News::Tricking out your dragon in 'Scalebound'

Scalebound is one of my most anticipated Xbox One games. It's a classic Platinum title, mixing over-the-top, combo-heavy combat with a gargantuan dragon that's willing to help you out in a pinch. Throw in a strange, luscious new world and some enormous, fantastical enemies, and you have a game that oozes both style and substance. Last year at Gamescom, Platinum founder Hideki Kamiya teased that players would be able to customize their dragons over the course of the campaign. Now, he's explained exactly how that will work. And oh boy, am I excited.

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News::AIs fight to the death in 'Doom' contest next month

Google DeepMind took a leap forward last year when its artificial intelligence agent mastered 49 Atari 2600 games. The learning system, or "deep Q-network" (DQN), that DeepMind designed achieved this mastery through general experience, rather than specific programming for each game. This milestone is just one step along a grander path toward the general-purpose "smart machine": an AI that can master any task with minimal input. DeepMind's work in this field is groundbreaking, and it's helping advance the field in ways you might not expect.

Wojciech Jaśkowski is an assistant professor for the Institute of Computing Science (ICS) at Poznan University of Technology, Poland. After reading about DeepMind's feat in the scientific journal Nature, he began to think about the possibilities. If an agent could learn Atari 2600 with our current levels of knowledge, why not push the envelope further? Why not try a 3D game? Jaskowski settled on the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. It has low power requirements and, more important, it's open source. He assembled a team of university students from ICS with the aim of building a platform that would facilitate testing AI agents.

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News::'Rez Infinite' is getting a collector's edition from iam8bit

Much like the game itself, Rez Infinite is being released in a very unorthodox manner. For example, iam8bit is publishing the game as part of a special collection with a vinyl soundtrack, special T-shirts, and collectible pins.

Source: iam8bit

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News::'Star Trek: Bridge Crew' hits VR headsets November 29th

Ubisoft has dropped the dates for three of its incoming VR games, including Star Trek: Bridge Crew. That title, set in JJ Abrams Star Trek universe, is available for pre-order and arrives on all three major platforms, the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony PlayStation VR on November 29th. It lets you take on the role of captain, engineer, tactical officer or helmsman on the Enterprise-style "Aegis" bridge. The aim is to work with your crew mates to help settle Vulcan's remaining population after the planet was destroyed in the first Star Trek reboot.

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News::Smart glasses make hands-free 'Pokémon Go' a reality

Pokémon Go has taken the world by storm. It's not uncommon to see dozens of people walking around parks and city streets with their heads buried in their phones, trying to catch cute cartoon monsters. Unfortunately, doing so means you're not keeping your eyes on the road, which has already led to a few accidents. But what if you could somehow play Pokémon Go while also paying attention to the world around you? That's exactly what Recon has attempted to do by porting the popular game over to the Jet, a pair of Android-based smart glasses the company released last year. The setup isn't perfect and it doesn't work completely just yet, but even what I've seen so far provides an exciting glimpse at the next wave of augmented reality.

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News::Facebook is launching its own PC gaming platform

Facebook's gaming aspirations didn't stop with Farmville and its $2 billion Oculus VR acquisition. Nope, the social network is also launching a dedicated PC gaming platform today. Said platform will lean heavily on developers using the ubiquitous Unity game engine, according to a release from the company. The partnership's first project is admittedly developer-centric, but it has a direct impact on the folks playing games on Facebook. Zuckerberg and Co. describe it as a new export feature baked into Unity that allows a studio to publish directly to Facebook and the aforementioned Facebook PC gaming platform "with very little effort and few code changes."

Source: Facebook

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News::AMD crashes Intel's party: Powerful Zen CPUs are coming next year

A block away from Intel's Developer Forum in San Francisco, AMD brought together a select group of media and analysts to make one thing clear: Its long-awaited Zen processor actually exists, and it's on track to ship early next year for desktops. Surprisingly, the company is aiming directly at the high-end PC gaming market, whereas its last few chips appealed more to budget builders.

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