News::Play a game about YouTube stars in 'PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist'

The gaming stars of YouTube were recently turned into physical action figures, but their next big feat takes them back to the digital realm. PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist is a pixelated action game for iOS and Android starring YouTube sensation Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg and a host of his fellow online entertainers, including Marzia, CinnamonToastKen, JackSepticEye, Cryaotic and Markiplier. Legend of the Brofist features a mix of platforming, bullet hell and and sidescrolling action genres, and it comes courtesy of retro-focused Canadian studio Outerminds. It's $5 on the App Store and Google Play.

Source: @pewdiepie

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News::The new Gear VR is Samsung's public bet that VR is consumer-ready

When Samsung announced the newest edition of its mobile virtual reality headset Gear VR, created in partnership with Oculus, it was less about hardware innovation and more of a statement: VR is consumer-ready. Yes, the headset's overall weight has been significantly reduced and its touchpad's been redesigned for easier access. But it's the combination of its $99 price point, range of compatible (and current) Samsung smartphones and multimedia content like Netflix that could finally usher this new medium into households everywhere. "Virtual reality that's accessible to consumers is still very young and so it was all about developing the ecosystem," said Jim Willson, director of immersive products and VR at Samsung. "We had to make sure there was enough content, both in terms of video content ... and on the gaming side."

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News::Sling TV shows off its improved guide for the Xbox One

As great as Sling TV is, the user interface isn't the best. One of the biggest problems is that it isn't easy to find the content you're looking for, but the company's well aware of this and has been working on a fix. Today, Sling TV announced the first of "several" planned updates to its UI, starting with the app for Xbox One. Aside from bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements to the streaming quality, Sling TV is refreshing the guide on Microsoft's entertainment console -- which should make it less tedious for you to quickly come across the live and on-demand shows you want to watch. For example, when you're browsing the guide and set on a channel, hitting up on the Xbox One controller's d-pad or joystick now brings up all the content available for each network. You'll also find better imagery throughout the app, with a focus on cast, crew and episode artwork.

Source: Sling TV

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News::The Star Wars Battlefront open beta starts October 8th

EA announced Thursday that the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront reboot will host an open beta between October 8th and 12th. Players will reportedly have access to three gameplay modes. There's a 40-person war on Hoth wherein the opposing forces attempt to destroy (or defend) a fleet of AT-AT's. Players can also compete in an 8 vs 8 capture-the-flag-style match called dropzone where they fight for control of escape pods. Finally, there's a solo/co-op survival mode where players must fend off continual waves of enemy troops for as long as possible. The full version of the game hits store shelves on November 17th.

Source: Major Nelson

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News::Epic Games reveals 'Bullet Train,' a sci-fi shooter for Oculus Touch

Epic Games, the studio behind Gears of War, unveiled its brand new virtual reality game, Bullet Train, during the Oculus Connect 2 conference today. Bullet Train is an Oculus Touch experience, meaning players use two motion-sensing controllers to pick up weapons, shoot and interact with the environment. Plus, Bullet Train features bullet time and teleportation, and it's developed in Unreal Engine 4. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney presented Bullet Train to the world today, and he's been a longtime champion of virtual reality. In February, he told Engadget that VR was "going to change the world."

Source: Epic Games

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News::'Oculus Ready' PC program offers VR-ready rigs for less than $1,000

Oculus Ready is a new program that offers officially licensed, Oculus-branded PCs from Alienware, Dell and Asus. These rigs will be ready to run the consumer Oculus Rift when it launches in Q1 2016, with at least the minimum specs of 8GB RAM, an Intel i5 processor and NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290. All of the Oculus Ready PCs will cost less than $1,000, Oculus announced during its second annual Connect conference.

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News::Minecraft Windows 10 Edition headed to Oculus Rift VR headset

Palmer Luckey, the boy wonder co-founder of Oculus VR, surprised attendees at the company's Connect 2 developer conference today with news that Minecraft is headed to the Rift. Though Oculus has yet to announce a release date for its virtual reality headset, it is expected to be hit retail sometime next spring, at which point Minecraft will be made available on both the Windows Store and Oculus Store. It's no surprise that Microsoft would extend the massively popular crafting game to the Rift platform as it's recently demoed several augmented reality versions for its HoloLens headset, and pledged to support both Oculus and Vive's brand of VR.

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News::'Oculus Arcade' brings 'Pac-Man' and other classics to Gear VR

Oculus Arcade offers classic games from Sega, Midway and Bandai Namco, all playable in the Samsung Gear VR. Oculus announced the nostalgia fix during its Oculus Connect 2 conference, where it also announced the new, $99 Gear VR. The new Gear VR will be available in time for Black Friday in November. Oculus also showed off a slew of new games coming to Gear VR, including Land's End (from the Monument Valley team), Gunjack and the new VR Adventure Time game. The company also briefly showed off Netflix and Twitch running in Gear VR.

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News::2K Games kills off 'BioShock' for iOS

When 2K Games launched a port of the original BioShock for iOS last year, fans of the adored franchise were ecstatic. But it looks like that joy has, unexpectedly, come to an end for some of them. Much to the surprise of people who had already purchased the mobile title, 2K Games appears to have pulled it from the App store -- if you deleted it from your device, there's no way to get it back. The company had recently cited compatibility issues with versions of iOS 8.4 or higher, bad enough that users couldn't play it, but it said a fix was in the works. Now, however, the developer appears to have given up completely. According to a forum post on Touch Arcade, a 2K Games customer service rep told a fan the removal was "a developer decision."

Via: Eurogamer

Source: Touch Arcade

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News::Samsung's new and improved $99 GearVR ships this November

When Samsung released its revised mobile virtual reality headset, the GearVR, earlier this year, it did so with the label "Innovator Edition" still attached since the hardware wasn't quite consumer-ready. Today, at the Oculus Connect 2 developer conference in Los Angeles, Samsung's VP of Mobile, Peter Koo announced a new GearVR priced affordably at $99 and ready to ship in the United States in time for Black Friday this November and worldwide shortly after.

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News::TBS will broadcast eSports in 2016

From 2016 TBS won't just show Conan and Big Bang Theory re-runs, as the channel has revealed that it's launching its own eSports league. Turner Broadcasting has signed a deal to broadcast bouts of Counter Strike: Global Offensive, which'll air on Friday nights for 20 weeks of the year. At this early stage, details are thin on the ground, except to say that qualifying rounds for the main events will be streamed online. Successful teams will then be handed a ticket to TBS HQ in Atlanta where the live show will be recorded.

Source: WSJ

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News::ICYMI: Best VR ride, screen buttons that re-form and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: A haptic controller for gaming that works with the muscles in the user's arms to both give feedback and guide touch is fully funded on Kickstarter, and still available for $212. Staying on theme, this prototype virtual reality set-up centers a seat for a human in the middle of eight steel cables that all move independently, delivering the most lifelike experience for gaming in VR yet. Meanwhile researchers in Germany invented a thin layer of gel that sits on top of a touchscreen and forms into a button while mildly heated. This would create on-demand, real feel buttons.

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News::'Roblox' lets indie game devs publish across platforms -- in a bubble

Roblox CEO David Baszucki has grand plans for his app's launch on Xbox One. Roblox is a free game-creating program that already has 6 million monthly players across PC, iOS and Android, and Baszucki expects that number to climb when it hits Xbox One on November 12th. The app allows users to create their own games -- action, simulators, shooters, capture the flag, basically anything -- and then publish (and make money off of) those creations simultaneously on all Roblox platforms. "An indie game developer, really for the first time ever, is going to be able to create a game that pushes to phone, tablet, computer and console," Baszucki says. "The exact same game." This isn't a simple feat.

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News::'Rise of the Tomb Raider' is more of the same, and that's okay

Crystal Dynamics' 2013 Tomb Raider reboot pulled off a tough task: It successfully brought life back to an aging, muddled franchise and provided heroine Lara Croft with an excellent origin story. Now that Croft has made her transition from a terrified shipwreck survivor to adventuring (but still vulnerable) badass, what does she do for an encore? Rise of the Tomb Raider (coming to the Xbox One and 360 as a timed exclusive on November 10th) answers that by tightening up and refining the first game's core experience while throwing players into an entirely new environment. The world is bigger, there are more skills to improve, more secrets to find and, yes, more tombs to raid. It isn't wildly different than the last game, but that's not a knock: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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News::I'm sick of getting sick from VR, but there's a remedy

It's inevitable at this point: After having experienced a variety of virtual reality -- from gaming to cinematic -- whenever I'm about to enter into a new demo, my anxiety spikes. "Is this going to make me massively ill?" I wonder, fearing the subsequent rapid heartbeat, flop sweat and nausea that mark the unwelcome arrival of motion sickness. I mention this not to discredit the coming revolution of VR -- because I do think it's here to stay and I'm glad for it -- but to sound an alarm bell for the industry. If VR is to go mainstream -- and given Facebook's billion-dollar bet on Oculus VR, it very well should -- consumers like me need to stop getting sick. It's a pitfall the brilliant developer Jesse Schell mocked in his talk on making great VR at Oculus Connect 2 in Los Angeles: "Our game is so good it makes you vomit." Schell's comment was obviously made tongue-in-cheek, but it underscored a common symptom of faulty VR development. Thankfully, there's an antidote to this: education.

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