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Tuesday, June 17, 2014
News::DSOGaming - Battlefield: Hardline Multiplayer Beta PC Performance Analysis
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News::The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Preview and Impressions from E3 2014 | Entertainment Buddha
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News::Pulstar - PC Review | Chalgyr's Game Room
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News::Meet Hopscotch, the iOS app teaching kids how to program
Turbine Truck is a small iPad game made up of very basic mechanics. Players guide a cartoon truck across a 2D plane, smashing into as many oncoming cars as possible while evading the police. It lacks complexity and isn’t necessarily a grueling test of skill, but Turbine Truck remains notable for one reason: it was created by a child using Hopscotch, an iOS app with its own visual programming language used to teach kids the basics of coding and programming.
Heavily influenced by the browser-based language Scratch, Hopscotch uses a drag-and-drop interface that allows children to put blocks together in order to issue commands to different items in their projects. It’s a system that does away with the fears of syntax errors and typos inherent in other programming languages, guaranteeing a certain level of stability that will help children focus on internalizing the basics.
Hopscotch programmer Jason Brennan describes the app as a toy that can be used to create other toys. “Hopscotch is kind of this little world that’s sketchy at the start,” he says, “but basically, you have characters and get to control them and teach them what to do. That was the metaphor we went with, and I think it’s a really powerful one because kids kind of like that it’s a dollhouse, it’s Lego, and it’s a way that you get to tell the story.”
The app provides children with a handful of characters at the start, with whom they have the opportunity to issue commands such as animating a character when the iPad is shaken or making a character breakdance when the screen is tapped. Different functions allow for more complex and unique creations, although the basics at the start provide an intuitive tutorial using the iPad’s touchscreen.
Created by Hopscotch Technologies co-founders Samantha John and Jocelyn Leavitt, Hopscotch was initially inspired by the lack of women in engineering and a desire to expose children – especially girls – to programming at a young age, in the hope that it would encourage them to pursue it later on in life.
While a special emphasis has been placed on making Hopscotch appealing to girls, great care has been taken to ensure that it is unisex and approachable to all in its design. It’s an app that encourages empowerment through creativity and gives children a chance to interact with a new artform.
“Being empowered with computers is an essential thing that hasn’t really happened yet, and Hopscotch is our way of helping that,” Brennan explains. “We’re helping empower kids with computers and iPads to create in a new way. This is the toy that I wanted when I was a kid. I wanted to make my own video games, and now we give kids the power to do that. But we also give them a way of explaining themselves in ways they couldn’t with pen and paper or drawings.”
Naturally, creating an application targeted at eight to twelve-year-old children brought with it its own set of design challenges. The team had to compensate for a child’s more limited motor skills, making sure the drag-and-drop interface was user friendly and that the text met a basic level of reading comprehension. Furthermore, it was necessary to disguise the often-complex nature of programming in an endearing fashion using a bright color palette and cartoonish design.
The app has largely been received positively, garnering praise from developers, parents, classroom teachers and critics alike. Brennan recalls being at a meet and greet during the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and being recognized as part of the Hopscotch team. “People came to us and were like ‘are you Hopscotch? I love your app!” he recalls. “It’s wonderful. It’s flattering and humbling at the same time.”
It’s the feedback he gets from children, however, that Brennan finds the most rewarding. “The really cool thing for me is when I hear about parents that have two children and they say ‘my seven-year-old daughter made a game for my four-year-old son to play on Hopscotch.’ So, these kids are making their own toys in Hopscotch, which blows my mind.”
Since the launch of version 2.0 in autumn 2013, the community surrounding Hopscotch has grown significantly. Through the app, children can upload and share their projects with others, allowing for users to interact and enjoy each other’s work.
While the Hopscotch team has project plans for the future, it’s continuing to foster this community and improve the app that remains their main focus. “We’re hoping to be the Lego of the future,” Brennan explains. “This is what I wanted as a kid – I wanted digital Lego, and this is what I’m making now. That’s a really good feeling, and it’s just cool to be able to put that in the hands of kids and adults that get to use it, too.”
The post Meet Hopscotch, the iOS app teaching kids how to program appeared first on Edge Online.
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News::Dead Island 2 at E3 2014: The Zombie Apocalypse of Your California Dreams | MediaStinger
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News::Godsmack stand alone with new Rocksmith 2014 DLC
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News::E3 2014: Dead Island 2 First Impressions
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News::DreamHack's Hearthstone tournament winner accused of cheating
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News::Eating Mushrooms Would Have Horrible Effects On Mario In Real Life
Pete Holmes' latest clip puts poor Mario into the painful situation we all probably joked about before: Filling yourself with mushrooms in a realistic Mushroom Kingdom would have different effects, and it would be a nightmare.
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News::Archlord II Closed Beta Testing Starts Today
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News::Chinese Students Delight the Internet with Graduation Photos
New grads at Shandong University in China decided they wanted to do something fun and memorable. They most certainly did.
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News::Youll End Up with the Companies You Deserve: The Minecraft Meltdown
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News::Watch_Dogs - Unbelievable Hidden Comment Shows Ubisoft's Arrogance Towards PC Gamers... Or NOT?
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News::Hardline Spin-Off Still a Full Range of the Battlefield Experience, Says Visceral MP Designer
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News::Persona Q's Battle Music Refuses to Leave My Head
I played a lot of Persona Q this past weekend, but let me say, I loved every moment I spent in battle—though not because of the (perfectly adequate) battle system. What I really loved was the game's awesome battle theme.
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News::Well, this seems slightly worrying: Capcom has not renewed its "takeover defense."
Well, this seems slightly worrying: Capcom has not renewed its "takeover defense." Meaning? Another company could possibly take over Capcom, I guess. Read the full release here. [Thanks, Sang!]
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News::Best New Sport: Throwing $5,000 Computers
Throwing the hammer or the javelin might have made sense in ancient times, but we don't live in ancient times. We live in the modern times with modern things to chuck around. You know, like computer servers.
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News::Destiny Is a PlayStation Exclusive in Japan
In the West, upcoming shooter Destiny is a multiplatform game. In Japan, it's not. It's a PlayStation exclusive, Sony announced today.
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News::Entwined review
Entwined is meant to be a poster child. With a big on-stage announcement all of its own at Sony’s E3 conference, it’s being positioned as a bright, whimsical champion to lead the company’s growing army of artsy indie games. It plays like a checklist for the anti-triple-A brigade: sparkly-if-basic visuals; simple, repetitive gameplay and a story that is (nominally) about love and souls instead of guns and ammo. Unfortunately, once you peel away the glossy surface there’s not a lot else going on in Entwined – no Shawshank tunnel to anywhere interesting, just a blank wall.
Take the story, for example. Here it is, in full: there’s the soul of a fish, and the soul of a bird. They’re in love, but they can’t be together – presumably because birds eat fish, but this is never explained. Thankfully, Entwined’s story is pretty superfluous. The main meat of Entwined is guiding the bird and the fish through linear neon tunnels, controlling one soul with each thumbstick to pilot the bird (blue) and the fish (orange) into floating orbs and through correspondingly coloured light gates. Collecting orbs charges each animal’s progress bar, while missing gates drains it. Fill both bars and you’ll be prompted to hold R1 and L1 to trigger a final dash to the level’s end.
More challenging configurations of gates are introduced slowly, and when you miss one, all that happens is that the offending soul flashes red and loses a small chunk of charge from its progress bar – no Game Over screens, no frustrating returns to the start of the level. But while it’s a peacefully rewarding experience guiding both souls safely through each segment, it’s hard to shake the feeling that after a couple of levels, the game has run out of ideas.
Take the between-level free-flying sections. Finish a stage and the bird and the fish join together into a dragon which must then be flown around to collect enough floating orbs to progress to the next level proper. These sections are supposed to represent the bird and the fish finally united after a lifetime of struggle – but really, they’re pure padding.
For a start, there’s no challenge: no time limit, no gates to fly through, just orbs to collect by steering your dragon into them. Worse, the game’s controls obviously weren’t built for this kind of gameplay. Both sticks still control movement, so when you instinctively twitch one stick to pan the camera, your dragon will veer into a mountain instead. It’ll harmlessly bounce off, but the lack of camera control makes it hard to spot and collect orbs, dragging out these weirdly misplaced segments when all you want to do is get back to the real game of dodging through light gates in tunnels.
That’s Entwined in a nutshell: a nice core bit of gameplay tarted up with unnecessary pretensions and stretched too thin, even over its short playtime. It feels like a minigame from a bigger title – specifically, those minigames from God of War and Dead Space 2 in which you guide a plummeting hero through falling debris. What it doesn’t feel like is a full a game – let alone the artsy indie hero Sony would like it to be.
The post Entwined review appeared first on Edge Online.
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News::Among the Sleep Review | "A visually stunning, dark, nightmarish world." [NoobFeed]
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News::China's Personal Bodyguard Training Looks Ridiculously Intense
Bodyguards, the often terrible henchmen found in video games and movies, are very important in real life. These men and women protect their charges with the utmost severity. In China, professional bodyguards take their jobs seriously. Just take a look at their intense training!
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