Category: Game

Virtual Reality was the major topic of last week’s Game Developers Conference with roughly 100 games and “experiences" on show for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.
But the one I found most compelling was the most mundane creation for Vive: The SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode.
Slip on the black plastic headset and instead of dropping into a fantastical world of mouthy orbs, atop a mountain with a robot dog or inside a game, I found myself sitting in a chair in a fairly non-descript room facing a big television screen.
To be specific, in this case big means about 19 feet.
To give me a sense of what the early beta of what SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode can do, a Valve employee loaded up a copy of Broforce from the Steam library.
Despite the (virtual) size of the screen, the game looked amazing, just like it does on my home computer running a GTX 980 TI. Because I was in a virtual room sitting in a virtual chair staring at a virtual screen, I could behave as if I was playing on a massive screen. That meant looking around, focusing on whatever I wanted, even moving my chair back a bit if I felt too close.
My time playing a game within an experience was limited, but I quickly forgot I wasn’t in an empty room playing on a giant television. The floor, which seemed to be highly polished, lit up with a light reflection of the game playing on the television. It was surreal.
The concept behind the mode is to allow users to play non-VR games within VR systems like the upcoming HTC Vive. While the room is fairly generic right now, I was told that it’s very likely that new takes on the room could be released. The system will support "most" games I was told.
While visiting Valve’s booth at the show, I also got a chance to check out the company’s latest version of The Lab. The Lab starts you off in a big room filled with all sorts of momentos. Imagine a museum created by a game developer. Each of the dozen displays feature floating globules of water. By picking one up, you can gaze into it and if you like what you saw you just dunk your head in and you are there.

My first visit took me to an experience that Valve refers to as a postcard.
This postcard was created by a Valve employee that took a bunch of pictures from the top of Washington State’s Vesper Peak. The team used photogrammetry to recreate the mountain top in VR. I was able to teleport short distances to different spots on the peak and look around at my surroundings. It was stunning. The devs also dropped a little robot dog into the setting, giving me something to play with if I was up for tossing the sticks scattered around the peak.
In the next experience, I tried out a game called Slingshot, which placed me inside some secret factory in Portal calibrating robot personality cores. The cores, it turns out, are all ball shaped and calibrating them involved launching them with a giant slingshot across the mammoth factory and into teetering towers of explosive barrels and stacks of crates. Each core also has a personality and chatters on a bit as you set about finding a target. The variety of bots and dialogue absolutely made the game. My favorite of the personality cores was the spider core which promised to release spiders upon activation. I shot that one pretty quickly.
Next was a game called Longbow, which had me fending off an army of flat enemies from the walls of a castle with a boy. Despite being fairly straightforward, the sensation of nocking an arrow, drawing and loosing it on an enemy felt so physical that I found this one of my favorite experiences.

Finally, I tried a 3D shoot-em-up called Xortex. The game has you holding a spaceship in your hand and moving it around to avoid the increasingly thick cloud of fire coming at you from basically everywhere. The entire game takes place inside a sort of big virtual sphere. You fire by pulling the controller’s trigger. Because Xortex is played in a 3D space, I found myself spinning around and swooping up, down, forward and back as I played the game. Initially, without even thinking about it, I was actually trying to avoid the incoming fire with the ship and my body. But after realizing that wasn’t necessary (and how stupid I must look), I focused on maneuvering the ship.
Xortex has the sort of pick-up-and-play, hard-to-put-down feel of Geometry Wars or, really, any good SHMUP.
With just a third of the dozen experiences sampled, I’m sure that this freebie for the Vive is going to be one of the system’s first early hits. Paired up with a program that gives you access to most of your purchased Steam games on an unusually large television screen, these certainly aren’t programs that will drive sales, but they could make dropping $800 on a computer peripheral a bit easier to excuse.
VALVE AND HTC’S VIVE STAND AT THE PRECIPICE OF VR’S FUTURE, BUT THEY MAY HAVE A LONG WAIT

Warzone Firefight is due this summer Halo 5: Guardians’ newest multiplayer is Warzone Firefight, and 343 Industries showed it off in this trailer released yesterday during the Halo World Championship Finals.
As the name suggests, this mode is a combination of Warzone from Halo 5 and Firefight, a very popular mode from 2009’s Halo 3: ODST. In it, teams of up to eight human players work cooperatively against enemy AI in over five rounds of increasingly difficult objectives, according to this post on Xbox Wire.
Halo 5 multiplayer’s REQ system is available in Warzone Firefight (as it is in Warzone) to help the ream repel the oncoming threat, which 343 says will feature “the most on-screen enemies in the history of the franchise." In addition to the standard class of enemies, Warzone Firefight will also introduce "Mythic" class bosses to toughen the challenge even more.
Warzone Firefight comes to Halo 5: Guardians sometime this summer.

The crafty action star returns to TV Lucas Till will play Angus MacGyver in an upcoming revival of the classic action TV series, Variety reports. The actor, best known as the mutant Havok in the recent X-Men movies, will play a 20-something version of the infallible problem-solver in a pilot produced for CBS.
Joining Till will be actors Joshua Boone and George Eads as MacGyver’s trusted companions; actor Henry Winkler serves as a producer on the reboot. Winkler, who was a producer on the original series as well, joined on back in October; the project was first announced back in February 2015, with Till’s casting marking the end of a long search, according to Variety.
MacGyver premiered in 1985 with Richard Dean Anderson in the starring role. The series lasted seven seasons on ABC where it found cult acclaim, spawning merchandise, two TV movies, featured spots on The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live parodies and more.

Can the Zero Escape series win new fans over with its final installment? Spike Chunsoft’s cult favorite Zero Escape series will conclude this June with trilogy-ender Zero Time Dilemma —€” but that shouldn’t deter total newcomers from trying out the dark, story-heavy puzzle game, according to director Kotaro Uchikoshi. Speaking with Uchikoshi through a translator during Game Developers Conference 2016, he was adamant that when the game launches in June, it will attract its own set of fans to the franchise.
“I think that, as a fan of something, you want to get as many people as possible on board," he said. "So we wanted to make a title to be accessible to as many people as possible."
But broadening the appeal of a series with an admittedly … complicated storyline without alienating existing fans is no easy task. At a GDC press event, Uchikoshi and members of Zero Escape publisher Aksys Games were on hand to demo the series’ final release, focusing on its combination of approachable tweaks and narrative payoff for the devoted.
Zero Time Dilemma, like its predecessors 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, tells a complicated story of nine participants in something called the "nonary game," an escape-the-room quest with mortal consequences. It’s hosted by the mysterious masked figure Zero, whose attempts to pit the players against one another are either successful or thwarted, depending on choices made during the lengthy cutscenes.
Making the complex story approachable
To pad out this basic premise is a heavy dose of violence, time travel, the supernatural and, of course, tricky puzzle-solving. The Zero Escape series has carved a niche and found relative success for itself thanks to these highly involved facets. Its three games almost demand to become the object of players’ obsessions; falling deeply into the highly complicated timeline and universe of the Zero Escape heroes might be the only way to truly grasp their story.
While that story has unfolded over the course of several years now, starting with 999 on Nintendo DS (and later iOS) before continuing onto 3DS and Vita with Virtue’s Last Reward, Zero Time Dilemma attempts to welcome those with no prior knowledge of the series while also answering the myriad questions fans have about the overarching plot.
One of the ways in which Uchikoshi hopes to draw in new fans is by setting Zero Time Dilemma in the middle of the Zero Escape chronology. Instead of directly following Virtue’s Last Reward, the game takes place one year after 999. This gave the team leeway to introduce completely new characters alongside familiar ones from the other two games, as well as hitting the reset button on the story by throwing these characters into a new iteration of the franchise-spanning nonary game.
Unlike the previous games, Zero Time Dilemma is also far more flexible in terms of discovering that story. All three games require players to make life-or-death choices in order to progress; in Virtue’s Last Reward, a linear flowchart showed which of the branching storylines your choices were sending you down, making it easier to define your decision-making around reaching certain longer pathways.

Zero Time Dilemma brings back this element with a twist: The developer has bucked the linearity of the flowchart, instead allowing players to dip into what are called "floating fragments." In this version of Zero’s mysterious puzzle game, each of the players (including the three new protagonists)€” gets dosed with a strange, amnesia-inducing drug every 90 minutes. When they wake up, they have no memories of what they previously encountered, and depending on which direction the player wants to go in, they either wake up sometime in the past or the future.
That nonlinearity is meant to appeal to the more casual player or budding Zero Escape fan who wants to uncover the storyline at their own pace, Uchikoshi explained. "The floating fragment system makes it so you can kind of move through different parts of the game episodically," he said. "You won’t get railroaded into doing one storyline from start to finish."
"We wanted to emulate the feel of a big-budget American TV show"
But that’s not the biggest change to the game —€” that would be, in keeping with that "episodic" concept, the newly cinematic cutscenes. These fully animated narrative sequences are meant to eliminate the at-times draining visual novel aspects of the series to create something a bit more familiar to Western players.
"We wanted it to kind of emulate the feel of a big-budget American TV show," Uchikoshi said of the change from the text-heavy cutscenes of entries past. "We think that giving it a cinematic look will give people who weren’t necessarily interested in visual novels of entry."
This might be the most striking difference to the longtime player of the series who, after two games, has likely become accustomed to spending as much time scrolling through the game’s text as in the escape-centric puzzle scenes. Although the cutscenes won’t be any shorter than before, the director said, players will be offered a reprieve thanks to full voice acting in both Japanese and English. For the full TV-watching effect, the developer even included the option to turn on or off subtitles.
Another way of courting the Western audience: Aksys will launch Zero Time Dilemma on Steam sometime later this year; it will hit 3DS and Vita first at the end of June. Bringing the game to PC makes it the first entry in the series to hit the platform; the publisher doesn’t yet have plans to port the previous games to Steam, although it’s looking into it as an option.
Yet even with all of this courting the English-speaking Zero Escape fan, Uchikoshi laughed when we asked him to explain the series’ unique Western success. Could he explain why the game — which by all accounts is a tough sell, thanks to its unabashedly complex storyline and visual novel features —€” has found more fans stateside than in its home country?
Uchikoshi can’t explain why Zero Escape has more fans in America than in Japan"
This is a good opportunity to ask you the same question," he replied with a grin. "I can’t for the life of me think of why."
We offered something about the murder mystery elements;€” Americans are really into that genre, we explained. But Uchikoshi saw it differently.
"To me, the main elements of the story is like a murder mystery, but also has these really out there science-fiction elements," he said. "Murder mysteries are huge in Japan, but they’re not really into science fiction.
"Those are two tastes that Western audiences are really into," he concluded.
Uchikoshi clearly knows his series best. But despite his insistence on introducing Zero Escape to those who might be on the fence about it if not completely unfamiliar with the series, he gave credit where it is due —€” back to those hardcore fans who made the third and final game possible in the first place.
"Originally we had planned to develop and simultaneously," he said, but due to "various circumstances" —€” like the games’ poorer sales in Japan —€” production was put on hold in 2014. After Uchikoshi announced the hiatus on Twitter, fans worldwide "besieged us and Aksys with messages of support."
"The higher-ups at the company saw these fan messages and were touched by how passionate fans were for the series, so that helped get things moving forward again," he said. The directer was able to unveil the game during last year’s Anime Expo.
For all of the efforts to make the game more accessible, then, Uchikoshi also insisted that fans will experience the most payoff from the storyline. All of the mysteries will be revealed, the director said, teasing that fans’ biggest questions based on the end of Virtue’s Last Reward will be answered.
They’re the ones who are making this game happen, after all, he said. "We wouldn’t be able to make without the fans."

The first time I ever played Thumper, upstairs in a restaurant a few blocks from last year’s Game Developers Conference, I was struck by a few things about it: primarily, the powerful sense of isolation, adrenaline and existential dread the game was able to instill in me, even while playing it in a sandwich shop on a stranger’s laptop with a huge pair of headphones on. After finishing my first session with the game and taking off my headphones, one of the first questions I asked Thumper’s creators was: “Have you considered virtual reality for this?"
It’s Thumper, but played at 90 FPS on a bright OLED screen inches from your face
At the time, the answer was no, but in the year since that meeting, Thumper was announced as PlayStation VR-compatible. The announcement had me thrilled — ever since I first played it, I’ve never been been able to shake the idea of how great Thumper in virtual reality could be, and hearing that it was coming true was genuinely super exciting.
Now, having played the PlayStation VR version of Thumper at this year’s GDC, I’m super relieved to report that it’s exactly what I hoped it would be: Thumper, but played at 90 frames per second on a bright OLED screen a few inches from your face.
At first blush, Thumper could seem like an odd fit for VR — after all, it’s not the type of game that requires you to crane your neck and look around at all while playing, and indeed, the 2D version of Thumper has no camera controls to speak of. But while most VR games we’ve seen so far use the technology to let you look around and explore a world from every angle, Thumper uses it for something much simpler: immersion.
Thumper uses VR as headphones for your eyes
Before now, the most important thing about playing Thumper was having a big pair of loud headphones to immerse you in its bassy, kaleidoscopic world. Thumper works as a VR game because it removes one more layer between you and its world, allowing you to easily immerse yourself in the intense, brutal audiovisual experience that is playing Thumper. No, you won’t spend much of your time in Thumper’s VR mode looking above, below, or behind you (although you’re free to), because that’s not why the feature exists — instead, Thumper uses the PlayStation VR as headphones for your eyes, and that’s exactly what a game like Thumper needs.

Another thing Thumper’s PlayStation VR mode exposes is how little the general public knows about predicting what will and won’t be nauseating in virtual reality. Thumper’s PlayStation VR announcement was met online with comments — some joking, some not — suggesting that the game would be nauseating or even seizure-inducing in virtual reality. While it’s easy to understand why folks who haven’t played Thumper could make that assumption, the experience of actually playing Thumper in VR is entirely non-sickening — perhaps because most VR-induced nausea is created by acceleration and deceleration, and Thumper’s movement speed, while breakneck, is also highly consistent. Whatever the reason, after my first VR session with Thumper was over, not only did I feel totally fine, I was ready to hop back in and play it again — which is exactly what I did.
Thumper in VR is fascinating because it’s one of the first examples of a non-VR game retrofitted into virtual reality in a way that actually makes perfect sense. It’s funny: while the benefits of playing Thumper in VR are relatively subtle compared to most VR games, they’re also completely undeniable. From the ultra-smooth framerate to the subtle head tracking, it’s hands-down the most immersive way to play Thumper, and the experience almost single-handedly converted me from a PlayStation VR skeptic to a possible day-one adopter.
For more from the 2016 Game Developers Conference, check out Polygon’s StoryStream of all the big news from this year’s show.

Now you can blast an arm off with steel-encased fireballs The next game from the makers of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is a surprisingly colorful, almost painterly game. And it’s not just spouts of blood that provide the color this time around. Mirage: Arcane Warfare is a medieval and magic game with an Arabian and Persian inspiration stylized with bold contrasting colors.
The opposing teams wear orange or purple, the landscape is also awash in tinges of those colors, and the cities are vibrant too. Characters, setting, everything also has a touch of an outline, giving the entire game a bit of a drawn look.
And, yes, there is also plenty of blood.
“We wanted to create a peaceful, calm setting, so we have these pristine areas that are then overshadowed with violence," said Steve Piggott, founder of Torn Banner Studios and game director of Mirage.
"We want you to paint these beautiful landscapes with blood and gore," added Alex Hayter, senior brand manager for the studio.
The inspiration for this spiritual successor to Chivalry was the idea of extending the precise, back-and-forth hand-to-hand combat of that original game to ranged combat.
"Magic seemed to be the best way to approach that," Piggott said.
In the original Chivalry, which started out as a Half-Life 2 mod before being recreated and improved using Unreal Engine 3, players warred against one another in a medieval setting using swords, polearms, battleaxes and other weapons of the era. What helped to set the game apart was the precise controls needed to succeed in the game … and the ultra-violence that often ended a clash with lopped off limbs and geysers of blood.

Mirage, created with Unreal Engine 4 for Windows PC, will feature the same level of violence, but this time it won’t just be the result of melee combat. All six classes in the game use both magic and weapons in battles.
Each of the classes has its own style, spells and weapons. The team didn’t show off everything available to each class, but this is what we learned so far:

Alchemancer: Has no melee and can’t block, but has more powerful spells like the ability to throw a shield spell or cast a big blast.
Vypress: An assassin that can deliver devastating backstabs and can phase through attacks or turn invisible.
Taurant: A melee-centric class that can dominate in close combat with a grand mace. He can also create a controllable bounder that can flatten enemies.
Tinker: Defensive trap class that can lay magic mines.
Vigilist: A support class that can summon a bird attack and launch a ground slam. Also the only class with a shield.
Entropist: A balanced class with a magic carpet and a mix of offensive and defensive spells.

Magic is designed to have weight to it in the game. Fireballs, for instance, come wrapped in straps of steel.
"That kind of shows they are harnessing the magic," Piggott said. "It doesn’t feel like pixie dust magic, it has real weight and force. So we added a cage around the fire, for instance."
All of the spells seem to take have some sort of wind-up. This gives opposing players a chance to block or stop those spells, it also adds to the back-and-forth nature of the game.
For instance, the heal spell creates a fixed area for healing, but takes three to five seconds to activate. If friendly players aren’t within the area when the spell activates, they’re not healed.
This, Piggott said, turns every heal spell into a skirmish between the teams as they fight to retain control of the spot or force the other team away from it.
The gameplay currently relies on six-versus-six matches with teams trying to achieve different objectives or prevent them from being achieved.

In one map, players had to capture an area which then unlocked a door, expanding the map. Once in the new area, players had to escort an object to the other team’s tower.
While the game is multiplayer only, that doesn’t mean it’s completely devoid of plot.
There is a light story being told between matches and a backstory exists as well.
The orange team are known as the Azar Cabal and the purple team is the Bashrani Emirate.
The Cabal are outcast rebels who have scarred themselves with runes used to capture magic, while the Emirate is the standing empire made up of people with runes tattooed on their skin.
The six classes can all be customized with clothing, tattoos and scarring, Hayter said.
The game’s maps will each have its own mode, though no word yet on the total map count when the game launches later this year.
While I didn’t have a chance to play the game at GDC, the team said that it will be playable at PAX East.
Until then, they continue their work building in hooks to keep players playing.
"That’s what we’re doing with the game design, playing with their egos," Hayter said. "Giving them big kills and then taking it away from them. Everyone feels powerful and vulnerable at the same time."

GDC talk looks at the math that goes into PvP challenges. Each and every time you are matched in an online game, there’s a lot of mathematics going on under the hood. Game companies are investing more time and effort into effective match-making, because it keeps players from straying to rival attractions.
That was the view of Josh Menke, speaking at Game Developers Confrence last week on “Skill, Matchmaking, and Ranking Systems Design." Menke has been working on skill systems for more than a decade, including work on World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Halo 5. He is currently a senior systems designer at Activision.
He pointed out that balanced matchmaking helps new players, who are often wary of being trashed by superior players when they venture into competitive arenas. But veteran players must also be given satisfying challenges, especially as they are often vocal boosters — and critics — of a game.
"A good skill system finds players’ skills really fast and predicts outcomes correctly."
Most games have some sort of skill system that tells players and game-makers the level at which the player is ranked. These might include a kill/death ratio or a numbered ranking based on hours played or on achievements unlocked.
But sometimes these are not enough to predict various skill levels. Bad players can have a decent kill/death ratio if they only ever play against other bad players.
So games companies find other means to match players appropriately, balancing various data points to create a bigger picture. Performance ratings based on the strength of opponents is always best, he said, adding that every system requires constant testing. The outcome should be a classic bell curve that portrays the skill levels of the entire community.
"A good skill system finds players’ skills really fast and predicts outcomes correctly," he said. "It should give the right probabilities."
Menke added that the ideal outcome is for "planned experiences of varying intensity" so that all players get a good mix of games that are easy, evenly matched and hard to win. "That keeps the most amount of players in your game having fun," he explained.
He spoke about how new weapons are sometimes introduced to games, and are then taken up and dominated by a small number of players. The developers sometimes react by seeking balance and by nerfing powerful weapons. But Menke said that could be a mistake. Those players ought to be matched together, though he warned that fragmenting the audience between too many modes and specialities risks increasing wait times to games.
One area he worked on was the problem of mixing groups of friends with groups of random people. The friends generally had an advantage over the strangers. He said that every team should create its own skill level so they can be matched correctly. A mediocre team of pals might get a better game against a bunch of strangers with individually high skill levels.
The most important thing is finding the right balance between getting people up and playing, and making sure they get a satisfying challenge. "People don’t like to wait," he said.

Replay this spooky JRPG tomorrow PlayStation 2 role-playing game Okage: Shadow King is launching on PlayStation 4 tomorrow, March 22. The PlayStation Blogcast revealed the date for the PS4’s latest PS2 classic in an episode released last week.
No price was given for the game, although it’s likely to cost between $9.99 and $14.99 like previous PS2 ports. So far, these include games like Dark Cloud and Dark Cloud 2, Rogue Galaxy, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Sony first rolled out these upscaled re-releases in December 2015.
The surreal Japanese RPG first hit PS2 in 2001, just ahead of Halloween. Okage: Shadow King is the most notable title in developer Zener Works’ catalog; the company collaborated with Sony Computer Entertainment on the game.

How to lose friends and humiliate people Drawful, a sadistic, friend-shaming twist on Pictionary, was arguably the best game in the original Jackbox Party Pack, so its absence from the second pack was pretty puzzling. That omission is a bit clearer now that Jackbox has announced it’ll bring a stand-alone sequel, Drawful 2, to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac and Amazon Fire TV this spring. Above you’ll find the first trailer for the game, which touts the expansion from one color per player to two as well as online play and expanded streaming options.
Jackbox also announced the release of Jackbox Party Pack 3, coming to the same platforms as Drawful 2 this fall. Though it’s not announcing any of the games included in the third bundle, Jackbox did reveal that Drawful 2 won’t be one of them.

All hail your film revival queen Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley’s next big role might be as Lara Croft in a new Tomb Raider film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Last week, reports circulated that suggested Ridley was in the running for the role of Lara Croft. But the movie doesn’t have a script yet, Ridley told THR, nor has she locked down the part. “I’m waiting for someone to say ‘I want you, let’s do it’," she said at the Empire Awards in London on Sunday.
The planned Tomb Raider movie reboot will be directed by Roar Ulthaug; it will be his first Hollywood feature. In 2013, Evan Daughtery (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Divergent) was attached to write the script based on the revived game franchise by Crystal Dynamics. GK Films bought the film rights to the series in 2011; the movie has been in development since 2013.
No release date has been set yet for the movie, which will be the Tomb Raider franchise’s first since 2003’s Cradle of Life.
While Ridley is best known as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the actress also has a voice acting credit on her resume. Starting in January, she could be heard in the English adaptation of Only Yesterday by famed animation company Studio Ghibli.
How Lara Croft is changing