Category: Game

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.

There’s something intriguing and unsettling about this Vive game Some years ago, I took a hot air balloon flight over the pretty English city of Bath. There were seven other people in the basket, as well as the pilot.
A woman I didn’t know —€” let’s call her Audrey — stood next to me. The moment the balloon took flight, she shrieked and curled up in a corner of the basket. Clearly frightened by the movement of the balloon, she did not move until the flight was over. No amount of coaxing could persuade her to rise and look out at the marvels below.
I thought of Audrey during a particularly nerve-wracking moment, while playing The Gallery, a forthcoming episodic story-game for Vive.
“I thought to myself, I might actually fall over here."
I was plunging down a rocky shaft in an open-faced, glass-bottomed elevator. At that moment, I felt the same urge as Audrey, to drop down into a fetal position and somehow diminish the fear I was experiencing. This would have been extremely embarrassing. I was standing in a very public convention meeting room and people were watching me and they were watching the game on a separate screen.
I wonder if Audrey suffered from a fear of heights before she got into that balloon, but assumed that this fear would be irrelevant to the experience. Or perhaps she had a fear of riding in hot air balloons, which only manifested itself the first time she actually got into one.
I have a terrible fear of heights, but it’s not the sort of fear that bothers me in situations like riding in hot air balloons, or looking out of the window of a jet airliner. Usually, it bothers me when I travel four or more steps up a ladder. Sometimes, when visiting castles or very old buildings, I’ll become frigid with terror while walking down steep, stone steps.

I cannot walk on reinforced glass observation points in skyscrapers. Sometimes, in fast-moving elevators, I’ll find myself touching the walls for reassurance. I will never, under any circumstance, voluntarily take a rollercoaster ride. (I once got into a line for an indoor Scooby Doo ride which, disastrously, I had misidentified as an amusing ghost train.)
In the The Gallery’s VR elevator shaft, I looked up to see a smear of star-lit sky framed by walls whizzing away. I felt dizzy. I looked down to see a lava-like floor rushing toward me. This was much, much worse.
I thought, I am standing still in the Moscone Center, at an elevation of zero feet. I am not actually moving. And yet, I badly wanted to rip the Vive headset from my face and plead phony VR-related nausea to attending developers, standing around watching me play their game.
"I was scared, physically, palpably frightened."
As the elevator increased the speed of its descent I reached out to hold onto some non-existent upright. I was starting to sway. I thought to myself, fucking hell, I might actually fall over here.
I was dizzy with anxiety. I knew, just knew, that the developers were watching me carefully, that this was a part of the game they had discussed with one another at length.
I told myself, slowly, that I was experiencing a piece of fiction, that my person was in absolutely no peril. And yet I was scared, physically, palpably frightened. I was struggling to conceal my fear, but it was winning against both my faculty for understanding the actual reality of the situation, and my considerably honed powers of hiding mortifying emotional responses, most especially fear.
The Gallery is a Myst-like adventure in which the player moves through an underground world, interacting with objects, solving puzzles and watching the narrative unfold. This elevator ride was just part of a non-interactive section of the story. I couldn’t actually do anything except for experience the thing that was happening to me.

The elevator crunched to a stop. With my legs shaking slightly, I continued the demo, enjoying some of the grand spectacles laid on by development studio Cloudhead Games. This game makes smart use of space, allowing players to "jump" from one space to another using the Vive’s touch pad. I like this game a lot, and I believe a lot of other people will like it too. It’s clever and colorful. It’s playful and funny. It’s a world that’s worth exploring.
When the demo was over, the developers explained that rapid elevator rides are served up at various points in the game, but that the intensity of them starts off at a mild level, increasing as the player becomes accustomed to the sensation.
But even though I was shaken by this late game ride, I was glad to have been a part of it. I felt that I had survived an experience that was designed to intimidate me. I felt that if I were to do it again, I would not be so scared.
Somehow, my fear of heights might be diminished or controlled by VR experiences and by VR games. And if that was true, what other phobias could be mitigated in the safety and privacy of one’s own home?
There will be a lot of VR games that are designed to frighten people, and they will be greatly enjoyed by people who like to be frightened within the parameters of intense fiction. But what of games and experiences that, by design or otherwise, help us to conquer our fears? Isn’t that a neat trick?
The Gallery’s first episode is out in April on Vive with an Oculus Rift version coming later.

What’s up with the pandas, though? Just when you think you know where you are, Anamorphine flips your expectations on their head.
The game was on display at GDC, and we played it on the Xbox One. Watch as a simple scene of a woman playing the cello turns into a surreal trip into another world, turns into … well, I won’t spoil it.
You might not glean it from this short demo, but Anamorphine is about a character with post-traumatic denial, and you are traveling through their emotional landscapes. Notice how the ground in this video heaves and swells, as if you were walking on the belly of an enormous beast. It’s beautiful, but disturbing at the same time.
It’s the first game from studio Artifact 5. The team plans to release the game in summer of 2016, for PC and Xbox One, and they’ve been testing scenes from the game on the Oculus Rift.

Play around with a mini-you As I’m writing this I’m watching myself wander aimlessly inside a rather bland apartment.
I’m wearing black jeans, a black sports jacket and a white button-up shirt with the collar unbuttoned and open. I’ve got some sort of VR headset strapped to my face, and I seem concerned about something.

I can tell I’m concerned because there’s a giant orange exclamation point floating above my head in a thought bubble.
Miitomo is Nintendo’s first iOS app, and it’s not yet available outside of Japan. But if you have the time and interest, you can create a free account on the iTunes App Store for that country and download the game yourself.
It’s a surprisingly deep experience; deep but narrow. It’s essentially a place to create a Mii simulacrum, dress it up with a variety of purchasable clothing, and then fill its head with your thoughts via a constant stream of random questions you can answer. Those answers are then parroted through your creation to the friends you make, who in turn tell you their thoughts.
You can level up your character or, and this is important, separately level up your avatar’s style. (You can watch a video on how the game starts and how you create your avatar at the top of this story.) Right now, I have a level four style. I suspect it’s because of the VR headset I’m currently wearing.
As I type this I have my iPhone sitting next to me, its screen a window into that tiny apartment and that mini-me. I plod around, scratch my butt, sneeze. I never seem to stop smiling.
Seems about right.
When I finally tap on the exclamation point balloon, tiny Brian turns to me and says hello. He wants to let me know that my style rank went up while I was away; now it’s a four. Nintendo decided to send me a game ticket to congratulate me.
While the Miitomo app does have a minigame of sorts, I wouldn’t get too excited about it.

It essentially boils down to a very basic form of pachinko. You adjust and then drop an avatar onto a pachinko field and hope he or she falls onto a platform that has some clothing you want to add to your closet. If you miss everything, you inevitably get some candy.
I’m still not sure what you do with candy. But I assume it’s as trivial and cute as everything else about this game.
Outfits, it turns out, are a big part of Miitomo. If you’re not winning them (it does cost something to try the minigame, either a ticket or in-game gold), you can go to the store and just pick stuff up for the in-game gold. The clothes seem to change daily, or adjust daily. Today, I woke up in the real world, signed in, checked the store and was delighted to discover that NIntendo was selling a VR headset. Ironic. So, of course I bought it.
You can also take pictures of your little person. The setup is pretty great. You can choose from a wide selection of animations and then freeze them in mid-movement to find the pose you want. You can also grab them, make them smaller or bigger, move them around, and twist and turn them.
Better still, you can add text and stamps, and even drop them into real-world photos you take.
Miitomo has strong, very strong, social ties. Photos can be shared on a number of services (including Twitter and Facebook) from inside the game. You can also auto-search for other players among your followers, friends and such. You can stand side by side with a person in the real world to add a friend through the app as well.
When you’re not dressing up your character, you’re likely to find yourself spending a lot of time texting into the ether through your character. You know that your friends may see these questions and answers randomly, but you’re not sure.

And you can write quite a bit. For instance, when the game asked me what I was spending my time thinking about this week, I used the service to talk about how much I dislike Donald Trump. And it worked — no one filtered my thoughts.
I’m not entirely sure Miitomo is a game I will grow to love. Right now I sort of don’t like the idea, but I also find myself checking in multiple times a day.
Nintendo also seems a little up in the air on the concept. A day after I installed Miitomo, my mini-me asked me if I was enjoying the game. My answer choices were “yes" or "meh."
"Meh," for now, perfectly sums up my feelings.

It isn’t about you, and that’s OK
Cibele is a deeply personal game. The Star Maid Games-developed title tells the tale of Nina, a young woman who meets, falls in love with, and eventually sleeps with someone she meets on the internet. But while creator Nina Freeman expects players to see parts of themselves in this experience, she’s adamant about one thing: “Cibele is not about the player."
During a GDC panel called "How Game Mechanics Helped Players Embody 19-Year-Old Nina in Cibele," Freeman spoke about her goals to help players understand Nina as a character. She describes it as a theatrical experience in which players perform as Nina while they play, using her hands and eyes to exist in the game’s fictional online space.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship."
"It’s essential to Cibele that the player embody Nina, not control her," Freeman said. "The player always has a sense of self of course, but they hopefully suspend that sense of self when playing a video game as a character … The player will always project their own goals and motivations onto the character to a certain extent, but as a designer, it’s my job to remind the player of the goals and motivations of the character that they’re mean to perform as."
Cibele began as a prototype while Freeman was a student at NYU. After realizing original scope of the project was simply too large, Freeman eventually cut it down to a handful of key scenes and conversations.
"I asked myself what the player needed to know about these two characters in order to understand their relationship and why they meet up for sex," she said. "I whittled this larger relationship down to three key conversations between Nina and Ichi that illustrated why they wanted to meet up at all."
Each of these represented a different phase in the characters’ relationship.
"The first is the light flirting phase," Freeman said. "The second is whatever the conversational version of heavy petting is. And, finally, the last conversation is about their decision to meet up. I guess the second conversation is less heavy petting and more like that and also becoming emotionally close."
Although these scenes didn’t full encompass the breadth of the relationship, they did offer up an answer as to why the two would meet up at all.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship," she said. "I was trying to tell the story about a particular moment during a larger relationship."

“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.
Developing …

Look at that cat go. Adventure on Clover Island is one of those games that you just want to fall into. At least, until you get to the bit with the lava.
The action-platformer follows Skylar and Plux. Skylar is a cat who has been augmented with a mechanical arm that was meant to turn her into a weapon. Now, she and Plux are taking on the evil AI that did the deed, before it destroys Clover Island.
Watch this level of gameplay to see why I’m kind of in love with this level design. From its sandy beaches to its nightmarish lava caves, Clover Island is really beautiful. You’ll also see how wicked fast the gameplay is. Skylar vaults from platform to platform, punches robots in the face, and swings over lava pits at not-quite-Sonic but certainly dizzying speeds.
Adventure on Clover Island is being developed by Right Nice Games, and will be released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. A PC version is in the works as well.