Gaming

When Valve let up to 25 hardware development staff go in February, Jeri Ellsworth was one of them, and she was working on a pair of 3D augmented-reality glasses at the time called Cast AR. Ellsworth continued work on them with her new company, Technical Illusions, and recently let our friends at Engadget take them out for a spin at the Maker Faire 2013 event in San Mateo, CA. Cast AR is described as a "projected augmented reality system" on the company's site. Ellsworth said she plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign later in the year to fund the project, with the goal of each kit adding up to less than $200 for buyers. The site notes plans to include a development kit with each pair.Engadget goes hands-on with ex-Valve engineer's AR glasses originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 19 May 2013 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments More...

When Valve let up to 25 hardware development staff go in February, Jeri Ellsworth was one of them, and she was working on a pair of 3D augmented-reality glasses at the time called Cast AR. Ellsworth continued work on them with her new company, Technical Illusions, and recently let our friends at Engadget take them out for a spin at the Maker Faire 2013 event in San Mateo, CA. Cast AR is described as a "projected augmented reality system" on the company's site. Ellsworth said she plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign later in the year to fund the project, with the goal of each kit adding up to less than $200 for buyers. The site notes plans to include a development kit with each pair.Engadget goes hands-on with ex-Valve engineer's AR glasses originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 19 May 2013 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

A few months ago we promised that we would keep the community updated on when a fix would become available for SimCity enabling offline saves, expanded cities and fixes for a few other big problems with EA and Maxis' recently released SimCity. Well, a new mod is available that does everything you would have hoped for and then some.

You’ve turned me into a monster. The above ScribbleTaku was not guessed because it is harder than the hardest coffin nail you could ever imagine. I’m going to help you out here — I’m going to provide you with a very clear clue that will make things marginally easier. More »      

This is Frontiers, a game designed and being developed by two men. Something that blows your mind when you see footage of the game in action. Developers AAD Productions describe it like this: FRONTIERS blends the feel of first-person RPG classics like Daggerfall with the relaxing tempo & simplicity of a point-and-click adventure. Discover ancient mysteries, live off the land and fight deadly creatures, all in a beautiful & massive open world. An open-world RPG? With a relaxing tempo? Good Lord, it's like they asked me what I wanted from a video game and decided to go out and make it. Frontiers will hopefully be out next year. Frontiers [Facebook, via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Spicy Horse's Oz game combines the undead with "an Oz not of our remembering" - it's called OZombie, and it stars Dorothy, Toto, the Lion and the Tin Woodsman. The Scarecrow, who always wanted brains, is cast as the villain in this iteration, and instead of carrying around a basket, Dorothy gets a repeater. Spicy Horse is unsure which game it will make next, OZombie or Alice: Otherlands, and it all depends on whether the studio can regain the Alice rights from EA. If Spicy Horse and EA work out a good deal, then Alice it is. If not, OZombie gets the green light and probably a Kickstarter. "Actually, the more I think about it - and the more I see/hear feedback from you guys - the more I'm personally leaning towards Oz," Spicy Horse founder American McGee writes on the OZombie Facebook page. "There's so much fun stuff to explore, so many interesting characters and locations to discover. Wonderland will also be there, if not today, if not the next project, then perhaps the one after that?" Keep in mind (and mind your brains) that OZombie is entirely separate from American McGee's Oz, the game Atari canceled in 2004.Spicy Horse's Oz game is OZombie: 'If I only had some brainsss' originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 19 May 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments More...

Title: Anomaly 2 Platform: PC / Mac (reviewed on Mac) Developer: 11 Bit Studios Publisher: Steam Release date: 15th May 2013 TL;DR: Worth it just for unique tower offence v defence multiplayer Family Friendly?: Click here to skip the detail and see if this game is right for your family! 11 Bit Studios’ sleeper hit Anomaly: Warzone Earth series is back with a sequel, appropriately entitled Anomaly 2, boasting the same unique strategy of its predecessor, available now for PC and Mac via Steam. The basic premise of the Anomaly games is that in the future, the Earth is invaded by aliens through an anomaly that opens up and sends aggressive machines teeming through. The player assumes the role of the “Commander,” who takes commands of convoys of vehicles to try and take down the alien threat. Training mode – before things heat up Probably the most commonly used way of describing the Anomaly games is that it’s a tower defence game, but in reverse. In the more traditional defence games, players put up towers to stop waves of aggressors reaching a point they’re defending. In Anomaly, you travel along player-determined routes with your variable squad to penetrate rows of towers to get to your objective. In the single player campaign of Anomaly 2, it’s pretty much just more of the same. Despite the heroic efforts of the characters in Anomaly: Warzone Earth and its successor, Anomaly: Korea, that darned anomaly has just gone and opened up again. The world is a different place though, with the aliens having since plunged the Earth into an icy wasteland to try and eliminate the humans in a plot point reminiscent of the “real world” from The Matrix. Humanity survives by taking to ruined highways to scavenge for supplies and staying ahead of the alien towers. Gameplay can get frenetic The change of graphics is a welcome one, providing something shiny and new while the game mechanics stay largely the same. There’s only so much you could do differently with a game like Anomaly, and although 11 Bit have pushed the envelope in providing various new unit types and trying to change the dynamic, it’s never different enough to feel like you’re not just revisiting the same world again. Granted though, gameplay has been evolved – units now have two different forms accessible by double clicking on them, and the cover system has been expanded upon to necessitate a change in tactics. There are now a lot more right angles in the maps, in the sense that towers can be tucked away behind a burning building, but this largely boils down to the fact that combat units have one mode to deal with more distant towers, and another to accomodate ones that appear to the sides. The distance mode has less armour, a slower fire rate and increased damage; the close-range mode is just the opposite. Anomaly 2 does present something totally new in its multiplayer mode, and although it presents exactly the same gameplay mechanics in both single and multiplayer modes, the chance to play against humans in player-versus-player combat really does push the game above and beyond reasons why you might want to buy it. You either control the Squad or the Towers, and the objective for each side is to gather as many points as possible. For the Towers, points accumulate for destroying vehicles in the other player’s convoy, while the Squad gets the most return on breaking through the enemy lines and taking out their key structures. The multiplayer mode is well worth a look, delivering tense and fraught matches between players that bubble away slowly until a destructive climax. Given that there are only finite routes the Squad might take, the Towers can try and guide their opponent down a prepared gauntlet to wipe out the competition, while it’s down to the Squad player to make the decision on if and when they choose to make a full assault on the enemy Generators. It’s a great example of how mul

Sega has released the debut trailer and screenshots for Yakuza 1&2 HD for Wii U. The clip shows the game’s Wii U-specific features like off-TV GamePad play, and how the GamePad displays the game map and other statuses. The game’s out in Japan on August 8 for 5,229 yen at retail and 4,700 yen via [...]

Title: Defiance Platform: 360 / PS3 / PC (reviewed on 360) Developer: Trion Worlds & Human Head Studios Publisher: Trion Worlds Release date: NA April 2nd 2013 | EU April 2nd 2013 | AUS April 11th 2013 TL;DR: Ambitious, flawed and unconventional TV tie-in Family Friendly?: Click here to skip the detail and see if this game is right for your family! As a general rule of thumb, video games based on a movie or TV show are usually terrible. You could argue that this is because they’re all rush jobs completed to cash in on the success of the thing it’s based on, or because it’s difficult to capture the same essence of a more traditional medium and deliver it in a game. Whatever the reason, it’s equally as difficult to lump Defiance into that same category, even though it’s based on the TV show of the same name – because actually, it’s not just based on it; it runs in parallel. Defiance is a Sy Fy show set in the town of – you guessed it – Defiance, a small multicultural community of humans and aliens living together to survive the bleak reality the Earth has become in the near future after the planet has been terraformed almost beyond recognition. The town in the show is formerly St Louis, while the game is set in the Bay Area of what used to be San Francisco. This fact by itself sets Defiance apart in that both mediums bring the same world to life in different ways. In the pilot episode of the TV show, Ark Hunters Nolan and Irisa are seen to live dangerous lives as they scavenge for Ark Tech – alien artefacts that fall to the Earth from a derelict alien fleet in orbit. Nolan and Irisa go on to settle down in Defiance, but the game allows players to fully experience life in the Badlands, battling raiders, hellbugs and mutants to accumulate wealth. It’s a dangerous life, but one that can yield great reward. We’re gonna need a bigger boat… Aside from the unique narrative premise, is it a good game? The simple answer is…kinda. Defiance is a very ambitious game, linking players using PCs, Xbox 360s and PS3s together to enjoy the same shared experience. There are many things to do – the game is part third person shooter, part racing game, and part single player story missions. In addition to this there are combat challenges, time trials, world events, and player vs player combat. Random missions pop up as you travel around the fairly large map in an open world style – don’t want to do the single player? Fine, don’t. Whatever goes in the world of Defiance. Given that the game’s scope is so great, it’s reassuring that no one part of it ever spectacularly fails. By no stretch of the imagination is it perfect. Far, far from it. World events sometimes glitch, meaning the 10-15 minutes you just invested in a sequence are now meaningless. The handling of vehicles can be very laborious, occasionally making driving a real drag. There are flaws in the landscape that can trap your character, leaving your only option to be dropping a grenade on yourself and respawning. The frame rate can be horrendously bad, particularly during world events with high numbers of player participation but also, unforgivably, during some single player segments when yours is the only character in a limited landscape. But for all of these flaws, there’s something about the game that drives you on. Arkfalls are one of the most redeeming features, which are world events involving pieces of alien technology falling to Earth from orbit that cause havoc. Players race from point to point to engage in minor battles, and the major Arkfalls summon an enormous beast to be defeated by players’ combined might in a pseudo raid boss affair. The number of Arkfall types are limited, but their frequency means that something is always going on, and provide the most entertainment. For example, watching three or four dozen players try to take the same shortcut

Friday the 13th, the 1989 game, is widely considered to be one of the worst video games of all time, certainly one of the worst ever made for the NES. So of course it rates a special edition figurine — Jason Vorhees in the strange purple getup he wore for the final, deeply unsatisfying boss battle. More »