Category: Game

“I know we disappointed many people" A Microsoft Xbox-hosted party during the 2016 Game Developers Conference last night featured women dancing on platforms, rightfully angering many attendees — both men and women — and reminding many in the industry that even an often progressive company like Microsoft can contribute to the video game industry’s long history of sexual objectification of women at professional events.
What makes this situation all the more jarring is that it took place the very same day as Microsoft’s well-received 16th annual (!) Women in Gaming Luncheon. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, sent an email to the entire Xbox team, and published it on the Xbox Wire blog, taking responsibility for the event and calling it "unequivocally wrong." Here’s Spencer’s letter in full:

How we show up as an organization is incredibly important to me. We want to build and reflect the culture of team Xbox – internally and externally – a culture that each one of us can represent with pride. An inclusive culture has a direct impact on the products and services we deliver and the perception consumers have of the Xbox brand and our company, as a whole.
It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values. That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. This matter is being handled internally, but let me be very clear – how we represent ourselves as individuals, who we hire and partner with and how we engage with others is a direct reflection of our brand and what we stand for. When we do the opposite, and create an environment that alienates or offends any group, we justly deserve the criticism.
It’s unfortunate that such events could take place in a week where we worked so hard to engage the many different gaming communities in the exact opposite way. I am personally committed to ensuring that diversity and inclusion is central to our everyday business and our core values as a team – inside and outside the company. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards and we will do better in the future.

In a separate comment emailed to Polygon, Spencer repeated some of this message, and acknowledged, "I know we disappointed many people."

At Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was not consistent or aligned to our values. It was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. I know we disappointed many people and I’m personally committed to holding ourselves to higher standards. We must ensure that diversity and inclusion are central to our everyday business and core values. We will do better in the future.

Aaron Greenberg, head of games marketing for Xbox, said on Twitter that he was "very disappointed" to see images of the dancers.

@ZenMobius @XboxP3 @Xbox @Microsoft @Spacekatgal @GDC Very disappointed to see this, going to follow up with team.
— Aaron Greenberg (@aarongreenberg) March 18, 2016

The event — clearly branded as a Microsoft-hosted party in the invitation obtained by Polygon below — took place at 1015 Folsom, a nightclub located about a half mile from GDC, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. PT. Attendees picked up their passes from Microsoft’s Business Suite in the Moscone Center complex where GDC takes place, leaving little question as to the official sanction of the software and gaming giant in the proceedings.

The image below from an attendee offers a glimpse of the party’s atmosphere, and of the scantily clad dancers performing there.

Great fun at the Microsoft Xbox party with a million geeks! #gamedev #gdc #gdcplay #sanfrancisco
A photo posted by Henning Ludvigsen (@henningludvigsen) on Mar 17, 2016 at 11:29pm PDT

Three years ago, the International Game Developers Association found itself in a similar situation in which scantily clad female dancers were hired to perform at a GDC party. The event prompted members, including designer Brenda Romero — then co-chair of the IGDA Women in Games special interest group — to resign from the organization.

It’s fighting time Legendary Pictures reportedly hosted a surprise screening of Duncan Jones’ Warcraft film this past week in Los Angeles, but for those that couldn’t attend, the studio has also released a new teaser.
The teaser features Travis Fimmel’s Sir Anduin Lothar, a knight for the Kingdom of Azeroth better known as the Lion of Azeroth, taking on a giant orc. They’re in the middle of what appears to be a desert, with skulls and other various bones scattered among them.
The video focuses pretty heavily on the various characters — both in Lothar’s army of human soldiers and a gang of orcs — as they prepare for war. There are some shots of the different lands World of Warcraft fans will be familiar with, too.
Jones’ movie will follow the orc and human races, once bitter enemies, as they come together to take on a new and bigger threat. Although there are issues within both armies over the newfound comradeship, it’s evident this is the only option the orcs have after being forced to move away from the land they called home.
Warcraft, which stars Fimmel alongside Toby Kebbell, Paula Patton, Ben Foster and Dominic Cooper, hits theaters June 10.

Time to upgrade to an Xbox One ESPN and Microsoft are retiring the Xbox 360’s ESPN app on March 23, according to a notice posted in the app.
Microsoft confirmed the ESPN app’s shutdown to Polygon in a statement that is essentially identical to the message in the app, which was first reported by Deadspin. The app debuted in November 2010, offering content such as live sporting events and personalized scores and highlights. Two years later, Microsoft and ESPN added live programming from all ESPN networks, including shows such as SportsCenter.
The shutdown applies only to the Xbox 360; the Xbox One’s ESPN app will continue to operate, and Microsoft noted as much in its statement, directing users to “check out ESPN on Xbox One for everything you love about ESPN on Xbox 360."

Asked for additional details on the closure of the Xbox 360 app, an ESPN spokesperson declined further comment. But an ESPN source indicated to Polygon that usage of the ESPN app on Xbox 360 has been dropping since the launch of the Xbox One in November 2013. The Xbox 360 itself is well over 11 years old, having debuted in November 2005.
ESPN remains accessible on external devices including computers, tablets and streaming set-top boxes through the WatchESPN app. However, the Xbox One is now the only video game console that offers an ESPN app.

Guns don’t kill people. The Punisher kills people A few episodes into the second season of Daredevil, the eponymous hero and his opponent — Frank Castle, the Punisher — finally talk out their differences. Well, it’s more like they yell their differences at each other in gravelly voices. One of them is a man who takes the law into his own hands to make sure criminals face the legal repercussions of their actions. The other is a man who takes the law into his own hands to viciously murder criminals with large guns.
“You’re both wrong!" I yelled at the screen. "I mean — Daredevil’s right! But his argument SUCKS!"
I credit superheroes with my opposition to the death penalty; it could be a side-effect of 20 years of Batman fandom. But that also creates a high rhetorical bar: It’s one thing when you have to defend a character refusing to kill the Kingpin, Green Goblin, General Zod or whatever.
Come back to me when you have to defend not killing the Joker.
Meta-textually, there are two simple reasons why superheroes don’t kill:

At his inception, Batman used guns and spouted one-liners like "Death to Doctor Death!" He and Superman were editorially mandated into non-lethal heroes a year or two into their existence, once it became clear that the nascent superhero genre was so popular with children that parents were starting to take notice. Historically, American comics have needed a fig leaf to show that publishers weren’t feeding reprehensible garbage to children. There were congressional hearings at the height of the McCarthy Era that examined a proposed link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. There were literal book burnings.
Editorially, publishers of indefinitely long serial stories need characters to stay around so that they can be used again. Readers like the familiarity, marketing likes the brand stability and writers and artists on a grueling monthly schedule like that they have a well of established characters and character designs to pull from. The "never kill" mandate lowers stakes, but it makes sense. Comics exist in the same sort of continuum as sitcoms (and Greek and Shakespearean comedies): Regardless of the crazy events of the story, ultimately the status quo must be maintained.

But if you’re asking "why don’t superheroes kill," those aren’t the answers you want. You want the in-universe reason, even if the external realities of the comics industry created the question in the first place. You’re not wrong. The best stories have understandable internal logic for the facts of their setting, whether or not those facts were mandated upon creators by whatever sort of outside constraints.
Unfortunately there are still a lot of half-assed attempts to write a superhero who explains why they don’t kill. I’m a Batman fan, and "Because we can’t cross that line," from a character who is routinely depicted as maiming criminals or torturing them for information becomes ludicrous. "Because it makes us like them," from a guy who repeatedly puts mass-murderers into a system that cannot hold them is dumb. "Because all people deserve a second chance." Seriously, dude, the Joker is on his, like, 400th chance.
"Because we don’t." Holy tautology, Batman! It’s not that I think Batman should kill the Joker. I don’t think he should kill anybody, ever. I just wish writers were better at articulating why.
Here’s the good reason why superheroes don’t kill
Whether or not they know how to say it, superheroes don’t kill because they believe the system needs help, but isn’t irreparably broken.
We know this for two reasons: one, they talk about it so dang much. Fixing Gotham. Saving Hell’s Kitchen.
And two: If they didn’t believe the system was ultimately fixable and desirable, they wouldn’t be punching criminals and corrupt officials while befriending the good cops and lawyers.

They’d be tearing that system down. They’d be Nolan’s Two-Face, Moore’s V, they’d be Ra’s al Ghul or Magneto. They’d be the Punisher.
Editorially, Batman is never going to fix Gotham, he’s never going to retire (except in stories where he lives long enough to become physically incapable of being Batman) and he’s never going to stop being needed. But textually, the vast majority of superheroes are trying to create a world in which they are not needed.
The characters who have formed our most standard superhero tropes are characters who ultimately believe in the system while acknowledging that it’s broken. By definition, a vigilante works outside the law — but at the end of the day (or, maybe, at the beginning of business hours), Matt Murdock is still a defense attorney. Bruce Wayne still uses the power of his wealth and influence to support political candidates and outreach programs. Clark Kent and Peter Parker still spend their days working in investigative journalism.
Which brings us to the Punisher. Like Batman, he’s motivated by direct personal tragedy, but unlike Batman (most of the time), the men that destroyed his family are alive, known and active criminals. Like Daredevil, Frank Castle looking to clean up the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. But unlike Matt Murdock, Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent, Frank doesn’t have the skills, influence or education needed to interact with the legal system in any substantive way. Instead, he’s just very, very good at killing people, and very, very motivated to do so. That doesn’t make him right. It just gives him the internally consistent motivation of being a lot less likely to feel like the criminal justice system is worth a damn.
If you kill criminals instead of assisting the proper authorities in apprehending them, you are replacing the criminal justice system. If nothing else, it’s clear that defense attorney Matt Murdock believes that due process should be respected. You’d think a lawyer would be able to present a more eloquent argument for that than a screaming match with the Punisher.

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.