasks.
There was an underwhelming Feebas day which served as a proof of concept, then a much-improved Clamperl day which everyone seemed to enjoy. But then developer Niantic tinkered with the format again for a Lotad/Castform day which stretched the whole thing on too long. After that, as the summer months rolled around, the concept disappeared.
Now, for Lunar New Year, a new Research Day has been announced. This time around it'll spotlight the previously-unavailable Minccino, the chinchilla Pokémon, because we're about to enter the Year of the Rat.
Hello, and welcome to our new series which picks out interesting things that we'd love someone to make a game about.
This isn't a chance for us to pretend we're game designers, more an opportunity to celebrate the range of subjects games can tackle and the sorts of things that seem filled with glorious gamey promise.
Check out our 'Someone should make a game about' archive for all our pieces so far.
Wow, that's a lot of Gen Z words in a headline - but I suppose it's what you'd expect from Fortnite, which is now searching for its next great emote on TikTok. I guess that makes a change from merely lifting them from, well, almost anything.
The competition kicked off over the weekend, and contestants must upload a video of themselves performing an original dance move on TikTok - along with the hashtag #EmoteRoyaleContest. Aside from being introduced into the game, the winning dance will also snag the creator a prize of 25k V-Bucks and a Fortnite VIP giveaway package.
Here's an example.
I walked into a HMV store over Christmas (one of the few remaining ones, anyway) - and on entering was greeted by rows upon rows of Funko Pop toys: their black, unthinking, lifeless eyes staring right back at me. Soon to join their ranks are the characters of Cyberpunk 2077, who have been converted into little plastic figures ready to sit on your desk. Staring.
Revealed at the London Toy Fair (via Game Informer), Funko is creating four different figures, including both male and female versions of V, and two models of Johnny Silverhand - one with him holding some guns, another with him looking sceptical. Listed on the official Funko Pop website is a glow-in-the-dark male V, but fortunately there's no image to accompany this.
These are expected to arrive on 16th April and, judging by pre-existing Funko prices, will likely cost around £10... a pop. That's the day Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to release, so perhaps you can use these to fill the emotional hole left by the delay. Personally, I'm much more interested in the art book.
A trailer for Godfall, the upcoming PC and PlayStation 5 fantasy looter-slasher, has popped up online and gotten people excited.
If you recall, Godfall announced itself at The Game Awards 2019 as the world's first PlayStation 5 game - our first glance at next-gen! - while also being a game for your personal computer, too.
This first look sought to impress with a collection of shiny chrome characters, particle effects and backing from Borderlands publisher Gearbox (though it is being developed externally by Counterplay Games, the studio behind collectable card battler Duelyst).
AMD continues its focus on the entry-level space with the release of the Radeon RX 5600 XT, a graphics card intended to sit between the RX 5500 XT and RX 5700 with strong 1080p performance at $279. Like so many recent graphics card launches though, the run-up to launch has been far from quiet, with both AMD and Nvidia repositioning their graphics cards to try and take a decisive advantage in the important sub-$300 price category.
AMD originally announced the 5600 XT as a competitor to the GTX 1660 Ti, offering higher frame-rates at the same price. In response, Nvidia has dropped prices on the next graphics card up, the RTX 2060, bringing their entry-level ray tracing GPU to $299. Now we're seeing the counterplay from AMD - and rather than dropping prices themselves to retain their value leadership, Team Red has chosen to boost performance instead.
This takes the form of a new BIOS update available for some overclocked RX 5600 XT models, which features significantly higher core clock and memory clocks at the expense of a nominally higher TDP. As you can see in the table below, these upgrades go far beyond what we'd normally expect to see from an overclocked card, with the projected performance gain placing the RX 5600 XT OC in nearly the same ballpark as the $349 RX 5700.
First, we had BT adding Google Stadia to its broadband packages. Now, as part of its current sale, you can get a free Xbox One with the Virgin Media Ultimate Oomph bundle.
You'll get Virgin's fastest M500 Fibre Broadband, the Maxit TV package that includes Sky Sports HD, Sky Cinema HD and Kids Pick (plus two Virgin TV V6 boxes), an unlimited mobile SIM and home phone calls all included for £89 per month.
It's not exactly cheap, but when you tot up what you're paying for all of these things individually you might find there's a saving in there for you.
Nintendo has trademarked a stylus attachment which connects to the Switch's Joy-Con.
Designs for the accessory popped up online this week (thanks, Siliconera) and show a redesigned Joy-Con strap with a pen-like nubbin on top.
When attached to a Joy-Con, the device acts as a stylus for the Switch in handheld mode. Examples for its use shown in the patent include as a simple touchscreen input, or to allow more detailed drawing. You can imagine it being handy for things like Dr Kawashima's Brain Training's touchscreen puzzles, or level design in Super Mario Maker 2.
We need #OurMischief’s support! #weneedtoknow: Focusing…… | https://buff.ly/2TkL5E7 | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀
⠀
We need #OurMischief’s support! #weneedtoknow: Focusing… | https://buff.ly/2F16lq3 | #OurMischief, WitWGARA | ⠀⠀
⠀… https://buff.ly/2NbYfze
https://ift.tt/2RbILNT
January 20, 2020 at 03:00PM
Rockstar and games industry trade association UKIE have responded to a report that the Grand Theft Auto developer claimed £37.6m in tax relief for the 2018/19 financial year, accounting for 37% of all UK games industry tax relief claims.
According to think thank TaxWatch, the figure, which is believed to relate to development of a new GTA game, means that Rockstar has now a claimed a total of £80m in UK Video Games Tax relief, equating to a a quarter of all relief claimed since the government scheme launched in 2014 after extensive industry lobbying.
It also means, as per TaxWatch's report, that Rockstar has paid no Corporation Tax for the fourth year running in the UK, despite the developer's GTAV having amassed more than an estimated $6bn USD in sales since releasing in 2014.
