News::Poorly-named 'League of Legends' players get psychology surveys

League of Legends has roughly 67 million players, so the developer has a big challenge when it comes to monitoring the community the size of a small country — and curbing the worser elements. While it's involved itself with how players interact with the game, this time it's doing something more: it's recently started asking ill-named players to take psychological self-evaluation tests. LoL players can report others for inappropriate character names that don't gel with the game's terms of use. However, this week, some players noticing a different naming process for characters that weren't okay the first time around. Gamers now have to complete a survey, play 50 matches, then follow that up with another survey. After that, players can change their name to something that follows the rules. (Before, cheekily-named users got a temporary name until they picked a better one.)

Source: Motherboard

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News::A sheep steals the show in the new 'Ratchet & Clank' movie trailer

Look at that sheep. Just look at it. Adorable, confused and fluffy -- a trifecta of cute cuddliness. Ratchet and Clank each come close, but it's really no contest. Sorry, guys.

Ratchet & Clank is set to invade the silver screen on April 29, 2016, and today in a new trailer, we get a closer look at the movie's sense of humor. Unsurprisingly (or for the cynics among us, very surprisingly), it feels a lot like the Ratchet & Clank games -- silly, action-packed and full of wild alien creatures. The film stars series veterans James Arnold Taylor as Ratchet and David Kaye as Clank, alongside Paul Giamatti, Rosario Dawson, John Goodman and Sylvester Stallone. In related news, the remastered and expanded PlayStation 4 version of Ratchet & Clank is due in spring 2016, alongside the film's release.

Source: Apple Trailers

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News::Playdate: Trying out Steam Machines and Valve's new controller

For years, Valve's been teasing us with the promise of a new kind of gaming device: a PC that lives in your entertainment center, outperforms traditional consoles and has more games available for it than you can count. Now it's finally here: I have a Steam Machine in my house, and I'm going to share it with you. Join me and Tim Seppala as we put the Alienware Steam Machine, its Linux-based SteamOS and the Valve Steam Controller through their paces. The fun starts right here in this post, on Twitch.tv/joystiq and on the Engadget gaming homepage at 6PM ET (3PM PT).

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News::'Fallout 4' live-action trailer brings the wasteland to life

With less than a month to go until Fallout 4's November 10th release, Bethesda has debuted a new live-action trailer to whet your appetite for some post-apcocalyptic wandering. Fallout 4 will feature the series' most in-depth character creation yet, Bethesda said earlier this year, and it'll sport a new dynamic dialog system that actually lets you walk away from dull conversations. The blend of real-world environments with Fallout models works really well for the trailer. Really, though, it just makes us long for the days when actual game environments can look that good. We'll get there, someday.

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News::The Alienware Steam Machine: finally, a gaming PC for the living room

I laughed when the rumors started back in 2012: "Valve is building a PC-based game console for living rooms." Sure it is, I thought. Imagine my shock when "Steam Machines" turned out to be real. The project promised a bizarre, revolutionary controller, a Linux-based operating system designed specifically to play PC games and in-home game streaming for titles that required Windows to run properly. The proposal was unbelievable, but it's finally here; it's real; and it will ship to customers in early November. As of today, I have an Alienware Steam Machine nestled in my entertainment center that delivers on almost everything those original rumors promised. Let's talk about that.

Note: Valve says it plans to continue rolling out software updates ahead of the Steam product family's official launch on November 10th. We plan to update our story as these new features come out. We will also hold off on assigning the Alienware Steam Machine a numerical score until the final hardware goes on sale.

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News::Valve's Steam Link: better than a 50-foot HDMI cable

Steam Machines are finally here -- real gaming PCs designed to live in your entertainment center and play the role of hardcore gaming console. There's just one problem: I've never wanted one. Don't get me wrong: Valve's quest to drag PC gaming into the living room is awesome, but I already have an incredibly powerful gaming rig in my office. I don't need a second, redundant machine in front of my couch. On the other hand, I'm an insane person who drilled holes in his wall to run 50 feet of cabling from his gaming PC to the back of his television set.

There's an easier way, according to Valve, and it's called the Steam Link. This $50 micro PC was announced at GDC earlier this year with one express purpose in mind -- piping high-end PC gaming over a home network on the cheap. That sounds pretty good, but can it outperform my power drill and various lengths of cable?

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News::Valve wants the Steam community to build its own controllers

Valve is all about fan service. And with "over 125 million active users" in its Steam base, that's a lot of varying expectations to meet. This month, the secretive Bellevue, Washington-based video game developer (Portal, Half-Life) is about to finally bring to market a suite of its Steam Machines, a console-like living room solution for its PC-gaming base. The hardware rollout's been a long time coming for Valve -- the original Steam Machine announcement was made back in September 2013 -- but at least one aspect of it has been very public: the evolution of the Steam Controller. And its design is about to, quite literally, be put in the hands of consumers.

"Anytime we've let the community get involved in the construction, the creation, the modification of things we've created, it always worked out fantastically," says Valve designer Robin Walker, speaking at the company's headquarters. "It was always better. It would be utterly bizarre if, for some reason, that wasn't the case for hardware." Slideshow-330222

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News::Throw money at YouTube Gaming stars each month with sponsorships

Remember when we said Twitch learned a lot from the recent launch of YouTube Gaming, Google's own video game-focused live-streaming site? Turns out, YouTube is picking up some tricks from Twitch, a veteran of the live gaming arena. YouTube Gaming is rolling out "sponsorships," a new option that allows viewers to give money to their favorite streamers monthly in exchange for a few perks, like a special badge for live chat and access to exclusive chat rooms. Sponsorships are $4 a month in the United States and the program is in beta now for a select group of streamers across 40 countries. It's a lot like Twitch's own subscription option, which is $5 per month and offers special badges, exclusive chat rooms and usually a live shout-out from the streamer.

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News::Blizzard's 'Overwatch' shooter enters public beta on October 27th

Blizzard is almost ready to put its colorful team-based shooter Overwatch in the hands of the public. An "extremely limited" number of US players will gain access to the closed beta on October 27th, followed by fans in Europe and Asia at a later date. Blizzard says it wants this group of testers to scrutinise every part of the gameplay, including the various heroes, maps and abilities. There's much to dissect, but in particular we suspect Blizzard will be looking at the individual characters and whether they're all balanced. If you fail to get into this elite group, fear not. Blizzard will also be running "Beta Test Weekends" from time to time, with the sole purpose of stress-testing its servers. The company will be limiting the modes, maps and heroes available, but it should still give you a flavour of the game and indicate if it's your cup of tea. Team-based shooters are nothing new, but Blizzard's pedigree means it's hard not to be just a little curious about the game. Its first cinematic trailer looked like something out of a Pixar movie, and if it can offer deep, over-the-top shooter mechanics, it could be a welcome break from the ever-proliferating MOBA genre.

Source: Blizzard

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News::Twitch made multitasking a lot easier on iOS9

In case you hadn't heeded that red flag on the App Store icon and downloaded the latest update for Twitch, you might want to fix that. The latest version of the streaming app favored by gamers adds a pop-out option for the game feed window for multitasking (like Android got months ago) and a couple of features that're very specific to iOS 9's new bag of tricks. Specifically, you can have a player window popped out of the app, hit the web browser or app of your choosing and then pop Twitch chat into its own pane. As the official Twitch blog tells it, that's available on most newer iPad models. However, Split View (where you have two fill apps running at once, only works with the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 4.

Source: Twitch

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