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Thursday, March 27, 2014
News::Optimus Prime in Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark revealed
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News::Yaiba Ninja Gaiden Z first 25 minutes gameplay video
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News::Planet Arkadia Offers The World's First $1,000,000 Virtual Property
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News::Banished review
Exile is a severe sentence, and Banished would have you remember that. Each world seed may fill the screen with sun-dappled woods and rolling hills, but you’ll soon discover these bucolic-seeming idylls are just waiting to swallow your hapless charges whole. We’ve watched settlers perish from starvation, hypothermia or, in the cases of a lucky few, old age. Either way, the slightest oversight means a flurry of low-key tombstone icons and a restart, hoping to build on your impressions of what went wrong.
Banished is a contradiction. It has the visual polish to suggest teams of 3D artists, your miniature village painted richly by the passing seasons, yet it’s the work of just one man. It’s pastorally slow paced, explicitly telling you to push the simulation speed up between events in tutorials, but carries a deceptive momentum that resists even early corrections. It’s non-combative, but embroils you in a battle with Mother Nature’s spiteful side. Winter is coming, and you need firewood.
You start with the bare essentials: some seeds, a storage barn and convicts in semi-urgent need of housing and food. Direct control is limited, too, your workers offering as little granularity as the average Sim City denizen. But the game is hands off with you as well. Shorn of a monetary economy, every construct is available from the start. And while to overstretch is to trigger a deadly domino effect, you’ll never be told when or where to focus your efforts.
That freedom extends to your objectives, in that there aren’t any. Banished is a simulation with a rich set of interlocking rules to discover, and eschews the contrivance of win conditions. Disasters will befall you regularly because of that detailed model, though, be it an infestation that makes a once-healthy orchard suitable only for matchwood, a twister, or your own greed depriving you of local resources. You’ll watch the death notifications rack up and begin again.
After many false starts and several hours, you’ll learn enough to know your continued existence means patient forethought, steady growth and tracking a lot of tiny numbers across menu panes. But the challenge of establishing a stable community makes that engaging for a time, even if it’s too easy to waste energy on a colony you doomed ages ago with a tiny error.
Banished is a rare technical achievement, pure in design and of purpose. Its many deaths almost always feel fair, and the battle up to self-sufficiency is gripping. But the absence of a long game beyond this early toil makes it hard to find reasons to settle down here, except for the views, especially if you’ve established yourself on these frosty plains before.
The post Banished review appeared first on Edge Online.
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News::Mechanic Escape Preview | The Game Scouts
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News::Dragon Age Inquisition: Alistairs Return Confirmed
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News::Fresh Batman: Arkham Knight news
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News::BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 2 Review | CheatCC
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News::War Thunder Expansion to Hit Rezzed this Weekend
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News::Betrayer Review | GIZORAMA
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News::Windforge Review (PC)| CriticalIndieGamer
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News::NaissanceE - Review | ReviewMango
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News::LUFTRAUSERS Review- Best Rauser Simulator Ever Created, Most Addictive Game in Years | GameNGuide
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News::Wot I Think BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Episode 2 - Rockpapershotgun
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News::SteamFirst Review: Race The Sun
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News::League Of Legends Step Aside, SMITE Has Arrived
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News::BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 2 Walkthrough
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News::Corporate Lifestyle Simulator Review | GameCloud
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News::Ether One Review (Strategy Informer)
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News::Loadout Update 2.0 Goes Live - New Content Added
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News::AMD Launches FirePro W9100 With Hawaii and 16 GB GDDR5 Memory
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News::Jimquisition: So, That Facebook And Oculus Rift Thing...
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News::A bunch of new Dragon Age: Inquisition details
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News::Door Kickers Review | The Indie Mine
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News::‘Let’s find water on Mars’ – Project Morpheus could help NASA crowdsource future research, says Sony
Scientists and consumers could collaborate on NASA research projects with the advent of consumer-grade virtual reality headsets like Project Morpheus, says SCEA’s Anton Mikhailov.
Sony introduced its VR headset, codenamed Project Morpheus, at GDC last week, also announcing its partnership with NASA during the reveal event. The two parties have been sharing knowledge around virtual reality tech for some time, Sony learning from NASA’s military-grade simulations and NASA taking advantage of Sony’s cheaper, consumer-grade tech to offer its scientists and academics access to virtual reality at a fraction of the previous cost.
And Sony’s bid to popularise virtual reality by bringing it to the masses could yet feed back into NASA’s own research, says SCEA senior software engineer Anton Mikhailov. “They’re excited about regular people following along with the NASA scientists, using similar hardware to explore the same thing scientists are exploring,” he told us at GDC last week. “Who knows, it could even crowdsource some of this stuff. Imagine if they collected photo satellite data from all around Mars – it’d take a lot of time for them to sift through all of that, so what if you could get the masses of gamers on PlayStation to help you out.
“Gamers are good at finding stuff – you give someone a VR headset and you say – ‘find water on Mars – go’. They get a ton of data and we help out science. That’s personally what gets me excited about collaborating with someone like NASA, and obviously there are other collaborations – virtual tourism, museums, all of that stuff. There are some very exciting possibilities.”
As Facebook’s $2 billion swoop for Oculus Rift has proven this week, using virtual reality to play videogames is just the start for the medium. As Mikhailov suggests, its wider applications are, in many ways, the more exciting part of the technology – and secretly, perhaps Sony knows that selling and licensing Project Morpheus out to businesses and institutions will be a more lucrative use of the tech.
It’s still a rather distant prospect for players, but Sony has already set about exploring the multitude of other ways in which its tech can be utilised, starting with its NASA partnership. “A lot of people have wanted VR to happen, not just gamers,” said Mikhailov. “NASA is an exciting partner because they’ve been doing virtual reality internally forever, basically. They’ve always researched how they can use it for science, astronaut training, pilot training and so on. The thing about working with them is that they have a lab full of this stuff – they’ve done a lot of it already and what’s encouraging is that they’re quite impressed with what we’ve done so far.”
So what are the differences between Sony’s Morpheus tech and NASA’s own? “Well, it’s not a million dollars, so that’s kind of the difference,” said Mikhailov. “It’s interesting because a lot of the old virtual reality stuff was quite bulky, extremely expensive, all military-grade. Now in the last few years because a lot of things have driven down the price of displays and computation down, we’re able to do things that we just weren’t able to pull off in the eighties and nineties unless they were in a military institution. It’s different technology but it’s delivering an experience that’s very similar to a proper simulator.”
Making virtual reality cheaper and more accessible to a far larger number of NASA staff has allowed its scientists to experiment with simulation a lot more, says Mikhailov, though NASA’s own high-end military grade VR will still be used for training pilots, astronauts, medics and the like. “For that kind of experience you need something that has to be completely bulletproof,” he said. “You don’t want anybody to get hurt…in games when you mess up or the tracking goes wrong it’s fine but, for example, in the medical world the tolerances are different, so on that level the technology is different – there’s a gap.
“What they’re excited about is for their institutions. If they want a scientist to use their VR system, it’s a million dollar system – they have one of them, and one of the scientists has to get a time share on that system, they have to sign up, get a grant, whatever. With consumer VR hardware they can get one for every one of their scientists and now, yes, they’re not having the ‘NASA experience’ but they’re having something close, and they’re having it on a wider scale. It’s a depth versus breadth approach.”
The post ‘Let’s find water on Mars’ – Project Morpheus could help NASA crowdsource future research, says Sony appeared first on Edge Online.
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News::Jet Car Stunts gets new trailer, coming to PSN, XBLA and PS VITA
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News::ZTGD | Luftrausers (PC) Review
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News::Riftbook - Cliff Bleszinski talks about Oculus, Facebook, and Notch
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News::Oculus on Partnering with Facebook: "It gives us the best shot at truly changing the world"
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News::Review: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 - Revelations | Rely on Horror
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News::Batman: Arkham Knight Preview | Gamereactor UK
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News::Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Review | Gamereactor UK
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News::Betrayer Review | NoobFeed
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News::Deus Ex: The Fall PC Review | Metal Arcade
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News::Games wed like to see as MMOs
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News::Titanfall Review | Attack On Gaming
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News::Beautiful RPG Dragon Fin Soup Finally Releases New Images And Info On The Game
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News::Palmer Luckey Responds to Minecraft Creators Oculus Exit
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News::Luftrausers - Review | GamingLives
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News::Can Oculus survive the Facebook effect?
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News::Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Review | VideoGamer
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News::World of Diving Launches First Multiplayer Build
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News::The Arkham Knight Revealed -- No, its Not Batman
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News::Beautiful And Memorable Concept Art Of Last-Gen
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News::An Interview with Cubical Drift about upcoming game, Planets³ Lookout Minecraft
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News::Getting Paid to Play with Green Man Gaming and Playfire
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News::This Unsolved Battlefield 4 Easter Egg Goes Deep, Battlefield Yeti Discovered
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