Category: Game

Open source software can save games, whether Nintendo likes it or not Frank Cifaldi, head of restoration at developer Digital Eclipse, took to the stage at this week’s Game Developers Conference for an hour-long talk about game preservation. Emulation — a software process by which programmers are able to make one computer pretend to be an entirely different kind of computer — is the best solution for keeping games in print, Cifaldi said.
But the clock is ticking. Games are being lost right now, and something needs to be done about it if the video game industry is to avoid the same fate as the film industry.
“According to the Film Foundation, over half the films made before 1950 are gone," Cifaldi said. "I don’t mean that you can’t buy these on DVD. I mean they’re gone. They don’t exist anymore." For films produced before 1920, Cifaldi said, that number jumps to 80 percent.

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"That terrified me. I wasn’t particularly a film buff, but the idea of these works just disappearing forever and never being recoverable scared the crap out of me. So I started wondering is anyone doing this for games. Is anyone making sure that video games aren’t doing the same stupid shit that film did to make their heritage disappear?
"And yeah, there were people doing this. We didn’t call them archivists. We didn’t call them digital archeologists or anything. We called them software pirates."
It’s emulation’s long association with piracy, Cifaldi said, that has given it a bad name. Nintendo in particular seems to have a particular aversion towards it, he noted, pointing to their official statement on the issue which has been available at their corporate website for the last 16 years.

How Come Nintendo Does Not Take Steps Towards Legitimizing Nintendo Emulators?
Emulators developed to play illegally copied Nintendo software promote piracy. That’s like asking why doesn’t Nintendo legitimize piracy. It doesn’t make any business sense. It’s that simple and not open to debate.

But this language, Cifaldi claims, is disingenuous because the Wii U’s Virtual Console is nothing more than an emulator.
More damning, Cifaldi claims to have found a piece of hexadecimal code from a freely available Nintendo Entertainment System emulator — a kind of watermark from a Nintendo emulator known as iNES — embedded within the code of the version of Super Mario Bros. for sale on the Virtual Console right now.
"I would posit," Cifaldi said, "that Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Bros. from the internet and sold it to you."

Polygon reached out to Nintendo for comment on that accusation, to which they responded emphatically; "Nintendo is not using ROMs downloaded from the internet."
Regardless of Nintendo’s stance on emulation, Cifaldi said that the easiest, the most accurate and the most non-destructive way forward for digital games preservation was to use emulators such as Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and Multi Emulator Super System, colloquially known as MAME and MESS respectively.
Cifaldi argued that if GOG.com can use a modified version of DOSBox to sell classic PC games, why can’t some company use MAME and MESS to package and sell classic arcade and console games? It’s easier now than ever since, on March 4 of this year, MAME and MESS went open source under the same license as DOXBox, meaning that for the first time those emulators can be used commercially for free.
"I’m not saying MAME and MESS are perfect," Cifaldi said, but since the code is open source volunteers can easily contribute to making it better. His own company, which recently ported Mega Man to modern platforms, is playing with the technology, and may use it in a commercial release before long, but the code is out there for anyone.
"We’re just a single studio," Cifaldi said. "I can imagine someone like an Amazon forking MAME, bringing it in house, bringing it up to snuff and bringing games back."

Yes, even the upcoming Quantum Break bundle Microsoft is bringing back its annual Spring Sale with deals on Xbox One consoles and games, headlined by a $50 discount on all Xbox One bundles, Xbox director of programming Larry Hryb announced today.
The console discount drops the price of the Tom Clancy’s The Division 1 TB bundle from $399 to $349 and the 500 GB Name Your Game bundle from $349 to $299. It also applies to the upcoming Special Edition Quantum Break bundle, which regularly costs $349 and includes a 500 GB console and controller in “cirrus white," even though the package won’t be released until the week after the Spring Sale ends.
All pre-orders of Quantum Break come with Alan Wake, and the bundle is one of the purchases that will also net buyers a free Windows 10 copy of Quantum Break.

The bundle discounts will go live when the Spring Sale begins Sunday, March 20. Then, on Tuesday, March 22, the Xbox Store will offer more than 150 deals on digital games, PC games, movies and TV shows. The discounts will cut prices by 40-60 percent, and will be available on titles such as Fallout 4, Halo 5: Guardians, Far Cry Primal and Rainbow 6 Siege. The Xbox Store will also have deals on backward-compatible Xbox 360 games like Fallout 3 and Just Cause 2.
This isn’t just an Xbox sale — it’s a Microsoft sale. The company is offering discounts on all kinds of products, including Surface devices and computer accessories, at the Microsoft Store. The Spring Sale ends March 28.

Dungeons and Dragons and … jump scares? I didn’t expect fantasy adventure Vanishing Realms, in development for the HTC Vive, to send me jumping half a foot into the air —€” but that’s exactly what happened during my demo of the game at the 2016 Game Developers Conference.
The jump scare happened toward the end of my time with the VR title, which is otherwise familiar and a bit unspectacular. In fact, that I had this visceral reaction at all might stand out as the one true highlight of the Vive fantasy game.
Despite Vanishing Realms being made specifically for HTC’s hardware, which affords players both head and positional tracking so that they can stumble around their living rooms for greater immersion within games, it doesn’t feel especially different from a standard, non-virtual reality video game. Drawing inspiration from the fantastical world of Dungeons and Dragons, players assume the role of a knight as they unlock doors and discover items in a nondescript magical world.
As is common with Vive games, each of the controllers is used as a hand; players can wield a sword in their right while grabbing items with their left, or vice versa. The various buttons on the controllers are used for performing actions, which doesn’t quite feel intuitive. I repeatedly struggled to grab certain items properly or place them into assigned areas using the awkward buttons on the Vive’s peripherals.

Worse was using the D-pad to move around the castle that I explored in the demo. Vanishing Realms might be a Vive game, but it’s far easier —€” even recommended —€” for players to stand completely still; they can instead choose a spot in the environment to teleport toward, in lieu of actually moving their bodies around the room.
This helps Vanishing Realms feel more like a traditional game than the “experiences" common on VR hardware at this stage. But that raises the question:€” If Vanishing Realms is comfortable being a "traditional game," why use the Vive hardware at all?
I didn’t have an answer for this until I was nearly finished with our demo. After opening a door by clumsily inserting a key I’d scoured the castle to find, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a gigantic, sword-wielding skeleton monster. With the headset on, this skeleton appeared to be nearly 6 feet tall —€” and its weapon was swinging mere inches from my face.
With a yelp, I jumped up and backed away from the monster. Vanishing Realms’ developer, Kelly Bailey, a former Valve employee who worked on the Half-Life games, laughed at me through the headphones we could hear him with; he sat in the room with me, watching my playthrough.
when I won, I felt like an actual hero
"Time to go buy a sword!" he said. I didn’t have a sword yet; the game thus far had solely been about collecting items and solving simple puzzles in order to progress. Turning around — not just in the game, but within the room too —€” I found a selection of swords in another room. After buying and grabbing the cheapest one, I trudged back toward the skeleton monster with trepidation.
Unlike the rest of the demo, where it was possible to statically press buttons to pick up objects, I had to swing my arms to attack with my sword and protect myself from the skeleton’s counterattacks. It was exhilarating and scary and, when I won, it made me feel like an actual hero.
That short boss battle illustrated what the Vive does best. I felt like I’d physically accomplished something by warding off a monster that appeared taller than me. In finding the balance between conventional game and unconventional experience, I hope that when Vanishing Realms launches April 5, it offers more unique moments that fall closer to the latter.

This is pure magic Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
Tilt Brush is amazing. It’s magical. It’s a bunch of stuff that sounds like hyperbole when you write about it.
We created the above video to describe why it’s so special before more people are able to try it when the HTC Vive launches in April of this year.
For the video we used a combination of my own doodling, the built-in work from the showcase in the application and drawings from artists like Tipatat Chennavasin and the YouTube account of Emerald Activities to show off what’s possible in the program.
I hope this video helps explain why Tilt Brush is so special, but nothing prepares you for actually putting on the headset, picking up the controllers and walking around the creations of others or creating your own masterpieces in full 3D. It’s also easy to use; anyone can have fun making silly drawings while you can also learn how to create something as good as what we’ve shown above.
Tilt Brush is a free pack-in with pre-orders of the HTC Vive.

Nick Carter, Joey Fatone and a few other boy band members from the 1990s have found a new job: killing zombies.
Various members from the Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, 98 Degrees and O-Town have teamed up for SyFy’s made-for-TV movie, Dead 7. In the film, the guys play a “ragtag team of gunslingers," according to the press release, who must defend a small town in the Wild West from a zombie invasion in a post-apocalyptic world. Carter will star in the movie as Jack, a reluctant hero who gets the band of outlaws together to fight the horde of undead in the first place.
The film will also star the aforementioned mentioned Fatone alongside Backstreet Boys A.J. McLean and Howie Dorough. ‘N Sync’s Chris Kirkpatrick, 98 Degrees’ Jeff Timmons and O-Town’s Erik-Michael Estrada have also signed on to the project.
Created in partnership with SyFy and the team that worked on the Sharknado series, Dead 7 will premiere on April 1 at 8 p.m. ET. Unfortunately, there’s no word on whether the boys will sing.

The first half of Daredevil’s second season is underwhelming.
When season one launched a year ago, it did so in a significantly different environment in superhero film adaptations. Marvel’s only other television projects were Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter, an ensemble spy show and a period action drama respectively. Daredevil burst onto the scene as Marvel’s first television show about a superhero — the first addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe where the hero actually fights crime, not supervillains, conspiracies, magic or their own super-science messes — and one that was bleak, suspenseful and violent in a way that the company could never get away with on primetime ABC.
Daredevil season two isn’t bad, it’s just alright
But then, this past fall, Jessica Jones took the television scene by storm, proving that a superhero show could be a faithful adaptation full of sci-fi action, intrigue and derring do — and also one of the most candid and affecting examinations of rape, domestic abuse and trauma survival in modern television history. Even more recently, Deadpool’s weird mix of humor, violence, sex and (yes) emotional heart somehow seems to have only taught Hollywood that audiences want more sex and violence in their superhero stories, despite nobody actually asking for that.
This is the environment in which Daredevil’s second season has arrived, and it just feels like more of the same.

The most fitting criticism of the first season of Daredevil was that it was a bit familiar, a bit comic book-y: If you wanted to watch a slightly updated take on street-level comic book superheroes of the late ’80s, it was for you (and I include myself in that). That’s fine and good! A first season — especially one with an origin story — can be forgiven for laying out a platform of expectations from which to spring and subvert. But season two’s first half does precious little that’s new with those ideas.
And while I’m interested to see where things go in the second half, to get to that point the audience will have to sit through a lot of the sort of writing that the word “cliche" was invented for.

"In all my years as a cop I’ve never seen anything like this," and "We need to find Matt before this goes wide; tell him everything’s about to change," are lines delivered without a trace of irony.
The show’s fight scenes are still well crafted, surprising and brutal. They’re also significantly more violent in a way that feels like an attempt to up the ante but just comes off as gratuitous. I was not expecting to watch a man’s face take the brunt of a shotgun blast from point blank range or a man’s foot have a power drill put through it in this season, much less both of those in a single episode.
Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and Elektra (Elodie Yung) are interesting as antagonist and unreliable ally respectively, but they feel like they’re distracting Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) from his actual goals in a way that the show is slow to acknowledge. Punisher is killing entirely reprehensible criminals, which means that both he and his victims are folks with dirty records. Elektra is only ever in danger that she deliberately courts. Without innocents hanging in the balance of their actions, the stakes don’t feel particularly high.
The season’s seventh episode was the first to end with a cut to credits that left me wanting to hit play on the next one immediately. Unfortunately, it was also the last episode that Netflix made available to press in advance. A Netflix show can’t afford to wait until its fifth or sixth episode to get to the meat of a season.

Still, it’s meat that I’m looking forward to. Nelson & Murdock are taking on another make-or-break-the-firm court case, and Daredevil has finally uncovered a truly bizarre mystery in Hell’s Kitchen (although the answer, judging by hints so far and the upcoming slate of Marvel Netflix shows, looks like it’s going to be "dated Orientalist tropes"). Both of these plot lines feel like the show is finally getting some urgency and pulling the viewer back into real drama.
Daredevil season two (what was made available to press, anyway) isn’t bad, it’s just … alright. It feels like it’s trying a little when it should be trying hard. And in an increasingly competitive and saturated market of on-screen superheroes, not trying hard is something no superhero show can afford to do.

Pied Piper just can’t catch a break The first trailer for Silicon Valley’s third season is here, and the Pied Piper folks are getting ready for the fight of their lives.
Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) wants to retain ownership of his company, but the venture capitalist firm he’s working with would rather bring in a new CEO. This causes some friction between the new head honcho, Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky), and Pied Piper’s spiritual commander, Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller).
While Richard and the crew figure out how to remain on top, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) is still devising a plan to take their company down and create a better platform at Hooli. There are also quite a few instances of Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) doing something unbelievably embarrassing, including the promotion of a new company jacket which doesn’t jell with the rest of the team.
Silicon Valley returns to HBO April 24, following the season six premiere of Game of Thrones.

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."

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.

Pee-wee’s Big Holiday doesn’t feel very big at all. Although the character’s March 18th Netflix debut — and first feature film since 1988’s Big Top Pee-wee — sends him from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, the eternal man-child’s travels feel like a string of mildly amusing diversions instead of a grand journey with ramifications.
Pee-wee’s Big Holiday begins in the West Coast town of Fairville, where Pee-wee Herman is but one of many absurd townies. In the years since we last saw him, Pee-wee (played by a frighteningly unchanged Paul Reubens) has traded his classic Playhouse for something a little more quaint. But it quickly becomes apparent that time has had only the most minor effects on Pee-wee, who maintains his penchant for silly gadgets, comically bad puns and quick-witted snark.
Big Holiday is going for quantity over quality
The seeming timelessness of the character becomes the central focus, however; Pee-wee tells his friends of his resistance to change. In the film — which seems to operate in a canon in which Pee-wee’s Playhouse and movies like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure never happened — Pee-wee counters possible life developments by proudly claiming to have never left Fairville — and he never wants to.
That conviction makes sense for a character whose primary trait is his childlike demeanor. But it’s one that Pee-wee quickly abandons in a move that undercuts what could have been the film’s emotional core. After he meets and befriends a cool guy from the city, portrayed by a game Joe Manganiello, Pee-wee is offered the chance to give up his small town digs for a New York City vacation — an invitation he takes up quickly.

And so Pee-wee heads off by car to the Big Apple to be a featured guest at his new friend’s birthday party. In doing so, the film abandons the semblance of plot it had been building up in Fairville; the viewer is now subject to a series of cross-country hijinks with varying returns.
Unlike his very first outing in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which remains the high-water mark for the character, Big Holiday is going for quantity over quality. There’s no memorable gag here that stands out above the others, nor do most of the characters leave an impression. Manganiello’s character works, thanks to the comic dissonance of the actor playing it straight in this ridiculous world, but the recurring girl gang is rarely funny in their myriad appearances. (And the relationship that builds between the babyfaced outlaw played by Alia Shawkat and the 60-plus-year-old Pee-wee is uncomfortable at best.)

What’s worse is that, despite the fact that each of these scenes unfolds quickly, the movie feels long. Really, really long. Pee-wee’s road trip feels like far more of a slog for the viewer than the traveler himself.
Even a Pee-wee fan who loved Big Adventure and grew up with Playhouse will likely concede that the character can get taxing quickly. In Big Holiday, his less endearing quirks are exacerbated by the film’s noncommittal storytelling, in which characters are dropped minutes after they’re introduced. It’s tiring to watch Pee-wee have the same drawn-out conversations and miscommunications with other oddballs over and over and over and over again.

The TV series worked far better than Big Holiday does thanks to its variety: There was a whole cast of characters at play, along with different skits and sketches that sidelined Pee-wee. But the Netflix film has its hero front-and-center for almost its entire duration. Scenes that cut back to Manganiello in New York as he awaits Pee-wee’s arrival are when the film is at its best, primarily because they feel like a reprieve. Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is anything but for the viewer who must try — and likely fail — to keep up with the spry and always-on Herman.
Sometimes seeing that something or someone you loved as a kid has stayed the same after all these years is comforting. But this film wears out its welcome fast, and those looking to relive their childhood Pee-wee Herman fanaticism are probably better off just rewatching Big Adventure on Netflix for the umpteenth time than dipping into this forgettable revival.