Console life cycles could be getting shorter Sony is working on a “PlayStation 4.5," a more powerful version of the PlayStation 4 that will be able to play games at 4K resolution, according to a report from Kotaku.
Kotaku cited multiple "developers who have spoken with Sony" about the purported console. Those sources indicated that the "PS4.5" — no word on whether that’s the official name — will include improved graphics hardware to power 4K games, and additional processing power for PlayStation VR, the virtual reality headset that Sony is releasing in October.
There are no indications of a release window or price for the "PS4.5," although one of Kotaku’s sources told the publication that such a device might not be released this year. Sony currently sells the PS4 for $349.99, having dropped the price of the console in October from $399.99, which is what it cost when it launched in November 2013. PlayStation VR will cost $399, although that does not cover the required PlayStation Camera accessory.
The PS4 cannot currently output 4K content, and its optical drive cannot read 4K Blu-ray discs. Masayasu Ito, executive vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment, said in an interview with 4Gamer in October (via Siliconera) that Sony was considering an enhanced PS4 that could support 4K Blu-ray discs. Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, told Huffington Post UK in January that Sony had "promised" Netflix that a new revision of the PS4 hardware with 4K support was coming. And Netflix told Forbes in February that it expected hardware refreshes this fall from both Sony and Microsoft with 4K video playback for the PS4 and Xbox One, respectively.

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Phil Spencer signals Xbox One hardware upgrades

If Sony is indeed considering a mid-cycle hardware upgrade, the company may not be alone. During a presentation to the media last month, Xbox head Phil Spencer posited a future in which Microsoft will "come out with new hardware capability during a generation."
Spencer contrasted the typical console life cycle with that of computers, smartphones and tablets, telling Polygon that the latter category of hardware offers "a very continuous evolution cycle in hardware, whereas between console generations most of the evolution is making it cheaper and potentially making it smaller." He also noted that PCs and mobile devices gradually get more and more powerful without locking out existing software like new gaming platforms usually do.
In particular, Spencer highlighted PlayStation VR as an example of Sony adding a new feature to the PS4 — virtual reality — without "changing what the core console is about," suggesting that Microsoft would want to do something similar, but in a way that would deliver better-playing games. Spencer later noted in an appearance on Major Nelson’s podcast that he wasn’t saying Microsoft would allow Xbox owners to open up their console and upgrade the parts. Instead, said Spencer, his comments were meant as a "longer-term vision statement."
We’ve reached out to Sony for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive.

Episodic series promises plenty of Bruce to go with your Bats At a panel at SxSW Gaming today, Telltale Games discussed its work on the upcoming Batman series titled, simply, Batman: A Telltale Games Series. Most notably, Telltale’s Job Stauffer revealed the rough release window for the game. “We’ll be premiering this summer," Stauffer said. But because of the way that Telltale makes its games, "There’s not a lot we can show you until we’re really close to premiering," Stauffer said.
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Virtual reality makes some of gaming’s oldest mechanics fresh again Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
Innervision, the developer of the upcoming Thunderbird virtual reality game, sent me a build of their GDC demo without much context or even setup. I didn’t know what kind of game it was. I didn’t know where I was going. I just downloaded the experience, put on my Vive Pre headset and …
Found myself on the side of a mountain, not knowing where to go and what to do. The mystery of the situation was instantly pleasurable, as was the detail poured into the design of the eagle’s head and the rock face. I could walk around to explore the environment, and as you can see from the video there is a teleport mechanic for people with smaller spaces.
It felt real. I finally figured out how to grab the disc and reflect the light, and the rest of the brief demo also dealt with light-based puzzles. But being inside the environment made the adventure game tropes feel fresh. We edited out a few minutes here and there, mostly because I struggled with an easy aspect of the puzzle for a bit, but this is the entirety of the build the developer was showing off. I played through it a few times to capture this footage, and I’m hooked. I want more.
“Created by one of the developers behind 1997’s best-selling game, Riven: The Sequel to Myst, Thunderbird fuses key elements from classic adventure games with next-gen tech to provide an unsurpassed level of immersion with stunning visual depth, life-like interactions, and a sense of realism never before possible," the official site states. It sounds like marketing copy, but the sense of reality from adventure games on the Vive is impressive. Using your own virtual hands to solve these puzzles and move the objects in the game makes all the difference.
Thunderbird will be released this summer, and is ultimately coming to the Oculus Rift, PlayStation 4, and HTC Vive.

We experienced no nausea, but did find a big bug Microsoft and Oculus VR held a press event yesterday to demo Minecraft on the Gear VR for the first time. Oculus’ chief technical officer, John Carmack, was on hand to give his thoughts, and it turns out he’s been strapping smartphones to his face for a while now. But the demonstration showed that the game is still not quite performing up to its potential.
“About a year ago I got Minecraft on the Gear VR and I couldn’t tell anyone about it," said Carmack. "And it was extremely frustrating because I was playing this game and I could spend hours playing. […] I thought it was the best VR experience that we had available. For anything."
The reason the Gear VR is the ideal platform for Minecraft, Carmack said, is because there are no wires tethering the user to a computer. With all the processing power built into the headset itself — in the form of a Samsung smartphone — there’s nothing holding the user back from moving in any direction.
"In VR, I want to go explore the world," Carmack said. "I think that the ability to be wireless, to spin around and have that freedom, really makes this a unique experience. […] Minecraft hits all of those buttons very, very well. It is the quintessential open-world game, and being able to explore that world in VR was what I always thought the core of this was all cracked up to be."

To enable that kind of experience, the demo space was littered with spinning office chairs and Gear VRs fitted with Samsung Galaxy S7 phones.
But while Minecraft has been up and running on the Gear VR for some time, it still has no release date. Looking at Minecraft: Pocket Edition side by side with Minecraft on the Gear VR, it’s easy to see why; right now, the view distance is remarkably shorter in VR.
The play space designed for journalists to experience was very narrow. While the frame rate was acceptable — I had no issues with nausea — the grand vistas I’ve come to appreciate in Minecraft were almost entirely absent.
Once I broke free from the prepared environment and ran off into the world, I immediately noticed how details were only visible out to a stone’s throw away, a distance of perhaps 40 or 50 blocks. Past that, the edge of the rendered space manifested itself as an opaque white wall. Underground, in the pitch dark, that wall actually lit entire caves, meaning I could glitch the game into giving me enough light to see.
Right now, the view distance is remarkably shorter in VR
Inside the prepared environment, it seemed as if I could see farther up and down than I could see out into the distance.
Despite these technical issues with view distance, the locomotion system was particularly well-refined. Jumps had been smoothed out, and felt more like mantling obstacles in a third-person shooter than leaping into the air.
That freedom of movement was a recurring theme in Carmack’s short speech.
"Knowing that you don’t simply control your character to turn 90 degrees this way, to move over here and turn around, but instead to actually turn your body all the way around ," Carmack said. "You know that you’re 200 meters away this way down the hill and around the bend from where you started, and that sense of being in a big world is wonderful."
Carmack closed by reaffirming his belief that Minecraft would be available in VR for consumers very soon.
"I said this was my grail for VR, that this was the most important gaming application that I could do, or that I could be involved with, and so I’m very proud for the part that I’ve had and I’m happy to have worked with Microsoft and Mojang to get this at the point that it’s at. I’m excited to be supporting it in the coming years as things continue to improve."

Another VR game based on a childhood activity In 2008, Dylan Fitterer released the music game Audiosurf, notable both for its reflex-based racing gameplay and its ability to create courses based on the music you already own. Fitterer developed the game mostly by himself, and it became a cult success, leading to a sequel that exited Steam Early Access last year.
Now he’s back with a virtual reality music game called Audioshield, which he says builds on a lot of the technology from Audiosurf. Fitterer showed the game running on the HTC Vive at the 2016 Game Developers Conference this week.
“It came from a desire to do VR, because I first started doing Audiosurf VR, which is the roller coaster ride that you kind of expect," he says. "And I am going to release that also, by the way. But that wasn’t hitting VR in exactly the way I wanted to."
Fitterer went on to experiment with a game featuring an exercise bike, which he says "was going to be terrible, obviously."
"But then I thought, ‘OK, well, I need to change this up where the music is coming to you.’ And once I did that, it all kind of fell into place."

Audioshield is a simple game where you stand in place, holding a controller in each hand, and in your headset you see each controller represented as a shield — blue on the left, orange on the right. Then as the music starts playing, blue and orange balls come toward you, and it’s your job to pop them with the corresponding colored shield.
The game mixes things up a bit with purple balls, which require you to hold both shields together. And everything comes with a minimalist look similar to the Japanese Dreamcast game Cosmic Smash, with a plain grid background to keep the focus on the balls.
You also earn bonus points based on the way you move when you’re playing. The majority of your score — the "technical score" — comes from the number of balls you pop and the number you miss. That’s the difference that will determine your place on the leaderboards, for the most part. Then the game gives you an additional score for how well you perform and show off. It doesn’t register Dance Central-style moves or anything overly complex, but it tries to sense whether you flail randomly or intentionally.
"As a tiebreaker basically, you get an artistic score, which is calculated different ways," Fitterer says. " kind of based on how much movement you had when the game thinks you should have moved."
At the moment, Audioshield is only confirmed for HTC’s Vive, but Fitterer says he plans to make the game for other platforms later on. The Vive version will go on sale along with the hardware next month.

“Hey everyone” There was a bit of internet bellyaching when the recent trailer for Captain America: Civil War showed a little too much of the film for some fans’ tastes (specifically a certain wall-crawling web head who may or may not be in the film, but definitely is). Modder and YouTube user UpIsNotJump may have found the perfect middle ground with his painstaking recreation of the contentious trailer in Fallout 4, with the help of copious mods.
It’s perfect for those want to avoid movie-ruining spoilers like "What does the fifth version of Spider-Man movie costume look like?" but who still want to get a basic idea of the story and set pieces. UpIsNotJump has previously provided this exciting spoiler-filtering service for the Daredevil season 2 trailer. Here’s hoping he can keep pace with all the TV shows and films the internet simultaneously wants to know everything and nothing about (which is to say all media that is, ever has been or ever will be).

In a couple of weeks, two of the DC’s biggest superheroes, Supergirl and The Flash, will team up together for a special episode of CBS’ hit series.
The episode, called “Worlds Finest," follows Grant Gustin’s Flash as he lands in an alternate universe and winds up fighting alongside Supergirl.
Although it’s not the first time the Flash is teaming up with another superhero — he recently paired up with Green Arrow for a couple of CW specials — it does mark the first time he’ll be crossing over into another network.
The special Supergirl episode airs on on March 28 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS. Check out some photos from the episode below.

GDC’s annual awards show streams live tonight GDC’s dual annual awards shows — the Independent Game Festival Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards — will be held tonight, March 16, starting at 6:30 p.m. PT. The two ceremonies will recognize the best in independent games and the digital games industry during back-to-back presentations.
The IGF Awards kick off first, and will be hosted by Capy Games president Nathan Vella. For a full list of IGF Award nominees, check out this post.
The Game Developers Choice Awards, “the premier accolades for peer recognition in the digital games industry," will follow the IGF Awards, and will be hosted by Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke. This year’s list of GDC Award nominees is lead by Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Why Rez is more than a game about purifying cyberspace Game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi talked about the “creative serendipities" that opened his senses and led to the pathway to creating Rez, the 2001 musical shooter that experimented with the concept of synesthesia — or, as Mizuguchi described it, "the expression or impression of cross-sensational feelings."
At his GDC 2016 postmortem, Mizuguchi, who sometimes spoke through a translator, also revealed the underlying concept of Rez. While the game appears on its surface to be about a hacker traveling through and purifying cyberspace, it’s also a metaphor for conception and birth. The player avatar, Mizuguchi said, is like a sperm cell traveling and trying to connect with an egg, a metaphor the developer tried to communicate through the abstract player forms and Rez’s ending movie.
Rez’s origins date back to Mizuguchi’s high school years. He said that two games — both vertical scrolling shooters — were early influences on his idea to combine music, color, sound and shooting action. The first was Namco’s 1982 arcade game Xevious.
"I was a high school student when I discovered it," Mizuguchi said. "The more I played, the more I was sinking into the illusion that as I played it was creating music back at me. That opened up my imagination about what this all means, and how do I create something off what I’m experiencing right now."
The other early influence was The Bitmap Brothers’ Amiga game Xenon 2: Megablast.

"When I was in university, my friend turned me on to Xenon 2," Mizuguchi recalled. He said the game’s music would repeat in his mind, over and over. "It really almost shocked me … this game gave me a sense of ‘This is a new media, a new media perspective’ — meaning games as an art form can exist. The marriage of sound and music was something undiscovered at the time, until I met this game."
Xenon 2 featured music from electronic dance musician Bomb the Bass, and Mizuguchi remembered that hearing dance music and seeing game mechanics "being intertwined in a real balanced way was something I didn’t know existed."
"Back then I think it was still pretty unusual," he said, "but it gave me a sense of hope that this could be a new space to express new entertainment experiences."
After university, Mizuguchi went to work at Sega, where he worked on arcade titles like Sega Rally. The job, he said, opened his eyes to new "multi-sensory" experiences and exposed him to an international audience. His work at Sega’s arcade division also brought him to Europe. During one trip, he attended Street Parade, a massive music festival, in Zurich, Switzerland.
"It was my first techno experience," he said. "The beats, synchronized to the color of the lights and the movement of the people … I was just blown away.
"The word synesthesia popped into my head."
Mizuguchi, also inspired by the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, began to think about how to express what he was seeing and hearing, but in computer form. He described his inspiration for what would become Rez in the following words:

a marriage of game and music
create music as you shoot down enemies
the best sensation in a game
keep you coming back for more
puts you in a trance
bodily sensation — vibration matched with music
synesthetic effect — sounds affecting visuals

Mizuguchi and the team at Sega’s United Game Artists started "experimenting with shapes, sounds and colors, and how it makes you feel when it’s fed to the screen." Their research include watching and repeatedly rewatching a video of Kenyan street musicians and dancers, as they tried to get to the root of the "groove" inherent in the video. The Rez team tried to find an answer to the question, "What is it that makes us feel good to watch this?"
They attended taiko drum festivals and went clubbing in Japan in the name of research and discovery. Mizuguchi said the team studied DJs, and the interaction of sight and sound, in their attempts to recreate certain sensations in a video game.

"The DJ makes us all feel good," Mizuguchi explained. "He’s the mood maker, the mood designer — atmosphere, tone, all of that. With every new track, or beat, he’s trying to elevate our feelings. He’s feeding us a feel-good quality with level changes.
"How can we design that in the game? If I could figure out how to make that happen … that’s what I want players to experience."
Mizuguchi showed work-in-progress versions of Rez, when it was little more than just a cursor on a screen, hitting targets and firing off musical sounds. At one point, the player character ran through Rez’s cyberspace world. At another, the avatar was more mechanical instead of humanoid. Mizuguchi said the team found Rez’s "magic" with quantization, syncing the various, sometimes random, sounds to a beat.
As for the player character, which ranges from spheroid to human-shaped to its highest form — that of a baby — Mizuguchi said the human forms are part of Rez’s larger metaphor.
"We all know the story of Rez … you’re hacking the system, purifying, cleansing, rebooting the network back to normal," he said. "We had another story. This is really hard to explain. Everybody had the same experience: You were sperm. This long but short journey we all took before our birth, the lone surviving sperm is traveling, trying to find and meet the egg. The story ends here with Rez … it’s right before the actual birth."

Rez was first released 15 years ago on Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. A high-definition remake was released for Xbox 360 in 2008, and Rez will return later this year with Rez Infinite. That version of the game is bound for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, and will go beyond a the scope of a remake. Mizuguchi and his new company, Enhance Games, will add a new level called Area X, which he said was "an experiment."
"We’re using the current technology," he said of Rez Infinite’s new area. " what is a VR-oriented Rez. The concept is particles moving with the music."
Mizuguchi said he hopes to release Rez Infinite alongside the launch of PlayStation VR, which is scheduled to hit this October.

“What sets us apart is we recognize when something is wrong, and we change it." After an initial reveal last August, followed by a notable period of silence, LawBreakers — the first-person shooter formerly known as Project Bluestreak in development at former Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski’s new studio, Boss Key Productions — has re-emerged with some changes.
Bleszinski and team announced those changes — most notably a move away from Boss Key’s plans for a free-to-play model, and a new art style meant to help it stand out from a busy crowd — during a GDC presentation today titled "Surrounded by 800lb Gorillas! Standing Up to the Competition."
"Is there a grey area between free-to-play and 60 dollars?" Bleszinski asked the crowd.
"We did a lot of discussions and even more research. There are some core free-to-play games that do well, but for us, we didn’t want to go down the well of players buying ‘energy’ or other sleazy things," Bleszinski said. "A lot of core gamers have a negative reaction when they hear free-to-play because they think they’ll get ripped off."
"We are more in the line of Team Fortress with less classes that are deeper, and we didn’t want to throw 20 classes in and limit that depth," COO Arjan Brussee said. Boss Key feels like the limited number of characters doesn’t lend itself to the character-for-pay business model of the biggest free-to-play titles. The studio also observed the "rampant" negativity around free-to-play among the core gaming audience.
That’s not the only thing LawBreakers has in common with Valve’s Team Fortress. The game will be exclusive to Valve’s Steam platform. "
The team debated on using a launcher like other free-to-play titles. "I don’t want to make new friends," said Brussee. "We don’t want people to have to jump through hoops and sign up with their emails to play our game," Bleszinksi added. "We want to go where our players are," said Rohan Rivas, the studio’s communications manager. But the game’s business model wasn’t the only thing to change. The art style has also undergone alterations.

"We didn’t go from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Gears," Boss Key art director Trammel Isaac said before revealing the game’s new look and logo, quoting boss Cliff Bleszinski. He later added, "What sets us apart is we recognize when something is wrong, and we change it."
"We knew we weren’t going to reinvent the wheel," Bleszinki said in response to a question from the audience. "Randy Pitchford played our game at PAX and said ‘be the M-rated game’," Bleszinki said, noting that games like Overwatch and Battleborn are very T-rated games in their character design and aesthetic.
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